The Vergecast - Spotify picks Joe Rogan over Neil Young / Intel’s $20 billion bet on Ohio / Q4 earnings for Big Tech

Episode Date: January 28, 2022

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Tom Warren discuss Q4 earnings for the big tech companies like Microsoft, Samsung, Intel, and Tesla. Casey Newton joins the show to discuss Spotify's controversy regarding Joe Rogan's podcast, leading to musician Neil Young removing his music from the platform. Further reading: Windows 11 is getting Android apps, taskbar improvements, and more next month Microsoft got a whole lot of people to play Halo and Forza Call of Duty’s next three games will hit PlayStation despite Microsoft’s Activision deal It’s 2022, and the Surface Duo is finally getting Android 11  Microsoft is making its Xbox subscriptions more flexible after UK regulator steps in Samsung sets revenue records with stronger product sales What to expect from Samsung’s February Unpacked Samsung’s next Unpacked event is set for February 9th What we know about Intel’s $20 billion bet on Ohio The chip shortage didn’t stop Intel from having its ‘best year ever’ Tesla hails its second profitable year as a ‘breakthrough’ Elon Musk says ‘don’t forget about my robots’ as Roadster, Semi, Cybertruck deadlines slip Tesla Cybertruck delayed until at least next year, Elon Musk confirms Tesla Cybertruck walkaround video shows the absurdly huge windshield wiper in detail The self-driving car industry is abandoning the term ‘self-driving’ and leaving it to Tesla Spotify picks Joe Rogan over Neil Young  Why Spotify can’t afford to lose Joe Rogan Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Today on the Vergecast, Tom Warren joins the show. We talk about Microsoft, Samsung, Intel earnings, a little bit of Tesla. Then Casey Newton joins the show. We talk about what is going on with Joe Rogan and Spotify with the little Apple earnings at the end. That's coming up on the Vergecast next. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together.

Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with Enterprise Security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all.

I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. Dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the optimum robot, soon to be Tesla's most important product. It is day 3,000 of Dieter being on vacation. every day my heart grows a little

a little smaller but he'll be back soon he's just on vacation you can like look at his Instagram I know where he is he's tearing down a tree in the backyard all I know of Deter's vacation is a tree yeah exactly

it's been it's been a big project to tear down one tree for Deter but Alex Kranz is here yes I've torn down no trees Tom Warren is here Hello I have returned Aren't you in Texas Alex I feel like you could

You could chainsaw a tree at any No I'm back Oh, you're back. Yeah, I think they will get very upset if I go to a park and chop down the tree. I don't think it'll go well. Well, it's like the two epicenters of Carhart in America are Texas and Brooklyn. I'm wearing Carhart right now. Seameless transition.

Far more expensive to buy in Brooklyn. So much more. Anyhow, Dieter's on vacation. But Alex is here. Tom's going to join us to talk about Microsoft stuff, Samsung, Intel earnings. And a little bit later, Casey Newton is going to join us. We've got to talk about Neil Young and Spotify with Casey, which we'll just see where that goes. We'll just see where that takes us.

All right. Let's start with earnings. It was a big week of earnings and its earnings season yet again. A little inside baseball for like verge stuff. Jake Castanakis runs our earnings for us. And I feel like every quarter when he has to send the email that's like it's earnings again, he has to perform an amount of enthusiasm that is getting increasingly desperate over the years. He started putting emojis in the subject line now.

spicy things up. One truth of tech reporting is that every three months you have to do earnings coverage. So here we are again. Let's start with Microsoft. Microsoft is they're having a moment, right? Tom, they're buying Activision. Their numbers are great. The cloud services gun gangbusters.

What's going up with Microsoft? How to do earnings was? Pretty much the same as, you know, the same as normal. It's like the cloud services office. All that sort of stuff is contributing heavily to their bottom line. but there was some surprise elements this time. And there was obviously Windows. I mean, you might call it a surprise,

but over the past year, the PC market has been booming as it was in 2020 with a pandemic. So surprising, not surprising. I don't know. Depends on your stance, really. But that was, I think it was like something like 25% up on Windows OEM revenue, which is quite a jump for Windows,

considering the position it was in before the pandemic as well. And then they actually predicted that surface would be down, down in, I think it was single digits of revenue percentage. But that didn't happen. It was actually up. So that was kind of surprising as well. So maybe they found some chips there to be able to ship more than they were expecting. Did people just love the plinth?

Yeah. It's just enthusiasm for the shape? Who doesn't love a plinth? Everyone hated it apart from some people bought it. And it raised their ASP, maybe. Panos Penae, who is chief product officer for Windows and devices, which encompasses surface. he had a blog post. It's a corporate blog post.

It's very polite. But you can see that the genesis of it was like, I got to figure out why people keep buying PCs. And so he just like wrote down all of his thoughts. Because it's unusual. No one was expecting this. Obviously now we're into the pandemic. And I think a lot of people expected a snapback. Right?

Everyone bought the PCs early to work from home. But then they just kept buying more PCs. And that hasn't seemed to have stopped. Yeah. And I think his blog post was obviously, you know, it was just a bunch. of like stats that they pull off of, you know, all the usage numbers that they have. But it was kind of interesting because it does show that people are perhaps using PCs more than they were before in sort of different ways. I know for sure that I pick up my phone less

now because I'm just stuck indoors. So it's like I don't have that time where I'm traveling to an office as much anymore. So I'm not listening to podcasts on my phone. I'm not, you know, doing these sort of tasks that I was using my phone for a lot more. So I can see where it's true with some of the stats that they've backed up with. But yeah, like the whole blog post was like full of all these stats and interesting figures about usage, you know, just percentage stuff that doesn't really mean anything, really. Because you don't really know what it's all based on. The worst, by the way, is when I'm looking at Twitter on my laptop and then I pick up my phone

and then I open Twitter and I don't know what I've accomplished. You're just chasing the notifications, right? Just make sure I haven't missed anything. Yeah. Yeah. Well, he called that three trends. It's the three trends in the blog posts that I think are interesting because you would have called them at the beginning of pandemic, but it's interesting to hear Microsoft say they're real. The rise in hybrid work and learning shifts in entertainment habits and distribution models, which is just dreaming and changing consumer habits for everyday tasks, which is a little fuzzier, but I think it means Tom's at home and picking up his phone less.

Pretty much. Yeah. I'm pretty sure that's what that means, right? Yeah. So you would have predicted that at the beginning of. pandemic. Is the sort of like ongoing increase in PC sales surprising to you? Yes and no. I think there's still that ongoing reality for a lot of businesses, especially. Like, we're probably thinking last year before Omicron arrived, you know,

we're probably going to go back into the office. And now they're like, yeah, that was two years ago. Just feels like it. Oh, boy. He's that staggered, you know, like businesses thinking, oh, we're probably going to go back to normal and then the reality hitting that things aren't going to go back to normal right like who knows this is probably going to be another variant and who knows what's going to happen basically and I think that reality is hitting again was hitting last year and it's definitely going to hit again this year so I think I wouldn't be surprised if sales dip off a little bit this year because you just because the Windows 11 refresh stuff you know I think everyone who's needed a PC is probably bought one by now

I would expect between 2020 and 2020 and 2021 so I think 2020 two would be a bit different. But I'm not that surprised that 2021 was still a big year for PC sales, to be honest. So you think it was more driven by the companies and not as much by like people at home? Yeah, I think it's a mixture, isn't it? Because you also got a lot of people. I think at the beginning of the pandemic, it was the realities that like schools obviously don't have these devices for one per people, right? So there's a reality of like people having to scramble and get to those particular sort of consumer devices. And then it's probably the of like, oh, I've got some crusty old laptop at home, how am I supposed to remote work?

And then the real core of reality is that businesses are looking, oh, are we, you know, are we still using desktops? A lot of people are using laptops. They have been over the past decade. But some shops are still, you know, like desktops. Do we ship those to our employees or do we upgrade them to laptops? There's all these sort of difficult decisions to make. And I think that creates a new sort of like cycle of buying. from businesses, and they are the main consumers, really, of PCs right now. They drive, like, any sort of growth in PCs, really. So I think that that's pretty much what's been happening.

You know, it's interesting. Monica had that great piece about how all pieces, like, the notebook market is totally reshuffled, like our old categories of enterprise laptops or consumer laptops. Like, it's all just, they're all just one thing now. The gaming PCs are going to have webcams. Yeah, because everyone wants to do a bunch of stuff on the same device, right? And what strikes me is the most interesting PCs are at the high end now. Right.

Like there's just a lot of really nice premium PCs. And you were talking about how surface was surprisingly up. The whole point of the surface line was to like drive the high end of the market and prove that they could compete with Apple at above a thousand dollars. And now I'm not sure they need to. Like that thesis isn't the point anymore. Which is maybe why they were like forecasting down. But they're still selling a lot. It's like, what's the next plan for Surface?

Because the market has sorted out that there's a lot of action above $1,000 now. Yeah, that's a really interesting question. And it's hard to answer really because they've experimented a lot with Surface and some stuff hasn't worked. I would say, like, you know, the point into the duo is something that hasn't really worked so far. Maybe the third iteration might work. No, it just got Android 11.

