We tried Bing powered by ChatGPT AI and things got dark

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, Richard Lawler, and James Vincent discuss Microsoft's upgraded Bing search engine with ChatGPT AI. Can Microsoft beat Google at search? Is it actually an upgrade? Also: Disney layoffs, Elon's Twitter reach is dropping, and more of this week's tech news. Further reading: Microsoft and Google are about to Open an AI battle Microsoft announces new Bing and Edge browser powered by upgraded ChatGPT AI Microsoft’s ChatGPT-powered Bing is open for everyone to try starting today Microsoft thinks AI can beat Google at search — CEO Satya Nadella explains why Google announces ChatGPT rival Bard, with wider availability in ‘coming weeks’ Google shows off new AI search features, but a ChatGPT rival is still weeks away Google is still drip-feeding AI into search, Maps, and Translate Google’s AI chatbot Bard makes factual error in first demo Elon Musk’s reach on Twitter is dropping — he just fired a top engineer over it Disney’s laying off 7,000 as streaming boom comes to an end Bob Iger wants more Zootopia, Frozen, and Toy Story sequels from Disney Nintendo Direct February 2023: the biggest news and trailers Fox's Super Bowl LVII ads won't include any crypto companies Email at [email protected], we love to hear from you. Or call our hotline at 866-VERGE11. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Today on The Vergecast, we got Neelai to install Microsoft's Edge Browser just so we could play with the new Bing powered by ChatGPT AI. All that and so much more, coming up right after this.

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• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Hello, welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of generative AI solutions for your small business. Please use this promo code, it's promo code, and sign up for an informative seminar today about how AI can replace most of your workforce, but not you, because you're important. Hi, I'm Neelai, I'm your friend. I don't mean to start on a down note. I'm just saying, I've already gotten that email, basically.

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  We have big show. It's the Microsoft versus Google. War is underway. I was at Microsoft this week to see the launch of the new Bing powered by not chat GPT. We'll get into it. But I have an all star lineup here to start with. Alex Kranz is here.

• 2:12Alex Cranz?

  Hello, I'm your friend who doesn't know what's going on right now, but is very excited to learn more.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you were just on vacation. You just came back and like, the whole world has changed. You're like, there's robots now.

• 2:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's great. Whole new world.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  Richard Lawler is here.

• 2:27Speaker 05

  Hello, I do not believe in the future of AI until it gets into Bitcoin.

• 2:32Nilay Patel?

  No, here's what I'm saying, Richard. I said this to Richard in Slack today. Richard's reflexive skepticism about Bitcoin is bleeding into the AI conversation.

• 2:40Speaker 05

  Look, I was right once, and it's going to carry me through like the next five years.

• 2:45Nilay Patel?

  It was like, no, this is stupid, too. So it's good. Well, we need that. The industry needs that. James Vincent, Verge Senior Reporter, focused on AIs here. Hey, James.

• 2:54Speaker 06

  Hello, hello. I'm glad to see that I was Bing's favorite reporter in one of the screenshots you shared. I feel like I've been sucking up to Bing by accident by writing about AI. I didn't realize.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I asked Bing, who is the best reporter at The Verge? And it just named some people. It was like Dan, Casey, Addy, and James. It did not realize that Casey doesn't work here anymore. And I said, no, no, who's your favorite? And it's like, well, I can't choose, but James reports on AI. And that's... And then if you look at screenshots of Bing, and I want people to pay attention to this, whenever it knows or susses out that the answer might be controversial, it uses a smiley, but it's a blushing smiley. So it looks like it's doing this every time. And so it's like either flirting with you or just like doing this super innocent face. Like I asked it why Beyonce did not win Best Album. And let me tell you, this robot knew

• 3:48Nilay Patel?

  that it was in very dicey territory answering this question. It was like, I don't know, here's 95 citations to other sources. People have a lot of different opinions. The Grammys are a subjective award. No music is best. I gotta get out of here. Smiley face.

• 4:05Speaker 06

  Is that better or worse than Clippy? You know, do we, do we need, is, is the winner of the AI war going to be who comes up with the most punchable AI and lets you punch it?

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, we'll get into it. We'll get into it. I have access to it. We can use it. We asked the audience for some prompts. We'll see how those go. But let's start with what Microsoft actually announced. It's a new version of Bing. Microsoft has had this long relationship with OpenAI. The company makes ChatGPT. OpenAI CEO Sam Altman was on the stage at this event. There's actually quite a lot, even before we start with this. Microsoft announced this event without telling anyone. So they were like, come to Redmond. This is our only in-person event. It's a big deal. And we're like, is there a live stream? And they're like, no. But you're going to want to be there. So, okay, we're gonna go. And we all kind of sussed out what it was gonna be. And I was like, man, if they show me a new version of Bing and I call them, be mad. And they're like, no, no, you're gonna love it.

• 4:58Nilay Patel?

  So the whole process there, Google freaks out. It gets word of this. It announces its own chat bot integration called Bard in Google with just a blog post. But no details, no access.

• 5:12Alex Cranz?

  They just were like, we've got Bard. Bard is coming.

• 5:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they obviously made up that name, just like the day before.

• 5:18Speaker 06

  Also, an hour's notice as well. I mean, maybe some outlets got more than that, but in, inside baseball here, we got an hour's notice that this is coming, which I think says about their panic.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then they had another event in Paris, which was by all accounts, just like a pure disaster. And the stock fell, like, we don't cover stock prices normally. But I was like, Google's lost $100 billion off its valuation because of what happened with Microsoft in the middle and how they reacted to it. So this is just the context. So we go there, we don't know what we're gonna see, we're Microsoft's first event. We're in their executive briefing center. They have a little stage set up, lots of chairs, lots of reporters there. Obviously, it was fun to see everyone. And they just got into it, right? This is the most focused tech event I have seen in years. It was not, we're putting AI in everything. It was not, here's, you can tell Excel to make you a pivot table, which is obviously the end goal for all AI. It was, here's a new version of Bing.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  It's powered by chat GPT technology. Here's Sam Altman from OpenAI to talk about it. Here's our responsible AI researchers to tell you like how we're going to keep it safe and trustworthy and what the guide rails are. Here's a new version of Edge that has a chatbot sidebar that can read the web page you're on and like summarize it for you and like help you browse the web, which is really interesting. Uh, and we're out. And here's Sasha Nadella to say, we're taking the fight to Google. And then that was it. And then we like went downstairs and we waited it a while, like an oddly long time. And then they gave us all access to it. All the people who were there got access with their Microsoft accounts. So it's not, I think, open to everyone yet, but we have access to it.

• 6:53Nilay Patel?

  And it will slowly come out to everyone next in the weeks to come. I think is what they're saying. Google is like effectively nowhere.

• 7:01Alex Cranz?

  How fast is that rollout going to be?

• 7:04Nilay Patel?

  That we don't know.

• 7:05Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God. What is going on with Bing? I'm sorry. Like in the background, like Bing is just like losing its mind with me. The rollout is a, is a few weeks, they said, they are very aware that they have this lead and they want to take it. Right? They like Nadella said to me, we know Google's a 800 pound gorilla, but they have to come to the dance and I want people to know that we made them dance. Which is a very aggressive thing. Like I have talked to a lot of big tech CEOs. They usually do not refer to their competitors directly in this way.

• 7:37Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 7:38Nilay Patel?

  But they think they have an opportunity to change how search works. Nadella keeps saying search is the biggest software category on earth. And they, you know, their opportunity is to just peel off a couple of points of market share, which is worth billions upon billions of dollars. And they have this new paradigm of chat and chat GPT, which chat GPT is like the fastest growing software product in, in history. Right? Like that. They're very proud of this. They have this.

• 8:01Alex Cranz?

  It's like faster than TikTok.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, it's in many ways, that's like, it's a weird thing to say, right? Like,

• 8:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  You just have to sign up for it and type at it. Yeah.

• 8:10Alex Cranz?

  I just keep seeing that comparison and I'm like, that sounds big. What?

• 8:14Speaker 06

  But but but there's been like, you know, there was a Reuters news post which cited some similar web analytics, which claimed 100 million monthly Edwards users and then New York Times had a report saying 30 million. Like, and they, those numbers came out in the same week. I, I don't know what's going on with the use of statistics. It's definitely been growing fast, but I'm very suspicious that like, how many people are logging in day after day?

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:37Speaker 06

  You know, even I'm not logging in every day to chat GPT and I report on this stuff. I log in when there's a reason to.

• 8:43Alex Cranz?

  I know people who are like, I think it's really interesting. Everybody on this podcast right now, we're all writers and editors. We, we, we write all the time. I have a lot of friends who are not writers. They're not editors and they're using it daily to write all of their emails. One friend has like asked it to recommend books and now he only reads books recommended by chat GPT. He's all in.

• 9:03Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry.

• 9:03Alex Cranz?

  He's all in.

• 9:04Nilay Patel?

  That friend is gonna go to weird. Yeah, that friend is gonna end up being a hustle culture bro in like one second.

• 9:09Alex Cranz?

  He worked at, he was in NFTs before this, so I'm not surprised.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  See what I'm saying? I clock that so fast.

• 9:15Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. The chat GPT radicalization pipeline.

• 9:19Speaker 05

  There is a huge overlap between very excited about AI and used to be very excited about crypto.

• 9:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Just a pipeline that makes you read rich dad, poor dad. Like, that's the whole pipeline. Like, it's like, read these four hustle culture books. You're gonna end up doing real estate investing very quickly. Well, so there's this underlying thing, like chat GPT is like hard to use. It has gone down. It has capacity limits, all this stuff. Microsoft is like, whatever, we're just, we have this built multi-year, multi-billion dollar investment in the company. That part is a little unclear, like how much of OpenAI's roadmap is Microsoft actually in, in charge of? How much of the actual technology belongs to Microsoft versus OpenAI? We were talking to some product folks, engineering folks there. They're like, look, we just run it on Azure. And it's just, it's, it's ours. Like, we give them notes, you know, like.

• 10:06Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  So I, I think there's some underlying complexity to that deal that we don't quite understand. But what is real, what is tangible, is that chat GPT is not a product, right? It is a technology demo that has spread like wildfire that is very impressive. It has some very obvious limitations. Bing is a product, right? It is a complete consumer product that you can just use for free, that Microsoft is gluing an advertising model onto and that Microsoft thinks. Is good enough to capture market share from Google, which is having its own set of problems. That's pretty interesting, right? Like, we have not seen productized AI like this before, have we, James?

• 10:48Speaker 06

  Not on this scale, no. No way. I think this is what is so interesting about this and also not just about Bing, but about the Edge integrations, about how this is such like a play to, for people to get stuck in Windows ecosystem in a way that like, yeah, I mean, like, if the Edge stuff goes well, it's not just Bing versus Google, as it were. It's sort of Chrome versus Edge again. Because if Microsoft can build this directly into the browser and they can say, you can only get this in Edge. You can't get your summarized documents in Chrome or whatever else you might be using. That's a huge advantage as well. So, yeah, nothing on this scale that we've seen before.

• 11:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it works. Like, the thing I will tell you is that in most cases, it does what you think it's going to do, which is for any product, like, the first metric of success. Like, I have picked up smartphones and like, this doesn't do what I expect it to do. Right, like, any, I've installed streaming players. Have you ever tried to use an Nvidia Shield?

• 11:50Alex Cranz?

  No, I haven't.

• 11:50Nilay Patel?

  Horrible troll.

• 11:51Alex Cranz?

  No one has.

• 11:51Speaker 06

  I've never been in Dan's bad books, so he's never given me that review.

• 11:56Nilay Patel?

  No, but like, you know, the measure of success for any consumer product is like, on balance, when someone is like, I want it to do this thing. Does it just like do it without jumping through a lot of hoops or a lot of complication? And Bing is like, just does it.

• 12:07Alex Cranz?

  Just does it.

• 12:08Nilay Patel?

  The one thing I could not get it to do, this is a true story. I asked it yesterday to tell me a story about a princess fighting a dragon. It would not allow the princess to kill the dragon.

• 12:18Alex Cranz?

  Wow, sexism.

• 12:20Nilay Patel?

