The future of the Kindle with Panos Panay

30:39But Apple just won't do that. You're right. If this was a giant iPhone, I think it would actually be more interesting as a device than as a tiny iPad. Yeah, but it's like, you know what it doesn't run? Instagram. Right. indefensibly so it just doesn't run instagram yeah uh and it's it's not so much bigger than my iphone 16 max like yeah well which is i think the strange thing it's at this point especially as the phones have just continued to get bigger i mean the the 16 pro max is 6.9 inches right now the ipad mini is 8.3 inches which is a difference but it's not that huge a difference like the only main user interface thing is a you can't run iphone apps and b you don't get the pencil support on the iphone right so that's i'm saying the picture apple's own press picture of the mini is a hand holding it like a phone like this yeah and like the only difference is the fingers are out like that's a huge hand i have a big hand i'm like that is a big hand uh we're gonna get there It's going to happen one day, and then the ghost of Steve Jobs is going to be very upset with everyone.

31:51I was looking at my old iPhone 5, which was like the biggest he would let it get. And he was like, your thumb has to hit the opposite. iPad mini is a phone. Those were the days. That's the future. All right. Can you explain this next one to me? Because I don't understand what's going on. I was really hoping you were going to explain it to me. AMD, Intel, and a bunch of tech companies formed an alliance. uh it's called the x86 advisory group microsoft google meta lenovo and then truly intel and amd which are ferocious rivals they formed the x86 ecosystem advisory group uh pat gelsinger announced it on stage at lenovo's tech world 2024 conference the hottest conference of the year and Gelsinger said, X-80 said, we are alive and well.

32:43Yeah, my we're alive and well t-shirt is answering a lot of questions raised by my we're alive and well. The only thing I can read into this is just pure existential fear from these companies, right? Of arm. Of arm, yeah. And I think frankly with good reason, Apple has been, sort of has completed its transition to its own ARM-based silicon stuff and is just lapping everybody else in like raw sort of everyday device performance. It is just crushing the competition. Qualcomm, I think for like a decade, made promises that it couldn't keep about its ARM performance and how it was going to bring like all the efficiency of mobile and all the power of desktops and put that together and it was going to be magic.

33:33And I think Intel and AMD and others watched Qualcomm sort of try and fail to do that. And we're like, okay, well, they'll never get there. It's not going to happen. And I think you could argue with relative success that Qualcomm is there now. And I think it's very clear that Qualcomm is going to get there, right? Whether or not you believe it's a real x86 competitor now with the Snapdragon elite and all that stuff in the new co-pilot plus pc and all that stuff it's either there or it's close and i think that leap was so big that all of these other companies just panicked i mean and intel is obviously like sort of collapsing in on itself like a dying star uh in in so many ways right now and amd is i think in a slightly less precarious position yeah but it also would very much like to not have qualcomm become a dominant player.

34:27And the whole chip industry has just turned, right? Like you have what Apple's doing, you have what NVIDIA's doing, and you have what Qualcomm is doing. And all these other chip makers are just out there being like, oh my God, this happened so much faster than we expected. Yeah. I just, I don't know how to read it other than that. On the AI side of things, so actually I read this as like a data center announcement of all of the things. Interesting. Even though it's a Lenovo conference, x86 is still doing well in data centers. Sure. And then, you know, NVIDIA, I think, gets a lot of the shine for AI because it's selling so many of its GPUs to AI companies.

35:01But like, you know, x86 processors outperform the N-series in a bunch of AI tasks. AMD has a pretty healthy business selling GPUs. There's just a whole thing there, right? where like you, if that is the big market, you might as well put together the big competitor to NVIDIA and say like, here's your other path because all the big companies would like not to be locked into NVIDIA. I don't know about consumer PCs at all. Like I truly don't. I guess they were on stage at the Lenovo event, but they weren't like waving laptops around. That's true. And so I just, it's weird. And it's weird that Microsoft is like co-pilot plus PCs and mostly ARM chips.

35:41and then also over here on this other platform that we are tied to forever right well and i think with a lot of that stuff there is the the arm advancement has just happened so fast while i think x86 particularly with intel has just been like stuck in the mud for a long time that intel has kind of gone version after version of its chips without sort of meaningful progress on some of the stuff that people really care about. And I think in theory, the idea of banding together on this is like, okay, we can sort of rising tide lifts all boats here by meshing together some of the work these companies are doing and saying, okay, we're all going to build better chips, which is actually going to benefit all of us instead of just, you know, sort of running in parallel and all trying to reinvent the wheel on our own, which I think is a good strategy.

36:33I just think they are way too late in starting this move. Let me just read you the list here to support my data center claim. Broadcom, Dell, Google, Hewlett Packard Enterprise, as well as HP, the other one. Lenovo, Meta, Microsoft, Oracle, and Red Hat. And then, just for fun, Linus Torvalds and Tim Sweetie. Sure. You know, guys, those are all people that run giant servers. I mean, the picture at the top of the press release is a data center. Like, it's not unclear what they're doing here. But no, I think you're right. And I think that's all fine, right? Like, many of these companies have big businesses.

37:20Like, did you mention Google is in this? And it's because of Google Cloud, right? Like, we run data centers. We kind of need this to work because otherwise we're hosed, paying NVIDIA every penny we have for the rest of our clients. It's funny because all those companies are also building their own chips on the side. Yeah. Right? Microsoft is building its own chips. They have a lot to say. If you're Microsoft and you want ARM on Windows to work, you get to walk into Qualcomm's office and be like, do what we want. You're it. Yeah. Right? Or we're going back to Intel, which someone has to tell them what to do.

37:50So you just see. Google's building TPUs. Like, this is, yeah, everybody is on this. Well, we'll see. I just think something is happening in the world of x86 trips and this is one of those things that's what I got for you right now and I will say that if you are if you're ever in position to give a keynote and you're like make the slide say we are alive and well just take a beat just really just really think about what that means to everyone yeah yeah I mean again like it's it's them trying to convince the world uh Allison Johnson who wrote the story made the point that this whole thing might have just been to convince investors that like, yes, we are taking ARM seriously.

38:33Might have been true. Really would have been a super good idea to do this in like 2017. What if you face down the ferocious, competitive monster of NVIDIA with a committee that works as well as the USB Interpositors Forum? Yeah. It's going to be awesome. Give leather jackets to everyone on the committee. It's game over. A couple more bits of gadget news. Sonos announced a new ARK Ultra soundbar and sub four. Two pieces here, I would say. One, I think they've decided the app is good enough again. Like they had paused new releases because the app was so broken. But they, you know, we've talked about this.

39:11They've like released their plan to fix it. They've mostly fixed it. They're doing the public Trello board with the future updates to come, which is incredible. uh you know they're eddie lazarus in their c-suite is he has given his media tour about what he found in his report which was we shouldn't have released a shitty app shocking revelation but i think they think they're fine they've gotten to where they need to be and it's time to start releasing products again so it's a thousand dollar arc ultra it's more powerful than the regular arc uh and it's got new transistors from a company called mate mate m-a-y-h-t i think it's mate yeah uh son of spotless company in 2022 they're like specialized speakers basically they call it sound motion and the quote is one of the most significant breakthroughs in audio engineering's in nearly 100 years that unlocks greater clarity depth and balance than ever before possible in the soundbar of the sleek seven tweeters six midwoofers a built-in woofer and you get nine one four from all from the one soundbar what do we know about sound motion like I do feel like Sonos is not typically prone to grandiose lies about its own sound quality.

40:25So I'm more inclined than a lot of companies to believe them when they say this is a big deal. But I also, it just seems like a lot of words. It's definitely a lot of audio processing. Okay. So I tested the original ARC a long time ago. And I tested it against my own 514 with actual speakers in the ceiling. And I thought the Arc did a great job, actually. But it was obviously more processed. Yeah. That was the tradeoff. Like, very clearly the tradeoff was, boy, there's not as much stuff happening around me when I use my actual system versus the Arc. And the Arc is like, boy, there's a lot of stuff happening around you.

41:06and boy it just sounds like more audio processing is occurring to make it seem like a bunch of stuff is happening all around you i've never been happy with how these things sound for music i just think music and movies are two different things yeah so i haven't heard this yet i'm excited to hear it um i know chris welch is excited to review it uh but you know the notable thing is we're getting to the place where 914 out of a soundbar is possible for a thousand dollars which is, if all that works, that is incredible. That is a system that would, you know, even if you buy cheap speakers, a receiver that can support 914, like you're out for thousands of dollars and then you got to put them on the ceiling.