It took, it's just like a minute ago. Just got to wait another two years for Android 12. the next time Satchanadella performatively pulls out a duo in the corner of a room, which she loves doing, it'll be running Android 11. Or 12, maybe,

hopefully. And then this is the Surface Studio, right? That was a cool sort of experiment to really, and that was very, you know, going off the Apple base of creatives and stuff. And I don't think that's,

you know, that's not really hit off, but I don't think it ever necessarily was supposed to, but their core is kind of like the Surface laptop and the Surface Pro, those two products.

and whatever, you know, different models they do to target different sort of sections of the market. But it's like, do they carry on just iterating on those, like a Mac book would? Or do they try and do something new? Like the Surface laptop studio, I think that's what it's called. Yeah. The Plimph. It was like... Well, wasn't there a dual-screen laptop for a while?

I could have sworn they announced one. Like, I feel like I wrote about one. Oh, the Neo. It came and it went away. Then they killed it again. Yeah, but that's cancelled, basically. Yeah. Like that sort of stuff was definitely so pre-pandemic, right?

It was like, you know, everyone's on the move and we're all super busy and how can we work whilst, you know, on our laps and all that sort of stuff. But like that's just out of the window now. So maybe your device like that might come back eventually. So what's like the big question for them, I guess? Like what is that? This is what I'm saying. So the initial thesis was don't make garbage. We're going to make not garbage.

And you'll see that people like it. Right. And they did it. Like, I mean, you have to, you put yourself back then. They were like, don't use garbage 16 by 9 screens. Surface laptops will have nice four by three screens. Like they were, it was just fish in a barrel improvements, right? To compete with Apple at the high end of the market.

They did that. Then they were like into form factors, right? They're like, this one has a kickstand. This one flips over. This one, the studio looks beautiful. But what if it didn't have a GPU that was any good? Like, they were in it, you know? And now they're kind of.

Kind of like the whole market is doing that. And I think my question is like, maybe the next thesis was dual screens. Right. Right. Like Microsoft's idea was we will push the market. We'll take the risk. But nobody wants to do dual screens. And there doesn't seem to be one of those anymore.

I think their next experimentation phase will probably be like they've pushed a lot about repairability. So like modularity perhaps, that sort of stuff. But also like chip experimentation. Like because they're going into doing arm stuff. So potentially with AMD, there's those rumors about that. So they'll want to experiment more with that on certain devices. Obviously, they've already shipped an arm Surface Pro X, a couple of those. So they want to ship like a good arm product is the next experiment?

That would be a good idea. Maybe something that doesn't have a Qualcomm chip. Yeah. Well, I was going to say this, Christiana Amman from Qualcomm was on decoder, and he was like, next year, the good arm chip is coming. Okay, buddy. I've heard that for like 10 years. I mean, he makes a good arm chip for phones, but he meant the laptop one. The repairability stuff is super interesting because they launched that super, I think it's like $249

Surface laptop, SE. I think that that's going to be an interesting market for them. They can push other OEMs to go that way as well, obviously, and try and push Apple to sort do it. What about gaming? Like, they just bought, like, they've gone real hardcore into gaming. They were always hardcore into gaming. But like...

It's one thing that's definitely missing. Yeah. Yeah, it's definitely missing from their lineup. They've kind of experimented with GPUs on the laptop side, but never really gone. But like terribly, right? Like all the GPUs have been horribly underpowered in like a year or two behind. Yeah, they've always been old models. Yeah, exactly.

So maybe that's definitely a hole that they need to fill. Is it and put Microsoft's gaming, if you want to buy a Windows PC from Microsoft that runs games really well, you buy an Xbox. Right? And then you put Project XCloud or... whatever it's called now. Yeah. Load it up. Get some Halo.

We should actually talk about gaming. So that's the Windows side. You know, the one thing we're talking about Arm, you know, Windows 11 is supposed to be getting the Android app support next month. Yeah.

It feels like that it was announced with a huge kaboom. And now, you know, we're just kind of in that middle period where it's like, oh boy. We've talked about the problems a lot.

Have you heard any developments there? Is it going better than we anticipated? So, like, I think the problem with Android apps on Windows is like, do you need them? I think that's the big question, right? And how they implement it and all that sort of stuff kind of is a secondary thing, really.

But I think it runs pretty well if you've got the hardware. And obviously you need a Windows 10, 11, sorry, officially supported device for it and all that sort of stuff. But you've also got Google, who are also doing their own thing where they're trying to bring games to it. So at least they've actually focused on a specific segment of the market that makes sense. Like you might want Android games on your on your PC because there are there's actually use cases for that.

So that kind of makes sense. But whereas Microsoft stuff with Amazon is a bit. I don't know. It still feels a bit like who needs this and where's where's the use case? Like if they if they focus squarely on games, like it could be, you know, it makes sense. But I don't know. We'll see if people use it. I'm not, I'm not convinced they will.

I feel like Google focused on games because they can do in-app purchases and games on Windows. and no one can get mad at them because you could also just ship your game on Windows. It's like go to the place that's competitive but it's so easy to port. We'll see. We'll see if any of that works out for Google, but certainly the idea that you'll play casual games in your PC

and they'll get the game revenue that they get on Android without the regulatory troubles that all the mobile platforms are getting into. It's very clever. It's like maybe one step away from my galaxy brain thinking, but it is very clever. It is. And they have competition there, obviously, BlueStacks have, you know, built out a platform that ships on OEM devices and stuff. But, you know, they've got the Google Play advantage, haven't there?

So they, you know, they can. How many people actually use it, though? Like, how many people are firing up Android games? Yeah, I'm not sure on the Blue Stacks numbers. But I think they have, like, a relatively healthy business as far as I know. And they're actually taking, like, their model of, you know, having these apps running, on Windows, they're actually just taking it into the cloud. So it's just on our own servers in the cloud using Amazon servers.

So that is kind of interesting because then you can run Android apps within a browser. And then it's like, where does this? Where does this end? Forever. I can't remember exactly how many people we use BlueStacks. But I think it's like that, you know, they have a healthy business for sure. So I don't think it's like a small amount. I do love that there's three competing ways to get Android apps onto your Windows PC.

And you have started with, but why would anyone want this? and it's like, I don't know, but if you do, infinite ways to do it. We'll see, I'm very excited for, like, Microsoft and Amazon to provide some sort of, like, app distribution competition to Google. We just haven't seen it. Yeah. Like, we've not seen it on any platform in so long. I'm just very curious to how it goes, even though I suspect having used Amazon's App Store. It's going to go bad.

Nothing that you actually want will be there. ever know. Do you want a six-year-old version of the status player? And Amazon's here for you. Okay, we got to talk about Activision with you. You weren't around last week when the Steel went down. Microsoft said it's going to buy Activision. That deal is already facing regulatory scrutiny.

It's a massive deal. The Xbox Division, I guess it's now Microsoft gaming. They did really well this quarter. It seems like they're poised to keep growing. Yeah, like I think they're having like record cores. and they're growing. Obviously, I think even with this deal, they're still saying that the revenue

will still be in third spot behind Tencent and Sony. So this doesn't immediately, you know, bank them into a sort of monopoly position or whatever. But like the deal is just super interesting in the terms of the way that Microsoft sort of like structured it and announced it. They're like, he could take us 12 to 18 months, which is kind of an unusually long time.

And I wonder if part of that is obviously they're expecting a lot of regulatory, you know, push back on this. It's also, Activision just operates with so many markets as well. But also I feel like they've left themselves some cushion to like get Activision to clean up. I feel like that is a part of this as well. Like I don't think they want to fully take Activision on until some of those gross issues with that company's culture sort of rectified. So you can see they've been doing that over the last six months. And there's a reason why we heard about some of those firings a day before Microsoft announced this acquisition. Just sweep that under the rug.

Yeah, like, so I think there's part of that. But in terms of the deal, it's consolidation in an industry that is just from the pandemic side of things, it's just been booming, hasn't it? Like gaming, it's just exploding in all different directions. It's a super interesting industry. You've got handhelds growing now. You've got cloud gaming on the horizon. It's just a big battle. And I think Microsoft's in there with GamePast,

trying to, you know, they want the exclusive content and all that sort of stuff, just as Netflix does, just as Disney does. And it's just a battle for your attention, isn't it? And how much you can keep that person on that subscription and paying that ongoing revenue. So Activision, Blizzard, Call of Duty. It all makes sense.

So it's a lot of money. It feels like Sony's, like, path to exclusives. And it's done really well. like historically it's had the better exclusives. Halo accepted. Like their path has always been kind of like make deals with studios. Occasionally buy studios, but make deals with studios. And Microsoft was like, no, no, we just buy the studios now.

