Apple M2 reviews, DOJ sues Google, and this week in Elon

Today on the flagship podcast of staring directly down the barrel of a camera, The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, and Monica Chin start the show with an inside look at our M2 MacBook Pro and Mac Mini reviews. After that, the crew breaks down the case the US Department of Justice has filed against Google's ad business and of course we try to make sense of the latest Elon Musk shenanigans. Further reading: The Vergecast - YouTube Apple Mac Mini (2023) review: Mac Studio junior Apple MacBook Pro 16 (2023) review: the core count grows Google is being sued by the US government and eight states over online advertising Google plans to demo AI chatbot search as it panics about ChatGPT More details come out on which departments saw layoffs at Google, Microsoft, and Amazon Tesla made more money in 2022 than ever before, but its future still looks rocky Elon Musk is theoretically sad that Tesla investors lost money because of his tweets Elon Musk thinks Twitter is real life Elon Musk’s Twitter is caving to government censorship, just like he promised Elon Musk gets serious about 420 at securities fraud trial - The Verge Tesla’s new $3.6 billion Nevada investment includes a ‘high-volume’ Semi factory Tesla Cybertruck mass production won't start until 2024 Microsoft Q2 2023: Windows, devices, and Xbox down as cloud holds strong Senators and Swifties take on Ticketmaster in Washington GoldenEye 007 is coming to Nintendo Switch and Xbox on January 27th TikTok confirms that its own employees can decide what goes viral 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

  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.

• 0:45Speaker 00

  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.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of staring directly down the barrel of the camera, whether it's your real eyes or fake, computer-generated eyes.

• 1:52Alex Cranz?

  These are real eyes here. These are fake. Beautiful, real eyes.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm your friend Eli. I have an announcement to make. This is going to be one of the first episodes of our show in a long time that we post as a video podcast to YouTube. We used to do it all the time. We used to do it live on video, which was a mistake. Then to pay back the the karmic debt of doing that.

• 2:18Alex Cranz?

  Just stop.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  We stopped the video.

• 2:19Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  And for years, now we've slowly started adding it back in with everything that we've learned.

• 2:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  And what we've learned is that Richard has the Nvidia software on his computer that makes his eyes stare directly at you, no matter where he's looking. And it is terrifying.

• 2:37Alex Cranz?

  I can't look away.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  Hello, Richard.

• 2:38Speaker 03

  It's fine. These are my real eyes. This is what I actually look like. This is not AI enhanced by Nvidia. I am offended by this suggestion that I would use software to enhance the way that I look at you, because I always look directly at you.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  It's so creepy.

• 2:55Speaker 03

  That's what people say about me all the time.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot. We're gonna.

• 2:59Speaker 03

  If there's anything I love, it's eye contact. That's what I'm into.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  When I say karmic debt, it's like we're already accruing it. Like, we paid off the balance. We're like, turn the cameras back on.

• 3:09Alex Cranz?

  We've got like three episodes in us.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  And Richard's like, I'm ringing it up. Just making purchases that we're gonna have to pay off with AI assist.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  Yeah, this isn't weird at all.

• 3:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my goodness.

• 3:19Nilay Patel?

  Alex Cranz is here.

• 3:20Alex Cranz?

  I am here, and I've got my own camera in the studio, and it's great.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  If you're in your car, you're you're doing great, because Richard isn't looking at you. But if you're watching this on video, here's Richard looking at you. All right. And Monica Chin is joining us for the first segment of the show. Hey, Monica.

• 3:36Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  You know, we're two minutes into doing this on video again. There's a reason I turned the cameras off.

• 3:45Alex Cranz?

  I think we look great. I think this is the best thing we've ever done.

• 3:47Nilay Patel?

  Well, look, I mean, I mean, start with some like inside. The funny thing is when

• 3:51Alex Cranz?

  Now, get out of my frame. I'm looking great.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  I can just get in Alex's camera.

• 3:56Speaker 04

  It looks like he's intently examining the wall.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst radio that's ever been made. Here's what I will tell everyone. Just back it up inside media baseball. We used to do it on video all the time. We were arguably ahead of our time.

• 4:08Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  In 2011, live streaming a podcast.

• 4:11Alex Cranz?

  But podcasts, live streaming podcasts, 2011. None of those things existed then.

• 4:16Nilay Patel?

  Younger, drunker, Neelai on camera live.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  Many mistakes.

• 4:21Alex Cranz?

  Some really good gifs out there of it, by the way.

• 4:22Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's.

• 4:23Alex Cranz?

  Incredible.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  Some of our finest moments.

• 4:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Who is the Samsung guy? Big Papa Joe? It's, we hired people off the, off the call ins for the podcast. This is a true story. Whatever. Many things happened in the Vergecast. I'm sure people remember or don't. We started the Vergecast up again and we're like, this is a lot of effort for videos.

• 4:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  That a small group of very passionate people watch. But we wanted the podcast to be big. And so we shut off the cameras to make a better radio show.

• 4:52Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  And our numbers went up because we were no longer looking at each other and telling each other jokes about things we could see.

• 4:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:00Nilay Patel?

  That no one in their cars could see.

• 5:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:02Nilay Patel?

  So we were like, okay, we're good at making a podcast. Fast forward to 2023, everyone with a podcast is like, just turn on the cameras and put it on YouTube. That's where all the podcast growth is.

• 5:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 5:12Nilay Patel?

  So now we're fully back to the future. We have potentially learned something about making a better podcast by just having made a podcast for a long time. And we are not, Alex, going to do bits to the camera.

• 5:27Alex Cranz?

  Never. I'm not doing that today, tomorrow, ever again. Hi, guys. How are you? Let me just talk to you personally. Get out of my frame.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. So if you are listening to this and we get out of line, send us a polite, polite.

• 5:44Alex Cranz?

  Very polite.

• 5:45Nilay Patel?

  Email. We'll, we'll try to rein it in. If you're watching this for the first time on YouTube, welcome. Liam, what's the YouTube channel people can subscribe to? Just type the Vergecast into whatever text field you encounter on the internet and it will lead you to our YouTube page.

• 6:00Nilay Patel?

  Yahoo.com. No, it's the, it's YouTube, The Vergecast. That's our channel that you can watch. You can watch us live.

• 6:06Alex Cranz?

  Love it.

• 6:06Nilay Patel?

  Once again.

• 6:07Alex Cranz?

  You won't regret it.

• 6:08Nilay Patel?

  And Richard continues to stare directly at you the whole time.

• 6:13Alex Cranz?

  Just unblinking.

• 6:14Nilay Patel?

  Can we, let's talk about this technology. We have a lot to talk about. Monica's here to talk about MacBook Pro and Mac Mini with M2 chip reviews, Tesla earnings. We have a, we have a headline here that just says trouble in Alphabet City, which is very good.

• 6:27Alex Cranz?

  So good.

• 6:28Nilay Patel?

  Which is just about Google.

• 6:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  Lots of problems for Google, Microsoft layoffs, Google, there's lots to talk about, but we should talk about the fact that Nvidia released this software for their video cards that lets you just stare at the camera. This is not new technology, right? It's built into FaceTime. Monica, you were saying it's built into a lot of laptops?

• 6:49Speaker 04

  It's been on the surface line for a bit. Samsung has claimed to have a technology that does it, which I haven't personally used it before. HP says they have it. There are various people who have been trying it with varying degrees of success.

• 7:05Alex Cranz?

  But no one like Richard.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  No.

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the thing about Nvidia, right? It's because it, you can set any video source to go through it.

• 7:12Speaker 04

  Right. This is a, this one is, is a, is a bigger release.

• 7:16Nilay Patel?

  So, right, like you can't.

• 7:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Cause usually if you're doing FaceTime, you have to be in the FaceTime app.

• 7:21Nilay Patel?

  On the FaceTime.

• 7:22Alex Cranz?

  And it's not as nearly as funny. Yeah.

• 7:25Nilay Patel?

  And then, Richard, this is just like Nvidia broadcaster and you're just pumping OBS through it? What's going on here?

• 7:30Speaker 03

  Yep. It just connects, it you, I open up Nvidia Broadcast, pick my camera, and then in our recording software, I just tell it to look for Nvidia Broadcast and it gets whatever, whatever is piped there.

• 7:40Alex Cranz?

  Which is your cartoon eyes.

• 7:42Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's.

• 7:43Speaker 03

  Eyes that it has drawn. And occasionally you'll see like if it decides that I've looked away too far, it'll go back to my real eyes and then it will turn my eyes back to you. For me, that's the creepiest part. It's the animated turn.

• 7:54Speaker 04

  Well, it would be weirder if they just like blinked out and then blinked to be staring at us again.

• 7:59Speaker 03

  It's strange because it's looking, it's like looking at like a ghost mirror of myself because I'm looking at myself down in the middle of the screen and it's looking directly back. Which is very strange.

• 8:10Nilay Patel?

  That's terrifying. We've done a lot of stories about this tech recently. James Vincent has written a lot of stories about this kind of tech. His one today is very good. It's just about people putting movies through it.

• 8:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:21Nilay Patel?

  So the actors are looking directly down the barrel of the lens.

• 8:24Alex Cranz?

  Don't do that.

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  And all of it looks like high school theater, like the most dramatic high school monologues that you have ever experienced. It's very good. I don't know if this is the future of all video conferencing. I know that it's very funny. And I also know that it's been on FaceTime for a minute and no one has noticed it.

• 8:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, true.

• 8:43Nilay Patel?

  And I think it's just because Nvidia is letting basically anybody pump anything through it.

• 8:47Alex Cranz?

  And how many people use FaceTime?

• 8:49Nilay Patel?

  Like lots of people, but like my mom is not like, you're looking directly at the camera, aren't you?

• 8:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  She's more like, where's your baby? Get out of my case. Like, you're old and dusty.

• 8:57Alex Cranz?

  Don't want you.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  I already raised you.

• 8:59Alex Cranz?

  Show me the child.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  All right. So this is amazing tech. Richard, enjoy. It's just so weird, man.

• 9:06Speaker 03

  I just flip it on and off randomly during meetings and during this call. It's fine. No, but we came into a meeting last week and Veeran, our video producer, he was on, and I forgot that I had turned it on the first day that it came out. And we were talking for about 10 minutes. And I don't know, he must have thought I was moving on.

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Because like, I'm just talking to him and I wasn't looking at the video preview. So I didn't realize it was on until until a while. And he was like, I was gonna say something, but.

• 9:33Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't have an entire meeting staring only directly into their webcam? I do it all the time, actually. I think it's.

• 9:40Alex Cranz?

  I was like, you're really, really good at it. Like, annoyingly so.

• 9:43Nilay Patel?

  I like mugging directly into the webcam. I'm doing it right now.

• 9:46Alex Cranz?

  So am I.

