Apple events, SEO, and other fights

22:33But I'm not going to buy this little baby Mac. Yeah, my in-laws had a 27-inch iMac from, I think, 2011, possibly even like 2009. They had this thing forever. And it finally got to the point where it's like they tried to load the tax website and it just didn't. it was like this this computer is a security risk like we can't do this anymore guys uh so they've been asking me for like a year and a half when is the 27 inch iMac coming out and i kept saying i went from i think it's going to happen give it a minute to i don't think this is going to happen because the mac studio and the studio display are the answers so i got them to buy a mac mini and a monitor which i actually think is a cheaper combo and works just as well but setting this thing up for them gave me like a real new understanding of why the iMac is great.

23:21Yeah. Because I had to buy them a webcam. We had to go through this whole crazy rigmarole with their keyboard because you can't set up a Mac without a keyboard and you can't connect a keyboard without setting up your Mac. So you need a wired keyboard, which no one has because it's 2023. No way. And I'm not a PC gamer. That's real. Yeah, it does not like Bluetooth. I always have to scramble. The advice they give you on the internet is keep a wired keyboard around just in case you have to set up a computer. Full chaos. So I went through this whole thing and, like, we eventually got it set up and I was like, boy, it would have been really nice if I could have just, like, pulled a thing out of a box, plugged it in and turned it on.

23:57Yeah. Look, I'm an iMac person. That's why. Although my iMac has all this stuff plugged into it, including an ancient flaky USB audio interface that needs to be replaced. So you got to buy a new Mac. So you got to buy a new Mac. Yeah. That's how you do it. That's called Verge Logic right there. It really makes a lot of sense when you think about it. I'm just going to buy like a 2017 iMac with USB-C. This is my idea. All right. Let's talk about shot on iPhone for two minutes. Okay. So at the end of the event, Apple puts up a label. It says shot on iPhone. Yeah. I know why they're able to do this now.

24:31We will come to that. And then a little bit later, they release some behind the scenes and they show massive production. Like cool. Like cool stuff. Lenses bolted to the front of iPhones and stuff like that. Yeah. Yeah. Big lights, big lenses. You know, there's like drone shots and CGI. It's a TV. They made a TV show. Yep. Apple is a TV company. It's like a high-end one. They made a TV show. Great. So we have a story that's like, here's what they mean when I say shot an iPhone. And the story, it contains almost no take. I'll get to it. But it contains almost no take. It's just here's all the stuff.

25:07If you want to do this, it costs us much money. people are freaking out that we're like accusing Apple of being liars and it's like no this is just at the end of the video it doesn't show you the stuff it's just a shot on iPhone and the very obvious thing that they want you to think is that you can do this with an iPhone and then it's cool they show you behind the scenes of what you need to do if you just want to do an iPhone and they did the same thing with Olivia Rodrigo right she has a music video they shot an iPhone they're running national ads during football games showing the thing in a gimbal They're not hiding the ball.

25:41But shot on iPhone is meant to make you feel good about the iPhone, not make you consider the production. It's just marketing. Yeah. I feel great about iPhones. I don't know. I bear no ill will towards the iPhone because they put it in a gimbal. But the point of it is like look how cool the iPhone is. if you had an iPhone, you too could be some combination of vampire Tim Cook and Olivia Rodrigo. That's how I feel every time I pick an iPhone. That's the dream. Yeah. Yeah. Whatever. I think people are upset about this for like the I'm smarter than you reason. Like you know it. Like if you're a Verge reader, you know instinctively that Apple has a lot of lights when they shoot the thing on the iPhone.

26:31And the idea that other people would know that and that would be surprising to them and make them feel feelings about Apple just made a bunch of Apple people mad. That's like basically my summation of this controversy. Whatever. It's like – All it did was make me realize that all of those shot on iPhone photos might also – Have had lights. Have had lights. So here's the thing. You can do – if you give me enough lights, I can make any camera look good. Actually, not me. If you give Becca enough lights, she can make any – Yes. That's great. Like that's well known. Any person who has played with photography knows like give me enough lights and lenses and stuff.

27:07You can pretty much make any camera look good. I think the reason they're able to shot an iPhone with the iPhone 15 Pro Max or whatever is not the camera system. It's that they can get the footage off the phone at USB-C speeds. Yep. And it shoots and log, which is software. I bet if Apple wanted to write a custom version of iOS that could shoot and log, they could do it. But the 15 can now do it for everybody, and it has the hardware capability of getting the footage off the phone. And so these are two things that are very important for pros, and Apple is showing off. Like, look, this sensor and this thing and the thing is good enough where you can replace a professional camera in some contexts if you have enough lights and professional things.

27:49But that's like a very hard thing to communicate. Like we've changed the port to USB-C, so now you can shoot a professional production on the phone and you don't have to wait six days to get the files off the phone. I would say not the world's greatest marketing message. Shot an iPhone, very good. Yeah. Yeah. I think to me the challenge is always that when we talk about smartphone shooting, it's kind of two different things that actually are totally different, but everybody kind of wants to have the best of both worlds. So on the one side you have something like this, which is like a very high-end production.

28:25And basically all they did was take out a fancy camera. Like they took out a Canon camera and put in an iPhone. Otherwise, the whole setup is essentially the same. And that's actually what they say in the behind-the-scenes videos, that one of the coolest things about it is how little of the process they had to change. They can still see the footage on all their monitors. They can still do this stuff in real time. They can get all the stuff that they need. Like plug-and-play into an otherwise very expensive professional setup is one side of things, right? The other thing we talk about with smartphone photos and video is that it lets you do stuff you couldn't do otherwise, right?

28:58I remember Anthony Bourdain's team used to talk about this, that when they started shooting with iPhones in restaurants instead of big TV cameras, it changed the vibe. And you can just get places you couldn't otherwise. Like nature photographers talk about this too, that you can get up close to things with a phone in a way that you can't with a giant camera with a giant lens. And so we have this idea that when we say things like shot on iPhone, the mental image is like a person holding a phone up in front of their face. That's obviously not how it works. Like no professional anything is actually shot that way.

