Reddit vs. Reddit: the latest on the fight for the platform

26:45I wonder if I brought up in the same meeting Jay was talking about, I brought up the example of eBay, which has weathered many, many storms. eBay famously just had some executives arrested for having a prominent critic of eBay stalked. This is a real thing that has gone down to eBay world. You just don't hear about it because eBay and they've just turned into a thing on the Internet that happens. They like mailed him a pig's head, I think. It was a pig mask, Alex, a bloody pig mask. Sorry. Sorry. But it's just eBay. It's just like it's in the background of the Internet. It's not important. We don't talk about it the way that we used to talk about Facebook or Google or whatever.

27:21We used to. We used to talk about Yahoo that way. AOL continues to just putter along for some reason. Like, is this the moment that Reddit goes down that path instead of being on the path it was on? That's the open question to me. Right. Your users hate you so much, but they don't really have anywhere else to go. Are we sure Reddit's not already in that position? No. I think what the protests have made clear is that Reddit is like the glue of the internet. That when stuff is happening and it's not like Twitter stuff, politics stuff, it's Reddit that creates most of the content and the vibrancy.

27:57That's why people append the word Reddit to search. From a community perspective, absolutely. Reddit is incredibly important. And I think it's only become more so as people have run away from Facebook and Twitter. Like Reddit has benefited from a lot of that. And Reddit as a company has figured out how to make more money over the last couple of years. I just found an article I was looking for that basically Reddit, as of a year or so ago, Reddit and Pinterest were about the same size. And Pinterest was making about three times as much money as Reddit. just to put some of the numbers in perspective.

28:30And Pinterest is famously under monetized and not doing a great job. You know, they've offered us the CEO of Pinterest for code. And I'm going to be like, what are you doing? What happens there? That's my plan. You have a mall. Why is it not making more money? And like Pinterest is not doing a good job and it makes three times as much money as Reddit. But I think to me, like the eBay thing is like, eBay is still chugging along. A lot of people buy and sell stuff on eBay, but eBay is not sort of vibrant in the same way, which I guess is your point. But to me, it's like Reddit has always been kind of a third rate social media company.

29:01And it seems less and less likely all the time that it's going to be more than a third rate social media company. Like Reddit consolidated forums, all the forums that existed in the world. They still are out there. But Reddit became the new kind of hub of forums, an easy place to search. And I think because the majority of people don't actually use forums, Reddit's been able to like skate by and be quiet. And now they're having what's essentially it sounds like a labor protest in many regards and certainly looks like one. It looks like if you look at what's happening there and the messaging and the actions and compare that to what's happening with the strike in Hollywood, it's very similar.

29:36And now they're just saying, oh, actually, like the money matters. You guys don't matter. You're you're the forums. Like we keep you up for niceties, but like we got to make money at the end of the day and we're going to do that. And if some of you leave, that's fine. I think it was very telling that he consistently was speaking up about how all of the people who are very vocal are keeping the majority of people quiet and not allowing them to speak up and not allowing them to have access to all of their beloved Reddits. Classic management tactic, Alex. Right. It's just like, OK, yeah, you're just trying to get everybody mad at the protesters.

30:13When you're the one who started it, you jacked up the API prices. Again, I just – the thing that strikes me about that is the only capitalists on the verge staff. It's fine. Check up the prices. That's a business negotiation. Great. Doing it with a hammer is like not great. Yeah. I think that's what's confusing – what's kind of baffled me here is like he's turned this into something that very much mimics a labor protest when it never had to be something that mimics a labor protest. Right. And I think that is like the third rail of Reddit. And that's really where my eBay comparison came from, right?

30:50Or Etsy. Like there was a time when Etsy sellers being mad at Etsy had like cultural cachet. Like it would break. We've covered moments like that. And now it's just on the marketplace. It looks more like eBay than not, right? It lost its definition. That's I think the danger for Reddit is like these actions. People need to care about you a lot to be this mad at you. yeah once you break that then you might as well just be anything else and i think the people on reddit for a long time felt like they were loved back by the company even when it was messy there's been many fights between the users and the mods and the mods and the admins but jay like steve is like an og redditor like i mean he is the og redditor that's what i'm saying like he should be one of the people who understands this community the best and i wonder if part of the reason this community feels so betrayed is because it's not like they hired some like, you know, corporate raider to come in and extract some money like they didn't make a private equity deal.

31:50It's like it's the guy they believed in who built this thing that they that they trust who is now the one upending it on them. And I wonder if that's part of the reason this feels bad to people. Steve said something to me to start the interview before I asked any questions. He talked about how my favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they're really these living organisms created by their citizens. And I think Reddit is very much the same. He said, we're a platform and a tech company on one hand, but on the other, it's a living organism, this democratic living organism created by its users.

32:23And I would agree with that sentiment. He clearly understands what the platform should be. He just also doesn't really care for them right now. Well, he doesn't care for a specific segment. And that's, look, the comparison there is Mark Zuckerberg, right? Who's like, I don't know, I'm going to do some stuff that everyone hates. Get over it. Famously with News Feed. But they've come back to this. Facebook in particular has come back to that moment over and over and over again. We rolled out News Feed. Everyone was mad at us. To members of Congress. Like, look, we rolled out News Feed. Everyone's mad at us.

