The Vergecast builds a tech company

23:00But I would say mostly, we're still pretty wide open. You have Xreal on here. Yeah. I do have Xreal on here. I'm not saying we should pick it. I'm just saying it's a company I thought of when I said wearable out loud to myself. What do you guys think? Any jump out to you that we should definitely get into? I have a clear favorite here. Out the gate, I'm going bold and taking meta for the Ray-Bans. Oh. Okay. Oh, that's a good point. I wasn't even, I was thinking of the headset. I forgot about the glasses. Yeah. Okay. On that front, do we get one or the other or do we get both? like if we if we say quest we get all the quests in one product but i feel like the smart glasses are a different thing get your face computers away from me you know what i mean just that no no no other what are the red pants you just want the smart glasses i just want the glasses even if we get the whole team we're immediately killing the quest line and we're just going smart glasses that's what i just did i just want to that's what meta just said yeah just reorganize that team so i'm saying the glasses are the future okay and we're putting we're putting our excess iphone profits into the glasses.

24:01Interesting. I mean, if the glasses like ran a really good AI, well, no, we don't have one of those. We have Siri. Although on a six year time horizon, it's like, maybe I just want to take Samsung's watches and do lock in. I mean, that is that is actually an interesting question, right? Like, are we betting that smart glasses are going to be sufficiently huge by 2030 that this is like worth it for us? Or are we just taking like a nerd gadget for the next six years? No, this makes sense for us because we're like, we're cool. We're luxury. What's this luxury like a pair of Ray-Bans? Fair. Okay. I have two others I'd like to throw at you.

24:37An Aura ring. That is one of the things I was going to throw at you. I think Aura is like a sneakily fascinating company and they're way ahead in smart rings. Smart rings are a lot of people think, including our own V song, about to be a real thing. I think, especially if you're betting that this like health and fitness thing is going to keep growing really fast. That's a place to go. I also think Garmin for kind of the same reasons. Like, what if we can redesign Garmin's watches so that they don't look dumb, but they have all the cool stuff that Garmin already has that people really like? I feel like you could make something out of Garmin.

25:09I also, my immediate reaction when we did this was snap because I want the spectacles line. But I think we go Ray-Ban meta smart glasses, and that gets us everywhere we're going probably significantly faster. Yeah, it's basically, do we want to go watch, ring, or glasses? Totally. But if we go Samsung, we do watch and ring, right? Well, so the thing that this, I think, makes very clear is you can take any of the watches and you can do iPhone lock-in and now you have a realistic competitor to the Apple Watch. Right? Yeah. That's the thing that actually holds a bunch of these companies back is they cannot communicate with the iPhone.

25:44Right. Yeah, but be cool, Nilay. It's written at the top of the building of our headquarters. It just says be cool. What's cooler than lock-in? What's cooler than lock-in? Yeah, the change I'm making is being like, all right, whoop, you're in. Like, let's go, you know? Yeah. Like, you can now more directly figure out Apple integrations. Buy a ThinkPad, get a whoop, let's go. But I'm just saying, if that, on a six-year time horizon, maybe that is a better move, then take the meta Ray-Bans and figure out how glasses work. Which, by the way, glasses also held back because they cannot properly integrate with your phone.

26:21Yeah. This is like a real problem for all these products. But yeah, that's why the glasses, we get them properly integrating with the phone. Then we also have an additional audio solution. When you say an additional audio solution, that means some headphones. Well, you know, headphones is coming up next. You've been a CEO for 20 minutes. You are already super corporate. Yeah, we need more than one audio solution for our company, guys. I've prepared a deck to talk about this. We need to be diversified in our audio. It's good. It happens to everybody. Just the immediate, yeah. But the Garmin, like, the Garmin has so much cool stuff in it.

26:59They just look so ugly. And we've got the Apple team now, right? They can, like, make it look good. That poor team in Panos Panay just chained to their desk. We need that team to keep making iPhones, though. I don't know. It's not like they're doing a lot. They're like, take the buttons off it.

27:16That's true. It's thinner next time. We did it. I think you're the tiebreaker. I think it's between Garmin and Meta. Once again, David, you have to pull apart this corporate battle. I think we should pick meta. Yeah. Because I think the Ray-Ban meta partnership is cool. I think the glasses are awesome and people really like them. And I think our ability to integrate them a little and make them way better for people, instant victory. Like, I think with the other picks that we have here, we have a chance to, like, immediately make these things much cooler in a way that I feel like we're going to have to basically, like, tear down the Garmin hardware team and build it back up.

