Samsung’s new folds, flips, and Apple clones

33:05Like if you are someone who knows you struggle with sleep and you're trying things and actually collecting that data on an ongoing basis helps you. Great. That makes total sense. A ring is going to be really useful. And the upside of a ring is that the fiddliness score is much, much lower. Like a thing that you wear on your index finger and take off once a week to charge while you shower, super low on the fiddliness meter. But the problem is that even its potential to do more stuff is not that high. I don't think it's that low on the fiddliness meter. I wear a ring every day. I pick it up when I leave the house.

33:38It serves an important function, which is from my ladies that I'm taking.

33:46It's a symbol of my ongoing devotion to my divorce lawyer of a wife. And I just never think about it. I put it on. I take it off. I never think about charging it, whatever. It has an obviously important societal, emotional function that it does. It's like symbolic, but there's it's zero fit. Like anything over zero is actually the standard. I think that is probably only some of our audience has that issue because a lot of our audience probably also enjoys to wear a little couple of different rings, replaced rings. Like they're also zero. No, because you take like I cannot tell you it's jewelry, right?

34:27Like jewelry. You're constant. A lot of people are constantly fiddling with their jewelry. Do you think that Galaxy Watch is jewelry? Fundamentally is. it's not jewelry I want to personally wear well but it doesn't have the function no it does it's it's a ring it's showing it's it's putting that extra bling on your hand and I think a lot of people do like to have that extra bling the aura ring has definitely attained like status symbol status over the years yeah it's it's got like a it's got like a bling kind of quality to it and I think the rings in a way like the apple watch quickly became went from fashion we all laughed at it being fashion and immediately it failed as a fashion famously we were all like that's stupid and we all just stopped treating it like fashion and it just became a watch on your wrist the ring is still i think both more capable of it so if you're someone who doesn't want to have a giant watch on your wrist and you do want those metrics like okay you can put on the rig the ring and you can still wear your brightling or your rolex or whatever you want to show that off and i think that's who this is for.

35:28That's the market. Yeah, this is for people with$6 ,000 watches that they don't want to replace it. This is why Silicon Valley billionaires love the Oura Ring. This is my aspirational ring. I just figured this out. I guess when I say, is it jewelry? I agree with you that it's jewelry. I meant, does it look like jewelry? The Oura Ring, actually, they tried very hard to make it look like jewelry. And one of the only reasons that I wouldn't just swap out my wedding ring for it is, I think you can only wear it on your index finger, right? Yeah, you're supposed to only wear it on your index. So it doesn't do the other thing.

36:00But there's a world in which you just infuse my existing jewelry with the tech and it looks good enough and that's fine. I just think that the Samsung one doesn't... But wait, the Nilay Patel theory of wearable bullshit does not have a fashion scale. That's the Z axis now. Yeah, this is about fiddliness. Those are not the same thing. Do you know what's very fiddly is fashion, Nilay. all right looking good i can make this work man i need to think about this for like five more seconds and i'll come up with something but no but i i really think the problem is the the ceiling for what you can do with a ring right now seems really low because like even even like the next thing you think of is like oh maybe it'll vibrate for notifications do you know how insane it would feel to have your the base of your index finger vibrate every time you get a text message like insane disaster you'd go to your doctor exactly like i have all of this medical information and samsung is doing a thing where they're like sort of gently pointing it like maybe this is a way to gesture control some stuff like they have a little bit of the like pinchy pinch stuff going on but only if you have a samsung phone right and so there's like but even that is like probably probably not i just don't think that's the thing yet what if i mean we're hearing a lot more about XR nowadays and and if which is like mixed reality that's just another word for mixed reality and what if that's a like kind of their way of this is how we're going to control it in the future I do think if if you want to like galaxy brain take the galaxy ring I think that's probably I that's all I want to do also I just realized if Samsung comes out with a headset and doesn't call it the galaxy brain I'm going to be furious entire AI service suite it should be called galaxy brain how do we have this idea david pierce's galaxy brain you can have one yeah god uh all right we're gonna try out the ring v i think v is very excited to get it we'll know much more about it soon uh the last piece we should talk about are some phones i just want to point out that we're almost 40 minutes into this segment just now talking about the phones which actually tells you every single thing you need to know about these new phones yeah they are more expensive i'm so disappointed in these new phones like of all the things like I can understand why you would copy Apple in making certain things.

38:21I can understand why you go all in on AI even before there are a lot of really compelling use cases. But this thing where Samsung was so far ahead in foldable phones and flip phones and seems content to just squander that in the name of making everything a smidge better and not doing anything new or interesting every year is really starting to bump me out. Well, do they have competition in this space? Is there anybody that's actually pushing? we should talk about the Motorola Razr Plus which Allison reviewed this week which she loved she just loved it that thing is one very good camera away from maybe being the best Android phone it's got a weird processor it's like who even can describe the Snapdragon 8S 3M or whatever the fuck it's called wait let me find it what is it it's the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3 which is just a weird mid-tier processor yeah uh it's weird it's just a weird it's one of those where like well this phone last two years or five like you know right yeah allison called it like an entry flagship which is like sure all right here we are um anyway let's talk about the samsung ones first um the flip six is the one that you know is sort of more interesting because i think that form factor is more interesting also it's the thing that's changing the most like those are the phones that are changing the most because the cover screens are getting bigger and bigger.

