The Vergecast - The Apple Car crash

Episode Date: March 1, 2024

The Verge's Nilay Patel and David Pierce talk through the weird and winding history of Apple's "secret" car project now that it's officially dead. And later, senior policy reporter Lauren Feiner makes her Vergecast debut to catch us up on the arguments made this week in the Supreme Court about online speech and the First Amendment. Further reading: Apple’s electric car project is dead RIP to the Apple Car, we hardly knew ye Behind Apple’s Doomed Car Project: False Starts and Wrong Turns Supreme Court hears arguments on the future of online speech: all the news The Supreme Court is about to decide the future of online speech Why Uber and Etsy came up so much in the Supreme Court’s social media arguments Google CEO says Gemini AI diversity errors are 'completely unacceptable' TikTok is removing even more songs as music rights battle drags on The Humane AI Pin worked better than I expected — until it didn’t  Ford offers EV owners free Tesla Supercharger adapters until July Attention English majors: now you can add handwritten notes to Google Docs The Vergecast and Decoder are live at SXSW this weekend, March 8th and 9th. SXSW attendees can see both shows live on the official Vox Media Podcast Stage at the JW Marriott, presented by Atlassian. Learn more at voxmedia.com/live. Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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. Prompts something like,

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

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello, and welcome to the Ritchcast, the flagship podcast of the Apple Car. In that we've spent a lot of money and it doesn't exist. It's the Vergecast, everybody. $10 billion in a decade later. And we have more to show for it than Apple does with the car project. I'm a friend Neli, David Peters is here.

Hi, we're in the studio. This is very exciting. Dave and I are together, like the saying, cable news, Alex Crenz is off this week. That's what they said. All the time. That's just the thing they say. You don't explain it. No further explanation given.

Now, Alex is, should we say it? She's sick. She's sick. Yeah, she'll be okay. Yeah. Send Alex nice vibes. Yeah. Happy vibes, Alex.

But Lauren Feiner, our new policy reporter is going to join us in the second segment. Talk about the Supreme Court hearing parade of justice. Of free speech on the internet, which is one of, you know. That's where you come to the show. What does YouTube weigh, Nilai? How much does YouTube way? That's a real thing that came up. We'll get to that.

But we should start with news, the news of the week, which is Apple killed their car project. After so many almost and kind of and false starts and what, like almost exactly a decade of work, right? So it was going to be a car kind of like Tesla. and then it was going to be a self-driving car kind of like Waymo, and then I think it was going to be a car kind of like a Tesla again, and now it's going to be nothing. Oh, there are three more twists. Were there more?

I'm sure there were. Then they were going to focus on making the software for other cars. Oh, right. That was a weird twist in there. Then they were going to buy the platform, like an EV platform from Hyundai, and put Apple stuff on top of that, and Hyundai would turn into Foxcon. And Hyundai was like, no, we are a carmaker. We know, don't do that to us.

Yeah. Then Foxcon was like, we're going to build cars. Foxconn. There are at least 10 more twists and turns in there. Yeah. I mean, it's really fascinating though, because I think if you rewind 10 years ago to when this was going to happen, it was the moment that everybody was saying, all cars will be self-driving and the world will have completely changed and everything will be on the road by like 2020. Yeah. And that was that.

People earnestly believed that. Uber was saying that. Lyft was saying that. All the car companies were saying that. Elon Musk was saying that there was this certainty that by 2020, the whole idea of owning a car was going to have disappeared and there were going to be fleets of robots roaming the streets everywhere. Yeah. And that just could not be further from the truth at this particular moment. There are some robots roaming the streets of Samford's here.

There are a few robots. Well, Andy Hawkins, who wrote a couple of great pieces about this this week, made the point that it's actually not that hard at this moment in time to strap a camera to the top of a Toyota Highlander. and put it on the roads. And that's true. But it is such a fascinating, like, counterfactual of history. If it had gone differently and we had solved kind of those core tenets of self-driving technology, would Apple have released a car? What would it have been?

Mostly, I'm just sad that we don't get to see the thing that Apple was building. Like, I feel like Apple has a- We should back up because I really want to talk about what Apple may or may not have been building for quite a long time. Yes. But the thing we're talking about was Apple sent out a massive. memo to its employees, just saying we're shutting down the car project and those employees will be moved to generative AI.

I believe 2,000 employees was the number that was reported. And that project has been both bigger and smaller than that over time. They've been working on this for 10 years. It's one of the worst kept secrets in Silicon Valley. There are Apple cars just driving the streets, collecting training data, you might call it. Well, we should say there are Apple-owned cars doing that. They are not Apple cars. Apple doesn't do Toyota Highlanders, by the way.

They buy Lexuses. Oh, you're right. That's true. I just want to put that out. Fancy Highlanders. Do fancier Highlanders than your average self-driving car company. So the project started in the moment David is describing, which is Apple needed its next big thing. And Apple-sized markets are hard to come by.

So it was health care and cars. Right. the next thing this can move the needle on Apple's revenue. And they decided healthcare, they do a bunch of watch stuff. And then cars always seemed like a lark. Like to me, it always seemed like, what are you doing? Okay. But it has been 10 years of people coming and going from that division of Apple called Project Titan.

And this last turn, they took Kevin Lynch, who ran the watch and said, you're in charge of it. And I think he was like, well, what if I'm not? What if I don't do this? Yeah. Well, I think Kevin Lynch being the one in charge is a funny example because he launched the Apple Watch and was very much the one who spearheaded that project. And to his credit was also a big part of how Apple discovered what the Apple Watch was. Right? Because we've talked about many times in the show, the Apple Watch was made because Apple wanted to make a watch.

That was the beginning of the story. Johnny Ive was like, what if Watch? And that's how it started. And so Apple over time figured out what it could be, what it should be, how it could work, who it would be for. And it has worked. Like, kudos to that team. They got there. They figured it out.

And my assumption is that the car is sort of the same way. We're like you're saying, Apple looked around and said, okay, what's a huge market? Oh, cars. Let's make a car. And then at some point, somebody had to sit down and go, what do we do? What is that? So there's a story that comes up over and over again. It's in some of the reporting today and the Times.

we had Tripp Mickle on the show a while back. It was in his book about Apple and just sort of the fight between Tim Cook and Johnny Ive in the post-jobs era. And the story has come up several times now. Johnny Ive built a model of a car with no steering wheel, and he sat Tim Cook down in it, and they pretended they were on a drive while an actor. This is true. An actor pretended to be Siri and pretended to talk to them as they went on their pretend. And tell them, like, the name of restaurants that they were going by,

and stuff like that. It was supposed to be, that was the interface for the car with Siri, which is terrifying. I just want everyone to sit with that for a minute and imagine, like these, when you think about Tim Cook,

imagine him going on a pretend car ride with Johnny Eye. It really is the most... Does pretend Siri. It's the most like CES vaporware demo from a company in China you've never heard of and we'll never hear from again thing.

Yeah. But it's also like, does Johnny Eye not think Tim Cook has any power of imagination because I could be like, here's what it's going to be like, you're going to sit in the car, it's a drive around and Sirius, we're talking to you. And I don't need that acted out for me. It doesn't help to have an actor go, that's a Dwayne Reed. It's like, I don't need that.

Like, it's in the mind's eye, you know? I got it. I just close your eyes. Everybody pull over your cars. Imagine your car's driving itself. Series, like, there's a hospital. Like, that's all you need to do. I think about that moment all the time.

It's like, does Johnny I think Tim Cook can't imagine the most basic thing you can imagine about a self-driving car? There are seats. The end. I made a beautiful chair for you. Sit in it and pretend it's a car. So that demo apparently convinced them that this is the future of the car. And they wanted to do the big thing, which is self-driving Siri car. Right.

No steering wheel. Which is, I think, like, that's the Apple-level innovation leap. Yes. And I think at that time, that's where if you're Apple, you say, okay, there is a thing we can do that is different, right? Because if you're Apple and you're just saying, oh, let's make a pretty good SUV, like that that's not what Apple does. But if you believed, as they did at that time, that in a decade, the whole way we experience cars would be different, you can see how you would talk yourself into, oh, it's just going to be screens you sit in instead of screens. Seriously, like it's... And we can take 30% of those screens too. Exactly. Like literally, the services business in a car is going to be nuts someday. By the way,

all the carmakers believe this. This is why GM took car play out of its cars. Like, down the line, the idea that you will roll around in a shopping mall, everyone's very excited about this. 100%.

And I feel like the tension has been, there has been this incredible sort of whipsawing hype around self-driving. And it seems like whipsawing strategy inside of Apple as a result. And everyone's, Once in a while, they've just been like, oh, crap, that's not going to work. We should just build a car.

And then somebody's like, why the hell are we just building a car? And then somebody else is like, but what if it drove itself? And they're like, we're back, baby. Higher 2,000 engineers. Yeah, that part, that's the other turn that I think is interesting. There's all these rumors that they try to buy Tesla. They investigated it. I think Elon has, like, said things that Apple has denied over the course of the past decade.

