The Vergecast - The government's plan to break up Google

Episode Date: November 22, 2024

The Verge's Lauren Feiner joins Nilay and David to talk about the US government's proposal in its search antitrust case against Google. They discuss the future of Chrome, what a white-label search engine might look like, and how a Trump administration might change the course of this case altogether. Then Nilay and David talk about the week in AI and gadget news, from the latest on Amazon's new Alexa to Google bailing on tablets all over again. Finally, in the lightning round, they discuss Comcast spinning off its cable channels and the latest in the Threads / Bluesky competition. Further reading: DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly Google responds to DOJ’s ‘extreme proposal.’ Google workers to DOJ: we need protections to make your breakup effective Apple fights to keep DOJ antitrust suit from reaching trial Amazon announces new Echo Show 21 and Echo Show 15 smart displays Google may be about to reboot its laptop and tablet hardware again Google reportedly cancels Pixel Tablet 2 and might quit the category — again Sonos’ smart TV plans might have found an OS Windows 365 Link is a $349 mini PC that streams Windows from the cloud Comcast is spinning off its cable TV business Trump names Brendan Carr as his FCC leader Strava closes the gates to sharing fitness data with other apps Inside Elon Musk’s messy breakup with OpenAI Threads’ custom feeds are already rolling out Threads’ algorithm will focus more on the people you follow Bose acquires premium audio brand McIntosh 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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It seems like a likely outcome here. I'm your friend, Eli, David Pierce is here. The browser wars are just the end of web browsers. I love this. This is great. What have we done? Yeah. Lauren Feiner's here.

Hey, Lauren. Hey. There is a lot of news, a lot of what I would call Lauren Finer news this week. Unfortunately, for Lauren Finer. Every week is that. Especially lately. The DOJ has put forth its proposal for what to do about Google antitrust in search, which involves potentially selling Chrome.

Google has reacted to this. There are more antitrust lawsuits. Apple is trying to get out of its antitrust lawsuit. There's a bunch of AI chaos. There's some gadgets. We got a lightning round. I want you to hear the excitement in my voice about the lightning round. You know it's coming.

It's going to be good. I also have some personal news. Can I tell you my personal news? news. What's that? I bought an M4 Mac Mini, and it is glorious. Liam, our producer, can attest to the number of times I have slacked him over the last two weeks being like, Liam, I'm going to do it, talk me out of it. And he keeps not talking me out of it. And so this morning, I opened up so many browser windows by accident that I got very frustrated with my computer. And so I went to the Apple Store and bought a Mac. All right. Let me just pull apart a few themes, few core Vergecast themes here.

David, who had an M1 Mac Mini on which he mostly does this, which was fine. It was fine, right? It was like not terrific computer. Right. And you bought a new computer that is vastly faster than what you need because after years of insisting eight gigs of RAM was enough, you ran out of memory and your computer slowed down. So you went and bought an entirely new computer to get eight gigs more RAM.

Okay. I have several responses. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. 8 gigs of memory is fine If you are a regular person You just bought a new computer Your M1 Mac Mini was not slow For this purpose

In no way, shape, or form Should other people make computer purchasing decisions Based on how I use browser tabs Like no one The only person in my life I've met Who is worse about browser tabs than I am is Addie Robertson Who sat down next to me last week

And I went, oh my God, that's so many tabs Right, and Addy is smart and good at buying computers and probably bought a computer or 16 gigs of RAM whereas you were like most normals need 8 gigs of RAM

I David Pierce Tab assassin are gonna buy a computer of 8 gigs of RAM and then unnecessarily buying you I had to choose between being good at life and having a powerful computer

and I pick powerful computer like it just this I will also point out that you refuse to buy a good TV yeah no that I still feel good about all right it's a mess I'm proud of you

one's it coming thank you it's here I'm on it right now oh you If you're like, gosh, David is so much smarter and more attractive than he usually is on the Vergecast, this is it. We did it. It's all. I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about buying M4 Mac Mini, but to do that, I have to convert one of my old IMAX into a monitor, which more and more people I will say out there are talking about.

Oh, yeah. I wouldn't say doing, right? But now that I've opened the door to, hey, what if we all broke our IMAX trying to turn them in monitors? more and more people are like, will you do it first so that I can see if it works? We've definitely successfully made the business case for our roving RV in which we will do this process for you. It's ready.

I will drive to your house in a van and break your old computer. That is the only promise I will make the listeners of the Vergecast. Some of you will come out of it with a monitor. Most of you will not. It's about the friends we made along the way. Will we spend time together in a van? Yeah. That is a guarantee.

I'm just saying. When I was a child, my father owned not one but two different conversion vans. They were great, and I think they should come back as a market. And the specific market I'm proposing is the back of the van is where we hang out and play video games. And the front of the van is where I break your old I Mac. Oh, I like that. Do you see what I'm saying? Yeah.

Inside of captain's chairs, there's like a little lab situation. And in the back is like couches. A good TV, David. some game consoles. I'm not sure this is going to work, and mostly it'll probably just get me arrested, because I'll be driving around me like, I'd like to break your computer and play video games with you in my van. It's less transparency.

It gives you everywhere. And we'll make content about it and be huge on TikTok, and it'll be fine. That's finally, finally a business model of media that makes sense. All right, we should get into the news. There's a lot to talk about. Lauren, let's start with the DOJ in Google. Just to lay some foundation for folks. I want to talk about the proposal this week.

There are multiple antitrust lawsuits against Google. And it's actually, I find it quite difficult to keep them all apart because it's not clear how all of the things that happen will ultimately play out and make a new Google. And then on top of it, there's a new president and a new administration and a new attorney general, although Matt Gates dropped out like minutes before we started recording. So I don't even know who the attorney general is going to be. But there's the one we're talking about today, which was the Google pays Apple money for search defaults in Safari, Google was found guilty of having a monopoly in search, and the remedies are at this. There's another case, which is what advertising, right, Lauren? Yeah, the ad tech industry. And that one is going to closing arguments on Monday back in Alexandria, Virginia.

And that's all about how Google connects publishers and advertisers through its tech. That one's the much wonkier one. Yes. But also maybe the more important one. Because it's the money. Yeah. Exactly. So I just want to start there.

There's a lot of activity around Google's business and how it all works together. And the reason I want to start there is all of that flows through Chrome. Right. At the end of the day, Google's ad tech is worthless unless there are web browsers that show you hats and Google has the biggest one. And at the end of the day, the reason it's paying for a default placement in other browsers is because it can't run Chrome on the iPhone. So it just pays Apple to do what it does on the desktop in Chrome. So that, I just want to lay all that out. Like, there's a lot of swirling activity around Google, and we're facing down this proposal inside of one case,

but I'm not sure how it will affect the other case. And we won't know because it's just at closing arguments. Oh, and then this, by the way, this trial, there's so much. It's so confusing. This trial is not even over. This is just a proposal. And then there's going to be another trial to debate this proposal. Right. Right. So I mean, just to give you a sense of kind of the timeline of both of these cases here, like the Ad Tech case is going to closing arguments on Monday. And then we go, then we might get a decision in that case by like the end of the year. And then that goes to the remedies phase if the judge says that Google is a monopolist in that case. And then they'll have to schedule that.

And then in April, we have the remedies trial in the search case in D.C. So and then after all of that, you know, we know Google wants to appeal the search case. And I'd imagine whoever loses in the ad tech case is going to want to appeal there. So this is not happening very soon. No. So it's just a mess. seen people react to the news today about Chrome is Google is going to have to sell Chrome. And that's just not where we are. It's this government as currently composed in the Biden administration has put forward this proposal. Many things will happen, including the inauguration of Donald Trump and whoever his attorney general was being confirmed and then further trials in April. So that's the foundation. So we're going to talk about this because the ideas are really interesting. But I just want people to know, like, nothing is happening. Like we're a long way from here to there.

So talk about this proposal. So the Justice Department put out this proposal. What's in it? Yeah. So the proposal that the DOJ put out is their kind of initial proposed final judgment. So this is, you know, them saying to the judge, this is what we want you to do. This is what we want you to tell Google that they have to do in order to restore competition to the online search market. And so basically, you know, they had filed a kind of high-level version of this.

not that long ago. And it was sort of like, here's what we're kind of thinking about. And, you know, we're looking at Chrome. We're looking at Android. We're looking at all these other things. This is like the more concrete version of that where they're saying, you know, this is what we intend to ask for in this trial. And, you know, they're going to get to go through a whole discovery process around this too. So now we can see that they are saying that they feel strongly that Google must divest Chrome.

It's not just an option that's on the table. They think that this is a critical access point for Google search that needs to be separated from the company. And then on top of that, they also considered divesting, having Google divest Android, but they're kind of, I guess, holding their fire on that for now. But they're leaving it on the table. So it's kind of an incentive for Google to comply with the rest of the remedies that they're proposing. And it's also, you know, something that they can turn to if they say, you know what, these other remedies aren't actually working to restore competition in the market. Yeah, they're pretty deliberately hanging that over Google's head, right? They're like, you can do all of these other hugely consequential things that you've only begun to list, which is insane.

But if you don't do them, like, the big gun is we will take Android away from you. That was the, it's just like this looming threat throughout this entire filing. Yeah, and I think what really comes through in this filing is that, you know, the DOJ really wants to have, you know, as many options that it can have available to them on the table. You know, they don't want to end up in a situation where, you know, some of the remedies they propose don't work or, you know, the landscape change such that none of these things really matter anymore because we know this is going to take years. And we know that AI is going to become a very important part of search. So they are clearly trying to be very deliberate in making sure that anything they ask the judge to impose isn't something that's going to be obsolete tomorrow. So Chrome is, I think, the highlight by far. It's the easiest one for people to understand.

The looming threat of we will take Android away from you, I think also pretty easy to understand. Then there's a bunch of other stuff in here. Yeah. Which also seems tremendously impactful, but maybe a little bit more open. Hey, can you go through those, Lauren? Yeah, sure. So I guess just some of the most important ones that come to mind, you know, going back to how this case began, it's really about contracts when you boil it down to it.

And these contracts are contracts that Google has with phone makers and browser makers to be the default search engine on those platforms. And the DOJ basically wants to say, all right, Google can't enter into certain. exclusionary agreements with those kinds of companies. They can't exchange something of value for like preferred placement or for boxing out rivals from those those kind of platforms. And so, you know, that's kind of like the most straightforward thing that they're asking for. And that's kind of what we thought this would boil down to, right? Like we've been saying for months that the easiest answer to where would this go is just the government is going to say, you're not allowed to make these deals anymore, period, the end, goodbye.

And it seems like everyone is prepared for that to be an outcome here. Totally. I mean, that seems pretty baseline. It's pretty much like exactly what was in the complaint and exactly what the judge ruled was some of their anti-competitive behavior. So that seems pretty cut and dry. But at the same time, you know, okay, sure, like Google could stop doing these agreements and then they could figure out another way to be the default or to, you know, just maintain their dominance in this area. So I think DOJ clearly thinks like that's not enough. That just kind of like stops the bleeding.

