The Vergecast - Microsoft beat the FTC, and the Nothing Phone 2 is here

Episode Date: July 14, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Microsoft winning the case against the FTC for its Activision Blizzard deal. Also: the Nothing Phone 2 and more gadgets. Further reading: Meta-provided Facebook chats led a woman to plead guilty to abortion-related charges Microsoft wins FTC fight to buy Activision Blizzard Read Xbox chief Phil Spencer’s memo to Microsoft employees about the FTC win FTC appeals its loss to Microsoft in Activision Blizzard case Nothing Phone 2 review: the vibes abide Is the Nothing Phone (2)’s camera better than these?  Apple iMac rumor suggests a 32-inch version is being considered Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and Meta for copyright infringement Email us at [e-mail], or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of an algorithmic following feed. You're going to like it. It doesn't matter what you think. Have you followed the Nugget account yet? Nugget. It's going to follow you.

That's my impression of Instagram threads. That's a whole review. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli. Alex Kranz is here. I haven't used the feed despite being on threads daily. David Pierce is here. Alone in the studio. It's weird.

This is a real inversion. If you're watching us on video, David's in New York, and we're both at home. That's not how this usually goes. No, I came to the office today, and you said, no. It's just you and the Nugget account in the office. You don't get to be around people you like. Nugget accounts killing it.

And then our friend Taylor learns, like, has a deep, intuitive understanding how social platforms work. And she's like, a new social platform is defined by volume. And she's going ham. And God bless her. Oh, yeah. It's like some people know, and I can't do it. But like the Nugget account, Pop Crave and Taylor,

they're like, we're going to dominate threads. Yeah, for me it's memes are. Oh, memes are. I don't know where memes are came from, but like every other post is memes are. And it is true. It's a algorithmic land grab. They're like, oh, you don't know who to follow? Here's some posts.

Yeah, just fire shit into the algorithm and maybe it will reward you. Adam is Siri, be like, turn up the knob on that person, Popgrave. For a while there, I was getting Bible verses. I think Casey was getting Bible verses too. And I was like, this algorithm is not very good. No, thank you. It's just the Wendy's account for me on Sunday. Only Wendy's.

All right, we should start with threads. There's a bunch of stuff to talk about. Microsoft FTC resolved. FTC lost. Microsoft may be able to buy Activision. That's a big deal, big, big deal. We should talk about. There's new Apple Beta to talk about.

There's a Senate hearing right now about Open AI and its data practices. The nothing phone two came out. There's just like a lot. Bob Eiger just like randomly said he was going to sell ESPN today. It's all kinds of stuff going on. But let's start with threads. Just like a quick vibe check on threads. How are you feeling?

I'm torn. So I feel like we've been. through this thing, what? Threads is now eight days old as we're recording this, has over 100 million users, the growth is insane, seems to be going very well. Everyone at Meta is very excited

and keeps talking about how this has exceeded their wildest imaginations. But I also feel like it's not even a backlash, it's like a pre-backlash, like everyone is talking about how mad they're about to be at threads for all the things that it isn't and all the features it doesn't have and the fact that your whole feed is just the Nugget account.

There was definitely, it had that for like four days of just like pure summer camp joy. It was just like a bunch of posters found each other again. And it was very exciting. And it feels like that is already kind of starting to turn off. And at least my feed has gotten very like engagement porn. Yeah. Constantly. It's just like interact with this. Look at this meme. Do you like this meme? Here's the Spider-Man meme. Remember you found the Spider-Man meme funny? Here's some more Spider-Man memes. And I still think it's more. fun than Twitter. Yeah.

But it is definitely like, it's settling into, I think, a slightly less enthusiastic phase, at least is my read so far. Yeah. My feed is a combo platter of jaded tech journalists being like, all the problems are coming. And then the Nugget account. And then Shakira being like, what's your favorite color? Yeah. And it's like, blue?

Will you talk to me, Shakira? I hear you're single. Like, you know, it's like, what are we supposed to do with this? I think that's kind of exactly what they want. One thing that's really interesting, right now blue skies in the middle of some sort of content moderation scan. They always will be. They don't have any. That's the issue.

Yeah, they don't have any trust and safety. They're just always going to have scandals. They didn't have any filters so people put the N-word in their usernames. Like, that's just baby stuff, right? Like, baby problems for babies. Instagram has it all. So I've seen all these people talk about, like, why are the vibes nice? And, like, they've said only answer is, like, because we're behaving.

ourselves. And the answer is like, no. The answer is a gigantic metadata center is keeping you away from it. And it works and it's good. And the product is content moderation. And so you see stuff that's good and you don't see stuff that's bad. And then occasionally the Nugget account is like, do you remember the 80s? And you're like, yes. And it's crazy. But like they're good at it. They're good at that thing in that way. That's my vibe check on it right now. It's like people are sort of, they're pre-mad because they think the problem. will happen again in exactly the same way that they've always been happening. But meta has, like, lived through most of those problems.

So they're going to have new problems. Don't get me. They're still meta, and we should talk about that a little bit. But it just seems like that first wave of disillusionment of new social platforms is definitely not going to happen to threats. Yeah. I have found myself in the unusual position this week of spending a lot of time running around reminding people that actually meta is better at running social networks than any other company

on the planet, which is like a deranged thing to have to say. and feels not true, but it is true. Like, meta is better at this than everybody else. It's so much bigger at it that it gets to deal with all the problems that no one else has. They're better to an extent, right? I think the truth is it's impossible to be good at it. Yeah. But no one else is doing this better at any kind of scale than meta.

Yeah. That's right. Yeah. Which is a deeply sad state of affairs. But seems true. And so it's weird to be that guy I'm, like, defending meta's content moderation abilities. But, like, I think you're right, Neelai. I found myself defending meta a lot this weekend.

Like I didn't realize so many people I followed were very like, we hate Facebook, so we just hate being here at all. And it's like, well, you don't have to be here. You can go somewhere else. They're like, no, but I want to be here because I need to like be here. Please follow me. So I'm going to be just very angry here. And I'm like, that's just like a week. And so it's like I'm having to be like, well, you don't have to be here.

You can just turn this off. I don't like you're just railing at the injustice of meta existing. Yeah. And that's a weird space. My actual, like, the interactions I'm having there are good. I've just realized, like, oh, if someone's being dumb, I don't have to interact with them and I can, like, mute them or block them. Yeah, I think that's the other thing.

Like, you're a pro. You're like a social media pro. Yeah, we're a pro now. No one has to convince you to use the block button. You're just doing it. I can just not do that. And I can go and, like, interact with people who just want to talk about cool stuff. And, like, that's really, really nice.

I'm not having to worry about getting pulled into culture wars. At one point, some guy was like, oh, you're saying this, but you're trash, or, you know, whatever random troll thing it was. And I was just like, mute. Yeah. Done. Insane. And my life went on. And I didn't get really upset for an hour.

Like, I have to call somebody to be like, do you believe what this guy said on threads? Which was far too common occurrence on Twitter. Yeah. I just think in general, people are overestimating how much the vibe is good because people are generally cool and underestimating how much it is that, you know, and underestimating how much it is that, meta is good at content moderation. And to your point, they're not perfect at it. And it's still Facebook, right? Like, they're still biased towards Shakir asking you what your favorite caller is.

It's just they want engagement and they're good at getting it. And sometimes that means just the weirdest stuff is happening on this platform. And like drivel, like basically. Do you know the fourth most popular Facebook page last week was like a picture of a potato? So it was in garbage day, Brian Broaddard who's great. We'll link it. But it's, he just had a great piece about how, like, the just the cultural impact of Facebook itself is almost nil. Because being so weighted towards engagement means that you have to acknowledge that the fourth most popular page is a picture of a potato.