Well, there was some reporting around this that Elon and Tim Cook did have some conversations. about it. Apple wasn't interested and also Elon would only do it if he was made the CEO of Apple, which is just an incredible. I have no idea. Like, A, perfectly in character for Elon Musk. B, I have no idea if it's true, but I am choosing to believe that that's a very truthy. It just feels good to rattle that. What is true is that Johnny I've sat Tim Cook down in a pretend car and they went on a pretend ride, which I just will never like that's when you know like, so this is your idea. No, we're not doing. And it wasn't even a car, it was like a couch. Yeah. It was just, it was just a seat. It's just very good. I just want everyone, it's fine. I want you to use your imagination to imagine then using their imaginations.

Just think about it. Do you think there was like fake wind? I can't stop thinking about this. Was somebody scrolling a picture? Like, these are not, I would say, mirthful personalities. Like, they were taking all this very seriously. Oh, yeah. These are two very serious people.

Just imagine it Just like I don't know Like you acted out with your friends See if you can even get through it I can't get over it Okay so then you got we should buy Tesla We can't do self-driving technology is there We should just build a car

And this is when you were like What does it look like? I cannot stop thinking about The moments when Apple was like Okay what does a car look like Because a car in the United States At this point in time Looks like a mid-sized crossover

Yes. Arguably the least design forward shape for a car. Yeah. Like, here's a shoe. Yeah. It's just a Subaru. Like, all cars are Subaru's now. That's just what it is.

It's like old Toyotas are angry robot, Subaru's. New Toyotas are sort of like mean fish Subaru's. Like, it's all the same. Slightly racy, Subaru's. Slightly tall Subaru's. It's just Subaru's all the way down, man. And so the idea that Apple's going to like deliver a hot-looking, in mid-sized crossover is very funny.

Yes. Like, very fun. Like, mid-sized crossovers look so much the same that the new Ferrari SUV looks almost exactly like a Buick. Like, there is a new Buick that looks almost exactly like a Ferrari that looks almost exactly like a Mazda. And it's like Apple entering this market. I mean, like, design, everyone.

Well, and to some extent, that is the result of literal dexterity. decades of work from these companies. And again, some of the reporting around this has been that Apple basically infuriated everybody who came to work on the car because it said, we're not doing anything the way the car industry has done things. We're going to operate from first principles. Which you can imagine means there's a meeting run by Johnny Ive where he's like, what if the wheels weren't round?

Just as like a thought experiment. What other shape could a wheel be? No, it's Johnny Yves. He'd be like, the answer must be so simple. It seems obvious. Everyone's like, round wheels, dude. Nailed it. Yeah.

It's like, what if it just hovers? And they're like, no, Johnny, that's not it. But and so from all the way down, it's like, this is what Tesla experienced too. Like, it turns out there aren't actually all that many ways to make a car. And you can litigate forever, whether that's a good thing or a bad thing, the way the regulation works, the way the industry works, the economies of scale. Like, there aren't that many ways to make a car. And if you try to get weird with it, you make a cyber truck. There's that.

But Apple basically tried to do. a thing that I think it just couldn't do. And again, I wish we had gotten to see what it would look like. I think someone at Apple is their moral responsibility to just like post the slide deck. Post the keynote file.

Show me. Showing the designs. So there is a little bit of reporting in the Times today. There's actually a lot of great senses in the Times series, but there's the Mr. But this paragraph jumped out. Mr. Ivan's team of designers

through concepts for a car that would look like a European minivan such as the Fiat Multipla 600 which has half a dozen windows and a curving roof. It had no steering wheel and we controlled by Apple's virtual assistant Siri. So it was a minivan. With no steering wheel. Yeah, and there was some reporting in there that one of the big innovative things they were going to do is put a polymer on the sunroof so that you didn't get heat in the sunroof.

And it's like that is the extent to which you are allowed to innovate in cars is polymers on the sunroof, right? Otherwise, we pretty much did it. For what cars are for now, we've pretty much done it. Can I just point out the Fiat 600 multi-plow? It looks exactly like a VW bus. Like, it is the most Johnny-Aff thing to be like, so it's a VW bus, but we picked a weirder Fiat version of it. It's a European one.

So is the VW bus. No, no, it's a Fiat this time. All of that is just the silliest to me. Yes. And I think the reality of what a car is to people. Apple is full of car nerds. Like Eddie Q is on the board of Ferrari. I think Aston Martin has the new version of car playing it

because Phil Schiller just like went there and was like, look, I own so many of these. Just like, let's make it happen. Yeah. And Johnny I was a big car guy. It is very much in the DNA of that company to love cars. Yeah. Wasn't it Jobs who got the new Mercedes every six months

so that he didn't have to have a license plate? Yes. That's good. Like, that's the, make a car without a license plate, Apple. Like, there it is. We did it. But that's like, I keep coming around to this question of, was this ever going to work? It is so for Apple, a backwards way of making great products, which is just like we found a huge market.

Let's go do something there. Yeah. But I do also think if you twist the world a little differently and self-driving technology is much further along and the regulation is much further along and we're doing better at all of that, I think it's not. It's not crazy to imagine that at some point we are due for a big reinvention of what a car is. Again, I'm just going to, I want to come back to this. Johnny, I have set Tim Cook down in 2015 in a fake car and said, what I'd like to do is build a $100,000 bus with no steering wheel. And they were like, let's spend 10 years on this. And that is, that's not just backwards, right?

That's like, we're not even going to move the market to, like, we're not even going to move. enough units to make revenue to make this worth it in the end. I mean, we just talked the other week on the show about the fact that the market for $100,000 SUVs turns out to not be huge. And it's hurting a lot of companies because everyone who wants $100,000 electric SUV already got one and there aren't very many of them. They're doing dumb stuff and their hummers. Yeah, exactly.

They're not going to buy it. They are not going to buy a bus. No. And the real market for cars is coming down, wade it back down to Earth and to operate its scale. I think you do to sell $100,000 a car. Apple, you do need it to drive itself. So then you can't get it to drive itself. And now you've got to make a $50,000 car or $70,000 car.

And now you are in just some of the most overheated territory that exists in cars. You're up against luxury. You're up against BMW and Mercedes and Audi, like all those companies, Lexus. You got your own self-driving Lexus already. Like if you're Apple and you have a self-driving Lexus, you have to be like, can we make something better than the Lexus we put a camera on? Did we just do it already? Yeah. could just buy, Apple could just buy Lexuses, put an Apple logo on them and resell the Lexus

and Apple car. And that, I think, is like a real problem for them. Yeah. The thing that I keep coming back to, that same moment, 10 years ago, that is when like the height of their weird TV ambitions. Well, it was really when Johnny was feeling himself the most. It was like peak Johnny Ive in terms of just having insane ideas about what everything should be. And some of those things were the butterfly keyboard and some of those things were the Apple Watch. And it just like, Apple had a real weird moment for a couple of years there because Johnny Ive was both kind of disengaging and just sort of lobbing insane ideas into Apple's design studio at all time.

Well, this is, I believe. And this is the most expensive one, I think. I believe this is, this moment has been described is when Apple thought it was a fashion company. Hmm. Interesting. Right. Yeah.

They had hired a bunch of fashion executives and the sort of like computer nerds were like, you should make the MacBooks thicker and work well. And they're like, what if they had no ports? Right. We sold all the ports back to you with $39 a piece. And the keyboards didn't work. Oh, also, we're going to make the phone so thin that they have no battery life. Huh?

And like that fashion conception of the company was real. Like that was a real thing that happened at Apple. And this turn lately from the company is much more like we make computers. Like, we make so much computers, we made a face computer. Like, it's the most... There's nothing fashion about the Vision Pro, except that it looks like a pair of expensive ski goggles. But I don't think that is fashion in the way...

No. At 2015, Apple would have thought about it as fashion. Right. Remez is not making one of those for you any time. It would be incredible. We did... There was a tweet today of a man who wore the Vision Pro to his wedding. Oh, wow. Vsong showed it to me, and the bride is just like...

What are you doing? That's love right there. That is love. The look on her face is very, it's exactly what you'd expect. You could read his vows, though. They'd be right there, right in front of you. Oh, my God. That would be so I'm saying.

You can have it on a window. Look at her, look at the vows. She can see your eyes, the googly eyes. I'm in on this. Don't do this. I don't know. Don't do this. If you're listening to this, David is joking and he's proposing a bad idea.

That's not an instruction. That's 2015 Apple, the weird. Fashion, Apple. The thing that was happening, like, right, next in the company at the same time, was they were, they were still trying to make good on this promise that Steve Jobs had figured out the TV. Right. And so, like, the thought experiment, I've been thinking about since reading about the car getting shut down. It's like, what if they just made TV? What if they put all those resources at a television?

Right. What if they were just like, it's a great TV, and it has a built-in. cable service and you're going to pay us a monthly fee to have the sickest TV in your house. And it probably would have taken all the market share from the high end of the TV industry because that's what Apple does. And they would have had a business, like a real business, selling a thing that people like. And ironically, in the same way that the self-driving car world has not gone the direction Apple expected, the TV world has gone exactly the way you would want it to if you're Apple.

