The Vergecast - Trump's confusing crusade against Big Tech

Episode Date: March 21, 2025

Starlink is in the White House, Siri is still bad, Pebble is back, up is down, everything is chaos. In this episode, Nilay and David start the show by running through some big gadget news, from a Siri-related shakeup at Apple to the new Google Pixel 9A. After that, The Verge's Lauren Feiner talks us through some of the latest in tech regulation: Trump's illegal firings at the FTC, the confusing state of the TikTok ban, OpenAI and Google arguing their case for free-for-all AI, and more. Finally, in the lightning round, Nilay and David talk about the latest Tesla recall, the hugely popular book about Meta, some exciting ActivityPub news, and Netflix co-CEO Ted Sarandos gently zinging Apple TV Plus. Further reading: From Bloomberg: Apple Shuffles AI Executive Ranks in Bid to Turn Around Siri The first new Pebble smartwatches are coming later this year Europe is trying to get non-Apple smartwatches to work better with iPhones Google’s Pixel 9A gets a bigger screen and beefier water resistance Google briefly delays Pixel 9A release to investigate ‘component quality issue’  Huawei’s new flip phone is weirdly wide Nvidia says ‘the age of generalist robotics is here’ Nvidia’s cute ‘Digits’ AI desktop is coming this summer with a new name and a big brother Nvidia announces Blackwell Ultra GB300 and Vera Rubin, its next AI ‘superchips’ Musk’s Starlink gets deployed at the White House Federal rural broadband program loses head Oracle is reportedly in the lead to save TikTok from US ban A”high-level” deal to save TikTok can probably happen by the April 5th deadline, Vance says. Democratic FTC commissioners say they were ‘illegally fired’ by Trump Fired FTC commissioner warns of the ‘corrupting influence of billionaires’ Democratic FCC Commissioner Geoffrey Starks will resign this spring WBEZ, 12 other public media stations under investigation  CTIA Announces Ajit Pai as New CEO and President OpenAI and Google ask the government to let them train AI on content they don’t own Hundreds of celebrities warn against letting OpenAI and Google ‘freely exploit’ Hollywood Google Search charged with breaking EU antitrust rules DHS’s airport panopticon is getting people deported and detained Space science is under threat from the anti-DEI purge DOGE stranded USAID workers with laptops full of sensitive data They’re removing webpages about Black soldiers by adding ‘DEI’ to the URL. ‘Tesla Takedown’ protesters planning ‘biggest day of action’  Tesla recalls more than 46,000 Cybertrucks after trim starts falling off From NYMag: Elon Musk Has Become Too Toxic for YouTube ‘Careless People’ debuts at the top of the NYT best sellers list. Threads finally lets you set the following feed as default Ghost connects its newsletters to the open web Netflix’s CEO talks Apple TV, Amazon, and the NFL Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build Me a Revenue Dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938.

This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome the virtual cast, flagship podcast of the Cybertruck Wiper Owners Club. It's for people who don't have a cyber truck, but they just have one big wiper. Can you just buy the wiper separately? Like, could I just frame a wiper above my mantle? I believe so.

Okay. And I believe that might be Tesla's fastest growing revenue line. Just giant wipers. Yeah, like the flamethrower, you know, bad choice for a bunch of reasons. The tequila, probably not great tequila. But, like, would I buy a comically humongous? windshield wiper and just sort of have it. Like, yeah, I would. I mean, I'm sending you one right now. We're going to take a break from this show and I'm going to figure out how to buy you a

cyber truck wiper. Remember when that was the story? Well, then we cracked it. You and I at South by Southwest, we cracked the case. People still send me photos of cyber truck wipers. Like, if they see a cyber truck driving on the street wiping rain, I get tweeted at. You make a lot of fun of me for being the person who sold everyone on Earth of Books, Palma, but yours is weirder. Being the Cypress Truck Wiper guy is weirder. It is also true that the wiper is not very effective. Look, we're going to talk about the cyber truck later and Elon and the government,

all the stuff. We have to start, by the way, I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here. Hello. Warren Feiner is going to join us for segment two to talk about the government. Our policy reporter is going to help us talk about the government. You see how that works? We just, we bring in someone who's smarter than us, and then she does the show when we tell

jokes. It's perfect. I highly recommended if you can pull it off. We got to start, though, with breaking news. As we were sitting down to record, there is breaking news in the world of Apple. It appears that they have noticed Siri isn't very good.

I can't tell you when this happened or who noticed it, but they're making some changes. David, what's going on? So Apple had its big executive retreat last week. I don't know exactly what they call it. The top 100.

Is it very famous? Steve Jobs started it. Okay. Yes. I don't know how it works now, but the lore at Apple is that Steve Jobs literally picked his top 100 people without regard for rank or hierarchy orchart. And making that list was a big deal. And it was Steve Jobs, so he didn't care about people's feelings that they got left out.

It's a very different company now. But that was the lore of top 100 back in the day. First of all, you should make several decoder episodes about the, the top 100 phenomenon. But so basically, so Apple had this meeting. And by all accounts, lots of reporting, especially from Mark German at Bloomberg, Siri being awful and the sort of general failure

of Apple intelligence was one of the big topics. And coming out of this, what has happened is the person who was running Siri, who was this guy John Gianna Andrea, who was overseeing a lot of their AI stuff at Apple. He's a huge name in this. He was Google for a long time. He was a big figure in Google's antitrust trial.

He is like a person who has seen where all the bodies are buried in the tech industry for a very long time. Reports directly to Tim Cook. Right. This very important person inside of Apple is being taken off of leadership of the Siri project, which is now going under Mike Rockwell, who until now was the one leading kind of all things vision pro. And if I understand Apple's org structure correctly, and I'm only like 60% sure that I do, Mike Rockwell reports to Craig Federigi, who oversees all of software, which would mean Craig Federigi now oversees Siri, which is sort of a meaningful coup inside of Apple's work structure. Like that would be a big shift away from this sort of AI project, which we've seen at a lot of companies sort of slowly annex the rest of the companies.

Like Demis Sivas, who runs DeepMind at Google, is like rapidly becoming the most powerful person at Google because everything is becoming AI and they're just giving everything to Demis. And that's very important. This is a shift big time in the opposite direction inside of Apple. And is the kind of thing that Apple doesn't typically do except to rectify something that is perceived to be broken. Yeah. We last week on the show, we talked about Apple delaying the next generation of Siri. It's, I think Apple's archard is like weirder in that everyone has worked at Apple for 500 years. Yes.

And they all just get paid a lot. Yeah. Like I, it's hard to actually parse out this sort of. of back and forth between who's in charge of what. Like Apple is very functionally organized. Product marketing, what they call product marketing is what most tech companies called product management. It's all, it's just different than other tech companies.

The thing that gets me at this, though, is Rockwell was in charge of the Vision Pro. They gave it to him to get it out the door. He kind of insisted, like around the time of the Vision Pro, he was a face that was popping up. we saw him at events. He was the one who really insisted that the Vision Pro had to get at the door this way. Mark Garmin at Bloomberg has reporting that John Andrea saw Rockwell as his successor,

which makes no sense to me. I'm just looking at the judgment that I can see, which is the Vision Pro shipped the way the Vision Pro is. And it's fine. It's a beautiful piece of hardware. It is the most state-of-the-art VR headset at its price point that works the way it does that you can get.

It is the best thing of its kind at its price point that has ever existed. It is also not very good. I half agree with that, right? And I think there's a way to look at this that is Apple saying what we need is somebody who will ship the thing, right? Yeah. But sort of tacit inside of that is also saying, like, the Vision Pro and Siri are in roughly the same stage, which I just don't think is sure at all. Like, the Vision Pro is a fabulous piece of technology that doesn't have anything to do. Siri is the opposite, right?

Like, Siri is bursting with interesting use cases. It just sucks. The Vision Pro is, like, not a bad product. It's just sort of a unnecessary one at the moment. Like, there's no, it has no jobs to do. And Siri is a bad product. And I think those are actually really different. And I think for Apple to treat them as the same thing,

like important technology early in its life cycle, totally, totally not true in AI's case. Siri is 14 years old and sucks. That is not the same thing as the Vision Pro. It just isn't. Sure. Okay, I grant you all that. I agree with all that.

For the sake of the argument, my response is the Vision Pro shipped for no reason. Like the error in judgment was saying we can't figure out true AR glasses, which is what we actually want. So we're going to insist that this VR headset with video pass-through that can be effectively defeated by low light is good enough to achieve our vision and mixed reality. And then app developers will flock to us. And then when we get to where we're going and we make really our glasses, the ecosystem will exist. None of those were the right decisions. Right. That's the thing that

I'm focused. And it's the developers will save us thing that I think might be the trap Apple is about to run into with Siri. Because as we've talked about many times, this whole promise of Siri is like the app intent machine that can go use your phone on your behalf, that depends on developers. And so if you're looking at Apple as essentially a company that just makes screens for developers to do stuff on, like that's increasingly what these things are. They're like, here's a chip in a screen. You figure out what it's for. And pay us 30% anytime someone pushes a box. Right. That is like increasingly the story of Apple as a hardware maker. If you take that same approach to Siri and you say, okay, what we need to do is just get a working version of this out the door and then developers will figure out how to make it great.

That, man, that way lies dragons and madness and disaster. But I agree, you can see how Apple would get there in that thought process of like, what we need to do is put this in front of the people who will figure out what to do with it. And it didn't work for the Vision Pro, and I don't think it'll work for Siri. The big problem is that they very foolishly announced the product that they wanted to make. Right. They showed the concept video at WWC. Then they've had to delay the delivery of the product that they showed off in the concept video.

So any pivot off of that now requires them to further eat crow. Not only is it delayed, but we changed it or reduced the specs. Right. It will be different in some meaningful way. And then on top of that, they have to solve what I keep calling the DoorDash problem, which is they have to get the app developers to basically hand their customers away to the robot. Because the promise here with app intents and all this is still the agents, like everybody else is talking about agents. But instead of clicking around on a website, Siri will use the apps on your phone for you.

Right. And all of those app developers have to be okay with their apps not being opened. I still don't know how any of that works. Right. Yeah, I mean, you could trace a lot of the design of iOS in particular over the last 15 years as aggressively creating more reasons for you to, open apps. And, like, is that the wrong direction for technology to have gone? Yeah, probably from a user experience. But, like, everything is about giving you more surfaces to show you company logos. Like, we were talking about this at the Dynamic Island last week, right? Like,

one of the reasons developers like it is because now when I'm on my home screen, it's still showing me the Uber icon. And, like, that's very powerful. And Siri promises, I think for good user experience reasons, but terrible, like, economy of the internet reasons to just abstract all of that away. So Apple has to get them on board for this increasingly high-risk thing, both because it's bad technology and because it's bad business. I just, I don't see it. Maybe, maybe John Andrea just, like, pieced out.

