Meta and Reddit prove the social web is over

The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss the vibe shift that is happening on social media and the communal internet. Further reading: Instagram’s upcoming Twitter competitor shown in leaked screenshots Facebook, Fosstodon & The Fediverse Daring Fireball: Not That Kind of 'Open' Daring Fireball: More on Preemptively Blocking Facebook’s Imminent ActivityPub Entry It's September, Forever Mark Zuckerberg agrees to Elon Musk cage match challenge Reddit removed moderators behind the latest protests before restoring a few of them Reddit says it’s ‘not acceptable’ for communities to go NSFW in protest Google Pixel Tablet review: the dock makes all the difference Apple reportedly has fitness features for the Vision Pro we haven’t seen yet Easily replaceable phone batteries might be back, and I’m here for it Gary Vaynerchuk is 'petrified' of Slack TikTok COO V. Pappas has reportedly quit Microsoft is hiking the price of Xbox Series X and Xbox Game Pass DPReview will live, actually — under new ownership 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

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• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:45Speaker 01

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• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, fighting in a cage.

• 1:32Alex Cranz?

  The exclusive team covering it.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  Alex Heath broke this story.

• 1:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  That's fine. I'm proud of him. He's a great reporter.

• 1:39David Pierce?

  Not only did Alex Heath break this story, I think Alex Heath like willed it into existence.

• 1:43Nilay Patel?

  That's the problem, really, is that Alex is goading it into reality. And that's, and that's fine. And it appear, we can talk about it. It appears Mark Zuckerberg really wants to do this.

• 1:53Alex Cranz?

  He should.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  And I feel that we should be very proud of ourselves as The Verge, as the journalistic institution that we have become, and also deeply, extremely ashamed that this is happening on our watch.

• 2:06David Pierce?

  That feels right.

• 2:07Nilay Patel?

  Here's the story. I'm your friend, Neelai. Alex Cranz is here.

• 2:10Alex Cranz?

  I'm your friend who could take Musk in a fight, but probably couldn't take Zuck in a fight.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna let that set. David Pierce is here.

• 2:17David Pierce?

  Hi. I have already called dibs on being the sideline reporter who interviews the fighters between rounds. It's gonna be unbelievable.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  We run a gigantic sports website. SB Nation's right there. They have a giant combat sports operation. Ariel Halani is a part of the Vox Media family. We can do it.

• 2:34Alex Cranz?

  No, we're gonna do it.

• 2:35David Pierce?

  This is the corporate synergy we've been waiting for.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  DraftKings Nation, the SB Nation partnership with DraftKings is already like running odds on this fight. It's a lot. There's a lot going on here. Here's what I will tell. We have nothing to do with it, by the way. They're just like doing their thing. It's just very funny. Here's the story as we know it today. Instagram is going to launch some competitor to Twitter. It's called Threads. We've seen screenshots of it from presentations that were given inside of Meta. Their position, and this is what they said at the All Hands that Alex Heath reported on, was people want a competitor to Twitter that is sanely run. That's what they said. The audience of Meta employees like clapped to this, which is also very funny. Given that Meta does not have like a sparkling content moderation track record, but whatever.

• 3:23Nilay Patel?

  Meta is the company that like set up the fake Supreme Court of content moderation. They're doing it a different way. Elon is, I would say, not doing it that way. He's running Twitter in a different way.

• 3:36Alex Cranz?

  That feels correct.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:38Alex Cranz?

  It's a very political way to say it. I like that.

• 3:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. One is a train and the other one is like an out of control haunted car from a horror movie. There are different ways of running a business, you know?

• 3:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  Every now and again, someone on Decoder is like, I don't know how I make decisions. I get drunk and flip coins until I fall down. And that's one way to run a business. Okay, fine. So now Elon has been tweeting about Zuck. Like taunts about this Instagram competitor. This Instagram competitor, we're gonna talk about in much more detail in just a second. Because it is causing a lot of drama. On the sort of federated social networks of the internet. However, someone goaded Elon into tweeting he would like to cage fight Zuck.

• 4:21David Pierce?

  Wait, can I just, can I just interrupt real fast? Not only someone, I'm just, I'm looking at this tweet thread right now and it is like the most beautifully Twitter thing of all time. So Mario Nahfall, I think is how you pronounce it, tweets it, has lots of followers. It's like a thing Elon Musk would potentially have seen. Elon responds to a tweet about Instagram threads being a thing. He responds, "I'm sure Earth can't wait to be exclusively under Zuck's thumb with no other options. At least it will be sane, was worried there for a moment." Laugh crying emoji. And then a person on Twitter who has 68 followers.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  68 and a blue check. One assumes and a blue check.

• 4:53David Pierce?

  No blue check.

• 4:54Alex Cranz?

  Oh, wow.

• 4:56David Pierce?

  Elon Musk checking his unverified replies.

• 4:58Alex Cranz?

  That's, love that for him.

• 5:00David Pierce?

  Whose username is KWmarkoff26656 and whose username is [email protected]. It's very good.

• 5:08Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 5:08David Pierce?

  Response, "Better be careful @ElonMusk, I heard he does the jujitsu now." And then nine different laughing emojis. And then to that Elon Musk responds, "I'm up for a cage match if he is lol."

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 5:22David Pierce?

  And that's how this all began.

• 5:24Nilay Patel?

  68 followers. Haunted car, that's all I'm saying.

• 5:29Alex Cranz?

  A legend.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  Zuck responds to this by screenshotting Elon's tweet. There's apparently, this is a reference to some famous MMA fighter and he just puts block text over it that says, "Send me location." You would think that this story has now reached its cringiest point.

• 5:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's like the cringe level there is.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  And here's where our friend Alex pours gasoline on the fire. He reaches out to Meta and says, "Is this real? Does he actually want to fight Musk?" Which is, I would say, just a very funny thing for a reporter to ask. Does your billionaire CEO wish to fight the other billionaire CEO for real? Or is he just taunting him with references to fighting? Like in the annals of journalism, that's chapter one.

• 6:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and there's like, for most people, we assume it's just a taunt because they're very rich, very pasty billionaires.

• 6:20Nilay Patel?

  But it is true that Mark Zuckerberg has been training in.

• 6:22Alex Cranz?

  He has.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  Martial arts. He did like a fight with Rogan and he had made a video of himself training. It's like a whole thing he did. He has competed in tournaments. So Meta PR is like, it speaks for himself, he wants to fight him. And now, everything we have heard is that Zuck is actually serious about this.

• 6:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  That he is pushing for luminaries of the fight world to somehow get involved. Jake Paul is like, I want to run it on ESPN Plus, which is just very funny.

• 6:47Alex Cranz?

  He's like a fighter too now.

• 6:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's no money being an influencer. As we, we'll talk about it in a very interesting interview later. But like, you can be a famous influencer and then your immediate move is to find something that will make you money.

• 6:58David Pierce?

  And, and then, and the next turn of that is social media CEOs pivoting to combat sports.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's like, it's the same thing. It's like, there's not a lot of money in social media.

• 7:06David Pierce?

  Get that pay-per-view money.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  Pivot to fighting. You need to collect some actual dollars.

• 7:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, it is, this story has gone from funny Alex Heath joke on the website to what I would describe is an inescapable and exhausting worldwide phenomenon. We are, like, people are taking action on this fight that hasn't happened and should not happen.

• 7:29Alex Cranz?

  Do you guys remember in 2006, there was this director named Uwe Boll, who was known for doing like horrible garbage video game adapt, adaptions? And critics hated him. And he was like, I'm going to fight my critics. And so he invited them all to fight, including like Low Tax, the founder of something awful? And proceeded to beat every single one of them. Like destroy them. It was the saddest thing in the world. I knew one of the guys and he's like, yeah, I'm going to fight him. And you're like, oh. And that's kind of, I'm kind of worried for Elon for that very reason. Cause these guys are all like, well, whatever. He's a film director. I can fight him. And like, no, he's like, he's like Zuck. He's like getting a little, was jacked, was like ready.

• 8:11Nilay Patel?

  We'll put the link to Zuck fighting a guy in the show notes. There's a YouTube video.

• 8:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I don't think it's going to be, it's going to be an interesting fight.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  I want to make it very clear. My position is that these men should not fight each other.

• 8:25Alex Cranz?

  That's fair.

• 8:26Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that would be good for the world.

• 8:30Alex Cranz?

  No, it would be like the most excruciating thing to watch. And just, I think I'd feel like we'd reached the point where we just shut it down.

• 8:41Nilay Patel?

  When I say that is my position, nominally, that would be the editorial position of The Verge. But I suspect very strongly that in a sort of mutiny type situation, the editorial position of The Verge is composed by its staff is let them fight.

• 8:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:00Nilay Patel?

  And I'm a little worried about that, but we're just gonna let it happen.

• 9:02Alex Cranz?

  Let them fight.

• 9:03David Pierce?

  The only thing I can say with absolute certainty is that there has already been a meeting at the WWE about how to get Elon Musk and Mark Zuckerberg into a ring together.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 9:13David Pierce?

  And if it hasn't, please invite me to that meeting.

• 9:15Nilay Patel?

  The last thing I will say about this, and then we should actually talk about the the real drama with Instagram threads. The last thing I will say is Elon is the WWE and Zuck is the UFC, and those things are not necessarily compatible. Right? Like, that's actually the split here.

• 9:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:31Nilay Patel?

  Is Elon, I think, would definitely do the WWE thing. I think Zuck wants to actually punch him in the face.

• 9:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair.

• 9:39Alex Cranz?

  That feels right.

• 9:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about the actual, we'll see, I'm sorry, I don't know.

• 9:45Alex Cranz?

  We do not condone violence.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  How do you explain, like, an apologetic curiosity?

• 9:50Alex Cranz?

  I think that's right. Like, you're just like, you know what? If that flits across my eyeballs on a TikTok, I'll wait a little second before I swipe up.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  What's pre-guilt? That's the, that's the word I'm looking for. Type, find your chat GPTs and be like, what's the word for pre-guilt? Send it to me. Okay, we should talk about the real drama with Instagram threads, which I think is like drama The Verge is designed.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  To cover. So if you, like me, think that we're reaching a moment for the social web, it appears to be tearing itself apart. It just is. Like, we're gonna talk about Reddit in the next section. Reddit has come to one sort of conclusion. Twitter has come to a very different sort of conclusion. Facebook isn't sending anybody traffic anymore. Like, that thing, the web of the sort of mid 2010s, has like, run its course. Yep, sure. No one's getting any, like, animal traffic anymore, you know? Like, it's not, if we're not doing it. No cute pets traffic. Right. And then you see what's happening in the media. BuzzFeed News is shut down, and BuzzFeed is pivoting towards some, like, that web, that particular web is coming too close. Something else is gonna happen. We have talked on The Verge Cast and on The

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  Verge a lot about Activity Pub, about Blue Sky, about these federated social networks. And now, the first big entrant is, it seems imminent, Instagram Threads, which we think is compatible with Activity Pub. Our evidence for this is some good reporting and a little bit of a mention on one slide, but they haven't, like, launched it, we don't know. The existing federated social network, Mastodon, and the Fediverse at large, which are run on Activity Pub, I would say, David, are reacting to this very poorly.

