Jony Ive's funky Ferrari

Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of Vox Media. Again. Every week. For the last time. For the foreseeable future. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay Patel is here. What's up? If you haven't been watching this podcast on YouTube recently, I encourage you to watch it once, only for the just unbelievable studio glow-up that Nilay continues to undergo. We added one light on the advice of a video professional instead of me just YOLOing it myself, and now I look incredible. It's literally, like, it hurts my feelings how good you look. And the people have been noticing. Don't get it twisted. The people have been noticing. Every time someone says, I look hot, I send it to Becky, and she says, don't get ahead of yourself.

It's good. We all need to have our things going for us. We have a lot of stuff to talk about. There's a new Ferrari that I'm confident we're going to spend somewhere between two and three hours having feelings about. Speaking of things that think they're hot but aren't. Nilay Patel, the Ferrari Luce of the Vergecast. We're going to get into that and why that's the meanest thing I've ever said to you in very short order. We got Brendan Carr to talk about. We got a lot of stuff to talk about. Also, real quick, this is the end of a Vergecast era. As of Monday, we become a daily show and it's important to me that everybody knows that essentially nothing is going to change. And so much of our news lately is like nothing will change.

We remain the Verge cast. We have a really fun slate of stuff set up for next week. You will see, I promise, how much we are committed to this continuing to be the Verge cast, even as we do more of it and get to move faster and try new things. It's all gonna be very exciting. But we remain the Verge cast. I've heard some people who are like, David, don't ruin the show, which is also a fun fact. When I joined the Verge, Dieter Bone called me and said, David, don't ruin the show. And four years later, I think I've kind of ruined it, but we're doing our best. But in a fun way. Exactly. But let's get to the news. I think clearly the story of the week.

You would have thought it was the Pope having 42,000 words of feelings about AI, but my guy got it just immediately news bumped by the Ferrari Luce. What is going on in Italy? He asked. What's wrong over there? Everyone has lost their minds in Italy. This is what's happening. So the Luce, just to very briefly set the scene here, is Ferrari's first EV. This is a company that a decade or so ago said it would never do electric cars, that has kind of poo-pooed this whole idea for a very long time, tapped Johnny Ive and his company Love From to do a lot of the design work. This is a big deal for Ferrari, right? I guess, like, let's actually just start there. I think, how important is the idea of Ferrari's first EV to the car world in general at this moment?

Five years ago, when this started, I think it was very important. In 2026, it is not important. Interesting. That's how I would describe this. Explain. So, you know, I'm not a Ferrari person. Lots of people have lots of feelings about Ferraris. I'm a car person, and I know enough about Ferrari to know that Ferrari has increasingly become, like, not just a luxury brand, but, like, a club for rich people to be in. So you can't buy a new Ferrari unless you already have a Ferrari.

Like that's just how it works. Like it's becoming increasingly exclusive to own a Ferrari in ways that like some people really don't like. Like Jay Leno is like an enormous car guy. He doesn't have any Ferraris because he thinks that exclusivity is weird and bad. You can go watch videos of him talking about that at length. The reason all the crypto bros have Lamborghinis is because Ferrari won't sell them Ferraris. Like no amount of money can buy you a Ferrari.

it will definitely get you a Lamborghini. And thus we have nine most. So this company is just like, it's repositioned itself in like very specific ways. People really like the cars. There's obviously Ferrari as a brand, it has an ethos, it has a look, which is very important. And so the idea that it needed an EV always struck me as odd because it's not like it's chasing market share. Sure. Right. It's not like, oh, we need an EV to compete with Tesla. It's like, no, to buy a Ferrari, you have to have a Ferrari. And there's a long waiting list of people with Ferraris. Ferraris also come with terms of service. So if you buy a new Ferrari, you're not allowed to resell it because you signed a terms of service and they will repossess the car.

Like, it's just like, this is not a company that needs to chase market share. So why do an EV? And the answer, you know, from Ferrari's one of you is like, to be on the cutting edge, to build a thing that only Ferrari can build using the technology of today. And then you sort of add Johnny Ive and Marc Muson to the mix, and you're like, all the announcements are like, this will be the pinnacle of what a car can be. And that's, I would say that's where the hype was. Okay. This also helps me understand the thing that the car actually is too, because they did all of this material. They filmed a bunch of things with Charles Leclerc and Lewis Hamilton, who are the Ferrari Formula One drivers. Like you could not have made more out of this release if you're a Ferrari, right? Like they clearly mean this to be a moment, I think for the reasons you're describing. But also I think the overwhelming question coming out of this release has been what on earth is this car? Like what did Ferrari do here? And I think...

You would go into it thinking, okay, you could probably sit most people down and ask them what a Ferrari looks like and get an answer, right? Like, they have a specific shape, a specific vibe, a specific sort of emotional response. What color is a Ferrari? Red. Like, a Ferrari is a Ferrari. See what I mean? Yeah, like, this is what I mean. I am not a car guy, and I could pick a Ferrari out of a lineup of a thousand cars. This car looks absolutely nothing like it. It's also blue. I suspect most people have seen some of these pictures before, but it looks like an EV way more than it looks like a Ferrari, if that makes sense. It looks like anything but a Ferrari. Yes.

It's full of like smooth lines and everything is very like sort of space-agey and they're doing the thing where they want it all to feel like one piece. It's very Johnny Ive, unibody aluminum. Like the guy who made a MacBook made this car and you can see it. Like you really can see it. And everybody, I feel so bad for the influencers who went on this trip, by the way. So just, you know, here's just a little media gossip that David never wants to do. But I think people like the inside baseball. To go to the Luce reveal, Ferrari had to fly you out.

this is against our policy. So we like tore ourselves into pieces trying to figure out how to go on this trip in a way that would comply with our ethics policy. And all the answer is like, you will, we will just pay out of pocket for a trip to Italy to see a car, which we could not justify. Like just as much as this car was, we couldn't do it. Everyone else who went, went on a paid junket. And so all of the videos, you can see there's just pressure to like go along and no one can just say the thing they're thinking, which is what, what is this thing? And then all of that content goes on the internet. And.

Everyone's like, this thing sucks. And I feel, I mean, I don't feel bad for Johnny Ive, but like this, the thing that he wanted out in the world is like, this is what the Apple car could have been, right? You see that was seeded to so much media. Like so much of the framing of all the videos was, if you wanted to know what Apple car could have been, like the ultimate car, like this is it. And I have to say the interior, which they announced first, looks incredible. Yes. Right? The switchgear and the handles on the screen to move it around and how the key works and it changes color as you put it in the center console to start the car. The rear seat switchgear particularly is like incredibly beautiful. And all of that is great. And you get outside the car and you're like, why does this Ferrari look like a Honda Concept EV?

Why does it look like anything but a Ferrari? And we're at the point in this cycle where, like, former Apple executives are texting me to be like, this is Johnny Hyatt on his own supply. Because there's no love lost between that group of people, right? And it's like, yeah, if you leave him to his own devices and you get lost in the sauce, you end up with Ferrari making a Ferrari that everybody hates. If this thing, TC wrote for us, TC Sadek wrote for us, if this was a Volkswagen, everyone would be losing their minds. This was the most beautiful car I ever made.

but it's a Ferrari. It has no sharp lines. It has some of the weirdest headlights I've ever seen, quite honestly. And like, none of it screams Ferrari. It has five seats for some reason. Like, why did you make a five-seat sedan? It's a Ferrari. Like, at most, you're supposed to do Christian Bale and Batman and pile two models in the front seat and drive away. Like, Ferrari. It's just unclear what the purpose of this car is and who it's for, except for Johnny Ive to be like, this is a car I could have made. Yeah, I think the is it Ferrari...

Like, what do we do with the Ferrari of it all? I think is a really interesting question. But I think on the spectrum of would we all be freaking out if this is a Volkswagen? I'm not entirely sure. I agree. Well, if it was a $700,000 Volkswagen. But like, let me just show you some of the comparisons that people have been making. Like to your point about there is the car that it is inside and there's the car that it is outside. There's a great shout out to Pretend World on our website. Dom on our team pulled this out in our daily newsletter. Pretend World said, what's crazy is that some of the exterior details are really stunning. The top down images are super cool. Some of the rear details are beautiful. Then it's suddenly a Nissan Leaf.

