How the tech world is responding to tariff chaos

Welcome to tech in 2025, where everything's made up and the numbers don't matter. Nilay, David, and The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes start the show by running down the latest tariff news, the uncertain future facing tech companies of all sizes, and what we're learning so far about how they're responding. After that, the hosts talk about a big week in AI news, including Meta's sketchy benchmark numbers and the latest damning reporting about the future of Siri. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a Dummy, along with some news about the TikTok ban and the Pixel 9A. And then some more tariff numbers, because they just never stop. Further reading: The Vergecast was nominated for a Webby, which means we can win a Webby People’s Voice Award and that’s voted online by you! So we’d love your support. You can vote at the link:https://bit.ly/3DXFgpN Sony adds three new speakers to bass-boosted ULT Power Sound lineup Sony seemingly bakes tariff penalty into its new US TV pricing Samsung’s The Frame Pro was never going to be cheap — and it isn’t Trump’s tariffs are officially in effect, including 104 percent on China China retaliates with additional 50 percent tariff on US goods Trump announces a ‘90-day pause’ on tariffs outside of China Trump believes iPhones can be made in the US, says White House Get your screwdrivers ready. Apple quickly shipped 600 tons of iPhones to ‘beat’ the new tariffs Trump triples tariffs on low value packages from China and Hong Kong Some Shein and Temu ‘haul video’ creators are stocking up Shein’s supply chain uncertainties. Amazon is already changing its ultra-cheap Temu copycat Framework stops selling some of its cheapest laptops due to Trump tariffs Framework delays Laptop 12 orders in the US over tariffs Framework will open US preorders for Laptop 12 after all: tomorrow, starting at $549. Framework raised prices and then un-raised them an hour later because of Trump Price hikes, idled factories, layoffs: how car companies are responding to Trump’s tariffs China will show fewer US films in response to tariffs Trump’s new tariffs leave small creators scrambling Arduboy creator says his tiny Game Boy won’t survive Trump’s tariff Trump’s latest tariffs may set the smart home industry back Nintendo boss on Switch 2 and tariffs: ‘we are actively assessing what the impact may be’ Trump’s tariffs ‘pause’ could help Nintendo ship more Switch 2s Musk calls Trump’s trade chief ‘dumber than a sack of bricks.’ We just declared a trade war with the world Meta gets caught gaming AI benchmarks with Llama 4 Siri in The Information Amazon plays catch-up with new Nova AI models to generate voices and video Shopify CEO says no new hires without proof AI can’t do the job Most Americans don’t trust AI — or the people in charge of it Adobe is building AI agents for Photoshop and Premiere Pro Samsung is finally releasing Ballie, its rolling home robot Sam Altman and Jony Ive’s AI project could involve a screenless device. Trump Is Now Mandating His Cabinet/Loyalist Wear "Trump Golden Bust" Pins From Ars Technica: The speech police: Chairman Brendan Carr and the FCC’s news distortion policy From Variety: FCC Commissioner Anna Gomez Sounds Alarm Over Trump Administration’s ‘Absolute Pattern of Censorship and Control’ From the FCC: Spectrum Is Back—Again! FCC eyes major satellite rule revamp in spectrum-sharing shakeup Trump delays TikTok ban again Trump’s TikTok delay is ‘against the law’ top Senate Intelligence Democrat says The US told Apple to keep TikTok in the App Store. Instagram might finally release an iPad app Google Pixel 9A review: a midrange phone done right Pixel 9A hits stores, and it’s still $499. 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

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:31Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of being nominated for the Webby Awards.

• 1:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It's very exciting. David, tell the people what's going on here.

• 1:40David Pierce?

  I thought you were going to say we weren't nominated for the Webby Awards, but we cover the podcasts that were nominated for the Webby Awards.

• 1:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's not us. It's everyone else.

• 1:49David Pierce?

  The Vergecast is nominated for Best Technology Podcasts, Webby Awards. It's very exciting. We care a lot about this award in particular because it is voted on by people. Like, I care so much more about what people listening to this think than, you know, random, fusty judges. I like to think of it like the Academy, where it's just like a bunch of old white dudes who haven't seen a movie in 50 years. Like, I don't care about them. Vote for us so that we can win and we can crush our competition. Our competition, by the way, is like lovely people, including like the EFF, and I want to destroy them. So we'll, we'll put a link in the show notes. I think there's another week to vote. We'll put a link in the show notes. We'll put a link in the container post on the site.

• 2:29David Pierce?

  But please go vote for us. And I think you can vote for us multiple times. It's like once a day or something you can vote. So like, make it your homepage and vote for us every single time you think about it and we will be eternally grateful.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  Have you been dying for an AI agent project? Here's one.

• 2:44David Pierce?

  Can you vibe code your way to a Webby victory is a very good question.

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  That's actually a perfect Vergecast episode.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  I want to be very clear about that. And that's what we're going to do for the rest of the show. We're going to live vibe code. I've opened Claude and David's going to open Cursor and then we're going to race.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  I love it.

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I'm your friend Eli. That's David Pierce.

• 3:04David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 3:04Nilay Patel?

  Jake Kastranakis is here, everybody.

• 3:06Speaker 06

  Hey, good to be here.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. We've got basically three lightning rounds. That's how David has structured this. Although I will say this first lightning round is just a segment about tariffs. We're just calling it a lightning round to pretend it's not just a full segment about tariffs.

• 3:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, pretty much. There's just, it's like, it's, it's tariffs is one of those things that it is, it contains multitudes. And so it's like, lightning round is like, let's just talk about it all very fast.

• 3:29Speaker 06

  Lightning is the speed at which these tariff changes have come this week. Like I'm afraid to say a single number on this podcast because we're recording Thursday afternoon. It's going to come out Friday morning. Anything could happen in those like 12 hours. It's so true.

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  My favorite thing about tariffs, and this is very inside baseball editorial stuff, is we often assign stories that are like, here's how something happened, right? Like here's the process by which Go90 went 90. And like, we talked to all the insiders and like, this happened on this day. This happened on the next day. Here's the big decision they made. You, you see these stories everywhere. Whenever a big decision is made or there's a deal that's done, someone gets what's called the TikTok. And it's just like, here's all the stuff that happened in order. And those are really fun to read. They're really fun to write. The funniest thing about the tariff situation is that all the major newspapers tried to do a TikTok story of what is by all accounts, pure chaos. And so they tried to impose this structure on like,

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Then the Treasury Secretary did drugs and called all of his friends and his friends were mad and they called Susie Wiles and you're like, this isn't a process story because there's no process.

• 4:38David Pierce?

  Right.

• 4:39Nilay Patel?

  But that, that's very much the like, the like Cuban beings have a desire for it to make sense and this refuses to make sense.

• 4:47David Pierce?

  Charlie Wartle, our friend over at The Atlantic, wrote a thing earlier this week comparing kind of the, the response and conversation around all of this to QAnon, which I love, right? And it is, it is exactly that thing. It is this relentless belief that there is a plan, that somebody is doing things on purpose, that this is thought out, that there is a, there is a bigger thing going on and just because you can't see it doesn't mean it's not there. When the blindingly obvious truth is that there is no plan, everybody in charge is an idiot and nothing is being considered or thought out. We just basically, it's like Trump and three people in a room and then a bunch of people around the government who just kind of let him do it and that, that's everything.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:28David Pierce?

  It's unreal.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  I think it was Bill Ackman had a tweet that was like, this is the art of the deal. And it's like, bro, what deal? No deal was made. I like, I'm not even arguing that it was a good deal or a bad deal. I'm asking you to identify the deal.

• 5:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:42Nilay Patel?

  Uh, okay. But because it is lightning round, the conceit of a lightning round is that it's like lots of different things jumbled up and we just move through them. So I'm going to start the show somewhere else. It's not tariffs and we can see if we can get to tariffs. You, you with me?

• 5:58David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  Just to, okay. Just a gesture of this being like.

• 6:01David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. Cause I, I put this here at the top for you because this is the, this is the most important news in the world if you're Neelai Patel. And so this is where we start, but if you can walk me from here to tariffs, I will be very impressed.

• 6:12Nilay Patel?

  I think I can get there.

• 6:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 6:14Nilay Patel?

  So as you know, I divide the eras of human existence into eras of Sony providing extra bass to its speakers.

• 6:29Nilay Patel?

  So I was born.

• 6:30Speaker 06

  The epochs of history.

• 6:32Nilay Patel?

  I was born in the mega bass era, which I think we all recall is when America was great. The eighties and early nineties, right? The mega bass button was on the Walkman. We were riding high. Top Gun had just come out. You all know what I'm talking about. But we've, you've seen the memes. That's when, I mean, that's, that was it. That was the peak. We were all young. In the mid 2000s, Sony moved to the extra bass era, which I believe tracks with our decline.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  It was really weird. You get, you get rid of this thing people love. You add a button called extra bass. No one knows what it means. It's going away. They've abandoned that into the ULT power sound era. So that's where we are now. We left mega bass behind. We're in ULT power sound. We've talked about this a lot. And in the news is that there are now three new party speakers from Sony, which is further evidence that the market for giant party speakers with LED lights around the, the drivers is so huge that Sony is continually investing in making new ones, as are all of its competitors. And this market is bigger than anyone can see. You know how they're like, we're tracking this outbreak, but it's much bigger because just to base on the, this is what we can just see.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  This is the tip of the iceberg. I'm saying the party speaker market is gigantic. It is under remarked upon. And it's just the evidence that there keep being new ones that let us know it's, it's happening.

• 8:01Speaker 06

  I, I'm curious for your experience here, and maybe this, maybe this just says something about me, but not, not once have I walked into a friend's home and seen a large party speaker the size of a piece of furniture.

• 8:12Nilay Patel?

  And yet, they're like cryptids. Have you seen Bigfoot?

• 8:15Speaker 06

  Where are they? Where are they going? I don't know.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  They're everywhere.

• 8:19Speaker 06

  In malls, they're filling up all the empty malls with these things?

• 8:22Nilay Patel?

  Taco Shacks, it's, it's weird vendors in malls. It's, it's car dealership. They're everywhere. And I know this because every single company now has a full lineup in sizes ranging from like shelf size to, to medium sized child. And they keep revving them. So the new one is the ULT Tower 9. It replaces, by the way, the Sony SRX SXV 900.

