Facebook lost daily users for the first time ever / Spotify CEO defends Joe Rogan deal

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Ashley Carman, and Alex Heath discuss Meta's rough week: Facebook reported its first-ever quarterly decline of daily users globally, along with lower-than-expected ad growth that sent its stock plunging roughly 20 percent. The crew also discuss Spotify's response to the Joe Rogan controversy and how it will be handling moderation going forward. Further reading: Facebook lost daily users for the first time ever last quarter Meta’s stock price plunges 25 percent overnight Google parent company Alphabet broke $200 billion in annual revenue for the first time Epic largely lost to Apple, but 35 states are now backing its fight in a higher court Spotify CEO defends Joe Rogan deal in tense company town hall Spotify says it’s a creator company now Here is the Spotify COVID content policy that lets Joe Rogan slide Spotify finally responds to Joe Rogan controversy with a plan to label podcasts that discuss COVID-19 Joe Rogan defends podcast and apologizes to Spotify for backlash The Joe Rogan controversy is what happens when you put podcasts behind a wall Sony is buying Bungie, the developer of Destiny and original creator of Halo Big video game companies just can’t stop buying studios Wordle has been bought by The New York Times, will ‘initially’ remain free for everyone to play Peloton’s latest gadget is a $90 heart rate monitor for your arm Echelon persuades USPTO that Peloton’s streaming tech is unpatentable Appeals court upholds California’s net neutrality law Google leaks Pixel 6A name in, of all things, a coloring book Tesla has a new feature that will disable your seat controls if you keep messing with them Public accountants are deducting themselves from their jobs What’s the difference between 5G, 5G Plus, 5G UW, and 5G UC? 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on The Vergecast, Alex Krantz, Ashley Carmen and Alex Heath join the show. We talk about Facebook, Google and Apple. Apple's app tracking has had a huge impact on Facebook's earnings and Google's earnings. We get into more Spotify and Joe Rogan, the CEO, had comments this week that Ashley leaked. And we do a little lightning round on other headlines. That's all coming up on The Vergecast now.

• 0:20Speaker 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.

• 1:05Speaker 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.

• 1:53Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Richass, the flagship podcast of being a platform and not a publisher. I wasn't, I wasn't gonna do it and then it just happened. I'm so sorry to everyone. I'm also sorry because Dieter still isn't here and I'm quite frankly, just at a loss. I don't know how to handle it. So in classic Indian mom fashion, I'm dealing with whatever emotions I'm having by having all the people I can together at once. So Ashley Carmen is here.

• 2:18Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  Alex Heath is here. Hi. And Alex Krantz is here. Hello. Everyone, I'm just gonna feed everybody and that's how we're dealing with my emotional state. The Dieter isn't, I think he's back next week. God bless him. He's on vacation. He deserves it. No one can see you cry in the metaverse. It's okay, Neil. Do you know one of, you weren't here this, a long time ago when we used to go to CS, like in force and the whole video team was there, we would make these videos, like on the last day, like art project videos, just like a reward for the video team. And so we did one that was Ross Miller, our managing editor at the time, spending a whole day at CS. Like the concept was, he lived at CS. I remember this. There's a scene in it where he's crying in a VR headset. It's like just very funny.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  But that was just like our little joke art project video. And then months later, this was when the media could still like play pranks and lie and it wasn't a threat to democracy. We did an April Fool's joke that we were gonna buy a Super Bowl ad, like as a stunt. So we put up this post and deleted it that said we had bought a Super Bowl ad and we had made a Super Bowl ad. So there's like unlisted YouTube link in this thing and we left it up just long enough for people to click on it. So this over the top, Super Bowl ad that we had made featured Ross crying in the headset and everyone thought we were serious. My god. We did, this is true. We bought airtime on the Super Bowl in Helena, Montana and

• 3:43Nilay Patel?

  we sent a local university student to Buffalo Wild Wings to watch our Super Bowl ad in Helena, Montana. So it's true. How'd it do? Did it do really well? I was like, did people stop? And she's like, they were all pretty confused.

• 3:58Speaker 03

  All that's pretty prophetic, really, if you think about it.

• 4:01Nilay Patel?

  I was right, and it turned out we should have just bought the full bill. We should have run the national campaign. I'm gonna talk to our CEO after the show. Anyway, regardless of all that, it's kind of a gigantic week of news. There's a lot of themes in the news, but we have to start with, I mean, Facebook had earnings yesterday. It was a huge miss. The stock is tanking. It's taking like the whole stock market down with it. Mark Zuckerberg addressed the company today. He said that he'd scratched his eye, so he might start crying, but it was not because of earnings. It was because he had scratched his eye. This is all true. Alex, walk us through what is happening with Facebook.

• 4:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, so Meta slash Facebook has been saying for a while that these Apple ad tracking changes, which is that prompt you see when you open an iOS app, asking if you want to be tracked, that that's going to hurt them quite a bit. We hadn't really seen what that looked like until this quarter, the fourth quarter, and it was bad. And they said it's going to stay bad for a while. They're projecting to lose 10 billion in revenue this year alone, just from Apple's changes. And so it was a combination of that and also the fact that Facebook, core blue, lost daily users globally for the first time ever. So for 30-plus quarters, it's been nonstop up and to the right.

• 5:22Speaker 03

  This time, they lost a million users in North America, which is their key market where they make the most money. And this all kind of feeds into the narrative that we and others have been reporting on, on, you know, Facebook is obviously losing touch with young people to a lot of competition. And just the theme of, it was a very downbeat earnings call. And, you know, I think Meta's Facebook earning calls are always pretty interesting, but this one was like very, it felt like, you know, they were under siege. And Mark Zuckerberg was talking about how competition has never been fiercer and which plays conveniently into the whole anti-trust debate, which we'll get into. But I do think it's real that TikTok is eating their lunch in

• 6:05Speaker 03

  terms of where people are spending time. And the news feed is lame, so they're trying to figure all that out. So they've got this kind of competitive pressure on the business side and on the product consumer side, all kind of converging at once in a really nasty quarter. And so, yes, they lost. Over $200 billion in market value in one day, which is a record that they had set themselves in 2018 previously. So they've set both records for most market cap lost in a day. And I saw some chart about how they drove down the entire NASDAQ or something with them. So yeah, pretty nuts.

• 6:42Alex Cranz?

  You really love an overachiever. Like, that's just going out there and doing their best in the worst way possible.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  Facebook's like a, like a, like a college partyer. They're up big, they're down big, you never know what's gonna happen.

• 6:55Alex Cranz?

  You never know. They party hard, they work hard. Well, I, I wanted to ask, the 1 million lost users, were those people just, just quit?

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Well, so those are DAUs, which, you know, daily active users. The global monthly users were up a little bit, but that's a lot easier to cheat. Like, I've heard stories about like engineering, you know, departments in Facebook where like, they can just kind of scramble some buttons and notifications to like prop up MAU and get them to their growth goals, like at the end of every quarter if they need to. It's a lot harder to fake daily users. And that's kind of their North Star metric in terms of like the health of the platform. And it's what Snap and Twitter and everyone else kind of guides towards. And so the fact that they lost those DAUs and they couldn't eke out a little bit of growth, even in like some other part of the world where they're always usually growing, was notable.

• 7:48Speaker 03

  And also the backdrop, like I said to that, is like they've been saying in the reporting from the Facebook files and everything has been showing that they're very, very weak with young people and that young people just aren't even getting on their apps, like a whole generation. So that's like a kind of existential threat for them that we kind of saw come to light for sure in the numbers this quarter.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  So Ashley, for a long time you covered Instagram. Instagram was Facebook's youth play. You and I have spent a lot of time talking on this show, talking to executives about Instagram is coming, becoming a shopping destination, they're gonna make it a catalog. It was the cool thing that they had.

• 8:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and, you know, recently, live video shopping. Like, shopping still seems like potentially the place they go. Like Pinterest, you shop it, basically.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  I just don't think of like cool, young kids in live video shopping.

• 8:37Alex Cranz?

  Well.

• 8:38Speaker 02

  You never know if the algorithm's good enough. Everyone dresses like an Instagram influencer now. It's like TikTok. It's like TikTok too. It's all kind of the same, but like you go on Instagram to buy from like Shein or whatever. I do want to say like using myself as an example, I used to occasionally check Facebook daily just to be like, okay, let's just see. I literally go weeks now and Instagram, it'll be a thing where at 9pm, I'm like, oh shit, I haven't checked Instagram today.

• 9:02Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 9:02Speaker 02

  It just feels like that's more and more, maybe, maybe I'm just getting older and I don't care as much, but it does feel kind of just like less relevant.

