Pixel 11 gets in on the digicam trend

Smart phone cameras have been getting better and better at capturing flawless, true-to-life images. But is that what the people really want? David Imel joins Nilay Patel and Jake Kastrenakes to talk through the Pixel 11's Camera Looks. They're Google's nod to the trend of retro digital and analogue cameras, and alter how a photo is processed on the sensor level. At the same time, its super zoom is still hallucinating text and making stuff up. Then it's a supersized Brendan Carr is a Dummy, with increasingly infuriating tales of how Brendan Carr is being a Dummy, culminating in the FCC's quest to make sure your internet connection remains slow. Plus, we talk through the confounding AirPods camera leak, the Fairphone, and YouTube's new method for counting views. Further reading: Google is making the Pixel cameras better by making them worse Revealed: FCC chair Brendan Carr’s close coordination with White House and rightwing media ABC sues the FCC over Trump and Carr’s campaign of threats FCC abolishes gigabit speed goal, suggesting it is unfair to slower technologies Apple’s camera-equipped AirPods appear in leaked video Meta glasses are a workplace menace Apple reportedly won’t launch AirPods with cameras until next year. Fairphone’s latest repairable phone is going on sale in the US YouTube is changing how it counts views to give the numbers a boost YouTube is reportedly offering channels “millions of dollars” not to cross-post videos on Netflix. We’re also on video! Check us out on YouTube. Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11. 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:29Speaker 02

  Folks, welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of David Pierce's baby. Yet another baby. Hi, I'm a friend, Eli. Jake Ashenakis is here.

• 1:39Speaker 03

  Hey, good to be here.

• 1:40Speaker 02

  And we have a special guest, David Amell is here.

• 1:42Speaker 03

  What's up, my friends?

• 1:43Speaker 02

  It's time, David. You're, it's your first time guest hosting in place of Pearce. One David for the other. And we, we have like a camera fight to have, like already out the gate.

• 1:53Speaker 03

  That's what I'm here for. I'm always down for a camera fight.

• 1:55Speaker 02

  I've never been more excited.

• 1:59Speaker 02

  Pearce's baby is good. I talked to him, everyone's doing well. Send congrats his way. Maybe he'll come back. Maybe he'll just have more children. You never know with him at this point. They, they do seem committed to repopulating the earth Elon style. But everyone's doing well. Congratulations to David. He'll be back in a few weeks. Until then, it's, it's gonna be the three of us. It's gonna be great. Jake, what are we doing today?

• 2:19Speaker 03

  There's a ton coming up. We're gonna talk a lot about pixels and pixel cameras in particular. We'll talk about Apple leaking its own AirPods news. There's a whole bunch of stuff. Obviously Brendan is gonna be back. First, I want to start with pixels. We already had one episode of Vergecast this week talking about all the reviews. David Amell was not there though, and we did not dive into the cameras nearly enough. That is the main thing I want to talk about with these phones. Cause there's just a ton of camera upgrades. David, do you want to just give us like big picture? What is new camera wise on these phones?

• 2:49David Pierce?

  Sure. So there is technically a new main camera sensor on the Pixel Pros. It saves a little bit of power. That's the only reason they swapped it in.

• 2:56Speaker 03

  They're really pretending this sensor didn't change.

• 2:59David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, it's strange. I think that's the reason. I think the, because if they made it bigger, then they would say it was a different sensor. But I think that people are going to be upset if they just say it's the same size, but it's a different sensor. They told me, so I had an interview with Isaac Reynolds, who heads the Pixel Camera Team. And he told me it saves a little bit of power and that's actually useful for them. His quote was, "We, we can fit some of my favorite computational photography features in that much power that we're saving." So that's something, at least.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Right. If you think about it as a camera system, you pull some power from the sensor and you give it to the processor.

• 3:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 3:37Speaker 02

  You, your, the camera system is using the same amount of power. That really implies that people are gonna use all of these computational photography features. What were Isaac's favorite features that got, that are, that are inside this, the power budget?

• 3:48David Pierce?

  Well, the biggest new feature is definitely camera looks. So we had a long conversation about this and it is very interesting. And it's something that feels like a response to things that people in the industry, including myself, have been shouting for many years. And maybe you and I will fight about this, Eli. That could be fun. But camera looks is effectively, if you, if you've ever used a Fujifilm camera before, they have a thing called Fujifilm recipes. And basically there's, there are these film simulations where you can, I don't know. They, they do simulate actual film. But you can also just tweak them to your liking. You can change things like saturation and white balance and all these things and save different presets. So now Google has added this. Now Isaac Reynolds did not want to admit to me

• 4:33David Pierce?

  that this was the right decision.

• 4:36David Pierce?

  He over and over and over again was saying, "Oh, we made the perfect camera in the Pixel. We know internally, there is no, there's no discretion here that this is the wrong way to do photography on the smartphone." Like, we know, we know, absolutely. However, there was a growing, and the phrase that he used was bimodal distribution of people

• 5:00David Pierce?

  that want something else from the smartphone camera, which just means that people want less processing.

• 5:05Speaker 03

  Particularly a loud contingent, who is often on TikTok complaining that their photos look bad. Although I should say, look bad on iPhones, not on pixels, because those are the people who are recording TikToks about.

• 5:18David Pierce?

  But I think it is just clear that, you know, there are, there's a wide swath of people who want things that do not look like reality. They look a little bit nostalgic. They look a little bit soft, you know, those things. I understand why Isaac thinks that they perfected the Pixel camera. If you want something sharp, if you want something bright, if you want something with a lot of contrast, that's what people use their smartphone cameras for most of the time. Smartphone cameras are not, they're not artistic cameras. They're information transfer cameras. And that makes sense.

• 5:48Speaker 03

  This is a very sad way of thinking about it. But, but I get it, right?

• 5:52David Pierce?

  It's a tool.

• 5:53Speaker 03

  Yes. And Eli, you and David were talking about this when they were announced. It's like, it's, it's for menus, right? It's like.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, there's, I would slightly disagree with the information transfer aspect of the camera. I think that's, it's a huge component of what a smartphone camera needs to do. I think the bigger thing is they can never fail to take a photo. Right? And if that is the, that's what you're trying to solve with your camera, you have to even everything out constantly.

• 6:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:22Speaker 02

  And so the examples are, yes, a menu, or you're on a bright beach and then 25 minutes later, you're inside of a restaurant and you're totally backlit and you're taking a selfie. The camera just has to deal with all of that.

• 6:35David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 6:36Speaker 02

  And you shouldn't have to deal with any settings. And that means everything ends up looking the same. Everything ends up looking oddly bright and flat at the same time, which is something David has pointed out many, many times in many, many camera reviews.

• 6:47Speaker 03

  Many, many times.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  It's the problem. Like the idea that they've perfected the camera to me, it is funneled through the goal of the camera, which is to never fail.

• 6:56David Pierce?

  Right.

• 6:57Speaker 02

  And Apple in particular will never fail. And so iPhone photos have just an incredibly particular look at this point in time. I think the Pixel has always been, like that team, they sell like five phones a year. Like they're a little bit more willing to get out there. And I think camera looks is them being way more willing to get out there. Because David, correct me if I'm wrong, these are destructive settings, right? If you shoot in a camera look, you can't get back out to the, you know, the averaged out ultra-processed HDR photo. There's no going back to default.

• 7:29Speaker 03

  Correct.

• 7:29Speaker 02

  You've made this choice and you've shot in it.

• 7:31David Pierce?

  Yep. Yep. It's changing in processing. And they can, you can tell that they know that it's destructive because actually unless you dig very far into the settings and change some of the settings, every time you close the camera, it will go back to the default. Which makes sense to your point, Eli. I mean, if you're, you know, taking an artistic photo and then you go to take a photo of a menu so that you can open the QR code, you need it to be able to do that.

• 7:53Speaker 03

  I think this is fascinating. They do not trust the user enough to, to know how to get back to taking a good photo. They think that people are going to be upset if they get stuck using one of these new themes.

• 8:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:03Speaker 03

  So you, you spent, you know, a week shooting in these different styles. You've also spent a long time shooting all kinds of camera systems and definitely Fuji camera systems.

• 8:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:12Speaker 03

  How do they actually compare to a Fujifilm sim, right? Is this, do they look good? Do you feel like you have real, meaningful control over how the photos come out?

• 8:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. This actually, there's a lot more control than you have on the iPhone. Right? The iPhone gives you a two-axis grid with a couple of settings. It's basically saturation and brightness. And then you've got the different tone settings that basically messes with white balance. These give you a lot of settings. You've got sharpness, you've got contrast, you've got all these things. I'm just gonna bring it up for you so you can see. And the film simulations that you have, like on the default camera, you have four different settings. There's original, natural, shadows and vanilla. And that's sort of just a, I don't know why they called it vanilla.

• 8:55Speaker 02

  What's original and vanilla?

• 8:56David Pierce?

  Vanilla is warmer. And I don't, it's, why do they call it vanilla instead of just warm? I have no idea. Yeah, strange, strange.

• 9:04Speaker 02

  Okay. My, my going theory for that is that people just like slightly warmer photos and they will confuse vanilla with original because it looks, it's the same word in many, in many ways.

• 9:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 9:15Speaker 02

  And they're gonna pick the slightly warmer setting.

• 9:17David Pierce?

  When I think of vanilla though, I think of like white. I don't think of warm necessarily.

• 9:22Speaker 02

  You don't think of plain?

