The Vergecast - The Google breakup is looming

Episode Date: October 11, 2024

Nilay and David make some predictions about Thursday evening’s Tesla event — which you’ve already seen, but we haven’t! Then they talk about the week’s gadget news, from Nintendo’s new Alarmo alarm clock to Apple’s upcoming iPads and Macs. Then Lauren Feiner joins to talk about the latest on all fronts in Google’s antitrust fight, and how the government might be planning to break up the company altogether. Then it’s time for a lightning round about Google Docs tabs, FEMA misinformation, and Zoom AI avatars. Further reading: The bill finally comes due for Elon Musk In the past week, 4 of Elon Musk's direct reports have announced their exits from Tesla All the buzz about Nintendo’s Alarmo clock I totally forgot we wrote about Nintendo’s sleep tracking alarm clock 10 years ago. Nintendo’s original alarm clock prototypes were a lot less playful A closer look at Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo clock Shrunken Mac Minis and a new iPad Mini might come in November Apple’s Vision Pro leader, Dan Riccio, is retiring A Google breakup is on the table, say DOJ lawyers How the DOJ wants to break up Google’s search monopoly Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge The filing: Microsoft Word - FINAL - Google Remedy Framework Google’s response: DOJ’s radical and sweeping proposals risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers Google Docs is making it much easier to organize information Zoom will let AI avatars talk to your team for you - The Verge Hurricane Milton hits tonight, and it’s past the point of evacuation. Creators are still there. Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control - The Verge FEMA adds misinformation to its list of disasters to clean up Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients.

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Can in skit quotes. There's a guy in the trunk that's driving the car, but we don't talk about him. He's wearing a Vision Pro. He's hungry. Don't look over there. It's fine. Hi, I'm your friend, Eli, David Pierce. He's in the studio with me.

Hello. It's very exciting to be here. This is your first time in the studio? This is my second time in the studio, but the first time that you've been here when I've been in the studio. Well, the other time you typically run away from me when I arrive in New York. You flee upstate somewhere. Yeah, that's my entire goal in life, is to flee. Flea to the woods.

Later on the show, Lauren Feiner is going to join us. We're going to talk about Google, which has attracted the attention of our nation's regulators, the white hot attention of the nation's court system. It's like historic way. Yeah. Yeah. And it's like going, I would say it's not making a blip. No.

Like, what if we break up Google? And everyone's like, huh. So Lauren's going to explain why it's much more than a blip. Because there's two different cases that are going to result in major changes to how Google works. And then we're going to have lightning round. And boy, do we have a lot of stuff in the lightning round, which remains, I would say, unsponsored. Also, there's at least one thing here is titled Microsoft Word Final Final Google Remedy Framework. Listen, that's how justice gets done in this country.

Final, final two. All right. Let's start with the news. There's one piece of news that I really want to talk about, the most important news of the week, which is Nintendo made a $100 alarm clock. Yes. We'll get to that. Then there's the news that has not happened yet as we are recording, but by the time you listen to this will have occurred. And by occurred, I mean, people will make you promises that will not come true.

And specifically what I mean is Tesla is going to have its robo-taxie event. It's long awaited. Once delayed, twice delayed. I mean, delayed since 2016. Fair. Yeah, delayed several times at this point. But yeah, they've been promising this. Elon Musk.

Not they. Fair. Elon in particular has been promising this for like a long, long, long time. And it was supposed to happen, what, in August? And then that got delayed. And now it, between when we record and when you hear this, it is supposedly going to happen. Yeah, I think it's like 10 p.m. at night on the East Coast for us, it's happening on a movie studio lot in California, and they're going to unveil what looks like a two-seater car with, like, Lambo doors.

Yeah. I mean, it seems, it seems like it's going to be a Tesla. I don't know what I was expecting part of me was like, you know, if the Robotoxy is going to be the thing, maybe they're going to take this huge swing. And we've seen all these concepts that are like, what if we completely reinvent the whole idea of what it means to be in a car. and instead of everybody facing forward, it's just going to be like lounges inside that everybody hangs out in. And it looks an awful lot like they're just going to be like,

here's a car. Well, it's a weird looking car. It's like there was a picture of it in the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson. It's just, it looks like a like a tricycle car, like a backwards, like a three-wheel car, two wheels in front, one wheel in the back, two seats and then doors that kind of open up into the side.

Sure. Yeah. I think the car is the least important part of this. I think in classic Tesla fashion, we're all going to look at the weird car idea, and no one will look at the underlying does it work idea. Right. Well, and this has kind of been Tesla's thing for a long time. Like, I think, I don't remember for the last time we talked about Tesla, but not that long ago we talked about Tesla. And I got very upset about the door handles on a Tesla.

A lot of people got very angry at me for thinking the door handles on a Tesla are stupid. They are stupid. And I was right. And I think one of the strange things that Tesla has been doing for a long time now is trying to like reinvent all the things about cars that we mostly figured out a while ago. Like the cyber truck is just a lot of new ideas about things that we've already solved. And to your point, so far not doing ultimately the only thing that matters both to Tesla and ostensibly to Elon Musk, which is solving self-driving. Like that has been the thing for so long that you could kind of. kind of argue everything else has been just a diversion along the way towards making self-driving

actually work. Yeah. Like that is the thing. So Andy Hawkins wrote us, I would say somewhere between a timeline and a primal scream. Yeah, that's about right. Like if you can organize a primal scream in chronological order, that is Andy's piece, which, by the way, was immediately brigaded by people who started their commenting accounts that day to tell us for your hand out you on. what's a tell guys. You got to start the bot accounts and lie them in wait. Yeah, play a long game here, people. And what you should do in the meantime is be a thoughtful and constructive verge commenter so that when it's time to strike, we're not expecting you. Don't start your account that day and be like, I'm never reading the verge again. We're just, we're going to know. That's like a 2016 strategy. We've come a long way. Yeah, you've got to again, thoughtful, constructive commenter for years and then you strike. Think about that. Yeah. All right. So Andy wrote a timeline and I'm just going to read a, the first paragraph. In 2016, Elon Musk said Tesla self-driving cars were two years away. In 2017, it was, quote, six months definitely. And customers would be able to sleep in their Tesla as well driving in two years. In 2018, Elon Musk said it was, quote, a year away and would be 200% safer

than human driving. In 2019, he said there would be feature complete full self-driving this year. That's 2019. He still talked about it. He's renamed full self-driving to full-self-driving parentheses supervised. Which is so funny. Full self-driving, narrator voice, not full self-driving. And it doesn't work. Like, if you use full self-driving in a model three today, say,

the chances that you will have to grab the wheel in anything but a highway environment are basically guaranteed. Yeah. That's just how it goes. And the accidents that it gets into are the mistakes that that system makes are funny if you're watching them on a YouTube video, and I think not so funny if you're in the car. Yeah, agree.

Meanwhile... And to be clear, a lot of these things that are, are happening with self-driving cars are not limited to Tesla. It's just that Tesla gets so much more crap for it because Tesla is the one most confidently saying it has solved the problem. Like, Waymo is not out here being like, we did it, we're finished, the job is done. Years ago, I would say 10 years ago, Waymo was just as ambitious as Tesla was. And then pretty quickly started to rewind to be like, actually, we've realized this is a much longer like asymptotic problem than we realized where we're going to get really good. And then the last

1% of this is going to go from like a two year problem to maybe like a two decade problem. And to your point, Waymo had no aspirations of reinventing the car. Right. They're like their early ones are like, you know what? It's a Chrysler Pacifica. Yeah. A car. Like car. When you imagine a car that can hold six people, Chrysler Pacifica. And then I think later on they're like, okay, it's some Jaguar F type. And now they only operate in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and all. Austin, notably cities with good weather, and except for San Francisco, pretty flat. Yeah. And so that easy terrain.

They have just, like, radically constricted their effort. Right. Can we make a Chrysler, Pacific, a turn left? And that took them, I think, three years. Can this thing make a left turn at a busy intersection? And the answer for a long time was maybe. And they just diligently solved that problem. And now you can get a way in own all those cities.

And it's fine. People really like them. People actually prefer them. They're paying a premium to ride around in Wayman. Well, and again, like, I think I keep coming back to like everybody drags us for dragging Tesla. And I think at this particular moment, the thing that has changed is if you rewind back to 2016, when Elon and everybody else was saying that stuff, everybody was saying that stuff, right? Like there was this industry-wide belief that by 2020, we were all going to be riding around in robo taxis. Uber was making that bet.

Lyft was making that bet. Car companies were making that bet. And then pretty quickly over the next couple of years, A, as the money for saying that started to dry up, and B, as the realities of, like, the world and the regulatory state and people being dumb at driving started to appear. Everybody else started to slow down. And it was like, okay, this is the thing we have to do thoughtfully and methodically. And it caused them trouble. Like, there are people out there who are like, Google needs to shut down Waymo.

It's a waste of money. Why on Earth are they still at this? but they've all started to push more carefully. With some exceptions, I think like crews got out over at skis in some ways. And like there have been issues, but... In huge ways. Yeah. But like, for the most part, a lot of these companies were at least starting to recognize, like,

okay, this is a bigger problem than we thought, let's try to be more thoughtful. Elon Musk is the only one who has continued to come out and tell us that it's going to be any minute now. And calling things full self-driving. And like, we've just gotten to the point where it's like, he's just been either wrong or lying so many times in a row now that on this particular thing, he has just lost all benefit of the doubt to talk about any of this stuff. And the really interesting dynamic in what you're describing is all these companies are promising that they will do robotaxies. Well, that was what, 2016-ish, the height of zero interest rate VC funding into everything.

And the whole plan was we'll flood these markets with VC dollars. We will take them over. we will just predatorily price everybody else out. Right. We'll kill public transportation. We'll get all the taxis off the road and we'll make it stupid for you to buy a car and then you'll have no choice but to use. And then we'll raise the price on Uber. And by then we'll get and Travis Kowlinick said this on stage of code.

