We've talked many times on The Vergecast about the dream of the perfect charger. We call it The God Cable, and imagine it would charge everything, at full optimized speed, no matter what you plug in. Well, one company tried to make it – sort of. TwelveSouth founder Andrew Green joins the show to talk about how his company developed its newest product, the PowerCord, and why actually the God Cable might be both impossible and a bad idea. After that, The Verge's Tina Nguyen joins the show to talk about her experience at Bitcoin 2025 in Las Vegas, the rise of $TRUMP, and how crypto and the government became so intertwined. Finally, we answer a question from the Vergecast Hotline about AI agents, and the tasks we should (and shouldn't) offload to our chatbots.
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TechTranscript
00:00:00Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of very fast charging. I'm your friend David
00:00:07Pierce, and I currently have a problem I have not had in a very long time, which is that
00:00:12I'm out of podcasts. So I had a friend's wedding this past weekend, which meant all in all
00:00:18between going up on Friday and back on Sunday, I spent like 20 and a half hours in the car,
00:00:24which A, too much, do not recommend. But B, meant that for the first time in a really
00:00:29long time, I just sat there and absolutely cranked through my podcast backlog. Normally
00:00:36I'm sort of oversubscribed to podcasts and I'll like pick and choose as I go. This time
00:00:40I just like opened up Pocket Casts, put on the new releases queue and just jammed through
00:00:45and I finished. That has never happened before. I have listened to all of my podcasts and some
00:00:52of them I'm sure have, you know, back catalogs that I should go back and listen to. And I
00:00:56was listening to a bunch of the Adventure Zone, which is a Dungeons and Dragons podcast that
00:01:00I like. There's like 40,000 of those episodes I haven't heard. So there's like stuff I could
00:01:04do. But I had this very strange experience of getting to the end of my podcasts. It felt
00:01:09like getting to the end of the internet. And it was it was weird and also kind of lovely
00:01:14at the same time. And now I'm like, either I need to go in and get 100 new podcasts, or I
00:01:20need to just revel in the idea that I have finished the internet in one very specific
00:01:26way. That said, I think I'm going to do the first thing. So if you have really great podcast
00:01:29recommendations, please do send them my way. I'd love to hear them. Anyway, this is a podcast,
00:01:35but we are not here today to talk about podcasts. We're here today to do two things. First, we're
00:01:40going to talk to Andrew Green, who is the CEO of a company called 12 South, which makes gadget
00:01:44accessories about basically the company's recent adventure to try and perfect the charging
00:01:50cable. It's a tricky thing. And it's a thing we've talked about a lot on this show. And
00:01:5412 South tried to do it. So we're going to talk about it. Then Tina Nguyen on our team
00:01:58is going to come on and talk to us about crypto and particularly how crypto and the Trump
00:02:03administration and the tech industry all have gotten sort of smushed together. She
00:02:09was at a Bitcoin conference last week, called us from her hotel room in Vegas. And we're
00:02:14going to talk about it. We also really fun hotline question about AI agents, lots to get
00:02:18to lots more to come. All of that is coming up in just a sec. But first, I'm going to
00:02:24go listen to more podcasts because I'm sure in the time that I've been doing this, more
00:02:28have shown up. So I'm going to I'm going to go refresh the queue. We're going to see
00:02:31how we're doing. This is the Verge cast. We'll be right back. All right, we're back. So
00:02:39we've talked a bunch on this show in the past about this thing that we call the God
00:02:43cable. Basically, we've talked a lot about the sort of sneaky mess that is the USBC
00:02:49standard. The idea that all of this is supposed to be standardized. The theory that all you
00:02:54really need is one cable to charge all of your devices. And if you own more than one
00:03:00device, you know how straightforwardly incorrect that is. And so a question we've been asking
00:03:06and a thing we've been trying to figure out for a long time now is, is the God cable
00:03:10possible? Could you build the one true USB-C cable to rule them all? I think the answer
00:03:18is no, but you know, there's still hope. Andrew Green, who is the CEO of an accessories
00:03:24company called 12South. 12South makes a bunch of really great, mostly Apple-centric accessories.
00:03:29If you've ever used the thing that props up your MacBook vertically that sits next to your
00:03:35monitor, that's probably a 12South thing. And more recently, the company launched this
00:03:40thing. It's just called power cord. And it is what it sounds like. It's power cord comes
00:03:45in four foot and 10 foot versions. And the idea is that you just take this thing out
00:03:50of the box, plug it into the wall and trust that it will charge your devices. I find that
00:03:56really fascinating and sort of complicated, right? They had to go through the questions
00:04:01of what does it mean to make one cable that can do everything? Is it even possible to do
00:04:05one cable that can do everything? So I made Andrew come on and basically just walk us through
00:04:10the process of how it all works. And we started at the very beginning with why build a thing
00:04:15called the power cord at all. Let's hear it.
00:04:19It all began with the first mobile phone, right? The OG Razor, the Sony Ericsson's, the Nokia's.
00:04:27When you got those phones in your world way back in the day, you took out a power supply and you put it
00:04:34in the wall and you took the other side of that power supply and you plugged it into your phone,
00:04:38right? So at the beginning of mobile phones and mobile accessories in general,
00:04:43it was typically a power adapter with a fixed cable that went to the device.
00:04:48Sure.
00:04:49And that was about as simple as it got. And anyone could understand that.
00:04:53Jumping way ahead and to our world today, we're in the world of standards, which is wonderful,
00:05:02USB-A, USB-C, multiple wattage that can go through all of them. And then mobile phones that don't even
00:05:10ship with a plug, right? So compare the simplicity of the first generation of powering and charging up
00:05:19a mobile phone with where we're at today, with immense flexibility, with immense speed and all
00:05:26sorts of things that come with that, but nothing that looks like simplicity, right?
00:05:31Interesting. Like, I think the argument for the way that we've landed now is sort of two things.
00:05:37One, it is a safer and safer assumption every day to assume that everybody has lots of chargers and
00:05:43that maybe adding another charger to the mix is not worth the cost and the e-waste and everything else.
00:05:50And B, that actually assuming everybody wants a dedicated charger for every device
00:05:57is wrong, right? And I feel like, and that's like, you rewind back and the problem with the
00:06:02simplicity of it all was I had to remember which cord went to which thing. And then I had to go
00:06:07unplug the one from the wall for my phone so that I could plug in the one to the wall for my laptop.
00:06:11And like, it is funny in a sense that we've made it both simpler and vastly more complex all at the
00:06:19same time. But I do feel like the idea of having a dedicated separate charger for every single one
00:06:24of my devices is not a good outcome. I don't disagree. Okay. For you and me. Okay. But for my
00:06:32mother-in-law who doesn't want to understand any of this and they go down to the Verizon store of which
00:06:40they're still over 5,000. And they get a new phone that might be replacing a phone that's five or six
00:06:46years old. And they go back to their drawer of things and none of it works. And they're like,
00:06:53why can't I charge my phone? And why doesn't this phone come with the plug? That's fair.
00:06:57Right? And that's a lot of people, dude. That's not you. That's not me. We enjoy the flexibility in
00:07:03that. But there are still millions and millions of people that don't live, eat, and breathe this every
00:07:08day where the simplicity has been lost for them. And a product like the power cord brings that back.