• 9:26Speaker 02

  I don't think most people are like vanilla. Wars were fought over. I think they're like plain. It's the plain setting.

• 9:32David Pierce?

  It is notably much warmer than the default setting. It's very strange. And then from there, you have the stylized look. So you have editorial, which is much more contrasty, like really contrasty. You've got velvet, which is Velvia Fujifilm simulation. By the way, they wouldn't tell me that. They said, these are not film simulations, but they're film inspired. And it's very clear to me. And Isaac Reynolds is a big Fujifilm person too. So it's like, pretty obvious. Velvet is Velvia, which is a high saturation, high contrast. There's classic, which is classic chrome on Fujifilm, which is low contrast, which looks pretty nice. There's Digi, which is a Digicam simulation. That obviously was such a strategic move because Digicams are selling like crazy.

• 10:15Speaker 03

  They should have just made that the default, right? I think if they just marketed the Pixel as like the Digicam phone, they would double their market share. 2%, baby.

• 10:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, they didn't really talk about that at all. And in the event, they didn't talk about it much.

• 10:27Speaker 03

  I'm so surprised.

• 10:28Speaker 02

  If they had just been like, you don't have to buy a G7X.

• 10:31Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, for $1,200.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Right, like if you're an influencer on the make and you think you need a G7X, just push this button and we will effectively recreate a pop-up flash G7X experience.

• 10:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:45Speaker 02

  I think they would have been, they would have been great.

• 10:47David Pierce?

  There is a black tie setting, which is, I don't know why they call it black tie, but it's black and white. They should have just called it black and white. And for the film photographers out there, they have a bunch of filter processing settings too. So they have a red filter, a green filter, a blue filter, a yellow filter, an orange filter, which on black and white photography, effectively changes the contrast of certain tones in the scene. So if you know what you're doing, you can make it look cool. There's minimal, which does less processing. So what I really want to get to here is the fact, in the most Google way possible, they are intelligently doing less computational photography based on the default setting that you change. So it's minimal, if it's black tie, if it's Digi, whatever.

• 11:31David Pierce?

  They're already doing like less image bracketing to have less information in the shadows and, you know, less sharpness, things like that. But also when you change the settings, like the contrast, the highlights, the shadows, the vibrance, the tint, the warmth, the sharpness. What all of these settings contribute to the amount of bracketing that they do when they do that computational photography HDR.

• 11:52Speaker 03

  I mean, that's fascinating that even, even when you're telling them to dial it down, right, there's no just like off mode, right? This is what they're saying.

• 11:59David Pierce?

  No.

• 11:59Speaker 03

  They're saying like, we don't believe in the.

• 12:01David Pierce?

  There are a couple of modes that are more obviously off, like the minimal mode.

• 12:05Speaker 02

  Is Digi off? Because the whole point of the Digicams is they're shooting a single frame and letting things blow out.

• 12:10David Pierce?

  Digi is not quite off because it feels sharper, but also lower contrast. But it is, it is definitely less HDR bracketing. That's what Isaac told me. And it's dynamic.

• 12:21Speaker 02

  Just to say it out loud for people who aren't huge camera.

• 12:25David Pierce?

  Yes, sorry.

• 12:25Speaker 02

  Why are you listening to this if you're not a huge camera? HDR bracketing is when you just take a bunch of frames and you layer them. Right, you take the frames at different exposure and layer them. And I think the iPhone does like nine or 12. I don't remember how many the previous Pixel did.

• 12:37David Pierce?

  They add them more every year, basically.

• 12:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, every, it's a spec race in how many frames you're taking and how many exposures.

• 12:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:43Speaker 02

  And so you take one that's really, really underexposed and then you take like 50 frames progressively higher exposures. And so you're really overexposed and you merge them together to get that flat HDR look. You're saying Google is intelligently saying, what if we just took three?

• 12:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:57Speaker 02

  To achieve this effect.

• 12:58David Pierce?

  Hundred percent.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  To get everything you need. How are they making those decisions? Are they obvious to you?

• 13:02David Pierce?

  That is.

• 13:03Speaker 02

  I find this whole thing fascinating.

• 13:04David Pierce?

  Not something that they will make obvious to you, which is actually a theme in the Pixel. There are multiple things in this new phone that they do not tell you exactly what is happening or how to make it work. And we'll maybe get to that later with the Gemini intelligence stuff, but yeah.

• 13:22Speaker 02

  So these are, so these are camera presets. And what they're doing is they're screwing with basically a tone mapping, right? Because they have less information. You mentioned Apple's tone control.

• 13:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:32Speaker 02

  And I think you described it as brightness and contrast. That's, I think that's basically how it feels to people. Apple's description of that technically is that that is a tone mapping control. Right, that you, they have the big stack of photos at different exposures. And if you move the tone control around in styles, you change how much tone mapping is happening.

• 13:53David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 13:54Speaker 02

  Right, so you allow things to blow out. You allow shadows to get underexposed. Like you basically just allow clipping to happen.

• 13:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:00Speaker 02

  I, I have actually mapped the tone control to my camera button, which I think is going away. It's going to make me really sad. And that's the only control I use on my iPhone is I change tone all the time.

• 14:12David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 14:12Speaker 02

  Because sometimes you just want a contrasty art photo and sometimes you just want everything to be fine. And I never put it in the middle. It's always like negative 100 or 100, right? In the way that every slider is always, always kind of maximal.

• 14:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 14:26Speaker 02

  Does the Pixel feel that way? Like you're just changing how a bunch of frames are cooked? Or does it feel meaningfully different?

• 14:34David Pierce?

  That's the main thing, especially with our artistic styles. Like the main thing that you're going to see a difference in is the tone mapping. But they also do big like hue shifts and stuff like that. Like the editorial look and the velvet look. Much more saturated, the hue is different, things like that. And then when you, they give you a lot more settings than the iPhone does. Because the iPhone is just sort of that 2D matrix that changes a bunch of things. On this one, you get, let's see, you get contrast, highlights, shadows, vibrance, tint, warmth, sharpness. There's a grain setting, which is simulated as well, annoyingly. But yeah, it's, it's strange. It's clear that like.

• 15:13Speaker 03

  Wait, sorry, you want, you want like real noisy digital grain? You want like.

• 15:17David Pierce?

  It depends. I mean.

• 15:18Speaker 03

  Big blocky artifacts?

• 15:19David Pierce?

  In Google, like Fujifilm, basically they scanned a bunch of actual film and did like frequency separation. And I'm, I'm guessing that's exactly what Google did too. Because that's exactly what they would do. And Isaac's also a nerd like that, so.

• 15:33Speaker 03

  The other part of this that I think is, is very complicated and very tricky is that Google does not have a developer ecosystem to rely on when it comes to offering these kinds of options to users, right? On the iPhone, if Apple doesn't get it right, which like they kind of didn't. You have all of these other apps that are willing to give you incredibly detailed tools to tune your camera, right? Process zero has become in an ecosystem of an idea. And you just cannot get that on Android. There are like a couple of apps that try it. They don't work with every phone. They don't have as much detail.

• 16:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:11Speaker 03

  And so there's this real, I think, very interesting problem for the Google camera team where if they don't provide these tools, they pretty much don't exist. And then they have to decide, okay, how much are we actually going to expose to every single user who buys this phone?

• 16:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:29Speaker 03

  Are we going to give them the tools that the super nerds who would go and find a specific app on a different platform would download? And it, it seems to me that they've actually given quite a bit of detail, like of control here, despite the fact that this is built into the default camera app for everybody.

• 16:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, and you can still also shoot pure RAW on the Pixel, which you cannot do on the iPhone yet. It's Pro RAW. So that's a big deal, in my opinion. Although Apple likes to move every single year. They like to offer a little, little bit more of a pure RAW experience, but just they'll never get there. I think they might this year. That's a whole nother conversation. But yeah, Google, Google's definitely at the point where it's like, okay, we have to offer a certain level of pure control to the user on the camera. Because otherwise, who's doing it? How can we compete?

• 17:16Speaker 03

  We should talk about one other thing on the Pixel camera, which is that last year, and actually Neela, you were out for this last summer. So I didn't get to hear your, I have a feeling you have, you have passionate feelings about this. They added an AI-powered zoom. It was to 100x last year. Now it's to 120x. How is it? And has it gotten any better? Because last year, it was a mixed bag, to put it politely.

• 17:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm going to show you a couple of photos. Yeah, in some cases, it's good at creating text. In some cases, it's just really not.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Well, this is the thing. I like scoured the internet for photos of these 100x zoom shots. And there are some that I was like, this is like, this is incredible, right? Like there's just like a little more texture here and it smoothed out some sharp edges and it looks great.

• 18:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:05Speaker 03

  And then other times, there's just garbled text. And you're like, oh, this is just pure AI.

• 18:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:09Speaker 03

  This is fully made up.

• 18:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Speaker 03

  I remember seeing some photo of like rooftops in the, in the distance. And it was just like, they were just going at all kinds of different like jaggedy angles that was not what was happening in the world.

• 18:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was in Lisbon. There was a beer bike really far away from me. That's just something they have in Europe during the summer. Obviously, you know, it got some of the sharpening semi-correct on this. But then when you look near the bottom here, I don't know, Beboar, Billy.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Right. I am very uncomfortable with that.

• 18:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:46Speaker 02

  That's really bad.

• 18:47David Pierce?

  It's really bad. You know, but on like, on this top part, which is a little bit bigger, at least you can make it out. It's something. I could not see it with my eyes, for what it's worth.

