The Vergecast - Are we really about to ban TikTok?

Episode Date: March 15, 2024

The Verge 's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the US House of Representatives passing a bill that could ban TikTok, the streaming news of the week, a Dyson robot, and more. Further reading: Lawmakers introduce bill that would punish app stores for hosting TikTok TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform  House passes bill that could ban TikTok TikTok’s fate now lies with the Senate after House advances path to a ban There might be a “TikTok Photos” app in the works to take on Instagram. TikTok CEO tells users to “make their voices heard” against a bill that could ban the app in the US. Nancy Pelosi is playing TikTok-toe. Donald Trump has even more to say about the TikTok ban. President Biden says he’ll sign a TikTok ban, if passed. TikTok is urging users to call Congress about a looming ban The TikTokers are revolting. Former Activision CEO Bobby Kotick is apparently eyeing TikTok. YouTube is revamping its TV app to make videos feel way more interactive  Spotify now has music videos  Neil Young’s music is back on “low res Spotify” two years after Rogan protest Neil Young says the MacBook Pro has ‘Fisher-Price’ audio quality Elon Musk cancels Don Lemon’s show on X after a ‘tense’ interview Linda Yaccarino on X: "X is becoming a video first platform” Roku hackers breach 15,000 accounts and are selling them online British monarchy rocked by bad Photoshop job The Kate Middleton photo scandal is a rare — and consequential — flub SpaceX successfully launches Starship in third flight test  Apple to allow iOS app downloads direct from websites in the EU Hands-on with the Dyson 360 Vis Nav robot vacuum Nikon is acquiring US camera manufacturer RED Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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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, welcome to the Bridgecast. A flagship podcast of algorithmic warfare. That's good. That's a good phrase. That's a good, like, band name. Yeah.

Like, if you were in high school, you would for sure play bass in a band called algorithmic warfare right now. Nilai. Nilai would, for sure. 100%. Cadillac this week. This is a true story.

Cadillac this week. Teased a new concept called opulent velocity. Oh, Yeah. Which is really good, like, really good. But it sounds like the name of one of those clubs or restaurants in New York that's always empty, but always open. Yeah.

And it does bottle service. But no one's ever in there. No one. Fully staffed, no visitors, opulent velocity. I love that. I would stand in line for that. Algorithic Warfare is playing at opulent velocity. Tickets are $8,000.

To no one. Right. Yeah. If you don't live in New York City, this is like a hard. thing to convey. Or city has corruption in it. And sometimes the people

have to launder the money. So every now and again you'll be in a neighborhood where there's just a fully staffed empty restaurant. There used to be one right by our office in Midtown. It was deeply confusing. No, I bet it would be like great. How are the deals? How are how is the food? No, you'd go

in there and you'd be first like, I should leave. Yeah. Like the vibes were immediately hostile. Yeah. you're not ordering. And then you would order food. And they'd be like, why? We don't know. We have to go to the grocery store and get you some chicken tenders. We'll be back. Opulent velocity. All right. There's a lot happening this week. I'm your friend, Nelai, Alex Cranes, here in studio.

Yeah. We're back. I was going to say it's been a minute, but we were just together in Texas, all three of us. But it's been a minute since you and I were together in this studio. That's true. It's nice. It's a good energy. I'm having fun. And then David Pierce has banished to his basement once again. Yeah. Cool. Thanks. It's really nice to you guys. Feeling great.

How is it? I mean, it's a basement. I did nap over there earlier, so I'm feeling great. Everything's going well today. Hell yes. My understanding is that we are soon to give you some sort of green screen experience where you can be anywhere. Liam is threatening to give me a background,

but every time he threatens the background, there's one more box involved. And so I think we're now at either two or three boxes plus a six-foot-long green screen that lives under my. couch. So it's either going to happen and really change my life in a big way, or I'm just going to refuse to engage in this process any longer. We'll see. Look, I know Verchcast listeners have a relationship with our producer, Liam, mostly because he's the person who makes us be on time, which we have defeated Liam. I just want to be clear that listeners plus hosts have defeated

Liam. But the way you know he's the right producer for the show is that when he's allowed to spend money in gadgets and gadget-related ideas, it's just out of control like the studio that is being built at my house fully out of control. It's sick. It's great. And one day we'll make Liam do the video

where he's like, here's all the stuff I bought. Studio tour. That's going to happen. It's going to be great. It's a lot of stuff. And then I have ideas. It's not great. I would not say it's a cost effective studio.

It's just a lot of stuff. It's great. I like to imagine you just never get out of your chair and you just sort of wheel from set to set all day, depending on what you're doing. Liam has threatened to automate the studio, so you just push one button and the shades go down and the lights turn on.

I don't know that we can get there. You totally can. Home assistant, right, Liam? It's going to be home assistant. It's going to be sick. I like hear you just like try to get Liam to jump in. Come on, Liam. Hop in.

Hop in. He's not doing it. He's like, no. He's hiding under the table. No, he's got ideas. Yeah, he's not. We were waiting. He just didn't show.

He will not be bathing. He's very upset with us right now. I'm sorry. We love you, Liam. Liam is incredible. Everyone tweeted Liam. Okay. Good things only.

Now that we're on the high vibes. Yeah. There's a lot to talk about this week. There's a TikTok ban, which we got to talk about a lot. There's a bunch of streaming wars news. There's Twitter now X pivoting to video. It's a real 2012 idea. There's a new YouTube app.

And then we got a lightning round. There's all kinds of stuff going on. Starship had its third launch, which appears to be totally successful. That happened to only minutes before he started recording. So I'm saying that, and we'll see if it landed by the time we get to talking about it. It's going to be great. But we should start with TikTok, which is undoubtedly the news of the week. It is very confusing, very stressful, and I have promised to have the hottest take of all.

But first, David, do you want to tell us what's going on on TikTok? Sure. So the very short version of what has now become a very long story is that, that after in 2021 deciding not to ban TikTok, Congress has decided once again that it would very much like to ban TikTok. So there is this bill called the Protecting Americans from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,

which just really rolls off the tongue. And what it essentially does is block app stores from hosting TikTok, and it blocks internet hosting providers from hosting TikTok. And there are a million complications and nuances in that that we should talk about. But the idea is essentially to either ban TikTok outright or force it to be sold to an American company

or a company at least not owned by a foreign adversary, which is a technical term that only a few countries qualify under. So it went through committee. I believe it passed in a House committee 50 to zero. 50 to zero. Yeah. And then it went to the broader house where it passed with like 80% yes, which was a huge, ridiculous victory in a time

where nothing passes with numbers like that. So now this bill is sitting in front of the Senate. President Biden has said that if it is passed to him, he will sign it into law. There is essentially now one step remaining between us and a TikTok ban. And it's a big step, and there are lots of good reasons to believe it will never surmount that step. Yeah, because it's Rand Paul, right? Like the step is Rand Paul. Senator Rand Paul.

The Senate. Yeah. It's Rand Paul and it's Chuck Schumer. And there are a lot of people in the Senate. who have reasons not to make this happen, right? But it is, we are much closer to a TikTok ban than we have ever been before to the point where a lot of people

inside TikTok and outside TikTok think it's gonna happen. All right, so can I quibble with you on one thing? Please. And it is just the most pedantic thing, but why else we're here? Yeah. The idea that it's a ban on TikTok specifically like conflates too many ideas.

Can I read you the first sentence of the bill, Eli? Yeah. To protect the national security of the United States from the threat posed by foreign adversary controlled applications such as TikTok. It's the only app they name in the bill. This is a TikTok ban. Sure. And it's the only app specified later in the bill.

Right. But the mechanism by which it is accomplishing that goal is not actually by banning TikTok. And I think that's important. If you want to understand the dynamics of this bill and the people arrayed for and against it, what might actually happen with TikTok. it's a bill that regulates app stores and internet service providers. It does not regulate TikTok at all. Like nothing in this bill requires TikTok to do anything.

It requires a bunch of other companies to do stuff that will make it impossible for TikTok to do business here. And I think when we have all these conversations about the 170 million Americans who use TikTok and free speech and all these businesses, it's all as though the government is regulated. tick tock. But it is, but very specifically and very mechanically in this bill, it is not doing that. It is making it impossible for TikTok to do business 906. And you might think that is the same thing. And you are, I'm sure people have a lot of like feelings about what I'm saying.

But if you just read the language of the bill, the bill does not regulate. It says TikTok for political expediency, but it doesn't actually regulate TikTok directly. it just says these other companies cannot do business with TikTok. And I think that's actually really important. It's also the only way to do it. Like you can't argue that TikTok is a company owned and run by China and then say the U.S. government can regulate it. Like you just can't have it both ways. This is the only way to get to TikTok if you want to get to TikTok.

No, there are other ways to do it. Some of those ways have succeeded in a courts and some of them have failed. Like over time, we are capable of regulating how foreign companies do business. States. For example, foreign companies are not really allowed to own like broadcast licenses in the United States. So if you want to set up a CBS tower in New York City, you can't go get a bunch of Saudi money to do it. We seem to be fine with that. And I just want to put that out there. Like there are some very direct regulations that we have over media ownership in this country. And then there's this bill, which is like, Apple can't do business with TikTok. And it's actually

different. And the reason I'm poking at that really hard. card is because I think the rhetoric on both sides of this has gotten one turn too simplistic. Right? On the we should ban it side. It's like, this is a danger to the United States. And then you're like, so what are you going to do about it? And they're like, we're going to tell Apple what to do. Weird.

Weird. Just like straightforwardly weird. And on the other side, it's like you're infringing our free speech rights by banning TikTok. And then you look at the thing. And it's like, oh, that is the third order outcome of this. But if what you're really doing is regulating Apple, or you're doing else. There's actually all these other outs, including you could sell TikTok,

which, as you pointed out, David, in 2021, like, boy, haven't we been through this before? Like, Microsoft was going to buy TikTok. Satchez-Nadella was like, this is the weirdest deal I've ever been a part of. Oracle has Project Texas, and no one cares. Like, the least Alex is from Texas. This is the least anything named Texas has ever talked about itself. Yeah. Yeah, it's true. It's true. All the other Texans are really. confused. What's happening? Like how I got to that? Yeah, I do not.

