The video game disc is dead

Summary

The Vergecast — "The Video Game Disc Is Dead"

Date: July 2, 2026
Hosts: David Pierce, Nilay Patel
Guests: Ashley Carman, Ross Miller

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Overview

In this episode of The Vergecast, David Pierce and Nilay Patel dive into the rapidly accelerating death of the video game disc and what that means for gaming culture, preservation, and the industry at large. They contextualize this shift against console sales declines, live service fatigue, and broader hardware and AI developments. The episode ranges from lively banter about old video game collections, current platform strategies, the future of input devices, to speculation on wild new hardware (looking at you, X-phone). Also featured: a gadgets roundup, a hands-on segment on Netflix’s ambitious new interactive horror game, and a discussion of major telecom shakeups.

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Key Discussion Points

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1. The Death of Physical Game Discs

[04:06–08:31]

• Sony ends PlayStation disc production: Starting January 2028, Sony will stop making physical PlayStation discs outright.
• Microsoft's weird disc-to-digital experiments: A new feature may let you digitize your game, then hand off the disc to someone else.
• Industry trend: Both moves reflect the now-inevitable transition to digital ownership—whether gamers like it or not.
• Cultural unease: There’s widespread nostalgia and angst over the loss of physical media, especially as it relates to access and preservation.

Memorable Quotes:

• “Discs are dying, like, immediately... everything is digital, discs are dead. No one needs physical objects in games or frankly, anywhere.” — David Pierce (05:10)
• “With games, man, once a game is gone and the console's gone, actually getting to replay a game is tremendously difficult.” — Nilay Patel (05:26)

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2. Why Physical Games Matter to Gamers

[05:26–08:31]

• Archival issues: Unlike movies or music, with games, hardware and DRM mean disappearing titles often become unplayable forever.
• Placebo effect: Physical discs have long felt like ownership, but downloads/updates mean even retail games aren’t self-contained.
• Live Service Problem: Even if you bought Fortnite on a disc, it's essentially just the gateway to a forever-updating live platform.

Memorable Quotes:

• “The idea that you can buy the game as a sort of perfectly preserved object on a disk kind of hasn't been true for a while.” — David Pierce (06:23)
• “The ability to create that for yourself is just essentially gone at this point. And there's just something very sad about that.” — David Pierce (07:14)

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3. Is Gaming Still an Art? Or Just Shopping Malls?

[08:31–10:16]

• AAA studios vs. "art": Nilay critiques how commercial motives (“shopping mall” engagement, DLC, live service) have overwhelmed artistic innovation.
• Failed live service boom: The industry’s attempt to replicate Fortnite/Minecraft’s financial model has yielded little but failed clones.
• PC Gaming Exception: On PC, at least (via Steam), you can preserve digital games more meaningfully than on closed consoles.

Memorable Quotes:

• “The big push to live service games... was not an artistic push. That was straightforward, let's turn video game consoles into a shopping mall and keep you here all the time and maximize engagement...” — Nilay Patel (09:14)
• “At the end of all of that, we have Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft.” — David Pierce (10:09)

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4. What’s Next for Microsoft, Xbox, and Sony?

[11:06–15:49]

• Layoffs and business pivots: Microsoft faces major layoffs in Xbox, rumored to be prepping to slim down or even sell the division.
• Is Xbox for sale?: Both speculate why Microsoft clings to Xbox (consumer relevance), but agree it’s increasingly at odds with Microsoft’s business focus (AI, B2B).
• Sony’s possible pivot: A rumored new PlayStation handheld could be Sony’s answer to stagnating console sales, with portability and hybrid play as new selling points.

Memorable Quotes:

• “Microsoft is desperately trying to have some tie to regular people. Like Microsoft cannot for some reason fully embrace the fact that it is a business to business company...” — David Pierce (12:59)
• “The consoles are supposed to be sold for a loss. Is there anybody left in the world who would ever want a PS5 or an Xbox that does not have one?” — Nilay Patel (18:15)

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5. Console Sales Are Tanking, but Why?

[17:02–19:23]

• Historic low sales: PlayStation and Xbox hardware unit sales just hit their lowest May figures since 2000 (PlayStation) and ever (Xbox), as reported by Circana.
• Hardware headwinds: Both hardware and games are now so expensive that even upgrades for blockbusters like GTA 6 seem uncertain to generate a new boom.

Memorable Quotes:

• “The proposition here, if you're any of these companies trying to build a successful gaming business, the headwinds just seem like they get worse.” — David Pierce (17:58)

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6. AI Gadgets & The Future of Input

[25:54–37:19]

• OpenAI “hardware for Codex”: OpenAI’s coding AI is inspiring a wave of “macro keyboard” gadgets, and prompting discussion about whether we’ll really stop typing.
• Voice replaces keyboard? Both hosts are skeptical: dictation has advantages, but talking to your device is ripe for hype and may never fully replace tactile input.
• Models can’t learn: AI models remain stateless—they don’t “improve” with feedback yet, belying the dream of self-improving superintelligence.

Memorable Quotes:

• “Keyboards are going to stick around... because we keep learning over and over again that these software engineering projects are vastly more complicated than anyone gives them credit for.” — Nilay Patel (27:32)
• “I'm just not at all convinced that any of them have set upon a path that is sustainable in the way that it's being expressed today.” — Nilay Patel (28:41)

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7. Hype Desk: Interactive Horror, Cozy Gadget Games

[54:51–66:01]

• Netflix’s Unhinged: A highly immersive, Netflix-exclusive interactive horror game developed with Night School and input from David Fincher. Notable for its phone-as-flashlight interface, unique web/TV gameplay, and strong voice cast.
  • “If this was more accessible, literally everyone would play it and be raving about it.” — Ashley Carman (57:28)
• Chill Electronic Repairs (Restory/Party Speakers): A cozy Steam game where you repair (legally distinct) classic gadgets (think PowerWash Simulator for Game Boys and Tamagotchis).
  • “It really makes you appreciate ... how repairable everything was in this kind of joyous mid-2000s days.” — Ross Miller (63:42)

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8. Brendan Carr Is a Dummy

[66:01–76:13]

• FCC & Supreme Court: Nilay unpacks how FCC’s politicization—specifically under Brendan Carr—is now even cited by Supreme Court justices as an example of too-powerful, unaccountable federal agencies.
• Unitary executive theory: The Supreme Court’s big rulings shift more power to the presidency, including over FCC/FTC, raising new questions about regulatory independence.
  • “He’s such a censorious traitor to the Constitution ... this week Brendan is so stupid that he caused Neil Gorsuch to point out that he’s a danger to the Constitution.” — Nilay Patel (67:13)

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9. Gadget/Gadget News Lightning Round

[76:13–99:49]

• SpaceX’s rumored “AI phone”: Wall Street Journal reports SpaceX developed a prototype phone, possibly with full X (formerly Twitter), Grok, and Starlink integration—hosts agree it’s a terrible-but-inevitable idea.
  • “The only way to win is to build a phone that somehow isn’t in Google or Apple’s orbit. And that’s very hard to do.” — David Pierce (81:09)
• Comcast splitting into two companies: The “pipes plus content” mega-bundle model is finally unraveling; the hosts celebrate, recalling that net neutrality could've prevented this folly.
  • “If we had just had appropriate net neutrality regulation in place, no one would have ever thought that mixing pipes and the content was a good idea...” — Nilay Patel (92:50)
• WhatsApp Usernames: Take the chance to get yours before they’re all gone!
• Car Design Has Gone Bananas: Nilay shares a TikTok of BMW’s new headlights/blinkers that look like giant X logos (“cartoon bunny had a drug overdose”); nostalgic wish for standardized, boring car hardware design.

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• “You pay $80 to, in a very real way, not own a game. They're getting more expensive, they're getting further away from you at all times.”
  — David Pierce [07:41]

• “Is there anybody left in the world who would ever want a PS5 or an Xbox that does not have one?”
  — Nilay Patel [18:15]

• “The actual distribution platforms people care about—Instagram, TikTok, YouTube—pay nothing for content. Effectively nothing.”
  — Nilay Patel [89:27]

• On the rumored SpaceX phone:
  “You're going to have a Starlink phone that has AI in it ... the same bet we were talking about earlier. You're going to rethink all of computers. You're just going to talk to AI and it's going to do stuff for you. ... No one has pulled it off yet.”
  — Nilay Patel [79:14]

• On BMW’s “X” headlights:
  “If you have to put a button in your car to turn off the design element that makes it look like the logo of a company that people have a lot of feelings about, maybe you shouldn't have that design element.”
  — Nilay Patel [97:24]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• Gaming news & Discs are Dead: 04:06 – 15:49
• Console sales tank & Next gen hardware strategy: 17:02 – 22:27
• AI gadgets and input revolution: 25:54 – 37:19
• Hype Desk (Netflix’s Unhinged & Chill Electronic Repairs): 54:51 – 66:01
• Brendan Carr is a Dummy / Supreme Court discussion: 66:01 – 76:13
• SpaceX/X-phone & wild phone speculation: 76:13 – 83:30
• Comcast splits up & net neutrality revisit: 85:02 – 94:12
• WhatsApp usernames & car design madness: 94:12 – 99:49

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Tone & Language

The episode maintains The Vergecast’s signature blend of playful banter, sharp critique, and deep industry knowledge. The hosts get nostalgic but forthright about cultural loss, snarky towards tech executives and regulators, and are candidly skeptical of yet another hardware “revolution.” Regular in-jokes (compliance disclosures, “Brendan Carr is a Dummy”) keep the mood light even with big topics.

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For New Listeners

This episode delivers a thorough walkthrough of why game collectors are upset, why the gaming business is a mess, and why tech's biggest companies keep promising new hardware breakthroughs but rarely deliver on the fundamentals users actually care about. If you care about ownership, nostalgia, or are just confounded by weird car headlights or AI phones, this episode has you covered.

Transcript

[David Pierce]

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[Ashley Carman]

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I call it majoring in the minors.

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And it is one of the five

[David Pierce]

mistakes I see people make most on their wellness journeys.

[Ashley Carman]

I'm Rapid Arjun, VP and head instructor at Peloton, and this week on my

[David Pierce]

podcast Project Swagger, I'm sharing all of

[Ashley Carman]

those mistakes and what I want to

[David Pierce]

see you do instead.

[Ashley Carman]

Follow Project Swagger now, wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Pierce]

One day, with the help of science,

[Nilay Patel]

you might be able to live forever.

[Ashley Carman]

Forever.

[Nilay Patel]

Your body will just need a couple tune ups.

[David Pierce]

Injecting bone marrow in your 40s, your kidney in your 50s, your heart in your 60s, and and so on, and then potentially a whole body transplant by the time that you were 90.

[Ashley Carman]

This week on Explain It To Me,

[Nilay Patel]

the quest for longevity.

[Ashley Carman]

Find new episodes Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Pierce]

Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the N64 cartridge, the greatest video game object of all time. I'm your friend, David Pearce. Neil Aptel is here. Hello, sir.

[Nilay Patel]

What's up?

[David Pierce]

You're in some other new place in the world today. I just, I forget what your house looks like at this point.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, the studio at home that we spend a lot of time lighting to make me look perfect, I have avoided conscientiously for some time. Uh, no, I'm upstate. I've recorded a lot of Vergecasts from this house before. Uh, and my book is overdue, so I ran away from my family to spend a few days here to, to wrap this thing up.

[David Pierce]

Like any good writer, you went to the woods to finish her book. This feels, this feels right.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. A person on business side, Andrew Melzack, who sometimes does our ad, reads you, you know his voice, even if you've never heard his name. Uh, he pointed out to me that this is the beginning of a horror movie. Like, I came to the woods to finish my book. I'm definitely gonna die here. This is the last podcast I'll ever be doing.

[David Pierce]

You're gonna get to the very last page of the book and then you're gonna die. And it's gonna be, it's gonna sell. It's gonna be huge. As like, honestly, you dying would be so good for book sales. I'm just throwing that out there.

[Nilay Patel]

This is what I keep saying. Almost every bad thing that can happen to me is good for book sales, which is a real negative incentive.

[David Pierce]

I love that for you. Do you wanna catch the book, by the way, Tell the people what the book is?

[Nilay Patel]

It's not done. So if you have ideas of what it should be, please let me know. I've got a couple days here to wrap it up. No, it's a decoder book. We're going to take all the stuff we've learned from Decoder over the years, how to make decisions, how to structure a company and write it all down so you can hand it to people who don't know what they're doing. The book is called how to get what you want and it really implies that. I know. So believe that.

