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- [00:01]
L'Oreal Group Announcer
Support for the show comes from l' Oreal Group, the global beauty leader defining the future of beauty through science and technology. L' Oreal Group, create the beauty that moves the world.
- [00:16]
David Pierce
Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of using your TV show to promote your YouTube channel. I'm your friend, David Pearce. Eli Patel is here. Hey, buddy.
- [00:24]
Nilay Patel
I keep saying it. No one's watching the TV shows, David.
- [00:27]
David Pierce
No, it really is. It's like we talked for so long about, like, social media as like, a marketing platform for other stuff. Other stuff. Broadcast television is now a marketing platform for your YouTube channel. This is what we've come to.
- [00:37]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, you're just selling ads at really high rates to local real estate agents, healthcare firms. That's all it's there for.
- [00:45]
David Pierce
This is what we do. So we have. We have a lot of news to cover. There's a bunch of Apple stuff coming. We have new pixels. We have information about what's coming from Samsung. We're like ramping up into gadget season again. There's also some AI stuff going on. The word autopilot is being debated. We're going to talk about that. But we have. Every once in a while, our boy Brendan breaks containment and it is time. We have. We just have to do this at the top, Eli. It's just. It's just time. We are going to begin today's show with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. We should say we're recording this on Wednesday morning, which is earlier than we normally record because, Nilai, I think you have to go do, like, little kid winter break things.
- [01:27]
Nilay Patel
We have vacation. It's winter break.
- [01:29]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [01:29]
Nilay Patel
You gotta let the kids run free.
- [01:31]
David Pierce
Yeah. So we're. We're recording this early and our other option was to have you, like, call in with a pina colada again. But we're here. This story will keep changing. We're recording this on Wednesday.
- [01:40]
Nilay Patel
To be clear, I was going to do the pina colada call in, but Brendan ruined it. This is.
- [01:44]
David Pierce
Yeah. Thanks, Brendan. With new theme music submitted by Christopher Sullivan, who described this, which I have not heard and I'm deeply terrified by as quote, a free jazz slash brain rot remix. Good. Idk. Unique. Yes.
- [01:58]
Nilay Patel
Here we go.
- [01:59]
David Pierce
All right, we're back.
- [02:00]
Nilay Patel
Okay, so today I'm doing something a little bit different.
- [02:02]
David Pierce
Is it time? Is it time? No. Is it time?
- [02:06]
Nilay Patel
No. He did it. He was. He was particularly done this week. Is it time?
- [02:11]
L'Oreal Group Announcer
Is it time?
- [02:11]
Nilay Patel
It's time. It is time.
- [02:13]
David Pierce
Now it's time. Once again, Daddy, chill. For America's favorite podcast dinner podcast. So delicious.
- [02:19]
Nilay Patel
Brandon Carr's dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy.
- [02:24]
David Pierce
Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Eli, what do you do?
- [02:28]
Nilay Patel
He's a dummy. He's such a dummy.
- [02:32]
David Pierce
That's crap.
- [02:34]
Nilay Patel
God.
- [02:34]
Todd Hazelton
Beautiful.
- [02:37]
David Pierce
Okay, I don't want anyone to submit theme songs anymore.
- [02:40]
Nilay Patel
The, the party horns really got me that in that one.
- [02:44]
David Pierce
The do do is, is nice though. I think anyone who does submit should, should use the knee line. Do do as as often as possible.
- [02:51]
Nilay Patel
It was, it was everything I wanted it to be. It was ominous, it was scary. It was oddly pornographic. One more. Can you ask?
- [02:58]
David Pierce
It made me very much. That was, that was lovely, Christopher. Thank you. Let me just very briefly set up where we're going here. And then, Nilai, I'm just gonna, I'm gonna leave for a while and you can just yell. So the other night, Stephen Colbert comes on his show and says that he had originally planned to interview James Talarico, a Texas Senate candidate for his show. And then goes into a long explanation about why that's not going to happen. Which starts with an explanation of our buddy Brandon Carr, who has just made himself a character on late night television shows. So Colbert explains this out. It then then posts James Talarico's interview on the late show YouTube channel that I, I, I'm looking at it this morning. We're, we're recording this on Wednesday. That video now has 5 million views, which is substantially more than the number of people who watch Stephen Colbert show. This becomes a whole thing. We, we can walk through the chronology of this, but starting at the very beginning here, Neil, I, this, this is like exactly the stuff you have been talking about on this show for months. Once again just brought to the biggest possible stage. Right?
- [04:06]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, yeah. Brendan Carr cannot help but make himself the speech police of American television. It's what he wants. And there's this concept in first Amendment law called the chilling effect, where you don't even do the enforcement. You don't even, you know, arrest the people for the illegal speech. You just talk about it so much that the speech stops, you chilled the speech, you make it go away. This is the chilling effect in action. Brendan has been talking about the equal time rule, which basically FCC hasn't enforced in years and years and years. Because again, I will remind everyone that people do not watch broadcast television. They watch stuff on their phones over the Internet and the FCC cannot say what happens on the Internet. In that way, they can only talk about what happens on broadcast television. And broadcast radio. So the FCC has just not been enforcing this rule forever. But Brendan, because he pulled it off the shelf and started making noise about late night talk show hosts interviewing Democrats, news programs like the View interviewing Democrats and needing to provide equal time to conservatives because of the horrible bias in American media, has chilled the speech of Stephen Colbert. He has made it so Stephen Colbert on his own program cannot air the interview because CBS's lawyers are so worried about triggering an equal time review or having to comply with an equal time rule that hasn't been enforced in forever in a way that they don't understand how to do. Right? Like, this is a real problem. Like, even if you say we're going to have Talarico on and will provide equal time to the other candidates, it is unclear what that compliance would look like because Brendan hasn't said what that compliance would look like. And we all know that Brendan's version of compliance is just whatever he wants whenever he wants it, right? So even if you pull the equal time rule off the shelf and you say, okay, on broadcast television, all the candidates in a given race get equal time. If you don't know how to follow the rule and at every turn, you could still be punished by a capricious idiot, you're definitely just not going to do anything that might trigger the rule. Your speech will be chilled. And that is 100% what Colbert is saying. He's saying the lawyers at CBS showed up and said, don't do this. The cost of doing this will be too high. The cost of your speech will be too high. So instead do something else. And I think if you're Stephen Colbert and you've been on television for as long as Stephen Colbert has been on television, this is rightfully maddening, right? This is infuriating behavior on behalf of a network which is owned by billionaires who are so rich they can do whatever they want. And obvious, and I think he points this out, it's obvious that what they're trying to do is curry political favor of the Trump administration so that they can buy Warner Brothers. Yeah.
- [06:51]
David Pierce
He says at the end, which I very enjoy. He goes, the audience is booing and he goes, but I just want to assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is, this decision is for purely financial reasons, which I just enjoyed very much. But the timeline here, I think, basically starts with this January 21st letter that we've talked about now, like, a bunch. Like one letter from the FCC should not come up this often on the Verge cast. And yet here we are in which Brendan Carr basically says he's thinking about doing away with the exception to the equal time rule that has been made for talk shows for forever. He has not gotten rid of it. He has not begun the process to get rid of it. He's just sort of announced out loud that he's thinking about getting rid of it. And this is, this is a thing that Colbert brings up over and over and over again. Let me just play one of the clips. This is from the first night when he explains what's going on. Let me just. Here, here's how he explains to. Again, this is the broadcast TV audience. This is on his show why they're not going to see the James Salarico interview.
- [07:52]
Stephen Colbert (clip)
Now, as I said, at this point, he's just released a letter that says he's thinking about doing away with the exception for late night. He hasn't done away with it yet, but my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had.
- [08:06]
David Pierce
So that's the thing, right, that CBS takes this letter that is, is binding in no way as just sort of a letter which Brett and Carr clearly intended to be, you know, intended to.
- [08:17]
Nilay Patel
Chill speech with it.
- [08:18]
David Pierce
Right. And, and CBS says, great, done, let's, let's chill some speech. Colbert takes exception to this, puts all of this stuff on the show and, and this becomes this, like the, the story kind of on Tuesday was this big back and forth, right, that, that the, the Talarico interview blows up because tons of people are watching it because all of a sudden it's, it's news that it's out there on YouTube. Colbert is, you know, fighting against the chilling of a speech. And then it takes this other turn.
- [08:47]
Nilay Patel
Well, first, can I say something? 1. In the history of free speech controversies, saying you can't watch something is the best way to get people to watch it.
- [08:55]
David Pierce
It's spectacular. Yeah. And Colbert knows this. Like this is a deliberate play.
- [09:00]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, Colbert absolutely knows this. The Producers at Late Night absolutely know this. CBS knows this.
- [09:05]
David Pierce
Right.
- [09:06]
Nilay Patel
Colbert show is pre taped. All of that that we saw sat in a can for several hours. Like everyone knew what would happen here.
- [09:13]
David Pierce
I've been thinking about that a lot. That like for six hours this thing was just recorded and everyone was fine.
- [09:19]
Nilay Patel
Everyone just sat and had to wait.
- [09:20]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [09:21]
Nilay Patel
Our friend Mike Masnick, who runs Tech Dirt, named this. It's called the Streisand effect, where you, you try to get something to go away and instead you draw more attention to it. It's named after Barbara Strand who tried to get something taken on off the Internet. It's like a famous term. And this is the Streisand effect. Colbert said CBS doesn't want you to watch this. Everyone watched it. This is by the way, the opposite of what Brennan Carr would want. He just can't regulate YouTube. I suspect he's going to try and find some way. There's a reason that last week we were talking about the Federal Trade Commission going after Apple News. This government, this administration is going after every source of information and trying to chill speech. That is the thing that they were organized around doing. Brendan just has this particular power over broadcast spectrum and he's using it to chill speech. The amazing thing about this is that if you were CBS and you have a lease to the broadcast spectrum, you have a great argument here that the the law is clear. I'm looking at it. It's 47 United States code 315 and it just says bonafide newscasts, bonafide news interviews, bonafide documentaries. If the candidate's appearance is incidental to the subject on the spot coverage of bonafide news events shall not be deemed to be use of a broadcasting station. So it's not the long standing exemption. It's written in the law. The Congress of the United States wrote a law saying these are the exceptions. And for 20 years, more than 20 years, the FCC has said talk shows are news. Like this thing. It's too hard to parse out what is and isn't news here. That talk shows are news. And there's a long list of cases where they went back and forth. This wasn't always the case. And they made this exemption over the past 20 years because the available media got so vast that parsing out what was and wasn't news on a talk show became a bad use of resources. Like it was obviously stupid to say, okay, well this candidate appeared on YouTube and this candidate appeared on Fox News, which is cable. And this candidate appeared on local origination public access cable which falls under this rule of a facility. And this. And none of this makes sense. It's like a bad use of time. And so for 20 years, more than 20 years, the SEC has said this is fine. Talk shows are news. Harold Feld, who is a lawyer at Public Knowledge has a great blog post about this. We'll link it. It's all in detail, like the long bloody history of this exemption. But the point is in the statute, in the law that the Congress passed, news is an exception to the equal timer. And you just have to read talk shows as being news. And Instead, and I, and I think CBS could have fought it. I think they could have said, you're. This one letter does not undo all of this precedent. If you want to change this rule, Brendan, you have to do what every other FCC has had to do whenever they wanted to change a rule. You've had to put out a notice of proposed rulemaking and go through the process and take public comment. We cover this all the time. The FCC wants to make it easier for you to get cheaper, faster broadband. This is like a 20 year fight. In a notice of proposed rulemaking, Brandon Carr wants a chill speech on CBS by saying he might reinterpret a rule. Everyone caves right away. That is just a pure moral failure on the part of cbs.
