Jony Ive's funky Ferrari

Drömmer du om en strand villa på Maldivarna? Ett butikhotell på Mauritius. Eller en gömd ö i Grekland. Gloebrotter tar dig till exklusiva resmål och handplockade hotell, värden över. Boka digitalt. På globtter.se eller låt våra resexperter ta hand om varje liten detalg. Vi finns med hela vägen, före, under och efter resan. Globter- en resarranjör utöver det vanliga. Hello and welcome to the VergeCast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media. Again, every week. Yeah. for the foreseeable future. Ha ha.

Uh I'm your friend David Pierce, Neil Ipotella here. Um, if you if you haven't been watching this podcast on YouTube recently, I encourage you to watch it once, only for the just unbelievable studio glow up that Neli continues to undergo. We added one light on the on the advice of a video professional instead of me just yellowing at myself and now now I look incredible.

It's it's literally like it hurts my feelings how good you look on and the people have been noticing. Like don't don't get it twisted. The people have been noticing. Every time someone says I look hot, I send it to Becky and she just says, Don't get ahead of yourself.

It's good. Everybody we all need we all need to have our things going for us. Um we have a lot of stuff to talk about. Uh there's a there's a new Ferrari that I'm confident we're gonna spend somewhere between two and three hours having feelings about. Speaking of things that think they're hot but aren't. What's a dish? Neil I Patel, the Ferrari Luce of The Verge Cast. Uh we're gonna get into that and and why that's a the meanest thing I've ever said to you in very short order.

Uh we got Brendan Carr to talk about. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. Um also real quick, this is this is the end of a VergeCast era. As of Monday, we become a daily show and it's important to me that everybody knows that essentially nothing is gonna change. Yeah. It's so much of our news lately is like nothing will change.

We remain the VergeCast. We have a really fun slate of stuff set up for next week. Uh or you will see, I promise, how much we are committed to this continuing to be the VergeCast, even as we do more of it and get to move faster and try new things. It's all gonna be very exciting. Um

But it we remain the Verge cast. I've I've heard some people who are like, David, don't ruin the show, which is also a fun fact. When I joined the Verge, Dieter Bone. Called me and said, David, don't ruin the show. Uh and four years later, I think I've kind of ruined it. But it's, you know, we're we're doing our best. But in a fun way.

Exactly. Um, but let's let's get to the news. I think clearly the story of the week. Uh you would have thought it was the Pope having forty two thousand words of feelings about AI, but my guy got it just immediately news bumped. By the Ferrari Luce. What is going on in Italy? Yeah. He asked. What's wrong over there? Everyone has lost their minds in Italy. Is what's happening.

So the the luche, just to very briefly set the scene here, is Ferrari's first EV, this is a company that a decade or so ago said it would never do electric cars, that has kind of poo-pooed this whole idea for a very long time, tapped Johnny Ive and his company Lovefrom to do a lot of the design work.

This is a big deal for Ferrari, right? I guess like l let's actually just start there. I think how important is the idea of Ferrari's first EV to the car world in general at this moment? Five years ago when this started, I think it was very important. In 2026, it is not important. Interesting. Is how I would describe this. Explain. So you know, I'm I'm not a Ferrari person. Lots of people have lots of feelings.

I'm a car person and I know enough about Ferrari to know that Ferrari has increasingly become like not just a luxury brand, but like a club for rich people to be in. So you can't buy a new Ferrari unless you already have a Ferrari. Like that's just how it works. Like it's becoming increasingly exclusive to own a Ferrari in ways that like some people really don't like. Like Jay Leno is like an enormous car guy. He doesn't have any Ferraris because he thinks that exclusivity is weird.

This is just a you can go watch videos of him talking about that at length. The reason all the crypto bros have Lamborghinis is because Ferrari won't sell them Ferrari. Like no amount of money can buy you a Ferrari. Right. It will definitely get you a Lamborghini and th thus we have Lambo's. So this company is just like it's repositioned itself in like very specific ways.

People really like the cars. There's obviously Ferrari has a brand, it has an ethos, it has a look, which is very important. And so the idea that it needed an EV always struck me as odd because it's not like it's chasing market. Right. It's not like, oh, we need an EV to compete with Tesla. It's like no, to buy a Ferrari you have to have a Ferrari. And there's a long waiting list of people with Ferraris. Fr Ferraris also come with terms of service.

So if you buy a new Ferrari, you're not allowed to resell it because you've signed a terms of service and they will repossess the cost. It's just like this is not a company that needs to chase market shape. Yeah.

Right. So why do an EV? And the answer, you know, from Ferrari's point of view is like to be on the cutting edge, to build a thing that only Ferrari can build using the technology of today. And then you you sort of add Johnny Ive and Mark Newsom to the mix and you're like, All the announcements are like this will be the pinnacle of what a car can be. And that's I would say that's where the hype was. Okay.

This also helps me understand the thing that the car actually is too, because th they did all of this material. They they filmed a bunch of things with Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, who are the Ferrari Formula One drivers. you could not have made more out of this release if you're a Ferrari, right? Like they they they clearly mean this to be a moment, I think for the reasons you're describing. But also

I think the the overwhelming question coming out of this release has been, what on earth is this car? Like like what what did Ferrari do here? And I think you would go into it thinking, okay, you you could probably sit most people down

And ask them what a Ferrari looks like and and get an answer. Right. Like they they have a specific shape, a specific vibe, a specific Sort of emotional response. Colour is a Ferrari. Red. Like a Ferrari is a Ferrari. See what I mean? This is yeah, like th this is what I mean. I am not a car guy and I I could pick a Ferrari out of a lineup of a thousand cars. Bye. This car looks absolutely nothing like it. It's also blue.

I suspect most people have seen some of these pictures before, but i I it's it's it looks like an EV way more than it looks like a Ferrari, if that makes sense. It looks like anything but a Ferrari. Yes. It's it's full of like smooth lines and everything is very like sort of space agey and it it all they they're doing the thing where they're like they want it all to feel like one piece. It's very Johnny I of unibody aluminum like

The guy who made a MacBook made this car and you can see it. Like you really can see it. And everybody, I feel so bad for the influencers who went on this trip, by the way. Um so just, you know, here's just a little media gossip that David never wants to do. But I think people like the inside baseball. To to go to the Luce reveal, Ferrari had to fly you.

This is against our policy. So we like tore ourselves into pieces trying to figure out how to go on this trip in a way that would comply with our ethics policy. And all the answers are like, you will pay we will just pay out of pocket for a trip to Italy to see a car, which we could not justify.

Like it just as much as this car was, we couldn't do it. Everyone else who went went on a paid junket. And so all of the videos, you can see there's just pressure to like go along. And no one can just say the thing they're thinking, which is, what? What is this thing? And then all of that content goes on the internet and Everyone's like, this thing sucks.

And I feel I mean, I you know, I don't feel I don't feel bad for Johnny Ive, but like this the the thing that he wanted out in the world is like this is what the Apple car could have been. Right. You see that was seeded to so much media, like so much of the framing of all the videos was

If you wanted to know what an Apple car could have been, like the ultimate car, like this is it. And I have to say the interior, which they announced first. looks incredible. Yes. Right? The switch gear and the handles on the screen to move it around and how the key works and it changes color as you put it in a center console to start the car. The rear seat switch gear particularly is like incredibly beautiful.

And all of that is great. And you get outside the car and you're like, why does this Ferrari look like a Honda concept TV? Why does it look like anything but a Ferrari? And we're at the point in this cycle where like, Former Apple executives are texting me to be like, this is Johnny Hyde on his own supply. Cause there's no love lost between that group of people. Of course.

Right. And it's like, yeah, if you leave him to his own devices and you get lost in the sauce, you end up with Ferrari making a Ferrari that everybody hates. If this thing uh T C wrote for us, uh T C Sodic wrote for us, if this was a Volkswagen, everyone would be losing their minds that this was the most beautiful carve in. But it's a Ferrari. Right.

It has no sharp lines. It has some of the weirdest headlights I've ever seen, quite honestly. And like none of it screams Ferrari. And it has five seats for some reason. Like, why did you make a five seat sedan? It's a Ferrari. Uh-huh.

Like at most, you're supposed to do Christian Bale and Batman and pile two models in the front seat and drive away. Like sure. Ferrari. Yeah. Um Yeah, it's just unclear what the purpose of this car is and who it's for, except for Johnny Ive to be like, this is the car I could have made. Yeah, I I think the Is It Ferrari

Like i what do we do with the Ferrari of it all, I think is is a really interesting question. But I think on the on the spectrum of would we all be freaking out if this is a Volkswagen, not entirely sure I agree. If it was a seven hundred thousand dollars.

Even but like let me let me just show you some of the comparisons that people have been making. Uh like to your point about the there is the car that it is inside and there is the car that it is outside. Um, there's a great shout out to uh pretend world on our website.

