The Google breakup is looming

Nilay and David make some predictions about Thursday evening’s Tesla event — which you’ve already seen, but we haven’t! Then they talk about the week’s gadget news, from Nintendo’s new Alarmo alarm clock to Apple’s upcoming iPads and Macs. Then Lauren Feiner joins to talk about the latest on all fronts in Google’s antitrust fight, and how the government might be planning to break up the company altogether. Then it’s time for a lightning round about Google Docs tabs, FEMA misinformation, and Zoom AI avatars. Further reading: The bill finally comes due for Elon Musk In the past week, 4 of Elon Musk's direct reports have announced their exits from Tesla All the buzz about Nintendo’s Alarmo clock I totally forgot we wrote about Nintendo’s sleep tracking alarm clock 10 years ago. Nintendo’s original alarm clock prototypes were a lot less playful A closer look at Nintendo’s adorable Alarmo clock Shrunken Mac Minis and a new iPad Mini might come in November Apple’s Vision Pro leader, Dan Riccio, is retiring A Google breakup is on the table, say DOJ lawyers How the DOJ wants to break up Google’s search monopoly Google must crack open Android for third-party stores, rules Epic judge The filing: Microsoft Word - FINAL - Google Remedy Framework Google’s response: DOJ’s radical and sweeping proposals risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers Google Docs is making it much easier to organize information Zoom will let AI avatars talk to your team for you - The Verge Hurricane Milton hits tonight, and it’s past the point of evacuation. Creators are still there. Instagram and Threads moderation is out of control - The Verge FEMA adds misinformation to its list of disasters to clean up 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.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of cars that can drive themselves if you don't look too hard.

• 1:41David Pierce?

  Can, in scare quotes.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's the guy in the trunk that's driving the car, but we don't talk about him. He's wearing a Vision Pro. He's hungry.

• 1:49David Pierce?

  Don't look over there. It's fine.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm your friend Eli David Pierce. He's in the studio with me.

• 1:53David Pierce?

  Hello. It's very exciting to be here.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  This is your first time in the studio?

• 1:58David Pierce?

  This is my second time in the studio, but the first time that you've been here when I've been in the studio.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  Well, the other time doesn't count.

• 2:03David Pierce?

  You typically run away from me when I arrive in New York. You flee upstate somewhere.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's my entire goal in life is to flee. Flee to the woods. Later on the show, Lauren Finer is going to join us. We're going to talk about Google. Which has attracted the attention of our nation's regulators. The, the white hot attention of the nation's court system.

• 2:23David Pierce?

  Like historic way. Yeah.

• 2:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's like going, it's, I would say it's not making a blip.

• 2:30David Pierce?

  No.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  Like, what if we break up Google and everyone's like, huh?

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  So Lauren's going to explain why it's much more than a blip. Cause there's two different cases that are going to result in major changes to how Google works. And we're going to have lightning round. And boy, do we have a lot of stuff in the lightning round, which remains, I would say, unsponsored. Also, there's at least one thing here is titled Microsoft Word final, final Google remedy framework.

• 2:55David Pierce?

  Listen, that's how justice gets done in this country.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  Final, final two. All right, let's start with the news. There's one piece of news that I really want to talk about, the most important news of the week, which is Nintendo made a hundred dollar alarm clock.

• 3:08David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  We'll get to that. Then there's the news that has not happened yet as we are recording, but by the time you listen to this, will have occurred. And by occurred, I mean, people will make you promises that will not come true. And specifically what I mean is Tesla is going to have its robot taxi event.

• 3:28David Pierce?

  It's long awaited. Once delayed, twice delayed.

• 3:33Nilay Patel?

  I mean, delayed since 2016.

• 3:35David Pierce?

  Fair. Yeah. Delayed several times at this point. But yeah, they've been promising this.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  Elon Musk, not they.

• 3:43David Pierce?

  Fair. Elon in particular has been promising this for like a long, long, long time. And it was supposed to happen, what in August? And then that got delayed. And now it, it between when we record and when you hear this, it is supposedly going to happen.

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I think it's like 10 PM at night on the East Coast for us, it's happening on a movie studio lot in California. And they're going to unveil what looks like a two seater car with like Lambo doors.

• 4:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, it seems, it seems like it's going to be a Tesla. I don't know what I was expecting. Part of me was like, you know, if the robot taxi is going to be the thing, maybe they're going to take this huge swing. And we've seen all these concepts that are like, what if we completely reinvent the whole idea of what it means to be in a car? And instead of everybody facing forward, it's just going to be like lounges inside that everybody hangs out in. Uh, and I, it looks an awful lot like they're just going to be like, here's a car.

• 4:36Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's a weird looking car. It's like, there was a picture of it in the Elon Musk biography by Walter Isaacson. It's just, it looks like a, like a tricycle car, like a backwards, like a three wheel car, two wheels in front, one wheel in the back, two seats and then doors that kind of open up into the side.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 4:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  I think the car is the least important part of this. I think in classic Tesla fashion, we're all going to look at the weird car idea and no one will look at the underlying, does it work idea?

• 5:06David Pierce?

  Right. Well, and this has kind of been Tesla's thing for a long time. Like I think, I don't remember if it was the last time we talked about Tesla, but not that long ago, we talked about Tesla and I got very upset about the door handles on a Tesla. A lot of people got very angry at me for thinking the door handles on a Tesla are stupid.

• 5:22David Pierce?

  They are stupid and I was right. And I think one of the strange things that Tesla has been doing for a long time now is trying to like reinvent all the things about cars that we mostly figured out a while ago. Like the Cybertruck is just a lot of new ideas about things that we've already solved. And to your point, so far not doing ultimately the only thing that matters, both to Tesla and ostensibly to Elon Musk, which is solving self-driving. Like that has been the thing for so long that you could kind of argue everything else has been just a diversion along the way towards making self-driving actually work.

• 5:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:00David Pierce?

  Like that is the thing.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  So Andy Hawkins wrote us, I would say somewhere between a timeline and a primal scream.

• 6:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  Like if you can organize a primal scream in chronological order, that is Andy's piece. Which by the way, was immediately brigaded by people who started their commenting accounts that day to tell us we were anti Elon. What to tell guys? You gotta start the bot accounts and lie and wait.

• 6:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, play a long game here, people.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  And what you should do in the meantime is be a thoughtful and constructive verge commenter. So that when it's time to strike, we're not expecting you. Don't start your account that day and be like, I'm never reading The Verge again. We're, we're just, we're gonna.

• 6:37David Pierce?

  That's like a 2016 strategy. We've come a long way.

• 6:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you gotta, again, thoughtful, constructive commenter for years. And then you strike. Think about that.

• 6:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:47Nilay Patel?

  All right. So Andy wrote a timeline and I'm just gonna read the first paragraph. In 2016, Elon Musk said Tesla's self-driving cars were two years away. In 2017, it was, quote, "six months definitely." And customers will be able to sleep in their Teslas while driving in two years. In 2018, Elon Musk said it was, quote, "a year away and would be 200% safer than human driving." In 2019, he said there would be "feature-complete full self-driving this year." That's 2019. He still talked about it. He's renamed full self-driving to full self-driving parentheses supervised.

• 7:21David Pierce?

  Which is so funny. Full self-driving narrator voice, not full self-driving.

• 7:26Nilay Patel?

  And it, it, it doesn't work. Like, if you use full self-driving in a Model 3 today, say, you, the chances that you will have to grab the wheel in anything but a highway environment are, are basically guaranteed.

• 7:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  That's just how it goes. And the accidents that it gets into or the mistakes that that system makes are funny if you're watching them on a YouTube video and I think not so funny if you're in the car.

• 7:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 7:47Nilay Patel?

  Meanwhile.

• 7:48David Pierce?

  And to be clear, a lot of these things that are happening with self-driving cars are not limited to Tesla. Like, it's just that Tesla gets so much more crap for it because Tesla is the one most confidently saying it has solved the problem. Like, Waymo is not out here being like, "We did it, we're finished, the job is done."

• 8:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:05David Pierce?

  Years ago, I would say 10 years ago, Waymo was just as ambitious as Tesla was. And then pretty quickly started to rewind and be like, "Actually, we've realized this is a much longer, like asymptotic problem than we realized where we're gonna get really good and then the last 1% of this is going to go from like a two-year problem to maybe like a two-decade problem."

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  And to your point, Waymo had no aspirations of reinventing the car.

• 8:29David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:30Nilay Patel?

  They're like, their early ones are like, "You know what? It's a Chrysler Pacifica."

• 8:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:33Nilay Patel?

  A car. Like, car. What, when you imagine a car that can hold six people? Chrysler Pacifica. And then I think later on they're like, "Okay, it's some Jaguar F-type."

• 8:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  And now they only operate in San Francisco, Phoenix, Los Angeles, and Austin, notably cities with good weather and, except for San Francisco, pretty flat.

• 8:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  And so the.

• 8:53David Pierce?

  Pretty easy terrain.

• 8:54Nilay Patel?

  They, they have just like radically constricted their effort.

• 8:58David Pierce?

  Right.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  Can we make a Chrysler Pacifica turn left? And that took them, I think, three years. Can this thing make a left turn at a busy intersection? And the answer for a long time was maybe. Then they just diligently solved that problem. And now you can get away and own all those cities. And it's fine. People really like them. People actually prefer them. They're paying a premium to ride around in Waymos.

• 9:16David Pierce?

  Well, and again, like I think I keep coming back to like, everybody drags us for dragging Tesla. And I think at this particular moment, the thing that has changed is if you rewind back to 2016, when Elon and everybody else was saying that stuff, everybody was saying that stuff, right? Like, there was this industry-wide belief that by 2020, we were all going to be riding around in robotaxis. Uber was making that bet. Lyft was making that bet. Car companies were making that bet. And then, pretty quickly, over the next couple of years, A, as the money for saying that started to dry up, and B, as the realities of like, the world and the regulatory state and people being dumb at driving, started to appear, everybody else started to slow down.

• 10:01David Pierce?

  And it was like, okay, this is the thing we have to do thoughtfully and methodically. And it caused them trouble. Like, there are people out there who are like, "Google needs to shut down Waymo. It's a waste of money. Why on earth are they still at this?" But they've all started to push more carefully. With some exceptions, I think like, Cruise got out over its skis in some ways. And like, there have been issues, but-

• 10:20Nilay Patel?

  In huge ways.

• 10:21David Pierce?

  Yeah. But like, for the most part, a lot of these companies were at least starting to recognize like, "Okay, this is a bigger problem than we thought. Let's try to be more thoughtful." Elon Musk is the only one who has continued to come out and tell us that it's going to be any minute now, and calling things full self-driving. And it's, we've just gotten to the point where it's like, he's just been either wrong or lying so many times in a row now, that on this particular thing, he has just lost all benefit of the doubt, to talk about any of this stuff.

• 10:52Nilay Patel?

  And the really interesting dynamic in what you're describing is all these companies are promising that they will do robotaxis. Well, that was, what, 2016-ish? The height of zero interest rate, VC funding into everything. And the whole plan was we will flood these markets with VC dollars. We will take them over. We will just predatorially price everybody else out.

• 11:13David Pierce?

  Right. We'll kill public transportation. We'll get all the taxis off the road, and we'll make it stupid for you to buy a car, and then you'll have no choice but to use-

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  And then we'll raise the price on Uber. And by then, we'll get, and Travis Kalanick said this onstage at COT. He said, "My problem is the other guy in the car. I gotta get rid of the other guy in the car, the driver. And then the robot can drive the car, and then I will make more money." And he said this with, I was in the room and he said this with such pride on his face to Kara Swisher and everyone else is like, what about the guys?

• 11:41David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  Like the guys in the car and they, it was like huge protest, you know, like walk it back. But what they were all chasing is software style margins in hardware. Right? So we, we have this one car, we're just going to run it 24/7. It's going to produce money while it lasts and then we'll throw it away and we'll make a new car. And they, no one has gotten there.

• 12:01David Pierce?

  No.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Like Waymos are still very expensive.

• 12:03David Pierce?

