AI might break the internet

27:01Yeah. I'm excited for the soundtrack for this movie. When I say I'm 0 % prepared, what I meant was I was only prepared to say the greatest weapon is love. You've just been waiting for it. You hit it at almost exactly the 30-minute mark, too. So congratulations. Congratulations. On that note, we should take a break. And then before we lose Neal, we're going to come back and talk about some gadgets and do a lightning round. We'll be right back.

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28:38When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants.

29:13At the end of the day, the most important thing to your small business is the quality of candidates. And with LinkedIn, you can feel confident that you're getting the best. Based on LinkedIn data, 72 % of SMBs using LinkedIn say that it helps them find high quality candidates. Find out why more than two and a half million small businesses use LinkedIn for hiring today. Find your next great hire on LinkedIn. Post your job for free at linkedin.com slash track. That's linkedin.com slash track to post your job for free. Terms and conditions apply.

29:49We're back. Let's talk about a couple of Apple things, and then we're going to get into a little bit of lightning round. The first one is the only story on the website I'm confident you read this week, Eli, so you get to tell us about it. Monica Chin wrote sort of a review, sort of a deep reported piece, a really great piece about the new Mac Pro. Tell us about it, Eli. Yeah, so we assigned Monica the thankless job of reviewing the Mac Pro, which comes down to we need you to review these PCI slots because we also had the new Mac Studio, the M2 Ultra in it. So we're going to benchmark the computers.

30:23The benchmarks are the same between the two computers. So the challenge is, like, how do you review the Mac Pro? And the only thing that's different is a case that can support these slots. and candidly, we have no applications for the slots at the Verge. It's just not a thing. So I kept going into the office and seeing Monica and she'd be like, have you figured out what to do with these slots? And I'm like, I don't know, have you figured out what to do with these slots? And so she landed on this great idea, which we often try to do in our pro machine reviews. We're going to go talk to actual professionals, put the machine in front of them, see what they think.

30:57And usually that works fine, right? We can drop it in a workflow, people use it. and the weirdest thing happened in this review. Monica went and talked to 20 people, WhatsApp developers, VFX people down the line, and they're all like, yeah, I don't need this computer because I have a MacBook Pro, which is incredible to think about. And really what they're saying is the MacBook Pro is fine and fast enough for most of what I need. They usually have M1 Max chips in their MacBook Pros. It's fast enough for most things I need to do. And when I need more, Or what I either need is a discrete GPU. I need an NVIDIA GPU, which the Mac Pro does not support, or I can just go to the cloud or I can just use my company's cloud services.

31:42So why do I need this thing at my desk? And she couldn't find anyone. And actually one of the funniest parts in the middle of the interview, I went and talked to her and I said, how's it going? She says, everyone I talked to says they don't need this machine. And then they imagine someone who might. and then I go talk to a person in that profession and they imagine yet another person. And so she just, you should go read the piece. It's great. Lots of quotes, lots of very specific things. But that cycle is just really interesting because you don't even need the slots, right? You can put most PCI cards in an external Thunderbolt enclosure, which works just fine at the Mac Studio.

32:17So you need the specific ultra high speed of the internal slots, which only a tiny handful of cards actually need. And most of those are storage. And even in that case, you might end up in the cloud. I was surprised that no discrete GPUs work with a Mac Pro. Like I knew NVIDIA hasn't worked with it for years now, but I thought like, you know, you can still use an AMD card with a lot of the older Mac Pros that run Intel and you just, it's done. Yeah, so Apple's argument has been, since the M-Series chips came out, is that unified memory is actually the heart of the technological bet. So M-Series chips are really fast, and we all think of them as like Apple moved the Mac to ARM, and they're building all their own custom chips, and the price and performance is great.

33:05And I think lost in the story, but Apple never forgets, is a huge bet that they have made is unified memory. and the way they describe it is the GPU finally has a lot of memory, as much memory as a CPU, and the CPU has memory that's as fast as a GPU. And you're like, that's great. And then you're like, where's my Nvidia card? And the Nvidia cards for a lot of industries still blow away these M-series GPUs. But what's interesting to me is I think what Apple said from the get-go, basically is that this mac pro exists for people who have systems into which you need to drop this right they said like there are people out there who have like hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of existing gear that they don't want to throw away or buy enclosures or dongles for to have this thing and what is seeming to be true is that that number of people is much smaller than we anticipated and apple's argument is also that the number of people who think they need a huge mega fast discrete gpu is actually much smaller than the people who really do need it uh and i think we can debate whether or not that's actually the case but the thing that just kept jumping out to me about monica's piece is basically like people are good like people have discovered that in most professions we hit the actual power threshold that they need to do the things that they need to do day to day a while ago see this this is this is where i i disagree mainly with with you, but also with Apple.

34:37Because this idea that Apple is like, oh, you know, people just wanted the PCI slots so they could plug their stuff in. That's not true. The reason people wanted PCI slots for years was because they wanted some form of upgradability for the Mac Pro. If they were going to spend$6 ,000 on a device, they wanted a bunch of it to be able to be upgraded. And Apple has systematically gotten rid of a lot of those ability to upgrade it. Yeah, you can't even upgrade the RAM anymore. Yeah, you can't upgrade anything in it. So it's like, well, what's the pro doesn't need to exist. Like, you're just like, this is just clowning us being like, yeah, you really wanted the PCI slots.

35:13What are you gonna upgrade now? Nothing. Maybe storage. so one industry that monica did go and talk to you that everyone guessed that they would would love this thing is visual effects vfx and no vfx companies would talk to her about it because they were like we're we've all been all all in on windows for years we don't know anything about max and the reason is exactly what you're talking about alex they treat their windows pcs like collections of parts and so when one goes down they can like swap in some parts and like get back up and running and like they're very modular they are probably loud and noisy you know like all the stuff that the mac pro is not but it's like the power supply is out they're just going to yank it and put a new power supply keep going and they are going to upgrade over time all the pieces so you basically have a like a ship of theseus situation where like what is this pc over time and all the pieces are getting replaced but the studios are running and they've made the investments and then the other piece of the puzzle which i think is really fascinating is because Apple walked away from the market for so long, they have another problem that I think you're hinting at, which is no one trusts them to stick around.

