Samsung’s new folds, flips, and Apple clones

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the announcements from Samsung's Galaxy Unpacked event, Redbox shutting down, and more tech news from this week. Further reading: Samsung Galaxy Unpacked: all the news on the Galaxy Ring, Fold, Flip, Watch, and AI Samsung’s Galaxy Z Fold 6 and Flip 6 are pricier with minor updates Samsung’s Galaxy Ring could be the one ring to rule an ecosystem Samsung Galaxy Watch Ultra hands-on: ultra déjà vu Galaxy Watch 7: price, availability, and how to preorder Samsung’s new Galaxy Buds are blatant AirPod clones in both form and function Samsung, Google, and Qualcomm are, uh, still doing that XR thing. Motorola’s 2024 Razr Plus is a fun and flawed flip phone Redbox shuts down as its parent company declares Chapter 7 bankruptcy Sling TV is the latest streamer to get those pesky pause ads Netflix’s next live event is a Joe Rogan comedy special Spotify is going to let you leave comments on podcast episodes Paramount agrees to sweetened Skydance merger deal Instagram is sticking to short videos, says Adam Mosseri Amazon’s Echo Spot is back with better sound and no camera Nothing’s CMF launches new supercheap earbuds and a smartwatch Nothing’s CMF Phone 1 is proof that gadgets can still be fun Early Apple tech bloggers are shocked to find their name and work have been AI-zombified Microsoft and Apple ditch OpenAI board seats amid regulatory scrutiny The developers suing over GitHub Copilot got dealt a major blow in court Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:01Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of saying they don't look like AirPods at all. Not even a little bit. Nope, those aren't AirPods. That's not what that they sure they look like AirPods, but they don't stop it. Anyway, we're going to talk about Samsung Unpacked today. I'm your friend, Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 0:51David Pierce?

  Hi, I feel like we just did talk about Samsung like you. You've ruined the whole thing already. So quick.

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Alex Krantz is here. Hey, Alex.

• 0:59Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who thinks they're not really AirPods if they've got cool lights on them. Right? Like that changes the game.

• 1:05Nilay Patel?

  Sure. In the same way that buying knockoff AirPods on Canal Street changes the game. Alex, you're in Texas. Are you okay?

• 1:12Alex Cranz?

  I am totally okay. I am, I am far away from the hurricane. We didn't even get any rain here. Okay, sucked. Sorry to everybody who doesn't have power. It's not that also sucks. Stay cool.

• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  If you, if you please, or you know,

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  talk to your local elected official.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot to say there. My favorite story of the hurricane, if you can have a favorite story from a giant hurricane has caused a great deal of harm.

• 1:40David Pierce?

  Bold way to start a story.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  Is, uh, is the people like the Texas power utilities don't have apps. So people are using the Whataburger app to find what areas still have blackouts because the Whataburgers are offline.

• 1:53Alex Cranz?

  It rules.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  It's a life finds a way. Do you know what I'm saying? Life finds a way. All right, well, hopefully we can be a little ray of sunshine in this time. If you are stuck down there, there's a lot of gadget needs to talk about. Samsung did have unpacked a bunch of phones. Motorola has new flip phones, which Allison reviewed. There's a bunch of streaming news. Alex, today was once again horny for David Zaslove in Slack. Quite openly, that was a real thing that happened today.

• 2:21Alex Cranz?

  It's all days.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  And we got a lightning round, unsponsored as always. I'm trying to sell our soul here, people. We get a lot of increase. I will say this. We get a lot of inquiries at price points that are entirely too low for my soul. Just keep that in mind.

• 2:37Alex Cranz?

  Reasonable cost for your soul.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  We're trying to buy boats. All right. Not dinghies. That's the lighting.

• 2:43David Pierce?

  But it's not dinghies. That's, that's going on a shirt. I don't know. I don't know what it's advertising, but we're putting that on the shirt.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  I can buy my own unicorn floaties for my daughter. I don't need your help.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's get into it. David, tell us about Unpacked. It was like a big one.

• 2:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, I sort of. This is a very weird year. So Samsung, I think, probably tries the hardest of any tech company to have cool events. Would you guys say that's fair? Like, Apple has the big ones, but they're increasingly like at Apple Park in a theater. They make a video with like, kind of know how they're doing it. Samsung is like, Samsung tries so hard, like so hard.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  So I can explain this because we've been talking about this for a long time and it's gotten weirder in a weird way. Like the weirdness of it is getting weirder.

• 3:30David Pierce?

  It's self weird. Yeah. Okay.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  Do you know what I mean? Like the mechanism of weirdness is getting weirder. So Apple, for the longest time, had like massive cultural influence. Like Steve Jobs, like, I don't know, here's Coldplay. They're going to tell you how good the iPod is. Bono's on stage. One year, famously scrubbed from the internet, Kanye West closed out a WWDC by playing Golddigger.

• 3:53David Pierce?

  Is that true?

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  And let me tell you, that audience did not scream prenup. Dead silence.

• 4:03Nilay Patel?

  It is impossible to find this video. It is removed. Apple just deleted it.

• 4:07David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  But Kanye was like, hello, we want prenup. And it was just like, we do not, sir. We're good.

• 4:14David Pierce?

  One Apple play just goes, I'm under NDA.

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  It was so weird. Uh, the weekend has played at a W W C, uh, just straight singing about cocaine at 10:30 in the morning. Weird, but Apple is able to do it like their brand has the cultural capacity for these moments. And now they don't, which is weird. Like they've gotten so corporate. They're making infomercials. They're like, I tried to use these AI tools and I couldn't like, you know, it's like, well, it's weird. It's like QVC, but they still have the cachet. Samsung has been trying to buy it for years. So they're like, I don't know. Here's a Broadway play about how women can't use phones, which is a real thing. They did.

• 4:54David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  That's a real story. Here's more famous people. Sydney Sweeney was at this event, which we should talk about very odd moment with Sydney Sweeney at this event. So they keep trying to buy celebrities and influencers to get to the level of cultural relevance that Apple has long had. But Apple doesn't actually, they're not that company, but they're just bigger. They're like a nation state.

• 5:17David Pierce?

  And I will say to Samsung's credit, I mean, speaking of nation states, Jesus, but uh, to Samsung's credit, it is still very invested in doing these things live in a way that Apple has gone full. Let's all sit here and watch a video. Samsung is like trying to create spectacle in a way that I, I kind of appreciate.

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  I appreciate you, but that's what I mean by the mechanism of the weirdness is getting weirder. Like that's been the disconnect is like, Apple's the cool one and Apple and Samsung's trying to buy the coolness. And now it's like, Apple doesn't even try to be cool. Like whatever.

• 5:51David Pierce?

  Which if I know one thing about being cool, that's how to actually be cool.

• 5:55Nilay Patel?

  They're just like over it and Samsung is like, here's even more, more stuff, like more hype, more.

• 6:02Alex Cranz?

  Here's Sydney Sweeney.

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  Here's Sydney Sweeney having like, being forced to react to like a deep fake. Truly bizarre.

• 6:11David Pierce?

  Let's come back to that. So, but this one was, they did it in Paris, which on the one hand makes a certain kind of sense because Paris is, it's where the Olympics is happening this summer. It's a big deal, all this stuff. On the other hand, makes no sense because it's two weeks until the Olympics. It's not like it's the middle of the Olympics. Like it's this. Long break, Olympics. Like, it's just weird that Samsung picked to do this, but whatever. They did it in Paris. Lots of people went. They seemed to fly in a ton of like creators and influencers and people. Lots of folks in Paris. We didn't have anybody there, but lots of folks were there. And had I what seemed like a giant, like warehouse sized theater thing. It was like the Samsung event and then like a, like a really dirty rave was like the vibe I got from this building.

• 6:56Nilay Patel?

  So Paris.

• 6:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. Touche. And it was, the reason I'm so hung up on the Apple comparison here is because Samsung basically got up and launched a bunch of Apple products. Like, like in a very direct, real way, launched a bunch of Apple products. And they launched phones that I think are cool and interesting and we should talk about.

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  And the Ring. But there are two in particular where you're like, oh.

• 7:22Alex Cranz?

  Thanks, Apple.

• 7:22David Pierce?

  And, and it's just Samsung is like doing a weird thing where it is becoming less Samsung-y all the time. And it's doing Google AI plus Apple hardware and, and kind of pretending that that is Samsung. And I think that's bizarre.

• 7:40Alex Cranz?

  Isn't that what happens when you work on Saturdays? You just say, what if we take these two and smoosh them together?

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  What if we cut our costs by just firing the design teams entirely?

• 7:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:49Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. Let's just do the two Apple ones first. Cause the other products are fundamentally more interesting. Right? So it's the Galaxy Buds and the Galaxy Buds Pro, which just fully look like AirPods and AirPods Pro, right?

• 8:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they used to look like little beans.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:04Alex Cranz?

  And they were kind of cool. Like I didn't, wouldn't buy them, but they were kind of cool. And now they look like AirPod Pros. AirPods. Just.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  They, they got stems. They're a little bit more angular. They do have LEDs on them, which I, is, which has listeners know, I appreciate more than it. Almost any other thing you can add to a tech.

• 8:21David Pierce?

  You know what you want is LEDs right next to your ear canal where you'll see them all the time. Makes perfect sense.

• 8:27Alex Cranz?

  Where everyone else can too.

• 8:28Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think people should be, be like, that dude's listening to tunes.

• 8:34Alex Cranz?

  Only if it like pulses with their music.

• 8:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, you want RGB lighting for your ears.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  Where's the party speaker effects for these headphones? So no one else can see them and you can't, no one else can hear what you're listening to and you can't see the lights. That's the place for party speaker LEDs. So, you know, we're at this weird place in headphoneville where the best headphones to buy for your phone are often the one that the phone maker makes.

• 9:00David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  Because they have all co-opted Bluetooth as a standard and built proprietary features for their own products. We didn't do this forever. They've all done it. Like whether or not you think that's good or bad, they have all done it. Apple has done it with the AirPods where they use Bluetooth, but then there's a bunch of proprietary features. Samsung has done it with the Galaxy Buds, Google has done it with Pixel Buds, just down the line. Everyone's approach to this is if you want the coolest stuff, you have to buy our proprietary earbuds. And if, God help you, if you want to use the Galaxy Buds with an iPhone, they're, they're just going to fall back to Bluetooth. Yeah. So if you're a Galaxy owner, like you have a Samsung phone, I think the question is whether you want to advertise it with the stuff in your ears.

• 9:39David Pierce?

  Well, I see it slightly differently. I, I think if you're Samsung, there is a perfectly reasonable set of decisions you make to land on, we should just make AirPods. Which is, uh, they, they cited the evidence and there is some evidence out there that that basic shape is actually more comfortable for more people. Uh, with the, the stem, it balances the weight. It also points a microphone towards your mouth instead of the microphone just sort of pointing out to the side of your head, which a lot of these things do. Uh, but also I, I'm curious if you guys feel this way, but in, in my circle at least, there is AirPods and there is knockoff AirPods. And that is, that is the perception of wireless headphones. Everybody knows what AirPods are. And then all the other ones are like, oh, those aren't AirPods.