Let me take the back. Yeah, I keep looking at this and it's fundamentally just like the next step in the Chinese American trade war, right? Like this is just saying we don't want apps created in China that are popular functioning in the United States, full stop and a few other countries, but specifically China. And so this is just an extension of that trade war. and I'm a little like taken aback by it. It does feel like the TikTok stuff in particular has always felt vaguely xenophobic.

It's always felt a little like, oh, we can't have the Chinese do things here because America. And but we do also at the same time have this quickly accelerating trade war that was like in the background. And then Trump was like, let me lob the trade equivalent of a bomb into the mix. And now this is not quite nuclear, but this is. is like a really significant moment in that trade war. And they're just, everybody is so focused on TikTok and ignoring the fact that you are fundamentally changing how the internet works in the United States and saying, no, we are actually going to build a wall. The way that China has a wall, the United States is going to have a wall. And some of this stuff, we've already said it about

a lot of the technology that's coming out of China. And now they're going to say, yeah, and also these apps. And, you know, it worked when it was Huawei and it was phones. and they didn't have a huge market share in the United States. And so it was like, oh, no, we lost Huawei. And, like, that sucks because they have really good technology in their devices. And now we're like, they're going after TikTok, and that's – and people suddenly care. All right. Here it is.

You ready? I'm ready. I think it makes total sense for the United States government to not want Chinese ownership of a major media platform in this country. Yeah. It is sensible on its face. It was sensible on its face for us to not want a bunch of Huawei technology in our communications networks. Yep. And I agree with you.

I think most people didn't have like Strand brand affinity for Huawei. So when we would have FCC commissioners on the show, Jeffrey Starks was on the show being like, we got to rip and replace all the Huawei gear. No creators said anything. Right. As far as I understand. Like maybe there was a Huawei powered creator campaign to be like. Save us. As far as I can tell.

I think some people maybe around the phones. Yeah. I mean they had like the Laker. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So, Mili,

in order to make that statement, you have to believe one of the two arguments that everybody makes against TikTok, which is either it is this, like, crucially important vessel

through which China is collecting data about Americans, or it is how China is disseminating propaganda and influencing U.S. elections and making our children idiots. Which of those do you believe? The second one.

Do you, do you really? Yeah. On what evidence? None. Just to be clear, I just, Just to be clear. It's going to be a great podcast.

I don't want to say I have a bunch of evidence. I think actually one of the problems in this entire situation is that the House Select Committee went into a secure briefing. They saw whatever evidence there was. And they walked out of that briefing and went immediately to a vote and voted 50 to zero to pass this bill that would either get TikTok off the app stores or force them to sell. With no dissension, no controversy, I was at South by Southwest. The vibe I heard coming out of the briefing was Congresspeople saying, if you saw what we saw, you'd do it too.

What did they see? I think they should be made to present that evidence to the American people. And yet. And yet they have not, right? And yet that evidence is also so persuasive that they voted 383 to whatever to pass the bill in the full house. And yet there's nothing. The evidence is so persuasive that Joe Biden's like, I'll sign it when it comes to my desk. And yet no one has made the case.

The thing that I'm saying based on no evidence is you should not let an adversary of United States even have this capability. We didn't know if Huawei was actually spying on our communications networks by embedding hardware directly into the cell system. No one wants to take the chance, right? Like, that seems silly. The problem, the problem I think with the argument of this is about protecting us from, from Chinese interests is that meta still exists. A ton of other algorithmically driven social media platforms that are extraordinarily susceptible to propaganda still exists in this country and function in this country. They're only going after TikTok, which means like Russia went and did. a whole lot of stuff in 2016, and we have a whole lot of proof of that. And not a lot's changed

on that front. Instead, we were just like, well, we're going to get rid of Facebook's going to get rid of a news feed, and we're all going to be fine. And Medistole is allowed to exist in a country. So this is explicitly about China, but feels like so wrongheaded and actually solving the problem. Because right now, okay, you say, we kill TikTok in the United States. It goes away. China can just go to U.S. data brokers and get all that same data. That's the first thing that David is saying, the data brokers thing. So this is why I ask about the two things, because I agree that I specifically mean the second one.

But on that second turn, again, they can just go and send their propaganda. Like right now, okay, it's cool. They maybe just have a button on the algorithm and they can control the algorithm in a very direct way. Instead, they can now just send all of their people, their propaganda specialists and all of those folks. on to meta, onto threads, on to Instagram, on to X for the four people still there. They can send them to all those other places. And that doesn't solve the problem. It just like makes their lives just a little bit more difficult.

And yeah, I just. But that, wait, it makes their lives a lot more difficult, vastly more difficult. I do agree with that. For all of their many, many, many faults. Mark Zuckerberg and Sundar Pichai and Elon Musk live in the United States. They operate United States companies. Right. Their kids live here.

If the United States and China go to war, their kids will be at risk. The United States government has direct regulatory control over their companies. Their companies, again, you can argue about the merits of this as much as you want. Their companies comply with and often support the military activities of the United States. Right. I'm saying I have a problem with the idea that we are okay with algorithmically driven propaganda machines only when they're American. We are because of the fucking First Amendment. Right? Like our government would love to sit down and directly regulate the algorithms of meta and YouTube in a heartbeat. They would do it in one second if they could and the First Amendment stands in their way.

And that's for good reason, right? You tend to believe that Americans have the best interest of America at heart. And I don't even mean that in a directly patriotic way. I just mean like a do you want the place where you live to get bombed? Yeah. Very directly. Yeah. There's just a very individualistic impulse that is sort of at the heart of this.

China is not that. China is an adversary to this country. It would like to destabilize this country in some way. it could gain an advantage. It does it militarily. It does it economically. We do it to them. Yep.

Straightforwardly. And I think TikTok users tend to believe that their individual experiences have no relation to that thing. Right. So I've watched a million TikTok videos from TikTokers who are outraged that would happen. They're making the argument you're making. Yeah. Why would you regulate us when YouTube still exists or meta?

I mean, I think they should all not exist. I think algorithmically driven social feeds are a, talks on our country and and anybody who's heard me talk knows that I agree. Yeah, yeah. So that's where I'm at with it. I don't disagree. Yeah.

Come directly to our website. It's theverge.com. You have a personal relationship with me on that website. And then send us money. Sure, why not? We make it very hard to send us money. We'll figure it out one day. Binmo, Nelai.

Yeah. This is all just a pain to cash at me. I will make dance videos for you. use cash app. But what I'm getting at is just think about something as dumb as Stanley Cups. Stanley Cups are not an organic trend, right? The algorithmic fed a bunch of people, a bunch of Stanley Cup content, and then more people were inspired to make Stanley Cup content.

And then the world around us generated an infinite supply of Stanley Cup explainers. So many of my friends car. You sound like somebody who watched the Great Hack last night, and is like there's somebody at a button saying it's Stanley time. I don't think there's somebody at a button. That's not how it works. It's just not how it works. But that's not how Stanley Cup works.

But why would you give a foreign power that capability inside the United States to even dream of having that button? A, TikTok would tell you that it absolutely has not given China that power inside of the United States. B, there's no evidence that it has. Look, I'm the one who said the government should show us that evidence. but just abstractly, why would you allow that to happen? I'm going to read to you the Communications Act of 1934. Foreign investors are limited to 20% direct ownership of companies holding a broadcasting license and 25% ownership of a holding company if you have multiple broadcast licenses.

Why did we think it was important to limit the ownership of the airwaves the United States in 1934? Because we did not want foreign companies controlling what was broadcasts the majority of Americans. The impulse is exactly the same. I get it. The United States should probably explain why it's terrified of TikTok. I really think this is a huge miss on a part of the government. And if they cannot, they should back the hell off. I agree.

But I'm looking at, okay, just on its face, is it a problem that so many Americans are buffeted by algorithms that we do not have any transparency into? and at least one of them, one very important one, potentially has an enemy of the United States controlling it. And all that stands in between that is like Tim Cook. Tim Cook is like iPhones are really important. Everyone do not do a war. Right? And like that's what got us through the Trump trade war in a real way.

It's basically the idea of the modern global peace is that we all be so economically tied up with each other that war will be bad. I don't have you looked around recently, like, kind of shaky. Like, more shaky than it's been in a long time. And I would just point out, like, on either side, none of these cases are proven. TikTok's saying we don't do it. Great, you've got to prove a negative. Very difficult.

Well, we also said that a lot. And, you know, most Western companies are like, we just don't want your hardware embedded in our networks. And that, to me, always felt like very obvious. Like, don't put their hardware in your networks. That's where you get O-Rand from, by the way. This is like a whole thing. And this was what led to Project Geno 5 says. Look, I'm not saying you should ban air.

You should keep the app stores from having it. I don't know. I'm sorry. I'm still thinking about how, like, Chinese trade war led to Project Geno 5Sys. Straight line. Oh, absolutely did. Yeah. I've seen the meme of the guy with, like, the logos.

But I'm saying if you're a TikTok user and you're outraged because they're going to do this, it's like, think about your experience on TikTok. You are being shown things that you are not in control of their sequence, of their content. Like, it just happens to you. And the number of TikTok trends that come and go because people on the app decide to participate in them and then our understanding the culture around us is absolutely, it absolutely has the potential to be controlled by a foreign party. Okay. I don't think that that is, I don't think the United States government has no business and paying attention to that. Should they lay out the evidence of American people that this is the only salute, they should?

Is the evidence strong enough such that 50 Democrats and Republicans in a room saw it and walked out and voted unanimously? That's weird. That doesn't happen a lot anymore. Like, it's just weird. No, it doesn't. But it is also true that the only two things anyone agrees on in politics right now. Now, our China is bad and we must protect the children on the internet. And if you want to gin up a 50 to zero vote, you would pick one of those two things.

That's just what you would do. And on anything, you're like, oh, we love kids, right? Like, 50 to zero is pretty, it's not that hard to do on that front. Like, this is just where we're at. I challenge you to go do it. Okay. Even COSA, like COSA, the most we protect the kids is not passing right now. But the kid's online safety act is not.

