The Vergecast - Montana bans TikTok. Also, FREE TV

Episode Date: May 19, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Adi Robertson discuss Montana being the first state to ban TikTok, the Supreme Court ruling against reexamining Section 230, and OpenAI CEO Sam Altman testifying before the Senate. Then, David interviews vlogger Hank Green about the TikTok ban in Montana. Later, Verge senior news editor Richard Lawler joins the show to discuss this week in gadgets, from the free Telly TV to the Beats Studio Buds Plus. TikTok is now banned in Montana: here’s what you need to know Montana bans Telegram, WeChat, and Temu from government devices Full Hank Green interview here TikTok ban: all the news on attempts to ban the video platform Supreme Court puts off showdown over Texas and Florida social media laws Supreme Court rules against reexamining Section 230 Congress hates Big Tech — but it still seems optimistic about AI This free TV comes with two screens The free TV company briefly wasn’t sure what it should do with data from kids Amazon’s latest Echo Buds have an all-new design and much cheaper price Amazon’s new Echo Pop is a $40 smart speaker Beats Studio Buds Plus review: it’s cool to be clear CueCat  YouTube is bringing unskippable 30-second ads to TV  Max promises shorter ad breaks than other streamers when it launches May 23rd Netflix’s ad tier has attracted almost 5 million users Apparently, they were all losers in the race to 5G. Tesla’s humanoid robot can pick things up and put them down 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 Skylar 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. Off of me money. Hello and welcome with Verchcast, the flagship podcast of the Princess Bride. Where we go deep. Yes. On the history and lore of the cult classic for children.

I know all the words. We will never top being the flagship podcast with the Princess Bride. This is the best thing we could possibly do. It's all downhill from here. When I read the book as a child, the conceit of the book, is that it's a book about the book? and I did not understand that for years.

Who's this kid who's sleeping? Well, no, there's the kid who's sleeping, but then there's the book itself is about the process of like writing a book. Right. It's very meta for a child. It's a lot to do. And I was like, well, I saw this movie, which I love,

and I'm going to read the book that it's based on. And I was like, where is the book? And I was like 25 years old. And I finally understood that there's no book. The person who does not understand that is Elon Musk. Hard transition. This is the only thing we're going to say about Elon Musk. David promised me that we would say nothing about it.

By the way, hi, I'm Nealai. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here in the studio. Yeah, we're in person. This is very exciting. Cranes is not. No. We keep Cranes out.

The three of us have never been in the same place at the same time. Cranes on vacation. We're going to miss Cranz. But Addie Robertson's here. Hi. And later on Richard Lawler is going to show us. Yeah. Not in the studio.

All right. Let's talk about the one Elon thing and then we can move past. Yeah. So Elon gave an interview on CBC talking to David Faber, who's a great reporter. Actually, I think he did a good job of this interview. He's the hard guy to interview. Because he kept lobbying what appeared to be softballs and then letting Elon talk. Somebody who interviews a lot of people.

Like, I was watching the technique. And I thought it was very good. There's one moment in this interview where he's like, should you tweet so much, you're hurting your companies. And Elon responds, and I must say this, I know every word of this movie by heart, by misquoting the Princess Pride badly. Let's just play the clip. Do your tweets hurt the company? Are there Tesla owners to say, I don't agree with his political position?

And I know it because he shares so much of it. He thought about it for so long. Yeah. A long time. Wow. You know, I'm reminded of the scene in the Princess Bride. Great movie. Great movie.

I mean, he's right about that. Where he confronts the person who killed his father. He says... Six fingers. He's going to do the voice right now. Off of me money. Off of me power. I don't care.

I don't care. So you just don't care. You want to share what you have to say? I'll say what I want to say. And if the consequence of that is losing money, so be it. Okay. So a few notes here. One, if you're more...

philosophy is based on the movie the Princess Bride. You should be able to recall it faster than 25 minutes. Yes. Two, you should be able to quote the movie accurately. Can we play the correct clip? Nigo Montoya. I can't believe that this is where we're at on the Verge cast. Offer me money.

Yes. Power to promise me that can. All that I have and more. Please. Offer me everything I ask for. Anything you want. I want my father. You will note he doesn't say, I don't care.

He says something very different. I will say, if Elon Musk in that moment had said, I want my Twitter back, you son of a bitch, it would have been the greatest moment in television history. It's just your brain has to be a particular kind of Swiss cheese to be like, why do you tweet to the detriment of your shareholders? And then you misquote that scene, which is about vengeance.

for his murdered father. And you're like, this is why I say whatever the hell I want. It just doesn't make any sense. Like, I can't formulate a version of this, that those two things are connected. I just,

as a young fedora boy myself, you cannot be tough quoting the Princess Bride. There is not a context in the world in which quoting the Princess Bride is a tough thing to do. And I think... I don't know, the I am not left-handed thing continues to be a rad,

move that I pull on many people. When I'm typing, I like type kind of bad. And I'm like, oh, I'm not left-handed. It's just a movie designed to make eight-year-old boys think they're tough. It has a number of scenes that are exactly that. I'm not left-handed. Again, not a tough thing to say. All right, that's enough, Elon.

Now we get a hard shift into the Supreme Court, which is super weird, but in a different way. They also quote the Princess Bride quite often. This is when you go to the Supreme Court, they're like, you have to watch this movie. To the pan. Can I tell you a story from my youth? My father had a conversion van, an 80s conversion van. Amazing. And he brought it home, and he was very proud of this.

He had a TV VCR combo in the back. And then we would drive this thing in New Jersey like five times a year. It felt like five times. And my sister and I watched the Princess Bride in the back of this conversion van 10 million times. This is just the only movie in the movie in the year. And if you could just rewind yourself, if I could just go back in time and tell that young boy, one day you will insult the richest man on earth with the knowledge you are gaining in this van. It will be good. Your parents are so proud, I'm sure.

All right. Let's talk with the Supreme Court. Actually, today, breaking news, I don't think we were expecting this case to come down. Addie, the last time you were on the show, we were talking about two big cases around Section 230 that hit the Supreme Court. Gonzalez versus Google and Twitter versus Tam-A, they were both related to terrorism, but under relying them was, are these platforms liable for what is being published on them through this root of the anti-terrorism statute? And the Supreme Court today said, why are you here from what I gather? It did. So it basically performed a two-step, which is that one of these cases is about Section 230 and one of them is not.

The question in Twitter versus Tamne is, is a platform aiding and abetting terrorism if it, in Twitter's case, fails to remove content that is posted by terrorists or if, it maybe recommends something, which is what YouTube did. And so that's this question. And then Gonzalez versus Google says, well, if you assume that maybe it would be aiding and abetting, then does Section 230 protect the site from liability? Or if it's doing something like recommending content, it is actually producing that. It does it become the speaker of it? And so what the Supreme Court decided was, look, the fact in this case involving Twitter and also involving Google, it just, you can't say this rises to the level of aiding and abetting. They were just providing the same service they provide to billions of other people.

Yeah. And so this is just a ridiculous attenuation of this doctrine. We can't say that they are liable. And so because of that, we don't have to touch Section 230. And the person who wrote this opinion is Clarence Thomas. Who wants to touch Section 230 so bad. What a phrase. So there was not actually assigned, there was nobody who signed the Gonzalez decision,

which was the We Won't Touch 230 decision. And then, yes, Clarence Thomas, the guy who is constantly like, we need to regulate what platforms say, wrote an entire long opinion about, first of all, the fact that, yeah, we should not say that this is illegal. They are not liable for this just because it doesn't rise to the level of aiding and abetting. And then there's also an interesting section that kind of gets to the heart of the recommendation question, where he decides that the problem for the people who are trying to sue these companies is that they can maybe point to content getting recommended, but the recommendation of the content itself is not supposed to promote terrorism. Twitter doesn't have like a, hey, feed this person, terrorism button. Right. It has a thing that just recommends stuff you like. And from that point onward, it's this, as he describes that kind of passive entity, that just it hits a button, the button runs, the button churns out content, and maybe that content is terrorism-related.

So this is like a long road for him where he says over and over and again in this opinion, this is passive. They're not screening it. it's just happening because there's another set of cases that are coming, the Florida and Texas content moderation cases, where I think the Thomas wing of the court wants to mess with Section 230 by saying these are like utilities and the government should be able to regulate what happens on that. I am curious if that's what's going to happen in part because these cases are pretty strongly the Texas and Florida cases described as First Amendment decisions, not Section 230 decisions. that the issue is whether companies have the right to say what goes on their site and whether it's compelled speech to make them put hate speech on there. And so, yeah, it's a really good question how that's going to intersect with 230 because in theory, 230 doesn't even necessarily come into this at all. With 230 and come into this case, see, this is the line.

