How YouTube and ESPN control the future of everything

23:15So how much is there to pay for? How much is there to pay for ESPN? How much is there to pay for everything else? How does it get balanced out? You have Max. They've been talking over the last few days really about their sports programming that they hope to build up. You've had Netflix. They're going to broadcast this weird, or at least they were before the strike, planning to broadcast this weird celebrity sports tournament as maybe they get into sports. Because there was a report they bid for F1. So they probably bid for something else. Apple TV, we know that they're doing sports deals. but do you do those as a part of your main package or as an add-on?

23:46And people don't get the add-ons. Like we already know that. So how much money is there really? Well, and this is where we go back to the college football thing is college football people don't want a Netflix deal. Like they would take it as part of another bigger deal, but they don't want that deal because they want to be on linear television. They want to be in the biggest places that people are watching. And even if there was a quote that I think it was the president of the University of Washington gave to ESPN right after all the Pac-12 stuff, broke down where he was basically like Apple TV doesn't give us enough reach.

24:16They could give us all the money in the known universe. They don't give us enough reach. And this is like, this is sort of the story of the whole business right now. I was listening to the podcast, The Town, which is Puck's Matt Bellany. It's a really great podcast about all things like the entertainment business. And he's talking to Rich Greenfield, who's a very smart analyst on this stuff. And Rich's big theory was that what every other content maker should do is have the first run of their shows on Netflix because Netflix has the biggest distribution. And if you want your IP to work, if you want stuff to merchandise like Disney, because it needs people to care about its characters and watch them and see them and go care about the rides and buy their toys should actually be putting its stuff on Netflix before it puts it on Disney plus.

24:59And that's never going to happen. But I actually think is an incredibly interesting point. That is bonkers. It will never happen for a million reasons, but in the sense that it's like, if what I want is for people to care about my shows, it actually makes a lot of sense that you should put them in the place where most people will see them. And so for the football and sports people in general who hold all the cards in all of these negotiations, because they are the live thing that people care about, increasingly like the only one, they're just going to go where the biggest audience is. And this has been ESPN's problem.

25:28If it cancels its cable network and just goes to streaming, it will stop getting these deals. Even if it has all the money in the world, it will stop getting these deals because it loses the size and scope of what it can offer. And so like, that's just another reason that it's like, what do you even do? So there's another piece of this, which I think is important to note. The big tech companies suck at broadcasting sports. Yes. Watching a football game being broadcast by Amazon is a chore, not only because for whatever reason, karmically, they get the worst football games in like broadcast history.

26:00Last season, some of the worst games ever played were on Amazon. That's not Amazon's fault. I'm just saying that's karma. They're also just not good at it yet, right? The pageantry of a major national broadcast football game is a thing that helps those athletes get their endorsement deals. That is the scaffolding for the big advertisers to come in and put big fancy ads next to premium programming. And you look at a baseball game on Apple, they've gotten a little bit better. It's still a pretty low-rent operation. For example, they're not in 4K yet. Just put that out there. It's amazing to me. You look at Amazon.

26:37Amazon is ready to broadcast those games in 4K. They own an entire streaming service that can do it. They haven't done it yet. Maybe they'll do it this season. And they're not paying the money for the biggest name broadcasters, like the Troy Aikmans and Joe Bucks of the world. They're on ESPN, right? They're doing Monday Night Football on ESPN because that is the best distribution for them. I mean, Al Michael's basically retired to Amazon. It's like more or less. Yeah. He seems very bored. There's just a piece of that puzzle where there's a product to be made here. There's a literal show to be put on and the athletes and the coaches and the owners of the teams and the people who run the conferences, they want to be part of the fanciest show.

27:17And the tech companies, bizarrely, they've paid a lot of money and they're kind of cheaping out on the show part of it, which is fascinating to me. They don't know how to build the stage. Yeah. Like that's a skill and something that has been built up in these networks over the years. They just have the institutional knowledge and the people to build the stage. And I think that what David mentioned about like reach, it's not just like what you think of like, oh, they have X number of viewers when they're talking about reach, especially for these college presidents who run these high profile universities who want to be seen, who want to be on that top level.

27:51It's that ESPN and linear TV is just on and it's everywhere. And when you're on there, it means that everyone is going to see you every week and they're never going to forget about your university. University of Western blah, blah, blah is very important. And you've heard of it and you've heard of it your whole life. And you know it because they had a good football team 15 years ago. And if they're on Apple TV, that doesn't happen. I think the other part of what you mentioned when you talked about like Disney and going on Netflix for the first season, like Formula One, I think is a great example.

28:20of that because they had that drive to survive that boosted the profile of the sport in the united states because so many people have netflix and they started watching this sport they've never paid attention to because it comes on at 3 a.m and they were like actually i love this and i need to see more of it and because they were on the biggest distribution platform they got a huge boost and you could see that happen well but that show is also really fascinating so we should talk about drive for a minute we should disclose that there's another version of that show about golf called full swing that Vox Media makes, which is great.

28:49You should watch it. The Drive to Survive is this fascinating phenomenon because it is owned by one company, right? Liberty Media owns F1. They own the whole league, and they're the ones who told their entire league, you are going to participate in this show. And the only teams in the first season that could say no were the winning teams, right? Like Mercedes and Ferrari said no, and everyone else sort of participated. and then those teams saw how much play the drivers were getting the league was getting and they came around in the second season and participated and now everybody has to participate and the show is like turning into like a meta show like everyone's constantly talking about the show on the show which was very funny yep yes that did boost the profile of the league but it's fascinating because it happened because it's owned by one company they could just make the deal and instruct all the participants like you're doing this and this is a strategy with an open explicit strategy of boosting our profile.

