How much MacBook is enough MacBook?

25:18But also I'm like, well, maybe I do need one for my bedroom because I can't figure out where to put a TV. Maybe I just have a – In a suitcase? In a little suitcase. The answer's a suitcase? On my bed? That'll go well. You need a ceiling projector. There's a fan up there. Get rid of the fan. I saw at CES, of course, in some random booth, like a combo platter light fan projector. Oh, yeah. Well, there we go. Then I'm done. That's what I'm going to get. Obviously, when you turn the fan on, the whole thing vibrate slightly. Very good. Very good. What I can't decide about this TV is whether I want it to be much better or much cheaper.

25:52Because part of me is like, give me the 1080p screen, give me 27 inches, make it 500 bucks, and like, will I buy this thing and take it on vacation with me three times a year? Like, yeah, I probably would. Or am I like, this becomes, you know, the like basement TV for all intents and purposes, and I want it to be better than this. And I'm so torn between those two things. Because$1 ,200 for what this thing actually is, is too much. It's ludicrous. Both of you have now described wanting this TV to keep it stationary in a room. You're like the basement TV. Just like buy a TV, dude. No, because it doesn't turn into a suitcase.

26:28Just like buy a TV. But why? The purpose of a suitcase is that you take it with your business. It's my vacation TV. I will say the thing where they're like put it in the bed of your truck and watch TV is like. The dream. It is the dream. It is also just the most specific use case. It's like I'm going to tailgate with this thing six times a week. And it's going to be worth it. Like if you are a season ticket holder to something, buy this television. Like that's where I'm at. It is true. Chris's basic point was like we need more gadgets again, which is a direct pull on my heartstrings. I think it should be cheaper.

27:05I don't think it should be better. I think it should be cheaper. He made a good point that he understood why it was so expensive because it is such a niche product. And he's like if they made it better, then it would just be more expensive. $1 ,200 is also expensive. But like I don't know if I fully buy it. I actually don't buy that at all. You don't? LG can make a good TV for virtually no money, right? All they've really done here is buy a suitcase. They put it in a sick suitcase. Yeah, it really is just a TV and a hinge. Yeah. Like that's not particularly – But you can plug stuff into it. You can plug stuff into it.

27:38You can play your Switch on it. It's got a touchscreen so you can like play Solitaire. You should buy one. Buy one right now, David. There's just something about this one picture in the review where the TV is on a couch and it's folded up. The suitcase is open. It's flat. And there's two people on either side of it playing chess. And this picture is both like truly absurd because I cannot imagine regular people ever actually doing this and also makes me want it so bad. And you can see that whole conflict in their faces too in the photo. Yeah, they're kind of like, what is this bad chess app that I'm playing on this enormous television?

28:15But I'm also having a good time. Yeah. Who doesn't have a good time playing webOS chess on suitcase TV? All right, speaking of gadgets, my lightning round is the yearly printer review was published. It's a big day for you. Big day for me. This is what I assume you did on vacation the whole time was just plan your epic comeback with the printer. So if you don't know, something is happening to Google search right now where various websites, their traffic is declining because Google changed the algorithm. And some of them are – we did a decoder with Mia about one of them, House Fresh, the Air Purifier blog.

28:53There's a retro gaming site who's editor-in-chief or owner or someone who's complaining on Twitter that their traffic is – and then a bunch of like content farms also. And the idea is to kill the content farms. Yeah. But they are catching some of the good, caring sites. A lot of people catching strays on this one. Yeah. Yeah. It's something that the internet as we know it, I believe this to be true. The internet as we know it is about to fall apart. Oh, I really agree with that. Yeah. Something weird is happening on the internet out there. so my contribution to that is to make stories that point it out by using the form of the stories the content farms it's a very meta art project yeah I think the version should be an art project so the answer to the question what is the best printer has been unchanging for a decade which is the cheapest brother laser printer you can find yep but that is like Google cannot accept that as an answer because it's not new enough, because there's not enough shopping links, because the data isn't semantic enough.

30:00How many H2s you got in that piece? I've won. Gotta have it. And it's just me pointing out that LLMs don't know the answer to the question yet. Anyways, I wrote the piece. Once again, we have sold like 2 ,000 printers. That's amazing. Which is just the funniest part of this whole thing. It's my favorite part. It's easily the funniest part of this whole thing. It's like, what should this actually look like? It should just be like, just buy this one and shut up. That's all anyone wants on the internet when they're looking for product advice. And Google's like, no. And Google won't do it. You have to update the page.

30:30So you look at the internet and you type in best printer and all the top results are like updated last week to point out that a bad product is the new winner. Or like we changed our methodology. And you look at the number of sites that, one, claim to have reviewed every printer and then claim to have updated those printer reviews yesterday and then also get the answer. Like updating it on January 1st, 2024, so that you – to say they've updated it on January 1st, 2024. Yeah. 2024. It's cool. It is. So my big edit to you in this story was to add a bunch of links to the kinds of things you're talking about.

31:09And some of it is just truly wild. And it's like – I feel like everybody has seen these at some point, right? You Google one of these and you go on to some site you've never heard of and it's basically just like a product name. People on Amazon like it. Here's what they say. Copy and paste a bunch of Amazon results and call it a day. But like one of them is on People.com, the eight best home printers of 2024 tested and reviewed. Like nothing against – I have not even read this piece. I don't know. But what in the world is People magazine doing caring about printers? Yeah. Like how is this what the internet has become?

31:39That's how they print the magazine out. I just looked. CBS News, I think was my favorite one. Then I realized the demographic of CBS News might be looking for printers. I don't know the answer to that question. It's just very odd that if you look at the architecture of our internet, a lot of people are like, affiliate, weird affiliate clicks will pay for everything. And then you just look at what that means in practice, which is trying to game Google search to get those affiliate clicks. And that, we're in the death spiral. Well, and one of the things Google has been trying to take away recently is sites that not only do that but try to hide it, that all have a sort of sneaky navigational part of their site that's not in the nav.

32:22They never put it on the homepage. You can never find it. It's like parts of these websites exist exclusively for Google. It's not just stuff that is like made because you see it on Google Trends, which a lot of people do, and that's a thing we think about. It's a thing everybody thinks about. Like knowing what people want to know is fine. but like when you go to this deep deep hole of like we are going to actively wall this off from the rest of our site so that the people who come here on purpose never even find it that's tough and that is now a game a lot of people feel like they have to play.

32:51People doesn't you can find it on the people page I just had to go check. People's like what's up guys we love printers. No they also love. What's Ryan Reynolds up to? Printers. Pool cleaners. Sure and dandruff shampoo This is the stuff. Yeah. It's just very odd. It's a very odd moment on the internet. I fully believe that this is not sustainable in any way, shape, or form. I give it a year before the Google-fied internet turns into whatever the next thing is going to be. I think that's probably right. There was a really interesting – the folks at 404 Media the other day wrote about a search engine called Kagi, which is one I've used and been talking about for a while.