32:56And they got over it and they realized they loved it anyway. And like, that's like part of the founding myth of Facebook is that moment. And I think Steve Huffman is the founder of Reddit. He understands his platform. He understands his company. And I think he's running a lot of that playbook or feeling a lot of that vibe. And I'm not sure it's the same moment or the same problem or even the same political skills as Mark Zuckerberg. I disagree. I think he's running Elon Musk's playbook of like, I'm coming in. I'm going to do what I'm going to do. Suck it up. I'm not sure that I see a lot of daylight between the Elon Musk Twitter playbook than Mark Zuckerberg.

33:34I'm the god king of Facebook playbook and the Steve Huffman, I'm the founder, CEO of Reddit playbook. That's fair. But one of them was like actively successful and happened almost 20 years ago. And the other one happened last year and is like in flux. And I think there's a direct line from how he treated that community and was totally fine with people leaving and what's happening here. Where, again, we're seeing him be like, yeah, I don't care if you leave. The people who are going to stay are going to stay because they love our community. I guess what I'm saying is if you believe that Reddit is a city, the thing that you are is the mayor of that city, right?

34:12You're not the dictator of that city. And that's the turn where you are also a politician. And what Zuckerberg was actually good at historically is being the politician at the top of Facebook. Loved, hated, admired, feared, whatever. He knows he has to play that role. and he does it to whatever amount of success you believe he does it. He, he knows he has to do it and he does it. And he has Adam Masseri doing it for Instagram, right? That's why Instagram changes a button from green to blue. Adam's out making a video being like, we made the button blue. Here's all the reasons we made the blue. Like, and everyone yells at him and he's like, if you don't like blue, maybe next week we'll change it, but probably not.

34:51Right? Like there's an amount of communication and presence for these leaders. Elon, whatever you think of what's going on with Elon, you cannot deny his constant presence. Yeah, he's out there shaking, kissing every baby on the forehead. No, he's not kissing the babies. He's telling the babies they're stupid. He's like, why aren't you making me money, baby? Make more money, baby. Jay, before we let you go, can I ask you a Reddit drama question? I've been trying to figure out what is going on with all of these subreddits who are claiming that they're being forced open and mods are being removed.

35:26And there's like all this intra-subreddit drama. What is going on? Can you explain this to me? This is like my favorite sub-drama, and I can't figure out what's going on. So maybe on Tuesday, earlier this week, there were claims that subreddits that were private in protest had been forcibly reopened by the Reddit admins because reasons. And the ones I'm aware of were claimed were advice animals and Tumblr, which my understanding is those are pretty big subreddits. But it's been hard to track who says what about which person doing which thing. And it has also been very confusing to me. Reddit, to its credit, said in the fact sheet today, we are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally opening communities.

36:10So Reddit says they're not doing the thing that some Reddit users say they're doing. Because the conspiracy theories on both of those have been rampant. People saying like, Steve is editing people's answers to his questions. Like it's been, it's been out of control the last few days. Steve has edited in the past. He's been busted doing that actually. But I think I would, I would suspect he's not doing that in this case, but he's also people have not been very happy with him recently. He's living his life. To be fair, if I had unilateral control of Reddit, I would probably do a lot of dumb things too.

36:44I want you to know that I edit every comment on theverge.com every single day. There's a reason every comment ends with Neil is so smart. A little macro I've got going, a text expander script. Now we know. Yeah. I always wonder. At the end of the day, it's my meditation. We thought it was just our community. Yeah, it turns out. Jay has been doing absolutely killer work on this story. Go read all the stuff. Read the stream. I suspect it's going to keep going until June 30th. So we've got much more to come. Thanks, Jay. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back with more BridgeCast.

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39:53All right, we're back. Thank you to Jay. He has been killing it on the Reddit reporting this week, along with Mia. It's just been amazing to watch. In many ways, this is what The Verge was made for, along with the story that I'm going to get into in the light near end. We've hit our peak. What did computers make us do? Is it the question The Verge was here to answer? Weird Reddit drama is one answer, and then something else. But this segment is just titled Kranz has feelings. I have a lot of feelings. So you wrote two stories this week. One of them actually connects to Decoder this week. It's about private equity.

40:28Another one is about the Vision Pro and the TV. actually Kranz both you and David had John Gruber dunks this week which I think is a record for us did we? that's exciting yeah so Kranz wrote the Apple Vision Pro might be a TV but it won't replace the TV and John is a friend so it's fine this is what like blogging is meant to be yeah and he was like this shoe might not be a shoe but it'll replace shoes it's like a great tweet from John and then David you wrote all phones should be flip phones and John wrote no they shouldn't effectively he's like what are you talking about so good this is what you want actually john and i've been talking about this thing like he is blogging a lot more lately uh-huh and we rebuilt our entire site to allow us to blog more and like the death of twitter and the end of the social web and all this reddit so it's all like mixing and matching the same thing but it has resulted in us all writing up more and like having conversations across our sites yeah the internet should have more fights on their own websites yes with other it's that's great i love it it's way more fun than Twitter.

41:28It's exactly what I want. But that means, Kranz, you are now compelled to defend your Apple Vision Pro take. And then, David, I want you to defend your flip phone take. Okay, we can go back to that. Let's start with the Vision Pro. I think we continue to just consider what happened to us a couple weeks ago at WWDC. Have you noticed, by the way, that there has been this run of people over the last couple of days kind of re-evaluating? It's like everybody does that re-review six months later. This is the like eight days after I experienced the Vision Pro, how do I feel? And it's just a lot of people like processing emotions about gadgets, which is very funny.