Yeah. I just like read Clarence Thomas's name on this opinion and then read this opinion, which people like, sort of across the spectrum, people like, they got to the right answer. And then you read it and he keeps talking about how these are passive services. and they're not exercising any discretion, and it's all just happening on the internet. And you can just see the next jump is. And thus, the state of Texas should be able to insist that you don't moderate against stuff. Yeah, except that there is a parenthetical where he says he does specifically point out, sometimes they remove it. Yeah.

Which I think it is, yeah, it's an offhand remark, but it is one that he included and is like, well, yeah, Twitter isn't promoting terrorism. If it's doing anything, it's taking some of it down. And he doesn't cite that as being a thing that strikes against the case. Yeah. Well, and am I wrong for thinking even that just taking sort of that stuff you're describing, like the hosting of that content and calling it passive and saying this is not them having an active role in it? That's not nothing, right? Like, it's not to the heart of the Section 230 debate, but we're, I feel like so much of this is so new that even having the Supreme Court say, like, no, just so you know, having something on your website is not illegal, like still means something at this moment in time. And not just that, but producing something like a recommendation, which is not just this thing sits on your servers. True, yeah. The thing I've seen a lot of people question is whether this means that AI statutes get like whether you can't regulate something and AI produces because the AI isn't meant to, I don't know, be racist. Yeah.

And I think that's a pretty open question. I think that this case opens a bunch of AI questions. There's another case about Andy Warhol drawing on a photo. The Supreme Court ruled against the Warhol. estate today, which is a big copyright decision that has further implications for AI. Yes. So the Warhol decision is, I think we've talked about it before, it's about whether the estate could take this photograph from this photographer of prints and then paint over it and make a sort of trademark Andy Warhol silk screen print. And then whether you can claim fair

use based on this one particular, it's a four-part, or a four-part defense of fair use, and whether the fact that it is a commercial work, to what extent that should count against the Warhol estate? Because they were selling it. Right. And the sort of example that they were pointing to in the decision is the fact that, say, when Prince died, there were a bunch of magazine covers. And one of the magazine covers used Warhol's print in a way that did not have to credit or pay the underlying photographer. And so since one of the standards of for use is, does this replace the original thing? This was their way of saying, well, clearly it does. Because if you want, a picture of prints, then you're going to use this picture of prints instead of this other picture of prints. And the fact that one of them transforms it, like what that picture of prince means is not material to this really particular part of fair use. So what comes up for me with this is every fair use decision is supposed to be case by case. So one shouldn't affect the other, the next one down the line.

This means nothing in practice. Like fair use decisions like this happen and then there's a massive knock on effect. in the world of culture. Famously, there was like the Blurred Lines case that went too far. And then just recently there's the Ed Shearin case. Marvin Gay's estate is suing in both cases. Okay, well, technically it was the other way around in the Marvin. The original Blurred Lines case, it was Robin Thick suing.

For a declared, yeah. Because it asked for money first. Yes. So it's like a circle where Marvin Gay's estate is like, we just want money. Marvin Gay, uh, dead. Andy Warhol also, also dead in this, but that's, yeah. Dead people are haunting us with copyright law. Anyhow, so the blurred lines case, it went too far.

Marvin Gay's estate got paid. Same state sues Ed Shearin. They lose and it gets recalibrated back a little bit. So you see this pendulum is constantly speaking. That's normally fine. There's some weirdness there. Whatever. You add generative AI to the mix of all of this and the Supreme Court saying,

hey, if you take this stuff and you copy it and you make a new thing based on it, and it replaces the existing thing, that's bad and you can't do that. And it's like, oh, that's all of chat GPT. That's about to be everything. And particularly if you sell the thing. Yeah. And that's all of mid-journey. Like, somewhere on the fan fiction forums of the internet, a great cheer was raised when

the Supreme Court handed off this Andy Warhol decision, because that is, as Addy has been saying to me, that is like a culture war that is brewing in the artistic community right now. Yeah, which is then particularly weird when you mentioned fan fiction, because fan fiction, and there has been this ongoing question of whether or not you can sell things against it and whether you can monetize it. And this is, I don't know, I have not spoken to people like the Organization of Transformative Works over this particular case yet. But this is maybe bad for that too. There's this common misconception that fair use only works for non-commercial things. And I've been telling people, no, this is a misconception.

You definitely can sell things that are fair use. And this seems like it is sort of making that less true. Yeah, you can absolutely saw things are our entire website is a collection of fair use that we operate commercially. Like we're like, here's some news someone made and then we like write about it that's just like inside a fair use. And then we sell ads against it and like I don't know, our other magazines sell subscription. Like commercial fair use is a real thing. It just gets me because where I think the AI thing is making everyone like copyright maximalists is the word you would use. And it's like, oh, this is the internet where everyone is remixing everything all the time.

And so to cut against your own interest here because you're mad at AI, like kind of shuts down everything you're doing. Like, do you want fan fiction to exist? Yes or no? Do you want it to exist only if Disney says it can exist? Yes or no? Do you want them to exist if you pay Disney the right to right fan? Like, you just keep walking up the hill in decisions. Like, I don't know.

I don't know if the world decision is right decision. But it does seem like, I mean, the, this just makes me think about like the writer's strike in Hollywood right now, right? And what they're betting essentially is that like the AI is going to get good enough very quickly that a lot of people are going to decide that it's worth just looping humans out entirely for commercial purposes. And now like you said, you're one step past normal copyright stuff that we've talked about for many years. This is like fair use on top of fair use on top of fair use. And when does it fall apart? And it just feels like everybody I talk to is like, yeah, sure, there's other complicated stuff going on. But if we don't fight against AI right now, it's all going to be moot because it will have just.

just like railroaded everyone out of their jobs before we get around to resolving the third one of these cases. And I don't know if that's true or not, but it does feel like it has just set people's hair on fire in such a new way about all of these issues over the last like eight months. Yeah. It's wild. It's funny because, you know, we were expecting the Twitter and Google Supreme Court cases to be important, right?

We covered them a lot. We covered them on the show. We were like in detail on them. And the Supreme Court was like, me. Like, get out of here. I was actually wondering about that because I think I remember I was on parental leave a lot of this was going down. And I remember listening to the Vergecast that you guys did with Alex, and you were talking about basically the totally disastrous showing from the Gonzalez lawyers,

who basically were like, anything that exists on the internet is illegal. It's like, all right. This isn't great. And so it became very clear that they were kind of out over their skis on that one. But it seemed like the consensus was that the Twitter case had a much more sort of relevant possibility to actually mean something and have a decision that meant something. And yet, both of these kind of came out. And I'm with you. It kind of feels like both decisions just amounted to like, nah, never mind. Like, why did we take these in the first place? No, I think that the Twitter decision was actually important. One of the, I think it was Blake Reed, the Silicon Flatiron's tech policy expert who was saying that Twitter versus Tamne is kind of an example

of what happens, it's like a warning for what happens if you get rid of Section 230 is that suddenly you have to litigate all these incredibly hard, complicated single use cases. And it is interesting that then eventually they just decided to shove everything on to that single use case and say, look, yeah, this just doesn't apply. It turns out that you have to have some kind of real affirmative connection. But it's also there are a billion of these cases suing web platforms for platforming like some terrorist organization or other. And so I think this was actually a pretty relevant decision because it's all about the fact that just having these people on your platform does not automatically mean that you are liable for violating anti-terrorist laws. That's fair. Yeah. But it just seems like of the cases we got today, they waved away the 231s, which could have been a disaster for the internet, left the door open for the Texas and California moderation cases to go a bad way. Right, because the line is going to be what is passive and what is that? That's where, I think that's where... Like, how much can you do before you're doing stuff is, right, is very much the open question. And who knows?

I don't know what he's going to do. Do I have any sense of what Amy Coney-Barritt thinks about? I just don't. Who knows this is going to happen? And in this Warhol case, very hotly anticipated, lots and lots of scholarship, lots and lots of writing, we've done it, Addy's done it. And it's like, oh, this case might be the thing that stops generative AI in its tracks. Now you've got a Supreme Court precedent and says, if you're...

fair use of an original work takes over the market for that work, we're going to say that's too much. And it's like, well, I don't know if you guys have used the tools. I'm also curious, like, obviously there's this four-part test. This is one of those four parts. The other issue is how much of the work you're using. And that's where I think generative AI gets really complicated because, okay, maybe the extreme case is you use it to generate a precise picture of prints that looks almost exactly like prints but isn't technically prints. That's its own case. And that seems like, I don't know, most nightmarish copyright, like, thing that might not be fair use. But I don't know, if you're

just generating any image in the world using a generate, like a data set that includes someone's work, at what point do you get to sue and say, because I was part of this data set, this person is stealing from me, which is a thing that I hear lots of people who don't like generative AI say all the time. Like, these people are literally stealing from me personally because I have a picture in this data set or because I wrote a fan fiction that got scraped. So there's the people saying it, and then there's the big company saying it. So every publisher, News Corp is saying it. Getty is doing stability.

