Apple could open up iOS, Elon gets booed, and the golden age of streaming is coming to an end

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler break down all the news from this week. Further reading: FTX co-founder Sam Bankman-Fried arrested in the Bahamas Apple is reportedly preparing to allow third-party app stores on the iPhone Twitter Blue is back, letting you buy a blue checkmark again Elon Musk sells yet another $3.58 billion of Tesla shares - The Verge Twitter suspends @ElonJet after Musk promises not to ban it - The Verge Elon Musk booed at Dave Chappelle show, claims it was only like ‘10 percent boos’ Jack Dorsey on Musk’s Twitter files: ‘There’s nothing to hide’ - The Verge https://www.theverge.com/2022/12/15/23511260/everything-ok-in-there-mr-musk-sincerely-the-ftc Twitter’s newsletter tool is shutting down on January 12th The golden age of the streaming wars has ended Apple is expanding Mythic Quest with a new spinoff series Westworld is leaving HBO Max Director Patty Jenkins says there was ‘nothing’ she could do to move Wonder Woman 3 forward Where are all the new Macs? iOS 16.2 arrives with improved always-on display and iCloud end-to-end encryption Google won’t launch ChatGPT rival because of ‘reputational risk’ The Echo Show 15 with Fire TV: a major upgrade with a major flaw Google is beta testing digital state ID cards in its Android Wallet app How to use Instagram’s new Notes feature TikTok starts testing a horizontal full-screen mode Google Nest and Android devices are now Matter compatible — yes, right now Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear 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

  Today on The Vergecast, the EU has Apple running scared, Elon Musk gets booed, and the golden age of streaming is coming to an end. That's all coming up right after this.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 0:57Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the future of car sounds. Today in this episode of the Vergecast, we're all just gonna make like bloop bloop sounds. And then we're gonna decide what car should sound like in the future. Do that sound nice? Doesn't that sound better than what we usually do on the show?

• 2:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm trying to think about my car sound is. I was thinking very, very hard about it.

• 2:19Speaker 04

  What do you want it to sound like when you're getting run over by a driverless Tesla? Like, what would, what would you want to hear?

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, it's the slide whistle.

• 2:26Alex Cranz?

  1967 Mustang.

• 2:30Alex Cranz?

  I want to feel like I got hit.

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  You want like a dramatic, like, like an orchestra hit.

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, I want it like

• 2:38Alex Cranz?

  that's, that's me going out.

• 2:40Speaker 04

  I want the ending theme from Buckaroo Banzai. Like, I should be able to select that on my phone, and then it just pops up in their car as it happens.

• 2:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, today, like Minority Report sounds like, today you're gonna get hit by an EV. So if you could just go ahead and pick a soundtrack for that, uh, we'll be, we'll be good. Tom Cruise will be dispatching the third judge.

• 3:01Alex Cranz?

  You remember a lot more of that movie than I did.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  If you haven't seen Minority Report, it's truly, it is truly something else. It's so funny that, by the way, they get to the, the name Minority Report. It's so integral to the plot, and then it means so little.

• 3:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:17Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's very good. You should just go, everyone, take a break, turn off the podcast.

• 3:21Alex Cranz?

  Wait.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  Go watch Minority Report.

• 3:23Alex Cranz?

  Why is it called, is it called that because one of the three sees a different future? Is that why?

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  You're spoiling the movie.

• 3:32Speaker 04

  No.

• 3:33Alex Cranz?

  It's been out for 20 years.

• 3:35Speaker 04

  Definitely.

• 3:38Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry to everyone. I just ruined.

• 3:40Nilay Patel?

  There are many problems with predictive policing, uh, that we should just immediately begin with. And then, obviously, the targeted advertising that movie, it just all came true.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Like Tim Cook saw Minority Report and he's like, we have to destroy Facebook's business. Let's do app tracking transparency.

• 3:57Alex Cranz?

  He was just like,

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of talking about Minority Report for no reason. 30 years after it came out. We actually have a lot of like housekeeping to do, but first of all, I'm Neil, I'm your friend. Alex Trans is here.

• 4:10Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend thinking about that one scene between the gardener lady and Tom Cruise in Minority Report. You know what I'm talking about.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  The memories have all come back.

• 4:18Alex Cranz?

  Just flooded back in. I'm that friend.

• 4:21Nilay Patel?

  Richard Lawler is here.

• 4:23Speaker 04

  I'm your friend who is definitely not under indictment. Say whatever you want.

• 4:28Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce continues to be off with his new baby. You know, it happens to the best of us. Now he's great. We wish David well. He'll be back soon enough. We've got a lot going on between now and the end of the year. So obviously we have this episode of Vergecast, which will mostly be about the movie Minority Report.

• 4:47Alex Cranz?

  Buckle in.

• 4:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there's, there's actually, SPF got arrested. There's this report that Apple's going to open up third-party app stores. Elon continues to just be himself. There's all kinds of gadget news, actually. So there's this episode. Then, the holiday spectacular is back, my friends. You might recall that in the waning years of the Trump administration, I said, we were just going to do an entire hour about HDMI to just clear the decks, reset. For some reason, we did this during the holidays. And so now during the holidays, we do episodes about specs. This is just, this is who we are now.

• 5:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  I feel great about it.

• 5:29Alex Cranz?

  I think it's a gift. We're giving a gift to our listeners.

• 5:33Nilay Patel?

  I think it's that the joke spectacular is too good to pass up.

• 5:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes. 100%.

• 5:39Nilay Patel?

  In our heart of hearts, it's can I let our producer Andrew Marino do sleigh bell sounds while we talk about Bluetooth? And the answer is yes.

• 5:49Speaker 04

  Have we started a new standards group to establish how this will happen? What is the name of it?

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  Spectacular standards group. So you've got a holiday spectacular. It's about Bluetooth. This year's holiday spectacular is about Bluetooth. We've got a discussion of the Bluetooth standard.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  We have holiday sound effects and my friends, we have Bluetooth Jeopardy, which we've already recorded, and I can tell you is one of the most chaotic

• 6:15Alex Cranz?

  I'm incredible.

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  45 minutes of Vergecast history ever put to tape. Liam thought it was going to take 30 minutes and we recorded for 90. And I'm just guessing they managed to cut that down to 45.

• 6:28Alex Cranz?

  They can't cut a single thing. Every minute of it was perfect.

• 6:32Nilay Patel?

  I'll just, I'll just tell you right now, Bluetooth Jeopardy is shockingly hard. It is so much harder than you think, and I can't wait for you to listen to it. So that's coming out on December 21st. That'll be good. And then actually, the biggest news of this week is the fusion breakthrough, where a bunch of researchers with the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory created a fusion reaction, basically shooting lasers at something that produced more energy than it took to cause the reaction. That's a very big deal. Does not get mean free energy, but it's like, it's one of those breakthrough scientific moments. We're not going to talk about it in this episode because our excellent science reporter, Justine Kama, is actually interviewing some of the scientists and will have an episode with them coming up very soon as well.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  So that's really exciting. Just a lot of Vergecast stuff to close out the year, including the holiday spectacular about Bluetooth, which I'm going to tell you is just one of the finest pieces of technology journalism ever made.

• 7:28Alex Cranz?

  Ever.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  Even though we have not made two thirds of it yet.

• 7:31Alex Cranz?

  It's amazing.

• 7:35Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I think, and if you are a Pulitzer voter, keep this in mind. More journalism should be in the form of Jeopardy.

• 7:44Alex Cranz?

  I think, I think it's right because like, what are you doing? Someone is making a statement and then you're asking a question. That's journalism, baby. We're doing it.

• 7:53Nilay Patel?

  It's true. If, also if you are a lawyer with the Jeopardy people. Please stop listening to this and

• 8:02Alex Cranz?

  Turn it off.

• 8:02Nilay Patel?

  Turn out the window.

• 8:03Alex Cranz?

  Delete us from your feed.

• 8:05Nilay Patel?

  You didn't hear any of this lawyers, the Jeopardy people. Anyway, holiday spectacular Bluetooth coming fusion episode of Justine coming. And then on the video side, we have an Apple Watch Ultra review that's coming next week. It is one of the most over the top videos we have ever made. The video team went all out because how else can you review the Apple Watch Ultra in video? You gotta go do a bunch of stuff. And we will note from Becca talking about that. Let's listen to Becca.

• 8:31Speaker 05

  Hey, it's me, Becca Versace. Listen, my question for you is have you heard that I have been working on this honestly insane review of the Apple Watch Ultra? Because the rumors are true. I have. We have dove down 130 feet with this watch off the coast of California. We've gotten lost in Yosemite and well, we have people have been wearing it around New York City for months now, and we are doing the most in-depth review that we've ever done. And y'all better check it out. Okay. Especially you, David Pierce. Anyway, uh, check it out, bud. YouTube.com slash a verge. That's all I got.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. I am theoretically responsible for everything that happens here at the verge. Legitimately afraid about this video.

• 9:13Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited about it.

• 9:14Nilay Patel?

  No one died. Excited in a way that like getting arrested is exciting.

• 9:19Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great. It's gonna be a good time.

• 9:21Nilay Patel?

  So that's coming. Apple Watch Ultra videos come next week. Bluetooth spectacular is coming next week. Fusion episode coming soon. All kinds of stuff. And we are obviously going to take a break for Christmas and New Year's. Cause yeah, it's time to take a break. That's why we made a holiday spectacular for you. Okay. That's all the business. All that's out of the way. Let's talk about some news. I feel like we gotta start with SPF. I feel like we had to start with crypto. We can, we can do it quickly.

• 9:45Alex Cranz?

  Richard, you were there.

• 9:45Speaker 04

  There's always time to start with crypto. I told you 2023, I'm becoming a big crypto guy.

• 9:49Nilay Patel?

  Tell me what is going on. By the way, we had this conversation like last week or the week before where we're like, should you interview Sam Bankman Fried? Is that journalism? And it's like, oh yeah, my dude talks so much. He's going to jail.

• 10:01Speaker 04

  This guy just couldn't stop doing interviews. I was trying to track the interviews that he was doing. I was gonna write up some of them, but he just kept doing more. And every time I would take a look at him and say, oh, there's a couple of interesting things here. He was always live doing another interview as I was thinking about it. Right up until he was arrested in the Bahamas.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  Right until he gave his final interview to the police.

• 10:22Speaker 04

  Yeah, now he's giving very different interviews than unfortunately not live streamed. But yes, he has been arrested in the Bahamas, in case you were wondering, over the last month after FTX collapsed and they discovered that everyone's money wasn't there like it was supposed to be. It happened pretty quickly, I think, in comparison, as our colleague Liz Mopado pointed out, he was arrested a little bit more quickly than Elizabeth Holmes was when Theranos started to go down. And if you've been watching, the amount of money that he is responsible for that appears to not be there anymore is quite a bit more than what Elizabeth Holmes was basically convicted of stealing. So assuming it gets to that point, you can imagine what the possible sentence could be. But let's run it back. Let's just see what happened.