[David Pierce]

Love it. Also, we mentioned this last week, but this week is Grill week on Decoder, which is the best week of decoder every year.

[Nilay Patel]

It is very good. This is a particular really good grill week episode.

[David Pierce]

I'm excited about it. It's good stuff.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I'm just the guy who started a competitor, Weber, ended up buying Weber and now he has to contend with the fact that he talks about Weber for years and now he runs it.

[David Pierce]

It's very good. It is. Everyone should have to do that. Go back and like run your worst enemy. That all you did was talk about for a long time. I really enjoy that. We have a lot to talk about today, actually. It's like it's the beginning of July, which is traditionally a very dead time in the news cycle, and yet there's kind of a lot going on. We have a bunch of gaming news to talk about. Some of it really interesting, some of it just like deeply bleak. There's a bunch of gadget stuff going on. Brendan Carr remains up to stuff. We have a new disclosure here on the Vergecast, which is a thing I'm very excited to get to later on in the show. We have to talk about Comcast at some point. What words do we say? Who is an investor in the parent company of the Verge? Who knows?

[Nilay Patel]

It's like an anti disclosure.

[David Pierce]

I literally don't know the answer. I know there's now Comcast, there's NBC Universal and there's Versant. And I know that used to be one company and now it's three companies. And one of them, I think potentially is an investor in the company that used to be part of our company.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep. I hate that's incorrect.

[David Pierce]

Let's start with gaming. There's a bunch of gaming stuff going on.

[Nilay Patel]

Let's start with the stable and predictable gaming industry.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, let's talk about the chill thing. There's a lot going on in the gaming business kind of writ large right now. And I think that there's a bunch of Microsoft news in particular that I think is a really interesting signal about what's happening in games more broadly. And I want to get to that. But we should start with the sort of immediate gadget news from the gaming industry this week, which is that discs are dying, like, immediately. Sony announced that starting In January of 2028, they will stop producing PlayStation discs altogether. Tom Warren on our team had a scoop that Microsoft is testing a feature where you can basically attach a digital game to a disc so you can digitize the game from a disk and then give that disc to somebody else, and it'll move the digital game. It sounds like a weird, bad idea that probably won't work as well as it's supposed to. But the overwhelming ideas here seems to be like, everything is digital discs are dead. No one needs physical objects in. In games or frankly, anywhere. Like this is. This is the running theme of the tech industry. But in a weird way, game discs feel important. This is like a physical object people have collected and cared about for a really, really long time. And people seem to be having very strong feelings that they're going away.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I mean, I. You kind of understand why movies and music, there's like, ongoing access and ability to play back in real ways. And maybe sometimes it's really hard to find a movie on streaming. It was very hard to find, pump up the volume on streaming for a really long time. And so my physical copy of that movie is really important. But there's not a playback issue with archival music and movies. And I do think the physical copies are important. And sometimes they do just disappear forever. With games, man, once a game is gone and the console's gone, actually getting to replay a game is tremendously difficult. And if a company goes out of business or they pull the servers or the DRM goes away, or the servers that run the back end of the game engine go. Like all kinds of things can go wrong with games in a way that takes the art away from you. And I think that has led the gaming community in particular, to really prize their physical copies, because you can't take those out. I do wonder if for now, you definitely can.

[David Pierce]

Apparently you super can now. Yeah, it does feel a little bit like that feeling has been a placebo for a while now, right. Where it. Even when you buy a thing, you put the disk in, and the first thing it does is immediately download several dozen gigabytes of more game. So the idea that you can Buy the game as a sort of perfectly preserved object on a disk. Kind of hasn't been true for a while. And I think you see these announcements, like, Sony is very straightforwardly, though, like, people just play games digitally, like, that nobody wants. This is kind of the running line. And I think to a large extent that that's probably true. It's also true that a lot of the games people play are increasingly live service and increasingly multiplayer. Like, even if you could buy Fortnite on a disc, what the hell would it be? Do you know what I mean? And so I think again, to some extent, this has been a trend for a long time, going away from the idea of I get to own this thing as an object. But when you take the discs away, it makes very clear, I think, in a way that is hard to see on those steps, the fact that it has actually already been taken away from you, right, that you have not owned these games for a long time. You pay $80 to, in a very real way, not own a game. They're getting more expensive, they're getting further away from you at all times. And I think, like, especially for people who have had, you know, decades of consoles, they've bought every PlayStation, they have libraries of games. Like, I think about our friend Chris Grant, who has just an attic full of every gaming console and game you can ever think of. And it's like the ability to create that for yourself is just essentially gone at this point. And there's just something very sad about that. Like, I love and play a lot of games that I played 25 years ago. Like, I was raised by the Nintendo 64 in a very real way. And I still have a Nintendo 64, I still play it all the time. And now we all sort of exist at the whim of, like, whether Nintendo feels like putting the game that I like onto its online service that I have to pay extra for. And that is just a crappy state of affairs, especially for something as expensive as game consoles and games have been for so long.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, David, it's time to discuss whether or not video games are art. And I would encourage everyone to turn off this portion of the podcast and not engage with it whatsoever, critically or substantively, just to protect the safety of ourselves and our families. We're going to.

[David Pierce]

We're just going to layer 20 minutes of silence over this debate. You can just imagine us having it

[Nilay Patel]

beeping, snap on,

[David Pierce]

we'll come back and Nilay and I will both be bloody and screaming, and that'll be it.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, the only reason I bring it up is I think the commercial imperatives of particularly the console makers and the AAA studios have run roughshod over games as an art form. And just to be clear, I think there are some games that are very clearly art.

[David Pierce]

Absolutely.

[Nilay Patel]

But the big push to live service games that essentially blew up in the industry's face was not an artistic push. That was straightforward. Let's turn video game consoles into a shopping mall and keep you here all the time and maximize engagement, the same way Meta would want to maximize engagement Instagram. Only now, instead of selling you physical items, we're going to sell you endless DLC in this live service game. And this industry chased that dream in just like ruthless, cynical ways. I don't think any. I mean, the games all failed. I think real people looked at all of those live service games and were like, no, thank you. We already have a Fortnite. We don't need another one. We certainly don't need to rebuy everything that we would want to buy.

[David Pierce]

It really is wild to think, by the way, that at the beginning there was Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft. Everybody spent infinity dollars and time trying to join that club. And at the end of all of that, we have Fortnite, Roblox and Minecraft.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Like it's. It's nuts how unsuccessful everyone else has been mortgaging their future to try and play this game.

[Nilay Patel]

And I think the thing that I'm just coming back to is I think those are commercial platforms, those are shopping malls.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And I think wanting to preserve games, wanting to have discs, wanting to maintain a collection, is nowhere close to those games, which are the industry.

[Ashley Carman]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

And somewhere in here is like a happy medium. I'm sure. And I know lots of people are going to have lots of ideas about the vast amounts of beautiful games that you can buy on Steam for your PC. But when you buy those games on Steam for your PC, they show up on your hard drive and you have them. Do you know what I mean? And you can take your hard drive away and put it somewhere else and store that hard drive forever and maybe have some Steam authentication issues, but you're able to have those games in a way that I don't think anyone feels like they have the PS5 games or they have the Xbox games.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I think that's right. I mean, and what's funny about that is all of the business machinations you just described are just not working. And like, again, we talk about some of the other news of this week. Tom Warren also Had a story that Microsoft is planning big layoffs across the Xbox team and also say that Microsoft

[Nilay Patel]

is going to sell Xbox. Can I just put my stake in the ground? Like they are skinnying down Xbox. They're simplifying its business model. Yes. Asha Sharma is saying a lot of the right things and making gamers happy. But at the same time a lot of what's making gamers happy is her divorcing Xbox from the strategy demands of larger Microsoft.

[David Pierce]

Yes, right.

[Nilay Patel]

She's like, I'm going to get rid of all this AI. And you're like, wow, you're just cutting it off from Microsoft's core strategic imperatives. So what else are you doing except creating the separation so you can, you can move on?

[David Pierce]

Who would you sell it to? Who's going to buy Xbox?

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, I don't know. Starlink, like it doesn't matter. It's like, you know, like X will just buy more stuff. It'll be fine. SpaceX now in launch business they do connectivity, they, they have x.com the everything app and Xbox.

[David Pierce]

I mean it kind of works. You just, just bake the Xbox into

[Nilay Patel]

X. I think there's a lot like, I think Tencent might buy, like there's a lot of big companies out there that could buy a giant global gaming brand. But I just think Microsoft has it because it's their one connection to consumer. It's the one thing that keeps Microsoft kind of cool. And yet you look at what they're doing with it and maybe, sure, maybe the one read, like a very charitable read is they're cutting it down, they're going to focus it up and then they're going to grow again. But like why would Microsoft do that? How do you connect that to Microsoft's larger strategy of we're going to put copilot everywhere?

[David Pierce]

I mean, I agree with the thesis. I also think the answer is the same. It's been for a very long time, which is Microsoft is desperately trying to have some tie to regular people. Like Microsoft cannot for some reason fully embrace the fact that it is a business to business company that is like a deeply unsexy but hugely successful business. That's just, it's, that is just not Microsoft's conception of itself all the way back, right to like the computer on every desk. And like they wanted to be a thing for people at work, but also a thing for people in their real lives. And Microsoft to its demise over and over and over and over again, can't stop trying to do that. And the Xbox is the Only one of them that has ever kind of sort of worked like it's. Microsoft will not sell Xbox for the same reason it made the Kin. Do you know what I mean? Like, it just can't give up on this dream of being relevant to regular people in their regular lives. I think they probably should, and I think they should probably sell Xbox to somebody who will run it better. And I also think, like, all the news right now is really interesting because our comments on this story from Tom, which is about the layoffs coming and the possibility of closing a bunch of the studios that Microsoft has bought and like laying off those people, canceling some games, just sort of mass, mass, mass problems coming to all of Microsoft's gaming systems. The comments are basically like, well, of course you have to do this. This is all Phil Spencer's fault. Phil Spencer, who was the boss before Asha Sharma, was the one who, like, collected all of these, like Pokemon. Let them do whatever they want. All these games are over budget, way behind schedule. This has just been allowed to sort of be a giant mess because of the previous leadership of the Xbox team. So there's a sense that, like, okay, actually what this is, is maybe a return to being a successfully run business.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

Possibly inside of Microsoft.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that's the charitable read, right?

[David Pierce]

It is a very charitable read. It's the full read.

[Nilay Patel]

We should have never bought Activision and got totally distracted with an integration that let all the other stuff we bought fall by the wayside. That got us away from, you know, the core gaming experience, which was all anybody ever really wants and all anybody ever really says to Microsoft about the Xbox. But instead we're going to put Xbox everywhere and do something that makes no sense and try to turn every Windows PC to Xbox or whatever that strategy was. It was very hazy. We're going to body up against Apple in proxy antitrust fights to try to put game streaming on the iPhone instead of just making the Xbox great. That was basically the strategy. Okay, none of that worked. So now we're going to get rid of all this fat, all the stuff that wasn't working, and we're going to focus up and we're going to run a great Xbox business.

[Ross Miller]

Great.

[Nilay Patel]

That is a very charitable read. It is on its face, the thing that they are doing. And then the only question that remains is why? Why would Microsoft do this? What is the point of running the great Xbox business? I just think Sascha Nadella is ruthless enough and canny enough to know that he needs a lot of capital to go buy a bunch of GPUs or whatever it is that the AI business is going to demand. And a successful Xbox business will bring him that capital without him having to go beg the public markets for it. And he will probably be rewarded just for saying he wants to sell it. Right. That's probably. The market will probably reward him for saying we're going to focus up and move on from this, this failed disaster. By the way, the antitrust argument here is really great because I keep saying mergers are bad and the idea that they bought Activision to gain some leverage over Apple was such an obvious failure at the time and now it's just a pure failure.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

It is. No part of the thesis that Microsoft laid out has come to pass. It's kind of wild.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. And if they, if they hadn't done it, would Xbox be more successful in some useful way like you have to imagine? Yes.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

I mean, but then meanwhile, we have an analyst firm this week, I think it was either end of last week or early this week. That said, and I'm just going to read you this quote from Circana analyst Matt Piscatella says PlayStation hardware unit sales fell to their lowest May total since May 2000, while Xbox hardware unit sales were the lowest ever recorded for a May month. Put that next to Microsoft just raised the price of the Xbox and, and it is like how on earth are they going to convince anyone to play any games ever again? Like the, the proposition here, if you're any of these companies trying to build a successful gaming business, the headwinds just seem like they get worse. Like we're at a point now where either GTA 6 is going to be so good and so earth shatteringly successful that everyone on earth goes out and upgrades their console in order to be able to play it. Or it feels like the, the bloodshed is going to get even worse because the consoles are getting even more expensive. Asha Sharma herself has been like, we, we're worried about people's ongoing ability to afford our consoles that like there is so much money tied up in this idea of we're actually going to make everyone a gamer and it's going to take over the world and this is the most mainstream activity on earth. That all just feels like it's like collapsing inside of itself right now.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean the consoles are supposed to be sold for loss. Is there anybody left in the world who would ever want a PS5 or an Xbox that does not have one?