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  That's enough talking about this. It's so creepy. But it's out. You should go play with it if you have an Nvidia card. The fact that you can pipe any source through it, I think is deeply hilarious. But I would expect, again, it's in FaceTime, it's in a bunch of laptops. I would bet the next generation of like, Apple laptops has it because they already have the technology and they're using the same chips, which brings me to the chips. Do you see that segue?

• 10:07Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I like that. That was good.

• 10:08Nilay Patel?

  I did it.

• 10:09Alex Cranz?

  I loved it.

• 10:10Nilay Patel?

  It was perfect. All right. So Monica, you have been reviewing the new MacBook Pro 16s with the M2 Pro, the M2 Max. Chris Welch reviewed the Mac Mini, which is the same chip, the same computer, a little case without a battery and a screen. What's going on here?

• 10:28Speaker 04

  So the MacBook Pro 16 looks very similar, identical even, to the 2021 MacBook Pro 16. But the chip inside is called the M2 instead of the M1. There's the M2 Max and the M2 Pro, which is not the M1 Max and the M1 Pro. It's the, you know, it's the two.

• 10:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:47Speaker 04

  It's the second one.

• 10:47Alex Cranz?

  It's dos.

• 10:48Speaker 04

  Yeah, dos.

• 10:50Nilay Patel?

  Is it any good?

• 10:51Speaker 04

  Yeah, for the workload that I do, which is, you know, lots of Google Docs and lots of spreadsheets and lots of Zoom calls, it's like not a noticeable difference. It's not, that's not anything that it impacts. It is an upgrade in graphic performance and an upgrade in CPU performance. And it is something that you will notice if you are doing heavier professional workloads. We saw decreases in export time, we saw decreases in Xcode time. Benchmarks across the board were higher. So it is a more powerful laptop, the battery life is a lot longer, and I think to me, that's the most significant part.

• 11:27Alex Cranz?

  Is it the same battery as last time, like the same size battery?

• 11:31Nilay Patel?

  I think, isn't Apple's like running right up against the limit?

• 11:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 11:34Speaker 04

  It is the same 100 watt hour battery.

• 11:38Alex Cranz?

  So that is like super impressive.

• 11:39Speaker 04

  Well, the chip is more efficient. There are two more cores on the M2 Max than there were on the M1 Max. They're both efficiency cores. It, it seems like a more efficient chip. I would usually get around 10 hours out of the M1 Max. I'm getting, depending on my workload, I'll get 16 to 20.

• 11:56Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy.

• 11:57Speaker 04

  It's a very big difference for me. That doesn't mean everyone will see that same difference. You know, people's workloads vary, people's usage habits vary, but I would be very surprised if any, if anyone didn't see a couple more hours at least of battery out of this machine than out of the older one. Which doesn't mean, I don't think anyone's necessarily trying to upgrade from the M1. That would surprise me, but like if you're thinking of doing that, you don't need to do that. The M1 Pro and M1 Max are fine. But these are, for people who are still upgrading from Intel machines, these are big increases in power and they are more efficient.

• 12:28Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's like six to eight hours extra battery, though. Like Neelai, do you have some FOMO about your M1?

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  So I'm staring at my M1 Pro.

• 12:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:37Nilay Patel?

  16 inch MacBook Pro. It's still the best laptop I've ever owned. And we have an M2 Pro, 16 inch MacBook Pro. We have yet to run benchmarks on it, but we've run the benchmarks on the mini with that chip.

• 12:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:50Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, it's a linear increase in performance, in a linear increase in battery life. It's just like, these numbers are better.

• 12:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:58Nilay Patel?

  In sort of exactly the way that you would expect them to be, which is kind of interesting.

• 13:02Speaker 04

  It somewhat has the vibes of like, an Intel, a pre AMD being a competitor Intel upgrade. It's like, they made the chips better, they didn't feel like they had to make a giant splash with the chips, which is fine, because the last ones that came out were a giant splash.

• 13:18Alex Cranz?

  So real TikTok kind of situation.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  Right, and the rumors are that M3s will be on a 3 nanometer processor, and that's like, that's like, straight up.

• 13:27Alex Cranz?

  That's just straight up Intel TikTok.

• 13:29Speaker 04

  And that is the pattern that we saw from Intel, before AMD sort of burst on the scene as, you know, making, we often had less exciting generations followed by more exciting generations.

• 13:38Alex Cranz?

  It was super fun to write about those, too. Because you'd be like, this year they're 10% faster. Nothing cool? I said 10% faster. That's all you need. Be excited.

• 13:47Speaker 04

  The number is 10. What order do you want?

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So, I don't, this computer, the M1 Pro, 16 Schmackwic Pro, same battery, 100 kilowatt hour battery, which is like, I think it's actually like 99 points, something to like sneak under the.

• 14:01Speaker 04

  Yeah, under the plane limit.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  But like, this computer, I just like never plug it in. I haven't plugged it in all day today.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, do we go, the only, the only way I'm getting that 16 hour figure is I do not let it go to sleep, and I have it run something constantly. If I were just using this in my day to day life, I would not need to plug it in every couple days.

• 14:18Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible.

• 14:19Nilay Patel?

  No, I didn't get that from the M1 Max when we tested the M1 Max. So if I was like, I'm always on the road rendering, road renderers.

• 14:28Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 14:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, who isn't?

• 14:29Speaker 04

  Just driving one hand over here.

• 14:31Nilay Patel?

  Just constantly, just mobile rendering.

• 14:33Speaker 04

  Compiling your Xcode, yeah.

• 14:34Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. Like, honestly, maybe, I'd be like, you know what? It's more power, and more battery life, and my mobile rendering workflow will be significantly improved. The thing that really struck me reading your review is that it runs the fan, and is like a noisier computer.

• 14:49Speaker 04

  It was much noisier. I was using, I was running like Puget Bench in the office, and like, people were a couple desks over, and they were coming over like, what is going on over here? Like, that, what is that doing?

• 14:59Nilay Patel?

  I can't remember the last time we had a noisy Mac.

• 15:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. So that is, and I mean, that was it running on high power mode, which, like, if you don't run on high power mode, you probably will not get that much noise, you probably will get decreased performance.

• 15:11Alex Cranz?

  Is high power mode like a thing you have to activate?

• 15:13Speaker 04

  Yeah. So if you go into the, the battery profiles, you can put on silent mode, you can put it on. High power mode, you can put it on automatic, which decides which one to use based on what you're doing.

• 15:23Alex Cranz?

  Which did you do for your battery test?

• 15:24Speaker 04

  The battery one.

• 15:25Alex Cranz?

  I love that. Okay, so like high power mode, super loud, but also like balls to the wall perform.

• 15:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, and there was when I ran benchmarks while I was in the battery mode, they were, there was substantially decreased performance. So you want to have high power mode on if you're doing load.

• 15:40Nilay Patel?

  Mobile rendering.

• 15:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:41Nilay Patel?

  But you won't be stealthy.

• 15:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you won't be stealthy. Everybody's gonna hear you come. I mean, given the truck you drive, everybody's hearing you come.

• 15:47Speaker 04

  It was very, like, the area behind the keyboard was like very hot, which like I've never seen from one of these MacBooks.

• 15:53Alex Cranz?

  Well, that's interesting, though, because that means like, so these are thermally limited, like, that's where the slowdown is on these.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, actually, I think this is like kind of a weird moment for Apple, right? Because they have been very aggressive, thermally limiting their machines for quite a while. Like, the Intel MacBook Airs were like thermally throttling all over the place. The first generation M1 Air in the old case design was throttled, like, would hit its limit and throttle down all the time. And the M1 13-inch MacBook Pro would be like, "I'm gonna run the fan," and like last a longer. And it was like a pretty quiet fan. This one seems like the first time Apple's like, "You know what? It's gonna get hot and noisy, and we're gonna keep that performance envelope up."

• 16:36Speaker 04

  Yeah, and I will just be clear, like, that was only, that was when it was running Puget Bench, which does just like the wildest things, like it's throwing effects, it's doing all this random stuff with 4K and 8K. Like, if I'm just like doing my like regular, like if I'm watching Better Call Saul or whatever, it's not like, I'm not hearing it.

• 16:52Nilay Patel?

  Those are the two extremes.

• 16:53Speaker 04

  Those are the two extremes.

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  Monica's like, "Either it's gonna melt down, or we're gonna watch the Superior prequels."

• 16:59Speaker 04

  Exactly. Those are the only two things that you would ever do on a MacBook. I'm just coming out and saying it. It is not, we're not back in 13-inch Intel MacBook Pro land, where like I open one Chrome tab and it fries itself to death. Like, this is still, that's not gonna happen if you're just like doing Chrome or whatever. That was when it was running like the most intense thing that I ran on it.

• 17:19Nilay Patel?

  The other thing that really struck me after the review is you pointed out that apart from battery life where Apple is still just like way ahead of everybody, performance-wise, Intel is making some products that can compete.

• 17:30Speaker 04

  Yeah, so this year, we just went, we just came back from CES, AMD and Intel both announced these just absolutely wild chips. There's like, Intel has a 24-core chip, AMD has a 16-core chip, and that's not a big little one, that's like a full 16 power cores. These, I would expect these chips to be competitive with Apple on like Cinebench scores. And so we are in a very different landscape from the landscape we were in when the One Max came out where Intel was just not even holding a candle to its performance. Where we do not expect Intel and AMD to compete is battery life. And I don't, I don't want to make pronouncements before I've tested the chips, but when I was talking to Jason Badde from AMD at CES,

• 18:12Speaker 04

  he was telling me basically like, "Yeah, we're not targeting an audience that cares about battery life with this chip."

• 18:17Alex Cranz?

  They don't care about it.

• 18:18Speaker 04

  This is, this is really for people who don't unplug their laptop.

• 18:21Nilay Patel?

  That's one way to describe it, yeah, sure.

• 18:23Speaker 04

  Those weren't the exact words, but that was the sentiment I got from, you know, talking to a number of different people who were involved in the making of that stuff.

• 18:28Nilay Patel?

  Richard, what were you saying?

• 18:29Speaker 03

  I said that that's one way to describe it. And the other thing that I noticed, the gaming performance is noticeably better. We've got a lot more GPU power here, and it seems like if you want to use your MacBook Pro to play games...

• 18:39Speaker 04

  Right. I don't do that, I don't recommend doing that, but if you want to do, I just need to caveat that, but if you want to buy a MacBook Pro and play a ton of games on it, we saw around a 20% increase in graphic performance. And that, you know, that's noticeably better gaming experience.

• 18:52Alex Cranz?

  This means like gaming developers have to actually develop for the Mac. And we're seeing like-

• 18:55Speaker 04

  We're seeing more of that, yes.

• 18:57Alex Cranz?

  Apple, Apple is courting these developers, these developers are starting to seem a little more interested. There's more you can play now than you could a couple of years ago, but it's still-

• 19:04Nilay Patel?

  This is such a low bar.