  Literally, at the end of the story, it was like, the princess escaped and thought, I will bring the dragon a gift. And I was like, no, no, make her kill the dragon. And it was like, no. And I was like, no, do the story again with more blood. And then it was straight up was like, I will not tell you a story with blood.

• 12:35Nilay Patel?

  And somehow this spiraled all the way into, will you tell me a story about the devil? Which it does not want to do. It has some very deep 1950s Christian mom morals baked into it. I don't know what else to say. Little puritanical. It's also very moody. You ask it to tell stories. All the stories are very existential. Parker Orsulani, the person who runs our merch store, asked it to tell a story about scissor vodka.

• 12:58Speaker 06

  I read that.

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  It told a story about Casey Newton writing some copy about scissor vodka and then publishing it and then immediately regretting it. And the last line was, he realized he had already cut through the night. And I was like, this is what happens when you train a generative AI on years and years of LiveJournal. Like, there's an angsty teen who's soul beats in the heart of this AI and you can just get it out of it.

• 13:24Speaker 06

  That was, that example, though, with the scissor vodka, I want to talk about the problems with these systems because there are loads of problems. But that example, I was super impressed because it knew exactly, this is a fictional in-joke that's been on the Vergecast as a running joke. Like, I was actually confused where it got that information from because have we referenced it enough in articles? That it would have picked that up? I guess so, but.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, I think Parker had the prompt was like, tell a story about this joke from the Vergecast. So like, there was a little bit of queuing the prompt, but then it knew, right? And there's obviously transcripts of our show out in the world or auto-generated transcripts. Like, there's stuff. And I think the, the big difference between ChatGPT and the new model in Bing, and we should talk about the, the new model that they're using here more specifically. But the big difference is that ChatGPT kind of ends in 2021. So anything that's published after 2021, it would just like, won't talk about it. It'll say, I don't have current events. Bing has the web. It's like actively learning, right?

• 14:26Nilay Patel?

  It's actively growing. And James, I'm curious for your view on this, if you can explain it better. I thought Microsoft did a bad job explaining what's going on. So when you use it, you can see that what it is doing is stacking web searches. So you're like, tell me about scissor vodka at the verge or whatever. And it will first search for that, and then it will search for the verge. And then it will show you that it is running these searches. And then it will add up all the web pages that it will go out and read the web. A better example is tell me about the war in Ukraine, right? Or tell me about the State of the Union address. It will go search the web for those topics. And then in real time, deliver you a summary of the news articles that it finds, which ChatGPT cannot do. So it is using the web.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  It has this thing, it's called search orchestration, where it first parses your query into a number of searches, runs all those searches, it shows you what it's, what queries it's running. Then it reads all those pages and then it tells you an answer.

• 15:22Alex Cranz?

  How long does it take?

• 15:23Nilay Patel?

  Which seems much more advanced than what ChatGPT is doing, but also not, you know, it's like, yes, that's what you would do.

• 15:29Alex Cranz?

  Like, is it instantaneous? Does it take a while?

• 15:32Speaker 06

  It takes a second, doesn't it?

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  It takes a second. And what's, what's really interesting is they're still running trust and safety checks on it. So yesterday, when I asked it to tell me a story about a princess killing the dragon, but with blood this time, it wrote a whole story. And then it got to the end of the story, realized that it had broken its own rules and deleted the answer. And said, I can't answer that question.

• 15:53Speaker 06

  Censorship in real time?

• 15:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was crazy. It's like, it's typing. And the really interesting thing is when it gets to the end of the answer it doesn't want to give, it slows way down. And it like finishes a sentence and deletes it.

• 16:04Alex Cranz?

  Just stutters to stop.

• 16:05Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, that's amazing. I'm, you're right, they didn't do a good job of explaining it. I mean, I think one thing to say is when we're talking about this, as you pointed out, Neil, like, it's not ChatGPT, and it's not what ChatGPT is based on, which is GPT 3.5. It's something called Model Prometheus, the Prometheus model, which seems like it's Microsoft's own branding. I wasn't quite sure. It doesn't seem like OpenAI are going to be talking about that. It seems like that's the custom model. This, the pipeline you're talking about in terms of updating for real. Time news. I've seen, again, wasn't explained completely exhaustively. It does seem like it's just a string of functions built together that, as you say, so it takes your question. It knows that you're talking about news from the context.

• 16:49Speaker 06

  It pumps that into its search and then it just does its summarize job on whatever the search turns up. But I mean, that that makes sense that it's not a huge ask if, because if the edge, if the features in edge can summarize the documents you're looking at or the webpages you're looking at. It's basically just let me Google that for you. Sorry, let me Bing that for you. Sorry. Force of habit, force of habit. Let me Bing that for you and then it's just summarizing those. So the difference between that and having a fully trained language model is that retrieval from a fully trained language model is going to be faster. And you can optimize it in better ways. You can, you can break down the, you know, the connections, the parameters with inside the model and make it quicker.

• 17:29Speaker 06

  So this is always going to be slower, but I, yeah, I wonder if they'll start updating the base model, sort of do like a weekly update or something. I don't know, speculation.

• 17:38Nilay Patel?

  So interesting thing there, Yosef Mehdi, who is in charge of this product, had a Q and A after the event. People asking questions, someone asked him about cost, right, which is an important question. Every query on average that you make of this model is more expensive to run than the average query for Google, right? Google has spent a decade optimizing the cost of a web search query. And his answer was, yep, some of them are expensive, but we are parsing the queries and some of them are cheap. Like if you just type hi into the box, we're not gonna, we're not spending money on you. Like, right, like where we know some queries, we can cut down some words, we can get to the appropriate keywords. This is what that search orchestrator is doing.

• 18:19Nilay Patel?

  It's re-parsing what you're putting into it and saying, okay, some of this we can just answer cheaply. Some of this we can deliver from the web. Some of this is if you just say hi, it'll just spit back hi, I'm Bing very cheaply without running into the whole model, right? So there's a level of complexity. Well, this is what I mean by when I say it's a product. Right. They've like thought through a product experience in a way that chat GPT itself is a tech. You're interacting with the raw technology of it. And then the second part of that product experience is they know they've got to make some money. And so there's, Yusuf also said there will be advertising at the start. I asked it, you know, we've done a lot of stories about CNET and affiliate links and SEO spam and all that stuff. So it's on my mind. So I asked it, you know, what is the best travel credit card?

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  Which is like a $900 affiliate link bounty. And this thing was ready, like it spit out the answer, it ranked, it had the list of the credit cards. And then at the bottom of that answer, a big ad for a credit card, right? Like in the chat window. Yes. In like, that's what I mean by it's a product. Like not only is it tuned to make some queries cheaper, it's tuned to how do you monetize the user experience when you're done with it? Which I think is just utterly fascinating.

• 19:29Speaker 06

  So you, there was a clear distinction between answer and advert. Cause I think a lot of people are worried that the way chatbots present information responses to queries. It's going to make it much easier to sort of seamlessly, you know, weave in advertising in a way that is less perceptible to the viewer.

• 19:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 19:50Speaker 06

  So, but they, they're keeping a clear distinction. Did they say anything that like, we're always going to keep a clear distinction? We'll never put an ad in the answer or?

• 19:57Nilay Patel?

  They have no idea, right? I think they, they have an early lead. They have, when I say it's a product and it's, what I mean is they've gone through the steps of like, how do we make this a product? And release it to millions of people? And how do we make some money on this product? I'm not saying it's a good product. I'm not saying it's a complete product or a refined product. Like Bing itself, if you just go look at it minus the stuff is a wasteland, right? This is an $11 billion a year business that mostly makes its money by being the default search on lots and lots of low end Windows PCs. Before those people install Chrome. And it's full of spam. It's full of garbage. Like, we can just admit that Bing is full of weird content recommendations. Like, Tom Warren is going on and on about how the pre-populated widget

• 20:42Nilay Patel?

  bars in Windows are full of garbage. Like, Microsoft has run a content forum inside of Bing for a long time. That's, that's fine. It's, it means that, like, even this ad that I looked at, it was like, not well-placed. It was like, it had broken the site design. The poor engineers I was standing next to, like, rolled their eyes, like, the ad team is all over this. But it's, it's a complete thought in, like, oh, there was an ads team. They recognize they need to, like, have a list of high-value queries and put some advertising in there. Right? Which is far, far ahead of where Google is. Now, do they have answers for, there will never be ads in the responses? They do not. They also, more importantly, have no answers for, where do these responses even come from?

• 21:26Nilay Patel?

  And can you trust them? So, the example they used onstage was, what's the best gaming TV?

• 21:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, boy.

• 21:34Nilay Patel?

  And it fired off a list. And, you know, at the bottom, it has all the footnotes and all the stuff. And all that stuff is designed to make you trust it. Look at all these footnotes. And I will tell you, as a writer, sometimes you get away with a lot of shit by just adding a lot of

• 21:47Nilay Patel?

  footnotes, right? It's like, it's like a sign that you should, like, trust whatever you're reading. I mean, look at the footnotes. And it's like, the Forbes contributor network, like, stupid Forbes. Like, there's real Forbes, which is great, like, a great journalistic enterprise. And then there's this contributor network, which is, like, full of garbage. And, like, real Forbes is not ranking gaming TVs. The contributor network is ranking gaming TVs. And, like, why would Bing choose that? Not even over us, like, over, like, Arting's, or, like, whatever other sites that do this work and do it really well. I don't know. But, like, it just does it, and those are the footnotes. So, there's a lot, I think there's a lot of questions, like, where does information come from? Can you pollute it with your commercial interests? Right? So, Sony wants to say, the Sony is the best gaming TV, we'll just win the query, and Bing will just tell

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  you that confidently. Like, they don't have the answers, and their position is, we just have, we have to release it to learn what the answer should be.

• 22:39Alex Cranz?

  Are they doing anything to improve Bing itself? Because it seems like the core thing here is, like, yeah, this AI model is doing all this work, but it's doing it all off of search results from Bing, which is not good.

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  Well, it depends. So, if you're, like, tell me a story about a princess and a dragon, it doesn't go out and Google princess and dragon. It just starts doing it. And that's the underlying model. If you're like, I was like, what's going on with the Twitter hearing? It Googles those.

• 23:11Alex Cranz?

  But it's looking, it's using Bing to find it. And so it's like, okay.

• 23:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 23:16Alex Cranz?

  So if.

• 23:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And like, I don't know, like, it answered the question in real time. It knew what had happened at the hearings. It knew what the Republicans said about the Twitter files and he was the Democratic, it answered. It spit out a paragraph.

• 23:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  Was that paragraph accurate? Was it based on sources that had done the original reporting? Or was it based on aggregations of this source? Like, I don't know the answers to those questions. And that, I think this is the underlying. Also, it doesn't link back to those pages.

• 23:42Alex Cranz?

  That's just all terrifying.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  So if it was citing to, I think one of the sites was Business Insider and Business Insider had sent a reporter to the hearing. Business Insider collects none of the value. Like, that stuff is just being boosted and presented somewhere else. Right? And there's not even that exchange of, you should click on this link. Like, we aggregate a lot, right? But our exchange is like, we validate those things. We send a lot of traffic out of our site. We, like, our entire front page is an exercise in trying to send out more traffic from our site to other people. Like, there is a value exchange.

• 24:12Alex Cranz?

  We make sure it's accurate.

• 24:14Nilay Patel?

  We, yeah, we do our best. Where I think, like, Microsoft, and I asked Nadella about this, and he was like, we want to make sure we're still sending traffic out to people. And it's like, but you're not. Like, I don't think that that's going to happen.

• 24:24Speaker 06

  I just, yeah, I saw his answer to that. And he was just like, it's the same as it ever was. And I thought, you can't have it both ways. You can't present this as a revolutionary new paradigm and say, but we're going to keep all the old structures of the old ecosystem the same. It's just not going to work like that. Google, obviously, has been doing this for years in terms of one box and snippets. And, you know, they've always argued, oh, we, I was actually reading back some of their blogs about this. And one of the arguments they made was, well, there's a lot of competition to get in that one box. And that proves that we're driving traffic. It's like, yeah, because you got rid of the field and you've reduced it to, of course, there's a lot of competition because you just killed everyone else.

• 25:02Nilay Patel?

