The Vergecast - Gemini is taking over Google

Episode Date: August 16, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss AI tools announced at this weeks Pixel 9 event, Nilay's TV competition, tech regulatory news, and more. Further reading: AI overshadowed Pixel at the Pixel event All the AI features coming to Google's Pixel 9 series  Google debuts Pixel Studio AI image-making app Google makes your Pixel screenshots searchable with Recall-like AI feature Every time Google dinged Apple during its Pixel 9 launch event Google Gemini’s voice chat mode is here Using Gemini Live was faster than Google, but also more awkward Google Pixel 9 launch event: all the announcements and products  Google's Pixel 9 lineup is a Pro show  The Pixel 9 Pro XL showed me the future of AI photography Google’s Zoom Enhance camera trick is finally available  Inside the competition that named the Sony A95L the best TV of 2024 Patreon adds Apple tax to avoid getting kicked out of the App Store  Apple is finally going to open up iPhone tap-to-pay Apple relents and approves Spotify app with EU pricing  AltStore PAL drops its annual subscription thanks to a grant from Epic Epic judge says he’ll ‘tear the barriers down’ on Google’s app store monopoly The FTC’s fake review crackdown begins this fall Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP, hire lawyers to “clean up the mess” Flipboard is going to let you follow fediverse accounts right inside the app Halide’s Process Zero feature captures photos with no AI processing Realme’s 320W fast charging can fully charge a smartphone in four and a half minutes 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

What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WNBA 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. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. and they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week unexplained to me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics.

New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome for our chest, the flagship podcast of our fancy new studio. Look at this, guys. It's sick. It's so fancy. I wish I was there to see it in person. Does it smell nice? You know, many times this studio smells like weed when I walk into it.

When Alex and I have sat down to record this show, many times you've commented that it smells like weed in here. Yeah. We don't know if that's from our colleagues at Vox.com. We don't know if that is from Liam. We don't know if that is from the other people who are podcasting here. But today it does not smell like weed. It smells fresh and new. It's good.

If you're listening to the show, it's going to be the same show, it's just the space that we are the space that we are. recorded has been dramatically upgraded. David was gone for two weeks and they, our amazing studio team took the time to rebuild the thing while we were kind of out and about and traveling and recording remotely. It's just real fancy in here. It does look awesome. And truly, even if you're just listening, like, you won't see it, but like the vibes will be better. It's very moody. You know what I mean? It's like the Nelai is like a happier, more optimistic person now that we're in this studio. I mean, I got a giant TV behind me. That's the largest frame TV they make, ladies and gentlemen. And there's like a hangout zone, like where sidekicks on podcasts go.

Oh, the like retired NFL player who just like only says two things in every episode. I love that. That's the job I want. Like the AJ Hawk Corner is right over there if you're a Pat Maxy fan. I'm going to do every segment of today's show from a different spot in this room. But it is beautiful. It's very nice. It's funny.

You know, we share the studio with other Vox Media Podcast Network shows. So Andre Iguodala and Evan Turner record in here. And then we have a new show with Megan Rapino and Sue Bird that also records in here. And the first time I saw pictures of it was all set up for them. And I was like, where's our GameCube? Don't worry. It turns out they just changed the studio around for every show. I do think, though, we should find a way to anchor our Webby to the shelves so that no one can get rid of our Webby.

Anytime you do a podcast, you will see the Vergecast's Webby. Those are the rules. I think our YouTube play button is. permanently match on a ball over there. So if you are an ex-NFL player sidekick, you know we have a million subscribers. You know it in your heart. You got to sit under that.

That's the mark, everybody. Forever. Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. Welcome, David Pierce is back from vacation. Welcome, David. Hi, I picked the worst two weeks of all time to be gone, but I'm very happy to be back. Nothing happened while you were on vacation.

No, including not the culmination of a trial that I covered for months and cared deeply about and seems very important to the end of the internet. Yeah. Super chill. Hey, does anybody know anything about the search engine Niva? Oh, I guess the guy who wrote the profile of it isn't here at all. Real bummer.

I only reported on them for like a year and a half and didn't get to talk about that at the end. But the good news is that case is going to go on for six to seven more decades. So we'll have more chances. It would be all right. Yeah, there's a long period. And then Alex, you were on last week. You've been on vacation. And then you immediately went away to cover the Pixel event in San Francisco.

Yeah. I'm currently on the West Coast and not in the room with you. Otherwise, so we're going to use a pixel to just do the Admi feature and put me in there with you. But otherwise, it's a good time out here. It's very nice, temperature-wise. Yeah. The theme of this episode is, can you believe your lying eyes? And the answer is fully, fully no.

So let's start with the pixel. There's a lot to talk about there always the pixel event, which you guys, David, I think you covered a little bit on the Tuesday show. Yep. I want to talk about TVs. I love talking about TVs. So a lot of gadgets to open the show. Then we got a bunch of just stuff in the app store. and the EU happening.

And then of course, we have a lightning round. The deeply controversial lightning round. I can't believe I left and you still didn't get the lightning round sponsored. Like that's, I wanted to come back from vacation. You were like, congratulations, David, here is the lightning round yacht that we all bought. We did it. We spent the money actually on the set. I've gotten all the way to, in my head, leaving the various Vox Media corporate meetings

that I have to go to with like, what if I ended every meeting with, don't talk to me until the Lightning Round is sponsored. I'm not sure this would go well. I'm not sure that it would achieve any goals, really, or even my continued employment. But rest is sure I've thought about it. You feel really cool. Yeah.

Like, why are you talking to me with an unsponsored lightning? Sashay out. A little scarf. Yeah. This is what I think about in my spare time, is how to get myself fired. Okay. Okay, let's talk about the pixel.

The pixel itself, David, you talked about on the Tuesday show with everybody. There's like two parts of the pixel event, though, that I think are kind of important. One was the phone, and then the second is that the phone wasn't introduced until like 20 minutes into the event. Because what it really was was Rick Osterlo, who now runs Android and Pixel, talking about Android becoming the platform for Google's AI ambitions. and even showing a bunch of AI features on Samsung phones. And there's something there that feels very worth talking about to me. What, you mean the fact that we saw a Samsung phone and a Motorola phone before we saw a pixel phone? Yeah, that's the simpler way of putting it, I think.

It's weird, right? There's something to that that I think is really interesting. It's weird and it isn't. Like, it's weird that it's not weird is actually where I'm at with this. because there are three things going on here, right? One is that Rick Austerlo oversees Android and Pixel, and that is a very hard job. We've talked about this, that for years,

Google was like we have a very hard firewall between our own hardware efforts and our partner ecosystem with Android. Now it's just literally the same dude in charge of it, and that's a complicated thing to do, especially because for Google, the vast majority of everything that matters about Android does not happen on Pixar.

So for Google to come out and say, look, a Samsung phone that does all this stuff is purely just a recognition of what actually matters to Google, which is the Android business, not the pixel business. That is just the fact of the matter. The other thing is, I think Google thinks AI as a thing and Gemini as a thing is more important than all of that. Right. Like that is the big bet. So you have to lead with Gemini and you have to lead with Android and then like a while later show everybody the phone that you made. And then it's a big bet. And then it's a big bet. And you have to lead with Gemini and you have to lead with Android and then, like, a while later, show everybody the phone that you made. And then. And then. If you also believe, as I do, and I think as Google does, that the hardware just exists in service of the software, which exists in service of the AI, like, it all ladders up. So it's weird that Google ostensibly launched a bunch of gadgets in what was not at all a gadget launch. But like increasingly, this was now two days ago as we're recording this. Like, it wasn't really a gadget launch. Like, they launched some gadgets.

But the main most important thing they talked about was not the gadgets, which is very strange. Yeah, it felt more like an I.O. I mean, not in the room. It felt like a pixel event in the room, but the content felt like an IO keynote more than a pixel event. Because it was just, yeah, we're going to talk about all these really great features that you can now use AI to generate adorable animals and Kiki Palmer's here. Yeah, the Kiki Palmer thing, I'm still, I got nothing on she's there. Like, between the Kiki Palmer thing here and the Sydney Sweeney thing at the So, like, can we just stop with the really awkward celebrity cameos? Nobody has fun.

It's good for them. They get paid. That's great. I say triple down. Just more celebrity cameras. Sydney's. No. Neil Patrick Harris at an Apple event.

Just get out there. Just whoever it is. It's going to be Chris Evans at the Apple event. Let's, or Scarjo. But no, like Sidney's sweet. Like, Kiki Palmer, like, she got to move around. Hey, set the celebrities free. Yeah.

Don't just make him sit in a chair an awkwardly wave. She was there sort of at the very end, right? Like she was just there to be like, AI is great. And there's a Kool-Aid manned in. Basically, yeah. But the thing you're discussing more broadly,

which is Google believes it has a huge distribution advantage for Gemini. That distribution advantage is Android. And they're going to put it everywhere and embed it into all of their platforms and services. Alex, right, we did see that coming at I. That's basically what they said. And Rick's message was, now this stuff is here.

It's shipping. Like, you can get it. And then, you know, they showed it on a bunch of Samsung Motorola phones. And then they're like, and here's the pixel. And then here's a tiny bit of stuff the pixel can do that the others can do, which is the ad me feature and the photos and all that. Right. Yeah. But there's a sense that Google knows it is better at distributing AI than any of its competitors.

It took a lot of digs at Apple, for example, just see. secret, not even secret, just like quiet side swipes at Apple throughout this whole event. We're available in all the languages. Apple's intelligence isn't. We don't have to send your data to a third party. Apple's going to send some of your stuff to open AI. Down the line, it was, Google was just reinforcing that it is building the AI. Like, it has it, it controls it.

It runs in the cloud. And the best way to get it is through Android. I just don't know if that's going to get anybody to switch from an iPhone. Like, that's actually the thing that I think is the most interesting here. That they're like, Android is the place where you get your AI. And everyone's kind of like, okay? Well, I think Jim and I live is probably a good example of that, because that's coming to iOS later this year.