• 11:05Speaker 04

  In November, in kind of mid-November, FTX, the second biggest crypto exchange in the world, collapsed. Suddenly, there was a run on the bank. People tried to get their money out and there was no more money very quickly. And no one knew what was happening. There was a supposed buyout by the largest crypto exchange, Binance. They looked at the books, quickly backed off. Fast forward to now, all the regulators, all of the celebrities, everyone who used to be Sam Bankman-Fried's friend when he was a billionaire are now running from FTX. They're now pointing the finger and saying that this guy lied, he is everything wrong. And they can't really explain why they didn't see these lies before, but that's where we are now. And now we have all of his interviews and we're also getting kind of the investigations that have been going on,

• 11:47Speaker 04

  especially over the last month. We're finding out more. We're finding out really hard information because it's coming out in the bankruptcy filings, it's coming out now in the civil charges and the criminal charges that have been filed against Bankman-Fried. And it's not good. We found out that a couple of days before the bankruptcy happened, one of the executives at FTX was telling the Bahamian authorities that Bankman-Fried had moved money that was supposed to be customer funds to his own research firm, Alameda, which if that is true, then that would be probably a crime.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's it. That's just jail.

• 12:18Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  That that's just a huge spot of ticket to jail.

• 12:22Speaker 04

  So yeah, there's kind of a long list of criminal activities that have been going on. And we've got breakdowns of the many lies that he's told and the charges that he's facing and everything that's going on. But I've been living the Sam Bankman Fried interview life for the last few weeks. I no longer know what is true or where I am. When you guys are looking at this, like, what do you see for the case? What are you wondering about?

• 12:43Alex Cranz?

  Is Tom Brady going to jail?

• 12:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, so a bunch of influencers have been hit with lawsuits. There's a class action lawsuit against a bunch of celebrities, including our boy Tommy, who probably needs to win another Super Bowl just to get a piece of his heart back.

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. That's going to go well for him. I feel like we have to mention that the fact that Tom Brady destroyed his life over Sam Bankman Fried and FTX every single episode.

• 13:05Alex Cranz?

  Every single episode.

• 13:07Nilay Patel?

  You know, here's what I worry about and what I've been thinking about. This whole thing is a Ponzi scheme, right? Even their ads, even if you just go back and look at that Super Bowl ad with Larry David, the ad is about not being left out, which is like the classic Ponzi scheme thing to advertise. It's like, are you in like, can you get in at the bottom of the period? So the people at the top of the year can cash out. And if you just create that sense of FOMO, like the Ponzi scheme will sustain itself a little bit longer. It was never about utility. It was not about what you could do with crypto. And at the end of the day, like what you can do with crypto is still mostly crimes. Like it's basically crimes.

• 13:46Speaker 04

  Some of them are gambling.

• 13:48Alex Cranz?

  You can buy a coffee from like a coffee house in Austin takes Bitcoin.

• 13:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the coffee, I'm sure that coffee house is connected to crimes in some way. I don't know if that's true. Again, if you are a lawyer with, at this point, either Jeopardy or a Austin coffee house, just stop.

• 14:04Alex Cranz?

  I didn't name it. It's fine.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, who knows?

• 14:06Alex Cranz?

  Nobody knows which one it is.

• 14:08Nilay Patel?

  But like fundamentally, the utility of crypto is is more related to crime than not.

• 14:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:14Nilay Patel?

  And there's this piece of the puzzle where all the people who are still in crypto, all the investors, all the technologists, Brian Armstrong from Coinbase, they're like, Sam Bankman Fried's a liar. No one should be talking to him anymore. Every time he talks, he just makes us all look bad. He pulls the wool over people's eyes. Journalists are too credible, blah, blah, blah. Just like get him in jail so you can move on with your lives. And I think what they're failing to see is there's still no more utility there.

• 14:42Nilay Patel?

  And actually putting someone in jail is not easy to do, right? Like proving a financial crime of this scale past a reasonable doubt and actually winning the case with the lawyers that, you know, he's going to be able to put together and the defenses he'll mount and just the cloud of obfuscation that he will put together is this is going to take a long time. And I think there's this immediate rush to judgment in all of this. Like he's a fraudster, he should go to jail. Let's close this chapter of crypto history and move on to the next thing, which is not clear, but let's move on to it as fast as we can.

• 15:25Speaker 04

  Let me mention, one of my favorite parts of this is that the fall of Sam Bankman-Fried and FTX has brought back all of our failed crypto friends from years past. Mark Karpalas, who ran Mt. Gox, a crypto exchange that failed in, what was that, 2015 now? That was many years ago. One of the first big crypto failures of exchanges that went away and took away everyone's money with it. He's been tweeting endlessly about it. He's been giving advice to Sam Bankman-Fried about what he should do and how mostly he shouldn't talk to anyone. He should only talk to his lawyers and he would know because he has been there and he is.

• 15:58Alex Cranz?

  I have a question. Are there any exchanges, crypto exchanges that are not Ponzi schemes?

• 16:05Speaker 04

  I don't know how to legally answer that.

• 16:06Alex Cranz?

  Like, because all of them, basically they take your money and then they say, now our money grew bigger and we'll give you your money back. But like, is the cat, is, is the US dollar?

• 16:15Nilay Patel?

  Wait, are you describing the exchanges or the tokens?

• 16:18Alex Cranz?

  The exchanges, like the exchanges.

• 16:20Speaker 04

  Themselves.

• 16:21Alex Cranz?

  Are they all Ponzi schemes?

• 16:24Speaker 04

  There's this weird thing in crypto, like the way that we talk about crypto and the way that people who are in it, who feel like they're in it, like the real players in crypto talk about it are very different. Like we talk about cryptocurrency and some kind of theoretical things. The people who are there who are trying to make some money, who are, who are looking at it and saying, this is going to be my nest egg. This is how I'm going to get rich. They have bought some crypto, they've traded back and forth, they, they own different cryptocurrencies, they have it all in their wallet and they're trying to turn it into something bigger. And what many of these companies offer is, okay, so you can loan, you can give us your crypto and we'll store it and we will somehow increase the value of it. We will do some magical thing, which sounds a lot like, I don't know, Bernie Madoff. And then there will be more money and they promise.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  And they all have their own tokens. I think that's where you're getting at, right? Like FTX had its own token.

• 17:09Speaker 04

  The magical money comes from when you, when you start talking about pay to earn stuff, when you start talking about practically everything in what the reason these companies have their own tokens. And that's where they're like, okay, so that's where the money is going to come from. But actually the money comes from other people depositing more money in it. And that's how you can get your money out, which.

• 17:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like it just kind of feels like they probably need to address that more than even the utility thing.

• 17:31Speaker 04

  If they address that, they wouldn't have businesses.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  Right. Cause the utility thing is way hard to address. Like, I just want to point at, I mentioned Brian Armstrong from Coinbase before, and he seems like a smart guy. You know, he's out there, he's public. He even interviewed to our friend Ben Thompson at Stratechery this past week. It's a good interview. You should read it. It's a lot of regulation where come from, who should do it, da, da, da. But there's this section in it where he's like, all the journalists failed at interviewing SPF. And so Ben is journalist and was like, all right, you be the journalist. What question would you ask? How would you defeat SPF interview?

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  And like, you know, I don't want to get too in the weeds or like navel gazy about journalism, but like I, I interview people. I, it's like you, if you approach an interview, like you're going to win it. Like most people, A, will not talk to you and B, also, what are you going to win? Like, you're not the cops, like you can just get people to talk to you as openly as they can. And like, people can judge the answers, but Ben asks him, okay, you're the journalist. So you have all these criticisms of media, like what would you ask? And Brian Armstrong's answer is like, I got nothing left to ask this guy. Like, we just need to move on. And it's like, well, that's the trap, right? Like you just don't want people to scrutinize the fact that all these exchanges are mostly unregulated.

• 18:46Nilay Patel?

  Y'all hated Gary Ansler, the SEC, all these other like regulators, would be regulators for even daring to think that they should regulate you. And now the thing happened that happens to unregulated financial institutions.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, where were the regulators? Why didn't they see these obvious lies?

• 19:04Speaker 04

  I mean, I've got a question that he could ask.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I just like, until you break that cycle, this is always going to feel scammy to me.

• 19:10Speaker 04

  And I know what he could ask Sam Bankman Fried. He could ask, why is it that every time there's a run on your business and people try to get their money out? Suddenly your site crashes and people can't get money out that day. I'm sorry, that's a question about Coinbase that I would ask to Brian Armstrong if he would answer it. He, for some reason, hasn't.

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's pretty weird.

• 19:26Alex Cranz?

  It's pretty shaky.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta stop talking about crypto. That is like the big news. It's in the background. I'm actually curious to ask the audience this. We got comments on the, on QuickBooks down on our site. So when you see this, go find the Verge Cast on our site. Leave us comments because I want people to engage with us on our own site. I think part of the crypto story is partially tech, right? It's obviously a technology story in its way, but it is quickly becoming some other kind of story. It's quickly becoming like a bank regulation story or, I don't know, like a politics story, a financial system story. So I'm just curious how people want us to cover it. Because for the longest time, we could cover crypto as tech, right? It was like really interesting tech with massive socio-political implications, like Verge Strike Zone and stuff, right?

• 20:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:10Nilay Patel?

  And now we're just at the level of like, oh, this guy just stole money. Like he's, he's just a bank robber. There's like not actually a lot there.

• 20:18Speaker 04

  CEO of FTX said in one of the hearings in Congress this week, just, this is just good old fashioned crime. They, they just stole the money. They just had the money and they just took it and spent it themselves. It's not, you don't have to like try and figure out what the algorithm did. They just took the money and bought jets and houses and stuff.

• 20:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:36Alex Cranz?

  At least Elizabeth Holmes went and she built something. Was it good? Did it work? No.

• 20:42Nilay Patel?

  No, that, did she?

• 20:47Nilay Patel?

  She took a, she took another device from another company that worked, took it apart, made it work in a shittier way.

• 20:54Speaker 04

  And gave people bad results on important medical tests.

• 20:58Nilay Patel?

  So I don't know about that one. Also, she, I mean, she's going to jail, the other guy's going to jail.

• 21:02Alex Cranz?

  A lot of people go to jail.

• 21:03Nilay Patel?

  The one part of this that is extremely a Verge story.

• 21:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  Like the most Verge story is like the new CEO of FTX is like testifying in, in the Senate. And he's just like, they fucking use QuickBooks.

• 21:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  He's like, what business at this scale uses QuickBooks? And he's just like gesturing at like the panel of senators. And the senators have no idea, like, they don't know. They're like, his QuickBooks bad?

• 21:31Alex Cranz?

  They're like, I use it for my taxes.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Oh, that moment also on our site, uh, just go watch it. It's, I mean, it is incredible. Okay. So that's SPF, FTX, whatever. Other big news from this week, it's kind of in the same zone, right? Like big breaking news would change the whole industry. Hasn't happened yet. Hard to talk about. It's this report from Mark German Bloomberg. Apple might be opening iOS to third party app stores in response to European legislation called the Digital Markets Act. This is another one of those European regulations that is like an inkblot test for how you feel about the power of democracy to regulate big companies. And also an inkblot test for how you might feel about the nature of time and deadlines.