Is that accurate? Like are they just like buying their way to exclusivity? Yeah, I mean, they just need the content, right? Yeah. Like they have a lot of aging IPs, really. Yeah. Like obviously, Fawzer and Halo and Geese War. You know, you can only churn out so many of the,

games before. Like I need a balls energy drink and like one of those puka shell necklaces to play a lot of these franchises. And yeah, it's, but it just seems like a really, I mean this is the antitrust person

in me horrible way to get the exclusives. So Microsoft said they're going to do the next three call of duties on PlayStation, which there are so many call of duties and infinite variations within any one call of duty that like, I'm not entirely sure what that promise means.

But when Microsoft was announced the deal, Phil Spencer said, I want to keep Call of Duty on PlayStation. And they intend to honor existing agreements. And then Bloomberg had reported that Activision had already signed a deal for those three games. Yeah. So it's like really unclear what Sony, what Microsoft does at the next turn on. And it's hard. Like after we've been talking a lot about antitrust in the last few weeks, it feels like. And all these investigations into Facebook and stuff.

And everybody does, when they're going to buy a bunch of other companies, they're like, yeah, don't worry. We're going to be super good about it. And it's like, there's nothing to stop you besides, like, irate guys on Twitter from making the next call of duty after you're contractually obligated to make them for Sony, just making it Microsoft exclusive. And it's like, you got to, you got to give us more than just your good handshake, Phil Spencer. Yeah. And I think a lot of that will obviously, we've got 18 months until this. closes so it's going to be a long time until we really figure out what they're doing. But the more interesting part is they made this Microsoft gaming division and now fills the CEO of it.

So not just a, you know, that's a special title of Microsoft to be a CEO of a separate business for sure. Because it's usually they acquire stuff in and then keep a CEO in place to run that business. So it shows you the intent of what they're doing here. And obviously that's going to mean Bobby's gone. Like, I know there was some confusion around that and the way they've worked. Oh, you're calling it. Oh, yeah, he's gone, like, 100%. Yeah, like, you can read it in the way that he sent the email to employees,

the way that Microsoft kind of wrote around it. But this is his exit, right? Well, he couldn't. And it makes him a lot of money. Well, if not for the flagrant cultural issues, I would take that exit. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's like an ideal exit if you've had shitty culture issues at your company that you've ignored and perhaps participated in.

so but that's that's that's capitalism i guess so we'll see we like tom like you said this deal is a long way out a lot of things could happen between here and now including the deal getting blocked so we'll see but it just seems like you know when adela took over he was all in on microsoft is a cloud services company we're going to serve mobile developers we're going to deemphasize windows i don't really know what's going on with games but it seems important and we've just come all the way to gosh, we're selling a lot of PCs, and we're going to be the third biggest gaming company in the world. And doesn't that feel a little full circle to you? Like, obviously, Azure is doing amazing, but it just emphasis-wise, we're kind of back to, boy, we sell a lot of Windows licenses, and this Xbox thing is going gangbusters.

Yeah, it's wild that they're going to be the third biggest gaming company and have all these franchises under their control. like yeah if you'd ask me that a couple of years ago I wouldn't have thought that they would be in the position of buying Activision or Bethesda like both of those are massive we thought Bethesda was big this is this is bigger you know

is there more I mean they still have a lot of cash on hand so they could still be doing some I don't think this is the end Sony just buy Sony no by Nintendo give us like proper cloud storage yeah well actually you brought up cloud gaming

Like, it's interesting that almost none of the Activision deal points, they brought up the Metaverse more than they brought up cloud gaming. Like, it's crazy. Like, that's actually the very clear future. They're going to do the Xbox app on smart TVs. Like, it's all coming. Do you think they would ever put an Xbox app on the PlayStation? Because that's how you get Call of Duty on the PlayStation. Yeah, this is the main thing that, because obviously Netflix is on all of these consoles and, and,

If you want to parallel that with Xbox GamePass, which obviously we do a lot. So you would naturally want your service to be on PlayStation, right, to stream. But the problem with it is that there's Xbox GamePass and then it's Xbox Cloud gaming. They're two kind of separate things. So Xbox GamePass allows you to download games and play them, which is why a lot of people like it. It's not currently, anyway. They don't like it because they can get XCloud and stream games. Like that's still something that's very niche.

and I think a lot of gamers aren't particularly impressed with because of the latency and everything else. It's weird because of what games are on it. I say this mainly because I really wanted to play Age of Empires when I went to Texas. Right, and it's not that. And I could not, I was like, well, I can play all the Halo I want. I just want to play Age of Empires badly.

Yeah, they're still like figuring out the sort of PC side of like streaming games. And I think that will come this year and next. But yeah, like, there's still, I don't think there's still a great demand streaming yet, but whereas to get Xbox Game Pass or whatever you want to call it onto PlayStation,

you're only going to do that from streaming. You're not going to get those native Xbox games on PlayStation, right? I just have to rewrite them or port them, all that sort of stuff. It's just not going to happen. So, but I do believe that Xbox Game Pass will probably be on PlayStation at some point.

Like, I don't see that that's... Another line in the sand. That's another bold prediction. It's a big... There's no way Sony lets that happen. Are you nuts. Well, like, don't forget that Sony and Microsoft want to work together more than they want Amazon, Google, and whoever else to enter the market and take a slice of the money that they make, right? I have a horrible question. Collusion. That's what you're, you're collusion. I mean, you want to keep the top two or always want to keep the top two, right? And we've seen.

Is the Xbox hardware going to one day be like the surface of gaming consoles where it's like, this is Microsoft, big fancy Microsoft's idea of what this should look like. And also Sony and Steam, I guess, however you feel about the Steam deck and Nintendo, make their other access points to our giant cloud gaming empire. Like, is that an endgame? I mean, it's entirely feasible that that could be the future, yeah, for sure. Like, the way things are going and the investment in the chips, especially on the server side, is it does mean that in a decade we you know the idea that there's an Xbox app on the PlayStation

store is not that crazy you know it does seem crazy right now yeah but collusion well no but it's also they had a strategic partnership between Microsoft and Sony to co-develop streaming solutions for gaming and entertainment services we don't even know exactly what that means and like what's shaping up there but that's an Azure deal you know like on the on the back end that there's a definite there's a definite business partnership there obviously exports and playstation still compete individually but like i don't know like i wouldn't be surprised if if if if sony does enter into you know it gets a bit more serious about playstation now that they have an app on exports and exports has an app wild man it wouldn't it wouldn't surprise

me but i don't know man i just like the amount of revenue sharing they'd have to agree to yeah Netflix is there because if you're watching TV on your PlayStation, like at least you're still using your PlayStation. Yeah. And there's a chance you're going to light up a game and play a game. And like Sony makes a lot of TV shows, so there's a chance you're just watching a Sony TV show. Like, it all kind of works.

I think the same is largely true for Microsoft. Maybe you're just watching MSNBC on your Xbox. And Bill Gates's dream. That M is still an MSNBC. It's very funny to me. I love it. They just don't know what to do with it. But I think once you get to,

we've turned your PS5 into a dumb terminal for Xbox GamePass like someone's going to be like hey did you run this by anyone did you does the CEO know about this decision but if we truly believe that cloud gaming

is the future then you know like probably most of us subscribe to Netflix and Disney right and probably not much else so many other things subscribe to PlayStation and Xbox in the future and maybe Nintendo

fair enough Like, can you know, like, it's not, it's not out of the realms for it to happen. Collusion. All right, let's talk about Samsung quickly and then take a break. Alex Samsung seems like it had a great quarter. They were in the doldrums last year, and they've bounced all the way back. Yeah, yeah. They actually, they sold, it seemed to think they were mainly driven by, like, TV sales,

because people like to buy TVs and surprisingly phones. I mean, surprisingly for me, I guess, especially being here, we've talked a lot about how everybody likes to buy laptops. And I keep thinking, okay, well, that means they're not buying phones. And no, Samsung is, people are buying phones. They saw like 24% year-over-year growth. So, like, it's kind of incredible. It's 24% year-over-year revenue growth total.

Right. And that is attributed to phones and TVs and appliances. And then they also saw a big drive in semiconductor business. So despite there being, like, nobody actually able to make them and ship them to people, to put into phones and other devices. They did a really good job. Like, I think it was 52% year on year for profit growth in that business. So just really, really huge, wonderful time for them to go and announce a brand new phone

that may or may not have some Samsung chips in it. In a couple of weeks. Yeah, in a couple of weeks. I also have an ongoing argument with Thomas Ricker that he predicted that Samsung would be like dead at some point in the next. next five years. Well, like, the family that runs it was trying that, but it's too big to fail. They just, yeah, it's huge. They've got so many different businesses.

So the chip thing is like interesting, right? So they, they could not produce, Samsung makes a lot of RAM, they make a lot of flash storage. They were not able to produce as much as people wanted. But it, like, makes sense. Like, the chip shortage is all on the demand side. Like, if you got a chip right now, someone will buy it. You just. Like if you, you're just walking down the streets.

Like, I had chips. Like someone will come. You crank those prices. And buy, like, desperate for them. So that, I think, makes sense. We just didn't see the, Samsung was not able to deliver phones last year. Yeah.

