Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of David Pierce's baby. Yet another baby. Hi, I'm your friend Eli. Jake Kastrenakes is here.
Hey, good to be here. And we have a special guest. David Imel is here.
It's time, David. It's your first time guest hosting in place of Pierce. One David for the other. And we have like a camera fight to have like already out the gate.
That's what I'm here for. I'm always down for a camera fight. I've never been more excited.
Okay. Pierce's baby is good. I talked to him. Everyone's doing well. Send congrats his way. Maybe he'll come back. Maybe he'll just have more children. You never know with him at this point. They do seem committed to repopulating the Earth Elon style. But everyone's doing well. Congratulations to David. He'll be back in a few weeks. Until then, it's going to be the three of us. It's going to be great. Jake, what are we doing today?
There's a ton coming up. We're going to talk a lot about Pixels and Pixel cameras in particular, and talk about Apple leaking its own AirPods news. There's a whole bunch of stuff. Obviously, Brendan is going to be back. First, I want to start with Pixels. We already had one episode of Vergecast this week talking about all the reviews. David Imel was not there though, and we did not dive into the cameras nearly enough. That is the main thing I want to talk about with these phones because there's just a ton of camera upgrades. David, do you want to just give us like big picture what is new camera wise on these phones?
So, there is technically a new main camera sensor on the Pixel Pros. It saves a little bit of power. That's the only reason they swapped it in.
They're really pretending this sensor didn't change.
Well, yeah. It's strange. I think that's the reason. I think because if they made it bigger, then they would say it was a different sensor, but I think that people are going to be upset if they just say it's the same size, but it's a different sensor.
They told me, so I had an interview with Isaac Reynolds, who heads the Pixel camera team, and he told me it saves a little bit of power, and that's actually useful for them. His quote was, 'We can fit some of my favorite computational photography features in that much power that we're saving.' So that's something at least, right? If you think about it as a camera system, you pull some power from the sensor and you give it to the processor, and the camera system is using the same amount of power. That really implies that people are going to use all of these computational photography features. What were Isaac's favorite features that are inside this power budget?
Well, the biggest new feature is definitely Camera Looks. So, we had a long conversation about this and it is very interesting and it's something that feels like a response to things that people in the industry, including myself, have been shouting for many years. And maybe you and I will fight about this, Nilay. That could be fun. But Camera Looks is effectively, if you've ever used a Fujifilm camera before, they have a thing called Fujifilm recipes. And basically they're these film simulations where you can, I don't know, they do simulate actual film. But you can also just tweak them to your liking. You can change things like saturation and white balance and all these things and save different presets. So now Google has added this. Now Isaac Reynolds did not want to admit to me that this was the right decision. He over and over and over again was saying, 'Oh, we made the perfect camera in the Pixel. We know internally there is no discretion here that this is the wrong way to do photography on a smartphone. Like we know absolutely.' However, there was a growing, and the phrase that he used was, a bimodal distribution of people that wants something else from the smartphone camera, which just means that people want less processing, particularly a loud contingent who is often on TikTok complaining that their photos look bad. Although I should say look bad on iPhones, not on Pixels, because those are the people who are recording TikToks about it. But I think it is just clear that there are a wide swath of people who want things that do not look like reality. They look a little bit nostalgic. They look a little bit soft. You know those things. I understand why Isaac thinks that they perfected the Pixel camera. If you want something sharp, if you want something bright, if you want something with a lot of contrast, that's what people use their smartphone cameras for most of the time. Smartphone cameras are not artistic cameras. They're information transfer cameras, and that makes sense.
This is a very sad way of thinking about it, but I get it, right? Yes. And Nilay, you and David were talking about this when they were analyzing. It's like it's for menus, right? It's like...
Yeah. I mean, I would slightly disagree with the information transfer aspect of the camera. I think that's a huge component of what a smartphone camera needs to do. I think the bigger thing is they can never fail to take a photo, right? And if that is what you're trying to solve with your camera, you have to even everything out constantly. And so the examples are, yes, a menu, or you're on a bright beach and then 25 minutes later you're inside of a restaurant and you're totally backlit and you're taking a selfie. The camera just has to deal with all of that. And you shouldn't have to deal with any settings. And that means everything ends up looking the same. Everything ends up looking oddly bright and flat at the same time, which is something David has pointed out many, many times in many, many camera reviews. It's the problem. Like the idea that they've perfected the camera to me, it is funneled through the goal of the camera, which is to never fail, right? And Apple in particular will never fail. And so iPhone photos have just an incredibly particular look at this point in time. I think the Pixel has always been like that team, they sell like five phones a year. Like they're a little bit more willing to get out there. And I think Camera Looks is them being way more willing to get out there because David, correct me if I'm wrong, these are destructive settings, right? If you shoot in a Camera Look, you can't get back out to the averaged out ultra-processed HDR photo. There's no going back to default. Correct. You've made this choice and you've shot it.