29:31But the mental image that I think Apple and everyone else wants you to have when you think about that is that it's essentially Tim Cook standing there and like, I don't know, Craig Federighi standing there just like cleaning his eyes on that. If you think about it for one and a half seconds, that's obviously not what's going on. And this is what I'm saying. I think this is what people are – they're like mad about is they've thought about it. and sometimes when other people learn something, a reaction of people on the internet is to get very mad about that. I mean, I do that anytime someone says, have you heard of this film?

30:02Yeah. I get so annoyed. It's just weird. It's like, I've heard of all the films. I think that's very human. I'm not blaming anybody for this reaction. I'm just saying I think I'm identifying a thing that is happening that has nothing to do with whether marketing elides the difference between a professional camera shoot and Craig Federighi holding a professional. But like of course the marketing elides the difference between those two things. It's an ad. Like it's the richest company in the world is making ads. Like duh. I really want Craig to shoot the next iPhone keynote. Just only Craig. He's just chasing Olivia Rodrigo around while she crashes cars in a vampire outfit.

30:43All right. That's that. Whatever. You can feel however you want. I hope you enjoy your iPhone. Please shoot more music videos and send them to us. Olivia Rodrigo. The other group of people that was really mad at us this week that I mentioned at the top of the show was SEO professionals who, again, I really encourage you to, one, go read our piece by Amanda Chicago Lewis about the culture of SEO, which no one ever writes about. We can get to the piece. But then read the comments from the angry SEO people because the comments are some of the best formatted most – like if they could have put H2s in the comments for better search discoverability, they would have.

31:19It is amazing. The keywords are impeccable. It is the funniest thing about this whole situation is the SEO professionals being mad at us, but doing perfect SEO by instinct in all of the places where they're yelling at us. Ah, chef's kiss. So we have this big package all year. It's been the running theme of our year. If you care about AI and you think AI is transformative, which I think a lot of people do, and you are looking at the canon of C plus AI generated content that is being fired at every platform in the world, you're like, oh, boy, the web is going to be weird. weird. Oh boy, what's Google going to do?

31:53What's Google going to do when it starts doing more of the generated answers instead of just 10 blue links? What's Apple going to do when Google starts doing that and their search revenue deal changes in big ways? Like if you undo search in any way, the knock-on effects are gigantic. It is the architecture of the web. So we're just like writing about it. Did we talk about the melting egg thing? No. On this show yet? Did you guys see this? This is just the tiniest little version of this thing, and it's just my favorite. So Quora, the question and answer website, has been doing work with AI-generated answers to people's questions.

32:29It's possible that I'm misremembering this, but I don't think so. There was a question on Quora that said, can you melt an egg? And so ChatGPT through Quora answered, yes, you can melt full of good user-generated content. So now if you Google, can you melt an egg? Google says, yes, you can melt an egg, even though that's not true. So then a bunch of news outlets pick up this story about being able to melt an egg, which feeds more data back into these generative systems. And so now there's all kinds of data on the internet in which phrases like you can melt an egg exist on high-ranking websites.

33:10And so we got to the point where the question, can you melt an egg, became like absolute certainty to Google through all of the signals that it wants about how things should work because one little tiny AI system said so. They fixed it. They have fixed it since. But that's like there are going to be literally an infinity of examples like that. Because I just Googled it, and apparently the most common way to melt an egg is to heat it using a stove or microwave. That's from tnnsupport.com. That's good. Your trusted source for egg melting. So if you – good example, everyone. We did it. If you think that these things are worth talking about, you might direct your resources at covering the present state of Google and the web and how we got here, Google search, so that you might be better positioned to cover what happens next, which appears to be a snake eating its tail of melted eggs.

34:10Delicious. Pretty soon we will all be melting eggs thanks to Google. These are just crazy outcomes, right? Right, and they are culture-shaping outcomes. A real reason that the Flat Earth conspiracy has as much traction as it does is because every time another NBA player says they believe in the Flat Earth conspiracy, people Google it and then a million websites see that in Google Trends and they write about Flat Earth stuff. Yep. And that is just a feedback loop that has made more people be like, Flat Earth is a reasonable debate to have because I see it in the information ecosystem. People are stupid.

34:46We've written that story. We'll put it in the show notes. It was just one of the weirdest things. I was like, go explain how search made the flat earth happen. And we did. It's kind of weird that people forgot that the Google bomb exists. So we wrote that story. So in our package, right? Yeah. We wrote an entire story about how the culture, our broader pop culture, for a minute, the algorithm at the center of it was the Google search algorithm. Ryan Broderick wrote that story for us. And now the algorithm at the center of the culture is the TikTok algorithm. Maybe three years ago, the algorithm at the center of the culture was the YouTube algorithm.

35:17There's a brief enduring moment where it's the Instagram algorithm that provided you the Kardashians. Just you open Instagram. It's like here's another one. I just watched them on E. Yeah. But they were like masters of one platform. They haven't jumped to another. Right. And it's just I think it's important to look at the search algorithm and say this thing once ran the culture. It's still how information is organized around the world. Everyone writes to it. I mean, I think about SEO, like it's not my Roman empire, but it's up there. What a phrase. See, that's a TikTok phrase. Yep. The algorithm at the center of the culture is ever-changing, but you can almost always identify it.

35:59So writing all these pieces, we'll link to all of them. Last week, we had a piece about restaurants naming themselves Near Me. Mia Seda wrote it. It's incredible. It's great. Thai Food Near Me is a real restaurant you can go to in New York. Food's actually quite good, Mia says. So we'll link to that. We've got a bunch of these this week. It was Amanda Chicago Lewis writing about the culture of people who practice SEO, not technical SEO tips of which this piece contained none. And everyone's like responding to it as though this is how to do SEO. No, no, no. This is a piece about the culture of the people who practice it professionally and the conferences they go to and how they talk about Google.

