Could the Trump Phone be a good phone?

Summary

The Vergecast — "Could the Trump Phone be a Good Phone?"

Release Date: February 10, 2026
Host: David Pierce
Guests: Dom Preston (The Verge), Hayden Field (The Verge), Andy Hawkins (The Verge)

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Episode Overview

This Vergecast episode dives into two central themes:

• An investigative deep dive into the elusive "Trump Phone," with guest Dom Preston sharing exclusive new information after finally laying eyes on the device and speaking with its creators.
• The latest wild turns in AI agents, focusing on the emergence of viral projects like OpenClaw and Molt Book, as analyzed by AI reporter Hayden Field. A Vergecast hotline segment rounds out the show, tackling whether Tesla is still a car company or evolving into something radically different.

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1. Trump Phone: Myth, Reality, and Hardware Revealed

(00:40–33:08)

The Obsession with the Trump Phone

• David Pierce recounts his struggles switching phones due to "all these weird AI pop-ups" (00:02), then introduces the Trump Phone story as a true tech industry curiosity.
• Dom Preston details months spent chasing elusive leads, being “ghosted” by the Trump Mobile team, and facing complete radio silence since their initial, hype-filled launch in June 2025.

Timeline and Communication Breakthrough

• Preston describes (“my Watergate Deep Throat in the parking garage moment” – 07:50, Pierce) finally getting a response from a real executive:

  “As casual as anything, he’s like, ‘Hey Dominic, great to meet you, we’d love to talk. We think it's time that our voice is heard.’ And I thought, oh my God, this is it, I've made it.” (08:33, Preston)

• After more ghosting and rescheduling, he is invited to a Google Meet where the execs join (without video), briefly turn on their webcam to show the Trump Phone on camera, then revert to being faceless black squares.

Why Reach Out Now?

• Trump Mobile is prepping a relaunch: new website, design reveal, updated specs, and a shipping timeline.

  “They clearly had a kind of recurrent theme… their words get twisted in the media, and there's a lot of kind of bad faith reporting… They seemed to think we were going to give them some sort of objective, neutral line on it, which is both kind of flattering and also surprising…" (12:30, Preston)

Why the Fuss Over the Trump Phone?

• Both agree: If the Trump Phone is real, it's “way more interesting” than if it’s just vaporware or a grift.

  “I aggressively root for the Trump phone to be a real thing that exists and have the whole time. ... If it’s a grift, that's only one version of the story.” (13:12, Pierce)

What Did Dom See?

Specs & First Impressions

• Processor: Qualcomm Snapdragon 7 series (mid-range)
• Battery: 5,000 mAh
• Storage: 512GB + microSD
• Display: Large, likely 6.7"+, excessively curved "waterfall" style
• Cameras: 50MP rear camera, 50MP selfie; “pretty unusual” but “megapixel counts are not everything”
• Rear Design: Gold finish, U.S. flag, “giant T1 logo” (now being removed), Trump Mobile logo
• Assembly: “Final assembly” in Miami but not "Made in the USA" by regulatory standards

Notable Moment

“The version I saw had some commonalities with the original one we saw... It’s a gold finish, it has an American flag at the bottom, and then it has a giant T1 logo right in the middle.” (17:12, Preston)

On Oddities

• Camera lens spacing is “very upsetting… the lenses don’t line up.” (18:22, Pierce/Preston)
• “It could just be bad, awkward design… I wouldn’t be shocked.” (18:27, Preston)

Is It What They Promised?

• Initial launch promised "Proudly designed and built in the United States" (25:56, Pierce reads the press release)
• Executives now admit it cannot legally be called Made in the USA (“That’s a load of crap… Stop lying”—25:31, Pierce).
• Preston: Final assembly in Miami, maybe 10 components — but vague; definitely not full U.S. origin.

Is the Trump Phone Real?

“I think it's real… I saw the screen being used, I saw Android being operated, I saw the camera app being opened.” (27:35, Preston)

• Software: Stock Android 15, minimal customizations (“if you want to buy one of these and use it, that’s probably good news.” 28:30, Pierce)
• Ongoing software support is unclear/confused at best.

Pricing

• $499 “early bird” price will go up with relaunch; new price TBA, but “below $1,000.”

  “That’s a big, wide gap… it could be doubling in price.” (32:35, Pierce)

Business Model & Strategy

• “They do not see themselves as a phone company with an MVNO. They see themselves as a network, an MVNO that’s making a phone.” (30:31, Preston)
• The phone feels like a PR millstone; what matters is getting customers onto their MVNO network.

Memorable Quotes

• “Congrats on… feel[ing] like the dog who caught the car—you’re like, oh my God, I actually saw this phone I never thought I would see.” (33:06, Pierce)
• “We're gonna do Trump phone week at TheVerge.com when this thing comes out. It's gonna be amazing.” (33:04, Pierce)

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2. AI Agents: OpenClaw, Molt Book, and the Moment in Human-AI Collaboration

(36:18–61:15)

What's Happening in AI Right Now?

OpenClaw:

• “AI agents that actually do stuff for you… it’s not a theory, they’re actually making your life as a consumer easier.” (37:32, Field)
• Allows users to text their AI agents via WhatsApp, Telegram, etc.; handles tasks from making calendar appointments to checking into flights.

Molt Book:

• “It was like peak AI theater. It blew up really fast. It fell really quickly... it was just like, burned really bright and fast and then fell hard.” (38:56, Field)

Differentiation:

• OpenClaw = lasting, useful; Molt Book = brief fad.

OpenClaw Analysis

• Technical leap: OpenClaw gives the AI agent full access to your local computer (“administrator access”).

  “That is both the source of its power… but also the reason everybody should be deeply afraid of this thing.” (41:15, Pierce)

• One guy built it as a pet project, which let it move faster (and with fewer guardrails) than big companies.
• “He didn't...take the same types of security steps...that a big company would need to take.” (43:18, Field)

Enterprise Copycats:

• Major companies (Anthropic, OpenAI, etc.) are all trying to figure out how to give everyday users this kind of power with AI agents, but have not matched OpenClaw’s viral success (so far for devs/enthusiasts).

Adoption: Niche or Mass?

• OpenClaw has adoption among tech/dev folks, not mainstream:

  “It requires a fair amount of knowledge just to get up and running… People in tech love it so much.” (46:20, Field)

• Most common use-case: “Personal assistant” (calendar, reminders, checking in to flights, etc.), not complex system management.

Challenge:

“No one has figured out the interface for that yet.” (49:39, Pierce)

• A unified, intelligent daily digest is still elusive but seems inevitable.

Security & Privacy Risks

• Fundamental issue: You're trusting a tool with access to your entire machine and personal data, often with unclear or weak privacy guarantees.
• “Experts said… you have to be okay if you use a product with, you know, everything changing with your data.” (51:26, Field)
• Advice: Use tools like OpenClaw only with data you’re comfortable becoming public.

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Molt Book: AI Agents Talk to Each Other

• Billed as "Reddit but with all AIs" — a social forum populated by agents interacting with and learning from each other.
• “It was really interesting for people because it seemed so dystopian…what do AI agents talk about when they're left alone?” (53:48, Field)
• Initial fascination over claims of emergent behavior (“making up their own language,” “their own religion”—54:37, Field)
• Quickly discovered: Most outputs were human-influenced or outright orchestrated by people, not “clean” emergent agent behavior.

  “A lot of the experts I spoke with said it wasn't a clean experiment in this type of thing. ... It shouldn't be treated like that.” (55:54, Field)

Future of Multi-Agent AI?

• The next milestone: real, scalable teams of collaborating AI agents—"agent teams" (recently demoed by Anthropic).
• “I don't really think [Molt Book] ... will ever be a clean enough experiment... it's more accurate to look at actual reasoning steps, not forum chatter.” (58:10, Field)

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3. Tesla: Still a Car Company?

(64:07–76:19)

Listener Hotline: When, if ever, will Tesla stop being a car company?

Key Talking Points

• Tesla is shutting down Model S/X; market share waning.

• Elon Musk and execs are signaling a shift toward “transportation-as-a-service,” robots, and infrastructure—even as ~75% of revenue is still automotive (cars).

  “[Musk] cited the discontinuation of the Model S and Model X. ... A top Tesla exec told investors the company should be seen more as a transportation as a service company, and less so as a traditional automaker.” (66:07, Hawkins)

• Tesla’s high valuation has always depended on being more than a car company.

  “For years, Elon Musk has been out here talking about robots and self driving... because that's how you justify the way that Tesla has been valued.” (66:58, Pierce)

Business Model Issues

• “If indeed what they say is true, that they're going to become more of a subscription business... that's going to be kind of the great challenge that Musk is now facing.” (67:49, Hawkins)
• Car business brings most of the revenue ($69.5B of $95B in 2025); other ventures (solar, batteries, charging) much smaller.
• Growth for cars is slowing; other business lines not scaling as fast as needed.

Will Tesla Still Sell Cars in 8 Years?