Yep. Yep. It's changing in processing. And you can tell that they know that it's destructive because actually unless you dig very far into the settings and change some of the settings, every time you close the camera, it will go back to the default, which makes sense to your point, Eli. I mean, if you're taking an artistic photo and then you go to take a photo of a menu so that you can open the QR code, you need it to be able to do that.
I think this is fascinating. They do not trust the user enough to know how to get back to taking a good photo. They think that people are going to be upset if they get stuck using one of these new themes. So you spent a week shooting in these different styles. You've also spent a long time shooting all kinds of camera systems and definitely Fujifilm camera systems. How do they actually compare to a Fujifilm sim, right? Do they look good? Do you feel like you have real meaningful control over how the photos come out?
Yeah, this actually there's a lot more control than you have on the iPhone, right? The iPhone gives you a two-axis grid with a couple of settings. It's basically saturation and brightness and then you've got the different tone settings that basically messes with white balance. These give you a lot of settings. You've got sharpness, you've got contrast, you've got all these things. I'm just going to bring it up for you so you can see. And the film simulations that you have, like on the default camera, you have four different settings. There's Original, Natural, Shadows, and Vanilla. And that's sort of just a... Yeah, I don't know why they called it Vanilla.
Original and Vanilla. Vanilla is warmer and I don't... Why do they call it Vanilla instead of just warm? I have no idea. Yeah, strange, strange.
Okay, my going theory for that is that people just like slightly warmer photos and they will confuse Vanilla with Original because it's the same word in many ways. And they're going to pick the slightly warmer setting.
When I think of Vanilla though, I think of like white. I don't think of warm necessarily.
You don't think of plain? I think most people are like, Vanilla wars were fought over like... I think they're like plain. It's the plain setting.
It is notably much warmer than the default setting. It's very strange. And then from there you have the stylized looks. You have Editorial, which is much more contrasty, like really contrasty. You've got Velvet, which is Velvia Fujifilm simulation. By the way, they wouldn't tell me that. They said these are not film simulations but they're film inspired. It's very clear to me and Isaac Reynolds is a big Fujifilm person too. So it's like pretty obvious. Velvet is Velvia, which is a high saturation, high contrast. There's Classic, which is Classic Chrome on Fujifilm, which is low contrast, which looks pretty nice. There's Digi, which is a digicam simulation.
That obviously was such a strategic move because digicams are so... Just make that the default, right? I think if they just marketed the Pixel as like the digicam phone that they would double their market share. 2% baby. That's really... talk about that at all. And in the event they didn't talk about it much. I'm so surprised. If they had just been like, you don't have to buy a G7X. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. For $1,200. Yeah. Right. Like if you're an influencer on the make and you think you need a G7X, just push this button and we will effectively recreate a pop-up flash G7X experience. Yeah. Yeah, I think they would have been great.
There is a Black Tie setting which is... I don't know why they call it Black Tie, but it's black and white. They should have just called it black and white. And for the film photographers out there, they have a bunch of filter processing settings too. So they have a red filter, a green filter, a blue filter, a yellow filter, an orange filter, which on black and white photography effectively changes the contrast of certain tones in the scene. So if you know what you're doing, you can make it look cool. There's Minimal which does less processing. So what I really want to get to here is the fact, in the most Google way possible, they are intelligently doing less computational photography based on the default setting that you change. So if it's Minimal, if it's Black, if it's Digi, whatever, they're already doing like less image bracketing to have less information in the shadows and less sharpness, things like that. But also when you change the settings like the contrast, the highlights, the shadows, the vibrance, the tint, the warmth, the sharpness, what all of these settings contribute to the amount of bracketing that they do when they do that computational photography HDR.
I mean, that's fascinating that even when you're telling them to dial it down, right, there's no just like off mode, right? This is what they're saying. They're saying like we don't believe in the...
There are a couple modes that are more obviously off like the Minimal mode.
Is Digi off? Because the whole point of the digicams is shooting a single frame and letting things flow out.
Digi is not quite off because it feels sharper but also lower contrast, but it is definitely less HDR bracketing. That's what Isaac told me. And it's dynamic.
Just to say it out loud for people who aren't huge... Why are you listening to this if you're not a camera? HDR bracketing is when you just take a bunch of frames and you layer them, right? You take the frames at different exposure and layer them. And I think the iPhone does like nine or 12. I don't remember how many the previous Pixel did.
More every year basically. Yeah.
Yeah. It's a spec race in how many frames you're taking at how many exposures. And so you take one that's really, really underexposed and then you take like 50 frames and progressively higher exposures until you're really overexposed and you merge them together to get that flat HDR look. You're saying Google is intelligently saying, 'What if we just took three?' Yeah. How are they making those decisions? Are they obvious to you? I find this whole thing...
Not something that they will make obvious to you, which is actually a theme in the Pixel. There are multiple things in this new phone that they do not tell you exactly what is happening or how to make it work. And we'll maybe get to that later with the Gemini intelligence stuff, but yeah. So these are camera presets and what they're doing is they're screwing with basically a tone mapping, right? Because they have less information.
