The Vergecast - Of course Meta thinks gambling is the future

Episode Date: June 26, 2026

Meta's business is doing just fine. But Meta as a company, and Meta as a series of products? That is, uh, messier. David and Nilay discuss the company's ongoing desire to be relevant and cool, the unceasing importance of Instagram, and why it makes perfect sense that Facebook would clone Polymarket. After that, the hosts talk about Apple's huge price increases, and the ways in which RAMageddon might change the gadget market forever. Then it's time for Brendan Carr is a dummy, the latest on the movie Artificial, and the looming fight over AI data. Further reading: ⁠The Steam Machine is the most ambitious game console I’ve ever played ⁠ ⁠Valve prices the Steam Machine at $1,049 ⁠ ⁠How much would the Steam Machine cost to build? ⁠ ⁠Valve describes just how brutal RAM negotiations are in 2026 ⁠ ⁠The Steam Machine is the start of an even more expensive future for game consoles ⁠ ⁠I drove the Slate Truck — there’s more to it than EV minimalism ⁠ ⁠The Slate Auto pickup truck starts at $24,950 ⁠ ⁠Meta pauses employee tracking tool after internal leak. ⁠ ⁠Now Meta will track what employees do on their computers to train its AI agents ⁠ ⁠Meta CTO Andrew Bosworth Admits the Company’s AI Reorg Was ‘Atrocious’ | WIRED⁠ ⁠Zuckerberg reportedly wants a Polymarket clone — but without real money⁠ ⁠Polymarket paid creators to post fake videos of themselves placing and winning bets. ⁠ ⁠Meta plans to release AI-powered prediction market app⁠ ⁠Facebook’s Creator Studio has been revived as an AI companion app⁠ ⁠Kaleidescape’s Strato E player blows streaming, and your wallet, away ⁠ ⁠Something’s off with Midjourney’s pivot to body scanners ⁠ ⁠People Inc. CEO says it’s “probably” headed for a confrontation with Google over AI crawling.⁠ ⁠ABC encourages viewers to back network amid FCC investigations⁠ ⁠Bob Iger’s Disney wanted Apple, Twitter, and 007 ⁠ ⁠The film about Sam Altman has been dropped by Amazon MGM ⁠ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. (Timestamps are approximate.) 00:01:00 Cannes Cold Open 00:07:00 Coach x Spotify Absurdity 00:10:00 Vox Media PMX Shakeup 00:14:00 Meta Chaos vs Money 00:26:00 Gambling as Engagement 00:33:00 Ramageddon Hits Gadgets 00:44:00 Slate Truck Price 00:45:00 Range And Truck Feel 00:48:00 Tech Bloat Backlash 00:50:00 BYD Versus Tesla 00:56:00 FCC Targets The View 01:04:00 Amazon Drops Artificial 01:08:00 Kaleidescape Versus Blu Ray 01:13:00 Bob Iger Merger Rumors 01:17:00 Blocking AI Crawlers 01:22:00 Wrap Up And Next Week Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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and I ended up at fucking Mumford and Sons. Oh, boy, I hate doing cold opens for podcasts, but can we please just do that? Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of PMX, a thing I suppose we have to talk about today. I'm your friend David Pierce, joining me from an increasingly fancy place. Neil Patel. Hey, buddy. What's up? How's it going?

Every time I see you, you seem to have moved up like one tax bracket in terms of where you're staying in the world. Where are you right now? What's going on? I'm in can in the south of France. Oh, you've moved up several tax brackets. I'm in what can only be described as an apartment at the Carlton Hotel. It is very lovely here. It is very hot.

There's a heat wave all throughout Europe and all throughout France. And I didn't know this, but apparently there's been a culture war in France over air conditioning for like years and years and years. It is like a left-right partisan issue. Oh, wow. And that has just come to an end with this heat wave as far as I can tell because everyone, from New York is it can to talk about advertising. And all the big tech platforms are here. It's basically America.

I'm just in America, but everyone's drinking smaller, more potent cups of coffee. And then the air conditioning everywhere is just cranked to the max. It's wild. For everyone listening to this and not watching, I want you to imagine Nelai in linen pants, oversized sunglasses and a shirt that is unbuttoned just like one button further than you would think Nelai would have a shirt on button. Oh, I went two, buddy. Don't want to.

Two butts. Okay. We're letting it fly. Just one button at the bottom hanging on for dear life. That's all we got here. The other thing to know is that we're on wildly different clocks. So David sounds tired because I believe it's 8.30 in the morning for you. It is in fact 8.30 in the morning.

I sound tired because I was out until 2 in the morning. All the tech companies are here throwing just the most elaborate parties. So the first night, Tuesday night, your choice was, did you want to see Ray, the artist Ray, or did you want to see ludicrous? And then there was, like, I saw Janelle Monet gave a concert at a mansion for 100 people. It's just like, all this is crazy. Wait, Ray versus Ludacris is like the most perfect generational split of who would go to which party? I went to Ray. Oh.

I saw Ludacris do his corporate gig for AWS at CW at CES. And I was like, I've had this experience. Like, I have seen a bunch of excited polo shirts. You know? I don't need to do it. So I went saw Ray. And then last night it was Tiesto. and

Mumford & Sons And I I stood in line for Tiesto And it was really long I was even in like the good line The priority line That everyone wanted to go to Tiesto And I went to

I saw DJD Nice At the TikTok party Shout out to Patreon My friends of Patreon For getting me into that one And then I left And I got a text And it was like

We're at Mumford and Sons And I was like Oh crap And I went to Mumford and Sons I'm proud of you It really it really happened All this is happening within, like, feet of each other. This is, like, this reminds me of the experience of, like, when you're too old to do any of this stuff, but you, like, go to a bachelor party.

And so you're like, all right, for 48 hours, I'm going to be 23 again. Like, let's go. The weird thing is, like, the amount of money in Cannes. Like, this is an advertising festival. Theoretically, it is an advertising awards festival where they award the most creative advertising made around the world all year. That is gone. I didn't see one piece of creative this whole week. Interesting.

I saw tech companies talking about platforms and data and scale and targeting. I saw everyone is just like, how do we hide the amount of surveillance we're doing? Creators. And so then there's just like a group of hot people at every party who are the creators. And we all have to talk about the creator economy. Like it's not built on massive surveillance apparatus. But like the undercurrent of all this is just like companies you've never heard of talking about their ability to target you the consumer. and meta and TikTok and OpenAI,

all talking about how they will know so much about you that they will generate custom ads for you individually. And then somewhere next to that is creators are great. And it's like, oh, you just need these people. Like you just need some hot people to distract you from the thing you're actually doing. Like dystopia, but do it on the beach is basically the vibe. But with hot people.

With hot people. You can get away with a lot if you put hot people on a beach. That is, I mean, history has proven that over and over for centuries. Wait, before, we shouldn't spend too much time on Cannes, although I do think it's going to make, your week is going to make a bunch of the other stuff we have to talk about here. Very interesting. But I do really want to know, so Matt Bellany, who works at Puck and has a great podcast called The Town that I really like. He's been on the show, front of the broadcast, wrote a thing in his what I'm hearing newsletter,

just ruthlessly making fun of Cannes. And this, like, kind of traveled all over the place. I'll just read you a snippet of it. He says, I shouldn't have to say this, but to everyone asking if I'll be at Cannes this year. Can is the festival to Cannes, a prestigious global film event, were talented, creative people display and sell their work, and look glamorous doing so. Can Lions is not. It's a tacky business conference for selling advertising and announcing brand partnerships,

populated mostly by Ponchy middle managers and YouTubers. The only response to this that I saw was Rich Greenfield, the analyst, standing with Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, basically saying, look at us, the Ponchy middle managers. But I wondered, like, are people at Cannes feeling sad about which can that they are? Has this caused a culture war, can? There is no self-warness here. What are you talking about?

Everyone is sweating their faces off. The amount of just like, what's being nude because it's so hot is like off the charts. I've had so many conversations out what is appropriate for people to wear men and women. Like, you can make friends with anyone here by being like, is it appropriate for men to wear shorts to a business meeting? because the answer in this environment, this moment in time has to be yes, and no one wants to admit it. Shout out to Dieter Bone,

who would not wear shorts at Cannes. He would die first. And there's just so much money here. This amount of money cannot be self-aware. Do you know what I mean? You can put enough GPUs in a data center and be like, I think that might be alive, right?

Like, it will gain consciousness, maybe. You put this much money on the beach and it loses intelligence, like, as fast as it can. Let me just give you one example of the kind of news that's being made here. Okay. Spotify, you know Spotify. They announced a partnership with Coach, the handbag company, and the heart of the partnership, according to the press release,

is a shared understanding of how Gen Z approaches identity and self-expression. And then, like, that was a panel. That was like a full room of people believing this. through handbags and Spotify? Through Spotify handbags? One of the things we learned about Gen Z consumers is they don't think about identity in terms of categories.

