The Vergecast - Jack Dorsey steps down from Twitter / The future of the blockchain / FTC is suing to block Nvidia’s purchase of Arm

Episode Date: December 3, 2021

Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn chat with Alex Heath and Casey Newton about Jack Dorsey stepping down as CEO of Twitter and what's going in the world of crypto. Managing editor Alex Cranz stops by to share news that the FTC is suing to block Nvidia's $40 billion purchase of Arm. Stories referenced: Jack Dorsey steps down as Twitter CEO Twitter CTO Parag Agrawal replaces Jack Dorsey as CEO Jack steps back  An introduction to Parag Agrawal, Twitter’s new CEO Big tech’s first generation of founders starts to step aside As tech founders resign, Congress loses its favorite targets Jack Dorsey’s Square is changing its name to Block The leader of Facebook’s stalled cryptocurrency project is leaving the company Macy’s is auctioning off Thanksgiving Day Parade NFTs, including this creepy elf Almost buying a copy of the Constitution is easy, but giving the money back is hard ConstitutionDAO will shut down after losing bid for Constitution Is the music industry’s future on the blockchain? US banking regulators are looking to clarify crypto rules in 2022  The FTC is suing to block Nvidia’s $40 billion purchase of Arm Qualcomm is updating its Snapdragon branding to try and simplify its chip names Qualcomm’s new Snapdragon 8 Gen 1 chip is here to power the Android flagships of 2022 Qualcomm’s new always-on smartphone camera is a privacy nightmare Qualcomm’s Snapdragon 8cx Gen 3 is its latest attempt to hit a Windows on Arm home run Microsoft’s Qualcomm exclusivity deal for Windows on Arm reportedly ending soon Qualcomm’s new G3x platform could usher in a new wave of Nintendo Switch-alikes Razer’s Qualcomm-powered handheld console leaks Meta ordered to sell Giphy by UK regulator Barnes & Noble announces new Nook GlowLight 4, says it cares for real this time Alex's tablet Tile is selling its Bluetooth tracking business to Life360 for $205 million Elizabeth Holmes admits that she was CEO of Theranos, the company she founded Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Alex Heath and Casey Newton joined the show to talk about Jack Dorsey stepping down from Twitter. What's next for his company, Block, that's Renamed Square, and a bunch of crypto conversation. Then Alex Kranz joins the show. We talk about the FTC suing to stop Nvidia from buying Arm and all of Qualcomm's news. That's coming up on the Vergecast now. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog.

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

And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the blockchain. Did you like it, Deeter? Right before we started, Deeter was like, we're going to piss off someone. And I thought we should do it from the start. Anyway, I'm Neal. I'm your friend.

Deeter Bone is here. I am a proponent of Web 4. Get there. We have an all-star lineup today. Casey Newton is here. Hey, Nealai. And Alex Heath is here. Hi, I'm a bearded Bitcoin maximalist with only one job.

That's a success. And a little bit later, Alex is Alex Cranz, to join us. We're going to talk about processors and Apple and all that stuff. But we wanted to start with Alex and Casey. You know, it's sort of that slowish holiday period. We had Thanksgiving. We gave thanks. I went home to Wisconsin. I gazed upon the Foxcon Dome just a mile and a half away from my parents' house. My niece said to me, what happens in there? And I was like, it's either a two-hour story or I'm just not going to tell you. And she chose not to be told. Anyhow, it's that holiday period, not a lot of news. And then this week opened with a bang, a block. Jack Dorsey stepped

down as Twitter CEO. Parag Agarwal is the new CEO. He was the former CTO, chief technical officer of Twitter. Jack is Alex hinted at. He's not only as one job, which is to run Square, his payments company. He also renamed Square to Block to focus on the blockchain. There's quite a lot going on here. Casey, let's start with you. Why did Jack leave? So Jack's story is that now was just the right time to step away and focus on other things. I suspect there was more going on. Last year, Elliott Management Corporation, which is sometimes called the most feared investor in America, took a large position in Twitter.

And one of their express goals was to get Jack out of the CEO chair. They were really agitated by the fact that he had two jobs and Twitter's stock performance has then totally stagnant, basically since the time that it had IPed. So last year it looked like Twitter had actually navigated that okay. They basically immediately caved. They gave into every one of Elliott's demands except for Jack leaving instantly. And earlier this year, the board member that they had appointed to Twitter actually stepped off the board.

And so at that point, I thought, all right, maybe Jack actually did survive this. But then he leaves and you start sort of talking to people in the back channel. And there's definitely some speculation that Elliott got one. what it wanted in the end. Twitter stock has not been performing well at all this fall. And I think there's just sort of renewed pressure to turn this thing into a real growth stock again. So if you ask me what my guess is, I think it's mostly that. But then it's also Jack Dorsey.

He's an enigmatic, unpredictable person. And it's very possible that he just woke up one day and decided, okay, I'm done now. And that that was part of it, too. So we haven't spent a lot of time on stock prices and financial performance on the show, outside of noting that it's earning seasons again, and Apple set another record for smart watch sales or whatever is to do. But we usually keep score, right? Like, are these companies doing well or the product's selling or not? But overall, the story of the pandemic is that tech companies have done extraordinarily well.

They are minting money. They have become just absolute bad rock services in our lives. and every one of the big tech companies you can think of has been on just an incredible run of financial performance, except Twitter. Yeah, I mean, they have an ad business that has just been not that great compared to what Google and Facebook built and now to what Amazon is building.

They're not great for display advertising. They're not great for direct response advertising. I think the business does okay, but given that Twitter is the beating heart of the global news cycle and has the attention of the entire elite of Earth, basically. It's always been crazy that they can't capture more of that value. And so you have started to see them diversify a little bit this year. They're testing this subscription offering right now Twitter Blue.

They're testing a sort of revived API that would let them charge developers to use Twitter. But they just have not built a massive advertising engine or some other money printing business the way that their peers have? Well, I think this puts the kind of bow on this is that, you know, Twitter IPOed eight years ago at about $44 a share. It's currently at $42 a share. And that was after a massive run-up with COVID, all the tech stocks went way up, Twitter cratered this year. And now it's trading below its IPO price eight years ago. And I mean, I think that says everything we've been saying in a concise way.

So one of the things I would say about Twitter in the past six months is they have had a run of product introductions and actual investment in the product at a faster pace than ever before. I think we have all sort of attributed that to their head of product, Kvon Bakepore. He has come on decoder. He's talked about how he's reset the product culture there. And what he really talked to me about was people at Twitter didn't believe that leadership was stable. so they wouldn't invest in long-term thinking and ship on a roadmap. Well, that explains why they hired the CTO as the new CEO. But at the same time, it's like, oh, well, I guess the leadership still isn't stable.

Why do you think they picked Underwall? I think there are a couple of answers. One is he is really well-liked among the technical side of Twitter. He started there as an engineer. He's been there for 10 years. He has really good relationships with a lot of the individual contributors who are high up at Twitter. And when you think about what happens during a big CEO changeover like this, one of the things you look for is a lot of people quit, right?

They say, like, I'm out of here. And it would be a really scary thing if Jack left and all of a sudden, everybody who knew how to actually keep Twitter up and running decided to lock out the door along with him. So I think there was kind of a continuity purpose. And then I think the other thing is people believe that he has some vision and that he's good at executing on it. So, like, what's been the biggest knock about Jack Dorsey's leadership? ship, he's not a full-time CEO. It's not even clear how much he works on the product at all.

Now they're going to have somebody who's clearly devoted to it and has a proven track record of shipping things. I want to talk about that vision a little bit. When we talk about stock price, they need to start printing money. I get worried that the product is going to get worse, right? But it seems like they're doing a bunch of random stuff and I have no idea what's going to lead to money. And our wall in particular has been in charge of blue sky, right? And that's their, we promise we're going to make the decentralized future of social media something, something, hand-wavy, something, is my understanding of what blue sky is. Do you actually think that there is a, like, a vision beyond continuity for what Twitter is trying to become? Yes. I mean, the idea behind blue sky is that you create a protocol,

not unlike email, that any client could plug into if it wanted. Twitter is, idea is that it would build that protocol and then itself would become a client of it. And the hope is that this would generate a lot of innovation and excitement in the social networking world. It would also mean that Twitter didn't have to make every decision about what speech was appropriate on the internet. You could have different variations of Twitter, some that were much more strict, some that were much more lenient, and maybe there would be kind of a big revenue opportunity in there somewhere. So that's the basic idea. But this project, has been moving very slowly. It basically took them a year just to write a white paper about what

this thing might look like. I assume we'll see it start to move faster next year. And then it took them like six months to make their first hire. Yeah. Yeah, which Parag led. And I think it's safe to say like the Blue Sky team, which Blue Sky is separate from Twitter. It's like a trust setup. Yeah. It doesn't actually know what Blue Sky is either. And yeah, I mean, Parag is super crypto Web3 enthusiastic as is Jack. And, you know, I think we should also note that Jack spoke at a Bitcoin conference in Miami a few months ago and basically said if he could pick anything to be working on with his entire, you know, schedule, it would be Bitcoin. And so when you're already running a company like Twitter where you're about, you almost got pushed out by an activist, I think that

kind of put the writing on the wall. I mean, like back to Casey's earlier point about why now and why did he leave. I think multiple things can be true at the same time. I think Casey's right that Elliot played a huge role. That's what I've heard. But Jack said publicly and then again to employees and in all hands the other day that it was his decision. He made that very clear. And it can be your decision if you know that someone's about to make the decision for you. And also like you're super excited about Bitcoin, Square is much more block, as much more aligned with that.