39:43But it's basically just like a little bit lighter and costs more money. Yeah. Also a little more rugged, which is meaningful, especially for the flip. They're getting better at making that thing into like an actual phone that you can treat like an actual phone. A little bit more rugged. A little. Yeah, like it doesn't even have dust resistance. Like do not take this to the desert. You can drop it in the toilet now. That's a victory. Yeah. You can drop your flip phone in the toilet and it'll probably be fine. Uh, and then the fold six boy, I couldn't tell you. It's literally like one of the main features they talked about is that when it's flat, it's flatter.

40:21Like what, what are we doing here? It's just, and again, I, I, part of me wonders like what are we several physics miracles away from there being a new thing you can do here because Samsung is making little bits of this better. the the cover screen it's it's a little wider on the outside which i actually appreciate it feels less like a tv remote and more like a phone uh it's just the same thing though like the the samsung is not even really like coming up with really cool new ideas about how the software here could work which at least motorola is pushing really hard for how do we make the outer screen useful and the inner screen useful and have them interplay with each other really well samsung feels like it is just not pushing that nearly as hard and so it's like what what is the case for why I should buy these things, Samsung?

41:10I don't think they care. I mean, presumably they'd like me to buy their phones. Yeah, I think they want us to buy the phones, but I think Samsung often feels driven by external pressures. It often feels driven by the market and its decisions are based in the market. And like, oh, we do the folding phone because nobody else is doing it and we get there first. And we get there before Apple. And Apple just hasn't done it, hasn't even talked about doing it. The rumors are scant, right? And that's their primary competitor. We want to say Boat Roller or Pixel or whatever. Let's be real. Their primary competitor is Apple.

41:43And if Apple's not doing anything in the space, then why should they invest in making the phone better when they can just rest on their laurels? Well, I think also, Alex, you mentioned Saturday Samsung. Their sales are down. They're trying to make more money. Saturday Samsung, man. This is the thing. Their efforts are going to marketing and more dollars from the same product. Of course they're not putting tons of money into changing things too much. At the same time, they still employ the software engineers and designers. Yeah, they should. Make it more interesting is a totally valid critique here.

42:19The phone opens. You have a little phone that turns into a big phone. What happens then? Right. That seems to be set aside. So that does, I think, bring us to the Motorola phone, where Motorola does seem to have a lot of ideas is what happens when you have a little phone that gets even smaller and you have a big cover screen and like their ideas about how apps even appear on that cover screen and how you might control them all pretty good yeah yeah it's the idea of like what if you only had to tap on your phone two times to accomplish something on the outside screen is like i don't know if that is the framework but that's kind of what it feels like and there's just little bits and pieces where it's like okay this is a screen you're gonna have sort of looking at you all the time so we're gonna to make it fun and cute and animated.

43:00And if you want to like, do something, you're probably going to open up the phone. So in this case, what we need to do is just give you all the things that are like one or two taps and just put it right in front of you. So it's like, what's next on your calendar, get to AI, stop the music. Like, I love that. And this is like the thing about flip phones that I'm enthusiastic about is it is I sometimes you should only have access to a tiny portion of your phone. And that is how you do it on that outside screen. Like I think Motorola is getting this really right in a way i find very exciting also it seems like they're when you unfold it their screen is less creasy looking than the samsung one yeah it's only 1080p and it's like 6.9 inches so it's like super long and not that high res and that makes me david's face right now you're just really enthusiastic i just you love a garbage phone you're single-handedly driving all of the sales of the books palmer that's been a wild couple of weeks but wait one of the one of the things that i've heard a bunch of people say about this samsung launch and i think this might be true for motorola and stuff too is that we're now in samsung's case six generations into the flip and fold universe and anecdotally at least and based on you know talking to people and what we've seen these are not winning in any meaningful way right like they're not taking market share away from the Galaxy S lines and the iPhone and the other popular candy bar phones.

44:26And so you wonder if instead of Samsung and others looking at these phones saying, this is how we win, they're increasingly looking at them as just like kind of a sideshow. And yeah, maybe and and if that is the case, of course, you slow down, and you put less interesting resources into doing it. And especially for Samsung, which has a gigantic business selling candy bar phones, like maybe maybe we should be less interested in these because the world is less interested in these for Motorola. Like they kind of have nothing to lose by swinging big for something new. And the Razor is the best brand Motorola ever had.

45:03So, like, I get why they're doing this that way. But for Samsung, like we've been waiting for this to become Samsung's thing for so long now. And I wonder if Samsung is increasingly convinced with every generation that maybe it's just not going to be. Is it just too expensive? Is that why it just hasn't become the thing? That's why I haven't gotten one is it's almost$2 ,000. I think for foldable phones, very much so. I think flip phones, you could like maybe have a debate about whether it is meaningfully more useful to have that. I would argue that it is, but I think you could debate that. But the like the fold problem is a they're huge and be they're twice the price.

45:44Like I just it's that is going to be so hard to come back from for any of these companies. But you get three times the screens for twice the price. You do. Yeah. The dollar ratio is off the charts. That's your Saturday Samsung pitch. Two X the price. Three X the screen. They'll give you a TV with it. So get that in Cupertino. That's true. You can also get a TV with it. All right. We have talked about everything. for too long. We're way over already. We're only halfway through. I think that makes sense. We'll be back with more of our chest. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24 seven.