So what they wear, what they listen to, the community is a part of is part of the same personal story. And that's why the partnership between Spotify and Coach feels so natural, David. What?

I hate this. I can say, Matt Bellany can say whatever he wants. You can't fight that. You can't body up against that and be like, are you? Do you feel bad? Because that is, that is, that is nothing.

Someday I aspire to be the kind of person who just goes around to conferences being like, people just want to be together. And everybody's like, yay! It's great. Oh, no, if you roll up to this conference with a British accent, you're like, advertising is broken.

Like, you will be the keynote speaker. Like, it's fine. But I'm just telling you that the thing about where I'm at right now, I had a bunch of great conversations. I did a Decoder interview with Amy Lanzi as a CEO of Digitosh. I think she's actually one of the smartest advertising executives

in the game. She's not confused. She's a tech executive. She traffics and data and analytics and she tries to get the right product and the right shelf at Walmart at the right time and the creative is somewhere down to turn to that but she knows what her business is.

I also interviewed Ali Behrman and Raina Pichanski who are like fancy agents for creators like Alex Earl and Jake Shane and they're like we're here to make money like we build businesses for these creators we find people of audiences and we build them businesses and they talked about money with me the whole time

so there's no confusion here here about what everyone's trying to do. Yeah. Right. This is about the creators who are on panels here call themselves marketers. They know what they're doing. They're here to move product. So the idea that like it's, it's that they have some feeling about the film industry.

They're like, whatever, man, everyone's watching Instagram. We're going to move product. Yeah. Yeah. That's fair. Actually, this is a useful pivot into some of the news that we should talk about. But first, we've been getting a lot of questions about some corporate version. news. Do you just want to talk this out for a minute?

Oh, sure. This is the second turn in the Vox Media corporate changes. Do you want to just talk through what's happening here? Yes, our company is killing itself. And then one part of the company is being reborn as Voxia 2.0, and James Murdoch will own that company, like the Phoenix from the Ashes. The other part of the company, a part of the company that we're in with Eater, that is being rolled up into a holding company called PMX.

which is Penske Media plus Fox. That's the name of the company. It does sound like BMX and DMX and DMX and DMS. The notion here that everyone keeps saying to me is that no one should ever think about that brand. It is a holding company. Penske Media owns variety, Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter, on and on and on.

They own the Golden Globes. They own South by Southwest. It's just a big media holding company. All of those things operate as little independent companies that they really do. And so Penske Media, all their publishing stuff, not like the Golden Globes, but like the magazines, and all the Vox stuff is coming together in one holding company. It's a joint venture between the stuff at Vox Media and the Penske publishing stuff. And it's going to be run by the president of Vox Media, Ryan Pauley.

So there was a lot of coverage of this, and I think the funniest part of it is Penske's own trades covered it. And they did not note that they, are the ones getting a new boss, which I think is very funny. Like, we woke up, and it's like the same guy that we've been reporting to for years. Right. Who we both started this company with as babies 15 years ago. Little children. Yeah.

And I stood next to Ryan at the Mumford and Son's concert last night, and we're both like, how did we end up here? So there's a lot of shared history there. I'm, you know, reasonably excited about this. There's a lot of work to be done. The deal is enclosed. You've got to figure out some structures. But Penske, Media Company, has a lot of resources.

Those are big fancy magazines that do great journalism. They fight off the lawsuits, which is a thing that I promise you I have to think about all the time that never comes to the surface. But it's a capability that we need and that I depend on in my job as editor-in-chief. And then, you know, the opportunity to invest more heavily in the verge is like right there in front of us. And the conversations we're having now are about how to make the verge feel even smaller. How to be our own little company with our own little product team. You know, Jay has been on our board for a long time. He's the largest shareholder in Vox Media, or what was Vox Media.

I go to our board meetings, and I, like, say wild things about Federation. That's, like, my role with this company. And he, like, listens intently and is curious about them. So that's a relationship. We're the same age, which is really weird. So that feels like a peer relationship in another weird way. So I'm hopeful there's more to come on this. But today, we woke up and we had the same boss we had yesterday,

and everyone should just take a breath. I think it's going to be fine. Yeah, I think that's right. We got a bunch of, as with the last one, a bunch of very well-meaning people worried that this meant bad things. An important thing to say, when I say we're the same age, Jay Penske has come up reading The Verge. Like, he is a reader of our website.

He's a fan of tech. Like, he pays a lot of attention to us. Again, he was the largest shareholder of the company. So if he was mad at our coverage, I would know. And that's just not the case. Yeah, if he wanted to kill us, he could have done it by now. It's the honest truth. It could have been happening a long time ago.

But that's just not how it goes. So I think he's intent on making sure he doesn't ruin it and in fact making it better. That is the conversation we have had. There's yet more to come. Like this deal has to close. You have to, a new holding company called PMX has to come into existence. It has to operate. Luckily, the person in charge of that is the guy that we have known for years and years and years.

I think it'll be fun. Yeah. And I think you and I talk about it, and we've been talking about with our team a lot, is that in the best case scenario, hardly anybody ever thinks about the corporate structure that enables our newsroom. We just get to go do the work. And that remains the goal. I will say the same thing to the audience that I say to our team and to our corporate overlords, just give me the money and leave a salute. That's my pitch. It's been a good pitch for 15 years. It's also, I'm sure, a really good pitch at Cam Lion. No, the money here has a lot of ideas. If you're not moving coach handbags, it doesn't want anything to do with you. That's a fair point. So actually, I wanted to talk about gadgets first, but you've now made me want to talk about meta.

Because while you've been at Can Lions, a place I'm confident there are a lot of meta people running around telling you about all of these things you're talking about, the creator future of everything, the advertising future of everything, the AI future of everything. Meta sort of publicly appears to be a company that is in like complete turmoil and is desperately flailing. to figure out what's going on. Can I just run you through a bunch of things that have happened this week while you've been gone? Yeah, this is very funny because that is not how it feels here, but dying to know, yeah. This is what I want to talk about,

because I think this disconnect we're about to get into has been true of meta for a very long time, and I think at this moment might be truer than it has ever been in complicated ways. But so here are just a bunch of news bits from meta this week. One, meta announced that the Instagram, AV app is getting a big overhaul. It's coming to new platforms, but also they're starting to experiment with a lot of the stuff

that has worked for YouTube on televisions, like the episodic series, things that feel more like shows, they're doing horizontal video. Like, they are making the same push into the living room that YouTube has very successfully made over the last several years. That's one thing. Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, is leaving and he's being replaced by somebody who built a fintech company that's very successful in India that Meta invested a huge amount of money in and is making this guy the global CEO of WhatsApp. Weird and fascinating.

Sure. Meta revived the Facebook Creator Studio app as an AI companion app for creators that will basically, I believe the phrase was tell you exactly how to grow on Facebook with AI. Like, we'll draft comments for you again. This is all the stuff that like YouTube and others have been doing for a while, but the idea is like how to grow your audience on Facebook in the most ruthless AI optimized way. Mark Zuckerberg has apparently tasked his team with Creators. Mark Zuckerberg has apparently tasked his team with creating a polymarket clone. Sure. Like, the idea is apparently not to do it with real money at first.

This product is at least codenamed arena, which is a very funny name for Mark Zuckerberg, the like Brazilian jiu-jitsu fighter in a bunch of funny ways. But there's this big idea about eventually letting people play with money after letting people play with credits at first. This is like a company doing everybody else's ideas about how. how to make money, right? You look at all of these things in every one of these is, what is a new way we can make money

that somebody else is already making a tremendous amount of money? Next to this, there is an incredible amount of reporting being done, particularly by our friends at Wired and Summit Business Insider, on this disastrous morale problem at Meta. They had this thing on Monday, I think, where they had to roll back the tool they had installed on everybody's computers that tracked all of their keystrokes and all of their mouse movements in order to train AI because a lot of the data that it was collecting was accessible to people across the company,

which bad. Yeah. Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of META, had to basically put out a memo acknowledging that the AI reorg at the company has been, I believe the word was atrocious and that they've created a huge morale problem. They think they're going to fix it with a snack budget. Sure. This company just appears to be a mess and twisting in all directions having,

no idea what's going on. And then, like you're saying, they just have all the money in the universe. Like, I cannot, meta is the company I understand the least, because it just continues to seem like it's winning and also to have absolutely no idea what it's doing. Yeah.