36:37And a five and a half foot long alligator. And the conferences they go in Florida. Generally, Florida as a concept is in this piece quite a lot. And what is – I would just point out to everyone, this is like a well-known thing you can do. You can say, we're sitting in the financial district in New York. I would like to write a piece about the culture of finance pros. It's like a real thing many magazines do all the time because they're cartoonish. And then they make movies about it and they star Leonardo DiCaprio. True. True. And very rarely do the movies contain technical explanations of what the finance bros are doing all day long.

37:12How to do finance. You get – right? Like many television shows are about the culture of being a lawyer. Very rarely does suits ever get any part of the law right. I can't watch the show. It's so bad. It's everywhere. The algorithms just want to make me watch suits. But this is just a thing, right? The culture of a profession is a reasonable thing to write about. So our piece is about the culture of the profession and, like, how they feel about doing a thing that scammers do to make money and that other people do to just get you to go to their doctor's office or whatever. Right. The piece is great.

37:51And it's a bunch of characters because the people who are best at SEO make a lot of money. And they have silly cars. And they buy alligators for their conferences. And they're just loud characters. And one of the central points of this story is the guy at Google who used to sort of manage the SEO industry. It was a guy named Matt Kotz who talked to us for the story. Matt has been out of Google forever. He went to the U.S. Digital Service under Barack Obama. So he was in the government. He was a CTO, I think, at the USDS. And Google, to replace him, hired a whole bunch of people. One of those people was a guy named Danny Sullivan.

38:25Danny Sullivan used to be a journalist. He ran a site called Search Engine Land. I used to be a regular reader of Search Engine Land. Now he's a guy who works at Google and sort of interfaces with people who want to do SEO. The people in our story are like things changed when one guy left and another guy came in, which is a totally reasonable thing to say, right? The posture of the company changed when the sort of ad hoc guy in 2009 was doing it. And then he left and they built an entire function to replace him. And the face of that function is this guy. Danny's been doing this a long time. I think having I know a lot of people who are reporting on search we've done a lot of stories about search I think the scrutiny of search and what it is and how it works is frustrating to people at Google who are in general idealistic about what it should do right there's a trial like David this week published the list of the was it top 10 most lucrative search terms in 2018 yep and the idea that search is a deeply commercial business really rankles Google, but it is their entire business.

39:29I don't think that's true. No? I actually don't think Google is afraid of the idea that it makes money from search. I actually think that's one step too far. I think what Google believes earnestly at its corporate center is that what's good for Google is good for the web. Yeah. And by making Google better and giving more people more access to Google, Google has made the web better. Like Sundar Pichai just said that in court this week. I genuinely believe that that is a thing that Google as a company believes. And so for us to come in and say essentially that what you've done is you've created a game to be won.

40:06And what everybody is doing is doing these things in order to win it. And by doing so, they're ruining the internet. Essentially what we're saying to Google is like – and I think it's true. I think you look at the internet and it is like provably true at this point. But what we're saying is Google, by trying to grow Google, you've not only grown the web, you've re-incentivized the web to make it worse in order to serve you better. Right. If I was to say to you, how do you win the Instagram algorithm, you have a mental model in your head. Yeah. Absent reels or whatever. But like in the moment of Instagram's greatest power, you have a mental model of how that incentive structure worked.

40:42If I was to say to you, how do you win the TikTok algorithm, you may or may not have a mental model. How do you win the Logan Paul era YouTube algorithm? You probably have a mental model, right? It's not a good one, but yeah. But it's there, right? Like you do a bunch of pranks with your bros, like whatever. All those things change and they come and go. But the idea that there's an algorithm that can be gamed, people try to game it, that leads to a type of content or a culture of those creators. When we go talk to the platform companies, the idea that we're doing a story like this never surprises them.

41:15It never rankles them. It never irritates them. It's just the thing that we do. When we have been going to do it with search, hey, there's an algorithm that creates a bunch of incentives. And there's a bunch of creators out there who are trying to game the algorithm. And that means the culture of the web and the content we create looks like it responds to your incentives. That's where I think Google is very frustrated. Oh, I think that's right. Yeah. Because I think what Google would tell you is that it is designed to reflect the best of the web. And in reality, what it did was decide what the best of the web is and then force everyone into that specific box.

41:49Right. And the particular thing that Danny read our piece, he doesn't like it because he's characterized as being somewhat unhappy with our reporter in the piece. And we link to Danny's response on the homepage. You can read that too. But where he and I have been going back on threads is Google keeps saying we publish all of these guidelines and we tell people not to do the things that the guidelines don't say. Like the response to every one of our pieces about Google search this year has been that's not what the guidelines say. Which is just – Thousands of pages. And then also in the next breath, they're like the best thing to do is not read the guidelines.

42:25Yeah, just make great content. Just make great stuff. And it's like, well, why do you publish all these guidelines if you don't want anyone to read them? And there's a real tension in there. Like if you are a person who builds a website, our website, a lot of the schema of our website is designed for Google. Like the underpinning of the layouts of our pages are designed to be predictable for Google. OK. Like I don't feel bad about that. I want our stuff to be searchable and discoverable. But I also don't want us to write headlines for the Google search robot. I want us to write headlines for people.

42:59And like there's a real tension there and one of the things that makes that tension worse I think on the web in general is Google doesn't like recognize that tension exists. So when the people – when scammers write headlines to fool Google, they win. Or when a company – like we see this a lot in our industry and elsewhere. I think we all think about SEO a lot and that's one of the reasons this story means a lot to people at The Verge is because we have to think about SEO. It's important. And we have to think, okay, well, how far do we go? Because there is that way where you can win the web. Yeah.

43:33And you can prove everyone that you can melt an egg. We are six months away from one of our major competitors emerging as like a totally AI-written content form. Exactly. I feel it in my bones that that is the thing we will compete against with next year for search traffic. And, I mean, that's exactly what's happening. We're seeing our major competitors go down that road after we already watch them go and do things like, you know, say, hey, check out the hands-on for the new iPhone 15 Pro two weeks before it was announced. Just so you can gain. Can we just do some SEO scam rundowns? Real competitors have done.