33:30and I just like posted about it and was like oh yeah this is good I've been using it for a while this is a good story they were talking about how much better it is than Google and shocked at the number of people I got who were like I'm done with Google I'm out I'm over it I've moved on I finally switched and I feel like Google has had this sort of like inevitability for so long that I just feel starting to crack in a lot of ways like I think there is this sense that Google is not the only option anymore and I think AI has kind of undone that in people's brains even though AI is not actually that good at a lot of search things.

34:03But it does – it feels like Google being sort of too Google to fail feels like it's slipping in a really interesting way. What was the most recent like search you went to do and Google just totally failed you? I haven't used Google in a while if I'm being honest. Okay. I still use it and I still am like, wow, it sucks every day that I don't change my behavior. It's not a straight Google search, but I actually haven't answered this question because I've been thinking about it ever since this happened. I have a Google – I don't even know what they call them anymore. A circle that runs Google Assistant in my bathroom.

34:39A Nest Hub. What are they called now? Sure. Have they killed Nest yet? A Google Home? Yeah, it's one of those. You know, a circle. Yeah. Like a fabric circle with a microphone in it. Google circle. A Google thing. I should know the name of this product. Is it the little guy? Is it the Home Mini? It's a Nest Hub. Yeah, it's a Home Mini. Is that what it is? Yeah. A circle. The little guy. The big hockey puck. I highly recommend putting one of those in your bathroom. They're very useful in there. And sometimes I have to play a podcast in the morning. Sometimes I just have a set of time. Like all this stuff.

35:11And I asked it how long it would take to drive to the airport. And first it answered with a number of miles. And then it said I can't. And I said, well, how many minutes will that take? And it just couldn't. And then it sent me some stuff on the web. and I was like, all of this AI, like all of this AI and Google Maps. Yeah, like you have that. You have all of the skills. If I just asked Google Maps this question, it would immediately deliver me that answer and you can't. And it's like, well, we just didn't close the loop. Yep. And that to me, I was like, I should have just tried something. Anything else would have been fine.

35:47And I think that that's like the Google loop closing. Hopefully they get better at it. It's like they've had a long time. You wrote about this this week. We're going to get to that. But yeah, that's the last one that really failed for me. And I was just like, how is it possible? Like, even if at this point, if Gemini had just lied to me. Yeah. And then like 45 minutes, I don't know. That's probably what it's. Seems right. Yeah, sure. Right. That feels right. Yeah. About 45 minutes. Yeah. Like, that would have been better than just like, I don't know. Yes. Like, there's nothing less useful than asking a robot how far away something is.

36:23And it's like 25 miles. It's like, what does that mean to me at this point in time? Should I run? What's the plan here? Just hustle it. What's your last one on Google field, honey? Yesterday, I was trying to decide. I asked it, should I get an impact driver if I already have a regular power? Oh, that's impossible. That's too hard. Yeah, it was too hard for it. It was like, no. And I was like, what power tools should I get? And it was like, here's all the power tools for carpentry. And I was like, I didn't – I just wanted to know what power tools should like a nerd who wants more power tools get.

36:55You failed me. I got really upset. That's a really hard – Maybe I went too hard. You've opened – like that's a Pandora's box question. Yeah. Like I have seen videos of people arguing that the housing crisis caused people to switch from the standard drills to impacts because all the people with experience building houses got forced out of the market and the kids didn't know what they were doing. Like you're touching on a third rail of power tools with that question. Like somewhere a data center exploded because you asked Google that question. I had to go like a couple of links in. I was like, I need something that's not people trying to sell me power tools.

37:28And eventually I got like some people debating impact drivers. And they're like, yeah, you got a lot of sheetrock. Or not sheetrock. You got a lot of drywall you got to get up? You get that impact driver. Change your life. And I was like, well, I don't have that. Our publisher, Chris Granite, is about to run in here. He is. If you're just generally talking about power tools, he's going to go crazy. Kick the door open. I'm just saying, this is my prediction a year from now mark it, what day is it? April 4th? Mark it, a year from now whatever Google is today will look radically different. Hey Siri No I agree and I think Google knows that too I'm not sure they know what to do about it do you see the, I don't know if it was a rumor or a report but I just saw something go by, basically saying that Google is now considering charging for its AI stuff, which I find totally fascinating.

38:16Like the actual AI search stuff would be a paid thing instead of a free thing. Messy and complicated. But like you get the sense Google knows it can't be like this for much longer. And it's flailing in a bunch of directions trying to fix it. But I think it seems like the internet is getting crazy faster than Google is getting good at doing things about it. The solution. They just need to sell some shit in Walmart. Knock$200 off, sell it in Walmart, you'll be fine. Yeah. Some other AI stuff for the lightning round. Microsoft is working at Xbox AI chatbot. It's a scoop from Tom Warren. It's just clippy for Xbox.

38:54And he's right that it needs to be called Xbox. It does need to be called Xbox. That is correct. Microsoft confirmed it. We are testing an Xbox support virtual agent, an internal prototype of an animated character that can query Xbox support topics with voice or text. This is the general manager of gaming AI at Xbox. The prototype makes it easier and quicker for players to get help with support topics using natural language taking it's like this is great this is cool but like how many people are on the daily just like asking xbox support for help why did i lose it fifa no i i mean customer support ai is like it's common done like that's that is good or bad that is the future of everything right like all the the robot phone trees are going to be replaced by chatbots and that's just where we're headed.

39:41And that's kind of what this sounds like. I think there is possibly more Xbox could do here, but this just sounds like it's going to be an adorable little customer service. No, wait. I love this idea of it killing phone trees, though. Like if AI kills the phone tree. Oh, my God. Oh, that's coming. I really I really think it is. Game changed. Just frankly, like just online chat customer service over having to call and wait for a human was delightful. Now, all of that is just being replaced by AI bots who are like, yeah, helpful. And my favorite thing is the people who go on to those things like the people who went to the car rental company and asked it to do all kinds of weird stuff.

40:19This stuff is going to get bad and crazy and weird. But that is, I think at this moment, probably the most slam dunk business use case for all of this. It is just going to eat the customer service industry. Right. Because all of, I mean, working customer support is not fun. you are mostly reading scripts of people just have a robot read the script I just want to know how they will all respond to me just mashing the zero button over and over again which is all I do human representative no thank you I feel like I never call a phone tree with a problem the phone tree is designed to solve never it's like I don't need to check my balance I can definitely do that on my phone I need to do something hard who calls to check their balance still why are they offering that still because I noticed that too.

41:05I called the bank and they're like, do you want to check your balance? I'm like, no. No, I'm looking at the app right now that told me to call you. Yeah, I'm going to start calling to check my balance. Yeah. How am I doing? I got to talk to somebody.

