The Vergecast - Truth and AI in Minneapolis

Episode Date: January 27, 2026

Like so many others, we’re still reeling from the killing of Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. To open the show, we talk with Adi Robertson about how videos of the incident moved around social platforms, how even well-intentioned people got confused by AI imagery, and what we’ve learned about the state of misinformation. Then Adi explains the new TikTok, which is both the same and very different from the old TikTok. The newly US-centric version of the app has had some switching pains so far, and the changes may only be just beginning. After that, it’s time for a hard pivot, as Vulture’s Nick Quah joins the show to talk about Netflix’s entry into podcasts — and whether what Netflix is doing can even be called “podcasts” anymore. Finally, David answers an old Vergecast Hotline question that got him thinking about all the ways we hold our phones to make calls, and which one is the best.  Further reading: It doesn’t matter if Alex Pretti had a gun The day of the second killing TikTok USA is broken Everything (Including Netflix) Will Become YouTube This Year It’s finally time to retire the word ‘podcast’ Subscribe to The Verge for unlimited access to theverge.com, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ad-free podcast feed.We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Virchcast, the flagship podcast of snow days. I'm your friend David Pierce, and it is, in fact, a snow day here at my house in Virginia. We got like, I don't know, 10 inches of snow maybe over the last 24 hours, which means I have spent a lot of time outside shoveling, only to discover that my back and my legs are just pathetically weak. It also means I've been indoors with my two small children for just an unbelievably long time. We're all getting through it. It's going to be okay. to everyone who is in the path of the storm over the last few days,

I hope everyone's doing okay. I hope everyone's doing okay for a lot of reasons. There's a lot going on right now. I hope everybody's staying safe and doing as well as you can. Anyway, today on the show, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. So weird episode of the Vergecast just is what it's going to be. First, Addy Robertson is going to come on, and we're going to talk a little bit about what happened in Minneapolis

with Alex Pready this weekend. An awful story about a man who was killed by ICE agents. The story is horrific. sad. We've been covering it. Everybody has been covering it. I hope you're paying attention to it. And Adi and I are going to try to talk a little bit about how we experience things like this online and what we're supposed to do about it. We're also going to talk about the new TikTok, which both is part of that story and is just changing a lot on its own. The TikTok deal is done. We're going to talk about what happens next. After that, we're going to do just a full 90 degree context switch,

and we're going to talk about podcasts. So Netflix has started doing podcasts. It's signed these big deals with these big podcasts. And all of a sudden, I open up the Netflix app and there's podcasts. And if that's not a PhD thesis in what is a podcast, I don't know what it is. So Nick Kwa, who writes for New York Magazine and is one of my favorite people to talk to about podcasts, it's going to come on the show and help me make sense of all of it. We also have a really fun question about phone calls on the broadcast hotline. Lots to get to. It's going to be great. But first, my kids are upstairs and I have to go tell them to stop talking. That's literally what it is. Sometimes people are like, David, do you make up things that you do? But no, you can

probably hear my kids banging around upstairs. One of them needs a nap. One of them needs lunch. We got a lot going on. I'm going to go deal with it and then we're going to do this. 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, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data and your cloud with enterprise security built in.

Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up y'all? I'm Skyler Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, And 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.

And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients. ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938. This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. All right, we're back. Addy Robertson's here. Hi, Adi.

Hi. How you doing? It's been a few days for all of us. Yeah. It's been a few days. No signs of letting up. Yeah. So I think I want to not spend a ton of time on sort of the facts of what happened in

Minnesota because we've covered them a lot. The facts are are straightforward and horrific and and what is happening with with ICE and in Minneapolis. It's awful across the board. For our purposes here, I want to talk a lot about the way that information moves on the internet because there's a version of this story that we cover over and over and over when something like this happens. And I think we've seen this evolve and we've seen this change and we've seen the way that things get recorded and discussed and documented and talked about, and this feels different to me in a way that I have struggled to put my finger on. And I'm curious if you've been watching this as closely as anybody, does it feel like something different has happened here over the last few days with the Alex Pretty story

than has happened before? I feel like in some ways it's an evolution of what's been happening in Minneapolis over the last several weeks. I think you have just this weird, first of all, kind of right-wing creator economy that's merged with the government. And so right from the start, you have like the ICE agent in Renee Goods killing allegedly, having a holding a cell phone, but then you also have just this huge number of observers. Like I think that obviously documenting law enforcement killings is absolutely nothing new, but I think that at this point now, it's something happens, a video goes up, and then you wait for the second and third and fourth angle. And I think that's kind of just this absolute omnipresence that feels, I think, new to this end for

the last few weeks. Yeah, I do think, I was trying to think about that even how it has changed since Renee Good was killed. And it does feel like one big difference with this one was that it was so much more kind of closely documented, right? Like the Renee Good thing, we spent endless hours litigating like the way the wheels of the car were turning in the way that this was just a video of a bunch of people on the street. And I think over and over the course of even like the first couple of hours after this happened, it felt like we got sort of clearer and clearer video and better and better angles of the video. And it was just this thing became well and authoritatively documented faster than anything like this, I can imagine. I mean, in a lot of ways, it was, yeah,

it was, I mean, a really graphic incident among other things. But I also think it's not just the actual video evidence. I think that to some extent, people have kind of learned that the debate in Renee Goods' killing was really overwhelmingly bad faith. And I think that the odds of getting caught in a discourse trap where you just endlessly litigate, well, did he have a gun? Did he have a gun? Did he pull it? Did he threaten with the gun? Did someone feel threatened by the gun? I think that people, at least some people were maybe a little bit primed to just realize that's a trap. Yeah. And I mean, it is a trap. And I think, I do think everybody fell into that trap again. But is, is there, there has been this.

turn very quickly where a lot of people are like, and Sarah John wrote a very good piece for us about this that is basically like, it actually doesn't matter. All this stuff you're saying is not a relevant part of the debate that we're having. But the flip side of this video thing that I was so struck by is we've reached this place where all of this stuff is being increasingly well documented, right? And I think the folks in Minneapolis have clearly made an effort to document these things. Like this is being done on purpose. And I think that's really good. And yet at the same time, The engine to either discredit what is being documented or ignore it entirely or modify it with AI is also spinning up at equally record speed. Charlie Worssel, who you and I both wrote a very good piece for The Atlantic, and I think his headline was Believe Your Eyes.

And I came out of that piece being like, yes, that's true, except you can't believe your eyes. because we've hit this thing where the minute something is documented, that same minute, it can be changed in any number of infinite ways. And it feels like the systems by which that is happening are getting sophisticated at unbelievable speeds. And I just, I don't know how to reckon with that anymore. It's really hard for me to tell because on one hand, yeah, there are just all of these cases in which AI has made reporters lives harder. I think the incident with a sensible drive, like the guy who worked for the food delivery. service that made up this entire AI generated document that Casey Newton posted about. Like, I think those things are definitely examples of just how this can be really troublesome.

But on the other hand, like as a bunch of us were watching this pretty much as it unfolded, it's actually in a lot of cases not that hard if you are used to paying attention to the provenance of images and to documenting like how things spread through systems and to kind of recognizing where is a credible source and where isn't, but I think in a lot of cases it's not actually that hard to tell what's real. And it's also been a little bit striking to me that the rebuttals that the administration has tried to offer in both Renee Goods and this latest killing have been really at least at first not AI manipulated things.

