The next Macs and the next Twitter

23:35That feels like a you problem. I'm worried about your physical safety. I love Taylor Swift. I'm a huge fan of the Arras Tour. The cool move for Apple, because it's going against Monday Night Football, would be to bring Taylor Swift and Travis Kelsey. That's how you one-up Sony. You get them to publicly announce their relationship. So we think it's chip bumps. We're not doing that. No, I like this plan better. Tim Cook is dressed up as Taylor Swift. and Craig is Travis Kelsey. You see what I'm saying. It's a very obvious movie. All right, well, we figured it out. So we think we're getting M3s and MacBook Pros.

24:10We think we're getting a 24-inch iMac refresh. We'll see. Yeah. Then there's some other stuff leaked. German had new AirPods. Apparently the third-gen AirPods are not selling well. People are just buying the cheaper older ones because if you're in that middle, why not go all the way to the Pros is basically my feeling. Yeah. I think there are basically two kinds of AirPod buyers right now. There are people who buy the newest Pros because they're the best ones and they're very good. And there are people who buy the thing that goes on sale at Costco. I am the person who bought them on sale at Costco.

24:39I literally could not tell you what generation of AirPods I have. And I don't care because they are AirPods. I don't like the pros because I don't like sticking them in the ear canals. That just feels bad in my ears. But I think that's the case now. They have entry-level AirPods and new pros. And anything in between, I don't know that that's interesting. There's yet another kind of buyer. And I have seen them. It's not Costco. It's the people who buy the knockoff AirPod Maxes at Home Depot, which are just in the middle of the store. At Home Depot? I see people pick this. I meant we bought a new house at Home Depot every weekend.

25:12That's where you live now. It's just like where I'm going. And I watch people walk by this display of knockoff AirPod Maxes at the Home Depot. And they pick up the box and they look at them. And I've seen at least two people do like a furtive look around because they know. And then they walk away with the box. and I'm like, oh, there's a lot of people on the New York City subway wearing the Home Depot AirPod Maxes. And I don't even know, why is Home Depot allowed to sell fully counterfeit products, but it's happening. Every weekend I see this. They're like 20 bucks. David's scrolling through them right now.

25:45Okay, I can offer you a pair of$100 skull candies, or I can offer you a$20 pair of Zoomy Soundplay wireless over-ear headphones. They look exactly like AirPod Maxes. For 1997 and do look alarmingly. I'm telling you on the New York City subways, a lot of people are wearing$20 Home Depot AirPod Maxes. This lady's just vibing. She's having a great time. Neelai, I have great news. They have HD sound for an immersive music experience. I'm just telling you, I think this is a third category. You've got the two categories of AirPod buyers, and then you have the whatever that looks fine. It looks like the thing.

26:21Oh, sure. It's expensive. That's why you go to Walgreens, and they just sell headphones in line, and it's like, who buys these? and it's like some people buy them. Yeah. And so I think that those middle, the third gen AirPods, like the good ones in the middle, I think Apple expected those to be the big seller. Yeah. But actually you're being squeezed by Home Depot on the bottom and at the top people actually give a shit and they're going to buy the best ones. Right. Yeah. No, I think that's right. But I do think it's exciting to see, frankly, Apple like continue to push what AirPods can be because it sort of seemed like for the last couple of years they were just like, well, we won.

26:55AirPods are like everywhere. everybody has them you either have airpods or you have the other ones but the problem is they're now commodified yes exactly and now it's like they're they're pushing on some of the stuff i think the new ones supposedly are gonna get they're gonna have shorter stimulation which is very upsetting if you like to use bluetooth headphones for audio stuff like for talking yeah i'd like longer stems yeah i was like that was the part i was like no at my my desk i would like airpods that are basically like dental headgear they kind of go all the way down around your chin. It's just one piece.

27:26Wow. This is a good idea. Get the Ray-Ban Medans. Do they still make neck buds? Those things that you were... Oh yeah, you can still get neck buds. That's you, baby. Yeah, the Walgreens checkout counter. You get those. We don't know when that's happening, but they're coming. You see them reinventing that lineup. Because I think wireless earbuds, total commodities now. They have to keep pushing them up. Alex, we've been talking about price hikes with you, I think every week now. It's another one. Throw a dart at the board of streaming services and it's like the price is going up. $9.99 for Apple TV Plus.

28:01Seems very high. Yeah. I really enjoy Apple TV Plus. There's one show on it that's one of my top 10 shows of all time. I'll watch it like every six months. It's like my office. I think Apple TV's hit rate is higher than any other streaming service. But it's also got 12 shows. I mean. No, it's got more now. It's got more now. I disagree that its hit rate is higher. Really? I think it has hits, which is unlike other streaming services. Is this because you watch the Octavia Spencer show and it's not very good? Most of the show. That's what I mean. They make a lot of brilliantly produced, excellent looking nothing.

28:36Yeah. See a show in which if you just go look at the Reddit for the show. See starring Jason Momoa. The most common question in that Reddit is, can they see? Because the show is not committed to its own conceit. It's complicated, guys. It just depends on which character you're talking about. But it's beautiful. It's beautiful, yeah. Are you looking at the Reddit? No, I'm looking at the... I mean, I honestly, I stand by this. There are very few disaster shows on Apple TV. That's true, that's true. Everything on there, with the exception of The Morning Show, which is full, honest-to-God garbage.

29:13No, it's a soap opera. It is so soap opera, so melodramatic that like we know where Reese Witherspoon was on January 6th. But like that's a spoiler. I'm so sorry. It's just like what if you spent all the money in the world to make a soap opera? That's why I love it. I'm like, wow, we're finally getting prestige soap operas. But yeah, the prices are$10 a month is hard to stomach, especially one of our commenters after we put the story up, just broke it down by percentages. Apple TV is going up about 43%. Wow. Apple Arcade is 40%. Apple News is 30%. Overall average is 37%. Does it feel like you're getting 37 % more service?

29:54Can I get a 37 % raise? Got to maintain it yourself. No, only if you're bundled with three other people. To me, what's very obvious here is Apple is trying to get everybody to subscribe to Apple One. Yeah. No, you can see it. The Apple One is only going up$5. Apple One Premiere for families has gone up$5. And if you use Apple Arcade and Apple TV +, that's that price right there. Done. Everything else is gravy. You get all of Apple services. It's so transparently a better deal to be on Apple One than to be on some other mismatch of their services. But it only became a better deal like this. Like right now.