41:20Samsung says Bixby is not dead, which is an incredible thing to say because it implies that everyone thinks Bixby is dead. My t-shirt that says, no, Bixby is not dead is causing a lot of questions. A Samsung executive tells CNBC that the company is, quote, working so hard to put AI features in Bixby, even though they just did a big deal with Google and Gemini is now all over the phone and the phones are running Gemini Mini, Gemini Nano. I'm not great at Google product names today. I'm back from vacation. There was a big awards banquet this week, the Asmi Awards. I drank a lot of them. Just like Google stuff.

42:02Google Circle, Gemini Tiny. Yeah, you're doing great. It's fine. You're as good as anybody, including most of Google's product managers. Don't worry about it. So if you will recall, when Bixby was announced, Dog with Shoes, if you are not caught up on VergeCast lore, Bixby, the name, sounds like a dog wearing shoes. That's the entire joke. That's it, yeah. It's a good joke. Like if you were to imagine, if you were to draw a picture of something called Bixby, you would imagine a dog wearing shoes. Was a butler, too. Yeah, like a butler. A fancy dog. People have sent us pictures, cartoons. I encourage you to go ask an image generator to make a Bixby dog wearing shoes and send it to us.

42:44Long ears? Short ears? Long. Yeah, that's what I thought. This is a real floppy dog. Yeah, that's what I thought. Bixby. Yeah. But if you will recall, the original Bixby, the idea was that it would not compete with Google Assistant to do web queries. it would change the settings on your phone. Right, it was designed to do stuff. Never did it. Yeah, it was not a good butler. I mean, it was a dog. Dogs aren't good butlers. Inherently suck at it. What do we think we're doing here? But now they're saying we're working so hard to make it that, which is fascinating because they still think that is a thing that people want.

43:23I think it is. I think the idea that I can just yell at my phone to do something, like, go download the Ticketmaster app. Way better user experience than what it actually currently takes to go download the Ticketmaster app, but it just has never really worked. But I think we're actually at a point with a lot of this AI stuff where, like, in that sort of limited scope of, like, things your phone is capable of doing, have the system connect the dots for you. That can work. Like, is it easier to say, turn on Bluetooth and look for this weird name of headphones that I have? Is that easier than going into the menu and hitting the thing?

44:01Like, probably not. But I think Samsung's idea that this is less about, like, getting esoteric philosophical answers about the world and more about just, like, getting the stuff done that you do on your phone, I think is right. Well, it's kind of what we talked about earlier where it's customer support. Yeah, it basically is. Yeah, it's for people being like, I don't know how to turn Bluetooth on on my phone. How do I do it? Right. And Bixby will appear. Yeah, like Bixby, my phone's in Portuguese. Fix that. Perfect. I was going to read you the quote from Wan Jun Choi, Executive Vice President of Mobile at Samsung.

44:34I believe we have to redefine the role of Bixby so that Bixby can be equipped to generate AI to be smarter. You have to redefine Bixby's role. Not a butler anymore. Bixby has to roll. Has to have a role. We'll see. So Bixby exists on all of Samsung's other products. You can see how they build a null ecosystem. I don't know, man. I feel like we're all racing to shove AI into these moments. And I think the phone companies are particularly afraid of the rabbits and the humanes and the blah, blah, blahs. You wrote a piece about this this week. The AI gadgets are coming. And I think you mentioned developer conferences.

45:10I'm confident we're going to see a bunch of AI stuff in iOS at WWDC. Google, obviously, at I.O. is going to talk about it a lot. I can't imagine Microsoft will talk about anything else at Build. No. I mean, and the problem is all of these companies, there's basically like two sides of the world at this point, right? There's the companies that have done well in smartphones, which is three companies. It's Apple, it's Google, and it's Samsung. Those companies are desperate to figure out an AI reason for your smartphone so that you will keep using your smartphone because what they're afraid of is that this new generation of other companies is going to come in, And they're not going to have solved the whole problem immediately, but they're going to have fixed some part of the user experience that people are like, oh, this is the thing that gets me past my phone.

45:55And I think that's what I'm particularly looking for with what Humane is doing and what Rabbit is doing and companies like Brilliant and even Meta with the smart glasses that are getting the AI. Like, can they start to pull pieces of what I do on my phone out of my phone? And if the answer is yes, that starts to kind of get in the way of this, like, essentially three-company ownership of the smartphone universe, at least in the US. And so it's not at all an accident that you have Apple with Siri, Google with Gemini, and Samsung with Bixby, like, desperately trying to figure out how to make your phone AI inside of the existing structure of phones, which is very hard to do because an AI that can do all the things I want it to do is literally not allowed in the way that phones exist right now.

46:37So it's going to be fascinating. And so Apple is either going to have to say like, oh, Siri can now go download apps for you and do stuff inside of those apps. And it has weird permission that nothing has ever had before. Or it's going to like protect this crazy revenue stream that is the app store at the risk of losing it all to gadgets that come up with a new way to do it. It's going to be a really fun like three months. Yeah. Pure chaos. Okay. I'm telling you a year from now. Yeah. That's my prediction. In the spring doldrums. I'm just like a year from now. Whole new internet. Yep. All right, we should take a break.

47:08We should come back. We have lightning round part two. Still available to be sponsored. Call now. All right, we'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. One of the most exciting parts of starting a business is when the sales start coming in. If your business is looking to start selling online, Shopify has everything you need to create your online store. Shopify is the commerce platform behind millions of businesses around the world and 10 % of all e-commerce in the US from household names like Mattel and Gymshark to brands just getting started. With hundreds of ready-to-use templates, Shopify helps you build a beautiful online store to match your brand's style.

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48:30All right, we're back. Lightning round part two. This one's going to be fast. We're going to, David pointed out, the first lightning round was almost an hour long. We talked about four things. Classic lightning round. We're just going to go, this is my plan for this one. I'm just going to read the headlines. Oh, okay. And then we're just going to. Alex and I just leave. It's fine. Jon Stewart's back on The Daily Show, just on Mondays, I think. He had a good segment on AI, mostly being fake outs. and then he interviewed Lena Kahn and basically accused Apple of censoring his previous show on Apple.

49:06Yeah. And this isn't the first time he's done that. That's the thing. That's what I wanted to talk about on the show. It was like, what's going on with Apple and Jon Stewart? Because he keeps being like, hey, Apple censored me more than once. It wouldn't let me talk about China. It wouldn't let me talk to Lena Kahn. It wouldn't let me do stupid pokes at technology. What's going on over at Apple and that's a bad sign. Yeah. Although, what did Apple think they were buying? Everyone around that. I've wondered that too. Just don't make a deal with Jon Stewart. It's fine. If that's how you feel, just don't have Jon Stewart.

49:43Well, that's what they eventually decided. Well, right. But I think about there was a thing Rian Johnson said a few years ago about how one of the sneaky things about Apple is they'll never let the bad guy have an iPhone in a movie. You guys heard that? Yeah. And I think about that all the time is just sort of like a silly quirk of Apple. Right. And there's a lot of things going on with how distribution works. And there's like now Tom Cruise can never be fighting an enemy with a name because it gets associated with the country and the movie doesn't play in that country. So like you can move around inside of this landscape in all kinds of weird ways.