00:07:15Verizon or any other mobility store could hand them a power cord and they know that that person's
00:07:23going to have a flawless experience. There's so many ways it can go wrong with an uninitiated person.
00:07:31They could have their old iPhone 5-watt power adapter, for example, and they could find a cord
00:07:38that connects them. Right? Oh, here's this USB-A that I got with my Razr last month, by the way,
00:07:44that does connect to a C-well. I'll just connect that. And then they're having a horrible,
00:07:48poor experience underpowering their new phone. Right? Or they have a drawer full of A cables and
00:07:55micro-USB cables. They all still have all of those. And so they have a drawer full of stuff that doesn't
00:08:00work with the phone that they just took home from a mobility store next to Walmart. Right?
00:08:06So that I do think, by the way, is a fairly universal experience. And this is something I
00:08:10think you and I probably both deal with too. Like I have a drawer here full of charging stuff.
00:08:15And it's a game of Tetris every single time. Right? I have the wall plug, I have a cable,
00:08:22and I have a device. And figuring out which three of how those things are supposed to fit together
00:08:28in order for this to work in the optimal way is a pain. And you have to do it every single time.
00:08:33And I think I'm very sensitive and compelled by the argument that something should come in the box
00:08:39because I want to be able to take the thing out and plug it in and use it. So when you sit down to
00:08:44make something like that, I'm curious where you even start trying to design a product like this.
00:08:48It's funny. I know exactly. So Apple makes a lot of lovely things. And on iMac, or at least some of
00:08:56the previous generations of iMac, they had this larger plug that had a grounding plug that was
00:09:03unbelievably well-designed and beautiful. The most beautiful plug ever. And it was that
00:09:07triangular one that kind of swooped down. Oh, yeah. I know what you're talking about.
00:09:11Right? Yeah, that was a good one. I haven't seen that thing in forever.
00:09:14I know, right? And I was playing with that. And I was like, well, wait a sec. There's a lot of volume
00:09:18in that overmold of that US-based grounded cable. If you took the grounding off and you didn't really
00:09:27need that grounding, but you still had that cavity of volume in there, could that fit a charger?
00:09:34You know, I'm like, at this point, all the chargers were getting so small. It's like, you know,
00:09:39it's like an arms race to like, you know, cost and size, right? And the charger itself was getting
00:09:45smaller and smaller and smaller. And so honestly, inspired by Apple's several generations back
00:09:51plug that had this beautiful shape, but had volume in there. I'm like, could you fit a charger in
00:10:02there? And if you could fit a charger in there, you could make this like magic all in one again,
00:10:08just for giggles. And so the initial initial idea was the idea that in a larger, but still beautiful
00:10:17overmold of a plug itself, can you hide the charger in that and then connect a cable to where it's an
00:10:24all in one scenario? And so actually when we ended up with this design, it's still kind of a little bit
00:10:31larger than it needs to be because it's hiding a 30 watt charger behind the plug itself. So this design
00:10:37was really interesting because at first we had it going out and then I was working with another
00:10:43designer here, Christina, and she's the one that said, well, let's play with this. I get that we
00:10:49can kind of like kind of hide a charger in there, but we started playing with this and actually she
00:10:54came up with this kind of new shape. And when we saw it, we actually were like, well, that's really
00:10:59cool. That looks like my grandmother's like ironing board plug. Yeah, it kind of does. Right?
00:11:06See, I immediately went like hotel room hairdryer when I looked at it. Fine. Right. But yeah, it's the
00:11:12same kind of thing. Right, right. And so how cool is that? And that's also how we got to cord
00:11:18instead of cable. We kind of decided that cables are dumb things that need to plug from one thing
00:11:24to another. But a cord, again, if your grandmother said, fetch me the ironing board and then plug that
00:11:30cord in. Right. Or you're you're the old vacuum cleaner has a power cord. They never said power
00:11:36cable. Right. Right. And so that's kind of how we started doing on cord is cord was kind of old
00:11:42school for like a permanent power thing that you use. So in terms of the why it didn't exist yet
00:11:48thing, I think my running theory would be that just that it seems like the sort of, I don't know,
00:11:55call it the the cord industry, the cable industry, like whatever you want, has sort of stratified in
00:12:00two separate directions. One is the like, you just buy the anchor thing you find on Amazon.
00:12:06And then on the other side, you have like, the the very expensive Apple cables and the Kevlar wrapped
00:12:13stuff and the like, really sort of durable, cared for high end, very expensive cables that are like
00:12:20several multiples of the price. The sort of middle path you're trying to find is so interesting,
00:12:24because they're either competing on price, or they're in some spec arms race or another,
00:12:31right? Like the the other place all these companies are pushing is is like wattage and
00:12:37milliamp hours of attached battery, right? Like those are the two things you can push on. And
00:12:41everything gets bigger and heavier and faster and like becomes a fire risk and whatever. And I think
00:12:47one of the things that most immediately interested me about the power cord is that it's a 30 watt
00:12:52charger, uh, in in a world where like, I would, when when we always talk about that, we call it the
00:12:58God cable, that's just like the one perfect cable for everything you want to do. It's like that thing
00:13:03it needs to be, it needs to be as fast as like I want I want 200. I want to be able to charge my like
00:13:09cordless drill in 10 minutes on this thing. Uh, but you you went with you went with 30, uh, as a as a
00:13:16sort of catch all for all of your devices. Is that sort of the spec that you start with as you're
00:13:22building this thing out is like how powerful should this thing be? It is a catch all for all of your
00:13:27mobile devices. Sure. It is a catch all for anything currently sold in AT&T or Verizon, right? Uh, going
00:13:35past 30 and you're into laptops and tools and, and a whole nother thing. And that's fantastic, but that's
00:13:42not what this product was. And at 30, we can charge every single thing, uh, in a, in a mobile phone
00:13:49category and even a tablet category and even a MacBook air, but we're not, this isn't the, this
00:13:55isn't that cable. And I mean, like, you know, the plug even today on a 90, isn't going to be this.
00:14:02And, and I mean, and when you're in that space, you're going to also make other decisions that you
00:14:07want multiple ports. I don't think you would want to trap 90 Watts in a fixed cable scenario,
00:14:13like the power cord design presents, but for 30 Watts charging every single thing and a mobile
00:14:19phone category and even a tablet category, 30 Watts is great. It's perfectly fine.
00:14:24As you're thinking about this as sort of a specifically mobile thing, does that make the,
00:14:30the vagaries of the USB-C spec a little easier to work with? I mean, even just to be able to say,
00:14:35here is one USB-C cable that will functionally do all the things you needed to do to charge your
00:14:43devices. I think people, we think of that as like a small accomplishment, but it's actually a pretty
00:14:48big one because USB-C is a weird constellation of different things rather than sort of one
00:14:55individual spec for one individual cable. How do you solve that problem here?
00:14:58So USB-C is still the new thing that even allows us to like do like a solution like this
00:15:03back to like that mobility store. It is only now that that store is full of only USB-C.
00:15:09Sure. Last year it wasn't. Yeah. So even doing something that you can say USB-C will charge every
00:15:16single thing in this store is less than 12 months old. Right. Well, and I think even to say, you know,
00:15:23every cable in this store will charge every phone in this store is in many cases still not true.