[David Pierce]

I will tell you, I've heard from a number of people recently who are like me Discovering how outrageously priced a console is right now and being like, what am I, what am I supposed to do? Like why on earth would I buy this right now?

[Nilay Patel]

But we're like many, many years into this generation.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

So the fact that raising prices aren't lowering them is outrageous. But we're also just at the tail end. Like this is when the sales should be slowing down.

[David Pierce]

But yes, sure, but we're looking at the lowest in 26 years and the lowest ever. This is not like the, the ebb of a cycle. This is worse than that.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I mean, I agree with that. I just. People play games on their phones, you know, like.

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

That was the thing that Microsoft was worried about was how do I get games on your phone? And they tried all kinds of ways to do it and they couldn't do it. I just think, yes, the consoles are more expensive, the games are maybe less compelling. Is a bigger problem for them all to solve.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And there are fewer of them being made because all these layoffs are happening in service of trying to build these gigantic live service games that nobody wants to play. Like we're just spinning in this cycle that it feels like it's going to be very hard to get out of. And again, I think that's the credit a lot of people have given. Asha Sharma at Xbox is she seems to be trying to unwind some of this thing that's like let's put all of our resources into games nobody wants to play. Because in theory those would be a great business except nobody wants to play them and actually get back to making things for people that they like. But boy, does that sell get harder when you're asking me to buy a many years old, many hundreds of dollars more expensive console.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I mean I would put that right next to this rumor from Sony that the next PlayStation will go beyond the living room.

[David Pierce]

Oh yeah, I was going to ask you about this.

[Nilay Patel]

Everyone knows what to do. It's to build a cheap handheld.

[David Pierce]

Yes. Much easier said than done at the moment. But yes, that's true.

[Nilay Patel]

But I mean that's, that's going to be the thing that juices all the hardware sales for them.

[David Pierce]

Tell me what you make of this quote. So this is the PlayStation folks did an interview and let me see. This is with it says for the next generation platform rather than simply serving as an alternative to PCs, we aim to deliver value that is unique to PlayStation. This includes not only technological advancements, but also an expansion of usage styles, enabling a seamless experience that can be enjoyed naturally beyond the living room. There's part of that that is like, okay, that's kind of what PlayStation already does.

[Ross Miller]

Right.

[David Pierce]

They have remote play, they have the portal. You can play on your couch. But there's also a part of this that's like, we're going to go make all the same mistakes that Microsoft has been making with Game Pass.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, I don't know. I have PS Plus. I download.

[David Pierce]

Everything's a PlayStation.

[Nilay Patel]

Everything's a PlayStation.

[David Pierce]

Is this a PlayStation?

[Nilay Patel]

I can see. But Sony has some, some credibility and we're going to build a first party handheld. That's good.

[David Pierce]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

And that credibility was the psp. It was not any of the stuff that they're making now. I can see it. Especially if all the games are digital and you can play them anywhere. And I mean, they can see how the Steam decks are doing. They can see how the little legion goes of the world are doing. Sure, now is the time to do it. And maybe you get a cheaper console and you can sell an upsell bundle with a bundle, a proper PS5. Like, you need to get some interest back into the ecosystem. You cannot just wait for GTA 6.

[David Pierce]

I, I agree with that. I also think everybody is just waiting for GTA 6. I mean, we, we keep hearing about the games being moved around for GTA 6. Like, the stakes for that game are so high. Both for Rockstar, which is like existentially dependent on this thing being the biggest game in history. And it's sort of everyone's clue as to whether people will pay money for video games. And that is, that is a lot to put on the back of one game.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I suspect people will pay money for GTA 6.

[David Pierce]

But I mean, I planned. I literally, I would like to. I don't know how.

[Nilay Patel]

I am, like, this is because you buy everything at the very last, like dying gasp of the life cycle.

[David Pierce]

I do. It's a real problem.

[Ross Miller]

I have.

[David Pierce]

I have an Xbox One that I used for like an alarmingly small amount of time and that might be my most recent console. It's a real problem.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

All right, we should take a break. We have more gadgets to talk about, including some weird OpenAI hardware that we just need to discuss. We'll be right back.

[Nilay Patel]

Is Donald Trump still cool? Well, at first it was what he

[David Pierce]

was promising to America.

[Nilay Patel]

He was promising change.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

That's a big thing. Has he lived up to that? No, no, I wouldn't say so.

[David Pierce]

I was like, I'm disappointed.

[Nilay Patel]

We're in Washington D.C. for one of the events that Donald Trump is throwing for America's 250th anniversary, and it's UFC night. Proud to be American. We got free tickets. It's just going to be a great time. That's about it. It's an opportunity to talk to a group that was Central in the 2024 election. Young men. Why do we think Trump and men seem to have a connection? I feel like he just knows how to advertise himself with the younger crowd. It aligns with masculinity, I feel like, to a certain extent. But if they don't like Donald Trump,

[David Pierce]

what do they prefer politically otherwise? Care about my family.

[Nilay Patel]

I care about my country. I want people to be safe and happy where they live.

[David Pierce]

Care about my wallet, too, man.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm Ested Hernton and this is America. Actually, catch us Every Saturday on YouTube or wherever you get your podcasts.

[David Pierce]

No one could blame you if you thought this men's World cup was gonna be a disaster. The president of the United States isn't exactly a welcome mat for the world, and there have been plenty of embarrassment stories for the country. There was the mom of Kate Byrd's goalkeeper who wasn't let into the United States to watch her son play until the team started doing well and people clamored for her entry. The team from Dr. Congo hadn't made a Men's World cup in 52 years and hardly made this one because the United States was supposedly worried about Ebola, even though no one on the team had Ebola. If you were watching Senegal Norway last week and were wondering where all the Senegalese fans wore, they weren't let into the country. But you probably noticed we let in like a million Vikings. I wonder what's different about their fan bases. Oh, and who could forget we're literally bombing one of the countries that up until Friday was playing here. Missiles aren't the problem, but. But somehow the vibes at this World cup are mostly positive. The World cup might just be healing us on today. Explained from vo. All right, we're back. Let's talk gadgets. Specifically Nilay, your very favorite thing. AI gadgets. There's nothing we enjoy more than a good AI gadget. So the news is that OpenAI is building new hardware specifically for codecs. Don't get excited about this. This appears to be basically a little macro keyboard that sits next to your keyboard that you can use to do some basic codecs things. Mostly what I want to talk about, Nilay, is this trend I've been noticing recently where there is this ongoing thesis that actually maybe I can start to use AI and ditch this keyboard. I'm not going to ditch my phone, I'm not going to ditch my laptop. But what I don't need anymore is a big old QWERTY keyboard. What I actually need is. Did you see this? This tweet that went like lightly viral, uh, where somebody was like, oh, our senior engineer replaced his keyboard with a microphone and he had one of those like Bob Barker skinny microphones that he was just sitting there talking and to presumably talking to, you know, Codex or cloud code. But there is this thing out there now that is like, what we're going to do is build specialized input hardware that isn't typing for basic like AI coding experiences. And I can't tell if all of this is like essentially a bit by a bunch of engineers who are just unnecessarily optimizing everything or if there's actually something to this idea of like specific coding hardware for AI.

[Nilay Patel]

And doesn't it all just seem like attempts to lock you into ecosystems with hardware because it's so easy to switch between them in software.

[David Pierce]

Oh, that's interesting.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I'm, I'm totally a cynic about all that.

[David Pierce]

That's super cynical. Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, sure. Cursor has an app now that keep. Makes sure you use Cursor. Sure. Right. Like cursor launches iOS app is just, you're gonna have Cursor on your phone and then you'll use Cursor. Do you know what I mean?

[David Pierce]

Like, but that's another example, I think, of this sort of macro trend.

[Ross Miller]

Right.

[David Pierce]

Like the idea that anyone would need to access their coding ide from their phone is a brand new idea. And yet I keep talking to people who are like, I actually spend a lot of time interacting with cloud code or Codex or in this case Cursor from my phone. Like, Paul Ford came on the show a while ago and was telling me about like all the weird little projects he's doing from his phone on his commute's home. And that is like a brand new kind of software development activity. And it just again, I'm still at this place where I can't decide if this is a bunch of people tinkering with workflows that won't actually amount to much and everybody will go back to typing or if there is some actual change in how people want to input long lines of code and this kind of prompt happening in front of us.

[Nilay Patel]

I think it's both. I don't. Keyboards are going to stick around. Confident predictions Keyboards will stick around. Keyboards are going to stick around in software engineering because we keep learning over and over again that these software engineering projects are vastly more complicated than anyone gives them credit for and require a bunch of senior software engineer attention to make them work the way they want to over and over. The evidence of this is vast. So I do think there's a bunch of people who are AI pilled, who are convinced that because they can now talk to a computer in natural language, that everything about computing is up for grabs. And I totally respect that belief. I think it is valuable and fun and interesting to be like, I have changed our core assumption and now everything is up for grabs. The music is no longer on 12 inch vinyl records, it's on tapes. And now Walkmans exist. Right? Like, this is all fine and you can just go through the history of technology and you're like, this core assumption changed and now the entire ecosystem can change around it. I'm just not at all convinced that any of them have set upon a path that is sustainable in the way that it's being expressed today.

[David Pierce]

Interesting. What do you mean?

[Nilay Patel]

So, like you, I know a bunch of engineers who are like constantly basically texting their coding agents. And I think that's great because what they're doing is tinkering in their spare time.

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

They're like, I now write software while I play video games by texting my phone. That's not work. Like, if you're like, I do my actual job as a software engineer by texting a handful of agents and then just like sitting around, you're not actually doing anything. Like, your time will get filled up by other things. Right next to this is a bunch of weird gadgets that engineers in San Francisco are using to keep their laptops open while their agents run locally. Because they need their laptops around for their agents to run locally. So I do think all this is just up for grabs. And I think part of the rush to the models are good at coding. We're going to redefine how coding works is because that is the domain where the models are verifiable. And you hear this. If you're paying attention to AI, you're hearing about this so much, right? Verifiability, running loops. This is the hot new thing where you have the model make something. You see if it gets verified by a compiler or other software testing tool and then it tries again. And you hear the sort of like, senior AI people be like, I write loops now. I didn't even write prompts. I write loops.

[David Pierce]

Right?

[Nilay Patel]

And I. They're off, off it goes and it does its own thing. And like maybe they're just all burning a lot of tokens because that is the thing that makes them all money.

[David Pierce]

Prompts are so like April 2026, like loops are very. July 2026.

[Nilay Patel]

Loops are in man. And you just kind of look at this and you're like, does this extend to any, anything else?

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Nilay Patel]

If you want to build a bridge. Do you know how you verify that a bridge won't collapse? Right. There's just many, many other domains in the world besides software engineering where the verifiability and the ability to make a loop against that verifier happens outside of a computer, all over the place. I'm always using the legal system as an example, but the, the verification in the legal system is a judge who are very unpredictable and often hungry. And you can't be like, well we're going to run that again, judge, no, you're going to jail. The judge is like, you're off to jail. With you. There's no loop will occur here, my friend. And this is my worry with the AI industry is they try to generalize everything from the experience of software engineering over and over and over again. And so yeah, it's cool that they're building hardware. I think that is just to lock software engineers into like muscle memory for macros.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. But it's a fair thing.

[Nilay Patel]

None of this is the thing that we were promised from AI.

[David Pierce]

No, I agree with that. I think the one part of it that I have been most personally compelled by is just dictation as a sort of system wide thing. This is now the thing everyone is building. Like for, for a minute everybody was vibe coding like habit trackers and to do list apps. And now everybody is vibe coding a Mac local first dictation app. There are 400,000 of them every single day. And they're all the same thing. And the idea that you can just speak into your computer and have it spit out properly formatted text I think is very powerful. There are a lot of messy, complicated things with that. And again the idea, I'm, I'm sure that that tweet with the guy who replaced his computer with the, or his laptop keyboard with the Bob Barker mic was a bit. But like that is, that is a thing that people are out there saying, I barely type anymore. I do, I just do all of my talking. I'm like a. Are you ever in public? Are you ever doing anything other than writing perfectly formatted emails or like how do you, how do you actually do a real life computer work with this kind of tool? So I, I, But. And yet there are times where I can write an email much more quickly by saying it out loud into Gmail than by typing it out loud into Gmail. And so, like, there's, there's some version of what if we didn't have to do every single thing available to us on a QWERTY keyboard? That I think is going to be very exciting. I just, I think I agree that it's not adding macro keyboards to your desk.