• 18:57Speaker 02

  Is that the standard? I mean, here we go. Let's just do it. Is it, is it, I will confidently hallucinate something you cannot see and verify? At least I got a photo. This is what I mean about these, the cameras have been designed to always generate a photo.

• 19:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:12Speaker 02

  In a way that, I don't know, a film camera sometimes just didn't get a photo.

• 19:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:17Speaker 02

  Right? If you like pick up an old SLR, load it up with film and you don't mess with the settings. Sometimes you're just like, well, I took a bunch of overexposed frames and no photos were taken today.

• 19:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:26Speaker 02

  These cameras are, these companies have got it religiously in their bones. They have to generate photos.

• 19:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:36Speaker 02

  Like you have to, you have to look at something. And I think that's led them to be like, yeah, you can just hallucinate the text. Like you zoomed in, there's gotta be something there. If we show them blurry nonsense, everyone will get mad. And so we'll just make up some letters.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:51Speaker 02

  Because we're like five generations into making up letters.

• 19:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. And the letter generation has not gotten better, as you can see in this Lisbon photo.

• 19:59Speaker 02

  I mean, that's even actually maybe the funniest thing of all.

• 20:03Speaker 02

  Like the, the models are solving unsolvable math problems, but we can't accurately detect the words beer bike.

• 20:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. There's one I want to show you here. This one, there was a reflection and it just made anime, anime stars on the reflection, which I find very funny.

• 20:19Speaker 02

  I mean, I find that this is way better.

• 20:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I mean, for what it's worth, like the upscaling of the roof tiles looks good. Like the text, the things where it's like, okay, this fundamentally changes the point of what I'm looking at. Those are the bigger issues, I would say.

• 20:35Speaker 03

  This is what I find so complicated about this, where it's like, okay, yeah, they just smoothed out the roof tiles. Like it, that, that's, that feels like a regular, I don't know, cleaning algorithm in some way. That's just upscaling. But then it's, then you see the letters and you're like, no, no, they're actively changing things here.

• 20:51David Pierce?

  Something that's funny on the phone too, is that you can't, when you transfer the image files to the computer, you can't, you don't have this data anymore. But somewhere in the container on the phone, it will show you what the photo was like before the upscaling happened. And it's really bad.

• 21:07Speaker 03

  I mean, I bet.

• 21:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:09Speaker 03

  120 from a 5X optical is like, kind of a lot.

• 21:12David Pierce?

  From a teeny tiny sensor.

• 21:14Speaker 03

  Yeah. So.

• 21:15Speaker 02

  I mean, that's as close to you're barely taking a photo as exists, right?

• 21:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Speaker 02

  You, you're just saying, look, I'm standing in Lisbon, there's a beer bike over there, generate an image for me.

• 21:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  And you're handing it the barest amount of sensor data.

• 21:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:27Speaker 02

  To, to do that generation. And you're, you're like, you're very close to being over the line.

• 21:31David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's getting close.

• 21:32Speaker 03

  How many actual pixels could possibly be viewing this image at that distance, right? It's like, yeah, it's, this is a.

• 21:39David Pierce?

  Not a lot.

• 21:39Speaker 03

  Four by four grid.

• 21:41David Pierce?

  Not a lot.

• 21:42Speaker 03

  Purely inventing everything.

• 21:44Speaker 02

  It's actually just one pixel is actually looking at this.

• 21:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:47Speaker 02

  This, my, my curiosity about all this is, one, I think Google can lean way harder into this is the most artistic phone camera you can get. It will allow you to express yourself the, in the most creative ways. They don't have the market share. They have nothing to lose.

• 22:03David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, true. And they don't really market this feature at all.

• 22:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. And then over here, there's the AI tools and all the other AI stuff they're doing. And I think they've realized they should, they, they should back off of that. Right? That what they're.

• 22:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:17Speaker 02

  Putting it in front of people now is a bunch of artistic decisions, not a bunch of, when you take this photo, we will detect that there's a stray dog in the background and remove the dog on your behalf, which is what, what all these companies have been doing for several years. I wonder, do you, David, do you think like the backlash of what is a photo? Are these real pixels? Is this reality? Do you think it's getting to them?

• 22:38David Pierce?

  I think that the backlash of AI in general is getting to them because the features that got added to the Pixel this year, almost none of them are Gen AI features and the ones that are, are very much hidden underneath all the other stuff like Rambler, which we'll get to, is like a new voice model that writes for you and gets rid of filler words and all of this stuff. And it is using Gemini, but they don't really talk about that. You know, Dieter presents it as this, this way to just like, you can have filler words and it'll cut them out and it's easier and it's faster, but they don't say like, oh, this is AI powered.

• 23:12Speaker 03

  Do you want to talk about Rambler a little bit more? What, what does it do? Because this is actually, it's this small feature and I feel like it has gotten the most buzz of all the stuff that they've added.

• 23:21David Pierce?

  Rambler was actually my favorite feature on this phone, which is funny.

• 23:26David Pierce?

  So.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  It's voice to text.

• 23:27David Pierce?

  It's voice to text. The Pixel has always had the best voice, I mean, in my opinion, the best voice to text on phones. The iPhone was really sad because the iOS 27 was supposed to have advanced voice dictation and it changes nothing. I do not, I do not understand. It's part of the, the new Gemini, like AFP core or whatever it's called, the, the Apple fun, I don't know.

• 23:51David Pierce?

  The new model on that, on the iPhone that is the advanced model and it is supposed to make it way better and it just doesn't do anything. Rambler is this kind of incredible new feature that there are some areas of it where I feel like they're kind of tricking your brain because regular voice to text, you can see the words coming on the screen as you're talking. Rambler, it doesn't show you anything until you finish and then you hit end and then it just all pops up instantly.

• 24:19Speaker 03

  Which is because it's secretly.

• 24:21David Pierce?

  It's secretly.

• 24:21Speaker 03

  AI.

• 24:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Which they could just be showing the rearranging in real time. But I do feel like there's something where they want to be able to like, just pop it up all at once and trick your brain into thinking it's happening faster than it is. But it got to the point where I could effectively just talk at the speed of thought and hit end and it would instantly be there. And it would have gotten rid of every little kind of like, oh, um, I mean this, because when you're thinking, you're not always thinking in the most concise way. You know what I mean?

• 24:50Speaker 03

  I do think it's very fascinating that, that in their implementation and in the scale of the features that they're adding, they are kind of pulling back on AI and maybe that's because of the backlash. Maybe it's because they're recognizing the limitations of these tools.

• 25:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:02Speaker 03

  Right? Like text to speech, cleaning that up, that is a thing that they can do pretty regularly, pretty well.

• 25:08Speaker 02

  Isn't this just Whisperflow? There's like 50 apps that can do this.

• 25:12David Pierce?

  It is, uh, but every time I've used Whisperflow on a smartphone, it's really freaking annoying because you have to like change your keyboard in order to invoke it, like every time. And, uh, it's, it's, it's practically the same thing. Yes. But like being built into the phone is, is a whole separate thing. If Apple had actually made their feature work, I would have been surprised, like happy with that in iOS 27, but it doesn't work.

• 25:34Speaker 02

  Look, we, we're, I think we're like legally obligated to say iOS 27 is still in beta.

• 25:38David Pierce?

  Still in beta.

• 25:39Speaker 02

  They could fix everything by tomorrow, David. The next beta could make everything great.

• 25:44David Pierce?

  That's true. Okay.

• 25:45Speaker 02

  Vault Apple into the lead.

• 25:46David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 25:48Speaker 02

  I really love the idea of Rambler. I mean, the idea that Whisperflow needs to be invoked at the keyboard. There's a bunch of companies that truly believe that replacing your keyboard is their way to get around Apple and Google's restrictions.

• 26:00David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:00Speaker 02

  Like Superhuman believes this.

• 26:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:03Speaker 02

  And I, I just feel bad for them. Like they, the operating system vendors will kill you. They're going to kill you. They will find a way to kill these things. Is Rambler good enough to compete with what people like out of apps like Whisperflow? Because they've been so good that people will go through the, the steps and jump through the hoops.

• 26:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that people mostly probably use Whisperflow in their laptops, right? I haven't, I haven't seen a lot of people talking about how great Whisperflow is on their phone. So in my opinion, yes, like I've only had it mess up like once or twice. It doesn't cut out curse words, which is nice. And it does do like weird spellings of things like proper nouns, like all, all these things that, or like product names, things like that, that might be spelled weird. It generally gets correctly, which I was surprised about.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Does it work offline?

• 26:54David Pierce?

  It does work offline. Uh, so it's mostly offline, but some of its full capabilities, uh, like it'll rewrite things for you if you want. So you can use it once and you dump your, all of your thoughts into it. And during that process, you can say, oh, actually I, I meant this and it'll just pop up when you're done and it'll all be correct. But if you wanna, if you wanna change kind of the tone of it, I don't know. This is, this is where the AI stuff comes in, which I'm like, I, I don't care for these stylistic rewrites and stuff. But once you've already done all of your writing, then you can press it again and you can say, can you change the tone of this? That uses cloud stuff, which is weird. I don't really know why Gemini Nano on the phone is fine with just the dictation and then it has to go to the cloud. I guess it's a probably a more powerful model, similarly to Apple's.

• 27:40David Pierce?

  But yeah.