00:15:28Correct. And, and so, and that's kind of what I'm, what I'm getting at. Like to, to be able to
00:15:32do this in a genuinely universal way, even with a universal plug, I think is still harder than
00:15:40it gets credit for. That's why they're connected because it's not universal unless they're connected
00:15:46because a person can go in and I mean, they, they've sold solutions, you know, before and they're
00:15:52still separated and you can still get in trouble separated. You're like, Oh, I'll just use my old
00:15:57thing. I can make it fit or I can, I can use this cable and make this fit. So until it's connected,
00:16:04you can't say it's universal. You can't say it's going to work because a person has the ability to
00:16:10go to that drawer and pull out something that's going to like wreck the whole game. Right. So that's,
00:16:16that's one of the reasons why we connected it. There's, there's a bazillion adapters with USB ports
00:16:22on them and, and there's a billion cables and they're all in the drawers that we all have.
00:16:27There was never something that was universally from plug to device, at least in, you know,
00:16:33in recent times that could guarantee that like grandmas could still get in trouble with their
00:16:39other, with the Belkin device that they might've bought from Verizon, uh, in her kitchen drawer,
00:16:44but she cannot with this. We know. And, and by the way, the stores can guarantee that they're
00:16:51going to have a perfect experience with this because of its simplicity, because it's fixed.
00:16:57It actually keeps you out of trouble. But I think trying to figure out, okay, what can we
00:17:02charge for this? That both accomplishes the goal of these users, but also doesn't price these people
00:17:08out. Right. Because if I have a five-year-old phone, I probably don't have a super high tolerance
00:17:12for $129 power cord. No, if we say that we're going to operate in, in a retail compatible pricing
00:17:19structure, all we have to do is to be about the same as them buying it separately, right? Like what,
00:17:25what, what is the typical retail for the cable and the adapter separately that they were going to sell
00:17:32anyway? And as long as we are competitive to that, um, it is what it is. And I mean, and you know,
00:17:37we're going to have like, you know, retail pricing, it's going to be 29, 39, 49. It's going to be that
00:17:44even though this is a unique product, it can't have a unique price. It has to be competitive with
00:17:49doing it separately. And it has to be the right idea at the right time with the right price.
00:17:52Right. And if any one of those three are off, it's a, it's a failed product.
00:17:57Yeah. No, I, I, I agree with that. And that actually, I think maybe answers some of the like,
00:18:01why doesn't this have X, Y, and Z features that I wondered about. And the one I'm particularly
00:18:05curious about was a built-in battery, because I think you could make the case that the exact user
00:18:12you're describing is also somebody who would love to have a little bit of backup power that they
00:18:17don't have to spend a lot of time thinking about that actually, maybe this cord should charge my
00:18:20phone, even when it's not plugged into the wall, at least a little. And my assumption is there are
00:18:26both like price and engineering challenges with that, but I'm curious if that's something you
00:18:30thought about in this process. So no, no way. I mean, cause again, it would blow out the
00:18:35pricing on it. And, and two is, is that the, so by the way, like we always knew we were going to do
00:18:41a long one. It's sold in four foot and 10 foot. In my mind, it was always 10 foot.
00:18:46Interesting. Okay.
00:18:47Right. Because, because back to my mother-in-law, I love her so much. She, she has a place,
00:18:54she has a chair where she watches TV a lot and that's where she charges her phone. And when she's
00:18:59sitting in that chair, she's charging her phone. So like a lot of people don't charge their phone and
00:19:04use it wireless when they're in their place in their home, they have it plugged in. Right. So
00:19:10it has to be this like living cable and like enough to kind of like do that. And so the, the length of
00:19:17the cable was actually part of the design as well, because in my experience, a lot of folks actually
00:19:23plug in and charge their phones in this same space in their living room and their couch. And it was
00:19:28never a mobile kind of accessory and they would never think of carrying that with them if it had
00:19:35a battery. Um, uh, because they're just not going to there. It's going to be where, where their places
00:19:44they're at most of the time in their home is where they're probably going to charge their phone most of
00:19:50the time in the home and they don't even charge it. They just plug it in when they're there just for
00:19:55security. Right. So, I mean, and that, that's an interesting, again, sort of product design
00:20:01thinking question there, right? Like you, you actually are not imagining this thing is going to
00:20:05be unplugged and moved around all the time. This is, this is a thing that will sort of live in the
00:20:10wall. And I think for this, that's not how people think about a lot of their chargers right now. Like
00:20:15you have maybe the one next to your bed. I think everybody has like one permanent charger and then
00:20:19we're all sort of used to carrying around cables with us. Yeah. But so, but like there's these,
00:20:25these huge long cables actually sell crazy, you know, the 10 foots, the 15 foots and stuff like
00:20:30that. Um, and so nobody bundles that nobody puts that kind of thing in there, but that's absolutely
00:20:36a thing. And it's that one, maybe two places that you always want that in your home. That's not what
00:20:42you put in your bag, but you know where it is in your house. There's both sort of a lot to think
00:20:47about in terms of how you make something like this and only so much you can do at the prices you're
00:20:52talking about. Like what, what's something you spent a lot of time trying to match to those things
00:20:57as you were building this? Well, the cable, the cable is going to be a big deal. It's going to be
00:21:01the thing that, that everybody touches the most. So I'd be nice to take your, take your plug and
00:21:06you're going to plug that in and maybe not unplug it for two years. Right. If it's in your, like by your
00:21:11chair, right. Yeah. You might never see it again. You're going to like, you know, you're going to touch
00:21:16this cable over and over and over again. And if you have a 10 foot one, um, it could get like
00:21:21bunched up and stuff. And so, you know, once you kind of solved all the little questions around this,
00:21:28that it can like hide a charger, that it can actually be a really distinctive little shape.
00:21:33That's really kind of comfortable immediately to people for, for like lots of interesting reasons.
00:21:38Then you run straight to the cable and a 10 foot cable in specific, because you have to solve for
00:21:4410 foot first, and then you just go backwards to four, obviously. Um, and when this was like a
00:21:50little bulkier than some plugs, the cable had to actually kind of like talk to that and like
00:21:57interface with that. And so, um, we didn't want a tiny, thin cable. We wanted kind of a chunky
00:22:03kind of meaty cable that actually kind of like interface with our, you know, plug appropriately.
00:22:10Like if this had like a dinky little cable that looked like a tail, it really wouldn't work that
00:22:15well. And then we had experience with the flat versions of these that they didn't tangle as easy.
00:22:20And so that was like super cool. So, and kind of like making every little element as kind of nice
00:22:26and kind of deluxe as we can. Um, after we solved the functional challenges of this and,
00:22:32and came up, uh, with this kind of fun design that is retro and modern at the same time,
00:22:38we focused our attentions immediately to the cable.
00:22:41Is making a 10 foot cable that works the way you're describing like a meaningfully harder
00:22:46prospect than doing it at four feet or three feet?
00:22:48Yes.
00:22:49How so?
