Samsung's thin, big, boring AI phones

Nilay, David, and The Verge's Allison Johnson run down all the biggest news from the latest Samsung Unpacked. The S25 Edge had everyone excited, but the other new Galaxy S25 models feel a little familiar. Then, The Verge's Lauren Feiner updates us on the many goings-on in the first days of the new Trump administration, from the TikTok ban delay to the executive orders on citizenship and AI. Finally, in the lightning round, David and Nilay talk about Netflix's price increase, smart-home standards, and more. Further reading: This is the Samsung Galaxy S25 Edge Samsung Galaxy S25 and S25 Plus hands-on: more of the same Samsung Galaxy S25 vs. S25 Plus vs. S25 Ultra: specs comparison Here’s what Samsung’s first Android XR headset looks like in person Samsung and Google are developing AR glasses together Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra stylus: back to boring basics Samsung Galaxy S25 Ultra hands-on: smoothing out sharp edges Samsung claims its new Galaxy S25 Ultra glass can survive head-high drops on concrete Google Gemini now works across multiple apps in a single prompt The Stargate Project is a $500 million AI data center plan for OpenAI The United States Digital Service is now DOGE — here’s what it was responsible for. Vivek Ramaswamy steps down from DOGE Trump signs order refusing to enforce TikTok ban for 75 days Trump says he’s open to Musk or Ellison buying TikTok TikTok’s service providers still risk billions in penalties for bringing it back online Bluesky and X launch new video feeds amid TikTok uncertainties Instagram announces a blatant CapCut clone Apple says it’s following the law by removing TikTok from the App Store Sen. Tom Cotton warns TikTok’s service providers of “ruinous liability” for hosting the app. Two lawmakers introduce a bill to repeal the TikTok ban. Trump is absolutely going to make ByteDance sell TikTok or shut down again. Netflix is raising prices again YouTube Premium gets more experimental features that can now be tested all at once Here’s the tech that could turn millions of Zigbee light bulbs into motion sensors with a single update Samsung is bringing ambient sensing to SmartThings Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to Vercast, the flagship podcast of whatever the hell is going on right now. Does that feel right, David?

• 1:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't know the answer. And there are thousands of answers, all at the same time.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  Whatever it is, we're here for you. It's gonna be great. We're super into it. We have a lot to talk about this week. I think we're talking on, what, day three? A flurry of Trump and Big Tech merger. We'll get to that later. It's basically a lightning round. We're just gonna have to get through that every week.

• 1:54David Pierce?

  Like, I was going through and putting the rundown together, and it's an unusual number of things that we just have to say out loud in a row. It's like, there's just, this is kind of the moment that we're in is a lot of things are happening, and I don't know what to make of any of them, but it feels useful to say all of them out loud.

• 2:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so we're gonna do that in like, two minutes, and then David's gonna talk about Netflix increasing prices for an hour and a half.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  Oh, good. We have the same idea. This is great. Okay.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's how that's gonna go. Well, let me just start by saying it's my first Friday Vergecast of 2025. It's nice to be back with all of you. There's quite a lot going on, and we should start, I think, with Galaxy Unpacked. Of all the things.

• 2:32David Pierce?

  I think that's right.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  We looked around, and it is Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. That's where we should start this Vergecast. Because there's new phones. And like, truly, what is the Verge except new phones?

• 2:43David Pierce?

  Yeah. If you, listen, you boil any of the other stuff that's happening down far enough, and you get to new phones. Which I think is like, the whole theory of the Verge.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 2:52David Pierce?

  So this works out.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  It's actually, I will say this, this is very true. We have a lot of very smart, very capable reporters on our policy desk, reporters, senators, and every now and again, they're like, yeah, we work for the phones website. And every now and again, they also point out that only the phones website can do some of the policy coverage they do, because you have to understand the phones to do the policy coverage. It all makes sense in the end. It's gonna be a little whiplashy here, here at the top. But let's start with Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. Because it was a big one, not a big one. There's a lot to say about Gemini and what Gemini means to people. And then it was also apparently very exciting. And to tell us about the excitement level, I want to actually bring in Allison Johnson, who is, I believe, we've called her in from the side of the road. Hello, Allison. Are you here?

• 3:36Speaker 06

  Hello.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  How you doing?

• 3:39Speaker 06

  Great. It's beautiful in California. Who knew? But I'm on my way back to Seattle, so it's gonna be short-lived, I think.

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  We'll see how that goes. I feel like in the annals of Vergecasting, pull over in your car and call us to talk about Samsung Galaxy Unpacked is, this is a high-water moment. Literally what has happened here.

• 3:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  So you were there, they announced the Galaxy Edge, which is the really thin one. I hope people saw the video you made from there. The vibes were high. Just a ton of excitement at Samsung Galaxy Unpacked. Tell us what was going on.

• 4:12Speaker 06

  Yeah, it was kind of a roller coaster ride because the bulk of Unpacked, you know, the S25 Ultra, the regular, the Plus.

• 4:23Speaker 06

  They are very, very minor updates, like in the most extreme way, because that's been the case for a long time. But this is, um, it's going to be a review of one UI seven. Let's put it that way. Um, so we kind of get through the presentation where like, these phones are mildly interesting. I'm not going to lie. Uh, and then right at the end, it was like, uh, and one more thing, the Galaxy S25 Edge. And then it was like, curtains and then run out to the, um, they had this, uh, area set up behind kind of where they did the presentation and had the, had some sort of phone there, the S25 Edge phone.

• 5:07Speaker 06

  So it was, yeah, it was full on.

• 5:11David Pierce?

  And if I understand correctly, the, the salient things that we know about this phone are that it is a phone and it's very thin.

• 5:19Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 5:20David Pierce?

  Is that, am I missing anything?

• 5:22Speaker 06

  Those are the two things I confirmed, uh, viewing it from a distance. No, it was a really funny experience, kind of like coming off of this announcement of like some pretty familiar devices. And then I think we were all just thirsty for something different. And so they had this, this slim phone out there. Um, and it was a full on like CES from 10 years ago, kind of scrum where we're all trying to get in and get photos of it.

• 5:53Speaker 06

  So yeah, but that's, we were not allowed to get close to it. We were not allowed to touch it. We weren't allowed to breathe too close to it. Um, but it's very thin. It's can say that. Um, it has two cameras instead of three. We, we could tell that.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  Did they say why it's so thin or why that's important? Like if, if Samsung was like, this phone is twice as thick as last year's phone, but the battery lasts for four days. I'd be like, let's talk, let's get in there.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  It's way thinner. To me, it's like we, we all lived through the Johnny Ive experience once. We're just doing it again. What's happening?

• 6:33Speaker 06

  It feels a little bit of that. It feels like a style thing. I don't, just from the very, very little we know of it. Um, supposedly it'll be lower priced than, well, than the Ultra, which is like the most expensive phone you can buy anyway.

• 6:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's kind of a curiosity. I think it's it's sort of uh, an answer to like phones are all the same. You know, folding phones aside, what do we do that's different? And I guess they can make the phones slimmer now. Um, so that's, that's what we're gonna have.

• 7:09David Pierce?

  I will say, to Samsung's credit, and I've only seen this on the video, but the, the way that they showed this thing off is extremely cool. It was on this, this big table. And the phone itself looked like it's, it's sort of suspended from a little chain. And then there are like thin slabs of what looked like stone in them. It's this very like earthy, cool, like thousands of years ago kind of vibe on this table.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  It looked like they were painting cabinet doors. What are you talking?

• 7:39Speaker 06

  Oh, right. That's how you would hang a.

• 7:41Nilay Patel?

  It looked like at any moment, someone was gonna come up with like a spray paint can.

• 7:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the, uh, the other little slabs, it was like.

• 7:50Nilay Patel?

  Is that it? So that's the whole thing is it's thin.

• 7:53Speaker 06

  It's thin.

• 7:54Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead. You go ahead, Alison.

• 7:55Speaker 06

  No, they were saying that the, the other little slabs were the, the previous phones. The S24 and I don't think the S25 was, it was like thick phone, thick phone, slim phone. Um, for comparison and yeah, I think that's the whole vibe. It's just a, a phone that's slimmer and they're like, isn't that cool?

• 8:20Speaker 06

  So we'll see.

• 8:21David Pierce?

  Sure. Can I throw a thing at you that might be a bit of a problem for Samsung? I didn't clock that these three things were different thicknesses. Like even, even looking at them in the video and even in the pictures now, I thought they were all the same thing.

• 8:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 8:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So we should just mention, there's, there's a big rumor that in September, Apple will do an iPhone Air that will be very thin. Do we think that this is Samsung just showing off like vaporware to get ahead of Apple? Which is a, you know, thing people believe? Or is it just something about the modern smartphone supply chain? Is like, you can make thin phones now, so everyone's just gonna do that?

• 9:01Speaker 06

  It feels like a little bit of both. I think Samsung absolutely is always thinking about Apple. And they're like, we can sneak this one in, um, ahead of whatever, you know, Tim Cook is gonna do. I do think it's a supply chain thing of like, well, we can do this now. So this is what we have. I, I think it's interesting that they, they call it an S25. So it should ship this year in 2025, you would, you would presume. But that's, yeah, that's all we got.

• 9:34Nilay Patel?

  What year did Zoolander come out? I feel like we're on the Zoolander curve.

• 9:38Speaker 06

  Oh, no.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  Zoolander is 2001. So we're, we're, we're exactly 25 years later and we don't remember that there was a movie in which one of the main jokes is that phones were super tiny. And so now we're just gonna do, we're gonna do marketing that's like, this one's really thin. And it's, we're gonna be like, yeah, does it bend a lot? Like that, the iPhone 6 was really thin and it bent a lot.

• 9:58Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  Did they say anything about durability?

• 10:01Speaker 06

  They said, they did not say one word about this phone, except play like a sizzle reel of, of some like metal pieces coming together. We're really just coasting on vibes.

• 10:14Nilay Patel?

  But the vibes were high. Like I, that was the thing that really struck. I watched your video, you're like, this is, people are stoked about this phone. Did anybody say why while you were there?

• 10:22Speaker 06

  I think it really was from.

• 10:24Nilay Patel?

  Were they just like, it was a thing to take a picture of?

• 10:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it was a thing to take a picture of. We were all kind of starved for like, I think in the present, end of the presentation, I was like, is this it? Like these S25 phones, like they're not much to write home about. And then it was like, no, here's this other thing you can all take pictures of. And it was so crowded, like they had security for the thin phone and they were like pushing us back. I saw Dieter, he was like trying to get in line too, and he just gave up. I was like, yeah, this is.

• 11:00Speaker 06

  This is old school.

• 11:02Nilay Patel?

  Let me just ask you for a vibe comparison. Unscientific. They had the thin phone and then they had the new headset. The Muhan.