You mentioned Apple's tone control. Yeah. And I think you described it as brightness and contrast. I think that's basically how it feels to people.
Apple's description of that technically is that that is a tone mapping control. Right. They have the big stack of photos at different exposures and if you move the tone control around in Styles, you change how much tone mapping is happening. Right. So you allow things to blow out, you allow shadows to get underexposed. Like you basically just allow clipping to happen. I have actually mapped the tone control to my camera button. Which I think is going away. It's going to make me really sad. And that's the only control I use on my iPhone is I change tone all the time.
Oh, interesting. Because sometimes you just want a contrasty art photo and sometimes you just want everything to be fine. And...
I never put it in the middle. It's always like negative 100 or 100.
Right. In the way that every slider is always kind of maximal. Yeah. Does the Pixel feel that way like you're just changing how a bunch of frames are cooked or does it feel meaningfully different?
That's the main thing. Especially with their artistic styles, like the main thing that you're going to see a difference in is the tone mapping, but they also do big like hue shifts and stuff like that. Like the Editorial look and the Velvet look, much more saturated, the hue is different, things like that. And then when you... they give you a lot more settings than the iPhone does. Because the iPhone is just sort of that 2D matrix that changes a bunch of things. On this one, you get, let's see, you get contrast, highlights, shadows, vibrance, tint, warmth, sharpness. There's a grain setting which is simulated as well annoyingly. But yeah, it's strange. It's clear that like...
Wait, sorry. You want like real noisy digital grain. You want like...
It depends. I mean blocky artifacts. In Google, like Fujifilm basically, they scanned a bunch of actual film and did like frequency separation. And I'm guessing that's exactly what Google did too because that's exactly what they would do. And Isaac's also a nerd like that. So the other part of this that I think is very complicated and very tricky is that Google does not have a developer ecosystem to rely on when it comes to offering these kinds of options to users, right? On the iPhone, if Apple doesn't get it right, which like they kind of didn't, you have all of these other apps that are willing to give you incredibly detailed tools to tune your camera, right? ProRAW has become an ecosystem of an idea and you just cannot get that on Android. There are like a couple of apps that try it. They don't work with every phone. They don't have as much detail. And so there's this real, I think very interesting problem for the Google camera team where if they don't provide these tools, they pretty much don't exist. And then they have to decide, okay, how much are we actually going to expose to every single user who buys this phone? Are we going to give them the tools that the super nerds who would go and find a specific app on a different platform would download? And it seems to me that they've actually given quite a bit of detail, of control here despite the fact that this is built into the default camera app for everybody. Yeah. And you can still also shoot pure RAW on the Pixel, which you cannot do on the iPhone yet. It's ProRAW. So that's a big deal in my opinion. Although Apple likes to move every single year. They like to offer a little bit more of a pure RAW experience, but just they'll never get there. I think they might this year. That's a whole another conversation. But yeah, Google's definitely at the point where it's like, okay, we have to offer a certain level of pure control to the user on the camera because otherwise, who's doing it? How can we compete?
We should talk about one other thing on the Pixel camera, which is that last year, and actually Nilay, you were out for this last summer, so I didn't get to hear your... I have a feeling you have passionate feelings about this. They added an AI-powered Zoom. It was to 100x last year. Now it's to 120x. How is it? And has it gotten any better? Because last year it was a mixed bag, to put it politely.
Yeah. I'm going to show you a couple photos. Yeah, in some cases it's good at creating text. In some cases it's just really not.
Well, this is the thing. I scoured the internet for photos of these 100x zoom shots and there are some that I was like this is incredible, right? Like there's just like a little more texture here and it smoothed out some sharp edges and it looks great. And then other times there's just garbled text and you're like, 'Oh, this is just pure AI. This is fully made up.'
Rooftops and it was just going... in Lisbon. There was a beer bike really far away from me. That's just something they have in Europe during the summer. Obviously, you know, it got some of the sharpening semi-correct on this, but then when you look near the bottom here, I don't know, 'be bore, Billy,' right? I am very uncomfortable with that. Yeah. Yeah, that's really bad. It's really bad. You know, but on this top part, which is a little bit bigger, at least you can make it out. It's something. I could not see it with my eyes for what it's worth.
Is that the standard? I mean, here we go. Let's just do it. Is it... I will confidently hallucinate something you cannot see and verify.
At least I got a photo. This is what I mean about these cameras have been designed to always generate a photo. Yeah. In a way that I don't know, film cameras sometimes just didn't get a photo. Yeah. Right. If you like pick up an old SLR, load it up with film and you don't mess with the settings. Sometimes you're just like, well, I took a bunch of overexposed frames and no photos were taken today. Yeah. Yeah, these cameras, these companies have got it religiously in their bones that they have to generate photos. Yeah. Like you have to be, you have to look at something. And I think that's led them to be like, 'Yeah, you can just hallucinate the text.' Like you zoomed in, there's got to be something there. If we show them blurry nonsense, everyone will get mad. And so we'll just make up some letters. Yeah. Because we're like five generations into making up letters. Yeah. Yeah. And the letter generation has not gotten better as you can see in this Lisbon photo.