• 27:41Speaker 03

  All right, we gotta take a break. When we're back, we're going straight into Brendan Carr is a dummy. Everybody's favorite podcast without a podcast.

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• 29:25Speaker 03

  All right, we're back. Neelai, we usually save Brendan Carr's a dummy till the end of the show. We, we leave that passion, we let it get pent up. There's too much this week.

• 29:35Speaker 02

  Also, Pierce isn't here to stop me.

• 29:38Speaker 03

  Most importantly.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  I just want to be clear, he's gone and there's no check on my behavior. And then on top of that, there is a flood of Brendan Carr being a dummy. This week, I'm Brendan Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast without a podcast.

• 29:53Speaker 09

  Brendan Carr is a dummy.

• 30:01Speaker 02

  You might recall, that's the, that's the, what we would call Brendan Carr Original by Avila Degumba. We're still in the market for theme songs. Send them in, especially if they have drops. We've had a lot of theme songs without drops lately. And also Travis really does not like the amount of AI slop we're receiving.

• 30:15Speaker 03

  I'm sorry, Travis.

• 30:16Speaker 02

  I have fun with Suno all the time. I'm not saying it's great, or that I feel morally correct about it. But Travis has much stronger feelings, not to. All right. Our nation's Federal Communications Commission Chairman Brendan Carr has been up to a lot this week. And we're gonna end with something that I believe will drive our audience into an absolute frenzy of both fury and despair.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  I'm ready for it.

• 30:37Speaker 02

  Well, let's start with some simple stuff. This week, Freedom of Information Act request filed by the advocacy group Democracy Forward was published by The Guardian. It's a trove of FCC documents, including Brendan's email and calendar. They're users of the Microsoft suite at the Federal Communications Commission. You'll be delighted to learn. As we know, Brendan is just a corrupt dummy, right? He coordinates the White House in a way that he shouldn't as the head of a theoretically independent agency. And he coordinates with a bunch of conservative broadcasters and cable companies to give them what they want, and ignores the other companies. In fact, this week, we're gonna come to this. ABC is actually suing the FCC, because they're so deeply corrupt and such a threat to free

• 31:20Speaker 02

  speech. But between, but according to these documents, between March 12, 2025, and February 11, 2026, Brendan Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House, and had three scheduled calls with administration officials, including Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and everyone's favorite, RFK Jr. RFK Jr. certainly was like, does 5G cause cancer? Like, as far as, from what we can tell from these documents, the call is like, five minutes long. And I'm guessing RFK was just like, I have another conspiracy theory. And Brendan told him where a tinfoil hat and go away. We also have Brendan trying to get himself on Fox News, which is really good. He reached out to a booker for Fox and Friends, and saying, do you want me to come on to talk about TikTok legislation? And he shared links of his previous

• 32:03Speaker 02

  appearances on Fox News to prove that he'd be good on TV.

• 32:07Speaker 03

  I think that's kind of adorable. I think it's nice that he's, he's proactively reaching out to Fox, being like, guys, look what a bad job we're doing.

• 32:15Speaker 02

  He wrote, no worries at all. There's nothing to make sense. And the Fox booker reported, there is no availability for him.

• 32:21Speaker 03

  Which is rough.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Oh, man. That's just funny on its face. But as I keep pointing out, all of Brendan's moves to censor information on the broadcast airwaves are just a trial balloon for censoring information on the internet. And the fact that he wanted to go on Fox News to talk about TikTok legislation is just more evidence that he wants to get way outside of his statutorily prescribed role governing the nation's airwaves, and actually start talking about internet content. Because there's no regulatory authority for him over TikTok whatsoever. There is Project 2025, which he wrote the telecom chapter in, in which he would claim that authority. But it doesn't exist today. So I just, Brendan trying to get on Fox News to talk about regulating

• 33:07Speaker 02

  TikTok is just more evidence of his actual plan. And when I say more evidence, I mean more evidence today, because you can literally go read the plan. You can just go read Project 2025, which he wrote, in which he would take claim over content on the internet.

• 33:21Speaker 03

  Brendan leaving his office and going on shows and podcasts has not gone well for him either, right? That's like him going out and issuing his vague threats against Jimmy Kimmel, and then everybody being like, this is very transparently not what you're allowed to do.

• 33:37Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. And this, like I said, we're gonna talk about the ABC lawsuit in one second. This is gonna come up.

• 33:41Speaker 03

  It's, it's nice that that's, that's not even the lead.

• 33:45Speaker 02

  It's gonna come up, that he's going on television and saying things like, we can do this the hard way or the easy way. By the way, speaking of Kimmel, he met with the Sinclair Broadcast Group Chairman David Smith. Sinclair is the local news broadcaster that preempted Kimmel in many markets around the country. He also met with, of course, Lachlan Murdoch, the chief of Fox Corporation. And he's met with like, many, many other conservative broadcasters as well. So he's meeting with the conservatives, he's meeting with the White House, he's issuing his little proclamations, and he's begging to get himself on Fox News. That's the documents. Then there is the court case. So ABC this week sued the FCC over their campaign of threats, particularly around Kimmel and around pulling the view. ABC's lawsuit is just strident here

• 34:26Speaker 02

  in a way that I think is good. I'm glad that we have a big media company standing up to the Trump administration in this way. It's been a long time coming. So ABC, Disney says, "The consequences of the administration's campaign against free speech reach well beyond ABC. If the administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable. Tell only the stories the administration deems favorable, or face the coercive machinery of the federal government in such a world the press can in no way be described as free."

• 34:55Speaker 02

  That's just straight from Brendan Carr's a dummy. I just want to be clear. We've been saying this on this show for like, two years now. The FCC has responded to this. You will love Brendan's response to this. "Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC's proceeding, as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation."

• 35:14Speaker 02

  I like this. I like that the FCC is like, ABC is doing Russian disinformation. How often we have, Brendan has gone on the air and literally said things like, you can do this the hard way or the easy way, or pulling the licenses early, or threatening the view. I don't think that's disinformation. I think those are just the things that are happening.

• 35:32Speaker 03

  I'm also, is anyone in the conservative ecosystem even supporting Brendan Carr on this one? Like,

• 35:39Speaker 02

  No.

• 35:40Speaker 03

  This is the thing, like, the conservative ecosystem is so happy to jump on Disney for any perceived slight. And I am not seeing that when it comes to this lawsuit, because he is just so transparently in the wrong here. It is, it is incredible.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Every week, Neil and the Wall Street Journal editorial board agree that Brendan Carr is way out over his skis, and the power of the FCC is, is, is being outrageously wielded to tamp down on free speech. That is very much present in the conservative media ecosystem. A bunch of conservative commentators and former FCC officials have all gotten together and written letters, and filed lawsuits, and anarchist briefs in these cases, saying, "Look, if you let the conservatives do it to the perceived liberal media outlets this time, when the liberals take power, they will do it to us." And the thing that they, they are trying to say, without saying it too much, is conservative talk radio is under

• 36:39Speaker 02

  threat. Right? If you start letting the FCC reach into what's happening on broadcast, the thing you would immediately do if the other side wins power, is go after conservative talk radio and say, "These aren't bona fide news programs. They don't get exceptions. They have to abide by the equal time rule." And then you're off to the races, because talk radio is dominated by conservatives. So there's a lot of wariness on that side. Oh, we get emails from those folks all the time, asking us to point it out more often, because I think they know they can't say it very loudly, but we can say whatever we want. We're on podcasts. We can't regulate us, Brendan. All right. So that is the, the shape of the legal situation. We know Brendan is meeting corruptly with the White House,

• 37:19Speaker 02

  with conservative broadcasters. We know ABC is suing the FCC over the threats to free speech. We talk about that stuff in regards to Brendan all the time. That's normal. That would be a normal Brendan Carr is a dummy segment. We would do that in the third segment. The reason I've elevated this over David's protestations from the grave, is the FCC actually took action this week that I find to be infuriating. And I, in a, in a normal time, I would have actually just made this a segment all unto itself. So, part of the crisis in government since COVID is a desire to say things are better by changing the standard by which we measure them. That's just a big idea, right? COVID will go away

• 38:00Speaker 02

  if we just stop testing. Keep that idea in your brain. Like, there's something in the, in the conservative mind that has held on to that idea forever. If we just change how we measure things, we can declare victory. This week, Brendan Carr's FCC eliminated the benchmark to bring gigabit internet to Americans. That was the standard set in 2024. We're gonna do gigabit internet for everyone. Brendan Carr's FCC got rid of that. Brendan's logic here is that holding internet providers to gigabit speeds unfairly prejudices wireless and satellite.

• 38:37Speaker 03

  Oh, my God.

• 38:38Speaker 02

  This is really good. Here's a quote. "As part of our return to following the plain language of Section 706, we propose to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,500 megabits established in the 2024 report." That's 1,500 down. "Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in this section, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers." This is incredible. Because the technological winner here is fast internet, and the loser is slow. And he's like, what if you had horrible, slow internet? That's all the statute says you need to have. We're not gonna put a speed goal here, because then any internet counts,

• 39:19Speaker 02

  including, most importantly, his friends at Starlink. This is very good. The FCC said that comments submitted by the cable industry group NICTA and the wireless industry group CTIA support our reasoning for abolishing the long-term goal, which again is holding them to speed requirements unfairly prejudices them, because their technologies suck compared to fiber.

• 39:40Speaker 03

  But they, but they do. That, right? Like, that, that feels like a notable reality, that like, if you want good speeds, you just need better techno, like, you should hold them to that.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  They should deliver. They should figure it out.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  I don't understand, what agency does this man think he's running?