27:56And I feel like that's going to take us a while. Yeah, that's going to be more than six years. Garmin, please know that I love you and you make cool things just, like, make them cooler. Garmin, if you'd like to integrate with VertiCast Incorporated's iPhone, you can pay us 55%. Yeah, we'd love to have you. We've got some really good audio solutions for you. Yeah, the developer program is open and it will only be slightly more than half of your revenue. Yeah, also the smart glasses are just like cool and I love using them and I want to have them. So we're going with that. I feel good about it. I don't love that we just hired a hardware team out of meta, which makes me feel a lot of feelings in general, but it's okay.

28:32We're doing it. We now know everything about you. Our privacy policy, by the way, is dope. Like, let's just take that for granted. in case you're wondering about our privacy policy it is sick the eu never gets mad at us no it's like not a problem at all i should have said at the beginning by the way by picking the iphone we did just bring ourselves a delightful antitrust case that i'm not super psyched about but i feel like it's it's one of those is coming anyway right like we might as well lena call us neil i has been begging to fight an antitrust case so yeah it's from this side that's really what i've been after this whole time is let me be the monopolist it's it's perfect i'm just saying we're raising rents If we're going down, we're going down rich.

29:13Yeah. And by the time any of this comes out, it'll be past 2030. We'll be out anyway. It's fine. I'm not worried about it. All right. Next category is headphones. And here again, we're pretty wide open. Apple is off the board, but I'm going to allow Beats to stay on the board because it is different enough that I think we'll allow it. Because they don't care about it. Yeah, pretty much. Like, I don't know if Apple knows that it owns Beats, so we're just going to let it ride. But there's also obvious players here. Bose and Sony and Sonos is a new one. Just headphones, though. No, we'll make this headphones slash speakers.

29:42We'll go audio solutions. Oh, my God. In Alex Grant's. I think you know exactly where we're going with this. Neelai is going to advocate for the party speaker. Yeah, I'm taking Sony. Now that it's audio solutions. Yeah, we got a lot of wider range. It's the ULT era. I mean, you want luxury. What screams luxury more than the words of megabase? A seven foot tall speaker. By the way, shout out to the Vergecast listeners who just send me pictures of it in the wild. Amazing. It's like they're birding, you know, but like only one person cares about birds and it's me. How does it feel to be known for the Cybertruck Wiper and Sony party speakers?

30:19Like, is this a good legacy that you're happy about? Is that on the Cybertruck Wiper? It's on the wild card gadgets, Cybertruck Wiper. We have two wild card options. So don't worry. For me, it's Sonos on this one. Interesting. I want Sonos real bad because, again, we're in this like we want to build cool stuff that's integrated. Sonos makes good products. They know how to make good audio products. I feel like we could take Sonos and be like, just learn how to make software. Everything's going to be fine. Just learn this easy part. Yeah. Like, have you heard of apps? What if we did that? This could be fine.

30:48So again, I would actually take Sony here, but not just because of the party speaker situation. I think their headphones are really good. They are. My Sony noise cancelers are really good. I think they compete with Bose to be the top of the market. Then they've got an actual audio solutions catalog, like an actual array of speakers. Like, what is one product I want desperately from Sonos that they won't sell is, like, a receiver, right? Like, there's a huge array of those audio products that you can ruthlessly integrate with a phone in a way that even Sonos can't right now. That's why they have the software problems.

31:19Like, their app platform has to support a bunch of stuff because they can't just put it on your phone directly. And also Megabase. I would just get it. Okay. I would have it. Alex, what do you think? I just really like the Sony headphones. Okay. They just have such a nice, wider range. Like Sonos just got into headphones. They don't have any in-ear monitors. They don't have any buds. Also, tough time to be taking over Sonos. Like real, real kind of reputation hit. Oh, you know what you don't have on here? What's that? Again, I'm just going to point this out for everyone. I think the age of televisions is coming to an end because David made a list of gadgets and didn't put TVs on them.

31:54Yeah, I don't care. I know part of me wants to build televisions. Well, I'll just remind everyone that I asked the CEO of Netflix about the Samsung frame TV and he was like, what, you should stop talking to me. I was like, do you think this is a harbinger of doom? And he was like, I don't know what you're saying. I own one. But I'm just saying, you made an entire list of gadgets and you didn't put TVs on here. It's a prophecy. Because he knew you were going to say we're going to acquire the Samsung frame and fix it. To be clear, not an oversight. We are not getting in the television business. What if we made no money and everything was impossible and we had to spy on our users?