50:16this one is just like, it just seems like it was a bad fit from the beginning. And I also, I don't know Jon Stewart personally, but I get the distinct sense that if you make Jon Stewart a list of things he can't do, he's going to then attempt to go do every single one of them. So I feel like it's almost a miracle that lasted this long with Apple. But it was very funny to hear him say to Lena Kahn, I wanted to have you on my show. And Apple said, uh, by the way, Lena Kahn is a chair of the federal trade commission. She leads a lot of antitrust efforts, It's the Federal Trade Commission, not the entity suing Apple for antitrust violations.

50:48That's the DOJ. But she's the face of a lot of it. She has a lot of feelings about antitrust in general. Yeah. A lot of things. And the tech companies all hate her. It's like a real thing. But it's weird. I come back to this all the time. Same as you, Alex, which is like these tech companies, they want to do media. And then they get one slice of what it's actually like to do media, which is just having to be okay with things. And they're like, no, thank you. Yeah. But I mean, we're seeing they're increasing their control in Hollywood. Like Apple is doing pretty well. Apple TV was the second most searched thing during the outage yesterday.

51:26Like they have this power and is always, I think, very uncomfortable for me to see any media organization, which Apple now is, saying, no, you can't cover something. And that's been the way it's been always, right? There's always been censors at these companies saying, no, you can't talk about this. No, you can't talk about that. And it felt like in the last, I don't know, 10, 15 years, those censors, their power had really started to wane because we had these different ways of getting this content to people. It wasn't just broadcast television. It was also the films, but it was also streaming.

51:57It was also cable, all these other ways. And Apple came in and was like, yeah, network censorship, huh? That's it. It's cool. And just brought it immediately back. And it makes sense, sure. But the last time they were doing it so that they didn't get sued by the FCC. That's why we had network sensors for so long. This time they're doing it because Apple doesn't want to upset people in China because it wants to sell phones in China. And like the motivation is very, very different. And I think that's what makes me the most uncomfortable here is that like we're seeing a very large company exert its influence directly on the things it owns and then saying like we're doing it for very greedy capitalism reasons, which is like fine.

52:43That's your job. Your job is to make money. But also if your job is to make money, your job is to create media. But also if you don't want someone talking about AI in China. Don't hire that guy. Don't hire Jon Stewart. Yeah. That's kind of where I'm at. This is the part about this I find so confusing. There was the thing with Disney forever, right? Where Disney was reluctant to do something like add Hulu to Disney Plus because this sort of family-friendly nature of a platform they call Disney was very important to that company. And that has, I think, changed internally over time. But that's a stance you can hold.

53:19Yep. If that's how you want to feel terrific, don't hire Jon Stewart. And so to me, it's like the thing that I find strange is not that Apple has these feelings, but that it really loudly wants to pretend it doesn't have these feelings. And then goes around just sort of quietly trying to steer everyone in the direction that Apple would like, which is honestly Apple's whole MO with everything all the time. It's like Apple prefers to be sort of the wizard behind the curtain, exerting influence without saying or doing anything publicly. This is the closest Apple has gotten to news programming, though.

53:53Like, I'm fine. If Apple wants to be a movie studio and it only makes heartwarming movies about uplifting. That's fine, yeah. Great. You're a great movie studio. Yeah, nobody's mad at the Hallmark Channel for not doing, like, hard-hitting news. I'm furious at the Hallmark Channel every single day, sir. But, like, hiring Jon Stewart is like, we're going to do news. We're going to be topical. We're going to be relevant. And you just see most other big tech companies, they tried it, and they're all running away from it as fast as, like, Instagram threads. We don't want to do news. They're like, this is messy.

54:21It's hard. It gets us in lots of trouble. It's not even what people want. Instagram threads, the algorithm is only going to show you content about how to be a trad wife so people can do engagement bait. And it's like, what's happening here all day long? And I think Apple hasn't quite had that realization yet. Yeah, I think that's true. But I think there's also just the concern that if these are also the companies that are the primary owners of how we view media and they all don't want to do news and they don't want to talk about serious issues all the time, well, that's bad too. Yeah. Take a look around the media industry.

54:53Let's see how well this is going for everybody. Okay, that's that one. Speaking of Apple and Hidtrust, two things. One, the first European alternative app stores have hit because of the DMA. Not the good one yet, which is Alt Store, which is going to have the emulators in it. But like an Enterprise one has hit, which is perfect. Of course, Enterprise Software is the first to go. Would you like to jump through a bunch of hoops to download B2B apps? Have we got the store for you? But Kalen Booth, who's in Europe, we hired them to look at this stuff. We have a good, deep look at it. There are a lot of hoops.

55:30Oh, yeah. It's intense. A lot of hoops. Yeah, let me just read this sentence to you. It made me laugh very funny. It goes like this. You begin by clicking a browser-based link to load the alternative store. From there, you receive a pop-up informing you that your installation settings don't allow marketplaces from that developer. Then you head into settings, enable the marketplace, return to your browser, click the download link again, and receive another prompt asking you to confirm the install. Finally, you can open the store and browse the available apps. Perfect. Yeah. I feel like I'd screw that up by accident.

55:59Yeah. So the argument is Apple doesn't know if its things are in compliance with the DMA until they release them and the European regulators tell them, which is weird, right? Like if you're going to be a regulator and you're going to insist that things are designed, you should just say how you want them designed instead of this weird back and forth. But I suspect all of this will change because the way it's designed is they released it and then the European regulators are going to be like, mahal. As they do. And they're going to say this isn't good enough. I think that's probably right. I also think I'm not terribly bothered by making people jump through several hoops to do this, honestly.

56:36Like I think the thing on the Mac where if you try to download an app from a sort of non-trusted source being like the App Store, it makes you open settings, find a thing, check that box and then go do it again. I think that is like the correct number of hoops to jump through. Like this is the sort of thing you should not be able to do by accident. But if you want to do it, you should be able to do it. Oh, I disagree. You should have to know that you're doing it. I want to be able to absolutely destroy my phone on accident. that's how I learned how to compute and I want to maintain that and I think like kids today kids today they got to learn too everybody's got to learn how to like just destroy all of their technology because they clicked one wrong box somewhere and it makes you sharper it makes you think more and we got to make people sharper I like it, this is how we bring down a number of Iranian centrifuges, just let the worms proliferate malware where it builds a character.

57:35Yeah, it does. Have you ever brought down an entire computer lab trying to download one MP3? All right, now you're a real man. I think there's a balance in there, because Android has had this model for a long time, where you can jump through some hoops, and the argument is, I mean, we've seen it in the Epic Antitrust case against Google. Google knew that people weren't doing it because the hoops were there. But then you kind of don't want a bunch of people accidentally screwing things up. The thing that's really interesting, though, is Alt Store has Delta in it, which is a Nintendo emulator. By all accounts, a great emulator.