Yeah. Like, TVs are a services business. TVs are sort of slowly inching towards becoming the center of a smart home, which we know Apple is very interested in. TVs are a hub device for lots of other devices. Like, in a way, it actually makes more sense today for Apple to try to build a television than it ever has in the past, both for Apple's business and just, like, the world. Yeah. And it is really interesting to think, like, what if they had spent $10 million trying to build the greatest TV the world has ever known instead of trying to build a car that actually I don't think there was ever really going to be any real demand for? anyway. Well, so, you know, the arguments against TV at that time were the TV upgrade cycles

are too long and the margins are too low. Right. And it's like, those are good arguments at the time. Now it's like, yo, do you know how long the iPad upgrade cycle is? One thousand years. Like, no one upgrades it. They're like, I have an iPad. It does the three apps I need. Sometimes I can circle things. I'm going to have this iPad until like that. My mom is finally hitting the point where some of her apps won't update on her iPad, so she's starting to think about it. And I was like, okay, how old do you think it is? She was like, I don't know, like, it's probably like four years old,

eight and a half years old her iPad. And it's just now to the point where she's like, it's been a little slow for a while, but now there's actually a handful of things I can't do. And I was like, honestly, the fact that you just made it eight and a half years without even really thinking about it on this device is pretty spectacular. Yeah, that's a credit to Apple, right?

Absolutely. They do the software updates. So the things last, like, all credit to them. But that's very funny. Yeah. That they were so, this is a reason not. to the TV and now it's like people hold on their phones for a million years, they hold on the iPads for, and all of their revenue is services.

Yep. And it's like, oh, you could have just had that business. This whole time you could have had that business instead of allowing, I know, Roku to become a huge competitor, instead of allowing Amazon to be the number one provider of cheap TVs to everybody. And the ad business on TV is booming, which Apple has been perpetually interested in building a real ad business. Like, it's kind of, it's all sitting there.

It's just very funny to me to be like, all the reasons they didn't. didn't do a TV were like worse reasons to not do something than all the reasons they should not have made a car. Like, I'm sure people are going to laugh at us that we started talking on the car and we ended up with Apple should make a TV. I think Apple should make a TV, but they should have done it a million years ago. Right. Instead of this thing, which some of the reporting here is fascinating that one of the reasons they had the car project was because the engineers were bored after doing the watch.

One of the next big thing, and Tim Cook didn't want them to go to Tesla. Right. And it's like, well, if you got a bunch of engineers and you're like, do a fake car, like, you haven't accomplished anything. Build me a thing, Johnny and I can sit in. It's like there's no, you literally, now at this point have not accomplished anything. Right. But even at the time, it's like all we, we're spending money and you're not going to Tesla. There's a weird, there's a weird logic in there.

Yeah. Because it's not like they were, they were working on the iPhone the whole time. They were working on a car that wasn't. shipping. Right. Well, I also, I wonder how much the part of the story that is all these folks being moved to generative AI is actually about just sort of being smart about resources in a complicated time in the economy.

I would believe that in almost every case that it actually makes more sense for Apple to have its highly paid employees working on a thing that everyone agrees is going to be a gigantic growth industry in a lot of ways in the next decade versus kind of continuing on this lark. But it's Apple. Like Apple can afford to do both those things at the same time if it wanted to. So it does mean that at some point there was someone within Apple who was just like, it's time to call this.

Yeah, I think that person was Tim Cook. I think you're probably right. I think he's like, I'm no closer to this couch moving than I was before. And also Siri, potentially worse than 10 years ago. I have put the chat, GBT, shortcut on my action button. And it's just like very obvious what Apple should do with Siri. Yeah. kill it and give it to chatchee TV

they should buy open AI like I don't know Siri just now makes horrifying videos of people lighting things on fire like Siri show me a picture of my family and it's like which is sorry I just keep I keep looking at videos generated by Sora up by Open AI and I'm like

this shouldn't threaten anyone because all of these videos are slightly terrifying yeah do you see the one of the guy smoking no where you like magic's the cigarette up in his hand and it's like lights on fire and then it brings it to his mouth. It's very good.

I love that. I just want to read this line from the Times piece, which again is full of just cutting asides, effectively. The story is really good. We'll put it in the show notes. Everyone should read it. But at the end of it, I mean, I'm just going to read it to you. Apple's dead car project will be survived by its underlying technologies. It's like, oh, now you're just writing an obituary.

Yeah. It's very good. It was loved by many in the community. No, this is the other cutting line. Interviews on Wednesday with New York Times, people who worked on the project praised the decision to strutter it. That's bad. Brutal. That's bad. Yeah.

It's a lot. I think it is fascinating to consider what if they built the other thing. It's fascinating to consider this decision in the context of deciding to launch the Vision Pro. Yeah. Which by all accounts, you know, I think some people have given it back. There are some reports on the return rates. But, like, people know what it is now. No more mystery.

No more hype balloon. It's a VR headset that some people really like and some people do not and they have a long way to go for that to become a mainstream project And it's like you decided to launch this thing that kind of doesn't work Just to learn something about what you need to do And you never shipped one mid-sized crossover I mean I actually don't think that's that complicated and we should move on from this this is The Applecar is going to loom large in my life forever so I'm sure we'll talk about it again But I think with the Vision pro

I see two big differences. One is that it's a thing Apple can just do, right? Like, you can't just put a car on the road and see what happens. We've seen a bunch of that. It's gone real bad. And Apple, to its credit, not interested in playing that kind of game. But it's also a lower stakes thing for Apple to try to figure out in so many ways, right? It's an ecosystem Apple can control.

It's a game. It can sort of play on its own at its own. pace, you don't have to be responsive to this gigantic car market that is moving in lots of directions all at the same time. I had the same thought that both of these things feel like unfinished experiments, and it's interesting that one launched and the other didn't. But it also seems like the experiment that is the Vision Pro is a lot easier to tolerate being a mess than a self-driving car.

Fair. Fair. But I just think there's some part of Apple that's very different, right? It's like, well, let's see what happens. Right. Like, that's not Apple. And I think with the Vision Pro, there's like a, there's a gap between how the company is talking about that product

as though it is finished in the future and the reality of that product, which is as good as it gets. Yeah, agreed. Right? Let's see what happens in, like the Apple Watch. Let's see where this needs to go versus the car, which is just 10 years of where it needs to go is away. All right.

We should take a break. We're going to come back. We're going to join us and we're going to talk about what happened to Supreme Court this week. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated A-B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot-com from day one. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scale-ups,

and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash verge for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com slash verge for 30% off.

Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic, can be getting lost in the shuffle.

Grammally gives you one place to think, write, and finish your work where you already write, while giving you access to agents that help you sound natural and engaging. No matter what kind of writing, you're doing, Grammarly helps you get ideas done faster and move from draft to done with less friction. You can use Gramerly's AI chat to brainstorm ideas, outline a solid draft, then refine it with

context-aware suggestions that fit what you're working on. See why 90% of professionals say Gramerly has saved them time writing and editing their work. In a world of generic AI, you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Gramerly for free, at grammarly.com. That's grammarly.com. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts,

but time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job.

Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track.

Terms and conditions apply. We're back. Lauren Finer's here. Welcome, Lauren. Thanks. First time on the Vergecast. Yeah. Yeah, excited about it. Lauren is our brand new policy reporter here at the verge.

very exciting because the policy news is off and running already in 2024 and it's an election year. So welcome. Thank you. Nope, no pressure. And when I say the policy news is already up and going, this week there was a very big Supreme Court hearing about two bills in Texas and Florida that purport to regulate how big platforms can do content moderation. The listeners are not going to be surprised to know that I think both of them are blatantly constitutional because they're government speech regulations at their country. core, and that's why they're in front of the Supreme Court. Tell us what's going on without hearing, how it got there, where we are.

Yeah, so these laws, each of them are a little bit different, but they're both essentially trying to get the tech platforms, you know, think of the major platforms, meta, Google, YouTube, Twitter, or now X, to regulate, to enforce their policies in ways that would be consistent or not discriminate by viewpoint between different users. So they're basically trying to tell the platforms what they have to host on their sites. And the genesis of both of them is like the worries about conservative censorship on social media, right?

Is that where both of these came from? Yeah, exactly. I mean, they were enacted in 2021 after Donald Trump, notably, was kicked off of major platforms after January 6th. Okay. So it was literally a direct response to that. Yeah, pretty direct, but I think these censorship concerns have been existing in the Republican Party for a while. So I don't think that's necessarily the only thing, but definitely drove a lot more conversation around that.

Okay. In this case seems like it was made to go to the Supreme Court. Oh, yeah. Right? Like, this has kind of always been, you've been saying this sort of all along, like it was destined to be one of the ones. Not to get too into the procedural history here, but what you have is a law in Texas and a law in Florida. they're in different court systems, like they're in different circuits. So I think it was Texas got stayed and Florida got to go through.

And then the appeals courts disagreed. And then that's how you get to the Supreme Court. So it's like a who's right about what this should be. In this corner of the country, this bill is going through. And in this corner of the country, the court's saying it's unconstitutional. You've got a circuit split. You've got a First Amendment problem. Clarence Thomas, would you like a word?

And he's been begging for this kind of. kind of case for years now. Yeah. So that actually I think is the piece of the puzzle I think is the most important. These are conservative states with a conservative, governors, conservative attorney generals. They're mad that Donald Trump gets kicked off the platforms. And in response, they pass these laws that on their face are like, here are some rules. We think the platforms should follow.

