Pod Insights The Vergecast The next Macs and the next Twitter About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the next Apple event, a Twitter successor, and Windows Phone regrets.
Further reading:
Apple plans ‘Scary Fast’ product event just before Halloween
Apple’s future AirPods roadmap just leaked, and big changes are coming
Apple TV Plus is getting a price hike — and other Apple subscriptions are, too
The Apple Watch’s double tap points at a new way to use wearables
iOS 17.2 Beta Introduces Journal App - MacRumors
Meta’s Threads app has almost 100 million users, says Mark Zuckerberg
Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella admits giving up on Windows Phone and mobile was a mistake
Here’s your first look at Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater gameplay
Humane's AI Pin is Here’s your first look at Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater gameplay
Google reportedly pays $18 billion a year to be Apple’s default search engine
Is my co-worker AI? Bizarre product reviews leave Gannett staff wondering
In the end, the FTX trial was about the friends screwed along the way
The obsessive tormentor who made professors’ lives miserable
The restaurant nearest Google
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 17,885 words · 6 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:11 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of Samsung Dex powered by Knox, supported by Android. It's real. When you turn on a Samsung phone, the logos are out of control. Powered by Knox.
1:24 David Pierce? I mean, it has always been thus. Nobody is better at logos than Samsung.
1:29 Nilay Patel? It's very good.
1:29 Alex Cranz? This is some touchwiz in there.
1:31 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm your friend Neelai. David Pierce is here.
1:32 David Pierce? Hi, we're in the studio together. This is very exciting.
1:34 Nilay Patel? You can just reach over and smack Alex if he wants.
1:37 David Pierce? Thank God, honestly.
1:38 Nilay Patel? Alex Franz is here.
1:39 Alex Cranz? I'm just really excited to hear Neelai talk about Dex.
1:42 Nilay Patel? It's a full hour of talking about Dex.
1:44 Alex Cranz? That's all we're doing today.
1:45 Nilay Patel? There's quite a lot. Apple has a surprise event in primetime up against Monday Night Football.
1:50 Alex Cranz? That's choice.
1:51 Nilay Patel? That's a real thing that's happening. There's some AirPod leaks, price hikes on services, a real theme of our show lately. David wants to talk about one year of X, and I believe we're going to put social networks on the go 90 scale.
2:04 David Pierce? We are, in fact.
2:05 Nilay Patel? It's just going to be incredible. And then we have a lightning round, including, I would say, the funniest recurring lightning round element of all time, which is Microsoft executives either bemoaning or being proud of the fact that they killed Windows 3. And the needle just swings back and forth between those two things.
2:21 Alex Cranz? Right.
2:21 Nilay Patel? The same people every couple of years. It's coming up on the Vergecast, but first, let's talk Dex.
2:27 David Pierce? Can I just read everyone two messages from Slack?
2:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:30 David Pierce? That Neel I sent. At 11:28 a.m. on Tuesday, October 24th. Neel I sends, "We have a Vergecast room for all of us that make the show." Neel I just says, "Also, hello from Dex." And then a moment later, "I have paired it to a mechanical keyboard, so that's the worst for everyone in this office." And there are two typos in that message. So, this is now, this is now an important part of my life, is tracking your Dex situation. And in general, your Ninja Train situation.
2:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah, okay.
2:58 David Pierce? How are we doing?
2:59 Nilay Patel? Here's, here are the basic updates. I have a Z Fold 5, a really cool Z Fold 5. It has a D-Brand skin on it. So that's cool.
3:08 David Pierce? It does look good.
3:08 Nilay Patel? It looks really good.
3:09 David Pierce? Putting those skins on is not a small amount of work, is the thing I've discovered, but they do look very cool.
3:13 Nilay Patel? It looks very cool. Boy, do I dislike this phone. Boy, do I just not like it. And it's not Android. I like a number of Android phones. Android's great. Specifically, trying to use a folding phone for what I'm trying to do is not good.
3:29 David Pierce? Are you one of those people who's like really mad about the crease in the middle?
3:32 Nilay Patel? No, so don't mind the crease. The Z Fold 5, so the Pixel Fold and Z Fold 5 are kind of the same folding display, but they fold in, in different directions. So Samsung went with tall, skinny, and Google went with
3:43 David Pierce? Short and wide.
3:44 Nilay Patel? The correct way.
3:45 David Pierce? Yeah.
3:46 Nilay Patel? So, using this phone when it's closed is ridiculous.
3:49 David Pierce? It's a TV remote. It just really is.
3:50 Nilay Patel? And it, nothing quite works right. And then, when you open it, you have to use two hands.
3:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
3:55 Nilay Patel? Which is fine, so I'm on the train, I got my tablet, and it jelly scrolls. So, the display controller, I think, is on the left. And so I scroll with my finger on the right, so the left side of the screen moves up faster than the right side of the screen.
4:09 David Pierce? It's super.
4:09 Nilay Patel? And so the text, I can just see it go whoop.
4:12 David Pierce? Yeah.
4:12 Nilay Patel? And I can see, Dan can't see it. We just argued, we just argued about this in the office. He's like, "I don't know what you're talking about." And I was like, "I'm on a roller coaster." I don't, I don't like this.
4:20 David Pierce? It's such a funny thing, because this is one of those things with phones that we largely solved. Like, back 10 years ago on this show, like, I bet if you go back to Verge Casts from like, 2013 and 2012, there were a lot of people mad about wonky scrolling stuff on Android phones. And the thing where like, you can't scroll and read the text at the same time, which is kind of how I always describe it to people. And we're back at this somehow. We're back at, although I will say, Neil, I just opened his phone and got immensely distracted.
4:48 Alex Cranz? The scrolling, the scrolling.
4:49 David Pierce? So Samsung should be doing something right here.
4:51 Nilay Patel? It doesn't have a, it doesn't have a ringer switch. I had to open it and like monkey with one UI to turn off the ringer. So that's the phone. So the first part of this, where I just roll up on the train, I've got one device. I don't like using this phone. I understand why it's sick as hell.
5:06 David Pierce? Yeah.
5:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
5:07 Nilay Patel? And in that blissful moment, when I've got it open and I'm reading the Google Doc and someone's like, what is that? That's, that rules.
5:14 David Pierce? Yeah. But then I- Do you get that? Do you get a lot of like, people looking at your shoulder being like, whoa, foldable phone?
5:19 Alex Cranz? On the train?
5:19 Nilay Patel? It's a flashy thing to do, to unfold a phone, even in 2023. People have seen them, but you're still just like, haha, whoop.
5:28 David Pierce? Oh, you'd like to see this larger? No problem.
5:30 Alex Cranz? Just make eye contact as you do it.
5:31 Nilay Patel? So that part's cool.
5:32 David Pierce? That's for your train ticket, you're just like, one second, let me open up my phone?
5:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and you're always just kind of like in a fight, whatever, but that part is fine. Like, it's a phone, it works, it's a good, fast Android Samsung phone. Except I find the display scrolling to be extremely distracting. That might just be me, a noted pixel density enthusiast, might just be me. Some people can't see it. Okay, fine. Then you get to Dex. So you roll in the office, you have a USB-C dock and a Bluetooth mechanical keyboard. And I'm just pulling stuff out of our reviews closet.
6:05 Alex Cranz? I like, how many keyboards did you go through? Because I kept going in and out of meetings.
6:09 Nilay Patel? I'm at the third now, I'm at a Logi MX Mini, or whatever it's called.
6:12 Alex Cranz? They were just stacking up on your desk.
6:14 Nilay Patel? It was not great. And then I've got a Razer gaming mouse, like a wired, ultra-high DPI gaming mouse.
6:21 Alex Cranz? It's like 20 buttons on it.
6:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there's a lot of buttons on the side, all of which appear to be mapped to something in Android for some reason, which is not great, because I'm, whatever. So you plug in a USB-C dock HDMI display. Then you get to Dex. And then Dan, Dex expert, Dan Seifert.
6:39 David Pierce? The Dexpert.
6:40 Alex Cranz? The masthead.
6:42 Nilay Patel? He told me that you have to install an app called Goodlock.
6:46 David Pierce? Okay.
6:47 Nilay Patel? Which is made by Samsung. To ultra customize Samsung One UI. And his characterization of this app is they made this app to get around Google's restrictions. Cause they have to ship One UI not too far away from Android.
7:04 David Pierce? Right, because Samsung for a decade completely lost its mind with software design and tried to shove apps called Milk Music at you. Google was like, stop doing that.
7:12 Nilay Patel? So now all that stuff is in Good Lock. It's called Good Lock.
7:17 Alex Cranz? Is Milk Music in there?
7:18 Nilay Patel? Good Lock has two tabs at the bottom.
7:20 David Pierce? Do you think it sounds like Good Luck on purpose where they're just like, here's some stuff?
7:23 Nilay Patel? It's what it feels like. Look, I know there are extremely hardcore Galaxy fans out there who think I'm crazy for only now discovering Good Lock, and I apologize. I'm just saying this is an app where at the bottom of the screen, the two tabs are Make Up and Life Up.
7:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
7:40 Nilay Patel? And then you can install various plugins to One UI.
7:43 Alex Cranz? Did you life up?
7:44 Nilay Patel? I lifeed up a little bit and I installed the plugin that lets Dex run at 1440p. So now I'm running Dex.
7:52 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
7:52 Nilay Patel? Looking good. Dex runs Android apps, it turns out. So Slack doesn't have a sidebar.
7:58 Alex Cranz? So gross looking.
7:59 Nilay Patel? You're just using the Android app wider.
8:01 David Pierce? Right.
8:02 Nilay Patel? On your desktop computer.
8:04 David Pierce? Tablet apps, it just makes of them as many, many, many phone apps.
8:07 Nilay Patel? No, so then I solved this problem by running Slack as a web app in Chrome, in which it is very broken because it's running an Android Chrome in desktop mode.
8:16 David Pierce? This is the thing about-
8:16 Nilay Patel? I was so close to this working.
8:18 David Pierce? This is the thing about the whole Android and Google universe is it's all there. They've made all the things.
8:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
8:25 David Pierce? It's just like they refuse to have the meeting where they're like, what if your thing and your thing both existed in the same place? And they're like, we would never do that.
8:35 Nilay Patel? So again, Dan's advice to me was treat this like Chromebook and use Samsung's internet browser because it's better on this than Chrome. So I switched to Samsung's browser, moderately better.
8:46 David Pierce? Okay.
8:47 Nilay Patel? It's just not quite there, is what I would say. You can see how it would rule.
8:52 Alex Cranz? Like, your desktop looked like a very functional desktop from afar.
8:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
8:58 Alex Cranz? When I last saw it, I didn't see a keyboard attached. I just saw you were using the phone as a touchpad.
9:04 Nilay Patel? Yes, that's true. Before I had a mouse, you can just use the fold as a touchpad. So that was my touchpad with like my little mechanical keyboard next to it.
9:12 Alex Cranz? The screen looked, the monitor looked, I was like, oh, that looks like a computer monitor with like computer stuff happening.
9:18 David Pierce? Can we get to the thing you were gonna do in the lightning round, but we should just talk about right now? Which is-
9:24 Nilay Patel? Talk about Metal Gear Solid.
9:25 David Pierce? You know, yeah, you can talk about that in the lightning round. But no, Satya Nadella gave an interview this week to Business Insider in which he, like every other Microsoft executive in history, said giving up on mobile and Windows Phone was a mistake. And like, you know who could have done a good job at the thing you are describing is Microsoft.
9:45 Nilay Patel? They sort of tried. They have tried.
9:47 David Pierce? They're trying now. They stopped trying for a long time. They're like, sort of pushing in back in that direction. But like, all the stuff you're describing where it's like, oh, I want a thing that like runs Android apps when it's my phone, but then I sit down and I have something that is much closer to a full desktop operating system. It's like, you know who could have built that starting 12 years ago, but instead did a bunch of weird shit and then shut all their platforms down and fired their CEO? It's Microsoft.
10:10 Nilay Patel? All right, let me just read, I'll read you the quote. Here's Nadella quote, because boy, does he agree with you. He was asked, "What about a mistake or a wrong decision that you might regret?" Nadella says, "The decision I think a lot of people talk about, and one of the most difficult decisions I made when I became CEO, was our exit of what I'll call the mobile phone as defined then. In retrospect, I think there could have been ways that we made it work by perhaps reinventing the category of computing between PCs, tablets, and phones."
10:41 David Pierce? You're totally right. I read that as him saying there's another category of devices that we didn't do, didn't think about. But he's definitely saying there is a version of a phone that is kind of all of those things, and we should have built it.
10:55 Nilay Patel? Or he's hinting that they're gonna try it yet again.
10:58 Alex Cranz? Sure, but they aren't.
11:00 David Pierce? Parnell's Panay. He tried so hard.
