Gemini is taking over Google

26:02And you can even see that having it exist at all allows bad actors to call into question the significance or reality of real media. so Trump saying the Harris rally was quote AI'd which can we not do that can we just pause real fast like can we not with the AI as a verb like AI already means too many things it's a it's a huge catch-all word that has become sort of meaningless can we not make it other parts of speech too I agree that we should not use language really Donald Trump uses language but what I'm getting at is you only get to do that if people believe the technology can do it And it is true that people have believed that technology can do this stuff for years before it can.

26:45But now they're going to hold in their hands the capability on a Samsung phone to circle an empty field and say add a crowd. Right. They can just do it. They are going to hold in their hands the ability to add people to photos who weren't there before with add me on a Google Pixel. And the companies are marketing this as this makes you more creative. It lets you take the photos you want. And now for Google, all the way to we want you to create the memories of the things you thought were happening rather than the things that were happening. I mean, haven't like Chinese phone makers been doing that with we want to create what I think I look like versus what I actually look like with the face tuning?

27:24Like, sure. It's been happening a while. It's one of those things I think. What was shocking to me is the ease of access of the tool itself. But I'm not like shocked at putting these tools in the phone. but it's weird that they put it in the camera app. The add me feature is not like the most AI. It's generating you, right? It's doing a bunch of cool stuff. On a technical level, it's doing something cool, right? It's generating a depth map and then using the depth map to realign the multiple photos. That's all very cool. And I'm confident there's a bunch of AI in there that is helping to do that.

27:59But at the most fundamental level, what it's doing is compositing two photos together. Like you look at the photos that the Hollywood magazines put out with like 500 stars on the cover. Those are often composite photos. Those are Admi photos. Like every single movie poster you see is one of those Admi photos. But like – Right. But I'm never like I wonder if this movie poster happened. Right. But I will also say I got to try it out a little bit at the event and Admi is certainly really cool. but also I would say it's like the royal family level of photoshopping abilities. Ooh, deep cut, Alex. You see some hands where hands should not be, that sort of thing sometimes.

28:44So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it'll do it. At a glance, it looks awesome. It looks really, really cool. You look closer and you see the edges on this stuff. And I haven't gotten to try all of these tools, but even the AI one where you circle things and add, like that messed up at the event they scrolled through it really really fast when they were like they're like here's a hot air balloon and then they like did another one it was like a blob and the guy like just speed scrolled past this horrible amorphous blob it was pretty great all i'm getting at is those tools aren't great but because they exist and they are broadly accessible it's not just that there's a bunch of synthetic photos we can point at and say those are fake bad actors are able to point at real photos and say they are fake and we are just barreling towards no one believes anything they see.

29:31I think we're already there. There's a strong argument we're already there. Do you guys remember a bunch of years ago, Farhad Manju, when he was at the New York Times, wrote this really great column about selfie culture. And his big sort of thinky thought that I've been thinking about ever since was basically like, we've entered into a place where everything that there is to be photographed has been photographed. And so now what's different is that I'm there. and that's it's like it's a meaningful thing right it's like I'm this picture is different because it has me in it in the Grand Canyon you've already seen pictures of the Grand Canyon so people are putting themselves in it as like this is a this is a new way of seeing this because I'm here something like add me just breaks that in the most interesting way it's like we talk about sort of the cultural meaning of photos and I was seeing a bunch of people during the Google event be like how on earth can a photo first social network exist after this like if If suddenly I can be anywhere at any time doing whatever I feel like just gets weird.

30:32And I get that AdMe has some like limitations that make that challenging. I mean, arguably the photo for social media has been weird for a while, given that like influencers rent sets that look like planes to fake looking like they're sitting on a plane. But at least that like costs money and time and effort. Yeah. I agree. Like what Pixel has done, what Google has done is just remove a ton of barriers that were already existed, right? Like Photoshop already existed. People faking photos has been happening forever. But now it's just like, to Nili's point, really, really easy. Yeah, it's Samsung faking the moon, but it's you and it's everywhere.

31:09Like weird. Two things. One, we should have made this set look like a private chat. What were we thinking? Oh, my God. We failed. Fundamental error, Liam. This should look like a PJ. Lying down in the PJ. I'm so mad that this room doesn't look like the inside of a private jet. Second, what we're talking about, the cost element that you bring up, David, is the thing. Yeah. It's the thing. When ILM made fake dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, there was not a widespread outcry about people believing dinosaurs are real. A small outcry somewhere, I'm sure. Yeah, right. There's actually one line from that movie that should have gotten even more outcry, which is you were so busy wondering if you could.

31:53Right. I'm just pointing out. But when you make it so that everyone's phone velociraptors in every photo and they look real and you brought the cost to nothing. Some people are going to believe some dumb stuff. And like we're just there. And I I agree with you, Alex. Like we might be way past the point of no return where people are just not going to believe anything's true anymore. Yeah. Like the needle might just be in the red. I'm just deeply cynical. I think we wrote with the Pixel 8 last year that we were at the what is a photo apocalypse. Yeah. I'm just saying I'm looking at it now and there's no longer.

32:29When we wrote about the Pixel 8, there was some pushback. Like we're not doing this. We're being careful. You're overreacting. And then this year they're like, you can just put yourself in the phone. Right. And it's like, oh, we're over it. There's just a lot there to talk about. We're going to get the phones. I think we should see how well they work as always. Yeah. But there's a piece of all of this, especially in election season, where I suspect we are going to be talking about whether or not people believe what they see for a long time now. Because it's just it's fully off the rails. All right.

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35:28All right, we're back. I'm in a different chair in the studio. I'm on this side of the table now It's much more like regal Like I want you to give me investment advice From this chair for some reason Should we invest in Bitcoin? I can't do that but I will tell you To smoke all the cigars you can smoke That's what this feels like to me Like I should be giving bourbon and cigar advice We should start that show And my answer is Have as much as you want Just enjoy it It's two or three in They're all the same really All right. That's enough. We've done enough philosophizing about AI and platform shifts and whether or not reality is real.

36:09Let's talk about the most important tech story of the week, which is that as promised, I published 2 ,500 words about judging the 2024 TV shootout. I've never been happier in my entire life doing the shootout writing the words avoiding the many other lawsuits that happened this week because if you remember last week I was going to do it and then the Google decision came out and the whole week got thrown away and I couldn't talk about TVs this week I just ignored everything Google also really ruining everybody's life is what I'm hearing it's been a hard time on all of us a thing we one assumes for Google we should probably there's some regulatory stuff to talk about Google is in a world of her right now we'll come to that later but we did it again we were going to talk about TVs we'll start talking about Google Antitrust tell us about the TVs these concepts are so inextricably linked for some bizarre reason why?

37:08no TVs we're going to TVs there's a really high-end boutique home theater store in Scarsdale, New York called Valley Electronics they've been running the TV shootout for 20 years this was the 20th one You can go Google all the coverage from 20 years ago. 2004, plasmas are it. Amazing. The whole thing's amazing. I bought my Sony A95L there because they have stock. It's actually pretty hard to get that TV, but they sell so many of them that Sony gives them special allocations. I went and bought one from them. I got to talk to the owner, Robert Zahn, and his wife, Wendy, and they were like, do you want to judge the shootout this year?

