Everybody wants to buy Chrome

30:16And I had a hundred emails the next day from people who were like, let me tell you why this just changed everything about how society is going to work. And it was like, you're totally right. It was like, this is a moment and the world will never be the same afterwards. And it was, it went right back. Uh, that's this, I mean, what's, what's staggering about all of that is COVID was an external crisis. Like it happened and everyone reacted to it. And then however you experienced COVID, like a number of behaviors changed. a really interesting one for example is we started decoder before covid and no one wanted to be on video and now everyone's assumption is that they will be on google meet calls yep weird that's just a totally a pandemic change that happened tariffs are a totally self-created mess like they woke up one day they asked chat gpt how to ruin the world economy and like here we are but the same kind of ripple effects are happening you can just see it and but no one there's no behavior change around it it's like on balance it's it's a little bit easier to convince david to buy a macbook air that that's where we are right now and that is but that's not a permanent change it's not like a everyone got used to video conferencing over these two years but you can see that companies are having to deal with it and in kind of the same ways i don't know like there's just something i wish i if i could go back before covid and predict what would have happened that you maybe would have predicted everyone gets more comfortable with video calls and working from home but there's this one i'm just not sure what the change is other than everyone's kind of mad that they can't get a switch to right yeah i mean there's going to be like a long long road of here's what happens when everything gets more expensive and harder to find but in terms of this sort of uh you know one day to the next culture change like here's hoping we never go through that again right like That was such a specific thing, but it does feel like in the sort of how do you plan for the next two years thing, we're in a surprisingly similar place.

32:21I mean, they really renamed the company Meta. Like, they did it so much. We broke that news. That was us, right? Remember we broke, Alex Heath broke that Facebook doesn't rename itself. There was a string of, like, local radio stations holding contests about what they should rename the company. And they're like, Meta, for the metaverse. And here we are. It's 2005. 5. I haven't put on a quest headset in a long time. That's all I'm saying. Let us know. If you are in a quest headset looking at a party speaker right now, email us. You can for sure be on the first cast. Yes. Who are you? All right.

32:54We should take a break. We got to come back. We got to talk about meta, which is in court right now. Potentially going to get broken up. Google is in court. Lots to talk about there. We're going to take a quick break. We'll come back. Get into all of it. Let's be honest. are you happy with your job? Like, really happy? The unfortunate fact is that a huge number of people can't say yes to that. Far too many of us are stuck in a job we've outgrown, or one we never wanted in the first place. But still, we stick it out. And we give reasons like, what if the next move is even worse? I've already put years into this place.

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36:23All right, we're back. Which trial should we start with? Should we start with Google? Should we start with Meta? They're both so good. Let's do Google first, just because I'm like, I need to warm up to how much fun I found Kevin Systrom at the Meta trial. So let's do Google first. Yeah, Google's a little simpler. There's a game to be played here. Right now, Google is in the remedies phase on the search trial. It has lost the ad tech trial. If you want nitty gritty on what those trials were, what those cases claimed, how they were constructed, Jonathan Cantor, who led the DOJ's antitrust division, was just on Decoder.

36:58We went through them in detail. So we'll hold off on the detail. But the remedies phase of the search trial. Google was found to have an illegal monopoly in search, partially because they pay a bunch of money to Apple and other companies for defaults in Safari and other places. Now we're on to what are we going to do about it? And the government says, and David, you were there for this part of the trial, so I want to hear what this was like in person. The government says you got to sell Chrome and you got to make search interoperable. And this is happening literally in the same courthouse at which Meta is on trial to have to sell Instagram and WhatsApp.

37:33And Lauren Feiner is like running between the courtrooms, which is hilarious to me. Yeah. Let's talk about the Google piece. You were in the courtroom when the government sort of like made this big claim. What are the vibes? So I was there for opening arguments on Monday. And one of the funniest parts about it to me was how much of opening arguments were just the lawyers reminding the judge of what laws are. It's like it's because there's a real sense of like it becomes I discovered this in the in the course of like talking to people about this and being there that like reminding everyone at the beginning of a remedies phase that Google is a monopolist and it lost and it has been convicted and that that is no longer the question.

38:13That is the starting point was was so important for the government. Right. Because they're setting up this thing where it's not a question of whether Google did the wrong thing. Google is going to appeal that and we will be litigating that for forever. But for the purposes of right now, Google is a convicted monopolist. That is that is no longer in question. And so David Dahlquist, who did the opening arguments for the DOJ, said that like over and over and over again. It's like every every two sentence he was like, well, because Google is a monopolist. But it was really interesting. And I think these two sides have had a long time to talk to each other and do discovery and figure things out.

38:56and try to understand what they want. And if anything, it feels like they're getting further apart from each other. Well, you're about as far as you can get right now. I mean, yes. But the DOJ's argument, I would actually put it into three buckets. One is you have to sell Chrome. One is no more distribution deals of any kind. You cannot give Apple$20 billion to make you the default search engine in Safari. They would just like to get rid of those deals entirely. And then number three is what you said about interoperable. They want Google to essentially white label Google search for anyone who wants it.

39:33Google doesn't like any of those. Surprise. What Google wants essentially is to stop making exclusive deals. It would essentially like to take the word exclusive out of all of its contracts. And so the idea is, well, now anyone can play the games that we're playing. If you want to give Apple$20 billion, you're welcome to. I would argue that is preposterous. That is also what the government argues. But the thing that I found most interesting is that it seems very clear to me that the one of those three things that Google is most nervous about is the white labeling of Google. I think the Chrome thing is really interesting, and I want to talk about who might buy Chrome.

40:14But essentially what is being asked of Google, if the DOJ gets its way, is to take all of its data. So it's its search index, it's query data, which is like what people are actually sending. Even it's like ranking algorithms and systems and just package that up and give to any other search engine that wants it for, I believe the phrase is a marginal cost. What is that cost? No one knows. It's up to some committee that will get appointed and Google would like a lot more clarification about that. but google's argument is essentially we have spent 25 years building this and now you just want us to hand it to anybody with ten dollars and a designer and they can just have google and the doj is like yes that is exactly precisely what we are trying to do david do you think that is that the like we're going to ask for too much and then get a step back or do you think they like legitimately are like no this is this is the thing we want and this is the thing we should have happened so i think i still think chrome is the ask for too much move oh interesting i think i think chrome is more like the doj i think is more serious about selling chrome than i expected but i think if if the doj was going to give one of these up it would be that one but i think the the argument that the government makes is essentially that if you just level the playing field starting now and you say okay everyone starting today has to play by the same rules Google is so far ahead that it doesn't matter, right?

41:41Like you're starting a marathon and you're saying you're both running a marathon, but Google gets to start 25 and a half miles ahead. But you can both run as fast as you want now. It's like that's not a fair race. And so what Google is saying is, well, OK, you're actually you're giving all of our competitors a giant leg up just because we're a monopoly. And the DOJ is saying, yes, that is the only way to rectify this thing that we're doing. So I wondered if it was one of the things that the DOJ would be willing to get rid of. But listening to them talk about it, they're like, no, this is not just about stopping the monopoly.

42:14It's about rectifying the monopoly. Like we have to. They kept using the phrase antitrust, antifreeze, which I hate. And it's a bad metaphor. And like they should stop. They were like. Did they like print on T-shirts? It's awful. What does that mean? So the idea is Google's conduct froze all of its competitors and basically like put a freeze on the search engine market. And they were like, I think it was David Dahlquist who was like, we want to we don't want to just, you know, put the block of ice out to thaw. We want to light a fire under it. And then somebody else came up and he was like, antitrust, antifreeze.