Like, they just weren't able to do it. It was, like, hard to buy a Samsung phone. And we saw Apple just, like, scoop all that up. Yeah. Right? Like, the carriers are in the midst of this endless, stupid 5G transition. They're now fighting with airplanes, like, whatever. Tom's going to be on 6G before we get there with them.

Do you see Walt Mossberg was tweeting about he was doing a 5G speed test? He's like, I prefer my planes to work. This is garbage. He's like 5 meg or something. It was horrible. It was very good. Yeah, it seems like the carriers are still heavily subsidizing 5G phones. Samsung was able to pick some of that up.

And then, you know, people are at home. So they're just buying a ton of TVs and appliances. and Samsung like makes a lot of refrigerators. And I think they've just kind of like gotten back on track. The big question is whether the S-22 is going to be any good. And how they're going to talk about it in a way. I mean, it's February 9th, they've confirmed that, well, they've confirmed a galaxy unpacked event.

And then everything else is leaked. So we know it will be the S-22. They'll put it on their website next week by mistake. They're going to mail us all one before. But it's going to have a stylus. It'll have a 6.1. display. It just seems like an iterative upgrade in adding a stylus. And the question is like, is that going to be enough. It's the note is back. He's going to have a fingerprint reader in the screen

though, right? Yeah. That is one of the leaks. Right? Ultrasonic fingerprint reader. So that's cool if it works. So it'll have a slow fingerprint reader. I think the first one of those was like in 2016. So it took us seven years to get to like an in screen reader that on a flagship device that people would actually buy in the United States. And isn't there rumors that the iPhone is going that way, potentially? The iPhone rumors, not to segue a Samsung conversation to Apple, the iPhone rumors right now are out of control in terms of like, it'll have a dot and a dash, and then it'll have it in, it's like, all of this makes no sense.

It's going to cuddle you at night and make you feel better when you wake up every morning. Like, it's just magic. But the point I was trying to make that, Samsung is it seems like they were able to deliver phones, which was very challenging for them a year ago. But I really believe all of that phone demand is carriers just given phones away so they can turn off their 3G and 4G networks, right? Which there are no position to do right now. Maybe they're going to turn off 3G networks. There's a lot of like arguing with T-Bel and one sprint around that stuff right now.

But they've got to upgrade the phones so they can like reform the spectrum. And so I think the phone companies are like, yeah, here's some phones. Here's some 5G phones. Just ride this way. I think Samsung's there, but I just don't, I think the big question for Samsung is, how are they going to differentiate this phone from? From the S-21. Everything else in the market right now. And then in particular, from the S-21, it's got a stylist's type.

And, like, importantly, because Apple has shipped so many phones in this market and sold so many phones because they were able to deliver these 5G upgrades. Like, that's a lot of people who just bought an expensive phone. So, like, I just think it's going to be a challenge. challenging time for them with the S-22. And then, of course, there's, like, the green bubble discourse happening everywhere. I think, like, the guys counting the numbers, counting the beans over there at Samsung, are really excited that they just announced that QD TV because they're not going to be selling a lot of phones this quarter.

It's all about that TV business, I bet, for them. Yeah, their TV stuff at CS was pretty cool, though. It's pretty good. Like, we've been waiting a few years for them to really do something else. I really, really want to see one in person. I want to drive out to Jersey and just bang on the door at their little TV testing lab. They'd be like, please let me in. They won't.

They'll be like, please leave. Can I see your TV? That's like a classic little kid move. Like, can I see your TV? Amazing. So, yeah, February 9th is unpacked. We're all assuming at CS22. The TVs are going to be, what, the summer?

It's usually when new TVs come out. Yeah, yeah, yeah. They will not actually affect this quarter. They'll come out this summer slowly, but surely. you'll only see reviews of the giant ones. But once again, Samsung is not a mobile world Congress, right? Right. With its announcement.

The Mobile World Congress is still going ahead, apparently. Apparently. Very good. We don't know what's going to be there. Or who. Do you remember, like, Mobile World Congress is, like, way back in the day, Tom, when, like, Microsoft would announce an entirely new operating system, and then 20 minutes later, like, like, Sony Erickson would announce 500 phones.

Like those days are over Like now it is definitely carrier Executive's just doing carrier stuff Yeah We'll see By the way at Unpacked We are sort of expecting A new Galaxy tab S8

Which I only bring up Because Google has a new head of Android tablets It's Rich Minor Who's like an old school Google executive And he's come back to run a tablet team He's gonna make it happen this time Is that the tablet with the notch? Yeah

The S8 Yeah All the renders I've seen the notch is so tiny to have me going, where is the notch? It's the notch that Samsung spent millions of marketing dollars on hitting Apple over the head for it. I think notches are the future. I just think it's interesting that, okay, we are hearing about Samsung has sort of been the only player in Android tablets for a long time, right? Apart from the very, very cheap ones. I did see a TikTok of a guy who bought all of the $100 tablets at a Walmart to try to mine Bitcoin with.

and then like it was like a long video and you like built this whole thing and then like the next video was like that cost me so much money and I made five cents it's like what did you think was going to happen? There was a GPU shortage man like it was very good and he's like running his like tablet farm of $100 so there's obviously a market there but Samsung has pretty much been alone at the high end I think it's interesting that if they put out another one with its notch but the idea that Google is going to bring in a, like a powerful executive to do it is somewhat fascinating to me.

Just based on everything we've talked about with laptops and changing consumption in the home and all, like the fight for Chromebooks, like they have just ignored their tablet plans. And I don't even know where that slots in. Well, they didn't ignore it. They were like, it's going to be Chromebook. No, never mind, never mind. Never mind. Ignore that.

Like, they definitely, they were, they've been thinking about tablets except for maybe last year. Is it the year before that that they did the terrible tablet? it, the pixel? Oh, yeah, the Go. The Go. Oh, yeah. Like, they keep flirting with it and trying to make it in Chrome OS. I think I called it Chromecast a second ago.

But they keep trying to make it in ChromeOS work together. And now maybe they will not and just respect their different markets. It was the pixel slate and it was very bad. And Dieter hated it. That's why I was saying. And then Google was going to make a pixel tablet and they canceled it. Everybody hated it. I think I was the only person who liked it.

And that was because mine was one of the few that wasn't terrible. Like it kind of actually worked. And I just played a lot of fallout shelter on it. I remember when we were hiring you, I was like, Dieter. She liked that pixel slate. It's a real red flag. It was definitely a moment of being like, what did I do? I did a different thing than everyone else reviewing this.

Everyone hates it. I've ruined my life. It was not great. I remember Dieter. Like, Dieter was like, oh, man. He was furious. I remember that. I'm going to kill this thing.

He was very upset. Okay, that's Samsung. We're seeing some stuff. Hopefully we'll see some Google tablet stuff. We got to take a break because there's a lot of Intel news we need to talk about. They're building some buildings. There might be stuff in them, which is a big deal. We'll be right back.

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Terms and conditions apply. Okay, we're back. So there's a lot going on with this Intel announcement. But we've been covering Foxcon for a long time. So I feel bad for Intel because everyone was like tweeting at me, being like, is Intel in Ohio another Foxx? I'm like, no, I think they're actually, they're going to make chips. Alex, do you want to walk us through this deal? Yeah, I just want everyone to know. Last week, I drove through Ohio and I looked to my friend and I said, what is the point of Ohio? I'm sorry to all of you listening in Ohio. I was being really... Wow. We're trying to grow the audience, man. I'm just sorry. What are you doing? We just turn one state off. You've all turned off. It's okay. It was really snowy and gross and I was upset driving. And then I get back to New York. I pop open my computer and I'm like, wow, I just got like slapped in the face. This was karma for this bad joke. Because Intel is, you know,

planning to spend $20 billion on this huge fab in Ohio. It's their largest fab in decades. It, they kept calling it the Silicon Heartland is being built in Ohio. I don't know. Someone from the Silicon Prairie. No, just don't put Silicon in front of things. It always sounds stupid. Well, someone from the Wisconsin Valley, I'm just, don't brand the places.

Don't brand it. Please don't. That's my idea too. But, you know, they're planning to, they're going to invest. $20 billion there, they're going to be investing in the universities there to try to create a whole new talent pool. The idea is that it's going to all kick off in around 2025, and they'll be building actually the terrifically terribly named Intel 18A like chips there, which is technically going to be like a two nanometer chip, even though it's called an 18A, don't get me started.

But they're going to build it there. And the idea is just build this whole new. like center for chip manufacturing in general, just has historically been in like Arizona. So it's, it's massive. Obviously, Ohio put in some tax subsidies. They did not offer the biggest package, which I think is interesting. They are deferring some employment taxes. One town had to annex land from another town, which is, if you're into Ohio, local politics, it was very spicy, but they did it.