37:43And I just imagined, I was like, yes, like more than anything. I'm just going to, my wife and daughter will be fine. I'll just wait here until the TV shootout begins. So they called me in to judge it. It was an incredible panel. You can look at the story. The pictures are adorable. It was just a bunch of nerds in a room. They cleared out the store and they set up three TVs, three OLEDs and three mini LEDs from Samsung, Sony, and LG. and they put$40 ,000 Sony reference monitors, like the ones that use for coloring in Hollywood in front of them. And then the first day was, quote, the objective day where the task was across a number of clips that they were playing to judge how similar the TVs were to the reference displays.

38:36And the TVs had been professionally calibrated by like famous calibrators on the AVS forums. I was like in heaven. That's an amazing phrase you just said, by the way. Calibrated by famous calibrators. Like, hell yeah. If you're an AVS forum nerd and you have ever just like gone and looked for the settings for a TV, it was probably Cecil Meade or Dwayne Davis. That's awesome. Who go by Classy Tech and D. Nice. I was in heaven. Heaven. Heaven. Like just a bunch of nerds talking about TVs. So where were you on the on the list of like panelists and experts from most to least qualified? Where would you say you were fully the least?

39:16Fully the least. OK. All the other judges are basically like Hollywood types. OK. So the director of encoding services at Warner Brothers Discovery, the senior director of technical operations at Paramount, a handful of professional cinematographers and directors, a handful of professional calibrators. So calibrators are, that's a real job in this industry. People set up their studios, they bring in the professional calibrators to make sure everything is displaying accurately at every point in the chain. So from your camera to your display to your mastering display, this is a real thing. And so those people have kind of the most knowledge of all of the quirks of all the various displays because they're constantly trying to get them to display accurately.

39:59And so what was particularly interesting is they know these TVs really well because these TVs are showing up increasingly in professional operations because fancy studio executives like watching things on big TVs instead of little reference monitors. and they're like, yeah, these Sony A95Ls are showing up all over the place as reference displays for the executives. And so they just, and obviously they do fancy home theaters and other viewing rooms and all this stuff. So it was really interesting to talk to them because they're in the weeds of what these things can and can't do. Sort of divorced from any marketing or whatever.

40:38Like they're just trying to make them look good professionally and they're completely aware of the limits of the TVs. So, and then there's me and I'm like, yeah i've just been looking at screens for 15 years i have a lot of opinions and i thought that was it was kind of interesting to be that person because it was like we weren't supposed to talk to each other so much but in the conversations we had it was kind of interesting how much my instincts were to compare things to like phones and tablets and you can see how the tvs relate to what these companies do on their phones and tablets so i was looking at the samsung and I was like, oh, that looks like a Samsung.

41:15Like, I have looked at a lot of Samsung screens over the years, and boy, does Samsung, like, nuclear colors. Yeah. Samsung has a move, for sure. Yeah. And it's like, oh, and they were like, why do they do that? I'm like, I don't know. They just always do that. Like, every Samsung display I've ever looked at has just been incredibly bright and colorful, even at the expense of accuracy. And it was kind of interesting to just have that other perspective in the room. They obviously knew more on the technical elements of the displays. Like they were, they kept bringing up the reference curves on the reference display.

41:46Oh, wow. And being like, see this? And I'm like, it's a line. Make it brighter. And eventually, you know, you start to pick up on what they were showing you. But it was just like, it was interesting to have that other perspective. So the fascinating thing about all of this is this is the year that Sony made a big bet on many LED TVs as opposed to their OLEDs. So Sony's still selling a bunch of OLEDs. Their flagship TV is still an OLED. That's the A95L. That's a year old now. That came out last year, last September, basically. But we're basically a year into it. And the A95L won again. It just won the shootout.

42:25Last year's TV. Last year's TV won the shootout. That's a quantum.OLED, so it has a wider color gamut. We think it's a Samsung panel. It pretty much is a Samsung panel. And then this year's Samsung OLED, we think, is the next generation quantum dot OLED. But Samsung is Samsung, and they did some weird stuff with colors. And it lost by just like 0.1. It was just a little bit behind in some things because— And then the LG was at the back? And so this is a really weird thing is the 65-inch LG G4 performed much worse than the 83-inch LG G4. And the calibrators in the room who have been like setting up these TVs for different people are like, this is the story with these TVs, the 55 and then the 77 and up.

43:15All great. The 65 seems to be worse. Oh, no, I have to go get a new TV. Well, I mean, like one takeaway I'll give everyone is like the OLEDs were so close to each other that it was taking like three times the amount of time to score them as compared to the reference because you had to see where the differences are. whereas on the mini led side you're like okay the lg is bad no one knows what samsung is doing and then the sony's pretty good but i can see these big problems right yeah and so the the game on that first day was you had the reference display that was showing ideally what you know the studio or whoever wants you to see in the picture that's the reference display we can ask a really dumb question yeah is a reference display like the best one like is that is that how we should think about reference display is like this is the perfect television yes no yes yes and no i'll agree with alex partially but no it's the most accurate representation of like the content so it's the one that like changes the least through the whole pipeline yeah it's like you have a display and uh it is ideally the same display as the person who did the color on the movie.

44:29Got it. Right. And I feel like sometimes that's the same. Or it's a display that performs identically to that display. But it's also like it does stuff that an OLED just can't do, right? Like a reference display is going to do a much smoother gradient of color than an OLED's capable of. You're going to see those weird stepping, that stepping issue in an OLED. Right. So these Sony BVMs were a dual layer LCD. So they were able to do it. Right. They had some capabilities the OLEDs didn't. Sorry. They also have giant ass fans in them. so they could run really bright for a very long time all the oleds were dimming you could and you said they're what like forty thousand dollars forty thousand dollars cool okay um interestingly small they're smaller but interestingly to your point alex the qd oleds have the capability of displaying more colors than these reference displays so there's places where they actually aren't as capable as the television right because and so there were there were scenes i forget which movie it specifically was where we were it was i think it was like the the saber fight in rogue one or darth vader just like lighting people up um spoiler i mean rogue one is itself a really good one for that yeah it's great um spoiler darth vader kills people in a star wars movie um what uh oh no but one of the questions there was like is this accurate because the people who made the movie were just sort of mastering to whatever set of colors but they couldn't see them.

45:54So then it's like, is it different? Is it bad? It was kind of, that was pretty interesting. Right. And so the, the reason that the first day was objective, but the goal was one out of five, how much is this the same as the reference display, which is a really interesting way of thinking about it, a picture. Cause sometimes you're like, this is better. I think this is better than the reference display, but it was different. So you knocked it down and that took a while to get your head around. Basically. This is where like, I just accuracy is King for me in TVs? Because I've done the calibration.

46:24I went to ISF and did the week-long course with them and everything. I love the accuracy. When I hear the Samsung is probably displaying more reds, those reds were never intended to be displayed according to the reference monitor. Is that actually better? No, because that's... The director could never have decided that, so therefore it's not better. We see that a lot with classic phone too. Like all of the, all the stuff they captured on Technicolor is so much more vibrant. And that was before we even had color spaces as like a concept. And, uh, and, and so it's just totally different and it's weird.