41:51To do it in a soundbar for a thousand bucks is pretty cool. Well, and that's, I think that's been Sonos' thing with soundbars for a minute now. Even what you're describing about the Ace, right? It's like, it's almost as good or like very good, if not as good, with essentially none of the effort. And that's, I think, the whole pitch of soundbars in general. I have become a big believer in soundbars as somebody who is just not going to put nine speakers in my house. It's just not going to happen. I'd love to, but it's not going to happen. But I think the idea that if you can use this processing to get even most of the way there with just a thing I plant in front of my television, that's pretty powerful.

42:35Like I think that goes a really long way for an awful lot of people. I just want to clear it. 914 is not nine speakers. It is 13. You're right. I apologize. And that's bonkers. Like I have a – I'll put in nine. I'm not putting in 13. Right. I have a 514 system, which is nine. And that's a lot of speakers. Like arguably too many. 914 out of a soundbar is legitimately kind of cool. If it works. So I'm excited for that. By the way, the quote from CEO Patrick Spence is, we have reached a level of quality in the app that gives us the confidence to launch our extraordinary new products. They have 90 % of the previous apps features with the forthcoming update and more on the way.

43:15I think that's all fine. I also think at some point, if you're Sonos, you just have to start shipping stuff. Like you can, you, you can only sort of sit there and apologize so many times and eventually you have to ship new things and it's about to be the holidays. And I think like, we just got to the point where they're like, well, it is what it It is. We're just going to ship the thing, which I think is fine, right? Like how, I don't know how much longer they're supposed to sit and sort of beat themselves up about the very bad app that they shipped. Yeah. I'm dying to listen to this thing. I'm dying to review it.

43:45I will say one of the, if you have a regular sort of 5.1 system, the biggest, most noticeable upgrade is front height. Oh, interesting. You have your three speakers in front of you. The most immediate upgrade is not over your head. It's in front of you and up. Hmm. because your ears are pointed to the front. It's basic biology. So you put the two speakers above your other speakers and things are coming at you from above there. That's just a huge upgrade. If you can figure out how to get that upgrade today, you should do it. But a sound bar or even the speakers you put on top of your speakers are sort of necessarily reflecting from the middle, because they can't make the sound come from straight up.

44:28So that's always a thing I'm curious about. We'll see, revolutionary new transducers, David. Listen, I still listen to the audio out of my crappy TCL Roku TV. I'm coming to your house. I am looking forward to the day that one of these feels worth buying. I have my old 5.1 system from college sitting in storage. I'm just going to drive to your house. It's not great. Listen, every time I leave for work, I come home and Anna has rearranged one room in our house. I think next time she leaves, you should come over and we'll just set up speakers everywhere. It'll be awesome. All right, last one. It's a 4K N64.

45:03from analog i'm so excited about this thing so this thing has been a year in the making maybe i think like we we've been getting teases about this for an incredibly long time it's called the analog 3d it just looks like a nintendo 64 actually the thing kind of looks like a sega genesis uh but it it'll play 64 cartridges it has a controller uh as somebody who grew up with the n64 like the the way I would date my childhood is the Nintendo 64. Uh, I'm so excited about this thing. And analog does a really great job of emulating stuff and, and letting you play old cartridges with these things. Uh, I have, I have every confidence that this thing is actually going to work really well.

45:44The N64 is notoriously hard to emulate and, uh, analog seems to feel very good about having pulled it off, which I'm excited about. They changed the controller to not have the weird third thing in the middle, which I think, which is a bummer to be honest. Like I, I love the stupid controller. It never made any sense because you only ever held the middle one and the right one. Yeah. Because you're not, you don't have three hands, but it does still have the, the ports on the front for plugging in an N64 controller, which I love. I don't know if it actually even works, but as it just as the way it looks, I'm into it.

46:18Let me ask you a really dumb question. This only takes cartridges or you can play off cards like SD cards. I think it only takes cartridges. so no it it takes it has two usb ports and an sd card slot so you'll you'll in theory be able that you'll be able to put other stuff onto it but the the thing is uh and i wonder how true this is i think there are probably a lot of people out there who still have a box full of n64 cartridges i mean i intend to only play on my legally acquired n64 cartridges i don't know what you're talking about yeah i'm gonna i'm gonna dump them as i always do and always have which is how i play goldeneye now uh it's it's totally fine i bought one of those amber nick Game Boys.

46:58The one that just ships with like 6 ,000 games on it from Amazon. Yeah, great. And we have friends over and someone was like, what's this? And the other, just without missing a beat, they're like, it's a Game Boy. And I was like, well, that's a whole, that's a PhD thesis in trademark infringement. Alright, we gotta take a break. We're already over. We gotta take a break. We'll be back with Panos Panay. Adobe Acrobat Studio. So brand new. Show me all the things PDFs can do. Do your work with ease and speed. PDF spaces is all you need. Do hours of research in an instant with key insights from an AI assistant.

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49:32All right, we're back. So Amazon introduced new Kindles this week. David, you were at the event. I was. Which very notably was the first event at Amazon for Panos Panay, who for a chest listeners almost certainly remember from his time at Microsoft when he ran Windows and Surface. How was that event? Really interesting. So I think they did it in a very unusual way. It was like a, it was an embargoed event. So the whole existence of the thing was not public. It was basically just like a media briefing, but they framed it in his event and Panos like got up on stage and gave a whole speech. Very clearly what's going on is whenever they do a big public thing, it is going to have to be the future of Alexa.

50:13But they wanted to like give the Kindle its moment. Right. And they launched four Kindles at once, which I think has never happened in the history of the Kindle, that it was like it's a full line reset. And it was fun. Like this team loves Kindles. I always forget how many people love Kindles. Like the traffic to our website on the day it launched suggests that a lot of people really care about Kindles. And the team has been making stuff. Panos has been there for like almost exactly a year and has done a lot of stuff with the Kindle team since he's been there. So it was cool to actually just get to live in Kindle universe for a minute.

50:49Normally, they just update the website, and it's like, here's some new Kindles. And this was much bigger than that. So what are the new ones? So there's four. I'll go from cheapest to most expensive. So the cheapest is just the regular Kindle, which has some spec improvements. It's a little brighter. It comes in a really cool new matcha color that I like a lot. But it's still just the base Kindle. the new paperweight has a bigger screen brighter screen faster processing they like redesigned it a little bit it has some really nice like vibrant colors uh one thing i heard a bunch from folks at amazon was the whole sort of book talk movement and the thing where people are like bedazzling their kindles has really changed the way they think about the device so they're leaning into sort of making it more fun uh the paperweight is the kindle right in like a very real way it is is the biggest, most important Kindle in the lineup.

51:38New one seems to be very good. There's the Kindle Scribe, which is the biggest one that you can take notes on. They made lots of changes to that, including some Gen AI stuff where you can write your notes and then have the Scribe either summarize them or just like neatly format them and fix your handwriting so you can share them and find them more easily. But that's still the Scribe. And then the big announcement was the Kindle Color Soft, which is the first color Kindle. And basically it's a paper white with a color display. And they've done some really interesting like display stack work to make that work.

52:12It's very expensive, but it is like the one that they were like, this is sort of the moment for a new Kindle. Looks really great. Like you look at color and it's like, what do I need from color in a reading device? But then just looking at it on a table, seeing the book cover, and now it's in color. It's just instantly like, oh, this is great. Yeah. I played with the new paper that you had in the office and it's very fast. Super fast. Yeah. It's a good advice. The only other thing I'll say is I asked Becky if she wanted to call her Kindle and she just looked at me and said, stop trying to buy me Kindles.

52:47This is the problem. You're going to hear it. We're going to talk about it right now with Panos Panay. And once we're done with that, we're going to go to an ad and we'll be back with the lightning round. Here's Kindles with Panos Panay. Panos Panay. Welcome to the Vergecast. Have you been on the Vergecast before? Yeah. Yeah. Okay. But not in your current iteration, Nupanos. Do you feel like a different person? I don't know. You guys come right out swinging. Unbelievable. We got to do this for 30 minutes? Yeah, yeah. We're just getting started. We got a lot to do. So I feel like - It's good to see you guys.

