The speech police came for Colbert

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Welcome to the Vergecast, a flagship podcast of using your TV show to promote your YouTube channel. I'm a friend of yours. We got to tell this here. Hey buddy.

I keep saying it. No one's watching the TV show, dude. No. It really is. We talked for so long about social media, as a marketing platform for other stuff.

Other stuff broadcast television is now a marketing platform for your YouTube channel. This is what we've come to. Yeah, you're just selling ads, really high rates to local real estate agents, health care firms. That's all it's there for.

This is what we do. So we have a lot of news to cover. There's a bunch of Apple stuff coming, we have new pixels, we have information about what's coming from Samsung. We're like ramping up into gadgets.

These, and again, there's also some AI stuff going on, the word autopilot is being debated.

We're going to talk about that. But we have, what every once in a while, our boy Brendan breaks containment. And it is time. We have, we just have to do this at the top of you, like it's just, it's just time. We are going to begin today's show with the America's favorite podcast within a podcast,

Brendan cars, it does me. We should say we're recording this on Wednesday morning, which is earlier than we normally

“record because in Eli, I think you have to go do, like, little kid winter break things.”

Mification. It's winter break. Yeah. You got to let the kids run free. Yeah.

So we're recording this early, and our other option was to have you, like, call in with a peanut colata again. But we're here. This story will keep changing. We're recording this on Wednesday.

To be clear, I was going to do the peanut colata call in, but Brendan ruined it. This is, yeah. Thanks, Brendan. With new theme music submitted by Christopher Sullivan, who described this, which I've not heard and I'm deeply terrified by as, quote, a free jazz/brainwrot remix.

Good. IDK unique? Yes. Here we go. All right.

We're back. Okay. So today I'm doing something different, different. Is it time? No.

Is it time? No. He did. He was particularly on this week. It's time.

It's time. It is time now. It's time. Once again. For America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

It's so delicious. Brendan cars dummy. Brendan cars. It dummy. This is Brendan cars.

It dummy. He's such a dummy. That's great. Dude, dude. God.

Beautiful. Okay. I don't want anyone to submit the theme songs anymore. The party horns really got me, that one. The dude to do is nice though.

“I think anyone who does submit should use the knee line.”

Dude, dude, as often as possible. That was everything I wanted to be. It was ominous. It was scary. It was oddly pornographic.

What more can you ask for? Thank you very much. That was lovely. Christopher. Thank you.

Let me just very briefly set up where we're going here. And then Neil I, I'm just going to, I'm going to leave for a while and you can just yell. So the other night, Stephen Colbert comes on his show and says that he had originally planned to interview James Teleriko, a Texas Senate candidate for his show and then goes into a

long explanation about why that's not going to happen, which starts with an explanation of our buddy, Brendan Carr, who has just made himself a character on late night television shows. So Colbert explains this out, then then posts James Teleriko's interview on the late show YouTube channel.

That I, I'm looking at it this morning, we're recording this on Wednesday.

That video now has 5 million views, which is substantially more not peed than the number

of people who watch Stephen Colbert show. This becomes a whole thing. We can walk through the chronology of this, but starting at the very beginning here, Neil I, this, this is like exactly the stuff you have been talking about on this show for months.

“Once again, just brought to the biggest possible stage, right?”

Yeah. Yeah. The bar cannot help but make himself the speech police of American television. It's what he wants, and there's this concept in First Amendment, well, called the chilling effect, where you don't even do the enforcement.

You don't even, you know, arrest the people for the illegal speech. You just talk about it so much that the speech stops. You chilled the speech. You make it go away. This is the chilling effect in action.

He's been talking about the equal time rule, which basically FCC hasn't enforced in years and years and years, because again, I will remind everyone that people do not watch broadcast television. They watch stuff on their phones over the internet, and the FCC cannot say what happens on the internet in that way.

They can only talk about what happens on broadcast television and broadcast radio. So the FCC has just not been enforcing this rule forever. But Brendan, because he pulled it off the shelf and started making noise about late

Democrats, and needing to provide equal time to conservatives because of the horrible bias

in American media has chilled the speech of Stephen Colbert. He has made it, so Stephen Colbert on his own program cannot air the interview, because CBS's lawyers are so worried about triggering an equal time review, or having to comply with an equal time rule that hasn't been enforced in forever in a way that they don't understand how to do, right?

This is a real problem, like even if you say we're going to have Tyler Rico on and we'll provide equal time to other candidates, it is unclear what that compliance would look like, because Brendan hasn't said what that compliance would look like, and we all know

“that Brendan's version of compliance is just whatever he wants whenever he wants it, right?”

So even if you pull the equal time rule off the shelf and you say, okay, on broadcast television, all the candidates in the given radio skit equal time, if you don't know how to follow the rule, and in every turn you could still be punished by a capricious idiot, you're definitely just not going to do anything that might trigger the rule, your speech will be chilled, and that is 100% with Colbert is saying, he's saying, the lawyers at CBS showed

up and said, don't do this, the cost of doing this will be too high, the cost of your speech will be too high. So instead do something else, and I think if you're Stephen Colbert and you've been on television for as long as Stephen Colbert has been on television, this is rightfully maddening, right? This is infuriating behavior on behalf of the network, which is owned by Billionaires

who are so rich they can do it, I really want it, and obvious, and I think he points us out, it's obvious what they're trying to do is curry political favor of the Trump administration so that they can buy Warner Bros. Yeah, he says at the end, which I very enjoy, he goes, the audience is booing and he goes, but I just want to assure you, ladies and gentlemen, that this is, this decision

is for purely financial reason, which I just enjoyed very much.

“But the timeline here, I think, basically starts with this January 21st letter that we've”

talked about now, like a bunch, like a one letter from the FCC should not come up this

often on the Vergecast, and here we are, in which Brennan Carb basically says he's thinking

about doing away with the exception to the equal time rule that has been made for talk shows for forever, he has not gotten rid of it, he has not begun the process to get rid of it, he's just sort of announced out loud that he's thinking about getting rid of it. And this is this is a thing that Colbert brings up over and over and over again. Let me just play one of the clips, this is from the first night when he explains what's

going on. Let me just hear, here's how he explains to, again, this is the broadcast TV line, so this is on his show, why they're not going to see the James Sattery code interview. Now, as I said, at this point, he's just released a letter that says he's thinking about doing away with the exception for late night, he hasn't done away with it yet, but my

network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had. So that's the thing, right, that CBS takes this letter that is binding in no way is just sort of a letter, which Brennan Carb clearly intended to be intended to, you intended to chill speech was it, right, and CBS has great done, let's chill some speech. Colbert takes exception to this, puts all of this stuff on the show, and this becomes the

story kind of on Tuesday was this big back and forth, right, that the teller echo interview blows up because tons of people are watching it because all of a sudden it's news that it's out there on YouTube, Colbert is fighting against the chilling of speech, and then it

takes this other turn. Well, first I'm going to say something, one, in the history of free

“speech controversies, saying you can't watch something is the best way to get people to watch”

spectacular. Yeah, and pullbert goes this, like, this is a deliberate play. Yeah, Colbert absolutely knows this, this Peter says it, late night, absolutely know this, CBS knows this, but Colbert shows pretake, all of that that we saw sat in the can for several hours, like, everyone knew what would happen here. I've been thinking about that a lot that like for six hours, this thing was just recorded, and everyone was fine. Everyone just sat and had to wait.

Yeah, our friend Mike Massnik, who runs tech to name this, it's called the Streisand Effect, where you try to get something to go away and instead you draw more attention to it, it's named after Barbara Streisand, who try to get something to take on the internet, it's like a famous term, and this is the Streisand Effect. Colbert said, CBS doesn't want you to watch this, everyone watched it. This is by the way, the opposite of what Brendan

Car would want. He just can't regulate YouTube. I suspect he's going to try and find some way. There's a reason that last week, we were talking about the federal trade commission going after Apple news. This government, this administration, is going after every source of information and trying to chill speech. That is the thing that they're organized by doing. Brendan just has this particular power over broad cast spectrum, and he's using

a lease to the broadcast spectrum, you have a great argument here. But the law is clear,

“I'm looking at it. It's 47 United States Code 315, and it just says, bonafide newscast,”

bonafide news interviews, bonafide documentaries, if the candidates appearance is incidental to the subject, on the spot coverage of bonafide news events, shall not be deemed to be used to a broadcasting station. So it's not the long-standing exemption. It's written in the law. The Congress of the United States wrote a law saying these are the exceptions. And for 20 years, more than 20 years, the FCC has said, talk shows are news. Like this thing,

it's too hard to parse out what isn't news here that talk shows are news. And there's

a long list of cases where they went back and forth. This wasn't always the case. And

they made this exemption in the past 20 years, because the available media got so vast that parsing out what was and wasn't news on a talk show became a bad use of resource. Like it was obviously stupid to say, okay, well, this candidate appeared on YouTube, and this candidate appeared on Fox News, which is cable, and this candidate appeared on local origination public assets cable, which falls under this rule of a facility. And none of this makes

sense. It's like a bad use of time. And so for 20 years, more than 20 years, the FCC said, this is fine. Talk shows are news. Harold Feld who is a lawyer at public knowledge has a great blog post about this. We'll link it. It's all in detail. Like the long, bloody

history of this exemption. But the point is, in the statute, in the law that the Congress

passed, news is an exception to equal time. And you just have to read talk shows as being news. And instead, and I think CBS could have thought it. I think they could have said, you're, this one letter