• 8:49David Pierce?

  It's a classic.

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  It has 25 hours of battery playback, a quick charge option that has three hours of playback after only 10 minutes of charging and is $900.

• 8:59David Pierce?

  It's a tough like 10 minute party foul to charge the speaker, but then you get it back for three hours.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  The ULT Tower 9 offers both ULT1 mode, which delivers deeper lower frequency bass, and ULT2 mode, which provides powerful punchy bass.

• 9:15David Pierce?

  Who's using ULT1?

• 9:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know.

• 9:17David Pierce?

  Let's be real. I think this, this suggests that the next era is going to be the one that is deeper, lower frequency, powerful punchy bass. All ULT3 is the next phase.

• 9:29Nilay Patel?

  It does appear that it also has HDMI in or optical in, so you can connect it to a TV. And it has improved 360 degree LED lighting that can illuminate more floor space. It's $900, it lasts for 25 hours on battery. If you don't need the battery, there's a $750 version that is ACL me.

• 9:46David Pierce?

  But you need the battery. Like you, you can't party speaker without a battery.

• 9:50Nilay Patel?

  This is evidence that the ULT era is not only here, but like it's secretly dominant. Like lots of people have ULT buttons in their home. And I know this because Sony keeps investing in making the speakers and they're getting more extravagant and more expensive. They're moving up market.

• 10:08David Pierce?

  It's true.

• 10:08Nilay Patel?

  It's not no one wants them, we have to make them cheaper. It's everyone wants them. They cost $900, they can last for a full day and illuminate your home.

• 10:16David Pierce?

  What if it was taller? I just want to say, before we move on, and you, you're stalling, walking us to tariffs from here, but.

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  That's all I want to talk about.

• 10:23David Pierce?

  I encourage everyone to click on this story and look at the pictures because these things are so large that photographs of them look like the speaker has been photoshopped into some other scene in such a large way that it, it can't possibly make sense. It really is like, it's, it's the size of like a 10 year old and they're just stuck in here. It's like, it's like an alien form just being photoshopped into this photo of a concert.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  The other very funny thing about these photos is Sony is by far the most restrained in design when it comes to these products and they still look bananas.

• 10:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. All right. So here, that's the ULT Tower 9, which has both ULT1 and ULT2 modes.

• 11:08Nilay Patel?

  This is where we are in our ULT era. Eventually, there's something else will come. But I'm telling you, I was born in the mega base era and I yearn. I yearn for the the simple pleasures of my youth. And instead, I have the ULT Tower Nine. The reason I bring this up is because it doesn't appear that Sony increased the prices of these products in response to tariffs. Still $900, but now you get two ULT modes and a wider and a wider floor illumination. But last week, we talked about the Bravia 2.2. Sony's new TVs and the Bravia 8.2. Incredible names.

• 11:45David Pierce?

  I don't know if you saw this, by the way. We got a bunch of emails from people who were like, I straight up didn't believe you that it was called the 2.2. So I went and looked and I would not like to apologize for not believing you about this stupid name.

• 11:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, one person was like, it's obviously the Bravia 2 Mark 2. And then like, no, it's not.

• 11:59David Pierce?

  It's just the 2.2.

• 12:00Nilay Patel?

  It's the Bravia 2.2. So the ULT speakers, apparently inflation proof, recession proof, tariff proof, same price. TVs, not so much. So it appears that the Bravia 8.2, the high end OLED, which replaces the A95L in a perfect naming scheme, is going to be $500 more in the United States than it was last year. And the price is unchanged in Canada. So you can already see the tariff impact there. The other TVs are also going up. So Sony is already beginning to bake in some tariff pricing. Samsung, on the other hand, announced pricing on the Frame Pro and it is just expensive, but it doesn't appear the price has gone up. The 65 inch Frame Pro is $2,200.

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  This is for a TV that still has edge backlighting. They're just lying and saying that it's mini LED because it's mini LEDs on the bottom edge.

• 12:53David Pierce?

  And that I would point out to anyone who is listening. Neelai's argument for the Frame TV always ends with, you don't want a TV. And now, actually, what you do want is a $2,200 TV.

• 13:07Nilay Patel?

  People buy these things.

• 13:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  And then they use them to show artwork or they watch TikTok. And now you can do that for $2,200. If you are, I will say, I I'm very proud of our audience. Because all of the comments on this are, I thought this was a good TV of how expensive it was and it turns out to be a shit TV.

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Never been happier. The audience has started to figure it out. The reason the Samsung one is so expensive, we think, is because they moved all the ports to a wireless one connect box.

• 13:35David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  So you just plug in the TV and then you've got this breakout wireless box to plug in your game consoles and everything else you can put up to 30 feet away. And instead of improving the picture quality, they spent all the money on this wireless box. This is a nightmare. But it doesn't seem, and also, I think Samsung didn't have to raise prices because of tariffs, because Frame TV is such a shit panel, it's been pure margin the whole time. They could just eat it. That's my going theory. But we can already see, here I got there, David, on the high-end TV where there's, where people are, pay the money for the highest-end Sony TVs, no matter what, the A95L never went on sale. It was a $5,077 inch TV. It has, as far as I can tell, never been on sale. Those customers are going to pay the tariff money and Sony's going to charge it to them.

• 14:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, because they can. I mean, all of that stuff is easier at the top of the market. I mean, this is something we're going to talk a lot about here is that like, the, the price elasticity question here is coming up over and over and over in tariffs. And it turns out, it's actually easier to raise the price on something that's already $5,000.

• 14:34Nilay Patel?

  That has perfect demand, right? Sony sold every one of those NFFLs at full price to somebody who wanted them. So we, I got here, I walked my way from ULT Power Nines to tariffs.

• 14:45David Pierce?

  I'm proud of you.

• 14:46Nilay Patel?

  David, your challenge

• 14:49Nilay Patel?

  in, on Thursday afternoon, is tell us what's going on with tariffs in a way that is relevant when people listen to this on Friday morning.

• 14:57David Pierce?

  Okay. Tariffs both do and do not exist at all times. And that is the state of America.

• 15:04Nilay Patel?

  Heisenberg uncertainty tariffs.

• 15:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. So I think where we are as of right now, is, we talked a bunch last week about this, this nonsensical set of quote unquote reciprocal tariffs that were not reciprocal tariffs, that were based on trade deficits and nonsense equations that had nothing to do with anything and appear to have been invented by various AI bots. Set the stock market on fire for several days. And then Trump, after saying he got phone calls from 75 different countries that he declined to name.

• 15:38David Pierce?

  Put a 90 day pause on all of it, except for two things. One, he has continued to do an escalating tariff war with China to the point where now all the numbers are over 100% and just, we've entered like full fake number territory on all of this, like 50,000%, like who cares?

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're just bigger. The number, it's six blades. That's what we're doing.

• 16:00David Pierce?

  It's six, yeah, exactly.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  Can I just quickly explain the over 100%? Because people have been confused and I kind of get it.

• 16:07David Pierce?

  Yes, but let me just say the one other thing that's happening and then we can dive it. The, because I think this actually gets lost in a lot of the back and forthness. The one thing that was left in place was a 10% base tariff on everybody, which seems simple, but it has become vastly complicated because countries like Mexico and Canada, where they have been exempted from some of these tariff deals are now suddenly like, wait, does this apply to us too? And it appears that it does. And so we are, we are back in this place of, it's, it's not as bad as many people thought it might be, at least for the next 90 days, but it's still very bad in the most important country in this case, which is China, and it is still impossibly confusing to everybody.

• 16:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:46David Pierce?

  So that's where we are. Now explain the over 100% thing.

• 16:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, it just means if you bring in something for $10, you have to pay $14 of tariffs. It's just fully ridiculous. Like, that's the end of people importing things here. Mr. Beast was pointing out that it will be cheaper for him to make feastables and his other products outside the country to ship to other countries. Like, he's gonna move production out of the United States because other markets will be cheaper to manufacture and distribute to, to get away from all this tariff noise. That's nuts. Like, it's just fully nuts to, to break the world trade system in that way. You can go read the, like, we tried to explain the decision, but the answer is, like, the world financial system started to teeter and Trump blinked, and he was like, screw it, 10% tariffs. And then there's the underlying question,

• 17:32Nilay Patel?

  which I think is one of those interesting political realignment things. The power to implement the tariffs is basically Trump declared a national emergency.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  And then he was like, now with the power of emergency, I command you to pay me an extra 104%. And the emergency is the trade deficit in many of these cases, which is not an emergency because that has existed for 50 years.

• 17:55David Pierce?

  And is also not what Trump thinks it is. Like, what the definition of a trade deficit that leads you to do what Trump is doing is not what a trade deficit actually is. And I am not an economist, but I am confident that I am smarter about this than our current president.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  So the really interesting thing about that is a bunch of hard right free traders. Rand Paul is screaming about the trade deficit not being what Trump thinks.

• 18:16David Pierce?

  I thought you were gonna say Dave Portnoy.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Dave Portnoy is, I don't think he's a hard right free trader. I think that dude is just trying to make some money. But, you know, his number went down, number went up. Like, he's reacting to it in real time. But the Rand Pauls of the world are out there giving strong speeches and strong quotes being like, this makes no sense. And then a bunch of conservative legal groups are filing lawsuits being like, this isn't an emergency. You don't have this power. Which is a thing that you would expect really conservative legal groups to do, say like, actually, the government shouldn't have this power. So you just see the realignment, right? That's not the political outcome you would expect usually from from Trump stuff. We'll see where all of it goes. But in the meantime, the tariffs haven't

• 18:58Nilay Patel?

  actually been rescinded. They've been paused for 90 days. They're still in massive effect against China, which has enormous consequences across the board. And then it's confusing how they apply to everyone else.

• 19:13David Pierce?

