Reddit vs. Reddit: the latest on the fight for the platform

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Jay Peters discuss all the news about the API changes infuriating Redditors, as well as takeaways from Jay's interview with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. Later on the show: will the Apple Vision Pro replace the TV? Further reading: Reddit CEO Steve Huffman isn’t backing down: our full interview Reddit CEO Steve Huffman: Reddit ‘was never designed to support third-party apps’ Reddit crashed because of the growing subreddit blackout Reddit CEO tells employees that subreddit blackout ‘will pass’ How Reddit set itself up for a fall Google is getting a lot worse because of the Reddit blackouts The Apple Vision Pro might be a TV, but it won’t replace the TV Steve Jobs Showing off Macintosh to Andy Warhol, Keith Haring and Kenny Scharf in 1984 ~ Vintage Everyday In the bid to grow at all costs, Instant Pot is cooking itself and has filed for bankruptcy Live Nation-Ticketmaster to disclose full ticket prices upfront Twitter sued for $250 million by music publishers over ‘massive’ copyright infringement The Meater smart meat thermometer now supports the iPhone Dynamic Island and Live Activities. Instagram’s status update now includes what song you’re listening to It’s not just you: Steam suddenly looks nice Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of open API access for third-party apps. On this episode of the show, we go deep into React. That would be incredible if we just did a whole show on React. We should do a whole show on React. Anyway, I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here.

• 1:41David Pierce?

  Eli, a thing that is true is that there is a whole series pitch that includes an episode on React. So don't, don't you worry. It's coming.

• 1:48Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Alex Cranz is here.

• 1:50Alex Cranz?

  I can safely say I don't want to be on that episode.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Alex is like Rust for life. I don't know what these words mean, and I hope people get very mad at me. I've learned that's the secret to online engagement.

• 2:00David Pierce?

  Can we make bumper stickers that say Rust for life? I feel like we tell a lot of those.

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  I want to be clear. I don't know what these words mean. Jay Peters is here. Hey Jay.

• 2:10Speaker 05

  Hey, I also cannot tell you what Rust is. I buy the sticker though.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  We can Google it. The problem is that we'd Google it and get a result from a Reddit forum that is down. And that's really the show today. So we have a lot to talk about. We had to talk about the Vision Pro. We got a lightning round coming up, but the story of the week, which Jay in particular has owned top to bottom, is what is going on at Reddit? I will tell you the listener now. Jay, five minutes ago, was on the phone with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman. In what I think we can only describe as a somewhat contentious interview. Steve Huffman does not want third-party apps. He does not care for them, it appears.

• 2:48Speaker 05

  No, it shouldn't be a surprise if you followed his AMA last week where he also said that he wants apps to pay the fees or go away. But in my interview with him, he kept that same line and believes very strongly that third-party apps should pay up or go away.

• 3:07Nilay Patel?

  So there's a lot going on with this story. On Wednesday, we had Christian Seelig, the developer of Apollo, a third-party app. We should have got the developer and user side of what's happening with Reddit. It's important to talk about the Reddit side of what's going on with Reddit. Jay, walk us through what's been happening at the company.

• 3:24Speaker 05

  So at the highest level, this all comes down to API changes that were announced in April, which the company at the time positioned as a way to monetize their data that had been used to train AI and large language learning models. CEO Steve Huffman gave a big interview to the New York Times to this effect. At the time, though, we didn't know how this might affect third-party developers. And at the end of May, third-party developers learned how it would affect them. And it turns out the cost would be, for the vast majority of them, very, very, very high. To the point where now, we know that some of the biggest apps are gonna have to shut down. And users are really unhappy about that.

• 4:05Nilay Patel?

  And the company's perspective on this is kind of muddled, right? It started out as we're mad at ChatGPT and Google for scraping Reddit for all these years and using them to train large language models. And it's ended with, and we hate this third-party app that's developed by one guy in Canada.

• 4:25David Pierce?

  Well, so actually, I think it might be useful to back up even one tick further than that, because I think the thing that has been true about Reddit for a long time is it is the best source of information on the internet, right? Like, it's sort of a truism of like people who love the internet, that if you want useful information about a product, you like append Reddit to your Google search, because that's where all the good product information is. It's where all the good conversation is happening. It's where all of the good stuff is, right? Like, Google's a mess. We've been writing a lot about the disaster that is SEO. Reddit is wonderful, right? And the thing is Reddit has never for one second figured out how to like build a business out of this. So it has just like floated along as this like lovely internet place that has an alien as a logo. And then recently has decided, okay, we want to be a public company.

• 5:08David Pierce?

  We want to be an ongoing business concern that makes money. And so they have spent the last couple of years really trying to find ways to be a successful business that could be a public business. And that really turned again when ChatGPT became huge. And it was like, okay, it's very clear that Reddit's data is valuable, not just to people on the internet, but to all of these companies who are building these AI models. And I feel like it started right at that moment to like, okay, our data is literally valuable in a monetary way, and we have to figure out how to squeeze more money out of it than we ever have before. And that's like, it's 15 years of work that they didn't do that is all kind of coming back right now.

• 5:50Nilay Patel?

  So I think that's right, right? They need to make money. They want to go public. They've been talking about it. This idea that other big companies are going to scrape their site and use that to generate outsized AI profits has got to be annoying them. They're just screwing up how they are talking about this. Like more than anything, Steve Huffman in particular, seems determined to just tell the users of Reddit what's going to happen. And I'm just reading the transcript of your interview, Jay. It comes through in text. What was it like in person?

• 6:24Speaker 05

  It was contentious, is what you said is the best way to put it. I wondered after seeing the AMA and seeing the company's response to this, I wondered if it was coming from the top. Like, I couldn't think of why else Reddit, which has previously been, I feel like, very responsive to its community, willing to listen, make adjustments as needed. That's not the case here. Steve Huffman believes very much in this business decision to charge more for its API. And he is going to go through with it, hell or high water, because I'm not 100% sure at the end of the day why he wants to do that. But I think

• 7:03Speaker 05

  it's the combination of making money from these AI companies and to run out these third-party apps that he believes have built businesses that should, that are in competition with Reddit itself.

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  I get it. So this is like a, David hates it when I talk about Decoder on the Vergecast, but this is like a Decoder trope, is that two things that look the same on the internet, often one of them is much more valuable than the other, right? So accessing Reddit through Reddit makes much more money for Reddit than accessing Reddit through Apollo. And so if you're just looking at Reddit, and he says this in your interview, if you type Reddit into the App Store, and Apollo comes up. And you pick Apollo over the Reddit app, you are making less money for Reddit. So I understand that, right? That framing that these things are in competition. These experiences are in competition and one of them generates more revenue for Reddit than the other.

• 8:03Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. And I'm wondering if you got the sense when you were talking to him, if the API pricing actually equalizes that, or it just gets rid of the competition.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  My sense is gets rid of is the latter. Unfortunately, that's what I think it is. The pricing seems so high for the developers who make these really beloved apps. And Reddit has just shown they're not going to give an inch on any sort of negotiation or giving them more time to follow the policies or even like a lower price. That I really think Reddit wants to get rid of these competing apps so that users have to go on to the website or the official Reddit app. And Reddit can hopefully find ways to better monetize those users from there.

• 8:50Nilay Patel?

  So I'm going to read the audience's quote from Steve Hoffman to Jay real quick, because I think it really puts a lot into perspective. The vast majority of uses of the API, not third party apps. The other 98% of them make tools, bots and enhancements to Reddit. That's what the API is for. It was never designed to support third party apps. And then Hoffman goes on to say he let it exist and that he should take the blame for those apps existing. Because, quote, "I was the guy arguing for that for a long time." There's an inherent tension in those statements, right? "I was the guy arguing for third party apps to exist." Also, the API was never designed to allow these apps to exist. Did he explain that tension at all to you?

• 9:33Speaker 05

  I mean, I'm still coming off the high of it all, but.

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  We really did. We're like, Jay, pick up the phone and tell us exactly what happened.

• 9:39Speaker 05

  Yeah. I mean, I don't remember him speaking to that, which tells me this change was pretty sudden. And especially when we hear folks like the Apollo for Reddit developer, Christian Selig, when he had heard in January that the API is not going to change. I believe his quote was from Reddit was it won't change for years. And then all of a sudden, it's going through this monumental shift, says that something over the past six months changed within Reddit. Even though this is something that Steve told me that they've been talking about doing something like this for a very, very long time, they actually have made a choice about it. And they gave everybody a month and a half to figure it out, or two and a half months.

• 10:21David Pierce?

  But ultimately, they didn't even get that long because I think, and you point this out in a lot of the coverage you've been doing is that they made this announcement in April without saying prices. And what we've heard from a bunch of developers overwhelmingly is like, yeah, that sort of makes sense, right? Like you've been giving us free data for a very long time. It makes sense that at some point you're going to have to charge us for this. But then what Reddit was telling them was we're going to do this in a sane way. It's going to make sense. And then Reddit comes out with this gigantic price at the end of May with a 30 day deadline, which is essentially nothing like there's really, there's not a lot of meaningful moves you can make in a 30 day window. And based on that, I don't know how you come out of this thinking anything other than they're just trying to kill the big third party apps because they've got like,

• 11:04David Pierce?

  it's not hard to model that out and figure out that's what's going on here. And Steve went out of his way a bunch of times to say, we're working with those who still want to work with us. A lot of the stuff that's on the platform is still going to be on the platform. And it's like, okay, but that's not the stuff you're describing as a competitor to Reddit. And what you're doing here is you are swiftly killing all of the things that you perceive to be a competitor to Reddit.