And so yeah, so you leave. You get to help put your friend, someone who sees eye to eye on kind of where the internet is headed with Web 3 in your role. Even though, and I'm sure Casey you've heard this too, I don't think Paragu was considered to be the obvious choice. I've heard from several people that everyone's kind of scratching their heads going, wait, what? And then when you think about it, it makes sense, but no one expected him.

He's got a pretty low profile internally and he didn't have a lot of reports. So definitely a bit of an odd choice. I had honestly lost track of who Twitter's CTO was because they had They had cycled through a bunch of them over the past five years. Like they'd cycle through a lot of people in their C-suite. And then one day I just happened upon his profile and saw that he was the Twitter CTO. I thought, oh, I better like throw this guy a follow. And he turns out to be the CEO.

But I've never interacted with him. He's never spoken at any of the Twitter press briefings that I've been to. Like, the guy really did have a low profile. When I thought, you know, because there was this brief time period where we heard that Jack was stepping down, but we didn't know who the CEO was going to be. Then I thought it's either going to be Kvon, who runs product or Vigia, who runs legal in policy, and then it was Parag, and I was definitely surprised. But then I immediately started talking to people inside Twitter who said, oh, no, like this makes a lot of sense. Like, Parag is

definitely the guy, super smart, brilliant executor. So I heard way more positive stuff about him than I heard negative stuff. Yeah, I heard all positive, and also that he's the least controversial choice. I think Kvon is loved by many and also has been a little bit divisive in terms of just, you know, product at Twitter is such a, it's a messy thing that people feel very, strongly about. And he had to kind of roll some heads to get things where he wanted them to be. And I think that Parag was kind of the left field, safe, not well-known choice. A product executive who irritated people in order to get them to ship? What a surprise. No one's ever heard of that paradigm before.

They are shipping, but can I mean, can we acknowledge that, and I think they would probably say this too, nothing has really hit, right? So like fleets, I was told was the top product priority fleets was before Spaces. They killed fleets. I don't think Spaces is doing that well. I would be shocked if it's like doing what they expected it to do. And then, you know, what else is there? The Twitter subscription thing, I'm paying for it.

I'm not really sure why. I've got a new app icon on my home screen. You can turn it into a holiday one. I get to read the verge without ads. Yeah, yeah. Which like, you know, I mean, I just don't really, nothing has really hit for them in terms of new products yet. Actually, you know, that's funny that that part of it, the read the verge without ads, many sites are participating in this.

But that was from an acquisition of a company called Scroll. And they actually reduced the functionality of Scroll. Yep. So Scroll used to let you just like it was a, you would install an extension to Safari on your phone. And then all the participating sites would be without ads. Now it only works if you come through Twitter, which is fine. Like I read a lot of sites through Twitter. But it's also like, why don't you just keep it good?

I really quite like the way that it was working before. All of that to me, this stuff hasn't hit, right? There was a time when Clubhouse had like a $4 billion valuation. Oh, it still does. It's still a private company, right? Like, on paper, it's still worth quite a lot of money. But there wasn't the excitement about Twitter Spaces, even though Twitter Spaces appears to have just destroyed whatever social value Clubhouse had.

Why don't you think the products are hitting? Well, I think Twitter Spaces is doing a lot better. in Clubhouse. Is that not a low bar? It is a low bar, but we, I don't know, we typically have a pretty low bar for Twitter too. And I do think that they managed to clone Clubhouse at impressive speed. I mean, like, this is sort of one of my favorite things to laugh about this year is if

you're the people running Clubhouse, the only thing that had to go right for you is that Twitter did not successfully clone your product, which throughout the entirety of human history would be the safest bet you could ever make. And guess what? you pulled the Joker card. So I think spaces definitely has problems. There's actually a lot of great people in my Discord server this week have been posting just images of what they see at the top of their space speed. And it's a lot of white nationalism.

So that's very bad. But I do think it's a much more natural fit inside the Twitter product. And, you know, speak it for myself. I am using it about once a week. You know, with my friend Keras Wisher, like we have thousands of people showing up on a weekly basis to hear whoever we're interviewing. So I do think there is some juice there, and it's a promising area for them to explore. I agree with Casey that there is something there. I'm just saying what spaces will be in the context of Twitter or broader we do not know yet.

And it also, I don't know. I've just talked to some people on product there who have said it feels like kind of throwing spaghetti at the wall. And they saw a clubhouse, and they were like, oh, this is something we need to throw at the wall because of clubhouse. And you're right, they did it. They executed faster than they ever have, which is maybe showing that they have some hope. And they can, even if it's copying, maybe it'll work. Also, like, we want Twitter to throw spaghetti at the wall. The problem with Twitter for 10 years is it tried nothing.

And now it's trying something. And we want to encourage them. And we want to say, try more things. Do you guys remember when they were going to make tweets 10,000 characters? Do you remember this? And then Jack Dorsey went on like a morning show and he was like, actually, we're not going to do it. We're not going to change it at all. And then I know for the fact that the product team that was working on that was like, wait, what?

And so then that got shelved. And then they finally do 280. And that's arguably the biggest change Twitter has made. at like a core layer in like what eight years yeah yeah i don't uh well so actually on spaces kavon told me on decoder that spaces is just periscope rebranded yeah yeah so like they'd already built it and they just turned off the video yeah which is very good um by the way it's just it just space my spaces maybe it's like uh who i follow and the people that i follow it's just non-stop people uh pushing crypto yeah just just not discussing

crypto. Like, it's pretty clear that a bunch of these are like some kind of pump and dump. Anyway. Did you, I mean, have you, have you pumped and dumped? I have not, I, I, I, I do. Have you bought any Tupperware on Twitter? Anyway, so Casey, you brought up the, the two execs, right? Kvon, who runs product, Vigaya who runs policy, and then obviously this sort of unknown in Prague who became the CEO. I would guess that if you had to look at the choices in front of Twitter, the actual Twitter problems are one, the product needs to move faster. And then two, the regulators are constantly in forever swarming.

Right. And the speech policy, content moderation, there was a Francis Hogan 230 hearing on the hill this week. Like, those are the problems. Whether or not you're going to successfully decentralize the protocol and have everybody do a crypto punk avatar, you'll never get there unless you solve the problems of today. Right? which is make it safer for advertisers and grow the revenue base or build some new products that grow the revenue base and then somehow navigate this thicket of angry regulators around the world.

Yeah, but, Deli, those problems are super boring. Crypto is fun. I assure you those problems. I agree with you. Those problems are boring. But, like, the most telling moment of all of the hearings we've ever covered are, I don't remember who it was, but some center is yelling at Mark Zuckerberg. and Zucker had to remind him that he was in charge of Facebook and not Twitter,

because what the senator wanted to yell about was Twitter. Oh, yeah. And he was like, I don't actually run Twitter. But those are the problems. Like you can't solve Twitter. You can't make Elliott more money. You can't grow the revenue. You can't build, unless you solve the two fundamental issues.

So why not pick one of the people that is most directly engaged with the two fundamental issues? So in terms of like, why not Vigia? it's like there's just never been a policy legal person appointed head of a big tech platform. So even though I think to me it made a lot of sense, like people who care about Wall Street said that that one was a non-starter, you know, with Kvon, I do think he was divisive. I've also heard like Alex has that, yeah, he has ruffled some feathers by, you know, making them ship on a more regular cadence. But I also think that Wall Street doesn't really just see this as a product problem. I think they want somebody who takes a bigger view. And I think whoever was pushing for

Parag, whether it was on the board or whether it was Jack himself, I think was making the case that Parag had a really big vision. And, you know, if you want to sell a story to a board, I think saying we're going to crypto all the things, it probably goes over a lot better now than like we're really going to optimize spaces. Yeah, Neelai, I hear you on the policy thing. I think, and I think people at Twitter would probably agree that the policy thing is actually maybe a third or fourth or even fifth order foundational problem for them. I think the two biggest problems that Twitter has always struggled with, they have never figured out, is that they can't get normal people who don't live their lives consuming news or politics or whatever to use Twitter beyond passively

checking it. They can't make the timeline interesting for them. They can't get them to tweet. It's a big problem for inventory. And they can't make money. And those are the two things. That's the reason Elliott came in. They gave them this absurd user growth target that I was told everyone internally laughed at thinking they're going to hit over 300 million day use in like 2023 it's like more than double you know growth that they've had and so that's why they've been throwing spaghetti with product stuff and they're just trying to figure out how to get normal people to care about Twitter and I'm not sure that a decentralized protocol is going to do that because normal people don't understand this at all and also like someone was an employee was pointing this

out to me like the ad model relies on centralized data that's how ad targeting works. And so how in the world are you going to continue having an ads business if you're trying to decentralize yourself? So these are all problems they haven't figured out. But I would argue those are like kind of the top two. Well, the decentralization conversations. It all started because Mike Maznick at TechDirt wrote protocols, not platforms, which everyone should go read. It's very good. And Jack Dorsey was like, this, this is what I'm doing. And then he's like, I'm going to decentralize Twitter. And the reason that all stemmed from how do you solve the regulatory problem?

right you decentralized the protocol you let everybody have clients if you want to run nazitwitre.com you're good to go if you'd want to run brand safe no nazi twitter that's what most people will pick and twitter will run that and probably be the dominant player in that space right like you see the thinking but that's it's a long way away and it's still just twitter like instantiations of twitter itself it is not what every other tech company does which is launch another product or another category or buy something. But the other tech platforms are in a better position, right? Like if you're Facebook and you launch a new ad unit, like that could, you know,

tack on billions of dollars in revenue, whereas Twitter needs to make a big change. And so I think for them, the idea of having a North Star that is far enough away that they might not hit it, what we used to call a moonshot here in Silicon Valley, is a really good thing for that. You know, I'm not saying necessarily this will be the thing. but they actually have to do something ambitious for a change. Do you think products got to do it? I don't know him well enough.