The initial response from the White House with Renee Good was just this one selective angle that they had found that they hung all of their hopes on. And then the first response here was the picture of the gun that they had been claiming they confiscated. And so then while all of this stuff does kind of just really spiral out and I think become a huge problem, I think it does so in kind of weird ways and also in ways that haven't compromised the fundamental ability to at least kind of establish that something is happening. It's funny that a lot of the examples we've seen of AI-generated misinformation have been sort of. sort of well-meaning, for lack of a better word examples. Like the idea is that you're attempting to enhance these things, that you're attempting to uncover stuff. You're not actually trying to

change the story. You are at least purporting to be trying to help. And this also happened with Charlie Kirk's alleged killer. So it's interesting that I think the AI saga has not quite played out the way that the most obvious versions of it could. Yes. I mean, and I think this is one of the reasons I'm so caught up in trying to figure out how to feel about this. Like the, I sent you this one image that has been all over my timeline for the last couple of days. And it's a, it's a photo of three agents next to Alex Prattie, who is, he's kind of in the middle of falling down. And the three agents are, one is kneeling and the other two are standing over him. And I have seen this particular image, A, everywhere, and B, used to make a variety of different arguments.

on either side of the case about what actually happened and who's at fault and the problem's here. Except the problem is this image that is being shared everywhere is essentially, like you said, an AI enhanced still from a video that doesn't show what the video seems to be showing. And there are a bunch of fascinating AI angles in this. You look at this image and actually one of the agents' head has been replaced by a hand. that because it looks like the agent's standing is sort of reaching his arm down and it looks like he just squashed the other agent's head down into his jacket. Alex Preddy, if you look at this image appears to be holding a gun, he's not.

He wasn't. We know these things. The video shows that he was disarmed before he was pushed down on the ground before he was shot. But it looks like he's holding a gun. And you can see why Gemini, in looking at this image, would take a blurry object in his hand and turn it into a gun, right? And I, this is just such a bizarre piece of this to me, because again, I think you're right. It's, you could go into this process with only the best intentions to say, I want to make this image better because I want to understand what's in it and give it to a tool that you don't fully understand because hardly anybody fully understands what's happening here. And then this comes out. And actually all of your sort of reasonable good faith incentives would be to believe what this image is, even though absolutely everything about it is wrong. And I think like you say it's easy to establish provenance and stuff like that, but I just think most people's experience is to sort of drop into a story like this somewhere in the middle and then winding your way all the way back to the beginning when it was obvious what was what just feels harder than ever. Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's also really frustrating that nobody has really established a social way to deal with AI as a stereotype machine and what it does is give you the most plausible narrative.

outcome, which is a stereotype. Because this has been going on for ages, that people have been enhancing images in ways that distorted them using more primitive AI tools, using non-commercial AI tools, just for years and years now. We've had years of knowing this happened. And really, nobody who is in a state to do anything about it, I think, has actually taken this seriously enough. Yeah.

What do you make of kind of the more universal? outcry against this. We've been tracking this a lot and I think a lot of creators we have not talk about this kind of thing directly, have been talking about this directly. There was like every subreddit on Reddit, this became a huge thing. It just feels, again, to go back to the like information moving differently question. I don't know if there's a dam that broke here or if this was finally the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, or if there's something about the particulars of this case that just made it feel different to anyone paying attention to it. But I don't know, does that feel different to you that

this has reached a different sort of scale of conversation in places you would not necessarily expect? Honestly, I think that Renee Goetz killing to some extent kind of had already done part of this, but it's possible it's the damn breaking. It's also, look, it's, they shot a man execution style in the middle of the street. Yeah. That's just a really striking image. and we watched it. Again, I really do think going back and watching the Renee Good videos, it is so much less visible what's happening.

It's just so much, you understand what's happening, but this was visceral in a way that I had not experienced with most of these other things. And it really, we still as a society, I think, have not reckoned with the fact that these videos just appear. You just open an app and they're just there. Like a lot of us just watched someone get murdered

by accident this weekend. What a bizarre experience that I don't know how to sort through that at all. Yeah. I mean, this is just this is something I've been doing for a really long time. And I do think that it's probably not good for other people to do. I don't think it's good for anybody to do, including you, but it's, I'm glad you're here to do it for us. Okay. So I think this is a thing we should talk a lot more about, but I actually want to like wait a minute because there's, there's a lot happening and we will we will come back to this. I think it is unfortunately pretty implicated in the story that we are about to talk about. Yes. And this is why I want to transition to this. I should say all of our thoughts are with everybody in Minneapolis.

This is, it's awful out there for a lot of people right now. We should talk about the new TikTok because I think this is a part of this story and there are real parallels or intersections of this that I think are really interesting. So the news of last week was that the long, awaited, long complicated TikTok deal is finally done. TikTok US has new ownership and new investors and a whole new plan. What do you make of where this landed? Is this roughly the TikTok US we've been expecting all this time? I think we don't know yet. The primary reason being that the entire thing the supposedly hinges on is data collection and the algorithm. And data collection, no one, I think, has established a really amazing way to say more than trust me at this point yet.

And the algorithm has not even been deployed yet. Right. So the changing that is supposed to happen here, as I understand it, right, is there's new leadership. Adam Presser is now the CEO of TikTok US. There are a bunch of new board members. There's still some connection to TikTok global. Shuzi Chu, the CEO is still, I think he's on the board of directors, right? Yeah.

Yeah. But the thing is supposed to be split off in a couple of meaningful ways. Like you said, the algorithm is supposed to be trained on and using and only concerned with U.S. user data. And then the data privacy of it all is supposed to be changed in some meaningful, important way. And like you said, this has been a black box for forever, right? Like TikTok has been making grand promises about transparency and data privacy and stuff for years now. Project Texas was supposed to be this thing. Right.

This Oracle deal is since 2020. Yeah. And so do you think we're at least on a path to knowing more? Like, what would it take to have some real certainty here? Is it a question I increasingly find myself asking? I think in a lot of ways that depends on what we find out about the good faith of the people who own it now. I really think that there's been a lot of parsing of, say, the terms and conditions, which now allow for some more precise data collection and some other things.

And I think people are reasonable to be worried about the things that we're being told. and to be parsing these things closely. But I think a lot of the problem is like just look at the X roadmap. Like I think X is sort of the worst case scenario for what we see with TikTok now. And it was not a case where they made all of these like changes that you could document in public. It was just a case where they slowly started doing things behind the scenes and because Musk can't stop talking about them. A lot of them came out. But I think that I think it's just become way more of a black box because now there is virtually,

virtually no accountability for it. Yeah, what do you make of this terms of service thing? I think one of the most predictable things that happens whenever a deal like this goes through is everybody reads the terms of service of the app for the first time and is incredibly alarmed by all of the things in it. This happens on Instagram all the time every once in a while somebody posts the terms of service and I was like, oh my God, can you believe they take all this information from me?

