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Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of using your TV show to promote your YouTube channel. I'm your friend David Pierce. You don't have to tell us here. Hey, buddy.
I keep saying it. No one's watching the TV shows, David.
No, it really is. It's like we talked for so long about like social media as like a marketing platform for other stuff. Other stuff, broadcast television is now a marketing platform for your YouTube channel. This is what we've come to.
Yeah. You're just selling ads at really high rates to local real estate agents, healthcare firms. That's all it's there for.
Yeah. This is what we do. So, we have a lot of news to cover. There's a bunch of Apple stuff coming. We have new Pixels. We have information about what's coming from Samsung. We're like ramping up into gadget season again. There's also some AI stuff going on. The word autopilot is being debated. We're gonna talk about that. But we have the every once in a while our boy Brendan breaks containment and it is time. We just have to do this at the top. Eli, it's just time. We are going to begin today's show with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. We should say we're recording this on Wednesday morning which is earlier than we normally record because Nilay, I think you have to go do like little kid winter break things. We vacation. It's winter break.
You got to let the kids run free.
Yeah. So, we're recording this early. And our other option was to have you like call in with the pina colada again. But we're here. This story will keep changing. We're recording this on Wednesday.
To be clear, I was going to do the pina colada call-in, but Brendan ruined it.
This is Yeah. Thanks, Brendan. with new theme music submitted by Christopher Sullivan who described this which I have not heard and I'm deeply terrified by as quote a free jazz/brain rot remix good IDK unique yes
okay so today I'm doing something a little bit different
he was he was particularly done this week
for America's favorite podcast.
Brendan Carr is a dummy. Blown away.
Brendan Carr is a dummy. What do you do?
Okay. I don't want anyone to submit theme songs anymore.
The party horns really got me on that one. The doo doo is nice though. I think anyone who does submit should use the nei as often as possible.
That was it. It was everything I wanted it to be. It was ominous. It was scary. It was oddly pornographic.
What more can you ask for?
That was lovely. Christopher, thank you.
Let me just very briefly set up where we're going here and then Nilay, I'm just gonna leave for a while and you can just yell. So the other night, Stephen Colbert comes on his show and says that he had originally planned to interview James Talarico, a Texas Senate candidate for his show and then goes into a long explanation about why that's not going to happen, which starts with an explanation of our buddy Brendan Carr, who has just made himself a character on late night television shows. So Colbert explains this out. It then posts James Talarico's interview on the Late Show YouTube channel that I'm looking at it this morning. We're recording this on Wednesday. That video now has 5 million views which is substantially more than the number of people who watch Stephen Colbert's show. This becomes a whole thing. We can walk through the chronology of this, but starting at the very beginning here, Nilay, this is like exactly the stuff you have been talking about on this show for months. Once again, just brought to the biggest possible stage, right?
Yeah. Yeah. Brendan Carr cannot help but make himself the speech police of American television. It's what he wants. And there's this concept in first amendment law called the chilling effect where you don't even do the enforcement. You don't even arrest the people for the illegal speech. You just talk about it so much that the speech stops. You chill the speech. You make it go away. This is the chilling effect in action. Brendan has been talking about the equal time rule which basically FCC hasn't enforced in years and years and years because again I will remind everyone that people do not watch broadcast television. They watch stuff on their phones over the internet and the FCC cannot say what happens on the internet in that way. They can only talk about what happens on broadcast television and broadcast radio. So the FCC has just not been enforcing this rule forever.
But Brendan, because he pulled it off the shelf and started making noise about late night talk show hosts interviewing Democrats, news programs like The View interviewing Democrats and needing to provide equal time to conservatives because of the horrible bias in American media has chilled the speech of Stephen Colbert. He has made it so Stephen Colbert on his own program cannot air the interview because CBS's lawyers are so worried about triggering an equal time review or having to comply with an equal time rule that hasn't been enforced in forever in a way that they don't understand how to do.
Right? Like this is a real problem. Like even if you say we're going to have Talarico on and we'll provide equal time to the other candidates, it is unclear what that compliance would look like because Brendan hasn't said what that compliance would look like. And we all know that Brendan's version of compliance is just whatever he wants whenever he wants it. Right? So even if you pull the equal time rule off the shelf and you say, "Okay, on broadcast television, all the candidates in a given race get equal time." If you don't know how to follow the rule and at every turn you could still be punished by a capricious idiot, you're definitely just not going to do anything that might trigger the rule. Your speech will be chilled. And that is 100% what Colbert is saying. He's saying the lawyers at CBS showed up and said, "Don't do this. The cost of doing this will be too high. The cost of your speech will be too high. So instead, do something else." And I think if you're Stephen Colbert and you've been on television for as long as Stephen Colbert has been on television, this is rightfully maddening, right? This is infuriating behavior on behalf of a network which is owned by billionaires who are so rich they can do whatever they want and obvious and I think he points this out. It's obvious that what they're trying to do is curry political favor of the Trump administration so that they can buy Warner Brothers.
