Truth and AI in Minneapolis

26:47I have no idea where it goes from here. But I think the idea of TikTok remaining TikTok just with better data privacy feels essentially impossible to me at this moment in time. I think the other thing that's going to be interesting to watch is just how much pressure the administration puts on TikTok. Like we already, again, with Charlie Kirk and with earlier ICE DHS operations, we saw lawmakers, we saw the DOJ, we saw other officials trying to just get companies to take things down. We've seen this framing of any accountability for any individual officer being described as doxing. That's why we don't really know anything about the people who killed Alex Pretty.

27:30I think that the odds that they're going to see this as a friendly platform and try to shut down the spread of things that they don't like on it feels just inevitable, whether or not it actually happens. Agreed. All right. Well, we will see. There's a lot left to come back to here, unfortunately. But for now, thank you, Addy. I appreciate you coming on. We're going to take a break and then we're going to just aggressively context switch. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. So if updating your company's website feels like a chore, then it might be time to try Framer.

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30:45See you next time.

30:55all right we're back so like i said let's just do a full clean break here there is no good way to segue from what we were talking about to what we're about to talk about but we're just going to do two different things on this show and we're going to have a lot more to say about what's going on in minneapolis our team is doing really great coverage from on the ground and from afar um there's just a lot of good stuff out there and i will do my best here to link you to it and to bring people on who can talk about it, but keep your eyes on the site. The story's moving really fast. We will cover it as we can.

31:26This is what you subscribe to The Verge for, by the way. If you subscribe to The Verge, do it knowing that it lets us do this kind of coverage the way that we do it. And I'm really proud of our team. So all that to say, full on, let's go do something else now. So I had this very strange experience a few weeks ago where I sat down to watch Netflix and all of a sudden I was confronted with a podcast I've been listening to for years. So Bill Simmons is a sports podcaster and was a sports writer for a long time, has a very famous sports podcast. He's a big deal. I've been listening to for many years and I had just a truly bizarre experience of being confronted by his face just like this on my screen as I sat down to watch television.

32:07And I had this moment of being like, is this the end of podcasts? And I don't mean that in a sort of bleak way. I just mean, we've always had delineations of where things are and what they are and different formats and different kinds of things. And I think if you ask somebody, what is a TV show? And then you ask them, what is a podcast? I think you would be able to intellectually understand the difference between those two things. And now it feels to me like all of that stuff is crashing into each other on Netflix, literally and figuratively crashing into each other on Netflix. So I called up Nick Kwa, who's one of my favorite people to talk about this with.

32:45He is a critic and staff writer. He writes for Vulture and New York Magazine, our sister publication here at Vox Media. He's also just been covering podcasts longer than just about anybody and knows this space super well. So whenever I have feelings about podcasts that I need to talk through, I like to do it with Nick. And that is exactly what we did here. Let's get into it. Nick Kwa, welcome back to The Verge Cast. Oh, my pleasure. It's an honor. One of the older podcasts in the world. I love it. It does feel like every day that goes by that we continue to make new episodes, we become one of the oldest still running podcasts.

33:17You live a new day every day. You two are becoming older. It's beautiful. So I like to bring you here whenever weird stuff that I don't understand is happening in the podcast business and try to make you explain it to me. And right now, the weird thing that is happening in the podcast business is Netflix, just kind of writ large. And there are two different pieces of the puzzle that I want to talk to you right now. There's Netflix paying a bunch of money to companies like Barstool and The Ringer and iHeart to bring video podcasts onto Netflix. And then there's Netflix starting to make its own original video podcasts.

33:52And I think those are sort of overlapping, but kind of different things. And I want to talk about them both. But my first question for you is, if I remember correctly, the last time I talked, you were kind of ambivalent about the idea of podcasts becoming a video forward medium. Since the last time we talked, if anything, it has become an even more video forward medium. How are you feeling about the world of video podcasts these days? Oh, you know, I'm feeling, you know, inevitability, right? We live in a world of incentives, motivations, and metrics. And the incentives and metrics are such that everything in the media business and the internet digital media business is oriented around video being a really fast highway to growth or to getting more audiences between video's ability to travel on social media a little better, get in front of more people, in theory, trickle them down the funnel, and video's ability to make sense to more places in the entertainment ecosystem that makes a lot of money.

34:56So, you know, I feel what I'm feeling. how I'm feeling is irrelevant to the way the world works, but very much so. Right now, January 2026, I would say that the bulk of the energy around podcasting is around it sort of pivot towards video. It's not pivot, it's complete. But I would also say that there should be a real conversation as to whether we call these things podcasts, right? Whether podcasting has a technical definition or it's more of a conceptual brand definition. Because at the same time, while we're talking about Pete Davidson's theoretical video podcast that doesn't really have a version that's going to be just audio that you can access it outside of Netflix.