29:45We're going to turn you into reality television. And every episode is basically Top Gun, right? A bunch of rich people run around, they're beautiful, and then there's a race. The stakes of the race are falsely amplified, which is great. I love it. Everyone should watch Drive to Survive. You see Netflix doing this with other sports. They've done it with tennis. They've done it with golf. Like I said, they try to do it with NFL with this new show, Quarterback, but because the NFL insisted on making the show themselves, it's not as good, right? It's very interesting. That alone is like the league is so involved in it on that front that NFL films made quarterback that the show isn't as good.

30:21And I think there's just something there about trying to replicate these models where like eventually you have like generational copy loss. Like you make a copy of a copy of a copy and you start with Drive to Survive and you end with quarterback. You're like, we made too many copies. You've seen that with Drive to Survive. The subsequent seasons, as you mentioned, it's gotten very meta. Like even when you're in the season that people are like, oh man, this is going to be on Drive to Survive. And what you end up with is when it actually comes out, it's completely disappointing or not in there in the way that people were expecting it.

30:50And it's just, you can't, you can't do it again. You can't go back to that first one. Yeah. I just think there's something fascinating about that cycle. Because Drive to Survive happens after the season. And they release it before the next season. It just creates a cast of characters. It creates a set of things to follow in a way that I think kind of segues into more conversation about ESPN. That's what ESPN is every day, right? Every day, ESPN is just, I mean, it is basically just a 24-hour podcast that is interrupted by broadcasts of major sports. But it is increasingly becoming not that, right?

31:24Like ESPN has gone through a bunch of layoffs over the last couple of years, including some of its really high-profile talent. And it seems like what ESPN has decided is that we are a place that airs sports and Stephen A. Smith. Like they have a couple of really big name people that they really care a lot about and everything else that isn't live sports. I think that the counterpoint to that is that they just signed Pat McAfee and gave him all of the money that they took from laying off all these other people. They took an independent podcaster and they said, OK, you're the new face of ESPN. And Pat took that deal.

31:57I watch his show, mostly because Aaron Rodgers' experience was, as David and Richard know, very traumatizing for me over these past few years. But Pat took that deal. He left his gaming company deal and said ESPN is like the natural fit for what I do. And I think that goes back to the prestige, right? It's still the top. And so you might take the discount on attaching yourself to the brand that is at the top. And it also has the massive distribution. I think that question of like, what is ESPN going to be is really stuck in that tension of, okay, there's going to be YouTube TV. And this is where a bunch of sports need to happen.

32:34So we're going to collect the sports and resell them YouTube TV. And that's going to be the cable deal of old. Or this is a network full of personalities talking about sports and its comfort viewing for you to just have on in the background all the time. I don't think they've made that decision. One answer that was supposed to be there for like what ESPN and some of these other sports networks is supposed to be is something that you mentioned there. Gambling and gaming. That was supposed to help fill the hole and was expected to. Pat McAfee, as you said, I think had his show with FanDuel or one of these other gaming companies.

33:05And ESPN had been talking about betting. We wrote about it last year that gambling was going to be a huge business for these TV networks, for Fubo, for everyone else. And it just has not worked out that way. Bob Iger has not talked about gambling except for like one small quote in a time interview ever since he came back. Fubo TV launched gambling kind of features on their network, on their streaming network. They're gone. They're out of that business. Fox shut down their Fox Bet app. The gambling companies are not making as much money as people expected. Some of them are losing money because it's so expensive to acquire customers.

33:38And so that's another element of why everything has suddenly changed and flipped up so quickly, because that was supposed to help kind of bridge that linear TV to streaming gap. and it just didn't happen. Yeah, it turns out people want to gamble in casinos, not on ESPN.com. And that it's more fun to gamble when you're getting stimulus checks than it is when the economy is bad. Also, nerds aren't as good at running casinos as they think. It's really hard to make money, they found out. Yeah. All right, but we should wrap this up, but I am curious, like if we cast this out a couple of years, right?

34:08I think we're in this interesting place where like the NFL did this big deal a couple of years ago for like$110 billion. All these college sports have giant deals. They're forever coming up. The next big one is the NBA, which a lot of people think is going to sign a gigantic deal that's going to change the way the NBA works. But also ESPN is competing with the Warner Brothers Discoveries of the World and some of these tech companies to get it. If we fast forward a couple of years, let's just talk about ESPN specifically. Richard, give me 2025 predictions for what ESPN looks like. Frankly, I'm a bit worried.

34:42Right. The NBA thing is a great point because it's something I've been thinking about. I watch the NBA. I love the NBA. I love NBA TV. I love the transactions. I love the games, all of it. And they are expecting a huge broadcast deal. You know, as I said, you have Disney still, you have Warner, you have all the tech companies. But I don't know who is going to pay that. I don't know if they're going to have to expand their international deals or what they're going to have to do to find this money so that they can pay all of the players in Boston who maybe made the all NBA team once$300 million or something like that.

35:11but that's where we are. And I just, I don't know if we're going to have the same sports landscape that we had, the kind of thing that we grew up with, the place where I saw that Barry Sanders was retiring and it still traumatizes me to this day. It just, I don't know. I'll probably hear about it on a podcast and that's going to be it. It's just podcast and streaming. That's my prediction. Neil, what about you? I think I agree with that. I think the idea that sports is the last thing driving the monoculture is going to get pulled into a smaller handful of leagues. Like Apple really wants MLS to happen in the United States.

35:44Yeah. And signing Messi was a great deal. And I've now seen a bunch of Messi highlights on my TikTok feed. I haven't signed up for Apple TV to watch MLS. It's just like, that hasn't converted me yet. But they've instituted it into the culture in a way that's interesting now. But it's still the big moments, right? Like the NFL still dominates American sports. And that is the thing that I think will continue to just drive a bunch of stuff is people wanting NFL style deals. And I just don't know if they're there. I, I think the audience is fractured enough that that bet that everyone will pay for ESPN and that will spend money out into all the leagues that enable lots of things to happen.