11:03 Alex Cranz? That's not gonna happen. They just, because they either have to do Android, or they have to do the thing everybody else has to do, which is build an entire OS from scratch.
11:11 Nilay Patel? Look, I'm just gonna say this directly to our friend Satya Nadella. If you're listening, Satya, you made the right decision. It was strategic catastrophe to buy Nokia. Yeah. And then to do Windows Phone instead of. It looked cool, though. It was all stupid.
11:28 David Pierce? Oh, yeah. The bad calls were made before him.
11:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah. He was just like, you know what? The platform is on fire. Into the ocean with you. That is a very deep cut. I'm not going to explain it, but for the people who get it, into the freezing Finnish ocean with you is basically what Sachin and said to these people. And that's, I think that was fine. I think the company is doing much better. Well, I think he's hinting at here is, and we're going to talk about humane later, too.
11:52 David Pierce? Yeah.
11:53 Nilay Patel? There's like, suddenly a bunch of people are like, what comes after the phone? And there's a lot of action around what comes after the phone, mostly because none of these people have businesses.
12:00 David Pierce? I was gonna say, the people who say all of that are not Apple and not Google, who really like phones.
12:06 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's just, there's just a lot of heat around what comes after the phone again, comes up every so often. And this is when the pendulum swings for Microsoft executives to, oh, should we have quit on the phone? And like, a year ago, he asked Nadella this question. He was like, that was the best decision I've ever made, is getting away from this dinosaur and saying, we sell services across everyone's platforms.
12:27 David Pierce? Yeah. I mean, I think, in general, Alex, I think you're right that this is never going to work at Microsoft to be foolish to try now. And I think it's been foolish to try really for the last five years to start building towards that again. But I do think there's a really interesting tech history alternate universe.
12:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
12:42 David Pierce? In which we tried to do this, right? Because I think.
12:44 Nilay Patel? I'm holding people trying to do it.
12:47 David Pierce? Even if decks were amazing.
12:48 Nilay Patel? It unfolds into a bigger screen. Have you seen it? It's amazing.
12:51 David Pierce? Even if decks were amazing, I don't think there's ever going to be a mainstream use for it, because it's just not how we've like, learned to use technology. It's just not how it works.
13:00 Nilay Patel? Here's the, actually, besides all the little problems in the software, there's one deeply hilarious problem with this entire approach to having just one thing. I come to the office. The whole point of this is I don't have a desk anymore. If I had a desk, I'd just put a laptop on the desk and I would leave. Which is what I did for years. But now, because we're like roaming desks, hybrid work, da, da, da. So I don't have a desk. So I'm like, I can't just leave my laptop on this like hotel desk. But then I have to get up. I know.
13:29 Alex Cranz? I would.
13:30 Nilay Patel? I have to get up and go to meetings all the time. Where having my computer is often useful. And instead, I have this little guy. And I'm just like, me me me me. What am I doing?
13:40 David Pierce? Nothing cooler than sitting on your phone in a meeting, being like, no, I'm taking notes on the meeting. So worry.
13:45 Alex Cranz? Everybody's like, open the spreadsheet.
13:46 Nilay Patel? With my little folding phone in laptop mode. Like, this is the worst.
13:50 David Pierce? Yeah.
13:51 Nilay Patel? So anyway, I'm gonna, I'm gonna try this for another week. Just for the comedy of it all. And I'm because I, I feel like I should write down some of these experiences.
13:58 David Pierce? Agreed.
13:59 Nilay Patel? About the future of computing and jelly scrolling, to be quite honest. And then I think my, my solution is gonna be, I'm just gonna leave my laptop in the reviews closet where I found this one.
14:08 David Pierce? That feels great.
14:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
14:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:09 Nilay Patel? And then I'll just buy another computer for home.
14:12 David Pierce? Okay.
14:12 Nilay Patel? And that's the real solution.
14:13 David Pierce? Your homework for next week, though, is you're not allowed to bring your laptop to the Vergecast. You have to do the Vergecast.
14:19 Alex Cranz? Ooh.
14:19 David Pierce? From with only your, you can bring your whole damn deck setup if you want to. Bring, bring the mechanical keyboard, bring the Razer mouse. No laptop allowed next week.
14:29 Nilay Patel? You do not want me to bring a mechanical keyboard to the Vergecast?
14:32 Alex Cranz? I mean, I do.
14:33 Nilay Patel? For our audience's sake alone, you do not want that amount of noise in this room.
14:37 Alex Cranz? Our audio engineer would not be a fan now.
14:40 Nilay Patel? He can AI it right out.
14:41 David Pierce? Yeah, it's no problem. Nvidia's got a thing for that.
14:43 Nilay Patel? All right, let's talk about some actual news. There's a bunch of actual news. We should start with Apple because there's a bunch of Apple news, including an event.
14:50 David Pierce? Yep.
14:51 Nilay Patel? So there was, there was some rumor build up late last week, early this week, that Apple's gonna have some Macs. A lot of people didn't believe it because we're just.
14:59 David Pierce? It's late in the year.
15:00 Nilay Patel? It's late in the year.
15:00 David Pierce? Yeah. We have passed the point typically where Apple is commonly going to release products. And there have been some rumors that there were gonna be no iPads for the rest of the year and no Macs for the rest of the year. And then Apple did the thing where they launched that stupid pencil that we talked about last week. So everybody was like, okay, well, if they were gonna have another event where they were gonna launch the pencil, why would they do this this way? I think it's just because it's stupid. They wanted to get it out of the way. So yeah, there were a lot of good reasons to think there wasn't gonna be an event. And then all of a sudden, out of nowhere, we have an event.
15:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So Monday night, at night.
15:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:30 Nilay Patel? The night before Halloween. It's called Scary Fast. That's the name on the invite. Streaming only. And we believe it's gonna be Macs.
15:39 David Pierce? We assume it's gonna be Macs because it's like the most likely thing. And there's been some reporting about it. The M3, we think, coming to MacBook Pros.
15:47 Alex Cranz? Okay.
15:47 David Pierce? And potentially a new 24-inch iMac. All of that stuff is kind of overdue.
15:52 Alex Cranz? No 27-inch.
15:53 David Pierce? Which drives me insane.
15:55 Nilay Patel? I think John Gruber believes there will be a 27-inch.
15:58 David Pierce? I hope so. I think John Gruber might be, they call it wish casting.
16:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:02 David Pierce? Uh, which is a term that I love very much. I hope he's right, I really do. But, yeah, the 24-inch iMac is pretty overdue for an update at this point. And I think the 27-inch iMac is just the studio display in the Mac Studio now. I think that's how Apple sees it. It's wrong, and I hope they change their mind. But, yeah, that and MacBook Pros, which doesn't really seem like it merits a whole event. They don't seem to have invited anybody to this.
16:26 Nilay Patel? No, no, so here's what I believe. Here's what I believe about this event.
16:30 Alex Cranz? I've heard this theory already.
16:32 Nilay Patel? Apple is looking at its own streaming numbers. They know it's probably just chip bumps to existing form factors. A reasonable guess, right? And they know that people will watch their events no matter what. So they're gonna do a primetime infomercial that millions of people are gonna watch. And it's just gonna be a weird spooky Halloween-themed TV show about the Mac.
16:53 David Pierce? Okay, I have several questions.
16:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:54 David Pierce? Question number one: Does Tim Cook come out in costume?
16:57 Alex Cranz? Yes, Frankenstein. Or Frankenstein's monster.
17:00 Nilay Patel? You think he's gonna be Frankenstein's monster?
17:01 Alex Cranz? Like, I just wanna see, I mean, mainly because I wanna see Tim Cook with like a green face, just like presenting products, cuz it'd be funny.
17:09 Nilay Patel? What do you think the maximum amount of costume Tim Cook would wear is? I've been thinking about this cuz my parents are coming this weekend to do our first Halloween with Macs in the new town. And I told my mom, I was like, I'm gonna buy you costumes. And she was, she just made this noise.
17:24 Nilay Patel? Like, and I was like, okay, what if I just get you like a witch's hat? And she's like, okay, what about like a witch's cloak? I got my dad a big silly haggard beard. And I'm just seeing how far I can push it, like how many additional elements I can add. And like, suddenly they will just be in full kit. And I don't think I'm gonna get there. I think I'm gonna get to two elements and we're gonna stop.
17:43 David Pierce? Yeah, I feel like you can do like hat and beard.
17:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
17:45 David Pierce? And that's about as far as you're getting.
17:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so what, how many elements do you think we can get on Tim Cook?
17:50 Alex Cranz? Oh, I think he goes all the way.
17:51 Nilay Patel? You think, you think he's just a full commit?
17:53 David Pierce? No, Craig goes all the way.
17:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I know Craig goes all the way.
17:56 David Pierce? Craig would be unrecognizable.
17:57 Nilay Patel? Craig, full Dracula is my belief.
17:59 David Pierce? Ooh, that's good.
18:00 Alex Cranz? Ooh, with the hair?
18:02 Nilay Patel? Cause the hair, cause you get the big flowy Dracula, you know?
18:05 Alex Cranz? And like the, the little cravat or whatever that, that Dracula always wears.
18:08 David Pierce? I think Tim Cook is gonna be more like...
18:10 Nilay Patel? I wanna come back to Dracula always wears a cravat.
18:13 Alex Cranz? Is it, whatever the thing is he wears.
18:15 Nilay Patel? I, I only, I only recognize the Blade Dracula Drake. Please continue.
18:20 David Pierce? I have Drake, short for Dracula.
18:22 Nilay Patel? That's what they called him in this movie.
18:24 David Pierce? That rules. I think Tim Cook is more like the, like in The Office, they have a Halloween episode, and Jim shows up with a, just a name tag on that says Dave. And Dwight's like, "What are you for Halloween?" And he points at it and goes, "I'm Dave." I feel like that's about the level of costume I would expect from Tim Cook.
18:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
18:40 David Pierce? He's gonna wear like a full zip instead of a quarter zip and be like, "Halloween."
18:45 Nilay Patel? Alright, but this is just my general theory here.
18:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
18:47 Nilay Patel? Is that Apple owns a streaming service, they have Hollywood stars and celebrities at their beck and call, and they know their numbers. They know they can attract attention on primetime on a Monday, up against Monday Night Football, and that's gonna be fine for them.
19:01 David Pierce? So...
19:02 Nilay Patel? No other company can do this.
19:03 David Pierce? I agree with everything you just said, I just don't understand tactically why you would do it for a boring event and not the iPhone.
19:09 Alex Cranz? This is, this is what I keep getting stuck on is like, "Why now?"
19:15 Nilay Patel? So, I have two...
19:16 David Pierce? Yeah, why, why make your Ultra Flex spec bumps to laptops?
19:18 Alex Cranz? Unless Tim Cook goes full costume.
19:21 Nilay Patel? Because the stakes are low. They have to, when it's the iPhone, all the analysts have to come, the partners have to come, the stock price has to go up or down, they have to do, we have to be there, the press has to be there, do the hands out, like, there's a whole bunch of stuff you gotta do with the iPhone. And they're still veering that towards full infomercial.
19:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
19:41 David Pierce? Oh, yeah.
19:42 Nilay Patel? This, if it's just a bunch of spec bumps to a Mac... They don't have to do any of that stuff.
19:47 Alex Cranz? Who was the last, I was trying to think about this.
19:50 Nilay Patel? You can test the conceit that you can move the event to primetime.
19:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
19:55 David Pierce? Right. Whereas if you try it with the iPhone and it flops, you've made a huge mistake.
19:59 Nilay Patel? Right. Whereas this is just like, we're just having fun at Halloween. But I think their events are headed inexorably in this direction.
20:06 Alex Cranz? Who was the last person to do a primetime infomercial? Because all I could think of was the Victoria's Secret fashion show. And like, there's a reason.
20:14 Nilay Patel? If Apple brings out Taylor Swift and Fall Out Boy for this thing, it's all over.
20:18 David Pierce? I mean, what this makes me think of is that event Apple had, Jesus, I don't know, five years ago, when they brought out the, all the Apple TV people.
20:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:26 David Pierce? And it was just a parade of celebrities with nothing to show. It was the worst Apple event.
20:30 Alex Cranz? I remember that.
20:31 David Pierce? Ever. We're all just sitting in the room and it was a bunch of people being like, here's a TV show we're talking about making.
20:35 Alex Cranz? Remember?
20:36 David Pierce? Do you have anything to show us? And then they like, had a couple of trailers at the end, but it was just a lot of like, Kumail Nanjiani being like, I might make a TV show.
20:43 Alex Cranz? Remember there was one, like an acting exercise and they're like, listen to the wind.
20:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:48 David Pierce? Some deeply.
20:49 Nilay Patel? This was before they had shows. They didn't show a lot of trailers. They, they were just like, Oprah's here. And she's like, there are a billion pockets.
20:53 David Pierce? Right. And the pitch was, look at all these celebrities who will do stuff with us.
20:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:58 David Pierce? And I would guess, if you're gonna do something like this again, I would not be shocked if there are musical guests, which Apple really hasn't done in a while. Uh, if there are lots of celebrities.
21:07 Alex Cranz? Heidi Klum is there.
21:08 David Pierce? It's just.
21:09 Alex Cranz? Because she goes all out.
21:10 David Pierce? Victoria's Secret fashion show.
21:11 Alex Cranz? No, no, she goes all out for Halloween. Like, remember the year she dressed as a worm?
21:17 Nilay Patel? Tim Cook there with a name tag that says Dave and then it's Heidi Klum in full worm.
21:21 Alex Cranz? That's all, like, that's TV.
21:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah. See, this is how you make a spectacle on television. This is just my theory. It could just be a bogged, standard Mac event. I just think if you're gonna program something of this in primetime, the night before Halloween, you definitely have cravats. That's, that's a given.
21:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
21:39 Nilay Patel? But I think the most important piece of the puzzle is like, Does Apple think that it is primetime entertainment?
21:46 David Pierce? Oh, I absolutely think it does.
21:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
21:47 David Pierce? Yeah, no, I think that's right.
21:49 Nilay Patel? Because you have to believe that about yourself in order to attract eyeballs at this time. And I think they will be successful. I think a lot of people are going to watch this thing. All of us are going to be waited on pins and needles for 27 inch IMAX. 27 inch IMAX. There's only one metric of success. Do I buy a new 27 inch IMAC?
22:04 Alex Cranz? Well, no, if they do it at primetime, are they truly competing with primetime TV? Are we going to see like, like, is that what we need to measure them against or just other Apple events? Like, do we need to measure them against Monday night?
22:16 Nilay Patel? Wait, I have no idea how many people watch Apple.
22:17 David Pierce? You see like the concurrent numbers on YouTube or whatever, but that's only part of it. I think there's been a bunch of interesting news this week, like Apple TV plus got more expensive as a lot of their services did. There was the news from Bloomberg that Apple is making yet more effort to consolidate everything into the TV space. It just feels like we are definitely at this moment where Apple is trying to flex itself as an entertainment company. And I think the idea that it's, it's going to treat its stuff as like huge TV and they're going to start to have like Apple event up fronts. I think is like not true, but there's definitely a thing that's happening that Apple believes everyone will pay attention no matter what it does.
22:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
22:50 David Pierce? I still don't understand why that leads you to say, let's do this at 8:00 PM Eastern on a Monday night just because we can like.
22:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
22:57 David Pierce? That's weird, but I think it'll work. Like it's, it's going to work in the sense that a lot of people are going to pay attention because people always pay attention because it's Apple. And the funniest part of this is no other company has been able to get to where Apple was like 10 years ago in terms of making their events an event. Sony tried really hard for a long time. Samsung continues to try.
23:16 Nilay Patel? Sony did have Taylor Swift. I just want to put that out there.
23:19 David Pierce? Yeah, Sony literally had Taylor Swift.
23:21 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but it wasn't good. It was like deeply uncomfortable.
23:24 Nilay Patel? It was, they were doing 3D TVs. It was not like a great time.
23:27 David Pierce? Yeah, they said, look at the TV Taylor Swift is on instead of looking at Taylor Swift over there.
23:31 Alex Cranz? She wasn't like Taylor Swift yet. She was like Taylor Swift.
23:34 David Pierce? Taylor Swift has always been Taylor Swift.
23:36 Alex Cranz? But there was like different degrees.
23:37 Nilay Patel? I'm so afraid.
23:38 Alex Cranz? There was like Taylor Swift where I confused her with Jessica Simpson and that's where she was at then.
23:43 David Pierce? You, that feels like a new problem.
23:44 Nilay Patel? I'm worried about your physical safety.
23:47 Alex Cranz? I love Taylor Swift. I'm a huge fan of the Eras Tour.
23:51 David Pierce? The cool move for Apple, because it's going against Monday Night Football, would be to bring Taylor Swift and Travis Kelce. That's how you one up Sony. You get them to publicly announce their relationship.
24:03 Nilay Patel? So we think it's chip bumps. We're not doing that.
24:05 Alex Cranz? No, it's, I like this plan better.
24:08 Nilay Patel? It's, Tim Cook is dressed up as Taylor Swift.
24:10 David Pierce? And Craig is Travis Kelce.
24:12 Nilay Patel? You see what I'm saying. It's a very obvious move.
24:14 David Pierce? Well, we figured it out.
24:15 Nilay Patel? So we think, we think we're getting M3s and MacBook Pros. We think we're getting a 24-inch iMac refresh. We'll see.
24:22 David Pierce? Yeah.
24:22 Nilay Patel? Then there's some other stuff leaked. Gorman had new AirPods. Apparently the third gen AirPods are not selling well. People are just buying the cheaper, older ones. Because if you're in that middle, why not go all the way to the Pros is basically my feeling.
24:34 David Pierce? Yeah. I think there are basically two kinds of AirPod buyers right now. There are people who buy the newest Pros, because they're the best ones and they're very good. And there are people who buy the thing that goes on sale at Costco.
24:44 Nilay Patel? Yep.
24:44 David Pierce? I am the person who bought them on sale at Costco. I literally could not tell you what generation of AirPods I have. And I don't care because they're AirPods. I don't like the Pros because I don't like the sticking them in the ear canals. That just feels bad in my ears. But I think that's the case now. There's, they have entry level AirPods and new Pros and anything in between.
25:03 Nilay Patel? There's yet another kind of buyer.
25:06 David Pierce? Okay.
25:06 Nilay Patel? And I have seen them. It's not Costco. It's the people who buy the knockoff AirPod Maxes at Home Depot, which are just in the middle of the store.
25:13 David Pierce? At Home Depot?
25:15 Nilay Patel? I see, I see people pick this. I met, we bought new hats in Home Depot every weekend.
25:19 Alex Cranz? That's where you live now.
25:20 Nilay Patel? It's just like where I'm going. And I watched people walk by this display of knockoff AirPod Maxes at the Home Depot. And they pick up the box and they look at them. And I, I've seen at least two people do like a furtive look around. Because, because they know and then they walk away with the box. And I'm like, oh, all, there's a lot of people on the New York City subway wearing the Home Depot AirPod Maxes. And I don't even know, like, why is some people allowed to sell
25:46 Alex Cranz? How?
25:46 Nilay Patel? fully counterfeit products, but it's happening.
25:49 Alex Cranz? How much are they?
25:49 Nilay Patel? Every weekend I see this. They're like 20 bucks. Like David's scrolling through them right now.
25:53 David Pierce? Okay, I can, I can offer you a pair of $100 skull candies, or I can offer you a $20 pair of zoomy, soundplay wireless over-ear headphones.
26:02 Nilay Patel? They look exactly like AirPod Maxes.
26:04 David Pierce? $19.97 and do look alarmingly.
26:05 Nilay Patel? I'm telling you, on the New York City subways, a lot of people are wearing $20 Home Depot AirPod Maxes.
26:11 Alex Cranz? This lady's just vibing. She's having a great time.
26:14 David Pierce? Eli, I have great news. They have HD sound for an immersive music experience.
26:17 Nilay Patel? This is, I'm just telling you, I think there's, I think this is a third category. You've got the people, you've got the two categories of AirPod buyers.
26:23 David Pierce? Yeah.
26:24 Nilay Patel? And then you have the whatever that looks fine. It looks like the thing.
26:28 David Pierce? Oh, sure.
26:28 Nilay Patel? It's expensive. And I-
26:30 David Pierce? That's why, like, you go to Walgreens and they just, like, sell headphones in line, and it's like, who buys these? And it's like, some people buy them.
26:36 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And so I think that those middle, the third gen AirPods, like, the good ones in the middle, I think Apple expected those to be the big seller.
26:43 David Pierce? Yeah.
26:44 Nilay Patel? But actually, you're, you're being squeezed by Home Depot on the bottom. And at the top, people actually give a shit, and they're gonna buy the best ones.
26:51 David Pierce? Right. Yeah. No, I think that's right. But I do think it's exciting to see, frankly, Apple, like, continue to push what AirPods can be, because it sort of seemed like, for the last couple of years, they were just like, well, we won. AirPods are, like, everywhere. Everybody has them. You either have AirPods or you have the other ones.
27:08 Nilay Patel? But the problem is, they're now commodified.
27:10 David Pierce? Yes, exactly. And now, it's like, they're, they're pushing on some of the stuff, I think the new ones supposedly are gonna get-
27:15 Alex Cranz? They're gonna have shorter
27:16 David Pierce? Noise cancellation.
27:17 Alex Cranz? Which is very upsetting if you like to use Bluetooth headphones for audio stuff, like, for talking.
27:23 David Pierce? Yeah, I'd like longer stems.
27:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I was like, that was the part I was like, no! At my, my desk.
27:28 David Pierce? I would like AirPods that are basically, like, dental headgear, that kind of go all the way down around your chin. It's just one piece.
27:34 Nilay Patel? Wow.
27:34 David Pierce? This is a good idea.
27:35 Alex Cranz? Get the Ray-Ban medals. That's-
27:36 Nilay Patel? What, you should- Do they still make neck buds? Those, like, things that you wear?
27:40 David Pierce? Oh, yeah, you can still get neck buds.
27:41 Nilay Patel? That's you, baby?
27:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah, the Walgreens checkout counter. There you go.
27:45 Nilay Patel? All right, so that's the, we, we don't know when that's happening, but they're coming.
27:48 David Pierce? Yep.
27:48 Nilay Patel? You see them reinventing that lineup, because I, I think wireless earbuds, total commodities now.
27:55 David Pierce? Yeah.
27:55 Nilay Patel? They have to keep pushing them up. Alex, we've been talking about price hikes with you, I think, every week now. It's like throw a dart at the board of streaming services and it's like, the price is going up. Nine ninety-nine for Apple TV plus. Seems very high.
28:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I really enjoy Apple TV plus. There's one show on it. It's one of my top ten shows of all time. I'll watch it like every six months. It's like my office.
28:19 David Pierce? I think Apple TV's hit rate is higher than any other streaming service.
28:23 Alex Cranz? But it's also got twelve shows. I mean.
28:26 Nilay Patel? No, it's got more now.
28:27 Alex Cranz? It's got more now.
28:27 Nilay Patel? I disagree that its hit rate is higher.
28:29 David Pierce? Really?
28:30 Nilay Patel? I think it has hits, which is unlike other streaming services.
28:33 Alex Cranz? Is this because you watch the Octavia Spencer show and it's not very good?
28:36 Nilay Patel? Most of the show, that's what I mean. They make a lot of brilliantly produced, excellent looking nothing.
28:43 Alex Cranz? See.
28:44 Nilay Patel? Yeah, see, a show in which if you just go look at the Reddit for the show See, starring Jason Momoa, the most common question in that Reddit is, can they see? Because the show is not committed to its own conceit.
28:57 Alex Cranz? It's complicated, guys. It just depends on which character you're talking about.
29:01 Nilay Patel? But it is beautiful.
29:02 Alex Cranz? It's beautiful, yeah.
29:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:03 Alex Cranz? But.
29:04 Nilay Patel? Are you looking at the Reddit?
29:05 David Pierce? No, I'm looking at the, I mean, I, I honestly, I stand by this. Like, there are very few disaster shows on Apple TV.
29:13 Alex Cranz? That's true, that's true.
29:14 David Pierce? Everything on there, with the exception of The Morning Show, which is full, honest to God garbage.
29:20 Alex Cranz? No, it's.
29:21 Nilay Patel? Wow.
29:21 Alex Cranz? It's, it's a soap opera. It is so soap opera, so melodramatic, that like, we know where Reese Witherspoon was on January sixth.
29:30 David Pierce? But like.
29:31 Alex Cranz? That's a spoiler. I'm so sorry.
29:33 David Pierce? It's just like, what if you spent all the money in the world to make a soap opera?
29:38 Alex Cranz? That's why I love it. I'm like, wow, we're finally getting prestige soap operas. But, but yeah, the prices are, ten dollars a month is, is hard to, to stomach, especially one of our commenters, after we put the story up, just broke it down and by percentages. Apple TV is going up about forty-three percent.
29:54 Nilay Patel? Wow.
29:54 Alex Cranz? Apple Arcade is forty percent. Apple News is thirty percent. Overall average is thirty-seven percent. Does it feel like you're getting thirty-seven percent more service?
30:02 David Pierce? Can I get a thirty-seven percent raise?
30:05 Alex Cranz? Gotta, gotta maintain.
30:06 Nilay Patel? No, only if you're bundled with three other people.
30:09 David Pierce? To me, what's very obvious here is Apple is trying to get everybody to subscribe to Apple One.
30:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, no, you can see it. The Apple One is only going up five bucks. Apple One Premier for Families has gone up five bucks.