And in this case on TikTok, it was the phrase, let's see, it said that it was going to collect information about, quote, your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status is transgender or non-binary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information. I would say A, it's important to note that this was already present in the terms of service. This does not appear to be a new thing under this group. There are a couple of new things. TikTok now seems to have access to more precise location and also having some more information about your AI interactions. But that sentence, right, that information is both, again, already in the terms of service,

but also in this new context of TikTok's new owners, who are Oracle and Larry Ellison, who is a very close friend of President Trump, and, you know, these other investors and the people on the board, they take on, I think, reasonably, if not accurately, new meaning for people. Do you make anything out of people being worried by this? Are they right to be worried by this? I think people are, again, not so much the language, which I think is like I fully support people looking at it and trying to change it. But I think people are right to be worried about the ownership. People are right to be worried about the fact that if TikTok does something to abuse people's trust, there's going to be no regulation or meaningful consequences for it. I think that people are right to be worried about the fact that now also the sort of circles that Larry Ellison is in are extremely gung-ho about censors. in the actual government censorship sense of taking down things that are critical of, I mean, Charlie Kirk and are critical of DHS and ICE. I think that we should just recognize that the intent of the people who own TikTok and the intent of the people that they are working with has become somewhat dramatically different. Yes.

And I think this is a really interesting one in the case of, who the old owners were versus who the new owners are, right? The old owners, everybody was afraid of China. China is sort of the big bad in this story, right? And there was this intelligence briefing a long time ago where a bunch of senators came out and voted 50 to zero to ban TikTok. So it's like, okay, well, clearly they must have seen something. We were never told what it was.

There's some inclination that it has to do with what's happening in Gaza, that there's just a lot of stuff that we don't know. but there has been this running undercurrent of what if China is changing what we see on TikTok to its own ends. That was always very abstract. And whether it was real or not, we genuinely don't know. There are people who probably do, but we don't. This feels, again, in keeping with all of the other stuff that we've seen and what's happened to Twitter and X, and you can see what that turn would look like in this case, right?

with these new owners, with their, you know, proximity to the Trump administration, with the way that information has moved on the internet the last few days with Alex Pretty's story, you can see where this might go. And I think to me, the biggest question is the best case scenario here is TikTok remains TikTok, right? Like it is roughly still the experience that people have, you know, liked it to be for a very long time. just with the data centers are now in California instead of in China. Sure. The good case scenario is capitalism works.

The capitalism works the way that people talk about capitalism being supposed to work, which is you want to make money, you want to run a good service, you want to run a service that appeals to everyone. And that's great, but you, again, like look at X. X does not make a ton of sense from a standard free market capitalist perspective. But it solves a different problem for a very, rich person, right? And that's exactly where I was going is, I think as you look at the capitalism works version of the outcome here versus the, this is a means to a different kind of end.

Maybe it's the cynic in me at this point in the technological history that we're covering, but it feels like if I had to bet on an outcome, I'm betting on it turning into X much more than it turning into the beautiful capitalistic utopia. We hope it might be. Yeah, I think a lot of it, I think that that's, I mean, at this point, probably what I would peg is the most likely outcome. I think the other outcome is that a lot of people are very responsive to vibes. And I think that even people who are not, who are like very willing to throw conventional capitalism out the window are like, well, will people not like me? Will this go against like culture? Will this put me on sort of the wrong side of the winning angle in politics? And I think that is probably the. thing that could stop someone at this point. Like, I don't know. Mark Zuckerberg is maybe the other example of like Mark Zuckerberg is someone. I don't really know what his actual political convictions are, but he very definitely has occupied different roles and very dramatically different styles of operating his company, depending on which way the winds are blowing. Yeah. In a strange way,

being a moving target like that is kind of useful in the long run for somebody like Mark Zuckerberg. But one thing I wonder in this case is how will people know whether it's changing? I think, you know, there was this weird change that happened this weekend after the change went through where as far as we can tell. And according to TikTok's own explanations, there has been some big power outage which screwed up the algorithm in some way. And everybody's TikTok experience was just broken. and there was a sense of like, okay, this is different and bad. But if we take TikTok at its word and it was just because a thing got turned off that needed to be turned back on again, do you have a sense of how we will know what is and isn't changing?

Because I think, again, you look at X and it was very obvious what was happening because, like you said, Elon Musk just kept saying it out loud, right? Like, you spend four minutes on X and it is blindly obvious what that place is. Is TikTok likely to go the same way if it goes the same? same way? I don't know about the early transition period because the other early transition period at X was just they like fired everyone and started randomly unplugging servers. And I don't know if there's that level of enthusiasm for just weird doge style chaos among like Silver Lake and Oracle. But in the longer term, TikTok has always, I think, been one of the most frustrating black boxes in terms of social media platforms and social media

and platforms in general. It's been a really huge issue that they have very quick like just gradually retired all of the tools that allow you to actually see into them and that this is a thing that academics have been asking about for a long time. And it's, again, we failed to fix something and now it's blowing up in our faces in the worst possible way. But I do think that the academics that have not been fired as part of the Trump administration purge are probably going to do a good job in some ways of testing how things work out. I think those are probably the people we want to look for. I think that while again, I find it eminently believable, they will change

things. People have pointed out, there is a huge incentive as a creator to claim that you are being censored and to interpret things in the most dramatic way possible. So I think that we're also just going to see a lot of noise in the signal. Yeah. Do you think politically this saga is over? Does this satisfy the many back and forths of what the ban is and is not that we've had over six years now? In terms of the letter of the law, well, they haven't got a new algorithm yet, which was the whole point of this thing. And I think there are other, Lauren has a good piece about just lawmaker responses. They are not terribly happy about this. In terms of there being the political will to actually make a big deal out of it, we've had a year or more and it hasn't happened. So I'm not sure that now that the deal is closed and it would be even harder to do something that people are going to suddenly wake up.

So I don't know. I think the saga probably isn't politically over in that there's still a lot to do. And that managing a very large social media platform that is working with another large social media platform that is the same thing but run by different people is difficult. And that if they start politically messing with it, that's going to be a whole other story. I think we've just opened like a whole other can of worms. We've just finished this one part of the saga and now there are many directions that could be. go. Yeah. And I suspect you're right and I think it's going to be one of those things that is very obvious in retrospect, how it turned out. You know what I mean? When we write the history books about all of it, it will know. But I think the, I'm just fascinated by what the day-to-day experience of being on TikTok is going to be like. Because there's going to be a brief period where I think it's just objectively worse because it's going to, if this new algorithm is going to exist, these things take time. It's going to be different. It's going to feel bad to people. The experience will just sort of meaningfully change in some way, even if it's not better or worse, it just will be different.

And then after that, all bets are off. I have no idea where it goes from here. But I think the idea of TikTok remaining TikTok just with better data privacy feels essentially impossible to me at this moment at time. I think the other thing that's going to be interesting to watch is just how much pressure the administration puts on TikTok. talk. Like we already, again, with Charlie Kirk and with earlier IHS operations, we saw all of, we saw lawmakers, we saw the DOJ, we saw other officials trying to just get companies to take things down. We've seen the, this framing of any accountability for any individual officer being described as doxing. That's why we don't really know anything about the people who killed Alex Pretty. I think that the odds that they're going to see. this is a friendly platform and try to shut down the spread of things that they don't like on it feels just inevitable, whether or not it actually happens. Agreed. All right. Well, we will see there's a lot left to come back to here, unfortunately.

