The Vergecast - How YouTube and ESPN control the future of everything

Episode Date: August 16, 2023

Today on the flagship podcast of non-exclusive distribution deals:  02:15 - The Verge’s David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Richard Lawler discuss how the future of sports streaming will have a lot to say about the future of entertainment. 41:57 - David chats with director Alex Winter about his new documentary The YouTube Effect.  1:12:00 - Keep listening for this week’s hotline question about Windows 11. 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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of non-exclusive distribution deals. I'm your friend David Pierce. It's about 525 in the morning, and I am out on a walk with my eight-month-old son and my dog. Because somehow along the way, they conspired and colluded to decide that this is the time that we get up and go for a walk. I would have picked a different time. But unfortunately, I didn't get a vote. So every morning we get up, Arthur has a snack and then naps in his stroller. Frida sniffs every leaf within eight miles of our house, and I listen to podcasts.

So if you make an incredibly long and kind of wacky podcast, just know that I'm probably listening, and I love you for it. Anyway, speaking of wacky podcasts, we have a great show for you today. We're going to talk about sports, which we don't do a ton of on this show. But I think at this moment in time, if you want to understand what's going on in streaming, and maybe with the future of entertainment in general, one good way to understand it is to look at a couple of things going on in sports. So we're going to dig in and see if we can figure out

where all this is headed. Then we're going to talk to Alex Winter, who you might know as an actor from the Bill and Ted movies or as a director from things like the Deep Web and the Panama Papers. He just directed a new documentary called The YouTube Effect, all about basically what YouTube has done to the world, good and bad. And he has some really interesting ideas and thoughts about where it's all headed.

So we're going to talk to him about that too. All that is coming up in just a sec, but I think, yeah, Arthur just fell asleep in a stroller. So I have a little more walking to do. But I'll be back in the studio in just a minute. This is the Vergecast. We'll see you in a sec. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th.

Tap in with us. Welcome back. I'm in the studio. I've had several gallons of coffee. Let's get to it. So you know how they say that porn is the forefront of the internet? It's the place that a surprising amount of technical innovation happens before it ever. actually gets to the rest of the web.

That's also how I feel about sports and TV. Sports are the most valuable, the most expensive, the most watched thing on television. And so what happens in the sports media landscape dictates a huge amount about how the whole entertainment world actually works. And the sports watching world is in an unusual amount of flux right now. There's a lot going on here. And I promise you don't have to be a sports fan to understand all the stuff we're about to get into or care about what happens to ESPN because this stuff matters to everybody.

That's kind of the whole point. You could make the case that what happens to ESPN will affect everything everyone watches for a long time to come. Anyway, we should sort through this all. So I grabbed the Verges Richard Lawler and my co-host, Nilai Patel, to talk all of this through. Oh, but before I bring them in, a quick thing. We recorded this a few days ago, and just to prove how fast this is all moving, a few

things have already changed since we chatted. We talk a bit in the conversation you're going to hear about ESPN being reluctant to get into betting, which it has been for a long time. Well, ESPN is now into betting. It signed a big deal with Penn Entertainment to launch a gambling app called ESPN bet. That's going to be interesting to watch in the coming months. Disney also just released earnings, which were pretty mixed this quarter. One big thing that happened was that Disney plus subscribers were way down in India in large part because Disney lost the right to Indian Premier League cricket matches. Sports, I'm telling you, they dictate everything.

Like I said, this is all changing really fast, and however it shakes out, the future of sports will have a lot to say about the future of entertainment. So let's just get into it. Richard Lawler, hello. Hey. Neelai, hello. Hey. There are these two things going on.

There's a big story about the future of ESPN, and there's a big story about the future of college football, that the three of us have been following a lot over the last few weeks. And I think it turns out that those two stories between them kind of tell the whole story of what's happening in the streaming business and kind of like in the tech industry and in the whole world of entertainment right now. So I want to both like explain what's going on and see if we can figure out what to make of it.

Does that make sense? Does this sound good? Am I am I totally insane here? How do we feel? I think your goal to try to explain what's going on in college football is optimistic, doomed, perhaps doomed, but confident. And I've always appreciated your confidence, David. Well, the good news is I have decided to foist this goal upon Richard.

And I have been waiting. Yeah, you have been in a Slack thread just dropping tweets for like two weeks now. So now is your moment. Explain to us what's happening in college football. This is the only thing that I want to talk about because I think what it comes down to is that crypto killed the Pact 12. And not in the way that you would have thought like a year ago. Like, I thought that crypto would kill college football because we would have too many shady sponsors giving kids money that they didn't know the source of and like everybody went to jail. And I was wrong.

I will admit it. I was wrong about crypto. You're not wrong yet. There's still time on that one. Could happen. But in case you don't remember, the economy went kind of bad last year. A lot of big companies had to kind of reevaluate their plans. Banks crashed.

It was a whole thing. We came through it. The bad news is not everyone is spending money. like they were kind of thinking that they would two years ago. And how does that connect to college football? Because when you look at these conferences, they signed their TV rights deals years in advance. And what happened to the PAC 12 specifically is that last year, they were kind of in line to renegotiate their TV broadcast deal, I think, starting for like 2024, 25, and on. And what they expected, they had some decent offers on the table from the various broadcast networks.

You have like the CBS, the Fox, the ESPNs and whatever, bidding against each other. but they didn't set up a deal at that time because they were looking at it. They thought that maybe they could get a better deal in a year from someone like Disney, from like Disney and ESPN bidding against someone like Amazon. However, back to that whole economic upset thing that I talked about and all the big tech companies suddenly tightening their wallets and those offers weren't there this year. And so when the various college presidents met, you know, specifically for the PAC 12 to look at their deal, they got an offer and the best offer they got apparently a,

according to reports from, you know, CNBC, Sports Business Journal, and others was from Apple TV. And Apple was trying to set up a deal sort of like it has for MLS, where they agree to pay a certain amount and they agree to pay more if they get a certain number of subscribers to add this particular sports package onto their Apple TV plus subscription, which is great, but it's risky because if enough people don't add it, you don't get all the money. And so the presidents were like, yeah, no, we need to be on linear TV because that's what recruits have. And recruits want to be on the networks that their parents have so they can play there. that you can recruit kids to be good so that people want to watch your games, and it's a whole snowball effect. Can I just pause there? The colleges believe that teenagers across America have linear TV. They're grandparents. Their grandparents. Their grandparents. All right, that's fine. I just want to, I want to circle that because that's important.

There's a twist on that that I've been reading a bunch about that I was going to bring up later, but I think is really interesting and worth mentioning. And this is another piece of like the technical chaos that we're going through right now. Is these name, image, and, like, likeness rights. So as of very recently, players can now benefit from their name, image, and likeness, they can get sponsorship deals. And one of the things that universities and, like, students are saying is we want the best players. And what the best players want is the best distribution, because if they are on the things that get watched the most, they'll get more money in their NIL deals. So the kids who want the most money will go to the schools that have

the most distribution, which will mean that they get more good kids to come. And so, it becomes this crazy spiraling thing where it's like if we just get a lot of TV ratings, we're going to get good players because that's how the players make more money. And it just like spins in this insane circle where suddenly being on linear TV means more money for college football players. And it just like it just blows my mind in a whole bunch of different directions as this is going. But so Richard, back to the story here. So basically what this has led to is like the entirety of the college football universe has like

exploded into a thousand pieces over the last two weeks. So the landscape of college football. of college sports has changed. We've gotten used to the kind of the conference system. We know what the big ones are. And now there's a few less of those big ones. The PAC 12 is basically gone. It's down to four teams after this year.

We'll see if it survives or if those teams stick around or bring in some new teams. The ACC could be next. So you're going to end up with kind of the Big Ten, the Big Twelve, the SEC. Can we just back up for one second? I grew up. I went to a Big Ten school that was the center of my universe for like a minute. But I think most people don't understand that the conferences and college sports are the, they're like how the competition between the colleges is organized.