• 11:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  Which is not a great name. But it's their headset, right? It's their Apple Vision Pro competitor with Google like embedded. They're gonna do a whole thing. What were people more excited about?

• 11:23Speaker 06

  A hundred percent the skinny phone. It was like not even, it wasn't even hard. It wasn't even hard to get up and take a picture of the headset. And there were just a lot of people kind of standing around going, oh, it looks like a Vision Pro. And you're kind of like, yeah. And same rules, we couldn't approach it. We couldn't touch it. You would get yelled at if you moved your camera too close to it. But yeah, the slim phone, the edge, won the day, I think.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  It says a lot. I would just say that that might be the entire story of the tech industry is they are desperate to get a computer on your face. And then you show up with like skinny phone and everyone rushes to skinny phone.

• 12:03Speaker 06

  We're like, yes, this is it.

• 12:05David Pierce?

  We talked a little bit about the iPhone Air on the show last Friday. I continue to think there is nothing particularly interesting or compelling about like an eight tenths of a millimeter thinner phone. But you use all of these phones all the time. You, you, you can sense eight tenths of a millimeter in a way that very few can. Is this exciting? Like, is the idea, if 2025 is going to be the year all of our phones get thinner, is that like a good, cool, exciting thing? Are we happy about this?

• 12:34Speaker 06

  I'm, I'm not entirely sure. The thing I come back to is the Pixel 9 Pro Fold, like the second Pixel Fold, was one of those things you read about on paper and they were like, we change the dimensions. I was like, sure, sure. And I went and picked it up at the event and immediately was like, oh no, this is right. Like this feels so much better. I don't know if a thin phone is gonna have that same kind of like, you pick it up and use it and you're like, oh, this is different. Like, I don't know. I'm not, I'm not like committing one way or the other. I'll reserve some, some hope, I guess. I'm, I'm mostly skeptical.

• 13:16Speaker 06

  But I think it'll be a thing we have to, to pick up the phone and live with it and see if it cracks in half if you sit in it, sit on it.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. We will let you get back in the car.

• 13:28Speaker 06

  All right.

• 13:31Nilay Patel?

  Thank you so much for joining us, Allison. I eagerly await the Thin Phone Review.

• 13:36Speaker 06

  Oh, me too. Thanks for having me.

• 13:40Nilay Patel?

  Right as we were hanging up an Allison there, the police came. So this is what you do for podcasting.

• 13:46David Pierce?

  This is the last time anyone will hear from Allison on the Vergecast.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  This is how devoted Allison is to Vergecast. I feel like left unsaid in that conversation is the fact that the other phones are tremendously boring.

• 13:56David Pierce?

  It's a weird year. So one of the things about unpacked is that every year Samsung shows up to unpack and launches what are basically guaranteed to be the best selling Android phones of the year.

• 14:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:07David Pierce?

  Every year. It's just, it just is what it is. It is clockwork. This is maybe the least interesting phone announcement I can remember, period. Like, for all the pomp and circumstance,

• 14:22David Pierce?

  these phones literally aren't upgrades. Like, so there's the S25, the S25 Plus, and the S25 Ultra, and they are, in every meaningful and meaningless way, the same as the S24 with a slightly newer revved chip from Qualcomm. They bumped up the RAM a little bit in, I think, all of them, but at least a couple of them. The prices are the same. The cameras are the same, except for one camera on the Ultra. They look the same. Like, they just shipped the same phones again.

• 14:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:54David Pierce?

  And I'm like, I'm sort of blown away by that fact. And especially, you know, they had this big arena event. They talked a ton about AI. And then like, oh, we're actually rolling all that stuff back to the S24s again. And so part of me is like, why ship new phones? Just have a software event. Just, just be like AI and be like, oh, we are the first company ever who made our old phones new phones with AI. Like, that would have made more sense to me than we just made more of these with a new name.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  Or lower the price on the S24. We're one year into this cycle. We're actually doing the radical step of making the phones a little bit cheaper and adding more software to them. Now, I know why they can't do it. There are carrier executives who are furiously sending me emails right now.

• 15:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:37Nilay Patel?

  Because the carriers need the full spectrum of all the price points from all their partners. And Samsung, maybe more than any company, just does what the carriers want. Uh, actually, maybe Motorola doesn't like Motorola made the phone for like the Dish Network 5G.

• 15:51David Pierce?

  True.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  Um, but like Samsung has to be on a cadence of all these like, there's all this machinery that is built around the notion of a new phone coming out every year.

• 16:01David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 16:02Nilay Patel?

  We're just at the point where the phone doesn't matter to the machinery. Like to just unlock T-Mobile's marketing spend for Q4, something has to be called a new phone.

• 16:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. It just has to be a thing. You have to, it doesn't, it, and it matters much less what that thing is. Or honestly, in Samsung's case, if it's any good, like it's the same thing as the iPhone in so many ways. Like people who have iPhones at this point will buy the newest iPhone when their current iPhone stops being viable. That is the upgrade path, right? You, almost everybody gets the latest iPhone, uses it until they can't anymore, and then gets the latest iPhone. And so if you're, if you're Samsung, that is, it's the same path. And it, it has, I think, made phones boring, uh, all of them.

• 16:50David Pierce?

  But this just felt like a real, I don't know, low moment, or maybe just like saying the quiet part loud of like, yeah, there's nothing left to do here anymore. So here's the same phone again.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  It's thinner now.

• 17:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, even like the YouTubers who are, have a lot of incentives to pretend to think, nothing, just total flat across the board. The thing that really struck me about all of this is the AI of it. You wrote about Gemini sort of being the winner in the assistant wars because it's just bundled in the Samsung phones now. But I was watching the, the demos of AI, like we're year two into it essentially, like here's the AI stuff you can do with our phone. Maybe you're 10, if you, you know, count Google for years, like not shipping, but talking about it. But it's like year two of like, we're shipping it on phones.

• 17:35David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and we're sort of past now the Apple Intelligence moment where I think of the newest version of the software, the newest version of iOS that's in release candidate right now, it's on by default. So we've like, we've hit the point, right? It's, this is just part of phones now. And I'm watching the demos and, uh, there are no new ideas.

• 17:52David Pierce?

  No. Like everyone has the same, like four ideas.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  Right. They did the you can search your photos, which is very smart. I'm very excited about that one. Great idea.

• 18:02David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  But they spent a long time being like, so what happens is you say a name, location, person and clothing, and then the AI understands you. And it's like, yeah, we, um, people have fallen in love with robots.

• 18:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, like we got that one pretty covered at this point.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, we're really good at that, actually.

• 18:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. People are doing a lot of illegal stuff with those things. Like, we know, we understand.

• 18:25Nilay Patel?

  Um, then there's the, like, you can change a setting by just talking.

• 18:30David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 18:31Nilay Patel?

  Which Samsung, to its credit, Dog with Shoes, Bixby, that was the whole point of Bixby.

• 18:36David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:37Nilay Patel?

  And no one cared. So like, getting rid of it and then doing it again with Gemini, I don't, but you can do it now. Maybe it'll work better. If it works better, maybe, maybe people will use it. But that's the other demo. And then everything else is kind of the same. Like, it does transcriptions. It can record phone calls. Like, we can just process language a little bit better than we could before.

• 18:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:59Nilay Patel?

  Did you catch anything that was like, oh, this is a step change because we have this capability?

• 19:04David Pierce?

  The one thing that feels meaningfully new is this, uh, multi-step, multi-app thing that Gemini can now do, uh, where it can, it can essentially direct actions to multiple apps at a time. It can just do several things with one prompt. Um, it doesn't work very well, because of course it doesn't. I'll give you an example. So right before we're getting on here, uh, one thing I think Gemini in particular is actually very good at is, uh, as a YouTube research tool, uh, because it has an extension into YouTube and you can just say like, find me popular YouTube videos about whatever. Uh, and it does a pretty good job of that in a way that like regular YouTube search actually doesn't. So I use it for

• 19:48David Pierce?

  that all the time when I'm just like, I want to watch a bunch of videos about how GPUs work. Uh, Gemini is actually very good for that. Uh, so it's like, okay, cool two-step thing. I'm going to say, Gemini, go find a bunch of videos about how GPUs work on YouTube and then put them all into a note in Google Keep. Two steps, right? That's the thing that this stuff is supposed to be able to do now. And it plugs into WhatsApp. So you can be like, find me a restaurant to go to and then, and then text it to Anna. That's where we're going tonight. This is like, these are the kinds of things they're starting to put together. And again, this is the idea everybody has.

• 20:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:21David Pierce?

  This is OpenAI's operator. This is Series App Intent. Like this is the agentic thing everybody is talking about. But anyway, so I do this in Gemini. The first thing it does is pull back five titles of videos. And it's like, do you want to save these to keep? And I go, sure, sounds great. It says, okay, I've created your notes. The notes I created were the titles of the videos and nothing else. Five individual Google Keep notes with just titles.

• 20:45Nilay Patel?

  Wait, it made it individual notes?

• 20:47David Pierce?

  It made it individual notes. So then I'm like, okay, let's try this a different way. So I go and I'm like, okay, can you just find me a bunch of YouTube videos about GPUs? And it's like, sure. And I was like, okay, next step. So we're already out of the interesting multi-step thing here. I'm like, what if we just do the simple thing?

• 21:04David Pierce?

  Great, you found all these videos, looks good. Can you put all that into a note for me in Google Keep? And it's like, sure, done. So now what it does is create a list with a title like videos about how GPUs work and five empty bullets.

• 21:19David Pierce?

  We've done nothing here. And I think like the, the, the point I keep making, and I, I said a snarky thing about Apple Intelligence on threads a few days ago that was like, I can't wait till iOS 21, when the only feature is getting rid of Apple Intelligence. And it's the best upgrading year. And, and people like raked me over the coals for it. And I just, I keep coming back to, none of this is actually useful for much of anything. And even the things that are useful, aren't useful reliably enough to be worth trying to use. Like the, the Samsung Bixby thing was a good idea, right? The idea of like, most people don't know how to find the Bluetooth switch on their phone. And so to be able to just ask my phone how to turn on Bluetooth is like a good and useful idea. And it just didn't work enough.

• 22:03David Pierce?

  So people would just go find Bluetooth on their phone. And if you can't, if you can't beat the reliability of swiping up through a settings menu until I find the thing labeled Bluetooth. You have nothing and we're now 10 years into that problem and I don't think we have meaningfully solved it. So like this thing Google keeps demoing, which is like the multi-step, multimodal, multi-action stuff is like, it's cool. It's the idea is very cool. It feels like the right thing. My phone can just sort of take in all the information that I need it to and then give it back to me in ways that are useful and natural. That all makes sense. It just doesn't work. And I'm so stuck on it. None of this matters until it works. And we're just not there yet.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the piece of the puzzle that I think just really eludes me is I like I do know how to turn Bluetooth on my phone. Like I'm cursed with this knowledge, as is our most of our listeners. And it is so much faster for me to learn how to use the thing than to fight the other tool that will do it for me.

