Why Apple is trying to save Google

Where will Meta, Apple, and Google be three years from now? It's starting to look like they might all be very different. Nilay, David, and The Verge's Richard Lawler start the show with Eddy Cue's testimony in the Google search trial, in which Cue argued that AI is taking over — and that Google should be allowed to keep paying Apple gobs of money. The hosts also chat about the latest in the Meta trials, and how the recent Apple ruling is already changing the App Store. Then, there are some gadgets to talk about: the panopticon-slash-killer-app coming for Meta's smart glasses, the new Surface Pro and Surface Laptop, and a lot of new iPhones. In the lightning round, we do another round of Brendan Carr is a Dummy, then talk about some new Netflix designs and the latest in our worldwide hunt for party speakers. Further reading: Eddy Cue is fighting to save Apple’s $20 billion paycheck from Google Apple’s Eddy Cue: ‘You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now’ Google searches are falling in Safari for the first time ever — probably because of AI Google's statement about Search traffic Apple is looking at adding Perplexity and other AI search engines to Safari Amazon now has a ‘Get book’ button in its iOS Kindle app Epic will use an EU account to bring Fortnite back to the US App Store Patreon’s iOS update allows creators to bypass in-app purchases Apple is trying to halt the App Store ruling. Apple files appeal to wrest back control of its App Store A new bill would force Apple to allow third-party app storesDOJ’s proposed Google changes would ‘deeply undermine user trust,’ search chief says Firefox could be doomed without Google search deal, says executive DOJ asks court to split up Google’s ad tech empire Threads was originally going to live inside the Instagram app | The Verge Instagram doesn’t want to be a ‘lean-back experience.’ | The Verge ‘TikTok is probably the fiercest competition that we have faced.’ | The Verge Instagram has spent up to $700 million in a year to lure creators. Mosseri calls the first version of Reels his ‘biggest mistake.’ | The Verge Meta’s new AI glasses could have a ‘super-sensing’ mode with facial recognition Apple is planning smart glasses with and without AR Apple ‘iPhone Air’ rumor suggests a bigger screen coming in 2027 Apple may stagger next year’s iPhones to make way for a foldable Microsoft’s smaller Surface Pro has a 12-inch display and starts at $799 Microsoft shrinks its Surface Laptop down to 13 inches, priced at $899 Microsoft’s new Surface devices ditch magnetic charging port for USB-C How Microsoft shrunk its Surface devices Policing News, Policing DEI: The FCC’s Shifting Priorities Erode Its Credibility OpenAI abandons plan to become a for-profit company Netflix is getting a big TV revamp Netflix will try a TikTok-like feed on its mobile app I put four robot lawnmowers through a brutal backyard battle Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of being vaguely remembered by Adam Mosseri. That's a real experience I had this week.

• 1:37David Pierce?

  This is your new claim to fame.

• 1:38Nilay Patel?

  We're going to talk about it. Vaguely remembered.

• 1:42David Pierce?

  Is it better to be, like, very remembered or not remembered? Like, if you had to choose between slightly vaguely barely remembered and not remembered at all? If he was like, "I have no memory of doing that podcast with Eli four years ago." Is that better or worse?

• 1:57Speaker 06

  Well, if you'd said Nellie Patel, he'd know who you're talking about.

• 2:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, exactly. Eli, who's that guy? You know, as a podcast host, I think what you want is, "I remember every minute of that experience, and I send it to everyone that I've ever met." And I'm like, "This is my org chart." We're going to get to it. We're going to explain what we're talking about. But it is true that, literally today, just hours before we are speaking, Adam Mosseri, under oath... In the United States justice system, said he vaguely remembered talking to me.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  Congratulations.

• 2:29Nilay Patel?

  It's a weird life I live. I'm your friend Eli, that's David Pierce.

• 2:33David Pierce?

  Hello.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  Richard Lawler is here. Hey, buddy.

• 2:35David Pierce?

  I'm back.

• 2:36Nilay Patel?

  He's back. A lot going on this week. A lot of courthouse activity.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  There's a rumor, by the way, from CNBC's David Faber, that Warner Brothers and Discovery will split up again, which is just the circle of life. Like, we're gonna play the Lion King song here.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  They should call the companies Warner Discovery and just Bros. Those should be the two companies.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  I would join Bros. Obviously, Bros is the one. There's some facial recognition news in the AR world. Brendan talked a lot this week.

• 3:10David Pierce?

  Yeah, he was back with a vengeance.

• 3:11Nilay Patel?

  Our boy Brendan just did not shut up this week. We got...

• 3:14David Pierce?

  He didn't like that the segment was short last week, so he had to do some stuff.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  He didn't. He was like, well, I gotta start running my mouth. We have Gen 2 battling robot lawnmowers to the death. And then finally, Netflix took my advice. Just be direct about what happened here. I told them to do something and they finally did it. So, a lot, a lot going on. Let's start in court. Where else? My hot prediction is that 36 months from now, we will not recognize Apple and Google. That's just my hottest prediction I've got going right now. Whatever you think of as Google now and whatever you think of as Apple now, 36 months from now, these companies will be radically different in some way.

• 3:54David Pierce?

  Interesting that you're not lumping Meta into that. Do you not think it also qualifies?

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. We'll come to that. Meta is also under trial, but if you peel Instagram and WhatsApp off of Meta, I think the essential character of Meta remains. Whereas, what we're talking about with Apple is you're gonna, in one trial, they're gonna take $20 billion of search revenue away from Apple. In the other case, they can't make money in the App Store the way they were. They've appealed that decision. That just changes the company.

• 4:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? And then in the Google case, just in 50 different ways, the government might break up Google. Fundamental changes of the company. So those are my hot predictions. Maybe they'll come true, maybe they won't. That's why they're they're hot. But you really see the pressure that these companies are feeling right now in court, where their various executives are on the stand talking about how their businesses work. In particular, in the Google Search Remedies trial, Eddie Q is on the stand this week. And he, I mean, literally, he with just a sideways comment, he dropped Google's stock price by 10% or almost 10%. David, you've been paying a lot of attention to the Google search case. You were in that courtroom during the other part of the trial. What's going on here?

• 5:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, so Apple's been a really important part of this trial the whole time because like it, the simplest version of this trial was about Google became too powerful because it could afford to be the default search engine essentially everywhere. And the most important and most expensive version of that is Safari on iOS. So Apple was, I mean, like, all over the the liabilities part of this trial. And a huge piece of this was essentially Google is the only company that was able to give Apple $20 billion a year to be the Safari search engine. Thus, we have a problem. Like, you can kind of boil it all the way down to that. And that is that is where we are. So it was meaningful again to see Eddie Q come back at all to talk about this stuff. He talked, he testified in the first version of the trial, and now he's back doing it again.

• 5:53David Pierce?

  And he made a surprising amount of news for somebody who is like very well media trained. And I think the thing I've come to believe is the people like this who come to testify largely come to do it on purpose, right? And I think, Neela, you're a lawyer, so you know this better than I do. But there's like two ways it goes. There's either somebody asks them a relatively open ended question and they get to say the thing that they've been preparing to say. And there was a lot of that, like, I was there for Sundar Pichai last time, and he really wanted to talk about not letting people reverse engineer Google. And he said that over and over whenever he was able to. And then there are just times where you ask them yes or no questions to get them to actually reveal things that they don't want to reveal because they're in order to and they have to. Those are the two sides of how you learn information in these trials is essentially

• 6:37David Pierce?

  what I've discovered sitting in them.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:39David Pierce?

  This one, Eddie Q just unprompted starts dropping bombs about what's going on with Google's So he's like, he says, the biggest news, the one you're referring to is that Eddie Q said, by way of sort of explaining how transformative AI is and why AI is so important and why it's becoming competitive to search. And it's very clear, obviously, that he would like to continue making $20 billion a year from Google. So all of this under the guise of like, Apple would really like Google to win this trial so that it can keep giving Apple lots of money. He says that for the first time in, I believe, 22 years was the number he gave ever. But in 22 years of having this deal, Google searches are going down in Safari by some meaningful

• 7:24David Pierce?

  amount. And that's the thing that tanked Google's stock.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  Like instantly, like,

• 7:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  The line went down, CNBC like broke into coverage. Like, Google's stock is down because Eddie Q said search falling is going down because of AI.

• 7:39David Pierce?