So there's a conference, like the Big Ten. And it goes and negotiates for TV rights and money. And it splits those up against all the schools in Big Ten. And what's happening is the smaller conferences are going away and the bigger conferences are getting bigger. And there's fewer of them so that they can go negotiate for more money from a smaller pool. Is that what's, and that's what it feels like is happening to me. Yeah, and that is exactly what's happening. And especially because they want more geographic reach,

they want more alumni reach, they want to be able to negotiate better deals, and being able to have teams in, for example, Los Angeles for the Big Ten, now means that you can negotiate for much more money because you have teams in New York and Los Angeles. That doesn't make sense in terms of competition or location or history or heritage or anything like that,

but it does make sense in terms of money. So that's why they're doing that. And also why they can't count because they haven't had 10 teams for a long time. It's like a long time. Yeah, the big 10 is going to be 18 teams just to deal with that. But yeah, I think to your point, this used to be, and was for a long time, like a regional thing, right? Like I'm in Virginia, which is ACC country. And here it's a lot of schools from Virginia and North Carolina and South Carolina and Georgia.

And all these teams are kind of centered around each other. And the idea was like those are the rivalries. So these teams have been playing each other for decades. It's like all the teams that your college hates are probably the ones in your conference. And now, as far as I can tell, the whole reason this is all getting blown up is because these teams are chasing the big TV deals that already exist that got made before the economy turned around. Richard, is it more complicated than that? It really feels like if I'm looking around and I'm saying, oh, there's a whole lot of money going to the Big Ten every year. If I go to the Big Ten, I will get a slice of that.

if I stay in the PAC 12 where the deal is up next year, that deal is probably going to be a lot smaller because the business looks a lot worse than it used to. I think that's true, but I think it's a little more complicated than that. And sometimes I'm not sure that I get it myself because I'm looking at the way that these leagues look, and I think they're still operating under the idea that they're going to be able to get big deals from the tech companies to compete with whoever's left in a traditional TV. And that that money is kind of still going to be there. But just by getting bigger, that is the way that you get more money. and by being part of the bigger hole. And that really is kind of how it has always worked.

That's why the Big Ten has had schools. That's why Michigan and Ohio State deal with Iowa and Minnesota. It's a rough picture. Richard lives in Michigan. I think it's important for everyone in this podcast to note that Richard lives in Michigan. If you're from Iowa or Minnesota, just know that we love you too. We love you. You just don't have that many people who watch TV.

But this gets that harder than matter. Actually, that statement, not a lot of people watch TV. Because when you were regional, right, you had regional sports networks. So you had no choice if you wanted TV but to sign up for your local cable system or put up an antenna. That was the 80s, right? Those are your two choices. And that meant the cable system could go and sign a deal with the Big Ten to distribute Big Ten games. And it was unlikely that they needed a deal to go distribute Pac-10 games because it was unlikely that people in the Midwest wanted to watch college football from the West Coast.

And when they did, it was national games and there was a lot of money involved for everybody. Now that's broken, right? If you want to watch anything, you have the internet which destroys that regional scarcity, which has made everything vastly cheaper. And those regional cable companies are no longer the wealthy middlemen in the middle of all of this. And in fact, their television distribution business is headed inevitably to zero. And particularly over the pandemic, seems to have taken a lot of shocks bringing it closer to zero in a way that no one's even denying it anymore. Like maybe five or ten years ago, people would deny cord cutting was a thing, and that's over. And so now what you have is, okay, maybe Apple or Amazon has the pockets to support these kinds of TV deals. Richard, your point is they don't seem that interested in it. No. And like Apple, of course, we know that Apple has basically infinite money. They could spend whatever they want to get a Pack 12 deal.

They just don't want to, and they don't have to. Right. And so they're like, we'll give you a deal where maybe if you attract enough viewers. Apple famously did not buy Sunday ticket, which is actually like a crown jewel sports streaming package. And they didn't do it. They were in the driver's seat. They were going to take it. And then they didn't go.

Something happened between Apple and the NFL. And the NFL went with Google, which is a much more normal cable deal on YouTube TV. Well, and I think the example there is actually really instructive because one of the things that it broke down, do you remember that whole kerfuffle about how the deal broke down over VR rights? Yeah. What Apple wants from these companies is basically complete control, right? Like what the MLS gave to Apple was everything for $250 million a year, which was like a multiple of what the MLS had gotten before. So it was a huge number.

But Apple now completely controls the MLS's broadcast. If you want to watch the MLS, you are going to subscribe to Apple, which is why when Lien O'Messie, the best soccer player in the world, went to the MLS. Apple reportedly gave it gave Messi a special deal to be part of that because it was a win for the MLS, which is directly a big win for Apple. That's where we get to the ESPN side of this, which I think is the other half of what's happening right now, which is ESPN more than any other single company is the one paying all of that money and has essentially in a lot of ways run out or is starting to run out because of what you were just talking about, Eli, we were at this point a few years ago where everybody was kind of looking at the the cable business going eventually this will die. A lot of people subscribe to cable. That number is slowly dwindling.

There's still a lot of money in it. Someday in the future, we're going to have to worry about what that transition looks like. That day in the future came much faster, I think, than anybody expected. And we are deep in the thick of everyone is canceling cable right now. You know, what's fascinating for me is all of that is based on physical scarcity. I love ranting about competition on the show. I will try not to do it too much.

but you were stuck with Time Warner or Comcast or whoever because they had the actual wires in the ground to your house and that meant that you could do whatever they wanted. Disclosure Comcasts and the master of the last meeting or whatever. And we all like football. That's a disclosure, I guess. I have not watched football in years. It's too dangerous.

Yeah, because the lions do. No, it's not because the lions suck. That's not it. They won a playoff game in my lifetime. They're never going to win again. Jordan left forever. The end of the story here is the scarcity went away and we have basically rebuilt all these cable bundles, right?

YouTube TV is a cable bundle. Hulu with Live TV is a cable bundle, whatever. But the cable companies utterly failed to do that for their customers. I think this market looks different if there was a great Xfinity app or there was a great Time Warner app. And that's where you were still getting your programming from and they were competing. And they just blew it. And now there's YouTube TV. And YouTube TV is national.

that might be the pot of money. It is growing really fast. David's reported on that. And it just seems like there's an opportunity here for, like, people like bundles. Like, it, signing up for different streaming services sucks. And no one has really seized that moment except for YouTube TV, which is becoming more and more, just a very standard cable package. Yeah, I saw this amazing tweet the other day from, it was River Ave Blues tweeted it. It said, you have to subscribe to four different services to watch the next five Yankees game.

Sunday, Peacock, Monday, off day, Tuesday, the Yes Network, which is the regional Yankees network, Wednesday, Amazon Prime Video, Thursday, Friday, Apple TV Plus. Like, that is deranged. Like, that is not how any of this is supposed to work. And there are a lot of people who continue to subscribe to cable just because it is the best place to get sports, right? Like, that is, and has been for a long time, the best reason to have cable is if you're a sports fan because it's going to have the most stuff for, frankly, the lowest price.

And it's all in one place, and that's very useful. And that's what a lot of these other bundles like YouTube TV are building towards, right? Like that's why YouTube spent all that money on Sunday ticket. It's reportedly paying $2 billion a year. And it's because if you can have a good sports package, people will pay a lot of money for it. But ESPN, I think, more than almost anybody, is stuck in this really complicated place where sports is still a really good business on cable TV. ESPN is still wildly profitable. It has been funding Disney for years.

And it still makes a lot of money. but that number is going down. It's going down really fast. And ESPN is now at a point where it has been pretty publicly saying that at some point we're going to go direct to consumer with flagship ESPN, right? ESPN Plus exists. It's mostly like little sports and documentaries and people don't really care. But like the thing will be when like all of the big sports that ESPN pays billions of dollars for, like the college football stuff that we're talking about, moves exclusively to streaming. And if ESPN does that, they're walking away from this.

gigantic pot of money that is the cable business. And if it does that, it will kill the rest of the cable business because all the people who watch sports will no longer want to be there. So it's stuck in this place. And like Bob Eiger did this interview with CNBC where it sort of just sounds like they're throwing up their hands in me. Like, we have no idea what to do here. That interview that Iger did with CNBC, people should go watch it. It's recent. He talked about the strikes. Every answer was like a nuclear bomb that went off. It really was. I suspect we will not be hearing from Bob Eiger again for some time. But his answer about ESPN was eventually we'll go direct-to-consumer. His answer about whether Disney should sell parts of itself,

where, yes, eventually we should sell parts of our linear, other linear networks, because we need to become a new kind of company. And what has funded all of Disney, this whole time, has been ESPN. Disney owns Marvel, Disney owns Fox and the rest of the Marvel universe, all the stuff that Disney bought, Lucasfilm, all of that was funded by excess cash from ESPN. And that number coming down has made it so that that, boy, Marvel needs to make a lot of money all the time. And, like, you can see how they got to. We'll just flood Disney Plus with Marvel stuff

because they were watching the ESPN cable revenue come down and they needed all those subscribers to go to Disney Plus. And they're just not going to. And even if they do, the finances don't seem like they work. Yeah. And I think that's one of the main things is that really none of the math works on this. For ESPN, for Disney, for streaming, for all of it. And no one is quite sure what's going to happen in the future.