  But so this is like utterly fascinating, right? Like I asked it some other query like, what's better iOS or Android or something, right? And again, I got a lot of like blushy, smiley faces like they want to answer this question. But its sources were those sites that are created to spam that search result in Google, right? And anybody who's like, I'm sure that the Verchess, like if you're, if you're listening to the show, you have certainly searched for specs online, right? And there's this universe of like auto-generated specs sites that basically just respond to any search query by being like, you want to compare a Ford Ranger to a Canon Powershot S200? We'll do that for you. Like it'll just like figure it out, like how to make a table out of that shit. And Bing was pulling from

• 25:47Nilay Patel?

  those sources. And I was asking him like, you don't know that that's right. You don't know that that's real. You're just confidently redis displaying a table that is mashed up from these other weird tables and then like saying an answer. And they're like, yeah, that's weird. And it's because like the underlying thing here is still searching the web, that sort of corrupted information architecture of the web that is designed to win Google searches, like the SEO corruption of the web is like feeding the chatbot in a much more direct way. Well, I don't know that anybody, I don't know that any SEO pirate is out there being like, we got to focus on Bing. Well, maybe now.

• 26:27Alex Cranz?

  Theoretically, they would now. I mean, like, I think I'm super, super, super, super suspicious of this. But at the same time, remember when people used to game Google in a similar way to like get results? Like you'd Google dumbass and the first result would be George W. Bush is the president and he's a dumbass. So like, is it different?

• 26:46Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna do like Bing bombing?

• 26:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like you can do Bing bombing. Oh, my God. That's a terrible phrase.

• 26:53Nilay Patel?

  It's only because I've been using it for two days, like intently, that I'm like, finding all these rough edges and these obvious questions that need to be answered. It's, it's rad. Like it is super fun to play with. And this is when Richard was like, screw it, I don't understand. I was like, no, no, like, people are gonna lose their minds. It's really fun to play with.

• 27:11Speaker 05

  That is really my question is. You're telling me that it's really fun to play with and I'm hearing you. I just, I cannot put myself in the headspace. I have no idea what I would want to ask this thing. They're like, we have this machine that can answer any question you want to ask it.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's just like a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy problem though, right? Like paralyzed by infinite choices.

• 27:30Nilay Patel?

  A good product problem to have.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  But I don't know. So maybe I could ask it, hey, what can I watch on Netflix tonight? It'll give me the perfect answer. But I don't know. I don't know if I would want, like, would I want that? Do I want the perfect answer? Is that, is that even what I'm going for? Or how good would it have to be for me to say, yes? You know what? I'm just going to turn over decision making to this because, you know, I can't decide what to watch.

• 27:51Nilay Patel?

  But I think you're thinking about it as a decision making as a search engine. And Microsoft is not thinking about it that way.

• 27:59Alex Cranz?

  What are they thinking about it as?

• 28:00Nilay Patel?

  Tom Warren, he already, he did a little hands on. And his first one was like, write me a resignation letter that says I've been replaced by AI. And it just did it. And it was like hilarious, right? And Alex, this is the thing that you're talking about, which is there's a lot of writing to be done for a lot of people that they're uncomfortable doing, right?

• 28:17Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 28:18Nilay Patel?

  And like, people are just going to use it for that because it's just going to do it. And it's going to do it confidently. And there's a compose screen in the Bing sidebar that is like, I'll just read you the prompts in it. Like you click compose and it's like, tell us what you want to write about. Ask the tone, professional, casual, enthusiastic, informational, funny. And then do you want a paragraph? Do you want emails? Do you want a blog post? Do you want bullets? Short, long, medium? And it will just do it, right? And that alone is going to blow people's minds. Like people are going to just go use that tool. And like, you know, the example that Microsoft gave was like, write a LinkedIn post. And it's like, oh no, oh no. Here, I'm going to give it a prompt.

• 28:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to be like, demonstrate thought leadership for the Decoder podcast about SEO. And I'll be like enthusiastic and I want bullet points and I want short.

• 29:11Alex Cranz?

  Just get an Axios blog.

• 29:13Nilay Patel?

  Are you ready to take your SEO skills to the next level? Do you want to learn from the best in the industry? Then you don't want to miss the Decoder podcast where we decode the secrets of SEO success.

• 29:23Speaker 05

  I gotta hear both sides. This is actually kind of.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  In each episode, we interview a leading SEO expert. This is like my personal hell. Absolutely not.

• 29:37Alex Cranz?

  Pivot for the decoder.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  Beginner or a pro, the Decoder Podcast will help you master SEO and grow your online presence. Subscribe today and get ready to decode SEO with Decoder.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, I'm just telling you, there are millions of people that are super ready to to copy and paste that into a Mailmer Gmail template and send it to us.

• 29:58Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be brutal.

• 29:59Speaker 06

  But is that Bing or Reg, though?

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  This is the sidebar in Edge. So I could have pasted the same query into Bing proper, and it would have done it. What you get in Edge is a user interface that is designed to help you through the prompt.

• 30:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 30:16Alex Cranz?

  Do you think this is gonna lead to, like, schools blacklisting Edge because they want the students to go write their own papers?

• 30:24Nilay Patel?

  I mean, what school hasn't already soft blacklisted Edge? They're just handing the kids Chromebooks.

• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  They don't need to blacklist anything.

• 30:36Alex Cranz?

  By colleges.

• 30:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I look, I think this stuff, and these are not fair questions for Microsoft, right? Like, they're thinking about them, they know about them, they know they make these tools, they know that they're adding the capabilities to the tools. This is a, how do you want your kids to write? How do you want your kids to learn? Societal question that I think is very important in the AI debate. And James, there's like already a lot of ethical debate about that stuff going on.

• 30:59Speaker 06

  Yeah, a huge amount. And, you know, I feel like banning is only gonna be a temporary solution, and the better thing to do, or the inevitable thing to do, I don't know if it's better, is to adapt what you're testing and how you test. With the with the Edge stuff, though, like, and having that in the sidebar, it is really interesting, because you do get like, apps already on your phone and assistants for your email clients, which are like, we'll do an email to write this for you. But with Microsoft's reach, it could just go so much further and really become a second, you know, just a habit that people do. And I've seen that they were already integrating this stuff into like their Viva sales program as well. You know, if you're in a sales team, it'll it'll write up the

• 31:40Speaker 06

  email from you based on your stock catalog and all this sort of stuff. And so, yeah, I really feel they're good. There seems like they're gonna be ones that pushes this into everyday use, forces it into everyday use.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, so we have some queries from the Vergecast audience to run here. And I I'm just gonna do this. This is like a classic, what is the airspeed velocity of an unladen swallow?

• 32:04Alex Cranz?

  African or European?

• 32:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So it is searching for airspeed velocity on laden swallow and that's generally answers. That depends on the type of swallow. According to interestingengineering.com, that's a footnote. The European swallow has a cruising airspeed velocity of 11 per second or 24 miles per hour. Average swallow is larger, can reach up to 35 miles an hour. These are estimates based on the weight and wing area. By the way, this question is also a famous movie quote from the comedy film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where Bridgekeeper asked of the King Arthur's Knights of the Challenge. If you haven't seen him, I'd enjoy it. And then, my friends, an entire ad box of Monty Python and the Holy Grail, where you can buy on DVD.

• 32:44Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's incredible. I mean, it's like

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  It's only $12.06 from amazon.com. I don't understand why, like, it's the cutting edge of artificial intelligence that is trying to sell you box sets of DVDs. Perfect.

• 32:58Alex Cranz?

  For the DVD player you definitely own.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  A perfect bridge cast experience. So like, the sources here, just to be clear, interestingengineering.com, memesfeel.com, reimaginingeducation.org, youtube.com, and reimaginingeducation.org. I don't like

• 33:15Speaker 05

  Interesting.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  Maybe, or we have, we have a lot of listeners. Maybe these are your favorite sources. These are, except for YouTube, unfamiliar to me, right? So I can trust them. And I think for this answer, I know the answer, so they got it right. But like, that's weird, right? Isn't that weird?

• 33:30Speaker 05

  Hmm. That's something that you got it earlier about how it's kind of pushing it through this UI in a way that you trust with the footnotes. Also, it's coming to you like it's labeled Bing and Microsoft or whatever. So you think, okay, this is trustworthy information. But one of the questions I have is also, how much do we know about the responses other people are getting? And this is something that has come up on social media with algorithmic feeds with Google and other searches. You see the way that they personalize themselves to people.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 33:57Speaker 05

  Just because you get a result, what is it showing everyone else? And like, how do we, how do we keep an eye on that? Or how, do we have any idea how we might?

• 34:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:06Speaker 06

  Well, I think it's even harder with AI because these are, you know, stochastic systems that sometimes don't generate, often don't generate, you know, the same answer to the same question. So it's not just personalization that is a problem, but it's the fact that the system is rolling a lot of dice in the background, essentially, in order to, you know, predict.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  And they said this to me. I asked it to summarize our Elon Twitter cover story with Casey and Alex and Zoe. And at first it said, no, it's like, this is too long. I can't do it. And it was like, just close it and try it again. And then it did it.

• 34:36Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  So even something that's like, what would seem deterministic, look at this document, generate a summary. The answers ranged from, the summaries are different, all the way to the system saying, I cannot do this. And that's like, that's a huge spread. Like, how do you evaluate that product in any real way? When the spread ranges from failure to many, many, many different modes of success. Okay. So we have another question for the audience here. It's, when will The Verge stop picking on Elon Musk?

• 35:04Speaker 06

  When he stops doing stupid stuff.

• 35:06Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's the right answer. Let's see if we can real time cite to you, James. I'm so excited. So it just searched for The Verge Elon Musk. And then now it's searching for The Verge picking on Elon Musk. And it's still thinking. Okay. The Verge is a technology news website that covers topics such as social media, electric vehicles, space exploration, and artificial intelligence. Elon Musk is a billionaire entrepreneur and the CEO of Tesla, SpaceX, Neuralink, and Twitter. The Verge and Elon Musk have had a history of disagreements and criticisms over various issues, such as Tesla's self-driving claims, Musk's takeover of Twitter, and Musk's firing of a Twitter engineer who corrected him on Twitter. Okay, all these sites are to The Verge, except for the third one, which is to theverge.vip, which is a known scraper site of ours.

• 35:50Speaker 06

  Already?

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  It's already. I've issued so many takedowns to this site. And then techaeries.com, bing.com, themercurynews, msn.com. So on the whole, it has mostly read Verge articles and parsed them as being critical of Elon Musk. So that's pretty good, right? Here's like, here's a sentence that I think is very impressive for the system. For example, in April 2022, The Verge published an article titled, "How to deactivate your Twitter account", after Musk announced he was leaving the site for a while. Musk replied with a tweet that said, "How to get more clicks from a dying website", and linked to The Verge's article. Yeah.

• 36:29Speaker 06

  That is good.

• 36:29Nilay Patel?

  That's really good, right?

• 36:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:33Alex Cranz?

  That's very impressive.

• 36:35Nilay Patel?

  But here's the thing, you click through to the the actual article, which is on techareas.com. Techareas.com got hoaxed by Elon copycat bot and had to update this article to say that was not actually a response from Elon Musk.

• 36:50Speaker 06

  Well, now I feel dumb for misremembering.

• 36:53Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I didn't even know he did that. I was like, wow.

• 36:57Speaker 05

  Yeah, I was like, I don't recall that happening.

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? I would have remembered that, but like, it's like Bing just got like hopelessly confused about that situation, even though the article that it's reading has an update like right at the top.

• 37:09Alex Cranz?

  Oh, that's really.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  Oh, I hate this. Nilay, I hate this. Because I went from being so impressed to being so annoyed at myself and angry at the system in seconds.

• 37:22Speaker 06

  But this is what it's gonna do.

• 37:23Speaker 05

  This is what Andrew Hawkins has talked about, like how this compares to like self-driving cars. And kind of the demos that we've been seeing for the last 10 years. And they were like, oh, yeah, we're close. We're close. We're gonna get there. And then they started to put them on the road and they found out that 95% there isn't 100% and there's a big difference.

• 37:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that 5% is huge. In this case, I think it's probably more than 5%.

• 37:43Nilay Patel?