  Right. And again, this is, this is a search surface that is worth $20 billion a year to Google. That's like, that it is such a core part of what makes search work, that any meaningful downtick is, is a huge deal for Google. Eddie Q's thesis is, this has to do with AI. People are turning to the, the built-in Siri and ChatGPT stuff to replace it. People are using perplexity to replace it. People are using ChatGPT search to replace it. Like, his theory is that instead of going to Safari and typing in the search box, people are doing lots of different things. Google even actually, I think in a really interesting way, confirmed that. So Google immediately comes out with a statement. Let me just read you the statement from Google. It

• 8:22David Pierce?

  says, "We continue to see overall query growth in search. That includes an increase in total queries coming from Apple's devices and platforms. More generally, as we enhance search with new features, people are seeing that Google search is more useful for more of their queries, and they're accessing it for new things and in new ways, whether from browsers or the Google app, using their voice or Google Lens." None of that is a refutation of anything that Eddie Q said, right? Like, both of these things can be true at the same time. But what is, what this implies is that a lot of people are leaving Safari and doing Google stuff elsewhere. And I certainly believe that. Like, the Google app is hugely popular, and Google has started pushing really, really, really, really hard to get you to download the Google app, in part because it's desperately

• 9:06David Pierce?

  afraid it's gonna lose this trial and not be able to be the default in Safari anymore. And one thing that Eddie Q said in the first version of this trial was that one of the things Apple was afraid of was that if they stopped doing this deal with Google, Google would use all the other surfaces that it has to get people to do things like download Chrome and download the Google app. They were afraid that, like, every time you open YouTube, which is like an unassailably powerful app on iOS, there would just be a big ass bar at the top that's like, "Want to use Google? Download Chrome."

• 9:36Nilay Patel?

  "Want to use Google?"

• 9:37David Pierce?

  Or like, whatever, right? And that's, that stuff is really important. Those are like, Google can do that kind of work and move a lot of people wherever it wants, and it doesn't do that because of this deal. And so Eddie Q is sitting here being like, "Maybe this is already shifting away from me," and he wants to do everything he can to protect this thing that is hugely lucrative for Apple.

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. There's a thing here that, you mentioned it briefly at the top. Apple and Eddie Q want to protect the $20 billion, maybe even $25 billion worth of revenue that they get for doing nothing.

• 10:14David Pierce?

  Right. It's free money.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  Right? They do literally nothing, except set Google search to be the default in Safari, which is the thing that everybody wants to be the default in Safari. And for doing nothing, except what everyone wants them to do... For zero effort, they receive 20 to 25 billion dollars a year in rent.

• 10:35David Pierce?

  And Eddie Q even kind of alluded to that where he was like, even if they didn't pay us, we'd probably still have to do it because it's the thing that everybody wants.

• 10:41Nilay Patel?

  And so if you're, you're Apple, you're like, well, that would go away. That's just the freest money that's ever existed. And then the other big pot of free money is in-app purchases and the Apple tax and all that stuff. And they're under a court order, which they are appealing, uh, which has allowed Spotify and Amazon, other companies to say, you can just buy our stuff on the web and you don't have to pay the tax. This is a big deal. Like Apple's looking at the free money going away. And so I, yeah, I, I see what Eddie is doing on the stand. He's, he's trying to make this thing seem like it's already dying. So the government doesn't take it away.

• 11:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:17Nilay Patel?

  And he's doing it in a framework that, you know, antitrust regulators like will roll their eyes and be like, yeah, yeah, we know the monopoly lifecycle, right? The companies get too big and they get too lazy and then the disruptors come up and then the companies go away. And on the stand, Eddie Q was like, look, when we started Apple, you know, IBM was the big dog. And now look at them, right? And he's like, well, maybe one day we'll go away. Just leave us alone so we can collect the 25 billion dollars in free money and tell them like, there's just a thing like he's, he's doing like, you know, it's like, what like the archetypes in storytelling, like the hero's journey, but it's the monopoly lifecycle. Right? Like we're going to learn your lesson and come back stronger. It's like, we're all going to die one day. Leave us alone.

• 11:58David Pierce?

  Right. Just let us die in peace with our 25 billion dollars.

• 12:02Nilay Patel?

  Just let us die rich, man. I, I beg of you, Judge. Let me die a rich man. That's all I've ever wanted. I'm on the board of Ferrari. Eddie Q is on the board of Ferrari. Why do you think Ferrari got CarPlay? You know what I mean? Like, it's just very obvious why Ferrari was one of the first. It's like Ferrari, Porsche and Aston Martin got CarPlay first. Like you know where Apple executives are spending their time. Um, but there's just a piece here where you're like, The other side of that, Apple wants to preserve this money. They're going to make this argument that they're already seeing the change. Like you don't, don't worry about this. The market's taking care of it. The thing that's really interesting to me is how fast and furiously the stock dropped. And there's a part of me that says, Google stock dropped. And the thing that's

• 12:47Nilay Patel?

  really, the thing that's really interesting to me is just how fast and furiously Google's stock dropped. On a pretty innocuous statement, right? Like, what Q fundamentally said was the market's already shifting. And like, all of these big search remedies you want to do, they're not going to matter because the market started taking care of this monopoly that you're so worried about government. This is pretty innocuous. But the market dropped, but the, but the stock dropped because I think everyone is waiting for that first piece of evidence that Google's search is under threat.

• 13:16David Pierce?

  Yes, that's exactly what I was gonna say.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  Right? The first sliver of evidence that AI will actually take search is like a kind of death knell for Google.

• 13:27David Pierce?

  And until now, it really has been all vibes.

• 13:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, all vibes. Like, at the launch of Bing, Satya Nadella told me, he's like, every point of market share I can take from Google is billions of dollars. Like, I don't have to win. I just peel off like two points of market share, and this is a huge business for us. And everyone's just been waiting. And it's like, well, Bing didn't do it. Sorry, guys. But like, everyone was waiting for like, oh, well, Google get dethroned. And even if you believe Google's statement here, which I think is reasonable interpretation of this, is search volumes are dropping in Safari because Google's getting people to use the Google search app.

• 14:04David Pierce?

  Right.

• 14:04Nilay Patel?

  That's more or less what they're saying. But maybe search volumes are dropping in Safari because everyone's using ChatGPT instead. Who truly knows? Apple knows, but they said Safari.

• 14:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, and realistically, I think the answer is, is pretty clearly some of each.

• 14:19David Pierce?

  But it is, it is certainly true that we are finally slowly getting real information that suggests that Google is fragile, right? And I think part of that is also, as this trial goes on. The people I talked to who are watching the trial seem to be like day by day becoming more and more convinced that something catastrophic is going to happen to Google at the end of this, that I think like going in the the the sort of overwhelming betting favorite for the outcome was Google is going to stop having to do these deals exclusively and is just going to win on its merits, right? That either it was just going to get what it wanted, which is to just remove the word exclusive from all of its deals and nothing else changed. Or Judge Meadow is going to be like, you can't pay money or you can't

• 15:04David Pierce?

  pay money above a certain amount to be part of these deals. And that would that would have real ramifications, but it would still leave Google with a giant advantage because it's Google. But now more and more, there is this sense that like, okay, something, some Google is going to get punched in the face in one, at least one, like seriously lasting way. And then you pair that with, oh, and maybe it doesn't even matter because maybe this thing is already starting to crack in front of our eyes. And there's like, you just set off this incredible panic about Google.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And again, the the market reacted to what is a pretty fundamentally innocuous comment.

• 15:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:42Nilay Patel?

  Right? Searches in Safari are falling for the first time ever. Like, Apple is obviously trying to protect the free money. So of course, it's saying that this thing you think is a problem is not a problem. And here's a tiny slice of evidence.

• 15:56David Pierce?

  Right. This thing you think is good actually sucks. Don't even worry about it.

• 15:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is like whenever, um, whenever regulators go to big cable companies, they're like, but we compete with everyone. Like, how can you, you can't possibly regulate us. Like, there's a guy down the street with a tin can and a dream, and he's obviously our biggest competitor. And it's like, what are you talking about? Like, that's this again. But you know, Eddie said some other stuff. He said they're looking at adding perplexity in other search engines, AI powered search engines to Safari. He he made a lot of noise about AI being a new user interface paradigm that might replace the iPhone entirely in 10 years. I think that was, you know, to your point, David, like, that was one of his canned lines. Like, there's so much change happening. Why would you bother the market? Like, 10 years from now, we'll all be wearing AI glasses and you won't even need an iPhone. Like,

• 16:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 16:43Nilay Patel?

  Just let me die rich. And you just look at all that, you know, like, oh, he's trying to protect it. But I think inadvertently, he validated some of people's biggest ideas about the change to come.

• 16:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, and I think it is important to remember his upside and his incentive for what he should believe. Like, it is good for Apple to convince everyone for lots of reasons that AI is about to change everything. And that suddenly this is all hugely competitive. And actually, maybe you should be more afraid of OpenAI than anybody. But the other thing that I really liked is that Eddie Hute said all this stuff. He's like, we're building it all. And then pressed, he said, and I quote, "To date, they're just not good enough," which is the answer to why they're not doing more AI stuff. And so he's like, AI is going to change everything, but also AI sucks.

• 17:32David Pierce?

  Welcome to the discourse about AI, right? And it's like, you know what I'm tired of? And Richard, you and I have talked about this before. The people who were like, well, this is the worst it's ever going to be, so just wait. And AI is going to change, like, maybe it sucks now, but this is the worst it's ever going to be. And I'm like, but it's still, so we agree it's bad.

• 17:51Speaker 06

  It's a weird thing that you can get people to say that at first they'll talk only about how great it is. But then, once they can't talk about that, suddenly it changes and it's, oh, well, what it will be and what it could be.