47:03It's just weird. So you're a real, like, what did the, what did the founding fathers intend? Yeah. Yeah. I'm a founder's intent. I'm, uh, me and Scalia are just over there. Yeah. You are truly the Antonin Scalia of TV calibrations. Whereas Neela is just like, What looks sick now? Like, it's 2024, baby. Give me them reds. I famously love a Samsung display. How many frame TVs do you own? Not even in the mix. I was just putting it out there. I'm sitting next to like a hundred inch frame TV. And it's like the TV quality of frame compared to all of these is like mad. That's why you're back to it. Can you describe a picture quality as present?

47:44Because that is a Samsung frame TV. Appears. That's what a Samsung frame TV looks like. Fascinating on the mini OLEDs. The OLEDs are all really close, Alex. Some color stuff aside in this, the fact that the QD OLEDs have a wider color gamut is kind of interesting. But outside of that context, it would be almost impossible to tell them apart. And honestly, it was like the way you could tell was it was taking so long for people to score them because the difference between a four and a five was like, am I seeing any? It's like, what is it? It was only the LG that was like, it just was really muddy and dark scenes.

48:20It just like didn't have the detail in dark scenes that the other ones did. Weird. On the mini LED side, everyone was like, all right, that one's bad. This one's good. Except for the Sony, because Sony is putting so much emphasis on mini LED this year. Like the Bravia 9, which apart from the A95 is like the flagship, it's the one they're pushing. All mini LEDs. They get hella bright because they're just LCD TVs with an LED backlight. and you're like oh this tech has a long way to go and it could get there but it's nowhere close like they look kind of washed out the colors are a little shifted the detail isn't quite there they're still a little blooming so if you think about how a mini led backlight works it's just another screen of pixels behind the screen that light up like it's a lower res screen behind the screen that lights up to produce light and it has to match what's on the screen in real time so that you get true black.

49:11So they're off when there's something black and they're lit when there's something on the screen. So if there's any latency, you see blooming, right? Or if the zone is too big because it's not one-to-one, you see blooming. And so you can see in the algorithms are like trying to manage all of this as fast as they can with as little latency as possible. The Samsung was like all over the place. Like sometimes like this just looks like a regular like local dimming TV. Sony was much better, but still had the problems. And then all of them, because they're LCDs, their viewing angles aren't as good as the OLEDs.

49:42And they're huge, right? These 65-inch, 83-inch TVs we're looking at. So if you were too close to them, even just moving an inch or two to the left or right, shifted all the color and brightness. And you're like, oh, we're just not close. Like, Sony is trying the hardest here, but we're not close. I just, I don't understand why we would go backwards on viewing angle. Because they're cheaper. because you can get 83 inch TV for much cheaper and it's very bright and it's very impressive. And outside of that room full of the most incredible display nerds I've ever met in my entire life. And I want all of them to come home with me tomorrow.

50:15Outside of that room, I think it would be hard to tell these TVs apart. But it was like just that experience of paying such close attention to one quality of these products with other people who are doing that same task. It was like very refreshing to me. We weren't judging whether or not Tizen is any good compared to webOS. We weren't judging how many HDMI 2.1 ports the Sony TV has. Not enough, right? Like none of that stuff, game mode, all that. We were like, can this picture be calibrated to match a reference monitor and which one comes closer? And that I, there was just a part of that having reviewed so many products over the years and had to think about so many things.

50:55It's like, oh, this is actually a really interesting way of thinking about these products specifically. Was there a consistent agreement among the, what was it, eight panelists? That's a lot of people to all point at this same, like it's both objective and subjective in a certain way. Like, did everybody tend to agree on everything? We weren't, we were all so excited to be there. When we started judging, we were all chattering and then we were like told to stop. Okay. So our score, I don't know what everybody else scored. You know, like a worry for me is like the consumer reviewer in the group was that I had no idea what I was talking about.

51:28I was like, man, I hope my scores are close. And they were in the end, you know, the, the average, the averages that were released and the rankings that were released were exactly as I had thought them. I feel like I was in the mainstream, you know, I think the one LG stand in the room who's like, I love blooming. That LG mini led is not good. Like it's like a half hearted. And to be fair, it was the cheapest TV on display. Like by thousands of dollars. So they put all their efforts into OLEDs anyway. Like they just farted that out. Yeah. It's like, let's hedge our bet a little bit. Like maybe this is the thing.

52:06But yeah, they have the micro lens array, which increases the brightness on their OLEDs. Like I said, the three OLEDs were so close to each other. You can tell that it's a mature technology, right? It just hit a point of refinement where you have to care a lot about extremely arcane picture details. And Alex, I think you and I vibe on this. Yeah. I care a lot about arcane picture details. The mini-LEDs is like all over. My notes on the color for the Sunny Bravia 9 was just the single sentence. Colors all over the map. Like just all over the place. Who knows what's going on here? So that was like the first day.

52:44The second day was much more subjective. They took down the 65s. They put up the biggest available sizes for all the TVs. So that was 77 for the Sony, 83 for the LG, 85 for the Mini LEDs. And Robertson, the owner, was like, I've never had more people ask for a head-to-head comparison of two TVs than people ask for the LG G4 at 83 versus the Sony Mini LED at 85. Because they're very price competitive and one is obviously bigger, right? That's the TVs. People have big, cheap screens. So he's like, this is what everyone wants to see. So those two are right next to each other. And the LG just wiped the floor.

53:21Wow. So much better. Just incredibly better. And the fact that the LG 83 was so much better than the 65, that's what everyone talked about. But we weren't doing the intense reference comparison out there. They took them. They set them up out of the box. They turned on filmmaker mode to turn off all the bullshit. And they turned off energy saver because energy saver brings the brightness down. Yeah. Energy Saver is the number one thing you should turn off on your display. I mean, destroy the environment, but just go turn – if you have it on right now, go turn it off. Right. It just significantly reduces the brightness of your panel.

53:55So they turn off Energy Saver and they put them in filmmaker mode or I think Sony calls it professional mode. It just turns off all the stuff and they let them run out of the box. And that's where like Samsung was the most Samsung. Like here – colors. Do you like them? um uh and i you know the the lg the 83 inch lg just it was just a great picture right like it it was right behind the sony in that evaluation but we weren't doing numbers we were just sort of ranking one two three for all the clips that we saw and i at the end uh and we can just wrap it up here at the end i was basically put the samsung qd oled the s95d and the sony led were in a tie for me.

54:33It was hard. It was hard for me to decide because the Samsung colors were so all over the place and the Sony's backlight was so all over the place and the viewing angles were weird and I couldn't decide and in the end, I was like, it's an OLED because I know the Samsung can be calibrated and I know the Sony can't. So that's how I picked. Again, like my takeaway from this was one, I should spend more time in rooms with huge nerds. Yes. Because those are my people. And I would say what, like$100 ,000 worth of TVs on a wall in front of me? More than that. I mean, like this store is out of control.