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47:30All right, we're back. we have this next segment list is streaming lightning round and i'm just looking for where alex talks about david zaslov's outfits which is a real thing that occurred today you know we're not going to talk too much about him he he's at the is it is it sun valley where he's at with all the other billionaires right now he's just layered up he's got a scarf a vest a shirt oh my gosh like he had like a bandana at one point i was like sir i i love his sartorial choices but um but he expressed a lot of enthusiasm this week uh for for the big paramount skydance deal and and that's the big deal so this we should tell people what's we haven't talked about paramount skydance because it's just been like a cloud whether you think that cloud is dark or light is up to you but it has been a cloud that has not reached a resolution so paramount which owns cbs Alex's favorite broadcast network.

48:26I got a story for this. I got a way to tell, explain this. All right, I'm just gonna let you drive. So once upon a time, there was a family and the dad went out and he put together a huge corporate conglomeration and they called it National Amusements. Which is very good. Yeah, great. They're nationally amusing. And in there was CBS and this big storied century old studio, Paramount, all of that in there. And then on the other side, there was another family. And they did something called Oracle. And Larry Ellison made a lot of money from that. And his kids got into films. And they started producing.

49:03And his daughter made a lot of good movies and then made some bad ones. And his son made some really successful movies, like Top Gun. The new Top Gun. The new Top Gun. Yeah. He was a baby when the last – was he even alive when the last one came out? But he did that. We're not going to find out. We're not going to find out. Don't worry about it. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. What matters is that there is Z2 families. And they said, you know what? We should really get together. And the tech family should buy the media conglomerate's family's business and just make an even bigger business.

49:36And then there was a lot of winging about that. There was a lot of, ooh, should I do this? I don't know. Sherry Redstone, the current owner of Paramount, was really concerned. She didn't know how she wanted her – she didn't want her dad's legacy ruined. She wanted money. Those are important things. And that's the plot of succession. everybody yeah yeah that's what happened and eventually david ellison went to his dad and was like dad you're a billionaire can i borrow a couple of billion say six of your money and put it in sweeten this pot and larry said i got your son and now his son owns one of the largest uh film studios in hollywood well it hasn't closed yet so it hasn't closed yet yeah that's true it It hasn't closed.

50:16He will potentially own it, provided the lawsuits that are already cooking up amongst the investors who are mad that they're not getting as much of this pot. Those those don't screw things up, provided there is Apollo or another investor doesn't come in and say, actually, I can provide even more money than Larry Ellison. I feel like that's probably not going to happen, seeing as Larry Ellison already put six billion in. I feel like this is probably David Ellison's company. And we've been seeing that all around Hollywood. We've been seeing that from a lot of the reporters. Variety, Matthew Bellany over at Puck.

50:49A lot of folks have been talking about this. Matthew Bellany had a really good interview with Ellison about this where he was like, yeah, I'm going to do all this tech stuff. And that was really interesting about all of this is he's pitched this as like tech taking over. And I think we'd argue that tech already took over given the success of Netflix and even smaller stuff like Apple. But this is really officially like tech has taken over Hollywood. And he's got big ambitions about using AI for workflows. That's as much as he said. I can just read you the quotes. Yeah, they're great. The quotes are wild.

51:23A slide deck for investors said AI would turbocharge content creation and drive efficiencies in streamlined operations. Terrifying. Ellison said the art will challenge the technology and the technology challenges the art. which, uh, okay. And then, and he also said, we believe that understanding the symbiotic relationship between art and technology is essential to be able to meet this moment. Uh, there are a lot of technology companies that are rapidly expanding into media. We believe it is essential for Paramount to be able to expand its technology prowess to be both a media and technology enterprise.

51:57Those are quotes that come up when you say chat GPT, write me some quotes about like, do you remember the paper that was like, we we found a huge increase in the the word delve being used because of chat gpt like that's what that sounds like to me that's a bunch of nothing like that's that's what you say there are there are two there are two things that are real they are 1000 the things you would expect all of those words to mean ellison proposed upgrading the advertising technology to give marketers more information about what audiences they're reaching so we're doing some data collection and algorithmic ads and that we are working to improve the algorithmic recommendation engines that paramount plus uses hoping subscribers will spend more time on the streaming service and viewer can't so we're doing engagement sure i don't think those are actually the actual tech that they're going to be doing like investing in i think i think the advertising is everybody's investing in that right now peacock if you talk to anybody at nbc right now they will not hesitate to be like have you heard about our our new ad tech platform we're really all in on ad tech platforms for streaming.

53:01It's great. Can I just read you more words? Yes. I wish you wouldn't. Ellison also said Skydance will work in partnership with Oracle to create a cloud-based animation studio. Skydance used the studio in the cloud to produce part of Spellbound, which is coming out later on Netflix. We intend to scale that business across all of our production workflows and animation. That's just, we're going to buy a bunch of GPUs. Like, what are we talking about? It's also kind of worthless because the guy who runs Skydance animation right now is John Lasseter, who famously got punted from Pixar because he couldn't keep his hands to himself, allegedly.

53:37Yes. And that's who's running it. They have not had a lot of successes. Most of their other animated properties have not had hit the, like, John Lasseter used to have a golden hand, right? Like, he'd look at anything and it'd make a billion dollars, it felt like. Nowadays, it's like, we barely sold luck to Apple TV. We're making a deal to get this thing sold over at Netflix. That all felt like things he was saying to get Sherry Redstone feeling comfortable to do this deal because Sherry Redstone was holding up the deal in big ways. And right now, everybody in Hollywood has a lot of anxiety about tech companies and about tech infrastructure and how they can compete with stuff like Netflix, who has, for what it's worth, the best algorithms when it comes to streaming and actually getting content in front of people's eyes.