- [12:29]
David Pierce
Yep. Which cbs, I would say, tries to fight back on while thus immediately doubling down on the thing. So the thing that comes out is, right, all of this happens. And on Monday night and then on Tuesday, CBS puts out this statement to, to lots of different. This becomes like the official CBS statement. And actually Colbert ends up reading it in a, in a delightful way that we'll get to. But let me just play you the clip of Colbert reading this statement. That was like CBS's go to statement.
- [13:00]
Stephen Colbert (clip)
Without ever talking to me, the corporation put out this press release, this statement. Now this is a surprisingly small piece of paper considering how many butts it's trying to cover in it. They say the Late show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Representative James Talarico. The show has provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal time rule for two other candidates, including Representative Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled. The Late show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on air promotion on, on the broadcast, rather than potentially providing the equal time options.
- [13:41]
David Pierce
So that's the statement. This becomes the official CBS response to this whole thing, which is Colbert is saying, the lawyer said in no uncertain terms, you can't put James Talarico on the tv. You can't show his picture. You can't use his voice. Colbert makes a meal out of this and CBS is like, no, this isn't true. All we did was provide legal guidance and legal options. Um, ne. You, you had kind of a, a, you had a delightful experience with this particular statement over the course of the last couple days.
- [14:09]
Nilay Patel
Well, let me just say so we published a lot of things and I actually, I love our lawyers here. They're, they're very good. We have very good media lawyers. The Lawyers saying they're providing guidance while saying no is the art of being a media lawyer. Right? They're always just providing guidance. That's what media lawyers do. They, they're always like, here's what you can and can't do, and here's the amount of risk. And they're very good at making sure that you are aware that the amount of risk is so high that you should shut up. That's what they do. That's like, as editor in chief, that is what my conversation with our lawyers looks like all the time.
- [14:40]
David Pierce
Yes. There's a risk that that alligator will bite you if you put your head in its mouth.
- [14:45]
Nilay Patel
It's very much like parenting a toddler. I'm like, can I put my finger in the outlet? They're like, you can again. Anyhow. So, like, I, I, I read this back and forth. I'm like, I know what the lawyers thought they were doing. Like, they, they're lawyers. They were like, the risk will be so high. And the, the Late show correctly read, that is we're saying no. Right. Fine. And maybe there's some ambiguity there.
- [15:06]
David Pierce
Colbert also alluded at one point to the fact that the, the lawyers vet all of his scripts. Because of course they do, because that's how it's broadcast television. Like, of course they do. But that at one point, he, he had to go backstage between his monologue and his explanation of why the Talarico interview wasn't going to air to talk to the lawyers again, which he said had never happened. Like, lawyers standing backstage waiting for the commercial break is lawyers saying no. Right? Like, that's, that's all that is.
- [15:35]
Nilay Patel
That's some, like, Soviet stuff.
- [15:37]
David Pierce
Right.
- [15:37]
Nilay Patel
The government minder is standing backstage to tell the talk show host what the government would like them to say. That's bad. Okay, so let me just make this about the Verge for one second.
- [15:46]
David Pierce
Yes, please.
- [15:47]
Nilay Patel
So this is CBS's statement, right? So we're covering the story. We reach out to cbs, and we're like, can you send us the statement? They send us the statement. And we have a really strict background policy. We do not let PR people be unbiased background. So you have to put your names on things. And the reason for this is just a long history we link to the background policy, but a long history of companies putting the burden of trust on us. Right. So making it so that if you read their statement, you have to trust the Verge for some reason. And all the companies used to do this to us all the time. They still do it to everybody. All the time. And we just got tired of it, and we said, no, we. You got to put your name on it. You want your statement in our story, you need to put your name on it. And that way, the trust is on you. We're not some amorphous corporation, but you, a person, have to stand by the thing you're saying. And if you look at our site, everyone plays ball. Everyone understands exactly why we do this. And when we push back, it's always like, one little turn of pushback, and then everyone's like, fine, here's a name. And we've done this for years now. This policy is five years old, and it works. It's fine. So everybody has a statement on background, no name. Here's what CBS says. We reach out and say, look, our policy is, you got to put a name on it. Phil Gonzalez, the SVP of comms at cbs, writes back to us and says, no, respectfully, you don't need to use the statement. We will keep that in mind next time the Verge asks us to reply. They don't even want to put their name on this cowardly statement. And, like, we're just. We just. I'm burning him now. We burned him in print. Because we insist that you put your names on the statements. If you're going to say this stuff.
- [17:18]
David Pierce
If it is your job to speak publicly on behalf of your company, we require that you put your name on it. That's the question.
- [17:25]
Nilay Patel
Anyway, the reason that you pay us money for the subscription is so that we can be brats like this. Like, that's. You're buying the ethics policy. I keep saying it. This, to me, is, if you are going to cave to the government, if you're going to cave to pressure from Brendan Carr, you got to put your name on it. You got. You have to be accountable for that. And I know exactly why Phil Gonzalez did not want to be accountable for the statement. Because it's just weasel stuff. And at some point, you're gonna run into us and we're gonna say, nope, if you wanna be a weasel, you gotta put your name on it. Sorry, Phil.
- [17:54]
David Pierce
Yeah, so, yeah, so this all leads to this second round with Colbert, who goes on his show on Tuesday night and does another screed against Brendan Carr and the equal time rule and all of this nonsense. And at one point, so he. He's holding this press release that CBS sent out with that statement, and he winds up crumpling it up and picking it up with a. With a doggy poop bag, which I really like, um, but the thing I've been thinking about through all of this is like, on the one hand, Brendan Carr has inserted himself into the media and that is clearly a thing that he wants, right? Like this is a, this is a game he keeps playing. It must be getting him what he wants out of this. Like you would think if the, the whole thing with Jimmy Kimmel, which was another time, that the, the whole world sort of immediately turned on the Free Speech Police was not what Brendan Carr wanted, he would have gone about things differently. But he continues to do this. And so what I've been trying to figure out through all of this is like, is, is Brendan Carr winning or losing this fight? In his own head, is he winning or losing this fight?
- [19:00]
Nilay Patel
Oh, in his head he's winning. He's absolutely winning. He is the speech police in America. If you are a major corporation in the business of distributing speech, and Brendan doesn't like it, he's either gonna dig up some 500 year old authority that FCC hasn't used to insist that he has a power to regulate your speech, he's going to sign on to some nonsensical FTC interpretation of your Terms and service and say that Apple News is biased and that's illegal in some way. He's going to use the phrase illegal speech, which is a thing that he uses. He's turned the FCC into a weapon against free expression and he's done it at every level of that organization. And that is a tragedy. You know Colbert mentioned Nipplegate. That was on cbs, right? When, when Justin Timberlake pulled down Janet Jackson's top at the Super Bowl. Yeah, but the FCC went into overdrive. This was like, we're going to sue Viacom, we're going to punish. That case went on for years. It eventually came to nothing. And out of that, the chairs of the fcc, Republican and Democrat alike, said we have to get out of the business of policing speech. The Internet exists. These companies are in competition with a universe of content that we cannot regulate. Putting regulatory burdens on them is a mess. Our job is to connect Americans, Democrats, Republicans alike running the fcc. I've known most of them, we've covered them deeply for years. What they have all said is the FCC has to get out of the speech business and into the connectivity business. I have had meaningful disagreements with a lot of the people who have run the FCC about what it means to be in a connectivity business and how to achieve those goals and all that. But like I've never thought to myself, the FCC should do something Other than connect Americans to broadband and figure out how to make broadband cheaper and more accessible. Brendan has thrown all of that aside and run headlong back into being the speech police. It's what he wants. So if you ask me if he's winning or losing, in his head, he is winning. I think we as the American people are losing. And I think over the medium term, not even the long term, but over the medium term, I think he will lose. I think most Americans understand that you should not have government minders standing backstage at a talk show telling the host what they can and cannot say. That is just an affront to everything people on both sides believe. And if you showed up on any right wing YouTube talk show and said the government is going to have a real interest in what you're saying, they would throw you out of the room. The idea that your distribution should meaningfully change that dynamic is so foreign to most people. If you went to some gen Alpha kid and said, look, there's this thing called the TV antenna and if you use that, the government gets to tell you what you can and can't say, they would, I mean, I, I, I just know they would look at you like you were a space alien.
- [21:53]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [21:54]
Nilay Patel
And so if that's what you can regulate, you can regulate the broadcast airwaves. It's only a jump before you say, you know what, Google is a national utility. We should regulate that too. It's only a small jump before you say, look, the entire Internet runs on people's phones, which come from AT&T and Verizon and T Mobile, that's broadcast spectrum. We have a real interest in making sure at&t, Verizon and T Mobile only broadcast the stuff that is good for America. You can see it coming, you can see where it will come from. You can see the slippery slope. And it's great that Stephen Colbert is pushing back. It is very bad that the Ellison family, which owns Paramount, CBS and wants to buy Warner Brothers with Trump administration approval, is not pushing back.
- [22:34]
David Pierce
Right.
- [22:35]
Nilay Patel
And this is where if you want to be a big media owner, David Ellison wants to be the big media mogul. The thing he needs to show the creatives who make the content is that he will fight for their free expression because otherwise none of them are going to want to work for him. And I think Colbert's just the tip of the spear here.
- [22:50]
David Pierce
Yep. Part of the way that they got this deal done to buy CBS in the first place was by paying off the Trump administration for a made up argument that they had about A Kamala Harris interview. Uh, and, and this is, this is the, the other bummer of all of this is anyone who decided to fight would win. Any, any thoughtful person in the world agrees that every single one of these trumped up things against these media industries has been ridiculous. And it keeps working.