42:07It's been a really interesting week of like re-coverage of that 30 minutes people spent wearing the Vision Pro. I am this close to mandating that every story we write about the Vision Pro have a screenshot of Apple's video, just a frame grab of Apple's video, where the father is taking a photo of his kids playing. And so they're playing and he's next to them in the headset. And I'm just like, we should put this in every story we write about this product. Constantly remind people. Just bring people back to the essential nature of wearing this around other people. Which is kind of Kranz's point, right?

42:43Which is Kranz's point. Yeah, it leads right into it, which is this is not really what TVs are for. Talk about it. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. So basically, we had a big fight in Slack, largely because Gruber had this great piece about how he was still thinking about this thing and how great it was as a TV and how they were going to sell a lot of units because it is like a TV. And I was like, OK, that's true. I agree. I agree with him. It's like a TV. I agree with David. It's like a TV. But it's not going to actually replace the TV because TVs are communal by nature, even though most of us probably don't watch TV with other people all the time.

43:16They're still relatively communal things. And this thing is very isolating and expensive and TVs are cheap. And there's a lot of conversations about how, oh, this thing is going to be really incredible because you're going to be able to watch NBA games from courtside. And like, we can't even get NBA games in 4K. We're going to be getting 3D NBA courtside. Like, let's come on, guys. So it really was like thinking about how we've seen TV and stuff transform over the last couple of years and how that media is slow to respond. And the same thing is going to happen with this product, even though we do have this commitment from Disney and everything.

43:53This feels a lot more like 3D TV than it does 4K TV. And even 4K TV has been really struggled to adopt and get content out there. Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this piece, Alex, since you and Richard and like half our staff were fighting about this in Slack. and the thing that i've come around to is i kind of think that this eyesight feature ends up being like culturally and technologically the single most important thing about the vision pro because like one of the things that happens at least in my life all the time is i sit on the couch and my wife sits next to me on the couch and we both look at our phones and we don't talk to each other we're both doing our own thing but we're in the same space and there's something to that and i think part of what feels so isolating to me about some of these headsets is like if i were to sit there and put on my quest 2 and start playing a game like i have in a very real way gone somewhere else right in the sense that like i can hear her less i can't see her as well she can't see me as well she doesn't know what i'm doing that's just like the dynamic changes even if i'm sitting next to you with my headset on versus i'm sitting next to you looking at my phone and eyesight in particular this feature where you can see someone's eyes through the headset when they're doing something and we don't know exactly how this is going to work with content can i watch a movie and have eyesight on i genuinely don't i don't know that we know the answer to that i think the answer is no okay i think eyesight only happens when you are talking to someone outside the headset but even that is messy right because one of the things we got in the demo is this idea that like i can be watching a movie and you start talking to me and you sort of fade in like do my eyes fade in as that is happening yeah i think this is why we weren't demoed it i don't think they figured all those moments out yet that's fair because the basics of it are very simple they take a picture of your eyes and they show them on a screen like i don't think i said it's gonna fix the fundamental isolation problem though because the fundamental isolation problem is you're sitting next to your wife you're both let's in this world you both have spent thirty five hundred dollars minimum on these headsets you're both sitting on your couch next to each other wearing them you can look and you can talk to each other but you know if you're looking at something on your phone you're like this is stupid you can like show it you can just look at it and be like honey look how stupid this is and hold it up to her face in this you can't do that classic phone interaction when i think about people who love each other it's like look how stupid this is but you can't really interact in that same way that you do when you're just like sitting on the couch watching tv and on your phone or something and i think that the fact that you can't interact that way that isolation is going to restrict use cases a little more.

46:28Well, spin that out all the way to the ideal hardware. I keep coming back to the idea that the Vision Pro, as it was announced, is a simulator of what Apple really wants to do. Which is AR glasses. Which is AR glasses. Okay, so now we're both wearing AR glasses. There isn't a dumb battery pack in our pockets. We've solved enormous technical challenges. No virtual eyeballs on front of... Right, right. We're both just wearing a pair of Ray-Bans. and we're sitting next to each other and something dumb happens and I need to show it to you. Like, there's still a problem there. Like, the friction, I agree with you, is like psychological and emotional friction.

47:02I mean, practically, I'm looking at a virtual object on my display and I want to show it to you on your display. And I've got to get two different computers to agree on that. Right? Hey, look at this. It's no longer me holding you a pile of atoms. is no longer me showing you a pile of atoms. It's me trying to send you a bunch of bits. And that is just, it's just harder. Like historically it's harder. I don't know. Like, are we going to get to a point where we've solved all of the technical problems to make AR glasses, but like airdrop isn't good enough that I can just like nod my head towards you and you see the thing that I'm looking at.

47:43Like that doesn't sound to me like the hardest problem of all of these to solve. Here's what I'm going to guarantee without a doubt that nod your head to airdrop a thing, 95 % successful. How long did it take bump? Yeah, exactly. One decade before you could wave your phones at each other. And even like, fine. I'm not saying it won't work or it won't mostly work. I'm saying that the problem of there's something on my screen that I want to put on your screen has bedeviled computers since the history of computers. And like, mostly it works fine, but it's never the same as we're both just looking at a screen together and it's even harder when you're trying to sync audio and video across those screens at extremely high bit rates in 3d with surround sound like what like isn't it just easier to to use our eyes and ears the way that we have them you know this makes me think of when i believe it was when our netflix show was coming out, you know, Disclosure of the Verge made a show with Netflix.

