The Vergecast - The Vergecast builds a tech company

Episode Date: July 9, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of corporate infighting:  The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz roleplay as CEOs of Vergecast Inc., tasked with creating a tech company by acquiring product lines from various industry giants. They select established products ranging from smartphones and PCs to messaging and audio solutions, sourced from companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Meta, and others.  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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of corporate infighting. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting on my back patio, getting the grill ready, because it is July 4th weekend, and that's just what you do. This is America. It's July 4th. It's also my birthday on July 4th, and so we sit outside and we grill, even though it's very hot, and there's mosquitoes everywhere. And would I rather be inside in the air conditioning looking at my television? Yes, but it's July 4th, so we're grilling stuff.

Anyway, we have an awesome episode coming up for you today. We are going to basically start a tech company together. Neil I Patel, Alex Cranes and I are going to, as a group of CEOs, which couldn't possibly go poorly, figure out how we would build a tech company out of the tech industry as it exists. Now, it sounds a little complicated, but I'll explain the rules when we get into it. It'll all make sense. But basically, I wanted to see if you were to start from scratch and say, okay, what are the best products in tech? What can I take? What can I put together?

What could we build that would be cool and different and that we could make awesome? How would we do that? We had a lot of fun putting this together and figured this would be a fun time to do it. It's July. The news is a little bit slow. We're about to get into crazy gadget season again. But it felt like a fun way to take a different kind of look at the tech industry. I should also say some credit for this whole concept goes to a podcast I really like called The Big Picture.

Really good show about movies. And they did one recently where the two of them started their own studios together. and they kind of did a draft and picked actors and writers and it was a very fun episode. And so I just kind of stole that concept and we're going to take it and turn it and do something similar on the show today. So we're going to start a tech company. I'm very curious what you think as you listen to it. If you think we made bad decisions, if you think we made good decisions, if you think we're monsters, I want to hear everything. Call the hotline 866 Verge1.

Email us, vergecast at the verge.com. Tell us how you'd start a tech company. And maybe between us, we're going to take over the tech industry. It's going to be awesome. Anyway, all of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I just noticed that I turned the grill on without actually turning the propane on. So this is how good I am at grilling.

I'm going to go fix that problem. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct-taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to,

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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. All right, we're back. Let's go. Eli Patel, hello. Hello. Alex Krantz.

Hello. Hello. I'm excited to be a CEO today, right? Thank you both for coming to maybe the most convoluted insane game. have yet devised on the first cast. But I'm very excited about this. So the structure of this is basically as follows. We, the three hosts, are now co-CEOs of a tech company because I would say historically speaking, companies with three CEOs tend to be the most successful. Yeah, it's like Blackberry a little bit more. Just like, what if you added one more person who had some weird ideas and wanted to

own a hockey team? It could be great. And we are going to build our own company out of parts of other companies is essentially how this is going to work. So I have, I think it's either 10 or 11 categories here that we as a tech company are going to enter by taking that product from another company. There are several rules. Again, this is very convoluted. But it's going to work. It's going to be fine once we get into it. Everything we take from a tech company, we get as it exists right now, whatever it's selling, whoever it is that makes it all the factory deals, all the marketing stuff, everything. We can change it as we like, but we don't get the idea of it. We get the thing as it. We get the thing as it is right now. We only care about things up to 2030. After that, who knows, we're all going to

live on Mars. So we're playing like a six-year-long game here. And frankly, if we as the triumvert of CEOs last until 2030, we will have been wildly successful. I'm banking out really fast. Yeah. As soon as we IPO, I'm gone. Alex is resting, investing from like day one here. It's going to be great. We can spend as much money as we want, but making money is not the point. We're actually not going to talk about money at all on this show. Okay. We don't want to go out of business, but our main goal is just to build the greatest tech company in the history of the universe. Like that is what we're after here because this is like if we start talking about the money side of things, it just gets weird and complicated in ways that we don't have time for. That's what we're going to tell our investors.

We're just going to be like, look, guys, if we talk about money, this is going to get weird and complicated. You just relax. We're just out to make an AGI. Don't worry about it. Yeah. Like for 20 years, Jeff Bezos was like, I can make money whenever I feel like it. For now, I'm just going to like make cool stuff. Like, that's the vibe at our tech company.

And I would say the two most important things as we pick here are we can only take one product from each company. So once we have used something from Apple, we cannot use anything else from Apple or Samsung or Google or whoever else, one product per company, which I think is going to be very complicated. That product also cannot be the whole company. So if there is a company that makes a single product with its name, like I originally had Figma in one of our categories. This is like a thing we might want to take. But if you take Figma from Figma, there is no Figma anymore, so that doesn't count. Well, what about FigJam? Sure.

No. Moving right along. Sure. That's actually, I'll give you that. Another one I had is like, oh, here's a good example. Like, we can't take Salesforce from Salesforce, but we could take Slack from Salesforce. Oh, I see. So if Apple had a product called Apple, you would just be like, no.

That accounted for, you know, 98% of its revenue. Yeah. So sure, I guess under that rule, we can take Fig Jam. I'll add fig jam back to the list. And most importantly, this is not competitive. We are three CEOs. We are doing this together. And so we have to agree on everything that we're going to take, which I assume means this is going to take 12 hours.

Is there such thing as a hung jury in this situation? No, because there are three of us. And if it comes to it, we will vote and two to one will win. This is why we have three CEOs. It's a perfect sure. I can't believe no one has thought of this before. Yeah, why are people doing one and two? Odd number CEOs.

Solves all your problem. Yeah. Yeah. Okay, here are the categories. We're going to do smartphones, tablets, and PCs. Then we're going to take a break. We're going to do wearables, headphones, app platforms, which is not specific apps,

but think of like app businesses, like Microsoft Office is one of the options in that category. And then we're going to do what I have called boring B2B money faucets, which is the thing that makes you all the money that nobody ever wants to talk about. Then we're going to take another break. And then we're going to do messaging,

streaming service, wildcard gadgets, and wildcard everything else. And then we're going to get out of here and we're going to go be filthy rich. Sound good? I'm so excited to be rich. All right. Category number one is smartphones.

This to me is maybe the easiest, but also maybe the most difficult one to do first, which is why I wanted it to do it first. See, I also agree with you because I think we're probably along the same lines for what the phone should be. Well, the only thing that makes it different is David told us not to worry about money. Oh, interesting. We don't worry about money. Well, if you give one wit about money, you take the iPhone.

Yes, right? Because now you funded whatever other boondoggles you want to get on. Like, yeah. Then we can pick the cobo for tablets and it's fine. That's what we should do. Exactly. You're right on the same way. But if you don't care about money, then you might have a substantive discussion about what

phone you want. Well, so, okay, let me frame this slightly differently. We don't care. We are not spending our time thinking about quarterly earnings and shareholder value, but we do want to win, right? In like big picture win. Then we're taking the iPhone. Yeah.