36:20And so, like, Final Cut Pro, which they changed Final Cut Pro to Final Cut Pro 10, like, 10 years ago. This is ancient history that they blew up Final Cut Pro 7 and went with this weird iMovie interface, which they've since, like, dramatically upgraded. Apparently a lot of people use it now. It's been a decade. But there are still, like, open letters in this community about Final Cut Pro and what you need to do to make it useful. And people just don't trust this company to service this market. And that is really tough when the computer has to make you your money, like in a very real, meaningful way.

36:53And so I think there's just a gap here with the Mac Pro that quite frankly, when we're at the event, we're looking at it and they're showing us all the 90 ,000 streams of audio in Avatar 2. Actually, the amount of times we've talked about James Cameron in the past month, it's been like shockingly high for good reasons and really bad reasons the world's foremost power user of computers apparently james cameron but like all those demos are great and then you walk away and like actual pros like i don't i can just buy a thunderbolt enclosure if i need these slots and actually my computer is a tool and i need to be able to treat it like a tool and i need the tool vendor to be there not ship this computer and potentially walk away for another six years And that's a hard.

37:38Was the trash can the end of that? Like 2013, that big redesign? Yeah, because the trash can wasn't super upgradable because it was such a small chassis. So you couldn't do a lot with it. There's a bunch of stuff that didn't fit. You had to have custom cards and stuff. And it didn't fit into racks. It didn't fit people's workflows. That was the moment I think a lot of people went, oh, not only do I not want this computer, I don't think Apple understands what I need anymore. And then there was the big redesign with the cheese grater where they were like, we're back. This is a love letter to developers.

38:11And it just doesn't seem like some of those people came all the way back. And even then, it wasn't really, like, it was a lot faster maybe to developers. But Nila's right. It was like, there's a whole group of people that were really into Macs for a very long time. One of my first jobs out of college was working in, like, a video editing studio. And they were all running, this was Mac OS X had been out for years at this point. And they were all still running 9.7 or something because it was so reliable. And that was what, they needed reliability. They needed to just know things were going to work and they weren't going to have to be troubleshooting.

38:45And Apple's moved away from that. Apple's like, yeah, we're going to go really fast, but sometimes your continuity camera won't work. And so you'll have to use your garbage Opal C1 to record the podcast with your coworkers. I mean, I still want a Mac Pro. Yeah, 100%. No, actually, I don't want one because I can't upgrade it. I was the person who was upgrading her G3 PowerBook Pismo to a G4 processor. This is why we vibe, Alex. It was not great, but it was cool that I could do it. And then I ended up going into Windows because I still got that feeling. But I like Mac OS better. And you've lost that.

39:24But between that and the fact that you can't do a Hackintosh anymore, it's kind of boring from a gadget perspective in a lot of ways. They're very pretty, but they're not like... Yeah, I have no idea why I want one. Again, I've been running this podcast from home on a 2015 iMac. And it shows. screaming at you right now it's not happy no but i think just the one last thing on this and we should move on i think the thing that was so surprising to me about this is i expected everybody to say oh no i bought a mac studio last year and i'm very happy and i think there are people out there like that but the number of people like you said right at the top nila who said actually no i'm very happy with my ultra powerful macbook pro i thought was really fascinating because it's like we've talked for years about this balance of of power and portability.

40:10And it's like a thing Monica spends a lot of time thinking about, especially as she reviews like gaming laptops and all that kind of stuff on the Windows side. And on this side, like it's pretty damn close to being the best of both worlds if you get a pretty souped up MacBook Pro at this point. And it's just a powerful ass desktop when you put it on a table with a mouse and keyboard, and then you can take it with you. And I think that is like, that's a pretty, pretty hard combination to beat, especially when you're as high a power threshold as the MacBook Pro can be right now. Yeah, I think it's I have a different perspective on it because when we test them, we are like waiting for the thermal throttling to kick in.

40:48Yeah. And so we're looking for it and then we see it. And I think probably in a regular situation, you're not actively looking for it. You're like, oh, this computer is really fast. But if you know that if you put that chip in a Mac Studio enclosure with proper cooling, it's even faster. But like how you can't know it until you know it, right? Like, so that's the split that I would just like push on there. It's like, yep, the MacBook Pro, especially the 911 Max is really great, but a Max Studio is even faster. And I think the real story of the Mac Pro is they couldn't fit four of those chips together, right?

41:21So an M2 Max is a single chip and M2 Ultra is two of them. And there were supposed to be one with four. And I don't think Apple could pull it off. And I think that's actually part of the story is they needed the bigger case for the extra cooling for the more, and they just couldn't do it. And so like, here we are, two computers, the same chip in them and almost identical performance. Okay. PCI slots. And$4 ,000 for the slots no one needs. And wheels, don't forget the wheels. The wheels cost extra. I'm just saying the M2 Mega with four chips is just sitting right there, Apple. It's just right there.

41:53One more Apple thing, and then we should get to the lightning round. And I moved this out of the lightning round because it is a great personal annoyance to me right now. Chris Welch wrote a very good story about how the AirPods Max are getting sort of deprecated, for lack of a better word, because of Apple's new software. So there's a bunch of new stuff coming to AirPods, adaptive audio and personalized volume and lots of sort of machine learning stuff that these devices are starting to do. And most of them are not coming to the AirPods Max, which are$549 and still very much on sale and still very much Apple's most expensive, fanciest headphones.

42:29I just bought a pair of third generation AirPods for$130 at Costco because they were on sale. So I feel like I have less reason to be annoyed by this, but I still think it's kind of annoying. And I had just never thought of headphones as a gadget that will get slowly worse and lose features over time. But now somehow this is the world we live in. It's like a TV now. It basically is. What you want is to turn everything into a computer with a planned obsolescence cycle built into it. That's my favorite. Can I just, I'm going to tell you a story. That's, I'm a professional podcaster. Tell us a story.

43:08Sit down, Justin. Well, I just keep thinking about, like, you know, we keep turning headphones into computers. We keep doing spatial audio. Everyone knows how you feel about spatial audio. I went to a very high-end speaker company. It's up here in the mountains with me. It's called AFER ARA. It's run by Rob Kalin. He's the co-founder of Etsy. He left, started a speaker company, hired a NASA engineer. He's got all these ideas about using horns and like really, really high end woodworking to enhance speakers. And he showed me some stuff that was incredible. He played me like a rocket launch that like shook me out of my body.