58:09Apple won't allow that on its stores. But now you're like, oh, there's an entire use case for the iPhone that's available to me now because there's an alternative application distribution model. That's worth it. Oh, agreed. A hundred percent. Agreed. And I think it's kind of great that that is the first thing because leaving aside all the legality questions about emulation in general, whatever, playing those kinds of games on your phone is so fun. It's so fun. And you're right that it has not been allowed and it's never going to be allowed. And there was a minute where Riley tested the developer, thought he was going to get into the App Store proper and then got that sort of ripped out from under him.

58:47This was a couple of years ago now. But now we're at a point where if you want to go through the hoops, you are going to be able to get your phone to do almost anything. And I think that is the right approach. I think it should be hard work to do the dumb stuff you want to do on your phone. I think it should be more than one click of one link to download malware onto your phone. But damn it, if you want to download malware onto your phone... You should be allowed. You should be allowed. And I think that's fine. And I think it is going to be interesting to see from a regulatory perspective how they view the hoops.

59:20Because I think if the goal of the EU and the regulators in general is to make it so sort of opaque in the process that it feels like you're downloading an app from the app store even when you're not. I actually think that's a bad outcome. But I also feel like the thing where you have to go essentially check the one box that declares the, like, I know what I'm doing and I'm willing to put up the consequences, and then you can move on with your life feels right to me. And this feels like a little overshoot of that. Yeah. We'll see how it goes. I'm very excited. I mean, this is the experiment. We've never run it before.

59:54Like, we'll see how it goes. I think there's something really exciting to happen here. I agree. David, you've added this extremely fake story about Steven Nugent buying TikTok without the algorithm. Defend yourself. Defend the addition of this. This is a totally fake story. It's a totally fake story. Well, this is why I added it. So we got a ton of feedback over the last couple of weeks about both the Apple antitrust stuff and the TikTok ban. And we're going to talk about all that stuff on Tuesday's episode. But for this one, my real question is more theoretical than this. Steven Nugent is not going to buy TikTok.

1:00:27By the way, he's a former treasury secretary under Trump. Yeah, who is not going to buy TikTok. Doesn't matter who he is, he's not going to buy TikTok. And I think I'm just fascinated by this question. So there are two pieces of news here that I think are related. So one is that Facebook this week rolled out a unified video player for all of its video across platforms. And it's basically all in on precisely TikTok style vertical video. and that plus this thing where it's like okay what do you buy if you buy TikTok without the algorithm just led me to believe like maybe maybe the answer is nothing like Buying TikTok without the algorithm, is that anything?

1:01:08But then we're at a point where TikTok has actually gotten more and more transparent about what the algorithm is. And so in theory, you could start to do better. And companies like Meta have been more explicit about like we're not going to show you stuff from your friends. We're not going to buy us anything except engagement and entertainment essentially. So it's like you can actually start to kind of reverse engineer TikTok. And without this magical algorithm that is so much of what TikTok has become, you're just buying a brand name, right? Like you're buying a license to the word TikTok and that's well and good.

1:01:40But TikTok without the algorithm feels like to me it's worth like$5. Yeah. I think that's right. I just don't see it. And I think if that's going to become the question, and I think so far our theory, which is that this is going to lead to nothing, has pretty much borne out. We've basically heard nothing about this since there was all that stuff a couple of weeks ago. I hope he does that. I hope like right now as we're recording. Oh, my God. When I think about the voice of the youth, I think of former Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin. Well, you get all the content. He'd buy all the content. And then you just put any algorithm on top of it and you're fine.

1:02:15Sure? Yeah. I mean, that's what you'd be buying. You'd be buying all the user-generated content that is TikTok. I guess that's true. But also all of that content now exists on all the other platforms, too. That's true. So that's kind of where I'm at, right? Like if I'm the Instagram team, I'm having meetings where it's like, what does TikTok have and offer at this moment that we can't? And like the YouTube Shorts team I know is asking that same kind of question. Like it's all just sitting there and especially if you don't have the algorithm. And the algorithm has been made out to be this like magical thing that is irreplicable and perfect and understands people better than they do themselves.

1:02:54I don't know that it's that. I think part of it is just that TikTok is so shameless about the way that it works. And Adam Masseri, who runs Instagram, is wringing his hands trying to be a good person. And TikTok is just like, TikTok shop, let's go. TikTok is doing the thing. Has this happened for you? I think they're testing this. It's definitely happening to me where they just start playing an ad at the end of every video now. Oh, no. I have not gotten that. So instead of looping, it's just like, here's an ad. And all of those ads for me are for the Land Rover Defender, which is utterly confusing.

1:03:26Like that algorithm believes that it can get me to buy a Land Rover Defender. And all the ads start with the same sweeping shot of the word Defender. So it's like I never know if it's just like some weird IT security company. No, it's Land Rover Defender. That's what it is. There it is. There it is again. Definitely not buying a Land Rover Defender. It's pretty good though. Yeah, it's just like, but they've started doing it. Like the platform is getting, they're squeezing more pennies out of it, right? Because it might go away or something might happen. I feel like the algorithm is also just getting worse.

1:03:55Like, it keeps showing me this guy going, what's up, brother? All right, sketch. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. I'm not a sports person. I don't play Madden. I don't know exactly what you were talking about. You guys immediately were like, yeah, yeah. Maybe that's why. He just goes like this on his screen. Yeah, I know that now because TikTok's shown me that repeatedly. The fact that TikTok just made a weird Twitch streamer a star is, like, very interesting. Super weird. All right. Mark this down. That's a story. We'll come back to this in a week or so. But the story's totally fake. This dude is not buying TikTok.

1:04:23No. No. Last two little regulatory ones. I think it's very funny that the House of Representatives has now banned staffers from using Microsoft Copilot because they're putting too much data into an insecure LLM system. Very funny. Yep. Just deeply funny. And then we'll come back to this in more detail. But the FCC has scheduled a vote to restore neutrality, which is very interesting. It feels like we've already ruined enough things. You know, it's like hard for anyone to get excited about this. It's like we did it. Like because they took net neutrality away, I just want to – there are people out there who are like nothing bad happened when net neutrality went away.

1:05:05And one very specific bad thing happened, which is that AT &T bought Time Warner. Like very specific bad thing happened. And they thought they could prioritize Time Warner services on AT &T's network. and then they paid Zack Snyder to make a 4-3 grayscale version of the Justice League. Alex, did Batgirl die because net neutrality died? Yeah. I feel like you could draw that line. I think you can. Because without that acquisition, they don't have all the debt when they get offloaded, which means Zaslav doesn't have to kill Batgirl. Yeah. Yeah. Thanks to Jeep Pie, you ruined Batgirl. I'm just saying, this man in his stupid mug, his stupid oversized Reese's Pieces mug, and everyone's like, no bad things happen.

1:05:47And it's like actually one very tangible bad thing happened. AT &T had a theory of the case. It was like we will buy a content service, prioritize it, and preload tiny little clips of Game of Thrones on mid-range Android phones. Wait. And accept all of that from our data caps. This was it. And then we're going to get Zack Snyder for some godforsaken reason. I know he thought it was the IMAX aspect ratio. Okay? I know that's what he was thinking. Mm-hmm. But the reality is he made a 4-3 version of Justice League. That's how I watched it on my TV. It was a square. Why? The more you say it, the more I feel like, what if net neutrality?