54:24and it just felt like let's alleviate this woman's anxieties by saying ai a bunch sure and giving her six million dollars yeah that seems pretty important helped yeah anyway i would just remind you uh the listener that these are the things that people say when they buy studios uh famously it's what he said when i bought warner brothers which again provided the world the 4-3 grayscale uh justice league yeah we don't know what this is going to look like what movies will david ellison remaster as square in grayscale i think it's the only question it's going to be impossible movie it's going to be six hours long mission impossible it's going to be black and white and square and it's going to be nuts anyway so this is like the big story in streaming we haven't talked a lot about it because it hadn't happened but now it's happened and it's if the deal closes and as Alex said all these lawsuits get resolved I think we're looking at a bunch of tech money and tech ideas coming for the studio that famously owns Top Gun, coming for CBS coming for famously owned Star Trek famously owned Star Trek it's going to be weird there's a real weirdness coming for this zone because this is just a flood of new money but also So.

55:45Just the ideas that you would expect for the money to have. but dressed up in ever larger ambitions. Yeah, that is exactly it. I'm curious to see what they do. I'm curious to see if they unload any of these properties and what kind of like movies and shows we actually start seeing if Taylor Sheridan gets the boot. I have been, by the way, furiously Googling for what studio in the cloud means. And it's just a thing they say. Yeah. It's called a data center. This is the thing. It's like everybody already does it. None of this means anything. It's called working remote. this is a rich guy who couldn't build a cool studio buying a cool studio like if i had the money to do it i would do it skydance is like cool but not that cool paramount is cooler the end the closest i've come to understanding what studio in the cloud means is it's a it's like a square in the deck that just says studio in the cloud uh and it says skydance animation is building a studio in the cloud that's the first ball it's great you turn on slack the second bullet is transition from on-prem to cloud-based production and hosting infrastructure which is fine that's a thing you know dentist office across america are switching from on-prem to cloud-based infrastructure and it feels like oracle is just going to get its six billion dollars back because it turns out they're building it with Oracle.

57:12Yeah. Okay. But does it, it's got to mean something. Listen, we're like minutes away from you reading the Salesforce website again. And I can't have that in my life. We need to move on. All right, Alex, you got a lot left in this lightning round. Well, yeah, I mean, what else do we got? Well, so Redbox, we had this great story from, from Yonko last week that was all about friend of the verge about how Redbox was in dire straits and why it was in dire straits. and now it's shutting down its parent company, Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. Yeah, that's the real name of the company. This is the second time in several weeks that Chicken Soup for the Soul has come up.

57:52You will recall that we looked at the Crackle website, which is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul. We'll see for how long. For now, yeah. For now, yeah. They got a new CEO last week and his job is literally to come in and fix companies that are in dire straits. And for Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, that means Redbox is toast. It had already been really bad. A lot of folks, probably if you're listening to this and you tried to go rent out a red box in the last couple of months, would struggle to get anything. A lot of them have been shut down and now it's done. RIP red box. So what's happening to all the DVDs in the red boxes today?

58:29You just go and you break the box open and you take it. So looting. So Alex is like, do looting. The problem is that all of the technicians who manage those things have all been grounded because all of their cars are getting repossessed because they haven't been paying the bills for the cars that they rent. So like Walgreens, 7-Eleven, everybody's just unplugging them. And I think you're just going to start seeing more of these unplugged and just sitting there. And I'm not saying you should loot them, but. That's it. That's where that ends. There's no but after I'm not saying you should loot them.

59:08Just don't do that. I can hear the footsteps of the lawyers coming down the hallway right now. Where is she? So do you think this is just straight up streaming killed Redbox? That's where I'm at. Because when you read Yonko's piece, this all happened. The big turning point for Redbox was when in 2021, when everybody said, we're going to stop releasing everything physically. and putting it in theaters and we're just going to do it all to streaming. What was the other thing going on in 2021, Chris? You know, yeah, but see, that's the thing. If they had said, like, there's a lot of the people who were renting these were in places where they don't have streaming.

59:48And they would also like to watch whatever King Kong and Godzilla are getting up to in 2021. And those discs weren't coming out, so they couldn't rent anything. So nobody was renting from Redbox because none of the studios were releasing this stuff physically. Well, right. But I think you can make an extremely compelling argument that COVID killed Redbox more so than you can make one that streaming killed Redbox. No, because how is COVID going to do it? Everybody's at home anyway. These things are outside. We didn't go outside for two years. You still have to go to the grocery store where the Redbox is.

1:00:20Yeah, there was a Redbox at the CVS in the woods. People gazed at it. And then they thought, I don't have a DVD player. I mean, there is that. Well, and part of Redbox's thing was access for people who didn't have great access to streaming, either because it's expensive or because they lived in places without great connection. Or like there was a real this is a complement to streaming or like this is a thing you do when you can't do streaming, not this is a real competitor to streaming. And so, Alex, to your point, I think as fewer and fewer people didn't have streaming, it's probably true that Redbox didn't fill that need for as many people.

1:01:02But the problem for me is this is also just spectacular corporate mismanagement. Oh, 100%. This company took on a mountain of debt to buy a company it probably couldn't afford. Chicken soup for this whole, I think it was like$325 million in debt to buy Redbox. Banking on, we're going to make a ton of money back one DVD at a time. Made a bunch of weird decisions and it all fell apart. So part of me is like maybe streaming killed Redbox, but I don't think we ever actually got to see streaming kill Redbox because I think like Chicken Soup for the Soul killed Redbox. Yeah, well, Redbox was like not doing great when Chicken Soup for the Soul bought it because it had just done a SPAC.