If you're here, it is obvious that Instagram and meta are the load-bearing pillars of the internet economy. You want to talk about creators, there is not really a creator economy without Instagram and YouTube. Like, TikTok is here,

and certainly they're, you know, big lucrative TikTokers, but they all have to pivot to other platforms. That's just a thing TikTokers have to do because TikTok doesn't really

have a follow graph and all the other platforms do. And so, like, you just see, like, okay, where are the two load-bearing pillars of the creator economy as it's being expressed

here at Ken? And it is absolutely Instagram and it's absolutely YouTube. And they know it. They're acting like it. And then meta's advertising tools are so lucrative and so powerful

that they are here surrounded by advertising executives, basically saying out loud, we're going to kill you. Just directly saying it. Like, their big announcements here are all about finding new audiences, generating custom content for those audiences, guardrails around the AI tools to make sure the AI generated, creative is brand safe, new tools for targeting where, you know, you can put more money into the meta ad manager to find new audience, but only. to a certain budget and then curve it back to make sure you still find qualified audiences

that want to buy your, like really boring ad tech stuff that is printing money for them. And you look at all that and how much energy that is being directed at that and how wildly successful it is. Everyone depends on it and needs it. And you look at the creator economy, which I said this a million times on the show, but Instagram does not pay creators anything. They are just a distribution platform for creators and they monetize. It doesn't matter what happens Instagram because meta is making money regardless. The creators have to go hustle out their own brand deals. That's why they've all become ad agencies.

So meta is winning both ways, right? It doesn't really matter what the creator economy does because meta makes money every time you open Instagram. And if you want to participate in sort of the larger internet economy, meta is getting to the point. And Zuckerberg has said this out loud. They're getting to the point where they just want your money and the business results you desire and everything in the middle will be automated by meta AI.

And that looks like it might work. Like, I have no idea if it will actually work. Right. But they're so confident here in it to come to an advertising festival and look at an ocean of executives from companies and say, we're going to put most of you out of a job is wild. And everyone's like, amazing. Yeah. Weird.

And I can only look at the rest of what's going on at Meta and say, oh, Mark Zuckerberg hates the business he's in. It's not fancy. It's not important. It's not cutting edge. That man sells ads. Yeah. It's also like wildly uncool. Yes.

This is the part of like Can Lion is not the cool one. He sitting in San Francisco knows how not cool he is. Yep. And how hard he's trying to be cool. Kylie Jenner is launching glasses with Mark Zuckerberg, right? We're just trying to yank some cool back to this company. Meanwhile, the money printer is just here in Cannes just whirring away. And he hates it.

I think he hate it. It's just not the thing that makes him cool. Whereas I think Google has no problem not being cool. Like, Google also prints money. And they're like, here's, like, the robot's going to buy you the shoes. And they're like, everyone's like, amazing. And Google's like, it's so nerdy. We love ourselves.

And like, they just don't care. Google learned from the Google Plus thing that being culturally relevant is not all it's cracked up to be. I mean, I have YouTube. I just want to be clear. They have YouTube. Sure. If you listen to Neil Mohan, his whole approach to YouTube now is we have learned not to be prescriptive about the creator economy. Like when ASMR videos came out,

everyone was like, what is this garbage? And now they're a whole cultural category. This is a real quote from Neil this week. So they know, but they're pipes, that Google wants to be pipes. Also, I think importantly, Google owns two major platforms. They own Android. That is their platform. They control their testing on that platform.

And they own the web. It's like some huge extent they own the web. They have Chrome on desktop. They have massive market share. And Google will contest this. They'll say the web is vibrant. And that is mostly true because mobile Safari exists. And Apple has very strong opinions about what web browsers can do on the iPhone.

Yeah. But like Google has two platforms where it controls its destiny, and meta has none. And they've known this forever, and I think this drives my sucker crazy. And if he was a sort of person who would just be happy selling ads and having ludicrous come to his parties, I think he'd be the happiest person alive because he's just the winner of this moment. But he, that man wants a platform of his own. I think he sees AI as one opportunity to do that. I think he sees his glasses and other opportunity to that.

And he is content tearing his company to shreds. in like ferocious ambition to get to a platform of his own. But I think the fact that he's not cool and no one trusts him is always going to stand in his way. Oh, I totally think that's right. I also think if you're Mark Zuckerberg, even in a more sort of calculating headspace, you look at these things and you realize that, okay, we have built what amounts to a perfect business model on top of this gigantic set of attention that we are able to deliver, right? because so many people are on Instagram and because so many people are on Facebook,

because these are so central to people's online lives, we make infinite money. That is just true. It's also, I think, fragile. And it feels more fragile all the time that the idea that actually maybe lots of people will pick up and leave your platform, I think, is a real and be increasingly in evidence, right? Like Facebook's users are going down for the first time. They would argue with you about that. They would, you know, that's just like regulatory battles. There's a war going on.

Like, they have reasons for those numbers wavering this time around. I'm sure that they do. But if those people go, it doesn't matter the reason. If those people go away, the business goes away. The business relies on I open Instagram 40 times a day, whether it makes me happy or not. It just that, that's it. Yeah. It is, it has to be that entrenched behavior or else this beautiful business model you've built on top of it collapses.

It has nothing to do. And so what I wonder is like all that stuff that you're saying about like being cool and being culturally relevant, that's also sort of centrally tied up in this company's business in a way that if I'm Mark Zuckerberg causes me to lose a lot of sleep. Because like the minute Instagram stops being cool. And I think Instagram is still cool. It's not what it once was, but it is. It's a load bearing pillar of the creator economy conversation here. And it is it is like glitzy and flashy in a way that like even TikTok isn't. Instagram is like... I would say ever since Oracle bought TikTok, something has changed.

You can just feel it. That company has lost its aggression in a lot of ways, and it has become more of an infomercial driving you to the TikTok shop. They had the smallest party here. That's what I'll tell you. Interesting.

Before we leave the Facebook thing, I did meet Flav of Flav at the TikTok party. I will say, that was very cool. Did he have a big clock on? He was wearing a chain. I don't know if it was a big clock. It wasn't like the clock. you know what I mean.

It wasn't, okay. I just, I feel like if I saw Flava Flav and he wasn't wearing the clock, I'm not 100% sure I would know it was Flav LaVV. Do you know what I mean? No, he was wearing the glasses. It was very obvious.

Oh, all right. Okay, cool. Can I tell you one more story about this? I tried to get a selfie with Flav with you. Like, hi, whatever, try to get selfie. And he's like, I got to get out of here. Like, he was just trying to get through a hallway at the end of the party.

And the person I was with, I won't say your name, but it was just a funniest moment. It was like, Flav! And he turned around And he saw that it was still us He was like, I'm good. You guys like, I'm out of here.

So that implies that Flav is Flav of Flav's first name, which is the thing I've never considered before. It was just like desperate call to Flav. And he'd obviously like reacted to it. He's like, someone needs me. And then he was like, you don't. This isn't important at all.

That's really good. I'm going to start yelling Flav of people as they walk away from me from on. I really like that. I do want to know what you think about this. idea of Facebook doing a sort of fake and then maybe real polymarket clone? I mean, Facebook doesn't have ideas. Meta doesn't have ideas. Famously, Evan Spiegel is the head of product at Meta.

Right. He talked about middle managers. And so the idea that there's something, there's some attention mechanic that will keep you engaged, that's Zuck. That famously when he was buying Instagram, you know, we have emails from all antitrust cases where his point of view was every generation there's another engagement mechanic that emerges and it disrupts the old one. And so photo sharing was that mechanic for Facebook. So he needed to buy Instagram. I think they wisely understood that buying TikTok was out of the cards in the middle of all that antitrust litigation and whatever. And they just

brought TikTok to Instagram in the form of reels. But they understand. I think Zuck particularly understands that these new engagement mechanics do come and take time away from his apps. And so he's very good at like launching fast follows. He's very bad at launching new ideas, which is where I think the AI glasses and the interaction paradigms, the hiring of Allen Dye to build a new interaction UI for the meta-glasses, like there's something about that that requires a ton of invention, like user experience invention that meta historically has shown no competence in. I just want to say the implication in what you just said is that the next big time spent mechanic

is gambling. Like straightforwardly, the implication in this decision is it's gambling. But I think he probably sees it. He probably has enough data to see, like, people move from their DMs on Instagram during a game to a gambling mechanic. Sure, yeah. They go to Fandool. That's a thing that happens all the time. That's a real thing.

Yeah. We have the CEO of Yahoo on Dakota while back, Jim Lenzhen, who you know. He's a really smart guy. And I was like, Yahoo has private equity ownership. It's like Apollo. They own Caesar's Palace. I was like, this is coming to Yahoo Sports, right? you're going to do gambling and sports and finance.

And he was like, no, but we know that once you're done in Yahoo Finance, you go to your stocks app. Once you're done in Yahoo Sports, you go to one of the prediction markets. Like, we see the mechanic. It is the most natural evolution the data would suggest. They haven't done it yet. I'm not sure if they're going to do it. But I think Zuck sees that too, right?

It's the night before the Super Bowl and everyone on Instagram and WhatsApp is talking about the odds. It's like you can just slide it in there. You can shove it in the big blue app like everything else. So I understand why he would do it. Do I love that everything is becoming gambling? I think that's pretty bad. Yeah.

