Netflix is turning into YouTube

15:16David Pierce:And Netflix's movies, frankly, have been like that for some time. It's why like Dwayne The Rock Johnson just does that movie over and over and over again on Netflix. But its shows, at least for a long time, didn't feel like that. And they're not all like that. There's still some good stuff on Netflix, but it does like if you are going to run your business that way, you are going to run a very particular kind of business that is not the like big swing creative thing that Netflix seemed to want to be for a really long time.

15:46Brendan Carr:There's just some part of this where there's a big drop-off between season one and season two of a Netflix show that runs right into Netflix's best when it's buying the content from networks that are good at this. It's not like there's a bunch of Hollywood talent that's all locked up at great jobs right now.

16:06David Pierce:And is totally against the idea of making more episodes of television.

16:10Brendan Carr:Yeah. It feels like you could be like, all right, we're going to set up a studio to do it like NBC did in the 90s, maybe at lower rates. We're not going to pay every single cast member of Friends a million dollars per episode. We're going to make 22-minute-long sitcoms and make 60 episodes of that in a season and do it again the next year. And just market that thing so that you have to watch Netflix. But it seems like they have decided the economics of that don't work and the economics of buying YouTube videos do. And that seems upside down to me for some reason.

16:41David Pierce:Well, the argument for Netflix in this case would be that it is such a good distributor, right? like the we've I've done a lot of reporting on recommendation algorithms over the years. And one of the things that is sort of seemingly true about Netflix is that it has done a better job than just about anybody else of putting content into a recommendation machine to put the right thing in front of you at the right time. It is very good at that. What it has not had is the raw volume of content to do that with that something like YouTube has. And so maybe for Netflix, what they're saying is like, well, we know what you want to watch.

17:14David Pierce:We just don't have it on the service. Let's go get it all on the service. And then we can put it in front of you. And I think like, I can see the spirit of that theory. I just feel like it doesn't hold up the minute you tell me that I came here to watch, you know, beef, which I didn't. And instead, you're going to show me a bunch of like old BuzzFeed YouTube videos, because structurally to you, that's the same thing. Like, I just don't, I don't think that's right.

17:39Brendan Carr:That's a company that believes what they do is distribute content, not sell you TV and movies. And that is a mistake. Okay, let me put two ideas next to you. One, YouTube is going to end up incentivizing its creators to make things that look like TV faster than Netflix will get to having enough stuff that looks like YouTube.

18:02David Pierce:I think that's right. I mean, YouTube is already well down that road. It's making those kinds of shows. It rebuilt the TV app to look like a television streaming service.

18:13Brendan Carr:Yeah, YouTube will confidently tell you that it's growing faster on TV than any other platform.

18:15David Pierce:Yeah.

18:16Brendan Carr:This is the new race, right? Like before it was, we had to become HBO before they become us. Then it was our only competition is sleep. And now, and you and I are saying, it very much feels like Netflix is that we have to overtake YouTube before YouTube overtakes us.

18:31David Pierce:Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. If you were to handicap that race, YouTube is well ahead.

18:36Brendan Carr:So where would you put Netflix on the Go90 scale of doing streaming services?

18:40David Pierce:I mean, it's like it's in the low single digits, right? It's like a it's like a two or a three. But I think it is it is just meaningful to me that it doesn't I don't know what Netflix is anymore. Like, I don't know what the value prop of Netflix is in my life anymore. But you you look at all the shows and some of them are good. And I've seen a bunch of them. None of those are like the shows of the year. Right. Like even looking at the Emmys, it's like Pluribus was a show a lot of people talked about. Widow's Bay was a huge hit that a lot of people talked about. The Pit is probably the show of the year for the second year running, which is pretty impressive.

19:15David Pierce:It just Netflix is not a thing you sort of have to go to. It's a thing you just sort of have in the background. And boy, is that just already YouTube. Yeah.

19:26Brendan Carr:Here's my here's my second one. Oh, yeah. Hit me. Here's my hottest take.

19:29David Pierce:OK.

19:31Brendan Carr:Netflix should buy Xbox.

19:34David Pierce:Wow. Is that not where I thought that was going? OK.

19:36Brendan Carr:Hot. Make the case. Netflix should buy Xbox. Hit me with it. Well, we'll start from the Xbox side of the house. Xbox is a disaster.

19:49Brendan Carr:And I know this because the people running Xbox keep issuing memos saying it's a disaster.

19:56David Pierce:Yes.

19:57Brendan Carr:Right? Asha Sharma just put out the big memo being like, I got to reset this whole thing. We don't make enough money. I think she said something like, for every dollar we put into Xbox, we lose 68 cents. Seems bad. That is one of the worst businesses I've heard of at massive scale in this industry. Oh, wait, it was$0.64. Shit. $0.64. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That extra$0.04 is really— And the calculus of Microsoft is really going to— You can buy three more GPUs over the course of one year. That's a bad business. And she is stripping it way down. Yeah. Right? You can see that she's spinning off the big studios.

20:33Brendan Carr:She's firing people at all the other studios that she's keeping. and she's focusing her energy on like Minecraft and like the big multi-service games that kind of print money. And she wants to be at a billion players a day. Don't we all? Which is a huge number.

20:51David Pierce:I think the Vergecast should be one of the platforms that entertains billions of people a day.

20:55Brendan Carr:A billion players a day is my favorite Fat Joe song, actually.

21:02Brendan Carr:Sorry. That's a good joke. Anyhow, and you can get there. Like, I know there's like a lot, like Andrew Rupster wrote for us a big piece being like that this number is big. And like, he's like, this whole plan doesn't make any sense. And basically the answer is this number is really big and you can't get there. Even if you count Candy Crush, right? And all the other sort of big casual games that they have, that's a huge goal that you have to get to. I think the reason that you would say that goal, which is, I think, impossible for Microsoft to reach with its current economics and commitment to AI over everything else is that you have to pump a lot of money in the system and do a lot of marketing and you have to compete with sleep.

21:40Brendan Carr:You have to say, we're going to win in all of these places over every other kind of entertainment. Right. Such that you're going to play a game, probably on a phone. Netflix has been desperate to get itself on your phone.

21:52David Pierce:True, yeah.

21:53Brendan Carr:They are desperate to get on your phone. That is why they've done games. It's why they've revamped their mobile app to be more TikTok-y. It's probably why they're doing podcasts and stuff now. This is inherently mobile content that people are watching on their phones. Well, why not just buy the gaming company and capture a bunch of that additional attention? You would have licensed then as Netflix to continue the sort of spin out of studios, but you are already really good at knowing what content to license and put in front of a bunch of people as a distributor and recommend the right stuff to the right people at the right time.

22:28Brendan Carr:And then you would body up against the phone platforms, which basically killed Microsoft's ambitions to do game streaming and find ways to turn your phone into an Xbox and say, look, you want Netflix here, you want Netflix and all your other platforms. We need to put games in the Netflix app in some way that is economically viable for us. And there's a lot of regulators around the world who are going to look more kindly upon Netflix needing to do this than Microsoft.

22:53David Pierce:Yes, because it is Netflix's actual business.

22:56Brendan Carr:Because it's Netflix's actual business and I think to Microsoft, they're like, yeah, file lawsuits and see what happens. Yeah. Right, but I think Netflix has a much stronger case to say, look, we need to expand the range of entertainment options, and these platform policies are keeping us from doing it. And you would just get, maybe they don't care about the console hardware, you would get the ecosystem of creatives that make games to drive whatever IP that you need to drive in all the studios and all the things you need to do. they are probably the most logical home for Xbox if you believe the future of entertainment has interactivity and gaming at the center.

23:36Brendan Carr:Which I want to say I do not. Yeah. But many, many, many people do. Correct.