And then in the details are like, and here's how we would like you to moderate Facebook. Right, right. Which is just, again, straightforwardly, a government speech regulation. right? But it's conservatives making the governance speech regulation. So in the run-up to this, did anybody reckon with that? Because usually the conservatives don't like a regulation. It's my understanding of conservative principles.

I mean, you've got a lot of really strange alliances or just seeing where people stand on this. Because even Net Choice has a lot of conservatives. Netchoice is the lobbying firm. Yeah, Netchoice is the trade association that represents pretty much all the major platforms. forms, and they're the ones that have brought this to the Supreme Court, essentially. And, you know, they have conservatives high up in their organization, and, you know, they feel strongly that this shouldn't be law. So I think where you see people netting out on this varies a lot.

It's, you know, no longer something I think that we really see falling on, like, conservative or liberal. It's really based on, you know, other forms, like, is it more populist or is it more just, like, traditional conservative. That's one of the things that I just think is utterly fascinating about this, is these platforms are really big. They have the revenues of a country. I think Facebook has more revenue by GDP than some countries.

Google definitely does. These are just big, rich companies are global. It's hard to think about who or how you could regulate them. They don't have competition, which is weird. someone from YouTube is going to like jump through the wall and be like TikTok but like not really you know and then in particular in the sort of Donald Trump moment

they all took the same action and so it's like they're not even competing to have like we have the platform with the most Donald Trump like they all took the same kind of action and it's like who would regulate them and it's just to me it's particularly strange that you have conservative states

who are like we're going to just past regulations about these platforms. And I think for most people that that's counterintuitive, but like you're saying, there's other ways of perceiving these laws, like far more populist. Obviously, like, hating on big tech companies is very popular in Washington, D.C.

Yeah, and I think you're actually seeing like another weird alignment on just like the competition question here because we've seen some like more, usually more liberal, like, competition groups saying like, hey, you know, we don't necessarily love these laws, but we're concerned about them being struck down.

And then what that means for just never being able to regulate the tech companies. Interesting. Yeah. So I think you have like another weird alignment where you see like more liberal groups saying something like that and kind of taking the Republican AG's side, even if they don't totally agree, but just being more fearful about what would happen if, you know, these laws are struck down and what that means for the future of tech regulation in general. There's been a lot of that over the last few years, I think, where there are some people who are like, I want regulation, but not this.

And then others who are like, we can't overregulate, but we have to regulate. It's like, wait. Yeah, it's a lot. Everybody's trying to find this, like, maybe impossible middle ground that everyone is convinced exists. And you had a great quote in the piece you wrote leading up to the hearing on Monday, where they were basically like, I've never seen the regulation that does what I think needs to be done, but I'm still convinced that it exists. or is possible. And I think we've now spent a long time trying to figure out if it's possible, and it doesn't necessarily seem like we're any closer to it than we were of like this nuanced,

perfect thing that addresses the right things and not the wrong things. And a lot of what they talked about in this hearing was all the wrong things that these bills might address if they're put into law. And I don't know, it just all feels like every time we try to do this in a small way, it all becomes sort of the size of the universe because that's what happens on these platforms. and everybody just kind of like runs and hides and no one knows who they're going to end up with at the end of it. It's very strange. Yeah, I think that's what you saw a lot of the justices struggling with on Monday was just like, where does the, where does this end?

Like if we strike down these laws, can we have no tech regulation then? And I think that's what concerned them about how these cases were brought to them is like, do we have to make like a huge sweeping statement on future regulation? or can we like tailor this to certain companies or like certain forms of companies that are really engaged in like expression? What was the vibe of the hearing? Like I think the Supreme Court justices have been pretty honest over the years about not being the greatest at understanding technology. Like I think it was Elena Kagan who said like we're not the nine foremost experts on the internet, not that long ago. I just want to point out that that's bad. Yeah.

Okay. Like it's like you should try harder. Get Gen Z on the Supreme Court now. Let's go. I don't know. You're nine unelected weirdos to get to decide everything about American life. Figure out how to use your phone, man. Like, I don't know.

I agree. I'm with you. But there's still, and I think part of why we've seen the Supreme Court not take these huge stances yet is because of that. They seem sort of unwilling to make things, make big sweeping gestures. I just shown by caveman lawyer. Like, figure it out, dude. Oh, sure. No, listen, if we litigate, is the Supreme Court a good idea?

How will we use our abundant power? Like, shut up. I don't know. You're there. You're there for life. All right. Sorry. But what was it like in the room, like actually kind of watching them ask these questions and try to figure this out in real time?

What were the vibes like? Yeah. So I wasn't in the room directly, but just listening to the arguments, I think, and especially compared to last year when we had Gonzalez v. Google, which was a case about Section 230. Which the Supreme Court ended up pretty much just punt. hunting on. Yeah, we don't know. Yeah, and I think it was those arguments where Kagan said that quote that you said. And, you know, those arguments, you could tell they're really struggling with, like, how does

the technology work and what are the implications? And so that was a question I had going in was, like, are we going to see the same thing this time? But what First Amendment experts I talked to before the hearing told me were basically like, you know, this is really a case about the First Amendment, where it was like, that was Section 230. That was a little. little bit more in the weeds. This court, they know the First Amendment. They're pretty strong on the First Amendment. So, you know, I think there was a feeling that they would be on a little bit more stable ground there, just like knowing what they would be talking about or the sorts of questions they should be asking. And yeah, it's about the technology and, like, how things work.

But fundamentally, it's a First Amendment question about, you know, can you regulate businesses around speech? So I think we saw more of that confidence in this hearing compared to the Gonzales. as arguments, where you were more able to see, like, they're asking questions that get to the heart of the First Amendment. And, yeah, so I think there was more of a sense that they knew what they were coming in here, wanting to do. But at the same time, I think they were struggling with figuring out how they were going to rule on this because the cases came to them as facial challenges, meaning that net choice is

basically asking for kind of an all or nothing ruling here. Like, can you just say like this category of law is bad as opposed to saying like, you know, we think that these laws as applied to these companies or these circumstances should not be allowed. And that would give them a little bit more flexibility. So I think what you saw was the justices kind of prodding at what are the outward bounds of what we could do here. And, you know, we heard them asking about Etsy and Uber. And it's like, what do these companies have to do with anything? But I think that's where you see them trying to figure out, like, is there a way to do this

where we don't preclude any regulation of the tech companies? And, like, maybe we focus in on the companies that really are engaged in speech. What did Etsy and Uber have to do with anything? Yeah. I mean, I think basically they're saying, like, you know, can this apply to, like, any tech company. Like, you know, Etsy has some speech in that, you know, you could leave comments on a seller, a seller site or something like that. Or, you know, Uber, you can chat with the driver. I would just point out, Etsy is one of the most dramatic websites in the entire, like,

it is constant moderation driving. Oh, yeah. Like all the time. Casey Newton, a platformer and Zoe reported out that in the middle of the Israel-Palestine war, Etsy is like moderating whether or not you can sell stuff that says from the river to the sea on it. That's a straight content moderation. Like, should the government force a store to carry products it doesn't want to sell? It's like an open question. The justice is being like, what about Etsy? It's like, no, like, Etsy is full of content.

It's full of user-generated content that the company moderates. Yeah. And it's like, of course this touches Etsy. And there was a moment in this hearing where there was like some debate about what a website is. And I had the reaction, like, well, this is why the verge exists. Like, the Supreme Court is like, what is the website? I was like, well, here we go. Maybe I just comes Kool-Aid manning into the room.

I was like, I'll tell you. Our publication was found at the inside that knowing what a website is will be very important to the future of the world. Like, here we are. And a lawyer for Net Choice was like, we can just set aside Gmail and these other problems you've raised because this law definitely covers websites. And I was like, Gmail's a website. Famously a website. That's how most people experience Gmail. And you just have this like really fine sort of philosophical delineation of things that all feel like the same thing and like the Supreme Court inventing these categories.

And it felt to me like they wanted to find a category that was like, what if we just regulate Facebook? Right? And I believe they kept calling them the classic social media networks is that they. that was like a well-defined. It's like in the antitrust thing where all of these fights end up being about market definition. Yeah. It feels like with so much of this stuff, it's just how do you draw the boundaries around this thing that we can talk about Facebook and Reddit and X and a couple of other things without talking about any comment, anyone leaves anywhere on the internet? And it just seems it's so leaky as you get down and it just gets murkier and murkier as you get bigger.

as you get bigger. And I think the question of like, can the government tell Facebook how to moderate Facebook is, again, sort of on its face unconstitutional. Right. And by the way, Lauren said facial challenge. Literally that is what that refers to. Yeah. Like on its face is this law unconstitutional.

Right. And it's not as applied or like in this place, the government uses law to do this thing that's bad, which is the justices, I think, we're kind of openly hoping that maybe they could just like kick it back to the court and like do some other stuff or the case we brought in some other way based on some thing that it actually. been done as opposed to this big question of like speech regulation's good or bad because they kind of want to be like sometimes good. Yeah.

Also, the courts stopped these laws from going into effect so early on that there's not really a super developed record for the justices to look at or, you know, to see in the real world like, well, what sort of bad things happened under this law? What sort of good things happened? So, you know, I think some of them were grasping at like, okay, well, what do we even do with this? We don't really know how this will work out. We have some clips in the argument of various justices asking what I would call searching existential questions.