He was like, you do it, Vision Pro guy. Mr. Vision Pro over here. He's, drinking out of coffee. cups. That's a deep cut. I was going to say, I wonder what percentage of this audience got not my sharing out my problem. If you get that, send us a note. Yes, please. It's very important. It's very important that we all know who we are, if you understand that reference. It is notable that the guy Apple hired from Google to run AI is no longer in charge of the the thing that AI should do on an iPhone. Right. It is a product. And we know that there's AI

I know, right, there's machine learning and neural engines all through the phone, and everyone's always excited about the neural engine cores. But the distribution, the reason no one was worried about Apple is that they had Siri ready to be plugged into these systems that people like to use. And that appears to have landed them approximately nowhere. Well, yeah, and it's a really interesting way of thinking about Apple, too, because, like, Craig Federigi has a longstanding reputation of, like, building software that people like, he has good. hair and they ship a lot of software. And so now thinking of Syria is like not this sort of many tentacled thing that exists across your whole phone, which is what Apple talked about Syria is for a long time. They're like, Siri's not just an assistant.

Siri is is everything. Siri is the friends we made along. Like it's the whole thing. And increasingly it's like, no, maybe what you need is an app that works. Like maybe you should think about Syria is just like an app on your phone that is good at things. We'll see. Might work.

This is breaking news. You heard us react to it in real time. We'll see. In the meantime, everyone gets a free Vision Pro if you use Siri. That's what I'm taking away from this now. They got to move units. Other big tech news of the week, the new Pebble smartwatches are out or they're coming later this here.

David, you talk to Eric Mujigovsky, the CEO of Pebble. This is like pretty fortuitous timing to be launching a smartwatch brand for a variety of reasons. What's going on there? So it's very funny because Eric Mijikikovsky, you might remember, before he was doing Pebble 2.0, which is technically a company called Core Devices, but it's just Pebble again. Like, let's all just be honest with each other.

I do love that one of the watches is called the Core 2 duo. It's one of the funniest names in the entire world. It's so funny. I asked him about this. We were talking about it, and I was looking at the little screenshot that he sent me that said, Core 2 Duo, and I was like, isn't Intel going to sue you? And he was like, eh, it's a watch, not a chip.

It'll be fine. I was like, Eric, I don't know if you understand how this works. But yeah, so he, before he started doing the pebble thing again, made a company called Beeper that got into a big giant fight with Apple because he felt that he should be allowed to interact with the IMSage protocol with a third-party app. And Apple did not agree with that sentiment. And it became a whole thing. And we talked about it a lot on this show. And he, you know, very loudly proclaimed that it was about freedom on the internet and all this stuff. and that was all well and good.

And he's now a little bit picking that same fight from a different direction. So there's two new watches, which are in virtually every way identical to the last generation of pebble watches. So there was the pebble two and the pebble time two. One has a black and white e-paper screen. One has a color e-paper screen. But they're very simple, right? They're designed to be sort of pixily and hackable. and they're like gadgets.

And I mean that in the most gadgety possible way. And Eric's whole theory, he has said this to me since we first started talking about this project. His whole theory is that actually the pebble kind of had it right. And what he wants is not some brand new spin on a minimalist smartwatch. He wants a pebble. And so he's like, he's rich now. He's sold two companies. And so he's like, whatever.

Maybe I'm the only one who wants this. I'm going to go make a bunch more of them. And that's where we are. So yeah. So there's the Core 2 Duo, which is a hundred, 50 bucks and is the like very basic one. And the part of that story I liked is, there was some factory somewhere,

he wouldn't tell me exactly where, that literally just had boxes full of Pebble 2 frames, just sitting there, just like in the warehouse somewhere. So they're just using those. They are literally just making watches out of those frames again. And then, so that one's shipping in July. And they're basically like they're using old hardware,

new sensors. which is one of the funny things about this. I thought you would enjoy this in particular, actually. One of the things that he found in working on these watches again was that just by virtue of how much more efficient Bluetooth has gotten in the eight years since they last made pebbles, they have quadrupled the battery life of the pebble. And he said it's lots of things like everything has gotten more efficient and stuff,

but he pointed to Bluetooth specifically as like, it is so much better that the battery life on these new devices goes from seven days to 30 without any other meaningful change. that's amazing Bluetooth man 2025 it's the year of Bluetooth we're doing it better so yeah and then the other one is the core time

two which is just the pebble time two with some of the same upgrades and they're pre-selling them now that one's coming out in December and it's 230 bucks but I kind of love this as an approach he's just like we did it we made pebbles they were cool

and here we are but also along with all of that he published a blog post, angrily describing why trying to use a pebble with an iPhone is so much worse than trying to use a pebble with an Android phone. And this gets to, I think what you're talking about

with the fortuitous timing of it all, Eric is very interested in picking a fight with Apple, again, about the openness of its platforms. And as it turns out, so is the EU. Yeah. Which I think, like, within the, like, 48-hour period, was it the same day? It might have even been the same day.

Right on top of each other. Yeah, okay. Put out two different decisions or under the, was it the DMA, the Digital Market Tax? Yeah, it's hard to keep, look, we're not European acronyms. All right. I can tell you what every version of Ford F-150 pickup truck look like. I'm trying hard to keep European tech regulation straight. All right, she's like cut me some slack.

Yeah. There's the DSA, which is the Digital Services Act, which Meta and a bunch of other companies are super pissed about. And there's the Digital Markets Act, the DMA, which regulates gatekeepers and preserves access to markets. So inside of the DMA, the Digital Markets Act, Apple is a gatekeeper, and they are under requirements to open their platforms in various ways so that there can be a functional market for things like smart watches. And the two decisions that came out just this last week under the DMA are exactly how, in particular, smartwatches need to interoperate with iOS. Okay. Yeah. And the one is essentially Apple is now required to give developers more access to some of the iPhone's features, right? So that like other watches will be able to do things like seamlessly pair or get notifications or share data back and forth in the same way that the Apple watch can. And then the other one I think is basically just transparency. It's just like explaining to developers how these systems work and how they can use them. Apple hates this, by the way. I mean, Apple's whole thing increasingly is that its stuff only works properly if you buy all of its stuff.

And it's been really interesting to watch Android follow that stuff up in slightly more open ways. Like the Android fast pair system is now very good. And it's only good on iOS if you use Apple or beats headphones. And so the EU is trying to pry all of that open and be like, no, you can't privilege your own devices in your ecosystem. system, that's the whole point. We are opening this up. And so, like, yeah, Apple's, the whole reason to buy an Apple watch is because you have an iPhone. Right. It's, it's because everything else is trash if you have an iPhone. But there's no market for other smart watches. Right. I think if you're a gadget fan listening to shit, that's kind of a good, it's sad. It's just sad. Yeah. It's sad that you don't think about, like, what other smart watch could I buy? You're like, I can only have this one because I can only send an I message and return on this one. And you can't even do any other kind of interactive. with the pebble, which is the point of Eric's blog post, right? They're a lockdown in certain ways. By the way, when I say that Apple hates this, here's the statement from the EU. With these decisions, we are simply implementing the law and providing regulatory certainty to both Apple and to developers.

Effective interoperability for third-party connected devices is an important step towards opening Apple's ecosystem. This will lead to better choice for consumers in a fast-grade market for innovative connected devices. This is a total boilerplate. Sure. Here's Apple's response. This is all in our story. You can go read it. Today's decisions wrap us in red tape, slowing down Apple's ability to innovate for users in Europe and forcing us to give away our new features for free to companies who don't have to play by the same rules.

It's bad for our products and for our European users. We will continue to work with the European Commission to help them understand our concerns on behalf of our users. Brutal. Furious. Yeah. That's fury. There's also a real. like we're just going to take our ball and go home thing inside of that.

Like this this statement made me think of in sort of a weird tangential way, uh, what Mark Zuckerberg always used to say about content moderation, where he was basically like, we invest the most. We try the hardest. We do the most. We spend the most money.

And all being this loud and transparent about it gets us is pain. So we're just going to stop. And they totally stopped. And then they stopped. And this is like this to me is Apple being like, oh, well, we've built all these cool features to make our devices.

together and now you're forcing us to give them to other, maybe we'll just stop. It would be amazingly stop selling the Apple auction here. They're like, fine, have this weird pebble. The threat here seems to be less that and more the next time we think about inventing a cool fast pairing feature, we just won't because we'll have to give it away. Like, we're going to make our products worse

because any cool thing we do we're going to have to give away. It's like, that feels like the threat to me. And that is a bummer, but I also think is a non-crazy threat from a company like Apple. Yeah, well, see how these things play out. In some cases, they've played out the way we kind of thought they would. Europe forces Apple to do alternative app stores. Emulators show up.

Apple immediately caves on letting emulators into the real app store. Or the Apple App Store, I should say, not the real one. I mean, the fact that it's called the real app store is kind of the point, right? Like, that is still where we are. So you just see a little dash of competitive pressure actually forced. Apple to respond within consumers who wanted forever. Right. If that's how it plays out in smartwatches, that's probably good.

Yeah. If it plays out that Apple is just like, screw it. No more Apple Watch features. Well, they still have a monopoly on Apple. It's like, there's just, I don't know how that one will play out, but you can see the fury at being made to compete. And then when there is real competition or something that sniffs like competition, you can see them cave like they do with emulators.

Yeah. Well, and you can also tell the EU is learning how. this game is played because not just the fact that it decreed that this stuff has to happen but actually expressly dictated to Apple

no you have to tell developers how to do it give them a timeline for how it's supposed to work and review these things in a predictable and timely way it's like the EU and Apple are just slowly learning

each other's games and are just like constantly trying to fend each other's off from being insane and I really enjoy it I will say just looking at this the idea that giving

third party smartwatches the ability to pair transfer data or display notifications or take action on them is not like the most innovative technology in the world you guys like you know what to me but it is it is the most uh important thing about the apple watch right like the the difference between the apple watch and any other watch is if i get a text i can respond to it from my apple watch and i can't respond to it from any other smart watch which is just immediately a crushing blow to anyone who wants to compete with Apple. Which is why there's no market for.

Right. Right. Anyhow, we'll see. I hope have it was well. We've got to get these things. We'll see if the passage of time has made Bluetooth better. Sure. I believe you.

But it's well timed that they're launching a smartwatch and then maybe they will be able to better compete, at least in Europe, with iOS users. They can already do all this stuff with Android, right? Yeah, Android has been more open in that way for a long time. and I think all that stuff will still work. Eric very proudly told me that you can still side load the original Pebble app, and it'll still work on an Android phone. And I was like, cool, Eric, I bet a lot of people are doing.