Yeah. And it's the flip side of that that really gets me reading through this filing that, like, this whole thing is so much more punishing of Google than I expected it to be. And like, I'm not a lawyer and maybe I should have seen this coming. But there is a real thing they're doing in this filing where they're saying, okay, not only do we have to prevent Google from doing these monopolistic things, we have to take aggressive steps to unwind all of the things that Google has been doing and the lead it has built over the last 15 years. Like a huge portion of this is just them saying we need to break Google in half

and give everybody else every advantage that Google has had in order for them to catch up. Right? Like, am I overreading that part? No, I think that's fair. I mean, I think a lot of antitrust is kind of backward looking by nature. And I think, you know, often you hear companies say, like, you know, we're not even doing this anymore. Like, this is all in the past. And, like, that might be true, but it doesn't mean that their conduct wasn't anti-competitive or that they can't still be held accountable for it. And I think, you know, the DOJ kind of often talked about in trial how there was this self-reinforcing cycle of Google is a good search engine. So then people come to it and they put in queries and then Google gets data and then it uses that data to make the search engine better and no one else has access to that whole cycle. And so I think they really feel like they need to break that cycle somehow for anyone else to even stand a chance.

And the way the DOJ is doing that basically seems like it just wants to open source Google now. It's basically like all of your query data, your whole search index, the information people give you in YouTube searches, all the stuff across all of your surfaces, which is like the Internet, should be made available. What's the phrase they keep using at marginal cost? Just to everyone. Anyone who wants to run a thing that looks and works like Google should be allowed to is essentially the vibe of what's coming here. And that to me is the part that surprised me the most. Like they're just like everything that has made Google special and successful, you have to give it to everybody else for free now just so they can catch up. Right.

Wild. Yeah, the thing that really strikes me about this is if you just take it at face value, I don't know how Google makes any money after this. right and then there's the ad tech case like right next to it which who knows how that will go but it's all that's also a case about contracts and pressure and I just get the sense that it is more likely than not than Google will face some penalty in that case as well so who knows but this part where you're like you have to stop preferencing Google search on YouTube and let other people search YouTube the way that Google can search YouTube YouTube is a closed platform yeah Yeah, I guess I think that's a completely fair point, but I also wouldn't cry too many tears for Google because I think they will be able to make money off of, you know, selling access to these APIs or, you know, to their index and to their search results and click and query data.

And they'll also be able to, you know, they're still going to be this like amazing, huge company full of great engineers and be able to create a product that's really attractive to people. in search. So. Well, I just hold on. They are currently an amazing company full of great engineers and they're ability to launch great products at scales. You know,

there's a graveyard for a reason. Yeah. They had a good run back in the day. Like a lot of Google is, you can trace it back to the fact that they have a monopoly in search. It just throws off cash and everything else is like, well, whatever, we tried messaging apps. You know, like, and this might make it better.

It might make it worse. There's just a part of this where half of me says, this is a negotiation. So you just put forward the most intense first offer that you can make, which is we're going to break your business in half. And also, if you don't like it, we'll take Android 2. And then we'll just see where we come back to you from there. And then there's a part of me that says, you know, we just spent a few minutes talking about breaking up in Google search. And the first part of this offer is we're going to take Chrome away from you.

Right. And it's like, oh, this is a complete restructuring of Google. Like at every level, what we're saying is there should be a search engine. that is almost like a utility for other people to build search products on top of, and other parts of Google like YouTube need to let other search products come into there. And we're basically going to take a closed platform in YouTube and make it a more open one, which is really interesting. And then there's, we're going to take this browser away,

which is the window to almost your entire ecosystem. And someone else will have to buy it, which will accomplish what, right? And there's just, those are two pretty different ideas from what I can tell. Like, you're basically telling Google, you have to be a search engine company now. And we're going to prescribe how that search engine company works. And then you're saying, we are going to make a browser company that someone else will buy. And the number one way browser companies make money is by betting paid for default search, which we will no longer allow you to do. And I'm just trying to puzzle all that through.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, there's no doubt this is, you know, a huge swing by the DOJ. And, you know, they might not get everything they want. Like you said, this is a negotiation. This is their starting point. They're asking for a lot here. And it's going to be up to the judge to figure out, you know, what is really necessary to restore competition here.

And, you know, courts really don't like to be, you know, playing babysitter or, you know, restructuring, like playing. like playing the, just really being the hand of God in the market. You know, they're not trying to dictate how the business goes. They're just trying to restore competition to this market generally. So I think the more that it gets into things that are about picking winners and losers, the more the judge is going to be skeptical and perhaps restrained on those things. So I think it really depends on how. well, the government makes the case in court for why these sorts of things are necessary.

And when I've talked to Jonathan Cantor, who is the assistant attorney general for antitrust, who's been leading this case, you can go listen to him on Decoder. His point is these consent decrees where we make companies promise to behave and then we have to watch them and go to court when they misbehave. Don't work because everyone's smart and they can get around it. And what we want is big structural. Like you break up the company that's clean. Then it's over and we can see what happens next. And I think courts tend to agree with that because courts, the only humility that our judicial system shows is like, I shouldn't run your business. And I think I can't tell if that's humility or laziness or what it is. But that's usually how they respond to that idea of

like ongoing compliance. Like the courts don't want to be in that business. I just think like at the at the end of this, you look at the amount of change that would be imposed on Google. And it, sure, Google will have its opinions. Kent Walker, their chief legal officer, put out, you can tell like he's writing directly to Donald Trump. He's like, this is a radical interventionist agenda that will harm America. It's pretty saucy. Yeah. Audience of one. Obviously, Google's going to pushback against this. What happens in the trial? Right? Because there's the remedies trial, and this is the proposal in the trial. Are they just going to, I mean, I was just like, going to sit down and be like, this is a bad idea? Do you have to show proof? Like, how does this work?

Yeah. I mean, my understanding is there's another discovery process. They get to call in witnesses. So it's going to be, you know, kind of like the first trial, but this time they kind of have to take as a given that the judge found that Google's, Google had an illegal monopoly, and they're just talking about what is reasonable to impose on Google or not. So, yeah, it's definitely, it's going to be a fight here. What's strange to me about this one is it feels like either of the options that the DOJ is presenting here would make sense, right? I think force, Google to spin off Android and Chrome into its own company, I think is, is, you can see a world in which that makes sense. Both of those are search businesses, I would point out, but like,

there are people who have made a lot of money selling operating systems, right? So like, I can, you can see it. There's a, there's a thing there. Somebody would spin up an app store, it'd be a whole thing. Sure. Great. Fine. Or force Google to essentially white label its search engine and make it available to everybody, right? So now, if I want to run a search engine, all I have to do is compete with Google on user experience, right? There is an assumption of like common infrastructure that whatever I search for, it's going to be as good, no matter where I search for it, let people compete on top of that. I actually think that could be super interesting. And suddenly you have a bunch of people with a bunch of different ideas about

how search could work. AI becomes really interesting on all of that. And then it's like, okay, the foundation of how we search is common. Let's compete for real. I don't understand how you can do both of these things because each one makes the other one worse, right? Like, Google's white label search engine will be better if Google controls Android and Chrome because it will get that data that it is then forced to share with everybody else. Wait, I feel like I'm like required, sigh to point out that every time you make this claim, like some Google PR person leaps out of a bush and is like, we don't use Chrome click data to inform search. And that is what they say every time. Yeah, and that continues to be provably not true.

I'm just saying. Like I said, I feel required to say it. I don't know if I believe it for one second. I trust things that come up in court and in discovery more than in the PR emails in my inbox. Like right now outside of David's house, there's like a Google PR person peering through the bushes. But like if the goal was to build the best search infrastructure for the whole internet, you do that, right? And like, that's how you get the user data. It's how you get the query data. Like on and on and on.

These things can actually reinforce each other in a way that would make the one product better if they were together. and then you're giving that product to everybody else. I can see a world in which that makes sense. But instead you're saying we're going to make Google search engine worse and also take away its engine to make it better and then force Google to give its worst search engine to everybody. It's like, what are we actually? We're just making the whole search market worse.

And I always thought that the whole point of this at the end of the day was who can build anything to compete with Google. And there's only one answer, which is Apple. And Google has been spending billions of dollars a year to make sure that doesn't happen. And really the outcome you want is Apple builds a search engine because it has enough incoming click data and query data from Safari on the iPhone. It has the compute capability. It has the money that like just a free, you know what they should have done instead of chasing a car is they should have built a search engine.

And they didn't because Google just paid the money to waste on a car. Like that's a weird economic outcome. But this doesn't seem like it creates that outcome at all. Right? You're going to prevent Google from paying Apple. Then you're going to spin off Chrome. Then you're going to say everybody can just use the Google utility version of search, which Apple will just use at marginal cost. And it's like, well, we didn't, we didn't make anybody build the new search engine. Maybe you're just betting on AI.

Like, are you, is this all just that's coming and it's going to change everything? I think the licensing actually does get you closer to that because, you know, if Apple and if, you know, really any other search engine that wants to is licensing the Google search results and click and query data, they really have a jump start on creating a very quality search engine. And, you know, if Apple combines that with its own data and own engineering of product, you know, I think they, then you're much closer to a very good product from Apple. And they're not, they're no longer constrained by, you know, if the judge decides to grant the contract remedies here, they're no longer constrained by their contract with Google. Yeah, I mean, if this goes a certain way,

you basically get to the point where I as a developer, all I have to do is write a pretty front-end and do like three API calls and I have a Google-level quality search engine. Like, yeah, that's pretty compelling. All of a sudden, Duck, Doe can reliably say, we're doing the privacy anything correctly. And also, our results are exactly as good, if not exactly the same as what you'd get from Google. And other people can compete on the AI stuff. You can compete on interface. Right. The moves become really different because what you're saying is not, we can't compete with Google in order to have results quality. And because that is a flywheel that we have no access to, I mean, this is, I just keep coming back to Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, sitting in the courtroom,

basically explaining why Bing is worse than Google and why it's completely insurmountable. And everything in this filing makes me think that that is sitting in the heads of both Judge Meta and the DOJ in particular. And they're like, what we are going to do is just give that flywheel to anyone who wants it. Exactly.

And just there it'll be. And if that works, you'd get a million interesting search engines really fast, I think. It would decimate Google. The Google comms person outside your house table right now, I can see them in the window back. They're holding up the sign that said, or Microsoft could have made Windows good. There's also that.

There is also that. These arguments are hard. They are hard. And Microsoft has mostly failed at competing with Google on search. And even Microsoft's AI work has not really meaningfully moved the needle. So I do see the argument that you got to break this wide open. Otherwise, you're going to end up in the same kind of Apple, Google, doop. that kind of define the last era of computing into whatever this next era is.

