The Vergecast - Anyone want to buy TikTok?

Episode Date: April 25, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss President Biden signing the TikTok ban bill, Apple's May 7th iPad event, Tesla's flop era, and more. Further reading: Senate passes TikTok ban bill, sending it to President Biden’s desk Biden signs TikTok ‘ban’ bill into law, starting the clock for ByteDance to divest it Rabbit R1 hands-on: early tests with the $199 AI gadget  Apple announces May 7th event for new iPads What to expect at Apple’s May ‘Let Loose’ event The Mercedes G-Wagen, the ultimate off-road status symbol, goes electric  The Ray-Ban Meta Smart Glasses have multimodal AI now  Kuo: Apple cuts Vision Pro shipments due to low demand Tesla’s in its flop era Tesla lays off ‘more than 10 percent’ of its workforce, loses top executives Tesla recalls all 3,878 Cybertrucks over faulty accelerator pedal  Tesla reveals a new Model 3 Performance with more horsepower and faster acceleration A cheaper Tesla is back on the menu Sonos announces redesigned app that puts everything on your homescreen Qualcomm announces Snapdragon X Plus and Elite processors  Apple might be the streaming home of soccer’s next big tournament  Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of saying, we're going to burn your house down unless you sell it. That's the metaphor I bring's using on TikTok. If you don't listen to the Vergecast, we will burn your house down. Yeah, those are your choices. You can sell your house, or Kranz will come to it and torch it.

Yeah, I've got a lighter and everything. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. I'm good. Kranz is here. Alex Kranz is here. Yeah, I'm here to hear all the scorching takes. Yeah, she's got a lighter, and she's not a free time. use it. David Pierce is here. Hello. We were all so close to being in the same city for like 10

minutes yesterday and we managed to not record a verge cast and it was very upsetting. Yeah, it's funny that we've gone 180. Usually at least two of us are together. We were all very close to all three of us being together and now we're all three of us remote. But it's for good reason. David has the Rabbit R1 in hand. I can't tell you how much I want to talk about the Rabbit R1 and all the things it can or mostly cannot do. So that's very exciting. We're going to talk about that. We got to talk to the electric g-wagon. That's another hour of the Verchcast. Apple announced new iPads. Tesla had earnings. Elon threatened once again to turn every Tesla on the road into some sort of distributed AWS situation. Very weird. We've got a lightning around at the end,

but we have to start. We have to start with breaking news. Joe Biden, just before we began recording today on Wednesday, signed the bill that would force TikTok to either divest itself, to sell itself to some other company in the United States or shutdown. Those are the two choices. It passed as part of an aid package to Ukraine, Israel. There's some humanitarian aid for Gaza in that package. The House passed it as part of that aid bill. They extended the timeline on the divestiture, which was the big holdup in the Senate before. So now TikTok has nine months to figure out a sale process. And if they're making progress, whoever is the president can add three months per the president's discretion, bringing the total to a year. So

Vitan's basically has a year to figure this out. The clock is now ticking that the bill is signed it's the law. No one knows what's going to happen next. Yeah, I like, there's so many strange unknowns about this. Things like who is going to be president when we hit the nine month gap? Like it's, it's so obvious to me that a big part of the sticking point was to move this past the election, right? That whatever is going to happen should have to happen after election day.

And it'll either be our problem after we've been reelected if you're the Democrats or it'll be their problem. Yeah. if you're the Republicans, right? That was a Lauren's reporting, too, is that a lot of these senators signed on to approve this bill because it pushed it past the deadline, because they gave them a little bit more space to do it. Yeah. No, I think it's such an easy maneuver at such an odd moment.

And we've talked so much about the politics of this, especially among young people in the United States, and all the weird ways that's going to go. And all of the stuff I've been reading recently has been very strange that, like, intellectually, overwhelmingly, it seems like if you ask people, is TikTok sort of bad in whatever, like, mysterious way you want to define bad? People say yes. Like, all of the polls are basically like, yes, most people believe TikTok is a net bad. But then I think the reality of like waking up and TikTok suddenly being gone is a, is a thing in an election season that nobody actually wants to deal with. Yeah. It's very strange. I also don't think that part is ever actually going to

happen, but we can talk about that. Look, I love eating. handfuls of Eminem's at midnight. Just the thing I love. I know it's bad. I know I shouldn't do that. Super do it all the time. That feels like our relationship to social media is a country right now. Maybe TikTok in particular.

But in general, our relationship to social media is like, eh, it's making us feel bad and maybe it's measurable or maybe it's not, or maybe this guy's just a grifter trying to sell a book. Whatever it is. Some ambient sense of, I shouldn't eat Eminem's at midnight, is there? and then everyone just like give them to me. Yeah. Like,

let me have them. The thing that's really interesting, right, it just got signed today. It felt inevitable all week that this would get signed. That was, the momentum was there. Lauren Feiner, her reporting suggested the deadlines were coming ever faster.

Like, usually with bills. There's delays in last minute's change. And this was just happening. And it actually happened, I think a little faster than we anticipated would happen, like a day faster. Now it's done.

There's no more argument whether you should ban TikTok. Like they did it. They passed. the bill. Joe Biden signed it. It's the law. I mean, I do think you could ask the question of is what Joe Biden signed intended to be a ban of TikTok. Like, it's not nothing to me that in his statement about signing the bill and his excitement and enthusiasm for the fact that this got done after all this time, didn't mention TikTok once or any of this stuff once. It's buried

like halfway down this long bill after, I forget the exact, heading of the thing, but it's like miscellaneous and then TikTok. Like this is not the point of the bill, right? Which I think is a strange thing that is going to play out potentially in some interesting ways as we go through the inevitable chaos of the next nine months. This got passed in service of passing something else. And I think what everybody decided along this process is passing this other thing is so important that sure will ban TikTok.

And so I think I don't know if that changes anything about the way this actually plays out. I think the bill is still law. Like it did happen. But it's a strange way that we got here that makes me wonder, like, does Joe Biden actually want to ban TikTok? Or is that just a price everyone is willing to pay in order to get this important aid bill? Oh, it's 100% of price everybody was willing to pay, right? Like, like, this was a really, the whole bill was a hard fought battle for everybody involved. And this was just like, you know what?

We just need to get this bill out the door. if somebody wants to put this in, this is like, so at the back of most of our list, it's fine. Which I thought was really, really interesting to go from, like, TikTok being like this huge center of discussion for everybody to being like essentially a footnote and a much larger bill. Yeah, I mean, they did have, the House did have the up-down vote on a standalone TikTok bill, which had a much shorter timeline. And I think a lot of people had problems with that shorter timeline. And that just sort of arrived in the Senate with nothing. So at least one part of our government had the straight up-down vote. That's true, right?

And then after the House voted to pass that version of the bill, Biden said, I'm going to sign it. I'll sign it. Did you get it to me and I'll sign it? Whether or not they skirted it through the Senate by attaching it to a bill that everyone wanted to get done. Yeah, I mean, like on the margins, but that's like how so many things get done. Totally. But I think you have, you had the House just the straight up time vote and you had Biden saying, I'm going to sign it. So the motivations, I think, are clear.

Whether or not Biden wants to run around crowing the TikTok, I think is very different, like politically. very different. The White House, for example, announced they, that's going to keep campaigning on TikTok. They're just going to, they're going to be like, I don't know if anyone's ready for that ratio. That is going to, in the history of ratios on the internet, every post the White House now makes, every post Joe Biden now makes on TikTok is going to get ratioed to hell and back, and it's going to be delightful. And that's fine. I was actually thinking about that as sort of, it's like a perfect microcosm of this whole thing. And I think the thing that I have come around to is in the months that we've been talking about this, I think at the beginning of all these conversations, I underrated

how important TikTok is as an information source, particularly to young people. But now you see the stats that are like, it is a growing search engine. It's a huge source of news, particularly for like Gen Z and younger. It matters a lot. And so for the White House to A, want to ban TikTok, but also understand that if we want to reach people, this is the literal only way is actually like a perfect summation of the TikTok problem. TikTok is so important that you can ban it and yet you have to use it. It's so strange. But that is like that is where we are with what TikTok means to people, right? Somewhere in the TikTok office, there's the knob that just throttles you and like shows you, the CEO of TikTok is just like Biden Harris HQ. Goodbye. Yeah, their engagement is going to go way

Newt from orbit. Good night, everybody. So it's done, right? The point I'm trying to make is it's done. There are only three options now. TikTok has said it's going to sue and it's going to file some sort of legal complaint to say this is not allowed. We don't know what that looks like. They showed G2 actually put up a TikTok himself saying, make no mistake. This is a ban, which is interesting. We'll come back to that. And then we're going to go to court and want to fight for your rights as Americans under the Constitution because you can't be silenced. Also a very interesting thing to say. And then he said, don't worry, TikTok will continue as before. Like, we'll keep running TikTok. We're going to keep investing in TikTok. Yeah, you just hold tight. I'm going to go defend the Constitution against the United States government. Yeah, it's, it's super funny to see the guy who made like unalive a word because you're not allowed to say dead on TikTok, the bastion of free speech. Like that's a really weird stance for him to take because it's not.

It's it's PG-rated social media, right? Like it's social media for kids, which is why the kids use it and why part of the reason people don't want the kids using it. Like, come on. I'm never going to look at a corner emoji the same way, right? After being on TikTok. You went from very innocent to very weird very quickly. So there's that element. There's also the fact that it's not the user speech that is being regulated here, right?

It's TikTok, the company that distributes the speech of users. And the notion that its control of the algorithm presents some sort of national security risk, that there is some sort of. longstanding issue with having foreign powers control a significant part of our media. That's a very old policy issue. There's some issue with concentration of media ownership. So you just look at option one. We're going to file a lawsuit. We're going to win pure coin flip.

We just don't know how that's going to go. We don't know what TikTok's lawsuit is going to be. It could hinge all on free speech or it could just hinge on like a technical drafting error where the government did not point to the correct statutory authority from 1805. to enact. We don't know. Like, we have to see it. So that's option one.

We're going to fight a lawsuit and win. Option two is they shut down and leave. They could do that. That's the ban, right? We've exhausted our other options and we're out of here. Goodbye. You ban TikTok. Weird.

I think that, I think that is, that is a choice that Bightance has to make under duress. Yeah. Right? That's the, we're going to burn your house down unless you sell it. And they could be like, we let the match.

Let's see you later. We shut it down. Option two. Option three is that they sell it. And, you know, they've got a year to figure it out. And option three has a bunch of weirdness in it because most of the companies that would want to buy TikTok, it feels like our own DOJ would prevent them from doing it for antitrust reasons. So that's option three. So it's not an easy road from here at all.