  Well, and and Trump continues to say during that pause that what he wants is, I was gonna say implied, but he's not even implying it. He's just saying it out loud. He wants people to like bribe him and make deals with him in some meaningful way. Like he, the the goal is to get everyone to come and tell him how terrific he is. And that's, that's what he says over and over. And there were reports of, you know, a bunch of leaders flying to Mar-a-Lago to basically tell Trump to stop doing this. Like Jamie Dimon apparently went and was giving a whole speech to Trump about why tariffs are bad. And Trump thought that was really great. And so it's like, it's, it's very clear that the leverage he is going for here remains the same. And the way you do that is by putting a pause on it. Sure.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  Everyone wants out. Like, Tim Cook is gonna show up and say, "Give Apple it out the way that you did for me during your first administration when you went into a trade war with China." It's true. I think he wants the deals. He wants to be flattered. At one point, he had Charles Schwab, and he like pointed at him, and he was like, "Look, it's a guy. It's like an actual guy," which is incredible television. Like, all of this is nonsensical. There's that goal, right? The weird, corrupt, "Let's do gangster deals on the side." Sure, that's Trump. Then there's this other goal, which is also an echo of his first administration, where Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick is saying, "I want factories in the United States. I want the army of people with little screwdrivers building iPhones. I want them to come here."

• 20:41Nilay Patel?

  Karen Leibert, the press secretary, was asked very directly by Maggie Haberman, "Does Trump believe we can make iPhones in the United States?" And she said, "Absolutely. We have the workforce. We have the talent." That has been the goal the whole time, right? There's the little goal, which is, "Let's do shady deals on the side." And then there's this big goal, which is like, "Let's restructure the world and build the iPhone in the United States, because that will make us great again." We've been covering that for a long time. Like, there's a part of this for me, and I don't know if you two feel the same, where it's just a bunch of people grew up, and they're having the same experiences that we had 15 years ago. And one of those experiences

• 21:23Nilay Patel?

  is Donald Trump insisting the iPhone can be built in the United States. And then we have to have Obama insisting the iPhone can be built in the United States, and we have to like go through the conversation again.

• 21:32Speaker 06

  I mean, they keep trying to bring like different pieces of Apple manufacturing into the US, and each time it becomes like a little bit of a disaster in some way. Like, they were going to try to do a bunch of glass in the US, and like, I think that factory just like didn't work out for them.

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  No, they do the glass here. Corning does the glass here.

• 21:49Speaker 06

  They do the glass. I thought there was something for the Apple Watch where they were going to do a specific type of glass, and they were building a specific factory. Corning is here. But there's that. There's the, you know, they did eventually, they relaunched the Mac factory for Trump himself. But all these things take time, like a surprisingly long amount of time. And we have, you know, TSMC opening a factory in Arizona that's just like, you know, "We're hoping it can produce enough chips to be useful for basically anybody." And we are hoping that those chips are going to be on a modern enough node that we actually want to use them in our latest gadgets. And so it's just like... There are these baby steps happening. But even when we put a concerted effort into it, we're never quite getting there.

• 22:33David Pierce?

  There is the ongoing question of why is this the goal? That I have continued to find really fascinating. And I think seeing the way it's being covered, particularly by the kind of right leaning press, is really fascinating because on the one hand, I think the reasonable people that I have seen make this sort of national security argument, right? That it is, this is a way to control your own destiny. If you don't make the chips, you are reliant on somebody else for something that is like crucially important to modern life. Sure, I think it is vastly more complicated than that, but I at least like understand the bones of that argument. But we've so quickly devolved now into this place where everybody is saying that factories are manly and like, and that actually the problem is, is men are sitting around playing

• 23:15David Pierce?

  video games, collecting welfare, and what they should actually be doing is working in factories. And that's how you make men, men. And this is like, this, this is what happens when there's no other move. Like, do you remember when, at the very end of the election or at the very end of the campaign in like October and November of last year, there was this whole run of stuff on Fox News that it wasn't manly to vote for a woman for president? This became a real thing and people were like repeating it. And now you have people on Fox News saying the same thing, that tariffs are manly and, and that somehow this is the thing you have to appeal to in order to get people to buy into this thing that just transparently doesn't make any other sense. And so I'm at this place where it's like, okay, even if you want to say it is possible

• 23:58David Pierce?

  and plausible to move all of this stuff to the United States, which it's not, and we should talk about that, like it isn't. But there still is not an interesting answer as to why, except that it will somehow return us to the, the beautiful past that everyone is so excited about.

• 24:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's implicit in all of that is the only market that matters is America, right? That if Americans make American products for the American citizens, like we will have an ounce of self-control and respect and we will. I don't know, once again, smash communism in some way. I don't know. Like, I find that argument very confusing in its way, because these are not only low-paid jobs in most of the countries in which they are done, they're increasingly automated jobs. And Lotnik is saying the same thing. He's like, these factories are automated and jobs like robot technician. And it's like, we're very confused. Yeah. Like, very, very confused about what is actually happening in China and what that

• 24:56Nilay Patel?

  ecosystem looks like and what the supply chains to make that ecosystem go look like. And the thing that is crazy-making to me is this new gloss of like, it's manly to work in a factory, is it's still unrelated to the problem. Right? It's like, we're having a new, dumber version of a conversation that literally, I think in 2010, Steve Jobs had with then-President Obama. Right? Where he's like, I just don't have the talent in this country. You have to invest in the educational system to make me the engineers to work in the plants. Not as the people with the screwdrivers, but as the engineering managers making sure the plants operate. You don't have enough. I'm never gonna do it. The Mac Pro story is really interesting. There's a really, I don't remember where

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  it was from, we'll find it. There's a really interesting story about that factory getting off the ground. It's run by a company called Flex, which is like a Foxconn competitor. That's how you should think of it. One of these big assemblers. Then Flex is in Texas. That's where they do the Mac Pro. They set up the facility there for Apple, and they could not get screws at Apple's specifications in Texas. And the one supplier they had was delivering the screws in the trunk of his car. Wow. That's the problem. It is not like manliness. It is, the problem is, we have not invested for years now in the ecosystem. And you go to China, and the ecosystem is

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  not about like, one company owning the manufacturing chain, like Intel owning the chip fab. It's about lots and lots of manufacturing companies serving lots and lots of customers. And they're good at customer service. In that we just, we have, you have to like, reset everything about our culture to make that go.

• 26:37David Pierce?

  And of course, the, the administration is in the middle of tearing down all of those other parts also. Like, you can't say with a straight face, "We want to train people to work in factories" while dismantling the Department of Education. Right? Like, those two things are completely at odds, which, again, there is no plan. There's just not a plan.

• 26:57Nilay Patel?

  So, I don't want you to take my word for it, or take our word for it. You can go read in the, it's the Walter Isaacson, Steve Jobs biography, which is mostly a bad book, but has like, good scenes in it. The story about Obama and Jobs, and Jobs is like, "This is never gonna happen." But years later, in 2017, Tim Cook, on stage at a Fortune conference, gave the same answer about why they can't build the iPhone in the United States. We should just run the tape. We should just run the tape.

• 27:23Speaker 07

  The truth is, China stopped being the low labor cost country many years ago, and that is not the reason to come to China from a supply point of view. The reason is because of the skill, and the, the quantity of skill in one location, and the type of skill it is. Like, the products we do require really advanced tooling, and the, the precision that you have to have in tooling and working with the materials that we do are state of the art. And the tooling skill is very deep here. You know, in, in the US, you could have a meeting of tooling engineers, and I'm not

• 28:07Speaker 07

  sure we could fill the room. In China, you could fill multiple football fields.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal.

• 28:14David Pierce?

  That's, that's rough.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  First of all, we should find out where the meetings of tooling engineers in the United States are, and how they're there. Like, "What's up, guys? The whole country is depending on you."

• 28:23David Pierce?

  And they fit in like, the back room of a Denny's.

• 28:26Nilay Patel?

  Like the pressure is out of control. I mean, that's the problem. If you want it, you have to invest in it. And no company is going to look at this tariff chaos and say, okay, this is a good investment based on expected return. I need to avoid these tariffs. So I'm going to start training multiple football fields of tooling engineers. So I can build one product. They're just going to find another way to do it.

• 28:50David Pierce?

  Well, and the uncertainty is so much a part of that, too, that, right? Like, I think you could, you could make a much more compelling version of that argument. If there was a coherent plan, even if you disagreed with the plan, it was like, here is, here is the future as it is laid out, and we are not going to go away from it. But what I keep hearing from folks and what lots of folks in our team have been reporting about is just the uncertainty is what kills you. Like, you don't actually even know where to invest your time and energy and money right now. Because the tariffs might go away, they might change, they might move, they might just suddenly evaporate all of your possibilities in one country or another. And everyone is just frozen by it. So the idea that you're going to redirect investment actually becomes harder in that world.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:34David Pierce?

  I think this also, like, even if you know this is going to last for four years, can you even do it within that time to a reasonable scale? That it'll be valuable for you? And that's not clear. And then additionally, like, to your point with uncertainty, we don't even know that it would last beyond Trump. Given that everybody seems to hate this. There's one person who in America who likes tariffs and we just happened to elected president.

• 29:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm not sure, by the way, if what Tim Cook was saying there was a football field densely packed with tooling engineers or like a football stadium.

• 30:06David Pierce?

  I imagined the former.

• 30:08Nilay Patel?

  Because if it's football stadium, you're like, you're, okay, you're doing the math. Like, okay, that's, that's between like maybe 75 and 100,000 people per stadium. You know, depending on your biggest college football stadiums, like 100,000 people. So, okay, it's like 300,000 tooling engineers. But if it's, it's one densely packed 100 yard football field, maybe it's way less than that. I've, I've been thinking about this since 2017.

• 30:32David Pierce?

  I like imagining that it's, what he means actually is just it's three football fields, but it's just 11 on 11 on each field.

• 30:39David Pierce?

  It's all he means is it's actually six football teams. But he said it weird.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, but it's the full 53, you know?

• 30:45David Pierce?

  Right, exactly.

• 30:47Nilay Patel?

  Look, that is from 2017. That's not today. That's not Tim Cook disagreeing with Donald Trump today. That is years ago, and that even that itself is seven years after Steve Jobs made the same exact argument to Obama.

• 31:04David Pierce?

  Right. And all that it has done since then is accelerate.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  It hasn't gotten better. We haven't invested more into these kinds of roles and this, this kind of training. And by all rights, the only party that can actually do that is the government, because the government is not expecting that to return on investment in the form of a product tomorrow. And so if, yes, we should thought, we should build the iPhone here. We, we, we all did this round of coverage in 2012 and 2013. We did it again when Trump got elected the first time in 16 and 17. Now we're doing it a third time. Only all of us have to be like, no, we are real men, which is deeply confusing. All of my cars are faster than yours. I'm just saying it out loud. One is real loud. And it's ridiculous because the

• 31:50Nilay Patel?

  problem is the same. The problem is you need apparently six football teams worth of tooling engineers. And I just, I don't like how, what's the plan there? Because if you want to, it's, you can't just punish people into training engineers in the United States.