He said, my problem is the other guy in the car. I got to get rid of the other guy in the car, the driver. And then the robot can drive the car and then I will make more money. And he said this with, I was in the room. And he said this was such pride on his face to Caras Fisher. And everyone else is like, what about the guys? Right. Like the guys in the car.

And it was like huge protests. You know, like walk it back. But what they were all chasing is software style margins in hardware. Right. So we have this one car. We're just going to run it 24-7. It's going to produce money while it lasts. And then we'll throw it away and we'll make a new car.

And they, no one has gotten there. No. Like Waymos are still very expensive. Except if you're listening to this, maybe Tesla. Right. And then along the, the way there's been these like enabling technology fights. Should we have LiDAR? Can we do it all with vision? Can we do it with just a handful of like half a megapixel video cameras in the sides of

vessels? No, we should probably upgrade those cameras. All of these little fights along the way. And really what you have is Waymo with the full LiDar sensor suite, you have a handful of other companies that are also trying a lot of stuff but haven't shipped anything. And then whatever happened between the time we are talking and the time you're listening, And I am just guessing that it's nothing. Wait, okay, let's, this is fun. Let's do this. So this is the rare time when we don't know the answers to something, but everyone listening to this is going to know.

Like you're at the part of the murder mystery where the audience has seen the murderer, but the people have not. It's a good time. So let's do this. Let's just make predictions about what's going to happen at this Tesla event. Yeah. And everyone who listens can tell us how right or we were. This is our only move, right? I feel like we have to do this.

All right. What's your first prediction? Okay. My first prediction is that there will be a live demo and it won't work. In some meaningful way, it will not work. I'm thinking about the person in the Optimist robot costume. That counts as a demo that didn't work. Throwing the ball at the cyber truck window.

That's a thing that didn't work. I think there is going to be some way in which this. thing tries to move itself and it's not it's not going to work in in some defensible but fairly problematic way can i make a sub prediction please i think there will be a live demo and it will work and it will be later revealed that the car was just being remote controlled off stage the the the the the nicola truck rolling down the hill yeah yeah vibes okay that's that's my it's my sub prediction literally was a person in the trunk yeah there's a guy with an rc controller you know, just doing it.

I wouldn't be shocked. And we'll see. It's true that Tesla cars can do summon in a parking lot that they can operate. But I think. But so this is the thing, right? This is the reason I think this, because if you're going to show off what it can do,

you have to do something more than that. Because that basic stuff they're good at, and they've been good at for a long time. So if you're going to show, we made a robo taxi. Then I think they're going to show a robo taxi and they're going to show it driving around parking lot and then let everybody, let all the fanboy imaginations go wild.

See what I'm saying? Yeah, I don't think so. I think it like hits a cone. All right. That's your prediction. Oh, it's just a cone. My prediction, no matter what, he will not announce an arrival date before 2027. That's two years.

That's essentially two years. Okay. First of all, wild that that's only two years. Second of all, sub-question, if I'm giving you the over-under on July 1st, 2027 for when this actually ships, are you taking the over to the under? Over. Way, way over. Okay.

And that's what I'm, what I'm pending that to is it took how long to ship the cyber truck? He's got to make a whole new car. Right. He's got to make this little taxi that's going to distract everybody from whether or not it can actually drive itself. And they're not great at that right now. Okay. All right. So 2027 is your, is your prediction.

That's my prediction. Are we, are we saying after 27 or are you just calling your shot? It's 2027. I'm saying the announced date. Yeah. Not the act. I'm not taking any. No, no, but I mean the one he's going to say.

He's going to say, 2027. Okay. All right. I love it. My second one, and this is, this is only half formed because I haven't all the way figured it out. I think the optimist robot is going to be featured in this product somehow. I don't, I don't.

That's the guy in the trunk. Yeah. You open it up. It's full self-driving, but then if it all goes wrong, something just springs out of the trunk in through the sunroof and starts driving. There is a debate. slash rumor that they have to certify level five self-driving without a steering wheel to pull this off. And that is really hard.

So the rumor slash debate is, will there be like a steering wheel that pops up when you need intervention? So it's still level three or level four. Because you can't, you can't not have a steering wheel. You pull a brick cord and a steering wheel at the others? Yeah. That's, I'm just saying, that's like, I've heard this debate. Like, will it have a steering wheel? Because the picture we've seen from the Isaacson book has no steering wheel.

Right. But if you're going to have no steering wheel, that means you have now launched level five autonomy, which means a bunch of people get to decide if that thing is safe. Or you can have something less than that. And like, the steering wheel appears. Or optimists in the back being like, something. I honestly would believe Elon Musk being like, and the beauty of this is because there's an optimist robot in a driver's seat.

you always get to be an HOV lens so you can go even faster. Oh, it's good. Like, I could, it's just sitting right there. I could see it. So I think, I think if you get one of these, you will get there will be an optimist robot involved somehow. I haven't figured it all the way out. But it's just.

That is a, that is a prediction. It's just in there something. It's just somewhere in there is a hand wavy optimist. Yeah. What's yours? Is it a guy in a suit optimist or an actual optimist? No, it's an actual optimist. Okay.

That pushes way out past 27 in my mind. I'm not saying. this is going to ship. To be clear, none of this is predicated on actually shipping. Okay, my third prediction, I think, is the one that will cause the most consternation. So for years, Tesla's evaluation in the stock market and with a bunch of Tesla fans has been predicated on the idea that the Model 3s and Y is sitting in driveways around the world and country will suddenly turn into the Robotaxy fleet. This is the promise.

People have bought these cars expected. that they will go to bed and their model threes will wander the streets being taxis making the money. And that is the multiplier in the stock price. I am saying they're going to have this launch event and they will say existing

Teslas will not be robo-taxies. No, no way. No way. Why? That would immediately, that is the worst possible investor move Elon Musk could make. Oh, I know. But it's the I think they're going to have to come clean and be like, here's

the cyber taxi. Here's our other weird triangle car that we've made. It's the future of the robo taxi program and a model three from 2018 that we promised would turn into a taxi. 2020. I think the height of this was around 2020. I only know this because it was one of those like pandemic feelings that I had. Sure. Like I've been drunk for four days and Elon is saying all the cars are taxis. Like whatever that swirl of feeling is, 2020, let's say. People bought these cars in 2020, assuming they would turn into taxis that run on Bitcoin or whatever they were doing in the middle of pandemic. And he's going to have to show up and say, and the Robotaxi only works on our cyber

triangle or whatever he's going to call it. I just don't buy it. I'm going to make my prediction the opposite. I think he might be slightly hand-wavy about it. I could imagine being like, this is the one, this is the future. Also, random sub-prediction. Do you think this is going to be a thing that? regular people can buy?

No. No, no, no. Absolutely not. Okay. The idea that you would buy a two-seater cyber taxi that you are like the landlord of. Have you seen the cyber truck on the road, dude? Like, yeah, people will buy that. But that's a status symbol.

This is a taxi cab. But it's your personal taxi cab. Are you telling me if I was like, do you want to buy my yellow cab from me? You wouldn't buy it. I'd just say the cyber truck is a status symbol. Sure. The ridiculous status.

Yeah, what status it confers we can debate. But this is literally meant to be a taxi. Yeah. So the idea is that you a regular person would buy a taxi and let it loose on the streets of your suburb at night. Oh, I don't know. The frame of that is like it's your own personal robot driver, right? And then when it's not working for you, it can go work for somebody else. I don't see that pitch as being all that different from what they've been saying about Tesla's for four years.

But I would be so shocked if he gets up and he's like, oh, I bait and switched all you clowns the last four years. You would be shocked if Elon Musk. Would I be shocked if he did it? No. Would I be shocked if he said that? Yeah. And I think my guess would be there will be a lot of focus on this and some like vague gesture toward it's coming. For all the Tesla's that exists today.

But I cannot imagine a world in which they just cut bait because people would go nuts. Maybe not cup bait, but they will hand wavy. But my prediction is that whatever Robotaxi program they announced today will not work on the Tesla that exists on the road today. All right, I'm going with it will. This is good. We're now, we're directly. And you let us know.

But maybe they want to address it directly, but it will be, I think it will just, it'll be one of those things like becomes obvious. Yeah. You know, like you're just like brushing away. They're like, oh, this dinosaur sucks. Yeah, I think by the end of this event, it'll be obvious. I am just really looking forward to this being like 90 minutes of Optimist robots driving around, and my victory lap is going to be incredible. I will say that in the lead up to the event, there's been some reporting that basically all the Tesla executives are leaving.

So four Tesla executives, this is reported in Business Insider, four Tesla executives. So now's the past week they were leaving or had already left. Some had been there for nearly a decade. How high executive are we talking? Company's chief information officers leaving after 12 years, director of public policy and business development, announced on October 1 that he was leaving on Sunday, the Global Vehicle Automation and Safety Policy Lead also announced that he'd left Tesla.

Those are people who would be quite important to the idea of like a global rollout of robo taxis. Yeah, you would think the public policy guy who's running self-driving. And, you know, information systems and automation. That's what matters. He would, this would be your time to shine. And then the former Model S and Model X program manager also left, which is fine. Whatever.

The model, he's like, you know, we're not making out of a Model X. I understand what's happening here. We're just doing triangles now. Just doing cyber things. Yeah. These are all people who are leaving right before, presumably a giant increase in the stock price. Because you're going to unveil the Robotoxy program, which is the valuation of the company. And I really mean this. We don't often talk about stock prices on the Vergecast,

but the entire story of Tesla right now is it's just another carmaker that is struggling to move cars. They just had a pretty good quarter, but they've been struggling to move cars. There's a lot of competition coming for them. Hyundai will just be like, it's $100 a month here. Take an Ionic 5. Get it out of my face. So there's just competition coming from all corners. and the stock price has just been based on the idea that it's a tech company, and the tech company evaluation is we're going to run a Robotaxy program. Right. There isn't another one.