That's basically their argument. Down the line, Hollywood writers are effectively saying this, right? We wrote this stuff. You're going to spit it. You're going to put it in AI. It's going to spit stuff out. So the four factors are the purpose and character of your use, the nature of the work, which is real fuzzy, the amount or substantiality of the port.

used, and then the last one, the effect on the market for the original one. So I'm just saying if you can type, I want a picture of prints in the mid-jurney, and it spits out something that was trained on a Getty set, and then you use that on Cover Magazine instead of licensing Getty. Getty wins under this ruling, I think. Well, this unrealized on the idea that all pictures of prints are from Getty. Like, if you have a data set that's trained on just, I don't know, a lot of people took pictures of prints, how does Getty prove that, okay, were the ones who created?

created this thing that then they're drawing from. Like, that seems like it cuts to the question of, like, the amount used. Yeah, it does. And I think Gettie's answer in the Gettie case is going to be like, you're generating our watermark on your pictures. Like, I mean, like comically stupid stuff is going on. But I would just say this Twitter case, we thought would be this lightning bolt and this kind of, we'll see what happens.

It's nothing right now. And this Warhol case, I think, is going to throw a loop into the generative AI conversation in a very serious way. Yes, potentially. Yeah, as always with our nation's government. Who knows what will happen? Well, and always with copyright. This is my dream.

David's Nightmare, my dream. We're only one segment in, and we've done the Princess Bride and we've done copyright law. This is Neely's greatest. I got to say Fedora Boys. It's everything I've ever wanted. We did the accent. One Mariah Carey reference away. Last thing with Adi here.

This is another thing that when we were walking in, David challenged me to put a percentage on how much this will matter. Montana passed a law last night. It, like, in the evening, like at 6.30 p.m. Okay, it was a little earlier by their time. It means, you know, it's like a sunset signing ceremony. Governor G. Forte. It was like, I hereby ban TikTok. And he said it's because it's a Chinese company.

It's scraping our data. The law specifically, I think, bans TikTok from being distributed in app stores. Yes. Or I'm making scare quotes here, operated. So if you open TikTok, you're operating it. Well, that's the question, right? A real question. Whether, okay, so opening the app or making the app available is explicitly operating.

One thing we don't know about is whether the web interface is operating. Okay. Like if you visit TikTok.com, and we should be clear, users, no one's getting sued over this. It does not apply to users. But if you visit TikTok.com from inside Montana, is that TikTok operating in Montana and therefore TikTok's going to get punished for that? I'm a little nebulous on that. Yeah.

And I don't think TikTok knows. I don't think Apple or Google knows. I don't think the governor of Montana knows. But he signed this bill saying TikTok can no longer operate in the state of Montana. It does not go into effect until January, 24. So you got six months or so, a little over six months. What happened? I mean, there's immediately going to be lawsuits, right?

I'm actually wondering about that because there is one other possibility in, well, there are two other cases in which this law never comes into effect and we never see it. The first is that Congress passes a law. that's nationwide that bans TikTok and does something similar. Something like the Restrict Act. Yes. So if Congress passes the Restrict Act,

then they're just like, yeah, never mind. We're TikTok's banned. We don't care about our state's law. And so then they never have to deal with it. And then the other option is that if TikTok gets sold to a company or spun off somewhere that is not run by or in China, then this law also goes off the books. And so I think those are two possibilities.

And I'm wondering if those possibilities are going to be strong enough that people decide they don't want to sue. That seems like maybe an option, but I think that would be a pretty big bet. And so, yeah, there are almost certainly going to be lawsuits. The people I would lean, I would expect it's possible TikTok would file one. It's also very plausible that a group of users would do that. That is actually how the WeChat lawsuit went to court after Trump tried to ban it, was that all of these users got together and said, this is infringing on our free speech rights. And so then a judge actually provisionally sort of agreed with them. And so it's possible we'll see, I don't know, the ACLU file a suit that says.

They collect a bunch of TikTok users and says this is infringing on our rights. Net Choice is the other organization. It's a trade group that ends up filing a lot of lawsuits against state cases, state laws. And so it's possible they will also do something. I just can't imagine why they wouldn't. Because on the one hand, I mean, it really seems to me like every single. action happening right now is designed to force a sale because there's just either a bunch of technology exists to geo fence the app store in a way that I don't understand or what Montana is

proposing is to essentially punish Apple for TikTok existing, which seems like a mess. Because what you're saying is like if you're going to have TikTok in your app store or let people who have iPhones or in Google's case, Android phones, use TikTok, we're going to penalize you. That's a real weird move, especially when Google and Apple have like pretty big levers they can pull to make users in Montana very mad at the government who's doing this. So I just, if you play this all the way out, it doesn't make sense to me how this works. And there's been no real communication from the state of Montana, how any of this is going to work. So I have to imagine everybody is just pushing for it. The governor's brother has a company called Big Buck.

Right. He's just hoping that Typhi is like, fine, we're merging with Big Buck. Yeah. And now the governor owns TikTok. Basically, yeah. They're like, it's a big, you know, political win in a moment where everyone is worried about China and there's a lot of feelings about TikTok and everybody likes to talk about, you know, half of American support of in on TikTok. And you just get to keep trying to push this thing down the road of let's sell TikTok and then everybody who is part of this gets to take yet another victory lap. But in the meantime, like, that's a big thing to do.

It's going to take a long time to do. January 2024 is not that far away. and it seems, I don't know. When I asked Neli this, I was like, what do you think? There's like a 5% chance that this happens. And his response was basically like, well, everything is pure chaos. So who knows? 50-50.

And that's fair. And so if I'm someone interested in making sure that TikTok continues to exist in the state of Montana and everywhere, why wouldn't you just immediately start yelling loudly to any judge who will listen about free speech? I feel the pessimistic take is. that everyone has this kind of it can't happen here feeling where they believe that something is too outlandish to actually come to pass until it's already there. And so everyone's like, yeah, somebody else will stop at this is so ridiculous. No one would ever like want this to happen. That's fair. And then comes January and it's happened. Is it also possible that it's a tough look

to be on the side of TikTok right now? I think that TikTok, you are, if you're siding with it, you are not only siding with China. I am putting scar quotes around everything. You are also siding with big tech. And so, yeah, I think that there's also, it's possible no one wants to take the reputational hit. There's a handful of like younger Democratic congresspeople and they kind of talk to them during the TikTok hearings, right? Like it's a tiny pocket of people who are like, this seems like a government overreach. But they don't seem to have any power in the situation.

Like they have very low risk. The other thing I've heard is that it's kind of it's all chilling effects that the goal isn't even necessarily to say we will literally crack down on TikTok for being in Montana. it's just to try to make Apple and Google drop it by making it toxic, like that you're never going to have to actually sue them. You're never going to have to technically punish them. You're just going to get them to kick TikTok off. And then it's, you know, going to be pretty debilitated there. So this is really interesting because Apple and Google don't, they don't have this ability right now.

They can block apps by country, but they have never built the infrastructure to say, we know you're in Montana. And so we're going to block this app from being downloaded in Montana. I think the goal is that they would just kick them off in general. Do you think the governor of Montana is like, I will ban TikTok in the United States of America because Apple can't figure out how to not allow downloads of Montana. It's like the flip side of the right to repair laws where it's like once one state everybody has to follow along because they don't want to make. Yeah, but usually their states are like California and New York.

Right. Yeah, well, it's Montana's tour. It's Big Box time. I'm just like, like, if you're TikTok, you're looking at like the raw population of Montana and you're like, well, I think the counter argument would be that a bunch of states are trying to consider this. And Montana has just said, we're the ones who pull the trigger first. And so if you're looking, I mean, look, I'm not going to put anything past California at this point in terms of making weird tech laws. But if you have a bunch of states that are saying we just want to try to ban TikTok, then, yeah, there's all this pressure on Apple and Google to just kick it out.

And then you don't have to worry about all of the incredibly wonky geo-fencing stuff because it's just gone and you have to go to www.w.tick-tok.com or sideload it. On your extremely powerful mobile web browser that Apple certainly loves you using. That's actually another really interesting piece of the puzzle, right? What does it mean to operate in the state? Do the ISPs of Montana have to block? This was part of the bill. Earlier, it was. It was part of an original draft that ISPs had to, they had the same punishments that app stores have,

and then that got cut by the bill. Maybe because everyone's like, this is a little too great firewall. Just a tiny bit. And so now TikTok just has to proactively block itself from being served in Montana? Yes. Amazing. Super great. I love this bill. I'm saying 50-50. If I'm TikTok, I'm suing. If I'm Apple and I'm Google, I am thinking about the net choices of the world filing a lawsuit on my behalf, saying this is a weird restraint on trade. Like, gin up some complaint about that sort of idea. The other wrinkle with Montana is that so the Restrict Act and some other places make this kind of pretense of, yeah, it's a TikTok punishment. But actually, it's just any company that's a threat to us. Montana's like, no, TikTok. You, TikTok here, which raises really specific issues legally because you are not supposed to make a law that is just essentially trying to replicate punishing one company.