But for now, thank you, Addy. I appreciate you coming on. We're going to take a rake, and then we're going to just aggressively contact switch. We'll be right back. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work.

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But we're just going to do two different things on this show. And we're going to have a lot more to say about what's going on in Minneapolis. Our team is doing really great coverage from on the ground and from afar. There's just a lot of good stuff out there. And I will do my best here to link you to it and to bring people on who can talk about it. But keep your eyes on the site. The story's moving really fast. We will cover it as we can. This is what you subscribe to The Verge for, by the way. Like if you subscribe to the Verge, do it knowing that it lets us do this kind of coverage the way that we do it. And I'm really proud of our team.

So all that to say, full on, let's go do something else now. So I had this very strange experience a few weeks ago where I sat down to watch Netflix and all of a sudden I was confronted with a podcast I've been listening to for years. So Bill Simmons is a sports podcaster and was a sports writer for a long time. Has a very famous sports podcast. He's a big deal. I've been listening to for many years and I had just a true. really bizarre experience of being confronted by his face just like this on my screen as I sat down to watch television.

And I had this moment of being like, is this the end of podcasts? And I don't mean that in a sort of bleak way. I just mean we've always had delineations of where things are and what they are and different formats and different kinds of things. And I think if you ask somebody, what is a TV show? And then you ask them, what is a podcast? I think you would be able to intellectually understand the difference between those two things. And now it feels to me like all of that stuff is crashing into each other on Netflix, literally and figuratively crashing into each other on Netflix. So I called up Nick Kwa, who's one of my favorite people to talk about this with. He is a critic and staff writer.

He writes for Vulture and New York Magazine, our sister publication here at Box Media. He's also just been covering podcasts longer than just about anybody and knows this space super well. So whenever I have feelings about podcasts that I need to talk through, I like to do it with Nick. And that is exactly what we did here. Let's get into it. Nick Kwot, welcome back to the Vergecast. Oh, my pleasure. It's an honor.

One of the older podcasts in the world, I love it. It does feel like every day that goes by that we continue to make new episodes, we become one of the oldest still running podcasts. You live in new day every day. You too are becoming older. It's beautiful. So I like to bring you here whenever weird stuff. that I don't understand is happening in the podcast business and try to make you explain it to me.

And right now the weird thing that is happening in the podcast business is Netflix, just kind of writ large. And there are two different pieces of the puzzle that I want to talk to right now. There's Netflix paying a bunch of money to companies like Barstool and The Ringer and IHeart to bring video podcasts onto Netflix. And then there's Netflix starting to make its own original video podcasts. And I think those are sort of overlapping, but kind of different things. And I want to talk about them both. But my first question for you is, if I remember correctly, the last time I talked, you were kind of ambivalent about the idea of podcasts becoming a video forward medium.

Since the last time we talked, if anything, it has become an even more video forward medium. How are you feeling about the world of video podcasts these days? Oh, you know, I'm feeling, you know, inevitability, right? We live in a world of incentives, motivations, and metrics, and the incentives and metrics are such that everything in the media business and the internet digital media business is oriented around video being a really fast highway to growth or to getting, you know, and to getting more audiences between video's ability to travel on social media a little better,

get in front of more people, in theory, you know, trickle them down the funnel. And video's ability to make sense to more places in the entertainment ecosystem that makes a lot of money. So, you know, I feel what I'm feeling. How I'm feeling is irrelevant to the way the world works. But very much so. Right now, January 2026, I would say that the bulk of the energy around podcasting is around it sort of, you know, pivot towards videos. It's not pivot. It's complete.

But I would also say that there's now, there should be a real conversation as to like whether we call these things podcasting. right? Whether podcasting has a technical definition or it's more of a conceptual brand definition, because at the same time, while we're talking about Pete Davidson's theoretical video podcasts, that doesn't really have a version that's going to be just audio that you can access it outside of Netflix. You know, there is still kind of an ecosystem of audio like forward and centric podcasts, many of which are independent. Of course, that are still making quite a bit of money and have quite a bit of audience. So there's a bit of a category collapse here. Yeah, one of the trends I have started.

it to find really interesting is I'm starting to see more and more podcasts where the audio episode is still the main thing, right? And often the only way to get the full episode is in audio, but they'll actually record on video just to run social clips. So you can't find the full episode on video anywhere, but you can find tons of social clips. And that to me is like the most perfect acknowledgement of what this is of anything I've ever seen, that it is like, okay, we want to make an audio thing. And I actually really appreciate the idea that audio things are different. Like as this show has become more video based, we do things differently and there are things we don't do now. Right. And that sucks, right? Like, I don't like that. And I think we're still trying

to figure out a way to make that work. But you can make an audio product, but it is just factually true that if you want to find new audiences, the best and in many cases, only way to do it is to make vertical video of your podcast and put it on TikTok. Like, it's just, that just is the way now. But, you know, that is also just like practical, right? Like if it turns out to be the case that video is the best marketing medium, then, yes, engage in a marketing medium, the sort of core product itself, how you make money, how you develop a relationship with an audience, if that is primarily oriented around the set of audio component of it, it makes sense. I was talking to somebody who hosts a show for a very big media company.

I don't think I have the liberty sort of shared details on this. But he was telling me about how he sort of, it kind of feels like there are two timing, two different audiences. and within the round the span of their sort of like episodes that they do, there are some episodes depending on the subject and depending on the guests, it just performs better as a video podcast on YouTube

versus as an audio only onto your RSS feed and it ping pongs back and forth pretty regularly. And the question to me is like how do you sort of square the accounting of that? Like can you make revenue on both sides collectively to actually so much a show? But there is this really strange sense where like a different, like you are serving fundamentally

different audiences using the same vessel and you've got to do it again and again and again and again to somehow make the numbers work. Yeah, I mean, I remember, you know, years ago thinking it was so weird that you could get a 60 Minutes podcast that was literally just the audio feed of 60 minutes. Right. And like some of the CNBC shows have done that. And there is, it is, that's sort of a different container for the same thing, but it is like a fundamentally worse product. Right. But that's also one one of the earliest forms of podcasting was that people's ripped straight from the broadcast of Fox News and throw it on Apple iTunes. Like that was a very, very legitimate way to people engage in podcasting in like the late 2000s, for sure. So funny. And it does, it kind of works. And it works in different ways, right? Like you listen to podcasts in sort of a different mode of consumption generally than you do watching something on TV.