And when you look at ESPN, people have seen. said, oh, I would love to have ESPN and be able to get that without cable in the future. If and when it happens, you might be paying like 30, 40 bucks a month for just ESPN. So let me, here, I'll throw this out there. Let me spin out a version of the future for you, Richard. You get to a place where it is nonsensical for YouTube TV, let's say, to have lifestyle programming on it. Anything that is not time sensitive, right, is nonsensical for MTV to exist showing episodes of ridiculousness all day and all night. You end up basically being like sports news in the Oscars.

Right. It's just live stuff. Like basically YouTube TV is there for things that are really important when they're live. And that is basically like the news networks, sports programming, and award shows. Yeah. Remember those bad shows on sci-fi network? Yeah, you're not going to have any more of those. Well, you can see how that there's pressure on the system. Like, I think if you pulled any Vergecast list or and said, what would you pay for on a cable system? It's like that list in some order of priority, right? Things that are live. We've lost another plane and CNN is going to go wall-to-wall coverage on planes and submarines, and you just need that thing, you just got to flip it on it's there. It's the Super Bowl. You need to flip it on. It's there. Everything else moves to a constellation

of streaming services. Like the future of Max is a streaming service appears to be reality TV, right? That's what David Zazov wants. You get to that split and maybe that's fine. It just seems like no one can get out of their way or leave the money on the table to get to that endpoint. Like, I would happily pay for a YouTube TV that was cheaper and totally focused on live coverage. It's the other way around than it used to be, right? You would pay for ESPN and you would get, like, CNN along for the ride. And people would be like, I don't want to pay for all these channels I don't need. It's just the order of what channels you don't need has radically changed because now you're

prioritizing live stuff. I sort of buy that theory. And I think to some extent that is kind of the way. world Disney is hoping comes to fruition, right? That eventually ESPN Plus can get all the best stuff that's on ESPN. ABC is a thing that Disney owns and doesn't know what to do it. It gets a lot of the news coverage and award shows. Like that's kind of what Max is talking about doing with CNN. There's like, there's a version in which you can put those things together in a way that kind of makes sense. I just think you'd have to charge so much money for it that you wouldn't get nearly the number of

people you need to make that financially work. And that's really the issue. is like, how do you make it work? Because the magic of ESPN and its magic money pile was that it was getting like $10, $15 a month from every single cable subscriber in the United States. A hundred million people at one point. Whether they watched sports or not, were just giving that to ESPN every month. Didn't matter. And it was, that money was actually making everything else go. And so when you suddenly take that out, when you don't have that ESPN in kind of any package, if it's by itself, if it's in the Disney bundle or wherever, it's not probably. dropping everything else up. So how much is there to pay for? How much is there to pay for ESPN? How much is there to pay for everything else? How does it get balanced out? You have Max. They've been talking over the last few days really about their sports programming that they hope to build up.

You've had Netflix. They're going to broadcast this weird, or at least they were before the strike, planning to broadcast this weird like celebrity sports tournament as maybe they get into sports because there was a report. They bid for F1. So they probably bid for something else. Apple TV, we know that they're doing sports deals. But do you do those as a part of your main package or as an add-on, and people don't get the add-ons. Like, we already know that. So how much money is there really? Well, and this is where we go back to the college football thing is college football people

don't want a Netflix deal. Like, they would take it as part of another bigger deal, but they don't want that deal because they want to be on linear television. They want to be in the biggest places that people are watching. And even if there was a quote that I think it was the president of the University of Washington gave to ESPN right after all the PAC 12 stuff broke down, where he was basically like Apple TV doesn't give us enough reach. They could give us all the money in the known universe.

They don't give us enough reach. And this is like, this is sort of the story of the whole business right now. I was listening to the podcast of The Town, which is Pucks, Matt Bellany. It's a really great podcast about all things like the entertainment business. And he's talking to Rich Greenfield, who's a very smart analyst on this stuff. And Rich's big theory was that what every other content maker should do is have the first run of their shows on Netflix. Because Netflix has the biggest. distribution and if you want your IP to work, if you want stuff to merchandise, like Disney,

because it needs people to care about its characters and watch them and see them and go care about the rides and buy their toys, should actually be putting its stuff on Netflix before it puts it on Disney Plus. And that's never going to happen, but I actually think is an incredibly interesting point. That is bonkers. It will never happen for a million reasons. But in the sense that it's like if what I want is for people to care about my shows, it actually makes a lot of sense that you should put them in the place where most people will see that.

them. And so for the football and sports people in general who hold all the cards in all of these negotiations, because they are the live thing that people care about increasingly, like the only one, they're just going to go where the biggest audience is. And this has been ESPN's problem. If it cancels its cable network and just goes to streaming, it will stop getting these deals. Even if it has all the money in the world, it will stop getting these deals because it loses the size and scope of what it can offer. And so, like, it's just another reason that it's like, what do you even do? So there's another piece of this, which I think is important to note. The big tech companies suck at broadcasting sports.

Yes. Watching a football game being broadcast by Amazon is a chore. Not only because for whatever reason, carmically, they get the worst football games in broadcast history. Last season, some of the worst games ever played were on Amazon. That's not Amazon's fault. I'm just saying that's karma. They're also just not good at it yet, right?

The pageantry of a major national. broadcast football game is a thing that helps those athletes get their endorsement deals, that is the scaffolding for the big advertisers to come in and put big fancy ads next to premium programming. And you look at a baseball game on Apple. They've gotten a little bit better. It's still a pretty low rent operation. For example, they're not in 4K yet.

Just put that out there. It's amazing to me. You look at Amazon. Amazon is ready to broadcast those games in 4K. They own an entire streaming service that can do it. they haven't done it yet. Maybe they'll do it this season. And they're, you know, they're not paying the money for the biggest name broadcasters, like the Troy Aikman's and Joe Bucks of the world are, they're on ESPN, right? They're doing Monday night football on ESPN because that is the

best distribution for them. I mean, Al Michaels basically retired to Amazon. It's like more or less Yeah, he seems very bored. There's just a piece of that puzzle where there's a product to be made here. There's a literal show to be put on. And the athletes and the coach, and the owners of the teams and the people who run the conferences, they want to be part of the fanciest show. And the tech companies, bizarrely, they've paid a lot of money, and they're kind of cheaping out on the show part of it, which is fascinating to me. They don't know how to build the stage.

Yeah. Like, that's a skill and something that has been built up in these networks over the years. They just have the institutional knowledge and the people to build the stage. And I think that what Dave mentioned about, like, Reach, it's not just like what you think of like, oh, they have X number of viewers when they're talking about reach, especially for these college presidents who run these high, these high profile universities, who want to be seen, who want to be on that top level. It's that ESPN and linear TV is just on, and it's everywhere. And when you're on there, it means that everyone is going to see you every week. And they're never going to forget about your university.

University of Western blah, blah, blah, is very important. And you've heard of it. And you've heard of it your whole life. And you know it because they had a good football team 15 years ago. And if they're on Apple TV, that doesn't happen. I think the other part of what you mentioned when you talked about, like, Disney and going on Netflix for the first season, like Formula One, I think is a great example of that because they had that drive to survive that boosted the profile of the sport in the United States because so many people have Netflix and they started watching this sport that they've never paid attention to because it comes on at 3 a.m. And they were like, actually, I love this and I need to see more of it. And because they were on the biggest distribution platform, they got a huge boost.

And you could see that happen. Well, but that show is also really fascinating. So we should talk about Drive for a minute. We should disclose that there's another version of that show about golf called Full Swing that Vox Media makes, which is great. You should watch it. The Drive Survive is this fascinating phenomenon because it is owned by one company, right? Liberty Media owns F1.

They own the whole league. And they're the ones who told their entire league, you are going to participate in this show. And the only teams in the first season that could say no were the winning teams, right? Like Mercedes and Ferrari said no. And everyone else sort of participated. And then those teams saw how much play the drivers were getting, the league was getting. And they came around in the second season and participated. And now everybody has to participate in the show is like turning into like a meta show.