And that's even actually maybe the funniest thing of all, like the models are solving unsolvable math problems but we can't accurately detect the words 'beer bike.'
Yeah. There's one I want to show you here. This one there was a reflection and it just made anime stars on the reflection which I found very funny. I mean I find that this is way better. Yeah. Yeah. And I mean, for what it's worth, like the upscaling of the roof tiles looks good. Like the text, the things where it's like, okay, this fundamentally changes the point of what I'm looking at. Those are the bigger issues. I would say...
This is what I find so complicated about this where it's like, okay, yeah, they just smoothed out the roof tiles. Like that feels like a regular, I don't know, cleaning algorithm in some way. That's just upscaling. But then it's then you see the letters and you're like, no, no, they're actively changing things here.
Something that's funny on the phone too is that you can't, when you transfer the image files to the computer, you can't, you don't have this data anymore. But somewhere in the container on the phone, it will show you what the photo was like before the upscaling happened. And it's really bad.
I mean, I bet you're... 12 from a 5x optical is like kind of a lot from a teeny tiny sensor. Yeah. So, I mean, that's as close to you're barely taking a photo as exists, right? Yeah. You're just saying, 'Look, I'm standing in Lisbon. There's a beer bike over there. Generate an image for me.' Yeah. And you're handing it the barest amount of sensor data. Yeah. To do that generation. And you're very close to being over the line. Yeah. It's getting close. How many actual pixels could possibly be viewing this image at that distance, right? It's like, yeah, this is not a lot. 4x4 grid. Not a lot. And purely inventing. It's actually just one pixel is actually looking at this. Yeah. My curiosity about all this is one, I think Google can lean way harder into this is the most artistic phone camera you can get. It will allow you to express yourself in the most creative ways. They don't have the market share. They have nothing to lose. Yeah. Yeah. True. And they don't really market this feature at all. Yeah. And then over here there's the AI tools and all the other AI stuff they're doing. And I think they've realized they should back off of that, right? That what they're putting it in front of people now is a bunch of artistic decisions, not a bunch of when you take this photo we will detect that there's a stray dog in the background and remove the dog on your behalf, which is what all these companies have been doing for several years. I wonder, do you, David, do you think like the backlash of what is a photo, are these real pixels, is this reality, do you think that's getting to them?
I think that the backlash of AI in general is getting to them because the features that got added to the Pixel this year, almost none of them are GenAI features and the ones that are are very much hidden underneath all the other stuff like Rambler, which we'll get to, is like a new voice model that writes for you and gets rid of filler words and all of this stuff. And it is using Gemini, but they don't really talk about that. You know, they present it as this way to just like you can have filler words and it'll cut them out and it's easier and it's faster, but they don't say like, oh, this is AI-powered.
Do you want to talk about Rambler a little bit more? What does it do? Because this is actually, it's this small feature and I feel like it has gotten the most buzz of all the stuff that they've added. Rambler was actually my favorite feature on this phone, which is funny.
So it's voice to text. It's voice to text. The Pixel has always had the best voice, I mean, in my opinion, the best voice to text on phones. The iPhone was really sad because iOS 27 was supposed to have advanced voice dictation and it changes nothing. I do not understand. It's part of the new Gemini like AFP core or whatever it's called, the Apple phone pro, I don't know, the new model on the iPhone that is the advanced model and it is supposed to make it way better and it just doesn't do anything. Rambler is this kind of incredible new feature that there are some areas of it where I feel like they're kind of tricking your brain because regular voice to text you can see the words coming on the screen as you're talking. Rambler, it doesn't show you anything until you finish and then you hit end and then it just all pops up instantly, which is because it's secretly AI. Yeah. Which they could just be showing the rearranging in real time, but I do feel like there's something where they want to be able to just pop it up all at once and trick your brain into thinking it's happening faster than it is. But it got to the point where I could effectively just talk at the speed of thought and hit end and it would instantly be there and it would have gotten rid of every little kind of like, oh, um, I mean this because when you're thinking, you're not always thinking in the most concise way.
You know what I do think it's very fascinating that in their implementation and in the scale of the features that they're adding, they are kind of pulling back on AI. And maybe that's because of the backlash. Maybe it's because they're recognizing the limitations of these tools. Yeah. Right. Like text to speech, cleaning that up. That is a thing that they can do pretty regularly, pretty well. Yeah. Isn't this just Whisper Flow? There's like 50 apps that can do this.
It is. But every time I've used Whisper Flow on a smartphone, it's really freaking annoying because you have to like change your keyboard in order to invoke it like every time. And it's practically the same thing. Yes. But like being built into the phone is a whole separate thing. If Apple had actually made their feature work, I would have been surprised.