Yeah, because that involves actually doing things. And Congress is not big on actually doing things. But wait, like, I'm still hung up on this thing where like, okay, Tencent, a company that is also headquartered in China and has, I would say, much clearer ties to the Chinese Communist Party than maybe not bite dance, but certainly TikTok. And I think the like, is TikTok bite dance and is bite dance? TikTok is a very interesting and still sort of unanswered question in a lot of ways that we should probably talk about. But Tencent owns, I think, if not all, almost all of Riot games, which

makes League of Legends, which is a very popular game, including in the United States. It owns a significant part of Epic, which makes Fortnite. Can you convincingly prove to me that there is a better chance of me seeing Chinese propaganda on TikTok than in Fortnite? Yes. How? Fortnite doesn't have any news in it. Fortnite is not the main news source for millions of young Americans in the middle of an election. I mean, A, that assumes that millions of young Americans have a news source or give one solitary shit about the news. And I don't think that they do.

And so, but like, leaving that aside, there is potential, sure, in the absolute worst case scenario that one can possibly imagine, bad things can happen on TikTok. Granted. In the absolute worst case scenario, China already owns Yahoo News and we don't even know about it. like we're arguing about these like insane hypotheticals and we don't know anything and we're just mad at China. Like I don't know how to make it less simple than that. Right. But I'm saying a majority of the members of the House of Representatives took a bunch of phone calls from their constituents and still voted to pass this bill because of whatever they saw. No, disagree. They took a

bunch of calls from their constituents and so as a result voted. The overwhelming takeaway from members of Congress from this huge phone bank thing that TikTok has been encouraging users to do is see, this proves our point. TikTok can make young people do whatever they want, so we have to ban it. This thing has backfired so spectacularly on TikTok in the funniest possible way. It was so bad. And everybody was like, oh, my God, they can make young people make phone calls. They can do anything.

Right. That's the only evidence of propaganda that we actually have from TikTok is that they can make people make phone calls. I want to point out that is indeed very funny. Like, it is very funny. I think mostly because TikTok didn't think anything would happen like this. And then they overplayed their hand. Yes.

Weird. But the idea that you can get a bunch of young people to take political action in service of a company that is owned by the Chinese government should not feel like a backfire when people are like, well, that's bad. You can't just say a service run by the Chinese government like it's a thing that we know. You just said that so nonchalantly. But by the Chinese company has Chinese government not supported. It's just true. Like companies in China are structured differently than the companies here and the state interests are much stronger for those companies. And if they don't like you, they just make you go away, which is a thing that happens to Chinese companies.

Poor von Bing Bing. That's true. Yeah, right? Like Jack Ma is like, where did that guy go? He just disappeared. Like, that's weird. Like that is a different, like a crucial difference. between the United States government, Chinese government.

Chinese government is a brutal dictatorship. Yeah, I mean, this is the thing we saw with Huawei, and we're seeing again in this case, that I think isn't always entirely articulated because racism gets in the way and xenophobia gets in the way, which is that like the problem isn't that it's China and China bad, because that's just racist and xenophobic. The problem is that the Chinese Communist Party, the CCP, has a very capable way of making business, that are in China do what they want. And they can exert influence and they will exert influence.

And they have exerted influence. And in TikTok's case, TikTok has gone again and again and again and said they do not do that. We are not based there. We work really, really hard to not have that relationship. And effectively, the United States government has said, don't believe you. Right. Because you made up Project Texas. Yeah.

And then when the chips are down, no one is talking about Project Texas. Yep. They made up this fake thing, which is like Oracle hosts the data. And there's a, we wrote about it. Alex Heath wrote about it. He visited the algorithmic transparency center, which is basically a children's museum for content moderation where you stand in front of a giant TikTok screen. You're like, ban this. And then behind that is like a wall with a data center behind it that you can gaze upon.

And you're like, look at the data. It's here in the United States. And none of that has anything to do with anything as near as we can tell. Right. Yeah, I think TikTok is always, it's always going to face this battle because unfortunately it is owned by a company that does, is based in China and therefore cannot fully say we are totally independent company. Like bite dance can just not do that. It never can't. It never will as long as the CCP is staying in its current like regime. And and so TikTok is always going to face that. And they have they really struggled to convince the government. at every turn they've struggled. And part of that is definitely the xenophobia and the racism, which is just like completely out of pocket and horrible. Yes.

Every single time. I fully agree there. Horrible. And I just, I don't know that TikTok can ever say anything that is going to make them believe them. Like even if they, even if Project Texas wasn't so stupidly, transparently like TikTok propaganda to say like us,

I don't know what they could do to make the, United States government like them. Yeah. Can I say something vastly more esoteric and philosophical, just to turn this somewhere else. As I've gotten older, I've realized the thing that the Internet does is make everyone believe that collective action problems do not exist, which is if you just take that idea and apply it to whatever your political leanings are, you will quickly realize like this is your primary frustration with other people.

It's like some problems are easier to solve if we all do them together. but getting everyone to do everything at the same time is like a political nightmare. Yeah. And that's just life. That's the history of politics. Do collective action problems exist or not? Is it, if I'm like the market will provide fighter jets, it won't unless we all pay our taxes in the government by spider jets. And we think we should have fighter jets for X, Y, and Z reason.

And you personally might disagree with those reasons. And you personally might sue the government of the United States and say, I do not want my taxes to pay for fighter jets, which is a real thing that happens. on the regular. And the United States government says, no, you don't get a choice because of collective act. Like, we have to do this thing together. And you might think to yourself, boy, we wish we would pull our taxes and pay for health care. I very strongly believe we should pull our taxes and pay for health care for people or better education or whatever it is that you think would be better if we all paid a little bit and we all got a lot. Right? This is like the main thing. And what is happening in this TikTok situation is TikTok is a collective

action problem. Our government believes the security of the United States is threatened by the existence of TikTok in some way. Our government says that. It believes it. It's taking the votes that it indicate its belief in that problem. Sure. I would remind you that you're the same, Neely Patel who believes most of the things that Congress does are like deeply disingenuous and not at all about the thing that they say that they're about. I cannot believe I'm the one making this case. I can't either. I'm just saying this to you now. I have never, just the 50, O vote, I think, just really, there's something about that. Like, they saw the evidence, they walked out. They all

did the same thing at the same time. I do agree that that is the single most compelling piece of evidence. I've just got it circled in my brain. Whatever happened there is a big deal. I don't know what it is, and that is the problem. Yep. To overcome the collective action problem they have, which is they're going to make a bunch of individuals

feel bad. A bunch of individual businesses will lose their marketing channel. A bunch of individual creators will lose their livelihoods. A bunch of individual people, will lose their ability to just see trucks jump over shit on command. This will hurt me personally. To overcome the collective action problem, they have to lay out the case.

But it is clear that they think, if we all endure that pain, collectively we will get some benefit. And the benefit will be freedom from Chinese interference in our media. That's the case. And when you take that and you're like, now I will make the same case against Facebook or the same case against YouTube, I would point out to you, the government has been trying to make that case. They haul these CEOs in front of the government and say, why are your algorithms bad? And the CEOs are like, yeah, I don't know, First Amendment, go away. Like, they cannot overcome that.

They have yet to come up with an argument that is strong enough to overpower the First Amendment and solve that collective action problem. They have not yet figured it out. The closest they've come is the kid's stuff. That's why you have a kid's online safety act. The closest they've come is sex trafficking. That's why you get Fasta and Sesta as carve-outs to 230. That's it.

The closest, actually, the farthest they've gone is copyright. Right. Like, that's why Disney gets to take stuff down off the internet, because we've decided collectively, that's fine. And most people don't argue with that. In this case, they have a different thing that they can't wield against the Facebooks and the YouTube's of the world, which is like national security. and they have to make the case.

And they've had one kind of sham hearing where they just ask, like, that's your xenophobia. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Where they just like, we're like, are you Singaporean? He's like, I am Singapore. Like, that doesn't work. They asked the dude if TikTok uses Wi-Fi. Truly a horrible theory.

That isn't the case. But some case was made to these people where they are willing to take the representative democracy hit, right? where their own constituents are calling them, and they're interpreting that is this is the problem. And I'm going to vote against what my constituents are saying to me. Can I put on my... That happens, like, very rarely.

I think you might be underrating the extent to which it's a political win to be mad at China right now. No way, I disagree. I think banning TikTok is a political loser for everyone, which is why Donald Trump is out there being like, no, I'll keep TikTok. Kids, vote for me, Donald Trump. Yeah. Oh, I totally agree with that. But there is a subset of people.

who are older and don't use TikTok and hate China, which is a lot of people in America who are going to be psyched about this. And so it's like there are, if you're just taking this as like pure political calculus and like this is not the thing we should get hung up on, but if you're taking this is just pure political calculus, the TikTok users aren't going to vote anyway.

The old people who hate China, but oh God, they love voting. Like that's, and this is the thing like I am so... Can I say? Can I offer you one thing? This is unsourced. It's half-assed. I'm sorry. I definitely heard it South West Southwest, Southwest that a significant number of people making the phone calls were boomers who spend all day on TikTok. Oh, the boomers love TikTok. I say that because they got nothing to do. They're all retired. Yeah.

Sitting on their bags of money that they have yet to pass on. I want to point out, I think you guys are both focused really a lot on the political side of this and not on the economic side of this, which is TikTok goes away. Suddenly all those American companies that are largely dominant. in the social media space across the world, right? Like, you know, like, I think I was reading today that an enormous portion of the famous people on social media are based in America because they use American apps like YouTube and Instagram. If TikTok goes away, YouTube and Instagram immediately get more users.

Like, there is real economic incentive to get rid of TikTok because that puts money back into American companies. But they could just sell it. And I think this is also part of. like the lobbying that is happening here. Like, like, we're seeing, oh, they went and they all got convinced in some hearing that we didn't all were privy to. But they were also getting convinced by lobbyists from meta and lobbyists from Google saying,

yeah, you want to get rid of our competition. Go for it. And we can't ignore that like the economic component of this thing because it's huge. Oh, I totally agree. And all these companies have had a big stock bump. in the last week since this started to happen. Like, Snap is sitting there being like, please, dear God, ban TikTok.

