The Vergecast - Apple could open up iOS, Elon gets booed, and the golden age of streaming is coming to an end

Episode Date: December 16, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler break down all the news from this week. Further reading: FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas Apple is reportedly preparing to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone Twitter Blue is back, letting you buy a blue checkmark again Elon Musk sells yet another $3.58 billion of Tesla shares - The Verge  Twitter suspends @ElonJet after Musk promises not to ban it - The Verge  Elon Musk booed at Dave Chappelle show, claims it was only like ‘10 percent boos’   Jack Dorsey on Musk’s Twitter files: ‘There’s nothing to hide’ - The Verge  https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23511260/everything-ok-in-there-mr-musk-sincerely-the-ftc Twitter’s newsletter tool is shutting down on January 12th The golden age of the streaming wars has ended Apple is expanding Mythic Quest with a new spinoff series Westworld is leaving HBO Max Director Patty Jenkins says there was ‘nothing’ she could do to move Wonder Woman 3 forward Where are all the new Macs? iOS 16.2 arrives with improved always-on display and iCloud end-to-end encryption Google won’t launch ChatGPT rival because of ‘reputational risk’ The Echo Show 15 with Fire TV: a major upgrade with a major flaw Google is beta testing digital state ID cards in its Android Wallet app How to use Instagram’s new Notes feature TikTok starts testing a horizontal full-screen mode Google Nest and Android devices are now Matter compatible — yes, right now Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, the EU has Apple running scared. Elon Musk gets booed and the golden age of streaming is coming to an end. That's all coming up right after this. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what. what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom.

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the future of car sounds. Today on this episode of the Vergecast, we're all just going to make like bloop-loop sounds, and then we're going to decide what cars should sound like in the future. Do you not so nice? Doesn't that sound better than what we usually do on the show?

I'm trying to think about my car sound is. I was thinking very, very hard about it. What do you want it to sound like when you're getting run over by a driverless Tesla? Like what would you want to hear? Yeah, it's like it's the side whistle saying. 1967 Mustang. I want to feel like I got a hit. You want like a dramatic, like an orchestra hit.

Yeah. Yeah. I want it like, that's me going out. I want the ending theme from Buccaroo Banzai. Like I should be able to select that on my phone. and then it just pops up in their car as it happens. Yeah, like today, like a minority report,

like today you're going to get hit by an EV. So if you could just go ahead and pick a soundtrack for that, uh, will be, we'll be good. Tom Cruise will be dispatching the third judge. You remember a lot more of that movie that I did. If you haven't seen Minority Report,

it's truly, it is truly something else. It's so funny that, by the way, they get to the name Minority Report. It's so interoperate. grill to the plot and then it means so little. Yeah. It's very good.

You should just go, everyone, take a break, turn off the podcast. Wait. Go watch Minority Report. Why is it called? Is it called that because one of the three sees the different future? Is that why? You're spoiling the movie. No.

It's been out for 20 years. Definitely. I'm sorry to everyone I just ruined. There are many problems with predictive policing that we should just immediately begin with. And then obviously the targeted advertising that movie, it just all came true. Like Tim Cook's a minority report and he's like, we have to destroy Facebook's business. Let's do outtracking transparency. He was just like, welcome to our chast.

The flagship podcast of talking about Minority Report for no reason, 30 years after it came out. We actually have a lot of like housekeeping to do. But first of all, I'm Neal. I'm your friend. Alex Trans is here. I'm your friend thinking about that one scene between the Gardner Lady and Tom Cruise and Minority Report. You know what I'm talking about. The memories have all come back.

Just flooded back in. I'm that friend. Richard Lawler is here. I'm your friend who is definitely not under indictment. Say whatever you want. David Pierce continues to be off with his new baby. You know, it happens to the best of us. Now he's great.

We wish David well, he'd be back soon enough. We've got a lot going on between now and the end of the year. So obviously we have this episode of The Vercast, which will mostly be about the movie Minority. report. Buckle-in. I mean, there's actually SBF got arrested.

There's this report that Apple's going to open up third-party app stores. Elon continues to just be himself. There's all kinds of gadget news, actually. So there's this episode. Then the holiday spectacular is back, my friends.

You might recall that in the waning years of the Trump administration, I said we were just going to do an entire hour about HTML to just clear the decks, reset. For some reason, we did this during the holidays. And so now during the holidays, we do episodes about specs. This is just who we are now. Yeah. I feel great about it. This year's holiday spectacular. We're giving a gift to our listeners. I think it's that the joke spectacular

is too good to pass up. Yes. A hundred percent. In our heart of hearts, it's can I let our producer Andrew Marino do sleigh bell sounds while we talk about Bluetooth, and the answer is yes. Have we started a new standards group to establish how this will happen? What is the name of it? Spectacular standards group. So you've got a holiday spectacular. It's about Bluetooth. This year's Holiday Spectacular. It's about Bluetooth. We've got discussion of the Bluetooth standard. We have holiday sound effects. And my friends, we have Bluetooth Jeopardy, which we have Bluetooth Jeopardy, which we've already recorded, and I can tell you, is one of the most chaotic I'm incredible.

45 minutes of Vergecast history ever put to tape. Liam thought it was going to take 30 minutes and we recorded for 90 and I'm just guessing they managed to cut that down 45. They can't cut a single thing. Every minute of it was perfect. I'll just, I'll just tell you right now, Bluetooth Jeopardy is shockingly hard. It is so much harder than you think and I can't wait for you listen to it. So that's coming out on December 21st.

That'll be good. And then actually the biggest news of this week is the fusion breakthrough, where a bunch of researchers with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory created a fusion reaction, but basically shooting lasers at something that produced more energy than it took to cause the reaction. That's a very big deal. It does not get mean free energy, but it's one of those breakthrough scientific moments. We're not going to talk about it in this episode because our excellent science reporter,

Justine Kalma, is actually interviewing some of the scientists, and we'll have an episode with them coming up very soon as well. So that's really exciting. Just a lot of Vergecast stuff to close out the year, including the holiday spectacular about Bluetooth, which I'm going to tell you is just one of the finest pieces of technology journalism ever made, even though we have not made two-thirds yet.

It's amazing. Here's what I think. And if you are a Pulitzer voter, keep this in mind. More journalism should be in the form of jeopardy. I think it's right. Because, like, what are you doing? Someone is making a statement and then you're asking a question. That's journalism, baby.

We're doing it. It's true. Also, if you are a lawyer with the jeopardy people, please stop listening to this and put your phone out the window. Delete us from your feed. You didn't hear any of this, lawyers, the jeopardy people. Anyway, holiday spectacular, blue tooth coming, fusion episode with Justine coming. And then on the video side, we have an Apple Watch Ultra review that's coming next week.

It is one of the most over-the-top videos we have ever made. The video team went all out because how else you can review the Apple Watch Ultra in video? You got to go do a bunch of stuff. And we have a little note from Becca talking about that. Let's listen to Becca. Hey, it's me, Becca Versace. Listen, my question for you is, have you heard that I have been working on this honestly, insane review

of the Apple Watch Ultra. Because the rumors are true, I have. We have dove down 130 feet with this watch off the coast of California. We've gotten lost in Yosemite. And, well, we have people that have been wearing it around New York City for months now. And we are doing the most

in-depth review that we've ever done. And y'all better check it out, okay? Especially you, David Pierce. Anyway, check it out, bud. YouTube.com slash a verge. That's all I got. All right. I am theoretically responsible for everything that happens here at the verge.

Legitimately afraid about this video. I'm excited about it. No one's excited in the way that like getting arrested is excited. It's going to be great. It's going to be a good time. So that's coming. Apple Watch Ultra videos coming next week. Bluetooth Spectacular is coming next week.

Fusion episode coming soon. All kinds of stuff. And we are obviously going to take a break for Christmas and New Year's because, you know, it's going to take a break. That's why we made a holiday spectacular for you. Okay. That's all the business. well, that's out of the way.

It's not about some news. I feel like we got to start with SPF. I feel like we had to start with crypto. We can do it quickly. Richard, you were there. It's always time to start with crypto. I told you. 21 and 3, I'm becoming a big crypto guy.

Tell me what is going on. By the way, we had this conversation like last week or the week before where we're like, should you interview Sam Bank and Fried? Is that journalism? And it's like, oh, yeah. My dude talks so much. He's going to jail. This guy just couldn't stop doing interviews.

I was trying to track the interviews that he was doing. I was going to write up some of them. But he just kept doing more. And every time I would take a look at him, say, oh, there's a couple interesting things here. He was always live doing another interview as I was thinking about it, right up until he was arrested in the Bahamas. Right until he gave his final interview to the police. Yeah. Now he's giving very different interviews than, unfortunately, are not live streamed.