- [23:21]
Nilay Patel
It keeps working and it's only not working in small ways. Barry Weiss took over CBS News. Anderson COOPER Just quit 60 minutes. Yeah, this is what I mean. You're going to drive the talent away and once you've done that, because you won't protect their expression. Yeah, they're all going to land somewhere that will, they're all going to land on TikTok or whatever it is. They're all going to get into fights with content moderation on those platforms. They're all going to start doing algo speak. Whatever that thing is, is going to happen. And you will have spent millions upon billions of dollars to own a network that distributes nothing to no one. And truly that is the lesson of the media mogul. Like if you want to be that character, a fight you are going to be in all the time is saying, no, you can't tell me what to say. And you have to say it to the government. You got to say it to the Parents Resource Council. You got to say it to whoever it is who shows up to chill your speech. You have to say, nope, we agree with you. There should be some limits, but we are going to protect our creatives. And you can just see the Ellison family, what they are communicating most strongly is that they will not protect creatives. And all this money they want to spend will. They're going to flush it down the toilet if they don't protect their creatives against dummies like Brendan Carr who haven't even changed the rules yet, who are just chilling speech.
- [24:30]
David Pierce
It's the same story with Bezos in the Washington Post. It is just these institution after institution being lit on fire because somebody bought it. Who doesn't want the game, doesn't want the game.
- [24:40]
Nilay Patel
And I, I, I'm going to do it. I'm going to end Brandon Carson by once again finding faint praise for Rupert Murdoch. I'm going to do, I'm going to.
- [24:48]
David Pierce
Make this comparison the unlikeliest bedfellows of Brendan Carr's dummy.
- [24:51]
Nilay Patel
I do not agree with nearly anything. David used to work at the Journal, the Wall Street Journal. In the entire Murdoch empire, the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal is a crown jewel. It makes real news to the highest standards. You know Joanna Stern, our friend just Left the Journal to go independent. She and I talked about that for years. And one of the reasons she loved the Journal was she loved the standards of the Journal. And she and I talked about it all the time. She's like, I love meeting these standards. That's Joanna, right? She's like, very competitive. She wants to hit the highest standard. The Journal was the highest standard. Murdoch knows that that is the thing he needs to protect. He knows that is the truest source of his power and authority. It's not Fox News scaring old people all day. It's when the Wall Street Journal publishes a story. It moves markets and it brings down empires. That's power. It's because he's a newspaper man, like, old school. And all these new guys, they don't understand that if you cede that authority, if you let that get tainted, you're going to end up with nothing. And you can really see that dynamic playing out with this new class of billionaires that thinks they can just play in the news. Murdoch, again, he understands one thing, that you can't screw with the Journal's newsroom. Because when the Journal says Theranos is full of shit. Yeah, Theranos is. Anyway, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on this show, which you currently cannot regulate. I would love to have this debate with you. I would love to see where you think you can just unilaterally change FCC administrative law precedent. That's a fulsome debate we could have. I could also just yell at you for a while because it seems like you like being humiliated. Brendan, as always, you're welcome on this show or decoder. That has been Brendan Carr as a dummy. America's favorite podcast. For the podcast.
- [26:27]
David Pierce
We did it. All right, we're going to take a break and then we're to going to talk about gadgets because God help us, we need to talk about gadgets. We'll be right back.
- [26:36]
L'Oreal Group Announcer
Support for the show comes from l' Oreal Group. Using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skincare. Light, straight and multistyler and the new LED face mask, both of which were recognized as CES 2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on L'Oreal.com L' Oreal group create the beauty that moves the world.
- [27:12]
David Pierce
All right, we're back. A lot of gadget news this week. Actually, some of it huge bummers about ongoing availability of gadgets, but we'll get to that. Nilay, we have to start with a thing that I think you did to us as a society. You have been saying forever that you think the killer app of smart glasses is essentially facial and name recognition of everyone. If I could walk around with glasses and just immediately know who everybody is, that would be awesome.
- [27:43]
Nilay Patel
Yes. But can I just point out, I've always said the other half of that idea too, which is in order to build that product, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is bad.
- [27:54]
David Pierce
Okay, well, Nilai, I have such good news for you, Meta.
- [27:57]
Nilay Patel
I just, I just want to just hammer that down, like, go back and listen, I've said this all too. I'm like, to get the thing everybody wants, you have to build the bad thing.
- [28:05]
David Pierce
Well, I have again, really good news for you, which is that Meta appears extremely interested in building the bad thing and in shipping it in, I would say, the grossest and most cynical possible way. So the news this week was a story from the New York Times about Meta planning to add facial recognition tech to the meta ray ban glasses, which is a thing I think we, we have all assumed was coming. There's been some reporting that this was a thing Meta was interested in for some time. There was that project that college kids did a while ago that you could use it for, that freaked everybody out.
- [28:37]
Nilay Patel
And Meta, by the way, disclaimed that whole project.
- [28:40]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [28:41]
Nilay Patel
Just to be clear about what that project was, they brought the meta ray bans and they hacked them up to send live video to a tool called Pim Eyes, which is very problematic all unto itself. And then that would feed back who you were looking at and like their LinkedIn. And they, they made a video where they were just like, running around the subway, like, walking up to people and like, don't I know you? And then like, sort of like reading their LinkedIn to them and blowing lines. And Meta was like, this isn't official. We didn't do it. And it's like, dude, you're so close to doing this.
- [29:09]
David Pierce
But anyway, so according to this New York Times story, they, they got a memo from a Meta executive who is not named in the story. I have a guess, but it's not important.
- [29:20]
Nilay Patel
I don't know. We have the same guess.
- [29:21]
David Pierce
I think we have the same guess. This feature is going to be called Name Tag. And this, this document, which I believe is from last May, basically lays out the plan to launch Name Tag. And the idea was to release it at conference for blind people to attendees There, which is already. Already sort of cynical in a way. It's like, we're going to take this thing and put the best possible version of the spin on it in a way that it is, like, accessibility feature and it is valuable to this group of people. Just ignore all of the other use cases and horrors. But anyway, there's also a line in the memo that specifically, I'm just going to read you this line because it's, it's just. I mean, like, I could set it up, but it, it tells on itself. It says, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns.
- [30:14]
Nilay Patel
Rough.
- [30:14]
David Pierce
That's just. I mean, like, right.
- [30:16]
Nilay Patel
ICE is putting babies in prison, and that's a good time to launch a worldwide facial recognition.
- [30:21]
David Pierce
Nobody's gonna have time to be mad at us about this because they're mad about others.
- [30:24]
Nilay Patel
I will point out to, to the credit, the civil society groups, aclu, the eff, all of them are like, no, we'll find time. Universally like, no, we'll find time for you.
- [30:33]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [30:34]
Nilay Patel
Wait, who's. So who's your guess as to who wrote this line?
- [30:36]
David Pierce
Andrew Bosworth.
- [30:37]
Nilay Patel
Yep, that's my guess. I think we both met Boz before we've spent time with him. He very famously wrote the memo called the Ugly, which was about the cost of connecting the world. And it was basically like, no matter what, we will connect people. If you go read that memo, it was very controversial at the time, and his argument was, I wrote it to make people think about all these costs. But the writing, the style is, like, dead on, exactly the same as this line. I'm not saying we know Boz. If you want to come on the show, by all means. I would love to talk to you about this, but I just. I'm guessing Boz runs reality labs. That's why. That's why. That's my guess.
- [31:11]
David Pierce
Same. Yeah, but I think this, this, this raised all of the issues. You would think that it would. Lots of people are very nervous about this. I just want to know how you feel. Knowing, like a. Of course, if anybody was going to do this, it was going to be Meta. Of course. Right? Like, yeah, of course. But even in this, in this same document, Meta outlines its supposed safeguards for this feature, which are nothing.
- [31:36]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [31:36]
David Pierce
Like, the idea is that this was. Sources that, that told the Times this in their reporting. The. The facial recognition technology isn't just supposed to work on everybody. It's supposed to find people that you're connected to on one of meta's platforms. But it also is looking into, quote, identifying people whom the user may not know, but who have a public account on a meta site like Instagram. That's everybody. That's everybody.
- [32:01]
Nilay Patel
That's real bad. Yeah, what you want is the influencer tracker that's going to make hot girls across America feel safe.
- [32:08]
David Pierce
What could possibly go wrong? Yeah, you follow her on Instagram, it's real bad.
- [32:12]
Nilay Patel
That's real bad. I mean, first of all, you should not build this product. Like I keep saying, it's the killer app because it's the killer app. If I could just remember people's names and faces, I would be the President of the United States. It is the only thing stopping the rapid ascent of my political career.
- [32:26]
David Pierce
You're one face blindness problem away.
- [32:28]
Nilay Patel
I am horrible at names and faces. I Again, for 20 years of this career, I've just been apologizing every day of my life. I'm pre apologizing to you now. Going to remember your name. It's just I'm really bad at it. If I had a pair of glasses that could just solve this problem, I would be the most powerful person in world history. But I know in my heart that the cost of that power, it's too high. Right? You should not de anonymize everybody all the time and do it in a way that allows every government on earth, which now thinks the guard rails are off, to go, access that data and track where everybody is all the time. And that is what our government will do. The second meta has a database of where and when it saw people, which is the thing that they inevitably have to create. There was a time when maybe you would trust the tech platform to say, no, we'll stand up to government pressure. We'll do warrant canaries. Right? The do you know about these? They all have these like compliance statements on their websites and if every year they publish one, it's like, we have not received any incoming requests for information. And then like every now and again, they subtly change the language to make it clear that they've received requests they don't like. Yeah, there was a time when like, this was a game everybody played. And like the civil society groups like the ACLU and the EFF would like watch those. That's all over the. All of them want to be defense contractors. All of them want to sell AI to Pete Hegseth. Except for anthropic. I don't know what's going on with these companies. I don't know why they think they should participate in the widespread abuse of our civil liberties, but I don't trust them to do the right thing.
- [34:02]
David Pierce
Money is, I mean, that's, that's, it's money.
- [34:04]
Nilay Patel
Money. But Sarah Jeong has this line she says, when she. Where she describes their attitude, which is they just want to fly their helicopters over the favelas. Like, yeah, they will have all the money and we will all live in the tent city and they will fly over us. And like, that's what this is. If you release this product, I want it so badly, I cannot. I've said it for so many years. So many people pinged me about this. This is the killer app. Putting digital information over the real world on a pair of glasses is the killer app for the next generation of devices. It's not chatbots, it's not VR, it's not anything. It's literally putting digital information over the real world. Right, and augmenting your reality. And the killer app for that is saying you can be at a conference and know everybody's name. It will, the second that feature is released, everyone will buy those classes. And you shouldn't make it because the social cost of that product is building a worldwide database of facial recognition and surveillance that will be used for nefarious purposes. And Meta, saying out loud we don't think the people will be there to stop us because they're busy with the rest of the civil liberties abuses is as cynical as it gets.