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  Because no one knows when it will actually happen or by which process the various nations of Europe will come together and actually implement the law that they have theoretically passed or not passed, or in some manner of, of working have assembled words together.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  The, the EU is just the cutting edge of politics in just the, it's like a probabilistic field of lawyers. And like every potential outcome is happening. But no one knows when.

• 22:51Alex Cranz?

  I like that they kind of like create laws like I assign stories. Just like, you know what? I got an idea. Run with it. And a bunch of like a billion people are like, okay. It's great.

• 23:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:03Alex Cranz?

  But yeah, they walk us, walk us through this, Deli. Cause like this Apple news, I mean, I, I think it feels kind of big, even though there's the whole question of how any of this law and stuff is going to be. Enacted.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so the Digital Markets Act is one of these things we've been covering for a long time. Yeah, we've been covering it sporadically as different parts of the regulation get debated, added to the law, the law has to pass, the member nations of the EU themselves have to pass the law, but it is supposed to happen in 2024. And the DMA is, it tracks along a lot of the antitrust bills in this country. You can see that the sort of two legal regimes are playing off of each other.

• 23:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  And the basics, the basic ideas are going to be familiar to any Verchess listener. If you have a dominant position on, if you run an app store, or you're another kind of dominant ecosystem player, you are a gatekeeper to all kinds of other businesses. And so app stores in particular, Apple and Google are the gatekeepers. They are referred to in the act as gatekeepers. And there's all the things that gatekeepers have to do to open up the markets. And so in this case, it's allow side loading, allow other app stores, it's reduce the in-app payment fees, there's this laundry list. It actually has to happen. And just like the USB C thing, Apple has no choice. If they want to sell iPhones in Europe, they've got to comply with the law.

• 24:24Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 24:24Nilay Patel?

  There's no, they can't sandbank them free.

• 24:29Nilay Patel?

  So it seems likely, probable, a certainty, that Apple is building systems that would bring it into compliance with European law, just like it's certainty. We've heard Greg Josbyak say to Joanna Stern, for example, that, yeah, they're going to comply with the law around USB C.

• 24:44Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 24:45Nilay Patel?

  So of course, there were, there's been an iPhone with a USB C connector inside of an Apple lab for a decade, right? They're always ready to do these things. But I think what is happening now is Europe in particular is passing laws to make the things happen. So next year, we might see an actual iPhone ship with a USB C connector. And next year's version of iOS will at least have the hooks to allow compliance with the Digital Markets Act in Europe, allow side loading, allow other app stores, allow other payment systems. The questions are, does that actually mean Apple's going to stop demanding the money from the app companies? Because that has not been the case in all the other markets, right? In South Korea, where they are required to allow other in-app payment systems, they charge a fee.

• 25:27Nilay Patel?

  In the Netherlands, where it's like narrowly tailored to dating apps. And they have to allow other payment providers and dating apps. It's very strange. They charge 27%. Addie and McKenna have written a piece about this for our site a couple of weeks ago, which we mentioned on the show. You can do the culture war. Elon can do the culture war and get the antitrust bill passed. Because he was mad at Tim Cook, but Apple is just going to say, you owe us the money. In one way or another, Apple's going to get its money. They're good at it. Tim Cook is good at it. So the big questions around the EU bill and the DMA and all this stuff is, is the bill written in a way that closes whatever loopholes Apple might find?

• 26:06Nilay Patel?

  And just the complication of European law is such that I can't even tell you when this bill is going to pass. Let alone whether all the loopholes are closed.

• 26:18Speaker 04

  If they have to do it, will it apply if you don't live in Europe? Will we have two versions of iOS suddenly?

• 26:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's another one, right? Will Apple keep the phone locked down in other countries? Now, the EU says the latest date, quote unquote, gatekeeper companies have to comply is March 6, 2024. But there's like a gated series of other compliance dates about notifying regulators and disclosing your changes. There's a lot of moments to argue along the way for Apple. And then there's this important piece of the puzzle, which is you might do this in Europe, but you might definitely not allow this in the United States or China or your other big markets. And that, to me, is going to be the most interesting piece. Like, are we going to start doing like region locked iPhones? Like we used to do like VHS tapes or whatever, like or Nintendo games?

• 27:07Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my gosh.

• 27:08Nilay Patel?

  Are there going to be, are there going to be apps that have more capabilities outside of the United States? Because they don't have to go through Apple's App Store rules? Is that going to be a good experience for people? Like, I have long thought that Apple has sort of tamped down on innovation on its phone because of the App Store process. I think they should open it up, but I have lived through a mobile phone market where there were multiple competing app stores and independent distributions of apps. That wasn't great. Shout out to my friend Dieter Bone, who like made an entire documentary about, about handspring. Like, that wasn't a great market for those early phones. And Apple actually did innovate by doing the App Store. So there are questions to be asked here.

• 27:50Nilay Patel?

  I was just thinking, in a world where Microsoft can't ship game streaming because Apple won't let them.

• 27:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  We might be losing more than we're gaining by Apple's control of the store.

• 27:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, I think we're definitely going to get region locked iPhones. I think that's like, we all just need to like, make our peace with it now. We're going to be importing our phones from Europe. So we can have the really good phones. It's always going to be a nightmare. Like, we're finally out of that phase where you had to really think about what network you were on when you bought your iPhone. And we're just going to go right back to having that weird little question of, okay, do I buy it unlocked from the US? Or really unlocked from Norway?

• 28:30Speaker 04

  I think that we're not going to have so much the hardware difference. It was just a software difference. And I got a VPN to Luxembourg so that I can play Fortnite on my iPhone.

• 28:41Nilay Patel?

  That sounds hot.

• 28:42Alex Cranz?

  We're going to be back to like jail breaking, right? Like, but instead of jail breaking, just so we can sign stuff onto our things, we're going to be like, okay, now I'm in Europe and that's just going to be your phone.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  The VPN market's going to explode.

• 28:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  It's going to be great. I just, the phones know where they are, right? At the end of the day, the phone has GPS chip and Apple can read it whenever it wants. And I, that is, I think that's the big question mark here. There is the other question mark about the nature of the EU regulatory process, which I just, I don't want to, I don't want to under emphasize just how nebulous all of it is. But it makes sense that Apple's preparing to comply with it. It's just, is it going to be effective? Is it going to mean anything to us here? Is the United States going to take the cover of this happening, of this report? And shove some antitrust stuff into this omnibus bill that appears to be passing in the lame duck session that Congress is in that? Like, all these things would happen.

• 29:38Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I hope they don't. I mean, I want like antitrust stuff, but I don't want it shoved in at the last minute into an omnibus bill. That just seems unpleasant.

• 29:48Nilay Patel?

  You have like a stylistic difference.

• 29:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like, it's like, ah, now I have to like read this whole bill because what if there's more than one part of it? Like, that's too many words for me to read. It's Christmas.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, the good news is we have a high-end policy desk with McKenna and Addy to read it for you.

• 30:06Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 30:06Nilay Patel?

  That happens, maybe there's just rumors that might happen.

• 30:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:09Nilay Patel?

  But you can see right now how the United States and Europe are kind of bouncing back and forth on antitrust stuff, particularly regulating the big tech companies. And I think Elon has provided more cover for antitrust stuff in regard to Apple because of the perceived content moderation issues with the store than ever before.

• 30:28Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  You can see how you might scoot some antitrust stuff along because you've got the cover of now both Europe doing it, right? It's already gonna happen anyway over there. And you've got the cover of being whatever kind of free speech warrior you think that you're being.

• 30:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but I think like my one concern there is that the GOP has historically been like, yeah, we're for antitrust, but only when it can, only when it like pertains to censorship. Otherwise, you can build as big a monopoly as you want. And so I just don't, I don't know, I'm real reluctant with our current Congress and their inability to like, parse a lot of tech, like really technologically advanced concepts to create a bill with actual teeth to it.

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and that's why they're gonna shove it into a bill at the end of the year and call it a day.

• 31:13Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's gonna be gross.

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  I think that's why those rumors are out there. Well, I don't know if it's gonna happen. It's just those are the rumors.

• 31:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:18Nilay Patel?

  Actually, speaking of Elon, we should talk about Elon quickly before we take a break. As always, there's a lot of Elon stuff, most notably Twitter Blue is back. Elon caved to Apple. It's 11.99 on iOS. It's 8.99 on the web, 7.99 on the web. So he's just paying the Apple tax.

• 31:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  Even after raging about it, he's paying it. There's the checkmarks are different colors. I think The Verge has a gold one because we're a media organization. Government organizations get a gray checkmark that says official. I will note here that a deeply hilarious situation over the past week is that various members of the Norwegian government, including the prime minister, were labeled as Nigerian government officials and just tweeted Elon. And he eventually was like, sorry, and they fixed it. And when I say for a while, it was like a day and a half. And they were just like, this is in

• 32:14Alex Cranz?

  This is not where we live. This is not where we do our work.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  Because the tweet was very funny. It was very much like, although we enjoy our diplomatic relationship and alphabetical proximity to Nigeria, we do not live in Nigeria. So that's going great. It's back. We'll see how it goes. A lot of people have stepped back their Twitter usage in the past few weeks. I'm one of them. Our friend Casey Newton is one of them. A bunch of our staff has done it. It just feels like people don't want to participate in whatever he's doing.

• 32:41Alex Cranz?

  I think it was kind of rough, especially earlier this week, when, when he, he made a bunch of transphobic jokes online. And then he went and appeared with Dave Chappelle in a very weird, bizarre appearance in San Francisco. And like Chappelle is also kind of notoriously transphobic. And I know a lot of people I know were like, I think that's it for me. I think that's my moment.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  So the moment that a lot of people mentioned to me was when Yoel Roth, who was Twitter's former head of safe, head of trust and safety, Elon just like basically sicked a mob on him.

• 33:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:12Nilay Patel?

  So Yoel Roth had written his PhD thesis about the responsibility of sites like Grindr to provide safe experiences for young people who were using the site anyway.

• 33:24Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 33:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? So if you are running a site like Grindr, you know that young gay people are on your site.

• 33:30Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 33:31Nilay Patel?

  You can't stop them.

• 33:32Alex Cranz?

  They're there.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  So his PhD thesis was you have a responsibility to create safer experiences for them. And Elon tweeted an out of context paragraph of the PhD thesis that says that explains a lot. And he sicked a mob of, you know, the crazy groomer, culture war people on his own former head of trust and safety.

• 33:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:50Nilay Patel?

  Who then had to flee his home. And that is just about as bad faith shit box behavior as it gets. And that to me, I think was, I don't need to make free shit for you.

• 33:59Alex Cranz?

  A hundred percent.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, it's my birthday tomorrow. Like, I'm too old to work for free.

• 34:05Alex Cranz?

  Well, we also saw the Elon jet stuff. Richard, you've been following this. Is Elon jet back on Twitter? Or do I only get it on Instagram now?