1:01:37It had just gone public via SPAC, which... Wait, can we just... Sorry, Eli. There's like all of that. This company is called Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. Right? Like you already know. like this started as a set of books for live laugh love moms right and they're like we're a media empire now at no point we're like funded we should change our name like you already know that this is just a bunch of weird like zombie media zombie ideas like i'm glad you brought this up because this does violate my theory that you can't survive a bad name for your company and Chicken Soup for the Soul is very much a bad name.

1:02:20Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. When did this book come out? The fact that I'm Googling Chicken Soup for the Soul as a book is going to be so bad for me. So this is technically spun, they spun off from Chicken Soup for the Soul for the books because that's like the book They don't even have the books yet? They spun that off. This is a whole other company. Yeah, this is the entertainment company. Oh, the books are Chicken Soup for the Soul LLC. I gotta end this. Also, the worst website I've ever seen in my entire life. But it's just that you can't survive a bad name, especially when you're not even connected to the Live, Laugh, Love books anymore.

1:02:57Yeah. You're just out there buying companies for too much debt that have already been half killed by COVID and streaming and thinking this will work, and it didn't. Can I say that the book company has chicken soup for the soul for kids? That's good. Okay, that's enough. next lightning round item just if you start a company don't call it chicken soup for the soul i think is that is probably the lesson and also if your entire company is distributing physical media you you should have a plan b well they did they had a big long plan for how to go digital with all of this and redbox has been trying to do a streaming service for like 10 plus years but then you're just just never you're just you're just netflix yeah i mean that's what paramount's trying to do and we didn't yell at them for that so well i can't wait to see what chicken soups plan to here's here's a new idea chicken soup in the cloud for the soul larry ellison buys red box do you think we're good as as long as they get off-prem uh and i would point out that red box one of the single most on-prem businesses of all time red box in the cloud so many prams think about it what if a red box put in the cloud all right what's next alex uh the next is i i never pause when i'm watching tv i learned because i don't get pause ads do you guys get those when you're just watching a show and you're like i gotta go to the bathroom so you pause it on amazon prime is the one i notice it on the most but i think there are other streaming services who does it who does it sling tv is now doing it that's the big news this week I was like, what is a pause ad?

1:04:33Oh, I'm watching TV wrong is what I learned from all of this. But basically, pause ads happen when you pause something and then it just decides to display an ad while you're going to the bathroom. Exactly what I wanted. Exactly what you want. Sling TV is now doing it, but they also have a little thing at the bottom saying you can go turn this off. For how much money? For free. You just go to the settings and turn it off. Which is different than what Prime and Hulu are doing. So good on you, Sling. Like, bad on you, Sling, but also good on you? As more and more of these companies move into, like, ad tiers, right?

1:05:10Pay money but still have ads, which is what they all are now. The desire to get more money is going to result in more and more ads being more and more. You can just see it coming. It's a tsunami of weird ideas. And they're just out of space. When do you think we get, like, a right rail of just ads? Dude, you can already get a free TV that has a physical rail of ads on it. It's literally a thing. So I will say, I think pause ads are fine. Like in terms of finding ways to show giant ass ads on my TV in a way that is non-interruptive, this is the best one they've ever invented. Because it's like, if I'm pausing my TV, who cares?

1:05:52Like, what do I want to see on the TV? it's do i care if it's a frozen like hat moving shot of someone's face or if it's like a toyota ad i don't care i think it's like fine i'm getting up to leave the room anyway like that's why i pause the show i think it's like when you're having like a phone call right like somebody calls you you're like oh i need a pause and then it's like toyota tundra is it gonna play a video there's sound i feel very differently yeah these are most of the amazon ones at least are just like a static image that is just like you press pause of Mr. and Mrs. Smith and a thing pops up.

1:06:28That's just like Jeep and then just freezes for as long as you needed to. Uh, and I think that's fine. You know what I hate? I'm just going to complain about ads for a minute here and then we can move on. Is there's now a thing that happens on Hulu and probably some others, but I noticed that the most on Hulu where at the beginning of a show, it will ask you to choose your ad experience. It's like, which Charmin ad would you like to watch? Uh, And we've gotten to the point now where Anna, my wife, will sit there and yell at the TV, I don't care. And I'm always like, Anna, that doesn't accomplish anything.

1:06:58And she's like, but I don't care. And it'll like linger there for 10 seconds. Then if you don't do anything, it'll just choose for you and then play the whole ad anyway. I'm like, no, if you're going to make me watch ads, you pick. Don't make me do the work to pick my own ads. I agree with that. Use your damn algorithms and show me the ads. Use AI to collect more data about you unless you generate more data, David. Apparently. it costs money to go from on-prem to the cloud drives me nuts but if i if i could choose between like in in like dynamic interstitial ads and pause ads give me pause ads every time the problem is it's both and it's going to be a bunch of other stuff too and they're just going to send you that way it's coming all right one more oh in the streaming lightning round do you want to talk about what actually let me do it i'll do it this way okay uh all right i want to call out one more that isn't technically streaming, but I think is really interesting for our lightning round of video over the internet, which is Adam Masseri, who runs Instagram, put out a video this week where he's like, I just want to make it clear we're not going to do long form video, which is interesting for a number of reasons.