• 9:08Speaker 03

  It's become a shopping mall. I mean, that's the thing, like the moment. So there's this like pattern that always plays out with Facebook products where they start off as like your close friends or your college or your high school or whatever. And they become shopping malls because like there is just a constant race for revenue. And so, yeah, I mean, that's kind of the, that's the worry is that Instagram is becoming less cool. It's definitely more cool than Facebook blue, but definitely not what it used to be. And you know, like, I think like, so this guy named Nikita Beer, who sold the last social media app, Facebook's actually acquired since all the antitrust scrutiny, he squeaked this one in, in like 2018, 2017. It's called, it was called TBH.

• 9:50Speaker 03

  He left recently. So he sold his company to Facebook and he, he kind of like analyzed earnings and I totally agree. He was like, Facebook's hands are tied because they've got TikTok eating their lunch. They can't acquire because of antitrust. They can't build internally because founders don't want to be there. This is a guy who was a founder and went there and left. Apple killed their ability to target ads and the metaverse is 10 years out and they're losing billions a year on it. So they've got all this pressure of like trying to spend their way out of irrelevance, I guess you could say.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  So we should talk about the metaverse thing and then I want to spend some time on the Apple side because it's fascinating. You said lost $10 billion. That's the headline I've seen everywhere. Like, I don't know if lost is the right word, right? It wasn't like,

• 10:32Speaker 03

  Where'd it go?

• 10:33Nilay Patel?

  They like, they know they're going to lose the money. Like they are pouring money into this.

• 10:39Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:40Nilay Patel?

  At just an absurd rate, they are poaching everyone. There was a Business Insider story yesterday about how Lenz three being kind of like a mess.

• 10:50Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  And that team not knowing and like everyone leaving and going to Facebook because Facebook will just like hand you a bag. Like if you work in tech and you have ever seen a VR headset. Like Facebook will just like give you the bag, right? Like it's nuts. That to me is like lost doesn't seem like the right phrase. Like they know what they're investing in. They know why they're investing in it. They know exactly how much they're losing in terms of money. But that bet is all right. 10 years off?

• 11:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, at least, I mean, it's kind of just the fact that it's so uncertain, I think, is a problem for investors because they're not breaking out like sales numbers for the Oculus Quest, for example, and the revenue they're making from it is nowhere near close to offsetting the losses. I think it was like $2 billion or something last year on like a 10 plus billion loss. But you're right, it's not fair to say that it's all just lost. I mean, they've got 15,000 plus people working in this division. They're just paying everyone top of market in the industry to try to like suck up all the talent because they can't buy things. They can't even buy Supernatural, as we've talked about on here. That's under antitrust review. And so that's the thing that's happening. But like, it's just wild

• 11:54Speaker 03

  to put that stat in context that like, they spent more last quarter on this than the entire ARVR startup industry raised last year. Like in one quarter, they're spending more than the entire startup ecosystem on ARVR. So it's just, it's like, they are the ARVR industry in terms of spend. And it's like, is that going to work out? TBD?

• 12:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Oh, actually, one thing I want to say, this has been going around today. So the antitrust bills that are in Congress are, they have market cap baselines. So you have to have a $600 billion market cap to get hit by the proposed rules. And Facebook is crashing so fast that it might go under the, under 600 billion in terms of market cap and then not be affected by the antitrust rules that are proposed.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  I think it's on a two-year average, but yes, I mean, chess, not checkers. If, if we can just torch our market cap enough, we won't be regulated.

• 12:53Nilay Patel?

  So it's interesting. We talk about Andrew's a lot like, are these regulators gonna get it right? How they will affect the markets? What are the downstream effects? Right next to that is Apple, which just was like, fuck you.

• 13:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? And turned like, turned off the ability for cookies to track across sites and apps. It's had a huge impact across every social media platform. I think it's crazy to me that Facebook wasn't able to find a way through it. They've been talking about it for a long time. Obviously, key for is when a lot of shopping happens. And then right next to that, Google had huge earnings. They broke $200 billion in revenue. They said their e-commerce search ads are up. And Facebook just like called out Google. They're like, well, Google has a sweetheart deal with Apple. Yeah, I mean, that's just like shocking to me.

• 13:39Speaker 03

  It was very shocking. So yeah, the CFO of Meta in the earnings call basically insinuated that Apple and Google are colluding to screw them. To screw Meta. And I'm not sure I buy that. I think that's a little bit of like, look over there. And we're like mad about Apple. But it is interesting. Yeah, that it's like, there was some analyst report today that was like, it's this week. It turns out if you're in bed with Apple, you're doing really well. And if you're not, you know, you're screwed essentially. Which like speaks to platform power and maybe like the fact that platforms should be regulated more harshly than these other kinds of businesses, which is something I agree with. But yeah, I don't know what I make of that. I mean, the argument is that, you know,

• 14:21Speaker 03

  Google pays Apple billions of year, billions a year for default search placement in Safari, right? And that Apple's ad tracking thing doesn't hurt browsers. It specifically carves out browsers. So if, you know, you're able to track people as they move around the web, that's okay. Safari does have cookie blocking in it. We should note that. Google is all first party. So basically, Apple defined tracking as like, tracking is when I'm sharing data between companies. And if I do that, the user needs to give me permission. The problem is Google is like the internet, right? And so it's like, yeah, okay, like we own Chrome, we own YouTube, we own search. Like, we don't need to share your data.

• 15:02Speaker 03

  Marketers definitely use third-party data for Google Ads, but their Google's fine. And if anything, this is also about like, I don't want to get too nerdy here, but this is about measurement and what Apple's effectively done is delay how Facebook can report the, how ads are going on their platform. So it used to be like real time, like you used to be able to adjust your budget and see things in real time. Now it's very delayed. Google doesn't have that problem because they're not hurt by this prompt the way that Facebook is. And so what's happening is like marketers are going, I can get way better performance and like optimization and see things in Google because of this ad tracking change not really hurting them. So the argument is basically just like, there's something going on here.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  As long as this agreement with them on the search placement default exists, Apple's not incentivized to be consistent in its philosophy of tracking. That's the argument.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  So I don't know if I buy that. Like, I love it. I mean, I am here for the argument, but how are you gonna, right? So Google owns Chrome and they get in a lot of trouble for tracking Chrome and they recently threw out, fuck, God, I missed either. They recently threw out Flock, which is their, their cookie replacement idea. They've got a new idea for that. Who knows when anyone will sign up for it. But like, if you are a small business, Facebook loves to talk about this one is your flower shop. By the way, every CEO on Decoder, when they talk about small businesses, they always go to flower shop. It's weird. We should just do a clip show about flower shops. So you're the flower shop, right? And you're like, I want to target people to make them buy more flowers. Before you could go on Facebook and like, set your region and find people who had birthdays

• 16:41Nilay Patel?

  coming up or who in their network were about to experience an event. And you could like, turn the knobs on how much you were spending and immediately see how many conversions you were getting into people buying flowers in your online store, right? Like this is your, and now you can't do that, it's much harder. Well, you can just take that money and give it to Google, right? And like, Google can tell you, like, people are searching for flowers in your area. Put ads in front of their face. There is nothing Apple can do to block that, to make that stop. Maybe you can be mad that Google has, they pay the money to be the default on Apple devices. They're getting sued over this, right? This, the reason we know this is because of antitrust lawsuits. But you can't be like, Apple's treating us unfairly when one thing is a social network

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  and the other thing is a search engine. And search engines tend to give you perfect data about things people want because they type in the thing they want.

• 17:34Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, totally. But I guess the argument to play devil's advocate is that Apple was being super high-minded about this and saying it's about privacy, kind of at a, at a macro level and that tracking is bad at a macro level. When in reality, they've defined a very specific, like subset of tracking that specifically hurts apps.

• 17:56Speaker 03

  And like, Google definitely has a ton of, it builds profiles based on our searches. It has, you know, ways of connecting the dots. It has huge parts of the internet under its eye. And so like, Google knows more about us than anyone, you know? Maybe the meta, but not anymore because of tracking changes. So like, yeah, I mean, I do see that argument a little bit, that like, these two are in cahoots because, I mean, some of the estimates are like 10 plus billion a year, Google's paying Apple, which is like a meaningful, I mean, it's, Apple makes a lot of money, but it's in terms of margin, that's like free, right? That's like free profit. And it would be very meaningful if Apple lost that money. And it would be felt in the earnings reports.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  And so I kind of do see that. I just like, I don't think Apple has been super ideologically like consistent with its definition of tracking. So I would like, I wonder if that will extend to browsers ever? You know, obviously they've been consistent with Safari and trying to block cookies and trackers and stuff.

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  What do you mean by browsers? Like Safari is the browser. On the iPhone.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  And every other browser is just a skin of Safari.

• 19:06Speaker 03

  Right. I guess even Chrome is technically, Chrome on the iPhone is still technically a skin, right? Yeah. But I mean, yeah, I don't know. I mean, so you, you're, you're not a buyer of this argument, Neil, it sounds like.

• 19:15Nilay Patel?