30:31Yeah. Because I was actually trying to switch over to Apple One two or three weeks ago. And I did all the math. And I was like, well, I don't use some of this stuff. So I'm not going to do this. Yeah, if you use News Plus and Fitness and all of that stuff, it's been a better deal for a while. But right now, it's like if you use two things. It's a much better deal. Yeah. I have to say, there's no way anyone should pay$12.99 a month for Apple News Plus. No, that's absurd. Someone out there is doing it. I mean, it's Tim Cook. I think it's got to be coming in the bundle. But as an a la carte subscription, unless you are extremely committed to reading PDFs of stereo review, which I am, that's a bad deal.

31:13Yeah. Like, that's so expensive. That's more than the TV service. Yeah. And you get paywalled news, which is good. Yay for money for the news industry. But there are not very many people for whom that's going to be worth$13 a month. Just don't see it. Right. And so now we're just like fully in the bundle. Yeah. Yeah. Other bit of Apple news, iOS 17.2 beta is out. Yeah, this is the other thing we'll probably hear more about on Monday, I would guess. It's a lot of little things. The big thing is the journal app is finally coming. I don't know why it took this long. I'm not sure anyone cares that the journal app exists.

31:45I forgot about the journal app until you just said that. I think you and a lot of people. But now it's coming. My guess would be, so the developer beta is out now. My guess would be we'll get some kind of public beta pretty fast. Or it'll just hit. Like, it's a.2 update. It's not ultimately all that exciting. but they will probably talk about the journal app on monday would be my guess i don't think i think it's oh all max and it's gonna be a tv show yeah spooky fast 27 inches just trying to manifest it and then we have a big story this week about double tap hit the apple watches v has a story about how it works which is pretty cool it seems really really i don't buy that it can't come to my apple watch ultra by the way or my my series six or my series two but it does seem really cool the one thing that's interesting is you have to have your display on for it to work I hate that and it doesn't seem to be super reliable like it's definitely a work in progress this feature but it's a cool idea and it seems to be like these stories are really interesting just in getting into how complicated something like this is to make and just like if you think about what your hands are doing all the time it's a noisy input mechanism so it's just it was neat to read her story and see all the stuff it takes to do it I don't know about you, but I'm constantly clenching my fists.

33:04Just sitting there like the meme of Arthur? Just furious. Bring me Drake. What if they have actual Drake? What if they had Drake dressed up as Dracula? That's my prediction for the Apple event every day. No 27-inch IMAX. Drake dressed up as Dracula. No actual Apple stuff at all. It's just going to be Tim hanging out with his friends. That would be the true flex. No new products. Just hanging out. Or they show off the Apple pencil, the new pencil. Oh, God. Just the pencil. Death first. All right, we got to take a break. We're going to come back and David's going to execute this idea of putting social networks on the Go90s scale.

33:40We'll be right back.

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34:59Zoe, this thing weighs a ton. Drewski, lift with your legs, man. Santa, Santa, did you get my letter? He's talking to you, Bridges. I'm not that. Of course he did. Right, Santa? You know, my elf Drewski here, he handles the nice list. An elf? I'm 6 '3". What everyone wants is iPhone 17. And at T-Mobile, you can get it on them. That center stage front camera is amazing for group selfies. Right, Mrs. Claus? I'm Mrs. Claus's much younger sister. And at T-Mobile, there's no trade-in needed when you switch, so you can keep your old phone. Or give it as a gift. And the best part? You can make the switch to T-Mobile from your phone in just 15 minutes.

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36:00All right, we're back on The Verge Cast, the show that we make every week. We may have just been watching Blade Trinity. I'm still thinking about Blade Trinity. It's a great movie. It's a really good movie. No. I mean, it's a watchable movie. It's a movie. It's a movie you will have a good time watching, but you probably won't earnestly recommend to another person. Yeah, so you're just one of those people who really likes bad things. Yes. I like it when a bad thing... But like because they're bad. Yeah. You're like, I'm glad that this is terrible and exists. No, it's bad in the right way. Right.

36:32Like it's a well-made bad movie. It's entertaining. It's just not good. Like The Morning Show. No, see, I disagree with every part of that about The Morning Show. Yeah. There are some things that are like bad and sloppy and ill-considered and not coherent. Every lifetime movie. Blade Trinity is like, they had an idea and they executed the hell of that idea. And it just wasn't a good idea. All right, yeah, that I can appreciate. Yeah. Right? Like, you executed your whole vision perfectly. Yeah. And you shouldn't have. There's not a frame of Blade Trinity where they weren't like, this isn't exactly what I wanted.

37:09You just should have wanted something else. Yeah, it should have just gone a different way. All right, David, this is your baby. And I believe a listener has requested that we do this. This was specifically requested. Okay. it's been a year. As you're listening to this on Friday, it has been exactly one year since the Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter was made final. Obviously, Twitter is no longer, both literally and metaphorically, it's dead. We've had a year full of new ideas about social. We've had a year of would-be coming and going. We've had a lot of change. We've been talking about it a lot.

37:42And so I think what we haven't done a lot of, A, over the last year, is just talk about Twitter as a product. Like we've talked a lot about the machinations of the company and all the weird stuff going on. But like, is it still a good, vibrant, thriving, potentially successful social platform? And it seems like a good time to check in on all of the other ones that are trying to be this thing. Of which there are an alarming number. You made some of these up. But an increasingly smaller number. Spoiler alert for what we're about to get to. So what I figured we should do first is just like, let's do the state of Twitter a little bit.

38:18a year after Elon Musk got it, took it over. I actually don't think this is going to take very long because I don't think it's a particularly complicated opinion to have anymore. I think if we'd had this debate three months ago, reasonable people could disagree about the vibrancy of Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it. I think at this point, it is pretty much undeniable and unavoidable that it is a worse platform and a dying one. Yeah, but there's a lot of jackasses in the world that really like to use X. Sure. Like what I want is it to be at an 80, but I think the jackass factor brings it down to like a 45 or a 50.

38:52All right. Well, let's get to the scale in a sec. Okay. Sorry. Because first, Neal is going to have to give us a speech about what the Go90 scale is. Sorry. I got excited. I have to remind a bunch of people what Go90 is. It's going to be a whole thing. Yeah. But I think like at this point, and I do think the question of is X going to continue to be around for a long time is separate than is it vibrant and cool and useful? and is it culturally relevant in the way that it was? Yeah, very different. I already feel like it is drastically less culturally relevant than it was even 12 months ago. Yes, 100%.

39:22Yeah. No, without question. And there's a way to measure it. Twitter was never very big. Right. It was always the smallest of the social companies. It was a bad business. I will once again issue our disclaimer that criticism of X under Elon Musk is in no way praise of Twitter under Jack Dorsey. It was a badly run company. Again, they sold it because they didn't have any ideas on how to make it that valuable. Clown car in a gold mine. Yep. That's the Zuckerberg quote about Twitter. So bad company, but outsized influence in the media, in sports, in politics. I mean, the joke for years that cable news was just hosts reading tweets to each other, which was not untrue for a very long time.