• 23:08David Pierce?

  100%.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  And maybe that, and I understand that that, again, I think the Vergecast's audience and the Verge staff is like a uniquely positioned group of people in that we also all like figuring it out. And most people would just like to move on with their day. But I, the danger is you're going to bounce off of it doing it badly and then you will never try again.

• 23:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:31Nilay Patel?

  Which is with Siri and Alexa in history, why they are perceived to be bad products.

• 23:36David Pierce?

  Yep. And I think these companies have underestimated how high that bar is for people of like, how quickly it will feel like I'm fighting this thing. And I will just go back to the definitely less efficient and hackier way that I can figure out how to do.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here's the flip side of that, which I've been thinking about a lot. There is the section of the audience that's like, please shut up on AI. We don't care about it. We, I can hear you already. You're screaming at me and coming back through the internet as you listen to this. I, it resonates in my heart. I hear you. It's the same group of people that whenever we write about some AI feature on theverge.com, you're in our comments. You're like, I hate this. Make it go away. I just want to turn off Apple Intelligence. I'm there with you. It's all fraud. Great. Then there's the people who ferociously read everything we write about AI. Um, dude, they're out there. They they love it. And then there's the companies who are all telling us

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  that their own usage statistics suggest people are using a hell out of these tools.

• 24:40David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so the example I'll give, which is old now, but it's just the one that is in my brain all the time. Um, uh, the CEO of Adobe, Shanti Ryan came on Decoder and you can go listen to it. He's like, the usage of generative fill in Photoshop is as high as layers, which is, uh, basically I opened Photoshop.

• 24:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's what Photoshop is for.

• 25:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. Like, that's where he's at. He's like, the take rate on generative fill is as high as layers. So, uh, yes, everyone's yelling, everyone's mad, everyone hates it, and then everyone's just using the hell out of it. We can see it on our site. People are reading about it like crazy. Um, and then you, I want to bring this to Gemini, specifically on these phones. Gemini is going to be the default on the Galaxy phones. Samsung is not going to do something. And Google's like, Gemini is more popular than ChatGPT now because it's just there and people are using it.

• 25:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  And I don't know how to square that with, it's not very good. Like, most of the time it's not very good. The, uh, ChatGPT, the day we're recording this on Thursday, it was down this morning. And there are people being like, I'm not getting any work done. Because I I've just like rely on this so much. And I'm like, well, you're, I hope your work is good. But like, you can see it's it's it's wound its way into so many different places. Even though I think the core criticism, boy, you hit a wall of this not being very good, is still very real.

• 25:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think, like, generative fill is actually a really interesting one because it's it's the kind of feature that is AI, but it's not in the way that we mostly talk about AI. Like, everybody wants us to think about AI as these like, you know, all-knowing, all-purpose, omnipresent companions that can just do everything. Uh, I I think that is like completely the wrong way we should be developing these things, like, AI as a tool, which is basically a smarter thing to plug into generative fill, makes a lot of sense. And so it totally attracts me that's working. And I think even in ChatGPT, like, I am very. Compelled by the stories I hear about people who use it as like a force multiplier for writing

• 26:37David Pierce?

  code. I think that's real. Even if it doesn't write very good code, like I have talked to enough people who are like, it is so much faster for me to take middling code and make it good than it is to start from scratch and write the like incredibly basic stuff that is required in order to write good code. Like all good code involves lots of bad code. And so I can do the bad code automatically. And then I just have to do the good code. Like that kind of thing, I think is is really powerful. The problem is for like, regular people in their day to day lives, these companies have not yet identified a ton of good versions of that. And this is why we keep landing

• 27:17David Pierce?

  on like, it'll help you write email and summarize email. That's like, that's the only normal person use case any of these companies can think of for what this stuff can do. So I think while in the background, all this interesting stuff is happening in in like back offices are being reinvented by AI that can do some of this work for them. All this stuff is happening, but the idea that like, there's a button on my phone that I'm going to press and it's going to do things for me 100 times a day. We just haven't figured out yet. And we haven't, we never figured it out with Siri. We never figured out with Alexa. Like the take rate is high because it's so present. But I think the the thing these companies know and have figured out and are pushing so hard towards is that if

• 27:59David Pierce?

  you don't stick it in front of people's face, they won't by and large go looking for it.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's nothing compelling about it that makes you go be like, I need to get this app.

• 28:09David Pierce?

  Right.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  I buy it, except ChatGPT is the most popular app. Right. The fastest growing consumer product around.

• 28:17David Pierce?

  I have, I have many theories about ChatGPT, but I continue to think that the novelty of ChatGPT is a huge part of its appeal. And that's, that's not nothing. But like, we are still so deep in the like, it's wild that this thing works at all, that I think we're not yet really having to reckon with the use cases here. Like ChatGPT's search stuff doesn't really seem to be setting the universe on fire. This operator thing that they launched to the $200 a month folks today seems interesting, but like. I don't know. People like ChatGPT in theory, I think, more than they are spending a lot of like

• 29:02David Pierce?

  useful day-to-day phone time with it.

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. So that's my prompt to the audience. Because I disagree with you. I think we are just old guys who are good at writing. Like, I think, I think we are just like out of the audience. We will do voice disguisers if you don't want to admit it. But call the hotline and, and tell us how you're using chat because I'm very curious. I think there's, there's just a weird split here. There's like a very vocal minority. It's like, screw this all. I hate it. There's a lot of people are just using this stuff. And then there's like, again, there's, there's sort of the middle. I think a lot of people are in the middle where you're indifferent because it's not very good.

• 29:40David Pierce?

  Yeah. But the caveat is I don't want to hear stories about how it makes you better at your job. Because there, there are lots of those. And I think that's, that's fine and good. And all of that is really interesting. I'm talking about like, stuff that you would press the side button on your phone to do with AI. Like, that's, that's the stuff I want to know.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  All right. Like I said, voices, we will, we will protect you. The verge has always protected its sources. And now in this time of increased threat against the First Amendment, I promise you, you can admit to us that you say,

• 30:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  I will protect you.

• 30:09David Pierce?

  And we will love you anyway.

• 30:11Nilay Patel?

  We should break. But before we do, I just actually want to, I want you to talk about Gemini for one second because you wrote this piece about how it's one, which is a big claim, especially because like real AI Siri isn't here yet. But Google was behind and now they've, I mean, they're the default on the most popular Android phone, which is a big deal. Do you think Gemini is good as an assistant? Or do you think it's just one by default of the placement?

• 30:35David Pierce?

  I think it won by default of the placement, but I actually don't think the difference between those two things is all that big. Like, I, I've been thinking so much in the last couple of weeks about the Google search trial, which essentially amounted to, if you have a good enough product that people want to use it, and you can put it in front of everybody, like everybody, you almost immediately build an insurmountable lead. Because what you need is you need data on how people are using your product that you can use to make the product better, which makes more people use it, which means you get more data, which means more people, like on and on and on. I mean, like, I will never forget Satya Nadella sitting up there being like, I will give Bing to Apple for free.

• 31:16David Pierce?

  Like, they can just have it. We don't just take all, keep all the money. I just want the query data. Like, that's real. And we're going through that with AI, too. This stuff gets better the more people use it. And what Google has is, A, unstoppable distribution advantages, because it has things like Chrome, that it can just stick it in the address bar. It has things like a very popular Google app. It has Google Maps. It has Gmail. Like, Google can both use Gemini underneath all of those things and get you to interact with Gemini on top of them. Then you make it the side button on essentially all of the Android phones that matter at this point. And you've built yet another place where you're essentially untouchable.

• 31:59David Pierce?

  And then throw in the fact that Amazon just seems unable to get its shit together with this new Alexa. Like, whatever that is going to be, it is, it does not seem like it's going to be very good or ship anytime soon at this point. Siri TBD, but nothing about the history of Siri suggests that it's going to be great.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Nothing but the present of Apple Intelligence suggests that Siri will be great.

• 32:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, there is nothing, there is nothing that leads me to believe there is some radical reinvention of that assistant coming anytime soon. So, Google is in a place where it's, it's pretty good. I think Gemini, by all accounts, is at least in range of ChatGPT and Claude, which I think have been kind of the, the two gold standards for a while now. And the difference between the two is like, personal taste and some are, one's better at some things and the other's better at other things. But the thing neither of those have is the distribution. They don't have a gadget they can be part of. They don't have web browsers that they can be built into by default. Google has a pretty good product and every other advantage you could possibly want in this space.

• 33:00David Pierce?

  And that, that just feeds itself. And so we're hitting a point where Google is going to get this like, escape velocity before anybody else can build themselves the things that they need that Google already has.

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  Or make a dollar from them. Like, the only thing Google has is like, a cash machine in search.

• 33:18David Pierce?

  Right. That has now just shoved Gemini into.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  I, this is gonna, we're gonna figure this out over the next four years, but this is where like the weirdness of the Trump administration just runs right into the reality of the tech products, especially in now in Trump two. Like Sam Altman standing on stage of the White House, not stage, just around, they were just in a room.

• 33:39David Pierce?

  I kept saying it looked like an SNL set.

• 33:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 33:41David Pierce?

  It's just like, here's, here's a wall and like a podium.

• 33:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they were just like, here's, here's a, here's a sitting room that we're in. Um,

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  announcing these quote, raised $500 billion to build data centers. Google isn't talking about raising money to do AI. Like they have the data centers. And actually what Sundar Pata talks about most of all is bringing the cost of inference down. He's like, we're great at this. And so you're, you can just see they're starting from like two radically different positions. Um, I don't know if any of those OpenAI announcements are real. Certainly Elon Musk does not think they're real. Um, Donald Trump thinks they're real. Like there's a lot of that, just like weirdness embedded in there. But you're just looking, I'm just looking at this much more broadly and abstractly from who are the competitors? How are they funded? How long will they last? Who can sustain? And Google is just in a position where, yeah, maybe it's not the best one. There's an argument that it's, it's very good at some

• 34:35Nilay Patel?

  things compared to the others.

• 34:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  But maybe it's not the best one overall. But it's in so many different places that are already popular and Google can just lose money on it in a way that Sam Altman has to go raise half a trillion dollars of weird laundered money from Middle Eastern states through SoftBank and then announce data centers that may or not. Like he's got to do a whole other thing and Google's just has to be like, would you like to buy ads on YouTube?

• 35:00David Pierce?

  Right.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  And that's different.