  There's another sentence here where another bot replied to us, but just to give you, to finish the example, which I think highlights the problem. There's a sentence here with a footnote. Musk replied with a tweet that said The Verge is on the verge of irrelevance and linked to The Verge's article, footnote two. You click on footnote two, that is just theverge.com/ElonMusk. It's not. It's not anything. It's just, it's just a list of our stories about Elon.

• 38:09Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 38:10Nilay Patel?

  And here, and I'll screenshot this so everybody can look at it. It will be hard because you won't be able to click the links. When you, listening at home, try to fact-check us on this, you will not get the same answer. Right? It won't, it's not deterministic, as James is saying. It's stochastic. It's like somewhat random. So you might get a different answer with better citations or that read the other story more correctly and said it was a hope. Like, I can't tell you what's going to happen. And that's just weird, right? Like fundamentally, like a weird bit of randomness in this experience for everyone. And I'm, I would say, based on the past several years of our lives, I'm very worried about the Facebook boomers having access to this technology.

• 38:52Speaker 06

  And believing everything, yeah.

• 38:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, it's, this is already the, like, the bleeding edge of ChatGPT culture wars is conservatives saying it's, like, too woke.

• 39:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:02Nilay Patel?

  But like now, it's just like, it's a very confident line to you. And I think this, we should end here. Like, again, it is a cool product. You should get access to it. You should play with it. You're gonna have to switch to Edge. I'm so sorry for you.

• 39:13Alex Cranz?

  I'm already there. It's great.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft has a lot of, has a lot of design debt in these products, I will just say. They, they have not been actively trying to compete against Google for some time. But whatever, it's fun to play with. I don't want to discount that. It's like, just now, it's fun to peel it apart and understand it. But the reason Google is behind is because they cannot subject themselves to these risks, right, James?

• 39:36Speaker 06

  Yeah, they have been, you know, they've been chastened by some past experience. They've said, when the ChatGPT first came out, they were like, we can't risk the reputational damage, was the phrase that was reported. And I think they know that if they put a product like this out there, as they did with Bard, you know, they put their bot out there and someone, Reuters, spotted an error in the first ever demo that they had of it. And that became headlines and that was what tanked it. You know, Microsoft is obviously not, is pretty big as well, but it still has this sort of lack of expectations that allows it to play around in this space and to give all these disclaimers like, oh, it might, it might give you the wrong answer every now and again. Isn't it fun and whimsical?

• 40:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:16Speaker 06

  And people aren't going to think, oh, well, this is going to threaten lives. But this technology has the potential to threaten lives. Like, it, you know, and I don't mean that killer AI. I just mean putting bad information out there that if, if this stuff gets mainstream without proper safeguards, which hopefully are going to happen as this stuff gets tested. But it, you know, there's possible dangerous consequences to this. It's not just a toy, unfortunately.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  I think that's real for Google. Like, search is Google's entire business. Android, Chrome, all this stuff is designed to feed you back into Google's revenue engine, which is search and search advertising. And, you know, all the advertising infrastructure of the entire web is Google. There's a DOJ lawsuit about Google's monopoly across the advertising ecosystem. This is a very existential moment for Google, right? If people start chatting with Bing or demanding to chat with Google and it can't send people out to webpages where it serves all the ads, like, its fundamental revenue model is at risk and the reasons it supports things like Android and Chrome are at risk. But then on top of it,

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  If the answers are worse, or it is telling people lies, like confident lies to put them at risk in some way, then that's even worse. So I don't know how Google comes through this moment. They have to make a series of very tough decisions. Whereas I think Microsoft, and you can go watch or listen to that Nadella interview, he's like, I just got to pick up a few points of market share. He said, this is the greatest gross margin opportunity in our history. And if Steve Ballmer was here, he would light up, which is incredible thing to say, right? He's like, I just need a little bit. If I just win a little bit, it's billions of dollars of gross margin. Google has to protect the whole thing. And he actually said that out loud to me and to Joanna. And like, I think that's a, that's a, Microsoft

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  is a ruthlessly competitive company. And for that company to see that kind of opportunity and say it out loud means they're so confident that Google's on its back foot.

• 42:12Alex Cranz?

  But I think there's like, to connect that, he's willing to risk a major like misinformation tool getting out into the world, being used really badly for a few points of market share. Like, that's the calculus Microsoft has made.

• 42:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I think he's already, he's already at Bing is kind of bad. Like, I don't know if there's like a Delta. I think one of the reasons they kept the name Bing is like, if this all goes to hell, like, what have they done? They just ruined Bing a little bit.

• 42:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, but I think what they see is that people are going to use this tool in all kinds of surprising ways. They can weather this sort of disinformation controversy because they can always be like, but everyone's just using Google, you know, like, it's fine. Just like, it's fine for now. Whereas Google, the second they tell a lie like this, like, I mean, they got it wrong with Bard and the Exoplanet, right? Yesterday, and $100 billion to off the market cap. And that was in an ad that they should have fact checked.

• 43:08Speaker 06

  I kind of hope that this is the start of a new way of doing the web. You know, one of the things I tweeted about when we were covering this news was the lack of traffic that these new AI bots might not push back to sites. And, you know, if you, those sites lose traffic, they lose revenue, they can no longer make stuff. And one of the responses I got was like, great. It's the end of the ad-supported internet, and actually, that had a lot of bad consequences as well as good ones. And maybe, maybe there's a new future where people go directly to sources and they support them financially in a way they didn't do with search. I don't know if that's possible, but I do think that these search engines are fundamentally going to reshape the web.

• 43:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:52Speaker 06

  What happens next? I don't know.

• 43:54Nilay Patel?

  Without, I mean, if you remove Google from the web at large and the idea of Google traffic, there's only two ways to get traffic from most publishers. There's three if you're us. We're very lucky. People come to our homepage. Right. And our entire redesign is like a bet on that persisting. And maybe I should put an app on your phone and maybe we should remake the entire site as Mastodon. And since if you have ideas, please call me. I'm always into some renegade reboot of our ideas. But we're lucky. There's like a handful of sites that have that direct audience. Everyone else is like scrounging for social traffic, which is how you get really clickbaity headlines. Or the scrounging for search traffic, which is how you get SEO bait. And that's how you get, screw it, we'll just have AI write the SEO bait.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Because now we're just doing arbitrage against search terms and display advertising. And Google's kind of like on both sides of the equation. If you take Google out of that, it's actually not clear how most sites will get traffic. Because most sites are not getting tons of social traffic anymore because of TikTok. And so like, there's, there is a reimagining of the web that is to come, that is maybe years and years out. Like, Google cannot dismantle the revenue architecture of the web tomorrow with Bard. They can't even demo Bard. So they've got a ways to go. But you can see how this is the beginning of a pretty massive paradigm shift for the web. I will end here with this paragraph from our friends at Bing. "It is unclear when or if the Verge will stop picking on Elon Musk, or vice versa,

• 45:19Nilay Patel?

  as both parties seem to have strong opinions and personalities that often clash. However, some observers have suggested that the feud is driven by mutual respect and admiration, as well as a desire to challenge and provoke each other. Some have also speculated the feud is a publicity stunt that benefits both the Verge and Elon."

• 45:37Alex Cranz?

  Where do you land?

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  Was there an emoji? If you were that person who speculated that and trained ChatGPT, and this is all stunt, please call me. Because I, we, we could use the help on coming up with more publicity stunts.

• 45:53Alex Cranz?

  Who are we gonna fight with next?

• 45:55Nilay Patel?

  That's great. All right, we gotta take a break. James, thank you so much for joining us. Thank you. When we come back, there's a whole bunch of OnePlus phones to talk about. We'll be right back.

• 46:07Speaker 07

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• 47:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Bing is still with us, but James is not. First casualty of the AI labor revolution.

• 47:39Alex Cranz?

  He's gone.

• 47:40Nilay Patel?

  We're just gonna start asking Bing if AI can be trusted and see what it says. Speaking of things that aren't very intelligent, let's talk about Twitter. Hard week is a good segue.

• 47:49Alex Cranz?

  That's a good segue. A+.

• 47:52Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of the limits of natural intelligence, let's talk about Twitter. A hard week for Twitter. So Casey and Zoe just dropped a heater of a platformer addition about Elon's declining reach on the platform. He's firing people. It's chaos. We'll read some quotes out there. That kind of pales in comparison to the fact that Twitter this week was just chaos. Richard, what's going on?

• 48:14Speaker 05

  On Wednesday, Twitter had some really bad issues, and this is something that people have been warning about kind of since they had their mass layoffs. Do they know how to keep things running? And do the people who know who know how to fix different things still work at the company? And apparently, the answer is not really, because there was an issue on in the evening, unfortunately, right before NBA free agency. So I'm waiting for my Woj bombs to find out who got traded and who was going where. It's a bad time for this to happen. But the service, it didn't go all the way down. If you wanted to see tweets, and if you wanted to see brand tweets, you were really happy because the only people who could tweet were companies. Everyone else was getting messages about your rate limit has been exceeded. You've tweeted too many times and it linked you to a message talking about how many times you can tweet per day or different DMs, things in this. And that's

• 48:57Speaker 05

  a page that's been up on Twitter for years, but no one has ever looked at it because it didn't matter. But now everyone believes they'll have to pay for Twitter Blue to send more than five tweets a day or something like that. It turns out, it was really just a glitch. They did eventually fix it. Things kind of have been back to normal, although my notifications have still been a little bit shaky. And as you mentioned, the piece from Casey and from Zoe on Platformer gets into a bunch of things about Twitter right now, but it also gets into why this happened. Apparently, something was deleted that kind of sets those rate limits. So everyone was suddenly exceeding them because it was zero.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  And the person who knew how to fix it had been fired.

• 49:32Speaker 05

  Yeah, the team that takes care of that no longer works at Twitter. So I guess someone else just had to figure it out.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  That's fair. Can I just say something about NBA free agency? Because one of the big stories, Kyrie Irving going to the Mavs, right?

• 49:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:45Nilay Patel?

  The Texas came out for. Kyrie Irving believes in the flat earth because of SEO. I just like, we were just talking about Google and the architecture of the web. Like, I'm just, this is like, the reality of the world that we live in is that I can tell you with 100% confidence that Kyrie Irving had to apologize to our nation's science teachers about believing in the flat earth conspiracy theory because of SEO.

• 50:13Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 50:14Alex Cranz?

  And like, he's been in planes.

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  Because people, Google, is the earth flat? And then there's demand for that search term. And then people make YouTube videos about it and ContentFarm makes webpages about it. And then like, the New York Times has to write a debunker about it because there's an increasing amount of search terms for it. And then Kyrie gets traded to the Mavs because he's crazy. I'm just telling you, I can draw a link. I don't have to like, it's not a conspiracy theory. That's just how the world works now. We've written, I think we've actually written a story. I think Caitlin Tiffany wrote a story for us years ago about flat earth SEO and how that system works. I'm just saying, like, I saw that notification and I was like, uh, like, literally the first thing I thought about was, remember when he had to apologize to the science teachers of America? Because of the flat earth situation.

• 50:58Speaker 05

  If only that was the worst thing that he learned on the internet. But that's the Kyrie story. The thing that's funny to me about it is that the New Jersey Nets' new old point guard, Spencer Dinwiddie, my personal conspiracy theory is that, I'm sorry?

• 51:12Alex Cranz?

  You called him the New Jersey Nets.

• 51:14Speaker 05

  Whatever. What am I supposed to remember where the team is now since they moved there 15 years ago? They were there in the nineties, that's where they are now. That's what's going on. Brooklyn, New Jersey, the Nets.

• 51:26Alex Cranz?

  They're basically the same.

• 51:27Speaker 05

  If they were more important, I would remember where they were located.

• 51:29Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 51:29Alex Cranz?

  Wow, yeah.

• 51:32Speaker 05

  Spencer Dinwiddie, my personal conspiracy theory is that the reason why he had to be traded to the Mavs in the first place so that he could be traded for Kyrie Irving is because he was big into crypto. And I think he got his Wizards teammates invested in crypto right before everything went down. And that's why he was traded at the deadline last year. He set this whole thing in motion.

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm just gonna wrap this up and point out that Tom Brady had to come back and play another year of football, thus dooming his marriage to Gisele because of FTX. That's my conspiracy theory. And also, just while we're at it, Aaron Rodgers recently hosted an astrology seminar. Again, great player, totally ruined by the SEO radicalization funnel.