00:22:50Um, uh, power, the, the power traveling over 10 feet needs a higher gauge, um, to do it successfully,
00:22:56or you, you actually have, um, uh, electrical power loss. Um, so you solve all your problems
00:23:01with 10 and then to make it match, you just pair that to four. So, um, right. It's, it's,
00:23:07there's, there's several like meaningful elements that you have to solve in a, in a longer cable
00:23:12adapter, um, combo, uh, like that as simple as just basically buying higher quality materials
00:23:18so that they don't lose the power as they go.
00:23:21It's the thickness of it in there.
00:23:22Interesting. Okay.
00:23:23You see that in Apple's cables, right? And, and like, so like a Thunderbolt four,
00:23:27like when they want to go beyond their kind of typical meter, it starts getting thicker
00:23:32and thicker that that's for gauge. That's for the wire and the thickness of the wire in there
00:23:38to transmit all of that stuff in longer distances requires more pipe.
00:23:43So, okay. So I, I'm, I'm, I, I agree with you and I understand the principle of like,
00:23:48you want to do a specific thing for a specific person, but you've now been down this road deep
00:23:52enough to know the answer as to whether it is even theoretically possible to build the,
00:23:58the God cable that, that we have been talking about. And I have been describing this sort of
00:24:01like one USB cable that works with all of my things. Even you can even be integrated if you
00:24:09want it to, but the, the sort of one thing that I can plug into the wall that will charge everything
00:24:12that I have at every correct speed and every, with every correct version of USB-C that it is just
00:24:19like, this is the one cable I need to charge everything I own in an optimized way. Is it
00:24:24even possible to do that? So one thing that pops up is that used to be Apple's, um, power
00:24:29adapters, like their MacBook power adapters when they were proprietary was the God cable, but just
00:24:34for the MacBook, but nevermind that what's the God cable for, for USB-C now. Um, and what you're
00:24:41saying is I need a hundred Watts, um, permanently into my USB-C. You would be so pissed if I trapped
00:24:48a hundred Watts and something that you can't connect other stuff to because you don't always
00:24:53need the hundred Watts. Right. What I want is 30 and 30 and 30. Right. And that's when you want the
00:24:59flexibility of the multi-ports. That's when the magic of C and these flexible adapters like comes
00:25:04to fruition. You would, you would hate having a hundred Watts trapped in like a permanent cable
00:25:09because it's not always what you need. So once we go there, we are in kind of charging utopia
00:25:15because there's so many options and, and they have batteries and you can run on a picnic table
00:25:20in the middle of nowhere. And there's four ports of everything for everyone. And so, yes, you could
00:25:28do it, but you wouldn't want it because you would want the flexibility of splitting out that much
00:25:33power to other things when you want to do that. Okay. The problem with that approach is it's, it's a
00:25:38much more complicated shopping. That's right. Right. That's like, now I have to make sure that I am
00:25:42buying the right adapter and the right set of cables to go into that adapter in order for all
00:25:47of this work. And then I can only use all of those things together or else it's just going to,
00:25:51it all falls apart again. Well, and so by the way, a lot of people selling devices that need that
00:25:56still do include the plug, all the MacBooks still include the plug. Sure. And that's because when you
00:26:01get to that level and stuff like that, that's still a reasonable expectation. And they want to know
00:26:06that like they have an end to end solution in that box over that price point and solving those big
00:26:11problems and stuff. And so by the way, even Apple offers the double port, when you buy an Air,
00:26:17you have the choice of a 70 or like a two port 30. So I think once you're over $50 or you're over
00:26:26charging small mobile devices, it becomes a little bit of a different game and you would always choose
00:26:34that flexibility. All right. Last question. And then I'm gonna let you go. Tell me about colors.
00:26:38Uh, you, you did black and white, which is like fine. Uh, but why, why not? Why black and white?
00:26:46Why not? You know, other colors or let people choose or get really weird with it. Uh, I have a,
00:26:52I have a deep orange USB-C cable that I love to pieces and I want more people to have weird colors.
00:26:58So why, why black and white? Well, so that's funny. You mentioned that because
00:27:03I, so we released power cord yesterday, right? And we released it. I mean, it's not black and white.
00:27:09It's like dove and, and charcoal or something like that. It's black and white. Sure. You call it a
00:27:16no dude. Listen, this is where we were right up until yesterday. A lot of 12 cells hardware,
00:27:23certainly around power was like our glossy white with red. Sure. And that goes back to like a plug bug
00:27:2915 years ago. And, and so I would say we made a huge step forward yesterday in our charcoal and like,
00:27:37and, and like Heather gray. Um, no, we're not, we're not afraid of that. Um, but you're not going
00:27:43to not do a black one. I mean, listen, you can ask anybody and, um, they can make like 15 colors
00:27:50and the black one still going to outsell it like a million to one. So we're going to, we're going to
00:27:56start out with, with like your, your, your basics and, and to get the job done, but we're not afraid
00:28:02of colors at all. But I would tell you that if we had like a orange, say for example, with the black
00:28:08and the white solutions yesterday, it would have distracted. When we have a new product that has a
00:28:13new idea, we wouldn't want a color to distract from it. And we want to put it out there and make sure
00:28:19that, that we talk about the important parts of the product and its function and its solutions
00:28:24before we get into, and did you see the purple one and the orange one? Okay. But we're not afraid
00:28:29of that at all. Yeah. But so, but you, you just don't want to start with, look at this cool orange
00:28:35USB cable. Right. Cause we would rather talk about the solution first. Yeah, that's fair. And that's
00:28:40typically in basics. Yeah. Color wise. Yeah. No, I get it. I buy it. And I do the, I, I still remember,
00:28:47and I've, I've mentioned this to people before, but like years ago I had a meeting with Lenovo and
00:28:52they had this very cool orange laptop. And I was like, that thing is awesome. Tell me about it.
00:28:56And he was like, straight up, that thing only exists so that people will walk over to the shelf
00:28:59and then buy the black one. It's like, that's why we made an orange one. People will look at it and buy
00:29:03the black one. They're not wrong. And I mean, and like, and so consumers, you know, uh, I mean,
00:29:09I do the same thing sometimes. I'm like, Oh, that's great. I'll take white or, you know,
00:29:13whatever. So, I mean, you know, the, the bold thing is, is to not do that, but you still have
00:29:20to like put something out that like meets people where they're at and, and meets their comfort
00:29:24level. Totally. All right, Andrew, this is great. Thank you so much for doing this. This is really
00:29:28fun. David, this is so fun. Let's do this again. All right. We got to take a break and then we're
00:29:32going to come back and we're going to talk crypto. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes
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00:32:19Tina Nguyen is here. Hi, Tina.
00:32:22Hi, David.
00:32:23This is your first time on The Vergecast. This is very exciting. Presumably for you,
00:32:26but definitely for me. I'm very happy you're here.
00:32:28I have been waiting to be on The Vergecast for the longest time. I have been here for over three
00:32:35months now. And the entire time I'm here going like, do they like me? Will they let me on their
00:32:41podcast? Am I cool? Have I successfully integrated myself into this company?
00:32:47That's exactly the thing we're trying to engender when new people come. But you've made it.
00:32:52Congratulations. You're here now.
00:32:54So stoked.
00:32:54So you're currently in Vegas at some kind of crypto conference, right? Which is like
00:33:00perfect timing for all of what we want to talk about. But tell me about the conference. What's
00:33:03going on? How are the vibes?