53:22It's good to see you guys. We've got a lot of news to talk about. You launched several thousand new Kindles that we have to talk about. It is the most Kindle's been launched, I think, in history. Which is kind of fascinating, and it's part of what we should talk about. But let's just start with you. I think our audience knows you well over the years. You've launched a lot of things. You've been a product guy for a really long time. Why did you go to Amazon? Tell us the Ponos transition. The audience does know, but you were at Microsoft for the longest time. You did all the Surface stuff there.

53:51And then it was kind of a surprise, right? You left Microsoft to go to Amazon. That was a surprise. I think people are very curious. Why the move? I feel like you had a Ring camera and you maybe had a bug and you're like, I'm going to Amazon. There were a few details I wanted to get. Enough of this. Enough. Fix this right now. You know what? I'm just going to go somewhere new to fix it. Yeah. Yeah. I don't think it was exactly that, but there's a little bit to that. You think about the array of products between Ring, Blink, Eero, Fire TV, Fire tablets, Alexa, Echo, Kindle, Satellites, Zoox. You just look at that and you go, what could you do when this technological pipe of AI that's coming, which eventually ends up being a red thread between all these things, how they all connect and you can change people's lives.

54:46Yeah, it's not a bug. It's just awesome. Like, awesome. And so, you know, it energized me. Plus, you know, it's like another chapter is a great thing. It's a cool thing. Yeah. Is there an underlying AI bet underneath all of that? Like, when you came in, because I think you were making this move right kind of at the beginning of the holy crap AI is going to change everything moment. And we've been talking to people now for, you know, two years who are like everything that you can see or touch or imagine. It's a platform shift. Right. It's a platform shift. Like, is that, is that your bet too? It's a real one too.

55:29Like, it's very real. Yeah, it's a hundred percent that. And so when you ask the question, like, why did you go to Amazon? Like, first, it's an amazing company. Second, the values are crazy cool, you know. but third um Wow. Like, That shift is real. And I think what you can do, especially in the consumer space, what you can do for people in their everyday lives is off the charts. So if you combine it, you know, it gets a pretty easy answer. Not simple, you know, challenging as a human, you know, emotional and on every way. No question. Let me just ask you this. You said you named all the things.

56:14Zoox is the autonomous taxis. Robo taxi. Robo taxi. Yeah, think about it that way. Kuiper is the satellites. What is the connection between Kindle and the satellites? You don't need to stretch. Okay. You don't need to stretch everything and pull them together. That's not the goal. Okay. It's just the, you know, how you impact people's lives is different in those things. Okay. I was just wondering because - Getting broadband to everybody versus, and let's just think about the impact that has on people. Like, and for me, like, it's like a dream. You have, you know, helping people read, learn, create.

56:48That's one side on a Kindle. and so game-changing for life to make sure, you know, you're reading, learning, getting into a book, disappearing into it. That's one, that's one way to think about, like, it's just positive everywhere. And then satellites are distributing broadband to the world where everybody needs it. Like same, like impact, both are massive, but very different ways. Very different ways. One of the things that could connect a bunch of these products is Alexa. Obviously you're talking about AI, the opportunity for Alexa to be a smarter kind of AI product. I think a lot of people can see it.

57:21Yeah. Is that happening? Are you working on that? Yeah. We are working on it. You know, I'm not necessarily here to talk about it. I think I'll be back soon to talk about it. Sorry, another way to say it. I mean, if you'll have me back, we'll see because so far I'm frustrated with both of you. So we'll see how this goes, like how it ends. No, that's right. It'll stay like that. That's what we keep doing here. We're going to keep this carefully calibrated. Yeah, it goes fine. Write it, should I leave? Yeah, just start right away. I'm sorry, why did you put it? I'm like, what? Come on, man. I mean, you were the face of products people love for a long time.

57:55I mean, you just had an event. David, I think you were at the Kindle launch event. And I got an immediate text from David that's like, I missed a Panos Panay presentation. Did you? I really did. I sent him that text. You did? Yeah. Yeah. It was a less of a tech presentation yesterday. Yeah? Yeah. A little bit different. Yeah. And I just, that was, Microsoft also has a big platform and has a lot of products that you can connect in different kinds of narratives. You were great at that. I was just curious, like the jump from one big company's ecosystem to another big company's ecosystem, trying to pull them together.

58:28It seems like the same challenge, but it sounds very much like you think of the opportunities as different. They're very different. You know, they are very different. And the way I look at it at Amazon, like the amount of consumers you connect around the world. Um. With the technology shift, you know, it seems like buzzword at this point to say AI. I can't, it's so hard for me to be like, I'm with AI. What we're going to be able to do with Alexa just to connect people. I'm not talking about it in detail today, but it's going to be transformative. And how it connects throughout your life with all the devices that we just talked about, all the brands that are coming together, both in the home and outside of the home.

59:08It's just, it's off the, it's so, it's so energizing. There's another side to it too, though. Like the leadership principles at Amazon are surreal. They're fully aligned with the way I love running teams, you know, connecting people and what it means to focus on a customer. All right, well, before this becomes a full decoder episode that you're gonna do at some point, I have lots of questions about leadership principles that you guys will get to some other time. Let's talk about gadgets. Yeah, I'd love that. We can talk about leadership principles all day. Those are, they're just, they're awesome.

59:38But if you're not gonna let me - That's the other show. I think that's what they're gonna do. That's the other show. There's time for that. We'll do that. We'll do that somewhere else. But Kindles. So I'm fascinated by just the scope of this launch. Like you said, it was four Kindles at once, which I think Amazon has never, ever done. And I feel like that's either like an accident of technological development or like a very much on purpose Kindles were so back kind of moment. Which one of those things is it? I mean, seriously, come on. It's not going to be an accident, as you know. Kindle's one of these products that kind of transcended other products in a sense of it's a brand and it's a thing and it's identified as e-readers and it's all about reading.

1:00:19All this connection to it is so powerful, but it all reflects back on the people making it. I joined Amazon about a year ago. One of the first couple of meetings I had was on Kindle. And then I was inspired to see like, where are we at? And you had a team with a bunch of stuff in the vault, basically. Like we're close, we're thinking, what do you think? what do you think and we you know we sat down we looked at it all true story you know in on the color soft we looked at and i said if the color is great won't let's not compromise any experience you know there are some limitations with ink it's challenging you know there's flashing and other small challenges and how bright it'll be and you always compare it to an oled and what that means and you have this team that's just obsessed about the detail and which of course is near and dear to my heart and so about a year ago you know we looked at the full lineup and we made we made the investment that said, let's get after these products.

1:01:11Let's launch them all. Reading has momentum. Literally. I mean, Kindle brand product line is growing. And there's a whole new generation of readers. I think, what was the stat that 60 % of people who bought a Kindle last year were first-time Kindle buyers? First-time Kindle buyers. I find that was so surprising to me. It's so awesome because you also have this up and to the right reading trend. And so when you put those two things together, it basically says people who have always read are still reading and there's a whole new cohort coming in reading. And it's happening right now. I love it because you have Gen Z and millennials who are diving into the power of like disappearing into a book.

1:02:00and if you go on, you know, TikTok, you'll find book talk and there's a lot of energy. People are bedazzling their Kindles right now. That's, that's always a signal or a sign. That's cool. But a year ago when we sat in a room, um, I mean, these can be very personal, passionate, that's why I should close that. But a year ago when we sat in that room, yeah, it was very, let me answer the question, super conscious. Like next year, Kindle will be the year of Kindle. Let's go. We'll bring color. Uh, we'll bring it where it belongs. We'll bring a new level of ink, to writing. And then we'll refresh the products that, you know, are just what you would call products that people already love.

1:02:35I'm super fascinated by that moment because I feel like the Kindle is a really unusual kind of device in that it just won so long ago that there has been, I think you can perceive Kindle as both like a giant success and as kind of a slow moving product line over time there was a sense of like we we did the thing right like 10 years ago just here's the paperweight it's great you're never going to buy another one again because you're not going to have to and in a certain way it was like victory for the kindle right and so i think there were people who were like that's a great thing but on the other hand also there's other stuff happening there are other companies out there doing interesting things with e-ink and building new kinds of things we have we've we have people who like import weird e-ink devices from china just to like try what it looks like to run Android on them.

1:03:23Like there's a whole - David's talking about himself. I am talking about myself. My book's Palma is just outside of this room and I have a lot of questions for you about it. Bring it in here. Let me evaluate it. Let's do that off camera. Fair enough. Take a look. I'll help you. But I'm curious, like in that moment, you're like, okay, the Kindle is in most ways a gigantic success for what it is, right? Like it won the thing it was trying to win. How do we move this along? strikes me as kind of a complicated question. And it also feels like, especially with something like The Scribe, you have given the Kindle a new job to do for the first time in a really long time.