Some people will come use Snap Discover. If Snap was smart, they would buy it. That's what I'm saying. Like, maybe it go away. Yeah. But maybe Steve Minuchin will put together his band of investors and buy it. Who is the other name that got floated?

Bobby Codick. Bobby Codick. Yeah, Activision's back, baby. When I think about responsible media ownership in the United States. The way that Chuzi Choo, the CEO of TikTok has talked about it, that seems like a total non-starter. Like, I don't think there's any world in which TikTok sells.

He has to say that. But also, like, who, literally who could afford it? Like, this is probably a several hundred billion dollar company. Microsoft's back at it. You can't sell to any of the big companies for antitrust reasons. Who else has the money? Snapchat doesn't have money. Literally, TikTok could buy Snapchat.

I don't know, man. Elon put together $44 billion for Twitter. You think, okay, Elon, if you buy TikTok and take it private and rebrand TikTok as X videos, now we're on to something. I understand it's a huge number. I just think that the opportunity for a bunch of investors to get that company and that advertising revenue and that influence, it's not such a big number for the thing that it is. it's a very big number.

Well, we don't know what the number is. So that's the unknown you're not okay with. I just think from you're not going to be like you were open to a sale while you're still trying to fend off the bill that would force you to sell it. Sure. Agreed. And at some point there becomes a number. Like everything has a number. It's a business.

Capitalism, baby. Welcome to America. I mean, and it is true that like we got a ways down this road in 2020 based on an executive order that pretty much everybody thought had no chance. of holding up in court. And like that's, I think, the thing that is different now. I think there is a real sense that this is a thing that could happen and could stick. And so to the extent that, you know, Oracle talked about it and Microsoft talked about it and there were all of these weird machinations going on, I think everybody kind of knew

it was probably nothing, but it seems to be much more likely to be something. And so we might get a real price tag at some point here in the future. Look, all I'm saying, I don't think it will. will end up getting banned. I think it will end up getting sold. Oh, I think the opposite. That's so fun. We'll see. I don't know. That's a good, that's a good for chess prop bet. I think nothing will happen. I think Rand Paul, a few other senators. Because they can kill it, right? Like, you do need, it was with 60 senators have to all agree. And who boy. Yeah, I'm with you. I think the massive, like, betting favorite is we never hear from this bill again. Yeah. Fair enough. But I will

say there are in i have a long history of producing work about the first amendment you can go and you're throwing it all away in one verse you can definitely go listen to it i feel very strongly about the first amendment there are a tiny handful of things that overcome the first amendment copyright law as you may be aware based on my long body of work uh national security is one of those things. Foreign ownership of United States media is historically one of those things. And I think that's gotten lost in all this conference. This is why I'm so focused on mechanics of how the bill actually works. Because that thing is actually important. Even if you believe they're not using it now, should they have that capability, has traditionally been so big of a deal that

we've stopped it before it could even happen. And in this case, we just let it slide because it's an app with dancing kids on it. Yeah. I mean, and if you believe that there is a nefarious thing happening here, that is the true genius of TikTok, right? That, like, like, the galaxy brain thing you hear is, like, all the kids in China are seeing on Dewean, which is, like, the Chinese version of TikTok, they're seeing, like, STEM and how to build robots and code and all this stuff. And we're just seeing dance challenges because it's making it's all stupid and slow. And this is, like, a long con plan to make the Chinese kids smarter than the American kids,

which, like, if true, incredible. Like, well-played everybody. My favorite consistency. That's why they added the STEM tab to TikTok, by the way. I know. I just want to point out it's right behind shopping. First, it's shopping. Then it's STEM.

But I think the one thing I'm hung up on, like, just I agree with you at the 50 to zero thing. And I think the idea that there is a smoking gun is very possible. And I'm so willing to be convinced by any shred of evidence that says this is happening. There are plans to make it happen. There is capability to do it quickly, like whatever. The flip side of it, for me is we've been at this for four years now, and we've never heard it. And there are so,

so many people with incentive to talk about this publicly. Like, so many people. Yeah, but why won't they? Well, I don't know. They're like, get it. They won't talk. Have you met politicians? They usually talk about it. This is what I'm saying. So either it is something so grave and incredible that we can't be trusted. It's like, it's like some alien shit. We're like, we can't know or else it would destroy our way of life. Or there's nothing to talk about. Like, I don't know how to think it's not one of those. Usually when there's nothing they make shit up.

I just historically with politicians, usually when there's, then there's nothing. You know, it's like, they pull off the sheet and the Scooby-Doo kids are like, it was bullshit all along. Like, that's his, I don't know. Maybe that's it. Maybe I'm just over-indexing on 50 to 0 and the fact that so many of them were convinced by this campaign. And there's something there that they won't say. What if this is all viral marketing for three-body problems? Very good.

Netflix's just really going for it this year. Yeah. We could see. Who knows? Look, I think I've been convinced through the course of the conversation that most likely, outcome is nothing. Yeah. Exactly. That's what Netflix wants you to think.

And I really do think. And I can't say this more clearly. The government needs to show us its evidence before it takes this action. Yes. We have not seen it. That is, if you take away one thing around this conversation, it's me saying the government needs to show us this evidence before it takes the action. But it's crazy that the evidence apparently exists such that they voted 50 to zero. Yeah, you seem more convinced than ever that there is evidence, which I think is fair.

Like what we've seen in the last seven days would indicate that some people have seen some things. I think that's fair. But I just am, I don't think we should take that on faith. I think Americans should own American algorithms. That's it. I think that comes down to it. Like, no algorithms. Well, I mean, if you really ask me, yeah. I think we should get rid of the algorithm of the media and go start bring back RSS.

Yeah. A bill to bring back RSS in the United States, vote Patel. That's what they should do. Just put TikTok on the Fediverse. It solves all of our problems. Everything will be fine. But barring that, I think it's pretty, it is, it just feels reasonable to me that what people see and consume should be a, they should, the, the people who are accountable for that should be here.

Closer to you. You know who would agree with that argument is the Communist Party of China. And also most people. Like I think most governments are very interested in making sure that their citizens see something that comes from within. That's pretty natural. And I get this, I think, just comes back to everything we've been talking about, which is, do you, do you think that you are like an individual? in a sea of individuals

or that you are part of a collective. And I think the internet makes everybody feel very alone in that particular way. And like almost every political problem comes back to that. I'm just thinking about what happens if we get like, everybody's like, no, you're right.

Like we need to own our own media. And then we get like the BBC version of TikTok and like the NHK version of TikTok, like the national broadcastings. Yeah. For companies, for countries, but for TikTok. I mean, NPR. I think has a TikTok account.

Just imagine that. Yeah. What's the NPR social media app look like? I want to see it. Well, get on it. Is it just the Apple podcast now? It's just that voice. All right.

We should take a break. Everyone can yell at me in the comments. Also, just tell us what you think. We have a hotline. I just want to say, I think it's, I actually think I do want people to reach out. You should call the hotline 866, Verge.1. You should email us, Vergecast to the verge.com. But if I had to bet, I think most people are going to agree with you.

you and Eli, I think it is, it is just, my brain is so broken by the fact that you were the one making this argument. I think it's a perfectly fair argument. We're all sort of arguing based on evidence that no one has and fundamentally you have to trust somebody and I think ultimately saying the, I choose to not trust China is like not an unreasonable place to be. I just can't believe you're the one saying all of this, but I'll, I'll get there. I'll settle down. It'll be. Yeah. Yeah. What's the, it's the line of foolish consistency is little minds. Sure. Whatever that quote is. I'm real smart, is what I'm trying to say. No, let us know. Look, I've been reading our own comments. I think most of our commenters believe I'm like stridently opposed to this ban.

I don't know why. Probably because I haven't said anything about it until now. I think the United States government owes us to severance. That's like the main thing I think. But apart from that, I think it's reasonable to say. I don't know. Media ownership should be more local. Show us the tapes. Yeah. Yeah. Band clear channel next. All right. We got. to go to break. We'll be right back with more of our chest. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome back. I want to tell Alex and David a story about the studio. Oh, Lord. It's looking around. in the break and things have moved and I know why they've moved and it's very funny. So the verge

is part of Vox Media, as you may know. Vox Media has a podcast network called the Vox Media Podcast Network. On the Vox Media Podcast Network is a very good podcast called Point Forward with Andre Aguaduala and Evan Turner more basketball players. I'm assuming most people know that but if you don't, they're basketball players. Now I know. They're very tall and very famous.

They do the podcast in the same studio we're in and they're in. and they redress it with their stuff. Are they the reasons it smells like weed all the time? No. Different podcasts. Does this explain why my seat sometimes changes height? I think it explains the chair moving.

I don't, they record on Mondays, and it would be incredible on Thursdays. So I'm just going to say no to that one. Call me. If you smoke that much weed, we'll hang out. That's different. But for the, so they redress the studio for their show, which makes, sense. And then we have to put our stuff back. But I think they didn't notice it for the first few they did in here. So the Heinecube is behind them. Why would they get rid of that?

It's so cool. Yeah, I think we should play NBA, well, it was before 2K, like NBA 94 on the Heine Cube. I think Jam probably existed on the on the Heine Cube. I don't think it did. Here's my official pitch for a Vox Media Podcast Network crossover. I will play NBA Jam on a GameCube with Andre Gawla. Sounds amazing. We have a GameCube. Yeah. Your move, Andre.

We have a long promise that we'll get together and Dave and I will play Madden and we just are never in the same place at the same time with the GameCube. Like, we've been in the same place at the same time without a GameCube. Both of us have been in this room

with the GameCube, but without the other person. We're going to figure out all three elements at the same time. I think you need some more elements, like a plug, a controller. A copy of Madden. Critical elements.