That's our audience. Yeah, I mean, they're here for it. Speaking of Android, little pixel news this week, not like major pixel news, but some weirdness in here. The Pixel 9A is out. What's going on with that thing? So I actually kind of think the 9A is a big deal. I think the A line of phones gets less credit than it deserves,

where it's basically like Google just showing up and being like, okay, we've now figured out how to make the last phone that we made. And it's a little cheaper now because we've made lots of them. That's all good. So we're just going to basically do that, but like at half the price. Is that something you're interested in? And like, yeah, it is. This is, Google has done this mid-range phone, I think, actually substantially better than Apple. And Alison Johnson, who wrote about the 9A, made this point very well.

The 16E just came out from Apple. I think we largely think it is a series of like pretty reasonable tradeoffs except for maybe a couple. But at $699, it's still pretty expensive. Then Google shows up with the 9A and it's like, okay, it has multiple cameras. 6.3 inch screen looks pretty nice. It actually doesn't have a camera bump, which in general, I'm of the mind of like who cares about camera bumps. Everybody puts cases on. But then I see a picture of this one where it doesn't have a camera bump.

Yeah, that's kind of slick. Like, I'm kind of into it. It's more durable than the last one. It's brighter than the last one. It has a bigger battery than the last one. Slightly smaller camera sensor, which I have a lot of questions about. All of Google's million weird new ideas about AI.

Sure. $499 bucks. This is a good deal. Like, this is, I think, in the lineup of Android phones, I think the A series from Google is actually one of the most compelling in terms of actual bang for the buck. Allison said in her piece that this is the phone she recommends for dads. And like, A, I agree. And B, as a dad, I'm like, yeah, I'm into this phone.

That's hilarious. It's funny because Samsung's Galaxy A-line is also the other cheap one that also moves a lot of units that every now at the end. We're like, oh, we should pay attention to these. Like, these are the ones. So A-35, 5G is $399. answer. They're a little bit higher than that, but it's a newer phone. Yeah, and it's, it's, it all gets very complicated. So like, uh, Anna, my wife dropped two, two phones and, and destroyed them in the span of 48 hours, which is very impressive and true kudos to Anna. Uh, and I ended up

buying her a pixel eight at Best Buy for $399. And I did that knowing that the 9A was probably coming soon. And I was like, the gap between last year's flagship and this year's midrange is like, kind of vanishingly small, which is weird because, like, ordinarily, this stuff either sort of lags a couple of generations or there's some meaningful spec difference between them, but now it's like there's just a lot of like same e-phones. And it's like whatever any phone from the last two years at a price that makes sense for you is probably going to be very good, which is both an odd and a cool place to get in the smartphone universe. I think particularly in a pixel line, because, I mean, the point of them is Google's software. Right. At the end of

the day that the point of buying a pixel is to run Google's vision of Android. Right. And that remains fairly constant among these phones. Yes. You know, it doesn't remain constant is Google's ability to make hardware that works. I would say that in a minor way, constant. Yeah, that's fair. Google's inability to make hardware. There you. So yeah, okay, I want to know what you make of this. So when Google announced the 9A, they also told us, this is Matt Fleming. legal at Google who said, we're checking on a component quality issue that's affecting a small number of Pixel 9A devices. They haven't shipped review units, at least as far as we know, to anybody. You can't pre-order the phone, and it's not coming out for a few more weeks, all of which are

kind of unusual for the way that Google tends to announce phones. This sets off like all kinds of alarm bells for me. What do you make of this? I think that they had their announced date locked and then they realized the phones were broken and they were stuck and they had to announce this phone and they have no idea when it's actually going to ship it's weird to announce it without even a pre-order button yeah well and to me it suggests that it is there is not something you can just fix with like a firmware push uh because what we've seen before is you know they'll ship phones particularly to reviewers and be like hey you know in a few days you're we're going to get an update that fixes x y and z thing

which is annoying as a reviewer, but is a relatively common thing for a phone right before it ships. But the fact that there is no date, there is no button, no one has seen these things suggest to me that even if it's a small number of phones, which is what they always say,

it's got to be something pretty show-stopping, right? Yeah, you've got something that makes the phone not work or works what? Those are your choices. Yeah, like, oh, no, the 5G chip is broken. It's like, it's got to be something, at that level. Like, we forgot to make a phone that connects to the internet. I don't know. I don't know. Yeah, I mean, it's supposed to be here. And it's just not, and there's no time.

They're not saying when. So there's there's a weirdness with this one, but I suspect they were locked into this date to announce the thing. Because Google also has to be nice to its entire ecosystem. Right. So it can't step on everybody else. So for example, this was not announced. announced at Mobile World Congress, which was just a few weeks ago. It's now because they let everyone else have their time. Weird. And so like, that's just going to keep happening. So I think they take their window and let's have everyone else do what they want. Phone delayed means they still have to hit their window. Yeah, that makes sense. And I let's say kudos to Google for actually taking this route if there is a real problem. We've seen a lot of companies ship slightly broken things with the promise of it'll be fixed later. The AI will fix it, David. Yeah, right. So at least for Google to be like, okay, we are not going to sell you this thing until we're confident that it won't break. It doesn't make me feel great about the quality of this phone or Google's ongoing hardware team, but at least feels like Google doing the right thing.

Yeah, I just wish they had a date. Yeah. They weren't like, we're delaying it by two weeks. They're just like, we're checking. Yeah, a phone that launches without a release date should, like technically the 9A is vapor. Like as of right now, the pixel 9A is vaporware. $500 paperware. At least it's not $600.

It's vapor till it ships. Those are the rules. I don't make them. I mean, I made that one. But it's bigger than me now. Yeah. It's vapor till it chips. No matter how mad you get.

Okay, let's talk about my favorite piece of phone vaporware. Walway's Pura X, which one will not ship here. Yeah. It's like a weird sort of geopolitical vapor. Also, it's only a render right now. And then third of all, it's like a wide flip phone. Like a very, it's a very, like to imagine a flip phone, but then make it really wide. Make it sideways?

It's not even sideways. When it unfolds, it's still the wrong shape. I love it. It is very weird. I want it very badly. This phone is thoroughly fascinating. It really is. Like, A, it's, I think, Huawei's first phone with no Android app compatibility.

It's like full on Harmony OS. They have had to do their own thing again because of geopolitical insanity. And so this is sort of the beginning of a new era of Huawei trying to build its entire ecosystem for itself. Yeah, it's not even open source Android. It's new. Yeah, it's a completely different operating system from the ground up. And I really appreciate that instead of being like, here's a phone you really like with new software, let's see how this goes. They're just like, what if we reinvented literally everything all at once?

This is also, I should say, justice for the Surface Duo, which was the other bookish unfolding phone that was a ridiculous idea that I nevertheless loved and used all the time. No, but this one, it's wide, but you open it sideways and then you're supposed to rotate it. It goes 90. So you get this weird vertical tablet, but then you close it and you're supposed to use it sideways again. I don't understand a piece of it. I just know that I love it.

Yeah. And I want to run Harmony OS next. In Chinese, I suppose, if I have to, but I'm ready to go. Do you remember that phone, the LG wing, the one with the sort of like, with the, it opened up into like a T shape? Yeah.

That's what this reminds me of, where they're just like, we're just going to come up with every possible way you could use a phone and we're going to make it slightly weird in every orientation. Do you want that? I love it.

I love the fact that it runs its own weird operating system that we basically try to have to build because of trade restrictions. And there's its own weird AI system in there that even Jensen Wong is like, yeah, that's pretty good. Yeah. All right.

If you want to send us a weird Huawei phone, legally, illegally. If it arrives, we'll use it. I'll just say that. Actually, I think Dom Preston. the UK is probably going to get this for us. We'll find a way. But I'm excited about weird phone form factors, as always.

Lastly, in this segment, we should talk about NVIDA a little bit. They just had a big conference. It was GDC. NVIDIA had GTC. Jensen was on stage. Made a lot of noise about chips. David, you said you had a theory here. I do have a theory here.

A, I have a recommendation than a theory. The recommendation is that everybody should go watch these Groot N1 humanoid robot videos that Nvidia is putting out. they're wild. And I think we all have spent, what, 10 years seeing the Boston Dynamics videos where the robot that looks like a dog can do backflips. And it's like, that's all willing. This is like a whole other thing. This is like we didn't write about a demo we saw of these because we just assumed it was a person in a suit.

Like that's, and I'm still not convinced. That's not what's going on. But that's how convincing some of these demos have gotten. And they're really fascinating. But the theory I want to throw at you is I think. think Nvidia has stolen Apple's Thunder as the most important product launch company right now, which is bonkers for a company that mostly announces chips. But in terms of like, I don't think you're going to tell me it hasn't hit the like they cover it

on the local news thing. And that's true. But in terms of like people who care about technology, there is so much enthusiasm now around everything that Nvidia does. and they have these things in like stadiums with thousands of people. And it's this huge personal event in a way that Apple now just like releases infomercials, which I think has sort of hurt the excitement of those announcements. But Nvidia is like deeply like sexy and cool in a way that I think Apple used to be when it talked about new products.

Yes. I agree with this. I also think that it's a small community of people like who really care about it. And then there's like a lot of people who own Nvidia stock who want to see number go up. That's fair. And what I wonder about this is do you think until Nvidia starts making itself some kind of like mainstream hardware, can it ever be that cool mostly as a chipmaker? Because I look at these things in like the, what was it, Project Digits is now the spark, this little like AI supercomputer thing that they're making.

And I'm like, there's a world here where Nvidia like really wants to make a consumer product that people care about to get that next level of like interest and excitement. All their money is in data centers. I think their consumer product is chat GPT. That's fair. Yeah, I mean, like, their consumer product is grok or whatever else is running a bunch of invidia trips and data center. Like, they're happy with that.

The comparison that I would make to you is Intel, which just this week got a new CEO who is going to try harder, I suppose. But Intel's years in the woods were marked. Like, we knew the end was coming for Intel because they didn't do the iPhone. They were bad at mobile. And every year we would go to CES or whatever. And Intel would be like, here's a vision of the future powered by Intel chips. And be like, are you going to make any of this stuff?

And they're like, no, that would be the end of it. Right. Like, every time it would be the end of it. And they couldn't make the leap to being a consumer company because I don't think it's in their DNA at all. And then nobody wanted what they were selling. But quite literally, nobody wanted what they were selling. And so you ended up in a place where it's like, I saw the future. of 10,000 drone

firework shows, that's Intel's future. That's what they were showing for years because they had the technology to make that stuff. But that wasn't the next turn. I don't think Nvidia wants to be in that place where they're like,

here's a vision of what you might build with our stuff. There are like small hints that it does, though. There's like the shield is a weird consumer product, but consumer product. And they're like doing the G-Force thing and they have the digit stuff.

It's like, there are, it seems like there is like one executive inside of NVIDIA who's like, what if we made the products ourselves? And they keep losing the fight in the meetings, but then, I don't know. It just feels like that there's some turn. First of all, the NVIDIA shield hasn't been revved in 500 years. And I know, even by talking about it, we've summoned the NVIDIA shield people.