43:43And just the way that he constructed the speakers, he was using like 11 inch drivers to do it. It was crazy. And then he, I don't like Lana Del Rey, but he sat me down in front of the speakers and he played me a Lana Del Rey song. And it was like an emotional experience. I was like, I'm like losing my mind. And he was playing it over Bluetooth from Spotify. And I was like, what are you doing? He's like, everyone's so focused on this. We all just forgot that the speakers have to be good. And like, that's the thing. It's like in my brain is like, we are so like lossless and spatial. And it's like, what have we just made like really kick ass speakers?

44:17The speakers are insanely expensive. I'm like, no one can afford them. But it was just like, it just occurred to me, like as I was reading the AirPods Mac story, that like turning the headphones into computers and shoveling software features like adaptive audio and all this stuff into them is absolutely taking away from the experience of listening to the music and like again i don't like london lorraine i was like oh my god i get it and then i got in my car and i listened i pulled up that song and i was like i really just like but it was just like literally like listening to good music in stereo from bluetooth on spotify was incredible.

44:56But that's all well and good because you can sit in a room with speakers that have 11 inch drivers. Like good luck strapping that to your head, right? Like, I don't know if you've seen AirPods. I would like to see that. AirPods Max are pretty big. Pretty big. They're chunky. But it's just like, that's where we are, right? Like in order to make them that small, you have to take a lot of that stuff and put it in software. Like at some point, speaker is just about moving air and physics. And Apple has to cheat that with software and i'm sympathetic to that but at some point it's like we are going to get to the point where my headphones get worse over time and that feels wrong in the way that like if you bought those outrageously expensive speakers those are going to sound that kick-ass for an unbelievably long time and i don't feel like that's the case with my airpods and that's the part that bums me out well you know like what the guys at headfi and a lot of these other like audiophile places would tell you just get better headphones like don't wear the airpods yeah but apple won't let them successfully connect to my phone and so every time i turn my head they lose connection like fix that and i'll buy your better headphones you know apple would happily tell you that they have the best blue c stack on the market yeah because only apple's allowed to use it it's true you could just wire it in listen wired headphones are coming back and i'm i'm very happy about it.

46:16I bought a pair of wired ear pods the other day. And do you know what is easier than dumb Bluetooth connections is just plugging the damn thing in. It's beautiful. I'm going to say nothing. I want you all to just imagine. It's like a text expander. I was super right. Anyway, I'm done. Move on. We can just sit here quietly and just acknowledge what you would have said if you were prepared for this podcast. That's going to be, we should do, we should have a third episode a week. It's just dead silence. It's just imagine what we would have said about various things. It would probably be our most popular episode every week.

46:50Somebody just quietly comes in and says, a new camera launched. And there's just 65 minutes of silence. I love this idea. All right, we should do a little laying around. And then, Neal, you're going to get out of here. Kranz, you go first. What do you got? Mine's kind of a bummer. Plex is laying off 20 % of its staff. That's a lot. That's a lot. For Plex, I did take a moment of being like, was that one person? It was 37 people. That's a lot. Yeah, Plex has gotten pretty big. And they're saying it affects every department. They're continuing to bet big on Fast TV. They're one of the many folks that are super into this space right now, which is the free ad-supported television.

47:32I think they were one of the first movers in that space, but most of us didn't understand what it was and was just like, Why is there a bunch of free garbage on my Plex when I want to watch definitely legally acquired copies of James Cameron's The Abyss? Why are you showing me reruns of The Addams Family 24 hours a day? Yeah. And so the stuff that was happening with Fast is actually partially responsible for this. Their ad business is down. Their ad business is dependent on that Fast stuff. And so, yeah, 20 % of folks are getting laid off. Plex isn't going anywhere. It's sticking around. Plex is basically a streaming service now, right?

48:07Like that was the thing that really jumps out to me about this. I was just reading over the Slack message that the CEO, Keith Valerie, sent. And I still think of Plex very much as like the way to get my legally acquired content from one device to another. And Neelai's friend, who also has a very good Plex server, all perfectly legal. But that's like Plex tried to get people to pay for that for a long time and it never really worked. And what it seems like happened is over the last couple of years, Plex was like, we are going to be a streaming guide and a streaming service and just has like barreled headlong into that.

48:44And it turns out, as any streaming service will tell you, there is not a lot of money in it at this particular moment in time. The economy is bad. The ad market is bad. It's just a tough time to decide you're a streaming service. I will always kind of admire Plex for what it's wanting to do, which is be that place where you're like, I don't know what I'm going to watch. I'm going to go to Plex and, oh, it's going to have my Netflix plugged in and my Hulu and my Disney Plus and everything. That's perfect. None of those companies want to work with Plex or any other company who has that desire. Plex has a bad reputation.

49:14Like if you're Disney and Plex shows up on your doorstep, you're like, go to jail. Why are you here? Can you imagine like the Pirate Bay being like, we're starting a streaming service. Would you like to work with us? But even if it wasn't Plex, even if it was a different company who had a bunch of support, say, in 2008 to 2009, until they decided to build a terrible box and their company went under, nobody wants to actually participate in that idea. And so Plex's other thing was like, okay, we're going to do fast TV. We're just going to make a bunch of free stuff so that your family, even when your server goes down, will not call and yell at you because they can find a bunch of stuff on their Plex account.

49:52and there's a limited runway there. One thing they could do is sell software to users to use it. They already did. I bought my lifetime pass in like 2010. That's like a real Reddit business model. Like that sounds great in the Reddit forum. And then you're like, crap, we'll never make any money from Alex again. Yeah, never. Plex,$8, 13 years ago. And it's like, why are they doing layoffs?

50:21all right i'll go next and neila you can go last before we kick you off the show mine is just reddit question mark is my lightning round pick so as you're hearing this it is it is friday june 30th this is kind of like inflection day for reddit reddit has been telling subreddit moderators that they have essentially 48 hours to open back up or something is going to happen uh that expired yesterday today is the day that apps like apollo are scheduled to shut down i think that's supposed to happen at midnight friday into saturday uh this just feels like reddit is going to be one company before today and another company after today and the way that it thinks about its moderators and about its community and about its business is about to change and i don't know exactly what that's going to look like but moderators are just like absolutely furious with everything that reddit has done and reddit like is its moderators in a very very real way and i think what's about to happen over this july 4th holiday which i think it is not an accident that reddit scheduled all of this mess to happen on the july 4th holiday is going to be really fascinating what's going to happen in our smoking is our smoking open what is going to happen our smoking is the meat smoking I mean, for July 4th, this is the 4th of July.