40:03That I don't see anywhere. Yeah, it's gone. So the notion that you could solve every problem by tweeting or create vastly more problems than tweeting is gone. Like it's just that sort of over in a big and important and probably healthy way. Is there even a Twitter person of the day anymore? You know, that person everybody would dunk on? It's Elon Musk. That's what he spent the money on. That's such an interesting point. Yeah, for so long. You just knew a random person. There was always like the main character of Twitter and everybody would be talking about it and then you would forget about them.

40:34Like the bird watching woman is always the first one that comes to mind. It's just Elon every day. It's just Elon every day. the reach of his tweets is dramatically increased. Yeah, because he said make my tweets. Sure. And if I bought Twitter I would do the same thing. But then recently apparently it's gone down. Did you see this? He tweeted something in a reply, which is how he tweets a lot and his stuff gets huge reach because he's Elon Musk and on and on. But then at one point I might get this slightly wrong, but I think he quote tweeted his own tweet onto his timeline saying bringing this to my main timeline so that it gets more reach.

41:06Yes. And it's like, oh, even Elon can't get the view counts anymore. And yeah, it just, I don't know. Again, I don't think we need to like dwell on this forever, but it's, there's just nothing about that product that feels like it has gotten better in 12 months. And there was like a relationship between Twitter size and its influence that kept it relevant. Yeah. Because it was never its size that made it relevant. Yeah. Like TikTok is very relevant because it is huge. And everybody uses it. And everyone uses it. but it's still pretty insular. Your average TikTok trend does not break into the mainstream too much.

41:43Everybody's going to be doing that slip slide soon. Just you wait. Out on the streets. I've seen it. The Skippy dance. Yeah. I tried to do it. Don't do it. You'll die. Did you try to do it? In my house. I'm at the point in my golden years here where I look at something and I'm like, that's a young man's game. I'm in my midlife crisis phase. I'm still like, I'm going to try. But TikTok is really fascinating just in that way because it's the phenomena are large yeah but they are contained yeah and the whole user base does not see everything by definition and so tiktok itself has a lot of cultural import individual things that are happening on tiktok are pretty siloed twitter was just like all of twitter will now look at this right we'll talk about this we'll be engaged with this and that for too long that thing was covered right but like it was the driving force of a lot of that debate even, like massive worldwide influence.

42:36And now Twitter, even if it keeps the users, the influence is gone. And that's the danger. And so the advertisers are leaving. We've seen reported the users are fleeing. And I think Elon's sort of like raging against it. He's just trying to like scream his way out of it. But online so it's not as aggressive. Yeah. I mean, look, he took Twitter and he turned it into Parler. He did it. He did it. Yeah. That's what it is now. And now I do wonder, there's an interesting, like the conspiracy theory has always been that he's trying to just bankrupt it. Like it's the equivalent of like burning your house down for the insurance money seems to be the theory.

43:12I don't think that's what he's trying to do. It does seem very clear that what he wants is to build the like finance app and thought he could just bolt that onto Twitter and it would make sense. Yeah. He thought he could just convert all of those users and instantly have his app. Right. He's just like, I'll just let Twitter users pay each other, and then that's how I'll get my finance super app. I do wonder if this all falling apart might just accelerate his, like, I'm going to go make PayPal again plans. So I think X is already very different than it was 12 months ago. I have a feeling 12 months from now it's going to be even more unrecognizable to what it was when he bought it in a bunch of weird directions.

43:50By that point, we'll all be paying a dollar just to have an account on it, and so none of us will have an account on it. Yeah. Truly one of the most hilarious. Or the European government will find it out of existence. Yeah. But the thing that is just obvious to me one year in is that the cultural relevance of Twitter, that everyone is going to talk about it, that the news will be driven about it, that the politicians are worried about it, that you name it, gone. And I think the thing that most immediately accelerated that recently was what's going on with Israel and Hamas and all of the misinformation stuff that was happening, like the flooding of people out of Twitter and into new platforms really took off in a big way just in the last few weeks.

44:33I thought it was really interesting that everybody flooded out of Twitter and into new platforms, none of which actually also did a good job. Oh, no, everybody's like, we want to figure out. TikTok will tell us the real news. And there was like a story this week about how TikTok did not, in fact, do a very good job of it. I think New York Times did that with Taylor Lorenz. And so, like, no, nobody did. Just go read the news. The news got it pretty wrong. Yeah, the news also got it pretty wrong. It's not been a great time. But like, if you're starting from that baseline, right, which is the New York Times issuing major corrections.

45:07Yeah. Well, then the secondary information ecosystem is going to be bad, too. And we've definitely seen that. And the thing is that Twitter, at least in its Jack Dorsey period, had an inkling of wanting to be neutral. Neutral is the wrong word. But it just wanted to be like. There felt like there was a level of peer review happening on Twitter before where generally the accurate stuff would crawl to the top eventually. Or the context would arrive. And you'd be like, OK, I understand what I'm reading here. And that doesn't happen anymore. where somebody will just be like, yeah, this is crazy, isn't it?

45:43I would say it's like the opposite of that. It's almost like neutral, but it's not neutral because Twitter was never neutral. But it was level and there were things that were out of bounds. And the new version X is like, what if we just amplify the things that are out of bounds? And that is a distinct shift in the character of the platform. I actually think it's even simpler than that. And I think one of the things that is working for threads right now is that the people in charge of it are believably trying their best. And I think that was a thing that people believed in Twitter for a long time was it was a lot of people trying to do a very hard thing but generally trying their hardest to do it right.

46:19And reasonable people can disagree about right. But I think the reason Mark Zuckerberg became a bad guy for a long time was that a lot of people believed he was not trying to do good things. And in a truly masterful PR campaign, Mark Zuckerberg has won many of those people back. But I think – Wait. The masterful PR campaign, by the way, is making – Compete with Elon Musk? No, it's make Adam Masseri the face of this product. Oh, absolutely. And I think Adam Masseri and the team running Threads has done a really good job of being out there and being present and appearing at least to be trying hard to do the right thing.

46:54And it's very clear now that the leadership at X is not interested in what the right thing is. And so it just changes the feeling that you get from being here. Like, I am no longer in good hands. And that feels bad. Yeah, which is weird because these products at scale, all of them have the same incentives. which is to increase engagement and be sticky. But you see Adam constantly try to thread the needle on, is there news here or not? And his answer is like, I really don't want there to be. People are going to do it anyway, but we're going to show you other happy stuff. Zuckerberg this week on their earnings call said, there should be a text-based social network of a billion people that is more positive.