I've already, I've crushed you. We're taking the iPhone. We win. I think that's right. I think the only reason for me that the iPhone is challenging is that there are a lot of categories here in which Apple is also very good and some in which it has a lot less competition. Oh, no, no. I can, every other category I can, I can defeat everyone else with the power of the iPhone's locking. Oh, interesting. You trust me. Just wait. And I'm allowed to change stuff.

Yeah, we're good. We nailed it. It's fine. Oh, my God. I just realized we're going to speed run building an app tax out of it. Yeah, it's going to go so fast. You think I don't care about money, David? 45% let's go. Yeah, somewhere Lena Khan just started listening to this and she's like, this is, she's like, this isn't the tech company I would have built. We're not even going to be allowed to make a company. Lena Khan's like, nope, no, not this group. Your fake company is illegal, sorry. Okay, but just for this, for the sake of argument, the other nominees that I had here were Samsung, which I think is probably the only other reasonable competitor here, the Google Pixel, if you're, you know, feeling good about yourself. The nothing phone, which is a fun like Dark Horse,

if you want to like bet on doing something weird and cool in the next six years until 2030. Interesting bet. Huawei, one plus, Asus, Motorola. Like, it gets bleak pretty fast. Real fast. Were you hoping that one of us would be like Motorola? I was hoping one of you would fight for Samsung, to be honest, just because I think it's possible to maybe want to pick an Apple product in another one.

Because we've now ruled out every other Apple product. No, because I'm looking at through the rest. And I'm like, there's other really good competitors in these other places. But like, like, the iPhone. If the phone is like the engine of the business, which it feels like probably is true, then we want the iPhone. I mean, alternatively, the one that I would have argued for would have been the pixel, because then the one thing you would change about it would be caring. And then it would be good. Yeah, but the iPhone, we've got like the people who are making the good processors on the iPhone, whereas the pixel we've got not that.

Sure, but, you know, a little caring goes a long way. Yeah, that's true. Like also trying to market the phone would be useful. I mean, yeah, like in terms of raw upside, the ROI, I think, for the pixel would be huge, whereas the iPhone, I have a hard time imagining making the iPhone more successful, but it's also very successful. I think the answer is just the iPhone. I don't know that we need to talk about this much longer. It's going to solve every other problem on this list.

So again, I would remind you that one of the things we are not trying to do here is build a services business or a monopoly. Wait, we're not trying to build a monopoly? We want to win. So you're saying this collection of three CEOs has to have some values? Yeah, we want to like be cool. Our main value is like be cool. Okay. I want to have a monopoly in a cool way.

Yeah. Yeah. All right. Fair. Okay. We can move on. All right. So the iPhone, next up, tablets.

Which is ironically a very similar set of companies. But I would say that we can't pick the iPad. So the iPad is out. Which leaves us with the four nominees I picked so far were the Samsung Galaxy tabs, the Google Pixel tablet, such as it. is Amazon's whole Kindle lineup, which I think counts as a tablet. Kobo, you could do One Plus. There's a lot of tablets out there.

We could argue about the Microsoft Surface as a tablet line, but I think I won't count that. We'll get to that in a minute. What do you guys think? Who's the favorite here? I think we go with the books and then we have the Apple, the iPhone team, make the operating system good. Wait, is that, can you make that choice? Can I pick the Galaxy, but it runs iPad OS?

No, but if we don't take the iPad, we don't get iPad OS. We're going to use iOS to put that on the books. Oh, and then we didn't take MacOS, which would have been in the real move. We can't. Huh. Yeah. See? So, wait, hold on.

To wind this week on all of this to get an iPad running MacOS. I have to like take the pixel so I can take the MacBook so I can take the Samsung Galaxy and make it run MacOS. To get to a Galaxy pad running MacOS, I have to take the pixel and then a MacBook. That would be the way. I'm going to be honest. I don't hate that. strategy. I feel like this Board of Directors meeting will be very confusing. No, I'm with,

I'm with Kranz. I think you take the Kindle lineup, you jazz up the software a little bit. People are happy. I wanted to go books to escape the lock-in because I feel like we save some money with that acquisition. But we can solve the lock-in. Remember, Android is open source. So Android is fair game no matter what we do. We can just have Android. We can on DRM the books is what you're saying. Yeah. And I think so then the real question is like who is better at making the hardware that we can take and have a pretty solid lead on it. And I feel like, I feel like it's Amazon. Like books does cool stuff, but I feel like if we, we just steal the Amazon team and we're like, what if we did a good job again? Yeah, because we get Panos. Oh, yeah, we get Panos. Yeah, we're

doing the Kendall. That's right. I feel good about that. Yeah. We're doing the Kindle or we're going to make it good now. It's a real culture hire right there. Yeah. Do we immediately kill the whole Kindle fire line and we just focus on E-ink? No, no, no, that's good for kids. Okay. So actually, I would say we take the tablet thing we're taking is like the extended Kindle. The Kindle universe we get. Yeah. All this class of tablets is accomplishing for anyone is playing Disney Plus for your children. So we're just like the Kindle Fire Kids is the centerpiece of our tablet strategy.

And then we also just make a nice E-reader on the side that runs iOS. Yeah. And then I can go to various state capitals and be like, you want to make laws protecting kids, make a law saying you have to buy a Kindle Fire for kids. Yeah. There we go. I mean, I love how we're like making a really good culturally important company that also doesn't break laws. I'm not trying to break the laws.

I'm trying to make the laws. Yeah. I'm trying to be the laws. You understand? If you don't buy a candle fire, you will be arrested. Here is my question is do we reboot the fire phone with our iPhone team? Which part? The 3D display.

We've already added 50 cameras to the phone. What if we had four more to make it 3D? Yeah. And it's one of the first. them is just for barcodes. Yeah. Amazon Kindle, easy choice. Next up is PCs. And I think the list of folks is fairly familiar here. Alex, what do you got? Okay. So the list is, it's, it's, we can't do Apple, but we got Microsoft, Lenovo, Assus, Acer, HP, Razor, Dell. I think we should go Lenovo. Because if you get rid of all of the spamware that they like automatically install, you have

some really nice laptops. You got really nice hardware. Yeah, you got really nice hardware. And then we make the iOS team, they're going to be working nights, but they're going to have to basically like reinvent MacOS. Like, they can figure it out. You can back into it. You start iOS started with MacOS. You're like, go the other way. Go the other way. I fully believe in them. If we can make PC clones, we can do this too. But we don't have the chips. I guess we do because we have the iPhone. So now we're just, now we just put a hinge and a lid on an iPhone. We're like, that's a laptop. Yeah. Which is more or less the iPad. I just want to be very clear about what we're

discuss it. We're like, we make iPads now. But it's also got the little, it's got the little, the dot. Yeah, the little, the trackpad guy. Yeah. See, I was going to say Microsoft, because I want control of the operating system. That's where I go to. Right. And I want the surface line. I don't. Now I've pulled the tablet ecosystem bigger, right? I've got my Kindles and my Kindle fires, and I've got the Surface Pro, and I've got a whole range of products. Tell us about all of the really good laptops and all in ones that that we're going to get with our Microsoft acquisition. Again, a lot of my strategy is just try hard. Okay.