• 11:31David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think that's right. So, one of the weird quirks of the Fediverse, and Mastodon in particular, is that it is very proud of itself and sort of insular. It is not famous for being an open group of people excited to welcome new people in from wherever they're coming. There are norms, we've talked about this on the show, there are norms like, everybody calls it the bird site and not Twitter, and if you call it Twitter on Mastodon, you're, like, shamed for it. It's just a strange place with a very, sort of, specific set of, like, in-crowdy rules. And the assumption is, and I think correctly so, that if and when Instagram launches Threads, this competitor, the codename we've heard is Project 92, that it will instantly

• 12:14David Pierce?

  be by far the biggest thing on the Fediverse, right? Like, it stands to reason, Instagram is enormous, you'll be able to take your Instagram handle and turn it into your Fediverse handle in this app that will be compatible with Activity Pub. So- In that moment, the Fediverse, this open social web that's powered by Activity Pub, goes from a lot of little pieces with Mastodon being kind of the largest little piece to Instagram and then everybody else. And there are a lot of people who, on principle, do not want Meta to be part of this thing. There is just a belief among some people that this would be a bad thing. Meta is a bad company run by bad people who will do bad things for the Fediverse. They will destroy the open standards. They will ruin everything.

• 12:57David Pierce?

  And they are fighting absolute tooth and nail to convince everyone to not even, basically, allow Meta into this world.

• 13:06Alex Cranz?

  Like, what's the point of having something be open source and then actively reject when you have new participants?

• 13:16David Pierce?

  So technically, Meta can do this without asking permission, right? Like, it can build a thing on Activity Pub, terrific. But what is true is if you run, and this is part of the beauty of these systems, actually, like, when it works, what this allows admins to do is say, okay, my version of my sort of little corner of the Fediverse is compatible with lots of things, but I get to choose the folks who can't even come into the room, right? Like, we're all using the same standard, but I'm not going to allow these people over here to be part of my club because, you know, whatever, they suck, they're Nazis, they're mean teenage boys, they send nudes, whatever. I just don't want them to be part of it. So you have these tools by which everybody is sort of on the same playing field,

• 13:59David Pierce?

  but you get to, like, have your own space if that's a thing that you want. And by and large, I think that's a good thing, right? And as this has been small, it has basically been like, okay, if you're going to be a good actor operating in good faith, we're all going to be open to each other. And what is now happening is that the largest player by far is perceived by some of these people to not be a good actor acting in good faith. And so what's going to happen if this boils up into anything, and we should talk about whether it's going to, because I'm suspicious that this is actually anything, it's just going to divide, right? Like, there's going to be two different things powered by the same thing, and it would be like Gmail users not being able to email Outlook users. And that's where this would land if Meta and the rest of the Fediverse, like, really part ways from each other.

• 14:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I think two things of note here. One, lots of good reasons to not trust Meta. Hundred percent. About half of which are directly related to Meta itself. And its actions and its advertising practices and its content moderation standards and its general platforming of unsavory char- the whole thing. So that's about half of the reasons to not trust Meta, Meta itself. The other half of the reasons are like, the history of this thing happening before. Microsoft shows up to the web with Internet Explorer and they're like, we love HTTP. Have you heard of ActiveX? And they just foist a version of the web on top of the web. They had a name for this. It was embrace, extend, extinguish.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  They would embrace the standard, they would extend it with proprietary extensions, and they would extinguish the standard and they would be in charge of everything. Famously, this got them into so much trouble with the web that the government sued them, almost broke them up, entered into a massive consent decree that created the Internet as we know it, because Microsoft was distracted from mobile, they had to let Google show up. This whole thing happened. I would note right now, and we will not talk about it a lot in this episode, but as we speak, Microsoft is in trial with the FTC about buying Activision. And Addy and Tom are covering that in real time, like while we're taping. So we'll get to some headlines later from the trial, but we'll cover it in depth on Wednesday's show. Anyhow, embrace, extend, extinguish is real.

• 16:10Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft did it to the Internet as a whole. Google, in many ways, has done it to the web. Like, big players show up to open communities, they establish themselves as big players, and then they take over.

• 16:21David Pierce?

  My favorite example of this, that I think a lot of people remember, is messaging services. Remember a million years ago when all the messaging services ran on, like, similar protocols and you could have an app like Jabber that pulled your MSN messenger and your Yahoo messenger and your Google messaging all into one app and everything was sort of cross-compatible? And then Google just said, never mind, Gchat doesn't run on any of that stuff anymore, and it all just instantly broke. That is embrace, extend, extinguish.

• 16:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:48David Pierce?

  That's the job.

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  Very hilariously about that, speaking of the government. My favorite topic, government regulation of the Internet. When AOL bought Time Warner, this is a true thing that happened. When AOL bought Time Warner, the first time Time Warner killed its host company, which never fails. The government demanded, the Bush administration demanded, that AOL make AOL Instant Messenger interoperable. Because they perceived it at that time, at that time, back in those days, to be a moat. So if AOL owned the content and AOL owned the sticky messaging service, no, no one would switch.

• 17:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  The Bush administration.

• 17:24Alex Cranz?

  Well, and it's like, speaking of AOL, when they first went into Usenet, too, right?

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 17:30Alex Cranz?

  Usenet was, was this big community, a lot of nerds. It was the early internet adopters. They were all loving it. AOL started to provide support for Usenet. So like little 13 year old me could be like, yeah, I'm gonna go have fun.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Do you know about the, the story of Eternal September?

• 17:45Alex Cranz?

  I, I kinda know it. I, I briefly lived it, but I'm like, I was the trash people.

• 17:52Alex Cranz?

  I, I was the one.

• 17:53Nilay Patel?

  You've come a long way. So.

• 17:54Alex Cranz?

  Very small way.

• 17:55Nilay Patel?

  Eternal September is one of my favorite phrases.

• 17:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:57Nilay Patel?

  Of internet lingo. So in the early, early 90s, basically how people got access to the internet would be that they went to college.

• 18:05Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 18:05Nilay Patel?

  And like colleges would hand out like tower PCs and ethernet connections.

• 18:09Alex Cranz?

  You had a fancy college.

• 18:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, they wouldn't hand it. They would assign, they would tell you that you had to buy a tower PC.

• 18:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:16Nilay Patel?

  And give you an internet connection in your dorm. So you, people would get to college in September and they would sign onto the internet and onto Usenet for the first time. And their hardwired internet connection in their dorm. And they would just wreak havoc on internet forums because they had no idea how to behave.

• 18:33Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 18:34Nilay Patel?

  So every September was chaos on the internet because all the kids would show up to college and sign onto the internet for the first time. And just act like college students on the internet. And then the community was big enough and they, they could see that this was happening. It was like time boxed enough. That they would wrangle the college students back into line.

• 18:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:54Nilay Patel?

  And the community would operate until.

• 18:55Alex Cranz?

  They'd teach them.

• 18:56Nilay Patel?

  The next September. September 1994 would come and a bunch of college students would show up and be idiots on Usenet. And they would wrangle them back in line. So every September is chaos. AOL shows up, says now every AOL user has access to Usenet. And remember, this is like the dominant service provider. America was online, my friends.

• 19:15Alex Cranz?

  We were online.

• 19:16Nilay Patel?

  And they flooded Usenet with like everyone's mom and like all caps yelling and like crazy. And the Usenet community started calling this the September of the never ends, Eternal September. Because it's just, it was just always September. Every day.

• 19:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Nilay Patel?

  Was new chaos and the community could no longer wrangle it back into line. It was just escalating chaos.

• 19:38Alex Cranz?

  I got kicked out of an X-Files Usenet. During that time, because I was like 10 or 11. I didn't know what I was doing. I wasn't very good.

• 19:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you were. You were part of eternal.

• 19:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was part of the eternal September. It was just what's up nerds, let's talk.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Alex is like, I'm the face of eternal September.

• 19:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's me.

• 19:55Nilay Patel?

  So this, this to me is like one of those moments. It was a great, Jason Kober at Vice has a great article about September forever. You should go read it. We'll put it in the show notes. This is one of the concepts that has defined like internet communities for generations now, since the early 90s. This concept of eternal September, you build this tiny little community and then it hits a scale point of influx of new users and the existing moderators, existing community, the norms disappear because you just can't constantly enforce them the way you could when it was, you know, however many college students went to college that September.

• 20:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  Now it's everybody all the time. And I think a lot of what Mastodon is responding to is yep, meta for meta, very valid criticisms there. Yes, embrace, extend, extinguish, but also, oh shit, our club's about to not be exclusive anymore.

• 20:49Alex Cranz?

  I see. That's the part where I really think they're being overly dramatic. And I'm so sorry to you Mastodon users. You were with me in the eternal September. Like, come on, guys. You're, you're being a little dramatic.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  I think people on Mastodon might have been the people who experienced the other side of eternal.

• 21:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they were. You guys were probably on the other side of it and you should know better at this point because one, it's hard to find things on Mastodon currently. So how likely is it that all of those people coming from Instagram are going to suddenly be descending into all of these Mastodon communities? Really? Even if you don't block them, because a lot of them, it sounds like are blocking them.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  And they're not organized the same way at all.

• 21:26Alex Cranz?

  Right. Like, so there's that part of it. And two, when things are more accessible, it tends to make things better. Like, I don't know if I would work at the verge and be in this community if I hadn't had that access at a young age. And I certainly hadn't had the, didn't have the tools then to access Usenet the way the rest of you guys were accessing it. So like, I think making things more accessible is always better. And yes, it does mean that the, that it dilutes these communities pretty quickly and it does change things, but it often ultimately changes things for the better. Even though in this case. Meta is the one doing the changing and that creates a whole other set of issues.

• 22:07David Pierce?

  I really think the fact that it's Meta is the thing here. And I think it's the fact that it's Meta across kind of all three of the points you just made, Neil. Like even in the case of there are about to be a lot of people coming and sort of disrupting our club, which I think is real, right? I think Mastodon in particular has this real like, we are the place that you go to get away from Twitter. Right? Like that's, that's its vibe. And in the same way that Twitter is obsessed with Twitter, like Mastodon is obsessed with Twitter. It really is. And now Meta is coming in and A, there, I would say it is overwhelmingly likely that Instagram's product is going to be a better product than Mastodon.