Some other stuff has to happen. Just once on point forward, I want these NBA superstars to be like, is that a Hineken GameCkey? I've been searching for. It's like, I'm on eBay all the time looking for one of those. It's very good. That shows great. You should listen to it.

They just had Megan Rapino on at Southby with him, which was wonderful. Nice. All right. Speaking of media, that is your segue. Boy, there's a bunch of media streaming news. this week. One correction I have to issue for the audience in our streaming draft. This is true. I won. Okay, so I have long since been claiming that I won. I think given this piece of news, I definitively lost. Even though I think I had the best lineup, I think this is an instant

DQ. What happened to Motor Trends? I picked as my niche streaming service. So David set up the draft. We had to pick player in every category. A 4K awards. Alex has an expansive definition of what counts as award-winning streaming service. Correct. Live, all these things. And the last one was niche. And I candidly blanked on stage. And I was like, I don't know, I have enough.

Like, I pick TikTok. I'm good. You know, like, even though it's going to get, you know, banned from apps stores. Like, I'll take it for now. I want to ban TikTok. I'm going to pick it first. Exactly. The point is to be confounding.

Never let him know what's coming. So I blanked on stage. And I picked what my father-in-law has. been watching at my home before I left for South by Southwest, which is Motor Trend TV. And we published the streaming draft. And YouTube commenters like, the shit went 90 two weeks ago. Oh, no. Like it was killed two weeks ago.

So, first of all, Motor Trend TV was long gone. It was called Motor Trend Plus. There's a rebrand. And now it's being shuttered and being folded into Discovery Plus, which is where all of us learn about house flipping and going to Car Rock. Yeah. Have you checked on your father-in-law? How's he holding up? You know, we haven't brought it up. It just wasn't one of those things. He's just watching like cashed videos on the TV. Yeah, you know, we're just going to let. You don't want to roll to a family member and be like, you have to watch Discovery Plus now. I think the app still works for a while. I think the app is still going to work for a while. It's, uh, nope, that's not even right. It's closing in 14 days.

Super, super isn't going to work for a while. Oh, you've got some time. He's got time. He can record it with his phone. Yeah. I'm just saying, look, I think overall I had the best, the best suite, but I do think picking an already dead service, like an instant DQ. Yeah.

If you pick a thing that's got 90, you're out the draft. Netflix is next, but yeah. Yeah, that was the real takeaway is Netflix is super dead really soon. Yeah. Any minute. now, don't you worry. It's coming. I do think my ability to pick an already dead streaming service distracted from

your bold prediction that Netflix would die soon. It didn't. I had friends messaging me being like, I heard the podcast, Netflix, Alex? What the hell? And I'm like, out of your mind. I think, I think Paramount plus Netflix? I don't.

I should be very clear. What do you say? All right. Let's talk about some news. RIP to Motor Trend TV. Real one. Yeah. Bitch and rides.

Where will you live now? That's a real show, by the way. It'll live on Discovery Plus. It's true. Yeah. You'll be fine. Which will then be part of Max, which will eventually be merged with Paramount Plus. Yes.

One way or another, you're going to watch bitch and rides. Yeah. It's coming for you. Don't you worry. I have a lot to say about that show, but I think it's a very limited audience for criticism of bitch and rides. I've watched a lot of it with my father-in-law. Okay, actual news, TV news. By the way, here's the disclosure. We'll just get them all the way. We mentioned Netflix. I was an EP on a Netflix show called The Future of. NBC is an investor in our company.

They run the Peacock Service, which if you believe Alex will far outlive Netflix. I'm right. I'm right. Don't worry about it. I'm right. Yeah, our company makes full swing the golf show on Netflix. That's pretty good. That's it. Those are the disclosures today. I'm sure there are more. I believe wired connections are better than wireless ones. RIP Starlink. That's just a fact. I say that because the Starlink people think that I'm in the pocket of a big Comcast. That's a real, it still comes up. Yeah. That's what I thought. They're like, he's in big Ethernet's pocket. All right. Uh, actual news. Yeah. YouTube is revamping its TV app, not YouTube TV, but the YouTube app on TVs. I have a question about this. Yeah. Who is

not watching in full screen. What people are like, I want to watch like with the ads and crap all around it. Who are they? This is everyone's dream is to make QVC. Well, it's that. That is half of it. I firmly agree with that. The goal is to let you point at something on your television and it just appears at your house the next day. Like that is literally what everyone who makes TV stuff wants. The only dream that anyone has ever had. Yeah, truly. The other half of it is YouTube has been on this very long quest to get YouTube onto televisions in like a more YouTube way, right? Like, YouTube has talked for years now about how the TV is the fastest growing YouTube platform.

Like, it's now to the point that I just laugh whenever they put that in a press release because it's like, yeah, it's been that way for like a decade now. But the problem with that is there are lots of things about YouTube that people like that are not just watching the video, right? Like, there's all this community stuff. Comments are very important. Recommendations are very important. You want to subscribe.

Like, it's harder to subscribe to a channel from your television than it is from your phone or your computer. And that is actually a threat to YouTube over time as its stuff gets bigger, right? So they've been on this thing forever to figure out, like, how do we let you use YouTube while also watching something on your television? And their step for a long time was to connect it better to your phone. Like, you know how they have the thing now where you're watching YouTube on your TV and you open up YouTube on your phone, that little thing pops up that's like, do you want to connect? First of all, that feature rules and thank you to YouTube for doing it.

But that was their big plan. And I think that's how they thought they were going to solve it, right? Like, they were like, we're going to be both the first and the second screen simultaneously. This to me feels like them saying that's not really working. And so actually what we need to do is put more stuff, more accessible on the big screen in front of you. So they have this new thing where it's full screen by default, I think. Yeah. But you can press a button and it will, the video will.

the video will shrink and then on the right side, you'll get some of the metadata, the description and the comments and like, you know, I said a list of the products in the video. It'll look more like seeing YouTube in like a desktop browser. To me, that feels like a reasonable thing to do and also like...

Yeah. The most obvious thing. They're like, what if we just did YouTube on your television? It's like, yeah, that's the one. But it does feel like they're saying

this thing where we're going to connect it to your other devices and you're going to be able to do it all simultaneously, maybe is not actually the answer the way they thought. It kind of feels like they pulled a Vizio. Oh, God. And went, oh, you know what? Actually, people don't want to control their TV viewing experience from their phone. Vizio was like, yeah.

That's what you meant. I was worried. There was any number of other bad things I could have. No, no, no. I'm thinking very clearly because I just, I have the 26 Vizio TV and I put it in the guest room and I have somebody staying over. And I was like, oh, I have to like, where's the remote? Yeah. I have to give you an Android tablet.

And I was like, you just have to use your regular phone. I'm sorry. And it feels like... I refuse to buy a $29 Roku to solve this problem. It's true. No, it's because I couldn't find it. It's in another box. But I don't know where anything is.

But yeah, this just feels like the same thing where people are starting to realize, wait, actually, the phone is not the best way to do this. And sometimes you just want to watch this and interact with it with a remote because remotes are probably the best way to control TV is because they've worked. worked. Yeah. Forever. Yeah. And the idea that you'll own both the first and second screen is like the dream. Like you'll watch up there and shop down here.

And it's like, people do that all the time, but they don't. No, we watch up there and we TikTok down here for now. I think this entire story is explained by one quote from the blog post, just one. And the image that YouTube supplied in that blog post. So the quote from the blog post, the design changes started with, quote, the I idea of reducing the size of the video player and simplifying the interactions. I hate it. That's just like, we're just going to make the video player smaller because we have,

everyone has long thought that the TV is like the lean back. You just put up the video and you're done and you're going. And now they're realizing, oh, this is just an Android tablet in your wall. What if we just let you control it like an Android tablet instead of saying all the interactivity happens in your phone, which is what you're saying? Yeah. But that first one, we're just going to make the video player smaller. That is now acceptable on our TVs.

Yes. That's a sea change. I mean, I fundamentally disagree with YouTube on this one. Possibly YouTube as well. This is what I'm saying. The whole story is in that quote. Yeah. No, I agree.

Because you look at that and then you look at the picture and it's her talking about products and then all the products are down at the bottom of the video. Yes, that is true. Okay. That's not what you were doing. My point is you pull over in your car and actually look at this image. And you're like, here's what YouTube thought best represents their big idea. and you look at the thumbnail

and you look at the headline and you're like, oh, YouTube has a quality problem. Because the headline is, I bought in all caps, mini beauty products that actually work. Because that is how you, and maybe this video is great. I'm not saying the quality of the video is wrong. I'm saying YouTube is, the algorithm is actively cheapening the YouTube brand

because it's a YouTube thumbnail with like a YouTube face on it. It's a headline that has all caps. It's shouting. at you and then underneath it what you're supposed to do is buy some stuff yeah and you're like oh this all this adds up to a less premium good thing you know what I mean like it's all of it is being in the mall where everyone's yelling at you I think you're old like that's that's what I mean not to put too fine a point on it but like the idea I think this feels bad I like I like cool things

that are cool I'm sorry I didn't know that I was an old guy thing no I mean I mean I mean, like, if you're mad at this particular video, fine. It has 2.8 million views, which I would say is a reasonable sign that it's pretty good and people like it. But also... I'm saying they should revert control of this algorithm to me personally, the president of America. If this thumbnail just had a jumping truck, would you be less mad about it? And then underneath it was trucks you could buy?

Yeah, probably. No, look, I don't have anything to say about beauty product videos or anything. this category video. I'm saying the presentation that YouTube picked for what do we want you to do on televisions is a shoddy shopping video, right? Like all caps in the headline. Like they are trying to take the market away from television. That's a long been the goal.

On TVs is where they are growing the most. And I think there's a real clash between what works in the algorithmic YouTube feed on phones and desktops. and then this experience on a television. This proves the opposite. Okay. What this says to me is that YouTube thought for years that what people would do when they sat down on their couch

is they would YouTube like they television, which is to say, put something on and sit for 30 minutes and look at it without doing anything else. And YouTube has slowly discovered over time that not only is that not what people want to do, it's not even what they want to do with their remotes. This thing where like fundamentally YouTube is about the thing that you're watching,

but only in part about the thing that you're watching. It's also about who the creator is and what the description is and looking at the products in the video because a lot of people do like to shop for this stuff and seeing the comments and finding recommendations and going down these rabbit holes. To me, what this says is, oh, people actually use YouTube on their TV with their remote exactly the same way they use it on their phone. And so what we need to give them is YouTube that looks like a desktop browser. Yeah, I think I agree with you.