30:20 David Pierce? And if you use Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus, that's that price right there. Done. Everything else is gravy. You could all have Apple services. Like, it's so transparently a better deal to be on Apple One than to be on some other mismatch of their services.
30:36 Alex Cranz? It only became a better deal like this right now.
30:39 David Pierce? Yeah, yeah, yeah.
30:39 Alex Cranz? Because, because I was actually trying to switch over to Apple One like two or three weeks ago. And I did all the math and I was like, well, I don't use some of this stuff, so I'm not going to do this.
30:48 David Pierce? Yeah, if you like, if you use News Plus and Fitness and all of that stuff, it's been a better deal for a while. But right now, it's like if you use two things.
30:57 Alex Cranz? It's a much better deal. Yeah. Now I'm really mad.
30:59 Nilay Patel? I have to say, there's no way anyone should pay $12.99 a month for Apple News Plus.
31:05 David Pierce? No, that's absurd.
31:06 Alex Cranz? Someone out there is doing it. I mean, it's Tim Cook.
31:09 Nilay Patel? Well, I think it's just coming. It's gotta be coming in the bundle, but as an à la carte subscription, unless you are extremely committed to reading PDFs to steer your review, which I am. It's, that's a bad deal.
31:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
31:21 Nilay Patel? Like, that just, that's so expensive. That's more than the TV service.
31:25 David Pierce? Yeah, and you get paywalled news, which is good. Yay for money for the news industry. But there are not very many people for whom that's going to be worth $13 a month. Just don't see it.
31:34 Nilay Patel? Right, and that's, now we're just like fully in the bundle.
31:36 David Pierce? Yeah.
31:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
31:37 Nilay Patel? Other bit of Apple news, iOS 17.2 beta is out.
31:42 David Pierce? Yeah, this is the other thing we'll probably hear more about on Monday, I would guess. It's a lot of little things. The big thing is the Journal app is finally coming. I don't know why it took this long. I'm not sure anyone cares that the Journal app exists.
31:53 Alex Cranz? I forgot about the Journal app until you just said that.
31:55 David Pierce? I think, I think you and a lot of people. But now it's coming. My guess would be, so the developer beta is out now. My guess would be we'll get some kind of public beta pretty fast. Or it'll just hit, like, it's a point two update. It's not ultimately all that exciting. But they will probably talk about the Journal app on Monday, would be my guess.
32:13 Nilay Patel? I don't think, I think it's, oh, All Max. It's gonna be a TV show.
32:17 David Pierce? Yeah.
32:17 Nilay Patel? Ooh, spooky fast.
32:22 Nilay Patel? 27 inches, just trying to manifest it. And then we have a big story this week about Double Tap hit the Apple Watches. V has a story about how it works, which is pretty cool.
32:31 Alex Cranz? It seems really, really cool.
32:32 Nilay Patel? I don't buy that it can't come to my Apple Watch Ultra, by the way.
32:35 Alex Cranz? Or my, my Series 6.
32:37 Nilay Patel? Or my Series 2. But it does seem really cool. The one thing that's interesting is you have to have your display on for it to work.
32:45 David Pierce? Yeah, and it doesn't seem to be super reliable. Like, it's definitely a work in progress, this feature, but it's a cool idea. And it seems to be, like, V's story is really interesting just in getting into how complicated something like this is to make and just, like, if you think about what your hands are doing all the time, it's a noisy input mechanism. So it's, it's just, it was neat to read her story and see all the stuff it takes to do it.
33:09 Nilay Patel? I don't know about you, but I'm constantly clenching my fists.
33:11 Alex Cranz? Just sitting there like the, the meme of Arthur.
33:16 Nilay Patel? Just furious. Bring me Drake. What if they have actual Drake? What if they had Drake dressed up as Dracula? That's my prediction for the Apple event, everybody. No 27-inch iMac, Drake dressed up as Dracula.
33:27 Alex Cranz? No, no actual Apple stuff at all. It's just gonna be Tim hanging out with his friends.
33:31 David Pierce? That would be the true flex. No new products. Just hanging out.
33:35 Alex Cranz? Or they show off the Apple pens, the new pencil.
33:37 David Pierce? Oh, God.
33:40 Alex Cranz? Just the pencil.
33:41 David Pierce? Death first.
33:42 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back and David's gonna execute this idea of putting social networks on the Good90 scale. We'll be right back.
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34:57 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back on the Vergecast, the show that we make every week.
35:01 David Pierce? We may have just been watching Blade Trinity.
35:04 Nilay Patel? I'm still thinking about Blade Trinity. It's a great movie.
35:07 Alex Cranz? It's a really good movie.
35:08 David Pierce? No.
35:09 Alex Cranz? I mean, it's a watchable movie.
35:10 David Pierce? It's a movie.
35:11 Alex Cranz? It's a movie you will have a good time watching, but you probably won't like earnestly recommend to another person.
35:18 David Pierce? Yeah, so you're just one of those people who really likes bad things.
35:21 Alex Cranz? Yes, I like it when a bad thing-
35:23 David Pierce? Because they're bad.
35:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:24 David Pierce? You're like, I'm glad that this is terrible and exists.
35:26 Nilay Patel? No, it's bad, it's bad in the right way. Like, it's a, it's a well-made bad movie.
35:32 Alex Cranz? It's entertaining, it's just not good. Like The Morning Show.
35:37 David Pierce? No, see, I disagree with every part of that about The Morning Show.
35:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah, there are some things that are like bad and sloppy and ill-considered and not coherent.
35:44 Alex Cranz? Every lifetime movie-
35:45 Nilay Patel? Blade Trinity is like, they had an idea and they executed the hell out of that idea and it just wasn't a good idea.
35:53 David Pierce? All right, yeah, that I can appreciate.
35:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:54 David Pierce? Right? Like, you, you executed your whole vision perfectly.
35:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:58 David Pierce? And you shouldn't have.
35:59 Nilay Patel? There's not, there's not a frame of Blade Trinity where they weren't like, this isn't exactly what I wanted.
36:06 David Pierce? You just should have wanted something else.
36:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it should have just gone a different way.
36:09 David Pierce? Understood.
36:09 Nilay Patel? All right, David, you, this is your baby. And I believe a, a listener has requested that we do this.
36:15 David Pierce? This was specifically requested.
36:17 Nilay Patel? Okay.
36:17 David Pierce? It's been a year, as you're listening to this on Friday, it has been exactly one year since the Elon Musk acquisition of Twitter was made final. Obviously, Twitter is no longer, both literally and metaphorically, it's dead. We've had- A year full of new ideas about social, we've had a year of like would be coming and going. We've had a lot of change. We've been talking about it a lot. And so I think what we haven't done a lot of A over the last year is just talk about Twitter as a product. Like we've talked a lot about the machinations of the company and all the weird stuff going on. But like, is it still a good, vibrant, thriving, potentially successful social platform? And it seems like a good time to check in on all of the other ones that are trying to be this thing,
37:01 David Pierce? of which there are an alarming number.
37:04 Alex Cranz? You made some of these.
37:05 David Pierce? Increasingly smaller numbers, spoiler alert for what we're about to get to. So what I figured we should do first is just like, let's do, let's do the state of Twitter a little bit. A year after Elon Musk got it, took it over. I actually don't think this is going to take very long because I don't think it's a particularly complicated opinion to have anymore. I think if we'd had this debate three months ago, reasonable people could disagree about the vibrancy of Twitter. Or X or whatever you want to call it. I think at this point, it is pretty much undeniable and unavoidable that it is a worse platform and a dying one.
37:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but there's a lot of jackasses in the world that really like to use X.
37:41 David Pierce? Sure.
37:42 Alex Cranz? Like what I want is it to be at an 80, but I think the jackass factor brings it down to like a 45 or a 50.
37:49 David Pierce? All right. Well, let's get to the scale in a sec.
37:51 Alex Cranz? Okay, sorry.
37:51 David Pierce? Because first, Neil is going to have to give us a speech about what the go 90 scale is.
37:55 Alex Cranz? Sorry, sorry. I got excited.
37:56 Nilay Patel? I have to remind a bunch of people what go 90 is.
37:58 David Pierce? It's going to be a whole thing. Yeah, but, but I think like at this point, and I do think the question of is X going to continue to be around for a long time is separate than, is it vibrant and cool and useful and like, is it culturally relevant in the way?
38:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah, very different.
38:13 David Pierce? I already feel like it is drastically less culturally relevant than it was even 12 months ago.
38:18 Alex Cranz? Yes, 100%.
38:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, no, without question. And there's a way to measure it. Twitter was never very big.
38:24 David Pierce? Right.
38:25 Nilay Patel? It was always the smallest of the social companies. It was a bad business. I will once again issue our disclaimer that criticism of X under Elon Musk is in no way praise of Twitter under Jack Dorsey. It was a badly run company. Again, they sold it because they didn't have any ideas on how to make it that valuable.
38:43 David Pierce? Clown car to gold mine.
38:44 Nilay Patel? Yep, that's the Zuckerberg quote about Twitter. So, bad company, but outsized influence in the media, in sports, in politics.
38:53 David Pierce? I mean, the joke for years that was that cable news was just hosts reading tweets to each other.
38:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
38:57 David Pierce? Which was not untrue for a very long time. That I don't see anywhere.
39:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's gone. So, the notion that you could solve every problem by tweeting, or create vastly more problems than tweeting, is gone. Like, it's just that's sort of over in a big and important and probably healthy way.
39:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah, is there even a Twitter person of the day anymore? You know, that person everybody would dunk on?
39:19 Nilay Patel? It's Elon Musk. That's what he spent the money on.
39:22 David Pierce? That's such an interesting point. There, yeah, for so long.
39:25 Alex Cranz? You just knew a random person.
39:27 David Pierce? There was always like the main character of Twitter, and everybody would be talking about it, and then you would forget about them. Like, the bird watching woman is always the first one that comes to mind. It's just Elon every day.
39:35 Nilay Patel? It's just Elon every day. His, the reach of his tweets has dramatically increased.
39:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because he said, "Make my tweets."
39:41 Nilay Patel? Sure. And if I bought Twitter, I would do the same thing.
39:43 David Pierce? But then recently, apparently, it's gone down. Did you see this? He tweeted something in a reply, which is how he tweets a lot, and his stuff gets huge reach because he's Elon Musk and on and on. But then at one point, I might get this slightly wrong, but I think he quote tweeted his own tweet onto his timeline, saying, "Bringing this to my main timeline so that it gets more reach."
40:03 Alex Cranz? Yes.
40:03 David Pierce? And it's like, oh, even Elon can't get the view counts anymore. And, yeah, it just, I don't know. Again, I don't think we need to like dwell on this forever, but it's, there's just nothing about that product that feels like it has gotten better in 12 months.
40:18 Nilay Patel? And there was like a relationship between Twitter's size and its influence that kept it relevant.
40:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
40:25 Nilay Patel? Because it was never its size that made it relevant.
40:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
40:28 Nilay Patel? Like TikTok is very relevant because it is huge.
40:31 Alex Cranz? And everybody uses it.
40:32 Nilay Patel? And everyone uses it, and, but it's still pretty insular. Like, your average TikTok trend does not break into the mainstream too much.
40:40 Alex Cranz? Everybody's gonna be doing that slip slide soon. Just, just you wait. Out on the streets.
40:44 Nilay Patel? I've seen it, with the Skippy dance.
40:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
40:46 Nilay Patel? It's a lot.
40:47 Alex Cranz? I tried to do it. Don't do it. You'll die.
40:49 David Pierce? Did you try to do it?
40:50 Alex Cranz? In my house.
40:51 David Pierce? Tell us more.
40:51 Nilay Patel? I'm at the
40:52 Alex Cranz? As far as I got.
40:53 Nilay Patel? Point in my, my golden years here, where I look at something, I'm like, that's, that's a young man's game.
40:59 Alex Cranz? I'm in my midlife crisis phase.
41:00 David Pierce? You're still like, I'm gonna try.
41:02 Nilay Patel? But TikTok is really fascinating, just in that way, because it's, the phenomena are large.
41:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
41:06 Nilay Patel? But they are contained.
41:08 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
41:08 Nilay Patel? And the whole user base does not see everything by definition. And so TikTok itself has a lot of cultural import. Individual things that are happening on TikTok are pretty siloed. Twitter was just like, all of Twitter will now look at this.
41:20 David Pierce? Right.
41:21 Nilay Patel? We'll talk about this. We'll be engaged with this. And that, for too long, that thing was COVID. Right, but like, it was the driving force of a lot of that debate even. It like massive worldwide influence. And now Twitter, even if it keeps the users, the influence is gone.
41:37 David Pierce? Right.
41:37 Nilay Patel? And that's the danger. And so the advertisers are leaving. We've seen reported, the users are fleeing. And I think Elon's sort of like raging against it.