• 39:57Speaker 02

  So they've gotten rid of all the standards. I mean, this is what the FCC should do, right? They should promote faster speeds and lower prices. If you get rid of the standards, if you eliminate COVID by ceasing to test for it, you suddenly get to claim victory. And so what did NICTA, the cable industry, and the CTIA do this week?

• 40:16Speaker 03

  No, no, no.

• 40:17Speaker 02

  They declared victory. They put out a, NICTA put out a press release. FCC's 2026 broadband report, faster speeds, lower prices, more choices. So we've changed the standard of measurement, and now we have declared victory.

• 40:30Speaker 03

  It's extremely depressing.

• 40:32Speaker 02

  Here it is. 97% of Americans now have access to broadband at what speeds? 100 down, 20 up. Hooray. We did it. The share of rural Americans lacking 120 megabits access has declined over two years. Rural deployment is nearly universal once satellite is included.

• 40:51Speaker 03

  Oh, my God. Congratulations.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  We've just declared victory. We, we had a standard. It was very high. It was hard. It was pushing the industry to succeed. We've eliminated the standard. We've allowed the industry to pick 120. 100 down, 20 up is the standard, and they've declared victory. They've also now declared victory in mobile 5G access for some reason. Mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous. What is the standard for 5G? Remember what the promises of 5G were. Remember what they promised you. You would be doing robot surgery in a self-driving car in VR with zero latency.

• 41:28Speaker 02

  The industry itself is now saying mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous. 95% of Americans now have access at 35 down, 3 up.

• 41:40Speaker 02

  This is brutal. This is brutal. We got rid of the standard and the industry has defined it down. In 2026, we're declaring victory at 35 down, 3 up for our mobile broadband networks. I just want to remind you all that 5G was supposed to definitively defeat China. If we didn't get to 5G, China would win something.

• 42:06Speaker 02

  35, 3. This is brutal.

• 42:09Speaker 03

  We did it, everybody.

• 42:11Speaker 02

  Yeah. All right, there's more from this victory lap because we've defined this down to 100 down, 20 up and 35 down, 3 up for 5G. 77% of Americans now have access to three or more fixed broadband services at 120. I live in, in New York. Jake, you and David live in New York City. These are highly dense urban environments. Do you feel like you have massive competition for your broadband providers?

• 42:35Speaker 03

  I, so in my building, we have one wired connection. I, I can't get FiOS. FiOS, they're next door. They won't come to us.

• 42:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  I've tried, they won't come to us. We do have other options if we want fixed wireless, right? If we want, if I want to pretend that T-Mobile is, is a reliable home internet provider, then technically I, I have a million competitors, right?

• 43:03Speaker 02

  By the way, the, the fixed wireless services are competition. There is evidence that Comcast and Verizon are churning customers to them because they can offer lower prices and almost immediate deployment.

• 43:13Speaker 03

  Which is great, which is great. I would just like them to be reliable and fast and cheap and none of that is real.

• 43:20Speaker 02

  I mean, I have FiOS and that's all I can say.

• 43:23Speaker 03

  Yeah. Congratulations.

• 43:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, I also have FiOS. They didn't.

• 43:27Speaker 03

  What the heck, guys?

• 43:27David Pierce?

  I'm sorry. They did, they technically didn't offer it in my building either, but because I live in a cellar, they will do, uh, drill it through the ground directly into my apartment.

• 43:36Speaker 02

  You have like illegal FiOS.

• 43:38David Pierce?

  Directly into my apartment.

• 43:39Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 43:39David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. If, yeah, I went online, it said, we do not offer it in your building. And I called them and they're like, we can make that work.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  You can drill a hole through the cement.

• 43:47David Pierce?

  That's what they did.

• 43:48Speaker 03

  Incredible.

• 43:48David Pierce?

  Um, I can't say that I have shopped around a lot because FiOS is, I don't know if I can say this, but it's reliable and fast and relatively cheap.

• 43:58Speaker 02

  You can say whatever you want.

• 43:59David Pierce?

  Can I say that? I find it to be pretty good. I, the, the absolute lowest FiOS service is 300 up and 300 down. And that's all I need and it's the cheapest one. And I, yes, I could have gigabit, but like, why? So.

• 44:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, every now and again, I, we have gigabit and every now and again, I look at paying for more, like two up and two down. I think optimum is here, optimum is a little flake here, but they offer five up and five down.

• 44:19Speaker 03

  How many remote surgeries are you doing over there in New York?

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Every day I'm cutting eyeballs in VR in my self-driving car. Here's this last little bit from the cable industry issuing a triumphant press release because Brendan Carr changed the standard for victory. And this is my favorite one of this.

• 44:41Speaker 02

  90% of all cable mobile data traffic. What does that mean?

• 44:46Speaker 03

  Cable mobile data.

• 44:49Speaker 02

  Cable mobile data traffic now runs over wifi.

• 44:53Speaker 03

  What does that mean?

• 44:56David Pierce?

  This is AK AI 5G all over again.

• 44:58Speaker 02

  Very good. Enabling cable mobile providers to deliver in compelling savings and greater competition in the wireless marketplace. I think what this means is that, you know, Comcast is like a bundle plan to get you like they, like MVNO, Verizon or whoever their partner is.

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:13Speaker 02

  But most of their customers are at home most of the time.

• 45:16Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 45:17Speaker 02

  So 90% of the traffic is running over wifi connected to Comcast and that is cable mobile data traffic.

• 45:24Speaker 03

  So they're patting themselves on the back for not having to pay money to, to.

• 45:29Speaker 02

  To Verizon. 90% of cable mobile data traffic now runs over wifi. This is an incredible thing to say.

• 45:35Speaker 03

  Oh my God.

• 45:35Speaker 02

  This is basically just like, most people are at home most of the time.

• 45:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:39Speaker 02

  Fine. They go on to say, the average home connects roughly 25 devices of wifi. That number has protection at nearly double by 2030. And then they go on to congratulate Brendan Carr for unlicensing the 1,200 megahertz, six gigahertz band and saying, that's what enabled all this cable mobile data traffic. I only point out that Comcast this week announced that it's going to turn all of its routers into motion detectors in people's homes using all this extra spectrum. And no one likes this idea. So it's the idea that everyone in America upgraded their wifi to six gigahertz wifi and that's what's driving a massive surge in connected devices. And then we should congratulate ourselves. This is all nonsense.

• 46:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:19Speaker 02

  Just like fundamentally, what we did in our country was we removed the goals and we allowed the industry to congratulate itself for delivering slower speeds at higher prices. Most people's prices have actually gone up. Allowed them to claim there are now more competitors because we've expanded the definition of competition to include many, many low speed vendors nobody cares about. And then on top of it, we've allowed them to claim that cable mobile data traffic exists and make some viable competitors in wireless. This again is, is pure nonsense and I would just connect it to if we stopped testing, the COVID would go away. If you stop measuring the goal, if you stop literally saying what the goal is, anything is possible.

• 47:04Speaker 02

  And this is as clear of an example of that happening in our government over the past, you know, five years as anything. We got rid of a goal to make all of the broadband be 1,000 down, 500 up. And we are now issuing press releases about Americans getting 5G at 35 down, 3 up, which is brutal. I was getting that on LTE a decade ago.

• 47:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:27Speaker 02

  And there's press releases about it today.

• 47:29David Pierce?

  Whatever happened to, um, the, what was it called? The, the internet that they put in your phone that was like stupidly fast and only at stadiums?

• 47:38Speaker 03

  Oh, millimeter wave.

• 47:40David Pierce?

  What the heck you even have on a millimeter wave?

• 47:41Speaker 02

  Millimeter wave, it does exist in stadiums.

• 47:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 47:44Speaker 02

  5G accomplished exactly one thing.

• 47:47David Pierce?

  That's that.

• 47:48Speaker 02

  It, it's live streams of Taylor Swift concerts at scale.

• 47:51David Pierce?

  Great.

• 47:51Speaker 02

  So you can watch any concert almost anywhere in the world.

• 47:54David Pierce?

  Great.

• 47:55Speaker 02

  Right? When, when they're happening live, because the millimeter wave networks in the stadiums exist and work, nothing else about 5G is functional.

• 48:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 48:02David Pierce?

  Sorry, if, if they had said the race to 5G was about live streams of Taylor Swift concerts, I think people would have.

• 48:07Speaker 03

  It would have been fine.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  Really been on board with that.

• 48:10Speaker 03

  It really would have been fine.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Raise my taxes. Let's go.

• 48:13Speaker 03

  This is one thing Americans can agree on.

• 48:15David Pierce?

  You know, considering so many of these companies have rolled out so much low band 5G, which the primary purpose of that is to release congestion on the 4G networks. I get people coming to me all the time saying, why is my internet so slow? It says 5G. And I have to, I have to break the news to them that they, you were lied to. There was a giant campaign and they told you that it would be 5G Taylor Swift concerts at millimeter wave and no, no, it's three, it's three up or three down.

• 48:42Speaker 03

  Three up is so brutal.

• 48:45Speaker 02

  But can you imagine being the person at Nikta who typed that line into the press release proudly? 97% of Americans have three up.

• 48:53Speaker 03

  They're so happy. They're, they're watching TikTok, uh, you know, it on the road, you know, and, and they, they feel great about it.

• 49:02David Pierce?

  Can you play Fortnite on your phone at three up? I don't know.