35:36You know, there is still kind of an ecosystem of audio, like forward and centric podcasts, many of which are independent. Of course, they're still making quite a bit of money and have quite a bit of audience. So there's a bit of a category collapse here. Yeah, one of the trends I have started to find really interesting is I'm starting to see more and more podcasts where the audio episode is still the main thing, right? And often the only way to get the full episode is in audio, but they'll actually record on video just to run social clips. So you can't find the full episode on video anywhere, but you can find tons of social clips.

36:09And that to me is like the most perfect acknowledgement of what this is of anything I've ever seen, that it is like, okay, we want to make an audio thing. And I actually really appreciate the idea that audio things are different. like as this show has become more video based we do things differently and there are things we don't do now right and that sucks right like i don't like that and i i think we're still trying to figure out a way to make that work but you can make an audio product but it is just factually true that if you want to find new audiences the right best and in many cases only way to do it is to make vertical video of your podcast and put it on tiktok right it's just that just is the way now like but you know that is also just like practical right like if it turns out to be the case that video is the best marketing medium, then yes, engage in a marketing medium, the sort of core product itself, how you make money, how you develop a relationship with an audience.

36:59If that is primarily oriented around the sort of audio component of it, it makes sense. I was talking to somebody who hosts a show for a very big media company. I don't think I have the liberty to sort of share the details on this, but he was telling me about how he sort of, it kind of feels like they're two timing, two different audiences and within the span of their episodes that they do, there are some episodes, depending on the subject and depending on the guests, it just performs better as a video podcast on YouTube versus as an audio only on the RSS feed and it ping-pongs back and forth pretty regularly.

37:35And the question to me is how do you square the accounting of that? Can you make revenue on both sides collectively to actually support your show? But there's this really strange sense where you're serving fundamentally different audiences using the same vessel. And you've got to do it again and again and again and again to somehow make the numbers work. Yeah, I mean, I remember, you know, years ago thinking it was so weird that you could get a 60 Minutes podcast that was literally just the audio feed of 60 Minutes. And like some of the CNBC shows have done that. And there is, that's sort of a different container for the same thing, but it is like a fundamentally worse product.

38:12Right, but that's also one of the earliest forms of podcasting was that. people's ripped straight from the broadcast of Fox News and throw it on Apple iTunes. Like that, that was a very, very legitimate way that people engage in podcasting in like the late 2000s, for sure. So funny. And it does, it kind of works and it works in different ways, right? Like you, you listen to podcasts in sort of a different mode of consumption generally than you do watching something on TV. And this, this is the collapse that you're talking about, right? Like Like YouTube in particular now has this idea that it can be all things to all people all of the time.

38:49And I think what it's trying to figure out with podcasts is, okay, how do we make something that you can watch actively, listen to passively and interact with all at the same time? And I don't know. Do you see shows out there that are doing a really good job of being all of those same things? because it feels to me like we are still in that phase you're talking about where it feels like I'm either doing one thing at the expense of the others or I'm doing all of them kind of mediocrely. I'm not quite sure that it's sort of not necessarily buying into the premise that it's encouraging shows that are able to do all three at the same time.

39:23I think YouTube is like television as we know it actually. It has different pockets of content that can hit different kinds of things. So it's also true that television, traditional television, even way back in broadcast, there are forms of television that exist for you to throw out a background that you don't really look at, you know? For sure. Yeah. So right now you turn on ESPN News, right? Or, you know, you can throw on Pat McAfee or something. And I don't really want to look at his face. I don't look at his face. But like I let it play in the background. That's kind of a legitimate way that television exists.

39:53I think a lot of news programs function that way. It's not really a thing to be looked at all the time necessarily. It's a thing to be glanced at. But like the sort of YouTube component of it is that it's able to hit. it cultivates an ecosystem where it's able to have all those forms that maybe sort of like efficiently matches and meets audiences that they need the question of Netflix is that like it has a supply, a much more narrow supply chain, right? It's not user generated, it's not user uploaded and so it controls the funnel but also Netflix has that's a way that you relate to the UI of it is a lot has more friction compared to YouTube in terms of getting from one show to the next but there's also, I mean, the sort of larger question about podcasting here is that it really does feel like we have two kinds of podcasts now, right?