41:48 Alex Cranz? He's just trying to like scream his way out of it. But on, online, so it's not as aggressive.
41:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, look, he, he take, he took Twitter and he turned it into Parler.
41:56 Alex Cranz? He did it.
41:57 Nilay Patel? He did it.
41:58 David Pierce? Yeah.
41:58 Nilay Patel? That's what it is now.
41:59 David Pierce? And now, I do wonder, there's an interesting, like, the conspiracy theory has always been that he's trying to just bankrupt it. Like, it's the equivalent of like burning your house down for the insurance money, seems to be the, the theory. I don't think that's what he's trying to do. It does seem very clear that what he wants is to build the like finance app and thought he could just bolt that onto Twitter and it would make sense.
42:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah, he thought he could just convert all of those users and instantly have his app.
42:25 David Pierce? Right, he's just like, I'll just let Twitter users pay each other and then that's how I'll get my finance super app. I do wonder if this all falling apart might just accelerate his like, I'm gonna go make PayPal again, plans. So I think, like, X is already very different than it was 12 months ago. I have a feeling 12 months from now, it's gonna be even more unrecognizable to what it was when he bought it.
42:45 Alex Cranz? Well, yeah, because
42:46 David Pierce? In a bunch of weird directions.
42:47 Alex Cranz? By that point, we'll all be paying a dollar just to have an account on it. And so none of us will have an account on it.
42:52 David Pierce? Yeah. Truly one of the most hilarious.
42:55 Nilay Patel? Or the European government will find it out of existence.
42:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
42:58 Nilay Patel? But the thing that is just obvious to me one year in is that the cultural relevance of Twitter, that everyone is gonna talk about it, that the news will be driven about it, that the politicians are worried about it, that You name it, gone.
43:12 David Pierce? Yep, and I think the thing that most immediately accelerated that recently was what's going on with Israel and Hamas. And all of the misinformation stuff that was happening, like the flooding of people out of Twitter and into new platforms really took off in a big way, just in the last few weeks.
43:29 Alex Cranz? I thought it was really interesting that everybody flooded out of Twitter and into new platforms, none of which actually also did a good job.
43:35 David Pierce? Oh, no, everybody.
43:36 Alex Cranz? Everybody's like, we want to figure out TikTok will tell us the real news. And there was like a story this week about how TikTok did not, in fact, do a very good job of it. I think New York Times did that with Taylor Lorenz. And so, like, no, nobody, just go read the news. You know, there are whole places.
43:53 Nilay Patel? News got it pretty wrong.
43:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah, the news also got it pretty wrong.
43:55 Nilay Patel? It's not been a great time, but like, if you're starting from that baseline, right, which is the New York Times issuing major corrections.
44:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
44:04 Nilay Patel? Well, then the secondary information ecosystem is going to be bad, too. And we've definitely seen that. And the thing is that Twitter, at least in its Jack Dorsey period, had an inkling of wanting to be like neutral. Neutral is the wrong word, but it just wanted to be like.
44:23 Alex Cranz? There felt like there was a level of like peer review happening on Twitter before, where like generally the accurate stuff would crawl to the top eventually. Or the context would arrive and you'd be like, okay, I understand what I'm reading here. And that doesn't happen anymore, where somebody will just be like, yeah, this is crazy, isn't it?
44:40 Nilay Patel? I would say it's like the opposite of that. The word, it's almost like neutral, but it's not neutral, because Twitter was never neutral. But it was, it was level and there were things that were out of bounds. And the new version X is like, what if we just amplify the things that are out of bounds? And that is a distinct shift in the character of the platform.
44:58 David Pierce? I actually think it's even simpler than that. And I think one of the things that is working for Threads right now is that the people in charge of it are believably trying their best. And I think that was a thing that people believed in Twitter for a long time, was it was a lot of people trying to do a very hard thing, but generally trying their hardest to do it right. And reasonable people can disagree about right, but I think the reason Mark Zuckerberg Became a bad guy for a long time was that a lot of people believed he was not trying to do good things. And in a truly masterful PR campaign, Mark Zuckerberg has won many of those people back. But I think
45:33 Nilay Patel? Wait, the masterful PR campaign, by the way, is making
45:36 David Pierce? Compete with Elon Musk?
45:37 Nilay Patel? No, it's make Adam Mosseri the face of this product.
45:40 David Pierce? Oh, absolutely. And I think I think Adam Mosseri and the team running threads has done a really good job of being out there and being present and appearing at least to be trying hard to do the right thing. And it's very clear now that the leadership at X is not
45:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
45:54 David Pierce? Interested in what the right thing is. And so it just changes the feeling that you get from being here. Like, I am no longer in good hands. And that feels bad.
46:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Which is weird, because these products at scale, all of them have the same incentives, which is to increase engagement and be sticky.
46:10 David Pierce? Right.
46:10 Nilay Patel? But you see Adam constantly try to thread the needle on, is there news here or not? And his answer is like, I really don't want there to be, and people are going to do it anyway. But we're going to show you other happy stuff.
46:22 David Pierce? Right.
46:22 Nilay Patel? Zuckerberg this week on their earnings call said, there should be a tech-based social network of a billion people that is more positive. And so you see them, they're actively trying to make it so you can't talk about Israel and Hamas. You definitely cannot talk about COVID, which, again, I think is a defining moment in the Twitter.
46:40 David Pierce? Yep.
46:40 Nilay Patel? This is the thing that broke Twitter the most. We'll see if the other platforms survive. But that thing where all of the influential people are using one platform and it's crazy, and you can just yell at them directly, which was a delight.
46:53 David Pierce? Yeah.
46:54 Nilay Patel? Is gone.
46:54 David Pierce? Yep.
46:54 Nilay Patel? I do not think it is ever coming back.
46:56 Alex Cranz? And I think that's okay.
46:57 Nilay Patel? I think that is easily for the best.
47:00 David Pierce? I agree. So which is a good segue
47:01 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
47:01 David Pierce? To our next bit, which is all of the would be successors. Neel, will you explain the Go90 scale?
47:07 Nilay Patel? All right. So Verizon started as a video streaming service called Go90. They were early to the idea of starting a Doom streaming service. Credit to Verizon. We profiled it. You can read that story, but eventually, like all streaming services, it died. It went 90. So the scale is the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services, which we are repurposing here for Twitter clones. But the Go90 scale of Doom streaming services is zero is alive, zero is alive, and then you can go 90.
47:35 David Pierce? You can go 90.
47:35 Nilay Patel? And you can die.
47:36 David Pierce? Right.
47:36 Nilay Patel? Like Go90.
47:37 David Pierce? You fall over and die.
47:38 Nilay Patel? I encourage you to read this story about Go90. Ben Papa wrote it. It's a lot of, it's a lot of telecom executives thinking they understand teenagers.
47:47 Alex Cranz? I understand the
47:48 Nilay Patel? You could join a video crew on Go90, my friends.
47:51 David Pierce? I just feel like somebody, the minute someone came out of a meeting and was like, we've decided to call it Go90, whoever that person's boss was should have been like, never mind, we're not doing streaming services. Like, we're out. But, okay. So that's the scale. Let's just start with X. It's a good balancing point to start with. Where do we think, again, remember, this is between fully alive, crushing it, totally vibrant, and like, full dead.
48:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:15 David Pierce? Like, end of platform, gonna be gone. Where do we feel like X is?
48:19 Alex Cranz? Okay. I said it earlier, but I think it's gonna be at 80. Like, that's where it should be. But I think it has such a high, like, kinda jackass quotient on the platform right now, that it's more like a 50 to 45 at the moment.
48:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'd say 45. It's at a 45.
48:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:34 Nilay Patel? Right, dab in the middle.
48:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah. For a lot of people, it's an 80. It's, it's like, most people, it's an 80. But there's just enough that it's like, it's
48:42 David Pierce? Yeah, my instinct would be to put it a little higher, except, A, like you're saying, never underestimate the number of people who are the worst. And B, these things just take longer than we give them credit for, right? Like, I spent a lot of time thinking about the people who still pay for AOL that they got on Discord. It's like, that stuff doesn't die as quickly as we think it does. We stop talking about it, and most people move on, but like, most things die slow. And I think Twitter has begun what is probably like, the inexorable slow death, but it has not died. So I, I think that's right. 45, somewhere in the 45 range feels about right.
49:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
49:16 David Pierce? Where do we put Threads? Which, so, the Threads news this week was also on the earnings call, like you were saying, Eli. They announced that Threads has almost 100 million monthly active users. What does almost mean in this context? Who knows? But it's a big number. The number has been growing. All the people, whatever, two months ago, who were like, Threads is struggling to keep users, have less to say now. Threads seems to be doing fine. Where do we put it on the list?
49:39 Nilay Patel? Forty-five.
49:40 Alex Cranz? Really?
49:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
49:41 David Pierce? Why?
49:42 Nilay Patel? I put just like a different color of forty-five.
49:45 David Pierce? Okay.
49:45 Nilay Patel? Like, you know?
49:46 Alex Cranz? Happy forty-five.
49:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's a happy forty-five, like.
49:50 David Pierce? Happy forty-five.
49:50 Nilay Patel? Most products fail. There's, that's just the nature of them. Most new products just fizzle out. Meta's launched a lot of products.
49:59 David Pierce? I was just about to say, yeah, so the, the case for and against threads is that it's meta.
50:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:04 David Pierce? My immediate instinct for threads is to put it at like a twenty-five. Because A, Zuckerberg is out here now saying we see a path to a billion users, which is what he's been saying all along. I think he's enjoying this competition. I think he likes how much threads has made him the good guy. And I think that's going to buy threads a pretty long runway. Threads also, I think, seems to be working, like, we're going to get to a bunch of other ones, but threads is...
50:26 Nilay Patel? Threads has the heat.
50:27 David Pierce? It has the heat. That's exactly right. And I think that can be fickle, but it very much has the heat right now.
50:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:34 David Pierce? So I, I would put it lower than twenty, or lower than forty-five. I'm in the like mid-twenty range.
50:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's, that's where I'm in. I'm in the twenties. It feels very, very likely that it's going to last a little while.
50:44 Nilay Patel? But that's not, okay, fine.
50:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I like.
50:46 Nilay Patel? Like, okay, is it going to last a little while is kind of a different question.
50:49 Alex Cranz? But it feels like it's, it's got some legs to it.
50:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:52 Alex Cranz? It feels like of a lot of these we were going to talk about, I think this is the one.
50:56 Nilay Patel? All the rest of them are dead.
50:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
50:57 Nilay Patel? And some of them are like literally dead this week.
51:00 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like, like this is the one I'm ranking closest to zero. It feels like it's going to have the one that lasts the longest.
51:07 Nilay Patel? I, I think the danger here is when you do that, you call it the winner, and I don't think it's actually.
51:11 Alex Cranz? I don't think it's the winner. That's true.
51:13 Nilay Patel? And that's why I'm at forty-five. It has the potential. It's like a happy forty-five.
51:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:17 Nilay Patel? But it very much has the potential to be the winner. Some, but some of the decisions they've made and some of the, the postures they have struck are actually dangerous for them.
51:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
51:26 Nilay Patel? Right? So it's not real time. Like, there's a bunch of people lately doing tests to see how like real-time threads is. Even in the following feed, it's like algorithmic, where it's keeping you from real-time posts from people you follow.
51:41 Alex Cranz? I mean, but the EU is going to fix that for us.
51:44 Nilay Patel? Sure.
51:45 David Pierce? The danger for threads would be, at least culturally, is essentially that it turns into Facebook, right?
51:51 Nilay Patel? Right.
51:51 David Pierce? Which is like, there's a version of threads that is hugely successful and totally culturally irrelevant.
51:56 Nilay Patel? Yep.
51:56 David Pierce? And that's what Facebook is.
51:58 Alex Cranz? But Facebook is zero.
51:59 David Pierce? It's a really good business, sure, but it's not like, it's not ever going to get to what Twitter was, right? Like that thing where people on cable news are reading tweets at each other.
52:09 Nilay Patel? Which, by the way, might have been bad for democracy and society.
52:12 David Pierce? I think a perfectly reasonable case to make is that every tech choice we've made in the last 15 years was wrong and we should just go back to news as a six and do it again.
52:19 Nilay Patel? Specifically, CNN is a bad podcast of people reading tweets to each other was a bad moment.
52:25 David Pierce? Yes.
52:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:26 David Pierce? A hundred percent agree.
52:27 Nilay Patel? And I think this is what Zuck and Messari are talking about when they're like, this shouldn't be, we don't want to do news. They have a million reasons to not do news. The governments around the world are making them pay for news. They're blocking it and they're like, there's a lot of complication there.
52:40 David Pierce? Yeah.
52:40 Nilay Patel? But I think if you look at the most negative impact of Twitter, it was the news became Twitter and Twitter lacked all nuance and was just a dogfight.