• 10:23David Pierce?

  And I feel like if you're Samsung, you're like, okay, well, we want something that integrates. And if it happens to at a glance, look like AirPods, and so people think they're AirPods, that's actually not the worst thing in the world. And I think like, maybe it is that simple.

• 10:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, I, I think we're saying the same thing in slightly different ways. Like, do you want your headphones to advertise they're not from Apple? And that means you don't have an iPhone.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  I think a lot of companies have killed themselves trying to differentiate from Apple. We are not Apple turns out to be like a pretty bad branding exercise most of the time.

• 10:55Alex Cranz?

  I don't think Samsung's ever done that. They've always kind of been like, yeah, we're Apple, but for Android. Like, oh, you live in any other part of the world where Apple doesn't make sense, or it's too expensive, or whatever?

• 11:06Nilay Patel?

  No, Samsung waxes and wanes on the "we are not Apple."

• 11:09David Pierce?

  I agree with that.

• 11:10Nilay Patel?

  There have been times of maximum "we are not Apple" from Samsung.

• 11:13Alex Cranz?

  It's pretty strong right now, yeah.

• 11:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is very much a low point in Samsung's, like, are we totally differentiated? Like, every, for years, they had bigger phones, and they were just like, they were making the ads that, you know, people stand in line for the iPhone, and then someone would come by with like a surfboard-sized Samsung phone.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  To the point that that, that marketing actually worked against Apple. It came up in various lawsuits that, like, Apple executives were saying, like, Samsung's branding was causing market share loss. Like, very famous, like, Phil Schorr was screaming at Apple's ad agency, because that was working. And it turned out it was just the screens were bigger, and people love big, cheap screens. And then Apple's like, here's the iPhone 6, and it just stopped being a problem.

• 11:55David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, and it's worth pointing out that all of this is incredibly cyclical, right? Like, Apple spends most of its time building features into the iPhone that already exist on Android devices. Apple got bigger phones way after the whole Android universe. Like, everybody is just perpetually shoving towards each other at all times. It's just particularly jarring when you see it in something as simple a shape as these headphones. Because it's not just like a slab of glass in the way that all phones are a slab of glass. There are a lot of shapes that headphones can be, and I don't know that there is necessarily like a perfect, correct way for headphones to be. But we've just decided that AirPods are the thing. And it's very clear that Samsung looked at it and said, "AirPods are the thing." And the best, smartest thing we can do is just make AirPods.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm just going to point out that the shapes of headphones, the designs of headphones, the sound quality of headphones, all much more varied and competitive when the headphone jack was still on phones. Just going to say it out loud, when there was an open interconnect that allowed for high-quality audio to pass from your device to the headphones, the variability of the market, variability in styles.

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  Was was real, was big.

• 13:01David Pierce?

  Also, as someone for whom AirPods don't feel great in my ears, it's a real bummer that this is what we've decided.

• 13:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we'll see. There's the, there's the two sides on the Galaxy Buds. There's the Pro, which are in ears. And then there's the regular ones, which are more AirPoddy, which are like just shove it.

• 13:16David Pierce?

  They just hang.

• 13:17Nilay Patel?

  They're just like in there, you know, and we gotta do the tests. We gotta try them out. I'm always curious to see if anybody's actually managed to make Bluetooth call audio sound good. Here in New York City, the number of people who use wired headphones all day long, it feels like it's just going up. I think people are just like over it. Which is interesting, but that's New York. It's not everywhere. So we'll see. We're gonna review the things. The other major, yep, you just made an Apple product, is the Galaxy Watch Ultra.

• 13:42David Pierce?

  This, I think, is actually the worst offender of the group.

• 13:45Alex Cranz?

  It's so bad.

• 13:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's first of all, it's called the Ultra. They've added the icons, like the menu switcher, Dealey, the home screen is the Apple Watch home screen. They even launched it with an orange band.

• 13:58David Pierce?

  And a quick button.

• 13:59Nilay Patel?

  And a quick button, which is orange. The colors are the same. Weird, weird all around.

• 14:05Alex Cranz?

  It's, yeah, it's just like a full on copy, right? Like the, I think the only, it feels like the only really big difference is the squirkle shape, which I absolutely hate that word. I want it to die.

• 14:18Nilay Patel?

  Agreed.

• 14:19Alex Cranz?

  But.

• 14:19David Pierce?

  And the crown doesn't turn.

• 14:21Alex Cranz?

  And the crown doesn't.

• 14:22David Pierce?

  Well, it does, but it doesn't scroll.

• 14:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:24David Pierce?

  Which, sure.

• 14:25Alex Cranz?

  Like the fact that it doesn't scroll, but it turns is just like mind boggling to me.

• 14:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, I just, I don't know. I'm so torn on this yet again, because I think on the one hand, what we've learned in the last couple of years is that Apple got the Watch Ultra really right in a lot of ways, right? Like it, it went super hard on this idea that this is a thing for people who are going to use it aggressively outdoors. So we're going to optimize for battery life. We're going to give you extra information about how you're doing. We're going to add some like GPS-y stuff into it. We're going to make it more rugged for you to do more rugged things. And all of that has, I think, largely proven right, but has also just proven popular. Like, there are a lot of people, including a lot of people who don't need all of that stuff.

• 15:10Nilay Patel?

  Here I am.

• 15:10David Pierce?

  Who wear ultras, right? And, and so I think if you're. Part of me is like, it's a real sort of abdication of like creative responsibility for Samsung to not find something more interesting to do. But also, it looked around and was like, oh, no, Apple, Apple maybe just got this one right. And maybe we'll just go do that and build it into Samsung-y stuff because ultimately, that's what people are asking us for. Right? Like, the thing you hear all the time is like, where is the Apple Watch for Samsung? And it has like steadily moved towards that. And this just feels like they just went the whole way. And we're like, you know what? Screw it. The Apple Watch Ultra is pretty good. Let's do it.

• 15:48Nilay Patel?

  But I want to say one thing. There's one very important differentiator here. It is vastly uglier.

• 15:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the squircle.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  It's not even a squircle. It's like got a round face on a squircle body with like a weird, the weird touch ring that they do.

• 16:06David Pierce?

  It's one too many bezels.

• 16:07Nilay Patel?

  It's a chunk. It's a chunk in a way that the Ultra is a chunk, but the Ultra feels like a singular idea. And this is just like, yeah, one too many bezels.

• 16:17David Pierce?

  It's like a case inside of a case inside of a case in a way that just feels tacky.

• 16:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:24David Pierce?

  I do sort of like some of the color combinations. Like if you, some of the pictures we've seen with some of the like really aggressive, like information dense watch faces, you look at them and it's like, okay, there's a certain amount of like, I could control a smart city from my watch with this and like, could I be Batman with this watch on? Like potentially. Uh, but it is, it is, I think, it feels, it's either overdesigned or underdesigned, and I genuinely can't tell which one it is.

• 16:54Alex Cranz?

  Does the screen feel like too much screen to you in a way that the?

• 16:58David Pierce?

  See, I feel that way about the Ultra.

• 17:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the Apple Ultra, I feel, doesn't quite scream screen at me as much as this does. But I have neither, so I don't.

• 17:06David Pierce?

  I think the Ultra is too much screen. I think they're both too much screen. Like anytime I'm around somebody with an Ultra, both, dear God, you're right. Anytime I'm around somebody with an Apple Watch Ultra, I'm like, I can just sit here and read your email. Like, you get a text message, it's like, we both got that text message. It's just, it's a lot of screen and this, this is, I think, very clearly going to be the same thing. But people seem to be fine with that. Like, I guess that's just a thing we're getting comfortable with.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  There is some other Samsung-y stuff here in that, you know, Samsung is just a weird company with weird ideas and they like to be ahead of the curve. So they've added like new sensors for health stuff. And the, the best part is that the, they call it the bioactive sensor. And they're like, what if we just add more colors of LEDs to the sensor and measure more things? And the funniest one here is like, no one can quite do the blood sugar measurement, which everyone wants to do. Like Apple struggled with it. Samsung is obviously struggling with it. But like, there's a lot of people out there who would love an ongoing blood sugar measurement.

• 18:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:11Nilay Patel?

  For a variety of reasons. So they've just added something called the Experimental Advanced Glycation End Products Index Metric.

• 18:19Alex Cranz?

  Which is nothing to do.

• 18:20David Pierce?

  Hold on, say that one more time. One more time.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  The Experimental Advanced Glycation End Products Index Metric.

• 18:27David Pierce?

  It sounds like a, like, third rate stock exchange.

• 18:32Alex Cranz?

  That's a penny stock.

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  It's an index of everyone's blood sugar is what it is. It's like, I ate a cookie, the A G E I went down. But so it's not, it's not, it's not supposed to be that. You're not supposed to read that. But Samsung says it looks at your diet and life cycle to reflect your overall biological aging process, which is worse.

• 18:56Alex Cranz?

  There's so much, it's like, who's the billionaire that's just slowly turning himself younger?

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, the vampire blood guy. Peter Thiel is like, I gotta get this Samsung going.

• 19:06Alex Cranz?

  I need this immediately, but no one else does.

• 19:09Nilay Patel?

  This is, this is the differentiation in this market. Like, everyone figured out watches are either you want a big screen because you'll have a big screen like me, or you want all these health and fitness features, or maybe you just want notifications and two factor codes. But at the high end, it's all health and fitness.

• 19:26David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's what sells the extra watch features to people. There's a reason that new health-specific features are not coming out at a high rate. Like, one, the tech isn't quite there. Two, there's a bunch of regulatory hurdles. Three, they have to make sure they're actually safe and say what they say they're gonna do.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Great. That means you end up with, like, fake, like, wellness health features. Like, the advanced experimental, like, the experimental advanced calculation and products result. And it's fine, but there's always the danger that people take that stuff way more seriously than they should. Just like 10,000, like, people take 10,000 steps very seriously and, like, that's just made up. Like, people just made that up. And, like, here we are. And, like, there's a piece of this puzzle where I think these watches are gonna end up being more samey. Because the thing that ultimately differentiates them is kind of caught up in a lull of innovation and regulatory behavior and all that stuff.

• 20:23David Pierce?

  And famously, like, aggressive lawsuits against Apple from other companies. No, I think that's right. And there's the, what was it? The, is it the health score? Is that what Samsung calls it? This, this, like, all-in-one tracking thing that they're doing with the watches to basically give you sort of an overall picture of your score.

• 20:40Alex Cranz?

  But, like, everybody's doing that right now, right?