  Except if you're listening to this, maybe Tesla.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  And then along the way, there's been these like enabling technology fights. Should we have LiDAR? Can we do it all with vision? Can we do it with just a handful of like half a megapixel video cameras on the sides of Tesla's? No, we should probably upgrade those cameras. Like all of these little fights along the way. And really what you have is Waymo with the full LiDAR sensor suite. You have a handful of other companies that are also trying a lot of stuff, but haven't shipped anything. And then whatever happened between the time we are talking and the time you're listening. And I am just guessing that it's nothing.

• 12:41David Pierce?

  Wait, okay, let's, this is fun. Let's do this. So this is the rare time when uh, we don't know the answers to something, but everyone listening to this is going to know. Like you're, you're at the part of the murder mystery where the audience has seen the murderer, but the people have not. It's a good time. So let's do this. Let's, let's just make predictions about what's going to happen at this Tesla event.

• 13:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:01David Pierce?

  Uh, and everyone who listens can tell us how right or we were. This is our only move, right? I feel like we have to do this.

• 13:08Nilay Patel?

  All right. You, what's your first prediction?

• 13:11David Pierce?

  Okay, my, my first prediction is that there will be a live demo and it won't work. In some meaningful way, it will not work. I'm thinking about the uh, person in the Optimus robot costume. That counts as a demo that didn't work, uh, throwing the ball at the Cybertruck window. That's a thing that didn't work. I think there is going to be some way in which this thing tries to move itself and it's not, it's not going to work in, in some defensible, but fairly problematic way.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  Can I make a sub prediction?

• 13:47David Pierce?

  Please.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  I think there will be a live demo and it will work and it will be later revealed that the car was just being remote controlled offstage.

• 13:54David Pierce?

  The Nikola truck rolling down the hill.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 13:58David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  That's my, that's my sub prediction.

• 14:01David Pierce?

  There literally was a person in the truck.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a guy with an RC controller, you know, just doing it.

• 14:06David Pierce?

  I wouldn't be shocked.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  And we'll, we'll see. It is true that Tesla cars can do summon in a parking lot, they can operate. But I think.

• 14:14David Pierce?

  But so this is the thing, right? This is the reason I think this, because if you're going to show off what it can do, you have to do something more than that. Because that basic stuff they're, they're good at, and they've been good at for a long time. So if you're going to show, we made a robo taxi.

• 14:27Nilay Patel?

  Then I think they're going to show a robo taxi and they're going to show it driving around a parking lot and then let everybody, let all the fanboy imaginations go wild. See what I'm saying?

• 14:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. I don't think so. I think it like hits a cone.

• 14:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's your prediction.

• 14:42David Pierce?

  Oh, it's just a cone.

• 14:43Nilay Patel?

  Uh, my prediction, no matter what, he will not announce an arrival date before 2027. That's two years. That's essentially two years.

• 14:54David Pierce?

  Okay. First of all, wild that that's only two years. Second of all, uh, sub question,

• 15:01David Pierce?

  if I'm giving you the over under on July 1st, 2027, for when this actually ships, are you taking the over the under?

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Over, way, way over.

• 15:08David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  And that, and that's what I'm, what I'm pinning that to is it took how long to ship the Cybertruck? He's got to make a whole new car.

• 15:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:16Nilay Patel?

  He's got to make this little taxi that's going to distract everybody from whether or not it can actually drive itself. And they're not great at that. Right now.

• 15:24David Pierce?

  Okay. All right. So 2027 is your, is your prediction?

• 15:27Nilay Patel?

  That's my prediction.

• 15:28David Pierce?

  Are we, are we saying after 27? Or are you just calling your shot? It's 2027 is the?

• 15:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm saying the announced date.

• 15:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:34Nilay Patel?

  Not the act, I'm not taking any.

• 15:35David Pierce?

  No, no, but I mean the one he's going to say.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  He's going to say 2027.

• 15:37David Pierce?

  Okay. All right. I love it. Um, my second one, and this is, this is only half formed because I haven't all the way figured it out. I think the Optimus robot is going to be featured in this product somehow. I don't, I don't.

• 15:50Nilay Patel?

  That's the guy in the trunk.

• 15:51David Pierce?

  It's the.

• 15:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, the backup driver. It's full self-driving, but then if it all goes wrong, something just springs out of the truck in through the sunroof and starts driving.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  There is a debate slash rumor that they have to certify level five self-driving without a steering wheel to pull this off, and that is really hard. So the rumor slash debate is, will there be like a steering wheel that pops up when you need intervention? So it's still a level three or a level four? Because you can't, you can't not have a steering wheel.

• 16:27David Pierce?

  You pull a brick cord in the steering wheel of yours?

• 16:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's, I'm just saying, that's like, I've heard this debate, like, will it have a steering wheel? Because the picture we've seen from the Isaacson book has no steering wheel.

• 16:36David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  But if you're gonna have no steering wheel, that means you have now launched level five autonomy, which means a bunch of people get to decide if that thing is safe. Or you can have something less than that, and like, a steering wheel appears, or optimists is in the back being like, something.

• 16:54David Pierce?

  I, I honestly would believe Elon Musk being like, and the beauty of this is because there's an optimist robot in the driver's seat. You always get to be in HOV lands, so you can go even faster.

• 17:05Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 17:06David Pierce?

  Like, I could, it's just sitting right there. I could see it. So I think, I think if you get one of these, you will get, there will be an optimist robot involved somehow. I haven't figured it all the way out, but it's just.

• 17:17Nilay Patel?

  That is, that is a prediction.

• 17:19David Pierce?

  It's just in there somewhere.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  It's just somewhere in there is hand-wavy optimist.

• 17:22David Pierce?

  Yeah. What's yours?

• 17:24Nilay Patel?

  Is it a guy in a suit optimist or an actual optimist?

• 17:26David Pierce?

  No, it's an actual optimist.

• 17:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, that pushes way out past 27 in my mind.

• 17:31David Pierce?

  I'm not saying any of this is gonna ship. To be clear, none of this is predicated on actually shipping.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, my third prediction, I think, is the one that will cause the most consternation. So for years, Tesla's evaluation in the stock market and with a bunch of Tesla fans has been predicated on the idea that the Model 3s and Ys sitting in driveways around the world and country will suddenly turn into the robo-taxi fleet.

• 17:58Nilay Patel?

  This is the promise. People have bought these cars expecting that they will go to bed and their Model 3s will wander the streets being taxis making them money.

• 18:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:08Nilay Patel?

  And that is, that is the multiplier of the stock price. I am saying they're gonna have this launch event and they will say existing Teslas will not be robotaxis.

• 18:18David Pierce?

  No, no way, no way. Why? That would immediate, that is the worst possible like investor move Elon Musk could make.

• 18:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, oh, I know, but it's the, I think they they're gonna have to come clean and be like, here's the cyber taxi. Here's our other weird triangle car that we've made. It's it's the future of the robotaxi program and a model three from 2018 that we promised would turn into a taxi. 2020. I think this, the the height of this was around 2020. I only know this because it was one of those like pandemic feelings that I had. Like I I've been drunk for four days and Elon is saying all the cars are taxis. Like whatever that swirl of feeling is. 2020, let's say, people bought these cars in 2020, assuming they would turn into taxis that run on Bitcoin or whatever they were doing in the middle of pandemic.

• 19:06David Pierce?

  Stone coin, obviously.

• 19:07Nilay Patel?

  And he's gonna have to show up and say, and the robotaxi is only works on our cyber triangle, or whatever he's gonna call it.

• 19:19David Pierce?

  I just don't buy it. I'm gonna make my prediction the opposite.

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 19:22David Pierce?

  I think, I think he might be slightly hand wavy about it. Like, I could imagine being like, this is the one, this is the future. Also, random sub prediction. Do you think this is gonna be a thing that regular people can buy?

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, no, no. Absolutely not.

• 19:37David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 19:38Nilay Patel?

  So you're gonna, you would buy a two seater cyber taxi that you are like the landlord of?

• 19:44David Pierce?

  Have you seen the cyber truck on the road, dude? Like, yeah, people will buy that.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  But that's a status symbol. This is a taxi cab.

• 19:51David Pierce?

  But it's your personal taxi cab.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  That you let other people.

• 19:54David Pierce?

  If I was like, Neil, do you wanna buy my yellow cab from me? You wouldn't buy it.

• 19:59Nilay Patel?

  I would just say the cyber truck is a status symbol.

• 20:01David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 20:02Nilay Patel?

  The ridiculous status symbol.

• 20:03David Pierce?

  Yeah, what status it confers, we can debate, but.

• 20:06Nilay Patel?

  But this is literally meant to be a taxi.

• 20:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  So the idea is that you, a regular person, would buy a taxi and let it loose on the streets of your suburb at night?

• 20:17David Pierce?

  Oh, I don't know. The the frame of that is like, it's it's your own personal robot driver, right? And then when it's not working for you, it can go work for somebody else. That's I don't see that pitch as being all that different from what they've been saying about Teslas for four years. But I I would be so shocked if he gets up and he's like, oh, I bait and switched all you clowns the last four years.

• 20:38Nilay Patel?

  You would be shocked if Elon Musk.

• 20:40David Pierce?

  Would I be shocked if he did it? No. Would I be shocked if he said that? Yeah. And I think my guess would be there will be a lot of focus on this and some like vague gesture toward it's coming.

• 20:54Nilay Patel?

  For all the Teslas that exist today.

• 20:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, but I cannot imagine a world in which they just cut bait because people would go nuts.

• 21:01Nilay Patel?

  Maybe not cut bait, but they will hand wavy. But I, my prediction is that whatever robotaxi program they announced today will not work on the Teslas that exist on the road today.

• 21:11David Pierce?

  All right, I'm going with it will. This is good. We're now.

• 21:13Nilay Patel?

  That's it. And you let us know. But maybe they want to address it directly, but it will be, I think it will just, it'll be one of those things like becomes obvious.

• 21:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:22Nilay Patel?

  You know, like you're, you're just like brushing away. They're like, oh, this dinosaur sucks.

• 21:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think by the end of this event, it'll be obvious. I am just really looking forward to this being like 90 minutes of Optimus robots driving around and my victory lap is going to be incredible.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  I will say that in the lead up to the event, there's been some reporting that basically all the Tesla executives are leaving. So four Tesla executives, this is reported in Business Insider, four Tesla executives announced the past week they were leaving or had already left.

• 21:50David Pierce?

  Oh, boy.

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  Some had been there for nearly a decade.

• 21:53David Pierce?

  How high executive are we talking?

• 21:54Nilay Patel?

  Company's chief information officer is leaving after 12 years. Director of Public Policy and Business Development announced in October 1 that he was leaving. On Sunday, the Global Vehicle Automation and Safety Policy Lead also announced that he'd left Tesla.

• 22:14David Pierce?

  Those are people who would be quite important to the idea of like a global rollout of robo taxis.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you would think that public policy guy who's running self-driving.

• 22:24David Pierce?

  And you know, information systems and automation that matters.

• 22:28Nilay Patel?

  He would, this would be your time to shine. And then the former Model S and Model X program manager also left, which is fine, whatever. The model, he's like, you know, we're not making another Model X. I understand what's happening here. We're just doing triangles now.

• 22:41David Pierce?

  Doing cyber things.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, these are all people who are leaving right before.

• 22:48Nilay Patel?

  Presumably a giant increase in the stock price because you're going to unveil the robot taxi program, which is the valuation of the company. And I really mean this. We don't often talk about stock prices on the Vergecast, but the entire story of Tesla right now is it's just another carmaker that is struggling to move cars. They just had a pretty good quarter, but they are struggling, they've been struggling to move cars. There's a lot of competition coming for them. Hyundai will just be like, it's a hundred dollars a month. Here, take an Ioniq 5, get it out of my face. So there's just competition coming from all corners. And the stock price has just been based on the idea that it's a tech company and a tech company valuation is we're going to run a robot taxi program.

• 23:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 23:30Nilay Patel?

  There isn't another one.

• 23:32David Pierce?

  And this is in a, in a pretty real way, like the tech company launch of Tesla.

• 23:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:38David Pierce?