32:26All I'm saying is if TVs were on here anywhere, then I would change my headphones spec. If you're giving me audio solutions but not TVs, then it's Sony. If TVs are back on the list, then I have to. I'm required by blood and heritage to take Sony televisions. Okay. And then I would change my headphones back. So we do have a wild card round coming later. And if you think you can win the fight for us to get Sony TVs, you can hold your fire for then. I'm going to fight for TCL so hard. Yeah, I don't think you're going to win the Sony TVs fight. I just don't think we want to be in the TV business. Well, if I take him off the board here, it's a big decision.

33:03How do I get macOS and the tablet? It's kind of, you know, I got to play three moves ahead. I will be down with Sony here. By the way, tough beat for Bose that none of us are even attempting to take Bose. They're fine. Well, you made it audio solutions. Right. If it was just headphones, I would immediately go Bose so I could win the Sony fight later. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. And I don't, it's just like a bunch of weird scientists in Massachusetts. Like we don't, we don't need that. I'll go Sony under one stipulation, which is that we immediately rename every single product they make to something not stupid.

33:34No, with more letters. Twice as many letters. And another dash in the middle for no reason. Just get in there. Okay. I think it's Sony. Okay. I feel good about this. I think we're aligned. I can figure something out for TVs. Yeah. I feel now obligated to take something from Samsung just so that you can't argue for the frame TV because I don't need this in my life. That's not what I was going to take. Again, I believe it's a harbinger of doom. Okay. So the next two things on here are, I would say the sneaky places we're going to make a lot of money. This is what pays for everything else that the shareholders are going to love.

34:11And we're probably never going to talk about again. The first one is app platforms, which I suppose could be a single app if we wanted a single app, but I'm thinking more along the lines of like big groups of things. So like I had Adobe creative cloud as an option here and Microsoft office, And Google Workspace. This is like probably B2B software that is going to make us just a tremendous amount of money. What do we think? So I have to go with Office. Okay. Only for one small reason. And I can't believe you didn't think of it first, David. We cannot run this company without Microsoft Excel. Oh, that's interesting.

34:41No company can be run without Microsoft Excel. Like just for our own survival. You know, you can just like pay for a license. We'll have so much money. We can just pay for a license for Excel. But what if other people paid us for licenses? Yeah. I'm just saying you want you want to you want to dog food you know you're you're in work yeah but we can have adobe creative cloud and just have a stranglehold on the entire industry you want people to hate us we could just like I love a monopoly I'm on this side of things now another antitrust fight that I'm really excited about yeah we're only going to be there six years by the time that stuff all hits we'll be long gone so I think the upside of creative cloud is we take creative cloud we make the pricing better and we're legends right like instantly best possible pr win is we just like give away premiere we're just like here you can have it no we sell like rather than the cloud license we're like okay you can just buy premiere but it'll cost a thousand dollars yeah yeah then we make a lot of money and people are happy because they can just own it for six years yeah for six years and then it's gone and then and then you know whoever follows us Panos, I'm sorry.

35:49You're taking over the company from us. Good luck. A lot of our ideas are like, what if we made slightly less money? But that's fine. Whereas my ideas are what if we made a lot more money? Yeah, this says a lot about the distinct vibes of the Vergecast Incorporated team, I would say. It's either Office or it's Creative Cloud, right? I feel like there's nothing else. We could go try to get Oracle's weird business or IBM's consulting arm or whatever, but we haven't picked a google thing do we not want google workspace do we just take google workspace and go kill office so my my idea here again you know the our company's mission is try hard yeah and workspace is a ripe target for trying hard yeah this is also where you could do messaging you could you know you could walk in the room be like make a list of all the messaging products and then walk out and six months later come back in and look at the list and like circle like this one we're just doing this one yeah and we're gonna name it gchat that's a real that's a thing you could do here it is it is messaging i would point out is a separate category so we're going to get to messaging but if we whatever company we pick here we can't pick there okay which is a case for and against some folks here and if we pick microsoft office we can't pick azure if we pick google workspace we can't pick google cloud that's right no one was picking google cloud okay i'll i will concede and say we should pick creative cloud and our mission here is to make people not hate us.

37:10Yeah, I think this is where we win over all the people to use our hardware because they're going to love... This is how we sell Lenovo Thinkpads. Because of 55 % lock-in. You can run Creative Cloud on someone else's laptop. It'll just cost four times as much money. I don't like the rules. Yeah. Except for that one. We just like the more your company makes, we charge you more. Like just a sliding scale. Oh, I like that. You pay per YouTube subscriber instead of per. Exactly. Oh, you're just getting out of this industry. You basically get it for free. Right. Yeah. I love this. The minute you start making success that we come for our cut.

