The Vergecast - Why Apple is trying to save Google

Episode Date: May 9, 2025

Where will Meta, Apple, and Google be three years from now? It's starting to look like they might all be very different. Nilay, David, and The Verge's Richard Lawler start the show with Eddy Cue's testimony in the Google search trial, in which Cue argued that AI is taking over — and that Google should be allowed to keep paying Apple gobs of money. The hosts also chat about the latest in the Meta trials, and how the recent Apple ruling is already changing the App Store. Then, there are some gadgets to talk about: the panopticon-slash-killer-app coming for Meta's smart glasses, the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, and a lot of new iPhones. In the lightning round, we do another round of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, then talk about some new Netflix designs and the latest in our worldwide hunt for party speakers. Further reading: Eddy Cue is fighting to save Apple’s $20 billion paycheck from Google Apple’s Eddy Cue: ‘You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now’ Google searches are falling in Safari for the first time ever — probably because of AI Google's statement about Search traffic Apple is looking at adding Perplexity and other AI search engines to Safari Amazon now has a ‘Get book’ button in its iOS Kindle app Epic will use an EU account to bring Fortnite back to the US App Store Patreon’s iOS update allows creators to bypass in-app purchases Apple is trying to halt the App Store ruling. Apple files appeal to wrest back control of its App Store A new bill would force Apple to allow third-party app storesDOJ’s proposed Google changes would ‘deeply undermine user trust,’ search chief says Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive DOJ asks court to split up Google’s ad tech empire Threads was originally going to live inside the Instagram app | The Verge Instagram doesn’t want to be a ‘lean-back experience.’ | The Verge ‘TikTok is probably the fiercest competition that we have faced.’ | The Verge Instagram has spent up to $700 million in a year to lure creators. Mosseri calls the first version of Reels his ‘biggest mistake.’ | The Verge Meta’s new AI glasses could have a ‘super-sensing’ mode with facial recognition Apple is planning smart glasses with and without AR Apple ‘iPhone Air’ rumor suggests a bigger screen coming in 2027 Apple may stagger next year’s iPhones to make way for a foldable Microsoft’s smaller Surface Pro has a 12-inch display and starts at $799 Microsoft shrinks its Surface Laptop down to 13 inches, priced at $899 Microsoft’s new Surface devices ditch magnetic charging port for USB-C How Microsoft shrunk its Surface devices Policing News, Policing DEI: The FCC’s Shifting Priorities Erode Its Credibility OpenAI abandons plan to become a for-profit company Netflix is getting a big TV revamp Netflix will try a TikTok-like feed on its mobile app I put four robot lawnmowers through a brutal backyard battle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome Verchast. The flagship podcast is being vaguely remembered by Adam Sarii. That's a real experience I had this week. This is your new claim to fame. We're going to talk about it.

Vaguely remembered. Is it better to be like very remembered or not remembered? Like if you had to choose between slightly vaguely barely remembered and not remembered at all, if he was like, I have no memory of doing that podcast with Eli four years ago. Is that better or worse? Well, if you said Nelly, Patel, he'd know who you're talking about. Yeah, exactly.

Eli, who's that guy? You know, as a podcast host, I think what you want is, I remember every minute of that experience. And I changed to me. And I've sent it to everyone that I've ever met. And I'm like, this is my org chart. We're going to get to it. We're going to explain what we're talking about. But it is true that literally today, just hours before we are speaking,

ademissary under oath in the United States justice system said he vaguely remembered talking to me. Congratulations. It's a weird life I live. I'm your friend, Eli. That's David Pierce. Hello. Richard Lawler's here. Hey, buddy.

I'm back. He's back. A lot going on this week. A lot of, a lot of courthouse activity. There's a rumor, by the way, from CBC's David Faber that Warner Brothers and Discovery will split up again, which is just the circle of life. Like, we're going to play the Lion King song here. They should call the company's Warner Discovery and just bros. Those should be the two companies.

I would join bros. Yeah. Obviously, I could work for bros. Broz is the one. There's some facial recognition news in the AR world. Brendan talked a lot this week. Yeah, he was back with a vengeance. Our boy, Brendan, just did not shut up this week.

He didn't like that the segment was short last week. So he had to do some stuff. He didn't. He was like, well, I got to start running my mouth. We have Gen Tui battling robot lawnmowers to the death. And then finally, Netflix took my advice. Let's be direct about what happened here. I told them to do something and I finally did it.

So a lot, a lot going on. Let's start in court. Where else? My hot prediction is that 36 months from now, we will not recognize Apple and Google. That's just my hottest prediction I've got going right now. Whatever you think of is Google now and whatever think of his Apple now, 36 months for now these companies will be radically different in some way. Interesting that you're not lumping meta into that. Do you not think it also qualifies?

I don't know. We'll come to it. Meta's also under trial, but like if you peel Instagram and WhatsApp off of meta, like I think the essential character of meta remains. Whereas, you know, what we're talking about with Apple is you're going to,

in one trial, they're going to take $20 billion of search revenue away from Apple. In the other case, they can't make money in the app store the way they were. They've appealed that decision. That just changes the company. Yeah. Right?

And then in the Google case, just in 50 different ways the government might break up Google. Fundamental changes of the company. So those are my hot predictions. Maybe they'll come true. Maybe they won't. That's why they're hot.

But you really see the pressure that these companies are feeling right now in court where their various executives are on the stand talking about how their businesses work. In particular, in the Google search remedies trial, Eddie Q is on the stand this week. And he, I mean, literally,

he, with just a sideways, he dropped Google's stock price by 10%, or almost 10%. David, you've been paying a lot of attention to the Google search case. You were in that courtroom during the other part of the trial. What's going on here? Yeah, so Apple's been a really important part of this trial the whole time because, like, the simplest version of this trial was about Google became too powerful because it could afford to be the default search engine essentially everywhere.

And the most important and most expensive version of that is Safari on iOS. So Apple was, I mean, like all over the liabilities part of this trial. And a huge piece of this was essentially Google is the only company that was able to give Apple $20 billion a year to be the Safari search engine. Thus, we have a problem. Like you can kind of boil it all the way down to that. And that is where we are. So it was meaningful again to see Eddie Q come back at all to talk about this stuff. He testified in the first version of the trial and now he's back doing it again.

And he made a surprising amount of news for somebody who is, like, very well media trained. And I think the thing I've come to believe is the people like this who come to testify, largely come to do it on purpose, right? And I think, Mila, you're a lawyer, so you know this better than I do. But there's like two ways it goes. There's either somebody asked them a relatively open-ended question and they get to say the thing that they've been preparing to say. And there was a lot of that.

Like, I was there for Sundar Pichai last time. And he really wanted to talk about not letting people reverse engineering. at Google. And he said that over and over whenever he was able to. And then there are just times where you ask them yes or no questions to get them to actually reveal things that they don't want to reveal because they're not going to and they have to. Those are the two sides of how you learn information in these trials is essentially what I've discovered sitting in them. Yeah. This one, Eddie Q just unprompted, starts dropping bombs about what's going on with Google search. So he's like, he says the biggest news, the one you're referring to is that Eddie Q said

by way of sort of explaining how transformative AI is and why AI is so important and why it's becoming competitive to search. And it's very clear, obviously, that he would like to continue making $20 billion a year from Google. So all of this under the guise of like Apple would really like Google to win this trial so that it can keep giving Apple lots of money.

He says that for the first time in, I believe, 22 years was the number he gave ever. But in 22 years of having this deal, Google searches are going down in Safari by some meaningful amount. And that's the thing that tanked Google stock. Like instantly, like, yeah. The line went down.

CNBC like broke into coverage. Like Google stock is down because Eddie Q says search volume is going down because of AI. Right. And again, this is a search surface that is worth $20 billion a year to Google. That's like that it is such a core part of what makes search work. that any meaningful downtick is a huge deal for Google. Eddie Q's thesis is this has to do with AI. People are turning to the built-in Syrian chat GPT stuff to replace it.

People are using perplexity to replace it. People are using chat GPT search to replace it. Like his theory is that instead of going to Safari and typing in the search box, people are doing lots of different things. Google even actually, I think in a really interesting way, confirmed that. So Google immediately comes out with a statement. Let me just read you the statement from Google. It says, we continue to see overall query growth in search.

That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple's devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance search with new features, people are seeing that Google search is more useful for more of their queries, and they're accessing it for new things in a new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app using their voice or Google Lens. None of that is a refutation of anything that Eddie Q said, right? Like both of these things can be true at the same time. But what is, what this implies is that a lot of people are leaving Safari and doing Google stuff elsewhere.

And I certainly believe that. Like the Google app is hugely popular and Google has started pushing really, really, really, really hard to get you to download the Google app. In part because it's desperately afraid it's going to lose this trial and not be able to be the default in Safari anymore. And one thing that Eddie Q said in the first version of this trial was that one of the things Apple was afraid, of was that if they stopped doing this deal with Google, Google would use all the other surfaces that it has to get people to do things like download Chrome and download the Google app. They were afraid that like every time you open YouTube, which is like an unassailably powerful app on iOS, there would just be a big ass bar at the top that's like, want to use Google?

Download Chrome. Want to use Google? Or like whatever, right? And that stuff is really important. Those are like Google can do that kind of work and move a lot of people wherever it wants. And it doesn't do that because of this deal. And so Eddie Q is sitting here being like, maybe this is already shifting away from me.

And he wants to do everything he can to protect this thing that is hugely lucrative for Apple. Yeah. There's a thing here that you mentioned it briefly at the top. Apple and Eddie Q want to protect the $20 billion, maybe even $25 billion worth of revenue that they get for doing nothing. Right. It's free money. right? They do literally nothing except set Google search to be the default in Safari, which is the thing that everybody wants to be the default in Safari.

And for doing nothing except what everyone wants them to do, for zero effort, they receive $20 to $25 billion a year and revenue. And Eddie Q even kind of alluded to that where he was like, even if they didn't pay us, we'd probably still have to do it because it's the thing that everybody wants. And so if you're Apple, you're like, well, that would go away. that's just the freest money that's ever existed. And then the other big pot of free money is in that purchases and the Apple tax and all that stuff. And they're under a court order, which they are appealing, which has allowed Spotify and Amazon and other companies to say, you can just buy our stuff on the web and you don't have to pay the tax. This is a big deal. Like Apple's looking at the free money going away.