  We should probably stop talking about this because now everything we've said is now woefully out of date already.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  We should move on. But I'm just saying that that's the stakes.

• 23:45David Pierce?

  Those are the stakes.

• 23:46Nilay Patel?

  And we'll, we'll pick it up again next Friday. We'll have Andy come on.

• 23:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  And tell us what actually happened. But those are our predictions. Let us know if we got them right or wrong.

• 23:52David Pierce?

  Optimus robots in the trunk.

• 23:53Nilay Patel?

  All right. Now onto something that is extremely real, like the most real, we already, Chris Welch already went out and bought one real. Nintendo made a hundred dollar alarm clock called Alarmo.

• 24:05David Pierce?

  It's fantastic. First of all, all alarm clocks should have names from now on. If you make it like Casio made one this week, that's like a blown up version of one of its watches. Looks very cool, only available in Japan. Its name is like 16 hexadecimal things. No, I'm done with that. If your product doesn't have a cool name anymore, get out of my face. Alarmo or nothing. I, I love this thing and I do not for one second understand why it exists.

• 24:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's right.

• 24:34David Pierce?

  It's, it's just, it's just an alarm clock.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  What has some sleep tracking in it?

• 24:41David Pierce?

  It does like motion detection, sleep tracking, which is like an app on your phone that you can do. Like that's not that, it's fine, but it's not anything particularly exciting. But it's, it's adorable as all hell. It's got a screen. It does the like Nintendo fonts. It'll like yell at you in very cute ways when you need to get out of bed. It has some fun sounds that it'll make. Like this thing is very charming and I want one and I will get one, I'm sure. But like, what was it like a week ago that there was a, it came through the FCC that Nintendo was doing some new hardware device and everybody got all excited and they were like, is this the next Switch? What's Nintendo doing? It could be anything.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  I will say the, um, the, there's a thing on the top that looks like a bell and it's a dial that lights up.

• 25:22David Pierce?

  Revolutionary.

• 25:25Nilay Patel?

  The fact that that is not the snooze button is a huge miss.

• 25:28David Pierce?

  Wait, is it not? I literally assumed it was the snooze button.

• 25:31Nilay Patel?

  The snooze is automatic to you, because it has motion detection in it. You can snooze it by just like waving your hand at it.

• 25:39David Pierce?

  Oh, I do like that.

• 25:40Nilay Patel?

  And then it, when you get out of bed, it stops the alarm clock.

• 25:42David Pierce?

  So like the motion you do when you're trying to like find your phone to shut it up?

• 25:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:45David Pierce?

  That will shut it up.

• 25:46Nilay Patel?

  So again, I have plugged this app on the show so many times, the alarm clock I use.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  It's called Sleep Cycle and the snooze button is a motion detector in the phone. So you can just smack the table and make the phone bounce and it'll snooze.

• 25:59David Pierce?

  That's cool.

• 25:59Nilay Patel?

  Or if you are particularly lazy, you can grab the USB C cord that is charging your iPhone and just give that a wave. And just go boop, boop. That snoozes it. And this all works. But the idea that the Alarmo, that the dial on top of the Alarmo is not a classic bash it snooze button, but is instead a dial that lights up. I think this product is doomed because of it. That's my hot.

• 26:23David Pierce?

  What it, what it should be is like one of the, the money bricks from a Mario game. And you should be able to hit it. You bounce on it and stuff comes out. That's, that's what I want from this.

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  The only, the only reason I really wanted to talk about this is because I came up as a gadget writer in the time of a device called the Chumby.

• 26:43Nilay Patel?

  Some of our listeners.

• 26:44David Pierce?

  Don't do that to Alarmo.

• 26:45Nilay Patel?

  Some of our people will remember the Chumby. This is just a weird closed source proprietary Chumby. I'm telling you right now, that's what it is. It's an alarm clock with a screen, has weird little app story download stuff that you can put on it. It has high-minded ideas about motion controls. The Chumby was a alarm clock that ran Linux.

• 27:03Nilay Patel?

  It was as successful as you can imagine that sense to be. Some people still have Chumby's. They're still running them out in the world, but the idea that you would have a connected device in your kitchen or by your bedside in 2006, revolutionary.

• 27:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:17Nilay Patel?

  And that was, I was like, I grew up being like, I have to write about this every day.

• 27:21David Pierce?

  Chumbies also were, in a certain way, very charming, in a way that then like died with the Alexa generation of,

• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 27:30David Pierce?

  You know, cans of tennis balls. So like, kudos, bring it back. One other thing that this has in common with Chumby is that the screen is way worse than you think.

• 27:37Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 27:39David Pierce?

  It looks like it, it's a round little face, but it's a square screen inside of said round little face. And it's just a lie. Like, the screen, the screen's a lie. And that's fine. And I'm okay with it. It's $99. I still don't understand why it exists. Why does this exist? Like, if you're, if you're running Nintendo, why do you make this? Just because you can and you're Nintendo?

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:04David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  I think fundamentally Nintendo does cute stuff. And they're like, we can put Mario by your bedside. And people will pay us $100 for that service.

• 28:14David Pierce?

  I mean, that's, yeah, when you put it like that. But Nintendo's so weird, because it's, like, if you take the cynical, not even cynical, but the sort of ruthless read of that, that is like, we want to be everywhere that you are and be like a lifestyle business and be a Nintendo. There's a million things they would have done by now, right? Like, yeah, Nintendo could have made smart everything for your whole house for the last decade and people would have eaten it.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  No, that would require technological innovation. This is much more like, we have a box of motion sensors, and we're gonna put them in an alarm clock. Like, what is the, what, what can we do?

• 28:51David Pierce?

  Switch outcasts.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  12-year-old arm chip. And it's like, well, we can make a switch, alarm clock. That's about the only other thing you can do.

• 28:59David Pierce?

  They just took apart a bunch of DSs and then put them back together into alarm clocks?

• 29:03Nilay Patel?

  As Crayons were saying on the show last week, the Switch 2, it feels like the Switch emulators can already run Switch 2 games, because Nintendo's cracking down on Switch emulators. It does not feel like Nintendo wants to be at the bleeding edge of the curve. So what can you do with a bunch of old hardware? It's an alarm clock.

• 29:18David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 29:18Nilay Patel?

  They just, they found a bunch of Chumbies. Right? Here you go. Here's some chumpies.

• 29:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  I do think Nintendo is more ruthless about selling its IP in various, like you can buy Mario anything.

• 29:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  Nintendo collects its money.

• 29:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:32Nilay Patel?

  If you want to do Total Doom and Gloom, one thing this might signal is they don't have a Switch 2 for the holidays. So they have an Alarm Clock instead.

• 29:40David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 29:41Nilay Patel?

  Because you gotta sell something.

• 29:42David Pierce?

  It's a pretty good little stocking stuffer.

• 29:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:45David Pierce?

  As these things go. It has Mario on the box. That actually makes quite a lot of sense to me.

• 29:51Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I, I hope they have a Switch 2.

• 29:53David Pierce?

  I hope so, too.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm ready to buy one. But if you wanna, if you wanna play, be the most negative, that's what you would say.

• 29:57David Pierce?

  But even like, there, there are a lot of people with Switches who don't want to upgrade and like, the, the timing sure suggests that they intend this as like a big holiday victory.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:05David Pierce?

  And it's Mark, big ass Mario on the bag that Chris Welch bought, like, I could see it.

• 30:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 30:12David Pierce?

  And again, I find this thing so charming. I just think Nintendo is like the least like every other company, company that we cover in ways that are mostly really fun and occasionally just completely inscrutable. And this is one of those moments for me.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing? But I'm, I wish more companies were weird.

• 30:27David Pierce?

  Oh, for sure.

• 30:27Nilay Patel?

  In this specific way.

• 30:29David Pierce?

  Um, we heard like eight stories about Alarmo. I would love to cover Thikflay.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have a full review of this Alarm Clock. It's gonna be amazing. Uh, some Apple rumors we should talk about.

• 30:38David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 30:39Nilay Patel?

  That kind of lead into, I want to talk about the Meta Ray Bans for one second. Uh, but the Apple rumors are that sometime this month or early November, I'm guessing it'll be early November, we'll get new Mac Minis that are in the form factor of like an Apple TV or on that size. And a new iPad Mini for all the pilots out there who listen to the show and email David.

• 30:58David Pierce?

  Please stop. I've started getting creep shot photos from people who take pictures of the iPads that they see their pilots having and send it to me.

• 31:08Nilay Patel?

  That's good. That's how you get arrested by the air marshal.

• 31:11David Pierce?

  I just have a whole library of pilots now. It's not good. I don't want that. Uh, but yeah, the rumor or from Mark German, the, the reporting that he has had is that I think they're launching on November 1st, at least the Mac Mini will be. Uh, I'm very excited about this Mac Mini. I have an M1 Mac Mini that I love very much and am very excited to upgrade to an M4 Mac Mini. I don't understand the compulsion to make the box smaller. Like,

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 31:38David Pierce?

  No one is mad about the size of their Mac Mini. Liam in the control room.

• 31:41Nilay Patel?

  Liam just started waving.

• 31:43David Pierce?

  Liam is the only person.

• 31:44Nilay Patel?

  More activity in the control room than we've seen in weeks.

• 31:47David Pierce?

  About the size of his Mac Mini. That was a lot. Uh, I take it all back. Everyone is so upset about the size of their Mac Mini. It's, it's way too big. Make it smaller or else.

• 31:58Speaker 06

  To be clear, I was agreeing with you.

• 32:01David Pierce?

  Oh, okay.

• 32:01Speaker 06

  I, I'm a long time lover of the Mac Mini. I've had many over the years as Plex servers and I just don't understand why it needs to be smaller. There's absolutely no reason for it. Sure, let's, let's make it less versatile. Let's take away ports that people use for weird.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna get one USB C port and the highest performance M4 processor available and you're gonna like it, Liam.

• 32:23David Pierce?

  And I'm gonna plug in my like eight year old USB C hub that threatens to catch on fire every time I use it. And I'm gonna compute the hell out of it. It's gonna be great. I think this is gonna be great. I think the Mac Mini is like a sneaky hit for Apple in a way that it never really talks about, but like, just sort of anecdotally.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:41David Pierce?

  People love the Mac Mini. Uh, in a way that the iPad Mini has its like devoted really loud followers, but not that many of them. I think the Mac Mini is like, just sort of around.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's the, it's everybody who needs, you bought your M1 because I basically was like, shut up and buy an M1 Mac Mini.

• 32:57David Pierce?

  You literally, I was, I was getting off a plane in DC from somewhere and you sent me a link because it was on sale on Amazon and I had bought it before I got off the plane.

• 33:09David Pierce?

  I was literally, I'm sitting there on the tarmac and you're like, the Mac Mini is on sale. Buy this. Shut up. I bought it.

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  It's like, stop complaining about your computer. Buy this Mac Mini. And it worked. Um, I'm excited for it. I, you know, we run the Decoder Studio in a Mac Mini. What is wrong with your M1 that you want an M4?

• 33:25David Pierce?

  Nothing. It's, it's fine. Like-

• 33:27Nilay Patel?

  Okay, just checking.

• 33:28David Pierce?

  Really what it is, is I have set up a beautiful thing where I get to get new things and then gift all of my gently used things to family members. Uh, and so really what it is, is my 2011 iMac. No, 2013, maybe somewhere in there. iMac is finally starting to die on my sister. So I have to start the whole process again by buying an M4 Mac Mini and, and passing things down such that she gets a workable computer. I'm doing this for them.

• 33:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I see what you're doing.

• 33:57David Pierce?

  I'm very good.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  Are you gonna do the project where you, uh, turn the iMac into a standalone display?

• 34:03David Pierce?

  Oh, that's actually a good idea.

• 34:04Nilay Patel?

  So I've looked into this.

• 34:06David Pierce?

  It's a 27 inch screen. I really should.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  I have a bunch of parts sitting around my house. You have to figure out exactly what model of display is in the iMac.

• 34:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 34:14Nilay Patel?

  And then you can literally just buy adapters that you can use it as a display. You have to take it all apart, but I'm like excited to take it all apart.

• 34:21David Pierce?

