One company's quest for the perfect charger

The Vergecast

Vox Media Podcast Network

News, Tech News, Technology

4.4 • 4.1K Ratings

🗓️ 3 June 2025

⏱️ 69 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

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. Further reading: The TwelveSouth PowerCord The Vergecast USB-C Holiday Spec-tacular Everything you need to know about switching to USB-C How a crypto bro shorted $TRUMP coin — and scored a dinner with the President Presidential seals, $100,000 watches, and a Marriott afterparty Trump’s media company says it’s buying $2.5 billion in Bitcoin The Strategic Bitcoin Reserve Act will soon ramp up in Congress. Crypto funds seized by the government may go into a ‘digital Fort Knox’ Google’s future is Google googling OpenAI’s new Operator AI agent can do things on the web for you Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Fill out a brief survey and tell us what you want from The Vergecast: voxmedia.com/survey. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of very fast charging.
0:07.0	I'm your friend David Pierce, and I currently have a problem I have not had in a very long time, which is that I'm out of podcasts.
0:14.0	So I had a friend's wedding this past weekend, which meant all in all between going up on Friday and back on Sunday, I spent like
0:22.1	20 and a half hours in the car, which, A, too much, do not recommend, but B meant that for the first
0:29.1	time in a really long time, I just sat there and absolutely cranked through my podcast backlog.
0:36.2	Normally, I'm sort of oversubscribed to podcasts and I'll
0:38.9	pick and choose as I go. This time I just opened up pocketcasts, put on the new releases queue,
0:44.1	and just jammed through. And I finished. That has never happened before. I have listened to all
0:51.3	of my podcasts. And some of them, I'm sure, have, you know, back catalogs that I
0:55.2	should go back and listen to. And I was listening to a bunch of The Adventure Zone, which is a Dungeons
0:59.5	and Dragons podcast that I like. There's like 40,000 of those episodes I haven't heard. So there's
1:04.0	like stuff I could do, but I had this very strange experience of getting to the end of my podcasts. It felt like getting to the end of the internet. And it was,
1:11.7	weird and also kind of lovely at the same time. And now I'm like, either I need to go in and get
1:18.3	a hundred new podcasts, or I need to just revel in the idea that I have finished the internet
1:24.5	in one very specific way. That said, I think I'm going to do the first thing.
1:28.6	So if you have really great podcast recommendations, please do send them my way. I'd love to hear
1:32.5	though. Anyway, this is a podcast, but we are not here today to talk about podcasts. We're here
1:38.1	today to do two things. First, we're going to talk to Andrew Green, who is the CEO of a company
1:42.9	called 12 South, which makes gadget accessories, about basically the company's recent adventure to try and perfect the charging cable.
1:51.5	It's a tricky thing, and it's a thing we've talked about a lot on this show, and 12 South tried to do it, so we're going to talk about it.
1:57.3	Then Tina Nguyen on our team is going to come on and talk to us about crypto, and
2:01.4	particularly how crypto and the Trump administration and the tech industry all have gotten
	...

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