But yes, he has been arrested in the Bahamas in case you were wondering over the last month after FTX collapsed and they discovered that everyone's money wasn't there like it was supposed to be. It happened pretty quickly, I think, in comparison. our colleague Lisbonne Pado pointed out, he was arrested a little bit more quickly than Elizabeth Holmes was when Therunel started to go down. And if you've been watching the amount of money that he is responsible for that appears to not be there anymore, it's quite a bit more than what Elizabeth Holmes was basically convicted of stealing. So assuming it gets to that point, you can imagine what the possible sentence could be. But let's run it back. Let's just see what happened. in November, in kind of mid-November, FTCS, the second biggest crypto exchange in the world,

collapsed. Suddenly, there was a run on the bank. People tried to get their money out, and there was no more money, pretty, very quickly. And no one knew what was happening. There was a supposed buyout by the largest crypto exchange finance. They looked at the books quickly backed off. Fast forward to now, all the regulators, all of the celebrities, everyone who used to be Sam Bankman-Fries friend when he was a billionaire, are now running from FTCs.

They're now pointing the finger and saying that this guy lied. He is everything wrong. And they can't really explain why they didn't see these lies before. But that's where we are now. And now we have, we have all of his interviews. And we're also getting kind of the investigations that have been going on, especially over the last month. We're finding out more. We're finding out real hard information because it's coming out in the bankruptcy filings. It's coming out now in the civil charges and the criminal charges that have been filed against Bankman Fried. And it's not good. We found out that a couple of days before the bankruptcy happened, One of the executives at FTCS was telling the Bahamian authorities that Banglain Fried had moved money that was supposed to be customer funds to his own research firm, Alameda, which, if that is true, then that would be probably a crime. Yeah, that's it. That's just jail. Yeah. That's just a huge spot a ticket to jail. So, yeah, there's kind of a long list of criminal activities that have been going on. And we've got breakdowns of the many lies that he's told and the charges that he's facing and everything that's going on.

But I've been living the Sam Bankman-Fried interview life for the last few weeks. I no longer know what is true or where I am. When you guys are looking at this, like, what do you see for the case? What are you wondering about? Is Tom Brady going to jail? I mean, so a bunch of influencers have been hit with lawsuits. There's a class action lawsuit against a bunch of celebrities, including our boy Tommy, who probably needs to win another Super Bowl just to get a piece of his heart back.

I don't know. That's going to go well for him. I feel like we have to mention that the fact that Tom Brady destroyed his life over San Bamkin, Fried, and FTCS every single episode. Every single episode. You know, here's what I worry about. And then what I'm, what I've been thinking about. This whole thing is a Ponzi scheme, right? Even their ads, even you just go back and look at that super ride with Larry David.

The ad is about not being left out, which is like the classic Ponzi scheme thing to advertise. It's like, are you in? Like, can you get in at the bottom of the period so the people at the top of your end can cash out. and if you just create that sense of FOMO, like the Ponzi scheme will sustain itself a little bit longer. It was never about utility. It was not about what you could do with crypto. And at the end of the day, like, what you can do with crypto is still mostly crimes. Like, it's basically crimes.

Some of them are gambling. You can buy a coffee from like a coffee house in Austin takes Bitcoin. Yeah. The coffee house, I'm sure that coffee house is connected to crimes in some way. I don't know if that's true. Again, if you are a lawyer with a. this point, either Jeopardy or Austin Coffee House,

just stop listening to the shit. I didn't name it. It's fine. Yeah, who knows? Nobody knows which one it is. But, like, fundamentally, the utility of crypto is more related to crime than not. Yeah. And there's this piece of the puzzle where all the people who are still in crypto, all

the investors, all the technologists, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, they're like, Sam Bankman Fried's a liar. No one should be talking to him anymore. Every time he talks, he just makes this all look bad. He pulls the wool over people's eyes. The journalist is you credible. Blah, blah, blah. Just like, get him in jail, so you can move on with their lives. And I think what they're failing to see is there's still no more utility there. And actually putting someone in jail is not easy to do, right? Like, proving a financial crime

of this scale past a reasonable doubt and actually winning the case with the lawyers that, you know, he's going to be able to put together and the defenses he'll mount and just the cloud of obfuscation that he will put together is this going to take a long time. And I think there's this immediate rush to judgment in all of this. Like he's a fraudster. He should go to jail. Let's close this chapter of crypto history and move on to the next thing, which is not clear. But let's move on to it as fast as we can. Let me mention one of my favorite parts of this is that the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTCS has brought back all of our failed to crypto friends from years past. Mark Carpalis who ran Mount Gox, a crypto exchange that failed in, what was that, 2015 now?

That was many years ago. One of the first big crypto failures of exchanges that went away and took away everyone's money with it. He's been tweeting endlessly about it. He's been giving advice to Sam Bangman-Fried about what he should do and how mostly he shouldn't talk to anyone. He should only talk to his lawyers. And he would know because he has been there. And he is. I have a question.

Are there any exchanges, crypto exchanges, that are not Ponzi schemes? I don't know how to legally answer that. Because all of them basically, they take your money and then they say now our money grew bigger and we'll give you your money back. But like, is the cash, is the U.S. dollar or other? Wait, are you describing the exchanges or the tokens? The exchanges, like the exchanges. Are they because all Ponzi schemes?

There's this weird thing in crypto. Like the way that we talk about crypto and the way that people who are in it, who are feel like they're in it, like the real players in crypto talk about it, are very different. Yeah. Like we talk about cryptocurrency and some kind of theoretical things. The people who are there who are trying to make some money, who are looking at it and saying, this is going to be my nest egg. This is how I'm going to get rich. They have bought some crypto. They've traded back and forth. They own different cryptocurrencies. They have it all in their wallet. And they're

trying to turn it into something bigger. And what many of these companies offer is, okay, so you can loan, you can give us your crypto and we'll store it and we will somehow increase the value of it. We will do some magical thing, which, sounds a lot like, I don't know, Bernie Madoff, and then there will be more money. And they promise... Right, and they all have their own tokens. That's where you're getting at, right? Like, FTCS had its own token.

That's where the magic money comes from. When you start talking about pay to earn stuff, when you start talking about practically everything in Web3, these companies have their own tokens, and that's where they're like, okay, so that's where the money's going to come from. But actually the money comes from other people depositing more money in it, and that's how you can get your money out, which would probably be a ponzi scheme.

It just kind of feels like they probably need to address that. More than even the utility thing? If they address that, they wouldn't have businesses. Right, because the utility thing is way hard to address. Like, I just want to point at, I mentioned Brian Oshan from Coinbase before. And he seems like a smart guy. You know, he's out there.

He's public. He had an interview to our friend Ben Thompson's trajectory this past week. It's a good interview. You should read it. It's a lot of regulation. Where come from who should do it? But there's this section in it where he's like, all the journalists failed at interviewing SBF. And so Ben,

his journalist. And I was like, all right, you be the journalist. What question would you ask? How would you defeat SBF interview? And like, you know, I don't want to get too in the weeds or like nable gazing by journalism, but like I, I interview people. It's like you, if you approach an interview, like you're going to win it, like most people, A, will not talk to you. And B, also, what are you going to win? Like, you're not the cops. Like, you can just get people to talk to you as openly as they can. And like, people can judge the answers. But Ben asks him, okay, you're the journalist. So you have all these criticism of media. Like, what would you ask? And Brian Armstrong's answer is like, I got nothing left to ask this guy. Like, we just need to move on. And it's like,

well, that's the trap, right? Like, you just don't want people to scrutinize the fact that all these exchanges are mostly unregulated. You all hated Gary Anselor in the SEC and all these other regulators would be regulators for even daring to think that they should regulate you. And now the thing happened that happens to unregulated financial institutions. and you're like, where were the regulators? Why didn't they see these obvious lies? I mean, I've got a question that he could ask. Wait, I just like, until you break that cycle,

this is always going to feel scammy to me. I know what he could ask, Sam Bankman-Fried. He could ask, why is it that every time there's a run on your business and people try to get their money out, suddenly your site crashes and people can't get money out that day.

I'm sorry, that's a question about Coinbase that I would ask to Brian Armstrong if he would answer it. He, for some reason, hasn't. Yeah, it's pretty weird. It's pretty shaky. All right, we got to stop talking about crypto. That is like the big news. It's in the background. I'm actually curious to ask the audience this.

We got comments on the quick post down our site. So when you see this, go find the Verchcast on our site. Leave us comments because I want people to engage with us on our own site. I think part of the crypto story is partially tech, right? It's obviously a technology story in its way. But it is quickly becoming some other kind of story. It's quickly becoming a bank regulation story or, I don't know, like a politics story, a financial system story. So I'm just curious how people want us to cover it. Because for the longest time, we could cover crypto as tech, right? It was like really interesting tech with massive sociopolitical implications, like Verge Strixone stuff, right? Yeah. And now we're just at the level of like, oh, this guy's just

stole money. He's just a bank robber. There's like not actually a lot there. As the RU of FTCS said in one of the hearings in Congress this week. This is just good old fashion crime. They just stole the money. They just had the money and they just took it and spent it themselves. It's not, you don't have to, like, try and figure out what the algorithm did. They just took the money and bought jets and houses and stuff. Yeah.

At least Elizabeth Holmes went and she built something. Was it good? Did it work? No. No. Did she? She took a, she took another device from another device from another. company that worked, took it apart, made it work in a shittier way.

And gave people bad results on important medical tests. So I don't know about that one. Also, she, I mean, she's going to jail. The other guy's going to jail. A lot of people go out of jail. The one part of this that is extremely a verge story. Yeah. Like the most verge story is like the new CEO of FDX is like testifying in the Senate.