What was really interesting to me, so this is great. I'm happy they're building chips to America. I'm happy to making this investment. I believe Intel when it says it's going to manufacture chips in a way that Foxxon saying it was going to manufacture LCD TVs in America when there are no LCD fabrication plants in America. Like it just doesn't see. There's a reality to this. I know I'm like the person who brought vaporware back, but there's a reality to this that I can see is real. But it's if you just look at the way they're talking about it and the way that the politicians are talking about it, there's massive disconnect from reality.

reality. They're like, we need to solve the chip shortage. The automakers and suppliers in around Ohio will use chips. And like Sean did this whole rundown. He's like, well, it's not going to be online anytime soon to stop the chip shortage. 2025, maybe. Intel doesn't make any chips for cars. And why would they make like their most cutting edge chips for car? Like, that's definitely not going to happen. Well, he kind of like, in his piece, he kind of theorizes why they're all suggesting, like, why they're using all this huge bombastic language. And it's that Biden specifically is trying to push through a bill right now that will get more chip funding. And so this is kind of like the taste, the tease of saying, hey, look, look, Ohio gave him a little money. And now they're going to

change the world. Think of how much world changing can happen if you give them a lot of money. I just love the idea that to ship like a silverado with heat. seats. You need a two nanometer chip. Like, what are we talking about? Like, that's the problem with the car industry. Like, their old process nodes do not have enough supply. It's a little stuff. I've talked to

lots of car CEOs now. They're very clear on what the problem is. And they all say it's going to be over by, like, the middle of the summer, maybe into next year if things, if there's another supply truck, like, but they're all like, we're managing through it. Yeah. The cars are coming off the trucks. It's just

I agree with you. I think there's some political expediency here. The Chips Act is floating around. McKenna is covering every twist and turn of it right now. Anyway, I think it's great. It's just going to be a long time. We still don't know exactly what they're going to build there, do we? No, no. They said that they're planning to build like the Engstrom line there. So like the 18A that they are planning. Like that's the kind of thing they would want to be building there. But my favorite part of this was the size comparison, which is that, that Intel says, oh, yeah, ours is going to be huge. It's going to be 30 football fields in size. Oh, my God. Then Samsung had said, well, they built one recently in 2020, and theirs was 16 soccer fields inside.

I'm so sorry, Tom. I'm so sorry for doing this. We all know that soccer fields are better than football fields. And then now, like, there's a third Samsung fab that will allegedly be 25 soccer fields. And I just love that everything is measured in sports fields and not even the same one. Like, we can't even agree on the sports field. It's the Super Bowl World Cup of chips. When Sean was writing this all down, he just had to put in this note being like,

soccer fields are larger than football fields. But we know how large they are. It's very good. It's very good. And then the other thing is Intel's already spending $20 billion on two new fabs in Arizona. Right. And then TSM is going to build factories in Texas and Arizona, I believe. Like, chip manufacturing is coming to the United States.

And then there's this bill in Congress, which would fund even more of it. So, like, I buy that the way they're talking about it is just to put some capital around it. Like, when the chip shortage eases up, people are like, oh, I remember when they announced all those football fields. And, like, maybe you'll, like, vote for whoever was on stage at that point in time. Pat Gelsinger. But this is years away from... Pat Gelsinger, the CEO of Intel, was on CNBC today. And he was like, we had great earnings.

We're excited. You can see we're a little bit ahead of schedule. The action around the Chips Act is A-OK. And, like, he's doing the politician stuff. Yeah. Because I think, you know, he runs the biggest chipmaker in the United States. So if the Chips Act, Pat, like, he gets the money. He's like, you don't need it for the trucks.

It's just interesting to see Intel. I think Pat has a... He's got a good plan. I keep asking him to come on decoder. We'll make it happen. He's got a good plan, but it's the amount of politics he's doing is sort of unlike most of the other CEOs that we encounter. Like he's fully into invest in Intel, pass some bills, give us money. We will shore up the American high-tech supply chain because we're Intel.

Your other choices are Samsung and TSMC. I think it's because he's also a different kind of company, right? Like Intel has always been building a lot of their chips here in the United States. They've always been kind of a manufacturer on top of all the R&D and other things we associate with the giant technology company. The Googles and the Microsoft and stuff of the world aren't doing that. They're not manufacturing, especially at that scale. And when they do, it's always been outsourced manufacturing. So it's a very different kind of, it makes sense that he would come at this from like the car CEO angle of things,

wheeling and dealing, rather than the way we've seen Google. and Microsoft and Facebook and other large tech companies interact with Washington. He's an engineer at heart, right? So he's definitely engineering Intel out of whatever they were doing before, which was, I don't know what they were trying to do, drones and all sorts of weird stuff. He's engineering them into a big pile of money from D.C. I respected. Yeah. Not getting to the next process now. I think a lot of people wrote off Intel and their ambitions years ago,

because they kind of went a bit strange at CES for a few good years. A lot of drone light shows. A lot of drone shows, just, I don't know, it was just a little bit crazy. A lot of like we've missed mobile, you know. Yeah, they seem like a place without purpose. Yeah, but having pat back is, I think it's going to be super interesting, especially with these two new fabs and who knows if they get to eight. I don't know, we'll see there.

But I think just the stuff. that they're doing. They're back on the PC side as well, for sure, like, and the laptop side. So it's good to have competition and to be pushed by AMD and everything and TSMC. So I'm intrigued to see where they go in the next five years. I will say this, and this by last until now. They had earnings. They did okay. They beat some estimates. Their client group, which is their sort of like consumer ship group is done. But their next generation server chip, Pat says, is on schedule to start. And the only reason I bring it up is because that chip is codenamed Sapphire Rapids.

Yes. Which absolutely sounds like a nightclub. That's incredible. Whoever's doing that stuff, get them on the consumer side. Yeah, they should just go straight to nightclub names to the next generation of trips. It sounds like a Disney, like, ride or something. Well, there's a specific kind of nightclub. I think it sounds like that I won't say on this or family-friendly show.

I'm just saying it would be. It would be one way to get some heat back on these names. Okay, let's talk about Tesla real quick. They had another profitable year. They called a breakthrough. They're selling a lot of cars. They're selling every car they make. They're actually getting very efficient in making the cars.

Build quality issues aside. But some of the noise around them, right, the rest of the... We're going to talk about the robots. Hold on. I was going to do like a vaporware. Let's do the vaporware segment first. Go for it. So the Tesla vaporware situation is like increasingly

hilarious. So the cyber truck is delayed until next year. There's a, there is a cyber truck floating around the factory in Texas. Yeah. That Elon says he's driving. There's,

there's like videos just like random people walking up to it and be like, damn, that looks like a triangle. Like a hilarious video. It's on our side. You can go, it's just like a random dude's just like security guards or something being like, that's the wiper.

Huh? Like it's very good. So that's delayed until next year. you know how I feel about vaporware cars. By the way, I'm pretty confident just based on the use of the word vaporware in my timeline since we started talking about vapor cars in the show, that that is us. We did that.

Yes. We brought the 90s back. Love it. Anyhow, so I think the Cybertruck is vapor till it ships, just like I think the Rivian and the F-150 Lightning, the Silverado, all vapor till they ship. But then the roadster is pure vapor. The semi is pure vapor.

And then Elon's like the most important thing we're going to do is the optimum robot, which right now is a guy of one zee dancing on stage. Like, it's the most vapor that's ever vapored.

And I've seen headlines that just like have absolutely no screwing of this thing. The robot's coming. That's just a guy. No, it's crazy. No, you guys, it's just a guy.

Well, maybe he's got like the neuralink. Maybe he's got that like in his, in his brain. Oh yeah, he said he's going to do neuralink this year too. Look, Elon has done amazing things. The rockets take off. They land. The electrorication is all him.

He misses a lot of deadlines, you know. I'm just saying, it's a guy in a suit, man. Yeah, but don't forget about him. Don't forget about the robots. I won't forget about the robots. But Tesla had a second profit year. They are selling an awful lot of cars.

You know, if you want to buy an EV right now, you have Tesla. is your choice. If you can get a mock E, you can find one. Andy Hawkins, or Transformation Editor, has an Ionic 5, a Hyundaiionic 5. It is a vanishingly small list of, like, practical EVs on the market. And I see why Tesla's doing great. It's just the vaporware car situation is bad.

And like with Tesla, it's like kind of getting worse. I just, I hope they announce a plane next. They just, they need like bigger and bigger things to be announced that never. happen. I'm just waiting for the robot to drive me around. Oh, that's how they're going to get there. No, so, so being the robot, you know, Tesla's very committed to the phrase full self-driving, which is deeply problematic for a variety of reasons. And now the rest of the car industry has decided to abandon the term self-driving because it has such a bad rep.

So the self-driving coalition for safer streets has renamed itself to the Autonomous Vehicle industry association to distance itself from Tesla. And so that group is Waymo, Ford, Lyft, Uber, Volvo, like, and then the software companies, Cruise, Aurora, Argo, like, Zooks. They're all like, yeah, we're done with self-driving. We're like, we're not using that word anymore. I look on Twitter early morning on the European time, so you get a lot of West Coast, and there's always just like a bunch of people with these, because they're on the full self-driving beta thing. And it's just some wild things. Like the car trying to turn in front of a truck.