• 32:04David Pierce?

  Right. And it's not at all clear that we're going to do anything to make that possible either. But we'll decide in 75 days. Sorry, 90 days, 90 days.

• 32:12Nilay Patel?

  That's right. They're not even permitted. It's like the pause is just 90 days. So we're already seeing a bunch of reactions to this. Apple shipped 600 tons of iPhones on planes to beat the tariffs. Anything that was already on a ship that was like en route, beat the tariffs. So there's a lot of that going on. So I don't think we're going to see immediate changes. The Sheins and Timus of the world are in real trouble because the de minimis exception that basically that those companies exist is going away. We don't know what's going to happen. We know that hall creators, like fashion hall creators, are just buying everything on Timo.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  Which is getting ready. Amazon has a weird team of copycat that they're already changing where stuff is coming from. We sort of asked around, you can see other changes, Tobias Butler from Toonshine, who was on the show last week, he emailed us, he said, so with the new 104% tariff, the cost of each manufactured Toonshine goes up 28%, which will cost $90 each, which gets pretty close to the figure he called last week as this would kill me. So he would have to raise price from $1.99 to $255, and it's still not worthwhile to switch to US suppliers. So he's, the little creators are like coming to these existential points. He says, I'm not sure what my immediate plan is, except to reach out to the community and see what people think about $250.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  Framework, which we cover a lot, they've just stopped selling their cheapest laptops here because of tariffs. They delay, I think they delayed pre-orders.

• 33:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, they've gone back and forth in a really fascinating way. And I think actually, Framework is a company a lot of other startups look to, to see how to do this, because Framework spends a long time working on this stuff and is also sort of unusually transparent in how all of this works. Like Framework will sell you an individual part of a computer, so it just like has to be able to tell more stories about how it makes those things. But Sean Hauser wrote a thing for us earlier this week, and basically, in the span of 16 hours, tariffs were enacted. Framework announced it was going to increase the price of all of its computers by 10%. Like 45

• 34:26David Pierce?

  minutes later, Trump announces the pause. 30 minutes after that, Framework announces that it's bringing the prices back to normal. And then two hours later, it says it's still going to increase prices. And then it was not going to add for pre-orders, it was not going to open pre-orders on the laptop 12, which is its new cheap one, but then it decided to anyway. And it's just like, this company, they just keep basically being like, look, we have no idea what's going on either. We're just going to keep updating this blog post as best we can to tell you what's going on.

• 34:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's right. Super certain, makes sense for everyone who wants to invest in a small company, if the company. Doesn't even quite know what's happening. Uh, not just small companies, the biggest companies in the world, uh, totally caught off guard. Uh, speaking of updating blog posts, we just have a list of automakers and what they're doing. And they're asking us to keep updating because the plans keep changing. Uh, it's basically chaos. We will, we'll, we'll link to that post, but VW is adding import fees. Uh, Stellantis is idling production at various places, putting nine error jobs on hold. Um, Jang Wal, Jaguar Land Rover, uh, like the people who live in the town around its factory are basically like, this is the end of us. Ford has so much inventory that they're just cutting prices across the board, which is very good.

• 35:39Nilay Patel?

  Um, Audi is just holding 37,000 cars at docks until something happens.

• 35:46Speaker 06

  Because as long as they're there, they don't have to pay the tariffs. They just, you just leave them. I think they haven't brought them in yet, right?

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're, they're, they're like,

• 35:53Speaker 06

  They're like, we gotta get these in eventually and like,

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  They're on the other side of the fence. Uh, it's nuts. Like that's, that's all nuts. And then the main thing that we should talk about is the switch to, which it, it feels like there's the weird cultural, like tariffs make you manly. And then there's the switch to, and in terms of just weird reactions, like the switch to, I think bore the brunt of it.

• 36:19Speaker 06

  It's also been the most public because Nintendo had the just like terrible luck of announcing the switch to, I don't know, 30 minutes before the, the, the tariff, uh, threats began. Um, and so they're doing this press tour as this information was unfolding. And so normally companies can kind of hide from some of these questions if they just don't put their executives out there. But Nintendo was in the middle of putting their executives in front of every single journalist they could find. And all of them only had one question and it was, what is, are you going to do about these tariffs?

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  And then the price is already high. So there's this assumption that Nintendo priced the thing high for tariffs. And the answer, and I think Doug Bowser said this to our own Andrew Webster, he's like, no, that was how much we priced it at. And we'll see what happens now.

• 37:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  Which is not a great answer.

• 37:10David Pierce?

  But then, pre-orders were supposed to have been this week, and were not this week. And that was, that was the thing that really set everybody on fire was Nintendo went from, "We're going to sell you our very expensive console that you're going to be slightly mad about, but definitely for sure buy anyway," to actually, "You can't buy it yet." Because we don't, we don't know what it's going to cost.

• 37:32Speaker 06

  And I think pre-orders for something like this is the worst possible situation to be in. Because they're importing millions and millions of these things. And if you're going to sell them at $450 today, and you have zero idea what they're going to cost you to bring in two months from now, when they actually go on sale, that could just devastate them. And obviously, they are going to be bringing a bunch in early to avoid the tariffs as much as they can. Allegedly, they've been stocking up for months already. But it doesn't really change the fact that they could be put in a position where a bunch of people have bought these things early at one price, and they actually have to start selling them at a much higher price two months from now. That's just going to lead to a complete disaster for them.

• 38:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, and, and there's, there's no good answer at the end of that either, right? Like, you, you either immediately increase the price of an already pretty expensive thing. And you can blame that on whoever you want, but it's going to hurt demand. Or you say, you know, "Get it now, maybe the price will go up," which is weird and bad. It's also, for a company that big, it's, it's like, logistically really complicated to change the price of something. This is something I've, I've heard from a couple of people that I hadn't really thought about before, that like, you have to change your marketing materials, and you have to change like, signs that you've made. And you have to change, like, commercials that you've, you've put out in the world that people are going to be running on television. Like, it's actually not as simple as just changing the price of a thing on your website.

• 38:56David Pierce?

  When you want to change the price of something, it actually becomes a real process. And it's, I just like, that alone is very complicated. But like, this is, that, that exact thing is everywhere now. Like, the, this guy Dan Siroker, who is the CEO of a company called Limitless, they make one of those like, AI voice recorders that listens to you all the time and tells you what interesting Stuff you said, I have one upstairs. I haven't used it yet, but we'll report back. He tweeted this yesterday. He said, our customers pre-ordered our product for as low as $59. We have the product ready to ship, but with tariffs, it will now cost us $189.38 per unit. Should we, one, wait until it gets better? Two, ship now and eat the tariff cost? Three, cancel the orders and eat the manufacturing cost.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst SAT question I've ever heard.

• 39:41David Pierce?

  But those are your options and they're all terrible. And if you're Nintendo, maybe you can eat the cost, right? Like if you're, if you're Apple with famously high margins, you can eat the cost. None of these companies want to because they like money and that's the job. But a lot of these companies, especially these smaller companies, literally cannot afford to eat that cost. And so now they're like, okay, do I triple the price of my thing? Or am I out of business? And am I out of business either way?

• 40:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, we're also saying like, they might be able to eat the cost. That's like at 10%, they might be able to eat that cost. At like 34%, that becomes a completely different equation. And then at some point, we're talking about these 100 plus percent tariffs. And I, you know, I think depending on the country that they're manufacturing in,

• 40:30Speaker 06

  they're going to have different levels of existential crises here, but all of them are pretty existential. Even 10%, you know, I think we're looking at, that's what some of the stuff that frameworks is dealing with. Even that is enough to cause them heartburn and go, I don't think we can sell this anymore.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the interesting question is going to be where the money moves. So, you know, for a product, an AI voice recorder, there's a service component with that. So you might sell the hardware at a loss and then make the subscription price five times higher.

• 40:58David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 40:58Nilay Patel?

  I think we're going to see a lot of those moves, which will suck.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Just like flatly, that will suck.

• 41:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  And then we're going to see like the end of discounting, like most people price in sales, like that stuff is going to go away. So that, we don't know what's going to happen. And I think the switch to is going to be a kind of like the leading indicator of how certain anybody feels. Because it is a product everybody wants and they could probably raise the price and still sell a lot of them. But I don't think they want to. I think they already know it's high and they're already getting yelled back because it's high. There's other stuff, weird stuff happening in response, by the way. China is considering showing fewer US films, which would just basically crush the Marvel machine, right?

• 41:38David Pierce?

  I mean, less so than a few years ago, like it's, that's shifted a little bit already, but it is still a huge part of the industry. And it's like, we, it was very funny, we were talking about this earlier, that like, do you remember how all the bad guys in Mission Impossible movies are now called like the entity? Nobody like fights foreign countries anymore. They're all just like nameless bad guys. That's because they wanted these movies to play in other markets, mostly China. And so like, and then China like took all the stuff that it learned from Hollywood, built its own, now has a huge homegrown movie industry and is now just like, yeah, get out. All that money you used to make from showing movies in our, our country, goodbye.

• 42:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:18David Pierce?

  China has a lot of those moves to make if it wants to.

• 42:20Nilay Patel?

  It does have a lot of those moves to make. I'm just saying that I watched The Three Body Problem and I'm like less worried about it than maybe you are.

• 42:27David Pierce?

  Not so worried about that one.

• 42:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And not, not the, not the new Netflix bad one. I mean, the Chinese bad one. Just to be clear, the Netflix one was worse. That's like worse evidence.

• 42:42David Pierce?

  And longer.

• 42:43Nilay Patel?

  What are we doing? I'm just over my alcoholism was a real plot point in the Netflix one. All right. Uh, we gotta take a break. Maybe by the time we're back, we'll know what's going on with Ferris. Let's find out. We'll be right back.

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• 44:30Nilay Patel?

  We're back. I want to issue a correction. It was just called Three Body. It aired on Peacock in the United States.

• 44:36David Pierce?