Yeah. He says at the end which I very enjoy he goes the audience is booing and he goes but I just want to assure you ladies and gentlemen that this decision is for purely financial reasons which I just enjoyed very much. But the timeline here I think basically starts with this January 21st letter that we've talked about now like a bunch like a one letter from the FCC should not come up this often on the Vergecast and yet here we are. In which Brendan Carr basically says he's thinking about doing away with the exception to the equal time rule that has been made for talk shows for forever. He has not gotten rid of it. He has not begun the process to get rid of it. He's just sort of announced out loud that he's thinking about getting rid of it. And this is a thing that Colbert brings up over and over and over again. Let me just play one of the clips. This is from the first night when he explains what's going on. Let me just here's how he explains to again this is the broadcast TV audience. This is on his show why they're not going to see the James Talarico interview.
Now, as I said at this point, he's just released a letter that says he's thinking about doing away with the exception for late night. He hasn't done away with it yet, but my network is unilaterally enforcing it as if he had. So that's the thing, right, that CBS takes this letter that is binding in no way as just sort of a letter, which Brendan Carr clearly intended to be, you know,
he intended to chill speech with it,
right? And CBS says, "Great, done. Let's chill some speech." Colbert takes exception to this, puts all of this stuff on the show. And this becomes the story kind of on Tuesday was this big back and forth, right? That the Talarico interview blows up because tons of people are watching it because all of a sudden it's news that it's out there on YouTube. Colbert is, you know, fighting against the chilling of speech. And then it takes this other turn.
Well, first can I say something? One, in the history of free speech controversies, saying you can't watch something is the best way to get people to watch.
Spectacular. Yeah. And Colbert knows this. Like this is a deliberate play.
Yeah. Colbert absolutely knows this. The producers at Late Night absolutely know this. CBS knows this. But show is pre-taped.
All of that that we saw sat in a can for several hours. Like everyone knew what would happen here.
I've been thinking about that a lot that like for six hours this thing was just recorded and everyone was fine with it.
Everyone just sat and had to wait.
Our friend Mike Masnick who runs Techdirt named this. It's called the Streisand effect where you try to get something to go away and instead you draw more attention to it. It's named after Barbara Streisand who tried to get somebody taken off the internet. It's like a famous term. And this is the Streisand effect.
Yeah. Colbert said CBS doesn't want you to watch this. Everyone watched it. This is, by the way, the opposite of what Brendan Carr would want. He just can't regulate YouTube. I suspect he's going to try and find some way. There's a reason that last week we were talking about the Federal Trade Commission going after Apple News. This government, this administration is going after every source of information and trying to chill speech. That is the thing that they were organized around doing. Brendan just has this particular power over broadcast spectrum and he's using it to chill speech. The amazing thing about this is that if you were CBS and you have a lease to the broadcast spectrum, you have a great argument here, right? The law is clear. I'm looking at it. It's 47 United States Code 315 and it just says bona fide newscast. Bona fide news interviews, bona fide documentaries, if the candidate's appearance is incidental to the subject, on the spot coverage of bona fide news events shall not be deemed to be use of a broadcasting station. So, it's not this long-standing exemption. It's written in the law. The Congress of the United States wrote a law saying these are the exceptions. And for 20 years, more than 20 years, the FCC has said talk shows are news. Like this thing, it's too hard to parse out what is and isn't news here. That talk shows are news. And there's a long list of cases where they went back and forth. This wasn't always the case. And they made this exemption over the past 20 years because the available media got so vast that parsing out what was and wasn't news on a talk show became a bad use of resources. Like it was obviously stupid. Yeah. To say, "Okay, well, this candidate appeared on YouTube and this candidate appeared on Fox News, which is cable, and this candidate appeared on local origination public access cable, which falls under this rule of a facility, and this and none of this makes sense. This is like a bad use of time." And so for 20 years, more than 20 years, the FCC has said, "This is fine. Talk shows are news." Harold Feld, who is a lawyer at Public Knowledge, has a great blog post about this. We'll link it. All in detail like the long bloody history of this exemption. But the point is in the statute in the law that the Congress passed news is an exception to the equal time rule and you just have to read talk shows as being news. And I think CBS could have fought it. I think they could have said this one letter does not undo all of this precedent. If you want to change this rule, Brendan, you have to do what every other FCC has had to do whenever they wanted to change a rule. You've had to put out a notice of proposed rulemaking and go through their process and take public comment. We cover this all the time. The FCC wants to make it easier for you to get cheaper, faster broadband. This is like a 20-year fight in a notice of proposed rulemaking. Brendan Carr wants to chill speech on CBS by saying he might reinterpret a rule. Everyone caves right away. That is just a pure moral failure on the part of CBS.