Like everyone's constantly talking about the show on the show, which was very funny. Yep. Yes. That did boost the profile of the league. But it's fascinating because it happened because it's owned by one company. They could just make the deal and instruct all the participants. like you're doing this and this is a strategy

with open explicit strategy of boosting our profile we're going to turn you into reality television and every episode is basically top gun right a bunch of rich people run around they're beautiful and then there's a race the stakes of the race are falsely amplified which is great I love it

everyone should watch drive to survive you see Netflix doing this with other sports they've done it with tennis they've done it with golf like I said they try to do with NFL with his new show quarterback but because the NFL insist on making the show themselves. It's not as good.

Yeah. It's like very interesting. That alone is like the league is so involved in it on that, on that front that NFL films made quarterback that the show isn't as good. And I think there's just something there about trying to replicate these models where like eventually you have like generational copy loss. Like you make a copy of a copy of a copy of a copy and you start with Drive to Survive and you end with quarterback. You know like we made too many copies. You've seen that with Drive to Survive. The subsequent seasons, as you mentioned, it's gotten very meta. Like, even when you're in the season,

people are like, oh, man, this is going to be on Drive to Survive. And what you end up with is when it actually comes out, it's completely disappointing or not in there in the way that people were expecting it. And it's just you can't do it again. You can't go back to that first one. Yeah. I just think there's something fascinating about that cycle. Because Drive to Survive happens after the season.

And they release it before the next season. It just creates a cast of characters, creates a set of things to follow in a way that I think kind of segues into more conversation on ESPN. That's what ESPN is every day, right? Every day ESPN is just, I mean, it is basically just a 24-hour podcast that is interrupted by broadcasts of major sports. But it is increasingly becoming not that, right?

Like ESPN has gone through a bunch of layoffs over the last couple of years, including some of its really high-profile talent. And it seems like what ESPN has decided is that we are a place that airs sports and Stephen A. Smith. They have a couple of really big-name people that they really care a lot about, and everything else that isn't live sports. I think that the counterpoint to that is that they just signed Pat McAfee and gave him all of the money that they took from laying off all of the people. Right. They took an independent podcaster, and they said, okay, you're the new face of ESPN. And Pat took that deal. I watch a show, mostly because Aaron Rogers' experience was,

as David and Richard know, very traumatizing for me over these past few years. But Pat took that deal. He left his gaming company deal and said ESPN is like the natural fit for what I do. And I think that goes back to the prestige, right? It's the, it's still the top. And so you might take the discount on attaching yourself to the brand that is at the top. And it also has the massive distribution. I think that question of like, what is ESPN going to be is really stuck in that tension of,

okay, there's going to be YouTube TV. And this is where a bunch of sports need to happen. So we're going to collect the sports and resell them YouTube TV, and that's going to be the cable deal of old. Or this is a network full of personalities talking about sports and it's comfort viewing for you to just have on in the background all the time. I don't think they've made that decision. One answer that was supposed to be there for what ESPN and some of these other sports networks is supposed to be is something that you mentioned there, gambling and gaming. That was supposed to help fill the hole and was expected to. Pat McAfee, as you said, I think had his show with Fanduel or one of these other gaming companies.

And ESPN had been talking about betting. We wrote about it last year that gambling was going to be a huge business for these TV networks, for Fubo, for everyone else. And it just has not worked out that way. Bob Iger has not talked about gambling except for like one small quote in a time interview ever since he came back. Fulbo TV launched gambling kind of features on their network, on their streaming network. They're gone. They're out of that business. Fox shut down their Fox bet app.

The gambling companies are not making as much money as people. expected. Some of them are losing money because it's so expensive to acquire customers. And so that's another element of why everything has suddenly changed and flipped up so quickly because that was supposed to help kind of bridge that linear TV to streaming gap. And it just didn't happen. Yeah. It turns out people want to gamble in casinos, not on ESPN.com. And that it's more fun to gamble when you're getting stimulus checks than it is when the economy is bad. Also, nerds aren't as good at running casinos as they think. It's really hard to make money, they found out. Yeah.

All right. But we should wrap this up. But I am curious, like, if we cast this out a couple of years, right? I think we're in this interesting place where, like, the NFL did this big deal a couple of years ago for, like, $110 billion. All these college sports have giant deals. They're forever coming up. The next big one is the NBA, which a lot of people think is going to sign a gigantic deal that's going to change the way the NBA works. But also ESPN is competing with, like, the Warner Brothers discoveries of the world and some of these tech companies to get it.

Like, if we fast forward a couple of them. of years. Let's just talk about ESPN specifically. Richard, give me like 2025 predictions for what ESPN looks like. Frankly, I'm a bit worried. The NBA thing is a great point because it's something I've been thinking about. I watch the NBA. I love the NBA. I love NBA TV. I love the transactions. I love the games. All of it. And they are expecting a huge broadcast deal. You know, as you said, you have Disney still. You have Warner. You have all the tech companies. But I don't know who is going to pay that. I don't know if they're going to have to expand their international deals or what they're going to have to do to find this money so that they can pay

all of the players in Boston who maybe made the All-NBA team once $300 million or something like that. But that's where we are. And I just, I don't know if we're going to have the same sports landscape that we had, the kind of thing that we grew up with, the place where I saw that Barry Sanders was retiring and it still traumatizes me to this day. It just, I don't know. I'll probably hear about it on a podcast. And that's going to be it. It's just podcast and streaming. That's my prediction. Neil, I would have you? I think I agree with that.

I think the idea that sports is the last thing driving the monoculture is going to get pulled into a smaller handful of leagues. Like Apple really wants MLS to happen in the United States. Yeah. And signing messy was a great deal, and I've now seen a bunch of messy highlights on my TikTok feed. I haven't signed up for Apple TV to watch the MLS. It's just like, that hasn't converted me yet,

but they've instituted it into the culture in a way that's interesting now. But it's still the big moments, right? Like, the NFL still dominates American sports. And that is the thing that I think will continue to just drive a bunch of stuff as people wanting NFL-style deals. And I just don't know if they're there. I think the audience has fractured enough that that bet that everyone will pay for ESPN and that will spend money out into all the leagues that enable lots of things to happen,

that's gone. Right. And more people are going to spend more money on watching The Witcher on Netflix or whatever. Like the fandoms are going to are going to fracture and be in more competition with more kinds of things in a way that I think is probably exciting over the long run just because I think we'll get more kinds of new upstart sports emerging or more opportunities. Like the emergence of F1 has been great for racing fans. Like they ran a NASCAR race in Chicago because they were like, we need to do some exciting stuff to capture the attention of a new class of race fans. And that was the coolest race I've ever seen, right? And I was in Chicago that weekend.

So it was very loud. That's cool, right? Like a little kick in the pants to all these leagues to not just milk money out of big fat broadcast deals is great. But I think that moment where all of my friends in school were always watching ESPN and kind of always talking about the same things, that's gone. That's got to be gone. I'm with you.

I think the thing that is remarkable about ESPN is that it continues to be as close to like a one-stop sports shop as kind of anything else. And that's just, I agree. I think that's going to die. Like, I don't see the leagues making less money, at least not in the relative immediate future. They're just going to keep making more money and the deals are going to keep going up. And so what's going to happen, I was reading a bunch about all the different deals that have been happening. And there was this big, big 10 deal to go back to college football that happened a couple of years ago. It was a seven and a half billion dollar deal for seven years. And it happened across three different networks because basically no one network could afford this whole deal. And so now if you want to

watch Big Ten football, you're going to have to like do a puzzle every Saturday morning to figure out what channel your game is going to be on. You can't just like know where your sports are. And I think that's where we're headed is like we're going to get more sports, more places, but it is going to be like vastly more distributed. And going forward, if you want to watch the NFL, you're going to need like 11 different subscriptions because no one company, ESPN or otherwise, is going to be a lot of. to afford it. My, my hottest take at the end of this is that I think YouTube stands to be the biggest winner

of all of this because I think YouTube TV is like going to keep looking like a really compelling sports bundle to a lot of people, but also the thing that YouTube does where you can subscribe to other streaming services through YouTube is going to be really powerful. So it's like, okay, I might have to get Paramount Plus and Peacock and Netflix and NFL Plus or whatever the hell.