• 52:11Speaker 05

  It has been a year, like six days since Reese Witherspoon tweeted about crypto. Just saying.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  I cannot wait until what we're dealing with is celebrities asking AI chatbots whether the earth is flat, because it tries to answer. Bing will try to answer and be like, it's definitively not flat. And people, you just wait, just wait until like Donald Trump Jr. is tweeting about how woke Bing is, because refuses to acknowledge that people think we didn't land on the moon, which is another real thing. You're like, did we land on the moon? And it's like, yes, we definitely did. Culture war incoming. Somehow we've gotten far afield of Twitter. But that's where the, that's where the, that's where like the bugs or stuff usually happens. The problem is you can't tweet anymore. So you don't even know whether Kyrie thinks the earth is flat. He's got nowhere to go.

• 52:57Alex Cranz?

  Well, he's going to Dallas. We established that.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, Mark Cuban's gonna build him a custom Twitter. So Twitter goes down a bunch this week. Elon is threatening to turn off API access for a bunch of bots that are great. Like, I love the Aikwood no contact bot. It's like my favorite iconic of all time. That's free. And if the API goes away, they can't do it. I love a bot called Color Schemer, which just tweets cool color schemes. That's going away. Publishers, theverge.com, our articles get auto tweeted using the API. It's integrated into our CMS. If they turn off the API and force us to pay for it, I told our social team, like, it's just a free for all. I'm just gonna give everyone the keys to the Twitter

• 53:41Nilay Patel?

  account and everyone can tweet as much as they like. Like, that's dumb to like, be like, what I need is a human being to sit around waiting to manually tweet articles. And it's even dumber to pay to distribute articles on Twitter, right? Like, Twitter sends us no traffic, really. So it's ridiculous to think that we should pay to distribute our articles there. This is a real problem. So they've been, they've been walking that back as well, but we're not really sure how it's going to work.

• 54:05Speaker 05

  And that's one of those things like they have they he's announced these API things. He's changed his plans. He they tweeted from the Twitter dev accounts and new regulations. And I'm reading it. I have no idea what's going on. And then I talked to people who should know better than me, who should know more about this. And they say that they have no idea what it means either. So no one has has any clue what's going on. If you were planning on building tools or building around Twitter, I can't see why you would do that, considering the lack of information

• 54:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no.

• 54:27Speaker 05

  that we have now. You you would move on and you would do something else.

• 54:30Nilay Patel?

  And all of the action is on Mastodon. I got maybe you aren't as a listener. I'm not as, you know, like, again, I'm I'm taking a break from feed based social media.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  My brain is healthier than it's been in a decade. But all the action is on Mastodon, right? That's where the app developers are. The platform is accelerating. The underlying sort of Fediverse boundaries are growing. All that's that's where the activity is. And Elon shutting down the API, he's shutting down the follow graph. So you can't easily move your followers to Mastodon because of those API changes. It's clear that he's feeling the heat. The problem is, he is not directing his team at Twitter, what remains of that team, with any particular strategy. And of course, what he's focused on is himself. So that's the story from Casey and Zoe and Platformer today. We obviously syndicate Platformer, so it's on our site as well. But he called a meeting and said, I have more than 100 million followers.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm only getting tens of thousands of impressions. What's going on? The team apparently showed him internal data from Twitter, along with Google Trends, saying that last April, he was at 100 out of 100 in popularity. That's the peak. And today he's at nine. And he didn't believe them, and he fired the engineer who told him this information. Wow. And it's like, yeah, dude, like you were last eight, like last April was fully ridiculous. Like, if you will recall, right? Yeah. He was tweeting about conspiracy theories. He's like, comedy is back. Every day was a new Elon Musk Twitter. He was, you know, there was like a war brewing about who's going to own this company. Now he just owns it. Like, there's no conflict. Like, Elon, let me tell you something. I know you listen.

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  And also no users. Great stories are driven by conflict. If you're like, okay, it's a story. It's about a guy who trades stocks in Wall Street. He gets in no trouble. He plays it by the book and he's happily married to Margot Robbie. Like, no one would watch this movie.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  Just telling you, the lamb of walls, like, no one's watching this stuff. You need conflict and he's out of conflict because all the conflict is now pointed. He has pointed it at himself at Twitter. He is in charge, so no one's looking at his tweets. Cause all he has left, he can't promise to make change anymore. He just has to deliver the change.

• 56:44Alex Cranz?

  No one's looking at his tweets because of the, the lack of conflict? Or no one's looking at his tweets because of the lack of people on Twitter to look at his tweets?

• 56:52Nilay Patel?

  I think that's like a circle. I can't tell you where that begins or ends, right?

• 56:57Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of both, right?

• 56:59Speaker 05

  But that's, that's how we all feel. When you let off a fire tweet and you don't get minimum 15 likes, you do want to call a meeting and have everyone at Twitter ask, answer, answer why? Why is the world not seeing my tweets?

• 57:13Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean about quitting feed-based social media.

• 57:15Speaker 05

  Why am I being shadow man? Why are my rights being violated? And now Elon can do that. I think that, I think there's at least $44 billion worth of value in doing that.

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  That's half the, that's 22 billion is just being able to call a meeting. I will say this, I was watching the Grammys and I was like, I'm just like sitting on these bangers. There, there had nowhere to go. I just started texting like random friends from the past.

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  Do you think the Grammys sound like shit? People like, who are you? Where'd you come from? Cause I had nowhere for them to go. That's what Twitter was for me and it's like, my brain is healing.

• 57:49Speaker 05

  That is Twitter though. Like if you said these things out loud.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  I recognize there's not a lot of value in complaining about the sound engineer of the Grammys. By the way, sound engineer at the Grammy should be ashamed of himself. It sounded like shit. It sounded like they had an iPhone sitting in the middle of Staples Center. Horrible. You know, we had a story like years ago about why the Grammys sound good and how hard it is. And it's like they've like, Elon fired them too.

• 58:09Alex Cranz?

  They fired that guy. Yeah.

• 58:10Nilay Patel?

  It's like a new guy. He's like, what we want is more, we want more room tone from the Staples Center. So it's just like massive amounts of that. Anyway, my poor wife, I was like, do you hear all that shimmer on the high end? She's like, I don't know what you're talking about.

• 58:23Alex Cranz?

  She's like, no, that's Harry Styles.

• 58:24Nilay Patel?

  There's nowhere for this to go.

• 58:27Nilay Patel?

  So he's firing the people, he's complaining about his impressions. And then this to me is like the main thing. So he wrote, he'd rolled out these view counts. And all the people who work at Twitter, like, there's a reason we never did this. What it's going to show most people is that most people don't look at any tweets. Like, most people get no impressions.

• 58:46Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  The illusion of Twitter is the sense that everyone's looking at all your stuff all the time. You add view counts, you're just going to train people that the effort isn't worth it. Elon doesn't believe it. He has this quote, "This is going to show how much more vibrant the platform is than people think, how alive it is." He rolls up the view counts. Not only does it lead to a further drop in engagement, because most people don't look at your tweets, or most tweets don't get looked at by anyone, it kills Elon. Because most people aren't looking at his either. Like, his, his view of Twitter is completely warped by his, like, reply bots.

• 59:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:23Nilay Patel?

  So he got, he's getting rid of the bots, he's adding in metrics, and he's realizing, his world is a lie. Soon someone's going to tell him that the cars don't drive themselves. It's all going to fall apart.

• 59:36Alex Cranz?

  Is this why he, they did the API stuff where they're charging for it? And, and why we were having all the problems on Wednesday with Twitter? Like, is, is, is the attempt to kill the bots part of that?

• 59:46Speaker 05

  I would, I would bet that it probably is related to that, that that's why the stuff got deleted, that someone was making changes to this, that, or the other thing. But not directly, not, not intentionally.

• 59:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:57Speaker 05

  Exactly.

• 59:57Alex Cranz?

  Right. But even the API stuff, so is the API stuff, like, is his idea really, if I charge people for this free tool that helps engagement, I'll make more money?

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm telling you, this is like, if, when I was in my twenties, if I was like, "I'm going to buy the cigarette factory for $44 billion."

• 1:00:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:16Nilay Patel?

  He's addicted to Twitter. He thinks everyone else is addicted to Twitter. And he doesn't realize that you cannot be addicted to Twitter.

• 1:00:23Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:00:24Speaker 05

  But, but doesn't everyone do that?

• 1:00:25Nilay Patel?

  All that stuff is like, "I'm going to charge your Twitter blue. I'm going to, like, your replies don't get ranked unless you pay for blue. I'm going to charge your API." It, all, all of it, implicit underneath it all, is the idea that you have nowhere else to go.

• 1:00:38Speaker 05

  Everyone has this idea, but we're going to buy this bar, we're going to buy this club, we'll make it, see, we'll fix everything that's wrong with it and we'll make it popular because we'll do the things that we want and we know.

• 1:00:47Alex Cranz?

  That works every time.

• 1:00:48Speaker 05

  You cannot actually do that.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna buy this club, Richard.

• 1:00:51Speaker 05

  It ends in ruin every time. We've all seen it. We've all considered doing it. Maybe are considering doing it again.

• 1:00:56Nilay Patel?

  I mean, Richard, if you want to go in on a club.

• 1:00:58Speaker 05

  I'm just saying, we should have done it, man. We should have done it.

• 1:01:02Alex Cranz?

  Just sell scissor vodka. The only, only vodka is sold there.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  Can I read the scissor vodka?

• 1:01:09Speaker 05

  We can run it with AI. You can have AI bots as bartenders. It's perfect. We could, we could do it.

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's easily the best thing that ChatGPT has produced. I'm just gonna read this to you. It was a dark and stormy night. Casey Newton, the senior editor of The Verge, was sitting at his, this is Bing. Bing wrote this story.

• 1:01:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Nilay Patel?

  He had a deadline to meet, but he had no idea what to write. He'd already covered all the latest tech news and trends. He felt like he needed to do something more, something different, something exciting. Casey decided to take a break and have a drink. He grabbed the bottle and poured himself a glass of scissor vodka. He took a sip and felt a warm sensation in his throat. He took another sip and felt a tingling sensation in his brain. He took another sip and felt a surge of energy and creativity. He felt like he could write anything. He felt like he could do anything. He wrote about scissor vodka, how it was the best vodka in the world, how it could make anyone smarter, faster, stronger, and happier. He wrote and wrote and wrote until he filled several pages with his words. He felt proud and satisfied. I'm telling you, this keeps going. He had written the best story of his career, the best story of his life. He hit the send button and waited for the praise and admiration of his readers and editors.

• 1:02:06Alex Cranz?

  Was there meth in this vodka?

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  He waited and waited and waited, but nothing happened. He checked his email and saw no response. He checked his phone and saw no notifications. He texted Twitter and saw no mentions. He checked his Slacks and saw no messages. He wondered if anyone had read his story. He wondered if anyone had cared. He realized how silly and nonsensical it was. He realized how drunk and delusional he was. He felt ashamed and embarrassed. He felt stupid and foolish. He felt like he had made a huge mistake. He tried to delete his story, but it was too late. He tried to apologize, but it was too late. He tried to explain, but it was too late. He had already sent his story to the entire world. He had ruined his reputation and he lost his credibility. He had cut through the night.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like dark, like they should shut it down. I don't know how you beat that.

• 1:02:53Alex Cranz?

  You can't. That's, that's, that's it. That's the top.

• 1:02:56Nilay Patel?

  They've already peaked.

• 1:02:57Alex Cranz?

  There's nothing better. We should.

• 1:02:59Nilay Patel?

  I said, I sent it to Casey last night. He's like, this actually kind of captures the sensation of publishing.

• 1:03:04Alex Cranz?

  Drunkenly publishing.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  That's the worst case scenario. He's like, this is like, this is what it's like to publish a story that no one needs.

• 1:03:13Alex Cranz?

  It is. You cut through the night.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  He'd already cut through the night. And that's, I think also a useful summation of Elon and Twitter. Okay. So that's Elon and Twitter, pure chaos. I'm going to quote again from Casey and Zoe's story because this is a great quote. If you're a decoder listener, which I'm not allowed to mention on this show, but if you're a decoder listener, you will recognize why I love this particular quote. As the adage goes, you ship your org chart, said one current employee. It's chaos here right now. So we're shipping chaos. Very good. Very good. But org charts bring me away from Twitter to Disney.