23:41David Pierce:My favorite thing about this is everything you just said makes perfect sense. And I believe with absolute confidence that if that happens, it will go disastrously badly.

23:49Brendan Carr:Yes.

23:51David Pierce:Like you just made such a compelling argument that I suspect is being made in the offices of Netflix at this moment and probably, frankly, at a bunch of other companies like this. Like if you think David Ellison is not going to try to roll up Xbox into Paramount, Warner, CNN, whatever it's going to be.

24:07Brendan Carr:Oh, David Ellison talks a lot about gaming.

24:09David Pierce:Yeah. Boy, does that guy love to talk about gaming. Yeah. For all the reasons you just described. And I think it would just, the cultures of those two things could not be further away from one another in a way that I think anyone who has tried to back their way into becoming a gaming company has found it very hard to do so.

24:29Brendan Carr:Oh, I think Sony managed to get enormous value from owning Sony movie studios. And they put the Spider-Man font on the PS3. They did. That was great.

24:41David Pierce:They did. And Sony, a famously spectacular business that everyone should try and emulate right now. All right, we should switch gears. If you have another idea for who should buy Xbox, I want to hear it because I think the idea that all of this is happening for Xbox to be sold to somebody. Neel, I think you were kind of there first, but this is in the ether now. And I want to know who you think should buy Xbox. We should take a break and then we're going to come back. And I have a bunch of mean things to say about smart glasses. We'll be right back.

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28:53All right, we're back.

28:55David Pierce:Nilay, big week for Nilay Patel's smart glasses panopticon. this is the facial recognition nightmare that is coming for us all continues to come for us all this is really exciting for you it's happening

29:09Brendan Carr:you know I'm gonna can I just say this from the beginning I've been saying for years that the killer app for smart glasses is facial recognition and being able to do faces and names like you're somewhere in the world it tells you faces and names and I personally if I had the ability to remember people's names I would be the president I just know this in my heart. It's the only thing in the way. It's just literally me, like, every day being awkward with someone that I've definitely met before and being like, yeah, let me introduce you to someone else real quick. You know, like, I think that has really thwarted my political ambitions.

29:44Brendan Carr:I say this because I've been saying it for years and it has been so removed from actual shipping reality for years that it's been kind of a joke. And now it's not a joke. and every now and again, the clips go viral without the context of the fact that I've been saying it for years to illustrate how bad it would be. And I just want to say clearly, I think it would be bad. I think it would be bad to create a worldwide facial recognition panopticon so that I can be the president. Am I going to refuse the opportunity to be the president when presented with such panopticon? I think it's a moral dilemma that each of us will have to choose in their own way.

30:19Brendan Carr:But I know it's bad. And I just want to say this as clear. I'm going to have to say it every single time. Yeah. Because it is the killer app. And I think there's a reason that we're inching our way towards Panopticon.

30:31David Pierce:Yep. But it's bad. So as a reminder, this was either last week or the week before we talked about the fact that Meta was building a facial recognition feature into its smart glasses. I think it was Wired that broke the news that this was a thing that they were building. They hadn't turned it on.

30:48Brendan Carr:Wired's news was the code was on the glasses. Right.

30:51David Pierce:The code was on the glasses. Meta's official response from Andy Stone, who likes to run around yelling at people on threads, was that this is disingenuous. We were never going to turn it on, which is just a fully insane response to you wrote the code and put it on the glasses. Like, that's just a thing that happened. So anyway, next to that has been this running story, including some really great reporting by our friend Joanna Stern about this like budding industry of people who will basically hack and break your meta glasses so that the light doesn't turn on when you're recording. Meta issued an update this week to make it so that if you tamper with the light, it'll just disable the camera entirely.

31:34David Pierce:That's a very good thing. It's a mandatory update. Yay, Meta, congratulations. And then immediately, immediately after this, news breaks that Meta is working on a new pair of smart glasses that is recording all the time. The idea is basically to capture snapshots every few seconds of audio and pictures and to basically use all of the input in this. Their big idea, apparently, for privacy's sake, is to not send the data itself, but to send metadata. Because in history, metadata has never been reverse engineered into data and has never been dangerous. But there is just this thing happening where meta is running around trying to explain and apologize for all of its disastrous security breaches.

32:24David Pierce:Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, did an interview with Nick Thompson at The Atlantic about a lot of this stuff. They had an interesting conversation in which Bos, I would say, very unsuccessfully tried to defend why a feature like this is worth doing. They both, like you, agreed it would be awesome. I totally want this. And then Nick was like, but how do you reckon with all of the other stuff? And he used the examples of the blind community and veterans who need features like this. And that is both true and just an unbelievably disingenuous way to try and defend a feature like this. Like, if you are going to use accessibility as a reason to like ham fist a feature into a thing for billions of people.

33:04No.

33:04David Pierce:But anyway, even as they're running around doing this, they're also just pushing ahead as fast as they possibly can to make this thing more and more privacy damaging and problematic and run at all of the things that people already hate about where these glasses are going. going. And I sort of feel like in the same way that what 13, 14 years ago now, the glass hole phenomenon ended smart glasses for a period of time. Like I talked to people years after that who were like, we had a project and we killed it after Google Glass because we just couldn't. It was Google ruined it for everybody. It set this industry way behind.

33:40David Pierce:I feel like Meta is in the middle of doing that right now. It is going to establish and ruin the idea of smart glasses before anybody else even gets to try.

33:49Brendan Carr:I saw a video, you know, Livvy Dune, the influencer. She's like a famous influencer. She posted a video and we talked about it in our newsroom. And she's like, people sell my travel itineraries. Like there's a black market for where she's going on planes. And then she's accosted when she lands in the airport. And she specifically was like, this is really weird and dangerous for me that I get off the plane and a bunch of weirdos are there to like take my picture. and then she specifically was like, and they're all wearing meta glasses. Oh, wow. And it's becoming that thing, right? Like that's the association people are making with it.

34:24Brendan Carr:Like this is a thing for a particular class of weirdos. Yeah. I have friends who are like world travelers and they're always like doing action sports and their Instagram feeds are all on their meta glasses as they're like surfing and going down. Like there's some set of uses that are good and benign. Sure.

34:42David Pierce:Wearing a GoPro on your head while you surf, not a problem. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you like walk through. A cost and stock influencers is bad. Exactly. Probably bad.

34:52Brendan Carr:Like there's just something about that where I was like, this is a very famous influencer. She had like, she literally is influential. And she's like, I feel at danger. And then the product she called out was Meta Glasses. And there's something there that I've just been stuck on. Like, what is that a signal of? I haven't quite figured it out. I can't quite articulate it. But the product is starting to stand in as a symbol of how we treat each other. Yes. Do you know what I mean? Yes. It means disrespect in some way. This is an enormous problem for Meta, whose entire brand is we don't respect you.

35:29Right?

35:30Brendan Carr:This is the problem. They made the product that most communicates their values, which is, it belongs to us. Sorry. We're going to listen to you. Right? Yeah. And for all of the Instagram is listening to you explanations about how they're actually, you know, like you're on the same Wi-Fi network as your friend in the same place. So like they search for travel, like you can do it. You can back into the programmatic ad tech explanation for why Instagram is listening to you. And then the glasses are going to watch you all the time. And now you're done. And everyone, you know, and everyone, you know, and, you know, Boz's explanation of how the, the faces and names feature would work.

36:03Brendan Carr:It's called name tag. He's like, it would just be people that have actually introduced themselves to you that have opted in and it's hashes and it's all stored locally. And you would say, remember that person. And you're like, this all sounds fine, except that person doesn't consent to be remembered in this way. Right. The person on the other side of the glasses does not consent to me storing a hash of their face and then recalling it later. Like maybe, maybe they would like it if I did that with my dumb meat sack of a brain, but they would probably have a lot of feelings about my computer doing that.