36:22That's gone. Right. And more people are going to spend more money on watching the Witcher on Netflix or whatever. Like the, the fandoms are going to, are going to fracture and be in more competition with more kinds of things in a way that I think is probably exciting over the long run, just because I think we'll get more kinds of new upstart sports emerging or more opportunities. Like the emergence of F1 has been great for racing fans. Like they ran a NASCAR race in Chicago because they were like, we need to do some exciting stuff to capture the attention of a new class of race fans. And that was the coolest race I've ever seen.

36:58Right. It was, and I was in Chicago that weekend. So it was very loud. That's cool. Right. A little kick in the pants to all these leagues to not just milk money out of big, fat broadcast deals is great. But I think that moment where all of my friends in school were always watching ESPN and kind of always talking about the same things, that's gone. That's got to be gone. I'm with you. I think the thing that is remarkable about ESPN is that it continues to be as close to a one-stop sports shop as kind of anything else. And that's just, I agree. I think that's going to die. Like, I don't see the leagues making less money, at least not in the relative immediate future.

37:37They're just going to keep making more money and the deals are going to keep going up. And so what's going to happen? I was reading a bunch about all the different deals that have been happening. And there was this big Big Ten deal to go back to college football that happened a couple of years ago. It was a seven and a half billion dollar deal for seven years. And it happened across three different networks because basically no one network could afford this whole deal. And so now if you want to watch Big Ten football, you're going to have to do a puzzle every Saturday morning to figure out what channel your game is going to be on.

38:05You can't just know where your sports are. And I think that's where we're headed. We're going to get more sports, more places, but it is going to be vastly more distributed. And going forward, if you want to watch the NFL, you're going to need 11 different subscriptions because no one company, ESPN or otherwise, is going to be able to afford it. my my hottest take at the end of this is that I think YouTube stands to be the biggest winner of all of this because I think YouTube TV is like going to keep looking like a really compelling sports bundle to a lot of people but also the thing that YouTube does where you can subscribe to other streaming services through YouTube is going to be really powerful so it's like okay I might have to get Paramount Plus and Peacock and Netflix and NFL Plus or whatever the hell all of that I might have to get to watch sports but YouTube wants to be this sort of interface through which I can do that so it's going to be expensive and annoying but I will at least have a single location for all of it and I think that is going to end up being the biggest fight is like the collector on top of the subscriptions and I think over the course of the next like decade YouTube looks pretty good there Amazon's also going to try pretty hard to win that fight but I I would I would bet on YouTube more than anybody else in this space expensive and annoying welcome to the future of tv yeah right it's very obvious like we're just headed back to cable companies and it it is i think important to note that none of the existing cable companies built any of this stuff that is just recapitulating the bundles they were always worried about losing yeah no i think i think it's exactly right and it's it's a shame because i think as a as a like fan and viewer and this is true of the whole streaming industry right now it's like it's all gonna get worse before it gets better yeah that's it's just it just is where it is there's too much money and too much stuff and none of it makes any sense anymore.

39:50And that's why I think you should subscribe to Alex Granz's Plex server. Just put it out there. All the good stuff. True cable bundle. All right. Well, we will come back, I'm sure during football season and be sad about why we can't watch any of the games. But thank you both. We need to take a break and then we're going to come back and talk to Alex Winter, the director of the new documentary, The YouTube Effect. See you in a sec.

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42:14All right, we're back. So there's this new documentary out called The YouTube Effect that I found totally fascinating. How did it go? I feel so. I'm Brookers, and I'm an internet celebrity. Hi everyone. How's it going, everyone? Welcome back to my channel. If you've followed YouTube over the years, or even listened to this show as we've talked about YouTube over the years, there's not a ton about the history the doc shows that will surprise you. But it's still a really good look at how YouTube became YouTube, and really what YouTube has done to the world, both good and bad. I liked the YouTube effect because it's not one of those loud screeds against the internet, or a rosy story about disruptors changing everything.

42:56It's both those things. And it's a bunch of other things. And it made me think a lot about what actually makes YouTube unique on the web. There's something different about it. And I've always had trouble putting my finger on what that thing is. And the doc did a pretty good job of trying to figure it out. So I called up Alex Winter, the director of the documentary, to talk about it. The sort of monetization of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation is really what the film is about at its heart. You might recognize Alex from the Bill and Ted movies. He plays Bill. and a lot of other shows and movies he's done over the years.

43:29More recently, he's also directed a number of documentaries about things like The Silk Road and The Panama Papers. He's just a guy who knows a thing or two about how video works and why it's effective from a bunch of different angles. So as soon as we got on the line, that's just what we started talking about. One of the things that really jumped out to me was there are a couple of little spots in the movie where you talk about video as a medium and specifically sort of YouTube as a medium. And I think one of the things we debate a lot internally at The Verge is, A, this question of like, is this a platform problem or a society problem, right?

44:06And I think I'm pretty resolute on the answer is both, but platforms play a real role. And we can sort of litigate that as much as you want. But I think there's just inarguable. I mean, that's come on. That's inarguable unless you're bananas. Right. Yeah. But I think the really interesting question to me is kind of what is special about YouTube as a place, right? Because if you want to talk about algorithms on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and elsewhere, I think this idea of algorithmic recommendations is really interesting. But there's something different about like the style and structure of a YouTube video even that makes it different.

44:40Can you explain how you think about that? Yes. In fact, I would say that I had an inkling about this going into the film and obviously being able to immerse myself in it and go meet everyone who was the smartest people in the world about these issues, which is what I always go seek out, did give me some concrete answers in this area that were very illuminating. And some of them are common sense and some of them aren't. I went into the film feeling exhausted by hearing about the algorithm. And I was thinking, you know, I know enough about technology and the way technology is spoken about to be skeptical of so much weight being put on anything that fuzzy.

45:17Everybody talks about the algorithm like it's like the villain in the story. And it's like, that's actually not how it's working. And, you know, you could be very cruel and like stop anyone mid-sentence and say, can you just stop and tell me what you think an algorithm is? And they would spout utter nonsense. Right. So, you know, most people don't know what an algorithm is at all, who are even using this term all the time. They don't even know what it is. They don't even know how it works. Most people don't even know that the recommended algorithm in YouTube has largely been remedied and has been not doing what it used to do for a very long time.