  Do I buy that big companies do shady background deals? Yes, I buy it. Do I think that Facebook is protesting a bit too much because the money moved from social networks to search? Yeah, I get it. Like, if I had money to spend, which I do not have any money to spend on ads. But if I was to put out another Super Bowl ad for The Verge, and I was like, where will I know there's a conversion? Well, Google will tell me and Facebook cannot. And I think that's meaningful to a lot of people. I will say Google is a monopoly in ads. Like, they're also being sued by like 36 states or whatever right now. Because at every part of the ad stack, they run the number one or number two provider, like service provider. And there's obviously collusion up and down that chain.

• 19:57Speaker 03

  I mean, isn't it, it kind of writes itself, right? Like Sundar going to Tim and being like, look, we like paying you all this money, but we'd like a little kickback, like. And Tim's like, I got you, I got you. Like, I mean, that's how, that's how it goes, right? That's business.

• 20:12Nilay Patel?

  Amy Klobuchar is like in the bushes with one of those like shotgun mics.

• 20:17Alex Cranz?

  No, I'm just fully like tin hat on this. Like, it absolutely feels like collusion from the outside. Just, I'm, I'm, I'm not as in it as you guys are. And just, but watching it and watching how Facebook, who's always been treated kind of like as the gauche little brother of these other companies, get absolutely brutalized by their agreements that they weren't, that Facebook wasn't included in. It's like, yeah, I can see how they're like, nah. You have to go sit in a corner and, and take your like $200 billion or whatever it was loss. While we're going to go rake in cash because we do it the proper way. We do it like the appropriate.

• 20:58Alex Cranz?

  Acceptable, socially acceptable way of stealing, of like mining everybody's identity for profit. Cause they're all, like, all three of them are doing it to some extent.

• 21:07Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's the point.

• 21:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Google has a more acceptable version. And so these companies, it really does feel like Facebook is, is, you know, definitely under the, like, everybody cares much more about Facebook regulatory rights, wise, right? Because besides being the big ad people, they're also the big putting Trump in charge, misinformation, all of that stuff. They're kind of like the bad kid and everybody's like-

• 21:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, if you're a politician in America and you said you, you're mad at Facebook, like, that's a winning argument no matter what party you're in.

• 21:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I think a lot, like, for me, it's almost like, okay, well, they're getting, they're getting regulated the hell out of them. Like, that's, nobody's going to avoid that. We have to separate ourselves as much as possible, even though we're doing kind of the same thing. We have to, like, push ourselves further away from them by saying, no, no, no, they do it through an app. They're, they're, they're much more holistic in how they, they mine our data. We're like, we're cool. Don't, don't bug us and, and how we mine your data. We're fine over here. Like, go, go, if you're, go regulate the hell out of them.

• 22:08Speaker 03

  I, I guess I agree with that. And I guess my, like, yeah, the point here, I think, is that if you think mining people's data to, like, build profiles of them and target them super specifically is de facto bad, Google is no worse than Meta. I just think that's a fair thing to say.

• 22:24Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 22:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And honestly, like, a big part of Meta's business was, we'll advertise apps and free to play games inside of the thing and they'll convert. But that's a big business line for them is app installs. Like, where did TikTok come from?

• 22:40Speaker 03

  They bought Facebook ads.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  That's how they acquired their user base. And like, now they're, now there's huge competitor. Like, Apple turned that business off for Facebook and they're trying to redirect all those dollars to their own App Store ads. Is that, does that seem correct? Or, like, maybe it's competitive, but-

• 22:58Speaker 03

  There is just like a unilateral, Apple controls the platform and they've decided what's acceptable. And it's unclear, like, well, Google's tracking you too. If you're signed into all of the Google apps on your phone and you are signed into Google and Safari-

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  They can target you just as well as Facebook every day.

• 23:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, the biggest issue with the Google Apple deal, I mean, it's just slimy in every respect. I think it just gives me EBGBs. Also, the fact that they will not publicly acknowledge it. We're only getting this piecemeal through discovery and litigation, right? Like, this is like, if if one company is paying the other billions of dollars a year, but the two refuse to talk about it, that's usually a good sign that something weird is going on with that arrangement. But the fact that like, it monopolizes search, because who is going to compete with Google on the iPhone?

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  If you can't get on the iPhone.

• 23:43Speaker 03

  For search, if you can't be a default, right? And I think in some countries now, they're starting to make Apple give people default choices, like Russia or something like that. I don't know if it extends to search, but there's some regulations starting to creep into the defaults there. And Meta has wanted default messaging status forever on the iPhone and the ability to get that on first open. But like, I do think that the Google Apple thing has just really entrenched Google in like, its most lucrative user base, which is iOS users for everyone usually. And yeah, if you're Nilay or you're a search startup, you have no way of competing. So even beyond like, how it affects Meta, it just is this like shady backroom deal between two of the largest companies in the world that they both refuse to talk about it. It's just, it's very strange.

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  I will say that every time anyone has tried a browser ballot, or a search ballot, or a defaults ballot, the thing that was the default before always wins.

• 24:35Speaker 03

  Well, no one cares. That's the thing. Like, you can't get people to care about this stuff as much as you can, like Facebook elected Trump. That's just a great soundbite. It's not true, but it's like, it just.

• 24:46Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, I don't mean the ballot in terms of like, political. I mean, when you open, install Windows for the first time, and it's like, do you want Explorer or Netscape? Like, everyone still picks Explorer. In Europe, there is, when you install an Android phone for the first time in Europe, due to antitrust regulations now, you get a search ballot, you gotta pick your search engine, everyone picks Google. Like, it's, it's interesting how, once you're entrenched, you just stay there. And like, even if you give people on startup, the ability to pick a different default. Like, they're not gonna pick Bing. Nothing in the world can make you pick Bing.

• 25:22Alex Cranz?

  Duck, duck, go.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Actually, if you're a Bing user, can you just email us? Like, I really wanna talk to you. Like, if you're a Bing by choice kinda, kinda person, like, let me know. So, in the middle of this, like, other social platforms reported earnings. Snap had earnings today. Are they coming through it? Like, they're kind of under remarked upon.

• 25:38Speaker 03

  Snap was crazy because there was this blast radius of the Meta earnings that, like, hit everyone. Like, all these stocks were down in social media, like, double-digit percentage points. And then Snap posted, like, "Hey, we're actually doing great. We just had our first, like, quarterly profit as a company ever." And they're up like 60%. Like, they swung from like 30 down to like 60% over and after hours in one day. Just, the stock market is a giant meme now, is like, basically my new theory. It's, it's, but, yeah, Snap has really diverged from, like, the growth narratives of Meta. They're actually growing quite a bit and seem to be navigating the Apple stuff a lot better.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I wanna call out, we've been talking about AnTrust a lot. Their Epic case is still ongoing, right? They, Epic lost a bunch at the trial court level. Now they're into appeals. A bunch of states, the EFF, Microsoft, the United States of America, have now all filed briefs in support of Epic. Actually, the United States brief is like, kinda down the middle. Like, it was very much like, "This is a good thing to consider." But Microsoft, in particular, stridently in favor of Epic. "A broad ruling for Apple could leave little room for a limiting principle to prevent Apple from leveraging its control of iOS to foreclose competition in countless adjacent markets," Microsoft says to the court. "Google, the only other mobile operating system provider, could be empowered to do the same.

• 27:00Nilay Patel?

  The stakes are high for Microsoft." So, in the context of all this, right, Apple just, like, turned off Facebook's business. Like, you have this lawsuit that's burning along in Microsoft, which is huge and just made a gigantic acquisition. And they're doing great.

• 27:13Speaker 03

  Being like, hey, Apple's in control of a lot here. I think that's pretty fascinating.

• 27:18Alex Cranz?

  Did Facebook ever sue Apple for, for the changes? Like, has that?

• 27:23Speaker 03

  No.

• 27:23Alex Cranz?

  Did that ever happen?

• 27:24Speaker 03

  They were preparing an antitrust lawsuit and they haven't filed it. I think it's kind of like you're out on the battlefield, looking at the other lion. It's like, who goes first? And then how many bodies are you willing to lose based on whoever goes first? You know, like that's seen in Game of Thrones. And so, yeah, it's kind of like a game of chicken, but they're not the only one either. Like a lot of companies, even ones that publicly say they're like, agree with the philosophy behind Apple's changes or privately fuming about it. But yeah, they were looking at that for a while.

• 27:56Nilay Patel?

  Facebook filing an antitrust lawsuit against Apple.

• 27:59Speaker 03

  Oh, it's very good. Yes.

• 28:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 28:02Nilay Patel?

  We gotta take a break. The other company that is often mad at Apple for its control of its platform is Spotify. Spotify is in the coalition of app fairness. They want the default, this is the name of the thing. I get it. I didn't name it. Spotify in a bunch of trouble itself this week. We'll come back. Ash is going to walk us through that.

• 28:23Speaker 05

  Real innovation is powered by real people. This is AMEX Corporate. Trusted experts, smarter technology, 24/7 dedicated support from day one to answer questions, help set up policies and approvals, and consult on spend capacity as your business needs evolve. Plus, on-demand resources help level up operations at every stage. That's the trusted service you've come to expect. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate.