Yeah. The other argument is that AI comes to nothing and this is all garbage. And that Google is better at this because it's better at this, not because it's somehow structurally impossible to compete. Right. I think, I mean, two things. One is that I think it would result in a world where you're competing more on the product and the wrapping and the extra bells and whistles around search if everyone has access to

the same kind of underlying data. And the second thing is that, you know, most of these remedies, the behavioral remedies, the things about licensing and that kind of thing would be enforced for 10 years. So it's not forever, but it's long enough that the DOJ feels that, you know, it would be able to create some sort of dynamic shift in the market. Yeah. See, I look at 10 years and I'm like, 10 years is an eternity. Yeah. Like 10 years is, and what was it after five years if Google's market share was less than 50% of search? they could petition to have this stuff called like that that's what we're asking for here right like

google which has been somewhere between like 85 and 95 percent of search for forever they're like no no no we would like you to be less than 50 and we will consider this to be a competitive market again so i want to talk about the politics of that timeline specifically but first i just want to play a quick game it's called who can buy chrome does anyone would anyone like to buzz in amazon amazon Amazon, but wouldn't the DOJ not like it if Amazon or meta or Microsoft or Apple bought Chrome? Like, didn't we just recreate the problem? Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's possible that they say, you know, what, these are, you know, different business lines and it's not.

And it's not competitive. Well, you don't think Amazon's Silk browser is a competitor to Chrome. Yeah, I mean, that's the problem they're going to run into here. And I think that that is an issue for that remedy. And I think on top of that, it's like, okay, well, what if this other theoretical big tech company that buys Chrome then decides that they want to make a search engine? And then are we back in the same place just like under a different company name? Yeah, I mean, the number being thrown around is what, $20 billion?

The number of companies that could spend that on a web browser with like you said earlier, Neelai, no inherent business model. Like it's so important to underline the fact that a web browser on its own is not a business. There is just no evidence that you can build a web browser that will be a business. business at any scale on a time. We had for Josh from, from ARC and the browser company on Dakota, and they just pivoted away for making a web browser. It's very obvious. You just can't do it. You certainly can't do it to make a $20 billion acquisition make any sense. By the way, $20 billion is low. That's the number that Google is paying Apple just to be the default in search. That's the yearly number. Yeah, I saw somebody say, just take over Chrome,

get the same deals because you'll be allowed to. And it's the greatest private equity arbitrage opportunity in history. Oh yeah. This is you should buy Chick-fil-A and open it on Sundays. Like, you don't have to do anything. It's very easy. Yeah. But I, but Google won't be allowed to make those deals. So you're already, you're just like operating very much behind. Right. I think Chrome, the more we talk about it, just even in the past half an hour here, it feels like Chrome is a sideshow. We're going to train all of our attention and argue about whether or not you can, you should sell Chrome or who you can sell it to. And the DOJ will take, We'll give it up so that Google can't make these deals and that Google has to be this weird kind of utility.

Anybody can do it. Like, that feels like part of the negotiation here. Maybe I'm wrong. I have no insight. It's just as we talk about it, it just seems so, it feels like it accomplishes so little in the end versus actually opening up the search engine. I think this is a weird case where, you know, generally structural remedies or breakups are thought to be like cleaner and easier. and, you know, the court can just say, all right, let's, like, sever this and then we're done. We can wipe our hands of it.

But it's complicated in this case because who's going to buy Chrome and, you know, how does that look? You know, there's a lot of questions there. Whereas the behavioral remedies are often thought of as, all right, this requires more oversight by the court. This is, like, a little bit harder to execute. But in this case, it does seem to get at the heart of what the DOJ had argued in the case, was the problem and was the reason that other search engines couldn't catch up. And so I think we might, I could see the logic of, you know, why they might tend toward a more behavioral remedy here. Yeah.

Yeah, I mean, it's like negotiation 101, right, to go in with something like this that you know you're willing to give up. Yeah, soon and it is. You will be the CEO of just Google Duo. Right. Like, yeah. You got to have, what do you want to give me in return? Right. Yeah.

You got to have the one thing that you're willing to part with just in the name of seeming like you're arguing in good faith. I will be here to see if Google Docs. I have a number of ideas already from the jump. They already did taps. Google Docs is perfect. Don't touch Google. I wonder if they would make it so that they do something similar like they're proposing with Android where it's like, all right, fine. We don't have to spin out Chrome, but, you know, we'll hang it over your head in case you don't comply with everything else. That's what I feel like you have to sell Chrome is such a big, shiny distraction. from all of this other stuff, right? The marginal cost to access to the Google search index is also a dagger

to that company's business. Yeah. But those are the things like you're saying, Lauren, that actually get to the trial that we had last year, right? Like, the Chrome thing, I think came out of left field for a lot of people

because it just doesn't address the stuff that they spent months in court arguing about. It is, you can sort of get there from Chrome, but all of these arguments were about like, the structural system that makes the underlying infrastructure of Google search unstoppable. And all the rest of the stuff in the filing is like poking at how to peel that apart.

And then there's Chrome. Yeah, I think, I mean, another aspect of the trial was like, where are you able to access search? And Chrome and web browsers generally are one of the big access points. You either access search through your browser or your phone, basically. So I think the thing with Chrome is that it's the one entity and Android. They're the one entity that Google actually owns. Like the court can't impose a remedy on another company. It can't impose a remedy on Apple or Samsung.

But I can. That's not true. But it can impose a remedy on Google to say, all right, at least for this one browser that you own, you can't use it in a self-preferencing way. Yeah. So I do want to talk about the politics of this. I think it's a good segue. So we've been comparing this case and the Apple case

to the Microsoft case in the 90s for some time, since they started, basically. And it strikes me, even the timeline here and the politics of the timeline are the same. So Microsoft case in the 90s started in 1998 under Bill Clinton. The DOJ won. They pursued a breakup. George Bush gets elected.

And the DOJ says, ah, never mind, we're going to settle the case. And there's some, like, winding back and forth in there. But there was a moment when Microsoft was going to get broken up. And then there was a moment when the DOJ said, nah, we're done with that. We're going to do these big consent decrees and you're fine. And all that was chaos, right?

And the executives of Microsoft who were there at that time, we'll tell you it was super distracting. And, you know, Bill Gates is like, this is why I didn't invent a cell phone, which is, you just tell yourself that, Bill. Right, like, you did the Zoom. Like, I'm sorry. But that distraction from the giant created the opportunity for Google to exist.

In many ways, it created the opportunity for Apple to make its big comeback because it's not like macOS9 software was selling the iMac. Web browsers were selling the iMac. So all of this distraction about Microsoft and bundling internet explorer and all this stuff in the 90s, whether it came to anything, it just created the opportunity for other players to enter because Microsoft was constrained by whatever. Here we have a very similar situation. This case actually started in the Trump administration. It got one in the Biden administration under this DOJ. Now we're going to head into a remedies phase with a new president, a much more transactional president who will pay direct attention to the CEO of this company, who has already said he's talking to CEO of this company, with Elon Musk on the call. That was reported this week.

And who knows who the attorney general will be. Let's just start with the basics. Is Jonathan Cantor still going to be the assistant attorney general of antitrust when this case goes to the remedies phase? That would seem highly unlikely. You know, even when I think administrations are aligned on certain policies, you know, they often just want to bring in their own people. So I think, you know, we're likely to see a different antitrust chief at the DOJ under Trump. But I think it is a big open question of what way that person will lean. Are they going to be a more populous neo-brandycean antitrust person who actually does want to pursue really strong remedies against Google?

Or are they going to be more of the establishment conservative type that wants to kind of do as light a touch a thing as they can? So I think we still don't really know what that's going to be. I mean, we don't even know who the AG nominee is going to be after Matt Gates dropped out. So I think there are a lot of big questions about that. But I do think it's important that it was brought under the first Trump administration. So I don't think we're going to see it completely wither away. But I could see for sure that maybe the next DOJ doesn't want to go as far as this DOJ has put out there. Do you think there's an engagement ship here, which is actually what we should sell Google into as many component parts as we think?

That's our proposal. So that the next DOJ shows up and even the walk. or like pre-negotiating against the next administration? Perhaps, I mean, I think any administration that walks back some of these, they're going to have to deal with what that looks like to the public. You know, I'm sure they would say that's not really a factor for them. But I think for anyone who works in politics, it is to an extent. They're going to have to say, all right, well, we did pull our punches here and explain that.

So I think it, you know, it's harder to take something away. than to add something back in. And, you know, I could see that potentially being a consideration here. The other piece, and I'm just curious to read on this, we obviously don't know who the attorney general will be. And Matt Gates had so many problems that he just withdrew. Like, he literally went to Capitol Hill for 20 minutes. He met with senators and was like, I'm out, you guys.

And so that is whatever it is. And that's not the kind of politics we ever really talk on the show. But he was kind of an antitrust guy. Like, he was into it. Maybe in a bad faith way. Like, I just want to punish big companies, which seems to animate a lot of Trumpist antitrust. But he was still like, that's pretty cool. Jady Vance, we've watched video of him saying Google is a problem and Lena Kahn is doing a good job.

We, Josh Hawley, right? Like, there is a strain of antitrust thinking in the modern Republican Party that says, yeah, we probably should break up Google. Elon Musk. I mean, he says everything. You can find a tweet of anything at this point. But he's said Google is a problem. Mark Andreessen and Ben Horwitz, benefactors of the Trump campaign and now benefactors the administration. They think Google is a problem.

Like, they've openly said it. How does that tie up with actually want the government out of messing with big American companies? Because there's a ideological inconsistency there. I have no idea how that resolves. Well, I think the staying out of American companies comes more from the establishment arm of the Republican Party. And I think Trump, you know, I think he can kind of talk that part of it when it is beneficial to him or, you know, in areas that make sense for him. But I think, you know, when it comes to big tech, he has often wanted to speak out on them and, you know, has an elevated antitrust enforcers in his previous administration. who did go after both Google and meta.

So I think there's always been that strain within Trump and, you know, Trump's previous administration. So I think, you know, it is definitely notable that he continues to surround himself with people who do believe in this kind of more progressive view of antitrust. But at the same time, I would caveat that like with Trump, we never really know, you know, what's going to happen. You know, is he going to change his mind the next day and who's really? got his ear. So I think it's hard to pull any policy from any one of those people. But I think

just seeing that there are so many of them that he's surrounding himself by and, you know, the animosity that he has had toward certain tech companies and tech executives, I think it's not hard to imagine that there would be some incentive to continue these fights against the tech companies. I would also just point out that the unifying theme of a lot of these antitrust fights is against companies that have, they have decided have wronged them in some way on the internet. Like, I think it's less about like a broad moral belief about antitrust and more about big companies that say bad things about me in search results.