And so, yeah, I see what Eddie is doing on the stand. He's trying to make this thing seem like it's already dying. So the government doesn't take it away. Right. And he's doing it in a framework that, you know, antitrust regulators, like, will roll their eyes and be like, yeah, yeah, we know the monopoly life cycle, right? The companies get too big and they get too lazy and then the disruptors come up and then the companies go away. And on the stand, Eddie Q is like, look, when we started Apple, you know, IBM was the big dog and now look at them, right? And he's like, maybe one day we'll go away.

Just leave us alone so we can collect the $25 billion in free money and tell, like, There's just a thing. Like, he's doing like, you know, it's like what, like the archetypes and storytelling, like the hero's journey, but it's the monopoly life cycle. Right. Like, we're going to learn your lesson and come back stronger. It's like, we're all going to die one day. Leave us alone. Right.

Just let us die in peace with our $25 billion. Just let us die rich, man. I beg of you, judge, let me die a rich man. That's all I've ever wanted. I'm on the board of Ferrari. Eddie Q's on the board of Ferrari. Why do you think Ferrari got car play? I mean, like, it's just very obvious why Ferrari was one of the first.

It's like Ferrari portion Aston Martin got carplay first. Like, you know where Apple executives are spending their time. But there's just a piece here where you're like the other side of that. Apple wants to preserve this money. They're going to make this argument that they're already seeing the change. Like, you don't, don't worry about this. The market's taking care of it. The thing that's really interesting to me is how fast and furiously the stock dropped.

And there's a part of me that says, Google stock dropped. And the thing that's really, the thing that's really interesting to me is just how fast and furiously Google stopped. On a pretty innocuous statement, right? Like what Q fundamentally said was the market's already shifting. And like all of these big search remedies you want to do,

they're not going to matter because the markets are taking care of this monopoly that you're so worried about government. It's pretty innocuous. But the market dropped, but the stock dropped because I think everyone is waiting for that first piece of evidence that Google's search. Search is under threat. Yes.

That's exactly what I was going to say. Right. The first sliver of evidence that AI will actually take search is like a kind of death now for Google. And until now, it really has been all vibes. Yeah, all vibes. Like at the launch of Bing, Sach Nadella told me he's like every point of market share I can take from Google is billions of dollars. Like I don't have to win. I just appeal off like two points of market share.

And this is a huge business for us. And everyone's just been waiting. And it's like, well, being didn't do it. Sorry, guys. But like everyone was waiting for like, oh, well, Google get dethroned. And even if you believe Google's statement here, which I think is reasonable interpretation of this is search volumes are dropping in Safari because Google is getting people to use the Google search app. Right. That's more or less what they're saying.

But maybe search volumes are dropping in Safari because everyone's using chat GPT and said, like who truly knows? Apple knows, but they said Safari. Yeah, I mean, and realistically, I think the answer is pretty clearly some of each. But it is certainly true that we are finally slowly getting real information that suggests that Google is fragile. Right. And I think part of that is also, as this trial goes on, the people I talk to who are watching the trial seem to be like day by day becoming more and more convinced that something catastrophic is going to happen to Google at the end of this. that I think like going in, the sort of overwhelming betting favorite for the outcome was Google is going to stop having to do these deals exclusively and is just going to win on its merits, right? That either it was just going to get what it wanted, which is to just remove the word exclusive from all of its deals and nothing else changed.

Or Judge Meadow is going to be like, you can't pay money or you can't pay money above a certain amount to be part of these deals. And that would have real ramifications, but it would still leave Google with a giant advantage because it's Google. But now more and more, there is this sense that like, okay, something, some, Google is going to get punched in the face in one, at least one, like, seriously lasting way. And then you pair that with, oh, and maybe it doesn't even matter because maybe this thing is already starting to crack in front of our eyes. And there's like, you just set off this incredible panic about Google. Yeah. And again, the market reacted to what is a pretty fundamentally innocuous comment? Yeah. Right? Searches in Safari are falling for the first time ever. Like Apple is obviously trying to protect the free money. So of course it's saying that this thing you think is a problem is not a problem.

And here's a tiny slice of evidence. Right. This thing you think is good actually sucks. Don't even worry about it. Yeah. This is like whenever regulators go to big cable companies, they're like, but we compete with everyone. Like, how can you can't possibly regulate us? Like there's a guy down the street with a tin can and a dream and he's obviously our biggest

competitor. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like, that's this again. But, you know, Eddie said some other stuff. He said they're looking at adding perplexity and other search engines, AI powered search engines to Safari. He made a lot of noise about AI being a new user interface paradigm that might replace the iPhone entirely in 10 years.

I think that was, you know, to your point, David, like, that was one of his canned lines. Like, there's so much change happening. Why would you bother the market? Like, 10 years from now, we'll all be wearing AI glass. and you won't even need an iPhone. Like, just let me die rich. And you just look at all that.

You're like, oh, he's trying to protect it. But I think inadvertently, he validated some of people's biggest ideas about the change to come. Yeah. And I think it is important to remember his upside and his incentive for what he should believe. Like, it is good for Apple to convince everyone for lots of reasons that AI is about to change everything. And that suddenly this is all hugely competitive. and actually maybe you should be more afraid of open AI than anybody. But the other thing that I really liked is that Eddie Q said all this stuff.

He's like, we're building it all. And then pressed, he said, and I quote, to date, they're just not good enough, which is the answer to why they're not doing more AI stuff. And so he's like, AI is going to change everything, but also AI sucks. Welcome to the discourse about AI, right? And it's like, you know what I'm tired of? And Richard, you and I have talked about this before. The people who were like, well, this is the worst it's ever going to be.

So just wait. And AI is going to change. Like maybe it sucks now, but this is the worst it's ever going to be. And I'm like, but it's still, so we agree it's bad. It's a weird thing that you can get people to say that at first they'll talk only about how great it is. But then once they can't talk about that, suddenly it changes. And it's, oh, well, what it will be and what it could be? Right.

And it's just like, what is going on? What is the real discussion here? What is it right now? What can you say? And I think it's notable particularly because Apple is a, at least perceived as being so far behind in AI. So there's a lot of questions about, like, what they can do there. And I feel like if they were really that worried about how fast AI is changing,

they would, his reaction would be different. The things he would say on the stand would be different than what he actually said. Well, he did say that the Google money prevented Apple from building its own search engine. Like, he's straightforwardly. He was like, yeah, that's probably, we probably didn't do it because we were just getting this free money. But then he was like, but it would have been hard and like, they're good at it. And it's like, yeah, dude, you just wanted $20, $20,000. Like, you shut up my house and you're like, if you would just keep eating the peanut butter,

you're already eating, we'll give you $20 billion. I'd be like, all right, yeah, I'm super not going to start a peanut butter factory at this point in time. Like, yep. How much money do they spend on the car that they never made? I think $10 billion was the number we heard, wasn't it? So half a year worth of free Google money. Yeah. You know?

That is the world of AI. Yeah. Well, actually, the funny thing about the, AI not being good enough yet. Sure. This is as bad as it will ever be. We can all fine. But like there was a study this week from IBM,

which is essentially a consulting company now, trying to sell AI services branded as Watson and other people's AI services. And in their own study about how much AI you need and you should buy from IBM, they're like in our survey of CEOs, only 25% of AI projects had returned on the investment. And so one out of four.

And then the rest of the answer is like And the CAs are like, we're using too much stuff And it's not all 11 credit it. And it's like, yeah, this kind of sucks. It's like if you just, if in 2004, you just walked up to everyone, you're like Bluetooth now, you're just going to use Bluetooth. And I was like, but these are giant. Like not all of us are real estate agents.

We can't wear these headsets all day. You know, I at least a three series and I've got this headset, but that doesn't make me a real estate agent. You understand what I'm like this isn't right yet? And you got to wait 10 years for AirPods. And like that's still where we are. It's like it'll be great next year. No, but it's not even like that's the best case scenario.

The worst case scenario is like we go and we tour a house and it's not as big as I want it to be, but I'm standing in the kitchen. I'm like, but think about it. This is the smallest this kitchen will ever be. Like that doesn't, that's nothing. I have implied that something is going to get bigger or better. And it doesn't matter that there's no evidence that it's going to. And I think the way, the place that's the most obvious to me is in the AI trends, the AI memes that developed. Like we saw what the action figures and other things like that, you have these people who are paying for access to AI tools.

They have no idea what to do with them. And so they're like, I can make an action figure myself. Would that be evidence that I'm paying for something that's useful? Anything that will work. Okay, I'll turn myself into a cartoon. Whatever. I need to do something to prove that this investment was worth it. Well, I want to make a distinction here because there's an entire class of,

of professionals that are using AI in different ways. Figma this week launched Figma sites, and you can just make, like, beautiful, designed websites with AI. It's basically a site builder. Like, you just tell it what you want. It just, like, makes you a website with all kinds of animations and CSS. It's cool. They have a co-generation tool that they're going to launch soon.

Obviously, cursor exists. We see the AI usage in apps like Photoshop, which is basically at, like, 100% like usage rate. It's the same as layers, which is essentially 100%. So there's, and we have like lots of listeners who are software developers who are like using this stuff all day long. There's some value there. I think what we are focused on in this conversation is the idea that AI search is already a useful, great product that can do everything you want, that agentic AI, where you just tell Syria to get you a sandwich and it can do it or you can tell Alexa Plus to exist and it will be in your house. none of that stuff is real yet.

Like that is all pipe dreams. Like truly pipe dreams. And I think that's the gap. I think that gap is getting bigger between what people say it can do or will do or one day will do and then the real things people are using it for now. And I think it's important to validate it.

Like, yes, people use cursor every day to great effect. Yeah. I use generative noise reduction in lightroom almost every time I take a photo now. it's not even, I think it should just be built into the import workflow for me. It's really good.