[Nilay Patel]

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

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. They built it on the same Mac OS X foundation as Macs of the day, but they threw away the app model, they threw away the interface paradox. They just started it over and they threw away copy and paste and they just started layering it all back in. And now the iPhone, regardless of its utterly nerfed application model, is like, as powerful as any Mac, as evidenced by the fact that the MacBook Neo is an iPhone chip. Right.

[Ross Miller]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

Fine.

[Nilay Patel]

You can see how powerful that willingness to start over is, especially the whole industry does it once. But, like, we can definitely get over our skis because we're trying to impress our friends on X, the Everything app.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And I, I think there's a lot of that going on right now. And I think that is driving as much antipathy towards AI as anything.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

There's a, there's a real sense of kind of what you said. Everybody has looked at this as a chance to reinvent everything and has decided that that actually means we are required to reinvent everything. And I think that just leaves a lot of people feeling exhausted where it's like, actually, I actually know how to Do a lot of things on my computer. Do you know what I mean? Like, there are some things I don't know how to do on my computer. It would be great to have systems through which to do those more successfully. But I'm pretty good at a lot of things on my computer and I don't actually need help doing those things. And I think there is this sense of like. Well, no, actually you have to relearn every single thing you know how to do. Even the things you really know how to do and have no problem doing, you have to relearn them anyway because of technology. And I think that just makes people feel bad.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I mean, I do like the idea that OpenAI hired Jony I've and love from and did all this hype around phones and laptops being, quote, legacy devices, which is what Sam Altman said to Jony I've in that video. And their first thing is like a macro keyboard.

[David Pierce]

It is very good.

[Nilay Patel]

Like the most legacy device you can get to.

[David Pierce]

And ironically, if anything, I think the actual winner of the AI revolution so far has been laptops. Like, without question, laptops are so cool now, in a way, they have not been cool in a very long time.

[Nilay Patel]

What did I just say about the utterly nerfed application model? It's true. It's because you can just run anything you want on a laptop. And I think that's great. Again, I think it's fun and exciting to be like, what if you could talk to the computer and not change everything about computers? And I think the overreading of that to be like, oh, I can definitely do software development because I can run my code against some sort of external verification does not translate to anything else. Like, literally any other domain gets caught up in the reality of reality. And so there's just this weird moment where it's like, of course it's a Codex keyboard. That's the thing it can do.

[David Pierce]

Right?

[Nilay Patel]

Of course you can build on the foundation of the thing it can do. But your big plan to ship a pen or a necklace or a bracelet that replaces your laptop because you can just issue commands and have your agents run around the Internet doing stuff for you. None of that works yet. And it might never have. You caught this? The AI industry is slowly starting to concede that the models don't know anything and can't learn.

[David Pierce]

Interesting. No, I hadn't actually really clocked that.

[Nilay Patel]

It's just at some point, you can't hype your way past the idea that when Gemini gets it wrong and you're like, it's wrong. And it's like, I'm so sorry, you're so right. It will get it wrong exactly the same way the next time.

[David Pierce]

Interesting.

[Nilay Patel]

You can't tweet your way past that lived experience that all of us have had now. And so there's just a little bit of concession here that the models, they know what they know, but they don't learn anything.

[David Pierce]

And like a vast amount of the supposed project of the AI industry is that these things will eventually become recursive and able to teach themselves. And once we get to self improving AI, we take over the world.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, all bets are off. Then it's AGI, it's all super intelligence or whatever, whatever definition that thing is. But like right now the industry has models that don't learn. They know what they know at the time of training and that's it. And if they hallucinate, get things wrong, they aren't smarter the next day. So you just see there's a little bit of. You can make a lot of promises about what AI can do in every single industry and every single situation, but now we've all been doing it for three years. And that experience of you're so right, you shouldn't drink bleach is like, it's just like baked into the human experience now where. And you can't just like tweet your way past it.

[David Pierce]

Can I tell you my new favorite horrible thing that my AI system does to me all the time? It's starting a paragraph with the word honestly. Drives me nuts when it's like, I was, I was, Bill, I was doing a thing this morning, I need like a little tiny chrome extension. And I was just like, what approach would you take? How would you do this? And it gives me all the lists, all the possible options, and then it goes, honestly, I would go with number three. Or like, here's my honest recommendation.

[Nilay Patel]

That's not good.

[David Pierce]

And over and over and over, it's like, here's a bunch of shit. And then it's like, honestly. And I'm like, I don't. Just answer my question.

[Nilay Patel]

It's very bad.

[David Pierce]

Stop using any of these words. Every time you use the word honestly. It's like a word I don't want to use in my writing anymore because it's, it's. Now the thing that makes you sound like AI to me when you use the word honestly. I hate it. Um, anyway, there are a couple of other gadget things we should talk about here.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay.

[David Pierce]

Um, and I want you to know that because. Because I love you, Nilay. I'm not going to make you talk about the working demo of the clicks communicator, a device that I think is very exciting and we will, we will cover more on this show. But you as somebody noted hater of physical keyboards on phones.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, very definitely.

[David Pierce]

We'll leave that alone. Everybody should go watch the clicks communicator. I think it's cool. We should talk about what appears to be a couple of different leaks of the iPhone 18 Pro. Have you seen these pictures and these videos of the drop test? The way this has all come out has been very strange to me. Has it felt weird to you? There's like a Reuters story about how there's photos on the dark web and then they end up on X and they get taken down on X, but then that like Streisand affects it. And so now it's everywhere.

[Nilay Patel]

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

[David Pierce]

Right. It's weird.

[Ross Miller]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

And it, it, apparently it all goes back to this company, was it called, I think it was Tata Electronics had a data breach and the security researchers said, seemed to think that one of the files that were breached and got posted to the Dark web included Tata Electronics customers like Apple. And I think Tesla was another one. Um, and so all this stuff, like there's a drop test video that is not the sort of thing you normally see in leaks like this. Normally it's like marketing images. Right. Like somebody finds the Best Buy URL ahead of time and that's how these things get leaked. This has come out in a very different way. But I was surprised at the same thing you were, which is that by, by clearly making an effort to take this down, they turned it into a thing. Like I'm now 100% sure this is the iPhone 18 Pro. And it's because of the way that this is gone down and the speed with which someone seems to be trying to scrub it from the Internet.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, I mean, we don't know that it's Apple. Right. Like X hasn't been particularly forthcoming about where these takedown requests are coming from. It could be the manufacturer themselves. There was some amount of like, you know, ransomware attack happening on the supplier so it's just like, it's unclear who would even own this video and where, where it got lost and how. And the idea that if the thing went viral and you should have paid the money is like, the whole industry wants to stop that. Like, when we've had cybersecurity folks on decoder, they're just like, look, pay the ransom. Like you're, you're, you're in a spot where if you don't, then the cost of not paying the ransom goes up because they will want to inflict maximum damage. So just pay the money. Which is not, I think, what most people. Right. Most people do not feel this way. Like, I don't negotiate with terrorists.

[David Pierce]

Rule number one is don't negotiate with terrorists.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, but there's enough diffuse cyber crime in the world where all of them have an incentive to make it so costly if you don't pay the ransom. So there's just this weird back and forth there that I quite understand. But yeah, you get to the point where it's like, yeah, let it leak and then just like deny it. Like you're fighting criminals. You don't have to play a totally honorable game. You can just let people believe whatever they want. And it's the Streisand effect of trying to take it down. I think it's interesting. What do you think of the actual phone itself?

[David Pierce]

I mean, it looks exactly like the 17 Pro, except the camera bump is huge. Okay. I've been trying, I'm very glad you said this because I've been trying to figure this out because there's like, there are angles at which it looks like it might just be a sort of trick of perspective that the camera bump is huge. But then there are other times where it just looks like the camera bump is huge, that we're going to get like full on pixel style cyclops thing along the back, which I got to tell you, I really do not like at all well.

[Nilay Patel]

So presumably we're looking at the Pro in these videos, right? It appears that way, yeah. So if you have a folding iPhone that has kind of like an iPhone air setup, right. Thinner cameras maybe not as good, maybe no zoom or no ultra wide, depending on the configuration Apple goes with. This sets up the opportunity for the Pro to be even better. Right. So you're the halo iPhone of this generation is the folding phone. The camera isn't any good. But don't worry, if you want the best camera, Apple has made the Pro the best pro phone that has ever proed.

[David Pierce]

And you think that's the whole push for the Pro is it is the camera.

[Nilay Patel]

I. I think at this point. What else?

[David Pierce]

I mean, I guess that's kind of. Yeah, that's sort of been true for the last couple years.

[Nilay Patel]

It's gonna run iPhone apps slightly. Slightly better. Do you prefer rectangle apps or square? Now the iPhone line, like you.

[David Pierce]

That's fair.

[Nilay Patel]

It's the only differentiation for the Pro in ages. Right. Like, the screens are better. Like is promotion. I'm like the person who buys a phone because of promotion on the display.

[David Pierce]

Right. Not most people. And I think all the people who are dazzled by the most impressive specs are the people Apple is going to try to convince to buy the fold or the ultra or whatever the hell they call it. Like, the folding iPhone is going to be the one for the people who want, like the best shiny thing. The case for the Pro is. I think you're right. It's going to have to be about

[Nilay Patel]

the camera or battery life.

[David Pierce]

True.

[Nilay Patel]

I have a lot of questions about the battery life on this folding iPhone will be based on the case mockups I've seen, which might be nothing.

[David Pierce]

That's the other way. These things always leak, by the way, is the case companies.

[Nilay Patel]

But yeah. So, I mean, like, you know, I think the folding iPhone, there's going to be some set of compromises that come with the folding iPhone. The camera looks very obvious. Battery life is another one that could potentially be obvious. You've got to drive one larger display and the secondary display, the COVID display, a lot of ways battery life can go sideways. So then the pro phone can get bigger and thicker and have more battery life and more cameras. And you're like, yes, you can have the thin one, you can have the folding one, or you can have the monster. And I'm just telling you right now, I'm all monster all the way. If that's actually how this lineup goes, if there's a cool folding phone, you're like, wow, that's intellectually very interesting. I'll go with the monster, please. The biggest battery life and the best cameras I can get.

[David Pierce]

Okay, wait. This lineup is amazing. So now there's the cheap one, which presumably is just like the base 18, the iPhone 18. We've heard some rumors that might not be a thing.

[Nilay Patel]

How weird.

[David Pierce]

I don't know. The rumors are all over the place. But anyway, so it's. Yeah. So you have the base model, the cheap one, you have the thin one, the air, you have the wild one, which is the foldable phone, and then you have The Monster. This is the lineup now.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. You've got base model, skinny one, Foldy and Monster. That's how Greg Josiah is going to introduce them. John Ternus is first Apple event as CEO. He's like, this one's called Foldy and that one's called Monster.

[David Pierce]

This is like a Disney plus show waiting to happen.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm dying. Virtual listeners should reach out, like, tell me which one sounds more compelling there. Do you. Do you care about folding or do you just want the biggest battery life? You can get the biggest battery with the longest battery life.

[David Pierce]

I've been thinking a lot about this, and there's a part of me that is like, as a. As a tech journalist who has been using new products for a very long time, I feel obligated to get the Fold just because, like, it is the newest version of the thing. But I also feel like I have now been very happily a base iPhone user for the last two cycles. And other than the battery life, which is, I think demonstrably better on the Pro, there is nothing about this phone I would like to upgrade, specs wise. Like, just nothing. And I am consistently amazed by the fact that I do not miss things about the Pro phone.

[Nilay Patel]

Don't you have children?

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Do you take pictures of your children?

[David Pierce]

Sometimes I let the AI do it.

[Nilay Patel]

You just, like, prompt the children?

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Like, look, I already took some pictures of them. Imagine pictures of them in a pool. That's. That's what I want.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. I mean, we get new iPhones every year because we have kids. And I just want the best cameras every year. And whether or not the new cameras are the best cameras is open to debate every year.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I. I think this year I am unusually excited about this year, even though I think next year is probably going to be the year and Apple will save a bunch of stuff for the 20th anniversary. IPhone. Whatever is about to happen with all of the rising prices and all of the. The complicated stuff with supply chains and which products continue to make sense. Like figuring out what Apple is about is most possible to do at the iPhone event. And I think this year is going to be a particularly interesting.