45:48And so I started to examine what is it that exactly to your point, because YouTube has more views than any other platform that we debate. It gets a lot less attention. And I think largely because it's overwhelming to people. Some of it's lobbying power, like they spend a lot of money to get people to look elsewhere. But we spend a lot more time looking at meta and a lot more time looking at what used to be Twitter and TikTok and other platforms. But you're talking about 4.6 billion views a day on YouTube. You know, number two most viewed website after Google being number one, both owned by the same company.

46:21So that immediately what makes it special is scale, right? As you guys well know, scale is everything on the internet. And YouTube has far more scale than any of these other platforms in terms of interactivity. And then you get to the video component and how the video component works specifically that's different than any other platform in terms of how long these videos are, how promoted and viral a very select group of influencers are on all sides of aisles and thought, which is one of the things about YouTube I love. You can have Steven Crowder over here and Natalie Wynn and ContraPoints over here, and they're both doing great.

47:00And one of them is trying to promote civil war, and the other one's kind of trying to stop civil war. But they're both getting a lot of traction. They both have the parasocial connection of, golly gee whiz, I'm your buddy hanging out in my bedroom talking into my webcam. You feel you know me, but you don't at all. Hugely powerful component. So I think for me, it's the trifecta of massive scale parasocial connection of these influencers and the power of that monetized for ad dollars. Right. So it's an ad based model, business model that is going to push. You know, I wouldn't say without an algorithm's help, because I think that's going overboard because algorithms obviously do things.

47:44But it's really not a technological issue. It's a business model issue. You could change algorithms and you would still have these influencers gaining enormous traction given the way salacious content catches fire, going back to yellow journalism in the 1890s. And then you attach the monetization to that. And then you attach whoever's funding those influencers and giving them the power to be online all the time in a powerful way and message correctly. Natalie really is like a one-woman band. And people like Crowder and Shapiro, I mean, those are huge entities with a lot of money behind them. So I think it's that trifecta.

48:23And I think that makes YouTube special in many good ways. I think that the way they've legitimately constructed a business model that allows creators to actually earn a living, going back to Smosh and some of the earliest players on the platform, I think has changed the world in many ways for the better. I think it has democratized culture. I think it has opened up people's ability to have a voice, you know, LGBTQ people and marginalized communities, people in small foreign countries who would never get, you know, on any broad based entertainment platform. And I think a lot of that stuff is good.

48:59I think obviously the dangerous, you know, we talk about quite a bit in the film. Yeah. And I think the intersection of those three things you talked about is sort of forever fascinating to me. It's like YouTube introduces mid-roll ads. And so videos get longer so that they can have mid-roll ads. And thus the structure of those videos change and the way that people respond to them changes. And then YouTube starts rewarding long watch time. So they make their videos even longer. And so it just, these things like cycle each other forever and ever. And it's just super fascinating. But I think the parasocial thing was the thing that like kept sticking with me as I was watching the doc.

49:32Like I was watching with my wife and we got to the section about Ryan, the kid who like does the toy stuff, made$22 million, wildly famous and super successful. And she was just like, why would kids want to watch this kid on YouTube? And it was a moment of being like, oh, right. We're old people who don't get it. And also like these people like think he's their friend in like a really real way. Like they have an actual relationship in a way that like, I don't know if you rewind 20 years, people liked and cared about movie stars, but didn't perceive them the same way. And I feel like we're still reckoning with this idea that like I can watch somebody on my screen who I now in some real way believe that I know because I've been inside their house and I've seen them eat dinner in a way that like watching somebody on a movie never did.

50:20Yeah, and they're looking at you. They're looking at a webcam. And you're often watching them on your phone or on your laptop and not in a sort of ritualistic way of like, here is an icon 100 feet tall on a movie screen. And I've gotten in my car and driven to the movie theater and gone to bought popcorn and then for being presented with this towering figure. It's the literal opposite of that in every conceivable way. And in fact, that's part of what we're dealing with with a strike right now is like the advent of streaming has broken that ritual to a degree that we're losing movie stars. And people don't feel that sort of opposite type of connection, that kind of epic connection with or interest in someone that you feel is larger than life that you don't know.

51:08So and Ryan, you know, just so it's been said, it's a couple hundred million dollars a year. So it's a vast sum. Sure. And they've been doing that year after year for a long time. So, I mean, you are talking about an enormous, enormous audience. And that has gotten Hollywood scared, you know, because it is – they're drawing numbers that are not comparable in terms of what – especially in the streaming world, which doesn't really monetize so well. So I think that the parasocial thing can't be understated. I think the work that Becca Lewis out of Stanford has done and other people is really significant work.

51:43And it was very important to me when I was making the doc, because it kind of answered the question I had about, OK, if the algorithm isn't the secret sauce, what is? And I think the secret sauce is really the parasocial relationships. And I think it's what draws people to YouTube. I think it would make people feel like it's what's influential. But it's also a big part of what's caused the societal impact, because it's really much more than just a political pundit saying, go do this. It's someone that you think is like your best friend saying, go do this. Was YouTube just first into that fray or is there something about it that is still different?

52:17Because like TikTok plays on the same sorts of things now, but I feel like maybe just doesn't have the history to pull that off. Instagram was always kind of the opposite. It's like this airbrushed version of everybody's life. Like, why is it that after all these years, no one else has figured out how to do this the way that YouTube has done it? I think that it would be possible to have competitors in the marketplace. I don't think TikTok is one for a number of obvious reasons. the way their algorithm works, the way their videos work, the way they don't monetize creators. They don't have the scale that YouTube has.