In that specific way, I'm saying that even if you look at, look at this headline, for some reason the word bought is capitalized, but the words that actually work are not. And mini beauty products is all caps. They are very tiny. The algorithmic, like, when you take the algorithmic media and you just like make it this much bigger, I think that stuff is going to get highlighted in different ways. And maybe the fight is between people don't care and people do care, but you just end up in this place where all social media turns into QVC, and really the dream of all interactive TV has always been to be QVC, and YouTube turning itself into QVC, like literally turning itself into QVC puts them right next to real QVC, which is weird.

I totally agree with that. And that is very clearly where all of this is going. They're like, look at some ads, pay us a bunch of money, and buy every single product that exists anywhere in this video. and that is how we went. But you know what's interesting is the way, like our comments are picked up on this too, on the piece that we wrote.

What was it? A few months ago now that TikTok changed the thing where now when you swipe up to see the comments instead of pulling the comments up over the video, it shrinks the video just down to the top of the screen. Yeah. So you can still see the whole video, just not as big.

That's essentially what this is doing now too, right? It's saying you want to get to the other part of the interface, instead of pulling it up over top of what you're seeing, we're just going to shrink what you're seeing. And I think you can argue about whether that's the correct viewing experience or not. But I think that is very much the trend of where we're headed. It's like, we want you to see the whole picture. We're just also going to recognize that the rest of the interface is at least just as important as the video.

Or at least provides more opportunities to shop. That one. I mean, it's just all. Oh, you're watching this video. Yeah, I've been watching the video this whole time. I'm sorry. I wanted to see what beauty products actually. work, but it's all like, they are, they are, they're very, very tiny, but it's, it's, it's cheap stuff that I don't, I don't want to use this. Well, they're mini.

Yeah, but it's... Well, you think it would be good stuff but cheaper. It's cheap brands. Gotcha. Ice cold, Alex. Yeah. I'm one of those boozy bitches when it comes to my Sephora runs. The last time I watched QVC, I was in a hotel room in California.

And it was, you know, it was the winter. It was just recently. And on QVC in California, someone was earnestly trying to sell a corded snowblower and being like, this court is so convenient. You just plug in the snowblower. And I was like, this is doomed. And somehow this is also the future of all media. It is.

Straightforwardly being like, what it is is a push snowblower. But you want to just plug it right in. No batteries to worry about. Yeah, because then you get to use your extension cord also purchased on QBC. It really is amazing how much of like the stuff you see on TikTok now even steals some of the conventions of how people used to talk on QVC. Like the thing where it's like, describe the problem somebody has an overly dramatic turn. and then big, beautiful turn into what a cool world you live in. Like, that's now TikTok shop.

And they're like, I can't believe how expensive it is. It's on the TikTok shop. It's only going to be this price for this long. Get it now. It's like you're literally doing a QVC bit. And I suspect most of these people probably don't know what QVC is and have certainly never seen it. But like, it just turns out that's the correct way to do by this thing from a video.

It has just been optimized over time. Yeah. There's just like one evolution. way to tell someone to buy your stupid cheap product. And it's the QVC way. Real, like, big thinkers. I was just watching this, you know, it's like the classic QVC, like, male host, female host, like.

Wow, what are you talking about today? How are you going to cook in your kitchen with that? And how do you power this snowblower? And I was like, I don't know, it's just like obvious on its face. It was very good. It was the most QVC I've watched in some time. Yeah. It was 70 degrees in California.

I was watching people try to sell me a snowblower. I was like, I don't, maybe I travel too much for work. I can't watch QVC because one time in the 90s, I watched an episode of Mama's family where she got addicted to QVC. That's bad. And the family had to be like, you can't use QVC anymore. And for whatever reason, I was like, me too. Yeah. As like a five-year-old.

I will tell one more QVC-related story. My dad was the overnight doctor in the ER, she in Wisconsin. So he would come, he wouldn't be able to sleep at night when he wasn't working. Right. He was used to being up all night. Boy, did we have a lot of stuff in my house. Boy did I grow up eating a lot of dehydrated apples. The only thing on TV at that time of night.

What are you going to watch? I did it again. Six to eight weeks later, in the 80s, we got a food dehydrator. It was great. The fruit leather is incredible. He was so proud of that food dehydrator. It was just a circle with a fan. I don't know if you ever actually looked at it.

Never mind. Yeah, I've seen one. They're like, we took the haird dryer, and now we've pointed it. up. It's a food dehydrator. You get fruit leather. This is, by the way, the Dyson stories, they invented a fan, and now they only make fan-related products. It's very good. Okay. Other news. Spotify now has music videos.

I don't subscribe. Oh, my God. Sorry. I'm excited for you all. I'm excited for everyone who subscribes and loves a music video. I just opened YouTube on my TV in a tiny box next to below a bunch of sales links and watch my music videos that way. You're going to be able to buy all the cars and beers and liquors and hats that you see in every music video for the rest of your life, Alex. Are you so excited? It's going to be really, really great for me. No, I think the music video is thinking, like, it turns out that every streaming story right now is kind of a TikTok story.

Like, and we've talked about it a bunch on this show in recent weeks, right? Like this question of like, okay, Universal's in a big fight with TikTok. TikTok might be having an existential crisis, whether it's, can continue to exist. Who is going to show up and say, oh, all the music videos you want to watch, which are a gigantic portion

of what is successful on the internet as a whole. And Spotify is like, yeah, we'll do it. But Spotify is doing it in like the slowest, weirdest way.

They have like a tiny number of artists and a few videos. And it's like, guys, it's not actually that hard to put videos into your app, Spotify. Kudos for trying,

I suppose. But like, if you really wanted to do this, do it better. Also, Apple has had music videos forever. It's not a great player. It's not a cool experience. But if you're ever bored on your Apple TV and your Apple music subscriber,

you can just be like, show me music videos. And we'll just play a playlist of music videos. Or you can open the YouTube app and do it there. I do think this thing where that YouTube music does very well and no one else does very well where you can sort of seamlessly switch from video to song is very cool. And I think that's what Spotify is going for here too. But Spotify is just like desperate to be an app that you look at more because they want you to

discover more stuff, pay them money and like look at ads. But they just aren't going to get there. Right? Like remember what was it like a year ago when they basically like redesigned the whole app to be TikTok and everybody was like,

no thanks. Like I just want to play a song and then put my phone away. And I think they just, I don't think they're ever going to escape that, honestly. I think Spotify is going to buy Paramount Plus. That's who's going to do it.

Solves everything. Done. After Netflix collapses. In other Spotify news, Neil Young has returned to Spotify. I'm pretty sure this is only on the list so we can reference the time that Neil Young was on the verge cast and described...

With his little player? With the pono, and he described the MacBook to me as Fisher Price Quality and said your new engineer is Captain Kangaroo. I think we can just run the clips, Andrew. I don't think we have to say anything else about this. That man really cares about sound quality, very confused about how digital audio samples.

simply works, refuses to acknowledge that it's very hard to hear the difference at an appropriate bit rate. And I just want to say, he thinks the MacBook Pro is a piece of crap, but an actual quote that we can run now. It's a piece of crap. Are you kidding? That's Fisher Price quality. That's like Captain Kangaroo, your new engineer. The MacBook Pro, what are you talking about? You can't get anything out of that thing. All right. There you guys. That was Neil. Thanks, Neil. No notes, Neil Young.

Well, even Neil has caved to Spotify. Yeah. Everyone does eventually. Well, not me. But it is. I just appreciate the logic that, like, he left. He was the, like, loud protester to Joe Rogan, right? When he signed a huge deal with Spotify,

Neil Young was like, I can't be on this platform. And then Joe Rogan got an even bigger but now non-exclusive deal. So he's now everywhere. And Neil Young's like, well, shit, I got to sell music somewhere. It's like, I do enjoy those royalties. Yeah. Those are nice. Go beyond like title.

I don't think they have podcasts. Oh my God. Neil's Young website is so bananas. It's amazing. It's incredible. I wanted to read the blog post about his return to Spotify. But it appears to be down. And also Neil Young's website is fully insane and looks like an old time newspaper from the Wild West.

It's incredible. It does have a full resolution. audio player on it with a switch that says master. Your choices are low-res MP3 or master quality. I love it. It's very good. Again, I love Neil Young.

If we just, you'll listen to an episode of the Vergecast after these clips. All of it was astounding. I'm rarely taken aback the way that Neil Young took me back when I was like, so computers exist and he was like, kill yourself. Get this little music player.

All right. Last bit of video news. I'm just going to say it. It's about Twitter. You mean X, yeah. X. Linda Yacarino, everyone's favorite. Yeah.

Composed stable media executive. It's wonderful. It continues to say X is becoming a video first platform. Because you get more money from ads. Yeah. When I look around the social media industry and the media industry, I can confidently say that the pivot to video has worked out super great for everyone. Every time. And all these companies are doing great and not doing layoffs.

Yep. Totally. Very, very accurate thing you said. Yeah. Not the biggest company in the world. They're super not doing layoffs because video is so lucrative for them. And then, everyone's favorite free speech warrior, Elon Musk,

signed Don Lemon to do a show on X. I think he thought Don Lemon would be sort of the counterpart to Tucker Carlson who does a show on X. Don Lemon said, okay, Elon, it'll be my first interview. They did an interview. We saw a tiny little clip of the interview. I couldn't finish watching. the clip. The clip is Don't you think you have to answer to reporters

for like hate speech on the platform? Yeah. And Elon saying, I don't have to talk to reporters. I'm only talking to you because you're on the X platform, which is very funny. Okay. Deal canceled. Yeah. And we talked about this, I believe, last week, but in classic Elon Musk fashion, there was no actual contract.