• 18:01David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:02Speaker 06

  And it's just like, what is going on? What is the real discussion here? What is it right now? What can you say? And I think it's notable particularly because Apple is at least perceived as being so far behind in AI. So there's a lot of questions about like, what they can do there. And I feel like if they were really that worried about how fast AI is changing, they would, his reaction would be different. The things he would say on the stand would be different than what he actually said.

• 18:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, he did say that the Google money prevented Apple from building its own search engine. Like, he straightforwardly is like, yeah, that's, we probably didn't do it because we were just getting this free money. But then he was like, but it would have been hard and like, they're good at it. And it's like, yeah, dude, you just wanted 20, 23 billion dollars. Like, you shut up my house and you're like, if you would just keep eating the peanut butter you're already eating, we'll give you 20 billion dollars. I'd be like, all right, yeah, I'm super not going to start a peanut butter factory at this point in time. Like, yep.

• 18:54Speaker 06

  How much money did they spend on the car that they never made?

• 18:58David Pierce?

  I think 10 billion was the number we heard, wasn't it?

• 19:00Nilay Patel?

  So half, half a year worth of free Google money.

• 19:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:05David Pierce?

  You know?

• 19:05Speaker 06

  That is the world of AI.

• 19:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:08Nilay Patel?

  Well, actually, the funny thing about the AI not being good enough yet. Sure, this is as bad as it will ever be. We can all, fine. But like, there was a study this week from IBM, which is essentially a consulting company now, trying to sell AI services branded as Watson and other people's AI services. And in their own study about how much AI you need and you should buy from IBM, they're like, in our survey of CEOs, only 25% of AI projects had returned on the investment. And so one out of four. And then the rest of the answers are like, and the CEOs are like, we're using too much stuff and it's not all well integrated. And it's like, yeah, this kind of sucks. It's like, if you just, if in 2004, you just walked up to everyone, you're like, Bluetooth now.

• 19:53Nilay Patel?

  You're just going to use Bluetooth. And I was like, but these are giant. Like, not all of us are real estate agents. We can't wear these headsets all day. You know, I lease a three series and I've got this headset, but that doesn't make me a real estate agent. You understand what I'm like, this isn't right yet. And you gotta wait 10 years for AirPods. And like, that's still where we are. It's like, it'll be great next year.

• 20:14David Pierce?

  No, but there, but it's, it's not even like, that's the best case scenario. The worst case scenario is like, we go and we tour a house and it's not as big as I want it to be, but I'm standing in the kitchen. I'm like, but think about it. This is the smallest this kitchen will ever be. Like, that doesn't, that's nothing. That I have, I have implied that something is going to get bigger or better. And just, and it doesn't matter that there's no evidence that it's going to.

• 20:38Speaker 06

  And I think the way, the place that's the most obvious to me is in the AI trends, the AI memes that developed. Like we saw what the action figures and other things like that. You have these people who are paying for access to AI tools. They have no idea what to do with them. And so they're like, I can make an action figure of myself. Would that be evidence that I'm paying for something that's useful? Anything that will work. Okay, I'll, I'll turn myself into a cartoon, whatever. I need to do something to prove that this investment was worth it.

• 21:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, I want to make a distinction here because there's an entire class of. Professionals that are using AI in different ways. A Figma this week launched Figma Sites and you can just make like beautiful designed websites with AI. It's basically a site builder. Like you just tell it what you want. It just like makes you a website with all kinds of animations and CSS. It's cool. They have a co-generation tool that they're gonna launch soon. Obviously Cursor exists. We see the AI usage in apps like Photoshop, which is basically at like 100% like usage rate. It's the same as Layers, which is essentially 100%. Yeah. Um, so there's, and we have like lots of listeners who are software developers who are just like using this stuff all day long. There's some value there. I think what we are focused on in this conversation is

• 21:51Nilay Patel?

  the idea that AI search is already a useful, great product that can do everything you want. That Agentic AI, where you just tell Siri to get you a sandwich and it can do it. Or you can tell Alexa Plus to exist and it will be in your house. None of that stuff is real yet. Like that is all pipe dreams. Like truly pipe dreams. And I think that's the gap. I, I, I think that gap is getting bigger between what people say it can do or will do or one day will do, and then the real things people are using it for now. And I, I, I, I think it's important to validate, like, yes, people use Cursor every day to great effect. Yeah. I use generative noise reduction in Lightroom almost every time I take a photo now.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  It, it's not even, I think it should just be bolted into the import workflow for me. It's really good. Like I'm, I'm like, why am I pressing a second button? Like just put it, just do it here. Um, there's all this stuff that is good and that works. There's this other piece, and even some of the generative AI tech stuff, like if you sell something on eBay and you're just like, make me an item for shit, fine. Right? Like it doesn't matter. Um, but then there's this other piece where you're like, 10 years from now, you won't need an iPhone. Because AI will be so good that you're just gonna be talking to your glasses. And it's like, well, a lot of stuff has to go right.

• 23:10David Pierce?

  Right. My, my new shortcut for that is to just, every time you see AI, just auto replace it with machine learning. And, and in some places, that makes perfect sense, right? Like, a lot of stuff you just described, uh, like Figma is doing this stuff and it, it's using machine learning to do all kinds of interesting stuff for you. And this stuff is like useful and valuable and it's a feature of the software. But then anytime I hear somebody be like, yeah, I asked my machine learning what I should do. And I'm like, oh, right. We're out.

• 23:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, we used, we used to just call this algorithms. And I think that we all understood what they were and it's still really good for those things. When they were like, oh yeah, you use the algorithms and it'll figure it out. If you know how to program, those AI coding tools are really useful because you know what they're doing and you know how to work around it and you know how to fix it. And whatever it's not good at, you can fill in. For me, I don't know how to program. If I try to use an AI coding tool, you will get something that does not work and I do not know how to fix it.

• 24:02Nilay Patel?

  We should do a Richard Baller hackathon, where we just demand that you vibe code different kinds of apps and see what happens.

• 24:08Speaker 06

  And they will all fail.

• 24:09Nilay Patel?

  Can Richard bring down NORAD by himself? Like, let's find out today.

• 24:15David Pierce?

  But just, just to bring this back to Eddie Q, I think a, a thing that I'm just realizing now as we're talking is that Apple is actually massively incentivized to bring all of these things to iOS as fast as it possibly can. Like, Apple's case for we should keep getting Google's money gets stronger and easier once it integrates perplexity. Like, that's because they can be like, look, this stuff is already being cannibalized. The change is already happening. So the fact that Apple is saying this stuff is not good enough and is actively not doing it strikes me as an even more damning critique of this whole thing because it would be much easier for Eddie Q to get up and be like, the Google deal doesn't matter that much because we, we already have a perplexity deal and people are using that too. Like, it could introduce the competition if it wanted to.

• 24:59David Pierce?

  And it doesn't because I think at some, somewhere in that company are people who continue to make, like, making good products.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's also a, a very interesting sort of like business flywheel that I don't think the AI search companies have really solved yet. So Google can spend $20 billion a year on Apple to get the default placement. Then they collect all of the searches. They show ads on those search pages, which are very good at making money to the point where like the search pages are getting more useless because they're just ads now. So they collect all the data from the searches, they monetize each individual search at varying rates and with increasing amounts of like revenue aggression. And then they've got all the search data, which helps make the search product better and feeds all their other training efforts. And so they've just got a lot of different ways to collect value for the $20 billion they spend.

• 25:48David Pierce?

  Right.

• 25:49Nilay Patel?

  Perplexity is like, if you do a search on perplexity, it costs them a bunch of money. Right? Like, there's just a bunch of GPUs that have to do some work and use a bunch of power and then they're like, they don't make any money.

• 26:03David Pierce?

  I'm now mentioning perplexity.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  They have a subscription fee and they make some revenue, but it's not a lot of revenue and they're certainly not profitable. And it's like, if they paid Apple money to collect a bunch of searches, which cost them money, that's just a, that's just a black hole of money. Like you're just spending money to lose money. And I, I don't know that any of these companies can actually make that deal yet in a way that doesn't just accelerate their own doom loop. Right? They'll, they'll just lose money.

• 26:28David Pierce?

  Right. Except for OpenAI, which has an infinite capability to keep raising money.

• 26:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Sam Altman just has to go tour the capitals of the world again. He was literally in the United States Senate saying, what I need is infinite money for nuclear power. And, you know, Ted Cruz is like, you, or tell me more. And it's like, how do you do this? Teach me your ways, Sam. But I, but that's a real problem for Apple. I don't think it can get those deals yet from these companies.

• 26:53David Pierce?

  Certainly not in the way that it has from Google.

• 26:57David Pierce?

  Google, capable of making those deals for Gemini. And we heard Sundar Pichai say that, that talks for a deal like that are underway and they were hoping to get it done by the middle of this year. So like that's, there's a deal there somewhere that makes more sense for Google, just because it's Google. And like you, you see Google on its own side, working towards that, right? Like there's, there's AI mode in search now. Gemini is starting to do search that it's like, you can start to see how they just pull piece by piece out of search and into AI, integrate Gemini, move on through life. But I think you're right that like perplexity just can't pull that off, I don't think.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  Not yet, until they figure out how to make money doing this stuff. I don't think they can. Okay. So my hot prediction is 36 months from now, these companies do not look recognizably with the companies they are today. What do you think? Google especially.