And that they spent a lot of time on Jim and I Live, it felt like. That's their like answer to chat GPT's voice assistant. And yeah, it really just felt like this moment of, okay, no, you don't actually just need to be on an Android device. And I personally, I just kept thinking of the fact that just last week they found out that something's going to happen with Google. And one of their biggest revenue drivers is their relationship with the iPhone. And so now it feels like their phone ecosystem is more important than ever. And we just didn't hear a single thing about it besides AI.

So, yeah, it is a little weird that everything hinges on this AI now. So what all the big AI companies have been saying is that they think AI is a plan. platform shift. You can interpret that a lot of ways. Like, I've tried to get Sundar Pichai to explain what that means to me. Sundar Pichai said it's as big as fire. I don't know that there's that many ways to interpret that. It's just the one, really.

Yeah, he's, yeah. I mean, but it's true. But the way I have interpreted platform shift is people are going to use computers in a different way, and that will create many more opportunities to build products and services, right? And if you look back at the history of platform shifts, you go from, I don't know, DOS and text-based computing to mice and keyboards. And then you go from local applications to the web and then you go to touch screens on phones, right? Yeah.

Those are the platforms. Yeah. If you can think of another way to think about the word platform shift, please let me know because I'm sort of dying to figure out how to understand the words platform shift as it relates to AI. And all I've come up with in that framework is, oh, you're going to talk to the computer instead of typing. Which isn't a, like, that's a platform shift we already had. Except now it can do it. Except now Gemini Live can just like listen to you and maybe take actions on your behalf. And maybe you're going to type to it.

Maybe you're just going to say, I don't know, like go make me an app that can do X and Gemini Live will spit it out and that'll be fine. Or Siri on with Apple intelligence will go use the apps for you, which is something that Apple has, you know, it's not going to. a ship, but it's what they previewed at WWC. That's the platform shift. That's the platform shift. That last piece is the real platform shift. And this is what I've been hearing from people forever. I think it was Paul Ford recently wrote a really good thing about this.

He said right now we're in the like command line era of AI, which is like the tech is kind of under there, but nobody has figured out how to use it yet. And the idea that you're going to basically use a command line to interact with it, which is essentially what writing an AI prompt is, is fine as far as it goes, but that's not the mainstream answer. And that actually what needs to happen is everybody needs to invent the interface on top of that

that makes it interesting. And that we have not seen. But I think the thing that I hear from everybody is like, this starts to get really interesting when we get to the, it can use your apps for you phase of all of this. Because that's where you actually do use your computer differently. Because right now it's like you can look up information by talking instead of by typing.

And Alex, to your point, A, that exists. B, it's not better. Like, it's not better. It's different. It's a little faster, but it's not better. And Alex, you've used Gemini Live a little, so I'm curious to hear what you think. But, like, we're still at this point where it is sort of a technology

in search of a user interface. Yeah. And I think I didn't, like, you see a lot of Google, like, poking at that. I think the pixel screenshots thing, which we should talk about in which I am on, record of being fascinated by is an interesting version of that. But like how you actually push and pull with this thing is such an unanswered question in so, so many ways. I feel like they, they definitely haven't figured it out. Like, like, when we spent a little time with Jim and I

live, it was me and Sean Hollister and Allison all, Johnson, all in our little room trying to talk to this thing. And was it the same? I'm picturing a demo like the chat GPT one where it's like phone on a table listening to you just chat. We have to hold the phone. Like, like I couldn't stand far away from the phone. You have to hold the phone really close to yourself because otherwise it'll be like, no, I'm not listening to you. But I really struggled with it because I try to be very polite in conversations and like, oh, if you're talking, I'm going to usually let you finish. Not always as Verchcast listeners can attest, but I'm usually going to let you finish. And this one, you're like encouraged to interrupt it. And you're encouraged to interact with it in a way

that would be like really rude if you were interacting with a person. And so it's at one point It wants you to feel like it's more human and more realistic. And at the other point, it's doing that. And then, like, I got in a fight with it because it wouldn't shut up. So I told it was mansplating me. And it was like, oh, I'm sorry. Do you want me to change my tone of my voice? And I was like, and it was a little sassy when it said it.

I was just like, did I just get like, talk, clap back to that by AI? Yes. And then, yeah. And Sean was like, I got this. And Sean just went in and it was like, no, shut up. I have a question. And just immediately was just, no, no, shush. Me now.

And he was basically a dick to it, and it worked perfectly. And I'm like, okay. So who knows more about the steam deck? You or me. He might have asked that. But he mainly asked it for stock tips and that it was like, I wouldn't personally invest in Bitcoin. But you can do that if you want. It's just very high risk.

Our very first Gemini scandal. No, that's not a scandal. That's just good advice. Here's my question. So you use it. You talk to it. It has some personality. This is the thing.

Like this is how Google is talking about beating Open AI, right? Open AI is going to put out its voice version. It's going to sound like Scarlet Johansson or not. It's going to have personality. It takes a breath in the middle of counting numbers as fast as I can. We've all seen that video. It's like they're competing on personality, not content. Right.

Yeah, because some stuff it did really, really well for me. Like I asked it to fix something. It took me a while to fix on my car, and it did it in 30 seconds. It was just great. And another stuff, it really struggled with. And it struggled to understand the questions. And if, like, somebody compared it to being a kind of a friend. And I wouldn't have friends like this thing.

Because it just talks. It doesn't listen to you. It doesn't respond to you in the way that a friend might. And it's, but it's at the same time, it's a computer. So you're just in this weird space where you're like, am I having to be nice to my computer? And I don't necessarily want that. I want it to just be my computer. What you want, I think that the thesis of The Verge as a whole, as a publication is, do I have to be nice to my computer?

Yeah. No. And we've been struggling to figure out that answer for quite some time. But I do think, in a way, those companies pushing that stuff are kind of telling on themselves about the actual state of the technology, right? Because what has been true for 60 years is that if you give a computer any kind of personality, people will fall in love with it and try to have sex with it and tell it their deepest, darkest secrets. Like, it's just true.

Like, we did a video about this a while ago that was very fun, and it's like in the 70s, this guy made a thing that basically all it did was say your commands back to you as a question. And so you'd be like, you know, my father was mean to me. And it would be like, your father was mean to you. And people were like, oh, my God, it understands me. This is Eliza, right? Yes, that was Eliza.

Yeah. And that's actually a really powerful thing. And I think one other thing I missed while I was on vacation was all the friend drama. I wrote the story about this guy who launched an AI friend, and everybody went nuts on the internet because there was drama about who owned it. It was the whole thing. I'm very happy I missed all of that drama.

But one of the things that Avi, the CEO said to me was he was like, the reason I'm doing this is because it's the only thing AI is any good at right now. And I think that's right. There is vast gaps between where we are right now with this technology and like true utility in people's lives. but it's pretty easy to make one of these, like, fun as hell to talk to, because it's not that hard to make them fun as hell to talk to. So what they're able to compete on right now is making them fun as hell to talk to

because that will make people use them more, even if they can't do very much and the things that they do, they don't do very well. And so if you're just using this as like a rote, straightforward robotic task machine, you're going to notice it's bad and you're going to hate it. But if you make it fun and cool and friendly and exciting, it doesn't have to do that much, right? And I think that's a fine road to go down, but it is so not the same thing as like making it more useful to people. So let me put that into the framework or the question I was asking.

Alex, when you were using Gemini Live, did any of it feel like the platform shift? Because that is the big question, right? If you're Microsoft and you're pouring billions of dollars into this because you missed mobile, then this is your chance to reclaim the primary user interface of computers. If you're Google and you're basically communicating that you're going to bet the company on this, is there is there evidence that that is real? Because I don't know. I honestly don't know. It's no. I think right now, yeah, I think right now the answer is no for me.

I think it is a valuable tool. I was talking with people afterwards who don't even work at Google, work at other companies about these kind of things. And they were like, oh, yeah, I really like it because it's a good brainstorming tool. It's a good way for me to like just figure some stuff out. And I'm not going to brainstorm that way personally ever. Like that's the whole thing. It's fun to talk to. But like I didn't feel this urge to just, oh, I want this in my car.

I did actually want to my car immediately. So never mind. I did feel that. So that's the platform shift. Yeah. I was like I want to be like. It's lightly mansplaining to her. You're like this is a future of the game.

It was like so mansplaining. It was very upsetting. But like as a voice as as as as if you think of it as part of the evolution of the assistant, the digital voice assistant, it's a lot better. It is a huge improvement over assistant. It's a huge improvement over Siri and Alexa. But is it a replacement for computing, like general computing? No, absolutely not. It's not a platform shift from my phone. It's a platform ship for my Alexa. Yeah. Well, I think even the question of, is it better than Google Assistant or Siri or Alexa is a really interesting one, because one of the things that's happening is Gemini is

replacing Google Assistant kind of all over Android, which is a big deal. Like, it wasn't that long ago that Google was out there being like, Google Assistant is the future of everything. And now it's very clearly Gemini. And there have been a bunch of people out there testing early versions of this thing. Obviously, they're early. We'll see. And it just can't do some of the very, very basic things you would expect.

That's what, right. And so it's like, okay, you have this thing that is more fun to talk to, understands you better, does the sort of basic interface tasks way better, like orders of magnitude. better than the stuff that we had before. But it can't do the things. I think it was Jared Newman at Fast Company, wrote a thing where he was like, it can't tell me what the weather is.

It can't play the podcasts that I have played because it doesn't have access to my apps. It doesn't do turn-by-turn directions very well. Just all these basic things, it's like, okay, what Google Assistant had is access to the systems that you actually want on your phone, right? Like, it was able to use your apps for you. And Gem and I can't use your apps for you,

but we're replacing the one with the other before it can do both. things, which to me is just it's like, it's so clear that that is what Google thinks is more important. It feels like a big rush, but I'm also, I feel not concerned about it. I feel like that's the kind of thing that they can do a software update and be like, yeah, now it can do timers, now I can tell you the weather. Like those should be relatively easy things to just pipe in. And I think they just haven't because they've been moving that quickly to turn this out and compete with Apple, like to the point of this whole event happened a month before what we assume is going

to be the Apple, the iPhone launch, and traditionally it's held in October. And that was very, I think everybody at the industry was just like, oh, that's just to get ahead of Apple intelligence. And so it definitely feels like they're rushing it. But at the same time, there's a level of polish there. But it's not perfect, right? Like there's, with Syrian assistant and stuff like that, you ask it a question, and it'll pop up something contextually on the screen for you so you can see it. there's a visual component and there's zero visual component here. And I think that, if anything, was the most annoying element of it. Because you ask it for questions.