Yeah, there's no, I want to be very clear. There's no rationalizing these decisions. No. I'm just pointing out it's a bunch of people who are mad. Yes. And they act in ways that accomplish retribution. And Trump in particular has said, they got to treat me better or I will break them up. Right, and right or wrong, like, however you want to feel about it, they have been mad at Google

long enough that I think it stands for reason that they are going to continue to be mad at Google. Right, and Anderson Horowitz can probably find a way to buy Chrome. Elon Musk has spent a bunch of competitors that are going to have a really easy time building ad-funded search engines now, right? Like, that suddenly, suddenly you take the best market in the history of the internet and you break it into a thousand pieces and make it available for anyone to come into. like that you've just made every VC's year, right? Like, we've heard this for years.

It came up at the trial that VCs won't fund search companies because it's a dead area. It's not even worth trying to compete with Google. And instead, what you're doing is you're saying, here's a hundred billion dollar a year industry that is suddenly completely up for grabs and you don't even have to try that hard to be competitive. Like, yeah. Yeah, I'd be into that if I were a VC. I will point out that the first Trump administration's antitrust efforts, ended with one

team mobile sprint in a negotiated deal that created Project China 5Sys America's fourth wireless carrier which to this day I think strikes terror in the heart of everyday Americans I don't who fuck knows what's going on over there

that's one and then the other one they fought against AT&T buying Time Warner because Trump hated CNN so much that's it that was the entire intellectual justification for opposing that merger, they lost, which is fine, and that resulted in a 4-3-grayscale Justice League directed by Zach Snyder.

Those are the two outcomes of the previous Trump administration's antitrust efforts. That's good. We've now hit the bingo card for the first cast talks about antitrust. I'm just pointing out. You're like, how will Trump deal with Chrome? And you're like, well, the evidence suggests they will force them to hire Zach Snyder to make grayscale square YouTube videos and start boost mobile. Like, I don't know what to make of all that.

But you could actually out of the pieces of Google, you could probably do that. GoogleFi is now Boost Mobile. Yeah, I was going to say. That's my prediction. The last thing I want to ask you about Lauren real quickly, this case, the Google case, is done, right? They were found guilty of having an monopoly. Now we're in the remedies phase. The other case, it's wrapping up, right?

It's going to come to a conclusion. The judge is going to decide. The judge, not a political actor in the way that some other folks are political actors, or at least not supposed to be. That will come to a conclusion. Apple's case is still pending. Right. It hasn't gone to trial.

No one's been ruled anything where Apple asked for a dismissal today. They said, make this go away. Apple has a lot to want from an incoming Trump administration. Just straightforwardly, Apple makes a lot of stuff in China, and Trump wants to impose tariffs on goods made in China. So you can see Tim Cook has to horse trade his way out of that. He did an excellent job of that last time. Like maybe Tim Cook's singular achievement as CEO. is navigating Donald Trump to excuse Apple products from tariffs.

You can make the argument. I'm not saying it's good or bad. I'm not outside of the morality of it. He did a good job of it. He excused Apple from a lot of noise by managing one man very directly. Do you think that he's going to be able to manage his way out of this antitrust lawsuit? Because the incoming attorney general could just drop it. That's true.

Yeah. I think, you know, when it's something like the, when it's coming from the DOJ, it really is to the DOJ where they, if they want to continue the case and what direction they want it to go. You know, they certainly could withdraw it, but I think that's hard. It's already, you know, in this kind of pretrial phase. They were just arguing a motion to dismiss and, you know, that's going to be up to the judge to decide whether any part of the case can move forward. And I guess it's theoretically possible that the judge dismisses the case.

I think often in these really big cases, we might see them narrowed but not fully dismissed. So, yeah, then it's on the DOJ to decide what they do. And I think Apple is in much more of a friendly position with Trump, in a sense, just based on the past administration, when Tim Cook managed to really kind of walk this really precarious line in, you know, just being on Trump's good side. So I think if any company could do it, perhaps it's Apple. But, you know, that would obviously be a big deal if DOJ just dropped the case entirely. I think that would be somewhat unusual. And the DOJ is supposed to be independent of the presidency.

And I don't think Donald Trump wants a DOJ that's independent of his presidency, right? Like, I don't want to be – what we're talking about is corruption. Like, sort of straightforwardly corruption. Can Kim Cook call Donald Trump and say drop my antitrust case? like in a normal administration that would end there. Like lawyers would come screaming into the White House and it would burst into the Oval Office and be like, Mr. President, you can't do that. And that is not going to happen this time.

Yeah. Very clearly he does not want that to happen. He does not want that constraint on his behavior. The question is what happens next, right? And honestly, what's a simple-up trade away? Do you care more about tariffs or do you care more about your antitrust lawsuit? Yeah. There's still a North Carolina factory that either does or doesn't exist and either will or won't exist that Tim can always throw into this.

Yeah, last time he held a fake factory opening in Texas, which was very good. Look at this MacPro. We've been making this whole time. It's a lot. That one, I think, is just up for grabs in a way that the Google ones are, they're up for grabs in a different way. Like I said, the Microsoft case sort of illustrative here, right? Like there was a change in administrations and then the posture of the government changed and we ended up with consent decrees instead of breakups. who knows what's going to happen.

But it does seem like Tim Cook, at the very least, cannot retire in the next four years. Yeah, I think Apple shareholders will definitely want him to hang on there. We're going to open so many fake factories. I'll take your, by the way, if you want to send me an email and tell me what the next Foxcon is going to be, I'm curious. We have to, we're going to end up with one. It's definitely going to happen. All right. We've got to take a break. We're already over.

It's segment one. We're already over. Lauren, thank you so much. Thanks for having me. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster.

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I honestly just want to see if in our stats we can see people stop listening to the podcast, whenever I say his name. We sure can in our emails. I'll tell you that. No, we're going to do gadgets. It's all the politics are out of our system. We're going to do gadgets. Well, there's going to be a little politics later.

But for now, we're going to do gadgets. Everything is politics, Eli. Just like Alexa calling an Uber. Only the Uber has a giant American flag match to the back of it now by law. So there's like a bunch of... That would be great. You know, it came home from JFK yesterday,

and Uber has a bunch of choices at the airport. Like, do you want Uber comfort? Do you want business comfort? Do you want Uber Electric or whatever? If I could pick giant American flag truck, Uber Patriot. Uber Raptor. I would take it.

I'm just saying, you know me. I would take it. All right. Lots of AI stuff, lots of gadget stuff. Just a big mix of companies trying to figure out what on Earth is going on,

I would say. What do we do now? What do we do here is like a real question facing the tech industry at this moment. So let's start with Amazon. Let's just bundle these up. So there's a lot of rumors about what's going to happen

with the next version of Alexa. There was some reporting earlier this week that Amazon really wants to roll it out, but it's still too slow. Yep. It's tough. The vibes coming out of Amazon about what Alexa is and might be when it comes out next,

just keep getting worse. And it was supposed to launch on October. It's now the end of November. And I would say there is no sign of it yet. And it's one of those things, like you kind of get to the point where once these things have been leaked in the way that they have several different times in several different ways, it starts to become clear this is like, this is people who think this is a problem

and want to talk about it, right? It's like, it was like, it's, it, there is so much smoke now that it's like this, there's something really problematic happening here. But, and then there's smoke on the other side, which is they've all been leaked in the other way, in like big hypey ways to like juice stock prices and make everyone think that, you know, they're not going to get lapped by opening eye. Like, Jesus will, digital Jesus will turn on your lights soon, we promise. Yeah. Is like a, is like a thing that all these companies are saying.

And then the reality of building those products is still very challenging. So here you have Amazon, which I think suffered the most from the first wave of like chatbots. Like, why wasn't Alexa doing this already? Totally. Right. You, you didn't even have an iPhone services business to distract. to you the way that Apple got distracted from Siri. Like, you didn't have some cash cow.

You just had a, like, this was your bet. You wanted Alexa to be Windows. The interface is voice. This is the platform shift. As we can talk to computers. They can talk to us. Like, what are you doing? And the answer is, don't worry, we got it.

And it seems like, yep, they wanted to do agency stuff. They wanted to call an Uber for you. They wanted to go buy concert tickets, probably in the same way that everybody's talking about, right? Which is, like, click around on some websites on the back end in AWS. But it's still too slow. Yeah, it's been really interesting to me thinking about the difference between the way that Google reacted to chat GPT and the way that Amazon reacted to chat GPC. Because what Google started saying almost immediately was basically we built all this technology. Like these things you think you did, we invented.

And we've been doing it for a long time. And what Google had was a lot of very good technology that it hadn't built into anything. And so Google all of a sudden raced to basically productize. this stuff it had been working on internally for a very long time. And I think the speed with which Gemini has become, like, ubiquitous inside of Google and also pretty good suggests that most of what Google was saying was true, right? Like, it had the tech, and it changed the company a lot to productize it, but, like, it had it. Amazon was the opposite, right?

Like, Amazon had the thing you would think would be the product, right? Like, Chad GPT is coming up being like, we've made voice mode. And it's like, Alexa is just voice mode, and we've had it for 10 years. and what Amazon had to do was basically say, no, no, no, we can build these underlying capabilities to the point where it soft launched this thing over a year ago in the middle of a bunch of weird personnel changes where Dave Limp was leaving to go run Blue Origin, Panos Penae was leaving Microsoft to come in and run all this stuff, but like, they launched this thing already a year ago. They told us what it was going to be and made these grand promises about

how it was coming soon. And it is, it has become abundantly clearer over that last 12 months that building the technology is the hard part. And Amazon just doesn't seem to be able to do it. But do you think it's the technology or do you think it's the product? I think the product. You could cheat, right? You could just go pay open AI to use whatever and you still have to turn on the lights. And there's some there's some reporting and evidence that that is a thing Amazon is either doing or has pretty aggressively considered doing is just paying for that. And you're right that then attaching all that stuff to the things that Alexa can already do is a challenge, right? Like, no matter what, you can't just write a check to open AI and suddenly Alexa is way better.

It's a lot of work. I think Sam Altman really wants everyone to believe that you can just write a check to open. Yeah, I think Sam Almond would love for you to believe that. And Dario at Anthropic is like, no, we'll do it for a smaller check. But, like, you can't do that. But it is also, if you want to be Amazon and you want to do this at the scale that they're going to, you at some point have to build it yourself. And there are a lot of little tentacles to doing that well.

But the first thing is just like, what if Alexa was just a little better? Like, you don't have to fix it all at once. Just do the thing that Apple has been doing with Siri for forever, where it just like quietly gets a tiny bit better all the time. No, I reject this comparison. What are you talking about? That is not true at all. That's a bad comparison.

Yesterday I asked Siri to call my wife and it was like, no. Like it did the new animation and everything. you know, like the glow, the screen glow. It's like beautiful. And I was like, call back, and it was just like, I don't, I'm, you know, I'm off the clock, man. Like, it's not better. I tried to say a reminder this morning. I put my coffee mug on the roof of my car and then forgot it.