And he's just like, they fucking used quickbooks. He's just like, horrified. He's like, what business at this scale uses QuickBooks? And he's just like gesturing it like the panel of senators. And the senators have no idea. Like they don't know. They're like his QuickBooks bad.

They're like, I use it for my taxes. It's very good. That moment also on our site, just go watch it. It's, I mean, it is incredible. Okay. So that's SPF, FTCS, whatever. Other big news from this week, it's kind of in the same zone, right? Like big breaking news would change the whole industry.

Hasn't happened yet. hard to talk about. It's a report from Mark Graham and Bloomberg. Apple might be opening iOS to third-party app stores in response to European legislation called the Digital Markets Act. This is another one of those European regulations that is like an inkblot test for how you feel about the power of democracy to regulate big companies. And also an ink block test for how you might feel about the nature of time and deadlines. Because no one knows when it will actually happen or by which process the various nations of Europe will come together and actually implement the law that they have theoretically passed or not passed or in some manner of

of working have assembled words together. The EU is just the cutting edge of politics in just the, it's like a probabilistic field of lawyers and like every potential outcome is happening. but no one knows when. I like that they kind of like create laws like I assigns stories. Just like, you know what? I got an idea. Run with it.

And a bunch of like a billion people are like, okay. It's great. But yeah, walk us through this, Deli. Because like this Apple news, I mean, I think it feels kind of big, even though there's the whole question of how any of this law and stuff is going to be enacted. Yeah. So the Digital Markets Act is one of these things. uncovering for a long time. Again, we've been covering it sporadically as different parts of the

regulation get debated, added to the law. The law has to pass the member nations of the EU themselves have to pass the law. But it's supposed to happen in 2024. And the DMA is, it tracks along a lot of the antitrust bills in this country. You can see that the sort of two legal regimes are playing off of each other. And the basics, the basic ideas are going to be familiar to any Verchast listener. If you have a done. dominant position on if you run an app store or you're another kind of dominant ecosystem player, you are a gatekeeper to all kinds of other businesses. And so app stores in particular, Apple and Google are the gatekeepers. They are referred to in the act as gatekeepers. And there's all the

things that gatekeepers have to do to open up the markets. And so in this case, it's allow side loading, allow other app stores. It's reduced the in-app payment fees. There's this laundry list. It actually has to happen. And just like the U.S. B-SBC thing, Apple has no choice. If they want to sell iPhones in Europe, they've got to comply with the law. Right. There's no, they can't sandbank freedom. So it seems likely, probable, a certainty that Apple is building systems that would bring it into compliance with European law.

Just like, is it a certainty, and we've heard Greg Jawswey Act say to Joanna Stern, for example, that, yeah, they're going to comply with the law around USBC. Right. So, of course, there were, there's been an. iPhone with a USBC connector inside of an Apple lab for a decade, right? They're always ready to do these things. But I think what is happening now is Europe in particular is passing laws to make the things happen. So next year we might see an actual iPhone ship with a USBC connector. And next year's version of iOS will at least have the hooks to allow compliance with the Digital Markets Act in Europe, allow side-loading, allow other app stores, allow other payment systems. The questions are, does that

actually mean Apple is going to stop demanding the money from the app companies? Because that has not been the case in all the other markets, right? In South Korea, where they are required to allow other in-app payment systems, they charge a fee. In the Netherlands, where it's like narrowly tailored to dating apps, and they have to allow other payment providers from dating apps. It's very strange. They charge 27%. Adi and McKenna have written a piece about this for our site.

A couple weeks ago, which we mentioned on the show. You can do the culture war. Elon can do the culture war and get the antitrust bill passed. because he was mad at Tim Cook. But Apple is just going to say, you owe us the money. In one way or another, Apple's going to get its money. They're good at it. Tim Cook is good at it.

So the big questions around the EU bill and the DMA and all this stuff is, is the bill written in a way that closes whatever loopholes Apple might find? And just the complication of European law is such that I can't even tell you when this bill is going to pass, let alone what are all the loophole? are closed. If they have to do it, will it apply if you don't live in Europe? Will we have two versions of iOS suddenly? Yeah, I mean, that's another one, right?

Will Apple keep the phone lockdown in other countries? Now, the EU says the latest date, quote unquote, gatekeeper companies have to comply is March 6, 2024, but there's like a gated series of other compliance dates about notifying regulators and disclosing your changes. There's just a lot of moments to argue along the way. for Apple. And then there's this important piece of the puzzle, which is you might do this in Europe, but you might definitely not allow this to the United States or China or your other big markets. And that, to me, is going to be the most interesting piece. Like, are we going to start

doing like region locked iPhones? Like we used to do like VHS tapes or whatever, like or Nintendo games. Oh my gosh. Are there going to be, are there going to be apps that have more capabilities outside of the United States because they don't have to go through Apple's App Store rules? Is that going to be a good experience for people. Like I have long thought that Apple has sort of tamped down on innovation on its phone because of the App Store process. I think they should open it up. But I have lived through a mobile phone market where there were multiple competing

app stores and independent distributions of apps. That wasn't great. Shout out to my friend Dieter Bone who made an entire documentary about Hanspring. Like that wasn't a great market for those early phones. And Apple actually did innovate by doing the app store. So there are questions to be asked here. I was just thinking in a world where Microsoft can't ship game streaming because Apple won't let them, we might be losing more than we're gaining by Apple's control of the store.

Yeah. I mean, I think we're definitely going to get region locked iPhones. I think that's like we all just need to like make our peace with it now. We're going to be importing our phones from Europe so we can have the really good phones. It's always going to be a nightmare. Like we're finally out of that phase where you had to really think about. what network you were on when you bought your iPhone. And we're just going to go right back to having that weird little question of,

okay, do I buy it unlocked from the U.S.? Or really unlocked from Norway? I think that we're not going to have so much the hardware difference. It was just a software difference. And now I got a VPN to Luxembourg so that I can play Fortnite on my iPhone. And that sounds hot. We're going to be back to like jailbreaking, right? like but instead of jailbreaking just so we can sign stuff onto our things we're going to be like okay now i'm in europe

and that's just going to be your phone the VPN market's going to explode yeah it's going to be great i just the phones know where they are right at the end of the day the phone has a GPS chip and apple can can read it whatever it wants and i that is i think that's the big question mark here there is the other question mark about the nature of the EU regulatory process which i just i don't want to I don't want to under-emphasize just how nebulous all of it is. But it makes sense that Apple is preparing to comply with it. It's just, is it going to be effective? It isn't going to mean anything to us here.

Is the United States going to take the cover of this happening, of this report, and shove some antitrust stuff into this omnibus bill that appears to be passing in the lame duck session that Congress is in that. Like, all these things would happen. Oh, I hope they don't. I mean, I want, like, antitrust stuff, but I don't want it shoved in at the last minute into an omnibus bill. bus bill. That just seems unpleasant. You have like a stylistic difference. Yeah. It's like, it's like, ah, now I have to like read this whole bill because what if there's more than one part of it? Like, that's too many words for me to read. It's Christmas.

Well, good news is we have a high-end policy desk with McKenna Addie to read it for you. Thank you. That happens. Maybe there's just rumors that might happen. Yeah. But you can see right now how the United States in Europe are kind of bouncing back and forth on antitrust stuff, particularly regulating the big tie companies. And I think Elon has provided more cover for antitrust stuff in regard to Apple because of the perceived content moderation issues with the store than ever before. Right. You can see how you might scoot some anti-trust stuff along because you've got the cover of now both Europe doing it, right? It's already going to happen anyway over there. And you've got the cover of being whatever kind of free speech

warrior you think that you're being. Yeah, but I think like my one concern there is that the GOP has historically been like, yeah, we're for antitrust, but only when it can, only when it, like, pertains to censorship. Otherwise, you can build as big a monopoly as you want. And so I just don't, I don't know. I'm real reluctant with our current Congress and their inability to, like, parse a lot of tech, like, really technologically advanced concepts to create a bill with actual teeth to it. Yeah, and that's why they're going to shove it into a bill at the end of the year and call it a day. It's going to be gross. I think that's why those rumors are out there.

I don't know if it's going to happen. It just does the rumors. Yeah. Actually, speaking of Elon, we should talk about Elon quickly before we take a break. As always, there's a lot of Elon stuff.

Most notably, Twitter Blue is back. Elon caved to Apple. It's 1199 on iOS. It's $8.99 on the web, $7.99 on the web. So he's just paying the Apple tax. Yeah.

Even after raging about it, he's paying it. There's the check marks are different colors. I think the verge has a gold one because we're a media organization. Government organizations get a gray checkmark that says official. I will note here that a deeply hilarious situation over the past week is that various members of the Norwegian government, including the prime minister, were labeled as Nigerian government officials and just tweeted Elon. And he eventually was like, sorry, and they fixed it. And when I say for a while, it was like a day and a half.

And they were just like, this isn't... This is not where we live. This is not where we do our work. The tweet was very funny. It was very much like, although we enjoy our diplomatic relationship and alphabetical proximity to Nigeria, we do not live in Nigeria. So that's going great. It's back.