This bookstore is one is interesting. It's Amy Coney-Barrant. What's she trying to ask here? Yeah. So Amy Coney-Barrant was basically trying to get at. Like, if you're talking about how these platforms organize content, isn't that just a judgment? Like, isn't all organization judgment? So that's what she was trying to get at here.

and she was giving the example of a bookstore as kind of an analogy. So we could listen to what she said there. Yeah, it's from the clip. They have to present information to a consumer in some sort of organized way and that there's a limited enough amount of information that the consumer can absorb it. And don't all methods of organization reflect some kind of judgment? I mean, could you tell, could Florida enact a law telling bookstores that they have to put everything out by alphabetical order

and that they can't organize or put some things closer to the front of the store that they think, you know, their customers will want to buy. So I just want to point out, it is very likely that the Ron DeSantis version of Florida passes a lot. I was about to say the same thing. Like, that is totally in character for 2024, Florida. Yeah. And eventually they'll ban all books that start with D, like, just for some reason. Yeah. Disney.

Get them out of here. By the way, Desantis now on the record saying our don't say gay bill went too far because too many books are getting. band. It's like, well, that's what happens, dude. That's why we don't ban books in America. It's just a thing that happens. So that, to me, right, is if you have any kind of algorithmic, if you have a platform with tons and tons of content, you have any kind of algorithmic filtering, you need, you have to have it. Otherwise, it'll be a fire hose of everything. And that will make your platform unusable. And so the distinction there that I think I struggle with, everybody's with is it makes sense to say you can't tell the bookstore owner how to organize the bookstore.

When you get to an algorithm saying here's some stuff that we think you will engage with, is that like an editorial First Amendment decision? I think the argument some people make is like, that's not. Like that should at least be transparent or we should at least give people some control over it or these companies are so powerful that the government does have some interest and being like, here's how those should work. But I don't know. It seems like when we talk about this realignment, you mentioned liberal antitrust people.

That's Tim Wu, who's been on the show. He's the one who's like, these are just algorithms. They're not like a newspaper, regulate away. Where do the court come down on that? You know, I think we don't know yet where they fall on it. I think, you know, through that questioning, I think we could infer that Amy Coney Barrett is a little bit skeptical of how organization is different from speech itself because she's saying,

is an organization a judgment? And, you know, we saw Florida's Solicitor General who was arguing to say, like, well, you know, the organization is really different here. And he later said, you know, this is, you know, we're not saying how platforms have to organize their content. But then in kind of the same breath is talking about how the law does talk. about shadow banning, which is inherently organizing content. Right. Shadow banning is just taking the book and putting it all the way at the back of the bookstore.

And importantly not telling the book. Right. Right. Well, and I think to your point, one of the things that it seems like is being talked about kind of underneath all of this is that it seems like what these bills want is for it to be a lot more work to ban somebody or remove content and that it should essentially have to be a person who presses the button and then fills out a form about why they press the button. And I think part of the outcome of that would very clearly be to make it harder to do that moderation,

just because you can't have an algorithm that just pulls stuff out. You essentially have to document every single time that happens. And also to make it so that it is more transparent but sort of more arduous in the name of being more transparent. So I think they want to make it look less like a series of algorithms that can make these kinds of decisions and more like literally people curating a bookstore. And then I think you're having a very different conversation about what all of this looks like. But that's just so far away from how these systems work now.

And I think one of the things that the tech companies have argued, right, is that this thing you're arguing for where there has to be like a person in a room writing a paragraph about every single post that we take off of Facebook is like preposterous and impossible. Right? And so it just feels like I don't know how to connect those ideas in my head that we're talking about algorithms, but we're also talking about a person who is like, let me tell you why I kicked your post off of Facebook. You were mean to everybody.

Yeah, the transparency thing, I think they didn't get into as much in these arguments as what are called the must carry provisions that platforms have to carry certain content. But I think that's definitely an important element of it too. And I think, you know, you could see why someone would want to know if they're kicked off a platform, why that happened or, you know, why something's not being shown to their followers as much. But I think the tech companies would say, like, that's a huge, like, resource suck. And also maybe it's going to make it harder for newer entrants to do that because, you know, yeah, Facebook can tell everyone, here's why you were kicked off our platform. But a newer platform is not really going to have the resources to do that. Right. Yeah. One of the arguments that has been made kind of around all of this is that any of these regulations just entrench the huge platforms that can afford to do this kind of moderation and take on the litigation risk and pay all the law. lawyers.

Whereas if you want to start a new thing, good luck. You're going to get sued by everyone who doesn't like oppose the day. But this is the alignment problem again. I don't want to say alignment problem because that's an a nai phrase. This is the weird political like shuffle that's happening is like the conservatives are like, what if we had a bunch of regulated monopolies? So we'll have like four companies and they'll just like do what we say. And then a bunch of liberal academics who are like, we should have more competition.

And like, what if we also did some speech regulations? And it's like, what is happening? Do you hear yourselves? Wait, what is going on here? Who are you people? Did you all literally wake up in the wrong house today? Like, I don't understand what's going on. I think we heard a lot of echoes of that split on sort of the right flank of the court.

And it's a six three court. So it's like a whole court is a right flank right now. But you have far more conservative members on that majority and less conservative members. and Sam Milolito and Clarence Thomas were like These are common carriers They have to carry everything They're Thomas kept on bringing up Section 230 like over and over again Because he hates it so much

Like he was just like sputtering and everyone's like That has nothing to do with this And then you heard Brett Kavanaugh say that like To me like you know I'm old Like the funniest things that would like say it in the slash dot forums When people would get banned on the slash dot forums You're like you're censoring me And so I'd be like the government

Only the government can censor you. You don't have any first amendment. This is like old internet forum poster stuff. So Alito is saying, isn't content moderation, just another word for censorship? And that's very Orwellian. Like we've made this fake name for this horrible thing. And we have a clip of Kavanaugh arguing with Alito and saying, hold on. Can we play that clip?

I just want to follow up on Justice Alito's questions. And I think he asks a good thought-provoking, important question and use the term, Orwellian. When I think of Orwellian, I think of the state, not the private sector, not private individuals. Maybe people have different conceptions of Orwellian, but the state taking over media, like in some other countries. And in Tourneo, we made clear, the court made clear, that we don't want to be that country. In Supreme Court parlance, that's such a sick burden. Maybe you have a different definition of Orwellian that's stupid and wrong. Have you actually read George Orwell, sir?

I think starting an insult with so-and-so asked a very good, thoughtful question is amazing. And it's your fellow Supreme Court. It's fundamentally misunderstands everything about everything. So that's weird. That's weird. Like that's on the right. And you can see that split between should we use some speech regulations? Should we like dress them up?

Or should we be the place with the First Amendment? Do you see that, like, indicating how it might go? Yeah, I mean, I think that, you know, if you're seeing, like, Kavanaugh and Amy Coney-Barrant asking these questions, you know, I think you're probably going to see the liberal justices aligned in some way on those kinds of things. You know, I think maybe we'll still see Alito and Clarence Thomas out on their own limb. Clarence Thomas is going to issue a one-page dissent that just says, Flock, Section 230, sign Clarence. It's like in crayon. Yeah, but I mean, I think that's kind of, it's a somewhat good sign for Net Choice that, you know,

they're seeing these alignments. But at the same time, you know, from analysis I've seen after the arguments, I think, you know, net choice is maybe not going to get as sweeping of a decision as they had hoped for. because the justices we're looking for, like, you know, where can we regulate tech companies or where could we at least leave open the option that that could happen? And, like, do we really have to rule in a way that says, like, any kind of law like this is, like, for sure, unconstitutional? Yeah, this might be just a stupid procedural question, but is this the kind of thing where

net choice can come in and say, we'd like a gigantic, sweeping, epic decision one way or the other? like this is the moment, gavel down on the internet, and the Supreme Court can say, like, no, but we are going to do this very tiny thing in the middle. Pretty much, exactly. The Supreme Court loves to do. That's their favorite move.

By far, like in the history of the Supreme Court. But I mean, in this case, especially, like, Netchoice is very loudly saying, this is gigantic, and the Supreme Court can be like, shut up, we're still going to do this tiny thing. They can still do that? Yeah, what ways do you think they could do that, learn?

Yeah, from what I've seen, it seems like they could probably just, you know, remand this to the lower courts and say, like, you need to develop a fuller record or, you know, just kind of give more guidance on, you know, how you should be deciding this. So, yeah, they can throw it back to the lower courts and just, you know, kind of or carve out some middle path of how they want to decide this. Yeah, the justices did in the oral arguments ask the lawyers for both sides several times. How would you write this opinion? Let's just straight up.

Like, what would you do? Here's my laptop. You do it. Because it is such a fundamentally complicated thing. In particular, two state attorneys general, when you're like, actually write the rule and enforce it, it's pretty easy to trip them up. And the justices were able to trip them up over and over again. For example, let me come back to noted forum poster Brett Kavanaugh. That man is definitely like a poster in his anger.

You can feel it. There is a great Daily Beast headline that was like, God help us, Brett Kavanaugh might save the First Amendment. Like, that's his vibe. literally he's reminding them that the First Amendment is about the government. Let me play that clip? In your opening remarks, you said the design of the First Amendment is to prevent suppression of speech, end quote. And you left out what I understand to be three key words in the First Amendment or to describe the First Amendment by the government. Do you agree by the government is what the First Amendment is targeting?