• 11:23Alex Cranz?

  I thought what was really interesting in your conversation there, Jay, was how actively hostile he was, not just to those developers, but to the users themselves. It really feels like the shift, and maybe it's because they figured out large language models and they can go and they can monetize that. But it really feels like there's a shift at Reddit where they no longer view the users as customers, but as something in the way of what their actual profit is. Like this whole conversation he had with you, he was just, he was talking about how the users are the ones that are shutting up other users. They're getting rid of dissent. They're not letting their true people of Reddit speak out. And this is just a tiny minority. And that just seems like. Incredibly hostile and cruel to your user base,

• 12:05Alex Cranz?

  many of which are mods who are certainly the most dedicated members of the team or of the community.

• 12:11Speaker 05

  What I feel like might be what the company is trying to stress test here is how much do people love Reddit even if these third-party apps go away? And I think for so many of us, Reddit has become a habit, it's become a site that we check on a regular basis. And will the power users of the Reddit apps, which I have to suspect are ultimately a minority of the users of the platform, do they move over? Or will it continue to be very vocal and want to be able to access Reddit in places that are not the official apps? That's what the protests this week have been about. And we'll have to see if Reddit will respond to that or if they're going to continue to stick to the party line. And based on our conversation with Steve Huffman, I think it's going to be the latter.

• 12:55Alex Cranz?

  I think that the confusion I continue to have with this, and maybe you can give some insight. He repeatedly says it's costing them $10 million a year in infrastructure and costs to support these apps, which make them very little money to no money. And he views that as almost they're stealing Reddit profit and stuff like that. So $10 million, which for a company like Reddit is a lot, but also should not be a whole lot for a company that large. And he's willing to go to war with his most vocal, most active users over $10 million.

• 13:29Speaker 05

  Steve Huffman, last week, he said in a May that we are not profitable is something that he said. And I think, based on my conversation with him, I think he's really trying to turn the business into a profitable business as soon as possible. And one very clear line item for that appears to be this $10 million infrastructure cost to maintain these apps that he is OK losing, perhaps at the expense of people being really, really, really mad at him so that the company can find better business footing. You know, we'll see if that pans out, but.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  You know, it's funny. Now I'm rooting for the Reddit IPO just so we can get public financial data on the company.

• 14:09David Pierce?

  Oh, I know.

• 14:10Nilay Patel?

  We just don't know the answer to that question.

• 14:12David Pierce?

  Alex, I think the one thing I would add to that is it's not just the $10 million, but it's the opportunity cost of all the people who use apps like Apollo, who are by definition going to be like power users of the platform, who are not using the Reddit app. So not only are you paying to keep Apollo alive, you're losing all of the money that you would get from all of the people who use Apollo.

• 14:33Alex Cranz?

  But the thing that confuses me, there is, that's a mobile-only app, which means it's affecting their mobile traffic. Reddit has its own app.

• 14:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it sucks.

• 14:41Alex Cranz?

  Which by all intents and purposes sucks. Yeah, like, I use Apollo because the Reddit app sucks.

• 14:46David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 14:47Nilay Patel?

  Right. The thing they should have done is spend $10 million to buy Apollo.

• 14:51Alex Cranz?

  Right. And that's the thing that I just, I keep getting confused on. I'm like, why are you like, we want to kill the good products and foist the shitty product on everybody? And then be like confused when everybody's mad that we're foisting the shitty product on them.

• 15:06Nilay Patel?

  Again, part of the interview and part of what prompted Reddit to speak today, they have not been speaking a lot. They put out a fact sheet. You know, their claim is like, this isn't such a big deal. Jay, you want to run us through some of the numbers there?

• 15:18Speaker 05

  So with this fact sheet, the main thing that they have on the fact sheet is that more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open. And this is what is technically day four of the protests that started in earnest on Monday. And what Reddit is trying to say here is that Reddit wants to be open. It does not want to be protesting. The many, quote-unquote, "normal" people want to be using Reddit, talking in their communities. In this fact sheet, they had a few examples of like, the Denver Nuggets subreddit is where people hung out when the Nuggets won the NBA championship.

• 16:02Speaker 05

  Because, this is not what's included in the fact sheet, NBA was closed because of protesting these changes. And so I think Reddit is trying to counter the idea that the entire platform is in revolt. Which is not necessarily a characterization I agree with when you go on to the are all subreddit, which I did during the interview with Steve Huffman. And at that time, four of the top five posts were images all about the blackout.

• 16:32David Pierce?

  In support of the blackout.

• 16:33Speaker 05

  Yeah, it's in support of the blackout.

• 16:35Nilay Patel?

  I just have to say they call out the subreddits that are open here. It's Denver Nuggets, Dark Souls, Not the Onion. And then the last one, they're like, our Taylor Swift is open. And it's like, you are playing with the hottest fire that burns on, on the planet.

• 16:48David Pierce?

  Why did you come at Taylor Swift? She just broke Ticketmaster by herself.

• 16:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:53Speaker 05

  Well, what's, what's missing from that statement is that this subreddit went dark on June 12th in protest of the changes. I believe it opened up on the 14th, which many subreddits did because that was the original intention of the protest was June 12th to 14th. But I just thought that was an interesting piece of missing context from the fact sheet.

• 17:13David Pierce?

  What I can't figure out is what point Reddit thinks they're making there. Because I think, I do think it's true that there are a lot of people, even on the blacked out subreddits, who would like them to be open, right? That it is, it's, this is, this was designed to be a problem for everybody. It's designed to prove a point and the only way you prove a point is by causing trouble, right? But what I don't get is, A, by saying a thousand of our top 5,000 subreddits are dark, is actually like a pretty large number, I would argue.

• 17:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a thousand subreddits are dark. That's, that's the math.

• 17:47David Pierce?

  Of the top 5,000, right? Like, that's a big number in one protest against an API change. Like, good God.

• 17:55David Pierce?

  But, but even beyond that, I think that this, there's this thing that Reddit is trying to do that to some extent I'm sympathetic for. Because I think if you're Steve Huffman, you know better than anybody that giving into Reddit is like the stupidest thing you can do. Because once, once they've defeated you, they will ruin your life forever. And I think that's probably true, but, but on the other hand, I, I think there's just no part of this in which he sounds sympathetic to the people on Reddit and what they actually want. He just seems to be like holding his nose and saying, we have investors to appease, screw the rest of you. I don't know, is that, is that, am I overstating that, Jay? Like, did you get any sense that the guy like wants Reddit to be successful and happy?

• 18:35Nilay Patel?

  Clarify that question. There's Reddit the business successful and happy, and there's Reddit the community successful and happy.

• 18:41David Pierce?

  Fair. I guess I mean the community. Yeah. And I think what Reddit always talks about, and what Steve even said to you, was a reminder that Reddit is a platform run by the community. And then everything else he said seemed very community hostile to me.

• 18:54Speaker 05

  I just think he's okay to take the heat. Like, he has made this decision. He is fine with the blowback, and he's just gonna stick to it.

• 19:05Nilay Patel?

  So let's come back around to large language models, because that's where he started, and then David, I think correctly pulled us out of that. But this is like, what most people are putting together, what we have put together, is Reddit sees a bunch of big companies using Reddit's user data to train large language models, and they're gonna go and be even richer companies. And Reddit's, I think, somewhat rightfully annoyed by that. Right? And then somehow they're taking it out of these like, independent app developers. Did you ask him, are you talking to Google and OpenAI? I feel like the Reddit-Google relationship is a very complex one. Google needs Reddit, and Reddit kinda doesn't need Google, but also needs Google. And now it's getting even weirder as Google trains data.

• 19:49Speaker 05

  I did ask what the AI company's response is to this, and he mostly just said that we're talking to them. We're having conversations with them. I tried asking one or two different ways, and he didn't really get into specifics. So I don't know what those conversations look like. I don't know if OpenAI is like, yep, we're gonna pay this. I don't know if Google says, yeah, we're gonna pay this. And we haven't heard anything from those big companies saying that they are gonna pay these fees either.

• 20:17Alex Cranz?

  Well, how much of that is a red herring for the other big thing that's happening with Reddit, which is, they want to do an IPO, right? Like, there's rumors of a planned IPO?

• 20:26Speaker 05

  They filed confidentially at the end, or end of 2021, and you'll notice that's a year and a half since they filed confidentially. It's been a long time. It sounds like, based on my interview, that that's something Reddit still wants to go through with, but Steve Huffman didn't really give me any sort of timeline. And so I don't know if it's like, the goal is, once this transition is done, that they really start to move forward with that? Is it, do they see if the AI companies spend a lot of money on them, that gives them a really great revenue stream? I'm not quite sure how that's all gonna shake out.

• 21:01Alex Cranz?