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

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

There's like all the Mark Newsome car designs. He's the other principal designer I love from. It looks exactly like that. There's Honda EV concepts that it looks like. The rear looks like a lot of other cars. You know, we talked for a long time about the Apple car. Johnny Ive worked on the Apple car for a decade. That project came to nothing. And the challenge in my mind for Ive was if you're going to make a car, you have to make the most popular category of car, which means you're making a midsize crossover, which means Johnny Ive has to design a car that looks like a shoe.

Every midsize crossover looks the same. Everyone's seen that one picture where it's like all the cars look the same. Like the Ford Mustang Mach-E looks exactly like the Mazda CX-5, looks exactly like the BMW X3. Like that's the shape of a car now because that's the most popular category of cars. And yes, they're more or less expensive. And you just see that he got to Ferrari and he didn't embrace the fact that Ferraris don't have to look like anything except Ferraris. He tried to make a car. And that means the car looks like all the other cars, even with some like Ferrari attention to detail. And it's like, you should have just made a Ferrari.

I think the saddest outcome here is that people are using AI to redesign Johnny Ive cars. It's tough, dude. And the AI is doing a better job. I don't want to feel that way. Do you want to feel that way? No.

So, but the thing I think is most interesting about this, and like, it's worth saying that there have been people who like this car, I'm sure, but there are a lot of people steeped in the tradition of Ferrari who think this is a problem, right? Like the idea that you look at this car and it is not a Ferrari has really bummed a lot of people out. Like there's this clip that's been going around. Let me just play this for you. It's from the former president of Ferrari, Luca di Montezemolo. And I'm going to play you the YouTube dubbed version of this audio, which is itself just a terrific piece of this whole thing. YouTube will now auto-dub this video, which is an Italian, into English. So please understand, this is not what this man sounds like.

But I'm just going to play this with the power of AI. And he's asked about this car kind of just offhandedly. And I would just say you can tell pretty quickly is not thrilled with what this thing is. We risk destroying a legend. But we can do it. I hope that at least a little horse is removed from that car. What should we do with China? What should we do with China? What should we do with China? This is definitely a car that at least the Chinese will not copy. They will not.

It's real. So the audio is incredible. But there are three things that he says there. He says they risk destroying a legend. I've also seen it translated as myth that like this risks tearing down the whole thing that is Ferrari. Thing number two, he says, I hope they at least take the prancing horse off that car, which is just a knife. And then at the very end there, he says, this is definitely a car that at least the Chinese won't copy.

I don't believe that. I disagree with him there. But, like, you couldn't say a series of meaner things about Ferrari than those three things in a row. Like, that is such a devastating take on what this car is. That not only... He's not even worried about, like, is this a cool car that's fast and going to be fun and people are going to like... He's like, this is a threat to Ferrari. Like, damn.

I mean, the stock price went down on the day. Again, it's very funny because Ferrari does not try to sell as many cars as it can. That's just not been the business it's been in forever. It has been in the, you have to be on a wait list and know a guy who knows a guy who has approved to sell you a Ferrari so that you can buy another Ferrari. Or if you want to buy the new hot Ferrari, you've got to buy four of our shit Ferraris that no one wants to buy. Like, that is just the way that market works. And it's just funny that they put out this car. I think they really wanted to be like, we got Johnny Ive and Mark Newsom to make us a car. And it is an ultimate statement of what a car can be. Like, only Ferrari can make a car like this. And then they made a Nissan Leaf.

And I just don't know what to do without that. There's a lot, like if this was an Apple car, let me just ask you directly. If this was an Apple car, would you be like, this is hot? No. Because I think in general, my bias on this is I'm deeply tired of this idea that everybody looks at EV and decides we have to completely change the look and feel and experience of being in a car because it's an electric car. And I think overwhelmingly what we're hearing, especially in the United States, is that people don't want that. That actually people like their cars and like the way it feels to be in a car. And that this idea that we literally have to reinvent every single piece of the experience because there's a battery in there now is just wrong.

Like it's just actively not what people want. And I think you look at other places around the world and I think the EV picture is a little rosier, right? Like in China, EVs have been much more successful. That's in large part because they're super, super, super cheap. And ultra subsidized. Right. And you look in places like Europe where they've been more successful. That's also because the government regulation is vastly more EV friendly and pushing much harder away from combustion engines. I think in an interesting way, the US has become the market that is the most sort of live and let live, right? Like it is, everybody just has to compete on their merits. And by and large, people are saying they don't want EVs. And I think that's in part because they don't want cars that look and work like this.

People don't want to drive spaceships. People like the way that combustion engines feel. They like the sound of their cars. Can I just play you one, actually, to this point? So I mentioned Lewis Hamilton and Charles Leclerc, the Formula One drivers. They did one of the jobs of being a Formula One driver is to be a brand ambassador. That's a huge part of what these folks do. So they made a sort of loving introduction video where they drive the car, they talk about it. Even they cannot articulate why this car exists in the way that it does. Let me just play this clip for you. The design is very, very different to whatever we've seen from Ferrari in the past, but I think it's very futuristic. It's very Ferrari-like to look towards the future and to innovate. In terms of attention to detail, you can tell it's very Ferrari.

Everything's soft and smooth, you know? The feeling is really nice, quality-wise. I like the glass key stick. And the key as well? The key's very cool. The key's very cool. If your introduction video is them agreeing on how cool the key is, you've missed something important about what the car's supposed to be. Sure, like you said, there are a ton of details about this car that are very cool.

No disagreement. It's not a Ferrari. It's not a Ferrari. If you were only just listening to that audio, I encourage you to go watch that video. It's just on the main Ferrari social channel. Which, by the way, all of their videos are getting roasted in the comments. I feel bad. But that video is just on the main Ferrari social channel. So you can watch Lewis and Charles try to be excited about the car. It's just all over their faces. And then they're in the car. And they do hot laps in the car. And it's very funny to see literal Formula 1 drivers have to pretend the car is shockingly fast.

Because it's just, like, they're Formula One drivers. It's not as fast as their day job. It's literally illegal for it to be as fast as their day job. I don't know, guys. Like, there's a lot of fast cars out there. Like, you can watch them drive around Monaco in much faster cars. Here's what I'll say. I actually disagree with you about the USB thing.

And I'll give you one tiny example. We have a Cadillac Vistic. It's the three-row Cadillac EV SUV. It looks just like an Escalade, like a baby Escalade. Everyone loves this car. Like, we got a great deal on it. It's sort of the end of the Biden administration where all the credits were flying and the dealers were trying to move all the cars because they thought the market was collapsed. Great. We pay as much for that car as we did our old Jeep because it was such a great deal all the time. Everyone loves this car. Like, we park it and people are like, what's that? And like, it's electric. And they're like, oh. And that's really not the point of the story. The point of the story is- No, but that is the point of the story. It looks like an Escalade, but it happens to have a battery is the correct answer. And everyone's into it because gas prices are out of control. Yes.

Right. And so like everyone's like, oh, that's great. And now you use EVs are really cheap. But the real turn is we're about a year into having this car. Right. And Becky drove my gas car, which I never drive, which like lives in the driveway in the case of emergency, like start engine. And we just needed to be in different places for one of the rare occasions we needed to be in different places. And she drove my car and she came back and I was like, was it fun? She's like, your car is basically a go-kart after driving this giant SUV. And I was like, did you go fast? She's like, I didn't go fast. And in fact, I hate driving gas cars now.

because I love driving the EV and I don't want to go back. And this is by and large what all the car executives will tell you, right? That once you like live the lifestyle and you never go to the gas station anymore and you drive the car and you feel the acceleration and the instant torque and blah, blah, blah, blah, you're not going to go back to a gas car. They just can't get enough people into the EVs. And so like the Rivian R2, the big argument for this car, which is on its way out, plug Wasim, who is the head of Rivian software, was just on Decoder. We were talking about the R2. It's on a new platform. His whole argument is like once you have the mainstream car that looks like the SUV Americans want to buy, they will go into the car and then I will deliver them a software experience that's superior to the gas car because it's a little computer and it can run Rivian Assistant with the power of AI. And just like every episode of Decoder, we talk to the power of AI. Yeah, I think two thirds of that is correct. And then you hit voice assistant powered user interface and the whole car explodes. It all falls apart. But I think what you have really identified is people love Teslas because the software in Teslas is great.

right? The software experience of being in a Tesla, of having that all be one experience of over the updates. This is why people love their Teslas. Most other car makers are like, it's electric and it has bad software. And that's the experience most people are having. And they don't want the other stuff. Maybe, maybe. But it's also, it's electric, it has bad software. And isn't it cool how much it looks like a spaceship? Like, no. Yeah. People like Ferraris because Ferraris are hot, dude. Like, this car has many things that is not sexy. Like, there's nothing sexy about the Ferrari Luce. Ferrari, like a fundamental fact of Ferrari is that it makes sexy cars, dude. Like, what was the last thing Johnny Ive made that was sexy?