Uh Dom on our team pulled this out in our daily newsletter. Uh Pretend World said what's crazy is that some of the exterior details are really stunning. The top down images are super cool, some of the rear details are beautiful, then it's suddenly a Nissan leaf. Yeah.

That's tough, man. That's rough. But here, like, people put out pictures of the Luce versus the Honda Accord, which I would say have a fair amount in common. And there is something to the similarity of the basic shape and vibe of this car. I y I I cannot describe to you how much it looks like a slightly fancier Nissan leaf. Like right down to the sort of aqua blue color choice.

It's just it's a fancy leaf. And I think the leaf has gotten way hotter. So like kudos to the leaf for the glow up it has gone under. But like just just the fact that this is immediately a car people see as other cars. Is such a weird Ferrari choice. Like some there, there is the the Luce versus the Apple Magic Mouse. Boy, are they the same shape. There's like all the Mark Newsom car designs. Yeah, he's the other principal designer at Lovefront.

Um, it looks exactly like that. There's Honda EV concepts that it looks like. The particularly the rear looks like a lot of other cars. You know, we talked for a long time about the Apple car. Johnny, I have worked on the Apple car for a decade. That project came to nothing. And the challenge for in my mind for Ive was if you're gonna make a car, you have to make the most popular category of car.

Which means you're making a midsize crossover, which means Shawnee Ab has to design a car that looks like a Every mid size crossover looks the same. You you and you everyone's seen that one picture where it's like all the cars look the same?

Like the Ford Mustang Mach E looks exactly like the Mazda CX5, looks exactly like the BMW X3. Like that's the shape of a car now, because that's the most popular category of cars. And yes, they're more or less expensive. And you just see that He got to Ferrari and he didn't embrace the fact that Ferraris don't have to look like anything except Ferrari.

Right. He tried to make a car. And that means the car looks like all the other cars, even with some like Ferrari attention to detail. And it's like, you should have just made a Ferrari. I I I think the saddest outcome here is that people are using AI to redesign Johnny Ive cars. It's tough, dude. And the AI is doing a better job? Like I don't want to feel that way. Do you want to feel that way?

So but the the thing I think is most interesting about this, and like it's it's worth saying that um th there there have been people who like this car, I'm sure, but there are a lot of people steeped in the tradition of Ferrari. who think this is a problem, right? Like the the idea that you look at this car and it is not a Ferrari.

w has really bummed a lot of people out. Like th there there's this clip that's been going around. Let me just play this for you. It's from uh the former president of Ferrari, Luca Di Montezemolo, Uh Very good. And I'm gonna play you the YouTube dubbed version of this audio, which is itself just a terrific piece of this whole thing. YouTube will now auto dub this video, which is in Italian, uh, into English. So please understand this is not what this man sounds like.

Ha ha ha. But I'm just I'm just gonna play with this stuff and hate. AI. And he he's asked about this car kind of just offhandedly. Um, and and I would just say you you can tell pretty quickly is not thrilled with what this thing is. We risk destroying legends But we can do it. That at least the little horse is removed from that car. What should we do with China? What should we do with China? What should we do with China?

This is definitely a card that at least the Chinese will not copy it. They will not So the audio is incredible. But there there are three things that he says there. He says they risk destroying a legend. I've also seen it translated as myth, that like this this risks tearing down the whole thing that is Ferrari. Thing number two, he says, I hope they at least take the prancing horse off that car.

Which is just a just a knife. And then at the very end there, he says this is definitely a car that at least the Chinese won't copy. I don't know if I believe that. I disagree with him there. Like you you couldn't say a series of meaner things about Ferrari than those three things in a row. Like that is such a devastating take on what this car is that not only

He he's not even worried about like is this a cool car that's fast and gonna be fun and people are gonna like? He's like, this is a threat to Ferrari. Like, yeah, damn. I mean the stock price went down on the day. Yeah. Again. And it's very funny because Ferrari does not try to sell as many cars as it can. Yeah. It has been in the

you have to be on a wait list and know a guy who knows a guy who is approved to sell you a Ferrari so that you can buy another Ferrari. Or if you want to buy the new hot Ferrari, you've got to buy four of our shit Ferraris that no one wants to buy for like that is just the way that market works.

And it's just funny that they put out this car. I think they they really wanted to be like, we got Johnny Ive and Mark Newsome to make us a car. And it is an ultimate statement of what a car can be. Like only Ferrari can make a car like this. And then they made a Nissan. And I just don't know what to do without that. There's a lot like if this was an Apple car, let me just ask you directly. Yeah. If this was an Apple car, would you be like, this is hot?

No. Because I think I I think in general my my bias on this is I am deeply tired of this idea that everybody looks at EV and decides we have to completely change the look and feel and experience of being in a car because it's an electric car. And I think

Overwhelmingly, what we're hearing, especially in the United States, is that people don't want that. That actually people like their cars and like the way it feels to be in a car. And that and that this idea that we literally have to reinvent every single piece of the experience because there's a battery in there now.

It's just wrong. Like it's it's just actively not what people want. And I think you you look at other places around the world and I think the the EV picture is a little rosier, right? Like in China, EVs have been much more successful. That's in large part because they're super, super, super cheap. And

Ultra subsidised for the change. Right. And you look in places like Europe where they've been more successful. That's also because the government regulation is vastly more EV friendly and pushing much harder away from combustion engines. I think i in an interesting way, the US has become the market that is the most

sort of live and let live, right? Like it is it is you everybody just has to compete on their merits. And by and large, people are saying they don't want EVs. And I think that's in part because they don't want cars that look and work like this. People don't want to drive spaceships. People like the way that combustion engines feel. They like the sound of their cars. Can I just play you one actually to this point?

Uh so I mentioned Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, the the the Formula One drivers. They did one of the jobs of being a Formula One driver is to be like a brand ambassador. That's that's a huge part of what these folks do. So they made like a a sort of loving introduction video where they drive the car, they talk about it. Let me just play this clip for you. The design

It's very very different to whatever we've seen from Ferrari in the past, but I think it's very futuristic. It's very Ferrari like to look towards the future and to innovate. of the attention to detail, you can tell that's very Ferrari. Everything's soft and smooth, you know, like the feeling is really nice. Yeah. Like quality wise. I like the glass geystick. And the key as well Key's very cool. The key's very cool.

Yeah. They're talking like like if if your introduction video is them agreeing on how c how cool the key is. You've missed something important about what Yeah. Sure. Like you said, there are a ton of details about this car that are very cool. No disagreement. It's not a Ferrari.

If you wa you uh if you were only just listen to that audio, I encourage you to go watch that video. It's just on the main Ferrari social channel, which by the way, all of their videos are getting roasted in the comments about how bad they are. So I feel I feel bad. Um Uh but like that video is just on uh the main Ferrari social channel. So you can watch like Lewis and Charles like try to be excited about the car. Like it's just all over their faces.

Um, and then they're in the car and you know, they do a uh like hot laps in the car and it's very funny to see literal Formula One drivers have to pretend the car is shockingly fast. Because it's just like their Formula One drivers. Like it's not as fast as their their data. Day job. Right. It's not it's it's literally illegal for it to be as fast as their day job.

I don't know, guys. Like there's a lot of fast cars out there. Like you can watch them drive around Monaco in much faster cars. Um here's what I'll say I I actually disagree with you about the US C V thing. And I'll give you one tiny example. We have a Cadillac Vistic. It's the three row Cadillac EV SUV. It looks just like an escalade, like a baby escalade.

Everyone loves this car. Like we got a great deal on it at sort of the end of the Biden administration when all the t credits were flying and the dealers are trying to move all the cars because they thought the market was collapse. Great. We pay as much for that car as we did our old Jeep because it was such a great deal at the time. Everyone loves this car. Like

We park it and people are like, what's that? And like I'm like, it's electric. And they're like, oh. And that's really not the point of the story. The point of the story is But that is the point of the story. The it looks like an escalade but it happens to have a battery is the is the correct Everyone's into it because gas prices are out of control.

Right. And so like everyone's like, Oh, that's great. And now you use Vs are really cheap. But the real turn is we're about a year into having this car. Right. And Becky drove my gas car, which I never drive, which is like lives in the driveway for in like case of emergency. Like Start engine. Um, and we we just needed to be in different places for w in one of the rare occasions we needed to be in different places, and she drove my car.

And she came back and I was like, Was it fun? Do you have fun? She's like, Your car is basically a go-kart after driving this giant SUV. And I was like, Did you go fast? She's like, I didn't go fast. And in fact, I hate driving gas cars. Because I love driving the EV and I don't want to go back. And this is by and large what all the car executives will tell.

Right. That once you like live the lifestyle and you never go to the gas station anymore and you drive the car and you feel the acceleration and the instant torque and the blah blah blah blah blah, you're not gonna go back to a gas car. They just can't get enough people into the event.