Like I'm like, why am I pressing a second button? Like just put it, just do it here. There's all this stuff that is good and that works. There's this other piece. And even some of the general of AI tech stuff, like, if you sell something in eBay and you're just like, make me an item description, fine, right? Like it doesn't matter. But then there's this other piece where you're like, 10 years from now, you won't need an iPhone. because AI will be so good

that you're just going to be talking to your glasses. And it's like, well, a lot of stuff has to go right. Right. My new shortcut for that is to just every time you see AI, just auto replace it with machine learning. And in some places, that makes perfect sense, right? Like a lot of stuff you just described,

like Figma is doing this stuff and it's using machine learning to do all kinds of interesting stuff for you. And this stuff is like useful and valuable and it's a feature of the software. But then anytime I hear somebody be like, yeah, I asked my main, machine learning what I should, and I'm like, oh, right. We're out. We used to just call this

algorithms. And I think that we all understood what they were. And it's still really good for those things when they were like, oh, yeah, you use the algorithms and it'll figure it out. If you know how to program, those AI coding tools are really useful because you know what they're doing and you know how to work around it and you know how to fix it. And whatever it's not good at, you can fill in. For me, I don't know how to program. If I try to use an AI coding tool, you will get something that does not work and I do not know how to fix it. We should do, Richard, where we just demand that you vibe code different kinds of apps and see what happens.

And they will all do. Can Richard bring down NORAD by himself? Like, let's find out today. But just to bring this back to Eddie Q, I think a thing that I'm just realizing now as we're talking is that Apple is actually massively incentivized to bring all of these things to iOS

as fast as it possibly can. Like Apple's case for we should keep getting Google's money gets stronger and easier once it integrates perplexity. Like, it's because they can be like, look, this stuff is already being cannibalized. The change is already happening.

So the fact that Apple is saying this stuff is not good enough and is actively not doing it strikes me as an even more damning critique of this whole thing because it would be much easier for Eddie Q to get up and be like, the Google deal doesn't matter that much because we already have a perplexity deal and people are using that too. Like, it could introduce the competition if it wanted to. And it doesn't because I think at some somewhere in that company are people who continue to make like making good products. Well, there's also a very interesting sort of like business flywheel that I don't think

the AI search companies have really solved yet. So Google can spend $20 billion a year on Apple to get the default placement. Then they collect all of the searches. They show ads on those search pages, which are very good at making money, to the point where like the search pages are getting more useless because they're just ads now. So they collect all the data from the searches. They monetize each individual search at varying rates. and with increasing amounts of like revenue aggression.

And then they've got all the search data, which helps make the search product better and feeds all their other training efforts. And so they've just got a lot of different ways to collect value for the $20 billion they spend. Perplexity is like, if you do a search on perplexity, it costs them a bunch of money. Right?

Like there's just a bunch of GPUs that have to do some work and use a bunch of power. And then they're like they don't make any money. I'm not mentioning for place fees. They have a subscription fee and they make some revenue, but it's not a lot of revenue and they're certainly not profitable. And that's like if they paid Apple money to collect a bunch of searches, which costs them money, that's just a black hole of money. Like you're just spending money to lose money. And I don't know that any of these companies can actually make that deal yet in a way that doesn't just accelerate their own doom loop.

Right. They'll just lose money. Right. Except for Open AI, which has an infinite capability to keep raising money. Yeah, then Sam Altman just has to go tour the capitals of the world again. He was literally in the United States Senate today. What I need is infinite money for nuclear power. And, you know, Ted Cruz is like, tell me more.

And it's like, how do you do this? Teach me your ways, Sam. But that's a real problem for Apple. I don't think it can get those deals yet from these companies. Certainly not in the way that it has from Google. Google capable of making those deals for Gemini. And we heard Sundarpechei say that that talks for a deal like that are underway and they were hoping to get it done by the middle of this year. So like that's there's a deal there somewhere that makes more sense for Google just because it's Google.

And like you see Google on its own side working towards that, right? Like there's there's AI mode in search now. Gemini is starting to do search that it's like you can start to see how they just pull piece by piece out of search and into AI, integrate Gemini, move on through life. But I think you're right that like perplexity just can't pull that off I don't think. Not yet until they figure out

how to make money doing this stuff. I don't think they can. Okay, so my hot prediction is 36 months from now. These companies do not look

recognized with companies there are today. What do you think? Google especially. Richard, what do you think? I mean, what is left of Google

if they, so are we thinking that they lose Chrome or that they lose Android or both? Maybe both. If they, you know,

they've lost, the ad tech case. Now they're onto the remedies phase, which starts in September. So that'll wrap up. And for all we know, they're going to have to sell their ad exchange or they're going to have to split off DFP. Like, something is going to happen. There was news there this week. Yeah, the government once again going for it. Like we talked about there are three parts of the Google ad tech stack. The government would like them to get rid of two of them. Yeah. And Google's counterproposal, by the way, is what if we do nothing? Yeah, like, actually, it's fine. Just get to go home. Just lit up. I can't even imagine Google without the infinite money spout that is their ad tech stack. This is what I mean. 36 months from now, they lose this trial. They'll find they'll appeal. They've already lost that trial.

They're going to go to remedies. Something will happen. It won't be nothing, which is what Google has once again asked for. It'll be something. They'll appeal that. It'll go up and down the chain. Something will result. That's why I'm giving myself three years.

It's not the end of next year. At the end of three years. Ten days ago, I would have said even three years feels too short. then watching what has happened to Apple and how quickly these policies have changed and how quickly the app store has changed and how hard it will be to wind this back, even if Apple does appeal and win on appeal. Like maybe three years is not that long a time. Like once, once this stuff shifts, it shifts. And again, this is part of the monopoly lifestyle like story. Like these things are big and they seem invincible and then tomorrow they're over.

Yeah. And there's a lot to be said for that. But the pressure right now is from the government, and a underrated part of the monopoly life cycle is the monopoly gets in self in trouble with the government, gets all distracted, and then the Challenger comes along and it has like free space. This is very much what happened to Microsoft. Yeah. Right?

This is why Google and Apple exists the way they do because Microsoft got distracted. So you have opportunities for like opening eye and perplexity and whoever else. I'm just saying three years. In three years, I don't think these companies. look recognizably like the companies we have today, particularly Google. I'm not sure what's going to happen with Apple, but particularly Google, it just feels to me like it's going to look a lot different. See, I would actually put Apple at the top of the rankings as I'm thinking about this, because I think there is an overwhelming chance that $20 billion goes away. One way or another,

it's not going to get out of this trial still being $20 billion. I just don't, I can't see a way knowing what we know now that that deal at that number gets preserved. And then like you said, stick that next to all of the stuff that's happening with the app store. Like the, my victory lap this week was I absolutely called that Amazon had a version of the Kindle app sitting around waiting with links in it to the web store. So you could buy a book in the Kindle app. That's already out.

The Patreon changed things. And now you can subscribe to Patreon's through the web. Like every app that has another way to bill you is starting to bill you quickly outside of the, and like all that is just money that Apple used to get for free that now it doesn't get for free. Well, wait, no, hold on. So, John Gruber will be on Decoder on Monday, so look forward to that. But I made a similar point to him in that conversation.

And what he reminded me of was you couldn't buy a book in the Kind of before. So it was not, it was money that Apple wasn't getting anyway, right? And so that's fair, I guess. The first players are seeing are Amazon, Spotify, Patreon, which weren't paying the taxes. Sure, but there's a, there's a massively long, like. Candy Crush is coming if it hasn't yet. I don't pay terrible attention to Candy Crush, but like this is the move, and now everybody has it.

And like you said, Apple has both appealed the overall ruling and appealed having to make this policy change ahead of the appeal. So it's like the way it is now Apple has to, had to comply immediately and then appeal. And it's saying, no, this thing you're asking us to do is so horrible and unconscionable that we can't be asked to do it until the appeal is over. again, not a lawyer. Seems like they're probably going to lose that one

based on what we know of how everybody feels about this case. But it's just happening so fast that at some point, like Apple is going to have to decide to individually pick a fight with every important developer on its store or the toothpaste is just out of the tube here. And once it's out, it's out, right?

Like people aren't going to wind back to happily paying Apple 30% if they don't have to. Yeah, there's a bill. it's a, it's a, it's a kind of a fake bill. In the way that some of these bills are just fake, like they're opportunistic bills from Congress people who just want to like be a part of the good fight. But there's a bill this week in the Congress that would require Apple to have alternative app stores, require Google to have alternative app stores on our platforms.

And so you just see, oh, the pressure is mounting, the political will, especially once people can see it. Oh, I was able to buy a book in the Kindle app. And then Apple took it away. It's very hard to convince people is something they can't see and feel. It is very easy to convince people that taking something away is bad. Speaking of John Gruber,

he wrote a good piece about that this week. It is one of those things that you open up the Kindle app, you tap the link to go get a book, and immediately your brain goes, oh my God, it's insane that it was not like this the whole time. Like, it is so unbelievably user hostile that you couldn't even, there was no way to even go get the book.

You had to go to a different app and type the name of the book. Like insanity. And the minute you see how it's supposed to work, the minute you realize this is just because Apple hates you. That's the only, like, and I think you're right that there, it's, there's no going back from that. Okay, so answer my question, Richard, 36 months from now, do you think it looks the same or do you think it looks unrecognizably different or I guess somewhere in between? I'm going to take the field.

I think that it still looks the same, but the, like the ecosystem has changed and now Apple and Google are throwing haymakers at each other. Oh, interesting. That's a good take. all right David I'm gonna I'm gonna I'm gonna sort of throw in with Richard which is I think I think these companies stay recognizable but are so vastly less powerful that other stuff bubbles up like I think I'm starting to hear is everyone on earth now is building a browser because they understand the browser is very important in new ways in part because of this trial and and like they also see that maybe whatever's going to happen to Chrome is going to open up the browser market in a meaningful way again we've been here hearing all these AI companies are building a browser, like, that is going to march into every single one of these markets, right? Like the, the market for being a payment processor on the internet is more interesting than it's been an extremely long time because now suddenly these things are open to all of those things. So like, I think it's less that like, to some extent,

the big companies are going to be like pulled down a little bit, but also like the tide under them is going to come up much higher than it has been able to in a long time. Yeah. You know, there's other pieces of the search remedies case this week, beyond Eddie Q, right? The head of search said these proposed changes would totally undermine trust in Google and search if you let everyone have access to the Google search

graph, right? And basically everyone can read all the searches that are happening, everyone can get access to our search results and repackage them, like maybe people will just stop searching using search. And, you know, the quote Google is used for years is people ask Google questions that are so intimate, they won't even say them out

loud. Right. And so you break that, going to break search altogether. And what the DOJ keeps saying to that, by the way, is, do you think you're the only company on earth that can protect user privacy? And Google continues to say no. Like, again, on its face, that's not a crazy thing to say, right? Like, we make a lot of fun of companies who don't have a better defense, who just scream privacy and security, that that's a shortcut for I don't actually have a good reason.