We'll see how it goes. A lot of people have stepped back their Twitter usage in the past few weeks. I'm one of them. Our friend Casey Newton is one of them. A bunch of our staff has done it. It just feels like people don't want to participate in whatever he's doing. I think it was kind of rough, especially earlier this week when he made a bunch of transphobic jokes online. And then he went and appeared with Dave Chappelle in a very weird, bizarre appearance in San Francisco.

And like, Chappelle is also kind of notoriously transphobic. And I know a lot of people I know were like, I think that's it for me. I think that's my moment. So the moment that a lot of people mentioned to me was when Yol Roth, who was Twitter's former head of trust and safety, Elon just like basically sick to mob on him. Yeah. So Yol Roth had written his PhD thesis about the responsibility of sites like Grindr to provide safe experiences for young people who are using the site anyway.

Right. Right. So if you are running a site at Grindr, you know that young gay people are on your site. Okay. You can't stop them. They there. So his PhD thesis was you have a responsibility to create safer experiences for them. And Elon tweeted an ad hoc.

Out of context paragraph of the PhD thesis that says that explains a lot. And he sicked a mob of, you know, the crazy groomer, culture war people on his own former head of trust and safety. He then had to flee his home. And that is just about as bad faith shitbox behavior as it gets. And that to me, I think, was I don't need to make free shit for you. A hundred percent. I'm like, it's my birthday tomorrow. Like, I'm too old for free.

Well, we also saw the Elon jet stuff. Richard, you've been following this. Is Elon Jet back on Twitter, or do I only get it on Instagram now? It is at this particular instant, as I am talking, and I can't say anything for beyond that, still suspended again. It was suspended, and then it was back, and then it was suspended again, and they changed the rules, and they said, no, actually, you can release location data maybe, sometimes if it's a day after. And there's been a whole saga of Elon claiming that someone was stalking him, and attacked a car that had his child in it, which many people can certainly understand and relate to. But his reaction is, I think the problem is this guy who is tweeting public information,

publicly available information about where my jet is, is the problem of someone attacking my car that I was not in. So he has to stop. And he took that off of Twitter, which is also something he promised he wouldn't do, but Elon's promises aren't worth anything. You can just ask Twitter, the company that he said he would buy and then didn't want to. So it's like TMZ and all of the like paparazzi? No, this is even. This is farther back. This is like 2005, six, seven,

Gawker, stalker. Yeah. Do you remember this? Yeah. I mean, I was a former geo media employee.

You've got to remember this. I mean, I had this debate. I was there already. Like, Gawker stock, if you don't remember, Gawker is a website. RIP.

Many, many, many things have happened. Gawker was a website. For a minute, the height of its powers, Gawker had, I mean,

it was crowd sourced. Yeah, you could just write in and be like, I saw Taylor Swift walking out of... And this feature was called Gawker Stocker. And it had a map. And like, literally, I mean, like, the celebrities went crazy. They all hit on the map.

They went crazy. It's dangerous. This whole debate occurred already. I promise you in like 2007. Right. What you're at now is Elon has a jet as a transponder. The location of the transponder is publicly available. The flight planes of the jet are publicly available.

Well, they were. They aren't now. Well, no, they still are. They still are. There's just this one Twitter account. It's not available. No, he filed a thing with the FAA so that he doesn't have to do that anymore because apparently that's a thing he has not that succeeded in such far.

Or is trying to anyway. Yeah. Yeah. And they have to keep that they have to keep those transponders on because they are used by all of the different air traffic controllers and all those air traffic controllers are paid for by the federal government. Like basically he has to do it because it's federal law. He doesn't just get to be special.

And he's upset about the fact that he can't just. And the Supreme Court has ruled that the transponder data is not a publishing is not a violation of first. I mean, it's like, he's just like off in the weeds of like he hates this one Twitter account. I get it. I like, I get it. And like having, he's now rewriting Twitter policy to say that you can't say where anyone is without their consent, which if you read it would say that the NORAD Santa Tracker is done, first of all. Second, the people who follow college coaches around to see who's getting hired or fired. Their accounts are done.

Also, you can't live stream anything or post a picture because if you post a picture, because if you post a picture and someone's in it, you know, know where they are, you've now broken the rules and your account will be deleted. Let me just say this and I say directly, welcome to hell, Elon. This is what it's like when you make speech regulations. When you appoint yourself the speech police and you start with all legal speech, you quickly discover there's a bunch of shit that is legal that you don't like that no one likes. And most of this conversation has been focused on whether or not.

we should let racist people be like the size of people's skulls determines how intelligent they are. Oh. Which is legal. That's just a legal, dumb-ass thing you can say in this country that most scaled social media platforms are like, well, the problem with doing that all the time is it makes all the cool people go away. And then we're left with shitheads. So we don't want the shitheads to do that. So the cool people hang out. This is more or less the calculus that has made on social platforms every day.

Do you want cool people? You can't have racists. Do the cool people make us more money than the racist? They do. Goodbye, racist. We want cool people. It's not complicated. But that's where almost all the energy of the conversation is.

Right. But the reality of it is that eventually your desire to be around who people always wins. So you just like reduce the reach of the racism or whatever you're going to do. I mean, most people's desire, not Elon's. But he wants to turn that knob down. I mean, he, right? Freedom of speech, not freedom. He's got all the things.

The problem is like, great. you can turn the knobs on that, whatever, your incentives are always the same and they will always land in the same places. It's when you get into things that are just flat out legal. Yeah. Publicly available government data about where planes are that you don't like. You have to start reaching. And I am very sensitive to the notion that people should not know where I am all the time. I think that's bad. I get it. I'm with you. But the proximate relationship to plane in city and guy attacks car does not exist. resist. Right. Right. It's actually not true. You can't when he, he's, he swore he's going to, or he tweeted he's going to sue this college kid that runs the tracker because his car was attacked. And you have to go to court. I hope he files his lawsuit. If the college kid is like any other Gen Z college kid, they've already got a merch store ready to go. This lawsuit gets filed. They've already got a Patreon set up. Like that's just hustle culture with the teens. But he's going to show up in court and he's going to have to try to convince it.

judge or a jury, that there is a proximate relationship, there's a cause and effect between this Twitter account and this person doing the thing that they did. And the Twitter account, just importantly, does not actually tell you where Elon Musk is. It tells you where his plane is. And like, it just says it's in this city at this airport, which are, I think they're supposed to be guarded and difficult to get into and do things around. That's my understanding of how airports work. in the United States. So like... He doesn't like it.

And he's the speech police on this platform. So he's now, he's reached himself. You know, you keep saying these legal words. But this is the thing that he's criticizing

all of the previous administrations of Twitter for. And I will remind everyone once again, criticism of Elon Musk administration on Twitter is in no way praise for the previous dipshit Twitter administrations. These things are not opposites.

They've all been bad. But he's doing the thing that every other platform ends up doing. in particular Twitter has ended up doing, which is you have an outcome, you have some pre-written set of rules, and then because you control the rules,

you can interpret them any way you want to arrive at the outcome you would like. So he's like, this validates my rule against public safety, and it turns out that he both writes the rules and is the judge. And at the end of the day, that's the thing that delegitimizes you

is no one believes that the rules mean anything because the judge just gets to make up whatever they want. And every platform has arrived at this exact moment and had to make some kind of decision. Facebook notably set up a Supreme Court, like a full-on external Supreme Court to create the appearance of legitimacy for the interpretation of its rules. And Twitter, notably, did not do that. Right. They just do whatever they want whenever they want. Every platform just does whatever they want, whenever they want. And Elon has just fallen directly into the trap because of the Elon, I know we got a cut to break in a second.

But I have one question. One final question. Does this make Elon Musk judge dread? I just want to know. Okay, so you act like he might lose in court. And maybe, maybe the legal argument doesn't hold up or something like that. But what if the person he's going against hires a lawyer who happens to be big into Q&O again? Yeah.

It's going to get messy. It is true that the legal system does not always produce the outcomes. I go back to why didn't it take a little bit longer to arrest St. Bankman-Fried? Because you had to put together a case. Government's kind of lazy. It's not, I'm not out here being like,

the government's great at this. They routinely fail at getting the right outcome in court. But I think this one is very much, you show up and you just have to prove that thing A led to cause B. And in this case, there's no connection between the two things. He just doesn't like it. Yeah.

And so he, reached to a conclusion. And that's the thing that delegitimizes the regulator, right? And this is why people hate platforms. This is why ultimately, everybody hates the person who makes the content moderation rules. He wishes he was Judge Shredd. That is the answer to your question, by the way.

He's the Judge Dredd sequel that nobody watched with Joel Kinneman in it. That's rough. I like Joel Kinneman, but I didn't see it. By the way, on top of all this, the FTC is out there asking questions like, do you have enough money to pay for the compliance that you are legally required to do with us. It's rough over there. All right, we've got to take a break.