Elon, by the way, speaking of vapor, he said full stolf arriving will be completely operational this year, which he's been saying for many years now. Let's see it. But that's what he said. I don't know, man. Again, all credit to the accomplishments, the rockets take off and they land. That's a big accomplishment. But the vapor situation around Tesla, like the whole car industry right now is all vapor. It's just fake cars. It's a render of a Mercedes where they didn't center the logo. And that just like all the way down the stuff, like everything. It's a guy in a

suit. We'll see. All right. We got to take a break. Tom, thank you so much for joining us. No worries. We got to go. We're going to come back. And then Casey and Alex and I are going to figure out what's going on with Neil Young. It's going to be emotional. But Tom, thanks so much. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online, or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in. But Whatnot flips that. They say they're the live shopping marketplace where you can shop, sell, and connect around the things you love.

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Casey Newton is here. Hey, Casey. Hey, Eli. Casey, when I think of the most complicated, annoying moderation problems, I think of you. So that's why we're having you.

on. So the baseline here is, uh, there's a guy named Joe Rogan, who our listeners may know is the guy who poisoned and corrupted my hero, Aaron Rogers, but he's, he's a very famous podcaster. He's got an exclusive Spotify. I believe it's a hundred million dollar deal. If you, even so much is a whisper that Joe Rogan is Spotify's employee, a Spotify PR person will like leap out of the bushes and remind you that it's not. It's just a distribution, exclusive distribution deal. And Spotify does not employ Joe Rogan, but it is an exclusive distribution deal. On his show, he often expresses an enormous amount of skepticism about vaccines to the point where he says they don't work. A lot of people are always mad at him about this. Doctors wrote a letter. And then

this week, Neil Young said, you know what, I'm out, take my music off of Spotify. He put up an open letter. The open letter went down. And then something, there were machinations. And then Spotify took Neil Young's music off. It just all seems like a mess, Casey. It is a mess. It has been a mess since Spotify hired Joe Rogan on some level, you have to believe they knew exactly what they were getting into, right? They listened to the show. Joe Rogan is very good at being an edge lord. He often stops just short of saying, don't get the vaccine, for example. Like, that's not a thing that he says. But he loves being in this mode of, I'm just asking questions. And as a result, he has platformed a lot of conspiracy theorists and some really awful folks.

And on one hand, Spotify has said that they prohibit their hosts from sharing COVID misinformation that is likely to harm public health. And yet on the Joe Rogan subject, they have taken no action whatsoever. So it really does feel like, at least to me, like this is a case where Spotify has said one thing and done another. So this is why I say when I think of troublesome moderation issues, I think of you. You've covered content moderation a lot. We know at the big social platforms, we know how their moderation team. work by and large. It's actually pretty remarkable. We might not agree with what those moderation teams do, but you have been to several Facebook moderation centers, as you've reported out,

the conditions that those people work in. You've been to their war room about election moderation, which I believe you're like, it's a conference room, right? Neil Mohan, who's the chief product officer at YouTube runs moderation. He came on Decoder. We talked about moderation. We know how Twitter, Like, just down the line, social platforms know they have to be at least somewhat transparent. Here, Spotify, like, the level of just opacity is out of control. I can't think of a single analog to it. It's quite high. And I think we should keep in mind that Spotify is relatively young in this phase, right?

Like, Facebook, what didn't have moderation centers two or three years into its existence, Spotify only started to sign these exclusive distribution deals two or three years ago. And I don't think that they have really made it a priority to spin up a set of publishing standards, essentially. They have not told us much about how they moderate content. You know, I think up until now, we have wanted these platforms, the podcast platforms in particular, to take a very light hand when it comes to moderation, because most podcast and clients are just RSS readers, right? And no matter how bad a thing is on the internet, for the most part, we're not calling on,

you know, RSS feed readers to remove feeds. It just sort of is above the level where we want to see content moderated. But something changes when you pay someone $100 million, right? And I think Spotify has just sort of willfully ignored that, but then Neil Young came along and I think revealed that they are going to have to change their approach. So Spotify has only sort of willfully ignored it. We, I mean, Joe has said other extremely right on the border vaccine, skeptical things. And we've asked Spotify. We actually, I got into a fight with Spotify over a story Ashley published. But Ashley, we would have had her on. She's traveling. But Ashley covers Spotify a lot with Hot Pod and her newsletter. She wrote a story about how they were okay with something Rogan had said. And we had this debate. There was, like, no, it just doesn't cross their line. And I was like, but you draw the line. That means that you're, you have drawn the line in such a place that this speech is okay. Like, that's how this

works. It just looks like someone's signature. Yeah, it's just like, well, you drew the line. Who drew the line? It's you. There's no one else. There's no like global standards, right? Like, there's a First Amendment in this country and that means the government can't draw the line. So it's you. And I just don't think they've contended with it as they've bought up all of these podcast studios. They have it. now, of course, you know, I always think it's just fun to put yourself in the shoes of Spotify as they're thinking through acquiring the Joe Rogan podcast. And we can assume that at no point during that meeting was there someone in the room saying, well, you know, this means we're going to

have to develop domain expertise on science and medicine, because Joe is going to be making a lot of claims related to that. And we want to make sure that he is not going too far outside the bounds of what is known to be true. And yet in practice, I think when you put yourself into a publisher role the way Spotify has, you kind of have to do that. You have to take a position on something like, do you think the vaccines are effective, which they are? And if so, do you want to pay people to tell them the opposite? I don't think we should pay people to tell them that the vaccines don't work, but Spotify has chosen to do that. And so it's only natural that you're starting to see folks in the artist community rise up and say, the hell with this. So the other problem here is the

dynamics of Spotify's money, which are unlike YouTube or whatever, right? You're a YouTuber or an Instagram influencer or whatever. You put the content on the platform. They monetize it in some way. They cut you a check. That check is almost not as much as you want it to be. And then they make a video about why you're quitting YouTube and then you don't quit YouTube. That's the pattern. We know it well. Spotify, right? It's effectively renting the music that you listen to. So it has some pot of money that it makes. And then it has a bunch of deals with major labels and artists to pay them per stream, which those numbers are not high.

You might have some other deal. But basically every time you pay Spotify for music, it is pre-allocated some of your subscription fee to the labels every time you stream music. And then it obviously layers on advertising. With podcasts, it just owns a bunch of studios and it paid Rogan all this money. And every time you stream an episode of a podcast, podcast, they don't have to pay for it again, right, which is a very different model than every time you stream a song, someone gets paid. And also, they can keep all the ad revenue. And they keep all the ad revenue. So they have a huge economic incentive to make this work. And they're, I think that they are trying to lump the two things together. Right. Daniel Eck has said, well, I don't want to moderate rap music. Right. Which are fair, right? But they did try for a while to like delist R. Kelly songs. And by the way, I think this is a really hard.

problem. Like, I don't want to sit here smugly and tell you that I think the question of what do you do about Art Kelly on a streaming service is really easy. My basic feeling is it should be okay to search for these people, but again, if you are going to put yourself in a publisher role and say, we're going to put together a list of

R&B hits, I think it's actually okay for people who work at the company to say, well, I don't know if we want to feature this person. And I can understand other people saying, that's ridiculous if you're going to start policing the behavior of every artist, we're going to have to delete the platform. Right? So these are just hard unsatisfying problems.

But, you know, all that said, I have been fairly critical of Spotify on the broken stuff. Do you think Young's going to be the only one doing this? Like, are we going to see other musicians? And is there any musician who could actually get Spotify to be like, actually, never mind? So, yeah, somebody on Twitter today was like, what, was asking me, how different is this if it's Taylor Swift or BTS? And I'm like, oh, I think it would be really different. I think Spotify would have to say a lot more. If for no other reason, then where Taylor and BTS go, others will presumably follow.

And again, I do think people will follow Neil Young here. But, you know, something I've been thinking about today is, on one hand, I think most artists want to be on Spotify because it's good for their exposure. And I do think once you hit some kind of threshold, Neil Young apparently had six million monthly listeners. I bet he's making some, you know, meaningful amount of money off of that, although I don't know how much. I think there are probably also a lot of artists who are already rich, and if they want to make a stand by losing their Spotify streaming revenue, which is nothing compared to what they already have, it's probably a choice they could make. Now, it's not always going to be their call. It's going to be the call of the record labels, right? So my understanding is that Warner Brothers essentially had to go along with Neil Young when he made this decision. So it won't just be as simple as, you know, Taylor deciding she doesn't want to be on the platform, although Taylor has been re-recording all of her own music. And, you know, this would give her the flexibility to do that. So look, artists, you know, throughout all of history have made political stands. And to the extent that Spotify's podcasters want to take political stands and to, you know, spread nonsense, I think it's just only natural that we're going to see an ever-increasing number of conflicts between those two sides.

So really the fascinating thing about can some artists leave, if you're Warner Brothers and you've got Neil Young, who is. not releasing a ton of new music and is like a catalog artist. And you're always also in negotiations about rates with Spotify and Apple Music and Title. This is great for you, right? He's going to quit Spotify. Some people will switch to title. Like Jack Dorsey is like tweeting like you should join Title because he bought it for some reason.