“does not undo all of this precedent. If you want to change this rule, Brendan, you have to do what”

every other FCC has has to do whenever they wanted to change a rule. You've had to put out a notice of proposed rulemaking and go through their process and take public comment and we cover this all the time. The FCC wants to make it easier for you to get cheaper faster broadband. This is like a 20 year fight in a notice to propose rulemaking. Brendan Car wants to chill speech on CBS by saying he might reinterpret a rule. Everyone came straight away. That is just a pure moral failure on the

part of CBS. Which CBS, I would say, tries to fight back on, well, thus immediately doubling down on the thing. So the thing that comes out is, right, all of this happens on Monday night and then on Tuesday, CBS puts out this statement to lots of different. This becomes like the official CBS statement. And actually, Colbert ends up reading it in a delightful way that we'll get to. But let me just play you the clip of Colbert reading this statement that was like CBS's go to

statement. Without ever talking to me, the corporation put out this press release, this statement. Now, this is a surprisingly small piece of paper considering how many butts it's trying to cover. In it, they say the late show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcast in the interview with Representative James Telerico. The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal time rule for two other candidates, including Representative Jasmine Crocket

and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled. The show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on-air promotion on the broadcast rather than potentially providing the equal time options. So that's the statement. This becomes the official CBS response to this whole thing, which is Colbert is saying the lawyer said in no uncertain terms, you can't put James Telerico on the TV. You can't show his picture. You can't use

his voice. Colbert makes a meal out of this. And CBS is like, no, this isn't true. All we did was provide legal guidance and legal options. Neil, you had kind of a delightful experience with this particular statement over the course of the last couple of days. Well, let me just say so. We published a lot of things and I love our lawyers here. They're very good. We have very good media lawyers. The lawyers saying they're providing guidance while saying no is the art of being a

“media lawyer. But they're always just providing guidance. That's what media lawyers do. They”

are always like, here's what you kind of can't do. And here's the amount of risk. And they're

very good at making sure that you are aware that the amount of risk is so high that you should shut up. That's what they did. That's like, as editor-in-chief, that is what my conversation with our lawyers looks like all the time. Yes, there's a risk that that alligator will bite you if you put your head in its mouth. It's very much like parenting a tub. I'm like, can I put my finger in the island? They're like, you can. Again, anyhow, so I read this back and forth and I know what the

lawyers thought they were doing. Like, they're lawyers. They were like, the risk will be so high and the the late show correctly read that is we're saying no. Right. Fine. And maybe there's some ambiguity there. Claire also alluded at one point to the fact that the lawyers vet all of his

they do. But that at one point, he had to go backstage between his monologue and his explanation of why the Tyler Rico interview wasn't going to air to talk to the lawyers again, which he said

had never happened. Like, lawyers standing backstage waiting for the commercial break is

lawyers saying no. Right. Like, that's, that's all that is. That's some like, soviet stuff. Right. The government minder is standing backstage to tell the talk show host what the government would like them to say. That's bad. Okay. So let me just make this about the verse for one second. Yes, please. So this is CBS's statement, right? So we're covering the story. We reach out to CBS. We're like, can you send us the same as they send us the statement? And we have a really strict

“background policy. We do not what PR people will be on background. So you have to put your”

names on things. And the reason for this is just a long history, we link to the background policy, but a long history of companies putting the burden of trust on us. Right. So making it so that if you read their statement, you have to trust the verge for some reason. And all the companies used to do this to us all the time. They still do it to everybody all the time. And we just got tired of it. And we said, no, we, you got to put your name on it. You want your statement in our story.

You need to put your name on it. And that way, the trust is on you. We're not some amorphous corporation, but you a person have to stand by the thing you're saying. And if you look at our site, everyone plays well. Everyone understands exactly why we do this.

And when we push back, it's always like one little turn to push back. And then everyone's like,

fine, here's a name. And we, we've done this for years. And this process of five years old.

“And it, it works. It's fine. So everybody has this statement on background. No name.”

Here's what CBS says. We reach out and say, look, our policy is you got to put the name on it. Phil Gonzalez, the SVP of comms. It's CBS. Right, back to us and says, no, respectfully, you don't need to use the statement. We will keep that in mind next time the verge asks us to reply. They don't even want to put their name on this kind of statement. And like, we're just, we just, I'm burning them now. We burned them in print because we insist that you put

your names on a statement. So if you're going to say this stuff, if it is your job to speak publicly on behalf of your company, we require that you put your name on it. That's anyway. The reason that you pay as money for this subscription is so that we can be brats like this, that you're buying the ethics policy. I keep saying it. This to me is if you are going to cave to the government, if you're going to cave to pressure from Brendan Carr, you got to put your name on it. You got,

“you have to be accountable for that. And I know exactly why Dolan Gonzalez did not want to be”

accountable for the statement, because it's just weasel stuff. And at some point, you're going to run into us. And we're going to say, nope, if you want to be a weasel, you got to put your name on it.

Sorry, Phil. Yeah. So yeah, so this all leads to this second round with Colbert, who goes on his

show on Tuesday night and does another screen against Brendan Carr and the equal time rule and all of this nonsense. And at one point, so he's holding this press release that CBS end out with that statement. And he winds up crumbling it up and picking it up with a with a doggy poop bag, which I really liked as an image. But the thing I've been thinking about through all of this is like on the one hand, Brendan Carr has inserted himself into the media, and that is clearly a thing

that he wants, right? Like this is a, this is a game he keeps playing. It must be getting him what he wants out of this. Like you would think if the whole thing with Jimmy Kimmel, which was another time that the, the whole world sort of immediately turned on the free speech police was not what Brendan Carr wanted. He would have gone about things differently. But he continues to do this. And so what I've been trying to figure out through all of this is like is, is Brendan Carr winning

or losing this fight in his own head? Is he winning or losing this fight? Oh, and he's had he's winning. He's absolutely winning. He is the speech police in America. If you are a major corporation in the business of distributing speech and Brendan doesn't like it, he's either going to dig up some 500 year old authority that he hasn't used to insist that he has a power to regular speech. He's going to sign on to some non-sensical FTC interpretation of your terms and service

and say that Apple news is biased and that's illegal in some way. He's going to use the phrase illegal speech, which is a thing that he uses. He's turned the FCC into a weapon against free expression, and he's done it at every level of that organization. And that is a tragedy. You know, Colbert mentioned Nipple Gate. That was on CBS, right? When Justin Timberlake pulled down Janet Jackson's top at the Super Bowl. Yeah. But the FCC went into overdrive. This was like we're going to

see Viacom. We're going to punish that case one on for years and eventually came to nothing. And out of that, the chairs of the FCC were public and in democratic light said, we have to get out of the business of policing speech. The internet exists. These companies are in competition with a universe of content that we cannot regulate,

Democrats, Republicans alike, running the FCC. I've known most of them. We've covered them

“deeply for years. What they have all said is the FCC has to get out of the speech business”

and into the connectivity business. I have had meaningful disagreements with a lot of the people who've run the FCC about what it means to be in a connectivity business and how to achieve those

goals and all that. But like, I've never thought to myself the FCC should do something other than

connect Americans to broadband and figure out how to make broadband cheaper and more accessible. Brendan has thrown all of that aside and run headlong back into being the speech police. It's what he wants. So he asked me if he's winning or losing. In his head, he is winning. I think we as the American people are losing. And I think over the medium term, not even the long term, over the medium term, I think he will lose. I think most Americans understand that you

should not have government minors standing backstage at a talk show telling the host what they can cannot say. That is just an affront to everything people have both sides believe. And if you showed up on any right-wing YouTube talk show and said the government is going to have a real interest in what you're saying. They would throw you out of the room. The idea that your distribution should

meaningfully change that dynamic is so foreign to most people. If you went to some Jan Alpha kid

and said, "Look, there's this thing called a TV antenna." And if you use that, the government gets to tell you what you can and can't say. I mean, I just know they would look at you like you

“are a space alien. And so if that's what you can regulate. You can regulate the broadcaster ways.”

It's only a jump before you say, you know what, Google is a national utility. We should regulate that too. It's only a small jump before you say, "Look, the entire internet runs on people's phones, which come from AT&T and Verizon and T-mobile. That's broadcast spectrum. We have a real interest to making sure AT&T Verizon and T-mobile. Only broadcasts the stuff that is good for America. You can see it coming. You can see where it will come from. You can see the slippery slope.

And it's great that Stephen Colbert is pushing back. It is very bad that the Ellison family, which owns Paramount and CBS, and wants to buy one of brothers with Trump administration approval, is not pushing back. Right. And this is where if you want to be a big media owner, David Ellison wants to be the big media mogul, the thing he needs to show the creatives who make the content is that he will fight for their free expression. Because otherwise, none of them are going to

want to work for him. And I think Colbert is a tip of the spear here. Yep. Part of the way that they

got this deal done to buy CBS in the first place was by paying off the Trump administration

for a made-up argument that they had about a Kamal Harris interview. And this is the other bummer of all of this is anyone who decided to fight would win. Any thoughtful person in the world agrees that every single one of these trumped up things against these media industries has been ridiculous. And it keeps working. And it keeps working. And it's only not working in small ways. Very wise to go over CBS news Anderson Cooper just quit 60 minutes. Yeah.