• 34:15Speaker 04

  It is at this particular instant as I am talking and I can't say anything for beyond that. Still suspended again. It was suspended and then it was back and then it was suspended again. And they changed the rules and they said, no, actually you can release location data. Maybe sometimes if it's a day after. And there's been a whole saga of Elon claiming that someone was stalking him and attacked a car that had his child in it, which many people can certainly understand and relate to. But his reaction is, I think the problem is this guy who is tweeting public information, publicly available information about where my jet is, is the problem of someone attacking my car that I was not in. So he has to stop. And he took that off of Twitter, which is also something he promised he wouldn't do. But Elon's promises aren't worth anything.

• 34:59Speaker 04

  You can just ask Twitter, the company that he said he would buy and then didn't want to.

• 35:04Alex Cranz?

  So it's like TMZ and all of the like paparazzi.

• 35:08Nilay Patel?

  This is even, this is farther back. This is like 2005, six, seven Gawker Stalker.

• 35:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:13Nilay Patel?

  Do you remember this?

• 35:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Alex, a former GEO media employee. You've got to remember this. I mean, I had this debate. I was there already, like Gawker Stalker. If you don't remember Gawker is a website.

• 35:25Alex Cranz?

  RIP.

• 35:25Nilay Patel?

  Many, many, many things have happened. Gawker was a website. For a minute, at the height of its powers, Gawker had, I mean, it was crowdsourced.

• 35:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you could just write in and be like, I saw Taylor Swift walking out of.

• 35:43Nilay Patel?

  And this feature is called Gawker Stalker and it had a map and like literally, I mean, like the celebrities went crazy. They all had a map. It's dangerous. This whole debate occurred already. I promise you in like 2007.

• 35:56Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:57Nilay Patel?

  What you have now is Elon has a jet, has a transponder. The location of the transponder is publicly available. The flight plans of the jet are publicly available.

• 36:07Speaker 04

  Well, they were, they aren't now.

• 36:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, they still are.

• 36:09Alex Cranz?

  They still are.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  It's just this one Twitter account is not available.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  No, he filed a thing with the FAA so that he doesn't have to do that anymore. Cause apparently that's a thing.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  He has not succeeded in such.

• 36:19Speaker 04

  Or is trying to anyway.

• 36:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And they have to keep that, they have to keep those transponders on because they are used by all of the different air traffic controllers and all those air traffic controllers are paid for by the federal government. Like, basically, he has to do it because it's federal law. He doesn't just get to be special. And he's upset about the fact that he can't just-

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  And the Supreme Court has ruled that the transponder data is not a publishing, is not the first. I mean, it's like, he's just like off in the weeds of like, he hates this one Twitter account. I get it. I like, I get it. And like, having-

• 36:49Speaker 04

  He's now rewriting Twitter policy to say that you can't say where anyone is without their consent, which, if you read it, would say that the NORAD Santa tracker is done, first of all.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  Second, the people who follow college coaches around to see who's getting hired or fired, their accounts are done. Also, you can't livestream anything or post a picture, because if you post a picture and someone's in it, you'll know where they are. You've now broken the rules and your account will be deleted.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  Let me just say this, and let me say directly, welcome to hell, Elon. This is what it's like when you make speech regulations, when you appoint yourself the speech police and you start with all legal speech, you quickly discover there's a bunch of shit that is legal, that you don't like, that no one likes. And most of this conversation has been focused on whether or not we should let racist people be like, the size of people's skulls determines how intelligent they are, which is legal. That's just a legal dumbass thing you can say in this country, that most scaled social media platforms are like, well, the problem with doing that all the time

• 37:54Nilay Patel?

  is it makes all the cool people go away. And then we're left with shitheads. So we don't want the shitheads to do that, so the cool people hang out. This is more or less the calculus that is made on social platforms every day. Do you want cool people? You can't have racists. Do the cool people make us more money than the racists? They do. Goodbye, racists. We want cool people. It's not complicated. But that's where almost all the energy of the conversation is. But the reality of it is that eventually, your desire to be around cool people always wins. So you just like, reduce the reach of the racism, or whatever you're gonna do.

• 38:27Alex Cranz?

  I mean, most people's desire, not Elon's.

• 38:30Nilay Patel?

  But he wants to turn that knob down. I mean, he, right? Freedom of speech, not freedom of rea- he's got all the things. The, the problem is like, great, you can turn the knobs on that. Whatever, your incentives are always the same and they will always land in the same places. It's when you get into things that are just flat out legal. Publicly available government data about where planes are that you don't like, you have to start reaching. And I am very sensitive to the notion that people should not know where I am all the time. I think that's bad. I'm, I get it. I'm with you. But the proximate relationship to plane in city and guy attacks car does not exist.

• 39:09Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's, it's actually not true. You can't, when he, he's, he's, he swore he's gonna, or he tweeted, he's gonna sue this college kid that runs the tracker because his car was attacked. And you have to go to court. I hope he files his lawsuit. If the college kid is like any other Gen Z college kid, they've already got a merch store ready to go. This lawsuit gets filed. They already got a Patreon set up. Like, that's just hustle culture with the teens. But he's gonna show up in court and he's gonna have to try to convince a judge or a jury that there is a proximate relationship, there's a cause and effect between this Twitter account and this person doing the thing that they did. And the Twitter account, just importantly, does not actually tell you where Elon Musk is.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  It tells you where his plane is.

• 39:56Alex Cranz?

  And like, it just says, it's in this city at this airport, which are, I think they're supposed to be guarded and difficult to get into and do things around. That's my understanding of how airports work in the United States. So like-

• 40:10Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't like it, and he's the speech police on this platform. So he is now, he's reached himself.

• 40:15Speaker 04

  You know, you keep saying these, these legal words.

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  This is the thing that he's criticizing all of the previous administrations of Twitter for. And I will remind everyone once again, criticism of Elon Musk's administration of Twitter is in no way praise-

• 40:26Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  -for the previous dipshit Twitter administrations. That, that, these things are not opposites. They've all been bad. But he's doing the thing that every other platform ends up doing. In particular, Twitter has ended up doing. Which is you have an outcome, you have some pre-written set of rules. And then because you control the rules, you can interpret them any way you want to arrive at the outcome you would like. So he's like, this validates my rule against public safety. And it turns out that he's, he both writes the rules and is the judge. And at the end of the day, that's the thing that delegitimizes you is no one believes that the rules mean anything because the judge just gets to make up whatever they want.

• 41:08Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  And every platform has arrived at this exact moment and had to make some kind of decision. Facebook notably set up a Supreme Court, like a full-on external Supreme Court to create the appearance of legitimacy for its, the interpretation of its rules. And Twitter notably did not do that. Right? They just do whatever they want, whenever they want. Every platform just does whatever they want, whenever they want. And Elon has just fallen directly into the trap because of the Elon Musk thing.

• 41:37Alex Cranz?

  I know we got to cut to break in a second, but I have one question, one final question. Does this make Elon Musk Judge Dredd?

• 41:45Speaker 04

  I just want to know, okay, so you, you act like he might lose in court and maybe, maybe the legal argument doesn't hold up or something like that. But what if the person he's going against hires a lawyer who happens to be big into QAnon again?

• 41:59Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 42:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:01Alex Cranz?

  It's going to get messy.

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  It is true that the legal system does not always produce the outcomes you might think. I, I go back to why did it take a little bit longer to arrest Sam Pangman Freed? Cause you had to put together a case. Government's kind of lazy. It's all, I'm not out here being like, government's great at this. They routinely fail at getting the right outcome in court. But I think this one is very much, you show up and you just have to prove that thing A led to cause B. And in this case, there's no connection between the two things. He just doesn't like it.

• 42:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:34Nilay Patel?

  And so he, he reached to a conclusion and that's the thing that delegitimizes the regulator, right? And this is why people hate platforms. This is why ultimately.

• 42:44Alex Cranz?

  It's why people hate Judge Dredd.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Who makes the content moderation rules. He wishes he was Judge Dredd. That is the answer to your question, by the way.

• 42:51Speaker 04

  He's, he's the Judge Dredd sequel that nobody watched with Joel Kinnaman in it.

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  That's rough.

• 42:55Speaker 04

  I love, I like Joel Kinnaman, but I didn't see it.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  By the way, on top of all this, the FTC is out there asking questions like, "Do you have enough money to pay for the compliance that you are legally required to do with us?" It's, it's rough over there. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be back. Alex is gonna lead us through what's going on in the streaming wars. We'll be right back.

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• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Alex Krantz, this week you wrote the following headline. "The Golden Age of the Streaming Wars Has Ended." I would tell you that I knew this was true.

• 44:46Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  When HBO started pulling content left and right, including its own marquee hit show, F-Boy Island.

• 44:55Nilay Patel?

  Like HBO Max had a hit show.

• 44:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  The show was a hit. People wrote about it. It's like the best rethink of the dating show in forever. Like.

• 45:04Alex Cranz?

  People liked.

• 45:05Nilay Patel?

  You should go read the coverage. I would tell you to watch it. You can't because HBO Max yanked it.

• 45:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  But go read the coverage in like Vulture and other places.

• 45:12Alex Cranz?

  They also like.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  It's fun to watch.

• 45:13Alex Cranz?

  They upset you in particular, I know, because Westworld also got pulled. I'm sorry.

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  I was trying not to lead with Westworld.

• 45:21Alex Cranz?

  I know. I could feel it and like I could hear the soundtrack in your head for the show.

• 45:26Nilay Patel?

  What's a show with more than five people watching it?

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Westworld is yanked off.

• 45:32Speaker 04

  They still, they still have me as a viewer. I'm in. My subscription is still good. It will, it will continue to be good as long as they keep the good content on HBO Max, which they have.

• 45:40Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 45:41Speaker 04

  I'm talking about Arlis, which is what I'm always talking about.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what?

• 45:44Speaker 04

  Arlis. That is the only show that they need to have.

• 45:47Alex Cranz?

  Is Arlis on? I thought it was on Showtime.

• 45:48Nilay Patel?

  So you're just like deep in the archive. I don't think Zaz live knows Arlis exists. First of all, like that's how you know you're safe.

• 45:54Speaker 04

  Drow was on it.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  Does you remember the show? Head of the class.

• 45:56Alex Cranz?

  As long as he doesn't have to pay residuals on it, it's fine. But it's so, so they pulled, they pulled this show. They pulled F Boy Island. I'm so sorry, Neelai. They pulled Westworld. I'm so sorry, Richard. I know you guys both really loved those shows respectively, but, but they yanked a whole bunch of this stuff. And part of this is, is part of the same calculus. They've been pulling a lot of shows over the last year. It's residuals, right? Like we've got a whole bunch of contracts coming up next year, including ones for the Writers Guild of America, Screen Actors Guild, Directors Guild. And they're all going to be negotiating for higher residuals because they want more of this, like if everything's on streaming, that's where the money is.

• 46:35Alex Cranz?

  And they would like a cut of that. And you've seen, you've seen it already. A lot of these writers and stuff are out there complaining right now about like how high their residual checks were with traditional TV where they could support themselves after writing a couple of really banger episodes because they go into syndication and they just live on that money. And then they can't do that in the streaming world. It's just done. Like that, that kind of way of, of making a living as a writer is gone. So there's this residuals conversation, but there also it turns out a lot of these shows are getting pulled because they're going to pack them together and sell them to what I learned is now called a fast network.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  It's good. They've tried a few different acronyms for this. What is the acronym?