• 35:02David Pierce?

  Right. The, I mean, like, in a very real way, Sam Altman has to build Google. And all Google has to do is convince people that Gemini is as good as ChatGPT. And that thing is not nothing. Like, I think the, maybe the biggest thing ChatGPT is going for it right now is like a huge perception advantage. Like it was first, it blew people's minds. It is the thing when people think about this space. Like it is, it is the closest to the like Kleenex of the AI space as there is. And that's a powerful thing. Can you surmount that before Sam Altman can build Google?

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think so.

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, we should take a break there and come back with Lauren Feiner and actually talk about Trump stuff because that is, it's right there. It's like, here's a transition from the consumer product to the weird politics of the tech industry right now. And Larry Ellison is going to stand in a room. I don't know, man. We're going to take a break. Hopefully Lauren can help us sort it all out. We'll be right back.

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• 37:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Lauren Finer is here. Hello, Lauren.

• 37:40Speaker 08

  Hi.

• 37:41Nilay Patel?

  Sorry that you're our policy reporter.

• 37:44Speaker 08

  Thank you. I'll accept the condolences.

• 37:47Nilay Patel?

  You have been very busy. The Trump administration kicked off on day one with a flurry of executive orders, some of which are fully nonsensical, some of which have already been put on hold by courts. Like, literally, as we're speaking, the birthright citizenship order was, I think the court was like, this is stupid. I don't think I've ever seen a judge just say, this is stupid. And he was like, this is stupid. So there's all this activity happening. Trump, as everyone remembers from the first Trump administration, talks a lot. And then you have to evaluate whether what he's saying is real. So I would start with Stargate announcement. We were just talking about OpenAI. They announced this $500 billion plan to build data centers

• 38:25Nilay Patel?

  with Oracle, with Nvidia, who is very odd. Softbank is involved. Masasun was in the White House next to Larry Ellison and Sam Altman. Sam Altman did the thing that people have to do when they announce anything with Trump. They're like, we can only do this because of you. There's some amount of like, you were already planning on doing this. And there's some amount of like, is this real? Like, did you just do a Foxconn? I got huge Foxconn vibes from this. And then on top of all of that, is Elon Musk, who is a senior White House advisor in charge of Doge, tweeting, they don't have the money. Lauren, can you, just like, over/under, how long do you think Elon's gonna last as a government advisor criticizing the president's deals?

• 39:06Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, it seems like there's gotta be an expiration date on this. I mean, it's hard, it's been hard enough that, you know, it's two big egos in a room. And now, you know, Musk is really clashing with things that Trump himself is putting out there as these like, big accomplishments. And I feel like that's really where we're gonna see a potential for a break.

• 39:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, again, when I say I get Foxconn vibes, we have some new listeners. It has occurred to me several times over these past few days, that Trump One was eight years ago, and that we have listeners who are in their 20s now, who were teenagers then. So if you don't remember the things that happened in Trump One, let me just catch you up. They took golden shovels to my hometown in Resing, Wisconsin, and announced an LCD factory. And Trump ceremoniously, you know, broke ground with a golden shovel. They never built the factory. We'll put some links in the show notes. We did a lot of coverage on this. It was a substantial portion of my life.

• 40:03David Pierce?

  They built a dome. There's a dome.

• 40:05Nilay Patel?

  They built a dome. They continue to claim it's a data center and is actually just a party zone.

• 40:12David Pierce?

  What's the difference, really?

• 40:14Nilay Patel?

  There's a, there are some servers in a shipping container outside the dome. Anyway, but that's like real vibes here, right? Like, we're just gonna make big announcements about building stuff and America's back. And eventually, all you get is a dome in Wisconsin and Microsoft saying it will build a data center there. And that's all that happened. This, to me, had all that, right? OpenAI and Microsoft are like headed towards this breakup. They're announcing this other funding. We're gonna stand in the White House and announce this big deal. And then, right next to it, you have Doge and Elon being like, no, that's fake. I, like, I'm better. Like, I hate Sam Altman. Like, he's like jealous. Like, I don't know how else to describe it. He's jealous of Sam Altman getting to stand in the White House to make an announcement.

• 40:53David Pierce?

  And they've been like beefing and subtweeting each other ever since. I mean, it is a remarkably like juvenile thing that's happening here. But I think, at the risk of asking a really stupid question, if this is a real thing, and, and I think one thing that we have learned is that Sam Altman's ability to raise money is not to be questioned. That man can raise any amount of money for anything at any time, just seems to be the case. What is the point of standing at a podium in the White House and doing this with Masasun and Larry Ellison? Like, just, just go spend the $500 billion on OpenAI infrastructure. Like, why, why does the Trump White House have anything to do with this at all?

• 41:34Speaker 08

  I mean, I think Ellison makes sense for sure, because he's been a Trump ally for a while now. And I think, you know, maybe Trump kinda wants to get his buddies in a room and make a deal. So I think he just likes the optics of having all of them up there, having people working together for him, in a sense, on this project that he is championing.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  Ellison, also, by the way, CEO of Oracle, which is technically operating TikTok illegally right now.

• 42:04David Pierce?

  Is it?

• 42:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, it is.

• 42:06David Pierce?

  What's legal, Neil? Define legal.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  Right. And at that same Stargate press conference, Trump was like, Larry, are you gonna buy it? Let's negotiate in front of the media. And so there's just a, there's a weirdness here. We should talk about Doge for maybe one second, like the executive order creating Doge renames an existing part of the White House called the United States Digital Service to the United States Doge Service, which means it's a nesting acronym. I want to kill myself. And it basically says we're going to put Doge people throughout the government and you have to tell them all your unclassified information. Weird spot for Elon to be in to run that. He kicked out Vivek Ramaswamy, which is very funny before he even started. If you don't

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  know about the USDS, the digital service, they're basically the product management organization of the government. Like they built healthcare.gov and they ran the VA website. I have no idea what Elon is going to do to those websites. Like those are very important websites.

• 43:05David Pierce?

  The USDS has had a lot of very smart people over the years doing interesting work. I suspect it will be different now.

• 43:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we'll see. And then, you know, Elon is doing like Nazi salutes. And so like, how long will this last? Like, how long can this last when he is the focal point for all of this stuff and he's attacking the president and he might hurt the VA website? Like, I'm giving it 90 days. That's my call. Lauren, what do you think?

• 43:31Speaker 08

  I'm gonna say, I think after the first 100 days, he's out.

• 43:37Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 43:38David Pierce?

  Really?

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  He's only got until July 4th, 2026. So that's, that's his own deadline. It's in the EO.

• 43:43Speaker 08

  Oh, okay.

• 43:44David Pierce?

  Okay. But just, just to logic this out for a second, I, I feel like the over under on this has to be like five days. Like, if, if there's no recrimination or change from what has happened so far, including a Nazi salute on inauguration day, two of them, in fact, uh, what's, what's, what problem is there going to be that, that undoes this? I think like we have already seen what this looks like. We like, this is just what it's going to be. And if everyone is comfortable with it now, why would they get uncomfortable with it later?

• 44:21Nilay Patel?

  Hang on, I feel like I have to very pedantically note.

• 44:26Nilay Patel?

  He did a thing that looked like a Nazi salute that Nazis believe it was Nazi salute. Governments around the world, the German press believes it's Nazi salute. His fans say it's not. The point is to make us argue about the ambiguity. That's the point of the troll.

• 44:40David Pierce?

  We don't know what was in Elon Musk's heart, but the thing he did looked more like a Nazi salute than any other thing that exists on Earth.

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  Then he supports the German fire. Part like you can just add it up, but the point is to make everyone yell about the equal sign. You know what I mean? Like, anyway, but that is how he gains attention. But the person that wants the most attention is his nominal boss. So you might be right about five days. I'm just saying it might be more like 90 because Trump is busy just like lecturing the world.

• 45:10David Pierce?

  You might just like forget Elon is there for a while and then, and then this will happen.

• 45:14Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so I just want to be clear. I said 90, Lauren said 100 and you say five.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna go 15. I'm putting the over under at 15 days. Like, I think if, if we get to Valentine's Day and Elon Musk is still, has an office in the West Wing, I will be surprised.

• 45:26Speaker 08

  Okay. I think he's had remarkable staying power so far. So I, I'm just betting that he's going to continue to surprise us.

• 45:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's Elon, that's Doge. We'll see if, how that turns into reality. It just, I think for the Verge cast audience, for the Verge audience, you should go listen to the adminishing, the administrator, the well, outgoing administrator of the digital service on Decoder. Like, that's a software company. There's a tiny little software consultancy in the government that makes all the websites go. And now it's Doge. So I think I say this a lot, like you can't know how something is changing unless you know what it was. So go listen, if you're interested, go listen to that episode because how Doge changes is going to be. I've seen a lot of USDS people say, actually, this is the right place for it to go. Because they're the software consultancy and this is like software helps you find efficiency. I suspect those people are coping.

• 46:18Nilay Patel?

  They're processing, but anyway, go listen to that.

• 46:19David Pierce?

  Wouldn't that also mean that the, the job of Doge would be to decide if the government should use like Microsoft Teams or Slack for its communication systems? Like, is that, is that where we're headed?

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  I've, I've met a few PMs in my life. I don't think that's how they spend their time.

• 46:33David Pierce?

  Wait, Lauren, before we move away from this, can I just ask you one like big broad question that I have been having all week? And there's this flurry of executive orders and, and my impression of what this moment looks like in a presidency is some mix of like real policymaking and some like Michael Scott in the office yelling, I declare bankruptcy. Like, how, how real should we be thinking about all of this stuff? He's talking about everything from like the, the Paris Climate Agreement to AI safety to all this stuff on electric cars. Like, how real are you tracking this stuff in your head right now?

• 47:11Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think that's definitely the perfect analogy for it. I think it's a mix. I think, you know, there's some things that are going to have real implications, or at least we'll really have to see a big fight play out over it to know where it's going to end up. And then I think there's other stuff that's either like, all right, well, this kind of already existed, like the executive order basically saying the First Amendment is a thing. And then other things that, you know, are just obviously not inconsistent with the Constitution, like ending birthright citizenship. So I think a lot of it is, you know, just shouting something, just declaring that things exist. But, you know, mixed in there are things that will at least have to be dealt with in the

• 47:55Speaker 08

  courts and, and, you know, in people's lives. So I think it is definitely a mix.

• 47:59Nilay Patel?

  Okay. This brings us inevitably to TikTok. I just want to.

• 48:03David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, there was a TikTok EO, wasn't there?

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 48:07Speaker 08

  There was.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  It's too many. Well, let's just focus.

• 48:12David Pierce?

  Can AI summarize the, all the executive orders?