40:37You have podcasts as we know it. That's like you and I talking to each other. Maybe most people listen to this as an audio show. Some of it will interact. Some audiences will interact over YouTube. Maybe some people interact over social. And then there's like cheap television. And that is, I think, Netflix's play around podcasts or video podcast with the deals that they've been signing with The Ringer, iHeartMedia, Barstool. Many of those shows visually are uninteresting, but they can get to a point where it is meeting local access cable or something like that. And then there is this sort of Pete Davidson and Michael Irvin show, this original Netflix podcast, which if you're being really uncharitable, we don't know if it's actually going to be released as an audio show outside of Netflix, but I don't know if they're going to use like union labor to make those shows?

41:32Does it mean it's a cheaper way to make television? That's another aspect of this conversation that's really important. So cheaper, yes. And also, this is going to sound less charitable than I mean it, worse. Yes. Sorry, I should have been so emphatic. Sure. I mean, I think one of the things that is so striking to me about this whole change is I think everybody involved acknowledges, I think that this idea of, I love the cheap television is such a good way of putting it because there is this thing we think of as a talk show, which can actually be very expensive, right? And there's been a lot of stuff like all the questions about Stephen Colbert's show being canceled and about the money that it was losing and the benefit that it brings.

42:15Like you can do a thing that kind of feels like a podcast in that it's two people talking in a way that is really expensive. And you can also do it in a way that's really cheap, where it's just two people talking. And I think especially now that we have all of this experience watching people on webcams talk to each other, in part because of like the experience we all had during the pandemic and in part because of what podcasts have become. But like I now I think about this all the time that like I listen to and watch Jon Stewart's podcast all the time. And it occurred to me relatively recently that I don't experience Jon Stewart differently when he's sitting on the Daily Show set, which is like beautiful and cared for.

42:52And he's wearing makeup and it's a whole thing versus his podcast shot, which he's like he's too close to the camera. The camera is not very good. He's kind of looking up at it every time. But it's like that's still Jon Stewart. I don't I don't experience those two people differently. And I think if I'm Netflix or any of these other companies, I'm looking at this being like, why in God's name am I spending all of this money on the set and the makeup and the crew and the whole thing when actually all I need is Jon Stewart and a webcam? Exactly. And that's the machine logic of how Netflix would approach the question, right?

43:20How do I get the same amount of money, if not more money, by spending less money? And podcasts and this entire sort of growing culture of like, let's call it reduced expectations around labor input, is a big sort of dynamic that we should be sort of thinking about this along these lines. Because you're right, if you don't think about everything else but engagement time, and if you don't think about anything else but the number of viewers, just the raw singular metric here, then yes, it makes a ton of sense that we shouldn't really care that we can see Jon Stewart's nose hair in the visual, right?

43:56Like that's kind of, I mean, and I threw on like the Bill Simmons show in its live broadcast a couple of Sundays ago after the Golden Globes. And like the visual composition is pretty terrifying. It's two very close faces of two sort of shiny, oily-faced men looking at me. And I'm like, I feel so assaulted right now. But the fact of the matter is that like I left it on because I was going to go to the other room to do stuff anyway, and I could hear their conversation, and that's kind of the way you relate to it. So in the span of Netflix's metrics, there is maybe very little difference between time spent watching something like Bill Simmons podcast or a Jon Stewart podcast situation versus throwing out four hours of Bridgerton.

44:37In some senses, the outcome is the same. They're driving the same metric, which is subscription, and at some point, advertising. But you would hope that there's another feedback loop in terms of the actual quality and the actual sort of care of actually looking at something. But my sense, you know, in whatever late stage capitalism version of the media economy that we're going through, that kind of stuff is not part of the conversation in terms of like what the company thinks it needs to do to survive. It becomes this more of a top-down, I'm making certain aesthetic decisions. And that disentanglement is a little sort of unnerving in terms of what the rest of us get as consumers.

45:12Maybe at some point consumers will reject it if there are sufficient better alternatives out there. But given the way that the economy is shaped right now, given the sort of like rapid consolidation of all the options that we have in terms of what to watch and what to consume, it's hard to see an off-ramp. Is it surprising to you that Netflix is okay with that version of the trade-off? Like Netflix doing podcasts, sure, right? For all the reasons you just subscribed. Podcasts are a thing you can make a lot of. You can buy a huge library. Netflix loves the kind of shoulder content to other stuff.

45:47Netflix doesn't have sports, but it has a lot of sports documentaries. So it makes sense that it would do sports podcasts. That all seems strategically very straightforward to me. The idea that Netflix was happy to just lift a bunch of videos that people were already making and just drop them as is onto Netflix was very surprising to me. For this company that has infinity money to at least like ship people better cameras or like tell them what to do. instead this company is just happy to take what is essentially user-generated content and just pour it all over Netflix. Is that surprising to you?