• 19:05Alex Cranz?

  It's, oh yeah, it's the lowest bar.

• 19:07Speaker 04

  The bar is on the floor.

• 19:09Alex Cranz?

  But it's, it's going up.

• 19:11Speaker 04

  Yeah. It's one of those things where it's like this, and I hate to make this comparison for all kinds of reasons, but if I had to make a comparison, I think it's, so it's competitive with the RTX 3070.

• 19:22Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 19:23Speaker 04

  And-

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, they're coming over the walls with pitchforks.

• 19:26Speaker 04

  They're coming with pitchforks. I only say that to sort of put it, the cat, the way you can think about it, or the way you can classify it, is like, that is the kind of- If you were thinking about like, what kind of power do I need? If that is the kind of graphic power you are looking for, this is the computer that will give you that.

• 19:45Alex Cranz?

  Cool.

• 19:47Speaker 04

  Which doesn't mean, doesn't mean buy it to play games.

• 19:49Alex Cranz?

  And you also can't do creepy staring down the camera lens with your Apple laptop.

• 19:54Speaker 04

  Well, apparently you can do it on FaceTime.

• 19:56Alex Cranz?

  Except for on FaceTime.

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  No, you can do that. I don't, can you, hold on.

• 19:59Speaker 04

  Is that only on the phone?

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I'm not running the latest version of macOS. It might only be on the phone. This is gonna make for both horrible video and audio.

• 20:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:07Nilay Patel?

  Let's just leave this behind us. The other thing that caught me was, basically the only other change here is an HDMI spec change.

• 20:14Alex Cranz?

  2.1.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, you mean, what show is this? We need to talk about the HDMI spec change for the next hour.

• 20:22Speaker 03

  Max don't do HDMI CEC. This is something I hadn't thought about, but I just learned last week. It's such a strange admission.

• 20:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because they don't do CEC. So you cannot, like, a Mac right now is not a recommended product for your home theater system. And it used to be, 20 years ago, when the Mac mini first came out.

• 20:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. What kind of piracy situation do you need a Mac in your home theater for?

• 20:47Alex Cranz?

  You know what? Sometimes you just need to acquire things from the internet and you don't want to, like, then transfer them over. You just want it fast.

• 20:55Nilay Patel?

  Can I, can I tell a very tangential story? You, you know the story. Alex actually is part of the story. So, I'm off Twitter. I gotta fill the time.

• 21:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  There's hours to reclaim now that the Twitter is not on my phone. Yes, I look at Twitter on the desktop every now and again. Sometimes I might send a tweet and then 500 people tweet at me like, "I thought you quit Twitter."

• 21:14Alex Cranz?

  It's great.

• 21:15Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, not on my phone. So I'm trying all these new things. I'm trying not to immediately fill it with more feeds.

• 21:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  Right? You're not trying to quit cigarettes and immediately pick up nicotine gum. You're like, I'm trying to rewire the brain. So this last week, Apple News, because I pay for Apple One, I get the... Did you know there's a magazine I read when I was a kid called Stereo Review? It has now turned into a magazine called Time Division. They do not publish the Apple News format. They publish as just PDFs of a print magazine, which is like, super fun to read.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Getting back to the source.

• 21:44Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's good, man. Like, reading a giant PDF magazine on iPad is like, maybe Steve Jobs is on something. Full page print ad for Samsung HDR 10 in this last.

• 21:55Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's beautiful, but they had letters to editor about the Kaleidoscope, which is like a $5,000, $8,000.

• 22:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:02Nilay Patel?

  Lossless audio, high bitrate streaming thing.

• 22:07Alex Cranz?

  Like the best, it's the best of the best.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  Highest quality digital video player.

• 22:11Alex Cranz?

  The people who own this also have like home theater systems that cost $50,000.

• 22:15Nilay Patel?

  They custom tag all the movies.

• 22:17Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  To trigger home automation points as you're watching them.

• 22:20Alex Cranz?

  Oh my.

• 22:21Nilay Patel?

  So when the credits come on, you can trigger the lights to come on in your house.

• 22:24Alex Cranz?

  I need to own this.

• 22:25Nilay Patel?

  I want this to, like, Liam's like losing his mind. This is Liam's stream. So like read, I'm like reading a letter to the editor about it and like the last line is, "I'm incarcerated and this is how I keep up with news." And it's like, well, first Alex.

• 22:38Alex Cranz?

  Immediately Googles.

• 22:39Nilay Patel?

  So we can't figure out who it is. I'm just telling you, no matter where you go, the AV nerds are like, I need to know.

• 22:47Alex Cranz?

  They need to know.

• 22:48Nilay Patel?

  Alex's people are everywhere.

• 22:49Alex Cranz?

  We're everywhere.

• 22:50Nilay Patel?

  And now I feel bad that I'm like, who has a Mac Mini in their home theater setup? Cause it's the guy in jail writing studio review.

• 22:56Alex Cranz?

  He's like, he's got like the little clear Mac Mini. They've taken all that out so you can see the inside. He's ready. He's got a sick system in there.

• 23:04Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, if anybody has a Kaleidoscope, please, please let me know. And I desperately want to know how you've coded your home automations to trigger with the custom triggers in the movie files.

• 23:12Alex Cranz?

  I'm just thinking.

• 23:13Nilay Patel?

  The thing sounds amazing.

• 23:13Alex Cranz?

  Think of like Panic Room and then all of the window shades come down when they go into the room and you're like, oh, it's so immersive. 3D.

• 23:21Nilay Patel?

  I read the actual review and in the middle of it, they're like Fast and Furious 7 looked great on the Kaleidoscope. I'm like, it doesn't matter. It's all the same in the end. All right, HDMI 2.1.

• 23:29Speaker 03

  All I had to do to start this conversation was mention HDMI. And there we go.

• 23:34Nilay Patel?

  I told you what show it is. So the only reason that you really need 2.1 is 8K, which you can support, great.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  But then it's really 144 Hz refresh rates, which is only for gaming.

• 23:47Speaker 04

  Yeah. Which, I mean, you know, if you bump the settings way down on Tomb Raider, you can maybe get there.

• 23:54Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so you can't, you don't think you can, you can't run 4K 144 on this thing?

• 23:58Speaker 04

  We got a 1920 by 1200. We got, I think, 103 FPS.

• 24:03Alex Cranz?

  Did you, what, what game was it?

• 24:04Speaker 04

  Tomb Raider.

• 24:05Alex Cranz?

  So you didn't run something like the classic Civilization 4? I mean, that would have gotten 144.

• 24:12Speaker 04

  I mean, I'm sure there are.

• 24:13Nilay Patel?

  Like a mostly static game?

• 24:15Speaker 03

  Open up SimCity, reticulate the

• 24:17Speaker 04

  I'm sure there are games where, I mean, you could find a game where you'll get that. If you're, if you really want to do esports on your Mac Pro 16 with M1 Max and that, M2 Max, and that's your pure choice.

• 24:28Alex Cranz?

  I feel like you just get bullied if you try to do esports on a Mac.

• 24:31Speaker 04

  I mean, I would bully you.

• 24:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I like, I would bully you.

• 24:33Speaker 03

  You're going to get your ass trashed.

• 24:34Speaker 04

  Like, why did you spend that much on your esports laptop? That's just, at the, at minimum, that is just such a waste of your money.

• 24:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, so these feel like solid incremental upgrades.

• 24:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, I mean, and I, you know, incremental upgrade is like a hot button word to use. I don't say that to mean that this is like an inadequate upgrade or a boring upgrade or like objectionable. Incremental in the sense that, you know, it's around a 20% CPU uplift and a 10 to 15-ish percent single core uplift.

• 25:04Alex Cranz?

  And a lot more battery. I mean, I like, I think we're kind of discounting the battery life here.

• 25:08Speaker 04

  And a lot more battery.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm dying to know what the battery life in the M2 Pro is.

• 25:11Speaker 04

  I'm, I have the whole weekend blocked out. We're gonna see if I can run it down. And I've canceled plans.

• 25:18Nilay Patel?

  Because last time, it took you the whole weekend.

• 25:19Speaker 04

  It was agonizing. I've canceled plans. We're gonna sit down. We're gonna run. We're gonna edit on it till it dies. But yeah, it, I don't mean to say it's unexciting. It's, it's exciting to see that, you know, these are increasing how quickly people can do their work and they're increasing, you know, the number of things they can cram into a workday. The most exciting upgrade for me is the battery life. And that is what would make biggest difference in, you know, the workload for someone like me. But that also goes to show somewhat that I'm not really the target audience for this, for this kind of device.

• 25:51Nilay Patel?

  You're not the stealthy mobile rendering ninja.

• 25:53Speaker 04

  No, I'm not. Maybe for my esports. Yeah.

• 25:58Speaker 03

  No, no, you, but you are a person who might work an entire day on your laptop. You've been in different places. You've moved from location to location. You didn't plug it in. You went to sleep. You didn't plug it in. You wake up. You have something you need to do and you can't wait.

• 26:10Speaker 04

  I can keep it right by my head, yeah.

• 26:12Speaker 03

  You can't plug it in again. It'll be fun.

• 26:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Can we do a challenge for you guys when you go to WWDC where you just take a 16-inch Mac Pro and don't charge it the entire time you're there?

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  No, because we have to get our work done. And that is, that is the environment where we actually end up killing the batteries. Because you're in a really RF-constrained environment. So your Wi-Fi radio is like hunting a lot. And that's actually bizarrely the thing that always ends up killing the batteries.

• 26:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, the other thing, and I meant in this review, I actually am almost as excited to see what kinds of discounts we see on the M1 Pro and M1 Max. Because if those laptops go below $2,000, I'm going to have, I can't say this for sure. I would not be surprised if I have a real hard time recommending any 15 or 16 inch laptop that's not those, because that is just going to be such a wildly good buy for a lower price than this.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm actually, I feel the same way about the Mac Minis.

• 27:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, like if this generation of Mac Minis ever sees a discount with the M2 Pro in it.

• 27:19Speaker 04

  Just.

• 27:19Nilay Patel?

  Right now, it's like sitting at $600, $599. If that thing dips anywhere below $5, it's like, ugh.

• 27:27Speaker 04

  So $550, no.

• 27:28Nilay Patel?

  No, it's like $499.99.

• 27:32Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah. $450, done. You just didn't even think.

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  Because it's the longevity of that machine, given its performance envelope.

• 27:41Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 27:42Nilay Patel?

  For the things you want to do with a Mac Mini, you're like, I'm going to have this computer for 15 years.

• 27:47Speaker 04

  But you won't be able to put it in your home theater system.

• 27:48Nilay Patel?

  You will not be. That's how you get a Kaleidoscope.

• 27:53Nilay Patel?

  If the Kaleidoscope people are listening, which I'm sure they are.

• 27:56Speaker 04

  Yes, 100%.

• 27:57Nilay Patel?