You just expect to see some sort of result in front of you. And instead you just see this little glowy screen. And it's like, okay, cool. Like that'd be cool in my meta glasses. That's just not cool on my phone. That's a waste of my phone. Even when I use the chat, GBT voice mode, which I think I've said it several times. I have mapped the action button on my iPhone.

halfway through it talking, I'm like, I just need to read this. Yeah. I'm tired of this. I can just read much faster than you can machine talk to me, robot. We're going to get another run at this when the phones come out. We're obviously going to get a chance to use it more. I want to talk for one second to wrap up the Android pixel AI conversation and just talk about the photo stuff for half a second.

I feel like I could spend five hours talking about what is a photo right now. historically speaking that we've proven that several times. So, you know, the pixel line's coming out. Becca's gotten a chance to use the Admi feature and some of the other photo stuff. You can go watch that video. But we're just in a really weird spot where it seems like the phone makers in particular have utterly given up on the idea that the pictures they take should represent reality. What was the line that you pulled out, Neelai, where like Google was like, we're not even,

they don't do photos anymore? Yeah. So Julian at Wired did the piece on the pixel camera this year, sat down with a bunch of Google folks, talked about the camera and the new features and why it's better. And basically his thesis in this piece is Google is chasing memories, not photos. And so he talked to a Google PM named Isaac Reynolds who says, quote, it's about what you're remembering. When you define a memory that has a fallibility to it, you can have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create a moment that is the way you remember it. that is authentic to your memory and the greater context,

but maybe isn't authentic to a particular millisecond. Wow. That's a PhD thesis. Seriously. It's beautiful. That is a PhD thesis in philosophy right there. Like, what is real? Is it what you remember or what actually happened?

I don't, a PhD thesis, I'm just telling you, you can spend the rest of your life chasing down that question. And Google has just made it. decision that what they want to do is help people create the memories they felt they were experiencing as opposed to capturing what actually happened. And they're just headed down that road. They have been for some time. I think not just Google. That's everybody. Like that's a pretty good summation of the whole industry right now. Yeah. It's bananas to me because we live in a time when like synthetic and

fake media is everywhere. And you can even see that having it. exist at all allows bad actors to call into question the significance or reality of real media. So Trump saying the Harris rally was, quote, AI'd. Which can we not do that? Can you just pause real fast? Like, can we not with the AI as a verb? The AI already means too many things. It's a huge catch-all word that has become sort of meaningless.

Can we not make it other parts of speech to? I agree that we should not use language. Donald Trump uses language. But what I'm getting at is you only get to do that if people believe the technology can do it. And it is true that people have believed the technology can do this stuff for years before it can. But now they're going to hold in their hands the capability on a Samsung phone to circle an empty field and say add a crowd. Right. They can just do it.

They are going to hold in their hands the ability to add people to photos who weren't there before with AdMe on a Google Pixel. and the companies are marketing this as this makes you more creative. It lets you take the photos you want. And now for Google, all the way to, we want you to create the memories of the things you thought were happening rather than the things that were happening. I mean, haven't like Chinese phone makers been doing that? We want to create what I think I look like versus what I actually look like

with the face tuning. Sure. It's been happening a while. It's one of those things I think what was shocking to me is the, ease of access of the tool itself, but I'm not like shocked at putting these tools in the phone. But it's weird that they put it in the camera app. The ADMI feature is not like the most AI. It's like generating you.

Right. It's doing a bunch of cool stuff. But on a technical level, it's doing something cool, right? It's generating a depth map and then using a depth map to realign the multiple photos. That's all very cool. And I'm confident there's a bunch of AI in there that is helping to do that. But at the most fundamental level, what it's doing is compositing two photos together. Like, you look at the photos that the Hollywood magazines put out with like 500 stars in the cover.

Those are often composite photos. Those are ADMI photos. Like, like, every single poster, movie poster you see is one of those ADME photos. But like... Right, but I'm never like, I wonder if this movie poster happened. Right. But I will also say, I got to try it out a little bit at the event and ADME. is certainly really cool, but also I would say it's like the royal family level of photoshopping

abilities. Ooh, deep cut, Alex. You see some like hands where hands should not be, that sort of thing sometimes. So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it'll do it. At a glance, it looks awesome. It looks really, really cool. You look closer and you see the edges on this stuff. And I haven't gotten to try it as all of these tools, but like even the AI one where you

circle things and add. Like, that messed up at the event. They scrolled through it really, really fast. And they were like, here's a hot air balloon. And then they, like, did another one. It was like a blob. And the guy, like, just speed scrolled past this horrible amorphous blob. It was pretty great.

All I'm getting at is those tools aren't great. But because they exist and they are broadly accessible, it's not just that there's a bunch of synthetic photos we can point at and say those are fake. Bad actors are able to point at real photos and say they are fake. and we are just barreling towards no one believes anything they see. I think we're already there. There's a strong argument we're already there. Do you guys remember a bunch of years ago,

Farhad Manjou, when he was at the New York Times, wrote this really great column about selfie culture. And his big sort of thinky thought that I've been thinking about ever since was basically like we've entered into a place where everything that there is to be photographed has been photographed. and so now what's different is that I'm there. And that's, it's like, it's a meaningful thing, right? It's like, I'm, this picture is different because it has me in it in the Grand Canyon. You've already seen pictures of the Grand Canyon.

So people are putting themselves in it as like, this is a new way of seeing this because I'm here. Something like Admi just breaks that in the most interesting way. It's like, we talk about sort of the cultural meaning of photos. And I was seeing a bunch of people during the Google event be like, how on earth can a photo first social network exist after this? Like, if suddenly I can be anywhere at any time doing whatever I feel like just gets weird. And I get that Admi has some, like, limitations that make that challenging. I mean, arguably the photo first social media has been weird for a while, given that, like, influencers rent sets that look like planes to fake looking like they're sitting in a plane. But at least that, like, costs money and time and effort.

Yeah. Yeah. I agree. Like, like, what pixel has done, what Google has done is just remote. move a ton of barriers that were already existed right like Photoshop already existed people faking photos has been happening forever but now it's just like to Deli's point really really easy yeah it's Samsung faking the moon but it's you and it's everywhere like weird two things one we should have made this set look like a private chat what were we thinking oh my god we failed

Mental error, Liam. This should look like a PJ. Lying down in the PJ. I'm so mad that this room doesn't look like the inside of a private jet. Second, what we're talking about the cost element that you bring up David is the thing. Yeah. It's the thing. When ILM made fake dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, there was not a widespread outcry about people believing dinosaurs are real.

A small outcry somewhere, I'm sure. Yeah, right. There's actually one line. from that movie that should have gotten even more outcry, which is you were so busy wondering if you could. Right? I'm just pointing out. But when you make it so that everyone's phone, you put velociraptors in every photo,

and they look real and you brought the cost to nothing, some people are going to believe some dumb stuff. And like, we're just there. And I agree with you, Alex. Like, we might be way past the point of no return where people are just not going to believe anything's true anymore. Yeah. Like the needle might just be in the red

I'm just deeply cynical I think we wrote with the pixel 8 last year that we were at the what is a photo apocalypse. I'm just saying I'm looking at it now and there's no longer When we wrote about the pixel 8 there was some pushback. Like we're not doing this we're being careful, you're overreacting

and then this year they're like you can just put yourself in the right and it's like oh we're over it there's just a lot there to talk about we're going to get the phones I think we should see how well they work as always but there's a piece of all of this, especially in election season, where I suspect we are going to be talking about

whether or not people believe what they see for a long time now. Because it's just, it's fully off the rails. All right, we should take a break. We're going to come back and we're going to talk about televisions. I promise you, it's going to happen. We'll be right back with more broadcast. Hey, I'm Matt Bouchel.

Comedian, writer, and Floating Head you may or may not have seen on your 4U page. And I'm starting a brand new podcast. Wait, wait, don't swipe away. It's called That Sounds Like a Leverest. lot, as in that feeling when you check your phone in the morning, you read three headlines, and you immediately think, oh, that sounds like a lot. I can't deal with all this.

But guess what? I can deal with it. And I'm going to get into it every Friday. I'll break down whatever chaos is happening in the world. Then I'll sit down with a comedian. You can be progressive and not be, like, fucking annoying. Maybe an actor. They go, feminism has gone too far.

You go, why? Because the Sadie Hawkins dance happened? Maybe a filmmaker. Since leaving that show, I'm challenged sparing. I just got to hang out and try to do stuff. I'm alone with a charmed life. Could be a politician. Basically anyone who responds to my cold DMs.

We're recording the whole thing in a beautiful studio, so yes, you can watch it on YouTube, or you can listen wherever you get your podcast. This is not the place to get the news, but it is the place to feel a little better about it. That sounds like a lot, part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. 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 risk. mood up everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary, third. That doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Antis delisembarco 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. All right, we're back. I'm in a different chair in the studio. I'm on this side of the table now. It's much more like regal. Like, I want you to give me investment advice from this chair for some reason. Should we invest in Bitcoin?

I can't do that, but I will tell you to smoke all the cigars you can smoke. That's what this feels like to me. Like, I should be giving bourbon and cigar advice. We should start that show. And my answer is to have as much as you want. That'll be fine. Just enjoy it. Yeah.

It's fine. It's two or three in. They're all the same, really. All right. We've done enough philosophizing about AI and platform shifts. whether not reality is real. Let's talk about the most important tech story of the week, which is that as promised,

I published 2,500 words about judging the 2024 TV shootout. I've never been happier in my entire life. Doing the shootout, writing the words, avoiding the many other lawsuits that happened this week. Because if you remember last week, I was going to do it, and then the Google decision came out, and the whole week got thrown away, and I couldn't talk about TVs.