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think AI wrote a lot of them. I'm kind of not joking. The TikTok one, I think synthesizes everything you're saying, Lauren, right? Like, it's, some of it is just yelling, some of it is just pointing out things that already are true, some of it is going to get litigated, some of it is like, does the president even have this power? I guess we're going to find out. Describe what's going on with the TikTok EO. And I mean, TikTok is running, but like in a weird way.

• 48:41Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the TikTok executive order is basically Trump saying that for 75 days, I'm going to tell my enforcers, back off, don't enforce this law. And like, actually, even the day preceding my presidency, when the ban took effect, like, don't go after the companies for that day. And basically saying to the companies, like, don't worry, we got you. We're not going to prosecute you if you bring TikTok back online, which sounds great, except that it doesn't really mean anything when you have a federal law on the books that the Supreme Court has upheld, that all of these companies risk facing billions of dollars in fines if they violate.

• 49:25Nilay Patel?

  It's like $5,000 per user. You have 170 million users, like, it's just billions of dollars. And it's weird because Oracle, if you recall, when TikTok was trying to save itself, during the first Trump administration, when he threatened to ban it, they built this thing called Project Texas, where Oracle ran its data centers and it was all walled off from China or ByteDance, or however they were. Project Texas, to me, always felt like a kid's museum. You know, like, you could go there and be like, here's how content moderation works. And like, nothing was real. So Oracle runs it, Akamai, who's their CDN, you know, moves the data actually around the internet and delivers content to people. And then Apple and Google obviously distribute it in their stores. And by the way, so does Amazon, so does the Samsung store. It's not in the Samsung store, in case you were wondering.

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  So it's really interesting to me that Oracle, which hosts the data, Project Texas, Akamai, which delivers the data, have decided this is fine. They're going to take the risk. TikTok is back. And then the app stores have decided it's not worth the risk. Like, if you search for TikTok in the app store today, it's not there. I have not yet figured out why some people think it's okay. I actually think Oracle and Akamai have more liability, because TikTok is already on the phones, right? So like, Apple isn't delivering it to more people. I guess software updates or something. But every time, all of those people open the TikTok app, like, Oracle's liable for it.

• 50:46Speaker 08

  Exactly.

• 50:47Nilay Patel?

  And so that's where I get to, like, Larry Ellison standing in a room. Right, like Larry Ellison delivered this win to Donald Trump, and that means he's a little bit more secure that he won't be prosecuted.

• 50:58Speaker 08

  Right, and Larry Ellison appears to be one of the only people in the US to be comfortable enough relying on Trump's promise here in this executive order that doesn't really hold the force of law more than the actual law on the books does to believe it.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  You went and talked to some lawyers about this. I think I want you to explain their read. My read was, well, if you read the executive order at the bottom, it's got the same boilerplate that every executive order has on it, which is this does not create liability for the United States. And you're like, well, if you make a promise that you won't enforce the law, that, you know, kind of like squint that looks like a contract. And at the bottom of the contract, you're like, you cannot rely on this contract. Well, you shouldn't rely on it.

• 51:42Speaker 08

  Exactly. I mean, I think it's pretty straightforward from the legal analysis that I've seen, where it's just, it's basically just, you know, this does not negate the fact that there is a law that fines all of these service providers for TikTok, $5,000 per user for accessing the app, and that can amount to, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars in fines for these companies. And even if you're like one of the richest companies in the world, that's a lot of money. And while it might insulate you in the long run from actually having to pay those fines, because you could make a decent due process argument that there's some sort of,

• 52:24Speaker 08

  you were operating under this kind of promise from the executive branch that you wouldn't be prosecuted for this. I think ultimately, it's a big risk to take when, you know, the penalties are that large.

• 52:37Nilay Patel?

  I keep trying to figure out why Apple and Google aren't like distributing this app. And I, I guess, you know, if Oracle doesn't play ball, there is no TikTok. If Apple and Google don't play ball, well, people still have the app. Right? And like, so maybe they're just like, look, this isn't worth it. The people who have it already have it. And all, all that's really happening is people aren't going to download this app for a while.

• 52:56Speaker 08

  Right. And I imagine what Trump would notice more is like, can people see content on TikTok or not versus like, can a marginal few who don't already have it on their phones? I mean, there's 170 million people in the US who already have been using TikTok. Can like a marginal few like get it now? And, you know, eventually if Apple and Google don't bring it back to their app stores, the app is going to degrade. And, you know, it won't work as well as it you'd expect it to, but how long will that take? We don't really know. It might be a long enough time that it doesn't really matter in the end.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  Well, yeah, you got 75 days.

• 53:36Nilay Patel?

  I, I know when, I know when something ends, right? Two really interesting things about that. One, some people did delete TikTok from their phones. They are very sad because they can't get it back. There's a weird black market for phones with TikTok on them on eBay where they're selling for thousands of dollars. And then we had the very weird experience of our posts saying TikTok is not available in app stores, like our little quick post ranked in Google. It was the number one search result for TikTok app store. Weird. And flawed of comments, thousands of comments from people who thought we were a social network. And we're posting things like, what app is this? Where did everybody come from? Which is a lot, was a lot like, we're like, is this a bot attack? And then our like head of Q and A is like, it's teens, it's teens.

• 54:22David Pierce?

  Who have never seen a website before and were just trying to find TikTok?

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 54:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, I have seen that some people have found a workaround for re-downloading TikTok if they somehow deleted it.

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  What's the, wait, what's the workaround?

• 54:35Speaker 08

  From what I saw, it has to do with like logging out of your iCloud account and then like logging in like you're in another country and downloading it. So I'm not endorsing this, but that's something that I've seen.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  There's a, you know, there's like a lot of like controversial science around like cell phone addiction, like, and you can have a lot of arguments. And it's like, well.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  Would you, do you see what's happening here?

• 55:02Speaker 08

  The teens will find a way.

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  The teens, it was just like really, like someone was like, this post is getting thousands of comments. Like, we must, it must be a bot attack. It is, it is currently the most commented post in our new commenting system.

• 55:14David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 55:15Nilay Patel?

  More comments than my endorsement of Kamala Harris.

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  Like, I got a note that was like, your record has been broken. It's teens making friends in the TikTok.

• 55:27David Pierce?

  Wow. Maybe Trump was right to save it after all.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it helped us. You know, this is a new, Trump too is very transactional. All right. We should keep TikTok shut down so teens can make friends in our comments on quick posts. So there's, there's, that's the shape of it, right? We got 75 days. There's also the politics of TikTok, where they, you know, they took the app down. They said, we are thankful for President Trump working on a solution. They brought the app up. They said, thanks to President Trump, we're back. They thought they were getting 90 days because in the bill, there's this provision to extend the deadline by 90 days if there's a sale in the works. There is no sale in the works, as far as we know. They didn't even get 90 days. They got 75 days. Trump shaved 15 days off their deadline, which is very funny.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  And now, you know, he, he's given a number of press conferences since, and he talks like a real estate developer. He, he has, you know, shoved all of this into his internal framework. He's an 80 something year old real estate developer. He's got one framework, and it's real estate. And he's like, oh, TikTok needs a permit. Which is not the case, but he keeps saying, I have to give them a permit to operate. If I don't give them a permit, it's worth nothing. If I give them a permit, it's worth a trillion. They have to do a deal with me.

• 56:44Speaker 08

  Right. So there's like a bunch of things in there. First of all, the 75 days is interesting because it kind of just goes to show how like not a thing this executive order is because in the law, it says that the president can give TikTok 90 days if there is like very much a deal happening, if the president is certifying that there's a deal happening and you know, then they can get 90 days. And it was like a little ambiguous, like could that 90 days be granted once the ban takes effect or not? But it seems like it's like ambiguous enough that it might have been available to Trump. Trump didn't do that. He did something totally different,

• 57:26Speaker 08

  pulled out 75 days and said, just like, let's not enforce this for 75 days. And then, you know, we also have that like, it just is a completely different way of going about this. So it just kind of shows that this is not really something that's like following the law itself. And nothing in the law says like permits. And we don't know that, you know, it's not just like Trump can decide to sell it and then the deal will happen. The main, you know, point of blockage here is China. And we still don't know if China will really ultimately agree to a deal that would put TikTok in compliance with the law.

• 58:07David Pierce?

  Yeah. And there's been a lot of reporting that China is like, open to it, thinking about it. But there's like, it's all so squishy that it's hard to make anything out of right now, especially when you have President Trump now running around saying that what he actually wants is a joint venture with the United States of America in which it owns half of TikTok, which A, what? And B, I can't imagine is a thing that is going to be palatable to the Chinese government.

• 58:32Speaker 08

  And it also doesn't seem like it would put it in compliance with this law anyway. It just kind of does this like other third thing. Because under the law, it seems like most likely ByteDance could not be involved. You know, we still couldn't have like more than 20% ownership by a Chinese entity. So I don't know how exactly this works. Is the US government owning a speech platform? Like, it's not really clear if Trump himself knows the answer to these questions.

• 59:01Nilay Patel?

  We said this a lot in sort of the Elon Twitter takeover era where criticism of the current administration is in no way praise of the previous administration.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  And I feel like that's just very clear on all sides here. Like, this is pure Trump chaos, right? Like, I invented an executive order. At the end of 75 days, if this thing isn't sold,

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  he doesn't get to pull the 90-day lever because the expiration date has hit.

• 59:31Speaker 09

  Right.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  You can't delay a deadline 75 days after it's passed by 90 days. Like, the law isn't written that way. So, by the time you're listening to this, we're down to 73 days, 72 days. Like, you gotta sell TikTok. Like, that's what you have to do.

• 59:48David Pierce?

  April 4th is the day, by the way.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  Right, so by April 4th, TikTok has to be sold. That's a huge transaction that two world superpowers have to agree upon in some way, that Trump has to...

• 1:00:00Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna give him a big novelty permit to hand over? Like, he runs City Hall? Like, I don't know what he's gonna do. Inside of that, like TikTok itself has to change ownership. It does feel like TikTok misplayed this completely. And this is what I mean about, like, it's not praise for any other administration. Like, TikTok thought they could roll the Biden administration, which totally blew this. Like, the Biden administration should have been pressuring TikTok to sell every single day.

• 1:00:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  And they just didn't. They did not communicate. Well, the failure of Biden administration is they fundamentally did not communicate very well. But they didn't. So then TikTok thought it could... And Biden signed it on the day which set off the clock, which landed it on the day that it did, which is effectively in between administrations. So he... I'm sure they could count. But he signed it on a day knowing what day the ban would hit. And he landed it right in the middle, creating this weird vacuum where he was like, "I'm handing enforcement over to the Trump administration." And Trump was handed this ability to just say, "I'll figure it out." Sure. And then TikTok had no Plan B. They have no deal in the works.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  And the fact that they have no Plan B, I think, is the most essential failure here. Because you might think Trump is gonna save it. And certainly, he's saved it for 75 more days, sort of, because it's the only app stores. But it's so obvious that he wants to make this deal.