• 20:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, but I think it fits exactly what you're talking about, Neelai, that it's, it's the sort of thing that as a, as a very casual data point is helpful, right? Where it's like, okay, like, I was just looking at this weather app. It's called La-Z-Weather. And its whole job is to tell you, is it going to be warmer or colder than yesterday? Right? Like, based on the assumption that, like, that's actually all you really need to know. And that is, to that extent, a health score is useful, right? It's like, am I, am I, am I better or worse? Like, how, how am I doing? And that's like, it gives you that answer. But all these things, as we get more of these sensors and more of this data, all you're actually doing is giving people tools they don't understand with which to do things that may or may not be helpful. And it feels like we are so deep down the road of, like, here's some numbers

• 21:28David Pierce?

  without giving people real ability to, like, do things with them.

• 21:33Alex Cranz?

  Well, and this age index in particular feels like it is trying to... Ride on the like, ride the wave of continuous glucose monitors. It's trying to sound like, oh yeah, we kind of care about glucose monitors and diabetes and all of that. But also, we can't legally do any of that because none of that actual technology exists in a safe way.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  To be clear, Samsung would not explain what the Experimental Advanced location and products.

• 21:58Alex Cranz?

  I was reading up on it all, like, as soon as I saw that word, I've been very into continuous glucose monitors right now because I've got a diabetic in the family. And as soon as I saw that, I was like, what is that metric? That's not the one I talk with the doctors about.

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:11Alex Cranz?

  And just immediately was like, oh, this is, I want to say bullshit, but like, close to it.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  Right. All Samsung will say, just to repeat this, all Samsung will say is that it looks at, quote, your diet and lifestyle to reflect your overall biological aging process. Sure. This is why I'm happy to announce a line of Virg Cast supplements, which will bring your biological age lower.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, if I only, if I had 10% more grift in my body.

• 22:45David Pierce?

  I'm going to sponsor the lightning round.

• 22:46Nilay Patel?

  Hustling for lightning round sponsorships.

• 22:49Alex Cranz?

  Your new supplements.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  We will not allow supplement companies to advertise a lightning round. I'm putting that out there. Unless the price tag is high enough.

• 22:56David Pierce?

  Unless they're like really good supplements.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  Unless they rule.

• 23:00David Pierce?

  Yeah. But no, I mean, I think even the, one of the big things Samsung announced with these watches is that they have FDA de novo clearance for sleep apnea stuff.

• 23:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:09David Pierce?

  And that's another really good example, right? Because what that doesn't mean is that this will tell you if you have sleep apnea. It's very hard to not understand it as that, but that is not what this is. What it means is, this is a device that will give you data that is not harmful and potentially interesting. And that you should take that data and take it to a medical professional who can help you make sense of it. And that is kind of indicative of like, the best of most smartwatches. And this is true of Apple and Google and basically everybody in this space right now, that they're all so careful to remind you constantly, like, these are not medical devices. This is not medical advice. These things are just indicated as ways to give you information that might be helpful

• 23:51David Pierce?

  in a certain context. And you should take it to your healthcare provider and consult with them. Like, over and over and over, that's the thing. But what it's actually doing is it's going to pop up a thing being like, you didn't sleep. Well, what do you think that's about?

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  Are we, what problems are we really solving for people here? Um, so I come from a family of doctors and they all talk about, uh, you know, like there are laws in most states now that say you have to have access to your medical records right away. And a thing that is real is you go in for tests and then you get the result of your test before the doctor gets it. And then people don't wait. They start furiously Googling numbers and they call the doctors having already formed conclusions. And the doctor's like, hold on, uh, you have no idea what you're talking about.

• 24:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, apparently I didn't have kidney failure. I just needed to drink more water.

• 24:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is like a real thing that happens like all the time. Yeah. Um, and I think that's fascinating in this context, right? Where you were like, you're just putting on people's wrists for a couple hundred bucks. You know, like this is good at hikes. Also, it will terrify you.

• 24:53Nilay Patel?

  And I, I'm saying like the, the bleeding edge of these devices is health features. And we're just kind of at a place now where they can't make the real claims. So they're just making other ones. We'll see how it goes. In any case, it looks exactly like an Apple Watch Ultra.

• 25:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, except uglier in like a real way. All right. So that's the two copies, right? Yeah.

• 25:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:13Nilay Patel?

  Like the, you put in, you put the AirPods through chat, GPT, it spit back AirPods with LEDs, like done and done. Nailed it. Then there's the other stuff. We should talk about the ring because the ring is easily the most interesting product they have. Yes. And it is the one where A, Apple has nothing, although we've heard about some attempts, uh, some research projects at that company. But there are other, you know, the Aura ring exists, but it seems like Samsung is, has a shot here.

• 25:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think it does because the Aura ring is really like, it's kind of one size. Most of the other ring makers are kind of like, yeah, we do one size. You can get different sizes of the ring, but ultimately the battery, everything else is the same. Samsung is doing what most big tech companies do, which is like, we're going to have multiple sizes. So like the largest ones have a little bit more battery than the smaller ones because they can put more in it. And that's just cool and smart, but also it just sounds a lot like an Aura ring with better integration for Samsung specifically. In a way that's like exciting and they have smaller ones. This is like, I think Victoria Song, our wearables writer, said that this might be one of the like smallest available smart rings for people.

• 26:18Nilay Patel?

  It still looks gigantic on her hand.

• 26:20David Pierce?

  It does. But she has, she, she will be the first to tell you she has small hands and is not a, a super indicative. Also, shout out to V, who I believe wore four other rings to the hands on with the Galaxy Ring. Like that is, that's some, that's some

• 26:35Nilay Patel?

  Straight up mafioso.

• 26:37David Pierce?

  Like brass knuckles, but it's all smart rings. Like, I, hell yeah.

• 26:41Alex Cranz?

  It's so good.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm either going to a Samsung event or the Jersey Shore. We're gonna find out. I might buy the ring sizer, because you can just buy Samsung's ring sizer for 10 bucks, and you figure out what your ring size is, which is useful. And then you get a credit when you buy the ring. I think that's really smart. Like, compared to the other, you have to wear this on your body fitment ideas we've seen, like, Apple making you go to the store.

• 27:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is actually very clever. It's obviously easier with a ring than a thing they have to wear on your face and, you know, prescription lenses and all that with the Vision Pro. But I think it's very clever that as we kind of go into wearables world, fitting stuff to your body becomes an interesting challenge, and it's not solved. So I thought that part is really cool. But the part where it's, it's the same product as everyone else, but it's more integrated in the system because Samsung owns the operating system. I, I can't, I don't know how I feel about that at all.

• 27:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Well, one thing that is better about it is that it also has like an actual case. Instead of just a little dongle, you have to periodically find and stick the ring on. And the case looks interesting. Did you guys look at the case for it?

• 27:48Nilay Patel?

  The case is, is it gigantic? I can't tell if this case is gigantic or not.

• 27:52Alex Cranz?

  It feels like gigantic and also so much fake crystal.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  Yes, yes.

• 27:58David Pierce?

  It's like a Claire's Jewelry case.

• 28:01Alex Cranz?

  I love it so much.

• 28:02David Pierce?

  I don't mean that as an insult. Like, it just is what it is. And, and it is true that it's better that it is a case than what you get from Aura and others, which is essentially just like a puck that sits on your desk, which is fine for what it is, but is easy to lose and doesn't travel very well. And I think a case that is properly a case makes a lot of sense. And I think actually, The thing I'm most excited about about the Galaxy Ring is that Samsung seems to have gotten the ring wearing experience closer to right than just about anybody that we've seen. Like, the thing is pretty light, it's pretty thin, it's it's concave, which will make it a little easier to wear and like bang around on a desk and stuff than some of the other sort of convex ones that we've seen.

• 28:44David Pierce?

  It's it's it comes in a bunch of different sizes, like, the battery life is long, it seems like No additional subscription? Right, there are like little bits and pieces of what it's going to be like to own this that I think are going to be really important, because we're still very much at a moment where like unless you are a psycho who wants to track their sleep, and no shade to those psychos, there's lots of them out there, unless you are that person, there are not a lot of compelling reasons to wear a ring. So we have to figure out, like, what what is this thing for? And the smart thing that Samsung did is be like, this is gonna be a nice thing to wear, before you really have 100 reasons to use it.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  It's just a bunch of sensors, right?

• 29:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  It does heart rate tracking, it does a skin temperature sensor. I've often wondered what my skin temperature is. And then it's got a bunch of sleep features, like, the watch, we just had this whole conversation about, like, they're adding more kinds of sensors to the watch ahead of their ability to actually tell you what they mean. It feels like, well, we also made a bunch of them smaller, now we can just put them in a ring.

• 29:43David Pierce?

  Well, they're also better on a ring, right? Like, the having that stuff on your finger 24 hours a day is a vastly better data collection system than having it on your wrist sometimes, right? Like, if if you are the person who wants that data and cares about it and is going to take it to your medical professional, a ring is is just a better than you for that in almost every way. Yeah. I want smart rings to work, like, really, I really do.

• 30:07Nilay Patel?

  If you had a smart ring, would you give up on your watch?

• 30:09David Pierce?

  No. And the reason I don't have a smart ring, frankly, is because every time I wear an Oura, I wear an Oura for three days, and I'm like, what on earth is the point of me having this thing on? Because I'm not, like, at that, if you're like a nine or 10 out of 10 on a, like, how much do I care about tracking my body sensors, person, a ring is great. I'm not that. And so, like, having it tell me I got bad sleep when I wake up tired is, like, not interesting to me. So I end up just putting the Oura back in a drawer. And the ring is still, the Galaxy Ring is is gonna have that same problem.

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  So this brings me to Neil Ippetel's theory of wearable bullshit.

• 30:49Nilay Patel?

  So if you remember this, by the way, this theory still needs a better name I'm in the market for, but if you remember.

• 30:55David Pierce?

  It's important that it has Neil's name in it, though.

• 30:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  It's mine.

• 31:05Nilay Patel?

  That's how you can, you can buy, I'll sell you naming rights to the theory of wearable bullshit. This is the Samsung Exxon theory of wearable bullshit presented by Citibank.

• 31:14David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 31:16Nilay Patel?

  So the X axis, right, is value. And then the Y is fiddliness, like how much you have to care about the thing. Or it's the other way around. It doesn't matter. Those are the two axes.

• 31:29David Pierce?

  Well, there's also a Z that you refuse to acknowledge, but it's okay.

• 31:32Nilay Patel?

  Many people have sent us many versions of this chart, right? And so my, my, my, the paradigm object on the chart of things you attach to your body is regular glasses, which are a little bit fiddly. You had to clean them. You got to care them. You can't lose them, but they, if you need them, provide you an immense amount of value. So you're like, I'm going to put these on my face all the time because they allow me to see. And then I will deal with having to clean them and owning a microfiber cloth and all the rest of the stuff that you're supposed to do with glasses.

• 32:01Alex Cranz?

  You just use your shirt.

• 32:03Nilay Patel?

  Right. That's right. Somewhere on that list is like the original Apple Watch, which was too fiddly, required a lot of care and didn't do well as a product. Then there's the current Apple Watch, which actually is pretty good. Bad at life, doesn't require a lot of care and has a lot of value for people, like exceeded the, the, the line. Then there's a Vision Pro, which is very, like anything that goes on your face, the fiddliness is off the charts and it can't deliver as much value.