It's amazing. Some people are going to switch to Apple Music. Neil Young gets to say Apple Music and Title have high quality audio. which is all he cares about. So, right? So maybe you'll cause some rebalancing on streaming. But you're also going to cause a bunch of sales of like Neil Young vinyl or CDs or whatever. Everyone keeps trying to claim that CDs are coming back.

And I just promise you, it's not true. But it's tapes. It's a meme out there. In the high-fi world, people want CDs to come back. But that's great for Warner. And then everyone's paying attention to Neil, like to boost his physical sales. where he makes way more money than streaming and then to potentially

cause a wedge between Spotify and Apple music that has never existed before, if I was wondering I'd be like, who else can we get to quit this platform? Let's do one a week for like six months. Yeah, I mean, I am not confident enough in my knowledge of the music industry to know how that

plays out, but is that what, does that outcome sound at least somewhat plausible to me? Like, yeah, sort of. Like, I do think, If you're like an up-and-coming pop star and you want to get way more famous than you are today and you're going to cut off Spotify as an access point, I think that really does hurt you, right? Because I think that Spotify has a huge imprint on the millennials and the Gen Z kids. And it's going to be hard to really dominate the charts if they just cannot find your music there.

You know, even amid all of the unhappiness over their streaming rates, you know, the only two really long-term holdouts among the pop stars were Taylor Swift and Beyonce, and they got on board eventually, right? Like, they essentially had really long windows, but they all said, yeah. So that just sort of tells me that overall the dynamics for these artists are such that they want to be on Spotify, even if Joe Rogan is there too. I think that is more true of established artists than new ones. I think new artists are getting discovered on TikTok, and actually that's a dynamic here.

They're getting discovered on TikTok, but, like, I can't, like, you know, go for a run to their music on TikTok, right? Well, because all the TikTok songs are only two and a half minutes long. It's like a real, a real pressure on the music on. How long do you think I want to run, Eli? Look, that's just all conspiracy theory for me. I pay a lot of attention to that dynamic because I think whatever happens to music industry tends to happen to the rest of the tech and industry in short order. Like, it is always upheaval.

It's always drama. And because artists cycle so fast, there's always a new cast of, like, unhappy characters taking stands. Like, the music industry just moves faster than every other industry. And tech is always at the center of it. But back to the moderation front. Spotify released

this statement that I have just been puzzling over for a day now. They said, we have clear policies in place, and we've removed 20,000 podcast episodes. since the beginning of the pandemic for COVID misinformation. That's nuts to me.

Like, how? Who press delete 20,000 times? Is it a room full of monkeys with typewriters? Is it, like, Facebook? Is it Accenture contractors? They said our in-house team sometimes goes to outside experts. Who are the outside experts? Podcasts are long.

Like, do you have to listen to the whole? Do they have to, like, if this gets reported to Spotify, there to listen to the full hour and a half of like Intel chip fab subsidy news before they get to this part. It just seems like the most challenging moderation problem. It's a yeah, hugely, hugely challenging moderation problem. And I would know too that Spotify, the way that they're disclosing it, it's a very sort of outdated way of doing it. Like if you look at what the big platforms are doing, I mean, I mean specifically YouTube, Twitter, Facebook. they're reporting what they call prevalence,

which is essentially of the bad stuff that was on the platform, like how likely were people to actually see it? You actually can't figure that out if you know that Spotify removed 20,000 episodes, right? Like what you actually want to know is, well, how many people listen to those episodes, right? It might, that number might not be much higher than 20,000 because I'm assuming that a lot of these things that were removed

may have been created on Anchor, which is Spotify's user-generated content platform, right? Like, I would be surprised if Spotify had removed a lot of episodes of the content that it itself is producing. So there's just so many question marks here. And Spotify asked to share more to build trust. How do they know what to remove? Like, are there people having to listen to everything? Is there a warehouse somewhere where people are being forced to listen to these horrible podcasts?

You can flag stuff on Spotify. Like, you can report stuff. And my guess is they just have a queue of reports that is handled by a mix of in-house people. and external contractors, and they're reviewing that queue. My guess is they're not doing a lot of proactive moderation. They might be doing some keywords searching. You know, my guess is if you go up to upload a podcast of Spotify and the title is just a bunch of like slurs, like that probably won't go through.

Right. So like my guess is that they've built like some of these sort of more rudimentary systems. But, you know, again, it's like it doesn't matter what, it doesn't matter what the process is or what your systems are, if when your most famous employee says, do you really need to get vaccinated? They're going to come into your house, man. He's not an employee.

They're very, there's big sticklers about this. I think right now, because of his exclusive, people think he's an employee. Yeah. The way that, you know, the Gimlet staff is employees

or whatever else. Well, so let's drill down on this, right? You know, podcast episodes, uh, in a world before giants were, distributing them on exclusive deals. They were delivered via RSS feeds, and I personally am comfortable with really bad stuff

being distributed over RSS feeds. If you're a bad person and you want to listen to terrible things and you want to search for those things and listen to them on your own time, I'm basically fine with that because that's the price for me living in a free society, right? I think where it changes is a big corporation comes in and says, we're going to give this our stamp of approval,

we're going to pay a huge sum of money for it, and then we're going to promote it. across various surfaces of our app. Now, I know how aggressively Spotify promotes podcast to me, but it's also personalized, so I have no idea how aggressively it's showing Joe Rogan to people. I can tell you it's not showing Joe Rogan to me. It sees what I listen to,

and I think it just knows. But I think it's important to highlight some of those differences, because I think some people will listen to this, and it'll just be, oh, well, here goes the left again with cancel culture, and they're afraid of ideas that they are mad at, like, whatever. And it's like, no, we're talking about at what level do we want companies to intervene and be moderators? And I'm saying it's at the level where you have decided to pay someone a huge sum of money and actively promote them. Because then it's actually

not just about what Joe Rogan believes. It's about what Spotify is actively supporting. And that's what I think we're really talking about here. I was going to say, there's a lot of precedent in the entertainment industry for these companies being the moderators. Oftentimes, like, you know, Disney's an example of one who's a moderator in a bad way. And, and then, you know, a lot of TV companies are putting these people on the airways and then like, oh, wait a minute, actually scale it back. And they just cancel them, like literally cancel them because it's not, it doesn't jive with what they want to do on their network. So like, there's a ton of precedence to just be like, actually, no, this isn't working out. You've gone too far.

We pay you so much money to be here exclusively. And if you look at like the TV model, there's so much precedence. And it really highlights the cowardice, I think, of Spotify in this situation. Yeah. I think you're exactly right. These are decisions that we ask entertainment companies to make all the time. I mean, like God help any, you know, movie star who accidentally says that Taiwan is an independent country, right? Like, you're going to be apologizing for the rest of your life.

You know, I think the vaccines are a much more consequential issue. So, you know, I mean, but, Look, you know, I mean, like, we have seen this story so many times before where a platform wants it both ways, right? They want to say, we're just a clearinghouse for content. Come and get what you want, right? We're not going to put our thumb on the scale. Or if we do, it's only going to be based on what we think that you will like. And we want all of the riches that will come with building that platform.

But then we also want to inhabit the role of a traditional publisher. And we want to go and support the kinds of content that we think, you know, are the most engaging. and when they inhabit that second role, they never want to take the responsibility that other people who are in that role, you know, in the media business, for example, sort of already play. So, you know, like, for all that I'm, like,

running my mouth, I'm very confident Spotify will figure this out eventually. Like, I think these, this is just like kind of a growing pains thing, you know, when Spotify bought Joe Rogan, I had a long conversation with Nick Kwa, who was then running Hot Pod for New York Magazine. and just kind of like predicted that these dynamics were going to happen. I didn't predict Neil Young, but it's like conflict is coming. And like, and conflict will be resolved when you start to answer some of the questions that we're bringing up on this podcast.

So, you know, I wish Spotify had addressed some of this stuff a little sooner. And I wish that they would give us better answers than they're giving us today. But in my experience, most platforms do get there eventually. We'll see. I think Spotify has, if you assume, and I think it's a fair assumption, that the 20,000 episodes that's deleted are mostly user-generated content uploaded through Anchor. And they're not policing individual RSS feeds that get ingested in the Spotify, which is frankly how we ingest our show into Spotify. Like, I don't know if Daniel, like, is sitting around with his thumb on the big red button

waiting to delete this verge cast. If he is, that would be a hell of a story. So Daniel, like, I mean, that'd be great. But. to do anything like that at scale, they have to build a huge team to do it. Eventually, those people are going to, they're going to have to put up job listings. Like, you can't even find the job listings, right? Like, they've got to, like, hire the people and do the work and become a moderation company. And, like, Facebook is a great example. Like, they're a moderation company to the point now where they fund a court system.

And they're like, this is the only way to do this fairly is an independent judiciary that we have created. And it's like, well, this is nuts. but it might also just be the end of the road for everyone. And they all have to publish their rules. Like, it's really unfair to participate in a platform that will moderate you and delete your shit. If you don't even know the rules, that platform expects you to follow. You know, it's true. And like, and I agree with that, but to be a little bit glib, how many podcasts does Spotify own?