And this is the collapse that you're talking about. Right. Like YouTube in particular now has this idea that it can be all things to all people all of the time. And I think what it's trying to figure out with podcasts is, okay, how do we make something that you can watch actively, listen to, passively, and interact with all at the same time? And I don't know. Are you, do you see shows out there that are doing a really good job of being all of those same things? Because it feels to me like we are still in that phase you're talking about where it feels like I'm either doing one thing at the, the expense of the others, or I'm doing all of them kind of mediocrely. I'm not quite sure that necessarily buy into the premise that it's encouraging shows that are able to do all three at the same time. I think YouTube is, like television, as we know it actually, it has different pockets of content that can hit different kinds of things. So it's also true that television, traditional television, even way back and broadcasts, there are forms of television that exist for you to throw out a background that you don't really look at,

you know? For sure. Yeah. So right now you turn on ESP and you. or you know you can throw on Pat McAfee or something and I don't really want to look at his face and I don't look at his face but like I let it play in the background that's kind of a legitimate way that television exists I think a lot of news programs function that way it's not really a thing to be looked at all the time necessarily is a thing to be glanced at but like the sort of the YouTube component of it is that it's able to hit it has it cultivates an ecosystem where it's able to have all those forms that maybe sort of like efficiently matches and meets audiences that they need the question in Netflix is that like A, it has a much more narrow supply chain, right? It's not user generated. It's not user uploaded. And so it controls the funnel. But also Netflix has a, that's a way that you relate to the UI of it is a lot, has more friction compared to YouTube in terms of getting from one show to the next.

But there's also, I mean, the sort of larger question about podcasting here is that it really does feel like we have two kinds of podcasts now, right? You have podcasts as we know it. That's like you and I talking to each other. maybe most people listen to this as an audio show. Some of it will interact. Some audiences will interact over YouTube. Maybe some people interact over social. And then there's like cheap television.

And that is, I think, Netflix's play around podcasts or video podcast with the deals that have been signing with the Ringer, Iron Media, Barstool. Many of those shows visually are uninteresting. But they can get to a point where it is meeting, you know, access cable or something like that. And then there is this sort of Pete Davidson and Michael Irvin show, this original Netflix podcast, which, you know, if you're being really uncharitable, it, some, you know, we don't know if it's actually going to be released as an audio show outside of Netflix, but I don't know if they're going to use like union labor to make those shows.

Does it mean it's a cheaper way to make television? That's another aspect of this conversation. That's really important. So cheaper, yes. And also, um, this is going to sound less charitable than I mean it worse. Yes. Sorry. I should have been so emphatic. Sure. I mean, I think one of the things that is so striking to me about this whole change is, I think, everybody involved acknowledges, I think, that this idea of, I love the cheap television is such a good way of putting it, because there is this thing we think of as a talk show, which can actually be very expensive, right?

And there's been a lot of stuff like all the questions. about Stephen Colbert's show being canceled and about the money that it was losing and the benefit that it brings. Like, you can do a thing that kind of feels like a podcast in that it's two people talking in a way that is really expensive. And you can also do it in a way that's really cheap where it's just two people talking. And I think especially now that we have all of this experience watching people on webcams talk to each other, in part because of like the experience we all had during the pandemic and in part because of what podcasts have become. But like I now, I think about this all the time that like I listen to and watch John Stewart's podcast all the time.

And it occurred to me relatively recently that I don't experience John Stewart differently when he's sitting on the daily show set, which is like beautiful and cared for and he's wearing makeup and it's a whole thing versus his podcast shot, which he's like, he's too close to the camera. The camera's not very good. He's kind of looking up at it every time. But it's like that's still John Stewart. I don't, I don't experience those two people differently. And I think if I'm Netflix or any of these other companies. I'm looking at this being like, why in God's name am I spending all of this money on the set and the makeup and the crew and the whole thing when actually all I need is John Stewart and a webcam? Exactly. And that's the machine logic of how Netflix would approach

a question, right? Like how do I get the same amount of money, if not more money with by spending less money? And podcasts and this entire sort of growing culture of like, let's call it reduced expectations or labor input is, you know, a big sort of dynamic that we should be sort of thinking about this along these lines? Because you're right. If you don't think about everything else but engagement time, and if you don't think about anything else but, you know, the number of viewers, just the raw singular metric here, then yes, it makes a ton of sense that like we shouldn't really care that we can see John Stewart's nose hair in the visual, right? Like, that's kind of, I mean, and I threw on like the Bill Simmons show in its live broadcast a couple of Sundays

ago after the Golden Globes. And like the visual composition is pretty terrifying. It's two very closed faces of the two sort of shiny, oily, face men looking at me, and I'm like, I feel so, I feel so assaulted right now. But the fact of my nurse is that, like, I left it on because I was going to go to the other room to, like, do stuff anyway, and I could hear their conversation, and that's kind of the way you relate to it. So in the span of, like, Netflix's metrics, there is maybe very little

difference between, you know, time spent watching Southey-Bulls-Simmons podcast or, you know, a John Stewart, you know, podcast situation, versus throwing on four hours of Bridgeton. In some senses, the outcome is the same. They're driving the same metric, which is subscription, and at some point advertising. But you would hope that there's another feedback loop in terms of the actual quality

and the actual sort of care of actually looking at something. But my sense, you know, in whatever late-stage capitalism version of the media economy that we're going through, that kind of stuff is not part of the conversation in terms of what the company thinks he needs to do to survive. It becomes this more of a top-down, I'm making certain aesthetic decisions.

And that disentanglement is a little sort of unnerving in terms of what the rest of us get as consumers. Maybe at some point consumers will reject it if there are sufficient better alternatives out there. But given the way that the economy is shaped right now, given the sort of rapid consolidation of all the options that we have in terms of what to watch and what to consume, it's hard to see it off-frame. Is it surprising to you that Netflix is okay with that version of, of the tradeoff. Netflix doing podcasts, sure, right? For all the reasons

you're just subscribed. Podcasts are a thing you can make a lot of. You can buy a huge library. Netflix loves the kind of shoulder content to other stuff. Netflix doesn't have sports, but it has a lot of sports documentaries,

so it makes sense that it would do sports podcasts. That all seems strategically very straightforward to me. The idea that Netflix was happy to just lift a bunch of videos that people were already making and just drop them as is onto Netflix was very surprising. me for this company that has

infinity money to at least like ship people better cameras. Yeah. Or like tell them what to do. Instead, this company is just happy to take what is essentially user generated content and just pour it all over Netflix. Was that surprising to you? Well, I mean, I think that's a bit of an overstatement of what Netflix is doing,

right? I think they would argue, you know, that is what YouTube is able to do and that's YouTube's like strength position, right? It has a theoretically an infinite pool of people to draw from. Like, it's a constantly replenishing pool of competition. And, you know, if I was putting on my sort of like sicko corporate boy hat, you know, I go like, if I made the argument for Netflix in relation to YouTube here,

Netflix is a curatorial funnel, right? You go to YouTube, the first thing you feel is overwhelmed. You feel overwhelmed with Netflix, but you feel a little less so with YouTube. And Netflix, you know, has for better or worse, by default, sort of a curatorial power. We're going to sign just these three kinds of podcasts first. And we're going to surface it to you. and if you don't know what kind of sports podcast you might want to try out on Apple Podcasts or YouTube come over here, we have five for you to choose from. That itself is a strength.

Whether or not I find it surprising that Netflix deigns to kind of quote-unquote lower its quality threshold. I don't know how you want to phrase it. That to me, it just, that is just strategic logic. You know, that's sort of the end point of a strategic game. And that's, I'm not surprised to see it happen at all. Okay. And I guess it is

to go back to the John Stewart analogy, if you don't, if making it look better doesn't make it better, what's the point of making it look better? A little bit. It's a very strange way of looking at it. It's like, it all feels so sort of nihilist when you think about what we're actually doing and making here. Yeah, you know, we live in nihilistic times, right?