52:50They don't have a Google behind them. And we chart this in the movie. It's the reason we spend time in the film in Act One charting the actual business growth of YouTube, because I think it's very important. And I think that um susan wuczycki and other people's vision in 2005 2006 i think you have to credit that vision i think that and especially given how much flack she got and they got for for buying youtube for 1.6 plus billion dollars which sounds like nothing now but at the time was like a preposterously large amount yeah it was just it was an unimaginable unimaginable number in the internet era of of that of that time when i mean when apple was still this kind of ailing company trying to get a foothold back in the business.

53:34And the prescience that they had of understanding that Google was becoming a dominant figure in what was going to be the jockeying for the very few lanes of the highway, which was true. Only a few companies did survive and take those lanes. And Google is one of them. In fact, they're the largest in terms of user interaction. Apple, I guess, has a bigger market cap, but Google has a lot more people using its tools. So I think that their vision was not complete. It wasn't like we see the whole picture. But I do think that they knew that if you harness a video platform that worked, that had a UI that people were responding to, which I think was not happening with Google Play, you harness that to one of the largest tech companies on the planet with enormous reach and influence and lobbying power, which is important, that you would be able to dominate the market in that space and that more people, you'd be able to create a new platform.

54:28entertainment infrastructure that people would want to use because they did start to monetize their influencers immediately. This wasn't like, you know, Smosh was making money almost immediately in the early days of YouTube and other people. Obviously, that was our use case in the movie. So I think that's really important because I think that is one of the things that we get at is one of the problems. It's sort of how we wrap the movie up, not to spoil it for folks who are going to go see it. But like, you know, Google is a monopoly. It's one of the largest monopolies on the planet, YouTube dominates the space because it has the benefit of Google's monopoly power.

55:03I don't think that if Google got broken up or if there were other equally large tech companies, I think you would see competitors in this space. And I do think, honestly, I'm curious what you all think and what you think about this given your understanding of the space. I do think it's where we're headed, even though I don't think it's happening anytime soon. I do think we're headed into a more fractured space, you know, in terms. And I think that's a healthy thing where, like, it isn't just three, four companies running everything. And there is more choice and there is more competition, which gives way to more policy and healthier regulation.

55:43I think it's going to be a bit of a dogfight because who wants to give up dominance? But I do think we're heading that way. And I think what's interesting to me is what Twitter, what Elon Musk's kind of disastrous takeover of Twitter has shown is that the public, everyone, I was interesting to watch people who were smart, but I knew hadn't spent a lot of time online when Musk did that. They were like, oh, this is, I was kind of getting tired of social media anyway. So this is kind of the end. I'm going to probably back off and not do this anymore. And within two weeks, those same people were like on Mastodon, on Post, on eventually on threads.

56:16It's like they figured out what a lot of us knew for years, which is like you don't need to be on one platform. It's OK. Right. You can communicate cross platform. So I think that that's the future on some level. Yeah, I I agree in most cases, actually. And we've talked about it a lot on the show, actually, is I think we are headed in kind of an unbundling phase. And it's where I think like things like Mastodon and the sort of decentralized social media stuff is really interesting. We're headed back towards like protocols being really interesting and exciting. And I think the future of social is definitely lots of places, not one place.

56:48And I think that's probably a good thing. I don't know about YouTube, though, because the thing the thing that jumps out to me, even as you talk about it, is there's no good reason for anyone to want to leave YouTube. It's monetizing really well for everyone involved. It's the best platform technically. It's a very good search engine. It has a very good video player, like short of some sort of spectacular own goal from Google at this point. I have a really hard time imagining what it would take to unwind YouTube at this moment. Yeah. And I agree with you. I mean, I think that at this moment, and I think in the immediate future and even the not so immediate future, they're it.

57:27So I mean, don't get me. This is not changing tomorrow. Unless Elon Musk buys YouTube and then all bets are off and got on us. And that just calls it X and we all just go home. And we do just get off the internet and give up. But no, I don't think it's going to change anytime soon. I mean, I feel pretty firmly that they are an entrenched entity and that they have the power. I don't know if they have the desire, but they have the power to eat Hollywood without blinking. Right. And, you know, they could gobble up every single one of these conglomerates and not bat an eye. I don't necessarily think that they want to do that.

57:59I think their forays into that level of content distribution, which they played with in the past, was not particularly fruitful for them, and they don't seem to need it, right? Right. But they could do it in a heartbeat. I don't think Google or YouTube is going to get smaller over the next few years. I think it's going to continue to get bigger. But I do think that there's going to be pushback, and I do think that harms are going to increase. And I think the general public will eventually, even though I think they don't understand the internet, even lawmakers don't understand the situation so well today.

58:31You know, a lot of younger people are coming up in law and government and in tech who absolutely do understand much better what's going on. So I think we will stop, hopefully stop seeing like really bad legislation being put forward like COSA and other, you know, forms of really misguided in terms to dismantle Section 230. I think we will stop seeing things like that soon and see a shift towards legislation and policy ideas, even if they don't get implemented right away, that at least make more sense. Yeah, I think that's right. And I do think it's going to be good when a generation of people who grew up with this stuff becomes the one legislating this stuff.

59:08That's going to go a very long way. But I think the thing about YouTube, I'm fascinated by YouTube just as a product, because not only does it continue to be this sort of dominant video place, it's also making big plays into essentially being a cable bundle. It's a music app now. It really is, like you've said, sort of becoming all things to all people in a way that I don't even think most people see yet. Like it has football now. YouTube has football. How did that happen? And one of the things you've said in other interviews I was listening to is that one of the things you thought was funny is that nobody can quite explain YouTube.

59:40And because it's hard to explain, that's why like Susan Wojcicki was never dragged in front of Congress because like it's not, it's not social media. It's not entertainment. It's too big to understand in the course of doing this. Have you come up with like a good metaphor for YouTube? Yeah. I it's Google's media front end. That's what it is. You know, I mean, cause it's me, it's all media. I mean, it's like, you know, like Howard Stern used to say, I'm the king of all media. I mean, YouTube, YouTube is truly the king of all media. And it's, it's absolutely true. That's not just lobbying power though.