  There you go. Also, I just want you to know, people sometimes ask what we did during the break. I went to NewYorkTimes.com because I literally thought it was possible that there was new tariffs news while we were at break. There's not, so that's exciting.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, good. We'll see. We'll see how this goes in the next 30 minutes. There's tariffs, then there's AI. AI also had, I would say, a messy week. Starting with Meta, which I think tried to release a bunch of exciting news about Llama, and then all of it quickly became unexciting. What's going on here?

• 45:08David Pierce?

  Jake, can you explain this one?

• 45:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, so Zuckerberg, I think he wanted to have a little bit of Elon energy here. So last weekend, I think it was the middle of Saturday, he was just like, boom, Llama 4, here it is, everybody go have fun. And just, you know, kind of try to catch people by surprise, drop this big new model that people have been expecting. And, you know, at first glance, everybody was like, wow, very impressive, great benchmarks. And this is the thing, every single time a new flagship model comes out, the companies brag about these benchmarks and they show how they perform against all the other models. And inevitably, inevitably, their best model beats out all the other models on the market. And that's what happened here with one of the Llama 4 models. And then eventually, people started to look a little bit closer, started to look at some

• 45:54Speaker 06

  of the fine print on this. And they realized that Meta had actually benchmarked a secret model that only they have access to, that they're not actually releasing. And so it's like an experimental chat-specific version that is sort of potentially designed to beat these benchmarks that they're not releasing to the public. It was just used to look great on benchmarks. And so people have been freaking out about this. The specific benchmark that they nearly topped the leaderboard on was like, hey, guys, that's not how it's supposed to work. And Meta was just like, we have lots of great models. I don't know what to tell you. And so I think it has not

• 46:37Speaker 06

  been the reception they were hoping for for Llama 4, which is supposed to be this big release, supposed to get them back in the conversation. Meta has been trying to make Llama the big, quote unquote, allegedly open source option to get a lot of big adoption here. And, you know, I think if they wanted to curry favor with the community, this is sort of off to a bad start because now they're starting to feel a little bit misled. And they're already also starting to, I think, complain about some of the restrictions and limitations around Meta's, you know, so-called open source approach to it, anyway.

• 47:13David Pierce?

  I really genuinely respect Meta's inability to help itself from doing stuff like this. Like, you go way back and, you know, Meta got in all this trouble for massively inflating the view count of all the videos so that publishers would make videos and like screwed up a whole generation of publishers on the internet as a result. This company just cannot help itself from making up numbers about things in order to look impressive.

• 47:40Speaker 06

  I kind of love it. I love this. Like, let me be clear. Don't do this. This is bad. But also, it really just shows how nonsensical these benchmark charts are. Like, what does it mean that it gets 98% of some random benchmark? Like, I don't know what that does. I don't know what that means. Number just goes up. And I think it's just increasingly clear that these do not actually correspond to Does the model give you a correct, accurate, good and useful output? It corresponds to can this model beat this computer test? And in this case, they specifically designed it so that it could beat this test a little bit better than the other models.

• 48:20Nilay Patel?

  Isn't this particular benchmark, doesn't have humans in the loop?

• 48:23Speaker 06

  It does. This is a really interesting one where they pair it against output from other models. And so you choose which one is better. And so they're specifically tuning it theoretically so that humans will respond better to their thing.

• 48:36David Pierce?

  Right. That's the best part of this. It's not designed to be better. It's designed to do whatever it takes to make the humans think that it's better, which is so funny. It's like, we don't have to build a better model. We just have to build a model that convinces the idiots that it's better. And then we've done it.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. That's one of the most meta instincts of all time. Like, we don't have to be sincere. We just have to be convincing. By the way, Meta loves to game benchmarks. Like, there's a whole thing here about companies gaming benchmarks in the history of tech. Like, every GPU company has been caught gaming benchmarks. It's just a thing they all do. Every laptop company has been caught gaming benchmarks of one way or another. Intel has been caught gaming benchmarks. But this one is like particularly meta in that they inflated their own video numbers for years. And then they kind of admitted it and they're kind of like, but whatever, like number was so big, right? And it's very much the attitude they're taking with this. I agree with you, Jake. At the end of the day, what really matters is can anyone build useful products out of this stuff?

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  Like, these benchmarks do not matter. Like, every week, there's a new one. And another thing is slightly better than the last one. And we're still all looking at fundamentally the same chatbot products with the same distribution. Maybe Meta is going to do the glasses, like we've heard about them, that, you know, that will obviously rely on Llama in some huge way, but. I don't think that matters if it's Llama in there or ChatGPT. Like, it's, it's really the interface and the distribution that like carries you forward, not the capability of the model.

• 50:07David Pierce?

  I agree with you in every way except one. And I think the, the one is that I think we're still early enough in this industry that momentum is really important. And what is definitely true is that LM Arena, which is the, the website that runs these benchmarks, is a website people who make AI stuff look at a lot. And so being at the top of that leaderboard is, is a signifier of stuff to the people you want to like come work for your company to build cool AI products or come, you know, build with your API and pay you a bunch of money to use it. Like, these things are not meant for regular people to care about, generally speaking. They're meant for like the people in the business to care about. And I think that's all the more reason to try and game it, right?

• 50:52David Pierce?

  Like, the, these benchmarks exist to try and get AI researchers to want to work at Meta and not OpenAI. And coming out like you're cheating is a, is a tough look. And I think there's been a lot of that forever, right? Do you, you guys remember in the early days of this, there was this whole big kerfuffle with Apple where Apple wasn't letting its researchers publish publicly their research? And so it was having a hard time getting researchers because one of the things these people want to do is like publish their work and share it with the world. And so Apple has had to rethink the way that it talks about its AI stuff in order to get good people to come work there. And so I think in that sense, playing these games really does matter, but it's in a much

• 51:34David Pierce?

  less like human relevant way than like actually making good products, which none of these companies are doing.

• 51:42Speaker 06

  No, I think that makes sense. And, you know, I think that community is, that community is the people who freaked out about this. They are the ones who feel betrayed because they're, you know, they were excited about this. And I think Meta has made big promises about, um, you know, how it'll be able to use Llama, uh, because of its, you know, allegedly open source approach.

• 52:03David Pierce?

  It's the opposite of DeepSeek. You just made me realize that. DeepSeek was the one where everybody was like, it can't possibly be this good. And then started using it and they're like, oh my God, it's incredible. This is the one everybody's like, whoa, it's really good. And then it's like, oh, nevermind.

• 52:14Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's funny, you mentioned Apple there because what I was going to say is, you know, who's not on the LM Arena boards is, uh, our friends in Cupertino.

• 52:24Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they have some models. They're not building their frontier model at scale. Big story in the information this week about Siri, actually, at Apple. It's a lot. There's a lot going on in this story. It's basically here's why Siri is bad. Which, keeping with the theme of this episode, is a story we have been telling for 15 years. But this one in particular has a lot of details, some of them shakier than others, about what actually happened. Here are the three that just jumped out to me. And you tell me, I know you guys read this story too. You tell me if these are the ones that jumped out to you. One, we've talked a lot about the WWDC video of what like agentic Siri could do on the iPhone with app intense. And you just ask it where your grandmother is and it like finds her and sends her a note or whatever. Whatever was happening in the demo.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  The Siri team, according to this information report, had not seen any of that working. So that was just a pure demo. And the Siri team was surprised at what they were seeing. That's really bad. That's real bad. Uh, second, there, and I'm just like a decoder org chart, you know, aficionado. John Jean Andrea ran his own AI team. He was apparently a very sleepy manager, didn't have a lot of fire. And Craig Federighi built his own team to do stuff with machine learning inside of Apple. That got bigger and bigger and bigger and started competing for researchers and engineers with the main AI team. Which led to him taking over Siri in the end. Also, which is very bad, right? That's, that's not good news.

• 53:53Nilay Patel?

  And then the last one, which is particularly funny, is there was apparently a big debate in the aftermath of the WWDC demo about how many models Apple would use?

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  If they would have a local model on the phone that responded to local stuff like timers called Mini Mouse? And then a big model in the cloud for big stuff called Mighty Mouse? Or whether it should all be Mighty Mouse? And I think they landed on All Mighty Mouse and none of that shipped and none of it worked. And who knows what's gonna happen? They picked wrong.

• 54:19David Pierce?

  I really like, really, I think the, the, one of the lessons we are learning here very quickly is that actually,

• 54:25David Pierce?

  single behemoth models that do everything have their place, but ultimately the answer is lots of models for lots of things. And Apple seems to have just, it's, it's like, it's like picking the Vision Pro instead of picking smart glasses, right? Like it, it tried to do the whole thing. And in so doing, prevented itself from doing the thing that actually works.

• 54:46Speaker 06

  I, I'm also really curious about, you know, they took this, we're going to do it. We're very heavily lean on local processing for the AI approach. And I think, you know, if you go back, what, like two years on the Pixel, they were like, hey, you know, you have to have the highest end Pixel in order to use Gemini because you need the local processing abilities, you need the RAM. And then fast forward, like, I don't know, six months and all of those abilities are just on all of the phones anyway, because they're all just doing it in the cloud. And so I'm kind of just wondering also if Apple's still just picking wrong by trying to do so much on the iPhone, because it is sort of against their constitution to offload this stuff to the cloud because of the privacy concerns around that, which, you know, that's fair.

• 55:31Speaker 06

  It's, it's a really great perk to be able to say, hey, this is all local, it's all secure, it's all safe. But it's just one of those things where sort of a self, uh, self enforced limitation. That's continuing to hold them back.

• 55:44David Pierce?

  Totally. And the way that they're getting around that when they have to go to the cloud is just by punting it on the chat GPT, which is.

• 55:50Speaker 06

  Actually, the best way to do it, unfortunately.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  I mean, probably, but it sure doesn't make Apple look very good. Uh, okay, wait, while we're talking about org charts, we, we should move on from this, there's other stuff to talk about, but I just, I want to read a paragraph to you guys from this story. It's by Wayne Ma at the information. Shout out to Wayne, it's a good story. And I want you guys to tell me whether this sounds like, uh, people want AI or that they don't want AI. It says, former Apple employees have referred to Siri as a quote, "hot potato", continuously passed between different teams, including those led by Apple's Services Chief, Eddie Q, and by Federighi. However, none of these reorganizations led to significant improvements in Siri's performance. There's one way to look at this that says, everybody is trying to get it, but nobody can pull it off. And there is another way of looking at it that says Siri is poison and no one wants to be in charge of it.