We'll be back. This is going to lead us through what's going on in the streaming wars. We'll get back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start

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That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time, you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

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Yeah. But go read the coverage and like vulture in other places. They also like, it's fun to watch. They upset you in particular, I know, because Westworld also got pulled. I'm sorry. I was trying not to lead with Westworld. I know. I could feel it and like I could hear the, the soundtrack in your head for this show. Yeah, what's the show with more than five people watching it instead of what I was? Yeah, Westworld is yanked off. They still have me as a viewer. I'm in. My subscription is still good. It will, it will continue to be good. It will continue to be good.

as long as they keep the good content on it on HBO Max, which they have. Wow. I'm talking about Arlis, which is what I'm always talking about. Arlis. That is the only show that they need to have. Is Arliss on? I thought it was on Showtime. So you're just like deep in the archive.

I don't think Zazov knows Arlis exists, first of all. Like that's how you know your sense. Sandra was on it. That's all you need to do. As long as he doesn't have to pay residuals on it, it's fine. But so they pulled this show, they pulled F Boy Island. I'm so sorry, Nelai. they pulled Westworld. I'm so sorry, Richard. I know you guys both really loved those shows

respectively. But they yanked a whole bunch of this stuff. And part of this is part of the same calculus. They've been pulling a lot of shows over the last year. It's residuals, right? Like, we've got a whole bunch of contracts coming up next year, including ones for the Writers Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild, and they're all going to be negotiating for higher residuals because they want more of this. Like, if everything's on streaming, that's where the money is. they would like a cut of that. And you've seen it already. A lot of these writers and stuff are out there complaining right now about like how high

their residual checks were with traditional TV where they could support themselves after writing a couple of really banger episodes because they'd go into syndication and they just live on that money. And then they can't do that in the streaming world. It's just done. Like that kind of way of making a living as a writer is gone. So there's this residuals conversation. But there also, it turns out,

lot of these shows are getting pulled because they're going to pack them together and sell them to what I learned is now called a fast network. It's good. They've tried a few different acronyms for this. What is the acronym? This is my new favorite though, because used to as like the cheap, shitty networks, but now they're fast networks. Free ad-supported TV is what that means. And that means like the weird garbage version of plaques when you first download plaques and you haven't put any of your other stuff on. Other stuff. Look, do you want to watch this movie with other stuff that I've legally acquired?

That's one, that's an example of it. I think Tooby is an example. Pluto, I think is an example. Crackle when it existed. I think crackle's gone now. I think it died finally. But these still exist. There's a lot of them.

The Roku Channel. Roku Channel, that's probably the most active, best known one. And so he's trying to pack it up and sell it. there. So someone probably Roku is going to be like, do you want to watch Westworld? And a full season of that Joss Whedon show that got canceled right when it

got really good. And it took way too long. The Nevers? Raised by Wolves. No, that's a different one. That's a garbage show. That was from, that's a bad show, Richard. No, who did that? That was the guy who did the original alien. I can't remember. Who made what or which show they were on. Yeah, he made it.

There are too many shows, which is what your article mentions. Yeah, and that's part of it too. There's too many shows. And so, so all of this stuff got pulled, HBO Max is, is like, it's really kind of unclear what he's trying to craft out of HBO Max or Max, whatever you want to call it. Shout out to better Maxes in the world. She's very cute. I personally think they should just give my daughter the streaming service. I think she'd program it better. It would just be like bluey all day and all night. And then whatever garbage YouTube that she watches, which is honestly terrifying. She'd be like, I don't care. Who has the rides to Bluey, but it's coming on my network. Make it happen.

It's basically how that would go. There's a, there's a Barbie cover of girls just want to have fun that she loves. And then we'll be in the car and actual girls just want to have fun. We'll come on. And Becky and I will be like, do you want to listen to the good version of this? And she's like, this isn't Barbie. And then both of us are hearts break in the car. We have to pull over and just cry, wailing for hours on end because we can't get our daughter like Cindy Lopper. Well, she's like, play the good one in the backseat. It's very bad. This is, to Richard's point, Alex, this was your article, right?

There was a golden age of streaming when everyone is flooding the zone. Yeah. Honestly, in search of like monopoly-style profits. Right. Right? To be the one true streaming network with the most subscribers. They were paying for a lot of things. A lot of interesting stuff got made.

And now all that stuff is kind of getting canned. And I think what you're seeing with Warner in particular, is some changes that needed to have in that studio are happening. We should talk about the DC universe or whatever's happening there. But the business model is reverting to traditional television. And that's, I mean, it makes sense, right? Right. Where you make some stuff, you run it once and you find a syndication window and sell it again.

Yeah. And I think a lot of people want those syndication, that, like, syndication to return, right? Like, syndication is dead. Used to the business of TV was you go, you get to your fifth season. Every season's 20 episodes. So you hit your 100th episode, that means you're syndicated. When you're syndicated, that means you get a really good deal with all these smaller channels that syndicate you. And that means everybody who's working on that show suddenly has like their house paid. Like their retirement is set when you hit a syndication deal. And that disappears with streaming because nobody wants to pay syndication forever, right? Like zero people want to do that. Nobody can afford that. That's why we see stuff go on Netflix and then go away. So a lot of people, including probably Zazlov, want to bring that back and they want to bring back the market. So in many ways, Zazlov is not the villain. He's actually good.

Oh, boy. This is a big change for you, Alex. This is a big change for you. I hate him. I despise this guy because I think everything he's done has been poorly messaged. I just think he's like a bad messenger. You're just big on messaging. You're like, I don't want an antitrust bill in the omnibus.

I was like, Zazel was doing the right things with messaging it the wrong way. Be gentle. You're just looking for a gentle touch. Yeah, 2020 was hard, y'all. Like, let's be more gentle with how we announce things. But I think, like, his calculus here is he wants to, he knows that network TV is dying. And that's where he made all of his money. And so he's like, how do I reinvent network TV and bring it here?

Meanwhile, Disney is like, how do I own all of the IP in the world? Yeah. Period. And that's what, that's where Netflix has been doing as well. I mean, that's, again, the point of your- Well, Netflix is like trying. I think Netflix is in a weird place. because they are so tech-focused that they don't quite understand how that TV industry worked before them.

And they don't necessarily want to. And that's why we see things like they go and they sell ads, but they're only selling ads to people who still pay $8 a month. Meanwhile, the fast trend. By the way, I mentioned the other acronyms. Yeah. The one that died was Avod, ad-supported video on demand. Because it was stupid. And I...

Bad message. It was good. Because it was the opposite of ESP. which is subscription video on demand. And people would say these words to us in dead seriousness. They'd be like the Avod market's booming and I'd be like you

need to reconsider yourself. And they've now arrived at fast. Yeah. Which is free and ad-supported TV. Fine. It's fast. Very good. What you mean is TV ads. But it's keeping companies like Vizio and Roki in business and the studios and everyone else wants a chunk. They're seeing that. They're seeing these profits and they want a piece of it. Yeah.

So it's fascinating. You mentioned Netflix and they're doing ads. report this week. Netflix wrote out its ad. They sold a bunch of stuff, right? They're doing the ads in partnership with Microsoft. I don't want to overstate this because even the people involved in the story we're trying not to overstate it.

But Netflix is returning the money to the advertisers because they can't deliver the inventory. Right. So if you are a digital advertiser, this is our business too. By the way, disclosure, I meant Netflix. This show is called The Future of You. should go watch it. I'm going to mention Peacock. Quick, do another one. Do another one. Comcast is an investor in a parent company of Ox Media.

Whatever. Now you know this information. But the way like the ad business works is like the verge does like millions of page views a week, right? We have ad slots on the page views. So we have inventory and we like tell advertisers, you come buy this inventory, we'll show you some impressions of ads and there's like a number. Netflix doesn't have the inventory. Like not enough people. have signed up for the ad plans, and they're not watching enough shows for Netflix to keep its promises

about how many ads will be shown to people. Yeah. So they're just returning the money. And all the advertisers are basically like, yep, they just started this thing. They ran into it. It's Q4. This is the hot time for advertising

because it's the holidays and all this other stuff. This is what a good partner would do so we can put the money against other platforms where people will actually see the ads. This is all fine. They'll get there in the end. But that's where Netflix is at in, growing that side of its business, which is they don't have the inventory.

They don't have a scaled advertising. Just started November 3rd, I think, was when it launched. So, like, they haven't had a lot of time to build those subscriptions. And they're going to have to build those subscriptions because most people were probably already paid, most people who were paying that $8 when it got bumped up to, what it was $11, $12, are probably still on that plan or just not on Netflix altogether. So, like, yeah, they're going to take it. It's going to take a long time, I think, for them to figure out.

how to do the ads well. And HBO has that head start and that Zazlov knows that business super, super, super well. You love him. I do kind of love him. Like, I respect him. I respect him. Do I hate everything he does? Yes. I don't want to like get too middle school on this, but like you love him. I love it. No, I know. I'm going to like, what's that thing, the little paper thing you would do? Put his name in that. The triangles? Yeah. Where's men? It's you and Zazlav. Me and Zash and MASH. He might as well be pulling your hair, Alex.

I just want to be clear about this. Call me, buddy. Call me Zazlav. But he is like he's trying to bring TV back. And that's good in some cases because financially a lot of people are going to make a lot more money theoretically in that way. Like you bring syndication back. You start selling this stuff to other things. You lean more on advertisers for your profits rather than subscriptions.