And this is in a pretty real way, like the tech company launch of Tesla. Yeah. We should probably stop talking about this because now everything we've said is now woefully out of date already. We should move on. But I'm just saying that's the stakes. Those are the stakes. We'll pick it up again next Friday. We'll have Andy come on and tell us what actually is.

happened. But those are our predictions. Let us know if we got them right or wrong. Optimist robots in the trunk. All right. Now on to something that is extremely real. Like the most real. Chris Welch already went out and bought one real. Nintendo made it a $100 alarm clock called Alarmo. It's fantastic. First of all, all alarm clocks should have names from now on. If you make it, like Cassio made one this week. That's like a blown up version of one of its watches. Looks very cool. Only available in Japan. Its name is like 16 hexade. decimal things. No, I'm done with that. If your product doesn't have a cool name anymore, get out of my face. Alarmo or nothing. I love this thing and I do not for one second understand

why it exists. Yeah, that's right. It's just, it's just an alarm club. It's not even, what has some sleep tracking in it? It does like ocean detection sleep tracking, which is like an app on your phone that you can do. Like, that's not that. It's fine, but it's not anything particularly exciting. But it's adorable as all hell. It's got a screen. It does the like Nintendo fonts. It'll like yell at you in very cute ways when you need to get out of bed. It has some fun sounds that it'll make. Like this thing is very charming and I want one and I will get one. I'm sure. But like what was it like a week ago that it came through the FCC that Nintendo was doing some new hardware device. And everybody got all excited and they were like, is this the next switch? What's Nintendo doing?

It could be anything. It's a lot. I will say the, um, There's a thing on the top that looks like a bell, and it's a dial that lights up. It's a revolutionary device. The fact that that is not the snooze button is a huge miss. Wait, is it not. I literally assume it was the snooze button. The snooze is automatic to you, because it has motion detection in it, you can snooze it by just like waving your hand at it. Oh, I do like that.

And then it, when you get out of bed, it stops the alarm clock. So like the motion you do when you're trying to like find your phone to shut it up. Yeah. That will shut it up. So again, I hear that. have plugged this app on the show so many times. The alarm clock I use. It's called sleep cycle.

And the snooze button is a motion detector in the phone. So you can just smack the table and make the phone bounce and it'll snooze. That's cool. Or if you are particularly lazy, you can grab the USBC cord that is charging your iPhone and just give that a wave and just go boop-boop. That snooze is it. All right. And this all works. But the idea that the alarmo, that the dial on top of the alarmo is not a classic bash-it snoo button, but is in

set a dial that lights up. I think this product is doomed because of it. That's my hot day. What it should be is like one of the money bricks from a Mario game. And you should be able to hit it. You bounce on it and stuff comes out. Yeah. That's what I want from this.

The only reason I really wanted to talk about this is because I came up as a gadget writer in the time of a device called the Chumby. Some of our... Don't do that to Alarmo. Some of our people will remember the Chumby. This is just a weird closed source proprietary Chumbi. I'm telling you right now, that's what it is. It's an alarm clock with a screen.

It has weird little app story downloads stuff that you can put on it. It has high-minded ideas about motion controls. The Chambi was an alarm clock that ran Linux. It was as successful as you could imagine that sentence to be. Some people still have Chambis. They're still running them out in the world. But the idea that you would have a connected device in your kitchen or by your bedside in 2006, revolutionary. Yeah.

And that was, I was like, I grew up being like, I have to write about this every day. Chumbies also were in a certain way very charming in a way that then like died with the Alexa generation of, you know, cans of tennis balls. So like, kudos to bring it back. One other thing that this has in common with Chumby is that the screen is way worse than you think. Yep. It looks like it, it's a round little face, but it's a square screen inside of said round little face. And it's just a lie. Like, the screen's a lie.

And that's fine. And I'm okay with it. It's $99. I still don't understand why it exists. Why does this exist? Like, if you're running Nintendo, why do you make this? Just because you can and you're Nintendo?

Yeah. Okay. I think fundamentally Nintendo does cute stuff. And they're like, we can put Mario by your bedside. And people will pay us $100 for that service. I mean, that's, yeah, when you put it like that. But Nintendo's so weird because it's like if you take the cynical, not even cynical, but the sort of ruthless read of that that is like, we want to be everywhere that you are and be like a lifestyle business ambient Nintendo. There's a million things they would have done by now, right?

Yeah. Nintendo could have made smart everything for your whole house for the last decade and people would have eaten. No, that would require technological innovation. This is much more like we have a box of motion sensors. and we're going to put them in an alarm clock. Like, what is it, what can we do with a 12-year-old arm chip? And it's like, well, we can make a switch alarm clock. That's about the only other thing you can do.

They just took apart a bunch of DSs and then put them back together into alarm clocks. As Cranes were saying on the show last week, the Switch 2, it feels like the Switch emulators can already run Switch 2 games because Nintendo's cracking down on Switch emulators. It does not feel like Nintendo wants to be at the bleeding edge of the curve. So what can you do with a bunch of old hardware? Yeah, it's an alarm clock. Fair enough. They just found a bunch of chumbies.

Right? Here you go. Here's some chumbies. Yeah. I do think Nintendo is more ruthless about selling its IP and various, like you can buy Mario anything. Yeah. Nintendo collects its money.

Yeah. If you want to do total doom and gloom, one thing this might signal is they don't have a switch to for the holidays. So they have an alarm clock instead. Oh. Because you got to sell something. It's a pretty good little stocking stuffer. Yeah.

as these things go. It has Mario on the box. That actually makes quite a lot of sense to me. I mean, I hope they have a switch too. I hope so, too. I'm right to buy one. But if you want to, if you want to be the most negative, that's what you would say. But even like there are a lot of people with switches who don't want to upgrade and like the, the timing sure suggests that they intend this as like a big holiday victory. Yeah. And it's more big ass Mario on the bag that Chris Welch bought. Like, I could see it. Yeah. And again, I find this thing so charming. I just think Nintendo is like the least like every other company

company that we cover in ways that are mostly really fun and occasionally just completely inscrutable. And this is one of those moments for me. What are you doing? But I wish more companies were weird. Oh, for sure. In this specific way. We were like eight stories about Alarmo. I would love to cover thickly. We're going to have a full review of this

alarm clock. It's going to be amazing. Some Apple rumors we should talk about that kind of lead into I want to talk about the Meta Raybans for one second. But the Apple rumors are that sometime this month or early November, I'm guessing it'll be early November, we'll get new Mac minis that are in the form factor of like an Apple TV or on that size and a new iPad mini for all the pilots out there who listen to the show and email David.

Please stop. I've started getting creep shot photos from people who take pictures of the iPads that they see their pilots having and send it to me. That's good. That's how you get arrested by the Air Marshal. I just have a library of pilots now. It's not good. I don't want that.

But yeah, the rumor from Mark German, the reporting that he has had is that I think they're launching on November 1st, at least the Mac Mini will be. I'm very excited about this Mac Mini. I have an M1 Mac Mini that I love very much and am very excited to upgrade to an M4 Mac Mini. I don't understand the compulsion to make the box smaller. No one is mad about the size of their Mac Mini. Liam in the control room. William just started to wait a way. Liam is the only person

More activity in the control room than we've seen in weeks. About the size of his Mac Mini. That was a lot. I take it all back. Everyone is so upset about the size of their Mac Mini. It's way too big,

make it smaller or else. To be clear, I was agreeing with you. Oh, okay. I'm a longtime lover of the Mac Mini. I've had many over the years as Plex servers, and I just don't understand why it needs to be smaller.

There's absolutely no reason for it. Sure, let's make it less versatile. Let's take away ports that people use for weird. You're going to get one USBC port in the highest performance M4 processor available, and you're going to like it, Levin. And I'm going to plug in my like 8-year-old USBC hub that threatens to catch on fire every time I use it, and I'm going to compute the hell out of it. It's going to be great. I think this is going to be great. I think the Mac Mini is like a sneaky hit for Apple in a way that it never really talks about, but like just sort of

anecdotally, people love the Mac Mini. In a way that the iPad mini has its devoted really loud followers, but not that many of them. I think the Mac Mini is like just sort of around. Yeah, it's the, it's everybody who needs, you bought your M1 because I basically was like, shut up and buy an M1 Mac Mini. You literally, I was getting off a plane in D.C. From somewhere. And you sent me a link because it was on sale on Amazon.

And I had bought it before I got off the plane. I was literally, I'm sitting there on the tarmac and you're like, the Mac minnie is on sale. Buy this. Shut up. I bought it. It's like, stop complaining about your computer, buy this Mac Mini. And it worked. I'm excited for it.

I, you know, we run the Decoder Studio in a Mac Mini. What is wrong with your M1 that you want an M4? Nothing. It's fine. Okay. Just checking. Really what it is is I have set up a beautiful thing where I get to get new things and then gift all of my gently used things to family members.

And so really what it is is my 2011 iMac. No. 2013, maybe somewhere in there, IMac, is finally starting to die on my sister. So I have to start the whole process again by buying an M4 Mac Mini and passing things down such that she gets a workable gear. I'm doing this for them. Yeah, I see what you're doing. I'm very good. Are you going to do the project where you turn the IMac into a standalone display?

Oh, that's actually a good idea. So I've looked into this. It's a 27-inch screen. I really should. I have a bunch of parts sitting around my house. You have to figure out exactly what model of display is in the, iMac. Okay.

And then you can literally just buy adapters that you can use it as to display. You have to take it all apart. But I'm like excited to take it all part. If I break it, it's broken. Like whatever. Oh no. This 2013 iMac is broken. So I have all the parts in my house.

I just have not done the thing. That's a good project. Take a heat gun and suction cups to an iMac to take it all apart. We should maybe like bring that into the studio and both do it. Both. Meilai and David both break their iMacs today. But yeah, my 2015 iMac is just. sitting waiting for this to happen to it.