• 28:55Speaker 06

  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 a 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.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. All right. Ash, the Spotify story is like out of control at this point.

• 29:31Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 29:31Nilay Patel?

  But they had earnings too. They had a town hall meeting with their employees about Joe Rogan. You heard the speech from Daniel, like the CEO, walk us through it.

• 29:40Speaker 02

  Yeah. So, well, I think the last time y'all did Vergecast was so last Thursday recorded. So since then.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Days of Rogan ago.

• 29:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think, I think this is important to contextualize. Since then, we leaked the moderation rules that Spotify has been playing by, which was like the big question. It's like, what are the rules on Spotify? Because everybody wants them to act on Joe Rogan's misinformation. And they're like, well, we're not because he's within our policy rules, our policies. Anyway, so we leaked the moderation rules on Sunday. Spotify finally formally publicly releases these moderation rules. I believe there are four rules related to COVID, one of which is just, you can't deny that COVID is real.

• 30:19Nilay Patel?

  It's a good, it's an important rule.

• 30:20Speaker 02

  That's critical. Another one is that you can't say that vaccines are designed to kill. Another one is that, I guess I have these memorized now. This is my pop quiz.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  There's only four of them.

• 30:30Speaker 02

  Yeah, but I mean, I'm still impressed. Like, the amount of brain space left for Rogan things is rapidly dwindling. Another one is you can't have COVID parties. So you can't encourage like COVID contagion parties. I don't remember the last one. But like, you can see from these rules that it's pretty easy to not break them. Oh, it's not to drink bleach.

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but it's bleach. I went and looked at it.

• 30:53Speaker 02

  Duh. You can't tell people to drink bleach. Those are the rules. And so we can easily understand now why Joe Rogan has been kept live and why Spotify has hesitated slash has not really moderated his show, even though they say they've taken down some episodes. Rogan obviously does not, I don't think, he believes COVID is real, seemingly. And he might suggest that people don't get vaccinated, but it's not because he thinks they're designed to kill people.

• 31:20Nilay Patel?

  Didn't he get COVID?

• 31:21Speaker 02

  He's had COVID.

• 31:22Nilay Patel?

  I would hope he thinks it's real. And when Aaron Rodgers had COVID, he consulted with Joe Rogan.

• 31:26Speaker 02

  Right.

• 31:26Nilay Patel?

  Honestly, at any moment, I can turn this into an Aaron Rodgers conversation. So I just, Cranz, if you could keep me in line, that would be much appreciated.

• 31:33Speaker 02

  No, you can't do it. You can talk about The Rock, though. Yeah, we all have to exercise restraint here. He will potentially encourage you to take ivermectin, but not bleach. Anyway, so that was on Sunday. Daniel Ek, Spotify CEO, also with that, like issued a press release blog post, basically being like, we're a creator platform, we're a platform, we're not going to, you know, do more than this, these are our rules. So then, fast forward more to this week, more, there's just more conversation among musicians, among other podcasters, and in-house podcast Science Verse says that they're not going to publish episodes unless they are dedicated to debunking misinformation on Spotify's own platform.

• 32:10Nilay Patel?

  I feel like that didn't get enough play, right?

• 32:13Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, imagine if, I don't know, SB Nation was like, we're not going to publish any more sports content unless it's dedicated to debunking everything The Verge publishes.

• 32:22Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, that is like, inside of Spotify, its own podcast is like, we're done, all we're gonna do is debunk Rogan. And they're like, I don't know, that one's the one that's just like, it washed over everything because there's so much noise. I was like, that is an insane situation.

• 32:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's brave, honestly, of them to do that. And we can get to, Spotify did actually respond, Hot Pod Insiders got the scoop on this one, but we can get to it. So, yeah. So then, Wednesday, Spotify had its earnings call. Broadly, like, everything's looking good from a corporate perspective. You know, users are up, subscribers are up. Notably, the whole podcast play is about getting into ad revenue. So, ad revenue now counts for 15% of their total revenue, which is a big deal for them because like, they just launched the Spotify Ad Network for podcasts, like broadly this year, I think last year it was. So, also on Wednesday, they took the opportunity to host a town

• 33:22Speaker 02

  hall internally with employees. We got the entire audio from that, and within it, there's a lot to parse. But you can see that a lot of what Daniel Ek, the CEO, talks about is basically how important Joe Rogan is to the business, and you could probably see that reflected in their earnings. He's critical to the entire podcasting ad apparatus. He also makes the argument that they are a platform, not a publisher. Neelai, I know you're gonna want to...

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying.

• 33:50Speaker 02

  And then Neil, I'll let you talk about the hardware part, but they actually talk about why they got into exclusive podcasts and licensing in the first place. And it actually has to do with hardware deals with Apple, or not with Apple. They didn't mention Apple. They mentioned Tesla. They mentioned Google and they mentioned Amazon.

• 34:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that part to me is fascinating. He was like, and I wasn't clear if this was podcasts in general or Spotify in general, right? But he was like, when we were trying to get deals with Google and Amazon and even Tesla, we didn't have the leverage because our catalog looked just like everyone's catalog. And you can read that as music. Basically, everybody has the same music catalog. You can read that as podcasts when podcasts were an open RSS ecosystem. Everybody has access to the same podcasts. So they had no differentiation. And then they, they signed the Rogan deal. And I'm guessing now, you know, people who want to listen to Joe Rogan on Google's smart speakers have to make a deal with Spotify.

• 34:43Nilay Patel?

  Amazon, I think did the same. And then Tesla famously has not had a Spotify app. But I'm guessing a bunch of Tesla owners want to listen to Joe Rogan. So now Spotify can say, if you want Joe Rogan, you got to put our app on your infotainment.

• 34:56Speaker 03

  I was just going to say the Venn diagram of Tesla owners and Joe Rogan listeners, it's, it's very good. I mean, I have to imagine this helps Elon wanting to get Spotify on the Tesla too, because Elon loves Joe Rogan. I mean, that's just, that is fascinating, that whole dynamic of them needing exclusives for these deals.

• 35:13Speaker 02

  Yeah. And, and they even say in this town hall as well, that the reason they pursued Rogan specifically is because his show was never available on the platform before. And even still, it was the number one most searched podcast. So they were like, we gotta get the big dog if we're going to play in this. And they're using it to their advantage as, you know, they should, I guess.

• 35:32Nilay Patel?

  After the Rogan deal, just to close this loop, Spotify Premium is now available on Tesla. Right? So they were able, once they got the leverage, they were able to go in and say, okay, there's. Now, do I think Daniel Ek and Elon had to sit down? And, you know, Ek had like a giant head of Rogan on a stick that was like, you want this? Like, I feel like we've been doing a lot of reenactments of CEO meetings on this episode of the Vergecast, and I believe that's what it was.

• 35:57Speaker 02

  Why was it on a stick?

• 35:58Nilay Patel?

  Because he's waving the head. Because he's decapitated. What were those big vinyl? What were they called? Like fat cats? Do you know what I'm talking about? Fat heads.

• 36:05Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, no, that makes sense. I was like, I went to a much more murderous place. And I was like, that feels like he's not going to be out doing podcasts.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  He's like, you want to build a robot, Elon? I've got just the brain for you.

• 36:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. But that is fascinating to me because you have Spotify trying to do ads, which is, as we just learned, a business that is very hard if you cannot connect your ad placement to data about what people want. So this is the business they want to grow. This is a business that Apple is crushing Facebook on. Spotify and Apple have the testiest relationship of all, right? Like Spotify has filed complaint after complaint in Europe about Apple's behavior. Apple, they have websites about how Apple is unfair. They are the heart of the coalition of app fairness. It's a good name. Like, how do you grow that business if everywhere else you look, advertising is becoming a bad business because you cannot connect the data?

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't know where Spotify is getting its tracking data from, apart from here's what you listen to.

• 37:06Speaker 02

  For podcasts?

• 37:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:07Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, that, but like, the sad part is in the podcast industry, traditionally, all they've had is IP addresses. So like geography and like what kind of device you're listening on. So even just a little music data is helpful.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, that's so sad. Right, so Spotify has, what's it, dynamic ad insertion? So when you stream a podcast, they can stop it and put in whatever ad, like they can target an ad.

• 37:34Speaker 02

  Oh, streaming ad insertion, yeah.

• 37:36Nilay Patel?

  We, we have dynamic ad insertion. I feel like I have to disclose that our podcast is served by Megaphone, which is owned by Spotify.

• 37:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I've never even seen the Megaphone interface. Andrew, our engineer and producer, I'm sure he's had to look at it a lot. But like, just there's your disclosure. Disclosure is our brand. But that Spotify buying up the entire tech stack of podcasts so they can make this ad play. But right next to it, Ashley, I think you're saying like, the data has been historically so bad that even just knowing that you like Beyonce is like better.