• 56:39David Pierce?

  And I'm starting to wonder if it's the second thing.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  It's the second. I, I don't know, I, I, I read that same thing and I. It's funny that you saw ambiguity in it and I was like, oh, it's poison.

• 56:50David Pierce?

  Okay, okay. I mean, that was my initial read too, but then I'm like, okay, there is another way you could look at this that is like, it's, it's, it's very competitive. Everybody wants to be in charge. I think you're right. I think it's poison.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think there's, you can intellectually make the argument that being in charge of Siri right now at Apple makes you the most powerful person at Apple. Because all of the things that might kill the iPhone are things that look like what Siri should have been doing 10 years ago.

• 57:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:14Nilay Patel?

  Like OpenAI has this project with Johnny Ive for a screenless device. That's obviously some sort of like Siri puck. Right? And maybe it'll work, maybe it won't, but like, that's the thing. The Meta Glasses, we've talked about a lot, that's gonna be a voice activated assistant thing. Samsung is gonna release the Bali robot.

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Let's, let's just pretend it's in the mix here, right? What you want is a ball that rolls around your house and projects Samsung's fast TV service on the wall in response to your voice.

• 57:45David Pierce?

  Hey, no other AI product has that kind of physical presence.

• 57:50Nilay Patel?

  It's true. That's very good.

• 57:52David Pierce?

  None of them even have a shape.

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  Do you want a small rolling ball in your house that shows up and commands you to exercise on command? The Bali is there for you.

• 58:01David Pierce?

  I do. Like, I earnestly do.

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  Every Bali demo is like, at the end of it, it's like, now do jumping jacks. It's like, very good. All of this is predicated on voice working. Alexa is predicated on voice working. So anything that might kill the iPhone has this one interface idea embedded in it. Which is natural language, voice commands will work and the computer will have natural language voice output. It will, it will, it will work. None of it works, to be clear. Like, Humane existed and then went 90, like famously no longer exists. None of it works yet. But if you're Apple.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  Being in charge of the Siri team is being in charge of the thing that might kill you.

• 58:45Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  And I think they can't figure it out because they also can't break it.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  But I think one of the hardest things about Siri is everyone knows that voice is a thing that might disrupt the touchscreen, but which I don't necessarily agree with, but that's what everyone thinks. But everyone knows that voice is a thing that might disrupt the touchscreen. And then you've got however many years of Siri existing and doing timers and starting music and pretty much doing those things that you cannot break.

• 59:11Speaker 06

  Right. And Apple talks all the time about how often Siri gets used. And even if it's just for those two things, it is still, it's an entrenched user behavior now that you can't screw up, even though they are doing their very best to screw it up.

• 59:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I just see it as here's this thing where if you get it, the stakes are so high. Your opportunity to make change is so limited because you can't break it. And then you also have to invent the cutting edge of AI.

• 59:38Speaker 06

  What you're describing is just what Google did with Gemini already, right? And, and the, the advantage they have is that they have a functional AI division. But they had Google Assistant, which was like roughly as good as Siri. And it, you know, it set timers, it added stuff to your calendar. And when they launched Gemini, it broke all of that, couldn't do any of that. And then they've just slowly hacked each one of those things on to Gemini. And now they're just like, we're done. Forget Google Assistant. We had 10 years of brand equity, whatever. Nobody cares. Gemini is new thing. And they just like, there, there just fundamentally wasn't that much good stuff about these old era of assistants that you can kind of just start from scratch and rebuild timers.

• 1:00:18Speaker 06

  Because as much as it pains us that it takes like five years to add a multiple timer feature to each of these things, like that surely isn't the hardest part of building AI. And so we've seen another company do this already. And it feels like what Siri needs is that start from scratch moment. And theoretically they had that, and it's just like not quite clear why that isn't clicking.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, two things about that. One, Google had its own bloody org chart battle over making AI, functional AI division.

• 1:00:45Speaker 06

  Google also invented most of this technology. Like there might be no other company in tech as equipped to do what you just described as Google. And even it was a giant mess for Google.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then they did have two products, Assistant and Gemini, coexist side by side in the most Google of fashions. And then I think if you go and look at the Google Home forums and the Google Assistant forums, the switch to Gemini just being there. Is it going about as well as Google Home goes? You know what I mean?

• 1:01:11Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I like, there's enough people in those forums who believe that Google Home is effectively abandoned, that it should really worry Google. Right? So like, yeah, they're in the middle of this transition and maybe it will all come out on the end as sunshine and daisies. But right now, it's like, oh, the thing that we depend on feels like abandoned. Like, for example, this is just a really dumb one. We have Google Homes in our house and they are meant to control our Sonos because we have Sonos speakers from the time when those two companies got along. And they just stopped working.

• 1:01:44Nilay Patel?

  You could be like, yo, play me the music. And it's like, I'm doing, I'm doing it on the kitchen. And you're like, no, you're not. Do it again. And it's like, I'm super doing, I'm playing this music on kitchen. And it's not. And there's just, you know, you look at the Reddit posts and it's like 400 days ago, someone said that Google Home stopped working and they just don't care. And I, that, that, I think that's, I agree with you, Jake. Google has done a better job. Like, Amazon hasn't pulled this off with Alexa.

• 1:02:08Speaker 06

  If I can defend Google Home for one second, it's been bad for years.

• 1:02:14Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough.

• 1:02:17Nilay Patel?

  Other AI stuff, Jake, you want to talk about the Shopify CEO saying that no one can make a new hire at the company without proof that AI can't do a job? And you were like, this is more reasonable than people think. And I'm excited for you to defend this take.

• 1:02:30Speaker 06

  Wow. Sorry, sorry. Oh, boy. Oh, boy. Here's this smoking stick of dynamite. What would you like to do? That's, that's, yeah, that was, is in fact part of what I said. So Shopify, not, not Spotify, let's be clear with that. Shopify CEO, Toby Lutke, if I'm pronouncing that ballpark. You know, this, this memo got leaked and so he just posted the entire thing on X. So you can go and read it. And, you know, the headline of it is, you know, Shopify CEO says, like, you can't hire anybody whose job can be done by AI. And you know what? It is true. He says that in there. But I do think, you know, if you read the entire thing, it is both more reasonable and I think less reasonable than you think.

• 1:03:15Speaker 06

  Because on one hand, he's just like, actually, we just also need to learn AI. And the other hand, he's like, we will 100x our productivity. So, you know, I think one thing that occurs to me is that the people who are using AI the most right now, it is the engineers. It is like the developers who are just coding all day long using these things. Separately, Anthropic just launched a $200 a month tier this week where they're just like, yeah, we think that engineers will just pay for this when their work won't, so they can just like use it all day long. So this is our, I think when you send this memo out to an organization that is substantially built out of engineers, this is not necessarily as scary as it would be if you sent it out

• 1:03:56Speaker 06

  to your news organization, which would be like, phew, sorry. And so I think, you know, there's parts of this memo where he says, here's just some of the preface where he goes, quote, "What we have learned so far is that using AI well is a skill that needs to be carefully learned by using it a lot." And it's like, okay, yeah, this is actually like, this is like pretty, pretty reasonable. You actually should test these tools to see if there are ways to build them into your workflow. But at the same time, he is saying, I think, the very big scary thing that has everybody worried, which is, yeah, these tools are going to, number one, change how we work, and in doing so, start to potentially replace roles that would otherwise have been hired. And so I think this is, you know,

• 1:04:39Speaker 06

  this is a very scary memo. I think it's also just worth reading and understanding because this is actually just how a lot of these companies are going to be thinking about this. And I think, is AI ready to replace a single human right now? I sure wouldn't make that bet. Is it ready to do little bits and pieces of some people's jobs? I think the answer is clearly yes, especially if you look to developers. And I think, you know, we have an engineering-heavy organization here that is saying, hey, let's start using this more and more to get a little bit more efficient. Some of the stuff he's saying is like, actually, you should just use this in your prototypes, right? It's not necessarily you should go and replace your coworker with it. He's just like, it's like, I'm making it mandatory that you use this in your prototyping phase. Okay.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because I didn't read that as being about the engineers. I read that as being about like product managers and salespeople and like, people have ideas for new features and it's like, you're just going to vibe code out a garbage version of the new feature so you can push the buttons and play with it and see if it's any good. And I, there's something about that that really speaks to me, right? Because I can't do that. And I, this is the thing I keep thinking about is

• 1:05:49Nilay Patel?

  Our own company like is like putting out ads being like, stop AI theft government. Disclosure of Box Media is putting out an ad with a bunch of other publishers being like, stop AI theft government. And you know, our team has thoughts about AI and I certainly have thoughts about AI. I think I'm a better writer than AI to this day. Declarative sentences be damned. That's what AI thinks I write like.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  But I can't code. I certainly couldn't code like a prototype feature of a thing that I wanted. And the idea that I this tool can let me do it is super interesting. And then you see even in creative industries, people are complaining about it, but then they use the features like mad. And so I would pair the Shopify up, the Shopify thing up with what I think is kind of the most interesting AI features. It's been announced in a long time, which is Adobe building AI agents in Photoshop and Premiere Pro. Where you're just like doing Photoshop work and it's like, do you want to do this thing? And it's like super clippy and then it just does it for you. Like it clicks around the Photoshop interface for you and just does it.

• 1:06:44Speaker 06

  I think there's something super interesting about this Photoshop example too. Where if you watch the video of what it shows that that it's suggesting you do, it's stuff like add a blur to the background. And it's like, three years ago, nobody would have called that AI. That like Google Photos just auto suggests that on literally every photo.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  It really does.

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  And it's like, there's just this broad spectrum of what like quote unquote AI is now. And there are, I think, these, these small tools that people are just sort of using instinctively every day without quite considering them to be AI. Because it's just, oh, this is just making me like 2% more efficient. And I, you know, we sort of freak out when it changes from this 2% thing to the like, I must replace my coworker because my boss won't give me more resources. Which is like concerning.

• 1:07:32David Pierce?

  I mean, and a funny thing to do is like, if you just sort of in your mind, find and replace every time somebody says AI with software. The, the temperature on everything goes down a little, but it also sounds exactly like the conversations everybody had when we were first inventing computer software, right? Like the, the sort of moral panic around computers kicking everybody out of jobs is, has been around as long as computers have been around. What's different now is that everybody is telling you that they're building God to do it for you.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, right. But I mean, like the, I don't need the accountant because I have Excel is like one version of this. I, I'm a marketing director and I can build a fully functional prototype of a feature that I want to ship in the main software. Very different.