00:33:04This is not just like some crypto conference. This is the Bitcoin conference. It is the biggest one
00:33:11in the country. I think it was like one of the first. It's hosted by Bitcoin Magazine,
00:33:15which has now turned into some like weird crypto version of Fox News. I think that people will be
00:33:23bad at crypto if they'd say that it's Fox News. But it has this like extremely broad power over
00:33:31not just the crypto community, but also now this wave of lawmakers that are coming to this thing,
00:33:39this wave of big businesses that are coming to this thing. I was talking to this guy who's been
00:33:45at the conference for like five years and he was like, this is the first time I've seen more people
00:33:49wearing suits than not. Interesting. I believe there are four senators, several members of the
00:33:55House, a whole bunch of like deputy secretaries of the Treasury and whatever people from the
00:34:02administration. David Sachs, who is the White House's AI slash crypto czar. Sure.
00:34:10Was there as well. And I don't know, there weren't points here where I was like, I don't think this is
00:34:16a crypto conference. This reminds me of CPAC and CPAC is the conservative political action conference
00:34:23that used to be the giant hub for every single Republican activist, elected official, what have
00:34:31you to like gather in Washington and, you know, do panels, hear speakers, have an expo floor,
00:34:38super duper Republican. I walked into this conference and there were people in like every variation
00:34:45of MAGA hat that you could possibly find, Steak and Shake was there. There's a really weird thing
00:34:53going on with Steak and Shake. I really would. It's a much longer story, but Steak and Shake was there
00:35:00with a big booth saying Steak Toshi over it because, yeah, referring to the mystical founder of Bitcoin,
00:35:10a dude who goes by Satoshi Nakamoto. But they had a booth there that was showing off how
00:35:17Steak and Shake now accepts Bitcoin. And they were also selling beef tallow. They were selling jars of
00:35:24beef tallow, $9 for a jar of grass fed tallow, $12 for a jar of wagyu tallow. And if you bought a jar of
00:35:33tallow, you would get a hat that said, I need to pull this up because it's one of the more deranged
00:35:38things I've ever seen handed out as merch. Uh, make frying oil tallow again.
00:35:45What? Yeah. Um, sure. Hold on. Um, I hope this, I hope this makes the pod, but like,
00:35:53Oh, it will. Yeah. What on earth? Yeah. This is just like a full, we've completely lost the plot
00:35:59kind of moment that you're describing here. But the thing is, okay, let me, I would like to make
00:36:04the case very quickly that what Steak and Shake is doing is actually like a super normal thing in
00:36:10the Bitcoin community. It feels like I've been seeing that in the crypto world, like for forever,
00:36:14everybody, the, the, like we've started accepting crypto and now we're going to go all in on this
00:36:18because it's like a, some version of a PR win. Sure. What strikes me as very different is the like
00:36:25Bitcoin 2025 turning into CPAC thing. And this is kind of what I want to talk about with you because
00:36:31it feels like that's like a perfect microcosm of a thing that has happened that I still don't
00:36:35totally understand, which is that somehow the, the, the sort of right wing MAGA crowd and the
00:36:42crypto crowd, two groups that you would not historically think would have anything to do
00:36:47with each other or anything that they agree on about how anything works are suddenly all
00:36:51tied up together. Uh, and I want to, I want to talk through some sort of specific pieces of
00:36:55that, but you've watched a lot of this happen. How did this happen?
00:36:59I can talk very thoroughly about the Republican side coming into this. Um, so for people who are
00:37:06listening, I don't know. I used to be a like full fledged political reporter. My beat was the MAGA
00:37:12movement and I had been covering Donald Trump for like vanity fair, Politico on the white house team.
00:37:18I've been covering Trump since 2015. So 400 years ago at this point, it seems 400 years ago,
00:37:26I am this old withered crone of political journalism. So during the 2024 election, uh,
00:37:35Trump actually made this unusual for, I guess, a politician outreach to the crypto community,
00:37:41uh, engaging with people who are in the field, uh, going to the Bitcoin conference last year
00:37:49and not, and then when he won, he actually started implementing policies that were friendly to the
00:37:56crypto community. Um, like removing tax, uh, regulations, removing the, uh, department of
00:38:06justice, uh, crypto tax evasion division. And then like pardoning Ross Ulbricht, who's the founder
00:38:13of the Silk Road, uh, pardoning all these other, uh, crypto bros who had committed SEC frauds.
00:38:20All of a sudden Coinbase, uh, donates $1 million to Donald Trump's, uh, inauguration committee that
00:38:28celebrates him becoming president. Oh man. Wow. I can't believe the SEC dropped its investigation
00:38:34into Coinbase. Whoa. Right.
00:38:37But I remember someone saying on the stage during a panel with like other Republican lawmakers that
00:38:43the crypto community is a very loyal community and they will always remember that someone who did
00:38:51something for them that was beneficial to them did that thing. Uh, now I don't know how long that
00:38:57loyalty will last. And that's sort of the thing that I kind of want to figure out as someone who's new to
00:39:02that space. But the thing is, is that like everyone I talked to who went to, uh, the conference were
00:39:08like, okay, yeah, it's great that these guys are doing stuff for us right now. And it's great to see that
00:39:15like these, uh, policymakers are coming to us and this is not just like a political nod. Last year, you just had
00:39:22Donald Trump show up this year. It's like actual lawmakers, people who are really deep in the weeds. But like
00:39:28what happens when those politicians start trying to regulate you again, what happens when they start
00:39:36going overboard and like have you as a community ceded too much power to said lawmakers, just because
00:39:43they came in and like told you some nice things. There's this one panel that I caught, uh, yesterday
00:39:48that I think it was called like, are Bitcoiners becoming sycophants of the state? Uh, which was,
00:39:55I think what I had been hoping to see, uh, play out on stage, like our people in the Bitcoin community
00:40:03really accepting these Republicans coming in. I do think that there is a really strong strain
00:40:09in the, uh, crypto community of a strong strain of suspicion in this community about the Republicans
00:40:16coming in. Well, and of the government in general. I mean, right there, there's so much of the whole
00:40:21crypto movement that is, is like anarchist in a certain way, right? It's, it's a belief that like,
00:40:25we actually shouldn't trust any government. It's, it's fiat currency. Like that's what they call it.
00:40:29And, and crypto is supposed to be this thing outside of that. And so that's, that's why this
00:40:34tie-up has always been so fascinating to me. But that like, that first sort of trade you describe
00:40:39makes some sense to me, right? Where it's like, okay, the crypto industry is like, well, we have a
00:40:43lot of money and you are regulating us. We will give you some of our money and then you will stop
00:40:48regulating us. And that, that basically happened, right? Like it's in, more or less, they donated a lot
00:40:54of money to Trump, helped get Trump elected. Trump pardoned a bunch of people, removed a bunch of
00:40:59lawsuits, took away a lot of regulation. And then it's like, everybody at that point could have just
00:41:05sort of shaken hands and walked away, right? Everybody got what they wanted. Number went up.
00:41:09Congratulations. But it feels like we're getting deeper and deeper into the ties between these two.
00:41:14And that's the thing you're talking about, like these lawmakers who are like really starting to dig in
00:41:17and care about this stuff and like, make it more of the Republican platform than ever. And that's the part
00:41:23I still can't wrap my head around.