  If I break it, it's broken.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Oh no, this 2013 iMac is broken. So I have all the parts in my house. I just have not done the thing.

• 34:29David Pierce?

  That's a good project.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Take a heat gun and suction cups to an iMac to take it all apart.

• 34:33David Pierce?

  We should maybe like bring that into the studio and both do it.

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  Me, Lion, David both break their iMacs today. Um, but yeah, my 2015 iMac is just sitting, waiting for this to happen to it.

• 34:46David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's pretty good. But yeah, but then there's also, uh, we're supposed to get an M4 MacBook Pro, I think in both sizes.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  And weirdly, it's already leaked, people think. Some like Russian YouTuber has a 14 inch M4.

• 34:59David Pierce?

  Oh, I missed that.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  But then there's a controversy because the box has the old, the old wallpaper on it. So people think the whole thing is fake.

• 35:07David Pierce?

  Huh.

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  And people are like, this is the biggest leaks in Safer for. And I'm like, I don't, even if it's real, like, it's not.

• 35:14David Pierce?

  No. I feel like it also tells you a lot about what to expect that no one can really tell.

• 35:21David Pierce?

  Fast computer, now faster.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:25David Pierce?

  Here you go.

• 35:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I'm kind of ready. There's no reason to upgrade this.

• 35:29David Pierce?

  Which one is that?

• 35:29Nilay Patel?

  This is an M1 Pro.

• 35:31David Pierce?

  Okay. I have an M1 Air sitting here that I'm like.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  It's a 16-inch MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro in it.

• 35:37David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Not the M1 Max.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  So that thing is still, but it's still, that's a pretty beefy computer.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  It's killing it.

• 35:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  So this is the best laptop I've ever had. I'm like, what if I got rid of you? What if I got an M4 for no reason?

• 35:48David Pierce?

  For me, it's colors. Every time I look at the really like dark MacBooks, I'm like, ah, I want one. Silver's stupid. Who wants silver?

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  I want more fingerprints in my computer.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly.

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  So we'll see. That is the rumor for the next couple of weeks. It's all coming out now. It does feel like we are ready for an Apple upgrade cycle. So keep an eye on that.

• 36:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  Lastly, there's some other little Apple news that I want to try to connect to Meta and what it's doing.

• 36:12David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  So it was announced this week that Henry Show, who used to be SVP of all hardware engineering at Apple, and is now in charge of Vision Pro, he's retiring. And it's like retirement season for a lot of Apple executives. They've all been there a long time. Being at Apple for 20 years is like, oh, you're just a baby.

• 36:26David Pierce?

  Truly.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  There are people stick around.

• 36:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  So it makes sense that he's retiring. The Vision Pro was announced. It is released. It's out in the world. And he took over engineering of that project in 2021. So the thing is out in the world. It's going to go do its thing. He's been there a long time. Goodbye, everybody.

• 36:42David Pierce?

  Presumably, numbers two, three, and four are deep in the works, like.

• 36:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And he had been at Apple for 26 years.

• 36:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah, there are a lot of ways to read that as not problematic.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  But what I would say is the Vision Pro itself in a weird spot. Apple just announced a new movie for it, Submerged. Like its first immersive movie.

• 37:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  At the same time, it announced that Apple TV Plus will now be available on Amazon channels, which is a pretty huge indictment of Apple TV Plus as a thing that is selling any Apple products.

• 37:13David Pierce?

  Do you remember all the controversy a while back? I think it was Lucas Shaw at Bloomberg just like offhandedly tweeted something about like. Nobody watches Apple TV plus and people just like ran him down over it. I would say every available piece of evidence suggests that Lucas Shaw was right and no one really watches Apple TV plus.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  Especially now that they're gonna sell it on Amazon to get more reach.

• 37:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Nilay Patel?

  But so all that, there's a swirl of stuff at Apple and one of the things in this world, I think is the Vision Pro. And this big decision over other, Apple wants to keep selling what is essentially VR headsets. Especially now that Meta, not Orion, Orion is vaporware no matter what Alex says. It's fully vaporware.

• 37:53David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  It is a thing that doesn't exist, no matter how proud of it Meta appears to be. But it's like, here's some vision of the future that isn't this headset.

• 38:00David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  Meta's pushing in front and much more importantly, the Ray-Bans appear to be a success. Hard to tell if they're really a success, but that form factor is much more successful than here's a giant headset that has an external battery pack. And so it just feels like we're gonna see some reset on Vision Pro. That's just very much, and Gorman has reported this, Apple has to make some decisions. It hasn't figured out what it wants to do and now the guy in charge of it is leaving.

• 38:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, I, I forget who it was that I was reading a while back, but basically what they said was, I can't remember the last time Apple was ahead, but completely on the wrong path. And I've been thinking about that ever since, like it is, it's still so true that the Vision Pro was like an incredible technical achievement. And increasingly it seems like, who cares? That like, maybe the technical achievement was the wrong thing to do and that like, I keep going back to the, the early days of the iPhone where it was like, do we do a more impressive iPod with the click wheel and everything? Or do we like build this brand new epic thing that no one has ever tried before? And they picked that path and it worked super well.

• 39:08David Pierce?

  And I think it taught Apple that the only swings you should make are the biggest ones possible. And it really seems like the lesson of this generation of hardware is like, build the iPod with the click wheel.

• 39:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:18David Pierce?

  That bring people along with you in a way that is

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  Get people used to wearing a computer on their face all the time.

• 39:24David Pierce?

  Right. And the other thing is like, when the iPhone came out, people had been using cell phones for a long time.

• 39:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:28David Pierce?

  Like, we don't have that history yet. And so you have to do the first cell phones before you can do the iPhone. And Apple just tried to skip all the way there. And so it feels like if you wanted to, if you were to tell me somebody is two generations away from getting it right, it seems like it's pretty clearly the meta Ray-Bans, right? Like, in terms of like mainstream success, two generations from now, that one feels like the easy betting favorite.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  Okay, except

• 39:56Nilay Patel?

  I bought the clear ones.

• 39:57David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 39:57Nilay Patel?

  And I am sending them back.

• 39:58David Pierce?

  No, everybody loves them.

• 40:00Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Sean Holster is sending his back too. Uh, they're, they're fine. They're fine. They're a fine product. And I know people who love them. Janice Stern loves hers.

• 40:07David Pierce?

  Do they look cooler in pictures than they do in reality?

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  They super look cooler in pictures than they do in reality.

• 40:11David Pierce?

  Cause they look so cool in pictures.

• 40:13Nilay Patel?

  They, like, Wayfarers are a very classic shape.

• 40:17David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 40:18Nilay Patel?

  And I think they are meant to be classic in black. And then you make them clear and they're, at least on my face, they are, they're too curvy.

• 40:26David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, the, when they are, when I have worn a lot of Wayfarers in my life, and when they are expressed in black, they're like, they're this very cool shape. And then you make them clear and it's just like, huh, I'm wearing cat eye glasses. So that's one thing.

• 40:38David Pierce?

  See all the, all the movements. I guess that makes sense.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  So that's, that's just one thing. Maybe clear, maybe I should buy these again in black. But then, um, they only ship the clear ones with transition lenses. Because they want you to wear them all the time, including inside.

• 40:51David Pierce?

  Good transitions now.

• 40:52Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they don't get dark enough outside. And they also only turn blue, which is weird. Uh, and then you're like, why am I wearing these glasses all the time? And then, as I've said many times, I have a huge head and the, they're just like not, they're just like uncomfortable on my face. And I think even though I got the bigger ones, it would still be uncomfortable on my face. And this was Sean's complaint. He's like, I've tried them in both sizes. And the big ones are loose and still uncomfortable. And the other ones are, and this is, and you know, and this is the fundamental problem with all of this stuff.

• 41:20David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Is our bodies are not really designed to mount hardware on. And particularly her face is a very challenging

• 41:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:28Nilay Patel?

  mounting environment. Uh, and so I'm sending them back. And I think I'm just coming back to my graph. My Matrix of wearable bullshit. That face penalty is just huge.

• 41:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  No matter how useful it is. Oh, the camera's not so... Whatever. I've got a camera in my pocket all the time.

• 41:43David Pierce?

  And like, kudos to Meta for having better options, but it is very true that you're still not solving it with two styles.

• 41:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And in the last piece, which I think Alex brought up when he was on the show last time, it is also true that iOS and Apple keep these glasses from being actually integrated with your phone.

• 42:02David Pierce?

  100%.

• 42:03Nilay Patel?

  Like, the weird Bluetooth to Wi-Fi pairing switch you have to do, on Android, it just syncs with your phone.

• 42:09David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 42:10Nilay Patel?

  Because the operating system allows it to. Apple's like, you will never get close to this. You have to switch your phone to the glasses Wi-Fi network. It's garbage.

• 42:19David Pierce?

  I'm actually super annoyed at Heath because he brought up that Meta is really annoyed that you can't automatically sync the photos to your camera roll on iOS. And I had never noticed how annoying it is to have to open the app and import them.

• 42:32Nilay Patel?

  Now you know.

• 42:33David Pierce?

  And now I can't stop noticing. Like, I was out the other day and I took, I don't know, five or six videos and like 25 photos. And I had to sit there and just stare at my phone for five minutes because if you put it in the background, the stuff dies and it stops. And so I'm just sitting there watching it import one by one. And I was like, damn you, Apple.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This is Apple's fault.

• 42:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  And like, we're gonna talk about Anheuser-Busch, whatever, but like, this is the story. The operating system limits other products to be good? You should be generally upset about that. It's my phone. I should be able to let Mark Zuckerberg look at my photos.

• 43:02David Pierce?

  It's my brain.

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. Liam has been giving me the wrap it up sign. We're way over. Somehow we spent

• 43:08David Pierce?

  I know.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  way too much time talking about gadgets. Warren Feiner is waiting patiently to talk about Google. We'll be right back with her.

• 43:16Speaker 01

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• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  We're back. David still here.

• 44:46David Pierce?

  Still here. The Optimus robots haven't gotten me yet.

• 44:50Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Finer is here. Hey, Lauren.

• 44:52Speaker 08

  Hi.

• 44:52Nilay Patel?

  Welcome back. Every time we talk to you on the show, it feels like some legal catastrophe has befallen Google.

• 45:01David Pierce?

  Wow, that's true.

• 45:02Nilay Patel?

  We have to break this pattern. We like talking to you, but right now you're a bit of an omen.

• 45:08David Pierce?

  Lauren, what do you think about Nintendo Alarm?

• 45:10Nilay Patel?

  Did you buy the Nintendo Alarm?

• 45:13Speaker 08

  I did not. I unfortunately have to talk about Google.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, at least this time we didn't make you sit in a courthouse all week, which is we have been doing. This time a little more procedural. So there was the big Google search antitrust case, which the government won, Google lost. We didn't know what the remedies would be. The government has put forth its not the actual proposal, but it's like framework of a proposal.

• 45:38David Pierce?

  Concepts of a plan.

• 45:39Nilay Patel?

  It's very much, it's 11 pages of concepts of a plan.

• 45:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  And the plan, I want Lauren, I want you to go into it in detail, but the plan right now is like everything, every idea is on the table for us. So let's talk about that and what those ideas are. Then Google also lost the antitrust case that Epic filed against it around the Play Store and the court has a plan for some remedies in that case, which amount to. Just like having to open things up and share apps with other app stores and all that. And then next to it is the big ad take case, which where you were just in the courtroom for weeks. And I don't know what's gonna happen there. That's a lot. And we were joking at the top of the show, and Lauren, I'm very curious for your perspective on this. That's a lot of stuff happening to Google that doesn't appear to be like having an impact.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  Like people, I can't tell if everyone knows that whatever we think of as Google today is going away. Like, it's going to change in some way over the next X years because of all this activity. Is that what you see as well?

• 46:43Speaker 08

  Yeah, I agree. I think the key is maybe that it is in X years, which should be a very large number. Because, you know, now that these things are in the remedies phase, at least in the case of Epic and Searchcase, you know, Google can then appeal. And then we have a whole other process there. So it's still gonna take quite a bit of time to see any real change here. I think in the Epic case, it depends on if they get a stay on remedies while they appeal. But, you know, it's still, you know, it's not something

• 47:22Speaker 08

  that consumers are necessarily gonna see a change on super quickly. But yeah, I think it hasn't really settled in for a lot of people that, you know, Google is definitely going to change.