Like what I can say is the people who work with him are all telling me that he's the real deal. And that's not like comms people, you know. But we just don't know. You know, I mean, my hope is that sometime in the next couple of months, like he starts giving interviews and starts telling us a little bit more about his way of thinking. I hope he launches some products, right? Hope he comes on decoder. You know, like we need to hear more from this person. I told employees in his first all hands as CEO, I was told that he's going to share more about kind of company vision in the next couple months.

It was pretty light on it. But I think the vibe I got from a couple of people who listened is that he has a different vision, at least slightly different than what's been in place. And so, yeah, I do expect him to share more. He is speaking at a banking conference, I think it's Morgan Stanley next week as first time as CEO. So I think he is going to get out there. But he has had a very low profile. He's done like maybe less than five interviews. And his two public things are both content moderation related, right?

He has like two blog posts. Oh, you mean blog posts? He did an interview with the information about kind of fixing Twitter's technical debt and scaling them with like relying on third party cloud providers. That's been a big focus of his because Twitter has actually has had a lot of problems with that. So I know he's been focused on that. But yeah, the couple things have been policy related as well. Yeah, they fix the image cropping and they and then the-

Which was an AI problem that he worked on. And so you can see the intersection of policy and AI and his world there for sure. Yeah. And then like the same day or the day after Twitter rolled out a new policy about posting media private individuals, which we could probably spend an hour on. Everyone hates it is like the sum total of what you need to know about this policy. And I anticipate it will change in some way. But I just keep coming back to the public perception of Twitter, even more so than maybe

the public perception of Facebook now because they've changed their name and they're running a lot of ads of people dancing in oculus headsets. The public perception of Twitter is that it still has a content moderation problem. And if you're going to, I think if you're the CEO, you either have to provide something new and shiny and distracting from it, or you have to solve that problem, which might be unsolvable, or you get a lot of people in Casey's Discord posting white nationalists-based screenshots. Like, that's just a big problem that I'm very curious to hear what his perspective on it will be. Because Jack's perspective in every hearing and every conversation was, gosh, that seems tough. Which might be the right perspective. Let's get Jack a little more credit. To just look at it and be like, this is very difficult and I'm going to make sure. I think he was good at communicating about it. But he was never like, I'm going to make hard decisions in favor of some values. He was like, I'm aware of the tradeoffs and we're going to try to balance them as best we can.

It's very hard. Jack is a Bitcoin stand. Like, like, I think what he has been saying more towards the end of his tenure is that Twitter shouldn't be making these decisions. And so that's the whole idea of like a marketplace of algorithms, a marketplace of protocols. It's more like, can we create a platform where we do not make these decisions, which is similar to what Zuckerberg says, but applied in a very different context that's informed by his Bitcoin maximalism. So, I mean, yes, he's been saying it's hard, but he's also been saying, like, this is why we're doing all this to centralize stuff is like, we don't want to be. involved in this. We shouldn't be, which, you know, whatever you want to believe there. I want to talk about Jack and Block and Crypto. We'll take a break into that. But before

do that, I just want to acknowledge this somewhat odd moment we're in where all of the founders are either looking at something else than the products they made that made them rich or just quitting. Right. Bezos stepped back from Amazon. He's now, he thinks he's a cowboy, from what I can Space Cowboy. He's Space Cowboy. Obviously, Zuckerberg re-branded the company into meta. He's very focused on the metaverse and not necessarily the Facebook problems. We'll see if that works out.

But he obviously made a change in focus. Jack has stepped back. Before that, you had Larry and Sergey step back from Google restructure the company into Alphabet. Sundar is now. The CEO of both Google and its holding company, which I think reveals something very important about the status of the holding company. obviously Sashi Nadella is at Microsoft.

None of the founders are there anymore. This does seem like a pretty big moment, right? Where the big players in tech have reached their levels. The founders are off onto the next thing. It's Evan Spiegel left who cares about the products he made. That's about it. Well, and Evan's really focused on AR and spectacles and, like, hardware, which is not how Snap makes money.

Like, he's not really focused on the ads business. So, yeah, I guess you can get to a point as a founder where if you build a scaled network, I guess you have the luxury of deciding I'm going to focus on the thing that I don't make money on. It seems to be the trend. Yeah, and I would also, Tim Cook also very focused on AR and whatever cars hobby he's doing. He's now in the textile business. I don't know if you got a cloth yet. Yeah, where's my cloth review?

It's still on the port, man. Come on. Still in Long Beach. But Caris Swisher did an interview with Cook on Sway maybe a month ago now, two months ago. And he's like, I'm not going to be the CEO of Apple in 10 years. Like, even he is looking at the finish line. So we're just, I think it's an odd moment. And I think the wave of excitement is all around Web3 in blockchain and crypto, which is fascinating.

So, I mean, a couple things. One, I think it makes sense that, you know, these kings would not wish to rule forever. These are very hard, all-consuming jobs. I think if you put in 20 years at something like Bezos did, it makes sense. You want to go to something else. I also just think when, like, like, the. kind of person that founds a company like this is just not well suited to running it for like 25 or 30 years, right? Because like the whole reason that you won is your sort of smart and

shrewd and always thinking like 40 steps ahead. And now we are in a moment to your point, Nelai, where a lot of the questions are intractable and cannot be solved by technological innovation, right? We're not going to AI our way out of content moderation problems. The third thing that I think these people just pay attention to each other, right? Like I think when Jeff Bezos stepped away, like, Mark Zuckerberg is probably like, yeah, I guess like I'm probably going to do that too. Maybe he did that before.

But like, it just sort of makes sense to me. And also just like, okay, I guess I said that was, I was only to say three things. But a fourth one is, you look at where all the energy is right now, like in Silicon Valley. And it is not around making these platforms the best versions of themselves.

It's about starting from scratch on the blockchain. Yeah. It's just, I think the plot of succession would be a lot different if after 20 years later, I was like, screw it, blockchain. Right, like, there's another conception of business leaders that we have traditionally had, which is that especially the ones with dynastic control of their companies, which Zuckerberg has, which Bezos has. Spiegel has, yeah.

They tend to not just like bail. Dorsey didn't have it, so maybe that's why he's at. But all the rest, like, they control these companies in ways that, short of, I don't know, like kidnapping, you cannot make them relinquency. you cannot make them relinquish. And even that, I think, probably wouldn't go well. I think it's notable, maybe to your point, Casey. Like, their personalities are pointed at the next hardest problem and not milking the thing they made forever.

All right. We need to take a break. We're going to talk about Jack Dorsey, Block, and Web 3. We're doing it. We're saying it out loud on the show. I think that's the first time. We've said it like 10 times already. This is the episode.

We took a break. We went to Thanksgiving. Now we're saying Web 3. We'll be right back. 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.

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Download Grammarly for free at Grammarly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Let's talk about the other thing Jack Dorsey did. He left Twitter. He's like, it's my decision. Super proud of this guy. Good luck to you.

I'm off the board, too. And then the next day, he changed the name of his other company Square to Block. There is a great meme today about the Block leadership page and what the avatars look like. turn yourself into a block head. It's a lot. Alex, what is going on with block? Yeah, Block is the new holding company that was once square. It includes Square, Cash App, and a couple of their kind of Bitcoin crypto moon shots

to keep that word going. Wait, can we just, hold on. Is it a holding company like Alphabet's a holding company or holding company like Meta is a holding company? Neither? I don't know. I mean, I think they were going to be reporting things the same on earnings. So if that answers the question, then I think it's more like meta, even though meta is going to change how it reports things a little bit on the next earnings. They also have title under this holding company, which is like... And title, which is like, why, right? Yeah, like titles there.

I think this makes sense. If you're going to get into Bitcoin, you actually want to have a little bit of distance between your crypto stuff. and Square, which needs to be rock solid, reliable, don't think about it, safe for small businesses, just use it. So, like, you want those ideas separated out from each other a little bit. The Cash app is there, and having that feel a little bit more separate from Square also makes it kind of sense. It's sort of a different thing. And, yeah, you got title, which obviously, I think, whatever.

Look, I see the other piece this week about how crypto can change music. Sure. There you go. I mean, I will say the block homepage, which is block. Z. Like at the top is a playlist curated by Jay Z. Oh, that was sick. First corporate tech rebrand with a Jay Z playlist. Like, all right. Maybe that's what they bought title.

Also, Jayzie has way too much time on his hands. I might read on that situation. Well, I mean, he's also a billionaire. He's like, on to the next thing. He's like, I'm good with this. Like making dad rap is like not where I need to be in my life. Talk about content moderation. How about putting out a better album, Jay?