  The first time we've ever mentioned this product on this podcast.

• 28:00Speaker 04

  They're like sitting up right now.

• 28:01Nilay Patel?

  Send Alex a Kaleidoscope.

• 28:03Speaker 04

  I want to try one out, please.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  It's a client server system.

• 28:09Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 28:09Nilay Patel?

  So if you just buy the client, you still can't do anything. You have to buy a separate like 64 gigabytes server.

• 28:16Speaker 04

  Huge servers. And I was trying to price them out, but it's one of those websites where you go and they, they're like, call us for a quote.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's good.

• 28:24Speaker 04

  Never mind. Yeah, I mean, the elephant in the room when you're reviewing something like this and, you know, sort of the caveat you have to make when you say anything good about it is like, these are really expensive. Like, they're really great, there are lots of great things about them. The cheapest M2 Max unit is like over $3,000. It is really inaccessible laptop for many, many people, but. So I'm sort of still, I'm still, you know, I think it's great. I still see it as kind of a niche purchase because it is in that high price point. The M1 Max and the M1 Pro are moving.

• 28:52Nilay Patel?

  If they come down.

• 28:53Speaker 04

  The more discounted they are, the much closer they are to being like very accessible mainstream purchases. Or is there certainly more so than the M2 devices?

• 29:01Nilay Patel?

  Again, that M1 Max, I felt like didn't quite have the best. It had the performance, but most people don't need it.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:10Nilay Patel?

  Because it's mostly like extra GPU performance, right?

• 29:13Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 29:14Nilay Patel?

  And like, what are you gonna do? Play games on this thing?

• 29:16Speaker 04

  Yes. Alex. Crusader Kings 3. Alex is gonna play the 2 and 4.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  It's the M1 Pro if it comes down, then like that thing is, it's in such a sweet spot.

• 29:28Speaker 04

  Yeah. Yeah, I mean, my device is usually, and I think that based on, we haven't gone to fully benchmark and break down the M2 Pro laptop yet. We do have the M2 Pro Mac Mini, so we have a sense of how that's going to perform. We'll have more updates next week about how the laptop specifically compare. But based on what we are seeing so far, I imagine it's going to be a similar situation where the M2 Pro is more of the everyone chip. Like, that's what you can get if you, you know, are doing this stuff occasionally. Like, this stuff being like video stuff, Xcode, the rendering that Neel is doing all the time.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  Constantly.

• 30:03Speaker 04

  If you are buying this laptop. In your car.

• 30:05Nilay Patel?

  I'm rendering Bitcoins on the go, left and right.

• 30:08Speaker 04

  If you are buying this primarily to do a graphically intensive task, then the M2 Max, you'll have a better time. It will save you, you know, if your job requires you to do all this stuff really fast, the M2 Max will save you time. But the increase is not such that it is super, super necessary for like the average buyer to have it.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. We gotta take a break. Monica, thank you so much for joining us.

• 30:30Speaker 04

  You're welcome.

• 30:30Nilay Patel?

  We'll have more after Monica's marathon M2 Pro battery testing session. We'll see if she's gonna come out the other side like a skeleton.

• 30:38Speaker 04

  I'll be just a zombie, yeah.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  We'll have more, we'll have updates on that. We gotta take a break. We'll be right back. We're gonna talk about Google.

• 30:45Speaker 04

  Okay.

• 30:45Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back.

• 30:51Speaker 05

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• 31:17Speaker 06

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• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. It's time to talk about trouble in Alphabet City. Big trouble in Alphabet City. Which is a real neighborhood here in New York City. Yeah, but this is, this is a different Alphabet. To normal people, if you say there's trouble in Alphabet City, they'll be like, what, did a trust fund baby run over a car? Yes. Did someone not get into the club? That's not what's happening here. No. It's way less fun. Yeah. So lots of Google news this week. They laid off 12,000 people on Friday. First mass layoffs in Google history. Major culture change for Google. They've never done it before. Larry Page, Sergey Brin back at the company to talk it over with Sundar. Yeah. Obviously, they're the founders in Trump. They, no one knows where they've been for years. Sergey is just like out, just like part.

• 32:36Nilay Patel?

  Came back from the, yeah. Larry's trying to fly a taxi. Larry Page has like five flying car startups.

• 32:44Speaker 03

  I think it's down to like three or maybe two.

• 32:46Nilay Patel?

  Just two. All right. But they're back in the building at Google because they got to refocus. Big New York Times story about Google calling a code red over ChatGPT. We can get all to that. They left 12,000 people seemingly at random. I'm sure that, you know, there are reports that hundreds of executives make like all together and make sure they made the right decisions. But, you know, very senior people who've been at Google for eight, 10, 12 years clipped very junior people who actually like, you know, it's 12,000 people, a lot of people.

• 33:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:15Nilay Patel?

  So like I've seen TikToks from Google employees who are like, I just walked out of a client meeting. Whoops, you know, and they're not done yet because they're all over the world. Lots of legal regulations, lots of different countries. So that's just the top line. And Liz actually has a great piece today about the layoffs across tech because Amazon had layoffs, Stripe had layoffs, Microsoft had layoffs just down the line. And they all have the same reasoning. Spotify had layoffs.

• 33:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  Which is, we thought the changes brought about by the pandemic would would stay.

• 33:46Alex Cranz?

  Which is, everybody really sat there and was like, we thought everybody sitting in their houses, baking bread and crying about missing the outdoors would just be the the present forever.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like we're all going to shop online. We're going to watch all of our videos on YouTube and Netflix. We're going to listen to everything on Spotify. We're going to do Clubhouse. Do you remember when the tech industry tried to convince us Clubhouse was real? And like I talk for a living and I was like, y'all.

• 34:12Alex Cranz?

  Everybody's like, we got spaces now, though. We got spaces out of it.

• 34:17Speaker 03

  They thought that they thought that we were going to be buying brand new electronics and new laptops every six months.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Logitech was like, webcams are back.

• 34:26Speaker 03

  You know, I'm trying to keep Logitech in business, but I can only buy so many.

• 34:31Speaker 03

  Like, I have to put them somewhere at some point.

• 34:34Nilay Patel?

  And stare directly down the camera, the racing wheel. Logitech had bad earnings this quarter. So this is the context, right? They're all blaming it on, we thought the pandemic trends would stay where they were.

• 34:45Alex Cranz?

  How could we know?

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  It seems a little short sighted.

• 34:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  Like, when Liz is writing this piece, she's like, what do you think? I was like, the first sentence is, they didn't think we would go back outside. And so I, like, we can talk about why the layoffs are happening, all this stuff. But like, that's the reason that the tech companies are giving. And we talked about it on this show, I've talked about it on Decoder, like, what are the first order changes of the pandemic? What are the second order changes? Like, remote work is a lasting second order change. Like, a real thing on, I go on CNBC a lot. All cable news is like, screw it, you can be on Zoom now. They used to be like, you have to come in.

• 35:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:28Speaker 03

  School has changed. We don't have snow days anymore. I was just talking to my sister about my nephew. They had a snow day, but it was not a snow day. It was just a go to school at home.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal. That should be illegal. I don't, I don't know if there's anyone we can call about that.

• 35:39Alex Cranz?

  Little kids unionize right now.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. The little kids union. Uh, that's great. I mean, so there's that stuff. But the top line of all these layoffs is we thought it was permanent. And that just seems so mistaken. And I think for Google especially, it just rings really hollow to me.

• 35:57Alex Cranz?

  Yes. Especially when you compare it to Apple, who's notably not had layoffs and also didn't grow at nearly the same pace as these other companies. Other companies were doing 60, 70% growth, uh, year over year for like their staff. And Apple was like 10, 20%. And so, yeah, now these companies are going, oh, we need all that money back. Never mind, give it back.

• 36:20Nilay Patel?

  And they're, and they're, apart from Meta, which Mark Zuckerberg said the same thing. We saw this acceleration of pandemic and now we gotta wind it back. Okay. But, you know, Google, they left their AI divisions alone, but they shut down their incubator, which does all their 20% time projects. They're shutting down all these like weird other bets they're doing. Their like health science division of Alphabet. Like, they're trying to refocus on the core of Google. I think a lot of people have learned from Elon. Like, I just get rid of like most of the company. And like, yeah, it'll be a little crappier, but.

• 36:54Alex Cranz?

  It still goes.

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  Crash?

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  And we have yet to see. So that's like the big context for Google, right? They just had this like very traumatic event.

• 37:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  And like, maybe the whole tech industry is just copycatting each other. Liz has great quotes in her piece, like, a management professor at Stanford is like, everyone's an idiot.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  She's like, he's like, it's morons being morons. What do you want from this? It's very good. So, but that's a broader context. But then specifically, Google. Right? You look at all the other companies, Amazon, it's like, oh, maybe they built too much warehouse capacity. They're letting people off. Microsoft, they're like, shut down Hololens. And a bunch of weird surface stuff that people aren't going to buy. PC shipments are down because pandemic is over and everyone already bought their new PC. Still, Microsoft, they're gonna be fine.

• 37:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:35Nilay Patel?

  Google is like, oh, they did all of this. They fired 12,000 people. The government is suing them. We should talk about this ad tech lawsuit. The second big antitrust lawsuit against Google, which it's.

• 37:47Alex Cranz?

  We're a little biased here, but yeah.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  A little biased. You know how I feel about the web? It's a big deal. And then they are on the run from ChatGPT. We talked about this a little bit last week. You just like add up this week for Google and like, oh, this is the most existential threats a company can face at the same time.

• 38:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is, this is way different than like, the pixel comes out and does not great numbers. This is, this is their core business is under attack from many different avenues. And like, I think the ChatGPT avenue is not actually the, the big existential threat that they feel it is. But the, the stuff going on with the DOJ, that feels really, really big and important to me, potentially. Much more so than the ChatGPT, but that feels like more of a, a crisis of like, what are we as a company?

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Richard Rosen?

• 38:36Speaker 03

  And all of these things are happening at once. It's just something that we really have never seen from Google, like since it came on the scene. That we, that they've had all of this, a real competitor that maybe they aren't ready for, in a, in a space that they aren't ready for. The, the pressures of regulators are higher than they've ever been because everyone has a reason to take, take a hammer to big tech. It's just a way that you can score points as a politician, as you've pointed out many times, Neel. And I, I don't know, I, I can't, I can't remember a time since Google has existed that we've seen them on the back foot like this.

• 39:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's tough. And I, you know, my theory about Google is people don't take it seriously because it's called Google.

• 39:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's hard to see the company for what it is.

• 39:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  Because it's called Google and it, you know, it very, and for a good reason. It maintains this image of being like a goofball place for smart people to do smart stuff.

• 39:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, it worked really hard on that whole do no evil thing, which they've gotten rid of.

• 39:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's gone.

• 39:32Speaker 03

  They had a movie about working, they made a movie about getting jobs.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  It was like a own wills movie.