Right. It's up against Barbie Himer. You know, like, it's like, which movie are going to see first? Barbie Oppenheimer or look at a picture of a potato? Like, they're not on the same cultural. scale. And so Facebook has tons of engagement, but it just doesn't have the impact. Threads is an opportunity for impact. I think they're taking that seriously. The last two things I'll say about this. One, a lot of people have asked me in particular if I believe them about activity pub, because I have

said very loudly, the only reason I feel comfortable using this platform is Federation and decentralization. The evidence that they are serious about it continues to grow. Right. I've been sent screenshots of meta employees very sincerely engaging in like mailing list discussions about the standard. I've seen meta employees on threads itself, like soliciting feedback for how activity pub should work, like being involved in the technical side of it. I think they have to do it to launch in Europe. I actually don't think they have a choice for any number of like regulatory reasons now. It's like a get out of jail free card. I don't know why they wouldn't do it. Yeah. Like it just ends so many regulatory discussions. It brings up a whole bunch of new ones,

but it ends so many of the big ones. Well, it's your choice. is it's like a very contradictory regulatory position that they're in in Europe, which is you have to be interoperable so you can get past the competition concerns, but then you've created a bunch of illegal privacy practices because you're interoperable. And that's like, yep, I don't know the answer to, but if anyone can figure out it's meta, and I think also on top of all of that they want to, I think they just want to. I think they think it's a neat technical challenge that their company is able to solve. Like technical, legal, compliance, like all that, all that, all that machine. machinery, this is the hardest problem for that machinery to solve. So I think they want to,

I think they might have to, but I think they're excited about applying themselves to that problem. I think the Instagram team is excited about it. Like Adam Messeri just cannot stop talking about activity pub. Like I believe him when he says how excited he is about integrating. But I think one of the things that I have wondered a lot about is because it's gotten so big so quickly and because meta clearly now sees this as like a real player and a real revenue opportunity for the company, does this start to look less like a place we can experiment with what sort of might be the future and more like we have to make money to make the metaverse happen and it's suddenly going to look really profitable short term to keep the doors closed.

The part of me that is cynical about this happening says that actually the more successful it gets, the harder it will be both technically and like culturally within meta to do this. But I do think all the people who are actually building this thing seem to be genuinely serious about it. And I believe them, at least at this point. It's a pretty small team, right? I think that's what Alex Heath said last week on the show. Yeah, I think Mosseri has said it's like a couple dozen people. Like, it's not huge.

Yeah. Like, this isn't been a big time sucker, financial suck for the company. And like, the upside's just adorbus. Right. And I think the money, importantly, is also not, they don't have to invent a business model. They have to get some data and do some ad targeting and deliver some impressions that convert into e-commerce. And they know how to do that. Like, it's just good at this.

Like, the Facebook ad units exist today. If all Meadow was saying was run these Facebook ad units and you can now target people on threads, they make the money. Will they convert? Like, are they good? Who knows? But they don't have to, like, invent it from Wholecloth and go out to the market and say, like, here's a new. thing to buy. They're just like, can you extend the reach of our existing things that are this thing is Facebook. Yep. It is the Facebook news feed. It's kind of funny that we, you know,

we're excited about, it's 2011 again. It's just here it is again. But key difference. I have not had to watch someone make a horrible, horrible dish in a video yet. Yet. Like I haven't gotten that that like taste spam, but it's coming. My God, the celebrities are there to cook at you in any minute it's coming. I will say it is still meta. This story, you know, good vibes on meta, Zuck's a hero, he's got a six-pack, whatever. It's still meta. The flip side of meta is still meta, right? All the problems are still there with the other platforms. They do not have end-to-end encryption enabled in Messenger by default. And so just this week, a woman pled guilty for exchanging messages with her daughter that enabled her to get abortion pills in a state in which

abortion was legal, the cops were able to go get a warrant to search her text because meta has not enabled end-to-end encryption by default. They should do that. They should take the political hit and just do that, and they haven't done it, and this is people have been asking them to for years. I would make the direct comparison to Apple, right, which is insistent upon encryption. And yes, there are ways around it, especially if I cloud on, all that stuff. But when there was a San Bernardino attack and the FBI said unlock the phone. Apple said, we won't. We have these principles. And so I just, it's great that Zuck is jacked in flexing on Elon. Like, all great, right? They still run some large platforms with some real problems. And that, that story about the woman going to jail, like,

that is a horrible story. Like, I'm outraged by that story every time I think about it. I mean, there's a lot of those horrible stories. We're not going to get into them all today, but like, meta consistently has said profit over people. And they're going to continue to do that. Just right now, it's really fun for the people. Yeah. Yeah, take some of those good vibes. Make money off of me. I'm having a great time.

This is like an old political quote. Like when you have the chips, you got to cash them. They don't hold. So you got the political chips. Cash them on end end encryption. That's all I'm saying. Other thing we should talk about real quick before we go into FTC, it's Apple Public Beta Week.

They just hit. We've got a bunch of coverage. Although Apple's, like, all the people have had them forever. People have been breaking the NDs and these forever. But the official. public betas are here. They're fun. They're like, it's a fun set of updates. Widgets, man. It's just widgets. Yeah. Life is widgets now. 2011 again. David, you're very happy. I love widgets. I will die and my last breath will be to say smartphones should not just be things you use to open apps.

That'll be, write that on my tombstone. What an epitaph. Monica wrote a really good thing about how the Mac is just turning into the iPhone, which I think is exactly right. Like you can have desktop widgets on your Mac now. Now, standby is a thing. The smart display stuff is starting to become interesting. I think it's very cool. I have also installed all of these betas and they have just absolutely decimated the battery life on every single one of my devices. My phone now runs really hot for about four hours every single day. It's really great.

I really recommend the public betas. I talked a bunch about this with a bunch of our team on the Wednesday show. What are you guys psyched about? Have you tested anything? Is there anything you're seeing that you think is cool? I have been terrified to test it because I need my. my battery life. I already have bad battery life. I can't make it worse. So I have put it off so far, but the standby mode, like that, I just got one of the mag save chargers, but for my bedside table.

And I'm like, ooh. Oh, nice. Oh, I want this. I also got one for my car and you're a liar, Neely, they suck. Just throwing it out there. Which ones you get? Someone hit me up on threads and said, there's a new one. Okay. I got to find the brand, but they're like, you should buy this one. It's the new, it's the newest hottest one. I put, it's like a belkin one, and I stuck it in my vent, and it immediately just tipped down. It starts drooping. Yeah, it's too heavy for the vents. Oh, that's better than CarPlay.

So, you know, whatever. Nope. So I'm in every other year MacOS updater. So I just skipped Ventura. Like, I just, like, miss me with it. Like, come at me the next year when you figured it out, you know? Sure. So I'm just excited about, like, a fresh coat of paint on MacOS.

And then I missed out on all the Ventura features. So I'm excited about dumb stuff, like continuity camera that I just haven't used for a year. And that's, it just seems like there's a layer of polish. that stuff. Stage manager on the iPad. David, you wrote about it. It's not great, but it's not just a... But it's not awful anymore. David's no longer, like, furious every time he mentions it. Like, previously, we would have heard a loud groan as soon as you said stage. And we didn't get that. It's gotten to the point where, like, I no longer think you're a bad person if you use stage manager. Wow. It was a moral flaw. Yeah. Like, if you used stage manager, you and I are just not on the same

page about how the world works. But now it's like, they're doing a thing. I don't think they've done it yet. There's a lot of work left to do. And I feel the same way about standby, actually, which is that standby is like an amazing idea that basically has no idea the rest of the iPhone exists. So, like, you put your phone up, landscape, and then you tap the thing to open the app,

and it just opens an app sideways. Yep. And it's like, well, that's not right. This is not how this is supposed to work. But you can see where it's going. And stage manager, I think now you can see where it's going, and that makes me very happy. Yeah.

I wonder if I'm ever going to use standby mode. It's one of those things where I'm going to buy a doc. and be excited about it and it will never happen. You're going to use it when you get in your car and car play comes on and you're like, oh, actually car play is good. Then your phone will just go into standby mode. No, Nilai, do you want to know my theory? The thing of all of this that is going to be the best for you is the redesign on the watch

where you just scroll the digital crown, the revolutionary input device on par with the mouse and multi-touch. And it's just widgets. Yeah. Just a bunch of widgets. Nealai's going to be out here just widgeting all day. I read V's preview of WatchOS 10, or she was like, and now you use the digital crown more.

And I was like, oh, we're going backwards. Like, we just got, Kevin Lynch got in that car and he was like, ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-and put it in reverse and just like speed it off the clip backwards. People, nobody understands the magic of it. He has to make you use it now. He's like, you will use it. Yeah. I'm usually, I don't want to prejudge.

I understand why you would head that way, right? These like app clipy widget things where you get lots of. slices of different apps on a screen that's getting ever larger. I get it all sort of emotionally. But I'm just kind of like, I don't know, man. I'm not out here trying to like fiddle with the watch all day long. Like give me the modular face with as much text on it as I can get and I will be happy. But we'll see.