Yep. Which CBS I would say tries to fight back on while thus immediately doubling down on the thing. So the thing that comes out is right all of this happens on Monday night and then on Tuesday CBS puts out this statement to lots of different this becomes like the official CBS statement. And actually Colbert ends up reading it in a delightful way that we'll get to. Let me just play you the clip of Colbert reading this statement. That was like CBS's go-to statement.
Without ever talking to me, the corporation put out this press release, this statement. Now, this is a surprisingly small piece of paper considering how many butts it's trying to cover. In it, they say, "The Late Show was not prohibited by CBS from broadcasting the interview with Representative James Talarico. The show was provided legal guidance that the broadcast could trigger the FCC equal time rule for two other candidates, including Representative Jasmine Crockett, and presented options for how the equal time for other candidates could be fulfilled. The Late Show decided to present the interview through its YouTube channel with on-air promotion on the broadcast rather than potentially providing the equal time options." So, that's the statement. This becomes the official CBS response to this whole thing, which is Colbert is saying the lawyer said in no uncertain terms, you can't put James Talarico on the TV. You can't show his picture. You can't use his voice. Colbert makes a meal out of this. And CBS is like, no, this isn't true. All we did was provide legal guidance and legal options. Nilay, you had kind of a delightful experience with this particular statement over the course of the last couple days.
Well, let me just say so. We publish a lot of things and I love our lawyers here. They're very good. We have very good media lawyers. The lawyers saying they're providing guidance while saying no is the art of being a media lawyer.
But they're always just providing guidance. That's what media lawyers do. They're always like, "Here's what you can and can't do and here's the amount of risk." And they're very good at making sure that you are aware that the amount of risk is so high that you should shut up.
That's what they do. That's like as editor-in-chief, that is what my conversation with our lawyers looks like all the time.
Yes, there's a risk that that alligator will bite you if you put your head in its mouth.
It's very much like parenting a toddler on the I'm like, "Can I put my finger in the can?" Again, anyhow, so like I read this back and forth. I'm like, "I know what the lawyers thought they were doing." Like they're lawyers. They were like, "The risk will be so high." And the Late Show correctly read that as we're saying no, right? Fine. And maybe there's some ambiguity there.
Colbert also alluded at one point to the fact that the lawyers vet all of his scripts because of course they do because that's how it's broadcast television. Like of course they do. But that at one point he had to go backstage between his monologue and his explanation of why the Talarico interview wasn't going to air to talk to the lawyers again, which he said had never happened. Like
lawyers standing backstage waiting for the commercial break is
lawyers saying no, right? Like that's all
I mean that is that's some like Soviet stuff, right? The government minder is standing backstage to tell the talk show host what the government would like them to say. That's bad.
Okay, so let me just make this about The Verge for one second.
So this is CBS's statement, right? So we're covering the story. We reach out to CBS and we're like, can you send us the statement? They send us the statement and we have a really strict background policy. We do not let PR people be on background. So you have to put your names on things. And the reason for this is just a long history. We linked to the background policy, but a long history of companies putting the burden of trust on us, right? So making it so that if you read their statement, you have to trust The Verge for some reason. And all the companies used to do this to us all the time. They still do it to everybody all the time. And we just got tired of it. We said, "No, you got to put your name on it. You want your statement in our story, you need to put your name on it." And that way the trust is on you. We're not some amorphous corporation, but you, a person, have to stand by the thing you're saying. And if you look at our site, everyone plays ball. Everyone understands exactly why we do this. And when we push back, it's always like one little turn of push back and then everyone's like, "Fine, here's a name." And we've done this for years now. This policy is 5 years old. It works. It's fine.
So everybody has a statement on background, no name. Here's what CBS says. We reach out and say, "Look, our policy is you got to put a name on it." Phil Gonzalez, the SVP of comms at CBS, writes back to us and says, "No, respectfully, you don't need to use the statement. We will keep that in mind next time The Verge asks us to reply." They don't even want to put their name on this cowardly statement. And like, we're just I'm burning him now. We burned him in print because we insist that you put your names on the statements if you're going to say this stuff. If it is your job to speak publicly on behalf of your company, we require that you put your name on it. That's
anyway. The reason that you pay us money for the subscription is so that we can be brats like this. Like that's you're buying the ethics policy. I keep saying it. This to me is if you are going to cave to the government, if you're going to cave to pressure from Brendan Carr, you got to put your name on it. You have to be accountable for that. And I know exactly why Phil Gonzalez did not want to be accountable for the statement because it's just weasel stuff.
And at some point you're going to run into us and we're going to say, "Nope, if you want to be a weasel, you got to put your name on it." Sorry, Phil.