But in this case, like, there is some truth to it, right? Like, if you think about the stuff you have put into the Google search box, you can tell everything about a person from what they Google in ways that are potentially very scary. But it is also true that Google is not the only company on Earth capable of being a good steward of that information. I also think it is now increasingly clear that people are asking wildly intimate questions to chat GPT. Oh, yeah. Maybe more so. Yeah, even more like incredible.

I mean, it's trying to get Kevin Riss to break up with his wife, man. And he's talking about the front page in The York Times. people weren't just uploading their entire medical history into Google in the little search box. Like that wasn't happening before. Can you make this a podcast? Like it's obvious that something else is happening. But right, but that would be something that really changes the dynamic of the web. Firefox basically said we'd be doomed if Google then pay us the money,

which our friend Casey Newton keeps pointing out like, that's your fault, bro. Right. You've built your entire business. is your competitor to Chrome on the back of a Google search sheet? Like, have you thought about, okay, but that Firefox has said that. Also, Mozilla has been through like several CEOs

and a decade knowing this is the problem and utterly failing to figure out what to do about it. Yeah, they're like, we're going to do NFTs. It's hard to have that much sympathy at some point. Yeah. It's tough. I'm always rooting for them, you know, like there will be open source champions.

Yeah. But, you know, they took the side quest into NFTs. And it was like, oh, you, we are a total. totally out of ideas. And then, right, then there's the ad tech stuff. So I just,

like, I look at this and I'm like, I would re-ranked them, David. I would say Google, absolutely 36 months from now, its revenue looks different. It's going to have to build other businesses.

Maybe it's going to go up because it doesn't have to give Apple $20 billion. Maybe there's that, but like right now, and you have written about this many, many times, every business at Google looks tiny next to search. So they don't invest in them.

Right? You're like, what? We'll move the needle at Google. And you're like, a business's biggest search. And everyone's like, well, we don't have any of those ideas. Right. And then eventually if you get big enough, you build a business that by accident runs into search and then you die. Yep.

Because search will kill you. And the only things that have survived are things that, like, help search in like meaningful ways. Android survives because it is a surface for search. And that's why they did it. You did not want to concede that user base to Microsoft at that time. Right. Okay, but it means that like how many times are we talked with a pixel? Are they going to truly invest in the pixel?

And like, the pixel is there to keep Samsung honest, and that is about it. Yeah. It's not there to be a big winner of a product because they don't care as long as people are searching Google on Samsung phones. Right. Well, maybe if the search business starts to wither, like those priorities shift, and Google has to invest in its other businesses and grow that maybe more diversified. This is what happened to Microsoft, by the way.

Windows came under significant pressure. Sashi Nadell was like, all right, we're just going to do Azure until I figure something else out. And then he started rebuilding each of those businesses in turn. And he pulled it off. He was very good at what he did. He pulled it off at Microsoft vastly more boring now than it was before. But like, you pulled it off.

I think Google is going to undergo that kind of transformation. I think Apple looks different because the sense that something is going to come after the iPhone will continue to panic that company. Yes. Right now they're saying it out loud. Something is going to come after the iPhone. And they think the user interface will probably be voice in AI. Well, that means we're just, we're in for it, right? That is a, that is a company in a defensive posture, not an offensive posture.

Well, and a company that is for whatever reason completely unable to compete in a meaningful way on those things. Like if you're, if you're sitting around and being like, okay, if we agree that AI is the thing, who's going to win? Apple's not in the first five companies you would name. it's the biggest company on earth and you wouldn't bet on Apple as a powerhouse to solve AI as AI gets really good, which is where I think Google has a real shot,

right? And this is another thing that keeps coming up in the remedies case is Google is out there trying to do again in AI what it already did in search based on the premise that Google has the resources to be a winner in AI. And I think that's true. I don't think it'll be the only winner.

I think there are going to be lots of winners as we saw Sam Altman at OpenAI acknowledge this week. They went, they like bailed on the whole for-profit idea and are just back to being like, never mind. We thought we were going to win so spectacularly, but now we're not. And just kidding. But you look at all of that and it's like, okay, Google has a real shot at this, but Apple is going to have to go undergo like a complete culture and organizational shift in order to be the kind of AI company that it is going to need to be if AI is going to win.

Yeah. I feel like I'm obligated by law right now to tell everyone to, the T in chat, Chb-T stands for Transformer, which is invented at Google. If you don't mention this every so often, a Google PR person

like leaps out of a bush and brandishes that fact at you. Right. They invented a bunch of the core technology and they know how to deploy it. Sundar has said many times, like they know how to make it cheaper and more energy efficient.

He's like, that's what we're good at. So like, you can believe that Google will just do its core competency. They've also, to their credit, done the hard restructure. Yeah.

Right? They got rid of Google, brain, they exited some executives, they put Demis in charge of everything. Okay, you can see that they've undergone some changes to make the move. But now the, the big thing is under the pressure. And I don't know. Apple hasn't undergone any changes, right? They're like, this guy's gone, but here's another executive who's been here for 40 years. You're in charge now. And for a company, like, Eddie Q gets on stage and gets on stage, Eddie Q gets on the stand and is talking about like, It really is a few good men.

Like he just starts vamping, you know, like Jack Nicholson, like just improvving the lines. And poor Tom Cruise just sitting there smiling. We're like, I don't know what's going on. Eddie Q would really like that comparison. But Eddie Q gets on the stand and talks about Apple's thing being cannibalizing its projects before they're dead, right? Like the iPhone exists because they cannibalize the iPod or the iPod. And everybody told them they were nuts to do so, but then they got the iPhone. Apple's not doing that now.

Like there is none of that left in what we see. from Apple anymore. And that posture just does not exist. It is kicking and screaming at every one of these changes. By the way, I just searched it on Google. I use Google for what it's intended for. And it is in fact true that Jack Nicholson improvised the line. You can't handle the truth.

And if you could have been. That's cool. And Tom Cruise just had to, you just had to be like, okay. Nice. Let's keep this baby going. And I'm Eddie. I don't know if you're listening. If you end up on the stand again in this case,

I encourage you to scream at the United States Department of Justice. You can't handle the truth. Absolutely, yes. All right, we got to take a break. Let's all breathe. You write us. Tell us what you think is going to happen. 36 months for now.

These companies look the same or different? You know what I think, but I'm curious what we all think. May 2008, predict what the world is going to look like. Good luck, everybody. We're going to come back when we're going to send a little more time in a courtroom with meta. We'll be right back. The support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard.

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You can visit Whatnot.com slash sell to start selling. That's W-H-A-T-N-O-T dot com slash sell. What-N-O-T dot com slash sell. All right, we're back. Look, I want to leave the policy talk and the legal talk. by always doing a pallet cleanser with gadgets. And we're going to do that. I promise we're going to do that.

But we can't leave court just yet. Because Richard, Adam Messeri, he was on fire today. Just chopping it up in our nation's capital. What happened in this case? He had a lot to say when he came on the stand today. We've heard a lot about Instagram. We've heard about reels.

We've heard about threads. I mean, I don't know if he's explained why they haven't launched an iPad app yet, but I'm sure he'll get to it at some point. We're still recording this. as he's talking. He said they're going to a couple weeks ago. He said Instagram's going to an iPad app. Yeah, I don't, I don't believe it until he says it under oath. Probably because he knew this testimony was coming and how he would be today. That is what it was, because I've been wondering,

why now, why is that happening? It's this. Because he talked about everything. He talked about Facebook deciding to buy Instagram in 2012, which he called one of the best acquisitions of all time. He said that Threads was originally supposed to live within the Instagram app, which is kind of weird to think about, but the way that they're linked, I can certainly see how they would have had that idea. And also when you look at, for example, how YouTube has done the posts in YouTube that these apps don't necessarily think about bringing things out.

But then they kind of realize that if you're going to take on Twitter, you need to have a dedicated app. So that makes a lot of sense, I think, also. He said that one of the biggest mistakes he made was the first version of Reels. That, to me, was just... I'm not sure if the current version of Reels is not still one of the biggest mistakes.

But I did think it was interesting that he said. All the subsequent ones also. Well, the first version of Reels was built on stories, right? And so he was like, you're going to open a story and you're going to swipe through stories the way that you're swiping through Reels now. And he's like, no, that's how people want to do. They just want TikTok. So they copy TikTok.

Copy Snapchat. Copy TikTok, move on. And that is the meta way, as we've seen. They said that Instagram has spent up to $700 million a year to lure creators. So they're bringing in a lot of money. They're spending a lot of money on Instagram. just so many different things. I was surprised that he said so much,

but also the way that Masary has been lately, as open as he's been, as frequently posting, is constantly talking to the people about algorithms and Instagram and what they think. I'm not really that surprised to see that he just has so much to say now.

You know, I've briefly talked to Adam about his posts and like what he does. And he makes two points. In general, I think he's even said this publicly. He's like, one, my audience for this is so small. Like, I just want creators.

Like, they have a lot of questions. They should hear from me. And then his point is, I want to use the tools. Right. Like, he's like, I want to feel what it's like on that side of the screen, not just as a consumer Instagram. So I always think it's like people overread why he's doing it. Like, 90% of Messary's Instagram posts are like, no, we're not listening to you. You know, like the basic stuff.

Like, the algorithm is not punishing you if you use the letter Q in your caption. Like, it's just him debunking consumer. theories and then almost all them boil down to. And you should post more, like, the most basic stuff. But I, the part where he's like, I want to use the tools. I think it's really interesting. But he doesn't get off.

