Of course Meta thinks gambling is the future

23:05Nilay Patel:But like Google has two platforms where it controls its destiny. And Meta has none. And they've known this forever. And I think this drives Zuckerberg crazy. And if he was the sort of person who would just be happy selling ads and having ludicrous come to his parties, I think he would be the happiest person alive. Because he's just the winner of this moment. But that man wants a platform of his own. I think he sees AI as one opportunity to do that. I think he sees his glasses as another opportunity to do that. And he is content tearing his company to shreds in, like, ferocious ambition to get to a platform of his own.

23:39Nilay Patel:But I think the fact that he's not cool and no one trusts him is always going to stand in his way. Oh, I totally think that's right. I also think if you're Mark Zuckerberg, even in a more sort of calculating headspace, you look at these things and you realize that, OK, we have built what amounts to a perfect business model on top of this gigantic set of attention that we are able to deliver. Right. That because so many people are on Instagram and because so many people are on Facebook, because these are so central to people's online lives, we make infinite money. That is just true. It's also, I think, fragile and it feels more fragile all the time.

24:18That the idea that actually maybe lots of people will pick up and leave your platform, I think, is is a real and be increasingly in evidence. Right. Like Facebook's users are going down for the first time.

24:32Nilay Patel:They would argue with you about that. There's regulatory battles. There's a war going on. They have reasons for those numbers wavering this time around. I'm sure that they do. But if those people go, it doesn't matter. The reason if those people go away, the business goes away. The business relies on I open Instagram 40 times a day, whether it makes me happy or not. It just that that's it. Yeah, it is. It is. It has to be that entrenched behavior or else this beautiful business model you've built on top of it collapses. It has nothing to do. And so what I wonder is like all that stuff that you're saying about like being cool and being culturally relevant, that's also sort of centrally tied up in this company's business in a way that if I'm Mark Zuckerberg causes me to lose a lot of sleep because like the minute Instagram stops being cool and I think Instagram is still cool.

25:22It's not what it once was, but it is. It's a load bearing pillar of the creator economy conversation here. And it is like glitzy and flashy in a way that like even TikTok isn't. Instagram is like...

25:33Nilay Patel:I would say ever since Oracle bought TikTok, something has changed. You can just feel it. That company has lost its aggression in a lot of ways, and it has become more of an infomercial driving you to the TikTok shop. Yep. They have the smallest party here. That's what I'll tell you. Interesting. Before we leave the Facebook thing... I did meet Flava Flav at the TikTok party. I will say that was very cool. Did he have a big clock on? He was wearing a chain. I don't know if it was a big clock. it wasn't like the clock you know what I mean it wasn't okay I just I feel like if I saw Flava Flav and he wasn't wearing the clock I'm not 100 % sure I would know it was Flava Flav do you know what I mean no he was wearing the glasses it was very obvious oh alright okay cool can I tell you one more story about this I tried to get a selfie of Flava Flav at the end so I was like hi whatever I tried to get a selfie and he's like I gotta get out of here like he was just trying he was just trying to get through a hallway at the end of the party and the person I was with I won't say their name but it was just the funniest moment was like Flav and he turned around And he saw that it was still us.

26:29Nilay Patel:He was like, I'm good. You guys like, I'm out of here. So that implies that Flav is Flava Flav's first name, which is a thing I've never considered before. It was just this like desperate call to Flav. And he'd obviously like reacted to it. He's like, someone needs me. And then he was like, you don't. This isn't important at all. That's really good. I'm going to start yelling Flav at people as they walk away from me if I'm not. I really like that. I do want to know what you think about this idea of Facebook doing a sort of fake and then maybe real polymarket clone. I mean, Facebook doesn't have ideas.

27:05Nilay Patel:Meta doesn't have ideas. Famously, Evan Spiegel is the head of product at Meta. Right. He talked about middle managers. And so the idea that there's something, there's some attention mechanic that will keep you engaged. That's Zuck. Famously, when he was buying Instagram, you know, we have emails from all these antitrust cases where his point of view was every generation, there's another engagement mechanic that emerges and it disrupts the old one. And so photo sharing was that mechanic for Facebook. So he needed to buy Instagram. I think they wisely understood that buying TikTok was out of the cards in the middle of all that antitrust litigation and whatever.

27:43Nilay Patel:And they just brought TikTok to Instagram in the form of reels. But they understand, I think Zuck particularly understands that these new engagement mechanics do come and take time away from his apps. And so he's very good at launching fast follows. He's very bad at launching new ideas, which is where I think the AI glasses and the interaction paradigms, the hiring of Alan Dye to build a new interaction UI for the metaglasses, like there's something about that that requires a ton of invention, like user experience invention that meta historically has shown no competence in. I just want to say the implication in what you just said is that the next big time spent mechanic is gambling.

28:24Like straightforwardly, the implication in this decision is it's gambling.

28:27Nilay Patel:But I think he probably sees it. He probably has enough data to see like people move from their DMs on Instagram during a game to a gambling mechanic. Sure, yeah. They go to FanDuel. That's a thing that happens all the time. That's a real thing. Yeah. We have the CEO of Yahoo on Decoder a while back, Jim Lenson, who you know. He's a really smart guy. Yeah. And I was like, Yahoo has private equity ownership. It's like Apollo, they own Caesar's Palace. I was like, this is coming to Yahoo Sports, right? You're going to do gambling and sports and finance. And he was like, no, but we know that once you're done in Yahoo Finance, you go to your stocks app.

29:02Nilay Patel:Once you're done in Yahoo Sports, you go to one of the prediction markets. Like, we see the mechanic. It is the most natural evolution the data would suggest. They haven't done it yet. I'm not sure if they're going to do it. But I think Zuck sees that too, right? It's the night before the Super Bowl and everyone on Instagram and WhatsApp is talking about the odds. Like, you can just slide it in there. You can shove it in the big blue app like everything else. So I understand why he would do it. Do I love that everything is becoming gambling? I think that's pretty bad. Yeah. Yeah. No, it is as ruthlessly correct a decision, I think, as you could make.

29:37But boy, does it feel bad.

29:40Nilay Patel:For Threads. Like Threads has an oddly, I wouldn't say odd. Threads has, how to describe Threads? In its diffuse way, in its sort of hazy way, Threads is like, we should do sports, right? They have like a partnership with the NBA. They're growing in communities or however they define communities. Very natural if you think real-time Twitter-like post app is good for sports, which I tend to think it is, that you would add the gambling mechanic to that. Sure. Very natural, deeply terrifying. Oh, yeah. By the way, just to be clear, I think gambling is bad and I think it's illegal. And my personal view is that when you go to Las Vegas, you should find out how much all of your friends are going to spend on gambling and spend that amount of money on limousines.