00:41:25So a lot of why I think the Republicans are here is a bit of a reflection of how Donald Trump operates.
00:41:32It's always been a little bit of like, oh, wow, nice thing you've got here. It would be a shame if
00:41:37it disappeared.
00:41:39And I think what you're seeing all these tech companies realize from like Apple and Google and
00:41:45Microsoft to like literally the Bitcoin people is Trump will not be happy if you just give him one
00:41:52thing one time. You cannot just do one transaction. He becomes president. He does this one thing for
00:41:58you. That's it. Like you have to keep feeding that beast. And like generally happens in politics
00:42:03or whatever. Like, but this is the most nakedly brazen way that you've ever seen a president and
00:42:11subsequently the party that he leads do it.
00:42:14Part of me keeps wondering sort of how far this goes, because, again, even that trade, if you're Coinbase
00:42:19and you just want to keep making that trade for four years and hope that you get to the end of
00:42:22this and you still get to exist and the number keeps going up, fine. But then there's like,
00:42:27we have lawmakers who are like, we need this strategic Bitcoin reserve and we want to be
00:42:32the capital of crypto in the world. And Trump seems to be endorsing this. And then there's the
00:42:37whole Trump coin thing, which we're going to talk about, but that feels slightly separate from all
00:42:41of this. I guess, what's your sense, both sort of at this conference and in general, how serious
00:42:48the government is in a bigger way about like really earnestly getting into crypto?
00:42:53There's definitely a faction of the elected officials who really want this. Granted, I think
00:43:00it's to win them support in their home states, but they're like some genuine crypto evangelicals
00:43:07in both in the House and the Senate. Cynthia Lummis, who is the Wyoming senator chairing the
00:43:13Digital Assets Committee, was here. Everyone kind of treated her as a bit of a superstar. I think I
00:43:18saw people taking selfies with her. The administration, on the other hand, is in this really weird position
00:43:22where the evangelists have to somehow convince the rest of the administration that this is actual
00:43:30money that is worth holding on to for a long period of time. So right now, the strategic Bitcoin
00:43:39reserve, which was established through an executive order, is like, all right, we'll establish this
00:43:49reserve. We can fund it with things that the government already has. We cannot buy more Bitcoin unless
00:43:55one of two things happens. One, either act of Congress passes into law. The Congress holds the
00:44:04power of the purse. They can like write into the budget. We will set aside this much money to buy
00:44:10Bitcoin. Much harder thing to convince 400, like 500, 20 something people. Or the government,
00:44:20the administration can find ways to purchase Bitcoin in a budget neutral manner. So something
00:44:27has to get cut in order to fund the government's purchase of Bitcoin. David Sachs was on stage
00:44:34saying we should try to convince Howard Lutnick and Scott Bessent, who lead Commerce and Treasury
00:44:39respectively, that they should just like start cutting some of their programs so that we can buy
00:44:43Bitcoin with the money that they have cut from their programs. Huh? I don't know if that's going
00:44:50very well. And I don't know whether people behind the scenes are willing to actually cut their own
00:44:58budget for the purpose of buying Bitcoin. There is definitely some sort of tension going on behind
00:45:03the scenes between not just like Elon and the administration, because that's obviously the most
00:45:09visible. But this other one that is like a much quieter power struggle behind the scenes over,
00:45:15all right, what are these tech people doing here? What is it they want from us? And do we feel okay
00:45:21giving it to them? Considering how much the Elon thing has blown up into the open it, I don't think
00:45:29they would like that. And I am fascinated to see how much this battle now plays out when the player is
00:45:38someone who is, you know, way more subtle, way less explosive, way fewer chainsaw wielding,
00:45:46like a guy with fewer chainsaws than Elon Musk has.
00:45:50Right. Well, yeah. And I think it's an interesting thing to see happen, this idea that, you know,
00:45:56let's cut all this stuff so that we can buy Bitcoin. And there's, there's a small group of
00:46:00people who I can completely understand why they would be very excited about that. And then there's
00:46:03the question of like, is that, is there any world in which that is a popular idea, except for the
00:46:09people who would like to make their Bitcoin go up? And I don't know, my sense is probably not like,
00:46:15I have a hard time imagining crypto being sort of on its own outside of the money of it all,
00:46:21a winning political battle. But maybe I'm wrong. Maybe that's changing. Maybe there are more people
00:46:26who are like intellectually into crypto than I think that there are.
00:46:29I think they would first have to understand crypto at a much larger scale. And I think that
00:46:34is happening. But it there also is the broader political consensus to consider of like,
00:46:40can you convince enough voters that crypto is real money, that Bitcoin is more stable than all of the
00:46:49other like scammy crypto things that you have seen floating out there? And once you agree that yes,
00:46:55the Bitcoin holds value, that we should protect it somehow. And that's a very complicated thing to
00:47:02explain to people outside of the Bitcoin community and crypto overall. That was what actually, yeah,
00:47:10Lummis was actually saying that on stage that working on the stablecoin bill, she was stalked by how many
00:47:16of her colleagues like still do not understand crypto and stablecoins are, I think, the easiest to like
00:47:24grasp onto piece of technology around crypto because, you know, one stablecoin, one U.S. dollar.