• 47:18Alex Cranz?

  This is, this is my new favorite though, because it used to, I was like, the cheap shitty networks. But now they're fast networks, free ad-supported TV is what that means. And that means like the weird garbage version of Plex when you first download Plex and you haven't put any of your other stuff on. And it's like, look, if you want to watch this movie with other stuff that I've legally acquired. That's one, that's an example of it. I think Tubi is an example. Pluto, I think, is an example. Crackle, when it existed, I think Crackle's gone now. I think it died finally. But, but they, they still exist. There's a lot of them.

• 47:55Nilay Patel?

  Roku Channel.

• 47:56Alex Cranz?

  Roku Channel, that's probably the most active, best known one. And, and so he's trying to pack it up and sell it there. So someone, probably Roku is going to be like, do you want to watch Westworld? And a full season of that Joss Whedon show that got canceled right when it got really good. And it took way too long. The Nevers?

• 48:17Speaker 04

  Raised by Wolves.

• 48:18Alex Cranz?

  No, that's a different one. That's a garbage show. That was from, uh, that's a bad show, Richard. No, who did that? That was the guy who did, um, the original.

• 48:28Speaker 04

  I can't remember who, who made what or which show they were on.

• 48:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he made it.

• 48:31Speaker 04

  There were too many shows, which is what your article mentions.

• 48:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's part of it too. There's too many shows. And so, so all of this stuff got pulled. HBO Max is, is like, it's really kind of unclear what he's trying to craft out of HBO Max or Max, whatever you want to call it. Shout out to better Maxes in the world.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  She's very cute. She's, I, I personally think they should just give my daughter the streaming service.

• 48:55Alex Cranz?

  I think she'd program it better.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  It would just be like Bluey all day and all night. And then whatever garbage YouTube that she watches, which is honestly terrifying.

• 49:01Alex Cranz?

  She'd be like, I don't care who has the rights to Bluey, but it's coming on my network. Make it happen.

• 49:08Nilay Patel?

  Basically how that would go. There's a, there's a Barbie cover of Girls Just Want To Have Fun that she loves. And then we'll be in the car and actual Girls Just Want To Have Fun will come on and Becky and I will be like, do you want to listen to the, the good version of this? And she's like, this isn't Barbie. And then both of us, our hearts break in the car. We have to pull over and just cry, wailing for hours on end because we can't get our daughter to like Cyndi Lauper.

• 49:34Alex Cranz?

  Well, she's like, play the good one in the backseat.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  It's very, very bad. This is, to Richard's point, Alex, this was your article, right? There was a golden age of streaming when everyone is flooding the zone.

• 49:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:47Nilay Patel?

  Honestly, in search of like monopoly style profits.

• 49:50Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. To be the one true streaming network with the most subscribers. They were paying for a lot of things. A lot of interesting stuff got made. And now all that stuff is kind of getting canned. And I think what you're seeing with Warner in particular, is some changes that needed to happen in that studio are happening. We should talk about the DC Universe or whatever's happening there. But the business model is reverting to traditional television.

• 50:15Alex Cranz?

  And that's, I mean, it makes sense, right?

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  Right. Where you make some stuff, you run it once, and you find a syndication window and sell it again.

• 50:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I think a lot of people want those syndication, that syndication to return, right? Like syndication is dead. Used to, the business of TV was you go, you get to your fifth season. Every season's 20 episodes. So you hit your 100th episode, that means you're syndicated. When you're syndicated, that means you get a really good deal with all these smaller channels that syndicate you. And that means everybody who's working on that show suddenly has like, their house paid. Like their retirement is set when you hit a syndication deal. And that disappears with streaming because nobody wants to pay syndication forever. Right? Like, zero people want to do that. Nobody can afford that. That's why we see stuff go on Netflix and then go away. And so a lot of people, including probably Zaslov, want to bring that back and they want

• 51:06Alex Cranz?

  to bring back the market. So in many ways, Zaslov is not the villain. He's actually

• 51:12Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy. This is a big change for you, Alex.

• 51:14Alex Cranz?

  No, I like.

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  This is a big change for you.

• 51:16Alex Cranz?

  I hate him. I despise this guy because I think everything he's done has been poorly messaged. I just think he's like a bad messenger, but.

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  You're just big on messaging. You're like, I don't want an antitrust bill in the omnibus.

• 51:26Alex Cranz?

  I was like.

• 51:27Nilay Patel?

  Zaslov is doing the right things, but messaging it the wrong way.

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  Be gentle. I have to sit through.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  You're just looking for a gentle touch. That's fine.

• 51:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. 2020 was hard, y'all. Like, like, let's be more gentle with how we announce things. But, but I think like, his, his calculus here is he wants to, he knows that network TV is dying. And that's where he made all of his money. And so he's like, how do I reinvent network TV and bring it here? Meanwhile, Disney is like, how do I own all of the IP in the world?

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:53Alex Cranz?

  Period.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, and that's what, that's what Netflix has been doing as well. I mean,

• 51:57Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 51:57Nilay Patel?

  That's, again, the.

• 51:58Alex Cranz?

  Well, Netflix is like, trying. I think Netflix is in a weird place because they are so tech focused, that they don't quite understand how that TV industry worked before them. And they don't necessarily want to. And that's why we see things like, they, they go and they, they sell ads, but they're only selling ads to people who still pay $8 a month.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  Meanwhile, the fast trend, by the way, we, I mentioned the other acronyms.

• 52:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  The one that died was AVOD, Ad-Supported Video On Demand.

• 52:28Alex Cranz?

  Because it was stupid.

• 52:28Nilay Patel?

  And I.

• 52:29Alex Cranz?

  Bad messaging.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  It was good. Because, because it was the opposite of SVOD, which was Subscription Video On Demand. And people would say these words to us in dead seriousness. They'd be like, the AVOD market's booming. And I'd be like, you need to reconsider yourself. And they've now arrived at fast.

• 52:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:45Nilay Patel?

  Which is free and ad-supported TV. Fine.

• 52:48Alex Cranz?

  It's fast.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  Very good. What you mean is.

• 52:50Speaker 04

  But it's keeping companies like Vizio and Roku in business. And the studios and everyone else wants a chunk. They're, they're seeing that. They're seeing these profits and they want a piece of it.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What's, so it's fascinating. You mentioned Netflix and they're doing ads. Report this week, Netflix rolled out its ad. They sold a bunch of stuff, right? They're doing the ads in partnership with Microsoft. I don't want to overstate this, because even the people involved in the story were trying not to overstate it. But Netflix is returning the money to the advertisers because they can't deliver the inventory.

• 53:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 53:22Nilay Patel?

  So if you are a digital advertiser, this is our business too. By the way, disclosure, I'm a Netflix EP. This show is called The Future of You. You should go watch it.

• 53:32Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna mention Peacock. Quick, do another one. Do another one.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Comcast is an investor in a parent company, Vox Media, whatever. Now you know this information, but the way like the ad business works is, I don't like the version does like millions of page views a week, right?

• 53:47Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  We have ad slots on the page views. So we have inventory and we like tell advertisers, you come buy this inventory, we'll show you some impressions of ads and there's like a number. Netflix doesn't have the inventory, like not enough people have signed up for the ad plans and they're not watching enough shows for Netflix to keep its promises about how many ads will be shown to people.

• 54:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  So they're just returning the money and all the advertisers are basically like, yep, they just started this thing. They ran into it. It's Q4. This is the hot time for advertising because of the holidays and all this other stuff. This is what a good partner would do so we can put the money against other platforms where people will actually see the ads. This is all fine. They'll get there in the end. But that's where Netflix is at in growing that side of its business, which is they don't have the inventory. Like they don't have a scaled advertising.

• 54:36Alex Cranz?

  It just started November 3rd, I think was when it launched. So like, they haven't had a lot of time to build those subscriptions and they're gonna have to build those subscriptions because most people were probably already paying, most people who were paying that $8, when it got bumped up to, whatever is it, $11, $12, are probably still on that plan or just not on Netflix altogether. So like, yeah, they're gonna take, it's gonna take a long time, I think, for them to figure out how to do the ads well. And HBO has that head start in that Zaslove knows that business super, super, super well.

• 55:10Nilay Patel?

  You love him.

• 55:10Alex Cranz?

  I do kinda love him. Like I respect him. I respect him. Do I hate everything he does? Yes.

• 55:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to like get too middle school on this, but like you love him.

• 55:22Alex Cranz?

  I love, no, I know. I'm gonna like, what's that, what's that thing? The little paper thing you would do? Put his name in there.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  The triangles?

• 55:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Where's Mash?

• 55:31Nilay Patel?

  It's you and Zaslove.

• 55:32Alex Cranz?

  Me and Zaslove and Mash.

• 55:33Nilay Patel?

  He might as well be pulling hair out. I just want to be clear about this.

• 55:38Alex Cranz?

  Call me buddy. Call me Zaslove. Uh, but, but he is like, he's, he's trying to, to bring TV back. And that's good in some cases because financially, a lot of people are going to make a lot more money theoretically in that way. Like you bring syndication back, you start selling this stuff to other things. You lean more on advertisers for your profits rather than subscriptions. You're gonna make more money, but that also means you're beholden to those, those like mass audiences, which means we're going to lose a lot of really cool content.

• 56:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The, the comparison I think is most interesting here is music and Spotify. So Spotify, Apple, titled, Amazon, whatever, they all have the same basic relationship to the music industry, more or less. Right? The music industry makes a bunch of songs. They put them on these services. You pay the services some money, hit play, there's a calculation made and then the artist gets a penny at the end of the day.

• 56:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  Right? But they don't own the content and every time you, the listener, consume the content, there is a series of financial transactions that take place in which the artist, the producers, the songwriters, whoever, receives some benefit. And I, I think it is fair and it is very clear. The industry has spent a lot of time arguing about that set of calculations between you hitting play and the pennies that show up in their bank accounts. And I, I think those conversations are fair and honestly, the number of pennies should go up.

• 56:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  When you hit play on Netflix, there isn't some payout.

• 57:02Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like you pay Netflix some money, you hit play, they own all the content. It's more or less the end of it. That's the case for Apple as well. It's the case for the, the TV streaming. So the, the way that the music market works is like Spotify doesn't really own anything. That's why they care about podcasts so much because they get to own the content.

• 57:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Cause that's where they want to own it.

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  They're not, they're not taking a cut of everything, right? They're not paying out some huge percentage of your subscription fee to someone else. They're making the podcast, they're on the podcast, that's the end of it. They take all the money. That's where Netflix has been. Right? They just like pay the money upfront and they get 95 Shonda Rhimes shows and like Shonda Rhimes gets a huge check and that's the end of it. Where you're talking about syndication, you used to make a show and then you would sell it 500 times.

• 57:47Alex Cranz?

  Like, that's why Star Trek exists.