But I guess the question is sort of what is the incentive to go, to do otherwise, right? What are the signals are I reading that will? And so there are a couple of different ways that there's like, that could be a counteracting signal, right? Audiences or some part of consumer base maybe goes, I'm not engaging with that as much as I'm engaging with something that has a higher quality or higher production quality or higher production investments. You know, maybe that tradeoff

you can see numerically works with them. There could be something as simple as like when advertising becomes to be a much bigger play with Netflix. Maybe advertisers prefer one form, maybe a higher, you know, prestige form of the other, maybe certain kinds of coveted advertisers prefer the Oji Daily show version of John Stewart versus, you know, very close up John Stewart. That kind of signal is really important. And as we see Netflix try to expand its live, you know, sports and live programming, that could be a thing that we see as a bit more of a

feedback loop. What are you hearing from podcast people about this? One of the things I've enjoyed the most about this change has been watching all of the people on these podcasts sort of feel the glow up of being on Netflix. There's a real sort of additional prestige

that they all keep like reminding themselves that now we're on Netflix. So theoretically we can be in front of everybody. Which is very funny next to YouTube, which is a vastly bigger and more global audience. The idea of like, now we're on Netflix, so we're mainstream is just a very funny way of thinking about it. But there is this kind of inferred prestige of being on Netflix. Are you seeing that all over the place?

I'm seeing that with Netflix. I'm seeing that with the Golden Glove's best podcast category, which is like completely ludicrous. And it feels like, you know, it feels a little bit like new money, right? Like YouTube's new money. Netflix is kind of representation of the old money. And no matter how rich, how much richer, how much more glitier and abundant new money is, there's always this kind of longing for and resentment against old money.

And I feel that sort of tension and their relationship, both in like how podcasters are talking about Netflix, but also how podcastsers that we're talking about the Golden Globes. Numerically speaking, there's very little to gain from the prestige of being on Netflix. But there is prestige, and prestige is a very human commodity. It's something that we covet. Yeah. Yeah, it's a very odd dynamic that I think the feedback I've seen from a lot of viewers and listeners is like, this is a weird new thing that I have to do.

Already you were telling me that to get the full experience, I had to go from listening to you in my podcast app to listening to you on YouTube or watching you on YouTube. It's changed the show. Things feel different. And now I have to go to this entirely new platform that I have no association with my podcast listening. but all the podcasters are like, yeah, we're on Netflix now. And that's just that, that seems like it goes a very long way. Right. I mean, you could be a substacker and make a lot of money and run around going, I'm on substack. Or you could say, I write for the New Yorker or New York Magazine.

And like, that still matters to some people. And that still opens doors, right? You no matter how much more money you make on substack. And so, like, I think that this is a system replicates over and over again. And I'm sure 10 years down the line, the brand of YouTube might mean. something very different, right? It might be more prestigious, depending on how YouTube plays it, depending how Google plays it. And, you know, we'll see where Netflix ends up if and when, more, I think more of a win at this point when it just Warner Brothers, like how that entire

apparatus transforms the way Netflix thinks about itself. That's another way that I think might alter or shift the way that leadership there thinks about what its incentives are, what it wants. But again, we're sort of like in a, we're in many layers worth of a pivot point right now. This is one of many. Yeah, that's fair. What do you make of the two new shows Netflix is actually commissioning and producing? There's the White House with Michael Irvin, and then there's a Pete Davidson show that I can't remember the name of. It's called the Pete Davidson show. Okay, it's a Pete Davidson show. That's why I couldn't remember the name. What does that tell you about what Netflix is trying to do here? So from a technical definition of standpoint, to be a bit

pedantic, like this is not the first Netflix original podcast. They have made sort of like kind of brand that marketing podcast that's audio only in the past for the past 10 years and it's usually

kind of like supplementary to the shows that they create like Bridgetterne and things like that and you know they're still continuing to make

the official Bridgeterton companion podcast which will also I think be a video podcast but when it comes to so we don't know

a lot right now about the Michael Orvin the White House of Michael Orvin and the P. Dividendant show. We know that

they're branding it as a video podcast that's original to Netflix. We know they're framing it as exclusive to Netflix.

We actually truly don't know if it will be released outside of Netflix non-video, which then really truly challenges the definition technically, the technical definition of what a podcast is. But I think what Netflix is doing there is exactly what we're talking about earlier. It's cheap television, right? I would love to know if actually there's union labor involvement in that. I would love to sort of actually take a look at, you know, when the show premieres next week, how the aesthetic of it looks, right?

Does it look more like Wayne's World? Or does it look more like everybody's life of John Mullaney, which is somewhere in between Wayne's World and, you know, the David Letterman show. And it does, there is this sort of collapse in aesthetic form a little bit in terms of this category of how we think about like what a talk show is. And that further collapse, that further like, you know, playing around with what a talk show could be. It's only to something like Netflix's benefit and it's only to the detriment of the people who made television, I think. Yeah. So can I, can I read you a quote from Ted Saramus on the earnings call.

Netflix just reported earnings for the last quarter. And somebody asked him about podcasts, basically. Like, how's it going? What are you doing? And he said, well, it's still very, very early, but we're super pleased by the early results that we're seeing. We think about video podcasts like a modern talk show. But instead of having a single brand-defining show,

you have hundreds of them. So it's a broad offering versus a single broad show or format. But it does generate a lot of very passionate engagement, lots of variety. That to me, that sentence, but instead of having a single brand defining show, you have hundreds of them, is both absolutely correct. And I think a cool, interesting strength

of the podcasting industry that instead of having one thing, you can have lots of versions of that thing, but is also like, boy, is that a cynical way of thinking about this that you're talking about, right? He's like, instead of investing in a lot of talk shows, and you think about it, especially for Netflix, a company that has tried and failed many times to make hit talk shows, they're just like,

well, now we can just cover the waterfront because it's going to be cheaper and it's going to be faster, and somebody else will do all of the work, and it's mostly just headphones and microphones, and boom, we've done talk shows. And I think just that way of looking at it to me sort of tells me everything about what Netflix is up to here. Again, it's extremely MBA brain, but like two things about that, right? Like one, the way that particular framing is exactly how management and studio systems

would like, it's the perfect ideal, like, machine world. Totally. Because each individual talent is ultimately fungible, right? They're ultimately interchangeable. there is no sort of big dog that you're going to have to negotiate with. It's like if you want to walk away, if you want to maybe to beat your $10 million contract, it's okay, I'll moneyball you. I'll get like 10 losers at $1 million to each and maybe make you up in the aggregate.

And that's sort of like perfect for a GM. The second thing is like whether that will actually be true, right? Whether the sort of dynamics of what people want actually work out that way. So you think about something like SiriusXM. In a sense, you could view Siris XM is at a higher category, the entire species of media, as exactly what Tatsaranis is talking about.

What we offer as Siris XM is not one particular brand name talent. We offer a broad range of this kind of content, this kind of programming that different audiences can relate to at different scales, and in the aggregate, we make up a family. But they still are contingent on Star Power. Howard Stern is still like the biggest,

show. It is the reason that you're able to sell Sirius XM as a brand. And I think that's still going to be true for Netflix, right? The danger becomes too much of a utility that consumers feel like, oh, it is a thing that you have to pay into electricity because I don't want to be bored in a silent room between 8 to 10 o'clock.