36:39David Pierce:Yes. Yes. And God, are there going to be ways to break that system? Even in the perfect version of that system, can I go stand up close to my TV and solve that problem with a video on my television?

36:52Brendan Carr:It's unclear, right? We have not used the thing, but this is their defense of it. It's like, we limit it to a local system. And then he talked about the various laws in various states that make it hard to ship. He's like, in Illinois, you got this dumb law. And it's like, no, the people in Illinois passed a law saying biometric face recognition is illegal. And I think they're pretty happy about that wall. Right? Like, I think on balance, there's going to be more of those because people don't want this to happen. They perceive the glasses as an invasion. And Meta's whole brand is invasion of privacy.

37:24Brendan Carr:Like, whether or not they want it to be, that is what people associate with them. All of this, I think, is next to the big dream of everybody wants the AR glasses. Right? Everyone is trying to build their way to AR glasses in some way. And if you're going to have AR glasses, you need a camera that is always on, looking at the world next to you, sending that visual information to something, to some computer somewhere, processing it, and then putting data over something. Whether it's real light and the lenses in front of you and clear lenses or whether it's a Vision Pro headset and it's screens and you're passing through, whatever it is, you need to process the visual information from the world around you.

38:03Brendan Carr:And there are lots of benign uses for this. I'm in an art museum. I just want to know more about the painting I'm looking at. There are absolutely not benign uses for this. But no one has contended with the fact that at the end of it, you have to record everything all the time. Because the technology to do that at scale simply has not existed. And I think this meta attempt to take snapshots and do metadata is the first baby step towards we're going to record everything all the time so we can layer AR information over the world around you.

38:32David Pierce:Yeah, ironically, one of the most compelling explanations for Instagram is not recording you using the microphone on your phone has been that it's actually just impractical to do that. Like to light up the microphone for a billion Instagram users and then store all of that audio in the cloud and process it is so prohibitively expensive that they actually just couldn't do it even if they wanted to is a very one of the many compelling reasons that Instagram isn't doing that. Uh, there's a bunch of evidence that says that's no longer true, that actually everyone is desperately trying to get all of your data.

39:09David Pierce:Meta itself rolled out this program to its employees saying, we're going to track all your keystrokes. We're going to track how you use your computer so that we can teach our AI models how to use computers. Like everyone in the AI space will tell you that all they want is more data all the time. They will, they will take all of it they can get no matter how like wacky or weird it is. let the compute do the work. And so suddenly this goes from being kind of prohibitively difficult from a technology perspective to being kind of a huge upside. And you're going to have to rely on the company that is going to do this to treat that data well, which is just a big, huge, giant leap.

39:47David Pierce:I mean, do you remember Microsoft Recall from whatever that was a couple of years ago now that the first run of that was Microsoft saying it's locally stored, it's encrypted, it's completely private to your device. We understand the privacy risks here. This is, this is meant just for you. And then it turned out they were just storing a huge amount of the data in plain text databases on your computer. So that like, if I, if I leave my computer at a coffee shop, you can just look at everything I've ever done on my computer. Like this, there are so many attack surfaces here that it, there is just no shot of getting this right at any point in the near or immediate future.

40:22David Pierce:and I cannot believe that meta in particular continues to try to push at this. And this is like the thing I keep trying to sort through in my head is, do we have a fundamental smart glasses problem, which is just that we're going to keep running into this same thing over and over again that you can't do smart glasses without the invasive stuff. It's literally, it's a feature, not a bug. And this is just a problem that is going to fall out forever. Or is it just that meta is the absolute worst possible advocate for this technology at this time. And if some other company, like if Apple were leading this race instead of Meta, would we feel differently about it?

41:01David Pierce:Because by and large, people trust Apple in a way that they don't trust Meta. I can't peel those two things apart in my head.

41:07Brendan Carr:It's definitely both. Sure. Meta's brand when it comes to privacy is garbage. And I think Meta's brand in general is garbage. Yes. It's not, Meta is not a beloved company. just straightforwardly. And even the way Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the we're tracking all of our employees to train AI was so fundamentally dehumanizing. He said something like, we could go collect this data from all the people in the world, but we think we've hired all the smartest people that met us, we're going to collect the data from you because the way you use computers is smarter than everyone else. And it's like, eesh.

41:40Brendan Carr:We put the good brains in vats.

41:42David Pierce:You know what I mean?

41:43Brendan Carr:Yeah, it's like, we're doing this diet eugenics. It was just a weird way of talking about the people that you employ, right? Like, I have to surveil you because you're smart. It's weird. There's just like, there's some disconnect from humanity at the center of that company that I cannot stop thinking about because they are desperate to own a platform. They are desperate to break away from their dependence on iOS and Android and the App Store economics and Apple being able to turn off tracking and all the stuff that Apple and Meta have fought about for years. Okay. Then you're like, well, people trust Apple.

42:20Brendan Carr:Do you know what people think is listening to them to do the ads? They're iPhones. True. Yeah. You can trust Apple all you want. Be like, Apple's the privacy company. And then 90 % of people are like, my phone's listening to me.

42:32David Pierce:Yeah.

42:33Brendan Carr:Very true. Instagram is listening to me all the time. And it's like, well, did Apple stop it? They're like, I don't know. It's listening to me all the time. And it kind of just doesn't matter. Like, I think tech companies as a whole do not have some great reputation for actually protecting people from the experiences that they are obviously having. Yeah, I think that's right. Does every single person believe that Apple slows down their iPhone after two years so they have to buy a new one? Like, sure. Like, can you trade on that trust in other ways? Maybe. but the reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it.

43:14Brendan Carr:There is not another way around it and there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of the glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You got to do it. There just isn't another choice. Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Like, those are the current choices in this world. And it just means, like, if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy. And maybe you shouldn't. There's an incredible argument for, nope, you shouldn't do that.

43:55Brendan Carr:Nope, the trade-offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it. I don't know who is positioned to make that argument today. It does not appear to be in our nation's capability to have a fulsome argument about the risks and rewards of technology and then tell anyone to stop. It might be in the market, right? Like these glasses might get pulled off people's faces and smashed. I think we can see the opposition to data centers happening in like local governments around the country. Like something else will happen. But the thing people want, AR glasses, augmented reality glasses, where you stare at a painting and it tells you who painted that painting and what it was.

44:42Brendan Carr:You are at a party and you just know that person's name. I'm telling you, I'd be the president if I had this case. I'm already so charming, I'm just like this one failing, you know? Who knows? The social cost of that is too high. Yes. And I think we're seeing it now, the cost of AI is too high versus the reward, and there's big backlash. And I think meta has no ability to make the case that the reward is worth the social cost of interacting with meta in this way. They do not have an ounce of credibility to say they're going to protect you.

45:20David Pierce:Well, and they have now two decades of evidence to suggest that they'll win in the end, that actually all you need to do is wait and people will come around. And I think I have believed that for a long time. Right. And it is the thing that makes me the most nihilistic about tech is this idea that everyone is going to stand in the way and say, I don't want this. It's going to be bad. And then it'll they'll have a Black Friday sale and everybody gets on board. And like everybody, it is very hard to leave Google in such a way that you can feel however you want about Google. And then you end up using Google products and you become sort of Stockholm syndrome into Google.