And so like the Rivian R2, the big argument for this car, which is on its way out, uh plug Wasim, who is the head of Rivian Software, was just on decoder. We were talking about the R2, it's on the on the new platform. His whole argument is like once you have the mainstream car that looks like the SUV Americans wanna buy.

They will go into the car and then I will deliver them a software experience that's superior to the gas car, because it's a little computer and it can run Rivian assistant with the power of AI. Just like every episode of Dakota, we talked to the power of A. Yeah, I think two thirds of that is correct. And then you hit voice assistant powered user interface and the whole car explodes.

It all falls apart. But I I think you're what what you have really identified is people love Teslas because the software in Teslas is great. Right. The software experience of being in a Tesla, of having that all be one experience of over the year updates, this is why people love their Tesla. Most other car makers like it's electric and it has bad software. And that's the experience. And they don't want the other stuff. Maybe.

Maybe, but it's also it it's electric, it has bad software, and isn't it cool how much it looks like a spaceship? It's like n no. Yeah. People like Ferraris because Ferraris are hot, dude. Like this this car is many things it is not sexy. Like there is nothing sexy about the Ferrari Luce. Ferrari that w the like a fundamental fact of Ferrari is that it makes sexy cars, dude, like What was the last thing Johnny and I've made?

Terrific question. I will say I did have feelings when he grabbed the handle on the the center console thing and turned it. That's hot. Yeah. There are so many little details about this car that are sexy, but it is not a sexy car. What are you the iPhone for? Maybe. But you know, you mean you know how I feel about the iPhone 4. Uh like Apple design for the past, I don't know, five years, a decade has been totally sex. Yes. Yeah, for sure. But like yeah, and I I I think

I the idea that this is Johnny Ive high on his own supply, I actually think is maybe the Occam's razor explanation of why this car is the way that it is, both good and bad. Because there are, I think he he talked a lot. He did a long interview with Cleo Abram on her YouTube channel as part of this and

talked a lot about not wanting to give up on digital screens and and that kind of interactive interface, but also not wanting to have everything be a touch screen. And there are a lot of details in this car that are really cool mixes of analog and digital experiences, right? Like the key is a good example. You put the key and you push it down and he he got really excited about how the

the color of the key sort of moves over to the gear shift as a way of communicating like the car is now on. And there there there are little details like that all over the car that are genuinely very cool and interesting. And I think

If you look at Ferrari as sort of a a tip of the spear of car design and eventually this all trickles down into Camries, I don't know if that's actually how it works, but there's something potentially exciting there. But the whole in this case is much less than the sum of all of those things. And I think that's what people are really responding.

Yeah, it needs to look like a Ferrari. Like you know, the Johnny I have design aesthetic is it's inevitable. And the you know uh as I always say the limitations become the defining feature of the project. And here it's like Ferraris aren't supposed to have limits. Do you think it would have been more interesting in that respect if Johnny Ive had had to design a Camry that had to cost like a Camry as opposed to because in this case, this is the most expensive Ferrari ever. Like this is truly

No holds barred, do whatever you want. And I think th there are clearly some ways in which he got it right and some ways in which he got it wrong. But I think if you were like Johnny, you have to make a car that is thirty-five thousand dollars, it this might have been a vastly more interesting Oh, without question. Again, the limitations. Johnny I've overcoming constraint limitation is the superpower. Yeah.

And it is true of every product he's ever made that has been a hit, right? The the constraint and limitation of the first IMAC was the CRT display and he made that thing the star of the show. Yeah. And that just goes on through all of the products that

AirPods needed to have antennas in them. Now we have little stems. Like you you just see him do it every time. He makes the thing that makes the product design hard into the star of the show. And with Ferrari, usually the star of the show is the V twelve engine. Which you do not have in this case. So, like, what are you gonna do? Yeah. Right. Like I I think the constraint of a Toyota Camry would have been much more interesting. And and that was the promise of the app.

Uh, you know what a more interestingly designed car is? Like as we're speaking, uh pre orders for the slate truck have opened up, which is just basically like a An EV battery and motor in a box. Yeah, it's like barely a car. Yeah. It's like forty thousand dollars. And you're like, this is a fascinating design object because it is

so utilitarian and it is so designed for you to do whatever you want with. And you're like, oh, this is a much more interesting product because the the way it is designed is to not have any opinions at all, really.

And that I d you it it's funny, just like put the two things next to each other and see how people react. Maybe probably to the price of the slate truck. Sure. But also to the idea that you can like take off the roof and put on a different roof and make it whatever car you want. And like that's a lot different vibe than this blue bob blob is the future of fraud, right?

And represents the absolute pinnacle of car design. Right. Like there is a self satisfaction that comes with Ferrari that I think also kind of rubbed people the wrong way on this one. That is like, by definition of the fact that it's Ferrari, we are correct. Right. There's You have to thank everyone at first. I wonder.

Like imagine the meetings where they're like ro rolling out the social plan, they're like we're gonna get Lewis and Charl in and we're gonna do a social video and the social video producer's like, Guys, I don't I don't know we should do that. At some point they they forgot to put the car designer in a room with Johnny until it was too late. And then they're like, Oh God, he thinks he made a car. Yeah. It's honestly it's very possible. Mamma mia! Ha ha ha.

I'm curious to know by the way what all of you think of this car. I think, especially now that the the news has died down a little bit, everybody's had time to like look at the pictures, digest it. Um, if you love the luche. In particular, I want to hear from you. VergeCast at the Verge dot com eight six six verge one one. Tell uh tell me and I why we're wrong and why Johnny Ive is right. I I'm I'm genuinely curious.

Excited for Johnny I have to call. Like Steve from Detroit has to be like, look, it was inevitable Alright, we should take a break um and then we have a bunch of AI news to talk about. Svenska spel har nu lanserat en namninsamling för att tillfälligt ställa om klockan i sommar till så kallad fotbollstid. Syftet är att landslagets nattmatcher ska kunna ses. När alla är vakna. Herr-landslagets lagkapten Victor Nielsson Lindelöv, som själv ställt om klockorna hemma, kommenterar.

Nej, men jag måste säga att det är faktiskt ett klockrent initiativ av Svenska. Namningsamlingen finns på fotbolstid.nu. Svenska spel. AB Svenska Spel. Holders gräns 18 år. stadlinjen.se. All right, we're back. Uh Neil, I it's it's now time for us to talk about a thing we keep talking about, which is that most people seem to hate AI. And and that every time AI things happen, the overwhelming response is no thank you. Yeah. Please make it stop.

Um one interesting bit of data, we talked a lot about Google I.O. last week. The the all this new AI search stuff. Google is changing the search bar to make it an AI product in a very real way. Uh DuckDuckGo, a a search engine competitor that is sort of proudly not being overrun by AI. This is now a a marketing thing. Like there's this browser, the the Vivaldi browser that is all over all of my feeds now.

And its entire pitch is we are the non-AI browser. Um, and it's working. Like it's bananas. But anyway, DuckDuckGo said that its own iOS app installs went up by 33% week over week in the US. After this stuff came out, and there's just nothing to attribute that to except people are trying to run away from Google. And that Is going to be a very small number up 33% to another very small number for DuckDuckGo because Google won this market a long time ago and continues to own it. But like

the the attrition there is real and people starting to look for something else is real. I think leaving Google is one of the hardest user behaviors on the internet and people are starting to do it. So it it's interesting to pull apart iOS installs and search B. Right. So if you open the Google app on your phone and it's just loaded with prompts to use Gemini products and

Don't you wanna read tint your photos like bright blue because AI can let you do that now? Like maybe you go and install DuckDuckGo, but Google search might not be effective. And also the amount of DuckDuckGo installs was small, as you're pointing out. Right. So I I I see it. I'm very careful not to overread like what one number means in the context of how big Google search is.

Yeah. That's not to say I don't think Google search is getting weirder and goofier and It's less predictable, which I think is really bad. Yeah. Like the in the new intelligence search box can just lead you down infinite rabbit holes. Like you know the do you have this behavior where like you do a search and you kinda click one result and that leads you to another result and you kinda remember the pattern in your brain.

And so you're like, I need to recreate that pattern to get back to where I was going. The new Google search does not let you do that. No, it is much more whole cloth every time. random every time. Now it can like might make you an app. Like there's something about that change where, you know, they want it to be so intelligent and talk to you and multimodal that you can't pattern match your way towards like, I use these keywords to get here in this path.