48:49We all got on like Netflix's sharing platform to watch something together. Do you guys remember this? And as it turned out, anyone who joined this thing could control it. So every single person that joins just instinctively pressed play to make it play. But actually what they did was pause it. So we got like a hundred people playing and pausing this thing. And so maybe you're right. Maybe we're never going to be good at this. Well, and Apple has SharePlay. Like they have begun to build the infrastructure they need to solve these problems. I'm not saying they're not working on it. I'm not saying they won't be 95 % successful.

49:25I'm just saying even if you spin it out to it's just a pair of wireframe Steve Jobs glasses, you have solved some of the most challenging physics and engineering problems in the history of computing. It's still like, all right, I got to Bluetooth some shit to you. Yeah. Like there's just something there that, okay, we've put up an expensive screen in the room and we're going to perceive it together. It will just forever be superior. Yeah. A TV is always going to be superior for that reason, right? Like you're always just going to be able to turn on a TV. It's a solved technology. It's way, way, way, way, way cheaper.

50:06And I think that's really crucial when we talk about this. We talk about like – because essentially I'm the ideal user for the Vision Pro, right? I live alone. I love TV. I love content consumption. Yeah. Having 105 inch 4K beautiful display in my home at all times, always in front of my eyeballs, sounds like the best thing in the world. But it also sounds like the worst thing in the world. It sounds just deeply unappealing. It's like it's expensive. And it is that isolation factor is there. And for me personally, I can't I wouldn't be able to get over the fact that like I'm just sitting in my house in a huge like not huge sitting in a fairly large apartment by myself, completely isolated.

50:50This is the Steve Jobs dream, a huge house devoid of furniture. And somehow there's just Macintoshes everywhere. Just everywhere. Have you seen that? There's a photo. Sean Lennon, John Lennon's kid got a Mac in the 80s for his ninth birthday. and there's a photo of Steve Jobs on the ground with Andy Warhol and he's like showing him how to use this nine-year-old's Mac. This is like what everybody wants, right? Now just imagine that Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol were wearing headsets at a nine-year-old's birthday party and he was like, look at my headset. Yeah. It's dumb. I think it's kind of stupid.

51:28And somebody after I wrote that piece immediately hit me up and was like, thank you. I don't think this is going to replace it because every time I use my husband's headset, I have to then wipe off like my face that's on the headset. And there's always like that, that intimate kind of grossness that headsets demand. Oh, dude, I use somebody else's laptop and I'm like, get this garbage away from me. Most people have natural scrolling turned on. Disaster. And now you're going to put it on your face. Yeah. Which is much more sensitive. By the way, people have asked us this. As far as I can tell, there's no profiles on the Vision Pro.

52:03So it's just one person. It's one person. And there were hints that there would be a guest mode, but there would be no user accounts, which seems like an enormous miss for the first version of this product. Really? I think it's the opposite. This is a win for people who want a reason to not give this to their children. I think this is a really good thing for Apple to launch on the third version of this. I'm not at all surprised this doesn't have family sharing stuff on it yet. I mean, if they want everybody to have a headset because everybody's going to be living in this AR future where you're wearing face computers all the time, then, yeah, you don't necessarily want profiles because face computers are just harder to share with other people naturally.

52:44So it's like, no, we discourage you. Everyone go spend$3 ,500. Get your entire family out. Yeah. Tell your mom to buy an iPhone, right? Like, that's the Tim Cook line. But you know, this makes me think of is the there's been this sort of long philosophical debate in tech about like, is the future that you sort of have the one screen that rules them all, right? Whether it's like your iPhone that the world revolves around, or in this case, like a headset that the world revolves around, or is the future that like everything around you is connected and has a display and it's and what you have is like a wearable or whatever that sort of imbues that with your preferences and information.

53:21And so like I can walk up to any screen on earth and just like tap it with my thumb and it will know that it's me and become my computer until I walk away. Like that's one vision of the future. The Vision Pro is the exact opposite of that vision, right? Where now the thing I have on my face controls literally the world around me, which I find fascinating. And Apple has always kind of been on the side of like your device rules the world as opposed to like every device can be your device. Like the Chrome OS vision is the every device can be your device, right? You just log in with your username and password to Google and boom, you have a Chromebook.

53:55Any Chromebook is your Chromebook. And it's really interesting to see the Vision Pro be like the very end of that, right? Where it's like you don't have a TV that you have information on. The information lives here. There's nothing else in the world that you need. I don't think there's an answer for that. I think that's going to be the persistent problem because the two things are so fundamentally at odds and privacy is sitting right there in the middle, right? Like your security and privacy are right there. And I think that's always going to be up to an individual and how much of that they want to give away.

54:23Some people are going to be like, yeah, I'm happy to live in this world. I don't want anyone to ever know what I'm watching. This sounds great. And a lot of people like myself are going to be like, no, I want some privacy. And then there are other people who are going to be like, yeah, I like leave every window open, lights blazing, look in my house kind of deal. And those people are making millions in subscription fees. I love them. Wait, so it's just like at the core of that, the problems are still the same. It's really interesting. If you drill into it, right, you're in your living room. You still need to put sensors and everything.