51:43Oh, yeah. This is huge. This is the Super Bowl. This is a big day for the meat smoking forum. It looks like they're good. It looks like they're good. Okay. All right. Meat smokers of the world unite. Neal, what's yours? Then we'll go to break. Oh, I got two. Of course you do. One is just very funny in a very simple way. Ford keeps raising the price of the F-150 Lightning, and now people don't want to buy it. Wait, didn't it used to be really expensive and everybody wanted to buy it? And now it's really expensive and nobody wants to buy it? There's a weird thing going on here. So they launched it at 40K and then the most expensive ones were like over 90, like 93K.

52:24And it's just sort of been getting more expensive over time. There was a moment right at the end of last year when the tax credit was expiring. Like people who are buying a$93 ,000 truck make too much money to get the new tax credit. So there was a moment last year where if you bought the thing, you still got a$75. And so everyone was trying to buy this truck. Ford couldn't make as many of them as they wanted. Dealers are dealers, and they're horrible. So the markups were out of control. That whole thing has collapsed. The markups are still there, but everyone's like, I don't need this truck. I'm not getting this tax credit.

52:57The truck's too expensive. There are other trucks. Rivian can't sell R1Ts. They set up a fake lot at their factory in normal Illinois, They have like one day sales events at their own factory. Part of the funny thing for me is like it's just supply and demand. Like at some point you raise the price so high that demand drops and Ford did it. Like I learned about that in like my 11th grade economics class. Like there's a curve and you can go over the curve and then demand will drop. And like great. And so I think Ford has to reset there. But then I think they have this other gigantic looming problem that they've all signed up for, which is they're all going to use the Tesla charger, which is superior to the sort of like CCS agglomeration of a J1772 and the DC charger that they're using now.

53:52Those are words. And that's like a big change, right? That's not like I put a slightly different thing into my car. That's like I need a new thing for my car, right? Well, it's a different plug in the car. I think the actual electricity bit of it, right? A charging station isn't actually a charging station. It's just a supply of electricity. All the charging componentry is in the car. Are we about to get car dongles? Yeah. So it's like if you buy this truck now and next year you're just able to use the Tesla network, you're like signing up for a decade of dongle usage with your$93 ,000 Ford F-150 Lightning.

54:30Is there like a little spot in the car where you store your dongle? Well, it's a pickup truck. There should be. There's a pretty significant amount of dongle storage space. Big space in the back. Alex, the way this needs to go is on the pickup truck, the spare tire is on a rack. We need a second rack for the car dongle. Just for the dongle. Like, what's the frunk for? Dongles. Instead of truck nuts, you just carry around another dongle. well i just like it's not just for like chevy has done it chevy's about to roll out the new ev silver auto right like youtubers and influencers already have it like this thing's about to hit and it's like gm just announced they're using this plug why were we spending all this time talking about ai when like ev dongle gate is looming like the existential threats of ai i don't care about yeah dongle gate well so again the weird thing it's like the right time for this to happen, right?

55:25There's not a lot of EVs on the road. And the most popular one is the Tesla Model 3, which has no associated dongle gate because they're just going to use Tesla's charger. But the government's basically pushing Tesla into doing this through a series of tax credit schemes, which is fine and I think appropriate for the government to do. Tesla is going to turn that charging network into another source of revenue because that's open to more people. The SAE, the Society of Automotive Engineers, has now certified the Tesla plug, the NACS plug as a standard. Volvo is signed up to use. Basically, they're winning.

55:59It is done. Everyone's going to use this plug. Just not for a couple years. We're just in this weird moment for the EV industry where adoption is finally starting to pick up. The cars aren't quite as vapor as they used to. You can get an F-150 Lightning. You can get an R1T. You might be able to get a Silverado. It's too new. I don't know. Particularly in that market, you can go get one. You can go get a Polestar. You can get a Mustang Maki. And then they've all got the wrong plug. So you've signed up for a decade of the wrong plug. How hard is it to just change the plug? Can't they do that in the factory?

56:36I suspect we're going to see a lot of TikTok mechanics trying to third-party plugs. What you might call a built-in dongle. At the factory, you might be able to who knows? But right now, the ones sitting on lots that dealers have to move that are overpriced and have a markup and the wrong plug. Oof. Oof. Not great. My last one is just this TikTok thing. I just think it's funny. So TikTok, we keep talking about the social web and how hard it is to be a creator and how not tenable it is. TikTok has a new feature where brands can put up money. We want some ads for our brand. And then TikTokers can make ads for free and then maybe get some money.

57:17So it's basically a creator fund. So I'm like, I want some ads. Here's like a million dollars. If you get the most views, I'll like pay you some percentage of the million dollars. I feel like that's not a good revenue stream to rely on for your business. Yeah. It's just basically like a new way to get free ads from kids. It's weird in that I think what they're trying to do is get people just starting out with fewer followers to make stuff for them. Because like there has been this incredible culture for so long of people wanting to seem sponsored before they're actually sponsored. and now it's like just make the spawn con and we'll decide later if we want to give you money and to some extent this is like i think it was 99 designs used to do this with like graphic design uh you could put up a thing and people would submit and you'd pay the winner and then i think a lot of people have decided over the years that that is kind of gross and bad and like you should pay me for my work not just pick a contest winner and like doing my job is not entering a contest Or you could do what McDonald's did.

58:19Have you seen the Grimace TikToks? No. What? Have you seen the Grimace TikToks? It's such a menacing sentence to say out loud. Everything about this is menacing. So they started tweeting and putting on TikTok just an image of Grimace and being like, his birthday's coming. And it's very menacing with how it happened. Because you just see the top of Grimace's little purple head. And it's like, oh boy lots of things happening there and then they sold a shake on his birthday and all like a lot of young people's particularly gen z all shot videos that were like happy birthday grimace and they'd hold up the shake and then it would smash cut to them like dead covered in grimace milkshake an increasingly graphic but not technically because it's grimace milkshake like tableaus oh my and now we're talking about it which means someone is going to go buy a grimace shake someone is going to yes take their car from where they are right now to a mcdonald's go to mcdonald's and ask them for money this is reverse advertising pioneered on the verge cast but like ask nicely and not like you're robbing the mcdonald's yeah please don't rob mcdonald's yeah my take is this is a bad idea and it's absolutely 100 gonna work oh yeah i think creators are looking for money this is just one of those things where like most of the money mr beast did a two hour interview on YouTube that Jay actually watched all of incredible.