But stars are, I think, really important, especially as we get into a larger landscape in which a lot of content will feel synthetic. like a lot of, you know, AI sort of inflected or generated a material so floods our world, I think the sort of curatorial artistic bet is that you still want the end of it, like the actual star, right? We're hungry for Timothy Chalames. We're hungry for Connor's stories.

That's in Williamson, right? There is still a thing that we want from people. And I still believe that stardom to some extent will become, will be a factor here. And that kind of stands against a little bit of how that surround us. what a framework is here. Is it a massive overreach to say we're headed down a road where instead of signing Timothy Chalamey to an overall deal to make a bunch of movies, you sign him to an overall deal to make a podcast for you?

That what we're about to see is like total gas on the fire for the whole, every celebrity has a podcast and this becomes how these folks get onto these streaming platforms. Is that, or we, it feels to me like there is a version of this road that ends that way, but am I getting ahead of myself? You know, I never bet against pessimism personally. Like, I always bet, you know, if I was a bet. I think Timmy would be a great podcast host personally. No, I doubt it.

Actually, I would listen to that show. I actually don't think so. I think he's fantastic because he's so scarce, right? No, I think, you know, the thing is that I've been thinking a lot about in terms of what we're talking about, we talk about celebrity sort of industrial culture. There is a very vast universe of celebrities, right? And we've always sort of accepted that there's a very small creme de la creme tier. A-list celebrity. And what we are sort of seeing now

in 2026 is that there is so many ways to be a celebrity, there's so much production of celebrity, there's so many different tiers, and there's so many different ways that they can sort of expand. You get reality stars, you got social stars, you got every single human being covered on Who Weekly, right? Like, it's this entire sort of economy

that's bigger than ever before, and it's sort of made the ability to be an A-lister is so much more difficult, but the status of being an A-lister is so much more valuable, right? It's harder to become a Brad Pitt of the modern era, Julia Roberts of the modern era, and it's contingent somewhat to the ability to play around with modern media dynamics. But the thing I think that Shalemi is showing a little bit is like you can do that while maintaining a mystique and that itself,

that scarcity creates your value. And that's a little bit I think of just sort of the modern face of A list of liberties, which is to say like the minute he starts a podcast, it's over for him. It's over for dead game. It's over for that strategy, right? And I think that dynamic is going to get sharper and sharper and sharper. The K-shaped economy comes for us all, right? This is why you and I are no longer A-list movie stars. It's because we started podcasting.

Exactly. We'll have to go to indie route now. That's the one and only reason. That's what I always say. We've talked about this a little bit. This is sort of total collapse of all of the ideas around podcasting and podcasts and talk shows. and what all this stuff means. And there's obviously this huge debate

about what a podcast even is or if it's even the right term. Andrew Marino wrote a great piece for us arguing that we should just get rid of the word podcast. And our commenters absolutely took him to task. They were like, this is ridiculous. Shut up, go away. And I think he's right.

A poster has got a post. Marino did the right thing there. Absolutely. It's a good piece. We'll link in the shutouts. My question to you is not just is that happening. like, does the term

podcast sort of mean everything and nothing anymore? But does it matter? Do we risk losing something with this incredible collapse of everything into podcasts and podcasts into everything? One million percent. I mean, first of all, like from a very nuts and bolts 101 meat and potatoes philosophy of language thing,

like words mean something. Words have to mean something. Agreed. But also words can be co-opted. Word can be expanded. Words can be weaponized. And in a situation, you know, podcasting as a culture,

as a thing with a historical tradition, it's a thing that still exists, right? There are peoples that were still published podcasts on the open ecosystem who reject the videoification and the closed platformification of the entire way that industry has sort of evolved and is chasing after

in terms of like trying to get bigger and bigger dollars, more solid staple, consistent dollars. But that ecosystem of the open podcast is still there. And so I would not retire the word entirely, but I would sort of draw some lines, right? Hollywood and Netflix and the celebrity complex is using the word podcast for a certain thing to signal a differentiation from the other products it produces, to differentiate from streaming television shows, from talk shows, from daytime talk shows. A podcast is a sort of a video web

show cheap television, right? It is cheap television. We can call it cheap television. They will not call it cheap television. But I think the sort of political fight over what the word means is it has real material consequences in how people are able to find the open podcast at the end of the day. It could be a situation in which the sort of, you know, original errors of the open podcast, trying to call the podcast something else, try to reclaim it. I don't know, but at the end of the day, it's a political fight, one that requires organizing, and one that requires a concerted effort a little bit. and one that like is difficult to do because Netflix and YouTube are so much larger. And when they say this is a podcast, because of the nature of the authority as large institutions with a lot of money, people tend to seat to that for sure. Yeah. Obviously there was a real moment at the beginning of this transition where everybody pointed back to the pivot to video that everybody did on Facebook that then incredibly became a real moment.

became a Facebook rug pull and Facebook ruined a lot of companies that had bet huge on Facebook video. And there were a lot of people who were cautioning against doing that here, that if you're going to invest in video, you're going to change the show you make for video, you're going to rethink your whole production process in order to make video. This rug will get pulled out from under you when YouTube or Netflix or whoever decides that they're no longer interested in video podcasts. Is that still a worry? It's always a worry, right? I mean, like the content then creating life is an uncertain one, beholden to the winds of both algorithms and itself algorithms as an extension of corporate incentives. Yeah, I mean, if you're a smart, anyway, decent

tactician when it comes as a media company or as a person to make stuff, you want to diversify. Like, you want to sort of be sure that you're not overly dependent on one particular scheme of revenue, that your power is not wholly dependent on something and one other thing that doesn't really care about you. And that's always going to be a reality. And that's been true, you know, that's especially true now in the age of algorithms. It was always true when you run any kind of business. Okay. All right. Last question. Then I'm going to let you go, give me a good show that I don't know about that you've watched or listened to recently. I have found every good show I've ever found, largely thanks to you. So recommend me a

television show or like in general. No, podcasts you're into right now. Podcasts. Right now I'm just sort of working through the back catalog of Truonon. Are you familiar? Okay. Yeah. Well, okay, so you know that. I know of it. I have not actually listened to it, but I know of.

Truonanon had kind of a moment recently, so I became lightly aware. Yeah. I am increasingly a big fan. Check it out. It's more of a vibe thing. And it's more of a dirt back left kind of thing. But yeah. Love that.

All right. Nick, I assume we will have you back to talk about my feelings about podcast again very soon. But thank you, as always for being here. This is my pleasure. My pleasure. All right. We've got to take one more break. And then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast hotline.

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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 their. 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. All right, we're back. Let's do a question from the Virgcast hotline. As always, the number is 866 Verge1-1. You can email Vergecast at theverge.com. Again, I'm still thinking through all of this Minneapolis and TikTok and how we experience information online. And what do we do in this space right now?