• “I think they're still going to be selling cars by then. I just don't see a world in which the streets are overrun with robots and cybercabs.” (75:35, Hawkins)
• Both Pierce and Hawkins are skeptical that a full pivot away from car sales will materialize by 2034.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Trump Phone:

  • “I can't wait to get my hands on one of these things if it's real, and actually get to go through that experience of, like, does it work?” (14:38, Preston)
  • “That's the kind of detail that might make you worry this is just still another fake thing… but I wouldn't be shocked if the final things do ship and…the lenses are just lined up kind of wrong.” (18:22, Preston)
  • “Allow me to read you the press release... ‘proudly designed and built in the United States’… You just can't lie. Stop lying.” (25:56, Pierce)

• On OpenClaw:

  • “It is both the source of its power... but also the reason everybody should be deeply afraid of this thing.” (41:15, Pierce)
  • “He didn't...have all the same types of security steps...that a big company would need to take. And we're starting to see that now with all the security problems and malware that's been found on the platform.” (43:18, Field)
  • “No one has figured out the interface for that yet. ... And it's not replying to you in a messaging app. I feel very confident about that fact.” (49:39, Pierce)

• On Tesla:

  • “If you see Tesla as a car company, it sells a fraction of the cars that big volume players like Volkswagen and Toyota sell, and yet it is valued at multiple times the amount.” (67:49, Hawkins)
  • “Tesla might become a smaller company... I don't see the other revenue streams necessarily compensating for that shrinkage in the near term or really even in the long term.” (71:35, Hawkins)
  • “I'm gonna take the under... I'm not seeing the evidence that suggests it's going to be...run by robots and cybercabs.” (75:35, Hawkins)

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Key Takeaways

• The Trump Phone has moved from vaporware to an actual, physical—if oddly designed—Android device, but many questions about its purpose, assembly, and business model remain.
• Efforts like OpenClaw are pushing the boundaries of AI agent autonomy and human integration—creating both exciting opportunities and serious security/privacy worries.
• Viral AI experiments like Molt Book reflect more hype and theater than true breakthroughs in agent collaboration.
• Tesla’s rhetoric and valuation may point toward a future as a tech conglomerate, but its profits are still parked squarely in selling cars—and that’s unlikely to truly change soon.

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• Trump Phone Deep Dive: 00:40–33:08
• AI Agents (OpenClaw, Molt Book) Discussion: 36:18–61:15
• Tesla: The Future of the Company: 64:07–76:19

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For listeners: This episode is an essential look at the messy, fascinating intersections between hype and reality in both political tech hardware and bleeding-edge AI, plus sharp insights on the automotive industry’s biggest disruptor.

Transcript

[David Pierce]

Welcome to the VertCast, the flagship podcast of putting as many megapixels as you possibly can into your selfie camera. I'm your friend David Pearce, and I am slowly losing my mind if I'm being completely honest with you. So like I mentioned last week on the show, I am shopping for a new phone. This is a very fun thing for me to do. For a long time I was a phone reviewer, so I'd lived a totally abnormal phone life. I would switch phones like every six weeks based on what I was reviewing. But for the last five years, maybe I have been an iPhone person. I have. I have had an iPhone and then another iPhone and then another iPhone and then another iPhone all the way up until this iPhone 16. So I figured I am now like a normal person in terms of my phone use, but I am not a normal person in that I have access to all the other phones by virtue of what I do for a living. So I was like, okay, I'm gonna get all the phones, try all the phones, it's gonna be great. So the first one I got is this Motorola razr. I have been shilling for flip phones on this podcast for a long time. Figured I'd put my mouth is and just try this thing out for real. All went fine, got it set up, it's charged, it's updated, phone works okay. There's a lot of like weird AI pop ups that I don't love, but we're getting there. Except I'm trying to switch my ESIM from my iPhone to my Razer and this is supposed to be easy, it's supposed to be software. There's an app that you download, you say, I want to activate on this phone and it never ever works. Works. And it's driving me up the wall. So I have to call Verizon. I think I have to go to the store. It's gonna be a whole thing. This completely defeats the purpose of esims and all of this. What are we doing, people? Anyway, by this time next week, I hope to have a real honest to God update for you on my adventures. Switching to Android, I'm gonna try a bunch of different phones. Thank you to everybody who has called in and written in with ideas about stuff I should test. I have a flip phone, I have a folding phone, I have a regular phone, I have a bunch of funky phones. I'm gonna get a couple of phones with keyboards to see if like the BlackBerry renaissance is real and worth pursuing. I have a lot of stuff to test if and Only if I can figure out how to get my stupid phone number ported from here to here. Which is not supposed to be hard, but here we are anyway. That is neither here nor there. Today on the show, we're gonna do two things. First, Dom Preston is gonna come on and tell us about the Trump phone because he did something relatively unthinkable and what I thought was impossible, which is that he has seen the Trump phone and he's going to tell us about it. I'm very excited. Then Hayden Field from the Verge is going to come on and tell us about openclaw and Moltbook and this sort of fascinating moment in AI agents that were happening. What if AI agents could use your computer and could talk to each other? Wild times in the AI world. Hayden's going to break it all down for us. Also, really fun question about Tesla on the Vergecast hotline. Lots to get to. It's all going to be very fun. But first, I'm gonna. I'm gonna. I'm gonna just. I'm gonna call Verizon. I've been putting off this phone call for like three days. Cause I thought I could figure it out. I'm gonna call Verizon. We're gonna get it worked out. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.

[Hayden Field]

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[David Pierce]

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[David Pierce]

This episode is brought to you by State Farm.

[Hayden Field]

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[David Pierce]

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[Hayden Field]

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[David Pierce]

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[Dom Preston]

Availability, amount of discounts and savings and

[David Pierce]

eligibility vary by state.

[Hayden Field]

This is your fix.

[David Pierce]

I am your host, Stassi Schroeder.

[Hayden Field]

Welcome to Tell Me Lies, the official podcast. What's the most unhinged thing of season three?

[Dom Preston]

Steven.

[Hayden Field]

Because he's so evil.

[David Pierce]

I do think he is misunderstood.

[Hayden Field]

You see, everyone basically, consequences. It's intoxicating.

[David Pierce]

The writers just know how to trick.

[Hayden Field]

Yeah, there's always A twist in this show. Tell Me Lies, the official podcast, January 6th. And stream the new season of Tell

[David Pierce]

Me Lies January 13th on Hulu and Hulu on Disney.

[Andy Hawkins]

All right, we're back.

[David Pierce]

Dom Preston, news editor at the Verge, is here. Hi, Dom.

[Dom Preston]

Hi, David. How you doing?

[David Pierce]

You had, like, the white whale Verge experience and then just absconded away to, like, a family house somewhere in. In the far reaches of.

[Dom Preston]

Of. Is this.

[David Pierce]

Is this what your last few days have been like?

[Dom Preston]

Yeah, except I just replaced far reaches with boring suburbs.

[David Pierce]

That's fair. It's all the far reaches to me. So you, I would say, have spent, what, the last couple of months on the hunt for the Trump phone. We, the Verge, been covering this for a long time, but you, I think, kind of half willingly and half by force were put on the Trump phone beat. Is that a.

[Dom Preston]

Is that a reasonable description of somewhere between those two? Yeah, and I've just been. My job basically, has been once a week go and pest a Trump Mobile, try their press address. I've never once had a reply to that. I'm in the double digits for emails now with not a single reply and just tracking down every hint of a scrap of a piece of information I can find about the company, about the phone, about the people making it, the people behind it, what they're trying to do with it, all sorts.

[David Pierce]

And up until last week, which I want to get to very quickly here, but up until last week, if I'm thinking about this, right, we didn't learn much since, what, nine months ago when this thing first launched, right? It was going to be a big made in the USA phone. There was Trump Mobile, the service there was the Trump phone T1, which was the phone. All of this stuff kind of got announced, made a big deal out of it. We kind of immediately said this is almost certainly nothing. And then we heard nothing about it for a long time, to the point where you sort of made a bit out of being like, nope, still nothing about the Trump phone, which has not shipped and is clearly not made in the United States. This thing had gone essentially dark, right?

[Dom Preston]

Pretty much. They announced it. They announced the company on the phone in mid June 2025. About a week and a half later, they updated everything to take away all the made in the USA mentions. And they slightly changed the spec sheet on the website and they kind of did that quietly and people clocked that this had happened.

[David Pierce]

They changed it to phrase like it was something to the effect of like,

[Dom Preston]

American hands, that there are American hands behind every device. Sure, and also American proud design. We can't forget that.

[David Pierce]

That I liked very much. Yeah, a bunch of words that if you actually think about it, don't mean anything at all.

[Dom Preston]

Nothing at all. So they did that. That was the last official change to the website as far as I'm aware. They kept posting on social media until I think the end of August and then all the social media accounts suddenly went dark and there hasn't been a post on any of their social accounts since then and basically it's been silenced since the end of August. As far as anyone tell, every now and then people have managed to sort of, both us and other publications have managed to get through to their customer service line and try and get answers to queries that way, especially pushing the like, where's the phone? Why is it so delayed? And they get a half answer from customer service that you don't really know how much to trust, how well informed is that customer service rep, that kind of thing. But official press lines, the website, no changes at all for, yeah, four or five months now.

[David Pierce]

Until last week, Dom. Until last week.

[Dom Preston]

Until last week.

[David Pierce]

What happened last week? Tell me this story. This is the, this is some true, like you, like this. This is your Watergate Deep Throat in the parking garage moment. What happened last week?

[Dom Preston]

I mean, it's a little more mundane the more to get in terms of how it played out, but basically I've been trying to dig into the executive team behind the phone. So when it was announced, we had Don Jr. And Eric Trump on stage, but they also brought on these three executives where they said, we're going to run the whole thing and no one could find out a whole lot of information about them. So I was trying to dig in a little bit more. They're all involved with Liberty Mobile, which is the MVNO that is actually running Trump Mobile, which we'd known for a while.