Yeah, we're going to get emails. Welcome. You know, we love you. You're safe here. It's old. I'm just letting you know it's old. It was always a little bit crankier than any of you want to do it to, to, to Yeah, damn it. Also, you have to, the Plex just changed its rates. I don't know what you all are going to do now.

They're increasing prices. It's tough out there. Big, big news. I see that they wanted to package some of their core technology in ways to indicate, like, oh, there's a real market here. But the shield was never going to go after the Roku, right? Like, that was not going to happen. And I think it's the same, like, that's what I mean. The Intel comparison I'm making is Intel kept trying to invent a new market because it had lost the old. one. Right. Whereas invidia's, it is this market. It literally, he's, Jensen standing on stage, talking about the price performance ratio of inference on Nvidia GPUs and how no one can compete with him. Right. And so maybe the fact that it has become such a huge event is less about how important Nvidia is and more about how much it owns that market that everyone is obsessed with. Yeah. And I think the point he's making is you can't compete with us. Like, it was like, What if everyone on earth cared about laptops when Intel was like at its peak? Yeah.

And I, and there's a lot of hype in AI. So I just feel like there, it would be, I think it would be a miss for Nvidia to be like, you can run the models locally. I think what Nvidia wants most of all is for Amazon to feel like they have no choice, but to buy Nvidia GPUs for their data centers. And that's, that was kind of the argument. You should go watch the thing because it's cool. But it was more or less the argument, Jensen was making on stage.

Yeah, I bet that. All right. We've got to take a break. We're going to come back with Lauren Finer. Boy, boy, a lot of things happened in what I have taken to calling the computer coup. It's good. Think about it. We'll be right back.

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Yeah, you know, just business as usual here. Yeah, nothing. No wailing in the streets of our nation's capital. No. Have you been forcibly removed from any spaces by Doge? I have not. I'm staying putt. Just hiding out. Have you guys noticed one of the strangest things about the whole Doge thing to me has been when you see the Doge team sort of goes to a new agency or a new

place and there start to be these headlines and these tweets and stuff that are like, Doge has infiltrated the NIH. And they talk about it like it's this like marauding band of bank robbers who are just like running in with masks on and causing all kinds of ruckus and they're like, they've infiltrated the building. And it's just, it's become this very strange like militia that is just like running around D.C. entering buildings. And I'm realizing as I say this,

that all these metaphors actually kind of work and are true, but it's a very strange phenomenon. You can see the realization just coming over your face as you were talking out of line. I will say this week, the theoretical administrator of Doge,

Amy Gleason, revealed in a filing with a court, this is true. She said, Doge has 89 people, but they have no formal org chart or front office. Look, I'm not saying I host a podcast about org charts on the side. I'm not saying that's my hobby.

I'm not saying I've asked virtually every CEO in this industry, how their company is structured. I'm saying I started The Verge with a bunch of friends. David was like employee number one. And we got to 10 people. And we were like, oh, we need some fucking structure. Like, you cannot have a totally flat 89 person organization that is infiltrating the government. Like, it's nonsensical on its face.

It's all I'm saying. But it's true. They're infiltrating things. Actually, Lauren, before we go into the computer coup, can I briefly talk about my favorite, nonsensical, the Doge-related story? Please. Do you mind? Okay. So, as you might expect, Elon's real hype on putting Starlink everywhere in the government, it's just what he wants.

I don't know. It's what he wants. Lauren, I've never lived in D.C. My sense of our nation's capital is that ISPs are thick on the ground. you can get internet access in Washington, D.C.? Yeah, I'm talking to you from an internet connection right now. There you go. It just seems very easy to get internet access in D.C.

Like in most places, you're not in the woods or on the battlefield. Yeah, no, it's like a city. Like, yeah, they solved that problem. Yeah, David lives there too. Yeah, it's like a whole thing. Yeah. So they've added Starlink to the White House. The New York Times reported this week.

They've added Starling to the White House. but they haven't actually added Starlink dishes to the White House. The Starlink dishes are in a data center that's miles away, and then the access to Starlink is being piped in over existing fiber to the White House, and then there's a Starlink network at the White House. Already confusing, right? Isn't that just nothing? And then we asked the White House, and Carolyn Levitt,

who I'm sure all of you have seen on social media or television, she responded that the goal is to improve Wi-Fi connectivity at the White House. The White House is working to improve Wi-Fi connectivity. Nonsensical on its face. Like, I don't,

I knew when we wrote this story that our audience would be mad. If you want to improve Wi-Fi connectivity, you just add more access points. You run, maybe, you do some mesh networking. Like, if you're like, it's really wild, but I'm confident the White House

has the ability to run cables through the White House complex and put up more access points. Do you think if The New York Times had run a story that was like the White House put up a bunch of Eros around the West Wing, we would have been like, oh, cool. Yeah, they put up that new outdoor Euro Pro 7. Everyone loves it. It's great.

It's inexpensive, but you get all the bands. I don't know. But I'm confident that federal government has IT contractors. So if your goal, like, just think about this. My goal is to improve Wi-Fi connectivity with White House. That's what I'm going to say. I'm going to have kids. Carolyn Leavitt, email theverge.com and say the goal is to improve Wi-Fi connectivity at the White House.

And the mechanism by which we're doing that is we're putting Starlink dishes miles away at a different data center. What? It's every part of covering this administration involves this. Like, just straightforwardly this. Where you have to look at it and say that, you know, it doesn't make sense, right? And then they bluster back at you, and that's the end of that conversation. Anyhow, they're Starlink to the White House now. It's probably insecure.

It's probably being hacked by the minute. And the goal is to improve Wi-Fi connectivity. Sure. By the way, the story got posted to Reddit, thousands of comments from angry tech nerds on Reddit being like, that's not how you would improve Wi-Fi connectivity. You would just add access points. That's what you would do.

So I think Elon just wants its own network. That's my firm belief is that he wanted a network outside of the government's sort of IT security protocols. Maybe he realized his gaming PC wasn't getting quite the lag he was hoping for. So he's like, I can upgrade my ping if I could just get the Starlink gun. You can use satellite internet. Yeah. I don't know, man. It's a weird one.

Speaking of Starlink, more importantly, the guy who ran the Bede program, which is the federal world broadband program that It was part of the Inflation Reduction Act that Biden passed. He quit, you know, as you do. His name is Evan Feynman, and he said that the Trump's administration's overhaul of the Bede program would lead to deeply negative outcomes because they would favor Starlink. Lauren, I know you've been kind of poking around at this. What's going on with this one? Yeah, I mean, I think this is, you know, one of the things that everyone is keeping an eye on to see, you know,

is Elon Musk's involvement with the government going to have tangible effects on, you know, how his business is fair when it comes to interactions with the federal government? And, you know, I think how broadband is deployed across the country is one of the most obvious areas to look for that. So, you know, this is a major program that's meant to expand broadband access in rural areas. And, you know, it's kind of placed a lot of emphasis on fiber. So the more that we see that shift to satellite, the more that SpaceX stands to benefit from that. In his email, when he announced he was leaving, Feynman said the overhaul of the program to favor Starlink would strand all or part of rural America with worse internet so that we can make the world's richest man even richer, yet another in a long line

of betrayals by Washington. The thing that strikes me at this is it's not like the bead program has of yet been a stunning success, right? The criticism is you spent all this money on broadband and no one got any broadband. And then the argument, Lauren, as far as I understand it, is, well, we gave out the money and now they got to do it. What's the holdup? Yeah, I mean, I think the holdup is there's kind of a lot of red tape here. It's, you know, this is a big undertaking for the government. There's a lot of different ideas about how to do things. So this has been a long process in general, not. because of all the changes recently.

But I think there's a lot of fear that, you know, adding more changes at this stage will just drag things out even further, which no one really wants. All right. Well, we'll keep an eye in this. I do think, and I know everyone's going to, the Starling people will find me. They're going to team up with the Nvidia Shield people.

It's true that I think wired internet connections are superior to wireless internet connections. I'm sorry. We like wires and we like buttons. These are like two of the foundational beliefs of the verge. It's also true that Comcast is an ISP and it's an investor and a parent company, Box Media, but they hate me. So it's like just, I'm just, I just think Ethernet is a superior and more reliable than Wi-Fi. And I think fiber is more secure and reliable than satellite. It's just how it works, man.

So we'll see. Right. I think, Lauren, we're on the like wait-and-seat phase of what's. going to happen with Bede? I think that's right. All right. There's a number of other things that are sort of in this wait and see zone. TikTok is one of those, right? The Supreme Court said it was banned, like it was constitutional for the law that banned it to have banned it. And then Trump took office and he said, no, don't worry about that until April 5th. It's almost April 5th. What's happening there, Lauren? Yeah. So I think the short version is that we haven't

really seen anything come of this so far. TikTok's in the same ambiguous position, but, you know, all the companies that service it have decided they're, you know, pretty much good enough with the legal protections that the Trump administration has offered so far, even though it's technically illegal to service the company at this point now that it's past the ban deadline. But we're hearing that Oracle is trying to swoop in and save TikTok from a U.S. ban. And if that sounds familiar, it's because it kind of tried to do this before. You might remember a thing called Project Texas, which was this whole plan for Oracle to work with TikTok and, you know, make sure that all of the U.S. data. the source code was all good. And, you know, there was nothing nefarious happening. And, you know, after TikTok rolled out this huge presentation about Project Texas, lawmakers were like, well, you know, we still don't think this is enough.

So, you know, we obviously don't know what exactly a potential deal with Oracle, assuming that's what Trump is looking at here would look like. But from everything that's been rumored, it sounds pretty similar to Project Texas, which begs the question, you know, what change? And will lawmakers get on board with this this time? There's a J.D. Vance quote, he said to NBC News, there will almost certainly be a high-level agreement that I think satisfies our national security concerns and allows there to be a distinct American TikTok enterprise.

I don't actually know what that means. That doesn't mean anything. Wait, can I read you a slightly longer version of that quote that is more words and says even less? He says, we'd like to get it done without the extension. I think the question is, what is the equity ownership of the new joint venture? How do you do the contracts for all the investors, the customers, the service providers? The deal itself will be very clear, but actually creating those thousands of things, and thousands of pages of legal documents, that's the one thing I worry could slip.