• 39:36Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:37Speaker 03

  With real Hollywood stars. And it's an advertising company, like, and for some reason, we don't think of it that way.

• 39:42Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know, it's funny, like, big advertising companies, they love to think of themselves as like creative, progressive shops. And then at the end of the day, they're like, selling you cigarettes and it's like, fine. Google is an advertising company, but they're like an ad tech company. And so this is where this lawsuit really gets at, is most of what we as consumers experience of Google are the products, and particularly the two, search and YouTube, Gmail. Great, and they're good products, people like them, they're the industry leader. It's very hard to compete with Google search in particular. But the other side of Google, the business of Google, is as ruthlessly competitive as any company.

• 40:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:17Nilay Patel?

  And it's run by advertising executives and salespeople and money people. And they are not shy. And so they are not shy about winning whatever competition they're in, or foreclosing competition or protecting their monopoly. So you see this lawsuit, it's got 194 pages long. It's fun to read in the sense that any lawsuit that explains what ad tech is and how it works.

• 40:38Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  I read it. I recommend you go read the complaint. It's just the complaint, it's a bunch of allegations, but you know, they've obviously done a bunch of discovery. They have a lot of quotes from executives. And what you find is that when you load a webpage, when you load one of our webpages, or the Times webpage, or any publisher, any website really that has ads on it, there's a whole stack of technology, it's called the ad tech stack. And there's lots of components. And in every layer of the stack, Google owns either the one or two product. And they make it so that all those products work better together. And they charge more money that Google then skims off at another layer of the stack. And they have ruthlessly operated this system to basically be the winner. There's no way to compete with him. Yeah.

• 41:23Nilay Patel?

  And all this other stuff that Google has done in the past, like Google AMP, uh, Google Discuss, like this, these products that Google makes, they use them to force people back into their advertising ecosystem. The funnel. It's, it's like a ruthless money machine. Yeah. And so if you, just like to abstract it, the way to think about it is Apple's revenue platform that we've complained about many times is the iPhone and the App Store. Right. Right. And at, at the end of the day, Tim Cook's goal is that every time you push any button on your phone. He gets money. He gets money. And you can just see that they ruthlessly optimize for that. And people can argue about whether that's good or that's bad. You can have antitrust lawsuits or laws in Congress or the Europeans come at you, but like, that's the goal and you can see how they get there. Yeah.

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  You can see that, you know, Amazon's revenue platform is its store and its AWS business. And their goal is to get you to buy everything from Amazon and for every app to use AWS and Cloud Search. You can do this with Microsoft too. You can do this with all these companies. Google's revenue platform is the web. Yeah. And so it's hard to see where it begins and ends because you're not. It's so ubiquitous. It's just everywhere. And so you forget. So you forget that all these ads are being served to you by Google, in particular by a company Google acquired called DoubleClick. Hmm. And they run this product called DFP, DoubleClick for Publishers. What they changed to Google Ads Manager, everyone still calls it DFP. Uh, and that's, that thing that they

• 42:49Nilay Patel?

  own, the ad server is like hardcoded to prefer Google's ad exchanges. It's hard, and that is hardcoded to prefer Google's demand side platform. These are all just like ad tech words. Whatever. It's just like everywhere you go, the whole chain is Google. And so the government's case against Google is you bought up all the competitors at every layer of the stack. You used your dominance in one layer of the stack to achieve dominance in another layer of the stack. And now you're charging higher prices, which every other time we talk about antitrust, we're like, we gotta change this thing from the consumer welfare theory where there's no higher prices because everything's free, right? Da, da, da. We gotta like invent this new app. This is just like old school. Yeah. 1980s Ronald Reagan, Robert Bork antitrust. It's like, oh, you bought all this shit

• 43:34Nilay Patel?

  and now the prices went up. And so like, maybe they got, like, you know, usually every time there's a lawsuit, Amazon's like, but people love Amazon Prime. Like, you know, Apple's like, the App Store made everyone happier today.

• 43:46Alex Cranz?

  Everybody loves Netflix.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  This is like a bunch of advertisers, like you, you robbed us.

• 43:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  And like Google's, Google can't be like, people love web advertising.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  Like, they're in a tough spot with this shit.

• 43:57Speaker 03

  That's a much harder case to make.

• 43:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so like, I just see this as, it's not a novel legal theory. It's not some like Lena Khan invention.

• 44:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  It's a class, the people who want the lawsuit are the media, advertising companies, other e-commerce companies. Like, they all see it, that, oh, we're losing revenue, we're losing profit margin into Google. There's real money at stake. And this is Google's bit, like, this is the money.

• 44:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? If you, if you uncouple the web from Google, I'm not sure what the web looks like.

• 44:31Alex Cranz?

  DuckDuckGo.

• 44:33Nilay Patel?

  Like, if people are doing SEO spam for DuckDuckGo, like, you found it like the nichest of niche interests.

• 44:40Alex Cranz?

  You've got three customers.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I do. I cosplay as a specific Victorian lord, and I do SEO for DuckDuckGo. What are you doing?

• 44:50Speaker 03

  Man, I'm telling you, what we're gonna do, we're gonna rebuild Ask G. It's gonna be real people. It's just, it's just gonna be a guy. It's just gonna ask a guy. He's gonna, he's gonna tell you something. And similar to AI, it may or may not be true, but you'll get a response.

• 45:04Nilay Patel?

  You think ChatGPT is just a bunch of cosplayers?

• 45:06Alex Cranz?

  Definitely.

• 45:10Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's, this to me is like, you just add this up. It's, on the one hand, and I, I don't think this is true at all, but people will, are out there freaking out the stock market by saying ChatGPT is gonna replace Google.

• 45:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:21Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, mostly what you experience with ChatGPT is the good stuff. Like, if you actually sit around trying to use ChatGPT, like, this seems like not very good.

• 45:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  It's very impressive, but you're seeing it filtered through millions of people, only showing you the best stuff.

• 45:35Alex Cranz?

  Resource-intensive and expensive to use.

• 45:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah. By the way, we got it wrong on the show. Um, in classic TikTok strategy, we published the thing we said wrong, and that is our most viewed TikTok.

• 45:46Alex Cranz?

  That's all for you guys. Misinformation.

• 45:49Nilay Patel?

  We got you. You clicked, didn't you? No, we got it wrong. We were getting it wrong. It's on Azure.

• 45:55Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft, I would say, has huge investment. OpenAI, they just made a bigger investment. Sam Altman, CEO.

• 46:00Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 46:01Nilay Patel?

  Says it is not very expensive to run.

• 46:02Alex Cranz?

  Oh, interesting.

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  They need to make it cheaper. It is not as cheap as Google searches.

• 46:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 46:06Nilay Patel?

  Per query.

• 46:06Alex Cranz?

  It's still like more resource.

• 46:08Nilay Patel?

  It's more resource intensive than Google Search. But you see, Microsoft is like, oh, we don't have to do Bing. We can just answer the questions directly with ChatGPT. All right, maybe that's right. Buzzfeed today announced that it's going to start having ChatGPT write the quizzes.

• 46:21Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  Mia has done a lot of great reporting on our competitor, CNET, which I have very bittersweet feelings about. CNET has been the thing that we have competed against.

• 46:30Alex Cranz?

  They're our enemy.

• 46:31Nilay Patel?

  Since we are founding, right? We're like, we got to beat CNET. They're like the bastion. And they got bought by this private equity company. And now they're like, publish SEO spam written by robots. Because they are flooding Google to try to win searches and then put ads on those pages. The ads are served by Google.

• 46:48Alex Cranz?

  Basically, they're just chasing Google.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  When I say I don't know what the shape of the web is without Google, it's you can. CNET's ownership can be like, everybody automates their mortgage rate stories. What they have not accounted for is why does CNET publish mortgage rate stories? And the answer is because they want to win the Google searches.

• 47:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:06Nilay Patel?

  So that when you buy a mortgage, you've come through their affiliate link and they get a huge cut of that. Do you know when you sign up for a credit card on, like, Points Guy is great. When you sign up for a credit card, it's all on the same company. It's like almost $900 to sign up in an affiliate rank. By the way, we are going to start recommending credit cards on the Verge.com.

• 47:22Alex Cranz?

  And mortgages. Sign up with us.

• 47:24Nilay Patel?

  You just look at that system.

• 47:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  And you're like, on the one hand, people think, whether or not it's true, that it will be disrupted by AI chatbot technology. And Microsoft is making that investment. And Google cannot replace, like, regulators around the world will destroy Google if Google stops sending traffic to people, scrapes their data into a language model, and then starts answering the questions directly.

• 47:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  I just don't think that's going to go well for them.

• 47:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think everybody would just also probably frantically start delisting and being all in on DuckDuckGo.

• 47:53Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Alex is the new CEO of DuckDuckGo.

• 47:57Alex Cranz?

  Please invest.

• 47:59Alex Cranz?

  Directly to B, Venmo.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  And then on the flip side, the AI is being used to flood the search results with garbage.

• 48:04Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 48:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? It's like Google's in like a war of attrition against SEO spammers who now have an even cheaper way.

• 48:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:12Nilay Patel?

  Of filling out their content forms. And then the government's like, also, your money is evil and we want to, and oh, that for instance, the government is asking to break up Google's ad tech division. They want to spin off DoubleClick for publishers and AdEx, which is their exchange. So like, just imagine being like Sundar Pichai. Right? You're like, on the one hand, I've got to kill the cash cow and replace it with the technology we developed, our own LLMs, Lambda and others.

• 48:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  Which are superior to ChatGPT, but we haven't released because we have ethical concerns about it. Whoops. But our competitor, Microsoft, has no such qualms. They're just going to do it. Meanwhile, our cash cow search is being turned into a worse product by the same ChatGPT wielding SEO spammers. Oh, and the government wants to break us up.

• 48:59Alex Cranz?

  And it's all kind of of Google's own making too, right? Like, Google became so dominant, everybody is chasing to be on Google, seeking the fastest, easiest way to get a tiny piece of the pie that Google has made itself.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:14Alex Cranz?

  So like, it's kind of its own fault.

• 49:16Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 49:16Alex Cranz?

  Success is like what's brought it here, right?

• 49:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, this is a very smart company. I think Sundar is a great CEO. I think he's ruthless when he needs to be, and he's kind when he needs to be, he's very thoughtful, it's like.

• 49:26Alex Cranz?

  He knows how to make money.

• 49:27Nilay Patel?

  We've interviewed him many times.

• 49:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  He is a very thoughtful and considered man. I just am like, his choice is effectively, all right, it's everyone on the web.

• 49:38Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 49:38Nilay Patel?

  It's governments around the world. It's the Department of Justice. Who am I going to piss off? Right? Because like, whatever move he makes is going to piss off like two of those entities.