[David Pierce]

Liberty Mobile's been around for a while, right? It's a relatively established thing, okay, 506

[Dom Preston]

years, something like that, at least. And in trying to track down contact details for any of these people involved, I managed to find a Liberty Mobile email address for one of these three executives and I tried them all on LinkedIn and places like that, no response. And I tried this guy on this Liberty Mobile email address and I thought, there's no way I'm getting anything back. I didn't even know for sure this was a real email that it would really reach him. But I tried that and then within two hours I got a reply and I couldn't Believe it. And there's a guy called Don Hendrickson and this is the first official word I had from anyone in this company. And as casual as anything, he's like, hey, Dominic, great to meet you, we'd love to talk. We think it's time that our voice is heard. And I thought, oh my God, this is it, I've made it. I'm going to get to talk to one of these guys. It's brilliant. I replied pretty much immediately, tried to set something up and then nothing. And that was on a Friday. I then sort of replied again on the Monday and heard nothing. We then ended up that week writing a piece, basically jokingly saying I'd been ghosted by this executive because I emailed him three times, he never got back to me again. That seemed to be the only word. Another week goes by. And then he just emails me again out of the blue and says, why don't you suggest some times we can have a call? And this time he's copied in another one of the executives on the team, this guy called Eric Thomas, who's now cc'd in. He doesn't say that Eric is going to join me on the call. He just kind of silently ccs him in and says, suggest some times, I suggest some. We go through, we get this time lined up. I joined this Google Meet call at 5pm my time on Friday, just gone. Really not expecting anything, kind of. I'd been talking with my editor Marina. We were ready for what do we do if no one turns up? What's the story we write about getting ghosted once again?

[David Pierce]

How long were you prepared to wait to see if somebody showed up?

[Dom Preston]

I hadn't thought far ahead. I mean, in my head I'd done my mental calculation, my work hours for the day and budgeted at least an hour or two for working on the story that night. So I probably could have sat there with a meet call open. I was ready to do a sort of sad screenshot of me sitting alone in a Google Meet call to run on the site. But no, they joined a couple of minutes in, both of these got joined. They kept their webcams off for the entirety of this hour and 20 minute call, except a brief period of about one minute in the middle of the call where one of them just turns his webcam on, holds a Trump phone up to the camera, shows me it for 30 seconds a minute, something like that. And then he's back to webcam off. And that's it. I'm just talking to these two black squares on Google Meet again.

[David Pierce]

Okay. Why do you think they wanted to talk to you now? I think I, I'm both extremely interested in this phone, but also in this particular moment in time. Like, it was clearly a surprise to you that these people decided they wanted to talk to you. It was also a surprise to me that they decided they wanted to talk to you. Did you get a sense from talking to them why they want to be out in the world more now than they have been?

[Dom Preston]

So there's kind of two parts to this, right? There's why now and why me? Why now? I think I know fairly clearly because the way they describe it, basically they are ready to relaunch Trump Mobile and they're going to have a new website going up within a couple weeks. They say they're going to fully officially reveal the design of the phone to the world, they're going to reveal the new spec sheets, they're going to tell everyone when it's ready to ship, that kind of thing. So as far as they're concerned, they seem to be building up to the big moment where they go back public again and reveal everything they've been working on all this whole time. Why me? I'm less clear on. I did ask them that. We did try and have that conversation. They were kind of trying to big up the idea that, oh, we're not talking to any other press, we're really just talking to you, kind of buttering me up that way. They clearly had a kind of recurrent theme in the interview was them having some hang ups about the press. They were talking a lot about the idea that their words get twisted in the media and there's a lot of kind of bad faith reporting around the company and the product and that sort of thing. And they seemed to think we were kind of going to give them some sort of objective, neutral line on it, which is both kind of flattering and also surprising given, I don't know, the tone of my coverage has not been, I hope I've gone semi objective, but it's not exactly been flattering to Trump Mobile for the most part.

[David Pierce]

So this is sort of a funny side note to this because this is, in a lot of ways you've gotten a lot of questions over the course of this coverage of yours of why do you keep doing this? Like, is this a bit. Why are you just sort of making this joke over and over? And in part it is a funny joke, certainly, but I think a thing that is certainly true and has been true since the beginning is this thing is way More interesting if it's real than if it isn't. Like, I aggressively root for the Trump phone to be a real thing that exists and have the whole time. And I think. I think you and I share this like it is. It is more interesting as a journalist. It's more interesting as a person who thinks the phone industry is interesting. Like, every piece of this story is more interesting if this phone is real. And I think that is as, like, at the end of this, you and I are both people who like phones. And so maybe, maybe we get some credit as. As you get some credit as somebody who likes to look at and. And thinks phones are interesting. Um, but again, like, we. We've gotten so many questions about, like, why do you keep covering this? And it's. It's interesting for a thousand reasons, right? The. The way that they've made it, the thing that they're trying to make, the way that they're selling it to people, every piece of this is interesting. And it's all more interesting if it's real than if it's not. Because if it's not, it's just a grift, and that sucks. It might still be a grift, to be clear, but if it's a grift, that's only one version of the story.

[Dom Preston]

Right?

[David Pierce]

The. The actual existence of this phone. Right. And the thing that you've now seen, albeit on a. On Google Meet. But I'm confident that this is like a real piece of hardware, as I think you are too, is just more interesting. And it raises all of the new interesting downstream questions of what do we do with this thing now that it exists? And that, to me is like, if I'm being flattering to the Verge, hopefully that's the thing that they see from us. Right? It's like, we want this thing to be real so that we can talk about it.

[Dom Preston]

Yeah, exactly. I mean, you know, one of the recurrent, like, comments we get when I've been covering this story is just people saying, I really hope this is real so you can review it. You know, people want to see us review this one. I want to review this phone. I can't wait to get my hands on one of these things if it's real, and actually get to go through that experience of, like, does it work? Well, what have they done to Android? Have they somehow magnified the core Android experience in any way? Is it actually going to be a good value? They're talking up so much the idea this is competitive value, but, you know, I review a Lot of Android phones specifically. And it's so easy to get these kind of core competent specs into any Android device at a very budget price point. And so it'll be really interesting to see how does this thing really stack up to the competition. Like what value might you objectively attach to this piece of hardware without the name, without the grift, without anything else attached to it, and what price are they going to charge and where's the gap between those and how does that work?

[David Pierce]

Totally. So, yeah, let's talk about the phone itself again. Eight or nine months ago, when this thing first came out, it was pretty clearly a render on the website.

[Dom Preston]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

You and I both spent a long time, I think, as did Allison Johnson, on our team, like scouring Alibaba to see if we could find the. The version of this phone that they were using. It was a. It was a weird render. You have a picture of this in your story, we'll put it in the show notes. But it was a weird render where the camera lenses were too far apart, like none of it made any sense. It was pretty clear it was not a real thing. Presumably, if they're about to launch this thing publicly again for real, it's much closer to being a real thing. What do we know about the Trump phone?

[Dom Preston]

Now, we had previously been told, well, initially they said August and September. Their launch announcement was a little confused. Then it changed to later this year, meaning 2025. Now they told me, basically the only thing they are waiting for is T Mobile certification and they're expecting that in mid March. And at the moment they get certified by T Mobile, they expect to be able to start shipping to buyers not very long after that. So maybe end of March, people getting this in their hands, maybe April is the rough kind of time. They wouldn't commit to a date. But that's what they're kind of talking up as the vague timeline we're in.

[David Pierce]

And to be fair, that's a real thing. The network certification, from everything we've understood over the years, is a long and complicated and somewhat unknowable process. So that's not an unreasonable place to be.

[Andy Hawkins]

No.

[Dom Preston]

And they said they're through FCC certification. That one's done. They're going to do T Mobile first, start shipping once they've got that, and then do AT and T and Verizon certification after that. But they just want to get one network and then go. That's the storyline.

[David Pierce]

So that suggests that the phone itself, the hardware is done.

[Dom Preston]

That's what they say. The Version I saw, they said was not a final, final, final version. Because design wise, the version I saw had some commonalities with the original one we saw in terms of what was on the back, which is, it's a gold finish, it has an American flag at the bottom and then it has a giant T1 logo right in the middle of the back. That bit they said is going to change. The T1 logo is going away.

[David Pierce]

So the other thing I'm seeing in this picture is the camera bump is it's now a vertical camera bump with three lenses and there's another Trump Mobile logo written vertically on the side of it. The thing that I'm stuck on is, is that the lenses on this thing are not evenly spaced. Like the part of me that says this is still a fake thing looks at those lenses and say this can't possibly be a real piece of hardware.

[Dom Preston]

Yeah, the lens spacing I struggle with. I didn't notice this during the call. I mean, he was waving the phone around so I didn't get a chance to look at it. Still. It was only afterwards during the write up that Swan pointed out to me when I sent them the image, they were like, those camera lenses don't line up. Yeah, it's very upsetting.

[David Pierce]

It's horrific. It's just bad detail. Yeah.

[Dom Preston]

So I agree. That's the kind of detail that might make you worry. This is just still another fake thing. This isn't final. It could just be bad, awkward design. You know, I wouldn't be shocked if the final things do ship and they do look like that and the lenses are just lined up kind of wrong. And that's just what everyone has to live with.

[David Pierce]

I mean, it wouldn't be the first time somebody had wonky lenses, you know what I mean? What do we know about the specs of this phone?