1:00:13I think that they are very good at spinning a narrative that keeps people off their back because they don't understand how to define it. And they don't go to any lengths to define it. But no, I mean, it's on top of everything you just stated. It's also, I mean, I've got a kid in middle school. That's his search engine. He doesn't search on Google. He searches on YouTube, which is terrifying to librarians who tell them that. They're like, oh my God, but it's all wrong information. I'm like, it may be, but that's where they're, you know, he's writing a term paper. He's got YouTube up. He doesn't have Google up, right?

1:00:41Or Wikipedia, much to my chagrin sometimes. But, you know, at least he's not like, you know, listening to Andrew Tate for like, you know, how to write his paper. But fair. Yeah. But, you know, but it's also our repository, you know, it's our library, Alexandria. I mean, it's a repository for pretty much all of recorded human history is that's on YouTube and almost nowhere else. When I when I'm looking for content of my own that I've created over the years, that's the only place I find it. Like it's literally the best archive tool for from those of us in the arts as well. and not just in the movie business, but in all areas of the arts, as you said, including in music.

1:01:15I watched my now oldest son, who's now out of college, I mean, as he was coming up, he sort of went from watching a TV when he was like seven or eight to watching a TV with a laptop on his lap to not watching the TV. And then all of his music was all YouTube, like all the time, even though we had Spotify, we had all these other things. And this was probably 2006, 2007, like early days of YouTube, 2008. And that was very fascinating to me. So I sort of watched the evolution of YouTube through my son's eyes because he was getting pulled into its multiple uses. I would say the least use I've seen my kids using it for is social.

1:01:54Like, you know, they're on Discord or they're on Twitch or they're in other areas where they can create their own servers and talk to the people they want to talk to. As you said, social is – for most internet users who are savvy, it's moved off of these siloed platforms I think a while ago. But I do think that the – for looking at the labor strike we're in right now in Hollywood, I think that one of the areas of disconnect between my gang, the sort of the unions – I mean all three of the unions that were up for contract negotiation, SAG, WJDGA, and the AMPTP – is that I don't know how well the unions understand the level of threat the AMPTP are under, right, from larger tech entities, some of whom are in the AMPTP, like Apple or Amazon or whatever.

1:02:41But those are just little tiny pieces of their portfolio, right? Like Apple's business is not making movies and neither is Amazon. They have a little side hustle, right? But they can essentially swallow the movie business anytime they feel like it. Completely. And so like all this talk of AI and like, you know, negotiating contracts and like, you know, getting terms in or even regulation, like, you know, who are you regulating against and who is really the power? And, you know, the disruption that's coming over the next five to 10 years, to your point about YouTube's growth, is largely going to be coming from these big monopoly tech companies that are going to shape in whatever way they want the future.

1:03:24Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. And that way of framing it is really interesting to me, because I think, you know, one of the things we've heard a lot about from the union side is this fear that essentially AI will make real people irrelevant kind of in every step of the process, right? We'll be able to digitize extras so that they won't need them in the background anymore. We'll use chat GPT to generate scripts. I think those are real fears, not necessarily founded in like how this tech works right now, but we're on a path where that seems reasonable. And I'm curious how you feel about that.

1:03:53But also, at the same time, all of the studios and distributors like you're talking about also fear being made irrelevant by technology. And they are just afraid they're going to get eaten by these handful of big companies that has so much money to throw at whatever they feel like that they could all just go away and become a rounding error in Apple's budget. And it's just fascinating to think that everybody is afraid of tech, but in completely different ways. And that's kind of why all of this becomes so hard to sort out. It does. And it also creates multiple conflicting conversations that don't make it easier to have resolution, which is why the strike is going on so long in one area.

1:04:29Because there's other areas, obviously, in terms of residuals and pay structures based on streaming, which is also a result of big tech and their influence on the entertainment industry, which is why we're in the streaming mess that we're in in the first place. But no, I think that that's absolutely right. I think that there's an existential concern on the part of the creative community that AI and sort of big technological advances, because some of those, even though they're put under the bucket of AI, aren't really about AI. or about other things that are called AI, but that these advances are going to replace all workers with robots, some of which is true.

1:05:05My fears are actually a little less grandiose, a little more mundane in ways that workers will get replaced by sort of AI-type technology, because a lot of it will be centered around scheduling and budgeting and using, like how a lot of lawyers are going to get replaced by certain types of AI. I had this conversation with Lawrence Lussig at Harvard. We had a call them to sort of get his frame. He was like, look, mostly it's going to eat up lawyers and we have too many lawyers anyway. So I'm particularly worried about it. But but, you know, but there are obviously these technologies are going to get used to cut corners and costs by companies at the expense of workers.

1:05:42So, yes, labor-wise, we are going to have shrinkage. I wouldn't be blasé about it. We are going to have shrinkage based on the advances in technology. We've all known that's been coming for a long time. There's actually very little we can do about it other than have extremely blunt contract terms that kind of shackle the studios or your boss or whatever from using these tools that exist. Because a lot of these tools are open source, so there's very little you can do. to, you know, I hear so much talk in my industry, like we got to stop them from ingesting our material. I'm like, that's not possible, right?

1:06:16You will not stop them from ingesting your material. They will do that. And there are a hundred thems now. Well, yeah, there's that. It's like Napster, right? It's whack-a-mole, you know, and you're going to have a kid in Taiwan with an open source tool that's making Star Wars all day long. And, you know, with starring Meryl Streep and, you know, Humphrey Bogart, and that's absolutely going to happen. So, you know, there are contract negotiations that you can get into. There is also, as you well know, there are realities about what these technologies can do. And there are fears about their potential that we're not at yet about what they can do.

1:06:54And I think it's important to try to stay focused on what they can actually do, because we do still need people to tell these stories. And we do still need to document human beings to tell most of these stories. And AI will, you know, in its present and even its potentially immediate future self will create mostly garbage or sort of regurgitated maybe curiosities. I'm more concerned about it being used for, you know, calculation type stuff that will cut the workforce, things that I know AI can do and do quickly that will, you know, will shove a lot of people out of the workforce. But I think generally the bigger concerns I have are the concerns the AMPTP are having, which is huge disruption to the overall industry from these tech companies.