I think they ought to change that. I I do think that's like beyond just the AI of it all, breaking that behavior is is dangerous for Google because then you can go get that anywhere. Yeah, the idea of when I search something, the same thing should probably happen every time. Yeah. Is such an interesting question because there's also a version of this like

a big thing that Google does, right, is make a lot of money when you do a bad job of searching. Because until now you've had to go back to the top and start over and and actually this has become

a huge problem for Google over the years because it had a lot of incentives to not be a very good search engine because you would do more queries. And everything at Google has always been about query growth. And one way to get you to do more queries is to not give you the correct answer the first time. Um But in this case, this idea of it feeling like a grab bag does just make the experience worse. Like I no longer go to Google

sort of confident in in what's going to happen. Right. Even if the answer was we're gonna have an AI overview for every single thing that you search and and then a bunch of links on the right side and then if you wanna make more stuff, if that was just the

sort of m most common denominator Google experience, that would make sense. It's not. You just you search and you just have no idea Do you have personal contacts turned on in your So the thing I've discovered with that is because it's constantly remembering other things you've searched and like reading your Gmail and doing all the personal context stuff, not only are the answers getting less predictable, they're getting more like confidently wrong about me.

And so, um oh, have you noticed Google also pretends it lives where you live? Oh that's interesting. No. Oh so maybe this is just a silly example, but we we swapped out our air conditioners for heat.

Um and so I'm like, you know, just Googling what model, like how does it work? Should I use my EcoBs with it? Like all this stuff. And by the end, it's like, you know, where we live in in Westchester County, like this is a great model. And then like the third search is like since you already bought those heat pumps, like I didn't buy shit. Like, what are you talking about?

Ha ha. You know, it's like w you're not my friend. Sure. Like I just need to get down the path. And there were some parts of it that were really useful, like spectacularly useful. Uh we have solar panels in the house now and we're gonna switch to these heat pumps. You know, gas prices are really expensive, like but we sized the solar panels before we had the thing. Can you run the math for me?

Like, am I gonna save money because the air conditioning is more efficient? Blah, blah, like real dad stuff. Yeah. Like no one in this house wants to talk to me about this at all, but Gemini does. You know, this is the promise of everything. Even sure that's true. Gemini wants to Gemini's like, you know, you and me, buddy, living in Westchester.

And it like did it. It like figured out the math for me and I checked it a bunch a bunch of different ways and it actually had gotten it right. And all this is really useful. But then the next time I ran a search, it was start it was just talking about this other interaction. Right. And like that's the personal context. So it's like even the other search, which in my mind is totally unrelated.

is like infected with my own history. And it like none of that you can see how it will get useful. Right. Sundar was just on decoder and he's like, these things are going to come together. Like the idea that you have the canvas where you make the apps and the AI mode in search where you get the answers, and then Gemini Spark, the agent platform. And so eventually you're gonna say, I'm looking for this, and it goes off and just buys it for you instead of showing you a search result.

or it books you the service appointment on your behalf or it makes you the vacation planning app and then you pick the places you want to go on what schedule and then it goes and books them for you. This is all obviously going to come But the thing you're going to do is what you're describing, it's you're going to destabilize the actual experience. It will be more random every time.

Yeah. Well and I think again, you're you're describing w what I think of as the uh this is the worst it will ever be fallacy, which is how everybody defends everything, right? Like Isn't it wild that this is the worst this is ever gonna be? Like as if the march of progress was linear and inevitable and and perfect forever and ever. Uh but what what Sundar Pittai told you, i it it cast another way is

We are running beta tests on every Google user on the internet until we figure out how to make this product actually good. We are going to subject you to the bad version of this in order to figure out how to make the good version. And that's what's happening. And I think that's what a lot of people are reacting to with these AI products is

You're you're actually telling me this product isn't any good. But you're saying you have to use it so that we can make it good. Right. Like because we can't unless we make you use it. So we are going to basically you know, sit you down and tape your eyes open so that you have to use this product so that we get what we need in order to make it good. And nowhere in that trade is Google today is a good product.

Did you see the clip where I showed Sundar all the search results? They don't they don't like it. When I do this and I I love doing it. Um and I That's Chromebook, right? Yeah. Yeah, it's it's it's just a useful search. Right? Like Google should know. Like if you are the company that makes Chromebooks, you should know which one is the best one. Like, you know, in a lot of ways, you should not need the web to tell you which one is the best one. Um and it's just a really commercial query.

Wirecutter built an entire business on the back of ranking for best Chromebook. Everybody wants to win that rank. We do it. Like everybody is. And there's you can put shopping links in there. So just how you organize a a page, a search results page for best Chromebook, like to me in my mind, just demonstrates a lot about the priorities of

And you know, so I I showed Sundar and he he he said this really interesting. He said that page is more opinionated than it should be. Like this AI result is more it because it just told me an answer, which is not the same answer as Wirecutter, which is not the same answer as Tom's guide. Like I found that really interesting, right? The the Google answer is different than the other. It told you a Lenovo laptop, right? I did. It was like an expensive one.

Yeah. It's also not the one it just tells me right now. Yeah. Weird, right? It says the Acer some some of the time. Yeah. Weird. It's it's weird, right? That like Google is not even consistent in knowing which was the best crime mode. This is not the important thing. I I recognize that it's a it's not a subjective answer, and you can have you can make that page a billion different.

But if you go watch the video of me interviewing Sundar, you see me hand him the phone and he no he knows it's coming um because I do it all the time, every time I talk to him. Um and he's like, great. Out of trillions of queries, we're going to look at this one. And then I asked him, like, is this good? And he's like, you know, we actually have a very scientific way of measuring this to make sure it's good. And like we do it statistically.

And I have just been thinking about that answer for a long time, right? That Google has reduced quality to some set of metrics that are in response to how people behave when they encounter the thing. Right? Like you show up in the search result. There's not a box that says, I think this sucks. There's just whatever you do next. Right. Right. You don't get to shout into the microphone. Like, it's weird that all the answers are different. There's just whatever you do next.

And somehow that's supposed to reveal like your emotional reaction to the design of this page, to how the page was constructed, to the idea that the AI overview confidently tells you a different answer depending on who you are, what part of the world you're in, or your own search history. There's no way for you to communicate that to God. And so Google's measuring all this stuff and they're saying no individual search result is like

indicative of the whole product because there's trillions of search queries and we have this like scientific process for measuring quality. But then you look at any individual search, okay, I can't actually tell you if this is good or bad. Yeah. Only in aggregate and only based on my next clip.

Do you have a sense of this is good or bad? And there's something about this AI world, it's what you're talking about, like it's bad until you tell us to make it good. And then there's me being like, I don't know that you can measure. This way. Yeah. If at all. Like, is this good? Are we having good experiences with these tools? Is not measurable. Based on the next click of billions of people.

No. Which is why you land on things like uh query growth based on the idea that if people do more Google searches, they must love Google, despite the fact that there's actually like a complete

logical leap in there that suggests that maybe if you'd done it correctly, I would have gotten the answer the first time and I wouldn't have had to do more queries. That like actually maybe success looks like me doing fewer queries. It looks like growth and ad revenue. And right, it's you you pick all of these things to manage again. Rather than How do we make sure the pages are good? Because that that involves some kind of like actual practical decision. And Google is

very aggressive about what it doesn't want on its pages. Right. Like and I think it's got increasingly vocal about the stuff it doesn't want on its pages. They're they're they're picking fights with SEO farms. Like they they've been fighting that fight loudly for years uh to varying degrees of success. But the idea of like what is this supposed to be, no one will ever tell you. And I I don't know that they know the answer. But if you think about it, like again, cast this out even further.

You and I both Google best Chromebook, right? The the next step of this according to Google is that it will buy me that Chromebook or that it should be able to, right? That I just say buy me the best Chromebook and it should appear at my door in two days. That is, that is everybody's idea of the future. If it's telling you and me different things.

Is that a is that a success or a failure? And why is it telling us different things? And and based on what criteria is it tell like the the all of this stuff is such a mess. Yes. Let me answer that in the the good way or the in the bad way. The good way, the positive vision for you Google Best Chromebook, and it determines A different answer for you and me, and then it goes off and buys you the the one that told you that it was the best. There's a positive vision for that, which is it.

Google has enough context about you. It knows how you use the web. It knows what apps and services you use. It is in your Gmail. Like it it has a sense of like what kinds of web pages you go to. Are you in Canva all day or are you just reading documents? Whatever thing that you're doing. It knows which Chromebook is best for you. Right. And that is actually a different answer than what Chromebook is best for me because I'm, I don't know, playing open web GL games.

I don't even know what that technology is anymore. It's not Open WebGL. Um, because I'm playing browser based games all day. Sure. In editing video in in like browser cap cut or whatever nonsense exists, right? Like um And so I have a different answer. And I need longer battery life and a faster processor, whatever it is. And so when I Google Best Chromebook, it's tailoring the answer to me.

I think that breaks people's fundamental expectations of what should happen when you begin the research process to buy it. Right. Like I ask you what the best Chromebook is and maybe you know me and you're like, I just tell everyone to get this. For two hundred dollars more you can buy a MacBook Air. Like end of story. But actually if you know me a little bit more, maybe that's a different answer and that's a different conversation you have with a person.