46:20Well, I mean, I think that's a bit of an overstatement of what Netflix is doing, right? I think they would argue, you know, that is what YouTube is able to do and that's YouTube's like strength position, right? It has theoretically an infinite pool of people to draw from. Like it's a constantly replenishing pool of competition. And, you know, if I was putting on my sort of like sicko corporate boy hat, you know, I go like, Like if I made the argument for Netflix in relation to YouTube here, Netflix is a curatorial funnel, right? You go to YouTube, the first thing you feel is overwhelmed. You feel overwhelmed with Netflix, but you feel a little less so with YouTube.

46:52And Netflix has, for better or worse, by default, sort of a curatorial power. We're going to sign just these three kinds of podcasts first. And we're going to surface it to you. And if you don't know what kind of sports podcast you might want to try out on Apple Podcasts or YouTube, come over here we have five for you to choose from that that itself is a strength um the whether or not i find it surprising that netflix deigns to kind of like quote unquote lower its um quality threshold i don't know how you want to phrase it um that to me it just that is just strategic logic you know that that's sort of the end point of a of a strategic game and that's i'm not surprised to see that happen at all okay and i guess it it is to go back to the john stewart analogy.

47:37If making it look better doesn't make it better, what's the point of making it look better? A little bit. It's a very strange way of looking at it. It all feels so sort of nihilist when you think about what we're actually doing and making here. Yeah, you know, we live in nihilistic times, right? But I guess the question is sort of what is the incentive to do otherwise, right? Like, what are the signals that are reading that will... And so there are a couple of different ways that could be a counteracting signal, right? Audiences or some part of consumer base maybe goes, I'm not engaging with that as much as I'm engaging with something that has a higher quality of production quality or higher production investments.

48:11You know, maybe that tradeoff you can see numerically works for them. That could be something as simple as like when advertising becomes to be a much bigger play with Netflix. Maybe advertisers prefer one form, maybe a higher prestige form of the other. Maybe certain kinds of coveted advertisers prefer the UG Daily Show version of Jon Stewart versus, you know, very close up Jon Stewart. That kind of signal is really important. And as we see Netflix trying to expand its live, you know, sports and live programming, that could be a thing that we see as a bit more of a feedback loop. What are you hearing from podcast people about this?

48:44One of the things I've enjoyed the most about this change has been watching all of the people on these podcasts sort of feel the glow up of being on Netflix. There's a real sort of additional prestige that they all keep like reminding themselves that now we're on Netflix. So theoretically, we can be in front of everybody, which is very funny next to YouTube, which is a vastly bigger and more global audience. Right. The idea of like now we're on Netflix, so we're mainstream is just a very funny way of thinking about it. But there is this kind of inferred prestige of being on Netflix. Are you seeing that all over the place?

49:17I'm seeing that with Netflix. I'm seeing that with the Golden Globes best podcast category, which is like completely ludicrous. And it feels like, you know, it feels a little bit like new money, right? Like YouTube's new money and Netflix's kind of representation of the old money. And no matter how rich, how much richer, how much more glitzier and abundant new money is, there's always this kind of longing for and resentment against old money. And I feel that sort of tension and that relationship both in like how podcasters are talking about Netflix, but also how podcasters that were talking about the Golden Globes.

49:51Numerically speaking, there's very little to gain from the prestige of being on Netflix. but there is prestige and prestige is a very human commodity. It's a thing that we covet. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very odd dynamic that I think the feedback I've seen from a lot of viewers and listeners is like, this is a weird new thing that I have to do. Already you were telling me that to get the full experience, I had to go from listening to you in my podcast app to listening to you on YouTube or watching you on YouTube. It's changed the show. Things feel different. And now I have to go to this entirely new platform that I have no association with my podcast listening.

50:28But all the podcasters are like, yeah, we're on Netflix now. And that seems like it goes a very long way. Right. I mean, you could be a Substacker and make a lot of money and run around going, I'm on Substack. Or you could say, I write for the New Yorker or New York Magazine. And that still matters to some people and that still opens doors, right? No matter how much more money you make on Substack. And so I think that this is a system that replicates over and over again. And I'm sure 10 years down the line, the brand of YouTube might mean something very different, right? It might be more prestigious, depending on how YouTube plays it, depending on how Google plays it.

51:03And, you know, we'll see where Netflix ends up if and when. I think more of a when at this point when it just Warner Brothers. Like how that entire apparatus transforms the way Netflix thinks about itself. That's another way that I think might alter or shift the way that leadership there thinks about what its incentives are, what it wants. But again, we're sort of like in a, we're in many layers worth of a pivot point right now. This is just one of many. Yeah, that's fair. What do you make of the two new shows Netflix is actually commissioning and producing? There's the White House with Michael Irvin, and then there's a Pete Davidson show that I can't remember the name of.