• 1:08:21David Pierce?

  See, but I think the second thing is less existentially frightening than the first thing. I think we won't need accountants anymore because Excel exists was much more plausibly threatening to people's jobs than now I can make a crappy prototype by myself.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  It is true, by the way, that Excel got so complicated that we need accountants more than ever. And maybe that's just the trajectory that we're on.

• 1:08:43David Pierce?

  People, accountants just use Excel now. That's, that's the only thing that changed is accountants use Excel.

• 1:08:49Nilay Patel?

  All right. I don't know on what timeline Google Assistant will be good. But I do know that we should probably put Shopify in charge of it. We gotta take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. David, it's time.

• 1:10:34David Pierce?

  Oh my God, it's time. We've waited this long. Once again, we are here for America's first or second favorite podcast within podcasts, for which we have now received theme music that I have to figure out if I'm allowed to play on this show, sent in by listeners. Once I know if that's legal for me to do without asking permission. Starting next week, we have theme music. It's time for Brendan Carr as a dummy.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because on this, America's favorite podcast within podcasts, except for the other podcasts within podcasts that people love.

• 1:11:06David Pierce?

  Top two.

• 1:11:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We've started to receive fan submissions for parts of the segment. Like more so than I think the main Vergecast at this point, which is very good.

• 1:11:17David Pierce?

  It's good stuff.

• 1:11:17Nilay Patel?

  So this week, a few things to talk about this week, but the main thing, so many people sent me this photo of Brendan Carr, Chair of the FCC, smiling in his dumb suit, wearing a pin that is the gold head of Donald Trump. Just so proud of himself that he's wearing a pin that is the gold head of Donald Trump. Look, there are some overheated blog posts about this thing, about how this is Maoism and this is what Mao did to China. Like Brendan's not that smart. You know, he's not intentionally making a callback to the Maoists in the Cultural Revolution.

• 1:11:53David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:11:54Nilay Patel?

  He's just a dummy who wants to impress his buddy Donald Trump and doesn't realize that being the head of our nation's communications infrastructure should require him to be nonpartisan. Instead, he's making it plain that in fact, he is a political flunky who shouldn't have this job by wearing the gold head of Donald Trump on his chest. You don't want that. If you had a Democrat wearing the gold head of Barack Obama in charge of the FCC during the net neutrality battles, I'm pretty sure the Republicans would have burned the building down.

• 1:12:26Nilay Patel?

  You don't want that. You don't want it on either side. You want these people to be relatively neutral. The reason you have a commission that's made up of Democrats and Republicans by statute is so that when they take votes, they're not political. That's not how it's supposed to work, right? They're supposed to reach some compromise on regulatory affairs. But anyway, you got this dummy wearing the gold head of Donald Trump. That's, that's just, that's our boy Brendan making it plain that he's just a political flunky. He's there to do the president's bidding, and the president's bidding is to chill speech across the board.

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  It's not important, but this pin itself is, is pretty spectacular. Like, I have to say, it's, it's definitely like some BS fake gold stuff, but in it, Trump has substantially better hair than he does in real life, but is also making like a, a little bit of a kissy face. And the direction it's facing on our man Brendan's lapel kinda makes it look like Trump is about to like kiss him on his neck. And that's just, that's just a visual I really appreciate.

• 1:13:22Speaker 06

  The first time I saw a photo of this, I was like, this is 100% AI. There's just like, there's no chance this is real. This is too insane. And regret to inform you all, I was wrong.

• 1:13:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's a real bummer.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  I, I can't believe I'm gonna say this, but, you know, if you pay attention to Trump, he's always kinda making a kissy face.

• 1:13:40David Pierce?

  That is true. He does have sort of like resting kissy face.

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  It's really true. He's, it's, and he's not lost in thought. He's just pursing his lips. I don't know what's going on there. I want to call out our friends at Ars Technica, who wrote a huge profile of Brendan this week. They called him the speech police. They're going through all the news distortion cases that we have covered endlessly on the show. It's just very clear to a lot of people. That Brendan Carr wants to censor the internet and censor broadcast regulators. It's not just us talking about it. We just have the most fun doing it because my brain is broken. It's out there. It's out in other publications. I think Rolling Stone did a piece. The ours piece is particularly good in a way that ours is particularly good all the time. Yep.

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  It's also starting to hit the other commissioners in the FCC. So we'll do something we don't usually do here on Brendan Carr is a dummy America's favorite podcast winner podcast. I'm going to point out that the other commissioners, the FCC are doing a good job. So in particular, Anna Gomez, who is a Democratic Commissioner, was recently in the National Association of Broadcasters Convention, the NAB Convention, and she directly openly called it out. She basically said Brendan is a censor and the FCC is totally out of bounds. She said it is particularly important for media regulation, which is why the FCC was set up as an independent agency a long time ago, because the fear was the type of interference that you are now seeing today with the White House with media, whether it's broadcasters, public

• 1:15:06Nilay Patel?

  media, internet platforms, in the attempts to control speech. And then she went on to say, we've seen this administration throughout the administration threaten tech companies for their moderation practices to give consumers an environment that they want to, that they want to stop fact checking. It is an absolute pattern of censorship and control. If we let them do this, it will be to the harm of the country. So you have at least one FCC Commissioner saying what we're doing here is wrong, just fully wrong. And it, we're actually doing the thing the FCC was set up to make sure didn't happen, which is censor the speech of Americans. So, good job, Anna. If you want to come on to Code, you're more than welcome to. We've extended that invite. I've got one last one on Brendan. This is

• 1:15:48Nilay Patel?

  maybe the single most predictable Brendan Carr is a dummy item in the history of America's favorite podcast winner podcast. It's an increasingly high bar, that one. I mean, I'm just going to start to say it and you will, you will complete my sentences for me. Okay. This week Brendan put out a blog post announcing the FCC's next open meeting, which is only go through agenda items. The title at Spectrum is back again because he thinks he's your buddy instead of being a vicious internet censor. And what he's excited about is opening up more Spectrum, which is basically the job of the FCC. And they want to open up satellite Spectrum that is currently being used by geostationary satellites.

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  You can guess. You can guess what what's happening here, right? SpaceX filed a petition to open up satellite spectrum that's currently being used by geostationary satellites and Brendan is taking up so he can open it up without once mentioning the fact that Elon Musk asked for it. Not even a passing mention of this. Just, I believe satellite internet for rural Americans would be great. It's like, what? You're not talking about HughesNet, dog. Let's get real. You're talking about your buddy, Dr. Doge. Not even a mention. It's it's buried in the open meeting notes that they are responding to a petition by SpaceX.

• 1:17:02David Pierce?

  By saying, yes, of course, absolutely. Sounds great. Let's do it.

• 1:17:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:05David Pierce?

  Yeah, cool. It's a good response.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  You know, he's a huge proponent of SpaceX over fiber. There's a lot of complaints about the Biden era bead program. Our buddy Ezra Klein is like basically selling his book by being like, this program sucked. But the reason the bead program sucked is they took it away from the FCC. I'm not saying it didn't suck. I'm saying that one of the reasons it sucked is because the FCC was so politicized and stupid that it didn't have accurate broadband maps deliberately so that it could roll out the infrastructure that we were going to pay for. So they moved it to another agency that had to start the maps over without like Verizon and Comcast getting in the way, which is a real thing that like a G-Pie and Brendan Karlik advocated for back in the day, that we're not gonna, we're not gonna demand these

• 1:17:48Nilay Patel?

  accurate maps. So Brendan is like, satellites will fix it. Don't worry about this dumb bead program that didn't give you fiber. And you're like, dude, you don't even know where you're going. But anyway, yeah, he's gonna, he's gonna re-farm the spectrum. And look, maybe, maybe this is the right choice. Maybe it is. But the reason that I'm calling it out is when you start with, I'm wearing the gold head of Donald Trump on my lapel, and you end with, I'm doing what Elon Musk wants, you've lost your legitimacy as a regulator.

• 1:18:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:18Nilay Patel?

  You just look corrupt. And that is because you're a dummy, Brendan. So again, you know, Anna's welcome. Brendan, if you want to come on the show and explain your behavior, or even just prove that you can complete a sentence without sucking up to Donald Trump or Elon Musk, I'm, you're welcome. I know you listen.

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  I know you listen. Come on in, Brendan. It'll be fine. Water's warm. That's when Brendan Carr's done.

• 1:18:43David Pierce?

  One more thing about this blog post, uh, which you shouldn't read. It's very boring. But he does the thing that Republican FCC commissioners really like to do, which is mention robocalls. Uh, they're like, we're doing, and Ajit Pai did this masterfully. He was like, I'm gonna ruin the internet in the following several ways, but because I am a, a man of the people, wouldn't it be awesome if we stopped robocalls? And that hasn't worked at all. But then Brendan in here is like, we're, we're doing, we're giving Elon what he wants. And then he's just like, of course, spectrum is not the only area where we're moving fast. We're continuing the FCC's longstanding efforts to crack down on illegal robocalls. That segue doesn't make any sense. It's just him being like, being like, but

• 1:19:26David Pierce?

  you hate robocalls, right? I'm gonna fix them.

• 1:19:29Nilay Patel?

  By the way, it's 37 gigahertz spectrum, not 36. I apologize.

• 1:19:34David Pierce?

  Changes.

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  Brendan, if you want to, Brendan's like, ready to tweet how wrong I am. Man loves to tweet. Um, it is, by the way, true. Ajit Pai was all about stopping robocalls. Uh, it wasn't successful because he didn't actually regulate anyone. He just incentivized the industry to regulate itself.

• 1:19:48David Pierce?

  Straight up not an exaggeration. I have gotten two robocalls since we started recording the podcast.

• 1:19:52Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Anyway, that is Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast. If you know where he got the pin from, let me know. I'm, I'm sort of dying to. All right, David, we need some.

• 1:20:03David Pierce?

  I will make Neel I wear the pin on the show.

• 1:20:05Nilay Patel?

  I will.

• 1:20:05David Pierce?

  If you get us one, I will make Neel I wear.

• 1:20:07Nilay Patel?