Yeah. So, this all leads to this second round with Colbert who goes on his show on Tuesday night and does another screed against Brendan Carr and the equal time rule and all of this nonsense. And at one point, so he's holding this press release that CBS sent out with that statement. And he winds up crumbling it up and picking it up with a doggy poop bag, which I really liked as an image. But the thing I've been thinking about through all of this is like on the one hand, Brendan Carr has inserted himself into the media and that is clearly a thing that he wants, right? Like this is a game he keeps playing. It must be getting him what he wants out of this. Like you would think if the whole thing with Jimmy Kimmel, which was another time that the whole world sort of immediately turned on the free speech police was not what Brendan Carr wanted, he would have gone about things differently. But he continues to do this. And so what I've been trying to figure out through all of this is like is Brendan Carr winning or losing this fight? In his own head, is he winning or losing this fight?
Oh, in his head he's winning. He's absolutely winning. He is the speech police in America. If you are a major corporation in the business of distributing speech and Brendan doesn't like it, he's either going to dig up some 500-year-old authority that hasn't been used to insist that he has a power to regulate your speech. He's going to sign on to some nonsensical FTC interpretation of your terms and service and say that Apple News is biased and that's illegal in some way. He's going to use the phrase illegal speech, which is a thing that he uses. He's turned the FCC into a weapon against free expression, and he's done it at every level of that organization. And that is a tragedy. You know, Colbert mentioned Nipplegate. That was on CBS, right? When Justin Timberlake pulled down Janet Jackson's top at the Super Bowl.
But the FCC went into overdrive. This was like, we're going to sue Viacom, we're going to punish. That case went on for years. It eventually came to nothing. And out of that, the chairs of the FCC, Republican and Democrat alike, said, "We have to get out of the business of policing speech. The internet exists. These companies are in competition with a universe of content that we cannot regulate, putting regulatory burdens on them. Is a mess. Our job is to connect Americans, Democrats, Republicans alike, running the FCC. I've known most of them. We've covered them deeply for years. What they have all said is the FCC has to get out of the speech business and into the connectivity business. I have had meaningful disagreements with a lot of the people who have run the FCC about what it means to be in the connectivity business and how to achieve those goals and all that, but like I've never thought to myself, the FCC should do something other than connect Americans to broadband and figure out how to make broadband cheaper and more accessible. Brendan has thrown all of that aside and run headlong back into being the speech police. It's what he wants. So if you ask me if he's winning or losing, in his head, he is winning. I think we as the American people are losing. And I think over the medium-term, not even the long term, over the medium-term, I think he will lose. I think most Americans understand that you should not have government minders standing backstage at a talk show telling the host what they can and cannot say.
That is just an affront to everything people on both sides believe. And if you showed up on any right-wing YouTube talk show and said the government is going to have a real interest in what you're saying, they would throw you out of the room.
The idea that your distribution should meaningfully change that dynamic is so foreign to most people. If you went to some Gen Alpha kid and said, "Look, there's this thing called the TV antenna, and if you use that, the government gets to tell you what you can and can't say." They would I mean I just know they would look at you like you were a space alien.
And so if that's what you can regulate, you can regulate the broadcast airwaves. It's only a jump before you say, you know what, Google is a national utility. We should regulate that, too. It's only a small jump before you say, "Look, the entire internet runs on people's phones, which come from AT&T and Verizon and T-Mobile. That's broadcast spectrum. We have a real interest in making sure AT&T, Verizon, and T-Mobile only broadcast the stuff that is good for America." You can see it coming. You can see where it will come from. You can see the slippery slope. And it's great that Stephen Colbert is pushing back. It is very bad that the Ellison family, which owns Paramount and CBS and wants to buy Warner Brothers with Trump administration approval, is not pushing back.
Right. And this is where if you want to be a big media owner, David Ellison wants to be the big media mogul. The thing he needs to show the creatives who make the content is that he will fight for their free expression because otherwise none of them are going to want to work for him. And I think Colbert is just the tip of the spear here.
Yep. Part of the way that they got this deal done to buy CBS in the first place was by paying off the Trump administration for a made-up argument that they had about a Kamala Harris interview. And this is the other bummer of all of this is anyone who decided to fight would win. Any thoughtful person in the world agrees that every single one of these trumped up things against these media industries has been ridiculous and it keeps working.
It keeps working and it's only not working in small ways. Bari Weiss took over CBS News. Anderson Cooper just quit 60 Minutes.
This is what I mean. You're going to drive the talent away. And once you've done that, because you won't protect their expression, yeah, they're all going to land somewhere that will. They're all going to land on TikTok or whatever it is. They're all going to get into fights with content moderation on those platforms. They're all going to start doing Algo speak. Whatever that thing is is going to happen. And you will have spent millions upon billions of dollars to own a network that distributes nothing to no one. And truly, that is the lesson of the media mogul. Like if you want to be that character, a fight you are going to be in all the time is saying, "No, you can't tell me what to say." And you have to say it to the government. You got to say it to the parents resource council. You got to say it to whoever it is who shows up to chill your speech. You have to say, "Nope, we agree with you. There should be some limits, but we are going to protect our creatives." And you can just see the Ellison family, what they are communicating most strongly is that they will not protect creatives. And all this money they want to spend they're gonna flush it down the toilet if they don't protect their creatives against dummies like Brendan Carr who haven't even changed the rules yet who are just chilling speech.