1:08:07One, he was like, the whole point of Instagram is connecting to your friends. So when you open a friend's video and then you're in reels by accident and then you're in reels by accident for two hours, he's like, that's great. That's what we want. because you are more likely to share a short video with your friend and then they'll watch it and they'll end up in the wheat the reels rabbit hole and they'll share some videos and he's like that's great long videos you won't watch all the way through and you definitely won't share them and they've apparently measured this and they know this and calls it a symbiotic relationship between connecting your friends and short videos which is interesting on its face the second thing that's interesting is that instagram has super tried to do long form video and compete with youtube before It was called IGTV.

1:08:45I went to the IGTV launch. It was one of the weirdest days of my entire life. And this was the previous administration of Instagram. This was not Masseri's Instagram. This was like the previous leaders of Instagram. But they tried. They were like, oh, we'll just be YouTube now. And they utterly failed. And now they were like, we'll be TikTok now. And they've succeeded. And TikTok is like, we'll be YouTube now. And I don't know how that's going. But it's interesting to see Instagram be like, huh, no. when in fact all of these streamers have to compete with reels and youtube and like youtube is growing fastest on tvs actually so it's interesting to see all this other action happening and then mysteria being like no we're gonna we're staying right here short form video i think it's the right call and i will say the thing you're describing that that like symbiotic thing makes perfect sense to me and anecdotally it feels true right that like the idea that i'm a going to sit here and watch one single 30 minute video on instagram and then send it to a friend right it just feels preposterous right and i think like i think all the time about like when you talk to people about the the act that you do on tiktok it's scrolling it's not viewing like the thing that you do on tiktok is flip channels that is more important than what is actually on the screen that you're viewing it's it's the activity that is the thing which is what's different from like tv or even youtube which is less of a scrolling thing but youtube is becoming more scrolly with shorts and stuff like that instagram is has always been scrolly and i think trying to undo that and be like this is now a destination that you're going to spend a half hour at a time without touching your screen i think was just never going to happen it's also like a much harder thing to sell ads against which is i think a reason it makes a lot of sense it's really easy to sell ads that are a video between two other videos that you're scrolling on and this This just feels this feels very obvious to me, except that these companies usually can't help themselves from all trying to be each other.

1:10:42So to hear Adam just kibosh it entirely was pretty interesting. It's also funny because it's the money like YouTube makes a lot of money. And they're like, we're not going to make that money, which is super. YouTube just has no competition. It is the place for long form video on the Internet, which is weird. Well, it's a place for independent long form video, right? Like it is effectively the VHS tape of the modern era where it's just like, hey, or cable access. It's just like, hey, I need a platform. I don't want to go make a deal with David Ellison. This is what I do. I put it – I just put it on YouTube.

1:11:17Like functionally, that's what YouTube is becoming. And it's getting more and more like that even though its UI and stuff isn't like that. And I think it makes sense. Well, but a really weird thing is you can just like rent Paramount movies on YouTube. No one does it, but you can just be like, I'm going to write Mission Impossible. You can subscribe to streaming services through YouTube. Yeah, you can watch movies on cable access in the olden times, too. And I think Instagram, to me, is more like, now I'm going to go just completely switch up the analogy and say that Instagram is kind of like the drive-through margarita bars.

1:11:53I don't know if you, they're in Texas and they rule. I was going to say, I got to move to Texas. You see those in Louisiana and Texas. And it's like, yeah, you drive through, you get your beautiful treat, you drive home, it's like, bam, bam, you're done. And it feels like long form video is like, what if we did fine dining at the drive through margarita bar? So it's like, what if you went to Sonic, but your meal was$100? And it's like, that's not what we're looking for here. Isn't this the plot of the bear? They still serve the sandwiches out the side window. Just isn't that the bear? People love the bear.

1:12:32Instagram, you could be the bear. All right. That is where we need to end this entire. Look, if you know the people who run chicken soup for the soul entertainment, bring them to us. I have a number of questions. What kind of zombies are they? All right. That's it. We got to take a break. We'll be back with the actual lightning round. Support for this show comes from LinkedIn. When you're a small business owner, your business is on your mind 24-7. So when you're hiring, you need a partner that works just as hard as you do. That hiring partner is LinkedIn Jobs. When you clock out, LinkedIn clocks in.

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1:14:03Okay, we're back. We are way over, just like bananas over. It's, you know, it's the summer. Every time we think we have nothing to talk about, we have a lot to talk about. That's how it goes. But we got to do this lightning round quick. Lightning. You hear what I'm saying? Yeah. All right, David, what's yours? okay i have great news my lightning round is several gadgets and an entire lineup of accessories does that does that seem good yes uh oh and it's it's two different companies involved well it's a company inside of a company uh so once upon a time there were smartphones uh no so cmf which is the the sub brand of nothing uh which is an insane sentence to say all that uh launched a bunch of stuff this week uh a new set of earbuds a new smartwatch and i would say by far most interestingly a new phone uh called the cmf phone one it's a 199 android phone uh that basically lets you replace the back of the phone with a couple of different accessories in different colors or add like a lanyard what's the other one a wallet you can put on and i think there's one that's a kickstand that you can just stick on through an accessory port uh by all accounts it's kind of a like mid-rangey android phone but it looks awesome it's orange it's 200 bucks and this is for some reason the android phone i have been most excited about in a very long time like nothing is out there being like we're gonna make tech more fun again this is the most interesting thing in that mold that i think nothing has ever done and it's a 200 android Android phone.