• 1:01:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Right, that he wants to be like, "There's a transaction. And the US government owns a 50% or whatever." We haven't even talked about how bananas that is. But like, there will be a sale. And so TikTok is maybe not going to sell to who it wants to on its terms. They're going to sell to who Trump wants on Trump's terms. And I don't know that the Chinese government is super down with that idea.

• 1:01:45Speaker 08

  I think there's an art, there's a way to see this where ByteDance didn't misplay it. They played it the only way they were going to play it, which is to ride out the legal process. And, you know, if it doesn't work, China's not going to let them sell in a way that complies with this law. And, you know, the Chinese government might be okay with that because they might think that this makes the US government look bad in the eyes of other governments around the world. So I think it's possible that that's one, that's still one way it goes. And I think there's a lot of, I've been surprised just how quickly people on TikTok have been cheering that it's back and like, kind of taking it for granted all over again. But I think it's a very real possibility that this goes away again.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, and it'll be even more fascinating as we get towards that, that deadline in April. Because there is now such a sense of this was all a nonsense misdirect. This isn't real. TikTok's never going to actually go away. Like the, the we're so back vibes on TikTok are just everywhere. And I think the, if it does happen and if it does go away in some meaningful way in April, it's going to weirdly, I think, hit even harder the second time. Because it doesn't seem like people are leaving. All these other apps are desperately trying to get people to come. Like X launched a videos thing, Blue Sky launched a videos thing.

• 1:03:10David Pierce?

  Instagram is out here like redesigning the app and trying to pay people to come make reels. Like all these other companies sense a moment. And at least as far as I can tell, that moment did not materialize, except for the one day everybody went and made jokes on Red Note. Which means I think that if it comes crashing down, it will crash even harder the second time.

• 1:03:30Speaker 08

  Oh, totally. I think people are not prepared for the possibility that it could go away again. And just like there were such short memories the first time because, and you know, I'm not blaming anyone for feeling this way because we've heard over and over, oh, TikTok's going to be banned, TikTok's going to be banned, and then it doesn't happen. But I think it's always been a much more real threat than anyone really processed. It just has been, you know, a far amount of time off. And I am really curious what Trump is going to do when those 75 days expire. And more likely than not, if there is any kind of deal, it's probably not going to be completed. And then does he extend it again?

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, he can't. That's what I mean. Like, he can't. But he can write another executive order being like, I hereby give you another 75 days. But triggering the 90 day deal clause is, I think that's an immediate, like, state attorney general lawsuit. Like, Tom Cotton, who is a Republican, he's like, I will, I will bring down ruinous liability in these companies. Like, I want this app gone. I want China out of my country, right? And you can agree or disagree with, like, strange bedfellows in the second Trump administration, right?

• 1:04:46David Pierce?

  And in the TikTok ban. Like, it's useful to remember that this is about as bipartisan a thing as we have had in this government for a very long time. Like, part of me wants to respond to all of what you're saying, Eli, with you're assuming like a rational government operating in a rational way. And there's no evidence that that's what the second Trump administration is going to be. But every Republican wanted to ban TikTok, and every Democrat wanted to ban. So it's really like, it's not, it's not a sort of swinging back in the new administration. Like, everybody in Congress voted for this already.

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  Wait, let me just, let me just offer you, this is a Lauren Feiner quick post. I'm just going to read it to you. The repeal TikTok ban act was introduced by Senator Rand Paul and Representative Rokanen.

• 1:05:33David Pierce?

  Speaking of strange bedfellows.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  It's weird. That is a weird combo platter of people.

• 1:05:38Speaker 08

  Yeah, yeah. I think another kind of weird combination that's coming up on the other side of things is, like, people who actually supported TikTok in their case, who wrote amicus briefs are now saying, like, yeah, we don't like this. But also, it's like generally bad to just like ignore a law and just like not follow the process.

• 1:06:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, it would seem like if you're in Congress, you should be pro laws. General, like, that's like, one of their main things is doing laws.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  No, but it's the EFF that wrote that one. It's like, one of the major digital civil liberties groups is like, this law is bad, the Supreme Court is bad, all this is bad. But then having a law that the president can be like, that law doesn't exist, equally bad.

• 1:06:25Speaker 08

  And I think people are like banking a lot on Congress just like realizing like, this is such a mess, but at the same time, like, hundreds of lawmakers voted for this in the first place. And, you know, these are people who have egos. They don't want to just like undo their own work. So I think like relying on something like that happening, even after all this is like a really big leap of faith.

• 1:06:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I just want to say this literally for the tape.

• 1:06:55Nilay Patel?

  The United States government owning a social network is one of the stupidest First Amendment, first year law school hypotheticals I can possibly come up with. It will, it will not be possible to run a social network if the government owns it in this country. Especially with Trump doing his like big EO that's like, I have circled the First Amendment. You know what's legal under the First Amendment? Spam.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  Just straightforwardly spam is legal under the First Amendment. So the government can't filter spam on the TikTok it owns. Pretty much brings an end to TikTok.

• 1:07:30David Pierce?

  I'm gonna go ham on this social network. You don't even know what I'm capable of on the government.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  There's a whole bunch of other stuff. TikTok, uh, the, by the way, the most moderated social network, right? The social network that gave the world the word segs because people are afraid to say sex. That's TikTok. You know what is, and because there's so many kids on it. Do you know what is legal under the First Amendment? Just pornography, all kinds. It's available. The United States government cannot, they would have to come up with some straightforward, like, digital version of a time, place and manner restriction. This is all like very technical First Amendment lawyering that doesn't exist if the government wants to own a social network and filter anything.

• 1:08:16Nilay Patel?

  And it probably can't. So I'm just like that. I'll just set that aside. We it hasn't happened yet. I don't know if it's gonna happen, but someone should explain to Donald Trump that the government taking an interest in TikTok in this way would actually result in the destruction of TikTok.

• 1:08:31Speaker 08

  I think that actually kind of goes to the idea that I think like TikTok users are just expecting now that TikTok's back, it's gonna stick around, it's gonna be kind of more or less like it's always been. And like, under a lot of these scenarios, it would look very different. Like, if the US government owns it and can't moderate content, if like Elon Musk owns it, and I've seen people commenting, if, you know, if Musk buys this, I'm leaving TikTok, which who knows if people actually would, but, you know, it's not gonna be most likely the same TikTok that you're using today.

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  Just to put this in perspective for folks, in what, 2017, after Trump won, became president, he blocked people from his Twitter account, and that was a First Amendment lawsuit that went for five years. Like, just that. Like, can the president block people was a Supreme Court level First Amendment challenge. And eventually he vacated because he lost, right? Like, he he lost the election, he wasn't president anymore, he gave up. But like, that is the amount of lawyer, just on the block button alone, that was the amount of lawyering that occurred about the First Amendment in social networks. Can the president block someone from his official account? The government owns a social network is like a nuclear Armageddon of First Amendment issues. It's just such a deeply.

• 1:09:51David Pierce?

  All right, you've talked me into it. Let's do it. I'm ready. 50% China, 50% US. Let's go. I'm in.

• 1:09:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's enough. We'll see what happens, right? We got April. April is upon us already. But it just, it all, everything about the Trump administration, like, it comes together in the TikTok. Like, why is Larry Ellison in the White House talking about a data center project? Because he's running TikTok. And like, he, the TikTok CEO is running around the inauguration, being like, don't ban me, please. It's a lot. Uh, there's other stuff. It's, it's a lot. We're gonna end up covering it. We're gonna find ways to cover it here on the podcast and on the site and in ways it's split up. The beginning of any presidential administration, as David was saying, is a flurry of activity. Trump administrations are typically very chaotic activity the whole time.

• 1:10:44Nilay Patel?

  As we know from the first one. Poor Lauren. I want to hear from everybody, like how you want us to handle it. Like, again, in Trump one, we spent a lot of time talking about Foxconn because Foxconn was just such a big symbol of a lot of things all at once. This time, there's a bunch of climate science impacts. There's a bunch of EV impacts. Brendan Carr is in charge of the FCC. You will be hearing this man's name a lot on this show. He wants to censor the internet. He just straightforwardly does. There's, as Lauren was saying, the birthright citizenship question, which a lot of our listeners and readers care about because they are H1B visa holders in the United States of America, work at tech companies. And whether or not their children are citizens is a pretty meaningful question that I think we're gonna end up talking about.

• 1:11:28Nilay Patel?

  And then there's tariffs. Uh, Trump announced what 10% tariffs on China, Lauren?

• 1:11:32Speaker 08

  Yeah, or he at least floated it.

• 1:11:34Nilay Patel?

  Sure. So, uh, everything is made in China. Like, how will Apple deal with this? What trade will Apple make, um, to reduce tariffs on the iPhone? Tim Cook managed it the last time. We're gonna end up having to talk about it because at the same time, I think it was today, uh, Trump gave a speech where he was like, "These cases, they're losing the EU. That's a, um, that's a tax on our great American companies." That's a lot. That's just, that's a lot of moving pieces that all, like literally, he's talking about Apple. So I want to hear from all of you. Uh, again, I think if you want to call us and send us a note about how you want us to cover Trump, I'd like you to begin that note with a formal apology to Lauren. I think it might be nice to just send her all those, but we have to strike a balance here. There's a lot.

• 1:12:19Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be really noisy and, you know, our goal is to always do good, rigorous journalism and also to make sure like, we're pointed at places that matter, not just all of the noise. Because if you do all the noise, you're just gonna burn out. But, but, yeah, I remember, like, it was eight years ago. It's a long time ago, but it wasn't so long ago. Um, and I want to make sure we get it right. So let us know. We're obviously gonna keep covering the TikTok ban, but there's just a whole bunch of other stuff happening. So let us know what you think is important.

• 1:12:45David Pierce?

  Neil, do you still think it's gonna be Walmart?

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that buys TikTok?

• 1:12:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:50Nilay Patel?

  Um.

• 1:12:51David Pierce?

  It's got like 71 days to pull it off.

• 1:12:54Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there's the Project Liberty with Frank McCourt, which I think is really interesting.

• 1:12:59David Pierce?

  And Mr. Beast now, apparently.

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  Is Mr. Beast in that one?

• 1:13:01David Pierce?

  Apparently, he's part of it.

• 1:13:02Nilay Patel?

  Is he part of that one? That one's interesting, just because I think on a technical level, they're interested in like federating TikTok. I have no idea what that means. Right, but he's like, we're gonna rebuild the tech stock and give you your own algorithms and he's, it's like federation-y noises. Okay, I'm rooting for that one.