00:47:31We are regulating the amount of U.S. of like one to one units of currency. That should be kind of
00:47:37straightforward if you are like a septuagenarian elected official who was like trying to figure out
00:47:45how to use a flip phone. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It's it's it's something. So speaking of scammy
00:47:52things, before I let you go here, let's talk about Trump coin just for a couple of minutes,
00:47:56because there was this big dinner. You got a bunch of really great reporting on what happened
00:48:01inside of this dinner. But just sort of very quickly walk me through the Trump coin story,
00:48:06because I think there's an argument to be made that one of the reasons Donald Trump cares about
00:48:11crypto in general is that he is very aware of what is going on with Trump coin. So I think these two
00:48:16things are both very separate and I think in a certain way also kind of tied together. So just
00:48:20tell me the story of Trump coin briefly. OK, so Trump coin launches right before his inauguration
00:48:27and all of a sudden this holding company that his sons are involved in, not Trump, of course,
00:48:35and his sons. It's very separate from Trump himself. Launch this coin. Suddenly there's a
00:48:43frick ton of hype around it because that's how meme coins do be. And the price of Trump coin shoots up
00:48:49to like seventy five dollars a token or something. Eventually that crashes to. Yeah, maybe like less
00:48:59and ten bucks. But there's an unlocked schedule that the creators and holders of the majority of
00:49:06Trump coin have to follow. And I think they hold like eighty ninety percent of the actual coin value
00:49:13itself. Everyone else is just trading on the twenty percent. But like their hype around the coin
00:49:17ultimately drives up the price of the entire coin. And then like that increases the paper wealth of
00:49:24what World Liberty Financial and Trump
00:49:28and whatever are holding. But if you're in crypto
00:49:32long enough, you understand that when the people who create
00:49:36the coin start selling their coin after they are
00:49:40able to in the next like ninety day period,
00:49:44several month period, whatever, once they dump their coin
00:49:48and try to sell it at like a higher price, that floods the market. The
00:49:52value of the coin like dilutes. And so this contest, as one of my sources told me, was
00:49:58really timed to keep the price of the coin
00:50:01juiced up as high as possible by ascribing a
00:50:04utility value to it because you can't like buy stuff
00:50:07with Dogecoin. It's just like a meme that you hold and you hope that
00:50:10everyone else gets hyped over it. If you can buy a dinner
00:50:14with the president or like an NFT, you could like win
00:50:18something with this Trump coin, then wow, doesn't that make that coin far more valuable
00:50:23hold? And if you're the top 220 holders of this coin by the end of the contest, you get
00:50:28to have dinner with the president. You get to go to Trump National, which is a golf resort
00:50:35in Sterling, Virginia. It's black tie affair. You will like get to see Trump. It'll be such a cool
00:50:43dinner. It'll be so amazing. And if you think about it in like a surface level way
00:50:51and don't understand crypto at all, you look at this and you're like, wow, this is brazen
00:50:56corruption. Look at all these crypto bros coming in from overseas, spending all of this money to
00:51:01have dinner with the president. But Trump was really only there for an hour. And the only the
00:51:09top 25 people in the contest had dinner with him. Everyone else just got to see him give
00:51:16a speech. Oh, interesting. Yeah. But the actual purpose of the contest was to drive up the price
00:51:23of Trump coin by getting everyone excited about it for something for like a prize. The prize being
00:51:30hang out with the president. To be fair, that does still sound like naked corruption. It's just like
00:51:35it's just clever corruption. Oh, no, no. I'd say this is absolutely corrupt, but it's a much more
00:51:40subtle type of corruption. Like the way I've been trying to explain it to people is that like it's
00:51:46sort of like appraising a house or something. If you can get someone to write down on a piece of paper,
00:51:54this house is actually worth a million dollars and the house is maybe not worth that. In fact,
00:52:01it's like a, you know, like, I don't know, supposed to be bulldozed down and is worth
00:52:09actually nothing. But if someone says this coin is actually worth a lot, you can do a lot with
00:52:13that house's collateral. And it's imaginary money, but like someone believes it's real money. And so
00:52:20like the Trump contest was a way to inflate the asset of Trump coin that is being locked somewhere for
00:52:29like 80 by and owned by several private entities who are not buying this on retail. And the idea is
00:52:36that like if the price is high enough and these guys dump it, they make the money that was going to
00:52:43that the coin is worth when it's high. The moment they dump it, though, that's when it crashed. The value
00:52:48of the coin crashes, which was why I found the story interesting. Oh, that is also another way that the
00:52:55Trump family profits from this contest, which is they collect the transaction fees on every
00:53:00they collect the fees on every transaction made of Trump coin. Oh, interesting. So
00:53:06so, yeah, if there's activity on the coin, too, they make money. It's much more. And if you
00:53:13incentivize people to buy your crypto, you're still going to like there. Some money is better than no
00:53:19money. Yeah, no, I agree. All right. So I should let you go here. But the at the risk of asking
00:53:24an incredibly general question, I am curious sort of how the vibes are shaking out to you right now,
00:53:30again, both at the conference and in general, like in crypto, there has always been the kind
00:53:34of number go up community of people who are like, it is it is good for me and for people I know,
00:53:40if Bitcoin is worth more tomorrow than it is today. So I will do what is required to make it worth more
00:53:44tomorrow than it is today. And then there's the people who are sort of the like true technology
00:53:47believers who are like, think this is sort of interesting internet infrastructure and are
00:53:53really interested in all the things that Bitcoin could be for the internet and the unbanked and
00:53:57whatever. It seems to me that the the number go up community has all the power right now. But are
00:54:04you still seeing sort of the the true believers at these conferences? Like, are there people out there
00:54:10who want to sort of reckon with what it means as a technology? Or is this just a money thing that
00:54:15we're all doing at a conference in Vegas? The technology community you laid out, I think,
00:54:19is still pretty powerful. And it's because crypto relies on actual technology and science in order
00:54:27to continue being mined, continue being made. You need programmers and IT specialists to, you know,
00:54:34man the data centers. You need legislation to pull energy to fuel set data centers. You need lawmakers on
00:54:47the ground who will help like deal with all the people who are really mad that your data farm is
00:54:53now polluting all of their air. There's a real cost to how to make number go up. And I think at some
00:55:01point these tech, the technologists and the number go up people will have to reckon with the fact that
00:55:07you need the technologists to make the number go up. I don't know how that's going to play out,
00:55:12at least from my, like, coverage area in Washington. But I think it's going to be
00:55:21really fascinating. It might be the environmentalists, actually. The environmentalists may want to start
00:55:26getting into this game. Yeah, that makes sense. And it does feel like the deeper this gets into
00:55:32the political community, the more sort of tentacles it's going to have into other things other people
00:55:37care about. Like, we have mainstreamed this stuff in a very sort of specific way that is going to make
00:55:42a lot of people, I think, want to get involved in all of the different sides of it. And I think we're
00:55:47like just beginning to see how weird that might get.
00:55:50It's going to get so weird, especially it's going to be weird, especially when
00:55:56most of the lawmakers in Washington still have no idea how any of the technology works.
00:56:04Everyone's old. It's like a notorious problem in Washington that most of the elected officials,
00:56:10especially the most powerful ones, are like over the age of 65. Someone who's 70 is considered young
00:56:15and sprightly. Yeah. So it's also going to be that big wall of ignorance that happens with this. So
00:56:21it's going to get really stupid. I am so sorry. It really, it really, really is. All right. You
00:56:26need to go do more Vegas things. I hope you survive. Godspeed the next couple of days. But thank you for
00:56:32being here. This was really fun. Thanks, David. This was really fun. All right. We got to take one
00:56:36more break and then we're going to come back and take a question for the first guest hotline. We'll be right back.
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00:57:56All right, we're back. Let's get to a question from the Vergecast hotline. As always, the number
00:58:06is 866-VERGE-11. The email is vergecastattheverge.com. You can also reach out to me directly. I'm davidattheverge.com
00:58:13and I'm davidpierce.11 on Signal. Any way you want to reach us, please do. But frankly, the hotline's
00:58:19the most fun. So keep on calling. This week, we have a question about AI agents.
00:58:23Hey, David. This is Brayden. I've got a question about agents and how we use the internet or how
00:58:30we will use it. So I believe that there are some purchases and some decisions that are
00:58:36big screen decisions. For example, buying an airplane ticket. You're a freak if you do that
00:58:45on your phone. That's a big screen decision. I want a mouse and keyboard to do that. I want
00:58:51my multiple tabs. I don't feel like I can do that on my little iPhone 12 mini screen. It's
00:58:59not right. It's not how the Lord intended it. But like, in the future, if agents are doing
00:59:06everything for us, like, am I going to be like a boomer and be like, oh, you kids, you're
00:59:13letting agents buy your plane tickets? I go to the website every time. Like, is this going
00:59:18to be the equivalent of that where I'm going to be like, looking at other people being
00:59:21like, I don't let it do it for me. I do it myself. And everyone will make fun of me and
00:59:27wait for me to die. Like, I don't know. I just don't understand what the world is going
00:59:32to be like if we let AI do everything for us. I don't think I'm going to trust AI to buy
00:59:37me a plane ticket. Because I want to do it. Or like, buying a house or big boy decisions
00:59:45deserve not AI. I don't know. Am I crazy? Am I going to be an annoying old man? Please
00:59:52tell me. Anyway, rock and roll.