Yeah. No, it is as ruthlessly correct a decision, I think, as you could make. But boy, does it feel bad? Or threads. Like, Threads has an oddly, I wouldn't say odd. Threads has how to describe threads. In its diffuse way. And it's sort of hazy way, Threads is like, we should do sports.

Right? They have like a partnership with the NBA. They're growing in communities or how are they defined communities. Very natural, if you think, real-time Twitter-like post-app is good for sports, which I tend to think it is, that you would add the gambling mechanic to that. Sure. Very natural, deeply terrifying. Oh, yeah. By the way, just be clear, I think gambling is bad.

And I think it's really legal. And my personal view is that when you go to Las Vegas, you should find. out how much all of your friends are going to spend on gambling and spend that amount of money on linens because that's the only place in the world where you can just demand a limousine arrive and one shows up. I'm in the south of France. I go outside and like, bring me a limo and they're like, aha, and it's not going to happen for me. But you can do that in Vegas. That's my hot take on gambling, buy limousines instead. I have been in your presence for this enough to know that you always end up being the one who has the best time, too. Because I'm the one with your biggest limo.

It's the Nilai Patel way. Everyone remembers me. No one remembers how much your dumbass lost at Blackjack. Exactly right. All right, we should take a quick break, and then I do want to talk gadgets because there's an interesting thing happening in gadgets right now, and I want to talk about it, but let's take a break. Support for the show comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted, but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, hosting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections, then you review and publish what goes live. Framer is the pro site builder for creators, teams, and businesses

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You can now buy an 8 gigabyte of RAM Microsoft Surface. It's to make it affordable, right? Like, it is so expensive to buy RAM that they're giving you less so that you can actually buy a product. The steam machine is out. I want to talk about the steam machine in a minute. We talked about it with Sean on the show earlier this week, but I'm curious what you think.

The vast majority of the story of this thing has been that it costs $1,049, which is a lot more than I think anyone including Valve hoped. And there's been this big kerfuffle about is it one RAM stick or two. Like this has been a news story. But the most immediate thing is that as promised, Apple just raised its prices. Tim Cook said this was coming. Wanted to preview it for people. But Apple just took its store down, put it back up, and everything is more expensive.

Can I read you some of the prices? It's the worst Apple store is down of all time. Truly. Like really, truly, yes. Can I read you some of the prices? Sure. The HomePod Mini is now $30 more expensive. The iPad Air is now $150 more expensive.

The iPad Pro is up $200. The MacBook Neo is up $100. The MacBook Air is up $200. The MacBook Pro is up $300. The IMac is up $200. The Mac Studio M4Max is up $500. The Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra is up $1,300. No way.

The Vision Pro is up $200. Like, meaningful across-the-board price increase for essentially every Apple product. I would just like to congratulate myself for buying a Mac Studio for no reason earlier this year. I really, we have been on this show all of 2026

being like if you need a gadget buy it now it's only going to get worse. Here we go. I don't even think we're at the top of it. I really don't. Yeah, the MacBook Neo I bought for no reason also seems like a smart purchase now. Yeah, you sell it for more than you bought it for.

That's wrong. It's working out. But do you agree with my over? overall thesis here that it feels like we are sort of at the product cycle into the Ramageddon experience where the world in which there is no RAM is starting to settle in to both what gadgets cost and even what they are. Yeah. Wasn't there reports this week that like the new nothing phone just won't come out? Yep. Because it was the CMF phone two pro successor. They just canceled it because they're like we can't we can't make it what we want under.

the current circumstances. Yeah, I think we're just seeing, like Apple's solution is we have price elasticity. People will pay the prices. Right. If you're going to buy a Vision Pro, the $200 is not going to deter you because you have conviction in your heart that wearing a headset is a good idea. If you need a Mac Studio, that's probably for work, you're going to absorb the cost. Maybe you'll pass the cost off.

You can see how they're playing the game, right? The smaller price increases are the consumer products and the bigger ones are the ones that tend to be used for work because you can absorb the cost. All kinds of ways. But I think a lot of other companies can't. just play the game the way that Apple is playing it. Yeah, Apple has, like, famously huge margins in this industry in a way that not a lot of companies do. I think that's why they held. I think they swallowed some of margins to see what would happen.

And this Tim Cook line that this isn't tenable was, in fact, a preview for prices being raised and a signal that their margins would go back up. And if Apple can't get pricing power in this market, like no one can. Totally. So, yeah, I mean, I think the steam machine is probably a better example. What is this drama about one stick around versus two? So that's the most steam machine drama you can come up with. It's very good. As I understand it, Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve, gave an interview in which he said there was going to be two eight gigabyte sticks of RAM in the steam machine.

And in reality, what they're shipping is one 16 gigabyte stick of RAM in the steam machine. And if you were to say, David, what's the difference? I genuinely could not sit here and tell you. I'm sure there is one. I am just out of my own technical depth in understanding why. it matters which one of these things you're getting. The implication seems to be that it's going to ship with one stick of RAM and an empty slot.

And that I think is sort of fascinating. For a thing that is more PC than not, sure. Yeah. But this has become a bit of a kerfuffle. And again, like everything Valve has said indicates that this device is probably three or $400 more expensive than they wanted it to be. And maybe even $400 or $400 more expensive than it was when they started making this product. And that just over time, this is just what the price has become.

And at some point, we've even specped it out. Emerald on our team did a great job of basically going and building a gaming PC to rival this thing. And this is just what it costs. Like, it's rough out there. And I think Dom Preston, writes our Daily Newsletter pulled a comment that I really liked that was basically like, this thing is both fairly priced and way too expensive. And it's like, buddies, welcome to the future of gadgets. Fairly priced and way too expensive is just what we are in and headed towards. I'm feeling like the big repairability wave for the past two years is about to pay its dividends.

Interesting. What do you mean? People are just going to hold on to things longer, and they're going to demand that they last a lot longer as they get more expensive. So it's interesting. These past few years, repairability has been sure about durability, about fighting planned obsolescence. I think now it's going to, we're going to add value for dollar to that mix. you buy something big and expensive, it cannot only last three years, right? It has to have a much longer shelf life. And we have been in what you would call an era of disposable gadgets for quite a while.

Yeah. And I just, all that repairability work, like a lot of products are more repairable now than they were before. And I'm just hopeful, like maybe all these market forces actually result in a good outcome, which is, okay, it's going to be more expensive. That means it needs to last twice as long. Right. Which means to replace the battery.

I didn't really thought about it, but like basically for two decades since smartphones really became mainstream, we have just been on this relentless path of every single part becoming cheaper and more available all the time. To the point where, like, as we've talked about, everybody just puts smartphone chips in anything they can find because smart phone chips are so readily available and so cheap that it's like, we'll figure out what to do with this later. We're just going to put it in your dishwasher and see what happens. it never really turned until now. And it's just the RAM. I don't think it's the rest of the supply chain. Yeah, but none of it matters, except the, right, the RAM drives the thing at this point, right?

That you can't do any of it without memory. And if you can't get memory, you're nowhere. But I think truly for the first time, it seems like the idea that you can count on this stuff being consistently cheaper and more readily available and higher quality as every generation turns over. maybe that's going to change this industry even more than we've realized. Right. You can make the products cheaper if you account for the higher price of the RAM

and use cheaper components elsewhere. Will people accept that? I don't know. But you can play different games here. It just seems like the industry is still doing what you are describing, which is they're pushing every component to the edge all the time instead of being like,

how do we actually make a holistic product based on the prices we have in front of us? And maybe this will be the thing that changes it. And that whole supply chain is like, oh, you can't make a cheap nothing phone anymore. Right. And the first thing to go is going to be the things that don't have that price elasticity, like cheap phones. That if you take a phone that was $200 and you make it $400,

that phone ceases to have a reason to exist. And the people who could afford it can't anymore and you just shouldn't make it. And we're going to see a lot of things like that. And all of the fun little like gadgety knickknacks that have been coming out, I think are going to start to die because they just don't have that. we can raise the price by $200 and get away with it because this is essential to your work life that a couple of companies and not many others do.

Yeah. Like if I'm a like, you know, Kickstarter-sized startup right now, this has got to be terrifying. Oh, yeah. We should do, and we did a bunch of tariff coverage with these smaller companies.

I feel like we should do some Ramigan coverage. We should. I've been talking to Eric Michigovsky from Pebble about coming back on a show to talk about some of this stuff. And we should do a couple of these. If you're a small hardware vendor, reach out. I would love to hear what's going on. Yeah, get at us for sure.