• 1:13:21Nilay Patel?

  As much as I can pick anything, that that seems, that one has Mr. Wonderful, it's just like, there's just characters, just like opening doors. I mean, I'll buy TikTok, like, um, I think Amazon's in the mix. I think Jeff Bezos is sitting on that stage.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I, I, if I were Walmart, I would be, they were, Lauren, weren't they in the mix the first time? It was like Microsoft, Oracle and Walmart were like a consortium, right?

• 1:13:45Speaker 08

  They were, yeah, yeah, I think the Mr. Beast one might be separate from Project Liberty. So just a bunch of, bunch of different characters.

• 1:13:53David Pierce?

  They at least were talking.

• 1:13:54Speaker 08

  Are they the same? Okay.

• 1:13:55David Pierce?

  I don't know if they're like technically in it, but they, they, they, they had a confab.

• 1:13:59Speaker 08

  Okay.

• 1:14:00David Pierce?

  At least, you know, maybe there was like lunch lease stock involved in the, I don't know. I don't know all the details, but.

• 1:14:07Nilay Patel?

  I'll do it.

• 1:14:07David Pierce?

  Mr.'s Beast and Wonderful are both part of this somehow.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  None of it's good. None of it's good. Um, yeah.

• 1:14:15David Pierce?

  I think they don't sell, and I think it actually goes dark in April, in a, in a real way. That's, that's my current stake in the ground.

• 1:14:23Speaker 08

  I agree. I think there's a possibility that some like crazy deal comes out of nowhere after it goes dark eventually. But I do think I, if I had to predict now, it does go dark after the 75 days.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I just, I want to believe you. I also know that Donald Trump wants nothing more in his life than to hand a novelty permit to someone. Like a, like a big red ribbon.

• 1:14:48David Pierce?

  There will be big scissors, for sure.

• 1:14:50Nilay Patel?

  You know what I'm saying?

• 1:14:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:51Nilay Patel?

  So I'm betting on novelty permit. I don't know who the buyer will be or whether that will actually be effective under the law. The novelty permit is happening. All right, we gotta take a break. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. Again, we're very sorry. We'll have you back very soon.

• 1:15:04Speaker 08

  Thank you so much.

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• 1:16:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We're already over. It's it's weird. Again, we got we got to figure this out.

• 1:16:44David Pierce?

  I don't think every week is going to be like this, but I think we also kind of spent four years saying that the last time Trump was in the White House. So I don't know. I'm tired.

• 1:16:56Nilay Patel?

  The last time this happened, and again, I recognize this was a long time ago. We got to the point on the show where I was getting angry anonymous letters from Foxconn employees telling me to leave the company alone. And then our our listeners were turning those letters into songs. So I just want to set.

• 1:17:14David Pierce?

  So we have a long road to go.

• 1:17:16Nilay Patel?

  It's like no one's broken out a guitar yet, you know, like we're it's a long way. All right, lightning round, unsponsored. You know, we're starting here off slow. It's Q1.

• 1:17:28David Pierce?

  It is.

• 1:17:28Nilay Patel?

  It's Q1. Everyone blew their extra Q4 budgets sponsoring a lightning round in 2024. And here we are in 25. It's gonna happen again, though. We got some ideas. All right. Netflix is raising prices again. I said it was a lightning round, but I think David is about to talk for one full hour.

• 1:17:46David Pierce?

  I just, it's, this is the most, uh, like mafia thing that has happened this week, and that's a pretty high bar. Like, so the, the thing that happened in the last month, really, and I think, I think this is even more true than I realized. I, I spent some time with some Netflix folks talking about how they're thinking about live ahead of the, the football game, kind of between the Paul Tyson fight and the Christmas Day football games. I spent some time with the NFL folks, or with the Netflix folks, wrote a story about it and came away from it being like, okay, they're, they're really committed to this, like always on live programming. What I didn't realize is Netflix is pretty sure it has already won television.

• 1:18:29David Pierce?

  They, they have proven now that this sports thing can work and drives real audience. They've proven that they can manufacture huge events out of nowhere, essentially, like they had a YouTuber fight an old man and 65 million people watched. Like, just on his face, that is nuts. And that's not a thing you can do infinitely, but it is a thing that Netflix continues to prove it can do whenever it wants. And so now, if you're Netflix, you say, okay, we have a bunch of big hit shows that people like. 2024 was kind of a down year for those shows. Stranger Things is huge. Wednesday is huge and coming back. There's a third one that I can't remember the name of.

• 1:19:06Nilay Patel?

  Sure, there you go. Keep going.

• 1:19:08David Pierce?

  I think Ryan Reynolds is probably doing stuff.

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  None of those count. Those are all, those are all so weightless as to not exist.

• 1:19:16David Pierce?

  I think Stranger Things is actually the only one I would, I would put like in the, it, in, on the list of like biggest things on television. I think Stranger Things belongs there.

• 1:19:25Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:19:26David Pierce?

  But what Netflix actually has is just an infinite library of C-plus stuff that people will watch, which actually turns out to be very important because that's most of what people watch.

• 1:19:37Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:19:38David Pierce?

  I will watch as many seasons of The Ultimatum as you want to watch, as you want to make Netflix. Like, sure, I'm into it. But so anyway, so Netflix is now in this position where like, it is making money in a time where it's very hard for entertainment companies to make money. It is more powerful than ever. It's driving more audience than ever. It is just winning. And so what they used to do is like, make these grand cases for why they had to, you know, raise the prices because they wanted to reinvest in amazing tech. And now they're just like, yeah, we're raising the prices. It went up a dollar. What are you gonna do about it?

• 1:20:08Nilay Patel?

  I have two things to say about this. One, it occurs to me that you have a garbage TV and you watch garbage TV.

• 1:20:14David Pierce?

  Correct.

• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  And I haven't, those things haven't, those puzzle pieces never.

• 1:20:18David Pierce?

  Listen, we can't all have Bravia core.

• 1:20:20Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's what I'm saying. I'm like, I'm gonna watch one movie a week and 75 glorious megabits of streaming. Right. And, fine, I'm worried about you, but it finally clicked.

• 1:20:30David Pierce?

  I turn off Deal or No Deal Islands to watch, to make this podcast, and that's it.

• 1:20:36Nilay Patel?

  This is generally.

• 1:20:41Nilay Patel?

  The other thing is, I think Casey posted this on Blue Sky this week. He's like, Netflix had better content when it cost 7.99. Like, and that, I think is straightforwardly true. When they were playing the big prestige TV game, they were making better stuff. When they're like, we're HBO, like, and now the quality has just dropped.

• 1:21:02David Pierce?

  Sure, but you know what happened in the interim is Netflix went from losing billions of dollars to making billions of dollars, which it turns out if you're Netflix is a pretty good trade.

• 1:21:13David Pierce?

  We made our content worse and our money bigger is, is the thing they are happy with. But the other thing is, there's this big macro trend away from premium, high-res streaming to ads. And, and that, that is the push here. And what Netflix is doing is a thing that I have been saying for a while that it was doing. It is just going to price you out. Like, it, it is, it went from, so the ad-supported tier, which is now the base tier of Netflix, went from 6.99 a month to 7.99 a month. A dollar a month is a lot, but whatever. The standard ad-free tier, which is standard Netflix, which used to be 7.99 a month,

• 1:21:53David Pierce?

  went from 15.49 to 17.99 a month. That's a $2.50 increase. That's a big number.

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59David Pierce?

  And then the premium tier, which I think is how you get 4K, I don't know, my TV doesn't do any of that stuff, so I don't even know.

• 1:22:05Nilay Patel?

  This is horrible.

• 1:22:06David Pierce?

  Went from $22.99 to $24.99 a month. So to have the best possible Netflix experience, just Netflix is $25 a month. Netflix does not want you to pay that. Like, I cannot be clear about this. Netflix is trying to price you out of every tier except the ads ones. And it is going to keep raising those prices as fast as it can until it does so. Because it makes more money when you do ads. And the more people go to ads, the bigger a scale advertising business Netflix can build, which is what it needs to go after who it really wants to be, which is YouTube.

• 1:22:40David Pierce?

  That's where those two companies are on like a collision course with each other. And Netflix needs to get bigger in order to like really try to play YouTube's game.

• 1:22:48Nilay Patel?

  And YouTube's growth is on television, which they've said over and over again to you, to me, to anybody who will listen. We're growing faster on smart TVs than anywhere else. This actually hilariously, Netflix raised prices by $2. YouTube announced this week a price decrease by $2. But only, but only if you also buy Google One, which you have to pay more money for. And it's like, this is the one of the saddest announcements of all time. And the way that I know it's one of the saddest is in the press release. They didn't say how much the bundle would be cheaper. And we had to go ask them and they were like, it's $2. And we're like, all right, it's $2.

• 1:23:25David Pierce?

  Cool. I'll take the $2, like, sure.

• 1:23:28Nilay Patel?

  They have as much other features. You get higher quality audio streaming. They're going to let you do picture in picture. Basically, you can run like the two of their beta features at once now, you know?

• 1:23:37David Pierce?

  Can I just say, my favorite thing about this is one of the experimental features that they have is you can automatically download recommended YouTube shorts to watch offline, which is like, if I were to make you a list of features that YouTube users do not want, download shorts to my phone.

• 1:23:54Nilay Patel?

  Without asking me, just like fill up my storage with YouTube shorts?

• 1:23:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, everybody wants a thousand YouTube shorts just taking up space on their phone. That's definitely what YouTube users are asking for.

• 1:24:05Nilay Patel?

  I guess if I could tell one of those platforms, like my subway ride from Grand Central to the office is about 22 minutes, like just make sure I have 22 minutes of garbage to watch. You know?

• 1:24:19Nilay Patel?

  I could see it.

• 1:24:21David Pierce?

  If there was a button called download garbage, I would take that.

• 1:24:26Nilay Patel?

  It would have to be like a dial, like I need about 25 minutes of garbage.

• 1:24:32David Pierce?

  How much time do you have to kill?

• 1:24:35Nilay Patel?

  Just, just make sure it's here. All right. Like, I don't. It should actually, it should be like a system wide setting that all of the social garbage apps can feed into. So you're like, you know, I'm going to bounce between like Instagram and Tik Tok and YouTube like just between the three of you, I'm giving you about 25 minutes of garbage storage. Like figure it out.

• 1:24:56David Pierce?

  You know, you know, what's great is in a fediverse world, that can happen. You could build that app on activity.

• 1:25:02Nilay Patel?

  25 minutes of garbage. Finally, an app idea that's really sticky.