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:36Speaker 08

  Or at least it seems like it will, based on how these cases have turned out so far.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  And to be fair, Google has said it will appeal all of the cases, and it has asked for a stay, which means a delay on the remedies in the Epic case being applied while it goes off and appeals. And the blog posts are appropriately outraged, if you go read Google's blog posts. But it's like, something's gonna happen, right? Like, all of this stuff is happening at once. And maybe Google can delay some of it, and maybe Google can appeal its way out of some of it. But it can't do it to all of it.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, it seems very hard to imagine at this moment that Google is able to just play it all the way out and just litigate its way out of trouble. And the sense I get just from talking to people at Google is that Part of what is confusing for Google right now is that it's not clear what is going to stick and what isn't, that there's like, and Lauren, I don't know if this is the sense you're getting from folks involved in this too, but it, there's something going on where there's, there is so much all happening at once, that it's almost like you kind of can't pick where to focus your energy. And so you were, you're just like, well, we're just going to kind of let all this wash over us and then something will stick and we'll deal with that when it comes. But everybody I talked to,

• 48:49David Pierce?

  even like sort of in and around all of this is just like, yeah, thrown by the volume of it all. Like, is that what you're hearing too, Lauren?

• 48:57Speaker 08

  Yeah, no, I think that seems right. I think, you know, a lot of, all of these different cases are in different parts of Google's business. So, you know, I guess Google could say, all right, we're gonna make some proactive changes in some of these businesses. But, you know, even if they think, even if they think they won't win everything, they don't know which things will stick necessarily. So it's sort of difficult to get in front of right now.

• 49:23David Pierce?

  Well, and I think that's actually a really good segue to the search remedies, which I want to talk about, Lauren, and I want you to help us go through, because I think what I get from that is the DOJ in particular is like, no, Google, you can't just make teeny tiny changes and sort of wiggle your way out of this. Like, we are coming for you and we are coming for all of it. Yeah. It's like, I could not believe, reading this filing, how big a window the DOJ is giving itself, or would like to give itself to mess with Google. And I think it's because of what you just said, Lauren, that Google is like, this touches lots of pieces of our business. We'll sort of noodle around the edges and we'll, we'll build a firewall back between things and we'll let Congress yell at somebody three times a year and then everything will be fine. And the DOJ

• 50:07David Pierce?

  seems very clearly to be like, absolutely not. Like, we are, we are going to burn you down. And like, that's what James, and out of the epic judge has essentially said, like, I'm going to tear this company open. And that is like, the vibe is so aggressive on that front from the government side of this. It's wild.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So let's talk about the search remedies. It is a 32-page filing, only 11 pages of which are actually substantive. 20 pages are just state attorney generals signing it, which I think is great. Everyone just like, join the club.

• 50:36David Pierce?

  That's what I aspire to.

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:38David Pierce?

  Just to be like the 11th signatory of everything.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  I helped. But it is, it starts with, we should break up Google. It's on our minds all the way down to I know you should appoint a compliance officer for us to yell at. Lauren, take us through it. What are the approaches in here?

• 50:54Speaker 08

  Yeah, so basically, there's four high-level categories that the DOJ lays out that they're looking for in terms of remedies here. So, you know, the first one is about the search distribution and revenue-sharing deals. I think these are kind of like the most closely tied to like the surface level of what this case was about, which was like contracts with phone makers and browser makers to make Google the default on their products. And basically, the DOJ says like, we'd want to put some limits on the kinds of contracts that Google can make. So, you know, that seems like probably the lowest hanging fruit here.

• 51:39Speaker 08

  And, but it's also something that doesn't really like fundamentally change Google's business. But another part of that section, they talk about, you know, making structural changes, which means a breakup involving Google's ownership of Chrome, Android, and the Play Store. And so it's basically saying like, there are these other channels where Google distributes its search engine that Google has an advantage in, that its rivals don't. And, you know, that's fundamentally a problem.

• 52:19Speaker 08

  So that's kind of where, you know, we get from this more surface-level remedy of contracts to something that really would like go into Google's business and change it up.

• 52:31David Pierce?

  Just to pause on that one, I want to get to the other ones. But I think the move from the first part of that to the second, I think, is what's so interesting about this whole filing. Because it's like, if you take the argument to be that Google made illegal amounts of money from its search engine, which is like, not exactly the argument, but is like, it's, you can get there pretty easily, right?

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  You have to make some things up and not be right, but you can get there.

• 53:00David Pierce?

  No, but it's like, that is what they're, what, part of what they're saying is-

• 53:03Nilay Patel?

  It's not an illegal amount of money. It's they illegally protected their monopoly.

• 53:07David Pierce?

  And thus made a ton of money, right? Like

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  But they're not so worried about the money.

• 53:11David Pierce?

  No, but they are. But the, but the point is the, what they're doing and they, there's all this setup at the top of the document that is like, not only do we have to stop Google from doing what it's doing, we have to undo it and fix it.

• 53:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:24David Pierce?

  And, and pull the market back. And you, there's like, they have a quote from somebody that's like, you know, we can't go back in history, but we have to, we have to do our best to fix it. And so it's like, that's how you arrive at, we have to split off Android. Because Lauren, I think you're exactly right, that like, the, the obvious thing to come out of this, or one obvious outcome would be no more search deals, right? You can't pay it to be the default anymore. That seems like a very straightforward answer to what Judge Meta clearly had issues with. But then, it's, it's a surprisingly small number of steps from that to, even if you let Google be the default search engine in the thing that it already owns, it's still too powerful. And so it's like, that, that leap feels wild, but I was surprised at how quickly the government got there.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  I would say, so it's not, to me, it's not money, it's data. The money is like, related to data.

• 54:14David Pierce?

  Well, that's one of the four things.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  Right, you can't make a good search engine without all the data that Google collects. And if they continue to own Chrome, you're hooped.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  But I agree with you, there, it's a small jump from these search deals are illegally being made to, we should tear Google to shreds.

• 54:32David Pierce?

  Right, because Chrome makes you too powerful.

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  Because Chrome makes you too powerful. Yeah, I agree with that. Okay, Lauren, what are the other two remedies for post, or concepts of a plan of revenue?

• 54:42Speaker 08

  Yeah, so the next one, kind of what we were just talking about, was the accumulation and use of data. So, you know, during the trial, the government kind of described this like self-reinforcing cycle where, you know, users go to Google, because it's the default and it's what they're used to using, and they enter their search queries, and then Google gets a lot of information from what you click on, about what's actually a useful answer. And that's, and because it, you know, kind of has this

• 55:15Speaker 08

  Basically has all of these distribution channels pretty much set to itself as the default. You know, most people are going to Google and then other search rivals are kind of being deprived of that query click information and then, you know, aren't able to improve their services as much and then, you know, they're not, they don't feel as good to users and then they go back to Google. So that's kind of the cycle that was described at trial.

• 55:43David Pierce?

  Including by Satya Nadella.

• 55:46Speaker 08

  Yeah.

• 55:47David Pierce?

  Very, he was not messing around.

• 55:49Speaker 08

  Yeah. Yeah. So basically the government wants to offset that advantage by making it so, you know, Google has to kind of share certain information, you know, they might have to, you know, license some information or make APIs to share some of the information on how it trains its search engine with that query data essentially. And, you know, the DOJ says like they know that there are privacy concerns here with sharing that kind of information, but they also say, you know, we need to kind of parse out what is really a privacy concern

• 56:31Speaker 08

  and what is just like a big tech defense.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  Yep. That comes up a few times where the government is like, yeah, we know there are privacy issues. Yeah, we'll figure it out.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  It comes up a lot. You know, Jonathan Cantor, the Assistant Attorney General for antitrust, has been on Decoder twice now and he's very careful. He's very, he's a government lawyer. He's very good at this, politician. But you can hear his frustration with privacy as a defense to every problem. Just it's blindingly clear. He's like, we know, Apple wants to protect your data. That doesn't mean they can do illegal things. We can figure it out. And I think that's kind of what they're saying to Google here too. Like, yes, other companies need this data to compete. They need to know what's going on the internet too. You can't say only we can protect you. Like, we're just not, that's not a rational defense to the government.

• 57:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 57:20Nilay Patel?

  I have no idea how that's going to play out, but I will say that I've interviewed Cantor twice and he is very frustrated about that particular wall going up.

• 57:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. And they do, like Lauren was saying, there are a few times where it's like, and before you say privacy. Don't say privacy.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, what's the fourth one?

• 57:40David Pierce?

  There's two more.

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  There's two more?

• 57:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:41Speaker 08

  Two more.

• 57:42David Pierce?

  She's only said two.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, she only...

• 57:45Speaker 08

  The first was like a two-parter.

• 57:46Nilay Patel?

  I got you.

• 57:48Speaker 08

  So the third is about generation and display of search results. So this one is pretty much about AI. And, you know, the government kind of says, you know, Google, Google is creating these like new AI products that are, you know, integrated in search and a feature in search that basically come from scraping data from sites that they say have, quote, "little to no bargaining power against Google's monopoly." So they're basically wanting to make sure that, you know, sites can maybe opt out of having their information being trained on AI data and things like that.

• 58:28David Pierce?

  This one feels to me like the government being like not entirely sure what problem it's trying to solve here. Because I think the thing we heard in both these trials, both in the search trial and in the ad tech trial, was there's this whole group of round Google on the internet that just feels powerless, right? And there's, there's a sense that one of the things that is monopolistic about Google is that you just have to play Google's games all the time. And so you can feel this energy from the government saying, "We want to level the playing field and give people more tools and more stuff to do." And like, you've actually been able to opt out of Google for a pretty long time. It's just that no one wanted to because it wasn't a good trade for the most part. And now that trade is different and it's worse.

• 59:11David Pierce?

  But like, the tools are still kind of there. So I feel like, to me, this was the least compelling part of this document. The government basically just trying to be like, "We want everyone else to feel big."

• 59:26Speaker 08

  Yeah, this was the shortest section in the remedies and it does feel like the one that like, maybe they're gonna have to figure out how to flush out a little bit more.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:35David Pierce?

  Yeah. This one... It's hard. I mean, like, it's, it's easier in this instance to sort of bring Google down a peg than it is to bring everybody else up, right? And I think they're, they're trying to do both and I think that that makes sense in this moment.

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  I think they are trying to push Apple into making a search engine. If I had to, if I had to describe the shape of the outcome that everyone wants the most... It's we knock Google down a peg. We make it illegal for you to to just pay the money. And Apple looks around and says, well, we should just do a search engine of our own. And we'll use some of this innovative new AI technology to do it.

• 1:00:08David Pierce?

  Well, wait, can I can I read you a thing that might actually point at that? So one of the things in the generation display of search results section says that they're considering remedies that would require Google to make available in whole or through an API. The indexes, data feeds and models used for Google search, including those used in AI assisted search features and Google search results, features and ads, including the underlying ranking signals, especially on mobile. So that's like, A, that is bananas.

• 1:00:37Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's it. Give Google away for free.

• 1:00:40David Pierce?

  You open source. All right. But like that, that what that clearly says is we want to spin up a whole bunch of Google competitors right away because anyone with 10 minutes of coding experience is now going to be able to build a Google level search engine. Like

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  On the back of Google.

• 1:00:56David Pierce?

  Right. Like wild. But it does. It does suggest that one of the things they want to do is very quickly create a lot of competitors in the search industry.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:05Speaker 08

  And to the point of Apple at trial, the government did kind of suggest that Google had made it in its contract so that it would make sure Apple would not compete with it directly in search. So I could definitely see that being something that the government would like to see, you know, opening up the opportunity for even, you know, a very well positioned competitor to just like get going here and crack open the ecosystem.