Do you know what that list comprises the deal? He just described, we're going to have the deal done. We just might not have the deal done. Exactly. Yeah. And, you know, actually we're interestingly starting to see some warning from some Republicans in Congress. John Moulnar, who leads the House Select Committee on China, actually said, you know, he's a quote, the law is clear any deal must eliminate Chinese influence and control over the app to safeguard

our interests. And he also said that, you know, Biden's has to fully divest control of TikTok and have no say in its operation. So he's pretty clear that, you know, there has to be a clean break from Bytance, which doesn't seem to be what Trump has indicated he's going for in his past public statements. Is it possible that this just works out to be essentially a redux of the whole project? Texas Oracle deal, but they're going to spin it in a more politically advantageous way and then just ram it through whatever they have to ram it through because they feel like they can. Like this feels to me like they're just going to say, Oracle, fix it, and then just yell loudly at whatever Congress people they need to make that workable. I think it's certainly possible. I think it puts a lot of Republicans in a really tough position because I think the whole concern with Project Texas before was like, this doesn't get up the fundamental issue we have with bite dance owning TikTok and, you know,

potentially still having a say over their operations and, you know, potentially as the argument goes, giving the Chinese government some sort of access point to U.S. user information or to, you know, kind of change the levers that are being pulled over, you know, what content is surfaced to Americans. So, you know, if that doesn't change, then it puts a lot of Republicans who I think, think, you know, despite what you might believe about the validity of that argument, I think do seem to really believe that. It puts them in a tough spot to just, you know, go against the president if what he wants is very different from that. It's all just so weird. The politics of this is just so bizarre that, like, Trump tried to ban TikTok the first time. So much of this

happened because Trump tried to ban TikTok the first time. And then it became this incredibly bipartisan thing. Like, Nilai, you and I have argued about this on the show a hundred times now, but like, the fact of the matter is a bunch of senators got this briefing and then voted 50 to zero to ban it. Like, it's everybody wanted this to happen.

And then Trump changed his mind during the election season and became like the great crusader to save TikTok. And now might just give it to Oracle because he and Larry Ellis and everybody. By the way, while he is hiking tariffs on China every single day, like he's a, Trump is a China hot. he's not, this isn't, it is incoherent like on its face. Right. And so even if you're just trying to do what you think the Trump administration wants

you to do to stay in the good favor of the president, I don't even know how to figure out what that is if I'm a member of Congress who has to figure out what to do with this right now. Yeah, I think it's going to be really tough for, I don't know how they're going to kind of square that circle. I think, you know, it's a lot of different moving piece. And, you know, so far, we haven't seen many Republicans go, you know, directly against Trump. So in a sense, it's kind of like, you know, why would they start doing that now? On the other hand, this is something that an overwhelming number of lawmakers, including Republicans, voted for and, you know, seem to really believe in, even despite pushback from their own constituents. So, you know, it's a just Completely doing about face on that would be really stunning. Yeah. We'll see.

There's a big April coming up, right? It's TikTok ban. There's the big antitrust trial for meta, where the stakes are splitting off Instagram and WhatsApp. There's a Google search remedies trial. A lot of things are going to happen. More tariffs. More tariffs are going to hit. Can't forget tariffs, Deer Street tariffs.

Soon all of Canada will be illegal from what I understand. It will just be criminal to even know. about Canada. That'll be ironic. Another deep cut right there. Sorry. I thought of a famous Canadian, and that's what happened to me. I'm so sorry.

We're going to see. A couple weeks from now, I think the world will go a wee bit topsy-turvy, especially Israeli-Sat. The world is already topsy-turvy. Lauren, I think the big story of this week is what happened at the FTC. So if you're staring at, okay, next month, we've got some big antitrust trials. One of them is the meta trial. That one is being led by the FTC. We've got some enforcement actions against Amazon. The Trump FTC, the Federal Trade Commission, has not been

soft on these companies. They've been pretty aggressive. They've held up Lena Kahn's merger guidelines, but at the same time, Trump illegally fired two Democratic commissioners this week. Like, the law there is very clear, and he just did it anyway. What is going on there? Yeah, so yeah, this week Trump fired the two remaining Democrats on the Federal Trade Commission, which was, you know, a really sudden and shocking thing to do because there is Supreme Court precedent where, you know, a president had tried to do pretty much exactly that. And the Supreme Court said, you can't do that because the Federal Trade Commission is an independent agency. even though it's technically a part of the executive branch. And, you know, FTC commissioners have to be fired for a cause, essentially. But that doesn't seem to be what was done here. And now there's two remaining Republican commissioners at the FTC.

Just to be clear, the Democratic commissioners say, you know, they don't think they can really be fired. So they're, you know, pretty much saying we're still commissioners or we should be. And then we have a third Republican commissioner who's set up to be confirmed at some point to the role. So, you know, what makes this even more confusing is that Republicans already would have a majority on the commission. So Democrats wouldn't really be able to sway how a lot of decisions come out. But, you know, it's kind of just getting rid of this dissenting voice or, you know, maybe a voice that would be able to sway some commissioners a little bit one way or another. It does seem like one of the reasons for this firing is to set up the Supreme Court challenge that would overturn, I think it's a hundred-year-old Supreme Court precedent called Humphreys Executor. Sarah Jong, our features editor and I keep joking that everything we learned in law school is valueless. Like, you learn this case in law school. It's just like, how does the government work? And, like, it's on the list of cases you read about what you can and can't do.

And this one is very much, it's like on the nose. The president can't fire FTC commissioners. You just can't do it unless there's cause. And here he didn't have cause. You just fired them. So it's illegal. Like the law is clear and he did the thing that the case says you can't do. But you do that on purpose because you want to go to the Supreme Court and get the law of return, which is the Supreme Court is very willing to do.

So it's a very odd limbo, right? The thing that gets me, though, is this FTC is still set up to be extraordinarily hostile to tech companies. Like what outside of we're running this legal challenge to chase down this idea of the unitary executive where the president is basically a king, which is a thing, like the federal society is in pushing this idea for a long time. Outside of that, doesn't it seem like they're losing their credibility to go after the tech companies the way that they've already wanted to? Like Bedoya, one of the fired commissioners, is like, I got fired because I'm, I criticize Jeff Bezos. But then you turn around and Trump loves to criticize Jeff Bezos. Like I kind of don't understand that goal here. Yeah, I think that's been kind of a big conundrum with this one.

You know, I think on the one hand, maybe Trump kind of made this decision outside of those considerations and said, you know, I just want to make sure I have full control over the FTC. On the other hand, it's concerning because it's. If, you know, you have an FTC that does want to go after legitimate issues in the tech industry and you have a Republican chair who says he wants to take on the tech companies, I think one of the commissioners actually said something to the effect of, you know, Ferguson, the Republican chair is interested in going after tech. But what happens if he gets a call from the White House saying, you know, don't go after this executive? who is becoming friendly with the White House. So, you know, I think it just calls into question the whole idea of the independence of the agency, which is something that Trump has already tried to assert power over in, you know, issuing an executive order kind of trying to exert more supervisory influence over independent agencies.

So, you know, I think this is just, it's more about it being another step in the direction toward controlling what are supposed to be independent agencies that are able to kind of follow the facts where they lead and issue enforcement actions. And the, you know, continuance of that is being called into question now. Yeah. It seems a dead certainty that this case will end up back before the Supreme Court and we will end up writing an explainer about 100-year-old Supreme Court precedents to get overturned. But the context is this is how the government goes and regulates a meta or an Amazon or seeks. a breakup of these companies in one way or another. And if you make that politics, then you get real corrupt, real fast, right? You get real stupid real fast if that is now like a horse traded negotiation as opposed to here's the antitrust law that's being applied. Like I'm struggling to articulate this, but it just, the thing I want to say is like,

if you make everything this political, you get stupid. Like there's like you just start, you just lose your grasp on reality because everything has to be politically expedient or politically coherent, not logically coherent. And this one to me is just like, they have the votes anyway. But if you're the, if you're the Trump administration and you're in a phase of testing your own invincibility, maybe it's pretty useful to make everything politics because then everything runs through you specifically and you get to horse trade anything you want. And I think like one of the strange things about this is the Trump administration in certain ways is incredibly business friendly. And a lot of the reaction to this has been,

this is what an incredible victory for all the rich people out there who are now not going to be regulated in any meaningful way, except the tech companies. Like, the FTC loves business and wants to tear big deck to the ground. And I think that that whole cognitive dissonance is very loud inside of all of this decision for me. It's very strange. Yeah.

And even the, you know, we mentioned that Google Remedies phase of the search antitrust trial is coming up. That case was started in Trump one, carried out under the Biden administration. Phase one was won under the Biden administration. And now the remedies phase, what are we going to do to Google, will be handled by a new Trump administration that is just like a meaningfully different footing. Like the last Trump administration antitrust posture was literally we will find a way to broker a deal for T-Mobile to buy Sprint. Like, we will arrange this to happen. Boy, do I have feelings about that.

Have you guys all been using your DISH Network 5G, everybody? Did that work? Great. I love it. I have TING Internet, which I think is DISH. But that was the first Trump administration's posture, and they're the ones who started the Google antitrust trial. This new Trump administration is way more aggressive, right?

They've picked up a lot of the pieces from the Biden administration's posture towards the tech industry. and they're carrying it out. And it's just, there's a part of this where, oh, that's great. Co-regulate tech companies. And there's a part of it's, we've been calling it gangster tech regulation where they're just going to, I don't know, like, Mark Zuckerberg's going to show up and you like, I made you a solid gold Porsche and that'll be the end of it. You know, like he gets to keep Instagram.

And I just, this level of politics, I think, makes you done. Speaking of dummies, Lauren, welcome to the Verchast. Now you can see we can play a up Brendan Carr? Wait, can I tell you something very. fun. So I like to call this America's favorite podcast within a podcast because it is that and it's very exciting. We heard from a number of fans of the podcast, my brother, my brother and me, which is a podcast that I love very much. And they also have a podcast within a podcast called Munch Squad where they talk about fast food and brand eating. So we now have a podcast enemy and it's Munch Squad. And I just wanted to tell you that because it's very exciting. It's a heated race for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. And I vote Brendan Carr. I can't believe I can pull this transition off, but I can do it. I'm going to do it.

You ready? So I believe on the Munchcast, they have talked about Reese's peanut buttercups. They have, yeah. We'll get to Brennan in a second. Welcome to Brennan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast with a podcast. FCC commissioner of Brennan Carr is a notable dummy. He's predecessor, a G-Pye in Trump One. loved to drink out of a giant oversized novelty,

Rhesus peanut butter cup. They had a huge coffee cup, Rhesus logo on it. It went everywhere he went as he tore down consumer protections across the country, made internet access more expensive than worse for everybody. Literally, one of the first things he did was he got rid of the privacy rules that ISPs were made to operate under. So now they can share your data. Great, love it.

But the mug made him, you know, charming. Hey, guess who the new president of the CTIA, the wireless lobbyist group is. Wait, really? Yep. He's back. The Wireless Industry Association, new president, Ajit Pye, affected April 1.

His doors just spinning, baby. You just leave the government agency that's supposed to regulate the wireless industry, land at the top of the wireless industry's lobbyist group. Fantastic. He's honored to lead CTIA, by the way. The wireless industry is a key driver of technology, innovation investment in the United States.

He's got a huge check. Oh, yeah, there's no way. You don't think the mug is like technically a government property. I'm going to mail him a grape and be like, do surgery on this. No, but you can't mail it to him. You have to leave it at your house. You have to send him a picture and you have to say surgery on this. Oh, her 5G.