I think we're like legally obligated to say iOS 27 is still in beta. It's still in beta. They could fix everything tomorrow. David, it's true. The next beta could make everything great. That's true. And vault Apple into the lead. Fair enough. I really love the idea of Rambler. I mean, the idea that Whisper Flow needs to be invoked with the keyboard. There's a bunch of companies that truly believe that replacing your keyboard is their way to get around Apple and Google's restrictions. Yeah. Like Superhuman believes this. Yeah. And I just feel bad for them. Like the operating system vendors will kill you. They're going to kill you. They will find a way to kill these things. Is Rambler good enough to compete with what people like out of apps like Whisper Flow? Because they've been so good that people will go through the steps and jump through the hoops.
Yeah. I mean, I think that people mostly probably use Whisper Flow in their laptops, right? I haven't seen a lot of people talking about how great Whisper Flow is on their phone. So in my opinion, yes. Like, I've only had it mess up like once or twice. It doesn't cut out curse words, which is nice. And it does do like weird spellings of things like proper nouns, like all these things that or like product names, things like that that might be spelled weird, it generally gets correctly, which I was surprised about.
Good. Does it work offline?
It does work offline. So it's mostly offline, but some of its full capabilities, like it'll rewrite things for you if you want. So you can use it once and you dump all of your thoughts into it. And during that process, you can say, 'Oh, actually, I meant this.' And it'll just pop up when you're done. It'll all be correct. But if you want to change kind of the tone of it, I don't know. This is where the AI stuff comes in, which I'm like, I don't care for these stylistic rewrites and stuff. But once you've already done all of your writing, then you can press it again and you can say, can you change the tone of this? That uses cloud stuff, which is weird. I don't really know why Gemini Nano on the phone is fine with just the dictation and then it has to go to the cloud. I guess it's probably a more powerful model similarly to Apple's. But yeah.
All right, we got to take a break. We're back. We're going straight into Brendan Carr is a dummy. Everybody's favorite podcast within a podcast. Support for the show comes from Bitwarden. Quick gut check. How many of your passwords are actually strong and unique? If you had to think about that for more than a second, today's sponsor is for you. Bitwarden is the trusted open-source solution for passkey, password, and secrets management. Built to make secure password management accessible to everyone. With its free forever plan for individuals, you can create, securely store, and autofill strong, unique passwords across all your accounts and devices. So you never have to remember dozens of complicated logins or rely on the same password everywhere. It also makes signing in faster by securely autofilling passkeys, passwords, payment cards, and identities on virtually any device. Behind it all is end-to-end encryption that helps protect your information from phishing attacks and data breaches. Get started with a basic free plan for individuals or protect your business today with a free trial. Visit bitwarden.com/vergecast to get started today.
All right, we're back. Nilay, we usually save Brendan Carr is a dummy till the end of the show. We leave that passion. We let it get pent up. There's too much this week.
Also, Pierce isn't here to stop me. Most importantly, I just want to be clear. He's gone and there's no check on my behavior. And then on top of that, there is a flood of Brendan Carr being a dummy. This week on Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast within a podcast.
You might recall that's the what we would call Brendan Carr original by the viola demba. We're still in the market for theme songs. Send them in. Especially if they have drops. We've had a lot of theme songs without drops lately. And also Travis really does not like the amount of AI slop they're receiving. I'm sorry. I have fun with Suno all the time. I'm not saying it's great or that I feel morally correct about it, but Travis has much stronger feelings not to. All right. Our nation's Federal Communications Commission Chairman, Brendan Carr, has been up to a lot this week, and we're going to end with something that I believe will drive our audience into an absolute frenzy of both fury and despair.
Well, let's start with some simple stuff. This week, a Freedom of Information Act request filed by the advocacy group, Democracy Forward, was published by the Guardian. It's a trove of FCC documents including Brendan's email and calendar. They're users of the Microsoft suite at the Federal Communications Commission. You'll be delighted to learn. As we know, Brendan is just a corrupt dummy, right? He coordinates the White House in a way that he shouldn't as the head of a theoretically independent agency, and he coordinates with a bunch of conservative broadcasters and cable companies to give them what they want and ignores the other companies. In fact, this week, we're going to come to this. ABC is actually suing the FCC because they're so deeply corrupt and such a threat to free speech. But according to these documents between March 12th, 2025 and February 11, 2026, Brendan Carr attended at least eight meetings at the White House and had three scheduled calls with administration officials including chief of staff Susie Wiles and everyone's favorite RFK Jr. RFK Jr. certainly was like, 'Does 5G cause cancer?' Like as far as from what we can tell from these documents, the call is like 5 minutes long. And I'm guessing RFK was just like, I have another conspiracy theory. And Brendan told him, 'We're at Tin Flat. Go away.' We also have Brendan trying to get himself on Fox News, which is really good. He reached out to a booker for Fox and Friends and saying, 'Do you want me to come on to talk about TikTok legislation?' And he shared links of his previous appearances on Fox News to prove that he'd be good on TV.