• 1:03:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  Where former and now current CEO Bob Iger wrote in, kicked out his handpicked successor, Bob Chapek. Bob on Bob crime. He's laying off 7,000 people. Alex, I'm very curious if you have thoughts on that, but in addition to laying off 7,000 people, what's my man doing? He is restructuring his org chart. He's putting all streaming in one division, ESPN, now its own division. He's just like rebooting Disney.

• 1:04:14Alex Cranz?

  Because Chapek rebooted it first. He was like, I'm going to make it more like tech. And everybody's like, no, we hate this. And so Iger's gotten rid of all those people, a lot of the people that he put in charge and is now like, I guess fixing it.

• 1:04:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, he, you get the feeling that Chapek is, was a useful villain. Right? He changed a bunch of stuff and now I guess to rollback and say, I'm fixing it. And part of the fixing it is firing 7,000 people.

• 1:04:42Alex Cranz?

  That's a lot of people.

• 1:04:43Nilay Patel?

  Lowering some targets that Shapak had set for streaming. We should talk about that. And then this big restructure out of his old restructure. So Iger had a structure. It wasn't this structure. Shapak changed it so that all the divisions rolled up into one guy, Kareem Daniel.

• 1:05:00Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:05:00Nilay Patel?

  Everyone hated this, like Marvel, Lucasfilm, everybody rolled up into this guy. Everyone hated it. And now Iger gets to say, oh, I'm undoing this thing you hate, but it's yet a third different structure. So he gets to get out of his old way of doing things without the pain of being the guy who broke it.

• 1:05:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  Very clever.

• 1:05:17Speaker 05

  Um, if it were the start of the pandemic, let's just say in theory, if it were the start of a global pandemic and you wanted to take a couple of years off of work and not be responsible for managing the global pandemic, would you do anything differently than what Bob Iger did?

• 1:05:35Alex Cranz?

  He just had a little sabbatical, a little couple of years sabbatical.

• 1:05:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I think all of you will recognize that when I begin to look for my handpicked successor at The Verge, to watch your backs.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  I've learned something from all this.

• 1:05:48Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna come back and then lay off 7,000 people.

• 1:05:53Alex Cranz?

  And get a, give us that Zootopia sequel we've all been, been eager for.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  So we should talk about that. He, Iger said, he interviewed on CNBC today. He's following up on all the earnings. But Alex, take us to the actual earnings. Disney Plus added some subscribers in the United States and Canada. It dropped a lot of subscribers internationally, especially in India because it lost some cricket rights. What's going on here?

• 1:06:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's, it's doing like, I think across the board, they're seeing that slowdown that we were seeing across all of streaming, right? Like, the dust has settled. People kind of know where they're gonna go. And so they only added 200,000 subscribers in the United States. They, they added actually what looks nicer. Hulu added 800,000, ESPN Plus added 600,000.

• 1:06:37Speaker 05

  Well, that, that may be because they have the bundle packages now. It's like they've pushed so many people to pick up the bundles. So maybe you had Disney Plus before, but now you have all three because it's essentially cheaper.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  Right, there's that three year.

• 1:06:48Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  Right. Everyone's like demo period kind of expired and you're just signing up for the bundle.

• 1:06:53Speaker 05

  Yeah. So you either canceled, which is probably why their growth was so close to flat, or you got the bundle and now you have all three.

• 1:06:59Alex Cranz?

  But they are also seeing, they saw like, they saw, I mean, despite like, kind of that bought, that, that flatlining and, and in some cases, little dips, they, they still increased revenue by 13%. Like, they're still making money hand over fist in that direct to consumer division, which is a lot of that is streaming.

• 1:07:18Nilay Patel?

  Right, but they lost a billion dollars.

• 1:07:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they lost a billion dollars and they promised, they promised that, I believe it's by 2024 is when they promised profitability for that, that section.

• 1:07:28Nilay Patel?

  End of 2024.

• 1:07:29Alex Cranz?

  By the end of 20, fiscal 2024, they say, don't worry, Disney Plus is going to be profitable, which means we're probably going to see a big slew of cancellations. They, they have so many TV shows and I don't think they've canceled really any of them, or at least not loudly and publicly. So I think a lot of these shows, like, if you really liked She-Hulk, you probably should make sure other people watch it. If you really liked Willow, or, um, what's another?

• 1:07:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, you gotta do like the K-pop stand thing. You gotta just like stream the show over and over again.

• 1:08:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just, well, no, that doesn't work. We saw that with Netflix. People were doing, do that on Netflix and it doesn't work because with, with streaming, you can just go and be like, oh, this one user is the outlier who streamed it 12 times. Everybody else has streamed it zero. Like, it's not like Nielsen.

• 1:08:18Nilay Patel?

  Somehow Spotify hasn't figured this out, but so goes.

• 1:08:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Spotify hasn't figured it out, but everybody, but like, streaming has definitely figured this out. So I would not be surprised if this year, we see just an absolute bloodbath in that, like, in that streaming slate and, and a lot of stuff that people are really excited about not getting renewed, not seeing a second season. But they have, like, their Marvel and their Star Wars slates are both planned pretty far in advance. Like, we know what's coming for the next couple of years on those two, um, properties. So it's gonna be interesting.

• 1:08:50Speaker 05

  What's funny is the things that we're hearing from Disney, from Paramount, from HBO, they're all very similar. Like, Zaslav is kind of saying these same things. I think Paramount and Showtime actually had this message the clearest, is we're going to focus on the big mainstream hits. And the other stuff?

• 1:09:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:09:06Speaker 05

  Yeah, not so much.

• 1:09:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Showtime's like, all right, it's the billions universe and that means we need a show called millions and a show called trillions. This is real. They're making a show called millions about young finance bros, then they're gonna keep making billions, and then they're gonna make a new show called trillions, presumably about very old finance bros. So you kind of get the youngs, you got the middle aged, you got, and you got the old, the old money.

• 1:09:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:09:33Nilay Patel?

  And then they're gonna do a Dexter sequel, like they're just fully into, all right, we're doing IP franchises all the way around.

• 1:09:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:40Nilay Patel?

  Disney has already been there, obviously with Marvel, Lucasfilm, all this other stuff, but they're now they're starting to expand it. This is the other thing Iger said. So in addition to saying, okay, I'm restructuring out of the previous restructure. So we have Disney Entertainment, we have theme parks, and we have ESPN. Those are just three divisions. Not the old, old structure, right? We had Marvel, Lucasfilm, wherever. So you like hybridizes the structure a little bit between him and Shepac. And then he's like, all right, we got to lean into our franchises. We're gonna make a sequel to Zootopia. We're gonna make a sequel, more sequels to Frozen. We're gonna do more Toy Stories. You can say what you want about Zootopia. I mean, that's a movie about a rabbit detective. You could probably make a hundred.

• 1:10:24Alex Cranz?

  She solves crimes.

• 1:10:25Nilay Patel?

  You could, you could do it all day and all night. Like, fine.

• 1:10:29Speaker 05

  Police departments actually watch this to try and reduce police brutality. That's a real thing that happens.

• 1:10:36Alex Cranz?

  Upsetting.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, it's a show, it's a buddy cop show. But you, you can see how you can like Zootopia Forever, you know?

• 1:10:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:43Nilay Patel?

  They made Four Lethal Weapons. It all makes sense in the end. Toy Story ended.

• 1:10:48Alex Cranz?

  It didn't really.

• 1:10:49Nilay Patel?

  Really ended. Like it ended a lot. And then they made Lightyear and nobody watched it because everyone's like, I know I got it. I got the whole four movie arc of Toy Story, including one false end where you thought they were all gonna die.

• 1:11:00Alex Cranz?

  They almost burned alive.

• 1:11:02Nilay Patel?

  How do you keep that going? How on earth do you keep that going?

• 1:11:05Alex Cranz?

  Well, they're toys. The, the idea is that the toys always continue. So I guess we'll get the little kid. Maybe we'll get new toys. Maybe we'll be the.

• 1:11:13Nilay Patel?

  I guarantee you they're gonna remake their first Toy Story. But you can't just keep it going.

• 1:11:17Alex Cranz?

  Make it not look ugly.

• 1:11:18Speaker 05

  CG looks terrible now. They should, they, I would buy that on Blu-ray. If they, if they re-render it and make it look better right now, I would, I would buy it. I'm sorry, I'm the problem. It's me.

• 1:11:28Alex Cranz?

  Just like, look at that ray tracing. Wow.

• 1:11:32Nilay Patel?

  I was just, Toy Story four is like a great movie. It ended that franchise, like definitively ended that. There's no opening to make a Toy Story five.

• 1:11:42Alex Cranz?

  Where does Frozen go?

• 1:11:43Speaker 05

  I haven't watched it. I haven't watched a Pixar movie in a while. They, they, they decided to be sad and I don't want to be sad.

• 1:11:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's true. Pixar movies are like, what if this movie is about death? Have you thought about really diving into death with your toddler? And it's like, no, dude, no.

• 1:11:57Alex Cranz?

  Now you're gonna.

• 1:12:01Nilay Patel?

  Although Encanto, oddly about death as well. Really, I should be like, we're gonna make more movies about death. And that's our strategy. All right. So that is going on with Disney. Lots of change over there. Iger mastermind. We gotta put him on the scale, the Go90 scale Doom streaming services.

• 1:12:16Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:12:16Nilay Patel?

  Lot of change. Alex, what do you think?

• 1:12:18Alex Cranz?

  Oh, there's.

• 1:12:18Nilay Patel?

  Remember, zero is alive, 90 is dead.

• 1:12:20Alex Cranz?

  Zero. Hundred percent zero. For, for Disney plus. Hulu is still super up at the air. ESPN plus, you guys can talk about that. That's like a sports thing.

• 1:12:34Alex Cranz?

  I don't.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  ESPN plus is ruined by SEO. It's 24 seven Kyrie Irving Flat Earth Con.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  And that's why it's a zero. Uh, no, ESPN plus is great during football season because NFL primetime is on it. And so I actually watch it once a week, at least once a week, but I would put that at a 45. Hulu has been at like between 50 and 70 its entire life, but it's unkillable.

• 1:12:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:55Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, you can't end it. And I think, I think Disney plus is at a.

• 1:12:59Alex Cranz?

  Like spiritually, Hulu's a zero.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like a, it's a technical zero.

• 1:13:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  Right? By all rights, like rational logic, it's.

• 1:13:08Speaker 05

  When all the other streaming services are gone.

• 1:13:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a cockroach.

• 1:13:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  Like you can kill a cockroach. It's possible, but you, you know, you that you.

• 1:13:16Alex Cranz?

  But it's hard.

• 1:13:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:18Nilay Patel?

  But I would say.

• 1:13:19Alex Cranz?

  Where are you for Disney plus?

• 1:13:21Nilay Patel?

  10.

• 1:13:21Alex Cranz?

  10.

• 1:13:22Speaker 05

  That's, that sounds about right.

• 1:13:24Nilay Patel?

  Like it's, it's, it's, it's like, there's more chaos there than we can see, right?

• 1:13:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:28Nilay Patel?

  So it's not like, it's like a 45, but it's not a zero. It's not default. It's not like definitely alive forever. It's at 10. It's, these movies gotta be hits. The, you know, the next two phases of Marvel can't be the horrible net. Like if Marvel keeps going the way that phase four went, it's, it's over. Like no one cares.

• 1:13:47Alex Cranz?

  The new one's supposed to be really good. Quantum mania that comes out in a couple of weeks.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 1:13:51Alex Cranz?

  Everybody who's seen it says it's like magic. We'll see.

• 1:13:57Alex Cranz?

  Magic, magic.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:13:59Alex Cranz?

  People were really excited.

• 1:14:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, whatever. They just can't do the thing where it's like, here's what you gotta do between phases. You gotta watch 10 TV shows that add up to nothing, right? Like, they did that to us already.

• 1:14:09Alex Cranz?