I don't know what the creators are going to do. The creators have a year to figure out how much they want to trust TikTok while TikTok is trying to turn itself into the home shopping network anyway. And like, it's not. And, you know, universal music isn't on there anymore. Like, there's a whole bunch of stuff over there that creators are going to have to react to. I think we're in for just a whole bucket of changes. Much in the same way that when, you know, Elon bought Twitter and started making changes over there, the social media landscape just started refracting around it.

Like, things started changing all around that energy. I think we're going to see the same thing with TikTok. But there's only three options. They fight and win a lawsuit, which we haven't seen. And we don't know what that lawsuit will be based on. So we don't know. They leave or they sell it. That's it.

Okay. I just want to float a fourth option. Yeah. which is they stay and the app stores pay a fine, which in case you're wondering, I calculated it would be $850 billion. So that's an option. Just throwing it out there.

Apple can do that. That's 8.5 car projects for Apple. Yeah, it's like not even a big deal. It's fine. But I think to me, the strange thing that's going to happen in the middle of all of that is just uncertainty. Right?

And I've been reading and talking to folks about this just in the last few hours. And there is this overwork, sense from a lot of people that TikTok is sort of screwed no matter what happens because this is like it just got completely thrown up in the air everything about TikTok and there is no indication it's going to settle down quickly right and like even if it gets a new owner there will be lots of changes if it disappears obviously it'll be gone and if it fights a lawsuit that's going to take a long time and so if you're a creator if you're an advertiser if you're

anyone who has any kind of investment in this platform, the simplest thing to do is going to be immediately start investing your time and energy and money somewhere else. And that is just going to bleed TikTok so fast. And to the point where even if a year from now TikTok sells to Oracle, like, are we sure TikTok is going to still be TikTok in a year? Because it's, I think this stuff moves fast. Right. And then the actual mechanism of sale is confusing because it appears BightDance would not sell the algorithm that underlies TikTok, right? Right. Well, BightDance has been pretty clear this whole time that it has no interest in selling.

Like, if you believe BightDance, divesting is not an option. Yeah, because then we have to see if TikTok actually makes money. Right. I mean, like, yeah, do they want a bunch of American tech companies poking around the books of TikTok? Like, they certainly do not. Do they have to say just as a negotiating tactic, we will never sell in order to ward off a ban? They sure do. but if you're just a responsible executive,

and now you're here and you have the three choices, or a choice for, to be fair to David, which is ask Apple to pay $850 billion a year in funds for having TikTok remain in the app store. Yeah, I don't know. Like, it feels like you got to run down two of them, right? Yeah, I mean, at some point, your option is either $0 or $100 billion.

Yeah. You just, you sort of have no choice but to take that. But if that is the game that you're playing, you have to play that basically, until the very last minute. Look, the millionaire Chinese teens buying G-waggans all over Los Angeles. It's got to come from somewhere. You know? Like, the children of the CCP, they need their G-wagons. That's all I'm saying. I'm just putting that out there somewhere. And like, money talks. I'm like, that's real. And I think having some dollars is better than no dollars. Whether or not it's fair that

the price is depressed because the thing has to be sold. Good question. There's just not a world in which the evaluation doesn't come down to, are we going to be successful in court? What number can we get? Because that middle road of we pulled out of the United States market and now we have nothing to show for all of our investment

in building the TikTok user base, it just seemed, that's a lawsuit too. It's also just straight up bad business. Like that is just straightforwardly like a stupid capitalism decision at some point. Notably the Chinese government not so capitalist. Putting that out there.

Well, and again, like there are, the question of who ultimately makes this decision on that side, very hard to know would tell you a lot about how this will turn out, right? Like if Shuchu, the CEO of TikTok is the person who ultimately makes the decision, that will be very different than if TikTok is connected to bite dance is connected to the Chinese Communist Party, which ultimately means the Chinese Communist Party makes that decision. That would go very differently. Like, there's so many things we don't know still.

It's an exciting time, honestly. Like I love when a social media platform changes hands or has this big moment. Because then you see things like Adam Aseri today. Was it on Instagram, Neely? I think you clocked the video of him just explaining to creators how to get engagement on the platform. And it's like, that probably wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a TikTok. Adam is Sarah being like, so, okay, you're at work. I'm going to set some goals for you.

We're going. We're going. We're going. And it's like, dude, why does this all feel like work? I actually think that's like the bigger story here. This feels like a work for an awful lot of people across all of these platforms. And like maybe some people are going to be like, I don't want to work for TikTok anymore because it came to nothing. And that will just create energy somewhere else.

We'll see. One of the funniest memes to me on Instagram is all the people who are like, oh, I had a call with meta. And we talked about, you know, strategies for how to succeed. And it like, it has become a meme of people making jokes about it. But it started as a real thing. And it's like it's a big win to have a business call with meta. executives about your Instagram presence. Wait, wait, did social media become the new Mary Kay? Yeah, oh, it's, it's been there for a long time. Have you seen the people selling the hydro water

bottles? Yes. The bottles just have a blue LED in the bottom and they're like, this adds hydrogen to your water. That's a lie. It's very bad. And if you don't understand why it's bad, I'm just telling you that water is made of hydrogen. Yeah, it's already in there. There's two of them for every oxygen, famously. You get, you get two. Two of them. Double your hydrogens. And it's like, what are you doing? Like, how is this happening on this platform?

And they're all selling them in TikTok shop. And I just think that platform, the revenue pressure on all the social platforms is so high. But all these companies need to make money and show property. They're doing layoffs. And they're just turning the screws. I'm like, can we, how do we make money? And they just landed on the home shopping network. I think it was headed towards a cliff anyway.

Like, there was a bubble in video creator economy. Taylor Lawrence has actually talked about it. and you can just see, like, to me, the hydro water bottle is like, oh, that bubble's getting pretty big. Yeah. Like, it's not good. All right, so here's the exercise I want to do. Three options, right?

Lawsuit succeeds, Bight Dance burns it down, or they get sold. TikTok is a prize, right? It is the thing that no one can get. It is a scaled social network with an active user base of young people. That's what everybody wants. It's really hard to get the way that TikTok got it, right? They acquired musically. and then BightDance started spending billions upon billions of dollars on Facebook and

Instagram ads to convert people into downloading the app. You can't really do that. You can't even run that playbook anymore because of Apple's app tracking transparency. Like they made the ad changes. And so the market for app install ads is basically gone. You have to pay Apple for them in the App Store app. A different conversation. But the point is you can't just run the playbook Bightance did.

And they ran that playbook to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars. Right. So here's this thing that was really hard to do. that the conditions under which BightDance did it have dramatically changed, and it was very expensive even when they could do it. It's what everybody wants. It will be expensive, right? This isn't like Twitter fire sale.

And even that was expensive, as we've all discovered. Like, that was overpriced. This is the thing. Like, it is a scaled video advertising platform with a bunch of young people on it that love it that defines the culture all the time. So who can afford it? I just looked up the list of the largest American companies by Market Cap. all of the ones that are measured in trillions are tech companies.

So I figure we could just go down that list. And then we can go to the companies that are measured in billions, which are much more amusing to think about as owners of BightDance. But I think we should start with the tech companies because they seem like the most likely group to at least have some interest. Clarifying question. How much should we think TikTok is worth? I have an idea in mind, but I'm curious if there is a like assumed number that I have not heard

for what TikTok is valued at. Do we know? So the number that I have just picked out of the blue is $100 billion because that is more than double what Twitter was worth. Okay. And it's a huge number. Most companies can't just do that, right?

I would have actually gone a little higher. Like there was the estimate recently that YouTube is worth $400 billion on its own. So I was going to say like 200, let's go. Once you're up here, it's just like whatever number you want. Another 100 bill? I'm good with the hundred bill. Oh, no. I'm good.

TikTok doesn't have like the numbers of YouTube though, right? Like, I'm at 50 billion. Yeah. No, you're right. I'm good with $100 billion. This works. By the way, I'm picking that number just because it is this, it's a small, hard number. Yeah.

Right. $44 billion for Twitter was like overpriced. But even then, a lot of companies can just like, do it. I don't think there's any world in which TikTok is in a regular, pure market sense, worth less than $100 billion. So I feel pretty good about this. And I'll just, for some comparison, as of December 2023, Apple had. $73 billion in cash on hand, which is an insane amount of cash.

Like Apple is one of those cash-rich companies out there, and that's how much. So I picked a hundred because it'll be hard even for an Apple to pull. Yeah. Anyway, here's the list. Apple and Microsoft jockeying back and forth for biggest market cap. So we'll start with Microsoft today. Microsoft. It actually feels like Microsoft should be in the running for TikTok.

They have been in the running before when Trump tried to ban TikTok. Sachendella got pulled into those conversations. He has repeatedly described it as some of the weirdest business dealings he's ever been a part of. Then it just went away. And we got Project Texas where Oracle took over the data,

blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Which came to nothing appears to have been mostly a front. Convinced no one of anything. No one cares about Project Texas. And Microsoft has been desperate for like a true consumer play for a long time.

I mean, wasn't it Microsoft that sniffed around Discord in a pretty big way. Like, it wants something like this very badly. I disagree. This is, this is like a big old hot potato Microsoft wants no part of. Like, the big power of Microsoft nowadays is that we don't talk about Microsoft that often. And, and that would change immediately with TikTok. A good question for all this is, does your CEO want to get hauled in front of Congress to talk about content moderation? Right? And Microsoft, no, the answer appears to be no. That said, there is a lot of scrutiny around Microsoft's deal with open AI, like a lot of antitrust scrutiny.

And this is going to come up. The idea of antitrust scrutiny is going to come up as we go through this list. And there's, I think Microsoft could run a play where they say, look, here's what we're going to do. We're going to do a partnership with like Snap, which can deft. Snap is not on the list of biggest American companies by any means. Like not even in top 100. Like, no, it's not even sniffing this.

But you can say Microsoft, but you can see Microsoft say, okay, we're going to do this weird kind of partnership with Snap where they will fund. them buying TikTok will be their backend provider. They'll run AI and Azure for recommendations. And it'll be the same kind of structure as Open AI. And if that's fine over here, because it solves your big problem, I bet it's fine over here with Open AI. Lena Khan will drop kick that deal right out the door.

I mean, but this is the game, right? All these companies are, it's an operative. This is a problem that needs to get solved. Someone has to buy this thing. And if Lena Khan is like, I'm not going to let anyone buy it, then it is a ban. And so you have to at least write. on the process and you have to create some leverage somewhere. I think Microsoft has like three meetings, but ultimately walks away.