You can't knock. He's as good as it gets, right? You can't knock him off his game. And it felt to me, I mean, this is the case where the government is trying to prove that Meta bought Instagram to foreclose a competitor. And Adam's point was to push meta's argument that Instagram would have never been successful without

meta, right, that all by itself, it would have never developed the way it was, that meta really turbocharged it. I think he made some of those points. And then I think, you know, as all these go, like, I think he oversold the idea that they're under existential threat from small competitors all the time. David, what do you think? I think that's right. He went way out of his way to talk about how big a competitor TikTok is, which is, we've talked about this before, but this has become meta's sort of hobby horse in this trial is the very existence of TikTok suggests meta cannot possibly be a monopoly, which in a certain way is actually a very compelling argument. But what it has done and did again to Misery is just make a bunch of Instagram executives admit that they're not doing a very good job, which I really enjoy. And so like over and over and over again, they just keep apologizing for all of the ways that they're losing to TikTok.

and I just find that to be so very funny. And again, like all this money, like you're talking about, Richard, the $700 million to lure creators. Like, where is that money going? Like, YouTube just pays ad revenue. There are creator funds and there are this stuff. But like Instagram is spending a huge amount of money in these sort of unknowable ways trying to get creators off of those other platforms and onto Instagram. I find that really fascinating.

but even just listening to Mystery talk about it. Like, I find myself wondering a lot if Instagram knows what Instagram is. And this kind of goes back to the point about wanting to use the tools. Like Adam Mystery also made a video, I think today about, oh no, sorry, this was months ago now, but it came resurfaced today about how he wanted Instagram to not be a lean back experience. And it's like, this thing is supposed to be interactive and social and like a place you hang out. And that was like one of their big things with threads was the reason they pulled it out into its own app was because they wanted replies and posts to be on the same level with each other. And so like they have this idea that it's a social network.

And like I don't know anyone who experiences Instagram that. Yeah. I mean, that's why they're spending the money in creators. Right. Right. Instagram sees creators as a good source of content after many rank and file users began posting fewer their own updates. That's why they spend the money. That's from the testimony today.

Yeah, and just come out and be like, hey, we're a, we're a streaming service. Like, it's fine. I just, I don't know. We've gotten to this point now where I think meta as a company, it continues to be obsessed with this idea that like we can get back to friends sharing with friends. And it hasn't been that in a very, very, very long time. I think that's what they say. I think internally they all know. This is why they spend $700 million a year on.

fair. Figuring creators from TikTok. Like, this is why they're fine with spaghetti, Jesus, and the feeds. It just doesn't matter to that. Right? And I think, you know, Mark posting on Facebook or Adam posting on Instagram,

like they're using the tools. I actually really appreciate they use the tools. I think not enough executives use the tools, except for Tim Cook claiming, I believe, to GQ, that he uses every single Apple product every day, which I don't,

they're not enough minutes in the day. But do you remember all those, all the times during like the Twitter years where people would keep track of how many tweets the various like executives and board members had. I think, like I think you're right. I think it's,

it's useful and correct to see executives be part of this. I think Mark and Adam are warped because they have, it doesn't matter, right? There's just like millions of people will just respond to everything they do. If Adam really wanted to experience Instagram, he would start a meme page from scratch, POTUS as a college student and try to go viral every day.

Because that is actually the experience the creators of Instagram are having. Right? This, like, desperate need for algorithmic validation. Right. If Adam really wanted to experience Instagram, he would download a Netflix video downloader, speed everything up 15%, add that weird vertical line and begin posting copies, clips of a few good men to Instagram every day. You just broke Richard a little.

Do you see what I'm saying? That's the real experience of Instagram, right? Freebooting memes from X and being like, here's the difference between men and women. Like, that's the experience of Instagram. And that's what many, many creators experience. Like being an Instagram creator is choosing between the dark path of just freebooting memes or doing those AI baby podcasts for like Theo Von's a baby that's all over the place right. And it's out of control like every other clip in my feed. And it's just like, can I just say I love this?

I'm forced to me. I am like, I am sort of constitutionally against AI generated content in my feed. And baby podcasts are very much for me. It's very funny. Please don't do it to us. or do it to us and don't share with anyone but us. You see what I'm saying? That's like one path, which is the dark side.

There's a slightly less dark path of like, be a Gary Vaynerchuk hustle bro where he just screams at you about your content not being good enough and the algorithm is just people and just make great shit. And like that's the path I've chosen personally. And then there's like everybody else. I just want more views. And it's like, well, you're not hustling hard enough.

And none of that is I made, a nice video update about changes the algorithm. We got a million views just because I'm at a mystery. Right. You're still having a synthetic experience on their own platforms. And I look at all this and it's like the thesis of this case is they saw a competitor and they bought it because they were afraid. Right. And you can argue at the markets and me, we and all this stuff.

But like that's the real case is look at how bad these emails were. They saw a competitor and they wanted to crush it. it. And I don't know if they realize that what they're doing right now is making the case very strongly that if they could have bought TikTok and crushed it, they would have. Because they obviously saw this competitor and they weren't allowed to buy it. So they had to compete. And like, look at all this evidence of all the stuff they're doing to compete with TikTok that they didn't have to do because they bought Instagram. And like, wouldn't that have been better? Right. And I don't know if that has been.

tied together correctly. I know the government will get there. But it's just like, we're kind of, you're kind of proving the point a little bit. Like, look at how hard worth competing with TikTok. It's like, yeah, look at how hard meta did not have to compete. Look at how hard Facebook did not have to compete with Instagram. Look at how hard Facebook didn't have to compete with WhatsApp.

That's the case. Yeah. And the messaging stuff, I think, has been in some ways even more damning. Like you talk about just what's in their emails. Facebook was petrified of what was happening as people were moving to messaging and understood that that was the next place people were going to go to actually talk to friends and family. And it has just come up over and over. Like they just keep showing emails where one Facebook executive or another is like, if we don't buy a messaging service, everyone will die because all of everyone's friends are leaving. And then they're like, ah, we didn't really think WhatsApp was going to make any money.

And it's like, well, is that, are those not the same thing? Yeah. It's a weird thing. And it really does feel like everyone is actually kind of saying the same thing with really different words. And it's to your point not super clear who is going to be the one to try to like make something cogent out of all of this. So there's another turn of the series testimony today where he talked about trying to integrate the teams. And it eventually got to the point where he was like the Instagram team was too spiky and too weird and I had to reel them in. And I didn't do that first. And then he just dunked on me a little bit, which is super great. The Federal Trade Commission in court, their lawyers, played Messeri his own interview on Decoder. They played him a clip from Decoder. And they prefaced it by saying, do you remember this conversation with Nealai? And Adam said, I vaguely remember speaking to Nealai.

Congrats. Super great. Yeah. I love you too, Adam. I vaguely remember our conversations as well. But the clip is really interesting. They played him, should we run the clip? We don't have it.

I'll read it to you and we can actually run the clip. Yeah, we can play the clip. So a clip is really interesting because, you know, Dakota is an org chart show, right? We asked, we're like, well, how are you structured the company? And so I asked him how Instagram was structured and how he had integrated it more into Facebook over time. And this is, if you will recall, 2021 is this conversation. It is, Facebook is trying to tie everything more tightly together because it sees this antitrust stuff coming. And if you'll recall, 2021, this is when Donald Trump had been banned.

And after, from all the platforms, after January 6th, after all the elections, like, just bad. Just bad stuff all the way around. Didn't this interview run with like a super spicy headline? The headline of the interview on our site was Adam aseri says banning Donald Trump was the right thing to do. And the Donald Trump FTC just played a clip of that interview to Adam Sering in a courthouse. But they used, I think the Apple podcast headline is like much softer. So they showed that screenshot instead of the one on our site, which is very funny. So he said, I told everyone, when I took over Instagram, I told everyone was going to be a sponge, I wouldn't change for any, push for any change.

I would try to understand Instagram, the product, the employee base, and the values. The one place where I almost immediately broke my promise was safety and integrity. I was very interested in details because I'd run blah, blah, blah. I'm just skipping ahead because we're going on the audio. And he said, I found, for the most part, Instagram was running around stuff and our team was tiny, and I made them integrate with the bigger meta team so it could grow. And this is the best argument that exists. I'm actually really curious why the government played this to Adam, right? Because the best argument is trust and safety is really hard.

The scale is really hard. Doing it on photography and video is even harder, right? Because you just need more compute to scan all that content. And you need unified rules and you need to manage contractors on the world and multiple language, all this stuff. That is the best argument they have. That Instagram was able to scale because Meta had that particular. infrastructure. And maybe you could argue that they had ad sales infrastructure also, but it was that

particular infrastructure. I thought it was really interesting. And then he gets to the Instagram team was chafing against meta, right? And he thinks a bunch of stuff was overblown. And eventually, of course, Kevin Sistram and Mike Krieger leave meta, they were on the stand last week. They're very spiky. They said they could have made it on their own.

But I just think it's really interesting that so much of the story is here are the capabilities that meta actually provide in. Instagram versus having to compete with Instagram. Yeah. I mean, and over the years, META has made the case for itself as a trust and safety organization like many, many times. It is one of the things that that company is invested in at a level beyond almost

anybody else, which is, A, wild given all the stuff that still happens on its platforms. But yeah, it is kind of weird to basically play that. Because, I mean, both of those things, I suppose, can be true at the same time where the Instagram team can be chafing against it, but also really needed the trust and safety help. but I don't know that at best that feels like a wash of an argument to me from Yeah Well I think that the two things that can be true

At the same time are that Even if in a world where Instagram it remained independent That it still could have been weird and bad In the ways that it is weird and bad now And just a cluster of things that don't really work together Even if meta had never purchased it We've seen what's happened with Twitter Like prior to Elon Musk

And also that the reason why matter purchased was to take out a competitor. Fair, yeah. And also, if you are the sort of person who believes all these companies censor too much and you're worried about social, big platform, free speech abuse, sure, you can worry about that. The solution is you have more big companies moderating different ways and competing to have the best moderation policies.

Not one ever bigger company imposing the same rules and the same processes and the same Mark Zuckerberg whims. We're not doing content moderation anymore. We're doing community ads. Like, that is the problem, right? is the scale. I don't know that the Trump administration, they were smart, would be making this argument because it's such a big argument they make all the time. But what they actually want is control over monopoly speech. So I don't think they're going to make this argument. But it's really,

like, that's a thing that you would want. You would want multiple platform companies operating independently so that if you hated the moderation on Facebook, you would leave and go to an independent Instagram and experience a different moderation system. And that just has never played up. We've never really see that playup. No. Or you would have an Instagram that was better at protecting teens, right? Because you would, they would feel pressure and people would leave their platform to go to some other platform.