I think most people Google Best Chromebook and they expect to find like four different people or four different websites. Like doing the testing and saying why, and they get to read it and make their own determination, and that fills them with a sense of agency, and then like. And I don't think this is just about Chromebooks.

sort of this concept in marketing right now about like terminal products where everything is marketed is I did the research so you don't have to and I so I made the coffee maker. I made the last coffee maker you'll ever have to buy. And it's because like choice is overwhelming and everything is actually the same microwave from China. That's what this represents, like terminal market.

Right, like at the we're at the end of the line and Google's just gonna tell you which one to buy because there's only one choice anyway. And I I I think, you know, pendulums swing back and forth. Like maybe that's where we are now. It's not where we're gonna be in the future. And AI mode doesn't have an answer to that other world where actually you do want a lot of choices. So you you get to try on 50 different coats and see if that's the Chromebook that's best for you. Right.

It's also important to say that even the first thing you describe

Even if that's exactly the future you want, n not remotely close to being the case. Like this idea of you have perfect data about me so you can make correct purchasing decisions about me is it it can't tell you with any confidence what kind of toilet paper you like. Forget any of the rest of this. Like none of that is close to coming to pass. And this is what I mean again, we're we're being served

what everyone understands to be the bad version of this product because there's no way for them to build the good one otherwise. And no one has figured out how to ship just the good thing in the middle. Like there there are vanishingly few small scope good AI products, and there are infinite bad, hugely ambitious AI products. You don't think that YouTube translation of the Italian president was good? Listen, it's it's did it say a bunch of English words? It sh it sure did. It's it sure did. Um

Speaking of YouTube, actually, there's some there's some interesting YouTube stuff happening right now too. And this is uh another thing we keep talking about is this endless back and forth between the platforms which are desperate to get more and more AI content onto them, and users who are more and more interested in understanding what is and is not AI content and in many ways having it removed from their systems. Uh YouTube this week

took its AI labels that like this is i made with AI in a in some meaningful way, out of they were it was buried like two settings deep. You had to go into like the the provenance of the video in order to find out if it was AI and is now pulling it up so that on the page, either like as a an overlay on YouTube Shorts or actually under the player in main YouTube, it will have a little thing that says

I would argue that that's very good and correct and this is the right thing. Um, but can I read you a quote from YouTube's announcement and I want you to try and make sense of where this line is? Yeah. So this is from YouTube's announcement. It says by moving these labels to the ma onto the main stage, viewers get the context they needed a glance.

This is now the single label format for all photorealistic and meaningfully AI altered generated content on YouTube. For content that is unrealistic, animated, or slightly altered, viewers can find this disclosure in the expanded description. Neely, I would like you to explain to me where that line is, please. What is a photo? Ha ha. That's what it is. That's the question, right? Like That you could drive a truck through the loopholes in that paragraph. Slightly altered is very good.

What what counts as unrealistic? So there are rules. I will say there are rules. You know, the big photo agencies have been dealing with this in the context of Photoshop for dozens of years.

Um, you know, there are lots of photography awards that have rules about how much you're able to edit the photo and you have to submit, you know, you have to testify that you didn't submit the photo. So like if you are a getty photographer and you go to some event and you sh shoot a photo of some newsworthy thing, you're not allowed to use a lot of Photoshop.

You're allowed to crop it. You're allowed to do some amount of just like brightness and contrast editing, but you basically have to leave that photo.

Right. You're not you're not allowed to do much. Right. And these are Getty's rules forever. You can just go look at them online. These are also the rules for the Times. Um if you're like a photo nerd, you will notice New York Times photos have insane amounts of vignette on them because that is the only thing they allow. That's interesting. Is that really why? Yep.

It's just like every New York Times photo is vignetted to Hell and Back because that's the one knob that they give the photo editors. And so they just turn it up because it's cool. Like I think vignettes are cool. My personal photos are vignetted to Hell and Back because I think that's a cool look.

But there are no other choices at the times, really. Um, so all the photos are vineyarded. It's uh it's it's stylistic, it's cool. So here, maybe YouTube has some rules, right? What does it mean? What's the line between unrealistic or photorealistic? You can make hyper-real photos. You can I can turn up the saturation in HDR on a normal photo of a sunset and make it look nothing like reality in in two clicks.

So I I I'm guessing YouTube has some rules. The challenge is if you're getty, you're in a repeat game with a bunch of photographers you pay money to. And so everyone starts to understand the rules of the game and everyone has aligned incentives to play the game.

It's the same for the Times and its photographers. If you're a YouTube, you do not have repeat relationships with people to whom you pay money. In fact, you pay almost no one any money. And so everyone has massive incentives to break the rules to make the video of the president doing something dumb and not have the label. Right. And this is where like YouTube has to auto label this stuff and they're starting to roll that out.

And I, you know, I remain ultra skeptical that any of these auto label or systems or auto metadata systems are gonna work just based on the fact that YouTube already has content ID and people upload full movies to YouTube all day and all night. Yeah. Yeah, none of this stuff works. And then I wonder, you know, th this is gonna launch a million conspiracy theories from people who are wondering if my thing gets labeled AI, what does it do to the ranking algorithm? And do

Well people yell at me'cause I made AI stuff. Right. Right. And like Instagram rolled out AI labels ages ago and they took them away. They were auto detecting metadata from Photoshop. that was AI generated, even if it was just like denoise or whatever, like generative fill, which everyone uses. Yeah. They was detecting that and putting the AI label on the photos and people were screaming at the photographers and Instagram took it away.

Because everyone hates AI. So YouTube is like cruising into it. Yeah, I mean i again, I I'm just so fascinated by this idea between you have Neil Mohan running around saying that actually what we're gonna do is put more and more AI tooling into the creator studio, right? That it's you can now make an AI background of your short with two clicks and you can you can dub everything with AI and you can you can do all sorts of things with AI.

But we actually are gonna have to put this this what amounts to a warning label on. That's how people are going to experience this. uh is as a warning label that this thing was made with AI. And I d increasingly don't know how a platform or a user of that platform is supposed to hold both of those ideas in their head.

that like what you you're giving me is an infinite new canvas on which to make cool creative stuff that we all agree is so rad. And then you're gonna put a like Surgeon General's warning on the video after I make it about how I made it with AI. How do those two things continue to coexist? It just doesn't make sense to me.

The real problem these companies are gonna have, all of them are gonna have it. Maybe YouTube will get there first, but I know Instagram and TikTok are gonna have this problem, is that they want the advertisers to make the ads with it. And there's a Who cares about the label?

Well, it's not who cares about the label. It's if you if you're the person who says, I don't want to see AI stuff, but they've gone and pushed all the advertisers to make infinite amounts of creative targeted specifically to people using AI, blah, blah, blah, blah, all the stuff they're talking about. And you're like, I don't want AI. They have to make a big decision about showing it to you.

And I you can assume which decision they'll make, but they're gonna piss off all the users who have said, I don't want And they are pushing all the marketers to using AI tools to make more and more creative. Like that's just where this industry is going. So at some point they're like, we can auto-detect it, we'll label it, and then we'll give you the switch to not see it. But the economics of their businesses are headed in.

Yeah. That's a good theory. Um, all right. Do you do you want to talk about the Pope before we switch off of AI stuff? Do you have any do you have any Pope thoughts? I know somebody who was at the encyclical and they uh came back. Cool. Uh yeah, it was my buddy Steve from Chicago. Yeah, Chicago Pope. Um uh and they just they said the Pope was uh very fired up about it being Christendom's responsibility to make us more human. Which was uh interesting. I was like, what about the rest of us?

All right. I'm good. Cool. Uh but I get it, he's the Pope. I said that to our team and everyone was like, buddy, he's the Yeah. Of course that's what he said. What else is he gonna say? Um but it was funny. I it was a it was a tech friend who Yeah. I think the the document is fascinating and I think it it's actually been interesting to see the way that it's being read because

the idea that it essentially boils down to is humans matter and we should continue to remember that humans matter, even as AI continues to be a powerful technology. And the fact that A, that's kind of a controversial take in some circles. And that B, most people figured out that that's the message, I think has been really fascinating. Right. Like the there is a fundamental

a humanity to the way a lot of people talk about AI and the way a lot of people talk about what it's gonna do to people's jobs and to the the way that our economy works and the way that we live our lives. Like this fundamental disregard for the fact that people are people and that actually people matter. And if you don't take that as a foundational belief of the world that people matter.

uh you wind up down a lot of really dark roads and I think a lot of people in AI are running down those roads right now. And so it's really interesting to see the Pope be like, forget all this AGI nonsense. Like stop worrying about any like we have to agree that people matter.

Or else we're lost before we even start having this conversation. I think it was like forty it was forty two thousand words to say that. I think is it was actually pretty interesting. And released alongside a co founder. Yeah. And then a day later he got in the Fari Luce. Ha ha ha ha! There's a video of him sort of gently getting into the driver's seat that just uh makes me laugh every single time I see it. I don't know why. It just kills me. Look I'm not like uh you know I'm not Pope Pil.