I do agree with that, Your Honor, but I don't agree that there is no First Amendment interest in allowing the people's representatives to promote the free exchange of ideas. Another sick burn by Kavanaugh, though. Like, seriously, as like Supreme Court shading this goes, like, he's tearing it up. Yeah, he's just like, what are you doing, man? And that's, again, that's on the right. Like, I think you would expect these kinds of questions from the three liberal justices. they're not obviously as motivated by the banning of Donald Trump as some of the conservative justices. And then Kavanaugh is just like, hold up, like by the government.

Like, that's the thing, right? And this argument in response that he got, which is the people's representatives, like our lawmakers, have some, they should pass laws that allow for the free exchange of ideas is like kind of a new argument. Right? Like the idea that we need government speech regulations so that Facebook, doesn't suppress, like, that's a winding path of logic that I think is like a hard sell. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think, you know, it seems like no one has figured out how to do this in a clean way, how to pass speech laws for the Internet that don't run afoul of the First Amendment, but do

get the sort of outcomes that people want on the Internet. So, I mean, I don't really know what the answer will be if there is a way to do that. Yeah. But this is such a new problem, right? I mean, I think they talked a lot about newspapers in this case. I think one of the big open questions is can you regulate Facebook like you would regulate a newspaper? And I don't know what the answer will be, but it seems like no for lots of reasons. But one of them is that like imagine if every single person on earth got the same newspaper.

Like maybe we would think about it differently. And that is fundamentally what something like Facebook is. and I guess this is where my favorite quote from the whole thing, was it Alito that asked how much YouTube would weigh if it was a newspaper? Oh, I forget who it was. I think it was Alito. I could be wrong. But one of them asked if YouTube was a newspaper, how much would it weigh?

Which is on its face a totally insane question, but actually kind of in context makes sense because the question is like, can we talk about these new things in the way that we talked about these old things? And I don't know. The answer, by the way, is 50,000 pounds. That's how much YouTube would weigh? The Washington Post literally has a headline. Here's a headline.

Here's how much a YouTube newspaper would weigh, Justice Alito. That seems low. And they calculated it at 50,000 pounds. Seems low. One billion words of daily YouTube output. 50,000 pounds of news. That's the answer. I mean, fair enough.

Asked an answer, Justice Alito. It's a big newspaper. It's a long article. It's a very long. Okay. But no, but I think that's, that's, kind of been the central question of a lot of these things, right? Is can we talk about these platforms in the way that we've talked about anything else before them?

And nobody seems to know the answer to that even. Like what is the precedent we're looking at here? Nobody quite knows. Yeah, I think that was kind of a question with the concept of editorial discretion and, you know, talking about a case that came before that looked at the Miami Herald and can they be compelled to print an op-ed? And, you know, on the one hand, you could see the similarities to the Miami Herald and Facebook. On the other hand, you might think, like, does what Facebook's doing is that really editorial discretion? There's so much information.

Like, they're not really parsing through all of it. There's just certain things that are flagged or certain things they're looking at. But does that constitute having, like, an editorial vision? Yeah. And I think we can confidently say that Facebook does not have an editorial vision. It's just people yelling at each other in neighborhoods and Facebook marketplace. Yeah. Those are the two things.

But that's not what Facebook is there for, right? Like that's not, they all at various points have tried to do editorial things and it mostly goes quite badly. We should wrap this up. We don't know what's going to happen. We're expecting an answer in June. Yeah, probably in June or before then. The one thing that didn't come up that I hope someone mentions to the Supreme Court justices is that there's actually quite a bit of competition, like Donald Trump owns a social network.

His reaction to being kicked off the platforms was to start his own platform. If you would like to hear from Donald Trump, his tweets are available to you. Right. And like, there are, TikTok does exist. And for whatever our government currently wants to think about TikTok, it certainly exists right now. And that to me is like, well, if you want the platforms with looser rules, you, you you can go get them. They're available to you.

And that should be, to me, it seems like that's the solution. And I think the thing that is probably frustrating too much of folks is that to build a healthy business with happy customers, you usually have to ban the assholes. Like, that's just how it goes, right? But I don't think YouTube is lacking for conservative voices. I don't think Facebook is lacking for conservative voices. But it doesn't seem like, it seems like the, it seems like our government. at every level, the Supreme Court, Congress,

whatever, all these hearings, constantly forget that many other platforms exist. And sometimes they forget that anything but Twitter exists, right? They're like, asked Mark Zuckerberg about Twitter. Do you see any hint of, like, a more expansive scope? Is that why they were talking about Uber and Etsy so much, or is that just confusion? I think that's a little bit different,

but I think on the question of competition, you know, it makes me think about Ken Buck, the Republican representative, who's actually on his way out of Congress. You know, he was a big champion of new antitrust laws for the tech companies. And he did think about it as like, you know what, I do care about censorship on the internet, but I think the way to fix that is to have more competition on the internet, to have more platforms. And so he dealt, he looked at that question from the lens of competition. But, you know, notably he's leaving Congress.

and, you know, his view isn't shared by maybe the majority of Republicans. I think there is a contingent that does feel like competition might be the answer, but there hasn't been enough brought on board to make these antitrust reforms be able to pass in the House or the Senate yet. So I think, you know, there is, there are like seedlings of that thought, but I don't know how far that's gotten us yet. Yeah. I mean, it's why all of the stuff happening simultaneously with these cases and the antitrust cases is so interesting because they so directly speak to each other for exactly what you're talking about. The antitrust cases are about the competition that would theoretically solve some of these problems. And by solving some of these problems in other ways with moderation and things like that, we're actually changing the way that the competitive landscape is going to look on the Internet.

And so these things are just going to keep spinning around each other. it seems like for a long time until somebody plants some kind of regulatory or, you know, I don't know, legal flag. And then a lot of things are going to start to fall out. It seems like. And what I wonder for you before we go is, does this feel like it has a chance to be the moment the Supreme Court sort of plants a flag in some way or another? I think Clarence Thomas in particular has been waiting for his chance for so long now to have strong. loud, aggressive feelings about this in official paperwork. And I think there was some indication that this had the chance to be a moment for the Supreme Court to really have a strong opinion where it has been so wishy-washy in other cases.

Coming out of the hearing on Monday, do you have any sense leaning one way or the other about whether this is going to end up being kind of small or big? I think, you know, if they take some sort of middle route, I still think even that will be pretty significant because anything that says, you know, these kinds of tech platforms are allowed to decide what they carry on their platforms. That's a big deal to have that affirmed by the Supreme Court, if that's what happens. And, you know, at the same time, if the court says, you know, we're going to deal with this little piece of it, but we're not going to deal with these other things, I think that's also a big deal because they're saying, hey, we could still regulate the platforms in these other ways, or we're at least leaving open the possibility that there's a constitutional law here that could be created.

And, you know, we'll see that go up to the Supreme Court at some point, too, probably. But at least, you know, we'll have a better sense of what's in the realm of possibility or not. It does seem like we're due for one of these a year for the rest of our lives. She's Clarence Thomas being like, Section 230. Get out of my face. He hates it so much. She's giving speeches about how much she hates it. Yeah.

And it's actually like many things in Clarence Thomas. I'm clear why. That's not like a fully reasoned argument. All right. We'll be 30 extra minutes of Duncan Clarence Thomas in a bonus episode. That'll be coming up. Totally kidding. We got to take a break, but Lauren's going to stick around.

We got a lightning round. We got a back. Support for the show comes from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that.

It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB. There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB, it's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics.

But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise that you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay.

I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. Complex and unprecedented the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship

disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. they are doing well.

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. We're back. 30 minutes by Clary Tombs. Here we go. Does anybody ever call them Clary Tombs? Clary Tombs? I think that's the last thing you do when you call him Clary Tombs.

Look, I am very proud to be American. I think one of the most American things you can do is make relentless fun of the Supreme Court. They're a bunch of weirdos. And they'll never see it because they don't know how to use their phones. It doesn't matter who they are, liberal, conservative. Just make fun of them. Just like, what are you nerds doing?

It's great. That's my First Amendment right. I love that. Bring it, Clary. All right. Vote Patel. That's my whole platform. I will roast these nerds every day of my term as your president.

It's beautiful. The NAG platform. You should go listening. audio of the hearing. It's good. It's important. I just think it's funny to make fun on nerds. Okay. Cut that part out. All right, lighting round. There's actually a lot in this lighting round. Yeah. Lauren, you're a guest. Do you want to go first? Sure. Yeah, so I chose the story about Google CEO saying that the Gemini AI diversity

mishap was completely unacceptable. So I thought this was an interesting story because It's basically, if you hadn't seen Google's Gemini generated racially diverse Nazis, which is kind of offensive for strange reasons. I just want to say we talked about this on last week's show for like 45 minutes, and that is such a better summation than anything else we do, which is strange for various reasons. It's so good. I will say, it's also, it's okay to point out it is hilarious. Oh, yeah. Yeah. It is the funniest shit in the entire world.