And we certainly have not seen that play out. No. All right. So same question as before, 36 months for now. What does meta look like? Is it recognizable? Is it very different? I think meta gets out of this one.

Yeah? Yeah. Because Mark Zuckerberg is just floating around the Oval Office? Kind of, yeah. I think Mark Zuckerberg probably thinks he can convince Donald Trump to just throw out this case in one way or another. And I think the like, again, the technicalities of this continue to be so complicated. And it's the market definitions are weird and like friends and family sharing services is a strange thing. And so I feel like it might sort of lose this case in the court of public opinion and win it on technicalities.

All right. They get out of this, but they do some weird thing where Facebook becomes a spin code that they spin off into its own thing. And Mark just takes Instagram and meta and all the VR stuff and turns it into Horizon and goes and lives in the metaverse. Okay, that's an unbelievably good idea. Mark just fully, he just zags on him. Spin off Facebook. He's like, the company's not even called that anymore. This is for old people. I'm going to sell Facebook to the AARP.

And I'm going to go do Instagram and what's happened in the meta first. Unbelievable idea. I have no notes. I, my answer here all depends on what happens with TikTok. I think if TikTok survives, meta does not look recognized one three years. I actually think there's a better chance they lose this case than anyone thinks.

Okay. Because that market definitions are they pinned a lot of that. The judge gets to pick. The judge is allowed to just invent their own market. They're like the market for scrolly videos, like done and done. calling it, right? So we'll see what happens there, but if there's no TikTok, right, if TikTok actually gets banned, I think meta just collects all those users and it can withstand whatever changes comes its way. If TikTok does not get banned, I think the competitive threat is still so high

and the relevance of these things are fading. Like TikTok is just vastly more culturally relevant than Instagram is today. Oh yeah. It's vastly more culturally relevant than Facebook is today, aside from your child's little league softball schedule is posted in an unscanable PDF in a Facebook group. Like, it's fine. But like the cultural relevance of TikTok is so high and meta doesn't have moves. I don't think they can figure it out. And so you get the pressure of the court case and whatever remedies in a court case, all the distraction of compliance, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And then a continued ascendance of TikTok, 36 months for now, these companies look totally different. I don't know. That's my conditional. It is certainly true that there doesn't seem to be any way in the next 36 months for meta to buy its way out of its problems, which is a thing. I mean, they've been trying. Yeah. How many meme coins has Zuck bought? Duck is like, here's what I'm going to do.

I'm going to punch Ukraine. I'm going to do some MMA in the Middle East. He's trying. Yeah, Dana White's running it now. There you go. All right. That's the baby podcast right there. If you want the clip, that's the one.

All right. Let's breathe for one second and then actually palette cleanses us with some gadget news. And it's meta gadget news, but it's still gadget news. It's NELI-specific meta-gadget. It is Nelai's number one dream gadget.

Okay, so here the news is there's a rumor that meta will have new AI glasses and they will have a quote, super sensing mode with facial recognition. I have been saying for years now that the killer app for glasses, for smart glasses, is names and faces. I'm horrible at names and faces.

If I could just look at people and be told their name, I would probably be the most powerful politician in America. You know? You think that's the only thing that stopping you? Yeah, because I walk up to people. I'm like, who are you? And you can't get votes that way. It's not normal.

Like Bill Clinton famously would, like, go to a rope line in Vermont, like five years after he'd last been there, and he'd remember every single person and their children. and everyone's like, well, we love that Billy Clinton and then, you know, like, now you're being president. I show up at a rope line in Vermont. I'm like, I don't, all of you look exactly the same to me, like total face blindness.

If I could just do names and faces. Is it like a white people thing? That's another baby podcast moment right there. You're the Theovine. You did it. No, it's like literally everyone. I just can't do it. If I could do it.

The problem is to do it, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition data, which is deeply problematic. Like that is the panopticon surveillance state. And as much as I want this product, I'm like, I think that tradehouse pretty bad. Facebook has long been able to build this product because they have everybody's names and faces. Yeah. There have been versions of this product hacked together using meta-AI glasses, live streaming to Instagram live, captured in a web browser and sent to Clearview.

We've run the demos who've talked about it. Yep. Like the proof of concept has been there. And so I think Meta knows, like, oh, this is the killer app. Like, we should show people the killer app. Like, all bets are off right now with privacy law in the United States. All bets are off with AI regulation in the United States. We're just doing it.

And I think people are going to be so creeped out so fast that the backlash will be intense. Oh, I completely agree. I mean, I think it's interesting to see this start to percolate up next to real-time translation as, like, everyone's holy grail feature for this stuff, right? Because that's the thing everyone is working on. Anyone who has ever done any AI anything would love to tell you how it's going to help facilitate real-time translation so all the people in the world could talk to each other. And this is like, it's getting right up there with it. And I think I would define it slightly broader than the way you're thinking about it, which is just like sort of latent world awareness. Right?

Because like think about the the project Astra demo we saw from Google last year where you can like ask it where you left your keys. Like it's it's relatively similar technology that makes my glasses know your NELI. and my glasses know that my keys are over there. Right. So I think that is the thing now that everybody understands is, or at least believes is like a killer app for all of this stuff. And it's like, where is the, you know, where are the groceries in the car?

And it'll like remind you that you left them in the car because it's all you put them in the car. And all that kind of stuff is starting to bubble up from all of these different companies. But it is, it's the same thing. Like, oh, I have to give you 100% constant access to everything happening around me all the time. And in exchange, you'll tell me where I left my keys and what Nila's name is.

You're going to label stuff. And I don't think most people want to make that trade. I just don't. Look, Tim Cook is heavily invested in air glasses. There's a rumor this week that Apple is building chips for its own AR glasses now. That stuff all seems still pretty pipe dream to me, right? Like, meta's Orion glasses are too expensive to build because the blocker is the optics. Right.

You got to make a lens that can accept images. Meta insists on calling them holograms. If you see a meta-executive refer to their glasses as projecting holograms, I literally want you to stop them in their tracks and be like, use words correctly. They're not holograms. They're just image overlays. They're just projecting onto waveguides and glasses like everyone else is doing. Holograms are three-dimensional, the existence.

We were Vergecast people. You understand what I'm saying. Use the words right. I mean it. Okay. But like the optics are the problem. Meta invested in one set of optical technologies that thought would scale. They didn't.

They didn't get cheaper. Apple hasn't solved this problem. That's why they built the Vision Pro the way they did. There's a lot of steps between here and now. And then you look at what the promise is. And again, I would buy names and faces glasses in one RV, even with all their problems. I would buy them tomorrow. I think it'd be great for conferences where everyone opted in.

Like there's a lot of places you could make it work, right? But at the end of the day, the promise is we're going to label stuff. You're going to look at a painting and we're going to be like, here's the name of the painting. And it's like you got to do a little bit better than that, right? You got to make a better promise than everything will be labeled. I think something interesting to happen here when you talk about that backlash and what might happen that they're not anticipating. Remember when Microsoft talked about bringing out their recall for Windows where it remember every single thing that has been on your screen.

And then people said, wait. Every single thing that has been on my screen. David wrote a piece where he was like, I love this. He's like screenshots of the future of AI. That was like your headline. Yeah, for precisely the opposite reason of recall. Like, it's because the thing a screenshot lets me do is say, I care about this, save this for me, and then make something out of it.

Like, the, I, we've talked about this V song was on the show just recently talking about these AI recording wearables. And there is, there's this thing you realize where you're like, oh my God, I do so much. stuff that I don't want to have any record of. And everybody goes to like porn and whatever, but like, I don't, it's weird that it has a, it has an audio record of every TikTok I watched today. Like, that's weird. Like, it shouldn't have a recording of what someone was saying when I walked past them in the

store. And like, it's pulling that up when I search because I don't even remember that. I didn't even hear it at the time. Yeah, it's, it's not my information to have. And yet I have it. I mean, I think we should summarize this podcast immediately. We'll see. Like, I'm excited.

If meta, of all companies announces a facial, a set of facial recognition glasses, like, it's, they don't have a great privacy rep to begin with, right? It is the killer app for these glasses.

I'm being a little snarky about labels, like that is the promise. Labeling people is the killer app for these glasses, right? Again, if you're at a conference, just imagine a conference and, you know,

there's big signs that say in this, in this convention hall, everyone's going to be wearing these glasses. Like we were already namebags before we're enabling the glasses in this one place. Okay. Still a little gray area you should be able to opt out. But like, let's say that exists, right?

Everyone has agreed to participate in this social experiment. And you're walking around and you see the person that you saw the conference last year and you had a conversation and you totally forgot their name and you gave them their card and it's like got lost to the backpack and that's gone. And what you get is here's this person. Here's their name. Here's like the company they work at, like the name tag, but you don't have to like look down at the name tag.

That is actually a trip that would ease social interaction in that environment in a very specific way that would be worth wearing glasses. In almost every case, like having to charge the glasses and put them on your face, this is my theory of wearable bullshit. Like that's a lot of care for not a lot of value. Right. I don't think meta can convincingly make the case. But I also think they know that the only thing people are. are wearing the Raybans for is to have a very convenient camera and no one is using any of the AI features of the meta glasses and they have to come up with something else yeah i mean i i i agree um

but i'm not i'm just not convinced this is that thing we'll see yeah uh more gadget news just to run through it quickly uh there's a rumor that apple's going to be the iPhone air with a bigger screen in 2027 there's also a rumor that apple's going to do a foldable next year and they're going to move the iPhone release date around? What do you think? The idea is that they're now going to be, I believe it would be six different iPhones and that that's too many to launch at one event. So they're going to be two different iPhone launch events going forward because they're going to do, I think it would be pro air and foldable at one and then base plus SE at another. And I would argue that Apple has learned precisely the wrong lesson here.

And the correct answer is don't have six phones. But this is where we are. So that's apparently like the iPhone 18 cycle appears it is going to be a huge one. The iPhone, this iPhone 16 cycle is so huge for Apple intelligence. Well, right. I was just going to say this is all based on like some perennially sketchy supply chain stuff. and we never really know and it's all very messy

but I think there has been some smoke about a foldable iPhone coming in and around 2027 that leads me to believe that's probably still relatively right

but I just I don't know I'm having so much hard I'm having such a hard time caring about a slim iPhone and it appears that is going to be the thing this year and I don't care

I just don't care I think if they make a foldable iPhone it folds out to like iPad iPad mini size and then the iPad gets like windowing which they've rumored. It's going to get real weird.