• 49:05Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's what people are caring about. They don't need to win. They're just like, look at this connectivity, America.

• 49:11Speaker 02

  If you stop measuring, it goes away.

• 49:13Speaker 03

  It goes away.

• 49:14Speaker 02

  And that's literally, I'm saying that we changed the standard of measurement. In fact, we didn't even change it. Carr eliminated the standard of measurement because he said picking 1,000 down, 500 up unfairly prejudices certain technologies.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  It's bad to.

• 49:29Speaker 02

  I E. The good ones.

• 49:30David Pierce?

  Like, like fiber over Starlink.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  So here we are, 35 down, 3 up. Congratulations, everyone. We won the race to 5G. We've defeated China, which remains resolutely defeated. Every day, the Chinese government issues sad press releases about how they can't possibly provide three up internet to their citizens.

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:49Speaker 02

  And Brendan Carr remains a dummy. Brendan, if you would like to come and defend this press release from what effectively is your organization at this point, you're, you're welcome to on this show, on Decoder. I would love to talk to you about the nature of measurement. I could bring on James Vincent, former Verge reporter, James Vincent, who wrote an entire book about the politics of measurement called Beyond Measure, which I highly recommend. I don't, I don't think you can take him. He's a charming British person. He will defeat you running away. That's just an, an open offer or you can just debate me. I think I can take you to Brendan. You're always welcome. That has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. We're done, podcast.

• 50:31David Pierce?

  The Gregorian chant really is my favorite one.

• 50:33Speaker 02

  It's really, it's really quick.

• 50:34David Pierce?

  It's really good. Well, it feels good to win. And with that, we gotta take a break. We're back. It's time for the lightning round.

• 50:43Speaker 05

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• 51:39Speaker 10

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• 51:40Speaker 11

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• 52:08David Pierce?

  All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. And you know what? I'm power tripping. I'm just gonna go first here, because we have to talk about the fact that Apple leaked its own product. Something that is not expected out until next year. A pair of AirPods with cameras in them.

• 52:24Speaker 03

  Great idea.

• 52:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, there was a little video clip of them. You can't actually see the cameras, but you can see somebody talking to the cameras.

• 52:33David Pierce?

  Can we roll the clip?

• 52:34Speaker 12

  With visual intelligence, your world becomes savable. See something you like? Just ask me to save it for later.

• 52:41David Pierce?

  There are many really weird things about this clip. From a production standpoint, it's really weird. That's just not a completed color grade at all. It's very green in the shadows. The highlights are really blown out. And Apple never ships something like this. So the fact that they included this in a macOS 26, not even, not even Golden Gate. This was a Tahoe release candidate. Is really weird.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Really strange.

• 53:05David Pierce?

  Really weird.

• 53:07Speaker 02

  Okay, here's my conspiracy theory. I just came up with this. I have no reporting to this. This is true.

• 53:13Speaker 02

  They leaked this on purpose to warm people up to the idea of AirPods with cameras in them.

• 53:18David Pierce?

  Is it doing the warming?

• 53:19Speaker 02

  Because we had a big story this week from Mia Sato about Meta glasses. Her headline is "They're a Workplace Menace", and they really are. Like, if you're a service worker or a retail worker, people are recording you without consent. They are, comedians are getting heckled. Like, there's a quote in her story where a comedian said, "Please stop recording me", and the guy said, "You're here to entertain me", and then she just cut her set short and left.

• 53:40Speaker 02

  This is a problem. So you gotta, you gotta preheat the oven. You gotta say that the AirPods with the cameras are coming. Let people have all their feelings, so that when they're announced, everyone is already a little bit blasé. This is, by the way, pure conspiracy theory.

• 53:53David Pierce?

  It is. I think this is very bad timing for, for these products to come out, right? Even if it's six months from now. Meta's been doing these glasses for a few years now, and I think people were kind of just like, whatever, about the, the cameras for a while, because people weren't buying that many of them. It is strange that it took quite a while for people to get really mad about these.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  I think it was Kylie Jenner, right? They did a Kylie Jenner partnership.

• 54:14David Pierce?

  You'd think so.

• 54:15Speaker 03

  Broke containment.

• 54:16David Pierce?

  That's a good point.

• 54:17Speaker 03

  Now everybody's like, "Oh, maybe we shouldn't have people walking around filming TikToks of trying to like, pick people up off the street while recording them." Maybe that's bad.

• 54:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:29Speaker 02

  Kylie Jenner is one part of it. Like, certainly Meta is trying to be cool in a way that is very difficult for Meta to be cool. I also think it's just scale. There's actually an argument in the, in the comments of that piece about the fact that camera glasses have been available from AliExpress for like, forever.

• 54:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:47Speaker 02

  And it's like, that's great. That's pretty niche. And like, literally only one class of depraved people were buying those.

• 54:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  Now they're just a product. You can just buy them. They're advertised. They're at Best Buy. You can buy them in the airport gadget kiosk before your flight. Like, they're ubiquitous, scaled, mass-market consumer products, and scale changes everything.

• 55:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:09Speaker 02

  Right? Like, the Meta label is a, is a permission slip to buy the glasses and have them and put a camera on your face. And I, I actually just think they've hit a tipping point of ubiquity.

• 55:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:20Speaker 02

  And so Kylie Jenner is a symptom of that, right? You, you sold enough, you believe in enough, you're gonna pay the marketing money to the big influencer. But the other side of it is, you sold enough, there's returns on this. They really believe in this form factor. And I continue to believe that Meta thinks they've made an AI wearable, because it just has some garbage AI in it. And what they've really made is glasses with cameras in them. And they have not reckoned with that at all. And when AirPods with cameras come out, whether or not Apple is capable of reckoning with that and protecting people's privacy with that, wide open questions.

• 55:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:00Speaker 03

  I mean, there, there is this big question of how Apple actually implements this, right? Are these for recording what you're up to? Are these for taking photos? Or do they tell you, "Hey, these AirPods have cameras on them"? Or do they just go, "Oh, it's a new AI wearable. Don't worry about it"?

• 56:16David Pierce?

  I guarantee you they're gonna call these a sensor and not a camera. That is the best way they can position these. And they say they're for-

• 56:22Speaker 03

  No, just pretend.

• 56:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. A sensor for visual intelligence.

• 56:26Speaker 03

  A vision sensor, yes.

• 56:26David Pierce?

  Sensor for visual intelligence. And I, this is my thought process on this. I don't think they're gonna let you just take photos of things or take videos of things. I think it's gonna be pretty limited to the like, "What am I looking at?" Kind of look, which, again, the, the "What am I looking at", in my opinion, is one of those like, problems that nobody has that all these companies are solving. Which happens a lot. And I don't, I don't know why they're like, "Save this book for later", when you could just write it down.

• 56:52Speaker 03

  You own the book.

• 56:53David Pierce?

  You could just write it down.

• 56:54Speaker 03

  Like, in your house.

• 56:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:56Speaker 02

  You have a line about this in your Pixel review, Dan.

• 56:58David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  What is it? The "What If Utopia Simulation"?

• 57:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah. It's the, the San Francisco "What If Utopia Simulator", yeah.

• 57:06Speaker 02

  Yeah, like, what if everyone was just looking at print books all day long and asking what they were? And it's like, "We've built a product that can solve this problem." And like, the reality is, it's like Anthropic employees looking at books and be like, "How could I most efficiently tear the cover off this to scan into the model"?

• 57:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I do think this will reveal the true gap, if there is one, which I think there is, of like, whether people actually want this in a wearable, right? Because if Apple comes out and they say, "These aren't for taking photos. These aren't for recording videos. You can't use these to creep on people. It's just for getting AI information about your surroundings, about getting directions." Well, if it turns out that that's useless, which, you know, maybe, maybe it is, then I think it's, it's pretty revealing that Meta has not built an AI wearable. They built a pair of headphones and some creepy glasses.

• 57:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the other question here is, do they sample the world all the time while you have the headphones in so that you can ask your phone, "Where did I leave my keys"? That's the thing that I'm wondering if they're gonna pitch it out.

• 58:04David Pierce?

  That I would not be happy about. That would be very-

• 58:07Speaker 02

  There's no way to do that in a privacy-centric way.

• 58:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  If you're sampling the world all the time is an amazing way of describing constantly taking pictures.

• 58:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Flock for your ears.

• 58:18David Pierce?

  They're gonna, I guarantee you, they're gonna say-

• 58:20Speaker 02

  Earflocks. They would be called earflocks.

• 58:23David Pierce?

  Where like, breaking the, the image data into encrypted strings of whatever and storing it locally on your- They're gonna do this. This is how they're gonna present it. So I don't know. I, what's interesting to me is how quickly the world comes along with them, you know? Because the first generation of AirPods looked terrible with the giant long stems, and everyone made fun of them. And they looked terrible. And then a bunch of people bought them, and then they normalized. And there's gonna be a backlash. There's definitely gonna be a backlash. But how long does the backlash last, is my question?

• 58:53Speaker 02

  Wait, I think that, that, to the extent there was a backlash for AirPods, it was, "These look pretty silly." And "This looks pretty silly" is overcomable by almost every product if it's good at what it does.

• 59:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Speaker 02

  Right? And the AirPods were good at what they did. They were the first successful wireless earbuds of their kind.

• 59:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:11Speaker 02

  The objection here isn't how it looks, and it can't be overcome by success at being functional. The objection here is, "Stop taking pictures of me."