51:42It's called The Pete Davidson Show. Okay, it's a Pete Davidson Show. That's why I couldn't remember the name. What does that tell you about what Netflix is trying to do here? So from a technical definition standpoint, to be a bit pedantic, like this is not the first Netflix original podcast. They have made a sort of like kind of branded marketing podcast that's audio only in the past for the past 10 years. And it's usually kind of like supplementary to the shows that they create like Bridgerton and things like that. And, you know, they're still continuing to make the official Bridgerton companion podcast, which will also, I think, be a video podcast.

52:14But when it comes to, so we don't know a lot right now about the White House of Michael Irvin and the P.Divinson show. We know that they're branding it as a video podcast that's original to Netflix. We know they're framing it as exclusive to Netflix. We actually truly don't know if it will be released outside of Netflix non-video, which then really truly challenges the definition technically, the technical definition of what a podcast is. But I think what Netflix is doing there is exactly what we were talking about earlier. It's cheap television, right? I would love to know if actually there's union labor involvement in that.

52:46I would love to sort of actually take a look at you know when the show premieres next week how the aesthetic of it looks right does it look more like Wayne's World or does it look more like everybody's life of John Mulaney which is somewhere in between Wayne's World and you know the David Letterman show and it does there is this sort of collapse in aesthetic form a little bit in terms of this category of how we think about like what a talk show is and that further collapse that further like you know playing around with what a talk show could be. It's only to something like Netflix's benefit, and it's only to the detriment of the people who make television, I think.

53:24Yeah, so can I read you a quote from Ted Sarandos on the earnings call? Please. Netflix just reported earnings for the last quarter, and somebody asked him about podcasts, basically. Like, how's it going? What are you doing? And he said, well, it's still very, very early, but we're super pleased by the early results that we're seeing. We think about video podcasts like a modern talk show, but instead of having a single brand-defining show, You have hundreds of them. So it's a broad offering versus a single broad show or format. But it does generate a lot of very passionate engagement, lots of variety.

53:52That to me, that sentence, but instead of having a single brand defining show, you have hundreds of them, is both absolutely correct. And I think a cool, interesting strength of the podcasting industry that instead of having one thing, you can have lots of versions of that thing. But it's also like, boy, is that a cynical way of thinking about this that you're talking about, right? He's like, instead of investing in a lot of talk shows, and you think about it, especially for Netflix, a company that has tried and failed many times to make hit talk shows, they're just like, well, now we can just cover the waterfront because it's going to be cheaper and it's going to be faster and somebody else will do all of the work and it's mostly just headphones and microphones and boom, we've done talk shows.

54:31And I think that just that way of looking at it to me sort of tells me everything about what Netflix is up to here. Again, it's extremely MBA brain, but like two things about that, right? Like one, the way that particular framing is exactly how management and studio systems would like, it's the perfect ideal like machine world. Because each individual talent is ultimately fungible, right? They're ultimately interchangeable. There is no sort of big dog that you're going to have to negotiate with. it's like if you want to walk away if you want to maybe to beat your 10 million dollar contract it's okay I'll moneyball you I'll get like 10 losers at 1 million dollars each and maybe make you up in the aggregate and that's sort of like perfect for a GM the second thing is like whether that will actually be true right whether the sort of dynamics of what people want actually work out that way so you think about something like SiriusXM in a sense you could view SiriusXM is an entire categories, entire species of media.

55:28That's exactly what Tats Aranas is talking about. What we offer at SiriusXM is not one particular brand name talent. We offer a broad range of this kind of content, this kind of programming that different audiences can relate to at different scales. And in the aggregate, we make up a family. But they still are contingent on Star Power. Howard Stern is still the biggest show. It is the reason that you're able to sell SiriusXM as a brand. And I think that's still going to be true for Netflix, right? Like the danger becomes too much of a utility that consumers feel like, oh, it is a thing that you have to pay into electricity because they don't want to be bored in a silent room at between 8 to 10 o 'clock.