47:32And so you see them. They're actively trying to make it so you can't talk about Israel and Hamas. You definitely cannot talk about COVID. which, again, I think is a defining moment in the Twitter. This is the thing that broke Twitter the most. We'll see if the other platforms survive. But that thing where all of the influential people are using one platform and it's crazy and you can just yell at them directly, which was a delight, is gone. I do not think it is ever coming back. And I think that's okay. I think that is easily for the best. I agree. So, which is a good segue to our next bit, which is all of the would-be successors.

48:08Neal, will you explain the Go90s scale? All right, so Verizon started a video streaming service called Go90. They were early to the idea of starting a Doom streaming service. Credit to Verizon. We profiled it. You can read that story. But eventually, like all streaming services, it died. It went 90. So the scale is the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services, which we are repurposing here for Twitter clones. But the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services is zero is alive. Zero is alive. And then you can Go90. You can Go90. And you can die. Right. Like Go90. You fall over and die. I encourage you to read the story about Go90.

48:44Ben Popper wrote it. It's a lot of telecom executives thinking they understand teenagers. I understand that. You could join a video crew on Go90. Yeah. I just feel like somebody, the minute someone came out of a meeting and was like, we've decided to call it Go90, whoever that person's boss was should have been like, never mind, we're not doing a straight service. We're out. But okay. So that's the scale. Let's just start with X. it's a good balancing point to start with. Where do we think, again, remember, this is between fully alive, crushing it, totally vibrant, and like full dead. Yeah. Like, end of platform, gonna be gone.

49:21Where do we feel like X is? Okay, I said it earlier, but I think it's gonna be at 80. Like, that's where it should be. But I think it has such a high, like, kind of jackass quotient on the platform right now that it's more like a 50 to 45 at the moment. Yeah, I'd say 45. It's at a 45. Yeah. Right dab in the middle. Yeah. For a lot of people, it's an 80. It's like most people, it's an 80. But there's just enough that it's like. Yeah, my instinct would be to put it a little higher, except A, like you're saying, never underestimate the number of people who are the worst. And B, these things just take longer than we give them credit for.

49:56Right. Like I spent a lot of time thinking about the people who still pay for AOL that they got on disk. It's like that stuff doesn't die as quickly as we think it does. We stop talking about it. And most people move on. But like most things die slow. And I think Twitter has begun what is probably like the inexorable slow death, but it has not died. So I think that's right. 45, somewhere in the 45 range feels about right. Where do we put Threads? Which, so the Threads news this week was also on the earnings call, like you were saying, Eli. They announced that Threads has almost 100 million monthly active users.

50:29What does almost mean in this context? Who knows? But it's a big number. The number has been growing. all the people whatever two months ago who were like threads is struggling to keep users have less to say now thread seems to be doing fine where do we put it on the list 45 really yeah why i put just like a different color of 45 okay like you know happy 45 yeah it's a happy 45 like happy most products fail i don't there's that's just the nature of them most new products just fizzle out. Meta has launched a lot of products. I was just about to say, yeah. So the case for and against Threads is that it's Meta.

51:07Yeah. My immediate instinct for Threads is to put it at like a 25 because A, Zuckerberg is out here now saying we see a path to a billion users, which is what he's been saying all along. I think he's enjoying this competition. I think he likes how much Threads has made him the good guy. And I think that's going to buy Threads a pretty long runway. Threads also, I think, seems to be working. Like we're going to get to a bunch of other ones, but Threads is... Threads has the heat. It has the heat. That's exactly right. And I think that can be fickle, but it very much has the heat right now. Yeah.

51:37So I would put it lower than 45. I'm in the mid-20s range. Yeah, that's where I'm in. I'm in the 20s. It feels very, very likely that it's going to last a little while. But that's not... Okay, fine. Yeah. Okay, is it going to last a little while is kind of a different question? But it feels like it's got some legs to it. Yeah. It feels like of a lot of these we were going to talk about, I think this is the one. All the rest of them are dead. And some of them are like literally dead this week. Yeah. Like this is the one I'm ranking closest to zero. It feels like it's going to have the one that lasts the longest.

52:10I think the danger here is when you do that, you call it the winner. And I don't think it's actually. I don't think it's the winner. That's true. And that's why I'm at 45. It has the potential. It's like a happy 45. Yeah. But it very much has the potential to be the winner. But some of the decisions they've made and some of the postures they have struck are actually dangerous for them. Yeah. Right. So it's not real time. Like there's a bunch of people lately doing tests to see how like real time threads is. Even in the following feed, it's like algorithmic where it's keeping you from real time posts from people you follow.

52:44I mean, but the EU is going to fix that for us. Sure. The danger for threads would be, at least culturally, is essentially that it turns into Facebook. Right. Right. Which is like there's a version of threads that is hugely successful and totally culturally irrelevant. Yep. And that's what Facebook is. But Facebook's a zero. A lot of people use Facebook. It's a really good business. Sure. But it's not like it's not ever going to get to what Twitter was. Right. Like that thing where people on cable news are reading tweets at each other. Which, by the way, might have been bad for democracy and society.

53:16Oh, sure. I think a perfectly reasonable case to make is that every tech choice we've made in the last 15 years was wrong. And we should just go back to 2006 and do it again. Specifically, CNN is a bad podcast of people reading tweets to each other was a bad moment. Yes. Yeah. In world history. A hundred percent agree. And I think this is what Zuck and Masseri are talking about when they're like, this shouldn't be, we don't want to do news. They have a million reasons to not do news. The governments around the world are making them pay for news. They're blocking it. There's a lot of complication there.

53:43Yeah. But I think if you look at the most negative impact of Twitter, it was the news became Twitter and Twitter lacked all nuance and was just a dogfight. Yes. All the time. And I don't think they want threads to be that. So I'm saying it's just like it's almost certainly going to be the winner. OK. Yeah. All right. Well, we'll split the difference. We'll put it at like 35. 35. There we go. Mastodon. Mastodon's a zero. It's alive. Necessarily by default alive. It depends on what you're talking about with Mastodon. Yeah. Because it is definitionally unkillable if you talk about the decentralized network of things that is Mastodon.

54:19No, we're not talking about ActivityPub. I'm not talking about ActivityPub. I'm talking about Mastodon, the social network of many, many, many Mastodon servers. The speed that David got there. Yes, everyone knows I want to talk about it. I mean specifically Mastodon, the social network made up of decentralized servers that people can run and federate however they want. I feel like that's... Definitionally unkillable. Sure, but I also feel like that's less and less what Mastodon is. Mastodon has leaned into Mastodon.social being the thing. Like they made this very intentional choice in the name of getting more people onto the platform and making discovery easier to default people to what amounts to a centralized platform.