Mm-hmm. It's going to get real weird. And then they will still refuse to make a touchscreen MacBook for reasons that continue to not make any sense. Or multi-user on the iPad. Yeah, also that. It's the only thing anybody actually wants. Richard, there's a bunch of new surface stuff.

What's going on here? This is what Tom Warren had all of the information this week about Microsoft launching some, first of all, they have a smaller Surface Pro laptop. So I've got a 12-inch, finally. We've heard some rumors about this. It starts at $799.

It has Arm inside, so it doesn't have a fan. I think you have the iPad competitor that the Surface Pro is kind of always supposed to be. Now the Windows on Arm is pretty good with the Qualcomm chips and with all the things that Windows have done to be able to run more and more programs. It's the time. The Surface Pro that people were looking for

that it was kind of supposed to always be. This is a lot more. The price is a lot righter. It's a good size. It seems like his first impressions of it. I think he said the 12 inch has the eight core chip, 16 gigs RAM, 256 gigs of storage for 799.

This fully looks like my new airplane computer. Yeah. Perfect, right? It seems like that is the one that you could just take with you and you'll have your computer in kind of the same size and shape of an iPad, but you'll be able to have multiple accounts

and computer stuff. Yeah, this does seem like, at least in theory, Microsoft has been sort of dancing around the right set of specs for a long time. Like it was too small and then it was too big. And then there was the surface go, and then some of it was too slow and some of it. Like, it always had a couple of things right and a couple of things wrong. And at least on paper, I think you're right, that this is the one that is like, okay, you made the list correctly this time.

It's still, it's a thousand bucks by the time you buy the keyboard, which everybody's going to do. so whatever. But still, like as a, as a, what is the sort of easy computer to recommend to most people, this feels plausible to me in a way that I'm very excited. And the, yeah, the keyboard case doesn't have Alcantara on it anymore. Oh, good. So we get all madded and nasty. Yeah. They don't have that. They also launched the Surface laptop 13 inch with an arm processor in it. So. And that one oddly covered in Berber Carbett. That'd be amazing. Microsoft made like a full 70s basement laptop.

No, that one's just made of, it's made of normal materials. This one has a fan, though, which I think is weird. That's the only thing about the surface laptop, which is a machine I have loved for many years. They went ahead and gave this thing a fan, which strikes me as maybe a good idea, but not a great sign of confidence in the whole Qualcomm situation at the moment. Yeah. The goal for these devices is to set the tone for the Windows ecosystem. I think they do that job just fine.

Yeah, they're great looking. Yeah, they look good. Those videos are on YouTube. Go watch them. They're great. A lot of so much you think. Also, the testing, with the smoke blowing around inside of the surface laptop to show how the air flow is up. That's really cool.

You can see that on the social media and the article. Dude, every time I watch one of these, like, stress testing gadgets videos, I'm always like, yeah, I've seen like 100 of these before. And then 11 minutes later, I'm like riveted just watching a thing press the button over and over and over again. I will watch an infinite number of something beating up a gadget video. turns out. Four, five years into the verge, I actually made a rule that we were never going to look at phone prototypes again. Like, this is just like fundamentally stopped. We were like, well, like, well, I was like, great. Like, once again, you've brought me to the quietest room in Northern California to look at your headphones. Like, we're just not doing this anymore. And then

it's like, I kind of, can I go to the quiet room again? You just have to acknowledge it for what it is. Like, this is, I'm here once again. In the quietest room in California. To watch you punch a gadget in the face over and over again. I'm like, I'm ready for it. It's very good. Watch the video. It's great. All right. We got to take a break.

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All right, David, it's time. Oh, we're so back. Last week, it was quiet. Too quiet. So this week, according to the notes that I'm seeing, we are so, so, so very back on America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Eli, what do we have?

Brendan Carr was a real dummy this week. Like a shotgun blast of Brendan Carr this week. He's all over the place. He's at a Milken conference. Alex Heath is actually at this conference. But at this conference, he gave a bunch of interviews, a bunch of media outlets. Not us, Brendan. Rude.

I'm just saying if you had real stuns, you'd show up on our show. But he gave a bunch of interviews to your cable news outlets. And boy, did he say a lot of things. So I want to start with some classic Brendan, like classic Republican FCC chairman stuff. Because, you know, for all of his many, many faults, he is still a deregulatory, telecom-friendly FCC chairman. And so he just says the things now that you would expect people to say, but after all this time, you just know that there are industry plants and they're dumb. So Brendan said, during the Biden administration, the United States fell behind on opening the airwaves up to private sector and China now has an edge.

If you recall. In American airwaves? I don't know. Okay. But we might be losing the race to 5G again, you guys. Oh, no. And then to put a gloss on it, a 2025 gloss, he said, AI is going to be the use case that will drive some of these telecom networks. That's why we have to get more spectrum out there.

We have to make it easier to invest in these high-speed networks. And it's like, bro, they're chatbots. Also, that quote is going to stick in my head for a long time as the moment AI officially lost all meaning as a thing that anyone agrees on. Yeah. Like, what does that even? mean it's AI is going to drive some of these telecom. Does he just mean it uses bandwidth? But again, it is currently expressed as chatpots. Like, we're, we're pumping vast amounts of UTF text around the internet. Like, what are you talking about? He's a dummy. But he wants to

have more spectrum options and sell more spectrum to the big companies and provide more government subsidies to the biggest telecom companies in the country. because we have to win a fake race. I don't know, man. If you, Brendan, if you can explain yourself, you can show up, but you tell, like, the race to 6G is coming. Where you sit today.

Think, just be ready. Take a beat. Take a moment. Pull your car over and get ready to shout down the people who say there is a race to 6G because of AI. Steal yourself for this battle because it's coming. And it won't be robot surgery on a grape, which never happened.

it's going to be AI. If we don't beat AI, China will win the race to 6G. 8K, 6G AI is a thing you're going to start to hear. It's going to be nuts. So that's just like you're a little amuse bouch of Brendan being a dummy, right? Just saying the same dumb things that FCC chairman who want to give more spectrum and handouts to telecom companies always say. Dumb, not illegally dumb, right? Not you're a traitor to America dumb.

Which for Brendan is, you know, great job. Good job, Brandon. Yeah. He made it. He made, he, whatever, you know, he, yeah. He stayed in his lane. Regular dumb. Then he started to get, well, I think, traitorously dumb.

He talked about the FCC's investigation into Disney's DEI practices. And he said the preliminary data from our investigation indicates they're doing intentional discrimination, potentially among race and gender. That's a really big deal. It's a good thing. Because, you know, Disney is slightly caved here. They've gotten rid of some of their rules. You know, they're trying to appease the Trump administration. He said, it's a good thing.

they're heading in the right direction, but we want to make sure that it's in substance and not in name only. We have to take a look at the conduct that took place in the past. That is a potential problem under the FCC's own equal opportunity employment rules, which, by the way, they got rid of Brendan, they got rid of all the D.R rules. So he's basically saying, I'm going to continue to try to punish Disney for nothing, right? Like, the Ariel was black one time and now Bob Iger has to go to jail and Brendan Carr is going to be the one to do it. Yeah, they're doing intentional discrimination potentially among race and gender is the whole problem that existed forever that we tried to solve with DEI.

Like, that was the problem. It's very good. So he's still, right? He's still trying to punish companies for their speech and how they run their companies. He is very interested in punishing companies for their speech. This is the thing he cares about the most. And so pushed on this, he tried to claim, and this is the one that just really, really got me, he tried to claim that the FCC's investigation into CBS and the Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes

and the Paramount merger with Skydance, Paramount Own CBS, was totally unrelated to Donald Trump's own $10 billion lawsuit against CBS for the Kamala Harris interview. He said, I haven't even read the president's complaint. We're just due in law enforcement. These aren't threats. That's just a penalty where I can take away to broadcast licenses, which, by the way, no, FCC has done for decades upon decades. And even the last time they did it required multiple and multiple court cases.

And they still didn't get to do it. He said, no, no, no, no. There are three separate things that are going on. President Trump has his lawsuit against CBS that's in state court. I haven't read that complaint. I don't know what all the complaints are. There's the transaction before us, Paramount and Skydance. And then there's a 60 minutes complaint.

Those last two have to do with the FCC. The first one doesn't. We're staying in our lien and we're just reviewing it. It's just the normal course of review where we take a normal interview with a politician during an election and we threaten to punish a company as hard as we can because they want to get a merger approved. And what we want from them is a settlement saying that they will not do quote unquote news distortion, which means they will tilt their coverage towards us. But that has nothing to do with Donald Trump.

Even though two weeks ago, Brendan is proudly wearing the literal gold bust of Donald Trump's head as a pin on his chest. You have no credibility, Brendan. Like, none at all. Because you love to spout out on social media and be a MAGA warrior. And then when you're pressed on it,

you pretend that you are a normal gray suit government bureaucrat just doing the normal process of review. And you can't have both. You can't. You can't be a totally corrupt, like, censorious bureaucrat. And then on the other hand, be like, I'm just a lawyer doing my job.

By the way, you know who agrees with me about this? It's not a bunch of weirdo, progressive libs. It's the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most conservative think tanks in America. Published an article this week called Policing News, policing DEI, the FCC's shifting priorities erode its credibility. It's an entire article about Brendan destroying the credibility of this agency by doing censorship from a conservative think tank.

Here's just a quote. In short, the FCC's mission crept panders to the president eroding the commission's stability because it's hard to predict the regulatory direction which it will head next other than a pro-Trump one. That's not me. It's not, you know, Uncle Woke over here. That's one of the most conservative think tanks in America, agreeing with bipartisan in groups of former FCC commissioners.