37:49And if you're wearing our wearable, we can track your general burnout level as a creator and we start bringing the price back down. Yeah, I love that. See? Oh, my God. Synergy. We actually turn the app off when you need a rest day and then we'll get it back. Calm down, Jimmy.

38:06All right. So we're good on Creative Cloud? All right. I mean, sure. I think it's the right answer. That's okay. I know I'm the one who has to deal with, like, whatever terms of service conflagration. It's like, fine. I'll do it. Yeah. David and I work four days a year. Oh, yeah. Crayons and I are the ones who, like, go to Cannes Lions and, like, meet with advertisers. You have to actually, like, do the things. I have to write the blog post. It's like, all right, we changed our terms of service. It's true that we're going to take your firstborn child. We're doing this for the good of all humanity.

38:36This is beautiful. I love this for you. All right. Next category is the boring B2B money faucets. This is where we get to pick our cloud provider. We can make B2B chips that we sell. I was going to put ARM in here, but we can't have ARM because ARM's only thing is ARM, so that doesn't really work. This is where we make all of our money, but we try to never talk about in public because no one cares. Can we take TSMC? What would you want to take from TSMC? Making the chips for everybody? No, that's their whole thing. But they don't make a product called TSMC. They don't ship TSMCs around the world.

39:12Right, that would be then just buying the company, which is not what we're doing. We're taking products. You get like one TSMC factory. This is like an expansion draft in sports, right? We get to like pick from your roster, but we can't have your team. What about that one company in Europe that actually makes the lithography machine that TSMC relies on? That like$23 million machine? Yeah. There's only, what's the name of that company? ASML. I think we should take ASML. I think we should take the machine that makes the fabs. The machine that makes the fabs. Okay. Not like Azure? Yeah, but like, you know, I'm already defending Creative Cloud.

39:43Like, I'm not trying to be out of here. I just want to print all the money. Like, this is our money printer. Who gets mad at Azure lately? No one, but it's also in second place, right? You have to go make the AI case. You got to do the AI CRM thing to grow Azure. I guess we're just milking it for profits and walking away, right? Right. We're only here for six years. And we can't take AWS because we took the Kindle. Right. Yeah. Which is a very funny trade to have made if you're trying to build a business. I mean, ooh, we could take Whisper from OpenAI. Whisper's open source. We're good there. Oh, yeah.

40:19Also, OpenAI, it's on this list as a money faucet, but it is not. It's like a reverse. It's a drain. Oh, true. I meant to write this as basically like, if we want, we can take like GPT-4.0 from OpenAI. Which still, which they are now in a stunning business judo move, are giving away for free to Apple. Yeah, no, I'm not. I don't think that's the winner, but I just I wanted to have an AI option here. Let's take NVIDIA GeForce now. Yeah, so this is the thing. How do we get something from NVIDIA? This is my question. What do we take from NVIDIA? Is it just the H100 business? Do we just take NVIDIA's whole AI chip situation?

40:59I'm telling you, do you buy ASML? and then you're like, if you use these machines to make H100s, 55%. That is a pretty good funny faucet. I feel like we will be ripe for disruption there. Yeah. I think taking the NVIDIA AI chip business is like a strong move because now you're selling to Google Cloud and Azure. And on a six-year horizon, they all want to disrupt you, but they won't be. So I was about to say, do we worry that every other chip maker on Earth is going to start making these and this becomes a bad bet pretty soon. That's Panos' problem in six years. Yeah, not in six years, baby. Okay.

41:38In six years, I'm on a boat. I mean, the other problem here is that if we take that, the bubble bursts and we become the poster child of the AI bubble that just burst. And that's going to happen in less than six years. That's true. This is why I'm saying we should take ASML, the chip company. That is like the least sexy business you could possibly imagine in that. I doubt there's as much money in it because I don't think they can make all that many of those. It's like Samsung and their battery business. Actually, maybe this is a good idea where Samsung just makes a bunch of random stuff that makes them a ton of money.

42:11Oh, yeah. We could take LG Display right here. Oh, that's good. Ooh. Right? You want to put an OLED in your phone? Come talk to Lucky Gold Star, you know? Wait, I like that a lot. I was like, LG Display, that feels like it. The way we all were just like. Yeah. And that feels sticky. They're going to make screens for a long time. I feel like we're in. And that's easy. It runs itself. We're good. All right. I love this. And we love talking about it. We do. You want to talk about dual layer OLEDs? Let's go. Do you feel like this gets you close enough to the TV business that you're happy now, Neelay?