Come and get it, dude. I'll be here waiting. All right. So, Brendan, this week, it was revealed that he sent a letter. He's investigating 13 public radio stations, including WBEZ, which is. is This American Life, right? It's This American Life. It's WB.Z.

Yeah. So, This American Life is under investigation from Renan Carr over what he says is illegal advertising because they do this thing called underwriting where, you know, it says this program is brought to you about that da-da-da-da-da. That's advertising. And if you're doing advertising, then you can get your funding cut. That's like the thing that NPR has been doing forever and ever always. That's what they do. Yeah. That's like NPR's whole thing.

We do not give enough public dollars to these radio station stop. operate so you underwriting to cover the gap and everyone gets to feel good about themselves and there's a gala at the shed aquarium or whatever in Chicago. But the argument is because they say the name of the underwriter on the thing now that's advertising? Here's what Brandon said. I am concerned that NPR and PBS broadcast could be violating federal law by airing commercials. It is possible that NPR and PBS member stations are broadcasting underwriting announcements that cross the line into prohibited commercial advertisements. I do not see a reason why Congress should continue sending taxpayer dollars to NPR and PBS given the changes. in the media marketplace. So he's just looking for an excuse to cut funding to NPRP.

Yeah, that's what that sounds like. He thinks are too woke. For its part, WBEZ says they received the letter on February 28th. We can confirm we receive the letter. They say in statements. They've requested detailed information. We adhere to the FCC underwriting guidelines. We're confident that we'll demonstrate compliance.

I should note here just a disclosure. It's not actually disclosure, but WBEZ is part of Chicago Public Media, the CEO of Chicago Public Media, media is our old publisher, Melissa Bell. She has co-foundedbox.com. Yeah, she's my mom. I sent her a text. She hasn't responded to me.

I'm going to try to get her on decoder. Melissa, if you would like to come dunk on Brendan, that's a choice. I suspect she will not. Just to put that out there, I suspect she will not. But there's your disclosure. This is just noise, right? This is Brandon once again going after media that he dislikes

because it's too woke or too liberal or too by or whatever he thinks. concocting some bullshit to express his power, and then he's attacking this American life by saying, I will make sure the government stops funding you because I have decided that you're underwriting sponsorships are illegal advertising, and Congress shouldn't fund you anymore. And that is just, again, Brendan Carr trying to chill speech in America that he disagrees with. And he does this weekend and week out. I barely even have to research this segment. I start typing Brendan Carr into my laptop.

It auto completes, and then there's a list of bullshit that this man does to chill speech in America. Every week without fail. So we're going to keep covering what's going on here. We're looking for the other stations that have received this letter. If you know who they are, if you work, you can tip us. We'd love to talk to you about this. But this is just nonsense. Like the First Amendment in this country is directly under attack in a huge variety of ways.

We've covered what's going on on campus with protests and protesters being reversed. moves at Columbia. We have a great story this week about what's happening to immigrants who are landing at airports and having our social media searched and then being kicked out of the country for no reason whatsoever. And like a weird combination of databases that Gabby, our reporter who wrote that story called a penopticon. Like, there's just real pressure on freedom of speech in this country right now. And Brendan remains the tip of that spear because he goes after media organizations, specifically media organizations that he disagrees with over and over and over again using power that he does not actually have.

He concocks bullshit to express his power. So, Brendan, as always, I know you listen. I know you get the alerts. I know that there's some intern who sends you a read out of this. I know that you like it. I do. You're welcome to come on the show, and I will humiliate you to your face anytime you want.

You can come on Decoder as well. But you should answer for this because it's real bad. That's when Brennan Carr is a dummy, everyone's favorite podcast within a podcast. Wait, I have a Brendan Carr's a dummy follow-up question. Is he connected at all? to what happened with the Trump administration and Voice of America? You speak, the sort of full shutdown of that entire arm?

I don't think so. Okay. Lauren, I think that's somewhere else. I think Voice America is somewhere else. I think so, yeah. It's very much like of a political piece, though, this, this like just relentless shutdown of anything that they perceive to be against them politically. Yeah. It's funny because Voice of America is meant to be it, like, the export of American cultural values.

Like, it is sort of meant to be propaganda. Yeah. But they landed at we should do, we should tell the truth. And that is uncomfortable when everything is this political and stupid. And so now they're shut down. It's fine. Just let it be propaganda. 24 hours a day, be like, you know what, rules America.

That's fine. I know, right? Like, go make your own propaganda. Don't shut it down. Very stupid. I guess that's what Joe Rogan is for. All right. Last one, we should talk about this one is, it seems complicated because I don't know exactly what

anyone is trying to get except yelled at. But, you know, the Trump administration is new. They've got new ideas about AI. They got David Sachs. AIs are doing something somewhere. And Lauren, both Open AI and Google this week basically said, hey, what if there wasn't copyright law? What? That's basically how I read these letters.

What's going on here? Yeah. So basically the White House was asking companies to kind of submit comments about, you know, what should we do about AI? And Open AI and Google's response was like, let us train on copyrighted work. Let's like have some, you know, application of like fair use for AI. And obviously the copyright holders like the entertainment industry did not feel so great about that. And, you know, a lot of celebrities were speaking out against this kind of idea. So, you know, just setting up kind of this big fight over.

copyright and AI and what the government should do about it. It's weird to me because there are so many pending lawsuits, right? A bunch of celebrities have sued Open AI. It feels like everyone's a little bit twitchier with Google. It's a harder company to sue for a variety of reasons. Everyone's tied up with Google for a variety of reasons. Every celebrity has their podcast on YouTube, for God's sake. What are you going to do without Google?

But there are all of these lawsuits. Our company has sued cohered. There's a disclosure. We also have to deal with Open AI. Another weird disclosure. None of that has anything to do with us. I'm just saying you can see how even in this tiny little context, everyone's like playing different games and we'll see how these lawsuits play out.

And these letters feel like, hey, what if we didn't do all that? And Trump just said it was okay. Like, I don't understand that. Do they think they're going to get that? Like, that's what it feels like they're asking for. I mean, I guess they think it's worth a shot. I mean, I think it's almost like what we've seen with TikTok, you know, the courts say one thing, and then Trump comes in and says, no, actually, I'm going to give an

extension that's not written into the law. So I think, you know, they're trying to go at this from all different dimensions in the courts and policy, you know, in like actual laws out of Congress and we'll see kind of what gets there first, I think. It actually strikes me as like a perfectly reasonable thing to try if you're one of these companies. Like it might work. And And the thing I think is so funny about all this is they're all making the stakes so high. And it's like both Google and OpenAI were like if you don't let us do whatever we want with everything that has ever been created in human history, China will win. That's like that's the stakes that they're making. And then everybody in Hollywood is like if you don't stop them from doing this, no creative act will ever occur in the future ever again.

And it's like, what if we all just settled down a little? Like, can we all, it's just... Wait, in this case, I kind of agree with Hollywood. I think... I mean, if you want me to pick a side, I'm on Hollywood side and it's not close. It is true that the number of movies is going down, right? Like, it's true that we all have to, like, pretend severance is, like, ten times better than it is, because it's the only good thing. Okay.

Do you know what I mean? First of all. Like, there's nothing as good as that to compare it to except the White Lotus, and now we all have to pretend that shows in which nothing has. happens or like the peak of all cinema. Just throwing that out there. I will say I, Neela, you know I hate you. So this, this brings me great pain to say. But after like two episodes ago of severance, Nelai posted on Blue Sky something to the effect of they made a 40 minute episode of severance in which the first 12 minutes is her going to a place, asking for a ride to a place to get another ride to another place. And I have, I have laughed thinking about that post every single day since then.

Ben Stiller replied to that post. Ben Stiller did not laugh at that post. Feel great. Ben, you're also welcome on the Roachcast. It'll go better for you. I like Severance. I like the show. My point is just we make so fewer shows that the bar is like, we have to pretend that like asking for a ride is like the peak of all television art.

And like maybe it isn't. And so I'm just saying Hollywood might have a point here. We should make some more stuff. We should not be in the situation. True. But Lauren, to your point, like, if I'm one of these companies, I would very much like to be excluded from the deep hate toward big tech. And I have to like, all that is still coming for these companies. And I, if I'm open AI, I would super love to just kind of be over here.

It's like maybe, maybe use all the deregulation you're doing again on me and not put me in the big tech. Is it like, can you imagine Trump issuing an executive order that's like, I've decided that AI is fair use. Yes. But like 100, yes. What are you talking about? Sure. We, it's the Gulf of America. What are you talking about?

Sure. But like, all right. There's a part of me that where he knows he still gets royalties from the apprentice. You know what I mean? Like, he knows where his money comes from. And that one's particularly art. Like, I have personally like intervened in a bunch of active court cases. I don't really care about.

It's much more likely to he would do Gulf America. I don't. Lauren, what do you think the endgame is here? Just like, give it a shot? I think so. I mean, I think they're going to try to say something on AI one way or another. So the company is want to make sure that their point of view and, you know, to David's point, maybe the most hysterical version of that point of view is heard.

All right. We'll see. I mean, I'm very excited for Trump to weigh in on 17 USC 107, specifically by statute. Look, there's a bunch of other politics stuff on the website. It is a heated time in America should be obvious to anybody who's paying attention. We have a great stories to speak about Doge, straining all the USAID workers with, like, work laptops full of data with no plan to recover them. We got stories about the Tesla takedown protests, which are starting to have a real effect on that stock price. One of the dumbest things that keeps happening in this administration is they just keep removing web pages by searching for words that mean other.

things. And so like a bunch of black soldiers got removed from the Department of Defense website because they just added the phrase DEI to their URLs and then broke all the URLs. Like all this stuff is just like relentlessly happening. We're covering it. I know a lot of our listeners and a lot of our audience would like a break from it. We're going to add some filtering to the website, but we're not going to stop covering it. I want to say that as clearly as I can. This is the story. The government is breaking and a lot of it is breaking because the tech industry is insisting that it get broken. in the form of Yon-Muss, yes, but also in the form of Google, just writing a letter saying, what if copyright law go away? What do you think? And it just, all of that keeps relentlessly happening.

So we're going to keep covering it. We have to build some stuff. We have some big ideas about how to filter the site. So we're going to build those tools for you as well. We'll do some RSS stuff. We can do that pretty fast. But I just want to say clearly,

we're going to keep covering it. Lauren is doing a great job leading a bunch of that coverage. So thank you so much, Lauren. Lauren, I should also warn you that you're going to be on this show a lot in the next six weeks. and I'm really sorry in advance. You're also going to be in courtrooms a lot in the next six weeks, and I'm also really sorry in advance. But it's about to be a wild spring for you in particular,

and we're going to be hanging out a lot. April's going to be a crazy month. Will we make TikToks about it? Who knows? We'll find out on April 6th. Lauren, thank you so much for being on. Thanks. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic.