• 59:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:21Speaker 02

  "I do not consent to being captured." And the existing privacy laws, such as we have in this country, are like, "Well, if you're in a public place, you have no expectation of privacy."

• 59:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:29Speaker 02

  But that is a framework and a set of norms and laws that don't imagine people with cameras in their ears. Right? Like, all that came up with, like, SL, like, film SLR cameras.

• 59:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:44Speaker 02

  Right? Like, all of that, like, street photography lives in that legal framework. Where if you're out in the street in New York and someone's just like, literally taking pictures of the camera, you don't have some like, big expectation of privacy. But I'm just at my job, and someone shows up with cameras in their ears? I don't even know if I'm being recorded. There's something else about that, especially when the distribution is social media. And so, to turn back to Meta for one second, and Mia's story about the glasses in workplaces. Meta has this ridiculous quote. "We've built privacy into our AI glasses from the ground up." And what they mean is the light.

• 1:00:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:20Speaker 02

  They can't mean anything else. Because if you were gonna build privacy into your AI glasses from the ground up, you would not put a camera on them that invades people's privacy.

• 1:00:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:27Speaker 02

  And if you're stuck with the legal definition of privacy, you're still really in a, a hard spot when you go into someone's home, or you go into someone's private workplace. Because those aren't public places in the same way. So you've just got this like, huge language gap. "We've built privacy in our glasses from the ground up." Like, Meta's saying this is nonsensical. And they have to know it. And then their solution is-

• 1:00:52Speaker 02

  This is incredible. They said to me, Meta has begun blocking hashtags on its platforms associated with harassment, including, quote, riz, pick up artist, and cold approach.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  Oh.

• 1:01:07Speaker 02

  Because people are using the glasses to try to pick up girls. And so then they're like hashtag riz. And Meta is like, don't worry, we're not using AI to detect this. We're gonna block it at the hashtag.

• 1:01:18Speaker 03

  Cool. Got it. So you make the product, then you own all of the platforms that people share video on, moderate those platforms to make sure people aren't creepy with it. So it's a really good plan.

• 1:01:27Speaker 02

  But you barely do it.

• 1:01:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, barely.

• 1:01:29Speaker 02

  You do hashtag based moderation of the word riz.

• 1:01:32Speaker 03

  Mm hmm. Thought Meta hated hashtags. I thought they were getting rid of all the hashtags. Doesn't seem to be working.

• 1:01:37Speaker 02

  And you just add this up. You're like, well, we kind of, we actually do want this. We're gonna say there's privacy from the ground up. And then, right, Jake, to your point, we also control the distribution. So we'll do some, we'll just like gesture at content moderation to disincentivize the bad behavior.

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:01:52Speaker 02

  But we won't actually do the content moderation you want, which is using our massive investment in AI to actually detect the bad content and turn it down or eliminate it. We're gonna block the word hashtag, or we're gonna block the hashtag riz.

• 1:02:06Speaker 03

  What can I also say? It's not just disincentivizing bad behavior. It is trying to avoid bad press.

• 1:02:13Speaker 02

  Yep.

• 1:02:13Speaker 03

  Right? If you don't see the videos, then you can't report on the videos. There can't be blowups about it. It's, it's not looking good over there.

• 1:02:20Speaker 02

  But wait, doesn't this all just come to Apple?

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  I was gonna say one more quick thing about Apple, which is, it is unclear to me if these products will even work at scale. They're also leaked that there's a warning if your hair is covering up the AirPods with cameras, because a ton of people on Earth have long hair.

• 1:02:36Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:02:36Speaker 03

  So like, this product, we'll see, where Mark Gurman at Bloomberg reported that it's still on track for, I think, Q1 2027. So there's gonna be a bit before these even come out. Lots to find out, but this is gonna be messy.

• 1:02:51Speaker 02

  I just think there's an enormous danger for Apple releasing a product that reminds everyone of a Meta product that everyone calls pervert glasses.

• 1:02:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:02:59Speaker 02

  That's not a game they usually play.

• 1:03:02Speaker 03

  No. It'd be a good way to introduce the new CEO.

• 1:03:09Speaker 03

  John Turner?

• 1:03:09Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:03:10Speaker 03

  Yeah, great, great timing. Okay, David, it's time to move on. What have you got for us?

• 1:03:15David Pierce?

  Okay. Mine's much more boring than this. But I think it matters. I think it matters. Company called Fairphone you guys might have been familiar with. They're a company out of France that makes all these more fair phones, where they go to these cobalt mines and they make sure that there's not as many children in the cobalt mines, things like that.

• 1:03:35Speaker 03

  Nice of them.

• 1:03:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's nice of them. It's good of them. They're trying to break into the US.

• 1:03:39Speaker 03

  Well, there are other things. These are also, these are the repairable ones, right?

• 1:03:42David Pierce?

  Yes, they're very repairable. But, but their, their big kind of push has always been about making sure that the working conditions for these phones are good, that they're using sustainable things, things like that. But yes, you can also, they have all the parts, not all of the parts, but many parts available on their website. So they have different parts on your phone, break, it works. I did use the Fairphone for quite a while, and I broke one of the cameras and I just swapped it back in. And it was nice. They have phones with expandable storage. Their phones have removable batteries. Kind of everything that we used to have in smartphones that now are just glued directly into the phone. Anyway, they are now selling the Fairphone 6 Plus in the United States through Amazon. This is a fairly big deal, to make a little pun there. Breaking in the US is incredibly difficult.

• 1:04:27David Pierce?

  However, I have had a lot of people that I know, friends of mine, that have said, I really want to leave Apple. I don't know what to do. My only other goal, option seems to be Google or Samsung, and I hate all these tech companies. I don't know what to do. And I'll, you know, point them in the direction of these Fairphones. The biggest problem with these Fairphones is that they are trading the fairness with a very mid-ranged Android phone, which is still, still the case. People want premium, they want low cost, and they want not Apple or Google. You can only choose maybe one, maybe one.

• 1:05:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:05:02David Pierce?

  So they are selling on Amazon. They are officially supported through T-Mobile and AT&T, which is a decently big deal. I think if they can get store space in T-Mobile or AT&T, that's a big deal. Media Mart in the UK has been selling these Fairphones for quite a while now, and they've expanded from like 40 stores to like 180 stores in, none in the UK, sorry, in Europe. They've expanded to a lot of stores. So this Fairphone 6 Plus is a Snapdragon 7 Gen 4, notably very mid-ranged, 12 gigs of RAM, 256 gigs of storage, 4,415 milliampere battery. But again, it is expandable storage, replaceable battery, and it's verd purple is the color.

• 1:05:43Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's pretty good.

• 1:05:44Speaker 02

  It's a, it's a purple, David.

• 1:05:46David Pierce?

  Blur, blurple.

• 1:05:47Speaker 02

  Blurple.

• 1:05:48David Pierce?

  Blurple. That's the official color, so.

• 1:05:50Speaker 02

  We should do, can I, am I allowed to just assign you YouTube videos? I think I can do. The other day, I'm like, I'm gonna assign him stories all the time. Someone, you should make a video about how all, like, the entire tech industry would be different if the concept of the mid-range Android phone was more successful.

• 1:06:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:11Speaker 02

  Like, so many things live or die on whether or not people will want to buy a mid-range Android phone.

• 1:06:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Speaker 02

  Like, Fairphone is a good example, like, a healthy, you know, competitive, we're gonna sell values, but you have to want a mid-range Android phone. Like, that's, that's one end of the spectrum.

• 1:06:26Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:27Speaker 02

  The entire thesis of AT&T buying Time Warner was people will love our mid-range Android phones more if they have bite-sized Game of Thrones apps on them, which is psychotic. But like, it also required people to want mid-range Android phones.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  I think they were just a couple of years too early to that, right? If they were putting out a micro drama, House of Cards, House of Dragons, what is it now?

• 1:06:50David Pierce?

  House of the Dragon.

• 1:06:51Speaker 02

  House of Dragon.

• 1:06:52Speaker 03

  Sorry, everyone.

• 1:06:53Speaker 02

  That's what it is.

• 1:06:53Speaker 03

  Yeah. I, you know, there's an audience for that.

• 1:06:57David Pierce?

  It is tough. They are $650. So people are gonna need to be able to, you know, trade their willingness to have a $650 mid-range Android phone in the United States. Not a great sell, very difficult.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  It's very niche. It's very niche. But it is like, if you're going to pick a mid-range Android phone, it is, there needs to be something that is driving you to that. And Fairphone does have.

• 1:07:19David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  Right?

• 1:07:20David Pierce?

  Yes. I personally do think that the, there's a lot of people that I know, even personally, who are like, they think a lot about, you know, the sustainability of these phones, the fact that they don't want to use as much Apple and Google stuff. Especially in Gen Z, they think a lot about those things. Whether or not they're willing to actually use them is a whole nother question. And especially pay $650 for them. But similarly to the framework laptop, which the more premium one came out recently, and it was more expensive than almost every laptop, it's one of those things where the value, at the very beginning, the value does not seem great. But over a long period of time, if you're able to fix things and maybe even upgrade things, because some of Fairphone's camera modules were upgradable, you could just swap them in.

• 1:08:05Speaker 03

  Okay, that's very cool.

• 1:08:06David Pierce?

  And that was great. Then the value becomes a little bit more apparent. So.

• 1:08:11Speaker 03

  I mean, I feel like the people who test these phones seem to really like them.