42:46And I was like, guys, this isn't it. Like, this isn't this isn't doing what you think it is. I don't want to. I mean, I am this person and this is our audience. I'm just going to go for it. That's not how melting and freezing things work. like you don't pour antifreeze on ice to make it you actually just whatever okay uh good job government you're doing great but anyway so all of this is to say i think uh that that piece of it and and what i left the courthouse wondering and i'm curious what y 'all think of this is if there is a middle ground in that one if there is a way to like give some of its competitors a leg up so that they can compete without just making Google hand over 25 years of trade secrets in order to prop up anyone who wants to build a search engine.

43:31Because literally the way the DOJ is framing this is that the three of us could design a front end with a search box and then just pipe in a Google API and we would have Google. It's not all the way that, but it is pretty damn close to that. Well, their idea is that we would pay Google some fee. for that service. And then we would have to then figure out a business model that made us paying that fee to Google worth it. What they want is competition on that layer. There should be competition in search engines and there can't be right now because no one has the click stream from Google. No one has the raw volume of search data.

44:12So you got to get that somehow. Google can give it to you and then you can have... Then KG can be better or whatever. Right. That feels hard for a variety of reasons because no one knows what the other business model is. The thing that gets me is, and you hear this now from a lot of antitrust people on both sides of the aisle, and it's fascinating that this is the Trump DOJ basically saying the same things Jonathan Cantor was saying. We can't just fix the problem now. We have to change it so it doesn't happen again. We have to go back in time and unwind some of this, I think they call it a flywheel, right?

44:46You have Chrome. You collect all the click data from Chrome. That feeds into search. You get better search. You get all the click data from search. You direct traffic to web. That's the problem. It's very hard for any external company to just replace one part of that. So you've got to break the whole thing up. But the real issue, and you just hear this a lot, is the complicated, you have to behave this way and we're going to watch you to make sure you act better, is really hard, especially for the government because presidents come and go. People come and go. Private companies, especially huge private companies, are very clever and motivated in finding ways out of the compliance rules that they were put in front of.

45:26And so breaking up the company, the quote structural remedy is just simpler. Yeah. And now the argument that I've heard like FTC commissioners were coming on Dakota next week. The argument they're making is it's actually more democratic. It takes the government out of your business. We just send Chrome off into the woods or you'd sell Instagram and then that's a different company and we're done. Like the government's out of your hair as opposed to we're going to watch your every move, which you kind of like the Trump administration is like, what if we watched your every move? Right. Like they have an inclination to be like up in your business.

46:05And so there's a little bit of a flip there. But I don't know if make the API interoperable, make search interoperable will play because Google will just preference itself again. They will find a way to do it. they will come to some settlement agreement and say, okay, our Google search experience is still slightly better than the one we sell to Microsoft. Yeah. Which I think one of the, one of the other things that DOJ really wants is, uh, that the, the sort of cloud they get to put over Google's head, if they don't comply with all of these things and all, and like live under the remedies correctly is to have to sell Android.

46:40Uh, like that's, that's the, that's the thing for noncompliance. That's like in case of emergency. Yeah. And so I came to realize over the course of this that like they picked the biggest possible hammer that they could in order to say, OK, if we don't think and again, it's all very nebulous. It's like if if just a bunch of people who have not yet been named decide that you're not doing a good enough job and Google is like, we have questions about all of that. But they're like their compliance rule is Android. And that is the that is the real huge hammer hanging over Google if it goes through.

47:17My hottest take here is that in 36 months, Google, as we know, it does not exist. It sure seems like it. Like, whether it's the government that does it, whether Google reconfigures itself somehow, whether the thing that sort of happened to Microsoft in the 90s happens, like, Microsoft had all these cases and all these, but Microsoft ended with a big consent decree. They were going to break up Microsoft into, I think they called it AppsCo and OSCo, which are horrible names. AppsCo is the one that was, like, on the cover of Time. I'm like, what's Appsco? It's very silly. And then George Bush got elected.

47:53The Clinton DOJ went away, and they settled the case with this big consent decree that said Microsoft had to not preference its own apps and stuff on Windows. And that just led to years of headaches that allowed Google to exist and Apple to make this roaring comeback on the strength of the open web, which is the only reason the iMac is any good. like apple came back because the web browser supplanted windows as an app platform now we have apple but if that hadn't happened why would you buy an iMac right so all of that happened because microsoft was kind of distracted and then bill gates will tell you that's why they miss mobile although i don't think that's the case at all i saw their mobile phones you know um i'm just wondering like 36 months from now three years from now what will have google been distracted by.

48:38Google is not like a monster of execution right now. So the government breaks it up. Google breaks itself up. Larry Page shows back up and is like, I don't know, spin off YouTube. Something is happening that changes this company as we know it in the next three years. Yeah. I think it's possible that the big tech companies now just have a different level of resources than any of those companies did back then, that they're so entrenched and so much bigger and have so much more money that they can they can you know walk and chew gum at the same time in that respect but it also i mean to your point we're seeing it now right like google is already not operating at full capacity because it has been fighting these fights uh and and you see you see leadership is changing and moving around and this company is like relentlessly trying to figure out what kind of company it's supposed to be uh which is a lot as all of this is happening And of course, Google's argument is that AI is that thing, right?

49:34Like what the web and what mobile were to Microsoft then, AI is now. And they're running the same playbook. Yeah. It says in a trial, it was revealed that Google is paying Samsung, quote, an enormous sum to pre-install Gemini. Yep. Like they're just doing what they do. Yeah. And so the DOJ is like, no, we have to stop Google from doing this so that it doesn't do it again. And Google is like, well, ChatGPT is doing just fine. And so that isn't a real problem. Like this is the fastest growing consumer technology in history and Google is not getting in its way. So I think where that shakes out in this trial is going to be really fascinating.

50:13But there's been a lot more AI already in court than we expected. Like the very first witness after opening arguments was an AI expert who literally just spent like an hour and a half explaining terms about AI to the court, which I thought was so interesting. I might be jumping ahead a little bit here, but the AI thing is really fascinating when it comes to Chrome because the big companies to be like, oh, I buy Chrome. They're AI companies. They're all looking for a gateway in. And those gateways are their Google products, right? It is Chrome. It is Google's search index. They would leap at this opportunity because Google is still the gatekeeper.

50:52They are still the biggest surface. they're winning because they keep putting their own stuff on that surface and i think these ai companies know no matter how good their product is you just cannot replace that well you said that the big ai companies i just want to peel that apart a little bit one open ai said they would buy chrome they said that in court right david um or they filed the documents and they would do it and then perplexity which is just a very different scale than open ai was like yeah we'll do it too But Perplexity is also like, we'll buy TikTok. Perplexity is a SPAC with an AI arm attached to it.

51:27Like, they will buy Peloton if it comes up for sale. So, look, I don't know if Perplexity can afford it. I don't know if Perplexity can afford TikTok. They do have some revenue. I tweeted that I don't have any revenue as a joke. They do have some revenue that's growing. But open eyes, the big dog. Yeah. Right? Sam Altman's like, what if I had a trillion dollars? And a lot of people are like, what if you did? Amazing. what they would get is distribution which is the thing they all need right if you're up against apple on the iphone and apple can just be like you're gonna use siri until we make it good you're kind of stuck right but if you're in chrome literally looking at all of the web pages that people are using and all of the things they are typing into all of the text boxes across the internet well you have a lot of power right that's that's huge and then you can put The AI system or the chatbot right in front of all the users all the time, which is stuff other browser makers are trying to.