Yeah. One day. But yeah, but then there's also, uh, we're supposed to get an M4 MacBook Pro, I think in both sizes. And weirdly it's already leaked people think.

So I'm like Russian YouTuber has a 14 inch M4. Oh, I missed this. But then there's a controversy because the box has the old, the old wallpaper on it. So we don't think the whole thing is fake. Huh. And people are like,

this is the biggest leaks since I have on four. And I'm like, I don't, even if it's real. It's not. No. I feel like it also tells you a lot about what to expect that no one can really tell. Fast computer, now faster.

Yeah. Here you go. I mean, I'm kind of ready. There's no reason I upgrade this. Which one is that? This is an M1 Pro. Okay. I have an M1Air sitting here that I'm like.

Yeah, it's a 16 inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro in it. Okay. Not the M1 Max. Oh, so that thing is still, but it's still, that's a pretty beefy computer. It's killing it. Yeah. It's the best laptop I've ever had. I'm like, what if I got rid of you?

What if I got an M4 for no reason? For me, it's colors. Every time I look at the really dark MacBooks, I'm like, I want one. Silver's stupid. Who wants silver? I want more fingerprints in my computer. Yeah, exactly. So we'll see.

That is the rumor for the next couple weeks. It's all coming out now. It does feel like we are ready for an Apple upgrade cycle. Sort of keep an eye on that. Yeah. Lastly, there's some other little Apple news that I want to try to connect to Meta and what it's doing okay so it was announced this week the day re-show he used to be SVP of all hardware engineering at Apple and is now in charge of Vision Bro he's

retiring and it's like retirement season for a lot of Apple executives have all been there a long time being at Apple for 20 years is like oh you're just a baby truly there people stick around yeah so it makes sense he's retiring the Vision Pro is announced it is released it's out in the world and he took over engineering that project in 2021 so the thing is out in the world it's gonna go do its thing. He's been there a long time. Goodbye, presumably numbers two,

three, and four are deep in the works. Yeah. And he had been at Apple for 26 years. Yeah. Yeah. There are a lot of his iPad as not problematic. But what I would say is the Vision Pro itself in a weird spot. Apple just announced a new movie

for it, submerged. Like, its first immersive movie. At the same time, it announced that Apple TV Plus will not be available on Amazon channels, which is a pretty huge diamond at Apple TV Plus as a thing that is selling any Apple products. Do you remember all the controversy a while back? I think it was Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg just like offhandedly tweeted something about like

nobody watches Apple TV Plus and people just like ran him down over it. I would say every available piece of evidence suggests that Lucas Shaw was right and no one really watches Apple TV Plus. Especially now that they're going to saw it on Amazon to get more reach. Yeah. So all that, there's a swirl of stuff at Apple. and one of the things in the swirl, I think, is a Vision Pro. And this big decision over whether Apple wants to keep selling

what is essentially VR headsets, especially now that meta, not Orion. Orion is vaporware, no matter what Alex Heath says. It's fully vaporware. It is a thing that doesn't exist, no matter how proud of it, meta appears to be. But here's some vision of the future that isn't this headset. Sure.

Meta's pushing in front. And much more importantly, the Raybans appear to be a success. hard to tell if they're really a success. But that form factor is much more successful than here is a giant headset that has an external battery pack. And so it just feels like we're going to see some reset on Vision Pro. That's just very much, and German has reported this. Apple has to make some decisions.

It hasn't figured out what it wants to do. And now the guy in charge of it is leaving. Yeah. I forget who it was that I was reading a while back. But basically what they said was, I can't remember the last time Apple was ahead, but completely completely on the wrong path. And I've been thinking about that ever since. Like, it's still so true that the Vision Pro was like an incredible technical achievement.

And increasingly, it seems like, who cares? That, like, maybe the technical achievement was the wrong thing to do. And that, like, I keep going back to the early days of the iPhone, where it was like, do we do a more impressive iPod with the click wheel and everything? Or do we, like, build this brand new epic thing that no one has ever tried before? And they picked that path, and it worked super well. And I think it taught Apple that the only swings you should make are the biggest ones possible. And it really seems like the lesson of this generation of hardware is like you build the iPod with the click wheel.

Yeah. Like that bring people along with you in a way that is. Get people used to wearing a computer on their face all the time. Right. And the other thing is like when the iPhone came out, people had been using cell phones for a long time. Yeah. Like we don't have that history yet. And so you have to do the first cell phones before you can do the iPhone.

And Apple just tried to skip all the way. there. And so it feels like if you wanted to, if you were to tell me somebody is two generations away from getting it right, it seems like it's pretty clearly the meta raybans, right? Like, in terms of like mainstream success, two generations from now, that one feels like the easy betting favorite. Okay. Except I bought the clear ones and I am sending them back. No, everybody loves them. Sean Halster is sending his back too. They're fine. They're fine. They're a fine product and I know people who love them. Joanna Stern loves hers.

Do they look cooler in pictures than they do in reality? They super look cooler in pictures than they do in reality. Because they look so cool in pictures. They, like, wayfarers are a very classic shape. And I think they are meant to be classic in black. And then you make them clear and they're, at least in my face, they're too curvy. Like when they are, when I have worn a lot of wayfarers in my life and when they are expressed in black, they're like, they're this very cool shape.

and then you make them clear and it's just like, huh, I'm wearing cat eye glasses. You just see all the movements. I guess that makes sense. So there's one thing. Maybe I should buy these again in black. But then they only ship the clear ones with transition lenses

because they want you to wear them all the time, including inside. Good transitions now. They don't get dark enough outside. And they also only turn blue, which is weird. And then you're like, why am I wearing these glasses all the time?

And then, as I've said many times, I have huge head. And they're just like not, They're just like uncomfortable on my face. And I think even though I got the bigger ones, it would still be uncomfortable on my face. And this was Sean's complaint. He's like, I've tried them in both sizes.

And the big ones are loose and still uncomfortable. And the other ones are, and this is, and the other ones are too tight. And this is the fundamental problem with all of this stuff. Yeah. Is our bodies are not really designed

to mount hardware on. And particularly her face is a very challenging, mounting environment. And so I'm sending back. And I think I'm just coming back to my graph. my matrix of wearable bullshit. That face penalty is just huge. You matter how useful it is.

Oh, not so the camera's not so, whatever. I've got a camera in my pocket all the time. And like, kudos to meta for having better options, but it is very true that you're still not solving it with two styles. Yeah.

And then the last piece, which I think Alex brought up when he was on the show last time, it is also true that iOS and Apple keep these glasses from being actually integrated with your phone. 100%. Like the weird Bluetooth to Wi-Fi pairing switch you have to do. On Android, it just sinks with your phone. Because the operating system allows it to.

Apple is like, you will never get close to this. You have to switch your phone to the Glass's Wi-Fi network. It's garbage. I'm actually super annoyed at Heath because he brought up that Meta is really annoyed that you can't automatically sync the photos to your camera roll on iOS. And I had never noticed how annoying it is to have to open the app and import them. And now I can't stop noticing it. Like I was out the other day and I took, I don't know,

five or six videos and like 25 photos. And I just sit there and just stare at my phone for five minutes because if you put it in the background, this stuff dies and it stops. And so I'm just sitting there watching it import one by one. And I was like, damn, you Apple. This is your fault. This is Apple's fault.

Yeah. And like, we're going to talk about an interest, whatever. But like, this is the story. The operating system limits other products and be good. You should be generally upset about that. It's my phone. I should be able to, I should be able to let Mark Zuckerer go look at my photos. That's my break.

All right, we've got to take a break. Liam has been giving me the wrap-it-up sign. We're way over. Somehow we spent way too much time talking about gadgets. Warren Feiner is waiting patiently to talk about Google. We'll be right back with her. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder,

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Still here. I haven't taken about it. Haven't gotten me yet. Lauren Finer's here. Hey, Lauren. Hi. Welcome back. Every time we talk to you in the show, it feels like some legal catastrophe has befallen Google.

Wow, that's true. We have to break this pattern. We like talking to you, but right now you're a bit of an omen. Lauren, what do you think about Nintendo Alarm? Did you buy the Nintendo AlarmP? I did not. I unfortunately have to talk about Google. Well, at least this time we didn't make you sit in a courthouse all week, which is we have been doing.

This time, a little more procedural. So there was the big Google search antitrust case, which, the government won, Google lost. We didn't know what the remedies would be. The government has put forth it's not the actual proposal, but it's like framework of a proposal. It's concepts of a plan.

It's very much, it's 11 pages of concepts of a plan. And the plan, I want Lauren, I want you to go into it in detail, but the plan right now is like everything. Every idea is on the table for us. So let's talk about that

and what those ideas are. Then Google also lost the antitrust case that Epic filed against it around the Play Store, and the court has a plan for some remedies in that case, which amount to just like having to open things up and share apps with other app stores and all that. And then next to it is the big ad take case, which where you were just in the courtroom for weeks, and I don't know what's going to happen there. That's a lot. And we were joking at the top of the show, and Lauren, I'm very curious for your perspective

on this. That's a lot of stuff happening to Google that doesn't appear to, to be, like, having an impact. Like, people, I, I can't tell if everyone knows that whatever we think of as Google today is going away. Like, it's going to change in some way over the next X years because of all this activity. Is that what you see as well? Yeah, I agree. I think the key is maybe that it is in X years, which would be a very large number.