• 57:49Speaker 04

  The other thing is you'd actually have some idea of how many people are watching it, which Netflix and the others, they're giving out a little bit more information now, but.

• 57:56Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's, that's part of the issue. That's part of the issue with Netflix we've seen.

• 58:00Speaker 04

  Is that, you know, you, you on the other end, you press play and no one knows.

• 58:03Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like, like they, they've started talking, they have to be a little more open now because they are selling, they're selling ads. So they have to be more open, but you're still seeing this really weird thing where they're like, oh yeah, we're going to give you a top 10. So you can see the shows most watched this month and we're going to give you all these various kind of small analytics. And then a show will go like this one, I'm going to talk about it because I really liked it and I'm sad it got canceled, but it is part of this conversation. Warrior None gets canceled. It had been in like the top 10 for three weeks. It had, it had done really good numbers theoretically and then it gets canceled and everybody like its fans are like, we did all we could. You had people like watching it on four different networks in their house because they heard that that was one of the metrics needed to get a show renewed on Netflix. Like they're just like out there

• 58:46Alex Cranz?

  making little prayer circles and stuff, doing everything they can.

• 58:49Nilay Patel?

  Four TVs in a circle.

• 58:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. All in a circle staring at each other and they still didn't get it renewed. And I think earlier this week, one of the executives for Netflix was on, was it Hollywood Reporter, Variety, just doing an interview and they're like, hey, you cancel stuff, but it seems to be doing well and you cancel it anyway? What's up with that? And they're like, well, you know, there's a lot that goes into it. We can't get into it right now. And keeps on going. And that's not going to work as, as this industry starts to kind of shift back into that TV space because used to, you knew your show was going to get canceled because it was doing terrible in the Nielsen ratings. And like, there was a whole lot of different signs from the organization that it was going to do bad. And Netflix doesn't do any of that. Netflix just like spits it out and is like, enjoy. You didn't enjoy it enough. Goodbye.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would just say like the old model was you would make friends.

• 59:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:42Nilay Patel?

  And then they would sell it to NBC is the first run and make your first big chunk of money. And then you would sell it to whatever next.

• 59:51Alex Cranz?

  UPN.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  Like UPN or the CW.

• 59:55Alex Cranz?

  Ovation.

• 59:55Nilay Patel?

  Syndication. And then like you just got to re up those syndication deals over and over and over again. The example I'll give, um, which I always think about all the time, like, I think a lot of people associate Shark Tank with CNBC.

• 1:00:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  But CNBC buys Shark Tank in syndication from ABC, like first run Shark Tank is on ABC. CNBC just buys it and runs it in prime time at night, like all day, every day.

• 1:00:20Nilay Patel?

  Disclosure, I'm a CNBC contributor. This is a disclosure. Every time I talk about TV, it's like.

• 1:00:24Alex Cranz?

  We just have a little ding pop every time you have to do a disclosure. It would be great.

• 1:00:28Nilay Patel?

  There's a lawyer, the Jeopardy's lawyers outside my window, just waving at me. It's great. But that's a syndication deal and that's, it's a really valuable syndication deal, not only for Shark Tank.

• 1:00:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  But for CNBC, right? They're getting audience at night and they didn't have to pay to produce it. They don't have to pay to make sure it's hit. It's, they already know it's a hit. They're buying it for a discount because it already went out in the first run. And they're getting audience at night and that dynamic has not existed across any of the streaming services. So you're good. Yeah. I think we're just seeing the industry move towards this moment where the content no longer belongs to streaming service forever. The people who make the content are saying, we want second, third, fourth bites at the apple. Because making something for one upfront payment does not actually make you rich. Selling, making something once and selling it five times makes you rich.

• 1:01:12Alex Cranz?

  It's coming from the audience too, right? Like, like audiences are already complaining about, oh, you release everything at once. And then I have to watch it and it doesn't have time to build audience. I don't have time to like, get my friends into it. Because you're going to cancel it in four weeks if I don't watch it four times at a circle. And, and so like, like, I think everybody has kind of gotten fatigued with this glut of content we've gotten. And as much as we've also enjoyed it, right? Like there's a lot of stories we wouldn't have gotten told. In a world where people were thinking really hard about what to green light and whatnot. So yeah, we're, we're just basically seeing a big contraction, I think is about to start and it's going to be really.

• 1:01:50Speaker 04

  Sounds like we're going back to basic cable. Like we're going back to.

• 1:01:52Alex Cranz?

  We're going back to basic cable, but you have less power.

• 1:01:54Nilay Patel?

  Dude, Richard, that's where you and I came from, man. Richard and I started is baby cable bloggers and gadget. Richard, you used to run Engadget HD. This is your time.

• 1:02:04Speaker 04

  More networks than anyone I.

• 1:02:07Speaker 04

  I will never forget, I said something uncharitable about one of the channels where they sell stuff. And the only note they sent was that they changed their name and I didn't know. And they were just happy that anyone was talking about them.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  I can't wait for Richard and I to like, go to another cable card meeting. It's coming.

• 1:02:27Alex Cranz?

  It's coming.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna have to do it. It's gonna be great. We should mention, by the way, we did an entire episode of streaming winners and losers with Charles Plaim Moore. We did the whole go 90 scale. I have a giant note here from Liam that says, don't rehash that episode. So go listen to it. It was great. It was really fun. We did go 90 for everyone. I want to end this segment, though, by briefly trying to understand what is going on with the DC Universe, with James Gunn.

• 1:02:53Alex Cranz?

  He's making moves.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  He's making everybody mad, but he's doing apparently the right thing. What he, what's going on?

• 1:02:58Alex Cranz?

  I mean, he's kind of like Zaslov in the way that he's not messaging correctly. I know. He's not doing it like my boy Zaslov. He's my future husband. Don't you know?

• 1:03:09Nilay Patel?

  Zas is the angel of death, man.

• 1:03:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Z baby.

• 1:03:15Nilay Patel?

  You said that. I was like gently teasing you and you landed at Z baby, not me.

• 1:03:20Alex Cranz?

  Please, please don't include that.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  I didn't do that. I want to be very clear that I had nothing to do with that.

• 1:03:27Alex Cranz?

  You could see it in your, I like, I could see it in your head. I could see you coming there. Like you're-

• 1:03:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a word cloud right here that says Z baby.

• 1:03:33Alex Cranz?

  And I had to read it. I'm compelled to read things when I see them. That's what my co-star said today. It said that I needed to read things out loud. But anyway, so a lot is happening there. Obviously, he was put in charge of the Warner Brothers Universe, like DC Universe, because they have as big an IP as Marvel. Nobody knew who Iron Man was when, when that first movie came out in 2008. Like, zero people knew who Iron Man was. And now he's one of the biggest superheroes in the world. And DC has been looking at that for the last 20 years, 15 years, whatever, being furious because they have Superman and they can't figure out how to do anything with Superman. And so they, they bring in

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  Gunn and he's like, yeah, I'm going to change things up. And part of his thing is like, the old shared universe sucks. And to his credit, the old shared universe sucks.

• 1:04:29Nilay Patel?

  It's not great. Even the ones that people like, like Aquaman. If you read The Ringer, I love The Ringer. You should read The Ringer.

• 1:04:36Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 1:04:37Nilay Patel?

  The Ringer like loves Aquaman and they love it ironically. Like they're like, this movie is so ridiculous that it's fun to watch.

• 1:04:45Alex Cranz?

  Like when Nicole Kidman shows up and she's like, I've been living underwater, wearing fish bones for 20 years. And you're just supposed to be like, oh.

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I would say that the orchestral fish rock concert is really when I give up.

• 1:04:58Speaker 04

  They recut the Justice League movie in four by three and let people watch it that way. That was a thing.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  That's actually, I might've done this entire segment just to bring up four by three Justice League with your. Look, say what you will about Zaslov, our new homie.

• 1:05:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:13Nilay Patel?

  Z baby.

• 1:05:13Alex Cranz?

  Z baby.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  He's making cuts. He's knifing things. He brought in James Gunn. James Gunn, you know, he clipped Wonder Woman three. Patty Jenkins put out a statement saying Wonder Woman three is off. She did not mention that Wonder Woman two was a disaster.

• 1:05:27Alex Cranz?

  That wasn't a good, yeah, it was a horrible film. It was like, it was sexist. You're like, how do you have so many women making this movie? And you're making this horrible sexist movie? Like, it was just obscenely bad.

• 1:05:41Nilay Patel?

  I feel like a movie, it's true. It was sexist in like surprising ways.

• 1:05:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  The plot of the movie really centers around taking over someone's body and then having sex with them.

• 1:05:53Alex Cranz?

  Like not a good thing to do. And also Wonder Woman was a terrible friend.

• 1:05:58Nilay Patel?

  Like I, I just, I just wanted, that is what happens in that movie.

• 1:06:02Alex Cranz?

  That's the movie. She's like, how are you in this new body? And he's like, I don't know. And she's like, cool, let's bang. And you're like, no, no Wonder Woman. That's not super heroic at all. Stop.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  It's really quite a lot. Anyway, so he kills Wonder Woman three, which seems like the right choice. Henry Cavill is a long statement. He's like, I quit The Witcher. Whoops.

• 1:06:27Alex Cranz?

  He quit The Witcher. He gave us like, not even one of the good Himsworth brothers to replace him in Witcher. And then he's like, I'm coming for Superman. And they're like, actually, we don't need you. They said they're gonna go with a younger version of Superman. So theoretically Smallville.

• 1:06:45Nilay Patel?

  All right. All this is happening. Whatever. It's all very funny in the background. He's adding the Snyder verse. I just, the, the, yep, Zazzla of Discovery changing all of Warner Brothers, changing all this. I just want to rewind to the time when the phone company bought Superman. It's a real thing that happened. AT&T buys Warner Brothers. There is an AstroTurf fan campaign from Zack Snyder and his fanboy army, which led to lawsuits. Like, crazy things have happened.

• 1:07:19Alex Cranz?

  Oh, and they're furious.

• 1:07:20Nilay Patel?

  They harassed the phone company so much, potentially with bots, that the phone company was like, we're giving you $70 million to remake Justice League. And he was like, cool, it's gonna be in 4.3.

• 1:07:34Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be in 4.3. It's not gonna be good. It's black and white if you want to watch it that way, but not a-

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  That part I appreciated. That was like, that's when you just like turn the screw all the way. You're like, what if, what if it's so gritty, there's no colors in it at all? I will say they improved the effects. The story does make more sense. It was just the first time, I don't know, Richard, did you have this reaction? The first time I sat down to watch it, and you're like, oh, this shit's a square.

• 1:08:01Alex Cranz?

  The first time?

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

  I thought my TV was broken. I was like-

• 1:08:04Alex Cranz?

  Neela, how many times have you watched it?

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  I was, I was gonna watch it again because of all this DC Universe stuff. I was like, I should just try one more time.

• 1:08:11Alex Cranz?

  Ready to get in.

• 1:08:12Nilay Patel?