52:22Like, that's basically what the Arc browser is going to become. Right. Yeah. Who else could buy Chrome? Well, it was really interesting listening to the lawyers in opening arguments try and make the case that Chrome is a really good business. Because the thing Google says and the thing I've heard a bunch is the browser business as a standalone business actually really sucks. that a browser has lots of value and is hugely useful. And like you said, the distribution is ridiculous. The DOJ's estimation was that Chrome has four and a half billion users, which would make it the biggest platform on the internet by like a pretty wide margin.

53:01But people don't pay for browsers. They put up a thing where they were like, here's how you monetize. And the first thing they came up with was ads, like the Mozilla Firefox ads that you see. And I'm just sitting there in listening to this being like, yeah, and how's that going for Mozilla, which gets all of its money from a Google default search deal. Like, it's just, that is very hard to pull off. And then they came around to, well, what if an AI company just took out the Google search box and put in their chatbot? And that is the answer. It's the only way, right? Like it becomes the thing that I use to interact with chat GPT that I spend$20 for, right?

53:43It's different than it is for Google because it doesn't, like there's nowhere that you pay money. Google's flywheel just exists sort of next to Chrome and you access it by constantly typing searches into the Chrome bar, which is why it's a perfect and unbeatable business. But that is the whole pitch as far as I can tell is it gives you massive distribution. It puts you in front of most of the population of the earth already. Even if it doesn't grow, it's like it is an unparalleled thing to just be able to put your stuff in front of. It does. It gets you browsing data. It gets you all kinds of stuff.

54:19But it will have to be in service of something else. And even the DOJ is like, this is not going to be a business by itself. You're not just going to be able to start charging$10 a month for Chrome. And that's going to work like they understand that it has to be in service of another thing. in order to work. And I found that really fascinating. Wait, it's just like, it's funny. You can do the TikTok exercise and you can come up with this list of potential acquirers for TikTok. But it's pretty vast, right? I think I keep putting Walmart on that list. Like Walmart should buy TikTok and then the TikTok shop won't feel quite like being mugged in the way that it does today.

54:55Like, have you heard of Vivo? You will now. Like there's something happening there that's just dark. Yeah. And maybe Walmart can just like take it and run it and have a young audience and compete with Amazon. You can build a pretty wide aperture for TikTok. Who buys Chrome? Is it just open AI and perplexity? Why would Apple buy Chrome? I think Apple should buy Chrome. Really? Okay. Yeah. Safari is a garbage browser. Chrome is probably the most used software on Macs, and it is the worst running piece of software on Macs. They fixed that. They've just doubled the battery life on MacBooks. And who needs a Surface for when they eventually have a good AI application?

55:33Apple. Wait, they have the biggest service in history. They have the iPhone. Yeah, but you put it on Chrome too. Now it's everywhere. You know what more people use than use iPhones, Neelay? Chrome. Right, but Apple doesn't care. Can you imagine whoever is Craig Federighi being like, we got to work on Windows Chrome, you guys. Like, that's your job. The very funniest outcome here would be that Apple buys Chrome just to shut it down and they claim it's in the interest of the user experience on the Mac. They're like, we don't want people using bad browsers on Apple devices, so we're just going to kill Chrome.

56:06Apple does not want the web to be a great application platform because they want iOS to be their application platform. There's something happening with Safari that is often overlooked, but it's like Safari just has a wall of capabilities that prevents web apps from competing with iOS apps. So again, I hear you. I bought a Mac Studio just to run Chrome. Ten years from now, it'll still be running Chrome, but not well. Yep. And listen, they're going to need to build a search engine once those search deal exclusivities, that exclusivity cache stops coming through. Chrome. But that's the argument to license Google.

56:46If you're Apple, you can quickly, and all this goes through, you can quickly build a better, more interesting search product into Spotlight or Siri or whatever because you have the back end of Google to support it in a way that has to be inoperable. It doesn't mean you have to buy Chrome. I'm not saying this is a wise decision. Okay, but that's the argument. Jake, you valiantly made the argument, which was increase the better life on MacBooks. Microsoft. wouldn't work the i mean they even said in court microsoft meta amazon basically out for antitrust reasons. Who can buy? What is, I don't understand this.

57:27It literally, the longer I think about this, the more it might literally just be OpenAI. Like, there's a really interesting case to be made. Like, I'm just like naming big companies. Exxon. Like, what? It becomes the Rivian exclusive browser. No, I think there's an interesting case to be made that if all of this goes against Google, the single company that stands to benefit the most is OpenAI. and it has the cash to do it. It doesn't have the antitrust worries to do it. It can raise money infinitely, clearly. It would hugely benefit from access to Google's search data. One of the things that an OpenAI person said in deposition was basically you can get to 80 % of Google's search quality pretty easily, and the last 20 % is virtually impossible and just absolutely impossibly expensive.

58:26And this is the thing I've heard from anyone who wants to build search. You can build a pretty good search engine by yourself, but the difference between a pretty good and a Google level search engine is many years and hundreds of billions of dollars or Google is forced to give it to you, right? And so OpenAI immediately starts to solve that quality gap, maybe gets a browser out of it and suddenly goes from having not distribution problems, but like it has to win its distribution to suddenly just having it. And like it would be in a very funny way raising one competitor in particular out of all of this, like up to Google's level.

59:03It's just funny that like literally a TikTok, I can make an argument for almost any company to buy TikToks. Yeah. Sunkist should buy TikTok. Like, fine, give me enough time. I'll get there. And the orange company should buy TikTok. talk. It's hard to make an argument for any company to buy Chrome because the business model doesn't make a lot of sense. You can sort of make a like browsing data argument that is interesting, but not at the price it would cost to get it right. Like having access to everyone's browsing data is very valuable and would be to lots of people. But I think buying and running Chrome is probably not the most efficient way to get there.

59:43Or at least the way that Google runs Chrome. Which, to its credit, is in a reasonably open way. I think people think of web browsers like document viewers, but they're actually application platforms. They're little operating systems now, right? They have different memory between tabs. Your apps are literally running them, and obviously in the cloud as well. That's where apps run on desktop computers for most people. And Google has to manage that. They have a commitment to the web being open, which is good. if you buy chrome you don't have to do any of that you can just say your app will run even better in chrome if you pay us some money yeah and like there's all these other things you could do to make that money which seemed bad and in addition to offloading chrome the government wants google to offload the chromium project which is it's it's like ostensibly but not really open source browser project that it oversees and funds and uh also powers every other browser that you probably use at this point like edge is chromium arc is chromium brave is like they're everything on the web at this point except for safari and kind of firefox uh is chromium and so you end up at this point where like we would be changing the way that like the underlying infrastructure of how people use the internet belongs to somebody else.

1:01:07And maybe there's a devil you know, devil you don't thing going on here, but for all of its flaws, Google has been a pretty good steward of browsers over the years. We give Chrome a lot of crap, but the reason web chat is very good and video looks really great in your browser is in large part thanks to work that Google did and then gave to the ecosystem. That stuff matters. It's funny because the reason they did that was to ensure Google search could see everyone's data. Well, sure. Yeah. This idea, I mean, like they were always aligned. Yeah. The alignment was good for the most part. Like let's build open web platforms for everything and make sure everything is standards compliant.