Let me just read. I want to read you just one thing from, this is an interview that Valve did with Gamer's Nexus about the steam machine. Gamers Nexus asked them, were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly, or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops? And this is Pierre, a software developer at Valve. He says, look, there's no contracts. There's nothing. Those guys, they give us a price every month or something, and they say,

you can buy that many, and it's yes or no. And if we say no, then they never talk to us again. This is the state of things. Do you know what this made me think of is I bought a car in 2021, like peak pandemic chaos year. Cars were the most expensive they've ever been. Used cars were going through the roof. We totaled our car and got more money for it than we paid for it used seven years earlier. Like insanity.

And we wanted a Hyundai Tucson. We wanted a hybrid. We wanted an SUV. We picked this car. and the people at the dealership put our name on a list of people. And when they got a car, they would start at the top of that list and they would call and they say, I have this car and this color at this price. Do you want it?

And they would say yes or no. And if they said no, they would go to the next person on the list and they would just call until somebody said yes. And the first time we got a call, they were like, it's this one, it's this color. It has all these bells and whistles you don't want. Do you want the car? And Anna, my wife, who was on the phone with them, was like, well, we don't really want all these other things.

And I was like, I was like, I'm going to be real with you. If you don't say yes to this, I'm almost certainly never going to call you again. And so we bought the damn car. And it's like, it was insane. That's very good. And this is like, this is the world that we live in with computer memory now. That it's like, it is run by this set of companies that have essentially all the power and leverage you could possibly imagine. It's wild.

All that power and leverage comes from having a handful of data center and chip vendor clients building data. Like, it will come to some sort of conclusion. Yes. I am increasingly pessimistic about how long that's going to take. Oh, yeah, I agree with that. But it will, it will end. I just don't think it's going to end as soon as we would like, and I think it's going to get way messier before it ends.

Here's what I want you to imagine before we move on. At some point, like, regular non-tech media is going to notice Ramageddon. Just imagine how those headlines are going to go when people are protesting data center prices and more expensive iPhones. Yep. I mean, that's coming in September, man. Like, can you imagine what this next run of iPhones, potentially including a foldable iPhone, is going to cost in this world? Yeah. Oof. Real quick, one other thing we should talk about. I want to know your thoughts on the slate truck. Speaking of things with prices that are important, they announced the slate truck, $24,950. Ronnie Mola, a verge contributor when took it for a ride, seems to like it. Where do you stand on the slate truck at this moment in time?

I love it. I mean, when was the last time you saw an affordable product? Right? And I love the fact that they, you know, if you're a car person, you know, people are just wrapping their cars left and right. Like, fine, we're not going to paint it. You can wrap it however you want. I love the modularity. I love the fact that you can turn it in an SUV and the airbags have little set, like the little connectors. So the car knows when you've put the SUV roof on it and engages the airbags and the pillars. Like, I think that's all so neat. Like, that's a lot of engineering. Yeah. Cool. Like, I think. All that is great. I think the range is troublesome to people. I think Americans just want to see 300 next to a range estimate.

That's fair. But that's maybe not what this truck is for. Like most of the people who are going to buy this kind of truck to do this kind of like have a toy or use it for work, they're not traveling hundreds of miles ago. So I think that's the one question mark I have on it. I'm dying to try one out. I think they're just so neat. So I wonder about you specifically because you are like, I would say you're sort of lightly a truck. If that makes sense.

I aspire to be a truck guy. Exactly. I had one. It was great. I think about it every day. Yeah. Does this satisfy the truck guy in you? Because like the line in Ronnie's story that keeps sticking out to me is that it drives more like a crossover SUV than a pickup, which I think is intended as a compliment.

But is not what a lot of like, you know, Ford F-150 truck guys are going to work here. But maybe this isn't for them anyway. So for you as like a light truck guy. how does this thing strike you? I mean, do you want to get into a long discussion of body unframed construction principles? And why the Ford Raptor in particular sells so well because of its suspension that makes it drive like an SUV? Like, the truck market is vast. It's complicated. I don't think that people buying this one are going to give one ounce of thought to ride quality in that way.

If it's more forgiving, then I think they will. But you drive like a regular pickup truck that doesn't have like an independent rear suspension. It bounces over a bump. Like, that's a weird feeling. Sure. So I suspect this thing is going to appeal to a lot of people that like the Ford Maverick appeals to. Like there's a, there is a market for smaller pickup trucks. The thing that's going to make or break the slate truck is how much people actually take to customizing it.

This entire thing is a bet on you, literally the base model is called a blank slate. The whole thing is a bet on actually you want to customize this truck. We are going to limit the options we put in front of you. All the way down to there's no infotainment. Just put your phone in the dash like all of you are doing anyway. And I think that's just incredibly smart. The part about that I don't like is it makes the very cheap price seem sort of fake, right? In the sense that, like, yes, 24-950 is slightly more, I think, than Slate wanted this thing to be,

in part because the giant tax break that you get for buying a car like this has gone away. But still, it is, I think, by a wide margin, the cheapest electric car, and the cheapest pickup you're going to find pretty much anywhere. But then we're in a Ramageddon world where now I have to go source a bunch of other parts that might be more expensive for a bunch of supply chain and, like, war in the Middle East reasons. Am I potentially signing myself up for a headache that I didn't even know I was getting into? that like the sort of DIY car economy feels a lot scarier right now than it did a couple of years ago. Yeah, I mean, that's the flip side of what I'm saying, right?

It's going to mean, it's make or break depending on how much people want to customize their own truck. True. And maybe they want it less than they did. Right. Like I don't, I really don't think we know. Yeah. I do think people stare at new cars, which are getting increasingly more expensive. Like we're closing in the median price being like $40,000 or $50,000 for a new car. Yeah. That's crazy. It's insane. And then you look at those cars and they are just chock full of tech.

Like the new Mercedes electric C class, like the interior is basically a Korean nightclub. Like there's no other way to describe what is happening in that car. Like what do you want me to do with this? I'm going to Google this way. It's just like, what is going on in this car? Right? Like the new electric BMWs are like the interiors are bananas and there's a weird trapezoid infotainment screen. No car maker can can just settle on using a circle for a steering wheel anymore.

Like new cars are getting increasingly weird to just. justify all of that cost. Yeah. And their, you know, carmaker's like, well, what will justify the money? Screens. And I don't think that's actually working. Do you know what I mean? Like, I think there's, this is, this will be a test of the market.

Does it, would the market prefer a cheaper, planer car for a reasonable a lot of money that you can just tweak it will without running into some DRM to Mercedes MbUX nonsense? Did you see the car? looks crazy in there. It does. It's, it's, it's all so blue and there are so many, yet again, so many screens showing wall to wall screens. It's wall to wall screens. The C-class is not a big car. Like, no, you're like, if I put my baby in that car, it's like there will be a one-to-one baby-to-screen volume ratio. Yeah, and there's a, there's a moon roof that's doing stuff. I got to stop looking

with this car. That's a lot. There's a lot going on. And like, that's obviously a luxury car, but like, it's just trickling down to everything. By the way, I was in an Uber here in France. It was a B-YD seal, which was basically the Tesla Model 3EY competitor. And I asked the guy, the Uber driver, like, do you like this? It's better than Tesla. And he was like, so much better than Tesla. Like, he blows Tesla out of the water.

Wow. And I was like, what do you like about it? He's like, the fit and finish is better. The range is better. And he pointed at the screen and he goes, and it has car play. And that was like the last, it was like, check. And he was like. And then you said, I'll get out here.

Thank you. Yeah. I was like, whatever. We were stuck in traffic, so I spent a lot of time talking about this car with him. And I was like, yeah, they're just like basically illegal in the United States. And he's like, in France, they have to protect Citroen and Pugéjo and Renault. And he made like the French spitting noise to indicate his disgust with the French domestic car manufacturer. He was like, Pugégeau, it was amazing.

Love that. And he was like, the French government just taxes these cars. If I went to China, I could buy two for the price that I bought one. here in France, but everyone is still buying them here because they're better cars. And like, there's just something to be, and obviously the Chinese government is subsidizing them. They're part of a huge trade where all this stuff is going on. But there's just something to be said for people who want a quality product at a good price. Much remains to be seen with the slate truck. But up against the feature creep and the tech

bloat in all the other new cars, we'll see, like, I'm happy it exists. Yeah. I have wondered if that is maybe one. one silver lining of what's about to happen is like, is there about to be a big new push in much dumber gadgets that like, is this how we get dumb TVs back? Because it literally becomes too expensive to make smart TVs. And rather than ship all that crap in your television. That's the most optimistic thing you've ever said. No. This is what I'm saying. It will always be more lucrative to track you until you die. Yeah, that's true. Even if they have to charge me more for it, that's, look, somewhere in this hotel is the fox set can.

and data activation. Well, on the surveillance economy, this is a good segue to the beginning of the lightning round. So let's take a break. Then we're going to come back. We'll do lightning round. Bear it back. Visit BetMGM Casino and check out the newest exclusive.