  Because if you go like Galaxy Brain, it's like, okay, the reason they're killing, like, I think he's pretty clear on the reason they're killing the API, the reason they're killing third-party apps is because that's taking money away from them and they want that money. And they would probably really need that money for their IPO and to like make it successful. They want to show that they've got users. They want to show that they're driving ads. And so this is a quick, fast, easy way for them to do that while also they're off negotiating their L L with the L L Ms. Does that seem, did I go too Galaxy Brain?

• 21:35Speaker 05

  I mean, I think, I think it's hard to get a really clear picture of what Reddit wants to do here besides shut down this API, make sure that no third-party app developers are making any money and potentially monetize their data for AI training models. And I think save costs at the end of the day, you know, Steve Huffman talked about that $10 million infrastructure cost, which

• 21:57Alex Cranz?

  They're not profitable.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  And they're not profitable. So they, they got to figure out if they want to IPO and look good for investors, I think they really have to try and put their business on as solid footing as they possibly can.

• 22:09Alex Cranz?

  And I think what's interesting there is you say their business, it's becoming increasingly clear their business is not the communities. Like, and that's something that they said over and over again was, you know, our community is our, like, our business is our community. We love our communities. It's so important to us. It's the driving force of Reddit. And it's like, well, no, it's not if you're willing to piss off this much of the community. Right? Like, ultimately, that's not your business. That's not your priority.

• 22:34Speaker 05

  We were talking about this earlier today at a meeting that Reddit has such good data on the individual communities that like, it should be able to build a strong business that's not, that's also maybe not super hostile or like overly like annoying because there's lots of really focused communities who care about really specific stuff that seems like really easy to target ads to, in my opinion. But clearly, they want to make this broader statement about you need to be on our version of the app and not somebody else's.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just reading through this interview and at one point Huffman says to you, I did my AMA. I took my beating. That's a, that's in here. Wow.

• 23:19Speaker 05

  Well, let me remind you about that AMA. He answered 14 questions. Nobody said when he was done, I had to ask Reddit and they had to tell me that and I had to post it in the AMA for people to find out that the AMA was over. So yes, he took the beating, but for a guy who probably knows how AMA decorum is supposed to be, I don't know if he did the best job there.

• 23:42Nilay Patel?

  I'm just like reading this, this interview right now. And what I'm getting from it over and over again is a sense that Steve Huffman thinks other people are getting more value out of Reddit than Reddit, the business is getting out of Reddit. And I, what I don't see here, and what I haven't really heard from the company in this 18 month run up to an IPO, is how Reddit's gonna get more value out of Reddit. That is just weird to me, right? We see this value that apps like Apollo are getting. And he's got a line in the transcript, it's like 95% of them, like Apollo uses our logo, they take our data for free and resell it to users, making 100% margin. And they use that and that's competitive. Okay, like, sure, I understand that. You should charge a fee to Apollo to regain your

• 24:26Nilay Patel?

  margin. Maybe that fee will be too high. But that's just a business conversation, right? You show up to the third party developers and you say, look, this is, we need to get some margin back from you using our data. Here's how much we think we need to get. We realize that we've allowed you to do this for free for a long time. Let's walk down the road to the right answer. You can come or go, but like you'll feel like you're at the table. There's, we need to go yell at Google and Stability AI and OpenAI and whoever else to make sure they're not scraping the site. That's all just recovering the money. I haven't yet heard an idea for like, and we're gonna make more money with X. And that, there's just a break there that I think is really important.

• 25:08Speaker 05

  Well, what I think is interesting there is this pricing, at least for like, let's say Reddit wanted to build a robust third-party app ecosystem. It doesn't feel like this pricing is a way to do that.

• 25:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, again, I think what we keep coming back to is that's not what they want. They want people to use the API to build tools that enhance the core Reddit experience, which they will then monetize. Jay, you've been on this like crazy. I encourage everyone to go read all of Jay's reporting this week. Read this interview. It is important to hear what Reddit and Steve Huffman are saying in their own words. So, so read that. I think we're just reacting to the fact that Jay just had this experience, which is quite a lot, but go read it. I mean, take in what they're saying. Jay, what do you think happens next here?

• 25:55Speaker 05

  I've been asked that a few times this week, and I'm very sad to say that after the interview, my opinion hasn't changed. And I think, I think the app shut down on June 30th, and I think Reddit keeps going. And I think the users stay really mad, but until Reddit responds in some way to these protests, which it really hasn't, and the protests have lost a little bit of steam, at least at this point, we talk on Thursday evening, I don't know whether Reddit's gonna budge. And it makes me sad to say that it feels like Reddit might quote-unquote "win" here, but they're so strong in their conviction to get rid of these apps, move forward with the API changes, and maybe monetize from the AI companies that I think they're just

• 26:40Speaker 05

  gonna go forward.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  I wonder, I brought up, in the same meeting Jay was talking about, I brought up the example of eBay, which has weathered many, many storms. eBay famously just had some executives arrested for having a prominent critic of eBay stalked. This is a real thing that has gone down in eBay world. You just don't hear about it, cuz ZeeBay, and they've just turned into a thing on the internet that happens.

• 27:04Alex Cranz?

  They like mailed him a pig's head, I think.

• 27:06Nilay Patel?

  It was a pig mask, Alex, a bloody pig mask.

• 27:09Alex Cranz?

  Sorry, sorry.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  But it's just eBay. It's just like, it's in the background of the internet. It's not important. We don't talk about it the way that we used to talk about Facebook or Google or whatever. We used to, we used to talk about Yahoo that way. AOL continues to just putter along for some reason. Like, is this the moment that Reddit goes down that path instead of being on the path it was on? That's the open question to me. Right? Your users hate you so much, but they don't really have anywhere else to go.

• 27:35David Pierce?

  Are we sure Reddit's not already in that position?

• 27:38Nilay Patel?

  No, I think what we, what the protests have made clear is that Reddit is like the glue of the internet. That when stuff is happening and it's not like Twitter stuff, politics stuff. It's Reddit that creates most of the content and the vibrancy. That's why people append the word Reddit to search.

• 27:56David Pierce?

  From a community perspective, absolutely. Reddit is incredibly important and I think it's only become more so as people have run away from Facebook and Twitter. Like Reddit has benefited from a lot of that. But, and Reddit as a company has figured out how to make more money over the last couple of years. I just found an article I was looking for that basically Reddit, as of a year or so ago, Reddit and Pinterest were about the same size and Pinterest was making about three times as much money as Reddit. Just to, just to put some of the numbers in perspective. And Pinterest is famously under monetized and not doing a great job.

• 28:30Nilay Patel?

  You know, they've offered us the CEO of Pinterest for code and I'm going to be like, what are you doing? What, what happens there? That's my claim.

• 28:37David Pierce?

  Why, it's, you have a mall. Why is it not making more money? And, and like Pinterest is not doing a good job and it makes three times as much money as Reddit. But I think, to me, like the eBay thing is like eBay is still chugging along. A lot of people buy and sell stuff on eBay, but eBay is not sort of vibrant in the same way, which I guess is your point. But to me, it's like I'm, Reddit has always been kind of a third rate social media company. And it seems

• 28:59Alex Cranz?

  It has though.

• 29:00David Pierce?

  Less and less likely all the time that it's going to be more than a third rate social media company.

• 29:04Alex Cranz?

  Like Reddit consolidated forums, all the forums that existed in the world. They still are out there, but Reddit became the new kind of hub of forums and easy place to search. And I think because the majority of people don't actually use forums, Reddit's been able to like skate by and be quiet. And now they're having what's essentially, it sounds like a labor protest in many regards. And it certainly looks like one. It looks like if you look at what's happening there and the messaging and the actions and compare that to what's happening with the strike in Hollywood. It's very similar. And now they're just saying, oh, actually, like the money matters. You guys don't matter. You're, you're, the forums. Like we keep you up for niceties, but like we gotta make money at the end of the day and we're gonna do that. And if some of you leave, that's fine. I think it was very telling that

• 29:49Alex Cranz?

  he consistently was speaking up about how, how all of the, the people who are very vocal are, are keeping the, the majority of people quiet and not allowing them to speak up and not allowing them to, to have access to all of their beloved reddits.

• 30:03Nilay Patel?

  Classic management tactic, Alex.

• 30:05Alex Cranz?

  Right. Like, like it's just like, okay, yeah, you're just trying to get everybody mad at the protesters. When you're the one who started it, like you, you jacked up the API prices.

• 30:14Nilay Patel?

  Again, I just, the thing that, that strikes me about that is, is the, you know, the only capitalist on the Birch staff. It's fine. Jack up the prices. That's a business negotiation. Great. Doing it with a hammer is like not great.

• 30:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I think that's what's confusing. What's, what's kind of baffled me here is like, he's turned this into something that's very much mimics a labor protest when it never had to be something that mimics a labor protest.

• 30:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. And I think that is like the third rail of Reddit. And that's really where my eBay comparison came from, right? Or Etsy. Like, there was a time when Etsy sellers being mad at Etsy had like cultural cachet. Like it would break. We've covered moments like that. And now it's just, it's just on the marketplace. It looks more like eBay than not, right? It, it lost its definition. That's, I think the danger for Reddit is like these actions, people need to care about you a lot to be this mad at you.

• 31:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  Once you break that, then you might as well just be anything else.

• 31:15David Pierce?