1:01:49Also, that will ensure that our systems can crawl everything and see everything. Right. Great. And now we're just like, if you break that apart, maybe there's not so much incentive for things to be open. I have no idea what's going to happen here. I just think it's fascinating that, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen with TikTok either. It's just really interesting that you should buy and run TikTok seems like a simpler problem than you should run Chrome, which does not have like content moderation issues or like the Chinese government hating Donald Trump issue. Like, but it's like, oh, that's way harder.

1:02:20Like we should buy TikTok. Is this because like TikTok, there's like a clear business model. Chrome, the business has to be something else, right? like unless you're just going to have a bunch of pop-ups on every single new tab screen like you fundamentally need to have another business that you are boosting with chrome um which means you need to have a pretty good business already um that could use that distribution and you have to have a bunch of extra cash and that's just a really weird situation to be in maybe it's walmart every new tab screen is just a bunch of recommended products to buy walmart at the end walmart buys wait wait hear me out taboola oh god oh well that's the end of that's the end of the internet at everybody uh okay so that's one trial we know it's gonna happen that's ongoing we're gonna keep covering that one really deeply simultaneously in the same building meta's on trial and that might result in the breakup of instagram and whatsapp i would say that one started out sleepy i got a note today from an executive in the industry says we complained too much about market definitions with alex eath last week uh it doesn't matter as much the judge is gonna to decide whatever and that it's the emails and Kevin Systrom on stage saying meta tried to choke Instagram after it acquired it that will win the day I have done a 180 on this trial in the span of seven days okay tell me why I left last week basically being like the government doesn't know how to categorize meta and it's going to tank its case right like meta is very deliberately all things to all people and that is a very hard thing to put a market definition on and if you can't have a good market definition, you can't call it a monopoly.

1:03:57And Meta is not a monopoly on the internet. And so it's like that there was just that fundamental disconnect that it was like, maybe the case against Meta is going to hinge on wrapping its arms around Meta, and that's going to be very hard to do. But then Kevin Systrom gets on the stand and just spends a day just throwing darts at every other executive at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg in particular. Kevin Systrom, famously the founder of Instagram, one of the co-founders of Instagram. Yeah. Sold Instagram to Facebook, then called Facebook, for a billion dollars. Obviously, Instagram is Instagram. And Mark Zuckerberg's argument before Kevin Systrom took the stand is essentially that Instagram is only Instagram because of this company.

1:04:40That we have the resources. We poured fuel on the fire. It grew because of us, like, on and on and on. And we talked last week about it's actually hard to prove otherwise. And then Kevin Systrom came and sat on the stand and said otherwise over and over and over again. That actually what happened was Instagram came aboard and was starved for resources that Mark Zuckerberg saw Instagram as a threat and so took stuff away from it in order to prevent it from growing and killing Facebook. and this is a thing we've heard kind of intermittently over the years is that like mark zuckerberg runs a big company but like facebook is his special baby and anything that threatens the facebook platform um cannot be allowed to do that like that that tracks with what we know of his personality and history that facebook the thing is more important to him than anything else in his empire and uh so sistrum just gets up there and basically for like a whole day was just like Instagram was killing it.

1:05:34And then we continued to kill it more or less in spite of the company that acquired us, which, by the way, got an unbelievably great deal in doing so. Do you think Mark Zuckerberg uses Facebook? No. I mean, he posts on Facebook. What is there for him to use? Like, is he looking at all the AI generated memes? Do you think he's on Marketplace? I've heard this thing that he loves Facebook and I'm sure he loves the charts and graphs that say he's rich, you know? Like Facebook makes so much money that when they think they're going to have a bad quarter, like PMs can just like turn knobs to make the revenue targets.

1:06:08Like it's nuts. The scale and the power of Facebook. But if you say to someone, I heard someone say this today on the train, he sounds like he reads a lot of Facebook. He sounds like he spends a lot of time on Facebook. And I was like, I know exactly what that means. And it's bad. Yeah. It's not right. It's not good. And it's like, do you think Mark Zuckerberg is just like Facebook brained? like that would be horrible and that it's whatever instagram is whatever it's becoming now full of ai slop for a minute it was cool right it's still uh it still has a place in the culture that's very important yeah in a way that facebook the only reason i use it is because like the parents group at the school is on facebook okay but if i'm if i'm gonna psychoanalyze mark zuckerberg here also sometimes i type i type mustang in a marketplace and i just think about the lives I could lead.

1:07:00That's it. I've been shopping for patio furniture on Marketplace and it is not a great time. I'm just saying, if you want to buy like a mid-2000s Terminator Cobra, you can find one on Facebook Marketplace. Continue. Okay, so if I'm going to psychoanalyze Mark Zuckerberg for a second, which feels dangerous, I think what is true of Facebook and Meta at large is that the rap on the company is that all Meta has ever done is copy. That it is a very successful and ruthless fast follower, right? That what it is in many ways is a collection of other people's good ideas executed on at larger scale, except Facebook.

1:07:40Mark Zuckerberg did Facebook, right? Like that is a real thing that he holds on to. And I think if you're Mark Zuckerberg and you are this like business tycoon who is sort of known for being a monster as much as you are like a great coder, Facebook is the thing that you did. And I think that is forever really meaningful to someone like he doesn't. Sure. He doesn't get credit for Instagram the same way. He doesn't deserve credit for Instagram the same way. Same with WhatsApp. Like those are part of his business empire, but they're not like things that he did. And I think the world sees it that way.

1:08:13And I would I would bet that he sees it that way, too. But like in the context of this, they also launched threads. Right. And threads is was a copy of Twitter. It now is a weird parallel ecosystem of just like it's still creators doing prompts. all day long yeah but like the prompts are getting darker and weirder like tell me five people you hate something like what is happening on threads and they uh adam asseri just launched their cap cut clone edits like instagram is getting ready for tiktok to go away yes and they're doing it by cloning all the rest of tiktok's features they're doing it by turning threads into more of a posting platform for her like they're building a creator marketing platform that still has nothing to do with Facebook as far as I can tell.

1:08:59All of the interesting things that are happening at Meta are happening in the Threads Instagram zone. But nothing is happening. If you care about it the most, why don't you have any ideas for it? Well, there's that. I mean, I think to some extent that's a view that is easy to hold for people of a certain age in the United States, right? Which are like Facebook's least engaged demographic right now. But it is true that you go lots of other places around the world and Facebook is much more like central to culture and it's very important. But also to your previous point, Facebook is now so big that I think you can't mess with it.

1:09:39And like we've even seen in the trial last week, Zuckerberg had used to have all these wild ideas. What if we reset everybody's friend count every year and made them rebuild it from scratch, which the more I think about it is an idea that I love. And I think all of social media should maybe adopt this. Like on January 1st, every year, you just start from a clean slate and have to do it again amazing should do that um but like increasingly it is like it's both sort of too big to fail and also too big to do anything with so it's just kind of left over here yeah by itself kevin's system showing up and saying i could have done this no problem i think is to your point devastating to to meta in this case yeah because he's he's very confident that he could have succeeded here but david you were saying that like market definition is not going to be important But it sounds like you're saying that actually what matters in the end is people just don't like Facebook.

1:10:32Right. And like, is that enough to get a judge to agree that it is a monopoly? Like I still just fundamentally write Instagram could have been great on its own. Sure. Sure. That's fine. But that doesn't make meta a monopoly today, does it? But it's not today. It's not today. This is actually as I've done more reporting on this and talk to more people. the thing that the government is trying to argue as clearly as it can is the bad thing that happened is Mark Zuckerberg saw upstart competitors and tried to kill them. And here now are the founders of those competitors showing up and saying, we got bought, they paid the money, and this argument that they supercharged our growth is just fiction because actually what there was was jealousy and a reduction in resources, and we would have raised money or grown on our own or been more innovative.