I think that's kind of adorable. I think it's nice that he's proactively reaching out to Fox being like, 'Guys, can you let me on? Look what a bad job we're doing.'
He wrote, 'No worries at all. There's nothing to make sense.' And the Fox booker reported there was no availability for him. Which is rough. Oh man. That's just funny on its face. But as I keep pointing out, all of Brendan's moves to censor information on the broadcast airwaves are just a trial balloon for censoring information on the internet. And the fact that he wanted to go on Fox News to talk about TikTok legislation is just more evidence that he wants to get way outside of his statutorily prescribed role governing the nation's airwaves and actually start talking about internet content because there's no regulatory authority for him over TikTok whatsoever. There is Project 2025 which he wrote the telecom chapter in in which he would claim that authority but it doesn't exist today. So I just Brendan trying to get on Fox News to talk about regulating TikTok. Just more evidence of his actual plan. And when I say more evidence, I mean more evidence today because you can literally go read the plan. You can just go read Project 2025 which he wrote in which he would take claim over content on the internet.
Brendan leaving his office and going on shows and podcasts has not gone well for him either. Right. That's like him going out and issuing his vague threats against Jimmy Kimmel and then everybody being like, 'This is very transparently not what you're allowed to do.'
Oh, yeah. And this, like I said, we're going to talk about the ABC lawsuit in one second. This is going to come up. It's nice that that's not even the lead. It's going to come up that he's going on television and saying things like, 'We can do this the hard way, the easy way.' By the way, speaking of Kimmel, he met with the Sinclair Broadcast Group chairman, David Smith. Sinclair is the local news broadcaster that preempted Kimmel in many markets around the country. He also met with, of course, Lachlan Murdoch, the chief of Fox Corporation, and he's met with like many, many other conservative broadcasters as well. So he's meeting with the conservatives. He's meeting with the White House. He's issuing his little proclamations, and he's begging to get himself on Fox News. That's the documents. Then, there is the court case. So, ABC this week sued the FCC over their campaign of threats, particularly around Kimmel and around pulling The View. ABC's lawsuit is just strident here in a way that I think is good. I'm glad that we have a big media company standing up to the Trump administration in this way. It's been a long time coming. So ABC Disney says the consequences of the administration's campaign against free speech reach well beyond ABC. If the administration gets its way, the message to every media company in the country will be unmistakable. Tell only the stories the administration deems favorable or face the coercive machinery of the federal government. In such a world the press can in no way be described as free. That's just straight from Brendan Carr is a dummy. I just want to be clear. We've been saying this on this show for like two years now. The FCC has responded to this. You will love Brendan's response to this. 'Disney is obviously very concerned about the FCC's proceeding as evidenced by their ongoing campaign of disinformation.' I like this. I like that the FCC is like ABC is doing Russian disinformation. How often we have got Brendan has gone on the air and literally said things like you can do this the hard way or the easy way or pulling the licenses early or threatening The View. I don't think that's disinformation. I think those are just the things that are happening.
I'm also... Is anyone in the conservative ecosystem even supporting Brendan Carr on this one? Like...
No. This is the thing like the conservative ecosystem is so happy to jump on Disney for any perceived slight and I am not seeing that when it comes to this lawsuit because he is just so transparently in the wrong here. It is incredible. Every week, Nilay and the Wall Street Journal editorial board agree that Brendan Carr is way out over his skis and the power of the FCC is being outrageously wielded to tamp down on free speech. That is very much present in the conservative media ecosystem. A bunch of conservative commentators and former FCC officials have all gotten together and written letters and filed lawsuits and amicus briefs in these cases saying, 'Look, if you let the conservatives do it to the perceived liberal media outlets this time, when the liberals take power, they will do it to us.' And the thing that they are trying to say without saying it too much is conservative talk radio is under threat. Right? If you start letting the FCC reach into what's happening on broadcast, the thing you would immediately do if the other side wins power is go after conservative talk radio and say, 'These aren't bona fide news programs. They don't get exceptions. They have to abide by the equal time rule.' And then you're off to the races because talk radio is dominated by conservatives. So there's a lot of wariness in that side. We get emails from those folks all the time asking us to point it out more often because I think they know they can't say it very loudly, but we can say whatever we want. We're on podcasts. You can't regulate us, Brendan. All right. So that is the shape of the legal situation. We know Brendan is meeting corruptly with the White House, with conservative broadcasters. We know ABC is suing the FCC over the threats to free speech. We talk about that stuff in regards to Brendan all the time. That's normal. That would be a normal Brendan Carr is a dummy segment. We would do that in the third segment. The reason I've elevated this over David's protestations from the grave is the FCC actually took action this week that I find to be infuriating. And in a normal time I would have actually just made this a segment all unto itself. So part of the crisis in government since COVID is a desire to say things are better by changing the standard by which we measure them. That's just a big idea right there. COVID will go away if we just stop testing. Keep that idea in your brain. Like there's something in the conservative mind that has held on to that idea forever. If we just change how we measure things, we can declare victory. This week, Brendan Carr's FCC eliminated the benchmark to bring gigabit internet to Americans. That was the standard set in 2024. We're going to do gigabit internet for everyone. Brendan Carr's FCC got rid of that. Brendan's logic here is that holding internet providers to gigabit speeds unfairly prejudices wireless and satellite. Oh my god, this is really good. Here's a quote. 'As part of our return to following the plain language of section 706, we propose to abolish without replacement the long-term goal of 1,500 megabits established in the 2024 report.' That's 1,000 up 500 down. 'Not only is a long-term goal not mentioned in this section, but maintaining such a goal risks skewing the market by unnecessarily potentially picking technological winners and losers.' This is incredible because the technological winner here is fast internet and the loser is slow and he's like, 'What if you had horrible slow internet? That's all the statute says you need to have. We're not going to put a speed goal here because then any internet counts, including most importantly his friends at Starlink.' This is very good. The FCC said that comments submitted by the cable industry group NCTA and the wireless industry group CTIA support their reasoning for polishing the long-term goal, which again is holding them to speed requirements unfairly prejudices them.