[Nilay Patel]

We're just going to hear about Siri the whole time. You think, you know, it's true.

[David Pierce]

It probably is, especially now that it's gone very well.

[Ross Miller]

Like, the.

[David Pierce]

The early Siri AI returns continue to be really good. They're probably just going to like, double and triple down on. We've done it. Siri is here. Um, all right, one. One more bit of. Of news, which is Just, I was thinking about this in particular. We just had a. A short, little quick post on the site about a. A future QI standard for charging that might bring 50 watt wireless charging to more devices. Some can do it right now, but you need a fan in your charger.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

That's how fast it goes. Um, I was thinking about this this morning because I was charging my phone with a laptop charger. That is not a, like, you know, excellent, highly rated, technically competent laptop charger. And the thing damn near set my phone on fire.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Happens all the time.

[David Pierce]

Boy, was it hot trying to charge this thing. And I was like, this is, this is the stuff I'm looking forward to. I want my phone to just be boiling hot all the time.

[Nilay Patel]

So I track a lot of this kind of tech in the weirdest way possible. I pay attention to what car tiktokers say when they're making the fun feature videos.

[David Pierce]

Okay.

[Nilay Patel]

So like, Forrest Jones is like, I think the single best car feature TikToker there is. Like, he set the model. Everyone does it. He's great. And so the fact that Forrest just waves at giant screens that cost billions of dollars of R and D to produce, and he's like, and it has CarPlay tells you one very important thing about the whole industry. So brutal. He does it all the time. Right. He's like, and it's got a 90 inch screen that runs CarPlay and Android Auto. And then he just moves on. And he never looks at the automaker interface at all. And if it's a test or something, he's like, and it runs Google Maps. And that's as far as we go. And like, you just know something very important by what car tiktokers prioritize in this way.

[David Pierce]

Yes. Meanwhile, an entire building of people at GM just sigh deeply every time.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. But they've got to make like a two minute TikTok running through all the features.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. Doug Demiro's like, here are all the quirks and features. He would make a long YouTube video, right. Car TikTok. I always have to do it in like, it's a much more ruthless prioritization. So the one that I've noticed keeps coming up now is they will wave at the wireless charger and they'll say, and it has a fan and it's a ventilated wireless charger. Because this is important, because when the car makers started putting wireless chargers in the cars, they weren't ventilating or cooling them in any way. They would get hot and the phones would Stop charging. And so people would obviously notice this. So the car tiktokers have all taken to asking or otherwise finding out that the car chargers, that the wireless chargers in new cars are ventilated because the audience gives a shit. That's so like in the prioritization of what I'm going to say, what features I'm going to talk about in my two minute TikTok, the wireless charger is ventilated. Makes the cut now, like more often than not.

[David Pierce]

That's really interesting. My. The, the wireless charging pad in. In between the seats in my car is probably the single least used feature in my car. In part because it was like, it's a 2022 car. And so it was like, you know, it's a few years old. We've made some wireless charging progress since then. And this is like, you have to set it exactly right and then if you go over one bump, it stops charging. Like it's not a good system. But also it's where all of my stuff goes. Like it is. The charger is in the spot where when you instinctively get into the car, that's where you put your keys or like the sandwich or like whatever. All of my stuff goes into the thing that is ostensibly charging my phone. Just a terrible, terrible feature. And I have never understood why anyone would want it. But maybe with a fan, I'll be into it.

[Nilay Patel]

This is why I always end up buying a MagSafe charger for my car and mounting it somewhere on the dash because the magnets hold it in place.

[David Pierce]

I've been meaning to tell you this. I got a long way down the road of wanting to buy one of these the other day. Like, to the point where I'm sitting with one of these in an Amazon cart because I couldn't get CarPlay to work. I'm running the iOS 27 developer beta and CarPlay is so flaky with this. And that's like, it's no one's fault. It's a developer beta. It's my fault. Like, I get it, but I also need Google Maps to work. And so I was all the way down the road of I'm just going to buy a mount and plug it in in my car. And then the vision of you taking a victory lap on that popped up in my head and I literally, I could not make myself.

[Nilay Patel]

That's right.

[Ross Miller]

I'm right.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm right about this every time.

[David Pierce]

I cannot.

[Nilay Patel]

The Slate truck is an entire product, an entire truck built around the reality that most people should just mount their phones.

[David Pierce]

I just knew that every time I looked at it, it would just be you cackling at me from my lock screen about how you were right and I couldn't do it.

[Nilay Patel]

It's very it. Look, it makes sense. You put the map in CarPlay or you put the music in CarPlay and you run the map on the phone screen.

[David Pierce]

I think that is.

[Nilay Patel]

This works.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah. Yeah.

[David Pierce]

I don't. I don't want to talk about this anymore. We should take a break, and then we're gonna come back. We get hypedesk, we got Brendan, we got the lightning round. We'll be back. 1, 2, 3. I'm stand up comedian John Marco Cerese.

[Nilay Patel]

And I'm actor penis model Russell Daniels.

[David Pierce]

The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are because, let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode, we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guests lives, the

[Nilay Patel]

world, but in a fun way.

[David Pierce]

Bottom line is you're gonna walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests. Caleb Huron.

[Nilay Patel]

Busy Phillips.

[David Pierce]

Stavros Halkias.

[Nilay Patel]

Laverne Cox.

[David Pierce]

Hassan Piker.

[Nilay Patel]

Alana Glazer.

[David Pierce]

I promise you're going to have a good time. Now on the Vox Media Podcast network,

[Nilay Patel]

this is the Downside. I'm Seth Matlins. My new show creator, Destroy Reimagining Marketing, explores how every decision a company makes. Not just the marketing ones, but the hr, ir, pricing, org design and planning ones. The ones most don't consider marketing at all contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking and reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. Creator destroys the show that argues they've always been the same thing. From the Vox Media podcast network and the Wisdomist Company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

[David Pierce]

All right, we're back. It's time now for the Hype desk where our friends Ross and Ashley come and tell us what's cool in the world and on the Internet. You're both here today. Hi, Ross. Hi, Ashley.

[Ashley Carman]

We are, in fact, not the same person. We have been seen in the same same room at the same time.

[Ross Miller]

Get that mistaken all the time.

[David Pierce]

It's the hair. I gotta tell you. It's the just. Just long, luxurious hair in all cases.

[Ashley Carman]

I went for a Summer Phoenix, no joke.

[Ross Miller]

What I would get for Ashley's hair right now.

[David Pierce]

Like, truly, what do you guys have for us this week?

[Ashley Carman]

I.

[Nilay Patel]

Okay, wait, can we just go back?

[David Pierce]

Ross, you can I. I'm working on this.

[Nilay Patel]

There is nothing stopping you.

[Ashley Carman]

There is nothing stopping you.

[Ross Miller]

This is a multi year project anyway. I know this is going to get cut.

[David Pierce]

My promise to all of you is that we will do a hype desk about all of our respective hair care situations at some point in the very near future. I'm just putting that into the universe.

[Ross Miller]

Will this also be the Widow's Bay watch party?

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Oh, I'm so very ready. But not this time. What do you guys have for us this week?

[Ashley Carman]

Total sort of horror. Horror. It is actually horror directly related instead of kind of horror comedy. So I am super excited because Unhinged is out, which is this new Netflix game by Night School. And it's. I played it and it's. I played it last night and maybe that was a poor choice. I did not realize that I would feel actually as scared as. As I ended up being. Okay. So I love it when I love interactivity. This is like, very exciting for me. So the one so Unhinged is this horror game. Netflix has a studio called Night School that developed this. And it seems like there's a special thanks for David Fincher in the credits. So it seems like he was involved in some sort of capacity. And so it's a survival game. And you're the lead character is Zoe Kravitz. And you're this character. You wake up, it's like a storm, and then you realize there's like a killer in your apartment building. And the neat thing about it is, so you can only play this game if you go to your Netflix account on a web browser or a smart TV that supports this game. Which is my one, like, bummer about this. Like, I wanted to play it on my couch. Like, sitting on my couch, using my Apple tv.

[David Pierce]

One of my questions for you is going to be, do you know anyone who actually earnestly plays Netflix games? And I feel like that sentence you just said answers no. For everyone on planet Earth, this is

[Ashley Carman]

like the most frustrating thing because I feel like if this was more accessible, like, literally everyone would play it and be raving about it. Because the access experience itself is so visceral. Because you connect your cell phone to the experience and your. Your actual phone in your hand is your flashlight in the game. And you can text people who are in the game. Like, Troy Baker plays the superintendent of the apartment building, you have your best friend, which is Sadie Sink. And it's really stacked, like, voice cast, which is amazing. And you can. You can literally mess. You get messages from them. Like, they're like. It is so immersive and visceral and interactive, and it's. So there's like, a bunch of ways you can die, like, in the game. And it's like, it's not like a no fail state. Like, this is. This is a thing where, like, you really do feel like your. Your. Your virtual life is on the line. And it's. It's very good. And it's about a half. It takes a half an hour. It's not a long, like, experience. It's like. It feels like you're experiencing a very scary episode of horror television in real time. And it's. It's so cool and impressive. Like, I loved it and I. Like I said the only thing I wish I could have done was experienced it, like, on my couch, chilling at night, and instead of at my computer, because it sort of felt a little more like work.

[David Pierce]

I do like this, though. It feels very Netflix. Like, this is the first Netflix game anyone has ever described to me that I'm like, oh, I kind of get why this would be on Netflix.

[Ashley Carman]

Yes, very much so. Like, this is a thing that feels very organic to the Netflix brand, but also is such a cool thing for Night school to have developed. Like, the. The way that the technology, like the way that your web browsers, like, interacted with your phone, like, you have your flashlights. It's really cool.

[Nilay Patel]

Can you explain that more? I don't think I. So if you were watching this on a TV, the TV is all run sort of like HTML5 apps. So is this just Netflix, like, running a web browser in your tv? What's happening here?

[Ross Miller]

It's kind of a. I think it's like an HTML5 streaming thing because your phone becomes basically a gyroscope controller. So as you kind of rotate it around, the flashlight also kind of rotates.

[Nilay Patel]

And so do you have to, like, log in your. Do you just open the Netflix app

[David Pierce]

on your separate one?

[Ross Miller]

So it's kind of like how Jackbox game works a little bit. Jackbox games lets you use, like, a web browser here. You'll get a QR code that'll let you download the Netflix game controller app connects the thing. Yeah, sure. So, yeah, you're using the gyroscope, you kind of move around a little bit, and then when you kind of get your cursor to the edge of the screen, you get a button that basically says go right, go to the next scene. So unlike, let's say like the Bandersnatch Black Mirror thing, which was just purely choose your own adventure or some of the other like early Netflix experiments, this really does feel like a full streamed game where you're having kind of real time.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah.

[Ross Miller]

I wouldn't say decision making. It feels much like if you play this PlayStation game until dawn. So those two are adventure horror games where you kind of have to make some motion decisions. It's very much like that.

[Nilay Patel]

That makes sense because Bandersnatch and all the other Netflix games have either been like mobile casual games or I'm gonna pick what the next cutscene is.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah. And so, okay, so in this one I died a few times and every time I died, there's like a cutscene of the cops, like talking about how you died. And it's like very like they talk about like the specific. They comment on like the crime scene. Like, and so it's like, this is like, it's really cool. Like, I can't. I'm just really. I was so surprised and delighted by how cool it was.

[David Pierce]

This is a good case. I will say. Ashley, you should know that after your Masters of the Universe recommendation, you're the trust level with Ashley was at a record low on the hype desk.

[Ashley Carman]

I'm sad to hear that. I'm so sad to hear that.

[Ross Miller]

I'm going to go down with who

[Nilay Patel]

could have seen this coming.

[Ross Miller]

I'm going to go down with a ship and agree, agree with Ashley here because unhinged, it is great. 30. I would say 60 minutes. Because I kept dying. For those out here who want to try it, there is a story mode which means you cannot die.

[Ashley Carman]

But you should, though. You should die.

[Ross Miller]

You should though.

[Ashley Carman]

Like, it's fine. Like, it's worth it to just to

[Nilay Patel]

see the cops standing over your body being like, she was resisting.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah. To like go through. Just die. Like die a few times. And then if you feel like, okay, I kind of get like, I'm over dying, then switch to the story mode. Don't start with the story mode. Right.