This is what I mean. You're going to drive the talent away. And once you've done that, because you won't protect their expression. Yeah, they're all going to land somewhere that will. They're all going to land in TikTok or whatever it is. They're all going to get into fights with content moderation on those platforms all going to start to be out of this week. Whatever that thing is is going to happen. And you will have spent millions upon billions of

dollars to own a network that distributes nothing to no one. And truly, that is the lesson of the

“medium of a way. If you want to be that character, a fight you are going to be in all the time,”

is saying, no, you can't tell me what to say. And you have to say to the government, you have to say it to the parents, resource, council, you have to say to whoever it is who shows up to show your speech. You have to say, no, we agree with you. There should be some limits, but we are going to protect our creatives. And you can just see the Ellison family, what they are communicating most strongly is that they will not protect creatives. And all

of this money they want to spend will, they're going to flush it down the toilet if they don't protect their creatives against dummies like Brandon Carr, who haven't even changed the rules yet, who are just chilling speech. It's the same story with Basis and the Washington Post. It is just these institution after institution being lit on fire, because somebody bought it who doesn't want the game. Doesn't want the game. And I, I, I'm going to do it. I'm going to end

Brandon Carr is a dummy by once again finding faint praise for Rupert work. I'm going to do, I'm going to make this comparison. It's likely as to bedfellows of Brandon Carr's stuff. Do not agree with nearly anything. David used to work at the journal, the Wall Street Journal in the entire Murdoch Empire, the newsroom of the Wall Street Journal is a crown jewel. It makes real news to the highest standards. You know, Joanna Stern, our friend, just left the journal to go independent.

We she and I talked about that for years. And one of the reasons she loved the journal was she loved the standards of the journal. And she and I talked about it all the time. She's like I love

highest standard. The journal was the highest standard. Murdoch knows that that is the thing

“he needs to protect. He knows that it's a truest source of his power in authority. It's not Fox”

News scanel people all day. It's a when the Wall Street Journal publishes a story. It moves markets and it brings down empires. That's power. It's because he's a newspaper man like old school. Yeah. And all these new guys, they don't understand that if you see that authority, if you let that get tainted, you're going to end up with nothing. And you can really see that dynamic playing out with this new class of billionaires that thinks they can just play in the news. Murdoch, again,

he understands one thing that you can't screw with the journal's newsroom because when the journal

says their analysis foolish it. Yeah, their analysis foolish it. Anyway, Brendan, as always,

you're welcome to come on this show which you currently cannot regulate. I would love to have this debate with you. I would love to see where you think you can just unilaterally change FCC administrative law precedent. That's a full-sum debate we could have. I could also just yell at you for a while because it seems like you like being humiliated. Brendan, as always, you're welcome in this show or to code or that has been Brendan Carr's a dummy, American's favorite podcast. We did it.

All right, we're going to take a break. And then we're going to talk about gadgets because God help us. We need to talk about gadgets. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Laurel Group, using the latest advancements in science and tech to create personalized beauty solutions for all. The global beauty leader recently introduced

two breakthrough technologies that bring the power of light to hair care and skincare. Light

straight and multi-styler and the new LED face mask, both of which we're recognized as CES-2026 Innovation Award honorees. Learn more about both technologies on laurel.com. Laurel Group create the beauty that moves the world. All right, we're back. A lot of gadgets news this week actually. Some of it huge bummers about ongoing availability of gadgets, but we'll get to that. Neil, we have to

start with a thing that I think you did to us as a society. You've been saying forever that you think the killer app of smart glasses is essentially facial and name recognition of everyone. If I could walk around with glasses and just immediately know who everybody is, that would be awesome.

Yes, but can I just point out, I've always said the other half of that idea too, which is,

“in order to build that product, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database,”

which is bad. Okay, well, Neil, I have such good news for you. Meta, I just want to just hammer that down. Go back and listen. I've said this a lot to like to get the thing everybody wants. You have to build the bad thing. Well, I have again, really good news for you, which is that Meta appears extremely interested in building the bad thing and in shipping it in, I would say, the grossest and most

cynical possible way. So the news this week was a story from the New York Times about Meta planning to add facial recognition tech to the Meta Rayban glasses, which is a thing I think we we have all assumed was coming. There's been some reporting that this was a thing Meta was interested in for some time. There was that project that college kids did a while ago that you could use it for that freaked everybody out. And Meta, by the way, disclamed that whole project. Yeah.

That's not just to be clear about what that project was. They bought the Meta Rayban's, and they hacked them up to send live video to a tool called Pymize, which is right. Very problematic all unto itself. And then that would feed back who you were looking at and like they're LinkedIn. And they made a video where they were just like running around the subway, like walking onto people in McDonald's, and then like sort of like reading their LinkedIn to

them and blowing lines. And Meta was like, this isn't official. We didn't do it and it's like dude, you're so close to doing this. But anyway, so according to New York Times story, they got a memo from a Meta executive who is not named in the story. I have a guess, but it's not important.

“I'm not going to be the same guess. I think we have the same guess. This feature is going to be”

called name tag. And this document, which I believe is from last May, basically lays out the plan to launch name tag. And the idea was to release it at a conference for blind people to attend these there, which is already sort of cynical in a way. It's like, we're going to take this thing and put the best possible version of the spin on it in a way that it is like accessibility feature and it is valuable to this group of people, just ignore all of the other use cases and horrors. But

anyway, there's also a line in the memo that specifically, I'm just going to read you this slide, because it's just, I mean, like I could set it up, but it tells on itself. It says, we will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns. Rough. That's just, I mean, like, right, this is putting babies in prison. And that's a good time to launch a worldwide

about it. I will point out to the credit, the civil society group say, so you, the FF, all of them are like, no, we'll find time for you. Yeah. Wait, who's so who's your guest is to who wrote this line? Andrew Bossworth. Yep, that's my guest, too. I think we've both met Bob as before. We've spent time with him. He very famously wrote the memo called The Ugly,

which was about the cost of connecting the world. And it was basically like, no matter what

we all connect people. If you go read that memo, it was very controversial at the time. And his argument was, I wrote it to make people think about all these costs. But the right, the style is like dead on.

“Exactly. The same is this line. Yep. And that's what we know. Boss, are you going to come on the show?”

Well, I don't mean so I'd love to talk to you about this. But yeah. I just, I'm guessing. Boss runs reality labs. That's why that's why that's my guest. Same. Yeah. But I think this, this raised all of the issues you would think that it would lots of people are very nervous about this. I just want to know how you feel knowing, like, A, of course, if anybody was going to do this, it was going to be meta. Of course, right? Like, yeah, of course. But even in this, in this same

document, meta outlines, it's supposed to save guards for this feature, which are nothing. The idea is that this was sources that told the time this and they're reporting, the facial recognition technology isn't just supposed to work on everybody. It's supposed to find people that you're connected to on one of meta's platforms. But it also is looking into, quote, identifying people whom the user may not know but who have a public account on a meta site like Instagram.

That's everybody. That's everybody. That's everybody. That's real bad. Yeah. What you want is the influencer tracker 5000. That's going to make hot girls across America. Yeah. What could possibly go wrong? Yeah. You follow her on Instagram. It's real bad. That's real bad. Uh-huh. I mean,

“first of all, you should not build this product. Like, I keep saying it's the killer app because”

it's the killer app. If I could just remember people's names and faces, I would be the president of the United States. Is the only thing stopping the rap at a sense of my political career. You're one face blindness problem away. I'm horrible at names and faces. Again, for 20 years, this career, I've just been apologizing every day of my life. I'm pre-apologizing to you now. I'm not gonna remember your name. It's just, I'm really bad at it. If I had some pair glasses,

they could just solve this problem. I would be the most powerful person in world history.