• 1:08:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:14Speaker 03

  But it, it's true. You'd like, you're getting a mid-range Android phone at the end, and you've got to really like what it comes with, for sure.

• 1:08:21Speaker 02

  I'm telling you, if we could just pull off mid-range Android phones. I mean, I know we have some listeners who are mid-range Android phones. This is great, but they're not the thing. And if somehow they ever became the thing, we would experience vastly more competition in lots of ways.

• 1:08:35Speaker 03

  Yes. Yeah.

• 1:08:37Speaker 02

  But they're, they're just super not the thing.

• 1:08:39Speaker 03

  Yeah, so close.

• 1:08:40Speaker 02

  You gotta make this dream come to life.

• 1:08:42Speaker 03

  Yeah. I should have brought it with me, because they shipped me one, and I just have not opened the box yet. It was very, it is, I think this is gonna be very interesting to see if they're able to expand their market share, because it's been, it's been just Europe for now.

• 1:08:52David Pierce?

  It's been almost exclusively Europe.

• 1:08:54Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:08:54David Pierce?

  It's very low, but, you know, they're growing a lot in Europe.

• 1:08:57Speaker 03

  Which is already a bigger Android market. So it'll be interesting to see if they can have any headway in the US where that is a very tough front.

• 1:09:05David Pierce?

  Very, very, very tough.

• 1:09:06Speaker 03

  Cool, say. All right. Neelai, what have you got for us?

• 1:09:10Speaker 02

  So I was gonna do the Meta trial. There's another Meta trial where it's very obvious they know bad things are happening to teenagers on their platforms. They're not doing enough about it. We had one in New Mexico. They lost that one. This one is California, New Jersey, a bunch of other states. It's ongoing. We expect to see Zuck and Misery and everybody else on stand. It's gonna be the New Mexico trial again, and I bet they're gonna lose. And Meta is so afraid of losing that they keep saying they're gonna be fined like $1.2 trillion to make it really scary. And the states are like, no, we're asking for $200 billion, which is still an enormous number, but not 1 point whatever trillion dollars. That's the state of that one. Fine. We're gonna cover that. You can read about it. Meta

• 1:09:52Speaker 02

  is in trouble, because whatever. We've asked for their executives to come on Decoder. I get the sense that they, they are scared of that idea. That's what I'll say at this time. I want to talk about something else. I'm gonna stay on measurement for one second. YouTube this week announced how its counting views is going to change.

• 1:10:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:14Speaker 02

  And so there was, previously it was a number of seconds. Like, you had to watch some seconds of a video for it to count as a view.

• 1:10:20Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:10:20Speaker 02

  And YouTube is like, screw it. The instant one frame of a video plays on any surface in the YouTube app, that counts as a view, which is going to massively inflate view counts. Just, they know it.

• 1:10:32Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  And I think, David, the reason for that is because the YouTube ecosystem is getting bigger. They're competing with TikTok and all these other platforms. And a lot of the creators I know are saying view counts have kind of been drifting down. So like, how do you fix it? You just literally say anytime one frame of the video plays, that counts as a view, and skyrocket, skyrocket all accounts again.

• 1:10:52David Pierce?

  Yeah. I feel that it feels like a very defensive posture for YouTube, which I'm surprised that they're taking, because they have always been the one metric that people care about. You know, like, everyone just makes views. As David Pierce will say, views are, view numbers are fake. Everything is fake. They're just, they change the way that they work all the time, and X is changing the way it counts views, and Twitter, all the, all these things. YouTube did shift the way that YouTube Shorts views worked quite a while ago to be in line with TikTok and all of those things. And so now their reasoning is that they want to unify the way that the views work across all their platforms. They now have a different metric name for the ways that views used to work, because the

• 1:11:35David Pierce?

  way views used to work is still the way that people are being paid. This is what's a little bit weird about this.

• 1:11:42Speaker 02

  Wait, I didn't realize this.

• 1:11:43David Pierce?

  This is true. So there is a, there's the public view count, which is just going to be massively inflated.

• 1:11:48Speaker 02

  Oh, sure.

• 1:11:49David Pierce?

  I think it's called qualified views or qualified view hours or something like that. And that is the way that people will still be paid. So now this is going to cause an insane amount of confusion between creators and the people who pay them, because their views are going to be way up. And the people who pay them will be like, wow, you're doing a great job. And then they'll actually ask for the real data and they will be way down comparatively. But I just want to note that there are so many tensions that YouTube gives creators between the amount of watch time they have, the watch percentage that they have. You know, if, if someone doesn't finish your video and they only make it 40% of the way through, that tells the algorithm like, oh, I guess this wasn't that quality of a video, right?

• 1:12:32David Pierce?

  The only way to make people watch a video all the way through is to randomly cut off your video at a random moment. So creators will now, instead of saying, thanks for watching, I hope you subscribe, hit the bell, whatever, they'll just like end the video because they want people to just finish the video. Now, if that happens and then it just instantly auto plays another video, that video that you did not click on, that you had no interest in watching now gets a view. So there, there's just a whole can of worms here that is going to change the way that YouTube numbers work completely.

• 1:13:03Speaker 02

  When you change how you measure things, you can declare.

• 1:13:06David Pierce?

  That's exactly what this is. That's precisely what this is.

• 1:13:10Speaker 02

  I would put that right up against another piece of news this week.

• 1:13:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:13Speaker 02

  YouTube is in talks to offer select creators millions of dollars if they keep their videos exclusively on YouTube for a set period. Two people familiar with those efforts said that to Business Insider, Bloomberg's Lucas Shaw also had that. The move is described as a direct shot at Netflix, which has been ramping up the licensing of creator videos. So Netflix is going to license more like high-end YouTube stuff. YouTube obviously wants to compete in television and YouTube is responding to this, but juicing view counts and then paying you money to not take the Netflix money.

• 1:13:45David Pierce?

  This is another very defensive posture. Like it, it seems they have never really had to worry about these people in the past. And it's strange that they are actually coming out and saying, we're a little bit worried about Netflix. And they should be a little bit worried about Netflix, but it's weird that they're publicly worried about Netflix in this way.

• 1:14:02Speaker 02

  Yeah, Netflix can offer you the best of YouTube. Right? They've licensed all the best videos that they like the most or the, the most popular creators on Netflix. And you can just watch them in the same app. Maybe you're not going to open the YouTube app and YouTube's watch time on television, which has been dominant for quite some time, will go down a little bit.

• 1:14:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:22Speaker 02

  Right? And if you're also going to count views, the second one frame of video starts playing, your view counts will go down a little bit.

• 1:14:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Yeah. Like this is a lot. There's, there's a lot of swirl here.

• 1:14:32David Pierce?

  Uh huh. Oh, I wanted to make a quick clarification. It's called engaged views now. So it's not qualified views. It's called engaged views. And this is important because literally like a week ago, YouTube changed the way that their, uh, the YouTubers can get into the partner program, both through shorts and through the actual long, they call it long form now, long form YouTube partner program. It used to be that they needed 4,000 watch hours in order to become a YouTube partner. Now it is 8,000. And so when they did that and then they changed the way that views were counted, people were like, oh, they're just changing it to 8,000 because it's way easier to get a view now. No, because it has to be 8,000 engaged views. So there will be a different engaged views metric

• 1:15:15David Pierce?

  in the YouTube Studio app in which you have all this data. So YouTube still understands that engaged views are real views. I mean, it also like, the, the name kind of implies everything. The other views are disengaged views. They're not actual viewers.

• 1:15:28Speaker 02

  They're technically called public views.

• 1:15:30David Pierce?

  They're autoplay views.

• 1:15:32Speaker 02

  But that's the number they're going to show under the videos and those numbers will look gigantic now.

• 1:15:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Speaker 02

  Right? And I think that's what the thing that they want. They want those numbers to look gigantic. They want those things to look dominant. You, you're saying defensive posture, but I think they want to indicate dominance. Like if you go on YouTube, look at all these videos with tens of millions of views that you can also watch as opposed to, boy, the number of people watching things for more than whatever, 30 seconds or whatever mysterious number of seconds counted as a view before, that number seemed like it was trending down as more and more people were watching shorts, as more and more people were watching TikTok or whatever else. And now they're, those numbers are going to skyrocket.

• 1:16:11David Pierce?

  I just also feel that we are getting worse and worse indicators of the quality of a video because they got rid of the dislike button. So we have no idea what that's going to mean now. And then now if everyone's, if the algorithm just decides to serve this one video to everybody, which it likes to do, there are some videos that get served to almost everyone on the platform, no matter what your algorithm looks like. And it will just have a view because it will have autoplay or you'll have hovered your mouse over it for a frame. Like it is a frame. That seems insane to me.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  I mean, I'm going to find a way to do a YouTube scam.

• 1:16:45David Pierce?

  The click farms are coming.

• 1:16:46Speaker 02

  As, as a parent of young children, I'm quite mad that I didn't invent Cocamelon. Like, yeah, we should have all invented Cocamelon. Let's be honest, we didn't. But now I'm going to find something. If you've got ideas, email us. Vergecast at theverge.com. Tell me what YouTube scam we should run. We're going to, we're going to run.

• 1:17:04David Pierce?

  All right. That's it for the Vergecast. Remember to subscribe to The Verge for ad-free episodes of our podcasts, exclusive newsletters and so much more. We'd love to hear from you. Email us [email protected] or call the hotline at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Fox Media Podcast Network. Today's show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer and Travis Lartjuk. See you next week, Neelai.

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