Pod Insights The Vergecast Apple events, SEO, and other fights About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the takeaways from Apple's Mac event, the problem with SEO on the internet, streaming news, and much more.
Further reading:
Apple ‘Scary Fast’ Mac launch event: the 4 biggest announcements
Goodbye, Touch Bar, you held incredible promise
Here’s what Apple means when it says its event was ‘shot on iPhone’
Amanda Chicago Lewis’ excellent piece about the web SEO built
Some thoughts about The Verge article on SEO
Sundar Pichai argues in court that Google isn’t evil, it’s just a business
Disney is about to own all of Hulu
Joe Rogan’s big Spotify decision
HBO Bosses Used ‘Secret’ Fake Accounts to Troll TV Critics
Max is taking 4K away from its legacy ad-free subscribers
Netflix’s ad-supported plan will reward binge watchers with ad-free episodes
Streaming is more expensive than ever — and it’s only going up from here
YouTube is getting serious about blocking ad blockers
There's a surprising new top-five player in the smartphone market
Excuse me, it’s “really an aftermarket sound solution.”
The best robot vacuum for me is the one I hacked
Chrome on iOS now lets you move the address bar to the bottom
Google is officially trying to make .ing domains a th.ing
The EV transition trips over its own cord
Closing time for Sam Bankman-Fried
What stalking a delivery robot taught us about AI’s limits
Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you.
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Transcript 16,828 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 Verchast, the flagship podcast of the Touch Bar.
1:15 Alex Cranz? It's good.
1:16 Nilay Patel? Only one of us thinks that, Alex.
1:18 Alex Cranz? It's true.
1:19 Nilay Patel? Two?
1:22 Nilay Patel? Okay, one thing that is true is that I became friends with a very famous record producer on Instagram because of the Touch Bar.
1:29 Alex Cranz? That was the best humble brag I've heard.
1:32 Nilay Patel? It's pretty good.
1:33 Alex Cranz? Who?
1:33 David Pierce? Okay, so Neely and David Guetta are best friends.
1:37 Nilay Patel? No, Oak Felder, you should follow him on Instagram. He's Ochustra. He's, he's super cool. We're just like dad friends. We just like, like pictures of each other's kids now.
1:46 Alex Cranz? This for you.
1:47 Nilay Patel? But he did a video with us just about how to make music with a Mac during one of our music video series. And he was like, and he was using the Touch Bar in his computer. And I was like, what are you doing? And he's like, I love this thing. And he was like swiping through Logic on the touchbar. And we just started.
2:02 Alex Cranz? Wow.
2:02 Nilay Patel? That's it. That's the beginning of a beautiful friendship.
2:04 Alex Cranz? That's beautiful.
2:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:05 Alex Cranz? I should have talked to him.
2:06 Nilay Patel? A beautiful dad friendship.
2:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
2:07 Nilay Patel? He doesn't post about the touchbar on his Instagram. It's mostly like him doing recording artist stuff and pictures.
2:13 Alex Cranz? I think if more people had, it probably wouldn't have gone away.
2:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah, if more Grammy award winning musicians were like, the touchbar rules. I think we'd be in a very different spot in America in 2023.
2:23 Alex Cranz? Only, it would only be on the 16th.
2:24 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm your friend Eli. Alex Cranz is here.
2:26 Alex Cranz? Hi, I'm your friend who loves the touchbar and the Texas Rangers, who are now have a World Series pennant. I don't know how the World Series works, but I've been waiting 30 years. It's awesome.
2:36 Nilay Patel? You've been waiting 30 years and learned none of the vocabulary along the way.
2:40 Alex Cranz? None of it. I learned who Nolan Ryan and Jose Canseco were in 1993.
2:43 Nilay Patel? Nice.
2:43 Alex Cranz? And nothing until this year. And apparently the Rangers rule.
2:48 David Pierce? You didn't miss that much between the two, to be fair.
2:50 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
2:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
2:50 Alex Cranz? I think I'm okay.
2:51 Nilay Patel? I follow one of those threads accounts. It's like freezing cold sports takes. And they had one about the Rangers. I was like, I don't know who any of those names are or what baseball is. David Pierce is here.
3:01 David Pierce? Sup, guys? I'm in my sick gamer YouTube channel setup.
3:06 Nilay Patel? David's in our DC office, the Vox Media DC office, which is-
3:09 David Pierce? AKA our sick gamer YouTube channel setup. I feel like I said that already.
3:13 Nilay Patel? That office is mostly populated by like the corporate staff of the company and then vox.com and a little bit of SB Nation, I think. And of course, when you think of vox.com, you think of Gamer Lights.
3:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
3:24 David Pierce? Yeah, obviously. I will say I'm here because I lost power today, just out of nowhere on a sunny day, in the middle of an interview for The Vergecast with two of the people who made Planet Earth 3. We were having an unbelievable time talking about cool drone photography in caves, which someday, Lord willing, you will hear on The Vergecast. And my power just disappeared. And now I'm here.
3:49 Alex Cranz? I hate it.
3:50 David Pierce? It's been a day.
3:51 Nilay Patel? I took a meeting with a developer who's making a cool app that David was supposed to be on. And I said, David lost power. And he looked at the weather and said, it's not raining out there.
3:59 David Pierce? Yep.
4:03 Nilay Patel? Very good. It's not. Bunch of news this week. There was an Apple event, which we should talk about. A lot of people have a lot of feelings about this event, and particularly how it was shot. Oh. Oh, my. Sometimes The Verge, you're on a publication, you're lucky if everyone's talking about one story. We had like three different groups of people, sort of like up in arms about three different stories this week. And I was like, oh, we are the only tech site that remains on the internet. There's no one else to yell at but us. But Apple event, new Macs, we should talk about those. We published the next installment of our big Google package about sort of where we are on the web and what's going on with search, how AI is coming. I would say that really got a lot of people going. And those people happen to be search
4:48 Nilay Patel? engine optimization experts. So their comments are impeccably formatted for discoverability.
4:54 David Pierce? That's true. It's a nice reminder every once in a while. Like, do you have those moments where like a corner of the internet wakes up in response to something? And you're like, oh, I didn't even know you were there.
5:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Yeah.
5:03 David Pierce? It's like, like when the knitters get really angry, you're just like, oh, all the people who love to knit, they just hang out together. That's so cool.
5:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's not a when. That's a permanent case with the knitting community. Just constant rage. They're holding needles and they're not afraid to use them, sir.
5:18 David Pierce? Yeah. But it was just like, it was like we accidentally walked into the SEO bar this week.
5:23 Nilay Patel? No, we barged into it and said, you all suck. That's what we did. And I don't want to shy away from it. We'll get to that. More Google news. They're about to go to trial in the antitrust case with Epic. David was in the other antitrust trial this week. Sundar Pichai testified. We got to talk about that. There's some spicy documents from Apple that were revealed in that case. That's pretty good.
5:46 David Pierce? Spicy documents.
5:47 Nilay Patel? I love a spicy document. I love a spicy document. Eddie Q's like, put some hot sauce on that before you send it out. Just the little, the little salt. Into cold storage for the prosecutors to find 10 years from now. And then there's a bunch of streaming news. Yeah. People are buying things. Prices are inevitably going up. And we got a lightning round, which is still not sponsored. And I implore you, major American shipmaker.
6:11 Nilay Patel? To call our financial
6:13 Nilay Patel? Our business, our business development person, make it happen. Uh, there's, there's some good stuff in line. Okay, let's start the Apple event. Scary fest. I would say, uh,
6:25 Nilay Patel? I was very disappointed. There were not more Halloween jokes. Uh, there were.
6:30 David Pierce? You were also just wrong. Like, we should just call this what you were, you were wrong. And I feel like this is, this is the time when you should atone for how wrong you were about what Apple was doing.
6:40 Alex Cranz? Your scary costume today, Neela.
6:42 Nilay Patel? Uh, no, thank you. Um,
6:46 Nilay Patel? I did dress, I dressed, my parents were here for trick or treat. I dressed them up as a witch and a warlock. Which means I put hats on them.
6:52 Alex Cranz? Yes.
6:53 Nilay Patel? And that's, and then my dad was like, oh no, I lost the hat.
6:57 Nilay Patel? What a surprise. My prediction, if I recall this correctly, would just be like over the top TV production. They're going to compete with money at football. Craig Federighi doing a vampire voice the whole time. That did not happen. And I want to make it clear I was wrong about that, but also that I was right in that it should have been what happened. Because the actual announcements were so lackluster that Craig Federighi doing a vampire voice, I think would have been more fulfilling to people.
7:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
7:24 Nilay Patel? Right?
7:25 David Pierce? Yeah. Neela, you posted at one point on threads, I think something to the effect of Apple has lost the plot of why people actually watch these things. What did you mean?
7:33 Nilay Patel? This one in particular. So if you go back and watch a Steve Jobs Apple event. He was the master of making you feel like, one, he understood the problem. And two, only he could solve it. And three, the product was cool as hell. Right. And that here is the solution to the product. And that first part, I understand the problem. Is the, I, I think as a person who came up covering these events and watching them unfold and watching them grow to what they are now. That's the part that's gone, but it's also the thing that was the most fulfilling. Everyone knows the first iPhone event, right? The problem is all these buttons down here. So we're gonna make a touchscreen like. And he put up the problem.
8:17 Nilay Patel? He was like, here's a picture of other people's idiot problems. And I'm gonna fix it for you. And this is how smartphones are gonna work now. He did that like all the time. And Apple traditionally kinda does that, right? They like identify the problem and like, here's how we're gonna solve it. And this one in particular, I just felt like identified no problems. It was like, are the problem we're solving is that the chip is even faster.
8:43 Nilay Patel? Right, and then, and then you look at how they were trying to sell it. They were like, this one is for creative professionals. If you're coming from an Intel Mac, it'll be 11 times faster. They just weren't solving any problems with the products. It was just like pure marketing. There was a moment in the middle of it. I actually didn't put it on threads. I just said that to you privately. You doxed me.
9:06 Nilay Patel? My bad, whatever. Uh, I'll say, I'll say it now. There was a moment in that where I was like, this could be any company. Like, this is how basically every company markets their products now. They're just like, look at how good it is.
9:16 Alex Cranz? It was just an AMD keynote. AMD also loves to do an evening keynote. Everybody loves to wear all black. There's usually some leather involved, but not in a fun way. And then they talk about a bunch of processors and show a bunch of charts.
9:29 Nilay Patel? So Qualcomm had an event the same week. Allison Johnson was in Hawaii for the event. She wrote a great piece about it. Festival of marketing. And the piece is basically about the festival of marketing. Qualcomm's processor graphs are the same as Apple's. They're the same unlabeled graph. And you could argue that they're just copying Apple or Apple's copying Qualcomm. Or there's a long history of these graphs. But just from the perspective of, are these events different? Do these companies act differently? The answer is, oh, they're converging. They're all converging on the same sort of marketing. I don't mean to say that the product's bad. I have a 16-inch M1 Pro MacBook Pro. It is the best computer I have ever owned. You, you put a better chip in it. You do some software tweaks to make it 600 nits instead of 500. I'm happy. As long as the battery life lasts as long as this one does.