I'd like to ban Neli from the state of Montana. Yes. Do you think I'm not? I encourage you to look at the book. It was a great weekend. Oh, and we should note that they also expanded their government device ban to include telegram, Timo, and we cheer. We do. We watch the app for Timo.

It's the shopping app for billionaires. You get to shop like a billionaire. Boy, you should ban that app. That ad was too sexy. That's all I got to say. Too many people whispering about you feeling like a billionaire. Weird. It was like the Spice Girls did an e-commerce ad.

I don't know how to describe it. David, you talked to Hank Green, notable Montana creator and TikToker about this band. Yeah, he was kind of nonplussed. When we go to break, we should play a few minutes of my chat with him because he was really interesting, but he was saying basically that he's in a good position because he's somebody who has a big audience and lots of different platforms, that the real people who would be hurt and affected by this are smaller creators who have really bet on TikTok in a big way. He also posited that what will happen is people will just like drive to Idaho and get TikTok and then come back. It'll be like going

to the grocery store. He just like go out, download your TikToks and come back. And he was kind of of the mind that like how on earth would you possibly enforce this and is this actually going to turn into anything? But the point that he made that I thought was really interesting was to your Bikbach point, there's this idea right now that you can just like rip and replace TikTok that if we just boot TikTok out of America, we have YouTube shorts and we have Instagram wheels. We can't do rip and replace either. We also can't rip and replace.

We tried that with Huawei and that hasn't worked either. But if you just kick it out, that something will replace it, everybody will have somewhere else to go. It'll be an American-owned company. You know, everybody wins. And that's just not how it works. Like, TikTok has this very specific culture with different kinds of users, doing different things and seeing different things and having different kinds of experiences

than anywhere else. And even if you just suddenly were like, TikTok is dead, long-lived Bikbock, it doesn't work like that. And our options are either have TikTok or don't have TikTok, right? Like, there is no third option. Well, so this is playing in two ways right now that I think are really interesting. One, directly related TikTok, we are at Google on. saw a bunch of Google people, and I said, where is the culture of YouTube shorts?

Totally. Like, I understand what the culture of TikTok is. To some extent, because Instagram had such a strong culture onto itself, even Instagram Reels has a, like, a vibe to it. It's a very low rent vibe. But it's kind of lifestyle-y. It is the thing that it is, it's just a desperate craven vibe. Yes. It's Instagram Reels.

It says, buy the shampoo, please. Yeah. And then YouTube Shorts is just like, just shoveling. in boots of anything that was successful on the other platforms. And it's like it doesn't have an identity. And it's the thing that should win. It's the thing that makes the most sense. And they haven't figured out yet.

And they were kind of like, yeah, we haven't figured out yet. And then the other one that's really interesting is Blue Sky, right? Which is as much of a clone of Twitter as you can get. And there's a lot of parts that we talked about this at length. There's a lot of parts of it that are just Twitter again. And then you see there's a whole new culture emerging on that platform. And maybe it will survive and maybe it will fail. Who knows what will happen?

but it's not just it's Twitter again. Right. Like very actively people are like, we don't want to do this again. So if you get rid of TikTok, yeah, maybe everyone will go to YouTube shorts, but it will never be the thing again. And some people will just quit and some people will choose to use it differently. And I agree that that particular piece of the puzzle, it's like once you have a big, vibrant network, it either lives or it dies. Right. You can't port it somewhere else.

It is bizarre that people have been, are saying that given that I thought that network effects was just the thing that everyone talked about, how that was all that mattered online. For years. No, the internet is just no one understands it. It's great. It's a series of tubes and vertical videos. One more thing to talk about really quickly with Addy. Sam Altman was in front of Congress this week. They seemed to love it.

Boy genius really wooed the members of Congress this week. Yeah, they asked if he wanted to run a regulatory agency. Will you be in charge? And his answer from where I gather was yes. He said, he said, I love my job. My current job. It's okay. That's what you say right before he quit your job.

I think James Vincent, who has a piece going up on this, called a chummy. Yeah. So, yeah, he was the sort of anti-Zuckerberg. So they want to regulate AI. They don't have the weird First Amendment problems they did with, like they, they don't know that yet. Government famously failed to regulate social media. They famously failed to pass even privacy laws in this country.

I think one of the reasons they failed to regulate social media is they just couldn't, they just couldn't figure out the First Amendment. They're like, boy, this thing. And at some point, both Trump and Biden were like, yeah, this. we should just do some speech regulations. Like, on both sides, yeah, they're like, this First Amendment's really pesky. We'd like to tell us to Zuckerberg what to do,

and they couldn't figure it out, which I think is on the whole good. On the AI side, they're like, this is a threat to humanity. When you know what to do here, we're going to do export regulations, we're going to ban the chips from going to China. Like, the whole list, and Sam Altman was like, I appreciate all of your ideas. I'm proposing an agency called Oasis, which is like Office of Artificial Intelligence.

Yes. It's very good. I love a good. I love a good fake acronym. It's very good. It is very sci-fi. It's ready player one. It's ready player one.

Yeah. Yep. But there was this notion that like this should definitely be regulated. Like I'm building on technology that I am not comfortable with. It should be regulated. Sooner up a try. It should be regulated. Obviously Microsoft's very close with Open AI.

They feel the same way. It seems like that's coming and they're more open to it in a way that the social media companies were always like. I don't know. The number of times Mark is. Zucker, I mean, like, Facebook ran ad campaigns. That's true. Dear God, please regulate us.

And I think they knew that they were always going to be one step ahead. And if I'm going to be cynical about Sam Altman, he's sitting there being like, he's not saying like, please regulate us. He's like, kicking him back in his chair. He's being like, yeah, regulate us. What are you going to do? The thing James pointed out is that also he was saying, yeah, we should be regulated because in the future, we might do really dangerous things, you know, in the future going forward.

The sort of counterpoint is that there's the AI Act right now going through in the EU and that it focuses a lot on really present day harms. There's things like surveillance or like face recognition and that this didn't really get that much of a hearing earlier this week in the U.S. That a lot of it is these kind of big apocalyptic scenarios and they're potentially skipping over the things that might happen right now before AI becomes Skynet. Yeah. And Sam Altman, to his credit, has done whether, you know, honestly or as a PR move, a very smart job of loudly saying he's worried about those things too. So, and I think that's the part that's different about social media, right? Because Congress was sitting up there saying social media is bad. And the CEOs were like, no, social media is a universal good that connects people to each other. In this one, Sam Altman is able to sit there and say, I'm worried about all the same things that you are. I'm not perpetuating them, but maybe someday in the future things will get bad. So let's work on it together. And he has. at least like an ounce more credibility than the social media seat. I think the difference, though, is that social media, one of the reasons they can't say will prevent any bad use is because a lot of this is up to users. But social media is a tool used by a lot of people.

And if you can't let people do what they want to some extent on social media, you don't have a product. In AI, I think that there is really, you can say, yeah, we're going to have these very circumscribed uses. We will control absolutely everything you can do with AI, us as Open AI. We will tell you exactly what you're able to. say with these tools, we will tell you exactly what pictures you can generate. There's not really the same downside there, so of course they can tell Congress.

Like, we will control exactly how this is used. And if it's something bad, we'll stop it. Yeah. Maybe. I mean, we're already seeing, like Sunaar Pichai said, already they're seeing their AI used in ways they couldn't predict and didn't know about it. It's like this stuff is. But that's pretty normal.

But the point is that they can stop that, is that they can see something and they'll say you'll do that and then they can just shut that down. Whereas if you do that enough in social media, then it no longer really feels like a thing that you were able to meaningfully do anything with as a user. True. Yeah, it is different in the sense that it is like the social media stuff is person to person and the platform is sort of underneath trying to solve it afterwards. There's a dial labeled horny.

And if Jack Dorsey had that dial on Twitter and he turned it down too low, Twitter would die. Satchanadella is fucking so hard. This is a thing. This is what top of her head. It broke, man. Sachinela just kicked it. It's like Max Horny. Max Horny Bing.