• 22:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:52David Pierce?

  It's going to have a better identity system because it's going to borrow it from Instagram. It's going to have better discovery because that's something that Meta is really good at. Like it will, it will immediately be the default product for the Fediverse. I'm not, I wouldn't guarantee that that's going to happen, but I would say that is overwhelmingly likely that's what's going to happen, that it will, it will instantly be the biggest and best thing on the Fediverse. And so you bring in not just a flood of new people, but a flood of new people coming from Instagram, which has its own set of rules and norms and cultures that people hate. And I think if, if Mozilla suddenly brought in, you know, 100 million people on Mozilla.social, I think there would be people with feelings, but it would not be this aggressive and contentious and like knee jerk, we can't allow these people here.

• 23:37David Pierce?

  But because it's Meta, and I think specifically because it's Instagram and because it's like, you, you can just imagine what all the like celebrities and influencers and commenters on Instagram will do.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Well, I can make that simpler for you. It's a bunch of girls, right? Like there's, there's a part of this where because it's Instagram, a bunch of dude nerds on Mastodon who figured out how to set up a Mastodon account and like, did it and like passed all the nerd tests is like, no girls allowed.

• 24:06Alex Cranz?

  There's a big, strong vibe of like, when I go into a comic shop and I have to then like, defend my knowledge of comics and usually show them the Superman poster. There's a bit like, that's the feeling I'm getting here where it's just like, oh, you can't join. And it's like, guys, get over yourself. Like, I don't think all these Instagram influencers are going to be descending on your mastodons and destroying them.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  So this is actually-

• 24:30Alex Cranz?

  Where are all the Tumblr users that are eventually coming and all the other Activity Pub

• 24:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 24:35Alex Cranz?

  users? Like, get over it, guys.

• 24:39Nilay Patel?

  I think this is the big difference between what's happening now and the Usenet example that we were talking about.

• 24:43Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 24:43Nilay Patel?

  Which is, Usenet was organized by topic. So I cannot believe I'm explaining Usenet on the Birchcast in 2023.

• 24:49Alex Cranz?

  I'm having the best time.

• 24:51Nilay Patel?

  The fact that we are currently embarking on completely resetting the internet is so exciting to me. And I feel like I might be the only one who can see it at all times. We are going back, people. We are in fully everything old is new again territory, and it is deeply entertaining.

• 25:07David Pierce?

  I forget who it was, but I was listening to somebody a few months ago who said that when we read about this era in the history books, the last 15 years will be a blip on the radar. It would be like one giant false start that we all made towards one way that the internet could work. And then we went right back to the way it was before and kept moving forward. And I honestly think that's where we're headed.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  Until this ends 15 years from now, and we go right back to a bunch of centralized social networking services.

• 25:31Alex Cranz?

  Usenet's still out there. It's still-

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, pendulums swing back and forth, unfortunately.

• 25:36David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:36Nilay Patel?

  They never landed exactly the right spot and stayed there. We haven't figured that out yet. But anyway, the way Usenet was organized was more or less Reddit. Like, Reddit is closer to how Usenet worked. So imagine if every September, 10 million absolute newbies descended on Reddit, found all the topics they wanted, and started going insane. Right? Like, that's how that worked. That's not how Twitter works. That's how Instagram Threads is going to work. I think there's still a follow graph there. Like, no one's going to find your, like, furry's mastodon and be like, I'm in it now. I will. Right. And so the question of defederating is really just a question of whether you want to be connected to Meta's version of this at all.

• 26:17David Pierce?

  Well, that's, that's true and it isn't, right? Like, I think one of the interesting things about the way that the Fediverse works is you, you can have things like tags that actually do work across instances. And there are people out there who have really careful systems for how things get tagged and how we think about topics. And you can sort of be in your own space, but also have access to, through things like tags and topics, the other stuff that's out there. It's definitely a smaller part of how it works. But I think because it's still such a like, power user tool, there are definitely a lot of people on Mastodon who have like curated tag sets that they use. And all of a sudden, like, do you remember when this happened on Instagram? All of a sudden, everybody got nuts about the tags to try and game the explorer page when people were going around? I think that's the kind of thing that people worry about. And it's exactly what you're describing. I

• 27:00David Pierce?

  think it's, it's definitely less likely than it would be if something like this were to happen to, say Reddit, like you said. But I do think that risk is real here.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  That's fair. Well, see, I, I think this is among the most interesting versions of this to happen, right? That the parallels to lots of other things are there. And what's interesting is that many of those things have played out. Microsoft attempting to colonize the web, played itself out, like from start to finish. We, we see how that went. And actually, a little bit of intervention, a little bit of competition, they were unsuccessful at doing it. And now they're a big baby.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  And now they just, they just want to own Call of Duty. Why won't you let them have it? Gosh. You can see how Google's various attempts to colonize the web have been successful and unsuccessful over time. Another great example, actually, is Apple and open source kind of in a general sense. Like, they showed up with an open source kernel in OS 10. Everyone thought they were going to pick Linux. They picked another project. That project does not have a life outside of Apple, right? Like, they just like took it and they made it their thing. They did the same thing with the rendering engine inside of Safari. They, they took an existing one, they built upon it. Now that Apple dominates that environment, right? Those are all good things. I don't think, no one's looking back and saying, "Man, WebKit really ruined our open source project."

• 28:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Apple adopting Unix really destroyed everything.

• 28:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we've just seen these cycles come and go in various different ways. And I think fundamentally, they're not good or bad, but the parallels are there and the negatives are there. And people are extremely wide open to them. And this one is particularly funny because it is the oldest of them all, right? It's the big service provider dumping users on a pretty closed system, a pretty small system. And like, they're having the same reaction as a bunch of people in the 90s had to it.

• 28:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 28:58Nilay Patel?

  I suspect some of them are the same people from the 90s.

• 29:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:02Nilay Patel?

  Which is pretty good.

• 29:03Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna be, I'm gonna be on the other side again.

• 29:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 29:07Alex Cranz?

  Because I've got my Mastodon account. I barely understand how it works. And as soon as the Instagram threads come along, yeah, I'll give it a go. Because the user experience will likely be a lot easier.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 29:17Alex Cranz?

  And at this point in my life, I'm not interested in tinkering with that. I've got a whole smart home to tinker with. I don't need to tinker with my social media. So like, yeah, okay, I want to go experience it this way and see what it's like when you have all of those resources, you have like, very good user interface designers and stuff participating in this.

• 29:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and we also just don't know what level of interoperability there's going to be.

• 29:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it may suck, right? Like, it could just be garbage, and it doesn't even touch most of the rest of the Fediverse. And then it's like, well, boy, we sure panicked.

• 29:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, is it you can post and people can follow you, people on a different server can follow your Instagram account, you can follow people from different servers? That seems like the basics.

• 30:00Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 30:01Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of other things you can do. You can build custom moderation services. That's what Flipboard is doing with Blue Sky and others. You could, they could have it moderate not with Mastodon, but with these Reddit alternatives like Lemmy and Kabin. There's a lot of ways. So there, from what we understand, Instagram is like, starting to have meetings. The meetings are under NDA, which is also extremely contentious in this community. I'll tell you, when we go have meetings at these companies, we're journalists. We don't sign the NDAs. I always just look at the iPad they have, and I say, "No." And then there's a sigh, and they go and get me a different badge. And that badge is like, "Don't talk to this person. Don't look at this person."

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  So I get it. I don't sign the NDAs, but I think these conversations are basically Meta slash Instagram is trying to be a good participant. And like what they're facing is, we don't want you to be here.

• 30:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, I do think one, one more sort of broad point I would make is I think one of the things that is a real worry is that the Fediverse is absolutely not ready for this many people. I think you could argue that the Fediverse isn't ready to have as many people as it currently has. It's, it's been a really interesting thing to watch, both with Twitter folks going to Mastodon and with Reddit folks going to things like Lemmy and Kabin. Those products are not done. They're like beta tech projects that everyone who works on them can make you a long list of the things that's wrong with them. And they're now trying to figure out and it's just complicated and slow work to build one of these things. And then all of a sudden, like it's not an accident that like, nobody was talking about Kabin. And then all of a sudden, a lot of Reddit users start looking for somewhere to go. They find it.

• 31:41David Pierce?

  And even on Kabin's website, it's like, this is alpha software. But people are showing up because they just needed somewhere to go, right? And I think one of the things on this Feddy pact that a lot of people are signing, which is this like incredible hot pink website.

• 31:54Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 31:55David Pierce?

  One of the very first things that they mentioned about why this is a thing that you should sign and you should not let Meta on is about content moderation and it's partly about content moderation based on the assumption that Meta is bad at it and won't do it for its own stuff, which will then pollute the rest of the Fediverse. But it's also about the fact that no one has figured this out because this got to scale so fast that most of the content moderation is done by the people who own the specific servers, which is just like a dude in his house for the most part. And figuring out how to do content moderation at this scale has been tough. Like when I wrote this story about Activity Pub, I think it was a Neil Dash that I was talking to, who was like, if Instagram shows up and just dumps 30 million people into the Fediverse, the whole thing is going to collapse.

• 32:40David Pierce?

  And I think that's a real valid fear, like Mastodon is by no means a finished product that is ready for this many people to be interacting with it.

• 32:49Alex Cranz?

  Right. That's fair.

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  I just, the, you know, you know how I feel. It's impossible. This is an impossible task. And yes, the thing that they are saying about content moderation is not Meta is bad at it. I think Meta is exactly as good at it as it wants to be.

• 33:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:04Nilay Patel?

  And it's actually like, if you take the politics out of it, Meta is very good at it. You get to the politics of it. Specifically, what speech, what kinds of speech will and won't be allowed. Meta has made some decisions that I disagree with, that other people disagree with, that many people agree with, disagree with on the other side of the coin. And really, what people are reacting to, what almost everyone is always reacting to, is those decisions on the margin. And so, you know, the position of Mastodon as a collection of people is, we wish to be so tolerant that some people are banned, which is really where you come back around to.

• 33:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:41Nilay Patel?

  Like, Donald Trump Jr. is not welcome here. Is like, a very tolerant position, in its own weird, twisted way. Okay, like, Meta is gonna make a very different kind of determination, and that's the content moderation they're talking about.