  And I think the people on Reddit for a long time felt like they were loved back by the company. Even when it was messy, there's been many fights between the users and the mods and the mods and the admins. But Jay, like Steve is like an OG redditor, like.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, he is the OG redditor.

• 31:31David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying. Like he should be one of the people who understands this community the best. And I wonder if part of the reason this community feels so betrayed is because it's not like they hired some like, you know, corporate raider to come in and extract some money. Like they didn't make a private equity deal. It's like, it's the guy they believed in who built this thing that they, that they trust, who is now the one upending it on them. And I wonder if that's part of the reason this feels bad to people.

• 31:56Speaker 05

  Steve said something to me to start the interview before I'd ask any questions. He talked about how my favorite analogy for Reddit is that of a city. Cities are physical things, but they're really these living organisms created by their citizens. And I think Reddit is very much the same. He said, "We're a platform and a tech company on one hand, but on the other, it's a living organism, this democratic living organism created by its users." And I would agree with that sentiment. Like, he clearly understands what the platform should be. He just also doesn't really care for them right now.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, he doesn't care for a specific segment. And that's, look, the comparison there is Mark Zuckerberg, right? He's like, "I'm gonna do some stuff that everyone hates. Get over it." Famously with News Feed. But they've come back to this. Facebook in particular has come back to that moment over and over and over again. "We rolled out News Feed, everyone was mad at us." To members of Congress, like, "Look, we rolled out News Feed, everyone's mad at us, and they got over it, and they realized they loved it anyway." And like, that's like, part of the founding myth of Facebook is that moment. And I think Steve Huffman is the founder of Reddit. He understands his platform, he understands his company. And I think he's running a lot of that playbook or feeling a lot of that vibe. And I'm not sure it's the same moment or the same problem

• 33:13Nilay Patel?

  or even the same political skills as Mark Zuckerberg.

• 33:17Alex Cranz?

  I disagree. I think he's running Elon Musk's playbook of like, "I'm coming in, I'm gonna do what I'm gonna do. Suck it up."

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm not sure that I see a lot of daylight between the Elon Musk Twitter playbook, the Mark Zuckerberg, the god king of Facebook playbook, and the Steve Huffman, I'm the founder/CEO of Reddit playbook.

• 33:36Alex Cranz?

  That's fair, that's fair. But one of them was like actively successful and happened almost 20 years ago. And the other one happened last year and is like in flux. And I think there's a direct line from how he treated that community. It was totally fine with kicking, with people leaving and what's happening here. Where, again, we're seeing him be like, "Yeah, I don't care if you leave. The people who are gonna stay are gonna stay, because they love our community."

• 34:01Nilay Patel?

  I guess what I'm saying is if you believe that Reddit is a city, the thing that you are is the mayor of that city, right? You're not the dictator of that city. And that's the term where you are also a politician. And what Zuckerberg was actually good at historically, his being the politician at the top of Facebook, loved, hated, admired, feared, whatever. He knows he has to play that role. And he does it to whatever amount of success you believe he does it. He knows he has to do it and he does it. And he has Adam Mosseri doing it for Instagram, right? That's why Instagram changes a button from green to blue. Adam's out making a video being like, we made the button blue. Here's all the reasons we made the blue. Like, and everyone yells at Adam and he's like,

• 34:45Nilay Patel?

  if you don't like blue, maybe next week we'll change it, but probably not, right? Like, there's an amount of communication and presence for these leaders. Elon, whatever you think of what's going on with Elon, you cannot deny his constant presence.

• 35:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, he's out there shaking, kissing every baby on the forehead.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  No, he's not kissing the baby. He's telling the babies they're stupid. He's like, why aren't you making me money, baby?

• 35:10Alex Cranz?

  Make more money, baby.

• 35:12David Pierce?

  Jay, before we let you go, can I ask you a Reddit drama question? I've been trying to figure out what is going on with all of these subreddits who are claiming that they're being forced open and mods are being removed. And there's like, there's like all this intra-subreddit drama. What is going on? Can you explain this to me? This is like my favorite sub drama and I can't figure out what's going on.

• 35:31Speaker 05

  So maybe on Tuesday, earlier this week, there were claims that subreddits that had, were private in protest, had been forcibly reopened by the Reddit admins because reasons. And the ones I'm aware of were claimed were Advice Animals and Tumblr, which my understanding is those are pretty big subreddits. But it's been hard to track who says what about which person doing which thing. And it has also been very confusing to me. Reddit, to its credit, said in the fact sheet today, we are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally opening communities. So Reddit says they're not doing the thing that some Reddit users say they're doing.

• 36:11David Pierce?

  Because the conspiracy theories on both of those have been rampant. People saying like Steve is editing people's answers to his questions. Like it's been it's been out of control the last few days.

• 36:21Speaker 05

  Steve has edited in the past. He has been busted doing that, actually.

• 36:26David Pierce?

  Oh, brother, okay.

• 36:27Speaker 05

  But I think I would I would suspect he's not doing that in this case. But he's also, um, people have not been very happy with him recently.

• 36:35Alex Cranz?

  He's living his life.

• 36:37David Pierce?

  To be fair, if I had unilateral control of Reddit, I would probably do a lot of dumb things, too.

• 36:41Nilay Patel?

  I want you to know that I edit every comment on the Verge.com every single day. There's a reason every comment ends with Neil is so smart.

• 36:48Nilay Patel?

  A little macro I've got going, a text expander script.

• 36:50Alex Cranz?

  Now we know.

• 36:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 36:52Speaker 05

  I always wonder.

• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  At the end of the day, it's like, it's it's my meditation.

• 36:55Alex Cranz?

  We thought it was just our community.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  Turns out Jay has been doing absolutely killer work on this story. Go read all the stuff, read the stream. I suspect it's gonna keep going until June 30th. So we've got much more to come. Thanks, Jay. We gotta take a break. We'll be right back with more Verge Cast.

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• 38:27Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Thank you to Jay. He has been killing it on the Reddit reporting this week, along with Mia. It's just been amazing to watch. In many ways, this is what The Verge was made for, along with the story that I'm going to get into in the lightning round. We've hit our peak. What did computers make us do? Is it the question The Verge was here to answer? Weird Reddit drama is one answer, and then something, something else. But this segment is just titled "Kranz Has Feelings."

• 38:55Alex Cranz?

  I have a lot of feelings.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  So you wrote two stories this week. One of them actually connects to Decoder this week. It's about private equity. Another one is about the Vision Pro and the TV. Actually, Kranz, both you and David had John Gruber dunks this week, which I think is a record for us. Did we? That's exciting. Yeah, so Kranz wrote, "The Apple Vision Pro might be a TV, but it won't replace the TV." And John is a friend, so it's fine. This is what blogging is meant to be.

• 39:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  And he was like, "This shoe won't replace... this shoe might not be a shoe, but it'll replace shoes." It's like a great tweet from John. And then David, you wrote, "All phones should be flip phones." And John wrote, "No, they shouldn't." Effectively, he was like, "What are you talking about?" So, good. This is what you want. Actually, John and I have been talking about this thing. Like, he is blogging a lot more lately.

• 39:41Alex Cranz?

  Uh-huh.

• 39:41Nilay Patel?

  And we rebuilt our entire site to allow us to blog more. And like, the death of Twitter and the end of the social web and all this Reddit. So it's all like, mixing and matching the same thing, but it has resulted in us all writing up more and like, having conversations across our sites. Yeah, the internet should have more fights on their own websites.

• 39:59Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 39:59Nilay Patel?

  With other... it's great. I love it. I'm all for this.

• 40:01Alex Cranz?

  It's way more fun than Twitter.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's exactly what I want. But, that means, Kranz, you are now compelled to defend your Apple Vision Pro take. And then David, I want you to defend your flip phone take. Okay, we can go back to that. Uh, let's start with the Vision Pro. I think we continue to... Just consider what happened to us a couple of weeks ago at WWDC.

• 40:22David Pierce?

  Have you noticed, by the way, that there has been this run of people over the last couple of days, kind of reevaluating? It's like, everybody does that, like, re-review six months later. This is the, like, eight days after I experienced Division Pro. How do I feel? And it's just a lot of people, like, processing emotions about gadgets, which is very funny. It's been a really interesting week of, like, re-coverage of that 30 minutes people spent wearing Division Pro.

• 40:47Nilay Patel?

  I am this close to mandating that every story we write about Division Pro have a screenshot of Apple's video, just a frame grab of Apple's video, where the father is taking a photo of his kids playing. And so they're playing, and he's next to them in that set. And I'm just like, we should put this in every story we write about this product.

• 41:09Alex Cranz?

  Constantly remind people.

• 41:10Nilay Patel?

  Just bring people back to the essential nature of wearing this around other people.

• 41:15David Pierce?

  Which is kind of Krantz's point, right?

• 41:17Nilay Patel?

  Which is Krantz's point, yeah. It leads right into it, which is, this is not really what TVs are for. Talk about it.