• 27:46David Pierce?

  Richard, what do you think?

• 27:49Speaker 06

  I mean, what is left of Google if they so are we thinking that they lose Chrome or that they lose Android or both?

• 27:58Nilay Patel?

  Maybe both. If they, you know, they've lost the ad tech case. Now they're onto the remedies phase, which starts in September. So that'll wrap up. And for all we know, they're gonna have to sell their ad exchange, or they're gonna have to split off DFP. Like, something is gonna happen.

• 28:12David Pierce?

  There was news there this week. Yeah, the government, once again, going for it. Like, we talked about there are three parts of the Google ad tech stack. The government would like them to get rid of two of them.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And Google's counterproposal, by the way, is what if we do nothing?

• 28:26David Pierce?

  Yeah, like, actually, it's fine.

• 28:29Nilay Patel?

  Just get Google home, just lit up.

• 28:31Speaker 06

  I can't even imagine Google without the infinite money spout that is their ad tech stack.

• 28:36Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean. Thirty-six months from now, they lose this trial, they'll, fine, they'll appeal. They've already lost that trial, they're gonna go to remedies, something will happen. It won't be nothing, which is what Google has once again asked for. It'll be something. They'll appeal that. It'll go up and down the chain. Something will result. That's why I'm giving myself three years. All right. It's not the end of next year. It's at the end of three years.

• 28:58David Pierce?

  Ten days ago, I would have said even three years feels too short. But then watching what has happened to Apple and how quickly these policies have changed, and how quickly the App Store has changed, and how hard it will be to wind this back, even if Apple does appeal and win on appeal. Like, maybe three years is not that long a time. Like, once this stuff shifts, it shifts.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  And again, this is part of the monopoly lifestyle, like, story. Like, these things are big and they seem invincible, and then tomorrow, they're over.

• 29:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:30Nilay Patel?

  And there's a lot to be said for that. But the pressure right now is from the government. And a underrated part of the monopoly lifecycle is the monopoly gets itself in trouble with the government, gets all distracted, and then the challenger comes along and it has, like, free space. This is very much what happened to Microsoft.

• 29:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:47Nilay Patel?

  Right? This is why Google and Apple exist the way they do, because Microsoft got distracted. So you have opportunities for, like, OpenAI and perplexing whoever else. I'm just saying, three years. In three years, I don't think these companies look recognizably like the companies we have today, particularly Google. I'm not sure what's gonna happen with Apple, but particularly Google, it just feels to me like It's gonna look a lot different.

• 30:10David Pierce?

  See, I would actually put Apple at the top of the rankings as I'm thinking about this because I think there is an overwhelming chance that $20 billion goes away. One way or another, it's not gonna get out of this trial still being $20 billion. I just, I just don't, I can't see a way, knowing what we know now, that that deal at that number gets preserved. And then, like you said, stick that next to all of the stuff that's happening with the App Store. Like, the, the, my victory lap this week was I absolutely called that Amazon had a version of the Kindle app sitting around waiting with links in it to the web store so you could buy a book in the Kindle app. That's already out. The Patreon changed things and now you can subscribe to Patreons through the web.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  Like, every app that has another way to bill you is starting to bill you quickly outside of the, and like, all that is just money that Apple used to get for free that now it doesn't get for free.

• 31:00Nilay Patel?

  Well, wait, no, hold on. So, uh, John Gruber, uh, will be on Decoder on Monday, so look forward to that. But I, I, I made a similar point to him in that conversation. And what he reminded me of was you couldn't buy a book in the Kindle app before. So it was not, it was money that Apple wasn't getting anyway, right? And so the first, the first players are seeing are Amazon, Spotify, Patreon, which weren't paying the taxes.

• 31:27David Pierce?

  Sure, but there's a, there's a massively long, like Candy Crush is coming if it hasn't yet. I don't pay terrible attention to Candy Crush, but like, this is the move and now everybody has it. And like you said, Apple has both appealed the overall ruling and appealed having to make this policy change ahead of the appeal. So it's like, the, the way it is now, Apple has to, had to comply immediately and then appeal. And it's saying, no, this thing you're asking us to do is so horrible and unconscionable that we can't be asked to do it until the appeal is over. Again, not a lawyer, seems like they're probably gonna lose that one based on what we know of how everybody feels about this case.

• 32:07David Pierce?

  But, uh, it, it's just happening so fast that at some point, like, Apple is going to have to decide to individually pick a fight with every important developer on its store. Or the toothpaste is just out of the tube here. And, and once it's out, it's out, right? Like the people aren't going to wind back to happily paying Apple 30% if they don't have to.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a bill, it's a, it's a kind of a fake bill. In a way that some of these bills are just fake, like they're opportunistic bills from congresspeople who just want to like be a part of the good fight. But there's a bill this week in the Congress that would require Apple to have alternative app stores, require Google to have alternative app stores on their platforms. And so you just see, oh, the pressure's mounting, the political will, especially once people can see it. Oh, I was able to buy a book in the Kindle app. And then Apple took it away. It's very hard to convince people of something they can't see and feel. It is very easy to convince people that taking something away is bad.

• 33:02David Pierce?

  Speaking of John Gruber, he, he wrote a good piece about that this week, that it is one of those things that you open up the Kindle app, you tap the link to go get a book, and immediately your brain goes, oh, my God, it's insane that it was not like this. Like, it is so unbelievably user-hostile that you couldn't even, there was no way to even go get the book. You had to go to a different app and type the name of the book. It like, insanity. And the minute you see how it's supposed to work, the minute you realize this is just because Apple hates you. That's the only, like, and, and I think you're right that there it's, there's no going back from that.

• 33:36Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so answer my question, Richard. 36 months from now,

• 33:41Nilay Patel?

  do you think it looks the same? Or do you think it looks unrecognizably different? Or some, I guess somewhere in between?

• 33:45Speaker 06

  I'm gonna take the field. I think that it still looks the same, but the, like, the ecosystem has changed, and now Apple and Google are throwing handmakers at each other.

• 33:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, interesting.

• 33:56David Pierce?

  That's a good take.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  All right, David?

• 33:59David Pierce?

  I'm gonna, I'm gonna sort of throw in with Richard, which is, I think, I think these companies stay recognizable, but are so vastly less powerful that other stuff bubbles up. Like, I think I'm starting to hear is everyone on earth now is building a browser, because they understand the browser is very important in new ways, in part because of this trial. And, and like, they also see that maybe whatever's gonna happen to Chrome is going to open up the browser market in a meaningful way again. We've been hearing all these AI companies are building a browser, like, That is going to march into every single one of these markets, right? Like, the, the market for being a payment processor on the internet is more interesting than it's been in an extremely long time. Because now, suddenly, these things are open to all of those things.

• 34:42David Pierce?

  So like, I think it's less that, like, to some extent, the big companies are going to be like pulled down a little bit. But also, like, the tide under them is going to come up much higher than it has been able to in a long time.

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You know, there's other pieces of the search remedies case this week beyond Eddie Q, right? The, the head of search said these proposed changes would totally undermine trust in Google and search. If you let everyone have access to the Google search graph. Right? And basically, everyone can read all the searches that are happening. Everyone can get access to our search results and repackage them. Like, maybe people will just stop searching, using search. Uh, and you know, the quote Google has used for years is people ask Google questions that are so intimate, they won't even say them out loud. Right? And so you break that, you're going to break search altogether.

• 35:25David Pierce?

  And what the DOJ keeps saying to that, by the way, is, um, do you think you're the only company on earth that can protect user privacy? And Google continues to say no. Like, again, on its face, that's not a crazy thing to say, right? Like, we, we, we make a lot of fun of companies who don't have a better defense, who just scream privacy and security. That, that, that's a shortcut for I don't actually have a good reason. But, but in this case, like, there, there is some truth to it, right? Like, if you think about the stuff you have put into the Google search box, y- you can, you can tell everything about a person from what they Google in, in ways that are potentially very scary. But it is also true that Google is not the only company on earth capable of being a good steward of that information.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  I also think it is now increasingly clear that people are asking wildly intimate questions to ChatGPT.

• 36:11David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. Maybe more so.

• 36:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, even more like incredible. I mean, it's trying to get Kevin Reese to break up with his wife, man. And he's, he's talking about the front page of the New York Times.

• 36:21Speaker 06

  People weren't just uploading their entire medical history into Google in the little search box. Like, that wasn't happening before.

• 36:26Nilay Patel?

  Can you make this a podcast?

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  Like there's, it's obvious that something else is happening. But right, but that's, that would be something that really changes the dynamic of the web.

• 36:37David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 36:38Nilay Patel?

  Firefox basically said we'd be doomed if Google didn't pay us the money, which our friend Casey Newton keeps pointing out like, that's your fault, bro.

• 36:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 36:47Nilay Patel?

  You built your entire business. Is your competitor to Chrome on the back of a Google search deal? Like, have you thought about, okay, but that Firefox.

• 36:56David Pierce?

  Mozilla has been through like several CEOs and a decade knowing this is the problem and utterly failing to figure out what to do about it.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, we're gonna do NFTs.