Let's do it. Addy, thank you so much. always delight. We're going to take a quick break. Here's David talking to Hank Green about the TikTok ban in Montana. We'll get back. So this like TikTok ban in Montana has been brewing for a while. You're a person who makes TikToks from Montana. Has this like changed your life? Have you been thinking about this at all? Like what do you do when this is happening? Honestly, it seems like I think that we're mostly talking about it because it's a good sounding headline. It's like Montana first day to ban TikTok. Because it ties into the broader narrative of a of a, of a, of,

a very important conversation. I'm not saying it's not important, but I do think that it is mostly news because it ties into the broader conversation rather than this thing itself being news for a few reasons. But mostly the big reason is it seems unlikely to actually happen. That's basically right. So, but let's play this out a little bit. So it's, it's, we've got, you know, seven months, eight months, however long it is, until this comes into play. For you as a person who is, you know, increasingly invested in TikTok, you've a big audience here, you make a lot of stuff here. Yeah. What do you think about, even if there's a 2% chance that TikTok goes away. And this is true of sort of the broader US band of TikTok in general, right? And this is, I know a thing you've talked

about. But how do you sort of hold the idea in your head that this is a remote possibility, but it's, it's not not a possibility. It is a possibility. Well, what I'll do is if it seems possible, I'll go get a new phone that day, and I'll download TikTok onto it, and then I'll have that phone for a few years. And TikTok will be a zombie app. Like, I won't get updates on it. So that'll be a problem. But I'll keep making content and and I'll keep uploading it. Like, I'm like the, probably like the person you least should be talking about about this because like, one, I have a well established audience and I've like got all, I'm well diversified among a bunch of social media platforms, which is tricky to do. And it's taken me 15 years, but I've done it. But there's a lot of TikTokers for who this is a much

bigger deal. And that is both because like maybe their phone's old and they can't off. afford a new one and it's going to peter out. And like six months in, they won't be able to get TikTok or they have to drive to Idaho, which isn't, I mean, depending on where you live, it can be quite, it could be a distance to get out of Montana. For me, it's about an hour. I kind of like the idea of like having to drive an hour to do TikTok. Well, just to download the app and then you drive back. And then you can use it again. I like, I'll just go to Idaho. Like, when I'm in California, I'll update the app and then I'll fly home. You know, like the entire idea of geofencing the app store is very strange. Like, I don't know if they, if anyone knows how to do that or whether that's even

possible. Do you think that's possible? You know more about that than I do. If it makes you feel any better, even the lawyers we've talked to, they don't know either. Which is part of why I think this is such an interesting moment because it's a series of weird, untested things that no one has ever had to answer before. And it's like, is it likely to get through, even if you consider sort of each one of these hurdles of toss up, is it likely to get through every single toss up? probably not. But again, like, never rule out the weirdest outcome. This is the world we live in now. Who's to say? So back to what you're saying about sort of being a diversified creator who's a little less worried about it than most. Like, what do you say to those people? I'm sure a lot of them ask you, like, Hank, what am I going to do if TikTok gets banned? What do you tell those people, like, go, you know, find a time machine, go back 15 years and make this thing called SciShow. It's pretty cool. It'll work really well for you. I mean, it's the same conversation that I have all the time, like for completely different reasons. People lose their TikTok accounts all.

the time. TikTok is a very weirdly moderated place. People lose accounts with millions of followers, and there is no recourse. There's no person to email. There's nothing you can do. V. Pappas and I, like, go back a bit. And if a friend of mine says to me, Hank, my TikTok account got banned for no good reason, they said I was 13, but I'm a 45-year-old man. Or something like, like, seriously, there's no one I can email to fix that. You know, you're sort of of building your house or your business on somebody else's land when you're making on social media platforms always. You know, and like YouTube changes its rules and they change how the algorithm works and they change how advertising works and they start demonetizing things. And like all this

stuff happens. And like it has really big impacts on people's businesses. And then a lot of times those businesses close down. And there's nothing to do about it because you built your house on somebody else's land. So that that's not that new, honestly. So it's a very similar conversation. I do say to all creators all the time, try and develop close direct connections with your audience, whether that's through newsletters or through Patreon or those are two of the really good ways to do it. And also diversify across platforms if you can, but that's very hard to do. Yeah. It's interesting to me that, like, the way you describe it is even as it becomes more work, TikTok is still worth the effort.

And I just can't stop thinking about this thing you brought up where like there is definitely going to be, if this all comes out the way that it might, there's going to be like a black market for phones that have TikTok installed. And like, that's insane. What a bizarre world's living. I mean, there's a black market for driving to Wyoming. Like, I don't know. Like, how is the geofence work? It's not like on the individual phone, I wouldn't think.

I think it would be based in like VPNs. And I don't know. It seems like there's going to be ways to get around it. But I do like the idea of the black market TikTok phone where I'm like scrounging around. I'm on Craigslist being like, I'm Hank Green. I'll pay $10,000 for a TikTok phone. Right. And somebody's like, I have a, I have a 2012 iPad that runs it. Do you want that? And you're like, okay, I'll take it. It's all that's out there. I did this with like my MacBook once where like they got rid of the SD card slot and I was like, I'm just going to keep buying old MacBooks until they bring that back. Because I'm not going to live that dongle life.

But at what point does it become not worth the trouble? Because it seems like part of all of this is just to make TikTok harder and more annoying. And if you can sort of make it frustrating for people to use, maybe they'll leave. But. What does that point look like? I mean, it's going to be really different for different people. Like, for example, for me, my audience, I have a great kinds of content for YouTube shorts. Like people on YouTube like the kind of content that I make. But, like, TikTok is very culturally different. And the thing that we don't do a good job of understanding is that social media platforms are not the code. They are not the algorithm.

They are the cultures that exist there. And, like, there are ways that the platform influences the culture. and the ways the culture influence is the platform. And it's much more complicated than we tend to give you credit for. And you won't, you can't recreate that culture. It's like, it's like trying to take, you know, the Gilman Street punk scene and move it to Boise. Like, it's just not going to happen. Like, if it becomes much easier and better to use YouTube shorts and much harder and worse to use TikTok,

what that will create is new cultures on YouTube shorts, but it will not be a direct port. It will be a moment of cultural destruction, which is like a big deal. And I don't think that we give it credit for the bigness of that part of the deal. Like culture is important and it's a very strange thing for, I don't think that the people writing these laws have any idea the impact that they could have. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise grade, no code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move fast. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing,

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Terms and conditions apply. All right, we're back. Inconceivable. We just took a two hour long ad break so that we could watch the Princess Bride. It's a good movie. I'm just saying it's for children and you cannot be tough. I will watch it tonight. Good.

And it's going to happen. You're going to see some stuff as an adult that you just missed. as a child. I'm sure that's true. It's just very true. Anyway, we're back. Richard Lawler is here. Hey, Richard. Hey, good to be back. Fan favorite Richard Lawler is here. We've heard the requests. They've been heard. Most of them were from me, but okay. Richard just calls the hotline once a week with a new voice saying, where's Richard? Yeah, it's good stuff. It's his AI voice. No, I don't use AI because AI is evil, but there you go. See, culture war is here. You can't replace Richard, man. The robot. All right, we got to talk about some gadgets.

It was a heady conversation just now. Yeah. And now we're going to talk about the stupidest TV ever made. The David loves. The next TV that I own is what you meant to say. So get into it, man, the telly. Talk about it. Okay, so this thing is called telly, which, first of all, unbelievable name.

I hated it the first time I heard it. I've come all the way around. It's extremely good. It's a new company created by one of the founders of Pluto TV, which is like one of the fast ad-supported streaming TVs. And its thing is basically they're going to give you the TV for, free. And in exchange, they're going to have a second screen below your TV that's like a wide sort of Kairon looking thing about the third, the height of the TV, but just as wide, that is just for

showing you ads. So you essentially, you get a free television and a ad bar in your house that is just a billboard that lives in your house and shows you ads while you watch TV. There are a bunch of other weird things about this TV. Many other weird things about this TV. So, so many. But I just, I just want to tell you. you my two favorites. Okay. It's a 55-inch 4K TV. That's good.

It has no built-in streaming stuff. So in addition to shipping you a TV, they will also ship you. I believe it's an Android TV dongle. Wait, wait, wait. Yeah, it's not a smart TV. In the specs, they're like built-in streaming stick. And I thought they were just... No.

It's just built into the box. I thought they were just trying to like meet the people where they are, you know? It's just a dongle that plugs in. I don't know what it is, but it is just a dongle of the plugs in. Oh, that's so good. They just... I bet there's something like a patent thing where, like, if it's in the TV, they have to pay an extra buck and they're just trying to shape every single dollar off so that it can be free. I suspect you're right.

Yeah. And then the other thing, which we'll get to in a minute, is that it has the worst and jankiest privacy policy in the history of the known universe. We will come to this. But I have not looked at this television. I don't know. I'm all in on this thing. You love it. My basic thesis here is that, A, two screens is actually an extremely good idea.