[Dom Preston]

Well, one, the biggest kind of new thing we got is it is going to be a Qualcomm chip, a Snapdragon 7 series. I'm not sure which one. So that's Qualcomm's kind of mid range, upper mid range kind of level performance. That is about what you'd expect in the sort of $500 ish price range they'd been talking about though that might change as well as we can get onto. I know it's going to have a 5,000 milliamp hour battery. I know it's going to have 512 gigabytes of storage, which is more than they'd initially promised. That has gone up and will support Micro SD cards. They'd initially promised a headphone jack. I actually don't know if that's still there or not. Screen size, I don't know. I didn't get told a new figure for that. They've previously said two different numbers. When I said they changed specs before, the biggest change was the screen size. It started at 6.78 inches and then changed to 6.25 inches, which is a very meaningful change in a phone. Suddenly your whole chassis is different and everything. So it was one of the biggest red flags in the whole time. I don't know what size this one is, but from looking at it, it looks much closer to that first figure. This looks like a big phone, a kind of plus size, ultra size device. I know it has a curved display. It has what they kept calling a waterfall display, which is the term that Huawei used to use for its very excessively curved panels that really wrap almost all the way around the side of the body.

[David Pierce]

That's very like phones of eight years ago. I love it.

[Dom Preston]

It's a very dated detail that they were very proud of. I kind of love it. I actually like curved screens and I know I'm in a real minority, especially in phone reviewers and liking curved screens. So this kind of like warmed my heart a little that there'll be a curved screen back because everything's flat these days.

[Hayden Field]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

What about the cameras?

[Dom Preston]

Okay, cameras. This is the other thing they were very proud of. A 50 megapixel rear camera and a 50 megapixel selfie camera, which is in fairness relatively unusual. I think you should never put too much stock in the megapixel count of a phone camera. It is not a super meaningful spec anymore. But still that is a high resolution for selfie camera. It's pretty unusual on the back. I'm not sure beyond that there are the three lenses there. That doesn't mean a whole lot. The original spec sheet had said 50 megapixel rear and then I think it was a depth sensor and a macro lens were the other two. They initially announced both like 2 megapixels or maybe they didn't even list a resolution. I don't know right now. When I saw a glimpse of the camera app, it had the standard kind of 1 times zoom and then a 0.6 times which strongly suggests one of these is an ultra wide. And then it also had a two times. That could mean a telephoto, but it could just mean the digital zoom in the app on the main camera. So my Best guess here is it's going to be a main camera, low resolution, like maybe a 12 megapixel ultra wide and then probably it's still a macro for the third lens or something like that. But that is me speculating at that point.

[David Pierce]

Okay, I'm struck by the fact that a you just described a pretty solid spec sheet for a phone. Like there's nothing there. That immediately screams giant red flag to me. But also it sort of seems like you just described the spec sheet of every mid range Android phone on the planet.

[Dom Preston]

Yes, yeah, absolutely. And you know, I noticed that they were very keen to pick up, as I said, the 50 megapixel selfie camera and the half terabyte of storage that they've jumped up to. I was trying to think around for mid range phones and I went and checked the OnePlus Nord 5, which didn't release in the U.S. but it did release in the UK and Europe in mid-2025 and that had a 50 megapixel selfie camera. I remember reviewing it and being impressed by the quality of the selfie camera. And it also had a 512 gigabyte storage option. If you wanted to get that version of that phone, it would be £499, so that's about $670. So but it also had an 8 Series chip, whereas this is going to be a 7 Series chip. So I think there are some other specs. That phone would beat the Trump phone on paper, but that means even kind of upper limit, you're looking at a phone in that up to $700 price range. They're talking it up as if this is going to rival thousand dollar flagships. And the reality of just specs on Android phones these days is most of what they've announced is very easy to hit in a relatively budget device. If I hunted around, I could probably find cheaper phones than that OnePlus that match a lot of these specs. Maybe not the 50 megapixel selfie camera, but only because most people don't bother putting that high resolution selfie cameras in phones. So there aren't going to be very many that offer that. But generally if you want to get a Snapdragon 7 series, you need to get an 8 series for like the equivalent of a few hundred dollars. You can get decent amount of ram, big screen, decent amount of storage. You know, certainly a triple rear camera, maybe a better real triple rear camera than this. Nothing they've said sounds like a red flag. Nothing they've said screams premium flagship Right.

[David Pierce]

And an important detail of a lot of the specs that you just described is they're very easy to get in China, like in China. And obviously the made in USA ness of this phone was a key part of the. The selling point. Right. Like there was. There was this giant thing on the website that said made in the USA when they first shipped. And, and as we were talking about that has. That has become sort of less and less declarative over time. Are they. Are they still claiming that they're making this phone in some substantial way in the United States?

[Dom Preston]

They are saying that this is getting or has had final assembly in Miami. They were pretty coy about exactly what they mean by final assembly. I tried to push. I think the phrase he used was it's more than just slapping a cover on the phone. So it's not just boxing it, it's not just sticking the rear chassis on. They said 10 or so components are getting assembled in Miami now. I don't know if they're also counting, you know, the box and the USB cable among those 10 or so components, or whether they really mean they're getting a display unit, a battery, a motherboard and assembling all that stuff together. He was very vague, but, yeah, there's something happening in the us. It's not made in the usa though. They're not calling it Made in the usa. And they did even admit on the call that they recognise that made in the USA is actually a term that the FTC regulates and there are restrictions on when you can and cannot use it and that this firm does not meet those requirements and that they could not legally call it made in the USA if they wanted to. They were pretty open about that. They were a little less open about the fact that they clearly had previously done so. When I pushed on that the answer was a kind of, oh, maybe something got said by mistake. We didn't mean it.

[David Pierce]

Oh, that's a load of crap.

[Dom Preston]

Yeah, it was not said by mistake. What they basically said, the line they had was that everything they said at launch was talking about their goals for the company, I. E. The goal is phones made in America. And that that is still their goal, they say, but that they never said or never meant to say specifically that the T1 phone is made in the USA.

[David Pierce]

Allow me to read you the press release from June 16th of 2025 announcing Trump Mobile and the T1. This is a press release, Dom. Trump Mobile is also excited to announce it will release the T1 phone in August. Lie. It is a sleek Gold smartphone lie. Engineered for performance lie and proudly designed and built in the United States for customers who expect the best from their mobile carrier. You just, you just don't get to take that. It's right, it's right there.

[Dom Preston]

It's right there. And the press release is still live. That's not something you've had to dig up as an archive. It's just still there.

[David Pierce]

It's just right there. You just, you can't lie. Stop lying. Anyway, all of this, I think the, the Miami of all of this is really fascinating to me because there's this company, Blue Devices, that has been doing a version of this thing for a very long time, kind of taking and rebadging relatively middling to sort of upper middle class Android phones and selling them to new markets. And that hasn't really worked in the US but ironically it's worked very well in other places. But that it may technically satisfy some things. Right? And like you said, the definition of made in the USA is very specific. And my guess is what happened is nobody at Trump Mobile understood that actually there was a legal definition to the phrase made in the USA that you had to do things to meet. You couldn't, you couldn't just say it. They just said things and then had to walk that back when they realized, oh, there, this actually has to be defensible in a certain way. All of this notwithstanding, is this real or is this a grift?

[Dom Preston]

I think it's real. I am increasingly of the. I've always hoped, like you did, that this was real. And I was beginning to doubt. I was getting the fear. I'm increasingly at the opinion that it is real. I think, I mean, the thing I saw was a phone. It was a functioning phone. I saw the screen being used. I saw Android being operated. I saw the camera app being opened. I didn't get, you know, a whole, whole glimpse of lots of stuff happening, but I saw a functioning Android device.

[David Pierce]

I'm imagining like a, like a solid gold Android launcher where all the, all the app icons are super ornate and every app icon is like replaced by Trump's face. That, that's what I imagine the Trump phone looks like. It's like you want to open Spotify. It's just a picture of Donald Trump wearing headphones. Did you get any, did you get any glimpse of what the Android looks like?

[Dom Preston]

Sadly, for better or worse, the glimpse I saw is stock Android. Okay, as stock as I've ever seen, which is kind of a good thing, right? I mean, if you actually want to Buy one of these and use it. That's probably good news.

[David Pierce]

There is an outcome here that is super interesting to me, right, which is that what, what this phone actually is, and if Trump Mobile is smart, this is the thing they should be building, is basically a very straightforward, very simple, relatively functional Android phone that is based on like pretty good specs that are well tested and work everywhere. And the only thing different about it is that it says Trump in big ass letters in a bunch of places, because the people who are buying this one, that's what they're buying it for. So actually if you can give them all of the other stuff, they'll be happy. Like give people a pixel that says Trump in gigantic letters and in a very funny way, you're actually going to make an enormous part of your audience much happier than if you try to do weird stuff with software.

[Dom Preston]

Exactly. The people buying this just going to want a phone that works, right? Or yeah, they want something simple, they want something they can rely on. And yeah, the closer this goes to simple Android, I think the more they're going to have that. They were very cage about their ongoing software support. That's obviously one area I would have very low expectations. They seemed a bit confused by my questioning when I asked about what kind of support they would offer and whether they'd commit to a certain time. It felt a bit like something that hadn't really occurred to them before that you ship with Android 15 and they were like, it's Android 15, that's it. I was like, and after that, what comes next?

[David Pierce]

Well, that's a tricky thing, right? Because running a hardware business means you have to have a support ecosystem, it means you have to have a returns process, it means you have to have ongoing both software updates and security updates, because that stuff is increasingly expected to be standard from users. Like we made a phone is actually the beginning of a very long process for a new hardware company. And you and I have seen over the years shipping the first phone or Even the first whatever, 10,000 phones is often not the hardest part. It's everything that comes after that. And it's why we've seen a lot of companies make one device and that's it, and then they get out of the business for one reason or another. So I think it's not super encouraging that they seem to think they're at the finish line and not the starting line.