Again, they came close before. Also, Microsoft doesn't have a dead on anti-hress problem because it doesn't run any social networks that's from Xbox Live. And so it, you know, they could just buy it. I don't know if they'd want to, but I think using this leverage to turn down the heat on Open AI might be interesting. That's Microsoft. Apple, one or two, the biggest company in the world, Microsoft and Apple, always go back

and forth. Apple. No way is my answer. answer to this question. 0% than Tim Cook wants to sit in front of Congress and talk about content moderation ever. The funniest possible outcome of this whole thing is that Apple buys TikTok and makes it a feature of Apple TV Plus. That is the single best thing that could possibly happen. That this is their content play for Apple TV Plus. Oh, it would be Apple Music. Yeah, Apple Music, right. Apple runs a music service. TikTok is huge in music. They have great

relationships with all the labels because they're the big hedge against Spotify. Apple importantly has an incredible relationship with the Chinese government that is extremely well managed by Tim Cook. So they're a known partner that would find a way to blah, blah, blah, interoperate, you know, with bite dance globally. You can see the arguments. I'm just saying, I don't think Tim Cook wants to sit in front of Congress and talk about content moderation. I think, Nilai, they're going to use that exact quote you just said when they pull Tim Cook in front of Congress for buying TikTok. You have a good relationship with the Chinese government is precise. the reason not to buy TikTok if you're Tim Cook.

All right, moving on. I think we can all, it would be the shock of all shocks of Apple buys TikTok. Invidia, third biggest market cap in the country right now. It feels a bit afield. No. No. Jensen's like, he's a smart dude, right? Like he started that company from the ground up.

He's still running it now. He made his big bet on AI. They think very measured over there. Like everything they do has a purpose and a point, even when it's a screw up. So I'd be like very surprised. Okay, allow me to make the countercase. I love it. I'm Jensen Wong.

I have somewhat intentionally, somewhat accidentally stumbled into just an unbelievable gold mine that is the AI revolution. This will not last forever. Other people are going to figure out how to make GPUs as good as mine. And I'm not going to be able to sell H-100s for however much money I want to, whoever I want to, whoever I want forever. I need another move. That other move is TikTok. I want that.

Someone is writing that memo in video right now. And then at the end of it, it's like question mark, question mark, profit, you know? Like, this is the move that's as as big as H-100. It's like, I don't know about that.

No, the other reason is there is a real version of this that is TikTok as training data. Yeah. which I think is not worth $100 billion, but is also not worth nothing. And I think one reason a lot of these companies will take a good, hard look at TikTok is not because they want to operate a social network forever, but because operating a social network gets them basically an infinite supply of good training data for AI systems.

For now, right? That's just what it is. I mean, this is what Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about with Facebook. They're touting the fact that they have this vast supply of stuff. So Jensen swoops in. And he's like, look, I'm already in the middle of geopolitical hot zones. Yeah. Because I'm building ships with TSM in Taiwan.

And the whole universe is organized around H100 production in Taiwan. What if I had a little TikTok to the mix? I could do it. All right. That's envy. I'm putting that sub 50%. Way sub 50. But I'm 10.

Do it. Do it. Alphabet. Or as the people know at Google. I mean, I think that no one wants them to buy it. If you want to ban TikTok, you let Google buy it and just slowly kill it until they shut it down. Yeah, like that's what will happen. That is effectively a ban.

So, no. Do you think they're having a conversation? I think Google's totally having that conversation, though. Like, they love a social media platform that they kill a few years later. This is just like. But so to David's point, this is a rich source of training data for Google. Yeah, I think that's why they're actually talking about it. It is a long time ago when I asked Sundar about the web and what SEO has done.

to the web and where you would start a new thing if you were a new creator. He said, well, we have YouTube. Right. So they know that all the sort of organic content that is made by human beings is happening on video platforms. This is a rich source of that. They're already searching TikTok. You can search for TikToks on Google search. Yeah, don't forget Google has been saying

loudly for two years now that one of the biggest threats to Google search is TikTok. Yep. Which is again why they're not going to This is the real Lena Conn hands-on hips one, right? Yeah. Alphabet would do this. I believe absolutely yes, Alphabet would do this. It would be sued to death once Lina Khan is like already standing outside of the Googleplex and Mountain View with a lawsuit and just ready to like huck it into Sooner Arpichai's office the minute this happens.

I like if I'm if I'm sooned Arpichai I would do this in one second. But there's absolutely no chance that they will. All right. So that's Google. And the next one is really interesting. Amazon. I think Amazon looks at TikTok slowly turning into the home shopping network and moving an awful lot of records.

And it's like, this is what we want. This is the future of shopping. Yeah. Yep. Amazon has been gently trying to do this on Amazon properties for a while. They've had creator brand things that they've done. They've brought people in. They've done video stuff.

None of it has really worked. But yeah, I think, I think Amazon of these is the one that makes the most sense and also probably the one that is most likely to be plausible? Yeah, I don't think they don't run a social platform now in way, shape, or form. So the antitrust issues don't seem so bad. That said, you know, the Europeans just blocked Amazon from buying I-Robot because they were worried about concentration in the robotic vacuum market. And Andy Jesse looked furious when he was talking about that on CNBC.

Just so mad. Yeah. He's like, we're well beyond the law now. Like, are we? It sounds like you were right by the law. But they don't, but they don't have a social platform. platform. And TikTok really is a big advertising play. And Amazon is actually one of the biggest advertisers out there. I could see it. I think this would probably turn TikTok into something

worse. Oh, yeah. Yeah. This is like Google where you don't, if you're a TikTok to you get there, you don't want this purchase. Yeah. Like where can you imagine if you just combine Amazon Alphabet soup brands with TikTok shops just general aesthetic? Amazon basics just nonstop in your feed. I would 100% start calling that group of TikTok creators, Amazon Basics. You know who I'm talking about. Oh, yeah. Like the Amazon basics, it would be bad for America.

Okay, so that's Amazon. That feels very likely. Of this list so far, Microsoft and Amazon feel like the most likely to at least try. Then there's meta, which feels like an immediate, hard now. Yeah. Yeah. And I think the TikTok user base would revolt and leave if they tried. Meta would do it.

It wouldn't be allowed to do it. Oh, I'm sure they would. Microsoft is a killer. Yeah. He'd be like $100 billion? Like, how many people do I have to kill? Well, it's done. It's been done.

And then at that point, I think Meadow would own the five most popular apps in existence. And also, the regulators have a really good argument for Mehta right now, which is, hey, you just made threads from scratch, and it's doing great by some, you know, fake accounting. It's bigger than Twitter. And I only say fake because Twitter's numbers are fake, and then it's like censor tower numbers, which are weird. No one's numbers are real. Yeah, you just mash together a bunch of very truthy-feeling numbers.

And like, threads is bigger than Twitter. fine. But the argument would be, well, you can do it on your own. You don't need, you don't need this. So we'll see. So that's, okay, that's all the companies with valuations in the T's. Notably, they are all tech companies. Then you slide down one notch. You go from six to seven. The valuations are now in the bees and the billions. And I would just say these are much funnier companies to consider. Berkshire Hathaway. Yes. That's the most likely, honestly. Warren Buffett. Warren Buffett's like social media. Let's go. Like Warren Buffett buying TikTok so that he could become like the ultimate TikToker in the way that Elon Musk bought Twitter so he could just be the tweeter. Yeah.

Perfect. When I think of Warren Buffett, I love this for you, Warren. I think of the phrase burnout, not fade away. And buying TikTok. Really, just light a fire, baby. Just get out there. You got God go. You got TikTok.

Driving in his old car to McDonald's every morning, just vlogging on TikTok. Are you kidding me? Come on. It would be great. I could see it. I don't know how it fits in the. in the portfolio. It would be good.

Eli Lilly? It feels like a note. Visa? Yeah? J.P. Morgan Chase. Why not have a bank own TikTok? What if TikTok was just payments process? At the end of the day.

Tesla is here at number 12 on the market cap list, although that valuation fluctuating wildly with every breath Elon takes. That feels like an obvious. No, although the man does love a social network. I mean, yeah, is Elon Musk himself a totally bonkers possibility here? I will say Elon, you know, he's doing what he's doing on Twitter, and he's got Linda out there being like, Twitter's a video first platform, and then Elon is the most text forward person in the entire world. That's it. I don't think so.

Yeah, he's done TikTok. This one's interesting. Walmart, which actually tried to enter the TikTok sweepstakes long ago on the list, a huge American company, would be fascinating. I think for the same reason as Amazon. Right. Can we build a new kind of shopping distribution? I don't know. It does not seem likely.

It does not seem like that's what. They have so many ambitions and a lot of money. But like Amazon, I don't want it. All right. I'm just going to read the next five as an exercise for the reader. Just like silently consider them. And send us an email over which ones you think should buy TikTok of this list. Exxon Mobil.

Yes. MasterCard. Proctor and Gamble. Home Depot, Costco, Bank of America. Okay, Costco is something. Costco, there we go. I just want to pause on Costco for one second. You know what is a brand that everybody loves?

Costco. People love Costco. But if they have to start paying influencers a living wage like they do with their regular staff, no, that's too much money. Yeah, Costco's like, well, you know, it's a well-room company in that way. Then there's the two tech companies I skipped over here, Oracle, which is already in the mix. you can see it right there are already the mix for a reason and then Salesforce which I think we should end with Salesforce because that is the darkest outcome for TikTok.

So Salesforce buys TikTok and tries to turn it into what LinkedIn became from Microsoft basically. Like Salesforce just goes all in on like business TikTok. Why not? This is the future of American small business is happening on TikTok. Small business TikTok is still my favorite thing. They're pressure washer guys out there today. I mean, like, it's spring, baby.

Light it up. And then they're immediately making TikTok shop content where they're trying to convince me to buy an extremely obviously cheap surface cleaner where like they plug it in and you see the whole thing dent in and they plug in the water. I'm like, what are we doing here?

Anyway, sorry. I have a lot of feelings of TikTok right now. You might watch too many ads on TikTok. I just scroll past them. You know that, right? Like, you just scroll past them. I just scroll until I get bloopers from the office. so I don't even know what you're talking about.

Have you started seeing they're doing the shimmer effect across it to prevent the content ID? It's very good. Yeah. TikTok, honestly, Disney should buy TikTok because TikTok is the most impressive laboratory of copyright infringement that exists in the world today. And maybe in world history. So I was actually going to bring up Disney as a wild card here. I don't think Disney can afford to do this. But I think like Disney kicked the tires on Twitter a bunch of years ago, Disney is interested in a

new media startup in a really big way. I think TikTok is probably too big to be that thing for Disney, but if I'm Bob Eiger, like I bet there is a memo in that boardroom. Is Disney still interested? Because I think when they kicked the tires on Twitter, that was also around the same time they launched Fusion, which was like their digital media play.