1:06:31Actually, that was a good thing that AT &T was allowed to. We got a 4-3 Justice League. Yeah, because it proved that no one wants that. It does prove. I agree with you. I actually agree. The market firmly rejected AT &T's ideas. It was like, no, this is stupid. but we didn't need to go through all that pain. We didn't need to fire all those people. We like the layoffs that occurred, the, the, the, the general pain. Thousands of people lobbed upon the American populace with black and white. The Zack Snyder, four, three justice league was created. Like we didn't have to, I'm saying like, I think the layoffs were worse.

1:07:11Like the millions of, the millions of dollars of like debt and weirdness. But we all experienced the Zack Snyder movie. Rounds of rolling layoffs are bad. I don't think we need to do them. We should have healthy companies in a functional marketplace. But then also there was a 4-3 Justice League. Also very tangible results. I watched all like 15 hours of it. You had to do it as a journalist. And the only thing that saved me is because I invest in OLED technology. Oh, my God. The pillar boxes weren't shining gray at me. How was your bit rate? Horrible! H2MX is a garbage bit rate. Get that shit on Bravia Court ASAP and excuse that from your data caps AT &T.

1:07:58I'm just saying, whenever anyone tells you, whenever you see the weirdos on the X being like, net neutrality led to nothing, immediately reply with a screenshot of 4-3 Justice League and Grayscale. I feel like the Venn diagram of weirdos on X saying net neutrality led to nothing. And the people who really wanted that 4-3 movie is a circle.

1:08:25It's just like they couldn't even, they weren't even like just fill, make it 16, just do it. IMAX enhanced, right? Because we all have those in our house. You don't have an IMAX screen in your house? All that OLED? I do like that IMAX enhanced is basically meant we took a 21.9 cinema frame and made it 16 by 9. It's just regular now. It's just regular. Disney Plus is like IMAX enhanced. What does that mean? It's 16 by 9. Yeah. That's what that has worked out to. It's great. All right. That vote is coming up. We'll probably have Lauren back to cover in more detail what it actually means. There's some meaningful differences between this version and previous versions.

1:09:04I just want to point out that, again, you live in an America right now in 2024 where Batgirl was killed. David Zaslav. Can't believe it. Reign of terror continues. We're down to three wireless carriers and Project Gen5Sys. All because of the stupid mug. It's a real thing. And there's no – by the way, at the same time, the same Ajit Pai FCC got rid of the privacy protections for broadband carriers and any ability to regulate them all. These are our favorite companies, the ISPs. I should note at this time that NBCUniversal is a minority investor in Vox Media, which owns The Verge, and NBCUniversal is owned by Comcast, which does not love net neutrality.

1:09:49Or me, as it happens. I subscribe to Verizon. It's okay. I have Fios. It's nice. It's okay. I'm an AT &T subscriber. I stream Justice League for free. Oh, wow. That was that. It didn't hit my data cap at all. Congratulations. This big for you. My AT &T subscription still locked into Max, and so now I only have Max and 1080p. It's very good. All right, we've got to take a break. We'll be back.

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1:11:29We're back with what David has titled The Everything Else Lightning Round Yeah, it's a kind of grab baggy Sponsored by everything else Sponsored by everything else Yeah, sponsored by Walmart Did you get a free blue check from X this week? No No Sad I hesitate to talk about Elon on the show Did you get a blue check? Yeah, me The guy who wrote, welcome to hell, Elon, has now been gifted a blue check on X. Congratulations, you're an influencer. Yeah. I don't know what that means. It's all working because now you're talking about it. See, he got you. Yeah, that's right. And you're going to use Grok now.

1:12:02Can't wait to buy a Tesla. He's had a bad couple weeks here. Yeah. Right? So Tesla's deliveries are way down under forecast. I've never seen it before, but various investors and executives are talking about replacing Elon as CEO. That will probably never happen. But even the fact that it is a conversation that has occurred, like in the CNBC orbits. The shine is off. Seems very bad. Tesla stock is generally tanking. Yep. Elon is tweeting about the woke mind virus instead of shipping more cars for making X good. It's not great over there. No. No. I think there was a thing about Tesla that made him kind of invincible for a really long time.

1:12:47because it was like the conversation around Elon for so long was like, say whatever you want, people are voting with their dollars, right? Like Tesla was on fire. Investors loved it. People were buying it. We talked on this show about how there was essentially unlimited demand for Teslas. And at some point in the last year or so, that turned. And I think you can probably blame that on a confluence of things. Not all of it is a lot of people decided they don't like Elon Musk anymore, but I think some of it is that. but like this sort of era of power that Tesla had for a long time seems pretty clearly to be if not over then under like really serious threat and as we've been saying and I think as you in particular, Neal, I have said a few times on this show, Tesla is both like a great strength and a great weakness for Elon because of the way it ties him to China, because of the way it like has all of his fortunes inside of it That like what happens to this company is so materially important to what happens to everything else that Elon Musk wants to do, including the way that SpaceX works with the government.

1:13:55Like it's all so tied up. And so you get the sense that as it is starting to turn the other way, like the spiral happens in the reverse direction too. Yeah. And it feels like it's getting really ugly really fast. So we have a story this week. There's a reputation tracking firm called Caliber. Went and surveyed a bunch of people. the consideration score for Tesla, which is basically consumer interest in brands, the question they went and surveyed people, I would buy or continue buying products and services from Tesla if given the chance. In November 2021, 70 % of people said yes. That's down to 31%.

1:14:29Whoa. Yeah. I mean, everything about that, because we've seen the quality has dropped. We've seen people talking more about that quality. We've seen people struggling with getting their cars repaired, Getting this customer service is really, really bad there. So all those things that actually do matter to consumer experience, and Elon kind of was like, don't worry about it. We're building the future. Eventually, people are like, yes, but I want my car to work now. I also think this ongoing full self-driving fiasco that this company just cannot get out of where it refuses to stop calling it full self-driving when it is not full self-driving and actually what it's doing is really dangerous.

1:15:08Like the public perception on that I think is like decidedly negative at this point. Which is really – like even outside of how you feel about Elon Musk, the idea that Tesla is like the future of cars in a lot of ways like hinges on that. Oh, their entire valuation hinges on that. Right. Like I've watched – I mean I go on CNBC all the time. I talk to the analysts there. you look at how the market values Tesla and it's still built into the idea that you will go to work and your car will leave your house and drive itself and be a taxi service. That Tesla is going to be like infrastructure. No, it's a car company.