But I know in my heart that the cost of that power is too high. Right? You should not deenonymize everybody all the time and do it in a way that allows every government on earth which now thinks the guardrails are off to go access that data and track where everybody is all the time. And that is what our government will do. The second meta has a database of where and when it's hot people, which is the thing that they inevitably have to create. There was a time when maybe you

would trust a tech platform to say, "No, we'll stand up to government pressure. We'll do warrant canaries." Do you know about these? They all have these compliance statements on their websites. And if every year they publish one, it's like we have not received any incoming requests information. And then like every night again, they subtly change the language to make it clear that they've received requests that they don't like. Yeah, there was a time when like this

was a game everybody played in like the civil society groups like the ACLU and the AFF would like watch those. That's all over. All of them want to be defense contractors. All of them want to sell AI to PETExet, except for anthropic. I don't know what's going on with these companies. I don't know why they think they should participate in a widespread abuse of our civil liberties. But I don't trust them to do the right thing. Money is, I mean that's money. Money, but Sarah Jong has a

slide and she says when she or she describes her attitude, which is they just want to fly their helicopters over the Favelas. They will have all the money and we will all live in the

“tent city and they will fly over us. That's what this is if you release this product. I want it so”

badly. I cannot, I've said it for so many or so many people ping me about this. This is the killer app. Putting digital information over the real world on a pair of glasses is the killer app for the next generation devices. It's not chat bots. It's not VR. It's not anything. It's literally putting digital information over the real world, right? An augmenting your reality. In the killer app for that is saying you can be at a conference and everybody's name. It will

the second that features released ever and by those glasses and he shouldn't make it because

the social cost of that product is building a worldwide database, a facial recognition and surveillance that will be used for nefarious purposes. And Meta saying out loud, we don't think the people will be there to stop us because they're busy with the rest of the civil liberties abuses is a cynical as it gets. Well, on the inside of that is I think a recognition of that exact

companies want you to believe in the way that they act publicly is that all of the ideas about

“the tradeoffs are overblown that we can solve them with product that we can just handle this”

the right way and that actually that tradeoff doesn't exist. It's a false dichotomy that you're creating. What this makes very clear is that Meta fully understands all of those ramifications and all of the ways that this is going to be received and discussed in all of the problems that it will cause and it has decided it's worth building anyway. Again, we're recording this Wednesday morning. Marshal, we're supposed to be on trial today. He's supposed to be on the stand today

in the case alleging that Meta and other social media companies designed products defectively, not speech, not 230 concerns, but the literal product design of their platforms caused harm to people. That's a big deal. This is unusual. We're going to see how these cases go, but atomist areas on the stands like we're going to stand the rest of the social media companies are going to be on the stand in this way. This is just the next term. I mean, last week we spent

“however long talking about ring cameras and pervasive surveillance and that the collective action”

tradeoffs of wanting a camera on your property even at little effect of the people's rights, just wait until you get the benefit from the glasses and everyone else gets the pain of being stocked. And the thing that's going to happen is you can't product your way out of glasses getting ripped off of people's faces. You can't product your way out of people physically demanding that you take the thing that's tracking them off of your face. We saw it with glass holes and I

guarantee you if this product is released, that we'll see it again. And there's a line in a story where Zuckerberg is saying he thinks they should turn off the recording light. Oh, why? We're not having to be so prominent. And you know why? It's because that is the social cost that will make people say turn that off or take those off. That becomes the problem. Have you you're watching the ring out cry and then you're like and then we'll put the glasses in a rinse face.

“So like these are not compatible ideas. Like we'll see how that goes. I've been thinking a lot”

about like a decade ago now when all of the sort of first stuff was happening in public about

Cambridge Analytica and the way that these platforms in particular Facebook at the time was being misused and the way that you know what's app was being used in genocides around the world. And like there was this idea that the mistake these companies had made was not considering the downstream effects, right? They had this one idea and they were like we want to do this thing and that the thing they didn't do was think through that thing the whole way, right? Like what if

this works? And I either what has changed or what we just realized now that we didn't then is they actually did. They understood the consequences. They understood the potential. They knew what the cost would be and they just pushed on anyway. And whether that is a new behavior now or it has

always been like that and we are just still continuing to learn about it, I don't know. But

but it is very clear to me that like Mark Zuckerberg is eyes wide open about what these things will be in society and what they will mean and what they will cost and he doesn't care. It doesn't care. And again, it is the killer app. If you want everyone in the world to buy these glasses, it can just tell you people's names. And nothing about how particularly Americans are currently wired will make them stop and consider the social cost. They will fly off the shelves

and then we will have the same as we saw with social media, the same that we as we are currently seeing with AI, we will have a wave of what are called unintended consequences but which are actually clearly forcing consequences. And again, that is this trial. Lauren Finer is actually in the courtroom today. We are covering it in the idea that they know that the products are defective

is very powerful. We will see. I am hopeful that there is more outcry here. I am not hopeful that

we will get a privacy law. I am not hopeful that meta won't push the boundary in some way, no matter what they do. But I am hopeful that just seeing how they talk about it actually changes the calibration of how they might release a feature like this. Yeah, okay. All right, some other guys just we should talk about. Apple is doing something in New York on March 4th. New York Shanghai and London. Yeah, that's right. Notably not Cupertino. I would guess what appears to be

happening here. And this is like John Gruber said something to his effect. Mark Rubin at Bloomberg said something to his effect that rather than have some big event where they launch a thing and make a whole video. Apple is just going to sort of press release announced a bunch of new products on its website and then let reporters look at them. All at once on this date on March 4th. Is that your is that your read to? I don't know about that. They've done the staggered press releases before.

I just think my real takeaway here is flying everybody to California to make you watch an information. You can only do that so many times a year. This is why I bring this up, right? Because

And like we talk about this all the time, right? When they launch something by press release,

it says a lot about Apple's own interest in this product. And my guess is this is going to be a series of relatively minor updates to things. What do you think it is? We've been hearing a lot about new iPads with updated chips, which I think would be fine. We've been hearing a lot about new MacBooks. The one wildcard idea is there's been a lot of reporting recently about the a new lower cost 12-inch MacBook, like bringing back the MacBook MacBook, but rather than have

it be super expensive and bad, have it be cheap and good. That would be really interesting and maybe bigger than some of these other ones that I'm thinking of. To me, this just seems like just a giant

round of spec bumps. That's what we get from Apple everyone's in a while now. Is there anything

you're thinking about that I'm missing? The thing I'm honestly thinking about the most is how are they going to handle RAM prices? You can do a round of spec bumps and Apple can be like as eight gigs of RAM for the 50th year in a row, but they're running up against it,

“particularly if you want to do more local AI, which I think they want to do. I'm actually just”

most curious about what everything costs because the RAM market is just fully out of control. Apple's having these gangbuster quarters, but that's all against high-end iPhone sales really in services revenue, which is really just candy crush whales. Something has to give and I'm actually sort of dying to know like if this really is what an iPhone 17e in a low-end MacBook and some iPad spec bumps. The news is going to be and everything got $100 more expensive. Yes.

And I, Joe, who knows? Who knows? I'm very, very curious about that aspect of it. Yeah, the news this week on the RAM shortage, by the way, continues to be brutal. We had a story that the price of the Switch 2 might go up. The PlayStation 6 might be delayed. The Steam Deck OLED is going to be intermittently out of stock. It's hard to buy right now. Western digital

“and I think other drive manufacturers have said they're essentially out of stock for the rest of the”

year. It's the middle of February. It's crazy. Yeah. And meanwhile, then Meta and Nvidia signed a huge deal this week for many, many, many, many AI chips. That is the story. The companies with infinite resources building monstrous data centers have just absolutely cornered the supply of memory in the world. And the idea now of, like, you're just a person who wants to buy a gadget, it seems like $100 more expensive might be the best case scenario for a while. The worst case

scenario is like, you're not going to be able to buy anything for a while. The worst case scenario and there are some CEOs who are hinting at this out there. It's like memory supply chain CEOs. The worst case scenario is stuff gets so expensive that the products go away or the companies go out of the business. Yeah. And I think we might just see, you know, mid range consumer electronics companies be like, we can't do this anymore. Like, so many products are really just like tiny Linux computers,

like tiny embedded Linux systems. And it's like the RAM is so expensive that it's not cost effective

“to ship a tiny embedded Linux system. You might not have a product. And like, I think we're coming”

up on that time. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're a relatively small company without much leverage,

like I've been talking to startups and folks trying to do hardware for the first time now. And it

is they have no moves because you haven't, like if you're Apple, Apple has a lot of leverage in the industry. It has a lot of pre-existing deals. It is one of the few companies that feels like it might be able to continue to get its way, even in the face of all the say I spending. But if you're just like, if you're a Kickstarter, you're inventory just went away. Like it's gone. They're just, you have no moves left. And there is going to be like a whole generation of these small and

middle-sized companies that just get frozen by this. Yeah. And it's funny. I think, you know, the bleeding educator is, boy, I got way too expensive to build a PC. Right. Like, you want to buy a GPU in some fast RAM? Like, well, that is right there. Like, we want all of it. Like, so that's like the bleeding educator of this. I think the Apple pricing at this next event on the fourth, like, I'm, you know, I love a spec bump. I'm interested to see what they think an iPhone 17

E should be given where they are in the iPhone lineup right now. That's all interesting. Yeah. But like, they're just like, you said you wanted a small cheap phone. Here it is $200. All the parts are from eight years ago. In joy. Right. We've been collecting all those refurbished iPhones to give these trade deals. Here you go. It's the iPhone 4. But now the big screen, like, who knows? Like, by the way, iPhone 4 with a huge screen would be sick. I was just about to say there are at least two

That would be amazing. It's just like, it's, I mean, interested in the products, but I'm like,

equally interested in what the pricing will be. Because Apple has a lot of leverage. It had the most leverage for years. And now all of the AI spending for chip capacity at TSMC for memory, they have competitors to, who want to pre buy a year's worth of output. So we'll see. Yeah. So gadgets not coming in March, but that Apple is reported they're working on. We got a big report from Mark Arman at Thelemburg this week about Apple's AI gadget plans. And since you and I have

been talking about this, I'm very curious to your reaction. So the idea is three different gadgets are being worked on inside of Apple. And the useful disclaimer here is Apple works on everything. Like, any, any shape of thing you can imagine exists somewhere on Apple's campus. They try a ton of this stuff and it eventually gets went down to a few. And then we actually just went down to one. And like the three types of gadgets I would be shocked to follow these that are shipping.