30:25Nilay Patel:Because that's the only place in the world where you can just demand a limousine arrive and one shows up. I'm in the south of France. I go outside. I'm like, bring me a limo. And they're like, oh, it's not going to happen for me. But you can do that in Vegas. That's my hot take on gambling. Buy limousines instead. I have been in your presence for this enough to know that you always end up being the one who has the best time, too. Because I'm the one with the biggest limo. It's the Nilay Patel way. Everyone remembers me. No one remembers how much your dumbass lost at Blackjack. Exactly right. All right, we should take a quick break.

30:53And then I do want to talk gadgets because there's an interesting thing happening in gadgets right now. And I want to talk about it. But let's take a break. Support for the show comes from Framer.

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31:53Nilay Patel:That's framer.com slash verge for 30 % off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedgeman. I have definitely already been here. Now, was it left, right, or right, left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later. But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the GEICO app, and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to Geico.

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33:14All right, we're back. There's a bunch of gadget news this week. And my theory of the case is that we are seeing the effects of Ramageddon on the products that we buy and use in the most clean way as possible now. Just to give you a preview. Uh, Microsoft put out new surfaces with less memory. You can now buy an eight gigabyte of Ram Microsoft surface. It's to make it affordable, right? Like it is so expensive to buy Ram that they're giving you less so that you can actually buy a product. Uh, the steam machine is out. I want to talk about the steam machine in a minute. Uh, we talked about it with Sean on, on the show earlier this week, but I'm curious what you think.

33:53The vast majority of the story of this thing has been that it costs$1 ,049, which is a lot more than I think anyone, including Valve hoped. and there's been this big kerfuffle about, is it one RAM stick or two? Like this has been a news story. But the most immediate thing is that as promised, Apple just raised its prices. Tim Cook said this was coming, wanted to preview it for people, but Apple just took its store down, put it back up and everything is more expensive. It's the worst Apple store is down of all time. Truly. Like really, truly, yes. Can I read you some of the prices? Sure. The HomePod mini is now$30 more expensive.

34:31The iPad Air is now$150 more expensive. The iPad Pro is up$200. The MacBook Neo is up$100. The MacBook Air is up$200. The MacBook Pro is up$300. The iMac is up$200. The Mac Studio M4 Max is up$500. The Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra is up$1 ,300. No way. The Vision Pro is up$200. Like meaningful across the board price increase for essentially every Apple product.

34:59Nilay Patel:I would just like to congratulate myself for buying a Mac Studio for no reason earlier this year. I really, we have been on this show all of 2026 being like, if you need a gadget, buy it now. It's only going to get worse. And here we go. I don't even think we're at the top of it. I really don't. And yeah, the MacBook Neo I bought for no reason also seems like a smart purchase now. Yeah. You sell it for more than you bought it for. That's rough. It's working out. but do you agree with my overall thesis here that it feels like we are sort of at the product cycle into the Ramageddon experience where the world in which there is no RAM is starting to settle in to both what gadgets cost and even what they are.

35:45Nilay Patel:Yeah, wasn't there reports this week that like the new nothing phone just won't come out? Yep. Because it was the CMF Phone 2 Pro successor. or they just canceled it because they're like, we can't make it what we want under the current circumstances. Yeah, I think we're just seeing, like Apple's solution is we have price elasticity. People will pay the prices. Right. Like if you're going to buy a Vision Pro, the$200 is not going to deter you because you have conviction in your heart that wearing a headset is a good idea. If you need a Mac Studio, that's probably for work. You're going to absorb the cost.

36:14Nilay Patel:Maybe you'll pass the cost off. Like you can see how they're playing the game, right? The smaller price increases are the consumer products and the bigger ones are the ones that tend to be used for work because you can absorb the cost all kinds of ways. But I think a lot of other companies can't just play the game the way that Apple is playing it. Yeah, Apple has famously huge margins in this industry in a way that not a lot of companies do. I think they swallowed some of our margins to see what would happen. And this Tim Cook line that this isn't tenable was in fact a preview for prices being raised and a signal that their margins would go back up.

36:44Nilay Patel:And if Apple can't get pricing power in this market, like no one can. Totally. So, yeah, I mean, And I think the Steam machine is probably a better example. What is this drama about one stick of RAM versus two? That's the most Steam machine drama you can come up with. It's very good. As I understand it, Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve, gave an interview in which he said there was going to be two 8-gigabyte sticks of RAM in the Steam machine. And in reality, what they're shipping is one 16-gigabyte stick of RAM in the Steam machine. And if you were to say, David, what's the difference? I genuinely could not sit here and tell you.

37:20I'm sure there is one. I am just out of my own technical depth in understanding why it matters, which one of these things you're getting. The implication seems to be that it's going to ship with one stick of RAM and an empty slot. And that I think is sort of fascinating.

37:36Nilay Patel:For a thing that is more PC than not, sure. Yeah. But this has become a bit of a kerfuffle. And again, everything Valve has said indicates that this device is probably three or four hundred dollars more expensive than they wanted it to be and maybe even three or four hundred dollars more expensive than it was when they started making this product and that just over time this is just what the price has become and and at some point they like we've even spec'd it out emma roth on our team did a great job of basically going and building a gaming pc to rival this thing and this is just what it costs like it's rough out there and I think Dom Preston who writes our daily newsletter pulled a comment that I really liked that was basically like this thing is both fairly priced and way too expensive and it's like buddies welcome to the future of gadgets fairly priced and way too expensive is just what we are in and headed towards I'm feeling like the big repairability wave for the past two years is about to pay its dividends interesting what do you mean?

38:34Nilay Patel:I mean people are just going to hold on to things longer and they're going to demand that they last a lot longer as they get more expensive. So it's interesting. It's these past few years, repairability has been, sure about durability, about fighting planned obsolescence. I think now it's going to, we're going to add value for dollar to that mix. You buy something big and expensive, it cannot only last three years. Right? It has to have a much longer shelf life. And we have been in what you would call an era of disposable gadgets for quite a while. And I just, all that repairability work, like a lot of products are more repairable now than they were before.