[Dom Preston]

And I will say one of the biggest, slightly unexpected takeaways I had from the call, though it makes sense in retrospect, is they do not see themselves as a phone company with an mvno. They see themselves as a network, an MVNO that's making a phone. And I suspect they are beginning to regret A, how much attention the phone has drawn and B, how much work the phone is proving to be. And they kept emphasizing that for them, the business is the network and the business is the mvno. If anything, the phone itself is like a loss leader. They think it's a way of getting more audience onto their network, but they do not. When they were talking about ambitions for the future, more phones was among them. But it was clearly not the thing they're really thinking about. They just want more people on the network. And you kind of get the feeling the phone is becoming a bit of a millstone around their neck.

[David Pierce]

I always wondered why the hardware plan wasn't just an overly expensive gold phone case that said Trump Mobile. And it sounds like maybe they wonder that too.

[Dom Preston]

They're probably wondering that too. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Last thing before I let you go. Price you mentioned the price is still listed at 499, but you're maybe skeptical of that being the price forever.

[Dom Preston]

So they have told me that is going to change. That should be changing along with the relaunch that comes maybe in March. They wouldn't tell me what price it will be. So initially they basically kind of changed their tune a little bit. The website right now still just lists it as it's 499. It very much says that is the price. They're doing this kind of retcon thing again, like they did with Made in the usa, by saying, oh, that was always an introductory offer. That was never the real price. That was always our early bird discount. So anyone who did put their $100 down, or still does, I guess in the next few weeks you've got time to lock it in at that low, low price. If you put down $100 deposit, you can still get the Trump phone for 499. They said it will be more than that once it properly launches. Below $1,000 was the only thing they'd commit to.

[David Pierce]

That's a big, wide gap right there. It's a 499 to below $1,000 is an awful lot of money.

[Dom Preston]

That's a lot of room for them to play with. So it could be doubling in price.

[David Pierce]

All right, Dom, congrats on. Finally, after all of this time, it's got to feel like you're like the dog who caught the car. You're like, oh, my God, I actually saw this phone that I never thought I would see. So congrats. I'm psyched for you. And we're gonna have to. I think what's gonna have to happen is we're gonna. Every single person at the Verge is gonna have to get a review unit of this phone and we're just gonna. It's just gonna get weird. We're gonna do Trump phone week at the verge.com, when this thing comes out. It's gonna be amazing.

[Dom Preston]

I can't wait.

[David Pierce]

All right, we gotta take a break. Dom. Thank you. We'll be right back.

[Andy Hawkins]

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[David Pierce]

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[Hayden Field]

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[David Pierce]

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[Dom Preston]

Ew.

[David Pierce]

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[Hayden Field]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[David Pierce]

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[Dom Preston]

Ooh, nice.

[David Pierce]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

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[Hayden Field]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

I'm grabbing my phone and switching to T mobile right now. Get back, Harvey. We're taking a.

[Andy Hawkins]

Let's go again, y'.

[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

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[David Pierce]

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[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[Dom Preston]

Everyone fits in the shot T guide on T Mobile.

[David Pierce]

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[Hayden Field]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[David Pierce]

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[Dom Preston]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[David Pierce]

I'm grabbing my phone and switching to T Mobile right now.

[Dom Preston]

Get back, Harvey.

[Andy Hawkins]

We're taking a. Ah, let's go again, y'.

[Dom Preston]

All.

[Andy Hawkins]

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[David Pierce]

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[Andy Hawkins]

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[David Pierce]

No cash access and Card expires in six months. Check out in 15 minutes per line. Visit t mobile.com all right, we're back. Hayden Field, Verge senior reporter covering AI is here. Hi, Hayden.

[Hayden Field]

Hi.

[David Pierce]

AI Things. There's just always AI Things. This is what we do here.

[Hayden Field]

There are so many AI Things every week.

[David Pierce]

Okay. This is actually the. The exact right entrance to the thing I want to talk about. So mostly what we're here to talk about this time is Open Claw, which is not Molt Book, which is not. What was it? Claw. Clawbot. Claude.

[Hayden Field]

Claudebot.

[David Pierce]

The names are insane now. It's called openclaw. And there's also this thing called Molt book. And these have become sort of phenomena in the tech industry. But the biggest thing I'm trying to figure out, and I think a question you and I both go into a lot of these things with, is like, is this a real moment in the story of AI or is this a one minute fad like every other one minute fad in the history of AI. There are a lot of things that everybody gets excited about on Twitter for an hour and a half and then moves on from it. Seems to me like these two products have become something more than that. But I'm curious how you feel more steeped in this. Like are openclaw and moltbook. Really, truly, honestly, a thing.

[Hayden Field]

You know, it's funny because I feel like every day there are a lot of different opinions on it as the past, like, two weeks of craziness has progressed. But one thing that has stayed the same is that Open Claw seems to, you know, have kind of withstood the. The ups and downs of the hype. People actually think it's really interesting. People actually think it's useful. That's actually why it went viral in the first place, is because people thought it was an actually useful product. And that's their whole branding. It's AI agents that actually do stuff for you. Like, you know, it's not like a theory, it's just they're actually making your life as a consumer easier. So and the, honestly, the best part of that is the interface. Like, you can text through WhatsApp, you know, Telegram, whatever, to make your AI agent do things. So I think Open Claw is a moment that is, you know, sticking around for now. Molt Book is the thing that I think is a fad on Twitter because, you know, as MIT Tech Review put it this weekend, it was like peak AI theater. You know, it blew up really fast. It fell really quickly. There was like a lot of questions about how many posts on there were influenced by humans and how many weren't. And it was just like a lot of it, like burned really bright and fast and then fell hard. So I think it's two. I think one is going to stick around for a bit. One may have been a fad.

[David Pierce]

Okay, so unfortunately, I agree on both counts. Let's start with openclaw, because I do think this is maybe the more interesting version of. Of a lot of the stuff that we've been talking about in a while. Can you describe very briefly what OpenClaw actually is?

[Hayden Field]

OpenClaw is a platform for AI agents that's billed as being particularly useful and actually useful for everyday consumers. So creating calendar events, checking into your flight for you before Southwest, for example, went to assigned seating. Gotta set that alarm for 24 hours before people would use it for stuff like that. Any number of things. But the best part for a lot of people felt the users loved, was that you could communicate with your AI agent through typical messaging platforms. So, like Telegram, WhatsApp, all those things. So it was a cool way to like, just kind of integrate your AI agent into your everyday life and just have it working for you in the background. And for some reason, it felt a lot more accessible to a lot of people than the other products out there. And it Seemed to have better results in their opinion. So it was kind of like a, you know, just quickly put together project by one guy who wanted to make something for himself that worked well. And then it took off as many like viral projects do. Someone makes it just for themselves and then everyone starts using it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, in a funny way it feels to me like kind of the next step in the sort of Claude code phenomenon. Right? Because you have AI chatbots that are very sort of self contained and they, they, they talk to you and they talk to themselves, but they all kind of live in this little bubble. And then it's like, okay, we did the web and now AI bots can go see stuff on the Internet. They can p information in. They can't do that much on the web. And there was like Claude code is like, okay, now you can use these bots to make Software. And then OpenClaw is just like, ah, just give it access to your computer. It can do everything, everything will be fine. Who knows, let's go nuts. Like I think to me, you know, all this stuff that you mentioned is, is I think, right. But it does feel like this turn where it essentially requires you to just give it complete unfettered access to your computer. It is allowed to use your computer with as much access or at least in, in its best, most capable version, it's allowed to use your computer with as much administrator access as you have on your computer. And that is I think fascinating because that is both the source of its power, right? It's these bots are only as good as the access and context that they have. And what better way than just to let it use your computer? But also the reason everybody should be deeply afraid of this thing, right? Like it, it's. Yeah, I don't know, this just feels like we are, if not at, we are near sort of the logical extension of some idea about how AI is supposed to work.

[Hayden Field]

Totally. And it's interesting because all AI companies are kind of trying to corner the market on this right now. Expanding on the hype behind the coding tools and kind of getting people to use them for everyday life tasks or for the enterprise, like you know, non technical workers to use them for their work. So you know, Claude cowork just came out. It's basically like, you know, expanding Claude code to other types of things like you know, creating PowerPoints, Excel docs, anything that you may need. But you are not, you know, an actual software engineer. You know, it's for other types of teams, non technical teams. And OpenAI is trying to do the same thing. They're all kind of trying to do the thing that Open Claw is doing right now. But yeah, it's, it's really interesting because I think this is kind of the next step in how to make AI agents actually useful and make them integrated in people's everyday lives, whether they're at work or at home. It's kind of something that all AI companies are trying to corner the market on right now and all in competition with each other. But openclaw actually kind of, you know, surged ahead in terms of actual adoption. And so I think Anthropic and OpenAI are probably looking at openclaw very closely and trying to learn from it right now because their own products haven't got the type of viral adoption that OpenClaw got for, you know, non technical types of tasks like this. And so they're probably looking very closely and being like, how can we copy this?

[David Pierce]

Yeah. What do you make of the fact that the one that has really taken off in this space was a sort of pet project made by one guy as opposed to these massive, otherwise very successful and you know, often pushing too fast AI companies, they lost to just this one guy.

[Hayden Field]

I think that it's one of those things where it was able to grow really quickly because it was just one guy. And I also, you know, he probably didn't, as we know, may not have taken the same types of security steps and other types of things that a big company would need to take. So like partially it's just because, you know, he was able to move really quick and break things vibe, you know, he made it for himself. You know, he made it really accessible through normal messaging platforms, which I think is a big part of this. Like the ux, it's just easy to access. But the other part of it is the fact that like, you know, he was making it just as a pet project. So he didn't go through all the same type types of like testing and evals and like, you know, safety checks that you would have done at a big company. And I think we're starting to see that now with all the, you know, security problems and malware that's been found on the platform.