• 38:10Speaker 02

  It's helpful.

• 38:11Nilay Patel?

  Than advertising in Apple Podcasts.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  And your age, gender, what I, I mean, not to get too into the text, the ad stuff. But I mean, what's interesting is like, the reason why Rogan is also especially lucrative is because the dude sells a ton of crap. Like if you're an advertiser and you advertise on Rogan, like he's huge for you. Like he moves product. And so.

• 38:34Alex Cranz?

  He moved ivermectin.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  There you go. So people like really seek him out as an advertiser, which, you know, they need to really get people in the door. And then when you buy ads on Rogan, you have to buy ads on the rest of the Spotify Podcast catalog. So they're really using him to just like jumpstart this operation.

• 38:50Alex Cranz?

  I just, I want to go back to the, the, the concept that they needed Joe Rogan to get leverage to get on platforms that aren't Apple, given that isn't their primary competitor in the music space, Apple.

• 39:03Speaker 02

  Yeah. I mean, it's what Neela said, like, and this is something I actually wrote about this week is like RSS, Joe Rogan's been around forever. Like, all this came about because people want to moderate Joe Rogan now that he's getting paid reportedly a hundred million dollars from Spotify. And like, prior to this deal, RSS has allowed him to be distributed basically everywhere other than Spotify. And no one ever really like spoke up about him, maybe a little bit. It was considered controversial, but it never kind of reached this fever pitch. And so Spotify kind of brought this issue upon themselves specifically to gain this leverage and close off the ecosystem to gain a competitive leg up on competition. So, but they would say they're just a platform.

• 39:41Alex Cranz?

  But I just don't understand why they, they were like, we have to like, I just don't get why they needed the leverage of this one podcaster.

• 39:50Speaker 02

  Well, it's the entire exclusives. It's all the exclusives, not just Rogan. But like, if you like Rogan, or you like heavyweight or whatever from Gimlet. And it's not available through your Alexa device. You might start being pissed and be like, where is my Rogan?

• 40:05Speaker 03

  They got the like modern day Howard Stern. I mean, isn't, isn't his show like listened to by like more of like than all cable prime time combined? Like it's, I mean, his reach is massive.

• 40:15Speaker 02

  It's like pretty safe to assume tens of millions. They say he's the number one podcaster in 93 markets.

• 40:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I mean, they got Howard Stern. I mean, they went for the top and they got it. So it's, I mean, I can see why they did it. They wanted the best in terms of reach, in terms of, you know, numbers. Not saying best in terms of content, but.

• 40:31Alex Cranz?

  If Harry and Meghan had delivered their podcasts last year, would we still be in this position we're in right now?

• 40:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's interesting. Like, you know how there's like shockwaves before an earthquake?

• 40:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  The tremors before this earthquake were like a bunch of stories. They're like, what happened to all those podcast deals that Spotify signed?

• 40:49Speaker 02

  I mean, my entire author page right now is Spotify stories and not just because of Rogan. It was they shut down an in-house studio. I've written about like programmatic ads kind of going wrong on their platform. Like, it's been building.

• 41:03Nilay Patel?

  So they've got this big business and we haven't talked about the platform versus publisher thing because.

• 41:07Speaker 02

  I want you to.

• 41:08Nilay Patel?

  The headache that it's causing for me.

• 41:11Alex Cranz?

  We talked about it last week.

• 41:12Nilay Patel?

  We did, but now we know, like, we have this like line from Mac that honestly, it's just exhausting. Like, my jaw is clenching just thinking about it, but I just want to finish the podcast business thing. What's fascinating to me and connecting it to, to Facebook is like their service is built on renting music that everyone else can rent. And they do it, it like artists are mad at Spotify. Artists don't make any money, right? This is why Neil Young and Jody Mitchell and whoever else can just like bail. But they have no differentiation there except for like user experience, right? And playlists and potentially your friend lists and network effects and whatever, but like, kind of, who cares? But this is still the most competitive market in tech that I can think of.

• 41:53Nilay Patel?

  Like when I joke that YouTubers, like the endpoint of every YouTuber's lifecycle is a video about how they're mad at YouTube. Like they're still like, they're still on YouTube. They can make that video and they can, right? And then they have to make a big decision about what kind of life they want to lead and they all stay on YouTube. We get mad at Facebook and maybe it took, what, four years of sustained negative Facebook stories? For them to lose one million daily actives in a quarter and we feel like that's going to tank the business. It's like, it's still not a huge effect.

• 42:20Speaker 03

  No, and it's not, that one million's not even really because of the PR. I mean, I'm sure the PR has a role in it, but the products just are getting irrelevant in terms of the way it's designed for younger people. And that's like the hard truth. There may be an unpopular view of it, but I don't think it was the PR that led to the one million.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  So it's still like, yeah, right. But Spotify, like, and you can just go down the list. Like, you're mad at Google search? I'm sorry. Like, enjoy being.

• 42:46Speaker 03

  That's not going away.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  Spotify's the one where if you're mad, you can go.

• 42:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, and there's competition, right? I mean, that's the difference.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  And perfect competition.

• 42:54Speaker 03

  Yeah. And that's the difference between, you know, Apple and Google and Spotify and Meta, right? The way like platforms versus, I mean, this is like very Ben Thompson-y, but like his whole thing is platforms versus aggregators, you know? Companies that aggregate attention are much more vulnerable to this kind of stuff, to competitive pressures than platforms. You know, that lock people into their platform. And Spotify's not a platform.

• 43:18Speaker 02

  It's a publisher.

• 43:20Nilay Patel?

  We have to talk about it. I just wanted to make that point. Like, they are trying to build this walled garden podcast ecosystem. Because it is the thing that protects them from competition. And it's the thing that gives, and that protection gives them leverage to distribute the app on all these platforms that would otherwise just say, like, you want music in your Tesla? Just pay us the money and all the music will be here. Or you want music on your Amazon Echo, pay us $4 a month and we'll give you an Amazon Music subscription to it. That's what Amazon would prefer. That's why they have that plan. But Spotify's saying, well, you want, what these people want is Joe Rogan and they're already paying for us and they're going to get mad at you if you ask them to pay again. So I just like, from a business perspective, I think it's fascinating.

• 44:00Nilay Patel?

  From a moral perspective, the platform versus publisher thing is just such pure corporate, both sides nonsense. First of all, just definitionally, Spotify is not a platform. I dare you to try to upload some shit to Spotify.

• 44:17Alex Cranz?

  This is the lawyer, Neelai, I was waiting for. Let's go.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  You cannot do it. Like, how do you, you cannot do it. You have to go through some intermediary. There's one place where you can upload stuff to Spotify. It's Anchor, their user-generated podcast platform that has the programmatic ads problem and mostly has ads for Anchor running on it, according to Ashley's reporting.

• 44:37Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  That's it. That's what they got. That's their user-generated content. I'm guessing that's where, when they're like, we took down 20,000 episodes, I'm guessing those are all Anchor podcasts. Everything else is ingested through a megaphone or some other distribution service, right?

• 44:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, through a hosting platform. But like, the key thing in this case with them is that they're paying Rogan.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, so they're paying Rogan, but like, they also own The Ringer and they own Gimlet. And they like, they have this deal with the Obamas, like, do you think the people at The Ringer are just like, we are owned by a platform and we have complete editorial? No, they work for a company. The company is liable for what they publish. The people at Gimlet, it's exactly the same deal. If you were to, if Joe Rogan said something horribly defamatory towards someone, that person isn't gonna like, ah, well, Spotify is just a plat- no, they're gonna sue Spotify too. And I, I just don't think they see that accountability because they say they're a platform. And it's just nonsense.

• 45:32Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think they see that accountability. I think that's why they say they're a platform, right? Like.

• 45:37Speaker 02

  Yeah, I'm sure they understand the argument and where it puts them.

• 45:41Nilay Patel?

  Well, can I just read the, can I read the line that makes my jaw clench? "Spotify doesn't fit neatly into just one category," said Daniel Ek. Quote, "We are defining an entirely new space of tech and media. We're a very different kind of company, and the rules of the road are being written as we innovate."

• 45:57Alex Cranz?

  That's a lie. The road, the road, the road was paved. Sorry, the road was paved like a decade ago. Netflix has paved the road. There are so many other companies that have paved the road. And Spotify doesn't get to just act like it's new to kind of divert attention from the fact that they paid a man $100 million and now he says really stupid things that destroyed Neelai's love of the Green Bay Packers. Like. They don't get to, they don't get to just make up.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  I know that Aaron did not perform well in that game because he was distracted by the noise. I'm just saying it. I should be very excited about the Super Bowl and I'm not. Eck did say this about Rogan and this, you know, I get this. If you do run a platform, you have to say this from time to time. Eck said this about Rogan, "There are many things Joe Rogan says that I strongly disagree with and find very offensive." Okay, like, I just, I think the idea that you're going to sign this exclusive deal to distribute something on what you consider to be a platform and then not accept the editorial choice you have made to take that thing because you need it to support your business goals is a total cop out. I completely understand the business goals.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  You need leverage to get distribution for your app, which would otherwise be undifferentiated from everyone's content catalog. And you've got to build this advertising business around podcasts because the, you know, 15% of all the money you make on user fees for music have to go back to the artist. Like, you're just, your margins are compressed forever. Yeah, but those are deals that are just written.