45:56David Pierce:And I think a lot of these companies are set up on the belief that they will win in the end because people will always trade those things and those feelings for other features and convenience. And I think, again, for a very for most of my career, I also believed that that was true. And it sort of filled me with sadness when I really sat and thought about it. I don't know that that's true anymore. It feels like something has changed in a way that I'm still struggling to put my finger on. But like this data center stuff is such a good example of there has been real like boots on the ground societal backlash to technology at a scale I don't think we've ever seen.

46:33David Pierce:And it feels like it is only growing and not receding. and I think it's why I'm so obsessed with the smart glasses question because I think this is going to be the first big new technology in a very long time that a vast number of people are going to look at and just say no to. Like we all eventually got smartphones. We just did. Feel however you want about that, about what smartphones did to the world. Everybody has a smartphone now. It just, it happened. I don't think we're going there with smart glasses and I think it's going to be really different and I still don't know how it's going to play out but it feels like it is headed down a different path.

47:09Brendan Carr:Yeah. I'll just bring it back to, you know, my daughter's silly iPod. That thing was on a shelf. I pulled it off the shelf. I plugged it into my computer and I put some MP3s on it. I will not say where the MP3s came from, but I put some MP3s on it and then it worked. And it worked exactly the same way today as it did 10 years ago when I first bought this iPod. And the experience, and she's delighted, right? and I own the files. Let's just say I own the files. I own the files. And I own the hardware, and it didn't require some like DRM handshake with some cloud service, and I didn't worry that social media was on this thing or that one of the reasons I didn't want to buy her like an old iPod Touch was like, I don't, I actually don't want a bunch of eight-year-olds running around with a camera right now.

47:58Brendan Carr:I just don't. No, thank you. That's just a parenting decision. Other people might feel differently. and I see that just like burbling with some of my peers you know as we all raise our kids together I see it with like a lot of younger people like they just don't they're just like looking at it and they're saying no like I just want to be offline in this way and I think the promise of the next interface paradigm the next way of using technology has always been this will be superior to the phone so we got to get there first this is Mark Zagreb in the metaverse you're going to live your life in this helmet because it's more fun than your phone and like pretty much just rejected.

48:36Brendan Carr:Like straightforwardly, I think the reaction to AI being everywhere and not being very good in most consumer use cases, people are rejecting it politically now. They're like, you don't need to build this infrastructure. I hate this actually. This chatbot on my car dealer's website is not providing me with anything. Turn it off. Like put all those tokens somewhere else. And I do wonder if the smart glasses, you know, my thesis about the metaglasses has always been people like them because there are a camera on their face and that's useful. Sure. And then you're like, now a lot of people have cameras on their face.

49:07Brendan Carr:Now a lot of people are recording without your consent. And like, you can stop that pretty fast.

49:11David Pierce:Yeah. It's that, but that is the feature, not the bug, right? Like, you can't have it both ways. You can't have a camera on your face without having a camera on your face. It feels like a Zen cone,

49:23Brendan Carr:but sure. Also, I just want to say,

49:26David Pierce:I own the files is a t-shirt we're going to make. Sure, I own the files. I'm excited about that. I own the files. I mean,

49:31Brendan Carr:in the sense that I have the files.

49:35David Pierce:Listen, let's not delve into copyright law here. I do have one more question on this. So there was a bit of gadget news. In addition to all of the big tech companies trying to make smart glasses, there's just a million startups out there trying to make smart glasses happen. Xreal is probably the best known one, but there's a lot of them out there. And there's this company, Solos, that announced a new version of smart glasses called the Ergo A6.

50:00Brendan Carr:Oh boy.

50:00David Pierce:Sure. But one of its like key features is that it doesn't have a camera. It has AI stuff. It has prescription support. It does a bunch of the other things that you would expect, like headphone style things. It doesn't have a camera. And part of me wonders, like, is this the next thing that's going to happen is we're going to see if we can do smart glasses minus a camera. This just is like, I don't know how to say this.

50:26Brendan Carr:Bone conduction headphones are a really cool technology. They will never be cool.

50:31David Pierce:Do you know what I mean? I mean, sure. But when my bone conduction headphones look like a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, they are cool.

50:37Brendan Carr:I'm not even sure these are bone conduction. The point I'm making is like, everyone's just trying to shove the assistant into a form factor. Yes. Do you know what I mean? Like, what if I could get a microphone and speakers onto your face? sure it looks like glasses. There was a time when that was a bone conduction headband. We covered a lot of these in Engadget in the 2000s.

50:58David Pierce:They had a real moment.

50:59Brendan Carr:They had a real moment. And it's like yeah, they're just AirPods. You just made AirPods that look like glasses. But the utility of the assistance is not high enough yet to support any of this. Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah. I'm sorry for the people who work at Solos. You did a good job.

51:18David Pierce:Their glasses are very light, which I think is very important. So kudos to them for that. All right, we should take one more break, and then it's time for some lightning round stuff. We'll be right back.

51:28Nilay Patel:Support for the show comes from Decagon. If you've looked into using AI to help with customer support, you've probably noticed most existing solutions don't quite fit your company's needs and take forever to launch. Thankfully, there's Decagon. Decagon helps companies create personalized, concierge-style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS. They're available 24-7, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own. So businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch. Decagon plugs directly into your existing systems so agents can go live quickly.

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52:56Nilay Patel:So when you're working through something important, it helps to have a sounding board to explore ideas and uncover what's really underneath them. That's where Claude comes in. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claude extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes.

53:30Nilay Patel:For problems worth solving, get started with Claude today at claude.ai.verge. That's claude.ai.verge. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.ai slash verge.

53:51Nilay Patel:I'm Seth Matlins. My new show, Create or Destroy, Reimagining Marketing, explores how every decision a company makes, not just the marketing ones, but the HR, IR, pricing, org design, and planning ones, the ones most don't consider marketing at all, contribute to either creating value or destroying it. Each week I sit down with CMOs, CEOs, founders, cultural thinkers, the people building, breaking, and reimagining how businesses grow or don't for conversations about what creates value and what destroys it. It's a business show. It's a marketing show. The creator destroys the show that argues. They've always been the same thing.

54:25Nilay Patel:From the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company. New episodes drop weekly on YouTube and your favorite podcast app.

54:38David Pierce:All right, we're back. No hype test this week. So we are straight into America's favorite podcast within podcasts. I think the My Brother, My Brother and Me stands are still in my email about which is the best one. But I'm claiming victory because you can just say thanks. It's 2026. Brendan Carr is a dummy. It's time.

55:14All right.

55:17Brendan Carr:A little bit of a seizure at the end there. I thought there was going to be a drop. I want to be honest. I thought that I thought that was building to a drop. It was really good. I appreciate it.

55:26David Pierce:This is good. We're doing a collaborative enterprise here. We're sampling and we're building here. That was by Ryan Muller. Thank you, Ryan. I love the dance remix. Somebody else take it and make the drop. That's what's coming next. Yeah, that's what I mean.

55:39Brendan Carr:That was a great build. I think we were all anticipating a pretty intense drop. And then I think Ryan fell down on the sampler.

55:47David Pierce:Listen, we all only have so much time in the day. Including Brendan.

55:50Brendan Carr:It's like his last shot of the night. It's like, I'm out. It's like, I've done it. Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate you.

55:57David Pierce:There we go. What did Brendan do this week?

55:58Brendan Carr:We have evidence this week that Brendan's various traitorous machinations against the First Amendment are starting to bear their poisonous fruit, David.

56:07David Pierce:That's what I'm saying for you. Okay. Starting to for the first time.