Oh, wow. Hey, 4444 is great. I think the, so my favorite conspiracy theory with all this, with Block rebranding and Twitter looking at decentralized social media is that this is all a giant, and Jack stepping off the board, by the way, of Twitter, which is notable. He's not just, he's relinquishing his board seat, which is highly unusual for a founder, to do a clean break, is that this is all set up for Block to buy Twitter. And it become this decentralized social media version of,

Wow. And like Jack has wanted to do this before, I've heard. He's like floated the idea of like, how can Square and Twitter work closer together, potentially merge? It's obviously never gotten serious, but I could see it. Okay. So, yes. So I have considered this too. And it is the fact-

Bying Twitter, you mean? You've considered myself just like Jack? But like Disney, I find the content too toxic. So I was doing very well. But I think the fact that Jack left the board lends credence to the idea that Elliot pushed him out. Because Alex and you all will probably remember that the way that Jack was able to finagle his way back into his CEO role was that the first time he was fired as CEO, he was able to maintain his board seat. So if you're Elliott, you know that history and you're saying, fool me once shame on me, but not again. You're out of here, buddy, right?

So I'm sure that Jack does want to do this, but I think it would be easier. if he were still on the Twitter board, and now he won't be. Now, that's not to say that he won't continue to have good relationships with a lot of people there, that it's still not possible, but I do think it would be easier

if he had some formal role left in Twitter. So if that's what he wanted, and he were actually empowered to do it, he would still be on that board. Right, that's fair. He's definitely not empowered to do it. I'm just saying it's a great conspiracy theory. Well, no, this is like when Stephen Elop

was sent out of Microsoft to Nokia and then sold himself back to Microsoft. Jack leaves, he appoints his guy, you know, and eventually they're going to release a Windows mobile cell phone. I mean, keep an eye out for a burning platform memo out of Twitter. I mean, it is literally a platform that they're trying to build here. There's a lot of weird stuff happening. We haven't even talked about Brett Taylor, the new board chair of Twitter, which unlike

meta actually has significance and like governance power being the board chair of Twitter because it's not a dual class control company. He was also, so he gets named the, he's been the CEO of Salesforce, super like connected guy in Silicon Valley, been on the Twitter board for a while. He gets named board share on Monday. On Tuesday, he gets named co-CEO of Salesforce. And then the information puts out a story saying he's actually still reporting to Mark Benioff.

So embarrassing. Can you imagine telling your parents that you actually still report to Mark Benioff after you've just been announced as the co-CEO? I would be mortified. Well, I'm sure Brett is, he's laughing to the bank. but like the idea that maybe there's something connected with all of this.

Like what was going on? Like why did he get this random co-ceo role that's kind of like a fake role? And then the Twitter boardshed like there's drama here that we do not fully know. And that's just my way of saying I wish I knew it. And if you know it, reach out.

So we don't quite know what block is going to do except put out a great web page. But they own a bunch of stuff. It is true. They bought title. they never really told anyone why they bought title. It is also true that a lot of music people are very excited about blockchain ideas. And like,

NFT tickets to concerts are like already the thing that you can see happening because it's a big database and you can sell tickets on it. But musicians are very excited because their revenues on platforms like Spotify and Apple Music are so low. So all kinds of artists are very excited. You can see there's some swirl there. At the same time, David Marcus, who was in charge of Facebook's cryptocurrency project, just, like, bailed this week as well. It was called Libra. We have dunked on a thing called Libra many times on the show,

but they changed the name to Novi. There's been five new changes, Neela, I swear to God. Like, it's like meta, the company formerly known as Novi, the crypto formerly known as that was formally known as that was formally known as. I mean, it's literally like four revisions, but yeah, no v. No. So David Marcus leaves. He puts out a bunch of tweets that's like, I'm still really interested in this.

In terms of the drama, we didn't know, it feels like, are you just going to end up at Block? The company that wants to do this thing in a successful way that Facebook doesn't seem like it will ever get its head around. And then, on top of all of that, Mark Zuckerberg is on and on about the Metaverse. And to me, the only compelling NFT story that I've heard is you will travel from virtual realm to virtual realm and your stuff will come with you because it that's already how like metamask works right like you have a ethereum address and then you can like log into another website it just like reads the blockchain and all your stuff comes with you and that's like a core principle of the metaverse at this time it's just there's just like a swirl of stuff going on here that

with facebook that i like kind of don't understand like they desperately need this to happen for their Metaverse play to work, but their one and only crypto initiative has been an epic disaster and the guy just left. I think a good question that I would like to see more reporting on and could presumably do myself if I could rouse myself to the occasion is how much of the Facebook crypto failure is on David Marcus and leadership team and how much is on just the regulatory crapstorm that they wandered into because people hate Facebook. I think the latter was definitely very real as they engaged with regulators around the world.

They found a lot of skepticism. They were sort of engaging at what may, looking back, have been the peak of people freaking out about Facebook's size and anti-competitive practices. And so the idea that it was going to take over all of global payments, they just basically ran into brick walls everywhere. And that sort of helps explain why they had to rebrand it several times. But at the same time, under Marcus, like if they would bring these people into, their partnership, their little consortium, and then those people just bail. And I think that actually

does sort of speak to leadership there, right? It seems like these companies were not getting what they were promised when they signed up to be part of this thing. And that chain of departures from the consortium really just made this thing look like it was snake bitten from the beginning. So look, Facebook still wants to own payments. I don't think there's any reason why they have to do payments on the blockchain. Like, they could just do freaking payments and it would probably be fine, even though they would also probably run into some regulatory headwinds and they can't talk about how it's innovative and how they're, you know, bringing economic freedom to the developing world. So I don't know. I think it's definitely been one of their biggest failures of the past,

like five years that doesn't involve democratic erosion. Yeah, definitely. And like, you know, in terms of what Marcus can do next, you know, he was the former president of PayPal. He is a, you know, very early crypto believer, probably has untold personal. wealth in crypto himself. And I had a couple like Facebook execs joke to me that he could just go raise like a billion dollar seed round off of a paper napkin for like pretty much any company he wanted to go start. So I imagine he'll probably start a company. And I imagine this was a little bit of like hitting your head against a wall repeatedly for three years and also seeing all the kind of hot activity in crypto and web three startups and having some fomo. I imagine it was a combo of that.

So Casey, even covering a lot of the crypto startups, a lot of the Web3 stuff, I will just tell everyone Casey has looked me directly in my eyes and told me crypto was a blind spot for me, which I don't disagree with. But over the past couple weeks, the Constitution doubt happened. Macy's sold a giff, a horribly ugly gif of a dragon for $310,000 on Thanksgiving as an NFT. I would say there's a break here between the traditional crypto stuff, which is financial services and decentralized financial services and Bitcoin taking over for the U.S. dollar or whatever. And then, oh, you can buy a bunch of stuff. And if we all just close our eyes and make believe, we'll pretend that that counts as ownership of things. Because underneath the NFT, there's a lot of belief that maybe isn't represent. presented by the thing you're buying.

Right. Like that's, that's the core of my skepticism. Before the Vergecast, I demanded that we not let this turn into a freshman jam session in the dorm room. But, Eli, if you think about it,

all ownership is just belief. That's true. Fine. The question I was leading to with Casey is you've been talking to a lot of these folks. We have mentioned several times now that this is where the energy is. This is where the executives

who have built the previous generation of big tech companies seem to be turning their attention to. I'm just, like, why do you think that is? A couple things. Besides the dollar amounts. Yes. So besides just pure greed, I think one is the sense that there's not that much left to be built on the internet that we have, that all of the white space has been carved up by five big platforms.

And nobody else can get anywhere meaningful. And so if you're an entrepreneur and you want to have a big impact, you want to look somewhere else. And I do think that explains some of the religious fervor that you see for these crypto projects is we are determined. to invent something that doesn't look like this current generation of companies that we have. But what gives them the sense of purpose and the sense that they're doing something really positive for the world? Well, it's when you look at the big platforms that we have, for the most part, while we benefit from some of the services that they provide, we don't really share in any of the economic

benefits that they have enjoyed, right? We live at a time of massively increasing inequality around the world, and it seems like five companies are capturing most of that value. So what these crypto folks want to do is to by giving out these tokens and, you know, hanging on to these beliefs that might be somewhat, you know, based on mostly on faith, they're hoping that folks like you and me, just as we transact business on the internet by where we put our time and attention and by what we think is credible and valuable, we ourselves will reclaim some of that value. So they see it fundamentally as a way to reduce inequality on the internet. and that is the story they are telling themselves as they tweet 4,000 times a day about, you know, their latest NFT. It is a good story. I think you could recapitulate that story using different words that make the tradeoff more obvious. And I think the tradeoff is really, really complex. So basically, like Ethereum and NFTs, right, is here's a big decentralized database that uses an awful lot of power.

I saw a study yesterday that said the Ethereum blockchain uses five coal plants at full power worth of power. Like that's its emissions output. I will say this study was not totally convincing because at the bottom, it was like the U.S. dollar is backed by the U.S. military, which emits more pollution. And I was like, I don't, that's not, those aren't the same thing. But like, actually, just to like finish the discussion on emissions, it's really frustrating because it's like, Hey, I am not sure about this because of environmental stuff. And then it's like, well, we'll fix it next year.

It's like, well, no, you won't. Well, you're just, you're just, you're just, you're just a hater. Well, no, actually I do care about the environment. But I am interested in this, but I have reservations. Well, we're going to fix it next year. Like, this cycle of pro-anti-crypto stuff, like, every time you try and go into any particular nuance of it, like, just start spinning up. And, like, that is where I'm at with the emission stuff.

is like, yeah, but there's no way to like finish that thought because it just, it gets sucked into the discourse so fast. Oh, yeah. Here, I'll give you a dead ahead example. We had Scott Balski, the chief product officer of Adobe on Decoder. And he was excited. And he was like, Photoshop's going to give you the ability to mint NFTs and prepare for NFTs. And like, the amount of people who, like, our feedback was why don't you ask him about the environment? And I was like, because we know.

