Why Apple is trying to save Google

25:55Perplexity is like you do a search on perplexity, it costs them a bunch of money, right? There's just a bunch of GPUs that have to do some work and use a bunch of power, and then they don't make any money. I'm not mentioning perplexes. They have a subscription fee, and they make some revenue, but it's not a lot of revenue, and they're certainly not profitable. And it's like, if they paid Apple money to collect a bunch of searches, which cost them money, that's just a black hole of money. You're just spending money to lose money. And I don't know that any of these companies can actually make that deal yet in a way that doesn't just accelerate their own doom loop.

26:33Right. They'll just lose money. Right. Except for open AI, which has an infinite capability to keep raising money. Yeah. And Sam Altman just has to go tour the capitals of the world again. He was literally the United States Senate. What I need is infinite money for nuclear power. And, you know, Ted Cruz is like, tell me more. And it's like, how do you do this? Teach me your ways, Sam. Seriously. But that's a real problem for Apple. I don't think it can get those deals yet from these companies. Certainly not in the way that it has from Google. Google is capable of making those deals for Gemini.

27:07And we heard Sundar Pichai say that talks for a deal like that are underway, and they were hoping to get it done by the middle of this year. So there's a deal there somewhere that makes more sense for Google just because it's Google. And you see Google on its own side working towards that, right? Like there's AI mode in search now. Gemini is starting to do search that it's like you can start to see how they just pull piece by piece out of search and into AI, integrate Gemini, move on through life. But I think you're right that like perplexity just can't pull that off, I don't think. Not yet until they figure out how to make money doing this stuff.

27:43I don't think they can. Okay. So my hot prediction is 36 months from now, these companies do not look recognized with the companies they are today. What do you think? Google, especially. Richard, what do you think? I mean, what is left of Google if they... So are we thinking that they lose Chrome or that they lose Android or both? Maybe both. If they, you know, they've lost the ad tech case, now they're onto the remedies phase, which starts in September. So that'll wrap up. And for all we know, they're going to have to sell their ad exchange or they're going to have to split off DFP. Like something is going to happen.

28:18There was news there this week. Yeah, the government once again going for it. We talked about there are three parts of the Google ad tech stack. The government would like them to get rid of two of them. Yeah. And Google's counterproposal, by the way, is what if we do nothing? Yeah. Like, actually, it's fine. Just get Google Home. Just lit up. I can't even imagine Google without the infinite money spout that is their ad tech stack. This is what I mean. 36 months from now. They lose this trial. They'll find they'll appeal. They've already lost that trial. They're going to go to Remedy. Something will happen.

28:49It won't be nothing, which is what Google has once again asked for. It'll be something. They'll appeal that. It'll go up and down the chain. Something will result. That's why I'm giving myself three years. It's not the end of next year. It's at the end of three years. Ten days ago, I would have said even three years feels too short. But then watching what has happened to Apple and how quickly these policies have changed and how quickly the App Store has changed and how hard it will be to wind this back, even if Apple does appeal and win on appeal. like maybe three years is not that long a time like once once this stuff shifts it shifts and again this is part of the monopoly lifestyle like story like these things are big and they seem invincible and then tomorrow they're over yeah and there's a lot to be said for that but the pressure right now is from the government and a underrated part of the monopoly's life cycle is the monopoly gets itself in trouble with the government gets all distracted and then the challenger comes along and it has like free space this is very much what happened to microsoft yeah right this is why google and apple exists the way they do because microsoft got distracted so you have opportunities for like opening eye and perplexing whoever else i'm just saying three years in three years i don't think these companies look recognizable like the companies we have today particularly google i'm not sure what's gonna happen with apple but particularly google it just feels to me like it's gonna look a lot different see i would actually put apple at the top of the rankings as I'm thinking about this, because I think there is an overwhelming chance that$20 billion goes away one way or another.

30:24It's not going to get out of this trial still being$20 billion. I just, I just don't, I can't see a way knowing what we know now that that deal at that number gets preserved. And then, like you said, stick that next to all of the stuff that's happening with the app store. Like the, the, my victory lap this week was I absolutely called that Amazon had a version of the Kindle app sitting around waiting with links in it to the web store so you could buy a book in the Kindle app. That's already out. The Patreon changed things and now you can subscribe to Patreons through the web. Every app that has another way to bill you is starting to bill you quickly outside of the...

31:01And all that is just money that Apple used to get for free that now it doesn't get for free. Well, wait, no, hold on. So John Gruber will be on Decoder on Monday. So look forward to that. But I made a similar point to him in that conversation. And what he reminded me of was you couldn't buy a book in the Kindle app before. So it was money that Apple wasn't getting anyway. And so the first players are seeing are Amazon, Spotify, Patreon, which weren't paying the taxes. Sure. But there's a there's a massively long like Candy Crush is coming if it hasn't yet. I don't pay terrible attention to Candy Crush, but like this is the move.

31:43And now everybody has it. And like you said, Apple has both appealed the overall ruling and appealed having to make this policy change ahead of the appeal. so it's like the way it is now Apple has to had to comply immediately and then appeal and it's saying no this thing you're asking us to do is so horrible and unconscionable that we can't be asked to do it until the appeal is over again not a lawyer seems like they're probably going to lose that one based on what we know of how everybody feels about this case but it's just happening so fast that at some point like Apple is going to have to decide to individually pick a fight with every important developer on its store or the toothpaste is just out of the tube here and and once it's out it's out right like the people aren't going to wind back to happily paying apple 30 if they don't have to yeah there's a bill it's a it's a kind of a fake bill in the way that some of these bills are just fake like they're opportunistic bills from congress people who just want to like be a part of the good fight but there's a bill this week in the Congress that would require Apple to have alternative app stores, require Google to have alternative app stores on our platforms.

32:53And so you just see, oh, the pressure is mounting, the political will, especially once people can see it. Oh, I was able to buy a book in the Kindle app and then Apple took it away. It's very hard to convince people of something they can't see and feel. It is very easy to convince people that taking something away is bad. Speaking of John Gruber, he wrote a good piece about that this week, that it is one of those things that you open up the Kindle app, you tap the link to go get a book and immediately your brain goes, oh my God, it's insane that it was not like this. Like it is so unbelievably user hostile that you couldn't even, there was no way to even go get the book.

33:28You had to go to a different app and type the name of the book. It like insanity. And the minute you see how it's supposed to work, the minute you realize this is just because Apple hates you. That's the only like, and I think you're right that there it's, there's no going back from that. Okay, so answer my question. Richard, 36 months from now, do you think it looks the same or do you think it looks unrecognizably different? Or I guess somewhere in between. I'm going to take the field. I think that it still looks the same, but the ecosystem has changed. And now Apple and Google are throwing haymakers at each other.

34:01Oh, interesting. That's a good take. All right, David. I'm going to sort of throw in with Richard, which is I think these companies stay recognizable, but are so vastly less powerful that other stuff bubbles up. Like, I think I'm starting to hear is everyone on earth now is building a browser because they understand the browser is very important in new ways, in part because of this trial. And they also see that maybe whatever's going to happen to Chrome is going to open up the browser market in a meaningful way again. And we've been hearing all these AI companies are building a browser like that is going to march into every single one of these markets.

34:39Right. Like the market for being a payment processor on the Internet is more interesting than it's been in an extremely long time, because now suddenly these things are open to all of those things. So, like, I think it's less that like to some extent, the big companies are going to be like pulled down a little bit, but also like the tide under them is going to come up much higher than it has been able to in a long time. Yeah. You know, there's other pieces of the search remedies case this week beyond Eddie Q, right? The head of search said these proposed changes would totally undermine trust in Google and search if you let everyone have access to the Google search graph, right?