55:02like that's just the TVs. We didn't even talk about the audio side of the store. Scarsdale is a wealthy town. We're moving product. It was great. And he sells all the country and they've been doing it for a long time. The room was full of Sony's actual product people, not just marketing people. So this like matters. This is not just like a small town bunch of nerds. This is like a thing people care about. TV shootout is a thing. There's a press release, like a whole thing. There are YouTubers there making YouTube videos. There are YouTubers live streaming with the Calibrators, just talking TVs in the back room.

55:36I already assigned Eli 10 ,000 words on the Calibrators, so that's coming. That's actually a great name for a show, the Calibrators. It is pretty good. I would watch this. And the picture, over the course of every episode, the picture just gets slightly better. Anyway, that's my TV story. I finally got to talk about it. It's on the site now. You should go read it. I'm sorry if you have an LGG4. and you it's a great TV you're fine don't listen to me just give it a 10 just say Alex is so disappointed I'm okay I'm okay I'm working through it I'll be fine Alex if you want I'll take your crappy TV anyone who would like to give me their very good TVs I will happily take them with no complaints whatsoever you'll just be like oh it's so crappy oh it's terrible can I say one more thing at the opening this whole event they're talking about the TVs and like what they are and all this stuff.

56:26And they said two things. One, they were like, TCL and Hisense aren't here. They asked not to be included in the competition. Because they were going to lose. You can just read into that. And then later, Robert was like, one year Vizio was here and it was embarrassing for them. Oh boy. So that's, just read into that whenever you want. Vizio rough. It's a real like, I will not be running for president in 2024 kinds of vibes. Yeah. Okay, that was it. That was my TV adventure. Thank you for joining me on this journey. This is why I started The Verge, so I could sit in a room full of TVs. Do you think they'll invite you back next year?

57:01Did you do a good enough job? I hope so. I hope. Can we come with you? We'll be quiet. We'll just stand there. Alex and I will live stream it next year. I asked Chris Welch if he wanted to come with me next year, and he goes, I don't want to get into that level of smoke. I respect that. Yeah. It was great. All right. We should talk about just a handful of regulatory things. What do you want to call them? But the main one that I really want to spend just a minute on is Apple. And it just can't give itself a break when it comes to the App Store and fees. It's in trouble all over the world. Right.

57:39It has an antitrust lawsuit in this country, in the EU. Various charming European bureaucrats wake up every morning thinking about ways to troll Tim Cook. Twitter. Like this company is under a lot of pressure and then it won't just do things that make its life easier. I don't know how to describe this, but this, I'm just, I'm going to tell you this story and you, you, if people out there can figure out why Apple did this, let us know. So Patreon exists, right? You can be a fan of someone, you can pay them some money to do whatever people on Patreon do, knit clothes, make video games, whatever it is, Patreon.

58:19They've been in a gray zone with the app store for years. because you can pay people money in Patreon and they haven't been charging the fee, right? They haven't been giving Apple the 30%. And I actually had Patreon CEO Jack Conte on Decoder a while ago. And I said, have you ever talked to Apple about this? Like, are you an exception? And he was like, no, please stop talking about it, right? Like they know they're in this gray area. Okay. And there have been other companies that want to do Patreon-like things, like this little company, Fan House, right? And they did a whole pressure campaign. to say, why are you charging our creators 30 %?

58:56Like this is unfair. You're providing no value to them. Right. And because the idea is if you sign up for a creator subscription inside of the app, Apple will treat that as an in-app purchase and take its 30%, right? Yeah. Okay. So they see signing up for whatever my favorite podcast on Patreon the same as signing up for Spotify through the app. Sure. And if you want to be very pedantic, That is probably the correct interpretation. Except that for years it wasn't. Right. That feels important to keep saying. Particularly for Patreon, they have been in this gray area for years. You are a Patreon creator.

59:35You sign up for Patreon. You agree your Patreon is going to take 8 % and you're going to take the rest of the money. It's fine. That's a fine deal. Apple is like, well, we got 30 % before Patreon takes 8%. so now it someone did the math instead of needing a thousand true fans which is the number everybody always says you need fifteen hundred fifty four fans like to make the same money that you were doing before that's weird and it is weird because apple doesn't need this fight right now because it's under all of this pressure for whether or not these fees are fair whether the app store is fair whether apple has too much power in the market overall antitrust lawsuit in this country wait I figured out why they did it.

1:00:17Yeah. So whoever sent the email and was like, okay, we're going to, we're going to, we're going to start charging the 30 % of Patreon is actually like, was placed there by someone else to just make Apple give up. This is like a United States Department of Justice sleeper agent. Yeah, yeah. Somebody like, like, like they're, they're just a spy or something. And they were sitting, cause it just, it doesn't, why would you do that? Why would you just. On the calibrators. Yeah. The calibrators went in. They parachuted in and they were like, okay, we're going to do this so that we give even more ammunition for when we go after Apple for all the things we're going after Apple for around the 30%.

1:00:56Yeah, maybe. It just seems like there are ways to make your life easier and there are ways to make your life harder. Pissing off a bunch of independent creators to whom you are providing no value, right? You can make the argument that Apple provides a lot of value to its developers, right? They make the APIs. They ship the platform. They run some of the services. They make Xcode. Sure. It's very debatable, like truly debatable. Yeah. But you can make the argument, and a lot of people have. If you are a Patreon creator, no value is coming your way from Apple. He probably actually comes from Patreon, and you're already paying them money.

1:01:35Right. So Apple's showing up and being like, we want 30%. It's just like too much. and I suspect a lot of these Patreon creators are going to tell their audiences about it and now Apple is right in a fight with creatives that they sort of keep walking into like their crush ad that they had to apologize for like why they just keep making their life harder with these creatives and I just don't know for what money like how like if you took 30 % of all of Patreon's revenue and you gave it to Tim Cook he'd be like get out of my face like this is nothing yeah like this isn't even gas for the jet it probably isn't the only thing i can think is that apple is desperately trying to get to a place where it can say with a straight face that it enforces all of its rules equally because one of the things that has happened to apple over and over is that it keeps saying these are the rules and we were very clear about them and we applied them to everybody.

1:02:34And then every 15 minutes, we hear about a sweetheart deal that somebody has from Apple, right? And there are the rules exist, except for all of the exceptions to the rules. And I think if you're Apple, one thing to do would be to say, okay, we're going to need to be able to stand up to regulators and say, look, these are the rules. They exist for everybody. Everybody follows them equally. I don't think that's a good strategy. I don't think it's going to work. But I think if you're Apple, it is at least one way to be able to say with a straight face look these are the rules we're clear about them you you you don't have to play by them anymore because you can go to alt store or whatever but these are the rules i think doing this this way and particularly in these very like haphazard ways that apple seems to be doing this is deeply bizarre but i think if if you're apple i cannot think of another reason to pick this particular fight with patreon right now other than that well so just to be clear on some of the timing they We told Patreon this was going to happen a while ago, and now it's just happening.