You're going to make more money. but that also means you're beholden to those mass audiences, which means we're going to lose a lot of really cool content. Yeah, the comparison I think is most interesting here is music and Spotify. So Spotify, Apple, titled Amazon, whatever. They all have the same basic relationship to the music industry, more or less, right? The music industry makes a bunch of songs. They put them on these services.

You pay the services some money. Hit play. There's a calculation made, and then the artist gets a penny at the end of the day. Right. But they don't own the content. And every time you, the listener, consume the content, there is a series of financial transactions that take place in which the artists, the producers, or songwriters, whoever, receives some benefit. And I think it is fair and it's very clear the industry has spent a lot of time arguing about that set of calculations between you hitting play and the pennies that show up in their bank accounts. And I think those conversations are fair and

honestly the number of penny should go up. Yeah. When you hit play on Netflix, there isn't some payout. Right. Right? Like you pay Netflix some money. You hit play. They own all the content. It's more or less the end of it.

That's the case for Apple as well. It's the case for the TV stream. So the way that the music market works is like Spotify doesn't really own anything. That's why they care about podcasts so much because they get to own the content. Yeah, because that's where they want to own it. So they're not taking a cut of everything, right? They're not paying out some huge percentage of your subscription fee. to someone else, they're making the podcast,

they're on the podcast, that's the end of it. They take all the money. That's where Netflix has been, right? They just, like, pay the money up front and they get 95 Shonda Rhyme shows. Yeah. And like, Sean Arimes gets a huge check, and that's the end of it. Where you're talking about syndication used to be,

you used to make a show, and then you would sell it 500 times. Like, that's why Star Trek exists. The other thing is you'd actually have some idea of how many people are watching it, which Netflix and the others, they're giving out a little bit more information now, but haven't been here. That's part of the issue. That's part of the issue with Netflix we've seen. You know, you on the other end, you press play and no one knows.

Right. Like, they've started talking, they have to be a little more open now because they are selling, they're selling ads. So they have to be more open. But you're still seeing this really weird thing where they're like, oh, yeah, we're going to give you a top 10. So you can see the show's most watch this month. And we're going to give you all these various kind of small analytics.

And then a show will go like, this one, I'm going to talk about it because I really liked it. And I'm sad it's get canceled. But it is part of this conversation. Warrior Nun gets canceled. It had been in like the top 10 for three weeks. It had done really good numbers theoretically. And then it gets canceled. And everybody, like, its fans are like, we did all we could.

You had people like watching it on four different networks in their house because they heard that that was one of the metrics needed to get a show renewed on Netflix. Like they're just like out there making little prayer circles and stuff doing everything they can. Four TVs in a circle. Yeah. All in a circle, staring at each other. And they still didn't get it renewed. And I think earlier this week, one of the executives for Netflix was on, was it Hollywood Reporter, Variety? Just doing an interview and they're like, hey, you cancel stuff, but it seems to be doing well and you cancel it anyway.

What's up with that? And they're like, well, you know, there's a lot that goes into it. We can't get into it right now and keeps on going. And that's not going to work as this industry starts to kind of shift back into that TV space. Because used to, you knew your show was going to get canceled because it was doing terrible in the Nielsen ratings. And like there was a whole lot of different signs from the organization that it was going to do bad. And Netflix doesn't do any of that. Netflix just like spits it out and is like, enjoy.

You didn't enjoy it enough. Goodbye. Yeah, I would just say like the old model was you would make friends. Yeah. And then they would sell it to NBC is the first run and make your first big chunk of money. And then you would sell it to whatever next, like UPN or, you'd sell it. a CW Ovation, like syndication.

And then like, you just got to re-up those syndication deals over and over and over again. The example I'll give, which I always think about all the time, like, I think a lot of people associate Shark Tank with CNBC.

Yeah. But CNBC buy Shark Tank in syndication from ABC. Like, first run Shark Tank is on ABC. CBC just buys it and runs it in prime time at night, like all day every day. Disclosure. I'm a CNBC contributor.

This is a disclosure. Every time we talk about TV, We just have a little ding pop every time you have to do a disclosure. It would be great. There's a lawyer. The Jeopardy's lawyers outside my window just waving at me. It's great. But that's a syndication deal.

And it's a really valuable syndication deal, not only for Shark Tank, but for CNBC, right? They're getting audience at night and they didn't have to pay to produce it. They don't have to pay to make sure it's hit. They already know it's a hit. They're buying it for a discount because it already went out in the first run. And they're getting audience at night. And that dynamic has not existed across any of streaming services. So you're going to, I think we're just seeing the industry move towards this moment where the content no longer belongs to streaming service forever.

The people who make the content are saying we want second, third, fourth bytes at the Apple because making something for one up front payment does not actually make you rich. Selling something once and selling it five times makes you rich. It's coming from the audience too, right? Like audiences are already complaining about, oh, you release everything at once and then I have to watch it and it doesn't have time to build audience. I don't have time to get my friends into it because you're going to cancel it in four weeks if I don't watch it four times at a circle. And so like, I think everybody has kind of gotten fatigued with this glut of content we've gotten. And as much as we've also enjoyed it, right? Like there's a lot of stories we wouldn't have gotten told in a world where people were thinking really hard about what to green light and whatnot.

So, yeah, we're just basically seeing a big contraction, I think, is about to start. And it's going to be really interesting. Sounds like we're going back to basic cable. Like we're going back to HD TV. But you have less power. Dude, Richard, that's where you and I came from, man. Richard and I started his baby cable bloggers and gadget. Richard used to run Engadgett HD.

This is your time, man. More networks than anyone. I will never forget. I said something unchitable about one of the channels where they sell stuff. And the only note they sent was that they changed their name. And I didn't know. And they were just happy that anyone was talking about them. I can't wait for Richard and I to like go to another cable card meeting.

It's coming. It's coming. We're going to have to do it. It's going to be great. We should mention, by the way, we did an entire episode of streaming winners and losers and Charles Plain Moore. We did the whole Go-90 scale. I have a giant note here from Liam that says, don't rehash that episode.

So go listen to it. It was great. It was really fun. We did Go-90 for everyone. I want to end this segment, though, by briefly trying to understand what is going on with the DC universe. with James Gunn. He's making moves. He's making everybody mad, but he's doing apparently the right thing.

What's going on? I mean, he's kind of like Zazlov in the way that he's not messaging correctly. I know. He's not doing it like my boy Zazov. He's my future husband. Zazz, the angel of death, man. Zee baby. You said that.

I was like gently teasing me and you landed at Z baby, not me. Please, please don't include that. I didn't do that. I want to be very clear that I had nothing to do with that. You could see it in your, like, I could see it in your head. I could see you coming there. Like, you're- Yeah, there's a word cloud right here.

Yeah, and I had to read it. I'm compelled to read things when I see that. That's what my co-star said today. It said that I needed to read things out loud. Yeah. But anyway, so a lot is happening there. Obviously, he was put in charge of the, Warner Brothers universe, like DC universe, because they have as big an IP as Marvel. Nobody knew

who Iron Man was when that first movie came out in 2008. Like, zero people knew who Ironman was, and now he's one of the biggest superheroes in the world. And DC has been looking at that for the last 20 years, 15 years, whatever, being furious because they have Superman and they can't figure out how to do anything with Superman. And so they bring in gun. And he's like, yeah, I'm going to change things up. And part of his thing is like, the old shared universe sucks. And to his credit, the old shared universe sucks. It's not great. Even the ones that people like, like Aquaman, like read The Ringer.

I love The Ringer. You should read The Ringer. The Ringer, like, loves Aquaman. And they love it ironically. Like, they're like, this movie is so ridiculous that it's fun to watch. Like when Nicole Kidman shows up, and she's like, I've been living under water wearing fish bones for 20 years. And you're just supposed to be like, oh.

Yeah. I would say that the orchestral fish rock concert is really when I gave up on it. They recut the Justice League movie in four by three and let people watch it that way. That was a thing. That's actually, I might have done this entire segment just to bring up four by three Justice League with your picture. Look, say what you will about Zazlov, our new homie. Yeah.

Z baby. Z baby. He's making cuts. He's knifing things. He brought in James Gunn. James Gun, you know, he clipped Wonder Woman 3. Patty Jenkins put out a statement saying, Wonder Woman 3 is off.

She did not mention that Wonder Woman 2 was a disaster. That wasn't a good, yeah. It was a horrible film. It was like, it was sexist. You're like, how do you have so many women making this movie? And you're making this horrible sexist movie? Like, it was just absurdly bad. I feel like a movie, it's true.

It was sexist in, like, surprising ways. Yeah. The plot of the movie, really centers around taking over someone's body and then having sex with that. Like, not a good thing to do. And also, Wonder Woman was a terrible friend. I just, I just want to, that is what happens in that movie. She's like, how are you in this new body?

And he's like, I don't know. And she's like, cool, let's bang. And you're like, no, no, Wonder Woman, that's not super heroic at all. Stop. It's really quite a lot. So he kills Wonder Woman 3, which seems like the right choice. Henry Cavill is a long statement. He's like, I quit the Witcher.

Whoops. He quit the Witcher. He gave us like not even one of the good Hemsworth brothers to replace him in Witcher. And then he's like, I'm coming for Superman. And they're like, actually, we don't need you. They said they're going to go with a younger version of Superman. So theoretically, Smallville. All right.