I just get to have like a CNN-style Kiron just showing me sports scores while I watch whatever else. Into that. David just had a kid and he misses being at the airport and the bar. That's what I'm getting from this conversation. This explains a lot about a lot of things. Just show me who's yelling about politics on the bottom at all times. And then it's all ads anyway. Like watching TV now, it's full of ads.

You go on YouTube. You watch ads. there's a bunch of ad news this week about how popular ads are and ads are coming back. So I'm like, whatever, give me one more ad and you're going to give me a TV for free? I'm sold. I'm super stuck on the streaming stick situation. Okay, so it says 4K streaming stick included, which again, I just read is like we're meeting the Walmart buyer where they are, right?

No, they literally mean included. Let me read you from Emma Roth wrote a story about this and she said, unlike, this is the most like understated burn of all time. I love it. Unlike most mainline smart TV operating systems, TeleOS, amazing name, currently doesn't support third-party streaming apps like Netflix. Little old app like Netflix. Who needs it? That's why Ateli comes bundled with a free 4K Android TV dongle that you can use to watch whatever streaming service you want. Right, because they don't need to worry about Universal Search or all this stuff where they need deals because they're just running ads on the bottom of the TV. Correct. They built, ironically, a dumb TV with ads.

Okay, well, so then here's my next question, because it has, on the spec sheet, it's labeled future-proofed. Yeah. And its evidence of being future-proofed is, quote, modern hardware, that's all it says, powerful chipset, again, all it says. What a see mean. Frequent OTA updates, bringing new and better experiences like AI and smart home control. Sure. And then down at the bottom. That's another box they ship.

Yep. Somebody else invents that, and then they'll just give it to you. And then it has a camera. Yep. and a mic array. The camera is an HD camera, no specs, for video calling, fitness, and interactive gaming. Unclear where any of that runs. It's not important.

Don't worry about it. It's for that. It can't do that. I don't know. And then it says, Mike Array with, quote, hey, telly voice control. Oh, Lord. So this thing is run in some software. Yes.

But just not Netflix. Just not streaming apps. Not the software that you want. That you have to make biz dev deals for. And then it has a motion sensor. for wake up and interactive gaming is they think they've built a Nintendo Wii with ads. And also to make sure that you are sitting there watching the ads. That's what it is.

Right. So they're like their advertisers said, we will only pay for this if we know for sure that somebody is actually sitting there watching television. And they said, oh, crap, we have to put a camera in everybody's TV and a microphone to make sure that they're actually in the room. What weird features can we invent such that we can put these in there and get away with it? So again, and if you opt out of sharing your viewing and activity data, this is what says in the privacy policy.

Unfortunately, that means you will no longer have access to the services and must return the television or you can pay $500. I am going to so immediately pay the $500 just to have this weird TV in my house. I get a two-screen TV for $500. Someone's going to hack it. It's going to be cool. And they're going to put like subway information on it. Stock tickers without their services.

And then I'll get sued. I'm thinking like ultra widescreen gaming on the bottom. But if this TV costs $500 and it has two-screen. in a sign bar and then do you know how shit this panel has to be you get two LEDs yeah on and off exactly it's like it says here backlight I'm in love with this I love the audacity I love the new product if you were an old head like me you remember this thing called the QCat from a long time ago this is like an old old internet controversy Richard's not in his head Richard was on slash dot in the QCat basically they handed out like barcode scanners

to people and you were supposed to like barcode scan print magazines and then it would like take you to what, I don't know what they were supposed to do. And people immediately hacked these barcode scanners. Like QR codes before QR codes? David, where were you in 1999 when this was going down? I mean, this was like a big deal that people were hacking the barcode scanners. They were handing out for free. Like, this was all over the New York Times and Wall Street Journal. This was the story of the 2000s. And then people, it was the story that 2000. Well, other than a few other things. Yeah. It was like the Q-Cat and then like Bush v. Gore. You know, it was like somewhere in there, a talented young artist named Britney Spears released her first single, but overshadowed by the QCat.

Anyhow, people started hacking it and not using their weird DRM software. And the company freaked out and started suing everybody. Oh, wow. And I'm, I don't know, Richard, I saw this thing and I saw that screen on the bottom. And I was like, oh, this is a massive QCat situation. People are going to take this. They're not going to pay for it. They're never going to sign up for their services.

They are immediately going to hack it because it's run in some janky version of Android. Yeah. Like the most hackable thing that's ever been created. And they're going to be like, I got myself a free two-screen TV. And this company is going to lose their mind. Yes. There is no chance to succeed. No, they're going to be in business for like 15 minutes, but that's long enough for me to sign up to get one of these televisions.

And that's all I record. All right. We got to talk about the privacy policy. Okay. Go ahead. This is your TV. As far as I'm convinced, you're the CEO of this company. So credit to Shoshana Widdinsky for being the first one to find this.

In Telly's privacy policy, I believe it's not there anymore, but it was, briefly, one of the things that talks about is the personal data of children, right? It's obviously super regulated what you can do with the personal data of children. And if you have a large television in your home, odds are if there's also a child under 13, they're going to see it. So they have to have a rule about this. So they go through all this stuff. If you're under 13, you can't have an account. You shouldn't have personal data. We're not collecting personal data.

And then it says, if we learn we have collected personal data from a child under 13 years of age, we will delete that information as quickly as possible. And then a parenthetical that I am quite confident was not meant to be in the published version and is clearly written by a lawyer says, parentheses, I don't know that this is accurate. Do we have to say we will delete the information or is there another way around this? 10 parentheses. It's like literally the most saying the quiet part loud that has ever happened in the history of the world. It's good. The company wrote to us, we have a long statement from Dallas Lawrence, Tully's chief strategy officer. He says it's all out of context.

It's literally. It's in, it's right, the context is right there. It could not be more in context. It's the privacy policy. They published an early version of the policy. The TV is only meant to be used by people who are over 18, which, natural for a television. Which they prove with the camera that watches you all the time. They've changed it. I'm just saying this thing, just read up on the Q-Cat.

Like, if you want to know what's going to happen with the tele. It's the thing that happened with the Q-Cat. This company has an entire business model based on tracking an advertising and advertising. But they've built a piece of hardware that they have no shot at locking down. Richard, are you going to buy one of these? And by buy, I mean, allow yourself to be given one for free. No. I don't know if you can see here.

I have too many TVs already. Otherwise, I would be all over. Let's go. I may be, you know, on a restriction when it comes to display. That's for the best. But this is like, this is the business model for all TV makers now. Viziel's been basically giving away TVs for years. Their TV business makes no money.

The business that sells subscriptions and ads. advertising makes money. That's exactly right. Tele is just doing it with more screens. I don't see the downside. Well, the downside is that a $500 panel is not going to be good. When you describe full array backlighting, that doesn't mean like a flashlight. One array.

Single array backlighting. It's fair. It's true. Every TV maker, we get this question all the time, all the time people are asking us, why can't I just buy a monitor and plug my Apple TV into it? And the answer is you can, and you can go out in the market and buy it. They're hard to find, and they cost thousands upon thousands of dollars because the architecture of subsidizing the TV is not included. Every time you sign up for an app on Roku, Roku gets a piece.

Just like on your phone. Every ad that's delivered on a Roku, Roku gets a piece. Yep. That's it. Remember when Peacock came out and wasn't on Roku's? They were arguing over ad serving. This thing is like, that seems hard. Another display.

Just a whole ass. display for our ads to run. I remember when Vizio was going to go public, they were going to have an IPO, and they released this document, obviously, for investors about their business and all their opportunities. And they mentioned this little section in there about this company called Inscape. That was their big plan to make a ton of money. And I read it, and I was like, wait, I've been reporting on Vizio for years, and I've never

heard of this thing. And that's because they had never talked about it, really. And that was, and after that, they got sued because everyone found out what they were doing with their data. Yeah. So they've backed off of the. That was years ago since I've gone public, but every TV on the market today can do ACR automatic content recognition and tell people what you're watching. It's just a thing.

You can go turn off. I haven't turned off on my TV. I don't even want my TVs connect to Wi-Fi. Do you know how you get a monitor? You buy a smart TV. You never let it connect to Wi-Fi. That's what I did. I went into the ERO settings and it was like, do you want to let this TCL thing connect to the Internet?

It's like, nope. Yep. So now I have a- America's dumbest smart TV. Oh, yeah. It hates it. Yeah. TV makers hate this one weird trick.

Let me connect to the internet. Anyhow, I can't wait for you to get this TV. I'm so excited. And I can't wait for the people on Reddit to figure out how to hack the spot on display. Oh, yeah. I think it's legal for me to say that. I'm not saying you should do it. I'm not saying I'm doing it.