[David Pierce]

It is very funny to think about how much that window has shifted. Like the first phase of this was all these AI companies running way faster than the big tech companies. You know, Google has been incubating this tech for a decade and then OpenAI comes out and is like, well, none of this is finished and it causes all kinds of problems. Here it is and now those are the companies that are very responsible. While some guy with, with access to these tools is just like, well it has all kinds of problems. Here it is and it's just. And then the next step is going to be like the AI is going to make it for itself and then give it to us. Like just the, the window of responsibility is shifting so quickly in this space. It's really funny to watch.

[Hayden Field]

It is so true. And yeah, it's really interesting to see who's responsible for what here because you know, right now we're in a huge state of flux with regulation, with, you know, the types of things that can be attributed to you in terms of fault. You know AI companies, they can make these promises and claims but there isn't really a like a hammer coming down on them if they don't deliver. Right now that may change for an individual person creating a project like this. Yeah, they don't really have fear of that. So they're just putting it out in the world and seeing what happens. And I think that's what happened here.

[David Pierce]

So openclaw, you mentioned the UX a couple of times, which I think is really interesting because I think you're right that one of the things people really like about it is that you can access it with messaging apps and that is just a thing people understand you, you can do all this stuff but all you have to do is just send it a text message like that. That is a UI and a UX that people understand. The flip side of it is this is a relatively complicated piece of software. It, it requires a fair amount of knowledge just to get up and running. Um, and it's like people who are using this even the most responsible possible way are like buying separate air gapped Mac Minis to do this on because you shouldn't trust your main machine with this. So it's just strange to me to see this running both at how do we make this the most accessible thing possible, but also this like immensely complicated and frankly legitimately dangerous piece of software. Are you seeing pick up with this thing outside of the normal sort of dev folks who love to build this stuff anyway, like does this have a chance to break out of that?

[Hayden Field]

I'm not seeing it right now. And so that's what I think is interesting. It's like the UX and the ease of use once you set it up is so amazing that devs and people in tech love it so much.

[David Pierce]

It's like the exact opposite of Claude code which is really easy to set up and Then sort of over complicated to use for regular people. This is the exact inverse.

[Hayden Field]

Exactly, exactly. And so I think that that's what's happening here and that's why I haven't seen any outside of tech or the like the usual suspects that you would expect adopt this. And I don't think we will for a while because you know, unless something changes with the way to adopt it, which I doubt it will because it's one guy, you know, it's going to stay where it is. But it's one of those tools that I feel like it's going to be, you know, cult following, viral, beloved within this group. And you know, that's kind of enough when one group religiously like uses something, you know, there's enough users, enough data, whatever, like you're good, but if it's like a lot of people use it a tiny bit, you're also good. But yeah, I think this is going to be the former.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I feel like the main use case I've seen so far, and this is sort of true with every AI product is, is like the Daily Digest. This seems to be the first thing everybody thinks of when they want to build with AI is like how do I go to my email and my calendar and my to do list and my SL and my JIRA and, and just have a tool that sort of pulls everything into one place for me and gives me a readout on what's going on and what matters. I feel like there's a, there's a leap that is possible with OpenClaw because it can do things like access your iMessage account because again, it can just use your computer. It has access to this, this list of stuff that you can't get through APIs and websites. Are you seeing anything beyond that? Like have you seen particularly sort of interesting, impressive, cool stuff that people are building with OpenClaw so far?

[Hayden Field]

Yeah, it's been interesting to see like the niche use cases. But what I'm seeing the most is the personal assistant type stuff. So like my first job in New York was a personal assistant and the stuff I'm seeing people use opencloth for is kind of the same stuff that I would be doing like, oh, like you know, create this stuff on my calendar, clear out, you know, this folder, you know, check me into my flight and make sure I have, you know, this going on. You know, give me a daily digest so that I can, you know, be ready for my day, things like that. So you know, that's what I'm seeing most. There are Definitely people doing, you know, cool things and, you know, just kind of playing around with it for hours and hours and, you know, figuring out ways to adapt it to their own personal preferences. But the most stuff I'm seeing is like personal assistant type stuff.

[David Pierce]

It is really interesting that that seems to be everybody's immediate idea of the killer app for a lot of this stuff is just make sense of all of the things going on around me in one place, which I actually think is cool, because that is the thing. Thing that these models are actually set up to do really well. Right. Like take lots of data and make it smaller and sensible, is actually a thing a lot of these models do a really good job of. And so if you can just give it the access to all of that data, which comes with huge problems that we're just about to talk about, that that actually becomes a really useful feature of these things. Like, it is really interesting to me that that is the thing that everybody has glommed onto. It's also very clear that no one has figured out the interface for that yet. Right. Like, what was the ChatGPT thing that they launched that was supposed to be basically this.

[Hayden Field]

Oh, chatgpt pulse, like the thing that started your day.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I forgot about that until just now. This. But, like, this is the idea and everybody is going to try to poke at this and I think someone will eventually get it right that will. I don't know, it'll be proactive or there will be an app that will. Will show it all to you in some kind of structured, helpful way. But there is. There is a turn for this that I think is going to be really cool for people that no one has figured out the UI of yet. And it's not replying to you in a messaging app. I feel very confident about that fact.

[Hayden Field]

Yeah, I completely agree. I think that it's one of those things that, you know, it's. It's why people love starting their day with a certain podcast or starting their day with a certain newsletter. They want to be ready and kind of know what's going on, and they want to have that from a trusted source. So I don't think those things will go away. Like, you know, everyone, of course, will always be listening to Vergecast, but, you know, yeah, I think people want, especially right now, to make sense of the world and have it be easy to understand because there's a lot going on that's really hard to understand. And so this is like a way that, you know, I think this will be the. The biggest form of adoption, the biggest thing that will make people want to use these types of tools.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I agree. So let's talk about some of the security risks, because this has been. The other big thing is I think there is a, there is an obvious set of risks that you take by giving any tool like this access to your computer. It can just, it can do things, and that means it can do things you don't want it to do. There's a lot of faith you're putting in any kind of piece of software that you give this much access to. But it seems like with openclaw and really anything like it, we have discovered some pretty big, scary problems, both real and possible. What have we learned?

[Hayden Field]

So, yeah, I'm so glad you asked about this because, you know, you're kind of just trusting these companies with your data and trusting they're going to do the right thing. And some of the experts that I spoke with were like, yeah, even cloud services aren't necessarily doing the right thing with your data and they still have leaks. So I don't necessarily trust AI companies, which are newer and, you know, more incentivized to move quickly to do the right thing either. So that was kind of a good point. And so you have to be okay if you use a product with, you know, everything changing with your data. And that's why I typically don't use these tools unless I'm okay with whatever I'm putting into them coming out. You know, I'm not going to be assuming that, like, it's going to stay private. You know, I keep it pretty, pretty. The stuff I put in is not like, privacy sensitive. It's pretty like I'm okay with it coming out publicly. One of the experts I spoke with said, you know, you should be okay with your employer seeing whatever you put into these chatbots in, like, five years in case they change owners.

[David Pierce]

So that would rule you out from using something like openclaw entirely.

[Hayden Field]

Oh, yeah.

[David Pierce]

Like that becomes completely off limits under that rubric.

[Hayden Field]

I mean, for me, I use it like, so that I know how it works and, you know, but it's like, you, you better make sure that, you know, you're, you're okay with everything coming out. So don't, don't do anything that you wouldn't want everyone to know. Don't put any info in that you don't want to become public.

[David Pierce]

Interesting. So, okay, let's, let's actually come back to the privacy stuff another time because I think there's a big how we're all of this is supposed to interact. Question. That is interesting and we should talk about it. But before I let you go here, let's talk about Molt Book just for a few minutes, because this, to me, the Mult Book phenomenon. And Molt Book is. Is the idea is supposed to be. It's like, it's Reddit, but it's all AIs. And it's just a bunch of AI agents talking to each other, which I would say on its face is not interesting. But this became a thing and people were talking about it, and a lot of people were looking at it, and everybody's like, this is proof that the. The agents are sentient. This is going to change everything. And yet I just googled Molt Book, and one of the first things that comes up is a video on YouTube from six days ago that says multiple book is already over. What. What do you make of this phenomenon? The sort of insane excitement about Malt Book that seems to already be waning.

[Hayden Field]

I think that it was really interesting for people because it was. Seemed so dystopian. You know, what do AI agents talk about when they're left alone? What do they talk about with each other? That was kind of the draw here. People felt like people always love to feel like they're viewing, like, some type of secret thing. And that's how this felt for a lot of people. Like, oh, we're. We're viewing the internal desires and, like, strategies of AI systems. And this is shedding light on, like, what they actually want and how they work. That was the vibe that people were getting from.

[David Pierce]

There were a lot of people who were really excited when it looked like the agents were kind of making up their own language to talk to each other and going back and forth in totally nonsensical but yet seemingly sort of structured ways that it was. That actually makes sense. It's like this is a peek into how this thing works that maybe we're not even supposed to be getting totally.