59:45And the, the big takeaway for Jay was the ad rates on a Mr. Beast video are so high that most companies can't afford them or won't pay them. And so Mr. Beast is like, screw it. I'm just going to put ads for feastables in my video because if I sell a lot of feastables, I'll make all the money. And it's like, that's where we are in the creator. When I say this thing is about to change, like it, none of it feels sustainable right now across any platform and setting up, letting brands set up creator funds on TikTok instead of TikTok figuring out how to make all of its creators more money. It just feels like evidence of this thing.

1:00:19Yeah. Yeah. More people should work for free is like not the right choice for you as a company. Yeah. Well, we should have ended on card angles. I liked that better, but we, I could do another 20 on card. I'm sure. I'm sure we will, to be honest, but right now, Neil, I, you need to go. We need to take a break. Uh, when we come back, we're going to catch up on all of the FTC versus Microsoft stuff, going on. If you haven't listened to the Wednesday show, I spent a bunch of time with Tom catching up on stuff. Pause this episode, go listen to that if you haven't, and then come back and we're going to catch up.

1:00:51Satya Nadella and Bobby Kodak were both on the stand on Wednesday and both had some surprisingly and you know, it was spicy. Importantly spicy things to say. Yeah, it was quite a day. So we're going to get to all of that without Neelai because we hate Neelai. Gotta go. Get lost. We'll be right back.

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1:03:56We're back by the magic of time travel. One of those, just like, you know what I mean? Like, I haven't had enough sleep. Yeah. No, I'm good. I'm feeling better today because it's the final day of this epic saga. Well, it's the final day of the hearing, but it's definitely not the end of it. Yeah. So by the time you're hearing this, this will be over. But we felt pretty good doing this now because the bulk of the interesting testimony, we can fairly safely say, is over at this point. Adi, are you expecting fireworks today, Thursday? Not unless something really strange gets disclosed. Yeah. Like a Sony document?

1:04:31I don't know if we're ever going to see a document getting disclosed again. We're going to get to that. But let's just kind of take Wednesday's testimony in order, because it was the CEOs of the two companies involved in this, Bobby Kotick, the CEO of Activision Blizzard, and Satya Nadella, the CEO of Microsoft. Let's start with Bobby, because he went first. Tom, what were we expecting to learn from Bobby? He ended up talking a lot about the history of Activision Blizzard, which is not what I expected. Was that what you were expecting? I mean, it's basically the basic questions of the lawyers in these cases.

1:05:06They were sort of like established the facts. So I'm not surprised that he kind of dug into the history a bit. But I was expecting, I must admit, that he was going to get a bit more grilled, especially by the judge as well. I thought she would be firing off questions to him around specifics of some of the stuff that's come up in the case. But there wasn't much of that. I was actually kind of surprised at that. I think both Bobby Kotick and Nadella both got off pretty lightly, if I'm honest, from the questioning from what we saw. I agree. But we did get some Nintendo Switch insight from Bobby, if anything.

1:05:39They just can't stop talking about Nintendo. This is like sneakily a trial about like, is Nintendo as cool as everybody thinks? That's like basically the main question. It's like everyone's got like some sort of advertising marketing agreement with Nintendo. They have to talk about the Switch. it's like the sponsored segment yeah like we got a little bit of the nintendo switch stuff which as you say it's been an ongoing sort of theme throughout this trial but before that we kind of got to bobby kotick talking about deals and cloud stuff and whether he hated subscriptions which was kind of interesting because the day before or jim ryan had said that he thought all publishers just basically thought that the game pass and subscriptions just ruined the value of their businesses and stuff.

1:06:23And he kind of, he didn't exactly say what Jim Ryan said, but he kind of backed that up. He was like, yeah, it's not something that I'm interested in. So yeah, his analogy was I've watched, he didn't use these words, but like I've watched Netflix destroy Hollywood, basically. Yeah. He's like living in Los Angeles. I see all these companies and their value going down and all this sort of stuff. So tease that out for me, actually, because this is one of the things I've been trying to figure out is like everybody's sort of talking in circles about class. And there's like Game Pass and there's xCloud and Satya brought in Xbox Live just to make everything more confusing.

1:06:55But there's this thing that Bobby in particular was talking about that it was like there's like one set of ideas about cloud gaming that he thinks are just like a non-starter. But I had trouble figuring out exactly what it was that he seems to hate about cloud gaming. Anything NVIDIA does, right? Yeah, there's that. yeah he did mention i think what was the quote adi do you remember it was like the refrigerator i was playing modern warfare 2 on your phone would be like using your refrigerator as a safe yeah and that was that was kind of in reference to cloud but also to mobile and so the fact that you have all these like call of duty games they don't run on the phone right now would they run like on a phone eventually he said maybe but also it's obviously like a kind of a segue into the sort of like cloud stuff as well because the answer also microsoft says the answer is cloud right well they used to say and now this they're kind of like oh we're just chilling with cloud you know don't worry about the cloud don't look there but i don't think he has like a specific opinion about cloud he's just like we're not putting our games on there but the ftc was kind of like arguing but you would if there was like a good commercial agreement and he was like we don't have plans for that you know like we don't have plans to put stuff on the subscriptions as well and they were like yeah but if you had an agreement and then they brought up some evidence and tried to sort of sway it that way and it's clear obviously that he probably would because we had Sarah Bond testify on was it Thursday but he'd been pushing specifically pushing Microsoft just before the Xbox Series X launch to not use the dev kits to on the Xbox side unless they sort of agreed to pay less or more revenue to Activision and less less the Xbox keep so So there's obviously when he can get an agreement out of a company, he'll do it.

1:08:43But like, is that revelatory? I mean, if I called Bobby Kotick and said, I will give you$1 trillion to just put Call of Duty on my computer specifically, like they do it, right? Yeah. We're going to make good business decisions is like not a surprising statement to me. And I think... But I think where it matters, though, is that in Microsoft's document where they have their like back and forth of like why why this is good is is one of the things is like call of duty will be available to like a hundred more million more people and that's because of the cloud right and call of duty will be available on switch but the ftc is saying well but these things would happen anyway because you you'd commercially like the market would change and you'd commercially make that deal so why does why does microsoft have to buy you to for that to happen you know and bobby coat is saying but i hate this stuff and it's like yeah you might hate it now but would you hate it in five years like that's that's what the ftc is asking really and that kind of comes down to the very like crux of this case as well addy what do you make of all of that is there is there anything i feel like to some extent everybody's just talking in circles here like did you pull anything out of what kodik was saying that struck you it's really hard for me to tell because it's really i don't feel like i have a bead on how sympathetic the judge is toward either side here like the thing that i keep comparing this to is epic versus apple where there were a bunch of really clear problems on the table, a bunch of really clear technical questions, a bunch of, OK, well, how much of a big deal is it if iOS has to open up?