Yeah, that was the wasting money in Disney era. Yeah, I think they're beyond this point now. Yeah, I don't think so. I think Disney is in the business of getting young people to watch its stuff. And the answer to that is TikTok. I want to run up pull over in a car and just imagine with a TikTok themed part of Walt Disney world would look like to close that loop. Every ride is 60 seconds long.

And you just leap. It's somewhat unsatisfying unless you do it 100 times in a row. I don't think Bob Auger wants to talk about content moderation in front of Congress. I think that destroys Disney's brand, right? To be anywhere close to there is evidence the teenage girls are feeling depressed because of our product. Not Disney's zone. But it's interesting to consider because it is where, you know, like Disney missed out on Cocoa Mellon, which is a YouTube phenomenon and is now a Netflix phenomenon. They don't have a pipeline for that stuff and TikTok might be that pipeline.

I just, I don't think they have the money and I don't think they have the mental stamina based on all the other things that are going to see. All right, that's the list. There's other stuff. You can talk about AMD and Pepsi and Netflix, but I feel like that's a list and you've got to end with Salesforce because I just want everyone to consider the darkest timeline. We'll see what happens. You know, a bunch of verge reporters are out in the world pounding the pavement to see who wants to buy things. What Alex, he told me yesterday when I was like, hey, let's go through your list. He's like, it's crickets because they're all afraid Alina Khan.

And I think that is, that was how they were talking before Biden signed the bill. And I think that will change in the weeks to come. But there's going to be a lawsuit. We'll see how it goes. Kind of a wild time, though. Like, if you've been paying attention to the Verchast, you know that we generally think, like, all of social media in the internet is being, like, table flipped upheaval and, like, things are shaken out in different ways. This is one pretty big table flip. Yeah.

I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this radiates outward, too, because, like, there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of days about what this is going to mean for Instagram and for YouTube shorts and for Snap. And there's this sense of a handful of companies in the U.S. that really stand to benefit from the downfall of TikTok. And I think where people go, if they go, and how those platforms start to change, is going to yet again upend the rest of everything. Like if TikTok suddenly floods into YouTube, it will change YouTube completely. Oh, there's going to be a land grab, 100%. Between like the QVC nature of TikTok and this, all those like edge case people,

the people who aren't really, really into it are going to be like, yeah, I'll just, I'll go somewhere else because at least I'm not getting sold to. Yeah, and this is, you will recall, what happened with Vine, right? The Exodus of Vine to YouTube really changed the nature of YouTube. So you can just feel it coming. By the way, I forgot, I was just scrolling. I forgot the darkest timeline option, which I'm just going to say, and I'm going to cut to a break. Verizon buys TikTok. That's it. We'll be right back. We're going to talk about the Rabbit R1. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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Speaking of... That one's like very bad. It's so obviously bad. Yeah, I haven't even looked at it. I saw, I don't think this is a spoiler. I saw a screenshot of one of the final scenes where the ship is revealed to be a woman who is hogtied. Oh. Good stuff.

Doesn't seem like my bag. Also, that's almost certainly a spoiler and I just don't care. So I'm sorry to everyone who... Now, I mean, it does make me kind of want to watch it, but just so I can be mad while watching it. That's how I felt about Arna. to be clear. Just range watch. Enough of the Zach Steiner talk.

Yeah. Look, the man took his bag from AT&T and he made a square movie in Grayscale where Superman is super weird. And you bring it up like three out of every four podcasts. You know, the policy thing that we're not about, we don't have time to talk about is soon net neutrality will become the law of land again. And everyone's going to talk about how net neutrality and meaning, blah, blah. And I'm just going to be like, Justice League happened to you because you repealed net neutrality. that was a real outcome of repealing that neutrality. You don't believe me, but it's 100% true.

All right. I want to talk about the thing that I've been most excited to talk about all week. David, you went to a party at the TWA Hotel at JFK in New York, which is a wild place to have a gadget launch. You saw, grab it, happened. There was a demo on stage, which we should talk about because I have a lot of feelings about that demo. And now you are holding a Rabbit R1. You have a room.

Show it. It's just so orange. It's mine. I bought this with my own money. Yeah. Oh, it's yours. It's on a review unit. It's not, they didn't do review units. This was, so what I went to was the, uh, the pickup party for the first, I think it was 300 R1s that came out. So they, they invited a bunch of media, but we had to buy our own in order to get into the event, uh, which is fine. It's very good. I should say to people, like, who don't know how this process normally works. Often for reviews, people will ship us something and we'll test it and review it and then we ship it back. That's usually how it works because if I had to buy every single thing that I wrote about, I would be homeless. So that's usually how it works. But in this case, we had to buy the thing. So now I own this thing. Luckily, it was only $200. But so we get to the TWA hotel, which is amazing. I had never been.

It's like it's a very old terminal at JFK that has since been converted into this very swanky, kind of old-fashioned hotel. It's awesome. Highly recommend I had never been there before. I will probably never go again, but it was super cool. You should only go if you're having to fly in or out of JFK. Yeah. Oh, God. It took me two trains in an Uber to get there.

Like, I don't recommend this plan otherwise. But, yeah, so it was me and 300 or so other people, along with a bunch of rapid employees in this space. They had done lots of, you know, work to overhaul it. It had a big stage in the middle. They had a 360 photo booth and a speakeasy upstairs. There was a bar with signature drinks. They were doing all kinds of merchy stuff. It was very much like an old school tech party.

Like I haven't been to one of those since before the pandemic where it's just like a company with too much money that's just like, what if we just blew a bunch of it on this large event space? And then Jesse Liu, the founder and CEO got up and spent like an hour basically just doing demos. And he's been doing this for the last couple of months kind of with increasing frequency showing off how this thing works and what it can do and all this stuff. He just sort of stood on stage and did a bunch of demos that were ostensibly live, and I have many questions about all of them, and then gave them out to that first group of, you know, 300 people. And so it was everybody there had like literally bought a thing to be there. So the room was very excited.

And there were a lot of people who had been in the Discord for months, sort of reading about the humane reviews and figuring out what was going on and trying to get details on what this thing would do and how it would work. and lots of people. It was very funny, like, being in line for a bar while people are behind me debating how the large language model works. And there was a guy who was like, yeah, every time you ask a question, you're eating into that $199 price.

And I was just like, these are my people. It was great. I had a delightful time, except that it was at 7 p.m. on a Tuesday night, and I'm very old, and I can't hang like that anymore. Yeah. So you've got the thing now. I have the thing. It's right here.

You've only had it for a day. I don't think this is a review. But I was watching the demo. done stage. And two things struck me with that demo. One, there was a little disclaimer on the stream and he showed himself turning off the Wi-Fi. The entire demo was done over 4G LT, not 5G, the one that is famously claimed to have very low latency. Good old 4G LT, which is an interesting choice, but that's $109. And then he kept pointing out how fast everything was. At one point, he took a picture and, you know, the thing did the thing where the AI told you it was in the picture.

And I was like, I don't, I don't think that uploaded over 4GLT. Like literally just the basics of it didn't seem like it was making sense. So two things on that. One, none of it was fast. Like, go back and watch it again. He did a very good job of sort of talking through his demos so that while it was waiting for stuff to happen, it would work. And there were a few times where he would do something and it would pretty instantly do it. But what it does very well is it signposts as it's doing stuff.

So like you'll ask it a question and it'll respond and say, let me go get that for you. And then it's say, I'm going to get that for you. And then it gets it for you. And what you've, what it doesn't do is just sort of leave you hanging in awkward silence for several seconds, which feels like an eternity. But it does take a while to do a lot of things. And with the photo, uh, having now tested this a bunch, what it does when you like hold up the thing and say, you know, look at this and tell me what you see, uh, which is like the sort of computer vision thing that a lot of these gadgets do, it's not taking a good picture. takes an awful picture and I can show you the awful pictures I've been taking. But it literally it just uploads just the tiniest little bit of data in order to be able to answer the question,

is there a crowd full of people or like a begonia in front of you? Right. Like that is the fidelity that it needs and that is all of the fidelity that it gets. So I actually think that particular one seems plausible to me. I guess I do need to watch it again because I was just struck by the speed at which things appeared to be happening. over a 4G connection, not even a 5G connection, over a 4G connection. I'm not even putting this on Rabbit.

I'm just like, I've used LTE connections before. They're not fast, especially now, right? When all the bandwidth is being prioritized to the 5G connections, all the spectrums are being prioritized

over there. That was one. And then the other thing that struck me was how much stuff it can't do that we were shown at doing at the first launch of that NCS where that stuff is just nowhere close. Like everything?

It's weird. And even after being at that launch event where he got up on stage, Jesse, and said out loud, I am going to demo all of the things that it can do from day one. And I have been testing those things and it can't do some of them. So one of the big things that Rabbit has been talking about

is this thing called the Large Action Model. And the idea is that it can actually like learn how to use apps on your behalf. That's like, that's its whole pitch. It's not just like a thing for ChatGPT. It's a thing where you can say, go do Spotify for me, right? or like go interact with Photoshop for me.

That's literally one of the things they've talked about. Like, you can teach it how to use Photoshop for you. That is not coming soon. It's not, it's like a thing that somebody had the idea to do. It's like when we talk about car renders, right? It's like it's at the render stage, as far as I can tell. And then there's a bunch of stuff that seems very basic. Like I gave Humane a lot of crap for not supporting things like alarms and reminders and these very basic things.

and you know what the rabbit R1 doesn't support is alarms and reminders. And I ironically, like Humane, like the deja vu of all of this is bananas for me. Like, like Humane, Jesse stood on stage and put up a big slide with, here's all the cool stuff we're shipping in summer of 2024. And it's things like alarm, calendar, contacts, GPS, memory recall, travel planning, Yelp, like basic things. These are, these are things that you should have from, the beginning, and there's just not really a good reason not to have it. So right now,

again, I've been testing this thing for a grand total of like 16 hours, some of which I was asleep, right? Like, none of this is final yet, but like a lot of things about this device do not work very well. Yeah. And it only has four apps, right? Yeah. Yeah. So I will say the biggest, most complicated question about the rabbit is how this large action model works. and thus what you're giving it access to. So when you log into the website, which is called Rabbit Hole, which I enjoy very much, the branding on this thing is on point. They've done a very good job.

When you're playing music, there's a little rabbit guy with headphones on. Like, it's great. Excellent branding exercise. Well done. But you log into Rabbit Hole and you go to, there's a tab called Connections, and it like lists all the apps you can connect to. And right now it's four. Like you said, it's Spotify, DoorDash, Uber, and Mid Journey.