• 41:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. So, basically, we had a big fight in Slack, largely because Gruber had this great piece about how he was still thinking about this thing, and how great it was as a TV, and how they were gonna sell a lot of units because it is like a TV. And I was like, okay, that's true. I agree, I agree with him, it's like a TV. I agree with David, it's like a TV. But it's not gonna actually replace the TV, because TVs are communal by nature. Even though most of us probably don't watch TV with other people all the time, they're still relatively communal things, and this thing is very isolating and expensive. And TVs are cheap. And there's a lot of conversations about how, oh, this thing's gonna be really incredible because you're gonna be able to watch NBA games from courtside. And like, we can't even get NBA games in 4K.

• 42:06Alex Cranz?

  Where are we gonna be getting 3D NBA courtside? Like, let's, let's, come on, guys. So we really was, like, thinking about how we've seen TV and stuff transform over the last couple of years, and how that media is slow to respond. And the same thing's gonna happen with this product. Even though we do have this commitment from Disney and everything, this feels a lot more like 3D TV than it does 4K TV. And even 4K TV has been really struggled to adopt and get content out there.

• 42:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, I've been thinking a lot about this piece, Alex, since you and Richard and like half our staff were fighting about this in Slack. And the thing that I've come around to is I kind of think that this eyesight feature ends up being like culturally and technologically the single most important thing about the Vision Pro. Because like, one of the things that happens, at least in my life all the time, is I sit on the couch and my wife sits next to me on the couch and we both look at our phones and we don't talk to each other. We're both doing our own thing, but we're in the same space and there's something to that. And I think part of what feels so isolating to me about some of these headsets is like, if I were to sit there and put on my Quest 2 and start playing a game, like I have in a very real way gone somewhere else, right?

• 43:20David Pierce?

  In the sense that like, I can hear her less, I can't see her as well, she can't see me as well, she doesn't know what I'm doing. It's just like, the dynamic changes even if I'm sitting next to you with my headset on versus I'm sitting next to you looking at my phone. And eyesight in particular, this feature where you can see someone's eyes through the headset when they're doing something. And we don't know exactly how this is going to work with content. Can I watch a movie and have eyesight on? I genuinely don't, I don't know that we know the answer to that.

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  I think the answer is no. I think eyesight only happens when you are talking to someone outside the headset.

• 43:53David Pierce?

  But even that is messy, right? Because one of the things we got in the demo is this idea that like, I can be watching a movie and you start talking to me and you sort of fade in, like do my eyes fade in as that is happening?

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think this is why we weren't demoed it. I don't think they've figured all those moments out yet.

• 44:07David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 44:07Nilay Patel?

  Because the basics of it are very simple. They take a picture of your eyes and they show them on a screen, like.

• 44:11Alex Cranz?

  I don't think eyesight is going to fix the fundamental isolation problem, though. Because the fundamental isolation problem is you're sitting next to your wife, you're both, let's, in this world, you both have spent $3,500 minimum on these headsets. You're both sitting on your couch next to each other, wearing them, you can look and you can talk to each other. But, you know, if you're looking at something on your phone, you're like, this is stupid. You can like, show it. You can just look at it and be like, honey, look how stupid this is and hold it up to her face. In this, you can't do that.

• 44:40Nilay Patel?

  The classic phone interaction. When I think about people who love each other, it's like, look how stupid this is.

• 44:45Alex Cranz?

  But you can't really interact in that same way that you do when you're just like sitting on the couch watching TV and on your phone or something. And I think that the fact that you can't interact that way, that isolation is gonna restrict use cases a little more.

• 45:01Nilay Patel?

  Well, spin that out all the way to the ideal hardware, right? I keep coming back to the idea that the Vision Pro, as it was announced, is a simulator of what Apple really wants to do.

• 45:11Alex Cranz?

  Which is AR glasses.

• 45:11Nilay Patel?

  Which is AR glasses. Okay, so now we're both wearing AR glasses. There isn't a dumb battery pack in our pockets. We've solved enormous technical challenges.

• 45:20Alex Cranz?

  No virtual eyeballs on front of.

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  Right, right. We're both just wearing a pair of Ray-Bans. And we're sitting next to each other and something dumb happens and I need to show it to you. Like, there's still a problem there. Like, friction, I agree with you, is like psychological and emotional friction. I mean practically, I'm looking at a virtual object on my display and I want to show it to you on your display. And I've got to get two different computers to agree on that. Right? Hey, look at this. It's no longer me holding you a pile of atoms. It's no longer me showing you a pile of atoms. It's me trying to send you a bunch of bits. And that is just it's just harder. Like, historically, it's harder.

• 46:04David Pierce?

  I don't know. Like, are we gonna get to a point where we've solved all of the technical problems to make AR glasses, but like, airdrop isn't good enough that I can just like, nod my head towards you and you see the thing that I'm looking at? Like, that doesn't sound to me like the hardest problem of all of these to solve.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm going to guarantee without a doubt, that the nod your head to airdrop a thing, 95% successful.

• 46:28Alex Cranz?

  How long did it take bump?

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. One decade before you could wave your phones at each other. And even, like, fine, I'm not saying it won't work or won't mostly work. I'm saying that the problem of there's something on my screen that I want to put on your screen has bedeviled computers since the history of computers. And like, mostly it works fine, but it's never the same as we're both just looking at a screen together. And it's even harder when you're trying to sync audio and video across those screens at extremely high bit rates in 3D with surround sound.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  What like, isn't it just easier to to use our eyes and ears the way that we have them?

• 47:15David Pierce?

  You know, this makes me think of when I believe it was when our Netflix show is coming out, you know, Disclosure, The Verge, Major Show of Netflix. We all got on like Netflix's sharing platform to watch something together. Do you guys remember this? And as it turned out, anyone who joined this thing could control it. So every single person that joins just instinctively pressed play to make it play. But actually what they did was pause it. So we got like 100 people playing and pausing this thing. And so maybe you're right, maybe we're never going to be good at this.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, and Apple has share play like they have. They have begun to build the infrastructure they need to solve these problems. I'm not saying they're not working on it. I'm not saying they won't be 95% successful. I'm just saying, even if you spin it out to it's just a pair of wireframe Steve Jobs glasses, you have solved some of the most challenging physics and engineering problems in the history of computing. It's so like, all right, I gotta, I gotta Bluetooth some shit to you.

• 48:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 48:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's just something there that, okay, we've put up an expensive screen in the room and we're going to perceive it together. So it will just forever be superior.

• 48:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a TV is always going to be superior for that reason, right? Like, you're always just going to be able to turn on a TV. It's a solved technology. It's way, way, way, way, way cheaper. And I think that's really crucial when we talk about this, when we talk about like, because essentially I'm the ideal user for the Vision Pro, right? I live alone. I love TV. I love content consumption. Yeah, having 105 inch 4K beautiful display in my home at all times, always in front of my eyeballs. Sounds like the best thing in the world, but it also sounds like the worst thing in the world. It sounds just deeply unappealing. It's like, it's expensive. And it is that isolation factor is there.

• 49:12Alex Cranz?

  And for me personally, I can't, I wouldn't be able to get over the fact that like, I'm just sitting in my house in a huge, like, not huge, sitting in a fairly large apartment by myself, completely isolated.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  This is the Steve Jobs dream, a huge house devoid of furniture. And somehow there's just Macintoshes everywhere.

• 49:32Alex Cranz?

  Just everywhere.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Have you seen that? There's a photo, Sean Lennon, John Lennon's kid got a Mac in the eighties for his ninth birthday. And there's a photo of Steve Jobs on the ground with Andy Warhol. And he's like showing him how to use this nine year old's Mac. This is like what everybody wants, right?

• 49:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Now just imagine that Steve Jobs and Andy Warhol were wearing headsets at a nine year old's birthday party. And he was like, look at my headset.

• 49:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's, it's dumb. I think it's, it's, it's kind of stupid. And somebody, somebody after I wrote that piece immediately hit me up and was like, thank you, I don't think this is going to replace it. Because every time I use my husband's headset, I have to then wipe off like my face that's on the headset. And there's always like that, that intimate kind of grossness that headsets demand.

• 50:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh dude, I use somebody else's laptop. And I'm like, get this garbage away from me. Most people have natural scrolling turned on. Disaster.

• 50:26Alex Cranz?

  And now you're going to put that on your face.

• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:29Alex Cranz?

  Which is much more sensitive.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  By the way, people have asked us this, as far as I can tell, there's no profiles on the Vision Pro.

• 50:36Alex Cranz?

  So it's just one person?

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  It's one person. And, and there were hints that there would be a guest mode, but there would be no like user accounts, which is, it seems like an enormous miss for the first version of this product.

• 50:47David Pierce?

  Really? I think it's the opposite. Like, this is like a win for people who want a reason to not give this to their children. Like, this is a, I think, I think this is a really good thing for Apple to launch on like, the third version of this. Uh, I'm not at all surprised this doesn't have family sharing stuff on it yet.

• 51:05Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if they want everybody to have a headset, because everybody's going to be living in this AR future where you're wearing head, face computers all the time, then yeah, you don't necessarily want profiles because. Face computers are just harder to share with other people naturally. So it's like, no, we discourage you. Everyone go spend $3,500. Get your entire family out.