• 33:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, I, that, I think, that's where I'm always the most interested in the Fediverse, is lots of different servers can make lots of different decisions, and you're not tied to them forever, right? You can go somewhere else, you can follow people on different servers with different rules. The market, such as it may ever exist, is actually making those speech determinations, and not the government, or one guy, one guy who's delegated to a bunch of lawyers that you never hear about. Like, that, that's where, that's where the mistake has been.

• 34:23Alex Cranz?

  I just don't see that that's their real concern. Those who are, who are fighting against Meta. Because like, what's, like, what's the point of the Fediverse? Where every instance can determine its own content moderation, if you don't let people determine their own content moderation? Like, I get that it's a big company coming in, and I think that's certainly a thing to be fearful of. But like, it stands on content moderation, isn't it? Because like, that's the point of the Fediverse. They get to decide that. They get to decide that for their users. And all of those 30 million, or whoever, 10 million, five people that join Instagram threads, or whatever it ends up being called.

• 35:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you don't have to, you don't have to contribute value to it.

• 35:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:04Nilay Patel?

  Right, you're like, this is my club, and you can't just like, take the content out of it and put it into your app.

• 35:09Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:10Nilay Patel?

  In many ways, you kind of end up right at this weird Reddit situation.

• 35:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 35:14Nilay Patel?

  Where like my server's content, which is really what my users have contributed to, I will control the boundaries of.

• 35:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 35:21Nilay Patel?

  I will not let AI scrape it, and I will not let it interact with Metas product. And I think we're just in for a few years of the internet refiguring out that dynamic.

• 35:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think that's gonna be fun.

• 35:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:35Alex Cranz?

  I'm excited for that.

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is like, again, I think this is why The Verge exists. Because covering the stories, A, you have to start with Usenet, which is perfect. And B, it's as much of a technical capability story as it is a how do people behave on the internet? As it is a what is Metas product gonna be story? And I frankly challenge you to find another group of nerds that will pay attention to it as as much as we will. All right, we need to take a break. I need to watch this video of Mark Zuckerberg and Jujutsu Matsumi one more time. We'll be right back.

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• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I'm gonna stay on the social media tip for one second longer.

• 37:26Alex Cranz?

  Just a second.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  Is that okay?

• 37:27Alex Cranz?

  And it's done. It's passed.

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  It's done. We, you know, there's gadgets to talk about.

• 37:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:32Nilay Patel?

  There's a trial going on. All right. We do need to talk about Reddit, though. Jay Peters has been just owning the Reddit story, top to bottom. It's, he interviewed Steve Huffman. That interview went, it went.

• 37:45Alex Cranz?

  Sure did.

• 37:46Nilay Patel?

  Haunted car. It's fine. Reddit is, you know, they're staying the course. They're not backing down in any which way. I would say the protests have gotten increasingly hilarious in true Reddit style. At one point Reddit said this needs to be more democratic. It can't just be the moderators. I think Steve Huffman referred to the moderators as the landed gentry of Reddit.

• 38:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:07Nilay Patel?

  Which is very funny. So the moderators started holding votes. Many subreddits, including, I think, R, A, others, said, okay, we're only allowing pictures of John Oliver. Our users voted on it. There's nothing you can do.

• 38:19David Pierce?

  I think not just pictures, but sexy pictures of John Oliver. That's a very important part of it.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  John Oliver has been like, he uploaded a folder of photos for them to use, which is very good. Other subreddits allowed not say four word content, which is very funny. Reddit did not like this at all. Just various other protests.

• 38:38Alex Cranz?

  Did you know the, the female fashion advice subreddit is only doing posts about 1700s fashion now?

• 38:46Alex Cranz?

  It's so good.

• 38:47Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. Some reddits have made everybody a moderator in true democracy. Also very good. I don't know if this is accomplishing anything, because all these people are still using Reddit, right? So going dark is like a direct attack on Reddit because new users, search users can't access the communities. Everyone's gonna show up and post pictures of John Oliver. What's Reddit gonna do?

• 39:10Alex Cranz?

  Enjoy the engagement.

• 39:12David Pierce?

  I don't know, though. I think people on the internet have learned at this point that just saying, "We're not going to use this product anymore," doesn't work, right? Like, you can't organize traffic killing. But what you can do, and one of the things I think has been very clever, is like, all of these subreddits categorizing themselves as not safe for work, which means they don't get monetized in the same way. And so that's like, there's a direct hit to what Reddit actually cares about, which is its money. These things with John Oliver, like, it's, you just, at the same time Steve Huffman is at Cannes trying to get more advertisers to come on, Reddit is just making a joke of itself as a platform, which in a way, I would actually argue is

• 39:55David Pierce?

  a much more powerful version of protest, which is to say like, "Oh, you think you actually run this platform? Like, hell, no, you don't. We run this platform, and you can, you can try and fight us all you want. We're actually in charge of what happens here." And I think, like, to me, that has actually come through, like, loud and clear.

• 40:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 40:12Alex Cranz?

  But does it mean anything at the end of the day?

• 40:16David Pierce?

  No, and it won't. And all these apps are going to shut down, and Reddit is going to go about its business. But it at least, it feels like you can feel like you tried.

• 40:24Nilay Patel?

  Well, so here's the thing that's really, I think, happening. Reddit is now imposing its power over this community. They sent an email to a bunch of the moderators, the subs that had gone private. The email was a threat. Like, I don't, I'm not going to beat around the bush. It's not in the language of a threat, but the email was, "Hey, if you want to get rid of the moderators who've chosen to go private, or you think they're not doing the job, let us know, and we'll help you get rid of them." And like, that's what, how, how else should you read this? If I'm a moderator that is choosing to stay dark, Reddit is emailing my fellow moderators and the users of the subreddits and saying they can get rid of me if I stay the course.

• 41:05David Pierce?

  Right. And it went even further. In some cases, there was a, there was a thing they were saying to moderators that was essentially, "By taking your subreddit dark, you're actually violating the terms of the code of conduct on Reddit because you're not being good to your community by not letting people use it," which is a leap. But then the threat there is that the consequence for not taking care of your community is Reddit will remove you as a moderator and put somebody else in. So they, they've been making abundantly clear that, like, "Play by the rules, or we'll just throw you out and find somebody who will," in every way they can.

• 41:37Nilay Patel?

  Which is, again, they wrote their rules. They're allowed to say you should play by them. But the attitude and the posture here are extremely aggressive. And, you know, if you are communicating, one responsibility you have is to how people feel about how you're communicating. And so if the moderators are telling us they feel threatened, those are threats. Like, that's just how that works.

• 41:58Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  That's life.

• 41:59David Pierce?

  And what's so weird about this to me is like Reddit's been around for 18 years. Like, where has this been? Like, at least when Twitter went insane, it was because somebody bought it, right? Like, at least, at least something changed. And I think part of what has been so strange for Redditors is this sense that, like, okay, there's a guy in charge who's been on Reddit literally since the beginning. He is a co-founder of the thing. He loves this more than anybody. And all of a sudden, just like on a dime, just decides to totally screw over the entire community all at once. And I think, like, the actions have felt bad, but I think this, like, total surprise of it all is the worst part of a lot of it for some folks.

• 42:35Alex Cranz?

  Because for most people, it really did come out of nowhere. It was just like one minute.

• 42:39David Pierce?

  It was that New York Times story. Like, all of a sudden, it's just like, oh, Steve Huffman wants to make money. And then everyone on Reddit's like, oh, shit.

• 42:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and just fury.

• 42:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, well, and killing the app. I mean, that's the real thing. Like, the rollout, that's the precipitating factor. But this, we are in control of Reddit, is new. So here's the thing I wanted to bring up. We have been reporting on this left and right. Jay Peters on our team owns the story. He's the one who interviewed Huffman. Lots of mods are talking to him. Lots of Reddit people are talking to him. Like, good journalists, we go to Reddit for comment on all these stories. Reddit is very unhappy that people are talking to us. They have decided that their official position is that they will wait for us to make mistakes and then issue corrections in order to discredit our journalism. That's straight up what they're doing. I know this is what they're doing because we have a statement.

• 43:30David Pierce?

  Because they told us.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Tim Rasschmidt, who runs comms at Reddit, says their blanket statement is, "We'll no longer comment on hearsay, unsubstantiated claims, or baseless accusations from The Verge. We'll be in touch as corrections are needed."

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 43:46Nilay Patel?

  I've been playing this game a long time. "We'll wait for you to make a mistake so then we can correct you and say your reporting was wrong?" is the oldest trick in the book, and we are just not gonna fall for it. So we're just gonna print this statement in every story from here on out. Like, that's the way it's gonna go. And if they want us to get it right, they can, they can tell us what is actually happening. But I will come back to, we're gonna take the people on the ground, we're gonna take the users, we're gonna take the moderators, we're gonna take the employees every time. And if you think they're wrong, you can tell us and you can explain why they're wrong. But we're not gonna stop because you've, you're running like a 1920s press playbook, like, whatever. Like, we're just gonna burn you every time. And that, it's that attitude. It's this aggressive posture where people

• 44:29Nilay Patel?

  are worried and they're coming to reporters and saying, "Here are our worries. Here's the communication we have received that makes us feel threatened." And Reddit's response is, "Shut up."

• 44:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  That's what breaks your community. And like, that story is easy to tell. We don't actually need your help to do it. And I, that, I think they're, they're misjudging all of that. Because when Instagram decides to launch its Lemmy clone and start that drama, people will just go. When Google decides, "Crap, we need something like Reddit to exist for search to be good. Here's a Reddit clone that we'll kill in five years." People will go use it. And the danger here is this posture, "I don't care. Like, we'll just print the line." We print the poop emoji from Twitter in every single story. Like, who cares? Right? We're like, "This is what we do. This is what you said? We're gonna print it." Your users are gonna take a very different message from that than we are. Like, we will just keep

• 45:22Nilay Patel?

  doing journalism. And I, I don't think that anybody quite understands that term.

• 45:26Alex Cranz?

  I think they understand it and they don't care.

• 45:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, straight up.

• 45:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think, I think for them, they view this as a relatively minor problem and something that they can just brute force their way out of. And so they like, they don't care if, if all of these things are going crazy right now because they're hoping, okay, in a month or two, it'll pass and we'll go back. And hopefully now we'll be able to sell ads because we'll have a much more predictable community that we can more easily monetize. Like, part of this is taming it and getting out all of the people that would make it more difficult to monetize.

• 46:02David Pierce?

  This is like Elon firing all of his staff, only it's Reddit firing all of its users.

• 46:05Alex Cranz?