42:43They make the panels that go in your sonys. That's true. They do make the panels. All right. Fine. I got myself a monitor in TV business. Yeah. We're going to take LG display and we're going to make TVs. And then we're just going to bolt two Sony party speakers to it. Boom. You think we want to sell these tomorrow? Come on. Come on. Some little pulsing lights at the bottom. Yeah. Okay. All right. Nailed it. That's good. LG display. This is great. I'm in. All right. We're going to take one more break and then we're going to come back. We've got four more to do. We're going to build Verge Casting.

43:12We'll be right back.

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46:39All right, we're back. Next up for the triumvirate at Vergecast Incorporated is messaging. We can take, again, not a company, so we can't take Signal from Signal or Telegram from Telegram, but we can take and reinvent any messaging app or platform or ecosystem that we want. We can't take from Meta, which I just realized because we took the Ray-Man smart glasses, which I now slightly regret because I would like to have taken WhatsApp. So we can take all of the different Google chats that have existed and finally make one? Yeah, this is our opportunity. Yeah, we can make Gchat. Done. Done. I can solve this.

47:20I mean, again, on the list of do it and be legends, finally making Gchat is way up there. Just making Gchat. And then I, you know, I got the phone. So your blue bubble problems are solved. Yeah. Oh, yeah. We don't have to worry about that. We just put blue bubbles on the iPhone. Yeah. Super. This isn't even why are you in G chat, baby? I met my wife. That's a real story, by the way. That's not just a case. That is a real thing. Yeah. Becky and I spent years of our early relationship in G chat. No, do you ever randomly find like the transcripts of those chats when you're searching for something in your Gmail?

47:53This is a thing that happens to me occasionally. I'll search for like pizza in my Gmail and it'll be like, did you mean this conversation you had with your ex 11 years ago that we saved in Gmail? Ooh, I haven't thought about that. And now I'm worried about looking. Don't look, don't look. We're going to set that aside. Don't look. It's probably for the best. All of those Gchat conversations were before we were dating. So they were just conversations about the things we had gotten up to at night, which is a lot of things. I love it. Yeah. That's very good. Yeah. All right. The only other one I would throw in is Slack, which I think is like a forever unrealized potential that.

48:29Or Discord. So, but we can't take Discord because Discord is Discord, right? Like, that's, it's off the. I thought somebody else owned Discord now. No, they almost sold, but it's still just Discord. Microsoft was gonna, but then they were like, this seems like a disaster, which probably reasonable call. Gchat being good. like we're gonna kind of win people over with with adobe but eventually we will jack up the prices on them and having like yeah yeah just having gchat there is like instant win oh yeah all right i feel good about this it's gchat and we're agreed that we're scrapping all the other nonsense and we're calling it gchat right yeah yeah without yeah easily we are building the gchat that always should have existed next one is streaming service uh which is actually fun because again we can't steal a company so like netflix is out oh shit we just traded gchat for youtube oh no no no can we go back no we should take tiktok oh we can take tiktok yeah you're right we can take tiktok for now it's on by my dance so oh we can buy we're it we're gonna save america yeah we buy it yeah very oh my god my dude the wild card around here is amazing we're gonna we're going to be heroes of gchat and we're going to save america's youth oh wow we just did it this is this we're now the coolest company on earth okay yeah yeah and the good news is this one isn't even going to be very expensive because they're desperately trying to get rid of it uh yeah eat your heart out we do have to fight the chinese government and larry ellison it'll be fine do you think at the end to buy tiktok you have to win a boat race against larry ellison he's like i'll do this if you can beat me in the america's cup let's yacht about it yeah okay so i will just say there's a bunch of disney streaming services that are interesting espn would make us an awful lot of money for a pretty long time uh hulu exists disney plus exists we could have apple tv plus and have all the good shows yeah but those are also dependent on external licenses that we might not acquire true with our streaming service acquisition right We're not getting the rights to Star Wars.

50:33We get all the existing contracts. Yeah. But I think you're right. If we get Disney +, we don't get to own Star Wars. You're right. The economics of streaming are very simple. There's a handful of companies who think the Samsung Frame TV will continue to exist. Their business model is they pay a lot of money for content and then try to make people pay money for it. The other model is TikTok gets free content from America's teenagers and then sells ads against it. And not for nothing, an infinite array of pirated movies from the idiots who are paying for content. Yeah. It's got to be TikTok. You just sort of the economics of the business.