56:12Brendan Carr:Yeah, in like real ways. So as you know, Brendan has been fulminating against our nation's broadcasters about the way in which they use their spectrum, which is nonsense because people are not watching broadcast television. They're watching the apps on their phone, as we have discussed at length. Already in this episode. But Brendan has power over broadcast spectrum, so he has issued content regulations against broadcasters like ABC and CBS and Fox and local radio stations. And if you recall from previous episodes, in a big one that he has been focused on is what's called the equal time rule, where if you have a candidate for a public office on the public airwaves, you are supposed to have the opposing candidate and offer them equal time, unless you are a bona fide news program, in which case you have news judgment and you can be off.

56:58Brendan Carr:So the only program that has ever really had to deal with this is Saturday Night Live, which has no argument that it is a news program. And Hank, we all agree on this. And Saturday Night Live would have Kamala Harris on and then NBC would give time to Donald Trump, which is a real thing that happened in the last election cycle.

57:12David Pierce:Yeah, they had Trump at like a NASCAR race or something the next day.

57:14Brendan Carr:They gave him ad space at NASCAR race.

57:16David Pierce:Yeah.

57:16Brendan Carr:The flashpoint of this has been ABC's The View, which has long operated under a bona fide news exception. It was actually started by Barbara Walters, who was a news anchor. Right. And they wanted to have some candidates on. The FCC and Carr fulminated against them. We all got in some trouble. There's now a review of whether or not The View is a bona fide news program. You'll recall, I think last week or the week before, ABC's running ads to have people file comments at the FCC to be like, don't screw with The View. Okay, that's all happening. And ABC actually filed its response this week, which we will get into.

57:48In the meantime, Brendan has had the effect he wanted.

57:52Brendan Carr:Semaphore did an analysis, and The View has not had any candidates for any competitive races on the air since all this happened. He has chilled the speech of a news program. Which is precisely the goal. That was the goal. So here's the quote from Semaphore. FCC chairman Brandon Carr announced in February the agency was investigating whether or not The View violated the equal time rule. Since then, the ABC talk show hasn't featured a single political candidate running a competitive midterm race, according to the Semaphore analysis. this. Earlier this year, a representative for New York mayor, Zaron Mandani, pitched the View on hosting the mayor and Democratic Socialist candidates he supported for Congress, according to a person familiar with the conversations.

58:27Brendan Carr:The View said it was interested in having the mayor on but couldn't accommodate the candidates because the staff was proceeding cautiously with political candidate bookings while the FCC equal time inquiry was progressing. So the investigation itself has chilled the speech of the program. Right. And they will not have candidates for office on the air, even if those candidates are interesting, even if people would like to see them, because they don't know if they will be punished for their political speech. Even though that speech is, for years now, been considered to be news programming.

58:59David Pierce:But this is job done by Renan Carr. This is his move. He's not going to win this fight, but he can win this fight without actually having the fight.

59:06Brendan Carr:Yeah. And this is the specific phrase in First Amendment law is the chilling effect. Yeah. You haven't actually made the rule that's illegal. You haven't actually violated the First Amendment. You haven't said, I will put you in jail if you say these things. You have just made the people stop doing it because they're afraid of a consequence that may or may not be real. And that means they have preemptively stopped saying the things they would have otherwise said. And all over First Amendment law, the specter of the chilling effect is raised. You can't do this because you will have the chilling effect.

59:35Brendan Carr:And that is as bad as actually banning the speech itself. court after court, administration after administration, Republican, conservative, progressive, liberal, you name it, the chilling effect is the problem. And so Brendan has accomplished an ice cold chilling effect, at least on The View, if not the rest of the media ecosystem that operates on the broadcast airwaves. So we'll see what happens. ABC did file its response to this inquiry this week. I can just quote you from it. It's pretty fiery for Disney, which had previously been pretty bendy when it comes to the Trump administration. But ABC says, the First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in an editor's chair, yet that is the seat the commission now proposes to take, deciding which broadcast programs qualify as legitimate news and for those it finds wanting, compelling them to surrender their airtime to guests they never chose to feature.

1:00:25Brendan Carr:They go on to say, an exemption that protects editorial independence only when the speaker's politics please those in power protects nothing at all, The shelter it gives one program today, it will deny another tomorrow when the gavel changes hands as it inevitably will. For ABC Disney, that is pretty fiery stuff.

1:00:44David Pierce:Yeah.

1:00:45Brendan Carr:I'm glad they've found some spine here to fight back. I think they realize the public is on their side. And I will just remind everybody listening to this, Brendan is not chasing broadcast regulation because he really believes in broadcast regulation. All of this is a trial balloon to find ways to censor and control speech on internet platforms, which everyone in the world is aware is actually what people consume. Even The View. People mostly watch The View on YouTube.

1:01:15David Pierce:I was just going to say one way to accomplish that goal is by silencing the view, right? Like that's there are a lot of people who watch Jimmy Kimmel and who watch the view and who watch Stephen Colbert on these other platforms. And if you can just chop them down one at a time, you can get a long way to accomplishing your goal without ever actually having to get out over your skis on it. Yeah, and eventually he will go to Google and he will go to TikTok and he will go to Meta and say, hey, all those defense contracts you want, all those big rich government contracts you want, well, actually, we think that you are using the

1:01:49Brendan Carr:public internet or the public airwaves or your services run on mobile broadband, which run on the public airwaves, and we don't think they're in the public interest. You had better change your algorithms. I'm telling you, I keep saying it every week. You can see the chilling effect in action right now in real time on ABC. Yep. And you can see that that will just empower Brendan and the rest of the administration to go after internet platforms using whatever laws and powers they can magic up out of fairy dust and bad interpretations of existing statutes, if not pass an executive order just claiming the authority, which the Trump administration loves to do.

1:02:25Brendan Carr:And in fact, which is in Project 2025, the chapter about telecom and speech regulation was written by Brendan Carr. He's not a smart man. We know what he's doing. None of this is subtle. He's a dumb rock of a man who is doing all the things he said he would do in absolutely ham-fisted ways that make it easy for a company like ABC to write fiery responses to because there's only but one right answer. In any case, Brendan, if you want to come on the show and try to justify any of these actions, or talk about the nature of the chilling effect when the FCC chair is punishing broadcasters for their speech, I would welcome that conversation.

1:03:05Brendan Carr:The show on Decoder, mono-e-mono, live-streamed on Kik. We can do it. You tell me the time and place. It'll happen. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast. in the podcast. Brandon Carr is a dummy.

1:03:25Brendan Carr:Boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants.

1:03:28David Pierce:I really like the idea that we are going to build like an epic trance remix one track at a time here. I'm very excited about this. It's very good. All right. I have a Raymageddon update for you. I don't know if you're aware of this. Everything is more expensive now. And it just keeps getting worse. And I feel ridiculous like continuing to be annoyed by this, but I'm continuing to be annoyed by this. But in particular, there were two bits of really interesting data this week that are directly Ram again related that I just want to talk to you about. So the first is IDC, a big research firm that does a lot of like analysis of market shares and stuff like that, put out a chart this week that said that after nine straight quarters of growth, worldwide PC shipments dropped by 4.9 % year over year.

1:04:14David Pierce:two uninterrupted years of growth. And I will say the growth actually sort of kicks back to like kind of right after COVID. Like there was this minute at the beginning of the pandemic where everybody bought a computer, everybody, everyone bought a new computer. And then it dropped a little because everybody had a new computer. And then it has been, it has been rising pretty steadily for several years now since then. And it is now dropping like a stone because computers are too expensive and people can't buy them. They are, they are harder to fine than ever. Everybody's raising prices. Apple just raised prices.

1:04:45David Pierce:It's ugly out there. And there's an increasing sense that it's going to keep getting worse. But the other one that I want to talk to you about is there's this chart from this company, Omdia, which I know nothing about, but it's fine. It put out a chart showing the share of the total bill of materials for products that is taken up by memory. And this is like how much of the total cost of building a gadget comes from buying the memory. And basically that number has at least doubled in the last couple of years, uh, that before, if you were buying a premium device above$800, in this case, the memory accounted for 11 % of the cost of that device.