But the idea is there are there are sort of three things being really actively worked on right now. One is smart glasses, which are essentially a sort of straightforward rival to what meta is up to, according to their reporting. They don't have a display. They're designed to be in really close

“concert with your phone, which I think is really interesting. Like, what if Apple's leverage here is”

just that it's the only one allowed to do stuff on your iPhone in a powerful way?

Worked for AirPods. The other one is essentially what I would describe as AirPods with the camera, which is a thing we have sort of been assuming they would do for a while. And then the third one is like, what if air tag? But AI gadget. It's the, it's the, it's the friend idea. You just don't want to say pendant. It's a pendant. It's a, it's a, it's a pendant that you wear around your neck or you put in a case or whatever, but it is, it is a little puck of a thing

that is a microphone and a speaker presumably that you talk to. This is the ecosystem Apple is thinking about. And I think I will say my, my biggest takeaway from this is that Apple continues to see the phone as the thing and that all of these other devices are sort of like, the, the phone is heliocentric in that sense. And they all operate around the phone and use it for connectivity and

“use it for processing. And I think that is a an extremely good idea and be like an unbeatably good”

tie-in for Apple as the first party manufacturer of this stuff. Yeah, the Apple can't not have a phone.

Right. You can't turn off the candy crushwales. Well, that, but also, like, if you just think of the iPhone is basically a brick of battery and connectivity that you can plug stuff into, you, you have a lot of extra utility you can provide without having to like accomplish the physics miracles that meta is trying to accomplish to put it all inside of the glasses. That's true. I think that's right. But I also straightforwardly, Apple is hopelessly dependent on candy crushwales.

Like, the service is lying that they constantly talk about is not severance. It is candy crushwales. It's in at purchases and like, mostly in at purchases and games. And like, you just got to contend with it. They can't turn that off. Somebody should make a reality show called candy crushwales. Like, like, the real housewives of, of whatever just forget that, candy crushwales. I do feel like that would be like someone should make a reality show about the

people in casinos, where they're 24 hours a day. And you're like, "Actually, don't want to watch this show." It's one episode and then I'm sad. I don't know what to do. No, thank you. Yeah, that might be good. Well, I mean, that's just a business reality for Apple. And so many of their decisions are warped around that business reality. I do think that it should just be a break of connectivity and in battery. That's where they started with the Apple Watch and they ended

up having to put way more processing in the Apple Watch and make something way more independent of the

“phone. And so I think there's, there are physics challenges there too. There are latency challenges”

there too. It's less so with the AirPods, right? Everybody's going to use Siri and Live Translate, all that stuff works while they're pods. But there are challenges there too, as we saw with the watch which eventually had become its own little iPhone. It's shocking to me that all this effort is not going into the watch. And I totally agree. And I think a lot of it, German's report says a lot of it is dependent on these devices having cameras, being able to see the world having visual intelligence.

And you can see Apple's big move for however long has been AR. Tim Cook has talked about it forever. The Vision Pro, right? The nicest thing anybody said about the Vision Pro was that this is just the dev kit for the true AR glasses they're going to be. I don't know if I believe that, but that was the nicest thing people. That's the excuse you get for the Vision Pro. Yeah, for like a decade. You can see how they're going to try to stagger step into it.

They have all of the same problems as meta. And I say this charitably to meta, which after the previous segment might be surprising, meta is way better at the we're going to label reality game because meta has a giant content moderation apparatus. If you're like, I need to see the

Whether or not you want to be. Oh, yeah. Whether or not you want to admit it. That is the business you're in. You're going to put information in the world in front of people's eyes or you're going

“to say you're looking at this. Here's what you need to know about it. You are now in the business”

of collecting sorting and displaying information, ranking information. That's recommendation algorithms. That's algorithmic semantic analysis. That's content moderation. And so meta for it's many, many, many flaws. That is just the thing they do. That's the thing Google does. And so Apple, you know, you can put the camera on the AirPods. And then someone is looking at something and they're like, what is this? Apple has to go get the information, understand it, rank it, and tell you what it is,

like very quickly, not their core skill. I wonder if they're going to lean on Gemini for that stuff. Because that's the big deal. I was actually just going to say a thing that I have noticed recently, just kind of at random is that the Google lens activity where you point your phone camera at something to search it or identify it is like utterly completely mainstream. Like everybody uses that. In a way that I didn't realize until very recently, but it is not novel, it's not new,

it is just a normal everyday phone activity for everybody. Because you got way more useful than AI. Yeah. Yeah. It's really good now. It is. I mean, at least in my experience, it has been. My three-year-old does these bath bombs that come with little tiny toys inside of them. And I can point at it and identify what like unknowably weird animal it is. And be it finds an olibobo link every single time. It's so funny. It's like he's the little resin toy that you could

buy a billion of on oliaxpress. That's great. But like that, that behavior, pointing a camera at

something and saying tell me more about this. I think it's like a completely normalized behavior. How to make that leap to new kinds of devices is very important. But then also, you're right, for anybody who doesn't already have that skill, which is basically everybody with Google, building that capability is hard. Google's been at that a long, long, long, long time. Yeah. And you know, my joke, not to make everything dire, is I've asked a lot of

CEOs who are doing VR stuff about this over the years. You're I'm wearing your glasses. You're looking at the United States Capitol building and you say what happened here in January 6th? And you have a big decision to make. Yeah. Look, that answer is very, look literally, very political and point right now, particularly fraught. And there's the truth and there's

“some bullshit and you have to make a choice. You cannot split the difference when that's happening.”

And so everyone wants to say you're walking through the art museum and you're looking at the painting

and we're going to tell you about the painter and the reality is people are going to ask

much more fraught questions. And you are going to have to make decisions and you can't the community note your way out of the truth and in that product. Yeah. Right. Like you have, like we've covered the like the crisis at Wikipedia, we've covered a bunch of times this year because that's a fight. It's like a literal fight about values and truth. And you're going to express it with labels and air gosses when people are just like asking what's up. There's a lot

here. And you know, it's great that Apple wants to build the form factors. I think they will probably do a better job with the form factor. But the actual product as expressed is what information you're going to put up into the world to overlay the world. And whether that is, I'm just asking for stuff and staying in my AirPods, whether it's I'm looking at it and showing it on display the glasses or what will certainly not be the case. It's I built a pendant for you to where

all the time. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. This is the thing I'm most curious about is how does Apple bridge that gap and does their big deal with Google lead them to just rely on Google for that

“set of knowledge. Yeah. I think Apple may end up being very happy to not be the arbiter of”

that information. Well, yeah. But then if they really want out there to have multiple writers, like you can change the search engine on the phone, this is very complicated. I don't know how you build that product without getting into this fight. Like the first thing that will happen is Apple released this product. And political bad faith actors across the spectrum will start asking questions. And then Apple will be a firestorm. And like, are they going to be

the same question? Are they going to be good at it? Are they going to stand up for what's true? I don't know. But this is to me. I'm very excited about these products. Right now, when you play with the friend or the rabbit or what, it's like the stakes are so low. These products are stakes are very high. Yeah. Apple is rapidly running towards being hauled in front of Congress so that somebody can read the equivalent of bad tweets to you.

Like every company that does this eventually gets there. And that is what Apple is just running towards. Here's my question for you. I know why they're doing this. Tim Cook has said

AR is the future for 15 years. Like some incredible amount of time. The bet is that one of these

things is the new interface. Right. The chat is the new interface. And that will display the phone.

Otherwise, open AI will release whatever they're going to make with Johnny and I. And that will kill

“the phone. Do you believe that's true? No. I think the thing that is ripe for change is input.”

Right. Like the idea that in order to do everything, I have to take my phone out and unlock it and open an app and enter into a thing and log in with my credentials and do something is incorrect. Right. And I think that the thing that people have seen with things like chatGPT and part of the reason is so compelling is that it just it just works. You don't have to learn the systems. You don't have to log in to do new things. It is just a box that contains lots of functionality.

And that's really powerful. Again, this is what Siri was supposed to be the whole time.

Like this is not a new idea that what we need is better input systems for information. And the idea of me needing to hold up my phone. Like again, you mentioned this with the iPad on stage. Like them running around playing games by holding up an iPad in front of their face is clearly not the correct idea. Yeah. But I think Apple believes very strongly that most things

“are going to happen on a screen for the foreseeable future. And I think it's probably right about that.”

So like what this looks like to me is Apple saying, okay, you need an easier way to point your camera at stuff. And you need an easier way to input bits of information, whether that's voice or whether that's capture of the world around you or whatever. I think Apple is pointed less at how do we do AR glasses here and more at how do we just get more stuff onto your phone more quickly. Yeah. For now, at least, I think that's probably the right move. Like is it possible that

AR glasses will obviate all of that someday because they just play it will be in front of your face. Maybe I don't think we're anywhere near that in reality. No. The hardware challenge AR glasses, I think is many, many years from being solved. Plus, you got to solve the fact that they're on your face. Yeah. Don't do the display speech now. Everyone can listen to Neil, I do the display speech every other reverse cast episode we've ever done. I won't do it. I'm just saying, look,

I've been right a lot of a lot of things on this particular episode. I could be right about a third one.