35:14And basically, everyone can read all the searches that are happening. Everyone can get access to our search results and repackage them. Like, maybe people will just stop using search. And, you know, the quote Google has used for years is people ask Google questions that are so intimate they won't even say them out loud. right? And so you break that, you're going to break search altogether. And what the DOJ keeps saying to that, by the way, is, do you think you're the only company on earth that can protect user privacy? And Google continues to say no. Like, again, on its face, that's not a crazy thing to say, right?

35:45Like, we make a lot of fun of companies who don't have a better defense, who just scream privacy and security, that that's a shortcut for I don't actually have a good reason. But in this case, there is some truth to it, right? Like, Like, if you think about the stuff you have put into the Google search box, you can you can tell everything about a person from what they Google in ways that are potentially very scary. But it is also true that Google is not the only company on Earth capable of being a good steward of that information. I also think it is now increasingly clear that people are asking wildly intimate questions to chat GPT.

36:17Oh, yeah. Right. Maybe more so. Yeah. Even more like incredible. I mean, it's trying to get Kevin Roos to break up with his wife, man. And he's talking about the front page of The New York Times. People weren't just uploading their entire medical history into Google in the little search box. Like that wasn't happening before. Can you make this a podcast?

36:37It's obvious that something else is happening. But that would be something that really changes the dynamic of the web. Firefox basically said we'd be doomed if Google didn't pay us the money, which our friend Casey Newton keeps pointing out. Like that's your fault, bro. Right. You've built your entire business. is your competitor to Chrome on the back of a Google search deal? Like, have you thought about, okay, but Firefox has said that. Also, Mozilla has been through like several CEOs and a decade knowing this is the problem and utterly failing to figure out what to do about it. Yeah, they're like, we're going to do NFTs.

37:12It's hard to have that much sympathy at some point, yeah. It's tough. I'm always rooting for them, you know, like, they're going to be open source champions. Yeah. But, you know, they took the side quest into NFTs and it was like, Like, oh, we are totally out of ideas. And then, right, then there's the ad tech stuff. So I look at this and I'm like, I would re-rank them, David. I would say Google, absolutely 36 months from now, its revenue looks different. It's going to have to build other businesses. Maybe it's going to go up because it doesn't have to give Apple$20 billion. Maybe there's that.

37:47Maybe. But like right now, and you have written about this many, many times, Every business at Google looks tiny next to search, so they don't invest in them. Right? You're like, what? We'll move the needle at Google. And you're like, a business as big as search. And everyone's like, well, we don't have any of those ideas. Right. And then eventually, if you get big enough, you build a business that by accident runs into search, and then you die. Yep. Because search will kill you. And the only things that have survived are things that help search in meaningful ways. Android survives because it is a surface for search.

38:20Yep. And that's why they did it. You did not want to concede that user base to Microsoft at that time. Okay. But it means that, like, how many times have we talked about the Pixel? Are they going to truly invest in the Pixel? And, like, the Pixel is there to keep Samsung honest, and that is about it. Yeah. It's not there to be a big winner of a product because they don't care as long as people are searching Google on Samsung phones. Right. Well, maybe if the search business starts to wither, like, those priorities shift, and Google has to invest in its other businesses and grow them and be more diversified.

38:49This is what happened to Microsoft, by the way. Windows came under significant pressure. Sachin Adele was like, all right, we're just going to do Azure until I figure something else out. And then he started rebuilding each of those businesses in turn. And he pulled it off. He was very good at what he did. He pulled it off. Microsoft, vastly more boring now than it was before. But he pulled it off. I think Google is going to undergo that kind of transformation. I think Apple looks different because the sense that something is going to come after the iPhone will continue to panic that company. Yes.

39:21Right now they're saying it out loud. Something is going to come after the iPhone and they think the user interface will probably be voice in AI. Well, that means we're in for it. Right. That is a company in a defensive posture, not an offensive posture. Well, and a company that is for whatever reason, completely unable to compete in a meaningful way on those things. Like if you're sitting around being like, okay, if we agree that AI is the thing, who's going to win. Apple's not in the first five companies you would name. It's the biggest company on earth and you wouldn't bet on Apple as a powerhouse to solve AI as AI gets really good, which is where I think Google has a real shot, right?

40:02And this is another thing that keeps coming up in the Remedies case is Google is out there trying to do again in AI what it already did in search based on the premise that Google has the resources to be a winner in AI. And I think that's true. I don't think it'll be the only winner. I think there are going to be lots of winners. As we saw Sam Altman at OpenAI acknowledge this week, they went, they like bailed on the whole for-profit idea and are just back to being like, nevermind. We thought we were going to win so spectacularly, but now we're not. And just kidding. But you look at all of that and it's like, okay, Google has a real shot at this, but Apple is going to have to go undergo like a complete culture and organizational shift in order to be the kind of AI company that it is going to need to be if AI is going to win.

40:47Yeah. I feel like I'm obligated by law right now to tell everyone that the T in chat to be T stands for transformer, which is invented at Google. If you don't mention this every so often, a Google PR person like leaps out of a bush and brandishes that fact at you. Right. They invented a bunch of the core technology and they know how to deploy it. Sundar has said many times, like they know how to make it cheaper and more energy efficient. He's like, that's what we're good at. So you can believe that Google will just do its core competency. They've also, to their credit, done the hard restructure.

41:20Yeah. Right? They got rid of Google Brain. They exited some executives. They put Demis in charge of everything. Okay. You can see that they've undergone some changes to make the move. But now the big thing is under the pressure. And I don't know. Apple hasn't undergone any changes, right? They're like, this guy's gone, but here's another executive who's been here for 40 years. You're in charge now. And for a company like Eddie Q gets on stage, or gets on stage, Eddie Q gets on the stand and is talking about like - It really is a few good men. Like he just starts vamping, you know, like Jack Nicholson, like just improv-ing the lines and poor Tom Cruise just sitting there smiling.

41:58Be like, I don't know what's going on. Eddie Q would really like that comparison. But Eddie Q gets on the stand and talks about Apple's thing being cannibalizing its projects before they're dead, right? Like the iPhone exists because they cannibalized the iPod and everybody told them they were nuts to do so, but then they got the iPhone. Apple's not doing that now. Like there is none of that left in what we see from Apple anymore. And that posture just does not exist. It is kicking and screaming at every one of these changes. By the way, I just searched it on Google. I use Google for what it's intended for.

42:31And it is in fact true that Jack Nicholson improvised the line, you can't handle the truth. And if you could have been. That's cool. and Tom Cruise just had to you just had to be like okay nice let's keep this baby going and I'm Eddie I don't know if you're listening if you end up on the stand again in this case I encourage you to scream at the United States Department of Justice you can't handle the truth absolutely yes alright we gotta take a break let's all breathe you write us tell us what you think is gonna happen 36 months from now do these companies look the same or different You know what I think, but I'm curious what we all think.

43:08May 2028. Predict what the world's going to look like. Good luck, everybody. We're going to come back, and we're going to spend a little more time in a courtroom with Meta. We'll be right back.

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45:33All right, we're back. Look, I want to leave the policy talk and the legal talk by always doing a palate cleanser with gadgets. And we're going to do that. I promise we're going to do that. But we can't leave court just yet. Because Richard, Adam Masseri, he was on fire today. Just just chopping it up in our nation's capital. What happened in this case? He had a lot to say when he came on the stand today. We've heard a lot about Instagram. We've heard about Reels. We've heard about Threads. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if he's explained why they haven't launched an iPad app yet, but I'm sure he'll get to it at some point.