• 47:29Speaker 03

  Neelai, you're coming at this as an editor in chief. Daniel Eck is the CEO of a tech company. That like, he's not a, he doesn't think of himself as a, all this discussion about Joe Rogan, I've been listening to a lot of it, not even just this podcast. We in the media are obsessed with this because we're obsessed with responsibility and the responsibility you have to like, put good information out into the world and like the checks that come with that. And like, these companies don't see themselves as that. And even if they experiment with it, it's not their door star. It's like taking responsibility for the things that people on their platforms say. And like, they're legally don't need to. So it's like, unless he-

• 48:07Alex Cranz?

  We shouldn't call it a platform. We shouldn't, let's not, let's not-

• 48:10Speaker 03

  Well, it is, but I'm just saying like, I don't think people care outside of the media industry as much about that. People probably have strong thoughts about what Joe Rogan said and whether he should be on Spotify or not, but like, Spotify's responsibility that if Joe Rogan says some crazy shit, you know, I just, they don't see themselves that way. So why should we hold them to the standard that we hold ourselves to as a news publication? I mean, what do you, I mean, what do you think about that?

• 48:35Alex Cranz?

  Because they're not a platform.

• 48:37Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I, I buy it. Maybe I'm like a little heated today because like, we, like, if you work at The Verge, it appears that I do like a lot of nothing, which is great. It's my whole goal is to like float along, but like- Some percentage of my brain space is like legal threats that like come to us, right? And so we have to be buttoned up just to like write the big soups and investigations. So that when those people are mad and try to sue us, we're like buttoned up. And so you're right, there's like just a frame of mind that I'm in. That is like a defensive posture about the first amendment. And I think that cuts both ways. That if you want to like enjoy the first amendment, the way that we do in the media. We have this responsibility to not just like defame people. Cause if we like screw up a bunch of those lawsuits, we will screw up defamation law in America.

• 49:22Nilay Patel?

  And that will actually be a threat to the first amendment. And this is like, this is not, we're innovating, we're making up the rules of the road. This is when I talk to our lawyers, like, don't fuck it up, like you will fuck up the first amendment. So this is like a big deal for us. The comparison I would make, Spotify is trying to run the same game as Netflix. Right? Netflix started out as a wholesale distributor of other people's content. So like NBC or CBS or whoever would like have a bunch of movies. And they would just like sell them to Netflix and Netflix would stream them because no one thought streaming is real. And then Netflix quickly realized they had to like have their own content because all of those companies were going to take their movies away and run their own direct to consumers.

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  They invested in content and now Netflix has two CEOs. They have a tech CEO, Reed Hastings, and they have a media CEO. And that to me is like Ted Sarandos, media CEO. That's where Spotify is going to end up here because they are trying to run a massive content business. Without accepting their like, who is in charge of the wringer? Is it just Bill Simmons? That's cool. Does he have the same standards as Gimlet? That's weird. Like someone has to break those ties. And when you go out to make the deals to distribute something else, you become responsible for it. Whether or not you want to be. Like if we ran a piece from a freelancer and someone tried to sue us, my defense could not be, will we merely license this content from a freelancer to put on our platform?

• 50:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, I guess here's my point is that we're like Spotify is being responsible because it is taking the responsibility of its decision. Like it's not saying like we're going to ignore this situation. It's saying, no, we're going to keep Joe Rogan on the platform. He didn't say anything illegal. He said some wild stuff. He says a lot of wild stuff. That is taking responsibility. It's not like the responsibility that Joe Rogan haters want them to take, but like, or like what we would take as a newsroom and like our, our, you know, medical facts, you know, standards that we have with publishing content. But that is, it's, it is a version of taking responsibility. Like taking, not taking responsibility would just be like not even caring, like completely ignoring it and waiting till a lawsuit shows up if he says something illegal. So like I, you know, that's, that's kind of how I view it.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, I think it would be different if they were a YouTube, right? If they were an open access platform and they had to make some rules that made sense. But this, because I think of the scale of the number and the importance, actually, you had this quote, right? The, it seems like everything at Spotify for employees feels like it has to support Rogan because that's the thing that supports the rest of the business. But just from a business perspective, like that's what your employees think. And then you're saying to them, this is the thing that creates leverage to do our business and we didn't have it, our business would look different. Wow. You've made a huge bet on one person that doesn't feel like you can control. And if you're Joe Rogan, and I've said this on like, my wife listens to Joe Rogan when her favorite comedians are on, like I've have listened to the show. He's very charming, but he gets rolled by other charming

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  con men. That's actually the issue here. Like, okay, fine. But if you're him, like, why wouldn't you just bail out of this and accept like all of the gambling money that's floating around? Realize like, oh, I could just call Tesla and get the distribution deal that Spotify is using my name to get. Like, it seems like Spotify has backed itself into a fairly dangerous corner where they they're building the future of their growth on one guy who can leave all the noise that has been created. Can he leave, Ashley? Can he just leave?

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's what I was gonna say. Like, I almost feel like maybe they were hoping this exact situation would play out when the deal expires. Like, that they could be like, we rode this. I don't know the exact deal terms. I'm gonna assume it was like two to three years. That's typically how their deals, it seems, have been structured. So I would say like, they were probably hoping, give us the two to three years, let's just grow this ad business as much as possible. We'll get the advertisers hooked. Rogan might piece out, might not, I don't know, but like, we can move on. Unfortunately, it didn't happen like that. And yeah, like what Tanila is saying is like, they've bought the Gimlet considers itself a journalistic enterprise and the Science Verse, the Science Verse host and editor are like, this actively makes us doing our job harder. You have someone on our platform saying things that are wildly wrong about the things that

• 53:33Speaker 02

  we report on. And that is the dicey situation, I think. And, you know, that's, that's where, and to me, it's just the money, I think. It's like, you can't, it's a lot.

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  All this to say, they did, they clearly talked to Joe Rogan.

• 53:47Speaker 02

  Oh, well, yeah.

• 53:48Nilay Patel?

  He's agreed to put labels on his content. He was contrite-ish and said he was gonna do a better job of it. Like, there is some amount of pressure that Spotify was able to impose on. And they've rolled out, like, now when you go to upload a podcast on Anchor, they give you the rules, which is amazing. They didn't tell anyone the rules before, actually. I think they're just kind of like speedrunning what it means to be a media company.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  That's truly what it is.

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  And they're just like pit-stopping at what if we were Facebook along the way? And that's just, that's a bad place to be.

• 54:18Speaker 03

  I wish Daniel would have called his good friend Zuckerberg because he would tell him that labels do not work.

• 54:23Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 54:24Speaker 03

  Especially with Joe Rogan. Who do we think is gonna like see a pop-up and decide, oh, maybe I'm not gonna listen to this about COVID? Like, I just don't see that working. If anything, people distrust labels.

• 54:40Nilay Patel?

  I went on MSNBC to talk about this and I was asked if I thought the labels would work. And I was like, no, because the labels just say, go listen to the CDC. And do you think that Joe Rogan listeners are gonna pick the CDC over Rogan? And I will tell you that this idea was met with complete shock. Of course.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  What if they got like a Joe Rogan impersonator to read the stuff at the CDC?

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  That's great. Um, Tash, your prediction is this is gonna burn out, right?

• 55:05Speaker 02

  Um, it kind of is like multiple, like it's either gonna burn out, like this is it, we've reached the apex and we're done, or employees are going to organize and speak up and be like, we're uncomfortable with this, or you're gonna have more musicians and podcasters also speak up and exert some pressure. So it's like, those are basically, I think, the three options. I suppose the wild card is Rogan leaves his deal, but I don't see that happening.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But I want to make clear, I don't think Joe Rogan should be canceled or taken off the air or censored. I think he should probably look at this moment and try to do a much better job with his platform. This is Alex's point about, I'm a media person, and we take this very seriously. He should take that seriously. Like, that's actually the right outcome, right? Is you use your huge platform and you like improve the, like, when he's like, I'm often unprepared, like, all of, all of the alarm bells go off. Maybe he's not always unprepared, he's just saying it. But that's the right outcome, right, is to improve the product. And Spotify, because they paid the money, look like a party that is accountable for the improvement of the product. So that's, that's the right outcome. It's not, you can't disappear Joe Rogan.