1:11:24But instead I fought these political battles. Which is a tricky argument because like scoreboard, right? Like look at Instagram. You can't argue that Instagram has not been a huge success. That's just, that doesn't work. But Sistrom got up there and was basically like, we succeeded against the wishes of our acquirer, which I think to your point, Eli, is if that argument is successful, that's the argument that wins this case. Yeah. By the way, Meta, you know, Andy Stone from Meta is out there being like, look at all this nice stuff Kevin Sistrom has said in the public in the past. And it's like, well, dude, he wasn't in court under oath, like totally free to say whatever he wants.

1:12:01Like he worked for you. Of course he said nice things. He worked for you. He's also got his fuck you money now in like a very real way. I mean, that's the dream, right? Is to sell the company for a billion dollars and then like years later show up and be like, you are a dick. Yeah. that's again that one's very clean I can see it I can see how Instagram survives as a business all on its own I can't quite see how WhatsApp survives as a business all on its own but the most interesting thing about that conversation is the founders of WhatsApp had no intention of being a big business and Zuckerberg was like shocked by anything he said they lacked ambition yeah they just were happy doing their thing and they were like a small team that was massively successful they probably would never have been a whatever it was,$21 billion business that they ended up selling for.

1:12:51But yeah, they were fine with that. And in a really funny way, that gave them tons of leverage. Yeah. It also turns out that this is the other thing that came up in court was that absolutely everyone wanted to buy WhatsApp. Like, we kind of knew that at the time, but Google kicked the tires. I think Twitter at the time kicked the tires. It was very clear that this was going to be a thing, and it gave WhatsApp a lot of leverage and credibility, but it also put Meta in a position of being like, oh, this thing is a huge threat to us is being validated. We have to go get it right now. Wow. I don't know what's going to happen in this one.

1:13:33the twists and turns day by day in this trial you know there's a very old cliche and like lawyer world that if you don't have the law on your side you argue the facts and you don't have the facts you argue the law and if you don't have it you pound the table this is like a joke that law that's good so and it feels like meta doesn't have the facts so they're really focused on these very hyper-technical legal arguments and then it's also just like the trump ftc is in charge of this trial and i mark zuckerberg's in the oval office like throwing money around like no idea what's going to happen here.

1:14:02But it does seem like my prediction with Google is 36 months, totally different company. One way or another, 36 months from now. 36 months from now, what do you think meta looks like? Jake, what do you think? I think they're going to walk out of this. I think they're going to be fine. It's a confusing technical trial. And I don't know how much the Trump White House is committed to this thing. Yeah. I keep saying it's the most legible one. It's very hard to explain Google ad tech to people. But it's so funny because I still feel like this trial is we don't like meta. We don't like Mark Zuckerberg.

1:14:37That is valid. Very legible. That is very, very, very, very real. But I don't know. Is it against the law? You're so unlikable it's illegal. That's tough. Right now in the American legal system, like edging closer to being a viable position. We'll see. We'll see. David, what's your prediction? i i think what meta should do and genuinely might is just spin off instagram of its own volition um i think that solves this problem you can't spin out whatsapp in the same way uh but i think it it it agrees to a settlement where it spins off instagram and actually wins just as much because instagram would be fabulously successful on its own do you think there's like a movement inside meta that's like let Mosseri cook.

1:15:26Yeah. I kind of, I mean, Mosseri's been cooking, right? Like it's, it's not nothing that he has been out in front of this company for a pretty long time now. He pioneered the chain. Exactly. Another thing that Mark fast followed. I mean, I've been saying this for months on the show that these companies should break themselves up before the government does it for them. And I could buy that, but I, I, I, they're too proud of a company to do that. Can I just say real quick, I just want to shout out two people before we get off this topic. One is Lauren Feiner, who has been in court, it's multiple courtrooms at a time all week, and has been doing awesome work for us all over the website.

1:16:03The other person is Dirk Stoop, who was a former product manager on the Facebook camera team, who was called up to testify in this trial and was basically asked a series of questions that amounted to why was Facebook camera so bad that they had to buy Instagram? And that's tough. and I just want to say to Dirk that you you did you did your best and I'm very sorry big shout out to Lauren by the way we would have had her on the show but she's in court right now yeah yeah literally the next time Lauren comes out of the DC circuit courthouse we will have her on this yeah uh but she yeah she's killing it all right we gotta take a break gonna rest up for the lightning round you let us know you tell me what you think email us 36 months from now what do these companies look like I'm dying to all right we gotta take a break we'll be right back Avoiding your unfinished home projects because you're not sure where to start?

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1:17:38Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more. Share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on Seasons 1 and 2 wherever you find your podcasts.

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1:18:34We're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored for Flavor. We've gotten some t-shirt designs. I'm pretty excited about them. Today I had a meeting with a platform executive and he asked me some business questions and I was like, I don't know. I talked to our publisher, Helen. She's very smart. And he was like, you don't get involved in your business? And I was like, no, what I sell is our ethics policy. He goes, oh, that's very royal. And it was a real interaction I was like, it is very royal. That's what we sell here. Because it's like high and mighty. That's what he meant. Oh, not like of the royals.

1:19:06I was like, I don't think so. He didn't mean that like me and Meghan Markle have anything in common. He meant that you sound like a pompous jerk. And I was like, I am in fact very, very precious about the fact that you can't pay me to say anything. Unless you sponsor the lightning round, in which case, let's talk. It's time for our new segment in the lightning round, Neelai versus Meghan Markle. who wore it best it's time to get some clicks on youtube my friends let's do it we're going straight into celebrity coverage all the latest in celebrity defamation i don't know anything about that she does have a podcast i think so technically she is our enemy now so did she win the webby for best technology podcast she did not duchess yeah all right i don't make us bc takes were just, they're out of left field, did not make any sense.

1:19:53The people weren't buying it. But I think the audience knows, I think Suits is a horrible show. All right, we have to stop talking about Meghan Markle. All right, David, is it time? It's time. It is time once again for the 2026 Webby winning podcast within a podcast. We're going to win so hard we create a category just so we can win it. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Eli, what do you got? Brendan had a quiet week. He did. He had a quiet week. He went to a satellite company in Texas with Ted Cruz and said he was bringing American innovation back in a way that required him to say Ted Cruz is like cool and smart.

1:20:37Again, I think Brendan's a dummy. So he got hoodwinked by Ted Cruz and having to say Ted Cruz is cool and smart. So that happened. The really interesting things that happened with Brendan this week amount to who he will talk to and who he will not talk to. The thesis of the Trump administration this time around is, what if corruption was cool? You can see it all over the place. What if Mark Zuckerberg gives Trump a million dollars? Is that enough to settle a lawsuit? The answer is no. So we're going to find out if it's$2 million. There's just a lot of what if corruption was cool happening in this administration.