Although Chicago Pope rules and I'm still trying to buy the parking lot of the church behind my house, so if Yeah. You know, if you're out there. Um I don't know who's out there, but if you're out there But like the the idea that you need an external source of morality in a time of extreme amorality is like that's what the church is for. Like

That's the role that popes play and he's leaning into it. It just it it strikes me as particularly odd that like the world turns to the Pope to figure out what to do about AI is just

It uh just like I don't know. What was the last papal encyclical that you remember? Like, what are we doing? Listen, my dad was a pastor growing up. You don't you don't wanna you don't wanna go with me on encyclical study. I can do this all day. Fair enough. Uh you know the guy who can sell me the parking lot behind me.

Um, one other data point that that we should just mention before we get off on uh into the lightning round, um, is this interview that Uber's president and COO Andrew McDonald gave this week where he he said a little bit the quiet part out loud, right? We've talked a lot on the show about this like relentless run towards token maxing and everybody has to use more in Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, being like, well,

w I I don't trust any engineer who's not using five hundred thousand dollars worth of tokens every year. Um and Andrew McDonald, the Uber COO, basically said, We are not seeing the connection between AI usage and actual productivity.

Um and let me just read you a chunk of this quote. He says that link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and okay, now we're actually producing twenty-five percent more useful consumer features.

I think over the coming quarters and years, maybe that will become clearer, but I think today it's hard, even if some of the underlying metrics are trending in a really astronomical direction. What he's saying there is people are doing a lot of shit and none of it adds up to anything.

Yeah, that's right. I I think it's funny in the context of all the tech layoffs we're seeing, where they're laying off product managers and designers and all the engineers are gonna report to Jack Dorsey directly. Like Right. That's what the product managers and designers are for. Yeah. Right. Brian Chesky is running around being like everybody has to be a full stack engineer all by themselves. Yeah.

It's funny because I, you know, I I know Brian and like his whole thing is you have to put he doesn't have product managers. He has product marketing managers, the same as Apple. And he's like the person who invents the new features has to be the person who brings it to market so that they know what people actually want.

And like you can quibble with whether or not Airbnb is successful in that. But like I totally agree with that as a theory. Sure. Right? Like this is obviously very successful for Apple. Apple doesn't have traditional PMs, they have marketing managers. Like Greg Josreact is the product marketing manager.

Like that's how it works. And all these companies are like, we're getting rid of all of the people whose job it is to understand the users and design things that people know how to use. And engineers just ship stuff. And you're like, Yeah, it didn't work. Yeah, surprise. Yeah. Like, sure, we shipped zero useful features because we've refactored the code base that a bunch of senior engineers have been complaining about for 10 years, but that didn't do anything for anyone.

Yeah. I'm excited to see that uh this is you know, as the guy who hosts a podcast about org charts, we are on the cusp of some of the weirdest org charts in history. And I I think that's neat in the sense that every it's all been the same for a long time. Like every company is kind of a copy of Google in like very real ways. Uh But boy is it gonna be chaos.

Yeah. Yes. And the idea that any one plus claude code equals every skill imaginable at a company, we are very quickly going to realize is not.

Yeah. Um but yeah, anyway, I just thought that was an interesting quote. Oh there was a lot of talk about that quote and it's just one data point, but I think I think we're gonna hear more stuff like that. That's like what am what am I spending all these tokens to actually accomplish and ship that benefits our company and our users? You know, the flip side of that is even Sam Altman is like the real differentiation is tape.

Yeah. Right. Which means like you have a vision of what a feature a good thing is and then you make that. And it's like none of these comp all these companies are firing the people with taste. Mm-hmm. Yeah. It's a it's a y you are right that the org charts are about to get a lot flatter and a lot weirder and then we're gonna invent a whole new like

You know McKinsey is out there just being like, we have to invent a new paradigm and ship it to everybody. Like, what is the open office plan of the next phase of AI? I don't even I don't even know. Um all right, we should take a break and then we're gonna come back and do a lightning round. Hej, det är jag från riksbyggen här. Har det svårt att fokusera på den här påtenen. Måste fixas i BRF-styrelsen. Ja, du vet, budgetar som ska hållas.

byten som ska planeras, energikostnader som sticker i höjden, All right, we're back. Hypedesk is off this week, which means it is time, Ne Lai, once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I assume he's just around doing stuff. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Ah, beautiful. And and thematically appropriate. Why is everything so popey? It is so popey. WHAT IS GOING ON?! I think Chicago Pope would approve of that. That theme comes from Scott Williams. Scott, thank you for for sending.

You have a translation. Uh it translates to God, the machine of Brendan. From the depths my heart is grieving. And then I believe Brendan Parsocks. Brendan Car sucks. Very good. Uh, this is a little one. This is a tiny little Brendan car this week. And there's no way to say this other than uh our man Brendan saw fit to issue a full press release from the Federal Communications Commission about a hat. That's what happened.

I saw a tweet about a hat. Is this a press release about a tweet about a hat? Yes. Ha ha ha. I'm just gonna read you the headline of the press release. From the Office of Chairman Brendan Carr. FCC Chairman Carr presents first Build America hard hat. Also for some reason he's put Build America Hardhat in single quotes, which makes no sense to me. Um Wait, so the the name of the hat is the Build America Hard Hat. It's not the Build America hard hat. It's the Build America Hard Hat hat.

Yes. Brandon Brendan, like use the AI to figure out your quote usage. I don't know what you're doing. Anyway, so Brendan loves to climb a tower. He loves to wear a hard hat. He loves to pretend he is a a tower worker in particular. Um, and he loves the crew. You know, the crews out there laying fiber and doing stuff. He does not love the crews to go out in the world and lay fiber for rural Americans for cheaper prices and faster speeds. He just loves the crews.

But the crew is being brutally exploited by our nation's telecom monopolies is of no concern to him. He loves the crew. Sure. I love the cruise. No follow up questions. Yeah, exactly. Like, do I want you to be paid more or lay more fiber? Not at this time, but I love the cruise. So he's always out there climbing a tower, wearing a hat. And so he issued a press release. He he decided that he would give out hard hats as awards Presumably to people who already have hard hats for work.

This is a weird award to give, if you just think about it. Like it's a s ceremonial hard hat. Anyway, there's this guy, Philip Morrow, uh Hurricane Helene, which was devastating. Destroyed connectivity and roads in his area. Philip and his crew waded into the broad river and hiked three miles. uh from Shiminyrock to Bat Cave, and he pulled conduit through the river and restored connectivity to Chimyrack. This is great. I very that It's kinda badass.

Honestly. Above and beyond. Like and uh Dude in a kayak just just pulling coax, like that kind of rule. Uh and so to reward him He has been presented the first Build America hard hat, which is obviously a story about Brendan Carr having a type of hat that he rewards to infrastructure workers instead of making sure they get paid living wages and have health. But he got a hat, and in fact the hat is really about Brendan and issuing a hat.

The press release is FCC Chairman Carr presents first Build America hard hat, not heroic telecom worker restores connectivity to chimney rock. And it as a result is getting paid. You know what I mean? The press release is about the giving of the hat, not the heroic thing the guy did. You see what I'm saying? Oh brother. Even the subheadline of the press release doesn't have the guy's name in it. It is still about Brendan. Visited cruise.

He visited the crews opening a new cell tower to restore and expand Internet connectivity. And it's like, No, it's about the guy who dragged the conduit through the river. That's what the that's what the press release should be about is not you putting it stickers on a hat. Anyway, he's a real dummy. He can't help but make it about himself. Uh certainly he should be working harder to get our heroic infrastructure workers paid more and in and not.

Forcing every telecom company to cancel its diversity programs, because you know who the infrastructure workers are? They're the people of America, broadly serving the people of America. Instead, we're handing out hacks. Uh, Brendan, if you can defend any of these actions or you can explain how you intend to get our nation's heroic infrastructure workers paid more and have better benefits, including better healthcare, you're welcome to come on the show uh where I think you will lose.

Straightforwardly. Anyway, that's been Brennakar's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. Can I just say one more thing before we get off of this? Brendan, in addition to all this, posted a ninety second long video about what is happening. Never hands the man the hat. Ah in no part of the video is anyone other than Brendan holding this hand. You know there's only one hat. He's gonna present the same hat to everybody.

I really very early on, I forget who it was, but somebody described the the Trump administration as m mostly just a very sophisticated merch operation. Yeah. And I think that's not It's a hype house. Exactly right. They're they're they're they're running like the world's greatest SEO farm. That's that's just ridiculous. Okay. I have two lightning round items for you. Beginning with um Would you like to spend a bunch of money on meta products for a bunch of features that you don't really

So th I'm being slightly disingenuous, but I think this is fascinating. So Meta is is starting to launch uh this has now been widely reported and confirmed that Meta is getting ready to launch uh subscriptions for most of its products. You're gonna be able to get uh Instagram plus, Facebook Plus, and WhatsApp plus, which are in fact different products. But then there's also a full meta one plus that rolls all this stuff up together. Um

The idea seems to be sort of a freemium feature set in a bunch of cases. Like you'll you'll be able to change the messenger app icon if you subscribe. Uh you'll be able to have your Facebook story last 48 hours instead of 24 hours.