- [35:18]
David Pierce
Well, and inside of that is, I think, a recognition of that exact dynamic that you're talking about. Right. Where I think what that, what a lot of these tech companies want you to believe in the way that they act publicly is that all of the ideas about the trade offs are overblown, that we can solve them with product, that we can just handle this the right way, and that actually that trade off doesn't exist. It's a, it's a false dichotomy that you're creating. What this makes very clear is that Meta fully understands all of those ramifications and all of the ways that this is going to be received and discussed and all of the problems that it will cause and it has decided it's worth building anyway.
- [35:50]
Nilay Patel
Again, we're recording this Wednesday morning. Mark Zuckerberg is supposed to be on trial today. He's supposed to be on the stand today in the case alleging that Meta and other social media companies designed products defectively. Not speech, not 230 concerns, but that the literal product design of their platforms caused harm. To people, that's a big deal. This is unusual. We're going to see how these cases go, but Adam Masserio is on the stand, Zuckerberg is on the stand. The rest of the social media companies are going to be on the stand in this way. This is just the next turn. I mean, last week we spent how, however long talking about ring cameras and pervasive surveillance and the collective action trade offs of wanting a camera on your property even though it'll affect other people's rights. Just wait until you get the benefit from the glasses and everyone else gets the pain of being stalked. And a thing that's going to happen is you can't product your way out of glasses getting ripped off of people's faces. Right? You can't product your way out of people physically demanding that you take the thing that's tracking them off of your face. Yeah, we saw it with glass holes. And I guarantee you if this product is released that we'll see it again. And there's a line in the story where Zuckerberg is saying he thinks they should turn off the recording light.
- [37:03]
David Pierce
Oh, wow.
- [37:04]
Nilay Patel
Or not have it be so prominent. And you know why? It's because that is the social cost that will make people say, turn that off or take those off.
- [37:10]
David Pierce
That becomes the problem.
- [37:11]
Nilay Patel
You're watching the ring outcry and then you're like, and then we'll put the glasses on everyone's face. Like, these are not compatible ideas. Like, we'll see how that goes.
- [37:20]
David Pierce
I've been thinking a lot about, like a decade ago now when all of the sort of first stuff was happening in public about Cambridge Analytica and, and the way that these platforms, in particular Facebook at the time was being misused and, and the way that, you know, WhatsApp was being used in, in genocides around the world. And like there was this idea that the mistake these companies had made was not considering the downstream effects, right? They had this one idea, they're like, we want to do this thing. And that the thing they didn't do was think through that thing the whole way, right? Like, what if this works? And I. Either what has changed or what we just realize now that we didn't then is they actually did. They, they understood the consequences, they understood the potential, they knew what the cost would be and they just pushed on anyway. And, and whether that is a new behavior now or it has always been like that and we are just still continuing to learn about it, I don't know. But, but it is very clear to me that, like Mark Zuckerberg, is eyes wide open about what these things will be in society and what they will mean and what they will cost. And he doesn't care.
- [38:24]
Nilay Patel
He doesn't care. And again, I'm. It is the killer app. If you want everyone in the world to buy these glasses, you're like, it can just tell you people's names. And nothing about how particularly Americans are currently wired will make them stop and consider the social cost. They will, they will fly off the shelves. And then we will have the same as we saw with social media, the same that as we're currently seeing with AI, we will have a wave of what are called unintended consequences, but which are actually clearly foreseen consequences. And again, that's this trial. Lauren Feiner is actually in the courtroom today. We're covering it. And the idea that they know that the products are defective is very powerful. We'll see. I don't, I, I, I'm hopeful that there's more outcry here. I'm not hopeful that we'll get a privacy law. I'm not hopeful that Meta won't push the boundary in some way, no matter what they do. But I am hopeful that just seeing how they talk about it actually changes the calibration of how they might release a feature like this.
- [39:25]
David Pierce
Yeah, agreed. Um, all right. Some other gadgets we should talk about. Apple is doing something in New York on March 4th.
- [39:34]
Nilay Patel
New York, Shanghai and London.
- [39:35]
David Pierce
Yeah, that's right. Notably not Cupertino. What I would guess what appears to be happening here. And this is like John Gruber said something to this effect. Mark Gurman at Bloomberg said something. That's the fact that rather than have some big event where they launch a thing and make a whole video, Apple is just going to sort of press release, announce a bunch of new products on its website, and then let reporters look at them all at once on this date on March 4th. Is that your, Is that your read, too?
- [40:08]
Nilay Patel
I don't know about the. They've done the staggered press releases before. You know, I just think my real takeaway here is flying everybody to California to make you watch an infomercial. You can only do that so many times a year.
- [40:23]
David Pierce
This is why I bring this up, right? Because you can tell a lot about how interesting an Apple product is by the way that Apple announces it. And like, we talk about this all the time, right? When they launch something by press release, it says a lot about Apple's own interest in this product. And my guess is this is going to be a series of relatively minor updates to things.
- [40:46]
Nilay Patel
What do you think it is?
- [40:47]
David Pierce
We've been hearing a lot about new iPads with updated chips, which I think would be fine. We've been hearing a lot about new MacBooks. The one wild card idea is there's been a lot of reporting recently about the. A new lower cost 12 inch MacBook, like bringing back the MacBook MacBook. But rather than have it be super expensive and bad, have it be cheap and good. That would be really interesting and maybe bigger than some of these other ones that I'm thinking of. But to me this just seems like just a giant round of spec bumps. Right. Like that's, that's what we get from Apple every once in a while now. Is there anything you're thinking about that I'm missing?
- [41:26]
Nilay Patel
The thing I'm honestly thinking about the most is how are they going to handle RAM prices?
- [41:31]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [41:32]
Nilay Patel
Right. Like you, you can do a round of spec bumps and Apple can be like it has 8 gigs of RAM for the 50th year in a row. Yeah. But they're running up against it particularly they want to do more local AI, which I think they want to do. So I'm actually just most curious about what everything costs because the RAM market is just fully out of control and Apple's having these gangbuster quarters. But that's all against high end iPhone sales really and services revenue which is really just candy crush whales and like something has to give. And I'm actually sort of dying to know like if this really is what an iPhone 17e and a low end MacBook and some iPad spec bumps the news is going to be. And everything got a hundred dollars more expensive.
- [42:16]
David Pierce
Yes.
- [42:16]
Nilay Patel
And I, who knows? Who knows? I'm very, very curious about that aspect of it.
- [42:21]
David Pierce
Yeah. The news this week on the RAM shortage, by the way, continues to be brutal. We had a story that the price of the Switch 2 might go up, the PlayStation 6 might be delayed, the Steam Deck OLED is going to be intermittently out of stock. It's hard to buy right now. Western Digital and I think other drive manufacturers have said they're essentially out of stock for the rest of the year. It's the middle of February. Like it's, it's crazy.
- [42:47]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [42:47]
David Pierce
And meanwhile then Meta and Nvidia signed a huge deal this week for many, many, many, many, many AI chips. Like, that's, that is the story. Right. Like the, the companies with infinite resources building monstrous data centers have just absolutely cornered the supply of memory in the world and the idea now of like you're just a person who wants to buy a gadget. It seems like $100 more expensive might be the best case scenario for a while. The worst case scenario is like you're not going to be able to buy anything for a while.
- [43:21]
Nilay Patel
The worst case scenario and There are some CEOs who are hinting at this out there, like memory supply chain CEOs. The worst case scenario is stuff gets so expensive that the products go away or the companies go to business.
- [43:31]
David Pierce
Yes.
- [43:32]
Nilay Patel
And I think we might just see you know, mid range consumer electronics companies be like we can't do this anymore. Like so many products are really just like tiny Linux computers, like tiny embedded Linux systems. And if like the RAM is so expensive that it's not cost effective to ship a tiny embedded Linux system, you might not have a product. And like I think we're, we're coming up on that time.
- [43:54]
David Pierce
Yeah, yeah. Especially if you're a relatively small company without much leverage. Like I've been talking to startups and folks trying to do hardware for the first time now and it is, they have no moves because you haven't like if you're Apple, Apple has a lot of leverage in the industry. It has a lot of pre existing deals. It is one of the few companies that feels like it might be able to continue to get its way even in the face of all this AI spending. But if you're just like, if you're a Kickstarter, your inventory just went away, like it's gone, you have no moves left. And, and there is going to be like a whole generation of these small and middle sized companies that just get frozen by this.
- [44:38]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And it's funny, I think you know that the bleeding edge indicator is boy, it got way too expensive to build a PC. Right. Like you want to buy a GPU and some fast ram like well that is right there. Like we want all of it. Like so that's like the bleeding edge indicator of this. I think the Apple pricing at this next event on the fourth, like I'm, you know, I love a spec bump. I'm interested to see what they think an iPhone 17e should be given where they are in the iPhone lineup right now. That's all interesting. Yeah.
- [45:08]
David Pierce
But like if they're just like you said you wanted, a small cheap phone, here it is, it's $200. All the parts are from eight years ago. Enjoy.
- [45:15]
Nilay Patel
Right. We've been collecting all those refurbished iPhones to give you trade in deals. Here you go. It's the iPhone 4 but now with a big screen, like, who knows? Like um. By the way, iPhone4 with a huge screen would be sick.
- [45:26]
David Pierce
I was just about to say there are at least two people in my life who are going to text me after this episode saying they want that exact phone.
- [45:31]
Nilay Patel
Uh, that would be amazing. It just like, it's fun. I'm interested in the products but I'm like equally interested in what the pricing will be because Apple has a lot of leverage. It had the most leverage for years and now all of the AI spending for chip capacity at tsmc, for memory, it's. They have competitors to who want to pre buy a year's worth of output. So we'll see.
- [45:53]
David Pierce
Yeah. So gadget's not coming in March, but that Apple is reportedly working on. We got a big report from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg this week about Apple's AI gadget plans. And since you and I have been talking about this, I'm very curious your reaction. So the idea is three different gadgets are being worked on inside of Apple and the, the useful disclaimer here is Apple works on everything like any, any shape of thing you can imagine exists somewhere on Apple's. They, they, they try a ton of this stuff and it eventually gets winnowed down to a few and then it eventually gets winnowed down to one. And like the, the three types of gadgets, I would be shocked if all of these end up shipping. But the idea is there are, there are sort of three things being really actively worked on right now. One is smart glasses, which are essentially a, a sort of straightforward rival to what meta is up to according to the reporting. Um, they don't have a display. They're designed to be in really close concert with your phone, which I think is really interesting. Like what if Apple's leverage here is just that it only one allowed to do stuff on your iPhone in a powerful way. Worked for AirPods might work.
- [46:57]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [46:58]
David Pierce
The other one is essentially what I would describe as AirPods with a camera, which is a thing we have sort of been assuming they would do for a while. And then the third one is like what if AirTag. But AI gadget. It's the friend idea.
- [47:12]
Nilay Patel
You just don't want to say pendant. It's a pendant.