44:07Yes. So the one Alex is talking about, we have a lot of competitors who a month before any device is released, they will put up a page. And it's a hands-on page. It's basically a holding page. The headline at the top, a lot of the copy is about the hands-on. And then it'll be like, come back on this day to check it out. This is just an SEO game. Like, I think that's fake. And now we have covered this a lot too. We have big competitors like Geo Media and CNET and others who are running trials of AI-generated content. And their staffs are furious about this. They're not happy. The people who make the work are not happy about this, but the corporations are doing it.

44:42And they all say the same excuse, which is we have to learn how to use this stuff. And it's like you're learning nothing. Yeah. What have you learned? Well, the other one, I think my guess would be one a lot of people have encountered is when you search for some kind of coupons on the internet. The number of sites that you would not expect to have a sneaky hidden coupons page for Bed Bath & Beyond that nevertheless has a sneaky hidden coupon page for Bed Bath & Beyond is like alarming. I just bought a solo stub. I took the coupon right from Wired.com. There you go. That was a totally weird experience, but I was like, I'm supporting my friends.

45:13Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is a thing we've talked about a lot on this show, right? Like there's an internet for humans and there's an internet for robots and Google is the robots. Like it's – AI is becoming the robots but Google has been the robots for a really long time and it has demanded a lot of people's time and energy because at the end of it, it's the discovery engine for the internet. And Google like really would love you to believe what they always say, which is just do good stuff and we'll help people find it. And I think anyone who has ever tried to do good stuff on the internet can tell you it's just not nearly that simple.

45:48Anyway, so that's the dispute. You can all evaluate. Disclosure, we have a website. There are people at our company that professionally do SEO. Yeah. And if you Google things, you might find our website. Yeah. Our website is designed to be surfaced in Google search. I think about that. Oh, there's one part. Can I tell this story? Yeah. No, no, no. I was just going to say I love SEO. I want people to read my stuff. All right. Maybe not that far. Alex is like running chat in the corner to replace us all. There's one Danny calls out. When we were redesigning the site, he says, Neil, I emailed me and wanted to know about some SEO question, which is true.

46:26I emailed him and said, we're going to have these quick posts. We're redoing this thing. Our internal SEO team, we're having a debate about whether to index the quick posts. This is a true thing. I say, Danny is the search liaison. I know him. I emailed him and said, hey, I've got this question. and he was like read the guidelines that's what Danny said which is the thing that he is supposed to do professionally what he says to everybody is read the guidelines no special treatment for anyone and I was like I don't think the guidelines are helping me here because they are designed to tell people who spam affiliate links not they'll get down ranked and our quick posts aren't that but they're also very short and like the folk wisdom of SEO is that short things are bad you know like there's all this stuff and we just don't know the answer and his answer was like do what's best great Like, that's a totally – I presume a totally reasonable interaction.

47:13And then we didn't index the Quick Post because we didn't want to tank the traffic to our other pages by having something that might be whatever. Okay, that's like a normal sort of like business conversation that you might have. We didn't have any terms. It was just advice, right? Like, I'm operating to the search liaison. It's not a commercial conversation. It's not the wrong side of the house. And I know Danny. So he calls us up to say like us caring about SEO somehow negates us from criticizing the practice of SEO. In fact, it makes us more like qualified to critique it. I feel much more qualified.

47:50Yeah, we do the thing. Yeah, like I do it all the time. I feel very qualified to critique it. Also, and we have a lot of commenters who are like, but you have posts that are about best laptops. We want you to read our website. If we do want you to read our website. But also just like – just turn the knob all the way. I will concede that we are the worst SEO scammers on the internet. The worst. We're going to find you and we're going to sell you some car insurance tomorrow. You looking for a wireless plan? Get that solo storage. That would be great if we sold wireless plans. We're like, don't buy any of them.

48:22None of these will let you do surgery on a grape. I'll concede it to you all the way. That doesn't change the idea that people who practice SEO have a culture. Anyway, you can tell that I care about this a lot. Yeah. David, I want to come back to a thing that you said real quick, and then we can wrap this up. Like, Google doesn't care if you think about search for the business. You were in the courtroom this week where literally the CEO of Google was talking about Google search as a business and what it means and how it works and this big deal with Apple. What's going on there? It was really interesting because the deal with Apple has been the story of this trial so far.

49:00Like fundamentally, if you really want to boil this entire antitrust trial down to one question, it's is it anti-competitive for Google to give Apple what we now know to be$18 billion a year in order to be the default search engine in Safari? Like, that's it. That's the whole question. Because even if that one deal goes away, everyone else testifying is saying that blows the search market wide open. But so Sundar Pachai gave this like long, mostly unspicy testimony, like Satya Nadella was very spicy, Sundar less spicy. But essentially what he argued over and over is that like Google is a business.

49:41It's a competitive business. There are a lot of things out there. Part of Google's line is that like everyone is coming for search all the time. Prabhakar Raghavan, who runs search for Google, talked a lot about TikTok and vertical search engines and this idea that like people look for information in lots of places. And that's fundamentally what Google does. It's very competitive on and on. And Sooner Pertages kept saying, look, we give all these companies all this money because it makes us more money. And like it's just that simple. Like Google wouldn't give Apple$18 billion a year if Google didn't make more than$18 billion a year as a result, right?

50:18Like John Schmittlein, the lawyer for Google, asked him about like you have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to make money, right? And Sooner was like, yes. We do these deals because they are good value and Google is a business and when people use our search engine, we make money from it. Like that fact is not unclear to anyone, right? I think if you want to talk about the ways in which Google search has gotten worse over time, which many people perceive that it has. If you want to talk about whether there are too many ads or Google hides the fact that there are ads or AI is going to ruin the quality of your search results, like that's all really interesting questions.

50:53But Google's coming out here and basically saying, like, we are a business. We make an awful lot of money. What do you want from us? Like, the idea that Google started out as this company in the relatively early days of the web and said, we are going to bet on the web. We are going to bet that we can be essentially infrastructure for the entire web and that if we help more people do more stuff on the web, that will accrue value back to Google. That has been one of the great bets of business of all time. Like, holy God, was that a good idea from Google 25 years ago. And the question in front of Google and that was kind of put to Sundar a bunch of different ways is like, has that turned?