• 1:25:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I agree with you. They're on a collision course. I just, I think YouTube has better economics because they don't pay anyone. Like, I understand some people make money from YouTube Premium, but again, the math on YouTube is just so staggeringly good. Like, they make much, so much more money than they pay out. That Netflix just has a pro, like Netflix has headed to a place where it makes no content and everyone in America watches like TV shows made in Korea and Australia because those markets have better economics for content. And reselling it to America is cheaper.

• 1:25:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I think Netflix in a really interesting way is going to like eat the business of Hollywood and then discover how actually small that business is in the scheme of things. Like, like if you add up all of the movie studios and all of the TV studios and all of the like interesting distributors, you're not at Google sized. You're not, you're probably not even a YouTube size as it comes to the business. So like Netflix, I think, is desperately trying to figure out how to do Hollywood at tech money and scale. And it's, it's gonna, it's gonna get to the end of that quickly and it's going to be very expensive for us as the viewers, but I think the question

• 1:26:25David Pierce?

  of whether Netflix can get beyond that kind of ceiling of Hollywood remains to be seen.

• 1:26:31Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then Google has, you know, a million kids every day being like, I'm going to be a YouTuber.

• 1:26:37David Pierce?

  Right. YouTube is, that's the strange thing about it is it is, it is a completely different game that is also competing increasingly on the same screen as Netflix, which I think. Is a scary thing if you're Netflix.

• 1:26:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. Again, I say this.

• 1:26:52David Pierce?

  But it's a lot scarier if you're anybody other than Netflix.

• 1:26:55Nilay Patel?

  Right. By the way, CNN today, after launching a streaming service and then killing it immediately four years ago, announced a streaming service.

• 1:27:06David Pierce?

  Yeah. By the way, we're way out of practice on disclosures. This is where we have to tell the people that Comcast is a minority investor through NBC Universal.

• 1:27:14Nilay Patel?

  Peacock exists. It sucks.

• 1:27:16David Pierce?

  You EP'd a Netflix show that actually came up in my recommendations not that long ago. That was pretty exciting.

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  Did it have my face on it? Was like, hey?

• 1:27:23David Pierce?

  No, it was like the animated poster.

• 1:27:25Nilay Patel?

  Oh, sure. Yeah, no, it did. It's called The Future of. You should go watch it. It was very good. Netflix doesn't pay residuals, so I'm not biased, but it's only gonna go watch it. I think it paid the first time. Straightforwardly. It was just like a fun side project we did. Sure, that's how that was supposed to work. We only made one season. Disclosure.

• 1:27:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that's it. Comcast owns it. Oh, and we talked about OpenAI. Somewhere our work is RSS fed into some chat GPT database.

• 1:27:55David Pierce?

  Do you ever use the search thing?

• 1:27:57Nilay Patel?

  No. This is why I always forget to do the disclosure.

• 1:27:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:01Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't matter in that way.

• 1:28:02David Pierce?

  That seems to have kind of come and gone in everybody's mind pretty fast.

• 1:28:07Nilay Patel?

  Is it copyright infringement? Who knows? But there's a deal in the background. Great. We don't pay any attention to it. Okay, two more lightning round things. They're like the same thing, but also different.

• 1:28:20Nilay Patel?

  The entire tech industry is figuring out how to make light bulbs watch you.

• 1:28:29Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. I don't know what else to say about this.

• 1:28:31David Pierce?

  I was hoping for. Okay.

• 1:28:33Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so Jen has the scoop on Sensify. Jen 2A has a scoop on Sensify, which is tech that can turn Zigbee radios into motion sensors. So light switches, plugs, whatever. Notably, Philips Hue bulbs are Zigbee devices. If you have a lot of Philips Hue bulbs in your life. The sensifi people are saying like, this is a firmware update away. Like there are, they're ready to go. Put in the firmware update and suddenly the Zigbee radios can do motion sensing, which, you know, solves a lot of problems like smart home problems. Like you walk into a room, the lights know you're there, they turn on. This is very cool. Also, your light bulbs are watching.

• 1:29:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, I feel like this is a yet another hard to remember name on top of all of the other smart home standards. So that's exciting. But I would, I would argue if this works, it's on balance, a good thing, right? Cause like, like you're saying, this, this sort of ambient awareness of you in your home has always been a requirement of making a smart home work. Like if, if my home is very smart, but has no idea that I exist. Yes, it can't actually do that much. So like, we've signed up for this already and it's weird because it's your light bulbs. But if it's not your light bulbs, we, everybody would have to eventually put some other sensor in their living room. So like, it might as well be the light bulbs.

• 1:29:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I call this out all the time. The way my hacked together smart home works is like the motion sensor in my EcoB thermostat is wired into an automation that turns on lights in the morning when it senses that my family is awake. That's too much. Like, that's no, no normal human should figure out how to do that, but it works for us. Having the bulbs themselves do it is great. I will say to your point about the smart home being very complicated, I'm just going to read you this full sentence from Jen's piece. There's been speculation that Hugh is working on a Zigbee sensing technology since its sister company, Wiz, debuted a similar tech called SpaceSense in 2022, which uses WNS over wifi.

• 1:30:39Nilay Patel?

  Did you know Wiz ran SpaceSense?

• 1:30:41David Pierce?

  The only words in that sentence I understand are like the prepositions.

• 1:30:44Nilay Patel?

  Very good. It's, it's all, it's all very good. Okay, so that, that's, uh, right. So Hugh bulbs might be doing wins over Zigbee.

• 1:30:53David Pierce?

  I mean, I've been waiting for that for years.

• 1:30:54Nilay Patel?

  And then at the same time, it was, um, Uh, Samsung did have its event and so they had a bunch of sort of other things. They're bringing ambient sensing to smart things. So Samsung TVs, speakers, fridges, air conditioners will become motion sensors for smart things. If you run a smart thing smart house. Unclear if they're using the WIZ supported technology spaces. Or this new Sensify thing that is running on like, this idea has been around for a long time. I've, I feel like I covered it in, in gadget years ago, where if you have wireless radios, they can detect disturbances and, and the radio waves that they're sensing. So this idea's been around for a while. So I think we're just getting to a place where you can do it at scale.

• 1:31:40Nilay Patel?

  And so there's different ways of doing it. So Samsung is doing it in a different way for smart things. And because they have TV speakers, fridges, all this other stuff, it will just be in your house. Now, I think it is weirder if your TV is the motion sensor for a lot of reasons. But I will point out Samsung TVs, the frame TV, famously a motion sensing product. Because it lights up and does the frame thing when you walk into the room. So that you can see they're kind of like building towards the puzzle pieces they already have.

• 1:32:09David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, it's a fun one because the, the usefulness factor and the creepiness factor are perfectly correlated on all of this stuff, right? Like the idea that I could just walk into my living room and flop down on the couch and the TV turns on and I don't even have to find the remote. Nifty, terrifying. It's all, it's all the same thing. Like, do I want to be able to walk into the room and have my lights automatically turn on? Like, yeah, that's, that's a like fundamentally good thing in the smart home that it knows when I'm there and it turns the lights on and it turns them off and I'm gone. Also, a constant reminder that I am being watched by my house.

• 1:32:46Nilay Patel?

  By Samsung. Let me just read you another paragraph from Jen's story. For example, Samsung says, "Motion sensors in a Samsung TV can quote, 'Detect what kind of exercise you're doing, guide you on your form and provide the optimal exercise time for maximum results.'"

• 1:33:00David Pierce?

  Can you imagine your fridge just suddenly going three more?

• 1:33:06Nilay Patel?

  Knees out. I'm gonna keep going. If you sit down in a chair,

• 1:33:12Nilay Patel?

  smart things can automatically turn on the nearby reading lamp and adjust the room to your preferred temperature. Samsung says it can also, quote, "Identify your miniature pincher jumping onto the couch, activating the air purifier to remove allergens from the air." And if you are drying your hair, a device with a speaker like the music frame can hear the hair dryer and tell the Samsung robot vacuum to come vacuum up the hair you have shed.

• 1:33:41David Pierce?

  Utopia and dystopia. That is the smart home story.

• 1:33:44Nilay Patel?

  I just want to point out, these were Samsung's own examples. Someone was like, "All right, I've got a little dog and an air purifier."

• 1:33:54David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, let's maybe brush your dog. I don't know. The air purifier doesn't need to do that much work, I don't think.

• 1:33:59Nilay Patel?

  I'm just telling you, we're headed towards a place where, like, having to demonstrate that linking up everything in your house in a smart home, all these companies are gonna start making up just absolutely absurd scenarios.

• 1:34:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:14Nilay Patel?

  The lights are watching you.

• 1:34:14David Pierce?

  It's the hairdryer one that really does it for me. Like, can you imagine just you, like, plug in your hairdryer and it's like set to on, and so it automatically goes on for a second, and your robot vacuum has to be like, "Ah, shit, here we go again," and just like comes rolling in from the other room.

• 1:34:32Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, David, because obviously Samsung's AI platform will be involved.

• 1:34:36David Pierce?

  I see.

• 1:34:37Nilay Patel?

  Right? You'll be like, "Hey, I've got this hairdryer problem. Can you get the... Can you get... Every time I do this, can you make the vacuum come in?" And then we're gonna sit through another intermodal demo that's like, "The computer understands language." You know what I mean? Like, it's happening. It's happening.

• 1:34:53David Pierce?

  And then we're all so screwed.

• 1:34:55Nilay Patel?

  I will say, I mean, I love a smart home. I just, the lights are watching you is... That's what you have like Apple's like, we're going to do a door lock. It's like step one, but to we're going to put a motorized iPad on a stick in your house. You need, you need all this other stuff to be there.

• 1:35:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:11Nilay Patel?

  Cause otherwise your house isn't going to be very smart at all.

• 1:35:13David Pierce?

  And then there's going to be a software bug and it's going to beat you to death when you try to use your hair dryer. That's, that's where we're headed. Welcome to the future.

• 1:35:19Nilay Patel?

  I do love that it, they specify that it was a miniature pincher.

• 1:35:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, other dogs, whatever. They're, they're not a problem.

• 1:35:27Nilay Patel?

  Our hair purifier, our air purifiers and all right. That's it. That was lightning round for what it's worth. Like I said, we want your feedback on how to manage all this coverage. I know that it's polarizing. Some of you want a lot of it. Some of you would prefer that we filter all of it on the homepage. We're going to find ways to do that on our website. We need to calibrate it on this podcast. So let us know. We're going to, we're going to work it out. But we can't ignore it because all of the products you make are downstream of some of these politics. Like that's, they were all sitting there.

• 1:36:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:01Nilay Patel?

  They were all sitting there.

• 1:36:03Nilay Patel?

  Mark Zuckerberg was sitting there. He was looking at stuff.

• 1:36:06David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:36:08Nilay Patel?

  That's it, everybody. That's the Vergecast.

• 1:36:15Nilay Patel?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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