Just a little book on your phone on your watch. But the betas are out. If you're, you know, the sort of person who downloads Vedas, go hit them, like, use them and then send us a note. I'm very curious to see what you all think of them. I will say the one I would most years I would say at this point in time everyone almost everyone should feel comfortable downloading the public betas this year especially on iOS I have had more weirdness than usual there's this weird keyboard bug in a lot of apps that like it'll just sort of disappear the text box and so you'll be kind of typing into nothing it's gone in some apps but like it's still there for me in messages so it's still like if you are not a person who wants to spend your day. like closing and reopening apps to make things work, I would probably wait one more rev on the public beta before you download it.

Okay, two things. I just thought two things. I have a much better answer to my favorite public beta moment. Okay. So we are like long past the point where Apple can even talk about all the features of iOS. Yeah. Do you remember when Apple is like and now you can copy and paste and that took an

hour to announce? Right? And now it's just like there's too much. Long press was like an entire Apple event. Yeah. They could not they could not announce all this stuff this year. And one thing they didn't really announce or spend time on is this personal voice assistant thing in accessibility where you can train it on your voice and then it can speak for you. So you do 15 minutes of training and then overnight locally it processes an AI voice for you. Cool as hell.

Straight up cool as hell. Have you done yours yet? No, I don't have the babies yet. I'm not brave enough. Oh, that's right. Look, this is a production environment, David. All right? We don't mess around.

So I have recorded the requisite 150 sentences. My thing is still processing. It takes a long time to do it. It turns out data centers are faster at this than your phone. Yeah. But I will come on the show next week and I will play for you some of what we have. And then we're working on some other fun stuff for later this month. So here's my absolute favorite public video moment and shout to our friend Marquez Brownlee, because I understand exactly why this happened.

He made it TikTok, demoing this feature. And it was obviously in drafts, and TikTok has a bug where if the video's in drafts and you publish it, it will just play whatever music you picked at full volume and not run your audio. And it was just the Paw Patrol theme song. And it was just the funniest thing I've ever seen. And I was like, I really hope they leave it up. And they took it down and they put it up and it's the real video now. It's great. And Marquez did a great job.

But there was just that brief like 50 minutes where it was just, it was a regular Marquez demo video like he's talking. But instead of any audio, it was just. Full volume paw patrol. Incredible. I was like, this is what the internet's for. Don't worry, we saved a clip. If you need it, you know, send us a Bitcoin. Okay, don't do that.

It's horrible for the environment. Okay, but if you're using it, Vertcast to the verge.com. I'd love to hear. Yeah, I'm always curious. Okay. We should talk about the big, big news of the week. There's just a lot of interpretation of this.

A lot of ways you can think about it. But Tom, Addy, Andrew, we covered the hell out of the FTC versus Microsoft trial. ups downs, twist turns, decision came out, FCC lost, like in pretty thorough fashion, I would say. Yeah, it was, this whole thing went very quickly because Microsoft had this July 18th deadline by which it had to acquire, or it had to finalize the deal to acquire Activision Blizzard or not. So this all happened super fast. And the thing I really want to talk about, and the thing I want you specifically to explain to me and Eli, because you've been sort of talking about this obliquely all week, and I want you to like put all your thoughts in one place for me is this

entire thing turned out to be about call of duty. Yeah. In the judge's ruling, like the second or third sentence was about call of duty. It says the gist of the FTC's complaint is call of duty is so popular and such an important supply for any video game platform that the combined firm is probably going to foreclose it from its rivals for its own economic benefit to customers detriment. And then it goes on to basically say that's not the case and so they lose. How is that what this trial was about?

Like if just this became, can everyone have call of duty or not? And I don't feel like that was what the FTC actually meant to argue if it was going to try to win this case. What is happening here? Yeah. Explain this to me. I'm going to respond to this by offering a statement that I can not back up, but which I believe is true. Okay. Sony doesn't think cloud gaming will happen.

That's what I believe. Okay. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if inside of Sony there's some, you know, we've reported on and Sean Hollister has reported on, you know, the hires that Sony has listed to build a new cloud gaming service. and they've had their fits and starts and whatever. They've got this weird handheld that only runs over Wi-Fi. It doesn't seem like they're working on it very hard, right? They bought Guy Kai and killed it.

Like, Sony, I think, at a base level, it's like the future of consoles is giant-ass GPUs in your living room and will send code to you and you'll run them locally. Right? Like, I think that's Sony's bet. If you're Sony, that's a good bet. It has won you every generation of the console were. Yeah. Every time Microsoft is like, we have a new idea.

And Sony is like, we have more powerful games in Sony. just keeps winning. Yeah, it's just the way it goes. You know, Microsoft's point of view, and I've had Phil Spencer on Decoder, and he has said this out loud. I think he said a trial. I was like, look, the console market is shrinking. We're losing to mobile.

So winning this ever smaller slice the pie is not the point. And he has said to me, and he said to the court, call of duty is not the point of this acquisition. The point of this acquisition in the present is like candy crush, the king, which Activition also owns, that makes a ton of money on mobile games. The point of this acquisition is building a library for our cloud gaming future, which, hey, we own Azure. This is a great business for us to be in. We've got all these ideas about cloud gaming. One day we'll solve the Apple problem and ship an Xbox cloud gaming app on the phone.

And so you're like, that's why they're doing it. And so if you're the FTC, I think they kind of got baited by both Microsoft and Sony into endlessly talking about Call of Duty. Because what Sony wants is Call of Duty. So Sony's version of this is we don't care about any of the rest of this. We just want some kind of assurance that we're going to keep getting Call of Duty. Right. That's the only game that Activision makes that Sony gives a shit about. Right.

Apparently, they haven't talked about any others. They don't care about Diablo 4. They don't care about Starfield. Like all this other stuff Microsoft makes. Like they don't, they have a lot of exclusives. Right. And the numbers we've heard are insane and back that up, right? Like the numbers that came up about the huge percentage of people who game who only,

play Call of Duty and the billions of dollars in revenue that this means to Sony every single year. Like, you can see why. But again, to your point, like, this actually should not have been a lawsuit about Call of Duty because no one was actually in disagreement about Call of Duty. If you're saying we're worried about this and your opponent is like, here you go, like over and over again, it's like, here you go, you want it on the Switch? What's some no-name third-rate game streaming service? Crackle.

We'll put Call of Duty on Crackle. Anything you want. Call of Duty wherever you want. Right? Microsoft's been saying this around the world. And, you know, the court in its opinion said, this is one of the biggest deals in the world. It deserves scrutiny. It got a lot of scrutiny. This is fine. Guess what? All the scrutiny resulted in call of duty. Microsoft was showing up at the table with that deal for everyone. Yeah. Can I just read you that chunk of the opinion? Because I actually think it's super interesting. It says Microsoft's acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off. Microsoft has committed in writing, in public, and in court to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parody. with Xbox. It made an agreement with Nintendo to bring Call of Duty to Switch, and it entered

several agreements to, for the first time, bring Activision's content to several cloud gaming services. And then it's basically the implication there is like, and we're done here. Yeah. And I think you're right. Like, that's everyone at Microsoft was up there yelling that this was what they wanted to do through the entire process. Yeah. Here's a deal that we would like to give you. And the court's like, they're going to give you that deal. That's fun. I just think that there's something in there that's like everyone wants to pile the FCC for losing this case. And you should. I think they did a bad job. I think they got distracted into this call of duty side show right and it's because sony wanted this deal so like

Sony is screaming like give us call of duty and the FTC is like all right that's our way in like this other big company is mad about it and like we'll find some anti-competitive stuff and then you've got sony's own executives and emails in evidence being like i'm not so worried about this yeah whatever but then you look around the world right it's still not done in the UK and the UK is like focused on cloud gaming. You look at the EU, which focused on cloud gaming and call of duty and got call of duty and said, all right, we'll see if the Americans can do this. It's not that the FTC shouldn't have done the scrutiny. Every other big regulatory body applied the same level of scrutiny and is getting various kinds of deals. I think what people are looking at is the FTC lost this case in court

and they've lost some other cases. And you're like, maybe this isn't, maybe they're just always going to lose and they should never try. And I just, that to me is the mistake. And it's a mistake for two, reasons. One, the court itself is saying, look at what the scrutiny got you. It got you call of duty. If Microsoft wasn't anticipating the scrutiny, they wouldn't have started with we'll give you call of duty. They would have started with, we're going to make call of duty exclusive like they did with their other games. So weird, right? Like, that's just a weird thing to be like, if you take away the threat, they'll still behave. I don't believe that. Then there's the second thing, which is like very, very, very wonky. But the Lena Con project at the FTC,

and Lena Con has been on this show before she was the chairperson in the FTC you can go listen to her. Her project is that the antitrust laws of this country are bad, right? That they were reinterpreted in the 80s by Robert Borg and Ron Reagan and all the stuff and that we got to a place

where we no longer think about competition we just measure prices. And that has led to all kinds of bad effects. And I think that is true. It's true for a variety of reasons. And her project is to go get the courts or Congress or someone to reset antitrust law.