39:11Nilay Patel:And I'm just hopeful, like maybe all these market forces actually result in a good outcome, which is, okay, it's going to be more expensive. That means it needs to last twice as long. Right. Which means it needs to replace the battery. I didn't really thought about it, but like basically for two decades since smartphones really became mainstream, we have just been on this relentless path of every single part becoming cheaper and more available all the time. To the point where, like, as we've talked about, everybody just put smartphone chips in anything they can find because smartphone chips are so readily available and so cheap that it's like we'll figure out what to do with this later we're just going to put it in your dishwasher and see what happens uh it never really turned until now and it's just the ram i don't think it's the rest of the the supply chain yeah but none of it matters except the right the the ram the ram drives the thing at this point right that you can't do any of it without memory and if you can't get memory sure you're nowhere so but i think truly for the first time it seems like the idea that you can count on this stuff being consistently cheaper and more readily available and higher quality as every generation turns over uh maybe that's going to change this industry even more than we've realized that like right you could you can make the products cheaper if you account for the higher price of the ram and use cheaper components elsewhere will people accept that i don't know but like you can play different games here it just seems like the industry is still doing what you are describing, which is they're pushing every component to the edge all the time instead of being like, how do we actually make a holistic product based on the prices we have in front of us?

40:46Nilay Patel:And maybe this will be the thing that changes it. And that whole supply chain is like, oh, you can't make a cheap nothing phone anymore. Right. And what's the first thing to go is going to be the things that don't have that price elasticity, like cheap phones. If you take a phone that was$200 and you make it$400, that phone ceases to have a reason to exist. And the people who could afford it can't anymore and you just shouldn't make it. And we're going to see a lot of things like that. And all of the fun little gadgety knickknacks that have been coming out, I think are going to start to die because they just don't have that we can raise the price by$200 and get away with it because this is essential to your work life that a couple of companies and not many others do.

41:25Yeah. Like if I'm a Kickstarter-sized startup right now, this has got to be terrifying.

41:34Nilay Patel:Oh, yeah. We did a bunch of tariff coverage with these smaller companies. I feel like we should do some Ramageddon coverage. We should. I've been talking to Eric Michigowski from Pebble about coming back on the show to talk about some of this stuff. And we should do a couple of these. If you're a small hardware vendor, reach out. I would love to hear what's going on. Yeah, get at us for sure. Let me just read. I want to read you just one thing from, this is an interview that Valve did with Gamers Nexus about the Steam machine. Gamers Nexus asked them, were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops?

42:04And this is Pierre, a software developer at Valve. He says, look, there's no contracts. There's nothing. Those guys, they give us a price every month or something and they say, you can buy that many and it's yes or no. And if we say no, then they never talk to us again. This is the state of things. Do you know what this made me think of is I bought a car in 2021, like peak pandemic chaos year. Cars were the most expensive they've ever been. Used cars were going through the roof. We totaled our car and got more money for it than we paid for it used seven years earlier, like insanity. And we wanted a Hyundai Tucson.

42:41We wanted a hybrid. We wanted an SUV. We picked this car. And the people at the dealership put our name on a list of people. And when they got a car, they would start at the top of that list and they would call and they say, I have this car in this color at this price. Do you want it? And they would say yes or no. And if they said no, they would go to the next person on the list and they would just call until somebody said yes. And the first time we got a call, they were like, it's, it's this one, it's this color. It has all the, all these bells and whistles you don't want. Do you want the car?

43:10And, uh, Anna, my wife who was on the phone with them was like, well, we don't really want all these other things. And I was like, I'm going to be real with you. If you don't say yes to this, I'm almost certainly never going to call you again. And so we bought the damn car. And it's like, it was insane. And this is like, this is the world that we live in with computer memory now. That it's like, it is run by this set of companies that have essentially all the power and leverage you could possibly imagine.

43:36Nilay Patel:It's wild. All that power and leverage comes from having a handful of data center and chip vendor clients building data centers. Like, it will come to some sort of conclusion. Yes. I am increasingly pessimistic about how long that's going to take. Oh, yeah. I agree with that. But it will end. I just don't think it's going to end as soon as we would like. And I think it's going to get way messier before it ends. Here's what I want you to imagine before we move on. At some point, like regular non-tech media is going to notice Ramageddon. Just imagine how those headlines are going to go when people are protesting data center prices and more expensive iPhones.

44:13Yep. I mean, that's coming in September, man. Like, can you imagine what this next run of iPhones, potentially including a foldable iPhone, is going to cost in this world? Yeah. Oof. Real quick, one other thing we should talk about. I want to know your thoughts on the Slate truck. Speaking of things with prices that are important, they announced the Slate truck,$24 ,950. Ronnie Mola, Virg Contributor, took it for a ride. Seems to like it. Where do you stand on the Slate truck at this moment in time?

44:41Nilay Patel:I love it. I think it, I mean, when was the last time you saw an affordable product? Right? And I love the fact that they, you know, if you're a car person, you know, people are just wrapping their cars left and right. Like, fine, we're not going to paint it. You can wrap it however you want. I love the modularity. I love the fact that you can turn it in an SUV and the airbags have little connectors so the car knows when you've put the SUV roof on it and engages the airbags and the pillars. Like, I think that's all so neat. Like, that's a lot of engineering. Yeah. Cool. Like, I think all that is great.

45:12Nilay Patel:I think the range is troublesome to people. I think Americans just want to see 300 next to a range estimate. That's fair. But that's maybe not what this truck is for. Like, most of the people who are going to buy this kind of truck to do this, kind of like have a toy or use it for work, they're not traveling hundreds of miles in a go. So I think that's the one question mark I have. And I'm dying to try one out. I think they're just so neat. So I wonder about you specifically, because you are like, I would say you're sort of lightly a truck guy, if that makes sense. I want, I like aspire to be a truck guy.

45:44Nilay Patel:Exactly. I had one, it was great. I think about it every day. Yeah. Does this satisfy the truck guy in you? Because like the line in Ronnie's story that keeps sticking out to me is, that it drives more like a crossover SUV than a pickup, which I think is intended as a compliment, but is not what a lot of like, you know, Ford F-150 truck guys are going to want to hear. But maybe this isn't for them anyway. So for you as like a light truck guy, how does this thing strike you? I mean, do you want to get into a long discussion of body-on-frame construction principles and why the Ford Raptor in particular sells so well because of its suspension that makes it drive like an SUV.