46:07You know, we're still recording this as he's talking. He said they're going to a couple weeks ago. He said Instagram is going to an iPad app. Yeah, I don't believe it until he says it under oath. Probably because he knew this testimony was coming and how he would be today. That is what it was, because I've been wondering why now, why is that happening? It's this. Because he talked about everything. He talked about Facebook deciding to buy Instagram in 2012, which he called one of the best acquisitions of all time. He said that Threads was originally supposed to live within the Instagram app, which is kind of weird to think about.

46:36But the way that they're linked, I can certainly see how they would have had that idea. And also when you look at, for example, how YouTube has done the posts in YouTube, that these apps don't necessarily think about bringing things out. But then they kind of realized that if you're going to take on Twitter, you need to have a dedicated app. So that makes a lot of sense, I think, also. He said that one of the biggest mistakes he made was the first version of Reels. That, to me, was just... I'm not sure if the current version of Reels is not still one of the biggest mistakes. But I did think it was interesting that he said it.

47:08All the subsequent ones also. Well, the first version of Reels was built on stories, right? And so he was like, you're going to open a story and you're going to swipe through stories the way that you're swiping through Reels now. And he's like, no, that's not what people want to do. They just want TikTok. So they copied TikTok. copy snapchat copy tiktok move on and that is the meta way as we've seen um they said that they instagram has spent up to 700 million dollars a year to lure creators so they're bringing in a lot of money they're spending a lot of money on instagram um just so so many different things i i was surprised that he said so much but also the way that maseri has been lately uh as as open as he's been is frequently posting is constantly talking to the people about algorithms and Instagram and what they think.

47:50I'm not really that surprised to see that he just has so much to say now. You know, I've briefly talked to Adam about his posts and like what he does. And he, you know, he makes two points in general. He, I think he's even said this publicly. He's like, one, my audience for this is so small. Like, I just want creators like they have a lot of questions they should hear from me. And then his point is I want to use the tools, right? Like he's like, I want to feel what it's like on that side of the screen, not just as a consumer Instagram. so i always think it's like people over read why he's doing it like 90 of miss aries instagram posts are like no we're not listening to you you know basic stuff like the algorithm is not punishing you if you use the letter q in your caption like it's just him debunking conspiracy theories and then almost all of them boil down to and you should post more like the most basic stuff but i the part where he's like i want to use the tools i think it's really interesting but he doesn't get off you can't knock he's as good as it gets you can't knock him off his game and it felt to me this is the case where the government is trying to prove that Meta bought Instagram to foreclose a competitor and Adam's point was to push Meta's argument that Instagram would have never been successful without Meta that all by itself it would have never developed the way it was and then I really turbocharged it I think he made some of those points.

49:14And then I think, you know, as all these go, like I think he oversold the idea that they're under existential threat from small competitors all the time. David, what did you think? I think that's right. He went way out of his way to talk about how big a competitor TikTok is, which is, we've talked about this before, but this has become Meta's sort of hobby horse in this trial, is the very existence of TikTok suggests Meta cannot possibly be a monopoly, which in a certain way is actually a very compelling argument. but what it has done and did again to Miss Aerie is just make a bunch of Instagram executives admit that they're not doing a very good job, which I really enjoy.

49:52And so like over and over and over again, they just keep apologizing for all of the ways that they're losing to TikTok. And I just find, I find that to be so very funny. And, and again, like the, all this money, like you're talking about Richard, the$700 million to lure creators, like how, how, where is that money going? Like, like, YouTube just pays ad revenue. There are creator funds and there are this stuff, but like Instagram is spending a huge amount of money in these sort of unknowable ways trying to get creators off of those other platforms and onto Instagram. I find that really fascinating, but even just listening to Mr.

50:31talk about it, like I find myself wondering a lot if Instagram knows what Instagram is. And this kind of goes back, to your point about uh wanting to use the tools like uh adam and sari also made a video i think today uh about oh no sorry this was months ago now but it came resurfaced today about how he wanted instagram to not be a lean back experience and it's like this thing is supposed to be interactive and social and like a place you hang out and that was like one of their big things with threads was the reason they pulled it out into its own app was because they wanted replies and posts to be on the same level with each other.

51:10And so like they have this idea that it's a social network and like, I don't know anyone who experiences Instagram that way. I mean, that's why they're spending the money on creators. Right. Right. Instagram sees creators as a good source of content after many rank and file users began posting fewer of their own updates. That's why they spend the money. That's from the, that's from the testimony today. Yeah. And just, just come out and be like, Hey, we're a, we're a streaming service. Like it's fine. I just, I don't know. we've gotten to this point now where I think meta as a company, it continues to be obsessed with this idea that like we can get back to friends sharing with friends.

51:44And it hasn't been that in a very, very, very long time. I think that's what they say. I think internally they all know this is why they spend$700 million a year on figuring creators from Tik TOK. Like this is why they're fine with spaghetti Jesus and the feeds. It just doesn't matter to them. Right. And I, I think, you know, mark posting on facebook or adam posting on instagram like they're using the tools i actually really appreciate they use the tools i think not enough executives use the tools except for tim cook claiming i believe to gq that he uses every single product every day which i don't there are not enough minutes in the day but do you remember all those all the times during like the the twitter years where people would keep track of how many tweets the various like executives and board members had.

52:28I think you're right. I think it's useful and correct to see executives be part of this. I think Mark and Adam are warped because it doesn't matter. There's millions of people will just respond to everything they do. If Adam really wanted to experience Instagram, he would start a meme page from scratch, POTUS as a college student, and try to go viral every day. Because that is actually the experience the creators on Instagram are having. right this like desperate need for algorithmic validation right if adam really wanted to experience instagram he would download a netflix video downloader speed everything up 15 add that weird vertical line and begin posting copies clips of a few good men to instagram every day you just broke richard a little do you see what i'm saying that's the real experience of instagram right freebooting memes from x and being like here's the difference between men and women like that's the experience of instagram and that's what many many creators experience like being an instagram creator is choosing between the dark path of just freebooting memes or doing those ai baby podcasts for like theo von's a baby that's all over the place right and it's out of control like every other clip in my feed and it's just like can i just say i force fed to me i am like i am i am sort of constitutionally against ai generated content in my feed and baby podcasts are very funny.

53:53Please don't do it to us or do it to us and don't share with anyone but us. You see what I'm saying? That's like one path, which is the dark, dark side. There's the slightly less dark path of like, be a Gary Vaynerchuk hustle bro, where he just screams at you about your content, not being good enough. And the algorithm is just people and just make great shit. And like, that's the path I've chosen personally. And then there's like everybody else being like, I just want more views. And it's like, well, you're not hustling hard enough. And none of that is I made a nice video update about changes to the algorithm.

54:26We got a million views just because I'm Adam Iseri. You're still having a synthetic experience on our own platforms. And I look at all this and it's like the thesis of this case is they saw a competitor and they bought it because they were afraid. Right. And you can argue at the markets and me, we, and all this stuff, but like, that's the real case is look at how bad these emails were. They saw a competitor and they wanted to crush it. And I, I don't know if they realize that what they're doing right now is making the case very strongly that if they could have bought Tik TOK and crushed it, they would have because they obviously saw this competitor and they weren't allowed to buy it.