1:10:14How much of a security risk is that? Here, a bunch of it just seems to be them grilling executives and talking about, would you make these deals if you weren't part of Microsoft? And it's all pertinent. Like, this is what antitrust law is supposed to be about, is about whether it's going to foreclose competition. But it makes it really hard for me to tell what we should be looking for when an actual decision comes down. How often is this the case with these antitrust hearings where it's just like a judge being like, I'm going to give you a billion hypotheticals. Tell me what you think. Because that just seems like wild as a way to like decide if a company can be purchased or not.

1:10:52I mean, it's got to be what kind of what it always will boil down to eventually. But a bunch of this just there aren't the kind of very, very clear hypotheticals, I think, that there were in, say, Epic versus Apple, which was just these very discrete technical, all right, is this thing going to work on this platform? Are you going to charge this amount of money for it? And this is much more about what does this mean for the larger state of the games industry? Is it going to change the way that companies make deals with each other? What does it mean for these, like 10 years down the road market shares.

1:11:29It also seems like, Tom, jog my memory on this a bit. There was a point in the hearing where the judge got really annoyed with the line of questioning about basically like, will you commit to putting this game on PlayStation? Just like over and over and over the lawyers. And I think it was when Phil Spencer was on the stand, but maybe I'm wrong. It was. Yeah. That was one of the moments. That was one of the few moments I think we've seen where the judge was basically like, just shut up with this line of questioning. And so I think it seems like the lawyers have had to then kind of go another way and be like, okay, how do we ask essentially that question with different enough words that the judge is not going to throw us out of the courtroom?

1:12:03And the point being that they just can't. Like, they can't make that promise. That's an impossible promise. And the FTC is like, well, yes, obviously. Yeah, and I think that frustration has happened multiple times. And it usually is to do with the FTC's questioning or whoever's answering the FTC's questioning. because obviously when Microsoft's up there, they're just letting the witness just talk away, you know, like you make your case. Whereas the FTC is very pointed and some of their questioning can be irritating to witnesses, right? So that particular example was interesting because she cut in, she intervened.

1:12:39She's done that. She did that quite a lot at the end of that Phil Spencer testimony and then she actually cut the testimony off. I mean, they were kind of at time anyway, but I think she was just like, okay, you're done. You know, your question is done. your time's done but yeah she has she has jumped in a bunch she jumped in with some of the expert um testimony from uh from yesterday and the day before just to sort of like get a grip on it and i think it's interesting to to watch when she does cut in because she wants to know predominantly from what i've seen she wants to know about call of duty um because that's obviously been the big thing here um so she's always jumping in to be like well like she asked bobby kotick like why would someone buy why would someone subscribe to World of Warcraft and not just pay$70 for a game so you're trying to get an understanding of that dynamic in the market as well and it all comes obviously I think it all comes down to Call of Duty and I think that's going to come from what I can tell that's going to come become part of her decision because that's the way the FTC have framed it as well and Sony's framed it so of course it's going to be part of her thinking.

1:13:44That's just incredible to me that Call of Duty is so important now to antitrust law and not just gamers i think it's just because it's like and jim ryan was saying this the other day that it is unique right like they do pump out we were talking about this the other day as well they pump out a new game every year so and that's kind of unusual unless you're like a madden or a fifa which are just iterative stuff so i loved codex answer to basically how do you put out a game every year uh which amounted to him basically just being like well there's been a lot of wars yeah there's so many for us to choose from sorry which is funnier because they're not even half of them in their in the future now well and the other half are world war ii like what are we doing here but they run out yeah yeah we did all the wars already i guess who knows what's going to happen next but i do think you're right that it seems like this came back over and over and over to like how big call of duty is and how much it matters to the game industry and also it seems to be the kind of thing that you can argue fairly successfully from both sides whereas the ftc is like well we can't just have this one company own call of duty it'll give it too much sway to the game industry and then both activision and microsoft come out and say basically no call of duty is so big that we would be ridiculous to foreclose on the rest of the game industry there's too much money people would revolt it's like it's so big that it's kind of a winning argument on both sides in a strange way call of duty too big to fail that's the rare correct use of too big to fail yes yes call of duty is such an important institution that were it to fail we must do anything in our power to prop it up because it would be catastrophic to society how we'd have to go back to doing real wars if we didn't have Call of Duty to play.

1:15:36All right. So anything else, Adi, that jumped out to you from Bobby before we get to Satya Nadella? I think that the part where the judge did jump in and say, well, all right, clearly, if you say you regret not putting this thing on Switch, you don't need Microsoft to come and make you make this thing cross-platform. You're going to be making decisions in your own rational self-interest. And that seems like another sort of little bit of a hint. But otherwise, yeah, I think we've... He talked for a very, very long time, and we learned a lot about Call of Duty and the Switch. Yeah, I did think it was interesting that he said he thought the Switch was probably the second most successful game console ever, assuming the first one is the Wii, which he's also spoken very highly of in the past.

1:16:17Yeah, he regretted not bringing Call of Duty to the Switch, right? So that's why the judge came in as well because she was like, well, you know, you regretted it, so of course you'd bring it to this next generation Nintendo console. Yeah, he had a good line about seeing the thing, and it was like, Nintendo can't possibly pull off all of the stuff it's trying to do, which I think is how a lot of people felt about the Switch. And then just slowly but surely, it was like, oh no, they did the thing. This works. It's a Zelda machine. Here we go. All right. Let's switch to Satya Nadella, who came on later.

1:16:47Tom, run us through the greatest hits there. What did we learn from him? Yeah. So he kind of started off, it was the FTC question him at the beginning. So he started off with some of the stuff to do with the cloud market. So he started off very quietly as well. like he's very really yeah very quiet i think bobby did as well but nadella was pretty pretty quiet he's like well microsoft is a company he was like yes usually when you'd answer if you ask nadella a question he'll answer like for an hour yeah he's a pretty like boisterous guy yeah yeah so that was that was kind of unusual um but yeah he started off like some xbox market share stuff the ftc dragged up some of the statements about how they were winning in north america for like three months when Sony didn't have good PlayStation shipments.