“I, but I think my personal feeling about this is, you know, Apple just got ready to”

try to design. Like, there's a new edit design in Apple now. It seems like Tim Cook is retiring. But this company needs to attack the problem of, is there a platform shift? Is there an input shift? Is vision? And it, it's actually like shocking to me that they've sort of cost-played this idea for every new product they've introduced for years. Steve Jobs' big innovation, almost every time, and every product category, was an input device. Right? The iPad had a click wheel,

the iPhone had a touchscreen, and then Tim Cook would be like, "It's a watch. It's got the digital crown. Like, we did it. We nailed it." And it's like, you're just, this is like when you're a little kid, you put on the firefighter jacket, like on the firefighter jacket. You have no idea what you're doing. Yeah. Like, this, the input device is only part of the puzzle. It's using input device to unlock the product. The mouse and the keyboard, Steve Jobs, right? Being like, we're doing mice

on the Mac. Yeah. Always a big input revolution that led to a new product category for him.

Here is one. Here is an input revolution that might lead to a new product category, and you don't see Apple have a strong point of view about what that means for all of its devices. And there's all this executive turnover. It's like, who's going to show up and have the strong point of view about what the actual new input device means for computing? Maybe there's some of them. Maybe it's Sean Turner's who's remember to be an XCM. Maybe it's their new head of design. I don't know. But

it's funny that they've sort of like played at it for so long. The Apple TV, you could, the remote has a clicker on it. You know, like, that's a horrible deviation. The buttons back. Like, all of that was like cost playing at the move that Steve Jobs had so often do, which is tell you about how the new input device would make the device easier to use and better. And here it is. Like, here is the ultimate new input device. I'm just very curious to have this company in that

literal moment of transition does the thing for real this time. Agreed. And it's not just Apple, in that sense, right? Now, everybody is doing the thing where they just point at the same ideas that are sort of in the ether and are like, well, we're doing that, too. And no one has done the thing that you just described. This is going to be a year filled with a lot of people trying. And I would not say I'm, like, massively optimistic about somebody really connecting those dots. It will be ridiculous.

It's going to be your ridiculous. It already has been like two years of ridiculous. All right. Well, we should move on. But there is one more gadget we should briefly talk about, which is the Google Pixel 10A, which is a new Pixel phone. And that's basically all there is to say about it. It is

the Pixel A series. We've always liked because it is a good sort of lesser version of the flagship

for a lot less money. Like, Google has generally made a set of really good trade-offs between the flagship phone and the midrange phone that has made the midrange phone really compelling.

than normal by that set of trade-offs. Can I just read you this sub headline and his hands on?

Yeah. It's like everything we need to say. It's a minimal update. Google didn't bring many Pixel 10 features down to the Pixel 10A by the very color. It's pretty good. But Todd went to the event and saw the thing. And he sent us back a video. So we're going to, we're going to play the video and then we're going to take a break. I just got out of Google's Pixel 10A event. And really, I think my biggest takeaway is that it's more like a Pixel 9A plus. It's a lot like this phone.

There's some hardware differences. The bezel around the screen is a little bit thinner, which Google said they made based on user feedback. And there's no camera bump that you have on this phone. The back cameras are the same. There's a 13 megapixel ultra wide and 48 megapixel main camera. Meanwhile, the screen got a little bit brighter. It's up to 3000

it's peak brightness. So that means it might be a little bit easier to see outside. Rather than that,

not much has changed hardware wise. It still has the same tensor G4 processor and a gigs of rem, which limits the AI features that you can get on this phone versus the regular 10 series. But some software features were already familiar with. They're coming to this phone, like auto best take camera coach and satellite SOS, which will be useful if you get lost in the woods and need to contact friends and family. Oh, yeah. There's also some new colors. And really

“Barry is the best color in the one that you should pick. That was my favorite in the briefing.”

So that's a quick look at the Pixel 10A. I really do think it's more of a Pixel 9A plus for most people. It'll be available to pre-order on February 18th, starts at $499 for 128 gigs of storage. Back to you, David. Okay, I will say if you weren't watching, go look at the pictures, Todd's right about the Barry. But also, flush camera, big deal. I'm very excited about the idea of no more camera bumps to my phone. I've been using the Pixel 10 Pro and this camera bump is just

monstrous. Are you a no-case person? Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. You got it. You got to live your life, Neil. I dropped this thing five hundred times today. No way. I've gotten over camera bumps and I'm like, well, they know you're going to put a case on it. That's fine. Yeah, no, I think that's right. But to live the no-case life, it is the way to be also get the insurance on your phone. All right. We got to take a break and then we're going to come back. We're going to do some lightning round stuff.

A true lightning round because we've, we're writing way over. Right, and it's fault. Neil, I has a vacation to go to you. It's lightning round time. We'll be right back. Hi, everyone. This segment of Dakota Sessions Features. My boss, Helen Havak, who's here in his publisher, and Laurie Algrim's global vice president of tech and open innovation.

“I think you're going to enjoy this conversation.”

We're going to start with a Dakota classic question, give. What does tech and open innovation mean at Laurie Algrim? Who is on your team? What kind of projects do you work on? Open innovation is all the partnerships that we have in Laurie Algrim working with startups outside. And it's really a great time right now to be doing open innovation because we're doing things in vertical farming and sustainable cultivation and biotech. So we do all those partnerships and our

team is responsible for them. And the augmented beauty team is all the tech that started 15 years ago when we kind of had a blank page and now how can we bring beauty and tech together? How do you decide which projects to invest in? At the beginning, I was trying to push as much as I could to get people to think that beauty was relevant for tech. So we're really tech-centric and then over time we started thinking about how to look more at beauty products

that we can upgrade thanks to tech. And so we have a little bit more kind of process behind how we choose projects now. We try to kind of do things like upgrading the hair dryer to be able to do three out of four people of a hair dryer at home. And so how do can we make a better or this year like the flat irons that we're using and a melee D mask and stuff like that. So we we do have a little bit of that kind of process but we leave some space for serendipity and some

creativity. So we have scientists all the way to engineers and we let the scientists kind of think of some new clever ideas too. All right, we're back. It's time for the lighting round "Unsponsored" for flavor. Unsponsored by Brendan Carr. Ungovernable. You can't tell us what's

“do, man. That's why you pay the money. That's why you subscribe to the verge and no one can tell”

us what to do. Unsponsored except by you, all of you who subscribe to the verge. The first dot com slash subscribe. You also get ad free podcasts. Neil, I was your first lighting round item. All right, we have to talk about this DJI rub of act that Thomas rigorous was review and then Sean started reporting on and then we caused a huge scandal. Oh, this is fun. I don't nothing about what you're talking about. Hit me. So DJI released a new rub of act. It's all the

rummo which is an incredible name for vacuum. Like this thing just throws interceptions. Drop that.

That actually hits really good. Shokes in the playoffs every time. Incredible. I love a Tony rummo again. But it is sneakily handsome. Yeah, right. It's like I've ever been loves him and it's like

was literally just trying to control his vacuum and he discovered that he was actually controlling 7,000 vacuums at once through a back door of the DJI had not secured. Well, it's so he we had

one, right, because Rickers reviewing it. So Sean Hall Sammy and he basically just gave him the

identifier for Rickers review unit and he was in it. He was driving around at this playstation trial. He was looking at the cameras. He had the full map of Rickers house. Like just totally unsecured DJI vacuum. On top of this, there was another security flaw. So big that Sean didn't feel comfortable disclosing it in the story. DJI has said they since patch both flaws. But this is just last week I was like don't have cameras in your house. Like all this stuff is so sketch. Wow.

And it to row back. And it's a camera in your house on wheels. Yeah. They can go places. No thank you sir. That's the sort of thing that you only ever sort of imagine in the science fiction possibilities.

“You know what I mean? It's like, well, what's the worst that could happen with this vacuum in my house?”

Oh, I can make this even worse for you. How? As of all, he figured it out using cloud code.

Oh, Jesus. So he just asked cloud code can control my vacuum and it found 7,000 vacuum. And then there's actually another set of devices that use the same servers. So he had access to 10,000 DJI devices. So this isn't like high end hacker behavior. Yes, this is a person who works in the eye and they know how to use cloud code. This is some like terminator singularity ship, right? But this is how the machines take old. You've got a way to make hacking way more than a

credit for good or bad. And you're like, I want to find a security vulnerability and I wouldn't found it. Anyway, DJI says it's patched at all up. It says it's patched the other one up when we get with so bad Shondon, even feel comfortable putting it in the story. What a story.