All of that I might have to get to. watch sports, but YouTube wants to be this sort of interface through which I can do that. So it's going to be expensive and annoying, but I will at least have a single location for all of it. And I think that is going to end up being the biggest fight is like the collector on top of the subscriptions. And I think over the course of the next like decade, YouTube looks pretty good there. Amazon's also going to try pretty hard to win that fight. But I would I would bet on YouTube more than anybody else in this space. Expensive and annoying. Welcome to the future of TV. Yeah. It's very obvious. Like we're just headed back to

cable companies. And it is, I think, important to note that none of the existing cable companies built any of this stuff that is just recapitulating the bundles. They were always worried about losing. Yeah. No, I think it's exactly right. And it's a shame because I think as a, as a, like, fan and viewer, and this is true of the whole streaming industry right now. It's like, it's all going to get worse before it gets better. Yeah. It's just, it just is where it is. There's too much money and too much stuff. And none of it makes any sense anymore. And that's why I think you should subscribe to Alex Grimes' Plex server. Just putting it out there.

All the good stuff. True cable bundle. All right. Well, we will come back, I'm sure, during football season and be sad about why we can't watch any of the games. But thank you both. We need to take a break. And then we're going to come back and talk to Alex Winter, the director of the new

documentary, the YouTube Effect. See in a second. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify. Millions of businesses around the world rely on Shopify for e-commerce.

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. So there's this new documentary out called The YouTube Effect that I found totally fascinating. How did it go? I'm Brookers and I'm an internet celebrity. If you've followed YouTube over the years or even listened to this show as we've talked

about YouTube over the years. There's not a ton about the history the doc shows that will surprise you, but it's still a really good look at how YouTube became YouTube and really what YouTube has done to the world, both good and bad. I liked the YouTube effect because it's not one of those like loud screeds against the internet or a rosy story about disruptors changing everything. It's both those things. And it's a bunch of other things. And it made me think a lot about what actually makes YouTube unique on the web. There's something different about it, and I've always had trouble putting my finger on what that thing is,

and the doc did a pretty good job of trying to figure it out. So I called up Alex Winter, the director of the documentary, to talk about it. The sort of monetization of propaganda and misinformation and disinformation is really what the film is about at its heart. You might recognize Alex from the Bill and Ted movies. He plays Bill, and a lot of other shows and movies he's done over the years. More recently, he's also directed a number of documentaries about things like the Silk Road and the Panama Papers. He's just a guy who knows a thing or two about how video works and why it's effective from a bunch of different angles.

So as soon as we got on the line, that's just what we started talking about. One of the things that really jumped out to me was there a couple of little spots in the movie where you talk about video as a medium and specifically sort of YouTube as a medium. And I think one of the things we debate a lot internally at the verge is, A, this question of like, is this a platform problem or a society problem, right? And I think I'm pretty resolute on the answer is both, but platforms play a real role. And we can sort of litigate that as much as you want. I think there's just inarguable. I mean, that's come on. That's inarguable, unless you're bananas.

Right. Yeah. But I think the really interesting question to me is kind of what is special about YouTube as a place, right? because if you want to talk about algorithms on Facebook and Twitter and TikTok and elsewhere, I think this idea of algorithmic recommendations is really interesting. But there's something different about like the style and structure of a YouTube video even that makes it different. Can you explain how you think about that? Yes. In fact, I would say that I had an inkling about this going into the film and obviously being able to immerse myself in it and go meet everyone who was the smartest people in the world about these issues, which is what I always go seek out, did give me some comments.

concrete answers in this area that were very illuminating. And some of them are common sense and some of them aren't. I went into the film feeling, feeling exhausted by hearing about the algorithm. And I was thinking, you know, I know enough about technology and the way technology is spoken about to be, to be skeptical of so much weight being put on anything that fuzzy. Everybody talks about the algorithm, like it's like the villain in the story. And it's like, that's actually not. And, you know, You could be very cruel and stop anyone mid-sentence and say, can you just stop and tell me what you think an algorithm is? And they would spout utter nonsense. Right.

So, you know, most people don't know what an algorithm is at all who are even using this term all the time. They don't even know what it is. They don't even know how it works. Most people don't even know that the recommended algorithm in YouTube has largely been remedied and has been not doing what it used to do for a very long time. And so I started to examine what is it? that to exactly to your point, because YouTube has more views than any other platform that we debate, it gets a lot less attention. And I think largely because it's overwhelming to people. Some of it's

lobbying power, like they spend a lot of money to get people to look elsewhere. But we spend a lot more time looking at meta and a lot more time looking at what used to be Twitter and TikTok and other platforms. But you're talking about 4.6 billion views a day on YouTube. You know, number two, most viewed website after Google being number one, both owned by the same company. So that immediately what makes it special is scale, right? As you guys well know, scale is everything on the Internet. And YouTube has far more scale than any of these other platforms in terms of other interactivity.

And then you get to the video component and how the video component works specifically that's different than any other platform in terms of how long these videos are, how promoted and viral a very select group of influencers are on all sides of of aisles and thought, which is one of the things about YouTube I love, right? You can have Stephen Crowder over here and Natalie Wend and ContraPoints over here, and they're both doing great, and one of them is, you know, trying to promote civil war, and the other one's kind of trying to stop Civil War, but they're both getting a lot of traction. They both have the parisional connection of golly G. G. Wis, I'm your buddy hanging out in my bedroom talking

into my webcam. You feel you know me, but you don't at all. hugely powerful component. So I think for me, it's the trifecta of massive scale, parisocial connection of these influencers and the power of that monetized for ad dollars. So it's an ad-based model, business model that is going to push, you know, I wouldn't say without an algorithms help because I think that's going overboard because algorithms obviously do things. But it's really not a technological issue. It's a business model issue. You could change algorithms and you would still have these influencers gaining enormous traction given the way salacious content catches fire, going back to yellow journalism in the 1890s. And then you attach the monetization to that.

And then you attach whoever's funding those influencers and giving them the power to be online all the time in a powerful way and message correctly. Natalie really is like a one woman band. People like Crowder and Shapiro, I mean, those are huge entities with a lot of money behind them. So I think it's that trifecta, and I think that makes YouTube special in many good ways. I think that the way they've legitimately constructed a business model that allows creators to actually earn a living, going back to Smosh and some of the earliest players on the platform, I think has changed the world in many ways for the better. I think it has democratized culture. I think it has opened up people's ability to have a voice, you know, LGBTQ, people in marginalized communities,

people in small foreign countries who would never get on any broad-based entertainment platform. And I think a lot of that stuff is good. I think obviously the dangerous, you know, we talk about quite a bit in the film. Yeah. And I think the intersection of those three things you talked about is sort of forever fascinating to me. It's like YouTube introduces mid-roll ads. And so videos get longer so that they can have mid-roll ads. And thus the structure of those videos change and the way that people respond to them changes.

And then YouTube starts rewarding long watch time. So they make their videos even longer. And so it just these things like cycle each other forever and ever. And it's just super fascinating. But I think the parisocial thing was the thing that like kept sticking with me as I was watching the doc. Like I was watching with my wife. And we got to the section about Ryan, the kid who like does the toy stuff, made $22 million,

wildly famous and super successful. And she was just like, why would kids want to watch this kid on YouTube? And it was a moment of being like, oh, right, we're old people who don't get it. And also, like, these people, like, think he's their friend in, like, a really real way. Like, they have an actual relationship in a way that, like, I don't know, if you rewind 20 years, people liked and cared about movie stars, but didn't perceive them the same way. And I feel like we're still reckoning with this idea that, like, I can watch somebody on my screen who I now, in some real way, believe that I know.

Because I've been inside their house and I've seen them eat dinner in a way that, like, watching somebody on a movie never did. Yeah, and they're looking at it, they're looking at you. They're looking at a webcam and you're often watching them on your phone or on your laptop, and not in a sort of ritualistic way of like, here is an icon 100 feet tall on a movie screen that I've like gotten in my car and driven to the movie theater and gone to like bought popcorn and then for being presented with his towering figure. It's the literal opposite of that in every conceivable way. And in fact, that's part of what we're dealing with with a strike right now. It's like the advent of streaming has broken that ritual to a degree that we're losing movie stars.