All this is happening. whatever. It's all very funny in the background. He's ending the Snyderverse. I just the, yep, Zazelav discovery, changing all of Warner Brothers, changing all this. I just want to rewind the time when the phone company bought

Superman. It's a real thing that happened. AT&T buys Warner Brothers. There is an astro-turf fan campaign from Zach Snyder and his fanboy army, which led to lawsuits. Like, it,

crazy things have happened. Oh, and they're furious. They harassed the phone company so much, potentially with bots that the phone company was like, we're giving you $70 million to remake Justice League. And he was like, cool, it's going to be in 4.3. It's going to be in 4.3. It's not going to be good. It's black and white if you want to watch it that way, but not a...

That part I appreciated. That was like, that's when you just like turn the screw all the way. Yeah. You're like, what if it's... What if it's... so gritty. There's no colors in it at all. I will say they improve the effects. The story does make more sense. It was just the first time.

I don't know, Richard, did you have this reaction? The first time I sat down to watch it. And you're like, oh, this shit's a square. The first time. I thought my TV was broken. I was like. Neelie, how many times have you watched it? I was going to watch it again because of all this DC universe stuff. I was like, I should just try one more time. Ready to get in. And then I like remembered that it's in 4-3.

And I was like, I can't be doing this. Yeah. And by the way, the point, I'm sure the Zach Snyder versus bots are going to come at me. They're like, it's more like IMAX. That's the, that's the stated justification for being in 4-3. Yeah. You're supposed to, you're supposed to watch this movie in IMAX. They're very tall.

And it's like, yeah. But you know what's not IMAX? My phone that I'm going to watch it on. Just despite you. Anyway, just remember the time the phone company about Superman and then got harassed by fanboys in making a three-hour square movie. We live through this together as a family, and I just want to thank you all for me. I mean, I feel, I do feel bad for Cavill, though.

Like, he had to make the square movie. He doesn't even get to make a movie when it's theoretically going to be a good shared movie. With the, like, Photoshopped mustache that was so bad. Oh, my God, that mustache was incredible. He has suffered for our sense. All right, we got to end this segment. We're now fully into whether or not the CGA mustache was like an important story. It's a whole future episode.

All I know is that AT&T and TV. AT AT&T paid $70 million to make a square movie with fake mustache. Zazlov, Zee Daddy wouldn't have let that happen. You just went too far. I would. We're going to take a break. We're going to just reset our brains a little bit. My respect.

Yeah, if you need to pull over and just rest, do it, you know? Take care of yourself. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from What Not. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in.

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All right, we're back. Honestly, we don't have Alex back yet. She's still broken. I'm still looking for my self-respect. She's going to be fine. We're back. We've got some gadgeting to talk about. Can we start with the Prius?

I was like, did you make this entire, it's just cars? This gadget section is just sick. I did make this segment. I was like, this is just Nila. It's time. There's a lot of EV news this week. And most of it is about the sounds that EVs might make. So there's a lot of EV news this week.

Most of it is about like the sounds that EVs might make. And then making it okay. for car people to like EVs. So, like, Hyundai is going to do, like, a fake manual transmission for its electric cars. Yeah. So you can feel good about it. Nilai, do you remember the time I was talking about how people were going to be so upset with electric cars because they wouldn't have transmission? And you said people still ride horses.

Well, Hyundai's doing one and Lexus is doing one. When I think of cars or the rip-in manual transmissions, it's Hyundai and Lexus. That's the only ones I think of. Yeah. So that's happening. They're adding sounds to them. You might recall from several episodes ago, Dodge is adding something called the fratzonic exhaust system to its charger EV. They won't disclose what it is.

But you know what it is? It's speakers that make exhaust sounds in the back of the car. And then there's like the other side of it where it is true that cars should make sounds to keep people safe. EVs make a bunch of sounds. I have a new plug-in hybrid Grand Cherokee. You can run on EV mode. When you put it in reverse, it makes this like whistling sleigh-bell sound.

It's very odd. But it's still like a sound. It like makes sense. I want you to listen to the new Prius because it just, it's evil. It's an evil Prius. Liam, can we run the Prius sound, please? That is the sound of being abducted by aliens.

I don't want that. That's what that is. That's when the concentric circles lift you into the space. Why does it sound like that? Why did they choose that? Can you imagine being high and walking home and hearing that coming down the street? It's a Prius backing up down the whole street. It's a very strange moment in cars. What was the other choice?

What lost out to that at the last minute? What was what lived they developing that wasn't good enough? And they said, no, we have to go with this. Yeah. I assume it was like the price is right sound they make when you get the answer wrong. I will say that Toyota's entire aesthetic for years now, has been angry robots. Like even like a Camry,

like the ultimate family car is like, what if this car transformed the Camry? And so like the sound makes sense. Like in in context of Toyota's entire aesthetic, it's like, yeah, this should sound more like Megatron than not. I imagine that was the meeting. But we have an entire episode of the Veritas coming up

from Andy Hawkins, our transportation editor and Andrew Marino about the sounds of cars because we are in the middle, of just a revolution and what cars sound like because they can sound like anything now because they don't sound like engines.

I actually was with the Rivian folks a while ago and I test her of the R1S. That is a dashboard. It's all screen, obviously. Car makes no sound. And they're like, we had to decide what the turn signals would sound like.

When you click the turn signal to go left or right, people expect a clicking sound. That used to be the sound of a relay clicking on and off to turn the light on and off on the dashboard. Now it's just a screen.

So we realized we can make it any sound we want. wanted and they're like, but if it gets too weird, people won't know it's working. So we've got a whole episode about this stuff because it is wild to think that you could just start car sounds over. Are people hacking their cars to make their own sounds? Because I would absolutely have the wee woo, wee woo, anytime I wanted to use my turn signal. Just the most obnoxious sounds.

Tesla owners have been doing this for a long time. I will say that. I don't try. And obviously, you know, Tesla, everything from the horn, people like have fart sounds in the horn. but now you're just seeing it get beyond the sort of hacker zone to the industry is competing on it, right? It's an area of differentiation in the industry. And like cars are getting weirder and weirder because all the drive trains are becoming so similar. It's neat.

Are we going to have an app store just for the sounds? Ringtones are back. Yeah. Everything comes back. Yeah. Car ringtones are basically back. So that's really cool. Our friend Tim Stevens, who Richard I used to work with and gadget as well,

reviewed the Lucid Air Grand Touring for us. This is like one of the vaporware cars. It's very expensive. He loved it. Go check out that review. Car looks cool. Lots of screens, lots of software in that car,

I will say. But he says the drive train is great. This is a big competitor to Tesla. We talked about Elon already. I would just say this is the year that Tesla is going to face its first real competition. I've complained a lot about vaporware cars in the show. But the Lucid is shipping in like some numbers. Porsche has a new Macon,

the new battery powered McCahn looks very normal to compete with the model Y. You can just see the competition's coming for Tesla in all kinds of other ways. I think that's going to be fascinating. If the car ship, please actually ship, that would be cool. Be into that. They ship that Cherokee yet? Yeah, I have one. You got it.

I have it. I had to go get it blacked out, but we have it now. It is the most Android computer that you have ever driven in your entire life. I don't want that. It runs Android. Like Oreo. It's all very skinned. But every now and again, it just does something that's like, oh, this is a slide Android computer.

That's cool. Do you just point at it and shout Android when it does that? Like, that's Android. I see it. In particular, the profile switching. So if you push the memory seats, it's like me. And that switches the presets and all the stuff on the tablet and the middle of the car. And that's like, oh, this is just Android profile switching.

And it's not going well. It doesn't like doing this. They did not spend money on a good processor. Got to get a snapdraggin in there. You plug it in, we drive it around the battery all the time. It's great. It's doing its job. We should talk about Max real quick.

We should talk about Apple. iOS 16.2 came out this week. Better always on display. I think every reviewer basically complained about the iPhone 14, always on display being too on. So now they reverted to. It was just on. Yeah, it was just like on. It was just like, here's display.

It was very confusing. So they've reverted. You can go change it. They've added end-to-end encryption iCloud. They've added the new feature in Apple Music where you can turn the vocals down, which is pretty cool. A bunch of cool stuff in there. But you know what they haven't shipped yet?

That Pro. Mac Pro with an M2 chip or M1 Max Plus. They haven't shipped really any other M2 Macs, right? They did the air in the 13-inch Pro, but we haven't seen an M2 16-inch Pro. Maybe next week. We haven't seen an M-2 Mac Studio. So it seems like, yep, there's a lot of supply chain stuff going on. They're protests in China.

It just seems like Apple's starting to take the hit of it. that stuff in a way that in the early part of the pandemic, it seemed like wasn't even touching them. Yeah. Do you think it's that or do you think it's the fact that they just, like, they were moving so quickly with these new processors that if they like released a new M2 plus Max or something, you know, eight months after the Macs Studio, it would feel like cannibalizing their various offerings already out there. Well, no, because when they did the Mac Studio, I remember, and it was Johnny Shrugie, he was like, and there's one. one more to talk about, but not at this time.