Like, we, then we talked about other things. He just was announcing his new feature. Like, I don't know. Like, maybe those NFTs are going to be on the Solana blockchain, which uses far less power. Maybe by the time this ship's Ethereum will go to the other system that they've been proposing for years. Like, there's something there that I agree with. It is another kind of religious fervor, but it is crashing into the religious fervor around the blockchain, and nothing about that is productive. But I would just say to everyone, we know.

about the environmental thing. We cover it a lot. I think the emissions problem is huge. That said, you just look at it, in particular with NFTs and the things I've heard about NFTs, it's if we take the database away from Mark Zuckerberg and we make it this big, power-hungry, like, trustless database that runs on the blockchain, then we can all build applications that use this database. Okay.

I still haven't seen an application that's really great. like that's where I'm still at, right? Like I've heard a lot of proposals, but none of them actually implicate needing the big decentralized database. Sure. And waiting until someone builds one of those is a great way to not make any money in venture capital.

So, I mean, this is sort of where we're at, right? Is that, you know, I have taken to calling Ethereum the world's worst computer for like all of the reasons you mentioned in others. I think it can handle like 15 transactions a minute or like something absurd like that. And it's very expensive when I tell us that.

It's like hundreds of dollars. Yeah, you pay hundreds of dollars to do a single transaction, which is not an exaggeration. Right. So like all of this stuff sucks, but what the crypto religionist will come back and say is like, well, did you ever use a 14.4 bod modem, bro? And I'd be like, yeah, I did. And it did suck, you know, but we kind of kept doing it. Now, I would argue that the internet was more useful to me on my 14.4 modem than crypto is today in my crypto wallet. But I don't know. I'm a tech reporter. You have to believe some of this stuff is going to work. Like if you're a tech reporter and you're just like,

this thing that everyone in Silicon Valley is doing, I'm just going to stake out a position against it forever. You're not a reporter anymore. You're a historian. I believe you. And after Casey told me this was a blind spot, I've worked hard to make it not a blind spot. I just keep coming back to, at the end of it all,

the fees are high to transact on this inefficient database, world's worst computer. And that is the thing that will, A, keep people away from it, or B, when it becomes more widespread or mainstream, it will lead to the financialization of more things, which I am not in love with. So musicians are really in love with NFTs because they can sell products directly in a way that they cannot sell music directly. But then you look at all the proposals about what musicians might be able to do with their NFTs or selling fractional ownership of their singles. And you're like, oh, we're just creating a stock

market for art. And like some people are very excited about that. And honestly, the music industry is not the most pure, uncorrupt. Like, fine. No. But there's just something, financializing everything is kind of icky. And that's every, every blockchain proposal involves some amount of financialization because you're trading against tokens.

Yeah. And I agree with you. It's not that great. Yeah. Alex is like everything is gross. Everything is financial already, though. Like the, and the music industry. has historically not been equitable in how it pays artists, right? So I think the hope with

crypto is that you can have more equity and that you can actually make money off of like how people engage with your content, not just like how labels arbitrage you, which I think is like a good thing. But yeah, like hearing you guys talk about this, I'm just like, where are we at in this cycle? Are we like pre-Blackberry in the mobile phone era or are we farther along than that? because there's going to be a huge trough of like disillusionment again and like bus and people losing a lot of money. These NFTs are like probably 99% of these are going to go to zero, right? So it's like when you're covering it. Whoever bought the Macy's dragon for $300,000?

If you're that person, they call me. I'll give you the full hour of decoder to explain that investment. Right? Like I'm dying to understand the psychology of that. Or alternatively, the, extremely corrupt financial scam that you just ran against Macy's on Thanksgiving. Like either way, it's a great story. I mean, did you guys see the Matrix Resurrections thing where they did an NFT thing and like 250,000 people were in the wait list to buy this like NFT and the site crashed and like,

a lot of people didn't even get theirs after they paid and like the gas fees are more than the NFT. I'm just like, what is happening here? Like a lot of people want this. Again, like 250 plus thousand people lining up for a matrix. NFT, but like, why? I don't... Well, the why is because there's a lot of value that has been created on the internet in the form of culture that is not captured by the person creating it, right? Like, if you want to sort of rewind back five years, remember all the conversations

about black creators on Vine and how they would create these amazing memes and they would inspire dances that would go viral. We saw the story on TikTok too, and they captured none of it. And often their work was erased, you know, by the platforms or by white people stealing their work. sort of thing. This is the place where I think this stuff merits exploration, right? Imagine being a creator and doing a dance and using some sort of financialization to ensure that you're able to keep a piece of that. If we want to talk about justice and equality, financialization may actually play a role in that. So I agree. Like, I grew up on an internet that was free and where like my heroes like Andy Beaux and Jason Kotke were just like putting cool stuff that I could enjoy

like after high school. And I love that so much, right? Everybody just like doing unpaid labor on Tumblr, like making my life in my 20s, amazing. But should people not be paid for their labor? Right? Like people doing work demanding to be paid for it is one of the mega trends of the 2020s

and it only makes sense that it's going to come to the internet. Yeah. I think there's, I mean, we're going to, we are trying to program like 90 Decoder episodes about this. There's a lot there, right? like the interaction between that and copyright law is like fraught intense. The interaction between copyright law and people believing everything on the internet should be free is fraught and intense. And you loop it right back to the right click mentality, which is my favorite phrase

in the entire world where people are just copying the NFTs and should be like I stole your JPEG. Like there's a lot of normative and legal change that has to come to make any of this work. And at the end of the day, even if you're like, here's a fractional token share of the renegade dance, TikTok's revenue model is not selling the dance. It is selling advertising around the dance. And so the platform revenue models have to change in like meaningful ways. I think this is the story of the next five years.

But I just think we're at this moment where, A, all the founders of the social media companies and the other, the big tech companies, the platform companies, are shifting their attention to this. And I would argue that financializing things creates the opportunity for more equity because more people can get rich in a different way. But the history of the financial system of the United States is not like, oh, this democratized it for everyone. Right, it is the people who figure out how to win the game

tend to win the game. Right, but I think another big trend on the internet is that the internet hates a middleman, right? It's the Jeff Bezos, your margin is my opportunity thing. And that's why I think that the music, music industry probably is a place where we will see something like this takeoff. The record labels for the top stars capture so much of that value. And in fact, their business models essentially demand that they stake out those deals because they're going to take so many swings and miss so

many times on people that they think are going to be the next big thing and then turn out not to be. Whereas if you're already Taylor Swift, you don't need a record label, right? And so then maybe the blockchain becomes interesting to you. And if you're a creator, this may be the best way for you to realize the value that you're creating. Yeah, I don't know if I have a ton of faith that the technologies that we're creating are eliminating middlemen or if they say they're eliminating middlemen

but they're creating just a different kind of middleman. Alex earlier asked like what era are we in? Like what's the right analogy for this? And are we like pre-blackberry? I think we're like pre.com. Like there is no way that you can rationally look at the prices that NFTs are going for and not say that there's some sort of mania happening here.

Right? And so there's going to be some kind of crash. And the question that I'm trying to answer is, after that crash, what technologies exist today, what things exist today, that are going to persist and not get destroyed by the crash

that are going to be interesting and create new things. Well, I think the idea of digital scarcity will survive. Like, what have we learned from the surge in crypto attention? It's that there are a lot of reasons why scarce objects on the internet

can have interesting uses. I do still think we're in the dial-up modem stage of all of it, but I think digital scarcity is the idea that's going to endure. Yeah, it's funny. We have now, like all conversations, we've arrived at Taylor Swift. My number one on Spotify Rapp this year. She's a really interesting example, right?

Not only because she is re-releasing all of her music despite the sale of her catalog to another record label, but because famously, she did not want to have her music on streaming services. Right? she was very convinced that Spotify and Apple were devaluing the music. She wrote a long essay in the Wall Street Journal in like 2014. And at that time, the argument was you're never going to be able to sell your music.

Like people want streaming. If you don't give in to this, like you will actually just disappear. And she held out for a while. And then she like completely gave in. And now she like has Spotify marketing events. I'm sure she gets a better rate than everybody else. But that's the thing I'm coming to is the thing that makes it very valuable. is in large part now just Taylor Swift.

She's just, there's only one of her. But it's the music, and her asset is no longer the music. And all of the stuff we're talking about does not actually make the music more valuable or create more money from listening to the music because you're still on Spotify. And that's the model that has to change. Yes. I think that the people that I've been talking to in the music industry about this stuff are only nibbling around the edges of it.