• 37:06David Pierce?

  It's hard to have that much sympathy at some point. Yeah.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's tough. I'm, I'm always rooting for them, you know, like they're the open source champions.

• 37:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:13Nilay Patel?

  But, you know, they took the, the side quest into NFTs and it was like, oh, you, we are totally out of ideas.

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  And then, right, then there's the Attac stuff. So I just, like, I look at this and I'm like, I would re-rank them, David. I would say, Google, absolutely 36 months from now, its revenue looks different. It's gonna have to build other businesses.

• 37:36David Pierce?

  Maybe it's gonna go up because it doesn't have to give Apple $20 billion.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  Maybe there's that, but maybe, but like right now, and you have written about this many, many times. Every business at Google looks tiny next to search, so they don't invest in them. Right? You're like, what? We'll move the needle at Google. And you're like, a business as big as search. And everyone's like, well, we don't have any of those ideas.

• 37:59David Pierce?

  And then eventually, if you get big enough, you build a business that by accident runs into search and then you die.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 38:05David Pierce?

  Because search will kill you.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  And the only things that have survived are things that like help search in like meaningful ways. Android survives because it is a surface for search and that's why they did it.

• 38:15David Pierce?

  You do.

• 38:15Nilay Patel?

  They did not want to concede that user base to Microsoft at that time.

• 38:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, but it means that like, how many times have we talked about the Pixel? And are they gonna truly invest in the Pixel? And like, the Pixel is there to keep Samsung honest and that is about it.

• 38:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's not there to be a big winner of a product because they don't care as long as people are searching Google on Samsung phones.

• 38:33David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  Well, maybe if the search business starts to wither, like those priorities shift. And Google has to invest in its other businesses and grow it maybe more diversified. This is what happened to Microsoft, by the way. Windows came under significant pressure. Satya Nadella was like, all right, we're just going to do Azure until I figure something else out. And then he started rebuilding each of those businesses in turn. And he pulled it off. He's very, he was very good at what he did. He pulled it off. Microsoft vastly more boring now than it was before. But like, he pulled it off. I, I think Google is going to undergo that kind of transformation. I think Apple looks different because the sense that something is going to come after the iPhone will continue to panic that company.

• 39:13David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 39:14Nilay Patel?

  Right now, they're saying it out loud. Something is going to come after the iPhone. And they think the user interface will probably be voice and AI. Well, that means we're just, we're in for it. Right? That is, that is a company in a defensive posture, not an offensive posture.

• 39:29David Pierce?

  Well, and a company that is, for whatever reason, completely unable to compete in a meaningful way on those things. Like if you're, if you're sitting around being like, okay, if, if we agree that AI is the thing, who's going to win? Apple's not in the first five companies you would name. It's the biggest company on earth and it wouldn't, you wouldn't bet on Apple as a, as a powerhouse to solve AI. As AI gets really good, which is where I think Google has a real shot, right? And this is another thing that keeps coming up in the remedies cases. Google is out there trying to do again in AI what it already did in search. Based on the premise that Google has the resources to be a winner in AI. And I think that's true. I don't think it'll be the only winner.

• 40:11David Pierce?

  Uh, I think there are going to be lots of winners as we saw Sam Altman at OpenAI acknowledge this week. They went, they like bailed on the whole for-profit idea and are just back to being like, never mind. We thought we were going to win so spectacularly, but now we're not. And just kidding.

• 40:26David Pierce?

  But you look at all of that and it's like, okay, Google has a real shot at this, but Apple is going to have to go undergo like a complete culture and organizational shift in order to be the kind of AI company that it is going to need to be if AI is going to win.

• 40:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I feel like I'm obligated by law right now to tell everyone. That the T in ChatGPT stands for Transformer, which is invented at Google. If you don't mention this every so often, a Google PR person like leaps out of a bush and brandishes that fact at you. Right, they invented a bunch of the core technology and they know how to deploy it. Sundar has said many times, like, they know how to make it cheaper and more energy efficient. He's like, that's what we're good at. So like, you can, you can believe that Google will just do its core competency. They've also, to their credit, done the hard restructure.

• 41:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, they, they got rid of Google Brain, they exited some executives, they put Demis in charge of everything. Okay, you can, you can see that they've undergone some changes to make the move. But now, the, the big thing is under the pressure. And I don't know. Apple hasn't undergone any changes, right? They're like, this guy's gone, but here's another executive who's been here for 40 years, you're in charge now.

• 41:37David Pierce?

  And for a company like Eddie Q gets on stage and, or gets on stage. Eddie Q gets on the stand and is talking about like-

• 41:44Nilay Patel?

  It really is a few good men, like he just starts vamping, you know, like Jack Nicholson, like just improv-ing the lines. And poor Tom Cruise is just sitting there smiling, be like, I don't know what's going on.

• 41:54David Pierce?

  Eddie, Eddie Q would really like that comparison. But Eddie Q gets on the stand and talks about Apple's thing being cannibalizing its projects before they're dead, right? Like, the iPhone exists because they cannibalized the iPhone, or the iPod, and everybody told them they were nuts to do so, but then they got the iPhone. Apple's not doing that now. Like, there is none of that left in what we see from Apple anymore. And it, that posture just does not exist. It is kicking and screaming at every one of these changes.

• 42:21Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I just searched it on Google. I use Google for what it's intended for. And it is in fact true that Jack Nicholson improvised the line, "You can't handle the truth, and if you could have been..."

• 42:29David Pierce?

  That's cool.

• 42:30Nilay Patel?

  And, and Tom Cruise just had to, you just had to be like, "Okay."

• 42:35David Pierce?

  Nice.

• 42:36Nilay Patel?

  Let's keep this baby going. And I'm, Eddie, I don't know if you're listening. If you end up on the stand again, in this case, I encourage you to scream at the United States Department of Justice, "You can't handle the truth."

• 42:49David Pierce?

  Absolutely, yes.

• 42:50Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. Let's all breathe. You, you write us, tell us what you think is gonna happen. 36 months from now, do these companies look the same or different? I'm, I'm, you know, you know what I think, but I'm curious what you all think.

• 43:02David Pierce?

  May 2028, predict what the world's gonna look like. Good luck, everybody.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna come back when we're gonna spend a little more time in a courtroom with Meta. We'll be right back.

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• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Look, I wanna leave the policy talk and the legal talk by always doing a palate cleanser with gadgets. And we're gonna do that. I promise we're gonna do that. But we can't leave court just yet. Because Richard, Adam Misery, he was on fire today. Just chopping it up in our nation's capital. What happened in this case?

• 44:53Speaker 06

  He had a lot to say when he came on the stand today. We've heard a lot about Instagram. We've heard about Reels. We've heard about Threads. I mean, I don't know. I don't know if he's explained why they haven't launched an iPad app yet, but I'm sure he'll get to it at some point. We're still recording this as he's talking.

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  He said they're going to a couple of weeks ago. He said Instagram's gonna not have that.

• 45:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't believe it until he says it under oath.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  Probably because he knew this testimony was coming and how he would be today. That is what it was. Because I've been wondering, why now? Why is that happening? It's this. Because he talked about everything. He talked about Facebook deciding to buy Instagram in 2012, which he called one of the best acquisitions of all time. He said that Threads was originally supposed to live within the Instagram app, which- Is kind of weird to think about, but the way that they're linked, I can certainly see how they would have had that idea. Um, and also when you look at, for example, how YouTube has done the posts in YouTube that these apps don't necessarily think about bringing things out. But, but then they kind of realized that if you're going to take on Twitter, you need to have a dedicated app. So, so that makes a lot of sense, I think, also. Um, he, he said that one of the biggest mistakes he made was the first version of reels.

• 45:57Speaker 06

  That, that to me was just. I'm not sure if the current version of reels is not still one of the biggest mistakes. But I did think it was interesting. All the subsequent ones also.

• 46:07Nilay Patel?

  Well, the first version of reels was built on stories, right? And so he was like, you're going to open a story and you're going to swipe through stories the way that you're swiping through reels now. And he's like, no, that's not what people want to do. They just want TikTok. So they copy TikTok.

• 46:19Speaker 06

  Copy Snapchat, copy TikTok, move on. And that is the meta way, as, as we've seen. They said that they, Instagram has spent up to $700 million a year to lure creators. So they're bringing in a lot of money. They're spending a lot of money on Instagram. Um, ju- just so, so many different things. I, I was surprised that he said so much, but also the way that Messerius has been lately. Uh, as, as open as he's been, as frequently posting, is constantly talking to the people about algorithms and Instagram and what they think. I'm not really that surprised to see that, that he just has so much to say now.

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  You know, I've briefly talked to Adam about his posts and like what he does. And he, he, he makes two points in general. He, I think he's even said this publicly. Um, he's like, one, my audience for this is so small. Like, I just want creators that like, they have a lot of questions they should hear from me. And then his point is, I want to use the tools. Right? Like he, he's like, I want to feel what it's like on that side of the screen, not just as a consumer Instagram. So I, I always think it's like, people over read while he's doing it. Like 90% of Messerius Instagram posts are like, no, we're not listening to you. Very basic stuff, like the algorithm is not punishing you if you use the letter Q in your caption, like. It's just him debunking conspiracy theories and then almost all of them boil down to, and you should post more like the most basic stuff.