And people don't feel that sort of opposite type of connection, that kind of epic connection with or interest in someone that you feel is larger than life that you don't know. So, and Ryan, you know, just so it's been said, it's a couple hundred million dollars a year. So it's a vast sum. Sure. And they've been doing that year after year for a long time. So, I mean, you are talking about an enormous, enormous audience. And that has gotten Hollywood scare, you know, because it is, they're drawing numbers that are not comparable in terms of what, what, especially in the streaming world, which is doesn't really monetize so well. So I think that the paris social thing can't be understated. I think the work that Becca Lewis out of Stanford is done and other people is really significant work. And it was very important. to me when I was making the doc is kind of the answer the question I had about, okay, if the algorithm isn't the secret sauce, what is? And I think the secret sauce is really the parosocial relationships. And I think it's what draws people to YouTube. I think it makes people feel like it's what's influential, but it's also a big part of what's caused the societal impact,

because it's really much more than just a political pundit saying, go do this. It's someone that you think is like your best friend saying, go do this. Was YouTube just first into that fray? Or is there something about it that is still different. Because like TikTok plays on the same sorts of things now, but I feel like maybe just doesn't have the history to pull that off. Instagram was always kind of the opposite. It's like this airbrushed version of everybody's life. Like, why is it that after all these years, no one else has figured out how to do this the way that YouTube has done it? I think that it would be possible to have competitors in a marketplace that don't think TikTok is one for a number of obvious reasons. The way their algorithm works, the way their videos work, the way they

don't monetize creators. They don't have the scale that YouTube has. They don't have a Google behind them. And we chart this in the movie. It's the reason we spend time in the film in Act 1, charting the actual business growth of YouTube, because I think it's very important. And I think that Susan Wuzziki and other people's vision in 2005, 2006,

I think you have to credit that vision. I think that, and especially given how much flak she got and they got, for buying YouTube for $1.6 plus billion. Which sounds like nothing now, but at the time was like a preposterously large amount of money. Yeah, it was just, it was an unimaginable number in the internet era of that, of that time. I mean, when Apple was still this kind of ailing company trying to get a foothold back in the business. And the prescience that they had of understanding that Google was becoming a dominant figure in what was going to be the, you know, jockeying for the very few lanes.

of the highway, which was true. Only few companies did survive and take those lanes. And Google is one of them. In fact, they're the largest in terms of user interaction. Apple, I guess, has a bigger market cap. Google has a lot more people using its tools. So I think that their vision was not complete. It wasn't like we see the whole picture, but I do think that they knew that if you harness a video platform that work, that had a UI that people were responding to, which I think was not happening of Google Play, you harness that to one of the largest tech companies on the planet with enormous reach and influence and lobbying power, which is important, that you would be able to dominate the market in that space and that more people, you'd be able to create an entertainment infrastructure

that people would want to use because they did start to monetize their influencers immediately. This wasn't like, you know, Smosh was making money almost immediately in the early days of YouTube. Right. And other people, obviously. that was our use case in the movie. So I think that's really important because I think that, and it's one of the things that we get at is one of the problems. It's sort of how we wrap the movie up, not to spoil it for folks who are going to go see it. But like, you know, Google is a monopoly.

It's one of the largest monopolies on the planet. YouTube dominates the space because it has the benefit of Google's monopoly power. I don't think that if Google got broken up or if there were other, you know, equally large tech companies, I think you would see competitors in this space. And I do think, honestly, I'm curious what you all think and what you think about this, given your understanding of this space, I do think is where we're headed, even though I don't think it's happening anytime soon.

I do think we're headed into a more fractured space, you know, in terms, and I think that's a healthy thing where, like, it isn't just three, four companies running everything. And there is more choice, and there is more competition, which gives way to more policy and healthier regulation. I think it's going to be a bit of a dog fight because who wants to give up dominance. But I do think we're heading that way. And I think what's interesting to me is what Twitter, what Elon Musk's kind of disastrous takeover of Twitter has shown is that the public.

Everyone, I was interesting to watch people who were smart, but I knew haven't spent a lot of time online when Must do that. They were like, oh, this is, I was kind of getting tired of social media anyway. So this is kind of the end. I'm going to probably back off and not do. this anymore. And within two weeks, those same people were like on Mastodon, on post, on eventually on threads. Like they figured out what a lot of us knew for years, which is like, you don't need to be on one platform. It's okay. Right. You can communicate cross platform. So I think that that's the future on some level. Yeah, I agree in most cases, actually,

and we've talked about it a lot in the show, actually, is I think we are headed in kind of an unbundling phase. And it's where I think like things like Mastodon and the sort of decentralized social media stuff is really interesting. We're headed back towards like protocols being really interesting and exciting. And I think the future of social is definitely lots of places, not one place. And I think that's probably a good thing. I don't know about YouTube though, because the thing that jumps out to me, even as you talk about it, is there's no good reason for anyone to want to leave YouTube. It's monetizing really well for everyone involved. It's the best platform technically. It's a very good search engine. It has a very good video player.

Like, short of some sort of spectacular own goal from Google at this point, I have a really hard time imagining what it would take to unwind YouTube at this moment. Yeah, and I agree with you. I mean, I think that at this moment, and I think in the immediate future and even the not so immediate future, they're it. So, me, don't get me, this is not changing tomorrow. Unless Elon Musk buys YouTube and then all bets are off and got on us. And that just calls it X and we all just go home. And we do just get off the internet and give up. But no, I don't think it's going to change anytime soon.

I mean, I feel pretty firmly that they are an entrenched entity and that they have the power. I don't know if they have the desire, but they have the power to eat Hollywood without blinking, right? And, you know, they could gobble up every single one of these conglomerates and not bad an eye. I don't necessarily think that they want to do that. I think they're forays into that level of content distribution, which they played with in the past. was not particularly fruitful for them and they don't seem to need it, right? But they could do it in a heartbeat. I don't think Google or YouTube is going to get smaller over the next few years.

I think it's going to continue to get bigger. But I do think that there's going to be pushback. And I do think that harms are going to increase. And I think the general public will eventually, even though I think they don't understand the internet, even lawmakers, don't understand the situation so well today. You know, a lot of younger people are coming up in law and government and in tech. who absolutely do understand much better what's going on. So I think we will hopefully stop seeing like really bad legislation being put forward like COSA and other, you know,

forms of really misguided in terms to dismantle Section 230. I think we will stop seeing things like that soon and see a shift towards legislation and policy ideas, even if they don't get implemented right away, that at least make more sense. Yeah, I think that's right. And I do think it's going to be good when a generation of people who grew up with this stuff becomes the one legislating this stuff. That's going to go a very long way. But I think the thing about YouTube,

I'm fascinated by YouTube just as a product, because not only does it continue to be this sort of dominant video place, it's also making big plays into essentially being a cable bundle. It's a music app now. It really is, like you've said, sort of becoming all things to all people in a way that I don't even think most people see yet.

Like it has football now. YouTube has football. How did that happen? And one of the things you've said in other interviews I was listening to is that one of the things you thought was funny is that nobody can quite explain YouTube. And because it's hard to explain, that's why, like, Susan Wojcicki was never dragged in front of Congress. Because, like, it's not social media. It's not entertainment. It's too big to understand. In the course of doing this, have you come up with, like, a good metaphor for YouTube?

Yeah. It's Google's media front end. That's what it is. You know, I mean, because it's me, it's all media. I mean, it's like, you know, like Howard Stern used to say, I'm the king of all media. I mean, YouTube, YouTube is truly the king of all media. And it's absolutely true. It's not just lobbying power, though I think that they are very good at spinning a narrative that keeps people off their back because they don't understand how to define it. And they don't go to any lengths to define it. But no, I mean, it's on top of everything you just stated, it's also, I mean, I've got a kid in middle school. That's his search engine. He doesn't search on Google. He searches on YouTube, which is terrifying to librarians if you tell them that because they're like, oh my God, but it's all

wrong information. I'm like, it may be, but that's where they're, you know, he's writing a term paper. He's got YouTube up. He doesn't have Google up, right? Or Wikipedia, much to my chagrin sometimes. But, you know, at least he's not like, you know, listening to Andrew Tate for like, you know, how to write his paper. But, you know, but it's also our, you know, it's our library Alexandria. I mean, it's a repository for pretty much all of recorded human history is that's on YouTube and almost nowhere else. When I, when I'm looking for content of my own that I've created over the years, that's the only place I find it. Like, It's literally the best archive tool for those of us in the arts as well,

and not just in the movie business, but in all areas of the arts, as you said, including in music, I watched my now oldest son, you know, who's now out of college. I mean, as he was coming up, he sort of went from watching a TV when he was like seven or eight to watching a TV with a laptop, you know, on his lap to not watching the TV. And then all of his music was all YouTube, like all the time, even though we had Spotify, we had all these other things. And this was probably 2006, 2007,