1:03:58Yeah, but a very focused job. Okay. A very focused job. And I think that's part of what Kindle is. Like Kindle's all about reading and now it's about reading and writing and it's that simple. These are both very innate behaviors in humans and just stay that focused, distraction-free. Create while you write, create while you read. These are big things for me, for the team. Yeah. I'm not sure how to think about it other than when you say it, I go, you know, Kindle is a fantastic brand. I don't think it's even near its peak. Okay. Not even close. I mean, not even close. Kindle's also a very humble brand.

1:04:33I mean, maybe that's why you say, oh, it had its date. No, it's so meaningful to be. That's why I call it a humble brand. It so means a lot to people. For sure. It's made a difference in their lives and still does. But here's a great example. Like if you had a paperweight from four years ago, I mean, you'd love that paperweight. you do yeah people love their kindles like love yeah but i think this would like my wife loves her kindle yeah i'm like do you want a new one and her answer is basically why right yeah and on the one hand you can read that as huge success but also absolutely it's rad like come on if they're if people are reading let's take it that's a that's a win and why it means it's a robust and meaningful device and it's doing the job it was meant to do however um as an example i'll challenge Like, do this for me.

1:05:18Go hand her the new paperweight. I think if I hand her the color one, then we'll have a different conversation. Try both. Yeah. Try both. I think color changes the emotion. Buy two Kindles. I'm understanding my instruction. Yeah, keep buying Kindles. No, no. But can I ask you, actually, a different variation on that question? Because I think the answer to – I think what you were saying will come out in the answer to this question. I look at – Yeah, I don't think David actually asked a question. I think he just made a bunch of statements there. David was like – That challenged me. The question is, does Kindle have a lot of competition and is there an ecosystem of things, other devices using like E-ing screens to drive that technology forward?

1:05:56Because there hasn't been a lot of action, like OLED displays. There's a lot of action in OLED displays. That technology is relentlessly moving forward and you can build new kinds of products around whatever those displays can do. Kindle is like, it's the main product in its category. Yeah. Do you think it has a bunch of competition that drives it forward? Do you think that the underlying ecosystem? Competition is always a great thing. You have to start there, I think. It's always been, it always will be, like just makes everybody better. It's got to be a good thing. But I would also say like, yeah, I don't think the tech is not done.

1:06:28It's not even close. I think there's another level that comes and it's actually purposeful. I've had several of these arguments in the past, but LCDs have its purpose, OLED has its purpose. That line blurs quite a bit, what that delta might be, what the purpose is between each. um and so super close but when you get down to ink displays and just the softer feel softer on the eyes what you're getting from it and there is something about it that is just is uh romantic um it it will they'll stay that delta is critical you know this is for these are noisier this is simple but that simplicity doesn't mean there isn't an innovation to be had there's a ton of it left.

1:07:12You know, and you start, you can start getting into color. You can start getting into ink. You can start getting into speeds. All of it is important, but it doesn't need, Neelight, when you're making products, you don't need these massive leaps to change people's lives. Sometimes it's like the most subtle difference has the, it's like just massive impact. So let's say, let's go back to, um, let's just go back to reading. We'll use your wife as the example, since you, you put it on the table. She loves her paperwhite. Yeah. Is that right? Hand her the new paperwhite. Color is a leap. You know, there's a different level of emotion.

1:07:54So it's easy to understand, Hey, this is the book. This is how the author intended you to see the cover. You like reading comics or take Trevor's new book or whatever. It's a color, it's a color book. You just, you know, read through it. It's very cool. But if you take it just to its most simple level and you hand her the new paperweight and just have her use it, then you'll experience something. It's just back to this point of it's a very subtle change. It's a massive change, really technically, but it's a subtle change to the user, which is basically speed of page turns. It's the first thing I noticed when I picked up the one David has.

1:08:28It doesn't, it's crazy. You hand somebody who had a four-year-old paperweight, the new one. First, they're like, I don't need it. And then they turn a page and they're like, don't touch this. It is mine. Yeah, I believe it. The emotion is, it's not because there was color. It's not because it's a huge leap. It's not because you saw it. It's subtle, but you feel it. And when you feel it, you know this, like it's so critical. Now, all of a sudden, it's like this feels better. And while it's a massive technology shift in the product itself under the covers on in many ways uh it's just totally different display stack but you're now in this place of wow the user just felt it and i think i don't think she gives it back yeah especially because all your books are there your content came with you you didn't lose anything you're not starting over it's very seamless and so now you're just back into the book you're in now it's just faster and it's not like people are going to read faster you just feel better and so when you're reading and you feel great you you read you just it's better well it goes back to what's so interesting about the kindle as a product for me is that like from the very beginning the kindle was always sort of not about itself like the the less you spent thinking about your kindle yeah the more you it's like the truth in a product that disappears into the background no hold on i'm just gonna disagree with david that first kindle really wanted you to think it did that's fair that thing was like that's remarkable it had a joystick it was a whole it was great it was a lot going on it was 17 years ago but it was really after that i'm just going out it was brilliant first one was a little out of control stick to the facts physical keyboard was sick stick to the facts man keyboard was awesome what you're talking about all right fair enough once like split keyboards are are one of my favorite things on the play once somebody other than jeff was in charge of the kindle design it it hit a point where and you know we heard this from people for a decade that like the goal is pen and paper right like that is that that was the north star of like it should feel like that it should crumple like that it should have all the properties of a thing that you don't think about or worry about as technology and that's i think a good and admirable goal in a lot of ways but also makes building the product really hard because you're like okay every cool thing we build calls more attention to this device designed to not call attention to itself and it's like if the goal is to just get people reading anything that you do that isn't open your book faster and turn the pages faster is both an upgrade and a downgrade in the experience yeah and that just strikes me as a really complicated tension to sort through with a device like this yeah um here's what it comes down to since people love the product so much you just have to listen to what they love like they love it which is different than listening to what they're asking for correct yeah listen to what they love and And, you know, with Paperwhite, just listen.

1:11:26And at the end of the day, it is. This isn't about thinking about the Kindle. It's about thinking about what they're reading and disappearing into it. And then you start getting into the nuance. Like, so what do you love? Like, I just like the way it feels. I like the way, how much it weighs. I like what I can lean in any posture. I like that I can lay by the beach. I like that I could spill my coffee on it. Like, they don't say those words, but you start listening. Like, I don't know, but one time I spilled my coffee and then I just wiped it and I kept reading and I'm like, so you like waterproof.

1:11:54You know what I mean? I'm laying at the beach, like, you know, that we test it with salt water. You know, that you can drop this thing in the pool. Like what you don't mean I know it, but that's what you love where you can do it. And now, but the real trick is the comfort that the product brings when you're reading. So it's not in your way and then it disappears. Take the new paperweight, like the screen just got subtly bigger. It's up to seven inches now, but the footprint of the device just barely grew, which means you still have that perfect center of gravity when you're holding it you still don't think about the weight it feels like a feather you know when you're holding it and reading it disappears lighter than a book and you're like you get to this point of um i've given you've got you know teams giving the user more real estate subtle back to one of those things and now you just you see more very simple the page was turning faster feels pretty good and but you haven't taken in a way anything they love you just added to it and i think uh critical but it is a product that i think disappears into the background sans 17 years ago i'm not gonna i'm not i'm not gonna bring back the transflective scroll bar on the side of the display let's go i don't know i'm not exactly sure but it's all about reading and it works it works really well now so there's two parts of the kindle david mentioned the books palma which uh i believe he caused the highest spike in their sales ever People like that device.

1:13:15They like other e-ink devices because of what you're talking about, right? Younger people especially know that their phones are distracting. They're drawn to a cheaper e-ink device that offers a more focused experience or just a black and white experience to cut down on distraction and noise. There's a dumb phone move in out in the world. Like there's this idea that we should just not use our phones for everything. I see that. The Palma is a fine piece of hardware. It's like a commodity e-ink screen. The Kindle is like integrated, right? It's hardware, software. There's a service behind it. When I hear people complain the most about the Kindle, it's I'm locked into the Kindle ecosystem.