So now Don Lemon is out there threatening to X for a contract that doesn't exist. And I I just want all of these people. If you are somewhere around Elon Musk, just write some stuff down and sign it on a napkin. All right. In the notes app, have him take a Sharpie to your phone and sign your phone after showing him the contract on a notes app.

Anything is better than the current situation where people just vibe deal with Elon. Yeah, don't vibe deal. No vibe. Please, I beg of you. What about handshake? Anyway, no, no, no vibes. Handshakes are the ultimate vibes. Okay.

Sorry. I wanted to make sure. I wanted to like, I wanted to double check. But I don't know. Like I needed to check in. Handshakes. They should give that to you in law school. Okay.

Handshakes are the ultimate vibes. All right. That's a class, actually. Like, no one really knows what's happening on the other side of that handshake. Well, I mean, not a contract in Elon's case. Never a contract in Elon's case. Handshakes of the Ultimate Fives, by the way, is Algorithmic Warfare's first album title. It's like surf rock and a variant.

Anyhow, it's very funny that Elon claims that he's a free speech absolutist cancel the deal over the most minor of questions when you run a giant platform with speech on it. Yeah. That interview is supposedly running on Monday. I am going to watch as much of it as I can physically stomach. I started it and... You started just that clip. I started the clip. Don spoke.

Elon started to talk and like everything about it. it, I was like, oh, I'm just cringing so hard. I can't even finish hearing him, like, finish the sentence. Yeah, just the awkwardness alone is tough. It was, but we'll see. Yeah. Here's one thing I'll say. Many people can have many opinions of Don Lemon.

Elon mostly signed all those deals with journalists who treat him like he has all the answers. Tucker in his interviews with Elon treats him like all the answers. Matt Taibi treats him like, you're letting me do this thing with all the answers. This is the first time, I think anyone's, straight up in like, so there's a lot of racism here. Are you accountable for it? And he just didn't know what to do.

Yeah. Elon does not like to be asked questions. Yeah. End of sentence. End of sentence. He doesn't like to be pushed ever. Like, do not push him. That's a good way to have your vibes deal on vibe.

Just sign contracts. But there's one thing I just beg of you. It protects both parties. It's not, all right, we got to take a break. There are form contracts available online, all right? Those will be fine. Anything. We'll be right back.

Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling. AHA moments and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of. and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough.

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com.A.I. slash vergecast. That's clod.a.ai slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend,

prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID. Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, explain, drops every weekday afternoon.

Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise

that you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything.

I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. Like, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actual. Let's begin. All right, we're back. Lightning Round.

We've got to make this fact. We are way over. This has been a deep Vergecast. We did food dehydrators. We did Elon Musk. An hour on the First Amendment. Chinese interference. We talked about Motor Trend TV.

I just want to say we've been everywhere. This is why you come here. Yeah. And now it's the lightning around. And David says he has a sponsor. Yes. So at South by Southwest, a friend of the Verge cast named Simon came,

and it was his birthday. And his big plan was, when we said it was lightning round time to scream, it's my birthday and I'm sponsoring the Vergecast. We didn't do a lightning round, and he came up to me like full devastating. Oh, no. So Simon today is sponsoring the Lightning Round.

Hell yeah, Simon. Happy birthday, Simon. Simon, we love you. Happy birthday. All right. For your lightning round, Cranz is going to talk about the British Monarchy. Yeah.

You're welcome. We're so long into the show to just be getting to this now. Well, it's okay, because this is going to be, I think, the shortest, what is a photo? one we've ever had,

Nelai will not be talking. He will simply be sighing loudly. We get tired. I hate the story so much. It's so good. Yeah, so Kate Middleton has been out of public view. She's just something.

She's a lady who gets a lot of money to live in England and look pretty. Very good. And she has been out of the public view and there's been a lot of theories about it. And then a relatively recently a Spanish journalist who at one point said out-of-pocket things about Michael Jackson and how he was probably murdered.

Wow. Where are we going with this? Oh, boy. She said Kate Middleton is in a coma. And then the royals came back and said, she's not. And that's very unusual because they usually don't respond to like absolutely insane stupid stuff. And so everybody's like, where is she then? So they released this photo.

And apparently Kate herself has claimed that she did the Photoshop job. But someone did it and they did that piss poor job. Wait, can I ask when the first time either of you saw this photo and Neelai, I know you follow her on Instagram, so you saw it. She's in your close friend's circle. So I know you saw it very quickly. I only pretend to not care about the British monarchy because Kate and I have been involved for several years. Everyone has seen this photo. I don't feel like I need to describe it.

But if you haven't, go to the internet, it will find you. No, continue living your life in peace. under no circumstances should you pull over your car and look for this image. But did either of you clock this as like weird anyway? Did you? Right away? Yeah. Like I looked at it and I was like why does everybody like they all look like they have AI faces.

Like they're all smiling. Oh, interesting. You went that far. Yeah. And then I didn't like to get to like zoom in and everything and I didn't realize it was a story because I had to get on a flight. And so I was like, this is so stupid. And I sent it to all my friends who we sometimes talk about royal stuff.

It's okay. It's just me. It's okay. Other people are allowed to care about the oil food. I don't actually care that much. I have a lot of friends who do. We have a lot of staffers who care about this for most. And it's great.

Ironically, none of our British staffers. Just a bunch of Americans. Not only Americans. The farther away you live from England, the more it appears you care about this. That's true, actually. I wonder if that keeps going. So if you circle around the Pacific Ocean, you start caring about it less again. You get to Japan and everybody's like up in arms about King Milton.

Could be. But, yeah, no, it was. It was clear to me, like, something was weird in the photo because her head was enormous. I was like, why is her head so huge in this picture? And it turns out because most of it was Photoshop. We don't know entirely how much. Kate later dropped, like, a thing being like, I just love to mess around with Photoshop. Still no photo of her.

The only photo we've seen is a picture of her husband driving. And there was a woman looking away when the photo was taken. And they said, that's Kate. That's good. And it's like, it's it? So unclear where she is. Unclear she's alive. Can I answer the one question?

Yeah. Not a photo. Not a photo? You think so? Yeah. Because of Photoshop. Just straightforwardly not a moment in time. Yeah.

That was my big question is what is a photo? Is this a photo? And it feels like no. And what's cool is everyone else agrees, including all of like the press. Everybody like AP Reuters. Everybody said, yeah, we're not going to carry this photo because it's not a photo. And it's been manipulated. And so very definitive, not a photo.

Everybody clocked it. I love how many people clocked in. I love how quickly, like, it made me feel better. The misinformation on the social media platform is about what's been edited here is out of control. So the number of people who think is AI is very high. The number of people who have decided, what's it, like a magazine cover. Yeah, it was a Vogue cover, I think, from years ago. And they used the face.

It's like, you know, that's just her face. It's like it's nowhere close to being the same face. Yeah. It's just at an angle? It is very funny. You see them side by side, and it's the same person making what amounts to essentially two totally different faces. Everybody's like, they swapped them. And it's like, no, they super didn't.

But the heart of the what is a photo debate, the heart of it is if you take a long sequence of photos over a period of time and synthesize one moment in time that never happened, but that contains all the other moments in time, is that a photo? That's the heart of the iPhone SmartHDR or whatever they call it now. The photonic engine takes, you know, eight frames and synthesizes one exposure. And that's what Kate did. But she did. But the eight frames happened like over five years. You know, it's like that's not the same thing. Is that even her kids?

Who can say? The reason you asked and I said I clocked it right away is I have but one child and getting her to look at the camera and smile is very difficult. And I was like, all three of them? No way. Like, just like immediately, I was like, this is some JCPenny shit. Like, no way. And it's the same smile on all of them. They all look like they had that, that's the filter in TikTok or whatever that makes you smile.

That's what they all look like. They do. It's horrible. I'm sorry I had to write about it. I know a lot, we had a lot of commenters. I don't think we should apologize for writing about it. Yeah, because I was going to say, we had a lot of commenters say, who gives a shit? All those commenters clicked and commented on the story.

This is the top story on our site by a mile. People really care about this. I want to be very clear about this. I'm an Indian American. My people have escaped the British royal family twice. We literally kick these people out of the countries that I'm from twice. Two different countries. We brought came together.

Here I am. Don't need you and you're queen on my money. Get out of here. It's a king now. Sure. I didn't even remember that. But I understand why it's important. I understand why so many members of our staff thinks it's important.

I understand why people are reading the shit out of it. Because it's hysterical. It's just, I'm from Westworld, and I'm literally getting inspired to me like, doesn't look like anything to me. She's like moving on. I mean, I do think if you want to, like, there's a really interesting story about, like, the media and information sharing and how we understand what's true. And like, all of that is fine and good.

And like, Liz Lapato, I think, is in the middle of writing what I assume will be 35,000 words about the Daily Mail that will be very good and I'm very excited to read it. But, like, I'm with you. It's absolutely not an AI. story and it is pretty much not at all a what is a photo story because it's just a hacky Photoshop job that's a CNN did a heroic job of trying to make it a what is a photo story they did they're like this raises the question of what even is a photo I was like you guys and also thank you to everyone who got that push notification and immediately sent it to us

this is how we know you are our people anyhow uh well I hope Kate's okay yeah who who who can say they may be weakened at burning She hasn't texted me back. Yeah. Yeah, what's up with that, Kate? Get to it. Come on. Nil's waiting.

It's a love affair. What can I say? This is why I have to pretend to discard the world. This is one of the rumors is that he was cheating on her. Well, I think the rumor should be. Yeah, like she got back at it with you. I can't even imagine how dismissive my wife will be of this idea. My actual divorce lawyer wife would be like, that's not true.

Shut it down. That's not the person I married. Okay. Second lighting round. I'll just go. As promised, while we have been recording, Starship the third launched. What up to orbit? Okay. Open some doors to prove it could open some doors.