like early days of YouTube 2008. And that was very fascinating to me. So I sort of watched the evolution of YouTube through my son's eyes because he was getting pulled into its multiple uses. I would say the least use I've seen my kids using it for is social. Like, you know, they're on Discord or they're on Twitch or they're in other areas where they can create their own servers

and talk to the people they want to talk to, as you said. Social is for most Internet users. who are savvy, it's moved off of these silo platforms, I think, a while ago. But I do think that the, you know, if we're looking at the labor strike we're in right now in Hollywood, I think that one of the areas of disconnect between, you know, my gang, the sort of the unions, I mean, all three of the unions that were up for contract negotiation, SAG, WJ, DGA, and the AMPTP is that I don't know how well the unions understand the level of threat that the AMPDP are under, right, from larger tech entities, some of whom are in the AMBGB,

like Apple or Amazon or whatever. But those are just little tiny pieces of their portfolio, right? Like Apple's business is not making movies and neither is Amazon. They have a little side hustle. But they can essentially swallow the movie business anytime they feel like it. Completely. And so like all this talk of AI and like, you know, negotiating contracts and like, you know, getting terms in or even regulation. Like, you know, who are you regulating against and who is really the power? And, you know, the disruption that's coming over the next five to ten years, to your point about YouTube's growth is largely going to be coming from these big monopoly tech companies that are going to shape in whatever

they way they want the future. Yeah, I mean, it's really interesting. That way of framing it is really interesting to me because I think, you know, one of the things we've heard a lot about from the union side is this fear that essentially AI will make real people irrelevant, kind of in every step of the process, right? We'll be able to digitize extras so that they won't need them in the background anymore. We'll use chat, GPT, to generate scripts. I think those are real fears not necessarily founded in like how this tech works right now, but we're on a path where that seems reasonable.

And I'm curious how you feel about that. But also at the same time, all of the studios and distributors like you're talking about, also fear being made irrelevant by technology. And they are just afraid they're going to get eaten by these handful of big companies that has so much money to throw at whatever they feel like that they could all just go away and become a rounding error in Apple's budget. And it's just fascinating to think that everybody is afraid of tech, but in completely different ways.

And that's kind of why all of this becomes so hard to sort out. It does. And it also creates multiple conflicting conversations that don't make it easier to have resolution, which is why the strike is going on so long. in one area, because there's other areas, obviously, in terms of residuals and paste structures based on streaming, which is also a result of big tech and their influence on the entertainment industry, which is why we're in the streaming master that we're in in the first place. But, no, I think that that's absolutely right. I think that there's an existential concern on the part of the

creative community that AI and sort of big technological advances, because some of those, even though they're put under the bucket of AI aren't really about AI or about other things that are called AI. But there's a lot. that these advances are going to replace all workers with robots. You know, some of which is true. My fears are actually a little less grandiose, a little more mundane in ways that workers will get replaced by sort of AI-type technology, because a lot of it will be centered around scheduling and budgeting and using, you know, like how a lot of lawyers are going to get

replaced by certain types of AI. I had this conversation with Lawrence Lestig at Harvard. We had called him to sort of get his frame. He was like, look, mostly it's going to eat up lawyers, and we have too many lawyers anyway, so I'm particularly worried about it. But there are, obviously, these technologies are going to get used to cut corners and costs by companies at the expensive workers.

So, yes, labor-wise, we are going to have shrinkage. I wouldn't be blasé about it. We are going to have shrinkage based on the advances in technology. We've all known that's been coming for a long time. There's actually, there's very little we can do it, about it other than, you know, have extremely blunt contract terms that kind of shackle the studios or your work or your boss or whatever from using these tools that exist. Because a lot of these tools are open source.

So there's very little that you can do. You know, I hear so much talk in my industry. Like, we got to stop them from ingesting our material. I'm like, that's not possible, right? You will not stop them from ingesting your material. They will do that. And there are a hundred thems now. Well, yeah, there's not.

It's like Napster, right? It's whack-a-ball, you know? And you're going to have a kid in Taiwan with an open source tool that's making Star Wars all day long. And, you know, starring Merrill Streep and, you know, Humphrey Bogart. And that's absolutely going to happen. So, you know, there are contract negotiations that you can get into. There is also, as you well know, there are realities about what these technologies can do. And there are fears about their potential that we're not at yet about what they can do.

And I think it's important to try to stay focused on what they can actually do, because we do still need people to tell these stories, and we do still need to document human beings to tell mostly stories. And AI will, you know, and it's present and even its potentially immediate future self, will create mostly garbage or sort of regurgitated, maybe curiosities. I'm more concerned about it being used for, you know, calculation type stuff that will cut the work. things that I know AI can do and do quickly that will, you know, will shove a lot of people out of the workforce. But I think generally the bigger concerns I have are the concerns the AMPGP are having,

which is huge disruption to the overall industry from these tech companies. I think that's a much bigger threat that will create much bigger disruption. Yeah, I think you're right. And I think one of the things I've heard you say and you can sort of feel in the YouTube effect is you're interested in scale as a thing, right? That's like what happens when things get huge, I think is a really interesting question and is one you've explored in a bunch of different places. Do you buy the idea that these platforms and these companies are just too big that eventually you hit a tipping point of that kind of scale where it's impossible

to be a good citizen of the internet and do content moderation well? And I think there's one school of thought that says these are the companies that have the resources to do this stuff well. And there's another school of thought that says this is just too much stuff. even if YouTube tries its hardest with all the available resources, it is not going to be able to successfully solve the problems that it has. Which side of that do you fall on? I fall on the side that there is plenty of room for accountability and no one should expect perfection. I think a good example is YouTube was removing content that pushed the stop the steel lie until about

two weeks ago. And then they reversed their policy and began to let that content back on platform right as we head into an election cycle, which is bananas. Yes. That's a really good example of content moderation that is doable that they were doing and then decided to stop doing. I don't think that the problem is, I think they're too big for, you know, in general, they're too big in terms of not allowing competition and other reasons that monopolies are bad. But I don't think they're too big to self-regulate.

I think that they don't self-regulate because it's not profitable to self-react. It's a business model issue. So as we talked about at the very beginning of this conversation, salacious content draws eyeballs, eyeballs draw, draw, add dollars. And that makes everybody lots of money. You know, how are you going to boot Stephen Crowder off your platform when he's got four million subscribers and you can tag that, you know, adds to that and everyone makes lots of money and goes home happy. And you go before your board or your shareholders and say, you know, stock is up. So I think it's a business model capitalist thing. That makes it different. That's why we need, that's why. It took us so long to get the automakers to start putting seatbelts in their cars. It's the same old thing with industry over and over again. And it does require policy. It just does because no company, just like a little kid, you give a kid a bag of candy and tell them to share with everyone else in the sandbox. They just aren't going to do that.

It's just not the way human beings are wired. So they have to have a teacher or a parent or someone say, you know, now Eddie, I'm going to take some of those away and give them to the other kids. And I think it's kind of where we're at. Yeah, we need more grownups. bad diagnosis of a lot of things in life right now. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. All right. Awesome. Well, Alex, thank you again. I really enjoyed the documentary and this is this is really fun. I really appreciate you coming on and doing this. Yeah, likewise. Yeah, thanks for having me. All right, we got to take one more break and then we're going to come back and we're going to answer a question from the Vergecast hotline.

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And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. Let's do the hotline. Tom Warren is here to help us with the hotline. Hi, Tom. Hello.

It's going to be very clear to you very shortly what we have here. But first, the hotline is 866, Verge 1. one call, ask us all your deepest, darkest questions. We do at least one every week. It's very fun. This time we have a Windows question, which we don't get a lot of, from Jim. Let's hear it real fast. Hi, this is Jim. I'm calling asking about Windows 11. I seem to have kind of memory hold everything I've ever heard about it. Is it actually time to upgrade to Windows 11? Just let me know. Thanks. So fairly straightforward question, right? Like, is it time to upgrade to Windows 11, which is like the funniest Windows question of all time.

is like, I have Windows from 11 years ago slash Windows 95. Do I need to upgrade? But it sent me down this weird rabbit hole of, I kind of forgot about Windows 11. And I kind of feel like Microsoft is perfectly happy with that being the case. But let's just start at the very top. Like answer the question. What do we think? Is it time for everyone to be on Windows 11?