  Right. And so it's like, okay, we're just going to get rid of all of you who makes it more difficult for us. And I wouldn't be surprised if that's a pitch that they're, they're doing behind closed doors because that's a pretty compelling one. If you're an advertiser and you want to like, avoid risk at all costs, Reddit right now is a super, Reddit even before this was super risky, right? Because they've said, no, no not safe for work stuff here. And you would still occasionally be like, oh, I didn't need to see that this morning checking Reddit. And they can get rid of a lot of those people and have a much calmer, easier to, to sell, easier to control community. And I think that's the point. I think that's probably the plan, is that these people will tucker themselves out, or they'll leave.

• 46:46David Pierce?

  I totally agree with that. I don't think it was the plan. I agree with every other part of that. But what seems clear to me now in retrospect is that Reddit thought it could do this relatively easily, that, that making these changes would cause some pain, because it always causes some pain, but that it would get through it relatively quickly, right? And then, and then Christian Sealy, the Apollo developer, starts making a lot of noise, and a lot of people get angry, and this just gets worse and worse. And then I think at some point, Steve Huffman and the executives at Reddit decided the only thing to do is just rip the Band-Aid off. And then I suspect what it seems like at any rate happened, is they basically just decided to like, put on a bunch more Band-Aids and rip those off too. That it was like, okay, this is a moment, we, we're going to

• 47:30David Pierce?

  go from rage over one thing to like, just get all the rage out now. Like, let's, let's have this hard reset with the moderators that Reddit has had forever. It has had the admins at Reddit and the mods at Reddit have had this contentious relationship forever where the admins wish the mods would run it as a platform more the way the company wants and the mods wish they got more tools to run it the way that they want it. And this is Reddit, like absolutely, I think you're right, exerting its authority and saying this is the hard reset. And I think at some point, you just have no choice but to fight through it. Like, I don't think Reddit wanted it to get this bad, but I think at some point, they looked at each other and said, well, it's gonna be this bad anyway. Like, let's just go to war.

• 48:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they can't back down at this point.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is never let a crisis go to waste.

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:16David Pierce?

  Absolutely, yeah.

• 48:17Alex Cranz?

  I think you're right, though. They probably didn't intend this, but now that they've got it, they're like, okay, let's lean in, burn it to the ground.

• 48:23Nilay Patel?

  The other way of saying that is that chaos is a ladder. And you really want to find the line between the two. Like, one of them ends with the king being dead. Not the show being good, but the king being dead. Reddit's gonna win with the power of stories, you guys. Okay, that's enough Game of Thrones on this episode of Vergecast. We're gonna take a break. We're gonna come back. We're gonna talk about some gadgets, do a little lightning round. Wrap this thing up. We'll be right back.

• 48:54Speaker 01

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• 50:29Nilay Patel?

  We're back. We're going to clear the air from all this social networking talk until a little bit later. Yeah, we got a, it's like a little between courses gadget palate cleanser.

• 50:40Alex Cranz?

  Little, little grapefruit.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  When I think of Amuse Bouch, I think of the Google Pixel tablet. The light, refreshing Google Pixel tablet.

• 50:47Alex Cranz?

  I think Dan would probably agree with you.

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  I think he would agree that it is light.

• 50:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't know about refreshing. I don't know that we've actually refreshed the Android tablet strategy. But Dan reviewed the Google Pixel tablet this week. That's the Pixel tablet that has the dock that makes it look like a giant Nest Hub. Yeah, it's an Android tablet.

• 51:04Alex Cranz?

  $500 Android tablet.

• 51:06David Pierce?

  Which we should say is, is not nothing. Like, one of my favorite things about this was talking to Dan through this whole process. He just kept testing the thing and being like, "Google made an Android tablet that is actually like a kind of good tablet for the first time in a really long time. Is that anything?" And we just kind of were like, we spent the whole time, he wrote this review and I was editing it with him and it was like, "Is this anything?" Because it is. It's a good tablet. It's a nice device. It has a nice screen. It has decent speakers. The dock thing seems to be really clever. There's a lot of little details missing in the way that you would expect a first-generation product to be missing. Extra docks are too expensive. It's missing some of the smart display stuff. That people might want, but it gets most of the basics right.

• 51:51David Pierce?

  It has no big ideas about what a tablet should be, which to some extent I love about it. It's not, there's no like heady thesis about tablets being the future of anything. It's literally deliberately just a screen for you to look at. And sometimes you will look at it while you're holding it. And sometimes you will look at it while you're cooking in the kitchen and it's sitting on its stock. That's the whole story. And the thing Dan and I spent a long time talking about was how you think about $500 in that context. Which I'm very curious what you guys think, because I've gone back and forth a million times on whether this thing is a good deal or not.

• 52:24Nilay Patel?

  It depends on whether you think it's a tiny portable TV or an iPad. That's how I think about it. So iPads are very cheap. They have really good software ecosystems. Apple will update the software every year on time without fail for like a decade. It's $329. Ecosystem of cases. If you break an iPad screen, you can walk into any mall kiosk in the world and get a crappy replacement for that screen for not a lot of like. Right. Like the iPad is an ecosystem and I will just come back to this. And Apple updates the software on that iPad. Apple's gonna make iPads next year. Is Google gonna make Pixel tablets next year? I hope they don't make iPads.

• 53:10Nilay Patel?

  It'd be amazing if Apple was like, eh, we're doing a Google, no more iPads. I'm just saying like, if you think about it as a competitor to the iPad, this thing loses left and right. For $500, you can get iPad Air, a superior product to this with a documented history of actual support from the company that makes it. But no doc. Tim Cook knows they make iPads. As Sundar Pichai ever held the Pixel tablet. You know, at this point with Google sprawl, they are narrowing it down. But like, if you think about a competitor iPad, like just on the merits, that's tough. That's a tough comparison and Google has a lot of baggage. If you are like, this is a TV that sits in a dock and shows me my Google photos. And sometimes I can turn off the air conditioner with the smart home controls. 500 bucks is actually not so bad.

• 53:54Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't you do that with an iPad?

• 53:56Nilay Patel?

  There's no, there's no iPad dock for a kitchen.

• 53:58Alex Cranz?

  That's fair.

• 53:59Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like that's the, if this is a slightly bigger Nest Hub that also happens to run an ecosystem of video playing apps.

• 54:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, the dock's the part, you, you talked to David about how there's no big ideas here,

• 54:11Alex Cranz?

  but the dock feels not really a big idea. We've seen Lenovo and other people experiment with it, but it seems like a well-executed version of a very old big idea. And that's kind of exciting to me because everybody kind of sucks at these docks.

• 54:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:25Alex Cranz?

  And this one seems to be good.

• 54:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. One of my favorite things that Dan told me was that he has, he has a magic keyboard for the iPad that he literally just uses as a stand for his iPad to just dock it in and out of, uh, which is also a thing that I've done. And it is the most ludicrously overpriced iPad stand you could possibly imagine. But for all the ecosystem stuff that there is in Apple's world, there actually aren't that many things you can attach to an iPad. The, it has the little, the little plugs on the bottom, the smart connector stuff, but that hasn't really turned into anything.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  So we have a seventh gen iPad that we bought for Max. It was her first iPad. She's on to her second iPad now.

• 55:02Alex Cranz?

  Just flick it.

• 55:03Nilay Patel?

  She's five.

• 55:06Nilay Patel?

  But we still have this one lying around. It basically just like got too old. Like I bought the cheapest one when she was born and then she got to about three and was like, I'm so sorry, kid. Like, you, you deserve a reasonably fast computer. So we just had this thing and what's it there for? It's there to like show photos and I don't know, sometimes be a kitchen TV or whatever. And I went looking for a dock that uses the, the smart connector on the bottom and there are zero.

• 55:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:31Nilay Patel?

  Zero. There's one. Logitech made it. It was called the Logitech Dock. They sold it for like a hundred and twenty-nine dollars and they stopped making it because it charged too slow and got the iPad hot.

• 55:39David Pierce?

  It's also like three inches thick for reasons I never understood. But yeah, it's bad.

• 55:44Alex Cranz?

  Is it like a technology thing? Like?

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, I think the smart, Apple has claimed the smart connector is open and does not require licenses and like.

• 55:53Alex Cranz?

  That can't be true.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  That does not seem to be the case.

• 55:55Alex Cranz?

  Cause otherwise Belkin would have 12 docks out there.

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:59Alex Cranz?

  And they have zero.

• 56:00Nilay Patel?

  I think the reality is the smart connector might not be that great.

• 56:02Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 56:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:04Alex Cranz?

  And there's no way to test it because there's something that runs the smart connector.

• 56:07Nilay Patel?

  Or the made for iPhone mafia. Like if anybody tells us the answer, like they're dead.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  And I would say it's been 10 years of me asking for this story. I've been trying to write a story about the made for iPhone program, the MFI program, and what it's like really like for 10 years. It has destroyed reporters. The wreckage, the human wreckage of me asking for a story about the MFI program is vast. But if you want to tell us about it.

• 56:34David Pierce?

  Several Apple employees just showed up outside the studio, as you were saying.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  It is, it is the most tightly, like, we're like, we're gonna do a whole episode on HDMI. And like, people are like, yeah, we'll talk about that. And it's cutthroat politics. A whole episode at ESPN. We're like, we want to do a whole episode about MFI, about the Lightning connector. And like, darkness falls.

• 56:54David Pierce?

  Say that again.

• 56:55Nilay Patel?

  It's like, omerta. Like, it's not happening. But I think the smart connector is wrapped up into that. So that's why there's no dots, is basically the answer.

• 57:05Alex Cranz?

  I like that plan. That's a good idea.

• 57:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. But I will say, I am very enthusiastic about the idea of a good fancy kitchen TV. I wish this thing didn't cost $500. I think if it was like $349, I would have bought one already.

• 57:18Alex Cranz?

  That, that feels right.

• 57:20David Pierce?

  It's just a smidge out of the range where I can just like, feel like it's an obviously good idea. Right now, like, I have an iPad and I can just carry it in and out of my kitchen and that basically works fine.

• 57:30Alex Cranz?

  Also, there's no remote for it, right?

• 57:31David Pierce?

  No.

• 57:32Alex Cranz?

  I, I'm firmly on.

• 57:34David Pierce?

  You got 10 remotes on the end of your arms, Alex.

• 57:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I, I need so many remotes. You have, like, you're in your kitchen, your hands are dirty. You don't want to, like, dry, like, I want a remote that can get all grubby in my kitchen. And also then be cleaned. So I don't disease people.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Throw it in the dishwasher?

• 57:52Alex Cranz?

  Wash it in the sink without electrocuting myself.

• 57:56David Pierce?