This week, I just ignored everything. Google also really ruining everybody's life is what I'm hearing. Yeah. It's been a hard time on all of us. A thing we, and one assumes for Google, we should probably, there's some regulatory stuff to talk about. Google is in a world of her right now. We'll come to that later.

But we did it again. We were going to talk about TVs. We start talking about Google antitrust. Tell us about the TVs anyway. These concepts are so inextricably linked for some bizarre reason. Why? No, TVs. We're in TVs.

There's a really high-end boutique, home theater store in Scarsdale, New York, called Valley Electronics. They've been running the TV shootout for 20 years. This was the 20th one. You can go Google all the coverage from 20 years ago. 2004. Plasms are it. Amazing. The whole thing's amazing.

I bought my Sony A95L there because they have stock. It's actually pretty hard to get that TV, but they sell so many of them that Sony gives them special allocations. Oh, wow. I went and bought one from it. them. I got to talk to the owner, Robert Zahn, and his wife, Wendy, and they were like, do you want to judge the shootout this year? And I just imagine, I was like, yes, like more than anything, I'm just going to, my wife and daughter will be fine. I'll just wait here until the TV shootout begins. Because I called me in to judge it. It was an incredible panel. You can look at the

story. The pictures are adorable. It was just a bunch of nerds in a room. Like, they cleaned, they cleared out the store and they set up three TVs, three OLEDs and three many LEDs from Samsung, Sony, and LG. And they put $40,000 Sony reference monitors, like the ones they used for coloring in Hollywood in front of them. And then the first day was, quote, the objective day

where the task was across a number of clips that they were playing to judge how similar the TVs were to the reference displays. And the TVs have been professionally calibrated by, like, famous calibrators on the ABS forums. I was, like, in heaven. That's an amazing phrase you just said, by the way. Calibrated by famous calibrators?

Like, hell yeah. Like, if you're an ABS forum nerd and you have ever just, like, gone and looked for the settings for a TV, it was probably Cecil Mead or Dwayne Davis. That's awesome. Who go by Classitech and D. Nice. I was in heaven. Heaven. Heaven.

like just a bunch of nerds talking about TVs for two days straight. Where were you on the list of like panelists and experts from most to least qualified? Where would you say you were? Fully least. Fully the least. Okay. All the other judges are basically like Hollywood types. Okay.

So the director of encoding services at Warner Brothers Discovery. The senior director of technical operations at Paramount. A handful of professional cinematographers and directors. a handful of professional calibrators. So calibrators are, that's a real job in this industry. People set up their studios. They bring in the professional calibrators to make sure everything is displaying accurately at every point in the chain.

So from your camera to your display, to your mastering display, this is a real thing. And so those people have kind of the most knowledge of all of the quirks of all of the various displays because they're constantly trying to get them to display accurately. And so what was particularly interesting is, they know these TVs really well because these TVs are showing up increasingly in professional operations because fancy studio executives like watching things on big TVs instead of little reference monitors. And they're like, yeah, these Sony A95Ls are showing up all over the place as reference displays

for the executives. And so they just, and obviously they do fancy home theaters and other viewing rooms and all this stuff. So it's really interesting to talk to them because they're in the weeds of what these things can and can't do. sort of divorced from any marketing or whatever. Like, they're just trying to make them look good professionally, and they're completely aware of the limits of the TVs.

So, and then there's me, and I'm like, yeah, I've just been looking at screens for 15 years to have a lot of opinions. And I thought that was, it was kind of interesting to be that person because it would, like, we weren't supposed to talk to each other so much, but in the conversations we had, it was kind of interesting how much my instincts were to compare things to like phones and tablets. And you can see how the TVs relate to what these companies do on their phones and tablets. So I was looking at the Samsung and I was like, oh, that looks like a Samsung. Like I have looked at a lot of Samsung screens over the years.

And boy, to Samsung like nuclear colors. Yeah. Samsung has a move for sure. Yeah. And it's like, oh, and they were like, why do they do that? I'm like, I don't know. They just always do that. Like every Samsung split ever looked at has just been incredibly bright and colorful, even at the expensive accuracy. And it was kind of interesting to just have that other perspective in the room. They obviously knew more on the technical elements of the displays. Like they were

they kept bringing up the reference curves on the reference display. Oh wow. And being like, see this? And I'm like, it's a line. They're like, make it brighter. And eventually, you know, you start to pick up on what they were showing you. But it was just like, it was interesting to have that other perspective.

So the fascinating thing about all of this is this this is the year that Sony made a big bet on mini LED TVs as opposed to their OLED. So Sony's still selling a bunch of OLED. Their flagship TV is still an OLED. That's the 895L. That's a year old now. That came out last year.

Last September, basically. But, you know, we're basically a year into it. And the 895L won again. Well, you just won the shootout. Last year's TV. Last year's TV won the shootout. That's a quantum. OLED.

So it has a wider color gamut. we think it's a Samsung panel, it pretty much is a Samsung panel. And then this year's Samsung OLED, we think is the, like the next generation quantum dot OLED. But Samsung is Samsung, and they did some weird stuff with colors.

And like, it lost by just like 0.1. Okay. Right? It was just a little bit behind in some things because... And then the LG was at the back? And so this is a really weird thing

is the 65-inch LGG4 performed much worse. than the 83-inch LGG-4. And the calibrators in the room who have been like setting up these TVs for different people are like, this is the story with these TVs. The 55 and then the 77 and up,

all great. The 65 seems to be worse. Oh, no, I have to go get a new TV. Well, I mean, like, one takeaway I'll give everyone is like the OLEDs were so close to each other that it was taking like three times the amount of time to score them as compared to the reference. because you had to see where the differences are.

Whereas on the mini LAD side, you're like, okay, the LG's bad. No one knows what Samson is doing. And then the Sony's pretty good, but I can see these big problems, right? Yeah. And so the game on that first day was you had the reference display that was showing ideally what, you know, the studio or whoever wants you to see in the picture. That's the reference display. Wait, can ask a really dumb question?

Yeah. Is a reference display, like, the best one? Like is that how we should think about reference display is like this is the perfect television? Yes. No. Yes. Yes and no. I'll agree with Alex partially, but no.

It's the most accurate representation of like the content. So it's the one that like changes the least through the whole pipeline. Yeah. It's like you have a display and it is ideally the same display as the person who did the color on the movie. Got it. Right. Or it's a display that performs identically to that display. But it's also like it does stuff that an OLED just can't do, right?

Like a reference display is going to do a much smoother gradient of color than an OLED's capable. You're going to see those weird stepping, that stepping issue in an OLED. Right. So these Sony BVMs were a dual layer LCD. So they were able to do it. Right. They had some capabilities. They're awesome.

They didn't. Sorry. They also have giant ass fans in it. So they could run really. bright for a very long time, all the OLEDs were dimming. You could see it at like $40,000? $40,000. Yeah, cool, okay.

Interestingly, though, and they're also small. They're smaller. But interestingly, to your point, Alex, the QD OLEDs have the capability of displaying more colors than these reference displays. So there's places where they actually aren't as capable as the

television. Right. And so there were scenes, I forget which movie it specifically was where we were, it was, I think it was like the, the saber fight and Rogue One or Darth Vader just like lighting people up. Spoiler. I mean, Rogue One is itself a spoiler. That's actually a really good one for that.

Yeah, it's great. Spoiler, Darth Vader kills people in a Star Wars movie. What? Oh no. But one of the questions there was like, is this accurate? Because the people who made the movie were just sort of mastering to whatever set of colors, but they couldn't see them. So then is like, is it different?

Is it bad? That was pretty interesting, right? Yeah. And so the reason that the first day was objective, but the goal was one out of five, how much is this the same as the reference display? Which is a really interesting way of thinking about it, a picture. Because sometimes you're like, this is better. I think this is better than the reference display, but it was different. So you knocked it down.

And that took a while to get your head around, basically. This is where, like, I just accuracy is king for me in TVs. Because I've done the calibration. Like I went to ISF and did like the way. week-long course with them and everything. So I love the accuracy. And so when I hear like, oh, the Samsung is probably doing more, displaying more reds, well, those reds were never intended to be displayed according to the reference monitor. So is that actually better? No, because that's, like, the director could never have decided that. So therefore, it's not better.

And we see that a lot with like classic film too. Like all of the, all the stuff they captured on technicolor is so much more vibrant. And that was before we even had color spaces as like a concept. And, uh, and, and so it's just totally different. And it's, it's weird. It's just weird. So you're a real like what did the, what did the founding father's intent kind of person? Yeah, I'm, I'm a founder's intent. I'm, uh, me and Scalia are just over there. Yeah. You are truly the answer and Scalia of TV calibrations. Whereas Neely is just like, what looks sick now? Like it's 2024 baby, giving them reds. I famously love a Samsung display.

How many frame TVs you own? Not even in the mix. I was just putting it out there. I'm sitting next to like a 100-inch frame TV, and it's like the TV quality of frame-impaired to all of these is like, man. That's why you're back to it. Can you describe a picture quality as present?

Because that is a Samsung frame TV. Appears. That's what a Samsung frame TV looks like. Well, fascinating on the mino. Oh, it's all really close, Alex. Like, some color stuff aside in this, like, you know, the fact that the QD OLEDs have a wider color gamut is like kind of interesting. But like outside of that context, it would be almost impossible to tell them apart. Yeah.

And honestly, it was like the way you could tell was it was taking so long for people to score them. Because the difference between a four and a five was like, am I seeing any? It's like, what is it? It was only the LG that was like, it just was really muddy in dark scenes. It just like didn't have the detail in dark scenes that the other one said. Weird. On the mini-lady side, everyone was like, all right, that one's bad, this one's good. Except for the Sony, because Sony is putting so much emphasis on mini-L-ED this year. Like, the Bravia 9, which apart from the 895 is like the flagship, it's the one they're pushing.

All mini-l-l-Ds. They get hella bright because they're just LCD TVs with an LED backlight. And you're like, oh, this tech has a long way to go and it could get there, but it's nowhere close. Like they look kind of washed out. The colors are a little shifted. The detail isn't quite There's still a little blooming. So if you think about how a mini LED backlight works, it's just another screen of pixels behind the screen that light up. Like it's a lower-res screen behind the screen that lights up to produce light. And it has to match what's on the screen in real time.