1:05:29David Pierce:So you're buying a thousand dollar device. It's a, it's a hundred dollars worth of memory. Um, that is now 26 % of the price. That is what the memory costs. It's even worse in lower end phones. We've talked about on the show that like the real danger immediately for a lot of these Ramageddon things is that cheap devices just go away. It becomes completely untenable to sell somebody a $200 phone in a world where the memory in that phone costs, in this case, it would be$120. dollars like it's the the number is for the mid low range 200 to 400 the memory alone makes up 59 of the cost of the bill of materials up from 32 that's crazy like the numbers are just insane and everywhere you look it's like the the costs just are what they are and either you can stomach it or you can't nobody nobody has deals nobody has access to anything there's just a bunch of chips out there and it is like full anarchy to get there first and everybody who can pay for it is paying outrageous quantities of money for it and everybody else just gets screwed and like the the increasing sense that i get from people is like this is going to get worse and it's going to last a while and it is just it's scary times out there man and now there's this big run on like you're starting to see youtubers make content about how to buy used gadgets yep i don't know if you've noticed this but this is like how to make your stuff last longer and how to buy used stuff and find the best refurbished open box deals is like a real rising type of content for exactly this reason.

1:07:03David Pierce:Everybody's just priced out of everything now. And so it's like, well, okay, maybe I'll go buy a three-year-old MacBook because it's literally the only thing I can afford. How do I go get it?

1:07:12Brendan Carr:Again, my prediction is the repairability push of the past several years is going to bear real fruit now. Yeah, I absolutely think you're right. We're almost a little bit lucky that there was that push. Yeah. There was actually, like, the FTC, the Trump FTC won a right-to-repair victory over John Deere this week. Like, I think consumers understand that being able to fix things is important to them, especially as costs go up and things last less long. So we'll see. Like, I'm hopeful there's one outcome here. It's that a generation or two becomes fixated on the notion that you should be able to fix things and make them last a long time because they were so expensive to begin with.

1:07:52David Pierce:Yeah.

1:07:53Brendan Carr:We should get like one of the refurb companies, like the back markets of the world. We should talk to them. Like I'm very curious if their business is booming the way that you would think it would be booming. Yeah.

1:08:06David Pierce:It's a good question. We should, we'll reach out to them. We'll get them on the show. Back market if you're listening, and I know that you are. Get at us. Trust me.

1:08:14Brendan Carr:They're already, the email's already been sent.

1:08:16David Pierce:Yeah, indeed. All right, what's your next lightning round item?

1:08:19Brendan Carr:Okay, I'm gonna do one heavy one and then I'm going to end on a fun one. Okay. It's heavy in the sense of the subject is heavy, but I think it is one of the greatest sort of verge stories, like verge-iest verge stories we've done in a while. And it's about the push to regulate ghost guns. So there is a law in New York, there's an upcoming law in California, there's a bunch of other laws around the country that would make it harder to print gun parts on your 3D printer, which sounds great. And actually a flashpoint for all this regulation is Luigi Mangione, who printed some of the parts of the guns he used to allegedly murder the CEO of UnitedHealthcare.

1:08:58Brendan Carr:He's in trial, so it's allegedly... I understand people have a lot of feelings whenever we say this. We do not support murder on this show. Another thing I feel like I have to say all the time. But this was a flashpoint in this regulatory conversation. And in particular, New York, where I live, Governor Kathy Hochul is all about regulating ghost guns because I think it feels like a thing politicians can do. Right? If you want to run at the Second Amendment, with regular guns, you're going to hit a wall. But the kids shouldn't be able to print guns at home. That feels like a winner.

1:09:27David Pierce:It's an awkward pro take to have. Do you know what I mean? To be the one who's really psyched about ghost guns is just kind of a weird hill to die.

1:09:34Brendan Carr:Yeah, it just feels like this thing. Your kids shouldn't be able to come home from school and print a gun. I passed a law stopping it. Who dares argue with me? Not the gun manufacturers because they'd like to sell you the guns they made in their factories. There's some weird political calculus here where this is an acceptable thing to say. In the laws that pass. Okay, here's the problem. If you want to stop someone from printing a gun part, you have to identify the fact that they are trying to print a gun part.

1:10:03David Pierce:Which means you have to know what they are printing.

1:10:05Brendan Carr:Where are you going to do that? At what point in the download a file or draw a picture on your computer, send it over USB to a 3D printer, have the printer run around and do it? Where? Where in that chain do you insert the regulatory mechanism that the law demands? No one knows the answer to this question. The laws do not say where, right? They just have a mandate for blocking technology. They're just like, don't do that. Don't do it. Make it, you printer manufacturers, you make it so you can't print guns. And the model is that printer manufacturers have made it so you can't print money, right?

1:10:43Brendan Carr:If you try to scan a dollar bill into Photoshop and then print the dollar bill, like a bunch of things will stop you. But the difference is that dollar bills are known. Right? And like the societal cost of fake money is like, right? Like everyone's like, okay, we get it. Like you can, you can flatly identify currency. It looks one way. And we all understand why Adobe Photoshop should not be able to accept scans of currency and print it. Sure. Because that will ruin everything for everyone. Yeah. Sure. If you would like to destabilize the United States economic regime, we prefer you do it with Bitcoin, not fake dollars.

1:11:20Brendan Carr:You know, like that's kind of where we've landed as a society. Okay, well, there's not just one gun. So you can't just identify one gun the way you can identify one dollar. Our ability to destabilize society with guns has already happened at scale. That ship has sailed. And it's the parts. It's not the finished product. So if you want to print a thing that looks like a pistol handle, well, now you got to block all the things that might look like a pistol handle, regardless of what it might be used for in the future. So this story is just excellently written about how hard it is, how the open source 3D printing community is railing against it, even if the people themselves support gun regulation, because they understand, like, this is a type of surveillance that can lead to all kinds of other outcomes and block all kinds of other legal things that you might want to print, or in the worst case, allow the government to ban even more things because they will have built a system to identify what it is you're printing and then tell the manufacturers to stop it.

1:12:19David Pierce:It's making me think about how like AccuWeather has successfully lobbied so that no one, the government is not allowed to do weather forecasts and TurboTax makes it really hard for you to file your taxes without using TurboTax that like you'd have an awful lot of companies trying to make it very hard for people to 3D print one thing or another. And like this, this slope gets really slippery from ghost guns, which I think are, like you said, a pretty universal. We all basically agree that ghost guns are bad. But boy, does the same principle run into things people do not agree on in the same way very quickly.

1:12:56Brendan Carr:Right. Do you want car makers to be able to say you can't 3D print replacement parts of your car?

1:12:59David Pierce:Yeah.

1:13:00Brendan Carr:And they can, will they concoct nonsense safety reasons for those things? 100 percent.

1:13:04David Pierce:Yeah.

1:13:05Brendan Carr:So anyway, this story is, you can go read the comments. By the way, some people do not agree with you about ghost guns in any way, shape, or form. They're in the comments of our story. But I just want everyone to go over this story. It's one of the virgiest virge stories in such a long time because it's one of those stories about politicians. And I think a lot of regular people seeing a problem. The kids can print guns. And then assuming that there's a technological solution that does not carry tradeoffs. And the community is way ahead of everyone on what those tradeoffs are and what they could be and why they're unacceptable.

1:13:39Brendan Carr:At the same time, it's like, you probably shouldn't be able to print a gun at home. Yeah, you read it. You tell us. Yeah. This is what I mean. It's a story that it's just going to make you uncomfortable, regardless of where you ultimately land on the issue.