Because, you know, now that these things are in the remedies phase, at least in the case of Epic and search case, you know, Google can then appeal. And then we have a whole other process there. So it's still going to take quite a bit of time to see any real change here. I think in the epic case, it depends on if they get a stay on remedies while they appeal. But, you know, it's still, you know, it's not something that consumers are necessarily going to see a change on super quickly. But yeah, I think it hasn't really settled in for a lot of people that, you know, Google is definitely going to change. Yeah. Or at least it, it seems like it will based on how these cases have turned out so far. And to be fair, Google has said it will appeal all of the cases

and it has asked for a stay, which means a delay on the remedies in the epic case being applied while it goes off and appeals. And the blog posts are appropriately outraged if you go read Google's blog posts. But it's like something's going to happen, right? Like all of this stuff is happening at once and maybe Google can delay some of it and maybe Google can appeal its way out of some of it. But it can't do it to all of it. Yeah, it seems very hard to imagine at this moment that Google is able to just play it all

the way out and just litigate its way out of trouble. And the sense I get just from talking to people at Google is that part of the what is confusing for Google right now is that it's not clear what is going to stick and what isn't. And Lauren, I don't know if this is the sense you're getting from folks involved in this too, but there's something going on where there's, there is so much all happening at once that it's almost like you kind of can't pick where to focus your energy. And so you're just like, well, we're just going to kind of let all this wash over us and then something will stick and we'll deal with that when it comes.

But everybody I talk to even like sort of in and around all of this is just like, Yeah, thrown by the volume of it all. Like is that what you're hearing too, Lauren? Yeah, no, I think that seems right. I think, you know, a lot of, all of these different cases are in different parts of Google's business. So, you know, I guess Google could say, all right, we're going to make some proactive changes in some of these businesses. But, you know, even if they think, even if they think they won't win everything, they don't know which things will stick necessarily. So it's sort of difficult to get in front of right now. Well, and I feel like that's actually a really good segue to the search remedies, which I want to talk about Lauren. And I want you to help us go through because I think what,

what I get from that is the DOJ in particular is like, no Google, you can't just make teeny tiny changes and sort of wiggle your way out of this. Like, we are coming for you and we are coming for all of it. Yeah. It's like I could not believe reading this filing how big a window the DOJ is giving itself or would like to give itself. to mess with Google. And I think it's because of what you just said, Lauren, that Google is like, this touches lots of pieces of our business.

We'll sort of noodle around the edges and we'll build a firewall back between things and we'll let Congress yell at somebody three times a year and then everything will be fine. And the DOJ seems very clearly to be like, absolutely not. Like, we are going to burn you down. And like, that's what Jamesonaut of the Epic judge

has essentially said. He's like, I'm going to tear this company open. And that is like the vibe is so aggressive on that front from the government side of this. It's wild. Yeah. So let's talk about the search remedies. It is a 32-page filing, only 11 pages of which are actually substantive. 20 pages are just state attorney general signing it, which I think is great. Everyone just like join the club. That's what I aspire to. Yeah. Just to be like the 11th signatory of everything. I come down. I helped. But it is, it starts with we should break up Google.

It's on our minds all the way down to, I know, you should appoint a compliance officer for us to yell it. Lauren, take us through it. What are the approaches in here? Yeah, so basically there's four high-level categories that the DOJ lays out that they're looking for in terms of remedies here. So, you know, the first one is about the search distribution and revenue sharing deals. I think these are kind of like the most closely tied to like the surface level of what this case was about, which was like contracts with phone makers and browser makers. to make Google the default on their products. And basically, the DOJ says, like, we'd want to put some limits on the kinds of contracts that Google can make.

So, you know, that seems like probably the lowest hanging fruit here. And, but it's also something that doesn't really, like, fundamentally change Google's business. But another part of that section, they talk about. you know, making structural changes, which means a breakup involving Google's ownership of Chrome, Android, and the Play Store. And so it's basically saying, like, there are these other channels where Google distributes its search engine that Google has an advantage in that its rivals don't. And, you know, that's fundamentally a problem. So that's kind of where, you know, we get

get from this more surface level remedy of contracts to something that really would like go into Google's business and change it up. Just to pause on that one, I want to get to the other ones. But I think the move from the first part of that to the second, I think is what's so interesting about this whole filing. Because it's like if you take the argument to be that Google made illegal amounts of money from its search engine, which is like not exactly. the argument, but is like, it's, it's, you can get there pretty easily, right? Like, you have to,

you have to make some things up and not be right, but you can get there. No, but it's like that, that is what they're, what part of what they're saying is not on the legal amount of money. It's they illegally protected their monopoly. And thus made a ton of money, right? Like, but they're not so worried about the money. No, but they are, but the, but the point is the, the, what they're doing. And they, there's all this set up at the top of the document that is like, not only do we have to stop Google from doing what it's doing. We have to undo it and fix it and pull the market back. And you, there's like, they have a quote from somebody that's like, you know, we can't go back in history, but we have to, we have to do our best to fix it. And so it's like, that's how you

arrive at, we have to split off Android. Because Lauren, I think you're exactly right, that like the obvious thing to come out of this or one obvious outcome would be no more search deals, right? You can't pay it to be the default anymore. That seems like a very straightforward answer to what Judge Meta clearly had issues with. But then it's a surprisingly small number of steps from that to even if you let Google be the default search engine in the thing that it already owns, it's still too powerful. And so it's like that that leap feels wild, but I was surprised at how quickly the government got there. I would say so to me it's not money, it's data. The money is like related to data. Well, that's one of the four things. Right. You can't make a good search engine without

all the data that Google collects, and if they continue to own Chrome, you're hooped. But I agree with you. It's a small jump from these search deals are illegally being made to we should tear Google to shreds. Right, because Chrome makes you too powerful. Because Chrome makes you too powerful? Yeah, I agree with that. Okay, Lauren, what are the other two remedies proposed or concepts of a plan of remedy? Yeah, so the next one, kind of what we were just talking about, It was the accumulation and use of data. So, you know, during the trial, the government kind of described this, like, self-reinforcing cycle where, you know, users go to Google because it's the default and that's what they're used to using and they enter their search queries and then Google gets a lot of information from what you click on about what's actually a useful answer. And because it, you know, kind of has this, basically has all of these distribution channels pretty much set to itself as the default.

You know, most people are going to Google. And then other search rivals are kind of being deprived of that query click information and then, you know, aren't able to improve their services as much. And then, you know, they're not, they don't feel as good to users. and then they go back to Google. So that's kind of the cycle that was described at trial. Including by Saty and Adela. Yeah. He was not messing around.

Yeah. Yeah. So basically the government wants to offset that advantage by making it so, you know, Google has to kind of share certain information. You know, they might have to, you know, license some information or make APIs to share some of the information on how it trains its search engine with that query data, essentially. And, you know, the DOJ says, like, they know that there are privacy concerns here with sharing that kind of information, but they also say, you know, we need to kind of parse out

what is really a privacy concern and what is just, like, a big tech defense. Yep. That comes up a few times where the government is like, yeah, we know there are privacy issues. We'll figure it out. It comes up a lot. Jonathan Cantor, the Assistant Attorney General for Antitrust, has been on Decoder twice now. And he's very careful. He's a government lawyer.

He's very good at this, politician. But you can hear his frustration with privacy as a defense to every problem. It's blindingly clear. He's like, we know. Apple wants to protect your data. That doesn't mean they can do illegal things. We can figure it out. And I think that's kind of what they're saying to Google here, too.

like, yes, other companies need this data to compete. They need to know what's going on the internet too. You can't say only we can protect you. Like, we're just not, that's not a rational defense to the government. Right. I have no idea how that's going to play out, but I will say that I've interviewed Cantor twice, and he is very frustrated about that particular wall going up. Yeah.

Yeah, and they do, like Lauren was saying, there are a few times where it's like, and before you say privacy, don't say privacy. All right, what's the fourth one? There's two more. There's two more. Yeah. Two more. She's only said two.

The first was like a two-parter. I got you. So the third is about generation and display of search results. So this one is pretty much about AI. And, you know, the government kind of says, you know, Google is creating these like new AI products that are, you know, integrated and in search and a feature in search that, you know, basically come from scraping data from sites that they say have, quote, little to no bargaining power against Google's monopoly. So they're basically wanting to make sure that, you know,

sites can maybe opt out of having their information being trained on AI data and things like that. This one feels to me like the government being like not entirely sure what problem it's trying to solve here. Because I think the thing we heard in both these trials, trials, both in the search trial and in the ad tech trial, was there's this whole group of round Google on the internet that just feels powerless, right? And there's a sense that one of the things that is monopolistic about Google is that you just have to play Google's games all the time. And so you can feel this energy from the government saying, we want to level the playing field and give people more tools and more stuff to do. And like, you've actually

been able to opt out of Google for a pretty long time. It's just that no one wanted to because it wasn't a good trade for the most part. And now that trade is different and it's worse. But like the tools are still kind of there. So I feel like to me this was the least compelling part of this document. The government basically just trying to be like, we want everyone else to feel big. Yeah, this was the shortest section in the remedies. And it does feel like the one that like maybe they're going to have to figure out how to flesh out a little bit more.

Yeah. Yeah. This one, it's hard. I mean, like, it's easier in this instance to sort of bring Google down a peg than it is to bring everybody else up, right? And I think they're trying to do both. And I think that that makes sense in this moment. I think they are trying to push Apple into making a search engine.

If I had to, if I had to describe the shape of the outcome that everyone wants the most, it's we knock Google down a peg. We make it illegal for you to just pay the money. And Apple looks around and says, well, we should just do a search engine of our own. and we'll use some of this innovative new AI technology to do it. Well, wait, can I read you a thing that might actually point at that? So one of the things in the Generation Display of Search Results section says that they're considering remedies that would require Google to make available in whole or through an API. The indexes data, feeds and models used for Google Search, including those used in AI-assisted search features, and Google search results features and ads, including the underlying ranking signals, especially on mobile.

So that's like, A, that is bananas. That's it. Give Google away for free. It's a man that you open source Google. All right. But like that, that, what that clearly says is we want to spin up a whole bunch of Google competitors right away because anyone with 10 minutes of coding experience is now going to be able to build a Google level search engine. Like.