51:35Like, are you no longer good for the web because you're so big, because you're so powerful, because you're so sort of singular in your power as that infrastructural layer? And that's obviously a much harder question to answer. And obviously Sundar is not going to say, yes, we're too big. It's a huge problem. But that thing that they bet on the web and the web got to take over the world and so did Google is like the central tension of all of this. Because it's like at what point does that go from – I think we all rooted for Google for a really long time because it was true that – I think a lot of our listeners are still rooting for Google.

52:10For sure. Like it was a company that believed in the internet at a time that I think it was good to have a company that believed in the internet. In many ways, when we interact with people from various companies, the people from Google are easily the most sincere. Yeah, and they want the web to be a good place full of good things that people can access and use. Like I think that rules. When does that turn on you and you become – you have to tamp down the web to keep it the way that you want it? That's the question. And like has Google tipped over that line was what Sundar was kind of being asked indirectly over and over.

52:43And it was just – it was fascinating to see it distilled down. I would point – we're going to link to this too. David wrote a story about Google AMP as part of our Google package when Google clearly went over the line. Yeah. And had to roll it all back. But that's such a fun example, right? Because Google is like, okay, if we don't do this, Facebook will. Right? Like that's a response to a real threat from a company that was like actively trying to destroy the open web. Like that's just like naked aggression against the open web. And so Google did. What it decided to do I think was way too far over the line.

53:15But to respond to that in some way and say we have to preserve the open web, not wrong and not out of bounds with what Google had always said that it was. But it's just it's that same thing. It's like where do you go from what's good for the web is good for Google and everybody wins to we have to keep the web just like this so that Google can keep winning. Yeah. And I think the interesting thing about the sort of like dominant algorithm theory is it's weird that the web is shaped for search, that there's no other discovery engine, that there's no other competing incentive. You can't just make a weird website and sort of like assume Google will find it.

53:54Right. And it's really telling that Google now is even struggling to do that. It's trying to find all these new ways to show you stuff. It's trying to do the more multimedia search. And it's just like, I don't know. Have you found yourself on one of those pages where you do a Google search and instead of getting a bunch of links to stuff, they just show you like vertical videos in a row? It feels bad. I don't like it. I click out every time, especially if it's like I'm trying to figure out how to grill something. I know why it feels bad it's because you don't know that you can ever get back there there's something really permanent about doing a Google search and finding a page and being like alright I looked through some of these I'll come back to it or whatever for me it was just oh god I'm going to have to watch a video I just want to like go and scan a I'm told that video is the highest bandwidth yeah that's just because you're old okay we gotta take a break I'll just say this at the very end we were getting documents out of this trial Apple had an internal presentation that said Android is a massive tracking device and they signed a big deal which was fantastic.

54:48It's very good. All right, we'll be right back.

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57:18All right, we're back. We went very long talking about Google search. Yeah. Yeah. So we're doing the back half of the show is two lightning rounds. This one is the streaming lightning round. that was my streaming voice. Alex Kranz, take it away. A lot happened this week. I'm going to kick it off with Casey Bloys, who is currently running HBO and during the early days of the pandemic was a little too into his phone and was directing people to direct interns to harass or not to harass, but to troll critics online of HBO shows. This is like Warner Media classic move. Yeah, hysterical. He has since apologized.

58:02Oh, my. Because this all came out because one of those interns is suing the company for wrongful termination. So it all came out from that. It was in this big Rolling Stone piece all about the company. A lot of really good reporting on that piece. You should go track it down. But since then, Casey Boyce has addressed it and he was basically like, I was too into my phone. And now I just DM when I'm angry at critics instead. Oh, my. Is that? That's really – that's the huge feat of self-realization that he's gone through. This is just direct message. Just tell it you myself. So he's DMing his criticism more and honestly, I would rather have Tim Cook come into my DMs and be like, that was a real rude thing you said about that phone.

58:46The flash was good. Yeah. I think I'd rather like prefer that. What are you trying to say, Casey Boyce? Okay. I have two things to say to Casey Blois. Casey, I know you're listening. So pull over your car. Take notes. Thing number one is use your own burners, man. Come on. I'm all for having burners. NBA athletes do it. Everybody has a burner that they use just for looking at accounts just in case they like one by accident. Everybody has burners. But you got to have your own burners. and if you're not going to have your own burners at least like do it for real and get like a bot farm you know what i mean like he he did this like half measure that it's like if you're going to go for it go for it otherwise just pretend you're like a random stranger and defend yourself and you'll inevitably get caught and it'll be very funny this is the weirdest worst way to do it to like yell at your desistance to defend you on the internet like don't do that it's not great He says it's much better now because he has – many of them are gracious enough to engage with him back and forth.

59:50So it's much better now instead of having the intern say, you suck. Because that was the gist of the ones they confirmed were coming from this person. I mean, OK. I'm going to disagree with David. It's not even good. I want an army of interns with burner accounts to tweet at our critics. And if you're interested in this job, you can just email us at vergecastattheverge.com. We'll see. we'll see what happens next we'll pay you in merch also those critics are not being very gracious because they didn't know that the army of anonymous interns was tweeting you suck at them it wasn't like it wasn't like Casey was like hey so all those weird Anon accounts that have been tweeting you suck at you that was me I prefer to start DMing now and they're like oh yes of course Casey come in no he just started DMing them alright here's my it's staying on HBO Max here's my lightning round one in the grand scheme of everything getting more expensive, if you're on HBO Max and you had ad-free, now they're going to charge you more money for 4K.

1:00:51God damn it. If you had a legacy ad-free account. How much am I paying now? I miss this and I'm very upset. You have to go to$20 a month. So if you're on the standard ad-free one that you used to get 4K on, which I think is$16 a month, you're going to lose 4K. You have to upgrade to Ultimate at$20 a month, and then you get$4K back. I'm not going to have any money for my children. I don't have any. Did we get— Mine is named Max. I get nothing for this. I should get a substantial discount. You should. Where did we land on our would you cancel your streaming services before you gave up$4K? A lot of people agreed with me.