  This is a point in favor of the Pixel tablet because Siri is garbage and the Pixel tablet is not, or and Google Assistant is not garbage. It's very exciting.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  All right. I found you something called the Slim Seal 5-in-1 Universal Waterproof Remote Control.

• 58:13Alex Cranz?

  But does it work for the Google Pixel tablet?

• 58:15David Pierce?

  It's, it's just a stylus you use to touch the Pixel tablet.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't, I don't like it. And I will say that Google's AI search results are like, what are you doing? This is the most useless AI.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Never mind. I'm not, every now and again, I look at what AI can actually produce. I'm like, I'm not worried. That's how you know you're gonna be first against the wall. Look, that's the, the thing about the TV in the kitchen is like, it's what everybody wants, it's what everyone's trying to build. It's been the pinnacle of technology since the 50s. And everyone's still kinda like looking at their phones. Also, the, the fact that it's like Android on the backend, I don't think that processor is fast enough to support like fast user switching in a way that would make having actual Android apps in your kitchen like useful to you, right? Like, if this thing is actually signed into my Google account and just like sitting on the dock in the kitchen, like Android tablets are not swift at switching to my wife's account, right, or whatever, right? And that, there's just like that piece of it that I

• 59:16Alex Cranz?

  Why would you need that speed in the kitchen?

• 59:18Nilay Patel?

  Oh, because if, at least in my world, if the other people, if it's not instant, it will just never be used. Right? If I was like, here's what I want you to do. I want you to get in the, walk into this room and then to use this huge screen, I want you to push some fiddly buttons and wait.

• 59:33Alex Cranz?

  And it takes like 30 seconds? Nope.

• 59:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but back he's, I'm gonna use my phone. Instantly, without question, he'll use your phone.

• 59:39David Pierce?

  But Neil, I would remind you again that, do you know what the iPad has in terms of multiple users? Nothing.

• 59:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, true. And that's why Max has had two of them.

• 59:54David Pierce?

  No, I, I think like, this is one of those things that I sincerely hope Google stays at this because I think there's a, there's a version of this a couple of years from now that's maybe a little cheaper and a little better and fixes some of the little things that are missing like you're talking about. And this starts to get really compelling. I have absolutely zero faith that that is going to happen, but I sincerely hope we, like, that I live to see the Google Pixel Tablet 3.

• 1:00:21Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna like send you a sign print that says, I hope Google sticks with this. And you can just like hang it above your desk.

• 1:00:27David Pierce?

  Remember? It'll go right next to my Rick Osterloh dartboard.

• 1:00:31Alex Cranz?

  Remember when there was like a 27 inch Android tablet that was supposed to be a TV for your kitchen, like in 2014?

• 1:00:38Nilay Patel?

  Putting a TV in your kitchen is the only dream the tech industry has ever had.

• 1:00:42Alex Cranz?

  They suck so much at it.

• 1:00:43Nilay Patel?

  They can't figure

• 1:00:43Alex Cranz?

  Cause they haven't figured out the waterproof remote. It's the remote. You figure that out, the rest of it'll fall into place.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  Can we run Windows on your TV and can that TV live in your kitchen? And everyone's like, you've got bad ideas.

• 1:00:54Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 1:00:55Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you.

• 1:00:57Nilay Patel?

  Other gadget news, a bunch of Vision Pro stuff is out this week. Apple officially released the SDK to let developers start playing with it. They're gonna have open developer beta zones. You airlift into them, you drop out. And then they put a headset on your face and you're allowed to test your apps.

• 1:01:13Alex Cranz?

  You have to sign an NDA.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  Very complicated.

• 1:01:14David Pierce?

  I really like imagining that they're gonna be like planes and like, you know how the oxygen mask drops down? You're gonna like sit in your seat and a Vision Pro is just gonna drop down from the ceiling.

• 1:01:23Nilay Patel?

  Apple has trotted a number of 747s and they will circle the globe, letting people try the headset.

• 1:01:30David Pierce?

  It's perfect. It's all right there.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  The previous section was like an impassioned plea about how to make journalism. This section, I'm lying to you and telling you that Apple's gonna fly developers around the world wearing headsets to build apps. That's just the worst chance. You never know what's gonna happen. But we've seen some apps from this SDK, because people have gotten it. They're able to like start building in the simulator. The simulator is very funny, because all the apps are in like a fake living room. You just like look at the photos and all the screenshots are like, what if you had a beautiful living room?

• 1:01:59Alex Cranz?

  Do we know whose living room it is?

• 1:02:00Nilay Patel?

  And it's some Apple living room. The number of beautiful fake living rooms in the Apple campus is off the charts.

• 1:02:06David Pierce?

  It really is.

• 1:02:06Alex Cranz?

  I was just wondering if it's like based on anyone in particulars. Is it Tim Cook's?

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  You think it's Tim Cook's living room? It's too small to be Tim Cook's living room. You know, Tim Cook, his living room is like a gigantic expanse of granite.

• 1:02:18Alex Cranz?

  I think he's got the pit.

• 1:02:19Nilay Patel?

  You think he's, he's like, step down with me?

• 1:02:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:22Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:02:24Alex Cranz?

  Big fireplace.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  It's like, welcome, welcome, come down, come down into my conversation.

• 1:02:28David Pierce?

  Step Down With Me is Tim Cook's memoir title.

• 1:02:31Nilay Patel?

  Step Down With Me is amazing. Anyway, so we've seen the apps. The apps are pretty interesting, right? There's our version of Pcalc, I've seen a few other apps. Some interesting things we've discovered already is the concept of dark mode seems to make no sense in like spatial computing.

• 1:02:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:48Nilay Patel?

  Then there's two ways to get an app into the simulator. One, you can take an iPad app and go that way. Or you can build it in the Vision Pro SDK. And the iPad apps are just floating iPad apps.

• 1:03:01David Pierce?

  Uh huh.

• 1:03:01Nilay Patel?

  I love it. It's just here they are. And the Vision Pro apps are like frosted glass, they've got depth. And it's just very clear that like, that's how you should do it.

• 1:03:10David Pierce?

  I mean, this is like back to when the iPad first came out and there was a thing you could do where you would just hit the 2X button. Do you remember this? You could run an iPhone app and you would just hit the 2X and it would blow up to the size of the iPad.

• 1:03:21Alex Cranz?

  You can still do that.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  That's how, that's how the majority of the people are running Instagram on their iPads.

• 1:03:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's, yeah, exactly. I think the Vision Pro is gonna have a long run of being just like that. Where it's just gonna be like, we took a rectangle. Here's, here it is in another place. Do you like this rectangle?

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is always back to Apple's initial strategy with anything, which is you like apps, right? Here are some apps.

• 1:03:44David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:03:44Nilay Patel?

  And they did it with the Mac, remember? They're like, iPad apps now run on your Mac. If you are the person who runs iOS and iPadOS apps on your Mac natively, I would love to hear from you. I was so excited about this concept and I did it once with some like...

• 1:04:01Alex Cranz?

  I do it with my air conditioning app.

• 1:04:03Nilay Patel?

  That's good.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  Do you ever like imagining how many Apple engineers are employed full-time so that you can control your heating and cooling from your laptop?

• 1:04:12Alex Cranz?

  I suspect it's one.

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so you should do that in the Home app.

• 1:04:16Alex Cranz?

  No, it doesn't work. It doesn't work with HomeKit or Home Assistant. I'm working through it. Medea, call me.

• 1:04:23David Pierce?

  You have to move, Alex. That's the only answer. It's time to move.

• 1:04:26Nilay Patel?

  Other Vision Pro news, the information has a report that they didn't show us everything. There are fitness features, which we have been talking about since it came out. It will guide users through yoga and Tai Chi.

• 1:04:37Alex Cranz?

  So like, crummy supernatural.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  Do a kick.

• 1:04:43David Pierce?

  Is that what Tai Chi is, Neelai? Neelai, can you just, can you just do, do some Tai Chi for us right now, real quick? Just for a couple of minutes?

• 1:04:50Nilay Patel?

  Do a kick.

• 1:04:52Alex Cranz?

  It's also yoga.

• 1:04:55Nilay Patel?

  Wave your arms around. Do kicks. Apparently, and then let you interact with content on a stationary bike.

• 1:05:02David Pierce?

  Is it weird that I'm very excited about that specifically? Like, for some reason, in this very good information report, that was the thing that jumped out to me. It's like, oh, I would use that.

• 1:05:10Alex Cranz?

  I mean, if they do it well, that would be really cool.

• 1:05:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, I often, the only way I will ever use a treadmill or a stationary bike is if I can also watch a television program, because otherwise, God help me. And so I'm the guy who, like, brings my iPad to the gym and just sets it up in front of me and, like, watches the league for an hour while I run on the treadmill, or stand on the treadmill and watch the league. And the idea of having a headset, it's kind of like the plane example, right? It's this, it's this very sort of specific episodic thing where I would very much like to not be here. And I can totally see why something like that would make a lot of sense on a stationary bike. I'd be very into that.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but you're still on the bike. The part that sucks is being on the bike.

• 1:05:51Alex Cranz?

  That's the problem. I, like, resent it. Like, I was trying to watch Ted Lasso one day on the stationary bike, and I was just like, I'm on this bike, I could be watching this on the couch. It's just right over there.

• 1:06:02Nilay Patel?

  Stupid moving.

• 1:06:03Alex Cranz?

  Stupid moving.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Well, look, here's what I'm saying. Do a kick. Have you thought about kicking more?

• 1:06:08Alex Cranz?

  Do a gentle kick.

• 1:06:09Nilay Patel?

  I think we all agree that this is one of the killer apps for these devices. I don't know how I feel about riding a stationary bike with a wired battery pack in my pocket.

• 1:06:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  Or mounted to the bike in some way.

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Getting all hot and sweaty.

• 1:06:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, gross.

• 1:06:26Alex Cranz?

  And then the back, ugh.

• 1:06:28Nilay Patel?

  Gross, just kick that right off your body.

• 1:06:29Alex Cranz?

  You're definitely not sharing that headset with other people.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, gross. But you can see that there's an expansive vision for this. I think the fact that, I mean, we know that they released it to WWCs so developers could get into it. The fact that the SDK is out so quickly afterwards, and that people will be getting to use it well before it actually launches next year. There is an amount of confidence in this device that I think is fascinating. It's I'm still the more I think about it, every time I think about it, I think of that picture of the guy taking a picture of his kids wearing the headset.

• 1:06:59Alex Cranz?

  That's the youth case.

• 1:07:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there, there's a version of this where they're already assuming people are bought into wearing the headset and they're going to do all the things in the headset. And it's like, no, step one, they gotta put on the headset. Like, you gotta tell them something amazing is gonna happen in that headset before they put it on.