1:03:35But there's no reason that it should be happening. So that's like, it's not that they woke up yesterday and were like, Patreon's going to pay us. They said, here's a big notice period, and now it's happening. And now Patreon is communicating about it. Right. So a more delayed timeline. But still, even if you want to make the argument, we have perfect enforcement of these rules, and there are no exceptions, you're still walking into, and we've pissed everyone off along the way. I'll give you another example. Apple is going to allow Spotify to show pricing in its app in the EU. Just the the thing that is happening is that Spotify is going to put numbers in its app.

1:04:11You still can't buy Spotify in the app. There's a there's I really encourage everyone if you're not driving to we'll put this link in the show notes, but open it up and look at the side by side screenshots because it is this like big dramatic regulatory moment in this long term. fight between Apple and Spotify. It's a big deal. And then you look at the side by side screenshots and they are identical, except that one of them says$17.99 per month,$14.99 per month, and the other doesn't. That's it. And this took like, you know, one of the more powerful government entities in world history to like force the one of the richest companies in world history to let another company show numbers.

1:04:50And you're like, what is the point of this fight? Who gives one solitary shit about this. You can't possibly care. This cannot matter to your bottom line so much, and it can't be such a good argument that your rules are so evenly enforced that you're willing to die on this hill over displaying literally$17.99 in the Spotify app. Not even letting people buy stuff, just showing the price that you can get on the web versus in the app. The only part of that I would take issue with is it can't possibly matter so much to your bottom line. I mean, Apple just reported earnings. It's super, super does matter to Apple's bottom line.

1:05:26And especially if you're Apple looking at a world in which Google is no longer legally allowed to give you$20 billion every year. Like this stuff matters an awful lot to Apple. And suddenly the rent that you get to extract from everyone in the app store goes from like small but meaningful part of your business to like a giant and meaningful part of your business. Yeah. Do you think that's part of it, too, is just their services – because they've been bundling that$20 billion into the services reporting, right? Yeah, it's the lion's share of both the services revenue and Apple's profits in a very real way.

1:06:03And they've been really big on, yeah, this is – our services is doing great. And now it's going to be like, no, actually, it doesn't. Well, the Google Remedy is years away. OK. So reacting to the Google case, like clamping down on Patreon. That would be hysterical. A little short-sighted. Again, I don't think it's gas for the jet. It is not a huge amount of money. But I think their general attitude towards all of these regulators and all these courts saying, yep, these platforms need to open up, has basically been to put a middle finger in the air instead of figuring out how to innovate. Right?

1:06:38And like icky. I'm just saying they could make their lives easier, not harder, and they are consistently choosing harder. Yes. And it is bizarre to me. There's a little more regulatory stuff to talk about because this comes right next to the judge in the epic Google antitrust case saying he will tear the barriers down on the Play Store because he ruled that the Play Store was a monopoly. And he's like, we're opening up the Play Store in the United States. Obviously, the court in the Google search case found that there was a monopoly. And then Google's ad tech case kicks off in early September.

1:07:15and that probably is not going to go poor. Like of all of the cases where we're going to see a bunch of emails of Google executives saying shady things about money, the ad tech case is the one. Oh, yeah. Right? It's going to be great. That's the one. It's so boring and so consequential. Right. So you just see like Google is under all of this pressure and the judges in these cases and the regulators in the EU are like, we're going to tear this company apart. And Apple is sitting there with the big open antitrust case to come. an obviously empowered justice department because they just won their big Google trial and they got the next one coming.

1:07:51And then a bunch of EU regulators started doing it. And it's like, why are you signaling to all of these people that your response to this is putting your finger in the air? Like, it's not going to work because they're winning right now against Google in a real way. And maybe Google is more cuddly than Apple. Maybe people like Apple better than Google. However, those optics feel, they're on the hunt and they're winning. And so like, if you, I don't know there's just something weird about this i was like it's bad optics to go take a cut of 30 from a whole bunch of creators who don't make a lot of most of them aren't making a ton of money right like that's bad optics it's just such an unforced error it feels like them just stepping in rakes constantly they're just sideshow bob if you know what the strategy here is please let us know because i'm dying to know if you even want to concoct a strategy we're not being successful at it.

1:08:40But there's a thing happening broadly in the world of tech right now where the regulators are winning and the platforms are being pried open and distribution is getting a little crazier. And it's kind of interesting for us. It means more interesting things are happening. Altstore is just a thing that's happening in the EU. Emulators are happening all over the iPhone right now because of EU regulation. The emulators are cool. They're downstream of some boring lawyer stuff. but now you can run DOS on your iPhone. Well, it's worth pointing out how big a shift all of that is from even, let's say, 12 months ago.

1:09:18Like, I think the bet this time last year would not have been on huge wins for the US government in particular, right? It was perceived that the EU had wildly overstepped its bounds and that that was all going to get very weird. But like, Lena Khan was having a really bad time picking fights with tech companies and it wasn't going well and it didn't go well. And over and over, this sense was like, what is happening here? The tech companies are going to keep winning. Apple was kind of winning against Epic. Google lost, but in kind of a like not necessarily quite as terrifying way. It just the momentum felt very different not that long ago.

1:09:57And I think it has maybe not caught up to everybody how quickly and aggressively it seems like the wins on all of that stuff have changed. Yeah. Yeah. And in part because of what you're saying, the things like the emulators, right? Like with every little crack, like product changes are happening. And there was the one just this week with Apple opening up tap to pay stuff like that's been in the antitrust trials. That is one of the things that Apple has kept really aggressive control over. Like we talked a lot about digital wallets on the show when this came out because like and that's the kind of stuff that is making big changes just because of the threat of regulatory action.

1:10:32Right. Like all this stuff is going to take a decade to play out, but it doesn't matter because as soon as it starts playing out, it all changes. Yeah. And I, I just think we're on the cusp of, and we've talked about this a million times on the show. It just feels like everything is about to change. Like the internet's about to change or social networks about change search about change. And then this stuff is going to break these companies open. I am hopeful we see a round of interesting, new, innovative companies and products and ideas. I'm also a little worried that like mostly we're going to get lawsuits and I'm going to try to talk about many LED TVs every week and instead have to read PDFs.

1:11:07Even on this own show, we have now sandwiched the television discussion inside of antitrust conversations. I don't know why this keeps happening to me, but my solemn promise to all of you is that anytime we talk about antitrust, I will bring up Ola televisions. I actually believe that. Yeah. All right. We got to take a break. We're going to come back with the lightning round and I'll be in a third chair. Support for this show comes from Atlassian. Wish projects could manage themselves? With Jira AI-powered project management software, keeping things organized and on track is a snap. AI agents manage the busy work, handling details that let your team focus on the work that matters.

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1:13:19All right, we're back. I'm in what I think of as the homeboy chairs. It's beautiful. Like when you got the NBA players in here during the podcast, this is where the homeboys sit. Yeah. You look like you should be like, you look like a professor during the pandemic who like went a little hard on redecorating the home office. That's right. That's also this look, you know, sidekick homeboys professor with an ax to grind. The slats are like, it's very trippy. It's a good look. We bought very similar slats for the studio at my house. And, you know, I don't know whose fault this is or if this is racist, but we forgot to consider that they're the same color as me.