1:17:31So it was a bit weird, but they brought that into the record. Then they talked about cloud gaming and Nadella said that he thought that Xbox Live was part of that and that streaming was a minor part of that. I'm like, I wouldn't say, I don't know, I mean, kind of, but I get where he's coming from, but that's not strictly true. And then they were like, well, so you think that, do you? The FTC was like, okay, well, we're going to bring up all these emails where you said you want to take cloud mainstream. So then it was like, okay. So one of the emails was Microsoft's, I think, leadership team and Nadella.

1:18:09They were talking to Meta or talking about Meta, the event where they had Meta's new headset. Which had a bunch of Microsoft integrations that came with it, right? That past tense is awfully generous. I'm not sure they've rolled all of it out. That is fair. Which said words about Microsoft products. This is some stuff, some major process. That hasn't happened. Which actually happens weirdly a lot with Meta and Microsoft. They were supposed to do some Xbox cloud gaming stuff on Facebook, but that never happened. So weird. But yeah, so they were discussing amongst themselves about this event and saying, Nadella was basically saying, look, this is how we want the world to perceive us, that we're like, you know, the leaders in cloud, essentially.

1:18:50We're going up with Teams and xCloud and everything else. I want us to push on cloud here. So the FTC is obviously using that to say, look, cloud is clearly important to Microsoft and this is part of your thinking for this deal. Because that was in October, I think, around about then. But since then, they've pulled back from cloud, right? Apparently. Yeah. I think they publicly have. So they say in this particular trial. Yeah. Yeah. But behind the scenes, they just hit pause buttons like, right, we're not doing emails no more. well good no because i mean i think even on our side of things when we were covering this like slow pullback from cloud we were like is this because of ai and like they're now going all in on ai or is it more likely that it was because they were about to go to like have to prove that they could buy activision so the cma the uk regulator was fine with the call of duty stuff the eu was fine with the call of duty stuff but they both weren't fine with the cloud stuff The EU worked out a remedy, essentially, with Microsoft for some licensing stuff to allow cloud competitors to just automatically get their games and stuff.

1:19:56The CMA were like, no, we're not interested in that sort of stuff. We're going to block your deal. So they've definitely obviously been talking to those regulators over the months and gradually pulled back. They probably pulled back when they first got that set of details from these regulators to say, this is what we're concerned about. So they probably thought, let's pause. Is that more likely why that cloud console never came out? I wouldn't be surprised if it's linked. I think it's probably half and half. Or impacted by it. Yeah, it's definitely impacted, yeah. Because they were very close to launching that.

1:20:24So it was close as in they'd made them and all that sort of stuff. It's also, you've got to figure, some lawyer at Microsoft was like, hey, if we have a box that is called the Xbox Cloud, the argument you're about to try to make in court is going to get a lot more complicated. But I do think, I mean, all these things can be true at the same time, right? The AI thing happened really fast and Microsoft clearly pushed resources at it. The business of cloud gaming has very much not been solved. Publishers do seem to have, if not problems with it, then at least questions about it. And there's this big regulatory fight.

1:20:58So I think it would not be hard for Microsoft to kind of read the room and realize, okay, we're still betting on this big in the long run, but maybe this is a moment for us to slow the pace down just a smidge. And I don't think that's an unreasonable thing to have done in this moment at all. No, I think it makes sense, right? Like we were talking the other day, David, about some of the other stuff that's been missing over the past year with the cloud stuff. They made like all these commitments to bring it to TVs and to bring your cloud library and all that sort of stuff. And that stuff hasn't happened.

1:21:27So there's obviously been some stuff going on behind the scenes. But yeah, so that was like the cloud section of Nadella's testimony. So I think it's clear he is all about cloud because he's all about cloud in all of Microsoft's businesses. So he's definitely all about cloud in gaming. Yeah, I was going to say anyone who has paid attention to him speak the last several years can tell you that. Yeah, exactly. And then we moved on to, I wouldn't say this is a bombshell, but it was just a kind of funny thing he said, was that he would get rid of exclusives in gaming if he could. But the market leader, which we'll assume is Sony here and not Nintendo, even though Nintendo's been doing exclusives for quite some time as well.

1:22:07so you could argue between yourselves who that refers to but i think it's sony because i don't think microsoft's trying to bury nintendo in this case they're definitely trying to bury so no microsoft is trying to remind you how terrific nintendo is that's microsoft's whole end game here yeah um so he said he wanted to end those exclusives but you know the market leader doesn't let us do that god poor downtrodden microsoft yeah and so that that was that and obviously didn't get questioned because it was under Microsoft's lawyers questioning him so he was free to just say stuff like that and then he committed again to shipping Call of Duty on PlayStation so similar to not as strong as Phil Spencer's sort of oaf I'll put my hand up sort of thing but you know it was still significant that the CEO is saying it as well and we also didn't get any back and forth with the FTC questioning him again to see if if he would put Diablo on there all the other questions that the FTC fired at Spencer.

1:23:07And then that was kind of most of his testimony, really. So like I say, he got off lightly. He really did. It was quieter than I expected. Yeah, I was just going to ask, were you surprised, Addy, at kind of how lightly both CEOs were treated? Tom mentioned being surprised. Were you? I was a little bit. And I mean, I'm wondering how much of it is that the people who went early are just popping up all over the evidence. They're in all of these email chains that they get asked about. Jim Ryan, while not there, was there in spirit. These are all these people who have been saying all these really contentious things about each other on these first two days.

1:23:42And now, Sachin Adeli is not primarily an Xbox guy. He is a guy who goes and sits back and manages the rest of Microsoft. And he's there because he owns Microsoft. But he's just not knee-deep in these decisions the way that a bunch of the people from the early days were. Yeah, it's a good reminder that CEOs mostly don't actually know what's going on inside of their company it's very true yeah and i think that's probably why they got off lightly right so but but i swear in other cases like federal cases we usually see judges going out at ceos so like meta and i know it was strange fair enough um all right well the the newsiest and funniest and best and most interesting thing that happened yesterday was was this document that came out from sony that was supposed to be adi you're the one who figured out what was going on here so So explain what happened.

1:24:31Somehow it just ended up in our Slack and like everyone mobilized to figure out what to do about this terribly redacted document. What happened here? So Sony at some point filed sworn testimony. It's like, here's our statement of facts pertinent. And at some point this was brought up in court and the courts agreed there were going to be portions of it that were sealed. These were like financial details largely. And there are various ways that you can redact things. You can just paste black bars over them. They did not do this. As far as we can tell, they went over it with an actual pen, which left just enough of the document original text still visible.