46:23Nilay Patel:Like, the truck market is vast. It's complicated. I don't think that people buying this one are going to give one ounce of thought to ride quality in that way. If it's more forgiving, then I think they will. But usually I have like a regular pickup truck that doesn't have like an independent rear suspension and it bounces over a bump. Like, that's weird. It's a weird feeling. Sure. So I suspect this thing is going to appeal to a lot of people that like the Ford Maverick appeals to. Like, there is a market for smaller pickup trucks. The thing that's going to make or break the slate truck is how much people actually take to customizing it.

46:57Nilay Patel:This entire thing is a bet on you. Literally, the base model is called a blank slate. The whole thing is a bet on actually you want to customize this truck. We are going to limit the options we put in front of you. All the way down to there's no infotainment. Just put your phone in a dash like all of you are doing anyway. And I think that's just incredibly smart. The part about that I don't like is it makes the very cheap price seem sort of fake, right? In the sense that, like, yes,$24 ,950 is slightly more, I think, than Slate wanted this thing to be, in part because the giant tax break that you get for buying a car like this has gone away.

47:32But still, it is, I think, by a wide margin, the cheapest electric car and the cheapest pickup you're going to find pretty much anywhere. But then we're in a Ramageddon world where now I have to go source a bunch of other parts that might be more expensive for a bunch of supply chain and like war in the Middle East reasons. am I potentially signing myself up for a headache that I didn't even know I was getting into? That like the sort of DIY car economy feels a lot scarier right now than it did a couple of years ago.

48:10Nilay Patel:Yeah, I mean, that's the flip side of what I'm saying, right? It's gonna be, it's make or break depending on how much people want to customize their own truck. True, and maybe they want it less than they did. Right, like I really don't think we know. I do think people stare at new cars which are getting increasingly more expensive. Like we're closing in the median price being like$40 ,000 or$50 ,000 for a new car. That's crazy. It's insane. And then you look at those cars and they are just chock full of tech. Like the new Mercedes electric C-Class, like the interior is basically a Korean nightclub.

48:37Nilay Patel:Like there's no other way to describe what is happening in that car. Like what do you want me to do with this? Hold on, I'm going to Google this while you're talking. It's just like, what is going on in this car? Right? The new electric BMWs, the interiors are bananas, and there's a weird trapezoid infotainment screen. No carmaker can just settle on using a circle for a steering wheel anymore. New cars are getting increasingly weird to justify all of that cost. And carmaker's like, well, what will justify the money? Screens. And I don't think that's actually working. Do you know what I mean? I think this will be a test of the market.

49:17Nilay Patel:Would the market prefer a cheaper, planer car for a reasonable amount of money that you can just tweak at will without running into some DRM to Mercedes MBUX nonsense? Did you see the car? It looks crazy in there. It does. It's all so blue and there are so many, yet again, so many screens showing more or less the same thing over and over again. The C-Class is not a big car. No. You're like, if I put my baby in that car, it's like there will be a one-to-one baby-to-screen volume ratio. Yeah, and there's a moonroof that's doing stuff. I got to stop looking at this car. That's a lot. There's a lot going on.

49:59Nilay Patel:That's obviously a luxury car, but it's just trickling down to everything. By the way, I was in an Uber here in France, and it was a BYD SEAL, which was basically a Tesla Model 3 EY competitor. And I asked the guy, the Uber driver, like, do you like this? It's better than Tesla. and he was like, so much better than Tesla. Like he blows Tesla out of the water. Wow. And I was like, what do you like about it? He's like, the fit and finish is better. The range is better. And then he pointed at the screen and he goes, and it has CarPlay. And that was like the last, it was like, check. And he was like - And then you said, I'll get out here.

50:30Nilay Patel:Thank you. I was like, whatever. It was like, we were stuck in traffic. So like, I spent a lot of time talking about this car with him. And I was like, yeah, they're just like basically illegal in the United States. And he's like, in France, they have to protect Citroën and Peugeot and Renault and he made like the French spitting noise to indicate his disgust with the French domestic car manufacturer and he was like Peugeot it was amazing love that and he was like the French government just taxes these cars if I went to China I could buy two for the price that I bought one here in France but everyone is still buying them here because they're better cars and like there's just something to be and obviously the Chinese government is subsidizing them they're part of a huge trade where all this stuff is going on but There's just something to be said for people who want a quality product at a good price.

51:17Nilay Patel:Much remains to be seen with the Slate truck, but up against the feature creep and the tech bloat in all the other new cars, we'll see. Like, I'm happy it exists. Yeah. I have wondered if that is maybe one silver lining of what's about to happen. It's like, is there about to be a big new push in much dumber gadgets? that like, is this how we get dumb TVs back? Because it literally becomes too expensive to make smart TVs. And rather than ship all that crap in your television. That's the most optimistic thing you've ever said. No. This is what I'm saying. It will always be more lucrative to track you until you die.

51:54Yeah, that's true. Even if they have to charge me more for it. That's... Look, somewhere in this hotel

51:59Nilay Patel:is the Fox set can data activation.

52:05Well, on the surveillance economy note, this is a good segue way to the beginning of the lightning round so let's take a break then we're going to come back we'll do lightning round bear back where is daredevil a minor don't miss the return of marvel television's daredevil born again so what's next i've been liberated we're gonna take

52:26Nilay Patel:this city back in an all-new season now streaming only on disney plus they're hunting us it's time when we started hunting them. I can work with them. This should be tons of fun. Marvel Television's Daredevil, Born Again, now streaming only on Disney+. Heat up your 4th of July at the Home Depot with our wide variety of grills under$300 and make every gathering one to remember. Give your outdoor space a glow up, whatever your budget is, with savings on seasonal plants starting at$5. With the grill fired up and your backyard set to perfection, you'll be able to invite friends and family over to kick off the party.

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53:47All right, we're back. It's time now for the lightning round. Beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I don't even have to ask. I just, I just, I give up at this point. I'm not, he just does it every week. We're still here. It's Brendan Carr as a dummy.

54:04Nilay Patel:Hell yeah!

54:27Nilay Patel:It's still going! Now it's merch. That rolled. Oh, man, that was good. That rolled. Play that at your can party, me. That's the real theme song for America 250 right there. Thank you to Dave Gertner who sent that to us. The revolutionary spirit in that was, it's real. That was awesome. Now with merch. That was very good. All right, Neelai, what do you do this week? What did he do this week? But the one that we should pay attention to is this was the week that the public comment period on whether or not the view on ABC is a bona fide news program opened. And the license renewal for the various ABC stations owned by Disney that he pulled the licenses early up for renewal to punish Disney for being too woke or whatever word salad exists in Brendan's corrupt little mind.