55:08So they had to compete. and like look at all this evidence of all the stuff they're doing to compete with tiktok that they didn't have to do because they bought instagram and like what wouldn't that have been better right and i i don't know if that has been tied together correctly i know the government will get there but it's just like we're kind of you're kind of proving the point a little bit like look at how hard worth competing with tiktok is like yeah look at how hard meta did not have to compete Look at how hard Facebook did not have to compete with Instagram. Look at how hard Facebook didn't have to compete with WhatsApp.

55:44That's the case. Yeah. And the messaging stuff, I think, has been in some ways even more damning. Like you talk about just what's in their emails. Facebook was petrified of what was happening as people were moving to messaging and understood that that was the next place people were going to go to actually talk to friends and family. And it has just come up over and over. Like they just keep showing emails where one Facebook executive or another is like, if we don't buy a messaging service, everyone will die because all of our everyone's friends are leaving. And then they're like, oh, we didn't really think WhatsApp was going to make any money.

56:18And it's like, well, is that are those not the same thing? Yeah, it's a weird thing. And it does. It really does feel like everyone is actually kind of saying the same thing with really different words. and it's to your point not super clear who is going to be the one to try to like make something cogent out of all of this so there's another turn of missary's testimony today where he talked about trying to integrate the teams and it eventually got to the point where he was like the instagram team was too spiky and too weird and i had to reel them in and i didn't do that first and then he he just dunked on me a little bit which is super great the the federal trade commission in court their lawyers played Masseri his own interview on Decoder.

57:03They played him a clip from Decoder and they prefaced it by saying, do you remember this conversation with Neal? And Adam said, I vaguely remember speaking to Neal. Congrats. Super great. I love you too, Adam. I vaguely remember our conversations as well. But the clip is really interesting. They played him. Should we run the clip? We don't have it, but let's pretend. I'll read it to you and we can actually run the clip. Yeah, we can play the clip. So the clip is really interesting because you know, Dakota is an org chart show, right? We asked her, like, well, how do you structure the company? And so I asked him how Instagram was structured and how he had integrated more into Facebook over time.

57:37And this is, if you will recall, 2021 is this conversation. It is Facebook is trying to tie everything more tightly together because it sees this antitrust stuff coming. And if you'll recall 2021, this is when Donald Trump had been banned after from all the platforms after January 6th, after all the election stuff, like just bad, just bad stuff all the way around. Didn't this interview run with like a super spicy headline? The headline of the interview on our site was Adam Aseri says banning Donald Trump was the right thing to do. And the Donald Trump FTC just played a clip of that interview to Adam Aseri in that courthouse.

58:13But they used, I think the Apple podcast headline is like much softer. So they showed that screenshot instead of the one on our site, which is very funny. So he said, I told everyone I took over Instagram I told everyone I was going to be a sponge I wouldn't push for any change I would try to understand Instagram, the product the employee base and the values the one place where I almost immediately broke my promise was safety and integrity I was very interested in details because I'd run blah blah blah I'm just skipping ahead because we're going to run the audio and he said I found for the most part Instagram was running around stuff and our team was tiny and I made them integrate with the bigger meta team so it could grow and this is the best argument that exists.

58:53I'm actually really curious why the government played this to Adam, right? Because the best argument is trust and safety is really hard. The scale is really hard. Doing it on photography and video is even harder, right? Because you just need more compute to scan all that content and you need unified rules and you need to manage contractors around the world and multi-language, all this stuff. That is the best argument they have, that Instagram was able to scale because meta had that particular infrastructure and maybe you could argue that they had ad sales infrastructure also but it was that particular infrastructure i thought it was really interesting and then he gets to the instagram team was chafing against meta right and he he thinks a bunch of stuff was overblown and eventually of course uh kevin's sister and my krieger leave meta they're they were on the stand last week they're very spiky they said they could have made it on their own.

59:43But I just think it's really interesting that so much of the story is here are the capabilities that Meta actually provided Instagram versus having to compete with Instagram. Yeah. I mean, and over the years, Meta has made the case for itself as a trust and safety organization like many, many times. It is one of the things that that company is invested in at a level beyond almost anybody else, which is a wild given all the stuff that still happens on platforms but yeah it is kind of weird to basically play that because i mean both of those things i suppose can be true at the same time where the instagram team can be chafing against it but also really needed the trust and safety help but i don't know that like at best that feels like a wash of an argument to me from yeah well i think that the two things that can be true at the same time are that even if in a world where instagram had remained independent that it still could have been weird and bad in the ways that it is weird and bad now and just a cluster of things that don't really work together even if meta had never purchased it uh we've seen what's happened with twitter um like prior prior to elon musk and also that the reason why meta purchased it was to take out a competitor fair yeah and also if you are the sort of person who believes all these companies censor too much and you're worried about social big platform free speech abuse sure you can worry about that.

1:01:00The solution is you have more big companies moderating different ways and competing to have the best moderation policies, not one ever bigger company imposing the same rules and the same processes and the same Mark Zuckerberg whims. We're not, that is not doing content moderation anymore. We're doing community nets. Like that is the problem, right? Is the scale. I don't know that the Trump administration, if they were smart, would be making this argument because it's such a big argument they make all the time. But what they actually want is control over monopoly speech. So I don't think they're going to make this argument.

1:01:33But it's really, like, that's a thing that you would want. You would want multiple platform companies operating independently so that if you hated the moderation on Facebook, you would leave and go to an independent Instagram and experience a different moderation system. And that just has never played out. We've never really seen that play out. No. Or you would have an Instagram that was better at protecting teens, right? Because they would feel pressure and people would leave their platform to go to some other platform. And we certainly have not seen that play out. No. All right. So same question as before, 36 months from now, what does meta look like?

1:02:04Is it recognizable? Is it very different? I think meta gets out of this one. Yeah? Yeah. Because Mark Zuckerberg is just floating around the Oval Office? Kind of. Yeah. I think Mark Zuckerberg probably thinks he can convince Donald Trump to just throw out this case in one way or another. and I think again the technicalities of this continue to be so complicated and the market definitions are weird and friends and family sharing services is a strange thing and so I feel like it might sort of lose this case in the court of public opinion and win it on technicalities. Alright Richard? They get out of this but they do some weird thing where Facebook becomes a spin code that they spin off into its own thing and Mark just takes Instagram and Meta and all the VR stuff and turns it into Horizon and goes and lives in the metaverse.

1:02:57Okay, that's an unbelievably good idea. Mark just fully, he just zags on him. Spin off Facebook. He's like, the company's not even called that anymore. This is for old people. I'm going to sell Facebook to the AARP and I'm going to go do Instagram and WhatsApp in the metaverse. Unbelievable idea. I have no notes. i my answer here all depends on what happens with tiktok i think if tiktok survives meta does not look recognizable in three years i i actually think there's a better chance they lose this case than anyone thinks okay because that market definition stuff they're they pinned a lot of that the judge gets to pick the judge is allowed to just invent their own market they're like the market for scrolly videos like done and done i'm calling it right um so we'll see what happens there.

1:03:46But if there's no TikTok, right? If TikTok actually gets banned, I think meta just collects all those users and it can withstand whatever changes comes its way. If TikTok does not get banned, I think the competitive threat is still so high and the relevance of these things are fading. Like TikTok is just vastly more culturally relevant than Instagram is today. Oh yeah. It's vastly more culturally relevant than Facebook is today, aside from your child's little league softball schedule is like posted in an unscannable pdf in a facebook group like it's fine um but like the cultural relevance of tiktok is so high and meta doesn't have moves i don't think they can figure it out and so you get the pressure the court case and whatever remedy is in a court case all the distraction of compliance blah blah blah and then a continued ascendance of tiktok 36 months from now these companies look totally different i don't know that's that's my conditional it is certainly true that there doesn't seem to be any way in the next 36 months for meta to buy its way out of its problems which is a thing that's done.