- [47:15]
David Pierce
It's a pendant. It's a pendant that you wear around your neck or you put in a case or whatever. But it is a little puck of a thing that is a microphone and a speaker presumably that you talk to. This is the ecosystem Apple is thinking about. And I think I will say my, my biggest takeaway from this is that Apple continues to see the phone as the thing and that all of these other devices are sort of like the, the phone is heliocentric in that sense and they all operate around the phone and use it for connectivity and use it for processing. And I think that is A, an extremely good idea and B, like an unbeatably good tie in for Apple as the first party manufacturer of this stuff.
- [47:56]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, Apple can't not have a phone. Right. You can't turn off the Candy Crush Whales.
- [48:02]
David Pierce
Well, that. But also like if you just think of the iPhone as basically a brick of battery and connectivity that you can plug stuff into you, you have a lot of extra utility you can provide without having to like accomplish the physics miracles that Meta is trying to accomplish to put it all inside of the glasses.
- [48:19]
Nilay Patel
That's true. I, I think that's right. But also straightforwardly, Apple is hopelessly dependent on Candy Crush Whales. Like the services line that they constantly talk about is not severance. Yeah, it is Candy Crush Whales. It's, it's in app purchases and like mostly in app purchases and games and like, you just gotta contend with it. They can't turn that off.
- [48:39]
David Pierce
Somebody should make a reality show called Candy Crush Whales. Like, like the Real Housewives of, of whatever. Just forget that Candy Crush Whales.
- [48:47]
Nilay Patel
I do feel like that would be like someone should make a reality show about the people in casinos who are there 24 hours a day and you'd be like, actually, I don't wanna watch this show.
- [48:54]
David Pierce
It's one episode and then I'm sad. I don't wanna watch any.
- [48:57]
Nilay Patel
No, thank you.
- [48:59]
David Pierce
Yeah, that might be true.
- [49:00]
Nilay Patel
Well, I mean that's just the business reality for Apple and so many of their decisions are warped around that business reality. I do think that it should just be a brick of connectivity and battery. That's where they started with the Apple Watch. And they ended up having to put way more processing in the Apple Watch and make that thing way more independent of the, the phone. And so I think there's, there are physics challenges there too. There are latency challenges there too. It's less so with the AirPods. Right. AirPods can use Siri and Live Translate and all that stuff works well with AirPods. But there are challenges there too, as we saw with the Watch, which eventually had become its own little iPhone. It's shocking to me that all this effort is not going into the Watch.
- [49:35]
David Pierce
I totally agree.
- [49:36]
Nilay Patel
And I think a lot of it. German's report Says a lot of it is dependent on these devices having cameras being able to see the world and having visual intelligence. And you can see Apple's big move for however long has been ar. Tim Cook has talked about it forever. The Vision Pro.
- [49:51]
David Pierce
Right.
- [49:52]
Nilay Patel
The nicest thing anybody said about the Vision Pro was that this is just the dev kit for the true AR glasses they're going to build. I don't know if I believe that, but that was the nicest thing, people. That's the excuse you get for the Vision Pro existing.
- [50:04]
David Pierce
Yeah. For like a decade. Yeah.
- [50:07]
Nilay Patel
You can see how they're going to try to stagger, step into it. They have all of the same problems as Meta. And I say this charitably to Meta, which after the previous segment might be surprising. Meta is way better at the we're gonna label reality game because Meta has a giant content moderation apparatus. Like, if you're like, I need to see the world and tell you useful information about it. You are now in the business of content moderation whether or not you want to be.
- [50:33]
David Pierce
Oh, yeah.
- [50:34]
Nilay Patel
Whether or not you want to admit it, that is the business you're in. You're going to put information in the world in front of people's eyes or you're going to say, you're looking at this, here's what you need to know about it. You are now in the business of collecting, sorting and displaying information, ranking information. That's recommendation algorithms, that's algorithmic semantic analysis. That's content moderation. And so Meta, for its many, many, many flaws, that is just the thing they do. That's the thing Google does. And so Apple, you know, you can put the camera on the AirPods and then someone is looking at something and they're like, what is this? Apple has to go get the information, understand it, rank it and tell you what it is like very quickly. Not their core skill. I wonder if they're going to lean on Gemini for that stuff, because that's the big deal.
- [51:17]
David Pierce
I was actually just going to say a thing that I have noticed recently, just kind of at random, is that the Google Lens activity, where you point your phone camera at something to search it or identify it, is like utterly completely mainstream. Like, everybody uses that in a way that I didn't realize until very recently. But it is not, it's not novel, it's not new, it is just a like normal, everyday phone activity for everybody.
- [51:43]
Nilay Patel
Because it got way more useful with AI.
- [51:45]
David Pierce
Yeah, yeah, it's really good now. Like I. It is. I mean, at least in my Experience. It has been my, my three year old does these bath bombs that come with little tiny toys inside of them and I can point at it and A, it identifies what like unknowably weird animal it is and B, it finds an Alibaba link every single time. It's so funny. It's like, here's this little resin toy that you could buy a billion of on AliExpress.
- [52:09]
Nilay Patel
That's good.
- [52:10]
David Pierce
But like that, that behavior, pointing a camera at something and saying, tell me more about this, I think is like a completely normalized behavior. How to make that leap to new kinds of devices is very important. But then also you're right, for anybody who doesn't already have that skill, which is basically everybody but Google, building that capability is hard. Google's been at that a long, long, long time.
- [52:36]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And you know my joke not to make everything dire is I've asked a lot of CEOs who are doing VR stuff about this over the years. I'm wearing your glasses, you're looking at the United States Capitol building and you say, what happened here on January 6th? And you have a big decision to make. Like that answer is very, like literally very political and right now particularly fraught. And there's the truth and there's some bullshit and you have to make a choice. You cannot split the difference when that's happening. And so everyone wants to say you're walking through the art museum and you're looking at the painting and we're going to tell you about the painter. And the reality is people are going to ask much more fraught questions and you are going to have to make decisions and you can't the community note your way out of the truth and in that product. Yeah, right. Like you have, like we've covered the, like the crisis at Wikipedia. We've covered it a bunch of times this year because that's a fight, it's like a literal fight about values and truth and you're going to express it with labels on your hair, glasses, when people are just like asking, what's up? There's a lot here. And you know, it's great that Apple wants to build the form factors. I think they'll probably do a better job of the form factor. But the actual product as expressed is what information are you going to put out into the world to overlay the world? And whether that is, I'm just asking for stuff and seeing it in my AirPods, whether it's, I'm looking at it and showing it on display of the glasses or what will certainly not be the case. It's. I built a pendant for you to wear all the time.
- [54:02]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [54:02]
Nilay Patel
This is the thing I'm most curious about is how does Apple bridge that gap and does their big deal with Google lead them to just rely on Google for that set of knowledge?
- [54:11]
David Pierce
Yeah. I think Apple may end up being very happy to not be the arbiter of that information.
- [54:17]
Nilay Patel
Well, yeah, but then if they really want out, they have to have multiple providers. Like you can change the search engine on the phone. This is very complicated. I don't know how you build that product without getting into this fight. Like the first thing that will happen is Apple will release this product and political bad faith actors across the spectrum will start asking it questions and then Apple will be in a firestorm. And like, are they going to be same question. Are they going to be good at it? Are they going to stand up for what's true? I don't know. But this is to me, I'm very excited about these products right now. When you play with the friend or the rabbit or what, it's like the stakes are so low. These products. The stakes are very high.
- [54:58]
David Pierce
Yeah. Apple is rapidly running towards being hauled in front of Congress so that somebody can read the equivalent of bad tweets to you. Like every company that does this eventually gets there. And that is. That is what Apple is just running towards.
- [55:13]
Nilay Patel
Here's my question for you. I know why they're doing this. Tim Cook has said AR is the future for 15 years, like some. An incredible amount of time. The bet is that one of these things is the new interface. Right. The chat is the new interface and that will displace the phone. That voice and vision is the new interface and that will displace the phone that you need these devices. Otherwise OpenAI will release whatever they're going to make with Johnny I've. And that will kill the phone. Do you believe that's true?
- [55:40]
David Pierce
No, I think the, the thing that is ripe for change is input. Right. Like the, the idea that in order to do everything I have to take my phone out and unlock it and open an app and, and enter into a thing and log in with my credentials and do something is incorrect.
- [56:01]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [56:01]
David Pierce
And I think that the thing that people have seen with things like chat, GPT and part of the reason it's so compelling is that it just, it just works. You don't have to learn the systems, you don't have to log in to do new things. It is just a box that contains lots of functionality and that's really powerful. Again, this is what Siri was supposed to be the whole time. Like, this is not a new idea that what we need is better input systems for information. And that the idea of me needing to hold up my phone, like, again, you mentioned this with the iPad on stage. Like, them. Them running around playing games by holding up an iPad in front of their face is clearly not the correct idea.
- [56:37]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [56:37]
David Pierce
But I think Apple believes very strongly that most things are going to happen on a screen for the foreseeable future, and I think it's probably right about that. So, like, what this looks like to me is Apple saying, okay, you need an easier way to point your camera at stuff, and you need an easier way to input bits of information, whether that's voice or whether that's capture of the world around you or whatever. I think Apple is pointed less at how do we do AR glasses here and more at how do we just get more stuff onto your phone more quickly? Yeah, for now, at least, I think that's probably the right move. Like, is it possible that AR glasses will obviate all of that someday because the display will be in front of your face? Maybe. I don't think we're anywhere near that in reality.
- [57:22]
Nilay Patel
No. The hardware challenge of AR glasses, I think, is many, many years from being solved. Plus, you gotta solve the fact that it's on your face.
- [57:29]
David Pierce
Yeah. Don't do the display speech now. Everyone can listen to Neil. I do the display speech every other verse cast episode we've ever done.
- [57:37]
Nilay Patel
I won't do it. I'm just saying, look, I've been right about a lot of things on this. On this particular episode, I could be right about a third one. I think my personal feeling about this is, you know, Apple just got rid of its head of design. Like, there's a new head of design in Apple now. It seems like Tim Cook is retiring. What this company needs to attack the problem of is there a platform shift? Is there an input shift? Is vision. And it. It's actually like, shocking to me that they've sort of cosplayed it. This idea for every new product they've introduced for years. Steve Jobs, big innovation almost every time in every product category was an input device. Right. The ipod had a click wheel, the iPhone had a touchscreen. And then Tim Cook would be like, it's a watch. It's got the digital crown. Like, we did it, we nailed. And it's like you're just. This is like when you're a little kid and you put on the firefighter jacket. You're like, I'm a firefighter. Like, you have no idea what you're doing.
- [58:29]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [58:29]
Nilay Patel
Like this in the input device is only part of the puzzle. It's using the input device to unlock the product, the mouse and the keyboard. Steve Jobs, right, Being like, we're doing mice on the Mac.