1:13:50I can't go to other bookstores. PDF on this device is messy. It's hard. There's not like an app store for Kindles to let you extend the capabilities of the device. There is a little bit of a back and forth there, right, where they love this device. It offers one very singular experience that might bring people into an ecosystem. They might love it. and then to make it do all the rest of things you might want to do, like the scribe, you have to let it go be a computer. You got to let it be a writing device. Okay. You got to let it be a writing device. I think it's a very slippery slope though. Once you try and get kind of too cute with features or go too far, you start getting away from what we really want, which is the analogous moving from the analog to the digital and just writing on paper.

1:14:39is very dangerous you know once you start introducing more by the way you can it's why like we added a couple of gen ai features to it um but but two very simple we have a list that we have such a long list i think i was telling david yesterday like the amount of features we could yeah um but i don't i don't think it's right to come to confuse this scenario if you can create some ands, great. But at the end of the day, what you need is fundamentally put your pen down and start writing as if it was paper. And we also introduced writing on a book as if you were writing on a book. And so that translation is also challenging, but I think we're getting pretty, I think we're there.

1:15:21I think we're close. But you're a unique person to talk about this with, because if I was like, who knows the most about running a full operating system with a pen on a piece of custom hardware i gotta find that person and then it's like and then you've got this other thing way at the other end of the spectrum where like you can write on a book yeah those experiences are kind of headed towards each other a little bit i i mean or the at least with the kindle scribe that the more you add capability to it to do anything else even if the capability is just as simple as you can access PDFs and write on them and get your notes out.

1:15:59Well, now you're like, here's the file system. Which you can, which you can right now. Right. With the newscrack. But not, it's still like within the Kindle world. Absolutely. There's still a bunch of abstractions there. And the feeling you're not going to get the extra distractions. There's nothing better than when you go to attach a file to an email and you're like, oh, but let me check the web right now. Oh, let me see. I'm reading about the Verge. Oh, let's see. And that's my goal. How do I get the version of Kindle? But I think that's... But all the way to a Surface with a pen. Yeah. Right?

1:16:30You're on the same spectrum. Somewhere between a device that exists only for reading books and nothing else and Windows. Purpose built matters. Let me just say that. That's what you're saying. It does, man. It does. Do you buy that for Kindle specifically? Specifically for Kindle. Be careful. This is one of the beautiful things. There's so many different things that can come together and make magic. Like, don't get me wrong. And how they come together makes a difference. Oh, I agree. But I think... But specifically in this space, like, of course, like, of course you can... You should be able to write on your iPad or a PC or a Surface or whatever it is.

1:17:09Of course you should. Of course. You know, there's things to accomplish and things to do. There might be a job to be done. This is purpose-driven. You don't need your paper to browse the web. You just don't. As a matter of fact, when you're writing, that's what you need to be doing sometimes, if not all the time. When I'm in a meeting, I take all my notes on my scribe now. You can't imagine trying to do it on. You just don't. It's either that or a notebook. Yeah. But it's definitely not a full functioning computer because it just distracts me right out. So that part where you take all your notes on the Scribe and then - I also do all my morning writing on the Scribe.

1:17:55It's why we brought this summarize feature together. Yeah. So that's got to go out, right? I mean, this is the service aspect of it. The Scribe is running some Kindle operating system. It's running some set of Gen AI features that helps you summarize and takes the notes out. Those go up to a cloud service and then - Encrypted, secure, and sends it back to your device. And then they land as text that you can use anywhere else. They land in - Yeah. So you, let's say in this case, in the summarize feature, the Gen AI feature, you can, I have, I don't know, so many notebooks now, but they're named by people, they're named by products, they're named by meetings, you know.

1:18:31They're also, I have my morning notes and generally it falls into one of those buckets unless there's a creation bucket or an invention bucket. You know, I've got a few different ways I laid out, but let's say there's 20 pages in a book, one of my notebooks, right? Those 20 pages of notes, that's a lot. And by the way, there's something emotional about writing, yeah? Because there's recall. I remember I wrote this note right here on this piece of paper. I know how I wrote it. I know why I wrote it. But once you send this to the cloud, my 20 pages, it's going to summarize all 20, send it back into a very simple format.

1:19:01Yeah, think OCR, handwriting recognition. Sure. Take it, look at the 20 pages, summarize, bring it back in kind of a beautification form. Like pick the font you want to put it in. We got a number of them. You can make it longer, shorter, whatever. but in very simplest form, it's two clicks comes down. Here's the summary of all my notes. I've got a page of notes from 20 pages written, which is powerful. I'm just getting to, let's say AI is the platform shift. And now, instead of having one converged device in the phone, I have three devices. I've got a paper to write on. I've got, I don't know, one of the many, many microphone pins that David is constantly being forced to review, uh, that he can, he can talk to all day long.

1:19:40And maybe, maybe I do have a phone that is mostly a camera. At some point I want all those things to talk to each other and the idea that my ai pin does not know about the notes i took on my amazon scribe does not know about a email i read on my laptop actually creates like the desire for me to have more lock-in right so like fine i'm just gonna buy it all from one vendor my phone already my the phone company is already selling me everything uh how do you break that like do you Is it more interoperability? Is it extending the Kindle operating system to do more and more things? No, I don't think it's that.

1:20:17I think interoperability is a great thing. And you can find it, you can remove seams between different OSs for sure. I don't really lose a lot of sleep over it. I also know that within the device family that Amazon builds, like that'll all continue because of AI become more seamless back to 0.1, like the opportunities off the charts. but I don't think you want to lock it all in. I think you still need the interoperability as well. So I think they both matter. And I think it's different for every person. Like you're going to end up in a place where you love a certain set of devices. I don't think you're going to have five in your bag, but if there's a purpose-built device that you do need, you're going to take it with you, man.

1:20:57It makes a difference. You're going to need that connectivity, but don't be confused. All your notes on your Kindle today show up on your iPhone. Like on the Kindle app, it's right there. Seamless. Integration's pretty awesome. And eventually you'll have editing those docs on your iPhone too, I'm sure. So not to give away the future roadmap. But I don't think there's a limit to that. So I don't... When you say it, it doesn't resonate as much for me because we do believe in interoperability. We do want to see it. We see our products on all the other platforms and in a way that's useful for customers where it matters to them.

1:21:29Not just to do it or to check a box, but that it matters. I have one more question and then we actually do need to let you go because you have other things to do. I do. It turns out You were talking about the sort of dedicated device. Isn't it at some point, doesn't our team save me at some point? We're in this moment of the supposed disintermediation of the smartphone. For years now, companies are like, what is the thing that comes after phones? And digital cameras are making a comeback. Everybody's buying cool pixels from 20 years ago again. Are they? Big trend. you've been through like you've been making products through the whole rise and sort of dominance of the smartphone and you mentioned you know the kindle is a distraction-free device it's been that thing for a long time it's been successful for a long time do you buy the like big picture trend here that we we shoved everything into a phone and the next phase is like pulling it all back out again no no i don't buy that at all okay yeah um i didn't know that was a big picture trend.

1:22:31There are a lot of people who would like you to believe that it is. I'm not sure there. They do? Any of them are. Yeah. Everybody who wants to make it. Tell me, are they really important people? Anybody who's not Google and Apple would really like that to be the case because that's a really great way for them to get around app store taxes. Yeah. I mean, I think if you believe AI is a platform shift and you - AI is a platform shift. There's no question. So then you can control a new kind of user interface, right? I mean, that's the heart of it. And then maybe you can get people to stop using it.

1:22:54Yeah. But I don't think the phone's going away. Yeah. Like everything you said was right. I think the and then part was odd. Yeah. I mean, look, a phone's an incredible utility and the product you have in your pocket right now probably is probably a great product. And it has its purpose and form. I do think jobs are going to move off the phone. I mean, I don't think the phone goes away. I think we can make some magical products that have literally nothing to do with the phone. Yeah. And we're going to. I mean, that's why I'm here at Amazon. Like, go back to your first question. That is why I'm here at Amazon.

1:23:34Like, no question. Like, we can, the opportunity to make magic with the through line of AI, as you said earlier, that's not fake. Yeah. That is a platform shift. But to get as silly to say, you know, I remember 12 years ago when, 13 so years ago when we had started Surface. I'll just give you an analogy, not that I want to go back there. there were so many people that told me the laptop is dead i mean what are you doing it's over the phone has replaced it that's that was the meme 13 years ago and uh that's not what's happening now what was happening is certain jobs were moving to the phone just shopping's great on the phone social media is incredible on the phone taking photos off the phone pretty damn good texting communicating um but then the jobs on the laptop just got stronger which is interesting the jobs that had to be done on it you know walk into any meeting and everybody opens their laptop it's just what they do and in many places um you can do a lot on your phone but what it's not that the pc was dying and it's analogous you know so take that analogy um Um, same thing now.