And there's two ways to do it. One, you create a lot of political capital. You make a lot of angry people so that Congress does something. So Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren and Ken Buck, who's a Republican, who's on that committee, can pass this antitrust bill that they've had in their back pocket forever, right? Saying, look, this wasn't the right outcome under the existing law. Here's a new law. Or you take it up to the appeals court and say the way we've been applying this law for ages is inappropriate because of these effects and this thing. we want you to write a new precedent.

And then you take that to the Supreme Court, which I would just point out, this particular Supreme Court is like, new precedent, here you go. Like, they're just into it. So she's just playing a long game. I think she's played the early innings of that long game kind of stupidly.

Like, candidly, I think she has done a bad job with these things. She certainly has not explained that she is playing a long game. And you would think it would help to have some kind of like small wins along the way to prove that like we are stepping in the right direction

and instead it's just like, I'm going to lose a aggressively and then I'm going to win. And that gets harder, I think. Could she have ever won this case? Because even the deal for the Sony deal, that's only 10 years. Call of Duty's been around for what, more than 20? It's been a huge, huge thing for more than 20 years. So nothing's to stop Microsoft 10 years from now from just saying, okay, that's it. Exclusive. Yeah, but we'll all be dead then. There'll be like a new generation of dancing teens on a different platform. Like, whatever. Even that felt kind of anti-competitive to me and the court saying, no, this is fine. Like, was there any hope of winning this case if she'd gone after the other stuff?

She hadn't gone after Call of Duty? I don't know. I think we just won't know. I think the Call of Duty stuff was just such a distraction. And somehow we ended just talking about it. And I just will point you, Phil Spencer on Decoder is like, this deal is not about Call of Duty. Who wants it? Well, we're going to run Call of Duty in an eye frame.

Theverge.com, like 10 years. So he'll write that deal with us tomorrow. Fine, as long as you're paying 70 bucks a pot for Call De, it's a great business. They're not going to change it. This thing is about, okay, how do we create a new paradigm for games that ends the console era and creates new market share? And that's why we end up talking about the switch and all this other stuff, right? Like, okay, and maybe they should have a big library of exclusives to do it.

But you just see how with every other kind of streaming media, that cycle is bad for consumers, it leads to less choices, it leads to less content, and it leads to higher prices. Like, just look at the streaming television industry. Not everything is on every service. All the prices are completely insane, and the apps are not good. And you're like, do we, is that how you want this to go? Like, shouldn't we make sure there's, like, a lot of competition here, or a lot of, like, developers across these services, so they have to compete for our dollars with quality, as opposed to competing for dollars with content that comes and goes? That's the thing I'm worried.

My question is, why didn't the judge see that? Because they made that case, like, during the thing, they maybe didn't hammer on it the same as call a duty. David's not the opinion. If you look at the opinion where the judge deals with cloud gaming, she's kind of like, I don't know. This seems weird. We're not going to do it.

Yeah. Like, that's my thing is, like, how could she have won if the judge doesn't even, like, understand cloud gaming, right? Like, if the judge is kind of being a dumb ass. Wait, I realize I've been very strident. But I think if we get to a place where, like, how can the American legal system not understand cloud gaming? We might have already lost.

Right. That's true. If her strategy is to overturn antitrust law at a higher court, they still have to or they're going to have to understand cloud gaming, right? Like, they're going to have to understand this stuff. Yeah. If we can't get this judge to understand it, how are we going to get the next judge to understand it?

But this is where we come back to. I feel like so many of these fights and trials end up coming down to market size definitions. And this was the case again, right? They had this giant fight over is Nintendo. a genuine competitor to Sony and Microsoft, and is the cloud an actual threat to the console world? And I think in that case, if Sony is in the ear of the FTC being the one sort of explaining the other side of this fight and Sony is out here saying, yeah, we're not that worried about

cloud gaming. It's fine. Then I can see how you would sort of write it off as like a lark that Microsoft is on. And Microsoft has been on many larks that have not worked out. And so I think Microsoft is also sitting there saying cloud gaming is like cool and fine, but we don't really care about it. Like they spent so much time. They tell investors it's the future. They tell the world it's the future.

They talk a ton about it. And then they sit on the stand and say, oh, we've pretty much paused all of our cloud gaming stuff. We don't care about it all that much. Is that like where the screw up happened for Kahn? Like is that where she's her team screwed up as they didn't try to explain the actual technology stuff? No, I think the screw up happened that Sony basically was like, We're the competitor and we will be harmed and the judge will understand us, Sony, saying this is anti-competitive. And then they fell down the rabbit hole of Call of 2D.

Okay. Yeah. I think that's right. One I'll compare to you. And this is really interesting. Antitrust is broken. So this is so long. Just go with me on this.

This is what's a vertical merger, right, where you buy the next company up and down a stack from you. So Microsoft needs games. It buys games. They're not direct competitor. It's a vertical merger. If Microsoft bought Sony, that'd be a horizontal merger, right? They're direct competitors. Vertical mergers like never get challenged.

There hasn't been one in like 40 years. The last one that's a challenge was AT&T Time Warner by the Trump administration. The answer to every antitrust trivia question in like the best way. It's a very good. So this opinion like has to cite the most recent precedent. And it just has to continuously cite AT&T and Time Warner as good precedent for allowing vertical mergers. And it's just like, my dude, did that work? Was that a good idea?

Is anyone happy about that except for David Zazlov, Zach Snyder? Like, Zach Snyder got to put out like a weird gray square version. The eight people who watched that are probably happy. I watched all three hours. I thought about watching it again the other day and I sat down and I was like, I can't do this. Like, I can't be watching a square movie right now. Like, if there's, you know, those AI things where it's like, we made the thing.

It's like, just do that for Justice League. Just please. Just AI the shit out of us. Just expand the frame. Please. Let me use my whole TV. That's it. It's like super didn't work.

It was a disaster idea that caused thousands of people to lose their jobs because the theory of the merger was bad. And yeah, you could say maybe the market will start out of our time. But like the government could have stopped it by saying this will reduce competition, which it definitely did. We definitely ended up with more consolidation on the other end of that in streaming. And we ended up with a less. competitive wireless marketplace over time. Like, it's just all that happened. Like, AT&T did not spend money on its network because they were busy spending money

on fucking Gray Justice League. Why? But that's the only other vertical merger case that we have. And in that case, the court in the 18th and Time Warner is constantly talking about how there's no precedent. Like, this is the first one in 40 years. That's weird. We should have more of these.

Oh, wow. So, like, I would just take a beat. Like, this is a big project to reset how we think about competition in this. country. It will, the beginning of it will be more losing than winning. It's just inevitable. And maybe we need a new law. But like, you get to the new law by a bunch of senators and Congress people saying, well, the FTC does not have the tools it needs to create competition. We have to give them some new tools. I guess my concern is we did have some protections for vertical integration. There was like the Paramount Consent Decree, which was from the 30s, which told like film studios that

they couldn't own the theaters. Now they own the theaters again. They're just streaming. And that also in the Trump era got overturned because they were like, no, we don't need this anymore. So it's like the court seemed to be like, yeah, vertical integration, coolest thing in the world. So how is, how do they go through their courts to stop something like Microsoft acquiring Activision or AT&T acquiring Warner Brothers? I just want to be clear.

At this point, a workable antitrust law in this country would to just be to make it illegal for AT&T to buy anything. or for anyone to buy Time Warner. Like, you, if that was just the rule, it might be fine. Like, more people would keep their jobs. Yeah, that's like, and that's a way to measure like, what's a good policy is like, when you have mergers, people get laid off. It ruins lives. Maybe some shareholders will make more money, but along the way, a bunch of like secretaries, like, that redundant function, like, your back offices merge and you, like lay off your accounting department, right? Like, those are destructive actions for, like, thousands of people.