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Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus, and yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning, and we assessed that individual. They are doing well. possibly because this is not the one to freak out over.

Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. It's unsponsored for Flavor. I said it once and I have to say it every time. And it's getting more embarrassing every time. The calls for T-shirts keep coming in and they've gotten to the point where there are several people who are now annoyed at me for bringing up T-shirts and not making the T-shirts. If you have an unsponsored for Flavor T-shirt design, I would love to see it.

That's all I can tell you. know, I have no promises on what will happen with it. But I, I personally want both an unsponsored for flavor shirt that looks like I'm an unsponsored skateboarder and I want an everything's computer t-shirt. I can't promise that either of those will exist or that we will do them, but I want them both in my life very badly. I understand. I mean, you know, the implication is that when we're sponsored, there's less flavor, which is just not, I would repeat to everyone. It's fine because we exist in the, you know, the creator. economy writ large and I think for many folks, the sponsorship does reduce flavor. But that's not us.

Because we have this annoyingly precious ethics policy. Right. It's just a different flavor. That's all. Yeah. It's still, I still directly challenge FCC commissioners to humiliation rituals on the show. You can sponsor it or not. It's going to keep happening no matter what. All right. I was going to be brought to you by the FCC. If we can ever pull, like, an executive from an ISP on one of our shows, I'll be like, have you unspensored for me? All right. I wanted to stop talking about Elon and politics, but the first item in the lightning round, it demands it. There's no other place in the show for this sentence to go. Tesla recalls more than 46,000 cyber trucks after trim starts falling off. Is that all of them?

It seems like a lot of them. It does. I don't think they've sold a lot. They've been sitting on lots. We've known the trim has been falling off for seven months. YouTubers are making videos about the trim. It's the triangle piece. It's just glued on there, like the part that goes over the window.

It's been flying off these cars since the first day. Like, we've known for a long time that this piece falls off the cars. And we're only getting the recall now. Cool. The recall applies to every cyber truck manufacturer between November 13, 2023. February 27, 2025. It's the 8th recall. A lot of them were software.

But a similar recall was announced last summer regarding a trim fault and a truck bed. It also risked coming loose. This car is not super well made. It does not seem to be the takeaway here. It does not seem great. I think one of the more interesting things about Tesla right now, and we don't have to overdo it,

is that the bloom is coming off the rows such that YouTubers are starting to chase the company. So there's, you know, there's a Mark Rober video this week about autopilot and LIDAR, and there's a lot of weirdness with that video. We don't have to like over-talk it, but there's just some, like when he drives the car through the wall, if you've seen the video, he drives Tesla through a wall that's like a Wiley-Coyote painting of more road because the cameras, because the thesis is the cameras won't be able to detect the wall because they just use vision and so I'll go to C-road.

When he drives through it, like, is a Looney Tunes cut? out of like a thing you would drive through. Like there's, it's an entertainment piece. You can tell it's an entertainment piece. But there's that. You can see Jerry Wrig, everything has been really harsh on the cyber truck lately. Marquez has been posting about his roadster pre-order. It's never shipping.

I think he wrote aged like milk. I wish being shot of it. You're just seeing, it's like, it's fine now in a way that, you know, they're still getting intact and there's quite a lot of angst about it. But it's just fine now to point out the problems with this, this company and its cars. And that is, that's a pretty big change. Yeah.

John Herman, our friend at New York Mag wrote a really good piece about this this week, basically looking at that turn. And at how long Tesla kept this thing where it was sort of a universally praised thing in that space. And it was considered sort of the standard thing to do to like Tesla. Like every tech YouTuber loved Elon Musk. and love Tesla. And it was like, it represented everything that people in that space believed in.

And that has completely shifted. Yeah, it just totally flipped. And, you know, the protests, I think I interviewed Ed Neidmerbier who wrote Ludacris, the inside story of Tesla Motors. He's one of the leaders that Tesla take down protest movement. And I'm just going to say this clear. He said on the show, he disavows any vandalism or violence. I asked him directly, he said it. This is like the bot comment of the day about Tesla protests.

Yeah. I asked him and he said, don't do vandalism. summer violence. But those protests are having impact because people are starting to, the bloom is coming off the rows of the brand. And now investors, big investors are starting to say things like Elon needs to pay attention to Tesla. We'll see how it plays out. I'm just, I'm just pointing out, the cyber truck continues to be one of the funniest cars ever made. Yeah. Big silly wiper, my guys. All right. David, do you know what's going on with this book, this careless people book? It's like, it keeps crossing my path. I have a copy of it. It just,

seems like meta wanted this book to go away because it's a book about Mark Zuckerberg and meta and now it's at the top of the North Times specialer list. Yeah, I mean, it is like an all-time strisand effect moment where Sarah Win Williams writes this book about her time at Meta that meta, I think, perceived to be, you know, disastrously terrible and full of lies. And so entered into this big fight to try and issue you an injunction to prevent her from from promoting and distributing the book. It became this whole thing. The publisher came out and said, you know, we defend what's in the book. This has been carefully vetted. Increasingly, people who are reading the book seem to be,

a vouching for a lot of it that what she is writing is true. I have not read the book, so I can't say for sure, but I know Alex Heath on our team has one and has been talking to people about it. The book is just out. You can just read it. I should read it this weekend. but by all accounts it is actually it's a good book full of real allegations and implications about the workplace at meta. Some of them about harassment and real problems.

Meta has just played this exactly the worst possible way if you're meta and don't want people to read this book because now like you said it is a number one bestseller which I would say for even a pretty splashy like memoir of a person's experience inside of a company is pretty unusual to be a number one bestseller is not an easy thing to pull off

and now this this book is a huge story. It is, I think the book itself is a bigger story than anything in the book at the moment, which is really interesting. Like this fight I think has subsumed some of the conversation about like the allegations of what has gone on inside of meta,

which is a weird way to have this conversation go. But it's very much out there now. And I suspect I, like many others, will be reading this book much more carefully and enthusiastically than I would have otherwise. Yeah. The weird thing about it is that Meta, they pulled out her like arbitration agreement, went to an arbitrator and said she's not allowed to promote the book. And then the publisher of the book. And then Meta completely overstated that ruling. And they're like, we've vindicated this book as lies.

which is not what the ruling said. And then the publisher of the book is like, look, that has nothing to do with us. We're going to continue promoting the book. So we're in this weird limbo. We're meta. You know, we're doing free speech now. We're going to eat community notes.

Everything's wide open on meta platforms is actively trying to shut down speech. And the thing that happens when you actively try to shut down speech is definitely happening, which is everyone is curious about the thing they're not supposed to read. Yeah. Right. It just never works. No. And of all of the companies who should know this,

meta should know this. And they are like Andy Stone, like meta-coms. It's like on threads every day being like replying to anyone who says anything about this book being like, this book is lies. Right. How dare you? Yeah. And it's just like, what are you doing? Like what, what has you so worked up?

And maybe it is all lies. But this isn't. But then you get people like Dustin Moscovitz, one of the co-founders of Facebook, uh, saying essentially that he encourages everybody to read the book and that there are lots of allegations in there, but that actually inside of all of that is. a really interesting and telling read about how the company works and how the personalities inside of the company operate. Like there's a lot about Cheryl Sandberg and a lot about Joel Kaplan and like it seems to be, again, I have not read the book. We should talk about this once we've both read it. But that there is a lot of just sort of interesting business memoir inside of here that is not super flattering to meta that now an awful lot of people

are going to be exposed to because there is, there is, I think, a really interesting version of this story that is like there are big problematic allegations that will get talked about and we'll get run through the press and will become the story. But then there are, I think the sort of lingering legacy of books like this is they do start to big picture change the way you understand how companies like this work. And I think we might get to that legacy much faster because this has become such a big story that it is like, oh, if for meta to be this upset about this must mean she's telling the truth. And that becomes really powerful.

And I think, like, this book is going to have really interesting, different impact, even from the sort of immediately headline-grabbing allegations that it makes. You know, it's interesting is, you know, I flipped through the galley. I haven't read it closely. But I flipped through the galley, and I've read a bunch of the stories about the book and some of the excerpts. And what's fascinating about it is it makes meta seem really small and personality-driven. Like, Mark Zuckerberg is fiddling with individual content moderation decisions, various executives are very personally driving the company.

Which is the opposite of how META wants you to think about it. Right. METO wants to be a government, right? That's how they set up a Supreme Court, for God's sake. Nobody cares about. I would compare that to Mark Bergen, who's a great journalist. I think he's at Bloomberg. He wrote a book about YouTube called Like, Comment, Subscribe.

He was on Decoder. He can listen to an interview. I love this book. It's good book. Because it makes YouTube seem big. Like, the scale of the problem that YouTube has to solve with content moderation with what it with the interface, all the stuff, particularly under Susan Wojcicki, the book doesn't shy away from the problem, and it's deeply reported, it's in the weeds of YouTube, and it makes the case

somewhat persuasively that YouTube has a shitload of problems, and that all these people are stressed to the max every single day, but the reason YouTube is perceived to be slow is because they're taking it seriously. Right. I can issue criticisms of YouTube all day and all night, and maybe we'll do that another episode of the show. But it was just interesting comparing and contrasting these two books and what you're saying about the narratives that take hold of a company. Like that book is very, very critical of YouTube. And I really do encourage people at radio or listen to an episode of a coder. But it, you just, it conveys the scale of the problem. It makes YouTube seem big in comparison that scale. And I think the reason meta hates this book is it makes them all seem small.

And Alex is, Alex Heath is reading. He's doing some reporting to try to figure out what's happening. So we'll have more of that. We'll probably have him come talk about the show. next week or the week after when he's done with that process. But that's just my read of it is like, oh, these guys hate it when you make him seem small. Yeah. Speaking of meta, there's a little bit of activity pub news. After a big run for blue sky.

Activity pub. Well, some glimmers. So maybe the most important one in terms of meta, Threads, by the way, supports activity pub. Threads is now going to let you set your following feed by default. Just five years too late. But they're going to do it. Five years too late for a two-year-old project.

It feels right. They're going to do it. I think that's smart. I think they've lost a lot of juice to Blue Sky. Yes. I think threads, in a really funny way, I think I thought Threads was sort of speed running Instagram, where it was going to go and become this sort of central platform everybody was very quickly.

And what it actually looks like it's doing is speed running Facebook, where it becomes the thing that everybody is on, but no one pays attention to really quickly. And I think meta does not want to build another Facebook, even though Facebook has been very good to Meta for a really long time. That is a dying thing, and you don't want to get to the end state of that very quickly. And yeah, I think they are desperate to make threads a place people want to hang out in the way that Blue Sky is a place people want to hang out.