Which is a strange four, but whatever. And then so you click on the connect button. And what it does is open up a virtual machine on Rabbit's servers through which you just log into the Spotify web interface or the DoorDash web interface. So like I click on the DoorDash button and literally it opens the DoorDash website, just the homepage of DoorDash.com on the thing. And then I had to go click sign in. I had to enter in my credentials. And then I clicked continue like I'm signing into DoorDash. normally, and then it closes that window because now it has stored my credentials.

And what Rabbit says is it doesn't store your credentials. It just stores like an authentication token so that you stay logged in. And to that I say, like, have you ever tried to stay logged into a service on the internet? Like, it's not possible. You can't the keep me logged in button doesn't work. So there is something else going on here. And there are a lot of people who are like, oh, what you're doing is you're just exposing all of your logging credentials to a virtual machine that's just sitting on Rabbit's computer.

Like you're just uploading your life to Rabbit servers. That's stupid. Well, there's also one step beyond that, which is you have now logged into DoorDash on Rabbit servers, and it's logged in. Right. So it doesn't matter if you have the credential.

Well, right. Fair. You have perfect logged in access to DoorDash. Yes. Yes. And I think for me, I, uh,

like, I'm logging into all of these things because I have to test this thing. But like, even logging into Spotify felt strange. Like this is like, this is actually kind of a lot of access to, information about me that you just have now

and that's odd. But anyway, the interface for that sucks. The system isn't very good. I have not yet successfully used DoorDash. Every single time I try to do it, you press the button on the side and you say, order me some food. And every single time it says,

DoorDash may take a while to load on Rabbit OS, which is very funny. And then it just immediately fails every single time. So what's happening in the background there from what I gather, the heart of the large action model, is it's going to click around on the DoorDash website for you? I believe that's correct.

Yeah. I think the long-term plan here is to have more, let's say, robust integrations that they can actually, like, there's way to you do that with, like, structured data that you can get to some of that stuff. But that's the old way, right? Like DoorDash has an API, and we've built a weird interface for DoorDash on our little orange square.

You don't need a bunch of AI for that. No, you don't. But it works. Right. So this is like you're logged into DoorDash and we're going to show you pictures of the, we're going to understand the DoorDash interface for you. And then we're going to let you're going to say, buy me this food and we're just going to use the DoorDash website on your behalf. Like that's that is my understanding of what the large action model should do. Yeah. No, that's exactly right. And part of the process that they make, that they're in theory one day, someday when this launches, going to make you go through is training the apps that you use. Like this is where. you click to do X and this is where you click to do Y and you scroll down to get to the other thing. And that is how you teach these models how to do this stuff. And the reason they've worked with these four apps now is because their people have done that training with these four apps. So like literally-

Do they have deals with the four apps? Do they have deals with Spotify and Uber and DoorDash? You know, Uber and DoorDash are competitors. Like Uber Eats exists. Yeah. I don't know, but I sure doubt it. I have a more basic question. Okay. I know you've only spent, what, 16 hours. with it. But in that time, have you had an experience with it where you're like, oh, wow, I would willingly train this model when I get more access to it to have these kind of experience with another app? The Spotify integration is the one to me that I'm like, this is the thing I really want to work. Does it? No, it's awful. It is so, so bad, you guys. I can't even tell you how

bad it is. Like, let me, I just give you a bunch of examples. Uh, I say to the thing, play my Discover weekly playlist. And it plays every single time a song called, can you discover by a band's discovery. Um, I say play Beyonce's new album and it played like a lullaby version of crazy and love. Yeah. And it's weird because it's not even like it's just searching and playing the first result. Because if you go to Spotify and search Discover weekly, it shows you your Discovery weekly playlist. So in theory, that shouldn't be that hard a problem. It's doing some weird thing that I can't figure out yet and almost always does it wrong. So if I ask like a very basic question, like, play Justin Timberlake. That works. It'll play a Justin Timberlake song. And I have done that many,

many times. But anything more complicated, at least so far it has fallen apart on me every single. See, this is why I don't understand about how it's working. If you're saying you can go to Spotify's website and type in Crazy in Love, and it shows you the first result is correct. Theoretically, that is all the large action model is doing on the back end. It's looking at the web interface. It's identifying the search box. It's entering the string. It's saying, here's the first result, and it's double-clicking on it.

By the way, this is not some radically new idea, right? Like big businesses deploy robotic process automation to run their billing systems on Windows 98. Billion dollar companies exist to deploy this at the enterprise scale. And Rabbit has more or less acknowledged that that is what it's doing. by the way. There was this weird thing. I don't know if you saw that there's somebody, it was called like Rabbit scam on GitHub,

GitHub sort of said they had found a bunch of code showing that all Rabbit was doing was just lifting stuff off of webpages and running the same systems that everybody else runs in order to like understand what's going on on a website. And they were like, this isn't as scary as you think it is like, yeah, that's what we do. That's our public code.

So like they're acknowledging that this is what is going on. But it's not working. Like, if you're, again, if you're like some mid-sized hospital system and you hire UiPath to show up and do RPA and it's like, we're doing the lullaby versions, you're like, fire them. It's like, get rid of them, right? UiPath is a billion-dollar company because it can do robotic process automation reliably at scale. Like, why? Rabbit costs $200. Well, cost $200.

But even the thing, like the basic thing, we entered a string of text into a search box and we played the first result. like the industry or the robotic process automation industry knows how to do that so why can't it do that like it feels like it's doing something else is it like inserting a little clipy in there is it trying to like be smart for you it might be it's also possible that it's doing something different with Spotify because Spotify yeah like has an actual sort of corpus of data that it lets other systems access so I can't speak to Spotify in particular but at least from the demos that I've seen Again, I haven't been able to get DoorDash to work once. But from Jesse's demo of DoorDash, that seemed very clearly to be the thing using the website.

Because the way that he showed what was working was he kept refreshing DoorDash.com on his laptop, and it would show that something had been added to the cart on the website. That's not like a thing that happens if you use like a third-party API to do all of this stuff. That is just a thing using the web app for you. So this is the part that I'm just like most interested in because DoorDash is the slowest one. said it's the slowest one. And there comes a point at which all this like just horsepower through the interface with computer vision, it just hits the wall of like, what if you just had an API? Right. What if you could just, instead of trying to have a robot figure out what's

happening on an interface made for humans, what if you just let the robot talk to the application directly using actual API commands? The example that I'll give people, one of my favorite companies that I wished had succeeded was Kavo, the universal remote company. that I hyped up on the show over and over again. They were doing exactly this to build the universal one. You plugged all of your devices into the cavo, and the cavo is doing computer vision to watch your Apple TV interface or whatever and click around on your behalf.

So you can just say the name of a show and the name of a service, and it would just like bang around your TV and use it for you. And this shit was awesome when it worked. It was very slow, and it was extraordinarily brittle when it broke. Yeah, it never worked. Like the win is very generous. Yeah, sometimes it worked. You know?

And it was cool. It was very cool in those moments. It worked. But most of the time it didn't. Right. And then the thing that like really got you was it wouldn't even show you the clicking around. Like it would put up the cavo screen and you would hear it like booping in the background.

You'd like, can I just see if you're getting this right? I would love to check your work. And then you'd be like, that is not what I wanted to happen at all. Or it would just error out. But the idea that like you've got a bunch of devices plugged into a central HTML switcher and you're like, watch the show and it knows that's the Apple TV. And you're like, I want to play a PlayStation and it switches the input and bangs running. Like all of that.

was awesome. But it failed because fundamentally the approach is brittle. Right. It's just, there are known ways for it to break when the computer cannot understand what's seeing. It's $199. Like, yeah, can they overcome this problem or do they actually just need to build a bunch of APIs? And then you've got something that looks like a, I think you have in your piece. That's just a mid-range Android smartphone with weird apps. Yeah, the answer is ultimately both, right? And I think, I think Humane has said this about what it's working on. Rabbit has alluded to this to you. Like, they eventually want to build big enough systems that others will actually integrate

with because the reason to not rely on APIs is that you're a tiny startup and nobody cares about you and nobody will make the deals with you. So you do hacky computer vision stuff so that you don't have to get the deals. Because by and large, they can't really stop you from doing that. They can get mad and they have some ways, but like it's a more winnable game in that particular respect. But the way for them to do this, they all acknowledge. is to eventually have those more official partnerships

that just give them access to the Dordash API. And then, like, this doesn't all have to be AI, right? Like, I actually think we, like, run into a trap when we assume that the only way to do AI things is for all of it to be AI. Like, some of it shouldn't be. We've solved a lot of problems, actually. Like, we're pretty good at a lot of things

that don't require pinging a large language models for order McDonald's. Like, that's like, ordering McDonald's on the internet is, like, a solved problem. We're very good at it now. And so I think we'll land there with a lot of stuff, but one nice thing you can do with these models is you can hack together a kind of n-solution to a lot of those business deals without needing those business deals. And I think that's what all of these companies are doing at first. The question is what our Dordash is going to say.

This is illegal scraping of our website. Like there's another whole set of problems that you kind of walk into immediately. I mean, the good news for Dordash is Dordash just wants you to order McDonald's, right? And I think that's the assumption that they're making, right? like Uber wants me in an Uber and is very happy anything that happens that gets me in an Uber. Same with Zordash and Meera and McDonald's. To Spotify want to stream copyrighted music to an orange rectangle. Yeah.

Yeah. I don't know. They did it on their list of things that are coming. It's Apple Music. And it's like, is it? Is that one coming? Have you met them? Like, they don't like competitors.

You know, even Apple Music, which is theoretically the, you know, horizontal play across, like, Have you tried Apple Music on Android? You think your weird little robot is going to be allowed to use Apple Music on the web that way? I don't know. We'll see. I'm very excited for you to review this thing. I think that that central question of like at $199 with no recurring fee, can you make this a business that needs to improve on some of the core AI features that is reliant on? Look at this way.

The thing you're saying, a bunch of these are solved problems, right? Okay. That's great. The things that are sort of easiest to do are solve problems. Order some food, call, ride, play songs, all API stuff. That means you're relying on the AI to solve all of the edge cases. Go to Photoshop and draw a cropping square around a thing. Like, that is not a solved problem.

You cannot API your way into doing that in Photoshop in the general case. You can do it maybe in some specialized ways. Okay, you're now, it's $199 with no recurring revenue. can you make an AI that can solve for the general case of using a computer is the question that this thing is asking and I just like don't know the answer. I feel the answer is probably no, but David, I just need you to do one thing for me. Can you hold it up to the mic and like click one of the buttons? I just need to know how clicky they are.