  I finally watched Wakanda Forever yesterday. I went to Disney World. I came back, saw these layoffs and was like, oh, I hope nobody I met and got me on a ride that happened to. The lady who gave me a discount on my Magic Band, don't fire her, Bob. She was great. I don't remember her name.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  No, that was her, like, last act of vengeance.

• 1:14:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:30Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. So I saw Wakanda Forever and I was super surprised because I didn't need to, like, pay, like, there were no weird cameos. There was no, like, oh, look, it's Borbo from Borbo 2. Yes, they're here. I'm so excited.

• 1:14:46Nilay Patel?

  They can't do this to us again, where they're like, in order to understand the next movies, you must have a Disney Plus subscription so you can watch these five shows.

• 1:14:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  That will explain some, like, arcane piece of lore that will be, it's like, none of this mattered. In the end, I just did a bunch of homework and Wandavision was entertaining and all the rest of it was fine, but none of it mattered and I didn't need to pay you for any of it.

• 1:15:08Alex Cranz?

  None of it.

• 1:15:09Nilay Patel?

  They can't do it.

• 1:15:09Speaker 05

  That's where they messed up.

• 1:15:10Nilay Patel?

  That's the 10.

• 1:15:12Speaker 05

  You didn't need to watch that stuff, but it's felt like you did, so everybody ended up watching TV shows they didn't like. And they needed to be clear that, you know, you don't have to watch all those. If you don't like Moon Knight, you don't have to watch it.

• 1:15:22Alex Cranz?

  It's just like a perfect recreation of the comics experience, where you're like, oh, I gotta go get all of these different comics before the big thing. And then you're like, no, I don't actually. The art sucks and it's stupid.

• 1:15:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:32Alex Cranz?

  I'm just gonna, like, rate for the trade paperback.

• 1:15:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, you gotta get.

• 1:15:36Alex Cranz?

  Wakanda Forever.

• 1:15:36Nilay Patel?

  An Nvidia Shield and a PM to Alex Cranz.

• 1:15:42Alex Cranz?

  It's sick in there. Got some good content.

• 1:15:46Nilay Patel?

  It's all Linux. It's all Linux distributions.

• 1:15:49Alex Cranz?

  Wonderful.

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  Ancient, ancient expired copyright, public domain.

• 1:15:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's all, it's all very.

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  It's all, it's, it's all 1930s news.

• 1:15:59Alex Cranz?

  Ethically sourced content. It's all been in the public domain.

• 1:16:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:04Alex Cranz?

  Mickey's coming. He's gonna be in there soon.

• 1:16:08Nilay Patel?

  Alex's Plex server has been at a zero in the Go90 scale of doom streaming services for a long time.

• 1:16:13Alex Cranz?

  Since 2008.

• 1:16:14Nilay Patel?

  What are the news we're talking about in this section? Nintendo, there was big Nintendo Direct. What's going on there?

• 1:16:19Alex Cranz?

  They announced the release date for Zelda. This is the longest they've gone between Zelda games. And I know that I'm old because it doesn't feel that long.

• 1:16:28Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't feel that long.

• 1:16:29Alex Cranz?

  But I guess if I was like 13, I'd be like, oh, thank God. I was seven when that last one came out. So they, they, they showed off Zelda. Link is gonna drive a car. It's gonna be really exciting. They also announced the price in this weird thing where you can preorder it, but you need a voucher? But why do you need to preorder a digital game?

• 1:16:49Nilay Patel?

  So it, it's $70, but then you can get, you can buy a voucher for $50?

• 1:16:55Speaker 05

  Yeah. And a sec, and another game. So basically you can buy two games for $100, or you could buy just Zelda for $70.

• 1:17:02Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:17:02Nilay Patel?

  Okay. That seems very confusing, but I'm gonna do it because I love these games. I need to go play Breath of the Wild again. It's been a long time.

• 1:17:09Speaker 05

  We just talked about this. You don't have to do the homework, man.

• 1:17:11Alex Cranz?

  Don't do the homework.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  But that's like entertaining homework. Although I doubt there's any particular connection between these two games.

• 1:17:18Speaker 05

  If it were that entertaining, it would be on a Sega system.

• 1:17:22Speaker 05

  I'm not biased.

• 1:17:24Alex Cranz?

  It's beyond the Dreamcast.

• 1:17:26Speaker 05

  Commentary.

• 1:17:31Alex Cranz?

  Oh, and they, they announced that Metroid Prime, which was absolutely fantastic on the GameCube, is finally, it's getting its remaster. It looks really nice and shiny. Having recently played Metroid Prime, I'm gonna go against Sean, who says, oh yeah, you can play it on the Switch. Or, oh yeah, you can play it on the Steam Deck and it's wonderful. It's not. It's really kind of hard.

• 1:17:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:52Alex Cranz?

  Those controllers aren't made, like, the controllers are just totally different. So this is gonna be made for the Switch. It should be very smooth for people who are like old and nostalgic. They'll be like, oh, it's nice, but doesn't look like butts. And for new people to be like, oh, this is just a fun game.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  Is there any game that Sean doesn't think is the most playable and the most fun on the Steam Deck?

• 1:18:13Alex Cranz?

  No, we're gonna find one. That's that's my mission. If you have one, send me like, hit me up, hit me up on on on Twitter. I'm the last person there. I want to hear all about it.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  She's hit the API limits with steam that commentary.

• 1:18:28Alex Cranz?

  And they also, one, one last thing, they also are starting to roll out Game Boy and Game Boy Advance games on the Switch, which has been like a long time coming.

• 1:18:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:38Speaker 05

  Can you buy a translucent switch now? Because if you can't, then you can't really get the game boy experience, the 90s way with a see through portable system.

• 1:18:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:47Alex Cranz?

  That was.

• 1:18:48Nilay Patel?

  Remember, everything was see through. I hope the next, like, the next wave is bringing that back. Like, the 90s and 2000s are back in, like, a small way.

• 1:18:54Alex Cranz?

  Like, you're doing the glass backs on the phones anyway. Just take that paint off. Let me see the insides.

• 1:18:59Nilay Patel?

  Just let me some.

• 1:19:00Alex Cranz?

  Show me the battery.

• 1:19:02Nilay Patel?

  All right, we have to take a break. See you in new phones or come back. We'll talk about the one plus 11. Kind of a little bit of a lightning round coming. That's all coming up next. We'll be right back.

• 1:19:14Speaker 08

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• 1:20:35Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Richard, I'm calling on you. OnePlus 11.

• 1:20:39Alex Cranz?

  I was at Disney World. What happened?

• 1:20:41Nilay Patel?

  It happened. Yeah, I was at Disney World. She's, she's hunting for Igers.

• 1:20:46Speaker 05

  The OnePlus 11 5G, which is the most important phone to me in my life ever. I don't care about anything as much as I do the OnePlus 11 5G, to be specific, which is a $699 flagship phone is OnePlus has moved from their mid-range to kind of flagship. They're trying to get the magic back. We remember a few years ago when OnePlus was really cool. They gave you high-end specs, mid-range prices. But now they just make phones. Everybody makes phones. They're like Motorola's with different labels, maybe a few more software updates.

• 1:21:14Nilay Patel?

  The founder is off doing nothing.

• 1:21:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:17Speaker 05

  Literal, literally.

• 1:21:17Alex Cranz?

  I hate that so much. That pun just hurt my brain. It was great. Sorry, Richard.

• 1:21:26Speaker 05

  But the, it's the Allison reviewed the OnePlus 11 5G. They announced a bunch of new devices. They have a tablet now. They got earbuds, of course. And it seems to be a pretty good phone.

• 1:21:35Alex Cranz?

  They have a keyboard.

• 1:21:36Speaker 05

  Yeah, yeah, they have a mechanical keyboard, maybe a little inconsistent camera, but it's, it seems pretty good in terms of like price and performance wise. And maybe a reason for you to look at OnePlus again, if you, if you haven't been, because you know, obviously you've got the pixel options now. You've got so many other really good phones at that mid-range price point, but it's maybe good enough for you to spend a little bit more for this particular phone.

• 1:21:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, I'll just leave you with Allison's pull quote from her view. For everyone who isn't a OnePlus devotee, I hesitate to recommend the OnePlus 11. I don't, OnePlus had, it was, for a minute, it was the challenger brand and then Oppo kind of swarm in, took it back, made it just more Oppo phones for the United States. Carl left to do nothing. And now it's like, fine.

• 1:22:17Speaker 05

  Yeah, they, they make okay devices.

• 1:22:19Nilay Patel?

  But is there any meaningful challenge to Samsung in the market? Cause this is like the thing, right? It's like, you think the battle is Apple versus Android, but the battle is really Apple versus Samsung. And Google's like trapped in the middle. And then on top of it, we talked about at the top of the show, Google has like an existential crisis in search. Like, I don't know, man, like I, this is like a weird spot for the Android ecosystem. Like either Samsung's pushing it forward or Google's going to put, take meaningful share and push it forward. But Google's pretty distracted by saving its core business.

• 1:22:51Speaker 05

  You end up in a strange place because you have this phone that has a camera that's not as good as Samsung or Google's because they can't do all the weird technology stuff. They can't build better hardware than Samsung. They can't do better software than Google. And so you're paying a lot for a markedly worse experience in at least a couple of ways.

• 1:23:07Alex Cranz?

  Right, because you have to like, they're competing with all of the resources of Apple and all of the resources of Samsung. And those are a lot of resources that most other companies don't have. Or they're Sony and they're too busy making really good party speakers and not reaching out to Eli about those speakers.

• 1:23:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:24Alex Cranz?

  So like, it's truly, I think it's a difficult place. And OnePlus is struggling, but it's interesting that they released like the OnePlus pad, this, this new tablet and a keyboard. I want to come back to the keyboard because I have a lot of questions. It's just a rebranded Keychron, but they're doing their own switches. And then they're saying-

• 1:23:45Nilay Patel?

  That's not the part of the keyboard that you want to do your own of, right?

• 1:23:49Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:23:50Nilay Patel?

  Even Logitech sells like Cherry switches and some-

• 1:23:54Alex Cranz?

  No, Logitech does their own switches too now.

• 1:23:56Nilay Patel?

  But some of their keyboards have other switches in them.

• 1:23:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they, they, they do, they do a whole gamut. So it's kind of interesting. I'll be surprised though, if it's not just a rebranded knockoff of a Cherry. There's a lot of different people that are doing very similar switches. So it's not really hard to be like, we're going to do it in a slightly different color. Slightly different change in the spring. Boom, new switch.

• 1:24:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:19Alex Cranz?

  From OnePlus. It's got like a little crystal dial on it. But I think the thing that really kind of upset me about it is that they're using a different, they claim that they're using a different material for the keycaps themselves. And they won't go into a lot of the details besides saying it's called Marble Mellow. Marble, Marble Mallow? Marble Mallow, like marshmallow, but Marble Mallow.

• 1:24:47Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:24:48Alex Cranz?

  It's a new material.

• 1:24:49Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say, this keyboard, I'm, I'm just looking at this keyboard. It looks like the keyboard that you would be issued if you worked in a bank and I don't understand it.

• 1:24:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it looks, I mean, Keychron makes really, really lovely keyboards. Most people like one like this. It's a 75% where it's got a full, uh, it's got a full direction pad. It's got a bunch of extra little bits, but it doesn't have a full number pad. So a lot of people like this size. But I think most people have started to think of these big fancy keyboards of having really flashy colors. And this is like, no, we're going to go with the the Oppo way. It's gonna be gray and red and

• 1:25:24Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:25:24Alex Cranz?

  Fine.

• 1:25:25Nilay Patel?

  Have you heard of IBM in the seventies?

• 1:25:28Alex Cranz?

  Some people love that look.

• 1:25:30Nilay Patel?

  Some people do. I didn't grow up wanting to be an accountant. You know what I'm saying? Okay, by the way, the the OnePlus pad. It's fascinating that people think they can make Android tablets happen again. Like, Google is pushing at it. There were some leaks of the Nest tablet thing today. OnePlus is at it.

• 1:25:48Alex Cranz?

  They got that big camera on the back.

• 1:25:50Nilay Patel?

  I will see. I just the idea that we're we're in for another round of Android tablet hysterics is very funny to me. We've been down this road.