• 1:07:19David Pierce?

  Which is why fitness is so powerful. Like, fitness is the reason wearables worked, because people will put things on their body to track their health and fitness.

• 1:07:25Alex Cranz?

  I was gonna say, it's the reason the Meta headset has done, or one of the reasons.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  I just started doing Supernatural again. The boxing absolutely kicks my ass every single time, but it's so funny.

• 1:07:34Alex Cranz?

  You're like, oh, it's only 10 minutes, whatever. And then you're like, fuck.

• 1:07:37David Pierce?

  It's wrecked at the end. Yeah.

• 1:07:38Alex Cranz?

  It's great. I love it.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of do a kick, there's, there's kicks in Supernatural boxing. Literally, there's like, it's like, I'm gonna kick it, and then you kick it. It's great. It's perfect.

• 1:07:48Alex Cranz?

  Do that Vision Pro.

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, it sounds like they will. Only you'll get a calming Apple voice. Uh, it's gonna be great. It's gonna be Johnny Ive's voice. I will buy a Vision Pro if you guarantee me that Johnny Ive's voice will be like, do a kick.

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  You want me to wear the headset? I'll wear the headset. It's ridiculous. But yeah, I think that's where fitness comes in. I think that's where this other stuff comes in, but the I think Apple, like, Apple's entire approach to this is like, they've skipped the first step of like, why you won't put this on? We'll see. We got a long way to go. More news out of our friends in Europe. You know, they're, they just keep passing laws over there.

• 1:08:27Alex Cranz?

  I love them. God bless them.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, so this one is tough. Barbara wrote about this. She's super into it. A new regulation that will say phone batteries have to be easily replaceable. Makes sense. This is like, we've covered every twist and turn of the phone battery story. Apple got in a lot of trouble for actually throttling its phones as the batteries got older. A justified reason, maybe you gotta tell people you're doing it. A lot of trouble for that. They've launched a battery repair program. They've launched all these repair programs due to regulations around the country and the world. And now we're at Actually, just from the beginning, you have to make the battery replaceable.

• 1:09:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  This has pretty huge implications for our phones to be designed.

• 1:09:04David Pierce?

  Yes. And we should say, it hasn't been passed. It seems very likely it's going to. The initial vote was, I think, let's see, Barbara said 587 votes in favor, nine against, and 20 abstentions. Like, it's a pretty strong majority. But the thing I think is most interesting about this is the phrase that it uses is that portable batteries have to be designed, quote, "in such a way that consumers can themselves easily remove and replace them." And the phrase "easily remove and replace" is in bold. And you can just tell this was so carefully worded so that you can't get out of it by saying, "Okay, we'll make it easy to go to the Apple Store and replace it," or a third-party manufacturer. It means no. A human being needs to be able to open up their phone, remove their battery, and put in a new one.

• 1:09:47David Pierce?

  Like, that is clearly the outcome they're looking for here, and I think that's really fascinating.

• 1:09:51Alex Cranz?

  Couldn't Apple argue that they can do that now?

• 1:09:55David Pierce?

  No. You can't argue that someone could remove the battery from their

• 1:09:58Alex Cranz?

  Oh my god, I love when you pull the adhesive in there.

• 1:10:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:01Alex Cranz?

  Very slow, most satisfying thing in the world.

• 1:10:04Nilay Patel?

  It's like, the way that phones are designed and structured.

• 1:10:07Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:10:07Nilay Patel?

  Are the batteries are, actually, in many cases now, like, a component of the structure of the phone.

• 1:10:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:13Nilay Patel?

  Okay, like, all that's gotta change, because now you can just, like, take it out. I don't think we're gonna go back to plastic tab batteries that pop out when you drop the phone.

• 1:10:20Alex Cranz?

  I miss this.

• 1:10:21Nilay Patel?

  And you might still have to be able to unscrew the phone. We'll see.

• 1:10:24Alex Cranz?

  It would make the phone thicker.

• 1:10:26Nilay Patel?

  It would make the phone thicker, potentially.

• 1:10:27Alex Cranz?

  Potentially affect waterproofing.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  But it really just depends on, like, where the connector for the battery is. Is it outside? Is it exposed? Or is it still inside the case and you just unscrew the case? I think if it comes down to, you can remove two screws in the bottom of your phone, pop up your phone, swap out the battery with a weird little connector that's pretty delicate, and you screw your phone back together.

• 1:10:49Alex Cranz?

  And then they get all the money from everybody bringing it in because they broke the delicate connector.

• 1:10:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:54Alex Cranz?

  Boom. It's easily replaceable. You just suck.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think we're gonna hear Apple go to war against this.

• 1:11:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  Like, they, like, didn't go to war against USB-C. You know, they're like, "Oh no, we have to use a connector we designed."

• 1:11:09Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 1:11:09Nilay Patel?

  If you don't know, Apple basically designed the USB-C connector. It's like a real thing. Fine, they're like, "We don't wanna do it, but we get it. We're already putting iPads." This is like, you're gonna blow up the phone market.

• 1:11:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. How many, how many Apple lawyers are currently in route to the EU?

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  747 is full of lawyers in that sense. Just going, getting over there. All right, let's do a little bit of lightning round. Let's wrap this thing up. Here's my lightning round one. I want to talk about this Gary Vaynerchuk interview on Decoder. So I interviewed Gary Vaynerchuk.

• 1:11:39Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna allow you to talk about Decoder because you're using it as your lightning.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  David said I'm allowed to do DVD liner notes for Decoder on The Vergecast.

• 1:11:45David Pierce?

  I just want you to know that this is two weeks in a row that you have talked about this on The Vergecast and I'm outraged.

• 1:11:51Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like, I'm the person who's always like, the fish never talk about the water. This is like a phrase he uses all the time. And I just did it to myself because if you have been in ad-supported media for a decade, you are aware that VaynerMedia is a gigantic ad agency that basically invented the concept of like social marketing. Like, the brands are added again is the thing that VaynerMedia like dragged into existence.

• 1:12:17Alex Cranz?

  Thank you, guys.

• 1:12:17Nilay Patel?

  It's not, whatever. It is, it's just true. I'm not saying-

• 1:12:21David Pierce?

  Without Gary Vaynerchuk, the phrase "Sir, this is a Wendy's" may not exist.

• 1:12:25Nilay Patel?

  Uh, any other clients, like real clients, like Pepsi and TikTok and what, like huge car companies are like VaynerMedia clients. So this is something I just like know because they're, they're just, I work in ad-supported media. I'm aware of ad agencies. I, it's a thing. Our audience does not know this and I completely forgot that this thing that is just like baked into my job of like knowing what ad agencies are. It's like, obviously nobody, they know the NFT guy. And I forgot to like say it out loud. Like, yes, I think, I think, is anyone confused about how I feel about NFTs?

• 1:12:58Alex Cranz?

  How do you feel about them?

• 1:12:59Nilay Patel?

  They're dumb.

• 1:13:02Nilay Patel?

  Look, what do you want from me? I think they're dumb. I, we called them scams for the whole time of NFT summer. Great. The thing I'm interested in is the end of the social web and the fact that being a content creator on a social platform is a fundamentally tenuous and hard way to earn a living. And all the big, the biggest creators in the world, they hit a point of their fame and they pivot to something more stable.

• 1:13:27Alex Cranz?

  Like fighting other people in a cage.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  Legitimately fighting other people in a cage. Fake boxing is a more stable career than being a YouTuber. That's weird. Right, selling, uh, we'll stay with the Paul brothers. Selling prime energy drinks is a more stable career than being a YouTuber. We, weird, there's weird outcomes left and right. You just go down the list, the D'Amelio sisters are selling shoes. I think it's because their dad used to be a shoe guy. But like they pivoted to, and they're like, we're going to innovate in the footwear space. And you just listen to that sentence. And you're like, but why are you doing that? And it's because it's a more stable business. And then you see what's happening with a lot of platforms and all the change. And so my interest.

• 1:14:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I want to go talk to the person who makes the platforms money. So when we talk about Facebook's revenue or TikTok's revenue. It comes from companies advertising on those platforms. And an ad agency sit in the middle of those transactions. So Facebook makes money because ad agencies like Publicis or whatever. Spend money on Facebook on behalf of their big clients. VaynerMedia invented a bunch of the stuff. And I just forgot to say it out loud. So I, I know people are mad at me about this interview and maybe I should have had him arrested on site. Maybe that's how you feel, like Gary Vaynerchuk. But the thing that's interesting to me is like, here's the company and here's a person who mastered that moment. And his view on where it's going is super interesting. If you think the moment is ending, which I do.

• 1:14:56Nilay Patel?

  He's at Cannes this week, the big ad agency thing in France. And he's giving speeches on stage, like AI. We're going to ruin our creative with AI. That's the part of him that I think you don't see where he talks to his people on the ad agency side. Like I said, I, I wish I'd reframed this interview. Dave and I have been talking about it since it came out, like, oh, I just forgot to say the thing I know.

• 1:15:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:20Nilay Patel?

  Not everybody thinks about ad, ad agencies as often as I do.

• 1:15:23David Pierce?

  I mean, the, yeah, Gary contains multitudes. He's a, he's a complicated dude.

• 1:15:27Nilay Patel?

  I think NFTs suck, by the way, I, I don't want to be like.

• 1:15:30David Pierce?

  And he, I will say, he does not make a compelling case for NFTs. He makes a compelling case for creating cool collectibles that people want. Why those need to be digital things on the blockchain? Don't know, but I just want to say.

• 1:15:42Alex Cranz?

  Faster and cheaper.

• 1:15:44David Pierce?

  Is it? I'm not even sure that's true. It's just worse is the only thing I know for sure. But the, the one thing I want to say, people should listen to the episode. It's, it, however you feel about Gary Vee, it's, it's a really interesting episode. But he says this one thing to you, Neelai, that has really stuck out to me. You're basically talking about kind of where to go on platforms and he is just ruthless about it. He's basically like, I go where the attention is. I, I have no other metrics. I want to be where people are. And you essentially are basically asking about how to sort of monetize as an influencer and what, whether you should worry when one goes away or just go where the attention is. Uh, and he says, that would be like saying running commercials on Seinfeld is not sustainable. No shit. Once it hasn't got the attention, you have to move on. Like, that's just it. Like, done. Just ruthless.

• 1:16:28David Pierce?