On the back of Google. Right. Like wild. But it does, it does suggest that one of the things they want to do is very quickly create a lot of competitors in the search engine. in the search industry. Yeah. To the point of Apple, at trial, the government did kind of suggest that Google had made it in its contract so that it would make sure Apple would not compete with it directly in search. So I could definitely see that being something that the government would like to see,

you know, opening up the opportunity for even, you know, a very well-positioned competitor to just like get going here and crack open the ecosystem. Yeah, that was when they were talking about Spotlight, right? and there were all these internal emails where Apple was trying to decide whether the stuff they were doing in Spotlight was like too close to Google and people at Google were worried that Spotlight was becoming too Googly. And these two things were actively trying to not run into each other. And you could tell the whole time this came up in trial, the government's just sitting there being like, yeah. We got you. I can't tell you the number of times I've walked out of a WWDC, which is where Apple does its operating system updates.

and I've gotten text from Google employees that are like they're coming for search. And my response is always like, why are you talking to me? Right. Like, you're Google. And it's because Apple has the click data. Right. They have the captive audience, particularly in the iPhone, that is just searching in Safari. And right now that goes to Google.

And the second that's diverted, Google knows it's in trouble, so it pays the money. And I think generally I've heard both Jonathan Cantor and Lena Con at the FTC say all these like programs where we install a babysitter to tell a company they're doing something bad and they fix it, like don't work. Like these compliance regimes don't work. We want structural remedies, which means we're going to break up your dumb company. And now you're two companies. And what we want is actual competition in the market.

And the reason I'm saying I think they want Apple to launch a competitor to Google is like that is the easiest fix to this problem. Yeah. Like without question, it's Google should have a competitor. Where can I just drag one into existence? It is on the iPhone. with Apple intelligence and you're talking to Siri and you've got new search results and new things to queer, all that stuff. Just do it. Well, and it's also the exact same logic that doesn't make it make sense for Apple to have not launched a search engine.

There were a lot of negatives in that sentence. But basically, the point is, like, given all of that evidence, the only obvious reason Apple wouldn't have launched a search engine is because Google pays it lots of money. And that was like, Lauren, I think you and I both heard, that was the implication. at trial that like they have successfully with $20 billion a year kept a huge and well-funded and immediately at scale competitor from existing and now we're just going to give them all of Google's other data. We're just going to fix it. Yeah.

All right. I think that's three. One more. One more. One more. All right. So the last one is about kind of a different part of this case, which was Google's monopoly in general search text ads. So this is like a super specific part of the case. We love a market

definition. But basically, in this area, you know, this is like the sponsored blue links that you see when you enter a search query. And, you know, the government here is thinking about maybe making Google license or syndicate its ad feed, even like separate. from its search results to allow for more competition in that really particular part of the market. You should see, if you're not watching this, you should see the squinting, Nilai is doing, listening to that. Yeah, I mean, I've been spending a lot of time talking to ad people lately. You have.

It's changed you. Because I see them. You're wearing a tie. God. I'm wearing a tie because of a secret verge project that will soon be revealed. And I decided to just keep wearing the tie today. but Ivan just sort of like watching like the influencer advertising market so I've been talking a lot of people like where is this money going like what is happening on these platforms I promise I will write a story about this but the thing that they're all saying is search ads on Google are not so valuable to us anymore. All the action all the young people of the money is in like TikTok shop or whatever and so the money is moving so there's just like this last piece of the puzzle where you're Googling running shoes and Google is going to show you search.

results for running shoes with a sponsored link at the top. Like, it's still very valuable. It's very lucrative. It hasn't moved in any meaningful way, but it's the thing that is changing all on its own without any intervention. Right, right? Because the dollars are just going somewhere else. And so this one just seems like, is what I want a feed of Google ads? That's my, that's the plan.

Like, we're fine. But it goes back to kind of the same idea of like, how do we undo the thing that has made Google Unstoppable, which is that it just has this gigantic lead on everybody. It has so much scale. It has so much click data. It has so much query data. It has so much user data. And it really seems like the only thing the government has figured out to do here is just give all that data to everybody else in order to level the playing field. I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't seem like a real plausible. So there's this idea. Sarah John and I've been talking about, there's this idea that you can't force a company to do something. You can't force

someone to do anything. It's called specific performance. It's very nerdy, but it's like, it's the thing you, it's like the hardest thing to get. Like, I'm mad at you because your tree is hanging on my property. I'm like, I need you to cut down the tree. And it's much more likely that the judge will move our property lines than to force you to cut down the tree. Interesting. Right. Like, that's a, if you're a first year lawyer, I know there's a million problems with that example, but that's the shape of it. Right. Like, it is very, hard to force a for someone to do anything in an ongoing way that's just the last thing you can ask for and i think in this context and lauren i'm curious what you are reporting is revealed it feels

like the government's like yeah we're going to break it up along the way we're going to ask for a bunch of like duty to deal you have to do these deals we're going to force your business to do business with that business we're going to force you to do these things which are the other choice either, Judge, you can break up Google. You can take YouTube and Chrome and Android. Just break them up. Now you've got three companies clean. We can all go to dinner.

Or we can force these companies in a slap in the face. You're going to slap George Washington in the face. The most anti-American thing you do and say, you have to do deals with your competitors. It just feels like that's the setup. And I don't know what's going to happen. But like you have to license all of your data and your search results generations and your ad stack. so that Apple can build a thing and you have to keep that going and where the American economy depends on your doing this deal because we forced you to, that's tough. That's a tough one. Yeah. And it might be easier. There's no way around getting that deal done correctly in the spirit of the law.

And it just might be easier to be like, cut it in three. And I kind of think that this whole concepts of a plan thing is like just setting up the, oh, that seems hard. We should just break up. Well, the government does say they think that there needs to be like, the judge needs to consider remedies from like most of these buckets. Like, it can't just be like one thing. And obviously, you know, this is early days they're asking for as much as they think they might be able to get and they haven't even gotten into specifics yet. But, you know, I think they feel like they need to attack this from multiple angles and also attack the network effects. which I think is what the licensing aspects of this get to is like, yeah, okay, once Google has all this query information, no one else is really able to get it and get in there unless they're able to access that in some way. Do these things typically get filed as like a negotiating tactic?

I'm realizing as you're talking that the way I read this is the government sort of vastly overshooting what it thinks it can do just as kind of a first overbid in the game to try and land. somewhere in the middle. Is that actually how this works? I don't know. To whatever extent, although I think that DOJ does not want to settle this one. I think they want it. They've won. They won. They won a trial. They want to see what remedies they will win. Whatever. I think the weirdness here is this was a two-part trial. So they had the first trial that's just like, are you bad? And the answer is yes. Yes. Did you do it? Oh, you're super did. And the second part is what should the remedies be? And a lot of this filing is, is here's what we think the remedy should be. Now we're going to have another trial

and we're going to get more information about how bad they are to support these. There's also going to be a whole other discovery process for this phase. So the government's going to get even more information about what's possible, but Google thinks actually gives it the power that it does and how it could get at that.

So I think that will be refined as they get that information. So that's the reason you go super broad in this first one, is to essentially give yourself leeway to go every possible direction in this remedies trial. Yeah. Okay.

That makes sense. And the thing, people are probably listening to me. I'm like, you just want to bring up Google. You hate Google. The thing that is right next to it is Google is generally terrified of all of this and has gotten itself into trouble throughout all these antitrust cases for constantly deleting emails and like saying things like, uh, antitrust, take this chat to private, which is weird. Or the putting attorney client privilege at the top of every email, even when it's

obviously not a certain client privileged. Yeah. Like they're like if you can't talk about your own business without having to say we shouldn't talk about this. Like something is going wrong. All the way up all the way up to Sunaer Pachai, who is like, we should take this off line. Like, so there's just this overwhelming sense inside of this case in particular that like the government's going to just run it to the end. Yeah. I don't know if that's a sense in the epic case. So that's this case. Again, there's another poor Lauren and David, are both going to have to sit in D.C. courtrooms some more. They see that coming. That's just

one of the cases. The ad tech case, we can set aside because nothing has really happened in the past couple weeks. We think November, right, for next moves on that one. November 25th is when closing arguments are happening. Oh, sick Thanksgiving present for everybody. That's going to be so fun. You can just be like, you know, the judge was like, I cannot hear about CPMs anymore. We're all taking a break and then you can come back and do your closing arguments. So that other case is happening over there. That's Google's money. So that's a big deal.

And then there's the Epic case, which is the weird one. It's like the weird outlier because it wasn't brought by the government. It's bought by Tim Sweeney and Epic. They lost against Apple and basically the same theory. But they super won against Google because in order to keep the Android ecosystem in line, Google had to go make contracts. And there's just a huge paper trail of what those contracts are and what they restrict companies from doing and how they work. And now we're at the same part where the judge is like, how do I fix it?

And Lauren, it feels like the remedies in this case are their own kind of extremely complicated multi-part system. Yes, that is true. But I guess basically the high level is that the judge is allowing for other app stores on Android to have, you know, kind of more equal footing with the Play Store. And I think Google has to give the entire catalog of Play Store apps to other app stores for three years. which is just back to that, how do I make it fair? I'm going to force this to be fair. Yeah,

Google has to give third-party developers access to all the apps in Google Play and list those third-party app stores in Google Play. So it's this, it turns the app store into this crazy, like, Oroboros of apps. They're like,

oh, you want to download Instagram. You can do it from 900 places now. Knock yourself out. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of, like, little things also that the judge ruled here. Like, there's some of the steering or the anti-steering stuff where it's now easier to link to billing outside of Android with these remedies. There's a lot of, I guess I would call it, like, weird contractness that that's trying to be undone in terms of, like, how app revenue gets shared and what developers get from Google to do things or in some cases not to do things. but yeah it seems like basically what the judge is trying to do here is just say there are a lot of apps on Android and everyone should have all of them and they should all be able to peacefully coexist and that is like I think a really fascinating UI experiment we're about to have because like I just I think most people are going to have trouble figuring out how any of that is actually supposed to work but it also does mean if you run a competitive app store

you have a lot of new advantages going for you. Well, I mean, this case is Epic's case. They're the ones who want all these outcomes. So Epic gets to start the Epic App Store, Epic Game Store on Android. Tim Sweeney has already answered, they're going to do this. That's going to have Fortnite in it. The argument, as far as I can tell, more than correct me if I'm wrong, is the Epic Game Store is at a huge disadvantage if the only app in it is Fortnite.