10:14 Nilay Patel? The problem is they have so fundamentally solved the problem.
10:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
10:18 Nilay Patel? That they're they're just going, they're kind of reverting to marketing.
10:22 Alex Cranz? And they've been doing it honestly for a little while now. Like, it's been a couple of years of they're not really solving a problem, they're inventing problems to solve on stage. And so I think we see that a lot with with a lot of the camera stuff they're doing. They're like, don't you hate that you can't see every fiber of a sweater? And it's like, three people hate that, but most people are fine. And it I do agree with you that in the beginning, it really felt like there was a problem and they were solving it. And in some cases, it was the problem was Apple's own making because Apple was at that time like a pretty crummy company. And it got better. And now it's just like, OK, you're at the top of your game. What do you do next? And they're like, we do it at night.
11:02 Nilay Patel? Right.
11:02 Alex Cranz? That's not enough.
11:03 Nilay Patel? And mostly they're mostly that we have solved a problem involves the introduction of a new category. Right? So they the iPod, that watch the iPod launch event. Right. He's like a thousand songs in your pocket.
11:15 Alex Cranz? Creative jukebox in the audience furious.
11:17 Nilay Patel? Right. He put up a picture of that thing. It was like, this thing sucks.
11:20 David Pierce? Yeah.
11:21 Nilay Patel? Like, he really did. He was like, here's the MP3 players of the of the day. Here's the ones that are flash memory. Here's the hard drive ones. These suck. I made a good one.
11:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
11:27 Nilay Patel? And and then every iPod, every year after, he invented a reason.
11:32 Alex Cranz? Well, that was like.
11:32 Nilay Patel? Why they were bad. And they like, fix it. Whatever. Uh, the iPad, if you watch the iPad one, it is remarkable, actually. Because he's like, you have a phone and a laptop and there's some, there's space in between.
11:48 David Pierce? He brought like a comfy armchair.
11:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
11:50 David Pierce? On stage. Like, that was that was the thing. It was the armchair computer, right? Like, that was, he did such a good job of that.
11:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, he had a show to put on for you. In, you know, whatever, Steve Jobs, Steve Jobs. I'm just saying that was the thing. And I think Apple has now gotten to this place where these are, it's an infomercial. We all sat around and watched a 23 minute infomercial the other night. It was produced like one, it was shot like one. I understand people a lot of feelings with that. But it was a TV show.
12:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
12:16 Nilay Patel? They should have done more vampire voices. I will, Tim Cook kinda did one with the first good evening. And Johnny Shrooge was like, "Welcome to my lab." And he was clearly, if they had lied to me, he would have done the whole thing in the voice.
12:29 David Pierce? Yes.
12:30 Nilay Patel? But those are the only two I got out of it. There were some eyes blinking in the background, whatever. Um, all I'm saying, and this is the most minor criticism, because we should actually talk about the products. The show of it, ever since it's become a TV show, has veered into just sort of regular marketing. And not the, Apple will identify a thing that everyone is frustrated with or has never thought of and show you something. The Vision Pro is arguably that product right now. Right? It's the new category, it's the new use cases.
13:00 Alex Cranz? But they didn't have a problem to solve for it.
13:02 Nilay Patel? That's, I would say, is the problem.
13:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:05 Nilay Patel? Um, and we'll see how it goes. But yeah, I don't, we don't need to overindex on whether the 23-minute, last-minute Mac infomercial was like the best Apple keynote of all. When I say they've lost the plot and why people watch these, it's, if you just watch them now, the only problem they have to solve is like, five years ago, you bought an Intel Mac and now you should buy a new one. And that's not a great problem to solve.
13:24 David Pierce? Yeah.
13:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:25 David Pierce? Which I think is why they're leaning ever harder into pros. Right? And that's like, that was so much of what this event was about. I just keep thinking about when they launched the Mac Pro, and we were getting demos of it and seeing how things worked. The demo was literally Avatar.
13:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
13:40 David Pierce? That it's like, this is, these computers are so good. Imagine if you were making the most complicated movie ever made in history. You would need this Mac Pro. And you're just like, alright, sick. Like, how many Chrome Taps can it handle? Like, what, I just, is, they, we've just gotten into these tiny niches where this stuff, especially having to do this every year, right? Like, if Apple only had to tell this story every five years, it wouldn't be that hard. Telling everybody who bought a computer in 2018, why the M3 MacBook Pro is gonna blow your mind. Is not complicated. But they have to keep telling this story year after year after year. And it does, you can just see it get sort of smaller and smaller and smaller, the people
14:22 David Pierce? who are sort of actually meaningfully going to notice the thing over the last year. And again, in a lot of ways, that's a really good thing. Like, these are great, super mature products. It just, it just makes this particular job much harder, I think.
14:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's why Qualcomm does it in Hawaii. Because they ran into the same issue. Like, all of the processor companies have been dealing with this for a very long time, and Apple's now having to reckon with it too. Where like, yeah, these speed improvements are nice, but they're mainly nice for when you look back five years. And most people in our industry don't care about that. And a lot of our readers probably don't care about it. Like, my brother, who has a five-year-old computer, might care. But those people who tune into these events to see the next big thing don't care about a small speed bump.
15:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I will say that there was one problem that they created that they solved to great acclaim, which was the touchbar and the butterfly keyboard.
15:16 Alex Cranz? The butterfly keyboard.
15:17 Nilay Patel? And the utter lack of ports on the MacBook Pro. And they fixed that a couple of years ago. Again, best computer I've ever owned. And then this year was the end of the 13-inch MacBook Pro with the touchbar.
15:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah, yeah. I feel like we've kind of been memorializing it since it stopped getting a lot of the same updates as everybody else. It was kind of sitting off in the corner by itself, clearly on its last legs.
15:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
15:41 Alex Cranz? But this year, they were like, no, we're done.
15:42 Nilay Patel? We're out.
15:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we're putting the stake in the heart. We're salting the earth, we're closing the door, we're done with it. And it's a bummer.
15:48 Nilay Patel? Good vampire imagery.
15:49 Alex Cranz? Yeah. I'm bringing it. Apple didn't, but I did. I still liked the concept of the thing. I still wish they had leaned in on the touchbar. But the touchbar was really a placeholder for the M1. Like, the touch bar came out because they wanted to show everybody they cared about laptops. Because in 2016, they didn't care about laptops. They were running, all the MacBook Pros had Haswells in them from like 2014 or 2013. And, and they were like, "No, no, we care, we care." "So, look, we've got this cool new way of thinking about computers. We're putting a touch bar in it." And everybody's like, "Cool, what can we do with it?" And they're like, "We'll get back to you."
16:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:27 Alex Cranz? "But it's cool." And then a few years later, they're like, "We've got the M1, and this is really cool." And everybody's like, "Oh, that is cool. I want that." And so, I always feel it was just a placeholder to keep people invested in Apple laptops until the real deal showed up a few years later.
16:43 Nilay Patel? That's a very kind way of thinking about the touch bar.
16:45 Alex Cranz? I was just, you know, when you, when you care about something that deeply, you're always looking for the good.
16:51 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
16:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
16:52 Nilay Patel? I think they made a giant mistake and refused to admit it for several years. But, honestly, I think they, that was the period where they thought the future of computing was the iPad.
17:01 Alex Cranz? Mm-hmm.
17:02 Nilay Patel? And they were pushing everyone towards the iPad, and then Mac was languishing.
17:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
17:05 Nilay Patel? And they're, and everyone thought, "You need to put a touchscreen on the Mac."
17:08 Alex Cranz? And they're like, "No."
17:08 Nilay Patel? They still, maybe some people kind of do. There's a Bloomberg report, by the way, this week or the week before, where Germaine said, "A forthcoming touchscreen Mac."
17:17 Alex Cranz? Oh.
17:17 Nilay Patel? What?
17:17 Alex Cranz? Wow.
17:18 Nilay Patel? This is a real thing, who knows?
17:19 Alex Cranz? Well, yeah, one day.
17:21 Nilay Patel? But, right, this was the height of what you might call Apple's touch era.
17:25 Alex Cranz? Uh-huh.
17:26 Nilay Patel? And they weren't gonna do it on the Mac, because they didn't want to cannibalize the iPad in any way, so they're like, "You want a touchscreen on the Mac? Here's a weird little one."
17:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
17:34 Nilay Patel? Also, the keyboard is garbage, and it has no ports. And people resolutely refused to let the Mac die. Until they re-upped the MacBook Air, and then eventually the M1 came out. And then the weird thing was, they did the good MacBook Pro, the 14-inch MacBook Pro.
17:50 Alex Cranz? Mm-hmm.
17:51 Nilay Patel? They did the MacBook Air, the MacBook Air got all the way to M2, and this weird, dumb, 13-inch MacBook Pro with a touch bar just persisted.
17:59 Alex Cranz? I want to...
18:00 Nilay Patel? It's, it's like, two years beyond its expiration date, at least.
18:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I want to know, who are the people, who were the people still buying it there at the end?
18:08 Nilay Patel? Some people.
18:10 David Pierce? I don't know, man, we, we wrote a story a couple of weeks ago about somebody who bought a Wii U the other day.
18:13 Alex Cranz? That's fair.
18:14 David Pierce? There's people out there.
18:15 Alex Cranz? That's...
18:15 David Pierce? There's, there's people out there doing stuff. But no, I think, I think Apple made two mistakes with the touch bar, which I do not believe, still to this day, was a fundamentally bad idea.
18:25 Alex Cranz? It was a good concept.
18:27 David Pierce? Mistake number one: look down at your laptop right now. And if you're in your car... Imagine a laptop.
18:33 Nilay Patel? If you're in your car and you have the ability to look down at your laptop right now, pull over in your car.
18:39 David Pierce? And also call the Vergecast hotline because you are our people. Do you see, do you see how you have all the function buttons on your laptop? Do you see how there's still some space above it between where there's just space? Put the touchbar there. That's the answer. Like, they said, what if we took away a bunch of buttons you love and replaced it with mostly nothing? Like, that's terrible. That's not, that's not anything. I still believe to this day that if the first version of the touchbar had kept the escape key, the touchbar had like a 60% chance to be successful. But it was because it didn't have the escape key and all of a sudden, this very basic thing that professional computer users do all day, every day, became harder because your finger couldn't find it anymore, like instant disaster.
19:22 David Pierce? That's mistake number one, was getting rid of keys people use to add this weird thing that no one ever asked for. Mistake number two was stopping investing in it. Like, Apple has a good history of saying, we care about this thing and thus you developers should figure out what to do with it. And if it does that long enough, it usually works. And on the touchbar, for like 15 minutes, they were like, come build cool apps. And then they were like, ah, never mind, we're probably gonna bail on this idea.