55:24Nilay Patel:So this is that week. So ABC stations are running ads, encouraging their viewers to leave comments at the FCC's website saying that The View is a bona fide news program. It's kind of a wild ad. We have it. Do you want to run it? Yeah, let's just watch this. I haven't actually seen this. I had this idea for a show. Different women, different points of view. The View has welcomed your favorite guests and covered the issues you care about for nearly 30 years. Now, the FCC wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show. Viewers, use your voice. Scan this QR code you have until July 6th. So a lot of ideas packed in there.

56:05Nilay Patel:It's kind of giving like pharmaceutical ads. It is. Opening with Barber and Walters is a choice. And ending with, we believe the viewers of The View will scan this QR code. And he's a comment at the FCC. Just a lot of ideas in there. Who knows if it will work. Brendan will tell you that none of this is true. This is just a good faith re-examination of whether The View is a bona fide news program and needs to abide by the equal time rule. All this is to punish Disney. So you recall all this kicked off in earnest after it was that James Tallarico appeared on The View. He's obviously a congressional candidate in Texas.

56:39Nilay Patel:And news programs do not have to give equal time. Entertainment programs do because that's like free advertising. So historically, the only program that has ever had to think about the equal time rule is Saturday Night Live because you cannot make the case that that is a news show. And they're very good at it. And, you know, when Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live, they gave President Trump airtime in a NASCAR race like the next weekend or something. But The View, it's right on the line. And it has operated under a bona fide news exemption for years and years and years. Like they've gotten it.

57:09Nilay Patel:And Carr, because he's a dummy and he wants to control speech in America, has said, well, what if I pull it? What if I reexamine this? and what if I chill your speech by not allowing you to have candidates on your news program or limit your speech overall? And so it's up for a review. He pulled the licenses of ABC stations early for renewal, which is totally unprecedented. And so now ABC is mounting this campaign in return to get its viewers to say, no, this is the news, right? You do need to say protect this program because we, the consumers of the view, want it to stay the way it is, which is fundamentally crazy for any media property in America to have to do in response to pressure from the government.

57:48Nilay Patel:And I'm just going to keep saying this over and over again. I say it almost every time we do this segment now. Brendan is going after broadcast because that is the power he has. Right. Right. So ABC has antennas in cities and it broadcasts over the radio waves. And the federal government has a lot of say over radio waves because radio waves are a scarce public resource and we do need to allocate them well. Right. You don't want the TV broadcast interfering with the cell broadcast interfering with what first responder radio transmissions. So that's why we have spectrum policy and that's the FCC's job.

58:18Nilay Patel:And for whatever reason, we have said, okay, the broadcasters have to use their spectrum in the public interest. And there's a lot of reasons for that. When they were the only game in town, there were a lot of good reasons for that. All of that is nonsense now. Most people experience the view on YouTube and as Instagram clips. The government having any instinct about what to do with the view or what candidates can appear on there is nonsensical when its primary distribution is internet distribution that Carr has no control over. And all of this is just a test balloon for can I control Instagram?

58:53Nilay Patel:Can I regulate speech on the internet? And he will find a way to do it if you start falling down the slippery slope because the public interest standard of spectrum use for broadcast television is as far removed from the experience of everyday Americans as, like, the telegraph. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. Part of the idea, in theory, there is, like, if he can scare the view out of existence, he solves this Instagram problem without needing to regulate Instagram, right? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Don Lemon will just go to YouTube. You know, like, that's the thing that is happening, right?

59:28But, I mean, like, they got Colbert fired in a very, like, straightforward way. Like, there's some evidence that this playbook works.

59:34Nilay Patel:They did, but Colbert, you don't think Colbert is going to have a more lucrative second act on one of these platforms? Oh, no, I think Colbert is going to be fine. He's going to be here at Cannes showing creator supplements like everybody else. And like, maybe that will break his heart, but the money will be there for him. Sure. This is what I mean. Like that ecosystem is richer. It is populated by right-wing voices. No one bodies up to Facebook and is like, you're not equally balanced. It's like, no, actually, this is pretty balanced to one side. The crazy uncles of your town make themselves known on Facebook every single day.

1:00:04Nilay Patel:So I think it's less about I need to solve the supply of the view on Instagram and more if I can get control over broadcast, if I can overcome the First Amendment using these high and mighty rules about equal time and fairness, I can bring that to the internet. And there's lots of ways you could bring that to the internet. Mobile internet, for example, runs on public radio spectrum. Sure. What are you going to do with that? Right? But it's just right there for Brendan that he wins these battles here. You know he will turn his attention to the broader internet. And I just remind everybody, YouTube is owned by a defense contractor.

1:00:43Nilay Patel:There's a lot of ways for a unified Trump administration to make life hard for a lot of these companies. Yeah. YouTube is owned by a defense contractor is a very funny way to think about a lot of things. Twitch is owned by a defense contractor. Yeah. Like, there's a lot of ways for things. Xbox is owned by a defense contractor. Again, I'm just pointing this out over and over again. Like, if the Trump administration thesis of this is one government that we control tip-to-tail holds, yeah, getting the view kicked off the air or punishing them or yanking their bona fide news exception on broadcasts.

1:01:17Nilay Patel:Like, it's broadcast spectrum policy. There's a reason we historically have not talked about it in the show. But all of this is a trial balloon for what can we do? how can we punish the other companies that control the media that actually matters? Anyway, that's Brendan. I'm in France, man. I can't believe I had to think about Brendan Carr in France. Here are the land of the free. Liberté, fraternité, égalité. Brendan, if you want to come on the show and defend your actions, you corrupt tyrant of a man, I welcome you. We can do it in France. That's been Brendan Carr as a Dummy, America's favorite podcast in the podcast.

1:01:58it's beautiful we're also going to do an ai version of you rapping the whole guns and ships hamilton song about brendan carr oh god and that's going to

1:02:08Nilay Patel:go that's what the ai is for we're gonna we're kevin o 'leary we're that big data center finally a reason that people can get behind love it um i have a lightning round item that dovetails actually sort of perfectly with everything you just talked about, which is this movie Artificial. Do you know about this movie? I don't. So it's, imagine the social network, but it's about Sam Altman and open AI. Is essentially, I think was like part of the pitch and kind of the vibe. The movie's called Artificial. It stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman. It's directed by Luca Guadagnino, who's a very good director.