So they're off when there's something black and they're lit when there's something on the screen. So if there's any latency, you see blooming, right? Or if the zone is too big because it's not one-to-one, you see blooming. And so you can see in the algorithms are like trying to manage all of this as fast as they can with as little latency as possible. The Samsung was like all over the place. Like sometimes like this just looks like a regular like local dimming TV. Sony was much better but still had the problems.

And then all of them because they're LCDs, their viewing angles aren't as good as the OLEDs. And they're huge, right? These 65 inch 83 inch TVs we're looking at. So if you were too close to them, even just moving an inch or two to left or right, shift a, all the color and brightness. And you're like, oh, we're just not close. Like, Sony is trying the hardest here, but we're not close. I just, I don't understand why we would go backwards on viewing angle.

Because they're cheaper, because you can get 83 inch TV for much cheaper, and it's very bright, and it's very impressive. And outside of that room, full of the most incredible display nerds I've ever met in my entire life, and I want all of them to come home with me tomorrow, outside of that room, I think it would be very hard to tell these TVs apart. But it was like, just that experience of paying so. such close attention to one quality of these products with other people who are doing that same task. It was like very refreshing to me. We weren't judging whether or not Tyson is any good

compared to WebOS. We weren't judging how many HDMI 2.1 ports the Sony TV has not enough, right? Like none of that stuff, game mode, all that. We were like, can this picture be calibrated to match a reference monitor and which one comes closer? And that I, I, there's just a part of that having reviewed so many products over the years and had to think about so many things. It's like, oh, this is actually a really interesting way of thinking about these products specifically. Was there a consistent agreement among the, what was it, eight panelists? That's a lot of people to all point at this same, like, it's both objective and subjective in a certain way. Like, did everybody tend to agree on everything?

We weren't, we were also excited to be there. When we started judging, we were all chattering, and then we were like told to stop. Okay. So our score, I don't know what everybody else scored. You know, like a worry for me is like the consumer reviewer in the group was that I had no idea what I was talking about. I was like, man, I hope my scores are close. And they were. In the end, you know, the average, the averages that were released and the rankings that were released were exactly as I had thought them.

Okay. So I feel like I was in the mainstream, you know. I think most people. The one LG stand in the room who's like, I love blooming. That LG miniality is not. good. Like it's like a half-hearted. And to be fair, it was the cheapest TV on display, like by thousands of dollars. So they put all their efforts into OLEDs anyway. Like they just farted that out. Yeah. It's like, let's hedge our bet a little bit. Like maybe this is the thing. But yeah,

they have the micro lens array, which increases the brightness on their OLEDs. Like I said, the three OLEDs were so close to each other. You can tell that it's a mature technology. Right. It's just hit a point of refinement where you have. have to care a lot about extremely, like, arcane picture details. And Alex, I think you and I vibe on this. Yeah. I care a lot about arcane picture details. The mini LEDs is like all over it.

My notes on the color for the Sunny Bravia 9 were just the single sentence. Colors all over the map. Like, just all over the place. Who knows what's going on here? So that was like the first day. The second day was much more subjective. They took down the 65s. They put up the biggest available sizes for all the TVs.

So that was 77 for the Sony, 83 for the LG, 85, for the mini L8s. And Roberts on the owner was like, I've never had more people ask for a head-to-head comparison of two TVs than people ask for the LGG-4-83 versus the Sony Mini-O-A-E 85. Because they're very, they're very price competitive and one is obviously bigger, right? That's the TVs. People have big, cheap screens. She's like, this is whatever one wants to see. So those two are right next to each other. And the LG just wiped the floor.

Wow. So much better. Just incredibly better. And the fact that the LG 83 was so much better than 65, that's what everyone talked about. But we weren't doing the intense reference comparison on day. They took them. They set them up out of the box. They turned on filmmaker mode to turn off all the bullshit.

And they turned off energy saver because energy saver brings the brightness down. Yeah. Energy saver is the number one thing you should turn off on your display. I mean, destroy the environment, but just go turn. If you have it on right now, go turn it off. Right. It just significantly reduces the brightest of your panel. So they turn off energy saver and they put them in filmmaker mode or I think Sony calls it professional mode.

It just turns off all the stuff and they let them run out of the box. And that's where like Samsung was the most Samsung. Like your colors. Do you like them? And I, you know, the LG, the 83 inch LG just, it was just a great picture, right? It was right behind the Sony in that evaluation, but we weren't doing numbers. We were just sort of ranking one, two, three

for all the clips that we saw. And I, at the end, and we can just wrap it up here, at the end, I was basically put the Samsung QD OLED, the S95D, and the Sony LED were in a tie for me. It was hard for me to decide because the Samsung colors were so all over the place, and the Sony's backlight was so all over the place, and the viewing angles were weird,

and I couldn't decide, and in the end I was like, it's an OLED, because I know the Samsung can be calibrated. And I know the Sony can't. So that's how I picked. Again, like my takeaway from this was one, I should spend more time in rooms with huge nerds.

Yes. Because those are my people. And I would say, what, like $100,000 worth of TVs on a wall in front? More than that. I mean, like, this store is out of control. Like, that's just the TVs. We didn't even talk about the audio side of the store.

Scarsdale is a wealthy town. This may, like, we're moving product. It was great. And he sells, you know, all the country. And they've been doing it for a long time. The room was full of Sony's actual product people, not just a marketing people. So this, like, matters. This is not just like a small town bunch of nerd.

This is like a thing. Oh, yeah, no, TV shootout is a thing. There's a press release. Like, a whole thing. Like, there are YouTubers there making YouTube videos. There are YouTubers streaming with the Calibrators, just talking TVs in the back room. Yeah.

I already assigned me like 10,000 words on the Calibrators. So that's coming. That's actually a great name for a show, The Calibrators. It is pretty good. I would watch. And the picture, over the course of every episode, the picture just gets slightly better. Anyway, that's my TV story. I finally got to talk about it.

It's on the site now. You should go read it. I'm sorry if you have an LG4. It's a great TV. You're fine. Don't listen to me. Just give it a 10. Alex is so disappointed.

I'm okay. I'm working through it. I'll be fine. Alex, if you want, I'll take your crappy TV. anyone who would like to give me their very good TVs, I will happily take them with no complaints whatsoever. He was like, oh, it's so crappy. Oh, it's terrible.

Can I say one more thing? At the opening this whole event, they're talking about the TVs and like what they are and all this stuff. And they said two things. One, they're like, TCL and high sensor aren't here. They asked not to be included in a competition. Because they were going to lose. You can just read into that.

And then later, Robert was like one year Vizio was here and it was embarrassing for them. Oh, boy. Does you read into that whatever you want? Vizio rough. It's a real, like, I will not be running for president in 2024, Kenda Vibes. Yeah. Okay, that was it.

That was my TV adventure. Thank you for joining me on this journey. This is why I started The Verge, so I could sit in a room full of TVs. Do you think they'll invite you back next year? Did you do a good enough job? I hope so. I hope. Can we come with you?

We'll be quiet. We'll just stand there. Alex and I'll live stream it next year. I asked Chris Welch if you wanted to come. with you next year and he goes, I don't want to get into that level of smoke. I respect that. Yeah. It was great.

All right, we should talk about just a handful of, I don't know, regulatory things. What do you want to call them? But the main one that I really want to spend just a minute on is Apple and it just can't give itself a break when it comes to the app store and fees. It's in trouble all over the world, right? It has an antitrust lawsuit in this country, in the EU, various charming European bureaucrats wake up every morning thinking about ways to troll Tim Cook on Twitter. Like, this company is under a lot of pressure, and then it won't just do things that make its life easier.

I don't know how to describe this, but this is, I'm going to tell you this story. And if people out there can figure out why Apple did this, let us know. So Patreon exists. Right. You can be a fan of someone. You can pay them some money to do whatever people on Patreon do, knit clothes, make video games, whatever it is, Patreon. They've been in a gray zone with the app store for years because you can pay people money in Patreon and they haven't been charging the fee. They haven't been giving Apple the 30%.

And I actually had Patreon CEO, Jack Conte, on Decoder a while ago. And I said, have you ever talked to Apple about this? Like, are you an exception? And he was like, no, please stop to talk you about it. Right? Like, they know they're in this gray area. Okay. And there have been other companies that want to do Patreon like things, like this little

company fan house, right? And they did a whole pressure campaign to say, why are you charging our creators 30%? Like, this is unfair. You're providing no value to them. Right. And because the idea is if you sign up for a creator subscription inside of the app, Apple will treat that as an in-app purchase and take it 30%. Right?

Yeah. Okay. So they see signing up for whatever my favorite podcast on Patreon, the same as signing up for Spotify through the app. Sure. And if you want to be very pedantic, that is probably the correct interpretation. Except that for years it wasn't. Right.

That feels important to keep saying. Particularly for Patreon, they have been in this gray area for years. You are a Patreon creator. You sign up for Patreon. you agree your Patreon is going to take 8% and you're going to take the rest of the money. That's it's fine. That's a fine deal. Apple is like, well, we got 30% before Patreon takes 8%.

So now someone did the math instead of needing a thousand true fans, which is the number everybody always says, you need 1,554 fans to make the same money that you were doing before. That's weird. And it is weird because Apple doesn't need this fight right now. because it's under all of this pressure for whether or not these fees are fair, whether the app store is fair, whether Apple has too much power in the market overall. Antitrust loss of it in this country. I figured out why they did it. Yeah. So whoever sent the email and was like, okay, we're going to start charging to 30% of Patreon is actually like was placed there by someone else to just make Apple give up.

This is like a United States Department of Justice sleep. Yeah, yeah. Somebody like like like they're just a spy or something and they were. Because it just, it doesn't, why would you do that? Tonight on the Calibrators. Yeah, the Calibrators went in. They like, they parachuted in and they were like, okay, we're going to do this so that we give even more ammunition for when we go after Apple for all the things we're going after Apple for around the 30%. Yeah, maybe.