1:21:12so the first one is just so funny who is who is brendan meeting with well he's meeting with his old boss ajit pai who was in the white house and at the fcc this week in his new role as president of the ctia which is the wireless industry's number one lobbying group and they're posting selfies together so here's the fcc posting selfies with his old boss who is now the top lobbyist for the wireless companies that brendan regulates just openly corrupt like it's just like hilariously corrupt right like these guys are supposed to be on opposite sides of the fence and there's always a weirdness right with with the regulator and the companies they regulate because the regulator wants the companies to be successful we all want the wireless companies to like have good networks and charge reasonable rates and all this stuff and you're like no that's gpi like he he's the one who was like you know what we should do we should create dish network like it doesn't make any sense at all none of this makes any sense like what if we went from having lots of competitors to three and then a fake network that ran something called open ran that doesn't work every day the ceo verizon wakes up thinking about dish network like it's just a fake it's a totally fake situation but he's in the office a jeep hi taking selfies together you know who he's not meeting with david ellison who wants to buy paramount and cbs reporting in puck this week brandon who has threatened cbs trump has threatened cbs over 60 Minutes, news distortion, all the censorship he wants to do, saying, I want to have investigations into CBS and how it works.

1:22:44Well, the potential acquirer of Paramount and CBS, David Ellison, whose father is Larry Ellison, notable Trump donor, can't get Brandon on the phone. Interesting. That's a weird one because, I mean, the other news this week was Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, quit basically because he was like, I have become a corporate problem. And because of all the like journalistic shenanigans of the parent company, he was like, I can't I can't be here anymore. And all of this is being done in this incredibly crappy, shady, anti-journalistic way so that Brendan Carr will take David Ellison's phone calls.

1:23:26That's the whole point of all of this is we are going to write giant settlement checks so that they let the deal go through. Yep. And it's just it's just not happening. What if corruption worked? Right. It's the answer is the check isn't big enough. The capitulation hasn't been big enough. There's Bill Owens, a 60 minutes producer. So I can't produce the show in an independent way anymore. I've got to go. The corporate pressure on the news division is too high and it's still not enough. And so the thesis is, and this is in the, in the Puck article, we'll put it in the show notes, uh, is legally, this is all bad.

1:24:00These are clear violations of the first amendment for the FCC to say, we'll launch an investigation is 60 Minutes, for Donald Trump to say last week, I think Brendan Carr should pull CBS's broadcast license because they didn't like the coverage. You take that to court, you're going to win, right? That's just violations of the First Amendment straightforwardly. News distortion does not mean I don't like it. There's a real standard there. There's a jurisprudence. These cases aren't brought very often because they're incredibly hard for the government to win for good reason because the First Amendment exists.

1:24:32But they have no intention of winning it. They have every intention of getting a check and an apology. What they want is power. So you don't take the call and you make the person do more and more stuff to bend to your will to get what you want. And this is the thesis now. He will meet with Ajit Pai in his office, take selfies together to give the wireless companies more spectrum because they spend a lot of money on lobbying. But he won't meet with David Allison, whose deal he's blocking on totally specious grounds so that CBS will put even more pressure on its news division. That is just censorship stuff.

1:25:04That is just Brendan trying to shift what is acceptable public debate in his role as a government regulator of speech. As always, this is a disaster for the First Amendment, for American civil liberties. And you can see at some point the rich people who want to buy CBS, who own the networks, should start fighting back. Because when they are fighting back in other parts of the government, when Harvard fights back in the Trump administration, they start to cave. But no one's really pushed back on Brendan yet, at least from the industry. But the thing that's starting to happen that I think is fascinating is the other commissioners of the FCC, former commissioners of the FCC, are starting to push back very loudly.

1:25:43So Anna Gomez, who is a Democratic commissioner of the FCC, is going on tour. I think she's starting today as we record. She's going on tour to protect the First Amendment. It's called the First Amendment Tour. What a cool thing to say, by the way. I'm going on tour to protect the first amendment. The tour is called the first amendment tour to challenge government censorship and control. So she announced it today. She's having events all over the country. She says the FCC is being weaponized under Brendan Carr to attack freedom of speech in the media and telecommunications sector instead of focusing on its core mission, connecting the public, protecting consumers and supporting competition.

1:26:19I feel like we can't say clearly enough that that is from another FCC commissioner. From another FCC commissioner. His colleague. Yeah. weird. They go to the same office. They park their cars next to each other. And she's like, hey, you're a weird threat to America. I mean, they actively work together closely. It's unclear. Under normal circumstances. It's unclear. Look, the FCC, I've covered the FCC for a long time. Until Brendan got there, this was never a bunch of fire breathers. It's a bunch of gray suit government lawyers being like, we need to allocate the spectrum efficient. And now they're like a censorship machine.

1:26:55And you can see it took a while for everyone else to be like, oh, this is really bad. They had to shake off the character they were supposed to play and adopt these new characters. Anna Gomez silencing dissenting voices is not a show of strength. It's a sign of fear. We must continue to speak out against the growing campaign of censorship and control before this dangerous new normal becomes the status quo. That's her talking about nominally her boss. Yeah. Weird. Yeah. But good. This is like if you ever discovered the podcast I have where I just say mean things about you the whole time. That's like that.

1:27:31Then I think you will see some signs of fear. Crazy, right? Like this is happening in the government right now. Sitting commissioners, the FCC who might be illegally fired by Trump. He's already illegal fired, illegally fired commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission. He's threatened to illegally fire Powell at the Fed. She's speaking out. Good for her. She's welcome. If you want to on tour, you want to stop with us in the decoder, we'd love to have you, Commissioner Gomez. Former Commissioner Tom Wheeler is out with a piece in a law fair this week saying, Brendan Carr is moving to break foundational principles of American government and democracy.

1:28:09I've met Tom Wheeler. Tom Wheeler has been on Verge shows before. Go back and just look at a picture of Tom Wheeler. Like, look at him, watch his interactions with me as I push him on things. He is not a you're going to break foundational principles of American government and democracy editorial writer. He is not a bomb thrower. He is he was a government regulator of spectrum. Famously, he came from the industry. People criticized Obama for revolving door hiring wheels. And here he is saying cars actions mark an unprecedented expansion of government intrusion in his free speech and a direct assault on those engaged in promoting equal opportunity.

1:28:47They undermine the constitutional balance of power by bypassing co-equal branches of government to enlarge presidential authority through self-serving presidential decree. For a high-level bureaucrat, that is like screaming swears as loudly as you possibly can. Again, I've known Wheeler for a long time. Just listen to him talk to me about anything in the past. Gaze upon him. Perceive Tom Wheeler. And he's like, yeah, you're doing some dictator stuff, man. That's not normal. so there's some pushback against car this week he again he was in texas having to pretend that ted cruz is hip and cool but i'm i'm i'm happy to see commissioner gomez and now former chairman wheeler really push back very loudly and you can see it it's it's starting to percolate throughout the media ecosystem again there's a big puck article so yeah the podcast within podcast continues, but the battle is joint.

1:29:42As always, Brendan, you're welcome to join us here on America's Favorite Podcast Within a Podcast. If you are as cool as you think you are, you will join a podcast called Brendan Carr as a Dummy. Right? If you have it, if you have the juice, you would be on the show. You're also welcome on Decoder, during which I am much more polite. That seems less fun. I mean, look, dude, the CEO of Verizon Wireless was just on Decoder. He did not have to come on that show, but he's a fan. Had the best answer to the decision-making question I've ever heard. One of the worst answers to why did you kill that neutrality I've ever heard, but that's life.

1:30:20So look, it's equal opportunity. He has a really great process for making really bad decisions. I love that. It was good. It's a good episode. I highly recommend it. We got into it. He's a listener. He's a Virg nerd. It was cool to talk to him. We disagree about it. That's fine. Brendan, you're welcome. It will maybe be less cool. Oh, also, by the way, in that Puck article, Brendan's wife, Michaela, she is the top policy person at Palantir. The MAGA universe, the MAGA extended universe continues to grow. There are only like four companies in this entire world, it turns out. All right, Brendan, you're welcome.