But they're helping to inspire a new generation of artists with the idea of, you know, you don't actually have to give away 80% of everything when you sign your first record deal. And in fact, if you have a social following, you could just release it on the blockchain right now. And maybe you can make a few million dollars. And I think that that could actually unleash some really great creativity, right? Think about the people who are signing these ANR deals. There aren't that many of them. I bet we're going to get a much more diverse and fascinating selection of artists in a world

where people can use their social followings and the blockchain to create new stuff. All right. We only have a few minutes left with Mr. Heath. So, Deider, I'm going to allow you to troll him about the Pixel Watch. So there's a Pixel Watch. They're working on it. And Alex, you've been reporting on this as well. You've actually got more info than I've ever gotten. Tell us what we heard today. Yeah, Insider put out a report angrily before I could get to it. Then we quickly corroborated that there is indeed a Google Pixel Watch in the works coming next year, unless they delay it. it's pretty high-end, it's geared to compete with the Apple Watch, looks pretty sleek, has health features, connectivity features, and is totally separate from Fitbit for better or worse. Yeah. Separate from Fitbit is really fascinating. I don't know what that means. Well, Deeter, you know Google likes to just kind of have like parallel competing projects that's

pouring hundreds of millions of dollars into. That their nesting Fitbit is really something. That should actually be the term from now on when Google buys a company and then like just lets it like flail for a while that it's being it's being nested inside google i just want to just the fact that the thing is code named rohan like things did not go well for rohan like maybe in the end i suppose like they had they had a win there but like a lot of people died a lot of a lot of kings didn't make it like it was that's that i don't know if i if i'd name my my big savior project rohan i'm just saying is there any word yet on whether this watch has its own dedicated messaging app.

RCS, baby. I could address that. There is a problem with RCS working on multiple devices because it's got the WhatsApp model, you know, but they are actually working on fixing that. And there's no architectural reason that they couldn't do that. Just to be on the safe side, I would start spinning up Google Watch Messenger and require a separate login for that. Yeah.

Yeah. Made by Allo. Yeah. And then like, so meta, you know, I reported is also putting out a smart watch next year that is like a little different. You can detach it and it's like a GoPro as well. So it's more communication focused, I guess. It'll be like, you know, Dick Tracy video calling on the wrist. I'm not sure pixels going that direction.

But what do we think about 2022 being the year of the two dominant internet ad platforms trying to compete with the Apple Watch? Well, I mean, my number one question when I go to make my purchase is going to be like, when I wear each of these watches, which one by wearing it, will I more improve my targeted ad recommendations? Who will get the better sense of my life and then use it to target ads at me? That's the nut that I hope they crack. How do you get past Apple blocking cookies? You just strap one of their devices to your list.

Opt-in, baby. Oh, man. If this is anything like the pixel, they're going to release it. It's going to cost two-thirds as much as the Apple product and then reflect it. It's going to be expensive. Yeah. Yeah. We'll see. All right.

Thank you very much, gentlemen. We've got to take a break. We'll be back with Alex Cranes. There's actually breaking news to talk about when Alex gets here. So we got to take a break. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited.

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understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move. Cloud extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter. Plus, Claude's research capabilities go deeper than basic search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes. Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. That's clod.aI. slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash verge cast. We're back. Alex Kranz is here. Hello. There's a lot to talk about with you. There's so much. Just before he came on, there's breaking news.

Do you want to break the news? Yeah, you will not hear it here first. You've probably already read it on the verge by the time you're listening to this. But the FTC is suing to block in video's purchase of Arm, which is, I don't think, super surprising. It's not, I mean, the Europeans have hated it. Big companies have disliked this idea. Google, Microsoft Qualcomm, notably have said, don't let it. Nvidia by Arm. There's a little

backstory here. So Arm is English company. They make processor designs famously. They don't make processors. Arm processors. The core designs are used by Apple, by Qualcomm, by everybody can think of. The reason we call them Arm Ships

is because they use the designs. There are many kinds of licenses you can have to Arm Chips. Apple famously has an architecture license. Lots. You can just be in the weeds of what Arm is as a company. But they design the architecture or the processors. And when other people license those designs in various ways, and they actually build them. Okay.

Arm was SoftBank, the big Japanese company, like bought arms. Spent a lot of money. Huge investment arm. Well, that was during the time when, like, SoftBank was, like, it seemed like they were just investing in everything and might eventually own everything. And then, like, that period just ended, like, really fast. Everybody was getting a ton of money from SoftBank, and then all of a sudden, no, just kidding.

Right. So famously, the big, big SoftBank Vision Fund, investment with we work. You can watch any number of documentaries on how that went. Any time you want. Arm is a little different. Arm is a little different. But Arm is a little different.

Functional, money-making, very important central company to the tech industry. SoftBank is going through its troubles. They're going to sell Arm. They're going to sell to Nvidia for $40 billion. Yep. Not a small amount of money. Big chunk of change. It seems like no one wants that to happen.

Yeah. And so now there's the European block, and now there's the FTC is going to block it. Yeah. I think one of the reasons it seems slightly surprising is it's hard to think of Nvidia as like a tech giant. And so it's like, oh, yeah, Nvidia, they make chips. They're going to buy ARM. That seems fine.

But the structure of what Arm is that they make the architecture that everybody uses, like fundamentally, you like thinking of them as Switzerland, right? And Nvidia is not Switzerland. Invidia competes with Qualcomm and, you know, Google and Microsoft as well. like they're making their own chips too based off Qualcomm stuff and based off their own stuff. So that I think is like fundamentally why you wouldn't want Arm to be owned by a tech company that also makes chips. And that that's the FTC's complaint is that Nvidia is already using armed chips and a bunch of stuff. And now it's going to be able to like the FTC is worried that, okay, you'll have an unfair advantage.

You'll be able to get access to these designs and stuff before everybody else or have them tweak it so it works better with Nvidia, Kuda instead of whatever. Now, they were not using it with arm chips. But yeah, so that's kind of the major complaint. And I think that was a smart way to frame it for them as like, you guys are already in the arm business. You can't own the company that you're in the business with building the chips that directly compete with other chips using arm architecture.

Yeah. Yeah. So it's interesting now because there's a, a number of parallels in the tech industry to that model. For example, Google makes Android and sells, or sells licenses with honorous terms, Android to other phone makers.

That's true. They also make pixel phones. It's not like the pixel phones have a notable advantage over the Samsung phones. Like they haven't been able to do it. Microsoft makes Windows, licenses, Windows to laptop makers. They obviously have their own line of Windows computers, the other laptop makers. seemed to be doing fine.

We could go all the way to Palm Theater. That was much more of a failure. No success was had by anyone in that situation. I would like credit for not making a WebOS joke when we were discussing Web 3 because I was definitely working on one. I was workshopping it in my head about a phone running on Web 3 and it was going to be the successor to the Palm Prix and I didn't do it. But now I have, so you're welcome.

Yeah. I think the big question I have for all of this is there was a time when consolidation seemed inevitable. and like everything needed to get bought. But Arm is a successful company that makes a lot of money. Yeah. It was never clear why they needed to get bought other than... SoftBank needs to make money.

SoftBank needs to make money or like only big things survive. Yeah. And they're big, but not big enough. Well, there was never clear what Nvidia needed Arm for. And I think that's one of the reasons people kind of got, I don't know, hives about it. is it was they were going to, they were going to, it was for AI and cloud stuff, and they were going to, they were going to bring AI down to the edge, you know, the intelligent edge is as Microsoft likes to do it. And there just, it felt like there was a lot of hand-waving about why and why owning Arm would be so

valuable to Nvidia that they would spend $40 billion. And if you don't have like the most clear, obvious reason to buy a company, then you start to worry about the less clear, nefarious reasons that they might want to own the company and that, it's no surprise at Qualcomm and Google and Microsoft and a whole bunch of other people lined up saying don't do this. Yeah. Also, not for nothing. Do you know who, you know what companies hate each other? Just like deeply hate each other.

Apple and Nvidia. Yes. It's so good. They just never, it's weird. They usually not. But once upon a time, Nvidia made some GPUs that went bad and Apple laptops. Yeah. And Apple just never forgave them.

And that is the end of that story. And they, and 50 years for now. new Apple employees will sit down at orientation and be like, you can't trust Nvidia. And that is just the war of that company. Like the garage is actually hard-coded into the M1 chip. Yeah, it's like, we're not doing it. So, I mean, but this is like, I just think fundamentally interesting.

It is unusual that most of the most interesting chips all use an instruction set. And Apple has, like the core arm designs, Apple has wildly diverged. from them. Right. But there's just something that relates all of these products from all these companies. It is good for the industry. It means a lot of things can work together. Yeah.

But this company seems to want to sell itself. And I think all this pressure, we've talked so much about antitrust in the show, all this pressure is like maybe everything shouldn't be consolidated. And I think this is like a good outcome. Yes. That this company needs to figure itself out. and Nvidia can't beat Qualcomm by giving itself access to the next generation of Arm Designs first or like doing weird licensing deals.

Yeah. That Arm just has to like sit at the center and remain like a good supplier to these companies. The thing I don't want is a consent decree where they like they're suing, but the end result is that they let it happen, but Nvidia has to promise to be nice for five years or whatever. Yeah. Because that doesn't seem like this FCC. Four and a half years. That's how far they're going.

That doesn't seem like this FTC. The Lena Con FCC is not doing that. But we'll see what happens. The suits filed, you know, Nvidia could win, right? Like, that's an outcome. It's not blocked yet. But they're facing this scrutiny in the EU,

in the UK and the United States. So we'll see how it goes. Okay. Speaking of chip news, there's yet more chip news, Alex. It was Qualcomm Day. Can I just say this? So Qualcomm had an invest. Calcom Week.

They had their big event, announced a bunch of stuff. They let it out. They're going to change the Snapchat branding. Which is a big deal. Yeah. Right? I was like, oh man, they're walking away from Snapchat.

No. The new branding is that it's called, instead of Snapdragon 888, it's Snapchat 8 Gen 1. And I'm just going to put it out there that if you're pre-announcing that you're making your branding more confusing, like maybe you should rethink that whole situation.