And like, you just rarely see Apple like wink and nod at the camera about unreleased products, right? But they were, they said it was coming. They said that these other devices. Yeah, they like said out loud. They were going to do it. And they were going to finish their transition this year. So that's just like a big ball. I think the things that are surprising to me are one, the M2 is an upgrade over the M1, but it's

not a huge upgrade. And this is what we found in Monica's review of the M2 air. It's an improvement, to be sure, but it's not this like rocket improvement over the M1. The way the M1 was over the Intel chips. And then on the sort of GPU side, like Apple still isn't there. It's not like the GPU vendors have slowed down. So if you're going to do a pro Mac, like you need high-end GPUs to make that case to people, to that customer base.

And I think, I don't know, there's something there that doesn't seem like it's adding up yet. You can't do weird power per watt graph. against the 4090 when you're actually competing against the 490? You've got some real problems there. That's actually the holdup. Is they're trying to figure out what to label the graphs? They've been working on it for months. I think that's interesting.

And then there's a bunch of stuff in iOS 16.2 that we're kind of waiting on. They said they were going to do a classical music thing. There's like just a bunch of features that have not yet arrived. And I think Apple is just starting to space out what it announces when instead of like these kind of monolithic. which they've been on track to do for years and years and years, but you just see, like, I think it's starting to catch up to them. You know, the early part of the pandemic, they was just hit after hit and they were shipping massive numbers of everything. Yeah. And now here, this weird part where it like, they just tuckered out. It's over. Is it over?

It's like, you know, the protests in China are causing some major changes in that country. The COVID lockdowns there are just like not going to work anymore. Like Apple's starting to feel that hit in a way that I don't think they've been totally open about. And I think, I think, we're just going to see that continue for months to come. Do you think we're going to get the Mac Pro next year, maybe? It feels like it's such a low volume product for them. I think they think the Mac Studio is doing that job as much as it needs to do that job for that market.

Right. If you're a professional premier user or whatever developer, somebody who's like really needs that power, you have already bought a Mac Studio. Right. Or you're on Windows and you're fine and like Apple can come get you next time. So I don't know if they feel the question. What's like the differentiates? Is it just like you'll be able to put an AMD GPU in it if you really want to?

I think the franchise is going to be their GPU. Ooh, making it home. I think it might be the holdup. I think they've got to beat what the other folks are doing. Okay. I think it would be really weird to Apple to Dem Series chips in the AMD GPU. Like it doesn't seem like the way they're going to go. I mean, the big reason that they took so long with the last pro release was they were like,

we want to make it as modular as possible. We want to make it more like a PC, but we don't like PCs. don't talk about PCs here. And so with their current setup, they really can't do that, that modular thing, right? Like a modular Mac Pro where you can replace the M2 with the M3

when it comes out and replace the GPU, that's a lot. Yeah, they're not going to do that. So it's like, what does a Mac Pro look like in a world where they sacrifice that modularity again? Yeah, I don't know.

I think they thought they had an answer. And I think that's why they hinted at it so explicitly. Yeah. I think that answer has changed. And I'll see, I just think it's interesting that like this was supposed to be in transition and like hasn't been here. And it's very rare that Apple misses deadline like this. I think the stakes are low. Yeah.

I think the stakes are much higher for can you ship enough iPhones, which they're struggling with. Are they recalibrating what power means? Like for a machine like that now, now you're talking about selling it to someone maybe who's doing AI processing or tasks that weren't on those old Mac pros. And now maybe they are saying, you know, what we were. doing, we were aiming at a market that doesn't exist anymore. And now somebody who might buy this is doing something completely different. We need to rethink it. We were going to sell it to the crypto market.

Now we've got to sell it to the AI market. There's no way that crypto miners were going to be buying it at max. Just spending $30,000 on a... Yeah, the whole name of that game was like buying, was reducing your cost to run a GPU. If only they could have done crypto mining on old PS3s, that would have been the perfect story, just for the content. It would have been great. All right. Well, Richard, you've been assigned that story. Can you mine a single Bitcoin on a PS3? A fraction. We'll give you just a fraction. We'll see you in 10 years.

We will not be paying your power bill. You can run Linux. I think my PS3 is one of the PS3s you can run Linux on. All right. I'm going to dig out my old PS3 and see if I can get Linux on it to render a Bitcoin. Render a Bitcoin, by the way, an old joke from the show. Shout out Paul Miller. Okay, two things we should talk about to wrap up. One, Instagram, rollout notes, which is seems like it's like weirdo Twitter competitor. but is actually just away messages and is the funniest thing in the entire world. Nothing goes away forever. I'm fully on board with using it as my communication app now.

Like goodbye, Twitter DMs. It's the only thing that's made me open Instagram again in like six months. Yeah. They did it. All the olds are goofing. We are told reliably that the youngs are selling weed. That's very cool. I'm just doing sound garden lyrics.

But you see, there is a wave of innovation in social networks again because of the Twitter drum. That is actually pretty exciting. and like Instagram rolling out this feature in the old days, right? Instagram would only do things that they thought like a billion more people would sign up for Instagram to do something.

No one's signing up for Instagram to use notes. But like, can they capture some minutes of your day back from Twitter as Twitter goes through a spasm? They can so they can justify this stuff. It's actually pretty fun. So Instagram is doing that. And then I want to end, of course, by talking about matter.

Google, it happened. iOS 16.2 brought Matter support So matter is here. The first Eve devices are run on thread. Now support and matter. Google has announced that Nest hubs and some Android devices support matter. You know, it doesn't, though, nest thermostats. It's like the one thing everybody wants.

How you do it, Deli? I have a homebridge setup. I switch from Hoobes to Homebridge. I'm going to docks my good friend, Joanna Stern. She just installed the Hoobes and text me about it. Hoobes is Homebridge out of box. It's like a whatever. It doesn't matter.

They're little Tomogachi. that you put in your garage to make all the rival systems talk to each other, in particular to get a home kit. In about three times a year, they fail catastrophically and you have to start over. But it's fine because you have a little tomogachi that you have to care for, a little Linux tamagashi that you care for. And for a while, it all works. And if you're a nerd, it's like deeply rewarding to make a raspberry pie, force your nest

thermostat to show up an home kit. It's nice. I use it for my Dyson fan. I'm confident that when Joanna's fails, I'm going to be in trouble in some, like, meaningful way, but for now, she's very happy. Just block her number for a week after. I know you can't turn on any of your lights in your home.

It's fine. Yeah, she's like, I just opened my garage with Siri. I've never been happier. And I was like, I'm so welcome to my club. It's a good club. This is what it's like to have Tomogashi's together. But matters here, this is like the thing. It's happening. You are as you listen to this in your car, witness to the birth of a new

smart home connectivity standard. It's way better than whatever horny stuff Alex is doing. See Daddy. I'm still Just thinking about him. Gen 2 is covering the hell out of matter. It's great. It's all over the website. Go check it out.

But yes, if you have Google stuff, Nest stuff, that stuff is insanely upgraded to support matter. The first devices are out. If you have an iPhone, you now support matter. This is all real. And I think it's going to be cool if these companies can just be cool, which is a tall order. But I think it's going to happen.

I think they, I think the executives. People are going to CES. Just be cool, guys. I mean, if I was going to CES, I would, on. necessarily walk around being like, be cool. Like, yes, I would do exactly what you're saying. Thankfully, after going up at CS for like 15 years around, I've not, I'm not being made to go this year.

But I think we're going to see a flood of matter devices at CS, a flood of smart home gadgets that actually support matter that are actually going to ship. And I think that enough of the executives of these companies that we have talked to have houses full of things that don't talk to each other and are aware that all their customers are kind of mad at them. So there's just a part of me that says the incentive to just like be happy is higher than the business incentive to make money for these people specifically because they want to open their garage doors with Siri without having a Linux Tomogachi. We'll see.

Be cool. Be cool. All right. Anything else you should talk about? Let's just add it. Let's call it a day. All right. We are way over as always.

There's more to talk about. We have Google basically had an all hands this week where they said they're not going to chat. get yet because of quote reputational risk. That's a lot because it's always wrong. There's all kinds of stuff inside. It was a really fun week on the site. There's all the fusion coverage, which we haven't talked about. Justine's going to have some interviews on the verge has coming up about fusion.

Go check it out. It's on the verge.com. This, what we do on Wednesday show? What's this Wednesday show? It's a spectacular. Okay. Once again, this coming Wednesday, 21st, the Vergecast holiday spectacular Bluetooth. It's going to be amazing.

It's going to be amazing. Apple Watch Ultra Review is hitting this week. It's one of our biggest productions ever for review video. That's going to be very cool. And then, like I said, just going to back with virtual chat episode of Fusion. And we're going to take a break. So it's been, it's been a ride. It's been a year.

But we're going to take a break. You can tweet at us. Richard is R.JCC. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. You're reckless Patel. Talk to her about Desla. He's just a reckless Patel. And I'm at Reckless on Twitter for now.

Although, please comment on the site. I've been commenting on our site way more often lately because I feel like I should work for the place that pays me. I think that's a good plan. It's simple. It's a very easy calculus there. That's it, though. That's the Virchcast, right? That's left. Call me. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio

director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Mentors, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.