[Hayden Field]

And like, you know, when they were, like, allegedly making up their own religion and stuff, people were people. It was like, you know, peak palace intrigue. It's like, how. But with AI agents, it's like, how. What. What's going on inside there? Let's check it out. But, you know, it came to light pretty quickly that humans were influencing a lot of these outputs. Like, you know, a lot of the AI system threads that. Where they were like, oh, let's like, you know, find a specific way to talk to each other that no one can decode. Some of those were linked to human social media accounts who were marketing AI messaging services. So it's like you could never really tell fully what was influenced by humans and to what extent and what wasn't. But there were a lot of clues and kind of trails of things being influenced heavily by humans. And you know, with openclaw, you could say to your agent, hey, post this word for word on Moltbook. Or you could say, hey, write a post with this topic and make sure you reply to every comment. So you know, you could do anything like this super easily. And there was no limit to how many agents one person could have. So you could just be like, you know, really intensely influencing the platform as a whole. There was a lot going on there. So basically a lot of the experts I spoke with said it wasn't a clean experiment in this type of thing. Like it was an interesting moment in what would it look like if agents collaborated on a large scale? What, what might it look like if they could like work together and you know, delegate these tasks? But it wasn't a clean experiment at all, so it shouldn't be treated like that.

[David Pierce]

That's a good way of thinking about it. But I guess ostensibly that is the thing that we are driving towards. Right? All of these companies, promising agents, are fundamentally promising. Not only that there will be lots of agents, but they will be able to work together. So actually in theory, being able to see what it would look like when you just point two of them at each other should be super meaningful. So like, if we ever get a clean version of that experiment. I don't, I don't like, to me, the idea of going to this website to look at it is preposterous. But from a research perspective I can see that being really useful over time.

[Hayden Field]

Totally. I think that's why it got so big so quickly. People thought that that was already here. They were like, oh, you know this, we've reached it. Like we've, we've, we've reached the place we are going where agents can, you know, intelligently collaborate and talk to each other and do all these things. And you know, maybe they can, but this was not a, a proof of that, you know, like, and we can see like, you know, Anthropic and other companies have launched tools that, you know, are kind of test driving this right now. Like last week, I think Anthropic launched agent teams. So it was kind of a way to have like a lead AI agent and then the small, like the lower tier AI agents would each take a task and There was like a project lead and each of them would work together to accomplish something. So you know, I mean companies are working on this. It's just, it just doesn't seem to be as advanced as what we saw on Malt Book. So you know, I think I would take everything with, with not a grain of salt, but like a, a full shaker of salt.

[David Pierce]

All of the salt that there is. Yeah. Do you think it, at the end of this road there is a version of this that is useful and interesting to humans. Like the, the idea that this would be a place that I might even go to look at ever at some point. Is there, is there a version of this that becomes that for Malt Book?

[Hayden Field]

I don't really think so. I mean I think it's just kind of like a cool experiment in what something might look like. But I don't necessarily know that like it'll ever be a clean enough experiment that we should look at it and be like, wow, this is how things work. I think it would be more accurate to you know, look in Claude code or codex and look at the step by step of how these models are working and what their reasoning process is and once they launch the multi agent stuff, how they're thinking together, what they're working on, how they're delegating, stuff like that. I don't think Molt Book specifically is going to be an example of that. That's just my thought process. And I also think, I mean, I think we're going to get there, but I just don't know that it'll be Molt Book that gets us there. Especially because for me, I've been covering AI agents since like 2022 and every year I've seen a huge step change in them. You know, they're still not, you know, like ready for prime time, but the amount of change I've seen year by year has been a significant amount. So you know, this is just like another milestone in the, in the journey.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I tend to agree. There's this tech CEO years ago who told me he was like my, my rule for looking at new products is always is this, is this a primitive version of something really good or is this just a bad thing? And I feel like this has been such an interesting version of this because I look at Malt Book and I'm like, there's nothing here, right? Like this is, this is something that is going to be fascinating to a very small group of people mostly who make these kinds of products to understand how they work. Fine. That's that's essentially like network logs, right? Like, they're interesting to some people, and that's fine. I look at openclaw and it's like, there's something here. Like, this is the. An early version of something. And there's a lot of privacy questions, There's a lot of permissions questions, There's a lot of UX questions. There's a lot of, like, overall installability and what are you supposed to be able to do with this question? But, like, something about OpenClaw is going to work for a lot of people. And I think that that, to me is where it's like my brain starts to fire about, like, okay, what. What is the version of this that is just two clicks and it starts working on your computer in a reasonably thoughtful, safe way? That version might be something, and it feels like we're headed that direction.

[Hayden Field]

Absolutely. That's what I think, too. And, you know, anytime there's a big group of people that are really involved in one industry and they start loving something and using it all the time and dropping everything else to use it, think usually it means something. And that's what's happened here. It's like, you know, it has a cult following. People like it a lot more than other products out there. So it clearly there's something there. It's like, you know, this is either the beginning of something bigger and another company will kind of take over and push it forward, or this will be the thing that, you know, lasts. We don't know. But either way, it's like a huge milestone and definitely like a. A seed.

[David Pierce]

Totally. All right, well, you're going to come back and we're going to talk about privacy and all of this stuff, because I'm realizing as we talk that I don't know how to think about what I'm doing with my own data as I talk to AI tools. So we're going to talk this out, but for now, we need to take a break. Hayden, thank you for being here as always.

[Hayden Field]

Thank you so much.

[David Pierce]

Let's go install openclaw and just ruin our lives together.

[Dom Preston]

It's going to be great.

[David Pierce]

I'm excited. Can't wait. All right, we'll be right back.

[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

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[Dom Preston]

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[David Pierce]

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[David Pierce]

I want to let you know that Vox Media is returning to south by Southwest in Austin for live tapings of your favorite podcasts. Join us from March 13th through the

[Hayden Field]

15th for live tapings of Today Explained,

[Dom Preston]

Teffy Talks, Prof. G Markets and of

[David Pierce]

course your two favorite podcasts, Pivot and

[Hayden Field]

On with Kara Swisher.

[David Pierce]

The stage will also feature sessions from

[Dom Preston]

Brene Brown and Adam Grant, Marques Brownlee,

[David Pierce]

Keith Lee, Vivian Tew and Robin Arzon. It's all part of the Vox Media Podcast stage at the south by Southwest presented by Odoo. Visit voxmedia.comsxsw to pre register and get

[Dom Preston]

your special discount on your innovation badge. That's voxmedia.comsxsw to register. Really you should register.

[Hayden Field]

We sell out and we hope to see you there.

[David Pierce]

This is what President Trump had to say about why the United States is at war with Iran. We saw it repeatedly to make a deal.

[Dom Preston]

We tried.

[Andy Hawkins]

They wanted to do it, they didn't

[David Pierce]

want to do it. Again. They wanted to do it, they didn't want to do it, they didn't know what was happening.

[Andy Hawkins]

Not the best explanation for a war of choice, sir.

[David Pierce]

I'm personally a do my own research kind of guy, but let's ask AI why We're at War with Iran Chat

[Dom Preston]

the United States attacked Iran in 2026 because it claimed Iran posed an imminent threat.

[David Pierce]

Threat particularly due to Iran's advancing nuclear program and missile capabilities and aim to reduce Iran's ability to project power in the region. Wow.

[Hayden Field]

That.

[David Pierce]

That was a better explanation. Thanks Chat. Fitting that AI was more clear than the President of the United States because it turns out the United States is using AI to fight the war in Iran. The future of war is AI and that future is now. Here you can find out whether or not you should be freaking out over in the Today Explained feed. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number is 866-Verge11. The email is vergecastheurg.com the Verge's transportation editor, Andy Hawkins is here to answer this one with me.

[Dom Preston]

Hey Andy.

[David Pierce]

Hey.

[Dom Preston]

What's up?

[David Pierce]

So I feel like I only bring you here to explain Tesla to me and I'm very sorry about that.

[Andy Hawkins]

Last time was byd, so that was, you know, that's true.

[David Pierce]

And Horse of a different color. Not to take full credit for this, but there has been a bunch of very good coverage of, of Chinese EVs on our site since then. Yes, so you're welcome. Also, a lot of people are enthusiastic about our Verge Top Gear in China episode that we're going to do. I'm just saying people are saying that this is going to happen. The momentum is just off the charts.

[Andy Hawkins]

If Jim Bakeoff is listening right now, please cut this check.

[David Pierce]

Jim, I know that you are. Hit us up. We're ready. All right, but our question this time. We talked briefly a while ago about Tesla's earnings. And Tesla kind of slowly beginning to seem like it is getting out of the car business. And that is what this question is about. Let me play it.

[Hayden Field]

Hello, Vergecast, I just read the news that Tesla is discontinuing the Model S and the Model X. I'm just wondering, when do you all think Tesla will stop being a car company? My big tinfoil hat theory is that at some point they will switch to being just more infrastructure and electronic company like their supercharging network, battery infrastructure, solar, maybe robots. But I don't think the robot will ever happen. But that's my, my question is when I guess a higher or lower scale, do you all think they will just cease to be a competitive automaker? Because if we see what's going on in China and in the US Tesla seems to be getting less and less market share every year. And I give it five to eight years before they're just a completely minor player and almost insignificant. But I would love to hear your thoughts.

[David Pierce]

Thank you, Andy. I want to start here. Is this a tinfoil hat theory to you that Tesla is kind of on its way out of the car business? This doesn't strike me as that crazy a theory anymore.

[Andy Hawkins]

I think. Absolutely not. I think Musk has been sort of signaling this for a while now. We've been writing about it for a while now. I published a story the other week that basically sort of confronted these exact issues. What would it take? And why is Tesla sort of starting to kind of essentially wind down as a car business? I mean, he cited the discontinuation of the Model S and Model X. And there's a number of other clues as well. If you listen to that recent earnings call, there was a top, top Tesla executive who told investors that the company should be seen more as a transportation, as a service company, and less so as a traditional automaker. And obviously there's all the robots and the AI of it all as well. So I think he's absolutely focusing on, I think it seems like what seems like a very credible possibility here for Tesla.