• 32:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:30Nilay Patel?

  Like face computers just can't deliver the value to make this worthwhile. You just keep going down and down the list. The ring has a problem in that it delivers no value to you. It is a totally passive computer that you have to fiddle with and put on your body. And then all the value that's delivered is like. At some later point, you will look at some data that was collected.

• 32:50David Pierce?

  Well, and I think if you're, if you're the kind of person who has like a pre-existing thing for which that is useful, great. Like if you are someone who knows you struggle with sleep and you're trying things and actually collecting that data on an ongoing basis helps you, great. That makes total sense. A ring is going to be really useful. And the upside of a ring is that the fiddliness score is much, much lower. Like a thing that you wear on your index finger and take off once a week to charge while you shower, super low on the fiddliness meter. But the problem is that even its potential to do more stuff is not that high.

• 33:24Nilay Patel?

  I don't think it's that low on the fiddliness meter. I wear a ring every day.

• 33:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  I've never think, I pick it up when I leave the house. It serves an important function. Which is for my ladies that I'm taking.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a symbol of my ongoing devotion to my divorced lawyer of a wife.

• 33:45Nilay Patel?

  And I just never think about it. I take, I put it on, I take it off. I never think about charging it, whatever. It has an obviously important societal, emotional function that it does. It's like symbolic, but there's, it's zero fit. Like anything over zero is actually the standard.

• 34:04Alex Cranz?

  I, I think that is probably only some of our audience has that issue because a lot of their audience probably also enjoys to wear a little couple of different rings, replaced rings. Like I wear-

• 34:16Nilay Patel?

  They're also zero.

• 34:17Alex Cranz?

  No, because you take like, I cannot tell you, it's jewelry, right? Like jewelry, you're, you're constant. A lot of people are constantly fiddling with their jewelry.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Do you think the Galaxy watches jewelry?

• 34:25Alex Cranz?

  It fundamentally is. It's not jewelry I want to personally wear.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Well, but it doesn't have the function.

• 34:32Alex Cranz?

  No, it does. It's, it's a ring. It's showing, it's, it's putting that extra bling on your hand. And I think a lot of people do like to have that extra bling.

• 34:39David Pierce?

  The Aura ring has definitely attained like status symbol, status over the years.

• 34:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's got like a, it's got like a bling kind of quality to it. And I think the rings in a way, like the Apple watch quickly became, went from fashion, we all laughed at it being fashion and immediately into-

• 34:57Nilay Patel?

  It failed as a fashion, famously failed as a fashion.

• 34:59Alex Cranz?

  Famously, we were all like, that's stupid. And we all just stopped treating it like fashion and it just became a watch on your wrist. The ring is still- I think both more capable of it. So if you're someone who doesn't want to have a giant watch on your wrist and you do want those metrics, like, okay, you can put on the Rick, the ring and you can still wear your right leg or your Rolex or whatever, show that off. And I think that's who this is for.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  That's the market.

• 35:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is for like people with $6,000 watches that that they don't want to replace it.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  This is why Silicon Valley billionaires love the ring.

• 35:29Alex Cranz?

  This is my aspirational ring.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  I just figured this out. I guess when I say is it jewelry, I agree with you that like, it's jewelry.

• 35:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  I meant, does it look like jewelry? The Oura ring, actually, they tried very hard to make it look like jewelry.

• 35:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  And one of the only reasons that I wouldn't just swap out my wedding ring for it is you can, I think you can only wear it on your index finger, right?

• 35:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you're supposed to only wear it on your index.

• 35:51Nilay Patel?

  So it's like, it doesn't do the other thing. But there's a world in which you just infuse my existing jewelry with the tech and it looks good enough and that's fine. I just think that the Samsung one doesn't, doesn't.

• 36:01David Pierce?

  But wait, the Ne- the Neelai Patel theory of wearable bullshit does not have a fashion

• 36:06Alex Cranz?

  scale. That's the Z axis now.

• 36:07David Pierce?

  You've, you've, yeah, this is, this is about fiddliness. Those are not the same thing. Do you know what's very fiddly is fashion, Neelai?

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 36:18David Pierce?

  Looking good is hard work, man.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  I need to think about this for like five more seconds and I'll come up with something.

• 36:26David Pierce?

  But no, but I, I, I really think the problem is the, the ceiling for what you can do with a ring right now seems really low because like even, even like the next thing you think of is like, oh, maybe it'll vibrate for notifications. Do you know how insane it would feel to have your, the base of your index finger vibrate every time you get a text message? Like insane, disaster.

• 36:48Alex Cranz?

  You'd go to your doctor.

• 36:50David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 36:50Nilay Patel?

  And be like, I have all of this medical information.

• 36:53David Pierce?

  And Samsung is doing a thing where they're like, sort of gently pointing it like, maybe this is a way to gesture control some stuff. Like they have a little bit of the like pinchy pinch stuff going on.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  But only if you have a Samsung phone.

• 37:06David Pierce?

  Right. And so there's like, but even that is like. Probably not. I just don't think that's the thing yet.

• 37:12Alex Cranz?

  What if, I mean, we're hearing a lot more about XR nowadays. And, and if you just like mixed reality, that's just another word for mixed reality. And what if that's a like the kind of their way of this is how we're going to control it in the future?

• 37:27David Pierce?

  I do think if, if you want to like Galaxy brain, take the Galaxy Ring, I think that's probably.

• 37:32Alex Cranz?

  I, that's all I want to do.

• 37:33David Pierce?

  Also, I just realized if Samsung comes out with a headset and doesn't call it the Galaxy Brain, I'm going to be furious.

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  Entire AI service suite should be called Galaxy Brain. How did we have this idea? David Pierce's Galaxy Brain, you can have one.

• 37:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  God. Uh, all right. We're going to try out the Ring. The, I think V is very excited to get it. We'll, we'll know much more about it soon. Uh, the last piece we should talk about are some phones.

• 37:57David Pierce?

  I just want to point out that we're almost 40 minutes into this segment, just now talking about the phones, which actually tells you every single thing you need to know about these new phones.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they are more expensive.

• 38:06David Pierce?

  I'm so disappointed in these new phones. Like of all the things, like I can understand why you would copy Apple in making certain things. I can understand why you go all in on AI even before there are a lot of really compelling use cases. But this thing where Samsung was so far ahead in foldable phones and flip phones and seems content to just like squander that in the name of making everything a smidge better and not doing anything new or interesting every year is really starting to bump me out.

• 38:34Alex Cranz?

  Well, do they have competition in this space? Like, is there anybody that's actually pushing?

• 38:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, so there, we should talk about the Motorola Razr Plus, which Alison reviewed this week, which she loved. She just loved it.

• 38:45David Pierce?

  That thing is one very good camera away from maybe being the best Android phone.

• 38:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, also it's got a weird processor. It's like, who even can describe this Snapdragon 8S 3M or whatever it's called?

• 38:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:00Nilay Patel?

  Wait, let me find it. What is it?

• 39:01Alex Cranz?

  I've tried to.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's the Snapdragon 8S Gen 3, which is just a weird mid-tier processor.

• 39:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's weird. It's, it's just a weird, it's one of those where like, well, this phone lasts two years or five, like who knows?

• 39:14David Pierce?

  Yeah. Alison called it like an entry flagship, which is like, sure. All right. Here we are.

• 39:20Nilay Patel?

  Um, anyway, starting with the Samsung ones first, um, the flip six is the one that, you know, is sort of more interesting because I think that form factor is more interesting. Also, it's the thing that's changing the most, like those are the phones that are changing the most because the cover screens are getting bigger and bigger. But it's basically just like a little bit lighter and costs more money.

• 39:41Alex Cranz?

  Hmm. Yeah.

• 39:42David Pierce?

  Also a little more rugged, which is meaningful, especially for the flip. They're, they're getting better at making that thing into like an actual phone that you can treat like an actual phone.

• 39:50Alex Cranz?

  A little bit more.

• 39:52David Pierce?

  A little.

• 39:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like it doesn't even have dust resistance. Like don't do not take this to the desert.

• 39:57David Pierce?

  You can drop it in the toilet now. That's a victory. Yeah, you can drop your flip phone in the toilet and it'll probably be fine.

• 40:03Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then the fold six, boy, I couldn't tell you.

• 40:08David Pierce?

  It's literally like, one of the main features they talked about is that when it's flat, it's flatter. Like what, what are we doing here? It's just, and again, I, I, part of me wonders like, what, are, are we several physics miracles away from there being a new thing you can do here? Because Samsung is making little bits of this better. The, the cover screen, it's, it's a little wider on the outside, which I actually appreciate. It feels less like a TV remote and more like a phone. It's just the same thing though, like the, the Samsung is not even really like coming up with really cool new ideas about how the software here could work, which at least Motorola is pushing really hard for.

• 40:49David Pierce?

  How do we make the outer screen useful and the inner screen useful and have them interplay with each other really well? Samsung feels like it is just not pushing that nearly as hard. And so it's like, what, what, what is the case for why I should buy these things, Samsung?

• 41:03Alex Cranz?

  I don't think they care.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, presumably they'd like me to buy their phones.

• 41:08Alex Cranz?

  I think they want us to buy the phones, but, but I think they're, Samsung often feels driven by, by external pressures. It often feels driven by the market and like its decisions are based in the market and like, oh, we do the folding phone because nobody else is doing it. And we get there first and we get there before Apple and Apple just. Hasn't done it, hasn't even talked about doing it. The rumors are scant, right? And so, and that's their primary competitor. Like, we want to say Motorola or Pixel or whatever. Let's be real, their primary competitor is Apple. And if Apple's not doing anything in the space, then why should they invest in making the phone better when they can just rest on their laurels?

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, I think also, we've, Alex, you mentioned Saturday Samsung. Their sales are down. They're trying to make more money.

• 41:50Alex Cranz?

  Saturday Samsung, man.

• 41:52Nilay Patel?

  They, their efforts are going to marketing and more dollars from the same product. Like, of course, they're not putting tons of money into making, like, changing things too much. At the same time, like, they still employ the software engineers and designers, like,

• 42:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:09Nilay Patel?

  Make it more interesting is like a totally valid critique here. Like, the phone opens, you can, you have a little phone that turns into a big phone. What happens then?

• 42:18Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 42:18Nilay Patel?

  And that, that seems to be set aside. So that does, I think, bring us to the Motorola phone. Where Motorola does seem to have a lot of ideas, what would happens when you have a little phone that gets even smaller? And you have a big cover screen. And like, their ideas about how apps even appear on that cover screen and how you might control them, all pretty good.

• 42:36David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, it's the idea of like, what if you only had to tap on your phone two times to accomplish something on the outside screen? Is like, I don't know if that is the framework, but that's kind of what it feels like. And there's just little bits and pieces where it's like, okay, this is a screen you're gonna have sort of looking at you all the times. We're gonna make it fun and cute and animated. And if you want to like, do something, you're probably gonna open up the phone. So in this case, what we need to do is just give you all the things that are like one or two taps and just put it right in front of you. So it's like, what's next on your calendar? Get to AI, stop the music. Like, I love that. And this is like, the thing about flip phones that I'm enthusiastic about is it is, I, sometimes you should only have access to a tiny portion of your phone. And that is how you do it on that outside screen. Like, I think Motorola is getting this really right in a way I find very exciting.