1:13:54David Pierce:Yep.

1:13:56Brendan Carr:The best Verge stories make you slightly uncomfortable.

1:13:58David Pierce:Do you have a 3D printer? I do not. I feel like I should get one now. I feel the exact same way. I'm like, I don't know what I would use one for. but then I see everybody like there is no genre of vertical video that I enjoy more than people solving teeny tiny low stakes problems with 3D printers.

1:14:16Brendan Carr:Yeah.

1:14:17David Pierce:It's everybody who's just like I didn't have a stand for this thing so I printed one. I'm always like hell yeah. Let's go. You did this. And then Belkin is going to lobby those things out of existence. This is the future we're at.

1:14:27Brendan Carr:You're gone. We were home on the farm. I did the episodes from my wife's farm and her dad not only just has a huge shop where he repairs the tractor on the farm. But then there's what can only be described as a crafting shed with one of those gigantic tables in the middle to just do projects on. And I walked in there and I was like, I'm going to get one of these tables and buy a 3D printer. And then I had no further thoughts. Like, what will I do with a giant craft table and a 3D printer? Like, I was just like, a goal I have in my life is to have a crafting shed with a huge table and a 3D printer.

1:15:00Brendan Carr:And then you will have it. You will say, I've done it. And you will close the door and never go in that room again. ambition over. But it was just one of those moments where I was like, oh, this is where I'm meant to accomplish this in some way. Yeah. And I think it's 3D printing small parts to solve pet peeves. All right, what do you got? I love this for you.

1:15:16David Pierce:All right, I have just a series of very funny posts from Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X.

1:15:25Brendan Carr:Nikita Beer, by the way, fully going through it.

1:15:27David Pierce:Fully going through it and posting through it as the head of product at X absolutely should. But just, is just over and over sort of saying the quiet part loud about how disastrous a platform X is. So the first one of these was a little while ago. Evidently, X ran an experiment with 3 % of users and discovered that removing the top 30, I'm quoting directly, removing the top 30 highest paid revenue share accounts from the For You timeline increased both time spent and daily active users on X. So this is to say the people we pay to post on our platform, if we took them out everyone liked our platform more like wild thing to admit out loud also incredibly obviously correct if you've ever spent any time on x in the last like three years if you get rid of all the posts that i see i will like x more correct absolutely yes could not agree more uh and then there's another one this week um x is in its ambition to be the everything app appears to be pushing really hard on video right now that they really want to be a vertical video platform in this for all the same reasons everybody wants to be a vertical video platform right like it just wants to be that thing it's where the ads are it's where the views are whatever um he put out a post in response to a bunch of people saying oh god x is just turning into tiktok because everything is turning into tiktok and he goes no it's not uh and then basically goes on to say yes it precisely is so he says uh he says post containing videos already make up close to half the impressions on x which is a fascinating and b a a decision that they made right like it's

1:17:06Brendan Carr:important to remember incentivize the type of content and correct and also boosted it in the

1:17:10David Pierce:algorithm like there's a reason you see elon musk every time you log into x and it's not because the algorithm thinks you'd like it it's because x decided to do that to you it's very important that you remember this uh but then this this is the one that's my favorite he says many videos from top accounts are simply stolen from other users, sometimes five years after they originally went viral. The next bullet says, our team believes this recycled content has a negative impact on the user experience and the business. You think? All the people we pay to post on X are bad and everyone likes it when they're gone.

1:17:43David Pierce:All the videos are old and stolen. Welcome to X. And he turns this into a pitch for, we're shipping an editor and recorder into X so that you can make original content. And then he says at the end, if you're a creator that does not recycle other people's content, you have the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career to build an audience here. What an unbelievably optimistic end to saying all of the stuff on our platform is trash and it would be better if it was all gone. There's no other takeaway from all this stuff that X is learning, except we have to just get rid of everyone here and start over and then maybe it'll be great.

1:18:17Brendan Carr:The reason I say Nikita Beer is going through it. He's the head of product at X, right? And he is just learning the lessons. Every other head of product at every other social network knew 10 years ago. 10 years ago, everyone knew, oh, people are going to game our algorithm with garbage. Oh, if you just let this run wild, the top, the people who game the algorithm best will rise to the top and people will hate it and they'll leave. It's a slot factory no matter if you have AI or not. Everyone knows it. Everyone has always known it. And Elon thought he was so much smarter than everyone else that he fired all the people who understood how to run the platform.

1:18:58Brendan Carr:And then he was like, just make the algorithm, do whatever thing I'm calling free speech today. And now here we are. And all the people who are Sondax are just getting their brains cooked left and right. And poor Nikita Beer is like, yeah, but our users are going away. Our money is going away. I have to fix it. I'll juice video views for original content, which is the last refuge of the scoundrel when it comes to social media, right? Like I will lie about your video views to get you to post here more. That is some 2016 Facebook shit.

1:19:28David Pierce:Yeah, and it works super well for five minutes and then you get some new thing you're interested in and it all falls apart.

1:19:36Brendan Carr:Well, because at the end of the day, the reason that you've gotten all the people to post videos is so you can put pre-roll ads around it and people hate those. And the advertisers don't want to be around it on X because of the thing that X is.

1:19:49David Pierce:All the five-year-old stolen videos that you're posting.

1:19:53Brendan Carr:Yeah.

1:19:54David Pierce:It's rough out there.

1:19:55Brendan Carr:It's rough. I do feel sort of bad for him because it's just very obvious that he's going through it.

1:20:02David Pierce:Yes.

1:20:03Brendan Carr:But I also don't feel bad at all because it's very obvious exactly what that job is.

1:20:07David Pierce:Yep. And it was the minute he took it. He did post on June 30th, Today Marks One Year at X, I'm proud to report three all-time highs, user engagement, my cortisol levels, my biological age. That's a good tweet.

1:20:18Brendan Carr:That's a good tweet. Man learned how to do a good tweet.

1:20:20David Pierce:That's a great tweet. Kudos to Nina.

1:20:23Brendan Carr:That's very good.

1:20:24David Pierce:All right, you get one more. What's your last one?

1:20:26Brendan Carr:All right, it's like a happy one and a mystery. Okay.

1:20:29David Pierce:It's all wrapped up in one. I love it. We should have more mysteries on the Vergecast. This is a good mystery. Okay.

1:20:35Brendan Carr:Okay. So every time we talk about smart TVs on the show, people are like, I wish I could just buy a dumb TV. And historically, the answer is you can't because the reason TVs are so cheap is they are subsidized by all of the surveillance that is built on TVs. David continues to buy Roku TVs for some mysterious reason. And the reason they cost$10 is because Roku is tracking his every move and foisting advertising around him.

1:20:58David Pierce:The TV on the other side of my computer right now is unplugged and I'm 100 % sure it's listening.

1:21:02Brendan Carr:It's still watching. It's just what it is.

1:21:03David Pierce:Yeah, it's just playing ads.

1:21:05Brendan Carr:And the TV market has gotten all the way down to the end of that road such that you can literally get a free TV with a permanent advertising screen bolted to the bottom of it.

1:21:14David Pierce:Yep, and a lot of people did it.

1:21:16Brendan Carr:And I don't know why. So those are the economics of the TV market. The reason they're cheap is because they're counting the revenue from the advertising to subsides price to the panel. Essentially, this is why you can't buy a dumb TV. And if you want one, you end up buying like a$5 ,000 digital signage display, which are often the same panels, but then they don't look as good, whatever. Anyhow, John Eggins, our TV reviewer this week, reviewed the new Vizio mini LED Quantum, which is a very cheap quantum.tv. He says it looks pretty good. And he discovered that as you set it up, you can just turn it all off.