It's pretty quiet. Yeah. Oh, it's so quiet. That's nothing. Yeah. Just clicking right now. Pull over in your car. Turn off the engine.

Roll up the windows. Click, click, click. That's what sounds like that was it. No, do it without the clicks. They're pulled over now. Oh, yeah. That's not so bad. The people in the electric cars are like, what engine?

No, but to me the thing is, like, the big open question for me with both the Humane pin and this was like, what is like the one thing that this is actually for it? And I keep hoping it's going to be music. And Humane almost got there, except for all the ways it was awful. And this, like, I was excited because it's Spotify and Spotify is what I and hundreds of millions of other people used to listen to music. just not there. But so far, it's a pretty good, like, question and answer machine, which I'm happy about.

Rabbit has a big integration with perplexity, the AI search engine. So for, like, relatively real-time questions, like the NFL draft is tomorrow as we're recording this. And I was asking a bunch of questions about, like, who is likely to go where in the NFL draft? And it had good up-to-date information about the NFL draft. Like, that's cool. cue all the people saying,

why can't I just do it on my smartphone? Like you super duper can. But what's weird to me about this so far, and again, I have a lot of testing and stuff left to do is like this little thing, the gadget itself, feels right for this moment in AI. Like it's pretty cheap, it's not that ambitious. It's sort of silly and fun.

It's like worst case scenario, it's just like will look cool on my desk. Yeah. People pay a lot more for cool things on their desk, right? but they're also at the same time talking about this massive world-changing vision for where it will all go. And Jesse, to his credit, is constantly sort of tamping that down, saying we're just at the very beginning. We haven't solved most of these problems. He said something at the beginning of his speech last night that was like, I'm going to try all these demos.

And if they don't work, I'll try them again. And if they still don't work, we'll fix it. And I was like, what a perfect summation of like the time we're in for AI. And so I think all of that is right. And I appreciate kind of the like realism of what Rabbit is doing as opposed to like humane, which is like, you know, sort of brought from the earth fully formed. We have solved this. But then they're still like wildly overstating what this thing can actually do in a way that I find very frustrating.

There's much of our comments on your hands-on post. So like, why are you being nicer to this inhumane? And it's like, well, one, it's not actually the review yet. important note, like we're just holding the thing. And two, it's like, it's $200. Yeah. Yeah. And that's just different.

But I, I am very curious to see as you go through this review process how much it needs to lean on the computer vision piece, because the more it has to do that, which is the AI of it all, the worse it's going to be. Yes. I feel that very keenly. All right. Some more things we should talk about in this section. Apple announced a May 7th event for new iPads.

two things about this. One, it's just an infomercial. Just like tune in to watch our stream. No one's going anywhere. Yeah. And then they're calling it Let It Loose. And our friend Joanna Stern pointed this out. The S in Loose looks like a G, so it's let it luge, which is, if you want to think about

what that means in the context of you iPads, I welcome you. I personally believe Apple is announcing a luge-oriented iPad. It's very weird. It's a huge, like, boogie board-sized iPad. It's a recursive capital S, so it's like weird. And so in context, it looks like a lowercase G. Very good. It's pretty good.

It feels like we're going to get an OLED iPad, right? That's the rumor. It feels like they'll just chip bump everything else. I'm trying very hard not to buy an OLED iPad. But you're going to. Why? Like, I don't use the one I have. So that I'm not the only one.

I need other people making bad purposes. We're going to do a group I. We're going to call Tim Cook and we're like, we get a group rate on ill-conceived iPads. it just feels like this what they actually need to do is announce to do software for the iPad not new hardware.

There were a bunch of people talking about this that I really enjoyed that was like after this came out, everybody was like, relax, the real iPad event is WWDC in June. Like this doesn't matter. And I think that's probably true.

Like the strangest thing about the iPad is the hardware has been really good for a really long time. I would say other than please move the camera from the bad spot to the good spot, I have very few. few issues with the iPads hardware and have not had issues for a long time. I have a million

issues with what it's like to actually use the damn thing. That's why I'm kind of curious about one of the big rumors is that they're going to do a new magic keyboard that's like aluminum or something. It's more like just a laptop case. Yeah, with a bigger track pad. Like that would be cool. David, I'm pointing out the 10th-gen iPad, they moved the camera. I know. But they haven't, they haven't on the other ones. Move it on all the other places. They're going to probably do it on on the pro in the air this time around. At some point, they have to admit that the pro is just a weird laptop. Yeah.

Maybe this is the time. Like, I've been using my ancient now, 11-inch iPad Pro is like a tablet. Like, this is dumb. Like, it's just a laptop all the time. I want to use it as tablet. Boy, do I want to read stereo review in PDF form on my iPad as God intended. But it's just like the thing, it just like yearns to be in its laptop. Yeah, you're also, I've noticed you started sending a lot of,

of Apple News Plus links around, which makes me think you are becoming more of an iPad user. I'm just a rumor now. I'm a dad. I live in the suburbs. I sold my truck. I haven't sold the truck yet. It's hard breaking. I think about selling my stupid truck. It's, this is just me trying to not use Twitter and Wall Street Journal and Condon and asked publications are Apple News Plus. I got suckered in the deal. Great. Fine. Right. But do I love it? Do I think Apple News? I just, I'm not going to pass any judgment. It's definitely so awesome. I'm just going to ask anybody who has the product. Go and look at the list of trending stories and be like, who do we think this audience is? You just make that distinction all in your, I don't, I'm not going to pass any judgment,

but I'm like, they're not getting younger. Is it what I would say? It doesn't appear that they're getting younger with time. But anyway, yeah, I'm trying to use the iPad as a consumption device and the iPad Pro in particular, it kind of yearns to be in a keyboard case. And I hope they just go for it. But we have a weird mini laptop. It's fine, you know, but the software has changed. So that's coming very soon, May 7th, a couple weeks from now. The Rayban Meta Smart Glass has got a big update. They have multimodal AI now. They announce some new colors, and it's in various three designs that they have. I feel like I'm about to buy one of these. You should. You do it. Also announced that it's making headsets with other people and

attempt to make sort of QuestOS the open VR headset, which Zuckerberg has talked about a lot. They're going to make an Xbox VR headset. It's a limited edition meta-quest. So you can see, Zuckerberg is like, we're going to be the Android of VR. We'll get Apple's doing whatever it's doing over here. Can we, we call out the fact that it is so funny to watch Microsoft go from being like, we're going to create the VR head, like the VR space. We're going to do it all mixed reality. We're going to own this place to. We're going to do a. rebranded Meta Quest 3. I mean, if you're

Microsoft and you're out there being like the future is Xbox game streaming, you might as well with an habit and run the Quest is basically like an Android phone right on your face. Yeah, take the free ads. I mean, and the way they described it is so funny, it's like it's a Quest 3

inspired by Xbox or something, which just makes me think like somebody at Microsoft sent over the hex codes for the Xbox green and we're like, do whatever you want. Leave us alone. I hope it is like just huge. I hope it is so chunky like the original Xbox. It's just a full-on like master cheap helmet.

Yeah, just over the top. So the OS, the QuestOS is being rebranded, I guess, to Meta Horizon OS, which is just a lot of ones. Yeah, it's weird. There was like Horizon Worlds and then there was Horizon Workrooms. So that was kind of always going to be their thing, but now they're trying to make it even bigger. I will say Horizon, great name. for an operating system. Yeah. Great job.

The names are insane. It's just a lot of words. So Horizon OS runs on the Quest hardware, and Xbox is making it Xbox-inspired. That's a lot. Good news, though. More companies that are known for their good names will be participating in this ecosystem,

including Assus's Republic of Gamers. Very excited for the names to come from them. Lenovo will make something. That will be... It'll have Legion in it somewhere. A word salad. the Lenovo Legion Quest Flip 13. Yep.

And then all of these are going to run on Qualcomm chips. Qualcomm also well known for stretching the boundaries of the Snapchat and beyond all human recognition. So that's interesting. We'll see how that goes. Right there. They are the players. They have the momentum. The Quest 3 itself got an update where the pass-through videos of higher quality and looks better when you look at phones.

There's momentum over there. I want to come back to actually the Rayvan glasses, which. are a hit. Like they feel like a quiet hit. I know a lot of people who have them, our friend Joanna Stern, says she doesn't travel or go on field video shoots without them anymore. Wow. They're really good. I've got a pair. I should wear mine more. I'm legit thinking about going and getting prescription lenses put in it because I always have to put my contacts in. It's like, that friction's too much. But every time I wear, I'm like, why don't I wear my contacts more often? These like are awesome. They're cheap. They're 300 bucks. I've got a friend who in the pandemic,

actually just became one of those people who doesn't live anywhere. She's just like, literally last week. She's like, I'm working from a boat. And I was like, I hate you. You seem great. All of her photos are from the meta class now on Instagram. And the thing meta got really right was it went the correct direction in terms of saying, like, we're going to pick a very small number of things for this device to do, and it's going to do them pretty well.

And then we're going to slowly add things that it can do. Like, when it started, it was like, okay, it's a pretty good speaker. speaker system if you like want to listen to music or podcasts or whatever that's mostly what I use it for it's become like when I'm out on a walk or whatever I wear it instead I wear the glasses instead of headphones now which is awesome pretty good camera people really like taking photos and videos that way and now they're adding on they're like okay now we can do they had the you could like ask meta-a-i questions but now they're adding the multimodal stuff and so they're like they're sequencing this stuff really smartly instead of like promising the world from the very

beginning and then not meeting people's expectations, which I think is really the key. These are better than people expected them to be, which is so, so, so rare in this moment with hardware. Yeah. And again, the first thing they just had to be with some nice looking ray bands. Yeah. It's like, all right, you get a pair of wayfarers. You get these other two designs. Like people just like those designs. Whether or not the battery lasts, the camera works is like, oh, no, they're just a pair of wayfarers. Like maybe it'll be cool. And now they're setting all this cool stuff. Well, it's like that old Mitch Headberg joke, right? That like when an escalator, an escalator doesn't break, it just becomes stairs. Like that's, that's, that's these.

glasses, right? Like the worst case scenario is you just have a nice pair of sunglasses. Yeah. And honestly, 300 bucks for a pair of ribands is like a little bit of a premium, but it's not crazy. And now the multimilal AI, you can do the thing. What am I looking at? It tells you, right? That's the big trick. That's the, it's emerging as the party trick of these AI devices. And it's as messy as anything else. Like V-Song did a bunch of testing with it and it was like hilariously wrong about cars and all this stuff. And it's always like all these systems, it's very confident and just lies to your face. I actually, I'm I'm starting to be of the mind that we need to push back strongly against calling any of this AI.