1:07:42I think that's a much bigger threat that will create much bigger disruption. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think one of the things I've heard you say and you can sort of feel in the YouTube effect is you're interested in scale as a thing, right? That's like what happens when things get huge, I think, is a really interesting question and is one you've explored in a bunch of different places. Do you buy the idea that these platforms and these companies are just too big that eventually you hit a tipping point of that kind of scale where it's impossible to be a good citizen of the Internet and do content moderation well?

1:08:13And I think there's one school of thought that says these are the companies that have the resources to do this stuff well. And there's another school of thought that says this is just too much stuff. Even if YouTube tries its hardest with all the available resources, it is not going to be able to successfully solve the problems that it has. Which side of that do you fall on? I fall on the side that there is plenty of room for accountability and no one should expect perfection. I think a good example is YouTube was removing content that pushed the stop the steal lie until about two weeks ago. And then they reversed their policy and began to let that content back on platform right as we head into an election cycle, which is bananas.

1:08:55Yes. That's a really good example of content moderation that is doable, that they were doing and then decided to stop doing. I don't think that the problem is, I think they're too big for, you know, in general, they're too big in terms of not allowing competition and other reasons that monopolies are bad. But I don't think they're too big to self-regulate. I think that they don't self-regulate because it's not profitable to self-regulate. It's a business model issue. So as we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, salacious content draws eyeballs, eyeballs draw ad dollars, and that makes everybody lots of money.

1:09:30How are you going to boot Steven Crowder off your platform when he's got 4 million subscribers and you can tag that, ads to that, and everyone makes lots of money and goes home happy and you go before your board or your shareholders and say, stock is up. So I think it's a business model capitalist thing. That makes it different. That's why it took us so long to get the automakers to start putting seatbelts in their cars. It's the same old thing with industry over and over again. And it does require policy. It just does. Because no company, just like a little kid, you give a kid a bag of candy and tell him to share it with everyone else in the sandbox.

1:10:04They just aren't going to do that. It's just not the way human beings are wired. So they have to have a teacher or a parent or someone say, you know, now, Eddie, I'm going to take some of those away and give them to the other kids. And I think that's kind of where we're at. Yeah, we need more grownups is not a bad diagnosis of a lot of things in life right now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Awesome. Well, Alex, thank you again. I really enjoyed the documentary and this was really fun. I really appreciate you coming on and doing this. Yeah, likewise. Yeah. Thanks for having me. All right. We got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to answer a question from the Vergecast hotline.

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1:13:00all right we're back let's do the hotline tom warren is here to help us with the hotline hi tom hello it's going to be very clear to you very shortly what we have here but first the hotline is 866 verge 11 call ask us all your deepest darkest questions we do at least one every week it's very fun this time we have a windows question which we don't get a lot of uh from Jim. Let's hear it real fast. Hi, this is Jim. I'm calling asking about Windows 11. I seem to have kind of memory hold everything I've ever heard about it. Is it actually time to upgrade to Windows 11? Just let me know. Thanks. So fairly straightforward question, right?

1:13:36Like, is it time to upgrade to Windows 11, which is like the funniest Windows question of all time. Everybody's like, I have Windows from 11 years ago, slash Windows 95. Do I need to upgrade? But it sent me down this weird rabbit hole of, I kind of forgot about Windows 11. And I kind of feel like Microsoft is perfectly happy with that being the case. But let's just start at the very top. Answer the question. What do we think? Is it time for everyone to be on Windows 11? This is one of those questions where it's like, you know, when someone asks you, what's the best laptop? And you're like, well, that's like a very big question.

1:14:10so i guess the the basic answer is it depends what you use your laptop for or your pc for whether you need to upgrade or not but on the flip side it's like if you upgrade you're not going to like lose anything potentially i mean i think initially when windows 11 came out there were some issues it's particularly around the taskbar but they've they've kind of improved that so you're not going to lose some of that functionality and stuff so yeah i think my general very quick answer to that and we'll obviously go very deep into it but the very quick answer is Yeah, it's probably time to upgrade now.

1:14:42I think it's a good time to upgrade now after, what is it, two years now? Yeah. Yeah, it does seem like, I mean, the sort of standard operating procedure for Windows was like, wait for two security patches, right? And then it was like, okay, you can update. And it feels like we're well past that. We're to the point now where like, if you get Windows 11, assuming your computer can support it, whatever, it's not going to be broken. Yeah, it used to be like, wait for service packs. And we've essentially had those service packs used to be, you know, once a year and they kind of changed them into updates now, essentially is the naming of them.

1:15:16So it'd be like the 2022 H2 update, which sounds very like a codename, but it just means it's the second half of the year. So essentially, we've had a couple of those and we've had a bunch of sort of updates in between as well. So Microsoft has been doing all sorts, really. so when i first reviewed windows 11 i think the main negatives i had about it was it was a bit inconsistent it felt like a work still in progress and there was some missing stuff around the task bar like for power users and just a bunch of stuff related to to how you say say you like drag and drop files into photoshop and work on them like some of that stuff was just missing and it was just it just felt like a little bit of a work in progress so i think like two years later it's still a work in progress but it's got better um so like some of the ui stuff that was a bit inconsistent where they didn't have dark mode in certain places like they've added it to like the task manager for example and places where it just hasn't had it for years so it's getting there with the inconsistency front and like i mentioned the task was a lot better now stuff like if you use a tablet for example if you've got a tablet that you're thinking of upgrading to windows 11 the touch experience is a lot better now and then it was when it first shipped and they've done stuff like add tabs to file explorer like tabs in apps like notepad and those sort of like small little things you might not notice them like immediately but i think it's one of those cases where if you upgraded to windows 11 you started using that stuff and then you went and used windows 10 you'd be like huh where's my tabs gone you know like it's stuff you get used to when when they do that so yeah that's what my experience too is there's there's not a ton about it that is like immediately sort of slam dunk life-changing and it seems like copilot which i think is coming this fall just to windows 11 might be that thing but until then it does seem like it's it's like whatever the opposite of death by a thousand cuts is right it's like a lot of tiny little things that add up to like my experience with windows 11 over time has gotten meaningfully better but i couldn't point you to like one specific thing that has totally changed my life about it yeah and i think that's exactly it like there's there's not something i can say right you should get 11 because it's going to do this for you.