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

But like, yeah, and I think the idea that this is Johnny Ive High on his own supply, I actually think is maybe the Occam's Razor explanation of why this car is the way that it is both good and bad. Because there are, I think, he talked a lot. He did a long interview with Cleo Abram on her YouTube channel as part of this and talked a lot about not wanting to give up on digital screens and that kind of interactive interface, but also not wanting to have everything be a touchscreen. And there are a lot of details in this car that are really cool mixes of... analog and digital experiences, right? Like the key is a good example. You put the key and you push it down and he got really excited about how the color of the key sort of moves over to the gear shift as a way of communicating like the car is now on. And there are little details like that all over the car that are genuinely very cool and interesting. And I think if you look at Ferrari as sort of a tip of the spear of car design and eventually this all trickles down into Camrys, I don't know if that's actually how it works, but there's something potentially exciting there. But the whole in this case is much less than the sum of all of those things. And I think that's what people are really responding to. Yeah, it needs to look like a Ferrari. Like, you know, the Johnny I have design aesthetic because it's inevitable. And, you know, as I always say, the limitations become the defining feature of the product.

And here it's like, Ferrari's not supposed to have limitations. Do you think it would have been more interesting in that respect if Johnny Ive had had to design a Camry that had to cost like a Camry as opposed to, because this is the most expensive Ferrari ever. Like this is truly no holds barred, do whatever you want. And I think there are clearly some ways in which he got it right and some ways in which he got it wrong. But I think if you were like, Johnny, you have to make a car that is $35,000. This might have been a vastly more interesting project. Oh, without question. Again, the limitations, Johnny Ive overcoming constraint limitation is the superpower. Yeah.

And it is true of every product he's ever made that has been hit, right? The constraint and limitation of the first iMac was the CRT display, and he made that thing the star of the show. And that just goes on through all of the products. The AirPods needed to have antennas in them, now we have little stems. Like, you just see him do it every time. He makes the thing that makes the product design hard into the star of the show. And with Ferrari, usually the star of the show is the V12 engine, which you do not have in this case. So, like, what are you going to do, right? Like, I think the constraint of a Toyota Camry would be much more interesting, and that was the promise of the Apple car. You know what a more interestingly designed car is? Like, as we're speaking, pre-orders for the slate truck have opened up.

which is just basically like an EV battery and motor box. Yeah, it's like barely a car. It's like $40,000. And you're like, this is a fascinating design object because it is so utilitarian and it is so designed for you to do whatever you want with. And you're like, oh, this is a much more interesting product because the way it is designed is to not have any opinions at all, really.

And it's funny, just like put the two things next to each other and see how people react, maybe probably to the price of the slate truck, but also see that you can like take off the roof and put on a different roof and make it whatever car you want. And like, that's a lot different vibe than this blue blob is the future of Ferrari. And represents the absolute pinnacle of car design, right? Like there is a self-satisfaction that comes with Ferrari that I think also kind of rubbed people the wrong way on this one. There's like, by definition of the fact that it's Ferrari, we are correct, right? You have to think everyone at Ferrari knew. I wonder. Like imagine the meetings where they're like, we're going to have a social plan. We're going to get Lewis in trial and we're going to do a social video. And the social video producer's like, guys, I don't know we should do that.

But in Italian, like, oh no. At some point, they forgot to put the car designer in a room with Johnny until it was too late. And then they're like, oh God, he thinks he made a car. It's honestly, it's very possible. Mamma mia.

I'm curious to know, by the way, what all of you think of this car. I think, especially now that the news has died down a little bit, everybody's had time to look at the pictures, digest it. If you love the Luce in particular, I want to hear from you. Firstcastatthevirge.com, 866-VERGE-11. Tell Neal and I why we're wrong and why Johnny Ives is right. I'm genuinely curious. I'm excited for Johnny Ives to call. Steve from Detroit to be like, look, it was inevitable. All right, we just take a break and then we have a bunch of AI news to talk about. We'll be right back.

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All right, we're back. Neal, it's now time for us to talk about a thing we keep talking about, which is that most people seem to hate AI a whole lot. And that every time AI things happen, the overwhelming response is, no, thank you. Please make it stop. One interesting bit of data, we talked a lot about Google I.O. last week, all this new AI search stuff. Google is changing the search bar to make it an AI product in a very real way. DuckDuckGo, a search engine competitor that is sort of proudly not being overrun by AI. This is now a marketing thing. There's this browser, the Vivaldi browser, that is all over all of my feeds now.

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

the attrition there is real and people starting to look for something else is real. I think leaving Google is one of the hardest user behaviors on the internet and people are starting to do it. So it's interesting to pull apart iOS installs and search behavior, right? So if you open the Google app on your phone and it's just loaded with prompts to use Gemini products and... don't you want to read, tint your photos, like, bright blue because AI can let you do that now? Like, maybe go and install DuckDuckGo. But Google search might not be affected. And also the amount of DuckDuckGo installs is small, as you're pointing out. Right. So I see it. I'm very careful not to overread, like, what one number means in the context of how big Google search is. Yeah. That's not to say I don't think Google search is getting weirder and goofier and it's less predictable, which I think is really bad. Yeah. Like, the new intelligent search box can just lead you down infinite rabbit holes.

Like, you have this behavior where, like, you do a search and you kind of click one result and that leads you to another result and you kind of remember the pattern in your brain. And so you're like, I need to recreate that pattern to get back to where I was going. The new Google search does not let you do that. No, it is much more whole cloth every time. It's random every time. Now it might make you an app. Like, there's something about that change where, you know, they want it to be so intelligent and talk to you in multimodal that you can't pattern match your way towards, like, I've used these keywords to get here in this path. I think they ought to change that. I do think that's, like, beyond just the AI of it all. Breaking that behavior is dangerous for Google because then you can go get that anywhere else.

Yeah, the idea of when I search something, the same thing should probably happen every time. Yeah. It's such an interesting question because there's also a version of this like a big thing that Google does, right, is make a lot of money when you do a bad job of searching. Because until now, you've had to go back to the top and start over. And actually, this has become a huge problem for Google over the years because it had a lot of incentives to not be a very good search engine because you would do more queries. And everything at Google has always been about query growth. And one way to get you to do more queries is to not give you the correct answer the first time. But in this case, this idea of it feeling like a grab bag.

does just make the experience worse. Like I no longer go to Google sort of confident in what's going to happen, right? Even if the answer was, we're going to have an AI overview for every single thing that you search and then a bunch of links on the right side. And then if you want to make more stuff, if that was just the sort of most common denominator Google experience, that would make sense. It's not. You just, you search and you just have no idea. Do you have personal context turned on your Google? I do. So the thing I've discovered with that is because it's constantly remembering other things you've searched and like reading your Gmail and doing all the personal context stuff, not only are the answers getting less predictable, they're getting more like confidently wrong about me. Yeah.

And so, oh, have you noticed Google also pretends it lives where you live? Oh, that's interesting. No. So maybe this is just a silly example, but we swapped out our air conditioners for heat pumps. And so I'm like, you know, just Googling what model, like how does it work? Should I use my Ecobee's with it? Like all this stuff. And by the end, it's like, you know, where we live in Westchester County, like this is a great model. And then like the third search is like, since you already bought those heat pumps, like I didn't buy shit. Like what are you talking about?