Anyhow, tell us what Snapchat 8 Gen 1 is. All right. Every year, Qualcomm has this really big event where they announced their new processor that's going to go in the phones for the next year. Yep. And that's essentially what we got today, which is a Snapdragon 8 Gen 1. Like, they looked at Intel and they said, this will be fine. Intel's got it on lock how to name processors. Let's follow Intel's Leagues.

At least there aren't to be lakes involved, right? Yeah, there's no lakes. Yeah. No lakes. Ponds. And it's interesting. Can I just contextualize the name real quick? There's also a Snapdragon 8CX Gen 3.

Yes. Okay. Which is different from the Snapdragon G3X, just to be clear. Okay. Go ahead, Alex. So this is going to be the first, speaking of arm, we're going to go back to Arm, this is going to be the first Qualcomm chip that's using the newest arm processor. And in a lot of ways, like, forgive me, I think.

the Qualcomm like upgrades every year are kind of boring. Like every year it's it's generally Qualcomm, Snapdragon phone processors have gotten faster. And then they announce a whole lot of really cool things that these chips can do that no one ever uses. Like so let me, company will will use any of the really cool things announced in these chips like the ability to automatically mute weird loud noises that are happening when you're on a call. I mean, I would like them to use that one. Everybody adopt that particular thing. Let me make the case that maybe this will be good.

So it's using the new Arm V9 architecture. It's got the new prime core, X2. It's got better performance cores, three of them. And it's got four high efficiency cores. Plus it has a new GPU, and they're promising 30% faster graphics with a 25% improvement on power efficiency. So the story with Qualcomm chips. I think it's 20% better performance and then 30% better power efficiency. Well, either way.

Either way. It's going to be faster. The knock on Android chips is always that they're getting smoked by the iPhone. I suspect that when we get the next version of an A-series chip, it will smoke the Snapchat and H-Gen 1. But these improvements and the fact that their power improvements seems prominent. missing. And I think that one of the reasons Qualcomm's improvements the last few years has been felt boring is they've had so much of their attention focused on getting 5G to not be a battery

destroying monster, right? They've been trying to get, they've been pushing 5G nonstop. And so the focus on the APU on the core processor stuff, I think they needed to get 5G right. So there's a new 5G modem, you know, blah, blah, blah, blah. So my hope. The X-65 is that. Oh, and then the last thing is that this is on the four nanometer process instead of the five, I believe. So they're making a nanometer jump. So my hope is that, like, we will actually see some real performance gains here. But, you know, yeah. Yeah, I, like, I want to be optimistic. I'm going to be optimistic. This was probably the biggest, you know, this, the Snapdragon Summit that that Qualcomm does every year. This is probably one of the most eventful that they've had in the last couple of years is certainly the first one

where I went, oh, I kind of wish I'd gone this year. Whereas usually I'm like, I'm fine. There was a lot that happened there. We got this new chip. We got their new developer kit that they're working on with Razor. That's like their version of the switch slash the new Steam deck. So they're clearly thinking we didn't get as much news on the competing with X86 front, though. I mean, there's the 8 CX Gen 3 for Windows and Arm, but we're all expecting like the bigger leap to happen next year. Yeah.

I got to tell you, until I see something radically exciting or different with arms, windows on arm, I'm just going to be writing it off. I'm sorry. I want to believe, but I don't anymore. Well, they're ending their deal with Qualcomm, who is essentially the biggest Windows on Arm maker. Like, Apple is not going to be licensing in ones. I mean, wow, that would be great. I'd be excited. Make a new Hackintosh. But, but yeah, but yeah. So this is going to be like, I think we're going to see a little lull in Windows on Arm stuff happening. I was at the Qualcomm event. He showed up. Yeah. Waved a laptop around. He said he was pumped.

He did. So, I mean, there's that. He's super excited. Having spent my own personal money on Surface Proexes, I just can't be heard again until I see some real improvement. Are we at the point with Qualcomm that Intel was at? Well, continues to be at. In particular, like five years ago, Intel would have events like this, and they would show us a bunch of products that you could make with Intel processors. Yeah.

And like, none of them had any partners or any plans to arrive. And he was like, why are you showing me this? And they'd be like, to show you the power of Intel's compute engine or whatever nonsense they had to say that day. That's where Qualcomm is, right? They're like, here's another Windows on Arm chip or a laptop. Here's Panos. here's our chip to make Nintendo Switches. Here's this weird Nintendo Switch thing that we made.

Chunky. We're just at the point where they're like, here's cool stuff you can do with processors. Yeah. And they're not at the point where they're like, here's our processor outperforming Apple. Yeah. I think that is what we needed to see.

Like everybody knows Apple does incredible arm chips. I think it's like universally understood. Apple is really, really good. at arm. And now Apple has not only smoked them in phones where it was hard to like compare, like you could say, oh yeah, the, you know, what's happening in an iPhone is way, way better than what's happening in a Samsung Galaxy phone. And then they did these new M1 processors. And it's like, oh, no, Apple is really good at arm processors. They have done what Qualcomm has been failing to do for years now. And I really would have liked to hear Qualcomm like have a nice

counterpoint to that at this event. And instead they're like, here's some really cool stuff we can do that is unrelated to that entirely. Look, we put it in a little console. This is the way about Intel. Intel will be like, look at these drones we made. The drones have spelled a Pepsi logo in the sky. And they're like, I don't, are the computers going to overheat and blow up? Like, that's what I care about.

They're like, yeah, but data. You can't ship a chip for a phone. Like, yeah. There were years at CS where we'd be like, we're going to the Intel thing. and they'd be like, here's the latest Intel advanced cable box, like whatever nonsense they were doing. They did show me a cable box once. That's why it's on my mind.

And I'd be like, are you going to make a chip for phones? And they'd be like, no, no, no, no, phone. And we would just do this dance. And the answer was they didn't have it. And they ended up where Intel is. Like, I feel like Qualcomm might be in that zone. Maybe. But like the problem is like there are going to be, you know,

how many hundreds of millions of phones. phones based on this new Snapdragon, right? Yeah. The difference between where Intel has been at, you know, they've got their core chip line

for PCs and then a bunch of stuff that they promise will be important. Right. So Qualcomm is, they have the core chip for phones and then a bunch of stuff that they promise will be important. So that seems really parallel.

The difference is that the phone market is an order of magnitude bigger than the PC market. And so they've got, they can just ride that for as long as they want until bringing it back to arm, other companies pull a Google or perhaps pull a Microsoft. Microsoft thing is Microsoft's arm chip was based on Qualcomm.

Or Samsung. Right. Or Samsung. You know, like maybe Xenos actually like becomes a thing in the U.S. So if a bunch of people figure out, oh, wait, it's actually not that hard to build our own arm chip and not pay Qualcomm quite as many licensing fees, like just a little bit less of the licensing fees. They'll always be paying patent fees to Qualcomm because that's their core business. that they actually may need to have these, like, other things that they're promising there

to distract from, like, people over the next five years slipping away out of their core phone business to make their own shares. And I also say that no one makes a 5G modem in America except for Qualcomm at this point in time. Apple, the rumors that Apple's, you know, they bought the Intel Modem division, the rumors are testing it, but it's all Qualcomm all the time right now. So, yeah, I'm not saying it's exactly. the same. Also, Qualcomm doesn't, like, the Intel disaster was Intel's commitment to manufacturing its own ships and not being able to get to, you just pick a number of nanometers

and Intel couldn't get there. That's the way that. Like, Qualcomm is doing the other thing, so they're fine. But it's just, the parallels are there, right? Like, this was a long event. They showed a lot of stuff. They talked about 8K video 10,000 times. And all of it was like, right, Apple just ship the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Those computers are amazing. Like, where's your product that enables that? And that story is still pretty hazy. Yeah.

It's coming. Should we talk about the camera thing? Yes. Okay, so here's the story. Qualcomm has a thing where the front-facing camera on your phone will be always on looking for a face. And if it sees a face, then the OS can, like, spin up, grab the camera, do its facial recognition.

and then, you know, unlock. So it's like, and always on camera seems super bad. Qualcomm's claim here, and they talk to Dan about it, is it's like a separate pipeline. So it's only like a super low resolution and the main OS and like you can't code to it. It's completely firewalled off. And all it does at the end of this completely secure chain is kick out, yes, I see a face or no, I don't see a face in real time. And so like if it were a separate camera module, it's like, I'm looking for a face.

It would feel a little bit less creepy, maybe. But it's just they're using the same camera module because people don't want to put two cameras on the front of the phone. So the question is, all of that sounds terrible, but we all already have always on microphones on our phones if we leave our, like, hot word detection on for Siri or Google. So is it different than that? I mean, is it different than the infrared camera on the iPhone? Well, I mean, you're more likely to capture a picture of a butt. That's true. Like, like, there's, there's the potential to, the data you could gather might be for many people more sensitive and they might be more concerned about that data being grasped.

I'm just curious if, like, the people who, the phone makers will enable this technology. Because a lot of the stuff, right? At the end of the day, Verizon asks me like, are always on camera in the store, right? Like, there are a lot of gatekeepers along the way. So I think it's an interesting thing. and it might be something we have to start talking about more if the phone makers and if the carriers adopt it, if other people start using it, if we start seeing it in Windows computers and never, and when will we get Face ID and a Mac?