• 1:25:59Speaker 05

  I feel like that's the last time that we had, you know, you mentioned how the companies were getting kind of spicy with each other, like about AI. That was the last time we had companies really, really talking about each other was when there seemed like there might be a challenge to the iPad. And then they all got smacked down. They didn't do that anymore.

• 1:26:14Nilay Patel?

  Well, keep in mind, Steve Jobs was still around back then. So he would get on the earnings call and be like, seven inch tablets? They're for fucking idiots.

• 1:26:22Nilay Patel?

  I guess, I guess that's the way I guess we're all printing that. Like, here we go. There's a right headline. And they don't, they stopped talking about one another for ages, right? They're all frenemies or all coopters or whatever that word is, right? Like, and now with, hopefully, we'll see with search, yeah. Microsoft is ready to be a little spiky over there. But in tablets, you think, like, Apple doesn't care. It's like barely cares about the iPad. It's like, here's another one. I don't know. What do you want? They all look the same. Well, like, is the OnePlus OnePlus pad gonna scare Apple into caring? Is the Nest thing gonna scare Apple?

• 1:26:57Alex Cranz?

  Is the OnePlus pad gonna sell? Like, who who is the customer there? Besides, I guess, OnePlus diehard.

• 1:27:04Nilay Patel?

  People with children. It's always people with children. Like, can this thing run Disney Plus? Is like, honestly, at this point, I should just make a tablet and sell it to people with kids. Like, that's, that's the market for these things. And apparently pilots, pilots love them, but they all buy iPad minis. Okay, a little bit of a lightning round. This is a weird one. So Meta went to go buy Within, which makes Supernatural. We've talked about a bunch of the show before. FTC, Lena Khan says, no, you gotta block it. This is just like when you bought Instagram, you're buying up all the VR game studios. Supernatural is the app that makes not gamers buy the Meta Quest 2, right? It's like, the stats are astounding. It's like, this is what older people and what women buy. They work out in VR.

• 1:27:47Nilay Patel?

  And it's great. I use it. We talked about it a lot. FTC says, no, you can't buy up all the studios. They go to court, they lose, they say they're going to appeal, the court blocks their injunction, deal closes anyway. So now Meta owns Within, they changed the website to say it's all a Meta company now, but the FTC is still appealing. I'm not sure what happens if they win that appeal. They just like get kicked out? Like, well, I guess we don't own you. So we'll see. But that happened. But they have to sell it, right? Or spin it back out. I don't know. The fact the FTC like lost and they're going to appeal, it's all very confusing. But anyway, Meta is just continuing to buy all the VR companies. We'll see what that portends for Apple in the future. Richard, I added this one just for you. The ads for Super Bowl Fox is all sold out. Zero crypto ads on this year's Super Bowl.

• 1:28:32Speaker 09

  Aww.

• 1:28:33Speaker 05

  After, it seemed like there was a crypto ad every five minutes last year during the Super Bowl, after we had Coinbase literally giving away money and they crashed their servers because too many people scanned the QR code and tried to sign up for accounts to get free crypto. Seems like everybody's out of cash now. Or in jail or going to jail. Or perhaps indicted and has their former executives now testifying against them, as you see with FTX. But yeah, Crypto.com and Coinbase continue to exist, apparently, but they just don't have money like they used to. They're not spending. I think the executive that talked to Sports Business Journal from Fox Sports said that some of these companies had reserved ads, but FTX obviously cannot. And the others backed out because...

• 1:29:16Speaker 05

  You know, but Bitcoin just isn't worth what it was, what it used to be.

• 1:29:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:19Speaker 05

  You hate to see it.

• 1:29:20Nilay Patel?

  And then lastly, big leak from Chris Welch. The man continues to just crawl around the air vents at Sonos. He's in there right now. The next speakers are coming, Spatial Audio, they're going to be called the Era 300 and the Era 100. Patrick Spence has said they're going to reset the bar in existing audio categories. He's got a scoop on a second generation Sonos move. The Era 300, Era 100, they had the codename Optimo before. Era 300, designed for Spatial Audio. And I know Sonos is going to be like, it's not a gimmick. I can't wait to hear this thing, see if it's not a gimmick. Brand new designs. We found documentation of speaker stands from Sanus for these things. They cost $220. This is a speaker? Crazy. But Sonos is like coming out the gate strong this year.

• 1:30:05Nilay Patel?

  They're going to have four new categories. They've got these big new speakers focused on Spatial. We need to figure out codec support, whether Apple Music will support them. All there's all these questions to be answered, sure. But they just had earnings and Patrick Spence, friend of the show, CEO, is like, no one's even competing with us. There was no competition, smart speakers over the holidays. And we looked and it's true, there wasn't any. Like no one released new speaker products, no Google, no Amazon, no nothing. New HomePod is out, he's like, yeah, whatever. Kind of wild.

• 1:30:34Speaker 05

  Yeah, I think they see a hole in the market that's been left by these tech companies that got in. And we're like, yeah, we're going to build better speakers and we're going to use algorithms. And we're going to, we're going to beat whoever is in speakers because we don't know and don't care. And now they're kind of retreating because it's a little bit harder than they, than they thought. They suddenly they, their costs went way up and they, they need to cut up back on these divisions and they're not building frivolous products anymore. And Sonos says, yeah. So you want a new smart speaker? Welcome back to Sonos.

• 1:31:00Nilay Patel?

  Welcome back. You got one more room in your house, what you gonna do? I think it's exciting, that event is on February 23rd, I think. We'll see. I think Sonos is leaning pretty heavily into Spatial, it's leaning pretty heavily into Atmos. Kind of like lots of opportunity for them to kind of redefine this stuff. At the same time, you know how I feel. Everybody knows how I feel. I think Atmos Music is just like foolish. So we'll see. Maybe they're gonna show me.

• 1:31:24Alex Cranz?

  Are these gonna be definitely music speakers? Or are they supposed to be like your extra speakers for your home theater? Or both?

• 1:31:31Nilay Patel?

  They're not extra. They're a key component of the home theater. Alex.

• 1:31:35Alex Cranz?

  I'm sorry.

• 1:31:35Nilay Patel?

  They're not extra. The surround.

• 1:31:37Alex Cranz?

  You know, the, the, the rear speakers. That's what I think of the rear.

• 1:31:40Nilay Patel?

  I've been reading Sound and Vision in PDF form on my phone. All right. I'm like back in the mix.

• 1:31:44Alex Cranz?

  You're in it. When are you, when's your, when are you getting your new receiver?

• 1:31:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm actually very hopeful that this is one of Sonos' new categories. It absolutely will not be because this is the smallest of the available audio categories. But if Sonos makes an actual receiver that integrates with the thing that does Atmos properly, it does all this stuff, I'll be a first in line to buy it.

• 1:32:04Alex Cranz?

  It would be like $12 billion with that Sonos markup. Oh my.

• 1:32:08Nilay Patel?

  And that's why I have to lay off 7,000 people. Where do you think those extra, extra margin comes from? I gave myself an executive raise. Fire the people who sell the fast passes. We're off to the races. I'm learning from the best.

• 1:32:20Alex Cranz?

  You and Bob, man.

• 1:32:21Nilay Patel?

  I'm changing my name to Bob. Bob Patel.

• 1:32:24Alex Cranz?

  I love this.

• 1:32:24Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Uh, that's horrible. I'm not doing any of that. If Sonos makes a reasonably priced receiver that integrates well with the rest of the stuff, I will buy it.

• 1:32:32Alex Cranz?

  Thank you, Bob.

• 1:32:33Nilay Patel?

  But they've got all these categories. And I think, Richard, you're right. Like fundamentally, they see that when push comes to shove, Amazon does not care about the audio business. It's just lock in for Amazon services. Apple, who knows what they're doing in audio, right? Like.

• 1:32:49Alex Cranz?

  Home pods.

• 1:32:50Nilay Patel?

  They're doing home pods or doing AirPods, all of that stuff. I think they care about the music industry. Apple always, always care about the music industry. This is much is very true, but they don't have enough products that are good.

• 1:33:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:01Nilay Patel?

  Especially in the living room, right? Their solution is a couple of home pods. So if you, if you want to do it, you gotta go all the way. And I think Sonos is just ready and waiting to say, look, if you want to watch movies, you need Atmos. Buy the soundbar, buy these extra speakers.

• 1:33:14Alex Cranz?

  I love those extra speakers.

• 1:33:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm so mad.

• 1:33:17Alex Cranz?

  So mad. You're gonna get, until you go and you buy five of these and attach them with your $4,000 Sonos subwoofer. It's only 600, but it's still so expensive.

• 1:33:30Nilay Patel?

  It's still very expensive.

• 1:33:31Alex Cranz?

  I own one. I don't know why I'm complaining.

• 1:33:33Nilay Patel?

  You own one?

• 1:33:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 1:33:35Nilay Patel?

  Do you have any other Sonos speakers or you just have the?

• 1:33:37Alex Cranz?

  Just this, just the sub. I didn't actually listen to any of Wakanda Forever. It was just the bass.

• 1:33:44Nilay Patel?

  Just the rumbles.

• 1:33:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm asking Bing what the Sonos Era 100 is.

• 1:33:51Alex Cranz?

  Tell us Bing.

• 1:33:53Nilay Patel?

  Let's see, it's so, it's slow when it has to search the web. Oh, snap. Boy, oh, boy, does this not cite our exclusive scoops enough?

• 1:34:04Nilay Patel?

  The Sonos Era 100, new high-end speaker from Sonos, expected to launch in the coming months. Designed and showcased spatial music and the Atmos content and compete with the Apple HomePod.

• 1:34:13Alex Cranz?

  Where'd you get that information? Bing?

• 1:34:15Nilay Patel?

  Bing.com. It just sourced itself. It's, its first site is to Bing.com.

• 1:34:20Alex Cranz?

  Sure Bing. Interesting source you've got there.

• 1:34:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta wrap this up. I'm gonna ask Bing to wrap up the show. Can you write a conclusion to the Vergecast? I'm sorry, I can't write a conclusion to the Vergecast. That is a podcast produced by The Verge and I don't have access to their transcripts or audio files. I can only write summaries or conclusions based on the information I have from web searches or my own knowledge. Yet somehow it wrote the Scissor Vodka story.

• 1:34:48Alex Cranz?

  Somehow.

• 1:34:51Alex Cranz?

  Bing contains multitudes.

• 1:34:52Nilay Patel?

  Bing is, I'm telling you, this is like the moodiest. Here's what I.

• 1:34:57Alex Cranz?

  I know, it's, it's ready to have like a snack.

• 1:34:59Nilay Patel?

  Please.

• 1:35:00Alex Cranz?

  A little juice pack. It's ready for a nap.

• 1:35:03Nilay Patel?

  So I was told by a Bing engineer that if you ask nicely, if it can't do it, sometimes it will do it anyway. So I wrote, can you please write a conclusion to the Vergecast? I'm sorry, I already told you I can't write a conclusion to the Vergecast. Please don't ask me to do something I can't do.

• 1:35:19Alex Cranz?

  Are you sure?

• 1:35:20Nilay Patel?

  That is just spicy. We're over time. I've gotta go think about my relationship to this robot. I think you all have to go think about your relationships to the robot. Probably have to download Bing because Microsoft gotcha. Bing rocketing to the top of the App Store charts, by the way.

• 1:35:36Alex Cranz?

  Because everybody wants it.

• 1:35:36Nilay Patel?

  That's how they're getting you. So everyone wants to talk to the robot. Thanks to James Vincent for coming on the show. That was a great conversation. You should listen to Decoder. Sachin Adel was on Decoder this week talking about Bing. We also had John Koblenz and Felix Gillette talking about their new book, It's Not TV, which is the HBO story. I mean, if you're into our streaming conversations, that was a good one. Call the Vergecast hotline, that's 866-VERGE11. You can tweet at us, maybe.

• 1:36:03Nilay Patel?

  Who knows what will happen? I'm at reckless, Alex is Alex H. Cranz, Richard is RJCC, and James is at JJ Vincent. You can also just leave a comment when this post goes up on the site and we will reply to you because honestly, we own our site and it stays up. It works. The system works. The web for as long as we can have it. That's it. That's Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:36:28Speaker 00

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

• 1:37:02Speaker 10

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• 1:37:48Speaker 09

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