You know, it's like, you're not my friend. Like, I just need to get down the path. And there were some parts of it that were really useful, like, spectacularly useful. Like, we have solar panels in the house now, and we're going to switch to these heat pumps. The gas prices are really expensive, like, but we sized the solar panels before we had the thing. Can you run the math for me? Like, am I going to save money because the air conditioning is more efficient, blah, blah, blah. Like, real dad stuff. Like, no one in this house wants to talk to me about this at all, but Gemini does. You know, this is the promise of it. I'm not even sure that's true, but it can't not. No, Gemini's like, you know, you and me, buddy, living in Westchester. And it, like, did it. It, like, figured out the math for me, and I checked it a bunch of different ways, and it actually got it right

And all this is really useful. But then the next time I ran a search, it was just talking about this other interaction that I had. And like, that's the personal context. So it's like, even the other search, which in my mind is totally unrelated, is like infected with my own history. And like, none of that, you can see how it will get useful, right? Sundar was just on Decoder and he's like, these things are going to come together.

Like the idea that you have the canvas where you make the apps and the AI mode in search, we get the answers. And then Gemini Spark, the agent platform. And so eventually you're going to say, I'm looking for this. And it goes off and just buys it for you instead of showing you a search result. Or it books you the service appointment on your behalf. Or it makes you the vacation planning app and then you pick the places you want to go on what schedule and then it goes and books them for you. This is all obviously going to come together. But the thing you're going to do is what you're describing. You're going to destabilize the actual experience. It will be more random every time. Yeah. Well, and I think, again, you're describing what I think of as the this is the worst it will ever be fallacy, which is how everybody defends everything, right?

Isn't it wild that this is the worst this is ever going to be? Like as if the march of progress was linear and inevitable and perfect forever and ever. But what Sunar, which I told you, it cast another way is we are running beta tests on every Google user on the internet until we figure out how to make this product actually good. We are going to subject you to the bad version of this in order to figure out how to make the good version of this. And that's what's happening. And I think that's what a lot of people are reacting to with these AI products is you're actually telling me this product isn't any good. But you're saying you have to use it so that we can make it good. Like, because we can't unless we make you use it. So we are going to basically, you know, sit you down and tape your eyes open so that you have to use this product so that we get what we need in order to make it good. And nowhere in that trade is Google today is a good product. Did you see the clip where I showed the search results? They don't like it. When I do this, I will do it. And I always do best Chromebook, right? Yeah, it's just a useful search, right? Like Google should know.

If you're the company that makes Chromebooks, you should know which one is the best one. In a lot of ways, you should not need the web to tell you which one is the best one. And it's just a really commercial query. The Wirecutter built an entire business on the back of ranking for best Chromebook. Everybody wants to win that rank. We do it. Everybody does it. And you can put shopping links in there. So just how you organize a page, a search results page for best Chromebook, to me, in my mind, just demonstrates a lot about the priorities of the product.

And, you know, so I showed Sundar, and he said this really interesting. He said, that page is more opinionated than it should be. Like, this AI result is more, because it just told me an answer, which is not the same answer as Wirecutter, which is not the same answer as Tom's guide. Like, I found that really interesting, right? The Google answer is different than the other ones. It told you a Lenovo laptop, right? I did. It was, like, an expensive one, too. Yeah. It's also not the one it just tells me right now. Yeah. Weird, right? It says the Acer some of the time. Weird. It's weird, right? Like, Google is not even consistent. This is not the important thing. I recognize that it's not a subjective answer, and you can make that page a billion different ways.

But if you watch the video of me interviewing Sundar, you see me hand him the phone and he knows it's coming because I do it all the time every time I talk to him. And he's like, great, out of trillions of queries, we're going to look at this one. And then I asked him, like, is this good? And he's like, you know, we actually have a very scientific way of measuring this to make sure it's good. And we do it statistically. And I have just been thinking about that answer for a long time. Google has reduced quality to some set of metrics that are in response to how people behave when they encounter the thing. You show up in the search result. There's not a box that says, I think this sucks. There's just whatever you do next. You don't get to shout into the microphone. It's weird that all the answers are different. There's just whatever you do next. And somehow that's supposed to reveal your emotional reaction to the design of this page, to how the page was constructed, to the idea that the AI overview confidently tells you a different answer depending on who you are, what part of the world you're in.

your own search history, there's no way for you to communicate that to Google. And so Google's measuring all this stuff and they're saying no individual search result is like indicative of the whole product because there's trillions of search queries and we have this like scientific process for measuring quality. But then you look at any individual search, I can't actually tell you if this is good or bad. Only in aggregate and only based on my next click do you have a sense of this is good or bad. And there's something about this AI world, it's what you're talking about, like it's bad until you tell us to make it good. And then there's me being like, I don't know that you can measure this.

this way? Yeah. If at all. Like, is this good? Are we having good experiences with these tools? Is not measurable.

based on the next click of billions of people. No, which is why you land on things like query growth based on the idea that if people do more Google searches, they must love Google. Despite the fact that there's actually like a complete logical leap in there that suggests that maybe if you'd done it correctly, I would have gotten the answer the first time and I wouldn't have had to do more queries. That like actually maybe success looks like me doing fewer queries. It looks like growth and ad revenue. And right, so you pick all of these things to manage against rather than how do we make sure the pages are good because that involves some kind of like actual practical decision. And Google is...

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

it will buy me that Chromebook or that it should be able to, right? That I just say, buy me the best Chromebook and it should appear at my door in two days. That is everybody's idea of the future. If it's telling you and me different things, is that a success or a failure? And why is it telling us different things? And based on what criteria, all of this stuff is such a mess. Let me answer that in a good way or in a bad way.

The good way, the positive vision for you Google best Chromebook, and it determines a different answer for you and me, and then it goes off and buys you the one that told you that was the best. There's a positive vision for that, which is Google has enough context about you. It knows how you use the web. It knows what apps and services you use. It's in your Gmail. It has a sense of what kinds of web pages you go to. Are you in Canva all day, or are you just reading documents? Whatever thing that you're doing. It knows which Chromebook is best for you. And that is actually a different answer than what Chromebook is best for me, because I'm playing open web GL games. I don't even know what that technology is anymore. It's not open web GL.

Because I'm playing browser-based games all day. Sure. And editing video in like browser CapCut or whatever nonsense exists, right? And so I have a different answer and I need longer battery life and a faster processor, whatever it is. And so when I Google best Chromebook, it's tailoring the answer to me. I think that breaks people's fundamental expectations of what should happen when you begin the research process to buy anything.

Right? Like, I ask you what the best Chromebook is, and maybe you know me, and you're like, I just tell everyone to get this. For $200 more, you can buy Macbook Air. Like, end of story. But actually, if you know me a little bit more, maybe that's a different answer, and that's a different conversation you have with a person. I think most people Google best Chromebook, and they expect to find, like, four different people or four different websites.

like doing the testing and saying why, and they get to read it and make their own determination. And that fills them with a sense of agency. And then like, you're done. And I don't think this is just about Chromebooks. There's sort of this concept in marketing right now, but like terminal products where everything is marketed as I did the research, you don't have to. And I, so I made the coffee maker. I made the last coffee maker you'll ever have to buy. And it's because like choice is overwhelming and everything's actually the same microwave from China. That's what this represents, like terminal marketing.

Right. Like we're at the end of the line and Google's just going to tell you which one to buy because there's only one choice anyway. And I think, you know, pendulum swing back and forth. Like maybe that's where we are now. It's not where we're going to be in the future. And AI mode doesn't have an answer to that other world where actually you do want a lot of choices. So you get to try on 50 different codes and see if that's the Chromebook that's best for you. It's also important to say that even the first thing you described, even if that's exactly the future you want, not remotely close to being the case.

This idea of you have perfect data about me so you can make correct purchasing decisions about me is it can't tell you with any confidence what kind of toilet paper you like. Forget any of the rest of this. None of that is close to coming to pass. And this is what I mean. Again, we're being served what everyone understands to be the bad version of this product because there's no way for them to build the good one otherwise. And no one has figured out how to ship just a good thing in the middle. There are vanishingly few, small scope, good AI products. And there are infinite, bad, hugely ambitious AI products. You don't think that YouTube translation of the Italian president was good?