It's the same story with Bezos and The Washington Post. It is just these institution after institution being lit on fire because somebody bought it who doesn't want the game.
Doesn't want the game. And I'm going to do it. I'm going to end Brendan Carr by once again finding faint praise for Rupert Murdoch. I'm going to do it. I'm going to make this comparison.
The unlikeliest bedfellows of Brendan Carr's dummy.
I do not agree with nearly anything he does. David used to work at the journal. The Wall Street Journal in the entire Murdoch empire, the newsroom of The Wall Street Journal is a crown jewel. It makes real news to the highest standards. You know, Joanna Stern, our friend, just left the journal to go independent. She and I talked about that for years. And one of the reasons she loved the journal was she loved the standards of the journal. And she and I talk about it all the time. She's like, I love meeting these standards. That's Joanna, right? She's like very competitive. She wants to hit the highest standard. The journal is the highest standard.
Murdoch knows that that is the thing he needs to protect. He knows that is the truest source of his power and authority.
It's not Fox News scaring old people all day. It's that when The Wall Street Journal publishes a story, it moves markets and it brings down empires.
That's power. It's because he's a newspaper man. Like old school. Yeah. And all these new guys, they don't understand that if you cede that authority, if you let that get tainted, you're going to end up with nothing. And you can really see that dynamic playing out with this new class of billionaires that thinks they can just play in the news.
Murdoch again, he understands one thing that you can't screw with the journal's newsroom because when the journal says Theranos is full of [__] yeah, Theranos is full of [__] Anyway, Brendan, as always, you're welcome to come on this show, which you currently cannot regulate. I would love to have this debate with you. I would love to see where you think you can just unilaterally change FCC administrative law precedent.
That's a wholesome debate we could have. I could also just yell at you for a while because it seems like you like being humiliated. Brendan, as always, you're welcome on this show or Decoder. That has been Brendan Carr's, America's favorite podcast for the market.
We did it. All right, we're going to take a break and then we're going to talk about gadgets because God help us, we need to talk about gadgets. We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. A lot of gadget news this week, actually. Some of it, huge bummers about ongoing availability of gadgets, but we'll get to that. Nilay, we have to start with a thing that I think you did to us as a society. You have been saying forever that you think the killer app of smart glasses is essentially facial and name recognition of everyone. If I could walk around with glasses and just immediately know who everybody is, that would be awesome.
I Yes. But can I just point out I've always said the other half of that idea, too,
in order to build that product, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is bad.
Okay. Well, Nilay, I have such good news for you. Meta.
I just want to just hammer that down. Like, go back and listen. I've said this a lot. I'm like, to get the thing everybody wants, you have to build the bad thing.
Well, I have again really good news for you, which is that Meta appears extremely interested in building the bad thing and in shipping it in, I would say, the grossest and most cynical possible way. So the news this week was a story from The New York Times about Meta planning to add facial recognition tech to the Meta Ray-Ban glasses, which is a thing I think we have all assumed was coming. There's been some reporting that this was a thing Meta was interested in for some time. There was that project that college kids did a while ago that you could use it for. That freaked everybody out.
And Meta, by the way, disclaimed that whole project. Yeah,
that just to be clear about what that project was, they brought the Meta Ray-Bans and they hacked them up to send live video to a tool called PimEyes,
very problematic all unto itself. And then that would feed back who you were looking at and like their LinkedIn. And they made a video where they were just like running around the subway like walking up to people being like, "Don't I know you?" And then like sort of like reading their LinkedIn to them and blowing lines. And Meta was like, "This isn't official. We didn't do it." And it's like, "Dude, you're so close to doing this." But anyway, so according to this New York Times story, they got a memo from a Meta executive who is not named in the story. I have a guess, but it's not important.
We have the same guess. I have a guess.
I think we have the same guess. This feature is going to be called Name Tag. And this document, which I believe is from last May, basically lays out the plan to launch Name Tag. And the idea was to release it at a conference for blind people to attendees there. Which is already sort of cynical in a way. It's like we're going to take this thing and put the best possible version of the spin on it in a way that it is like accessibility feature and it is valuable to this group of people. Just ignore all of the other use cases and horrors. But anyway, there's also a line in the memo that specifically I'm just going to read you this line because it's just I mean like I could set it up, but it tells on itself. It says, "We will launch during a dynamic political environment where many civil society groups that we would expect to attack us would have their resources focused on other concerns."
right ICE is putting babies in prison and that's a good time to launch a worldwide facial recognition.
Nobody's going to have time to be mad at us about this because they're mad about others. I will point out to their credit, the civil society groups, the ACLU, the EFF, all of them were like, "No, we'll find time."
Universally like, "No, we'll find time
Yeah.
Wait, who's so who's your guess as to who wrote this line?