The fact that it happened is funny. The response was funny. The fact that it went all the way up to Sundar Pshai having to like send a long internal memo about it is funny. The fact that Ben Thompson sent out a newsletter that's like Sunnard should be fired. Yeah. Because of the black pope that he made is like, dude, everybody just like, just turn the knobs down. All of it's funny. Like open, some very smart people being the dumbest.

And carry on. Yeah. I mean, I think it is, it's a music. way that this happened, it also could have happened in a way less amusing way. So I think we're fortunate that it's something that's funny to talk about. But I think Sundar Pichai is clearly seeing this as like, you know, this could have been way worse. And like we can't keep having these errors. And it just reminds me how like, you know, opening eye releasing chat GPT when it did just like spurred all of these companies, like racing to put out their own, you know, competitors.

And like here we are with this like kind of. of, I don't know, maybe this was a product of being rushed and, you know, having something really strange and, like, uncomfortable happening as a result. And, you know, maybe this is some kind of reset for Google thinking. Yeah, I mean, yeah. Do you remember that phase where Mark Zuckerberg was just reflexively apologizing for everything? Yeah. There was, like, a two-year phase where anytime anything happened on the internet,

Zuck would, like, do a video in which he, like, very earnestly apologized. That, to me, feels like the Sundar Pichai era we're heading into right now. He's just like, whatever is happening, I'm so sorry. We're doing our best. I don't understand how we got here or what weird thing we put into Gemini to make it do this. But I'm so sorry. They were like, robot, be less racist. And the robot was like so not racist that we're racist again.

That's what we're doing. I mean, this is to me, every part of this is funny. So, right, like Google famously did not release its chat bots because they were afraid of bad outcomes and misalignment and bad things happening. Open-Aid, as you point out, released it. Google gets kicked in the butt. They start releasing things left and right. And then you have an entire move in a people called effective accelerationists who are like,

no rules, like all the AI we can't. Like, do it. And they're the people who are like, Google went too fast here. Their AI is too woke. And it's like, this is the thing you want. The thing you want is to just like put it out. But not with so many black people. And it's like, you guys should shut up.

Like, you should stop saying what you're saying. It's very revealing because the problem with the other AI is it only made white people and you were cool with that. And now it's like, well we... Because progress or something. Now you're like the AI that only makes black people is like bad. It's like, you should shut up. You should point out to Google that a racially diverse picture of Nazis is very funny and probably not the intended outcome. And then you should stop talking about how mad you are about.

I just think you should be quiet. And also, no one is out here with any actual good ideas about what is supposed to happen in any of these cases. Yeah. They're like, I wanted to be perfectly historically accurate and also help me dream up new things and create things that no human could ever come up with. And it's like, well, what? Yeah. It kind of just makes you think like, okay, maybe this is a really human thing. Like, how do you program?

Like, we want diversity, but not in like historically accurate depictions of not. Do you think there's a white word at Google that's just like labeled the Hamilton conundrum? It's like should Lynn Manor and be able to use Judd Manor to make Hamilton too? Do you remember that drill tweet from a million years ago where he's like turning a huge dial that says racism and looking at the crowd like I'm a contestant on the prices, right? That's what suit and our Pagia is doing. It's very good. That's where we are. Truly every part of this is funny.

I can't get it. And I just, I beg you, if you're like, what I'm mad about is the computer made drawings of black people. Just shut up. It will go better for you over time. And also to your point about Google being forced to catch up on all of this stuff, you've got to assume Sundarpegize also sitting in meetings going, this is why we did this slowly, you idiots. Like, Google has had this technology forever. And Google loves to remind you that, like, oh, what's the T and GPT? like we did that.

That's a Google thing that we did. It's Transformers, we made them. And Google was taking it very slowly and then OpenAI just like yoloid its way onto the internet and now here we are. And so, like Mark Zuckerberg made the heel turn to being like, I don't care, I just make glasses now. Sundar's next move is just to be like, yeah, morons,

this is what you wanted. Welcome to the world you asked for. It might be amazing. It might be the best move Sundar ever did. That's what I'm saying. Here's what you wanted morons. Yeah. Totally out of character.

I can't even imagine him saying the word morons. I'm going to go get it like an AI voice cloner. It'll just be soon to Rissuing like devastating burns to people. He's a very polite man. We're working to get him on Decoder and I hope that we didn't just kill that. We'll see what happens. That whole episode of Decoder would be like, will you say the word morons? Just get him to say each phoneme and then we can put it together and he'll see it.

Okay, I've got a Lightning Round. I forgot to mention the Lightning Round is sponsored this week. Oh, yeah. But not for money because no one is that dumb. If you would like to pay us money, this is the only time I will say the name of a sponsor. I will sell my integrity if you sponsor the Lightning Round for money. But we're not, we didn't take money this week. We took an excellent, hilarious tip from our friend Christopher, who is this week's

sponsored Lighting Round, who said, how did you miss this SmeG News? Which is an incredible sentence. My smeg Google alerts really letting me down. If you recall, Smeg is a maker of quirky refrigerators. You know, the retro refrigerator company. As you do. Yeah. They have a collaboration with Fiat.

They've made a Fiat 500 with a refrigerator. What? That's true. It's the Smeg 500. On the Smeg website, here's the first line. What is a fridge doing underneath the bonnet of a Fiat 500? Smeg and Fiat merge form and function to create an extraordinary item for the Fiat 500 design collection because the refrigerator is not just an electrical appliance and a bonnet is not just a car part.

Hell yeah. This seems like an April Fool's joke. Then there's a picture of a Fiat 500 and it says an iconic place for food with an arrow pointing to the trunk of the car. This is all true. I would like to make T-shirts. that have just on the stomach the phrase, an iconic place for food. These two made an Italy brand that already met in 1950s.

It's like a meat cute. Aw. They've been trying to get a fridge. The Smeg 500 sounds like the last NASCAR race that ever happens. Yeah. You win a fridge at the end. For me, Vittorio, this keeps going, by the way. There's a lot here.

Thank you, Christopher, again, for sponsoring lighting around with this link. CEO of Smeg, Vittorio. Britazani, he said, for me, creating the Smegna 500 was above all a matter of personal honor. Seriously? This is about my family's legacy.

Wait, you're not, you said that as joke. That is the rest of the quote. Are you serious? I strongly, I strongly believe of this project that pays tribute to the memory of my grandfather

when he founded Smegg After the Second World War, one of his first collaborations was creating refrigerators with Fiat. Incredible. It's just like the whole whatever. We'll link to it. Thank you, Christopher, for sponsoring the Lightning Round with the Smeg 500. No thanks to Smeg who paid us no money for this. Yeah.

All right, David, what's yours? I don't know anymore. Mine is, so MWC, the Mobile World Congress in Barcelona. Barcelona. Barcelona was this week. Surprisingly newsy, MWC. John Porter and Allison Johnson are on our team. We're going to have them on Tuesday's show to give us the whole run down.

But the most personally exciting thing that happened was we actually got like a first-person demo of the humane AI pin, the mysterious gadget that I'm only, I'm like 90% it's real. It's real now. Sam Schaeffer is like making videos on the streets in New York with it. Sam, by the way, I keep, show it to me. Bring it over. Yeah. Come on the show, Sam. We'd love to have you back.

The people need it. But Allison got a demo. She got to see some of it work and had a really interesting experience with it. Like the thing about this pen, I'm desperate to actually test this thing out because it seems like they did a lot of cool technology to it. Like the projector thing seems to work. She had it take a picture and it identified her as a person with a verge lanyard and all the other stuff in the back. Seriously impressive technology going in here. But Allison also sort of landed on the question that I think a lot of us have been asking about this device.

It's like, what on earth is any of this for? Yeah. Like, you made a neat thing that does some of the stuff that you said it was going to do. It also was super slow and I think overheated on the show floor. That's like conference demo stuff, whatever. I'll leave that alone. But she kind of got to the end and was like, why? Why is this?

Yeah. It does seem so. You can watch a video of that demo while the places we post videos. Yeah, I think I saw it on our TikTok. Yeah. Find a scrolly video place and look for the first. And she asked a question, 19 seconds go by before the answer. That's brutal.

That's not good. In which she like made small talk with the person. And then it started talking and interrupted. Yeah. It was like, oh, it's doing it. It's like, I don't know about this. She did say, and I think this is a lesson to everyone, she's like, this gadget would be so much cooler if this company wasn't so overbearing serious about itself. Right?

Yeah. If you're like, this will change the nature of culture. And it's like, you made a laser that says like your name. Right. Well, what's funny is like, I think there's been this interesting thing now where we have the Rabbit R1 and we have the Humane AI pin. And they are very much like racing each other to be kind of the nifty AI gadget that everybody's excited about. Rabbit's CEO is just like nakedly out there trying to beat Humane to market, which I think is so funny. Yeah.

But they've just played this so differently. Right. Where Jesse, the CEO of Rabbit, has been out there basically being like. This is like a silly fun thing that we made. We think it's cool. Let's see what happens. Maybe this will be the future. And you're right.

And Humane is actually being like, we have changed the paradigm of your life. Yeah. And they just like seem sad in a room together. And it's like what, what is happening? I feel like they, everyone is doing a Steve Jobs impression, but they never watched any Steve Jobs videos. Yes. Do you mean? Yes.

It's like they're doing an impression of who was. It was Fastbender Steve Jobs. He was like very serious all the time. and like very intense. And like the real estate jobs is like kind of a goofball. Yeah, if you go back and watch, I went back for some reason not that long ago and watched his first iPad reveal. Yeah.