So it fell off and exploded. And so I'm driving and I go on car play and I'm like, hey, remind me in an hour to buy a new Yeti. That was what I said, because it's a Yeti mug. I love the thing. It's great. What it said was, in an hour, buy any popular, was the name of the reminder. So you're right. I take back the Siri comparison.

But at any rate, if Amazon wants to do this, it has some of the hardest things already out there, right? It has hundreds of millions of devices that support this thing. It has a big ecosystem of devices that work on its devices. Like, you just have to build the underlying part. And that is an easy thing to think is the easy part. And it is very clearly not the easy part. Yeah. And I think with Apple, you can see it's also not the easy part. Totally. And Apple just decided to punt it to chat GPT in a very real way.

And even that is not it. Like the part where you talk to the phone and it goes and does stuff for you, that's not chat GPT. No. I actually think that can you make the existing voice assistant incrementally better with AI is not possible. Like, I think the way that Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant are currently architected is their dead ends. Like, it feels very clear that these are dead ends and that everyone is struggling to rebuild the general purpose LLM into a thing that can do the same stuff that Siri can do and then make it more capable. And you're, they're just stuck. Like, I don't think you can be like, it's Alexa, the same Alexa you know and love. But sometimes it's a thousand times smarter.

Like, I don't think that that is like working. And so, yeah, we'll see. I mean, you know, my sense is that they brought in Panos to make this go because they needed strong leadership to make calls. And he's as strong of a product leader as you can get. So we'll see how it goes. But the basic problem of, on the one hand, you have Sam Altman and Dario out there being like, we can build AGI on current hardware, which is a real thing these people has said. And then on the other hand, you've got Amazon being like, well, it's turning, it's turning to be very difficult to switch on a light switch with these tools. It's like,

we're just like all over the place. Yeah. Well, this is why there was the one bit of Amazon news that I thought was super interesting this week was, I believe it was Business Insider that had a story that Amazon is, instead of trying to do all of this stuff itself and do the like agentic AI that can go use websites on your behalf, it's just making deals with partners. to do this stuff, which is like a thing you and I have been talking about for forever, right? Like APIs over AIs is like a thing I keep saying to people that like, why can't you just make the Uber app do it for you because you don't have to go fake the Uber app. Just let Uber do it.

And that appears to be the way that Amazon is going, which I think A, you can read as a total referendum on how good Amazon's own AI stuff is. But also like they're making deals with Uber so that when you say, get me a ride, it'll just call you an Uber and DoorDash for food deliveries and ticket master for buying tickets to things. And these are ideas that raise other complicated questions. Like, should it tell me that it's DoorDash doing it so that I understand the like transparency of this process and the fees and who all this stuff is going to and who has my information? All that stuff is really complicated UI. But like DoorDash is going to do it better than

Amazon hacking DoorDash. You know what I mean? So like I think that is actually, a good sign to me that there is a version of Alexa that is going to be better at this stuff in a more integrated way that Amazon has stopped saying we're going to solve all of this problem with fake Rabbit style AI where we're just going to go use websites for you. We're just going to be partners with the people who know how to do this. And I think that is going to be the right approach for a pretty long time. Yeah. Let me name Amazon has the money to do it. I mean, you know, Jesse from Rabbit is like, I don't have the money to do it.

So I've got to do some clicking around. we'll see. I just, again, we can achieve AGI and current hardware, but Apple and Amazon can't quite deploy this stuff at scale in a way that makes sense and doesn't break light switches. Just something to consider. Speaking of light switches, one other bit of Amazon news, which is fascinating. They announced new Echo Shows this week. Chen has the write-up.

Echo Show 15 and 21, which is basically just a TV. Uh-huh. Like just a 21-inch Echo Show in your kitchen. They show it in their own press photos running the fire TV interface. Like, it's a TV with some... On a stand with a remote. Like, it's just a television. It's just a TV.

Pretty good. People like having TVs in their kitchens in particular. Great. They're doing some adaptive light stuff. I don't think Amazon's photo stuff is very good, but they're obviously making a run. Put photos in here and make them look good. Do you have a kitchen TV? Like, do you have a dedicated screen for watching stuff in the kitchen?

No. We have a Nest Hub that shows photos. that often just mis responds to Google queries. You use it for setting timers. And because it is a Google device, you can run YouTube TV on it. Right. But it's small. And then our house, the first one of our house is gigantic.

So you can just see the big TV in the kitchen. You can just look across the house to that TV. And to whatever extent we are watching TV, that is the solution. But we're just not like TV people in that way. That's fair. And also, Becky's just constantly listening to a podcast on our phone, built-in speakers on our phone. Like, that's the real TV in our house. Understood.

What's fascinating about these two echo shows, aside from the fact that they're enormous and cheap, although a 21-inch screen with 10 AP resolution for 2019. That's like some David Pierce stats right there. Literally, that is more expensive than my 4K TCL Pierce P series that is 50 inches right behind me. Yeah, no, that thing looks great, I'm sure. No banding in the colors. It's great. $2.99 for the 15. All that aside, the screens aside.

They've got built-in cameras for video calling. They're proud of the cameras. And then they have built-in Wi-Fi thread and Zigby radios for smart home stuff. And so you just see, okay, the idea is we're going to put a little computer in your house, a little server. It's going to connect to everything for you. You're not going to have a bunch of little hubs, like your Hugh Hub or your Smart Things Hub or or whatever.

It's all going to be built into this device. And then you'll have this device. And this will be the locus of Smart Home Control. also the thing you talk to and also your TV. Pretty interesting. Whether any of that actually works or whether matter plays out the way it's supposed to play out so you can buy a bunch of stuff and still control it from your iPhone

and also have this home hub, who knows? But at least we're making like confident steps towards you just buy this thing. Everything connects to this thing. And then it is expressed out to your phones and your voice assistance or whatever. It's still messy, but you can see the idea. I do think it's the right.

Infrastructure. I mean, you pit this against what we've heard about Apple's stuff, which is very much like buy a little controller for every room kind of thing. And I think I think you're right that having sort of the one big screen you can yell at from almost anywhere and then your phone is actually a much closer answer to the right one. And I also think like Jen talks about this all the time. Having a screen with big ass buttons on it goes a really long way towards making your smart house usable by actual humans. It sort of does. I just want to, I will offer, I will offer this one piece of evidence, which is both a huge victory and a gigantic failure. There are so many ways to turn lights on and off in this house. Infinite ways. You can, you can just speak to the heavens and lights will turn off. You can just, you can just wish for lights to turn off. Just yell darkness and things happen. Like it will happen. And so in our kitchen, which is pretty dark, I have hue at lights in adaptive mode. So they just turn out in the morning and they're in day. daylight and then as the day goes on, they get warmer and warmer and warmer. And at the end of the day, they were warm. And yesterday they were out of sync and I was in California. So I get a text from Becky, which is a huge victory.

A huge victory. She said, I hate you, the lights are the wrong color. Because when I put them in, she's like, who gives a shit about this? Right. Right. Now she knows. This is of a piece with, I hate you. I can see the motion smoothing on my parents TV.

I hate you, the lights are the wrong color. Yep. You did it. Huge victory. I was like, I'm done. Welcome to my particular circle of hell. Marriage over. Mission accomplished.

I got another one. On to the next. And then she was like, how do I fix it? And I was like, there's like 50 different ways to fix this problem. You can open your phone. There's scenes and home on your phone. But it occurred to me that one, there's a button on one of our Lutron light switches. You can just push to fix it.

And she didn't, she was like, I don't care about that. Like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to figure out what that is. Because it's like, it's just an unlabeled little round button. And she was like, I don't care. And then I was like, well, you can go to the Nest Hub. And you can just like yell at it. She's like, I, she literally said voice commands are so inefficient.

And I said one day, sometime in the next 50 years that we are married and live in this house together. I wouldn't, you were going to say movie time out loud just once. That didn't get anywhere. And it got all the way to there is an old iPhone mounted. on one of those new standby mode stands that just shows the buttons. It is next to the Home, the Nest Hub. They're physically next to each other,

but because the Nest Hub doesn't see the HomeKit scenes, I needed an old iPhone on a stand, and it says, Kitchen Day, time lighting, and she went and pushed that button. And I was like, this is just a gigantic failure. There's so many ways to accomplish this, and she just didn't do it. Yeah, A, matter will fix it.

Sure. Sure. But B, you just described the exact problem with everyone's smart home, which is that what you end up doing is you're like, oh, I've built a million ways to do everything. It's totally redundant. It totally works. And it's like, no, no, no.

The actual thing she wanted from you is tell me to walk up to the big screen, slide the thingy that's the colors, and I'm done. That's a better answer. Which is more or less effective what happened, right? She walked up to the phone on the stand. It said kitchen, daytime, and she just pushed it. Fine. But it's a next. It was next to the nest hub, which cannot do that because it doesn't support the home kit scenes.

Right. Which is not good. Therein lies the actual. But she could also, should have just said movie time, dwarf. Not movie time. She could have said kitchen. She will never say movie time. We sit down to watch a movie.

I'm like, are you going to say it? She's like, I'm never saying this. And you, I'm just imagining you doing it like hammer time. Just like, stop. Movie time. It doesn't even do much. Everybody else leaves if you watch a movie alone. It just turns off lights in one room.

but it's such a funny thing to say. Like, other people have it where, like, the shades come down, the projector turns on. The popcorn starts, yeah. Like, all this stuff happens. Mine is just, like, lights off in one room, but it's still the funniest thing you can say. It's pretty good. It's pretty good. All right.

We'll see if Matter can fix it, I think, is the end of that. That. Yeah, Matter 1.5. I hear that's the one. It's funny how AI and Matter and Bluetooth are all the same, on the same cadence. Like, we're going to get there. We're going to build digital God, and it's going to turn off the light. to you guys.

I take it, honestly. If that's the one thing Digital God can do, I'm ready for it. Let's move on to Sonos because it's of a piece with all this. So there have been rumors that Sonos is going to make like a TV streamer for a long time. This is the next logical thing for them to make.

A huge part of their business is soundbars and home theater systems. And lately improving their app. Set that aside. So it's been very logical they're going to do this. Many, many questions about how Sonos could build a TV streamer. Like you need an operating system, you need app support, you know, all this stuff.

So Bloomberg reported a price. It'll hit somewhere between $150 and $200. And then Chris Welch put together some evidence based on some previous reporting by Yankeo Ruckers, who's an excellent reporter, that this operating system will be called Ventura and be made by a company called the Trade Desk. This is very confusing. Do you know what's going on here? It is bonkers. So, okay, so the trade desk is an advertising company. Like, it's more complicated than that, but it's also not more complicated than that.

Like, they are an advertising company. And they just launched this thing. The thing that Yonko reported a while ago was that the trade desk was building a smart TV operating system. And he got a bunch of pushback, including from people who just straightforwardly like, no, we're not. Yes, they were. And they launched it officially, and it's called Ventura. The trade desk wouldn't tell us anything about it. They wouldn't share images.