52:50 David Pierce? Yes.
52:51 Nilay Patel? All the time. And I don't think they want threads to be that. So I'm saying, it's just like, it's, is almost certainly going to be the winner.
52:57 David Pierce? Okay.
52:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:58 David Pierce? All right, well, we'll split the difference. We'll put it at like.
53:00 Nilay Patel? Thirty-five.
53:01 David Pierce? Thirty-five. There we go. Mastodon.
53:03 Nilay Patel? Mastodon's a zero. It's, it's alive, necessarily by default alive. It depends on what you're talking about with Mastodon.
53:09 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
53:10 Nilay Patel? Because it is definitionally unkillable if you talk about the decentralized network of things that is Mastodon.
53:15 David Pierce? No, we're not talking about Activity Pub.
53:17 Nilay Patel? I'm not talking about Activity Pub. I'm talking about Mastodon, the social network.
53:20 David Pierce? Sure.
53:20 Nilay Patel? Of many, many, many Mastodon servers.
53:22 Alex Cranz? The speed that David got there.
53:26 Nilay Patel? Everyone knows I want to talk about it. No, I mean, I mean specifically Mastodon, the social network made up of decentralized servers that people can run and federate however they want.
53:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
53:34 David Pierce? I feel like that's.
53:35 Nilay Patel? Definitionally unkillable.
53:36 David Pierce? Sure, but I also feel like that's less and less what Mastodon is. Mastodon has leaned into mastodon.social being the thing. Like, they made this very intentional choice in the name of getting more people onto the platform and making discovery easier to default people to what amounts to a centralized platform. You don't have to stay there. You can leave if you want. You can federate. But like Mastodon and mastodon.social, which is one instance of Mastodon, are increasingly the same thing. And I don't know what that means. I think there continue to be open questions about what happens when Mastodon gets 100 million users if literally the people running it can afford to do that. I think you're probably right that it's pretty close to zero at the moment, but I also think the idea that it is unkillable, I don't think is true.
54:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I think the concept of Mastodon is zero. I think execution is like in the 40s or 50s because because we're so early in this conversation about decentralization and stuff, or so or in the movement or whatever you want to call it. We're so early on in it that I don't know if Mastodon is necessarily going to be the most successful one. I don't know if like its theories for for how to do decentralization is going to work, especially when you have threads just out there. I'm trying not to talk about it. I got too close to activity.
54:47 Nilay Patel? You're flying so close to the activity pub, son.
54:49 Alex Cranz? I'm so sorry. But Mastodon.
54:51 Nilay Patel? I'm not sorry. David is keeping us from the truth.
54:54 David Pierce? That was specifically to David. Notorious activity pub hater, David Pierce. That's me.
54:58 Alex Cranz? But yeah, I think I think Mastodon's social and that concept and stuff is is much higher on the scale because we're already seeing this. This is something that Dan talks about a lot. He's our our big Mastodon user in the office and and he's seen it a ton where everybody's like, well, I don't want to be on my little servers that I'm on. It's actually more complicated and I want to be on the main Mastodon server. And that's death for that whole platform. Whenever I want to be on the main one is everybody's desire, then then the whole the whole conceit falls apart.
55:26 Nilay Patel? Then you've re-centralized the service.
55:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like then what have you done? You've done you've made crumier threads.
55:31 David Pierce? Well, yeah, right. And then you become something that threads can eat.
55:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:34 David Pierce? And.
55:35 Alex Cranz? So I'm like at a I'm like at a 45 50.
55:38 Nilay Patel? I think this really depends on whether you think Mastodon is Mastodon social or not. Because I the, yes, there's one platform. I think they're opportunistically trying to grow users on that one. But, you know, they're a very idealistic bunch over at Mastodon.
55:52 David Pierce? Yes.
55:53 Alex Cranz? I'm rooting for them, but I'm like, whoa.
55:55 Nilay Patel? Eugen was on Decoder and he was basically like, I don't know how to make money and I don't want to, right? Like, that's not his posture.
56:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
56:04 Nilay Patel? And I think he just wants to grow the service because there's an opportunity to grow the service. But I think fundamentally, they're into the decentralized approach to the network, which Thread could federate into and could either crush or flood with users, or who knows?
56:17 Alex Cranz? I will say this, when we're talking about all of these and talking about the scale and survivability, we think a lot in that concept of growth, but that growth itself, like the growth at all costs is a very like Threads financially incentivized thing. And a lot of these, particularly something like Mastodon, that's not their interest. It is about that decentralization and stuff. So I think for a lot of those users, they'll probably be there for ages.
56:39 David Pierce? Yeah. Well, and I think part of the reason I wanted to do this on the go 90 scale is like streaming services, this won't be a winner takes all.
56:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
56:46 David Pierce? Right? Like, there can be lots of these that exist.
56:49 Nilay Patel? Ideally, yeah, that's the ideal state.
56:51 David Pierce? Right.
56:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
56:51 David Pierce? That's, yeah, again, activity.
56:54 Alex Cranz? Although some of these on here.
56:55 David Pierce? Next one up on the list, Blue Sky. Yeah, we're going in order from like possible to less possible. It's about to get real ugly, but let's.
57:04 Nilay Patel? It's a hard drop.
57:05 David Pierce? Yeah.
57:06 Alex Cranz? Blue Sky's a 70 for me.
57:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
57:08 Alex Cranz? And it's a vindictive 70, mainly because I'm on Blue Sky, I never use it, and a bunch of my friends in academia use it a lot. And they're always like, why aren't you ever on Blue Sky? So I want it to go away, so they stop asking.
57:21 David Pierce? Blue Sky is definitively where the weirdos went.
57:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
57:24 David Pierce? And like, whether that's an insult or a compliment, is it relevant? All the weirdos went to Blue Sky.
57:30 Alex Cranz? Just thinking of our coworkers who are active Blue Sky users, I'm like, yeah.
57:33 David Pierce? It's the weirdos.
57:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
57:34 David Pierce? And that's like, it's where the shit posters went. Like, if you mostly just went to like, cause low stakes trouble for other people, Blue Sky.
57:43 Alex Cranz? And you have 40,000 followers there right now.
57:46 David Pierce? Nice. Look at you.
57:48 Alex Cranz? No, I don't. I have four.
57:49 David Pierce? Oh, nice. That's less.
57:50 Alex Cranz? And it's all my friends saying, why aren't you chatting here more? I was like, because look at Threads.
57:56 Nilay Patel? Blue Sky, I agree, at 75, a little, little higher than Alex.
57:59 Alex Cranz? And it's not even, and it's also not even active in that thing we're not talking about today. That's totally not related.
58:05 Nilay Patel? Well, no, they have their own decentralized idea.
58:06 Alex Cranz? That makes it like, that, that gives it like a plus five.
58:09 Nilay Patel? It's even closer.
58:10 Alex Cranz? Modifier. Yeah.
58:12 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Blues, if the, the tension for Mastodon is between Mastodon, the decentralized social network idea, and Mastodon social, the centralized server that you can log on to. Blue Sky is at the far end of the tension where they're like, we made a decentralized social network. It has one server. We won't even tell anyone else how to set up their own server. The protocol isn't finished and we're standing up trust and safety on this server. Also, Jack Dorsey is an investor in our company. Like.
58:36 Alex Cranz? You just kept, like, you just are trying to shoot it to 90. Just modifier after modifier.
58:42 Nilay Patel? It's there, but all of these companies are gonna run into a revenue problem. I think Threads will solve it very quickly. Again, Mastodon, I think, is just ideologically unkillable. Blue Sky, how are they gonna make a dollar? What's the plan?
58:57 Alex Cranz? They're gonna start.
58:58 Nilay Patel? This is a group of people that advertisers do not want to be near.
59:02 Alex Cranz? They're gonna open a Patreon.
59:03 Nilay Patel? Right. It's gonna, it's gonna be some weird mix of subscription and, and contributions. And the, and the goal of it is not to run the centralized server, at least from their white paper, from like, they're just very far away from where they started.
59:18 Alex Cranz? Yes.
59:19 Nilay Patel? They're running a Clubhouse. That's fine.
59:21 Alex Cranz? They're running Clubhouse. Oh, we, that, yeah.
59:23 Nilay Patel? Clubhouse is also dead, I would point out.
59:24 Alex Cranz? I was like, that's on the night, that's 90 on the scale.
59:27 Nilay Patel? And they just have to make some decisions along the way there.
59:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
59:30 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right. I, I would put it about that high, too. They did a couple of things really right. Like, the way they thought about usernames was very smart.
59:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
59:37 David Pierce? They had some, some nifty ideas about custom timelines that I continue to think is very cool. But I think they're gonna end up having the legacy of being like, like friend feed, right? Where they're like, we had a bunch of ideas before the products took off. And they're gonna be like, we did that first, right? Everybody's like, oh, they invented the news feed. And there's like some developer out there who's like, actually, it was me first. And everybody's like, I don't care, because Facebook destroyed you. That's gonna be the legacy.
1:00:02 Nilay Patel? There's already some, like, connector software that connects Blue Sky's decentralized approach to the Activity Pub decentralized approach. And you can see how that thing is, it's just designed to piss everyone off, you know?
1:00:15 Alex Cranz? Like the, the app when you need to move music services.
1:00:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:00:19 Alex Cranz? And you're always thinking it'll work and it never does.
1:00:21 Nilay Patel? Well, we'll just see how this goes, but my, my feeling is that it's successful now because it has a bunch of investor money in it.
1:00:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:00:28 Nilay Patel? And the, the turn is coming.
1:00:30 David Pierce? Yep. All right. Bunch more. These are all going to be fairly quick. Uh, I'm going to change the order up here. Substack Notes is the next one I want to talk about, which is slightly different.
1:00:39 Nilay Patel? Oh, Substack is a company right now? Is it easily at 65 or 70?
1:00:43 Alex Cranz? So Notes is even higher, right?
1:00:45 Nilay Patel? Notes, Notes is just like a long for the ride.
1:00:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah. It's a 70, 75 for me.
1:00:50 Nilay Patel? What Notes or Substack?
1:00:51 Alex Cranz? All of it.
1:00:52 David Pierce? Make the briefcase against Substack.
1:00:54 Nilay Patel? Uh, Substack's entire business is taking a cut of other people's businesses. The number of people who have started successful Substacks is not large. Like it's large in the context of the internet or like maybe like the media, Casey has a really successful Substack. More power to Casey. They're taking 10% of his revenue. This is a business that is founded on whales.
1:01:18 David Pierce? So you just And it does not seem to be creating new ones.
1:01:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:01:21 David Pierce? Right. Anymore.
1:01:21 Nilay Patel? And then the ones that it has created, some of them are like, again, large amounts of money, large amounts of subscribers, cultural relevance, shaky, the Barry Weiss's of the world.
1:01:33 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:01:34 Nilay Patel? Uh, Andrew Sullivan's of the world. I, I came up as an Andrew Sullivan reader in the nineties.
1:01:38 David Pierce? Yep.
1:01:39 Nilay Patel? Fine, right? But they've got a handful of those that are making a bunch of money. They're taking a huge amount. You take 10% out of Andrew Sullivan.
1:01:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:01:47 Nilay Patel? Or Heather Cox Richardson, or Barry Weiss, the, the top of the charts at Substack. You're taking an awful lot of money from those people to send emails. This is what you're doing. That's the service you are providing. They are not bringing new customers onto the platform. Most new subscribers on Substacks are subscribers to other Substacks.
1:02:06 David Pierce? Yep. The recommendation thing seems to have worked.
1:02:08 Nilay Patel? So they, they, they're just moving, they're taking more money out of the existing Substack base and not bringing new people on a Substack.
1:02:13 Alex Cranz? Never mind. I'm at 80 now.
1:02:15 Nilay Patel? And then in April, they are hitting up retail investors for cash in like a pre-public round of investment. They won't release all the numbers, but we know Substack had negative revenue last year. It's just like, Substack is in a place where the next thing they have to do is introduce advertising to their platform because they need a big new source of revenue to make that go because they can't convince millions upon millions of more new people to pay them. And I know people are gonna say that I'm biased against Substack because I had Chris Best on Decoder and I yelled at him about not moderating Substack notes. Whatever you think of that, I'm looking at the math of their business and I'm saying
1:02:57 Nilay Patel? there's a cliff coming and that's why you're hitting up retail investors for cash with negative revenue. However, you think about the trust and safety function of Substack notes, when you're in that position and you're charging your most popular creators the most money to send emails, eventually one of them is gonna wake up and say, I wonder how much MailChimp costs.
1:03:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah, there's other services.
1:03:22 David Pierce? WordPress.
1:03:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah, there's so much free stuff that they can go and do this on and it just doesn't seem...
1:03:30 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:03:30 Alex Cranz? It's bad.