If you just banned AT&D from buying stuff, like, more people would have kept their jobs. Like, straight, like, that's just a way to measure it. If you could ban anyone from buying Time Warner, like, AOL might still exist. Like, it's just like one of those things. Do you buy the logic that the FTC and even the judge in this case have said, which is basically just that the existence of cases like this and the fact that there is someone paying attention and willing to pick this fight is going to do a lot of the work all by itself? Yeah.

Because before, I think we spent a generation with companies just being like, no, what, everyone at the FTC is asleep at the wheel. This is a non-issue. We'll get anything through we want to. And now the case for Alina Khan would be at least someone is willing to pick the fight and that's going to make fewer people want to be on the other side of it. Wait, I have two questions. I have two questions for you. Name one other commissioner, the FTC. No.

Okay. I know them all. I don't want to. I don't want to pick favorites. name the previous chair of the FTC. Right? It's tough. Ronald Rakes. Herbert.

I don't know. It doesn't, like, she has a reputation. And her reputation is that she thinks big mergers and consolidation are bad. Maybe she'll win, maybe she'll lose. But that is like a drastic change. And I want to be clear. Two things. One, I think that she did a bad job arguing in this case, the trial.

I think that call. of duty head fake, she just got lost in it. Two, the more I think about it, it's more like, I don't care if Microsoft owns Activision. Oh, I do. Why? Because vertical, as we saw with streaming, vertical integration is bad. But like, the actual bad outcome of that, when Sony is dominant and Apple is not going to let anyone do cloud gaming anyway. Because Sony is dominant today, and they have Call of Duty today.

Is there anything in that decision to stop Microsoft? from saying, okay, Diablo 4 no longer works on PS5. Well, so now there's a lot of Phil Spencer running around saying that would be bad. There's all of this. And then on top of it, Microsoft is in third place. So, like, if the market's more competitive, is that bad? I mean, theoretically, that's it. If at any point, like, this is all dependent on Microsoft being like, yeah, we're just good guys.

We're fine with third place because we're keeping an open, like, we're altruism. No, I don't think they're fine with third place. I'm saying if they flip out and they make Call of Duty exclusive and then sales between the Xbox and PS5 even out and the market is more competitive, is that a bad thing? I don't know the answer to that question. Is the market more competitive if one of the largest gaming console makers in the world owns the majority of the studios? Because Activision Blizzard is just one of many studios they've been acquired. They've been on a buying spree. They own most of the big studios.

With the exception of things like EA, they own just about everything, but after they acquire activist in Blizzard. But even in that case, Sony's still winning. For now. Well, but I'm sure. But like, okay, so let's say it evens out and Microsoft goes from third to first. That means the market's more competitive. And then they go from third to first and then they say, okay, it's been 10 years.

Call of Duty is now exclusive. Diablo 5 or 6 or whatever is now exclusive. If you want to play any of these games, you have to play them on an Xbox. And so now Sony has nothing, no leg to stand on because it's been 10 years. They bided their time and they're having a great time. Like we saw this happen over and over with streaming. Streaming was like, yeah, we're going to acquire this stuff. We're going to do this vertical integration.

And then we're going to pull the rug out from under people. And because it's financially expedient for us. And I'm just like, I don't trust companies to do what's best for the people. They do what's best for their bottom line. And their bottom line does not always mean what's best for people, right? Yeah, I don't think we're agreeing. I'm just saying that instinct to do its best for your bottom line is usually tempered by competition in the market. You only have two choices.

Like, either I can set prices for every product in America, vote Patel. I'll be a great benevolent king. Or you can have, like, actual market competition that people can vote with their dollars. And right now you kind of don't. Right. And I think that's the thing that I'm getting at is Microsoft is so far behind that if you want a new console, you kind of end up buying a PS5. Right? Because they have exclusives.

That's why it's doing better is because it's got all the, it's got naughty dog. And now Microsoft owns everybody that's not naughty dog. But that's market competition. Like if Sony waits, sits on its ass for 10 years. Yeah. And then Call of Duty goes away and they're like, whoops, Microsoft. Like that is their fault. Like Sony is also a multi-billion dollar self-interest company.

And that's all I'm getting at. It's like the harms here are hard to see and they're definitely more pronounced in cloud gaming and the FCC kind of blew it. But the bigger project of the FTC is to say, like, any antitrust enforcement is good, and the laws should change. And I think everyone is kind of missing that second turn that they were always walking into a loss because the law does not support their Lina Khan's theories for how this should work. And again, you can go listen to her on this show before she worked at the FTC talking about her theories. And it's basically like this kind of consolidation creates a ton of bad outcomes for. consumers that aren't just measured in raw prices. So in that case, it's, and we really should take a break here, but in that case, it sounds like

what you're saying is it's not so much the loss that's the problem, it's the fact that the FTC allowed itself to fall down this distraction of Call of Duty being the problem that is actually the thing that's going to pull it away from getting to where it was trying to go. Yeah, I think that's right. But at least we get Call of Duty on the Switch. Yeah, it's Ray animated, it's like Call of Duty, but you're Yoshi. That sounds awesome. I think a real problem for me is that I do not play.

call of duty, so it's like, whatever. You can have it. Phil, if you're listening, I want to run it on the homepage, okay? We'll sign the deal. 10 years of call of call at the verge.com. All right, we should take a break. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere.

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at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Okay, we're back. David is just waving his computer around in the studio. What is happening there, man? The thing that happened about 20 minutes ago on this podcast is I spilled one whole pomp LoMus LeCroix, just all over my computer.

Turn it upside down. I did for a while. The key is to just make a tent and put it on the floor. And then that makes everything better. It, it, luckily, Liam, our producer brought me what I would say as several rolls of paper towels that I have now used. Put it in some rice. Liam, get a bag of rice. The really big bag of rice. The most astounding part is it seems fine. I think the software updated at one point. But now I'm just, I'm back. If it suddenly, like, lights on fire while we're sitting here. That's why. And I will probably have to leave briefly. But I'm somehow. It's going to make for great TV. Listen, did I almost burn down the building when I tried to poke a battery for a video at the Wall Street Journal?

Yes, I did. And this can be round two. Going to make a jiff of it. Pranz, I have a stat for you. Okay. Hit me with it. The average blockbuster store had between 8 and 10,000 videos in it. Some of them had 7,000 videos.

Netflix, 3,600 movies. So, like, in moving to the streaming area, the amount of choice on the, on the platform, platforms has dwindled. Shrink. Yep. Which is the opposite of what people think. I bet if you gave those two numbers to a person and was like which is which, I bet almost everyone would say Netflix is the bigger number. Yep.

But then you ask them to go find a movie they remember from their childhood on Netflix. And they'll be like, oh, this is garbage. Yeah, I'm just saying, pump up the volume. Not available on any streaming service. Let's make it happen. It was definitely in Blockbuster. You had that ready to, you did not just look that up. I want everyone to know, Nilai did not just Google to confirm that.

That is a fact he knew before this podcast began. I think he just knows it at all times. Like, if it does appear. All right, that's my stat for you. But to Alex's point, like, you move to the streaming world and your choice gets lessened. Like, that's a real stat about Blockbuster, which I think is fascinating. All right, let's talk about it. There's a bunch of gadgets.

There's a bunch of gadgets talk about. There's a new foldable from Honor. There's some IMac rumors. I think we should start with a nothing phone, too. Is it in parentheses? In my head, it's in parentheses, because whenever I get a new, iPhone, it's always like iPhone 4, and that's how it shows up on all the Bluetooth's, you know. And this is the nothing phone too.

It is in parentheses. Our style guide says that it is not in parentheses, and I love our style guide for that. But if you ask nothing, it is in parentheses. This thing is like a vibes phone. It's like the first true vibes phone. Yeah, I think that's exactly right. It's like, I don't know, the Nothing Phone one was like cool because it was new, right? And I like, I root for every company that wants to make phones because we need more good phones in the world that are not made by Apple or Samsung.

And like we've been talking about, competition is a good thing. And if someone could figure out how to sell phones that isn't Samsung or Apple, that would be terrific. But it was like it was a new phone, right? Like it had some weird performance stuff. The camera wasn't amazing. The battery life was kind of, yeah, like it felt like a first phone. And this one, Alison Johnson reviewed it for us and basically came out of it saying, like, look, it's a very good phone. It has a bunch of big ideas that either work for your brain or they don't.