54:57You still need to put networking chips and everything. You still need to put control logic and everything. It's just kind of like where does the interface live? So I look at my thermostat, and the thermostat could just be a computer with a display and an interface and a whole bunch of stuff I got to learn. or the vision pro could say you're looking at a place where a thermostat should be we'll put up some thermostat controls but there still needs to be a bunch of stuff on the other end of that experience that controls the furnace and knows how hot it is in the house you look at an area where a tv should be you still have to like have streaming services and i think you run into the other situation and this is coming again from someone who lives by themselves has a whole home kitted out as a smart home people still come over to my house they like like you still have people over that's your first mistake yeah that's the first beyond the walls of the z-wave alliance you shall not pass but people visit and then if they want to do things like like one of my friends i didn't know this i had forgotten i set it up so anytime i took the dog for a walk after after dark it would turn all the lights off to save electricity i forgot that and she was like okay i'll stay in your house watching tv while you go walk your dog and then like a minute later she's just like texting me being like i'm in complete darkness and everything's off what do i do and i think the vision pro is like exacerbates that problem right somebody comes over to your house and they're like can we watch tv like what kind of no but they have their own vision pro theoretically they have their own vision pro but realistically no like like that level of adoption is so far down the line.

56:36It took us how many decades to like adopt, fully adopt TV? Right. And then the privacy problems are even worse. Right. So again, even if you solve it, it's just a pair of glasses. Everybody's got their glasses on. And you got to come to your house and connect to your network and get control of your devices and blah, blah. And it's like, oh, it's actually a little bit better for the computers to be like physically air gapped a little bit. Yeah. That's not the right word, but you know what I mean? It's like you can't actually control this unless you're touching it is a meaningful layer of security.

57:05Yeah. Yeah. You don't want the guy who's coming over to install your fridge to be like, oh, yeah, I'm just going to go adjust the thermostat. Like, you watch him do that in real life, you'd be like, dude, what are you doing? But with the Vision Pro, he could just be like, like, reaching out. Or maybe, or we live in, like, a horrible world of, like, sharing passwords for augmented reality devices. Whoa. It's coming. It's coming in the... They're going to have to solve the bump problem, right? They're going to have to figure out how they airdrop it. Again, if you're the sort of analyst out there who writes Apple fanfic, there are some of them.

57:37What you're doing is you're saying, OK, Apple's the beginnings of all of these technology solutions are getting made. Right. So the contact sharing with Bump, SharePlay, this, that, all these little branded Apple features will coalesce into an amazing AR experience. Yeah. Maybe, but right now that is fan fiction and that's fine. Like fan fiction has led to a number of things in this society. Fifty Shades of Grey. It started off as fan fiction. Maybe one day your Apple fan fiction will turn into reality. I can't. I can't predict the future, but I know that it's not now and I know that those problems are real.

58:21Here's the thing I really want to get into and I don't know the answer to this. I've been noodling on it. I'm just going to put out a call for submissions. Okay. I keep talking about this formula for things that you wear, where it's like the amount of time it's on your body versus the amount of time you fiddle with it has to be lower than the amount of value it gives you. And I think the Vision Pro is going to make it clear that it has to be like the most utility ever. Yeah. Right? Like a watch, a pair of glasses on your face is extremely useful, right? Like if I didn't wear my glasses, I couldn't see.

58:58So I want them on my face all the time and I will deal with cleaning them and generally being worried about the zombie apocalypse. Like if there's a zombie apocalypse, I'm done. We're boned. I'm like, these glasses are the most important things in the world. I will hold both of your hands and lead you to safety. Don't worry. It'll be fine. It's like, find the 2020s and we're going to build our society around them. But like, they're really useful. So you deal with the amount of care you have to put into them. my smartwatch Apple has generally increased the amount of utility and I deal with charging it every night the Vision Pro is like it lasts for two hours in a battery you have to wear it on your face all the time to get any value out of it at all and it delivers something and I just feel like we should write out that equation I've done it in all kinds of different ways I'm open to submissions like let us know like write to us and let us know what you think that equation is because I think as we come closer to reviewing the Vision Pro and the next quest and all this stuff, it will truly help us figure out if these things are going to be the future or if they're just a weird side quest.

1:00:02Yeah, I think, A, vergecast at theverge.com. Send us an email. Send us a formula. We will find the best ones, and we will give you credit for it. It's something like time on body times fiddliness equals value. You have to add the dillweed factor in there, too. It makes me like times how stupid do you look in this? Yeah. But I think this goes back to me for like the more I think about it, the more Apple's like fundamental whiff on the Vision Pro was how was the storytelling. And it's the guy at the birthday party. It's the woman doing laundry. It's like Mark Zuckerberg had that good zinger where he was like, all the pictures of this are someone sitting alone on their couch.

1:00:42Like, I think that's true. And I think what's going to be true about the Vision Pro is that it's going to be very cool for very specific episodic things, right? Like Chris Grant said this on the Vergecast a while ago, like VR is great for things you do for a short period of time and then you take the headset off. And I think if Apple had said that or like shown us versions of that where like here are things you can do in this that are cool, this is not a lifestyle product yet. and Apple would never say that, but they could have told stories about it differently because it's not a lifestyle product and it's a really long way from being a lifestyle product.