1:03:31 David Pierce? I agree. Alright, so we're all in agreement on that one. I'm just gonna read you a bunch and I want you to tell me if any of these are not at least an 85. And then after that, we can go to break. I have Pebble, which is objectively a 90. It died.
1:03:45 Alex Cranz? I didn't even know what Pebble was.
1:03:47 David Pierce? It was called T2 for a minute because they just straight up were like, this is the new Twitter. And then it was Pebble. It's gone. There's also Noster, which is the other decentralized thing that Jack Dorsey has invested in. And then we have things like Spoutable and CounterSocial and Post and WT.Social and Co-host.
1:04:05 Alex Cranz? I thought these were all Mastodon instances.
1:04:09 David Pierce? Nope. Sadly, do we have any reason to not put any of these things at at least an 85?
1:04:15 Alex Cranz? I want to put WT Social at a zero, just because I'm, I think it's funny. I want to root for it.
1:04:20 David Pierce? Just pick something to believe in.
1:04:21 Alex Cranz? I'm rooting for you, WT Social.
1:04:22 David Pierce? You gotta believe in something.
1:04:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's my Tinkerbell.
1:04:24 Nilay Patel? So all of, they all have the same problem. They all have the same problem. Yeah. It's not users. It's not technology.
1:04:31 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:04:31 Nilay Patel? It's how are you gonna make money?
1:04:32 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:04:33 Nilay Patel? What's your plan? Let's say, let's say you have 100 of the world's most dedicated spoutable users. Spoutable has 100 people who are logged on to it and they have 24 hours a day of user engagement from its 100 people. What's the, what's the plan? Is it charge the money?
1:04:46 Alex Cranz? They're gonna make flower grounds.
1:04:48 Nilay Patel? I just think all of these have a sort of blinkered view of what it would take to replace Twitter, which is.
1:04:53 David Pierce? So does Mastodon, to be fair.
1:04:54 Nilay Patel? You just need a place to post.
1:04:55 David Pierce? We didn't levy that against Mastodon. It's true of Mastodon, too.
1:04:58 Nilay Patel? Mastodon, first of all, as a company, is like two people funded by a government grant in Europe.
1:05:03 David Pierce? Sure.
1:05:03 Nilay Patel? And one contractor who manages billing. You should go listen to that episode of Decoder.
1:05:07 David Pierce? That's real.
1:05:08 Nilay Patel? I was like, what's your org strategy? He's like, well, there's me and Claire. And that's like. And obviously they have server costs and I'm sure they're gonna grow in different ways.
1:05:16 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:05:17 Nilay Patel? But as a company, this is just a social experiment. I think if you're WT.social, you might believe you're a company.
1:05:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah, if you believe hard enough, it could be a zero.
1:05:27 Nilay Patel? And I, I think if your company is modeled after Twitter, a notoriously poorly run company, you've just got some problems coming your way.
1:05:35 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:05:36 Nilay Patel? I think the cold start problem of how do I get a network effect or how do I get a bunch of users is actually, and they're all trying to compete on weird ideas about what people had a problem with on Twitter. And I think they all miss the fact that a lot of people liked how drama, that a lot of people liked how dramatic Twitter was.
1:05:52 David Pierce? Or at least couldn't look away from it.
1:05:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:05:54 David Pierce? Like it was, it had that car crash appeal.
1:05:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like, what if we made Twitter without car crashes? And it's like, yeah, no one's.
1:06:00 Alex Cranz? I want my, my Twitter person of the day.
1:06:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:06:03 Alex Cranz? I love telling people who don't use Twitter about it and they're just like, okay.
1:06:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:06:07 Alex Cranz? Anyway, here's what's going on with my kids.
1:06:10 Nilay Patel? Uh, did you see Kevin Durant tweeted, I'm on threads with a burner, come find me?
1:06:14 David Pierce? No way.
1:06:15 Nilay Patel? And it's like, that's what people are here for.
1:06:18 David Pierce? I respect that.
1:06:19 Nilay Patel? He's not tweeting, I'm on WT Social with a burner.
1:06:23 David Pierce? So this is threads to lose, basically. Like, nobody has won this yet, but it, it very much feels like the next 12 months are threads to screw up.
1:06:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I, I would put it, just the mirror image is, it's a negative 45 for Twitter and it's a positive 45 for threads. But it's about to be an election year.
1:06:40 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:06:41 Nilay Patel? A lot of weird stuff is going to start happening on these platforms. Just a lot of weird stuff. And those numbers can move. But I think threads, their attitude about news and real time information is just, the pressure on that is just increasing.
1:06:56 David Pierce? Yeah, and that's going to collide with an election in a pretty real way.
1:06:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and sport, and just sports. The NBA season has started, we're still in the middle of the NFL season.
1:07:05 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:07:05 Nilay Patel? Like, that audience is wanting to move to threads and it's just like not happening.
1:07:09 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right.
1:07:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:07:11 David Pierce? The next 12 months, I think, are going to be really fascinating. Like, I think many of these we will not even mention in a year. And I think the stakes are going to feel super high for a lot of these folks as we wind towards an election.
1:07:22 Alex Cranz? I'm still rooting for WT Social, which I've learned a lot about. It's got two stars on Product Hunt out of five.
1:07:28 David Pierce? Okay, we, that's, yeah, that's.
1:07:30 Alex Cranz? LifeWire's got a great.
1:07:31 David Pierce? This segment has gone 19.
1:07:32 Alex Cranz? On how to use it.
1:07:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'm just like, it's the non-toxic social. Like, that's great, I'm happy that there's a non-toxic social network.
1:07:38 David Pierce? Okay, we've officially, Alex is now Googling WT Social, which means we're done here. This segment has gone 19.
1:07:45 Nilay Patel? It's, it's all over, baby. All right, we're going to take a break, we'll wrap with the lightning round. We'll be right back.
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1:08:58 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. It's Lightning Round time. We're still open for sponsors. As we know, the Lightning Port has been deprecated.
1:09:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:09:03 Nilay Patel? Some people have been posting at various Ford executives on my behalf. Thank you very much. I appreciate you. I'm still looking for a major American ship company to sponsor the Thunderbolt 4 Round. And just trying to will things into a... You have to make the media company you want.
1:09:19 David Pierce? Neil's vision board is just Thunderbolt 4 cables.
1:09:22 Nilay Patel? They're very expensive. All right, I'll take the first one, which I'm... The only thing I wanted to talk about this week is Metal Gear Solid Delta Snake Eater, now running in Unreal.
1:09:33 Alex Cranz? The top.
1:09:34 Nilay Patel? It was the first thing on the rundown. And David moved it.
1:09:37 Alex Cranz? I watched... It was great, just watching it get highlighted and...
1:09:40 Nilay Patel? In our editorial meeting today, I said, "There's a lot of weird passive-aggressive stuff that happens in enterprise software." And what I was thinking about was David rewriting the rundown every week.
1:09:48 David Pierce? Can I just say, just before you get into this, this might be the greatest video game title of all time. Metal Gear Solid Delta: Snake Eater.
1:09:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:09:56 David Pierce? Just whips to it. That's so good.
1:10:01 Nilay Patel? Uh, this is one of the greatest video games ever made. It was a PS2 game. It just ruled. It ruled. And now it still looks like a video game. Like, you know, like you get new gameplay footage now in new engines. No, it's still super looks like a video game. But this game ruled.
1:10:17 Alex Cranz? This used to be called something else, though. This was Metal Gear Solid 3.
1:10:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's Metal Gear Solid 3 Snake Eater.
1:10:23 Alex Cranz? I didn't get past one.
1:10:24 Nilay Patel? Oh, my God, Alex.
1:10:25 Alex Cranz? I'm still in a box somewhere on PlayStation.
1:10:26 Nilay Patel? The number of things that you and I just have to stream together, right? Just on this show alone, it's all of the Metal Gears now. Just a full-on, week-long Twitch stream.
1:10:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:10:35 Nilay Patel? Blade Trinity, and I believe Pump Up the Volume is still...
1:10:39 Alex Cranz? This is gonna be a good time. Everybody come join us. It's gonna be great.
1:10:42 Nilay Patel? This is our...
1:10:43 David Pierce? We're gonna start a podcast called Copyright in Front of It, in which we just watch all the things that we have to watch.
1:10:49 Nilay Patel? I'm more excited about this game than I think it is. This is a defining video game.
1:10:54 Alex Cranz? Are you gonna take that day off?
1:10:56 Nilay Patel? And just burn through Metal Gear Solid?
1:10:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:10:58 Nilay Patel? Probably, yeah. That's my idea. All right, David, what's yours?
1:11:00 David Pierce? Love that. Mine is a little tidbit of information we got. So we've talked a lot about the Google antitrust trial. And one of the big open questions has been, how much money does Google pay Apple to be the exclusive search engine on all the Apple devices? We knew it was billions of dollars. I had heard numbers as low as five and as high as 20. But these numbers have come out, but they've only come out in closed court, and they're not being given to reporters. Like, the access to information has been a huge, open question during all of this trial. The New York Times had a report on Thursday that the actual number is $18 billion. Or at least in 2021, Google paid $18 billion to Apple to be the default search engine in Safari. There was also some interesting stuff in there
1:11:42 David Pierce? that when Satya Nadella testified, he said, and it seemed like he was kind of guessing at the time, that one thing Apple might be worried about is that if it took the deal away from Google, Google would use all of its many powerful and popular iOS apps to do things like promote Chrome. Like, if every time you went to Gmail, it was just like, hey, download Chrome, a better browser. Like, a lot of people would download Chrome. And they were very afraid that Google was gonna do that if it lost the search deal. Satya said this like it was a possibility, but not that he was certain. But the Times report said that, in fact, Google was thinking about doing exactly that and was building things to compete with Spotlight and was gonna start to get people to use Chrome by using its other tools on iOS.
1:12:24 Alex Cranz? How is that any different from right now? If I go, if one of you sent me a Google Doc and I try to open it on my phone on Safari, my phone flips out.
1:12:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:12:33 Alex Cranz? Unless I go and I download the stupid Google Docs app and log in and use that. How is that any different?
1:12:40 David Pierce? Google Docs might be the single worst mobile program.
1:12:44 Nilay Patel? No, no, no, no, no. It slides. Google slides.
1:12:47 David Pierce? Okay, no, you're right.
1:12:48 Nilay Patel? Mobile program.
1:12:49 David Pierce? Google, Google Slides, Sheets, and Docs are all full of that.
1:12:52 Nilay Patel? But I'm saying Slides is... You know how every year the iPhone comes out, or any other phone comes out, and like, this processor is crazy fast? Like, it's just there for headroom. I'm like, can this run Google Slides? Because it probably can't. My phone's gonna get hot, and it's gonna slow down and crash Google Slides.
1:13:08 Alex Cranz? How's Slides on Dex?
1:13:11 Nilay Patel? I don't want to think about it. Let me unfold this stupid thing. All right, but keep going.
1:13:15 David Pierce? But, well, so to answer your question, though, it would be, it would be kind of like, this is not a perfect analogy, but if you were to like, open a Pages document on your phone, and Google just threw a pop-up being like, wouldn't you rather use Google Docs?
1:13:27 Alex Cranz? It does that currently.
1:13:29 David Pierce? No, if you try to open a Google Doc, it will take you to Google Docs.
1:13:32 Alex Cranz? But if it does for any...
1:13:33 David Pierce? I'm saying if you, if you opened any webpage in Chrome, and Chrome was like, wouldn't you rather use Google Docs?
1:13:38 Alex Cranz? I'd set it on fire.
1:13:39 David Pierce? Yeah. Properly.
1:13:41 Alex Cranz? That, that, like, that's my, that's my villain story. That's, that's how you get me to never want to use your products again.
1:13:47 David Pierce? Yeah, but also it's how you get a lot of people to download your stuff.
1:13:50 Alex Cranz? This is true, and, and Google...
1:13:52 David Pierce? I bet you also have the Google Docs app on your phone now.
1:13:54 Alex Cranz? I had to. It bullied me for so many years.
1:13:56 David Pierce? This is the thing. They're not, they don't care.
1:13:58 Alex Cranz? I needed to put my notes in for a story on the train.
1:14:02 David Pierce? This is, this is the thing, right? And if you're, if you're Google, and you can say, "Stay logged into YouTube," in the YouTube app, "by logging into Chrome."
1:14:11 Alex Cranz? I hate it.
1:14:11 David Pierce? You're gonna get people to download Chrome.
1:14:13 Alex Cranz? That's FTC, do something about this.
1:14:15 David Pierce? And, and truthfully...
1:14:16 Nilay Patel? They have put Google on trial.
1:14:18 David Pierce? I think it was...
1:14:19 Alex Cranz? Do more.
1:14:20 David Pierce? I think it's possible that Google would never have actually done this, but the threat of doing it,
1:14:25 Nilay Patel? Right.