• 51:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. Tell your mom to buy an iPhone, right? Like, that's the Tim Cook line. But you know what this makes me think of is the, there's been this sort of long philosophical debate in tech about like, is the future that you sort of have the one screen that rules them all, right? Whether it's like your iPhone that the world revolves around, or in this case, like a headset that the world revolves around. Or is the future that like, everything around you is connected and has a display? And it's, and what you have is like a wearable or whatever that sort of imbues that with your preferences and information. And so like, I can walk up to any screen on earth and just like tap it with my thumb and it will know that it's me and become my computer until I walk away. Like, that's one vision of the future. The, the Vision Pro is the exact opposite of that vision, right?

• 52:08David Pierce?

  Where now, the thing I have on my face controls literally the world around me, which I find fascinating. And Apple has always kind of been on the side of like, your device rules the world as opposed to like, every device can be your device. Like, the, the Chrome OS vision is the every device can be your device, right? You just login and with your username and password to Google and boom, you have a Chromebook. Any Chromebook is your Chromebook. And it's really interesting to see the Vision Pro be like the very end of that, right? Where it's like, you don't have a TV that you have information on. The information lives here. There's nothing else in the world that you need.

• 52:41Alex Cranz?

  I don't think there's an answer for that. I think that's going to be the persistent problem because the two things are so fundamentally at odds. And privacy is sitting right there in the middle, right? Like, your security and privacy are right there.

• 52:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 52:53Alex Cranz?

  And I think that's always going to be an, up to an individual and how much of that they want to give away. Some people are going to be like, yeah, I'm happy to live in this world. I don't want anyone to ever know what I'm watching.

• 53:02David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 53:03Alex Cranz?

  This sounds great. And a lot of people like myself are going to be like, no, I want, I want some privacy. And then there are other people who are going to be like, yeah, I like leave every window open, lights blazing, look in my house, kind of deal.

• 53:16David Pierce?

  And those people are making millions in subscription fees.

• 53:19Alex Cranz?

  I love them.

• 53:20Nilay Patel?

  Wait, so, but it's just like, at the core of that, the problems are still the same. It's really interesting. If you, if you drill into it, right? You're, you're in your living room. You still need to put sensors and everything. You still need to put networking chips and everything. You still need to put control logic in everything. It's just kind of like, where does the interface live? So I look at my thermostat and the thermostat could just be a computer with a display and an interface and a whole bunch of stuff I gotta learn. Or the Vision Pro could say, you're looking at a place where a thermostat should be. We'll put up some thermostat controls. But there still needs to be a bunch of stuff on the other end of that experience that controls the furnace and knows how hot it is in the house.

• 54:04Nilay Patel?

  You look at an area where a TV should be. You still have to like have streaming services.

• 54:11Alex Cranz?

  And I think you run into the other situation, and this is coming again from someone who lives by themselves, has a whole home kitted out as a smart home. People still come over to my house. They like, like I still have people over.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  That's your first mistake.

• 54:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's the first.

• 54:24Nilay Patel?

  Beyond the walls of the Z-Wave Alliance, you shall not pass.

• 54:27Alex Cranz?

  But people visit and then if they want to do things like, like one of my friends, I didn't know this. I had forgotten. I set it up. So anytime I took the dog for a walk after, after dark, it would turn all the lights off to save electricity. I forgot that. And she was like, okay, I'll stay in your house watching TV while you go walk your dog. And then like a minute later, she was just like texting me being like, I'm in complete darkness and everything's off. What do I do? And I think the Vision Pro is like exacerbates that problem, right? Somebody comes over to your house and they're like, can we watch TV? They're like, what kind of?

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  No, but they have their own Vision Pro.

• 55:02Alex Cranz?

  Theoretically, they have their own Vision Pro, but realistically, no. Like, like that level of adoption is so far down the line. It took us how many decades to like adopt, fully adopt TV?

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then, and then the privacy problems are even worse, right? So again, even if you solve it, it's just a pair of glasses.

• 55:19Alex Cranz?

  Everybody's got their glasses on.

• 55:21Nilay Patel?

  And you gotta come to your house and connect to your network and get control of your devices and blah, blah. And it's like, Oh, it's actually a little bit better for the the computers to be like physically air gapped a little bit. Yeah. That's not the right word, but you know what I mean for it's like you can't actually control this unless you're touching it is a meaningful layer of security. Yeah.

• 55:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you don't want the guy who's coming over to install your fridge to be like, oh, yeah, I'm just gonna go adjust the thermostat. Like you watch him do that in real life, you'd be like, dude, what are you doing? But the but the Vision Pro, he'd just be like, look like reaching out.

• 55:51Nilay Patel?

  Or maybe, or we live in like a horrible world of like sharing passwords for augmented reality devices. Hmm. It's it's coming, it's coming in the

• 56:00Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna have to solve the bump problem, right? They're gonna have to figure out how they airdrop it.

• 56:04Nilay Patel?

  Again, if you're the sort of analyst out there who writes Apple fanfic,

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  there are some of them, you're what you're doing is you're saying, okay, Apple's the beginnings of all of these technology solutions are getting made. Right? So the the contact sharing with bump, share play, this, that, all these little branded Apple features will coalesce into an amazing AR experience. Yeah. Maybe, but right, right now, that is fanfiction. And that's fine. Like, fanfiction has led to a number of things in this society. Fifty Shades of Grey. This started off as fanfiction. Maybe one day, your Apple fanfiction will turn into reality. I can't, I can't predict the future, but I know that it's not now, and I know that those problems are real.

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  Here's the, here's the thing I really want to get into, and I don't know the answer to this, I've been noodling on it, I'm just gonna put out a call for submissions.

• 57:03Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 57:03Nilay Patel?

  I keep talking about this formula for things that you wear, where it's like, the amount of time it's on your body versus the amount of time you fiddle with it has to be lower than the amount of value it gives you. And I think the Vision Pro is gonna make it clear that it has to be like the most utility ever. Yeah. Right? Like, a watch, a pair of glasses on your face is extremely useful. Right? Like, if I didn't wear my glasses, I couldn't see, so I want them on my face all the time, and I will deal with cleaning them and generally being worried about the zombie apocalypse. Like, if there's a zombie apocalypse, like, I'm done.

• 57:40Alex Cranz?

  We're boned.

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, these glasses are the most important things in the world. I will hold both of your hands and lead you to safety. Don't worry, it'll be fine. It's like find the 2020s and we're going to build our society around them. But like they're really useful. So you'd like deal with the amount of care you have to put into them. My smartwatch, Apple has generally increased the amount of utility and I deal with charging it every night. The Vision Pro is like, it lasts for two hours on a battery. You have to wear it on your face all the time to get any value out of it at all. And it delivers something. And I just feel like we should write out that equation. I've done it in all kinds of different ways. I'm open to submissions. Like let us know, like write to us.

• 58:20Nilay Patel?

  And let us know what you think that equation is because I, I think as we come closer to like reviewing the Vision Pro and the next quest and all this stuff. It will truly help us like figure out if these things are going to be the future. Or if they're just like a weird side quest.

• 58:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think A, [email protected], send us an email, send us a formula. We will find the best ones and we will give you credit for it.

• 58:43Nilay Patel?

  It's something like time on body times fiddliness equals value. It's, it's something like that.

• 58:49Alex Cranz?

  You have to add the dillweed factor in there too. It has to be like, times how stupid do you look in this?

• 58:54David Pierce?

  Yeah. But I think this, this goes back to me for like, the more I think about it, the more Apple's like fundamental whiff on the Vision Pro was how, was the storytelling. And it's, it's the guy at the birthday party. It's the woman doing laundry. It's, uh, like Mark Zuckerberg had that good zinger where he was like, all the pictures of this are someone sitting alone on their couch. Like, I think that's true. And I think what's going to be true about the Vision Pro is that it's going to be very cool for very specific episodic things. Right? Like Chris Grant said this on the verge cast a while ago, like VR is great for things you do for a short period of time and then you take the headset off. And I think, I think if Apple had said that, or like shown us versions of that, where like, here are things you can do in this that are cool.

• 59:38David Pierce?

  This is not a lifestyle product yet. And Apple would never say that, but they could have told stories about it differently. Because it's not a lifestyle product and it's a really long way from being a lifestyle product. But the idea that I would put this on, do something in it for a couple of hours and then take it off and go about being like a regular person in the real world again. I think is much more compelling than this idea of like you were going to wear this headset while you do laundry and go to birthday parties for the rest of your life.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  But this is what I mean about it's a simulator. They showed us what they want it to be and they built like a hardware simulator of what it can be.

• 1:00:12Alex Cranz?

  Right, but they still told everybody that this is what it was. Like, I think, I think the, the big problem with, with Apple and the messaging, and I think you're totally right, David. It is, they, they did bad storytelling here. The story was, we have a vision of the future. Here's your first taste of it. And instead they're like, here is the future. Now you can have it. And that's just wrong.

• 1:00:32David Pierce?

  We did it already. Yeah, like that's.

• 1:00:34Alex Cranz?

  No, you didn't.

• 1:00:35Nilay Patel?

  To be, to be fair, and I have criticized the Apple Watch launch more than anyone, I think. I would point out that they announced the digital crown as an input device on par with multi-touch and the mouse and the click wheel. Didn't work out.

• 1:00:47David Pierce?

  What they didn't show you is, they didn't show you pictures of somebody sitting there at their kid's birthday party, like using the phone as a, the watch as a viewfinder.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  Right, but they, they showed us supermodels running through Africa with a first generation Apple Watch, which we now know is a completely foolish idea, like.