We just need to call them language models because they just make up words. There's no intelligence artificial or otherwise happening here. That's going to be a hard fight. I don't think we're going to, I'm not going to win that fight. There's a lot of fights of one. I'm not going to win that fight. But the conflation of can you talk with Are You Smart is in a real weird moment on the internet right now. Turns out, I talk, maybe less smart you are.

I talk a lot. I'm not trying to burn anybody. I'm just putting that out there. Fascinating to me, though, just add all this up, right? You got meta doing the sort of open stuff with Lenovo and all these other companies. You've got the glasses, which are sort of a sneaky hit that people like. Next to, okay, analyst reports, a vision pro demand is suffering. Right?

And it's like, did Apple just get outgun by a pair of rebands? Yes. Yes. That's crazy. It's nuts. It's not crazy, though. It was a $3,500 bet against a $300 bet. I don't even think it's that.

I think Apple just miscalculated. Like I, the longer I use these devices, the more I can't believe Apple didn't make the smart glasses. Like in the thing that Apple has traditionally done, which is like build a thing and then build the more complicated thing and then build the more complicated. Like Apple is actually very good at laddering that stuff up over time. And in this case, just way overshot. It was like it was like building four generations.

too soon and trying to convince people to buy it. And what if they had just built like the iPod version of it, which is just like a nice thing for listening to music and talking to an assistant, people would have gone nuts for it. And it is like it continues to blow my mind that Apple just, I think, picked wrong. They could still do it. We could still get the Apple vision air. Oh, I'm sure we will.

I'm sure that's where it's headed. But like I, what the humane folks told me is they were like, okay, well, when we built this, we decided to build the hardest thing first. based on the idea that then it's much easier to sort of ratchet or ambition down and sell cheaper, simpler versions of the thing. But it turns out if you blow the expensive one, you don't get the chance to do the next things. And I think Apple has kind of dug itself a hole here by so aggressively overshooting. I also like all these supply chain numbers should be taken with like a giant heap of salt all the time.

But I will say anecdotally, nobody talks about the Vision Pro anymore. Yeah. It has totally faded. I spent a lot of time looking in the subreddit. And it is, a lot of people are like, what are we using this thing for? You know, and then there's like, one app comes out and it's a hit, and people really like it. But it's a little dire in there. I'm just going to say, I was right in the review.

Yep. It's putting that out there. It took a lot of heat for that one. It's better out here. Yeah, it's better. Right. The question is, like, is it worth putting it on? Yeah.

And there isn't anything that makes it worth putting on. There's a few things sometimes, but even Mark German in his newsletter where he was talking about some of these relatives. He's like, I'm wearing this thing less and less. Like, it's lonely. Like, he's like, I don't want to watch basketball alone. I think it's weird. It's just like a weird moment in hardware. Yeah.

Where the big expensive stuff didn't go and the sort of cheap stuff that's making small promises is gaining a new kind of momentum. I think I'm going to buy them. I don't know why. I have too many glasses. I lose them. I have a rule to not buy glasses that are more than 50 bucks, not buy sunglasses and more than 50 bucks. Because they're gone. That's good.

I might as well just flush the $50 down the toilet. You know what I mean? But there's a part of it's like, what if? The goodness is these, these ones are very heavy. so it will be hard to lose them. And the charging case is really nice. So you're going to be like, oh, I can't lose my charging case because it's so nice.

And then you'll never lose your glasses. Alex, you've never under us. I'm just filled with optimism today. Just all optimism. All right, we're going to take a break. I'm going to look on the meta website and see and see if I convince myself to those $300. We're going to come back.

We've got to talk about Tesla and then we've got a lightning round. Then we're going to get out of here. We'll get right back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that.

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But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. one, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo.

And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the real. root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third. Like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembark, as asymptomatikas.

Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well.

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain drops every weekday afternoon. Okay, we're back. We have to talk about Tesla. Tesla had earnings. Andy Hawkins headline for the preview of earnings was Tesla is in its flop era, which is a great headline. Just to recap, Tesla has laid off more than 10% of its workforce, like 14,000 people.

A bunch of executives are leaving, including the guy who was in charge of the power train and energy division. And then the head of policy, who's the guy who gets autonomy, like, approved. Also gone a lot going on with Tesla. There's a rumor that they're going to cancel the cheap EV, and then they kind of said they weren't going to cancel it. But it also sounds like what they're really going to do is make the Model Y cheaper. they recalled all 3,800 cyber trucks, 3,8708 cyber trucks. But they talked.

Elon said Optimus would be a fully sentient robot that would, quote, expand the world economy infinitely. Oh, sick. They'll be selling that at the end of next year. Yeah. Sure. So a classic Elon bump there. I think he even said in that sentence, in that sentence,

I think he said, but I'm just guessing. It's like, all right. Yeah. Great investor. call. There's a new model three performance. Great. But they don't have as new cars. There's not really a plan to have new cars. They're going to announce some Robotaxy plan on August 8th. And then there's this thing that they've been talking about, which he brought up again on the earnings call today, which I just wanted to talk about for five seconds, because it is bonkers to me.

He was talking about how many H-100s Tesla has. He went on this very funniest side about how he doesn't like calling them GPUs because they don't have any graphics, but whatever. It's you can hear the investors being like, what? And then he got to, we have all the these H-100s and we are doing inference, AI inference more efficiently because we had to learn how to do it in the car, which is constrained. Great. That makes sense. It's a good argument.

When I can measure it, well, that makes sense. And then he's like, we've got this like AWS play, which they've hinted at before, but he was like, what we're going to do is run it on all the Teslas that are just sitting around. So, quote, if you can imagine in the future, perhaps there's a fleet of 100 million Teslas. And on average, they've gotten like maybe a kilowatt of inference compute. That's 100 gigawatts of inference compute. distributed all around the world.

It's pretty hard to put together 100 gigawatts of AI compute. So, and perhaps maybe instead of using the car 10 hours a week, we use it 50 hours a week while it's sitting there. That leaves over 100 hours a week where the car inference computer can be doing something else, and it seems like it would be a waste to not use it. My man is describing steady at home for Tesla. Yeah. What do those terms of service look like?

Right. It's just like, do you want to run compute models on your car while just like sitting in the driveway? You're a car, which, by the way, famously runs on electricity. Like, where's that electricity? Where's that power bill coming from? Are you going to get it cheaper? So you buy a car and now Elon can use it to do whatever inference to run, whatever Robotaxy fleet that he thinks he's going to need to run it.

Also, I don't know if you know about AWS. They like knowing where the computers are. And typically those computers are not driving somewhere between 20 and 100 miles an hour while they're being used. Yeah, I've interviewed the CEO of AWS. I would say a core assumption of that conversation was that he knew where the servers were. And they were not ever at risk of crashing into other servers. This feels like such a classic Elon Musk thing. Because even as you were reading that, it's like, okay, this sort of makes sense.

Like big fleet, lots of compute sitting around. What if we use the compute? And then it's like, you raise your hand and you go like, how is any of that going to work? And it's like, ah, don't worry about that. He's doing it at the same time that like Chevy is getting a lot of flack because they've been using their computers to spy on people and report. it to their insurance companies. Like, maybe not the time to be like, yeah, you've got a computer in there and I want to use it.

Yeah, it's like, it's mine now. Yeah. I just think this is the one where it's like, what Elon is searching for is arguments that Tesla will have massive margins, software company style margins instead of car company margins. And the thing that's hammering Tesla right now is they have absolutely car company margins again because they drop the price so much. And they don't have any new cars.

So the competition is here. And you can see the sales fell, like 55%. Like they're just not doing it anymore. And so he's concocting these arguments where a sentient optimist robot will expand the world economy by infinity. That's a pretty good margin. It's good. I mean, you know, more power to you, if you pull that off. And then he's like, and I'm going to build this like distributed data center.

So now I'm running AWS. Instead of having to build a data center in Texas or wherever he might need to build it. And it's like, this is the truth is outing here, right? like it is very hard to get from here to I'm running a distributed AI supercomputer in every Tesla in the world. It's like very hard. It kind of feels a little like a Peloton moment for him. You know, where Peloton, everybody got a Peloton because they wanted one. And it feels like maybe everyone who wanted the Tesla got one.

Well, let me just ask you this question about this distributed inference computer. What happens at Rush Hour? Yeah. Right? The total capacity of the computer is just like plug. It's like hour by hour. Like, it's always five o'clock somewhere. Like, every hour, there's just a huge dip in capacity.

It starts coming back online at 7 p.m. Like, literally the sun sets on Tesla's compute capacity across the United States every single day. Like, it's very hard to pull this through. I think Tesla is in a, like, fascinating moment. I am not sure it five years from now. It looks anything like this company. No, yeah, it seems hard to imagine. I mean, I think this company has already gone through so many weirder iterations than anybody would have expected and continues to sort of chug along.

Like, Tesla feels very much like a cockroach at this point that sort of nothing could happen to Tesla that would surprise me. And also, it will be the last company that exists on planet Earth. Oh, I disagree. But, like, it feels like it's going to crap. Yeah, even like a bunch of Tesla fans are like, I don't know about this anymore. Well, that's, I mean, that's one of the big questions to me. I was talking about this with Andy Hawkins yesterday. Like, this question of kind of the Elon Musk effect that the people who are predisposed to want Tesla's for a lot of the reasons that Tesla promotes them being good for the world and all that are also people who are likely to not be psyched about Elon Musk's shenanigans, particularly as he runs X.

And so trying to figure out how to quantify how much of this is. about the challenges in the EV market, how much this is about plug-in hybrids, which I thought was a really interesting thing that Musk said during the earnings call. He blamed a lot of the struggle on the rise in plug-in hybrids, and how much of this is just people voting with their dollars and voting against Elon Musk is really hard to know. And I think it's going to be super obvious in retrospect. And I'm very curious how it's going to shake out. There's also the fact that if you're just going to buy a car and you're going out in the world and you're like, I'm going to buy a car and you don't buy a car based on id, then you go and you look and you say, okay,

Tesla's have really bad reliability. They're really hard to repair. They're really hard to just get an appointment and oftentimes that appointment's horrible. The build quality is crap to the point that like they keep having to do recalls on the cyber truck. Like those are all just signs of a badly run company. And I think I think this company had a lot of advantage because it was first mover. And Elon Musk is an incredible salesman. But, now like the bloom is off that rose. Twitter X, whatever you want to call it, ripped that right off. And now it's like, okay, we see that this guy is just a really good salesman and he pulls it all out of his butt and he is not some genius. And actually, he's not running a very

good company because he's running 12 at once. And no one can do that, even Elon Musk. Alex is Alex Kranz of the Verge with a K. Yeah. Just email that. Hit me up. I'm doing you a favor. I'm here to debate you. Debate Alex with a K. Please. It's going to be great. Honeypotting. Tesla trolls. I don't think you're wrong. I just think the fundamentals is the auto business.