[Ross Miller]

But I will add that it's hard to find a comp for this even on the gaming side. It is a clever experiment. It's only 30, maybe 60 minutes if you're bad at the game like I am. And I'm very curious to see if this is what Netflix does going forward because they've tried interactive, they've tried to figure out what the games program is going to be. This feels like a step in the right direction and in many ways and just finding something that just feels uniquely theirs and can uniquely kind of handle, let's say, their infrastructure to make the streaming work seamless.

[Ashley Carman]

Like this is a thing I feel like is so unique to a place like Netflix. Like it's something they can say, like, you really can't get this almost anywhere else. Like there are so few places that you could actually platforms that you could actually get this. And that feels, to Ross's point, like that. That great. Really good, like solid step in the right direction.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I dig it. Ross, you have one for us.

[Ross Miller]

I do. I was scanning through kind of like Steam's different, like PC demos checking out and I found what I really do feel is kind of like the ultimate Vergie game. It's in a demo now. It's gonna come out later this year. It is called Chill Electronic Repairs. And here's the gist. It's called Party Speakers.

[Ashley Carman]

Yes.

[Ross Miller]

You are running like a mom and pop little gadget repair store in the 2000s in Akihabara district of Japan. And so people come up and you can take your time with this. They'll hand you old knockoff Nokia phones, Motorola razors like Nintendo DS's and PSPs and. And you just kind of very slowly and casually unscrew them, take the parts out and just kind of dust off and clean all the gadgets and give them back. It is a cozy game. If you've ever played this kind of cleaning games like Power Wash Simulator, where you just very satisfyingly do menial chores? That is exactly what this game is. And there's a demo out now. It takes about an hour to play.

[David Pierce]

I have a really important question about this. Is this the kind of game where you look at the gadget and then you press a button that says repair and it is magically repaired? Or do you have to like do the work to repair?

[Ross Miller]

You have to do the work.

[David Pierce]

Okay, good. This is what I want. The Power Wash simulator is great because you are actually doing the full activity of power washing. If it was just like press a button and it will, it will be power washed. You lose all of the fun of things.

[Ross Miller]

No, this is like the gentle look at every detail. It's like the Tamagotchi. This little girl comes up and goes, hey, can you fix my Tamagotchi? You take off the front panel, the screen, cover the screen, the circuit breaker, you unscrew every little bit of it and then you Take each piece and you can just kind of dust it off, or you can order new parts and replace it. And, like, it really makes you appreciate one. How repairable everything was in this kind of joyous mid 2000 days where you could just, you know, take apart a Nokia 3310 and go, oh, that's how that works. And put it back together yourself. You are doing that. And then you have this kind of like, very gentle, like, brushing animation. The sounds in this game are amazing. Every time you, like, unscrew and, like, put a little piece of plastic on the table, it's, like, so joyous.

[David Pierce]

I love this. I'm looking at the picture. This is so charming. This looks like what every one of the VR games I played for years was trying to be.

[Ashley Carman]

No, that's a good point.

[David Pierce]

Like, every VR game was like, we're gonna put you in a workshop and you're gonna make beautiful things. And this one is just not trying to do such weird stuff, but is, like, charming and animated in exactly the same way.

[Nilay Patel]

Wait, I have a question. It's a Steam game, right?

[Ross Miller]

Is a Steam game right now? Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

Can you take apart a Steam deck on a Steam deck?

[Ashley Carman]

Oh, they should add that as dlc.

[Ross Miller]

Yeah, it should be good.

[Nilay Patel]

It's, like, obvious. It's like, the first thing they should have done.

[David Pierce]

Take apart your own Steam deck.

[Ross Miller]

You do have an Atari.

[Nilay Patel]

If you die in the game, do you die in real life?

[Ross Miller]

And we're back on Unhinged. This is the Netflix 4D experience. No, when it comes to Restory, it is a lot of, like, legally distinct. So I think I wrote a few of these down. It is a. The Noni PMP is your Sony psp. Of course.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[Ross Miller]

Your. I think Electrogotchi is what they call

[David Pierce]

it, a faux Kia Fokia.

[Ross Miller]

And of course, of course, they officially license Atari. So it's just a flat out 2600.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, Atari will take money from anyone.

[Ashley Carman]

You can.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, we could officially license Atari right now. You can send them, like, a handful of loose change in the mail, and they're like, yeah, you're an Atari now.

[David Pierce]

All right, I'm going to go play Restory, like, as soon as we finish recording this podcast. This is, like, extremely my kind of game.

[Ross Miller]

I hope it makes a newsletter. I'm just really hoping we'll.

[David Pierce]

I'm excited about it. All right, Ross, Ashley, good to see you both. Thanks for being here.

[Ashley Carman]

Thank you.

[Ross Miller]

Cheers, y'.

[Ashley Carman]

All.

[David Pierce]

All right, now it is time once again for America's favorite podcast within her podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[Nilay Patel]

Makes me sick to my tummy.

[David Pierce]

That's from Arthur. Larry, that was beautiful. That's gonna be stuck in my head for a long time.

[Nilay Patel]

It's playing out, by the way. Did you hear that? That guitar tone is real. It's still in the background.

[David Pierce]

It gave me, like, immediate. Do you remember the Disney Robin Hood movie? That's where my brain went as soon as that started playing.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, yeah. No, I get it. That's very cute. I was expecting, like, the metal breakdown

[David Pierce]

like we had last week, which, by the way, maybe the most response we've ever gotten to a Brendan theme song. The now with Merch. Really, really hit for people.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, we'll play it at the end of the show every week.

[David Pierce]

Now it's going to be the end of the show. Ten minutes of silence, a bunch of ads, and then that Brendan Carr every time. It's going to be amazing. That's how we finance everything from now on. What did Brendan do this week?

[Ross Miller]

Ne.

[Nilay Patel]

So Brendan did do some stuff this week. We're going to set that aside, though, this time, because a thing that has

[David Pierce]

he just, like, kicking it at the country fair or whatever it was called.

[Nilay Patel]

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

[David Pierce]

Whoa.

[Nilay Patel]

And like, I don't spend a lot of time agreeing with Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch. Do you know what I mean?

[David Pierce]

Yeah. So the coalition is now you, Ted Cruz and Neil Gorsuch.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, it's like every now and again in the show, actually, like Ted Cruz, he gotta hand it to him. Or like the Wall Street Journal editorial board once again issued a stunning indictment at Brendan's whole deal, which I once again agree with.

[David Pierce]

Turns out, by the way, free speech, relatively bipartisan issue. Yeah, a lot of people like free speech.

[Nilay Patel]

So, Neil, it's this week, it's me and my buddy Neil Gorsuch, who is otherwise, like, a crazy person. So this was a big week at the Supreme Court. Bunch of big partisan decisions, six to three. The one you've probably heard of is the Birthright citizenship case where they decided that the Constitution protects birthright citizenship. You're hearing that as like a big 6, 3 win for the Constitution. It's actually like 5, 4, Brett Kavanaugh's like in the middle. So you just have this spread of like, Trump lost one big one, but actually the Trump administration won a bunch of other big ones that make the presidency even more powerful. So the centerpiece of all that is Trump v. Slaughter, which is about whether Trump can just fire the members of independent agencies, in this case the Federal Trade Commission. And former Commissioner Rebecca Slaughter was actually on decoder explaining why she filed this case like ages ago. The idea is that independent agencies are supposed to be apolitical. The Congress set up all these agencies, the Federal Communications Commission, the Federal Trade Commission, what have you. And the President says, I'm going to appoint members of these commissions. Congress will confirm them, the Senate will confirm them, and then they will have independence from either the President or from Congress so that they can operate in a bipartisan way outside of the demands of politics and make good decisions over the long term. And this has been the case for 100 years and there's like famous law school precedent. And this time the Supreme Court threw it all out. And that they even said, John Roberts even wrote in the opinion, whatever remains of this former president that said the President can't fire these commissioners is gone, it's overturned. This is like a big deal. If you are a lawyer or like somebody who studies the federal system, this is the biggest deal in the world. I bring all this up because Neil Gorsuch wrote a concurrence in this decision saying, we have to do this. These agencies have gotten too powerful. They're fundamentally undemocratic. Making sure the President can feel the pressure from the public and fire the people and be accountable is important. This is his big argument. You can believe this argument or not.

[David Pierce]

It's kind of a wild twist of logic to get into that.

[Nilay Patel]

But sure, the whole point is that you insulate the agencies from politics and like heated public debate so they can make good long term decisions about spectrum things that should not be political.

[Ross Miller]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

And if you make them more political, they will inherently get more corrupt, as you can see right now with the Federal Communications Commission run by Brendan Carr, which keeps handing everything to his friend Elon Musk. Right, right. So the idea that the agencies are political is very bad. But this is like a centerpiece of the Trump administration, a centerpiece of the conservative movement. There's this whole idea called the unitary executive. You can fall down the rabbit hole. None of this actually matters. What matters is that Neil Gorsuch wrote in his concurrence in Trump v. Slaughter, independent agencies today hold tremendous sway over the nation's affairs. They regulate our businesses and our financial markets. They set the rules for the Internet and airwaves. They decide how we light our homes, how we run our elections, and the manner of our employment. Often these agencies do this with hardly any statutory guidance based on broad grants of legislative authority. So he's saying Congress says you can have a Federal Communications Commission, and then they're the kings of the airwaves. And that's. And there should be some political influence over them, because then if you're mad at Trump or if you're mad at some decision that the FCC makes, you can put that pain on the president and he'll fire the person. Again, this is some twisted logic. Yeah. So then Gorsuch goes through this, like, laundry list of, like, ways agencies are too powerful, almost all of which are like, I hate the environment, you know, like, whatever it is.

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Ross Miller]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And then he comes to. And then there's late night comedy. Last year, taking objection to a network host on air remarks, the chairman of the SEC suggested there would be additional work ahead for the agency if broadcast companies did not find ways to take action. And then he cited, we can do this the hard way or the easy way, which is what Carr said about Jimmy Kimmel. And so the centerpiece of we will tear down the administrative state is Brendan Carr being a traitor to the Constitution and try to censor comedy. And now that a conservative justice is pointing out we should not have an FCC chair who's that powerful.

[David Pierce]

Wait, but. Okay, hold on.

[Nilay Patel]

Unaccountable to the people.

[David Pierce]

This doesn't make any sense to me.

[Nilay Patel]

This is a lot. This is a lot of jumps to get there.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

This just, like, broke my brain in half. Because what Neil Gorsuch is saying is that we have to make sure that these people can be fired by the president.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep.

[David Pierce]

In fact, the whole problem that we have is this person was put into their job and given every incentive to be completely corrupt in favor of the president.

[Nilay Patel]

You see what I'm saying?

[David Pierce]

This feels bad.

[Nilay Patel]

I see what I'm saying.

[David Pierce]

Neil, I love you, but I don't think you understand what we're doing here.

[Ashley Carman]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

It's not. I don't think that enough voters are going to be so mad about Jimmy Kimmel that they throw Trump out of office. Right. The idea is that the agencies should be independent so the president can't pressure

[David Pierce]

them to Be mad at Jimmy Kimmel.

[Nilay Patel]

To be mad at Jimmy Kimmel. Look, you can make the argument that it's better for the President to operate the government, that actually, if you look at the frustrations of everyday Americans, the amount of bureaucratic process between a campaign promise and a policy being affected is too high. Sure, Right. Like, sure, I buy all this, but I think it's very funny that Neil Gorsuch of all people, is like, man, these agencies are out of control, powerful. My best example of them is a guy doing the bidding of the President. Thus the President should have even more power to fire that guy.

[Ross Miller]

What?

[Nilay Patel]

It's good. But what Gorsett's project here and John Roberts project and a conservative project generally is to get to the point where the agencies are the President.

[David Pierce]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

And so everything the agencies do is a reflection on the President. And there's some political check on the President's worst impulses

[David Pierce]

or that the President's worst impulses are allowed to run completely rampant because this is a purely political system.

[Nilay Patel]

That what Americans want is a king, I'm told. Yes, Famously. Here are the three days before the 4th of July. We fought a war to have a king. A king of late night comedy. Great movie, by the way. Anyway, anyway, that's been Brennan Carr as a dummy. Neil, you're also welcome to come on the Vergecast. I welcome any of our Supreme Court justices. I think Clarence Thomas would bang on the Vergecast. I think that would be one of our best episodes of all time.