Right? Just to be clear. So, yeah, the Surface Studio, but like, what if you put a real chip in it? Huh? And that's just me in meetings. Like, what if circle this on the whiteboard and then write try hard and then like three exclamation points? And that's my whole surface strategy.

We can make it all run Risk V. The power of one Raspberry Pi 4. Yeah. My vote. David, you have a tiebreaker here. It's between Microsoft and Lenovo. I agree Lenovo makes some of the better hardware here. You make a compelling point about being able to have Windows and make it good.

The one wrench I would like to throw in is that if we get Dell, we just instantly have the best lineup of Windows PCs that exists. But we don't have Windows. We don't have Windows. Do we want Windows? You know, like, for example, I would like to walk up to the box that says, like, security and try hard. I will say, though, under the rules of this game, though, I don't, I think what we're getting is like a perpetual license to Windows. I don't think we're getting... Even inside, Mike, that's probably how the service team.

Yeah, I don't think we get to run Windows. So when we took the iPhone, we don't get to run iOS? No, we do. That one counts. It does. It feels different. I can't describe you why... No, it's because it's one device to one operating system.

This is not one device to one operating system. We are a partner to the operating system, not the only venue for the operating system. Even if we're Microsoft? We're not, but we're the Surface team. We aren't Microsoft. We're Vergecast Incorporated. We're not taking Windows from Microsoft. I still think.

think it's Microsoft. Just because I think we're clearly building a luxury thing here. And I think getting there with Lenovo is going to be challenging. Like I don't, I don't know how we're going to convince everybody that Lenovo is like kick-ass cool again. I think we can get there with Surface. We're not, we're not, we're not, we're just taking the product. We're doing a little rebrand. We got the think pad. Yeah, you're right. A little coat of paint on there. Get the yoga's. You guys want some yoga's. They do the flippy things. I'm going to make tent mode happen for America. Okay, I'm going Lenovo because I think we're going to want Microsoft later. I think there are other things in this list that are going to be more useful to have for Microsoft.

So I think we should pick Lenovo. You're right. That's true. I'm dying to know what you think those things are, but we'll come back to it. Think of all the boring things that make you the most valuable company on planet Earth. And that's what Microsoft does so well. It's not the surface team. Yeah.

I think, all right. So we're picking, we're picking Lenovo. Welcome to the team, the little nub. It's very excited. What's that thing called? The track point. Track point. That's what that's called. We just call it a nub. It's a nut. We're rebranding it immediately. Just immediate. That's the first thing we do, day one. Yeah, I love this. All right. So just to recap so far, we're going to take a quick break. We have, as Vergecast Incorporated, we now make the Apple iPhone, the Amazon Kindle, and Lenovo's set of PCs. I feel like we're doing very well so far. I'm excited about this. We're doing well. All right. We're going to take a really quick break. We're going to come back. We're going to do some more stuff. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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the ones we're about to do is wearables. And I'm defining wearables deliberately broadly. Anything that you wear on your body accounts. We can't do things like the Apple Watch or the Vision Pro. We can't do all of Amazon's weird Alexa wearable. stuff, but I would say mostly we're still pretty wide open. You have X-Real on here. Yeah. I do have X-real on here. I'm not saying we should pick it.

I'm just saying it's a company I thought of when I said wearable out loud to myself. What do you guys think? Any jump out to you that we should definitely get into? I have a clear favorite here. Out the gate, I'm going bold and taking meta for the Raybans. Oh. Oh, that's a good play. I wasn't even, I was thinking of the headset.

I forgot about the glasses. Yeah. Okay. On that front, do we get one or the other? do we get both? Like if we, if we say Quest, we get all the quests in one product. But I feel like the smart glasses are a different thing. Get your face computers away from me. You know what I mean? Just that, no, no, no. Although, what are the three pants? You just want the smart glasses. I just want the glass. Even if we get the whole team, we're immediately killing the quest line and

we're just going smart glasses. That was what they just did. I just want to, that's what Meta just did. Yeah. And just reorganize that team. So I'm saying the glasses are the future. Okay. And we're putting our excess iPhone profits into the glasses. Oh, I mean, if the glasses, like, ran a really good AI, well, no, we don't have one of those. We have Siri. Although on a six-year time horizon, it's like, hmm, maybe I just want to take Samsung's watches and do lock. I mean, that is, that is actually an interesting question, right? Like, is, are we betting that smart glasses are going to be sufficiently huge by 2030 that this is, like, worth it for us?

or are we just taking like a nerd gadget for the next six years? No, this makes sense for us because we're like, we're cool, we're luxury. What's this luxury like a pair of rebants? Fair. Okay, I have two others I'd like to throw at you. An aura ring. That is one of the things I was going to throw at you. I think aura is like a sneakily fascinating company.

They are way ahead in smart rings. Smart rings are a lot of people think, including our own V-Song, about to be a real thing. I think especially if you're betting that this like health and fitness thing is going to keep growing really fast. That's a place to go. I also think Garmin, for kind of the same reasons. Like, what if we can redesign Garmin's watches so that they don't look dumb, but they have all the cool stuff that Garmin already has that people really like. I feel like you could make something out of Garmin. I also, my immediate reaction when we did this was Snap because I want the spectacles line.

But I think we go, we go Rayvan meta, smart glasses, and that gets us everywhere we're going probably significantly faster. Yeah, it's basically, do we want to go watch, ring, or glasses? Totally. But if we go Samsung, we do watch and ring, right? Well, so the thing that this, I think, makes very clear is you can take any of the watches and you can do iPhone lock-in and now you have a realistic competitor to the Apple Watch. Right. Like, that's the thing that actually holds a bunch of these companies back is they cannot communicate with the iPhone. Right.

Yeah, but be cool, Neelai. It's written at the top of the building of our headquarters. It just says be cool. What's cooler than lock-in? cooler than like. Yeah, the change I'm making is being like, all right, whoop, you're in. Like, let's go, you know? Yeah.

Like, you can, you can now more directly figure out Apple integrations. Buy a think pad, get a whoop. Let's go. But I'm just saying, like, if that, on a six-year time horizon, maybe that is a better move, then take the meta-ray bands and figure out how glasses work. Which, by the way, glasses also held back because they cannot properly integrate with your phone. Yeah. This is like a real problem for all these products.