19:49 Nilay Patel? No, so they had a huge problem here. They do this all the time. The best example is iPhone, right? They bring a high-end feature to an iPhone Pro, and the next year, the regular iPhone gets it, and then everyone has it.
19:59 David Pierce? Yeah.
19:59 Nilay Patel? And then developers are like, wow, look at all this cool stuff Apple made. I've got some ideas I need to. They never brought the touchbar out of the MacBook Pro.
20:06 David Pierce? Exactly.
20:06 Alex Cranz? And even out of the...
20:07 Nilay Patel? Because they knew it was bad. They were watching all these pro users stare at their horrible keyboards, and they thought to themselves, we cannot give this to the general public.
20:18 David Pierce? Hence mistake number one. Like, you can't get rid of the function keys.
20:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:24 David Pierce? It's like if Apple was like, look, we built this cool touchbar, but also we just scrambled all your letter keys around. Like, no, don't do that.
20:31 Nilay Patel? Like, it's dead. Here, here, it's amazing to me that we've spent this much time on the touchbar, which I have finally vanquished. They announced like three new processors and four new computers.
20:39 David Pierce? We talked about all that on Wednesday. Who cares?
20:42 Alex Cranz? You know what? We talked earlier about how they didn't solve a problem during this event. They did. They got rid of the touchbar.
20:48 Nilay Patel? Not having enough processors.
20:49 Alex Cranz? No, they got rid of the touchbar. They solved a problem. If they had led with that, like...
20:54 Nilay Patel? See, that's a good Halloween show.
20:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
20:56 Nilay Patel? Tim Cook dressed up as the Grim Reaper, chasing Eddie Q in a touchbar outfit down the hallway. I would've watched two hours of that.
21:05 David Pierce? That's pretty good.
21:05 Nilay Patel? Probably would've, I would've pre-ordered at the end.
21:08 Alex Cranz? I don't want to watch that show, but I would've watched GIFs of it. I would've watched the TikTok clips.
21:12 Nilay Patel? That's pretty good. Um, so if you wanted a deep dive on the main announcements, the Wednesday show is there for you. Quickly, they basically spec bumped the 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pro. They spec bumped the iMac. They did not do a bigger screen size. They spent an, like, an inordinate amount of time saying that 24.5 inches, 4.5K display was perfect.
21:36 Alex Cranz? Sounded a lot like the touchbar is going to revolutionize computer.
21:39 Nilay Patel? It was just a lot of like, this is the perfect size in between 4K and 5K. And it's like, is it? Or is it just the size in between 4K and 5K?
21:47 David Pierce? It's just the one you already made a lot of.
21:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I'm, I'm dying, uh, because I really wanted a new 27-inch iMac to replace my, my 2015 27-inch iMac that I already rescued from its planned obsolescence in our studio.
22:03 Alex Cranz? Couldn't you just get like a Mac Studio and slap it on the end?
22:06 Nilay Patel? But then I have to, yeah, but then I have to like buy a new monitor, all this stuff. Anyway, we, they just sent me a new USB audio interface for recording at home, because my old one is kind of flaking out.
22:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I'm, I'm aware.
22:19 Nilay Patel? It's USB-C only. So I've got, I gotta get a new Mac. So I was like, I'll just buy the new 27-inch iMac.
22:25 Alex Cranz? Have to get a new Mac. That's the only solution.
22:29 Nilay Patel? But now, now, but I'm not going to buy this little baby Mac.
22:32 David Pierce? Yeah, my in-laws had a 27-inch iMac from, I think, 2011, possibly even like 2009. They had this thing forever. Uh, and it finally got to the point where it's like, they tried to load the tax website and it just didn't. It was like, this, this computer is a security risk. Like, we can't do this anymore, guys. So they've been asking me for like a year and a half, when is the 27-inch iMac coming out? And I kept saying, I went from, I think it's going to happen, give it a minute, to I don't think this is going to happen because the Mac Studio and the Studio Display are the answers. So I got them to buy a Mac Mini and a monitor, which I actually think is a cheaper combo and works just as well. But setting this thing up for them gave me like a real... Uh, new understanding of why the iMac is great.
23:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
23:17 David Pierce? Because I had to buy them a webcam. We had to go through this whole crazy rigmarole with their keyboard because you can't set up a Mac without a keyboard and you can't connect a keyboard without setting up your Mac. So you need a wired keyboard, which no one has because it's 2023.
23:31 Nilay Patel? No way.
23:32 David Pierce? And I'm not a PC gamer. That's real.
23:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it does not like Bluetooth. I always have to scramble.
23:39 David Pierce? The advice they give you on the internet is keep a wired keyboard around just in case you have to set up a computer. Full chaos. So I went through this whole thing and like we eventually got it set up and I was like, boy, it would have been really nice if I could have just like pulled a thing out of a box, plugged it in and.
23:55 Nilay Patel? Look, I'm an iMac person, that's why. Although my iMac has all this stuff plugged into it, including an ancient flaky USB audio interface that needs to be replaced.
24:03 David Pierce? So you gotta buy a new Mac.
24:04 Nilay Patel? So you're gonna, I gotta buy a new Mac.
24:05 David Pierce? Yeah.
24:06 Alex Cranz? That's how you do it.
24:06 David Pierce? That's called verge logic right there.
24:07 Nilay Patel? It really, it really makes a lot of sense when you think about it. I'm just gonna buy like a 2017 iMac with USB C. This is my idea.
24:16 Nilay Patel? All right, let's talk about shot on iPhone. For two minutes.
24:20 Alex Cranz? Okay.
24:20 Nilay Patel? So at the end of the event, Apple puts up a label that says shot on iPhone.
24:24 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
24:25 Nilay Patel? I wanna, I, I know why they're able to do this now, we will come to that. And then a little bit later, they release some behind the scenes and they show massive production. Like cool, like cool stuff.
24:36 Alex Cranz? Big lenses bolted to the front of iPhones and stuff like that, yeah.
24:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah, big lights, big lenses, you know, there's like drone shots and CGI. It's a TV, they made a TV show. Apple is a TV company.
24:47 David Pierce? Like a high-end one.
24:48 Nilay Patel? They made, they made a TV show, great. So we have a story that's like, here's what they mean when I say shot on iPhone. And the story, it contains almost no take. There's, I will get to it, but it contains almost no take. It's just, here's all the stuff, here's the, if you want to do this, it costs us so much money. People are freaking out that we're like accusing Apple of being liars. And it's like, no, this is just, at the end of the video, it doesn't show you the stuff. It's just a shot on iPhone.
25:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
25:16 Nilay Patel? And the very obvious thing that they want you to think is that you can do this with an iPhone. And then it's cool, they show you the behind the scenes of what you need to do if you just want to do an iPhone. And they did the same thing with Olivia Rodrigo. Right? She has a music video, they shot an iPhone. They're running national ads during football games, showing the thing in a gimbal. Like, they're not hiding the ball. But shot on iPhone is meant to make you feel good about the iPhone, not make you consider the production. It's just marketing.
25:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
25:48 Nilay Patel? Kind of, I feel great about iPhones, I don't know. I bear no ill will towards the iPhone because they put it in a gimbal. But the point of it is like, look how cool the iPhone is. If you had an iPhone, you too could be some combination of Vampire Tim Cook and Olivia Rodrigo. That's how I feel every time I pick up my iPhone. That's the dream.
26:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
26:10 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Whatever. I think people are upset about this.
26:16 Nilay Patel? For like the "I'm smarter than you" reason.
26:20 Nilay Patel? Like, you know it. Like, if you're a verge reader, you know instinctively that Apple has a lot of lights. When they shoot the thing on the iPhone. And the idea that other people would know that. And that would be surprising to them and make them feel feelings about Apple, just made a bunch of Apple people mad. That's like basically my summation of this controversy. Whatever. It's like...
26:40 Alex Cranz? All it did was make me realize that all of those shot-on-iPhone photos might also...
26:45 Nilay Patel? Have had lights.
26:46 Alex Cranz? Have had lights and lenses.
26:46 Nilay Patel? So here's the thing. You can do, if you give me enough lights, I can make any camera look good. Actually, not me. If you give Becca enough lights, she can make any camera look good.
26:56 Nilay Patel? That's great. Like, that's well-known. Any person who has played with photography knows, like, give me enough lights and lenses and stuff, you can pretty much make any camera look good. I think the reason they're able to shot on iPhone with the iPhone 15 Pro Max or whatever is not the camera system. It's that they can get the footage off the phone at USB-C speeds. Yep. And it shoots in log, which is software. I bet if Apple wanted to write a custom version of iOS, they could shoot in log, they could do it. But the 15 can now do it for everybody. And it has the hardware capability of getting the footage off the phone. And so these are two things that are very important for pros and Apple's showing off. Like, look, the sensor in this thing and the thing is good enough where you can replace
27:41 Nilay Patel? a professional camera in some contexts if you have enough lights and professional things. But that's like a very hard thing to communicate. Like, we've changed the port to USB-C, so now you can shoot a professional production on the phone and you don't have to wait six days to get the files off the phone. I would say not the world's greatest marketing message. Shot on iPhone, very good.
28:03 David Pierce? Yeah. Yeah. I think to me, the challenge is always that when we talk about smartphone shooting, it's kind of two different things that actually are totally different, but everybody kind of wants to have the best of both worlds. So on the one side, you have something like this, which is like a very high-end production. And basically, all they did was take out a fancy camera, like they took out a Canon camera and put it in an iPhone. Otherwise, the whole setup is essentially the same. And that's actually what they say in the behind-the-scenes videos, that one of the coolest things about it is how little of the process they had to change. They can still see the footage on all their monitors, they can still do the stuff in real time, they can get all the stuff that they need. Like, plug and play into an otherwise very expensive professional setup is one side
28:48 David Pierce? of things, right? The other thing we talk about with smartphone photos and video is that it lets you do stuff you couldn't do otherwise, right? Like, I remember Anthony Bourdain's team used to talk about this, that like, when they started shooting with iPhones in restaurants instead of big TV cameras, it changed the vibe. And you can just get places you couldn't otherwise, like nature photographers talk about this too, that like you can get up close to things with a phone in a way that you can't with a giant camera with a giant lens. And so we have this idea that when we say things like, "shot on iPhone," the mental image is like a person holding a phone up in front of their face. That's obviously not how it works. Like, no professional anything is actually shot that way. But the mental image that I think Apple and everyone else wants you to have when you
29:31 David Pierce? think about that is that it's essentially Tim Cook standing there and like, I don't know, Craig Federighi standing there just like.
29:40 David Pierce? If you think about it for one and a half seconds, that's obviously not what's going on. But like.