• 47:37Nilay Patel?

  But I, the part where he's like, I want to use the tools. I think is really interesting. But he doesn't get off. You can't knock, he's as good as it gets, right? You can't knock him off his game. And it felt to me, I mean, this is the case where the government is trying to prove that Meta bought Instagram to foreclose a competitor. And Adam's point was to push Meta's argument that Instagram would have never been successful without Meta.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  Right? That all by itself, it would have never developed the way it was, and Meta really turbocharged it. I, I think he made some of those points. And then I think, you know, as all these go, like, I think he oversold the idea that they're under existential threat from small competitors all the time. David, what did you think?

• 48:19David Pierce?

  I, I think that's right. He went way out of his way to talk about how big a competitor TikTok is, which is, we, we've talked about this before, but this has become Meta's sort of hobby horse in this trial is the very existence of TikTok suggests Meta cannot possibly be a monopoly, which in a certain way is actually a very compelling argument. But what it has done and did again to Miss Arie is just make a bunch of Instagram executives admit that they're not doing a very good job. Which I really enjoy. And so like, over and over and over again, they just keep apologizing for all of the ways that they're losing to TikTok. And I just find, I find that to be so very funny. And, and again, like the, all this money, like you're talking about, Richard, the $700 million to lure creators, like,

• 49:05David Pierce?

  how, how, where is that money going? Like, YouTube just pays ad revenue. There are creator funds and there are this stuff, but like Instagram is spending a huge amount of money in these sort of unknowable ways, trying to get creators off of those other platforms and onto Instagram. I find that really fascinating, but.

• 49:27David Pierce?

  Even just listening to Mr. Terry talk about it, like I find myself wondering a lot if Instagram knows what Instagram is. And this kind of goes back to your point about wanting to use the tools. Like Adam Mr. Terry also made a video, I think today about, oh no, sorry, this is months ago now, but it came resurfaced today. About how he wanted Instagram to not be a lean back experience. And it's like, this thing is supposed to be interactive and social and like a place you hang out. And that was like, one of their big things with threads was the reason they pulled it out into its own app was because they wanted replies and posts to be on the same level with each other.

• 50:07David Pierce?

  And so like, they have this idea that it's a social network and like, I don't know anyone who experiences Instagram that way.

• 50:14Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's why they're spending the money on creators.

• 50:16David Pierce?

  Right.

• 50:16Nilay Patel?

  Instagram sees creators as a good source of content after many rank and file users began posting fewer of their own updates. That's why they spend the money. That's from the, that's from the testimony today.

• 50:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. And just, just come out and be like, hey, we're a, we're a streaming service. Like it's fine. And I just, I don't know. We, we've gotten to this point now where I think Meta as a company, it continues to be obsessed with this idea that like, we can get back to friends sharing with friends. And it hasn't been that in a very, very, very long time.

• 50:45Nilay Patel?

  I, I think that's what they say. I think internally they all know this is why they spend $700 million a year on gururing creators from TikTok. Like this is why they're fine with spaghetti Jesus in the feeds. It just doesn't matter to them. Right. And I, I think, you know, Mark posting on Facebook or Adam posting on Instagram, like they're using the tools. I actually really appreciate they use the tools. I think not enough executives use the tools. Except for Tim Cook claiming, I believe to GQ, that he uses every single Apple product every day, which I don't, there are not enough minutes in the day.

• 51:17David Pierce?

  But do you remember all those, all the times during like the, the Twitter years where people would keep track of how many tweets the various like executives and board members had? I think, I think like, I think you're right. I think it's, it's useful and correct to see executives be part of this.

• 51:32Nilay Patel?

  I think Mark and Adam are warped because they have, it doesn't matter. Right. There's like millions of people will just respond to everything they do. If Adam really wanted to experience Instagram, he would start a meme page from scratch, post this as a college student and try to go viral every day. Because that is actually the experience that creators on Instagram are having. Right? This like desperate need for algorithmic validation. Right. If Adam really wanted to experience Instagram, he would download a Netflix video downloader, speed everything up 15%, add that weird vertical line and begin posting copies, clips of A Few Good Men to Instagram every day.

• 52:08David Pierce?

  You just broke Richard a little.

• 52:10Nilay Patel?

  Do you see what I'm saying? That's the real experience of Instagram, right? Freebooting memes from X and being like, here's the difference between men and women.

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  That's the experience of Instagram and that's what many, many creators experience. Like being an Instagram creator is choosing between the dark path of just freebooting memes or doing those AI baby podcasts where like Theo Von's a baby that's all over the place right and it's out of control. Like every other clip in my feed and it's just like force fed to me.

• 52:42David Pierce?

  I am like, I am, I am sort of constitutionally against AI generated content in my feed and baby podcasts are very much for me.

• 52:50Nilay Patel?

  It's very funny. Please don't do it to us or do it to us and don't share with anyone but us. You see what I'm saying? That's like one path, which is the dark, dark side. There's the slightly less dark path of like be a Gary Vaynerchuk hustle bro where he just screams at you about your content not being good enough and the algorithm is just people and just make great shit. And like, that's the path I've chosen personally. And then there's like everybody else being like, I just want more views. And it's like, well, you're not, you're not hustling hard enough. And none of that is, I made a nice video update about changes to the algorithm. We got a million views just because I'm Adam Mosseri.

• 53:26David Pierce?

  Right.

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  You're, you're still having a synthetic experience on their own platforms. And I, I look at all this and it's like, the, the thesis of this case is they saw a competitor and they bought it because they were afraid. Right. And you can argue at the markets and MeWe and all this stuff, but like, that's the real case is look at how bad these emails were. They saw a competitor and they wanted to crush it. And I, I don't know if they realize that what they're doing right now is making the case very strongly that if they could have bought TikTok and crushed it, they would have. Because they obviously saw this competitor and they weren't allowed to buy it. So they had to compete. And like, look at all this evidence of all this stuff they're doing to compete with TikTok

• 54:12Nilay Patel?

  that they didn't have to do because they bought Instagram. And like, wouldn't that have been better?

• 54:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 54:19Nilay Patel?

  And I, I don't know if that has been tied together correctly. I know the government will get there. But it, it's just like, we're kind of, you're kind of proving the point a little bit. Like, look at how hard we're competing with TikTok. It's like, yeah. Look at how hard Meta did not have to compete. Look at how hard Facebook did not have to compete with Instagram. Look at how hard Facebook didn't have to compete with WhatsApp. That's the, that's the case.

• 54:44David Pierce?

  Yeah. And the messaging stuff, I think, has been in some ways even more damning. Like, you talk about just what's in their emails. Facebook was petrified of what was happening as people were moving to messaging and understood that that was the next place people were going to go to actually talk to friends and family. And it has just come up over and over. Like, they just keep showing emails where one Facebook executive or another is like, if we don't buy a messaging service, everyone will die because all of our, everyone's friends are leaving. And then they're like, ah, we didn't really think WhatsApp was going to make any money. And it's like, well, is that, are those not the same thing?

• 55:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:21David Pierce?

  It's a weird thing. And it does, it really does feel like everyone is actually kind of saying the same thing with really different words. And it's, to your point, not super clear who is going to be the one to try to like, make something cogent out of all of this.

• 55:35Nilay Patel?

  So there's another turn of Misery's testimony today where he talked about trying to integrate the teams. And it eventually got to the point where he was like, the Instagram team was too spiky and too weird. And I had to reel them in and I didn't do that at first. And then he, he just dunked on me a little bit, which is super great. The, the Federal Trade Commission in court, their lawyers played Misery his own interview on Decoder. They played him a clip from Decoder and they prefaced it by saying, do you remember this conversation with Neil? And Adam said, I vaguely remember speaking to Neil.

• 56:10David Pierce?

  Congrats.

• 56:10Nilay Patel?

  Super great.

• 56:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  I love you too, Adam. I vaguely remember our conversations as well. But the clip is really interesting. They played him, should we run the clip? We don't have it, but let's, I'll read it to you and we can actually run the clip.

• 56:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, we can play the clip.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  So the clip is really interesting because Decoder is an org chart show, right? We're asking really, how do you structure the company? And so I asked him how Instagram was structured and how he'd integrated more into Facebook over time. And this is, if you will recall, 2021 is this conversation. It is, Facebook is trying to tie everything more tightly together because it sees this antitrust stuff coming. And if you recall, 2021, this is when Donald Trump had been banned after, from all the platforms, after January 6th, after all the elections, like, just bad, just bad stuff all the way around.

• 56:58David Pierce?

  Didn't this interview run with like a super spicy headline?

• 57:01Nilay Patel?