1:02:43This movie has been in the works, I think for about a year, is very near production, being finished, Amazon was going to run the movie and had said that it was going to put it in theaters to basically give it an Oscar qualifying theatrical run. Like this movie is supposed to be a big deal. Andrew Garfield is a very good actor. The cast is really impressive, all this stuff. And then just sort of out of nowhere, Amazon dropped the movie this week, of course. Yeah. Again, this is like owned by a defense contractor, right? And I think the the story seems to be essentially that uh this this script uh was originally like a mix of kind of brutal but also like funny satire it's written by simon rich who like wrote for snl for a very long time is very funny person and uh it would have been sort of needly in a way i think would be my my guess about the first read of this script um but it definitely did not paint sam altman as like a good person and open ai is like a good company wanting to make the world a better place.

1:03:43It's like very much the sort of duplicitous schemer Sam Altman that a lot of people have come to know recently. Then apparently what happened is Luca Guadagnino, the director, made the movie darker and darker and sort of more anti-AI as time went on, finished the movie, screened it for Mike Hopkins, who runs the studio at Amazon, who immediately pulled the plug. And Amazon has not, as far as I can tell, publicly given a reason for this, except to say, basically, we don't think we're the right distributor for this. We want somebody else to have it. But I think you can draw the lines pretty easily, right?

1:04:17Like Amazon has lots of deals with OpenAI and other AI companies. All of these companies are tied up together. OpenAI has been making these like weird circular deals with everybody for a very long time. And you can see why if you want to A, impress the Trump administration, which looks favorably generally on people like Sam Altman and on people like Elon Musk and others who are apparently not depicted super well in this movie and you want to keep your very lucrative ai deals going you would dump this movie so they they dump this movie and then apparently start shopping it around and one by one it appears other studios are starting to pass wow uh netflix has apparently passed a24 has passed uh warner brothers one of its i think sub studios has passed there are other distributors who are looking at picking it up but it's starting to seem like this movie might just kind of die.

1:05:11And I, the only like, sure, maybe it's just a horrible movie that nobody wants. I don't think that's the most likely answer as to why nobody wants to distribute this movie.

1:05:20Nilay Patel:A24 just took a big Google investment. Exactly. To make AI movies, which a lot of people are real pissed about. Yeah. Like, it's just, you can just see it. It's a very naked way of looking at the fact that it kind of is in no one's business interest to say mean things about AI right now. Which is funny because if you're reading the cultural room, this is the movie you should release. Yes, I don't understand that at all. Like, there's a lot of money to be made in releasing the movie that says AI is bad. And it's not like there's been a shortage of them. Yeah, but is that more money than the money that you risk by pissing off the AI people?

1:05:58That's the equation. There's gotta be some indie studio

1:06:02Nilay Patel:or indie distributor that's gonna pick this up. So apparently Neon and Mubi are apparently the front runners for it, which are like perfect. They are the ones who should release a movie like this. And I hope it hits big for them and I hope everything goes great. But I think like this, all the things you're talking about, about like these companies are owned by defense contractors and the government and this other part of the economy and the business world has leverage over these things in ways that don't necessarily seem obvious but are still very real. This is like a perfect example of that to me.

1:06:31Nilay Patel:There should be more than five companies. Vote Patel 28. that's my entire presidential platform that's really good there should be more than five companies yeah it's good stuff alright what's your next lightning round item I actually know what it is because I assigned this one to you but do you want to talk about it yes we finally published our review of the Kaleidoscape Strato E John Higgins did it we have Kaleidoscape streamers he has got a setup I've got a setup this is the$10 ,000 movie streaming server player setup that we both have at our houses John is actually a good TV reviewer. I just like cosplay as a TV reviewer, so he did the review.

1:07:08Nilay Patel:The fight here is against Blu-ray. It is Blu-ray quality. They do do all of their own encoding. They take the master files from the studios and they make their own encodes, so they can exceed Blu-ray quality in some cases. Blu-rays are dying, which is really sad. So this is the high-quality movie playback system. Like, there isn't another one except for Sony Bravia Core, which only exists on Sony televisions and can only play Sony movies. I love it, you know? That's an ecosystem that I really am fond of. It's vastly cheaper than the Kaleidoscape because it just arrives on Sony televisions. But you need a big setup to see it.

1:07:45Nilay Patel:This is John's real point here. You have an average TV and an average soundbar. None of this money is worth it. If you have a really nice TV and a really nice audio system, particularly if you have a nice audio system, you will get a lot out of this setup. And that was my main takeaway, was that it's really hard to show people the visual fidelity increase. Like in Pacific Rim, you can see it blocks less. The color red is really hard to compress and it does a better job at the color red across the board. These are very fine details. Like it is fast action scenes with a lot of moving elements. It does a way better job there.

1:08:20Nilay Patel:Everything else is like, oh, it's definitely crisper. I'm going to leave now. Like that's how people react to it. on the audio side, blows everything out of the water. Like if you have a good audio setup, it is uncompressed audio. It's louder. The dynamic range is way wider. So the quiet parts are quieter and the loud parts are even louder. Everything is crisper. Like it just sounds better than the overly compressed streaming audio that we've been listening to for so long that it like knocks people's socks off. So it's very expensive. You do not need to buy the full$10 ,000 client server setup.

1:08:58Nilay Patel:You can get the Strato ePlayer alone, which I think is three grand. This is one of those things that's never supposed to be on sale, but you can find them on sale. Like people will sell them to you for cheaper. You do end up having to buy or rent all the movies and shows. It's not as convenient as everything else, but for that set of movies that you want to have the full experience in, yeah, I think it's worth it, especially as Blu-ray kind of declines, which it's slowly been doing in meaningful ways year after year. A lot of people are going to tell me that we should just review a Plex server next to this.

1:09:30Nilay Patel:We have plans. We have plans to cover what I will call the community. Blu-ray, by the way, turned 20 this week. That's nuts. Happy 20th anniversary of Blu-ray. That's such a weird phenomenon. Man, that makes me feel a lot. I remember being at the CES edit with the Engadget team when there was a Blu-ray booth and an HD DVD booth and it was going to be the kickoff of the format war and the night before CES, HDV failed. It collapsed and he took the booth down before CES opened. Whoa. Now I just feel like an old guy. I feel like that's a version history episode waiting to happen. We're going to have to do that at some point.

1:10:06Nilay Patel:That's a good one. But yeah, literally the night before, it was like the breaking news was like Toshiba just caved. They were like, yeah, we're out. Whoa. That's kind of wild, actually. That's pretty cool. I have been Blu-ray shopping this week because of the anniversary and then realized I literally don't own a Blu-ray. So now I'm also shopping for a Blu-ray player. It's been a fascinating week. $3 ,000 Strato eBay. Although you have like a garbage TV, like very proudly have a garbage TV. Well, what I was going to say is like, I have been slowly starting the fight with my wife to put a soundbar in the living room.