They wouldn't share videos. But it is apparently a thing, and it is so abundantly clear that what they are doing is offering a place on which you can show ads and run Netflix. That seems to be the whole vibe of the thing. And they had a bunch of information, you know, from partners. And it was like heads of advertising at various streaming services being like sick ads. We love ads. Ads are great. And then Sonos being like, we are excited to be.

part of this. And like you said, Chris Welch has been reporting on this for forever. And he put two and two together and is basically like, this is pretty clearly what Sonos is doing. Which is weird, but also pretty sensible if you're Sonos and you're like, oh, we desperately need not only for people to buy this thing, but for this to be a real source of revenue for us outside of hardware, which Sonos has been desperately trying to figure out how to do for a long time. And so throwing in with a thing that is fundamentally about building an advertising business. Seems like a bummer of a user experience, but probably a good business for Sonos. So I'm just going to read you this paragraph from Trade Desk about Ventura.

Ventura represents a major advance in streaming TV operating systems as it solves key issues with prevailing market systems today, including frustrating user experiences, inefficient advertising supply chains, and content conflicts of interest. I mean, those are my three biggest issues, I'd say. When I think about what I hate about watching TV, inefficient advertising supply chains is number two on the list for sure. That's very good. It's very good in that the young people are just watching YouTube. It doesn't even matter. That's a pretty efficient advertising supply chain.

Yeah, it's pretty good. It's like I watch the NFL and YouTube and then the Jake Paul fight on Netflix. I know what they mean by inefficient advertising supply chain. It's my curse to know what that means. Yeah. I don't even want to tell you because it's so stupid. All they mean is that when you open a TV box, you have multiple apps on the TV box, and those apps don't know what ads you have seen.

And so different ad providers are selling the same ad to like Hulu and Netflix and whoever else, YouTube TV. And the supply chain is inefficient because it can't just target you the user. It's targeting apps, which then have user. Like, this is all a mess. And Roku's entire business model is you can't even put that stuff on a Roku unless you give Roku a cut, just like the app store. And that means Roku makes money. But all these other companies are like, why are we all paying the fees to run the same ads in the same box, the same person? And Roku's like, I don't know, I'm rich.

Give me $5. Is this a thing you can sell to a consumer? We've solved the problem of you might see the same ad a bunch of times. To be fair, yes. Like, honestly, if I could just stop getting the one ad that I get 100,000 times a day, for a stupid HVAC cleaning company. Like, I would pay more money for that. I would.

You would pay more money for an efficient advertising. Yeah, if it was like, if Peacock was like $5.99 a month, but for $6.99 a month will only show you the same ad once. I would pay the ad. But they do say that. They pay more money and we won't show you any ads are real. No, no, that's not what I'm saying. I'm fine with that. I thought you want a middle tier.

I have to look at my phone sometimes, right? Like, I'm good with ads. I just want, I want more ads. I want ad. We'll see. I just think like it's it's great to chase a TV box. It's very hard and nothing about this makes me confident that they will solve the core problems, which is like, where do I find the thing I want to watch? And sometimes it's on Netflix and Netflix has no incentive to play.

Right. That's just real. And like, and then you got to integrate it. You got to be able to stay movie time and have the curtains come down. I got to get some curtains in my house. There's also the question of like, why would you buy this from Sonos ever? Like what TV streaming box could Sonos possibly offer you that would be super compelling? A soundbar.

I don't know that they will ever do an actual box. I think they will do a sound bar with a bunch of HTML inputs and say, just buy this thing. It'll sound amazing. And also it's got the streaming stuff built into it. But the reality is more and more people are not buying boxes at all. They're just buying the TVs and using the built-in garbage TV software. And like, is Sonos going to make a TV?

Who knows? Speaking of who knows what anyone is doing in hardware. that's my segue Google is reportedly canceling the pixel tablet two might leave tablets entirely

but then also might be about to reboot all of laptops and tablets and then also there's a rumor that they're going to shut down

Chrome OS and re-bole it on Android. Kudos, by the way. You just explained a thing that doesn't make any sense in about the most

sensible possible way. Who knows what's going on? Yeah. And also the government forcing is so cruel. Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean,

there is an interesting thing here is a line between those two things. Like, do you remember the thing that Meta did where they were like, oh, you're going to, you're going to make us break up our messaging apps, so we're going to stitch them all together in such a way that that's impossible? Like, is that what's happening here? As Google says, we shouldn't do these things?

No, no. Meta's thing was ice cold, was calculated. They saw it coming. They made a move. They haven't actually actually to move. Like, they're sort of interoperable. Yeah. But this is not that.

There's nothing ice cold or calculated about Google. about Google's hardware strategy. We made another run at tablets and nothing has happened. We might cancel this whole deal. Also, maybe Chromebooks should run Android, they said for the 50th time in the past five years. Yeah, I mean, the thing I think is interesting about this is the pixel tablet thing is weird. There's been some conflicting reporting on a bunch of sites that primarily report on Google and Android about what was coming for the pixel tablet 3.

And then there was a report on Android headlines that the pixel tablet 3. that the pixel tablet three was canceled. And then there was another report that actually the thing that was canceled was not the pixel tablet three. It was a pixel tablet two, which would imply that there are no more pixel tablets coming. I would say what seems to be clear is that Google is getting out of the tablet business in some fairly short order, which like I don't see a lot of pixel tablets in the world. I'm not super shocked by this.

But also, boy, was it not a long time ago that Rick Austerlo and the whole Google crew were like, no, we're serious about this. We're doing this for real. We're in it to win it. All we can do is keep making stuff that people like and we're in it for the long haul and like, whoops. I think the, I think the Chromebook, ChromeOS, Android thing is probably more interesting. Because the thing that happened not that long ago is that Android and hardware all became Rick Osterlo's problem. And what you need in order to do this thing that Google has tried and failed to do a thousand times, which is combined ChromeOS and Android. is you need somebody to just make that call

who can direct every single person involved what to do. And now that person is Rick Osterlo. And we reported a while ago that Google was canceling the next pixel book and that that was just not going to be a thing. And what seems to be the case now, if Google is going to get back into the laptop business, it's going to be something like the pixel laptop, and it's going to run Android.

And basically Android plus desktop class Chrome browser, could work. Like it's just sitting there, right? But it requires a big leap from Google to say we're out of the Chromebook business or to at least just say we're doing this other thing instead. Chromebooks are going to be low-end education things

and we're going to do Android for the high end. Boy, is that probably not going to work. But it's like it's a thing you can organizationally do inside of Google now, I think kind of for the first time ever. Sure. I just think the promise of the Chromebook is that it is simple and being like, now it's Android

really gets you away from that promise, right? Because you're, and by simple, what I mean is there's only one, I mean, you can run Android apps on that Chromebook now and they've gotten vastly more complicated over the past few years. But what I mean is generally the application model on a Chromebook is Chrome. Yeah, it's browser tabs.

You're going to run a bunch of browser tabs and you can run most applications. and browsers, and that is a powerful application environment. It's taking over most things. Most desktop apps are really just web apps and various wrappers. That's a big idea, and they have just abandoned it, kind of, which is weird. And now they have to sell Chrome, so who knows? That's a joke.

But to say, actually, we should run this on our other operating system with a vastly different application model. We're just like right back in the mess. Now it's just a laptop. Yeah, right? It's just a Windows laptop or a Mac, because you've got the native. application model, and then you've got whatever he is actually doing on their laptops, which is running web apps.

Right. And you end up in a weird iPad-y zone where, like, we're starting to see bits and pieces with Android as it gets into foldables, right? Where they're testing the free-form desktop windowing, which makes no sense on some Android devices, slight sense on some Android devices and, like... Maybe that's why they're getting out of tablets, because they're just like, foldables are it, and we're just going to put all over effort into that. Foldables and laptops?

Like, I think it's a not crazy thesis. Yeah, I was... I was out with somebody who had a pixel fold the other day. It wasn't Liam who bought one and returned one. I will call out our producer. But I was out with somebody who had one and loved it, just grinning from ear to year every time he unfolded it. Yeah.

It's a good phone. That's like, yeah, I think that would not be an insane stance for Google to take. If and only if you can then make the desktop thing actually work. And like we've been saying, Google has promised to figure out how to marry Chrome. and Android for a very long time, and it has never, ever once come even close to being remotely good. And now they might have to be forcedly divorced.

Right. By the United States government. All right, let's end here, which is, this is like the funniest place to end after that conversation. It was Microsoft Ignite this week. Sosci and Della got on stage. Talked a lot about scaling laws and AI

and all this stuff. And then it was like, also, here's a $349 PC that streams Windows, which is basically a Chromebox for Windows. Yes. Like, it is precisely exactly that. It's a cute. little guy.

Yeah. I mean, it's a square. But yeah, it's like a little guy. And it just, it's a Chromebox for Windows. Yeah. You stream Windows on it. I think this is going to be very successful. Like, maybe not this one, but this idea of basically like, here's just a super,

essentially like thin client that you plug into a screen and run windows on in an internety kind of way. Gangbusters. I'm all for it. This thing is, it's like, I want to buy one of these just to like have a round. I think the idea that people are going to completely stream their computer is still a long way away. But this is like a, you know, I need it for a developer environment at work or we're running our dentist office on streaming windows. Like, sure, I'm into it.

I mean, this thing just looks like a, it's a, this is, when you get your first job and you sit down at your first computer and your first cubicle and this thing is looking at you, it's like, oh, this sucks. That's, that's my reaction to this. David's like, I want to stream windows at my house. Yeah, but the beauty of it is, unlike the crappy desktop computer that you get your first day at work at the, you know, accounting firm. This one just runs the internet. And the internet is fast now. So that's good. You don't have to do much on this thing.

It just has to run the internet. You just have to be surveilled by your boss. Well, yeah. This thing has a built-in mouse jiggler detector. Like, the cops come if it detects your fake work game. This is perfect. No, it is very funny. Google is like desperately trying to become more like Windows.

And Microsoft is like, never mind, we're done being Windows. Let's just do the internet. If you were to remember, the first iPad was explicitly positioned by Steve Jobs as not a netbook. Yeah. Right? This idea that you would have a thin client PC that like, maybe not stream the entire operating system, but just ran web apps. I mean, that was the EPC. I cut my teeth writing about EPCs.

Joanna Stern. she became a name in the gadget world by getting netbook scoops by EPCs. That's very good. Were netboxes a thing? Can we make netboxes a thing? Okay. Yeah,

they were a little, whatever. The idea was you're going to buy this cheap Linux computer that's going to run web apps, and that's going to cost $500. And then Steve Jobs is like, here's an iPad.

Would you like a good computer? They went away. I was it. It's time. All right, we got to take a break. One day we're going to have Joanna back I'm going to make her tell the story about when she came to me, totally stressed out.