1:04:47I mean they've been trying. Yeah. How many meme coins has Zuck bought? duck is like here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna punch ukraine like i'm gonna do some mma on the the middle east like i he's trying yeah dana white's running it now there you go all right that's the baby podcast right there if you want the clip that's the one um all right let's let's breathe for one second and then actually palate cleanses with some gadget news it's meta gadget news but it's still gadget news it's neilai specific meta gadget it is it is neilai's number one dream gadget. Okay, so here, the news is there's a rumor that Meta will have new AI glasses and they will have a, quote, super sensing mode with facial recognition.

1:05:35I have been saying for years now that the killer app for glasses, for smart glasses, is names and faces. I'm horrible at names and faces, but I could just look at people and be told their name, I would probably be the most powerful politician in America. I'm not, you know. You think that's the only thing stopping you? Yeah, because I walk up to people, I'm like, who are you? And you can't get votes that way. It's not normal. Like Bill Clinton famously would go to a rope line in Vermont five years after he'd last been there, and he'd remember every single person and their children. And everyone's like, well, we love that Billy Clinton.

1:06:10And then now he became president. I show up at a rope line in Vermont. I'm like, I know all of you look exactly the same to me. Like total face blindness. If I could just do names and faces. Is it like a white people thing? that's another baby podcast moment right there. You're the theobrine. You did it. No, it's like literally everyone. I just can't do it. If I could do it. The problem is to do it, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is deeply problematic. Like that is the panopticon surveillance state. As much as I want this product, I'm like, I think that trade-off is pretty bad.

1:06:48Facebook has long been able to build this product because they have everybody's names and faces yeah there have been versions of this product hacked together using meta ai glasses live streaming to instagram live captured a web browser and sent to clearview you've we've run the demos we've talked about it yep like the proof of concept has been there and so i think meta knows like oh this is the killer app like we should show people the killer app like all bets are off right now with privacy law in the united states all bets are off with ai regulation in the united states we're just doing it and i think people are going to be so creeped out so fast that the backlash will be intense.

1:07:22Oh, I completely agree. I mean, I think it's interesting to see this start to percolate up next to real-time translation as like everyone's holy grail feature for this stuff, right? Because that's the thing everyone is working on. Anyone who has ever done any AI anything would love to tell you how it's going to help facilitate real-time translation so all the people in the world can talk to each other. And this is like, it's getting right up there with it. And I think I would define it slightly broader than the way you're thinking about it, which is just like sort of latent world awareness, right?

1:07:54Because like think about the Project Astra demo we saw from Google last year where you can like ask it where you left your keys. Like it's relatively similar technology that makes my glasses know your knee lie and my glasses know that my keys are over there, right? So I think that is the thing now that everybody understands is or at least believes is like a killer app for all of this stuff. And it's like, where is the, you know, where are the groceries in the car? And it'll like remind you that you left them in the car because it's how you put them in the car. And all that kind of stuff is starting to bubble up from all of these different companies.

1:08:31But it is, it's the same thing. Like, oh, I have to give you 100 % constant access to everything happening around me all the time. And in exchange, you'll tell me where I left my keys and what Nila's name is. You're going to label stuff. And I don't think most people want to make that trade. I just don't. Look, Tim Cook is heavily invested in AR glasses. There's a rumor this week that Apple is building chips for its own AR glasses now. That stuff all seems still pretty pipe dream to me, right? Like Meta's Orion glasses are too expensive to build because the blocker is the optics. Right. Right.

1:09:06You got to make a lens that can accept images. Meta insists on calling them holograms. If you see a meta executive refer to their glasses as projecting holograms, like I literally want you to stop them in their tracks and be like, use words correctly. They're not holograms. They're just image overlays. They're just projecting onto waveguides on glasses like everyone else is doing. Holograms are three-dimensional in the existence. We're Vergecast people. You understand what I'm saying. Use the words right. I mean it. Okay. but like the optics are the problem meta invested in one set of optical technologies that thought would scale they didn't they didn't get cheaper Apple hasn't solved this problem that's why they built the Vision Pro the way they did there's a lot of steps between here and now and then you look at what the promise is and again I would buy names and faces glasses in one RV even with all their problems I would buy them tomorrow I think it'd be great for conferences where everyone opted in like there's a lot of places you could make it work right but at the end of the day, the promise is we're going to label stuff.

1:10:07You're going to look at a painting and we're going to be like, here's the name of the painting. And it's like, you got to do a little bit better than that, right? You got to make a better promise than everything will be labeled. I think something interesting that happened here when you talk about that backlash and what might happen that they're not anticipating. Remember when Microsoft talked about bringing out their recall for Windows, where it would remember every single thing that has been on your screen. And then people said, wait, every single thing that has been on my screen? David wrote a piece where he was like, I love this.

1:10:37He's like screenshots of the future of AI. That was like your headline. Yeah, for precisely the opposite reason of recall. Like it's because the thing a screenshot lets me do is say, I care about this, save this for me, and then make something out of it. We've talked about this, V song was on the show just recently talking about these AI recording wearables. and there is there's this thing you realize where you're like oh my god i do so much stuff that i don't want to have any record of and everybody goes to like porn and whatever but like i don't it's weird that it has a it has an audio record of every tiktok i watched today like that's weird like it shouldn't have a recording of what someone was saying when i walked past them in the store and like it's pulling that up when i search because i don't even remember that i didn't even hear it at the time yeah it's it's not my information to have and yet i have it i I mean, I think we should summarize this podcast immediately.

1:11:31We'll see. Like, I'm excited. If Meta of all companies announces a set of facial recognition glasses, like, they don't have a great privacy rep to begin with. Right? It is the killer app for these glasses. I'm being a little snarky about labels. Like, that is the promise. Labeling people is the killer app for these glasses. Right? Again, if you're at a conference, just imagine a conference and there's big signs that say in this convention hall, everyone's going to be wearing these glasses. We were wearing name bags before. We're enabling the glasses in this one place. Still a little gray area.

1:12:11You should be able to opt out. But let's say that exists. Everyone has agreed to participate in this social experiment. and you're walking around and you see the person that you saw at the conference last year and you had a conversation and you totally forgot their name and you gave them their card and it's like got lost the backpack and that's gone and what you get is here's this person here's their name here's like the company they work at like the name tag but you don't have to like look down at the name tag that is actually a trip like it would ease social interaction in that environment in a very specific way that would be worth wearing glasses.

1:12:45In almost every case, like having to charge the glasses and put them on your face is my theory of wearable bullshit. Like that's a lot of care for not a lot of value. Right. I don't think meta can convincingly make the case. But I also think they know that the only thing people are wearing the Ray-Bans for is to have a very convenient camera and no one is using any of the AI features of the meta glasses. And they have to come up with something else. Yeah. I mean, I agree. But I'm just not convinced this is that thing. We'll see. More gadget news, just to run through it quickly. There's a rumor that Apple's going to do the iPhone Air with a bigger screen in 2027.

1:13:24There's also a rumor that Apple's going to do a foldable next year and they're going to move the iPhone release date around. What do you think? The idea is that there are now going to be, I believe it would be six different iPhones and that that's too many to launch at one event. So there are going to be two different iPhone launch events going forward because they're going to do, I think it would be Pro Air and Foldable at one and then Base plus SE at another. And I would argue that Apple has learned precisely the wrong lesson here. And the correct answer is don't have six phones. But this is where we are.