And then it was supposed to splash down. Did not. Well, presumably it did. Just not in the way that everyone was hoping for. Well, no, the quote from SpaceX spokesperson that we have in our story. We haven't heard from the ship up until this point. And so the team has made the call that the ship has been lost. So no splashdown today. Oh, you're right. I took that to mean like it's going to come down. We just don't know where. But actually what that means is it's still up there

somewhere. Or it burned up in the atmosphere. Or it came down and they lost track of it. Or it exploded in some other way. Yeah. Any number of exciting opportunities for Starship fans. So as successes go. Well, so much, much more successful. Um, that, before when it fully exploded. And then when the booster exploded. This one went all the way up. It did some planned maneuvers. Love a maneuver.

That's it. And then, quote, remained in one piece until contact was lost. I mean, I think it's generally true in these cases that getting it down is the part the least concern. Yeah, that's the part that they worked on the hardest for the longest time. That is the massive engineering problem with it. We've gotten really good at.

But in a test like this, like worry about that once you can get the thing where it's going, right? Like, let's get it there and then we'll worry about getting it back. And it seems like they're getting it there. Like, that's cool. Yeah. That's cool. And probably the guy who runs that company,

the guy should run the company is maybe a thing that I could. Don Lemon. Why does he care if it comes back? He wants to go up and stay up. Go to Mars, Elon. I think everyone would be happier. It'll be fine. All right.

Okay. My lightning round. I'm just going to run away from that as fast like that. Yeah. I just want to take you on like a brief emotional roller coaster that I went on earlier this week, which is when I read a headline from Tom Warren, lovely reporter at the verge, who said, Apple to allow iOS app downloads direct from websites in the EU.

David wakes up to this news. Hell yeah, sounds awesome, super exciting. Apple's going to let you properly sideload. And then you scroll down a way and Apple has done what it always does, which is say a thing and then set up like a hilarious set of hoops you have to jump through in order for this to be real. You have to be in Apple's developer program. You have to be in good standing. you have to have more than a million annual installs in the EU,

which is actually a huge number. You have to only offer apps from your developer account. You have to be responsive to communications from Apple. You have to publish your data. Like, you basically have to do all the things you have to do to be in the app store, only harder. And then you can have it from your website. Yeah, you have to, like, go on a dinner date with Tim Cook at one point.

Like, that was a really weird one. I didn't understand that one. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, you have to go to the house of everyone who wants to download your app and do it for them. Yeah. So, yeah, again, like, this is just what Apple is doing here, right? Like, they are allowing things, but making it so onerous that I don't think anything real is actually going to change for people.

But just the fact that this is a thing that technically exists, I still think is very cool. Yeah. The concept is cool. The execution is hot garbage. Yes. I'm just like, how's this going to work? The EU is absolutely like, come on, man. They won't stop.

They won't stop. They will come to your house and then take a nap on 4 p.m. and they're going to wake up and they're going to regulate the shit on you. They will work six hours and they will get a lot done in that six hours. I don't mean to denigrate our European friends. They're wonderful. No, because they are getting stuff done. I think Europe is doing a much better job at legislating technology than the United States.

And it's because they eat well and sleep right. Yeah. There we go. They walk a lot. Yeah, we figured it out. We solved it. You do some walkable cities, and then suddenly you're able to do tech regulation. I think all this stuff we've talked about this at length is all going to backfire on Apple.

This is political nightmare territory for Apple. These technical compliance measures that don't actually add up to anything real. They're just getting trouble. All right. Cairns, you want to do one more? Yeah, I got one more. And that is, our European friends will already know about this, the Dyson 360 VizNav. what is that you ask

with a name like the Dyson 360 Viznav that is a robot vacuum cleaner that uses visual navigation Wait do you know what I just realized Alex Do you remember when Dyson was building an electric car

They for sure had a thing called Viznav and we're like oh crap We got to use this name for something We like bought the domain name That's where this came from How was the car gonna go? Was it gonna like have a big fan on the bag?

I'm telling you anytime Dyson tries to make something that isn't a fan-based product. Couldn't have worked. That either sucks or blows. To get nowhere. This thing does apparently suck. Like that's its whole thing. Is it supposed to be really good at it?

And it has the most enormous fluffy brush. Like she said, it's got a really fluffy brush. And I was like, that's a weird thing for you to say. And I don't understand. And then she sent me a picture. And I was like, no, it's awesome. Like, I want to just reach through the photo and touch it. It just looks very squeezable.

But she's going to be, she just got it in. It's finally available in the United States or is about to be available in the United States. She just got it in. She's going to be spending a lot of time messing around with it. How stupidly expensive is it? So expensive. It's over $1,000. Yeah, like, come on.

Can I just say the way this thing looks. I mean, it's Dyson, so I assume whatever number I think I should just double it and that's what Dyson costs. This is not going to fit under, if you have one of those cool platform beds with like real low clearance to the ground. this will not clean under it. It is quite tall. $1,200, sorry. Purple. It does look like one of those things,

the Matrix that puts you back in the power plant. Yeah. But like in a friendly way. That's what it's doing to the dirt. That's how the dirt feels when it comes at it. It's like, you know that scene? It's like, I'll get my body back to the power plant, but I don't want to know nothing.

It's like, this thing comes to your house. And it's like, we'll get you back in there, but you have to trade Neo. I have weird feelings about this. vacuum cleaner. It's so fluffy looking. Like, did you look at the... It does look very fluffy. I don't know why I like both, both, uh, Jen and I were both like, oh my God, this brush. Like, we lost our minds over the brush, which is very weird and fun for us. I'm excited to see what she does with it. This is vacuum our house? Yeah, but she's got a lot of robo-vaks in there right now,

and I really want her to put knives on all of them and have them fight, and she told me no. So, um, I'll update you guys on that. We can, let's work on that together. Yeah, we can work on that. I We can do it. All right, Dad. Do you have another one or is it just me again? Mine's just really quick, which is that Microsoft Teams is now attempting to become like an app that families use to talk to each other. And Microsoft has been talking about this for a while as like a thing they want to do, but

they're now like unifying the app so you can have personally and work accounts together. And I just feel very vindicated by the fact that I've been saying Teams was the stupid as possible name for this product this whole time. And I was right and I feel great about it. Can you imagine like going home tonight and being like, okay, I'm going to set up the family teams and then that's how we're going to like no I'm out pass abort teams get out of here I'm proud of you for having feelings of Microsoft teams most people I know who use teams including me whenever I use it I try to use it on my computer something bad happens I join the team

meeting the audio's messed up and I always say this thing I have a very complex relationship with Microsoft teams and then everyone in the room starts laughing it's a good joke because it's just it's good Yeah, everyone knows what I'm talking about. Yeah. Whatever it is. And Zoom has to update every single time. Every time. You use it.

Those are the two facts of life now. It's very good. And then Google Meet on my 2015 IMac. Just talk about a Dyson fan. That thing could power a car, you know what I'm saying? It's not great. Got to get a new Mac. Still working with it.

Okay, mine, my last one, and we've got to wrap this up. Many people wrote in to ask about this. Nikon is acquiring red. So red, the big famous camera manufacturer. I think you mean phone maker. Phone maker. The red hydrogen one, famously one of the worst products we've ever reviewed. Incredible.

A review so bad, they canceled the product. It's only happened a few times in our history. I was just, I loved that thing. I mean, I loved like its existence. I didn't love it. What if we took the design language of a rugged hard drive and made you hold it all the time? It's so look at it.

It was very ridiculous. Bad, bad, bad 3D screen as well. That is not why they're selling to Nikon. They weren't like, we're so embarrassed we've got to get out of this. There's been some patent battles in the past between these two. If you're Nikon, you know that so much of the action of imaging is happening in video, that is driving a huge amount of the sensor technology that is happening, all the stuff is happening on the video side. And that's not what Nikon's known for.

It's not even a little bit. Nope. Not at all. So you see the cannons and the Sonys of the world, like, really lean into video. There's just an explosion of digital video making happening everywhere. Red obviously owns a big chunk of that. I'm not entirely sure how the shape of this patent battle led to an acquisition. I just know strategically, Nikon was kind of out of moves.

Yeah. And I think Red saw a number, and they took the number. I'm very curious to see if Nikon cameras turn more into red cameras, because I don't think the people who use red cameras will accept them turning more into Nikon cameras. No. I feel like both ways. Like neither one of those crews want to use that product, the other product.

Yeah. But that makes it a good deal for them is because then they get both of those. Yeah, maybe that's okay. Like red is a good brand with great products. Like maybe the best place to land is just like, oh, you need Nikon to have a video strategy. Like here it is it's called red. And I know it's got good glass. So it's like...

Yeah, I mean, I'm a Nikon person, famously. Our video team is deeply confused by this at all times. But I love my Nikon. D7500 still going strong. We'll just see. It is also, by the way, it is a good time in still cameras. We haven't already talked about us, but Becca's been doing a lot of coverage

of like very exciting still cameras from Fuji and Lika that are coming out. That Fuji film. I think about it a lot. I'm like, I don't need that camera, but what if I got into photography again? That's a midlife crisis camera right there. I'm like, yeah.

Interesting. What if Max doesn't go to college? Yeah. College is overrated. Yeah. What you want to see? Get a cool camera. Beautiful street photography.

Yeah. Sorry, kid. I took a picture of a dumpster. Okay. That is it. That's the Vergecast. We're going to send her to college one way or the other. We'll just see how many dumpster photos pay for it.

Yeah. If she wants to go, which she's going to want to because I'm her father. Okay. That's it. That's a virtualcast. on way over. Thank you for listening. Many things to give us feedback on this time. David, tell us how they can get in contact with us. You can email us, vergecast at theverge.com. That goes to all of us. Or you can call the hotline 866,

verse 1-1. We got a tweet from somebody the other day who thought it was very funny that we used to tell everybody about Twitter, and then we told people about threads for a minute, and now we want them to call our landline, which is objectively very funny. We're all also on threads. You can find us there. And also just like theverge.com. We make a website. It's pretty good. Yeah. Come to it directly. Escape the algorithms. That should be our new tagline. Escape from algorithms. It's pretty good. Theverge. All right. That's it. That's it for the verge cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.