1:01:16But the idea that I would put this on, do something in it for a couple of hours and then take it off and go about being like a regular person in the real world again, I think is much more compelling than this idea of like, you are going to wear this headset while you do laundry and go to birthday parties for the rest of your life. But this is what I mean about it's a simulator. They showed us what they want it to be and they built like a hardware simulator of what it can be. Right. But they still told everybody that this is what it was. Like, I think the big problem with Apple and the messaging, and I think you're totally right, David, it is, they did bad storytelling here.

1:01:49The story was, we have a vision of the future. Here's your first taste of it. And instead they're like, here is the future. Now you can have it. And that's just wrong. We did it already. Yeah. Like, no, you didn't. To be fair, and I have criticized the Apple Watch launch more than anyone, I think, I would point out that they announced the digital crown as an input device on par with multi-touch and the mouse and the click wheel. But what they didn't show you is they didn't show you pictures of somebody sitting there at their kid's birthday party, like using the phone as a watch as a viewfinder.

1:02:21Right. But they showed us supermodels running through Africa with a first generation Apple watch, which we got and it was completely foolish. I run through Africa every day with my watch. they showed us that thing where people were sending heartbeats to each other which by the way I accidentally did to Joanna Stern the other day she's like what are you doing she's like are you sending me your heartbeat right now yeah that's like that's way too intimate that's like I wouldn't do that to anybody I didn't even know it was still there I just pushed the wrong button in iMessage anyhow the point I'm making is even with the Apple Watch they did the thing that Apple is prone to doing right now which is they sort of remix the greatest hits of their product launches.

1:03:02They say one more thing. They told you about a new input method. They tell you that everything else is garbage. It's a script, right? And they can kind of mad libs the announcement. And I think here the jump is so vast that that script kind of let them down in a way that the Apple Watch followed the script and computers had to get slightly better for the Apple Watch to start working. And then they totally rebooted the interface. uh it was a gen 3 or gen 4 series 3 or series 4 and you know then they figured out how to turn the screen on all the time and it got faster and like it just caught up to where they were going always this is like what are they going to catch up to well and also the apple watch was not as huge like revisionists might say it was successful it was not hugely successful when it first started there was a lot of criticism of it they like that was that script creaking under the load and having to wait three, four years before the watch really worked.

1:03:59Like my first watch I called my great regret. But what I'm saying is like the path from the beginning to the end of the fourth year. It was clear. Right. Even when they totally rebooted the interface, it was like, all right, we threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall. We figured out what sticks. We're going to hide all this other stuff. Right. We're going to simplify this down. This is like, here's a bunch of spaghetti at the wall. No one can tell you. It was fairly obvious, I think, with the watch that notifications and health features were of the things that were the most interesting. It was never obvious that sending your heartbeat to people would be the thing that would sell Apple Watches, but they needed to fill out the idea of the product.

1:04:34We'll just see, like, your point with your piece, Alex, is what they have showed most compellingly is it's a TV. Yeah. Right. And all the other stuff is like, eh, you got a headset on your face. But ultimately, this is a very, very nice TV. Well, so if you do the math, their math on this is a nice TV and it might be worth it is not so off. A nice big OLED TV is going to cost you more than$2 ,000. So 65-inch. But this is much bigger than that, right? Yeah, yeah. So a 75-inch, 85-inch OLED TV, depending on the sales and the time of the year and whether it's a Super Bowl, who knows? It's going to cost you more than$2 ,000.

1:05:11Right. A nice Atmos sound system to pair with it will probably cost you around$1 ,000. And that's a cheap one. That's like a refurbished one with a receiver and speaker wires. Right. If you go like the Sonos, right? It's going to cost you way more than$1 ,500. Just the ARC alone is$700. Okay, we got there. We got to the price of a Vision Pro. But then you have a Vision Pro. You don't have a TV and a nice sound system that you can plug your console into. Well, and I think that's a different person necessarily. Because I think what this is for is for those people who don't want to have that one big home theater system, right?

1:05:48Like those people are going to go do that all the time. Hey, guys, I love you. You're my people. You're wonderful. I know they're here and I want to acknowledge them. Yeah. You guys all, you two, you and them all read the same publications on your iPad together. But that's one kind of person. I think this felt like it was more intended for everybody else. And everybody else is going to spend$600 on a TCL, maybe$100 on a Vizio soundbar after they keep saying it sucks and they go to theverge.com and Google best soundbar. And they're like, oh, okay, I'll get a Vizio. And so they're going to spend like a grand.

1:06:26How do you convince them to go spend$3 ,500? TV manufacturers have been struggling with this for a while now. They all keep pushing the biggest, fanciest TVs, but the TVs that actually sell, that actually move, are the cheap TVs. I think that price gap is going to be a problem for Apple. And it'll definitely come down in price, right? Like this is$3 ,500, but there's going to eventually be a Vision next to Pro, and it'll probably be like$1 ,500 or something. And you're still going to be struggling with that. OK, I could spend this and have a really good set for me personally. Or I could have something that is much more flexible and can do a lot more.

1:07:03And I think that's where they're going to struggle. But they don't have to. They're not trying to displace the TV market right now. Right. But that's what they're going to have to compete with because that's what they've made. They've made a competitor to the TV. Right. I think we're both saying the same thing, which is in the end, no one is going to cross shop this with TVs. Yeah. But in the end, the value proposition is look at this TV. So that's a there's a disconnect there that somehow some way will get resolved. And I think probably what resolves it is time and determination from Apple to make this a product that works.