Did it say a bunch of English words? It sure did. It sure did. Speaking of YouTube, actually, there's some interesting YouTube stuff happening right now, too. And this is another thing we keep talking about is this endless back and forth between the platforms, which are desperate to get more and more AI content onto them, and users who are more and more interested in understanding what is and is not AI content and in many ways having it removed from their systems. YouTube this week took its AI labels that this is made with AI in some meaningful way.

out of it was buried like two settings deep. You had to go into like the provenance of the video in order to find out if it was AI and is now pulling it up so that on the page, either like as an overlay on YouTube shorts or actually under the player in main YouTube, it will have a little thing that says AI. I would argue that that's very good and correct. And this is the right thing. But can I read you a quote from YouTube's announcement? And I want you to try and make sense of where this line is.

So this is from YouTube's announcement. It says, by moving these labels onto the main stage, viewers get the context they need at a glance. This is now the single label format for all photorealistic and meaningfully AI-altered generated content on YouTube. For content that is unrealistic, animated, or slightly altered, viewers can find this disclosure in the expanded description. Eli, I would like you to explain to me where that line is, please. What is a photo? That's what it is. That's the question, right? Like, you could drive a truck through the loopholes in that paragraph. Slightly altered is very good.

What counts as unrealistic? So there are rules. I will say there are rules. You know, the big photo agencies have been dealing with this in the context of Photoshop for dozens of years. You know, there are lots of photography awards that have rules about how much you're able to edit the photo and you have to submit, you know, you have to testify that you didn't submit the photo. So like if you are a Getty photographer and you go to some event and you shoot a photo of some newsworthy thing, you're not allowed to use a lot of Photoshop on that. You're allowed to crop it. You're allowed to use some amount of just like brightness and contrast editing, but you basically have to leave that photo alone.

You're not allowed to do much. And these are Getty's rules forever. You can just go look at them online. These are also the rules for the Times. If you're like a photo nerd, you'll notice New York Times photos have insane amounts of vignette on them because that is the only thing they allow. That's interesting. Is that really why? Yep. It's just like every New York Times photo is vignetted to hell and back because that's the one knob that they give the photo editors. And so they just turn it up because it's cool. I think vignettes are cool. My personal photos are vignetted to hell and back because I think that's a cool look. But there are no other choices at the Times, really. So all the photos are vignetted. It's stylistic. It's cool. So here, maybe YouTube has some rules. What does it mean? What's the line between unrealistic or photorealistic?

You can make hyper real photos. I can turn up the saturation and HDR on a normal photo of a sunset and make it look nothing like reality in two clicks. So I'm guessing YouTube has some rules. The challenge is if you're Getty, you're in a repeat game with a bunch of photographers you pay money to. And so everyone starts to understand the rules of the game and everyone has aligned incentives to play the game. It's the same for the Times and its photographers. It's the same for art photo rules. It's all the same. If you're YouTube, you do not have repeat relationships with people to whom you pay money. In fact, you pay almost no one any money. And so everyone has massive incentives to break the rules to make the video of the president doing something dumb and not have a label on it.

Right. And this is where like YouTube has to auto label this stuff and they're starting to roll that out. And I, you know, I remain ultra skeptical that any of these auto label or systems or auto metadata systems are going to work just based on the fact that YouTube already has content ID and people upload full movies to YouTube all day and all night. Yeah. Yeah. None of this stuff works. And then I wonder, you know, this is going to watch a million conspiracy theories from people who are wondering if my thing gets labeled AI, what does it do to the ranking algorithm? And do people, people yell at me because I made AI stuff. Right.

Right. Instagram rolled out AI labels ages ago, and they took them away. They were auto-detecting metadata from Photoshop that was AI-generated, even if it was just like de-noise or whatever, like generative fill, which everyone uses. It was detecting that and putting the AI label on the photos, and people were streaming at the photographers, and Instagram took it away. because everyone hates AI. So YouTube is like cruising into it. Yeah, I mean, again, I'm just so fascinated by this idea between, you have Neil Mohan running around saying that actually what we're going to do is put more and more AI tooling into the creator studio, right? That you can now make an AI background of your short with two clicks and you can dub everything with AI and you can do all sorts of things with AI, but we actually are going to have to put this, what amounts to a warning label on. That's how people are going to experience this, is as a warning label that this thing was made with AI.

I increasingly don't know how a platform or a user of that platform is supposed to hold both of those ideas in their head. That what you're giving me is an infinite new canvas on which to make cool, creative stuff that we all agree is so rad. And then you're going to put a surgeon general's warning on the video after I make it about how I made it with AI. How do those two things continue to coexist? It just doesn't make sense to me. The real problem these companies are going to have, all of them are going to have it, maybe YouTube will get there first, but I know Instagram and TikTok are going to have this problem, is that they want the advertisers to make the ads with AI.

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

but they're going to piss off all the users who have said, I don't want the AI stuff. And they are pushing all the marketers to using AI tools to make it more and more creative. Like, that's just where this industry is going. So at some point, they're like, we can auto-detect it, we'll label it, and then we'll give you the switch to not see it. But the economics of their businesses are headed in the other direction. Yeah, that's a good theory. All right, do you want to talk about the Pope before we switch off of AI stuff? Do you have any Pope thoughts? I know somebody who was at the encyclical, and they hang back. Cool. Yeah, it was my buddy Steve from Chicago. And they just, they said the Pope was...

very fired up about it being Christendom's responsibility to make us more human, which was interesting. I was like, what about the rest of us? I'm good. I like humans. Cool. But again, he's the Pope. I said that to our team and everyone was like, buddy, he's the Pope. Of course that's what he said. What else is he going to say? But it was funny. It was a tech friend who was there and that's what he said. Yeah. I think the document is fascinating and I think it's actually been interesting to see the way that it's being read because the idea that it essentially boils down to is humans matter and we should continue to remember that humans matter even as AI continues to be a powerful technology. And the fact that A, that's kind of a controversial take in some circles and that B, most people figured out that that's the message I think has been really fascinating. There is a fundamental,

a humanity to the way a lot of people talk about AI and the way a lot of people talk about what it's going to do to people's jobs and to the way that our economy works and the way that we live our lives. This fundamental disregard for the fact that people are people and that actually people matter. And if you don't take that as a foundational belief of the world that people matter, you wind up down a lot of really dark roads. And I think a lot of people in AI are running down those roads right now. And so it's really interesting to see the Pope be like, forget all this AGI nonsense. Stop worrying about it. We have to agree that people matter.

or else we're lost before we even start having this conversation. I think it was like, it was 42,000 words to say that. I think it was actually pretty interesting. And released alongside a co-founder of Anthropic. Yeah. And then a day later, he got in the Ferrari Luce. There's a video of him sort of gently getting into the driver's seat that just makes me laugh every single time I see it. I don't know why. It just kills me. Look, I'm not like a, you know, not Pope-pilled. Although Chicago Pope rules. And I'm still trying to buy the parking lot of the church behind my house.

you know, if you're out there, I don't know who's out there, but if you're out there, but like the idea that you need an external source of morality in a time of extreme immorality is like, that's what the church is for. Like, that's the role that popes play and he's leaning into it. It just, it strikes me as particularly odd that like the world turns to the Pope to figure out what to do about AI is just, just like, I don't know. What was the last papal encyclical that you remember? Like, what are we doing? Listen, my dad was a pastor growing up. You don't want to, you don't want to go with me on encyclicals, but I can do this all day. Fair enough. You know the guy who can sell me the parking lot behind me.