  It's the closest we're gonna get to Trump or Brendan on the show. Let's be honest. All right. We need a palate cleanser, my friend.

• 1:20:12David Pierce?

  Theme music TK, by the way. Uh, all right. Let's, can we talk about TikTok for like 35 seconds? That's all I want. That's all I want to do.

• 1:20:19Nilay Patel?

  So the, the opposite of a palate cleanser. All right.

• 1:20:21David Pierce?

  Well, then we're gonna get to the palate cleanser, but we gotta talk about TikTok just for 35 seconds because we, we spent a little bit of time on it last week. Uh, nothing happened. Everybody says it's against the law. Nothing is happening. Is that a fair summation of what's going on? Trump delayed it another 75 days. Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, is is out there essentially demanding that Apple and Google keep the apps alive, which is what they've been doing all along, saying, we're not going to enforce this. You have to keep it in the store, on and on and on. And then Senate Democrats are saying it's it's against the law to do this delay, which of course is true. All you do is read the law and you know that that's the case. But I don't imagine any of that changing much of anything.

• 1:21:03Speaker 06

  It's a particularly bad situation for Apple and Google because they just get exposed to another 75 days of liability, just hoping that everything works out for them. They're just these like weird pawns trying to hope nobody notices them. And they're just gonna have to keep waiting this out because it's maybe never gonna end.

• 1:21:18Nilay Patel?

  But they want tariff relief, too.

• 1:21:20Speaker 06

  Hmm. So they've gotta keep it.

• 1:21:22Nilay Patel?

  Like, the the level of just like base corruption here is wild, right? Like, everyone has to fly to the golf course and be like, please, sir, not 104%. And they're all gonna leave with like different numbers and compare them in the parking lot. They cannot take TikTok down because they want the number to be lower than the next guy. It's it this TikTok is doomed. That's my prediction. It is the ultimate pawn in this entire situation. China is not going to want to sell it. And at the end of the day, what they're going to say is turn it off. Like, we don't want 104%. Donald Trump is not going to keep this promise.

• 1:21:58David Pierce?

  Oh, you think China is gonna say turn it off?

• 1:22:00Nilay Patel?

  It's the last bit of leverage. They did it once, right? They wanted leverage the first time. They just turned it off. The last bit of leverage you have, we don't want 104%. We want zero. TikTok's gone.

• 1:22:11David Pierce?

  Trump will blink. It that will work. I think you're right that that is that is like, if you start at, we're not gonna release your movies here anymore. We're like a few escalations up to we're gonna turn off TikTok. And that will work.

• 1:22:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:26David Pierce?

  In every way that China would need it to, it would work.

• 1:22:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And China is not afraid to play these games. China is like, oh, you're the CEO of Alibaba? What if you weren't around for a while?

• 1:22:35Nilay Patel?

  It is an authoritarian government. It is just a move they play. So we'll see. All right. Now can we have a palate cleanser?

• 1:22:43David Pierce?

  Yes, palate cleanser. I have two bits of exciting news for you before we leave. One is that it appears to be plausible, possible that Instagram is actually going to get an iPad app. 750 years after the launch of Instagram.

• 1:22:57Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can I tell you the funniest thing about this story?

• 1:22:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:00Nilay Patel?

  It made me laugh so hard. This is also from the information, which is doing great work. This, it's in the context of a story that's about Adam Sari and Instagram being ready to be super aggressive if TikTok goes away. And there's a long list of stuff they might do. And they're like, it's time to ship that iPad app. And it's like, no, that's not it, guys.

• 1:23:21Nilay Patel?

  That's not, if TikTok goes away and your answer is also there's an iPad app now, I, I don't know if that's going to be it, but I do love it.

• 1:23:28David Pierce?

  I don't think that is how you do it. Like TikTok famously also not a great iPad experience. But I think there's a, there's a case to be made for Instagram just attempting to be everywhere as it goes through all of this, right? And one way to make people happy and get a bunch of headlines is to launch an iPad app. Like I think it's not crazy that Meta has been sitting on a finished iPad app for a long time, just sort of waiting for the right moment.

• 1:23:55Speaker 06

  I mean, there's no way this requires, I'm gonna say like any work on their part, right? Like you like click a couple of buttons, it goes, it's wider. You've got an iPad app. They were just like mad at Apple, right?

• 1:24:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah. And I also, I was just talking to our friend Casey Johnston for a Vergecast thing that's gonna run in the next couple of weeks. And, and one of her theories is that Meta doesn't like iPad apps because they want you to be on your phone because the phone is the more addictive and harder to put down device. Which just strikes me as a good theory. I have no evidence for that theory, but it's a theory that makes sense. But I think there are a lot of people who have iPads and want to look at Instagram on their iPads. And I think if you claim to be a media first thing that is great on screens. iPads kind of make a lot of sense. Seems like a good idea.

• 1:24:45Speaker 06

  This also, I I'm curious if this extends to Threads, which also does not have an iPad app, which feels like a little embarrassing as well, particularly given that it is in the heat of battle with these other platforms. Instagram is at least like singular in its way.

• 1:25:00David Pierce?

  There's also no WhatsApp for iPad. Like Meta has made a calculated effort to not do the iPad. And I think it is in part because of this ongoing beef with Apple, but I think there there may be a moment here where it is so useful to do that that they'll do it.

• 1:25:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's wild. Again, I just think it's very funny, like list of things to do if TikTok goes down. And now like they moved the card on the Canvan board like

• 1:25:26Nilay Patel?

  from jail to immediate, you know? All right, what's the next one?

• 1:25:30David Pierce?

  The last one is the Pixel 9A, uh, which Allison Johnson just reviewed for us, and it is great. It is, it is the mid-range phone you would want it to be. Uh, it comes in a cool color. It's like pink that I'm very into that Allison had. Uh, and this is like, Google continues to make good phones. This phone is still $499. There's been some sketchiness with the, the like release date and all this stuff, but like the price is right at a time when it might not be for long. Uh, this is just a really good phone, and this has become the phone I tell most people who are not like tech people, but like Android phones to buy. And I feel like this easily continues that in a way that I find very exciting.

• 1:26:11Speaker 06

  Yeah, Google seems to be killing it with this series, and I I think it's particularly interesting this coming like, what? A month after the iPhone 16E, which is $100 more expensive. And I think that delta and just a couple extra little like, um, you know, friendly tweaks on the 9A, right? The fact that it will do both fingerprint and face authentication, the fact that it has a higher refresh rate screen. Go a long enough way to make it feel like a deal in the way that the 16E doesn't quite get there.

• 1:26:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think Google ironically, like the big trade off here that Google made is it does less AI stuff, which is a very surprising

• 1:26:52Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:26:52David Pierce?

  trade off for Google to make, but also a really good one. It has all the other stuff you'd want your phone to have. It just doesn't do quite as much of the AI stuff. And spoiler alert, most people are pretty willing to make that trade, it turns out.

• 1:27:05Nilay Patel?

  All right. I just want to end the episode by pointing out that in the time that we've been talking.

• 1:27:09David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 1:27:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the tariff on China has risen to 145%.

• 1:27:14David Pierce?

  145?

• 1:27:15Nilay Patel?

  The, the, the White House has clarified that the tariff on China is now 145.

• 1:27:20David Pierce?

  You know what's, you know what's manly in Eli? A thousand percent. Real men do a thousand.

• 1:27:25Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, it's a, it's a very loud V8 engine, my friends.

• 1:27:29David Pierce?

  Wait, can I ask one more question about phones before we go? This is the thing I've been thinking about and I'm curious what you guys think. I think my sort of ongoing thesis for a while now has been that phones are not actually that price sensitive anymore. That, you know, you get the trade-ins, you get the, the financing that like actually the, the sort of hundred dollar delta between one phone or another is not that meaningful. But I wonder in, in a tariff-y world where people are more price conscious about everything. Like, are we as people who write about these things going to have to care about price in general? More than we have in the past?

• 1:28:04Nilay Patel?

  It's interesting because we run a reviews program and so much of our reviews program is like, is it worth the money? And so I want to say the answer is yes, because it just changes the heart of the thing that we do. But I, I also think what's going to happen is like, there's going to be more bloatware on the phones. Right? Like, people are price sensitive, especially right now. And I, you're just, I think you're just going to be like, you open your Pixel 9A and Google is like, do you want three free months of Max?

• 1:28:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:34Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, it's just that thing is going to start happening in extremely weird ways. Or they're going to lower the base storage and be like, do you want Google one? Like, you know, like, there's something shittier that's coming that like will keep the price the same. I'm not sure what it will be, but I, it feels like they're not going to up the price. Right? Because that's a drastic measure.

• 1:28:56David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it is easier to sneakily make the phone worse than to sneakily make it more expensive. That's definitely true.

• 1:29:02Nilay Patel?

  If you're any one of these big, if you're Apple or Google, you can go to one of the big carriers and be like, here's what we need to do. We need to adjust the terms of our revenue sharing. And so the phone contract lengths will be six months longer or add on a provider service upcharge fee that's labeled like the cook doctrine, like what it doesn't matter. You know, like there's just other places to sneak the money in that isn't the selling price because of the way we've structured all of these things.

• 1:29:31David Pierce?

  I think I buy that. It feels like, it feels like bad news.

• 1:29:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:34David Pierce?

  But I think that, I think that is where this goes. Like, we're gonna see, Chris Mims, my old colleague at the Wall Street Journal, was tweeting about like, the, the thing people don't realize is not that a lot of stuff is gonna get more expensive, it's that a lot of stuff is gonna go away. And I think that and the sort of in shitification of things ahead of their time are, are two sort of non-obvious things to look out for here.

• 1:29:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. By the way, the 145, they clarified it's because of fentanyl, which, which one of those things is not a crisis coming from China.

• 1:30:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. What's the trade deficit on fentanyl?

• 1:30:07Nilay Patel?

  It's very confusing. Like, there's, there's a hole in the heart of this whole argument that's like, oh, that, but your emergency is fake. So we'll see. By the time you listen to this, the number could have gone up or down. Who knows?

• 1:30:20David Pierce?

  Tell us, email us and tell us what the number is right now as you're hearing this. I desperately wanna know.

• 1:30:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. We gotta get out of here. That is the Vergecast.

• 1:30:35Nilay 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-VERGE-11. 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.

• 1:30:57Speaker 09

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