• 43:21Nilay Patel?

  Also, it seems like there, when you unfold it, their screen is less creasy looking than the Samsung one.

• 43:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's only 1080p and it's like 6.9 inches, so it's like, super long and not that high res. And that makes me sad.

• 43:35Alex Cranz?

  David's face right now. You're just really enthusiastic.

• 43:38David Pierce?

  I just.

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  You love a garbage phone. You were single-handedly driving all of the sales of the Bookspal.

• 43:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's been a wild couple of weeks. But wait, one of the, one of the things that I've heard a bunch of people say about this Samsung launch, and I think this might be true for Motorola and stuff too, is that we're now, in Samsung's case, six generations into the flip and fold universe. And anecdotally, at least, and based on, you know, talking to people and what we've seen, these are not winning in any meaningful way, right? Like, they're not taking market share away from the Galaxy S lines and the iPhone and the other popular candy bar phones. And so you wonder if, instead of Samsung and others looking at these phones saying, this

• 44:24David Pierce?

  is how we win, they're increasingly looking at them as just like kind of a sideshow. And maybe, and, and if that is the case, of course, you slow down and you put less interesting resources into doing it. And especially for Samsung, which has a gigantic business selling candy bar phones, like, maybe, maybe we should be less interested in these because the world is less interested in these. For Motorola, like, they kind of have nothing to lose by swinging big for something new. And the Razr is the best brand Motorola ever had. So like, I get why they're doing this that way. But for Samsung, like, we've been waiting for this to become Samsung's thing for so long now. And I wonder if Samsung is increasingly

• 45:08David Pierce?

  convinced with every generation that maybe it's just not going to be.

• 45:11Alex Cranz?

  Is it just too expensive? Is that why it just hasn't become the thing? Like, that's why I haven't gotten one, is it's almost $2,000.

• 45:18David Pierce?

  I think for foldable phones, very much so. I think flip phones, you could like, maybe have a debate about whether it is meaningfully more useful to have that. I would argue that it is, but I think you could debate that. But the like, the fold problem is, A, they're huge, and B, they're twice the price. Like, I just, it's, that is going to be so hard to come back from for any of these companies.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  But you get three times the screens.

• 45:43Alex Cranz?

  For twice the price?

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  You do.

• 45:45David Pierce?

  Yeah. Pixel to dollar ratio is off the charts.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  That's your Saturday Samsung pitch. Two X the price, three X the screens.

• 45:53David Pierce?

  And they'll give you a TV with it.

• 45:54Nilay Patel?

  You getting that and Cupertino?

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  That's true. You can also get a TV with it. All right. We have talked about everything for too long. We're way over already. We're only halfway through. I think that makes sense. We'll be back with more of our chest.

• 46:11Speaker 00

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior light beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch in Bev. Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 46:42Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We have this next segment listed as streaming lightning round, and I'm just looking for where Alex talks about David Zaslove's outfits, which is a real thing that occurred today.

• 46:53Alex Cranz?

  You know, we're not going to talk too much about him. He's at the, is it Sun Valley where he's at with all the other billionaires right now?

• 46:59Nilay Patel?

  And he's just layered up. He's got a scarf, a vest, a shirt.

• 47:03Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my gosh. Like, he had like a bandana at one point. I was like, sir, I love his sartorial choices. But, um, but he expressed a lot of enthusiasm this week for, for the big Paramount Skydance deal. And that's the big deal.

• 47:20Nilay Patel?

  So this, we should tell people what's, we haven't talked about Paramount and Skydance because it's just been like a cloud. Whether you think that cloud is dark or light is up to you, but it has been a cloud that has not reached resolution. So Paramount, which owns CBS, Alex's favorite broadcast network.

• 47:38Alex Cranz?

  I got a story for this. I got a way to tell, explain this.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm just gonna let you drive.

• 47:43Alex Cranz?

  So, so once upon a time, there was a family and, and the dad went out and he put together a huge corporate conglomeration and they called it National Amusement.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  Which is very good.

• 47:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, great. They're nationally amusing. And in there was CBS and this big storied, century-old studio Paramount, all of that in there. And then on the other side, there was another family and, and they did something called Oracle and Larry Ellison made a lot of money from that. And his kids got into films and then they started producing and his daughter made a lot of good movies and then made some bad ones and his son made some really successful movies like Top Gun that

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  The new Top Gun.

• 48:23Alex Cranz?

  The new Top Gun. Yeah, he was a baby when the last, was he even alive when the last one came out? But he did that.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  We're not gonna find out.

• 48:30Alex Cranz?

  We're not gonna find out. Don't worry about it. This is, it doesn't matter. It doesn't matter. What matters is that there was these two families and they said, you know what? We should really get together and the tech family should buy the media conglomerate's family's business and just make an even bigger business. And then there was a lot of winging about, there was a lot of like winging about that. There was a lot of, oh, should I do this? I don't know. Sherry Redstone, the current owner of Paramount, was really concerned. She didn't know how she wanted her, she didn't want her dad's legacy ruined. She wanted money.

• 49:02David Pierce?

  And that's the plot of Succession, everybody.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. That's what happened. And eventually David Ellison went to his dad and was like, Dad, you're a billionaire. Can I borrow a couple of billion, say six of your money and put it in, sweeten this pot? And Larry said, I got you, son. And now his son owns one of the largest film studios in Hollywood.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, it hasn't closed yet, so we should be careful.

• 49:26Alex Cranz?

  It hasn't closed yet. Yeah, that's true. It hasn't closed. He will potentially own it, provided the lawsuits that are already cooking up amongst the investors who are mad that they're not getting as much of this pot. Those, those don't screw things up, provided there is Apollo or another investor doesn't come in and say, actually, I can provide even more money than Larry Ellison. I feel like that's probably not gonna happen, seeing as Larry Ellison already put six billion in. I feel like this is probably David Ellison's company and, and we've been seeing that all around Hollywood. We've been seeing that from a lot of the reporters, Variety, Matthew Bellany over at Puck. A lot of folks have been talking about this. Matthew Bellany had a really good interview with Ellison about this where he was like, yeah, I'm gonna do all this tech stuff. And that was really interesting

• 50:10Alex Cranz?

  about all of this is he's pitched this as like tech taking over. And I think we'd argue that tech already took over, given the success of Netflix and even smaller stuff like Apple. But this is really officially like tech has taken over Hollywood. And he's got big ambitions about using AI for workflows. That that's as much as he said.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  I can just read you the quotes.

• 50:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're great.

• 50:32Nilay Patel?

  Quotes are wild. Um, a slide deck for investors said AI would turbocharge content creation and drive efficiencies in streamlined operations. Terrifying. Um, Ellison said, the art will challenge the technology and the technology challenges the art. Which, uh, okay. And then, and he also said, we believe that understanding the symbiotic relationship between art and technology is essential to be able to meet this moment. Uh, there are a lot of technology companies that are rapidly expanding into media. We believe it is essential for Paramount to be able to expand its technology prowess to be both a media and technology enterprise.

• 51:09David Pierce?

  Those are quotes that come up when you say chat GPT, write me some quotes about, like, do you remember the paper that was like, we, we found a huge increase in the, the word delve being used because of chat GPT. Like, that's what that sounds like to me. That's a bunch of nothing. Like, that's, that's what you say.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  There are, there are two, there are two things that are real. They're 1,000% the things you would expect. All of those words to mean. Ellison proposed upgrading the advertising technology to give marketers more information about what audiences they're reaching. So we're doing some data collection and algorithmic ads and that we are working to improve the algorithmic recommendation engines that Paramount Plus uses. Hoping subscribers will spend more time on the streaming service and viewer account. So we're doing engagement.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 51:56Alex Cranz?

  I, I don't think those are actually the actual tech that they're going to be doing, like investing in. I think, I think the advertising is, everybody's investing in that right now. Peacock, if you talk to anybody at NBC right now, they will not hesitate to be like, have you heard about our, our new ad tech platform? We're really all in on ad tech platforms for streaming. It's great.

• 52:14Nilay Patel?

  Can I just read you more words?

• 52:16Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 52:17David Pierce?

  I wish you wouldn't.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  Ellison also said Skydance will work in partnership with Oracle to create a cloud-based animation studio. Skydance used the studio in the cloud to produce part of Spellbound, which is coming out later on Netflix. Uh, we intend to scale that business across all of our production workflows and animation.

• 52:34David Pierce?

  That's just, we're gonna buy a bunch of GPUs. Like, what are we talking about?

• 52:38Alex Cranz?

  I, it's also kind of worthless because the guy who runs Skydance Animation right now is John Lasseter, who famously got punted from Pixar because he couldn't keep his hands to himself allegedly.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 52:50Alex Cranz?

  And that, that's who's running it. They have not had a lot of successes. Most of their other animated properties have not had hit that like. John Lasseter used to have a golden hand, right? Like, he'd look at anything and it'd make a billion dollars, it felt like. Nowadays, it's like, we barely sold Luck to Apple TV. We're making a deal to to get this thing sold over at Netflix. That all felt like things he was saying to get Sherry Redstone feeling comfortable to do this deal, because Sherry Redstone was holding up the deal in in big ways. And right now, everybody in Hollywood has a lot of anxiety about tech companies and about tech infrastructure and how they can compete with stuff like Netflix, who has, like, for what it's worth, the best algorithms when it comes to streaming and actually getting content in front of people's

• 53:35Alex Cranz?

  eyes. And it just felt like, let's alleviate this woman's anxieties by saying AI a bunch.

• 53:42David Pierce?

  Sure. And giving her

• 53:44Alex Cranz?

  Six million dollars, yeah, yeah.

• 53:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that that probably helped, yeah.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I will just remind you, the listener, that these are the things that people say when they buy studios. Famously, it's what AT&T said when it bought Warner Brothers.

• 53:59David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  Which, again, provided the world the 4.3 grayscale Justice League.

• 54:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we don't know what this is gonna look like.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  What movies will David Ellison remaster is square in grayscale? I think is the only question.

• 54:15David Pierce?

  It's gonna be a Mission Impossible movie. It's gonna be six hours long.

• 54:20David Pierce?

  Mission Impossible Dead: Wrecking Engine 2 is going to be black and white and square. It's gonna be nuts.

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so this is like the big story in streaming. We haven't talked a lot about it because it hadn't happened, but now it's happened. If the deal closes, and as Alex said, all these lawsuits get resolved, I think we're looking at a bunch of tech money and tech ideas coming for the studio that famously owns Top Gun, coming for CBS, coming for

• 54:45Alex Cranz?

  Famously owned Star Trek.

• 54:46Nilay Patel?

  Famously owned Star Trek. It's gonna be weird. There's a real weirdness coming for this zone, because this is just a flood of new money, but also

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  Just the ideas that you would expect for the money to have.