It just seems like there are ways to make your life easier and there are ways to make your life harder. Pissing off a bunch of independent creators to whom you're, are providing no value, right? You can make the argument that Apple provides a lot of value to its developers, right? They make the APIs, they ship the platform, they run some of the services, they make X code. Sure. It's very debatable, like truly debatable. Yeah.

But you can make the argument, and a lot of people have. If you are a Patreon creator, no value is coming your way from Apple. He probably actually comes from Patreon, and you're already paying them money. Right. So, like, Apple's showing up and me like, we want 30%. That, it's just like too much. And I suspect a lot of these Patreon creators are going to tell their audiences about it. And now Apple is right in a fight with creatives.

Did they sort of keep walking into? Like, their crush ad that they had to apologize for. Yep. Like, why? They just keep making their life harder with these creatives. And I just don't know for what money. Like, how, like, if you took 30% of all of Patreon's revenue and you gave it to Tim Cook, he'd be like, get out of my face.

Yeah. Like, this is nothing. Yeah. Like, this isn't even gas for the jet. It probably isn't. The only thing I can think is that Apple is desperately trying to get to a place where it can say with a straight face that it enforces all of its rules equally. Because one of the things that has happened to Apple over and over is that it keeps saying these are the rules and we were very clear about them and we applied them to everybody. and then every 15 minutes we hear about a sweetheart deal that somebody has from Apple, right?

And there are, the rules exist except for all of the exceptions to the rules. And I think if your Apple, one thing to do would be to say, okay, we're going to need to be able to stand up to regulators and say, look, these are the rules. They exist for everybody. Everybody follows them equally. I don't think that's a good strategy. I don't think it's going to work. But I think if you're Apple, it is at least one way to be able to say with a straight face, look, these are the rules we're clear about. them, you don't have to play by them anymore because you can go to alt store or whatever,

but these are the rules. I think doing this this way and particularly in these very like haphazard ways that Apple seems to be doing this is deeply bizarre. But I think if you're Apple, I cannot think of another reason to pick this particular fight with Patreon right now other than that. Well, so just to be clear on some of the timing, they told Patreon this is going to happen a while ago and now it's just happening, but there's no reason that it should be happening. So that's like, it's not that they woke up yesterday and we're like, Patreon's going to pass. They said,

here's a big notice period and now it's happening. And now Patreon is communicating about it. Right. So a more delayed timeline. But still, even if you want to make the argument, we have perfect enforcement of these rules. And there are no exceptions. You're still walking into, and we've pissed everyone off along the way. I'll give you another example. Apple is going to allow Spotify to show pricing and its app in the EU. just the thing that is happening is that Spotify is going to put numbers in its app. You still get by Spotify in the app. I really encourage everyone if you're not driving to, we'll put this link in the show notes,

but open it up and look at the side-by-side screenshots because it is this big dramatic regulatory moment in this long-term fight between Apple and Spotify. It's a big deal. And then you look at the side-by-side screenshots, and they are identical, except that one of them says 1799 per month, 1499 per month, and the other doesn't. That's it. And this took like, you know, one of the more powerful government entities in world history to like force the one of the richest companies in world history to let another company show numbers. And you're like, what is the point of this fight? Who gives one solitary shit about this? It's like, you can't

possibly care. This cannot matter to your bottom line so much or, and it can't be such a good, that your rules are so evenly enforced that you're willing to die in this hill over displaying literally 1799 in the Spotify app. Not even letting people buy stuff, just showing the price that you can get on the web versus in the app. The only part of that I would take issue with is the, it can't possibly matter so much to your bottom line. I mean, like Apple just reported earnings.

It's super, super does matter to Apple's bottom line. And especially if you're Apple looking at a world in which Google is no longer legally allowed to give you $20 billion every year, like this stuff matters an awful. lot to Apple. And suddenly the rent that you get to extract from everyone in the app store goes from a small but meaningful part of your business to like a giant and meaningful part of your business. Yeah. Do you think that's part of it too? It's just they, their services, because they've been bundling that 20 billion into the services reporting, right? Yeah. It's it's the lion's share of both the services revenue and Apple's profits. And they've been really big on. Yeah, this is, this is,

our service is doing great. And now it's going to be like, no, it actually, it doesn't. Well, the Google remedy is years away. Okay. So reacting to the Google case, like clamping down on Patreon. That would be hysterical. A little short-sighted. Again, I don't think it's gas for the jet.

Like, it is not a huge amount of money. But I think their general attitude towards all of these regulators and all these courts saying, yep, these platforms need to open up has basically been to put a middle finger in the air. instead of figuring out how to innovate. Right? And like, I'm just saying, they could make their lives easier

and not harder and they are consistently choosing harder. And it is bizarre to me. There's a little more regular stuff to talk about because this comes right next to the judge in the epic Google antitrust case saying he will tear the barriers down on the Play Store because he ruled that the Play Store was a monopoly.

And he's like, we're opening up the place for the United States. Obviously, the court in the Google search case found that there was a monopoly. And then Google's ad tech case kicks off in early September. And that probably is not going to go poor. Like, of all of the cases where we're going to see a bunch of emails of Google executives saying shady things about money, the ad tech case is the one. Oh, yeah. Right.

It's going to be great. It's so boring and so consequential. Right. So you just see like Google is under all of this pressure and the judges in these cases and the regulators in the EU are like, we're going to tear this company apart. And Apple's sitting there with the big open antitrust case to come. And obviously empowered justice department because they just won their big Google trial and they got the next one coming. And then a bunch of EU regulators started doing it. And it's like, why are you signaling to all of these people that your response to this, putting your finger in the air?

Like, it's not going to work because they're winning right now against Google in a real way. And maybe Google is more cuddly than Apple. Maybe people like Apple better than Google. However those optics feel, they're on the hunt and they're winning. And so, like, if you, I don't know, there's just something weird about this. I was like, it's bad optics to go take a cut of 30% from a whole bunch of creators who don't make a lot of, most of them aren't making a ton of money, right? Like, that's bad optics. It's just such an unforced error.

It feels like them just stepping in rakes constantly. They're just sideshow Bob. If you know what this strategy here is, please let us know because I'm dying to know. If you even want to concoct a strategy, we're not being successful at it. But there's a thing happening, like, broadly in the world of tech right now, where the regulators are winning. And the platforms are being pride open and distribution is getting a little crazier. And it's, like, kind of interesting for us, right? Like it means more interesting things are happening.

Like, Altstore is just a thing that's happening in EU. Emulators are happening all over the iPhone right now because of EU regulation. The emulators are cool. Like, they're downstream of some boring lawyer stuff. But now you can run DOS on your iPhone. Well, it's worth pointing out how big a shift all of that is from even, let's say, 12 months ago. Like, I think the bet this time last year would not have been on huge wins for, the US government in particular, right?

It was perceived that the EU had wildly overstepped its bounds and that that was all going to get very weird. But like, Lena Khan was having a really bad time picking fights with tech companies. And it wasn't going well and it didn't go well. And over and over, this sense was like, what is happening here? The tech companies are going to keep winning. Apple was kind of winning against Epic. Google lost, put in kind of a like not necessarily quite as terrifying way.

It just, the momentum felt very different, not that long ago. ago, and I think it has maybe not caught up to everybody how quickly and aggressively it seems like the wins on all of that stuff have changed. Yeah. Yeah. And in part because of what you're saying, the things like the emulators, right? Like, with every little crack, like product changes are happening. And there was the one just this week with Apple opening up tap to pay stuff.

Like, that's been in the antitrust trials. That is one of the things that Apple has kept really aggressive control over. Like, we talked a lot about digital wallets on the show when this came out because, like, and that's the kind of stuff that is making big changes just because of the threat of regulatory action, right? Like all this stuff is going to take a decade to play out, but it doesn't matter because as soon as it starts playing out, it all changes.

Yeah. Yeah. And I just think we're on the cusp of, and we've talked about this a million times in the show, it just feels like everything is about to change. Like the internet's about to change or social networks about to change, search about to change. And then this stuff is going to break these companies open.

I am hopeful we see a round of interesting, new, innovative companies and products and ideas. I'm also a little worried that, like, mostly we're going to get lawsuits, and I'm going to try to talk about many LAD TVs every week, and instead have to read PDFs. Even on this own show, we have now sandwiched the television discussion inside of antitrust conversations. I don't know why this keeps happening to me, but my solemn promise to all of you is that any time we talk about antitrust,

I will bring up all my televisions. I actually believe that. Yeah. All right, we've got to take a break. We're going to come back with the lightning round, and I'll be in a third chair. This week on Net Worth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition? And trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged.

And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check. Because let's be real, when it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com slash you are rich BFF. All right, we're back. I'm in what I think of as the homeboy chairs. It's beautiful. Like, when you got the NBA players in here during the podcast, this is where the homeboys sit.

Yeah. You look like you should be like, you look like a professor during the pandemic who like went a little hard. on redecorating the home office. That's right. That's also this look, you know, sidekick, homeboys, professor with an axe to grind. The slats are like, it's very trippy. It's a good, it's a good look.

We bought very similar slats for the studio at my house. And, you know, I don't know whose fault this is or if this is racist, but we forgot to consider that they're the same color as me. So we had to stain the slots. Just turn to the side. disappear in the frame. It's very good. Anyway, this is, well, I'm in the loose hangout. You might call this the hype desk.

It's a Veritas throwback. One could. One could say we are now in the market for someone to sit in the hype desk during the Verchast once again, because we have a hype zone over here in the studio. The as yet unsponsored, unlaunched, hype desk. Look, once we get this lightning round sponsored, we're moving on. But now that I'm in the hype desk, I think, David, that makes you, you got to run the lightning round. And I'm just going to say whether or not things are hype. Okay, good.

Well, now that, now that I'm in charge, I've picked six things for the lightning round. Classic. Classic lightning round. No, Kranz, let's start with you. You have a fun gadgety one. So you go first. Oh, yeah. I got a fun gadgety one.

So Real Me is a Chinese phone maker and they make phones. I don't want to make a big assessment on the quality of those phones. They are phones. We can say that with confidence. And they are really into like making the charging better and faster. And they introduced 320 watt fast charging. Just. That's great.