He has to not be a car company. And the thing that is happening is it's getting sucked into being a car company. Because it is one. Because it is one. Yeah, because it is one. Yeah. And the blaming the hybrid thing is super funny to me.

Like, yes, I own a hybrid, but like you're basically telling your customers that they're wrong. Right? And how do you get across, how do you get past the market making a decision and regulate the market? Joe Biden will you make hybrids illegal

is like kind of the only answer to that. Or you can yell at everyone that they're wrong. And, like, yelling at the market that it's wrong, and, like, not great. That always famously works for everyone who does it. This is famously why Betamax beat VHS. Yeah. Everyone knows it. I don't think hybrid.

I think everyone I know as Ibrids knows it's like some short-term solution to the infrastructure not being there. And everyone prefers to drive around on the battery. My dad just recently bought a Prius after spending months looking for an EV because he just, like, they just couldn't find one that made sense. decided that in their lives at this point, like the next car should be an electric car. The car right now should not be. And I think a lot of people are making that decision. Yeah.

Also, new Prius, it doesn't look like an angry robot anymore. No, it's kind of great. Yeah. We'll see. All right. Lightning round. What's you got, David? So while we're talking about Apple TV Plus, soon to be augmented by the purchase of TikTok,

There was a report this week that Apple has been negotiating with FIFA, which is the governing body of soccer around the world, to do a new global tournament exclusively on Apple TV Plus. I find this fascinating for a bunch of reasons. One, Apple is increasingly deep into the sports world. They have this thing with Major League Soccer that's going very well, it seems, in part because Lionel Messi decided to play for the MLS. but the numbers that have been thrown around

are upwards of a billion dollars from Apple to be the one to stream this tournament which is like we've spent a lot of time talking about Apple TV Plus as kind of a somewhere between sort of a lark and a side project that it was never going to be really material to Apple it was just kind of a thing it did on the side in order to sell more subscriptions to iCloud right

like that was always the play this seems to me to be the sort of thing that you only do if you're actually truly serious about turning this into a real thing. And Apple is just further and further and further into sports in a way that I continue to find surprising and sort of fascinating. And they want to invent a completely new thing with some of the biggest soccer clubs in the world, which would be huge and is immediately the kind of thing that would draw potentially

millions of new people to Apple TV Plus. But this is like, there's no indication. I think it was a New York Times story that first recorded. of this, that this is like a done deal, but they want to do it next summer, which means, like, this is a big thing that could happen very quickly. And like, I don't know, Apple TV Plus just continues to be a bigger thing than I think I've given it credit for it. I think it kind of makes sense, though, right now for Apple to do it. Because Hollywood is in a state of flux, right? Like streaming is completely changing the game there. Everybody's trying to figure out where the

revenue streams are. And the tech companies are kind of leading the forefront. The tech companies are running Hollywood in a way they haven't previously. And Apple is doing it really, really well. It's a smaller play than everybody else, but it's doing it intelligently. And it's like, yeah, this makes sense for them to go in and just like take a couple of streaming services out. Yeah. Just body a few with money and then snap up the dregs of that later, right? Like make a deal with Skydance or whatever. But if that's the play, Apple could just walk into the offices of any streaming service it wanted to and just write a check for its valuation and then so. Yeah, but they don't want to do that. They want, like, they want, they want cheap licenses

and stuff like that. That's what runs these services. But this is what I'm saying, a billion dollars to create a new soccer tournament is not that thing. Like the MLS thing I understood, that's a relatively small, relatively safe bet, and they got to essentially take over that whole project. This is a much, this is like negotiating for NFL rights, which Apple, like, famously has not won because it was a, yeah. They can't close for Sunday ticket. Yeah, but it wanted what has been reported is that it wanted complete control over this thing. And you're not getting that from the NFL and you're not getting it from FIFA and they're still willing to throw billions of dollars at it. It's fascinating.

But this would drive subscriptions. Yeah. For sports is sticky. Yeah. Like Eddie Hughes smart. He's also a huge sports fan. Yeah, he is. And he knows sports are the stickiest thing.

We'll see. I think Apple has to get good at broadcasting sports. Yeah. If they're not great at it right now. So the more they get into it, the more they have to come. Does Tim Cook want to sit in Congress and talk about contact moderation? I don't know. Does Tim Cook want to sit in front of a bunch of soccer fans and soccer penalties?

Like, I don't know about that either. But does Tim Cook want to go, like, sit in a box at the World Cup? Like, yeah, absolutely. That's true. All right. Cranz, what you got? Qualcomm. They're back, baby.

We'll see. We say that every once in a while. Just immediately undercut. Just immediate. Yeah. So Qualcomm has announced, they had previously announced some new processors. And these are their kind of responses to the X86 processors from Intel and AMD. This is meant to go in Windows machines, meant to compete with Apple. They're saying

they're as fast as the M3 and it's going to blow it out of the water. Joanna Nelius, our new laptop reviewer went and checked some of them out in some very, very, very, very controlled demos. And she was like, there could be something there. She was seeing it was slower than the M3 in some cases, faster in others. I mean, if it's even in the ballpark of the M3, that's a huge deal. That's a huge deal, right? And I think there's some really interesting stuff, particularly around architecture. They're not doing the big little core deal that everybody else does, where they're like,

these are performance cores, and these are efficiency cores. They're like, yeah, these are all performance cores because they're just that efficient. That was me doing a Qualcomm impression. Sorry. So it's the Snapdragon X Elite was the ones previously announced. And now we have the Snapdragon X plus. Oh, good. Which is slower because it's not elite.

They're going to throw a premium in there and no one's going to know what's going on. Yeah, nobody will know. I appreciate that when you try to match Apple's performance, you also try to match Apple's insane names game. This is good. And it's all bad. All the names are bad. But we don't know when these are probably going to come this year.

We'll probably start seeing them in some Windows devices this year. And I'm really, really curious to see it. is like if arm and windows can work for once, that would be huge. Yeah. But they famously kind of like screwed it up the last time. And the time before that, and the time before that. And the time before that, yeah. That's why I immediately undercut.

Qualcomm's like back at it again at the Krispy Cream. The Microsoft event is May 20th or 21st or something, and they're going to announce new surfaces that we think, by all indications, are going to run these things. So we're going to see this sooner rather than later. But Tom's been reporting about how excited Microsoft. is. Quakom seems very excited. This could be something.

Well, we've got Computex come in. That's May 31st. Oh, yeah. Oh, it's going to be like laptop explosion here. That's going to be great. Yeah, so we're going to get a lot of laptops soon, and I suspect a lot of them are going to have these new processors in them. Will these processors be good? It's a big move away from Intel if there's a lot of laptops with these weird snaptracking ships in them. We'll see.

Yeah, well, we'll also have to see because historically the laptop makers don't like to ship the stuff besides Intel to reviewers to check out because they want you to check out the thing that people actually buy and that's usually the Intel products. So it's going to be a fun one. All right. Mine is very simple. So that says a new app.

It's very good. On mobile, they've sort of gotten rid of all the tabs and it's all just widgets. It's cool. They said it's going to be faster. It's coming out May 7th. We'll see if the mobile app is faster. This is not the thing I actually want to talk about.

They are getting rid of their desktop apps, which they've had forever on Mac and. Windows, and they're going all to web apps, and you can now, because it's web app, you can control your sono's from anywhere, which is interesting. I'm just pointing out that the move to distribute applications on desktop computers to the web instead of in native binaries is like full speed ahead. Like it's over. Like, you know, Dylan Field, the CEO Figma was like, why would you distribute an app on a desktop computer any other way except the web? And like, yep, there's electron and some other stuff where you packaged it up and it looks native and da-da-da-da. But I saw

this and I was like, oh, this is just a huge shift in computers that is like reaching a point where it's like no one even talks about it. Like it just assumed that if you're going to make a new app for desktop computers, what you are actually shipping as a web app. Yeah. And I, the thing I point to is the Vision Pro, the high end of computers, the cutting edge of what a computer can be, mounted directly to your face. All of the most interesting apps on the Vision Pro, the Netflix app, the YouTube app, whatever, are just custom web browsers. Yeah, we really called that, by the way. I feel like we deserve credit for saying over and over that the thing that,

the only thing that might save the Vision Pro is, is web apps. Yeah. That has been absolutely correct. Anyway, I'm excited for the news on this thing because the old app is indeed slow. Wasn't the old app supposed to fix the fact that the app before that was slow and bad? No, so they, this is like a long story. We have Patrick Spence on the show, I think, to explain himself to us when they did this. I know.

And they had the old platform, which they now call S1, which was like ancient. and they re-architected everything for the future and to support Atmos and all this other stuff they wanted to do. And that's called S2. So that was just an architecture update. It was not a, we need to make a really faster update. So they kept their slow app, but made it work on the new architecture.

Yeah, there's a lot of arguments about, like, what the best way to run Sonos is now. Like, do you want to run Sonos net, which is like a custom 2.4-gaguergaguer timework? He just want to run everything on Wi-Fi, which Sonos says you should do. Good times in these subredits. I just use Spotify Connect.

it works fine. Yeah. It's fine. I wish I had a more complicated, interesting idea than that. I never, ever touched the Sonos app, and I'm very happy.

I've used Airplay for years now. It's great. It works just fine. And you can group things in Airplay. You can group unlike speakers in Airplay, which is very interesting. But I don't know, I still got a soft stop for it.

All right, we are way over. We've touched on everything. From web apps to the future of free speech in America. Busy week. To whatever's going on with Tesla. It's a lot. It was a busy week. And we got more of them coming because we're head first into developer conference season now.

Yep. All right. I'm going to start a go fund me for this OLED iPad. You can hit me up. That's not true. Not too. Tell Alex all your favorite things about your Tesla if you have one. She'd love to hear him.

Oh, we need to say this. We utterly forgot to say this because we were so bad at this. We won Webby Awards. Thank you so much for all the people who voted for us in the People's Choice of our cast. Thank you, the judges who gave the same award to the Dakota podcast. We really do appreciate it. it. It's very cool that we have been doing the show for as long as we're doing it,

and people stroll voting for us for these awards. I truly appreciate it. Sponsor the lighting ready to generate. All right. It's time. All right. That's it. That's the Vergecast. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.