“And it's like classic bird stuff. I wanted to have this one because it's like the”

version is for a stuff. It's like, here's his vacuum. It's like pretty good. It's pretty fat. Oh, no. Whoops. And and the idea that we are now building these increasingly resourceful AI machines that can go just spend all of their time hunting for these vulnerabilities suggests that this is going to get a lot worse. Because we've had these bug bounty things forever. And they essentially rely on A most bugs are so hard to find that most people won't find them

that most of these vulnerabilities, even the ones that exist just sort of lay unfound for a long time. And B that they are able to quickly be patched and that you can win the cat and mouse game with hackers. These AI tools are just going to completely invert all of that in deeply scary ways. That's horrifying. And now I'm like, I have a internet connected robot vacuum in my house that maybe needs to not be in my house anymore. You know, it's funny is we don't have a robot

vacuum. We just have a regular step back. And for some reason it's on our Wi-Fi and I don't know why. So this is actually what I was just thinking as you're talking about this is like maybe the idea of, you know, somebody being able to remotely control my robot vacuum

“is not on its face all that alarming. It's the camera of it all that really I think tips it into”

truly, truly scary potential. And so it's like maybe what's about to happen is we're going to

have this incredible referendum on anything that has a camera regardless of what it is being used for.

Yeah. Right. Like I think people have long made fun of the people who put the shutters on their webgames to keep them close. Like maybe that's where we're all headed. Do you know, famously as a piece of tape over is laptop? Okay. Mark Zuckerberg. Oh, perfect. Great. No being in there's doing. You know what I mean? Okay, speaking of being invasive. My first one is we're getting, we think galaxy S26 from Samsung at the end of this month, they're having a

big impact event. A lot of stuff coming. We've seen a lot of leaks for it. One of the leaks that came out is an ad that seems to confirm that there's going to be basically a privacy display built into DS26. I love this. And the idea is right that as with all privacy displays, if somebody looks at it from an angle, they won't be able to see anything. You can only see it when you're sort of at your own vantage point looking at your phone. I have two questions for you. One is this

a feature that's interesting to you. I love it. Okay. And two, do you also constantly look at other people's phones? This is why I love it. I constantly look at other people's phones. And I have, I feel really intense guilt looking at this phone because I'm like, well, the A, the sucks because

You're in it, you're in it, you're in it. Okay. Neil, I, this is, this is not an exaggeration. I have deliberately missed my subway stop in the past because I was watching someone send, I had to be a 3,000 words. And I just refused to leave. They were, I was standing in the subway well and they

were sitting in the first seat and I just stood there and watched over their shoulder like it was a

TV show for solidly fooling. No, I, I was not being cool. But they were going through something

“very emotional. So I think they were not paying attention, particularly to the world around them.”

But this is a special important moment for me that I enjoyed very much. And now this is going to go away. Well, no, not if you are hovering directly over them. That's true. You're from that vantage point. Maybe a deeper David here is still in the game. So this is probably a good thing. This is as phone screens have gotten bigger. It has, I think, become more or more acquired for people that have these things. I read this subway here in New York all the time and I'm basically

just watching TikTok on other people's phones. Totally. That's just everyone's doing it. And it's it's so normal now that you're just like having a shared social experience, but you're all kind of alone. You can't talk about it. But it's like full volume all the time everywhere. I'm all for this. Like make the phone a little more private with a private screen. I'm wondering if it can be turned on and off. Because if it's like, you know, if it's like the things you can buy,

then sharing your phone will be very difficult. Right. Right. Let's look, let's all look at something together or something gets way harder. So I'm curious if they find a way to turn that filter off.

“That's an interesting one. There is also a real, I think you people look at their phones”

from sort of oblique angles more than they realize. Right. Like your phones on the table. I remember this at the beginning of Face ID. It was sort of annoying that you were like, oh, my phones here. And if I want to open my phone, I can't just sort of reach over and hit the thing. I have to like, huge gesture lean over and look at my phone. There's just little bits of that that I think are going to be interesting to work out with the UI of something like this.

But it will protect a lot of people from me. So I guess I suppose it's a good thing. But anyway, that phone, whatever that phone turns out to be February 25th. So a week from today, as we're recording this, we'll talk about it on next week's show. We'll have lots of information. Neil, I will turn next one. All right. I have an obscene update. That's my lightning rod. It's good. Okay. I just want to say, obscene updates will not become a podcast with

“it in podcasts on the first cast. Friend of course, the dummy. I think has carved out a niche on”

this show that is good and important. We will not be giving that to Jeffrey Epstein. That's true. Although, again, the people seem to love him. So I have two very minor ones. Both updates. Yeah. Last week, we talked about how Epstein has this relationship across the far right internet and online harassment and gamer dating, all these things. And in the files, there is a meeting between the founder for Chen, Chris Pool, and Epstein, the day before Chris Pool, started the

politics sport on. So we wrote about this. Cat 10 barge is a great piece for us. I encourage

you to go read it. Anyway, Chris Pool, the founder for Chen, who never talks, sent us a statement.

On the record, take that CBS, Chris Pool, Fox News, on the record, and denied it. Here's the statement. Epstein had nothing to do with the reintroduction of a politics sport to foreshand, nor anything else related to the site. The decision at the borders made weeks beforehand, almost 24 hours prior to a first chance encounter at a social event. I did not meet with him again, nor maintain contact. I regret having ever encountered him at all and have deep sympathy for all

of his victims. We are now at the point of the Epstein story where the founder of 4 Chen is like, "Get me away from this guy." You know anything about 4 Chen? That is wild stuff. Yes, that's my one update. Chris Pool fully denies Epstein having a video for Chen. Two toxic for the Paul Board on 4 Chen. Two toxic for the founder for Chen. My second up to Epstein, it is, I promised an explanation of the equal signs. People have done this. There's a great YouTube video. There's a great blog post,

my guy who actually wrote email clients digging into like the actual encoding of mine, and emails like the series of hacks upon hacks over the years. Josh Jessa, a great reporter, also dug into this because he's been working on a story about AI and PDFs, which are not a compatible set of technologies. Two things. One, there is some just encoding weirdness as you move between systems. In particular, it seems like moving from blackberry emails to a windows and coding,

really screwed things up and introduced a bunch of equal signs. That sort of technical explanation in that YouTube video is very good and that blog post is very good on it. Then there's also the fact that it appears the FBI attempted to strip the metadata out of the Epstein files by

first taking them all into JPEG and then OCR being the JPEGs, which is an incredible hack,

and then there's just this quote that I want to read to you. It's from Peter Wyatt, the Chief Technology Officer of the PDF Association, who talked to Josh for a story about

and he goes, "It was in the news. It was a lot of PDFs. Generally speaking, we're interested in

“anything to do with PDFs. That's what we do and what we're about. Many people have reacted to this”

by saying that the next product has to be about PDFs and the existence of the PDF association." And so I think we know David. I will say, "Do not tempt me with a good time." PDFs are fascinating, and the backstory of how a PDF became the universal file format of the internet is weird, and in many ways really bad, and would actually be a very fun holiday spectacular. So I'm writing that down. That is now officially the leading candidate.

There's a lot of comments on this story that this is a perfect first story. I just like quote,

it was in the news, and it was a lot of PDFs. I mean, you've got to assume a bunch of PDFs come out, and there are a bunch of people, the PDF association, who are like, "This is our time." We've done a moment, boys. That's very good. Yeah, I read the email and coding blog posts, we'll link to it in the show. I need to go watch that YouTube video, but just the way that blog post lays out how bonkers email is as an underlying technology is fascinating. Like,

it is a miracle that your email ever gets delivered correctly. It's very bad. It's nuts. Yeah. All right, my next one, as I am required to do, apparently every week now, is I have a silly, ridiculous update on the Warner Bros. Paramount Netflix shenanigans. This week's update is that Warner Bros. is now given David Ellison and Paramount one week from Tuesday. So next Tuesday, the 24th, to give its best and final proposal.

Paramount has said it's willing to pay more money that it wants to reopen the negotiations,

but there is a very important thing that happened when the first round of these deals started to

happen, which is that David Ellison reached out to Warner Bros and was basically like, just so you know, this is not our best and final offer that it was like, he made very clear, like, we're willing to negotiate. They essentially seem to be coming from a place where we have all the money in the world. We will pay whatever it takes to get this done. And Warner Bros over and over has kind of just been like, no, thank you. Please lose our number. Goodbye. And so now,

what is happening is essentially Warner Bros Discovery is saying, tell us the actual number. Like, at this point, we can negotiate up forever. Paramount keeps raising the number, keeps coming up with new ways to pay shareholders, like keeps trying to argue,

“regular story things. And at this point, it is like, what is your best and final?”

Well, there's a little bit of, there's a little bit of, there's a little weirdness there. So the

sort of like total number has gone up with some of the fee structures and the blah, blah, blah's. The actual price was only $1 more than Netflix's price. But it was for all of it, including the cable networks like CNN. Whereas Netflix was only going to buy the studios. So Ted Saranos was on CNBC, I believe it's Julia Porsten. And she said, what, how are you going to counter? And he said, well, usually you don't do this on the phone for the phone. Like, let them make an actual move.