• 1:01:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, that was when they were talking about Spotlight, right? And there were all these internal emails where Apple was trying to decide whether the stuff they were doing in Spotlight was like too close to Google and people at Google were worried that Spotlight was becoming too Googly. And like there, these two things were actively trying to not run into each other. And and you could you could tell the whole time this came up in trial, the government's just sitting there being like, yeah.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  I can't tell you the number of times I've walked out of a W W C, which is where Apple does its operating system updates, and I've gotten texts from Google employees that are like, they're coming for search. And my response is always like, why are you talking to me? Right? Like, you're Google. And it's because Apple has the click data.

• 1:02:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:02:12Nilay Patel?

  They have the captive audience, particularly in the iPhone, that is just searching in Safari. And right now that goes to Google. And the second that's diverted, Google knows it's in trouble. So it pays the money. And I, I think generally, I've heard both Jonathan Cantor and Lina Khan at the FTC say, all these like, programs where we install a babysitter to tell a company they're doing something bad and they fix it, like, don't work. Like, these compliance regimes don't work. We want structural remedies, which means we're gonna break up your dumb company. And now you're two companies, and what we want is actual competition in the market. And the reason I'm saying I think they want Apple to launch a competitor to Google is like, that is the easiest fix to this problem.

• 1:02:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, without question, it's, Google should have a competitor. Where can I just drag one into existence? It is on the iPhone. With Apple Intelligence, and you're talking to Siri, and you've got new search results, and new things to query, all that stuff. Just do it.

• 1:03:08David Pierce?

  Well, and it's also the exact same logic that doesn't make it make sense for Apple to have not launched a search engine. There were a lot of negatives in that sentence. But basically, the, the point is, like, given all of that evidence, the only obvious reason Apple wouldn't have launched the search engine is because Google pays it lots of money. And that was like, Lauren, I think you and I both heard, that was the implication at trial, that like, they have successfully, with $20 billion a year, kept a huge and well-funded and immediately at scale competitor from existing. And now we're just gonna give them all of Google's other data.

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  We're just gonna fix it.

• 1:03:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  Uh, all right. I think that's three.

• 1:03:47David Pierce?

  One more.

• 1:03:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. One more, one more. All right.

• 1:03:49Speaker 08

  So the last one is about kind of a different part of this case, which was Google's monopoly in general search text ads. So this is like, a super specific part of the case.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  We love a market definition.

• 1:04:07Speaker 08

  But basically, in this area, you know, this is like the sponsored blue links that you see when you enter a search query. And, you know, the government here is thinking about maybe making Google license or syndicate its ad feed even like separately from its search results to allow for more competition in that really particular part of the market.

• 1:04:35David Pierce?

  You should see, if you're not watching this, you should see the squinting Neel is doing.

• 1:04:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, I've been spending a lot of time talking to ad people lately.

• 1:04:45David Pierce?

  You have.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  It's changed you. Because I see them.

• 1:04:48David Pierce?

  You're wearing a tie. Oh, God.

• 1:04:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm wearing a tie because of a secret Verge project that will soon be revealed. And I decided to just keep wearing the tie today. But I've been just sort of like watching like the influencer advertising markets. I've been talking to a lot of people like, where's this money going? Like, what is happening on these platforms? I promise I will write a story about this. But the thing that they're all saying is, search ads on Google are not so valuable to us anymore.

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  That this, all the action, all the young people, the money isn't like TikTok shop or whatever. And so the money's moving. So there's just like this last piece of the puzzle where you're Googling running shoes and Google is going to show you search results for running shoes with a sponsored link at the top. Like, it's still very valuable. It's very lucrative. It hasn't moved in any meaningful way, but it's the thing that is changing all on its own without any intervention. Right? Because the dollars are just going somewhere else. And so this one just seems like, is what I want a feed of Google ads? That's my, that's the plan? Like, we're fine.

• 1:05:50David Pierce?

  But it goes back to kind of the same idea of like, how do we undo the thing that has made Google unstoppable, which is that it just has this gigantic lead on everybody. It has so much scale, it has so much click data, it has so much query data, it has so much user data. And it really seems like the only thing the government has figured out to do here is just give all that data to everybody else in order to level the playing field. I'm not a lawyer, but that doesn't seem like a real plausible.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  So there's this idea, Sarah, I've been talking about this, there's this idea that you can't force a company to do something, you can't force someone to do anything. It's called specific performance. It's very nerdy, but it's like, it's the thing, it's like the hardest thing to get. Like. I'm mad at you because your tree is hanging on my property. I'm like, I need you to cut down the tree. It's much more likely that the judge will move our property lines than to force you to cut down the tree. Right? Like, that's a, if you're a first year lawyer, and there's a million problems with that example, but that's the shape of it, right? Like, it is very hard to force someone to do anything in an ongoing way. It's just the last thing

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  you can ask for. And I think in this context, and Lauren, I'm curious what your reporting has revealed. It feels like the government's like, yeah, we're gonna break it up. Along the way, we're gonna ask for a bunch of like duty to deal. You have to do these deals. We're gonna force your business to do business with that business. We're gonna force you to do these things, which are the other choice. Either, Judge, you can break up Google, you can take YouTube and Chrome and Android, just break them up. Now you got three companies clean. We can all go to dinner. Or, we can force these companies in a slap in the face. You're gonna slap George Washington in the face, the most anti-American thing you do, and so you have to do deals with your competitors. And it just feels like that's the setup.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  And I don't, I don't know what's gonna happen. But like, you have to license all of your data and your search results generations and your ad stack, so that Apple can build a thing, and you have to keep that going. And where the American economy depends on your doing this deal because we forced you to? That's a tough one.

• 1:08:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, and Lauren knows there's no way around getting that deal done correctly in the spirit of the law.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  And it just might be easier to be like, cut it in three. And I kinda think that this whole concepts of a plan thing is like just setting up the, oh, that seems hard, we should just break up.

• 1:08:16Speaker 08

  Well, the government does say they think that there needs to be like, the judge needs to consider remedies from like, at least most of these buckets. Like, it can't just be like one thing. And obviously, you know, this is early days, they're asking for as much as they think they might be able to get. And they haven't even gotten into specifics yet. But, you know, I think they feel like they need to attack this from multiple angles and also attack the network effects, which I think is what the licensing aspects of this get to is like, yeah, okay, once Google has all this query information, no one else is really able to get it and get in there unless they're able to access that in some way.

• 1:09:01David Pierce?

  Do these things typically get filed as like a negotiating tactic? I'm realizing as you're talking that the way I read this is the government sort of vastly overshooting what it thinks it can do, just as kind of a first overbid in the game to try and land somewhere in the middle. Is that actually how this works? I don't know.

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  To whatever extent, although I think the DOJ does not want to settle this one. I think they want, they've won, they won. They want a trial. They want to see what remedies they will win, whatever. I think the weirdness here is this was a two-part trial. So they had the first trial that's just like, are you bad? And the answer is yes. Did you do it? Oh, you super did. And the second part is what should the remedies be? And a lot of this filing is here's what we think the remedy should be. Now we're going to have another trial and we're going to get more information about how bad they are to support these.

• 1:09:53David Pierce?

  I see.

• 1:09:53Speaker 08

  There's also going to be a whole other discovery process for this phase. So the government is going to get even more information about what's possible. But Google thinks actually gives it the power that it does and you know, how it could get at that. So I think that will be refined as they get that information.

• 1:10:10David Pierce?

  So that's the reason you go super broad in this first one is to essentially give yourself leeway to go every possible direction in this remedies trial.

• 1:10:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:20David Pierce?

  Okay, that makes sense.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  And then the thing, and people are probably listening to this to me like, you're, you just want to bring up Google. You hate Google. The thing that is right next to it is Google is generally terrified of all of this and has gotten itself into trouble throughout all of these antitrust cases for constantly deleting emails. And like saying things like, eh, antitrust, take this chat to private, which is weird.

• 1:10:41David Pierce?

  Or the putting attorney-client privilege at the top of every email, even when it's obviously not attorney-client privileged. Yeah.

• 1:10:47Nilay Patel?

  Like there, like if you can't talk about your own business without having to say, we shouldn't talk about this. Something is going wrong. All the way up, all the way up to Suneer Pichai, who is like, we should take this offline. Like, so there's just this overwhelming sense inside of this case in particular that like, the government's gonna just run it to the end.

• 1:11:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if that's a sense in the Epic case. So that's this case. Well, again, there's another, poor Lauren and David are both gonna have to sit in DC courtrooms some more. They see that coming. That's just one of the cases. The Adtech case, we can set aside because nothing has really happened in the past couple of weeks.

• 1:11:25David Pierce?

  We think November, right, for next moves on that one, Lauren?

• 1:11:28Speaker 08

  November 25th is when closing arguments are happening.

• 1:11:32David Pierce?

  Sick Thanksgiving present for everybody. That's gonna be so fun.

• 1:11:35Nilay Patel?

  You can just be like, you know, the judge was like, I cannot hear about CPMs anymore. We're all taking a break and then you can come back and do your closing arguments.

• 1:11:45Nilay Patel?

  So that's, that other case is happening over there. That's Google's money. So that's a big deal.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  And then there's the Epic case, which is the weird one. It's like the weird outlier because it wasn't brought by the government. It's brought by Tim Sweeney at Epic. They lost against Apple on basically the same theory, but they super won against Google because in order to keep the Android ecosystem in line, Google had to go make contracts. And there's just a huge paper trail of what those contracts are and what they restrict companies from doing and how they work. And now we're at the same part where the judge is like, how do I fix it? And Lauren, it feels like the remedies in this case are their own kind of extremely complicated multi-part system.

• 1:12:25Speaker 08

  Yes, that is true. And, but I guess basically the high level is that the judge is allowing for other app stores on Android to have, you know, kind of more equal footing with the Play Store.

• 1:12:38Nilay Patel?

  And I think Google has to give the entire catalog of Play Store apps to other app stores for three years, which is just back to that, how do I make it fair? I'm gonna force this to be fair.

• 1:12:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, Google has to give. Third-party developers access to all the apps in Google Play and list those third-party app stores in Google Play. So it's this, it turns the App Store into this crazy, like, orboros of apps. You're like, oh, you want to download Instagram? You can do it from 900 places now. Knock yourself out. But yeah, I mean, there's a lot of like little things also that that the judge ruled here. Like, there's some of the the steering or the anti-steering stuff where it's now easier to link to billing outside of Android with these remedies. There's a lot of, I guess I would call it like weird contract-ness

• 1:13:32David Pierce?

  that that's trying to be undone in terms of like how app revenue gets shared and what developers get from Google to do things or in some cases not to do things. But yeah, it seems like basically what the judge is trying to do here is just say, there are a lot of apps on Android and everyone should have all of them and they should all be able to peacefully coexist. And that is like, I think, a really fascinating UI experiment we're about to have. Because like, I just, I think most people are going to have trouble figuring out how any of that is actually supposed to work. But it also does mean if you run a competitive App Store, you have a lot of new advantages going for you.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, I mean, this case is Epic's case. They're the ones who want all these outcomes. So Epic gets to start the Epic App Store, Epic Game Store on Android. Tim Sweeney has already announced they're gonna do this. That's gonna have Fortnite in it.

• 1:14:29David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:14:29Nilay Patel?

  The argument, as far as I can tell, and Warren, correct me if I'm wrong, is the Epic Game Store is at a huge disadvantage if the only app in it is Fortnite. So you need some other apps. Okay, Google, you have to give the entire catalog.

• 1:14:42David Pierce?

  Well, and if you can't download the Epic Game Store through the App Store that comes built into it.

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  Right, with all the warning screens.

• 1:14:47David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:14:47Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So to get the Epic Game Store, you gotta go through the Play Store. And so now it feels like it's on par with everybody else. So now you got the Epic Game Store. You go in there to get Fortnite. And if the only thing in there is Fortnite, you're never gonna use it again and Google retains its advantage. They've just made it harder to get Fortnite. So instead, we're gonna demand that Google give the entire catalog of the Play Store to Epic. So when you open the Epic Game Store, you can see all the apps that are available on Android.

• 1:15:12David Pierce?

  And Fortnite.

• 1:15:13Nilay Patel?

  And Fortnite, but the Play Store doesn't get Fortnite.