29:44 Nilay Patel? This is what I'm saying. I think this is what people are. They're like mad about is they've thought about it. And sometimes when other people learn something, a reaction of people on the internet is to get very mad about that.
29:55 Alex Cranz? I mean, I do that anytime someone says, have you heard of this film?
29:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
29:59 Alex Cranz? I get so annoyed.
30:00 Nilay Patel? It's just weird. It's like.
30:02 David Pierce? Yeah. I've heard of all the films.
30:04 Nilay Patel? I think that's very human. I'm not blaming anybody for this reaction.
30:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
30:08 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying, I think I I'm identifying a thing that is happening. That has nothing to do with whether marketing aligns the difference between a professional camera shoot and Craig Federighi holding a. Like, of course, the marketing aligns the difference between those two things. It's an ad. Like, I'm. It's the richest company in the world is making ads like, duh.
30:29 Alex Cranz? I really want Craig to shoot the next iPhone.
30:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
30:32 Alex Cranz? Just only Craig.
30:33 Nilay Patel? He's just chasing Olivia Rodrigo around while she crashes cars. In a vampire outfit. Uh, all right, that's that. Whatever. You can feel however you want. I hope you enjoy your iPhone. Please shoot more music videos and send them to us.
30:46 Alex Cranz? Olivia Rodrigo.
30:47 Nilay Patel? Uh, the other group of people that was really mad at us this week that I mentioned at the top of the show was SEO professionals. Who, again, I really encourage you to, one, go read our piece by Amanda Chicago Lewis about the culture of SEO. Which no one ever writes about. And we can get to the piece, but then read the comments from the angry SEO people, because the comments are some of the best formatted. Most or like if they could have put H2s in the comments for better search discoverability, they would have. It is amazing.
31:17 David Pierce? Keywords are impeccable.
31:18 Nilay Patel? It is the funniest thing about this whole situation is the SEO professionals being mad at us, but doing perfect SEO by instinct. In all of the places where they're yelling at us. Ah, chef's kiss. So we have this big package all year. It's been the running theme of our year. If you care about AI and you think AI is transformative, which I I think a lot of people do. And you are looking at the canon of C plus AI generated content. That is being fired at every platform in the world. You're like, oh, boy, the web is going to be weird. Oh, boy. What's Google gonna do? What Google gonna do when it starts doing more of the generated answers instead of just 10 blue links? What's Apple gonna do when Google starts doing that and their search revenue deal changes in big ways?
32:00 Nilay Patel? Like, if you undo search in any way, the knock-on effects are gigantic. It is the architecture of the web. So we're just like writing about it.
32:10 David Pierce? Did we talk about the melting egg thing?
32:12 Nilay Patel? No.
32:12 David Pierce? On this show yet? Did you guys see this? This is just the tiniest little version of this thing, and it's just my favorite. So Quora, the question and answer website, has been doing work with AI-generated answers to people's questions. It's possible that I'm misremembering this, but I don't think so. There was a question on Quora that said, can you melt an egg? And so ChatGPT through Quora answered, yes, you can melt an egg, which you obviously cannot. Google indexes Quora because it's a high-ranking site full of good user-generated content. So now, if you Google, can you melt an egg? Google says, yes, you can melt an egg, even though that's not true. So then, a bunch of news outlets pick up this story about being able to melt an egg,
32:55 David Pierce? which feeds more data back into these generative systems. And so now, there's all kinds of data on the internet in which phrases like, you can melt an egg, exist on high-ranking websites. And so, we got to the point where the question, can you melt an egg? Became like absolute certainty to Google through all of the signals that it wants about how things should work, because one little tiny AI system said so.
33:20 Nilay Patel? They fixed it.
33:21 David Pierce? They have fixed it since, but that's like, there are going to be
33:23 Alex Cranz? I don't know if they did.
33:25 David Pierce? Literally an infinity of examples.
33:26 Alex Cranz? Because I just Googled it, and apparently, the most common way to melt an egg is to heat it using a stove or microwave. That's from tnsupport.com.
33:36 Nilay Patel? It's good.
33:37 Alex Cranz? Trusted source for egg melting.
33:39 Nilay Patel? So if you... Good, good example, everyone. We did it.
33:46 Nilay Patel? If you think that these things are worth talking about, you might direct your resources at covering the present state of Google and the web and how we got here, Google's search, so that you might be better positioned to cover what happens next, which appears to be a snake eating its tail of melted eggs.
34:06 Alex Cranz? Delicious.
34:07 Nilay Patel? Pretty soon, we will all be melting eggs, thanks to Google. These are just crazy outcomes, right? And they are culture shaping outcomes. A real reason that the Flat Earth conspiracy has as much traction as it does is because every time another NBA player says they believe in the Flat Earth conspiracy, people Google it, and then a million websites see that in Google Trends, and they write about Flat Earth stuff. Yep. And that is just a feedback loop that has made more people be like, "Flat Earth is a reasonable debate to have, because I see it in the information ecosystem."
34:41 Alex Cranz? People are stupid.
34:42 Nilay Patel? We've written that story. We'll put it in the show notes. It was just one of the weirdest things. I was like, "Go explain how search made the Flat Earth happen." And we did.
34:52 Alex Cranz? It's kind of weird that people forgot that the Google bomb exists.
34:54 Nilay Patel? So we wrote that story. So in our package, right? We wrote an entire story about how the culture, our broader pop culture, for a minute, the algorithm at the center of it was the Google search algorithm. Ryan Broderick wrote that story for us. And now, the algorithm at the center of the culture is the TikTok algorithm. Maybe three years ago, the algorithm at the center of the culture was the YouTube algorithm. There's a brief enduring moment where it's the Instagram algorithm that provided you the Kardashians. Just you open Instagram, it's like, "Here's another one."
35:23 Alex Cranz? I just watched them on E.
35:25 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But they were like masters of one platform, they haven't jumped to another. Right? And it's just, I think it's important to look at the search algorithm and say, "This thing once ran the culture, it's still how information is organized around the world." Everyone writes to it.
35:41 Alex Cranz? I mean, I think about SEO, like, it's not my Roman Empire, but it's up there.
35:46 Nilay Patel? What a phrase. See, that's a TikTok phrase.
35:49 Alex Cranz? Yep.
35:49 Nilay Patel? The algorithm at the center of the culture is, it's ever-changing, but you can almost always identify it. So writing all these pieces, we'll link to all of them. Last week, we had a piece about restaurants naming themselves near me. Mia Sato wrote it. It's incredible. It's great. Thai food near me is a real restaurant you can go to in New York. Food's actually quite good, Mia says. So we'll link to that. We've got a bunch of these this week. It was Amanda Schrag Lewis writing about the culture of people who practice SEO. Not technical SEO tips, of which this piece contained none. And everyone's responding to it as though this is how to do SEO. No, no, no. This is a piece about the culture of the people who practice it professionally, and the conferences they go to, and how they talk about Google.
36:34 Alex Cranz? And a five and a half foot long alligator.
36:36 Nilay Patel? And the conferences they go, in Florida. Generally, Florida as a concept is in this piece quite a lot. And what is, I would just point out to everyone, this is like a well-known thing you can do. You can say, we're sitting in the financial district in New York. I would like to write a piece about the culture of finance bros. It's like a real thing many magazines do all the time, because they're cartoonish.
36:58 Alex Cranz? And then they make movies about it, and they star Leonardo DiCaprio.
37:02 Nilay Patel? True. And very rarely do the movies contain technical explanations of what the finance bros are doing all day long.
37:08 Alex Cranz? How to do finance.
37:10 Nilay Patel? You could write, like, many television shows are about the culture of being a lawyer. Very rarely do suits ever get any part of the law right. I can't watch the show, it's so bad. It's everywhere. The algorithms just want to make me watch it.
37:26 Alex Cranz? The Kino Torres.
37:27 Nilay Patel? But this is just a thing, right? The culture of a profession is a reasonable thing to write about.
37:33 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
37:34 Nilay Patel? So our piece is about the culture of the profession, and like, how they feel about doing a thing that scammers do to make money, and that other people do to just get you to go to their doctor's office or whatever.
37:45 Alex Cranz? Right.
37:46 Nilay Patel? Piece is great. It is, it's a bunch of characters, because the people who are best at SEO make a lot of money, and they have silly cars, and they buy alligators for their conferences, and they're just loud characters. And one of the central points of this story is the guy at Google who used to sort of manage the SEO industry. It was a guy named Matt Kots who talked to us for the story. Matt has been out of Google forever. He went to the US Digital Service under Barack Obama, so he was in the government, he was a CTO, I think, at the USDS. And Google, to replace him, hired a whole bunch of people. One of those people is a guy named Danny Sullivan. Danny Sullivan used to be a journalist. He ran a site called Search Engine Land. I used to be a regular reader of Search Engine Land. Now he's a guy who works at Google and sort of interfaces with people who want
38:31 Nilay Patel? to do SEO. The people in our story are like, things changed when one guy left and another guy came in, which is a totally reasonable thing to say, right? The posture of the company changed when the sort of ad hoc guy in 2009 was doing it. And then he left and they built an entire function to replace him. And the face of that function is this guy.
38:51 Nilay Patel? Danny's been doing this a long time. I think, having, I know a lot of people who have reported on search. We've done a lot of stories about search. I think the scrutiny of search and what it is and how it works is frustrating to people at Google who are, in general, idealistic about what it should do. Right? There's a trial. Like, David this week published the list of the, was it, top 10 most lucrative search terms in 2018?
39:17 David Pierce? Yep.
39:18 Nilay Patel? And the idea that search is a deeply commercial business really rankles Google. But it is their entire business.
39:25 David Pierce? I don't think that's true.
39:26 Nilay Patel? No?
39:26 David Pierce? Like, I actually don't think Google is like afraid of the idea that it makes money from search. Like, I actually think that that's one step too far. I think what Google believes earnestly, like, at its corporate center, is that what's good for Google is good for the web.
39:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
39:43 David Pierce? And by making Google better and giving more people more access to Google, Google has made the web better. Like, Sundar Pichai just said that in court this week. I genuinely believe that that is a thing that Google as a company believes. And so for us to come in and say, essentially, that what you've done is you've created a game to be won. And what everybody is doing is doing these things in order to win it. And by doing so, they're ruining the internet. Essentially, what we're saying to Google is like, and I, I think it's true. I think you look at the internet, it is like provably true at this point. But what we're saying is, Google, by Trying to grow Google, you've not only grown the web, you've reincentivized the web
40:20 Nilay Patel? Yep.
40:21 David Pierce? to make it worse in order to serve you better.
40:24 Nilay Patel? Right. If I was to say to you, how do you win the Instagram algorithm? You have a mental model in your head.
40:30 David Pierce? Yeah.