1:24:50I think jobs are going to move off the phone. I think there's probably better products and I know there is that are coming, you know, products that will bring more seamless, more seamlessness for AI, make it more useful for people. Um, I mean, I'm, you know, I might be working on some of those products right now, if it turns out, you know, where we started, I believe that. I don't really believe it. I know it's, and I, and I know it's right for customers, like for people. but to say it's going away, come on. That's just, that's silly. It just, I think jobs do move though. Does that analogy make sense?

1:25:23Like the phone's not going away that screen in your pocket. That's not the point. However, will they, will certain jobs move and be better somewhere else? I think. Yeah, for sure. Now, is there a world where everyone has a hundred devices in their bag? No, no, no, no. But you know, some jobs move to your wrist and they're better there. Some jobs stay in your pocket and they're better there. Some jobs will be on your eyes. They're better there. And you know, Once that, back to your seamless operations, a lot of things will be ambient devices where voice is powerful. I know a few of those things.

1:25:56We got over 100 million people using them right now. Jobs are going to move there and they're going to be awesome. And by the way, unbelievably powerful jobs. And you're going to see it on devices that my team's building, like literally. I'm not supposed to talk about it. I got to see my team's like, don't talk about it. Don't want you to hold on. Slow down on your, you know. I'm still, stop hinting at Echo and Alexa, stop it. Like, but let's be clear. Like there's reality between bringing together all these things. That's why I'm here working with this amazing team at Amazon, man. Like, and I'm telling you the product makers at Amazon are so good.

1:26:31And so you, you just, there's this opportunity to pull, to pull a lot of things together, but then go back to your original point. I'm not, I'm not sitting here as a, you know, as part of this industry saying yes. and the phone is going away. Like, come on. Silly. Silly. Couldn't get me to say that about technologies that matter every day in our lives. I might be wrong, maybe. Be happy to be proven wrong. It's fine by me. You know, we got other options, but. Do you think AI represents an opportunity to rethink the phone? I think so. This is the other thing we hear a lot about. Yeah, I think so.

1:27:04I think that's true. Right, as these jobs move, maybe these form factors change. But just like anything, like, you know, like go back to my analogy from 13 years ago, it was a way to rethink the PC too. his job's moved to the phone there was a whole other set of technology that hit the PC that like these jobs have to get stronger and you just rethink how those are done. I think the last time you were here you showed me the Surface Duo Is that right? I think that was last time we chatted in the studio That was a cool product by the way Super cool product. Do you think there's an opportunity to enter the phone for you?

1:27:33To make a new? See now you're bridging into territory that I'm just you know. I figure. You gotta end with the big shot. Yeah. Nice swing Nice swing. Where's that button? Where's that button I'm not supposed to touch? Panis, we're going to have you back, and you're going to talk about leadership principles for, like, several hours. It's going to be awesome. Yeah, I think I mean, look, you've got a lot of passion around it. Love it. Thank you for being here. Yeah, this is right. Thanks, guys. It was a lot of fun.

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1:30:12All right, we're back. The lightning round. This week I sent slacks about getting a lightning round sponsored. Whoa. Did they accomplish anything? How rich are we now? I will say there were some very creative ideas that are still not the idea of just having us say the lightning round is sponsored. if you've got a company with the word lightning in it boy do they want to talk to you

1:30:41sure yeah it's a lot we're working on it again i have no uh ability or sophistication or experience in selling ads so i'm just my job is to just say it every week it's just speak advertising into existence someone else with some money show up and someone here will figure it out I hope it's like the Tampa Bay Lightning, the NHL team that eventually sponsors the Lightning round. That's basically where we're at. And I was like, I don't, it doesn't have to be that complicated. Like sponsored by George, I think would work at this point. I like that. George, get us. If your name is George and you can write a check, call us up.

1:31:17It's Sumnum. I don't know how it works. I don't know if you can call us up to buy an ad. Anyway, there's kind of a lot in this Lightning round. There is. You take the first one. All right. So this happened today, Thursday, as we're recording, Google announced some pretty big org chart shifts. And this is the thing we've kind of been tracking all year. Google has been pretty aggressively changing the way the company works, partly in order to just AI-ify everything. But I think partly because Google has changed a lot as a company and you have a lot of people who have been there a long time who maybe don't want to be there anymore or are just tapped out on what they've been doing for a long time.

1:31:57And so, like, it's just changing a lot. And the new one that happened on Thursday was that Prabhakar Raghavan, who has run search ads, several other things, but mostly he is, I would say, the single most important person in terms of how Google makes money and has been for a very long time, is now stepping down from that role and is becoming Google's, I think the title is chief technologist. What's the nice way to say this? That title doesn't mean anything. It's like, this is what, I mean, we went through this with Hiroshi Lockheimer, right? Who was like, I'm not leaving Google. I'm just going to go take on other roles.

1:32:35That's all fine and good. They're going to continue to be interesting, important people inside of Google. But like, the way that google works is if you don't run a thing you don't run a thing you know what i mean and and so i think the idea of being chief technologist will be big and interesting and he'll like show up at conferences every once in a while but like it is it is super meaningful that he is leaving the search team which is the team the most important team under the most pressure right both from regulators and open ai whatever yeah it is it is the thing and uh to that point Actually, the person who is taking over that job is Nick Fox, who has been at Google for like forever.

1:33:17And a thing that I've heard internally over the years is that Nick is one of a very small number of people who Sundar Pichai believes are like his fixers. He is the person who is tapped to like make a thing work. He had to do with messaging, which I'm David. I would just say your evidence does not support. you know but so yes except uh rcs has worked google messages is now everywhere like to the extent that nick fox had to solve an impossible problem he actually did a pretty good job uh he ran assistant for a long time he has he i think was one of the ones who launched google fi uh like hits and misses but but he is a guy who has been tapped to do some of google's most important most ambitious things at various times.

1:34:04And so I think it's telling that he is showing up as the one, he's not like a grizzled search executive, right? Like there are lots of people inside of search who've been working inside of search for a long time. He is a guy coming from another part of the company to presumably change the way that search operates, which I think is very interesting. Then the other big change is that the whole Gemini division is now going under DeepMind. um deep mind and demis asabas who runs deep mind is just ruthlessly consolidating ai power inside of google uh demis just won a nobel prize which is bananas uh like kudos to them for some of the protein stuff that they've been doing it's really cool uh but like piece by piece every ai thing google has been doing has come under demis and deep mind and except for google assistant which is going to platforms and devices.

1:34:58Which is, I think, a sign that Google Assistant is dying, right? Like, Google Assistant is going to be how you turn Bluetooth on and off on your phone, and everything else is going to be Gemini. Like, that's so clear where that's going to be. So that's the Rick Osterla group. That's the Pixel group and the Android group. Oh, that's right. That is that group. So that's just fascinating. I actually think that makes perfect sense, right? That means that becomes a feature of Android, not an AI thing. Or the Home Hub stuff. Sure. It's a way to turn things on and off on your devices, which is fine. You actually don't need AI to do that.

1:35:32But isn't the future of Google Assistant the future of Gemini? Aren't they the same thing? No, which is what's super annoying about using Android right now. Because Gemini can't do the things on your phone. Oh, yeah, but this is Google. Come on. I mean, give it a minute and it'll all get rolled under Demis at this point anyway. So what I take from this is actually no one knows how to organize these companies. Right? You're announcing a new chief technologist at your company. what is the most important technology in the future of Google? It's AI. Yeah. Is your new chief technologist going to, no, he's going to run right into your CEO of AI, the guy who just won a Nobel prize.

1:36:07Well, this is the problem with AI, right? Like if you believe AI is the future, AI is everything. It's your infrastructure, it's products, it's the like in-between stuff that enables all this stuff. It's everything. AI is the whole stack. and all these companies are putting someone in charge of AI, which is like not the same as making them the CEO of the company, but it's also not that different. Well, so I mean, I just compare and contrast to Microsoft, which has now largely the same structure. Google has moved itself to the same kind of structure as Microsoft. So Microsoft had Kevin Scott, who's a CTO.