So you need some other apps. okay Google you have to give the entire catalog well and if you can't download the epic game store through the app store that comes built into right without all the warning screens right okay so to get the epic game store you got to go through the play store and so now it feels like it's on par with everybody else now you get the epic game store you go in there to get fortnight and if the only thing in there is fortnight you're never going to use it again and google retains its advantage they've just made it harder to get fortnight so instead we're going to demand that google give the entire catalog of the play store to epic so when you open the epic game store you can see all the apps

that are available on Android. And Fortnite. And Fortnite. But the Play Store doesn't get Fortnite. Yeah. It actually disadvantages the Play Store in a lot of ways. Because now if you have an app that is so compelling that you can pull people into your ecosystem, it's still going to be a lot of work and maintenance to build an app store of your own.

But like you now have pretty strong incentives to do it because there aren't a lot of downsides. But going back to the search case, You know, the Play Store is preloaded on a lot of Android phones. So there's still that advantage for the Play Store. Yeah. It just seems like what we're going to get is Epic gets to launch the Epic Game Store. And maybe Microsoft will launch a Microsoft store. And maybe Amazon will try again.

Maybe Amazon will notice that it runs the Amazon Amazon. The Silk Browser. Yeah. And those will become more viable. Yeah. Because just by default, Instagram will be in them as well in a way that right now, whatever. Like, they're not going to go make those deals and no one has any incentive to chase that down. Right.

Does that, does this matter for anybody but Epic? I think it matters for any developers that want to make a app store. But, you know, I don't know how many developers are out there who want that. And I guess it also matters for developers who want, options to be in other app stores that don't have the same rules as the Play Store. Yeah, so on the iOS side, this has been expressed pretty directly, right? So there's Alt Store, because the EU mandated alternative app stores in iOS. Immediately Alt Store came out.

The bunch of emulators showed up, and then Apple changed the rules in its app store because of some competition. That has sort of been already, like, available on Android. Like, you could side load all this stuff in Android. it hasn't changed the rules of the Play Store. So is it that we'll have another app store with more permissive rules about what's allowed or better payment splits? I don't know.

Like this one, because Android was already open-ish, it's like a weird paradox of this case. Yeah. Like because Google doesn't control the ecosystem, the evidence of it trying to control the ecosystem is much more available because it's just like sending emails to Samsung being like, we control your phone. Well, and there were a couple of things. that Epic was asking for that it didn't get that I think might have potentially been bigger deals. Like one of their things, I forget exactly how they expressed it, but the idea was basically

you should be able to side load an app as easily as you can download an app from the Play Store, and they didn't get that. And if they'd gotten that, that becomes a big deal because now, and it just becomes trivially easy to distribute an Android app outside of any app store. And that becomes very powerful for lots of good and bad reasons. And then there was the one where they wanted to decouple a lot of the Android APIs from Google Play, so that in theory you could buy a device that has the full Android experience except it doesn't have Google Play at all. And so then if you're Epic, you sell a gaming handheld that is full Android, but only the Epic Game Store or something like it, right? Like you can see how you get down the road from that.

I think the world in which we're going to live, which is that the Play Store is still very powerful and still exists, you just have more. control inside of it, that one feels a little less obvious to me. And I think one weird possible outcome of all of this is that you get some of the big companies you're talking about. Like, in theory, Microsoft and meta and a handful of other companies are powerful enough to say, we are doing our own app store. We're not going to play the rest of your games and we're going to offer you better terms if you come buy apps from our store instead of the Play Store or whatever.

And then you start to have real weird tiers of competition inside of Android where like I'm going to get to the point as a user where I have to download five app stores just to have my side. And that sucks. Like that's a bad consumer outcome. And that is what Google has been railing against this whole time. And I think that is a reasonable part of its defense. But the truth is I just think epic got what it wanted, which is we can do Fortnite on our own terms. And there's going to be a lot of fallout. But I don't think there are that many epics.

out there. You know what I mean? In the way that there are a million search engines that would like to be powerful, I don't know that there are a million other epic games. Well, there's a Sony. There's a Microsoft. There's a bunch of game companies that really walk us laughing. There are a bunch of game companies.

I'm just saying that the little with a weird paradox here is because it was already open. To control it, Google had to do a bunch of aggressive stuff that created the evidence that is like, now you have to be more open, which is weird. And I can tell you because I had this exact. reaction, a bunch of our listeners are screaming in their cars right now that it is already somewhat trivial to download an APK and Android phone outside of an app store. Sure. Right?

And it's weird because that openness exists. When Sonos was broken, I just got the APK of the old version of the Sonos app and my sonos was fine for a week. It's easier. But you can't go to a website, tap, install this app on my phone and it installs the app on your phone. You can, but you also have to accidentally run like a Bitcoin mining scam. It's fine.

Actually, you brought up Google's responses to this. Lauren, I'm looking at a blog post from Google that says DOJ's radical and sweeping proposals, risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers. That seems like it sums up the response, but you've been doing some reporting. You've read this more closely than I have. What is Google's response to all this? Yeah, that's their response to the search remedies, I believe. And yeah, they basically think, you know, this is a big overreach.

You know, this case is about, you know, a set of search distribution contracts. And here's the government going and, like, reaching out into all these different businesses that it has. And, you know, this is, you know, really going beyond what this case is about. So I think, you know, we're going to be seeing a lot more from them. I believe they have to file something about their response at some point. So, you know, I think we're not going to really see them backing down from this. And they have to go through this remedies phase before they can appeal. but I think we're going to see a big fight from them down the road.

Yeah. Am I being too hard on Google to just read this blog post as Google yelling but privacy over and over and over? They do kind of yell but China once in here. But mostly it seems to me that they're just like it's all the stuff that we've been saying the judges in these cases are not finding compelling. I think it's privacy. It's, you know, we're going to hold back American innovation. And also just this is a big overreach. So I think those are kind of some of their key arguments here.

Yeah, they also say that if Android and Chrome were their own companies, there would be no incentive to keep them open source, which is a big deal. And I feel like we could make a hard left turn in talking about WordPress right now, but we should not do that. We should not do that. But there's a lot there. Google's response to this, we'll link the blog post. Everybody can read it.

But their blog post is basically like, look, we make a lot of money, and then we give a whole bunch of stuff away for free. and if you change that dynamic, maybe this stuff isn't free anymore. Like I said, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't really know what all the right answers are. I can just tell you with 100% certainty that the Google we knew a year ago is not the Google we will have a year from now. Yeah, agreed. Like this, the, and it's weird to me how little everyone is paying attention to it.

Like this, this company is the infrastructure of the internet. Like, we, there's a reason we've been talking about the first. for however long now we've been talking about it like when Google changes this dramatically basically everything around it necessarily changes yeah that's weird and some of those points about like would another company have the same incentives to keep Android as accessible and open sources it has been that's true like the the whole Android business is the search business and if you decouple those things Android needs a business and it would it would change like I think Google's not wrong

about that. Yeah. The pixel team, wake up. It's time to start selling some phones, buddy. All right, we've got to take a break. Lauren, stick around. We want you on the lightning round with us. That's good. All right. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies.

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Ready to tackle bigger problems? Get started with Claude today at cloud.aI slash vergecast. That's cloud.aI slash vergecast and check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude. dot AI slash verge cast. 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. 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. 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 dig in all right we're back unsponsored lightning round yeah it's never going to happen we've gotten some very nice emails but i'm not allowed to make the deals i just walk in rooms of box media

demanding and no one no one takes me seriously for all you guys know this is a sponsored lightning round i i won't tell you that's true that's true sponsored by leham all right david you're going to start first one. It's another Google story, but I will tell you, one, it's a pallet cleanser, and two, shockingly popular story. Okay. Not shocking, because it's the greatest news in years if you are a person who cares about your documents. And don't we all care about our documents? So Google announced this feature in April, and I completely miss it, but is now rolling out a thing that basically it's the docs equivalent of the thing in sheets or Excel where you can have sort of multiple tabs open

that kind of interact with each other. It's just a pain on the side that you can open tabs and sub-tabs. But it's essentially like having multiple documents inside of one document. Does that sound like a big deal to you that will completely change your life? You're wrong because it is and it will.

This is as a person who creates infinite Google Docs for my job. This is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me. I knew it was a big deal when I saw wired staffers who I know and love. Like freaking out on threads

about our story about it. Yeah. Because they like immediately needed to share it. So the thing that's great about this is a thing that is more and more popular all the time, it seems,

is the like public Google document. Yes. More and more you're seeing like there's a great newsletter that I subscribe to that the newsletter every month is just a link to a Google doc and you go read the Google Doc.

And it's kind of a great experience. This is, it's great for navigation. It's great for putting lots of docs together. There has been that table of contents thing you can do on the side where it'll let you just jump from header to header. This is just that, but like better and more navigable and less awful on big documents. But I think it's Google Docs is like used for a lot of really interesting things. Public docs are everywhere.

It's a super collaborative thing. I see things where like groups of hundreds of people are like. like planning things together in a single Google Doc. And like, this is a kind of structure that Docs has just never had and is going to make a lot of type A people very, very happy. And they are very happy. They're so happy.

They are just reading and sharing the story. If we did nothing but write about tabs and Google Docs the rest of the year, we'd be set. It's real. And that's what we're doing. It's Google Antitrust and Tabs and Google Docs. You can make them emojis. When I was just a pup,

there was this piece of software that came with almost every mat called HyperCard. And it was, I don't even know how to describe it. It was the internet, but local and expressed as like virtual index cards. And you could like program hypercard stacks. Some of our audience is freaking out because they're talking about it. When I tell you, other people think I sound like an ancient which involves hypercards in a surprisingly meaningful way. This is just hypercard.