Yep. That's my guess. So I we I think we've both met Bos before. We've spent time with him. He very famously wrote the memo called The Ugly, which was about the cost of connecting the world. And it was basically like no matter what we will connect people. If you go read that memo, it was very controversial at the time. And his argument was, I wrote it to make people think about all these costs, but the writing the style is like dead on exactly the same as as this line. Yep. Um, I'm not saying we know. Bos, if you want to come on the show, by all means, I would love to talk to you about this, but um I just I'm guessing Bos runs Reality Labs. That's why that's why that's my guess.
Same. Yeah. But I think this this this raised all of the issues you would think that it would. Uh, lots of people are very nervous about this. I just want to know how you feel knowing like a of course if anybody was going to do this it was going to be meta of course right like
of course but even in this in this same document meta outlines its supposed safeguards for this feature which are nothing right like the idea is that uh this was sources that that told the times this in their reporting um the the facial recognition technology isn't just supposed to work on everybody um it's supposed to find people that you're connected to on one of Meta's platforms, but it also is looking into quote identifying people whom the user may not know, but who have a public account on a meta site like Instagram. That's everybody. That's everybody.
That's real bad. Yeah. What you want is the influencer tracker 5000.
That's going to make hot girls across America feel safe.
What could possibly go wrong? Yeah. You follow her on Instagram.
It's real bad. That's real bad.
Um I mean, first of all, you should not build this product. Like I I keep saying it's the killer app because it's the killer app. If I could just remember people's names and faces, I would be the president of the United States. It's the only thing stopping the rapid ascent of my political career.
You're one face blindness problem away.
I am horrible at names and faces. I again for 20 years of this career, I've just been apologizing every day of my life. I'm pre-apologizing to you now. I'm not going to remember your name. It's just I'm really bad at it. If I had some pair of glasses that could just solve this problem, I would be the most powerful person in world history. But I know in my heart that the cost of that power it's too high. Right? You should not deanmize everybody all the time and do it in a way that allows every government on earth which now thinks the guardrails are off to go access that data and track where everybody is all the time. And that is what our government will do. The second meta has a database of where and when it saw people, which is the thing that they inevitably have to create. There was a time when maybe you would trust the tech platform to say, "No, we'll stand up to government pressure. We'll do warrant canaries, right? That do you know about these? They all have these like compliance statements on their websites and if every year they publish one it's like we have not received any incoming requests for information and then like every now and again they subtly change the language to make it clear that they've received requests they don't like.
Yeah. There was a time when like this was a game everybody played and like the civil society groups like the ACLU and the EFF would like watch those. That's all over the all of them want to be defense contractors. All of them want to sell AI to Pete Heg Seth except for anthropic. I don't know what's going on with these companies. I don't know why they think they should participate in the widespread abuse of our civil liberties, but I don't trust them to do the right thing.
Money is I mean that's that's money
money. But uh Sarah Jong has this line uh she says when she where she describes their attitude, which is they just want to fly their helicopters over the favas like yeah they will have all the money and we will all live in the tent city and they will fly over us and like that's what this is. If you release this product I I I want it. so badly. I I cannot I I I've said it for so many years or so many people pinged me about this. This is the killer app. Putting digital information over the real world on a pair of glasses is the killer app for the next generation of devices. It's not chat bots. It's not VR. It's not anything. It's literally putting digital information over the real world, right? And augmenting your reality. And the killer app for that is saying you can be at a conference and know everybody's name. will the second that feature is released, everyone will buy those glasses. And you shouldn't make it because the the the social cost of that product is building a worldwide database of facial recognition and surveillance that will be used for nefarious purposes.
And Meta saying out loud, we don't think the people will be there to stop us because they're busy with the rest of the civil liberties abuses is as cynical as it gets.
Well, and inside of that is, I think, a recognition of that exact dynamic that you're talking about, right? Where I think what that what a lot of these tech companies want you to believe in the way that they act publicly is that all of the ideas about the trade-offs are overblown, that we can solve them with product, that we can just handle this the right way, and that actually that trade-off doesn't exist. It's it's a false dichotomy that you're creating. What this makes very clear is that Meta fully understands all of those ramifications and all of the ways that this is going to be received and discussed and all of the problems that it will cause and it has decided it's worth building. Anyway, again, we're we're recording this Wednesday morning. Mark Zber is supposed to be on trial today. He's supposed to be on the stand today in the case alleging that Meta and other social media companies designed products defectively. not speech, not 230 concerns, but that the literal product design of their platforms caused harm to people. That's a big deal. This is unusual. We're going to see how these cases go. But Adamio is on the stand. Zuckerberg's on the stand. The rest of the social media companies are going to be on the stand in this way. This is just the next turn. I mean, last week we spent how however long talking about Ring cameras and pervasive surveillance and that the collective action trade-offs of wanting a camera on your property even though it will affect other people's rights. just wait until you get the benefit from the glasses and everyone else gets the pain of being stocked. And a thing that's gonna happen is you can't product your way out of glasses getting ripped off of people's faces, right? You can't product your way out of people physically demanding that you take the thing that's tracking them off of your face.
we saw it with Glass Holes and I guarantee you if this product is released that we'll see it again. And there's a line in the story where Zuckerberg is saying he thinks they should turn off the recording light.