1:17:26But you could say there's this tiny bunch of things that add up into being like a meaningful update that you will get used to. There'll be some changes, like the start button changes to the center. You can move it back to the left. There's some stuff to sort of get used to when you first sort of upgrade. But once you're used to all those sort of changes, I think it does improve the way you use Windows for sure. Like it's definitely, it's not the horror update that you usually get. It is amazing to me how much I think Vista and Windows 8 have like left this scary taste in people's mouths about upgrading.

1:18:02Because I also feel like it's just true that it's good to update for like security reasons. Right. And I feel like that was my immediate answer to this is like you should always try to be on the latest version of software because it will be better and safer and more secure. If nothing else, that's a victory. And I think that's true, but I also think people's reluctance to upgrade their perfectly functional piece of software and gadget is well-founded. And I think over the years, every company has given people reasons not to upgrade. Yeah, you don't want something that's working fine to just randomly break because you've updated Windows.

1:18:36And Windows usually in the past has been a bit clunky when you've updated it. But the other aspect, though, is can you even upgrade to Windows 11? like that's that's the sort of bigger question because you might have hardware that just isn't compatible um so obviously microsoft cut the the list of processors only to ones that were available in the sort of last well by now like four to sort of five years um also so talking roughly 2018 onwards i believe the processors both on the intel and md so you might even be thinking oh we're not great to windows 11 being might not actually be able to like in an official capacity there are workarounds out there and all that sort of stuff but who knows when those are stop working and they're not officially supported and stuff so so you might be thinking i want to upgrade i've heard good things about windows 11 but you'd have to get a new pc technically to upgrade officially which obviously that's good for microsoft bottom line because they sell another windows license and it's good for oems and stuff but it's not good for consumers right whereas in the past windows you've been able to upgrade pretty much freely you know unless you've got a really ancient pc going back you know 10 or more years but we're seeing increasingly people like the look of windows 11 and then they're like i can't upgrade so that's that's definitely another part of this question is like you might like the look of it but you need to go check to actually see if your system is actually capable of that so yeah and it does seem to me that like if you're in a position where you can get another year out of your computer before you upgrade but you can't yet get windows 11 like wait a year right like there's nothing to me so great about windows 11 that you to sort of rush out to buy a computer to get it but also if you can get it it's it's better you should get it for me honestly just the part where they've designed most of the settings menus in a new way and nothing falls back to like 20 year old windows designs when you click on a folder worth it alone it just it's so much better it just makes me so happy it's it's a it's a nice little thing and there's a lot of things like that like we were talking about that it feels worth it but don't break the bank for it yeah like one of the small additions they did do is when you're like multitasking with different apps and you're trying to like lay them out, there's like a nice feature that will sort of really guide you through laying them out in the perfect way, like Snap Assist.

1:20:48And I think that's definitely worth upgrading for, let alone and the tab stuff. Really depends how you use your PC and what PC you have, laptop or tablet or desktop PC. There are some like stuff, there's some stuff in there for like on the gaming side. Like we've been saying, it's not one of those sort of like big features where you go you should upgrade for this but there is some improvements to window mode performance and latency for gaming which is actually kind of useful if you have like a massive ultra wide monitor that you run a game on in a window you'll get all the sort of latency performance improvements rather than having to run it full screen in that way and a lot of games aren't obviously optimized to run those sort of ultra wide monitors so so there's some there's some improvements there as well if you're thinking on the gaming side so yeah it's way too many to to list but it's a bunch of improvements that sort of all add up and like you said we're pretty much out of reasons to be afraid to upgrade like i think if you can do it it's time you're good you're safe yeah i think so like i think unless you really love the old look of windows like the old start menu um you really love those live tiles which i can't imagine as many people if you're the one person who loves live tiles yeah yeah like if you're in that very small category of people then sure you might want to hold off and if you're on a windows 10 pc and you're like everything's working fine what do i really need then sure you know you can hold off because you're probably going to buy a new pc at some point which will then have probably windows 12 by that point so and we'll see what they do with that so because there's there are rumors of windows 12 and they're going to do some like ai stuff with the chips and stuff so there's going to be new hardware coming probably next year that will enable all that sort of stuff so that's another potential reason to hold off if you're thinking about getting a new machine but i think if you've if you've got a machine where you're you're curious about windows 11 and you see all the improvements and you're like stuck on windows 10 you're like i'm not getting any new features here because nothing is changing it's just it stays as it is then i think you're probably good to upgrade fair enough i like it all right well jim i hope that helps tom thank you appreciate it no worries thanks all right that is it for the verge cast today thanks to everybody who's on the show today.

1:22:58And thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more from all of our conversations, especially the chat with Alex at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes. But you know, it's a good website. There's a lot going on right now. It's a surprisingly busy August. So keep it locked on the verge. If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or YouTube videos you really want me to see, you can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com or call the hotline. Like I said, 866-VERGE-101. We'd love hearing from you send us all of your thoughts and questions, and we will do at least one hotline question every single episode.

1:23:28Oh, and specifically, we're doing an episode in a couple of weeks all about cybersecurity. So call us for sure if you have cybersecurity questions. No question too small, no question too weird. Bring them all on. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neel, I, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about presumably Zuckerberg and Musk fighting or not fighting, plus some news in the YouTube world, big stuff going on in AI. Like I said, surprisingly busy summer.

1:24:02We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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