Oh, 100%. Google is making a hypercard. Yeah. They're turning Google Docs into hypercard. Or if another less successful comparison, Google Wave. They're doing just a modular. That's good. I mean, Google has been trying to do Google Wave in various forms for an extremely long time. Just Google, it's an impossible thing to Google to Google the word Google and the word wave. It's hard. We'll find a link to some ancient coverage of this thing Google made. Years ago, it was like, what if we blew up all email and docs? And it was all the same thing and no one could figure it out. And now we're just back.

Lorna, are you as excited about tabs as I am? Be honest. I can't say I am. I'm not the person who has like a million Chrome tabs open at the same time. You guys are the problem. As someone who somehow missed this story, I'm like freaking out in the control. I'm so excited. There are workflows in my head right now that are now possible. I'm going to just share. Was that a threat?

William just threatened us. Yeah, he did. All right, we're toast. It's lighting around. We got to move on. Yeah. All right, Lauren, what are you got? Next tab.

Yeah, next tab. Yeah, I mean, I'm sure everyone heard there was a major hurricane in Florida this week. And FEMA is out there cleaning up fighting the storm and also now fighting disinformation about the storm as well, including some false claims spread by former President Trump. And, you know, I think FEMA kind of always knew this was going to be a problem, but the FEMA administrator said this is absolutely the worst I've ever seen about misinformation around the storms recently. So, you know, it's just kind of wild that they've had to do all this fact-checking while just trying to literally clean up a major disaster. I think we did a link to a Rolling Stone story on the homepage today, just about meteorologists who are getting death threats. These people believe they can control the weather. Marjor's Taylor Green out there saying that they can control the weather.

Oh, great. Which is an incredible, like, retcon of climate change. Like, do you, yes, it's true we can control the weather, just not the way that you think. It just takes 40 years of burning fossil fuels. It's true. We did, in fact, control the weather in one very specific way. I don't know if we've run a bunch of stories about just moderation failures lately. Like threads moderation is way too heavy-handed.

It appears to be partially AI driven in a way that no one can control, least of all the people at meta. X, obviously not moderating any of this misinformation. It is weird to be in a social media environment where I'm like, they did kind of a good job during COVID because they didn't. Like that was a nightmare. And this is so much worse. And it feels like people are going even one step farther away from reality into they're controlling the weather in Florida to influence the election. I mean, all of like I don't think we were doing a great job when we were. bringing Jack Dorsey in front of Congress so that people could yell at him.

And then bad tweets. And then people were yelling at Mark Zuckerberg about Twitter. Like that accomplished broadly nothing, I think, Lauren. You covered all that. Nothing. Nothing was accomplished and some weird First Amendment problems there. But it taught these companies that what if doing nothing was a more viable strategy. And now it feels like we're just reaping the dividend of doing nothing.

Well, it feels like these companies. are just very reactionary. And it's like being like yelled at as a kid. And at first you're like, oh, I need to do better. I need to like do what I'm being asked. And then they're like become adolescents that are like, wait a minute. Why am I just following what you say? It seems like it gets me in more trouble. And then they decide to back off. By the way, that is a perfect description of Mark Zuckerberg and his t-shirts and chains. Seriously. Flowing. Like flowing. He's in his adolescent phase of like, well, and I remember,

yeah, we, we were talking a couple of years ago about like all of these companies, a few of them in particular, made a real show of doing their best and trying their hardest and decided that it accomplished nothing. Yeah.

For them, for their image. And we were even wondering, we were like, okay, what's it going to look like when they decide that actually the penalty for not caring and the penalty for caring are basically the same? and they're just going to decide to not care.

No, but I'm saying it's worse. Right now, it is worse. The penalty for caring was worse than the penalty for not caring. In the world. But they are paying less of a penalty. They are in their bunkers. That's what I mean. And on their mega yachts.

Right. And they are not paying any price for like fake AI generated photos of like children with puppies that don't exist. They're like, oh, this is fine. Whereas when they tried, they got yelled at. Exactly. And the incentive structure is. like totally backwards. Yes, 100%.

And they're like, we have now reached a point where all of their incentives are to not try. And now we know what it looks like, right? It turns out trying and failing. And I think we all pretty much agree that content moderation is a completely unwinnable game. And all you can do is try and fail as well as possible. That trying and failing gained them nothing. And they might as well just give up and not care and wear T-shirts. And here we are.

And it's awful. It is. I would say the hurricane misinformation story is, it might be a defining story in, in like the history of media. I mean, it's just fully out of control. And the other aspect of that,

that I don't know if you guys have seen this, but like all of my feeds everywhere are just creators in Florida who stayed and are like making a show out of not going. Some of them are like outside trying to sort of journalism the hurricane, but then there's one guy I keep finding who just wears a headlamp and is just like walking around his house being like, seems bad.

I'm in the eye. I don't care. And he just has a headlamp. And that's like, I've seen like 50 of his videos. We don't have the time to do David and Eli talk about journalism. And really never do we have the time and nor should we on the show. But the drawing the difference between that in Anderson Cooper being like, it's pretty bad. Yeah.

Actually pretty hard to do. Isn't what I mean? You can journalism the hurricane just like going outside of the hurricane. I get it. It's like, they're like, I'm staying here to do to get eyeballs. And Anderson Cooper's like, I'm going there to get. eyeballs and it's a very fine line between those two things. 100%.

I do think these, the platforms are, they've dropped the ball. And I don't know. Every virtual listener knows how I feel about the First Amendment, which is, everyone else seems to be sick of it. I think that's a worrying trend. Like, we're banning books and everyone has bad, everyone's screaming fire in a crowd at theater.

Tim Walls of the debate just randomly blurted it out for no reason. And our entire newsroom, you saw our entire slack. Everybody's like, no. Like, I don't know what's going on. It's all bad. But the idea that our social networks are actually, they actually have an important social function in our society to try to get accurate information out and not amplify lies. They just let go. Not going great. Super like, oh, all right. I'm going to try to clean this up. Yeah. I'm going to try to end us on a high note. That's my goal. Okay. Here's the high note. Several months ago, the CEO of Zoom came on Decoder. And he said, here's my dream.

All of your Zoom meetings will have AI clones in them, digital twins. You're going to clone yourself. And then that clone will go to the Zoom meeting for you while you sit on a beach and drink a bakery. And I was like, how many clones are I have? Could I have 10,000? And he was like, as many as you want. Unclear how any of this work. Unclear if he was building.

Unclear how if he had the technology to do it. I don't know. There were some great YouTube videos made about that specific interview. Sure. We'll link it. Zoom has announced AI avatars can talk to your team on your behalf.

The first step towards our goal of 1,000 digital NELIs going to meetings across Fox Media demanding to have the Lightning Round sponsored. But now it's one digital Nilai. Yep. I feel like one's too many.

Zoom announced it will soon let you create an AI avatar of yourself that you can use to send brief messages to your team. and the only message I want to send is when is the lightning around getting sponsored? And I would like my AI avatar to attend every single meeting at this company. This is nothing. You need to record an initial video of yourself that Zoom's AI will use to make an avatar that looks and even sounds like you.

From there, you can write the message you want your avatar to say and then have it go to meetings and say it. It's the same amount of work. It's the same amount of work. It's just doing it. I feel like this could have been an email. Seriously. And I'm going to have my AI avatar go to every. every meeting and say this could have been an email.

Okay, A, that's a pretty good idea. B, I have come around to the idea that actually the solution to our AI problem is to just ban meetings. Everybody is like, we're going to make a thing so that you don't have to go to a meeting. Just don't have the meeting. This is uncomplicated. No, no, 1,000 digital AI avatars all having meetings with each other while we sip Dachrys in the beach. This is the future of the information economy. Or don't have the meeting.

Just Dacreras. Just the daquery parts and no meetings. But then you have to have a meeting with your AI avatar to learn what happened, which feels worse. I would say Eric did not. Yeah, I go from having no information to still having no information, but a weird digital version of me talk to some people. Again, you can listen to the episode of Decoder. We try to get there. I would say that that was not forthcoming.

The answer to that specific problem, you know, it was a real like, we'll get there when we get there kind of situation. Sorry, I'm just reading the quote that Eric said to you. And it begins with today for this session. He's saying this to you, by the way. Today for this session, ideally, I do not need to join. That's pretty rough. If the AI future is I don't have to hang out with Nealai anymore, I'm in. Let's do it.

I'm just telling you, I'm going to use this technology to get the Lightning Aaron sponsor. By the way, they asked Zoom's chief product officer about deep fakes doing bad things with their new AI avatars that can leave voice mails for people or whatever this is. And she said the company's handling the possibility of defakes with, quote, really carefully with advanced authentication, watermarking, and strict usage policies. Nothing like a terms of service to keep people from doing deepfakes. Please don't. I'm going to make, I'm going to train one of these on you. Send David did meetings. That's fine.

It's coming. I'm just telling you these ideas are coming. This is a dream. This is the last first cast where it will be real me ever again. Just an AI avatar of David, for some reason, demanding that the Lightning Round could sponsor. I do think if you're a CEO, if you make an AI of yourself that goes to every Zoom meeting at your company and just says this meeting should have been an email, you will have done the greatest service to your company that any CEO has ever done. 100%. Just be like, why is the CEO here?

And then like theatrically leaves before they even realize it was AI. That's pretty good. That's pretty good. There it is. That's my idea. All right. That's it. We got to wrap this thing up.

We're way over. Like crazy over. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us. Thanks for having me. We have lots and lots to come, including this Robotaxi event, which is happening tonight, and then we'll cover it next week on the Vergecast, but we'll have full coverage on the site in the meantime.

So go check that out. Let us know how we did on our predictions. Optimus Robots. That's it. That's a Vergecast. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you.

Give us a call at 866, Verge 101. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and buy. Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Poor, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.