It's big on like, we want to give you tools to help you use your phone a little bit less. And one of those tools is making all the icons look the same, which is weird. It's like, what if it was harder to find the Instagram app? Like, I'm not. I see. So that's the thing, right? Like how you respond to that idea. It's good.

It's aesthetically pleasing. Oh, it's beautiful. The home screen of the nothing phone is one of the best looking home screens I've ever seen. It has the glyph thing on the back. So if you put it down on the tape. They will phase down. It has these lights that show up that will do some new stuff. It has the little charging indicator.

So like the light at the bottom will fill up as it charges. It has a new countdown thing that if you have a timer on, it'll actually sort of decrease the light as the timer count down. There are these nifty things. Like do any of these add up to like a transformational idea about smartphones? Like no. But there's some cool ideas here. And I think that's what you mean, Nila, by calling this a vibes phone, right? Like it's if the things about it make you feel something, awesome.

You're going to love this phone and be super happy. because it does all the phone things pretty well, unlike the phone one. But it's still like, is this the future of smartphones? Like, there's really nothing here that screams. Yes. We've just come to a place with smartphones where that question is kind of like saying, like, is this the future of shoes? It's just like doesn't.

What are you talking about? Like, and it, because of the platform split, you're kind of always like, will the nothing phone to capture share from the iPhone? It's like, that doesn't matter. Like, if you're in the Android ecosystem, you now get to pick. from like a bunch of different vibes, right? You can pick a galaxy fold and like run subway servers next to TikTok, next to Discord, and like just fully live in that zone, which is crazy.

Or you can like get this phone, which is like very chill and has lights on the back. I think it's just like a neat place for phones to be in, at least on the Android side of the equation, where you can almost buy a mood or buy a style. and yeah and it's only because this one has a reasonably good camera and like it does phone things well whereas i think on the on the iPhone side of house it's kind of like boy that camera bump got even bigger you know it's like and that's fine it's fine but it's just at least on the android side of the equation you can you can now kind of pick a style which is interesting and it hasn't always been the case yeah i so i just like a few hours ago sat in this studio wearing this shirt and talk to

Carl Pay, the CEO of Nothing, that's going to be on next Wednesday show. But one of the things he kept saying that I thought was really interesting is kind of to your point, Eli, that like, we're sort of at a point now where like if you just want a phone, this is especially true in the US, if you want a phone and you have no follow-up questions, the answer is an iPhone, right? It's like it is sort of, it is the phonest of phones at this point. And Samsung is like kind of there on the Android side, but it has some weird, bad ideas and some wacky ideas. and some good ideas. But Android is the place where there should be lots of different ideas about what a smartphone

can, like, be and do and how it can work. And where finally, it seems like sort of turning into that era. And you mentioned, like, the honor phone, the foldable thing is starting to happen. And the tech is getting better really fast. The flip phones are starting to be competitive. It's like there are finally a bunch of different kinds of phones you can buy in the Android ecosystem. My issue with the nothing phone, too, is it doesn't push on any of those ideas far enough to really feel big.

Can anyone push on those ideas? Like, one of the reasons Samsung and Apple have become so big is because they were the ones that had their resource to do things like make the camera not garbage. Right. And everybody, nobody else had the, like, you need a lot of really good engineers to do that and nobody else could afford that. So, like, it seems like most of the big kind of ways to make the phones interesting are expensive and nothing is like, okay, well, we're just going to go for the interesting.

cosmetic stuff because that's a ring light on the back of your phone. It probably costs them five bucks to stick it in there. Right. It's like a thing they can do instead of pouring $10 billion into camera R&D. Yeah. Right. But like all things, even camera R&D got commoditized. Right. You can right. Like this phone I think is an example of it per Allison's really like it's fine. It's fine. Yeah. In a way that I think when we were sort of on the cusp of computational photography, like you needed the money. And now you're like, or I can just buy it all. off the shelf because it's a commodity. Yeah. I mean, yeah, and that's even true.

Like the Nothing Fun has the Snapdragon 8 plus Gen 1, which is technically a last year chip, but it's a very good chip. It does all the things you would need a smartphone chip to do. It's pretty efficient. It's pretty fast. Like, that stuff just is widely available now, to your point, which is really cool. But the weird central tension of all of that is that all this stuff is so commoditized, but there are so many people in the market that it can,

still be hard to get in because even though everyone is out here building better cameras than ever that you can buy, there's so much more competition to buy those cameras that small companies have a hard time getting to these new supposedly commoditized things because like Foxcon is just tapped making all the phones for all the other companies making phones. And so it's just, it's a weird thing where it's like the stuff is all there. It's more accessible to more people than ever. And yet it's still kind of on the other side of the wall unless you're a really big company. Yeah, which is I think how you end up with, we're still here talking about Apple, Samsung, and nothing.

Like, you know what I mean? And like nothing is connected too much. Like they have the ability to capture some of the resources and big company just because of the way, because Carl Pay, basically. It's so cool. I mean, like, it has LAD lights in the back. I want it. The aesthetic, like, honestly, the home screen is so, so, so good looking. They're doing this monochrome thing with the like old-timey pixelated text.

It just, it just looks so good. it makes me so happy. And it's like the first Android phone where they're like, what if we actually gave like one whole shit about what it looked like when you turned it on? And I don't feel like there's any other Android manufacturer out there doing that. And it makes me happy that nothing is doing that. Yeah. You know what it kind of looks like? It kind of looks like the books, Palma, that was also announced this week, the six inch Android E-ink phone. I knew it was coming. It's not even on the list, and I knew it was coming. Yeah. I was sneaking it in. I was waiting for the right moment. And the nothing phone gave it to.

me. But yeah, this thing is, I think this thing is gorgeous for the same reason that I want the other one is like something about that just monochrome sleek design. I'm like, yeah, all right. I don't need colors. I got a TV for colors. That's fine. Threads doesn't have colors. It's great. I got a TV for colors is a stance I would really like you to keep on this show for a very long time. I'm going to see how long I can make that last. All the colors I need in life are satisfied by my television is an Alex Cran's belief that I feel like you should care. on for a long time. It's true.

My gadget that I was inevitably going to sneak in in this conversation is that telly has started shipping the free TV. Yes. It's real. Did you guys think it was real? I knew it. It's like not a hard product to ship. It's a TV if you ship it to you for free.

They didn't have to turn on stripe. They were just like, here you go. How much are they spending on the TVs? Like, or on the shipping of the TVs. Because any time I had to review a TV, that was always an affair. Oh, yeah. Expensive one for whatever the company shipping it to be one. They had to capitulate.

Did you read this? They had to capitulate because it doesn't have any streaming software built into it. It just has intrusive advertising software. So they're just like, screw it. Here's a Google TV dongle, like in the box. I mean, everything about this is great. I cannot wait for people to get it. I hope it's just rattling around in there.

Like it's not even its own package. It's like taped on the side. It's sad to me that the internet's like tearing itself apart right now. Like I'm very happy about it for some reasons. But, like, that Reddit is in turmoil and, like, no one at Twitter and threads. Like, there's a version of the Internet where immediately disassembling this thing and figuring out how it worked would have been all we all did together for a minute, you know? And, like, I just can't wait for people to get this thing. If you get one, please email us.

We want to know everything. Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. If you have a telly, I am not allowing one in my home. But if you get one, you know, let me know on the side securely from an honest account about how you get it. Yeah, call the hotline and tell us about your telly, and we can change your voice and play it on the podcast if that's what you want. I am desperate to know more about this thing. I think I continue to think it's actually an extremely good idea. I think it's going to work.

I think it's going to be very successful. I also think it is hilarious nonsense in the best possible way. Do we know what panels they're using? Like, where they're sourcing them? It's a free television, Alex. It has all the colors I need. I need to know how it's tailoing. Yeah.

I mean, the whole thing is very, very good. Other gadgets, there's a rumor that Apple's going to do a 32-inch IMac. I'll buy this thing in a heartbeat. I'm so close to always buying a Mac Mini. Like, every time there's one on sale and there's one in sale lately all the time, especially the M1, which is all that I need, because all I would, I run one app to podcast. I have one, and it's wonderful. I'm always so close to buying one, but I'm like, then I got to buy a display, and then,

you end up in that display thing where I, I buy a cheap one, but then I'm, I'm me, and I can't buy a cheap one. And, like, crap, I'm not going to buy a studios. You spend so much money. It's great. Yeah. Just. Monitors.