- [58:38]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [58:39]
Nilay Patel
Always a big input revolution that led to a new product category for him. Here is one. Here is an input revolution that might lead to a new product category. And you don't see Apple have a strong point of view about what that means for all of its devices. And you. There's all this executive turnover and it's like, who's going to show up and have the strong point of view about what the actual new input device means for computing? Maybe there's someone there. Maybe it's John Ternus, who's rumored to be the next CEO. Maybe it's their new head of design. I don't know. But it's funny that they've. They've sort of like played at it for so long. The Apple tv, you could. The. The remote has a click clicker on it. You're like, that's a horrible idea. You should put the buttons back. Like, all of that was like cosplaying at, at the move that Steve Jobs would so often do. Which, which is tell you about how the new input device would make the device easier to use and better. And here it is, like, here's the ultimate new input device. I'm just very curious to see how this company, in that literal moment of transition, does the thing for real this time.
- [59:37]
David Pierce
Agreed. And it's not just Apple in that sense. Right now everybody is doing the thing where they just point at the same ideas that are sort of in the Ether and are like, well, we're doing that too. And no one has done the thing that you just described. Um, this is going to be a year filled with a lot of people trying and I, I would not say I'm like massively optimistic about somebody really connecting those dots.
- [59:58]
Nilay Patel
It will be ridiculous. It's going to be a year of ridiculous. It already has been like two years of ridiculous.
- [60:02]
David Pierce
Agreed. Um, all right, well, we, we should move on. But there is one more gadget we should briefly talk about, which is the. The Google Pixel 10a, which is a new Pixel phone. And that's basically all there is to say about it. It is the Pixel A series we've always liked because it is a good sort of lesser version of the flagship for a lot less money. Like Google has generally made a set of really good trade offs between the flagship phone and the mid range phone. That has made the mid range phone really compelling. Todd Hazelton on our team who saw the phone and has used the phone I would say is less impressed than normal by that set of trade offs.
- [60:39]
Nilay Patel
Can I just read you this sub headline? It is hands on. Yeah, it's like everything we need to say. It's a minimal update. Google didn't bring many Pixel 10 features down to the Pixel 10a by the Berry color.
- [60:49]
David Pierce
It's pretty good. But Todd went to the event and saw the thing and he sent us back a video. So we're going to play the video and then we're going to take a break.
- [60:56]
Todd Hazelton
I just got out of Google's Pixel 10a event and really I think my biggest takeaway is that it's more like a Pixel 9a Plus. It's a lot like this phone. There's some hardware differences. The bezel around the screen is a little bit thinner which which Google said they made based on user feedback. And there's no camera bump that you have on this phone. The back cameras are the same. There's a 13 megapixel ultra wide and 48 megapixel main camera. Meanwhile, the screen got a little bit brighter. It's up to 3000 nits peak brightness, so that means it might be a little bit easier to see outside. But other than that, not much has changed hardware wise. It still has the same tensor G4 processor and 8 gigs of RAM, which limits the AI AI features that you can get on this phone versus the regular 10 series. But some software features we're already familiar with are coming to this phone like Auto Best Take, Camera Coach and Satellite sos which will be useful if you get lost in the woods and need to contact friends and family. Oh yeah. There's also some new colors and really Barry is the best color and the one that you should pick. That was my favorite in the briefing. So that's a quick look at the Pixel 10a. I really do think it's more of a Pixel 9a plus for most people. It'll be available to Pre order on February 18th. Starts at $499 for 128 gigs of storage.
- [62:11]
Nilay Patel
Back to you, David.
- [62:14]
David Pierce
Okay, I will say if you weren't watching, go look at the pictures. Todd's right about the Berry but also Flush camera. Big deal. I'm very excited about the idea of no more camera bumps in my phone. I've been using the Pixel 10 Pro. And this camera bump is just monstrous.
- [62:29]
Nilay Patel
Are you a no case person?
- [62:30]
David Pierce
Oh yeah. Oh yeah. You gotta. You gotta live your life, Nilay. This is.
- [62:35]
Nilay Patel
I dropped this thing 500 times a day. No way. I've gotten over cameras and like, well, it's. They know you're gonna put a case on it. That's fine.
- [62:43]
David Pierce
Yeah, no, I think, I think that's right. But live the no case life. It is the way to be. Also get the insurance on your phone. All right, we gotta take a break and then we're gonna come back, we're gonna do some lightning round stuff. A true lightning round. Because we've. We're way over. We're spreading its fault.
- [62:56]
Nilay Patel
We.
- [62:56]
David Pierce
Nila has a vacation to go to. It's lightning round time. We'll be right back.
- [63:02]
Nilay Patel
Hey, everyone. This segment of decoder sessions features my boss, Helen Havlak, the writer's publisher and l' Oreal Group's global vice president of tech and open innovation. I think you're gonna enjoy this conversation.
- [63:13]
David Pierce
We're gonna start with a decoder.
- [63:14]
L'Oreal Group Announcer
Classic question, Giv, what does tech and.
- [63:17]
David Pierce
Open innovation mean at l'?
- [63:18]
L'Oreal Group Announcer
Oreal? Who is on your team? What kind of projects do you work on?
- [63:21]
Helen Havlak
Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in l', Oreal, working with startups outside. And it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech. So we do all those partnerships and our team is responsible for them. And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had a blank page. And now how can we bring beauty and tech together?
- [63:47]
L'Oreal Group Announcer
How do you decide which projects to invest in?
- [63:49]
Helen Havlak
At the beginning, I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that beauty was relevant for tech. So we were really tech centric. And then over time we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products that we can upgrade thanks to tech. And so we have a little bit more kind of process behind how we choose projects. Now we try and kind of do things like upgrading the hair dryer to be able to do three out of four people have a hairdryer at home. And so how can we make it better? Or this year, like the flat irons that we're using and LED masks and stuff like that. So we do have a little bit of that kind of process, but we leave some space for serendipity and some creativity. So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we Let the scientists kind of think of some new clever ideas, too.
- [64:41]
David Pierce
All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored for flavor. Unsponsored by Brendan Carr. Ungovernable.
- [64:50]
Nilay Patel
You can't tell us what to do, man. That's why you pay the money. That's why you subscribe to the Verge. So no one can tell us what to do unsponsored.
- [64:56]
David Pierce
Except by you. All of you who subscribe to the Verge. Theverge.com subscribe you also get ad free podcasts. Nilai, what's your first lighting round item?
- [65:03]
Nilay Patel
All right, we have to talk about this DJI Robovac that Thomas Ricker was supposed to review, and then Sean started reporting on, and then we caused a huge scandal.
- [65:13]
David Pierce
Oh, this is fun. I know nothing about what you're talking about. Hit me.
- [65:16]
Nilay Patel
So DJI released a new Robovac. It's called the Romo, which is an incredible name for a vacuum. Like, this thing just throws interceptions, drop of a hat. That actually is really good. Chokes in the playoffs every time. Like, incredible. And I love a Tony Romo game.
- [65:29]
David Pierce
But it is sneakily handsome.
- [65:30]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, right? It's like everyone loves him. And it's like he did it again. Anyway, so we're reporting on this, and Sean discovers this guy named Sammy Asdufal was literally just trying to control his vacuum. And he discovered that he was actually controlling 7,000 vacuums at once through a backdoor that DJ had not secured.
- [65:51]
David Pierce
What?
- [65:52]
Nilay Patel
So he. We had one, right? Because Ricker's reviewing it. So Sean calls Sammy and he basically just gave him the identifier for Ricker's review unit. And he was in it. He was driving around with his PlayStation controller. He was looking at the cameras. He had the full map of Ricker's house. Like, just totally unsecure. DJI vacuum. On top of this, there was another security flaw so big that Sean didn't feel comfortable disclosing it in the story. DJI has said they've since patched both flaws, but this is just last week I was like, don't have cameras in your house. Like, all of this stuff is so sketch.
- [66:31]
David Pierce
Wow.
- [66:31]
Nilay Patel
And it's a Robovac, and it's a camera in your house on wheels that can go places. No, thank you, sir.
- [66:38]
David Pierce
That's the sort of thing that you only ever sort of imagine in the science fiction possibilities. You know what I mean? It's like, well, what's the worst that could happen with this vacuum in my house?
- [66:47]
Nilay Patel
Oh, I can make this even worse for you how? As default, he figured it out using Claude code.
- [66:53]
David Pierce
Ah, Jesus.
- [66:54]
Nilay Patel
So he just asked, claud Code can control my vacuum. And it found 7,000 vacuums. And then there's actually another set of devices that use the same servers. So he had access to 10,000 DJI devices. So this isn't like high end hacker behavior. Yes. This is a person who works in AI and they know how to use cloud code.
- [67:10]
David Pierce
This is some like Terminator singularity shit right here.
- [67:13]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [67:13]
David Pierce
But this is how the machines take over.
- [67:15]
Nilay Patel
You've got a. Yeah. You've got a way to make hacking way more democratic for good or bad. And you're like, I wanted to find a security vulnerability and I went and found it anyway. DJI says it's patched it all up. It says it's patched the other one up. Which again was so bad Sean didn't even feel comfortable putting it in the story. What a story, man. And it's like classic Verge stuff. I wanted to have this one because it's like the vergiest Verge stuff. It's like, here's this vacuum. It's like pretty good. It's pretty fun. Oh no. Whoops.
- [67:49]
David Pierce
And. And the idea that we are now building these increasingly resourceful AI machines that can go just spend all of their time hunting for these vulnerabilities suggests that it's. This is going to get a lot worse because.
- [68:04]
Helen Havlak
Right.
- [68:04]
David Pierce
We've had these bug bounty things forever and they essentially rely on. A, most bugs are so hard to find that most people won't find them, that most of these vulnerabilities, even the ones that exist just sort of lay un found for a long time and B, that they, they are able to quickly be patched and that you can win the cat and mouse game with hackers. These AI tools are just going to completely invert all of that in deeply scary ways. That's horrifying. And now I'm like, I have a. I have a Internet connected Robovac in my house that maybe needs to not be in my house anymore.
- [68:43]
Nilay Patel
You know what's funny is we don't even have a Robovac. We just have a regular Stip Vac and for some reason it's on our WI fi and I don't know why.
- [68:49]
David Pierce
So I. This is actually what I was just thinking as you were talking about. This is like maybe the idea of, you know, somebody being able to remotely control my robot vacuum is, is not on its face all that alarming. It's the camera of it all that really, I think, tips it into truly, truly scary potential. And so it's like, maybe, maybe what's about to happen is we're going to have this incredible referendum on anything that has a camera, regardless of what it is being used for. Yeah, right. Like, I think people have long made fun of the people who put the shutters on their webcams to keep them closed. Like, maybe that's where we're all headed.
- [69:27]
Nilay Patel
Do you know who famously has a piece of tape over his laptop webcam?