  The headline of the interview on our site was Adam Mosseri says banning Donald Trump was the right thing to do. And the Donald Trump FTC just played a clip of that interview to Adam Mosseri in the courthouse. But they used, I think the Apple Podcast headline is like much softer. So they showed that screenshot instead of the one on our site, which is very funny. So he said, "I told everyone, I took over Instagram, I told everyone I was going to be a sponge, I wouldn't push for any change, I would try to understand Instagram, the product, the employee base, the values. The one place where I almost immediately broke my promise was safety and integrity. I was very interested in details because I'd run blah, blah, blah, I'm just skipping ahead because we're going to run the audio." And he said, "I found, for the most part, Instagram was running around stuff and our

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  team was tiny, and I made them integrate with the bigger Meta team so it could grow." And this is the best argument that exists. I'm actually really curious why the government played this to Adam, right? Because the best argument is, trust and safety is really hard, the scale is really hard, doing it on photography and video is even harder, right? Because you just need more compute to scan all that content, and you need unified rules, and you need to manage contractors around the world in multiple languages, all this stuff. That is the best argument they have, that Instagram was able to scale because Meta had that particular infrastructure.

• 58:19Nilay Patel?

  And maybe you could argue that they had ad sales infrastructure also, but it was that particular infrastructure. I thought it was really interesting. And then he gets to, the Instagram team was chafing against Meta, right? And he thinks a bunch of stuff was overblown. And eventually, of course, Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger leave Meta. They were on the stand last week. They're very spiky. They said they could have made it on their own. But I just think it's really interesting that so much of the story is here are the capabilities that Meta actually provided Instagram versus having to compete with Instagram.

• 58:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, and over the years, Meta has made the case for itself as a trust and safety organization, like many, many times. It is one of the things that that company is invested in at a level beyond almost anybody else, which is A, wild, given all the stuff that still happens on its platforms. But yeah, it is kind of weird to basically play that because I mean, both of those things, I suppose, can be true at the same time where the Instagram team can be chafing against it, but also really needed the trust and safety help. But I don't know that, like, at best, that feels like a wash of an argument to me from.

• 59:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I think that the two things that can be true at the same time are that even if in a world where Instagram had remained independent, that it still could have been weird and bad in the ways that it is weird and bad now, and just a cluster of things that don't really work together, even if Meta had never purchased it. We've seen what's happened with Twitter, like prior to Elon Musk. And also, the reason why Meta purchased it was to take out a competitor.

• 59:48David Pierce?

  Fair, yeah.

• 59:49Nilay Patel?

  And also, if you are the sort of person who believes all these companies censor too much, and you're worried about social, big platform, free speech abuse, sure, you can worry about that. The solution is you have more big companies moderating in different ways and competing to have the best moderation policies, not one ever bigger company imposing the same rules and the same processes and the same Mark Zuckerberg whims. Meta's not doing content moderation anymore. We're doing community ads. Like, that is the problem, right, is the scale. I don't know that the Trump administration, if they were smart, would be making this argument because it's such a big argument they make all the time. But what they actually want is control over monopoly speech. So I don't think they're gonna make this argument.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  But it's really like, that's a thing that you would want. You would want multiple platform companies operating independently. So that if you hated the moderation on Facebook, you would leave and go to an independent Instagram and experience a different moderation system. And that just has never played out. We've never really see that play out.

• 1:00:46David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  Or you would have an Instagram that was better at protecting teens. Right? Because you would, they would feel pressure and people would leave their platform to go to some other platform. And we certainly have not seen that play out.

• 1:00:58David Pierce?

  No.

• 1:00:58Nilay Patel?

  All right. So same question as before. Thirty six months from now, what does Meta look like? Is it recognizable? Is it very different?

• 1:01:05David Pierce?

  I think Meta gets out of this one.

• 1:01:07Nilay Patel?

  Yeah?

• 1:01:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:08Nilay Patel?

  Because Mark Zuckerberg is just floating around the Oval Office?

• 1:01:11David Pierce?

  Kind of. Yeah. I think Mark Zuckerberg probably thinks he can convince Donald Trump to just throw out this case in one way or another. And I think the, like, again, the technicalities of this continue to be so complicated. And it's the market definitions are weird and like friends and family sharing services is a strange thing. And so I feel like it might sort of lose this case in the court of public opinion and win it on technicalities.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, Richard?

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  They get out of this, but they do some weird thing where Facebook becomes a spin code that they spin off into its own thing. And Mark just takes Instagram and Meta and all the VR stuff and turns it into Horizon and goes and lives in the metaverse.

• 1:01:55David Pierce?

  Okay, that's an unbelievably good idea. Mark just fully, he just zags on him. Spin off Facebook. He's like, the company's not even called that anymore. This is for old people. I'm gonna sell Facebook to the AARP. And I'm gonna go do Instagram and WhatsApp in the metaverse. Unbelievable idea. I have no notes.

• 1:02:16Nilay Patel?

  I, my answer here all depends on what happens with TikTok. I think if TikTok survives, Meta does not look recognizable in three years. I, I actually think there's a better chance they lose this case than anyone thinks.

• 1:02:30David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:02:30Nilay Patel?

  Cause that market definition side, they pinned a lot on that. The judge gets to pick. The judge is allowed to just invent their own market. They're like, the market for scrolly videos, like done and done. I'm calling it, right? Um, so we'll see what happens there. But if there's no TikTok, right? If TikTok actually gets banned, I think Meta just collects all those users and it can withstand whatever changes comes its way. If TikTok does not get banned, I think the competitive threat is still so high and the relevance of these, these things are fading. Like TikTok is just vastly more culturally relevant than Instagram is today.

• 1:03:04David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:03:05Nilay Patel?

  It's vastly more culturally relevant than Facebook is today. Aside from, uh, your child's little league softball schedule is like posted in an unscannable PDF in a Facebook group. Like, it's just fine. Um, but like the cultural relevance of TikTok is so high and Meta doesn't have moves. I, I don't think they can figure it out. And so you get the pressure, the court case and whatever remedies in a court case, all the distraction of compliance, blah, blah, blah. And then a continued ascendance of TikTok, 36 months from now, these companies look totally different. I don't know. It, that's, that's my conditional.

• 1:03:37David Pierce?

  It is certainly true that, uh, there doesn't seem to be any way in the next 36 months for Meta to buy its way out of its problems, which is a thing that's done.

• 1:03:45Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they've been trying.

• 1:03:46David Pierce?

  That's, yeah.

• 1:03:48Nilay Patel?

  How many meme coins has, has Zuck bought? Zuck is like, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna punch Ukraine. Like, I'm gonna do some MMA in the Middle East. Like, I, he's trying.

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  Yeah, Dana White's running it now.

• 1:04:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. All right. That's the baby podcast right there. If you want the clip, that's the one. Um, all right. Let's, let's breathe for one second and then actually palate cleanses with some gadget news. And it's meta gadget news, but it's still gadget news.

• 1:04:17David Pierce?

  It's Neelai specific meta gadget. It is, it is Neelai's number one dream gadget.

• 1:04:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay. So here, the, the news is there's a rumor that Meta will have new AI glasses and they will have a quote, super sensing mode with facial recognition. I have been saying for years now that the killer app for glasses, for smart glasses is names and faces. I'm horrible at names and faces. If I could just look at people and be told their name, I would probably be the most powerful politician in America. I'm just, I'm, you know?

• 1:04:50David Pierce?

  You think that's what that's the only thing stopping you?

• 1:04:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, cuz I walk up to people, I'm like, who are you? And that you can't get votes that way. Not normal. Like Bill Clinton famously would like go to a rope line in Vermont like five years after he'd last been there. And he'd remember every single person and their children. And everyone's like, well, we love that Billy Clinton. And then, you know, like now he's being president. I show up at a rope line in Vermont, I'm like, I know all of you look exactly the same to me, like total face blindness. If I could just do names and faces.

• 1:05:17David Pierce?

  Is it like a white people thing?

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  That's another baby podcast moment right there. You're the Theo Von.

• 1:05:24David Pierce?

  I'm trying not to say it, dude.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  No, it's like literally everyone, I just can't do it. If I could do it. The problem is to do it, you need to build a worldwide facial recognition database, which is deeply problematic. Like that is the Panopticon surveillance state. And as much as I want this product, I'm like, I think that trade off is pretty bad. Facebook has long been able to build this product. Cuz they have everybody's names and faces.

• 1:05:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Nilay Patel?

  There have been versions of this product hacked together using Meta AI glasses, live streaming to Instagram Live, captured in a web browser and sent to Clearview. We've run the demos, we've talked about it.

• 1:06:03David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  Like the proof of concept has been there. And so I think Meta knows like, oh, this is the killer app. Like we should show people the killer app. Like all bets are off right now with privacy law in the United States. All bets are off with AI regulation in the United States. We're just doing it. And I think people are going to be so creeped out so fast that the backlash will be intense.

• 1:06:20David Pierce?