She's like, I can't just get EPC scoops on demand. It was amazing. I was like, you're good. Don't worry about. All right. We've got to take a break. We'll be right back. What's a lightning hand.

It's coming. Get ready, everybody. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. 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, 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, that doesn't, that's not a priority.

That's this week on America Actually. Let's dig it. This week on Networth and Chill, we're diving into another edition of Am I the Asshole, Finance Edition? Trust me, these money dilemmas will have you questioning everything. I'm breaking down real stories from real people who are navigating financial situations that range from mildly awkward to absolutely unhinged. And I'm giving you my unfiltered take on who's in the right and who needs a serious reality check.

Because let's be real. When it comes to mixing relationships and finances, someone's always asking if they're the asshole. Learn how to set boundaries, protect your wealth, and avoid becoming the villain in your own financial story. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. We're rich BFF. We're back.

My friends, I've asked for sound effects for this. For fanfare, it happened. The Lightning Round is sponsored. And not in a small way. Drumroll, please. Liam, please announce our first ever Vergecast's Lightning Round sponsorship. Okay, let me turn on my ad voice.

This week's Lightning Round is presented by AWS. We did it. We did it. If you hadn't heard of AWS before. We all get new frame TVs now because it's sponsored.

Let's do it one more time. Play the music one more time. One more time. We did promise this would be the greatest ad buy in the history of the first cast. Right? And I still won't do it. Just to be clear.

I'm still a precious flower. But I'll run the music. music again. We'll just do it again. Liam. Who sponsored Lightning Round? This week's Lightning Round is presented by AWS. Oh, it's very good. We have grand plans for future Lightning Round sponsorships. It took a long

time to pull it off. And then, you know, our ad team, they just went for the biggest whale they could find. And again, you know, now you've heard of them. They were just a little a little fly by now operation before. But now

the real validation is finally to come to AWS. This is great. We have grand plans for other companies. I don't know how that works at all. Some other people. Liam will announce your name, the drop of a hat if you pay us money.

And then we have grand plans for how people can participate because we've gotten so many emails from listeners being like I was sponsored a lightning round, and we have some ideas. It's going to be good. All right. So we're changing lighting around. We got some feedback last time on our new segment show and tell,

which is this is just the lightning round, which is, It's not wrong. It's not wrong. It's not right, but it's not wrong. Yeah, they're thematically similar. So here's the new idea. We'll still do show and tell. You show up, we talk about stories, we go through them. Lightning round, we just have the long list. We're just going to go through them as fast as we can. Yep. Lightning speed. Yep. Sponsored by cloud computing. I will say, historically speaking, for everyone who is listening to this, when we have tried this, it becomes the longest thing we do. And so our good friend, Nilai Patel, has committed

to actually lightninging his way through the lightning. We have grand plans for this, too. It's going to be great. As soon as someone sponsors us for enough money for us to buy a clock, we're going to have one clock. Yeah. The most expensive clock of all time. First we buy the yachts and then we buy the clocks.

One stopwatch and we're going to go through this very fast. All right, let's start. Comcast is spinning off its cable TV business. This is actually huge news. So Comcast, as you know, NBC, Universal's investor in box media. The big news here is that we're probably going to have to change this disclosure. Oh, yeah, that's true. I don't know how it's going to happen. I have no insight into how that will change. You know what's going to be amazing is pretty soon our disclosure is

going to be SpinCo. Yeah. Is an investor in a podcast? So Comcast signal this in the last earnings report. We're going to spin off some of our cable assets and do quote a well capitalized company, which means they're going to give them a bunch of money, not load them up with debt, which is usually how that goes. And the new company right now, because it doesn't have a name, is called SpinCo. And it is MSNBC, CNBC, a bunch of cable networks. So Comcast wants to be out of the cable network business. That's not where the money is for them anymore. The money is in broadband.

They're going to hold on to NBC Universal. And then hilariously, Bravo, because Bravo makes money on Peacock. Is that true? Yep. Weird. I just assume Brian Roberts, the CEO, just like really loved below deck or something. And he's like, I can't get rid of Bravo. So this is what we have yet to see how this is going to go.

Mark Lazarus is the CEO of Spinco. There's big questions about CNBC, MSNBC, because they're built on the infrastructure of NBC News, which Comcast is going to keep. So like, how does that work? By the way, people know, I've appeared on CNBC many times. There's your disclosure. I hope everyone there is doing great.

But I think you can just point to this directly and say, oh, the era of cable television is over. It is just over. We're fully into streaming, and maybe not even into streaming. We might just be into video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. And what you actually need to do is figure out how CNBC or MSNBC or any of these other networks that you're taking is a participant in those. Yeah. It's really interesting.

You go back even a few years, and the overwhelming theory was basically the pay TV landscape is slowly declining, right? It's going to make us a lot of money, but it is going to very slowly winnow away. And what actually happened is it is just exploding into a thousand pieces all at once, right? Like it is collapsing more quickly and more aggressively than anyone expected. So what you're seeing now is all these companies scrambling to get out of that business as fast as they possibly can. Yeah. And we've gone from like, this is how do we manage the slow growth of streaming with the slow death of cable? And now it's how do we manage.

the slow growth of streaming with the extremely rapid death of cable. And it's putting a lot of people in weird positions. I think they're keeping NBC. I think disclosure is still NBC. Nothing would make me happier than you having to say spincoe on every episode of a podcast. So that is what I'm rooting for. It's going to be confusing.

That's a big deal. We're going to see how it plays out. But the idea that you have this other company that has to find its own distribution, that is the problem to solve. Every company is trying to solve this problem. right next to that, Donald Trump has officially named Brendan Carr is his nominee for chairman of the FCC, which we predicted on the show the last three weeks in a row. Yep. I will actually lightning around this one.

This is dumb and bad, and Brendan has bad ideas. You can just go read his Project 2025 chapter. It is nonsensical. Like, he wants to seize power at the FCC and use it to control speech on platforms and do it using, like, threats of Section 230 reform. No, that's going to work. just going to make fun of them for the next four years. That is a promise for me to you. Perfect. Done. Moving on. I don't quite get this one. The explain this one. Strava is closing its API, basically. Yeah, so Strava is one of those companies that is kind of like the data layer of a lot of other fitness apps. It's like what you use to track your runs and bike rides and all that other stuff.

And kind of out of nowhere informed lots of developers that it's changing the way it polices its API. And, Ostensibly, it's about privacy and AI training and making sure that people's data is preserved in the way that Strava understand. And Strava has come out and said, we think this is barely going to touch anybody. It's not going to be a problem. But a lot of users and app developers are saying, actually, things that we like, like these automatically generated leaderboards that let us compete with our friends inside of these apps, or like, you know, summaries and things over time that let you track information, like things you can do that Strava doesn't let you do, but you can do with Strava data is all just going to disappear. And I think it's happening really fast.

Strava gave everybody like 30 days notice that this was happening, which is really fast in any kind of like developer environment. And so people are just kind of freaking out. And I think what it will actually be remains to be seen. But it's just one of those things that is like one company is in the middle of a lot of this stuff. And this data means a lot to people. And you can read it as Strava trying to be good. to its people, and you can read it as Strava trying to close the windows so that you have to use Strava more.

And it remains to be seen which one it's actually going to be. So let me make the comparison to, of all things, Reddit. Okay. Reddit just had a good quarter. It's public company. Profitable for the first time ever. Crazy. Like they haven't arrived for a long time.

20 years later, yeah. Reddit got there by going to war against its developers and its users and taking what had been a pretty open ecosystem and closing it down and saying, And you're going to use our app. If you want to make another app, we're going to pay us so much money that it's not even remotely worth it. If you want to be a moderator of a subreddit, you're going to play by our rules or we're going to take it away from you. And this was generally bad, right? This is a large platform that pissed off its most important constituency. I think we've said it.

Like the power users of Reddit who moderate the subreddits, the app developers make the apps people like they're basically like get out. Like we are way of the highway. Yeah. And it has had effectively no negative. repercussion that we can see. Reddit's still growing. It just made money. It's signed a big deal with Google.

People are still using Reddit. It's the only non-AI spam source of data for Google search. There's a lot going on with Reddit that is positive, but they had to go through this wrenching change, which, you know, can't make an arm without breaking some eggs. Some very important, very meaningful eggs. Yeah. Still broken. Is that Strava?

Right? They're just closing it down saying screw this ecosystem. We're going to make money out for what we have here. That's certainly the cynical read. And one of the things that's happening is Strava is starting to build its own AI features. Like they have a V-Song who's been covering all this force mentioned that I think it's called athlete intelligence Strava's thing, which is essentially like a summary of all of your training data that tells you how you're doing. That's the kind of thing that you've been able to use Strava data for in other apps. And now Strava is saying, no, you can't do that, but we're doing that.

And that is precisely the thing that Reddit said to like third-party app developers, right? Like, that's, that's the speech. The difference is I think it's, I don't use Strava. So I could be wrong about this. And I would be curious to hear from people who have been using Strava for a really long time. But to me, the switching costs out of Reddit are much higher than they are out of Strava. Like, if you want something like Reddit, but not Reddit, it doesn't exist. There's nowhere to go.

You just, there are no other places. Strava has lots of competition. And you've seen this even in like the forums and on ironically, the subreddits. where people are talking about this stuff, people are encouraging people to go, invest in the Garmin ecosystem more or, like, there are other ways to track this kind of stuff.

I think for people who have been in this ecosystem a long time, getting out will be very hard. But it'll be interesting to see if Strava can actually pull this thing off because I just don't know that its walls are quite as high and impenetrable as Reddits were. And that was Reddit's bet all along, right? It was like, we can do this

because fundamentally most of you like it here and also where are you going to go? Yeah, we use Facebook groups. Right, exactly. I just, I don't know that Strava has quite that same tie to people. But again, I am not a Strava user. And if you are, I would love to hear like what the perils of leaving Strava feel like. Yeah, I'm very curious.

I also choose not to track how much I run every day. I track it just by sitting at my desk. I'm like, is it zero? Was it zero again? All right. That's it. Ding, ding, ding. The clock went off.

imagine this you can see the future lightning round coming now that we're swimming in cash can we buy an alarmo the nintendo's alarm clock and have that be our little mascot of the lanternground uh there were some documents filed by elan musk and his pending extremely shaky loss against open ai but at least it's generating discovery um emails between elon sam altman between the other founders of open ai and sam altman that sort of document how this company went from a nonprofit to Sam Altman's house of profits. I don't know how to describe it. Like in the beginning, Elon's like deep mind to Google is going to hire everybody.

Here's some money started nonprofits. We can make. And now we're at we're going to make this a for-profit company controlled only by Sam Altman. Lots in these emails. Like Kylie wrote them up. But it really does seem like I think that Elon gave a bunch of money to Sam Altman without a contract. step one from your friend who is not your lawyer but is a lawyer, Neil Lappatel, have a contract?