- [69:30]
David Pierce
Who?
- [69:30]
Nilay Patel
Mark Zuckerberg.
- [69:31]
David Pierce
Oh, perfect. Great knowing. And there's doing, you know what I mean? Okay. Speaking of being invasive, my first one is we're getting, we think, a Galaxy S26 from Samsung at the end of this month. They're having a big unpacked event. A lot of stuff coming. We've seen a lot of leaks for it. One of the leaks that came out is an ad that seems to confirm that there is going to be basically a privacy display built into the S26.
- [70:02]
Nilay Patel
I love this.
- [70:03]
David Pierce
And the idea is, right, that it, as with all privacy displays, if somebody looks at it from an angle, they won't be able to see anything. You can only see it when you're sort of at your own vantage point looking at your phone. I have two questions for you. One, is this a feature that's interesting to you?
- [70:18]
Nilay Patel
I love it.
- [70:19]
David Pierce
Okay. And two, do you also constantly look at other people's phones?
- [70:23]
Nilay Patel
This is why I love it.
- [70:24]
David Pierce
I constantly look at other people's phones and I have, I feel really intense guilt looking at this phone because I'm like, well, a, this sucks because, like, I love to stand on the subway and watch people like, go through breakups in text messages on their phones.
- [70:38]
Nilay Patel
Hey, you're in it. You're okay. Nei.
- [70:40]
David Pierce
I, I, this is, this is not an exaggeration. I have deliberately missed my subway stop in the past because I was watching someone send. It had to be a 3,000 word.
- [70:50]
Nilay Patel
How big was their font size?
- [70:51]
David Pierce
And I just refused to leave. I, they were, I was standing in the subway. Well, and they were sitting in the first seat. And I just stood there and watched over their shoulder like it was a TV show for solidly four years. Do they know I, I was not being coy? I don't know. But they were going through something very emotional. So I think they were not paying attention particularly to the world around them. But this was a special important moment for me that I enjoyed very much. And now this is going to go away.
- [71:18]
Nilay Patel
Well, no, not if you were hovering directly over them. That's true.
- [71:21]
David Pierce
You're fine from that vantage point. Maybe I'll be creeper.
- [71:24]
Nilay Patel
David Pierce is still in the game.
- [71:28]
David Pierce
So this is probably a good thing, right?
- [71:29]
Nilay Patel
This is. As phone screens have gotten bigger, it has, I think, become more and more required for people to have these things. I ride the subway here in New York all the time, and I'm basically just watching TikTok on other people's phones.
- [71:40]
David Pierce
Totally.
- [71:41]
Nilay Patel
That's just everyone. Everyone's doing it, and it's. It's so normal now that you're just, like, having a shared social experience, but you're all kind of alone. You can't talk about it. Yeah, but it's like full volume all the time, everywhere. I'm all for this. Like, make the phone a little more private with the private screen. I'm wondering if it can be turned on and off, because if it's on, if it's like, you know, it's like. If it's like the things you can buy, then sharing your phone will be very difficult.
- [72:06]
David Pierce
Right, Right.
- [72:07]
Nilay Patel
Look, let's look at. Let's all look at something together. Something gets way harder. So I'm curious if they find a way to turn that filter off.
- [72:13]
David Pierce
That's an interesting one. There is also a real. I think you people look at their phones from sort of oblique angles more than they realize. Right. Like, your phone's on the table. I remember this at the beginning of Face id, it was sort of annoying that you were like, oh, my phone's here. And if I want to open my phone, I can't just sort of reach over and hit the thing. I have to, like, huge gesture, lean over and look at my phone. There's just little bits of that that I think are going to be interesting to work out with the UI of something like this. But it will protect a lot of people from me, so I suppose it's a good thing. But anyway, that phone, whatever that phone turns out to be February 25th. So a week from today, as we're recording this, we'll talk about it on next week's show. We'll have lots more information. Nilai, what's your next one?
- [72:56]
Nilay Patel
All right, I have an Epstein update. That's my. That's my lightning round. It's good.
- [73:01]
David Pierce
Okay. I just want to say Epstein updates will not become a podcast within a podcast. On the Merch cast, Brenda Cars, the Dummy, I think, has carved out a niche on this show that is good and important. We will not be giving that to Jeffrey Epstein.
- [73:15]
Nilay Patel
That's true. Although again the people seem to love him. So I have two very minor ones. Both updates. Last week we talked about how Epstein has this relationship across like the far right Internet and online harassment and Gamergate and all these things. And in the files there is a meeting between the founder of 4chan, Chris Poole and Epstein. The day before Chris Poole started the politics board on 4chan Paul so he wrote about this. Kat Tanner Bar did a great piece for us. I encourage you to go read it anyway. Chris Poole, the founder of 4chan who never talks about sent us a statement on the record. Take that cbs. Chris Poole talked to us on the record and denied it. Here's the statement. Epstein had nothing to do with the reintroduction of a politics board to 4chan nor anything else related to the site. The decision to add the board was made weeks beforehand, almost 24 hours prior to a first chance encounter at a social event. I did not meet with him again nor maintain contact. I regret having ever encountered him at all and have deep sympathy for all of his victims. We are now at the point of the Epstein story where the founder of 4chan is like get me away from this guy. If you know anything about 4chan, that is wild stuff. Yeah, that's. That's my one update. Chris Poole fully denies Epstein having anything to do with 4chan.
- [74:29]
David Pierce
Too toxic for the pole board on 4chan.
- [74:32]
Nilay Patel
Too toxic for the founder of 4chan. My second upstream update is I promised an explanation of the equal signs people have done this. There's. There's a great YouTube video. There's a great blog post by a guy who actually wrote email clients digging into like the actual encoding of mime and email is like this series of hacks upon hacks over the years. Josh Jezza, our great reporter also dug into this because he's been working on a story about AI and PDFs which are not a compatible set of technologies. Two things. One, there is some just encoding weirdness as you move between systems and in particular it seems like moving from BlackBerry emails to a Windows encoding really screwed things up and introduced a bunch of equal signs. That's sort of the technical explanation and that that YouTube video is very good and that blog post is very good on it. Then there's also the fact that it the FBI attempted to strip the metadata out of the Epstein files by first taking them all into JPEG and then ocring the jpegs.
- [75:24]
David Pierce
Oh wow.
- [75:25]
Nilay Patel
Which is an incredible hack. And then there's just this quote that I want to read to you. It's from Peter Wyatt, the Chief Technology Officer of the PDF association, who talked to Josh for a story about Equal Signs, the Epstein files. And he's saying, he's explaining why they were paying so much attention. And he goes, it was in the news and it was a lot of PDFs. Generally speaking, we're interested in anything to do with PDFs. That's what we do and what we're about. Many people have reacted to this by saying that the next holiday spectacular has to be about PDFs and the existence of the PDF association. And so I, I think we know, David.
- [75:57]
David Pierce
I will say, do not tempt me with a good time. PDFs are fascinating and they. And the. The, like backstory of how a PDF became the, like, universal file format of the Internet is weird and in many ways really bad and would actually be a very fun holiday spectacular. So I'm, I'm writing that down. That is now officially the leading candidate.
- [76:19]
Nilay Patel
There's a lot of comments on this story. They're like, this is a perfect first story. I just, like, quote, it was in the news and it was a lot of PDFs. Like.
- [76:27]
David Pierce
I mean, you've got to assume, like, a bunch of PDFs come out and there are a bunch of people at the PDF association who are like, this is our time. We've done it.
- [76:34]
Nilay Patel
This is the moment, boys.
- [76:35]
David Pierce
That's. That's very good. Yeah, the. I read the email encoding blog post. We'll link to it in the show notes. Um, I need to go watch that YouTube video. But the. Just the way that blog post lays out how bonkers email is as an underlying technology is fascinating. Like, it is a miracle that your email ever gets delivered correctly.
- [76:53]
Nilay Patel
It's very bad.
- [76:54]
David Pierce
It's nuts. Yeah. All right, my next one, as I am required to do apparently every week now, is I have a silly, ridiculous update on the Warner Brothers, Paramount, Netflix shenanigans. Uh, this week's update is that Warner Brothers has now given David Ellison and Paramount one week from Tuesday. So next Tuesday, the 24th, to give its best and final proposal. Uh, Paramount has said it's willing to pay more money, that it wants to reopen the negotiations. But there was this very important thing that happened when the first round of these deals started to happen, which was that David Ellison reached out to Warner Brothers and was basically like, just so you know, this is not our best and final offer. That it was like, he, he made very clear, like, we're willing to negotiate. They essentially seem to be coming from a place of, we have all the money in the world, we will pay whatever it takes to get this done. And Warner Brothers over and over has kind of just been like, no, thank you. Please lose our number. Goodbye. And so now what is happening is essentially Warner Brothers Discovery is saying, tell us the actual number. Like, at this point, we can negotiate up forever. Paramount keeps raising the number, keeps coming up with new ways to pay shareholders, like, keeps trying to argue regulatory things. And at this point it is like, what, what is your best and final.
- [78:16]
Nilay Patel
Well, there's a little bit of, there's a little weirdness there. So the, the sort of like, total number has gone up with some of the fee structures and the blah, blah, blahs. The actual price was only $1 more than Netflix's price, but it was for all of it, including the cable networks like cnn, whereas Netflix was only going to buy the studios. So Ted Sarandos was on cnbc, I believe, with Julia Borsten, and she said, what? How are you going to counter? And he said, well, usually you don't do this on the phone, over the phone, like, let them make an actual move and then we will make our move in return. So you get the feeling there's going to be a little bit more of a bidding war here because the actual number has only gone up $1 a share, which is still millions of billions of dollars. But you just get the sense that Netflix is like, you want to buy a dollar? Like, okay, like, yeah, we, we can do. Would you like $2? And there's going to be some of that back and forth.
- [79:01]
David Pierce
Yes. But it is also, I think, very clear that everyone involved with this, it would like the nonsense back and forth to end. And so it's like, I think, what end?
- [79:10]
Nilay Patel
I also, I'm just going to point this out. The Ellisons want to buy the whole thing, including cnn. And they are very much in the business right now of forcing their talent to constrain their speech for political purposes. That's not going to win you a lot of hearts and minds at the thing that you're buying.
- [79:25]
David Pierce
No, but it sure might get the deal through.
- [79:27]
Nilay Patel
It might get the deal through, but then who's going to work there? Right? And then if the people who work there, I'll leave. And you're left with like the C team that loves having their speech chilled. What are they going to make? And now you're just blowing money, like, in ways that are so stupid. Again, I just, someone should just like, talk. Call Rupert, man. He will tell you, you have to preserve the source of your authority if you want to be in this business.