1:21:51Brendan Carr:Whoa. You can just make it a dumb TV. So as you're going through the setup, you can just say, I don't want this. To turn it off, you can disconnect the OS, basically. You can add it, obviously, an external streaming device. But the HDMI port stay active. and all of the smarts are literally disabled. You can keep the OS from even being active at all.

1:22:13David Pierce:You just nope your way through the whole setup process.

1:22:16Brendan Carr:You just nope your way through the whole setup process and the OS is not active. So it asks you to, Vizio is owned by Walmart. It asks you if you want to have a Walmart account and you just say no and it warns you, you will not be able to manage payments and subscriptions. And it's like, great. Oh no. I don't care at all. And then when you decline another warning, it literally pops up a box that says, whoops. Declining this step means missing out on all of your smart TV features and you just hit okay and that's it. Then the OS is disabled and you've got a dumb TV with enabled HDMI ports and that's it.

1:22:49Brendan Carr:And you can obviously keep it off of Wi-Fi which a lot of people do anyway and then you've got it. So here's the mystery. Did Vizio do this on purpose? There's some set of people that are like, Vizio has gotten in trouble for tracking before and they might have done this on purpose. So John is digging into the mystery of the$400 Vizio dumb TV. But right at this second, you can go buy a$400 Vizio mini-LED quantum.tv and have it be a totally dumb panel.

1:23:19David Pierce:So the Occam's razor explanation here is just that no one in the development process thought to test the flow of what if I just say no to everything? And so they accidentally shipped a thing you can just say no to everything? and

1:23:33Brendan Carr:you can say no to everything on most TVs like when you start up my Sony 895L you can put it in like basic mode sure but like Android is still there right this is off like dumb panel with HDMI inputs huh at least that's what it looks like so did they do that on purpose because of like legal issues did they just forget were they so cheap that they're like yeah just don't turn on the OS yeah they're like we're just

1:23:59David Pierce:happy you're in Walmart you know what I mean

1:24:01Brendan Carr:Anyway, he's digging into it. Interesting. He's digging into it, but that's why it's like a great story because everyone wants a cheap dumb panel. And now you, at least for the time being, you can go to Walmart, you can buy a$400 mini LED Quantum.TV, which is like a reasonably good deal. It's not like an OLED, but like it's pretty good. And it's dumb TV. It's the thing you want. Wow. And it, you know, in an age where everything is getting more expensive, kind of cheap. And then we will solve the mystery of whether or not Vizio knows what they did. Huh. I mean, they do now because the headline's on the site.

1:24:33Brendan Carr:So we'll see if we ruined it for everyone.

1:24:34David Pierce:I mean, John even got a quote from a senior product manager, Mike Wood, at Vizio, who said, essentially, he said, obviously, we believe there's a lot of benefits using the Vizio OS and our smart features, but the choice is up to the user.

1:24:47Brendan Carr:Yeah, but it's like, did they say that? And then they realized that, like, we pointed out that you could turn it off.

1:24:51David Pierce:Right. And then they're going to issue a software update that just turns off the last nope. And then that's it. That is fascinating.

1:24:57Brendan Carr:Anyway, he's following up on it to see what the case is. But today,$400 dumb panel.

1:25:03David Pierce:Imagine a world in which you had to actually make your product worth using in order for people to use it. What a world that would be.

1:25:09Brendan Carr:I think everyone is very addicted to how cheap advertising supported things are. I know. It's very true.

1:25:14David Pierce:I think all the way back to the Netflix conversation, I think you can put that right underneath everything Netflix and every other streaming service is doing right now. You can do an awful lot of stuff. You can just do ads. Yep.

1:25:24Brendan Carr:You can make as many seasons of Love Island for Peacock as you want, David.

1:25:28David Pierce:Thank goodness. All right. We should get out of here. It's nice to see you. It's nice to see you at home again. It's good to be home. I'm never leaving again. I really, really, really feel that.

1:25:39Brendan Carr:Who's on Decoder next week? Decoder next week is really good. It's Jinju Wu, who runs automotive at NVIDIA. And we spent a lot of time just being like, what's up with cars? How do you make them drive themselves? I made him evaluate Tesla full self-driving and whether or not they need LiDAR. You'll not be surprised to hear that NVIDIA thinks AI is the solution.

1:25:59David Pierce:What's NVIDIA's take on CarPlay?

1:26:02Brendan Carr:I think this might be the only episode where we didn't talk about CarPlay. Neil, you've won a job, Patel. It just didn't come up. I mean, I know what he would have said. He's like, NVIDIA believes in open systems and consumers can do whatever they want as long as they're running our chips. There, that's the whole episode. We did that for one hour. That's pretty good. No, it's really good. I'll give you a little preview. They are literally running models in the car, like reasoning models to drive the cars. So the models are constantly talking to themselves. Whoa. Like the car is like, there's a double parked car.

1:26:30Brendan Carr:I should go left. Like it's happening like furiously, like talking it out. I think it's great.

1:26:37David Pierce:That's wild and terrifying. It's very good. In equal measure. I like that. Also, if you haven't yet, the episode you did with Peter Kafka about Comcast and NBCU and like the whole state of media distribution, also very interesting. And kind of right next to all the stuff we were talking about about Netflix. That's a good episode.

1:26:55Brendan Carr:That one has the long disclosure about what's going on with our company. I'm going to go listen to that one.

1:27:00David Pierce:It's like so long. It's like three minutes long. It'll get shorter in a few weeks. I don't know exactly what it'll be, but we'll figure it out. Version history this weekend is Phillips Hue, a late add to this season of version history, but one of the most interesting smart home products and actually like maybe the most successful smart home thing we have yet had. Hue Light's super interesting, fun story. Gen 2 is on it. She actually interviewed the guy who invented the Hugh Lights and comes with lots of fun stories. It's a great episode. It's a good time. And if you want to get all of those.

1:27:35Brendan Carr:Is his name Hugh?

1:27:36David Pierce:No. Hugh Hugh. Is H-U-G-H Hugh. His name is Phillips Hugh. That'd be amazing. If that's your name, get at us. I have lots of questions.

1:27:46Brendan Carr:Or if your name is Hugh Phillips.

1:27:47David Pierce:Hugh Phillips. Also acceptable. We'd love to hear from you. I'm out on Alexa's. I'm in on Hugh Phillips. if you want to get all of our podcasts ad free including all of the ones that we've just mentioned the best thing you can always do is subscribe to The Verge that's how you make Neelai ungovernable that's how you make it so that he can afford to never leave his house ever again

1:28:07Brendan Carr:I truly hate being told what to do

1:28:09David Pierce:how do we get more wood slats for Neelai so that he doesn't have to leave anymore subscribe to The Verge

1:28:13Brendan Carr:now I travel with wood slats

1:28:16David Pierce:theverge.com slash subscribe you get all our newsletters you get all our podcasts ad free lots of other stuff and also we want to hear from you about everything Taylor Swift's MSG wedding, your favorite shows on Netflix, all of the videos that you hate to see on X, your feelings about The View, all of it. Send it all to us. Vergecast at theverge.com is the email. 866-VERGE-11 is the hotline. Send us everything. I think somebody, can someone text this number? Actually text whatever you want to 866-VERGE-11 and tell me if it goes through. Not whatever you want. Well, don't text whatever you want.

1:28:48David Pierce:Instead of calling us with a hotline question, text us with a hotline question. There you go. I think this works, but I need some more testing than just me to see if this works. So text the hotline, say what up. I look forward to hearing from you. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron LeCasio. We will see you next week. Neelai.

1:29:12Brendan Carr:Rock and roll.