Yeah. It's really hard to file a claim for breach of contract without a contract. It's basic stuff, guys. So they don't have a contract. So he's inventing all these other legal theories, which are all very tenuous. But the emails make it very clear that Sam Altman was like, here's a nonprofit and then slowly made it a for-profit.

And it now is about to actually flip the switch and make it a for-profit. Yeah. And also the ways in which Sam in particular has like consolidated his power over time. And all of this happened almost to the day a year after the insane events of last Thanksgiving when Sam got briefly fired and then came back with more power and more autonomy and ability to do whatever he wants. My read of this whole lawsuit and there's a, I'll link to the blog post.

I'm sorry, I don't remember who wrote it, but somebody just put all the emails in a blog post in a row and it is so funny to read because you can tell. Elon Musk's angle here is basically just to like big brother, Sam Altman, that he's like, listen, Bucko, you couldn't have done this without me. I'm the reason OpenAI exists. I did it. But then all the bad stuff that's happened and the fact that it's not what we wanted is your fault. And it's very, it's very funny because a lot of the emails are basically Sam going to Elon with every question, every problem. and Elon being like the grand fixer who's like mostly just says throw money at the problem, it'll be fine.

Elon's stuff. Which is a theory and it seems to be working in a lot of voice for him. Half the time he says, do you want to have one of my babies? Which is Elon's other move. Right. And Sam, I don't think has said yes to that yet. But an opening eye board member did in fact ultimately have three of Elon's babies. Correct.

Three of the 12 that we know about. But yeah, it's just there's a lot more to come. We've heard, we've seen reporting that there are a lot of messages from in the inside of Open AI, including in like Signal and other messaging apps that we're going to see as part of this discovery. Like, we're going to learn a lot about how this company operates. Because of this one lawsuit that is, because of this. I promise you, he will lose this lawsuit. Well, that's what that's, that's kind of what I mean. I think this is as much a push to make this stuff public as it is to win the lawsuit. Like, this is a, Elon Musk trying to insert himself as the brains behind Open AI as much as it is an attempt to actually win the lawsuit, which I just find totally fascinating. Yeah. And we'll, and well, We're going to cover every twist and turn over. Read the emails, read Kylie's piece. It's very good. Okay, we should end.

Actually, can I insert one extra lightning round? Please. Bose acquired the company that makes Macintosh the super high-end speakers. I don't know why. I just want to point out that there's incredible amount of consolidation in high-end audio, which is very funny because there's Bose, which now owns Macintosh, which makes like $10,000 amplifiers, and I've always wanted one. So, cool.

like cool like legitimately cool I'm happy this company continues to to succeed in whatever way it's going to succeed so yeah so there's sound united which is owned by massimo that's Bowers and Wilkins Denon poke Morant's definitive technology Boston just like all of them over there and then there's another company that owns like Pioneer and Ankio and they're all the same like it's just bananas like all over the like that's all consolidated over there and now both Bose owns Macintosh. And there's just this, like, wild consolidation in audio. And you're basically end up picking, like, the same products, but at different levels of expense, because that's how big acquisitions for. If I'm, like, the kind of person who wants $10,000 speakers, which, as you know, I obviously am, as you can tell by the incredibly powerful audio setup behind me in the room here. Is this good news or bad news?

Like, I can't imagine. On the one hand, Bose is, like, going to allow this company to keep existing. But on the other hand, are these just going to be the like brand names they slap on their existing products so that they can charge five times as much money for? Yeah, there's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of like every car company needs a name. So you can license the names to car companies. Like my Jeep has Macintosh that does it really. Harmon Cardin was everywhere in cars for a minute there.

Yeah. My Jeep is actually funny because it runs Android and there's a little Android app on the screen that puts up the blue Macintosh meters. And it is all that's great. And I love it. Like, I was like, yep, I'm buying that car. And then it's a slow Android app that is like very slow. And it's like the meters are like a full second behind me. I paid extra for this. I just want to know.

This is who I am. But I'm just fascinated with this market in particular because it is consolidating in such a high rate because consumer audio is going away. Just like it just is. Right. There's not a headphones market anymore. There's an AirPods market and everything else. Right.

Right. And those things are becoming where. like they're putting a lot of compute into those. You can see that if you buy a Samsung phone, the best headphones to buy or Samsung's headphones, you buy a pixel, the best headphones to buy a pixel bots. If you buy an iPhone, best headphones to buy or AirPods, because they're extensions of the phones now.

Weird. That's a weird, bad outcome that I promise you happen because they took the headphone jack out of phones. And so all these other companies are racing to consolidate the very, very high end of the market where the money is. Interesting. I never thought about it like that, that headphones are now, they're a phone accessory, much more than they are their own gadget. That market just got wiped out.

Which is why everybody is trying to do those like $350 noise cancelling headphones, because that's like the only thing left. That's what's left. And even that, kind of shaky. Yeah. Although I did, on my flight home from California, yesterday, I saw so many knockoff AirPod Maxes. I believe that. They're everywhere. All right.

Last one. This is a good one. You take this one. So we talked a lot about the state of social last week. blue sky being ascendant, threads being threads. And the fascinating thing that has happened in the seven days since, I would say, is that blue sky has continued to grow. It's over 20 million people now.

Continues to grow at like somewhere on the pace of like a million people a day, which is huge. And Threads is terrified. I would say is the simple way I would put it. Threads has already started copying some of the feeds. They're letting you do the custom feeds thing. just today, you pointed this out just before we started recording. I had missed it.

It had happened so recently. Adam Masseri, who runs threads and Instagram, said that they're tweaking the algorithm to focus more on people you follow, which people have been asking threads for since the first damn day of threads. And it is just not a coincidence that they're doing this because of and after the crazy flight to blue sky. So Threads is like moving. pretty fast to start to do some of the stuff that Blue Sky is doing really well. I made a joke the other day that Blue Sky's legacy is going to be unfortunately the same as Snapchat, which is that it's going to have all the good ideas that get eaten by meta. And instead of Evan Spiegel being the de facto product chief of Facebook, it's going to be Jay Graber. And that is coming through much faster than I expected. I disagree. A couple of reasons. One, you know, We should just have like a soundboard where I just,

you can just play clips of me talking to the Fediverse. Like, ultimately these things should interoperate, right? Oh, sure. So Blue Sky gets some benefit if it's interoperable with Macedon. And the protocols are different, but I think there's just a lot of bridges that are going to be built and like that'll be fine.

Yeah, they will cross talk pretty quickly here, I think. That's coming. We'll see. I mean, the protocols are very different. Very, very,

very different and wildly different levels of maturity. And honestly, Threads isn't fully federated and neither is Blue Sky. Like there isn't, I think now they're personal data servers that you can just like, you can host, you can self-host Blue Sky, but there are no other apps. Like the actual app of Blue Sky, only Blue Sky makes. Sure. And there's pieces of it that are still kind of proprietary. They're early.

They just started. Yeah. They promised to do it. They haven't done it all the way yet. Same with Threats. They promised to do it. They haven't done all the way yet. But the network effect here will benefit both companies in a way that did not happen for Snapchat.

That's true. I agree with that. That should be the promise. Second, threads has not. boosted the best idea, which is starter packs. So you can steal feeds, you can show people, more people they follow, but starter packs on Blue Sky are the thing. They're such a great product. I made a list of people you should follow if you care about K-pop and you publish the list and you can just hit follow and you're done. Like that is driving so much growth over there.

Yeah. In addition to it being RevCron by default, in addition to having multiple feeds and block lists and all that stuff, but they have made it. really easy to just start. Yeah. Even in a way that like Twitter never figured out. Like the, there were the Twitter suggested follows when you would start. And that was like really great for whoever made it on those lists.

But it wasn't specific in a way. But now you're right. You can go to Blue Sky. You can type in, I did this the other day. I was like, I like Arsenal, the soccer team.

I just typed in Arsenal to the list of starter packs, clicked follow on one of them that was like all the Arsenal people. And all of a sudden my feet is full of Arsenal people. Like, it's wild that no one invented this before. And Blue Sky just nimb. I think threads is going to be somewhere between one day and several days from putting out something very much like that. But kudos to blue sky.

I really think, and again, I'm very nervous about the First Amendment in the Trump II administration, Brendan Carr. You're going to, I'm so sorry. We're going to find some way to algorithm that cut out the Brendan Carr segments of the Vergecast over the next four years. But then those of you who like it, we're going to find a way to turn. the volume up on those. Perfect. We've got ideas for podcasts, everybody. I'm nervous about it.

And Federation is a thing, is the escape hatch for social media. Yep. Right? Where I think Jay Graber can say, look, we moderate Blue Sky this way, but if you don't like it, there are other servers or other apps. You can compose your own moderation, and you can just have it that way. And that is the, no other company has built that yet. I think Threads wants that for various EU reasons, right?

This isn't a closed network. We're building it any way you want. But if you want to follow our accounts on another network, you can. These are big ideas. Again, they're not fully baked. But they're the thing that is going to escape a bunch of weird regulatory pressure on speech on the internet. I'm excited for them. Yeah.

And we are still in kind of the rising tide lifts all boats moment, right? Where like what these things are trying to do fundamentally is less compete with each other and more lure people away from X. And the more the balance shifts away from X and into all. of these other things, they all stand to benefit as they interconnect. And I think they all have incentives, like you're saying, to interconnect. It's going to take a minute, but they'll do it. But I think whether you're blue sky or threads, you can look at the success of the other one as a victory. As long as Threads keeps being the winner, if you're Adam Masary, right? Like, you've got to, there is still some victory in being the one that people are excited about. And I think,

threads has lost that in a pretty big way. It had it for a while. People were psyched about threads. People wanted threads to win. And I think really quickly in the last three weeks, all of that, like, good energy has shifted to blue sky. And I think if you're at a necessary, that's the thing you worry about. Yeah. While still feeding just the weirdest engagement bait to your audience of 275 million people. Yeah. We'll see. I mean, they have different ideas. And I, a little bit of competition goes a long way. 100%. And it's amazing how a little bit of competition here is, made meta react more than governments around the world. Yep.

Like, it's just, oh, other people like this other product better, we better change. That's a good, that's the feedback loop everybody wants. But like I said, we're, it's early, very early. Maybe Linda Yakorino is going to stage like an enormous comeback here. Starter packs on X could change everything. My favorite Nazis. All right. Sorry.

I mean it. That's it. We're way, we're at 100 miles over. I can't, I shouldn't say Nazis. Whatever, I mean, I meant it. Leave it in there. All right, that's it. We're way over.

Liam, just because it's the inaugural one, just say the name of this once again. AWS. Ah, that feels so good. It's beautiful. It's good. Beautiful. Play the music again.

It's, oh, yeah, we did it. I don't even know what the music is. Mission accomplished. We did it, everybody. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Thank you to Lauren Finer for being on the show. That's it.

That's Vergecast. That's Vergecast. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866, Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of the Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Liam James, Will Pore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it.

We'll see you next week.