  It's like, I will go where people are and when people go somewhere else, I don't care where it is, I'll be there too. That's the internet.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  That's the internet, but it's also to me, that's why I keep saying like, the influencers aren't making money. Like, being the most famous TikToker is not a great business. It's certainly not like long-term sustainable. It'll, it'll burn you the hell out. Like, all these platforms rewards scale. Uh, I was talking to James Vincent today about just AI and what it's going to do to the web. And what we were talking about is if you are a YouTuber and you make four perfect YouTube videos a year, you're not going to make it. If you make two crappy YouTube videos a day with garish YouTube thumbnails, you're probably on your way to success. One of those things is going to burn you out. Instantly, immediate, like, no question, every YouTuber will tell you it will. Doug Demer, one of my favorite YouTubers, what's he pivoting towards? Cars and bids.

• 1:17:17Nilay Patel?

  What's cars and bids and the big investment in cars and bids allowing him to do right now? Expand the number of hosts on his channel. He's still going to make as many videos, he's the first person to tell you, but like, he's, he's spreading out the workload to make the amount of content that YouTube demands of him. That's just a weird place to be. So, you listen to Vaynerchuk's approach. He's not trying to monetize the content. He's trying to put ads near attention. And that's the internet. Like, that's how all the platforms are monetized. They are ruthless. And so I, I just think there's a turn in there where it's like, if you don't know where the money is going, you actually don't, you're not going to have an understanding of how the next platform shift will happen. Again, I forgot to say this out loud.

• 1:18:00Nilay Patel?

  Wish I had said this all out, but that's the impetus of this. And, you know, every day we will strive to be better. But that's, to me, it's, I really think we're at this like crazy moment in the social web. And talking to people who built it involves talking to the marketers who have built it because they're the money. Like, we, they have been, you know, that, what's the saying? If the thing, if you're not paying for it, you're the product?

• 1:18:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  They're the ones buying the product. And I, there's just something in there that I think is like, are they ready for this? Is, is that world ready for this too? I'll tell you one other quick story and then we can move on to the next sliding around. This is the longest sliding around entry in history. I was the CMO of a gigantic financial services company. And we were talking about the whole Bud Light kerfuffle. And the worry is that the internet has pushed marketers towards ultra-targeted advertising. That's what internet platforms sell, ultra-targeted advertising. You're going to make a piece of creative to sell Bud Light. You're going to find an audience for that creative that because that has been precisely targeted to them, they are going to be more likely to buy Bud Light. And then next to them, what is constantly happening is total context collapse,

• 1:19:09Nilay Patel?

  where like the precisely targeted thing becomes a culture war issue in some other way. And so just the way that people are thinking about even that, like the main thing you sell, targeted advertising, is, oh, boy, there's danger here that we weren't aware of because of the politics of the country.

• 1:19:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:25Nilay Patel?

  What are you going to do when targeted advertising is no longer a good idea? Right? Like, is that a Veritas story? I don't know, but it's boring. It was boring just saying it out loud just now. But like, I'm just like, that whole thing, that, this whole like apparatus of the social internet is straining under the weight. And like, I, I personally think I can do a better job of explaining why I'm interested in talking to people who built it. But when they change and when that money moves, these companies are going to shift like that overnight.

• 1:19:53David Pierce?

  To combat sports.

• 1:19:53Nilay Patel?

  The way the platforms are going to change overnight.

• 1:19:56David Pierce?

  They're going to shift to combat sports and everything's going to be fun.

• 1:19:59Nilay Patel?

  All right, Alex, let's roll into round one.

• 1:20:01Alex Cranz?

  Microsoft, who's just a little baby.

• 1:20:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:03Alex Cranz?

  They're so ineffectual and they're so small and tiny. They are increasing the price of Xbox Game Pass and the Xbox Series X. Not in the United States, but in a whole bunch of other places, including the UK. So naturally, our resident Brit, Tom Warren, wrote all about it. The price is going up a little bit for the Xbox Series X. And then it's about a dollar for Game Pass. It's kind of weird because how they're changing the prices. So if you have never subscribed to Xbox Game Pass, you've got to do it before July 6th to avoid the price hike immediately. That's when the price hike goes in for new customers. And then if you're a current customer, you don't have to deal with the price hike until August 13th.

• 1:20:48Alex Cranz?

  And people are kind of upset, they're a little bummed, but Microsoft has been telegraphing this for a while now. And this is all happening the exact same week that they are going to court with the FTC over whether or not they can acquire Activision. And part of that fight is that they have to say that they suck and that they should totally be allowed to buy this company because they're terrible and they suck and they're the worst in the world. And so they said that they lost the console wars, which I think is a massive, massive thing to drop into a legal dock, even if it's just to win a fight. I feel like that's going to have some lasting impact for the company.

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we'll see what happens in this trial.

• 1:21:30Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's ongoing, it's like five days.

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:33Alex Cranz?

  Today was day one, Tom has been covering all of it. There's a really great stream, you should totally go watch it, read it, because he's just giving minute by minute updates. And it's wild, but for the most part, they are really aggressively being like, we suck the most.

• 1:21:49Alex Cranz?

  We're just babies.

• 1:21:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we've lost the console battle.

• 1:21:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:51Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how this is going to shake out. You know, obviously, there's this trial, it'll go one way or another. There's, in the UK, the Competition Markets Authority there has already said, no dice.

• 1:22:01Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:22:01Nilay Patel?

  It feels like Microsoft should walk away.

• 1:22:03Alex Cranz?

  It does. It's a little perplexing that they keep going for it because it seems like it's not going to work in a lot of places. And how does that work?

• 1:22:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11Alex Cranz?

  Do you just stop operating in those countries when they say, no, you can't acquire it here? Like, do you make a ton of little splinter companies?

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Alex Cranz?

  It's just messy. And, but I think both sides really want this to happen. They want it to happen because they've been on a buying spree for the last few years, buying every single gaming company. So they want it to happen and then Activision wants it to happen because everybody hates Activision.

• 1:22:32Nilay Patel?

  They would like to stop being Activision.

• 1:22:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:34David Pierce?

  Although they get $3 billion if the deal falls apart. So it's a

• 1:22:38Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 1:22:38David Pierce?

  good spot to be in for Activision either way.

• 1:22:40Nilay Patel?

  I would just remind everyone, I'm not saying this is the same at all. But remember when AT&T was gonna buy T-Mobile? Do you remember this? And the government stopped it. It's a real thing that happened and T-Mobile walked away with a breakup fee and then became T-Mobile.

• 1:22:52Alex Cranz?

  And then bought Sprint.

• 1:22:53Nilay Patel?

  Less good. Remember when our nation had four wireless carriers and now we're down to three and Dish Network? Different times, but

• 1:23:01Nilay Patel?

  a little competition goes a long way. All right, David, what's your lightning round?

• 1:23:04David Pierce?

  Uh, mine's very quick because both of you all just took forever. Which is just that the TikTok CEO, V Pappas, is leaving the company, which is a big deal because they are kind of the American figurehead of TikTok. For a minute, it was Kevin Mayer who was gonna be the American figurehead. That was a hilarious disaster. He basically like took one look around the room and was like, never mind. And so V has been the COO and the CEO had Shu Chiu has been more visible in recent months. But V leaving is a, is a big deal and I think continues to be more and more evidence that TikTok is not going to get its way and be a happy company in the United States for very long.

• 1:23:47David Pierce?

  I cannot imagine being the like American symbol of TikTok is a particularly fun job. And so I'm not super shocked, but it is yet another bad sign if you're a person watching to see how TikTok fares in the United States.

• 1:24:00Nilay Patel?

  So TikTok CEO Shu Chiu sent an email to the company saying V Pappas was leaving. And then the spin is, don't worry. We've hired 20-year Disney veteran Zenia Moucha to join the company in the new role of TikTok's chief brand and communications officer.

• 1:24:15David Pierce?

  Which is not the same thing.

• 1:24:17Alex Cranz?

  Not, very different.

• 1:24:19Nilay Patel?

  And you can, it's like, where is the challenge? The challenge is talking about what TikTok is to a bunch of senators. Not operating TikTok. Rough.

• 1:24:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:28Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna try to get all these people at the Code Conference, by the way. Including our friend Steve Hoffman.

• 1:24:33David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:24:33Nilay Patel?

  He can correct us in person. But I, I agree with you, David. I think that the, the signs are ominous, I would say, around TikTok right now.

• 1:24:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, agreed.

• 1:24:42Alex Cranz?

  The vibes are bad.

• 1:24:42Nilay Patel?

  I don't think Project Texas is gonna go.

• 1:24:44David Pierce?

  We're about to hit a presidential campaign and I think this is about to flare up again in a pretty big way. And I suspect V, among other people, saw the writing on the wall on that one.

• 1:24:53Nilay Patel?

  One last lightning round, I want to end on a high note.

• 1:24:55Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:24:56Nilay Patel?

  DP Review got purchased by Gear Patrol.

• 1:24:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:59Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna live. It's good. And we, we, I, we love that site. We love the work they do.

• 1:25:05Alex Cranz?

  Very happy about that.

• 1:25:06Nilay Patel?

  Weird, weird behavior from Amazon trying to shut it down before selling it. For what I assume is just like nothing to Gear Patrol, which was happy to take it and they're right home for it. But, huh, good. It's good.

• 1:25:18David Pierce?

  DP Review is great. If you are a camera nerd, it's probably already your favorite website. If you're not a camera nerd, go and you will become a camera nerd.

• 1:25:26Alex Cranz?

  You will.

• 1:25:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Alex Cranz?

  I'll get that Rico one day.

• 1:25:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:29Alex Cranz?

  PR3.

• 1:25:30Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, it's pretty.

• 1:25:31Alex Cranz?

  It's so pretty.

• 1:25:32Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're gonna go and shop for cameras. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Uh, Wednesday, like I said, we'll have full coverage of this Microsoft trial that has literally been going on in the background while we're taping. There's a live stream on the, the site. Tom has been covering it like as it goes. We'll have lots of analysis. That's all happening. Look at the site, theverge.com if you don't remember what it is. You're this far into the Vergecast, you know, it's theverge.com.

• 1:25:54David Pierce?

  It's a good website.

• 1:25:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know what you're doing. Also, we've gotten a number of submissions to our wearables equation. We're gonna get into that next week, right?

• 1:26:02Alex Cranz?

  They're very good.

• 1:26:02Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna lay them all out. We, we have to do some algebra. So we're gonna figure out how to do algebra on this podcast.

• 1:26:08David Pierce?

  Just imagine that scene from A Beautiful Mind. That's gonna be us next week.

• 1:26:12Nilay Patel?

  It's great. I love those submissions. If you have them, keep it, [email protected]. Email us your wearable equation submissions. It's been fun to read them all. We'll get into it next week. All right. That's it. That's Vergecast.

• 1:26:29David Pierce?

  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.

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