• 1:15:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. It actually disadvantages the Play Store in a lot of ways because now if you have an app that is so compelling that you can pull people into your ecosystem,

• 1:15:27David Pierce?

  it's still going to be a lot of work and maintenance to build an app store of your own, but like you now have pretty strong incentives to do it because there aren't a lot of downsides.

• 1:15:37Speaker 08

  But going back to the search case, you know, the Play Store is preloaded on a lot of Android phones. So there's still that advantage for the Play Store.

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It just seems like what we're going to get is Epic gets to launch the Epic Game Store. And maybe Microsoft will launch a Microsoft Store. And maybe Amazon will try again. Maybe Amazon will notice that it runs the Amazon app.

• 1:16:03David Pierce?

  The Silk Browser.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  Like, and those will become more viable.

• 1:16:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:08Nilay Patel?

  Because just by default, Instagram will be in them as well. In a way that right now, whatever, like they're not going to go make those deals and no one has any incentive to chase that down.

• 1:16:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:16:20Nilay Patel?

  Does that, does this matter for anybody but Epic?

• 1:16:23Speaker 08

  I think it matters for any developers that want to make a app store, but you know, I don't know how many developers are out there who want that. And I guess it also matters for developers who want options to be in other app stores that don't have the same rules as the Play Store.

• 1:16:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So on, on the iOS side, this has been expressed pretty directly, right? So there's Alt Store because the EU mandated alternative app stores in iOS. Immediately Alt Store came out, the bunch of emulators showed up and then Apple changed the rules in its app store because of some competition. That has sort of been already like available on Android, like you could sideload all this stuff in Android. It hasn't changed the rules of the Play Store. So is it that we'll have another app store with more permissive rules about what's allowed or better payment splits? I don't know, like this one, because Android was already open-ish, it's like a weird. Paradox of this case.

• 1:17:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:26Nilay Patel?

  Like because Google doesn't control the ecosystem, the evidence of it trying to control the ecosystem is much more available because it's just like sending emails to Samsung, being like, we control your phone.

• 1:17:36David Pierce?

  Well, and there were a couple of things that Epic was asking for that it didn't get that I think might have potentially been a bigger deal. It's like, one of their things, I forget exactly how they expressed it, but the idea was basically you should be able to sideload an app as easily as you can download an app from the Play Store and they didn't get that. And if they'd gotten that, that becomes a big deal because now, and it just becomes trivially easy to distribute an Android app outside of any app store.

• 1:18:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:01David Pierce?

  And that becomes very powerful for lots of good and bad reasons. And then there was the one where they wanted to decouple a lot of the Android APIs from Google Play so that in theory you could buy a device that has the full Android experience, except it doesn't have Google Play at all. And so then, if you're Epic, you sell a gaming handheld that is full Android, but only the Epic Games Store or something like, right? Like, you can see how you get down the road from that. I think the world in which we're gonna live, which is that the Play Store is still very powerful and still exists, you just have more control inside of it. That one feels a little, a little less obvious to me. And I think one weird possible outcome of all of this is that you get some of the

• 1:18:45David Pierce?

  big companies you're talking about. Like, in theory, Microsoft and Meta and a handful of other companies are powerful enough to say, we are doing our own app store. We're not, we're not gonna play the rest of your games and we're gonna offer you better terms if you come buy apps from our store instead of the Play Store or whatever. And then you start to have real weird tiers of competition inside of Android where like, I'm gonna get to the point as a user where I have to download five app stores just to have my side. And that sucks. Like, that's a bad consumer outcome. And that is what Google has been railing against this whole time. And I think that is a reasonable part of its defense. But the truth is, I just think Epic got what it wanted.

• 1:19:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25David Pierce?

  Which is, we can do Fortnite on our own terms and there's gonna be a lot of fallout, but I don't think there are that many Epics out there. You know what I mean?

• 1:19:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, we'll see.

• 1:19:35David Pierce?

  In the way that there are a million search engines that would like to be powerful, I don't know that there are a million other Epic games.

• 1:19:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's a Sony, there's a Microsoft, there's a bunch of game companies that really want this.

• 1:19:46David Pierce?

  There are a bunch of game companies.

• 1:19:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying that the little, with a weird paradox here is because it was already open. To control it, Google had to do a bunch of aggressive stuff. They created the evidence that is like, now you have to be more open, which is weird. And I can tell you, because I had this exact reaction, a bunch of our listeners are screaming in their cars right now, that it is already somewhat trivial to download an APK on an Android phone outside of an App Store.

• 1:20:11David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:20:12Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it's weird, because that openness exists. When Sonos was broken, I just got the APK of the old version of the Sonos app, and my Sonos was fine for a week.

• 1:20:20David Pierce?

  It's easier, but you can't go to a website, tap "Install this app on my phone," and it installs the app on your phone.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  You can, but you also have to accidentally run like a Bitcoin mining scam. Actually, you brought up Google's responses to this. Lauren, I'm looking at a blog post from Google that says, "DOJ's radical and sweeping proposals risk hurting consumers, businesses, and developers." It seems like it sums up the response, but you've been doing some reporting, you've read this more closely than I have. What is Google's response to all this?

• 1:20:47Speaker 08

  Yeah, that's their response to the the search remedies, I believe. And yeah, they they basically think, you know, this is a big overreach. You know, this case is about, you know, a set of search distribution contracts, and, you know, here's the government going and like, reaching out into all these different businesses that it has. And, you know, this is, you know, really going beyond what this case is about. So I think, you know, we're going to be seeing a lot more from them. I believe they have to file something about their response at some point. So, you know, I think we're not going to really see them backing down from this, and

• 1:21:29Speaker 08

  they have to go through this remedies phase before they can appeal. But I think we're going to see a big fight from them down the road.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:37David Pierce?

  Am I being too hard on Google to just read this blog post as Google yelling, "But privacy"?

• 1:21:43David Pierce?

  They do kind of yell "But China" once in here, but mostly it seems to me that they're just like, it's all the stuff that we've been saying the judges in these cases are not finding compelling.

• 1:21:54Speaker 08

  I think it's privacy, it's, you know, we're going to hold back American innovation, and also just this is a big overreach. So I think those are kind of some of their key arguments here.

• 1:22:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they also say that if Android and Chrome were their own companies, there would be no incentive to keep them open source. Which is a big deal. And I feel like we could make a hard left turn in talking about WordPress right now, but we should not do that.

• 1:22:21David Pierce?

  We should not do that.

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  Um, but there's a lot there. The Google's response to this, we'll, we'll link the blog posts. You can, everybody can read it. But their, their blog post is basically like, look, we make a lot of money and then we give a whole bunch of stuff away for free. And if you change that dynamic, maybe this stuff isn't free anymore. Like I said, I don't know what's going to happen here. I don't really know what all the right answers are. I can just tell you with a hundred percent certainty that the Google we knew a year ago is not the Google we will have a year from now.

• 1:22:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 1:22:50Nilay Patel?

  Like this, the, and it's weird to me how little everyone is paying attention to it. Like this, this company is the infrastructure of the internet. Like we, there's a reason we've been talking about on the verge for however long now, we've been talking about it. Like when Google changes this dramatically, basically everything around it necessarily changes.

• 1:23:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:13Nilay Patel?

  That's weird.

• 1:23:13David Pierce?

  And some of those points about like, would another company have the same incentives to keep Android as accessible and open source as it has been? That's true. Like the, the whole Android business is the search business. And if you decouple those things, Android needs a business and it would, it would change. Like I think Google's not wrong about that.

• 1:23:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Pixel team, wake up. It's time to start selling some phones, buddy. All right. We kind of take a break. Lauren, stick around. We want you on the lightning round with us.

• 1:23:43Speaker 08

  It's good.

• 1:23:43Nilay Patel?

  All right. We'll be right back.

• 1:23:48Speaker 01

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• 1:25:15Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Un-sponsored lightning round. It's never gonna happen. We've gotten some very nice emails, but I'm not allowed to make the deals. I just walk into rooms of Vox Media demanding. And no one takes me seriously.

• 1:25:29Speaker 06

  For all you guys know, this is a sponsored lightning round. I won't tell you.

• 1:25:33David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 1:25:33Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Sponsored by Liam. All right. David, you're gonna start with the first one. It's another Google story, but I will tell you, one, it's a palate cleanser, and two, shockingly popular story.

• 1:25:45David Pierce?

  OK. Not shocking, because it's the greatest news in years. If you are a person who cares about your documents. And don't we all care about our documents? So, Google announced this feature in April, and I completely missed it, but is now rolling out a thing that basically, it's the Docs equivalent of the thing in Sheets or Excel where you can have sort of multiple tabs open that kind of interact with each other. It's just a pane on the side that you can open tabs and subtabs. But it's essentially like having multiple documents inside of one document. Does that sound like a big deal to you that will completely change your life? You're wrong because it is and it will.

• 1:26:30David Pierce?

  This is, as a person who creates infinite Google Docs for my job, this is the greatest thing that has ever happened to me.

• 1:26:39Nilay Patel?

  I knew it was a big deal when I saw Wired staffers who I know and love, like freaking out on threads about our story.

• 1:26:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  Because they like immediately needed to share it.

• 1:26:50David Pierce?

  So the thing that's great about this is a thing that is more and more popular all the time, it seems, is the like public Google document.

• 1:26:57Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:26:58David Pierce?

  More and more, you're seeing like, there's a great newsletter that I subscribe to that the newsletter every month is just a link to a Google Doc and you go read the Google Doc. And it's kind of a great experience. This is, it's great for navigation. It's great for putting lots of docs together. There has been that table of contents thing you can do on the side where it'll let you just jump from header to header. This is just that, but like better and more navigable and less awful on big documents. But I think it's, Google Docs is like used for a lot of really interesting things. Public docs are everywhere. It's a super collaborative thing. I see things where like groups of hundreds of people are like planning things together in a single Google Doc. And like, this is a kind of structure that Docs has just never had and is going to make

• 1:27:41David Pierce?

  a lot of type A people very, very happy.

• 1:27:44Nilay Patel?

  And they are very happy.

• 1:27:45David Pierce?

  They're so happy.

• 1:27:46Nilay Patel?

  They are just reading and sharing the story. If we did nothing but write about tabs and Google Docs for the rest of the year, we'd be set.

• 1:27:52David Pierce?

  It's real.

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  And that's what we're doing. It's Google antitrust and tabs and Google Docs.

• 1:27:55David Pierce?

  You can make them emojis.

• 1:27:59Nilay Patel?

  When I was a, just a pup, there was this piece of software that came with almost every Mac called HyperCard. And it was, I don't even know how to describe it. It was the internet, but local and expressed as like virtual index cards. And you could like program, they were called stacks. You could program HyperCard stacks. Some of our audience is freaking out because they know what I'm talking about.

• 1:28:17David Pierce?

  When I tell you.

• 1:28:17Nilay Patel?

  Other people think I sound like an ancient wizard.

• 1:28:19David Pierce?

  It involves HyperCards in a surprisingly meaningful way.

• 1:28:22Nilay Patel?

  This is just HyperCard.

• 1:28:24David Pierce?

  Oh, 100%.

• 1:28:24Nilay Patel?

  Google's making a HyperCard.

• 1:28:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:26Nilay Patel?

  They're turning Google Docs into HyperCard. Or if another less successful comparison, Google Wave. They're doing just the modular.

• 1:28:34David Pierce?

  That's good. I mean, Google has been trying to do Google Wave in various forms for an extremely long time.

• 1:28:37Nilay Patel?

  Just Google, it's an impossible thing to Google. To Google the word Google and the word wave. It's hard. Well, we'll find a link to some ancient coverage of this thing Google made. Yeah. Uh, years ago, it was like, what if we blew up all, all email and docs and it was all the same thing and no one could figure it out and now we're, we're just back. Lauren, are you as excited about tabs as I am? Be honest.

• 1:28:57Speaker 08

  I can't say I am. I'm not the person who has like a million Chrome tabs open at the same time.

• 1:29:03Nilay Patel?

  You guys are the problem.

• 1:29:05Speaker 06

  As someone who's somehow missed this story, I'm like freaking out in the control. I'm so excited. There are workflows in my head right now that are now possible.