1:15:48But all of the multiple of Tesla is built on the idea that the cars will generate more value than just being a depreciating asset that most people should lease. Did they all think it was Uber? yeah that's like that's the idea here like the multiple and that's why elon is constantly talking about ai now yeah all this stuff and he's like a like tesla's really an ai company because he's trying to get this other thing to happen and get this other multiple and it's like the market is starting to just see a car company a car company that uh shipped a triangle instead of a regular pickup truck um a car company that can't deliver like well-made cars on the regular like all this stuff and whose CEO is becoming more and more unpopular by the day because he won't shut up.

1:16:33Yep. I talk to a lot of CEOs. They're not all pleasant people. Like by and large, like very aggressive type A personalities in the C-suites of American companies. But they know to not. They have people around. They hire publicity firms and stuff, which Elon famously refuses. Like don't tweet turns out to be pretty good advice. Yeah. Most especially about the woke mind virus and the great replacement theory. Yeah. If you're a publicly traded company, don't don't tweet. If you're a publicly traded company that sells electric cars to extremely liberal people, by and large, just doing some white supremacy on the side.

1:17:14It's not a great idea for you. Yeah. Not great for your value. Anyway, it's just a weird time. Like. Let's bring this all back around. X now giving the check marks away to journalists for free. Very funny. Yes. Like all the way back around, they're like, what if we verified some people? It's because they need people to use the platform. I suspect it won't work. No, if anything, it seems to be – like do you remember that moment right after they said you're going to have to start paying for the blue check, but they hadn't taken it away from people who had it before? And all these people were coming out saying, no, no, no, just so you know, I didn't pay for it.

1:17:51Yeah, it's happening. We're doing that again, where people are like embarrassed to have a blue check. Yeah, but. In a way that it is like it's a badge of like you are pathetically still using this platform rather than something you're actually part of. I was going to say it kind of works because then you have to go log in and tweet or excuse me, post. I didn't pay for this checkmark. Yeah. Like they got you. And your unregretted user minutes go through the roof. Yeah. Yeah. That's enough Elon talk for one day. Spotify reportedly having a price increase. They've realized. They increased prices last year.

1:18:27It had their best year ever. They also laid off a bunch of people who had cuts. So they increased revenue, reduced costs heartlessly, but do it. That does, in fact, work. Usually math's out. There's not a lot of places to go from Spotify. I don't think people are like, oh, Spotify's going up. I'm switching to YouTube music. No. People should not and are not doing that. I mean I think to me the thing that seems to be true is that$9.99 was the wrong price for streaming music. We just kind of decided this like years ago. It was just like in the same way that Steve Jobs was just like what if songs cost 99 cents and everybody was like all right.

1:19:08Like a long time ago it was just like 10 bucks a month and this is where we are. And it turns out that is good money for record labels and bad both for most artists and most streaming companies. Well, I mean Spotify did it because that was when they were coming into the United States where you had this really entrenched market run by Apple. And they were like, OK, we got to compete with 99 cent songs. How do we do that? $10 a month and you get all of the songs. And we were like, yes, that's sick. Yeah, and I think if it had been$20 a month, it probably wouldn't have worked. But if it had been$20 a month, it might have been a hell of a lot more sustainable.

1:19:46Yeah, I mean, I would say the last 10 plus years of like$10 a month, that's a pretty good run. It's a better run than like Netflix. Oh, for sure. Yeah, no, I actually think we as users probably saved a lot of money over the last decade on Spotify's dime. But I think this feels super inevitable to me, and this will not be the last one, I don't think. that like it went from$9.99 to$10.99 and now the report is it's going to go up I think either one or two more dollars, right? I would not be surprised if a couple of years from now we're at like 15 bucks for Spotify. What? I'll still pay it. Like music services are awesome.

1:20:26I have zero qualms with the fact that I have all the music on earth available to me at all times. But it is a bummer to see this. I'm more sensitive to this for Spotify because it's a bad business for Spotify. It's not Spotify being like, we make lots of money, but we want more. Give us more. This is Spotify being like, we literally cannot do this anymore. Please give us more money. How do you all feel like Apple will respond to this? I don't think Apple will raise their prices at all, actually. I think any price increases get rolled into Apple One, and that's just what they're going to keep doing.

1:21:03I think Apple Music they run as a loss leader to get you into that bigger bundle. I don't even pay for it. I get it through my Verizon account. And I'm like, all right. Yeah, I think Apple is very happy to let that be somewhere between an okay business and a slightly less than okay business in service of everything else. Yeah. They want you in that Apple One bundle as hard as they can be. When all their services went down, it was like people searched for the App Store being down and a little bit of Apple TV and nothing else. Oh, it was so sad. We were looking at the thing we put in. We were like, well, what about Arcade?

1:21:39No. We couldn't even find the line on the graph. We're like, oh, that's a bummer. Which is funny because Apple Music is hugely popular. Apple Music and Spotify are the two winners in this market by a gigantic margin. It's not the one people go Googling when they can't get on their rush hour. Definitely not. All right. Two stories that are in conflict in really interesting ways. OpenAI has a new voice cloning model. It only needs 15 seconds of audio to clone your voice. Fascinating. And there was a fake George Carlin special. They settled with the estate of George Carlin. They promised not to do it anymore.

1:22:15Actually, a weird drama inside of that story is whether there was actually AI used to make the fake George Carlin special or whether they were faking it, which is interesting. Well, they admitted to writing it themselves. Yeah. how the rest of it was produced, I think as far as I know, at least has not been really nailed down. But the idea that this was like written, produced and created by AI, just flatly not true. And it's been a really fun thing going around. Like there was this whole story this week about how Amazon's just walkout technology was actually powered by like a thousand contractors in India manually reviewing your trip through to make sure that you paid for everything.

1:22:55And I think it was Molly White who runs the website, I think it's, what is it, Web3 is going great, who was basically like, I wish I had been tracking all the times that AI turned out to just be a guy. It's really true, and this feels like that too. It's just a guy. It doesn't help that one of them is from Mad TV, like one of the hosts. Yeah, but these two ideas are in tension. We've talked about this so many times, like AI being able to clone a voice or clone a picture, and then you have, and doing it faster than ever, 15 seconds of our voices to clone us, which we have generated more of that on this very podcast.

1:23:30You're welcome. And then it's like, oh, but we have no controls over how those likenesses are used or any of that is actually being done, except for these handful of lawsuits that might bring the whole thing crashing down. Yeah, well, and OpenAI's strategy has been so far to roll it out really slowly and only with a few partners. And it's like, okay, that's fine at the beginning, but then what's gonna happen is you're gonna have a better version of this technology that you give to everybody. So like, what's the plan then? It's like, if they were saying, you know, it takes 900 hours, so we're only letting a few people use it because it's hugely intensive, I'd be like, okay, well, whatever.