I think I've been hearing from a lot of people is just this sense of everything is happening all at once and it's not clear how I'm supposed to react, how I'm supposed to respond when I learn how different people are responding. And if you are feeling helpless or if you have figured out some way to sort through all of that, I would love to hear from you. This is a thing we care deeply about and want to keep covering. So reach out, send us emails, call the hotline. we love hearing from you. But for now, though, something completely different. We got a call

based on a response to something I said about how, if you're the kind of person who wears AirPods, but also sort of holds your phone in front of your mouth like this and talks into it, that you're out of your mind and that doesn't do anything. This person had a very good point that made me think a lot of thoughts. Here's the question. Hey, David. I just have a comment. He said your phone is doing nothing when you're holding it to your mouth and listening and I have your AirPods in. and I do have a small rebuttal to that because I've done that before. And it is when I'm listening to a podcast or listening to music,

and I'm in a situation where I want to pretend like I am on the phone because I've got weird social anxiety or something. Or say, I don't know, I was in Miami, and I wanted to know if this hotel lobby that I was not staying at had a bathroom that I could use. and so for some reason walking in and, you know,

pretending to be on the phone in my AirPods just isn't enough. There's something about holding my phone up to my face that says, I am official, I'm on the phone, good sir, which somehow implies I'm meant to be in this hotel. It's just lying,

but I think it works, or at least it makes me feel better about it. The hotel didn't have a bathroom, so I left. But there are times, where I will hold my phone in my mouth to pretend have a conversation just to get out of social situations.

Not a normal thing, just a I'm broken kind of thing, but I thought you should know. Okay, so I've been thinking about this call ever since I got it, and I think the simple point is correct, right? That wearing AirPods and holding your phone to your mouth communicates I am on a call

in a way that just wearing AirPods doesn't. And this is a social problem we've had for, I don't know, two decades now, ever since the first run of Bluetooth headsets, which were those kind of one ear long, pointy ones with the microphone that pointed at your mouth that basically you couldn't see if you were on the other side of somebody. So a lot of people just started walking down the street looking like maniacs talking to themselves. We still have not come up with a good social way to say, I am on a. phone call versus I am listening to something versus I'm just wearing these. Like, should there be a system of lights that communicates how responsive you are? I don't know. But we haven't figured this out.

But what this did make me think is I think there is a hierarchy of how official do you look to other people when you're on a call? And I would like to share that hierarchy with you right now. So thing number one, the most official way you can look to be on a call, on your phone is, I agree with our caller, it's to hold your phone to your ear, right? If you walk in somewhere with your phone up to your ear like this, there is just only one thing you can be doing, and that is taking a phone call. It looks official, it looks powerful, like you're doing something with your hands, you look like you might yell at somebody and then throw it across

the room. It just, it looks legit. So that's number one. Number two is when you're wearing wired earbuds, like ear pods or something else, but the important thing is those wired earbuds have to have an inline microphone on one of the wires. And you have to be holding up that wire to your mouth so that the microphone is right in front of it. So you're wearing two headphones and then you're kind of holding the microphone right in front of your mouth. This is very close to being number one, but it's not quite there because it involves an accessory, which is by definition slightly more complicated. But this still does the thing where it makes it look like you are holding something up to your mouth.

You're using your hands to make a phone call. And that's very powerful. This also has the useful side effect of sort of making you look like a spy where you're like holding up a covert microphone to your mouth and talking into it. So that's number two. That is also, by the way, if you want to like sound good on a phone call, that's the one to do. Holding your phone up, fine. Earpods, all that stuff are better because they have a microphone that you can just put up to your mouth. Like, I cannot describe to you the difference between having a microphone right here that you're talking to and even having the AirPods microphone appear by your ear.

Giant difference. Anyway, thing number three, two earbuds. Any earbuds, I don't care which ones you have. If you have two of them in your ear and you're walking and talking, it looks like you're on a call. It's important that you talk or at least like nod and make faces in response. You need to be sort of an active listener on your call. Otherwise, people will just think you're listening to music. but if you have two buds,

people will be able to see from all angles that you have some kind of headphone in, which is very important, and it communicates a certain sense of being locked in. Right? This is like, I'm getting no external noise. I am fully focused on this call. And that's very powerful.

So that's number three. Number four is one earbud. And this is a tough one to get away with because wearing one earbud mostly signifies I am aware of the world, right? It says, I'm listening to a podcast or some music in the background, but I also want to be aware of what's going on and see my surroundings. This is a very hard one to make the case that you are focused and locked in because by definition you are not. It also means that a lot of people who see you will not at all clock that you're on a call because they

won't see the buds at all. So this is a case where you have to, again, at least, in very actively, or be extremely performatively talkative and say a lot of like, hmms and yeah, and that sounds right, and stuff like that, just in order to make people see that you're talking, because otherwise you're going to do the thing where you're just sort of listening for a long time and somebody comes up to you and says, hey, because you have one ear open. And I think when you have the one ear open that signifies, like, you can come talk to me and it will be okay. But then you're going to have to do the thing where you like put up the finger and you're like, I'm on a call. You point to your ear. And that's no good. Once you've done that, you've already lost.

the game. So that's number four, and that's almost last place. Number five is last place. And number five is holding your phone up to your mouth on speakerphone. This is the worst thing you can possibly do in public, because this signifies several things. This says, A, I'm on a call that you can listen to if you want to because I'm just on speaker phone. So welcome to my conference call. It says that I don't care about you at all because I am happy to just have you hear what I hear and listen to me shout into my phone. And it also says, please interrupt me. I would love to not be paying attention to this because it is just sort of happening while I'm in the world. I think of this like holding it up on speakerphone as like the I'm walking through the grocery store

getting information about something kind of phone call. This says I don't need to be focused. We're not paying attention. This is not a phone call. Either of a us are interested in. We're just here because I need some information from you and you have it. It is, if you want to have like a business call and you walk around on speakerphone, please know that I think you're a monster. That's all I have to say about that. So all of this is to say, caller, I agree with you. And that the next time you want to seem like you're on an important call, you can either hold the phone to your ear or you can wear the wired buds and hold the mic right up your mouth like a spy. It's those two and then it's a big gap to everything else.

Anyway, thank you to our caller. If you have other cool phone call mechanisms, by the way, that I don't even know about if you're like, I've figured out how to like strap my phone to my chest so I can have calls that no one even knows. I don't know. Hit me up. Tell me all of your funky ways to make phone calls and how official they feel. Anyway, for now, that's it for the show. Thank you to Addy and Nick for being here. And thank you, as always, for watching and listening. We're going to have lots more on everything going on in Minneapolis. We're going to have lots more on the new TikTok. We're going to have lots more AI news. There's a lot of really interesting gadget and AI product news happening right now. We're going to talk about all of that.

We'll talk about it on Friday show. We'll talk about it next week. There's lots more to do on all of this stuff. And as always, A, keep it locked on the verge.com. Our team is spinning up a lot of important, good, interesting coverage about what's going on in Minneapolis. We want to be helpful. We also want to be thoughtful. We also want to just be able to say, the things out loud that are true that are hard to say out loud. Our team is very good at that, and I'm very proud of the work

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It's 66, Verge. We love hearing from you on all this stuff and everything. else. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, and Travis Larchuk. We will be back on Friday. Like I said, with more of all of this, more AI news. There's just a whole lot going on, and we're going to get into all of it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.