51:09Like, do you want to have costs or not costs? But again, TikTok not famously making a ton of money right now. Well, because they're, you know, we'll fix that. 55%. No, no. We do something like deal with Adobe Creative Cloud where we somehow charge our own creators. Well, we're going to have to because if we get TikTok, we don't get CapCut. So we're going to have to immediately put the Creative Cloud team on building CapCut so that people will. But the TikTok video editor is CapCut. So we just spin it out. It's good enough. Yeah. Like it'll work. And we call it CutCap. We can probably. CutCap. There we go.

51:38All right. TikTok and CutCap. We've done it. All right. I think that's right. I feel good about it. I like briefly wanted to fight for Prime Video just because it is like it's another one that is like try harder. Oh, no. We took Kindle. God. Yeah, we took Kindle. The amount of money that taking Kindle has cost us. Good Lord. I mean, it is very funny that we took Kindle and Google Chat. That's what we took from those companies. I will say, if we want to go back and take Slack and YouTube, we have a chance. No, we're committed. Is there anything cooler than fixing Gchat? Like, that might be the single most important thing we do at this company.

52:13I feel really good about it. I mean, the teens will prefer us for TikTok. That's true. Okay, so we have two more categories, one of which I just changed two minutes ago, and I'm very excited about it. So far, we have the iPhone business from Apple. We have the Kindle business from Amazon. The PC business from Lenovo. We're doing all of Meta's wearables. We haven't decided yet if we're killing the Quest, but we're probably killing the Quest. We're all in on the smart glasses. We're taking Sony's audio solutions. We're taking Adobe Creative Cloud. We're taking LG Display. And we're taking GChat.

52:46Well, we're taking the mess of Google's messaging systems, which I think actually probably means we hire most of Google because everybody's working on messaging. in one way or another. And we're making Gchat. And then we are saving America and taking over TikTok. How do we feel so far? Feel good? Just have any rules. I'm feeling great. I really feel like it does. Lenovo is still very much the like weird one out, but we're going to make Lenovo cool again. It's going to be great. Yeah, we'll fix it. Okay, so we have two left, which one is wildcard gadgets, which is, I think the rules still apply.

53:16So we can't take from a company we've already taken from, but we can take from any category, including categories we have not talked about. so it's some other product that verge cast inc is going to make that is not off limits because we've already taken from another company we can we can do tvs this is where we take the cyber truck if we want to take the cyber truck anything you guys want any initial thoughts anything you're excited about well so this is where i was kind of back into taking lg's tv okay too late but then we already have lg display i think this is better we have the part of the business that's like good and not the part of the business that is web os i feel really good about lg display and not lg tvs Have you guys heard of a company called Stores and Bickle?

53:54Is this how we get into like bespoke whiskey? No, this is how we get in. We just get the volcano. They make a whole bunch of different vapes. We just get the volcano business. Okay. And then we like, we make one that looks really, really cool. We put a big screen on it. We put some big speakers on the side. Just a whole one-stop party business. It's just for Alex Kranz. It was just, you know, legalization is coming for this country. We gotta be there at the start. I'm not feeling that. I gotta tell you. I just feel like if we were in this till 2040. Yeah, that makes sense. I'd be down. 2030 feels iffy.

54:27And that's just like a lot of legislation stuff. All right. I'm just I'm throwing this out there. The NVIDIA shield. Oh, yeah, we didn't do NVIDIA, did we? We took LG display over NVIDIA's GPU business. We're doing really well. This gets us the Tigra. Yeah. Why this? Because I think between Kranz and I, we can communicate with an audience of TV. We can bring the shield back to problem. This is a try harder move. Look, if you look on the forums right now, people are like, the shield isn't it anymore. It's true. And it was for a long time. There's a lot of people who are like, what you want to do is run infused on Apple TV.

55:02And I think that's a shame. Interesting. Yeah. We're not getting infused. Do we want to get into the car business is my big question here. No, because to be a successful carmaker, you got to make a shoe. You got to make a midsize crossover. And that's just not for us. Okay. But again, we would take all the infrastructure required to do it. So we'd be up and running making Kia Fortes tomorrow. We're not buying Kia. We're not. We're just taking the Forte. I was like, I don't want any part of the Kia Hyundai business. They keep that. Neelai, you don't want the Mustang Mach-E. This is your moment.