• 49:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  And I just think that is such a difficult place to be. So there, like I said, there's reporting out that Google has called a code red about ChatGPT. They do have all this AI technology. They have incepted this meme that Google invented the T in ChatGPT. It stands for transformer. It's true. They've demoed it many times. Go back and watch any Google I/O. Like, there's a weird middle segment where Sundar is like, now I will talk to a fire hydrant, as though it's a kitty. And it's like, I don't know what's going on, but like, they can do it.

• 50:17Alex Cranz?

  When they had everybody calling, you could just like ask for it to call and make a reservation for you?

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that's the transformer model.

• 50:24Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 50:24Nilay Patel?

  That's it's a different conversation. They've been demoing the transformer large language models. And like, I think the last time it was either this past year or the year before, he like asked Pluto if it was a planet.

• 50:35Alex Cranz?

  That's right.

• 50:36Nilay Patel?

  And Pluto was like, kind of sad, you know?

• 50:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, I'll go by myself.

• 50:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't really know what's going on, but what they were demoing is effectively the same technology as chat GPT. So they have it. They are not releasing it because it's they've thought until now it is unethical to let people talk to a robot that will confidently lie to them.

• 50:54Alex Cranz?

  Yes, and it is unethical, Microsoft.

• 50:59Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft is like, whatever, man. Like, we lost it mobile, we lost on the web, we lost it search.

• 51:03Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna do something.

• 51:05Nilay Patel?

  Check out this lying robot.

• 51:07Alex Cranz?

  With Bing.

• 51:10Speaker 03

  But that's that's the issue that they're running into now. So they're trying to launch all these AI products. They've got their search issues that you've laid out. But something that you've talked about a lot when we talk about this antitrust and these these massive tech companies is that every single thing that they launch isn't big enough to really have any impact on their core product and all the money that it makes. So they can have all these these new AI things. They could, you know, Sundar, he can, he can do all of this.

• 51:34Nilay Patel?

  They said they're gonna launch 20 new AI products.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  None of them matter. None of them will replace what he has. Yeah. The New York Times, the New York Times described all of these products that they are going to try to make. They're doing all the AI things that you've heard of that everyone else is doing, maybe some that we haven't heard of. We're gonna see them all in I O, but none of them are bigger than advertising.

• 51:52Nilay Patel?

  And and that's the thing that's under direct threat. And it's under threat again in two different. No, it's under direct threat in three different ways, right?

• 51:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:00Nilay Patel?

  The demand side of it, we talked about this last week, the demand side of it is people might search TikTok or Ask Chat GPT or something else instead.

• 52:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  Or just search Reddit. People do that all the time. The supply side of it is Futurism, which has also done a great job reporting on the CNET AI controversy. They had a great headline last week that's like, the SCS spammers are thrilled at Google's non-response to CNET's AI issues like. And they're like in the dark web forums and the SCS spammers are like, light it up, boys. Because that is a pure volume game for them, right? You flood the internet with garbage content. You hope that people, you hope it ranks anywhere. You hope you collect some traffic. You show some garbage ads and you take your pennies and you. Just stack pennies until you've made dollars. And if you can make webpages for nothing with an AI product.

• 52:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  Phew, you can stack those pennies pretty fast, right? And Google just like needs to have an answer to this. And I don't think that they've arrived at one where they're like, we will preserve the quality of Google's search without irritating everyone or compete with ChatGPT without irritating everyone. And in the middle of it, to Richard's point, the government's like, you know the machine that makes money that you're trying to fix? What if we took two thirds of it away and spun it off into different companies? And I just, I'm just like looking at this week for Google. I'm like, this is one of the most pivotal weeks for one of, like, we talk about the, you know, this set of fan companies every week. We're never like, man, Netflix is having an existential week. Whenever, you know, like, whenever like, oh, Apple could be five companies tomorrow. Like, this

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  is like one of the most consequential existential weeks for Google that I can think of for a big tech company in a, like, a long time, where potentially five years down the line, we're looking at this week as like, oh, that was the beginning of a total re-architecting of the web.

• 53:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I do wonder, I, you know, I've been knocking on the ChatGPT plan to like, compete with it. I wonder how much of that plan, though, is also to figure out how to combat it and the spam it creates on Google. Cause like, if you go and you create a new competitor for it and figure out all the inner workings, you theoretically could like, figure out how to highlight it and spot it.

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  I think Casey and Platformer spotlighted some of this where he's like, Google does have AI detection, uh, systems. It can, because it knows the training data sets, it knows what it looks like on the other side. And there's this concept of like radioactive data, where you seed the models with some stuff where you know what outputs it will generate and you can detect it even better. We'll see. I, I think we're in the middle of an arms race for Google.

• 54:32Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  12,000, this is the first time the company's ever had layouts of this scale.

• 54:36Alex Cranz?

  Never mind, I don't love it.

• 54:37Nilay Patel?

  I just think it's gonna be weird. All right, we gotta take a break. We come back, we talk about test learnings, a little lightning round, some Microsoft in there. We'll be right back.

• 54:47Nilay 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, as 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.

• 55:09Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that 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.

• 55:33Nilay 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.

• 55:46Speaker 05

  This series is presented by EY.

• 55:50Speaker 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.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I don't know why I thought we could get through Tesla and the lightning round in the last segment here.

• 56:42Alex Cranz?

  I believe in us. We're gonna go really fast. We're just gonna accelerate it. Listen to us at 3X.

• 56:46Nilay Patel?

  Because we're gonna talk fast and they have to listen to us at 3X?

• 56:50Alex Cranz?

  Do a line of coke first. Don't do a line of coke. This is not an endorsement of cocaine. Sorry.

• 56:58Speaker 03

  I heard specifically, I was told by an executive at this company that I had a job to do. And what else can I do?

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  Was the job doing cocaine?

• 57:16Alex Cranz?

  Which exact?

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 57:17Alex Cranz?

  It's fine.

• 57:18Speaker 03

  Was that not, was that not, was that not?

• 57:21Speaker 03

  Because.

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  Our start, our startup days are over.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  There was a time.

• 57:27Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  Again, this was the time when we were doing the video verge cast. The last time, like I said, karmic debt, we are just immediately running up the bill again.

• 57:37Alex Cranz?

  Just.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  You turn the cameras on, Alex is like, here's what you should do, kids.

• 57:41Alex Cranz?

  It's a whole line.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  All right, we do have to get through this, please, uh, just don't tell your parents about that.

• 57:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, don't do that. It's bad.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Just don't let them know any of that happened. All right, lots of Tesla, Tesla earnings, Elon's on trial for the 420.

• 57:59Alex Cranz?

  The 420 tweet, finally back.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  He is very upset about being on trial.

• 58:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:06Nilay Patel?

  He's attacked the plaintiff, he's attacked the plaintiff's lawyer several times. The, it's a class action. It's a group of investors who feel that they lost money because Elon tweeted, taking Tesla private at 420 a share, funding secured.

• 58:21Alex Cranz?

  Which was a thing that the SEC was also like, no.

• 58:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the judge has instructed the jury in this case to proceed, knowing the tweet was a lie. So like Elon's on his back foot. And so he's in the courtroom, he's taking the stand. We've been covering it, but he's basically said to the plaintiff's lawyer, like, you don't represent my actual investors.

• 58:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:44Nilay Patel?

  You're just, you're just like a vulture, which is very funny. The judge got mad at him. He said that he knows that he's popular because he has so many Twitter followers.

• 58:54Alex Cranz?

  Oh, buddy.

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  That's tough, that's a tough one. Just, I would say he's complaining of back pain.

• 59:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:00Nilay Patel?

  So just a very rough week.

• 59:02Alex Cranz?

  He did say the 420 tweet was not about anything in particular as well.

• 59:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, he said it was not, he said it wasn't a wee joke. He said it was a real number that was a 20% premium over the share price.

• 59:13Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  For which, again, he was castigated by the judge because the judge was like, but the tweet was a lie. It's a lot. So he's been on the stand. There's a lot of coverage there. Obviously, that trial is mostly mechanical about injury to these shareholders. But Elon's on the stand. We're not gonna cover it.

• 59:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're gonna, we're gonna watch.

• 59:31Nilay Patel?

  So that's happening. At the same time, Tesla had earnings. Richard earnings did pretty well.

• 59:36Speaker 03

  They actually made more money in 2022 than they ever did before. So it's amazing, the way that we talk about the chaos, the way that his focus on Twitter may have taken away from Tesla, or any number of other things. Tesla is still making money. They are still making more cars than they, than they did before. They are relying less on those credits that they sell to other companies for revenue. They are acting like an actual car company. Amazing. Building vehicles that people buy. They showed off the semi finally. The Cybertruck will arrive someday.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  So they pushed, 2024, they pushed the Cybertruck.

• 1:00:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:10Nilay Patel?

  They said, you know, the factory construction is underway. This is on the earnings call. No update on the windshield wiper situation.

• 1:00:17Alex Cranz?

  Zero.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  I swear to God, they are still working on the Cybertruck.

• 1:00:21Alex Cranz?

  That's what's holding it back.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  It's three wipers in a circle. I will accept no other answer.

• 1:00:26Alex Cranz?

  Just gonna get super hot?

• 1:00:27Nilay Patel?

  They have, they have not solved this problem.

• 1:00:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Nilay Patel?

  I guarantee you, they have not solved this problem. It's, it's the, it's amazing. But Cybertruck's still vaporware. But they lowered the price of the three in the Y. Sales skyrocketed.

• 1:00:41Speaker 03

  They say they have a new platform coming that they're going to show at their Investor Day. So there's stuff.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Tesla's moving. Obviously, he got some questions about Twitter. He again, said that he didn't think Twitter was a distraction. That it's a good marketing channel for Tesla. Look at my followers. Yeah, I don't know, man. At the same time, Twitter has run just face first into what I might be so bold as to call a predictable welcome to hell situation.

• 1:01:12Nilay Patel?

  In which the government of India, the Modi administration in India is very upset about a BBC documentary that looks at riots in Sittivagadrap, Hindu versus Muslim riots. They're very, very bad and basically places a lot of the blame for these riots with the current prime minister of India, Narendra Modi. This is like not a surprise to anyone that like he was an inciting factor in these riots or that he, he allowed it to happen. Like he's a Hindu nationalist, that's what this party is known for. This happened in 2014. This has been the accusation all along. BBC just made a documentary about it. If you are interested in such thing, you should watch this documentary. Government of India has strict censorship laws, like super strict censorship laws.