One other data point that we should just mention before we get off into the lightning round is this interview that Uber's president and COO, Andrew McDonald, gave this week, where he said a little bit the quiet part out loud. We've talked a lot on the show about this relentless run towards token maxing, and everybody has to use more, and Jensen Wong, the CEO of NVIDIA, being like, well, I don't trust any engineer who's not using $500,000 worth of tokens every year. And Andrew McDonald, the Uber COO, basically said, we are not seeing the connection between AI usage and actual. productivity. And let me just read you a chunk of this quote. He says, that link is not there yet, right? I think maybe implicitly there is more that is getting shipped, but it's very hard to draw a line between one of those stats and, okay, now we're actually producing 25% more useful consumer features. I think over the coming quarters and years, maybe that will become clearer, but I think today it's hard, even if some of the underlying metrics are trending in a really astronomical direction. What he's saying there is people are doing a lot of shit and none of it adds up to anything. Yeah, that's right. I think it's funny in the context of all the tech playoffs we're seeing, where they're laying off product managers and designers, and all the engineers are going to report to Jack Dorsey directly. That's what the product managers and designers are for.

Brian Chesky is running around being like, everybody has to be a full-stack engineer all by themselves. Yeah. It's funny because I know Brian and his whole thing is he doesn't have product managers. He has product marketing managers, the same as Apple. And he's like, the person who invents the new features has to be the person who brings it to market so that they know what people actually want.

And, like, you can quibble with whether or not Airbnb is successful in that. But, like, I totally agree with that as a theory. Sure. Right? Like, this is obviously very successful for Apple. Apple doesn't have traditional PMs. They have marketing managers. Like, Greg Joswiak is the product marketing manager of Apple. Like, that's how it works. And all these companies are like, we're getting rid of all of the people whose job it is to understand the users and design things that people know how to use. And engineers just ship stuff. And you're like, yeah, it didn't work. Yeah, surprise. Like, sure, we shipped zero useful features because we've refactored the code base that a bunch of senior engineers have been complaining about for 10 years. But that didn't do anything for anyone.

I'm excited to see that. This is, you know, as the guy who hosts the podcast about work charts, we are on the cusp of some of the weirdest work charts in history. And I think that's neat in the sense that it's all been the same for a long time. Like every company is kind of a copy of Google in like very real ways. But boy, is it going to be chaos. Yes. Yes. And the idea that any OnePlus cloud code equals every skill imaginable at a company, we are very quickly going to realize is not correct. Yeah. But yeah, anyway, I just thought that was an interesting quote. There was a lot of talk about that quote, and it's just one data point, but I think we're going to hear more stuff like that. That's like, what am I spending all these tokens to actually accomplish and ship that benefits our company and our users? You know, the flip side of that is even Sam Altman is like the real differentiation is taste. Yeah. Right. Which means like you have a vision of what a feature, a good thing is, and then you make that. And it's like none of these, all these companies are firing the people with taste.

Yeah, you are right that the org charts are about to get a lot flatter and a lot weirder. And then we're going to invent a whole new, like, you know, McKinsey is out there just being like, we have to invent a new paradigm and ship it to everybody. Like, what is the open office plan of the next phase of AI? I don't even, I don't even know. All right, we should take a break. And then we're going to come back and do lightning round. Be right back.

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It transforms messy meeting calls into something you can actually reference weeks later. Your notes become searchable, organized, and actionable. You get better notes in a central place, all while staying present in your meetings with no extra work. Once you try it on a first meeting, it's hard to go without. You can try it totally free. Just head to granola.ai slash verge. That's granola.ai slash verge to get your time back. Go to granola.ai slash verge and try it on your next call. All right, we're back. Hypedesk is off this week, which means it is time, Nilay, once again, for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I assume he's just around doing stuff. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

Oh my god! Ah, beautiful. And thematically appropriate. Why is everything so Pope-y? It is so Pope-y. Ugh. What is going on? I think Chicago Pope would approve of that. That theme comes from Scott Williams. Scott, thank you for sending it in. We have a translation. It translates to God, the machine of Brendan, from the depths my heart is grieving. And then I believe Brendan Carr sucks. Brendan Carr sucks. Very good. This is a little one. This is a tiny little Brendan Carr this week. And there's no way to say this other than our man Brendan saw fit to issue a full press release from the Federal Communications Commission about a hat.

That's what happened. I saw a tweet about a hat. Is this a press release about a tweet about a hat? Yes. I'm just going to read you the headline of the press release from the Office of Chairman Brandon Carr. FCC Chairman Carr presents first Build America Hard Hat. Also, for some reason, he split Build America Hard Hat in single quotes, which makes no sense to me. Wait, so the name of the hat is the Build America Hard Hat? It's not the Build America Hard Hat. It's the Build America Hard Hat hat. Yes. Presumably. Brandon.

Brendan, use the AI to figure out your quote usage. I don't know what you're doing. Anyway, so Brendan loves to climb a tower. He loves to wear a hard hat. He loves to pretend he is a tower worker in particular. And he loves the crews. You know, the crews out there laying fiber and doing stuff. He does not love the crews to go out in the world and lay fiber for rural Americans for cheaper prices and faster speeds. He just loves the crews. But the crews being brutally exploited by our nation's telecom monopolies is of no concern to him. He loves the crews.

It's just a real disconnect here. I love the cruise. No follow-up questions. Exactly. Do I want you to be paid more or lay more fiber? Not at this time, but I love the cruise. So he's always out there climbing a tower, wearing a hat. And so he issued a press release. He decided that he would give out hard hats as awards, presumably to people who already have hard hats for work.

This is a weird award to give if you can just think about it. It's a ceremonial hard hat. Anyway, there's this guy, Philip Morrow, Hurricane Helene, which was devastating, destroyed connectivity and roads in his area. Philip and his crew waded into the Broad River and hiked three miles from Chimney Rock to Bat Cave, and he pulled conduit through the river and restored connectivity to Chimney Rock. This is great. Kind of badass, honestly. Above and beyond. Dude in a kayak just pulling coax, like that kind of rule. And so to reward him, he has been presented the first Build America hard hat, which is obviously a story about Brendan Carr having a type of hat that he rewards to infrastructure workers instead of making sure they get paid living wages and have health care.

But he got a hat. And in fact, the hat is really about Brendan and issuing a hat. Right. The press release is FCC Chairman Carr presents First Build America hard hat, not heroic telecom worker restores connectivity to Chimney Rock. And as a result, it's getting paid. You know what I mean? The press release is about the giving of the hat, not the heroic thing the guy did. You see what I'm saying? Oh, brother. Even the subheadline of the press release doesn't have the guy's name in it. Nope. It is still about Brendan. Visited crews. He visited the crews opening a new cell tower to restore internet connectivity. And it's like, no, it's about the guy who dragged the conduit through the river.

That's what the press release should be about is not you putting stickers on a hat. Anyway, he's a real dummy. He can't help but make it about himself. Certainly, he should be working harder to get our heroic infrastructure workers paid more and not forcing every telecom company to cancel its diversity programs because you know who the infrastructure workers are? They're the people of America, broadly serving the people of America. Instead, we're handing out hats. Brendan, if you can defend any of these actions or you can explain how you intend to get our nation's heroic infrastructure workers paid more and have better benefits, including better healthcare, you're welcome to come on the show where I think you will lose, straightforwardly. Anyway, that's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast from the podcast. Can I just say one more thing before we get off of this? Brendan, in addition to all this, posted a 90-second long video about...

what is happening. Never hands the man the hat. In no part of the video is anyone other than Brendan holding this hat. You know there's only one hat. He's going to present the same hat to everybody. I really, very early on, I forget who it was, but somebody described the Trump administration as mostly just a very sophisticated merch operation. And I think that's not. It's a hype house. That's what we have. They're running like the world's greatest SEO forum. It's just ridiculous. Okay. I have two lightning round items for you. Beginning with.

Would you like to spend a bunch of money on meta products for a bunch of features that you don't really care about? So I'm being slightly disingenuous, but I think this is fascinating. So meta is starting to launch. This has now been widely reported and confirmed that meta is getting ready to launch subscriptions for most of its products. You're going to be able to get Instagram plus, Facebook plus, and WhatsApp plus, which are in fact different products. But then there's also a full meta one plus that rolls all this stuff up together. The idea seems to be...

sort of a freemium feature set in a bunch of cases. Like you'll be able to change the messenger app icon if you subscribe. You'll be able to have your Facebook story last 48 hours instead of 24 hours. You'll be able to search for the particular viewers in your stories, which is a thing people wanted for a really long time, right? Like thousands of people see your story. You want to be able to search to see if somebody saw it. This is a feature that is very controversial and now you can pay to have it. All of this is fine, right? Like I think to some extent, this is like normal behavior when you're not growing super fast. You make people pay for more features. It's fairly normal. This is what happens. It's not all that far off from like the Discord Nitro model where you sort of get the basics for free and then some neat add-ons.