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research at the Princess Margaret. Feel free to buy your payday for life ticket today. Raffle number 155-2194. Please play responsibly. Are you one of those media strategy people clicking through slides, scrolling spreadsheets? Yes? Good. This is for you.

Because on Spotify, there's an audience that's different. Locked in. Loyal, invested. They're called fans. Fans don't just listen to music. They feel seen by it, like it belongs to them. So when your brand shows up on Spotify, that's who you're talking to

and you're right next to artists like me, Lizzo. So, are you ready to talk to fans? Spotify advertising. You're among fans. All right, we're back. It's time now for the lightning round. Beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast.

I don't even have to ask. I just, I give up at this point. I'm not, he just does it every week. We're still here. It's Brendan Carr is a dummy. Hell yeah. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

Brendan Carr is a dummy. Dumbum, dumb. It's still going. That ruled. Oh, man, that was good. Play that at your can party. That's the real theme song for America 250 right there. Thank you to Dave Gartner who sent that to us.

The revolutionary spirit in that was, it's real. That was awesome. Now with merch. That was very good. All right. Niela, what do you do this week? What didn't he do this week? But the one that we should pay attention to is this was the week that the public comment

period on whether or not the view on ABC is a bona fide news program opened and the license renewal for the various ABC stations owned by Disney that he pulled the license. since is early, up for renewal to punish Disney for being too woke or whatever, whatever word salad exists in Brendan's corrupt little mind. So this is that week. So ABC stations are running ads, encouraging their viewers to leave comments at the SEC's website saying that the view is a bona fide news program. It's kind of a wild bat.

We have it. Do you want to run it? Yeah, let's just watch this. I haven't actually seen this. I had this idea for a show. Different women, different points of view. The view has welcomed your favorite guests and covered the issues you care about for nearly 30 years. Now, the FCC wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show.

Viewers, use your voice. Scan this QR code you have until July 6. So a lot of ideas packed in there. It's kind of giving like pharmaceutical ad. It is. Opening with Barron Walters is a choice and ending with, we believe, viewers of the view will scan this QR code. And she forgot at the FCC.

Like, just a lot of ideas in there. Who knows if it will work. Brendan will tell you that none of this is true, right? This is just a good faith reexamination of whether the view is a bona fide news program and needs to buy by the equal time rule. All this is to punish Disney. So you recall all this kicked off in earnest after it was that James Tolerico appeared on the view.

He's obviously a congressional candidate in Texas. And news programs do not have to give equal. time, entertainment programs do because that's like free advertising. So historically, the only program that has ever had to think about the equal time rule is Saturday Night Live, because you cannot make the case that that is a new show. And they're very good at it. And, you know, when Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live, they gave President Trump airtime in a NASCAR race like the next weekend or something. But the view, it's right on the line. And it has operated under a bona fide news exemption for years and years and years. Like, they've gotten it. And Carr, because he's a dummy and

wants to control speech in America. He said, well, what if I pull it? What if I re-examine this? And what if I chill your speech by not allowing you to have candidates on your news program or limit your speech overall? And so it's up for a review.

He pulled the licenses of the ABC stations early for renewal, which is totally unprecedented. And so now ABC is mounting this campaign in return to get its viewers to say, no, this is the news. Right? You do need to say, protect this program because we, the consumers of the view, want it to stay the way it is,

which is fundamentally crazy for any media property in America to have to do in response to pressure from the government. And I'm just going to keep saying this over and over again. I say it almost every time we do this segment now, Brendan is going after broadcast because that is the power he has. Right. Right. So ABC has antennas in cities and it broadcasts over the radio waves, and the federal government has a lot of say over radio waves,

because radio waves are a scarce public resource, and we do need to allocate them well. Right? You don't want the TV broadcast interfering with the suburb. all broadcast interfering with what first responder radio transmissions. So that's why we have spectrum policy and that's the FCC's job. And for whatever reason, we have said, okay, the broadcasters have to use their spectrum in the public interest. And there's a lot of reasons for that.

When they were the only game in town, there were a lot of good reasons for that. All of that is nonsense now. Most people experience the view on YouTube and his Instagram clips. The government having any instinct about what to do with the view or what candidates can appear on there. is nonsensical when its primary distribution is internet distribution that car has no control over. And all of this is just a test balloon for can I control Instagram? Can I regulate speech on the internet?

And he will find a way to do it if you start falling down the slippery slope. Because the public interest standard of spectrum use for broadcast television is as far removed from the experience of everyday Americans is like the telegraph. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. Part of the idea, in theory there is, like, if he can scare the view out of existence, he solves his Instagram problem without needing to regulate Instagram, right? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Don Lemon will just go to YouTube.

You know, like, that's the thing that is happening, right? But, I mean, like, they got Colbert fired in a very, like, straightforward, right? Like, there's some evidence that this playbook works. They did, but Colbert, you don't think Colbert is going to have a more lucrative second act on one of these platforms? Oh, no, I think Colbert's going to be. He's going to be here at Cannes, showing creator supplements like everybody else. And like, maybe that will break his heart, but the money will be there for him. Sure.

This is what I mean. Like, that ecosystem is richer. It is populated by right-wing voices. No one bodies up to Facebook and is like, you're not equally balanced. It's like, no, actually, this is pretty balanced to one side. The crazy uncles of your town make themselves known on Facebook every single day. So I think it's less about I need to solve the supply of the view on Instagram. and more if I can get control over broadcast.

If I can overcome the First Amendment using these high and mighty rules at equal time and fairness, I can bring that to the internet. And there's lots of ways you could bring that to the internet. Mobile internet, for example, runs on public radio spectrum. Sure. What are you going to do with that?

Right? Like, it's just right there for Brendan if he wins these battles here. You know he will turn his attention to the broader internet. And I just remind everybody, YouTube is owned by a defense contractor. Like, there's a lot of ways for a unified Trump administration to make life hard for a lot of these companies. Yeah. YouTube is owned by a defense contractor is a very funny way to think about a lot of things. Twitch is owned by a defense contractor.

Yeah. Like, there's a lot of ways for Xbox is owned by a defense contractor. There's, again, I'm just pointing this over and over again. Like, if the Trump administration thesis of this is one government that we control tip-to-tail holds, yeah, getting the view kicked off the air or punishing them or yanking their bona fide news exception on broadcasts. Like, it's broadcast spectrum policy. There's a reason we historically have not talked about in the show. But all this is a trial balloon for what can we do? How can we punish the other companies, the control of the media that actually matters?

Anyway, that's Brendan. I'm in France, man. It's, I can't believe I had to think about Brennan Carr in France. Here are the land of the free. Liberté, fraternity, egalite, Brendan. If you want to come on the show and defend your actions, you corrupt, tyrant of a man, I welcome you. We can do it in France. That's been Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast in the podcast.

It's beautiful. We're also going to do an AI version of you. rapping the whole Guns and Ships Hamilton song about Brendan Carr. Oh, God. And that's going to go in here. That's what the AI is for. Kevin O'Leary, that big data center?

Finally, a reason that people can get behind. Love it. I have a lightning around item that dovetails actually sort of perfectly with everything you just talked about, which is this movie artificial. Do you know about this movie? I don't.

So it's, imagine the social network, but it's about Sam Altman and Open AI. is essentially, I think, was like part of the pitch and kind of the vibe. The movie's called Artificial. It stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman. It's directed by Luca Guadino, who's a very good director. This movie has been in the works, I think for about a year, is very near production being finished. Amazon was going to run the movie and had said that it was going to put it in theaters

to basically give it an Oscar qualifying theatrical run. And like, this movie is supposed to be a big deal. Andrew Garfield is a very good actor. The cast is really impressive, all this stuff. And then just sort of out of nowhere, Amazon dropped the movie this movie. Of course. Yeah. Again, this is like it owned by a defense contractor, right?

And I think the story seems to be essentially that this script was originally like a mix of kind of brutal but also like funny satire. It's written by Simon Rich who like wrote for SNL for a very long time. is a very funny person, and it would have been sort of needily in a way, I think, would be my guess about the first read of this script. But it definitely did not paint Sam Altman as like a good person and Open AI as like a good company wanting to make the world a better place. It's like very much the sort of duplicitous schemer Sam Altman that a lot of people have come to know recently. Then apparently what happened is Luca Guadani knew the director made the movie darker and darker and sort of more anti-AI as time. went on, finish the movie, screened it for Mike Hopkins, who runs the studio at Amazon, who immediately pulled the plug.