00:59:55I love this question because it gets in a thing that I've been thinking a lot about over
01:00:00the last few weeks. And I frankly don't have a pat answer. The reason I'm bringing this
01:00:04one up is that I want to hear from all of you. And the thing that I want to hear in
01:00:08particular is how big and how high stakes a decision or an action would you count on
01:00:17AI to do for you? And I think in a lot of ways, we're in the middle of figuring out the
01:00:21answer to that question, right? I think I love the framing of big screen decisions and
01:00:26small screen decisions. This really resonates with me. And I think it does in part because
01:00:30I'm a person of a certain age who didn't like have a smartphone when I was 10. And so I'm
01:00:36not used to everything being a smartphone activity. But I do think of certain things as like things
01:00:42I do when I sit down at my laptop, right? Anything that needs a lot of typing, anything that is
01:00:46like big and sort of visually comparative where I need to look at a bunch of stuff at once.
01:00:50Those are big screen activities. And I have a set of them in my head that just feel ridiculous
01:00:56to do on my phone. And I never would. But I think that has shifted in a real way to the
01:01:01sort of mobile native generation. And to the am I just going to be a cranky old man, as
01:01:07a as a burgeoning cranky old man myself, I wonder about this. I wonder if, as a lot of
01:01:13these companies hope, we will get quickly to the point where younger people first, and
01:01:18then everybody after gets used to the idea of just offloading tasks to AI agents. But there
01:01:24is a difference there. Because the thing that changes there is instead of going from a big
01:01:29screen to a small screen, which is sort of a user interface difference, but fundamentally
01:01:33the same activity, right? Like I'm on booking.com, whether or not I'm on a giant monitor or a tiny
01:01:40phone screen, the interface is different, but the sort of steps are the same. And your involvement
01:01:45is the same. With AI agents, it turns completely. And suddenly, I am no longer doing the thing I am
01:01:53trusting something else to do the thing. And I think, for me, the biggest question, and frankly,
01:01:58for a lot of these companies, the biggest question is, how far can they push that, right? And what
01:02:03we've seen so far, frankly, is not super enticing from a lot of these companies. I think one of the
01:02:08things Amazon really hoped when it started investing in Alexa, is that people would start shopping with
01:02:13their voice, you just say, you know, buy toilet paper, and it would buy toilet paper. That hasn't
01:02:16really panned out that hasn't been a business for Amazon, so far. And I think that's partly because of
01:02:22the technology, it just hasn't been good enough or interesting enough or fast enough yet. But it is
01:02:28also because there's something in the process of doing complicated things that I think we want to
01:02:34be involved in, right? Like even if I had a very smart person in my life who I trust, who was buying
01:02:40plane tickets for me, I would still want them to check and ask me if this is the right time and do it
01:02:45like, involve me in the process in some way. And so the idea that I'm just going to be like,
01:02:50I'm going to Italy, go, and the AI agents will do it all for me. Even if the technology is good enough
01:02:58that that happens successfully, I still don't think that's going to feel good to people. And so for me, a
01:03:04thing I've been trying to figure out is if we've gone from big screen tasks to small screen tasks to I guess
01:03:09what you'd call like, agent tasks or no screen tasks, in my own life, I'm trying to figure out what to move
01:03:16around, right? And there's a certain set of things that I think will move to the agents, very simple
01:03:21stuff, very like, make a little app that'll do this for me on my computer. I just vibe coded a giant
01:03:28stopwatch that just like, shows the time in really large letters on my computer. When I hit a button,
01:03:34simple thing, I don't need anything more complicated than that. That is a perfect agent task that it can
01:03:39just go and do for me. But like, I would not use ChatGPT to buy me toilet paper because then something
01:03:46will show up at my house, maybe. But it might not, it might not be the thing that I wanted. I don't
01:03:52know how much it costs. I don't know how whether it's the brand that I wanted. I don't know why it's
01:03:55that right. There's just so many middle questions that I think we have not yet answered. But I do think
01:04:02it's useful to interrogate that line, just as I've tried to figure out, okay, what is worth doing on
01:04:10the small screen that I used to do on the big screen, because I can do it right now and without
01:04:14getting up and from the couch, right there, there's something to that trade of, it's convenient,
01:04:20and it's easy, and I can do it before I forget about it, versus I can sit down and kind of do it
01:04:25properly. And agents are going to push that boundary again, right? What, what can I offload
01:04:32so that it is, it's good enough, and I don't have to do it at all? What, what is that list of
01:04:37things? And I think the, the technology to do almost all of those things is not yet good enough
01:04:41to be interesting, but that line and the sort of Overton window of those things as they, as it moves
01:04:47down towards agents, I think is going to be really fascinating. So that said, I, I think anyone who
01:04:54tells you that you are eventually going to offload all of your tasks, specifically shopping, anyone who
01:04:59tells you that you're going to use agents to buy things has a really, really, really heavy incentive
01:05:04to tell you that because they are going to get a cut of the things that you buy. That's all I would
01:05:08ask you to remember. I think there's lots of interesting AI tasks out there. And I think one
01:05:12of them might be shopping and buying of stuff, but I will tell you for sure that there is a reason
01:05:19everybody's doing that. And it's because it's the business model. So just keep that in mind as you're
01:05:24thinking about this stuff. They all want you to buy plane tickets with AI agents. I know why they
01:05:28want that. And I'm not at all sure that it's a good idea. Anyway, lots to think about. And I do
01:05:33want to hear from you. I think both right now and in the future, what do you think the right set of
01:05:40tasks is to offload to AI? Things that you can just prompt it to do and trust that it will happen
01:05:46with, with little or no extra interaction from you. What, if you're using stuff like that today,
01:05:51if AI is currently buying you toilet paper, I would love to hear from you. But also how far
01:05:55down the rabbit hole of that do you think we get as this technology gets better? I'd love to hear
01:05:59from you. 866-VERGE11, vergecast at theverge.com. Keep it all coming. Listening to how all of you do
01:06:06AI and are thinking about AI and incorporating into your life has been fascinating and really helpful.
01:06:11And I want to keep doing more of that on the show. But for now, that is it for the show. Thank you to
01:06:17everybody who is on this episode. And thank you as always for listening. Like I said, email us
01:06:22vergecast at theverge.com. Not just about AI, about everything, all your feelings. We love hearing all
01:06:26of your, all about your feelings. Let me just start that over. For now though, that is it for the show.
01:06:33Thank you to everybody who came on this episode. And thank you as always for listening. Like I
01:06:37mentioned, you can email us vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11 about AI, but also about
01:06:43whatever you're thinking about. We love hearing all of your questions, all of your party speaker
01:06:47updates, all kinds of good stuff. Thank you as always for reaching out. It is one of the most
01:06:51fun things about making this show.
01:07:00This show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. Vergecast is Verge Production,
01:07:05part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neil and I will be back on Friday to talk about what's coming
01:07:10at WWDC next week. Lots of other AI news, anything we can hopefully learn this week about Johnny Ive
01:07:16and Sam Altman. I think there's a lot of stuff coming this summer and we just have an awful lot
01:07:21to talk about. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.