I've never used a computer in my life. I'm just saying I anticipate the day that someone might do it. It is literally inevitable. It's just going to happen. Inconceivable. Talk about these echo buds. And the beat studio, a big week for headphones. Chris Walsh has been on a roll here.

Yeah. Richard, what do you make of these echo buds? So Amazon, as I just want to do, came out with a bunch of new stuff. New Echo Pop, little colorful-looking smart speaker that looks kind of like they took an echo dot and just, like, chopped it in half. And then the Echo Buds, super cheap, like, prototypey-looking things with no design or interesting features whatsoever, but they're like $40 wireless headphones, so I can't be that mad at them. I don't know.

What do you make of all this? They should have just called these the Amazon Basics buds. Yes, that's absolutely right. Because then we all would have understood how to take this. You could put Alexa in it, you can do whatever. But you put Echo on it, and then you say it's $50, and you show me these that have no branding. If you saw them sitting on a table, you would have no idea what buds they were. You would understand that, yes, these are earbuds in the most generic sense.

And I'm sure they're probably fine. Amazon basics. Yeah, I really, I'm a big believer in cheap ones like this because I think we're entering a point where, like, if you want to to spend $150 or more, you're like absolutely spoiled for choice when it comes to wireless earbuds. There's so many good ones out there. The AirPods are good. The new beats ones are great. Like, Sony makes good ones. JBL makes, like, there's tons of good ones out there. But the low-end stuff, and most of the people I know who don't want to spend that much money on headphones there, but then they're like, I literally can't find earpods anymore. So like, what do I buy? I'm stuck

buying wireless headphones. So I'm like, psych that these exist. But, like, you couldn't design these less than they are currently designed. This is, if you just imagine, close your eyes, don't close your eyes for driving, but pull over and then close your eyes, and imagine the most boring, nondescript wireless headphones you've ever seen in your life. And the echo buds are like 40% more boring than that. It's really kind of incredible. It reminds me of the, do you remember the first Chromebook, the CR 48?

Yeah. Where Google was like, we made this black rectangle that is not at all interesting. And we don't know what to do with it, so we're just going to ship it. So we're just going to ship it and call it on the first Chromebook. It's good. This is that again. I appreciate it. They are, they're, it's something.

Amazon's going to give them to you for free if you sign it for Prime. Yeah, they'll just come in every box you can sign it from now on. But the Beat Studio Buds plus look amazing. They do look amazing. Richard, are you a headphone guy in general? Not so much, but I do have the Beat Studio Buds love them. Okay. I think that they are Apple's secret plan to get data from Android users.

Because Android, I know a lot of people who use Android. And I know myself, this is probably the Apple product I most quickly and most eagerly bought, and then I bought these new Beat Studio Buds Plus, too. Yeah, so the deal with the Plus, right, is basically they're just, they have this, like, amazing-looking translucent design. They look great. Like, the pictures Chris Walsh took with his review are beautiful, and the headphones look fantastic. But otherwise, it's just like it's the studio buds, but like everything is slightly better now, right?

Yeah, but a slightly better processor, slightly better case with a little bit bigger battery, better active noise cancellation, better, you know, listening to you, all of those things. But it's still the same. Okay. And how do they fit? The one thing that has always worried me, and I've never actually used these myself, but they seem they're very small. Like they don't have the stem that the AirPods do.

They're kind of a little circle that just sort of sticks in your ear. Yeah. One of the reasons I like these in particular, because I also got the pixel buds around the same time with my phone. And those would always fall out in my ears, like if just for no reason. These tiny never fell out of my ears I could do anything And they just they felt good I could sit there and listen to podcast for however long

I wanted to And I immediately went out The studio buds plus or I will once I go pick them up Yeah They look really good Like just for aesthetic purposes alone I kind of want to buy on there They're 169 bucks

They also come in regular colors But the clear model is the only way to go Yeah you gotta get the video Don't get regular stuff You gotta look at these photos Pull over in your car look at Chris's photos He found a bunch of vintage clear gadgets It's good

If you existed in the 90s, you know why. I had the clear QCat, you know what I'm saying? I'm hopeful that this translucent design thing is coming back. Yeah. That, like, I would love to see all kinds of stuff like this. Like, Apple, make the next iPhone this, like, frosted translucent thing. I'm in. Sold.

That would be amazing on the next iPhone. Right? Like straight up, like Bondy blue translucent. Yeah, it'd be amazing. Some people haven't liked them. They don't have wireless charging. They don't have like the in-ear sensor, I think, to automatically know when you take them out of your ear or things like that. So if that's something that's something that you add.

absolutely cannot live without. They may not do it for you, but yeah, I'm willing to plug these in for 20 minutes once a week to charge them. Yeah, I never wirelessly charge my iPod. Can we just talk about the ear detection thing for a sec? Do you guys use the ear detection? Do you turn it on? No. No, I turn it off. I turn it off. Okay, if I have two on, one of the nice things about wireless headphones is that I can take one of them off, talk to somebody or listen to something or whatever and then put it back in and for it to just pause and unpause and pause and repause and unpause every time I move and then it's like if you move your head slightly too fast it thinks you took it out yeah it's just awful and to me it's like it's like the thing that Apple does where when you walk into your house Apple is like do you want me to switch devices that you're listening to it's like no like just leave let me manage my headphones yeah like I'm good if I wanted to pause I would press the button that's yeah I just I'll

Literally all I have to do is tap my ear. Like, it's going to be fine. When I'm reaching up to take it out of my ear, I'll just tap on my ear with my hand that's already right there. Yeah. It makes me so crazy. Apple, like, try less hard. You just turn it off. I do.

Okay. But I do. You're still thinking about it. I don't even use Apple headphones anymore. Yeah. I have it on the Sony ones that I use, and it's still like, I don't like this. Yeah, it's not good. The Sony ones, they really believe that you should be able to put your hand to your cup.

so you can like go into transparency mode and like talk to the you know the flight attendant and I'm like every time I try to do this I'm like I look like a jerk isn't the natural behavior you just slide the you slide the air back that's that's like that's like not this thing we're like yeah excuse me yeah no awful nonsenseical okay we got to take a break and we'll come back for lighting around we'll be right back 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.

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There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. You know the Q-Cat actually looked like a cat? I have to look this thing up now. It's like C-U-E-Cat.

Yeah. How did I not know? Oh, my God. Because you were a baby. But like the Wikipedia pages long and most of it is the controversy section. This thing is horrifying. I'm going to put a link to this in the show notes and I don't recommend looking at it because it's the last thing you see before you die. It's real bad.

Rich and I like live through it. These were like the OG Internet Forum Wars. It made Time Magazine's list of the 50 worst in this one. Yes. Yes. It was one of the things that happened. Maybe not one of the best or most important, but it was definitely one of the things. Yeah.

All right. Lightning around time. I'm sorry. It's on time magazine's list of the worst inventions. Right after QCat comes subprime mortgages. That's how bad the QCat was. The early 2000s were wrong. It was a hard time to be alive.

Wow. Yeah. I just say one day there, they're going to be. going to make the big short about the QKAT. No, it'll be about divX. Oh, divx. Oh, man. The original divx.

All right. Richard, we can't, we cannot be relitigating slash dot from 2002 right now. Let's go. Let's dig through some Circuit City flyers. I'll just give people a peek into like the verge editorial process. We had our daily editorial meeting today. And Liz Lapato is like the internet, you know, Twitter's fallen apart, like searches, whatever. It's all weird.

Like, we're back to the basics. We're back to the old internet. And that was supposed to be like a rousing. to blog and to like build connections. And Richard's like, we're doing divX. I'm like, Qat drama. Let's go. I find the slash dot flame wars of ancient history.

And we're going to do them all again on the site. I love it. I think Windows is a monopoly. Linux forever. This is the year of the Linux desktop. It is. It is truly the year of the Linux desktop or two screen TVs. All right.

Lightning around, David. So what ads? Can I just tune some ads to more ads to the ad guy? I really don't know how it became my brand that I believe in ads, but here we are. Weirdly large amount of ad news this week. It's the upfronts for a lot of the Hollywood studios, which is weird and awkward and complicated because the writer's strike is happening. So it's all been very messy. But one of the things that all these companies are announcing is more ads because they want to make more money.