40:30 Nilay Patel? Absent reels or whatever, but like in that, in the moment of Instagram's greatest power, you have a mental model of how that incentive structure worked. If I was to say to you, how do you win the TikTok algorithm? You may or may not have a mental model. How do you win the Logan Paul era YouTube algorithm? You probably have a mental model, right?
40:49 David Pierce? It's not a good one, but yeah.
40:51 Nilay Patel? But it's there, right? Like you do a bunch of pranks with your bros, like whatever. All those things change and they come and go. But the idea that there's an algorithm that can be gamed, people try to game it, that leads to a type of content or a culture of those creators. When we go talk to the platform companies, the idea that we're doing a story like this never surprises them and never rankles them and never irritates them. It's just a thing that we do. When we, when we have been going to do it with search, hey, there's an algorithm that creates a bunch of incentives and there's a bunch of creators out there who are trying to game the algorithm. And that means the culture of the web and the content we create looks like it responds to your incentives. That's where I think Google is very frustrated.
41:31 David Pierce? Oh, I think that's right.
41:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
41:32 David Pierce? I think, because I think what Google would tell you is that it is designed to reflect the best of the web.
41:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
41:39 David Pierce? And in reality, what it did was decide what the best of the web is and then force everyone into that specific box.
41:45 Nilay Patel? Right. And the particular thing that Danny read our piece, he doesn't like it because he's characterized as being somewhat unhappy with our reporter in the piece. And we linked to Danny's response on the homepage, you can read that too. But where he and I have been going back on, on threads is Google keeps saying, we publish all of these guidelines and we tell people not to do the things that the guidelines don't say. Like the response to every one of our pieces about Google search this year has been, that's not what the guidelines say. Which is just- Thousands of pages. And then also in the next breath, they're like, the best thing to do is not read the guidelines.
42:22 David Pierce? Yeah, just make great content.
42:23 Nilay Patel? Just make great stuff. And it's like, well, why do you publish all these guidelines? Right. If you don't want anyone to read them. And there's a real tension in there. Like, if you are a person who builds a website, our website, a lot of the schema of our website is designed for Google. Like, the underpinning of the layouts of our pages are designed to be predictable for Google. Okay, like, I don't feel bad about that. I want our stuff to be searchable and discoverable, but I also don't want us to write headlines for the Google search robot. I want us to write headlines for people. And, like, there's a real tension there. And one of the things that makes that tension worse, I think, on the web in general, is Google doesn't, like, recognize that tension exists.
43:07 Nilay Patel? So that when the people, when scammers write headlines to fool Google, they win. Right.
43:11 Alex Cranz? Or when a company, like, we see this a lot in our industry and elsewhere. I think we all think about SEO a lot, and that is one of the reasons this story means a lot to people at The Verge, is because we have to think about SEO. It's important. And we have to think, okay, well, how far do we go? How, because there is that way where you can win the web.
43:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
43:30 Alex Cranz? And you can show, prove everyone that you can melt an egg.
43:33 Nilay Patel? We are six months away from one of our major competitors emerging as, like, a totally AI-written content firm.
43:39 Alex Cranz? Exactly.
43:40 Nilay Patel? I feel it in my bones that that is the thing we will compete against with next year for search traffic.
43:45 Alex Cranz? And I mean, that's exactly what's happening. We're seeing our major competitors go down that road after we already watched them go and do things like, you know, say, hey, check out the hands-on for the new iPhone 15 Pro two weeks before it was announced. Just so they can gain.
43:59 Nilay Patel? Can we just do some SEO scam rundowns?
44:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
44:01 Nilay Patel? Competitors have, real competitors have done.
44:03 Alex Cranz? Yes.
44:03 Nilay Patel? So the one Alex is talking about, we have a lot of competitors who, a month before a device, any device is released, they will put up a page.
44:12 Alex Cranz? And it's a hands-on page. It's basically a holding page. The headline at the top, a lot of the copy is about the hands-on, and it'll be like, come back on this day to check it out.
44:21 Nilay Patel? This is just an SEO game. Like, I think that's fake. And now, we have covered this a lot, too. We have big competitors, like... Geo Media and CNET and others who are running trials of AI-generated content. And their staffs are furious about this.
44:35 Alex Cranz? They're not happy.
44:35 Nilay Patel? The people who make the work are not happy about this, but the corporations are doing it. And they all say the same excuse, which is, we have to learn how to use this stuff. And it's like, you're learning nothing.
44:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
44:44 Nilay Patel? What have you learned?
44:45 David Pierce? Well, the other one, I think my guess would be one a lot of people have encountered is when you search for some kind of coupons on the internet. The number of sites that you would not expect to have a sneaky hidden coupons page for Bed Bath and Beyond, that nevertheless has a sneaky hidden coupon page for Bed Bath and Beyond, is like alarming.
45:02 Nilay Patel? I just, look, I just bought a solo stub. I took the coupon right from wired.com.
45:06 David Pierce? There you go.
45:07 Nilay Patel? That was a totally weird experience, but I was like, I'm supporting my friends.
45:10 David Pierce? Yeah. And it's, I mean, this is a thing we've talked about a lot on this show, right? There is like, there's an internet for humans, there's an internet for robots. And Google is the robots.
45:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
45:18 David Pierce? Like, it's, AI is becoming the robots, but Google has been the robots for a really long time, and it has demanded a lot of people's time and energy. Because at the end of it, it's the discovery engine for the internet. And Google, like, really would love you to believe what they always say, which is just, do good stuff and we'll help people find it. And I think anyone who has ever tried to do good stuff on the internet can tell you, it's not, it's just not nearly that simple.
45:43 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Anyway, so that's the dispute. You can all evaluate the disclosure. We have a website. There are people at our company that professionally do SEO.
45:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:54 David Pierce? And if you Google things, you might find our website.
45:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Our website is designed to be surfaced in Google search.
45:59 Alex Cranz? I, I think.
46:00 Nilay Patel? Oh, there's one part. Can I, can I tell this story?
46:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah. No, no, no, I was just gonna say, I love SEO. I, I want people to read my stuff.
46:07 Nilay Patel? All right. Maybe not that far. Now, Alex is like running chat GPT in the corner to replace us all.
46:14 Nilay Patel? There's one Danny calls out, when we were redesigning the site, he says, Neil, I emailed me and wanted to know about some SEO question, which is true. I emailed him and said, we're gonna have these quick posts, we're redoing this thing. Our internal SEO team, we're having a debate about whether to index the quick posts. This is a true thing. I say, Danny is the search liaison. I know him. I emailed him and said, I've got this question. And he was, he was like, this, read the guidelines. That's what Danny said, which is the thing that he is supposed to do. Professionally, what he says to everybody is, read the guidelines. No special treatment for anyone. And I was like, I don't think the guidelines are helping me here, because they are designed to tell people who spam affiliate links, not, they'll get down ranked. And our quick posts aren't that, but they're also very short and like. The folk wisdom of SEO is that short things are bad.
46:59 Nilay Patel? You know, like, there's all this stuff and we just don't answer it. And his answer was like, do what's best. Great. Like, that's a totally, I presume, a totally reasonable interaction. And then we didn't index the quick post because we didn't want to tank the traffic to our other pages by having something that might be whatever. Okay, that's like a normal, sort of like, business conversation that you might have. We didn't have any terms, it was just advice, right? Like, I'm operating to the search liaison. It's not a commercial conversation, it's not the wrong side of the house. And I know Danny. So, he calls this up as if to say, like, us caring about SEO somehow negates us from criticizing the practice of SEO.
47:39 Alex Cranz? In fact, it makes us more, like, qualified to critique it. I feel much more qualified than-
47:46 Nilay Patel? Yeah, we like do the thing.
47:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah, like, I do it all the time. I'm feeling very qualified to critique it.
47:50 Nilay Patel? And we have a lot of commenters who are like, but you have-
47:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
47:53 Nilay Patel? Posts that are about best laptops.
47:55 Alex Cranz? We want you to read our website.
47:55 Nilay Patel? Uh, we do want you to read our website, but also just like, just turn the knob all the way. I will concede that we are the worst SEO scammers on the internet. The worst. We're gonna find you and we're gonna sell you some car insurance. Tomorrow. You looking for a wireless plan?
48:12 Alex Cranz? Get that Solo stuff.
48:13 Nilay Patel? That would be great if we sold wireless plans. We're like, don't buy any of them.
48:19 Nilay Patel? None of these will let you do surgery on a grape.
48:23 Nilay Patel? I'll concede it to you all the way. That doesn't change the idea that people who practice SEO have a culture. Anyway. You can tell that I care about this a lot.
48:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
48:31 Nilay Patel? David, I want to come back to the thing that you said real quick and then we can wrap this up. Like, Google doesn't care if you think about search as a business. You were in the courtroom this week where literally the CEO of Google was talking about Google Search as a business and what it means and how it works and this big deal with Apple. What's going on there?
48:50 David Pierce? It was really interesting because the deal with Apple has been the story of this trial so far. Like, fundamentally, if you really want to boil this entire antitrust trial down to one question, it's, is it anti-competitive for Google to give Apple what we now know to be $18 billion a year?
49:10 David Pierce? In order to be the default search engine in Safari. Like, that's it. That's the whole question. Because even if that one deal goes away, everyone else testifying is saying that blows the search market wide open. But so Soonar Pichai gave this like long, mostly unspicy testimony, like Satya Nadella was very spicy, Sundar less spicy. But essentially, what he argued over and over is that like, Google is a business. It's a competitive business. There are a lot of things out there. Part of Google's line is that like, everyone is coming for search all the time. Prabakar Ragavan, who runs Search for Google, talked a lot about TikTok and vertical search engines and this idea that like, people look for information in lots of places. And that's fundamentally what Google does.
49:54 David Pierce? It's very competitive, on and on. And Soonar Pichai just kept saying, look, we give all these companies all this money because it's, it makes us more money. And like, it's just that simple. Like, Google wouldn't give Apple $18 billion a year if Google didn't make more than $18 billion a year as a result, right? Like, John Schmidtline, the lawyer for Google, asked him about like, you have a fiduciary duty to shareholders to make money, right? And Soonar was like, yes. We do these deals because they are good value and Google is a business. And when people use our search engine, we make money from it. Like, that fact is not unclear to anyone, right? I think if you want to talk about the ways in which Google's search has gotten worse
50:38 David Pierce? over time, which many people perceive that it has, if you want to talk about whether there are too many ads, or Google hides the fact that there are ads, or AI is going to ruin the quality of your search results, like, that's all really interesting questions. But Google's coming out here and basically saying like, we are a business. We make an awful lot of money.
50:57 David Pierce? What do you want from us? Like, the idea that Google started out as this company at, in the relatively early days of the web and said, we are going to bet on the web. We are going to bet that we can be essentially infrastructure for the entire web. And that if we help more people do more stuff on the web, that will accrue value back to Google. That has been one of the great bets of business Yeah. of all time. Like, holy God, was that a good idea from Google 25 years ago? And the question in front of Google, and that was kind of put to Soonar a bunch of different ways, is like, has that turned? Like, are you no longer good for the web because you're so big, because you're so powerful, because you're so?