1:01:32That's what I'm going to say is a lot of people agree that, yeah, they would rather cancel than give up$4K. Yeah, that was most of the feedback I heard too. Honestly, the audacity of Max, who was late to 4K and half-assed 4K and is still half-assing 4K, to expect me to pay more. I'm going to do it, but I'm going to be so furious the whole time. This is the problem with millennials, Alex. This is the same energy I bring. You and your avocado coast, you're$20 a month of garbage 4K. No children. What am I doing with my life? Do you know what I've realized recently? So I've been sort of systematically going and downgrading everything to the ad plans because I just want the ads.

1:02:08Like, I'm good. Give me the ads. 4K the ads. You want that Myrtle Beach timeshare. The strangest thing I have discovered is that I kind of love it because it's a phone break. I now like four times an hour, I get a phone break. So I don't look at my phone during shows anymore because I know that in seven minutes, I'm going to get three minutes to look at Reddit or check my texts or whatever. And then we're going to – it's perfect. It's just like a tiny little intermission where whatever is happening on the TV happens on the TV, but I get to look at TikTok. Your house sounds horrible. You're watching like 480p Survivor on a garbage fast service looking at your phone for three-minute chunks.

1:02:43Anna is sitting next to me doing spelling bee, and I'm sitting here. I do connections during one. I look at Reddit during another one. I check my email and Slack during another one, and then it's the end of the hour, and I've watched the whole show. It's perfect. I don't know about this. All right. What's your lightning round one beyond your bad idea about watching ads? Ads. What if there was an ad break but just no ads? It was just silence on the TV for two minutes. Everybody gets a phone break. Yeah. Exactly. Sponsored by Intel. Mine is Disney appears to be actually for real about to own all of Hulu, which we've kind of known is coming for a while.

1:03:17But it seems like approximately one minute after Comcast was allowed to exercise the clause that would force Disney to buy the rest of Hulu, it did so. Now comes the part where Disney and Comcast have to figure out what Hulu is worth, which I think is going to be really fascinating. They set it up in such a way basically, and Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I understand this right, which is that a bunch of years ago when they made this deal that would allow Disney to eventually buy all of Hulu, they valued Hulu at about$27 billion, which meant that the roughly third of the service that Comcast owned was worth like$8 and change billion.

1:03:55Now, that's the minimum price Disney is going to have to pay. If the price has gone down since then, sucks for Disney, they still have to pay that money. I don't think it has. if that price has gone up, Disney is going to have to pay the eight and change plus whatever percentage difference there is based on the new valuation of Hulu. So the question now is, what is Hulu worth in the market? And we're about to find out. It's a deeply weird time in the streaming world. Streaming is both like ascendant and a mess. I have no idea, but I think figuring out how much money this is, especially for Disney, which is not in a super a good position to be writing checks for eight plus billion dollars at this moment in time.

1:04:35It's about to get really weird. I think it's going to force Disney to actually think about what it's doing and what its strategy is. I don't think Disney's been doing that lately. It is a weird time to announce this deal when the cover of Variety is, is Marvel screwed? Yeah. Which is a piece worth reading. Yeah. It's a great piece. I wrote kind of an addendum to it it's on the site right now they don't know how Marvel like Marvel's just in a bad spot and the piece was very kind of weird because it refused to blame Kevin Feige who runs Marvel Studios for anything but then everything seemed to quietly like they'd be like yeah there's someone at the top and we don't know what to do and it's like weird story but yeah I think Disney has to figure out it's got multiple services for a long time it was like this is for adults and Disney Plus is for babies and maybe it's going to merge the two together.

1:05:30It's also got the Hulu Live subscription and there's a reasonable amount of subscribers there but not as many as you think. Hulu is still way below Disney Plus in subscriptions. So it's going to be like they already own everything on it because it's all Fox and ABC shows. So they own everything. It's just like what do you – I don't know. I think that all the people who have to figure the price out are going to fight, like the Comcast and the Disney folks, I want to be in that room watching those two groups fight each other because that's going to be really cool. One assumes that Disney is planning to sell ESPN, and Comcast knows this, and they would like some of that money to come back to Comcast.

1:06:12That's fair. Disclosure, NBCUniversal, a division of Comcast, is a minority investor at Vox Media, our parent company. We produced a Netflix show, which you should go watch. It's called The Future Of. I was the executive producer of that show. It's really quite good. but I'm hopelessly biased in favor of that show which you should watch on Netflix which you should watch yeah that's it I think that's all for now we all have televisions I think those are the ones that are implicated in this conversation again our site is discoverable in search we have a TikTok account we use YouTube two more we won an Emmy this week hell yeah we did Becca won an Emmy for her YouTube series Full Frame.

1:06:56Big bias in favor of winning Emmys. Just know, you can't trust anything we say if it's not going to win us an Emmy. One more thing before we move on from the streaming stuff. There was a big debate in our comments on the Hulu-Disney thing about whether, if you're Disney and you're going to combine all your streaming services, should you call it Disney Plus or should you call it Hulu? I think this is the most obvious question ever, but I'm curious what you two think. Ooh, I think if Disney knew what they were doing, they would call it Hulu. No. Yes, 100 % because Disney itself has a very specific brand identity and that's what they're terrified.

1:07:30You mean the best brand identity potentially of any brand anywhere on planet Earth? But also – Disney is the good brand. That's literally what it is. Yeah. It's the good brand. It's goodness and happiness and joy and happiness. I literally heard one of Becky's aunts say out loud, what is the difference between Hulu and Roku? And I looked at her and I was like, you know what? That is a surprisingly deep and meaningful and good question. It's a good question. It is. Right. I think that's a good question. Like it's just TV stuff. Yeah, but the problem with Disney is that Disney is not just Disney.

1:08:05It's ABC. Well, for now. It's ABC. It's FX. It's all of these things. And they're running into the exact same problem as Warner Brothers. And Warner Brothers obviously went with the incredible Max. and here's the real opportunity for them to be like, we're not going to do that. Disney Plus was always kind of a stupid name because it was. And instead we're just going to click to Hulu. Here's what they're going to do. They're called the Everything app. It's going to be called X. It's going to do payments. You can date Minnie Mouse. It's going to be amazing. Elon will be. It's all going to be great.