And they're realizing that subscription-only streaming is not actually all that good of business. but it turns out subscription plus ads is a much better business. So Netflix announced that its ad tier already has almost 5 million users, which is actually a pretty big number for as quickly as it has come out. YouTube is bringing what it calls unskippable 30-second ads to TV, which sucks real bad. It's mostly replacing two 15-second ads, but they just want to be more like TV,

which means they've always wanted to be more like TV. Right, and it's going to be more prestigious. It's only going to be for when you're watching stuff on your TV, but they're going to be bigger. more serious unskippable ads. And then Max, the streaming service that is coming from Warner Brothers Discovery, which is combining Discovery Plus and ATSD Max, has said that it's going to have shorter ad breaks than other streamers. Don't forget, it's going to cost at least $10 a month for the quote,

ad light plan, which, as I have said, implies the existence of an ad heavy plan, but we will leave that alone. And I believe he said, David Asloff said it's going to be between three and four minutes of ads per hour, which is substantially better than like if you watch broadcast TV, it's something like 18 minutes of ads per hour. So three to four is pretty good. But that is still for people paying $10 a month to also watch four minutes of ads per hour is going to frustrate some people.

So ads are coming, y'all. The world is not going down with the number of ads that it has. It's only going to get worse. So just get your TV for free from TV. It's so horrible. All right, mine. Speaking of costs going up, Verizon rejiggered its plans this week. They're bad.

They're basically unbundling a bunch of services. People are very upset about this and saying they're going to quit Verizon. The problem is that if you want a new iPhone or a new S24 or a new pixel fold when they hit, they're going to offer you subsidies to get the new plans. So new plans have left stuff. They're more expensive. This is only an entree to what I actually want to talk about. Well, I do think it's interesting though because there was a minute there where the bundles coming from carriers were really

good. Like I got a, like, Apple TV and Disney Plus and Peacock and all kinds of stuff free from your carrier. And I started, like, it became a thing I started telling people about. It was like, a new streaming service comes out. It's like, oh, tell your carrier, because there's a pretty good chance that there will be some deal because they're all so desperate. A, these companies need subscribers, so they're going through your carrier because you already have a bill, and so they can say it that way. And B, all these carriers are like desperately competing with each other. And so you're going to win. And now all at once, that seems to be getting. It was Verizon that did the most of it.

Verizon did the most, but T-Mobile started to push on some of that stuff. APT just never did anything. They're like, we've got you. They bought HBO. They bought HBO and then sold HBO. Like, I think their willingness to participate dramatically decreased. That is fair. But Verizon gave a much stuff away.

Now, all that stuff, $10 a month extra, basically. They're like, you can pick your perks and you just add them up and you end up paying about $10 a month extra. It's less good. It's less good. People are very annoyed by this, especially. the Disney Plus being out of the bundle, which I think a lot of people were depending on. I want to point out that there was a big conference this week. They called it a big 5G event.

It was a telecom conference. RCR Wireless wrote about it. Allison Johnson and I were looking at it. And there were multiple sessions at this industry conference about 5G where the carriers just admitted that all of their fancy plans to make more money with 5G have come to nothing. That they have not monetized 5G in any ways that they've been. we're not monetizing 4G. We were going to do self-driving cars. We were going to have AI generation at your house and at your Walmart.

Yeah, you were supposed to be getting surgery in a self-driving car. And these new Verizon plans are an incredible example of this because, remember all that zero latency robot surgery, Richard's talking about? All that depended on millimeter wave. It depended on those mid-band stuff. The plans now tear out the good 5G. So you have to buy the most expensive plan to get mid-term. mid-band 5G. You're just getting, on the cheaper ones, you're just getting refarmed LTE spectrum. And it's like, what was the point of all of this?

So we're just admitting failure on all of that, basically. It was just a disaster. So Ultra, Alison, right about this. Verizon is playing its cute little games of not including, quote-unquote, ultra-wide band, mid-band 5G on its lower-tray plan, only the slower nationwide 5G, which is just LTE plus or whatever. I love that they call mid-band ultra-wide band, first of all. That's incredible. Perfect, perfect. But it's like, oh, this just didn't work. Like this whole race to 5G rhetoric, all the meetings we took, like the amount of just add dollars spent.

Yep. They built the networks. Great. The networks are indeed faster. It is very cool to see how many people can stream video out of NFL stadiums during these Taylor Swift contracts. True. They've increased the capacity of the networks.

Richard, I don't know about you, but I have not yet received a robot surgery in the back of the salt driving car. Not yet. Maybe next week. You never know. I'm just saying, no one's hacking a telly in the back of a soldier. That's the Richard optimism I'm looking for right there. I like that.

Just incredible. We'll link the RCR piece in the show notes. Allison put it in a quick post on the site. But the plans are getting more expensive and the bundles are going away and the incentives are going away. Because at the end of the day, no matter how hard they have tried for decades, they cannot be anything more than a dumb pipe. Right. They've tried everything. Like, they got rid of net neutrality.

They only have the courtesy of excusing the bundle. streaming services from the data caps. That's what they were supposed to do. That was the nightmare scenario and they won't do it because they need the money. Right. Bah. Well, and I just, I feel so vindicated by this because for so many years we just kept asking people, okay, you're going to make the network faster.

That's awesome. What is that going to change other than I can download Netflix movies slightly faster than I could before? And you can. I just took a trip. You can. It was a plane. It was great. Yep.

I have downloaded many a Netflix movie. Thank you for that, everybody. But there are millions of people who have home internet from T-Mobile and stuff, it exists. Yeah. Yeah, and it changed nothing for anybody. Like, all of this new world we were supposed to enter because all of this worked. Well, so I think Richard's saying for the home internet, like the customers you can't

get good fast internet and they've got a T-Mobile home connection. Maybe they're a little bit happier. Sure. Yeah, that's something. But the thing that they can't do, which is like make more money because more people are doing more things on the internet, they just didn't figure it out because ultimately it wasn't there. I'm telling you a 5G in crypto, two biggest hype balloons of recent memory.

They're right there on top of each other. I'm not sure. In the Q-Cat. Right? Big three. The old big three. Let us know. What do you think is a bigger hype balloon, 5G or crypto?

I'm dying to know what the readers think. All right, Richard, what's your landing around? Well, you know, I don't want to bring up anything that's overhyped. Let's just talk about the Tesla robot. The last time that we saw it, the more advanced version was not walking. It was not really moving. waved its arm. We now saw a video with some segments that were sped up to 2x speed so that, you know, we weren't sitting there for a half hour, watching it hold things and occasionally

take steps. So without falling over, which is an achievement. How confident are we that this wasn't a person in a suit pretending to be a robot? There are holes in them, so there is probably not a person in a suit, I think. That's good. Was this rendered by AI? I don't know. It's really hard to say. Yeah, it is a video. They are moving slowly. It's weird. Yeah. And, you know, it's like, so they show it picking up things and putting them in a box after it watches a person and pick up things and put them in a box. So you could spend however much it costs one of these for that. Do you know that walk that people do when you like, they've like done too many squats at the gym that day and they like can't quite move their legs completely? That's how these robots walk.

Oh, I very much relate to this robot. Yeah. I move exactly like that. So many squats. This robot's yoked. He just kind of, you see what I'm? Like, look at this guy. He just kind of, he's just got his knees out, and he just kind of shuffles. Like every step might be his last. Yeah, look, I know we promised not that about Elon. I'm just going to end here.

Elon promised on CNBC in the same interview that a chat GPT moment for Tesla was coming. That's what he said. That's what he said. And maybe it's the robot. Maybe it's the self-driving robot taxis that he promised again. He said that was coming any minute now. So you know that if you buy a Tesla, the terms of service in a Tesla, prevent you from using that Tesla with any other self-driving network, like any other

Robotaxy Fleet. Really? He said this on the television. Oh, wow. And then he quoted the Princess Pride. I really just wanted to come back to the one lesson I want to offer the audience today. If you are in a situation where you need to sound tough, do not under any circumstances quote the Princess Bride.

But at the very least quote it correctly. Like use the words that they use in the movie. And don't try to do an impression of many particular. Can't access. Do Fezic, do Andre the Giant. Okay, so they just announced you can upload two-hour videos on Twitter now if you're a Twitter Blue verified. That means you can upload all of Princess Bride.

By the way, Twitter movie privacy is very funny. People are just doing it left and right because they fired everybody who does compliance at Twitter. It's amazing. I watched like a little too much of the Super Mario Brothers movie on Twitter. And I was like, I feel bad. I should not be doing this. And then you just did some more of it.

We owned that copy of the Princess Bride. The van, man. I, you know, I already paid my money for that movie. All right, that's it. That's a Vergecast. Oh, it was a good one. Thanks to Addie Robertson for joining us. Thanks to Hank Green for joining us. That's a great time. Richard, thank you so much, man. Of course. All right. When's this show? What's happening? A.M. Markey. It's true. Ed. Ed.m. Radio in cars about which he has, I'm told, very strong feelings about AM Radio is, of course. We're going to talk about Zelda. We're going to talk about Zelda. I assume this is going to be like a seven or eight hour episode because we're going to talk about Zelda. It's going to be I'm excited about it.

Very cool. That's on Wednesday. We'll be back next Friday. That's the show. 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 Box 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.