1:30:55Again, I think you're a coward, so you won't show up. And dummy. And so if you do, I think you'll lose. But you should come on. It'll be fun. We'll have a good time. Bring Ted Cruz. We'll have a great time. I've been dying to debate Ted Cruz this is like one of those things like what would you throw it all away for and it's like yelling at Ted Cruz alright we need a pallet cleanser David can I interest you in a wood smartphone? is that is that a good pallet cleanser? Jeep I think is bringing back the wood Jeeps wood is back man this is we're doing it here yeah because we can't import anything else right we're just gonna cut down more trees we have to cut down America's forests so it's great Motorola came out with some new phones i am torn on these so it's it's three different flip phones like the the thing motorola has been doing at the razor but the most interesting one is the razor ultra which i would say essentially makes the same set of changes that the other new razors do which is like you know it's a little a little faster it has slightly better um like build quality essentially like that's the thing motorola sort of consistently is trying to get better at it's just like how to make these things nice.

1:32:01But the Ultra has a wood back. It's$1 ,300. It is preposterous. And I love it so much. There's a really fun thing to do whenever this comes up, which is look at our links of our own coverage about Motorola making wooden phones. And I'm just pointing out that in 2014, January 29th, 2014, David Pierce wrote a story about the Moto X called The New Retro, how Motorola brought wood back, literally. And it's about the wooden back of the Moto X and the first line, the lead. The terrible. I don't know how you and I chose this because I remember editing this story, but the lead of this story, the first sentence, not so long ago, wood was everywhere in the world of consumer electronics.

1:32:45It was. This is fact. And by not so long ago, I mean the mid-1970s. it's like I look at our own website it's like a time capsule into like what were we thinking Jake what do you think about this film be with me on this well there's a there's a key feature that you failed to mention by the way the Motorola executive in 2014 was Rick Osterlo who now runs Android Chrome so I was right and so is he yeah key feature you forgot to mention exclusive to the Ultra big upgrade possibility here AI button on the side oh no so what what kind of button are we talking about i missed this i need to look at pictures of this uh it's like your standard flavor button uh it's it it opens up some ai menu uh where you can maybe there's there's been a lot of noise this week about how uh perplexity is going to come pre-installed on this thing um i think perplexity was was probably hoping everyone would you know think this is a more serious integration um and not just our app is on the second screen open it up um you know much potential there i would say in another world where gemi didn't exist uh but um listen i'm all for it i love it they also have an uh alcantara i don't know if i'm saying that right a version so um really greatest hits um surface line gave that up uh you know we're due for some fun phone textures i feel like the razor line in its way is sort of all about throwback stuff um this is fun it's cool i love it uh it's unfortunate that it is exclusive to the ultra version which is the most expensive version um and i think you're stuck with you know the plain old uh options on the like standard model that i think most people probably go for but um but even the standard ones i will say have they're doing a fun sort of two-tone color thing where the bottom half is one color and the top half is another color.

1:34:46It's just nice, right? Like we're in this moment where like the best you can hope for is like a gentle blue on your smartphone. I bought my phone just to get the blue and this is what excitement looks like in smartphones now. And like genuinely kudos to Motorola for A, continuing to go with the only thing it ever did that anyone cares about, which is the Razer. Like truly, I mean that sincerely. And also apparently wooden phones, which you cared about a lot in 2014. Listen. This story is very long. The Moto X was sick. There's two things, and this just combines them. That's exactly right. Can I continue to read you quotes from Rick Osterloh to David Pierce from the story from 2014?

1:35:27Sure. The X phone team started to show the wooden models to focus groups, and the response was overwhelming. Quote, people were immediately like, whoa, that's different from anything I've seen before. People couldn't believe that it was actually real. That's a bad quote. That's my bad. I should have cut that one out. And then he goes on to say, there's no supply chain for wood, Osterlo says. There's your headline. Wood is typically used for furniture and stuff. It's a totally different group of people from the people we normally do business with. Wood is typically used for furniture and stuff.

1:36:00That's the insight you come to The Verge for. That's why we just didn't, it was a long time ago. We didn't really know what we were doing yet. Rick rolled David Pierce in particular with, here's how hard it was to make a wooden phone. All I'm saying is 11 years later, we're back at it. So they must've been onto something. Finding wood that won't warp, splinter, or crack is hard. Another, I think that was a pull quote, actually. Is this one wood or is it bamboo as well? The Moto X was bamboo, I believe. Allison, who wrote about this and saw it, her piece calls it a wood grain back panel. Oh boy, it's like a sticker.

1:36:36don't know what to make of it yeah it's it's either like a sticker or it's like wood in the way that ikea furniture is wood it's like it it does make me slightly nervous but all of this is like there's some interesting like you know material stuff going on but it just looks great and there's something to these things just being more than a giant slab of glass that i think should be explored a lot more than it has been recently yeah and once we break up every single company many more companies will be able to build a wood supply chain perfect uh i want to end with a big think youtube turned 20 this week we we ran a piece about the first videos on youtube famously it was like my day at the zoo or whatever it's called um and david you wrote about youtube itself and then youtube tv is getting some changes and it's all kind of the same story like there's still just random clips of stuff but it did eventually eat tv it really did eat tv so that Where I started with the story was essentially trying to figure out what is YouTube now?

1:37:37Because the big change that happened at YouTube really over the last two or three years is that it became mostly a TV platform. It is still viewed everywhere. It's still very popular, but it is both in terms of how people watch YouTube and how YouTube conceives of itself. It is mostly a TV platform now. And I just think that's fascinating. So I talked to a bunch of people across the company about like YouTube's conception of itself and tried to understand just sort of like what makes this thing go and landed on essentially. This is not a reference anyone is ever going to remember, but there's this very famous Matt Taibbi story in Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs, where he described Goldman Sachs as I'm paraphrasing, but a vampire squid that jumps on the face of anything that smells like money.

1:38:23um and that's youtube but for content and in a much less like society destroying way um but this company is fascinating like i talked to the people there who do the tv stuff and the people who do the gaming stuff and the people who do the creator stuff and overwhelmingly like if you just think of youtube as like an insatiable content machine that just it will take anything that is content however broadly you want to define that and it will put it into an algorithm that is very good at figuring out what somebody is going to want and then stick it in front of you. That is like, like you talk about Google flywheels.

1:38:59That is Google's best flywheel right now. It is, it is unstoppable and it is working way beyond anything I realized. I think it's so interesting to be talking about this right after we discussed the meta trial because meta, they turned or Facebook turned 20 last year. YouTube turns 20 this week. And if you just look at the, the, the cultural trajectory of those two platforms, they could not be more different. That's so true. YouTube, I don't know that you necessarily call YouTube a social platform exactly. But I think it is probably at a stronger place than it's ever been in many ways. And Facebook, you just could not say the same thing by any stretch.

1:39:36And I couldn't tell you exactly why, but maybe this is because they have looked at it much more as a platform for other people's content. And they have just embraced that rather than, I think, trying to do all those different social plays. I kind of disagree. in like a very small way not not a big way check i think i think you you've got the shape of it right youtube is a social platform in that you as a user are meant to be in the comment section you are not meant to be in the video box there's a weird period where they thought you were everyone is supposed to be uploading videos to youtube right like you can go you like search file names from a specific period in time and you get everybody's iphone videos because they thought it was just a general sharing platform that's gone they they pivoted out of that really fast right they invented the youtube creator uh taylor alerans has a great history of where that word came from it came from the advertising industry actually um and mcn's like multi-channel networks they invented the youtube creator who is this like semi-professional and now very professional dominant culture maker that's not regular people regular people are doing social stuff on YouTube, right?