Is it 10? Is it 20? Is it 30? We're talking about something that fits on like two pages of a Google Doc is basically like the number of shows that I think the Spotify. is producing, that's actually an extremely manageable content moderation, right? That's basically asking, how does Vox Media moderate what Vox Media produces? Like, that is the scale of the challenge that Spotify actually has. And they FFed it up, man. Well, it's a lot like Netflix. And I think it's Netflix with the whole thing with Dave Chappelle, the same situation of like,

oh, no, we can't moderate. And it's like, no, you're not Facebook. You're an entertainment company. You have commissioned this person to make this product. You can absolutely say, actually, like, if I go and write a blog, 4,000 words on why I love E-ink, Nelai has every right to be like, actually, Alex, no, we're not going to publish that on the verge. 8,000 words. 8,000.

Shit. Let's get to 12. But, like, they have that right, and they keep acting like, oh, no, no, you know, it's just like Facebook. No, you're not Facebook. Yes, you're a technology company, but you're not Facebook. I mean, Facebook, that's another whole other story of, like, their whole publishing thing, but you are very fundamentally an entertainment company. And you have every, you're entirely within your right, presumably contractually to, to stop this.

And instead they're like, oh, who can do it? Who know? You can. Yeah. And like, you know, here we are getting into a debate over free speech, which can get really tedious. and it's impossible and it's obviously very unsatisfying. I am surprised as a journalist who grew up

very much in that free speech tradition at how far we are moving away to actually we do want to get rid of a lot of speech. We're seeing it from the right right now all across these elementary school districts that want to ban wonderful literature about like the Holocaust and slavery and everything.

And so I feel like I do want to stand up for platforms. that want to welcome a wide variety of views, including views that I find upsetting, you know, that sort of thing. But at the same time, I do think there are just sort of a handful of issues where I am going to judge you for what you promote.

And public health and safety is just at the top of that list for me. You just said platforms that publish things, even if you don't support them or they make you uncomfortable. You're on substack. That's an obvious reference to substack, which published a little moderation manifesto this week. I don't know if they knew, Young was going to get no fight with Spotify, but certainly these things lined up perfectly for you to write a sparkling issue of your newsletter.

SubSAC is like, look, all no holds part. Like, we're not going to let you do hate speech. Apart from that, like, we think the answer is, you know that everything on this platform is a direct relationship between you and the writer. We trust writers. We trust their audiences have at it. That's fine. You know, subsac like takes a cut. I think there's a little bit of at the end of the day. Like, what if the, what if the most highly paid writer on Substack? is like, I don't know, thinks your IQ is determined by your race, for example. That is true right now. Like, there's a lot of uncomfortability there, but I get it from that perspective. I think on the other perspective,

it's like there's just not a lot of competition for these platforms. I think the heart of like the substack thing is, well, if you don't like it, you could just not pay them and you can pay another substacker. And like, that feels competitive in a way that the internet is very good

at making you feel competitive. If you want to, leave Spotify. You can go to Apple Music, which probably has the exact same set of restrictions, maybe even more knowing Apple, right? And then you get into, do they want to censor the music industry, which we already talked about a little bit, which is the most problematic. And like, I grew up in the 90s with Tipper Gore putting parental advisory labels on CDs at the Sam Goody, which I thought was ridiculous when I was younger, and I still think is ridiculous. Like, yeah, I'm with you. I think it's a very,

odd time for speech in America, but here it's like, they're just paying the money. And that, that changes the dynamic in a real way. I think it's different conversations about speech. Like, I'm with you on Tipper Gore and obviously like saying, oh, you need to go shut this down is a slippery slope because then you have Disney being like, well, gay people? No, no, they don't appear in Marvel films until we feel they're marketable in China. Like. Until several years later, when we say that that person, that one, there's a guy in the background, it's crossing the street. plays an unnamed crying man. Like, it's, you know, I think that that's obviously, like, I feel a little bad for just being like, yeah, shut them down, Spotify.

But at the same time, like, I get really annoyed with their aggressive. We don't know what to do. There's no precedent here when they absolutely is a lot of precedents on, on both from the technology side and from the entertainment side for solutions. And it's always going to be tricky because we don't want to be. you know, you know, it would be TikTok saying lesbians don't exist in the hashtags and then saying, oops, we turned on the wrong switch again, and which happens consistently. But we also don't want them saying a lot of other really bad hashtags. And like, they just need to stop washing their hands in the situation.

They need to take a stand one way or the other. And right now they're taking Joe Rogan's side, but also in like the lamest way possible. Yeah, I think there's like, most of this is like impression based because like spotify really has not wanted to talk to me about any of this stuff. But I feel like for the past couple years, their stance whenever there's been a controversy has sort of been like, give it a day. It will pass. Like this will blow over. You know, every once in a while, Joe's going to say something a little cuckoo, but we will weather the storm and we can just sort of proceed business as usual. and the reason I think the Neil Young thing was a big deal was I think this shows that

the pressure is going to escalate, right? Like it's not going to be a little bump, little bump, but like everything is basically chill. Like it's going to be escalating pressure on them to not necessarily dump Rogan, but to publish some publishing standards, right, and enforce them. You know, it's, you know, Neil I brought up a substack earlier, and I think what Spotify actually believes is spiritually way closer to what Substack posted yesterday than what Spotify has said so far. Because what Subtac said was like, we don't want to police misinformation because we don't think it works. Like we don't think it's helpful to crack down on misinformation.

Misinformation is going to be out there, whatever. I do think that Substack sort of went overboard trying to wash their hands of that subject. But I think it's reasonable for Platform to say in some cases, we're just not going to bother to, try to go after this stuff, based on the kind of tech platform we are, and based on the way that people get content from us, right? Like, Substack is a tool that writers pay to use, right? More often that it is the opposite. So, like, Substack is a service provider, and generally, it's like we don't pressure payment processors or domain hosts too much when it comes to questions of content moderation, because, again, most of us feel like, well, the price of living in a free society is a bunch of

people make money in horrible ways and post stupid stuff on the internet. All right. Here's my bold prediction for all of this. I said this case last night. Next to all of this is Pat McAfee, who I listen to, especially because Aaron Rogers was on a show every Tuesday, who just signed like a $140 million sponsorship deal with Fandul, which is a gambling company. And his stuff's on RSS. He just streams it on YouTube. He got his bag from his sponsorship.

I could see Joe Rogan being like, because he, Joe Rogan. can definitely get that bag from gambling company. I can see him be like, this is dumb. I hate Spotify. Ashley Carmen at the Verge has reported that guests get a smaller bump from appearing on my show after I went exclusive than before. My relevance is declining. I'm going to just like pay out my deal.

And I don't know, Jamie Fox is doing MGM ads with the fire. MGM, you got some money for me. And he bails. And he reclaimed. That's a winning move for him. So that's my prediction is that he takes a bag from one of the gambling companies and just goes independent again. And I think that might be a good outcome, right? Like, again, if people want to listen to Joe Rogan, like listen to Joe Rogan, right?

I come at this from the perspective of a paying Spotify customer and somebody who worries about what the largest platforms promote to audiences of hundreds of millions of people. And I feel like things are a little bit easier for me if Spotify is not. not promoting anti-vax content in its app. But if Joe wants to go run his RSS feed from his ranch in Texas and take like gambling money to do it, I have no issue with that. That's it. Gambling, sports gambling and crypto gambling will solve every problem in America at once. We have gone way over. Casey, thank you for coming on.

I do have to note that while we have been talking, Apple earnings came out. Apple made all of the money in the world. Biggest quarter ever in its history, the largest revenue in profit. I thought this was the one when it was going to break and they were going to have to go dip into their savings just to make it through the next quarter. Anyway, 34.6 billion in profits up 20% from last year. The iPhone was the big growth engine as always. And then the Macs are doing great. So that's Apple earnings.

It literally, while we were talking about this, cross the wire. And then Tim Cook is talking. He's very proud of his company in case you were wondering if Tim Cook was proud of Apple. I mean, we have to say, Apple, famously successful company. If you're running that company, you're having a good day. It's always a party over there in the spaceship. Okay, we have gone way over. Thank you for listening.

You can tweet at us. Casey is Casey Newton. Alex is Alex H. Kranz. Tom is at Tom Warren. I'm at Reckless. I want to call out a couple of stories. Back up, put out a full frame video, which is amazing about how to take better night photos and astrophotos with the pixel, the iPhone, or any camera.

It is just the funnest video. I highly recommend it. We have a big feature about Susie Thunder, who's like a forgotten hacker figure from the 70s. That's great. And then McKenna actually interviewed Amy Klobuchar about the antitrust bills. Great interview. Really great photos, too, actually.

Check that out. It's on the site. Decoder next week, CEO of Career Karma, Ruben Harris, who is super fun to talk to. So it's coming on Tuesday. That's it. Rock and roll.