It's, they're doing, they said they could do a battery in four minutes and 30 seconds, like a pixel nine battery. Wait, isn't the plug I have in the wall like seven and a half watts? And I'm pretty sure. Like 30 is like very fast. Yeah. So this is, this is insane. Unclear if it will burst into flames as soon as you plug it in. Unclear if it will set your phone on fire.

Do you need like a Thunderbolt 4 style cable, like a big, thick, braided? I wouldn't feel comfortable using. You're not sending this through like a flimsy, like lightning cable. Yeah, this is not what you want to use, like, that random cable you found at the bottom of your desk. Don't, don't use that for this. You're probably like a CCS charger into your phone. Yeah, yeah. So it's USBC right now.

Of course. What can't USBC do? except tell you what it's doing. But they haven't really like, there's no phones that's really fully supported out in the wild. It's just technology. They just said we did it. This was kind of there.

They were doing their road show and showing off their new technology. And it was like, yeah, we're going to do this soon. So at some point, we're going to have phones charging in four minutes. And that'll rule unless they catch on fire. Can I just say my favorite part of the story is, I mean, the story is great. We should try your funds faster. The press image they supplied is incredible. It's just like a happy guy standing in front of a screen that says 320 watts supersonic charge.

And he just pleased his punch. What else do you need? That's all you need. Like that's how I feel when I read 320 watts. I'm like, okay, yeah, same feeling. Like I wish I was giving this presentation right now. Like I truly, can we get the words 320 watts supersonic charge in this TV, please? They also smile at it.

They call the charger the pocket cannon. which is unbelievable. Yeah. Just, God, that's great. Tremendous. Everything about it's wonderful. But we'll have to see if it actually does it not just in a demo that I will say. I have for years thought that the thing that all these companies say that it's like, you know, the battery is trashed, but it charges pretty fast.

You can get from zero to 50% in 35 minutes. I've always kind of thought that was nothing. Like, who cares? but the idea of fully charging my phone in four and a half minutes, it's like, okay, I can plug it in my phone, I can brush my teeth and my phone is going to be at like 70% is awesome. You can also heat a small village. You can fry one egg.

It's going to be great. I do like the idea of both turning my oven on and charging my phone at the same time. No, I think you'll blow a circuit breaker if you do that. No, it's like a hot plate and a phone charger all in one little gizmo on my table. This is great. The street lights for miles around dim when David plugs in his phone. I'm just looking at this photo. This guy smiling at the words 320 watts supersonic charge. And I think more of the tech industry should be like this. Yeah. Yeah.

That's what I have for you. I will take a pocket cannon. I feel like I probably am not allowed to say that on a podcast. But yeah, here we are. All right. I have two. The first one, I actually should have brought this up up at the top where we were talking about all the AI image processing stuff. but Halliid, a very good camera app for iPhones and iPads, launched a thing this week called Process Zero that is basically just a setting inside of their app that instead of running every photo you take through either Apple's...

I think they offer Apple's standard image processing, the ProRaw processing, and then a thing they call reduced, which is just kind of a light version of Apple's processing, runs it through no processing. So you get what is supposed to be as close to like a film camera experience as possible. You just get the light it collects the end.

A, super cool feature. Got a lot of people very excited, this idea that like we can actually choose to go another way. It's going to make some of your photos meaningfully worse. It's going to change them in certain ways. But I think that idea of like not only do I get to pick like where I am in the photo, which is weird, but like I have actual real control over what is happening to my photo every time I

capture it is very cool. Also just the idea that I, camera on your phone can have that kind of access is very cool and not a thing I really understood until I started writing about this thing that like it's again it's just collecting sensor data and if you give apps like how I'd access to that sensor data there's all kinds of interesting stuff they're going to be able to do with it and I just think that's very cool and a sort of rich vein that at least to my knowledge nobody has really explored and I think that's really cool if you don't know a lot about photography don't use that feature all

your photos are going to look like trash. Disagree. This is how you learn a lot about photography. That's true. I'm assuming of like the 70-year-old who listens to the verge cast and is like, you know what? This sounds cool. I want to put this on my phone.

No, that person, what are you doing with your time? Get out there. Oh, I see. Got it. Understood. So just Alex's mom. Don't do it. Everyone else.

I've hung out with your mom before, Alex. I'll teach her about, about. about digital photography. You say that now. That'll be a great four-hour verge cast. I think people will listen to it. Talk about a Patreon.

Just me and your mom. There's got. But what's really interesting here is pocket point-and-shoot digital cameras are making a tiny blip of a comeback, particularly with younger folks, because they see how bad the processing on their phones has gotten.

And they don't want to be always connected. Like, my nieces and nephews are all carrying around power shot elves. And I'm like, I made a lot of mistakes of those cameras. Don't do what I did. But it's fascinating to see that little comeback. Is it meaningful?

Is it the threat to smartphone? No, none of that. But it is a pushback on how processed the photos are getting. Yeah. And I think, you know, an app putting some of those photos into the phone might push the default cameras back towards sanity. And I'm kind of hoping Apple takes the hit, right? That there's, they've overdone it.

Samsung has overdone it for years. Google has been inching towards overdoing it. I think it's Apple that has taken kind of the most aggressive step from, you know, the 12 or the 13 to now, where it's just like, oh, these photos are just bananas. Yeah, I like the photos less on my iPhone 15 than I have in a long time from the iPhone. Like, I think in a certain way, they are like technically better photos. I like them less. Like, my photos don't look like I feel like they should anymore. on most smartphones.

But the iPhone, I think, held out a long time, but that has kind of gone away. What is it that, I guess, because I maybe don't see it as much. What is it that you guys are seeing when you do that? Is it like, is it the color? Is it the dynamic range? All of it?

It's all of it. The things for me, and I'm curious, David, since you have the same opinion, if you're seeing something different. For me, it's the iPhone is now just completely allergic to shadows, just takes them away.

It loves the sky. Like nothing loves the sky, like the iPhone camera loves the sky. So just like more sky. But not the sky as it is. Like what if the sky was the best it has ever been in history all the time, every time you take a photo? Oh my God. Sky? Oh, turn up that sky knob.

Yeah. You're like, oh, no, it's gray out today. And the iPhone's like, the fuck it is. Let's go. And then those things combined, if you're outside in a bright scene, it can actually make your photos gray. Yeah. So I was thinking about dynamics. Like, if you're a music person, the dynamics right, quiet and loud.

Like, there's dynamics in photographs, too. And so if everything is bright, the perceived brightness of the whole image drops. And so the iPhone, by getting rid of shadows and pumping up the sky and then over, like, bringing everything up actually makes the photo looked in. And I've seen influencers, like, complain about their iPhone cameras. And they're like, why does this camera so gray? Like, I think Alex Earle has made a video about why her camera appears to be gray. Right?

And like, that's bad. Like, you don't want to be there, right? When you are the hardware of the entire creator economy, having the creators being, why is my phone gray? And it's not because they're less bright. It's because if you destroy all the shadows and you make everything bright, actually, everything looks dim. And that's just kind of a weird spot Apple is going to.

I don't, David, is that what you're seeing here? Or is it something else? No, that's basically right. And the other thing I keep noticing, and in the highlight story I wrote, there's a really interesting comparison shot where what Apple does by getting rid of shadows wherever it can and hyping up the brightness everywhere you can is it just it just flattens it all too so there's a there's a version of the shot that is like it's a it's the front of a flower shop and so you see all this sort of the flowers and the pots in the front and the photo was like crisper and brighter than the one that

you got with the process zero thing that Hallad is doing but it's also much less like dynamic the photo itself. There's no, there's no sense of sort of ups and downs. You get the sense the whole curve is just like bright. And it makes the whole thing look really flat, kind of like you're talking about, and it just, it makes all the photos less interesting in a way. Like, they're brighter and cooler and less interesting to me in, in so many ways. Yeah. And there's other stuff there's and there's like weird sharpening. When you get in the low light iPhones just start freaking out. Oh yeah. And like not in a bad way. They're not like making technically bad photos. I think this is what you're getting at David. They're just trying so hard to be.

make a great photo that you lose the character of it. And then there's tons and tons and tons and processing. Right. And I think what you're seeing, a lot of coming back with the point in shoots and the process zero stuff, like this whole idea is like, people should be allowed to take bad photos. You know what I mean?

And it's like there's something too. If I'm standing in a dark room and I take a picture, maybe it's actually okay that the picture is dark. Like maybe that's okay. And sometimes that's what I want. And increasingly with these devices, you are not allowed to take a dark photo. and I think that's just weird.

I'm going to say a sentence that a small number of people will understand the significance of. Charlie X-E-X invited the Cobra Snake to a birthday party. That's a real thing. And if you were in your 20s in the early 2000s, you're like, oh, it's back.

It's just fully back. That whole aesthetic is back. And like, we're just going to do flash photos with drunk people. And like, let's do it. The iPhone can't do that shit. Yeah. No one who wants that. No, a bunch of squinting people with a flash on.

That's what we're looking for. Oh, they're not squinting. Those eyes are dilated, my friend. Fair enough. Tusha. All right, my other one, and then, Nil, we should get to you, and then we should get out of here, is a flipboard, which is, we've been sort of chronicling flipboards, like relentless quest to figure out the Fediverse, which I continue to find very interesting, turned on a thing

that I think is actually very instructive in understanding how all of this is supposed to work, which is just that now you can follow Fediverse accounts, so, like, people from Mastodon, or Pixel Fed or even on threads, uh, from inside of Flipboard, right? And it's like, if you, if you want to understand the way the Fedaverse is supposed to work, it's that where you make posts and where you read posts can be different and that anybody can decide how those posts are supposed to look and how they're supposed to work and inward or they show up. And so like, the idea that you can do Massadon inside of Flipboard is both like mind bending and exactly the point. And so if you've like wanted to understand how the Fedaverse works, go to Flipboard

and like mess around with a bunch of Massadon stuff. They've put together some lists. I think one that includes you and Eli because you're just a tremendously huge deal in the FedEvers. But like that, I think this is the closest thing I've seen to like telling the whole story of like, here is here is what you get when all you have is just this mass of content that you can either build something that adds to or build something that reads from however you want. So I think that was very cool. Yeah. That's awesome. Flipboard is way ahead of this curve. They've like re-architected their app or the way they're thinking about their app around.