1:10:39Wow. Like this is the person with whom I had to fight my way up to a 55 inch television.

1:10:46Nilay Patel:Yeah. Anna began our relationship with a 22 inch computer monitor as her TV. and I think would still be perfectly happy in that place. So I'm like, I'm slowly fighting battles and I've decided soundbar is the next one. That's a good one. I'm really looking forward to it. The problem is to get the most out of the soundbar, you gotta stick a subwoofer somewhere in that room too and that is the hardest fight of all. Yeah, that's true. Because you can't really hide that either. I can't like stick that in a cabinet. That's just a big box. You gotta let the kids paint it or something. You're doomed.

1:11:15Yeah, we're gonna have to come back to that one. All right, I have one more lightning round item for you. Yeah. which is did you see this Bob Iger sort of exit interview that he did with the Financial Times really interesting I think Bob Iger is is sort of a weird story he was the CEO of Disney for a very long time left once kind of did aggressive sabotage on the person that he picked to succeed him during the pandemic Bob Chapek came back as if he was like the white knight who like also killed his predecessor. I don't know. It was a very weird thing. Now he's left for real, he says. Did a really interesting interview with the Financial Times.

1:11:54We'll get in the show notes. The piece about it and sort of the state of Disney is really interesting. But there are a couple of things that he mentions in it that I just found really interesting and pertinent to our purposes. One is the Twitter deal, which he confirmed this was sort of known at the time that Disney was one of the potential shooters for Twitter. They wanted Twitter

1:12:13Nilay Patel:and they thought Twitter was toxic. Yeah. The phrase Iger used was, quote, a horrible distraction, which I think was a super good call in retrospect. He also said they wanted to buy James Bond, which obviously didn't work out. That's now owned by Amazon. But the one I really want to talk about, and I think this is so funny, is Bob Iger made it sound like there was work underway to have Disney merge with Apple. Sure. Sort of. This is the thing that I really like. So Iger describes the potential merger as truly transformational, right? This is like a thing people have talked about before that Apple should buy Disney.

1:12:54They have a lot of like values that they talk about that are similar. You can see how it might work. But then Iger also says in the end, the conversations, quote, never went anywhere. And that, quote, Apple didn't show that much interest. So I'm like, Bob, did this almost happen? Or did you just call? Yeah, you sent a series of emails.

1:13:13Nilay Patel:This is the equivalent of Valiwagger being like, Flav!

1:13:19Yeah, that's exactly right. It just makes me laugh. So Iger ends up on the Apple board. They're like, these companies have been tied up together for a very long time. But I just really like the idea that we almost merged, by which he means I asked if you wanted to buy me, and you never responded to my email.

1:13:35Nilay Patel:There was that period, sort of, I wouldn't say late Jobs era, because Jobs had no interest in buying anything, really. But in the beginning of the Tim Cook era, where I was like, they've got to spend money. Well, it was after the Beats thing, too. There was this sense of like, maybe Apple is on a real acquisition tear now and it's just going to go eat the industry alive because it has$200 billion in cash. Yeah, they've got to buy something. Everyone wanted them to buy like Hyundai. Like, do you remember? Like, every company got floated. Yeah. And in the end - When Netflix was going to be it for a minute.

1:14:05Like, there was a lot out there. And I think in the end, actually,

1:14:09Nilay Patel:Apple got so burned by the Beats acquisition that they never wanted to do anything of that scale again. Like the Beat Acquisition, sure, it got them Apple Music and all this stuff, but it also brought them Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre's Apple employees with no titles and like a massive culture clash that I think they're still fighting through. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, I just thought that was interesting. And also I continue to think the Disney-Apple combination is a strange and fascinating thing that clearly will never happen. I mean, Jobs was the largest Disney shareholder for a time. so you can see why he sold Pixar to Disney you can float a bunch of stuff but like yeah there's you had no shot Bob yeah I'll say it can I was gossiping with a media person here and we were talking about Iger and they're like every one of these big company CEOs is now effectively an accountant and the only difference with Bob Iger is he has any amount of emotional intelligence whatsoever like he can communicate like I like Avengers movies in a way that doesn't make him sound like a robot program to try to make a human connection.

1:15:13Nilay Patel:And then he's like, we'll see if the new guy can do it because he might just be an accountant too. Yeah. Like, do you remember that trend was like a couple months ago where all the burger CEOs were eating their burgers and every single one of them was just like weird and bad. And it was like, have you ever eaten a burger before? That was actually the context in which this came up. Was it really? They are. Them all being accountants now is a perfect explanation. Yeah. That's really funny. All right, what's your next lightning round? What do I got? What do I got? Hold on. Oh, speaking of KN, I want to end here because I think this is a preview of some stuff that's coming.

1:15:51Nilay Patel:The CEO of People, Inc., Neil Vogel, has been doing the rounds here. So People, Inc. owns, obviously, People. They used to be called Dot-Meredith. They own, like, About.com. Like, this is a big roll-up of digital media companies, and they changed their name to People, Inc. to take, you know, just use the name of the famous magazines. To not be called Dot-Meredith. Yeah. You know how it goes. Good call. Yeah. So he's on this terror and you can hear him on all the media podcasts and all this stuff. And he's like, in the age of AI, brands stand for something. And I like largely agree with him on a lot of these things.

1:16:17Nilay Patel:But he was on the Axios yacht, giving an interview to Axios because you do interviews in yachts here at Cannes. What a sentence. And he said this line, which I think is really interesting. He's like, we partnered with Cloudflare and we blocked every single AI crawler and scraper. We just blocked them all. Like Cloudflare did us a solid. We just blocked them all. and all of them started calling us because they need our data because we make new information and now we have deals. Like you turned off the spigot and we got all the deals. And he says the one we could not turn off was Google because Google uses the same crawler for search as it does for AI training.

1:16:53Nilay Patel:He called it an abusive market power and he said, I wish we could work with them constructively but we are probably headed for confrontation which means the antitrust litigation about Google using the search crawler to train AI is like, we are on the precipice of that antitrust litigation. Because once the one media company CEO says it, all the rest of them get real brave and they start saying it too. And you can just see it's coming. That's the tip of the iceberg, I think. That's interesting. And I think, I mean, A, if you want to talk about sort of abusing monopoly power, that seems like a pretty straightforward, like you can't leave our search engine, so we're going to force you to play nice with our AI is like, I am not an antitrust lawyer, but boy, does that seem like a fairly straight line.