• 55:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  But dressed up in ever larger ambitions.

• 55:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that that is exactly it. I I'm curious to see what they do. I'm curious to see if they unload any of these properties and and what kind of like movies and shows we actually start seeing if Taylor Sheridan gets the boot.

• 55:18Nilay Patel?

  I have been, by the way, Google furiously Googling for what studio in the cloud means. And it it's just a thing they say.

• 55:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:24David Pierce?

  It's called a data center. This is the thing like.

• 55:27Alex Cranz?

  It's like everybody already does it.

• 55:28David Pierce?

  Anything.

• 55:29Alex Cranz?

  It's called working remote.

• 55:31David Pierce?

  This is a rich guy who couldn't build a cool studio, buying a cool studio. Like, if I had the money to do it, I would do it. Skydance is like cool, but not that cool. Paramount is cooler. The end.

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  The closest I've come to understanding what studio in the cloud means is it's a it's like a square in the deck. It just says studio in the cloud. And it says Skydance Animation is building a studio in the cloud. That's the first bullet.

• 56:02Alex Cranz?

  You turn on Slack.

• 56:03Nilay Patel?

  The second bullet is transition from on prem to cloud based production and hosting infrastructure, which is fine. That's a thing, you know, dentist office across America are switching from on prem to cloud based infrastructure. And it feels like Oracle is just going to get its $6 billion back because it turns out they're building it with Oracle.

• 56:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but does it? It's got to mean something.

• 56:29David Pierce?

  Listen, Neil, we're we're like minutes away from you reading the Salesforce website again, and I can't have that in my life. We need to move on.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Fine. All right, Alex, you got a lot left in this lightning round. What else?

• 56:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, what else have we got? Well, so Redbox, we we had this great story from from Yonko last week that was all about friend of The Verge about how Redbox was in dire straits and why it was in dire straits. And now it's shutting down. Its parent company Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. Yeah, that's, that's the real name of the company.

• 57:00Nilay Patel?

  The second time in several weeks that Chicken Soup for the Soul has come up.

• 57:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:04Nilay Patel?

  You'll recall that we looked at the Crackle website, which is owned by Chicken Soup for the Soul.

• 57:08Alex Cranz?

  We'll see for how long.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  For now, yeah.

• 57:11Alex Cranz?

  For now, yeah. They, they got a new CEO last week and his job is literally to come in and fix companies that are in dire straits. And for Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, that means Redbox is toast. It had already been really bad. A lot of folks, probably if you, if you're listening to this and you tried to go rent out a Redbox in the last couple of months, would struggle to get any, anything. A lot of them have been shut down and, and now it's, it's done. R I P Redbox.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  So what, what's happening to all the DVDs and the Redboxes today?

• 57:41Alex Cranz?

  You just go and you break the box open and you take it?

• 57:44Nilay Patel?

  So looting. So Alex is like, do looting.

• 57:46Alex Cranz?

  The problem, the problem is that all of the technicians who, who, who manage those things have all been grounded because all of their cars are getting repossessed because

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal.

• 57:57Alex Cranz?

  they haven't been paying the bills for the, the cars that they rent. So like come, like Walgreens, 7-Eleven, everybody's just unplugging them. And I think you're just going to start seeing more of these unplugged and just sitting there. And I'm not saying you should loot them, but.

• 58:14Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's where that ends.

• 58:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, don't loot them.

• 58:16Nilay Patel?

  There's no but. After, I'm not saying you should loot them.

• 58:19Alex Cranz?

  Just don't, don't do that.

• 58:21Nilay Patel?

  I can hear the, the footsteps of the lawyers coming down the hallway right now.

• 58:25Alex Cranz?

  Ha. Where is she?

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  So do you think this is just straight up streaming killed Redbox? Is this?

• 58:30Alex Cranz?

  That's where I'm at. Because like when you read Yonko's piece, this all happened, the, like the big turning point for Redbox was when, uh, in 2021, when everybody said, we're going to stop releasing everything physically and putting it in theaters and we're just going to do it all to streaming.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  What was the other thing going on in 2021, Chris?

• 58:50Alex Cranz?

  You know? Yeah, but see, that's the thing. If they had, if they had said, like, there's a lot of the people who are buying, who are renting these were in places where they don't have streaming. And they would also like to watch whatever King Kong and Godzilla are getting up to in 2021. And those just weren't coming out, so they couldn't rent anything. So nobody was renting from Redbox because none of the studios were releasing this stuff physically.

• 59:13David Pierce?

  Well, right. But I think, I, I, I think you can make an extremely compelling argument that COVID killed Redbox. More so than you can make one that streaming killed Redbox.

• 59:23Alex Cranz?

  No, because how is COVID gonna do it? Everybody's at home anyway. These things are outside.

• 59:27David Pierce?

  We didn't go outside for two years.

• 59:29Alex Cranz?

  You still have to go to the grocery store where the Redbox is.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there was a, there was a Redbox at the CVS in the woods. People, people gazed at it and then they thought, I don't have a DVD player.

• 59:43David Pierce?

  I mean, there is that. Well, and, and what part of Redbox's thing was access for people who didn't have great access to streaming, either because it's expensive or because they lived in places without great connection, or like, there was a, there was a real, this is a compliment to streaming. Or like a, this is a thing you do when you can't do streaming, not this is a real competitor to streaming. And so Alex, to your point, I think as fewer and fewer people didn't have streaming, it's probably true that Redbox didn't fill that need for as many people. But the problem for me is this is also just spectacular corporate mismanagement.

• 1:00:19Alex Cranz?

  Oh, 100%.

• 1:00:19David Pierce?

  Like this company took on a mountain of debt to buy a company it probably couldn't afford. Chicken Soup for the Soul, I think it was like $325 million in debt to buy Redbox. Banking on, we're gonna make a ton of money back one DVD at a time, made a bunch of weird decisions and it all fell apart. So part of me is like, maybe streaming killed Redbox, but I don't think we ever actually got to see streaming kill Redbox because I think like Chicken Soup for the Soul killed Redbox.

• 1:00:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, well, Redbox was like, not doing great when, when Chicken Soup for the Soul bought it because it had just, it just done a SPAC. It, uh, it just gone public via SPAC, which

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  Can we just?

• 1:00:54Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, Eli.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  There's, there's like all of that. This company is called Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment. Right, like you already know, like this started as a set of books for live, laugh, love moms. Right. And they're like, we're a media empire now. At no point we're like, we should change our name. Like, you already know that this is just a bunch of weird, like zombie media zombie ideas, like.

• 1:01:20David Pierce?

  I'm glad you brought this up because this does violate my theory that you can't survive a bad name for your company.

• 1:01:27David Pierce?

  Chicken soup for the soul is very much a bad name. Yeah, right. Sorry. Chicken soup for the soul entertainment.

• 1:01:33Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 1:01:34David Pierce?

  When did this book come out? Sentence people say.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  The fact that I'm Googling chicken soup for the soul as a book is gonna be so bad for me.

• 1:01:40Alex Cranz?

  So this is technically spun, they spun off from chicken soup for the soul for the books. Cause that's like the book.

• 1:01:45Nilay Patel?

  They don't even have the books yet?

• 1:01:47Alex Cranz?

  They spun that off. This is a whole other company.

• 1:01:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, this is the entertainment.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  The books for chicken soup for the soul LLC.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta, I gotta end this. Also, the worst website I've ever seen in my entire life. But just that you can't survive a bad name, especially when you're not even connected to the, the live, laugh, love books anymore.

• 1:02:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you're just out there buying companies for too much debt that are already been half killed by COVID and streaming. And thinking this will work and it didn't.

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  Can I say that the, the book company has chicken soup for the soul for kids?

• 1:02:24Nilay Patel?

  That's good. Okay, that's enough. Next lightning round item. If you start a company, don't call it chicken soup for the soul.

• 1:02:30Alex Cranz?

  Please don't.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  That is probably the lesson.

• 1:02:32Nilay Patel?

  And also if your entire company is distributing physical media, you, you should have a plan B.

• 1:02:39David Pierce?

  Well, they did. They had a big, long plan for how to go digital with all of this. And Redbox has been trying to do a streaming service for like 10 plus years.

• 1:02:49Nilay Patel?

  But then you're just, you're just Netflix.

• 1:02:52David Pierce?

  Yeah. And that's what Paramount's trying to do and we didn't yell at them for that. So.

• 1:02:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, I can't wait to see what chicken soup's plan to.

• 1:03:00David Pierce?

  Here's a new idea.

• 1:03:02Nilay Patel?

  Chicken soup in the cloud for the soul.

• 1:03:03David Pierce?

  Larry Ellison buys Redbox. Do you think we're good?

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  As, as long as they get off prem. And I would point out that Redbox, one of the single most on prem businesses of all time.

• 1:03:16David Pierce?

  Redbox in the cloud.

• 1:03:18Nilay Patel?

  So many prem.

• 1:03:18David Pierce?

  Think about it. What if a red box put in the cloud?

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. What's next, Alex?

• 1:03:23Alex Cranz?

  Uh, the next is I I'd never pause when I'm watching TV I learned because I don't get pause ads. Do you guys get those? When you're just watching a show and you're like, I gotta go to the bathroom. So you pause it on Hulu.

• 1:03:35David Pierce?

  Amazon Prime is the one I noticed it on the most, but I think there are other streaming services.

• 1:03:38Alex Cranz?

  Hulu does it. Hulu does it. Sling TV is now doing it. That's the big news this week. Um, I was like, what is a pause ad? Oh, I'm watching TV. Wrong is what I learned from all of this. But basically pause ads happen when you pause something and then it just decides to display an ad while you're going to the bathroom.

• 1:03:57David Pierce?

  Exactly what I wanted.

• 1:03:58Alex Cranz?

  Exactly what you want. Sling TV is now doing it, but they also have a little thing at the bottom saying you can go turn this off, which Prime and for free. You just go to the settings and turn it off, uh, which is different than what Prime and Hulu are doing. So good on you, like bad on you, sling, but also good on you.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  As more and more of these companies move into like ad tiers, right? Pay money, but still have ads, which is what they all are now. Um, the desire to get more money is going to result in more and more ads being more and more. You can just see it coming. It's a tsunami of weird ideas. Uh, and they're just out of space. Like the goal.

• 1:04:35Alex Cranz?

  Do you think we get like a right rail of just ads?

• 1:04:38Nilay Patel?

  Dude, you can already get a free TV that is, has a physical rail of ads.

• 1:04:46David Pierce?

  It's literally a thing. So I will say, I think pause ads are fine. Like in terms of finding ways to show giant ass ads on my TV in a way that is non-interruptive. This is the best one they've ever invented because it's like, if I'm pausing my TV, who cares? Like, what, what do I want to see on the TV? It's, do I care if it's a frozen, like hat moving shot of someone's face? Or if it's like a Toyota ad? I don't care.

• 1:05:14Alex Cranz?

  I think it's like.

• 1:05:16David Pierce?