54:56You don't have to stay there. You can leave if you want. You can federate. But like Mastodon and Mastodon.social, which is one instance of Mastodon, are increasingly the same thing. And I don't know what that means. I think there continue to be open questions about what happens when Mastodon gets 100 million users if literally the people running it can afford to do that. I think you're probably right that it's pretty close to zero at the moment, but I also think the idea that it is unkillable I don't think is true. Yeah, I think the concept of Mastodon is a zero. I think execution is like in the 40s or 50s because we're so early in this conversation about decentralization and stuff or in the movement or whatever you want to call it.

55:35We're so early on in it that I don't know if Mastodon is necessarily going to be the most successful one. I don't know if it's theories for how to do decentralization is going to work, especially when you have threats just out there. I'm trying not to talk about it. I got too close to ActivityPub. It's so close. You're flying so close to the ActivityPub sun. I'm so sorry. But Mastodon— I'm not sorry. David is keeping us from the truth. That was specifically to David. Yeah, notorious ActivityPub hater, David Pierce. That's me. But yeah, I think Mastodon social and that concept and stuff is much higher on the scale because we're already seeing this.

56:09This is something that Dan talks about a lot. He's our big Mastodon user in the office. And he's seen it a ton where everybody's like, well, I don't want to be on my little servers that I'm on. It's actually more complicated and I want to be on the main Mastodon server. And that's death for that whole platform. Whenever I want to be on the main one is everybody's desire. Then the whole conceit falls apart. Then you've re-centralized the service. Yeah. Then what have you done? You've made crummier threads. Well, yeah, right. And then you become something that threads can eat. Yeah. And. So I'm like at a 45, 50.

56:41I think this really depends on whether you think Mastodon is Mastodon social or not. Because, yes, there's one platform. I think they're opportunistically trying to grow users on that one. Yeah. But, you know, they're a very idealistic bunch over at Mastodon. Yes. I'm rooting for them, but I'm like, whoa. Like, Eugen was on Decoder, and he was basically like, I don't know how to make money, and I don't want to. Right? Like, that's not his posture. Yeah. Yeah. And I think he just wants to grow the service because there's an opportunity to grow the service. But I think fundamentally they're into the decentralized approach to the network, which Thread could federate into and could either crush or flood with users or who knows.

57:20I will say this. When we're talking about all of these and talking about the scale and survivability, we think a lot of that concept of growth. But that growth itself, like the growth at all costs, is a very like Thread's financially incentivized thing. And a lot of these, particularly something like Mastodon, that's not their interest. it is about that decentralization and stuff so I think for a lot of those users they'll probably be there for ages yeah well and I think part of the reason I wanted to do this on the go 90 scale is like streaming services this won't be a winner takes all yeah there can be lots of these that exist ideally yeah that's the ideal state right yeah that's yeah again activity pub although some of these on here next one up on the list blue sky yeah we're going in order from like possible to less possible it's about to get real ugly But let's.

58:07It's a hard drop. Blue Sky's a 70 for me. Yeah. And it's a vindictive 70, mainly because I'm on Blue Sky. I never use it. And a bunch of my friends in academia use it a lot. And they're always like, why aren't you ever on Blue Sky? So I want it to go away so they stop asking. Blue Sky is definitively where the weirdos went. Yeah. It's where the weirdos went. Whether that's an insult or a compliment, is it relevant? All the weirdos went to Blue Sky. Just thinking of our coworkers who are active Blue Sky users. I'm like, yeah. It's the weirdos. And that's where the shit posters went. If you mostly just went to cause low stakes trouble for other people, Blue Sky.

58:46Yeah. And you have 40 ,000 followers there right now. Nice. Look at you. No, I don't. I have four. Oh, nice. And it's all my friends saying, why aren't you chatting here? I was like, because look at threads. Blue Sky, I agree. It's 75. A little higher than Alex. And it's also not even active in that thing we're not talking about today that's totally not related. Well, no, they have their own decentralized idea. That gives it like a plus five. It's even closer to death. Like a modifier, yeah. Yeah. If the tension from Mastodon is between Mastodon, the decentralized social network idea, and Mastodon social, the centralized server that you can log on to, Blue Sky is at the far end of the tension where they're like, we made a decentralized social network.

59:28It has one server. We won't even tell anyone else how to set up their own server. The protocol isn't finished, and we're standing up trust and safety on this server. Also, Jack Dorsey is an investor in our company. You just are trying to shoot it to 90. Modifier after modifier. It's there, but all of these companies are going to run into a revenue problem. I think Threads will solve it very quickly. Again, Mastodon, I think, is just ideologically unkillable. Blue Sky, how are they going to make a dollar? What's the plan? They're going to start. This is a group of people that advertisers do not want to be near.

1:00:05They're going to open a Patreon. Right. It's going to be some weird mix of subscription and contributions. And the goal of it is not to run the centralized server, at least from their white paper. They're just very far away from where they started. Yes. They're running a clubhouse. That's fine. They're running a clubhouse. Clubhouse is also dead, I would point out. I was like, that's 90 on the scale. And they just have to make some decisions along the way there. Yeah. Yeah, I think that's right. I would put it about that high, too. They did a couple of things really right. Like, the way they thought about usernames was very smart.

1:00:40Yeah. They had some nifty ideas about custom timelines that I continue to think is very cool. But I think they're going to end up having the legacy of being like friend feed, right? Where they're like, we had a bunch of ideas before the products took off. And they're going to be like, we did that first, right? Like, everybody's like, oh, they invented the news feed. And there's, like, some developer out there who's like, actually, it was me first. Everybody's like, I don't care because Facebook destroyed you. That's going to be the legacy. There's already some, like, connector software that connects Blue Sky's decentralized approach to the Activity Pub decentralized approach.

1:01:12And you can see how that thing is just designed to piss everyone off, you know? Like the app when you need to move music services. Yeah. And you always think it'll work and it never does. We'll just see how this goes. But my feeling is that it's successful now because it has a bunch of investor money in it. Yeah. And the turn is coming. Yep. All right. Bunch more. These are all going to be fairly quick. I'm going to change the order up here. Substack Notes is the next one I want to talk about, which is slightly different. Oh, Substack is a company right now? Is it easily at$65 or$70? So Notes is even higher, right?

1:01:48Notes is just like a long for the ride. It's$70,$75 for me. Notes or Substack? All of it. Make the briefcase against Substack. Substack's entire business is taking a cut of other people's businesses. The number of people who have started successful Substacks is not large. It's large in the context of the internet. Casey has a really successful Substack called More Power to Casey. They're taking 10 % of his revenue. This is a business that is founded on whales. And it does not seem to be creating new ones very quickly anymore. And then the ones that it has created, some of them are like, again, large amounts of money, large amounts of subscribers, cultural relevance, shaky.