Or not have it be so prominent. And you know why? It's because that is the social cost that will make people say turn that off or take those off.
That becomes the problem.
You're watching the ring outcry and then you're like and then we'll put the glasses on everyone's face. Like these are not compatible ideas. Like we'll see how that goes.
I've been thinking a lot about like a a decade ago now when all of the uh sort of first stuff was happening in public about Cambridge Analytica and and the way that these platforms in particular Facebook at the time was being misused and and the way that you know WhatsApp was being used in in genocides around the world and like there was this idea that the mistake these companies had made was not considering the downstream effects right they had this one idea they were like we want to do this thing and that the thing they didn't do was think through that thing the whole way, right? Like what if this works? And I either what has changed or what we just realize now that we didn't then is they actually did they they understood the consequences. They understood the potential. They knew what the cost would be and they just pushed on anyway. And and whether that is a new behavior now or it has always been like that and we are just still continuing to learn about it, I don't know. But but it is very clear to me that like Mark Zuckerberg is eyes wide open about what these things will be in society and what they will mean and what they will cost and he doesn't care.
He doesn't care. And I again I'm
it is the killer app. If you want everyone in the world to buy these glasses, you're like it can just tell you people's names and nothing about how particularly Americans are currently wired will make them stop and consider the social cost. They will they will fly off the shelves and then we will have the same as we saw with social media, the same that as we're currently seeing with AI, we will have a wave of what are called unintended consequences, but which are actually clearly foreseen consequences.
And again, that's this trial. Lauren Finer is actually in the courtroom today. Um, we're covering it. And the idea that they know that the products are defective is very powerful. We'll see. I don't I I I'm hopeful that there's more outcry here. I'm not hopeful that we'll get a privacy law. I'm not hopeful that Meta won't push the boundary in some way no matter what they do. Um but I am hopeful that just seeing how they talk about it actually changes the calibration of how they might release a feature like this.
Yeah, agreed. Um all right, some other gadgets we should talk about. Um Apple is doing something in New York on March 4th.
New York, Shanghai, and London.
Yeah, that's right. notably not Certino. Um what I would guess what appears to be happening here uh and this is like John Gruber said something to this effect. Mark German at Bloomberg said something to this effect that uh rather than have some big event where they launch a thing and make a whole video, Apple is just going to sort of press release announce bunch of new products on its website and then let reporters look at them all at once on this date on March 4th. Um, is that your is that your read, too?
I don't know about the this they've done the staggered press releases before. I you know, I I I just think my real takeaway here is flying everybody to California to make you watch an infomercial. You can only do that so many times a year.
This is why I bring this up, right? Because you can tell a lot about how interesting an Apple product is by the way that Apple announces it. And it like we talk about this all the time, right? When they launch something by press release, it says a lot about Apple's own interest in this product. And my guess is this is going to be a series of relatively minor updates to things.
We've been hearing a lot about new iPads um with updated chips, which I think would be fine. We've been hearing a lot about new MacBooks. Um, the one wildcard idea is there's been a lot of reporting recently about the a new lowerc cost 12-in MacBook, like bringing back the MacBook MacBook. Um, but rather than have it be super expensive and bad, have it be cheap and good. That would be really interesting and maybe bigger than some of these other ones that I'm thinking of. But, uh, to me, this just seems like a just a giant round of spec bumps, right? Like that's that's what we get from Apple every once in a while. Now, is there anything you're thinking about that I'm missing?
The the thing I'm honestly thinking about the most is how are they going to handle RAM prices?
Right. Like you you can do a round of spec bumps and Apple can be like it has 8 gigs of RAM for the 50th year in a row.
But they're running up against it particularly if they want to do more local AI which I I think they want to do. So, I'm actually just most curious about what everything costs because the RAM market is just fully out of control and Apple's having these gangbuster quarters,
but that's all against high-end iPhone sales really and services revenue, which is really just Candy Crush whales
and like something has to give. And I'm I'm actually sort of dying to know like if this really is what an iPhone 17e and a low-end MacBook and some iPad spec bumps. The news is going to be and everything got $100 more expensive.
And I who knows who knows. I'm I'm very very curious about that aspect of it.