And the size advantage it has is real, right? Like they continue to dominate in terms of like raw number of users, and people who are, and whatever, but like, blue sky is more fun. And, and like, I, we're in so many ways what Facebook was to Twitter, which is vastly bigger and totally irrelevant. Threads now risks becoming to blue sky. And if I'm Mark Zuckerberg and Adam Aseri, I am like fighting tooth and nail to make sure that doesn't happen. And the best thing that that has led to is better product. truly like this thing where you can just see your following feed does not happen if blue sky doesn't exist and isn't this. It just doesn't because this company has very specific ideas about what it believes is best and is best for engagement. And the following feed is not good for engagement. It just isn't. And it doesn't matter because they need people to use the platform. Yeah. And it's so it's so good that this that there is real meaningful competition here because it's forcing everybody's hands to.

actually build better products. I honestly think one of the biggest successes of the TikTok algorithm is that it is divorced from time, but it still manages to feel relevant. Right? There's something really good about that algorithm where you're like, some news happened today and like you see it on TikTok in the algorithm pretty much right away, right? Like, it just happens every day. Like whoever is on tour right now, you see clips from the concert of that night, like in real time

every day. Uh, threads is so divorced in time. Yes. Right? Like never feels relevant. So even, you get the big algorithmic juice, which is whatever one wants to copy from TikTok, but you lose all of the relevance. And then blue sky is just a fire hose of nonstop apocalyptic relevance.

But at least it's funny. You know, like, yeah. I don't think they've nailed that because once you lose the relevance, then you're like, Twitter like becomes meaningless. So you can have everybody. there, but it's like, what's the point? And in particular, the thing that I think they've utterly biffed on is sports. Because if you don't want politics, right?

They keep saying they don't want politics. They want to polarize. It's like, dude, just like build great, like hire every sports beat writer in America and pay Adam Schaefter to put the trades there first. Right. Well, the, the problem is, uh, sports might move faster on the like new to irrelevant timeline than anything else because. like play by play and signing by set like all that stuff happens so fast and it is it ceases to be timely and new seconds after it happens.

And so I think for threads to try and be more like Instagram where they're a little more timeless and they can show you older stuff that is still interesting doesn't work with any of that stuff. And like what what I think threads is slowly learning that Blue Sky learned really fast is that there is no middle ground between like Twitter and Instagram. you just have to do Twitter. Like, you can't do Twitter on an Instagram pace. Like, the only way to do it is it Twitter pace. And Blue Sky figured that out really fast. And I think, too, it's benefit. It's, it, do you post to both?

Every now and again, I post to both in my experiences. You just see that anything on threads just lives a life free of constraint. It's so true. Like, random people find it. They get mad at you for reasons that are impossible to understand. because they're seeing your post like six months after it happened. Bootsky is a very tight, constrained

amount of anger and then it dips. Right. Everybody gets mad at you for 10 minutes and minutes out of their feet. Like a threats post that goes is like three weeks of just randos being like, I bought a Mac five years ago. And it's like, I don't remember what we were talking about.

Yeah. Speaking of Activity Pub, uh, Ghost, the so open source rival, the substack newsletter platform, they have completed the first switch of their activity pub integration. I think it's still in beta.

You have to go enable it. But they, so now you can, ghost newsletters can go out over activity pub to platforms like pixel fed to threads to Massadon. And then importantly, if you're a ghost person, you can feed all those things back into ghost. This is the one, you know, I don't think it's going to set the world on fire, but especially because it's just in beta, it's very small.

But the part where the content comes back in, and if you're a ghost newsletter writer, you can look at Mastodon and then like republish that and get engagement. That's the part that I'm dying to see happen because that's the promise of all these services and none of them. It's come true nowhere yet. Right. And that's also like this is, if you want to understand what makes the Fedaverse interesting, it's this stuff, right? Because this is not my Twitter clone can talk to your Twitter clone is one thing. That's fine. And that's exciting. And that's part of the solution here. but this is I can publish a newsletter that goes to my website, your email inbox, and their Mastodon feed.

And if they respond to my email or like on their Mastodon or comment on my blog, that actually all ends up as one conversation. And like that is the thing that is hard to wrap your head around, but is ultimately what makes this stuff work. It's just stuff. And you write where you want and I read where I want and we both talk to each other in different places. but have the same conversation. It's like, that's the magic of it. Yeah, I can, concretely, you know,

we talked about that Starlink in the White House story. That was on Reddit. I got hundreds, if not a thousand comments. It just did big numbers over there. And the people on our site never saw that that whole set of engagement had happened.

And if I could just connect those communities, maybe not directly, because I think there's value to having distinction between communities. But if I could just let you see, like there's a huge conversation with this story happening.

somewhere else and that's built into the piping of the internet, then we all kind of get more value out of all of it. As opposed to being like, we basically just like gave Reddit a thing to generate free content about. Like, if we can all pull that together, there's something strong there. So I'm happy if the ghost has done this and watching it. I do think there's a protocol fight between Exhibit Pub and at

protocol, which is what Blue Sky runs on. But like, that's pretty fun. I agree. Green shoots of innovation. Um, okay, last one. I just want to, I want to read you this quote. Ted Sarandos, the co-CEO of Netflix, the content CEO, gave the interview variety. And then they asked him about Apple TV.

And here's what he said about Apple TV Plus. I don't understand it beyond a marketing ploy, but they're really smart people. Maybe they see something we don't. That's a pretty good dunk. I love this so much. He dunked on everybody in this one interview. He, like, came at David Zazlov and Warner Bros. Discovery for going with the Mac's name and said of the HBO name.

He dunked on Amazon. He was like, they're good at football, but what else are they doing? But I agree, this was the best one. He's basically like, I don't know, they can throw some money at this if they want to. Did you see also the information had a story, I think today that said Apple's streaming is losing over a billion dollars a year? That it is, like, maybe Ted Sarandos is right. Maybe this is just Apple wanting to.

to have an in with people and be able to bring Oprah Winfrey up on stage at events to talk about a billion pockets. And I do think there is more to it than just that. But it is not obvious what Apple is in this for. Wait, you don't think it's obvious? I think it's totally obvious. I think I can galaxy brain my way into a theory. But it is clearly not just trying to build a competitive streaming service. No, it's definitely not that.

Yeah. So, okay, what do you think it is? You think it's obvious? I think it's obvious. I think Apple's money doesn't come from the iPhone anymore, right? iPhone sales are declining. Mac sales are growing, but like, just not enough. Apple's money comes from Candy Crush whales.

Sure. Yeah. Meaningfully, that's the money. It comes from the base tier of ICloud being way too small and ever having to pay for more storage. Right. And then they upsell you into services. But like, it's in-app purchases. It's the, it's the apps for it.

tax. It's 30% on Candy Crush Whales. That is the bulk of Apple's revenue now. It's the thing that's growing. Every year it's growing. And you cannot be like, okay, we're the richest company in the world. We're the most innovative company in the world. The money is from Candy Crush Whales. They can't. They have to put a better face on services. Interesting. And so you get severance. And you're like, we're the company that makes severance. That's a service. Don't you love Apple TV, the service, we're a services company. And then hidden under that are some candy crush whales. So it's the sexy loss leader in the bundle that like makes the bundle seem cooler than

just payment processing in Candy Crush Wales. Yeah. Because I think if they're that company, then they lose their, their like sense of self. Right. Right. Like what we are is Stripe, but we have a gun. Like in the gun is your app doesn't. exist anymore. Yeah, I don't, that's not Apple. I think we're the creative company and we make

the Mac Pro and don't, this video, music video was shot on an iPhone. Like, they're that company. I think they have a lot of consternation on how much money all this is losing. Yes. But I think at the end of the day, all of it exists to, to make them the art company, not the billing company. That's a good take. And it is, I think, would Apple spend a billion dollars a year on maintaining its identity as a company that does and loves creative stuff, absolutely. No question. Which is why, like, there was all this talk when Severin's season two is coming out about how, you know, super delayed and super over budget.

And now it is, it is probably the busiest show out right now, I would say. You hate it, but what do you know? I'm, uh, I watch this show religiously. I think it is beautiful. It is beautifully made. I'm just saying we have landed in a time when there are so few beautifully well-crafted things to watch that we have to pretend that this is the best one. Sure, but this is all ancillary to my point, which is I think your argument would suggest that the brand value of how much people loved Ted Lassow and how invested people are in severance makes the rest of the thing irrelevant. that like it's not quite marketing,

but it is like it's like a love engine for Apple that kind of doesn't exist anywhere else right now. Yeah. And again, they get to show up on their earnings calls and say, once again, services led the quarter with our award-winning show, Ted Lassen.

Right. Not with our candy crush whales. Extremely ruthless collection of taxes from candy crush whales. We extracted more value from all of our app developers. Every developer in the world is pissed at us. Yeah. Because our people call them up and demand that we add in-app purchases to their apps.

And that's our money. Like, have you heard about Ted Lassau? He's so cheerful. No, I buy that. That's a good theory. And I do think they will reconcile costs along the way because, I mean, what am I pointing out? There's less competition for beautifully made shows.

So they will find a way to bring things. You can see it. What's that movie they just made? The Gorge? Uh-huh. Don't do that. They're bad at that. Like, they should stop spending that money.

I think, have they made a movie that's, like, good? Cota won Best Picture. But they bought that movie. True. No. Of the, like, big Apple originals, F1 is the big swing coming this summer. That's going to be the one, I would guess. It's either going to be a big monster hit or it is going to make a lot of heads roll inside of Apple.

Because that is, I think, by some accounts, like one of the most expensive movies of all. all time. They've been talking about it forever. It is, it's a huge deal for Apple. And if it doesn't hit, uh, I think a lot of people get fired. Yeah. I watched the trailer. It, it, it's not a very good trailer. It, it doesn't seem like it has a lot to do with F1. No. It's just Brad Pitt, like being beautiful. And he's very good at that. That's that. Like, even at this point, Drive to survive doesn't have a lot to do with F1. No. Like I, I think was Toto Wolf was like, this show is basically top gun. And I was like, yeah, it rules. So that's fine. Yeah. It's kind of right. Anyhow, they will reconcile their costs. But you can see that I think Ted Sarandos knows that Apple has this to dress up at services line. And he's, I think he's willing to take that dog.

Yeah. And I don't think, I don't think Netflix feels pressure from any of the company is Ted Sarandos named here. Like, yeah. He's not there. There was that one moment where they accidentally lit up universal search on the Apple TV and everyone thought they'd caved. And they're like, yep. No, we mis-set a feature flag. Yeah. I kind of hope they did that on purpose just as a flex. They're like, wouldn't it be cool if we did this? Too bad. Yeah. All right.

We're way over. Like, way, way, way, way over. Thanks again to Lauren for joining us. There's like a million stories on our site about all kinds of things. Tech, uh, coos, Netflix. It's a good website. You should read. It's at the verge.

com. The show notes will be lively this week. Yeah. There's a lot going on. That's it. That's it. That's for the Vergecast. And that's it for the Vergecast this week.

And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcasts Network. Our show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.