Agreeing with everybody who's ever looked at. Stephen Levy wrote a piece and wired about this a couple weeks ago. Down the line, everyone looks at this and says, this man who is in charge of our nation's communications infrastructure keeps issuing threats about content to broadcasters, to cable networks, to internet companies, he has no power to regulate. And it's because he wants to censor speech. And these little claims, he's just doing the normal review with a penalty that has

essentially never been used in the course. of a merger review to take away broadcast licenses for news distortion. You don't get to do that when you also wear the goldhead of Donald Trump on your chest, when you're also a MAGA warrior, when you're also on Twitter all day, every day, responding to reply guys saying you're going to punish companies for their speech. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on this show, which is much harder than the softball cable networks that you go on and try to answer some of these questions and see if you can respond with rigor and care to the accusations that you're,

Your desire to censor speech rises to the level of not just First Amendment violation, but outright hostility to our Constitution. Anytime you want, this show, Decoder, you can just hang out with David in a coffee shop and I'll film it from around the corner with an iPhone. Sounds great. However you want to do it. I don't think you can. I think you're a coward. That has been Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast for the podcast. We're so back.

It felt good. I didn't like taking a week. Last week we were just like, yeah, Brendan, kind of still seems like he sucks. Don't worry. He'll talk again. He can't sure. He keeps saying he's loving his job. So being America's chief censor.

All right. We need a pallet cleanser. David, what you got for me? Let's talk about Netflix just for a minute. Yeah. Because Netflix had kind of a sneakily interesting week product-wise. First, big new update for the TV app for Netflix,

which I find my like hobby horse of reporting is about streaming recommendations. Like how to tell you what you want to watch. I think it's just the most fascinating thing in the world. And what Netflix did. did in part was that banner at the top of the Netflix app. It's now much bigger. And the one thing that that communicates is that Netflix believes more strongly than ever that it can just put something in front of you and you will probably click play.

And so I think that's fascinating. This is much less like a discovery thing that we're moving rapidly away from the like infinite, you know, side scrolling tiles to just like a big-ass thing that's like, watch this, you clown and Netflix is betting that that's going to work. And I find that really fascinating. But thing number two, and Nilai, I believe you are going to maybe rightfully, maybe wrongfully take a victory lap on this one.

Netflix is just doing TikTok now. Like imagine Netflix did TikTok. That's what it's doing. So it's interesting because it's not TikTok. It's in the mobile app. They're going to do a vertical, swipey feed of stuff you might want to watch. We haven't seen it.

Right, there's this quote from Eunice Kim, the chief product officer Netflix. We know swiping through a vertical feed on social media apps is an easy way to browse video content. We know our members love to browse or clips and trailers for the next of session. Sort of. What people love to do is watch pirated clips of movies from the middle on TikTok. And so that's the experience you have to recreate. Not you're going to swipe and then watch a trailer from the beginning. Yes.

Right? Like, that's not it. Like what it is, I'll just keep using. a few good men because it's very funny and TikTok just insists that I keep watching this movie. Maybe because I watch every clip to the end. It's like, do you want more of this? It's like, I do. We're going to drop you in the middle of some of the most impactful scenes from the movie, ice cold, and there's comments next to it, most of which are what movie is this?

And then people lying, which is very entertaining. It's that. So I'm curious how they actually execute this idea. I've asked everybody. I've asked the CEO of Tobey. I've asked Netflix itself. Their executives have been on show. I've asked them.

And they're all like, yeah, it's hard because we don't have the rights to all this content. Right. And, you know, TikTok, there's people are stealing it. So, of course, you just put the best part. But, like, the studio is going to say, Netflix owns a bunch of its content. So it could do it right. We'll see. But I think in many ways, this is the new discovery method.

And, you know, and David is just like, the laziest TV watcher in the world. He's like, just play me whatever. Like, this is the modern, just, I want to start watching something. so I'm just going to flick channels. It's that mechanism, but for like the social media, social video age. Yeah, but it's funny you mention the trailers thing because that's been the thing I've been thinking about too. Like Spotify has been desperately trying to do this with music and podcasts too.

And like you go to the podcast page on Spotify and it just like starts playing a podcast right there in line. And it starts at the beginning, which is a huge mistake. And like you're saying, when you're in this browse thing, showing me the beginning of the movie is the wrong thing to do. Showing me like the thing that is happening that is going to catch my eye is the thing to do. And we're already seeing this in trailers now like there's now the trailer before the trailer where they show like eight seconds and then it's like the trailer for Thunderbolts begins now.

And it's like I thought it began when I clicked play on this YouTube video 19 seconds ago. So already that has shifted to like grab you faster. and I think either a bunch of content makers are going to start to have to be smarter about how they make these trailers for these people or Netflix is going to have to get really smart about saying, okay, this is the grabiest 30 seconds of this show, which is a thing Netflix knows.

Like it sees how people interact with this stuff. Oh, that's really interesting. I haven't thought about that. Netflix can theoretically figure out and it could just, it could play me the thing that is likely to work for me in my own feed. Does Netflix know that? I mean, Netflix, watch.

Watch data is like mostly linear, right? What they know is when people stop watching. They don't know when most people begin watching. Because for Netflix, everybody begins at the beginning. Right. Well, they know which ones you come back to. Sure. And obviously, maybe they're a producer here is actually the people on TikTok who post the clips,

and they just go back and take those clips. That would be amazing if Netflix was scraping TikTok to see which Netflix shows got their most reactions as pirated TikTok videos. There's something here that's really powerful. Yeah. It all comes down on the execution. And the thing that they're competing against is infinity people trying infinity variations on infinity free content that they're not paying for, which is like always the problem. But to me, it's so the future of discovery.

I'm kind of excited to try that. It's going to be fascinating. And to Richard's point, there is this source of tons of good data on what people actually care about. It's just, it's just all illegal and doesn't belong to Netflix. I wonder if what if the. the use of it isn't even as much, okay, so you watch this and then you watch the video, but just it means that you're using the Netflix app more and that you're less willing to let your Netflix subscription die.

Whether or not you watch the show anything, but it's just something you can use to eat time, which is what a lot of these apps really are. You don't know what to watch, but you just don't want to scroll past some men talking on a podcast. Or babies. Yeah, like what if step two of this thing is it just becomes another set of things to watch on Netflix? That they're just like, oh, you're watching, instead of watching Netflix shows, you're watching things 18 seconds at a time. That's fine.

And Netflix is definitely, right, we compete with death or whatever they say, sleep, not death. Netflix is like, Tenser Anders is like, I will defeat death. They're like, we compete with, like, they're fully in the attention economy. They've known it for a long time. Their competitor is YouTube and video games. And so if you're in the Netflix app watching. short clips of Bridgeton all that? I don't think they care because they already own the content. That's the thing that makes it harder for every other service. Right? Like, even Apple TV can't do it.

You think Apple's paying for all that stuff, but like many other big production companies and studios actually make the majority of their content still. So these are all licensing deals and they don't have all these moves. Netflix just outright owns a bunch of its stuff. Yeah. So, well, see, I'm excited for this one. There's something here that I think is very powerful. The TVUI is weird because it's like three different versions of interfaces they already did. But I don't know. Back to the future, I guess. I mean, this is like the Netflix story in a nutshell. They're like, what if we just, what if we just stretched some boxes and condensed some boxes? Does that help?

What if we made the thumbnails bigger and the text smaller? I just want them to never show me a summary that is like a clip of a review of the show that doesn't tell me anything about what it is in the show. I don't care if XYZ website said it was cool. Yeah. What is it about? Fascinating deadline. And you're like, cool, thanks, Netflix. This is great.

That's exactly what I needed to know. You know, Apple doesn't show you the Rotten Tomato scores of its own shows. If you're at like, look and, you know, the Apple TV interface usually has a little bit of metadata, but for Apple stuff, it's not there. It's very good. All right, I want to end on two more gadgets.

Well, one more gadget, really. I just want to call it, in fact, that Gen 2E reviewed four robot lawnmobes. and maybe the most Gen 2e moment that can exist. You have to read it. It's very good. It includes the line. They don't cut your lawn.

They shave it. Perfect. Perfect. Jen went through a lot to get that story done. And it's very good. So everyone should go read it and buy a lawn mower just to support Jen. Because this is like a year of work to try and get these things to shave her lawn. I don't know.

You should buy the lawnmower. I think you should read the story. Subscribe to the verge. You can wait a couple of years in the lawnmower. That's fair. Read the story and subscribe to The Verge and then maybe don't buy a longer. Okay. And then I want to end with just a tiny wee party speaker update.

It's very hard to top party speaker in front of a fighter jet, which is what we had last week. Thank you again for sending us a photo. We got some more photos, many more photos of party speakers and boxes in stores. Again, I love you. I'm happy that when you see a party speaker, you think of us. It's very validating. I'm glad we're a community. That's not it.

But it's in the wild, right? Guys in Europe on a scooter using it as a chair. We did get one photo that was really good. I don't want to run it because it was, it's an audible marketing campaign, you know? Yeah. But Audible apparently puts people in marathons, wearing party speakers as backpacks, playing audiobooks.

And so you can like run along in the race. It's good. And that's like multiple different books. Like there's a rom-com book. There's like another book and you can follow it. Very good audible stunt. We got one like up on a shelf in a gym. A lot of people seeing party speakers at their gym.

One at a, I think it was a butcher shop in India. I think the thing that we've done that I'm very proud of is we have taught people to see the party speakers in the wild. It turns out there everywhere and we were all just trained to not notice them. It's like a real fish noticing the water situation that's happening right now. now, and we are discovering the extent to which the world has been infiltrated by party speakers. And so people who are like, I've been to this place every day for five years and I never noticed this giant fifth grader-sized speaker blowing audio at me all day. Now we're seeing it.

We've changed the world. And then we received one person who was like, how do you not know about this phenomenon called sound clashes that apparently take place in Jamaica and India, where they just build giant speaker systems and play them at each other. And I was like, first of all, that's, how did I not know this? Like battle bots, but it's party speakers? But those aren't party speakers. Those are giant custom audio rigs.

So honorable mention to sound clashes, I encourage you to go watch the videos on YouTube. They're wild. Different, different. Right? That's like the people who, if you get in the car audio, they're people like, all I really care about SPL and what they're just talking about their sublifers are. I love you. You know, that's great.

Forward facing or rear facing, Nilai. Are you stealing your trunk? Not stealing your trunk. We got to talk about it. This is a big issue. You know what's up? Like, that's a different, we'll do a whole other series on that someday. And I appreciate that people were like, oh, you want to talk about party speakers.

I get it. I understand the connection that was made in your mind. Different. We're still on party speakers. We'll get to that. All right. We're way over. Just so over.

We love you all. That's it. That's a Virchcast. Bye. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network.

Our show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.