[David Pierce]

That would be based on some of the. I think it was the birthright citizenship dissent he wrote was like 90 pages or something like. Yeah, do.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

To be fair, he wrote it in 48 point font. He's very old. Clarence Thomas, that's another one.

[David Pierce]

We'll just. We'll just play a lot of silence over top of that episode. You can imagine it however you want.

[Nilay Patel]

Here's my idea for a Vergecast segment. Our nation's octogenarian men of power come on the show and I just ask them what font size their iPhone is sent to. And that's it. That's the whole segment.

[David Pierce]

I love it. We just call it Old Heads be great.

[Nilay Patel]

Chris, what is it? How big are those icons? You tell me. How much power should you have based on the size of your phone icon? Pretty good. That's from Brennan Cars, the dummy, as always. Brennan, you're welcome. Anyone's welcome, really, if you can explain yourself or your. The. The amount of corruption it has taken to have the Supreme Court cite your actions in an effort to increase executive power. I would love to talk about this with you. That's from Brandon Carr's A Dummy, America's favorite podcast. For the podcast, Brandon Car is a Dummy.

[David Pierce]

It's a good one, no context. I'm just going to read you a Wall Street Journal story that just dropped a few minutes ago. Elon Musk. SpaceX has developed a prototype for a handset like device designed to reshape how humans interact with artificial intelligence that SpaceX has shown investors recently. The rocket and AI company showed the prototype which features a sleek design that is slimmer than an iPhone, to some investors and other stakeholders ahead of the company's mega IPO, according to people familiar with the matter. SpaceX is building a phone.

[Nilay Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

We're doing AI phones. Sure. Okay. The funniest part about this, to me, I just want you to imagine a phone in which X is presumably a crucial part of the operating system. Uh, Grok is how you interact with everything and presumably starlink is how you get service. This, this is, this is the all time worst idea about cell phones that I've ever heard. I love it so much.

[Nilay Patel]

I think it's very funny that there are rumors that SpaceX will buy t Mobile.

[David Pierce]

I was going to ask you about this. I, I genuinely want to know what you think about this.

[Nilay Patel]

And there's another rumor. You know, Comcast is splitting itself into two, that eventually the Comcast broadband business will get to be acquired by, by SpaceX as well. They're a telecom firm. At some point we're all just going to have to admit that SpaceX is a telecom firm with worse margins than T Mobile.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, right.

[Nilay Patel]

They have way higher costs and they, they have to deliver competitive broadband prices. So you inherently have worse margins than T mobile.

[David Pierce]

I mean SpaceX is like, it's, it's Starlink and then it's a really expensive marketing department that launches rockets is like functionally how that business works.

[Nilay Patel]

And it's funny because starlink is profitable on its face, but they have to pay the launch costs to the other part of the company. And it's great that the rocket. Every time you talk about SpaceX, you have to concede it is very cool that the rockets land themselves. Absolutely no one thought anyone could do it. Gwen Shotwell has done a great job running that company and obviously Elon Musk can just overpower the laws of physics through nothing but charisma and racism or whatever combination of traits that he has. Great. The reality of that business is that it's a telecom provider at the end of the day that it is a broadband company and we know the economics of broadband companies extraordinarily well. And for as uncompetitive as that market is, it's not like the most lucrative market in the history of the world. I also think it's funny that they're going to make a phone. You're going to have a Starlink phone that has AI in it. You have to. This is the same bet we were talking about earlier. You're going to rethink all of computers. You're just going to talk to AI and it's going to do stuff for you. Are you going to have an Instagram app? Is it going to run TikTok? People like doing things on their phones. Is it going to have Candy Crush? Like, will it support Outlook? Like, I can just go down the

[David Pierce]

list of things that, like X is the everything applied.

[Nilay Patel]

I don't know if, you know, phones can do.

[David Pierce]

You don't need anything.

[Nilay Patel]

You just run into some pretty obvious problems.

[David Pierce]

Right. That's money now. That's true.

[Nilay Patel]

And it's not just one bank account. It's a sweep across many bank accounts in order to. It's very good. It's like, oh, we're doing financial engineering now as well. I love this. I'm very happy about it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, it's. It's. The whole thing is just deeply, deeply silly.

[Nilay Patel]

By the way, it's the same idea that Sam Altman has to build a phone. It's exactly the same idea that Sam Altman has.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Like there's no point in making this a Starlink phone. Most people are around places with cell service.

[David Pierce]

It.

[Nilay Patel]

The idea is that you will make a device that replaces your phone and you just talk to an AI model and the AI model runs around doing stuff for you and it's like, that's really hard.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

No one has pulled it off yet. And there's no true application model for AI yet in that way.

[David Pierce]

Right. It's worth saying, by the way, that Elon Musk has denied for a very long time that SpaceX is building a phone. This rumor has been floating around for a long time. It also just makes a lot of sense. Right. Like even for Starlink in particular, having a sort of Halo device kind of tracks. He also on this one even has said he called it utterly false. A statement to which I put almost no stock. But that's what he said. And I think there's going to be a very funny turn that a lot of these folks have to make where they're going to have to convince you that the phone that they made isn't a phone. Do you know what I mean? Like there is, there, there are a bunch of reasons that we have cataloged extensively on this show that the thing you should make is a phone, but you can't because Google and Apple own that. And there's no, there is no winning that game anymore unless you are Google and Apple. So you have to build something else. But if you like make the stack of things that people want, you end up making a phone. And this is, this is the incredible challenge with all hardware right now is the only way to win is to build a phone that somehow isn't in Google or Apple's orbit. And that's very hard to do. And so what we're going to see with all of these devices is them try very, very hard to explain to you why this isn't a phone while shipping you a thing that looks and feels like a worse phone.

[Nilay Patel]

And all of it's going to be input, all of it's going to be. You just talk to it.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

I think it's going to be fascinating and in a way, like these OpenAI headphones that keep floating around, like you can sort of understand why they would do that and what the case is there for.

[Ross Miller]

Right.

[David Pierce]

It's like easy interaction with your AI assistant. Like, great, well and good. The, the thing with a six inch screen that goes in your pocket is a very different kind of game to play next to somebody's phone.

[Nilay Patel]

But if you run a telecom provider and you want that fee on top of your Starlink broadband fee, you almost have to make a phone.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, absolutely. And it is certainly true that a phone made by SpaceX and Starlinks and Elon Musk will sell. Like that thing will do numbers. Whatever that thing is, it will you shake your head at me all you want, it will sell. People will buy it whether it's good or not.

[Nilay Patel]

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

[David Pierce]

people running a Snapdragon chipset, it's a phone that Grox. It's a Groq phone.

[Ross Miller]

Cool.

[Nilay Patel]

Is gonna run. It's not gonna run Android. Right. That's a proprietary operating system. It feels like a fork of Android.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

No, you don't have Instagram and I'M keying on Instagram. But just think of any, any Edge case app for any human being that's on their iPhone. I think for most people it's Instagram. I think a phone without Instagram almost is a non starter for like 90% of people.

[David Pierce]

Oh, yeah. And I think you, you make that list 10 apps long and you've captured everybody.

[Ashley Carman]

Right.

[Ross Miller]

Like.

[Nilay Patel]

Right.

[David Pierce]

It's not super hard. But I do think, I mean, the, the like galaxy brain thesis of all of this puts together the idea of X being an everything app. And you look at what like WeChat is in China, where essentially that becomes the most important thing. And you could essentially build a phone that only ran WeChat. And it would work if you, like Elon Musk could talk himself into. All we need is Grok and X and we can solve everything because X is the everything app and Grok is this agent that accomplishes everything on your behalf. And that's all we need. It is utterly divorced from reality. But you can see why he might be very excited about the idea.

[Nilay Patel]

Right? You don't need a bank app because you use X, the everything app for your bank.

[David Pierce]

Yes, exactly.

[Nilay Patel]

This is nonsense. I just, I can't be.

[David Pierce]

I.

[Nilay Patel]

Is it gonna run Outlook? Do you know what most people need at work? They need Outlook. It's, it's. It's like I can ask you the dumbest questions. How many times have we covered a new phone platform?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, it's true.

[Nilay Patel]

Is it gonna support rcs?

[David Pierce]

I mean, that's a good one. Yeah, no, I.

[Nilay Patel]

What, what version of Bluetooth does it run all day? I could do this to you all day long.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, listen, I wanted the Trump phone to be real and it kind of ish. It's like real ish.

[Nilay Patel]

No, I'm told that our review units have shipped.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that's. That's still real ish. I'm sure there are some Trump phones,

[Nilay Patel]

but at least the Trump phone runs Android. Like, I know that that phone has gone through Play stores.

[David Pierce]

It does have Instagram.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Like, I first knew that the Trump phone was closer to real when, like, Google people told me it had gone through Play Store review.

[David Pierce]

Very true.

[Nilay Patel]

Because you know what that means. It has Instagram. It comes preloaded with Truth Social, to be clear. But you can download Instagram on it.

[Ashley Carman]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

By the way, the Trump phone supports rcs because Android supports rcs. I can answer the questions. Is any of this good?

[David Pierce]

No, no, but it's more of a.

[Nilay Patel]

Does it illegally mine crypto for Eric Trump in the background, probably.

[David Pierce]

That's what phones do. That's Android, baby. What's your next lading round?

[Nilay Patel]

All right, well, I mean, I obviously have to do Comcast splitting in two.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, this was the setup. Yeah, you do.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, first of all, what an incredible personal victory for me.

[David Pierce]

You did it. You brought down Comcast all by yourself.

[Nilay Patel]

Just through the power of disclosure alone. So let me do the disclosure. So if you might have noticed, it is all the rage for media companies to cut themselves into lately. This is what we're doing. It's that time. There's only two business models here. There's bundling and unbundling. And we are going through unbundling.

[Ross Miller]

Yep.

[Nilay Patel]

That is the time. So Comcast has not been part of our disclosure for ages because the NBC Universal investment in Vox Media went to Versant.

[David Pierce]

That's right.

[Nilay Patel]

So Versant is an investor in Vox Media, our parent company. A parent company that is splitting in two. And so there will be a new Vox Media which will sell our ads as part of the Vox Media podcast network. And then there's going to be a new company called PMX Inversent that's a joint venture with an old Vox Media that Versin is an investor in. This is all so tortured. I feel like it. It can't possibly matter anymore. Do you know what I mean?

[David Pierce]

Like, I. Yeah, we've really like ship of Theseus to this investment at this point.

[Nilay Patel]

Right. Our disclosure is going to look like we talk about south by Southwest and our parent company owns south by Southwest. Yeah, something like that. If we talk about New Year's Eve, I think we're going to have to disclose that our parent company owns Dick Clark Productions. It's going to be great. It's a new season of disclosures for us.

[David Pierce]

You know, this means our new goal now is for you and I to host New Year's Rock and Eve.

[Nilay Patel]

Oh, it's happening.

[David Pierce]

This is now the stated goal of the Vercast.

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to be there and it's going to be amazing. Just making sure David's going to sing.

[David Pierce]

Done.

[Nilay Patel]

Anyway, so Comcast had the thesis, if you will recall, a huge part of like the 2010-2016 net neutrality fight was Comcast buying content to put on its pipes. So they're like, we're going to buy NBCUniversal and then you will have preferential access to NBCUniversal content on Comcast Network, which just flies in the face of net neutrality.

[David Pierce]

To be fair, everybody was doing this.

[Nilay Patel]

Everybody had this idea at&t bought Time Warner and their entire idea was they would preload like Game of Thrones shitware on mid range Android phones.

[David Pierce]

This is zero rating. That was the, that was the term, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, so like zero rating was the thing. So if you're a Comcast subscriber, Peacock would not hit your data cap. If you're an AT&T subscriber, HBO Max would not hit your data cap. There's all these ways you can bundle the content to make the pipes more valuable. This was the thesis of this industry and they all ran into reality, which is the, their content distribution platforms suck. They just suck. They're not as good or compelling as the user generated platforms like TikTok or YouTube or Instagram or whatever. And so is it true that I now watch lots and lots of bite sized clips of Game of Thrones? I do. I watch them on TikTok illegally uploaded by crazy people who make fan edits of Oberyn Martell. I don't know who those people are, I don't know where they come from, but this is provided to me all day long. Yep, this is just like crazy stuff. I'm actually convinced HBO is behind it to promote House of the Dragon. Like they've, they've concocted an army of overseas clippers to promote Game of Thrones. Really hard on TikTok right now. But the thesis didn't work, right, that you would put the content and the pipes in the same company and you would switch from Charter to Comcast because you wanted NBC content. This never worked. It never made any sense. The idea that the distribution, the content should be in the same place. And now I think we're just at the end of it in a very real way. The content businesses, the big overwrought, overhead driven Hollywood cost structure, content businesses are getting crushed by creators, just devastated by creators. The actual distribution platforms people care about, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, whatever. Pay nothing for content. Effectively nothing.