1:08:39All right, we got to take a break. We'll be right back with Lightning Round Part 2. We'll be right back.

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1:11:27okay we're back can i start with my favorite thing of the entire week yes please absolute favorite thing of the entire week it's not even a thing we covered oh it's a it's a thing that tfl truck covered on tiktok by the way tfl truck one of my all-time favorite they're just it's just a website about trucks they rule it's great uh they're at some car show the guy's like i'm here with a Ford F-150 Lightning at the Borla booth. And he goes to the Borla guy and he's like, so you've built an exhaust system for the F-150 Lightning. And the guy looks at him and goes, it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution.

1:12:06And then he goes, it can play futuristic sounds too. This is a thing that happens in this video. I lost my mind. I've watched him say it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution a thousand times. Did he play it? The confidence. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. What he means by this is that there are speakers mounted under the bumper of the truck. What? And then when he pushes the accelerator down, it makes engine sounds. And it's all very complicated. Mm-hmm. Right? He's like, look, we're plugged into the systems of the truck. We're measuring the distance. The accelerator pedal is pushed to the floor of the load on the engine.

1:12:45We've got simulated gear shift sounds on an electric truck. And then he's like, and there's buttons and knobs. So there's one knob switches between four presets. The other one is the volume. You can change the presets on your phone to futuristic sounds. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. And then he's like, here's what you can set it to right now. Mind you, this is a Ford truck. He's like, a Chevy Silverado. What? A Dodge Charger. and I'm like there was a meeting that the exhaust company Borla is a famous exhaust company and they had a meeting and they're like this EV thing is killing us no one's gonna buy exhaust pipes from us anymore headers out the window we're not doing this what's our plan and someone's like aftermarket sound solutions we're gonna put speakers on the trucks and we're gonna make Ford trucks sounds like they have Chevy V8s in them how are they gonna roll cold there was a meeting Alex I love it.

1:13:44Just go watch this video. It's not even our video. I just quick posted a TikTok from another publication because I can't get enough of this guy saying it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. There was a period of time like two months ago, I would say, where, Neelai, you missed a couple of shows in a row. You were super busy. You didn't do the iPhone review this year. You were doing code. You were moving. A lot was going on. And we got a bunch of emails being like, is Neelai leaving? Is he going off to like some big job? And I want everyone to know that when Neelai does leave, it will be to do the thing he just described just now.

1:14:17Neelai will leave us to go do aftermarket sound solution truck TikTok, and that will be the end. It's the only thing. If ever Neelai disappears, look for him on truck TikTok. That's what it will be. I just got to go watch the video. Well, it's just the confidence. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. You're very – like I feel confident listening to you say it. I just – like if you're buying – The way it just – The number of companies that are solving the sort of like political culture war of EVs by being like, here's what we're going to do. We're going to put speakers on the car and we're going to make them sound like they burn gas.

1:14:53And that'll fix it. Dodge is doing this. They are. They call it the Fretsonic exhaust system and they won't admit that they're putting speakers under the car. At least Borla is like, yeah, it's a. What does it sound when it's like crossing water? Like the speakers are drowning? That was really good, actually. That was really good. That was really good. What you want is to drive your battery-powered truck into some water and make it bubble. Everyone very confident that that's a good situation. Neela, did you say it's called Fret Sonic or Frat Sonic? Frat Sonic. Frat Sonic. That's fantastic. Frats.

1:15:28Whatever, man. All right. What's yours? Okay. Mine is Chris Person, friend of The Verge, has a great story up on the site where he hacked a robot vacuum to make it more, like, secure. Because robot vacuums, you know, they're going around your house. You're hopefully wearing pants when they're going around your house. Yeah. Always wear pants. And they're mapping your house. They're mapping everything. And then they're uploading all of that to the cloud. And while it is typically pretty secure, it is also a potential privacy nightmare. Yeah. And so he had to go use this project called Valle Tudo.

1:16:03It's a great name. Valle Tudo. Valle Tudo. Valle Tudo. And so he used this project to hack a robot vacuum and make it – disconnect it from the cloud and still make it work and do all this stuff. And it worked. But, you know, it's hacking. This is not just – yeah, he's in the system. He's physically removing boards and adding new boards. And he was working on this for a while. He was working with, I believe, Dan Seifert. And Dan would just be like, oh, yeah, I'm just getting all these pictures of robot vacuum guts. And you're like, what is going on over there? Has he thought about adding an aftermarket sound solution to his robot vacuum?

1:16:41Full Silverado Viet powering through the living room? It's going to sound great. But the story is really cool. And I love the idea of it, especially as the other day, like, I kept having to stand in front of my robot vacuum cleaner. And it would, like, bump into me. And I was like, oh, my God, none of these photos can ever, like, be leaked because it's just the worst look for you. Just horrible because it's like it's from your feet up. So it's like it's basically even worse than that one where you pull your phone out and you go to check something and the camera is facing you and you're not expecting it and you've got four chins.

1:17:14There's like 12 chins on your ass, on your face. There's a lot of chins happening and nobody needs to see that. So I might – I feel like I kind of want to hack mine now. My robot has become a supervillain in my house. The noise, the little boop, boop, boop thing that it does right before it starts scares the hell out of my dog. For some reason, she literally, as soon as any—the vacuum doesn't even have to move. As soon as she hears that noise, which it, for some reason, will occasionally just make randomly out of nowhere, she just goes flying upstairs and hides in the bed under the covers and will not come back for hours.

1:17:47And our 11-month-old, he is now crawling like a maniac, and he sees this little glowing light, and he presses the button because that's fun. And then it moves and it hits him and he doesn't like that. And then it's like, oh, well, I have to get around this. So it just keeps moving a little bit, like an inch at a time, and just bashing into his legs over and over. So I have to figure out a place to put the robot vacuum that is somehow accessible to no one but can still vacuum my floors. So if anybody has any, like, sneaky hiding places for your vacuum, please. I think you just get, like, a drone apparatus for your child.