1:02:35The Barry Weiss's of the world. Yeah. Andrew Sullivan's of the world. I came up as an Andrew Sullivan reader in the 90s. Yep. Fine. Right. But they've got a handful of those that are making a bunch of money. They're taking a huge amount. You take 10 % out of Andrew Sullivan or Heather Cox Richardson or Barry Weiss, the top of the charts at Substack. You're taking an awful lot of money from those people to send emails. That's just what you're doing. That's the service you are providing. They are not bringing new customers onto the platform. Most new subscribers on Substacks are subscribers to other Substacks.

1:03:09Yep. The recommendations thing seems to have worked. So they're just moving. They're taking more money out of the existing Substack base and not bringing new people on a Substack. Never mind. I'm at 80 now. And then in April, they are hitting up retail investors for cash in a pre-public round of investment. They won't really sell the numbers, but we know Substack had negative revenue last year. Substack is in a place where the next thing they have to do is introduce advertising on platform because they need a big new source of revenue to make that go because they can't convince millions upon millions of more new people to pay them.

1:03:48And I know people are going to say that I'm biased against Substack because I had Chris Best on Decoder and I yelled at him about not moderating Substack Notes. Whatever you think of that, I'm looking at the math of their business and I'm saying there's a cliff coming and that's why you're hitting up retail investors for cash with negative revenue. Like that's however you think about the trust and safety function of sub stack notes when you're in that position and you're charging your your most popular creators the most money to send emails. Eventually, one of them is going to wake up and say, I wonder how much MailChimp costs.

1:04:23Yeah, there's other services. WordPress. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. There's so much free stuff that they can go and do this on. And it's just doesn't seem. Yeah. It's bad. I agree. All right, so we're all in agreement on that one. I'm just going to read you a bunch, and I want you to tell me if any of these are not at least an 85. And then after that, we can go to break. I have Pebble, which is objectively a 90. It died. I didn't even know what Pebble was. It was called T2 for a minute because they just straight up were like, this is the new Twitter. And then it was Pebble. It's gone. There's also Noster, which is the other decentralized thing that Jack Dorsey is invested in.

1:05:02And then we have things like Spoutable and Counter Social and Post and WT.Social and Co-Host. I thought these were all Mastodon instances. Nope. Sadly, do we have any reason to not put any of these things at at least an 85? I want to put WT.Social at a zero just because I think it's funny. I want to root for it. I'm rooting for you, WT.Social. You got to believe in something. Yeah, it's my Tinkerbell. So they all have the same problem. They all have the same problem. Yeah, it's not users. It's not technology. It's how you're going to make money. Yeah. What's your plan? Let's say you have 100 of the world's most dedicated spoutable users.

1:05:40Spoutable has 100 people who are logged onto it, and they have 24 hours a day of user engagement from its 100 people. What's the plan? Does it charge them money? They're going to make flower crowns. I just think all these have a sort of blinkered view of what it would take to replace Twitter. So does Mastodon, to be fair. You just need a place to post. We didn't levy that against Mastodon. It's true of Mastodon, too. MassDawn, first of all, as a company, is like two people funded by a government grant in Europe. Sure. And one contractor who manages billing. You should go listen to that episode of Decoder.

1:06:11That's real. I was like, what's your art chart? And he's like, well, there's me and Claire. And that's like the whole company. And obviously they have server costs, and I'm sure they're going to grow in different ways. But as a company, this is just a social experiment. I think if you're WT.social, you might believe you're a company. Yeah, if you believe hard enough, it could be a zero. And I think if your company is modeled after Twitter, a notoriously poorly run company, you've just got some problems coming your way. Yeah. I think the cold start problem of how do I get a network effect or how do I get a bunch of users is actually.

1:06:43And they're all trying to compete on weird ideas about what people had a problem with on Twitter. And I think they all miss the fact that a lot of people liked how drama that a lot of people liked how dramatic Twitter was. Or at least couldn't look away from it. Yeah. Like it was it had that car crash appeal. Yeah, it's like, what if we made Twitter without car crashes? And it's like, yeah, no one's going to look at it anymore. I want my Twitter person of the day. Yeah. I love telling people who don't use Twitter about it. And they're just like, OK. Yeah. Anyway, here's what's going on with my kids.

1:07:13Did you see Kevin Durant tweeted, I'm on threads with a burner. Come find me. No way. And it's like, that's what people are here for. I respect that. He's not tweeting, I'm on WT social with a burner. Wait. So this is threads to lose, basically. Like nobody has won this yet, but it very much feels like the next 12 months are threads to screw up. Yeah. And I would put it just the mirror image is it's a negative 45 for Twitter and it's a positive 45 for threads. But it's about to be an election year. Yeah. A lot of weird stuff is going to start happening on these platforms. Just a lot of weird stuff.

1:07:50And those numbers can move. but I think threads their attitude about news and real-time information is just the pressure on that is just increasing yeah and that's going to collide with an election in a pretty real way yeah and sport and just sports the NBA season has started we're still in the middle of the NFL season yeah like that audience is wanting to move to threads and it's just like not happening yeah I think that's right yeah the next 12 months I think are going to be really fascinating like I think many of these we will not even mention in a year. And I think the stakes are going to feel super high for a lot of these folks as we wind towards an election.

1:08:25I'm still rooting for WT Social, which I've learned a lot about. It's got two stars on Product Hunt out of five. Okay. LifeWire's got a great on how to use it. Yeah, I'm just like, it's the non-toxic social. That's great. I'm happy that there's a non-toxic social network. Okay. We've officially, Alex is now Googling WT Social, which means we're talking here. This segment has gone 90. It's all over, baby. All right, we're going to take a break. We'll be back with the lightning round. We'll be right back.

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1:10:10When 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. LinkedIn makes it easy to post your job for free, share it with your network, and get qualified candidates that you can manage all in one place. LinkedIn's new features can help you write job descriptions and then quickly get your job in front of the right people with deep candidate insights. either post your job for free or pay to promote. Promoted jobs get three times more qualified applicants.

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1:11:22All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. We're still open for sponsors. As we know, the lightning port has been deprecated. Some people have been posting at various Ford executives on my behalf. Thank you very much. I appreciate you. I'm still looking for a major American ship company to sponsor the Thunderbolt floor round. And just trying to will things into it. You have to make the media company you want. Neil's vision board is just Thunderbolt 4 cables. They're very expensive. All right, I'll take the first one. The only thing I wanted to talk about this week is Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater.

1:11:56Now running an NREAL. The top. It was the first thing on the rundown. And David moved it. It was great just watching it get highlighted. In our editorial meeting today, I said, But there's a lot of weird passive aggressive stuff that happens in enterprise software. And what I was thinking about was David rewriting the rundown every week. Can I just say, just before you get into this, this might be the greatest video game title of all time. Metal Gear Solid Delta colon Snake Eater. Yeah. Just whips to it. That's so good. This is one of the greatest video games ever made. It was a PS2 game. It just ruled.