1:07:38Yeah. And I think the stakes for it would be so much lower if it were five hundred dollars. Right. If this is like a thing you could buy that was sort of purely additive to your TV and you watched it when it was just you. But when it wasn't just you, you put it down and you watch TV with whoever else is in the room. But at$3 ,500, the value prop is just so different that I think Apple is going to lose that fight for a while here. Yeah, a$500 one, every single college dorm would be filled with them. It would be the most popular thing. There's a long way to go between this product as it exists and$500.

1:08:11Oh, yeah, we're not getting there any time to do. Just the displays alone. This thing costs$3 ,500 because it has to. All right, we should take a break. Like, Kranz, you also wrote about the Instant Pot and what happened with private equity. And I just want to point out. They're bankrupt. They got purchased by a big private equity firm that did some private equity stuff and now they're bankrupt. Yep. This was a pretty simple business. They made Instant Pots and then once a year they sold Instant Pots when everyone's parents bought them an Instant Pot. Like, it wasn't a complicated business. The connection I want to make is Kranz wrote a piece about how the search for endless growth tanked this company, which happens over and over again.

1:08:49And then just by coincidence, this week's Decoder is Brendan Ballew, who's a federal prosecutor, who wrote a book called Plunder about how private equity is destroying American markets. And you should just go listen to it and then consider the Instant Pot. It's a very good episode. As everyone knows, I hate Decoder and refuse to listen to it. But it's a good episode of Decoder. We'll allow it. I have never been more surprised. Like, soon after I was on Decoder, everyone's like, good job. I'm like, here's a federal prosecutor who wrote a wonky book about antitrust and private equity. And everyone's like, this is the episode.

1:09:20Okay. I know we've cultivated an audience of nerds. And even to me, sometimes it's surprising what people are nerdy about. Wait, before we take a break, I just have one question, which is, Alex, were you as sad as you seemed writing this story about the Instant Pot? You seem very sad about the Instant Pot. I was just bummed. I'm always bummed when private equity kills something that's cool. Stop doing that, private equity. But they won't because they love profit. I do love my Instant Pot. The bank isn't taking it away. Kicking down our doors, reclaiming all our Instant Pots. This is why you should buy things that don't rely on cloud services, because the bank can take that away.

1:09:57That's true. Always on my mind. All right. We got to take a break. We'll come back. We had a little lightning round, and we'll wrap this up. We'll be right back.

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1:12:27All right, we're back. Slightening round time. am david has picked one for me and in retaliation i've picked two more for myself but david why don't you begin yeah i really played myself on this one uh the good news is mine's very quick so we can leave two or three hours for your several mine is that instagram added a feature to its uh status update thing in the app that will now show what song you're listening to and i just want to give real genuine kudos to the instagram team and meta as a whole for doing its damnedest to bring back the away message yep i have been saying the away message and status things need to come back for years i believe in it with my whole heart i wish this were like an open standard that worked everywhere and i could like change my slack status it would also change my instagram status like that'd be rad but this rules this is aim away messages coming back via instagram um and i just i just want to applaud instagram i think they do a lot of bonkers things and it's mostly a bad app but notes and the whole status feature is very good so congratulations instagram well they're doing that and they added broadcast to instagram is quickly turning into the everything app yes eat it twitter like you can just see where it's going it's kind of neat but it's also boy you open instagram and a lot of things are happening i think instagram is really quickly heading down a path of being like the everything social app because like facebook is an entertainment platform slash dying whatsapp is only ever going to make money by helping you chat with businesses so they're leaning really hard into like shopping they're doing some social stuff but instagram is like especially if the their twitter competitor threads sort of attaches to instagram in an interesting useful way like this becomes the place you share stuff with your friends that is what they're going for in a really big way and i think it's gonna be really interesting to watch yeah all right my first one is one david assigned who's actually really cool taylor swift exists her fans exist the ticketing catastrophe happened that led to a series of hearings listings live nation slash ticket master along with a bunch of other ticketing companies and airbnb so live nation seat geek dice and airbnb it's so funny to me that airbnb is part of this well you know why but they have announced that they will no longer have hidden fees they're going to disclose the total price while you're shopping and this is like a classic right a threat of regulation like taylor swift fans were so upset that the government was like what if we regulate these companies and they're like what if we just do what you want don't regulate us And Airbnb is in the mix because people are so pissed about cleaning fees.

1:14:58So Airbnb also sees the writing on the wall. And so all these companies are going to be more transparent about their pricing, which is wholly a good thing. I think it might be better if there was more actual competition in the space. But I will take whatever crumbs of transparent pricing we can get. Yeah, they're going to take this to be a huge victory. But what this actually is is just they know that they can charge whatever they want. So instead of hiding the fees, they're going to tell you about the fees. But if you want to go see Taylor Swift's Heirs tour, you are still going to pay the dumb, enormous, monopoly-riddled fees because you have to.

1:15:33So we have not solved our problem, but we've solved this much of the problem. Let me read you. I mean, it's called the Breakup Ticketmaster Coalition. I don't think this quote is going to be surprising. Here's what the Breakup Ticketmaster Coalition said about this announcement. Live Nation Ticketmaster's announcement today is a half-hearted attempt to ward off a lubing DOJ investigation into addressing the real issue, its monopoly power over live events. Yeah. That's pretty much what the Breakout Ticketmaster Coalition would say. Also, do you actually want the fees broken out? Every time the fees get broken out, I just get really annoyed about the fees.