That's the other place I get my color. You're like, I'm very, this is, you should start like a wellness trend. Yeah. Just have color on your TVs and your mom. Anything bigger than 27 inches. Can I have color. You can have color on it. Anything smaller?

No. You should. Black and white iPad. Like a chroma diet. Like, that's like the TikTok trend, a chroma fest. Chromifest. Gwyneth. Gwynethethethro just trademarked that.

while you were talking. No, Goop, don't steal her idea. Goop, don't steal. I'm watching you, Gwyneth. The 32-inch Imec, I think, is super exciting. I think it's, if we get a 32-inch imac before we get a 27-inch imac, I'm going to be furious because the 27-inch iMac is a perfect product, and the fact that it doesn't exist is so stupid and bad.

And a 24-inch iMac is a dumb idea, but a 27-inch iMac is an amazing idea. But I also think there was this rumor. I don't know if we've heard about it since like January, but there was this rumor at the beginning of the year that Apple is starting to think about smart display stuff. And like you look at like standby and the lock screen widgets and there's like this thing starting to happen where Apple is like, what can your screens be when you're not using them?

And I think the idea of like Apple basically doing that with my computer monitor is very exciting to me. Like make that the hub of all of my stuff because it's a, big screen that just sits on my desk and I'm near it all the time. Like, I love that. I assume this thing will cost $67,000 and I will not buy it. What if it's the IMac Pro? Remember, like, if we get that again, that's the 32 inch. You want a big screen? It can't be cheap. That's very, see, this is a problem. It's like, I want to buy just an M1 Mac and like a beautiful display that's not expensive or isn't a panel from 1985, which is the current studio display. Can I interest you in the

specter 4K monitor that I bought that just randomly turns off three times a day for no reason. See, I can't live that life, man. I'm too old now. I refuse. I got gray hair in the beard. Only the finest of displays. When I break my chroma fast, David. I only chroma between noon and 8 p.

I do a 168 chroma fast. H.T.R. is a treat. All right, all this color has exhausted me. I got to take a chromophast. By the way, by the way, did you know? When I was in high school, I staged managed over 70 productions of Joseph and the Amazing Tykin College Dream Code. What?

100% true. We'll be right back, everybody. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts, but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in.

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in today's episode. Claude.a.ai slash vergecast. All right. We're back. I have so many questions, Neil. Yeah, we've got something to talk. No lightning round. We're just going to talk about Joseph. All right. I'm just going to tell this

one, there's so many stories embedded in this. So I was like a theater tech nerd kid. This should be very obvious to everyone. Super off-brand for Nila. Yeah. And so it's like summer in Wisconsin in the 90s by theater nerd friends and I'll just like descend on the Racine Theater Guild, which is mounting a production of Joseph Mason's technological. This is true happening. I don't know how to describe all the things that happened there.

But rest assured, there's a scene in this Andrew Lodweber musical where Joseph's and brothers have to destroy a goat. Are you aware of this? This is a real thing that happens in the show. And they're seeing Theater Guild as theater in the round. So there's VOMs down the side of the stage. So to get the goat on at the stage, you couldn't build the normal things that you would build. So I took a remote controlled truck and disassembled it and built a goat on top of it. And we had a remote controlled goat that this is like one of my, like, highlight of my youth.

That's legitimately like peak, Neely. Would it like drive in? Yeah, it would like speed up the side of the sage. And then they would like rip its legs off and like, you know, he would. would sing about how saddy wheel was or whatever and then we had drive the disembodied goat down I think one time in the many shows because we're like teenagers we were like go out and party after every single one of these things

I forgot to plug the you know the old school RC battery back in his charger so the thing can come back down off the stage it just went oh and yeah that thing just got kicked just straight up dance kicked off the stage

this really feels like Like the adult version of Nilai needs to disassemble his Ford Raptor and turn it into a robot goat. That's your weekend plan. I hadn't thought about that until Croma fast. I'm going to cross. All right. It's a lightning. Yeah.

Cranz, you should start because as we've been talking, there has been massive news in the world of entertainment. Yes, as we were talking, SAG declared that starting Friday at midnight, their own strike. So they are officially, if you're listening to this, SAG is on strike. They're picketing. This is the first time both SAG and the WGIL and the WGA were both on strike since 1960. Yeah. So it's been a while. Like WGA goes on strike at the drop of a hat. Love him for it. But SAG usually doesn't. We should note a series of escalating disclosures here. I know. I wanted to see how far I could get before you interrupted. Well, I think once you get to WJ strikes the drop of hat, I think we have to disclose our new newsroom, wonderful people unionized with the WGA. They're great. We love them. I'm a member. Yeah. Cranes in it. Great. We're fine, but we should disclose that. We make television shows with Netflix and HBO. I'm the executive producer of a Netflix show. And then Comcast with trends NBC is an investor in the company. All of them are on the one side of the table or the other.

None of them are making anything as you're listening because all the actors and the writers are on strike. Well, and this is also happening as there was this big deadline story in which a bunch of unnamed studio executives basically said, not even basically, said in as many words, we are just going to wait out the writers until they lose their homes. And then they're going to have to come back to the table and we're going to win. Is incredibly stupid. And there was apparently some backroom, this is not like a dumb thing an executive said off the top of their head. There was some backroom strategizing among studio executives, apparently, who decided to say all this stuff to a reporter who was going to put it into a story as if it was like a negotiating move. And instead, I think it is to the extent that you can move things even more against a bunch of billionaires who are mad at writers for wanting to have homes, it has shifted it even further against the billionaires who don't want writers to have homes. It's really something.

Yeah, it backfired terrifically. There are rumors that there's like recording of the video call of all the producers arguing about the deadline story after it went up, which if you have that, hit me up. I would love to see it. Kranz posted the phrase, and I quote, this is my pee-p-tap. I must see it. It is. Lots of our chest, everyone. And we're done.

I think that's the fastest segue from Andrew Lloyd Weber to pee-P-Tape in media history. That's a PhD thesis for you. Breaking records here on the French case. Call Dr. Guinness. I don't know if there's a Dr. Guinness. I don't know how anything that works. But yeah, this thing is popping off. And it didn't help that Bob Iger today said that the writers were hurting the industry.

I think that probably only added fuel to the fire. Fran Dresher spoke. She's the president of SAG, the nanny. Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's her. SAG, she had a very fiery speech saying that basically they're ruining lives. They're getting rid of residuals. That's the big thing here. That's like the big fight with both the WGA and SAG is they want residuals. If they make product, they want to make money from that years down the line because that's how most of them support themselves,

especially like people who maybe have big careers in their 30s and then nothing in their 40s because people start hiring them for a wide variety of reasons, usually due to ageism. So they really want these residuals, and the companies are like, well, no, because we're due streaming now. We don't make enough money to pay your residuals. But I, Bob Iger, make $27 million a year. And I think you guys need to get back to work. Just a terrifically tone-deaf move on his part. That was a real bummer. So I encourage everyone to go watch this, like, Iger was on CNBC.

It's the Sun Valley Convent. It's an incredible setting to be like, this strike is disturbing and it should stop, right? He's at Sun Valley. Because this is where all the billionaires go to make mogul deals where they buy each other's companies. Right. Like the next turn, he's going to be like, and we're consolidating all the studios even. Like, who knows, right? But the occasion of it is that he just signed a new-to-year contract.

Like, he's never leaving Disney. No. Like, the last thing that they're going to do at Bob Eager is instead of the animatronic Spider-Man, they're just going to yeat him into the sun at that exhibit. And that's how he's going to go out, right? Like, it's, he's just in the company. And he said two things originally. One, he said, the strike is disturbing.

Like, the actors and the writers are not paying attention to the economic reality of this industry, which is fascinating. And you can feel any way you want about that. Like, on some level, there isn't a grain of truth in there, which is these companies do not make as much money selling Seinfeld 60 billion times over and over again in different territories in the world. Like, the economics of that are not happening. should they still make it more equitable?