And then we will make our move in return. So you get the feeling there's going to be a little bit more of a bidding more here, because the actual number is only going to have one dollar share, which is still, you know, millions of billions of dollars. But you just got the sense of Netflix is like, you want to buy a dollar? Like, okay. Like, yeah, we can do, would you like $2? And there's going to be some of that back and forth. Yes. But it does also, I think, very clear that everyone involved with this,

would like the nonsense back and forth to end. I thought it's like, I think with end, I also, I'm just going to point this out. The Ellison's want to buy the whole thing, including CNN. And they are very much in the business right now of forcing their talent to constrain their speech for political purposes. That's not going to win you a lot of hearts and minds of the thing that you're buying. No, but it sure might get the deal through. Am I going to deal through, but then

who's going to work there? Right. And then if the people who work there all leave in your life with like the C team that loves having their speech chilled, what are they going to make? And now you're just blow in money, like in ways that are so stupid. Again, I just, they, someone should

“just like talk to call Rupert, man. He won't tell you. You have to preserve the source of your”

authority if you want to be in this list. Yeah. Well, there's a whole, that's a whole rabbit hole we should go down sometime because that's like, why doesn't Jeff Bezos just sell the Washington Post? I think is one particularly cynical and terrifying answer to that question that we should come back to another time. But anyway, that's my update and suggest that maybe next week, we will have a more concrete update that might stop changing every week, which would be really exciting for me

and for the lighting around the purchase. What's your last one? Last one's very simple. Tesla's updated. It's Robotaxi crash figures in Austin. Electrack ran the numbers. They've had five more in a month. The Robotaxi is going to have 4x worse drivers than humans. It's about 14 incidents since the service launched in June 2025. They quietly added one more crash that led to someone

entirely vision-based. It's going to happen, you guys. They're going to have the super going to everyone in America is going to have a self-driving model three tomorrow. So, you know, it's fascinating

“about this to me is I think a piece of the self-driving debate I have always struggled with,”

but always sort of found really fascinating is this idea of like, okay, it is demonstrably true in

most cases that these things are better drivers than humans. And so, no, it's mostly true that waymos are better drivers. So that's fair. That's a good distinction. But if we take as gospel, right, there are lots of questions, there's lots of ideas that we have to figure out about insurance and responsibility and how we reckon with these things being on the roads, but they are safer drivers than humans. We should keep pushing forward with this technology. It's an argument you hear

over and over. There's a lot of stuff to figure out, but that is, that is already true that if you get in a waymo, you are safer than driving your own car. Lots of data supports that. It is so nuts to see just the opposite thing happening. And it's very funny that it's Elon Musk and it's very funny that it's Tesla. And of course, it's Tesla. This is obviously how this would go. But this is such a dramatic inversion of the whole case for continuing to work on self-driving cars

that it is just like, what are we even doing here, guys? Well, again, I'm going to point out that

“the whole industry has sort of been collapsed in the waymo for a long time. And you have to split”

up Tesla's with full self-driving, full self-driving, from actual autonomous road taxis. Sure. And actually Tesla no longer is able to call autopilot autopilot in California because it's confusing people, but supervised FSD, you take for granted that there is a driver in the car behind the wheel. And so it's safer because you actually have a hybrid system there in its own way. Now, lots of people try to hack FSD and get drunk and watch their phones. But like theoretically,

there's a human minder in the typical FSD scenario. So that's safer. Waymo is just very safe because Google alphabet has dumped tons of money into every generation of the waymo driver as multiple redundant sensors and every ounce of data shows you that a waymo car is safer than a human. Just taking FSD and being like, it's a taxi now doesn't do the job, no, which is what Tesla did. And so you're kind of like, you're uncollapsing the product from

waymo and saying, okay, we just let FSD run around Texas. Is it safe? And it's like, no, I could it, I could have told you that. And now we have the data and it is not safe. Electric points out, it's 14 crashes over roughly 800,000 miles. That's a crash rate of 1 crash every 57,000 miles. Tesla's own data indicates that a typical human driver has a minor collision every 229,000 miles. So this is like one in four, just bump it into stuff. It's ridiculous. It's very good.

Man, first of all, this suggests that my wife is an even worse driver than I suspect it. And I love

you. I hope you're not listening. Can I tell you a very quick story about growing up in Wisconsin it is before the world was financialized to come back. My dad was the ER doctor in small time Wisconsin in 1980s. And my mom, the parking garage at her hospital, was very tight. And she scraped the shit out of her cars. And so my dad just had a deal where the local body shop guy just would come in the ER and fix my mom's car side for free. Just in the parking lot? No, you would be like,

like, we dented the car again. So you would like drop it off with the body shop guy. And he's just like, in the 80s, they just bartered out that like, something happened. He would come to the ER and that would just get handled on the side. That's a pretty good deal, honestly. Like, oh, my ER doctor owes me one.

“It's like not that's not the worst thing to have going on. Yeah, it was just the full of our economy.”

That's amazing. Growing up with your dad is the ER doctor in small time,

80s Wisconsin was very much like knowing the mayor. Does everybody knew my dad? It was crazy. I grew up with my dad being a pastor. And so I had that same thing except everybody thought he could get them in the heaven, which also has a lot of, like, really, really real upside. Same but opposite. You don't even think that's like 100%. We were very much trying to avoid that outcome on a night shift at St. Mary's Hospital. Right. But if you're a dad can't fix it, mine can't.

You know what I mean? It's good. It's good thing. All right. My last one before we get out of here is I think a bit of AI news that sort of snuck under the radar, which is the WordPress launched in AI assistant. And I just, I think this is really interesting for a couple of reasons. One because one of the things everybody seems to do when they start vibrating is build a website. Right. Our friend Casey Newton made a lot of noise about redoing his own personal website when he got his

thing to do with existing tools is manage a personal website. I'm just going to point a cloud code at it and let it build me a website. And it can do a reasonably good job and it's pretty interesting. And so everybody has been saying all over social media, a thing that I've really enjoyed is people being like WordPress is dead because now you can just ask cloud code to do it for you. And WordPress, I should remind you, powers like have to internet. Like it is, it is one of the most

“important pieces of software on the internet. And it doesn't just doesn't get talked about that”

much because they're sort of fundamentally uninteresting infrastructure. There's a lot of drama with WordPress. It comes and goes. There's a lot of drama with WordPress. But it is like, at its best, it is boring infrastructure. Like it's designed to be boring infrastructure. But they just release this AI assistant that actually now just lets you interact with and change your website just by talking to it. And you can request font changes. You can move stuff around.

Like anybody who has used WordPress knows, it is like a developer tool built for developers and just pretends to be very user-friendly. It's not. If you've ever tried to mess with your WordPress template, it's a lot. And this idea of like, I just, I want this thing to be a bullet or I want this thing to be that font and this thing to be a little bigger and move this thing over there

is like a big, powerful, meaningful thing that is now being baked into WordPress. Which I actually

think is pretty cool. WordPress.com. There's some distinctions here. You're right out, God. Yeah. It's a lot. WordPress is very complicated. There's WordPress.org, the open-source project, and there's like WordPress VIP, which is what the verge runs on, which is like the enterprise grade hosted WordPress. And then there's WordPress.com, which is like all the way down to the bottom, which is like the Squarespace competitor. And that it's still running WordPress with four consumers

in like small businesses in a different way. And that's the thing that's getting the AI assistant. Because they do have to compete with Squarespace and Wix and blah, blah, blah, blah, all the way down to Casey's going to provide code is on website and right. There's some part of Casey's story where he's like, and then it's signed me up for hosting account. It's like, I don't know, man.

“Now the DJI Rubovax can see everything. Yeah. Yeah. It's real. But anyway, I think I'm curious to see”

if folks who are listening to this are watching this are on WordPress and you do mess around the AI assistant. I'm very curious how it works. Because it's actually it's the sort of thing that ought to work really well. It's like websites are very structured data. WordPress knows how WordPress works. Like you ought to be able to point an assistant at this and actually have it do a pretty good job of the most things. So if you've used it, let me know. I'm very curious about it.

Yeah. We should do a whole episode on just software because there's a lot of confusion about what software is and what products are right now because of AI. We do not have time for right now. I would just say I'm open to people's thoughts about that too because boy does that seem like it's confusing. You're talking about the the SaaS apocalypse that either is or is not coming. Yeah. And it's like, I don't know, man. I think people like products, not legos. You know, like,

I don't know. I'm very curious where people think about it. I've read a lot of stuff lately, but I think that's a different show. Yeah. If you think business software is dead, email, kneel at thefirst.com and pitch yourself to be on the Dakota podcast. And I would point out that famously I refuse to use that press. Don't do it. It's very true. All right. We should get out of here. Kneel at you of a vacation to go on. What are you doing, by the way? Anything exciting?

We're going to Boston to go to all the kids' museums. That sounds amazing.

That would be delightful. Well, enjoy. We've gone way over. We will be back. You're going to be back next week. You're just gone for a couple of days. So don't. People stress when you leave, but I don't want anyone to stress. It's going to be okay. I'm going to be coding my own website. That's it. Take a couple of days off and cloud code your way through. Everything will be fine.

“We'll be back. Remember, as always, the best thing you can do to support all of this and keep us”

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If you're having weird robot vacuum hacks happen to you, if you have thoughts about the obscene coverage we've been doing, if you want to talk about anything else going on in this space, if you want to keep sending us Brendan videos, which I hope that you do. Stephen Colbert, if you're listening and want to come on the show. Call the hotline. 866 version 11,

send us an email [email protected]. We love hearing from you as always. The show is a

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