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  They require social media companies to have national offices staffed by locals so that they can threaten to arrest those locals if you do not comply with their censorship laws. I don't want to work. You do not, yeah, this is like, and this is like one of those things where you can claim to be a free speech warrior, you are going to end up asking yourself if you would like to do business in India, one of the largest countries in the world. And if you do want to do business in India, you have to staff an office full of potential hostages for the Indian government to take if you do not comply with their censorship demands. Oof, real problem. So India sees this documentary, again, produced by the BBC, have many opinions about the BBC, but you know, they at least attempt to be journalist to be rigorous.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  It says a thing that people have been saying for a long time. They hate it. Right. This attacks the government of India, this is not respectful, whatever. The justification, take it down YouTube, Twitter, Internet Archive, remove your links to this thing. So YouTube caves, which is unsurprising. Right. For YouTube, they have the office there, they do it. This is their stance, right? This like tight rope balancing act that all the big platforms have done. Where do we comply? Where do we stand up for our users? All right, we're taking this one down. We're not serving it in India, you can get it here, but in India you don't get to see it. By the way, Indian YouTube flooded with Indians talking about the video that was removed. Did this work? Who knows? VPNs exist.

• 1:03:21Nilay Patel?

  Strazin effect, was this, does censorship work on the internet? Who knows?

• 1:03:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:26Nilay Patel?

  That's what, that's what YouTube does and on balance, right? YouTube is like, they have a lot of lawyers, a lot of Google policy people were like actively arguing that Twitter just takes down. And it's like, does Twitter have a policy team anymore? Do they know that the government is removing links to BBC documentary? Do they know that their owner is like Elon Musk, who's like, I believe in free speech. I'm a, I'm a free speech absolutist. I don't know. People asked Elon about it. He's like, I can't keep on top of everything all the time.

• 1:03:53Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is it, right? If like you are against government censorship.

• 1:03:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:59Nilay Patel?

  These are the fights that you are going to have.

• 1:04:01Alex Cranz?

  Like this is a core fight for someone who says they are very much against government censorship.

• 1:04:05Nilay Patel?

  So Addie Redd, a piece you should read it. Her point is Elon has always said, I don't think companies should censor. If the people want things censored, they should pass a law. So that is just open support of government censorship.

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:04:17Nilay Patel?

  I don't think the people of India have voted on a lot of this documentary. But that's where we're at is this extremely fine, tight rope walk of what it actually means to support free speech against the actual threat to free speech, which is government censorship.

• 1:04:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:34Nilay Patel?

  And I, I think Elon, I think he's like back on the Tesla SpaceX trip. He's over the Twitter adventure and it's just going to get worse. Richard, do you want to say something?

• 1:04:43Speaker 03

  Well, I just wanted to know, you know, if, if you support free speech, if anyone does support free speech, why didn't they spend $44 billion on a social network? Didn't no one run it by?

• 1:04:53Speaker 03

  That's, that's just what a real free speech supporter would have done, like Elon Musk, who does support free speech for people who have $44 billion and don't piss off the governments in countries that they wanted to visit.

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, again, I think that I should be made king of Twitter. Elon, if you're listening, I'll do it. It'll be expensive. Yeah, that's the title that I demand.

• 1:05:13Alex Cranz?

  I like it.

• 1:05:14Nilay Patel?

  King of Twitter. It'll be spendy. Yeah. I ain't cheap.

• 1:05:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh no, they're not public. I was going to be like, do you go to earnings calls? But you wouldn't have to because you're the king of Twitter.

• 1:05:21Nilay Patel?

  There's one earnings call you have to go to and it will be extremely annoying.

• 1:05:27Nilay Patel?

  Audience of one. Um, we'll see. I'm just saying like Tesla's back on track. They need new cars. They're facing an onslaught of competition this year. Most of those cars are still vaporware. Like, can you get an F-150 Lightning? No, you cannot. Can you get a Rivian? No, you cannot.

• 1:05:43Alex Cranz?

  Can you get a Cybertruck?

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  Fair enough. Can you get a Cadillac Lyric? No, you cannot. Like, the competition is coming as a drum that has been beaten, but the cars are not shipping.

• 1:05:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:56Nilay Patel?

  Once they start shipping, once the ad dollars flow through Google's ecosystem,

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  I think Tesla is gonna have to like figure out what to do. But what they know they can do right now is lower prices.

• 1:06:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:10Nilay Patel?

  People are just gonna show up. And I think I'm excited for actual competition in the EV market. I think that'll be good. But the moment Elon has to turn his attention back to governments around the world want to censor Twitter. And it's like, that's a powder keg.

• 1:06:25Alex Cranz?

  Once, because he doesn't want to really turn there. He's already said, if you make a law and we're just gonna abide by that law, so if the government comes to us and says, "Take it down," we're gonna take it down.

• 1:06:34Nilay Patel?

  Except, but if the United States government does that, he gets real mad.

• 1:06:37Alex Cranz?

  Because the First Amendment.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  He doesn't care about that.

• 1:06:41Alex Cranz?

  I know, that's what I'm saying. It's like, he's got that. So he doesn't want to take anything down in America, right?

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I don't know, but he wants to make it the safest place in the world for advertisers. Like, it's, it's...

• 1:06:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  When I say this is a welcome to hell problem, this is like...

• 1:06:53Alex Cranz?

  None of it makes sense.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  The other social networks, do you know that Financial Times set up a mass instance? Everyone wants us to set up a mass instance. By the way, thank you to the one Veritas listener who just went off and did it.

• 1:07:02Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:07:03Nilay Patel?

  And like, beat our own teams to setting up a mass instance with Activity Pub, which has quick posts in it. Like, very good. Congratulations. Potentially IP issue, but for now, I've just, I'm overlooking it. It's great. I love it. Thank you so much.

• 1:07:19Alex Cranz?

  Really excited for you to talk about that in the court case in six months.

• 1:07:22Nilay Patel?

  Yes. If, if this is opposing counsel's attorney, I didn't mean it. I'm not Neil I Patel. This is a deep fake. You can tell because I'm looking directly into the camera.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  I'm not me. Right now, Deepfake is saying this in Spanish. Who knows what's happening?

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  The Financial Times set up a Mastodon server. Did you see this?

• 1:07:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  If they took it down, they're like, this is too hard.

• 1:07:45Alex Cranz?

  No, it's too much.

• 1:07:46Nilay Patel?

  They're like, the escalating legal server costs are too much. We don't want to do this anymore.

• 1:07:51Alex Cranz?

  You said server costs? You have to be like, oh, I can now see everyone's DMs.

• 1:07:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like, we don't, we don't want this in our lives. Very good. Uh, Microsoft also had earnings. What's going on at Microsoft?

• 1:08:00Alex Cranz?

  Uh, not, not good, good news. Pretty bad news at Microsoft.

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  That is at Intel, too.

• 1:08:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think there is a theme here, which is that everybody bought their laptops and computers in 2020 and 2021, and they didn't buy any in 2022. Especially at the end of the year. So Microsoft's earnings were really down across all hardware. So that means Windows, the OEMs, they're not selling enough to the OEMs because the OEMs aren't selling enough laptops. They're not selling surfaces because nobody wants to buy them. They're not selling Xboxes, which was kind of an interesting one. Their, their cloud's holding strong. Azure is, is doing great. That's where they're putting a lot of their investments. And I think we saw also with their layoffs, their layoffs really particularly hit hard a lot of those hardware divisions, a lot of those places

• 1:08:47Alex Cranz?

  that are based in you owning the device and using all of it. So if you like that.

• 1:08:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Microsoft's turning away from you.

• 1:08:57Alex Cranz?

  They don't care about you. I mean, they probably still care about you. They still have the business. They're not going to get rid of it.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  They're going to put edge icons on your desktop to try to get you into Microsoft services?

• 1:09:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, but it was, it was not good times for Microsoft. And we saw the same thing with Intel. Intel, again, their stuff's down. Chips are down because nobody is buying the laptops to put the chips in, so none of the laptop makers are buying the chips. And the GPU business is real down. To be fair, there's only like one GPU, two. There's not that many GPUs at Intel. So this is not a shock. Intel is also anticipating a 40% drop year over year next quarter.

• 1:09:32Alex Cranz?

  Not good. So Intel's in trouble. They knew they were in trouble. They've been anticipating this, unlike a lot of the other companies. They still miss a lot of their forecasts, right?

• 1:09:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:42Alex Cranz?

  They didn't hit any of their marks, but they also were like, it's not gonna be good. And it wasn't good. And they're like, it's gonna be even worse. And it's gonna be even worse. And I think they're really looking towards when they get these fabs up in, what, 2024, I think is when the first one's supposed to come online.

• 1:09:56Nilay Patel?

  In Ohio.

• 1:09:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So they're like, them and Tesla, they were like, just wait. Don't worry about 2024.

• 1:10:02Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna back the Cybertruck right up to our new fab.

• 1:10:04Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:10:05Nilay Patel?

  Roll out some 3-nanometer chips, send them directly to AMD. We'll see. I mean, again, the theme of these tech layoffs, and you really should read Liz's piece, all of them are like, we just thought the pandemic would last forever.

• 1:10:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  We just thought people would buy a new laptop every year. And it's like, why did you think that? It's like, the best example I can give is like, the whole TV industry thought 3D TV would work and last forever.

• 1:10:26Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:10:27Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, guys.

• 1:10:29Alex Cranz?

  James Cameron still thinks that, by the way.

• 1:10:32Nilay Patel?

  Some of the lightning round stuff, it was the big Taylor Swift Ticketmaster hearing.

• 1:10:37Alex Cranz?

  T-Swift was not there.

• 1:10:38Nilay Patel?

  But they all, she was there.

• 1:10:41Alex Cranz?

  She was there in spirit.

• 1:10:42Nilay Patel?

  That every senator quoted.

• 1:10:44Speaker 03

  She was there in every senator's comments where their interns or whoever had written in Taylor Swift lyrics.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  It's good. We've got a big Decoder episode about Ticketmaster monopoly coming. It's another tech stack.

• 1:10:57Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna allow you to plug Decoder just this once, because.

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  Just this one. I'm just saying, it's coming. I'm excited about it. We were waiting for this hearing, because we wanted. And I was like, now I've got us a bunch of like old senators saying Taylor Swift lyrics. What did I get out of this? That's gonna be good. GoldenEye remaster coming to Nintendo Switch and Xbox.

• 1:11:17Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna, the big fight for GoldenEye is gonna be who gets to play Odd Job when we all play together.

• 1:11:22Nilay Patel?

  Should we do a Vergecast?

• 1:11:24Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  An ice cream?

• 1:11:25Alex Cranz?

  I'm real bad at it. It's gonna be great.

• 1:11:27Nilay Patel?

  Whenever, whenever David comes back from his break. He had a baby. He's, he's on break. He should take care of the baby.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  No, we're just giving him time. But David can't have all this time to practice.

• 1:11:37Nilay Patel?

  He's got a baby. He's not practicing.

• 1:11:38Alex Cranz?

  He's practicing with like one hand. He's holding that baby. He's got him in the little pum-putz. It's great.

• 1:11:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay. I mean, you know, there's, there's four of us.

• 1:11:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  Where, oh, by the way, it has local split screen multiplayer, which is like what I really want.

• 1:11:50Alex Cranz?