Because their technologies suck compared to fiber.
But they do that, right? Like that feels like a notable reality that if you want good speeds, you just need better technology. Like you should hold them to that.
They should figure it out.
I don't understand what agency does this man think he's running.
So they've gotten rid of all the standards. I mean, this is what the FCC should do, right? They should promote faster speeds and lower prices.
If you get rid of the standards, if you eliminate COVID by ceasing to test for it, you suddenly get to claim victory. And so what did NCTA, the cable industry, and the CTIA do this week?
They declared victory. NCTA put out a press release: FCC's 2026 broadband report. Faster speeds, lower prices, more choices. So we've changed the standard of measurement, and now we have declared victory.
It's extremely... 97% of Americans now have access to broadband. At what speeds? 100 down, 20 up.
Hooray. We did it. The share of rural Americans lacking 120 megabits access has declined over two years. Rural deployment is nearly universal once satellite is included.
Oh my god. Congratulations.
We've just declared victory. We had a standard. It was very high. It was hard. It was pushing the industry to succeed. We've eliminated the standard. We've allowed the industry to pick 120. 100 down, 20 up is a standard, and they've declared victory. They've also now declared victory in mobile 5G access for some reason. Mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous. What is the standard for 5G? Remember what the promises of 5G were? Remember what they promised you? You would be doing robot surgery in a self-driving car in VR with zero latency. The industry itself is now saying mobile 5G access is now ubiquitous. 95% of Americans now have access at 35 down, three up.
This is brutal. This is brutal. We got rid of the standard and the industry has defined it down. In 2026, we're declaring victory at 35 down, three up for our mobile broadband networks. I just want to remind you all that 5G was supposed to definitively defeat China. If we didn't get to 5G, China would win something. 353. This is brutal.
All right. There's more from this victory lap because we've defined this down to 100 down, 20 up, and 35 down, three up for 5G. 77% of Americans now have access to three or more fixed broadband services at 120. I live in New York. Jake, you and David live in New York City. These are highly dense urban environments. Do you feel like you have massive competition for your broadband providers?
So in my building, we have one wired connection. I can't get FiOS. They're next door. They won't come to us. I've tried. They won't come to us. We do have other options if we want fixed wireless, right? If I want to pretend that T-Mobile is a reliable home internet provider, then technically I have a million competitors, right?
By the way, the fixed wireless services are competition. There is evidence that Comcast and Verizon are turning customers to them because they can offer lower prices and almost immediate deployment.
Which is great. Which is great. I would just like them to be reliable and fast and cheap. And none of that is real. I mean, I have FiOS and that's all I can say.
Yeah, congratulations. Yeah, I also have FiOS. They didn't... What the heck, guys? I'm sorry. They technically didn't offer it in my building either, but because I live in a cellar, they were able to drill it through the ground directly into my apartment.
You have like illegal FiOS.
Directly into my apartment.
Oh yeah. I went online, it said, 'We do not offer it in your building.' And I called them and they're like, 'We can make that work. You can drill a hole through the cement.' That's what they did.
I can't say that I have shopped around a lot because FiOS is... Yeah, I don't know if I can say this, but it's reliable and fast and relatively cheap.
You can say whatever you want.
Can I say that? I find it to be pretty good. The absolute lowest FiOS service is 300 up and 300 down, and that's all I need and it's the cheapest one. And yes, I could have gigabit, but like why? So yeah, every now and again we have gigabit and every now and again I look at paying for more like two up and two down. I think Optimum is here. Optimum is a little flaky here, but they offer five up, five down.
How many remote surgeries are you doing over there, Neil?
Every day I'm cutting eyeballs in VR in my self-driving car. Here's this last little bit from the cable industry issuing a triumphant press release because Brendan Carr changed the standard for victory. And this is my favorite one of this. 90% of all cable mobile data traffic. What does that mean? Cable mobile data.
Cable mobile data traffic now runs over Wi-Fi.