1:14:05So that's apparently like the iPhone 18 cycle appears it is going to be a huge one. The iPhone, this iPhone 16 cycle is supposed to be used for Apple intelligence. Well, right. I was just going to say this is all based on like some perennially sketchy supply chain stuff. And we never really know. And it's all very messy. But I think there has been some smoke about a foldable iPhone coming in around in and around 2027. that leads me to believe that's probably still relatively right. But I just, I don't know. I'm having so much hard, I'm having such a hard time caring about a slim iPhone. And it appears that is going to be the thing this year.

1:14:49And I don't care. I just don't care. I think if they make a foldable iPhone, it folds out to like iPad mini size. And then the iPad gets like windowing, which they've rumored. It's going to get real weird. It's going to get real weird. And then they will still refuse to make a touchscreen MacBook for reasons that continue to not make any sense. Or multi-user on the iPad. Yeah, also that. It's the only thing anybody actually wants. Richard, there's a bunch of new Surface stuff. What's going on here? This is what Tom Warren had all of the information this week about. Microsoft launching some, first of all, they have a smaller Surface Pro laptop.

1:15:26So they've got a 12-inch, finally. We'd heard some rumors about this. It starts at$799. It has ARM inside, so it doesn't have a fan. I think you have the iPad competitor that the Surface Pro was kind of always supposed to be. Now that Windows on ARM is pretty good with the Qualcomm chips and with all the things that Windows has done to be able to run more and more programs, it's the time. The Surface Pro that people were looking for, that it was kind of supposed to always be, this is a lot more it. The price is a lot righter. It's a good size. It seems like his first impressions of it. I think he said that the 12-inch has the 8-core chip, 16 gigs RAM, 256 gigs of storage for$799.

1:16:10This fully looks like my new airplane computer. Yeah. Perfect, right? It seems like that is the one that you could just take with you and you'll have your computer in kind of the same size and shape of an iPad, but you'll be able to have multiple accounts and computer stuff. Yeah, this does seem like, at least in theory, Microsoft has been sort of dancing around the right set of specs for a long time. Like it was too small and then it was too big. And then there was the Surface Go, and then some of it was too slow and some of it, like it always had a couple of things right and a couple of things wrong.

1:16:42And at least on paper, I think you're right, that this is the one that is like, okay, you made the list correctly this time. It's still, it's a thousand bucks by the time you buy the keyboard, which everybody's gonna do, so whatever. But still, like as a, what is the sort of easy computer to recommend to most people? this feels plausible to me in a way that i'm very excited and the yeah the keyboard case doesn't have alcantara on it anymore oh good so it'll get all matted and nasty yeah they don't have that they also launched the uh surface laptop 13 inch uh with an arm processor in it so and that one uh oddly covered in berber carpet that'd be amazing microsoft made like a full 70s basement laptop no that one's just made of it's made of normal materials.

1:17:30This one has a fan though which I think is weird. That's the only thing about the Surface laptop which is a machine I have loved for many years. They went ahead and gave this thing a fan which strikes me as maybe a good idea but not a great sign of confidence in the whole Qualcomm situation at the moment. Yeah. You know the goal for these devices is to set the tone for the Windows ecosystem. I think they do that job just fine. Yeah they're great looking. Yeah they look good. Those videos are on YouTube. Go watch them they're great let us know what you think also the testing with the smoke blowing around inside of the uh surface laptop to show how the air air flows i thought that was really cool you can see that on the social media and in the article dude every time i watch one of these like stress testing gadgets videos i'm always like yeah i've seen like a hundred of these before and then 11 minutes later i'm like riveted just watching a thing press the button over and over and over again i will watch an infinite number of something beating up a gadget like it turns out I think four, five years into The Verge, I actually made a rule that we were never going to look at phone prototypes again.

1:18:31Like, this just, like, fundamentally stopped. I was like, great. Like, once again, you've brought me to the quietest room in Northern California to look at your headphones. Like, we're just not doing this anymore. And then it's like, I kind of, can I go to the quiet room again? You just have to acknowledge it for what it is. Like, this is, I'm here once again. In the quietest room in California. To watch you punch a gadget in the face over and over again. I'm like, I'm ready for it. It's very good. Watch the video. It's great. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be right back with Lightning Round.

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1:19:38I'm Murlov Boota, managing partner of Sequoia Capital and the host of Crucible Moments. We're returning for a brand new season. Join us as leaders from Stripe, Zipline, Palo Alto Networks, Klarna, Supercell, and more share what it's actually like to navigate the make-or-break decisions. Crucible Moments is back on October 23rd. Until then, catch up on seasons one and two wherever you find your podcasts.

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1:20:44All right, back. The lightning round. Unsponsored for Extra Flavor. See, the reason I keep saying that, a joke which is I agree with many of our audience, is getting less funny over time, although people do want the shirts, is so every time you hear someone say who their sponsor is, you realize they have less flavor. Because we don't take the money. You can't pay us to say anything. You can show up. Suitcase is full of money. They have. Ford Fiesta is full of money. It's not a lot of money. You see what I'm getting at? Well, that was good because if there's one thing that resuscitates a joke, it's explaining it in great detail to the audience.

1:21:18It's a small car. That's the joke. Frunk's full of money. We won't take it. Everyone else takes the money. If you want to support us, you can subscribe on TheVerge.com. You can pay us money, but then you still can't tell us what to do. It's a great deal. But you get a badge next to it when you yell at us about it. That's true. And that's good. It's very good. All right, David, it's time. Oh, we're so back. Last week, it was quiet. too quiet. So this week, according to the notes that I'm seeing, we are so, so, so very back on America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

1:21:59Neal, what do we have? Brendan Carr was a real dummy this week. Like a shotgun blast of Brendan Carr this week. He's all over the place. He was at a Milken conference. Alex Heath is actually at this conference. But at this conference, he gave a bunch of interviews to a bunch of media outlets. Not us. Brendan. Rude. I'm just saying, And if you had real stunts, you'd show up on our show. But he gave a bunch of, you know, interviews to your cable news outlets. And boy, did he say a lot of things. So I want to start with some classic Brendan, like classic Republican FCC chairman stuff. Because, you know, for all of his many, many faults, he is still a deregulatory, telecom-friendly FCC chairman.

1:22:41And so he just says the things now that you would expect people to say. But after all this time, you just know that they're industry plants and they're dumb. So, Brendan said, during the Biden administration, the United States fell behind on opening the airwaves up to private sector. And China now has an edge. If you recall. In American airwaves? I don't know. Okay. But we might be losing the race to 5G again, you guys. Oh, no. And then to put a gloss on it, a 2025 gloss, he said, AI is going to be the use case that will drive some of these telecom networks. That's why we have to get more spectrum out there.

1:23:22We have to make it easier to invest in these high speed networks. And it's like, bro, they're chat bots. Also, that quote is going to stick in my head for a long time as the moment AI officially lost all meaning as a thing that anyone agrees on. Yeah. Like, what does that even mean? It's AI is going to drive some of these telecoms. Does he just mean it uses bandwidth? But again, it is currently expressed as chatbots. Like, we're pumping vast amounts of UTF text around the internet. Like, what are you talking about? He's a dummy. But he wants to have more spectrum auctions and sell more spectrum to the big companies and provide more government subsidies to the biggest telecom companies in the country because we have to win a fake race.