56:09but stars are I think really important especially as we get into a larger landscape in which like a lot of content will feel synthetic like a lot of you know AI sort of inflected or generated a material so floods our world I think the sort of curatorial artistic bet is that you still want the individual like the actual star right we're hungry for Timothee Chalamet's we're hungry for Connor's stories Hudson-Williams' right there is still a thing that we want from people um and I still believe that stardom to some extent will become will be it will be a factor here and that kind of stands against a little bit of how that that Sarando sort of framework is here is it a massive overreach to say we're headed down a road where instead of signing timothy chalamet to an overall deal to make a bunch of movies you sign him to an overall deal to make a podcast for you that that's that that what we're about to see is like total gas on the fire for the whole every celebrity has a podcast and this becomes how these folks get onto these streaming platforms is that are we it feels to me like there is a version of this road that ends that way but am i am i getting ahead of myself uh you know i i i'm i'm i never bet against pessimism personally like i always bet you know if i if i think timmy would be a great podcast host no i doubt it actually i would listen to that shit i actually don't think so i think he's fantastic because he's so scarce right uh no i I think, you know, the thing is, is that I've been thinking a lot about in terms of what we're talking about, we talk about celebrity sort of industrial culture.

57:42There is a very vast universe of celebrities, right? And we've always sort of accepted that there's a very small creme de la creme, tier A list celebrity. And what we are sort of seeing now in 2026 is that there is so many ways to be a celebrity. There's so much production of celebrity. There's so many different tiers and there's so many different ways that it can sort of expand. You get reality stars. You got social stars. You got everybody, every single human being covered on Who Weekly, right? Like it's this entire sort of economy that's bigger than ever before. And it sort of made the ability to be an A-lister so much more difficult.

58:15But the status of being an A-lister is so much more valuable, right? It's harder to become a Brad Pitt of the modern era, Julia Roberts of the modern era. And it's contingent somewhat to the ability to play around with modern media dynamics. but the thing I think that Chalamet is showing a little bit is like you can do that while maintaining a mystique and that itself, that scarcity creates your value and that's a little bit I think of the modern face of A-list liberties which is to say the minute he starts a podcast it's over for him it's over for that game, it's over for that strategy and I think that dynamic is going to get sharper and sharper The K-shape economy comes for us all, right?

59:01This is why you and I are no longer A-list movie stars. It's because we started podcasting. No, absolutely not. Right, exactly. We'll have to go to indie route now. That's the one and only reason. That's what I always say. We've talked about this a little bit, this sort of total collapse of all of the ideas around podcasting and podcasts and talk shows and what all this stuff means. And there's obviously this huge debate about what a podcast even is or if it's even the right term. Andrew Marino wrote a great piece for us arguing that we should just get rid of the word podcast. And our commenters absolutely took him to task.

59:31They were like, this is ridiculous. Shut up, go away. And I think he's right. A poster's got a post. Marito did the right thing there. Absolutely. It's a good piece. We'll link in the shout outs. My question to you is not just, is that happening? Does the term podcast sort of mean everything and nothing anymore? But does it matter? Or do we risk losing something with this incredible collapse of everything into podcasts and podcasts into everything? One million percent. I mean, first of all, like from a very nuts and bolts 101 meat and potatoes philosophy of language thing, like words mean something.

1:00:09Words have to mean something. Agreed. But also words can be co-opted. Words can be expanded. Words can be weaponized. And in this situation, you know, podcasting as a culture, as a thing with a historical tradition, it's a thing that still exists, right? There are people that will still publish podcasts on the open ecosystem who reject the videoification and the closed platformification of the entire way that industry has sort of evolved and is chasing after in terms of trying to get bigger and bigger dollars, more solid, stable, consistent dollars. But that ecosystem of the open podcast is still there.

1:00:42And so I would not retire the word entirely, but I would sort of draw some lines, right? Like Hollywood and Netflix and the celebrity complex is using the word podcast for a certain thing to signal a differentiation from the other products it produces. To differentiate from streaming television shows, from talk shows, from daytime talk shows. A podcast is a sort of a video web show, cheap television, right? It is cheap television. We can call it cheap television. They will not call it cheap television. but you know I think the sort of political fight over like what the word means is it has real material consequences in how people are able to find the open podcast at the end of the day it could be a situation in which the the sort of you know originate original heirs of the open podcast try to call the podcast something else try to reclaim it I don't know but it's a at the end of the day it's a political fight one that requires organizing and one that requires a concerted effort a little bit uh and one that like is difficult to do because netflix and youtube are so much larger and when they say this is a podcast because of the nature of the authority as large institutions with a lot of money people tend to cede to that for sure yeah obviously there was a real moment at the beginning of this transition where everybody pointed back to the pivot to video that everybody did on Facebook that then incredibly became a Facebook rug pull and Facebook ruined a lot of companies that had bet huge on Facebook video.

1:02:11And there were a lot of people who were cautioning against doing that here, that if you're gonna invest in video, you're gonna change the show you make for video, you're gonna rethink your whole production process in order to make video. This rug will get pulled out from under you when YouTube or Netflix or whoever decides that they're no longer interested in video podcasts. Is that still a worry? It's always a worry, right? Right. I mean, like the content creating life is an uncertain one, beholden to the whims of both algorithms and itself algorithms as an extension of corporate incentives. Yeah, I mean, like you're a smart, anyway, decent tactician when it comes as a media company or as a person who makes stuff.