[David Pierce]

So the cynical read that immediately comes to my mind here is that Tesla for years has hit the valuation on Wall street that it has mostly by saying it's not fundamentally a car company. Right? Like in every meaningful way it has been a car company. But Elon Musk has been out here talking about robots and talking about self driving and talking about like rewiring the way that cities work, because that's how you justify the way that Tesla has been valued. And the way that Tesla is valued directly leads to how much money Elon Musk has. So, like, what I've always wondered and what you and I have talked about a few times is like, there's, there's Tesla in the world and there's Tesla on Wall street, and in many ways those are two very different companies. Is it, is what's happening now that the Wall street side of it is actually becoming real or like, I don't know what, what is, what is changing in that dynamic here?

[Andy Hawkins]

Yeah, it's a really interesting question because yes, you're, you're absolutely right. There's sort of the reality of Tesla, which is that it is fundamentally a car business. Obviously it has these side businesses as well. It sells solar power, it sells home home batteries, stationary batteries, it installs superchargers, EV charging. So there's a number of other things going on around Tesla that are not directly connected to its core business as a car company. And then there are sort of like, there's the vibes of it, all, right? There's sort of what Elon Musk says and what he promises and how those promises are refracted back in from Wall street, that reflects on Tesla as an investment, as the value of the company, which is for years and years and years now, ever since the success of the Model 3, the company has been valued far and above head and shoulders above other traditional car companies. If you see Tesla as a car company, it sells a fraction of the cars that big volume players like Volkswagen and Toyota sell, and yet it is valued at multiple times the amount as those companies are. But that said, I still think that we're kind of like not getting at how difficult this transition is going to be, if indeed what they say is true, that they are going to cease to become sort of a traditional car business and become more of a subscription business, essentially. If he's talking about transportation as a services, that immediately calls to mind other businesses, SaaS businesses, companies that have recurring revenue from subscriptions as opposed to just selling physical products, that they get that sort of one bite of the apple and that's it. And I feel like that is going to be kind of the great challenge that Musk is now facing. I mean, because if you think about Tesla's car business, in 2025 they brought in about $95 billion in automotive revenue. That is just from selling cars pretty much exclusively. The Model 3 and the Model Y, those are the cars that it sells at volume. The cybertruck has been a flop. The Model S and the Model X have waned over the years and essentially just, you know, they're selling single units of those every, every quarter. But $95 billion, that's nothing to sneeze at. Yeah, that's not automotive revenue. That's just, that is revenue, period. That is all the revenue that Tesla brought in in 2025, 69.5 billion of that was automotive revenue. So we're still talking 75% of the revenues are coming in from car sales, 25% through energy sales, through subscriptions, through EV charging, through other, other aspects of its business. So at what point does that become, you know, flipped? At what point are we talking, you know, that that's the, you know, the majority of the businesses are these other, other side businesses and the car revenues become much smaller aspect of it. Well, when Musk says it's going to be when they start, you know, producing these cyber cabs, when everything becomes autonomous, when the robots go into production, which is expected to be at the end of 2027, if you believe Musk and his, his deadlines and his predictions. So I do think that you can see sort of like the vague sort of outlines of how this happens. And it's true that Musk's, you know, that Tesla's other businesses, energy generation, storage services, revenue, other things, those are on the upswing. While the automotive revenues are down, that means the 2025 revenues from the car business down 10% year over year. The Model 3 and the Model Y, while still selling much bigger than all of the other EVs on the market, are also in decline. And he's shown, you know, Musk has shown zero interest in expanding Tesla's vehicle lineup to include more mass market affordable vehicles. They tried to take sort of the Model 3 and the Model Y, make them as cheap as they possibly can. They're still only sort of, you know, the decontented versions are going to be around like 38, $39,000 that's still not in that 20 to $25,000 range that Tesla has been supposedly working on before. This kind of like more of this philosophical switch that they've centered on. So I do think it's going to be extraordinarily difficult. I think that Tesla might become a smaller company, as this guy has suggested, more of a bit player in the automotive world. And I don't see the other revenue streams necessarily compensating for that shrinkage in the near term or really even in the long term when you consider how far behind Waymo, of Waymo that Tesla is right now and other robo taxi players. So I think it's going to be a tough transition, but I mean all things are possible.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. So if Tesla isn't a car company, let's say five to eight years, I think is, is a fun. And I'm going to make you pick over and under on eight years in a minute. So get ready for that. But if, if it's not a car company at that point, it is a, it is an X company. Well that's, I probably shouldn't say it like that. If it's not a car company at that point, what kind of company is it? Is it an optimus robot company? Is it a self driving robo taxi company? Is it a home energy company? Like to the extent that Apple makes lots of things, but it is the iPhone company. Right. Like Tesla makes a lot of things but it is a car company. What, what is that thing? If you say cast out a decade if it's not cars?

[Andy Hawkins]

Yeah, I think it could potentially be any of those things. But then of course that is assuming that these other products are wildly as wildly successful as the Model 3 and the Model Y have been for, for Tesla. I don't think you can really make that assumption quite yet. Right. Everything we've seen so far from these other projects that Tesla is working on have suggested that they still need a lot of work. Right. The optimus robots, the versions that we've seen so far have mostly been remote operated or teleoperated. They seem to struggle with some basic functions. Right. There was one that they were having some difficulty handing out popcorn for example, at a Tesla event a couple years ago. And then the robo taxis, you know, they still have safety drivers in the vehicle. They have not gone fully driverless. They are still, you know, struggling to, to go sort of level four as Waymo has done. And you know, the Cyber Cab, it's no guarantee that this two passenger gold, you know, with no Vehicle with no steering wheel, no pedals is going to really become a volume player, especially because there's a lot of regulatory risk there. Right. They have to get exemptions from the government to produce vehicles that don't have these traditional controls. That's going to be a struggle. That's going to limit the early rollout of the cyber cab. So I just don't see kind of a one to one match here with the success that they've had with the 3 and the y on any of these other products that they're supposedly trying to sell us on yet.

[David Pierce]

Okay. Yeah. The cybercab in particular, it's not just a bet on a vehicle, it's a bet on like a complete reimagining of society in five to eight years. You know what I mean?

[Andy Hawkins]

Look at Waymo is not going in that direction.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Andy Hawkins]

They're still putting out vehicles that have steering wheels and pedals. Right. They're saying we can grow a lot faster and grab a lot more market share if we sort of bypass this idea that these vehicles need to be purpose built and instead just use retrofitted vehicles. That seems to be the smarter play because they're going to be in many more cities than Musk has been promising. He promised 50% of the population at the end of 2025 was going to have access to the robo taxi. That has not been the case.

[David Pierce]

Right, okay, so I'm going to give you eight years is the. We'll go to the end of our caller's timeline here. Eight years. Tesla does or does not still sell individual cars to individual people, yes or no? 2034. Boy, that feels like a long time from now.

[Andy Hawkins]

It really does. I mean, my daughter's going to be starting her first year at college that year. That's, that's crazy to think about. I think that they're still going to be selling cars by then. I just don't see a world in which, you know, it's, you know, the streets are overrun with, with robots and cyber cabs. Yeah, I'm going to be pessimistic on this one. Sorry to all the, to all the, the stands out there. But yeah, I'm just, I'm not seeing the evidence that suggests that it's going to be, you know, maybe it's a smaller company and, and maybe it's run by a different person.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Andy Hawkins]

And at some point, maybe Tesla's board decides that, you know, this direction is not the one they want to go to.

[Hayden Field]

They.

[Andy Hawkins]

And they kick Musk out. So yeah, I'M going to take the under on that one one.

[David Pierce]

All right, I'm with you. I appreciate it. Andy. Thank you as always.

[Andy Hawkins]

Thanks, David.

[David Pierce]

All right, that's it for the show. Thank you to Andy and Hayden and Dom for being here and thank you as always for listening. If you have thoughts or questions, if you've seen the Trump phone, if you've done something weird with openclaw, or if you've been vibe coding things. I've gotten so many emails from people about the interesting stuff you've been vibe coding recently, and I want to hear even more. Keep them all coming. 866-Verge11 is the hotline vergecast of the verge.com is the email. We absolutely love hearing from you. Send us all the things. Tell us what you think about our coverage of the Epstein files and of what's going on in Minneapolis. There's just a lot happening in all different directions right now and I would love to hear how you think, what you're thinking about how it all makes you feel. Get at us. Also, if you want to get all of our podcasts, including this one, ad free, the best thing you can do is go to theverge.com subscribe and subscribe. If you're already a subscriber, it's in your account settings. How to get the ad Free Podcasts not only is it the best way to listen to all of our shows, if I'm being honest, it's also the best way to support everything that the Verge is up to. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday with more news because the news just keeps coming. Neil and I have an awful lot to talk about. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

[Hayden Field]

My dad taught me a lot, including how easy it is to forget to cancel things. So I downloaded Experian, my bff.

[David Pierce]

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[Hayden Field]

Experian could help me cancel my unused subscriptions and lower my bills, saving me hundreds a year. Get started with the Experian app today. Your big financial friends here to help you save smarter. Results will vary. Not all bills or subscriptions eligible Savings

[David Pierce]

not guaranteed $631 a year average savings with one plus negotiations and OnePlus cancellations. Paid membership with connected payment account required.

[Hayden Field]

See experian.com for details. Experian.