Yeah. The news this week on the RAM shortage, by the way, continues to be brutal. Um we had a story that the price of the Switch 2 might go up. Uh the PlayStation 6 might be delayed. The Steam Deck OLED is going to be intermittently out of stock. It's hard to buy right now. Uh, Western Digital and I think other drive manufacturers have said they're essentially out of stock for the rest of the year. It's the middle of February. Like it's it's crazy. Yeah. And meanwhile then Meta and Nvidia signed a huge deal this week uh for many many many many AI chips. Like that's that is the story, right? like the the companies with infinite resources building monstrous data centers have just absolutely cornered the supply of memory in the world and and the idea now of like you're just a person who wants to buy a gadget. I it's it it seems like $100 more expensive might be the best case scenario for a while. The worst case scenario is like you're not going to be able to buy anything for a while.
Uh the worst case scenario and there are some CEOs who are hinting at this out there. of like memory supply chain cos the worst case scenario is stuff gets so expensive that the products go away or the companies go out of business.
And I I think we might just see you know mid-range consumer electronics companies be like we can't do this anymore. Like
so many products are really just like tiny Linux computers like tiny embedded Linux systems. And if like the RAM is so expensive that it's not cost-effective to ship a tiny embedded Linux system you might not have a product.
And like I think we're we're coming up on that time. Yeah. Yeah. Especially if you're a relatively small company without much leverage. Like I've been talking to to startups and folks trying to do hardware for the first time now and it is they have no moves because you haven't like if if you're Apple, Apple has a lot of leverage in the industry. It has a lot of pre-existing deals. It it is it is one of the few companies that feels like it might be able to continue to get its way even in the face of all this AI spending. But if you're just like if if you're a Kickstarter, your your inventory just went away. Like it's gone. They're just you have no moves left and there is going to be like a whole generation of these small and middlesized companies that just get frozen by this.
Yeah. And it's funny. I think you know the the bleeding edge indicator is boy it got way too expensive to build a PC, right? Like you want to buy a GPU and some fast RAM like well Meta is right there. like we want all of it like so that's like the bleeding edge indicator of this I think the Apple pricing at this next event on the fourth like I'm you know I I love a spec bump I'm interested to see what they think an iPhone 17e should be
given where they are in the iPhone lineup right now. Um that's all interesting.
they're just like you said you wanted a small cheap phone. Here it is. It's $200. All the parts are from eight years ago. Enjoy.
Right. We've been collecting all those refurbished iPhones to give these tradein deals. Here you go. It's the iPhone 4, but now with a big screen. Like, who knows? Like, um, by the way, an iPhone 4 with a huge screen would be sick.
I was just about to say there are at least two people in my life who are going to text me after this episode saying they want that exact phone.
Uh, that would be amazing. It just like, it's f I'm interested in the products, but I'm like equally interested in what the pricing will be because Apple has a lot of leverage. has had the most leverage for years and now all of the AI spending for chip capacity at TSMC for memory. It's they have competitors to who want to pre- buy a year's worth of output. So, we'll see.
Yeah. So, gadgets not coming in March um but that Apple is reportedly working on. We got a big report from Mark German at Bloomberg this week about Apple's AI gadget plans. Um and since you and I have been talking about this, I'm very curious your reaction. So the idea is three different gadgets are being worked on inside of Apple. And the the useful disclaimer here is Apple works on everything like any any shape of thing you can imagine exists somewhere on Apple's campus. They they they try a ton of this stuff and it eventually gets winnowed down to a few and then it eventually gets winnowed down to one. And like the the three types of gadgets I would be shocked if all of these end up shipping. But the idea is there are there are sort of three things being really actively worked on right now. One is smart glasses, uh, which are essentially a a sort of straightforward rival to what Meta is up to, according to the reporting. Um, they don't have a display. They're designed to be in really close concert with your phone, which I think is really interesting. Like, what if Apple's leverage here is just that it's the only one allowed to do stuff on your iPhone in a powerful way. Worked for AirPods, might work. Yeah. Um, the other one is uh essentially what I would describe as AirPods with a camera, which is a thing we have sort of been assuming they would do for a while. And then the third one is like what if air tag but AI gadget. It's it's the it's the friend idea.
You just don't want to say pendant. It's a pendant.
It's a pendant. It's a it's a pendant that you wear around your neck or you put in a case or whatever, but it is it is a little puck of a thing that is a a microphone and a speaker presumably that you talk to. Uh this is the ecosystem Apple is thinking about. And I think I will say my my biggest takeaway from this is that Apple continues to see the phone as the thing and that all of these other devices are sort of like the phone is heliocentric in that sense and they all operate around the phone and use it for connectivity and use it for processing and I think that is a an extremely good idea and b like an unbeatably good tiein for Apple as the first party manufacturer of this stuff.
Yeah, Apple can't not have a phone, right? You you can't turn off the Candy Crush whales.
Well, that but also like if you just think of the iPhone is basically a brick of battery and connectivity that you can plug stuff into, you you have a lot of extra utility you can provide without having to like accomplish the physics miracles that Meta is trying to accomplish to put it all inside of the glasses.
That's true. I I think that's right. But I also straightforwardly Apple is hopelessly dependent on Candy Crush whales. Like the services line that they constantly talk about is not severance.