55:34Take the Mach-E, man. It's a shoe. I'm just telling you, I'm not making a midsize crossover. All right. No, thank you. Like, if you're going to let me be crazy about it, you know, let's get nuts. but I don't, that business is too wackadoo. I talk to a lot of car CEOs. They're all insane. Like that's what will tear us apart. Okay. Wait, I thought of it. Okay. Samsung's barely alive digital camera business. Oh, I like getting into the camera business. Oh, and then we can actually make them smartphones, right? Yeah. We actually take, you do the thing where you make the smartphone mirrorless camera.

56:09Interesting. Does Samsung still make cameras? Do we want Samsung's though? or do we want like Fuji's X100 business? Yeah. And then the solution is you just make them. Right. Make more of them. Let people buy them who would like them. I like that. I like taking a camera. That's actually a great idea. Yeah. And then we fix the software so that it like doesn't take you 12 hours just to change the setting. Yeah. Sony cameras, but with menus that humans beings can navigate. Yeah. But I do think Fuji is like a good in terms of wildcard gadget for our brand, especially. And then we do like a limited release of the iPhone and the Fuji and they have like the same look to them.

56:48We'd sell a lot of money. That's pretty good. All right. So we're taking we're taking Fuji's X100. All right. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. And then last category, the one I just added a minute ago, I had another non gadget wild card, but I think that's boring. So what we're going to do instead is we're going to buy a startup. Yeah, I know my answer right away. Really? Yeah. I really hope it's the same one. It's Rivian. Oh, so you want to get into the car business. yeah it was uh because they don't make a shoe they also famously lose all the money in the world sure but 55 i can fix it if you want a rivian you have to buy an iphone rivians are now in-app purchases on iphone 55 what about like we could get ssi we could have like just the ai guy this is one guy we're all ready i mean in that case uh is open ai still a startup because that would be another i was just about to say i think open ai counts but you want something you want like a startup you want like an earthy so my vote if we're buying an ai company i want to buy anthropic yeah yeah which is i would say less valued but also way less problematic and they're actually making products right their product is is moving along fast they're like kind of right in the mix with google and open ai i don't know that i want to deal with the like sam altman of it all if i'm

58:10Yeah, exactly. So if we're going AI, and that was one of my instincts, my vote would be Anthropic. I also think a company like Notion would be an interesting one for us to buy, potentially a lot of money there. Is Notion a startup? They've been around for a long time. This gets us into what is a startup zone. Yeah. Is Stripe still a startup? They're doing pretty well. I like the idea of Anthropic, though. That is firmly a startup. Yeah, Anthropic counts, I think. Like Rivian has factories. Is that a startup when it has factories? Fair. It is just pretty much a car company. But, Nilay, the problem is if we buy Rivian, we have six years to convince you to make a shoe.

58:50We will convince you to make a shoe. Look, the R3X is very close to a shoe. But it's a cool shoe. That's all I got for you. So, okay, the other anthropic question is do we want to be in the AI game? Like are we? No. We don't need a move. Not really. Because then we have to deal with copyright stuff. Neelai's got a lot of blogs he's going to have to write already, like apology blogs. I don't, we don't need more. Yeah, Neelai is definitely the one testifying in Congress, right? We're all on the same page about that. Yeah. I have several other options for you. Can I throw some options at you? I love an option.

59:21We could buy DJI, another company that might need some saving in America that does some interesting stuff. But not a startup. So this is not just companies we could buy. Is it not a startup? It's super not a startup. Yeah, you're probably right. Okay, fine. That doesn't count. there's the like canvas and figmas of the world that also are kind of iffy on whether they're startups but like if we're in the creator world with creative cloud we fold that in the ftc won't allow it yeah these aren't the rules canva is 10 years old and has a 26 billion dollar value like it's just like not a startup like you want to go you do you need some installer shit like what's some like weird two-person app oh interesting let's get carrot does discord count no yeah not a startup like the if rivian isn't a startup none of these other things are startups that you're mentioning okay fair enough i think anthropic is the best idea i have yeah anthropic i think i'm buying anthropic yeah it's like we're gonna like run them off to the side though there we're gonna sort of instagram anthropic where it's like you do your thing and if you become really successful we'll ruin it for you eventually yeah but until then like you're kind of this is like your your problem and like if you get in trouble that's your problem and not ours We're going to call them like the moonshot factory or whatever.