  Fine. I'm getting up to leave the room anyway. Like, that's why I pause the show.

• 1:05:20Alex Cranz?

  I think it's like when you're having like a phone call, right? Like somebody calls you and you're like, oh, I need a pause. And then it's like Toyota Tundra.

• 1:05:26Nilay Patel?

  Is it gonna, is it gonna play a video?

• 1:05:28David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, there's sound. I feel very differently.

• 1:05:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:31David Pierce?

  These are, most of the Amazon ones at least are just like a static image that is just like you, you press pause of Mr. And Mrs. Smith and a thing pops up that's just like Jeep. And then just freezes for as long as you need it to. And I think that's fine. You know what I hate? I'm just going to complain about ads for a minute here and then we can move on. Is there's now a thing that happens on Hulu? And probably some others, but I noticed it the most on Hulu where at the beginning of a show, it will ask you to choose your ad experience. It's like, which Charmin ad would you like to watch? And you've gotten to the point now where Anna, my wife, will sit there and yell at the TV. I don't care. And I'm always like, Anna, that doesn't accomplish anything. And she's like, but I don't care. And it'll like linger there for 10 seconds.

• 1:06:14David Pierce?

  Then if you don't do anything, it'll just choose for you and then play the whole ad anyway. I'm like, no, if you're going to make me watch ads, you pick. Don't make me do the work to pick my own ads.

• 1:06:25Alex Cranz?

  I agree with that.

• 1:06:26David Pierce?

  Use your damn algorithms and show me the ads.

• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  Use AI to collect more data about you unless you generate more data, David.

• 1:06:32David Pierce?

  Apparently.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  It costs money to go from on prem to the cloud.

• 1:06:35David Pierce?

  Drives me nuts, but if I, if I could choose between like in, in like dynamic interstitial ads and pause ads, give me pause ads every time. The problem is it's both and it's going to be a bunch of other stuff too.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  And they're, they're just going to send you that way. It's, it's coming. All right, one more.

• 1:06:53Alex Cranz?

  Oh.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  In the streaming lightning round.

• 1:06:56Alex Cranz?

  Do you want to talk about?

• 1:06:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, actually, let me do it. I'll do it this way.

• 1:07:00Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, I want to call out one more that isn't technically streaming, but I think is really interesting. For our lightning round of video over the internet, which is Adam Masary, who runs Instagram, put out a video this week where he's like, I just want to make it clear we're not, we're not going to do long form video, which is interesting for a number of reasons. One, he was like, the whole point of Instagram is to connect with your friends. So when you like open a friend's video and then you're like in reels by accident, and then you're in reels by accident for two hours. He's like, that's great. That's what we want.

• 1:07:31Nilay Patel?

  Because you are more likely to share a short video with your friend. And then they'll watch it and they'll, they'll end up in the we, the reels rabbit hole and they'll share some videos. And he's like, that's great. Long videos, you won't watch all the way through and you definitely won't share them. And they've apparently measured this and they know this. And he calls it a symbiotic relationship between connecting your friends and short videos, which is interesting on its face. The second thing that's interesting is that Instagram has super tried to do long form video and compete with YouTube before. It was called IGTV.

• 1:07:57David Pierce?

  I went to the IGTV launch. It was one of the weirdest days of my entire life.

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

  And this was the previous administration of Instagram. This is not Masary's Instagram. This is like the previous leaders of Instagram. But they tried, they were like, oh, we'll just be YouTube now. And they utterly failed. And now they, you know, they were like, we'll be TikTok now and they've succeeded. And TikTok is like, we'll be YouTube now. And I don't know how that's going, but it's interesting to see Instagram be like, huh, no. When in fact, all of these streamers have to compete with reels and YouTube. And like YouTube is growing fastest on TVs, actually. So it's interesting to see all this other action happening. And then Missary being like, no, we're gonna, we're staying right here. Short form video.

• 1:08:39David Pierce?

  I think it's the right call. And I will say the thing you're describing, that, that like symbiotic thing makes perfect sense to me. And anecdotally feels true, right? That like, the idea that I'm A, going to sit here and watch one single 30 minute video on Instagram.

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  And then send it to a friend.

• 1:08:57David Pierce?

  Right. It just feels preposterous, right? And I think, like, I think all the time about like, when you talk to people about the, the act that you do on TikTok. It's scrolling. It's not viewing. Like, the thing that you do on TikTok is flip channels. That is more important than what is actually on the screen that you're viewing. It's, it's the activity that is the thing, which is what's different from like TV. Or even YouTube, which is less of a scrolling thing, but YouTube is becoming more scroll-y with shorts and stuff like that. Instagram is, has always been scroll-y. And I think trying to undo that and be like, this is now a destination that you're going to spend a half hour at a time without touching your screen. I think was just never going to happen. It's also like a much harder thing to sell ads against, which is, I think, a reason it makes a lot of sense.

• 1:09:41David Pierce?

  It's really easy to sell ads that are a video between two other videos that you're scrolling on. And this, this just feels, this feels very obvious to me, except that these companies usually can't help themselves from all trying to be each other. So to hear Adam just kibosh it entirely was pretty interesting.

• 1:09:57Nilay Patel?

  It's also funny because it's the money, like YouTube makes a lot of money. And they're like, we're not going to make that money, which is super, like YouTube just has no competition. It is the place for long form video on the internet, which is weird.

• 1:10:11Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's a place for independent long form video, right? Like, like it is effectively the VHS tape of, of the modern era where it's just like, hey, or cable access. She's like, hey, I need a platform. I don't want to go make a deal with David Ellison. This is what I do. I put it, I just put it on YouTube. Like functionally, that's what YouTube is becoming. And, and it's getting more and more like that, even though it's UI and stuff isn't like that. And I think it makes sense.

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, but a really weird thing is you can just like rent Paramount movies on YouTube. No one does it, but you can just be like, I'm gonna rent Mission Impossible.

• 1:10:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:47David Pierce?

  You can subscribe to streaming services through YouTube.

• 1:10:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you can watch movies on cable access in, in, in the olden times too. Like, and I think Instagram to me is more like, now I'm gonna go just completely switch up the analogy. And, and say that Instagram is kind of like the drive-through margarita bars. I don't know if you, they're in Texas and they rule.

• 1:11:07David Pierce?

  I was gonna say that I gotta move to Texas.

• 1:11:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like you see those in Louisiana and Texas. And it's like, yeah, you drive through, you get your, your beautiful treat. You drive home, you have, it's like bam bam, you're done. And it feels like long form video is like, what if we did fine dining at the drive-through margarita bar?

• 1:11:26David Pierce?

  So it's like, what if you went to Sonic, but your meal was a hundred dollars? And it's like, that's not, that's not what we're looking for.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  Isn't this the plot of The Bear? I just.

• 1:11:35Alex Cranz?

  They still serve the sandwiches out the side window.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  Just, isn't that the bear? People love the bear.

• 1:11:43Alex Cranz?

  Instagram, you could be the bear.

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  All right, that is where we need to end this entire. Look, if you know the people who run Chicken Soup for the Soul Entertainment, bring them to us. We, I have, I have a number of questions. What kind of zombies are they? All right, that's it. We gotta take a break. We'll be back with the actual lightning round.

• 1:12:02Speaker 00

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• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. We are way over, just like bananas over. It's, you know, it's the summer. Every time we think we have nothing to talk about, we have a lot to talk about. That's how it goes. But we gotta do this lightning round quick. Lightning. You hear what I'm saying?

• 1:12:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, David, what's yours?

• 1:12:50David Pierce?

  Okay, I have great news. My lightning round is several gadgets and an entire lineup of accessories. Does that, does that seem good?

• 1:12:56Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:12:58David Pierce?

  Oh, and it's, it's two different companies involved. Well, it's a company inside of a company. So, once upon a time, there were smartphones. No, so CMF, which is the, the sub-brand of nothing, which is an insane sentence to say all that, launched a bunch of stuff this week. A new set of earbuds, a new smartwatch, and I would say by far most interestingly, a new phone called the CMF Phone One. It's a $199 Android phone that basically lets you replace the back of the phone with a couple of different accessories in different colors, or add like a lanyard. What's the other one? A wallet you can put on, and I think there's one that's a kickstand

• 1:13:43David Pierce?

  that you can just stick on through an accessory port. By all accounts, it's kind of a like mid-rangey Android phone, but it looks awesome. It's orange, it's 200 bucks, and this is, for some reason, the Android phone I have been most excited about in a very long time. Like, nothing is out there being like, we're gonna make tech more fun again. This is the most interesting thing in that mold that I think nothing has ever done. And it's a $200 Android phone, and I'm very excited about it.

• 1:14:12Alex Cranz?

  Like, it rules.

• 1:14:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, just like, what if, what if we tried new things, right? I really, spending all that time with the books, Palma has gotten me like obsessed with this idea that what if you took a phone and just tweaked two things about it? Like, what, this, if we, if we take this form factor we're all obsessed with and just turned it a little, can you change that? And that one of those is like, what if the screen folded? One of them is like, what if it was E Ink? And one of them, like, I've been obsessed with modular phone ideas for, forever. And I really continue to think there is something to, like, what if you could make your phone several different things? Overtime. And this is such a cool version of that. And they did a really like Ikea ish thing here where it has some like exposed screws and you can actually open up the back

• 1:14:55David Pierce?

  of your phone and see the inside of your phone. It's just, it just seems fun. And again, it's like, it's $200. Like, yes, more of this, please.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  It's weird because what you want is, what you would expect is that the phone parts of the phone, 15 years into phones, more would be a commodity by now. Right? Like, an Android phone should just be a commodity. And then the way it looks and works and feels in your hand, and it's that just hasn't played out for, for a million reasons. Because of carriers, because of competition, because Google, whatever it is, eSIMs, like whatever you think has restricted this market from being competitive and commodifying the Android part.

• 1:15:36David Pierce?

  It's happened with Android parts, like with the other parts of Android phones, like cameras that go into Android phones are now everywhere. The sensors are everywhere. Android runs everything. But like, the phone thing, that hasn't happened. You're totally right.

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  At least the United States. We're gonna, we're gonna have listeners in other countries, particularly like India and China, who are like, no, this, this is pretty competitive out here. But this is like, one of those things where I was like, oh, if only we had a little competition, we'd have way more ideas like this. Yep. It is cool. I'm assuming that it is a very slow phone, because it's $200.

• 1:16:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. But I, like, I saw a bunch of reactions from people that were like, they, people were, I got a bunch of people asking me, like, is this a good reading device? Because it has a, it has an OLED screen. It has a, I think, 5,000 milliamp battery, which should last a while. It'll run Android apps. And then I saw a bunch of people who are like, this is gonna be a kick ass gaming handheld. And to me, it's like, this is, this is the stuff, right? Like, we don't, what if we didn't have one device that we demanded to do everything? But instead, we could just buy these things that are $200 and actually just like, sort of push them towards one use case or another. And instead, it's like an overlapping Venn diagram of things that look like phones. And I think that's super fun.