But yeah, that's why, like, the glasses, we get them properly integrating with the phone. Then we also have, like, an additional audio solution. When you say an additional audio solution, I mean some headphones. Well, you know, headphones is coming up next. You've been a CEO for 20 minutes. You were already super corporate. Yeah, we need more than one audio solution for our company, guys. I've prepared a deck to talk about this.

We need to be diversified in our audio. It's good. It happens to everybody. It's just immediate, yeah. But the Garmin, like, the Garmin has so much cool stuff in it. They just look so ugly. And we've got the Apple team now, right? They can, like, make it look good.

That team, that poor team in Panos-Penay just chained to their desk. We need that team to keep making iPhones, though. I don't know. It's not like they're doing a lot. They're like, take the buttons off it. That's true. It's thinner next time. We did it.

I think you're the tiebreaker. I think it's between Garmin and Meta. Once again, David, you have to, you have to. You have to pull apart this corporate battle. I think we should pick meta. Yeah. Because I think the Rayban meta partnership is cool. I think the glasses are awesome and people really like them.

And I think our ability to like integrate them a little and make them way better for people, instant victory. Like I think with the other picks that we have here, we have a chance to like immediately make these things much cooler in a way that I feel like we're going to have to basically like. tear down the Garmin hardware team and build it back up. And I feel like that's going to take us a while. Yeah, that's going to be more than six years. Garmin, please know that I love you and you make cool things just like make them cooler. Garmin, if you'd like to integrate with Veritcast Incorporated's iPhone, you can pass 55%. Yeah, we'd love to have you.

We've got some really good audio solutions for you. The developer program is open and it will only be slightly more than half of your revenue. Yeah. Also, the smart glasses are just like cool and I love using them and I want to have them. So we're going with that. I feel good about it. I don't love that we just hire a hardware team out of meta, which makes me feel a lot of feelings in general, but it's okay. We're doing it.

We now know everything about you. Our privacy policy, by the way, is dope. Like, let's just take that for granted. Because you're wondering about our privacy policy, it is sick. The EU never gets mad at us. No. It's like not a problem at all. I should have said at the beginning, by the way, by picking the iPhone, we did just bring ourselves a delightful antitrust case.

that I'm not super psyched about, but I feel like it's one of those was coming anyway, right? Yeah, you might as well. Lena call us. Neli has been begging to fight an antitrust case. Yeah, from this side. That's really what I've been after this whole time is. Let me be the monopolist. It's perfect.

I'm just saying we're raising rents. If we're going down, we're going down rich. Yeah, and by the time any of this comes out, it'll be past 2030. We'll be out anyway. It's fine. I'm not worried about it. All right. Next category is headphones.

And here, again, we're pretty wide open. Apple is off the board, but I'm going to allow beats to stay on the board because it is different enough that I think will allow it. Because they don't care about it. Yeah, pretty much. I don't know if Apple knows that it owns beats, so we're just going to let it ride. But there's also obvious players here, Bose and Sony and Sonos is a new one. Just headphones, though. No, we'll make this headphones slash speakers.

We'll go audio solutions. Oh, my gosh. In Alex Grant's. I think you know exactly where we're going with this. Nelai is going to advocate for the party speaker. Yeah, I'm taking Sony. Now that's audio solutions. Yeah. We got a lot, a wider range. It's the ULT era. I mean, you want luxury. What screams luxury more than the words of megabase? A seven-foot-tall speaker.

By the way, shout out to the Verstcast listeners who just send me pictures of it in the wild. Amazing. It's like they're birding, you know, but like only one person cares about birds. And it's me. How does it feel to be known for the Cybertruck Wiper and Sony party speakers? Like, is this a good legacy that you're happy about? Is that on the Lyme, CyberTruck Wiper? On the wildcard gadgets, Cybertruck Wiper. We have two wildcard options, so don't worry. For me, it's Sonos on this one. Interesting.

I want Sonos real bad, because, again, we're in this, like, we want to build cool stuff that's integrated. Sonos makes good products. They know how to make good audio products. I feel like we could take Sonos and be like, just learn how to make software. Everything's going to be fine. Just learn this easy part. Yeah.

Have you heard of apps? What if we did that? This could be fine. So, again, I would actually take Sony here. Not just because of the party speaker situation. I think their headphones are really good. They are. My Sony noise cancancers are really good.

I think they compete with Bose to be the top of the market. Then they've got an actual audio solutions catalog. Like an actual array of speakers. Like, what is one product I want desperately from Sonos that they won't sell is like a receiver? Right. Like there's a huge array of those audio products that you can, ruthlessly integrate with a phone. In a way they even Sonos can't write out. That's why they have the software problems.

Like their app platform has to support a bunch of. just stuff because they can't just put it on your phone directly. And also, Megabase. I would just get it. Okay. I would have it. Alex, what do you think? I just really like the Sony headphones. Okay. They just have such a nice wider range. Like, Sonos just got into headphones. They don't have any in-ear monitors. They don't have any buds. Also, tough time to be taking over Sonos. Like, real, kind of reputation hit. Oh, you know what you don't have on here? What's that? Again, I'm just going to point this out for everyone. I think the age of televisions is coming to an end. because David made a list of gadgets and didn't put TVs on them.

Yeah, I don't care. No part of me wants to build televisions. Well, I'll just remind everyone that I asked the CEO of Netflix about the Samsung Frame TV, and he was like, what are you to stop talking to me? I was like, do you think this is a harbinger of Doom? And he was like, I don't know what you're saying. I own one. But I'm just saying, you made an entire list of gadgets and you didn't put TVs on here.

It's a prophecy. Because he knew you were going to say we're going to acquire the Samsung frame and fix it. To be clear, not an oversight. We are not getting in the television. business? What if we made no money and everything was impossible and we had to spy on our users? All I'm saying is if TVs were on here anywhere, then I would change my headphones pick. If you're giving me audio solutions but not TVs, then it's Sony. If TVs are back on the list, then I have to, I'm required by like blood and heritage to take Sony televisions.

Okay. And then I would change my headphones back. So we do have a wild card round coming later. And if you think you can win the fight for us to get Sony TVs, you can hold your fire for them. I'm going to fight for TCL so hard. Yeah, I don't think you're going to win the Sony TVs fight. I just don't think we want to be in the TV business. Well, if I take him off the board here, it's a big decision. How do I get Mac OS in the tablet? It's kind of a, you know, I've got to play three moves ahead.

I will be down with Sony here. By the way, tough beat for Bose that none of us are even attempting to take Bose. They're fine. Well, you made it audio solutions. Right. If it was just headphones, I would immediately go both so I could win the Sony fight later. Interesting. Okay. Yeah. And I don't, it's just like a bunch of weird scientists in Massachusetts. It's like, we don't, we don't need that. I'll go Sony under one stipulation, which is that we immediately rename every single product they make to something not stupid.