1:25:11Like, imagine drawing a Sharpie over a piece of printed text that if you messed with the gamma from the PDF, you could actually find out all of these top secret things. We don't know who did this. We don't know who. Their penmanship was impeccable, though, right? Like the actual marking out was nearly perfect to the point where we're like, did a computer do this? See, I want to know. I would love to hear from someone who is a listener who actually knows how this stuff goes down, because I don't know if someone is just really amazing at handling a pen, if there's some kind of semi-automated process.

1:25:47It's like you take calligraphy for years and then you're like, what am I going to do with this professionally? And then you just get into redacting for a living. I will say it is not the worst redaction I've seen. There have been much, much worse redactions, including ones where you can just highlight the text from behind it because they just put a black bar over something that had already been scanned. So it's not that embarrassing, but it's not great. Yeah, I'd like to think that they did it all line by line with a ruler and a Sharpie. Oh, yeah. I hope so. I mean, it sure looks like it. Because some of it is slightly off, but you can tell where the pen ends on the sides of it.

1:26:22So, yeah. Tom, we asked you to make us a list of everything we learned because it was some of the most revelatory stuff from the whole trial. You want to give it to us? Give us the rundown. Yeah, well, firstly, there's a bunch of stuff in there that people have been tweeting about that we can't exactly see the figures. So we're not sure. It's like percentages and all sorts of stuff. But the stuff that we're fairly sure on is that Horizon Forbidden West apparently costs$212 million to make over five years with 300 employees. The Last of Us Part 2 was$220 million and around 200 employees. And then Sony says that one million PlayStation gamers play nothing but Call of Duty, which is interesting.

1:27:06So it's just literally Call of Duty console. And then there's suggestions that in the document, it was around about 800 million in PlayStation revenue just in the US alone during 2021 for Call of Duty. Just from Call of Duty. Wow. Yeah. And we think the document says 1.5 billion globally in 2021 alone. And then when you count, so Sony says like when you count accessories, subscriptions and everything else that comes with that franchise, then this jumps up to what we think is either 13.9 billion or 15.9 billion a year but either way it is too big to fail it is it's so much money wow there's a lot of money there's the this is why you have to have call of duty everywhere thing like the yes numbers don't lie on that front yeah like it that that should immediately say to you it has to be on all platforms like And Bobby Kotick said, they asked him yesterday, why wouldn't you make it exclusive?

1:28:06Okay, here's my new theory, is that somebody redacted this badly on purpose, hoping that everyone would see it, because those numbers tell such a story about why you would not make this game exclusive. I have no evidence for this. There's no chance this is true, but this is now my conspiracy theory. So what you're saying is an Xbox fanboy in the core or in the FTC or something that's done this? absolutely yes yes someone with great calligraphy skills who loves call of duty on their xbox i mean it's not beyond you never know if that's you email us vergecast at theverse.com but that that news about the last of us in horizon forbidden rest that was kind of like big news too because we usually don't know how much these games cost to make like we get rough estimates from the outside yeah and i think it is roughly always around the sort of 200 million mark really for those sort of big games.

1:29:02But it also wasn't just Sony that had redaction problems in all of this. So obviously we got all that information out there and that was like, oh, cool. And then we realized, oh, hang on a minute, the courts pulled all the documents on this folder that they have apart from one. And I was like, let me have a look at this document. It was the Xbox one that revealed that Microsoft was obviously going after Sega, Bungie and a bunch of other studios. And they had redacted all of that stuff in this new document. that had been uploaded. And then as the hours went by, that document disappeared. The link to the documents disappeared from the court website and it's all just gone very quiet.

1:29:37So I'm hoping today that we hear exactly what's going on there because there hasn't been any filings mentioned in it just yet. But it's obviously a bit of a mess. And who knows when we're going to see the other exhibits in this case now. It's just all going to be redacted. They're just going to be like, never mind, you don't get to read anything. It's just a giant Sharpie. Just a picture of a Sharpie. Yeah. All right. Well, speaking of, y 'all need to get to this thing, which starts in just a few minutes. Addie, what are you looking for today? Anything that's still sort of outstanding that you're curious about to see?

1:30:08At this point, the thing I'm most curious about is just what more questions the judge has, especially because we're going to have closing statements and the closing statements, I believe she said earlier, that it's not just going to be one way. It's where she gets to kind of do her last grilling of both sides. And so I'm hoping that will at least give us a little bit more of a sense of what we could be looking for in a ruling. Yeah, that was one of the things we really learned from Epic versus Apple, too. It was like the more you pay attention to the questions the judge is asking, the better equipped you're going to be to figure out where this is actually going to go.

1:30:38Tom, what about you? So it's going to be a lot of financial stuff in the morning, I think, with the CFO of Exports and CFO of Microsoft appearing. So I think we're going to probably get some stuff there. I am curious to see what Nintendo has to say as well, because they're appearing today. And it will mean that we will have five days of constant arguments about the Switch, I'm sure of that. so hopefully nintendo will sort of answer the question whether it's a game console or not the switch and then the closing statements yeah i think they'll kind of hint at where they're trying to sway the judge i guess um which they kind of started off at the beginning with the opening statements and then i'm interested like you say to see what if the judge cuts in at any point again today and if it's about call of duty all right and alex you and i are just gonna screw off and go play some co-op call of duty right that's that's my day yeah i mean it's too big to fail.

1:31:25We got to play it. I mean, you're Americans. You love shooting things and you love multiplayer. Love shooting your friends. Yeah. And there we go. On that note. Awesome. Thank you all. That's it. That's the Vergecast. The website was really good this week. We had a thing on the best tech books that is both very good and surprisingly controversial. Like it's sort of encouraging to know that the internet has strong opinions about books at this moment in time, but they do. And we have a form where you can tell us all the books that you missed and you'll be wrong about that, but that's okay because we picked all the best books.

1:31:56Go read some of those books. I wrote a thing about Google Reader that just went live on Friday and it made me sad that Google Reader has been gone for 10 years, but here we are. The Reddit stuff continues to be chaotic. Today's going to be a crazy day on Reddit like we were talking about. Lots to talk about next week. We're off next Wednesday, but we'll be back next Friday. Have an awesome weekend. That's VergeCast. Rock and roll.

1:32:21And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

1:33:13The Limu Emu Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty.