The Vergecast - YouTube wants you to go live

Episode Date: September 23, 2025

In all the tech news and world news last week, YouTube's Made On event got a little lost. So we circled back: The Verge's Mia Sato explains why YouTube is suddenly all-in on livestreaming, why it seems to be rapidly turning into a shopping mall, and whether all these AI features will improve YouTube or destroy it. After that, it's time for a second round of David's Summer Takes, in which he subjects The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes and Hayden Field to his thoughts on Threads, podcasts, and social media. Finally, Hayden sticks around to answer a question on the Vergecast Hotline (call 866-VERGE11 or email [e-mail]!) about the words we use when we talk AI. Further reading: YouTube makes it easier and more lucrative to go live YouTube is inching closer to becoming a shopping channel YouTube is going all in on AI New YouTube AI tools help creators give viewers what they want Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of new podcasts. I'm your friend David Pierce, and we have a super fun episode coming up. We're going to talk about YouTube and phone calls and all kinds of stuff. But first, I just want to quickly tell you about a show that we're launching. I'm super excited about this. We've been working on this show with a really awesome team of people all year, and we finally get to show it to you. It's called Version History, and we've been calling it a rewatch show about technology.

Here, let me just play the trailer for you. You'll get the idea. Let me tell you that a show we're launching here at the verge. You ever watch or listen to those rewatch podcasts where a bunch of people go through episode by episode and talk about all their favorite stories and all the stuff that they remember? We're going to do that, but with tech. None of that existed back then. That pared down funkiness of it still works.

We're talking about products from the Zune to Guitar Hero. Wow, it's very 2005. And software from Linewire to BBM. This was the selling point. Going through how all this stuff came to be and why it matters. I feel like when I hold it, I'm in some sort of. 80s movie. That's the whole Verge. Like, that's what we do here.

Every week on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. It's called Version History. Check it out, starting Sunday, October 5th, and every Sunday after that, see you there. I have to tell you, I'm very, very excited about this show. So here's the way it's going to work. The show is launching Sunday, October 5th, and the first eight episodes. We've made eight episodes

so far, and I think they're all very fun. I have a favorite, but I'm not going to tell you which one of it is. The first eight episodes are going to play on the Vergecast feed and on the Virges YouTube. After that, we're going to keep making the show, but it's going to be on its own feed. It's going to still be on the Versa's YouTube channel, but it's going to be on its own podcast feed. So I'm going to spend the next eight weeks reminding you to please go subscribe to the version history wherever you get podcasts, and I will do it with increased urgency

and fear and rage every single week. But really, this show is super fun. We have a great team of people who have been working really hard on it, and I cannot wait to show this thing to you, because I think it's awesome. Version history, October 5th, go subscribe. All the links you need are down in the show notes. It's going to be so much fun. I can't wait. But for now, we have a Vergecast for you.

And it's a good Vergecast. I'm very excited about this episode. We're going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about what's going on with YouTube. The company had one of its biggest product announcement events of the year last week and shipped some stuff that I found slightly confusing and slightly surprising. So Miyasato on our team is going to come on and help me make sense of it. Then it's going to be time for round two of David's somewhat deranged summer takes,

which I'm very excited to shout into a microphone and have Jake and Hayden tell me how insane I am. We also have a question from the Vergecast hotline, lots of stuff to get to. It's going to be a really fun show. All of that is coming up in just a second. But first, I have to go buy more old gadgets on eBay, because thanks to version history, that's a thing I do now. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool.

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Hi, Mia. Hi. Happy Friday. Happy Friday. Let's talk about YouTube ads. Happy, happy, happy Friday. Yeah, we should say we're recording Friday afternoon. It's been a week.

But one of the things that I think actually got kind of lost in the shuffle this week, which is one of the things I want to talk about, is made on YouTube. YouTube's sort of big annual creator event. And I think a thing you and I agree on is that YouTube is culturally way more important than it gets credit for, generally speaking, like, do you remember years ago when everybody was like, why isn't YouTube getting dragged in front of Congress to answer for the content moderation stuff? And like, I agreed with a lot of that. And I still think YouTube is like a very important platform that we don't understand all that well. And I think you understand it better than most. And so I just want to talk

through some of the new stuff and see if you can help me make sense of it. That's not good. Yeah. Yeah, let's do it. Okay. So let's start with live streaming, which I think surprised me a lot, that it was a big focus at Made on YouTube this year. This is basically like, I want everybody to picture, like, a big, beautiful room filled with creators who love each other and YouTube. And that is, like, this is very much like an event to just sort of bring those people together and tell them about all the lovely stuff that YouTube is doing for them. And so it's a real sort of statement of intent from the platform to be like, here is what matters on YouTube this year. And YouTube as much as anything picked live streaming, just in principle, is that as surprising to you as it was to me? Yeah, it was, it seemed kind of random, honestly.

And there was like a boatload of news this year specifically, I thought, even more than the other years that I've covered. But, you know, I think the way that they described it was like, these are the biggest updates to live streaming that we've ever made. And I was like, why? Right. Yeah, it was, it was really random. Well, so try and make sense of it for me. Like, why? I think there's a, there's a cynical version of this that is like YouTube has already won everything else.

and now it is focusing on live. And I think on the back of like YouTube did an NFL game that went medium, it is very clearly invested in this idea of live events being a thing on YouTube. And I think my read of this whole industry has been that live never quite became the thing we wanted it to be on the internet. There's lots of ways to live stream. Twitch is working. Like there's tons of live stuff out there.

But I don't feel like live, at least in my brain, is next to, like short form vertical video or like, I don't know, blockbuster movies in the sort of huge pillars of culture. Yeah. YouTube clearly wants it to be. Why do you think that is? I mean, okay, first I have to say I have a quote. I've come prepared with a quote.

If you look at YouTube as a series of products reverse engineered from advertising budgets, the company's mini offerings start to make a kind of sense. Do you know who wrote that? That sounds like me. It's you. And so, like, the first, you know, the first lens that I would look at this is, like, that's a lot of time for ads. That's a lot of time for putting stuff that YouTube gets a cut of. There are a couple things that YouTube announced that I think, like, specifically goes into this. Like, one, just, I think this was a feature that already existed, but the ability to tag products in streams. Think about, like, the many, many, I mean, at least for, like, my demographic beauty YouTube is, like, a huge. place. That is where kind of the modern beauty content creator influencer started as YouTube, doing like tutorials. Now all of those people do get ready with me streams on TikTok where they're

using the products, telling you what it is, and hanging out for like an hour and a half while they do their makeup. YouTube sees that. Obviously they want a cut of that. And even better if they can like put the products into it. The other thing that YouTube announced was this sort of like ad experience where it doesn't interrupt the stream. I was watching. a live stream on YouTube the week prior, and it was really annoying because I was watching a stream from like a news outlet carrying a press conference, and in the middle of them talking, it cut into an ad, like a mid-roll ad. And I was like, wait, I need to know. Don't do that, please. But now YouTube is saying, like, we can put your face on one side, the streamers face on one side, and then the ad

next to it, and it's an uninterrupted experience. And this really, to me, like, you see it happening on other mediums as well. Like, if you are a baseball fan, you know that it doesn't matter if Aaron judges at the plate, they're going to get a word in from Taco Bell, and it's going to be like two seconds long, and it's going to be seamless. So that, like, that's kind of like a straightforward way to think of it, is like, this is more surface. This is more ad surface. The other thing I was thinking about was like, and this is kind of like a dark example, but this video in, you know, this video in video experience where, you know, you can have one streamer reacting to another stream. I feel like the value proposition is just, like, so obvious because after Charlie Kirk was shot, everyone

wanted to watch Hassan Piker react to it. And indeed, they did go, thousands of people watched his Twitch stream where he was just reacting to, like, CNN or whatever. And, you know, that's like, maybe they don't want to monetize that. Like that's kind of, you know, a specific kind of event. But think about like the Met Gala award shows, VMAs just happened. Even the election. On TikTok, on election night, people were just streaming for hours watching returns come in and watching like counties and states being called.

So it really makes sense to me. And we can talk about like the actual format of live streaming. But considering. YouTube really wants this experience of being on every screen in your home, obviously they want this too. Yeah, I think there's something to the sort of hang being the thing that knits all of these ideas together in a really interesting way. And like, I'm glad you started by talking about the makeup stuff because it's very clear that that is top of mind at YouTube as they build product. And it was all over the place it made on YouTube. And I think with Live in particular, like I confess I am not a person who watches Get Ready with Me streams.

But I suspect you could go like line by line through the live streaming announcements and every one of them would make sense in context of Get Ready with Me streams. Like there's the practice before going live thing, which I think is very smart and is a good idea and like a fascinating sort of reflection of culture that we should talk about. But there's the thing where you can do horizontal and vertical lives simultaneously. Again, talking about your point, we want to be on every screen possible. That's the kind of thing that like most of these streams are just my face. That's a pretty easy thing to make work. you have the side-by-side ads, like you said, that works. You have the AI tagging of products that when a product shows on screen,

rather than me having to tell you what it is and how to go get it, it'll just be like, it's this and have a link and send me out to buy it. Crazy. I have to say also. All of this is perfectly designed for like, I am a person using products in front of you, and we're hanging out and we are going to monetize every single inch of this in a way that feels grosser the longer you think about it, but also is just where all of these platforms have been headed for a while.

Yeah. Actually, I just got a push notification on TikTok today that was like, by the way, did you know that there's a feature where TikTok will scan your video and look for products using AI and it will create like an outward, like an internal app link to like more. So if they see that I have like a record player in the background, they'll create, I don't know if it's like the blue clickable links or what, but it's like it will take you to a page where it's like. searching for record players. And then if you're a viewer or a creator, you have the ability to turn that off. And I need to still, like, figure out how to turn that off because I don't really want my content monetize like that, but some people do, right? And it really feels like we're coalescing around a thing that I have thought for a while, which is like every piece of content that we watch online is an invitation to buy something. And that's always been true because of, like,

the ad-supported nature of these platforms. But it feels increasingly true. right now, especially like post-Tick-Tac ascendance, where it is really just like, it's a, window into commerce. And I think that is, I mean, we can argue about whether that's good or bad, but it's, it's kind of unavoidable. Let's briefly argue about whether it's good or bad, because I think your point is right that I think that's just where we are. And I think one of the most fascinating things about TikTok was that it did the thing everybody else is doing, which is use videos to sell you stuff, it just did it so much more brazenly.

Like, Instagram spent so long trying to pretend that it was this sort of pure, beautiful place for art, and they were just kind of doing commerce over there. And then TikTok was like, what if all of the videos were just trying to sell you something? And it turns out people still watched those videos of, like, people reviewing candy became a huge thing. Like, it just, these things have just smashed right into each other. And I think one of the things that has been interesting about YouTube is that it has actually been slower to some of that.

stuff that I think they hold on to this idea that it is sort of the creator's place to be creative and that that matters. And the idea that they're just now really whole hog into this idea of like, we are going to shop a bullize the hell out of every single thing that you make for you. It does seem like a tone shift on the platform. Yeah. I think also, you know, a lot of creators think of YouTube still as sort of the place where polished work. goes and I've heard this come from a lot of like when the TikTok band seemed like truly imminent I don't even know like six months ago um you know there was a sense of like where will I go and a lot of creators were saying I'm trying to learn YouTube right learn YouTube and that is because

there is more of like you know I think people still think of it as like a mid to long form place there's a little bit more like advanced editing that's happening you're not just like camera in front of you yapping. You need some sort of like cadence. You need a good title. You need a good thumbnail. You need a good description that's like SEOed to hell. And so I think there's a sense of like, you know, there is a barrier to entry for YouTube. And I think YouTube knows this also. That goes into like the practice thing. That goes into a lot of the AI driven creator tools in the background that I wrote about earlier this week for Maidon. And yeah, I think that YouTube kind of wants a piece of this like off-the-cuff, easy, literally no production value streams. And, you know, the live stream

stuff is really interesting because to me that is truly like an endlessly generative content style. What is different from a stream is different from like a traditional video in that literally any moment can be a stream. Like I follow a few TikTok creators who their whole thing is they're just, they have like a selfie stick, they're walking around New York City, and they're just responding to comments for hours and hours and hours. And that pays the bills. And that is something I think that YouTube rightfully sees as being like a way that people consume content. Some people like to watch streams because you don't have to swipe. Like, you know, people are lazy. Some people watch streams because they're really invested in a specific person where if they can watch you do a thing

in real time, they will watch it and send you gifts. Obviously, that's a big part of it. And yeah, YouTube also had like a tool that they announced where it will cut down pieces of your stream to become other types of content like shorts or midform or whatever. I mean, it's kind of a no-brainer, right? They need more content. They want people to make more stuff. And so of course they're going to, one, tell people to stream for hours and two, give you an easy way to just like pull that out into more like permanent content. That's really interesting because that makes live streaming sound simultaneously both really high stakes and really low stakes, right? Like it's designed to be the most human off-the-cuff version of this, but it's also like it becomes the sort of entry point for both a lot of your audience and a lot of your. content, which makes this practice thing even more interesting. Tell me why you think the practice

before you go live feature is fascinating. Okay. This one truly perplexed me because I think, like, I understand the utility, right? If you are maybe like a dancer and you're going to stream practice that day, right? You work, you're, you are a dancer at one of these like viral also like popularized by YouTube dance studios and you're going to just like stream your practice. Maybe I, like, I'm just making up a thing. But I, I, I, I, understand that, but also it's so funny to me. You're going to practice to be off the cuff. You're going to practice to be live with your fans. You know, it's just like, it's so weird. And I kind of I hate to be the one to break this mirage for you, Mia, but that is kind of how it works.

Totally. Totally. But the idea that there needs to be like a dedicated feature and kind of like a pulling back the curtain moment where it's just like, we're just going to straight up say like none of this stuff is organic, none of this stuff is like authentic, really, in the way that viewers might be led to believe. Like, we're going to just put a practice screen, you know, like a green room into this. It's just, it's so funny to me. And we can, I think this kind of feeds into another thing I've been thinking about, which is just like, we can talk about it later. I want to hear what you think about practice. But this idea that tech platforms and social media platforms have never been more open with what they want. You know, it is just in a weird way.

And yeah, we'll get into that later. But what do you think about practice? We are very much in the like saying the quiet part loud phase of things. Yeah. The practice feature made me think of like, did you ever have that moment when you learned how reality TV shows actually work and that there are like producers in the background being like, you guys should fight about this? or like you see the, my wife and I watch house shows all the time. And there's always that moment where it's like the couple sitting at a table, drinking smoothies, like talking about how much money they're going to make from this house. And it's like, until you start thinking about it, it all feels sort of natural and normal. And then it's like, oh, no, this is like days later.

They've already had this conversation six times. And a producer just sat them down and said, and now talk about how much money you're going to make from selling this house. And it's as soon as it like the veil is lifted. it starts to feel weird. And now I watch these shows and my wife and I have made a game out of trying to figure out what's off the cuff

and what isn't. And it just changes the way that you look at all of these things. And it's like some of this stuff like the practice before going live and even the way that we're talking about like AI product tag, it's like this stuff has always been

more intentional and more thought out and more rehearsed and more practiced than you want it to be. It's just that the shame of that is completely gone. And in a lot of ways, I think that's fine, right? Like, we should stop pretending that this stuff is real life when it's not. Yeah.

And I don't know that it actually changes the appeal in a lot of ways that it's not real life, but it isn't. It never has been. And we should stop talking about it like it is. Yeah. But it is interesting to see every platform. And I think YouTube, to your point, is like the last one to really get on board with the idea of like, this is a ruthless money-making machine and we're going to start showing it to everybody. And that's okay. And we're not sorry.

You know what I mean? This is what we're doing here. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I wrote about this in my piece that I published around Maidon when I was writing about, like, behind-the-scenes creator tools. But it really feels like it's a new era, both for the platforms and also for creators online. Like, in that story, I wrote about how, I talked a little bit about how, like, you know, we, historically, we really talked about platforms being black boxes. And to some extent that's still true. Like there's a lot in the algorithm that we don't know.

There's a lot in, you know, internal conversations and discussions at these companies that creators aren't privy to. There are things that we don't know about how they operate. But also it feels like it's never been clearer, right? And it's because the platforms will just come out and say it, what they want from creators. And I think of it almost as like, I see it as really mirroring what happened in SEO. and it's just like, we're just going to tell you what to make and how to make it. When TikTok changes its creator fund where only people who make videos over one minute are eligible,

it's just saying make longer videos. We want to compete with YouTube. Stop making your little 15-second things. We want long videos. We want long form. We want you to make videos in horizontal, which is like a thing that they did at one point. YouTube is giving creators tools to just like use this and figure out which thumbnail and title combination your viewers like best that lead to the highest watch time. Just do it. Like we'll tell you. Previously that was all stuff that creators had to kind of like figure out themselves. And, you know, these optimizing, this kind of like ruthless optimizing is beneficial for both parties, right? YouTube wants people. watching videos longer. I don't think they really care what videos they are. They just want more watch time.

Creators specifically want people to be watching their videos. And so, I mean, it makes sense. I can see why creators wanted a tool, like the thumbnail and title thing for so long. But it's really fascinating to me. You know, YouTube is giving you an AI chatbot that just tells you what's wrong with your content. And it's like, change this. Like, you didn't do the intro right. Like, do change this next time. And yeah, like on TikTok, there will be, like, sometimes when you search for things on TikTok, there will be, like, a weird little box that TikTok shows you that says, like, hey, there's not that much content about this search term. Why don't you just make it? Interesting.

It's so funny to me. It's really, really interesting. And I think, like, this is kind of what is happening with live on YouTube right now. They're like, we don't think enough people are streaming here. We don't like. Maybe they don't. like dislike, but you know, we want a different type of streamer on here. They're trying to court those people. So now they're like, just, why don't you just stream and just like make your videos from your streams? That's what we want. And what we've learned over the years is that these platforms have all of the tools and all of the leverage in that debate, right? Because you get to a point where it's like, okay, if I'm going to keep making what I want, even if it's against

what, quote, unquote, the platform wants and what the algorithm wants. And I'm eventually just going to be making videos into a void because what what the algorithm will show people and what the platform wants has moved away from me. And I think we've seen, and you and I both talk to a lot of people who are stuck in that place. I know what works and I know what I want to do. And putting those things together is an increasingly big challenge. And I think especially right now, YouTube is being increasingly clear about what it wants. And it has all of the levers to pull to make people who do more live streaming be more successful, right? Like, it just, it just can do that. Your lives don't have to be good. YouTube can still put them in front of people. And they can be great. And if YouTube

doesn't put them in front of people, you're, you're hosed. And so I think it's just, like, we've seen YouTube going from sort of pretending that creators lead the dynamic to, like you said, telling creators what to do. And TikTok, sort of to its credit was the one that has enabled a lot of this because it never pretended otherwise. TikTok was always a place to ruthlessly optimize your content to be viewed by as many people as possible. It was a marketing platform, and it has been an enormously successful one. And YouTube was always the one that was like, okay, go get big audience discovery gaming the TikTok algorithm and then come here and make your art. And that it is completely losing that pretense kind of every day.

Yeah, yeah. It's interesting because it's like you kind of see this dynamic play out in different ways on different platforms. like there's a reason why every Instagram photographer is now a Reels, like an Instagram Reels photographer or whatever. You know, it's just like that is what it is. And I think YouTube still is trying to hold on to this idea that they are the creator platform, like you said. And some of the stuff when you read it, it just like really punctures that veil.

And I think I'm just, I'm curious how, YouTubers react to it. Because I think it's true that not everyone wants to stream. Not everyone wants to be on live. And there's like, I just am curious, like, what level of resistance really is tenable. Yeah, like how much can you fight this and still be viable on YouTube is going to be an interesting question. Yeah. I have to let you go here in a minute.

But let's talk about AI just before we do it because we've talked a little bit about it. And this is like the second or third year in a row that AI was a big story of made on. And not just like AI as a sort of behind the scenes tool to help you answer comments and whatever. AI is like a creative tool for shorts in particular. And this year they're just like, just do a prompt and it'll make a short for you

and publish your shorts. And it's like, what's your, I have not seen a ton of that. I was saying this on Friday show, but I deleted Instagram and TikTok from my phone for the summer as a way to be like, I'm on parental leave. I'm going to spend my time with my child and not on YouTube.

And what actually happened is I just watched a lot of YouTube shorts. I encountered almost no generative AI stuff on shorts, but I understand that that's like my own algorithm. But I'm curious, like, are you seeing this stuff take off, this idea that like upload a photo to YouTube and tell it what to do and it'll use AI to add motion and turn it into a chance challenge and you can make that a short? I don't know if it's like that level. I think there is a level of slum. And, like, you know, I think a couple weeks ago or a few, like a month ago, that was kind of the fear, right, that YouTube was like tweaking something about its policies for monetization. And people freaked out because they thought that it meant anyone who's using AI and their videos would be affected. And then they went back and clarified.

And it's like, no, we're just updating what we mean by like spammy content, right? I think they changed the name to inauthentic. But, yeah, I think they probably recognize that this is a way that people have been. filling the platform with garbage. I think that's true across platforms, whether they're using the in-app tools or not. Like, TikTok is filled with AI sludge. One time, actually, like, I wrote a story and then I found a video of an AI-generated avatar reciting my story back to me. And I was like, what is happening? It's interesting because I think that YouTube is kind of like talking out of its mouth on one side and then there's like everything else that's happening in the background, which is that,

millions of YouTube videos have been trained on without the creator's permission. Yep. And YouTube has been sort of like staying out of it for the most part. There is actually a great piece in the Atlantic where you can search for creators and see, you know, what videos were trained on. And it's a lot of like how to content. But at the same time, it's also like encouraging content creators to use these tools. And I have to, I really wonder how creators feel about that.

If you're, if this bot can also like come up with video ideas, write the script, um, dub your lips, right, to like do the lip matching for voice, for like lip syncing with um, dubs. What is your job? It can also edit your shorts by the way. Right. Right? Like I'm just, that's such a good version of the question because I think like the, the,

the pro case for all of this stuff, which I'm, it's actually sympathetic to is. that it makes it easier to make stuff. And I think what we have seen, generally speaking, is that when technology makes it easier to make stuff, people make more stuff. Some of it is bad. Some of it is good. And the idea of these tools is like democratizing forces to help creative people make more stuff

I think is awesome. But this question of what is your job, I think is like the question in front of both the people making these tools and the people using them. Because you're right. Like I could sit here. I could type one line into YouTube's back end and it could make the short. It

could edit the short and it could publish the short and it could optimize the short and it could put it out. And that might get a lot of views. It feels like a bad outcome for like big human ways that I can't even necessarily describe. That feels like a bad outcome. And I think what seems to me is that a lot of creators are going to have to spend the next year or years trying to figure out what they do here and what the thing is that makes them different. Because it's like everyone is going to have access to these same tools that do the same mediocre job for you. Yeah.

How, what do you do here? And how do you elevate this stuff? And I feel like that just gets murkier and murkier with every one of these new tools that gets added that is just a new thing you don't even have to do anymore. Yeah. And if you're just the person on the screen, well, guess what? They have something for that too. Like, it's just like, I really, really wonder, we should have, we should have like a bunch

of content creators on here. And I would love to ask, like, do you feel the fear of like job replacement? You know what I mean, that other workers do? Because you are a worker. And, yeah, I don't know. It's really weird. It's really weird. And also, do audiences care, right?

Do they care if your scripts are all written by AI now? That you're getting all your ideas from YouTube's, like, in-app, like AI bot? Right. I don't know. It's a great question. And how do those viewers show you that they care, too, right? Because it's like, what we keep hearing is basically the numbers keep going up. And I just keep thinking about this company that I forget the exact name of it, and I'm glad to not be able to say it out loud.

But basically their thing was we're going to make infinity podcasts, and every one of those podcasts is going to get 10 listeners. But it's so cheap for us to make, and we're going to do it at such incredible volume that it's going to make us money. And on the one hand, that's probably going to work. On the other hand, that sucks and I hate it. And I want that thing to not exist. because what you're saying is we are going to flood this thing with so much crap that it's going to work because it's going to work because the volume will outplay the quality and we're going to keep making money off of it.

And like, again, that was the SEO play, was we're just, we are going to ruthlessly optimize our junk so that even if you click it by accident, it doesn't matter, we're still going to get paid. And you worry that like we as viewers who our main thing to do is scroll, if you hit the video, they're going to make the money. And so it's like my incentive is actually to make more of this stuff if all I care about is just getting views even five at a time.

Yeah. And so I wonder, and I think, I do think these platforms know, and I think YouTube knows better than most, that if it lets itself be completely overrun by this slop, it will be a long-term bad decision. Totally. And like if your platform's offerings are the NFL and AI slop, you're in trouble.

And but I think every creator is going to have to figure this out for themselves and these platforms are going to have to figure out like what is the line between useful thing we can do to help creator and thing that in the long run will actually destroy all of the quality stuff on our platform. Yeah, it's a great question. It's also just like we we can't go operating at like where the goal is as much content as possible because it is right. That's not good. There aren't enough people to watch it, frankly. Yeah, like YouTube's good. Like at some point, YouTube should just be like, actually, guys, everybody just like take a month off. We actually don't need any more stuff.

We're just going to keep researching all the stuff people haven't watched. There's 50 lifetimes of things everybody likes already available to them. Y'all go take a vacation. Yeah. I think nothing would change. I don't think, I completely agree. I completely agree. Especially now with this live stream stuff, I'm like, oh, my God.

Who's watching this? Who can possibly watch this? Seriously. But the answer is both of us watching Get Ready With Me Streams, which you've now talked me into and it's going to be, this is going to be my new thing. They're oddly satisfying, I'll say. I would like to get ready with somebody. This would be great.

My process takes like four minutes and involves a T-shirt. So I'm going to need to improve my Get Ready with me. It would hit on YouTube, I'm sure. Put it on shorts. Love this for us. All right. Mia, thank you as always. It's good to have you here.

We should. Let's drag some creators on here over the next few months and just, talk through all this stuff. Love it. Yeah. All right. Until then, we're going to take a break

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Terms and conditions apply. All right, we are back. It is time for another round of David yells his opinions into a microphone and subjects other people to them live on the Vergecast. Back with me to do this. Jake Castranakis, hi, Jake. Hey, good to be here. Haydenfield, welcome back.

So psyched. Thanks. All right, so last week, I threw a bunch of AI-related takes at both of you. And in the spirit of our favorite show, Subway takes, your allowances were to either 100% agree or 100% disagree, or I gave you the option to just bail because David is letting his career on fire, and I want no part of this.

Neither of you picked that. Either for any of them last week, I would say a lot of people have had a lot of feelings about my feelings, and I'm okay with that. And I have more of them. This week, this is the last one of these we're going to do, and this is just, I would say, sort of unordered thoughts I had strong opinions about

over the course of a summer spent on my couch reading news, talking to newborns, and hanging out. So I have seven completely unrelated and unordered summer takes for the two of you. Are you ready? If we're wrapping up, I have to assume, is because you get canceled at the end of this. Yeah, if suddenly we only get through five of them, you'll know that two of them were, I just immediately, David, is removed from the verge, and that's the end of everything. Yeah, you spent a long time talking to Annie on Grok this summer, didn't you? Listen, you spend a lot of time on YouTube shorts and things just start to get weird.

Oh, yeah. Okay, summer take number one is that podcasts should be listened to at 1X and all other fast speeds are wrong. If you don't have time to listen to the podcast, listen to fewer podcasts. It's fine. OneX is the correct speed at which you should listen to a podcast. all other speeds are insane. I've got to say 100% disagree for that one. I have a life.

I have a brain that goes fast. Actually, I feel like, I don't know if my brain goes fast all the time, but you know what? When I'm listening to people talk, it does. I'm a visual learner. I can read really fast. But when I'm listening to people talk in my ear, sometimes they're taking a while to get to the point, you know? So I got to listen to 1.5x, 2X. same with TikToks, you know.

I feel that I, many people will agree with me about this and that, David, you could have such like an awakening if you could just, you know, be done with the podcast in two, like, point five the amount of time as you would have before. But just don't listen to the podcast. It's so easy to not listen to a podcast you're not interested in. And I realize, I'm saying this to a large audience of people who I assume listen to this podcast at faster than 1X and me being like, well, if you have to listen to it too fast, just don't listen to it is the most like self-owning thing I could possibly do.

So please know that I understand what I'm doing here. Just watch and listen to less stuff. Like I have come to a point where it's like, to me, listening to a podcast of 2X is like looking at the AI generated summary of a book and saying you've read the book. You haven't. I do have a take here that is a follow up, okay? for me, it's not about that I want to listen to more content. I'm not like, oh, let me finish this podcast or this video so that I can like see the next thing. For me, it's really, I think,

just the fact that I was raised in the Gilmore Girls era of people fast talking on TV. So I'm used to people talking quicker than they do on most podcasts. And I'm like, I got to amp this up to the Gilmore Girls speed. That's what I was raised on. That's what I'm used to, you know? That's a good take. My wife is currently watching Gilmore Girls for like, the 55th time, which means I'm currently watching Gilmore Girls for like the 35th time. That show rips, and they do. They talk so fast. That's, okay, that's a decent take. Jake, you've been suspiciously quiet here. Yeah, you know, the Vergecast is a work of art, and I think like you wouldn't watch Oppenheimer

on 2X, you should not listen to the Vergecast on 2X. Every other podcast, though, do what you please. I strong disagree with you, David. Listen, sometimes I just want to get that info. I want to get in and out. I'm not here for the artistry, for the subtle pause. With deep, deep apologies to our audio editing team, who are truly masterful. Okay, wait, so here's my follow-up question for both of you,

is, are you, do you have a setting, like, universally I listen to all of my shows at 1.5x? do you have like a setting per show or is it a thing you like dial up and down as you're listening? For me as I'm listening. Okay. Oh, interesting. So you'll start an episode of a show and be like, we got to we got to keep moving here and just crank it to 2X. It really depends on how slow the person is talking. You'd be so surprised at how slow some people talk.

You know, it's slower than the my brain. Like I feel like I have to calibrate it with the speed at which I think. I'm like, if you're talking at the speed at which I think, great. If you're talking like three times slower than I think, I've got to dial you up. Okay. Jake, what about you? I'd say like most YouTube videos would be improved by a default 1.25 X. Like just a little bit more, a little bit more.

TikTok, oh yeah, 2X on everything. Just like those things are going. Seriously? They made them long. So I set a 15-minute timer for myself on TikTok so I can't watch too much every day. And this way I can squeeze 30 minutes of TikTok in 15 minutes. Not bad. Okay.

That's terrible. So what you just said is I don't want to watch TikTok. So I've invented a way so I can watch more TikTok in the time I shouldn't be watching TikTok. And have a have a worst time watching it. Just don't look at TikTok, Jake. Yeah. This is, I got to know what's happening on TikTok.

How will I know what Stanley water bottle to buy? But like, the world would be a better place if everyone only listened to their podcast on 1X is really kind of where I'm landing on this. That I 100% agree. I mean, I will say that it is. Zen to just not care how fast this person is speaking and really live in the moment. Maybe I need to meditate more, and maybe my form of meditation will be listening to podcasts on 1X and just really living in the moment and hanging on their every word, you know?

Do you guys have podcasts you listen to, not because you, you know, like the hosts or like the storytelling style or whatever, but for like purely informational reasons? I'm a visual learner, so I feel like if I only want it for informational reasons, I've got to read it or it kind of doesn't stick with me. Yeah, I'm fully with you, Aiden. Yeah, audio is like, it's more for a, I don't know, there's like a hanging out vibe to it, right? But yeah, trying to get like news that way.

It's not quite working for me. Okay. So that's the one kind of podcast that I'm like, yeah, listen to that as fast as you want, right? It's like, it's the audio version of like skimming the headlines, just like 3x your way through whatever headlines podcast you're listening to. But I think I've just only selected for podcasts that I sort of like. hanging out with and putting those at 2X feels weird. The problem is once you go up, you can never go back down because then you're like, why are you all talking so slowly?

What is like, why did you all do drugs right before you started this episode? And you're just like, no, this is how fast they normally talk. Like, I've had people meet me in person and be like, you don't sound like I'm used to. And then they realize in the course of our conversation that they only ever listened to the podcast at 1.5 or 2X. So they're used to me just talking like this all the time. And they're like, why don't you talk like this all the time? It's insane. And I'm like, I can talk that fast. Like, we can do this. I can be this. person. Especially now that you're watching Gilmore Girls.

Oh my God. I mean, it's out of control. Also, a very strange thing has happened to me now that I have children as I identify with very different people in those shows. And now I'm like, Laurelis' parents were basically right about everything. And Lorelai is kind of a menace. But that's for Hayden, when we record our Gilmore Girls podcast, we'll come back to that.

Perfect. Can't we? My second take is that Threads is good, actually. That's it. That's the whole take. I'm going to agree with you. I think Threads gets way too much. much hate. And you know what? I'm going to go even further. The algorithmic feed, it's all right.

I agree. Like, I feel like I enjoy threads more than X or blue sky. Sorry, Macedon. That's not even on my radar. Massagon is full of good ideas and not full of interesting people doing interesting thing. Threads is pleasant. I feel like people on threads, or at least the algorithm on threads, keeps things pleasant and down the line. And I feel like on other social networks, people are very raw and passionate and intense. And I don't need that all the time. Sometimes I just want a laid-back take about the new iPhone.

And that's what I get on threads. Taden? I feel like I can't speak to this with actual knowledge because for threads, like I get on and then I leave. Like, I post my story and then I log off. So I honestly haven't spent that much time. scrolling on threads because I have so many social media platforms that I have to be on now that I just threads is the one that like one had to fall and it's threads for me it's like I go on

I post my stories I leave I don't scroll where do you scroll blue sky and Twitter um but yeah threads and LinkedIn for me both I'm like I go on I post my thing and I leave I don't have any understanding of like what's going on on there Instagram I scroll like personally um blue sky and Twitter X, I scroll for work, and then the other two I just kind of let fall by the wayside, and I'm there technically, but not in actuality. So to me, my

experience this summer over and over was that Twitter has essentially, like, lost its mind. It's a 10 out of 10, like, right-wing cesspool all the time. Blue Sky is, like, the same, but on the opposite end of the political spectrum. Like, I think there's a lot of fun

to be had on Blue Sky, but I think the thing where the culture has turned into a lot of people scolding each other is real and true. It's at least more full of people saying things that are real than Twitter is, at least on my feed. But, like, I just don't find either one to be a particularly good time. And threads, I think, Jake, I have the exact same experience that you do too, which is like the temperature on threads is not as high. And I think a lot of people in our business take that to mean, oh, it's not real time, it's not lively, it's not exciting, it's not what's happening, it's not the news. And to me, I'm like, oh, I actually, when I come to this, I don't want the news all the time. It's just nice to have some people posting about some things.

And I think Threads has gotten better at being timely. Like, I'm seeing many fewer yesterday and four days ago posts on my Threads timeline every time I open the app. So they're like, they're getting better with that algorithm. And it's just like, I have a nice time on threads in a way that I no longer have a nice time on Blue Sky or on Twitter. And I feel like that is, I hit this point where it was like, why am I subjecting myself to opening Twitter? or five times today. Like, this is an insane waste of time because I feel some, like, journalistic obligation to know what these lunatics are saying to each other.

And it's just, I don't know. Like, I think ultimately, maybe the sort of boring middle is actually the right place for social media to land. Can I tell you, Threads is actually the only other app on my phone that I have a timer on, and it's because it is, like, it is pleasant, and because it's algorithmic by default, and it's, like, a decent algorithm, you can keep good. going forever, and I do not want to keep going forever. So yeah, I think threads, like, totally pleasant. It is not, it's true. It's not a spicy. And that's kind of nice.

Okay, maybe I'll spend some more time on threads. You've convinced me. It took me a while because it's actually like, you have to realize that being slightly bored by it is actually a good thing and not a bad thing, where it's like, I don't open the app and immediately have like a fight or flight response is probably a healthy thing for how we deal with our lives on the internet, but it feels very different than I think what we're used to. Which brings me to my third take, which is that it's actually pretty easy to quit social media and I think many more people should do it. I deleted Instagram and TikTok from my phone basically right as I had a kid and have actually had zero impulse to put either one of them

back. The thing Instagram does where if you click a link, it won't show it to you until you open the app is really annoying, but has not actually caused me all that much trouble. TikTok is fine. Somebody sends you a link. It opens in the webpage. You watch the TikTok. You move on their day. I have essentially stopped spending time on Blue Sky and Twitter.

And even threads is like, it's there because I feel a sort of obligation to be around. But like, if you're, most people are like in a place where they should spend less time on social media. And it's actually not that hard to do. And maybe we should just all quit social forever right now. Let's do it. Agree or disagree? I feel like you're right in that, of course, we'd all be so much happier if we didn't have social media. But I will say, I think there are ways to use it in ways that are a little less harmful. So one, Jake's timer idea, amazing. Two, something that I do that has always given me a lot of peace is that I don't, I mean, let's use Instagram as an example. I don't look at who likes my stuff. And I I don't look at who watches my stuff so that I feel like I'm always just shouting into the void

in a good way. Like I am not aware of myself being perceived. I'm not like, oh my God, this person from high school saw my story of this. I wonder what they thought. Let's think about this through their eyes. It's like I don't know, so I don't care. I'm like blissfully ignorant. I just feel like I'm posting. This is how I feel. I think I would use Instagram the exact same way if I had no followers. Like if I was just posting for myself, I think I would do the exact same thing. And it's because I don't, since I don't see

who's looking at my stuff, I don't like, you know, really, I'm blissfully ignorant of anyone looking at my stuff. However, I do like to use it a lot as a messaging platform. Like a lot of times, maybe it's just like, you know, something about people today,

but it feels a little too intimate sometimes to ask for someone's, like, number. So you ask for their Instagram, and then you message on Instagram. So I love using it as like a messaging app. Same with Twitter. Like I can message someone on there and then we can move it to another platform after. But I think all of these tools, their biggest values and their like direct messaging features. And then scrolling and infinite scroll is like the thing that basically causes you internal turmoil and you have to find a way to, you know, address that. But I don't know. I mean, I'm like, of course we'd all

be happier if they, if we didn't use them as much. But I also think there's some value in using it in a way that's measured if you can do that, which is hard. So I agree, but I think even the premise of all of this is just like this is an unavoidable thing that we have to manage the best way that we can. And I'm increasingly of the mind that actually it's really easy to quit. Like, I was shocked at how simple it was to just not be on Instagram anymore. And like, do I occasionally feel like I'm missing something? Like, honestly, no.

I've probably missed some DMs, but that's fine. I think we do have a real messaging problem across all of these different platforms. I've been using this app Bieber that we've talked about a lot on this show to try and manage all of the DMs in one place and that like almost kind of works. But in general, it's just like, I don't know. The thing that really shocked me was how easy it was to get rid of and how few times I have missed TikTok and Instagram. and how rare it has been to like want to be on blue sky this summer. I did once quit social media for like a month and it was very easy. Like it was weirdly easy and I think it's just because, yeah,

I reverted back to like my old life of just living in the moment. Yeah. What a crazy idea. Jake, what about you? You've just been scrolling TikTok this whole time. You're not even listening. Oh, sorry. Were you guys still still going?

You weren't going fast enough. This is the problem. I agree with you, David. but I kind of feel bad about it. You know, I have never been very good about posting to social media. And there's a lot of, I would say like acquaintances I follow, right? Like old friends from college, people who, you know, we used to work with, who, you know, I'm not going to stay up to date with them day to day to day.

But by following along with their posts, I'm able to get some sense of what's going on in their life. And there's this really weird thing that happens where I'm like, oh, I know what's going on with you. I actually still feel like somewhat close to you. You have no idea what's happening with me. You like, and you will not because I'm not putting anything back out there for you. And so there is this sort of like interesting way that you can use this to maintain a friendship, even if it's like, even if I'm not really doing more than like liking a post. I think that's nice.

Like it lets you keep up with people. I just, I think all the things that hate and talk to. about where it's like it shows you everyone who views it shows you everyone who liked it it's like i can't not look at those things and whenever i post an instagram story i'm like like did i post this at the wrong time is this is this inconvenient for everybody nobody's seeing it and i'm like i i don't feel good about like i don't i don't feel good right like when i when i watch other people's stories i'm like oh this is so nice they're doing things i'm so happy for them and i'm just like i feel stress when I'm posting. So I would love for there to be a version of social media that I enjoy. I feel

bad and I think like not engaging on social media is maybe sort of like a net negative for like, I don't know, friends. Society. Yeah. But but also like is it easy to tap out and is it like maybe healthy for a lot of people to tap out? Like yeah, like the people who I'm going to hang out with, I'm texting with them anyway. It's fine. You know what's so funny. is what both of you just described as the ideal outcome of this is original Facebook, where I have a wall, I post stuff on the wall, and if you want to know what's going on with me,

you go to my wall and you look, and if you want to interact, you can, and if not, no hard feelings, I'm not going to know either way. That's how it worked. That was good. That was the right thing. And then they realized that people would use it more if they made it feel worse to use,

and now here we are 20 years later and everything's a disaster. Like, you both just pitched me on what if we had Facebook 1.0? And I think it's right. I agree, but I will say I do remember in high school being worried that my wall posts were like too old. And I would call my friends and be like, oh, can you post laying on my wall? It looks like no one cares about me this week. So even then we had some insecurities. But I agree.

It was a better time. It was a better time. That is very fair. All right. My next take. And this is kind of related to all of this. And I'm actually, this is the one I am least convicted on and kind of want to talk through. But my take here is that the anti-phone.

movement is real and we and the tech industry should take it seriously. The people who are actively trying to get away from technology and not just talking about how terrific it would be to use technology less is it's a real and growing and powerful movement and it's going to change things. I disagree with the first half of that, but I think that you said two separate things, actually. I think if we're talking about the people who are like, I'm going to get a dumb phone. I'm going to use the, oh God, what's it called? The light phone. The light phone. Like, okay, there's a, there's a small, small number of people who are going to use these things. Smartphone is fine. How you use the smartphone is not fine. As far as, like, the anti-technology, I'm worried about

screen stuff more broadly. That I agree with you, and that I think is real. Interesting. And you think those are separate groups of people? Yes, because I think going for, you know, a dumb phone or being not having a phone and being disconnected, that's just like arbitrarily inconvenient. And I think like I would like to be less connected at home so I read more books. That's different, right? Like you can still do that and be capable of sending, you know, of making a FaceTime call to your mom. I see. Okay. Yeah. I agree with what Jake said.

I mean, because everyone I know that has a dumb phone or like a flip phone, It's one of their two phones. So it's like they bring it when they go out or they bring it when they go hiking or they have it in certain situations. But I don't know anyone that has switched it out completely just because sometimes they need like Google Maps. Sometimes they like even from a safety standpoint, sometimes they need some of those features even if they don't really want to use them. I know people that have kind of turned their smartphone into a dumb phone in a way by like, you know, bricking it during certain times or, you know, setting timers on. apps or deleting all apps except like three, you know, or doing the black and white screen things. So there are ways, I think there's a lot of ways that people are trying to be less connected and less reachable all the time, but I don't know anyone that's just tossing their,

you know, smartphone full time for a dumb phone. Yeah. That's fair. And I think if you look at like, you know, maybe kids shouldn't have their phones in schools. People are like, oh, you know what, we went a little far than that. And that's like, there's starting to be a shift there. And I feel like we're going to see more of that where it's like these specific places and instances where we have overstepped with technology where we're like, we're maybe a little too connected. But I don't think we're going to like fully throw it out the door. That feels like a little bit of an overreaction or maybe like a niche trend than an actual like societal movement. So you're on the side of like sensible regulation, not like let the Luddites take over the world.

Yeah. Okay. I think that's. Probably right. I think I just keep being struck by, A, talking to a lot of people who are in the situation that I'm in of like you're being busy young parents with young kids and it's like trying to figure out how many iPads you give them. Yeah, like, is it okay to be an iPad kid? It's like a weird and complicated question in life in front of a lot of people right now. And then I'm sitting there next to my kid like scrolling Reddit. I'm like, what am I doing? This sucks. And so I've hit this point where and you read all these studies about like every time they do a study that's like,

we took the cell phones away from a bunch of kids and their mental health scores went through the roof. And it's like there's just, there is something bubbling here. And I think we've spent a long time listening to companies essentially say, you can say whatever you want, we know how much you use our product. And the more we give it to you,

the more you will use it. And as far as I understand, there's not a lot of evidence that that's changing yet. But like anecdotally, the smoke is real, that people in some meaningful way are starting to pull out and fight back. And I just think,

I think we're going to start to see that show up in meaningful ways. Because every time a company has even tried to like address that, like Instagram had the thing where it was like, you're all caught up. And then do you know what happened? They got rid of it because they were like,

oh, actually, we want people to keep scrolling and they will. And I think, I think and I hope we're about to see that start to shift against some of that. trend definitely i hope maybe maybe i'm wrong maybe maybe we're all gonna like bitch and moan about screen time as we ever increase our screen time until we're dead you know i think you're right though i mean i have um a friend that's starting like a movement for um connecting in real life and uh i'm

going to one of her events this week this weekend or next weekend and i'm excited it's like you know they're we're saying more like community kind of almost activism i guess around like connecting in real life and how to how to just like hang out with people, which is sad that we have to do it. But it's cool that it's happening. A movement to hang out in real life is like just a terrifying concept that that needs to exist at all. But I'm glad it exists. Exactly. I don't know.

I say this as I'm staring into my screen for the 15th hour today. Like, I don't know. Yeah. On one hand, I feel like it has just been like enough years with social media, with electronics. So like naturally we're like kind of due for a little bit of that pushback. on the other hand, I was at the grocery store when TikTok got unbanned back in, what was it, February. And the cashier at the register was like, hey, she like said to her manager, she's like, hey, can I leave like TikTok's back online? And I'm like, yo, it was banned for like eight hours.

Like, you're fine. It's going to be all right. Yeah. Yeah. I think, I don't know. I'm hopeful, but that is like, as a reporter, very much a thing I'm paying attention to now. It's like the smoke feels like it's there in a way that it has not been before. All right, my next take, this is the one I feel the most strongly about. All the streaming services are bad, and they should feel bad, and they have made the experience of trying to watch shows and movies awful. I'll let Jake take this one first. I will elaborate, if you would like, but I feel this very strongly.

Oh, man, there's just a whole lot bundles. up in that. Would you like me to make it simpler for you? Yes. Yes. I'm going to take that lifeline. It's just the last thing. At this moment in time, the experience of trying to watch TV shows and movies is awful. I mean, I disagree with that. Like, it's fine. It's fine. I have like a nuanced disagreement, but like if there's a show that I want to watch on HBO or Hulu or whatever, that's fine. I sign up for the service. I go to the service. I click the button. It plays. It's fine. Maybe if my, if my, you know, Google, TV, whatever, streamer is, is feeling good about it, it might even remember that I was watching that series and just put the next episode on my home

screen. Might not. I don't know. But it's fine. And this is a good experience that you're describing. This, this, you're happy about this. I can get there. I can even, I can like use my voice to. I have to go to some unknowable app that I pay an unknowable amount of money for. No, no, no. It's not an, I, it's easy enough to remember what? How much do you pay for HBO Max right now? Tell me. Off the top of your head. Oh, it's too much money. It's like, HBO Max is like $90 a month. I don't know. Do you know?

I'm serious. Do you know how much you pay for HBO Max right now? 20? I want to say it's 20 for the 4K. It's too much money. It's too much money for 4K. Well, this is, but I would make a distinction to it, right? Like, is the experience good?

Like, yeah, I can sign up, easy. I can sign up. I can like turn off my subscription, easy enough. The thing that I am like, I want to tell everyone you should actually do. If you want to watch movies, do not just sign up for Netflix. Do not just sign up for Hulu. whatever, just pay $3 and rent them for the weekend. You will spend less than you would if you were subscribing to a service for an entire month,

and you get a bigger selection. You don't have to worry about which service you're on, which service you're not on. But if we're talking about TV shows, it's a little different. Yeah, I agree with that. I mean, for me, it's not a bad experience, you know, but I will say I've been really end up paying for physical media. In Brooklyn now, there is a DVD store, and it's so exciting to be able to go in there. And I hope it survives. It's only been open for like six months, but I hope it survives. And right now you can go in and just buy your favorite DVDs. And now, you know, I have a

collection of my favorite ones that I watch over and over because I am a chronic rewatcher. I rewatch everything so many times. I think it's like an anxiety thing. It's very comforting to me to rewatch my favorite movies. So I have all my favorites and I can just do it at any time. Even old ones that are no longer on streaming services like Childhood, Marricade and Ashley movies, I can now watch them, you know? But yeah, I don't think it's a bad experience to, you know, watch. I mean, it's annoying to have to Google which streaming service I watch whatever thing on. But, you know, I think it's all about diversification and everyone should buy some DVDs from their local store to keep it alive. That's what I think. Hated, let me tell you what I just heard you say.

What I just heard you say is actually streaming is fine, but it doesn't have anything that I want to watch such that I have to leave my house and go buy a DVD so that I'm able to actually watch the things that I want to watch when I want to watch them. That's what you just said. Listen, that's not the streaming service's fault, honestly. Yes, it is. There's a lot of weird rights issues with my childhood faves. Like there's a Tyra Banks movie called Life Size that no one can find on any streaming service anywhere, not even Prime Video. So I had to order it on eBay like a Luddite, or minus the eBay part. This is the problem.

This is the problem. I can't, like, imagine, imagine if you went on Spotify and just like four out of ten songs you wanted to listen to just weren't there. And you were like, cool, I'll still listen to Spotify every day. Like, no. That might be the case soon. This is, it's outrageous that this is where we have landed. That you actually pay, however many services you want to pay for, and I pay for a lot of them, you still can't reasonably expect

to watch the thing that you want to watch and that it will be in the same place when you go back to find it and that it will have all the stuff that you want. I watch Always Sunny on Hulu. There are just a bunch of episodes of Always Sunny that Hulu doesn't have because it finds them objectionable. Is that the show that put you over the edge? No, I was over the edge all summer

because what I have is a toddler who wants to watch the same movie 650 times in a row and I can never remember where it is and the search never works and it drives me insane. And I'm paying a billion dollars a month to have 70 different apps that are all really slow on my Roku TV

and none of them put the continue watching row in the same place. And the search sucks across all. Like it's just there is more content available to all of us than ever and it is being put together in the stupidest, most hostile way. And it drives me nuts.

The solution is putting K-pop Demon Hunters on a loop forever and never switching to any other movie, and then your toddler will be thrilled. I also blame Netflix because it took Netflix like 10 days to put K-pop Demon Hunters on my home screen, and I was just sitting at home unaware of K-pop Demon Hunters for far too long.

Unfortunately, my entire Spotify Rapped this year is going to be K-pop Demon Hunters, the soundtrack. And I accept that, but I'm not going to be sharing my Spotify Rapt this year. I don't think there's anything wrong with that at all. Also, Jake, by the way, I just checked, and you're paying $21 a month for HBO Max. That's too much. I don't even know what I'm watching on HBO right now.

And David Zazov recently said it's way underpriced, so that number's probably going to go up. Yeah, that's not great. That's why, listen, I subscribe to this thing for like a month at a time and then I'm turning it off because that is way too much money. Yeah, because what's a better user experience than having to, like, balance your checkbook against streaming 16 times a year? It is rough, yeah.

I would pay a subscription fee for somebody to just manage these for me, and I would probably come out ahead. I'm like, I'm coming around. I'm 100% agree with your anger, even if I don't necessarily 100% agree with this in practice. I don't care who's fault is it. To be so clear, whether or not all of this is Netflix's fault, the fact that there literally is not a way for me to watch the movie,

The Nice Guys, which I tried to watch the other day. It literally does not exist in a digital streaming service, and I pay for all of them. That is dumb and bad, and everyone should feel bad. I am going to buy it for you at my DVD store instead of you. And then I will buy a DVD player because I haven't in one of those forever. And then my life will be good again. I have come back around to like, especially for shows that I want to watch again,

there are a couple of streaming services I basically subscribe to for like one or two shows. And I'm getting to like I'm just going to buy those shows on DVD or digital or whatever and then just watch them. And like who needs the streaming service anymore? Okay. I need to calm down. I should have done that one last. And then I could have like,

I could have like relaxed into the break. I'm going to give you a calmer take. My calmer take, and this is the second and last one, is I think we will look back on 2025 as the year self-driving cars actually happened. And I'm not sure we're talking about it. Like we're in sort of the like boiling frog state

of like city by city, company by company. Waymo is starting to pull this off. Like the, we've been lied to. too about self-driving cars for a full decade. But I think they did it now. And I think I think this is the year they're doing it.

What do you guys think? I mean, it's hard when you have a nuanced take on these things, you know? I've been covering... Not allowed. I remember... I mean, it's like, I guess I disagree because I don't believe that they've done it now. I think they've made strides. Waymo is testing vehicles in New York City, which they never did before because they said

there were too many crazy factors that they couldn't really control for. And they always want some uncontrollable factors, but there were just too many in New York City. Now there aren't. So I do think they made a lot of strides, but I won't really say they've done it until it's something that most people I know do to get to work, like city bike. Or like, until it's as common as biking in general, I don't think I will say that they have done it. But I know in SF, everyone is loving Waymo's. I've heard of some parents, like, putting their kid in a Waymo to take them somewhere.

That certainly is, you know, does mean that it's come a long way. But I think for me, until it's as common as, say, like, biking, which, you know, I have a handful of friends that bike everywhere. I feel like when self-driving cars reach that status, I will say they've done it. Okay. That's a good take. Jake, what do you think? I think you're right. At least that 2025 might be a turning point.

you know, it's not, it's not clear to me what has improved, right? Like, I don't know if the technology got better or if the regulations just got a little fuzzier and they're like, let's see what happens. But I, it's Waymo in particular. I do not count the Robotaxi. I'm sorry, no. But, right, like, Waymo, which I assume cares more about their reputation. And safety of people.

Yes. Yeah. Right, like I've been hearing a ton about their rollout in San Francisco. And yeah, now they're in New York. So I've been hearing about at least some pushback to them. I believe it was Waymo rolling out in Boston, right? Like once stuff starts happening, like, that means that the technology is improving, right? If they're putting it in a place that the average person can experience them,

doesn't necessarily mean everybody's going to use them. But that feels like a turning point. I have not gotten a chance to write in one yet. I don't know how the experience is. I don't know if they really are all there yet. And it does seem like there's still quite a few limitations to where they can go and what environments they're good in. But I am like changing your take a little bit, David.

But I think you may well be on to something that like 2025, something happened this year. I agree that it was a turning point. Yeah, I think there will be like a chapter in the book about how self-driving cars happened that is 2025. and it'll be like the year real people started taking it seriously. There was nothing for a decade, right? We got, we got, we're from zero self-driving to like, we can basically do self-driving, but actually they're not safe enough to put on real roads.

And that was 10 years. And now this year they're like, we're just going to roll it out to a bunch of cities. And like, I don't know what changed here. Uber and Lyft were promising that it was going to be 2020. I would remind everyone that those companies made a huge amount of noise and a huge amount of money lying to everybody about how close we were to self-driving cars. Tesla has been doing the same thing for a very long time. And I think personally, I got so jaded by all of that that I got to the point where

anytime somebody would be bullish on self-driving cars, they'd be like, oh, congratulations. Like, whatever, I don't care. Now I kind of buy it. Like, I agree with you, Hayden, that I think we're a ways away from it being, like, ubiquitous in a really important way. And I think the sort of world tilt towards self-driving cars is going to take a really long time. But at this point, it's the like, do I think a person who doesn't pay any attention to this might get in a Waymo in 2025? I think the answer is yeah. And I think that's already happening.

I think that's a big deal. It just becomes a way to get somewhere, not a technology story. I think they had, like you said, we did have 10 years without not without a lot of progress. But I do think for me, it's like I was getting all the press releases of the tiny incremental changes that they were making every year. Like they were testing in a new city. They were suddenly starting to test in snow for the first time. They were suddenly starting to test somewhere with a lot of pedestrians and crowds that were a little more unpredictable.

So I think for me, it's like I've seen incremental progress year after year, but it was nothing to write home about. And 2025, I think, is when kind of the snowball effect happened. Like all that incremental progress that was like kind of not worth writing about sometimes became worth it. And, you know, I did drive in a couple of Waymo's last year. And I have to say my favorite thing about it was honestly that I could just be completely alone.

I didn't have to talk to anyone. I didn't have to worry about playing my music loud. I was just like in my own little room, you know? So that's my favorite part, just being solo and being able to play, you know, K-pop demon hunters. It wasn't out yet. But that's what I'd be playing now. Are you guys nice to your Uber drivers? Like, do you, are you people who, like, get in the back and, like, hang with the driver the whole time?

or do you just like wear headphones, no talking, wave and get out? I say like a very play. I'm always like, hey, thanks for coming by. I appreciate it. And then we're done. The thing is, they're in New York, they're on the phone with somebody. They don't want to talk to me. Always.

Yeah, that's very true. I used to like try and talk to people. And then I saw a thing that was like a meme of somebody being like, so how long have you been doing this for? And the Uber driver, like, leaping out of a window. And then I was like, oh, no, I asked that question to all of my Uber drivers. So now I don't talk very much. I just get in and I say, hey, thanks.

And then I put in my headphones and don't talk. Because, yeah, New York, I mean, they don't want you to talk. You don't want to talk. There's no false pretenses. But you know what? Whenever I take an Uber in Atlanta, I am in the longest conversation in my life every single time. I don't know what it is. I have invented phone calls to get out of those conversations before.

I'm not proud of that. I'm going to call you next time. Oh, that's a perfect segue. That was not intentional. But this is a perfect segue to my last take. My final summer take of 2025 is that we're going to, We should bring back phone calls as like a normal thing that people do to each other all day every day. But I want to bring back phone calls in one very specific way.

And I want to bring back phone calls like cops do in movies where there's no, hello, how are you? Let's small talk for 60 seconds before we get into it. We don't even say goodbye at the end. You call me. Hayden, you call me. I pick up the phone. I say, hey, you say, hey, was it in Brooklyn or Manhattan? I say, cool.

And you hang up the phone. Done. The end. we should call like we text and we should do it all the time. I could not agree more. I 100% agree. I think it's because my friends and I don't like phone calls that much, but we call each other a lot.

So we have defaulted to that. Literally, I'll call and be like, hi, you know, literally what you just said. I'll be like, hi, blah, blah, blah. There's no pleasantries. There's nothing. And we know the love is there. We know what's going on. And then if I'm calling for like, you know,

just to catch up, I'll be like, hi, I have no reason to call. I'm just, like, calling on a whim. And then I set the expectations. Then we can small talk and catch up on our lives. But most of our calls, it's like, if I pick up a call from my friend, I know it's going to be within, like, under one minute or five minutes. And that's amazing. And then if it's a whim call, great.

If you could assume that every time you got a phone call, the average duration of it was going to be like 45 seconds, I think everything about making and receiving phone calls would get better. That sounds wonderful. Like, Jake, I just want to be able to call you and be like, Jake, you'd be like, hey, and I'd be like, hey, 2.30 or 3? And you'd be like, cool. The end. Done.

Done. We're moving on with our lives. The no goodbye is a key part. I love that. Just saying cool. Nobody ever says goodbye in movies. And it drives my wife crazy because every time we're watching a movie, she's like, why didn't even say goodbye?

And I'm like, well, that's not like an interesting part of the movie, people like small talking on the phone. But I think we should do it. And you're just like, cool. Hang up. Get done. David, you should absolutely start communicating with me this way because I 100% agree with you. Dude, I hate text messaging. Text messaging is so tedious.

The amount of time and energy that goes into like deciding on a restaurant over text, no, no, get on the phone. You'll be done in 30 seconds. Yes. People are so afraid of phone calls and it is so much easier to get anything done. Do it. Call your friends. It's great. And stop saying, how are you?

Stop saying hope all is well. Stop saying what's new? No, if you have a question for me, ask me the question and when I've answered your question, hang up the phone. Which means we need all these companies to make it a louder noise when you hang up the phone again because I need to know when you've hung up on me. So that's a product change I need these companies to make.

It's like I want a loud click now that the phone is over to let me know that you're gone. I really miss my Motorola razor. Oh. I could. No, sorry. Not the, well, I miss the razor. Yes. But what I'm actually talking about is that I miss my juke because it was even cooler. You remember you'd like flip it up like that and then you'd flip it down like that. It was like a you were like a comb from grease that you were like flipping open. Yeah. It was so cool. And the funniest part is I never even had any music on my juke phone. I only bought it because I loved the way you could like, oh, answer a phone call and hang up a phone call. Incredible. That rules. This is good. I'm glad we agree. I think we have the power to start a nationwide movement to call like we text, and it will just make everything better. I'm in.

Love it. All right. We need to take a break. Thank you both. I have no more summer takes. I've gotten all my feelings out, and I appreciate you both being here to absorb and reflect my feelings back at me. That's an honor. If I'm fired, it's been a pleasure to do this with both of you.

All right. Hayden, you're going to stick around for a minute because we have a question from the Vercast hotline that you are the perfect person to answer. Jake, you can go. We're going to take a break. Thank you, Beth. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

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Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Complex and unprecedented, the Spanish authorities are calling it. Before the disembarko, asymptomatikas. Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship

disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was. was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well.

Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over. Today, Explain drops every weekday afternoon. All right. We are back. Hayden Field is still here. Hayden, thank you for hanging out. Of course. It's an honor.

So I have brought you here because we've been talking a lot about AI. We got a bunch of good questions about AI, and we're going to talk about one in particular. But first, I just want to give a shout out to Remy, who sent us a very good question. that included this paragraph. I wanted to say, I love your AI coverage, especially since Hayden joined, who is a star.

Just wanted you to know. Oh, that's so sweet. Shouts to Remy, who may or may not be Hayden's burner, Gmail, but we'll talk about that later. So let's do a question from the hotline. As always, it's Vergecastleverge.com is the email. 866, Verge11,

is the hotline. You can call. You can text me. You can stop Hayden on the street and yell questions at her. Whatever you want. We love hearing all of your questions. This one comes from

I believe it's pronounced Filippo. And it says, I listened to David's answer to a listener's question who asked if Apple might not even believe in AI. The answer was measured and insightful, as usual. Thank you, Philippo.

This is not my burner email, I should say. But it inspired one intuition. Shouldn't we differentiate much more the term AI? Like literally, use more words to describe clearly the different applications and products it fuels slash enables. Using only the general AI term is, I feel, doing us a disservice

in terms of our understanding of the technology, it's value in use and separating buzz from reality. This is the thing Hayden, you and I have talked in bits and pieces about for a long time, but I'm curious, you're the person on our team who has to live in this space all day, every day. It really feels to me like we desperately need a new vocabulary to talk about AI. Do you agree? Yes, I really do.

Because it is something that, it's tough because for me, like, colloquially, you know, the public understands things as just being AI. so I often have to write in that context, you know, just AI and keeping it simple. But I remember even when I started on this beat almost six years ago, when I would write articles about AI. And this was before, you know, generative AI was as much of a thing. Chat GPT wasn't out, et cetera. But when I would write articles about AI, I remember when I would do my fact check calls, researchers would be like, hey, you know, you should really specify the type of AI. We're talking about here.

AI is a catch-all term. It doesn't really mean anything anymore. It means everything, which means it means nothing. I, of course, kind of did just have to say AI because, you know, if I get really jargony right away, no one's going to know what I'm talking about. But I do remember I had to write a lot of, like, encyclopedia-type articles defining a lot of different terms. And I think that we need more of that. I think we need more mentions of what the subcategories of AI really are.

You know, people are confused about AGI. They're confused about superintelligence. they're confused about AI, they're confused about deep learning, reinforcement learning, recursive self-improvement, all these terms that really will help people have a better understanding of how this technology works and exactly how it responds to you and why it responds the way it does. I think if we had a better vocabulary for talking about AI, it would actually be really, really helpful for combating, you know, some of the misconceptions about AI that are out there right now with people kind of thinking sometimes their emergent beings inside it or thinking

that it knows more than it does or thinking that it's almost sometimes an Oracle that can predict certain things. Like, is it a good pattern match? Or yes. And can it find amazing insights and trends within a large amount of data and, you know, give great answers? Yes. But, you know, with the rise of some of the mental health concerns we've seen recently, I think that would be helped a lot if we could just use the actual terms and define them on like, you know, how different models are trained and why. And also, these methods are changing all the time. So it'd be great to just have kind of like a, you know, constantly updating vocabulary showing people how AI is advancing and how fast it's moving and then exactly how it works. Even though we don't know everything about how it works, we can explain a lot more than is currently being explained. Yeah, the struggle for me with all of this has been that the solution just requires so much learning on the part of the consumer, right? That, like, to reckon with the differences in how these systems are trained, it's just a lot to ask of people, right?

It's like, I remember we were even going through this in, like, the early days of talking about virtual assistance and that kind of thing, where it's like, okay, I have to teach you the difference between reinforcement learning and neural networks. and when those things overlap and when they don't. And it's like I'm having to sort of give myself and everybody else like a computer science degree in order to understand how Google Assistant works. And that is, that's just a lot to ask. And I feel like we're still in that place where it's like the only way to be more specific than AI

is with sort of increasingly complex scientific terms. And I just don't know that that's ever going to work. And I think this is the thing that we've struggled with is how do we talk about this stuff in a way that is like you're saying accessible and understandable. that doesn't feel like school, but is still accurate. And I think, like, I know one thing we've talked a lot about here at The Verge

is when do we call something AI versus when do we call it, like, a large language model, versus when do we call it a chatbot? Right? Because, like, a thing I hate, my least favorite thing that everybody does in AI is refer to the AI as if it's like a character. That is not a thing.

The AI does not exist. It is either some, like, interface, It's on top of AI. Maybe it's a chatbot. Maybe it's whatever. But the AI as a being is such a bad mental image for people to have for all the reasons that you're talking about. Or NAI. Yeah, or NAI. Like any of these things, it is not, AI is not an object and we should stop treating it as such. But it is really hard to know what else to call it. Especially now it feels like in so many ways the toothpaste is out of the tube on this stuff. And like maybe that just is going to be what it's called, even though it's wrong. But it feels. wrong. For me, it's about kind of peppering, and I don't know if this is right, but what I try to do is pepper in these types of definitions in pieces that I write whenever I can as like a quick parenthetical, you know, like when I define AGI in a piece, like I can't go without, you know, doing a quick like parenthetical phrase saying what that is. And, you know, with reinforcement learning, deep learning, all these methods, it's helpful to just have a quick like, you know, one sentence or like, you know, one sentence or like, seven-word way of describing it, even if it's oversimplified, that can kind of help people understand what's really going on here and the different ways in which the tech is advancing and how it changes and how it's trained and all these things. I think it's hard because sometimes you do oversimplify it, and then people are like, well, that's not 100% right, but also, okay, you're trying to do it in

like seven words. So you have to be accurate and simplify it without oversimplifying it. It's tough, but I think it's something we can do if we just start bringing these terms into the same. the public eye more. One example is large language models, right? I remember back when I couldn't say that term without it being too jargony. So I just have to say AI. Now large language models is a household term,

I think. Maybe I'm just in my own bubble, but I think it is. And so I can say that without defining what that is now usually in an article. And so I think we can get there with other terms. So, you know, hopefully we just keep building our vocabulary, do it a little bit at a time, and we get

to where we are with large language models with other terms and we just kind of like increase public understanding of this stuff because the cool thing is like you said, I mean, consumers, we don't want to put the burden on the consumer to, you know, go to school basically and learn all this stuff. But the other cool thing is that consumers do want to know. People are super curious about this. And so I think with the combination of people wanting to know more about what is and is an AI and what falls into every category and what's just data science and what's just if this, then that ruled

and all these things and us being able to give them kind of simple explanations and then if you want to dive deeper, here's more. I think we can get there. Yeah. Is there another term like LLMs?

Like if you could just wish another one into like mainstream acceptability that would make your life as a reporter and writer easier, what would the next one be? It's hard because it changes like by the month and by the year, you know? It really does. Like, I remember there was a time when, like, deep learning would have been my choice.

And then I remember there was a time when reinforcement learning would have been my choice. But now, I think it would be recursive self-improvement. So, yeah, I think it would be cool if people could know how these models are making themselves better and also the societal implications of that and the economic implications of that and what that might mean for jobs and things like that. I'm hearing that phrase a lot, and it's something that I think it would be great if the public could know more about. So I would say, yeah, for me, the phrase that I would want to make a household name changes by the like three month period. But right now it's that.

I think recursive self-improvement is also like a very good memoir title that you should maybe just lay claim to right now. Perfect. Copyright it. I love it. All right. Hayden, thank you as always. I appreciate it. Thanks.

All right. That is it for the Vergecast. Thank you to everyone who is on the show today, and thank you, as always, for watching and listening. If you have thoughts or questions or feelings or want to just, like, call me and say something really short and then hang up immediately just to prove a point. You can always call the hotline 866 Verge11.

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We have some Google news coming. We have some Amazon news coming next week. Pure chaos in the tech industry right now. And we have an awful lot to talk about. Until then, rock a mole.