This is AI 5G all over again.
Enabling cable mobile providers to deliver compelling savings and greater competition in the wireless marketplace. I think what this means is that, you know, Comcast has like a bundle plan to get you like they like MVNO, Verizon or whoever their partner is.
Yeah. But most of their customers are at home most of the time. Yep.
So 90% of the traffic is running over Wi-Fi connected to Comcast and that is cable mobile data traffic.
So they're patting themselves on the back for not having to pay money to... 90% of cable mobile data traffic now runs over Wi-Fi. This is an incredible thing to say. This is basically just like most people are at home most of the time.
Fine. They go on to say the average home connects roughly 25 devices or Wi-Fi. That number is projected to nearly double by 2030. And then they go on to congratulate Brendan Carr for unlicensing the 1200 megahertz 6 gigahertz band and saying that's what enabled all this cable mobile data traffic. I only point out that Comcast this week announced that it's going to turn all of its routers into motion detectors in people's homes using all this extra spectrum. And no one likes this idea. So it's the idea that everyone in America upgraded their Wi-Fi to 6 gigahertz Wi-Fi and that's what's driving a massive surge in connected devices and then we should congratulate ourselves. This is all nonsense. Just like fundamentally what we did in our country was we removed the goals and we allowed the industry to congratulate itself for delivering slower speeds at higher prices. Most people's prices have actually gone up. Allowed them to claim there are now more competitors because we've expanded the definition of competition to include many, many low-speed vendors nobody cares about. And then on top of it, we've allowed them to claim that cable mobile data traffic exists and make some viable competitors in wireless. This again is pure nonsense. And I would just connect it to if we stopped testing, the COVID would go away. If you stop measuring the goal, if you stop literally saying what the goal is, anything is possible. And this is as clear an example of that happening in our government over the past, you know, five years as anything. We got rid of a goal to make all of the broadband be 1,000 down, 500 up. And we are now issuing press releases about Americans getting 5G at 35 down, three up, which is brutal. I was getting that on LTE a decade ago. Yeah.
And there's press releases about it today.
Whatever happened to the what was it called? The internet that they put in your phone that was like stupidly fast and only at stadiums.
What the heck even have in a millimeter wave?
Millimeter wave. It does exist in stadiums.
5G accomplished exactly one thing.
It's live streams of Taylor Swift concerts at scale.
So you can watch any concert almost anywhere in the world.
Right. When they're happening live because the millimeter wave networks in the stadiums exist and work. Nothing else about 5G is functional.
Yeah. Sorry. If they had said the race to 5G was about live streams of Taylor Swift concerts, I think people would have really been on board with that.
It would have been fine.
It really would have been fine.
Raise my taxes. Let's go.
Is the one thing Americans can agree on, you know, considering so many of these companies have rolled out so much low-band 5G, which the primary purpose of that is to release congestion on the 4G networks. I get people coming to me all the time saying, 'Why is my internet so slow? It says 5G.' And I have to break the news to them that you were lied to. There was a giant campaign and they told you that it would be 5G Taylor Swift concerts at millimeter wave and no...
No, it's three up or three down.
Like can you imagine being the person at NCTA who typed that line into the press release proudly? 97% of Americans have three up.
They're so happy. They're watching TikTok on the road and they feel great about it.
Can you play Fortnite on your phone at three up? I don't know.
Yeah, that's what people are caring about. They don't need to win. They're just like, look at this connectivity, America.
Stop measuring it, it goes away.
And that's literally what I'm saying. We changed the standard of measurement. In fact, we didn't even change it. Carr eliminated the standard of measurement because he said picking 1,000 down, 500 up unfairly prejudices certain technologies.
Like fiber over Starlink.
So here we are, 35 down, three up. Congratulations everyone. We won the race to 5G. We've defeated China, which remains resolutely defeated. Every day the Chinese government issues sad press releases about how they can't possibly provide three up internet to their citizens. And Brendan Carr remains a dummy. Brendan, if you would like to come and defend this press release from what effectively is your organization at this point, you're welcome on this show on Decoder. I would love to talk to you about the nature of measurement. I could bring on James Vincent, former Verge reporter James Vincent, who wrote an entire book about the politics of measurement called Beyond Measure, which I highly recommend. I don't think you can take him. He's a charming British person. He will defeat you running away. That's just an open offer. Or you can just debate me. I think I can take you, Brendan. You're always welcome. That has been Brendan Carr is a dummy. America's favorite podcast.
Brendan Carr.
The Gregorian chant really is my favorite one.
It's really good. Well, it feels good to win. And with that, we got to take a break. We're back. It's time for the lightning round.
All right, we're back. It's time for the lightning round. And you know what? I'm power tripping. I'm just going to go first here because we have to talk about the fact that Apple leaked its own product. Something that is not expected out until next year. A pair of AirPods with cameras in them.
Yeah, there was a little video clip of them. You can't actually see the cameras, but you can see somebody talking to the cameras. Can we roll the clip?