1:24:06But this is like, we found a very good technology, but only a few people can have it. And then everybody can have a very good technology. It's like, what are we accomplishing here? But I think, I mean, this has been coming, right? Like the New York Times, I think it was this week, had a big announcement about how most of its articles are now going to be available in audio form read by automated narrators. Like, Eleven Labs, which is a company we've talked about on the show before, is doing, like, incredible slash terrifying work synthesizing people's voices. Like, this stuff is moving as fast as any other tech in AI right now, and it's getting really crazy really fast, and I feel like probably should be talked about more than it is in the way that we talk about like generated images and how they're being used in political campaigns and all this stuff like you're going to start you're going to get phone calls from joe biden telling you not to vote like that's a thing that's going to start to happen it's already yeah it's like it happened yeah and i think like this open ai is uh typically very good at this and i think is not usually wrong when it says it built something good uh but is not great at playing it slow Yeah.

1:25:17One story that hit just as we were as we've been talking on this broadcast, Neil Mohan, who runs YouTube at a conference, said OpenAI should not train its systems on YouTube, which is not how OpenAI has thought about the Internet. No. And who was it? It was was it Mira Mirati at OpenAI who said to Joanna Stern, our friend, Joanna was when they were talking about the video thing, Sora, that OpenAI came out with. Joanna was like, are you training this on stuff from the internet? And she was like, ah, some training stuff, internet, public, private. And Joanna was like, are you getting it from YouTube?

1:25:50And she was just like, I don't know. So I was like, oh, okay, so you're obviously getting it from YouTube. It's not great. No. If Google sues OpenAI on behalf of YouTube creators for training, it's weird. There's a copyright apocalypse. We did an entire decoder with Sarah Jong. You can go listen to it. But there's a potential copyright apocalypse. Mr. Beast is going to make a video in which he sues OpenAI for$100 million. And then gives the money away. Gives the money away. That would be incredible. All right, we've got to end this thing. We're way, way over. But, David, you should end by talking about Google Podcasts.

1:26:23Well, this is a good – we're circling back around to – we're closing the loop on Google not closing the loop. Google could stand to learn from us. So Google Podcasts is dead. Although it's actually not dead. It's like, ironically, Google has so forgotten about Google Podcasts that it seems to have forgotten to turn it off. That was its podcast app. Yeah. So it had a dedicated podcast app. It came out in 2016. Been around for a while. It did what Google does to many of its apps, which is like it launched. It had big ideas. It seemed kind of cool. It got a couple of updates. Google forgot about it.

1:26:57Google launched a competitor, and then Google killed it. This is the story of Google Apps. And so the plan here is to replace Google Podcasts with YouTube Music. And they've been making some moves into YouTube Music. There is a, I would say, strong chance you are watching or listening to this podcast right now on YouTube. Part of the reason Google is investing in YouTube is because that is a vast and massively growing place for podcasts. But it had this really cool opportunity in podcasts. Right. Like Google, I went back and read their initial thing. And in 2016, when they launched this app and they had these big ideas about discovery and helping people find insights inside of podcasts and doing audio transcription and search and all this stuff.

1:27:42And it's like, oh, that seems good. Like, why didn't you do any of that? That would have been cool. And instead, you just forgot about this app for eight years and then killed it. And YouTube is not going to do that. Are they going to release Google Podcasts with Gemini at Google I.O.? Oh, my God. If they relaunched Google Podcasts at I.O., that would be incredible. With Gemini. They could have also solved huge amounts of podcast analytics and advertising problems that everyone has all over the place. I heard from a lot of people after I wrote this story. I had a paragraph in here basically being like, hey, Google, if you had just done for audio creators what you did for video creators on YouTube, you could have won this industry the same way that you did.

1:28:24And I heard from a surprising number of podcasters who were like I have been begging slash hoping YouTube would do that for years. Like build the ad tools, do the rev share, let me post my stuff on YouTube and make money from it as an audio creator the same way you can as a video creator. And there are lots of, I was about to say good reasons, but there are bad reasons, but there are lots of reasons Google didn't do that, but it didn't do that and it could have. And that sucks. I remember being in meetings at our company. It's like, Google's coming. We better be ready. And I'm like, dude. They'll get distracted.

1:28:56Don't worry about it. It's like, I don't know, man. But also to everyone who wants to know, the answer is Pocket Casts. Pocket Casts. If you want a good cross-platform podcast app that is not going to go away, the answer is Pocket Casts. There are other good ones out there. AntennaPod's really good on Android, Overcast, Apple Podcasts. But if you want to know the answer, it's Pocket Casts. All right. We'll end there with that completely uncontroversial opinion that no one will definitely have. The lightning round brought to you by Pocket Casts. No, we've got to pay the money. We can't give this stuff away for free, man.

1:29:26Perceived value. Yeah, you're right. I apologize. Brought to you by anything other than Pocket Casts. All right, that's it. That's the Verge Cast. I'm going to call it a few stories. Becca did a comparison video of the Fujifilm X106 versus the Ricoh GR3X. I'm saying it slowly because that's just a lot of letters. It's a lot of Roman numerals in that. Yeah, it's not good. But it's really fun. I'm desperate to buy these cameras for no reason other than I just want them. Allison wrote about notifications being bad, which is worth reading. She's right. No takeaways. Just like start over. Just like throw all this away.

1:30:01It's bad. And then Liz wrote about Vice, one of the weirdest, wildest stories I think we've done in a long time. We did an entirely decoder with Liz about the story, so you can listen to that next week. But the gist of it is we thought we were writing a story about how advertising on the web went sideways and couldn't support Vice because they shut down their newsroom and website. So we thought we were writing about advertising cookies and programming. And no, no, we were just writing about crazy people. That's the story. She talked to 20 people. She described reporting that story as a hall of mirrors because they all hate each other.

1:30:35They're all lying to each other about each other. It's very good. Beautiful. Including one part where it was revealed that Vice had a NetJets account that was on the budget of their digital division. And then two different people took credit for shutting it down. And Vice's response to us was, we have not had a NetJets account since 2021. Oh. Which is like. There you go. So you did have a NetJets account. We're really proud of you. It's very good. Great story. Go read that. That's it. Oh, by the way, we got nominated for a bunch of Webby Awards. Oh, yeah. Yeah. for Best Technology Podcast, the Big Webby and the People's Choice.

1:31:08Go vote for us. We'll have a link. Go vote for us in the Webby Awards. Also, listen, people. It's so important that you vote for the Vergecast as Technology Podcast. Decoder is also nominated in Business Podcast. Neelai can have his. That's all fine. I need you to vote for the Vergecast. It's so important that Neelai does not win as Decoder. It's so important. Please vote for the Vergecast. The Webby's really did a sturdy beer. I'll take the business win. Give this show the tech win. Yeah, you get to have it either way. Because Decoder is nominated in both categories. Okay. Just look for my face and click on it.

1:31:42That's all I'm saying. It's going to be great. All right, that's it. We're way over. On a slow week, we still went way over. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

1:31:54And 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.

1:32:14Lemo, Lemo. And Doug. Here we have the Lemo, Lemo in its natural habitat, helping people customize their car insurance and save hundreds with Liberty Mutual. Fascinating. It's accompanied by his natural ally, Doug. Uh, Lemu? Is that guy with the binoculars watching us? Cut the camera! They see us! Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.