1:12:32It ruled. And now it still looks like a video game. You get new gameplay footage now, new engines. No, it still super looks like a video game. But this game ruled. This used to be called something else, though. This was Metal Gear Solid 3? Snake Eater. Yeah, it was Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater. I didn't get past one. Oh my god, Alex. I'm still in a box somewhere on PlayStation. The number of things that you and I just have to stream together, right? Just on this show alone, it's all of the Metal Gears now. Just a full-on, week-long Twitch stream. Yeah. Blade Trinity, and I believe Pump Up the Volume is still.

1:13:03This is going to be a good time. Everybody come join us. It's going to be great. We're going to start a podcast called Copyright Infrared, in which we just watch all the things that we have to watch. I'm more excited about this game than I think it's happening. This is a defining video game. Are you going to take that day off? And just burn through Metal Gear Solid? Yeah. Probably, yeah. That's my idea. All right, David, what's your point? I love that. Mine is a little tidbit of information we got. So we've talked a lot about the Google Antitrust trial. And one of the big open questions has been, how much money does Google pay Apple to be the exclusive search engine on all the Apple devices?

1:13:39We knew it was billions of dollars. I had heard numbers as low as 5 and as high as 20. But these numbers have come out, but they've only come out in closed court, and they're not being given to reporters. The access to information has been a huge open question during all of this trial. The New York Times had a report on Thursday that the actual number is$18 billion. Or at least in 2021, Google paid$18 billion to Apple to be the default search engine in Safari. There was also some interesting stuff in there that when Satya Nadella testified, he said, and it seemed like he was kind of guessing at the time, that one thing Apple might be worried about is that if it took the deal away from Google, Google would use all of its many powerful and popular iOS apps to do things like promote Chrome.

1:14:26If every time you went to Gmail, it was just like, hey, download Chrome, a better browser. Like a lot of people would download Chrome. And they were very afraid that Google was going to do that if it lost the search deal. Satya said this like it was a possibility, but not that he was certain. But the Times report said that, in fact, Google was thinking about doing exactly that and was building things to compete with Spotlight and was going to start to get people to use Chrome by using its other tools on iOS. How is that any different from right now if I go, if one of you send me a Google Doc and I try to open it on my phone on Safari.

1:14:55My phone flips out unless I go and I download the stupid Google Docs app and log in and use that. Google Docs might be the single worst mobile program. No, no, no, no. No, no. It's slides. Google Slides. Okay, no, you're right. Google Slides, Sheets, and Docs are all full zapped. Yeah, they're all bad. But I'm saying slides is. You know how every year the iPhone comes out or any phone comes out? Like this processor is crazy fast. It's like, it's just there for headroom. I'm like, can this run Google Slides? Because it probably can't. My phone's going to get hot and it's going to slow down and crash Google Slides.

1:15:33How's Slides on Decks? I don't want to think of that. Let me unfold this stupid thing. All right, but keep going. Well, so to answer your question, though, it would be kind of like, this is not a perfect analogy, but if you were to open a Pages document on your phone and Google just threw a pop-up being like, wouldn't you rather use Google Docs? It does that currently. No, if you try to open a Google Doc, it will take you to Google Docs. But if it does for anything. I'm saying if you opened any web page in Chrome and Chrome was like, wouldn't you rather use Google Docs? I'd set it on fire. Yeah, probably.

1:16:06That's my villain story. That's how you get me to never want to use your products again. Yeah, but also it's how you get a lot of people to download your stuff. This is true. And Google kind of is. I bet you also have the Google Docs app on your phone now. I had to. It bullied me for so many years. This is the thing. They don't care. I needed to put my notes in for a story on the train. This is the thing, right? And if you're Google and you can say, stay logged into YouTube in the YouTube app by logging into Chrome. I hate it. You're going to get people to download Chrome. FTC do something about this.

1:16:40And truthfully. Well, they have put Google on trial. Do more. I think it's possible that Google would never have actually done this, but the threat of doing it. Right. At least the DOJ would tell you is enough to keep Apple, along with$18 billion, from walking away from Google. I want to just talk about that for a second. Google, if you're listening, I will also make you the default search app on my phone for$18 billion. I'm here for you. So it's interesting. The context of this is fascinating. So in Europe, Digital Services Act is in force. Apple is going to have to let people pick Chrome. Google will have to let people switch default browsers in various ways.

1:17:21We'll just see if this regulatory intervention actually does something. Notably, for the past decade, it has not. Right. Right? Like, there have been browser ballots and search ballots on Windows PCs and Android phones in Europe. They don't do anything. They don't do anything. Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of evidence that shows that the thing where you boot up the phone and it says, what search engine do you want to use? Everybody picks Google. Right. And everybody picks Google in large part, the DOJ would argue. because they've never heard of any other search engine because of the way that Google does it.

1:17:51So people are like, what's Ecosia and why would I use that? I'm just going to pick Google. And this is the hard part of the DOJ's case is they have to wind this all the way back and essentially argue that Google has made it so that you've never even tried another search engine because it's impossible. And that is a very hard case to argue when Google is like, they're just right there. Like, just go do it. Here's what I'm curious about, though. The only browser about I could see working, you turn on your iPhone and it says do you want Chrome or Safari? And I think that's a coin flip and that's in this case too that people think that that's a coin flip.

1:18:24That's two brands everybody's heard of which is, I agree, I think it'll be really fascinating and I would bet in somewhere in Apple Park in Cupertino is Safari for Android. It's just sitting there. They made Safari for Windows once. It didn't go well. I think they would pick this fight backwards if they had to. They will bring it to Google if Google is going to bring it to them. And they're like, there's this like mutually assured destruction thing that has worked for everybody for a long time. Again, along with 18 billion dollars. And either it's going to stay that way or it's going to get all unwound.

1:18:57And I think it's going to get the other piece of this puzzle, which I think is a pretty important wrinkle right now, is there's a bunch of reporting this week that Apple's behind an AI or feels like it's behind an AI. It needs to get better at AI and put it in all the products, as you would expect. and Apple's privacy posture will keep it from going and hoovering up a bunch of data or sharing a bunch of data. And you know what would be a good source of data for an AI tool is search queries. Yep. We know this because they're a great source for Google. And that's how Apple gets a bunch of differential privacy shielded input for an AI system.