• 1:01:02David Pierce?

  I run through Africa every day with my watch.

• 1:01:05Nilay Patel?

  They showed us that thing where, um, people, like, people were sending heartbeats to each other, which, by the way, I accidentally did to Joanna Stern the other day. And she's like, what are you doing? She's like, are you sending me your heartbeat?

• 1:01:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's like, that's way too intimate. That's like, I wouldn't do that to anybody.

• 1:01:20Nilay Patel?

  I didn't even know it was still there. I just pushed the wrong button in iMessage. Anyhow, the, the point I'm making is even with the Apple Watch, they did the thing that Apple is prone to doing right now, which is they sort of remix the greatest hits of their product launches. They say one more thing. They told you about a new input method. They tell you that everything else is garbage. Well, they, they, it's a script, right? And they can, and they can kind of mad libs the announcement. And I think here the jump is so vast that that script kind of let them down. In a way that the Apple Watch followed the script and, you know, computers had to get slightly better for the Apple Watch to start working. Right. And they, then they totally rebooted the interface. It was a gen three or gen four, series three or series four.

• 1:02:05Nilay Patel?

  And then, you know, then they figured out how to turn the screen on all the time and it got faster. And like, it just caught up to where they were going always. This is like, what are they going to catch up to?

• 1:02:15Alex Cranz?

  Well, and also, the Apple Watch was not as hu- like revisionists might say it was successful. It was not hugely successful when it first started. There was a lot of criticism of it. That like, that was that script creaking under the load and having to wait three, four years before the watch really worked. Like, my first watch I called by great regret.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  But what I'm saying is like, the path from the beginning to the end of the fourth year.

• 1:02:39Alex Cranz?

  It was clear.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  Right. Even when they totally rebooted the interface, it was like, alright, we threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, we figured out what sticks, we're gonna hide all this other stuff, right? We're gonna simplify this down. This is like, here's a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, no one can tell you what. Like, it was fairly obvious, I think, with the watch, that notifications and health features were the things that were the most interesting. It was never obvious that sending your heartbeat to people would be the thing that would sell Apple Watches. But they needed to fill out the idea of the product. We'll just see, like, your point with your piece, Alex, is what they have showed most compellingly is it's a TV.

• 1:03:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:03:16Nilay Patel?

  And all the other stuff is like, eh, you got a headset on your face.

• 1:03:20Alex Cranz?

  But ultimately, this is a very, very nice TV.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, so if you do the math, their math on this is a nice TV and it might be worth it, is not so off. A nice, oh, a nice, big OLED TV is gonna cost you more than $2,000.

• 1:03:33Alex Cranz?

  So 65-inch.

• 1:03:34Nilay Patel?

  But this is like, much bigger than that, right?

• 1:03:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  A 75-inch, 85-inch TV, OLED TV, depending on the sales and the time of the year and whether it's a Super, who knows? It's gonna cost you more than $2,000.

• 1:03:44Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  A nice Atmos sound system to pair with it will probably cost you around $1,000. And that's a cheap one. That's like, a refurbished one with a receiver and speaker wires.

• 1:03:55Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:03:55Nilay Patel?

  If you go like the Sonos, right, it's gonna cost you way more than $1,500. Just the Ark alone is $700. Okay, like, we got there. We got to the price of a Vision Pro. But it's also, but then you have a Vision Pro. You don't have a TV and a nice sound system that you can plug your console into.

• 1:04:12Alex Cranz?

  Well, and I think that's a different. Person necessarily because I think what this is for is for those people who don't want to have that one big home theater system, right? Like those people are going to go do that all the time. Hey, guys, I love you.

• 1:04:25Nilay Patel?

  You're my people.

• 1:04:26Alex Cranz?

  You're wonderful.

• 1:04:27Nilay Patel?

  I know. I know they're here and I want to acknowledge them.

• 1:04:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, you guys all you two, you and them all read the same publications on your iPad. Together. But but like, that's one kind of person. I think this this felt like it was more intended for everybody else and everybody else is going to spend $600 on a TCL, maybe 100 bucks on a Vizio soundbar after they keep saying it sucks and they go to theverge.com and Google best soundbar and they're like, oh, okay, I'll get a Vizio. And and so they're going to spend like a grand. How do you convince them to go spend $3,500? TV TV manufacturers have been struggling this with this for a while now. They all keep pushing the biggest, fanciest TVs, but the TVs that actually sell that actually move are the cheap TVs.

• 1:05:14Alex Cranz?

  I think that price gap is going to be a problem for Apple and it'll definitely come down in price, right? Like, like this is $3,500, but there's going to eventually be a Vision Knicks the Pro and it'll probably be like $1,500 or something. And you're still going to be struggling with that. Okay, I could spend this and have a really good set for me personally, or I could have something that like is much more flexible and can do a lot more. And I think that's where they're going to struggle.

• 1:05:39Nilay Patel?

  But they don't have to. They don't. They're not trying to displace the TV market right now, like.

• 1:05:43Alex Cranz?

  Right. But that's what they're going to have to compete with because that's what they've made. They've made like a competitor to the TV.

• 1:05:50Nilay Patel?

  Right. I think we're both saying the same thing, which is in the end, no one is going to cross shop this with TVs.

• 1:05:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  But in the end, the value proposition is look at this TV. So that's a there's a disconnect there that somehow, some way will get resolved. And I think probably what resolves it is time and determination from Apple to make this a product that works.

• 1:06:11David Pierce?

  Yeah. And I think the stakes for it would be so much lower if it were $500, right? If this is like a thing you could buy that was sort of purely additive to your TV and you watched it when it was just you, but when it wasn't just you, you put it down and you watch TV with whoever else is in the room. But at $3,500, the the value prop is just so different that like, I think Apple is going to lose that fight for a while here.

• 1:06:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a $500 one, every single college dorm would be filled with them. It would be the most popular thing.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  There's a long way to go. Between this product as it exists in $500. Oh, yeah. Just the displays alone. Yeah.

• 1:06:47David Pierce?

  This thing costs $3,500 because it has to.

• 1:06:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right, we should take a break. Kranz, you also wrote about the instant pot and what happened with private equity. And I just want to point out.

• 1:06:58Alex Cranz?

  They're bankrupt.

• 1:06:59Nilay Patel?

  They got purchased by a big private equity firm that did some private equity stuff. And now they're bankrupt. Yep. This was a pretty simple business. They made instant pots and then once a year they sold them to the bots. Whatever one's parents bought them an instant pot. Like, it wasn't a complicated business. The thing, the connection I want to make is Kranz wrote a piece about how the search for endless growth tanked this company, which happens over and over again. And then just by coincidence, this week's decoder is Brendan Blue, who's a federal prosecutor, who wrote a book called Plunder about how private equity is destroying American markets. And you should just go listen to it and then consider the instant pot.

• 1:07:37David Pierce?

  It's a very good episode. As everyone knows, I hate Decoder and refuse to listen to it, but it's a good episode of Decoder.

• 1:07:42Alex Cranz?

  We'll allow it.

• 1:07:43Nilay Patel?

  I have never been more surprised. Like, sooner or later, I was on Decoder and everyone's like, "Good job." I'm like, "Here's a federal prosecutor who wrote a wonky book about antitrust and private equity." And everyone's like, "This is the episode." Okay. I know we cultivate an audience of nerds and even to me, sometimes it's surprising what people are nerdy about.

• 1:08:02David Pierce?

  Wait, before we take a break, I just have, I have one question, which is, Alex, were you as sad as you seemed writing this story about the instant pot? You seem very sad about the instant pot.

• 1:08:10Alex Cranz?

  I was just bummed. I'm always bummed when private equity, like, kills something that's cool. Stop doing that, private equity, but they won't because they love profit.

• 1:08:18David Pierce?

  I do love my instant pot.

• 1:08:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're not, the bank isn't taking it away.

• 1:08:23Alex Cranz?

  You're kicking down our doors, reclaiming all our instant pots.

• 1:08:26Nilay Patel?

  This is why you should buy things that don't rely on cloud services, because the bank can take that away.

• 1:08:31Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 1:08:32Nilay Patel?

  Always, always on my mind. All right, we got to take a break. We'll come back. We had a little lightning round and we'll wrap this up. We'll be right back.

• 1:08:43Speaker 01

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• 1:10:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Slightening round time. David has picked one for me, and in retaliation, I've picked two more for myself. But David, why don't you begin?

• 1:10:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, I really played myself on this one. The good news is mine's very quick, so we can leave two or three hours for your several. Mine is that Instagram added a feature to its status update thing in the app that will now show what song you're listening to. And I just want to give real, genuine kudos to the Instagram team and Meta as a whole for doing its damnedest to bring back the away message.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 1:10:31David Pierce?

  I have been saying the away message and status things need to come back for years. I believe in it with my whole heart. I wish this were like an open standard that worked everywhere and I could like change my Slack status. It would also change my Instagram status. Like, that'd be rad. But this rules. This is AIM away messages coming back via Instagram. And I just, I just want to applaud Instagram. I think they do a lot of bonkers things and it's mostly a bad app, but notes and the whole status feature is very good. So congratulations, Instagram.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're doing that and they added broadcast. Instagram is quickly turning into the everything app?