1:16:09Because then I'm like, why am I paying all these fees? Yeah. I would rather not know it all and just be like, why is that? But then you pay them. Yeah, I still have to pay it either way. But one way I can be like, you know what? Maybe this flight really did cost$1 ,000. And I don't need to know about the$100 gas tax fee that got passed on to me that Delta could have paid for themselves. They do that to make you mad at the government. Yeah, they're trying to make me. But instead, it just makes me mad at the company. And I just want to not be mad. Besides the price itself. I have bad news for you about the current state of American markets.

1:16:43You're going to be mad. All right, Kranz, what's your lightning round? Something I'm not mad about is Steam looks nice. It's looked pretty nice, versions of it. But you know how sometimes you're using Steam and you go to a tab and you're like, oh my god, what's happened here? They've started to make it a little more cohesive. Everything's running together. There's a new Notes app, which is a lot of fun. And Sean Hollister absolutely adores it. And I cannot wait to start using it on my Steam Deck. And it's just like, it's a nice thing. Something I'm not mad at. There you go. Yeah, something I didn't want to rage at.

1:17:20I want to do something positive. I regret to inform you there's a$100 gas tax. God damn it. For the next team update. Okay, I got two more, but they'll be really fast. One, Twitter, I got a work copyright law on to Overcast somehow. Twitter is being sued for$250 million by the Music Publishers of America because they just don't pay any licensing fees for music. It's a hilarious, hilarious problem for Twitter to be in. this is like the most solved problem for the major platforms these are just deals they all can take because the companies know that music on these platforms is a lucrative marketing channel for them whoops well and the my favorite part of this is the other things that twitter decided not to pay for this week which were like it's google cloud bill apparently uh and that's become a whole thing um they're getting evicted from an office in colorado because they stopped paying rent like twitter's new biz dev strategy is just like don't pay any of our bills and see what happens and it's a it's a move it is a move yeah it certainly worked for some people i would just say that the don't pay the music industry move is not one that traditionally works out well for anyone fair including the music metallica's yeah they're just gonna come collect on you they want their money and they're gonna get it uh okay and here's my last one i want to end on a high note This is the most important software update of all time.

1:18:43The Meter Smart Meat Thermometer has gotten a software update. M-E-A-T-E-R. That's very important. It's very good. It's owned by Traeger. This was a big deal when they acquired it last year. It now supports the Dynamic Island in live activities in iOS. What does it do? You're smoking a brisket. You just glance at your phone. It'll tell you the internal and the ambient temperature right there. And maybe I actually have very little success getting this work. It will calculate the time remaining. Our computer is good at math. Who knows? You got to wrap it in brown paper. It's all good. Yeah. My favorite thing about this is this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard.

1:19:20And also for sure the best use of the dynamic island that anyone has discovered since the dynamic island. Think about the amount of engineering that has had to occur for this to happen. Right? The meter people had to make a thermometer with a wireless chip in it that could survive the heat of a grill and work. And actually it has two different thermometers in it. That's just a feat of like miniaturization in packaging. All in and of itself. Apple had to make the iPhone. Can you imagine if the meat guys had been working on the Vision Pro? Yeah. I imagine it every day. Can you imagine you look at your grill and it just shows you a bunch of grill information?

1:20:05This is the future. This is why you want the glasses. That's what you want. Yeah. My wife says that whenever I'm operating the smoker, she's like, the only words you say to me are temperatures. She's like, how are you? And I'm like, 207. She's like, what have you done? I don't care. And then the other day when we had the wildfire smoke and we were running the air purifiers in the house, she's like, I finally understand. Because I just want to tell you what number of the air purifiers are at all day. And then she started calling them the smoke machines, which was a perfect name for an air-peer fire.

1:20:35That's about right, yeah. A wildfire smoke event. Anyhow, those need to get updated for the Dynamic Island as well. I just want to tell you, the Meter Smart Thermometer has been updated to support the Dynamic Island on the iPhone is the sentence that The Verge was created to publish. A number of concepts in that sentence that normal people don't give a shit about is so high. But you, my people, you're here for me. Also, I want to thank Dave Lee for tipping me into that story because that's why we have readers. They know you. All right. That's it. Thanks to you, our nerds, for being with us. One story I want to call out, Mia wrote about Google, about the storefronts on Google and how they're like SEO disasters.

1:21:18It's part of our ongoing coverage of like the world Google has made in this time of change. It seems like a good time to look at what we built before we tear it all down, build something new. So go read that story. It's really good. And we have lots more Google coverage to come. Okay, that's it. David, what's Wednesday's episode? Next Wednesday, we're going to talk to Jen Toohey about a bunch of smart home stuff. This week was smart home week on theversion.com. Like a lot of really great stories. I learned a ton about all of people's weird, insane smart home setups, including yours, Kranz. But we talked to Jen about basically like where to start and how smartphones should work or smart homes should work rather.

1:21:54and then we're going to talk to Josh Jezza about a thing he's been working on for a long time that I can't tell you about yet but it is really cool and it's coming next week very exciting all right that's it that's for chest and that's a wrap for verge cast this week we'd love to hear from you shoot us an email at verge cast at the verge.com the verge cast is a production of the verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network the show is produced by me Liam James and our senior audio director Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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