  And then I like remembered that it's in 4.3. And I was like, I can't be doing this. Yeah. And by the way, the point, I'm sure the Zack Snyder verse bots are gonna come at me. They're like, it's more like IMAX. That's the, that's the stated justification for being in 4.3.

• 1:08:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  So you're supposed to, you were supposed to watch this movie in IMAX, which is very tall. And it's like, yeah, but-

• 1:08:33Alex Cranz?

  You know what's not IMAX? My phone. That I'm gonna watch it on.

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Just to spite you. Anyway, just remember the time the phone company bought Superman and then got harassed by fanboys in making a three hour square movie?

• 1:08:51Nilay Patel?

  We lived through this together as a family and I just want to thank you all.

• 1:08:55Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I feel, I do feel bad for Cavill, though. Like, he had to make the Square movie. He doesn't even get to make a movie when it's theoretically going to be a good shared

• 1:09:02Speaker 04

  With, with the like photoshopped mustache that was.

• 1:09:05Alex Cranz?

  Oh my God, that mustache was incredible.

• 1:09:08Speaker 04

  He has suffered for our sins.

• 1:09:09Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta end this segment. We're now fully into the, whether or not the CJ mustache was like an important.

• 1:09:13Alex Cranz?

  It's a whole future episode.

• 1:09:15Nilay Patel?

  All I know is that AT&T, AT&T paid $70 million to make a Square movie with a fake mustache.

• 1:09:20Alex Cranz?

  ZDaddy wouldn't have let that happen.

• 1:09:23Nilay Patel?

  You just went too far.

• 1:09:28Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna take a break. We're gonna just reset.

• 1:09:31Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna go find.

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  A little bit.

• 1:09:33Alex Cranz?

  My respect.

• 1:09:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, if you need to pull over and just, just rest, do it, you know? Like, take care of yourself. We'll be right back.

• 1:09:48Speaker 07

  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.

• 1:10:17Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:10:39Speaker 08

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you, if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be a thousand times human traffic online.

• 1:11:03Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:11:16Speaker 09

  This series is presented by EY.

• 1:11:23Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Honestly, we don't have Alex back yet. She's still broken.

• 1:11:28Alex Cranz?

  I'm still looking for my self-respect.

• 1:11:30Nilay Patel?

  She's gonna be fine. We're back. We've got some gadgets to talk about. Can we start with the Prius?

• 1:11:37Alex Cranz?

  I was like, did you make this entire? It's just cars. This gadget section is just like, I was like, this is just Neela's time.

• 1:11:44Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of EV news this week, and most of it is about the sounds that EVs might make. So there's a lot of EV news this week. Most of it is about like the sounds that EVs might make and then making it okay for car people to like EVs. So like Hyundai is gonna do like a fake manual transmission for its electric cars.

• 1:12:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  So you can feel good about it.

• 1:12:10Alex Cranz?

  Neela, do you remember the time I was talking about how people were gonna be so upset with electric cars because they wouldn't have transmission? And you said people still ride horses.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, Hyundai's doing one and Lexus is doing one. When I think of cars with rip in manual transmissions, it's Hyundai and Lexus.

• 1:12:27Alex Cranz?

  That's, that's the only ones I think of.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So that's happening. They're adding sounds to them. You might recall from several episodes ago. Dodge is adding something called the Fratsonic Exhaust System to its Charger EV. They won't disclose what it is, but you know what it is? It's speakers that make exhaust sounds in the back of the car. And then there's like the other side of it where it is true, the car should make sounds to keep people safe. EVs make a bunch of sounds. I have a new plug-in hybrid Grand Cherokee. You can run it on EV mode. When you put it in reverse, it makes this like whistling sleigh bell sound. It's very odd.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  But it's still like a sound. It like makes sense. I want you to listen to the new Prius because it just, it's evil. It's an evil Prius. Liam, can we run the Prius sound, please?

• 1:13:23Nilay Patel?

  That is the sound of being abducted by aliens.

• 1:13:25Alex Cranz?

  I don't want that.

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  That's what, that's what that is. That's when the, when the concentric circles lift you into the space.

• 1:13:30Speaker 04

  Why does it sound like that? Why did they choose that?

• 1:13:32Alex Cranz?

  Can you imagine being high and walking home and hearing that coming down the street?

• 1:13:39Nilay Patel?

  It's a Prius backing up down the whole street. It's a very strange moment in cars.

• 1:13:44Alex Cranz?

  Panic attack.

• 1:13:44Speaker 04

  What was the other choice? What, what, what lost out to that at the last minute? What was, what were they developing that wasn't good enough? And they said, no, we have to go with this.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Alex Cranz?

  I assume it was like the Price is Right sound they make when you get the answer wrong.

• 1:13:57Nilay Patel?

  I will say that Toyota's entire aesthetic for years now has been angry robots. Like, like even like a Camry, like the ultimate family car is like, what if this car transformed the Camry? And so like the sound makes sense, like in, in context of Toyota's entire aesthetic. It's like, yeah, this should sound more like Megatron than not. I imagine that was the meeting. But we have an entire episode of the Verge Has coming up from Andy Hawkins, our transportation editor, and Andrew Marino about the sounds of cars. Because we are in the middle of just a revolution in what cars sound like. Because they can sound like anything now because they don't sound like engines. I actually was with the Rivian folks a while ago and I test drove the R1S.

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  That is a dashboard. It's all screen, obviously. Car makes no sound. And they're like, we had to decide what the turn signals would sound like. When you click the turn signal to go left or right, people expect a clicking sound. That used to be the sound of a relay clicking on and off to turn the light on and off on the dashboard. Now it's just a screen. So we realized we could make it any sound we wanted. And they're like, but if it gets too weird, people won't know it's working. So we have a whole episode about this stuff because it is wild to think that you could just start car sounds over in the Megatron.

• 1:15:12Alex Cranz?

  Are people hacking their cars to make their own sounds? Cause I would absolutely have the wee woo wee woo anytime I wanted to use my turn signal, just the most obnoxious sounds.

• 1:15:21Nilay Patel?

  Tesla owners have been doing this for a long time. I will say that.

• 1:15:25Alex Cranz?

  I don't drive them.

• 1:15:25Nilay Patel?

  And obviously, you know, Tesla, everything from the horn, people like have fart sounds in the horn. But now you're just seeing it get beyond the sort of hacker zone to the industry is competing on it. Right? It's an area of differentiation in the industry. And like cars are getting weirder and weirder because all the drivetrains are becoming so similar. It's neat.

• 1:15:46Alex Cranz?

  Are we going to have an app store just for the sounds?

• 1:15:49Speaker 04

  Ringtones are back. It's everything comes back.

• 1:15:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, car ringtones are basically back. So that's really cool. Our friend Tim Stevens, who Richard and I used to work with in gadget as well, reviewed the Lucid Air Grand Touring for us. This is like one of the vaporware cars. It's very expensive. He loved it. Go check out that review. Car looks cool. Lots of screens, lots of software in that car, I will say, but he says the drivetrain is great. This is a big competitor Tesla. We talked about Elon already. I will just say this is the year that Tesla is going to face its first real competition. I've complained a lot about vaporware cars in the show, but the Lucid is shoving in like some numbers. Porsche has a new Macan, a new battery powered Macan. It looks very normal. It's compete with the Model Y. You can just see the competition's coming for Tesla in all kinds of other ways. I think that's gonna be fascinating. If the

• 1:16:37Nilay Patel?

  car ship, please actually ship. That would be cool. Be into that.

• 1:16:41Alex Cranz?

  They ship that Cherokee yet?

• 1:16:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I have one.

• 1:16:43Alex Cranz?

  You got it.

• 1:16:44Nilay Patel?

  I have it. It took, I had to go get it blacked out, but we have it now. It is, it is the most Android computer that you have ever driven in your entire life.

• 1:16:52Alex Cranz?

  I don't want that.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  It runs Android.

• 1:16:57Alex Cranz?

  Like Oreo.

• 1:16:59Nilay Patel?

  It's all very skinned, but every now and again, it like, it just does something that's like, oh, this is a slow Android computer. But it's cool.

• 1:17:05Alex Cranz?

  You just point at it and shout Android when it does that?

• 1:17:09Nilay Patel?

  That's Android.

• 1:17:11Alex Cranz?

  I see it.

• 1:17:12Nilay Patel?

  In particular, the profile switching. So if you push the memory seats, it's like me and then that switches the presets and all the stuff on the tablet and the car. And that's like, oh, this is your Android profile switching and it's not going well. This, it doesn't like doing this.

• 1:17:28Alex Cranz?

  They did not spend money on a good processor. Gotta get a Snapdragon in there.

• 1:17:34Nilay Patel?

  They plug it in, we drive it around the battery all the time. It's great. It's doing its job. We should talk about Macs real quick. We should talk about Apple. iOS 16.2 came out this week. Better always on display. I think every viewer basically complained about the iPhone 14 always on display being too on. So now they reverted to.

• 1:17:50Alex Cranz?

  It was just on.

• 1:17:50Nilay Patel?

  Does. Yeah, it was just like on. It was like yours display. It was very confusing. So they reverted. You can go change it. They've added end to end encryption iCloud. They've added the new feature in Apple Music where you can turn the vocals down. It's pretty cool. Bunch of cool stuff in there. But you know what they haven't shipped yet?

• 1:18:07Alex Cranz?

  That Pro.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  Mac Pro with an M2 chip or M1 Max Plus. They haven't shipped really any other M2 Max, right? They did the Air and the 13 inch Pro, but we haven't seen an M2 16 inch Pro.

• 1:18:20Alex Cranz?

  Maybe next week.

• 1:18:21Nilay Patel?

  M2 Max Studio. So it seems like, yep, there's a lot of supply chain stuff going on there, protests in China. It just seems like Apple's starting to take the hit of that stuff in a way that in the early part of the pandemic, it seemed like it wasn't even touching them.

• 1:18:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Do you think it's that? Or do you think it's the fact that they just like they were moving so quickly with these new processors that if they like released a new M2 plus Max or something, you know, eight months after the Max Studio, it would feel like cannibalizing their various offerings already out there?

• 1:18:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, because when they did the Max Studio, remember, and it was Johnny Strugie? He was like, and there's one more to talk about, but not at this time. And like, you just rarely see Apple like wink and nod at the camera about unreleased products, right? But they were.

• 1:19:09Speaker 04

  They said it was coming. They said that these other devices.

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they like said out loud, they were gonna do it and they.

• 1:19:15Alex Cranz?

  They were gonna finish their transition this year. So that's just like a big ball.

• 1:19:21Nilay Patel?

  I think the things that are surprising to me are, one, the M2 is an upgrade over the M1, but it's not a huge upgrade. And this is what we found in Monica's review of the M2 Air. It's an improvement, to be sure, but it's not this like rocket improvement over the M1, the way the M1 was over the Intel chips. And then on the sort of GPU side, like Apple still isn't there. It's like the GPU vendors have slowed down. So if you're gonna do a Pro Mac, like you've, you need high-end GPUs to, to make that case to people, to that customer base. And I think, I don't know, there's something there that doesn't seem like it's adding up yet.

• 1:19:56Speaker 04

  You can't do weird power per watt graphs against the 4090 when you're actually competing against the 4090.