You'll be able to search for the particular viewers in your stories, which is a thing people wanted for a really long time, right? Like thousands of people see your story. You want to be able to search to see if somebody saw it. Um, this is a feature that is very controversial and now you can pay to have it. Um

All of this is fine, right? Like I think to some extent this is like normal behavior when you're not growing super fast. You make people pay for more features. It's fairly normal. This is what happens. Uh it's not all that far off from like the Discord Nitro model where you sort of get the basics for free and then some neat add-ons.

The thing I think is most interesting is and I think is is frankly the real business here for Meta, is they're rolling out the same kinds of opportunities to creators and businesses. Um, so you can now get meta one essential, uh, which gives you a a s a meta verified badge. Like this is just straight out of the X playbook, right? Like

We're going to make you pay for what you thought were normal features available to you. But then for$50 a month, you can get Meta One Advanced, which will, among other things, make you show up higher in certain. Yeah. You can now just straight up pay for visibility on meta platforms. This is just this is just the the most naked pay us to continue to exist on this platform play you could possibly imagine.

This is just pure intritification, to borrow the phrase from Corridactor, right? They they have distribution monopolies and now they're, you know, the the and I mean classic intritification. I most people hear that word and they just mean the thing's getting worse and I don't like using it. His Corey's specific definition, which he's talked about with you on the VergeCast before, is that first you squeeze the consumers and then you squeeze the businesses.

And th now they're squeezing the businesses. So like, Oh, you still want customers? You gotta pay us money to access your own custom Cl like this is the heart and soul of intritification. I think these distribution monopolies will not last. People rebel against the idea that everything on your feed is fake because it's paid there or it's put there by clip form, which is another episode of the show you just did with Mia, like that is coming to its conclusion.

Yeah, I mean, did you read that New York Mag piece that went kind of mini viral a week ago or so? Everything I read the the V is fake. Yeah, like me as pieces the the clippening is is very good. There's like th this sort of increasingly mainstream idea that um actually nothing in my feet is real. And I think people have been feeling that for a while and are starting to understand

how bought and paid for your feed is to the point where I think it's it people are gonna start to tune out. Like I I use TikTok less and less because it has gotten to the point now where one out of two things on my feed is a a TikTok shop thing. Yeah. For whatever reason, a lot of mine is candy. And I say for whatever reason. I bought a bunch of candy on the TikTok shop. Like I did this to myself. What are you Doing man.

There was a time where you could buy Swedish candy on the TikTok shop for like pennies on the dollar. Unbelievable. Uh that that those days are unfortunately over for me. I I like TikTok less now, and it is it is now blindingly obvious and becoming increasingly understood.

how these systems work. And so for me, it's like if I'm meta, I'm looking at this as fifty dollars a month. This isn't gonna last forever. We're losing this thing anyway. We have to squeeze every dollar out of it we can on the way down. And so we're gonna make people pay

to reach their audience. Already people believe this to be true, right? Like we we hear this from creators and advertisers all the time that they're now being told that to get the reach you used to be able to get organically, you now have to pay. That actually the only way to reach your whole audience is to boost your stock. to get in front of them because we control the knobs and we control the algorithms. This is just making that m straightforward to pay for. Yeah. I mean

It's gonna work for a minute until it doesn't work. You know, like Instagram already is hyper commercialized. Yeah. And they will be the first to tell you that all the sort of organic activity Instagram happens in DMs. Yep. So fine. Right. You you wanna promote your T V show.

And you want people to send clips of the TV show and DMs to one another, fine. Like, but there's just something about this that Everyone feels the pressure, everyone feels the screws tightening, and they that doesn't last forever.

I think that's right. And especially th there's one other feature that I I didn't mention here, which is that uh now if you pay, you can see a quote mini preview of stories. I'm not completely clear on what that means, but you can see them without showing up as a viewer.

Uh, and there is something here that breaks a fundamental contract of Instagram. If I can now watch your story without you being able to know that I watched your story. Yep. And and some something changes. And there it even says that posters will be notified that this feature exists and that when you post, people might be able to watch you don't see it. But like you you've now destroyed an important part of why people liked stories.

But David, think of the Drake verses we're gonna get out of this. You're right, it's worth it. I would I would pay$2.99 just for that. They should charge whatever they want and Drake will pay that money. That's that's a good thing. By the way, if you don't understand that reference, what I'm trying to point out is that the song Hotline Bling is entirely about Drake using Instagram. Mm-hmm. Also Drake, legendary DM slider.

Do you see what I'm saying? Like just think about what uh someone saw my story, but I don't know who it was. Think about what that's gonna do that man's brain. Like this is Ha ha. From now on, you should assume that Drake has seen your story, is what Neil Eye is saying. Anytime you post a story, you should assume Drake has been. David, I'm hot now and I know Drake is coming for Alright, what do you got? Oh I have the nerdiest gotcha channel.

Compared to that, this is like this is some nerd stuff. This is the this is what you get on the VergeCast. Uh you get culture and technology. That's the whole promise of the the thing that we make. This is Sony Braviacore, we're ending the podcast. It is not Sony and Bravia Core, but it is Sony Bravia. Okay. They do come with Sony Bravia Cor, which is the highest bit rate streaming you can get outside of a collidescape, which review I am told is forthcoming.

Well. Bye. Sony is uh they put out the Bravia seven two and the Bravia nine two, which are horrible names. Mm-hmm. Because they're not really twos, they're the first generation of Sony's new RGB LED backlighting. Which is the f probably the future of every T V that isn't Really? Yes. Explain. So if you think about just like T V technology, my theory is that if you pay attention to display technology, you can see the few.

Because everything in our world is made of displays. And if you know how displays work, you can see what kind of products can be built, and then you can see the few.

So we've had OLEDs forever. OLEDs are in our phones or they're in every kind of device. And OLEDs, as I'm sure the VirgCast audience knows, all of the little dots make their own light. Like all the pixels are their own little LEDs and they make their own light. And that's why you get perfect blacks, because you're gonna turn them all over. Right. Every other kind of TV has had some kind of backlight system.

Right. So you got an L C D panel that makes the color and then you've got literally, in the case of the oldest TVs Um you've got fluorescent lights back there, just shining light through the pixels. And that's what you get. And so you don't get true blacks, you get grays. And then the next turn was LED backlights. So you got rid of the fluorescent tubes, you added LEDs, you can control the dimness of those a little bit better. You get slightly better black.

Then you added uh local dimming LEDs. So you made a grid of LEDs behind the the the screen and you could turn them on and off. Right. So you could have you could get something like perfect blacks where the LEDs were turned off. Then you add like lots and lots of them and you get like mult like thousands of zones of local denning. And so you you kind of you're reapproximating OLED in one way. Finally, now here at the end. We're getting RGB LED TVs where the backlights are have their own color.

So you're sending colored light through the colored panel to make even brighter, more vibrant colors. So you can outshine OLEDs, you can get way brighter than OLEDs, and you get more vibrant colors, you can get more colors. You can get not quite the contrast, you can't get true black. But you get this like rich ultra saturated color because the back line itself is RGB color.

So instead of shining white light through a green pixel to make green, I'm shining green light through a green pixel to make better green. G yes, that's like more or less the case. Interesting.

There's like problems with this. Like you get color crosstalk, you can get some noise. Sony says it solved all of it, but the idea is you just get the most vibrant color possible because you're sending colored light through the colored L. And if I understand this is cheaper because you still have a backlight, thus you don't need millions of individual lit pixels.

So the problem right now is that they are not cheaper. So John Higgins, who is our TV reviewer, um reviewed the first TCL one, which is really expensive. These Sony's, um, the 65 inch is 2600, you can get an ol a 65-inch OLED on sale for.

So they're still not much cheaper. They will obviously get cheaper over time in a way that OLEDs have just sort of remained around the same price. But you get bigger, brighter color. Like if you're a sports fan, this is the way to go. You just get brighter color in a way that OLED can't do. And that's great for sports and great for action and all this stuff. There are there are reasons yet now.

But we these are the first ones. John gave him an eight. Um there are flaws with them because they're first generation. But this is Sony's bet on the future of T V display technology. And I'm paying a lot of attention to it because this this potentially is how we do really bright, really vibrant displays across a number of applications where you you can't put an OLED for all kinds of reasons or you want more bright.

And I I think there's something here. I'm still an OLED person, you know. I still uh my A ninety five L I still think is the best TV ever made. Um, but you can just see how much brighter and more vibrant the T V is and the way that John talks about it, he's like, Oh, there's There's something here that will attract everyone because people are attracted to brightness. They're not attracted to like a Like that's the brightest one. So Sony can make the brightest one with Sony's picture processing.