Wow. And Amazon has not, as far as I can tell, publicly given a reason for this, except to say, basically, we don't think we're the right distributor for this. We want somebody else to have it. But I think you can draw the lines pretty easily, right? Like, Amazon has lots of deals with Open AI and other AI companies. All of these companies are tied up together. Open AI has been making these, like, weird circular deals with everybody for,

a very long time. And you can see why, if you want to, A, impress the Trump administration, which looks favorably generally on people like Sam Altman and on people like Elon Musk and others who are apparently not depicted super well in this movie. And you want to keep your very lucrative AI deals going, you would dump this movie. So they dump this movie and then apparently start shopping it around. And one by one, it appears other studios are starting to pass. Wow. Netflix is apparently passed 824. has passed. Warner Brothers, one of its, I think, sub-studios has passed. There are other distributors

who are looking at picking it up, but it's starting to seem like this movie might just kind of die. And I, the only, like, sure, maybe it's just a horrible movie that nobody wants. I don't think that's the most likely answer as to why nobody wants to distribute this movie. 824 just took a big Google investment. Exactly. To make AI movies, which a lot of people are real pissed about. Yeah. Like, it's just, you can just see it. It's a very naked way of looking at the fact that it kind of is in no one's business interest to say mean things about AI right now.

Which is funny because if you're reading the cultural room, this is the movie you should release. Yes, I don't understand that at all. Like, there's a lot of money to be made in releasing the movie that says AI is bad. And it's not like there's been a shortage of them. Yeah, but is that more money than the money that you risk by pissing off the AI people? That's the equation. There's got to be some indie studio or indie distributor is going to pick this on. So apparently neon and Mooby are apparently the front runners for it, which are like perfect.

They are the ones who should release a movie like this. And I hope it hits big for them and I hope everything goes great. But I think like this, all the things you're talking about, about like these companies are owned by defense contractors and the government and this other part of the economy and the business world has leverage over these things in ways that don't necessarily see. obvious but are still very real. This is like a perfect example of that to me. There should be more than five companies. Vote Patel 28.

That's my entire presidential platform. That's really good. There should be more than five companies. Yeah, it's good stuff. All right, what's your next landing round item? I actually know what it is because I assigned this one to you. But do you want to talk about it? Yes, we finally published our review of the Collider Escape Strato E.

John Higgins did it. We have Collidercape Streamers. He has got to set up. I've got to set up. This is the $10,000 movie streaming server player setup that we both have at our houses. John is actually a good TV reviewer. I just like cosplay as a TV reviewer, so he did the review. The fight here is against Blu-ray.

It is Blu-ray quality. They do do all of their own encoding. They take the master files from the studios and they make their own encodes so they can exceed Blu-ray quality in some cases. Blu-rays are dying, which is really sad. So this is the high-quality movie. playback system. Like, there isn't another one except for Sony Bravia Corr, which only exists on Sony televisions and can only play Sony movies. I love it. You know, that's an ecosystem

that I really am fond of. It's vastly cheaper than the Clydescape because it just arrives on Sony televisions. But you need a big setup to see it. This is John's real point here. You have an average TV and an average soundbar. None of this money is worth it. If you have a really nice TV and a really nice audio system, particularly if you have a nice audio system, you will get a lot out of setup. And that was my main takeaway was that it's really hard to show people the visual fidelity increase. Like in Pacific Rim, you can see it blocks less. The color red is really hard to compress and it does a better job at the color red across the board. These are very fine details. Like, it is fast action scenes with a lot of moving elements. It does a way better job there. Everything else,

it's like, oh, it's definitely CRISPR. I'm going to leave now. Like, that's how people react to it. on the audio side blows everything out of the water. Like, if you have a good audio setup, it is uncompressed audio, it's louder, the dynamic range is way wider, so the quiet parts are quieter

and the loud parts are even louder. Everything is crisper. Like, it just sounds better than the overly compressed streaming audio that we've been listening to for so long that it, like, knocks people's socks off. So it's very expensive. You do not need to buy

the full $10,000, client server set up, you can get the strato E player alone, which I think is three grand. This is one of those things that's never supposed to be on sale, but you can find them on sale. People will sell them to you for cheaper. You do end up having to buy or rent all the movies and shows it's not as convenient as everything else, but

for those, that set of movies that you want to have the full experience in, yeah, I think it's worth, especially as Blu-ray kind of declines, which it's slowly been doing in meaningful ways year after year. A lot of people are going to tell me that

We should just review a Plex server next to this. We have plans. We have plans to cover what I will call the community. Interesting. Blu-ray, by the way, turned 20th this week. That's nuts. Happy 20th anniversary of Blu-ray. That's such a weird phenomenon.

Like, man, that makes you feel like. I remember being at the CES edit with the Engadgette team when there was a Blu-ray booth and an HDD booth. And it was going to be the kickoff of the format war. And the night before CES, HDV failed. It collapsed. and he took the booth down before CS opened. Whoa.

Now I just feel like an old guy. I feel like that's a version history episode waiting to happen. We're going to have to do that at some point. That's a good one. But yeah, literally the night before, it was like the breaking news was like, Toshiba just caved. They were like, yeah, we're out.

Whoa. That's kind of wild, actually. That's pretty cool. I have been Blu-ray shopping this week because of the anniversary, and then realized I literally don't own a Blu-ray player. So now I'm also shopping for a Blu-ray player. It's been a fascinating week.

$3,000 strato e-baby. Although you have like a garbage TV. Like very proudly have a garbage TV. Well, what I was going to say is like I have been slowly starting the fight with my wife to put a soundbar in the living room. Wow. Like this is the person with whom I had to fight my way up to a 55-inch television. Yeah. Anna began our relationship with a 22-inch computer monitor as her TV and I think would still be perfectly happy in that place.

So I'm like, I'm slowly fighting battles and I've decided to. soundbar is the next one. That's a good one. I'm really looking forward to it. The problem is to get the most of that soundbar, you gotta stick a subway for somewhere in that room too, and that is the hardest fight of all. Yeah, that's true.

Because you can't really hide that either. I can't, like, stick that in a cabinet. That's just a big box. You got to let the kids painted or something. Like, it's, you're doomed. Yeah, we're going to have to come back to that one. All right, I have one more lightning round item for you. Yeah.

Which is, did you see this Bob Eiger sort of exit interview that he did with the Financial Times? really interesting. I think Bob Eiger is sort of a weird story. He was the CEO of Disney for a very long time. Left once, kind of did aggressive sabotage on the person that he picked to succeed him

during the pandemic. Bob Chepec came back as if he was like the White Knight who also killed his predecessor. I don't know. It was a very weird thing. Now has left for real. He says, did a really interesting interview with the Financial Times.

it and the show notes, the piece about it and sort of the state of Disney is really interesting. But there are a couple of things that he mentions in it that I just found really interesting and pertinent to our purposes. One is the Twitter deal, which he confirmed this was sort of known at the time that Disney was one of the potential users. They wanted to buy Twitter and they thought Twitter was toxic. Yeah. The phrase Iger used was, quote, a horrible distraction, which I think was a super good call in retrospect. He also said they want to.

wanted to buy James Bond, which obviously didn't work out. That's now owned by Amazon. But the one I really want to talk about, and I think this is so funny, is Bob Eiger made it sound like there was work underway to have Disney merge with Apple. Sure. And sort of. This is the thing that I really like. So Iger describes the potential merger as truly transformational, right? This is like a thing people have talked about before that Apple should buy Disney. They have a lot of like values that they talk about that are similar. You can see how it might work. But then Iger also says in the end, the conversations, quote, never went anywhere.

And that, quote, Apple didn't show that much interest. So I'm like, Bob, did this almost happen? Or did you just call? Yeah, you sent a series of emails. It's just the equivalent of Valorhiger being like, Flav! Yeah, that's exactly right. It just makes me laugh. So Iger ends up on the Apple board.

They're like, these companies have been tied up together for a very long time. But I just really like the idea that we almost merged by which he means, I asked if you wanted to buy me and you never responded to my email. There was that period sort of, I wouldn't say late jobs era because jobs had no interest in buying anything really. But in the beginning of the Tim Cook era, where I was like, they've got to spend money. Well, it was after the beats thing, too. There was this sense of like maybe Apple is on a real acquisition tear now and it's just going to go eat the. the industry alive because it has $200 billion in cash. They've got to buy something.

Everyone wanted them to buy like Hyundai. Like, do you remember? Like, every company got floated. Yeah. And in the end... Netflix was going to be it for a minute. Like, it was, there was a lot out there. And I think in the end, actually, Apple got so burned by the beats acquisition that

they never wanted to do anything at that scale again. Like, the beats acquisition, sure, it got them Apple music and all this stuff. But it also brought them Jimmy I, Dr. Dre, as Apple employees with no titles in, and, like, a massive culture clash. that I think they're still fighting through. Yeah, yeah. But anyway, I just thought that was interesting. And also, I continue to think the Disney Apple combination is a strange and fascinating thing

that clearly will never happen. I mean, Jobs was the largest Disney shareholder for a time. So you can see why. You sold Pixar to Disney. You can float a bunch of stuff. But, like, yeah, you had no shot, Bob. Yeah. I'll say it can.