1:36:43Famously, still the person at Microsoft, he told me this on Decoder, Kevin Scott owns the GPU budget at Microsoft. If you want to buy a GPU, you got to call Kevin. How do you make yourself the most powerful person in the company? It's real. So he was the CTO. He was the one who did a bunch of the opening, like early work to do the opening ideal. He was like figured it out. But then Microsoft, all the opening drama happened and Microsoft went out and sort of like just acquired the talent from inflection. And now Mustafa Suleiman is the CEO of AI at Microsoft and they have a CTO in Kevin Scott still.

1:37:17That is just a complicated org chart and it looks exactly like this. Yep. 100%. And so you're just ending, these companies are starting to, they're trying to figure out how to structure themselves to make all this work. And the only difference to me is that Google's business is under such regulatory threat that a bunch of people are, I think, are kind of choosing to bail instead of taking the next turn. yeah i mean and again even if you think google might come out of all this regulatory stuff unscathed it's going to take so long and if i'm provokah raghaven like do you want to sit and twiddle your thumbs for the better part of a decade until all this antitrust stuff gets sorted out or do you just want to like dip and go work on other problems i kind of get it yeah they did all that consolidation android android and google is filing emergency motions with the court in the case today to delay opening up Android to other stores.

1:38:11Do you want to do that or do you just want to wander the earth? Right. Yeah. All right. What's yours? Weird. I actually have more Google stuff. Do you? But it's also Trump stuff and I apologize. It's election season. Oh, God. Trump is talking a lot. And people are mad at us for covering this stuff, but, you know, there's a meaningful chance he could win. And I would just point out that we live through the tech policy of the first Trump administration. which was bananas. I've been made to remember it recently, which I'm very upset about. Do you remember when I just counted days since Trump announced Google would build a website for coronavirus testing?

1:38:48Like every week? Like that's where we're at again. Only this time he hates the tech companies. Like J.D. Vance's answer to did Donald Trump lose the election is not yes or no. It's big tech interfered with the Hunter Biden laptop story, which is not an answer. But they're pro TikTok now. So none of this makes any sense. By the way, that's not an answer. Like you can be upset that people did or did not have information. That does not mean that their votes don't count. Like I think a lot of people who voted for Hillary Clinton are pretty mad that the New York Times chose to make the word emails incredibly relevant to everyone such that the Verge.com sells a T-shirt that just says emails on it.

1:39:30But that doesn't mean their votes didn't count. Yep. And so that whole Vance line of attack is nonsensical. What it's pointed out is we're all mad at tech companies. So Trump is on stage at the Economic Club of Chicago being interviewed by John McElthwaite, who's the editor-in-chief of Bloomberg News. John McElthwaite is a very proper British man. He used to be the editor-in-chief of The Economist. He is not a guff-taking kind of dude. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, he's not a shenanigans kind of guy. Yeah. I know a lot of EICs. This isn't the one that is having a party on the boat. You know, I'm just putting out – but there are other ones that are.

1:40:12I'm not going to say who they are. But if you're on my list, you're on my list. You know what I'm saying? Okay. So John McElroy is interviewing Donald Trump and he says the Department of Justice wants to break up Google. What do you think? And then Trump just says some stuff. and all of it adds up to I want to do some speech regulations. I'm just going to read it to you. Trump says, yeah, look, Google's got a lot of power. They're very bad to me, very, very bad to me. I can speak from that standpoint. They only have bad stories. In other words, I have 20 good stories and 20 bad stories. Everyone's entitled to that.

1:40:47You only see the 20 bad stories. I called the head of Google the other day and I said, I'm getting a lot of good stories lately, but you don't find them in Google. I think it's a whole rigged deal. I think Google's rigged just like our government's rigged all over the place. Confusing. So I think what he's talking about is if there are 20 stories about good stuff Trump has done and 20 stories about bad stuff Trump has done and you search for Donald Trump's name in Google News, you only get the negative stories. Presumably that is what Ben has up to. I believe that is what he's talking about. And he called up presumably Sundar Pichai and complained about this.

1:41:24That is just core First Amendment activity. Maybe he called Prabhakar and Prabhakar was like, I'm done with this. I'm out. Never mind. I don't know, man. That is just straightforward First Amendment protected activity. We're going to rank some stories. You're going to type in a search term and we're going to show you a list of them. And maybe you think Google should be more neutral. But if you want to do something about it, you're going to – in this country, we'll run straight into the First Amendment. and these companies have won multiple cases asserting their first men rights. Yep. So then he pivots this conversation about Google to China.

1:42:01And he says, I do something. But you have to give them a lot of credit. They've become such a power, such a power. You have to give them credit. How they became a power is really a discussion. Is that an interest argument? I don't know. And then he says, at the same time, it's a very dangerous thing because we want to have great companies. We don't want China to have these companies. Right now, China is afraid of Google. And then he says, China is a very powerful, very smart group of people. I'm really glad you read that part. I was going to make you read that part if you didn't otherwise. Which is a great way to describe a country.

1:42:31Yeah. What is a country? So I don't know, man. Like, is China afraid of Google, a company that doesn't operate in China? Is he talking about AI? I, I true, I, I've like been trying to parse this for some time. So then Micklethwait says, well, if you're afraid of China, you wanted to ban TikTok and now you're going to let TikTok operate in this country. And I don't know, Trump just kind of just pivoted this conversation because Micklethwait said, is TikTok a threat? And Trump goes, I think it is a threat. Frankly, I think everything is a threat. There's nothing that's not a threat. We should put that on a t-shirt.

1:43:14But sometimes you fight through the threats. Like Google. I'm not a fan of Google. They treat me badly. But are you going to destroy the company by doing that? If you do that, are you going to destroy the company? What you can do without breaking it up is make sure it's more fair. And then he ends with, and it's only bad because of fake news because the news is really fake. That's the one thing we have to straighten out. We have to straighten out the press because we have a corrupt press. All of that is speech regulations. Yeah. I want to make Google more fair. That's a content moderation law.

1:43:47We're going to pass a law insisting that Google is fair. I don't know how you do that. And then we're going to straighten out the press. How? Write the law. If you're mad at me for saying those, go ahead. Write the law that straightens out the press. Involve the government in that process. Just in the course of that, he drills all the way down to actually the problem is not fix Google. It's fix the people who are writing the stories about Google. or about me that get posted on Google. Like it just, I don't know. If you think too hard about it, your brain sort of explodes. But these are things he said out loud.

1:44:24And apparently he's calling CEO. So then the other story is today, he said Tim Cook called him. So I'm just going to read you this quote. He's on one of the many, many bro podcasts that he's been going on lately. Like this man's on YouTube. Like who's on YouTube? It's Mr. Beast, Logan Paul. It's Donald Trump. But he's just – Real. If you've got a YouTube bro podcast, call him up. He's ready to go. So he's on one today, the PBD podcast. Please don't get mad at me if you're like some huge YouTube fan of this podcast. I've never heard of it before. This is what I'm telling you. And I'm looking at the thumbnail here and I'm describing it as I'm describing it.

1:44:57He's on this podcast today. And he says two hours ago, three hours ago, he, Cook, called me. He said the European Union has just fined us$15 billion. On top of that, they got fined by the European Union another$2 billion, which is true. In March, the EU fined Apple$2 billion after finding that Apple was restricting music apps in some way. And then they basically said Apple needs to pay$14.4 billion in unpaid taxes. Totally different things. Totally different fines. And then Trump goes on to say, Cook said something that was interesting. He said they're using that to run their enterprise, meaning Europe is their enterprise.

1:45:32And then he said, that's a lot, Tim, but I have to get elected first. But I won't let them take advantage of our companies. That won't be happening. What? Okay. First of all, I love the idea that either Tim Cook or Donald Trump thinks that it costs$15 billion to run the EU.

1:45:50Very good. The most efficient government in world history. That would be great. But unclear how any U.S. politician can negotiate tax rates in other countries. That's just a thing. Like if Germany showed up on our doorstep and was like, we've got some ideas about your tax. Like we wouldn't – we just wouldn't do it. I don't know. I would be like, go away, Germany. American flag. Get out of here. So that's confusing. Maybe there's something the president can do in that case. The weirder thing is he just said it. He said – in the Google case, he said, I called the head of Google and I said some outlandish nonsense.

1:46:39OK. We asked Google. They didn't say anything. But that's Trump's claim that he called and maybe he's lying. In this one, he says Cook called him to complain about EU regulations, which is a very interesting thing for Tim Cook to have done. He put a time frame on it. He said three hours ago he called me. So we know approximately when. That's today as we're speaking. And so we asked Apple about this. Apple flatly doesn't respond. I will tell you, we talk to Apple a lot. We send a lot of notes to a lot of companies. Hey, did this happen? Hey, we need a statement. Hey, here's this thing. Hey, I have a lot of thoughts about your iPhone camera.