No, with more letters. Twice as many letters. And another dash in the middle for no reason. Just get in there. Okay. I think it's Sony. Okay. I feel good about this. I think we're aligned. I can figure something out for TVs.

Yeah. I feel now obligated to take something from Samsung just so that you can't argue for the frame TV because I don't need this in my life. That's not what I was going to take. Again, I believe it's a harbinger of doom. Okay. So the next two things on here are, I would say, the sneaky places we're going to make a lot of money.

This is what pays for everything else that the shareholders are going to love and we're probably never going to talk about again. The first one is app platforms, which I suppose, could be a single app if we wanted a single app, but I'm thinking more along the lines of, like, big groups of things. So, like, I had Adobe Creative Cloud as an option here and Microsoft Office and Google Workspace. This is, like, probably B-to-B software that is going to make us just a tremendous amount of money. What do we think? So I have to go with Office. Only for one small reason, and I can't believe you didn't

think of it first, David. We cannot run this company without Microsoft Excel. Oh, that's interesting. No company can be run without Microsoft Excel. Like, just for our own survival. You know, you can just, like, pay for a license. We'll have so much money. We can just pay for a license for Excel. But what if other people paid us for licenses? Yeah. I'm just saying, you want a dog food, you know, you're on work.

Yeah, but we can have Adobe Creative Cloud and just have a stranglehold on the entire industry. You want people to hate us? We can just, like, I love a monopoly. I'm on this side of things now. Another antitrust fight that I'm really excited about, yeah. We're only going to be there six years. By the time that stuff all hits, we'll be long gone. So I think the upside of Creative Cloud is we take Creative Cloud, we make the pricing better,

and we're legends, right? Like instantly, best possible PR win is we just like give away Premiere. We're just like, here, you can have it. No, we sell like, rather than the Cloud license, we're like, okay, you can just buy Premiere, but it'll cost $1,000. Yeah. Then we make a lot of money and people are happy because they can just own it. For six years.

Yeah, for six years. And then it's gone. And then, you know, whoever follows us, Panos, I'm sorry, you're taking over the company from us. Good luck. A lot of our ideas are like, what if we made slightly less money? But that's fine. Whereas my ideas are what if we made a lot more money. Yeah, this says a lot about the distinct vibes of the Vergecast Incorporated team, I would say.

It's either office or it's Creative Cloud, right? I feel like there's nothing else. Like, we could go try to get like Oracle's weird business or like IBM's consulting arm or whatever. But we haven't picked a Google thing. Do we not want Google Workspace? Do we just take Google Workspace and go kill Office? So my idea here, again, you know, our company's mission is try hard. Yeah.

And Workspace is a ripe target for trying hard. Yeah. This is also where you could do messaging. You could, you know, you could walk in the room, be like, make a list of all the messaging products and then walk out. And six months later, come back in and look at the list and circle one. Like this one. We're just doing this one.

Yeah. And we're going to name it G-chat. That's a thing you could do here. It is. It is. Messaging, I would point out, is a separate category. So we're going to get to messaging. But whatever company we pick here, we can't pick there.

Okay. Which is a case for and against some folks here. And if we pick Microsoft Office, we can't pick Azure. If we pick Google Workspace, we can't pick Google Cloud. That's right. No one was picking Google Cloud. Come on. Okay.

I will concede and say we should pick Creative Cloud, and our mission here is to make people not hate us. Yeah, I think this is where we win over all the people to use. our hardware because they're going to love, this is how we sell Lenovo think pads. Because of 55% lock-in, you can run Creative Cloud on someone else's laptop. It'll just cost four times as much much. I don't make the rules. Yeah. Except for that one. Well, you just like the more your company makes, we charge you more. Like, just a sliding scale. Oh, I like that. You pay per YouTube subscriber instead of per.

Yeah. Yeah. Exactly. Oh, you're just getting out of this industry. You basically get it. for free. Right. Yeah. I love this. The minute you start making success that we come for our cut. And if you're wearing our wearable, we can track your general burnout level as a creator and we start bringing the price back down. Yeah. I love that. See? Oh, my God. Synergy. We actually turn the app off when you need a rest day. And then we'll get it back. Calm down, Jimmy. All right. So we're good on Creative Cloud? All right. I mean, sure. I think it's the right answer. That's okay. I know I'm the one who has to deal with like whatever terms of service conflagration.

It's like, fine, I'll do it. Yeah. David and I work four days a year. Oh, yeah. Cranza and I are the ones who like go to canned lions and like meet with advertisers. You have to actually like do the things. I have to write the blog post. It's like, all right, we changed our terms of service.

It's true that we're going to take your firstborn child. We're doing this for the good of all humanity. This is beautiful. I love this for you. All right. Next category is the boring B2B money. faucets. This is where we get to, we get to pick our cloud provider. We can make B2B chips that we sell. I was going to put arm in here, but we can't have arm because arms only thing is arms, so that doesn't

really work. We can, this is, this is where we make all of our money, but we try to never talk about in public because no one cares. Can we take TSMC? What would you want to take from TSMC? Making the chips for everybody? No, that's their whole thing. But they don't make a product called TSM. We don't ship TSMs around the world. Right. That would be then just buying the company, which is not what we're doing. We're taking products. You get like one TSMC factory. This is like an expansion draft in sports, right? We get to like pick from your roster, but we can't have your team. What about that one company in Europe that actually makes the lithography machine that TSM relies on? That like $23 million machine. Yeah. There's only what's the name

of that company? ASML. I think we should take ASML. I think we should take the machine that makes the fabs. machine that makes the fabs. Okay. Not like Azure? Yeah, but like, you know, I'm already defending Creative Cloud. Like, I'm not trying to be out of here. I just want to print all the money. Like, this is our money printer. Who gets mad at Azure right lately? No one, but it's also in second place, right? You have to go make the AI case. You got to do the AI CRM thing to make, to grow Azure. I guess we're just milking it for profits and walking away, right? Right. We're only here for six years. And we're, we can't take AWS because we took the Kindle. Right. Yeah. Which is a very funny trade to have made if you're trying to build a business.

I mean, ooh, we could take Whisper from OpenAI. Whisper's open source. We're good there. Oh, yeah. Also, Open. It's on this list as a money faucet, but it is not. It's like a reverse. It's a drain. Oh, true. I meant to write this as basically like if we want, we can take like GPT40 from Open AI. Which still, which they are now in one of a stunning business. judo move are giving away for free to Apple. Yeah, no, I'm not, I don't think that's the winner, but I just, I wanted to have an AI option here. Let's take Nvidia G-Force now.

Yeah, so this is the thing. How do we get something from Nvidia? This is my question. What do we take from Nvidia? Is it just the H-100 business? Do we just, we just take Nvidia's whole AI chip situation? I'm telling you, do you buy ASML? And then you're like, if you use these machines to make H-100's, 50,000.