I was gossiping with a media person here. and we were talking about Eiger and they're like every one of these big company CEOs is now effectively being an accountant and the only difference with Bob Eiger is he has

any amount of emotional intelligence whatsoever like he can communicate like I like Avengers movies in a way that doesn't make him sound like a robot programmed to try to make a human connection and he's like we'll see if the new guy can do it

because he might just be an accountant too yeah like did you remember that trend was like a couple months ago where all the burger CEOs were eating their burgers. And every single one of them was just like weird and bad. And it was like, have you ever eaten a burger before? That was actually the context in which this came up.

Was it really? Yeah. They are. Them all being accountants now is a perfect explanation. Yeah. That's really funny. All right. What's your next lightning round?

What I got? What I got? Oh, speaking of K. I want to end here because I think this is a preview of some stuff that's coming. the CEO of People Inc. Neil Vogel has been doing the rounds here. So People Inc. owns obviously people. They used to be called dot-dash Meredith. They own like about.com.

Like this is a big roll-up of digital media companies. And they change their name to People-Nc to take, you know, just use the name of the famous magazines. To not be called dot-dash-meridth. Yeah. You know how it goes. Good call. Yeah. So he's on this terror. And you can hear him on all the media podcasts and all the stuff.

And he's like, an age of AI brand stand for something. And I, like, largely agree with him on a lot of these things. But he was on the Axiosi-Yat. giving an interview to Axis because you do interviews and yachts here at Ken. What a sentence, sure. And he said this line, which I think is really interesting. He's like, we partnered with Cloudflare

and we blocked every single AI crawler and scraper. We just blocked them all. Like Cloudflare did us a solid. We just blocked them all. And all of them started calling us because they need our data because we make new information. And now we have deals. Like you have turned off the spigot and we got all the deals.

And he says, the one we could not turn off was Google because Google uses the same crawler for search as it does for AI training. He called it an abusive market power. And he said, I wish we could work with them constructively, but we are probably headed for confrontation, which means the antitrust litigation about Google using the search crawler to train AI is like we are on the precipice of that antitrust litigation. Because once the one media company CEO says it, all the rest of them get real brave and they start saying it too. And you can just see it's that's the, it's coming. That's the tip of it. That's the tip of

of the iceberg, I think. That's interesting. And I think, I mean, A, if you want to talk about sort of abusing monopoly power, that seems like a pretty straightforward, like, you can't leave our search engine, so we're going to force you to play nice with our AI. I am not an antitrust lawyer, but boy, does that seem like a fairly straight line. But also, this is a thing that has been brewing, right? And we've been talking a lot about this. And these companies, like, you had Nick Thompson, and the CEO of the Atlantic on Decoder, like two years ago? A long time ago, talking about kind of this same dynamic of like, well, we have to figure out how to set a market and protect ourselves while also we think participating in this

business and technology that we think is interesting and important. And that has just come for everybody that now we are in this place where like, he's right. People Link is huge. They have a lot of brands. We've actually been seeing this. This is some like weird inside baseball stuff, but like our real-time traffic analysis has recently shown a bunch of weird spikes that make it very obvious. Spikes in the world. Yeah. And like kind of out of nowhere, all of a sudden, like, our traffic just like multiplies.

And it's very obvious that what this is is this is AI bots crawling our site. Like I just don't know what else it could possibly be at this moment in time. And so like this thing is not going away anytime soon. And in fact, it's getting worse. And it's changing the traffic mix of the internet for lots of people. like Cloudflare has talked about that for the first time it's seeing more bot traffic than human traffic. Like this thing is here now. And I think People Inc. is an interesting place to fight it.

The thing that it's going to make everyone do is it will force either week everyone gets deals right from the AI companies. And it becomes very lucrative for us to put, you know, meaningful human journalism in a database for AI companies to reconstitute as AI summaries. Like maybe that's the future of everything. The other thing that might happen is that everything gets paywalled even harder. Because it costs money to serve traffic at scale. And if you're serving a bunch of bot traffic, and there's literally nothing on the other end of it for you, you're just going to turn it off.

Right. And I think you're going to see a bunch of smaller companies head that way. The people inks of the world are going to body up and do antitrust litigation against. Like, that's what they're going to do. But him saying it at can on a stage, you can see all the other media executives. They're like, huh, is it time that we say that too? We've been waiting.

You know, like, it's a herd mentality, and this is, I'm, I think in particular with Google, you know, the deal has been obvious. You allow the Google search crawler to hit your site at scale, and in return, it delivers you traffic. Like, search traffic arrives, and you can monetize how you want. You, like, now we're also doing AI and Gemini is just telling you the answers to stuff. Like, you get literally nothing in return. And I think any judge or jury is, like, yeah, that's a new deal. No one's signed up for this. Google is going to have a lot of responses to that, I'm sure.

But that's, it does feel like pray I don't change the deal further. You know, like that's the mode this industry is in. Yeah. That said, it's the south of France. You would not, just looking at the amount of money sloshing around here, you would not feel like any of these people are in any kind of distress whatsoever. Well, I mean, that's why it's the people links of the world who have to go fight this fight because they're in a, their business model is much more actively threatened by this.

at this moment in time. Oh, without question. Yeah. That fight, I think, is only just beginning, and boy, are we going to cover it here on the show. We should get out of here. You've got fancy people things to do, I'm sure, today. Mumford and all of his sons, I assume, are just right outside of your door.

Get out of here, Mumford. You do need to go, but before you go, what's on Decoder next week? What's coming out? It's our best episode of the year. It's the 4th of July. Oh, yeah. It's our grill episode. And I will say this.

I shot the intro at a grill. The bit that I never thought would have gone this long. It's five years. Can I, so this year, it's the CEO of Weber Blackstone. So when we first made our list of like, what grill CEO should we have as a joke? You obviously put Weber at the top, right? And at the time, Weber was too fancy and they wouldn't do it. And they were like, what are you?

A tech website? No, go away. And so our first ever grill company was Blackstone, the griddle company, which was like a TikTok sensation. Oh, sure. And not only are they a TikTok sensation. they were enough of a rocket ship that they acquired Weber. So it's the same guy.

It's Roger Dolly, the CEO of Blackstone, but he's now the CEO of Weber because he just bought it. Wait, I heard Weber Blackstone and I assumed Weber bought Blackstone. You're telling me Blackstone Bob Weber. They put the more famous name first. Yeah, he's just like, yeah.

Like, I won and then I bought you. And now he has like the conversation's hilarious because he's a really good dude. I really like him a lot. He's very humble, but he's like, yeah, I had to fix this culture that had broken to the point where I showed up and just bought it. Wait, you've backed your way into

like an accidentally perfect decoder episode. It is the funniest Dakota episode of all time. Like, we talked about grilling, not at all. Like, he had to put his merger through FTC antitrust review. Wow. So, like, I was like, so, because I wanted him on the show last year when the deal went down, but he was an antitrust review.

So he couldn't come on. That's awesome. It's just like the easily the funniest. We even talked about, at Ramageddon. I was like, is the I grill platform affected by the RAM shortage? And he was like, no, that's not really a problem. It's like I got another, I got another 50 fry here. But yes, like a perfect Dakota episode is a guy who literally as a startup founder came to like massive prominence in the pandemic because of TikTok bought the biggest name in the space.

That's awesome. It's pretty good. I'm very excited for that. Happy Fourth of July, everyone. That's good stuff. Also, you're on Virgin history this coming weekend. We're doing the Nest episode. Oh, very good. Where we get deep in our feelings about thermostats. That was really fun. Go subscribe to the Virgin History YouTube channel, the podcast feed, whatever. It's a really good episode.

I think one of my favorites we've done in a while. I think you'll all enjoy it. For now, that's it for the Vergecast. Next week's a short week. But you and I are going to be back, I think, next Thursday before we head out for a while. But we got a lot of stuff coming up next week. It's going to be a fun one. Until then, remember subscribe to the Verge for all of our podcasts ad free, including

this one. You get all of our exclusive newsletters. You get all of our coverage of grills and everything else. I don't know. Theverge.com slash subscribe. That's where you go to subscribe. Also, send us email Vergecast at the verge.com. Call the hotline 866,

verge 1-1. All of your questions, all of your thoughts and feelings about technology and the movie artificial and everything else. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show was produced by Josh Kajas,

Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larich, and Aaron Lacassio. We will see you next week, Eli. Can we end on the song instead? Can we just play Brennan Carr as a dummy instead? Because that's the real rock and roll. Yes! Brendan Carr is a dummy.

Brandon Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Dummy. That's really good. Rock and roll. Hey y'all. It's Kelly Clarkson with Wayfair. Ever order furniture online and wonder.

Or what if? Like, what if it doesn't hold up? That sofa was four days old. You should have ordered from Wayfair. With Wayfair, there's no what if. Just style you love and quality you can trust. Visit Wayfair.ca. Wayfair, every style, every home.