51:38 David Pierce? Sort of singular in your power as that infrastructural layer. And that's obviously a much harder question to answer. And obviously Sundar is not going to say, yes, we're too big. It's a huge problem. But that thing that they bet on the web and the web got to take over the world and so did Google is like the central tension of all of this. Because it's like, at what point does that go from? I think we all rooted for Google for a really long time because it was true that like-
52:04 Nilay Patel? I think we have, I think a lot of our listeners are still rooting for Google.
52:06 David Pierce? For sure. Like it's, it was, it was a company that believed in the internet.
52:11 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:11 David Pierce? At a time that I think it was good to have a company that believed in the internet.
52:14 Nilay Patel? In many ways, when we interact with people from various companies, the people from Google are easily the most sincere.
52:19 David Pierce? Yeah. And they want the web to be a good place, full of good things that people can access and use. Like, I think that rules. When does that turn on you and you become, you have to tamp down the web to keep it the way that you want it? That's the question. And like, has Google tipped over that line? Was what Sundar was kind of being asked indirectly over and over. And it was just, it was fascinating to see it distilled down.
52:42 Nilay Patel? I would point, we're going to link to this too. David wrote a story about Google AMP as part of our Google package. When Google clearly went over the line.
52:49 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:49 Nilay Patel? And had to roll it all back.
52:51 David Pierce? But that's such a fun example, right? Because Google is like, okay, if we don't do this, Facebook will. Right? Like it's a, they, that's a response to a real threat from a company that was like actively trying to destroy the open web. Like, that's just like naked aggression against the open web. And so Google did what it decided to do, I think, was way too far over the line. But to respond to that in some way and say, we have to preserve the open web, not wrong and not out of bounds with what Google had always said that it was. But it's just, it's that same thing. It's like, where do you go from what's good for the web is good for Google and everybody wins to we have to keep the web just like this so that Google can keep winning?
53:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I think that the interesting thing about the sort of like dominant algorithm theory- Is it's weird that the web is shaped for search, that there's no other discovery engine, that there's no other competing incentive. You can't just make a weird website and sort of like assume Google will find it.
53:50 David Pierce? Right, and it's really telling that Google now is even struggling to do that. It's trying to find all these new ways to show you stuff, it's trying to do the more multimedia search, and it's just like, I don't know. Have you found yourself on one of those pages where you do a Google search and instead of getting a bunch of links to stuff, they just show you like vertical videos in a row? It feels bad, I don't like it.
54:09 Alex Cranz? I click out every time, especially if it's like, I'm trying to figure out how to grill something.
54:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I know it feels bad. It's because you don't know that you can ever get back there. There's something really permanent about doing a Google search and finding a page and being like, all right, I looked through some of these, I'll come back to it or whatever.
54:24 Alex Cranz? For me, it was just, oh god, I'm gonna have to watch a video, I just wanna like go and scan up.
54:29 Nilay Patel? I'm told that video is the highest bandwidth.
54:30 David Pierce? Yeah, that's just because you're old.
54:31 Alex Cranz? Sorry, sorry.
54:34 Nilay Patel? Okay, we gotta take a break. I'll just say this at the very end. We were getting documents out of this trial. Apple had an internal presentation that said Android is a massive tracking device. And they signed a big deal with Google. Fantastic.
54:45 Nilay Patel? It's very good. All right, we'll be right back.
54:51 Speaker 00 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Wanna make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 in 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the stay.
55:22 Speaker 01 When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
55:54 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. We went very long talking about Google Search.
55:59 David Pierce? Yeah.
56:00 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
56:01 Nilay Patel? So we're doing, we're doing the back half of the show is two lightning rounds. This one is the streaming lightning round.
56:07 Alex Cranz? That was my streaming race.
56:08 Nilay Patel? Take it away.
56:11 Alex Cranz? A lot happened this week. I'm going to kick it off with Casey Boyes, who is currently running HBO and during the early days of the pandemic, was a little too into his phone and was directing people to direct interns to harass, or not to harass, but to troll critics online of HBO shows.
56:32 Nilay Patel? This is like Warner Media classic move.
56:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah, hysterical. He has since apologized.
56:37 Nilay Patel? Oh my.
56:38 Alex Cranz? Because this, this all came out because one of those interns is suing the company for wrongful termination. So it all came out from that. It was in this big Rolling Stone piece all about the company. A lot of really good reporting in that piece. You should go track it down. But since then, Casey Boyes has addressed it and he was basically like, I was too into my phone.
56:55 Alex Cranz? And now I just DM when I'm angry at critics instead.
56:59 Nilay Patel? Oh my.
57:00 David Pierce? Is that, that's really, that's the, the, you know, huge feat of self-realization that he's gone through?
57:08 Nilay Patel? This is your direct message?
57:09 David Pierce? I just tell you myself.
57:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah, so he's, so he's DMing his criticism more and honestly, I would rather, I would rather have Tim Cook come into my DMs, be like, that was a real rude thing you said about that phone.
57:21 Nilay Patel? The flash was good.
57:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah, I would, I think I'd rather like, prefer that.
57:25 Nilay Patel? What are you, what are you, what are you trying to say, Casey Boyes?
57:28 David Pierce? Okay. I have two, I have two things to say to Casey Boyes. Casey, I know you're listening. So pull over your car, take notes.
57:35 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
57:35 David Pierce? Thing number one is use your own burners, man. Come on. I'm all for having burners. NBA athletes do it. Everybody has a burner that they use just for looking at accounts, just in case they like one by accident. Everybody, everybody has burners, but you gotta have your own burners. And if you're not going to have your own burners, at least like, do it for real and get like a bot farm. You know what I mean? Like, he, he did this like half measure, that it's like, if you're going to go for it, go for it. Otherwise, just pretend you're like a random stranger and defend yourself and you'll inevitably get caught and it'll be very funny. This is the weirdest, worst way to do it, to like yell at your disassistance to defend you on the internet. Like, don't do that.
58:18 Nilay Patel? It's not great.
58:19 David Pierce? No.
58:19 Alex Cranz? He says, he says it's much better now because he has, uh, many of them are gracious enough to engage with him back and forth. So it's much better now, instead of having the intern say, "You suck." Cause that was, that was the gist of the ones they confirmed were coming from, from this person.
58:36 Nilay Patel? I mean, okay, I'm gonna disagree with you.
58:38 David Pierce? It's not even good.
58:38 Nilay Patel? I want an army of interns with burner accounts to tweet at our critics. And if you're interested in this job, you can just email us at [email protected] . And we'll see, we'll see what happens next.
58:49 Alex Cranz? We'll pay you in merch.
58:50 Nilay Patel? Also, those critics are not being very gracious because they didn't know that the army of anonymous interns was tweeting, "You suck at them."
58:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
58:57 Nilay Patel? It wasn't like, it wasn't like Casey was like, "Hey, so all those weird anon accounts that have been tweeting, "You suck at you." That was me. I'd prefer to start DMing now. And they're like, "Oh yes, of course Casey, come in."
59:11 Nilay Patel? No, he just started DMing them.
59:14 Nilay Patel? All right, here's my, staying on HBO Max, here's my lightning round one.
59:19 Nilay Patel? In the grand scheme of everything getting more expensive, if you're on HBO Max and you had ad free, now they're gonna charge you more money for 4K.
59:27 Alex Cranz? God damn it.
59:27 Nilay Patel? If you had a legacy ad free account.
59:31 Alex Cranz? How much am I paying now? I miss this and I'm very upset.
59:36 Nilay Patel? You have to go to 20 bucks a month.
59:37 David Pierce? So if you're on the standard, if you're on the standard ad free one that you used to get 4K on, which I think is 16 bucks a month, you're gonna lose 4K. You have to upgrade to ultimate at 20 bucks a month and then you get 4K back.
59:50 Alex Cranz? I'm not gonna have any money for my children. I don't have any.
59:54 David Pierce? Did we get?
59:55 Nilay Patel? Mine is named Max. I get nothing for this. I should get a substantial discount.
1:00:00 Alex Cranz? You should.
1:00:01 David Pierce? Where did we land on our, would you cancel your streaming services before you gave up 4K?
1:00:06 Alex Cranz? A lot of people agreed with me. That's, that's what I'm gonna say is a lot of people agree that, yeah, they would rather cancel than give up 4K.
1:00:12 David Pierce? Yeah, that was the most of the feedback I heard too.
1:00:14 Alex Cranz? Honestly, the audacity of Max, who was late to 4K and half-assed 4K and is still half-assing 4K, to expect me to pay more. I'm gonna do it, but I'm gonna be so furious the whole time.
1:00:28 Nilay Patel? This is the problem with millennials, Alex.
1:00:30 Alex Cranz? This is the same energy I bring-
1:00:31 Nilay Patel? You and your avocado coast, your $20 a month of garbage 4K.
1:00:34 Alex Cranz? No children. What am I doing with my life?
1:00:37 David Pierce? Do you know what I've realized recently? So I've been sort of systematically going and downgrading everything to the ad plans because I just want the ads. Like, I'm good. Give me, give me the ads.
1:00:45 Alex Cranz? You want that Myrtle Beach time share.
1:00:47 David Pierce? The strangest thing I have discovered is that I kind of love it because it's a phone break. I now, like, four times an hour, I get a phone break. So I don't look at my phone during shows anymore because I know that in seven minutes, I'm gonna get three minutes to look at Reddit or check my texts or whatever. And then we're gonna, it's perfect. It's just like a tiny little intermission where whatever's happening on the TV happens on the TV, but I get to look at TikTok.
1:01:11 Nilay Patel? Your house sounds horrible. You're watching like 480p Survivor on a garbage fast service, looking at your phone for three-minute chunks?
1:01:19 David Pierce? Anna's sitting next to me doing spelling bee. And I'm sitting here, I do connections during one, I look at Reddit during another one, I check my email and Slack during another one, and then it's the end of the hour and I've watched the whole show. It's perfect.
1:01:33 Nilay Patel? I don't know about this. Alright, what's your lightning round one beyond your bad idea about watching ads?
1:01:37 David Pierce? Ads. What if there was an ad break, but just no ads? It was just silence on the TV for two minutes.
1:01:41 Nilay Patel? Everybody gets a phone break.
1:01:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:01:43 David Pierce? Exactly.
1:01:44 Alex Cranz? Sponsored by Intel.