1:14:06So we had to stay in the slots. Just turn to the side. You'll disappear in the frame. It's very good. Anyway, this is where I'm in the loose hangout. You might call this the hype desk. It's a very fast throwback. One could. Yeah. One could call it that. One could say we are now in the market for someone to sit in the hype desk in our chest once again, because we have a hype zone over here in the studio. The as yet unsponsored, unlaunched hype desk. Look, once we get this lightning round sponsored, we're moving on. But now that I'm in the hype desk, I think, David, that makes you got to run the lightning round.

1:14:42And I'm just going to say whether or not things are hype. OK, good. Well, now that now that I'm in charge, I've picked six things for the lightning round. Classic. Classic lightning round. No, Kranz, let's start with you. You have a fun gadgety one, so you go first. Oh, yeah, I got a fun gadgety one. So Realme is a Chinese phone maker, and they make phones. I don't want to make a big assessment on the quality of those phones. They are phones. We can say that with confidence. And they are really into making the charging better and faster, and they introduced 320-watt fast charging. That's great.

1:15:21They said they could do a battery in four minutes and 30 seconds, like a Pixel 9 battery. Wait, isn't the plug I have in the wall like seven and a half watts? And I'm pretty sure like 30 is like very fast. Yeah. So this is insane. Unclear if it will burst into flames as soon as you plug it in. Unclear if it'll set your phone on fire. Do you need like a Thunderbolt 4 style cable, like a big, thick, braided? I wouldn't feel comfortable using. You're not sending this through like a flimsy lightning cable, right? Yeah, this is not what you want to use, like that random cable you found at the bottom of your desk.

1:15:56Don't use that for this. You're probably like a CCS charger into your phone. Yeah, yeah. So it's USB-C right now. What can't USB-C do except tell you what it's doing? But they haven't really like – there's no phones that's really fully supported out in the wild. It's just technology. They just said we did it. This was kind of their – they were doing their roadshow and showing off their new technology. And it was like, yeah, we're going to do this soon. So at some point, we're going to have phones charging in four minutes. And that will rule unless they catch on fire. Can I just say my favorite part of the story is – I mean, the story is great.

1:16:33We should charge our phones faster. The press image they supplied is incredible. It's just like a happy guy. He's so happy. I have a screen that says 320 watts, supersonic charge. And he just pleased his punch. What else do you need? That's all you need. Like, that's how I feel when I read 320 watts. I'm like, okay, yeah, same feeling. Like, I wish I was giving this presentation right now. Like, I truly, can we get the words 320 watt supersonic charge in this TV, please? So I can just smile at it. They call the charger the pocket cannon, which is unbelievable. Yeah. That's great. That's great.

1:17:08Tremendous. Everything about it is wonderful. and but we'll have to see if it actually does it not just in a demo that i will say i i have for years thought that the thing that all these companies say that it's like you know the battery is trash but it charges pretty fast you can get from zero to 50 percent in 35 minutes i've always kind of thought that was nothing like who cares but the idea of fully charging my phone in four and a half minutes it's like okay i can plug in my phone i can brush my teeth and my phone is going to be at like 70 % is awesome. You can also heat a small village. You can fry one egg.

1:17:47It's going to be great. You can. I do like the idea of both turning my oven on and charging my phone at the same time. No, I think you'll blow a circuit breaker if you do that. No, it's like a hot plate and a phone charger all in one little gizmo on my table. This is great. The street lights for miles around dim when David plugs in his phone. I'm just looking at this photo this guy's smiling at the words 320 watt supersonic charge and I think more of the tech industry should be like this. That's what I have for you. I will take a pocket cannon. I feel like I'm probably not allowed to say that on a podcast.

1:18:23But yeah, here we are. Alright, I have two. The first one, I actually should have brought this up at the top where we were talking about all the AI image processing stuff but Halide, a very good camera app for iPhones and iPads, launched the thing this week called process zero that is basically just a setting inside of their app that instead of running every photo you take through either apple's i think they offer apple's standard image processing the pro raw processing and then a thing they call reduced which is just kind of a light version of apple's processing runs it through no processing so you get you get what is supposed to be as close to like a film camera experience as possible you just get the light it collects the end a super cool feature got a lot of people very excited this idea that like we we can actually choose to go another way it's going to make some of your photos meaningfully worse uh it's going to change them in certain ways but i think that idea of like not only do i get to pick like where i am in the photo which is weird but like i have actual real control over what is happening to my photo every time i capture it is very cool uh also just the idea that a camera on your phone can have that kind of access is very cool and not a thing I really understood until I started writing about this thing that like it's again it's just collecting sensor data and if you give apps like Halide access to that sensor data there's all kinds of interesting stuff they're going to be able to do with it and I just think that's very cool and a sort of rich vein that at least to my knowledge nobody has really explored and I think that's really cool if you know a lot about photography don't use that feature all your photos are gonna look like disagree i this is how you learn a lot about photography that's true i i'm assuming of like the the 70 year old who listens to the verge cast and it's like you know what i want to this sounds cool i want to i want to put this on no that person what are you doing with your time It's my mom.

1:20:17Get out there. Oh, I see. Got it. Understood. So just Alex's mom. Don't do it. Everyone else. I've hung out with your mom before, Alex. I'll teach her about digital photography. You say that now. That'll be a great four-hour Verge cast. I think people will listen to it. Talk about a Patreon. Just me and your mom. There you go. But what's really interesting here is pocket point-and-shoot digital cameras are making a tiny blip of a comeback, particularly with younger folks, because they see how bad the processing on their phones has gotten and they don't want to be always connected. Like, my nieces and nephews are all carrying around power shot elves.

1:21:00And I'm like, I made a lot of mistakes with those cameras. Don't do what I did. But it's fascinating to see that little comeback. Is it meaningful? Is it the threat to smartphone? No, none of that. But it is a pushback on how processed the photos are getting. and I think you know an app putting some of those photos into the phone might push the default cameras back towards sanity and I'm kind of hoping Apple takes the hit right that there's you've they've overdone it Samsung has overdone it for years Google has been inching towards overdoing it I think it's Apple that has taken kind of the most aggressive step from I don't know the 12 or the 13 to now where it's just like oh this these photos just look bananas Yeah, I like the photos less on my iPhone 15 than I have in a long time from the iPhone.

1:21:49Like, I think in a certain way, they are like technically better photos. I like them less. Like, my photos don't look like I feel like they should anymore on most smartphones. But the iPhone, I think, held out a long time. But that has kind of gone away. What is it that I guess, because I maybe don't see it as much. What is it that you guys are seeing when you do that? Is it like, is it the color? Is it the dynamic range? All of it? It's all of it. The things for me, and I'm curious, David, since you have the same opinion, if you're seeing something different. For me, it's the iPhone is now just completely allergic to shadows.