1:15:40And I'm very excited about it. Like it rules. Yeah, just like what if what if we tried new things? I really spending all that time with the books Palma has gotten me like obsessed with this idea that what if you took a phone and just tweaked two things about it? Like what this if we if we take this form factor, we're all obsessed with and just turned it a little. Can you change that? And that one of those is like, what if the screen folded? One of them is like, what if it was the ink? And one of them like I've been obsessed with modular phone ideas for forever. And I really continue to think there is something to like what if you could make your phone several different things over time and this is such a cool version of that and they did a really like ikea-ish thing here where it has some like exposed screws and you can actually open up the back of your phone and see the inside of your phone it's just it just seems fun and again it's like it's it's 200 like yes more of this please it's weird because what you want is what you would expect is that the phone parts of the phone 15 years into phones more would be a commodity by now right like an android phone should just be a commodity and then the way it looks and works and feels in your hand and it's that just hasn't played out for for a million reasons because of carriers because of competition because google whatever it is uh e-sims like whatever you think has restricted this market right from being competitive and commodifying the android part has happened with android parts like with the other parts of android phones like cameras that go into android phones are now everywhere the sensors are everywhere android runs everything but like the phone thing that hasn't happened you're totally right at least the united states we're gonna we're gonna have listeners in other countries particularly like india and china who be like no this this is pretty competitive out here um but this is like one of those things where i was like oh if only we had a little competition we'd have way more ideas like this yep um it is cool i'm assuming that it is a very slow phone because it's 200 yeah but i like i i saw a bunch of reactions from people that were like they people were i got a bunch of people asking me like is this a good reading device because it has a it has an oled screen uh it has a i think 5 000 milliamp battery which should last a while uh it'll run android apps and then i saw a bunch of people who are like this is going to be a kick-ass gaming handheld and to me it's like this is this is the stuff right like we don't what if we didn't have one device that we demanded to do everything but instead we could just buy these things that are two hundred dollars and actually just like sort of push them towards one use case or another and instead it's like an overlapping venn diagram of things that look like phones and i think that's super fun i like that more i'm gonna buy the hell out of this thing but also the earbuds and the watch also both look pretty cool and the earbuds in particular uh yeah really great like total i love a little pointless fidget spinner of a dial on a case like good job cmf and the ones last year if i remember correctly were better than we expected for something pretty cheap i think these are like these are yeah 59 they're cheap and for a pair of kind of airpods looking things by all accounts they've sounded pretty good in the past so i'm I'm pretty optimistic here.

1:18:55I'm very excited. I will say it was surprising to me that this week we got two kind of AirPod knockoffs and nothing was the one that didn't have LEDs in it. That surprised me. You're going to change AirPods. What's the first thing to do? You had LEDs. Yeah. All right. I'll do mine quick and then Kranzer should end with yours because yours, we should end on outrage basically. So I'll just pick one. I had two, but I'll just pick one. You know, we're paying a lot of attention to AI and copyright. I think it's kind of a house of cards. And there's lots and lots of lawsuits. Sarah Silverman is suing AI companies.

1:19:28There's the record labels are suing Sunon Udio, which are AI companies. The New York Times is suing OpenAI. On and on and on. The one that I thought was really interesting and kind of like a long shot was a bunch of developers sued over GitHub Copilot because it can obviously spit out code. And this is like the main thing that people have been excited about with AI. Most of their claims got tossed out this week, except for the one that said they're violating the open source licenses, which is a really weird circle. So they're like, look, the GitHub Copilot can just spit out code. They trained on a bunch of our code.

1:20:04They didn't have the copyright to that code. That code is copyrighted, and that's copyright infringement. Like, pretty straightforward. The judge is like, none of that makes any sense. This isn't really happening. Interesting precedent. And then they said, but it is true that there were software licenses for that code, open source software licenses. They didn't abide by them because the code they spit out should have the same licenses. That's how open source licenses work. So now we might have a weird open source legal battle over AI and not a copyright legal battle over AI, which is equally weird because all of those open source licenses absolutely depend on copyright law because that's what they are.

1:20:42They're licenses to copyrighted work. So there's just this weird knot of like copyright law problems happening with this one case. And if you're a really optimistic AI person, you say, look, it was fair use. All these claims got thrown out. If you're very negative, you say, well, that was just a weird one. And the big ones to come are still going to define how this whole industry survives or thrives. Does it feel like that's where all of this is headed? that we're starting with kind of a hundred different versions of the same fight and what we're going to end up with is like two of the most consequential ones and then that will percolate out because it does feel like i mean we've talked a lot about a lot of these lawsuits and they're all different but they're all also kind of the same and you wonder if we're going to get to a point where everybody decides like okay let's let's figure out what we're actually fighting about and then fight about that instead of fighting about like a hundred variations of that thing well this is america jack like no it's gonna just be chaos like yeah okay that's that's the way our system is designed to work is like there isn't yet a king of america i mean there is now yeah soon soon there might be um uh but the the notion that there is just some definitive answer or that everyone will quit their whining so the new york times can get to like it's not gonna to happen.

1:22:04So what you're going to get is this like mishmash of precedents until Congress passes a law that unifies all these precedents into like a regulatory framework. Seems unlikely. Or there's a Supreme Court case that, I don't know, throws out 50 years of precedent for no reason. That's they love doing that. And you just have to like work through the process. But in the meantime, everyone's just going to take their shots. And I think one of the things that's interesting is like there are so many shots and they're all kind of weird, right? They're all just like picking off at the edges. But again, I've been saying it, like only one has to like go through for the bottom to fall out and these companies have to pay.