That is a pretty good funny faucet. I feel like we will be ripe for disruption there. Yeah. I think taking the Nvidia AI chip business is like a strong move because now you're selling to Google Cloud and Azure. And on a six-year horizon, they all want to disrupt you, but they won't be able. So I was about to say, do we worry that every other chip maker on Earth is going to start making these and this becomes a bad bet pretty soon? That's Panos's problem in six years. Yeah, not in six years, baby.

Okay. In six years, I'm on a boat. I mean, the other problem here is that if we take that, the bubble bursts and we become the poster child of the AI bubble that just burst. And that's going to happen in less than six years. That's true. This is why I'm saying we should take ASML, the chip company. That is like the least sexy business you could possibly imagine in that.

I doubt there's as much money in it because I don't think they can make all that many of those. It's like Samsung and their battery business. Actually, maybe this is a good idea where Samsung just makes a bunch of random stuff that makes them a ton of money. Oh, yeah, we could take LG display right here. Oh, that's good. Ooh. Right? Like, you want to put an OLED in your phone?

Come talk to Lucky Gold Star, you know? Wait, I like that a lot. I was like, LG display, that feels like it. The way we all were just like, yeah. And it, that feels, that feels sticky. They're going to make screens for a long time. I feel like we're in. And that's like, that's easy.

It runs itself. We're good. All right, I love this. And we love talking about it. We do. You want to talk about dual layer OLEDs? Let's go. Do you feel like this gets you close enough to the TV business that you're happy now, Neely?

They make the panels that go in your sonies. It's true. They do make the panels. Yeah. All right, fine. I got myself a monitor and TV business. Yeah. We're going to take LG display and we're going to make TVs.

And then we're just going to bolt two Sony party speakers to it. Boom. You think we want to sell these tomorrow? Come on. Some little pulsing lights at the bottom. Yeah. Okay. All right.

That's good. LG display. This is great. I'm in. All right. We're going to take one more break, and then we're going to come back. We've got four more to do. We're going to build Vergecasting. We're right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer. And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling.

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which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. Claude.aI. slash vergecast. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend,

prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. they are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over.

Today, Explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs

or settle for the status quo. And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually. Let's begin. All right, we're back. Next up for the triumvirate at Vergecast Incorporated is messaging. We can we can take, again, not a company, so we can't take signal from signal or telegram from telegram, but we can take and reinvent any messaging app or platform or ecosystem that we want. We can't take from meta, which I just realized because we took the Rayvan smart glasses,

which I now slightly regret because I would like to have taken WhatsApp. So we can take all of the different Google chats that have. existed and finally make one. Yeah, this is our opportunity. Yeah, we can make G-chat. Done. Done. I can solve, I can find, I can solve this.

I mean, again, on the list of like, do it and be legends, finally making G-chat is way up there. Just making G-chat. And then, you know, I got the phone. So, or your blue bubble problems are solved. Yeah. Oh. Yeah, we don't have to worry about messengers.

We just put blue bubbles on the iPhone. Yeah, super done. Whoa. This isn't even a, why are you in G-chat, baby? I met my wife on there. That's a real story, by the way. That's not just the case in you. That is a real thing.

Becky and I spent years of our early relationship in G-chat and nowhere else. Do you ever randomly find the transcripts of those chats when you're searching for something in your Gmail? This is a thing that happens to me occasionally. I'll search for like pizza in my Gmail and it'll be like, did you mean this conversation you had with your ex 11 years ago that we saved in Gmail? Ooh, I haven't thought about that. And now I'm worried about looking. Don't look. Don't look.

We're going to set that aside. It's probably for the best. All of those G-Chack conversations were before we were dating. So they were just conversations about the things we had gotten up to at night, which is a lot of things. I love it. Yeah. That's very good. Yeah.

All right. The only other one I would throw in is Slack, which I think is like a forever unrealized potential that. Or Discord. So, but we can't take Discord because Discord is Discord, right? Like that's right. It's off the... I thought somebody else on Discord now. No, they almost sold, but it's still just Discord.

Microsoft was gonna, but then they were like, this seems like a disaster, which probably reasonable call. Gchat being good. Like, we're going to kind of win people over with Adobe, but eventually we will jack up the prices on them and having like, yeah. Yeah, just having G chat there as like instant win. Oh, yeah. All right.

I feel good about this. It's G chat. And we're agreed that we're scrapping all the other nonsense and we're calling it Gchat, right? Yeah, yeah, without. Yeah. We are building the G chat that always should have exactly. I did. Next one is streaming service, which is actually fun because, again, we can't steal a company, so, like, Netflix is out. Oh, shit. We just traded G-Chat for YouTube.

Oh, right. We did. Oh, no. Can we go back? No, we can take TikTok. Oh, we can take TikTok. Yeah, we're right. We can take TikTok. For now. It's on by my chance. So, oh, we can buy, we're it. We're going to save America. Yeah, we buy it. Oh. There we, oh my God. My dude, the wild card around here is amazing. We're going to, we're going to be. We're going to be. We're going to be. We're Heroes of G-Chat and we're going to save America's youth. Oh, wow. We just did it. We did it.

We're now the coolest company on Earth. Okay. Yeah. And the good news is this one isn't even going to be very expensive because they're desperately trying to get rid of it. Yeah. Eat your heart out, Oracle. We do have to fight the Chinese government and Larry Ellison.

It'll be fine. Do you think at the end to buy TikTok, you have to win a boat race against Larry Ellison? He's like, I'll do this if you can beat me in the America's Cup. Let's yacht about it. Yeah. Okay, so I will just say there's a bunch of Disney streaming services that are interesting. ESPN would make us an awful lot of money for a pretty long time.

Hulu exists. Disney Plus exists. We could have Apple TV Plus and have all the good shows. Yeah, but those are also dependent on external licenses that we might not acquire. True. With our streaming service acquisition, right? We're not getting the rights to Star Wars. We get all the existing contracts.

Yeah. But I think you're right. We get Disney Plus, we don't get to own Star Wars. You're right. The economics of streaming are very simple. There's a handful of companies who think the Samsung frame TV will continue to exist. Their business model is they pay a lot of money for content and then try to make people pay money for it. The other model is TikTok gets free content from America's teenagers and then sells ads against it.

And not for nothing, an infinite array of pirated movies from the idiots who are paying for content. Yeah. It's got to be TikTok. You're just for the economics of the business. Like, do you want to have costs or not costs? But again, TikTok not famously making a ton of money right now. Well, because they're, you know, we'll fix that, 55%. No, no.