1:01:45 David Pierce? Mine is, uh, Disney appears to be actually for real about to own all of Hulu, which we've kind of known is coming for a while. But it seems like approximately one minute after Comcast was allowed to exercise the clause that would force Disney to buy the rest of Hulu, it did so. Now comes the part where Disney and Comcast have to figure out what Hulu is worth, which I think is gonna be really fascinating. They set it up in such a way, basically, and Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, but I think I understand this right, which is that a bunch of years ago, when they made this deal, that would allow Disney to eventually buy all of Hulu, they valued Hulu at about $27 billion, which meant that the roughly third of the service that Comcast owned was worth like eight and change billion dollars.
1:02:30 David Pierce? Now, that's the minimum price Disney is gonna have to pay. If the price has gone down since then, sucks for Disney, they still have to pay that money. I don't think it has. If that price has gone up, Disney's gonna have to pay the eight and change plus whatever percentage difference there is based on the new valuation of Hulu. So the question now is, what is Hulu worth in the market?
1:02:53 David Pierce? And we're about to find out it's a deeply weird time in the streaming world. Streaming is both like ascendant and a mess. I have no idea, but I think figuring out how much money this is, especially for Disney, which is not in a super good position to be writing checks for eight plus billion dollars at this moment in time. It's about to get really weird.
1:03:12 Alex Cranz? I think it's going to force Disney to actually think about what it's doing and what its strategy is. I don't think Disney's been doing that lately.
1:03:24 Nilay Patel? It is a weird time to announce this deal when the cover of Variety is, is Marvel screwed?
1:03:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:03:31 Nilay Patel? Which is a piece worth reading.
1:03:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's a great piece. I wrote kind of an addendum to it. It's on the site right now. They don't know how Marvel, like Marvel's just in a bad spot. And the piece was very kind of weird because it refused to blame Kevin Fagie, who runs Marvel Studios for anything. But then everything seemed to quietly like, they'd be like, yeah, there's someone at the top and we don't know what to do. And it's like, weird story. But yeah, I think Disney has to figure out, it's got these, it's got multiple services. For a long time, it was like, this is for adults and Disney Plus is for babies. And maybe it's going to merge the two together. It's also got the Hulu Live subscription and there's a reasonable amount of subscribers there, but not as many as you think. Hulu is still way below Disney Plus in subscriptions.
1:04:17 Alex Cranz? So it's going to be like, they already own all of, they own everything on it because it's all Fox and ABC shows. So they own everything. It's just like, what do you? I don't know. I think that all the people who have to figure this, the price out are going to fight, like the Comcast and the Disney folks. I want to be in that room, watching those two groups fight each other because that's going to be really cool. But.
1:04:40 Nilay Patel? One assumes that Disney is planning to sell ESPN and Comcast knows this and they would like some of that money to come back to Comcast.
1:04:47 Alex Cranz? That's fair.
1:04:48 Nilay Patel? Disclosure, NBC Universal, a division of Comcast, is a minority investor and Vox Media, our parent company. We produced a Netflix show, which you should go watch. It's called The Future Of. I was the executive producer of that show. It's really quite good. But I'm hopelessly biased in favor of that show.
1:05:03 David Pierce? Which you should watch on Netflix.
1:05:05 Nilay Patel? Which you should watch. Yeah, that's it.
1:05:09 David Pierce? I think that's all for now.
1:05:10 Nilay Patel? We all have televisions. I think those are the ones that are implicated in this conversation. Again, our site is discoverable in search. We have a TikTok account.
1:05:22 Alex Cranz? We use YouTube.
1:05:23 Nilay Patel? Uh, two more.
1:05:26 Nilay Patel? Uh, we won an Emmy this week.
1:05:27 Alex Cranz? Hell, yeah.
1:05:28 Nilay Patel? Becky won an Emmy for her YouTube series, Full Frame. Uh, big bias in favor of winning Emmys. Just know, you can't trust anything we say if it's not gonna win us an Emmy.
1:05:37 David Pierce? One more thing before we move on from the streaming stuff. Uh, there was a big debate in our comments on the Hulu Disney thing about whether, if you're gonna, if you're Disney and you're gonna combine all your streaming services, should you call it Disney Plus or should you call it Hulu? I think this is the most obvious question ever, but I'm curious what you two think.
1:05:55 Alex Cranz? Ooh, I think if, if Disney knew what they were doing, they would call it Hulu.
1:05:59 Nilay Patel? No.
1:05:59 Alex Cranz? Yes, 100% because Disney itself has a very specific brand identity and that's what they're terrified.
1:06:05 David Pierce? You mean the best brand identity potentially of any brand anywhere on planet Earth?
1:06:10 Alex Cranz? But also...
1:06:11 David Pierce? Disney is the good brand. That's literally what it is.
1:06:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:06:14 Alex Cranz? It's the good brand.
1:06:15 David Pierce? It's goodness and happiness and joy.
1:06:16 Nilay Patel? I literally have heard one of Becky's aunts say out loud,
1:06:20 Alex Cranz? Uh huh.
1:06:21 Nilay Patel? "What is the difference between Hulu and Roku?" And I looked at her and I was like, you know what? That is a surprisingly deep and meaningful and good question.
1:06:31 Alex Cranz? It's a good question. It is.
1:06:33 Nilay Patel? Right.
1:06:34 Alex Cranz? I think that's a good question.
1:06:35 Nilay Patel? Like, it's just TV stuff.
1:06:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but the problem with Disney is that Disney is not just Disney. It's, it's ABC, well, for now. It's ABC, it's FX, it's all of these things. And they're running into the exact same problem as HBO or as Warner Brothers. And Warner Brothers obviously went with the incredible Max.
1:06:56 Alex Cranz? And here's the real opportunity for them to be like, we're not gonna do that. Disney Plus was always kind of a stupid name because it was. And instead we're just, we're just gonna click to Hulu.
1:07:05 Nilay Patel? Here's what they're gonna do. They're calling the everything app, it's gonna be called X, it's gonna do payments. You can date Minnie Mouse. It's gonna be amazing.
1:07:13 Alex Cranz? Elon will be...
1:07:13 Nilay Patel? It's all gonna be great. Alright, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back with Lightning Round, Part 2. We'll be right back.
1:07:23 Speaker 00 College football is back. So Hilton called to me, the superstition concierge, to make your fan rituals a reality. Need a room to match your lucky number? We got you. Want to make sure our team doesn't wash your lucky jersey? Oh, that smells lucky. Hilton's unmatched hospitality can keep up with any superstition. Even a marching band wake up call at 5:55 and 55 seconds. Hit it! When you need a team that will do whatever it takes on game day, it matters where you stay. Hilton, for the say.
1:07:54 Speaker 01 When you need to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work, use Indeed sponsored jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more. Spend less time searching and more time actually interviewing candidates who check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit at indeed.com/podcast. That's indeed.com/podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero? This is a job for Indeed sponsored jobs.
1:08:27 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. Can I start with my favorite thing of the entire week? Yes, please. Absolute favorite thing of the entire week. It's not even a thing we covered. It's a thing that TFL Truck covered on TikTok. By the way, TFL Truck, one of my all time favorite. They're just, it's just a website about trucks. They rule. It's great. They're at some car show. The guy's like, I'm here with a Ford F-150 Lightning at the Borla booth. And he goes to the Borla guy and he's like, so you've built an exhaust system for the F-150 Lightning? And the guy looks at him and goes, it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution.
1:09:05 Nilay Patel? And then he goes, it can play futuristic sounds too. This is a thing that happens in this video. I've lost my mind. I've watched him say, it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution, a thousand times.
1:09:18 Alex Cranz? Did he play it?
1:09:19 Nilay Patel? The confidence. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution. What he means by this is that there are speakers mounted under the bumper of the truck. And then when he pushes the accelerator down, it makes engine sounds. And it's all very complicated. Right? He's like, look, we're plugged into the systems of the truck. We're, we're measuring the distance. The accelerator pedal is pushed to the floor, the load on the engine. We've got simulated gear shift sounds on an electric truck. And then he's like, and there's, there's buttons and knobs. So there's one knob switches between four presets. The other one is the volume. You can change the presets on your phone to futuristic sounds. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution.
1:10:03 Nilay Patel? And then he's like, here's what you can set it to right now. Mind you, this is a Ford truck. He's like, a Chevy Silverado.
1:10:09 Alex Cranz? What?
1:10:10 Nilay Patel? Dodge Charger.
1:10:13 Nilay Patel? I'm like, there was a meeting that the exhaust company, Borla is a famous exhaust company. And they had a meeting and they're like, this EV thing is killing us. No one's going to buy exhaust pipes from us anymore. headers out the window. We're not doing this. What's our plan? And someone's like, aftermarket sound solutions. We're going to put speakers on the trucks and we're going to make Ford trucks. Sounds like they have Chevy V8s in them.
1:10:38 Alex Cranz? How are they going to roll?
1:10:39 Nilay Patel? There was a meeting, Alex.
1:10:43 Nilay Patel? I love it. Just go watch this video. It's not even our video. I just quick posted a TikTok from another publication because I can't get enough of this guy saying, it's really more of an aftermarket sound solution.
1:10:53 David Pierce? There was a period of time, like two months ago, I would say, where Neelai, you missed a couple of shows in a row. You were super busy. You didn't do the iPhone review this year. You were doing code, you were moving, a lot was going on. And we got a bunch of emails being like, is Neelai leaving? Is he going off to like some big job? And I want everyone to know that when Neelai does leave, it will be to do the thing he just described just now. Neelai will leave us to go do aftermarket sound solution truck TikTok. And that will be the end.
1:11:21 Nilay Patel? That's the only thing.
1:11:22 David Pierce? If ever Neelai disappears, look for him on truck TikTok.
1:11:26 David Pierce? That's what it will be.
1:11:27 Nilay Patel? I just got to go watch the video. Well, it's just the confidence. It's really more of an aftermarket sound solution.
1:11:33 Alex Cranz? You're very, like, I feel confident listening to you say it.
1:11:37 Nilay Patel? I just like if you're buying.
1:11:38 Alex Cranz? The way it just.
1:11:39 Nilay Patel? The number of companies that are solving the sort of like political culture war of EVs by being like, here's what we're gonna do.
1:11:47 Alex Cranz? Make it loud.
1:11:48 Nilay Patel? We're gonna put speakers on the car and we're gonna make them sound like they burn gas and that'll fix it. Dodge is doing this.
1:11:55 Alex Cranz? They are.
1:11:56 Nilay Patel? They call it the fret sonic exhaust system and they won't admit that they're putting speakers under the car. At least Borla is like, yeah, it's a.
1:12:02 Alex Cranz? What does it sound when it's like crossing water?
1:12:05 Nilay Patel? Like the speakers are drowning?
1:12:09 David Pierce? That was really good, actually.
1:12:10 Nilay Patel? It was really good.
1:12:11 David Pierce? It was really good.
1:12:13 Nilay Patel? Also, you want us to drive your battery powered truck into some water and make it bubble. Everyone very confident that that's a good situation.
1:12:20 David Pierce? Neil, did you say it's called fret sonic or frat sonic?