• 1:29:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna just share. Was that a threat? Liam just threatened us. Yeah, he did. All right, we're toast. It's lighting around. We gotta move on. Yeah. All right, Lauren, what do you got? Next tab.

• 1:29:25Speaker 08

  Yeah, next tab. Um, yeah, I mean, we sure everyone heard there was a major hurricane in Florida this week. Um, and FEMA is out there cleaning up, fighting, uh, the storm and also now fighting disinformation about the storm as well, including, uh, some false claims spread by former President Trump. Um, and you know, I think FEMA kind of always knew this was gonna be a problem, but the FEMA administrator said this is absolutely the worst I've ever seen, uh, about misinformation around the storms recently. Um, so you know, it's just kinda wild that they've had to do all this fact checking,

• 1:30:08Speaker 08

  um, while just trying to literally clean up a major disaster.

• 1:30:14Nilay Patel?

  I think we did a, a link to a Rolling Stone story on the homepage today, just about meteorologists who are getting death threats. Oof. Because people believe they can control the weather. Marjorie Taylor Greene out there saying that they can control the weather. Oh, great. Uh, which is an incredible, like, retcon of climate change.

• 1:30:32Nilay Patel?

  Do you? Yes, it's true. We can control the weather, just not the way that you think. It just takes 40 years of burning fossil fuels. It's true. We did, in fact, control the weather in one very specific way. Um, I don't know if you, we've run a bunch of stories about just moderation failures lately, like threads of moderation is way too heavy handed. It appears to be partially AI driven in a way that no one can control, at least all the people at Meta. X, obviously not moderating any of this misinformation. It is weird to be in a social media environment where I'm like, they did kind of a good job during COVID. Because they, they didn't. Like, that was a nightmare. And this is so much worse.

• 1:31:14Nilay Patel?

  And it feels like people are going even one step farther away from reality into they're controlling the weather in Florida to influence the election. I, I, I mean, all of like, I, I don't think we were doing a great job when we were bringing Jack Dorsey in front of Congress so that people could yell at him. And then bad tweets. And then people were yelling at Mark Zuckerberg about Twitter, like, Yeah. That accomplished broadly, nothing, I think, Lauren. Um, you, you covered all that. Uh, not, nothing, nothing was accomplished in some weird First Amendment problems there. But it taught these companies that what if doing nothing was a more viable strategy? And now it feels like we're just reaping the dividend of doing nothing.

• 1:32:00Speaker 08

  Well, it feels like these companies are just very reactionary and it's like being like yelled at as a kid. And at first you're like, oh, I need to do better. I need to like, do what I'm being asked. And then they're like, become adolescents that are like, wait a minute, why am I just following what you say? It seems like it gets me in more trouble. Um, and then they decide to back off.

• 1:32:24Nilay Patel?

  By the way, that is a perfect description of Mark Zuckerberg and his T-shirts and chains. And seriously. Flowy. Like flowing logs, like he's in his adolescent phase of like, eh, screw you.

• 1:32:34David Pierce?

  Well, and I remember, yeah, we, we were talking a couple of years ago about like, all of these companies, a few of them in particular, made a real show of doing their best and trying their hardest and decided that it accomplished nothing.

• 1:32:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:49David Pierce?

  For them, for their image. And, and, and we were even wondering, we were like, okay, what's it gonna look like when they decide that actually the, the penalty for not caring and the penalty for caring are basically the same and they're just gonna decide to not care.

• 1:33:02Nilay Patel?

  No, but I'm saying it's worse. Right now,

• 1:33:06Nilay Patel?

  it is worse. The penalty for caring was worse than the penalty for not caring.

• 1:33:12David Pierce?

  In the world.

• 1:33:14Nilay Patel?

  But they are paying less of a penalty. They are in their bunkers.

• 1:33:16David Pierce?

  That's what I mean.

• 1:33:17Nilay Patel?

  And on their mega yachts.

• 1:33:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:33:18Nilay Patel?

  And they are not paying any price for like fake AI generated photos of like children with puppies that don't exist.

• 1:33:27Nilay Patel?

  They're like, oh, this is fine. Whereas when they tried, they got yelled at.

• 1:33:30David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 1:33:31Nilay Patel?

  And the incentive structure is like totally backwards.

• 1:33:33David Pierce?

  Yes. A hundred percent. And they're like, we, we have now reached a point where the, all of their incentives are to not try. And, and now we know what it looks like, right? It turns out trying and failing. And I think we all pretty much agree that content moderation is a completely unwinnable game. And all you can do is try and fail as well as possible.

• 1:33:52David Pierce?

  That trying and failing gained them nothing and they might as well just give up and not care and wear T-shirts.

• 1:33:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:59David Pierce?

  Here we are. And it's awful.

• 1:34:01Nilay Patel?

  It is. I would say the hurricane misinformation story is, it might be a defining story in, in like the history of media. Like it's just fully out of control.

• 1:34:10David Pierce?

  The, the other aspect of that, that I, I don't know if you guys have seen this, but like, all of my feeds everywhere are just creators in Florida who stayed. And, and are like making a show out of not going. Some of them are like outside trying to sort of journalism the hurricane, but then there's one guy I keep finding who just wears a headlamp and is just like walking around his house being like, seems bad. I'm in the eye. I don't care.

• 1:34:33Nilay Patel?

  And he just has a headlamp and that's, that's like, I've seen like 50 of his videos. We don't have the time to do David and Eli talk about journalism and really never do we have the time and nor should we on the show, but the driving difference between that and Anderson Cooper being like, it's pretty bad. Yeah. Actually, pretty hard to do. That's what I mean. You can journalism the hurricane, just like going outside of the hurricane. I get it. It's like, they're like, I'm staying here to do, to get eyeballs and Anderson Cooper's like, I'm going there to get eyeballs. And it's a very fine line between those two things. A hundred percent. Um, I do think these, the platforms are, they've dropped the ball and I, I don't know. I have all of, every Verge House listener knows how I feel about the First Amendment,

• 1:35:15Nilay Patel?

  which is everyone else seems to be sick of it. And I think that's a worrying trend. Like we're banning books and everyone has bad, everyone's screaming fire in a crowded theater. Tim Walz of the debate just randomly blurted it out for no reason and our entire newsroom, you saw our entire Slack, everybody's like, no, like, I don't know what's going on. It's, it's all bad. But the idea that our social networks are actually, they actually have an important social function in our society to try to get accurate information out and not amplify lies. They just let go. Not going great. Super let go. Yeah. All right. I'm going to try to clean this up. Yeah. And to try to end us on a high note. That's my goal. Okay.

• 1:35:55Nilay Patel?

  Here's the high note. Several months ago, the CEO of Zoom came on Decoder and he said, here's my dream. All of your Zoom meetings will have AI clones in them, digital twins. You're going to clone yourself and then that clone will go to the Zoom meeting for you while you sit on a beach and drink a daiquiri. And I was like, how many clones do I have? Could I have 10,000? And he was like, as many as you want. Unclear how any of this will work. Unclear if he was building, unclear how if he had the technology to do it.

• 1:36:25Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. There were some great YouTube videos made about that specific interview. Sure. Uh, we'll link it. Um.

• 1:36:33Nilay Patel?

  Zoom has announced AI avatars can talk to your team on your behalf. The first step towards our goal of 1,000 digital Neelies going to meetings across Fox Media, demanding to have the lightning round sponsored.

• 1:36:48David Pierce?

  But now it's one digital Neelie.

• 1:36:50Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:36:51David Pierce?

  I feel like one's too many.

• 1:36:53Nilay Patel?

  Zoom announced it will soon let you create an AI avatar of yourself that you can use to send brief messages to your team. And the only message I want to send is when is the lightning round getting sponsored? And I would like my AI avatar to attend every single meeting at this company.

• 1:37:06David Pierce?

  Ugh, this is nothing.

• 1:37:09Nilay Patel?

  You need to record an initial video of yourself that Zoom's AI will use to make an avatar that looks and even sounds like you. From there, you can write the message you want your avatar to say and then have it go to meetings and say it. It's voicemail.

• 1:37:20David Pierce?

  It's the same amount of work as just doing it.

• 1:37:23Speaker 08

  Could have been an email.

• 1:37:25David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 1:37:26Nilay Patel?

  And I'm gonna have my AI avatar go to every meeting and say this could have been an email.

• 1:37:32David Pierce?

  Okay, A, that's a pretty good idea. B, I have come around to the idea that actually the solution to our AI problem is to just ban meetings. Everybody is like, we're gonna make a thing so that you don't have to go to a meeting. Just don't have the meeting. This is uncomplicated.

• 1:37:47Nilay Patel?

  1,000 digital AI avatars all having meetings with each other while we sip daiquiris on the beach. This is the future of the information economy.

• 1:37:55David Pierce?

  Or...

• 1:37:56Nilay Patel?

  Don't have meetings.

• 1:37:57David Pierce?

  Just daiquiris, just the daiquiri parts and no meetings.

• 1:38:00Speaker 08

  But then you have to have a meeting with your AI avatar to learn what happened, which feels worse.

• 1:38:06Nilay Patel?

  I would say Eric did not...

• 1:38:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, I go from having no information to still having no information, but a weird digital version of me talk to some people.

• 1:38:15Nilay Patel?

  Again, you can listen to the episode of Decoder. We tried to get there. I would say that that was not forthcoming. The answer to that specific problem, you know, it was a real like, we'll get there when we get there kind of situation.

• 1:38:28David Pierce?

  Sorry, I'm just reading a quote that Eric said to you. And it begins with, "Today for this session..." He's saying this to you, by the way. "Today for this session, ideally, I do not need to join."

• 1:38:40Nilay Patel?

  It's pretty rough.

• 1:38:41David Pierce?

  If the AI future is I don't have to hang out with Neil anymore, I'm in. Let's do it.

• 1:38:45Nilay Patel?

  I'm just telling you, I'm going to use this technology to get the lightning round sponsored. By the way, they asked Zoom's chief product officer about deepfakes doing bad things with their new AI avatars that can leave voicemails for people, or whatever this is. And she said, "The company is handling the possibility of deepfakes with, quote, 'really carefully with advanced authentication, watermarking, and strict usage policies.'" Nothing like a terms of service to keep people from doing deepfakes.

• 1:39:09David Pierce?

  Please don't.

• 1:39:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna make, I'm gonna train one of these on you.

• 1:39:15Nilay Patel?

  Send David to meetings.

• 1:39:17David Pierce?

  That's fine.

• 1:39:19Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's coming. I'm just telling you, these ideas are coming. This is a dream.

• 1:39:22David Pierce?

  This is the last Vergecast where it will be real me ever again.

• 1:39:26Nilay Patel?

  Just an AI avatar of David, for some reason, demanding that the lightning round could sponsor.

• 1:39:34Nilay Patel?

  I do think if you're a CEO, if you make an AI of yourself that goes to every Zoom meeting at your company and just says, "This meeting should have been an email," you will have done the greatest service to your company that any CEO has ever done.

• 1:39:45David Pierce?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:39:47Nilay Patel?

  Just be like, "Why is the CEO here?"

• 1:39:48David Pierce?

  And then like theatrically leaves before they even realize it was AI.

• 1:39:54David Pierce?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:39:54Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty good.

• 1:39:55David Pierce?

  There it is.

• 1:39:55Nilay Patel?

  That's my idea. All right, that's it. We gotta wrap this thing up. We're way over. Crazy over. Lauren, thank you so much for joining us.

• 1:40:03Speaker 08

  Thanks for having me.

• 1:40:04Nilay Patel?

  We have lots and lots to come, including this RoboTaxi event, which is happening.

• 1:40:07David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:40:08Nilay Patel?

  Tonight, and then we'll cover it next week on the Vergecast, but we'll have full coverage on the site in the meantime. So go check that out. Let us know how we did on our predictions.

• 1:40:16David Pierce?

  Optimus Robots.

• 1:40:17Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's the Vergecast. Back and roll.

• 1:40:23Speaker 06

  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 Liam James, Will Pore, and Eric Gomez. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:40:41Speaker 09

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• 1:41:12Speaker 10

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.