1:22:25Just takes them away. It loves the sky. Like, nothing loves the sky like the iPhone camera loves the sky. So just like more sky. But not the sky as it is. Like, what if the sky was the best it has ever been in history all the time, every time you take a photo? Oh, my God. Sky? oh turn up that sky knob yeah you're like oh no it's gray out today and the iPhone's like the fuck it is let's go and then those things combined if you're outside in a bright scene it can actually make your photos gray yeah right so um I was thinking about dynamics like if you're a music person you know dynamics right quiet and loud like there's dynamics in photographs too and so if everything is bright the perceived brightness of the whole image drops and so the iPhone by getting rid of shadows and pumping up the sky and then over like bringing everything up actually makes the photo looked in and I've seen influencers like complain about their iPhone cameras and they're like why is this camera so great like I think Alex Earl has made a video about why her camera appears to be gray right and like that's bad like you don't want to be there right when you are the the hardware of the entire creator economy having the creators being why is my phone gray and it's not because they're less bright it's because if you destroy all the shadows and you make everything bright actually everything looks dim and that's just kind of a weird spot apple's going to i don't know david is that what you're seeing here is it something else no that's that's basically right and the other thing i keep noticing and in the the highlight story i wrote there's a really interesting uh comparison shot where what apple does by getting rid of shadows wherever it can and hyping up the brightness everywhere you can is it just it just flattens it all too so there's a there's a version of the shot that is like it's a it's the front of a flower shop uh and so you see all this sort of the flowers and the pots in the front and the photo was like crisper and brighter than the one that you got with the process zero thing that highlight is doing but it's also much less like dynamic the photo itself there's no there's no sense of sort of ups and downs you get the sense the whole curve is just like bright and it makes the whole thing look really flat kind of like you're talking about and it just it makes all the photos less interesting in a way like they're brighter and cooler and less interesting to me in in so many ways yeah and there's other stuff there's like weird sharpening when you get in the low light iphones just start freaking out oh yeah and like not in a bad way they're not like making technically bad photos i think this is what you're getting david they're just trying so hard to make a great photo that you lose the character of it and then there's tons and tons and tons and processing.

1:24:59Like, right. And I think what you're seeing a lot of coming back with the, the point and shoots and the process zero stuff, like this whole idea is like, I, people should be allowed to take bad photos. You know what I mean? And it's like, there's something to, if I'm standing in a dark room and I take a picture, maybe it's actually okay that the picture is dark. Like maybe, maybe that's okay. And, and sometimes that's what I want. And increasingly with these devices, uh, you are not allowed to take a dark photo. And I think that's just weird. I'm going to say a sentence that a small number of people will understand the significance of.

1:25:33Charlie XCX invited the cobra snake to her birthday party. It's a real thing. And if you were in your 20s in the early 2000s, you're like, oh, it's back. It's just fully back. We're just doing it again. That whole aesthetic is back. And we're just going to do flash photos of drunk people. And let's do it. The iPhone can't do that shit. No one wants that. No, a bunch of squinting people with a flash on. That's what we're looking for. Oh, they're not squinting. Those eyes are dilated, my friend. Fair enough. Touche. All right, my other one, and then, Neelai, we should get to you, and then we should get out of here, is Flipboard, which is, we've been sort of chronicling Flipboard's, like, relentless quest to figure out the Fediverse, which I continue to find very interesting, turned on a thing that I think is actually very instructive in understanding how all of this is supposed to work, which is just that now you can follow Fediverse accounts, So like people from Mastodon or Pixel Fed or even on threads from inside of Flipboard.

1:26:29Right. And it's like if you if you want to understand the way the Fediverse is supposed to work, it's that where you make posts and where you read posts can be different and that anybody can decide how those posts are supposed to look and how they're supposed to work and in whatever they show up. And so like the idea that you can do Mastodon inside of Flipboard is both like mind bending and exactly the point. And so if you've like wanted to understand how the Fediverse works, go to Flipboard and like mess around with a bunch of Macedon stuff. They've put together some lists. I think one that includes you and Eli because you're just a tremendously huge deal in the Fediverse.

1:27:00But like that, I think this is the closest thing I've seen to like telling the whole story of like here is here is what you get when all you have is just this massive content that you can either build something that adds to or build something that reads from however you want. So I think that was very cool. Yeah, that's awesome. Flipboard is way ahead of this curve, right? They've like re-architected their app or the way they're thinking about their app around ActivityPub and these open protocols. And you kind of have it, you know, in the broadest sense, like the future of a browser. Yeah. But it's bi-directional.

1:27:34Like you take content and you get to read it and you can like reply to it and it goes right back to the person who made it. And it's pretty powerful. Like nothing works with it yet. Right. Like which is a problem. but you can just see there's like glimmers here of a new kind of web i'm the one who keeps babbling on about how we're going to federate our site you can see how our site would play with something like that right very quickly but then you start to build it and we're trying to build it and it's like oh there's a million problems to solve here yeah like big hairy technical problems that no one has ever really tried to solve before um which is why you know threads is federating and they are doing it in like drip by drip.

1:28:16Like they're solving one little problem at a time. They let you know that someone in the Fediverse had liked one of your posts. Sure, that was just a problem to solve. Now they let you see those posts, but you can't reply to them. Now they let you like those posts, but you can't reply to them. Obviously, replying to Miss Coney Nix. And all of that is just like, where does the data go? If you want to delete something, how do you delete it across all of these servers that have now ingested it? Maybe you can't. Weird, right? If someone replies to me on another server with another kind of moderation policy and puts something bad in my replies on my site or in mass, like, how do I moderate that?

1:28:55Big questions, like huge earth shattering questions, like that obviously have made the process slow for everyone. But you're like, oh, these are new problems. Like I'm in the market for new problems. Totally. Like we've never thought about these problems before. Fun. Like this is great. So I'm very excited to just like see everyone making slow progress here. I just have a question. Which is the bigger platform shift, Jim and I Live or Flipboard? You know I believe it's the Fediverse. In my heart of heart, I believe it's the Fediverse. I just really wanted to hear us all say Flipboard is the platform shift this week.

1:29:27Look, I like Flipboard. I think they do really interest that. I don't know if Flipboard is a platform shift. I think it is part of the platform shift about how information moves around the internet. that, you know, if you are going to break something like Google through regulatory action or just Google killing stuff, like Google end of life Google search seems like a likely outcome. It's more likely than not, you know, given Google's history. If all that stuff is breaking down and all, you know, the photo based networks are flooded with synthetic images no one can trust, you need to make something else.

1:30:04Yep. And it seems like everyone has bet on open, interoperable networks this time. And I do think that is fundamentally a bigger shift that more people will feel than Gemini. Maybe in the long term, obviously, okay, I will do all the things and none of us will have to work and the robots will just bring us pina coladas. But right now, I think it's the social web. Yeah, I agree. All right, Neal, what's yours before we get out of here? What is mine? This is what happens when you're in a sidekick chair. You're not prepared. You're just here to hype. Yo. Good point.