1:12:23 Nilay Patel? Frat sonic.
1:12:24 David Pierce? Frat sonic. That's, that's fantastic.
1:12:26 Alex Cranz? Frats.
1:12:27 Nilay Patel? That's whatever, man. All right, what's yours?
1:12:30 Alex Cranz? Um, okay. Mine is Chris Person, who, friend of The Verge, has a great story up on the site where he hacked a robot vacuum to make it more like secure because robot vacuums, you know, they're going around your house. You're hopefully wearing pants when they're going around your house.
1:12:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:12:46 Alex Cranz? Always wear pants. Uh, and, and they're mapping your house. They're mapping everything and then they're uploading all of that to the cloud. And while it is typically pretty secure, it is also a privacy, potential privacy nightmare.
1:12:57 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:12:57 Alex Cranz? And, and so he had to go use this, this project called Vale, Vale Tudo.
1:13:02 Nilay Patel? It's a great name.
1:13:03 Alex Cranz? Bill Tudo?
1:13:04 Nilay Patel? Vale Tudo.
1:13:05 Alex Cranz? Vale Tudo. And, and so he, he used this project to hack a robot vacuum and, and, and make it, disconnect it from the cloud and still make it work and do all this stuff. And it worked, but he, you know, he's hacking. This is not just, yeah, he's, he's in the system. He's physically removing boards and adding new boards. And he was working on this for a while. And he's working with, I believe, Dan Seifer. And Dan would just be like, oh yeah, I'm just getting all these pictures of robot vacuum guts. And you're like, what is going on over there?
1:13:34 Nilay Patel? Has he thought about adding an aftermarket sound solution to his robot vacuum?
1:13:39 Nilay Patel? Full Silverado Viet powering through the living room.
1:13:42 Alex Cranz? It's gonna sound great, but the story is really cool and I love the idea of it, especially as the other day, like, I kept having to stand in front of my robot vacuum cleaner and it would like bump into me and I was like, "Oh my god, none of these photos can ever like be leaked." Because it's just the worst look for you.
1:14:02 Alex Cranz? Just horrible, because it's like, it's from your feet up. So it's like, it's basically even worse than that one where you pull your phone out and you go to check something and the camera's facing you and you're not expecting it and you've got four chins. There's like 12 chins on your ass, on your face. There's a lot of chins happening and nobody needs to see that, so I feel like I kinda wanna hack mine now.
1:14:23 David Pierce? My robot has become a supervillain in my house. The noise that the little like boop boop boop thing that it does right before it starts scares the hell out of my dog. For some reason, she like literally as soon as any, the vacuum doesn't even have to move as soon as she hears that noise, which it for some reason will occasionally just make randomly out of nowhere, she just goes flying upstairs and hides in the bed under the covers and will not come back for hours. And our 11-month-old, he is now crawling like a maniac and he sees this little glowing light and he presses the button because that's fun. And then it moves and it hits him and he doesn't like that. And then it's like, "Oh, well, I have to get around this." So it just keeps moving a little bit, like an inch at a time, and just bashing into his legs over and over.
1:15:06 David Pierce? So I have to figure out a place to put the robot vacuum that is somehow accessible to no one but can still vacuum my floors. So if anybody has any like sneaky hiding places.
1:15:18 Alex Cranz? I think you just get like a drone apparatus for your child.
1:15:21 David Pierce? Oh yeah, I'll get the Ring Flying Camera, that'll go super good. My dog will love that. That'll go really well.
1:15:26 Nilay Patel? Every time I've ever bought an expensive vacuum, it's been shittier than the like $30 vacuum we bought when we were like very young.
1:15:33 David Pierce? We were in a hotel in Tennessee a couple of weeks ago and the one vacuum that they had in there was this like piece of crap dust devil that weighed nothing. And all anyone talked about all weekend was how nice it was because it was so light and small.
1:15:49 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:15:49 David Pierce? It was like this piece of junk vacuum is like my favorite thing I've ever used to clean floors because it weighs nothing.
1:15:54 Nilay Patel? I have a $1,000 LG vacuum with wifi that empties itself into a stand. I thought this was so cool. It looks so good, man. I just like looking at it.
1:16:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:16:07 Nilay Patel? We have a $30 shark that just outperforms that thing, coming and going.
1:16:12 Alex Cranz? Yep.
1:16:13 Nilay Patel? Just all that money is in the Wi-Fi chip and not in the part that sucks up dirt.
1:16:17 Alex Cranz? It's, I, I, I have it run four times a week. And that kind of helps.
1:16:22 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I've never had any luck with robot vacuums and now I've heard about the ass chin situation and I never will.
1:16:26 Alex Cranz? Yeah, don't, don't go and look at the images.
1:16:28 Nilay Patel? David, what's your lightning round item?
1:16:30 David Pierce? If we could title this episode of the podcast, "The Ass Chin Situation", I would very much appreciate that.
1:16:37 Nilay Patel? That'd be great for SEO. No one's Googling ass chin situations.
1:16:42 David Pierce? Mine is, um, I was picking between two Google things. One is that now you can put the Chrome URL bar on iOS down at the bottom. Most controversial decision on the internet for a while there, if you guys remember. Uh, but the one I ended up choosing was Google is now selling like in pre-registries, .ing domains. A fun fact about me is I'm obsessed with domain names. I find them totally fascinating. And there was this thing like 10 years ago where I can was like, we're going to put out a million new kinds of domains. You can be .pizza, you can be .restaurant, you can be .online. And we're going to reinvent the way people think about web, webpages. Instead of trying to be a .com, you can just be, you know, Alfredo's .pizza and that's your restaurant.
1:17:24 David Pierce? That didn't work at all. And if you go to like a messaging system or email or Slack or whatever, most of those don't even show up as URLs, which I would argue is like, pretty spectacular failure. So now Google's out here trying to make .ing happen and their thing is like, if you want it to be, you know, if you're a flight booking company, you do book .ing or fly .ing. And they're charging a ton of money for it. R .ing, which would be Ring, obviously. It's like, if you wanna, if you're Victoria, not Victoria's Secret, if you're Tiffany's or whoever, $130,000 a year for this domain name. And I just think,
1:17:59 Nilay Patel? Whoa.
1:18:00 David Pierce? Google has been way out in front of these, they're called top level domains or TLDs. And all these like alternate TLDs, Google has been out in front of for forever. .xyz has actually been fairly successful as a kind of catch-all thing. .ai had a moment. .social has kinda had a moment. And now Google is gonna try really, really, really hard to make .ing a thing.
1:18:21 Alex Cranz? I, I really wanna have, they see me roll .ing.
1:18:25 David Pierce? That's very good, Alex.
1:18:26 Alex Cranz? But I don't have, I,
1:18:28 Nilay Patel? $200,000 a year.
1:18:30 Alex Cranz? Like, Neil, I, can, can I have some money?
1:18:34 Alex Cranz? I got an idea.
1:18:35 Nilay Patel? Wait, didn't Google leave the domains business?
1:18:38 David Pierce? Google domains business. I had not even sold, I think, just gave to Squarespace, which some people are very mad about.
1:18:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:18:45 David Pierce? But it still has its like overarching TLD registry thing. So it like administers these domain names, but it doesn't do the buying and selling and management of them.
1:18:57 Nilay Patel? Are they gonna have messaging?
1:19:01 Alex Cranz? That's a good one.
1:19:01 Nilay Patel? They should just call it G chat.
1:19:04 Nilay Patel? Put the put full manifestation. Just call it G chat. All will be forgiven. The government will give up your their antitrust trials. We'll stop covering SEO. Just call it G chat.
1:19:16 Alex Cranz? We're so easily bought.
1:19:18 Nilay Patel? That's that's your disclosure. If they just call it G chat, we'll back all the way off. Huh? Deal? No deal.
1:19:27 Nilay Patel? Last one I want to call out. X had its first all hands with Elon and Linda Iaccarino. Alex Heath has the full transcript of that meeting. You should go read it just to witness the wild vacillations of Elon making stuff up and Linda having to pretend it was part of the plan.
1:19:45 David Pierce? Yep.
1:19:46 Nilay Patel? There's one point where I don't remember exactly what he was saying, but Elon was like, I'd like to start with this. And it was obviously a surprise to her. And she was like, I'd raise my hand to be a part of that. Perfect.
1:19:55 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:19:56 Nilay Patel? Perfect.
1:19:59 Nilay Patel? It's very good. That's what you want out of your CEO. Just complete befuddlement and surprise.
1:20:05 Alex Cranz? Love chaos.
1:20:06 Nilay Patel? That's a good piece. We got a bunch of good stuff on the site this week. Liz, in addition to the things people are very unhappy about, Liz has been covering the FTX trial. Sam Bankman Fried was on the stand. He is lighting himself on fire. There's no other way to describe what is happening in this trial. That dude's going to jail. But you should read the coverage because Liz is a great writer and she's having the time of her life covering this trial.
1:20:29 David Pierce? And also, it's probably going to be over very there's there's a non-zero chance that by the time you're listening to this, a verdict has come in.
1:20:37 David Pierce? And we're going to talk about that on the show next week, for sure.
1:20:39 Nilay Patel? And.
1:20:42 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be guilty. I agree with that. It would be a shock if it was not. We have a great video Andy Hawkins made about delivery robots, which is very cool. You should go watch that. Like I said, Becca won an Emmy this week, which is incredible. Go watch them full frame in celebration. And then, like I said, we've talked about this a lot, a big feature this week on SCA. You should go read it. We'll link it in the show notes. And then, seeing Andy, he has a great piece about the EV transition and the weird liminal spot it's in right now, where it seems like it's ready to start happening, but instead, culture war. Instead, culture war. America 2023. Go read that. But it's also, the carmakers have kind of blown it, right? They assumed that all the demand for Teslas could be applied to their existing business models.
1:21:26 Nilay Patel? And so they made big stupid trucks instead of like little EVs that people want to buy. Like 100, like Chevy is like, look at our $100,000 Silverado instead of look at our Bolt, which is, it feels like an error, like the people who want to buy EVs are not up there. Yeah. Anyway, that's a great piece. You should go read it. There's also obviously some coverage of Charger Networks in there. And lastly, before we break, we want to know how you feel about The Vergecast on YouTube. Are you watching it on YouTube? Are you catching the Easter eggs in the background? Or are you sticking with the podcast player? What do you like about the show on YouTube? What don't you like? We know you want us to cut to more pictures of things and add chapter. We'll do all that stuff. But beyond that, what do you want from us on YouTube? We're growing on YouTube.
1:22:08 Nilay Patel? It's great. It's fun to be in the comments on YouTube, but we want to make it better. Let us know what you think in the comments on YouTube. Bringing the multiple ass chins to YouTube. Amazing. That's it. Thank you so much. It's Vergecast. Bye, everyone.
1:22:27 David Pierce? And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.
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