But like, here's the thing. It's built into the chip, right? Like, the capability is just there. That's true. You can't, you know, pick and choose whether or not it goes in the chip to go on your phone. It's there. So they just have to, like, turn it on. Yeah, but I feel like if you're the bad actor and you're like, I'm going to turn on

this camera, like the camera is on your phone. Like the camera is actually the vulnerable part, right? And you're like trying to read it. If you're Qualcomm, you're just like lit it up. You've got the camera lit up all the time. Maybe it makes it easier. But if you're maybe. I'm just saying like the iPhone right now has an IR camera on the front of it that is

looking for a face quite often. Yeah. Right now. But it wants it detects movement. It's like, hey, I'm on. So it's like if it's sitting there, it's not on. If it detects it's in a pocket, it's not on. So what I don't think anyone has ever really seen is the output of the I-R camera from the iPhone.

Because it's all in the secure enclave. Like, that's not video you can get. Right. Well, so in theory, that's the same story with this Qualcomm system. Yeah, and they're just using their regular camera. So a fun game you can play if you're out and about. It's Friday. You're probably listening to Friday.

You're at the bar tonight, right? You're out. You're vaxed. Get your shots. But you're out. Ask people if they would put a camera and they'd, their bathroom and then be like, your phone has five cameras on it and you always take it to the bathroom with you.

It's just a weird fact that we're like, this is so useful. I'm just going to ignore this part. And Deeter, your point, like, yep, everything's always listening for a wake word and we're fine with it for the most part. Yeah. Our parents might not be, but. No, I would say at this point, the boomer relationship to technology is like they're way more fine with it than I want them to be. I kind of wish they would back it up a little bit and be like maybe a little more thoughtful about how it's going.

I think Qualcomm has to show that they can do a bunch of stuff. I think the question of whether any filmmaker will want to ship it, whether any carrier will allow this feature to hit. Like, because as bringing back to Palm, like, the carriers often get to determine what features make it on the shelves. And this is one that's a little twitchy. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. There's some other news we should hit quickly.

Crucial news. Crucial news. It's only important news. Well, we were just talking about the FCC, Nvidia, and Arm. It's funny because Meta bought Giffy. Do you remember about Giffy? Facebook, the company formerly known as Facebook,

bought Giffy. The UK's ordered them to sell Giffy because it's an antitrust problem, which is very funny. But good on everyone. Less consolidation, more competition. That's the thesis of the show. There's a line here with no link.

It just says Alex's tablet. This is what I'm talking about. This is good stuff. Buckle up. We're going to be on the verge cast for another hour. I've got another hour. It's all E-ink. You know, first of all, Barnes & Noble came back and they announced for the first time in years

that they're doing a Nook Glowlight 4. And the big difference is it's got USBC and it's slightly less chunky and it is not waterproof. And it is $150. And for twice that, you could be like me and get an E-ink. Android tablet. Yes. I have more than one. But this is,

this is, I'm going to show it to you guys. Nobody, you can go look at my Twitter account if you want to look at it. Maybe I'll do a review of it. But look at this, look at this guy.

It's beautiful, isn't it? Aren't you just so enchanted? You can't see it. It looks like a big e-ing screen. It's just a big e-ing screen. It looks exactly like a Nook or a Kindle. Can I run the Kindle app?

Yes. It can, What I love about an Android e-ink tablet is it's like a Kindle, but I can use all the other e-readers. Oh, you read books from a library? I can just do that. Oh, you read books on the internet? You can just do that. I even found like there's a browser called E-Inc Bro.

Oh, my gosh. And it's just meant for E-ink reading on your Android tablet. And somebody today was like, I figured out how to get the buttons on the case to work. with this thing. And I was doing it right before I came on for the podcast, was like figuring out how to get the buttons on my tablet to work. Have you rooted your E-ink Android tablet yet? I haven't rooted it, but I just added Google Play to it. Like, you have to go through the whole process because it's a Chinese company. And it's called the Onyx Books Leaf. I should probably talk about the name of the company, like what this thing is. Yeah. It's the Onyx Books Leaf.

It is a 7-inch Android E-Inc tablet. Onyx Books makes a wide range of E-Inc products, and they have for years. I have more than one because I have a problem. There's like four of us. There are dozens of us who buy these tablets. Dozens. Dozens of us. And the second one I got was the Note Air, which was a 10-inch Android E-ink tablet.

And I was like, oh, this will be great because I'll get it instead of the remarkable because it's got a walk-on layer on it. So I can use like a pen and write on it. This one doesn't have that. And I thought that would be fine. It's cheaper. It's smaller. That's great.

I'm not going to be writing on it. That wasn't a good idea on my part. I should have spent a hundred bucks more and gotten the digitized layer because the touch on this is a nightmare right now. Like anytime I try to type anything, I'm like, I'm going to go to a website and read something. It takes me four hours, you know? It doesn't take me four hours. It just feels like it. So the touch, the responsiveness of the touchscreen is terrible.

But it's so good. I don't care. Like, it's just the perfect size of reading books. And I can read all of my books. And it's got USBC and Bluetooth. Oh, my God. It's great. The Alex tablet hour is over.

She's like, I have a tablet with a bad touchscreen. Thank you all five people who are really interested in it. Well, that's very exciting. There is a new nook. Barnes & Noble says it cares. I mean, I think as somebody who got this, spent so much money on this because I wanted to get out of the Amazon Kindle ecosystem and stop relying on it entirely.

This is good news, but Barnes & Noble is still also kind of a monopoly, still kind of a huge company, still not like letting you put your library books and stuff on these products. it's also still not waterproof. So this is like a nice step, and it's nice that they're thinking about it and saying we really care about e-ink, but like care harder. The next bit of news, actually, we keep talking about buying and some of the things. Tile, which makes the tracker, is selling its Bluetooth tracking business to a company called Life 360.

Isn't that just its business? It's just the, yeah. Is there anything left of tile after that? it's yeah it's gonna be part of it I don't know there's like a very confusing bit of here but life through 60 is acquiring tile mostly because tile got crushed by Apple's fine mine which is like tiles VPs were in front of Congress being like

we're about to get crushed because we don't have access to the phone and Apple is like just compete and it sounds like being owned by a company called Life 360 is how they're going to compete it's just like one of those things like if you make a product that can get integrated into the operating system of a phone, eventually the operating system will crush you. I don't know if that's good or bad, but it's the way things are going. Deeter, there's a Google Pixel 6A.

Yeah, it's confusing. It looks like it's not going to have a headphone jack, but it's going to have the same design language as the 6, which that's good. It's basically like take a 6A, different probably crappier screen and put the old camera on it. So that's all fine. But it's confusing just because, I don't know, I kind of, I'm going to end up missing the design language that we got from like the three and stuck around all the way through the five in one way shape or form.

And I also feel like I like that the A series had headphone jacks. And it makes me sad that they're finally going away even on the cheaper phones. It's time for everyone to get proprietary Bluetooth headphones. That's what we have now. Something you get an ingratator on the operating system. They're just going to take it away from you. They're going to come to your house. That's why you need Web3 headphones.

please invest in my new Web 3 headphone Dow. Okay, and lastly, I just want to call out, because we are way over, I want to call out that Liz Lapato has been in the courtroom at the Theranos trial, the trial of Elizabeth Holmes for fraud. She has to get to the courtroom at 4 a.m. Because there's like a press feeding frenzy every morning to get seats in the courtroom.

But Liz has won almost every day, because she's getting there so early. But she's been in that courtroom. she's in live tweeting, she's been filing coverage from the trial. We haven't talked about it a lot in the show, but the coverage has been incredible from Liz. The trial is bonkers. Yeah. Right.

Like, it's, I mean, it's a story about just incredible. Got incredibly dark this week. Holmes actually, like, testified herself, which I think surprised everyone. Yeah. And she's been, but yeah, Liz has been doing, our Liz. Not Elizabeth Holmes. Our Liz has been doing a great, great job. Yeah, so I just want to call out that coverage because it's been happening.

I'm sorry. Lots of people in reading it. We just haven't talked about on the show. But Liz is doing great. When it's all over, we'll have her back and talk about what's happening. My money is, this case is like open a shot. But we'll see how it goes. So I want to call that out.

And then Dieter, you've been doing Tuesday Vergecast. You've got a good one this week. Yeah. So this week, we are going to air this coming. week, we're going to air the discussion you and I had after the Springboard documentary on Tuesday. There's a reason that we're doing that on that day, which I'll just tell y'all, if you haven't managed to watch the Springboard documentary on a smart TV app, it will be available on another platform that is more widely available pretty soon. So stay tuned for that.

Twitter video. Garbage compression. It'll be three pixels wide. There's also a little scoop in that episode. would be pretty good. And then Decoder this week, I talked to Kat Norton, who is a Microsoft Excel influencer. I feel this episode of the show, in many ways, is the culmination of my career. I don't have anywhere else to go. That episode is great. I encourage you all to listen to it. It made me really rethink the creator economy in ways big and small. And also, I manifested a lot of energy. Got to manifest it. That's it. Thanks to Casey and Heath. You can tweet at all of us. Casey is at Casey Newton.

Alex is Alex E. Heath. Alex Kranz is Alex H. Kranz. Dieter is Backlon. I am at Reckless. We love hearing from you. By the way, thank you to everybody who sent us their Spotify unwrapped. Where we are at the top of the charts. We love you. That's just so cool.

It was fun to see. And we're going to keep doing the show. It's not like over. Or is it? What? What? Surprise. I just thought it was some tension.

No, we're going to have some holiday breaks. But I assure you, because no one else will employ us. We have to keep doing this show. It's the only option we have. Say rock and roll, delay. That's it. That's the Vergecast, Rocket Roll. Get a boost.