They should. And like somewhere in there is probably the right icon, but nobody knows what it is. And then he said, oh, I might sell ESPN and ABC. Like linear television is like on its way out for us and we might have to do something else. And that is like, that's the end of Disney as we know it. ESPN funded everything. Like the cable fees for ESPN funded the acquisition of Marvel and Lucasfilm and all this stuff. And that engine is gone is basically what he's saying.

and I think that is utterly fascinating. Well, and not only that, ESPN, like, was the shining star of the cable business for decades. Like, a big part of the reason that the cable business has started to go away comes back to what people say about ESPN, which is what I don't want to pay these massive carriage fees for sports because I don't watch sports. And my cable bill includes $7 a month for ESPN because ESPN has to pay billions of dollars to the NBA in order to get games. so they're charging the cable providers who are charging me and I don't watch sports. And so, like, that is the single cleanest example of why unbundling is useful. And it has just, it's destroying ESPN as it happens. Like, ESPN spent so much money because it could pass those fees on to so many people.

And it is now, I think, very much an open question of, does that business continue to exist if you have to just charge directly the people who watch the sports? Where are the sports? Are they still on ESPN? Yeah, they're on Reddit. Like, it's so true for so many people that is so complicated to watch sports that pirating the streams are right, it is easier. Oh, yeah. And sports is a disaster, and this will take a long time to play out because they sell these rights like a decade at a time. And so it's going to get real weird.

But also the thing that happened is companies like Disney signed decade-long deals thinking that cable was going to vary slowly and care. fully decline and streaming was going to grow and the money was going to offset and everybody is going to get rich. And now what it looks like is all the numbers are down big, really fast. And so Iger saying, like, we need a strategic partner for ESPN. Like, Disney, other than money, Disney doesn't need anything in terms of like how to do content. And so the fact that even Disney can't figure this out is fascinating. You also just stole my lightning round thing, which is the ESPN thing.

So that's fine. So I'm done. That's you. I've got another way. I got the Google thing for your lightning around. No, I don't even want to. I'm just mad about ESPN now.

You're just mad on ESPN. David, there's a big future of sports media piece to be written because it is just a total chaos zone right now. Yeah. And even stuff like Twitter and Instagram threats, like that's where the center of gravity in sports has been for a while, right? It's like, here's a story I want. I'm desperate for this.

Do you know when, if you're a sports fan, you see this happen like every season? like high school students get recruited by a college and they say they're going to commit to some college right this like happens in every sport and they all put up like Instagram templates where they've written a bunch of copy and they have a bunch of photos I just want to know who designs the templates who's doing it who's open in Canva and listening to some 17 year old talk about how Jesus is in their heart and they were always meant to play for ASU like who is it let me know like I just want to talk to you I have all the jerseys yeah done It's amazing, right? And it's like where that's a whole economy of creators and creatives and agencies and that da-da-da-da-da that exists because of Instagram, not because of ESPN. And so like you just see like even that part of it is shifting. I just think it's like there's a whole thing to be written about how all of it is shifting. But then the actual part of it where you like sit down and watch the games is so hard that it's easier to open Reddit and just find them. Yeah. And it's going to cascade through everything else because sports have been the richest thing in TV on all sides for a really long time. Yeah. We'll talk. about that more. Nelai, what's your lightning around? Even you ever saw this coming a mile away. Sarah Silverman is suing open AI in meta for copyright infringement. Oh, weird. Neely wants to talk about legal things? What? I love it. How does this relate to Joseph in the Technicolor dream coat, would you say? Well, so Sarah Silverman has a

coat of many colors. And those colors are a number of legal theories about AI. You know, a real problem with being authorized as I'm tweeting out lots, it's getting people like, yeah, this is what we came here for. It's like, this is not the feedback loop America needs. more lawsuits no no no no this is what I was trying to get away from easy dopamine hit by saying I hate this judge like stop it bad but I'll do it anyway because I'm addicted to it

anyway Sarah Sutherman there's a law firm basically that is organizing itself around suing the AI companies so they had a couple other offer they had a couple other children's book authors and now they filed the second one Sarah Silverman some other authors and they're basically saying look you can ask these tools to summarize these books and then they do it. At some point, that means you have made a copy of this book and that

copy was unauthorized. And that's the whole argument. It's a pretty good argument. Like, as far as legal, it's not like out on a ledge, right? It's saying, hey, did you have permission to make this copy of this book? Because usually you don't. Isn't that like basically exactly what worked for the record companies against all the free pirating websites was it was like we we can worry about all the big picture stuff but you're taking our thing and you're putting it over here and that's not allowed no it's a different like Sarah John and I could probably like two hours of our chest on that they they had to invent all these theories about how they were enabling users to do copier infringement okay right it's like Napster wasn't doing any infringement on its own like I was sending a file

from my computer to your computer and that was unauthorized but Napster created a business that let us do that and they knew that. So they just had to like invent a bunch of legal theories about contributory or whatever. So this one's even more straightforward. This is just straight up. Like, did you make a copy of this book? Did you have permission to make a copy of this book?

If you did not have permission, is it fair use for you to have made a copy of this book, ingested into your servers and then deliver what is obviously a derivative work of this book, which is a summary of the book? Wouldn't that have ramifications for like, everything computers do? Yes, without question. All computers do is make copies, right? Fundamentally, and copyright law is very backwards in this way, because it, I think I said

this many times of the show, it's hard for people in the computer era to wrap their heads around the basic of copyright law, which is that it regulates the act of making copies. So if I make a copy of something that implicates copyright law, if you don't make a copy, then there's nothing, whatever. Like, so like you reading the book, you have not made a copy of the book. You reading a book perfectly memorizing it and then writing it all down is an unauthorized copy of the book. Can you do that?

Most people cannot do that. Computers can do that at rapid scale. So like there's just a decade of law, like furious law. Google books. Like go look at that case. Like ferocious lawsuit about the existence of Google books. Amazon, remember they had a Kindle and the Kindle had text the speech bill? into it, ferocious lawsuit

from the Authors Guild about whether that was copyright infringement. That makes no sense to me. Like, just, right? Like, it's text. It's on my computer. I can hit a button. It should read to me. They're like, no, that's a derivative work. We make a lot of money doing audiobooks. You can't have it. Like, we're not letting you make that copy.

And they won, essentially. They got a settlement on Amazon. So, like, there's just this thing where it's like, it's the simplest thing. And, like, the hardest thing in any conversation is to keep people focused on the simplest thing. which is, did you make a copy of the book? Like, everyone spins off into, like, the philosophy of it. It's like, no, no, no.

Did they make a copy of the book? Did they have permission to make that copy of the book? The answer is, like, obviously no. And I think these lawsuits are just going to escalate because copyright law is, like, not ready for this problem. Well, that's exciting. Yeah, I'm thrilled. And then just to bring this all the way back around,

the FTC is also now investigating OpenAI for the way that it has gotten some of that data to train its models. And it just feels like, like, Sam Altman was out here a while ago being like, please regulate us. We love regulation. And like, boy, is he about to get what he asked for. Yeah, but he's like, he's like, regulates some like mythical problem. He's like, make it illegal for the AI to launch nuclear weapons. It's like, fine. Fine. Okay, good. The part where it's like, the AI has hoovered up all the data in the world about permission and hasn't returned any of that value to any of the people who made the starting works,

that is a decade of litigation, like straight up a decade of lawsuits to come, which is great because we have a website and we like writing about lawsuits and the people on threads are like super into it when I tweet about the lawsuit, so off we go. I think what we're going to do is we're going to have one Vergecast episode a year

that's just 19 hours long and it's just all of Neela's thoughts about copyright law. It's like a honeypot vergeast episode. Right. And we never even publish it. It's just on the intranet. It's going to be great. I think people have been threatening that one.

I keep threatening an hour long about metadata on decoder. It's all coming. That's what we're here for. We're the people who do holiday spectaculars. Very few other publications at our scale or sustained success. People are like, why is it a purchase a sustained success? I'm like hour long HTML podcasts. Yeah.

We were asked the other day if that's a thing we intend to keep doing. And we said absolutely you are damn right. That is a thing we intend to keep doing. I will die. before I don't do a holiday spectacular. That's how much I like me. All right, I don't, I was going to end on another Joseph in The Amazing Technical Dream Code joke, but actually I don't remember any of the words. David, you're a musical theater nerd. I have never seen Joseph in the Amazing Technic Dream Code. I could sing you several songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, which feels like it's in

this movie. This is the most Andrew Lloyd Weber that has ever been on the show. I think it's time to stop. It has been wonderful. I love you, the Vergecast audience. As David said, Carl Pay on the show next week, right? Yeah, we got some fun stuff coming up next week. But yeah, that's going to be a good one. All right. That's it. I got to take a Chrome a Fest. That's the Vergecast.

Rock and roll. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it.

We'll see you next week.