1:24:13I don't know, man. Brendan, if you can explain yourself, you can show up, but the race to 6G is coming. Where you sit today, just be ready. Take a beat, take a moment. Pull your car over and get ready to shout down the people who say there is a race to 6G because of AI. Steal yourself for this battle because it's coming. And it won't be robot surgery on a grape, which never happened. It's going to be AI. If we don't beat AI, China will win the race to 6G. 8K 6G AI is a thing you're going to start to hear. It's going to be nuts. So that's just like your little amuse-bouche of Brendan being a dummy, right?

1:24:54Just saying the same dumb things that FCC chairmen who want to give more spectrum and handouts to telecom companies always say. Dumb, not illegally dumb. Sure. Not you're a traitor to America, dumb. Which for Brendan is, you know, great job. Good job, Brendan. Yeah. He made it, he made it, he, whatever. You know, he, yeah. He stayed in his lane. Regular dumb. Then he started to get, well, I think traitorously dumb. He talked about the FCC's investigation into Disney's DEI practices. And he said, the preliminary data from our investigation indicates they're doing intentional discrimination, potentially among race and gender.

1:25:30That's a really big deal. It's a good thing because, you know, Disney is slightly caved here. They've gotten rid of some of their rules. You know, they're trying to appease the Trump administration. He said it's a good thing they're heading in the right direction, but we want to make sure that it's in substance and not in name only. We have to, like, take a look at the conduct that took place in the past. That is a potential problem under the FCC's own equal opportunity employment rules, which, by the way, they got rid of. This is Brendan. They got rid of all the rules. roles so he's basically saying i'm i'm gonna continue to try to punish disney for nothing right like they ariel was black one time and now bob eiger has to go to jail and brendan carr is gonna be the one to do it yeah they're doing intentional discrimination potentially among race and gender is the whole problem that existed forever that we tried to solve with dei like That was the problem.

1:26:23It's very good. You doofus. So he's still, right? He's still trying to punish companies for their speech and how they run their companies. He's very interested in punishing companies for their speech. This is the thing he cares about the most. And so pushed on this, he tried to claim, and this is the one that just really, really got me. He tried to claim that the FCC's investigation into CBS and the Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes and the Paramount merger with Skydance, Paramount-owned CBS, was totally unrelated to Donald Trump's own$10 billion lawsuit against CBS for the Kamala Harris interview.

1:27:07He said, I haven't even read the president's complaint. We're just doing law enforcement. These aren't threats. That's just a penalty where I can take away their broadcast licenses, which, by the way, no FCC has done for decades upon decades. And even the last time they did it required multiple, multiple cases, and they still didn't get to do it. He said, no, no, no, no, no. There are three separate things that are going on. President Trump has his lawsuit against CBS that's in state court. I haven't read that complaint. I don't know what all the complaints are. There's the transaction before us, Paramount and Skydance.

1:27:36And then there's a 60 minutes complaint. Those last two have to do with the FCC. The first one doesn't. We're staying in our lane and we're just reviewing it. It's just the normal course of review where we take a normal interview with a politician during an election and we threaten to punish a company as hard as we can because they want to get a merger approved. And what we want from them is a settlement saying that they will not do quote unquote news distortion, which means they will tilt their coverage towards us. but that has nothing to do with Donald Trump even though two weeks ago Brendan is proudly wearing the literal gold bust of Donald Trump's head as a pin on his chest you have no credibility Brendan like none at all because you love to spat out on social media and be a MAGA warrior and then when you're pressed on it you pretend that you are a normal gray suit government bureaucrat just doing the normal process of review and you can't have both you can't you can't be a totally corrupt, like, censorious bureaucrat, and then on the other hand be like, I'm just a lawyer doing my job.

1:28:39By the way, you know who agrees with me about this? It's not a bunch of weirdo progressive libs. It's the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most conservative think tanks in America. Published an article this week called Policing News, Policing DEI, the FCC's shifting priorities erode its credibility. It's an entire article about Brendan destroying the credibility of this agency by doing censorship from a conservative think tank. Here's just a quote. In short, the FCC's mission crete panders to the president eroding the commission's stability because it's hard to predict the regulatory direction which it will head next other than a pro-Trump one.

1:29:18That's not me. It's not, you know, Uncle Wilk over here. that's one of the most conservative think tanks in america agreeing with bipartisan groups of former fcc commissioners agreeing with everybody who's ever looked at steven levy wrote a piece and wired about this a couple weeks ago down the line everyone looks at this and says this man who is in charge of our nation's communications infrastructure keeps issuing threats about content to broadcasters to cable networks to internet companies there's no power to regulate And it's because he wants to censor speech. And these little claims that he's just doing the normal review with a penalty that has essentially never been used in the course of a merger review to take away broadcast licenses for news distortion.

1:30:02You don't get to do that when you also wear the gold head of Donald Trump on your chest. When you're also a MAGA warrior. When you're also on Twitter all day, every day, responding to reply guys saying you're going to punish companies for their speech. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on this show, which is much harder than the softball cable networks that you go on, and try to answer some of these questions and see if you can respond with rigor and care to the accusations that your desire to censor speech rises to the level of not just First Amendment violation, but outright hostility to our Constitution.

1:30:35Anytime you want. This show, Decoder, you can just hang out with David in a coffee shop and I'll film it from around the corner with an iPhone. Sounds great. However you want to do it. I don't think you can. I think you're a coward. That has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast for the podcast. We're so back. Felt good. I didn't like taking a wee. Last week, we were just like, yeah, Brendan, kind of still seems like he sucks. Don't worry. He'll talk again. He can't share. He keeps saying he's loving his job. So, being America's chief censor. All right, we need a palate cleanser.

1:31:04David, what you got for me? Let's talk about Netflix just for a minute. Yeah. Because Netflix had kind of a sneakily interesting week product-wise. first big new update for the the tv app for netflix uh which i find my like hobby horse of reporting is about streaming recommendations like how to tell you what you want to watch i think is just the most fascinating thing in the world and what netflix did in part was that banner at the top of the netflix app it's now much bigger and the the one thing that that communicates is that netflix believes more strongly than ever that it can just put something in front of you and you will probably click play and so i think that's fascinating uh this is much less like a discovery thing that we're moving rapidly away from the like infinite you know side scrolling tiles to just like a big ass thing that's like watch this you clown and netflix is betting that that's gonna work uh and i find that really fascinating but thing number two and neil i i believe you are going to maybe rightfully, maybe wrongfully take a victory lap on this one.

1:32:10Netflix is just doing TikTok now. Like imagine Netflix did TikTok. That's what it's doing. So it's interesting because it's not TikTok. It's in the mobile app. They're going to do a vertical swipey feed of stuff you might want to watch. We haven't seen it. There's this quote from Eunice Kim, the chief product officer at Netflix. We know swiping through a vertical feed on social media apps is an easy way to browse video content. We know our members love to browse are clips and trailers for the next obsession. Sort of. What people love to do is watch pirated clips of movies from the middle on TikTok.