1:30:39Okay, so mine is actually related to AI. So Eric Schmidt used to be the CEO of Google. He gave a talk recently. He got dinged for a lot of stuff he gave in this talk. And then he asked for the talk to be taken off of YouTube. Not a great cycle, right? You give a talk at Stanford, you're like, oh no, you're quoting my talk. Please remove it from YouTube. Yeah, wasn't there a moment in it where he's like, this is off the record, and the person he's talking to like points at the camera yeah what are you doing it's a tough look it's brutal um so the thing he got in trouble for that he asked for the talk to be taken down um was he said google was behind an ai because the workers prioritized working from home and snacks as opposed to being competitive from the former cea of google this did not go well like just what are you talking about just a bad take yeah yeah there's a million reasons and i don't think it's the people who work at Google who made the strategic errors, right?

1:31:34But whatever. And also Google is, you know, this is coming on the heels of like the Pixel event where Google is like doing huge muscular AI stuff. Yeah. Whatever. So he got in trouble for that. Alex Heath wrote a quick post about it. He's like, here's this thing that happened. The video got taken down. And then Alex got a transcript of the thing. And you actually watched part of the other video. And Schmidt said something else that I think is very fascinating, very telling, and I think very important to understanding not just Silicon Valley, but Google and Google's place in the world. So he said to this room full of like Stanford students, a lot of you are going to be tech people.

1:32:10I hope a lot of your tech startups. What I would do right now, if TikTok was banned, I propose each and a quote, I propose each and every one of you say to your LLM the following, make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it. And in one hour, if it hasn't gone viral, do something different along the same lines. What LMM is he using? So first of all, yeah, I don't know what kind of magic LMM. Like, at best, you're going to be like, do you want to bang this iPad? He's using the rabbit we all expected to see.

1:32:42Yeah, seriously. But you understand what he's saying. He's like, if TikTok is banned, just clone it. Just take it. Take the music, take the users, take the content, just make a clone of TikTok and stand it up and people will start using it. If they don't, do it again. and his point was the quote the example i gave of the tiktok competitor is that's what you do if you're a silicon valley entrepreneur which hopefully all of you will be if it took off you would hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean up the mess but if nobody uses your product it doesn't matter that you stole all the content wait wait wait what's what's the next line and do not quote me yeah whoopsies so anyway my point of this is eric schmidt ran google in the early period, right?

1:33:24He was famously the adult they hired to run Google. Well, I don't know, Larry and Sergey were growing up or whatever they were doing, learning whether or not toe shoes were for them. Eric is the adult in the room. This is what Google did. And not in a small way, in a big, open way. They just built a company on copyright infringement. They hired a bunch of lawyers and they cleaned up the mess. And they were a friendly company with two lovable goofballs as their founders. They were providing an enormously valuable service at the time. Google search was enormously valuable. Google book search, copyright lawsuit, enormously valuable.

1:34:01YouTube, enormously valuable, built on copyright infringement, particularly against Viacom. So valuable that Viacom lost its copyright infringement case because Viacom's own people kept uploading the content to YouTube. Like ridiculous. But this is how Google worked in the beginning. That is the attitude. We're going to make the thing. It's going to be so useful. People are going to love it. And then when the copyright infringement cases or whatever other lawsuits come, we will have enough money to pay lawyers to make it go away. And Google did it. That actually worked. It was a successful strategy at the time.

1:34:34It was successful for other companies like Uber or whatever it is, right? We are at a point now where the AI companies kind of want to run the same playbook. Google wants to run the same playbook with AI and training, and they're not lovable goofballs anymore. And so when Eric Schmidt is at Stanford complaining that the kids aren't working hard enough anymore and then on top of it being like, just steal the stuff and figure it out later,

1:34:59the world's attitude in response to that is nowhere near as friendly as it was when they were building Google. And I think it's actually kind of fascinating to see that shift. Like, I don't know, like Alexis Ohanian like wrote the book that was like, ask for permission, not forgiveness. And that was like the whole industry's attitude. And that worked. Like, I think that's a great message for a lot of things still to this day, but you're in this place where if you want to build Google again, or something like Google, and you're like, I'm just going to tell a robot to copy TikTok and then I'll figure it out if it works.

1:35:33I don't think, I actually do not think that is going to succeed in the culture as it is today. No. And I think that is one of the most misplaced things in some corners of silicon valley now and it's not true everywhere but it is true a surprising number of places this sense that the folks in the tech industry still are the like counterculture revolutionaries trying to build a better future uh and it's just like a you know a bunch of hippies in san francisco who are just like trying to make cool stuff together like that is not how those people are perceived and enough of them see themselves that way that that's why they're like, oh, we're just the contrarians.

1:36:10And it's why you see this like crazy push away from wokeism and all this stuff. And like, I don't want to get into the political side of it, but it comes from the same impulse that it is like, we are the renegades. And it's like, no, you're not, dude. Like you are the most establishment of the establishment. And you don't get the leeway that you once got. And maybe you never should have. The thing is also, they were never the renegades. Like Silicon Valley was built on like military funds and stuff, right? Like they were never that. It was a very conscious PR move. And they decided at some point we are too big to need to do that PR move.

1:36:48But actually you can't keep running your playbook and do that because then you just look like a Hearst or something. You just look like all of the kind of like people who are always the villains in period films. That's not a great look. No. And we're seeing Apple doing the 30%. You're just seeing it over and over again. It's like, no, you guys forgot. Like, you forgot the PR part of this. That actually is really important. You do have to market this. You market yourselves. And if you stop doing that, we are going to all eventually be like, hey, you're being kind of assholes. I can actually draw a straight line from what you're saying, Alex, to Rick Osterleau.

1:37:21In an interview with Joanna Stern this week at the Wall Street Journal, she said, hey, you had to pull this ad that you ran during the Olympics of someone asking Gemini to write a letter to an athlete for his daughter. And it got pulled because everyone's like, why? Just have your kid do it. Like, sit down with your kid and do this. Don't ask the robot to do it. And he was like, the market isn't ready for this. This is like when we went from handwriting to email. And it's like, no, it's not. It just isn't. And that little attitude, like, you're just not ready for the thing. It worked at a different time.

1:37:50It really did. It worked for the web. It worked for computer mice. It did not work, I would say, for the digital crown on the Apple Watch. But it worked for the iPod. All this stuff it worked for. this is the moment where we're just going to take this stuff and you're going to thank us later a little warning sign I would just say that's my lightning round item watch that one because it's the source of more conflict than you think alright that's it that's the show we've gone way over we've talked about antitrust too many times do you have any more chairs to sit in how are the chairs there's several more chairs we'll do more chairs next week if you had ideas for sponsoring the hype type zone please let me know my god i'm gonna get this show sponsored i think we actually have ads right now i don't even know how it works that's not my side of the house at all all right that's the show thank you for listening uh we got like like hydrogen car special episode on tuesday david yeah so uh we we have deeply fun stuff coming up the next few weeks of the verge cast but the short version of a long story that I'm very excited for everybody to hear is Will Poore took a ride in a hydrogen car that no one was sure was going to go anywhere or keep everyone alive during the whole process.

1:39:08And he learned a lot about kind of the history and future of cars and everything. And he's alive. It was an awesome story. And he made it out. So it's a happy ending. All right. Well, that's going to happen Tuesday. Escape from hydrogen cars. Pretty much. today on The Calibrators. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

1:39:31And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. 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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