• 56:10Speaker 02

  And they're building the product around him. Like, that's the other interesting thing, is like, they're building the product around him. They launched video podcasts, basically, in coordination with him coming to the platform. They are rolling out interactive ads. Rogan, I think, was a show they used as an example. Like, it's just fascinating, kind of like what this employee who I quoted said, which is like, everything kind of rolls up to Rogan. It's like, well, if you're looking at product innovation, those two right there is straight up just Rogan stuff.

• 56:36Nilay Patel?

  Man. All right. Well, hopefully, Apple does some, like, product innovations to compete, because Apple Music is just like a dusty wasteland of a product.

• 56:45Speaker 02

  What if they combined podcasts and music?

• 56:47Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if anybody wants that. You know, I think-

• 56:50Speaker 02

  Galaxy Ray.

• 56:51Speaker 03

  I would like some more ads in my settings app for it. I think that would work great.

• 56:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'm an Apple Music listener, and it's fine.

• 56:59Speaker 03

  I'm sorry.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  It is aggressively fine. Neil Young's happy because there's lossless. Okay, we gotta take a break, and then we're gonna do a quick lightning round. There's actually, there's so much going on this week. We'll be right back.

• 57:12Speaker 01

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/AF.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  If you're looking to hire, you need Indeed. With Indeed Sponsored Jobs, you can spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Less stress, less time, more results. And listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit to help your job get the premium status it deserves at indeed.com/podcast. Just go to indeed.com/podcast right now and support our show by saying you heard about Indeed on this podcast. Indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need to hire? This is a job for Indeed Sponsored Jobs.

• 58:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We're gonna do a lightning round. I'm just gonna say a headline and then randomly call in one of you for an immediate reaction.

• 58:43Speaker 03

  This is like class.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like a first year law class. All right, Alex Heath, Sony is buying Bungie, the developer of Destiny and the original creator of Halo.

• 58:51Speaker 03

  FOMO?

• 58:52Nilay Patel?

  You think that's it?

• 58:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I mean, isn't this just like game industry consolidation? Like, is gonna keep happening and everyone's like, oh, we need more studios. It's like similar to what has been happening in ad tech because of the Apple changes. Like, every time there's these kind of seismic moves, everyone's just like, chase for scale, chase for scale. That seems like the rationale behind that, right?

• 59:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Do you agree with my prediction that? Apple has been blowing it for a long time in games and they will have to make an like Halo was originally downloaded on the Mac. It's very funny.

• 59:24Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  But if they want to sell a $2,000 headset, or however much that thing is going to cost, don't they need some like major killer app or piece of gaming IP?

• 59:33Speaker 03

  They do.

• 59:34Nilay Patel?

  To make the case.

• 59:34Speaker 03

  They do. And like, they have the white glove Apple Arcade thing, and I'm sure that will factor into the headset. But yeah, it's, that's the benefit, you know, of being a platform is you can simultaneously command the most profits in mobile gaming while also sucking the most at mobile gaming.

• 59:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe they'll figure it out. You know, they've got some money. They could maybe figure it out if they try.

• 59:56Alex Cranz?

  They're not gonna buy a studio.

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  They gotta do something.

• 1:00:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're not gonna buy a studio, because

• 1:00:02Speaker 03

  They're not going to, because then, yeah, the studio will unionize and

• 1:00:07Alex Cranz?

  Like, like, it's, it's too, it's, it's too much drama for them to buy a studio. But also, they, they won't have to, especially like if this headset comes out and it's as game changing as everybody seems to anticipate it, or one of its like followers being, they're not gonna have to, just like they didn't have to buy a studio to, to dominate on, on the iPhone. Like, if they get the users, it doesn't matter. They don't need it.

• 1:00:31Speaker 03

  That's so true.

• 1:00:32Alex Cranz?

  And like, Sony is doing this because Microsoft has been quietly consolidating like heck and just bought COD, Call of Duty, and all this other stuff. So like, yeah, Sony, Sony needs, I mean, this was obviously in the works long before Microsoft bought Activision, Blizzard, and that still might not even happen. But like, everybody just wants to consolidate right now there because Sony and Microsoft are like, well, we gotta buy everything before Google decides to do Stadia 2 and go on a buying spree, or Facebook, or, or not Facebook, Amazon.

• 1:01:06Speaker 03

  Oh, watch out for Google. Google's really gonna destroy everyone.

• 1:01:10Alex Cranz?

  You know, like, I think there's just this weird fear there. And they're, they're also seeing everybody else, like, vertical integration works. It's working really, really well for a lot of the, the, in the film and like, all of streaming has shown that vertical integration's great.

• 1:01:25Nilay Patel?

  But here's my argument. All of that stuff was like, it's happening on your phone, and your phone's great.

• 1:01:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:30Nilay Patel?

  And it's a camera, and it's a tech, like, whatever. It's got all this utility that was great, and Apple could solve it. They're trying to put a computer on your face, man. Like, they can't just like, assume that everyone's gonna do it.

• 1:01:41Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  If it's a pretty enough computer. I love it.

• 1:01:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, but like Beat Saber has already been purchased. What are they, what are they, what, what killer app are they gonna purchase?

• 1:01:52Speaker 03

  Oh, there's stuff out there. They did buy a VR content company that was struggling based out here in Southern California. I'm trying to remember what it was, actually. That shows how relevant it was. They have, they have game people working on AR stuff. I don't know if they're gonna do like full IP there or just license or whatever. But, I mean, they need something. Yeah, I'm surprised they haven't bought more studios, but.

• 1:02:13Alex Cranz?

  But the AAA studios aren't even looking in that direction yet. Like, they, they kind of flirt with it.

• 1:02:17Speaker 03

  There's no market.

• 1:02:18Alex Cranz?

  They're like, oh, yeah, we'll put something out on Oculus because face, because Meta gave us a bunch of money.

• 1:02:22Speaker 03

  Yeah, there's no market.

• 1:02:23Alex Cranz?

  But they don't, they don't, they don't care. Like, they, they don't need to buy one until there's actually a market. And then they might. But if they went and like.

• 1:02:30Speaker 03

  Apple will make the market and then, yeah, exactly.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  All right, Alex Cranz. Wordle has been bought by the New York Times reportedly for a number that in their own press release, the Times is like the low seven figures, which is an incredible weird self dunk. And will initially remain free to play for everyone.

• 1:02:50Alex Cranz?

  I finally played Wordle. I now, I now know how it works. I did it. I, I, I use beast as my starting word there.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  Oh, that's a good one.

• 1:02:57Alex Cranz?

  And, and I got really upset because somebody this week did like a study to figure out what is the scientifically best word that you can play Wordle with as your starting word. And it just made me furious because that's not the point of Wordle. Like, you don't want to game Wordle. You don't want to get like cheats. There's always that person. There is that person and I hate them.

• 1:03:18Speaker 03

  I want to be good at Wordle, I'll tell you that.

• 1:03:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I want to be good at it, but I don't want to like go to gamefax.com and figure out the best way to, to get my, my score this week. But it was always gonna be New York Times, right? Like, New York Times was always gonna be the one, if somebody bought this, it wasn't gonna be Apple. And it wasn't gonna be.

• 1:03:37Speaker 03

  It should have been Apple. Apple would have been like, from time to time, Apple buys smaller companies and we do not say why. It's like, dude, it's Wordle. Also Wordle. Yeah, yeah. I, no, there's no, I mean, it's also such a low price. That was the reaction I had immediately was like, if this was Mark Zuckerberg, he'd put like a 16x multiple on that.

• 1:03:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just, just for fun.

• 1:03:57Speaker 03

  It's like network effects, baby. I mean, come on.

• 1:04:01Nilay Patel?

  Put that shit behind a paywall.

• 1:04:03Alex Cranz?

  I think it's like, I love that they bought it. I mean, it's, it's gonna suck when we eventually get the brought to you by New York Times banner on it. And when some other weird ad appears, just thus ruining why everybody likes Wordle.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  So one of our top stories of the week is all of Wordle is contained in the source of the page. So you can just download all of Wordle.

• 1:04:23Speaker 03

  That explains the price.

• 1:04:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so it's just written off. What's interesting about this to me is,

• 1:04:28Alex Cranz?

  It's like an NFT.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  You stop it right now. It's pronounced Neft, by the way.

• 1:04:33Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, they bought a Neft and now just copy paste your way out of it.

• 1:04:37Nilay Patel?

  Our new security reporter, Cornface, is like, he is trolling the most troll.

• 1:04:42Speaker 03

  Oh, man, what a blog.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  He was initially very apologetic. He's like, I wrote a dumb post. And now he's like, wait, this is who I am.

• 1:04:47Speaker 03

  He shouldn't apologize. It's a beautiful blog.

• 1:04:49Alex Cranz?

  Touch the blogging power.

• 1:04:53Nilay Patel?

  His Twitter feed is just people DMing him how mad they are about Neft and him being like, I apologize for nothing. It's great. It's good. It's, it's a perfect, this is what the Verge is for. I just think, in the context of all the Spotify conversation, the New York Times is trying to make, they're trying to acquire more users. And they can't do it with just news. So it's like recipes and word games are their growth markets. And they bought The Athletic.