1:32:44And so that's the experience you have to recreate. Not, you're going to swipe and then watch a trailer from the beginning. Yes. Right? Like, that's not it. Like, what it is, I'll just keep using A Few Good Men because it's very funny and TikTok just insists that I keep watching this movie. Maybe because I watch every clip to the end. And it's like, do you want more of this? And it's like, I do. um it's we're gonna drop you in the middle of some of the most impactful scenes from the movie ice cold and there's comments next to it most of which are what movie is this and then people lying which is very entertaining it's that so i'm curious how they actually execute this idea i it i've asked everybody i've asked the ceo to be i've asked netflix itself their executives have been on the show i've asked them um and they're all like yeah it's hard because we don't have the rights to all this content right and you know tiktok there's people are stealing it so of course you just put the best part but like the studio is going to say netflix owns a bunch of its content so it could do it right we'll see but i think in many ways this is the new discovery method and you know and david is just like the laziest tv watcher in the world he's like just play me whatever like this is this is the modern just i want to start watching something so i'm just going to flick channels it's that mechanism but for like the social media social video age yeah but it's it's funny you mentioned the the trailers thing because that that's been the thing i've been thinking about too like spotify has been desperately trying to do this with music and podcasts too and like you go to the podcast page on spotify and it just like starts playing a podcast right there in line and it starts at the beginning which is a huge mistake and and like you're saying when you're in this browse thing showing me the beginning of the movie is the wrong thing to do showing me like the the thing that is happening that is going to catch my eye is the thing to do and we're already seeing this in trailers now like the there's now the trailer before the trailer where they they show like eight seconds and then it's like the trailer for thunderbolts begins now and it's like i thought it began when i clicked play on this youtube video 19 seconds ago so already that has shifted to like grab you faster and I think either a bunch of content makers are going to start to have to like be smarter about how they make these trailers for these people or Netflix is going to have to get really smart about saying okay this is the grabbiest 30 seconds of this show which is a thing Netflix knows like it sees how people interact with this stuff oh that's really interesting I hadn't thought about that Netflix can theoretically figure out and it could just it could play me the thing that is likely to work for me in my own feed.

1:35:18Does Netflix know that? I mean, Netflix watch data is like mostly linear, right? What they know is when people stop watching. They don't know when most people begin watching. Because for Netflix, everybody begins at the beginning. Right. Well, then they know which ones you come back to. Sure. And obviously, maybe their producer here is actually the people on TikTok who post the clips and they just go back and take those clips. That would be amazing if Netflix was scraping TikTok to see which Netflix shows got the most reactions is pirated TikTok videos. There's something here that's really powerful.

1:35:50It all comes down to the execution. And the thing that they're competing against is infinity people trying infinity variations on infinity free content that they're not paying for, which is always the problem. But to me, it's so the future of discovery. I'm kind of excited to try that. It's going to be fascinating. And to Richard's point, there is this source of tons of good data on what people actually care about. It's just all illegal and doesn't belong to Netflix. I wonder if, what if the use of it isn't even as much, okay, so you watch this and then you watch the video, but just, it means that you're using the Netflix app more and that you're less willing to let your Netflix subscription die.

1:36:31Whether or not you watch the show, anything, but it's just something you can use to eat time, which is what a lot of these apps really are. You don't know what to watch, but you just don't want to scroll past some men talking on a podcast. Or babies. Yeah, like a, What if step two of this thing is it just becomes another set of things to watch on Netflix? That they're just like, oh, you're watching, instead of watching Netflix shows, you're watching things 18 seconds at a time. That's fine. And Netflix is definitely, right? We compete with death or whatever they say. Sleep, not death. Netflix is like, Ted Surrender says, I will defeat death.

1:37:11They're like, we compete with, like, they're fully in the attention economy. They've known it for a long time. their competitor is YouTube and video games and so if you're in the Netflix app watching short clips of Bridgerton all that I don't think they care because they already own the content that's the thing that makes this harder for every other service right like even Apple TV can't do it you think Apple's paying for all that stuff but like many other big production companies and studios actually make the majority of their content still so these are all licensing deals and they don't have all these moves Netflix just outright owns a bunch of its stuff yeah so we'll see I'm excited for this one there's something here that I think is very powerful the TV UI is weird because it's like three different versions of interfaces they already did but I don't know back to the future I guess I mean this is like the Netflix story in a nutshell they're like what if we just stretched some boxes and condensed some boxes does that help?

1:38:07what if we made the thumbnails bigger and the text smaller I just want them to never show me a summary that is like a clip of a review of the show that doesn't tell me anything about what it is in the show. I don't care if XYZ website said it was cool. Yeah. Fascinating deadline. And you're like, cool, thanks, Netflix. This is great. That's exactly what I needed to know. You know, Apple doesn't show you the Rotten Tomatoes scores of its own shows. If you ever look, the Apple TV interface usually has a little bit of metadata, but for Apple stuff, it's not there. It's very good. All right, I want to end on two more gadgets.

1:38:40Well, one more gadget, really. I just want to call out The fact that Jen Tui reviewed four robot lawnmowers and maybe the most Jen Tui moment that can exist. You have to read it. It's very good. It includes the line. They don't cut your lawn. They shave it. Perfect. Perfect. Jen went through a lot to get that story done. And it's very good. So everyone should go read it and buy a lawnmower just to support Jen. Because this is like a year of work to try and get these things to shave her lawn. I don't know. You should buy the lawnmower. I think you should read the story and subscribe to The Verge.

1:39:14You can wait a couple of years in the lawnmower. That's fair. Read the story and subscribe to The Verge, and then maybe don't buy a lawnmower. Okay. And then I want to end with just a tiny wee party speaker update. It's very hard to top party speaker in front of a fighter jet, which is what we had last week. Thank you again for sending us that photo. We got some more photos, many more photos of party speakers in boxes and stores. Again, I love you. I'm happy that when you see a party speaker, you think of us. It's very validating. I'm glad we're a community. That's not it. It's in the wild. Right?

1:39:48Guys in Europe on a scooter using it as a chair. We did get one photo that was really good. I don't want to run it because it's an Audible marketing campaign. You know? Yeah. But Audible apparently puts people in marathons wearing party speakers as backpacks playing audiobooks. and so you can like run along in the race and that's like multiple different books like there's a rom-com book there's like another book and you can follow very good audible stunt we got one like up on a shelf in a gym a lot of people seeing party speakers at their gym one at a I think it was a butcher shop in India I think the thing that we've done that I'm very proud of is we have taught people to see the party speakers in the wild.

1:40:38It turns out they're everywhere and we were all just trained to not notice them. It's like a real fish noticing the water situation that's happening right now. And we are discovering the extent to which the world has been infiltrated by party speakers. And so people who are like, I've been to this place every day for five years and I never noticed this giant fifth grader sized speaker blowing audio at me all day. Now we're seeing it. We've changed the world. And then we received one person who was like, how do you not know about this phenomenon called sound clashes that apparently take place in Jamaica and India, where they just build giant speaker systems and play them at each other?

1:41:16And I was like, first of all, how did I not know this? Like battle bots, but it's party speakers? But those aren't party speakers. Those are giant custom audio rigs. So honorable mention to sound clashes. I encourage you to go watch the videos on YouTube. They're wild. Different, different. Right? That's like the people who, if you get into car audio, people are like, all I really care about SPL and what they're just talking about how loud their subwoofers are I love you you know that's great forward facing or rear facing Neal are you stealing your trunk or are you not stealing your trunk we got to talk about it this is a big issue you know what's up like that's a different we'll do a whole other series on that someday and I appreciate that people were like oh you want to talk about party speakers like I get it I understand the connection that was made in your mind.

1:42:01Different. We're still on parties. We'll get to that. All right. We're way over. Just so over. We love you all. That's it. That's the Verge Cast. Bye.

1:42:16And that's it for the Verge Cast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

1:42:57Spectacular's watching us. Cut the camera. They see us. Only pay for what you need at LibertyMutual.com. Liberty, Liberty, Liberty, Liberty. Savings vary. Underwritten by Liberty Mutual Insurance Company and affiliates. Excludes Massachusetts.