1:00:33Well, I think just having them collab on making Siri not suck would be like huge. Yeah. Oh, yeah. Because we do need Siri to not suck. That's pretty important. Big, big change for us. Okay. All right. Anthropic it is. Welcome to the team, Anthropic people. How do you feel about party speakers, Anthropic? How can you make AI accelerated? Make these LEDs blink smarter than ever. We have a lot of audio solutions that are ready for you. Okay. I feel like we've done this. Can I recap for you? Yes. At Vergecast Incorporated, here are the things that we make now. We have the iPhone business. We have the Kindle business and all that that entails.

1:01:12Lenovo PCs are now Vergecast PCs. Meta's whole wearables thing, the Quest and the Ray-Ban smart glasses, that's us now. Sony's audio solutions, headphones, party speakers, the whole jam, that's ours now. Yes. Adobe Creative Cloud is our big software app platform play. lg display is now ours we are we are just fabbing it up for everybody if you want a tv hit up the verge cast i love this that feels right we are taking over all of google's messaging shenanigans and turning them into gchat which might be the single hardest thing we've signed ourselves up for this is what kills us i want to be clear that's right it's like the guitarist and the singer start arguing a little bit and then oasis breaks up that's messaging yeah uh-huh uh joe biden just gave us tiktok congrats to us big day we now have fujifilms x100 business and anthropic is now part of a first cast incorporated how do we feel this feels good this feels great this is the right combo of things we're doing a little bit of good we're doing a little bit more evil uh we're making some money and then we're gonna fix messages we are incredibly deep into hardware like my only worry is like should we not have done lg display and pick something that is more like cloud software ai no no no because if we own the hardware then they all have to do we got ai we got anthropic yeah we got anthropic in the iphone we we have all the power and anthropic is like their whole thing is they want to be like a b2b thing so that's that could eventually pay dividends for us and we have most of google because we acquired all of google messaging yeah and we're we're just printing money on increasing creative cloud fees yeah just to be clear right Microsoft is going to be paying so much money for their creative cloud.

1:02:54I think there's money to be had. Again, TikTok's business model is they pirate content. What are we going to do with the TikTok shop? What's our first move with the TikTok shop? Oh, we are 55%. Yeah. Straight up. You want to transact in the TikTok shop? We're taking the fees. Yeah. We just charge outrageous fees there except for our own products, in which case we give them, we don't charge a fee at all. Oh, yeah. The self-preferencing is going to be out of control on all of these. like do you want good photoshop you have to use rx100 camera otherwise you get bad photoshop really sorry this is actually great it's like why do these companies act like this and like we're pretending we run the company we are gonna be so evil we started out trying to do a good job and now we're doing this we're just the most evil lena khan just waiting behind us all right now yeah all right well i think we've solved it i feel like there's we're easily a trillion dollar company right off the bat here immediately our website is going to be sick by the way yeah that's very important to me we're gonna give all our products cool names and our website is gonna be so tight with like a good understandable url scheme these are the things i care about i'm gonna run the naming of everything you guys can run the company but i'm in charge of names the speakers will like have real names yeah more letters continue to say this there's only one solution but it's but it's i think it's right it's no more numbers it's just all letters and you have to guess what the letters mean because they're in no order it's just consonants and you You have to guess.

1:04:19That's all of our products from now on. I love it. I'm very excited. And I promise the people Megabase is coming back. Oh, absolutely. Megabase is coming to many new products. We have new places to put Megabase. The iPhone is going to have a hardware Megabase button. We're going to rattle your head off with the smart glasses with Megabase. We will give you and solve your migraines all at once. G-chat Megabase. Every time you type, just a pfft. All right. Well, it's been an honor. Thank you for joining this company with me. This is wonderful. This is going to be a wild six years. Yeah. We're going to make so much money.

1:04:53Panos, have fun. And then go to jail. No, Panos goes to jail. We're out. We're out. Lena Khan, you know how to reach us. Yeah. All right. Thank you, guys. We'll do this again soon. Thank you. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to Neelai and Alex for doing this weird thing with me. And thank you, as always, for listening. As you can tell, we have a lot of thoughts on all this, but I want to hear yours, too. We're going to put some links in the show notes to coverage we've done of these companies. But I really want to know what you think. What did we pick wrong? What did we pick right?

1:05:23What would you have picked differently? How would you build your tech company? You can always email us at vergecast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Tell us all your thoughts on Vergecast, Inc. If you have thoughts on anything else, hit up the hotline, send us an email. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poore. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nilay, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the upcoming news. There's a lot of gadgets about to come, plus some more weirdness in the AI world and lots more.

1:05:56We'll see you then. Rock and roll.

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