We do something like deal with Adobe Creative Cloud where we somehow charge our own creators. Well, we're going to have to because if we get TikTok, we don't get Capcut. So we're going to have to immediately put the Creative Cloud team on building Capcut so that people will. But the TikTok video editor is Cap Cut. So we just spin it out. It's good enough. Yeah. Like, it'll work.

We call it Cut Cat. We can probably cut cat. There we go. All right. TikTok and cut cap. We've done it. All right. I think that's right.

I feel good about it. I like briefly wanted to fight for Prime Video just because it is like, it's another one that is like try harder. Oh no, we took Kindle. God. Yeah, we took Kindle. The amount of money that cost, that taking Kindle has cost us. Good Lord. I mean, it is very funny that we took Kindle and Google check.

That's what we took from those companies. I will say if we want to go back and take Slack and YouTube, we have. a chance. No. We're committed. Is there anything cooler than fixing G-chat? Like, that might be the single most important thing we do at this company. I feel really good about it. I mean, the teens will prefer us for TikTok. That's true. Okay, so we have two more categories, one of which I just changed two minutes ago, and I'm very excited about it. So far, we have the iPhone business from Apple. We have the Kindle business from Amazon, the PC business from Lenovo. We're doing all of meta's wearables. We haven't decided yet for killing the Quest, but we're probably,

killing the quest. We're all in on the smart glasses. We're taking Sony's audio solutions. We're taking Adobe Creative Cloud. We're taking LG Display and we're taking G-chat. Well, we're taking the mess of Google's messaging systems, which I think actually probably means we hire most of Google because everybody's working on messaging and one way or another. And we're making G-chat. And then we are saving America and taking over TikTok. How do we feel so far? Feel good? Just how many rules? I feel like I really feel like it does. Lenovo is still very much the like weird. one out, but we're going to make Lenovo cool again. It's going to be great. Yeah, we'll fix it. Okay, so we have two left, which one is wildcard gadgets, which is, I think the rules still apply,

so we can't take from a company we've already taken from, but we can take from any category, including categories we have not talked about. So it's some other product that Vergecast, Inc. is going to make that is not off limits because we've already taken from another company. We can do TVs. This is where we take the cyber truck, if we want to take the cyber truck. anything you guys want. Any initial thoughts, anything you're excited about? Well, so this is where I was kind of back into taking LG's TVs. Okay. Too late. But then we already have LG display. I think this is better. We have the part of the business that's like good and not the part of the business that is webOS.

I feel really good about LG display and not LG TVs. Have you guys heard of a company called Stores and Bickle? Is this how we get into like bespoke whiskey? No, this is how we get in. We just get the volcano. They make a whole bunch of different vapes. We just get the volcano business. Okay. And then we like, we make one that looks really, really cool. We put a big screen on it.

We put some big speakers on the side. Just a whole one-stop party business. It's just for Alex Kranz. It was just, you know, legalization is coming for this country. We got to be there at the start. I'm not feeling that. I got to tell you. No.

I just feel like if we were in this till 2040. Yeah, that makes sense. I'd be down. 2030 feels iffy. And that's just like a lot of legislation stuff. All right. I'm just, I'm throwing this out there. The Nvidia shield.

We didn't do Individa, did we? We took LG display over Invidia's GPU business. We're doing really well. This gets us the Tigra. Yeah. Why this? Because I think between Kranz and I, we can communicate with an audience of TV. We can bring the shield back to prom.

This is a try harder move. Look, if you look on the forums right now, people are like, the shield isn't it anymore. That's true. And it was for a long time. There's a lot of people who are like, what you want to do is run infuse on Apple TV. And I think that's a shame. Interesting. Yeah, we're not getting infuse.

Do we want to get into the car business is my big question here. No, because to be a successful carmaker, you got to make a shoe. You got to make a mid-sized crossover. And that's just not for us. Okay. But again, we would take all the infrastructure required to do it. So we'd be up and running making Kia Forte as tomorrow. We're not buying Kia.

We're not. We're just taking the Forte. I was like, I don't want any part of the Kia Hyundai business. They keep that. Eli, you don't want the Mustang Maki. This is your moment. Take the Maki E, man. It's a shoe.

I'm just telling you. I'm not making a mid-sized crossover. No, thank you. Like, if you're going to let me be crazy about it, you know, what's good nuts. But I don't, that business is too, too whack-a-do. I talk to a lot of Carseos. They're all insane. Like, that's what will tear us apart.

Okay. Wait, I thought of it. Okay. Samsung's barely a live digital camera business. Oh, I like getting a. to the camera business. Oh, and then we can actually make them smartphones, right? Yeah.

We actually take, you do the thing where you make the smartphone mirrorless camera. Exactly. Interesting. Does Samsung still make cameras? Do we want Samsung's though, or do we want like Fuji's X100 business? Yeah. And then the solution is you just make them. Right.

Make more of them. Let people buy them who would like them. I like that. I like taking a camera. That's actually a great idea. Yeah. And then we fix the software so that it like doesn't take you 12 hours just to change a setting? Yeah, Sony cameras, but with menus that humans beings can navigate.

Yeah. But I do think Fuji is like a good, in terms of wild card gadget for our brand, especially. And then we do like a limited release of the iPhone and the Fuji and they have like the same look to them. We'd sell a lot of money. That's pretty good. All right. So we're taking, we're taking Fugis X100. Yeah. Yeah. I like it. And then last category, the one I just added a minute ago, I had another non-gadget wildcard, but I think that's boring. So what we're going to do instead is we're going to buy a startup. Yeah, I know my answer right away. Really?

I really hope it's the same one. It's Rivian. Oh, so you want to get into the car business? Yeah, yeah, yeah, because they don't make a shoe. They also famously lose all the money in the world. Sure, but 55%. I can fix it. If you want a Rivian, you have to buy an iPhone.

Rivians are now in-app purchases on iPhones. 55%. What about like, we could get SSI. We could have like just the AI guy. This is one guy? We're already. I mean, in that case, is open AI still a startup? Because that would be another.

I was just about to say, I think open AI counts. But you want something, you want like a startup. You want like an earthy. So my vote, if we're buying an AI company, I want to buy Anthropic. Yeah. Yeah. Which is, I would say, less valued, but also way less problematic. And they're actually making products, right?

Their product is moving along fast. They're like kind of right in the mix with Google and Open AI. I don't know that I want to deal with the like Sam Altman of it all, if I'm being honest. And a CEO is notoriously difficult to get rid of it. Yeah, exactly. So if we're going AI, and that was one of my instincts, my vote would be anthropic. I also think like a company like Notion would be an interesting one for a spy, potentially a lot of money there. Is Notion a startup?

They've been around for a long time. This gets us into like what is a startup zone? Yeah. Like is Stripe still a startup? they're doing pretty well. I like the idea of Anthropic, though. Like, that is firmly a startup. Yeah, Anthropic counts, I think.