1:40:43They're, they're hitting like, they're trying to get T series above PewDiePie. Like that's all happening. Like it's very interactive and social, but it's, it's, it's not in the main box. The main box is like for pros now or people who want to be pros, whereas Instagram is still just everything all at once. I think that's, that's the thing that keeps getting meta into trouble. They have never built the thing that lets you, like my daughter just like discovered that YouTuber is a job. And now I have to stop that from now. I'm really sorry right but like instagram creator is like not really a job tiktokers is a job like it's it's just meta is in this weird space where it never delineated all of those things well yeah and i think i think i remember when threads was first launching adam massaria was talking about you know there's something in the design of the app where like the the reply and the original post look the same and that's actually really important in an app like threads or twitter um and to your point, Eli, YouTube never, ever, ever tried to do that.

1:41:42It always had such a clear hierarchy of who you are and where you are on the platform. And I think the thing that has made TikTok interesting is that it has found the middle ground there that actually works for people, right? Like the duets and the stitches and they have really forced YouTube to be reactive to that. But like Jake, to your point, what most people want, the vast majority of people want is to mostly consume and like maybe very lightly participate and youtube hit that formula early on and then never ran away from it and like even even at times when it looked like it maybe should have when like facebook was ascendant and all of a sudden it was like oh we need to make this more interactive and do different kinds of feeds and all this stuff youtube just like kept being youtube and like history just proved it right over and over and over again and it's funny because the content got to move up.

1:42:33Right. The product didn't, the product always had that delineation and the stuff in the video box got more and more and more premium. And now it's eating TV. Yeah. And I think it's just fascinating. It's also why I think Google should break itself up before the government shows up and distracts that whole company away from whatever YouTube is or is becoming because it's, I think YouTube looks more like Google's future than anything. And I think Google kinds of kind of knows it too, but it's just tied to this mess. Yeah, no, I would agree with that. I think there's a strong case to be made. And people make this case.

1:43:06You see it from analysts and stuff every once in a while that YouTube is a substantially more valuable business alone than it is inside of Google. Huh. I wonder if one of the most fascinating things about Google and other people have made this point for years now is that no one pays attention to it as a platform. Everyone is constantly paying attention to TikTok's moderation rules. Everyone is constantly paying attention to threads or X or whatever's moderation rules. We all pay a lot of attention to Mark Zuckerberg and how he feels about racism today. Surprisingly more open to it than the day before because his company is on trial.

1:43:43And what if corruption was good? Who knows? No one talks about YouTube moderation. It just doesn't come up. We sometimes talk about YouTube radicalization with all this stuff. But the day-to-day YouTube stuff, even though creators there, my joke is that a creator gets their wings when they make their first video about how they're mad at YouTube. No one talks about it. And I think that is part of the benefit of being part of Google. You just can't yell at YouTube. Like, that's Google. Yeah. I also think it's a big platform that feels big in a way that, like, TikTok is a really big platform that feels small, right?

1:44:16And so I think it's very funny talking to people about their TikTok feeds because you slowly discover over the course of a conversation that, oh, my TikTok and your TikTok have nothing to do with each other. But we both sort of open the app and use it in the same way. So I feel like I'm getting some kind of universal experience. YouTube is just, it just feels giant in a way that I feel like no one thinks they understand YouTube, which really works to YouTube's benefit. I think people engage with YouTube very differently too, right? For Facebook, for Instagram even, for absolutely for TikTok, you go specifically to those apps.

1:44:47YouTube comes to you. That's not true for everybody, right? You still open it up on your TV. You still open up on the website and browse, but you're going to find videos embedded. You're going to be sent a link, right? When was the last time somebody sent you a link to a piece of content on Facebook? Like that wasn't a spammer. I mean, I send people spaghetti Jesus all day long. Dude, it's so funny. I asked you, I asked a bunch of people at YouTube about that because I posed to one of their engineering people that like my theory of the case for YouTube is that it is a very good video player that is easily embedded across the internet.

1:45:22And for some reason, no one else has figured out how to do that. uh and the guy kind of hemmed and hawed and he gave he gave me a good explanation for why that's not the whole answer and a lot of his answer is actually in the piece uh but then i was like but but explain to me why no one has done a good enough like why aren't embeds as good as youtube's and he was kind of like i don't know it's weird it's like you can't do it with music like there are no music embeds anywhere on the internet that are as good as youtube music videos which is hugely powerful for YouTube. And you just poke at that across everything.

1:45:54And it's like the fact that none of these other platforms have invested in, like you said, Jake, that sort of experience I have somewhere else that I interact with this content is just weird to me. And YouTube is ubiquitous that way. you know, it's still connected to all the Google stuff because YouTube is part of Google, which wants the web to be good, which invests in big web containers that it's crawlers can see that are interoperable across different browsers, all the web stuff fed into YouTube. Whereas I think if they didn't have that pressure, they might be more closed like all the other embeds.

1:46:25Yeah, that's a fair point, yeah. I think it was either TikTok or Instagram that after we launched our redesign, they made their embeds behave better. I was like, these embeds are too tall for our design. And they were like, I don't remember which one it was. They were like, I think it was Instagram. They're like, oh, that's bad. But no one uses these embeds, so we never got this feedback. Weird. All right, that's it. Tell me, I feel like I've asked for a lot of emails. from people. Send us your party speakers. Tell me if you would buy Chrome and how much you would spend on it. And then tell me about YouTube.

1:46:55I'm just sort of dying to know. Everyone has a different YouTube, right? We're 20 years in. I have friends who only watch YouTube. They don't have streaming services. They just watch YouTube. Wait, okay. Real quick before we go. Let's just do this. If you were to go to YouTube.com right now, what would it show you? Jake, you go first. Oh, it's all chess videos and Bon Appetit cooking content. Oh, okay. Like chess tutorials or like Magnus Carlsen like being cool oh it's uh both both yeah it's like it's like play by plays it's hugely embarrassing i'm so sorry i love this for you nila what's yours oh i've turned off all the tracking it doesn't show me anything it just begs me to turn the tracking back on you get just it's like the one it no the one line of text they've started i think they've realized that this was working too well so they started flashing recommendations and they take them away and say your tracking is off and it's like yeah i know it's like i'd love to show you it was a lot of um it was in the covet area before i turned the tracking off it was a lot of um i don't remember the channel a guy who restores things but he would like take an old drill and like sandblast it and repaint it and i found this very calming i was like i just i need projects that come to a conclusion because nothing in covet felt like a conclusion so i just watched this guy he's like i fixed this the hand mixer.

1:48:11I'm like, you did it. It was very good. That is really good. Mine, I just went to youtube.com and mine is, I would say, a mix of female singer-songwriter music videos, which there's a lot of right now, soccer highlights, and Parks and Rec combinations. That's my YouTube right now. Yeah. I watch an embarrassing number of park videos on YouTube, I will say. It's very fun. All right, that's it. That's for just, send us notes we want your feedback if you see a party speaker think to yourself is this enough? and then email it to me that's it that's the Verge Cast back around

1:48:52and that's it for the Verge Cast this week and hey we'd love to hear from you give us a call at 866-VERGE-11 the Verge Cast is a production of the Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network our show is produced by Will Poore Eric Gomez and Brandon Kiefer and that's it we'll see you next week

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