1:47:14We talk to these companies a lot. Dead silence, I don't know what it means. I'm not going to interpret it. I'm just saying it is there's not I don't have to like go to a magistrate judge and file a form in triplicate to get a comment from a big tech company. Like this is the thing that we do all the way. So they just didn't respond. I don't I don't know how to interpret this one. I don't either. It's very it's very odd. odd. I mean, I think to some extent, the idea that a lot of tech CEOs are somewhere between actively rooting for a Trump presidency and hedging their bets in case he wins by, you know, sucking up to him in various ways.

1:47:56That's real. It happened the last time he was president. It seems pretty clearly it's happening now. Tim Cook is not the like, jump on stage at a rally. Tim Cook opened a fake factory for Donald Trump. Do you remember this? This is what I mean. Like, this is not. He was like, they're making iPhones and Macs in America again. And Tim Cook was like, we've sure come to this factory or we've been doing it for some time. This is what I mean, right? So like, it wouldn't be completely out of character for Tim Cook to have done that essentially as like a make the man feel good, right? Like that is the overwhelming advice on how to get things out of Donald Trump is flatter him.

1:48:33And so to call him and be like, Donald, WTF, Europe, am I right? It's like, I can see why you would make that phone call if you're Tim Cook. I also can see a series of ways in which this story is not true and why Apple would decide that there is literally no upside to responding at all. So again, I'm in the same place of like, I don't know what to make of this. All the way on the spectrum from none of this happened to this happened exactly the way that he describes. I don't know how to interpret any of the possible outcomes. It's bananas. I do love the idea that Tim Cook was like, they run Europe on my taxes.

1:49:07And it's like, well, first of all, they're mad at you because you haven't paid them. They actually don't. And that's the problem. To be clear. So I don't think that's enough to run Europe. I've never run Europe before. I've imagined it as all children in the Midwest do. And it just – my budget was higher. When I was working out in high school in Wisconsin, I was like, I think it's going to take like one or two trill to run Europe. Again, not an economist. I didn't have any formal training at the time. I just think it's more than 14.4. We'll see. We asked all these companies to respond to this.

1:49:40I will say that the two comments run right into each other, right? If you're Apple and you're mad at Europe, you're probably also mad at the United States Department of Justice for filing an antitrust case against you. And Donald Trump is here saying something has to be done about Google, which just lost its big antitrust case at the United States Department of Justice. the main result of which is that Google is going to stop paying Apple the money to be the default search provider on the iPhone. So it's just kind of all the same problem. And Trump is Trump. And he, I think he likes Tim Cook and is mad at Google search.

1:50:17Yeah. Two easy things to be right now. If you're, if you're Donald Trump, you know what I mean? And really that man is searching for the simplest one. Uh, all right. Let's end with, let's end with Anthropic and AI. Cause I think we should end with a vision of utopia. What's going on with this one? Okay. So, so Dario Amadei, who is the CEO of Anthropic, uh, wrote, I think it's, it's, it's either 13 ,000 or 14 ,000 words. It's so many words. My man wrote like a short book, basically making the case for AI. Uh, and I think it's particularly interesting that he's doing this because a Sam Altman recently wrote his sort of opus about why AI is going to make everything wonderful.

1:50:59And Anthropic in a lot of ways has been kind of a tonal counter to open AI that they've been much quieter about what they're building. They've been much less utopian. They've been much more concerned with security. They've talked a much more like realistic game about what they're doing. But as Kylie Robison on our team pointed out, they also need to raise astounding amounts of money in order to do any of the stuff that they want to do. And it's much harder to raise money on like a careful case for why this stuff might be interesting than it is to just say out loud, I am building God. Like Kylie has just been running around the newsroom being like, this is why they're doing this.

1:51:37And I think she's right. And so what Dario did here basically was write a more reasoned, but still like wildly outrageously optimistic vision for what AI can be. And I think a lot of it is about the stuff that doesn't get talked about a lot when we talk about AI, which I actually really appreciate. People should read this. It's this and Stephen Wolfram's thing about how chat GPT works from like two years ago are two very instructive primers on like what is going on in this space. And I think everybody should read both of them. They're both incredibly long, but they're very good. And I'll just read you the five things that he says are the categories he's most excited about.

1:52:18It's biology and physical health, neuroscience and mental health, economic development and poverty, peace and governance, work and meaning. First of all, that's everything. It's all the things. It's just... That's Europe. And if you have 14.4, you too can run. but he makes a bunch of interesting cases and i think does a good job of explaining like here is what it's gonna take to get to this that we need ai that is sufficiently powerful and has lots of different interfaces and you can poke holes in all of this because none of it exists most of it is going to be wildly difficult and he just says there's a line where he just says in it it has all the interfaces available to a human working virtually as if that's just like a like a feature you can ship tomorrow.

1:53:04So I take this less as a real roadmap towards anything and more just like an actually really thoughtful idea about what AI could be in the absolute best case. And in that way, it's a really good read. He talks a lot about what it could mean for medicine and what it could mean for how we interact with each other and with technology. And we've talked a lot about like the relationships people are building with AI characters. He mentions that kind of stuff. There's a lot of stuff in here and you get to the end and you're like, hell yeah, AI, let's go. And then it's like, oh, there's other things. And also none of this exists or probably will anytime soon.

1:53:41And that's where we land. And the thing I've seen most people say about this is like, even if he's right about all of this, his timelines are off by orders of magnitude. And so I think if you go into it, thinking with that perspective, I actually think this is a super fun read. Yeah. It's funny because right next to it is the New York Times warning perplexity to stop using its content and it's like kind of all this is built on just like taking everything yeah like all of the electricity and all of the content all of the money and it's like you had i guess you in return you have to promise digital god i mean and and to what is worth all of that taking what this does promise is digital god he doesn't say it in as many words and he's actually he's very careful to not say agi which is what has become the synonym for digital god i I think he just calls it powerful AI, which doesn't sound less alarming.

1:54:32It's just different alarming, I guess. But yeah, it is. This is the size of the promise you have to make if you're one of these companies in order to do everything you need to do to get there. And this is as neat and reasoned a summation of that stance as I've seen yet. He might be wrong about everything. But it's like, if you want to get inside the rational brain of the AI industry right now, this is about as close as I've seen. And they have to take everything. Right. And it takes 14 ,000 words to explain. It's just like, and one lawsuit from Sarah Silverman can bring this all to a grinding.

1:55:09A hundred percent. Yeah, you put this next to, was it Marc Andreessen who was like, you can't force us to pay for this because then we won't be able to do it. But take those two statements next to each other and it becomes very hard to know where any of this is going to go. Yeah. And that one, by the way, was it Mark Andreessen said that in a filing to the United States Copyright Office? Perfect. Very good. All right. We are over. That was a good one. I'm sorry. It's very close to election. We have to talk about it. We're going to actually have a bunch of election coverage coming soon, just like policy coverage.

1:55:43So get ready. It's coming. It's going to be weird because it's going to be right next to laptop reviews. but that's what we do here. That's the verge, baby. That's the verge. That's the thing that we make. It's all one thing. We're going straight from 2004 week to election coverage. Oh, we should just mention, but David was the editor on 2004 week. Congratulations, David. It's been incredible this week. It turned out awesome. I deserve the least credit of everyone who worked on it but it turned out awesome and everyone should go read every single one of the stories and even if you don't read them, just click on them because the design of everyone is different and they're all so sick and you should just look at them.

1:56:15Don't even read them. Just look at them. And that's all I ask. Well, you should read them because the reporters did a great job writing them. But it is true that Graham Macri, our engineer, Chris Naraki, our creative director, and Patrick Jr., our designer, had the time of their lives making this go. And it's very good. So go click on all the links. We'll put them there. That's happening. And then thanks to Panos for coming on the show. We're going to have him back when it's Alexa time. Yeah. I think we can say that. All right. That's it. That's for Shasta Rock and Roll.

1:56:50And 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 Liam James, Will Poore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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1:57:47We all have moments where we could have done better, like cutting your own hair. Oh, yikes. Or forgetting sunscreen, so now you look like a tomato. Ouch. Could have done better. Same goes for where you invest. Level up and invest smarter with Schwab. Get market insights, education, and human help when you need it. Learn more at schwab.com.