Pub and these open protocols. And you kind of have it, you know, in the broadest sense, like the future of a browser. Yeah. But it's bi-directional. Like you take content in, you get to read it, and you can, like, reply to it, and it goes right back to the person who made it. And it's pretty powerful. Like, nothing works with it yet.

Right. Like, which is a problem. But you can just see, there's like glimmers here of a new kind of web. I'm the one who keeps babbling on about how we're going to federate our site. can see how our site would play with something like that very quickly. But then you start to build it and we're trying to build it. And it's like, oh, there's a million problems to solve here. Yeah.

Like big, hairy technical problems that no one has ever really tried to solve before. Which is why, you know, Threads is federating and they are doing it in like drip by drip. Like they're solving one little problem at a time. They let you know that someone in the Fediverse had liked one of your posts. Sure, that was just a problem to solve. now they let you see those posts but you can't reply to them now they let you like those posts

but you can't reply to them obviously replying to miscoming next and all of that is just like where does the data go if you want to delete something how do you delete it across all of these servers that have now ingested it maybe you can't

weird right if someone replies to me on another server with another kind of moderation policy and put something bad in my replies on my site or like how do I moderate that big questions like huge earth-shattering questions like that obviously have made the process slow for everyone but you're like oh these are new problems like I'm in the market for new problems

like we've never thought about these problems before fun like this is great so I'm very excited just like see everyone making slow progress here I just have a question which is the bigger platform shift Jim and I live or flipboard you know I you know I believe it's the Fediverse in my heart of heart I believe it's the Fediverse I just really wanted to hear I'll say flipboard is the platform shift this week. Look, I like flipboard. I think they do really interested. I don't know.

Flipboard is a platform shift. I think it is part of the platform shift about how information moves around the internet. That, you know, if you are going to break something like Google through regulatory action or just Google killing stuff. Yeah. Google end of life, Google search seems like a likely outcome. It's more likely than not, you know, like giving Google's history. If all that stuff is breaking down and all, you know, the photo-based networks are flooded with synthetic images and no one can trust, you need to make something else. Yep.

And it seems like everyone has bet on open, interoperable networks this time. And I do think that is fundamentally a bigger shift that more people will feel than Gemini. Maybe in long term, obviously, okay, I will, like, do all the things and none of us will have to work and the robots will just bring us peanut colladas. But right now, I think it's the social web. Yeah, I agree. All right, Nealai, what's yours? Before we get out of here. What is mine?

This is what happens when you're in a sidekick chair. You're not prepared. You just hear of hype. Yo. Good point. Okay, so mine is actually related to AI. So Eric Schmidt used to be the CEO of Google. He gave a talk recently.

He got dinged for a lot of stuff he gave in this talk. And then he asked for the talk to be taken off of YouTube. Not a great cycle. right you give a talk at Stanford you're like oh no you're quoting my talk please remove it from YouTube yeah wasn't there a moment in it where he he's like this is off the record and the person he's talking to like points at the camera yeah what are you doing it's a tough look it's real um so the thing he got in trouble for he asked for the talks to be taken down um was he said google was behind an AI because the workers prioritized working from home and snacks as opposed to being competitive

from the former see of Google this did not go well like just what are you talking about also just a bad take. Yeah. Yeah. There's a million reasons, and I don't think it's the people who work at Google, who made the strategic errors, right? But whatever. And also, Google is, you know, this is coming on the heels of, like, the pixel event where Google is, like, doing huge muscular AI stuff. Yeah. Whatever. So he got in trouble for that. Alex Heath wrote a quick host about it. He was like, here's this thing that happened. The video got taken down. And then Alex got a transcript of the thing. And you actually watched part of the other video. And Schmidt said something else that I think is, very fascinating, very telling, and I think very important to understanding not just Silicon Valley,

but Google and Google's place in the world. So he said to this room full of like Stanford students, a lot of you're going to be tech people. I hope a lot of your tech startups. What I would do right now, if TikTok was banned, I propose each and, quote, I propose each and every one of you, say to your LLM the following, make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it, and in one hour, if it hasn't gone viral, do something different along the same lines. What element, LMS is using? So first of all, yeah, I don't know what kind of magic LLM.

Like, at best, you're going to be like, do you want to bang this iPad? He's using the rabbit we all expected to see. Yeah, seriously. But you understand what he's saying. He's like, if TikTok is banned, just clone it. Just take it. Take the music, take the users, take the content, just make a clone of TikTok and stand it up. and people will start using it.

If they don't, do it again. And his point was, the, quote, the example I gave of the TikTok competitor is, that's what you do if you are a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be. If it took off, you would hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean up the mess.

But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content. Wait, wait, wait, what's the next line? And do not quote me. Yeah. Whoopsies. Oops. So anyway, my point of this is Eric Schmidt ran Google,

in the early period, right? He was famously the adult they hired to run Google. Well, I don't know, Larry and Sergey were growing up or whatever they're doing, finding, learning whether or not toe shoes were for them. Eric is the adult in the room. This is what Google did. And not in a small way, in a big, open way. They just built a company on copyright infringement.

They hired a bunch of lawyers and they cleaned up the mess. And they were a friendly company with two lovable goofballs as their founders. they were providing an enormously valuable service at the time. Google search was enormously valuable. Google Book Search, copyright lawsuit, enormously valuable. YouTube, enormously valuable, built on copyright infringement, particularly against Viacom. So valuable that Viacom lost its copyright infringement case because Viacom's own people kept uploading the content to YouTube.

Like, ridiculous. But this is how Google worked in the beginning. That is the attitude. We're going to make the thing. It's going to be so useful. People are going to love it. And then when the copyright infringement cases or whatever other lawsuits come, we will have enough money to pay lawyers to make it go away.

And Google did it. That actually worked. It was a successful strategy at the time. It was successful for other companies like Uber or whatever it is, right? We are at a point now where the AI companies kind of want to run the same playbook. Google wants to run the same playbook with AI and training. And they're not lovable goofballs anymore. Yeah.

And so when Eric Schmidt is at Stanford complaining that, you know, the kids aren't working hard enough anymore. And then on top of it being like, just steal the stuff and figure it out later, the attitude that he said, that the, like the world's attitude in response to that is nowhere near as friendly as it was when they were building Google. And I, I think it's actually kind of fascinating to see that shift. Like, I don't know, like Alexis O'Hanian, like wrote the book that was like asked for permission, not forgiveness. And that was like the whole industry's attitude. And that worked. Like, I think that's a, great message for a lot of things still to this day, but you're in this place where if you want to build Google again or something like Google and you're like, I'm just going to tell a robot to copy TikTok and then I'll figure it out if it works. I don't think, I actually do not think that is going to succeed in the culture as it is today. No, and I think that is one of the most misplaced things in some corners of Silicon Valley now. And it's not true everywhere, but it is true a surprising number of places. This sense that the folks in the tech industry still are the

like countercultural revolutionaries trying to build a better future. And it's just like a, you know, a bunch of hippies in San Francisco who are just like trying to make cool stuff together. Like that is not how those people are perceived. And enough of them see themselves that way that that's why they're like, oh, we're just the contrarians. And it's why you see this like crazy push away from wokeism and all this stuff. And like, I don't want to get into the political side of it, but it comes from the same impulse that it is like, we are the renegades. And it's like, no, or not, dude, like, you are the most establishment of the establishment and you don't get the leeway that you once got. And maybe you never should have. The thing is also, they were

never their renegades. Like, Silicon Valley was built on, like, military funds and stuff, right? Like, they were never that. It was a very conscious PR move. And they decided at some point, we are too big to need to do that PR move. But actually, you can't keep running your playbook and do that. then you just look like a hearse or something. You just look like all of the kind of like people who are always the villains in period films. That's not a great look. No.

And we're seeing like Apple, like Apple doing the 30 percent. You're just seeing it over and over again. It's like, no, you guys forgot like you forgot the PR part of this. That actually is really important. You do have to market this. You market yourselves. And if you stop doing that, we are going to all eventually be like, hey, you're being kind of assholes.

I can actually draw a straight line from what you're saying, Alex, to, uh, Rick Ostrillo in an interview at Juan's turn this week at the Wall Street Journal, she said, hey, you had to pull this ad that you ran during the Olympics of someone asking Gemini to write a letter to an athlete for his daughter. And it got pulled because everyone's like, why just have your kid do it? Like sit down with your kid and do this. Don't ask the robot to it. And he was like, the market isn't ready for this.

This is like when we went from handwriting to email. It's like, no, it's not. It just isn't. And that little latitude, like you're just not ready for the thing. It worked at a different time. It really did. Yeah. It worked for the web.

It worked for computer mice. It did not work, I would say, for the digital crown of the Apple Watch. But it worked for the iPod. All this stuff it worked for. This is the moment where we're just going to take the stuff and you're going to thank us later. A little warning sign, I would just say. That's my lightning round item. Yep.

Watch that one because it's the source of more conflict than you think. Agreed. Yep. All right. That's it. That's the show. We've gone way over. We've talked about antitrust too many times.

Do you have any more chairs to sit in? How are the chairs? There's several more shares. Okay, good. We'll do more chairs next week. If you had ideas for sponsoring the hype zone, please let me know. My God, I'm going to get this show sponsored.

I think we actually have ads right now. I don't even know how it works. That's not my side of that house at all. All right, that's the show. Thank you for listening. We got like hydrogen car special episode on Tuesday, David. Yeah. So we have deeply fun stuff coming up the next few weeks of the Vergecast.

But the short version of a long story that I'm very excited for everybody to hear is Will Poor took a ride in a hydrogen car that no one was sure was going to go anywhere or keep everyone alive during the whole process. And he learned a lot about kind of the history and future of cars and everything. And it was an awesome story. And he made it out. So it's a happy ending. All right, well, that's going to have on Tuesday.

Escape from hydrogen cars, pretty much. Today on the Calibrators. That's it. That's the Vergecast, rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.

That's it. We'll see you next week.