1:19:35It's on some little chip just right on the board so you don't have to worry about it. Yeah, you can see how they would do it. That was my Tim Cook impression. That was good. It's good. He's full vampire fangs. Cravat. We'll see. The dynamic there is interesting because it might be in Apple's long-term interest to not take the$18 billion. No. Said no one ever. If there's one company that can look past$18 billion, it's Apple. It's Mastodon. Claire. Those are the only two. I really bet everyone should go listen to that. He's a fascinating guy. It was a good one. All right, Kranz, what's yours? Okay, so mine is a shout out to Mia Sato.

1:20:12She has a really, really great story up on the site right now called Is My Coworker AI? Bizarre product reviews leave Gannett staff wondering. It's a really, really good story. It's basically Reviewed, which is one of the sites for Gannett. Gannett does like USA Today and a lot of local newspapers. Reviewed is their kind of wire cutter. And a bunch of new reviews appeared on it. And everybody's like, I didn't write that. And then when they went and they looked up the people, a lot of them didn't seem to exist. Oh, boy. And so it seems that this was all like this was stuff that Gannett went partnered with another company who's using AI to just write AI churn and then try to like sell you stuff.

1:20:53I don't have these ideas. Well, it's not going great. The reviewed staff is pretty upset about it. They just recently went on strike over union stuff with Gannett. So with News Guild. So no disclaimer needed. Wow. I could see you getting ready for it. So yeah, the story is really good. It's really, really wild. There's a bunch of stuff we still don't know about this, the rationale and everything like that. But it sucks for the folks that work there. I'm just saying if you work at a business and anyone in your business thinks we should just get some AI chum to get Google search results to make pennies, you should leave that business.

1:21:31There's a product pros and cons, and apparently instead of pros and cons, it's just specs. Yeah. Did it. Or, I mean, on the flip side, if you are the scammer using AI to cheat Google out of pennies, buy another Lambo, live it up while you can. Yeah, I was like, it's going great for you. These are the last days of disco, brother. But that internet's ending, and this is the force that will end it. Yep. All right, here's mine. I'm very excited about this one. It's Humane's AI pin. Oh, God. It was named Time's Gadget of the Year. Time. One of many, to be fair. It's just no one's ever seen it. I also have named it my Gadget of the Year.

1:22:13It's really serious. Sure. We learned that it has some integration with GPT somehow in it. And it has a light called the trust light that lights up when it's listening, which I would remind you is apparently all the time. So it's just constantly a little glowing. There's a little yellow light. It's not even a light. It's just a piece of yellow. I will say this time thing is interesting in that it has a couple of new details like the trust light and the fact that it has a magnetic attachment. That's something. I like that part. That's cool. It also has one of the funniest disclosures in history.

1:22:49So, again, you're putting an unannounced product that really no one knows anything about on your best inventions of 2023 list. Bold strategy. And then it says at the end, investors inhumane include Time co-chairs and owners Mark and Lynn Benioff. It's just a tough look. Disclosure is our brand. We love a disclosure. That's a tough one. This product you've never seen. It's so sick. It's funded by my boss. You're going to love it. Best inventions of 2023. Well, I will say this. The owner of Time Magazine is scheduled to be on Decoder soon. There you go. I'm going to ask him about the pin. If he brings the AI pin, I will tell you.

1:23:27I'm going to wear the pin. He'll take all of it back. Yeah. What else can we do? I hope he has it. He won't do it. He's not going to betray the Ohana. Are you kidding me? Come on. I'm fascinated by that thing, though. It's supposed to launch November 9th. There's so much we don't know. They have done this, like, what, eight-month-long hype cycle at this point, Humane? They've been out there talking about this. I think that original TED Talk where he showed off and or lied about a bunch of demos was in April. So we've been talking about this for a long time. And this thing is either going to be great or it's going to be a total disaster.

1:24:03And I have a very hard time imagining anything in between. And I have a much easier time imagining a total disaster. So there was some reporting that in OpenAI integration, Sam Altman might be an investor in this thing. There's also some reporting that Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are working on their own thing, which is fascinating because Humane is a bunch of ex-Apple designers. that's gotta be a weird email chain yeah just in general just a weird email chain a lot of ellipses a lot of thoughtfully considering materials and then also you betrayed me you know it's like it's all in there i don't know man i'm still stuck on the basics you want to call bethany how does it know bethany's phone number and how does it call bethany does yeah does it have a service plan how do you configure the uh the imei just just the basics i I just want to know.

1:24:52Yep. It's all magic. And I'm telling you if this thing requires an app on your phone to function, disaster. Yep. And it definitely does. I'm so excited for this. It's going to have to be 15 hours long and it's just them explaining how it does basic things. I cannot wait. It's very good. I should disclose that we are also owned. By human. By human. No, that's not true. There is a number of disclosures we could have made on this episode, but I leave those as an exercise to the viewer. No, I don't think there were any. There wasn't. No, we did good this time. We did good. All right. We should end the show before we screw this up.

1:25:30If you think we missed one, send us a note. You know, we're here for it. I closed the tab with all that. Quick, somebody talk about Netflix. FTX trial. Or no, shout out is Lurker. All right. A few things to mention before we close. Sam Bankman-Fried was on the stand in the FTX trial today. Liz Lopato has been there every day. she's having the time of her life covering this trial. Yeah. We're going to have her on the show in the next week or so. Yeah. To come talk about it. David and I went to the premiere of the Bloomberg doc about FTX yesterday. And people walked up to me and were like, Liz is doing a great job covering the trial.

1:26:05That's incredible. So she's having the time of her life. And I'm eager to see what Sam had to say today. And then we have an incredible, I guess you could say a spooky story about someone who has been tormenting professors online. and it is one of our best layouts ever. It's very cool. Go read it. It's great. And then lastly, as you all know, we've been covering Google obsessively this year, just the culture Google made. Like I said, the last days of disco. You got to put the marker down and see, this is the world we made before we move on. So we've been covering Google and Google's SEO web and we have a really great one this week from Mia, who's been on a run lately.

1:26:44Yeah. It's called The Restaurant Nearest Google. It's about a restaurant called Thai Food Near Me. in New York City. That's the whole name. The SEO has broken out of the internet, people. Yep. And she found a bunch of other businesses around the country. Notary Near Me is very popular. Barbershop Near Me is very popular. And she just went and talked to these folks about why they named their businesses this. And we had a lot of comments. Like, this is like when people named them that A1 Auto Shop. Yep. They're just trying to beat the discovery algorithm. But this is a new way of doing it. And then, of course, Google's in the story being like, that's not how it works.

1:27:16which is a lot of our google coverage involves that dynamic but the story is great the pictures are incredible and mia said the food was good which is important so go check that out it's on the site now that's it we're way over subscribe to installer listen to decoder listen to all of our shows yeah verge is a cool it's a cool website it's the only one left that's it that's a verge Rock and roll.

1:27:43And 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. We'll see you next week.

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