The thing I think is most interesting is, and I think is frankly the real business here for meta, is they're rolling out the same kinds of opportunities to creators and businesses. So you can now get meta one essential, which gives you a meta verified badge. Like this is just straight out of the X playbook, right? Like we're going to make you pay for what you thought were normal features available to you. But then for $50 a month, you can get meta one advanced, which will, among other things, make you show up higher in search results. You can now just straight up pay for visibility on meta platforms.

This is just the most naked pay-us-to-continue-to-exist-on-this-platform play you could possibly imagine. This is just pure intrudification, to borrow the phrase from Cory Doctoral, right? They have distribution monopolies, and now they're, you know, and I mean classic intrudification. Most people hear that word, and they just mean the thing's getting worse, and I don't like using it. Cory's specific definition, which he's talked about with you on the Vergecast before, is that first you squeeze the consumers, and then you squeeze the businesses. Right. And now they're squeezing the businesses. They're like, oh, you still want customers? You've got to pay us money to access your own customers. Like, this is the heart and soul of intrudification. I think these distribution monopolies will not last in this way.

people rebelled against. The idea that everything on your feed is fake because it's paid there or it's put there by Clipform, which is another episode of the show you just did with Mia, like that is coming to its conclusion. Yeah, I mean, did you read that New York Mag piece that went kind of mini viral a week ago or so? Yeah, the feed is fake. Yeah, like Mia's piece, the clippening is very good. There's like this sort of increasingly mainstream idea that actually nothing in my feed is real. And I think people have been feeling that for a while and are starting to understand how bought and paid for your feed is to the point where I think people are going to start to tune out. Like I use TikTok less and less because it has gotten to the point now where...

one out of two things on my feed is a TikTok shop thing. For whatever reason, a lot of mine is candy. And I say for whatever reason, I bought a bunch of candy on the TikTok shop. Like I did this to myself. What are you doing, man? There was a time where you could buy Swedish candy on a TikTok shop for like pennies on the dollar. Unbelievable. Those days are unfortunately over for me. But I like TikTok less now. And it is now blindingly obvious and becoming increasingly understood how these systems work. And so for me, it's like, if I'm meta, I'm looking at this as $50 a month. This isn't gonna last forever. We're losing this thing anyway. We have to squeeze every dollar out of it we can on the way down. And so we're gonna make people pay.

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

It's going to work for a minute until it doesn't work. You know, like Instagram already is hyper-commercialized. Yeah. And they will be the first to tell you that all the sort of organic activity Instagram happens in DMs. Yep. So fine, right? You want to promote your TV show and you want people to send clips of the TV show and DMs to one another? Fine. Like, but there's just something about this that...

everyone feels the pressure. Everyone feels the screws tightening and that doesn't last forever. I think that's right. And especially, there's one other feature that I didn't mention here, which is that now if you pay, you can see a quote, mini preview of stories. I'm not completely clear on what that means, but you can see them without showing up as a viewer. And there is something here that breaks a fundamental contract of Instagram. If I can now watch your story without you being able to know that I watched your story. And something changes. And it even says that posters will be notified that this feature exists and that when you post, people might be able to watch you don't see it. But like you've now destroyed an important part of why people like stories.

But David, think of the Drake verses we're going to get out of this. You're right, it's worth it. I would pay $2.99 just for that. They should charge whatever they want and Drake will pay that money. That's largely correct. By the way, if you don't understand that reference, what I'm trying to point out is that the song Hotline Bling is entirely about Drake using Instagram. Also, Drake, legendary DM slider. Do you see what I'm saying? Just think about what, someone saw my story, but I don't know who it was. Think about what that's going to do to that man's brain. From now on, you should assume that Drake has seen your story, is what Eli is saying. Anytime you post a story, you should assume Drake. Look, David, I'm hot now, and I know Drake is probably for me.

All right, what do you got? Oh, I have the nerdiest gadget in the world. Compared to that, this is a nerd zone. This is what you get on the Vergecast. You get culture and technology. That's the whole promise of the thing that we make. If this is Sony Bravia Core, we're ending the podcast. It is not Sony Bravia Core, but it is Sony Bravia. Oh, God. They do come with Sony Bravia Core, which is the highest bitrate stream you can get outside of a kaleidoscape, which review I am told is worth coming.

Sony is, they put out the Bravia 7.2 and the Bravia 9.2, which are horrible names because they're not really twos. They're the first generation of Sony's new RGB LED backlighting, which is probably the future of every TV that isn't in OLED. Really? Yes. Explain. So if you think about just like TV technology, my theory is that if you pay attention to display technology, you can see the future. Because everything in our world is made of displays. And if you know how displays work, you can see what kind of products can be built, and then you can see the future. So we've had OLEDs forever. OLEDs are in our phones. They're in every kind of device. And OLEDs, as I'm sure the Virchast audience knows, all of the little dots make their own light. Like all the pixels are their own little LEDs and make their own light. And that's why you get perfect blacks, because you can turn them all the way off. Every other kind of TV has had some kind of backlight system.

So you've got an LCD panel that makes the color, and then you've got, literally, in the case of the oldest TVs, you've got fluorescent lights back there, just shining light through the pixels, and that's what you get. And so you don't get true blacks, you get grays. And then the next turn was LED backlights, so you got rid of the fluorescent tubes, you added LEDs, you can control the dimness of those a little bit better, you get slightly better blacks. Then you added local dimming LEDs, so you made a grid of LEDs behind the screen, and you could turn them on and off, right? So you could get something like perfect blacks where the LEDs are turned off. Then you add, like, lots and lots of them, and you get, like, thousands of zones of local dimming, and so you're kind of re-approximating OLED in one way. Finally, now here at the end.

We're getting RGB LED TVs where the backlights have their own colors. So you're sending colored light through the colored panel to make even brighter, more vibrant colors. So you can outshine OLEDs, you can get way brighter than OLEDs, and you get more vibrant colors, you get more colors. You can get not quite the contrast, you can't quite true blacks, but you get this like rich, ultra-saturated color because the backlight itself is RGB color. So instead of shining white light through a green pixel to make green, I'm shining green light through a green pixel to make better green. Yes, that's like more or less the case. Interesting, okay. There's like problems with this. Like you get color cross-talk, you can get some noise. Sony says it solved all of it, but the idea is you just get the most vibrant color possible because you're sending colored light through the colored LCD. And if I understand this is cheaper,

because you still have a backlight, thus you don't need millions of individual lit pixels. So the problem right now is that they are not cheaper. So John Higgins, who's our TV reviewer, reviewed the first TCL one, which was really expensive. These Sonys, the 65-inch is $2,600. You can get a 65-inch OLED on sale for $2,600. So they're still not much cheaper. They will obviously get cheaper over time in a way that OLEDs have just sort of remained around the same price. But you get bigger, brighter colors. If you're a sports fan, this is the way to go. You just get brighter color in a way that OLED can't do. And that's great for sports and great for action and all this stuff. There are reasons to get an LCD TV. But these are the first ones. John gave them an 8.

There are flaws with them because they're first generation. But this is Sony's bet on the future of TV display technology. I'm paying a lot of attention to it because this potentially is how we do really bright, really vibrant displays across a number of applications where you can't put an OLED for all kinds of reasons or you want more brightness. And I think there's something here. I'm still an OLED person. My 895L I still think is the best TV ever made. But you can just see how much brighter and more vibrant the TV is. And the way that John talks about it, he's like, oh, there's something here that will attract everyone because people are attracted to brightness.

They're not attracted to like OLED black levels. They're just like, that's the brightest one. So Sony can make the brightest one with Sony's picture processing. I don't know, I'm excited about it. If it can do the brightest one that is like approachably closer to having some of the OLED features. That's the idea. That seems like a huge win. That's the idea. So you'll get some of the black levels because you have the massive local dimming in the background, but you'll get brighter colors and more vibrant colors. Okay, that's exciting. I'm telling you, you know me, I love a TV. What's this going to mean for my frame TV?