1:18:22Oh, yeah, I'll get the Ring flying camera. That'll go super good. My dog will love that. That'll go really well. Every time I've ever bought an expensive vacuum, it's been shittier than the$30 vacuum we bought when we were very young. We were in a hotel in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago, and the one vacuum that they had in there was this piece of crap dust devil that weighed nothing. And all anyone talked about all weekend was how nice it was because it was so light and small. Yeah. Just like this piece of junk vacuum is like my favorite thing I've ever used to clean floors because it weighs nothing.

1:18:55I have a$1 ,000 LG vacuum with Wi-Fi that empties itself into a stand. I thought this was so cool. It looks so good, man. I just like looking at it. Yeah. We have a$30 shark that just outperforms that thing. Coming and going. Yep. Just all that money is in the Wi-Fi chip and not in the part that sucks up dirt. I have it run four times a week, and that kind of helps. I've never had any luck with robot vacuums, and now I've heard about the ass-chin situation, and I never will. Yeah, don't go look at the images. David, what's your lightning round item? If we could title this episode of the podcast the ass-chin situation, I would very much appreciate that.

1:19:38That would be great for SEO. No one's Googling ass-chin situations. Mine is – I was picking between two Google things. One is that now you can put the Chrome URL bar on iOS down at the bottom. Most controversial decision on the internet for a while there, if you guys remember. But the one I ended up choosing was Google is now selling like in pre-registries.ing domains. A fun fact about me is I'm obsessed with domain names. I find them totally fascinating. And there was this thing like 10 years ago where ICANN was like, we're going to put out a million new kinds of domains. You can be.pizza. You can be.restaurant.

1:20:13You can be.online. and we're going to reinvent the way people think about web pages. Instead of trying to be a.com, you can just be, you know, Alfredo's.pizza and that's your restaurant. That didn't work at all. And if you go to like a messaging system or email or Slack or whatever, most of those don't even show up as URLs, which I would argue is like pretty spectacular failure. So now Google is out here trying to make.ing happen and their thing is like if you want it to be, you know, if you're a flight booking company, You do book.ing or fly.ing, and they're charging a ton of money for it. R.ing, which would be ring, obviously.

1:20:52It's like if you want to, if you're Victoria, not Victoria's Secret, if you're Tiffany's or whoever,$130 ,000 a year for this domain name. And I just think Google has been way out in front of these. They're called top-level domains or TLDs. And all these like alternate TLDs Google has been out in front of for forever. .xyz has actually been fairly successful as a kind of catch-all thing. .ai had a moment. .social has kind of had a moment. And now Google is going to try really, really, really hard to make.ing a thing. I really want to have they see me roll.ing. That's very good, Alex. But I don't have – $200 ,000 a year.

1:21:31Like, Neelai, can I have some money? I got an idea. Wait, didn't Google leave the domains business? Google domains business. I had not even sold. I think just gave to Squarespace, which some people are very mad about. Yeah. But it still has its like overarching TLD registry thing. So it like administers these domain names, but it doesn't do the buying and selling and management of them. Are they going to have messaging? That's a good one. They should just call it Gchat. Put full manifestation. Just call it Gchat. All will be forgiven. The government will give up their antitrust trials. We'll stop covering SEO.

1:22:15Just call it Gchat. We're so easily bought. That's your disclosure. If they just call it Gchat, we'll back all the way off. Huh? Deal? No deal. Last one I want to call out. X had its first all hands with Elon and Linda Iaccarino. Alex Heath has the full transcript of that meeting. you should go read it just to witness the wild vacillations of Elon making stuff up and Linda having to pretend it was part of the plan. Yep. There's one point where I don't remember exactly what he was saying but Elon was like I'd like to start with this and it was obviously a surprise to her and she was like I'd raise my hand to be a part of that.

1:22:56Perfect. Yeah. Perfect. It's very good. That's what you want out of your CEO. Just complete befuddlement and surprise. Love chaos. That's a good piece. We got a bunch of good stuff on the site this week. Liz, in addition to the things people are very unhappy about, Liz has been covering the FTX trial. Sam Bankman-Fried was on the stand. He is lighting himself on fire. There's no other way to describe what is happening in this trial. That dude's going to jail. But you should read the coverage because Liz is a great writer and she's having the time of her life covering this trial. And also it's probably going to be over very – there's a non-zero chance that by the time you're listening to this, a verdict has come in.

1:23:38And we're going to talk about that on the show next week for sure.

1:23:43It's going to be guilty. I agree with that. It would be a shock if it was not. We have a great video Andy Hawkins made about delivery robots, which is very cool. You should go watch that. Like I said, Becca won an Emmy this week, which is incredible. Go watch them full frame in celebration. And then, like I said, we've talked about this whole thing. We have a big feature this week on SEO. You should go read it. We'll link it in the show notes. and then speaking of Andy he has a great piece about the EV transition and the weird liminal spot it's in right now where it seems like it's ready to start happening but instead culture war instead culture war America 2023 go read that but it's also the car makers have kind of blown it right they assumed that all the demand for Teslas could be applied to their existing business models and so they made big stupid trucks instead of like little EVs that people want to buy like 100 like Chevy is like look at our $100 ,000 Silverado instead of look at our Bolt which is it feels like an error like the people who want to buy EVs are not up there yeah anyway that's a great piece you can go read it there's also obviously some coverage of charging networks in there and lastly before we break we want to know how you feel about the Red Chest on YouTube are you watching it on YouTube are you catching the Easter eggs in the background or are you sticking with the podcast player what do you like about the show on YouTube what don't you like we know You want us to cut to more pictures of things and add chapters.

1:25:03We'll do all that stuff. But beyond that, what do you want from us on YouTube? We're growing on YouTube. It's great. It's fun to be in the comments on YouTube. But we want to make it better. Let us know what you think in the comments on YouTube. Bringing the multiple ass chins to YouTube. Amazing. That's it. Thank you so much. It's Verge Cast. Bye, girl.

1:25:27And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. give us a call at 866-VERGE-111. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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