I don't understand about it. If it can do the brightest one that is like approachably closer to having some of the OLED features. That's the That seems like a huge win. That's the idea is that you'll get you'll get some of the black levels because you have the the massive m local dimming in the background, but you'll get brighter colors and more. Okay, that's exciting. I'm telling you,you know me,I love a TV I my what's this gonna mean for my frame T D?

I I have nothing but bad news about your friends you do. God. Yeah, I my my whole life is full of nothing but bad news about my frame TV. Uh except that it's not a Roku, which is pretty exciting right now. Have you seen this new this is a total diversion, but have you seen the new Roku homepage that just came out? No I'm not. So Roku's home screen uh used to just be a wall of apps, right? There there would be the big ass ad on the right and then the left was just a grid of apps.

Now they're splitting that so that at the top it's it's content, right? It's supposed to be like movies and shows you want to watch. And then they have a a row of apps they think you might want to open and then more stuff. And then you have to scroll down even further to actually get to the grid of app.

And this seems like a good idea in theory, because you're like, Oh yeah, sure, just take me to the show I wanna watch. Don't make me go to the app and then to the show that I wanna watch. This is a thing I've been advocating for for a very long time.

There are two problems with this theory. One, Roku hates you and would just love to fill every single one of those spaces with advertising and is just utterly uninterested in making a good user experience for you. Um, thing number two is there is no version of this that is a perfect system. So, like this is the thing actually that annoys me the most about.

the frame TV is I open it up and it has that continue watching panel. But it's from like a random smattering of apps that I open sometimes. And so it's like Netflix is not on there. HBO Max doesn't show up. But like, do you want to see the last thing you were watching on Peacock five months ago?

Here it is. It's like the this is you've you've one third solved this problem and by doing so actually made the user interface vastly more confusing. Uh And Roku is like I have a Roku TV here in the basement that I I use occasionally, uh, and I I got opted into the beta of it, I guess, and was immediately like, I am no longer interested in using this television. Every time update, something catastrophic.

And they add more ads. Like ev every time Roku does anything, it's to put more ads in front of you. And they do not care about how you feel. I'm so sorry. I mean that's more in shodification too. Like straight up.

Yeah. Um, all right, I have one more for you and then we should get out of here. This is just um David's occasional everything is getting more expensive update. Uh the prices are too damn high is the the subtitle of this section of the podcast. Um Valve raised the price of the Steam Deck by two hundred dollars. That's brute.

Valve, you know, cites all the things that everybody cites. It's this is about the memory shortages and the chip shortages and all this stuff is more expensive and harder and more complicated to get than ever. All of that is true. But like the the thing we have said a bunch of times on this show is It's all gonna get worse before it gets better and it it just continues to get worse. Yeah, brutally bad.

Everything everywhere is getting more expensive. And Sean Hausser uh wrote a really great piece. pointing out basically this marks the end of a certain kind of era of technology. Uh, he was talking about it with handheld consoles in particular because there was this sort of beautiful moment where it was like, Oh my gosh, we have an increasingly mature smartphone chipset that can do more and more. These things are very powerful. We're able to make

would amount to full powered handheld gaming consoles for a few hundred dollars. And they were starting to be everywhere. Like companies you can't pronounce that you've never heard of were making pretty capable handheld gaming machines. This was like a a big future of Windows if they could ever figure out how to make the software. Like this is going to be a thing.

And this has now been absolutely systematically priced out of being compelling at all. Yeah. And I I think we're we're about to see a lot of those things happen. Right. Like there was a really great piece I read the other day about how uh cheap phones are a thing that don't exist. You just can't buy a cheap smartphone and that in huge parts of the world that Hugely, hugely problematic because there are billions of people who rely on cheap phones and cheap internet access.

to live their lives. And those phones aren't literally aren't being produced anymore because the financial side of it doesn't work for anybody. So there's like there are just bands of product. That are just ceasing to exist because the the the price of it doesn't make any sense anymore. Yeah. And there is no sign that this is getting better any time.

I've been having conversations with people who are like really into politics and they all want to talk to me about data centers. Or data centers the big issue in the midterms.

AI and you know, I I I love to say the products aren't good enough and maybe the products be good enough and that'll change people's attitudes about data centers. Everyone wants to talk to me about this. And that's fine. And maybe data centers will be the big issue the midterm. People can't afford video game consoles is like right there. Right. You made it hard for people to play video games.

or be excited about buying new handhelds or upgrading their gaming PCs or whatever it is, it's gonna be right there. It's like right there next to gas prices. And I think people forget how pervasive video games are. And how pervasive cheap smartphone supply chain products are.

Right. Like everything in your life is basically a smartphone. Like everything's an Android tablet. We had that C of uh Scutio on Decoder, Adam. Really cool. You know, they're making like military drones and first responders. So we got really into the weeds of like working with the government and the military and building technology and At the end he let me fly one of their drones. Oh cool. Um

And I did one that was like totally remote. You know, it was in California. We were in New York, and I did it on the laptop. And then I did one, their indoor drone, just on their controller. And their controller is legitimately a controller with just a Samsung phone in the middle and kiosk.

And this is like the cutting edge drone company. And he was like, Yeah, it's just easier. Like we're gonna make our own controller. It's basically an Android tablet. But like right now we can just buy Samsung phones and put them in kiosk mode and like the it was like built in. It was like seamlessly integrated, but it was just obviously an Android.

Right. Like he booted it up and it said Android on it in that way. And he was laughing. He's like, basically everything's an Android tablet. You just have to have the patience to want to build your own. But if you're busy, you just like go take one off the shelf.

And that that's the era that's coming to an end. Yes. Where it's like, oh, you can just take for granted that an Android tablet exists as a computer that can run whatever device that you're actually interested in. Yeah, there is just none of that left. Can I just tell you the how this has affected me personally this week? Yeah. Um Double O seven First Light came out, the new James Bond video game, is by all accounts

Fabulous. Everybody loves it. I love a James Bond game. I will even play a shitty James Bond game, and I have played many. The only console I have right now that will play it is a Switch 2, uh, which I bought before it got more expensive. So I legitimately was like, okay, I this is a game I will play enough to be worth buying a PS5. So I find I will bite the bullet and go buy a PS5. Did you know the PS5 is six hundred and fifty dollars now? What the hell did that happen? What are we doing?

They've raised the price. I went back and found this out. They raised the price twice over the past year. Sales have plummeted as a result. Uh it's si I g I'm not spending six hundred and fifty dollars on a PlayStation five. I now have to wait several months until this thing come to the switch. And it sucks and I hate it and I blame everybody. But also if you i if you have first light and I can come to your house and play it, please let me Yeah.

That's brutal. Did you look at used ones or are those going up too? They have gone up there. They're out there. Uh, and I've I'm that may be where I end up. But even the prices of those have gone way up. Like it's not that much cheaper to buy a used one anymore. That's not what's supposed to happen to consoles over the course. No, the PS five is like

Many years old now. Yeah. We should be done with this. That's great. Makes me sad. Yeah. Anyway, everything keeps getting more expensive, which is why my advice continues to be go buy the two expensive things now, because I really think it's only going to get worse. That's some real some real Jim Kramer advice to end the Verge Castle. Whatever the top of this is, it does not feel like we've hit it yet. Yeah. Uh but also Just you know, don't buy things. It'll be fine. Yeah.

Uh all right. We should get out of here. Uh Two bits of business. One Monday is daily verge cast begins. Uh you're gonna be around a bunch on the show, including obviously on every Friday episode. Uh but you also have this other podcast. What's on Decoder next week?

Dakota next week is the CEO of the recording academy, Harvey Mason Jr., the guy who runs the Grammys. Boy, did we get into our feelings about AI and music. Yeah. You're not you you're not supposed to be able to win a Granny if you use AI, but AI is everywhere in music, so he's got a real real puzzle to solve. Oh, that's fun. I like that. We're also gearing up for all of our WWDC coverage. That's in two weeks.

We're like deep in developer conferences and it's Computex next week. It's build next week. We got a lot going on. It's gonna be it's gonna be insane. Um the AI things just keep happening and the people keep hitting them and we will be here talking about it. Uh remember you can subscribe to The Verge for all of our ad-free podcasts. Um, I will tell you, maybe more than any of our other shows, Daily VergeCast is going to be

better with no ads. We are like working very hard to make sure that we make the best version of it, the ad-free show. Uh and I I I think it will be worth subscribing for just for that reason alone. But you can also get all of our other shows ad-free. have thoughts and feelings and want to get in touch with us about anything, you can always email us vergast at the verge.com.

Or call the hotline 866-Virge11. We also have more hotline space in a daily verge cast world, which is a thing I'm very excited about. Until then, the VergeCast is Verge Production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you. See you on Monday, Neil.