I have nothing bad news about your frame TV today. Yeah, my whole life is full of nothing but bad news about my frame TV. Except that it's not a Roku, which is pretty exciting right now. Have you seen this new, this is a total diversion, but have you seen the new Roku homepage that just came out? No, I've not. So Roku's home screen used to just be a wall of apps, right? There would be the big ass ad on the right and then the left was just a grid of apps. Now they're splitting that so that at the top, it's content, right? It's supposed to be like movies and shows you want to watch. And then they have a row of apps they think you might want to open and then more stuff. And then you have to scroll down even further to actually get to the grid of apps.

And this seems like a good idea in theory because you're like, oh, yeah, sure. Just take me to the show I want to watch. Don't make me go to the app and then to the show that I want to watch. This is a thing I've been advocating for for a very long time. There are two problems with this theory. One, Roku hates you and would just love to fill every single one of those spaces with advertising and is just utterly uninterested in making a good user experience for you. Thing number two is there is no version of this that is a perfect system.

Like, this is the thing actually that annoys me the most about the frame TV is I open it up and it has that continue watching panel, but it's from like a random smattering of apps that I open sometimes. And so it's like, Netflix is not on there. HBO Max doesn't show up. But like, do you want to see the last thing you were watching on Peacock five months ago? Here it is. It's like, this is, you've one third solved this problem. And by doing so actually made the user interface vastly more confusing. And Roku is like, I have a Roku TV here in the basement that I use occasionally. And I got opted into the beta of it, I guess, and was immediately like, I'm no longer interested in using this television.

Every time Roku does a software update, something catastrophic happens, is my experience. And they add more ads. Every time Roku does anything, it's to put more ads in front of you. And they do not care about how you feel. They don't. I'm so sorry. I mean, that's more in certification, too. Straight up.

Yeah. All right. I have one more for you and then we should get out of here. This is just David's occasional everything is getting more expensive update. The prices are too damn high is the little of this section of the podcast. Valve raised the price of the Steam Deck by $200. That's brutal. Valve, you know, cites all the things that everybody cites. This is about the memory shortages and the chip shortages and all this stuff is more expensive and harder and more complicated to get than ever. All of that is true. But like the thing we have said a bunch of times on this show is it's all going to get worse before it gets better. And it just continues to get worse. Yeah, really bad. Everything everywhere.

is getting more expensive. And Sean Hollister wrote a really great piece pointing out basically this marks the end of a certain kind of era of technology. He was talking about it with handheld consoles in particular because there was this sort of beautiful moment where it was like, oh my gosh, we have an increasingly mature smartphone chipset that can do more and more. These things are very powerful. We're able to make what amount to full powered handheld gaming consoles for a few hundred dollars. And they were starting to be everywhere. Like companies you can't pronounce that you've never heard of were making pretty capable handheld gaming machines. This was like a big future of Windows if they could ever figure out how to make the software. Like this is going to be a thing. And this has now been...

absolutely systematically priced out of being compelling at all. And I think we're about to see a lot of those things happen, right? Like there was a really great piece I read the other day about how cheap phones are a thing that don't exist anymore. You just can't buy a cheap smartphone. And that in huge parts of the world, that's hugely, hugely problematic because there are billions of people who rely on cheap phones and cheap internet access to live their lives. And those phones literally aren't being produced anymore because the financial side of it doesn't work for anybody. So there's like, there are just bands of products that are just ceasing to exist because the price of it doesn't make any sense anymore. And there's no sign that this is getting better anytime soon.

I've been having conversations with people who are like really into politics and they all want to talk to me about data centers. Our data centers are the big issue of the midterms and AI and, you know, I love to say the products aren't good enough and maybe the products be good enough and they'll change people's attitudes about data centers. Everyone's talking about this and that's fine. And maybe data centers will be the big issue of the midterm. People can't afford video game consoles. It's like right there.

Right. You made it hard for people to play video games or be excited about buying new handhelds or upgrading their gaming PCs or whatever it is. It's going to be right there. It's like right there next to gas prices. And I think people forget how pervasive video games are and how pervasive cheap smartphone supply chain products are. Right. Like everything in your life is basically a smartphone. Like everything's an Android tablet. We had that CEO of Scudio on Decoder, Adam. Really cool. You know, they're making like military drones and first responders. We got really into the weeds of like working with the government, the military and building technology. And at the end, he let me fly one of their drones. And I did one that was like totally remote.

You know, it was in California, we were in New York, and I did it on this laptop. And I did one, their indoor drone, just on their controller. And their controller is legitimately a controller with just a Samsung phone in the middle in kiosk mode. And this is, like, the cutting-edge drone company. And he was like, yeah, just easier. Like, we're going to make our own controller. It's basically an Android tablet. Like, right now, we can just buy Samsung phones and put them in kiosk mode. And, like, it was, like, built in. It was, like, seamlessly integrated. But it was just obviously an Android phone, right? Like, he booted it up, and it's an Android on it in that way. And he was laughing. He's like, basically, everything's an Android tablet. You just have to have the patience to want to build your own. But if you're busy, you just, like, go take one off the shelf.

And that's the era that's coming to an end. Yes. Where it's like, oh, you can just take for granted that an Android tablet exists as a computer that can run whatever device that you're actually interested in making. Yeah, there is just none of that left. Can I just tell you how this has affected me personally this week? 007 First Light came out. The new James Bond video game is by all accounts fabulous. Everybody loves it. I love a James Bond game. I will even play a shitty James Bond game and I have played many. The only console I have right now that will play it is a Switch 2, which I bought before it got more expensive. So I legitimately was like, okay, this is a game I will play enough to be worth buying a PS5. So I will bite the bullet and go buy a PS5. Did you know the PS5 is $650 now? What the hell did that happen? What are we doing? They've raised the price. I went back and found this out. They raised the price twice over the past year. Sales have plummeted as a result.

I'm not spending $650 on a PlayStation 5. That's crazy. I now have to wait several months until this thing come to the Switch. And it sucks, and I hate it, and I blame everybody. But also, if you have First Light and I can come to your house and play it, please let me know. That's brutal. Do you look at used ones or are those going up too? They have gone up there. They're out there. And that may be where I end up. But even the prices of those have gone way up. Like, it's not that much cheaper to buy a used one anymore. That's not what's supposed to happen to consoles over the course of their life cycle. No, the PS5 is like many years old now. We should be done with this. That's crazy. Makes me sad. Yeah. Anyway, everything keeps getting more expensive, which is why my advice continues to be go buy the two expensive things now because I really think it's only going to get worse.

That's some real Jim Cramer advice to end the Vergecast. Whatever the top of this is, it does not feel like we've hit it yet. But also... Just, you know, don't buy things. It'll be fine. All right. We should get out of here. Two bits of business. One Monday is Daily Vergecast begins. You're going to be around a bunch on the show, including obviously on every Friday episode. But you also have this other podcast. What's on Decoder next week? Decoder next week is the CEO of the Recording Academy, Harvey Mason Jr., the guy who runs Grammys. Boy, did we get into our feelings about AI music. Oh, wow. Yeah. You're not supposed to be able to win a Grammy if he's AI, but AI is everywhere in music. So he's got a real puzzle to self. Oh, that's fun. I like that. We're also gearing up for all of our WWDC coverage. That's in two weeks.

We're like deep in developer conferences and it's Computex next week. It's Build next week. We got a lot going on. It's going to be insane. The AI things just keep happening and the people keep hitting them and we will be here talking about it. Remember, you can subscribe to The Verge for all of our ad-free podcasts. I will tell you, maybe more than any of our other shows, Daily Vergecast is going to be vastly better with no ads. We are like working very hard to make sure that we make the best version of it, the ad-free show. And I think it will be worth subscribing for just for that reason alone. But you can also get all of our other shows ad-free. If you have thoughts and feelings and want to get in touch with us about anything, you can always email us, vergecastatheverge.com.

or call the hotline 866-411. We also have more hotline space in a daily VergeCast world, which is a thing I'm very excited about. Until then, the VergeCast is a virtual production and part of the Fox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will see you on Monday.