- [79:49]
David Pierce
Yeah, well, there's a whole, that's a whole rabbit hole we should go down sometime because it's like, why doesn't Jeff Bezos just sell? The Washington Post, I think is one particularly cynical and terrifying answer to that question that we should come back to another time. But anyway, that's my update. And suggest that maybe next week we will have a more concrete update that might stop changing every week, which would be really exciting for me and for the lightning round of the Birchcast. What's your last one?
- [80:16]
Nilay Patel
My last one's very simple. Tesla has updated its robo taxi crash figures in Austin. Electrek ran the Numbers, they've added 5 more in a month. The robo taxis are now 4x worse drivers than humans. It's bad. 14 incidents since the service launched in June 2025. They quietly added one more crash that led to someone being in the hospital, which is very bad. Also, the taxis don't work in the rain because Tesla is entirely vision based. It's gonna happen, you guys. They're gonna, they're super gonna. Everyone in America is gonna have a self driving model 3 tomorrow.
- [80:48]
David Pierce
So you know what's fascinating about this to me is I think a piece of the self driving debate I have always like, struggled with but always sort of found really fascinating is this idea of like, okay, it is demonstrably true in most cases that these things are better drivers than humans.
- [81:05]
Nilay Patel
And so, no, it's demonstrably true that waymos are better drivers.
- [81:09]
David Pierce
So that's what, that's fair, that's a, that's a good distinction. But if, if we, if we take as gospel, right, that there are lots of questions, there's lots of ideas that we have to figure out about insurance and responsibility and how we reckon with these things being on the roads. But they are safer drivers than humans. We should keep pushing forward with this technology. Right? That's, it's an argument you hear over and over. There's a lot of stuff left to figure out. But that is, that is already true that if you get in a Waymo, you are safer than driving your own car. Like, like lots of data supports that. It is so nuts to see just the opposite thing happening on the road. It's like, and I'd love to like, it's, it's very funny that it's Elon Musk and it's very funny that it's Tesla and like, of course it's Elon Musk. And of course it's Tesla. Like this is, this is obviously how this would go, but this is such a, like dramatic inversion of the whole case for continuing to work on self driving cars that it is just like, what are we even doing here, guys?
- [82:07]
Nilay Patel
Well, again I'm going to point out that the whole industry has sort of been collapsed into Waymo for a long time and you have to split up Teslas with full self drive, quote, full self driving from actual autonomous robo taxis. Sure. And actually Tesla no longer is able to call autopilot autopilot in California because it's confusing people. But supervised fsd, you take for granted that there's a driver in the car behind the wheel. And so you, it's safer because you, you actually have a hybrid system there in, in its own way. Now lots of people try to hack FSD and like get drunk and like wash their phones. But like theoretically there's a human minder in the typical FSD scenario, so that's safer. Waymo is just very safe because Google Alphabet has dumped tons of money into every generation of the Waymo driver. It has multiple redundant sensors and every ounce of data shows you that a Waymo car is safer than a human. Just taking FSD and being like, it's a taxi now doesn't do the job.
- [83:12]
David Pierce
Nope.
- [83:13]
Nilay Patel
Which is what Tesla did. And so you're kind of like you're un, collapsing the product from Waymo and saying, okay, we just let FSD run around Texas. Is it safe? And it's like, no, I could have, I, I could have told you that. And here, now we have the data and it is not safe. Electric points out it's 14 crashes over roughly 800,000 miles. That's a crash rate of one crash every 57,000 miles. Tesla's own data indicates that a typical human driver has a minor collision every 229,000 miles. So this thing is just like one in four, just bumping into stuff. It's ridiculous. It's very good, man.
- [83:52]
David Pierce
First of all, this suggests that my wife is an even worse driver than I suspected. Anna, I love you. I hope you're not listening.
- [83:57]
Nilay Patel
Can I tell you, can I tell you a very quick story about growing up in Wisconsin in the 80s before the entire, before the world was financialized to Helen back. My dad was the ER doctor in small town Wisconsin, 1980s. And my mom in the parking garage at her hospital was very tight and she scraped the shit out of her cars. And so my dad just had a deal where the local body shop Guy just would come to the ER and fix my mom's car outside for free.
- [84:25]
David Pierce
Just in the parking lot.
- [84:26]
Nilay Patel
No, you would be like, we dented the car again. So you would like drop it off at the body shop Guy and he's just like, in the 80s, they just bartered out that, like, it's amazing. If something happened, he would come to the ER and that would just get handled on the side.
- [84:37]
David Pierce
That's a pretty good deal. Honestly. You're like, oh, my ER doctor owes me one. It's like, not. That's not the worst thing to have going through.
- [84:43]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. It was just the full barter economy.
- [84:44]
David Pierce
That's amazing.
- [84:45]
Nilay Patel
Growing up with your dad as the ER doctor in small town in 80s Wisconsin was very much like knowing the mayor. Just everybody knew my dad. It was. It was crazy.
- [84:53]
David Pierce
I grew up with my dad being a pastor, and so I had that same thing, except everybody thought he could get them into heaven. Which also has a lot of, like, really, really real upsides.
- [85:02]
Nilay Patel
Same, but opposite. You know what I mean?
- [85:04]
David Pierce
It's like 100%.
- [85:05]
Nilay Patel
We were very much trying to avoid that outcome on the night shift at St. Mary's Hospital.
- [85:09]
David Pierce
Right.
- [85:10]
Helen Havlak
But if.
- [85:10]
David Pierce
But if your dad can't fix it, mine can't.
- [85:11]
Nilay Patel
You know what I mean? Very good.
- [85:13]
David Pierce
It's a good thing. All right. My last one before we get out of here is I think, a bit of AI news that sort of snuck under the radar, which is that WordPress launched an AI assistant. And I just. I think this is really interesting for a couple of reasons. One, because one of the things everybody seems to do when they start vibe coding is build a website. Right. Our friend Casey Newton made a lot of noise about redoing his own personal website when he got his hands on cloud code. Uh, this is just like, it's sort of a normal use case. I've just. This is a hard thing to do with existing tools is manage a personal website. I'm just gonna point Claude Code at it and let it build me a website. And it can do a reasonably good job. And it's pretty interesting. Um, and so everybody has been saying all over social media. A thing that I've really enjoyed is people being like, WordPress is dead, because now you can just ask Claude Code to do it for you. And WordPress, I should remind you, Powers, like half the Internet, like it is, it is one of the most important pieces of software on the Internet. And it just doesn't get talked about that much because it is sort of fundamentally uninteresting. Infrastructure.
- [86:14]
Nilay Patel
There's a lot of drama with WordPress that comes and goes.
- [86:17]
David Pierce
There's a lot of drama with, with WordPress, but it is like at its best, it is boring infrastructure. Yeah, like it's designed to be boring infrastructure. But they just released this AI assistant that actually now just lets you interact with and change your website just by talking to it. And, and you can, you can request font changes, you can move stuff around. Like anybody who has used WordPress knows it is like a developer tool built for developers and just pretends to be very user friendly. It's not. If you've ever tried to Mess with your WordPress template, it's a lot. And this idea of like, I just, I want this thing to be a bullet or I want this thing to be that font and this thing to be a little bigger and move this thing over there is like a big, powerful, meaningful thing that is now being baked into WordPress, which I actually think is pretty cool.
- [87:02]
Nilay Patel
WordPress.com we should be. There's, there's some distinctions here. You're right.
- [87:05]
David Pierce
Okada.
- [87:06]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it's a lot. It's. WordPress is very complicated. There's, there's WordPress.org, the open source project, then there's like WordPress VIP, which is what the Verge runs on, which is like the enterprise grade hosted WordPress. And then there's WordPress.com, which is like all the way down to the bottom, which is like the Squarespace competitor and that is still running WordPress but for consumers and like small businesses in a different way. And that's the thing that's getting the AI assistant because they do have to compete with Squarespace and WIX and blah blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way down to Kasey's gonna vibe code his own website. And there's some part of Kasey's story where he's like, and then it signed me up for a hosting account. It's like, I don't know, man. Now the DJI Robovax can see everything in your house.
- [87:48]
David Pierce
Yeah, yeah, it's real. But anyway, I think I, I'm, I'm curious to see if, if folks who are listening to this or watching this are on WordPress and you do mess around with the AI assistant. I'm very curious how it works because it's actually, it's the sort of thing that ought to work really well. It's like websites are very structured data. WordPress knows how WordPress works. Like you ought to be able to point an assistant at this and actually have it do a pretty good job of most things. So if you've used it, let me know. I'm very curious about it.
- [88:17]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. We should do a whole episode on Just Software because there's a lot of confusion about what software is and what products are right now because of AI. We do not have time for it right now. I would just say I'm open to people's thoughts about that too, because, boy, does that seem like it's confused a lot.
- [88:33]
David Pierce
You're talking about the SaaS apocalypse that either is or is not coming.
- [88:36]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. And it's like, I don't know, man. I think people like products, not Legos, you know, Like, I don't know. I'm very curious what people think about it. I've read a lot of stuff lately, but I think that's a different show.
- [88:47]
David Pierce
Yeah. If you think business software is dead, email neilitheverge.com and pitch yourself to be on the Decoder podcast.
- [88:54]
Nilay Patel
And I will point out that famously I refuse to use enterprise software. Just don't do it.
- [88:59]
David Pierce
It's very true. All right. We should get out of here. Neil, you have a vacation to go on. What are you doing, by the way? Anything exciting?
- [89:05]
Nilay Patel
We're going to Boston to go to all the kids museums.
- [89:07]
David Pierce
That sounds amazing. That'll be delightful. Well, enjoy. We've gone way over. We will be back. You're going to be back next week. You're just gone for a couple days, so don't. People stress when you leave. But I don't want anyone to stress. It's going to be okay.
- [89:20]
Nilay Patel
I'm vi coding my own website.
- [89:23]
David Pierce
That's dangerous. A couple days off and Claude, code.
- [89:25]
Nilay Patel
Your way through it.
- [89:25]
David Pierce
Everything will be fine. We will be back. Remember, as always, the best thing you can do to support all of this and keep us out of the clutches of Brendan Carr and everybody else is subscribe to The Verge. The Verge.com subscribe. You can also, if you're a subscriber, get ad free versions of all of our podcasts. This decoder version history, it's in your account settings. If you're already a subscriber, it is like actually remarkably easy. I've done the ad free podcasting places before for and it sucks. Our team did a very good job. So go do that. It rules. Also, we love hearing from you on on all things. If you're having weird robot vacuum hacks happen to you. If you have thoughts about the Epstein coverage we've been doing. If you want to talk about anything else going on in this space. If you want to keep sending us Brendan videos, which I hope that you do, Stephen Colbert if you're listening and want to come on the show, call the hotline 866-version-11 Send us an email First Castle to the verge.com we love hearing from you as always. The show is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. The show was produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer and Travis Larchuk. We will be back next week. Nilai Rock and Roll.
- [90:29]
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