1:02:51You want to diversify. Like you want to sort of be sure that you're not overly dependent on one particular stream of revenue, that your power is not wholly dependent on something and one other thing that doesn't really care about you. And that's always going to be a reality. And that's been true, you know, that's especially true now in an age of algorithms. It was always true when you run any kind of business. Okay. All right. Last question, then I'm going to let you go. Give me a good show that I don't know about that you've watched or listened to recently. I have found every good show I've ever found largely thanks to you so recommend me a podcast television show or like in general?

1:03:26no, podcasts you're into right now podcasts, right now I'm just sort of working through the back catalog of Truanon nice, okay I know of it, I have not actually listened to it, but I know of Truanon had kind of a moment recently so I became lightly aware I am increasingly a big fan check it out, it's more of a vibe thing and it's more of a dirt back left kind of thing. But yeah. Love that. All right, Nick, I assume we will have you back to talk about my feelings about podcasts again very soon. But thank you as always for being here. This is my pleasure. My pleasure. All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and take a question from the VergeCast hotline.

1:04:04Be right back.

1:04:10All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the VergeCast hotline. As always, the number is 866-VERGE-11. You can email vergecastatheverge.com. Again, I'm still thinking through all of this Minneapolis and TikTok and how we experience information online. And what do we do in this space right now? I think I've been hearing from a lot of people is just this sense of everything is happening all at once. And it's not clear how I'm supposed to react, how I'm supposed to respond when I learn how different people are responding. And if you are feeling helpless or if you have figured out some way to sort through all of that, I would love to hear from you.

1:04:45This is a thing we care deeply about and want to keep covering. So reach out, send us emails, call the hotline. We love hearing from you. But for now, though, something completely different. We got a call based on a response to something I said about how if you're the kind of person who wears AirPods, but also sort of holds your phone in front of your mouth like this and talks into it, that you're out of your mind and that doesn't do anything. This person had a very good point that made me think a lot of thoughts. Here's the question. Hey, David, I just have a comment. He said your phone is doing nothing when you're holding it to your mouth and listening.

1:05:17And I have your AirPods in. And I do have a small rebuttal to that because I've done that before. And it is when I'm listening to a podcast or listening to music. And I'm in a situation where I want to pretend like I am on the phone. because I've got weird social anxiety or something. Or say, I don't know, I was in Miami, and I wanted to know if this hotel lobby that I was not staying at had a bathroom that I could use. And so for some reason, walking in and, you know, pretending to be on the phone in my AirPods just isn't enough. There's something about holding my phone up to my face that says, I am official.

1:06:03I'm on the phone, good sir, which somehow implies I'm meant to be in this hotel. It's just lying, but I think it works, or at least it makes me feel better about it. The hotel didn't have a bathroom, so I left. But there are times where I will hold my phone in my mouth to pretend have a conversation, just to get out of social situations. not a normal thing just a I'm broken kind of thing but thought you should know okay so I've been thinking about this call ever since I got it and I think the simple point is correct that wearing AirPods and holding your phone to your mouth communicates I am on a call in a way that just wearing AirPods doesn't and this is a social problem we've had for I don't know two decades now ever since the first run of Bluetooth headsets which were those kind of one ear long pointy ones with the microphone that pointed at your mouth that basically you couldn't see if you were on the other side of somebody.

1:07:04So a lot of people just started walking down the street looking like maniacs talking to themselves. We still have not come up with a good social way to say I am on a phone call versus I am listening to something versus I'm just wearing these. Like, should there be a system of lights that communicates how responsive you are. I don't know, but we haven't figured this out. But what this did make me think is I think there is a hierarchy of how official do you look to other people when you're on a call? And I would like to share that hierarchy with you right now. So thing number one, the most official way you can look to be on a call on your phone is, I agree with our caller, it's to hold your phone to your ear, right?

1:07:51If you walk in somewhere with your phone up to your ear like this, there is just only one thing you can be doing. And that is taking a phone call. It looks official. It looks, it looks powerful. Like you're, you're doing something with your hands. You look like you might yell at somebody and then throw it across the room. It just, it looks legit. So that's number one. Number two is when you're wearing wired earbuds, like ear pods or something else, but the important thing is those wired earbuds have to have an inline microphone on one of the wires and you have to be holding up that wire to your mouth so that the microphone is right in front of it, right?