• 1:16:48Nilay Patel?

  I like that more.

• 1:16:48David Pierce?

  I'm gonna buy the hell out of this thing. But also, the earbuds and the watch also both look pretty cool. And the earbuds in particular.

• 1:16:57Nilay Patel?

  The little dial.

• 1:16:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, really great. Like, total, I love a little pointless fidget spinner of a dial on a case, like, good job, CMF. And the ones last year, if I remember correctly, were better than we expected for something pretty cheap. I think these are like,

• 1:17:14Nilay Patel?

  These are, yeah, $59. They're cheap. And for a pair of kind of AirPods-y looking things, by all accounts, they've sounded pretty good in the past. So I'm, I'm pretty optimistic here.

• 1:17:26Alex Cranz?

  I will say, it was surprising to me that this week we got two kind of AirPod knockoffs. And nothing was the one that didn't have LEDs in it.

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna change AirPods. What's the first thing you do? You had LEDs?

• 1:17:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'll do mine quick and then transition ends with yours, because yours, we should end on outrage, basically.

• 1:17:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so I'll just pick one. I had two, but I'll just pick one. You know, we're paying a lot of attention to AI and copyright. Like, I think it's kind of a hassle cards. And there's lots and lots of lawsuits. Sarah Silverman is suing AI companies. There's the, the record labels are suing Suno and Udio, which are AI companies. The New York Times is suing OpenAI, on and on and on. The one that I thought was really interesting and kind of like a long shot was a bunch of developers sued over GitHub Copilot. Because it can obviously spit out code. And this is like the main thing that people have been excited about with AI. Most of their claims got tossed out this week, except for the one that said they're violating the open source licenses.

• 1:18:26Nilay Patel?

  Which is a really weird circle. Uh, so they're like, look, the GitHub Copilot can just spit out code. They trained on a bunch of our code. They didn't have the copyright to that code. That code is copyrighted and that's copyright infringement, like, pretty straightforward. The judge is like, none of that makes any sense. This isn't what's really happening. Interesting precedent. And then they said, but it is true. That there were software licenses for that code, open source software licenses. They didn't abide by them because the code they spit out, uh, should have the same licenses. That's how open source licenses work. So now we might have a weird open source legal battle over AI and not a copyright legal battle over AI. Which is equally weird, because all of those open source licenses absolutely depend on copyright law.

• 1:19:11Nilay Patel?

  Because that's what they are. They're licenses to copyright work. So there's just this weird knot of weird, of like, copyright law problems happening with this one case. And if you're a really optimistic AI person, you say, look, it was fair. All these claims are thrown out. If you're very negative, you say, well, that was just a weird one. And the, the big ones to come are still gonna define how this whole industry survives or thrives.

• 1:19:36David Pierce?

  Does it feel like that's where all of this is headed that we're, we're starting with kind of a hundred different versions of the same fight and what we're going to end up with is like two of the most consequential ones and then that will percolate out. Cause it does feel like, I mean, we've talked a lot about a lot of these lawsuits and they're all different, but they're all also kind of the same. And you wonder if we're going to get to a point where everybody decides like, okay, let's, let's figure out what we're actually fighting about and then fight about that. Instead of fighting about like a hundred variations of that thing.

• 1:20:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is America, Jack.

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  Like, no, it's gonna just be chaos. Like, that's, that's the way our system is designed to work is like, there isn't yet a king of America.

• 1:20:20David Pierce?

  I mean, there is now, yeah.

• 1:20:22Nilay Patel?

  Soon, soon there might be.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  But the, the notion that there is just some definitive answer or that everyone will quit their whining. So the New York Times can get to, it's not gonna happen. So what you're gonna get is this like mishmash of precedents. Until Congress passes a law that unifies all these precedents into like a regulatory framework. Seems unlikely. Or there's a Supreme Court case that, I don't know, throws out 50 years of precedent for no reason. That's they, they love doing that. And you just have to like work through the process, but in the meantime, everyone's just gonna take their shots. And I think one of the things that's interesting is like, there are so many shots. And they're all kind of weird, right? They're all just like picking off at the edges. But again, I've been saying like, only one has to like go through for the bottom to fall out and these companies have to pay.

• 1:21:10Nilay Patel?

  And the thing you're saying is that they're all kind of the same case. It's all the same argument. You took our stuff without permission. Whether or not you need that permission is like the thing that makes the internet go in like the realist way. And so if you change the boundaries of what you need permission for to use or reuse or remix or sample or whatever, you kind of change the economy. The whole economy changes around it, uh, which is why it's kind of wacky that it's just a bunch of shots. Like, who knows? But this one in particular is interesting because it's going to end up being an open source contract case. And we haven't had one of those in a very long time.

• 1:21:48Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that was mine. Alex, bring us home with some pure outrage.

• 1:21:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, some pure outrage. So do you guys remember the, what is it, the unofficial Apple weblog?

• 1:21:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Tuah. I used to work, I worked at Engadget and they were our sister site.

• 1:22:02Alex Cranz?

  They were your sister site. Tuah was like, old school, one of the original Apple blogs. Used to love reading it. One of my best friends used to work there. One of my best friends got very upset this weekend because Christina Warren, a former, she works at GitHub now, and she was suddenly writing at Tuah again. She herself wasn't. Her byline was appearing at Tuah, just next to a bunch of like clearly AI-written schlock. And she wasn't the only one. A lot of former reporters from Tuah had their bylines appear on the site. Because earlier this year, it seems to have been acquired from Apollo. It left the Yahoo land for Apollo.

• 1:22:45Alex Cranz?

  And then Apollo seemed to have sold it to someone else. And that someone else, who we still don't entirely know who they are, or what they do, were just filling up, filling up this empty blog with content. And allegedly, like, the explanation that they had on their site was, on the Tuah site was, "Yeah, we don't have any of this content, so we're replicating it with AI, so we don't lose these important archives." That's not how archiving works.

• 1:23:13Nilay Patel?

  It's very good, by the way. It's a very good, like, what if I made some stuff up?

• 1:23:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just full stop. That's not how any of that works. People were very upset. Christina Warren was among them. And she reached out and they promptly changed the name of her character and changed the headshot, so it was no longer her. And it's just a big bummer in the world. It's just a bummer that sites are getting picked up and just filled with AI garbage. I think it is particularly a bummer for those of us who've worked at a lot of these smaller sites and stuff, who, who knows where my byline could appear next.

• 1:23:51Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited to find out.

• 1:23:52David Pierce?

  This is like, Google did earlier this year, a thing Google normally doesn't do, which is come out and basically say aggressively and clearly that it was making changes to its search algorithm such that this is no longer a good idea. Right, because the reason you do this is you you buy a domain that has real authority in the hopes that it will still rank in Google, you fill it with nonsense, that nonsense ranks well in Google, you sell a bunch of ads, you make some money. It it does work, like it is, it is a strategy, it's not necessarily a long term victory.

• 1:24:27Alex Cranz?

  It is a strategy for like, half of media online.

• 1:24:29David Pierce?

  Right, and it and it and it works, and Google has been saying aggressively that it is trying to prevent this from working, and yet it pretty clearly seems to continue to work.

• 1:24:39Alex Cranz?

  I I I just don't know when Google's gonna be able to do that, because this has been, like, the the only difference here is the scale of crappy content. Like, somebody would have done this without AI as well, right? They would have hired a bunch of people with no name and said, just write a bunch of content, put it on the site. We've seen that happen before, I think IBT was an example of that. And in this case, it happened to be AI, it happened to be this early Apple blog full of like, well-known tech bloggers, and that's just a terrible, terrible move to make in that case. Don't do that, you want to choose like, better homes and gardens? No, they're still around.

• 1:25:17David Pierce?

  They're still around.

• 1:25:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but you know, you want to choose something maybe not tech-adjacent to do this with, if you're gonna be gross.

• 1:25:24David Pierce?

  It it was a weird choice to do it on an Apple blog. I will, I I will agree with that. But this is the thing, like, Mia Sato on our team wrote this great piece this week about the guy behind, I think the company, is it called Advan? I think is the name of the company, uh, which is the one that did a lot of the AI stuff that became a huge mess at Sports Illustrated. Like, this, the internet is so quickly becoming this. And I've been thinking a lot about this, like, after, uh, the MTV archives went away and the Comedy Central archives went away, like, speaking of two websites that a lot of people know and trust and would believe if someone bought them and filled them with spam nonsense, like, there's just going to be such a long run of this. And it's, it's gonna get weirder before it gets normalized, in whatever way it's gonna look like.

• 1:26:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, to be clear, I don't think Google can stop it.

• 1:26:12Alex Cranz?

  I, yeah, I don't think they can.

• 1:26:13Nilay Patel?

  And I, it's not, and that's not because of antipathy towards Google, I think the problem is so hard. And then the internal philosophical reckoning for Google is even harder. So the problem is, you have to say a bunch of AI-generated sludge is bad.

• 1:26:32David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:26:33Nilay Patel?

  Right? We're gonna not rank it.

• 1:26:35David Pierce?

  Sludge that you're charging people $20 a month per person to make.

• 1:26:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. So you're like, okay, you just, there are two wolves. You know, it's like, what are you gonna do? Like, you have to say the output of your own models is bad. At some point, like, that is the task ahead of the search team. And I don't know that they can reckon with it fully, like.

• 1:26:55David Pierce?

  Well, and let's be real, like, what are Google's AI overviews for web searches if not more or less exactly the same thing?

• 1:27:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see. They, by the way, have been, the overviews have been, they're still, some of them are still very bad. They're also moving them around the page. I don't know if you've noticed this.

• 1:27:11David Pierce?

  I have not.

• 1:27:12Nilay Patel?

  They've, they're moving all over the page. Sometimes they're at the top, sometimes they're in the middle, sometimes they're at the bottom, like, they're still doing them. But they are, they haven't figured out where they go, or when they should appear, or how they should look. And then one of them, David Immel from MKB HD's team and Waveform and everything else. He, he posted that the answer to like, how do you check the film in your camera is getting like much worse.

• 1:27:38David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 1:27:38Nilay Patel?

  So it was like, how do you see if there's film in some model of film camera? And AI overview is just like, open it up in bright sunlight. Like it said, in bright sunlight. Yeah. And he found it on some Reddit thread, but it's like crazy.

• 1:27:51Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it would work.

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  What is going on?

• 1:27:53Alex Cranz?

  You wouldn't know afterwards if the film camera, if the camera.

• 1:27:57David Pierce?

  That is true.

• 1:27:57Alex Cranz?

  This is exposed.

• 1:27:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this is what happens when you're like, the future of all intelligence is Reddit. It's like, is it?

• 1:28:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's it. We've, we're way over. We're way over.

• 1:28:09Nilay Patel?

  Look, they're all, everything's gonna look like AirPods. And then the robots are gonna tell you to do dumb shit to your cameras. That's the future. I'm excited for it here at The Verge. We know what we're gonna write about. All right, that's it. That's The Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:28:25David Pierce?

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:28:43Speaker 04

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