1:22:40And the thing you're saying is they're all kind of the same case. It's all the same argument. You took our stuff without permission. Whether or not you need that permission is like the thing that makes the internet go in like the realest way. And so if you change the boundaries of what you need permission for to use or reuse or remix or sample or whatever, you kind of change the economy, like the whole economy changes around it uh which is why it's kind of wacky that it's just a bunch of shots like who knows yeah but this one in particular is interesting because it's going to end up being an open source contract case and we haven't had one of those in a very long time okay that was fine alex bring us home with some pure outrage yeah some pure outrage so do you guys remember the what is it the unofficial apple weblog yeah two all i used to work i worked at Engadget and they were our sister site.

1:23:31They were your sister site. It was like old school. One of the original Apple blogs used to love reading it. One of my best friends used to work there. One of my best friends got very upset this weekend because Christina Warren, former, she works at GitHub now and she was suddenly writing at Tua again. She herself wasn't. Her byline was appearing at Tua just next to a bunch of like clearly AI written schlock. and she wasn't the only one. A lot of former reporters from Tua had their bylines appear on the site because earlier this year, it seems to have been acquired from Apollo. It left the Yahoo land for Apollo and then Apollo seemed to have sold it to someone else and that someone else, who we still don't entirely know who they are or what they do, were just filling up this empty blog with content and allegedly like the the explanation that they had on their site was on the tool site was yeah we we don't have any of this content so we're replicating it with ai so we don't lose these important archives that's not how archiving works it's very good by the way it's a very good like what if i made some stuff up yeah just full stop that's not how any of that works no uh people were very upset.

1:24:50Christina Warren was among them. And she reached out and they promptly changed the name of her character and changed the headshot so it was no longer her. And it's just a big bummer in the world. It's just a bummer that sites are getting picked up and just filled with AI garbage. I think it is particularly a bummer for those of us who've worked at a lot of these smaller sites and stuff, who knows where my byline could appear next. I'm excited to find out. This is like Google did earlier this year, a thing Google normally doesn't do, which is come out and basically say aggressively and clearly that it was making changes to its search algorithm such that this is no longer a good idea, right?

1:25:39Because the reason you do this is you buy a domain that has real authority in the hopes that it will still rank in google you fill it with nonsense that nonsense ranks well in google you sell a bunch of ads you make some money it does work like it is it is a strategy it's not necessarily a long strategy for like half of media online right and it and it and it works and google has been saying aggressively that it is trying to prevent this from working and yet it pretty clearly seems to continue to work I just don't know when Google's going to be able to do that because this has been like the only difference here is the scale of crappy content.

1:26:17Like somebody would have done this without AI as well, right? They would have hired a bunch of people with no name and said, just write a bunch of content, put it on the site. We've seen that happen before. I think IBT was an example of that. And in this case, it happened to be AI. It happened to be this early Apple blog full of like well-known tech bloggers. and that's just a terrible, terrible move to make in that case. Don't do that. You want to choose better homes and gardens? No, they're still around. They're still around. Yeah, but you want to choose something maybe not tech adjacent to do this with if you're going to be gross.

1:26:53It was a weird choice to do it on an Apple blog. I will agree with that. But this is the thing. Mia Osato on our team wrote this great piece this week about the guy behind, I think the company, it's called Advan, I think is the name of the company, which is the one that did a lot of the AI stuff that became a huge mess at Sports Illustrated. Like this, the internet is so quickly becoming this. And I've been thinking a lot about this, like after the MTV archives went away and the Comedy Central archives went away. Like speaking of two websites that a lot of people know and trust and would believe if someone bought them and filled them with spam nonsense, like there's just going to be such a long run of this.

1:27:32and it's it's going to get weirder before it gets normalized in whatever way it's going to look like to be clear i don't think google can stop it i yeah i don't think they can and i it's not and that's not because of antipathy towards google i think the problem is so hard and then the internal philosophical reckoning for google is even harder so the problem is you have to say a bunch of AI generated sludge is bad. Yes. Right. We're going to not rank it sludge that you're charging people$20 a month per person to make. Right. So you're like, okay, you, you just, there are two wolves, you know, it's like, what are you going to do?

1:28:14Like you have to say the output of your own models is bad at some point. Like that is the task ahead of the search team. And I don't know that they can reckon with it fully. Like, well, and let's be real. Like what what are Google's AI overviews for web searches, if not more or less exactly the same thing? Yeah, we'll see. By the way, the overviews have been, some of them are still very bad. They're also moving them around the page. I don't know if you've noticed this. I have not. They're moving all over the page. Sometimes they're at the top, sometimes they're in the middle, sometimes they're at the bottom.

1:28:46They're still doing them, but they haven't figured out where they go or when they should appear or how they should look. and then one of them David Amell from MKBHD's team and Waveform and everything else he posted that the answer to like how do you check the film in your camera is getting like much worse oh no so it was like how do you see if there's film in some model of film camera and AI overview is just like open it up in bright sunlight like it said in bright sunlight oh my god but it's like crazy what is going on you wouldn't know afterwards if the film if the camera is exposed this is what happens when you're like the future of all intelligence is reddit it's like is it alright that's it we're way over we're way over look everything's going to look like airpods and then the robots are going to tell you to do dumb shit to your cameras that's the future I'm excited for it here at the Verge we know we're going to write about alright that's it that's the Verge cast rock and roll

1:29:54And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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