Like, Rivian has factories. Is that a startup when it has factories? Fair. It is just pretty much a car company. But, Nilai, the problem is if we buy Rivian, we have six years to convince you to make a shoe. We will convince you to make a shoe. Look, the R3X is very close to a shoe,

but it's a cool shoe. That's all I got for you. So, okay, the other. question is do we want to be in the AI game? Like are we? No. We don't need a move. Not really. Because then we have to do with copyright stuff. Neely's got a lot of blogs he's going to have to write already. Like apology blogs. I don't we don't need more. Yeah, Neely is definitely the one testifying in Congress, right? We're all on the same page about that. Yeah. I have several other options for you. Can I throw some options at you? I love an option. We could buy DJI, another company that might

need some saving in America that does some interesting stuff. But not a startup. So you, this is not just companies we could buy. Is it not a startup? It's super not a startup. Yeah, you're probably right. Okay, fine. That doesn't count. There's the like Canvas and Figmas of the world that also are kind of iffy on whether

they're startups. But like if we're in the creator world with Creative Cloud, we fold that in. The FTC won't allow it. Yeah. These aren't the rules. Canva is 10 years old and has a $26 billion value. It's just like not a startup. Like you want to go, you do you need some installer shit.

Like what's some like weird two person app? Oh, interesting. Let's get carrot. Does Discord count? No. Not a startup. If Rivian isn't a startup, none of these other things are startups that you're mentioning. Okay.

Fair enough. I think Anthropic is the best idea I have. Yeah. Anthropic is good. I think I'm buying Anthropic. It's like, we're going to like run them off to the side, though. Mm-hmm. We're going to sort of Instagram Anthropic where it's like, you do your thing.

And if you become really successful, we'll ruin it for you eventually. Yeah. But until then, like, you're kind of, this is like your problem. And like if you get in trouble, that's your, you're, problem and not ours. We're going to call them like the moonshot factory or whatever. Well, I think just having them collab on making Siri not suck would be like huge. Yeah. Oh yeah, because we do need Syria to not suck. That's pretty important. Big, big change for us. Okay. All right. Anthropic it is. Welcome to the team.

Anthropic people. How do you feel about party speakers, Anthropic? How can you make AI accelerated? Make these LEDs blink smarter than ever. We have a lot of audio solutions that are ready for you. Okay, I feel like we've done this. Can I recap for you? Yes. At Vergecast Incorporated, here are the things that we make now. We have the iPhone business. We have the Kindle business and all that that entails.

Lenovo PCs are now Vergecast PCs. Meta's whole wearables thing, the Quest and the Rayband Smart Glasses. That's us now. Sony's audio solutions, headphones, party speakers, the whole jam. That's ours now. Yes. Adobe Creative Cloud is our big software app platform. play.

LG display is now ours. We are, we are just fabbing it up for everybody. If you want a TV, hit up the Vergecast. I love this. That feels right. We are taking over

all of Google's messaging shenanigans and turning them into G-chat, which might be the single hardest thing we've signed ourselves up for here. This is what kills us. I want to be clear. That's right. It's like the guitarist and the singer

start arguing a little bit and then Oasis breaks up. That's messaging. Yeah. Uh-huh. Joe Biden just gave us TikTok. Congrats to us. big day. We now have Fuji Films X100 business and Anthropic is now part of a Vergecast incorporated.

How do we feel? This feels good. This feels great. This is the right combo of things. We're doing a little bit of good. We're doing a little bit more evil. We're making some money and then we're going to fix messages. We are incredibly deep into hardware. Like my only worry is like should we not have done LG display and pick something that is more like cloud software AI. No, no, no. Because if we own the hardware, then they all have to do. We done AI. We got Anthropic. Yeah. We got Anthropic in the iPhone. We we have all the power. And Anthropic is like their whole thing is they want to be like a B2B thing. So that's that could eventually pay dividends for us. And we have most of Google because we acquired all of Google messaging. Yeah. And we're we're just printing money on increasing creative cloud fees.

Yeah. Just to be clear. Right. Microsoft is going to be paying so much money for their creative cloud. I think there's money to be had. Again, TikTok's business model is, they pirate content. What are we going to do with the TikTok shop? What's our first move with the TikTok shop? Oh, we are 55%. Yeah. Straight up.

You want to transact in the TikTok shop? We're taking the fees. Yeah. We just charge outrageous fees there, except for our own products. In which case we give them, we don't charge a fee at all. Oh, yeah.

The self-preferencing is going to be out of control on all of these. Like, do you want good Photoshop? You have to use RX100 camera. Otherwise, you get bad Photoshop. Really sorry. This is actually great. It's like, why do you?

these companies act like this and we're pretending we run the company and we're like we're going to be so evil we started out trying to do a good job and now we're just the most evil Lena con just waiting behind us all right now yeah all right well I think we've solved it I feel like there's we're we're easily a trillion dollar company right off the bat here immediately our website is going to be sick by the way yeah that's very important to me we're going to give all our products cool names and our website is going to be so tight with like a good understandable URL scheme these are the things I care about. I'm going to run the naming of everything.

You guys can run the company. But I'm in charge of names. The speakers will like have real names. Yeah. More letters. I continue to say this. There's only one solution. But it's,

but it's, I think it's right. It's no more numbers. It's just all letters. And you have to guess what the letters mean. Because they're in no order. It's just consonants. And you have to guess.

That's all of our products from now on. I love it. I'm very excited. And I promise the people, Megabase is coming back. Oh, absolutely. Megabase is coming to many new products. We have new places to put megabase.

The iPhone is going to have a hardware megabase button. We're going to rattle your head off with the smart glasses with megabase. We will give you and solve your migraines all of once. G-chat, megabase. Every time you type, just a... All right, well, it's been an honor. Thank you for joining this company with me. This is wonderful.

This is going to be a wild six years. Yeah. We're going to make so much money. Panos have fun. And then go to jail. No, Panos goes to jail. We're out. We're out. Lena Khan, you know how to reach us.

Yeah. All right. Thank you guys. We'll do this again soon. Thank you. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to Neela and Alex for doing this weird thing with me.

And thank you, as always, for listening. As you can tell, we have a lot of thoughts on all this. But I want to hear yours, too. We're going to put some links in the show notes to coverage we've done of these companies. But I really want to know what you think. What did we pick wrong? What did we pick right? What would you have picked differently?

How would you build your tech company? You can always email. us at Vergecast at theverge.com. Call the hotline 866, Verge11. Tell us all your thoughts on Vergecast, Inc. If you have thoughts on anything else, hit up the hotline, send us an email. We love hearing from you. This show is

produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Por. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Nelai, Alex and I will be back on Friday to talk about all of the upcoming news. There's a lot of gadgets about to come. Plus some more weirdness in the AI world and lots more.

We'll see you then. Rock and roll. Thank you.