This is one of those questions. It's like, you know, when someone asks you, what's the best laptop? And you're like, well, that's like a very big question. So I guess the basic answer is it depends what you use your laptop for or your PC for, whether you need to upgrade or not. But on the flip side, it's like if you upgrade, you're not going to like lose anything potentially. I mean, I think initially when Windows 11 came out, there were some issues,

particularly around the task bar, but they've kind of improved that so you're not going to lose some of that functionality and stuff. So yeah, I think my general very quick answer to that will obviously go very deep into it. But the very quick answer is, yeah, it's probably time to upgrade now. I think it's a good time to upgrade now after, what is it, two years now? Yeah. Yeah, it does seem like, I mean, the sort of standard operating procedure for Windows was like wait for two security patches, right?

And then it was like, then it was like, okay, you can update. And it feels like we're well past that. We're to the point now where like if you get Windows 11, assuming your computer can support it, whatever, it's not going to be broken. Yeah, it used to be like wait for service packs. And we've essentially had that those service packs used to be, you know, once a year. And they kind of changed them into updates now. Essentially is the naming of them.

So it'd be like the 22 H2 update, which sounds very like a codename. But it just means it's the second half of the year. So essentially we've had a couple of those. And we've had a bunch of sort of updates in between as well. So Microsoft has been doing all sorts, really. So when I first reviewed Windows 11, I think the main negative. I had about it was it was a bit inconsistent. It felt like a work still in progress. And there was some missing stuff around the task bar, like for power users. And just a bunch of stuff related to

how you say, say you like drag and drop files into Photoshop and work on them. Like some of that stuff was just missing. And it was just, it just felt like a little bit of a work in progress. So I think like two years later, it's still a work in progress. But it's got better. So like some of the UI stuff that was a bit inconsistent where they didn't have dark mode in certain places. Like they've added it to like the task manager for example and places where it just hasn't had it for years. So it's getting there with the inconsistency front. And like I mentioned, the task was a lot better now. Stuff like if you use a tablet, for example, if you've got a tablet that you're thinking of upgrading to Windows 11, the touch experience is a lot better now.

And then it was when it first shipped. And they've done stuff like add tabs to file explorer, like tabs in apps like Notepad. And those sort of like, small little things, you might not notice them immediately, but I think it's one of those cases where if you upgraded to Windows 11, you started using that stuff, and then you went and used Windows 10, you'd be like, huh, where's my tabs gone? You know, like, it's stuff you get used to when they do that. Yeah, that's what my experience, too, is there's not a ton about it that is, like, immediately sort of slam dunk, life-changing. And it seems like, co-pilot, which I think is coming this fall just to Windows 11, might be that thing. But until then, it doesn't,

seem like it's like whatever the opposite of death by a thousand cuts is, right? It's like a lot of tiny little things that add up to. Like my experience with Windows 11 over time has gotten meaningfully better, but I couldn't point you to like one specific thing that has totally changed my life about it. Yeah. And I think that that's exactly it. Like there's, there's not something I can say, right, you should get 11 because it's going to do this for you. But you could say, there's these tiny bunch of things that add up into being like a meaningful update that you will get used to, there'll be some changes like the start button changes to the center, you can move it back to the left. There's some stuff to sort of get used to when you first sort of upgrade.

But once you're used to all those sort of changes, I think it does improve the way you use Windows for sure. Like, it's definitely, it's not the horror update that you usually get. It is amazing to me how much I think Vista and Windows 8 have like left this scary taste in people's mouths about upgrading. Because I also feel like it's just true that it's good to update for like security reasons, right? And I feel like that was my immediate answer to this. It's like, you should always try to be on the latest version of software because it will be better and safer and more secure. If nothing else, that's a victory. And I think that's true. But I also think people's reluctance to upgrade their perfectly functional piece of software and gadget is well-founded.

And I think over the years, every company has given people reasons not to upgrade. Yeah, you don't want something that's working fine to just randomly break because you've updated Windows. And Windows usually in the past has been a bit clunky when you've updated it. But the other aspect, though, is can you even upgrade to Windows 11? Like, that's the sort of bigger question, because you might have hardware that just isn't compatible. So obviously, Microsoft cut the list of processors only to ones that were available in the sort of last, well, by now, like four to sort of five years or so. So talking roughly 2018 onwards, I believe, in the processes, both on Intel and AMD. So you might even be thinking, oh, we'll upgrade to Windows 11,

but it might not actually be able to, like, in an official capacity. There are workarounds out there and all that sort of stuff, but who knows when those are stopped working and they're not officially supported and stuff. So you might be thinking, I want to upgrade. I've heard good things about Windows 11, but you'd have to get a new PC technically to upgrade officially, which obviously that's good for Microsoft Online because they sell another Windows license. and it's good for OEMs and stuff, but it's not good for consumers, right?

Whereas in the past Windows, you've been able to upgrade pretty much freely, you know, unless you've got a really ancient PC going back, you know, 10 or more years. But we're seeing increasingly people like the look of Windows 11 and then they're like, I can't upgrade.

So that's definitely another part of this question is like you might like the look of it, but you need to go check to actually see if your system is actually capable of that. Yeah, and it does seem to me that, like, if you're in a position where you can get another year out of your computer before you upgrade, but you can't yet get Windows 11, like, wait a year, right? Like, there's nothing to me so great about Windows 11 that you have to sort

of rush out to buy a computer to get it, but also if you can get it, it's better. You should get it. For me, honestly, just the part where they've designed most of the settings menus in a new way and nothing falls back to like 20-year-old Windows designs when you click on a folder, worth it alone. It just, it's so much better. It just makes me so happy. It's, it's, it's, It's a nice little thing. And there's a lot of things like that, like we were talking about, that it feels worth it, but don't break the bank for it. Yeah, like one of the small additions they did do is when you're like multitasking with different apps

and you're trying to like lay them out, there's like a nice feature that will sort of really guide you through laying them out in the perfect way, like Snap Assist. And I think that is, that's definitely worth upgrading for alone and the tab stuff. It really depends how you use your PC and what PC you have, laptop or tablet or desktop or desktop PC. There are some stuff, there's some stuff in there for like on the gaming side. Like we've been saying, it's not one of those sort of like big features where you go, you should upgrade for this, but there is some improvements to window mode performance and latency for gaming, which is actually kind of useful. If you have like a massive ultra wide monitor

that you run a game on in a window, you'll get all the sort of latency performance improvements rather than having to run it full screen in that way. A lot of games aren't obviously optimized to run those sort of ultra-wide monitors. So there's some improvements there as well if you're thinking on the gaming side. So, yeah, it's way too many to list. But it's a bunch of improvements that sort of all add up. And like you said, we're pretty much out of reasons to be afraid to upgrade. I think if you can do it, it's time.

You're good. You're safe. Yeah, I think so. I think unless you really love the old look of Windows, like the old start menu, you really love those live tiles, which I can't imagine as many people. If you're the one person who loves live tiles. Yeah. Yeah, like if you're in that's a very small category of people, then sure, you might want to

hold off. And if you're on a Windows 10 PC and you're like, everything's working fine, what do I really need? Then sure, you know, you can hold off because you're probably going to buy a new PC at some point, which will then have probably Windows 12 by that point. So I'll see what they do with that. So because there's, there are rumours of Windows 12 and they're going to do some like AI stuff with the chips and stuff.

So there's going to be new hardware coming probably next year. year that will enable all that sort of stuff. So that's another potential reason to hold off if you're thinking about getting a new machine. But I think if you've got a machine where you're curious about Windows 11 and you see all the improvements and you're like stuck on Windows 10, you're like, I'm not getting any new features here because nothing is changing. It's just it stays as it is.

Then I think you're probably good to upgrade. Fair enough. I like it. All right. Well, Jim, I hope that helps. Tom. Thank you. Appreciate it.

All right. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who's on the show today, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more from all of our conversations, especially the chat with Alex at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but, you know, it's good website. There's a lot going on right now. It's a surprisingly busy August, so keep it locked on the verge.

If you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or YouTube videos you really want me to see, you can always email us at vergecast at theverge.com or call the hotline. Like I said, 866, Verge 1-1. We love hearing from you. Send us all of your thoughts and questions, and we will do at least. one hotline question every single episode. Oh, and specifically, we're doing an episode in a couple of weeks all about cybersecurity. So call us for sure if you have cybersecurity questions.

No question too small, no question too weird. Bring them all on. This show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. Brooke Minters is our editorial director of audio. The Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nilai, Alex, and I will be back on Friday to talk about presumably Zuckerberg and Musk fighting or not fighting, plus some new. news in the YouTube world, big stuff going on in AI.

Like I said, surprisingly busy summer. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.