It's the most casual, relaxed, like man sitting on a chair using a web browser is the whole vibe of the thing. And it was, yeah, he would make jokes. He was funny. He was silly. Like that was their whole vibe. Yeah. And now everybody remembers him as this like dictator presenter.

Yeah. Yeah. It's like he would get on stage like, so these are our competitors probably. They fucking suck. Right. Look at this piece of shit. But here's what I made. It's pretty awesome.

Right? And like every like the humane. I don't know. There's something that's like everyone's doing an impression of the wrong thing. Even Apple kind of is increasingly getting serious in a way that feels kind of unjobsy. Yeah. And I think it's they're doing an impression of those like the Johnny I've designed videos because Johnny I didn't like to be on stage. Yeah.

So they would make these videos and be like, what is plastic is I've invented? It's very beautiful. It's like, what are you doing? And it's like, that didn't work. What worked was the other guy who was like, you know, I love his records. Now I put a thousand of them in your pocket. Huh? He pulled the MacBook era out of a sleeve.

It was sick. But anyway, so the humane pin is supposed to ship. I think at the end of March is the last thing that we've heard. That has slipped a little bit. It's close enough that I think we're going to get these things for real soon. I bought one. I'm very excited about it. I can't believe you bought one.

I have so many questions about why I spent $700 on a humane AI pin. But I am fascinated by this thing. And every little step I get towards being able to make a phone call with a projector, I'm all about it. When you kick your kid out of the house at 18 and be like, I don't have money for college, I hope you hand them the humane-a I pin. I'll frame it. You're like, this is your gift. This is for you. In lieu of a college education.

This thing. Sell this, my son. And go on your way. This thing will describe with medium accuracy what you are currently looking at. 19 seconds later. It's like I'm the person wearing the verge liner. That's me. Yeah, exactly.

All right, Neely, what's yours? I think I'm going to pick two. I'm sorry. I'm going to pick two. I'm shocked. One, I'm going to start with a fun one. Okay. Okay.

As you all know, Lauren doesn't know. As David knows, Lauren, you're going to find out. I have one dream as editor-in-chief of the verge, which is for David to file a... story to me and for me to mark it up with a red pen. That's all I want. Very old school. Very old school.

I also would love a glasswold conference room where we print out the layout of the magazine and I just move the pages around. We don't have a print magazine, so that dream has long since been, I've just had to let it go. I'm never going to play professional basketball. I'm never going to move pages of print magazine around a glass wall a conference room. The New York Mag people have a conference room in this office, like stare at it all the time. They're just moving pages. ever go just move pages around just to see if they notice blow up the magazine the red pen thing

no one thing i could do is i could have david print out his google box and circle them sadly we don't live in the same place as though that's not the reason just to be clear that's not the reason i don't know how that so every time a new stylus gadget comes out i'm like is this is this it is this the thing that will enable me to like circle stuff that's all i want and in particular circle David's copy in a red pen. The answer for a decade now has been no. We've tried almost every stylus gadget in this way, and they don't work.

Google just released an update to Android at MWC. Where Google Docs on an Android tablet. It's called Project Inquil. You can now mark up with a pen. That's very exciting. The problem is that this requires you to have an Android tablet.

It also requires David to file his copy to me. Yeah, well, it's, you know, challenging problems. We're getting there. I'm just thrilled about this. Oh, yeah. We're getting an Android tablet. We're going to demo this on the show.

It's going to happen. I'm excited about it. I can't look. I can't see Liam right now. I imagine he's vigorously agreeing with me that we're going to do a demo of me. That is what's happening. He's circling things live on the Vergecast. That's all I want.

This is my dream. We're going to do it. I would say, based on the history of Google Docs being good at things, I would not get your hopes super high. But I believe in this dream for you, and I want you to have it. If you could just add up the number of things that have to be good for this to go well. Android tablets, conceptually. The Google Docs app.

On the Android tablet tablet. Android tablet stylus. Actually, some of the Samsung stylus are pretty good. Yeah, they're getting there. But does the S-Pen support Google Docs markup on Android? It's okay. You just import it into Samsung's proprietary document viewer and then export it out. such a small dream. Just give it to me. Just figure it out. Take all that energy. Shut down

Gemini. Put all those engineers on a circle problem. Be like, we'll do the Hamilton conundrum another day. So maybe now that the Apple car's gone, everybody's working on generative AI highlights. This could be you. What's your other one? It's TikTok. We got to talk about TikTok. We should talk about TikTok. So they're in big fight. Believe tomorrow, as you're listening to this, is the drop dead deadline. So Universal Music Group, which has Taylor Swift, Usher, everybody can think of, Justin Bieber, I believe. I looked at David very knowing. It's like, your favorite.

I can confirm. Harry Styles, many others. David, the lead of one of David's stories this week was Justin Bieber. It was good stuff. With a photo of Justin Bieber. I want to point out what I'm here for. David put a lot of the Beebe. I spent 90 full minutes on Getty images looking at pictures of Justin Bieber in public.

It's the best thing I did all week. It's a good story. Anyway, Universal Own had all the biggest artists you can think of. They're going to fight with TikTok over music licensing. They say TikTok is a bully. They don't want to pay the higher rates. There was a first date. That date came.

The music went away. The poor woman on TikTok who has all the jobs, her sound is gone. Oh, no. And so she's just making, like, increasingly sad TikToks about her sound being gone. It's awful. There's, like, a lot of this happening on the planet. And tomorrow, I believe, the time that you are currently listening to this, Friday. That's what it's called.

There you go. Is the drop-dead date when the rest of it goes, and TikTok has already started pulling not just Universal's, like, own music, but anybody who has a publishing deal with Universal, some of the songwriters that are associated with Universal. So even more music is coming off the platform, which I think TikTok thinks it has the leverage. Which is why, I mean, one of the stats that I read,

and I think a lot of this is really fuzzy, so who knows, but one of the stats that I read is I think it was something like 30% of the songs, but 80% of the videos with music would suddenly go silent. Like that's a huge number. That's just most of TikTok. If you take Taylor Swift off of TikTok, that's not great. Yeah. And I think what TikTok is like, we seem to be fine.

And I don't know if that's true. There are no numbers. We're trying to do some more reporting on it. One thing I've seen that's been really interesting in the last few days has been a bunch of up-and-coming artists who now can't promote their own songs on TikTok. Basically, like, A, having to figure out a new thing to do and be kind of pleading with their audience, like, keep watching my stuff, follow me like it so that it stays on your for you page. Because if I can't put my song on it and you're not following me, the algorithm is not going to serve stuff. And this is the thing artists have said for forever is that like when they just make a thing where they talk, it doesn't do as well.

So they do covers of well-known songs so that they get put into that part of the algorithm or they do their own songs that people like so they get served to their fans. but if it's just them talking to camera, that doesn't do as well. Like, just historically, that is the thing I've seen a bunch of artists say on TikTok. And now, it's like if you're an up-and-coming artist, the place where people find you is TikTok. And so I think it's just creating this interesting. And that's TikTok's leverage, right? That's what they're basically saying. But then Universal's leverage is Taylor Swift.

Yeah. And most of the rest of the music people want to listen to and do stuff. But it's like that spectrum is going to affect people. so many messy ways. Also, though, like, not having music on so many TikToks makes TikTok like kind of unusable. That's totally been my experience now. Like, it's like one out of every two videos is just awkwardly quiet. And it turned out watching people do TikTok dances with no music is uncomfortable.

Like, it's not a good time. And it takes to a couple seconds to register that like there's no music. It's not that like your volume's too low. Yeah. It's weird. I totally agree. I'm surprised that, you know, YouTube has a much healthier. relationship with the Universal.

Like, Universal is like, we're very mad about fake Drake and AI, and YouTube was like, we made some stuff for you, like, we have a council about AI. Like, I'm surprised that YouTube is not doing more to promote shorts in this moment and to say, like, all these creators come over here, because that is right now their competitive advantage is that they have access to all this music. Yeah, they've been kind of quietly saying things like, you know, we continue to be a good partner to the music industry and stuff like that. But it is weird that, like, Leor Cohen, who runs YouTube music is not.

out there being like you want music we have all the music like this is you're kind of right this is sort of youtube's best shot instagram has the correct deals with the industry yeah they're not they're not pushing it it's i think universal is basically like all right like we just won't be on tictock that'll be the end of that and like we have to figure out any way to promote artists but guess what we do we're a record label yeah that's there have been ways before that's historically how we provide value to the artists uh but we'll see tomorrow i think will be an interesting day because i think it either gets solved or if they pull out even more, I think it actually drags on for quite a bit longer. I think you're probably right.

All right. Do you have another one or we should just read? We should just get out of here. We should get out of here? You don't want to talk about Wendy's dynamic search pricing? No, they said they weren't going to do it. All right. We've gone over as always. Lauren, thank you so much for joining our podcast. Yeah, thanks for having me. Really fun. We'll have to have you back soon. Would love to.

We'll have our Clary Tom's issues. It's going to be a mega chill policy year. So we probably won't have much to talk about it. It'll be great. All right. That's it. Alex will be back next week. That's Vergecast. That's Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1.

The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.