• 1:11:05David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:11:06Alex Cranz?

  Eat it Twitter.

• 1:11:07Nilay Patel?

  Like you can just see where it's going. It's kind of neat, but it's also, boy, you open Instagram and a lot of things are happening.

• 1:11:14David Pierce?

  I think Instagram is really quickly heading down a path of being like the everything social app. Cause like Facebook is an entertainment platform slash dying. WhatsApp is only ever going to make money by helping you chat with businesses. So they're leaning really hard into like shopping. They're doing some social stuff, but Instagram is like, especially if the, their Twitter competitor threads sort of attaches to Instagram in an interesting, useful way. Like this becomes the place you share stuff with your friends. That is what they are going for in a really big way. And I think it's going to be really interesting to watch.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My first one is one David assigned, who was actually really cool. Taylor Swift exists, her fans exist. The ticketing catastrophe happened. That led to a series of hearings, Live Nation slash Ticketmaster, along with a bunch of other ticketing companies and Airbnb. So Live Nation, SeatGeek, Dice and Airbnb.

• 1:12:06David Pierce?

  It's so funny to me that Airbnb is part of this.

• 1:12:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, you know why, but they have announced that they will no longer have hidden fees. They're going to disclose the total price while you're shopping. And this is like a classic, right? A threat of regulation, like Taylor Swift fans were so upset that the government was like, what if we regulate these companies? And they're like, what if we just do what you want? Don't regulate us. And Airbnb is in the mix because people are so pissed about cleaning fees.

• 1:12:31David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:12:32Nilay Patel?

  So Airbnb like also sees the writing on the wall. And so all these companies are going to be more transparent about their pricing, which is wholly a good thing. I think it might be better if there was more actual competition in the space, but I will, I will take whatever crumbs of transparent pricing we can get.

• 1:12:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're going to take this to be a huge victory, but what this actually is, is just they know that they can charge whatever they want. So instead of hiding the fees, they're going to tell you about the fees. But if you want to go see Taylor Swift's era's tour, you are still going to pay the dumb, enormous monopoly riddled fees because you have to. So like this is, we have not solved our problem, but we've solved this much of the problem.

• 1:13:10Nilay Patel?

  Let me read you. I mean, it's called the breakup Ticketmaster Coalition. I don't think this quote's going to be surprising. Here's what the breakup Ticketmaster Coalition said about this announcement. Live Nation Ticketmaster's announcement today is a half-hearted attempt to ward off a lubing DOJ investigation into addressing the real issue, its monopoly power over live events.

• 1:13:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:32Nilay Patel?

  That's uh, that's pretty much what the breakup Ticketmaster Coalition would say.

• 1:13:36Alex Cranz?

  Also, do you actually want the fees broken out? Like any, every time the fees get broken out, I just get really annoyed about the fees. Cause then I'm like, why am I paying all these fees?

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Alex Cranz?

  I don't want to see, I want like, I would rather not know it all and just be like, why is that?

• 1:13:49Nilay Patel?

  But then you pay them.

• 1:13:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I still have to pay it either way, but one way I can be like, you know what? Maybe this flight really did cost a thousand dollars and I don't need to know about like the hundred dollar gas tax fee that got passed on to me that Delta could have paid for that for themselves.

• 1:14:03Nilay Patel?

  They do that to make you mad at the government.

• 1:14:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they're trying to make me, but instead it just makes me mad at the company. And like, I just want to not be mad, besides that the price itself.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  I have bad news for you about the current state of American markets.

• 1:14:15Alex Cranz?

  Ah.

• 1:14:16Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna be mad. All right, Cranz, what's your lightning round?

• 1:14:19Alex Cranz?

  Something I'm not mad about is Steam has, Steam looks nice. Like, it's always, it's looked pretty nice versions of it, but you know how sometimes you're, you're using Steam and, and you go to a tab and you're like, oh my God, what's happened here? They, they've started to like, make it a little more cohesive. Everything's running together. There's a new Notes app, which is a lot of fun. And Sean Hollister like absolutely adores it and I cannot wait to like, start using it on my Steam Deck. And it's just, it's just like, it's a nice thing, something I'm not mad at.

• 1:14:50Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 1:14:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, something I didn't want to rage at. I want to do something positive.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  I regret to inform you, there's a hundred dollar gas tax.

• 1:14:57Alex Cranz?

  God damn it.

• 1:14:58Nilay Patel?

  For the Steam update. Okay, my, I got two more, but they'll be really fast. One, Twitter, I gotta work copyright law into my chest somehow. Twitter is being sued for $250 million by the music publishers of America because they just don't pay any licensing fees for music. It's hilarious, hilarious problem for Twitter to be in. This is like the most solved problem for the major platforms. These are just deals they all can take because the companies know that music on these platforms is a lucrative marketing channel for them. Whoops.

• 1:15:32David Pierce?

  Well, and my favorite part of this is the other things that Twitter decided not to pay for this week, which were like its Google Cloud bill, apparently. And that's become a whole thing. They're getting evicted from an office in Colorado because they stopped paying rent. Like Twitter's new biz dev strategy is just like, don't pay any of our bills and see what happens. And it's a, it's a move. It is a move.

• 1:15:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:55Alex Cranz?

  It certainly worked for some people.

• 1:15:56Nilay Patel?

  I would just say that the don't pay the music industry move is not one that traditionally works that well for anyone.

• 1:16:03David Pierce?

  Fair. Including the music industry.

• 1:16:05Alex Cranz?

  Metallica's.

• 1:16:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Alex Cranz?

  Just gonna come collect on you.

• 1:16:08Nilay Patel?

  They want their money and they're gonna get it. Uh, okay, and here's my last one. I want to end on a high note. This is the most important software update of all time. The Meter Smart Meat Thermometer has gotten a software update.

• 1:16:20David Pierce?

  M E A T E R. That's very important.

• 1:16:23Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. It's owned by Trager. This was a big deal when they acquired it last year. It now supports the dynamic island and live activities in iOS.

• 1:16:31David Pierce?

  What does it do?

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  You're smoking a brisket, you just glance at your phone, it'll tell you the internal and the ambient temperature right, right there. And it may be, I actually have very little success getting this to work. It will calculate the time remaining. Our computer's good at math. Who knows?

• 1:16:48Alex Cranz?

  You gotta wrap it in brown paper. It's all good.

• 1:16:50David Pierce?

  Yeah. My favorite thing about this is this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard. And also for sure, the best use of the dynamic island that anyone has discovered since.

• 1:16:58Nilay Patel?

  Think about the amount of engineering that has had to occur for this to happen. Right? The meter people had to make a thermometer with a wireless chip in it that could survive the heat of a grill. And work, and actually it's two different thermometers in it. That's just a feat of like miniaturization in packaging. All in and of itself. Apple had to make the iPhone.

• 1:17:26Alex Cranz?

  Can you imagine if the meat guys had been working on the Vision Pro?

• 1:17:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I can. I imagine it every day. Can you imagine you look at your grill and it like, it just shows you a bunch of grill information? This is the future. This is why you want the glasses.

• 1:17:40Alex Cranz?

  That's what you want. Yeah.

• 1:17:41Nilay Patel?

  My wife says that whenever we're, whenever I'm operating the smoker, she's like, the only words you say to me are temperatures. She's like, how are you? I'm like, 207. And she's like, what have you done? I don't care. And then the other day, when I had the wildfire smoke and we were running the air purifiers in the house, she's like, I finally understand because I just want to tell you what number the air purifiers are at all day. And then she started calling them the smoke machines, which was a perfect name for an air purifier.

• 1:18:08David Pierce?

  That's about right. Yeah.

• 1:18:08Nilay Patel?

  Wildfire smoke. Anyhow, those need to get updated for the dynamic island as well. I just want to tell you, the meter smart thermometer has been updated to support the dynamic island on the iPhone is, is the sentence that the verge was created to publish. The, a number of concepts in that sentence that normal people don't give a shit about is so high. But you, my people, you're here for me. Also, I want to thank Dave Lee for tipping me into that story because that's why we have readers. They know you. All right, that's it. Thanks to you, our nerds, for being with us. One story I want to call out, Mia wrote about Google, about the storefronts on Google and how they're

• 1:18:49Nilay Patel?

  like SEO disasters. It's part of our ongoing coverage of like the world Google has made in this time of change. It seems like a good time to look at what we built before we tear it all down, build something new. Go read that story. It's really good. And we have lots more Google coverage to come. Okay, that's it. David, what's Wednesday's episode?

• 1:19:08David Pierce?

  Next Wednesday, we're going to talk to Jen Tuohy about a bunch of smart home stuff. This week was smart home week on the verge.com. Like a lot of really great stories. I learned a ton about all of people's weird, insane smart home setups, including yours, Cranz. But we talked to Jen about basically like where to start and how smartphones should work, or smart homes should work, rather. And then we're going to talk to Josh Jezza about a thing he's been working on for a long time that I can't tell you about yet, but is really cool. And it's coming next week.

• 1:19:35Nilay Patel?

  Very exciting. All right, that's it. That's for chest.

• 1:19:43Speaker 08

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:20:16Speaker 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

• 1:20:56Speaker 09

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

• 1:21:07Speaker 10

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