  Perfect.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. Very excited about that. TikTok has confirmed now, after reporting in Forbes, that it can just make videos go viral whenever it wants.

• 1:11:58Alex Cranz?

  Shock. I'm just shocked by this news.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  Back in the Facebook video era, we would joke that Mark Zuckerberg just had a knob and he'd just like turn it up. TikTok's like, oh yeah, we bought, we have that knob and you can pay us to turn it whenever you want.

• 1:12:09Speaker 03

  Just press the button. Just press the button.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  I feel like the TikTok balloon is gonna pop. Uh, that story in Forbes.

• 1:12:14Alex Cranz?

  That's why the one video that really pops for us is they're like, oh, Verge got it wrong.

• 1:12:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:21Alex Cranz?

  Crank it.

• 1:12:21Speaker 03

  I feel certain that TikTok is not actually an AI feed. It's just, that's, that's the one. That's, it's just some dude.

• 1:12:29Speaker 03

  There's like 25 playlists.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  You can be on one.

• 1:12:30Speaker 03

  There's just some dude, Casey Kasem III is back there dropping videos in the playlist. And that's all it is. And we're gonna find out that all this time, there was no AI.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm very excited for that. Go read that story. It's actually really interesting because TikTok is so embedded in the music industry. There's just a lot of pay to play to break a song on TikTok right now, which is fascinating. And then we gotta, we gotta end here, Alex. It's a downer.

• 1:12:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:54Nilay Patel?

  But in the Vergecast, we have to end with Peacock. Comcast had earnings. Comcast, as you know, NBC, U division, minority investor in Vox Media, the first parent company. There's your disclosure.

• 1:13:06Alex Cranz?

  That was really good.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  What's going on with Peacock?

• 1:13:07Alex Cranz?

  So Peacock, eh, it's, it's not doing great. I truly believe that Poker Face is gonna save it.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Alex Cranz?

  If you watch the show with Natasha Lyonne.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  I almost, it's not out yet.

• 1:13:19Alex Cranz?

  It just came out.

• 1:13:20Nilay Patel?

  It's out today.

• 1:13:21Alex Cranz?

  It's out today. Some of us got to watch a little bit of it early. I swear I didn't watch six episodes.

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  And get screeners is what I just learned.

• 1:13:30Alex Cranz?

  It was great. Highly, highly recommend it. But yeah, Comcast overall, NBC Universal overall, did face big losses. Peacock just recently surpassed a really big number for them. Guess how many subscribers?

• 1:13:42Nilay Patel?

  Six.

• 1:13:43Alex Cranz?

  20 million.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Hey, that's pretty good.

• 1:13:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:48Alex Cranz?

  What is it a 10th of what Netflix is doing?

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  I would just say it's more subscribers than I have.

• 1:13:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like.

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  Subscribe to my Substack, everyone.

• 1:13:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't have one of those. I don't even have a Twitter anymore. What am I doing?

• 1:14:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so, so it's, it's taking losses and it's a loss on the Comcast balance sheet. I think we've always said in the go 90 scale where the zero means they're alive and the 90 means they're, they're doomed. This is now like a 70 to 80.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  Wow, you're going always 70, 80?

• 1:14:16Alex Cranz?

  I, I think so. I think Peacock probably has the best chance of being the first big broadcast streamer that goes, actually, this is not for us. I don't know what they're gonna do though, cuz.

• 1:14:27Speaker 03

  All right. Are you sure they'll do that or that they'll try and buy some other streamer that is also?

• 1:14:31Alex Cranz?

  Who? They're not gonna buy Paramount cuz Paramount has been like in this, we're doing it by ourselves thing before anybody else.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  And, and they have the, um, uh, Yellowstone verse.

• 1:14:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they got the, they got the.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  Versus.

• 1:14:42Alex Cranz?

  1923. Oh, my God. 1923 is so good.

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  You know what? Every single year of American history, people in Montana have shot each other.

• 1:14:49Alex Cranz?

  With Tommy guns.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  That show, we even watching that show.

• 1:14:55Alex Cranz?

  It's.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  Yellowstone.

• 1:14:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  Yellowstone proper.

• 1:14:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:58Nilay Patel?

  Okay, the conceit of, I don't know, um, this is crazy we're talking about, which has, it just, if you think about that show, is having the lawyer's son, the business daughter, and then the Call of Duty son. It just like locks into place. We're like, all right, we need to have a Call of Duty cutscene in the middle of this episode. And it just always happens.

• 1:15:18Alex Cranz?

  It's so like the most compelling thing. Is it good TV? I don't know.

• 1:15:22Nilay Patel?

  We've been watching. It's very entertaining.

• 1:15:24Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 1:15:24Nilay Patel?

  There's like, oh, the cutscene is here.

• 1:15:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, look at it. And they're on horses.

• 1:15:30Nilay Patel?

  They introduce characters just for the Call of Duty son to murder them. It's like very, like, oh, that motherfucker's gonna die.

• 1:15:36Alex Cranz?

  But he's sad about it. He's sad about it. He feels, he feels grief.

• 1:15:39Nilay Patel?

  No, I think actually by season four, he's like, this is what I do.

• 1:15:43Alex Cranz?

  I just kill.

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, but that's, that Peacock hat, that's what Peacock had going for it.

• 1:15:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Peacock.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  The first four seasons.

• 1:15:48Alex Cranz?

  It's got the first four seasons.

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  It's Paramount Plus.

• 1:15:50Alex Cranz?

  Paramount Plus has all of the adjacent shows. So it's got the, the fancy one with Harrison Ford. It's got the Sylvester Stallone one where he goes to Oklahoma to start a mob.

• 1:16:02Alex Cranz?

  It's him and like Martin Starr, just out there mobbing out.

• 1:16:06Nilay Patel?

  I'll take it. I love it. I want to watch them all. See, that's, that's why Peacock won't buy Paramount Plus.

• 1:16:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they, they can't afford it.

• 1:16:13Nilay Patel?

  They're all in on the Taylorverse.

• 1:16:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So, so Peacock is not doing great. It has not had any hits. It's still hoping Poker Face, like it's put a lot of, of time and energy into making Poker Face a thing. This is the new show with Natasha Lyonne. It comes from Ryan Johnson, who did Knives Out and the Star Wars movies and stuff like that. So they're really-

• 1:16:29Nilay Patel?

  Ryan Johnson, a Verge fan.

• 1:16:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, in fact, The Verge makes a cameo in Knives Out, too.

• 1:16:35Alex Cranz?

  That's true. It did. I screamed. I was with my mom and I was like, see, I have a job.

• 1:16:40Nilay Patel?

  I looked at my 17 year old niece and nephew and said, that's cool, right? And they're like, it was cool.

• 1:16:45Alex Cranz?

  My mom did. She was like, it's fine. Cigarette. Uh, so yeah, Peacock not doing great. I, I'll be surprised if it lasts. And, and I think the big concern though, if something happens to Peacock, what happens to shows like Poker Face, which is a legitimately great show. It's super, super entertaining. But 20 million people max are going to be watching it because that's how many people have subscribed.

• 1:17:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're trying to get more people. We'll see.

• 1:17:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So we'll see, we'll see. Not optimistic.

• 1:17:10Nilay Patel?

  But you're putting it 70 to 80 on it.

• 1:17:11Alex Cranz?

  I'm at 70 to 80 now.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  All right. Big call from Alex Cranz.

• 1:17:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Sorry, guys.

• 1:17:16Nilay Patel?

  Peacock 70 to 80 on the Go90 scale of gym streaming services. Let us know what you think of Peacock and its rating on the Go90 scale. You can tweet it out. She's Alex H. Krantz.

• 1:17:24Alex Cranz?

  Wow. Thanks.

• 1:17:25Nilay Patel?

  Tweet it, Richard. He's at RJCC. Monica is at MC squared 96. I'm at reckless. I do check it like once a day and just like all the tweets. So if you want to get a like, you can still tweet at me. It'll just be delayed from what's happening. I'm trying to be off of feeds based media for a little bit.

• 1:17:42Alex Cranz?

  It's nice.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  I do feel like I'm rewiring my brain. I have read a lot of magazines on PDF. God bless. Do you have a new editor in chief of Sound and Vision is an ex AVS forum poster?

• 1:17:52Alex Cranz?

  That's like-

• 1:17:52Nilay Patel?

  Like that's where we are in like the media cycle.

• 1:17:54Alex Cranz?

  Perfect.

• 1:17:55Nilay Patel?

  We're like the hardcore forum posters are now the editors in chief of like the legendary stereo.

• 1:18:01Alex Cranz?

  How, how many, how many staff came from The Verge came from The Verge forums?

• 1:18:04Nilay Patel?

  A surprising amount.

• 1:18:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's a good path.

• 1:18:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I came from the In Gadget comments.

• 1:18:10Alex Cranz?

  I love this.

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  Pretty good. Don't look up those comments. I presumably anyone has deleted them all. You're good.

• 1:18:16Alex Cranz?

  Please don't.

• 1:18:17Nilay Patel?

  It's all gonna be fine. Uh, Wednesday show. What's going on the Wednesday show?

• 1:18:21Alex Cranz?

  So on the Wednesday show, I'm talking to Sean Hollister about the Steam Deck. Liam had to cut us off.

• 1:18:27Alex Cranz?

  We almost got Liam, we almost bullied him into buying one. It was great. I'm also talking with Catherine Chincacosta about faking your own death online. Surprisingly common, just recently happened with a romance novelist, created a whole bunch of

• 1:18:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Alex Cranz?

  conversations. And then, I don't know if I can talk about this last one yet, but we're gonna have a really special one coming up next week as well. So you gotta stay tuned and tell them to hear it, because it's gonna be really good and exciting, but I can't talk about it right now. It's gonna be great.

• 1:18:52Nilay Patel?

  All right. You can call the Vergecast hotline, 866-VERGE-11. Here's what I'll tell you about listener and now viewer feedback. Last week on the show, I was like, "Spazial audio sucks." Usually I say anything is bad. A flurry of responses.

• 1:19:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  One. One person tweeted. And I was like, "I don't know, it might be good." That's how I know. That's how I know.

• 1:19:13Alex Cranz?

  It sucks. But if you are that one person, 866-VERGE-11.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm asking for the call.

• 1:19:20Alex Cranz?

  Call him. Just call me. That's his number.

• 1:19:23Nilay Patel?

  All right. That's the Vergecast. Thank you for listening in your car. If you're watching this for the first time in years, we're so sorry. We just...

• 1:19:30Alex Cranz?

  We're not. Hi.

• 1:19:31Nilay Patel?

  We're not. Go home and do your cocaine. That's it. That's the Vergecast rock and roll.

• 1:19:38Speaker 08

  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's and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:20:31Nilay 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.

• 1:20:52Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that 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.

• 1:21:16Nilay 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. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:21:33Speaker 09

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