• 1:05:16Alex Cranz?

  And audio app.

• 1:05:17Nilay Patel?

  And audio, yeah. Oh, right. And they're doing premium audio.

• 1:05:20Speaker 03

  That was their press release was like, we've hit our subscriber goal because we bought 2 million of them with The Athletic. And next thing you know, it's gonna be like 15 million subscribers because we are charging for Wordle.

• 1:05:32Alex Cranz?

  Who, who will pay for Wordle? I don't get it.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  No one's gonna pay for Wordle. That's why it's initially free. They're just gonna, they're gonna be like, have you tried spelling bee? Like, this is what they're gonna do. Ashley, Peloton made a $90 heart rate monitor for your arm. They also lost a patent case and the USPTI ruled that their stuff isn't patentable and competitors can copy.

• 1:05:51Speaker 02

  Yeah. So Neelai knows. Also, I think a Peloton rider. I have a Peloton here. The heart rate monitor, not gonna save Peloton. Not, not the product that's gonna revive Peloton. I don't think. Unless they sell a shit ton of heart rate monitors.

• 1:06:07Nilay Patel?

  I definitely took a Peloton ride today and the instructor is like, I've been here for eight years and I still love it. And I was like, the vibes in this are all off.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  I love how you said I took a Peloton ride like you went somewhere.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's been two years, man. I can go upstairs. I can go downstairs.

• 1:06:23Speaker 02

  It's an emotional journey.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  Everyone wants to think, Peloton, by the way, another company that has been feuding with Apple, because their, their one bike has Apple Watch integration and like only for parts of it, they couldn't get it on the treadmill. It's, once you see it, it is everywhere. They should join the coalition for app fairness. That would save them. Alex Cranz, Google has leaked the Pixel 6A name in a coloring book.

• 1:06:49Alex Cranz?

  Like, I just, they, they did a full, like, the six, the, the six, they were like, we're just gonna tell you everything. You're not gonna see it and we're gonna tell you five months in advance. And this time they're like, two people will see this. And they're both Google super fans who bought, it was like a speaker that they got in the mail or like a, it was a Nest camera, I think.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  It was a Nest Audio smart speaker.

• 1:07:10Alex Cranz?

  Okay, I was almost there. So it was a Nest speaker. They like, the super fans. And of course, the super fan will be like, yeah, I'm gonna scan this. Nailed it. And I just love that. It's, it's so goofy.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  You have to imagine they were really hoping this would happen. And when it did, they were like, yes. Also, in Google earnings, they said they've sold more Pixel devices than ever before, which is five.

• 1:07:33Alex Cranz?

  So they sold, yeah, like, five or six now.

• 1:07:36Speaker 03

  Good job, you know. Wasn't this supposed to be like the iPhone moment for the Pixel?

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:07:41Alex Cranz?

  They sold more than ever.

• 1:07:42Speaker 03

  I don't know one person who has it. All I know is that that back thing, the back bump is an atrocity.

• 1:07:50Nilay Patel?

  It's so ugly. This is why we missed Dieter. Dieter would, Dieter would be like, bah, but they tried. Come back, if you're listening, like, I need you, man. I'm gonna take up the net neutrality one. The appeals court held up California's net neutrality law. This is, to me, the most galaxy brain Trump administration lawyering that has ever been lawyered. So the Trump FCC got rid of net neutrality, right? That was the first thing they did. It's gone. And then they tried to write a law saying it was so gone that the federal government would no longer regulate broadband and would have no business doing such a thing ever again. And also, state governments can't do it either. And then all of the states were like, but you just said you can't regulate broadband. So why can you regulate us regulating broadband? And this is, it is 2022.

• 1:08:34Nilay Patel?

  And a court is like, yeah, that, that seems a little silly. So California still has net neutrality law. Complete galaxy brain lawyering. Very good.

• 1:08:42Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  And there's all these memes about net neutrality and doing anything. It's because these court cases are just from like burning along in the background. And that the case is not about net neutrality. It's whether a government agency can devoid itself of authority and then prevent a state from having the same authority that it once had. That's not normal. Like, you can't have a dinner conversation about that.

• 1:09:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, you lost me.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  Why the news isn't covering net neutrality?

• 1:09:04Speaker 03

  You totally lost me there, dude.

• 1:09:05Alex Cranz?

  But you can have a podcast conversation.

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  I can do it for hours.

• 1:09:08Speaker 03

  Sir, I have a podcast.

• 1:09:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, last one. Tesla rolls out any feature that disables your seat controls if you mess with them too much. Because the noters are over here. They put up a warning.

• 1:09:18Speaker 03

  I do.

• 1:09:19Nilay Patel?

  It's good.

• 1:09:19Speaker 03

  I want a car that tells me what to do. I think that's where we should go as a society.

• 1:09:24Alex Cranz?

  Is this like mainly for small children? Like when you get in your, your, your dad's car and just start messing with a seat until they said, no, never again?

• 1:09:33Speaker 03

  I think it's mainly for the people who drive Teslas and act like small children who do it.

• 1:09:37Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:09:37Speaker 03

  Who like don't, aren't in the driver's seat when autopilot is on.

• 1:09:44Alex Cranz?

  Just sit there.

• 1:09:45Nilay Patel?

  The warning will come up. Seat track motor unavailable due to excessive use. Wait five minutes to adjust the seat again. It's very good. Um, it's made me, I haven't adjusted the seat in my car since I bought it. And I was like, what am I, am I missing out?

• 1:09:59Speaker 02

  I mean, as someone who moves a seat now.

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Alex Cranz?

  Like, the only time I've ever done it is when my friend gets in my car and jacks my seat all the way back because she apparently has the legs of a gazelle. And then like, I need to, I need to be able to get back up so I can reach the pedals.

• 1:10:15Nilay Patel?

  All right. Well, calm down, Cranz.

• 1:10:17Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry.

• 1:10:18Nilay Patel?

  Successive use.

• 1:10:20Alex Cranz?

  My mom's just gonna yell at me when I get into next.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  All right. We've gone over, as always. Hopefully next week, Dieter is back to put some order, semblance of normalcy back to this podcast. You were all wonderful. I think we got another week of Spotify stories out of us. That's my prediction.

• 1:10:36Speaker 02

  Okay, we'll see if I'm back again.

• 1:10:39Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. But that's it. I want to call it two stories on a site. Liz Zapata has a great story about accountants heading into tax season who are all quitting their jobs. And it is just a very funny, like, the whole thing is hilarious. I mean, in one way, sad for accountants. In another way, very funny, because they're all just like dunking on the profession of accounting. Very good. Read that. Allison Johnson has an explainer on all of the 5G icons that are now proliferating everywhere. There's a hearing today where the United States Congress dumped on the industry for the problems it had with planes. Very good. We're gonna write that up. But the icon explainer is just very good. Allison did a great job with that. Decoder this week was career commerce CEO Ruben Harris. He's

• 1:11:21Nilay Patel?

  great. He should listen to that. So he's a cool founder. We got more decoder coming up next week. And hopefully, like I said, Dieter Bohn will stop being, I'm assuming he's just like drinking. He's just like drinking a frosty tropical drink right now. He shouldn't be listening.

• 1:11:34Speaker 03

  He's just like in his backyard felling trees, right?

• 1:11:36Speaker 02

  And like biking?

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  And biking?

• 1:11:38Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:11:39Alex Cranz?

  But maybe he has pina coladas.

• 1:11:41Nilay Patel?

  I hope you're having a pina colada, Dieter. Anyway, we miss you. Ideally, he's back next week. We'll be back with the Bridge Cast. That's it. Rock and roll.

• 1:12:09Speaker 07

  Trying to locate news sources that reliably separate fact from fiction can seem like looking for a needle in a haystack. That's why The Guardian is launching Stateside with Kai Wright and Carter Sherman, a conversation with experts who slow down the news and wrestle with the questions we all have about what's actually happening in the world. Three times a week, hosts Kai and Carter utilize all the reporting resources The Guardian has to discuss the news, international affairs, climate, culture, sports, lifestyle, fashion, and wellness. And The Guardian is not billionaire-owned, meaning they're free to report the whole picture without interference. Go to theguardian.com/stateside to learn more. And listen wherever

• 1:12:51Speaker 07

  you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube. That's theguardian.com/stateside.

• 1:13:00Speaker 08

  There are sales teams out there who never seem to stop moving. Always a step ahead, always working with a level of precision that doesn't seem normal. It's no secret they're on Attio, the Agentic CRM. Attio runs the work behind every win. It's built for humans and agents, with the guardrails of human software and the scale of Agentic infrastructure. This is the frontier of go-to-market. Teams like Parallel, TurboPuffer, and Wordsmith are already using Attio to set the pace. Now it's your turn. Try Attio for free by going to attio.com/fox. That's A-T-T-I-O dot com slash fox.