• 1:20:02Nilay Patel?

  You've got some real problems there. That's actually the holdup is they're trying to figure out what's a label to grasp. They've, they've, they've been working on it for months. That's, I think that's interesting. And then there's a bunch of stuff in iOS 16.2 that we're kind of waiting on, right? They, they said they were going to do a classical music thing. There's like just a bunch of features that have not yet arrived. And I think Apple's just starting to space out what it announces when, instead of like these kind of monolithic releases, which they've been on track to do for years and years and years. But you just see like, I think it's starting to catch up to them. You know, the early part of the pandemic, they were just hit after hit and they were shipping massive numbers of everything.

• 1:20:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:40Nilay Patel?

  And now here, this weird part where it like,

• 1:20:44Alex Cranz?

  They just tuckered out.

• 1:20:45Nilay Patel?

  It's over, is it over? It's like, you know, the, the protests in China are causing some major changes in that country. The COVID lockdowns there are just like not going to work anymore. Like Apple's starting to feel that hit in a way that I don't think they've been totally open about. And I, I think we're just going to see that continue for, for months to come.

• 1:21:01Alex Cranz?

  Do you think we're going to get the Mac Pro next year? Maybe?

• 1:21:04Nilay Patel?

  It feels like it's such a low volume product for them. Like, I think they think the Mac Studio is doing that job as much as it needs to do that job for that market. Right? If you're a professional premiere user or whatever, developer, somebody who's like, really needs that power, you have already bought a Mac Studio.

• 1:21:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:21:21Nilay Patel?

  Or you're on Windows and you're fine. And like, Apple can come get you next time. So I don't know if they feel,

• 1:21:27Alex Cranz?

  What's like the differentiator? Is it just like, you'll be able to put an AMD GPU in it? If you really want to?

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  I think the difference is going to be their GPU.

• 1:21:35Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  I think it might be the, the holdup. I think they've got to beat what, what the other folks are doing.

• 1:21:40Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  I think it'd be really weird if Apple did M series chips in AMD GPU.

• 1:21:47Nilay Patel?

  It just doesn't seem like the way they're going to go.

• 1:21:49Alex Cranz?

  I mean, the big reason that they took so long with the last Pro release was they were like, we want to make it as modular as possible. We want to make it more like a PC, but we don't like PCs. Don't talk about PCs here. And so with their current setup, they really can't do that, that modular thing, right? Like, A modular Mac Pro where you can replace the M2 with the M3 when it comes out and replace the GPU. That's a lot. Yeah, they're not going to do that. So it's like, what, what does a Mac Pro look like in a world where they they sacrifice that modularity again?

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think they thought they had an answer, and I think that's why they hinted at it so like explicitly.

• 1:22:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:27Nilay Patel?

  I think that I think that answer has changed. And I will say, I just think it's interesting that, like, this was supposed to end transition and like, hasn't been here. And it's a very rare that Apple misses deadline this. I think the stakes are low.

• 1:22:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:40Nilay Patel?

  I think the stakes are much higher for can you ship enough iPhones, which they're struggling with.

• 1:22:44Speaker 04

  Are they recalibrating what power means? Like, for a machine like that, now, now you're talking about selling it to someone, maybe who's doing AI processing or tasks that weren't on those old Mac Pros. And now maybe they they are saying, you know, what we were doing, we were aiming at a market that doesn't exist anymore. And now somebody who might buy this is doing something completely different. And we need to rethink it.

• 1:23:04Alex Cranz?

  We were going to sell it to the crypto market. Now we got to sell it to the AI market.

• 1:23:08Nilay Patel?

  There's no way that crypto miners were going to be buying Macs like.

• 1:23:12Alex Cranz?

  Just spending $30,000 on a.

• 1:23:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the whole name of that game was like buying was reducing your cost to run a GPU.

• 1:23:21Speaker 04

  Only they could have done crypto mining on old PS3s. That would have been the perfect story, just for the content.

• 1:23:26Alex Cranz?

  It would have been great.

• 1:23:27Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, Richard, you even assign that story. Can you mine a single Bitcoin on a PS?

• 1:23:31Alex Cranz?

  A fraction. We'll give you just a fraction.

• 1:23:33Nilay Patel?

  We'll see you in 10 years.

• 1:23:35Alex Cranz?

  We will not be paying your power bill.

• 1:23:36Nilay Patel?

  You can run Linux. I think my PS3 is one of the PS3s you can run Linux on. All right, I'm going to dig out my old PS3 and see if I can get Linux on it to to render a Bitcoin. Render a Bitcoin, by the way, an old, an old joke from the show. Shout out Paul Miller.

• 1:23:50Nilay Patel?

  Okay, two things we should talk about to wrap up. One, Instagram rollout notes, which is seems like it's like weirdo Twitter competitor.

• 1:23:56Alex Cranz?

  Great.

• 1:23:57Nilay Patel?

  But is actually just away messages and is the funniest thing in the entire world.

• 1:24:00Speaker 04

  Nothing goes away forever.

• 1:24:02Alex Cranz?

  I'm fully on board with using it as my communication app now. Like, goodbye Twitter DMs.

• 1:24:07Speaker 04

  It's the only thing that's made me open Instagram again in like six months.

• 1:24:10Nilay Patel?

  Same.

• 1:24:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, they did it.

• 1:24:12Nilay Patel?

  All the olds are goofing. We are told reliably that the youngs are selling weed. Very cool.

• 1:24:18Alex Cranz?

  I'm just doing Soundgarden lyrics.

• 1:24:20Nilay Patel?

  But you see, there is a wave of innovation in social networks again because of the Twitter drum. That is actually pretty exciting and like Instagram rolling out this feature in the old days. Instagram would only do things that they thought like a billion more people would sign up for Instagram to do something. No one's signing up for Instagram to use notes. But like, can they capture some minutes of your day back from Twitter as Twitter goes through a spasm? They can. So they can justify this. It's actually pretty fun. So Instagram's doing that. And then I want to end, of course, we're talking about Matter. Google, it happened. iOS 16.2 brought Matter support. So Matter is here. The first Eve devices that run on Thread now support Matter.

• 1:25:01Nilay Patel?

  Google has announced that Nest Hubs and some Android devices support Matter. You know what doesn't though? Nest thermostats. It's like the one thing everybody wants.

• 1:25:10Alex Cranz?

  How you doing, Eli?

• 1:25:12Nilay Patel?

  I have a Homebridge setup. I switched from Hoobz to Homebridge. I'll, I'm going to dox my good friend Joanna Stern. She just installed the Hoobz and texted me about it. Hoobz is Homebridge out of box. It's like a, whatever. It doesn't matter. They're little Tamagotchis that you put in your garage to make all the rival systems talk to each other. In particular, to get a HomeKit. In about three times a year, they fail catastrophically and you have to start over. But it's fine because you have a little Tamagotchi that you have to care for. A little Linux Tamagotchi that you care for. And for a while, it all works. And if you're a nerd, it's like deeply rewarding to make a Raspberry Pi, force your Nest thermostat to shut up in a HomeKit.

• 1:25:48Alex Cranz?

  It's nice. I use it for my Dyson fan.

• 1:25:51Nilay Patel?

  I'm confident that when Joanna's fails, I'm going to be in trouble in some like meaningful way. But for now, she's very happy.

• 1:25:56Alex Cranz?

  Just block her number for a week after. Like, I know you can't turn on any of your lights in your home. It's fine.

• 1:26:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. She's like, I just opened my garage with Siri. I've never been happier. And I was like, I'm so like, welcome to my club.

• 1:26:08Alex Cranz?

  It's a good club.

• 1:26:08Nilay Patel?

  This is what it's like to have Tamagotchis together. But Matter's here. This is like the thing, it's happening. You are, as you listen to this in your car, witness to the birth of a new smart home connectivity standard. It's way better than whatever horny stuff Alex is doing on TV.

• 1:26:23Alex Cranz?

  I'm still just thinking about him.

• 1:26:27Nilay Patel?

  Gen 2 is covering the hell out of Matter. It's great. It's all over the website. Go check it out. But yes, if you have Google stuff, Nest stuff, that stuff has been silently upgraded to support Matter. The first devices are out. If you have an iPhone, you now support Matter. This is all real. And I think it's gonna be cool if these companies can just be cool, which is a tall order. But I think it's, I think it's gonna happen. I think they, I think the executives-

• 1:26:49Alex Cranz?

  You're like going to CES. Just be cool, guys.

• 1:26:52Nilay Patel?

  I mean, if I was going to CES, I would honestly walk around being like, be cool. Like, yes, I would do exactly what you're saying. Thankfully, after going to CES for like 15 years in a row, I'm not being made to go this year. But I think we're gonna see a flood of Matter devices at CES, a flood of smart home gadgets that actually support Matter that are actually gonna ship. And I, I, I think that enough of the executives of these companies that we have talked to have houses full of things that don't talk to each other and are aware that all their customers are kinda mad at them. So I, there's just a part of me that says the incentive to just like be happy is higher than the business incentive to make money for these people specifically because they want to open their garage doors

• 1:27:36Nilay Patel?

  with Siri without having a Linux Tamagotchi. We'll see. Be cool.

• 1:27:41Alex Cranz?

  Be cool.

• 1:27:42Nilay Patel?

  All right. Anything else we should talk about? Let's send it. Let's call it a day. All right, we are way over, as always. There's more to talk about. We have, Google basically had an all hands this week where they said they're not gonna do ChatGPT yet because of quote reputational risk. That's a lot, because it's always wrong. There's all kinds of stuff on site. It was a really fun week on the site. There's all the Fusion coverage, which we haven't talked about. Justine's gonna have some interviews on The Verge Cast coming up about Fusion. Go check it out. It's on theverge.com. This, what we do on a Wednesday show, what's this Wednesday show?

• 1:28:12Alex Cranz?

  It's spectacular.

• 1:28:14Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Once again, this coming Wednesday, 21st, The Verge Cast Holiday Spectacular, Bluetooth. It's gonna be amazing. It's gonna be amazing. Apple Watch Ultra review is hitting this week. It's one of our biggest productions ever for review video. That's gonna be very cool. And then, like I said, Justine on the back with Verge Cast episode about Fusion. And we're gonna take a break. So it's been, it's, it's been a ride. It's been a year, but we're gonna take a break. You can tweet at us. Richard is RJCC. Alex is Alex H. Krantz.

• 1:28:41Alex Cranz?

  You're Reckless Patel.

• 1:28:42Nilay Patel?

  Talk to you about Des. You should say Reckless Patel. And I'm at Reckless on Twitter for now. Although, please comment on the site. I've been commenting on our site way more often lately. Because I feel like I should work for the place that pays me. I think that's a good plan. It's simple. It's a very easy calculus there. That's it, though. That's Vergecast. That's left. Call me.

• 1:29:06Speaker 00

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:29:40Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:30:02Speaker 08

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that, you know, it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:30:26Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:30:39Speaker 00

  This series is presented by EY.

• 1:30:42Speaker 10

  Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything? Ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to coreweave.com/readyforanything.