1:17:42But also this is a thing that has been brewing, right? And we've been talking a lot about this and these companies, like you had Nick Thompson, the CEO of The Atlantic on Decoder like two years ago now, maybe? A long time ago, talking about kind of this same dynamic of like, well, we have to figure out how to set a market and protect ourselves while also we think participating in this business and technology that we think is interesting and important. And that has just come for everybody, that now we are in this place where like, he's right, PeopleLink is huge. They have a lot of brands. We've actually been seeing this.

1:18:16This is some like weird inside baseball stuff, but like our real-time traffic analysis has recently shown a bunch of weird spikes that make it very obvious.

1:18:26Nilay Patel:The weirdest spikes in the world. Yeah. And like kind of out of nowhere, all of a sudden, like our traffic just like multiplies. And it's very obvious that what this is, is this is AI bots crawling our site. Like, I just don't know what else it could possibly be at this moment in time. And so like this, this thing is not going away anytime soon. And in fact, it's getting worse and it's changing the traffic mix of the internet for lots of people. Like Cloudflare has talked about that for the first time, it's seeing more bot traffic than human traffic. Like this thing is, is here now. and I think People Inc.

1:18:56Nilay Patel:is an interesting place to fight it. The thing that it's going to make everyone do is it will force, either way everyone gets deals from the AI companies and it becomes very lucrative for us to put meaningful human journalism in a database for AI companies to reconstitute as AI summaries. Maybe that's the future of everything. The other thing that might happen is that everything gets paywalled even harder because it costs money to serve traffic at scale and if you're serving a bunch of bot traffic and there's literally nothing on the other end of it for you, you're just going to turn it off. Right?

1:19:27Nilay Patel:And I think you're going to see a bunch of smaller companies head that way. The people inks of the world are going to body up and do antitrust litigation against, like, that's what they're going to do. But him saying it at Cannes on a stage, you can see all the other media executives are like, huh, is it time that we say that too? We've been waiting. You know, like, it's a herd mentality. and this is, I think, in particular with Google, you know, the deal has been obvious. You allow the Google search crawler to hit your site at scale, and in return, it delivers you traffic. Like, search traffic arrives, and you can monetize however you want.

1:20:03Nilay Patel:You, like, now we're also doing AI, and Gemini is just telling you the answers to stuff. Like, you get literally nothing in return. And I think any judge or jury is going to be like, yeah, that's a new deal. No one's signed up for this. Google is going to have a lot of responses to that, I'm sure. But that's, it does feel like, pray I don't change the deal further, you know, like that's the mode this industry is in. Yeah. That said, it's the south of France. You would not, just looking at the amount of money sloshing around here, you would not feel like any of these people are in any kind of distress whatsoever.

1:20:36Well, I mean, that's why it's the people inks of the world who have to go fight this fight because they're in a, their business model is much more actively threatened by this at this moment in time. Oh, without question. yeah that fight I think is only just beginning and boy are we going to cover it here on the show we should get out of here you've got fancy people things to do I'm sure today Mumford and all of his sons I assume are just right outside of your door

1:21:01Nilay Patel:get out of here Mumford you do need to go but before you go what's on Decoder next week what's coming up it's our best episode of the year it's the 4th of July oh yeah it's our grill episode and I will say this I shot the intro at a grill That I never thought would have gone this long. It's five years. Can I, so this year, it's the CEO of Weber Blackstone. So when we first made our list of like, what grill CEO should we have as a joke? You obviously put Weber at the top, right? And at the time, Weber was too fancy and they wouldn't do it. And they were like, what are you, a tech website? No, go away.

1:21:35Nilay Patel:And so our first ever grill company was Blackstone, the griddle company, which was like a TikTok sensation. Oh, sure. And not only are they a TikTok sensation, they were enough of a rocket ship that they acquired Weber. So it's the same guy. It's Roger Dolly, the CEO of Blackstone, but he's now the CEO of Weber because he just bought it. Wait, I assume, I heard Weber Blackstone and I assumed Weber bought Blackstone. You're telling me Blackstone bought Weber? They put the more famous name first. Hell yeah. Yeah, he's just like, yeah, like I won and then I bought you. And now he has like the, a conversation is hilarious because he's a really good dude.

1:22:08Nilay Patel:I really like him a lot. He's very humble, but he's like, yeah, I had to fix this culture that had broken to the point where I showed up and just bought it. Wait, you've backed your way into like an accidentally perfect Decoder episode. It is the funniest Decoder episode of all time. Like we talk about grilling, not at all. Like he had to put his merger through FTC antitrust review. Wow. So like, I was like, so, cause I wanted him on the show last year when the deal went down, but he was an antitrust review. So he couldn't come on. That's awesome. It's just like the easily the funniest. We even talked about Ramageddon.

1:22:43Nilay Patel:I was like, is the iGrill platform affected by the RAM shortage? And he was like, no, that's not really a problem. It's like, I got other fish to fry here. Yes, like a perfect Dakota episode. It's a guy who literally, as a startup founder, came to like massive prominence in the pandemic because of TikTok, bought the biggest name in the space. That's awesome. That's pretty good. I'm very excited for that. Happy 4th of July, everyone. That's good stuff. Also, you're on Virgin History this coming weekend. We're doing the Nest episode. where we get deep in our feelings about thermostats. That was really fun.

1:23:17Go subscribe to the Virgin History YouTube channel, the podcast feed, whatever. It's a really good episode. I think one of my favorites we've done in a while. I think you'll all enjoy it. For now, that's it for The Verge Cast. Next week's a short week, but you and I are going to be back, I think next Thursday before we head out for a while. But we got a lot of stuff coming up next week. It's going to be a fun one. Until then, remember to subscribe to The Verge for all of our podcasts ad-free, including this one. You get all of our exclusive newsletters. you get all of our coverage of grills and everything else.

1:23:43I don't know. The Verge.com slash subscribe. That's where you go to subscribe. Also send us email, VergeCast at the Verge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE-11. All of your questions, all of your thoughts and feelings about technology and the movie artificial and everything else. The Verge Cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show was produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk, and Aaron Lacasio. We will see you next week, Eli.

1:24:08Nilay Patel:Can we end on the song instead? can we can we just play brendan car as a dummy instead because that's the real rock and roll yes

1:24:32Nilay Patel:that's really good

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