[Ashley Carman]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

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

[David Pierce]

Yep.

[Nilay Patel]

And even that business is declining. Comcast lost, I think 700,000 subscribers in 2025.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

And that's. They're losing them to fiber, they're losing them to fixed wireless. All this stuff in broadband and it's saying, we'll charge you more money and give you Peacock for free is not compelling to anyone.

[Ashley Carman]

No.

[Nilay Patel]

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

[David Pierce]

I'm going to give you two outcomes. You have to tell me what you think is more likely. Outcome number one, both of these companies continue to exist as kind of their ongoing concerns and if anything, become like buyers in the market and try to go and sort of grow on their own. Outcome number two, in within 24 months, both of these companies have been bought by somebody else. Which do you think is more.

[Nilay Patel]

It will be two.

[David Pierce]

It's gotta be, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Well, I mean, it just depends on whether you think that pendulum swings back to bundling fast. Right. So you can see outcome two.

[David Pierce]

Well, bundling parentheses by right wing billionaires is sure, that's the. But those are the bundlers everybody else is unbundling.

[Nilay Patel]

I mean, Brian Roberts, he's the guy who ran Ms. Now, you know, like Donald Trump does not like Brian Roberts. So.

[David Pierce]

True, true.

[Nilay Patel]

He's going to emerge in some way as a shareholder of two companies that go on whatever turn they go on. But I think maybe Comcast, the cable company, merges with another large telecom provider, maybe Charter, and they're just a big national fiber provider. The Trump administration very amenable to that kind of deal. And if you don't own the content, you can't squeeze the broadcast. Right. You can't say, oh, I would let you do this merger if only NBC was acting better.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilay Patel]

So you create some ability to do M and A just outside of the political influence. By the way, that's completely inappropriate political influence of the Trump administration. You create a way to go do that. And then I think the Peacock division is just like, whew, I bet Netflix buys you. You know, like that thing is not long for this world all by itself. Like NBCUniversal will get swallowed up in some way. Yeah, they, by the way, they claim up and down that this is not going to happen.

[David Pierce]

So everybody always says that until the minute the deal gets announced.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, but the big Hollywood businesses are all chasing scale in a way that is fundamentally doomed. And I just want to point out. I'm just going to. I'll end this now. It's the light era, after all. If we had just had appropriate net neutrality regulation in place, no one would have ever thought that mixing pipes in the content was a good idea, because it would have. Even the thesis that you could zero rate peacock on Comcast pipe and that would generate more subscribers. It would have been prevented. So you'd be like, whoops, I'm not allowed to do the thing that would make this work. I guess I won't do it. I'll just invest in my fiber network, which is the thing Americans want. Just pointing it out, just saying I was right the whole time.

[David Pierce]

We're allowed to have many things, but fast, cheap Internet is just not one of them in this country. All right, I have a very quick one and then I want to end with your last lightning round item. Um, mine is just a very brief PSA. I mentioned this in 90 seconds on the Verge the other day, but I have now had a personal experience with this and just want to bring it back up. WhatsApp is launching usernames. Instead of needing your phone number, you can now give people your username. I think that is going to be messy and complicated, especially with something like WhatsApp, which is very private and not as easy to publicly verify people's identity. There are going to be lots of ways this goes sideways. Also, you should try and reserve your username. The feature's not out yet, but for a lot of people. You can now go and reserve your username in the app. As someone with a very common first and last name, all of the possible iterations of my name were gone by the time I try to go and reserve it. So either convince your parents to name you something more interesting than David Pierce or go fight very hard to go get your username now. It's in settings in the WhatsApp app. This is. It's like, I just think back to how quickly it became impossible to get, like a normal human Gmail address. WhatsApp is going to speed run that. So go. Go get your WhatsApp nickname as soon as you possibly can.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that means I have to use WhatsApp, but I'll do it if I open WhatsApp. There's just a million messages from like my parents, friends in India being like, good morning.

[David Pierce]

Oh, that's nice. How awful. How awful for you. People want you to have a good day.

[Nilay Patel]

Have you seen the chart? Like every morning in India, WhatsApp slows the global Internet to a crawl because of the amount of good mornings. It's a great story. It's like one of the great all time Internet culture stories. I'm very jealous that we into it.

[David Pierce]

That is really cool. All right, you have one last one that I know you're very excited about. What do you want to talk about?

[Nilay Patel]

Has become a running theme on the show. I want to point out that car design has gone completely bananas. And leading the charge are BMW and Mercedes. Some of the leading lights in car design, luxury automobile design. Where these companies go, the others tend to follow. And so, David, I regret to inform you that the people at BMW have lost their fucking minds.

[David Pierce]

You sent me a TikTok. I have not watched it yet. We're going to watch this now together.

[Nilay Patel]

The BMW X5 is out. There's a new BMW X5. And these are the headlights.

[David Pierce]

Okay, so. Oh my God. So the blinkers are X's. Four of them. And the headlights are just two tall rectangles in the, in the middle of the car.

[Nilay Patel]

They're not X's, David. It's the X logo.

[David Pierce]

Oh my God. It is the X logo.

[Nilay Patel]

It looks for all the world like

[David Pierce]

the X logo, which is literally just a Unicode symbol. Thank you, everybody.

[Nilay Patel]

Yep. And if you don't like it, there's a button to turn them into just plain slashes.

[David Pierce]

And it like it lights up from, from the inside out. It. I mean, they look like nostrils. Nilay the head. The headlights are nostrils?

[Nilay Patel]

No, it looks like, you know in cartoons when a stuffed animal dies and you turn their, their eyes into X's. Do you know what I mean? Do you know what I'm talking about? Wait, that's what it looks like.

[David Pierce]

I can't even figure. So the blinkers are the X's?

[Nilay Patel]

No, the. I mean, you know, modern cars, the actual headlights are hidden away. Right. So like there's like the LED light show that looks like headlights and there's actually for sure. So the things that look like headlights in the new BMW X5 are X's and the X's look exactly like the X logo. A solid slash and then a hollow slash.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

If you don't like it, there's a button on the inside of the car to turn off one of the slashes and just have a plain slash.

[David Pierce]

It's.

[Nilay Patel]

So I would submit to you and the designers at BMW that if you have to put a button in your car to turn off the design element that makes it look like the logo of a company that people have a lot of feelings about. Maybe you shouldn't have that design element, but you know, maybe around the world people think differently of X. Then there's like a million other buttons on this car. It comes with 10 different drivetrains, including a hydrogen drivetrain in 2028. The battery technology seems amazing. It's like up to 400 kilowatt charging. It's like over 400 miles of range. That's all very cool new stuff. The interior is bananas. It's screens for days, including the new BMW. Like weird. Not a square screen. The door handles are electronic. You can open the doors electrically from the key fob, all this stuff. But I'm just focused on these headlights which are literally the X logo. And so much so that there's a button to turn them off and turn them just into slashes.

[David Pierce]

My wife Anna, one of her most closely held theories, I think I've mentioned this on this before, is that there should only be one kind of acceptable headlight and all other headlights should be illegal. That like we, that was the 80s and we should.

[Nilay Patel]

In 1980s America there was only seal beam headlights. All cars had the same headlights.

[David Pierce]

But like they should be the same shape, they should be the same size, they should have the same amount of like light. We headlights should not be a thing you get to have design theories about. And I could not agree with her more. Like even, even the little thing.

[Nilay Patel]

I think I'm going to buy you like a 1980s Camaro with like pop up seal bed lights.

[David Pierce]

But I think even the. Is it the Mustang that does the thing where it points the arrow from. From left to right and from right like it.

[Nilay Patel]

Those are the tail lights.

[David Pierce]

It sort of blinks out on the tail lights. I hate those. That also should be illegal.

[Nilay Patel]

Tail lights are different than headlights.

[David Pierce]

Blink your lights and when they're blinks, they, they blink. They're called blinkers. Your blinkers should blink. Your headlights should be on and they shouldn't blind me. And they should be obviously headlights. This is not. You can have, you can have so many things. Car designers just make the headlights. Headlights. This is not a complicated.

[Nilay Patel]

You want to go back to sealed beam headlights like the 1980s.

[David Pierce]

Yes.

[Nilay Patel]

Also, I'm still worried that we're not 100% clear on the difference between headlights and tail lights.

[David Pierce]

Listen, if I have to look at it on your car, I should be in charge of it. You know what I mean?

[Nilay Patel]

I get it. It's a real. It's like an inversion of the John Stuart Mill harm principle, you know, like, everything harms me, thus society should be in charge of it.

[David Pierce]

Exactly. This I. These are terrible headlights. How. And like, this is one of those things where you're like, how many meetings were there where nobody raised their hand and said, you know, that's the logo of that other thing, right?

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah, that's the X logo.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

Well, I mean, there's obviously one meeting because they put in a button to turn it off

[David Pierce]

at the very last second. Somebody's like, guys, this is horrible.

[Nilay Patel]

And this looks like a cartoon bunny had a drug overdose.

[David Pierce]

I'm sorry to everyone who's just listening to this, but I promise, if you. If you close your eyes and picture what Nilai is describing, it's.

[Nilay Patel]

It is picture a BMW X5. We didn't even get to the grill, which looks like beaver teeth. But picture a BMW.

[David Pierce]

It looks like nostrils.

[Nilay Patel]

Yeah. Picture a BMW X5. And where the headlights are, picture blinking X logos. That is 100% what it looks like. I don't know what's going on over there.

[David Pierce]

I'm out on this. Thank God. I don't have enough money to buy a BMW. That's what I always say. All right, we should get out of here. Nilai, it's good to see you. Are you going home one of these days? Will I see natural habitat?

[Nilay Patel]

Let's assume I get this book right now. I'll be home next week.

[David Pierce]

Okay. What are you doing for the fourth?

[Nilay Patel]

We're going to light some fireworks. We're going to eat some hot dogs. You know, the baby is born on July 8th.

[David Pierce]

Oh, yeah.

[Nilay Patel]

So we've got a big party coming up the weekend after the fourth.

[David Pierce]

That's very exciting. Well, we just had. We just had a June 30 birthday, so that was very exciting. And I think we're going to take the three year old to fireworks, which will either go really well or really badly. So we will see how that goes. What's decoder next week?

[Nilay Patel]

Dakota? Next week is the heads of the creator division at uta, the giant talent agency. They rep everybody. They rep Alex Cooper and Alex Earl,

[David Pierce]

Kai Senet, who are not the same person, I'm reliably told.

[Nilay Patel]

Yes, but like all the biggest creators, they are their agents and they build them businesses. So we spent some time being like, how does this actually work? How does this money actually work? It was really interesting.

[David Pierce]

That's cool. I like that version.

[Ross Miller]

History.

[David Pierce]

This weekend is the story of the Keurig which is one of the most fun episodes we've ever made.

[Nilay Patel]

That sounds amazing.

[David Pierce]

Also on that episode, Morgan Eckroth, who is a coffee influencer and a barista champion, I found the most coffee snob person I possibly could to litigate the future of Keurig with, and we had an absolute blast. It was a really good episode. Lots of good stuff going on. On the Verge. We published. I think my favorite thing this week that we published was a really great explainer about quantum computing. Basically trying to figure out where are we in the history of quantum computing? Really good, really smart story.

[Nilay Patel]

Is it nowhere?

[David Pierce]

It's the answer is nowhere, but not forever. Do you know what I mean? It's like it's inching towards somewhere. That's the name of my memoir. Anyway, we should get out of here. We've got a long weekend to head off to. We've got one more episode for you. We're doing stuff sort of out of order this week, so you'll be hearing this on Thursday. We've got a fun holiday thing for Friday and then we're off for the weekend. I hope everybody has good, fun weekends. I hope you have a good long weekend. I'm sure I will not see you until you go do July 4th things.

[Nilay Patel]

I'm out of here. You're never going to see me again.

[David Pierce]

All right. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast network. You can subscribe to The Verge the Verge.com subscribe to get all of our podcasts ad free, including this one and decoder and version history. You get all of our newsletters, you get all of our coverage of everything verge.com subscribe you can also send us email vergecastverge.com, call the hotline 866 version 11 we love hearing from you about all of your Brendan Carr theme songs and everything else. This episode is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron Licasio. We will see you tomorrow. Eli.

[Nilay Patel]

Rock and roll.