1:08:24So you're wearing two headphones and then you're kind of holding the microphone right in front of your mouth. This is very close to being number one, but it's not quite there because it involves an accessory, which is by definition slightly more complicated. But this still does the thing where it makes it look like you are holding something up to your mouth. You're using your hands to make a phone call. And that's very powerful. This also has the useful side effect of sort of making you look like a spy where you're like holding up a covert microphone to your mouth and talking into it. So that's number two.

1:08:55That is also, by the way, if you want to like sound good on a phone call, that's the one to do. Holding your phone up, fine. EarPods, all that stuff are better because they have a microphone that you can just put up to your mouth. Like I cannot describe to you the difference between having a microphone right here that you're talking to and even having the AirPods microphone up here by your ear. Giant difference. Anyway, thing number three, two earbuds. Any earbuds, I don't care which ones you have. If you have two of them in your ear and you're walking and talking, it looks like you're on a call.

1:09:32It's important that you talk or at least like nod and make faces in response. You need to be sort of an active listener on your call. Otherwise, people will just think you're listening to music. But if you have two buds, people will be able to see from all angles that you have some kind of headphone in, which is very important. and it communicates a certain sense of being locked in, right? This is like, I'm getting no external noise. I am fully focused on this call. And that's very powerful. So that's number three. Number four is one earbud. And this is a tough one to get away with because wearing one earbud mostly signifies I am aware of the world, right?

1:10:12It says I'm listening to a podcast or some music in the background, but I also want to be aware of what's going on and see my surroundings. This is a very hard one to make the case that you are focused and locked in because by definition you are not. It also means that a lot of people who see you will not at all clock that you're on a call because they won't see the buds at all. So this is a case where you have to, again, listen very actively or be extremely performatively talkative and say a lot of like, hmms and yeah, and that sounds right and stuff like that just in order to make people see that you're talking because otherwise you're going to do the thing where you're just sort of listening for a long time and somebody comes up to you and says, hey, because you have one ear open and I think when you have the one ear open that signifies like you can come talk to me and it will be okay.

1:11:01But then you're going to have to do the thing where you like put up the finger and really go, I'm on a call. You point to your ear and that's no good. Once you've done that, you've already lost the game. So that's number four and that's almost last place. Number five is last place And number five is holding your phone up to your mouth on speakerphone. This is the worst thing you can possibly do in public because this signifies several things. This says, A, I'm on a call that you can listen to if you want to because I'm just on speakerphone. So welcome to my conference call. It says that I don't care about you at all because I am happy to just have you hear what I hear and listen to me shout into my phone.

1:11:42And it also says, please interrupt me. I would love to not be paying attention to this because it is just sort of happening while I'm in the world. I think of this like holding it up on speakerphone as like the I'm walking through the grocery store getting information about something kind of phone call. this says I don't need to be focused we're not paying attention this is not a phone call either of us are interested in we're just here because I need some information from you and you have it if you want to have like a business call and you walk around on speakerphone please know that I think you're a monster that's all I have to say about that so all of this is to say caller I agree with you and that the next time you want to seem like you're on an important call you can either hold the phone to your ear where you can wear the wired buds and hold the mic right up to your mouth like a spy.

1:12:34It's those two and then it's a big gap to everything else. Anyway, thank you to our caller. If you have other cool phone call mechanisms, by the way, that I don't even know about, if you're like, I've figured out how to like strap my phone to my chest so I can have calls that no one even knows. I don't know. Hit me up. Tell me all of your funky ways to make phone calls and how official they feel. Anyway, for now, that's it for the show. Thank you to Addy and Nick for being here. And thank you as always for watching and listening. we're going to have lots more on everything going on in minneapolis we're going to have lots more on the new tiktok we're going to have lots more ai news there's a lot of really interesting like gadget and ai product news happening right now we're going to talk about all of that we'll talk about it on friday's show we'll talk about it next week there's lots more to do on all of this stuff and as always a keep it locked on the verge.com our team is spinning up a lot of important good interesting coverage about what's going on in minneapolis we want to be we want to be helpful We also want to be thoughtful.

1:13:27We also want to just be able to say the things out loud that are true, that are hard to say out loud. Our team is very good at that. And I'm very proud of the work our team has done already and is in the process of doing. Keep it locked. Subscribe to The Verge, theverge.com slash subscribe. That is the thing that enables all of this for us. And we are immensely grateful to every one of you who subscribes. And when you do and you tell us that it's this kind of coverage, it means the world. And if you want to get in touch, please, as always, email vergecast at theverge.com and call the hotline 866-VERGE-11.

1:13:56We love hearing from you on all this stuff and everything else. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday, like I said, with more of all of this, more AI news. There's just a whole lot going on, and we're going to get into all of it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.