1:14:25 David Pierce? at least the DOJ would tell you, is enough to keep Apple, along with $18 billion, from walking away from Google.
1:14:33 Alex Cranz? I wanted to just talk about that for a second. Google, if you're listening, I will also make you the default search app on my phone for $18 billion. I'm here for you.
1:14:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so it's interesting, the context of this is fascinating. So in Europe, Digital Services Act is in force. Apple's gonna have to let people pick Chrome. Google will have to let people switch default browsers in various ways. We'll just see if this regulatory intervention actually does something. Notably, for the past decade, it has not.
1:15:03 David Pierce? Right.
1:15:04 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, there have been browser ballots and search ballots on Windows PCs and Android phones in Europe.
1:15:10 David Pierce? They don't do anything.
1:15:10 Nilay Patel? They don't do anything.
1:15:11 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah, there's a lot of evidence that shows that the, the thing where you boot up the phone and it says, what search engine do you want to use? Everybody picks Google.
1:15:18 Nilay Patel? Right. Here's what I'm curious about.
1:15:20 David Pierce? Everybody picks Google, in large part, the DOJ would argue, because they've never heard of any other search engine because of the way that Google does it. So people are like, what's Akosha and why would I use that? I'm just gonna pick Google. And so, and this is the hard part of the DOJ's case, is they have to wind this all the way back and essentially argue that Google has made it so that you've never even tried another search engine, because it's impossible. And that is a very hard case to argue when Google is like, they're just, they're just right there. Like, just go do it.
1:15:47 Nilay Patel? Here's what I'm curious about, though. The only browser ballot I could see working, you turn on your iPhone, and it says, you want Chrome or Safari?
1:15:54 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:15:55 Nilay Patel? And I think that's a coin flip. And that's in this case, too, that people think that that's a coin flip.
1:15:59 David Pierce? That's two brands everybody's heard of.
1:16:01 Nilay Patel? Yep.
1:16:01 David Pierce? Which, which is, I, I agree. I think it'll be really fascinating. And I would bet in, somewhere in Apple Park in Cupertino, is Safari for Android. It's just sitting there.
1:16:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah. They made Safari for Windows once.
1:16:13 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:16:13 Nilay Patel? It didn't, didn't go well.
1:16:14 David Pierce? I think they would pick this fight backwards if they had to. Like, they, they will, they will bring it to Google if Google's gonna bring it to them.
1:16:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:16:21 David Pierce? And they're like, there's this like mutually assured destruction thing that has worked for everybody for a long time. Again, along with 18 billion dollars. And either it's gonna stay that way, or it's gonna get all unwound, and I think it's gonna get ugly.
1:16:34 Nilay Patel? The other piece of this puzzle, which I think is a pretty important wrinkle right now, is there's a bunch of reporting this week that Apple's behind in AI or feels like it's behind in AI, and needs to get better at AI, put it in all the products, as you would expect. And the Apple's privacy posture will keep it from going and hoovering up a bunch of data or sharing a bunch of data. And you know what would be a good source of data for an AI tool is search queries.
1:16:59 David Pierce? Yep.
1:17:00 Nilay Patel? We know this because they're a great source for Google. And that's how Apple gets a bunch of differential privacy shielded input.
1:17:09 David Pierce? Totally.
1:17:09 Nilay Patel? For an AI system.
1:17:10 Alex Cranz? It's on some little chip, just right on the board, so you don't have to worry about it.
1:17:14 Nilay Patel? Yeah, you can see how they would do it.
1:17:16 Alex Cranz? That was my Tim Cook.
1:17:16 David Pierce? That was good.
1:17:17 Nilay Patel? It's good.
1:17:19 Nilay Patel? Full vampire fans. Uh, cravat. We'll see. I, I, the dynamic there is interesting because it might be in Apple's long-term interest to not take the 18 billion dollars.
1:17:31 Alex Cranz? No.
1:17:31 Nilay Patel? Said no one ever. If there's one company that can look past 18 billion dollars, it's Apple. It's Mastodon.
1:17:39 Alex Cranz? Claire.
1:17:39 Nilay Patel? Those are the only two. I really bet everyone should go listen to Carter. He's a fascinating guy. It was a good one. All right, Kranz, what's yours?
1:17:45 Alex Cranz? Okay, so mine is a shout out to Mia Sato. She has a really, really great story up on the site right now called, is my coworker AI? Bizarre product reviews leave Gannett staff wondering. It's a really, really good story. It's basically reviewed, which is one of the, the sites for Gannett. Gannett does like USA Today and a lot of local newspapers. Reviewed as their kind of wire cutter and a bunch of new reviews appeared on it and everybody's like, I didn't write that. And then when they went and they looked up the people, a lot of them didn't seem to exist.
1:18:15 Nilay Patel? Oh, boy.
1:18:16 Alex Cranz? And so it seems that this was all per like, this was stuff that Gannett went partnered with another company who's using AI to just write AI churn and then try to like.
1:18:27 Nilay Patel? Oh, my God.
1:18:27 Alex Cranz? Sell you stuff.
1:18:28 Nilay Patel? Why don't I have these ideas?
1:18:30 Alex Cranz? Well, it's, it's not going great. The reviewed staff is, is pretty upset about it. They just recently went on strike over union stuff with, with Gannett. So, uh, with News Guild, so no disclaimer needed.
1:18:41 Nilay Patel? You know.
1:18:44 Alex Cranz? You were, I could see you getting ready for it. So, yeah, it's, the, the story is really good. It's, it's really, really wild. There's a bunch of stuff we still don't know.
1:18:52 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:18:52 Alex Cranz? About this, the rationale and everything like that, but, um, sucks for the folks that work there.
1:18:58 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying, if you work at a business and any one of your business thinks, we should just get some AI chum to get Google search results to make pennies, you should leave that business.
1:19:07 Alex Cranz? There's a product pros and cons, and apparently instead of like pros and cons, it's just specs.
1:19:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:19:14 Alex Cranz? Did it.
1:19:15 Nilay Patel? Or, I mean, on the flip side, if you are the scammer using AI to cheat Google out of pennies, are you, you know, buy another Lambo, you know, live it up while you can?
1:19:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I was like, I was like, it's going great for you.
1:19:25 Nilay Patel? These are the last days of disco, brother. It's just like, but that internet's ending. And this, this is the force that will end it.
1:19:32 Alex Cranz? Yep.
1:19:32 Nilay Patel? All right, here's mine. I'm very excited about this one. It's Humane's AI pin. Oh, God. Was named Time's gadget of the year.
1:19:39 Alex Cranz? Time.
1:19:40 Nilay Patel? One, one of many, to be fair. It's just, no one's ever seen it, you know?
1:19:46 Alex Cranz? I also have named it my gadget of the year. It's really serious.
1:19:50 Nilay Patel? Sure, we learned that it has some integration with GPT somehow in it. And it has a light called the trust light that lights up when it's listening, which I would remind you is apparently all the time.
1:20:02 David Pierce? That's
1:20:02 Alex Cranz? So it's just constantly a little glowing.
1:20:04 Nilay Patel? There's a little yellow light.
1:20:05 David Pierce? It's not even a light, it's just a piece of yellow. I will say this time thing is interesting in that it has a couple of new details like the trust light and the fact that it has a magnetic attachment. That's something.
1:20:18 Alex Cranz? I like that part, that's cool.
1:20:20 David Pierce? It also has one of the funniest disclosures in history. So again, you're putting an unannounced product that really no one knows anything about on your best inventions of 2023 list. Bold strategy, and then it has at the end, investors in humane include time, co-chairs and owners, Mark and Lynn Benioff.
1:20:38 Nilay Patel? Yep.
1:20:39 David Pierce? It's just a tough look. Like disclosure is our brand, we love a disclosure. That's a tough one. This product you've never seen, it's so sick, it's funded by my boss, you're gonna love it.
1:20:51 Nilay Patel? Best inventions of 2023. Well, I will say this, the owner of Time Magazine is scheduled to be on Decoder soon.
1:20:58 David Pierce? There you go.
1:20:58 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna ask him about the pin.
1:21:00 David Pierce? If he brings the AIP, I will take all of it back.
1:21:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah. He better
1:21:05 Nilay Patel? What else can we do?
1:21:05 Alex Cranz? I hope he has it.
1:21:06 Nilay Patel? He won't do it. He's not gonna betray the Ohana, are you kidding me? Come on.
1:21:13 David Pierce? I'm fascinated by that thing, though. It's supposed to launch November 9th. There's so much we don't know. They have done this like, what, eight month long hype cycle at this point, humane? They've been out there talking about this, I think that original TED Talk where he showed off and or lied about a bunch of demos was in April. So we've been talking about this for a long time. And this thing is either going to be great, or it's gonna be a total disaster, and I have a very hard time imagining anything in between. And I have a much easier time imagining total disaster.
1:21:45 Nilay Patel? So there was some reporting that in OpenAI integration, Sam Altman might be an investor in this thing. There's also some reporting that Sam Altman and Johnny Ive are working on their own thing, which is fascinating, because humane is a bunch of ex Apple designers. That's gotta be a weird email chain.
1:22:03 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:22:04 Nilay Patel? Just in general, just a weird email chain.
1:22:06 Alex Cranz? A lot of ellipses.
1:22:09 Nilay Patel? A lot of thoughtfully considering materials. And then also you betrayed me. And it's like, it's all in there. I don't know, man. I'm still stuck on the basics. You want to call Bethany? How does it know Bethany's phone number?
1:22:19 David Pierce? And how does it call Bethany?
1:22:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Does it have a service plan? How do you configure the IMEI? Like just, just the basics. I just want to know.
1:22:28 David Pierce? Yep.
1:22:28 Alex Cranz? It's all magic.
1:22:29 Nilay Patel? And I'm telling you, if this thing requires an app on your phone to function, disaster.
1:22:34 David Pierce? Yep.
1:22:35 Nilay Patel? And it definitely does.
1:22:37 David Pierce? I'm so excited for this. It's gonna have to be 15 hours long and it's just them explaining how it does basic things. I cannot wait.
1:22:44 Nilay Patel? It's very good. I should disclose that we are also owned.
1:22:48 Alex Cranz? By human.
1:22:52 Nilay Patel? No, that's not true. There is a number of disclosures we could have made on this episode, but I leave those as an exercise to the viewer. No, I don't think there were any.
1:22:59 Alex Cranz? There was.
1:23:00 David Pierce? No, we did good this time.
1:23:01 Nilay Patel? We did good. All right.
1:23:04 David Pierce? We should end the show before we.
1:23:05 Nilay Patel? If you think we missed one, send us a note. You know, we're here for it. I closed the tab with all the.
1:23:10 Alex Cranz? Quick, somebody talk about Netflix.
1:23:14 Alex Cranz? Uh, FTX trial. Or no, shout out is Lurker.
1:23:18 Nilay Patel? All right. A few things to mention before we close. Sam Bankman Fried was on the stand in the FTX trial today. Liz Lopato has been there. Every day. She's having the time of her life covering this trial.
1:23:29 David Pierce? Yeah. We're gonna have her on the show in the next week or so.
1:23:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:23:32 David Pierce? To come talk about it.
1:23:32 Nilay Patel? David and I went to the premiere of the Bloomberg doc about FTX yesterday and people talked to me and were like, Liz is doing a great job covering the trial. That's incredible. So she's having the time of her life and I'm eager to see what Sam had to say today. And then we have an incredible, I guess you could say a spooky story about someone who has been tormenting professors online. And it is one of our best layouts ever. It's very cool. Uh, go read it. It's great. And then lastly, as you all know, we've been covering Google obsessively this year, just the culture Google made. Like I said, the last days of Disco. You gotta put the marker down and say like, this is the world we made before we move on. So we've been covering Google and Google's SEO web.
1:24:16 Nilay Patel? And we have a really great one this week from Mia, who's been on a run lately. Yeah. It's called "The Restaurant Nearst Google." It's about a restaurant called Thai Food Near Me in New York City. That's the whole name. The SEO has broken out of the internet, people. Yep. And she found a bunch of other businesses around the country. Notary Near Me is very popular. Barber Shop Near Me is very popular. And she just went and talked to these folks about why they named their businesses this. And we got a lot of comments like, "This is like when people named the A1 Auto Shop." Yep, they're just trying to beat the discovery algorithm. But this is, this is a new way of doing it. And of course, Google's in the story being like, "That's not how it works." Which is, a lot of our Google coverage involves that dynamic. But the story is great, the pictures are incredible. And Mia said the food was good, which is important. So go check that out, it's on the site now.
1:25:01 Nilay Patel? That's it, we're way over. Subscribe to Installer, listen to Decoder, listen to all of our shows. Yeah. Verge is a cool, it's a cool website. It's the only one left. That's it, that's The Verge Cast, rock and roll.
1:25:19 Speaker 05 And that's it for The Verge Cast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Verge Cast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. We'll see you next week.
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