  Oh, I completely agree. I mean, I think it's it's interesting to see this start to percolate up next to real time translation as like everyone's holy grail feature for this stuff, right? Cuz it's that's the thing everyone is working on. Anyone who has ever done any AI, anything would love to tell you how it's going to help facilitate real time translation so all the people in the world can talk to each other. And this is like, it's it's getting right up there with it. And I think I would define it slightly broader than the way you're thinking about it, which is just like sort of latent world awareness, right? Cuz like, think about the the Project Astra demo we saw from Google last year, where you can like ask it where you left your keys. Like it's it's relatively similar technology that makes my glasses know you're Neelai

• 1:07:04David Pierce?

  and my glasses know that my keys are over there, right? So I think that is the thing now that everybody understands is, or at least believes is like a killer app for all of this stuff. And it's like, where is the? You know, where are the groceries in the car? And it'll like remind you that you left them in the car because it's all you put them in the car. And all that kind of stuff is is starting to bubble up from all of these different companies. But it is, it's the same thing like, oh, I have to give you 100% constant access to everything happening around me all the time. And in exchange, you'll tell me where I left my keys and what Nilay's name is.

• 1:07:40Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna label stuff.

• 1:07:41David Pierce?

  And I don't think most people want to make that trade. I just don't.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  Look, Tim Cook is heavily invested in air glasses. There's a rumor this week that Apple is is building chips for its own AR glasses now. That stuff all seems still pretty pipe dream to me, right? Like Meta's Orion glasses are too expensive to build. Because the the the the blocker is the optics.

• 1:08:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  Right? You gotta make a lens that can accept images. Meta insists on calling them holograms. If you see a meta executive refer to their glasses as doing projecting holograms, like, I literally want you to stop them in their tracks and be like, use words correctly. They're not holograms, they're just image overlays. They're just projecting onto wave guides on glasses like everyone else is doing. Holograms are, you know, three dimensional, the existence. We were Vergecast people, you understand what I'm saying? Use the words right. I mean it. Okay. But like, the optics are the problem. Meta invested in one set of optical technologies that thought would scale. They didn't, they didn't get cheaper. Apple hasn't solved this problem. That's why they built the Vision Pro the way they did. There's a lot of steps between here and now. And then you look at what the promise is.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  And again, I would buy names and faces glasses in one RP. Given even with all their problems, I would buy them tomorrow. I think it'd be great for conferences where everyone opted in. Like, there's a lot of places you could make it work, right?

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  But at the end of the day, the promise is we're gonna label stuff. You're gonna look at a painting and we're gonna be like, here's the name of the painting. And it's like, you gotta do a little bit better than that, right? You gotta make a better promise than everything will be labeled.

• 1:09:15Speaker 06

  I think something interesting to happen here when you talk about that backlash and what might happen that they're not anticipating. Remember when Microsoft talked about bringing out their recall for for Windows? Where it would remember every single thing that has been on your screen? And then people said, wait, every single thing that has been on my screen?

• 1:09:32Nilay Patel?

  David wrote a piece where he was like, I love this. He's like screenshots are the future of AI. That was like your headline.

• 1:09:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, for precisely the opposite reason of recall. Like it's, it's because the thing a screenshot lets me do is say, I care about this. Save this for me and then make something out of it. Like the, I, we've talked about this. V song was on the show just recently talking about the, these AI recording wearables. And there is, there's this thing you realize where you're like, oh my God, I do so much stuff that I don't want to have any record of. And everybody goes to like porn and whatever, but like, I don't, it's weird that it has a, it has an audio record of every Tik Tok I watched today. Like, that's weird.

• 1:10:12Speaker 06

  Like, like it shouldn't have a recording of what someone was saying when I walked past them in the store and like, it's pulling that up when I search because I don't even remember that. I didn't even hear it at the time.

• 1:10:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's not my information to have, and yet I have it.

• 1:10:25Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I, I think we should summarize this podcast immediately.

• 1:10:29Nilay Patel?

  We'll see, like, I'm excited if Meta, Meta of all companies announces a facial, a set of facial recognition glasses, like it's, they don't have a great privacy rep to begin with, right? It is the killer app for these glasses. I'm being a little snarky about labels, like that is the promise. Labeling people is the killer app for these glasses, right? Again, if you're at a conference, just imagine a conference and, and you know, there's big signs that say in this, in this convention hall, everyone's going to be wearing these glasses. Like we, we were already name bags before we're enabling the glasses in this one place. Okay. Still a little gray area. You should be able to opt out, but like, let's say that exists, right?

• 1:11:11Nilay Patel?

  Everyone has agreed to participate in this social experiment and you're walking around and you see the person that you saw at the conference last year and you had a conversation and you totally forgot their name and you gave them their card and it's like got lost the backpack and that's gone. And what you get is here's this person, here's their name, here's like the company they work at, like the name tag, but you don't have to like look down at the name tag. That is actually a trip that it would ease social interaction in that environment in a very specific way that would be worth wearing glasses.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  In almost every case, like having to charge the glasses and put them on your face is my theory of wearable bullshit. Like, that's a lot of care for not a lot of value.

• 1:11:50David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  I don't think Meta can convincingly make the case. But I also think they know that the only thing people are wearing the Ray-Bans for is to have a very convenient camera. And no one is using any of the AI features of the Meta glasses. And they have to come up with something else.

• 1:12:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I, I agree. But I'm not, I'm just not convinced this is that thing.

• 1:12:13Nilay Patel?

  We'll see.

• 1:12:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:15Nilay Patel?

  More gadget news, just to run through it quickly. There's a rumor that Apple's going to do the iPhone Air with a bigger screen in 2027. There's also a rumor that Apple's going to do a foldable next year and they're going to move the iPhone release date around. What do you think?

• 1:12:29David Pierce?

  The idea is that there are now going to be, I believe the, I believe it would be six different iPhones. And that that's too many to launch at one event. So there are going to be two different iPhone launch events going forward because they're going to do, I think it would be Pro, Air and Foldable at one. And then Base Plus SE at another. And I would argue that Apple has learned precisely the wrong lesson here. And the correct answer is don't have six phones. But this is where we are. So that's apparently like the, the iPhone 18 cycle.

• 1:13:09David Pierce?

  Appears it is going to be a huge one.

• 1:13:12Nilay Patel?

  The iPhone, this iPhone 16 cycle is what you use for Apple Intelligence.

• 1:13:15David Pierce?

  Well, right. I was just going to say, this is all based on like some perennially sketchy supply chain stuff and we never really know and it's all very messy, but I think there has been some smoke about a foldable iPhone coming in around, in and around 2027. That leads me to believe that's probably still relatively right. But I just, I don't know. I'm having so much hard, I'm having such a hard time caring about a slim iPhone. And it appears that is going to be the thing this year. And I, I don't care. I just don't care.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  I think if they make a foldable iPhone, it folds out to like iPad mini size. And then the iPad gets like windowing, which they've rumored. It's gonna get real weird. It's gonna get real weird.

• 1:14:02David Pierce?

  And then they will still refuse to make a touchscreen MacBook. For reasons that continue to not make any sense.

• 1:14:07Speaker 06

  Forever. Or multi-user on the iPad.

• 1:14:09David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  It's the only thing anybody actually wants. Richard, there's a bunch of new Surface stuff. What's going on here?

• 1:14:15Speaker 06

  This is what Tom Warren had all of the information this week about Microsoft launching some, first of all, they have a smaller Surface Pro laptop. So they've got a 12 inch, finally. We'd heard some rumors about this. It starts at $799. It has ARM inside, so it doesn't have a fan. I think you have the iPad competitor that this smaller, that the Surface Pro was kind of always supposed to be. Now the Windows on ARM is pretty good with the Qualcomm chips. And with all the things that Windows has done to be able to run more and more programs. It's the time. The Surface Pro that people were looking for, that it was kind of supposed to always be. This is a lot more, the price is a lot righter. It's a good size. It seems like his first impressions of it.

• 1:15:01Speaker 06

  I think he said that the 12 inch has the eight core chips, 16 gigs RAM, 256 gigs of storage for $799.

• 1:15:08Nilay Patel?

  This fully looks like my new airplane computer.

• 1:15:10Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  It's like, perfect, right?

• 1:15:12Speaker 06

  It seems like that is the one that you could just take with you and you'll have your computer in the, kind of the same, the same size and shape of an iPad. But you'll be able to have multiple accounts and computer stuff.

• 1:15:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, this does seem like, at least in theory, Microsoft has been sort of dancing around the right set of specs for a long time. Like it was, it was too small and then, and then it was too big. And then there was the Surface Go, which was, and then some of it was too slow and some of it. Like it always had a couple of things right and a couple of things wrong. And at least on paper, I think you're right, that this is the one that is like, okay, you, you made the list correctly this time. It's still, it's a thousand bucks by the time you buy the keyboard, which everybody's gonna do, so whatever. But still, like as a, as a, what is the sort of easy computer to recommend to most people? This feels plausible to me in a way that I'm very excited about.

• 1:16:02Speaker 06

  And the keyboard case doesn't have Alcantara on it anymore?

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  Oh, good. So we'll get all matted and nasty.

• 1:16:07Speaker 06

  Yeah. They don't have that. They also launched the Surface Laptop 13-inch with an ARM processor in it, so.

• 1:16:15Nilay Patel?

  And that one oddly covered in Berber carpet.

• 1:16:20Nilay Patel?

  That'd be amazing. Microsoft made like a full 70s basement laptop. No, that one's just made of, it's made of normal materials.

• 1:16:27David Pierce?

  This one has a fan though, which I think is weird. That's the only thing about the Surface Laptop, which is a machine I have loved for many years. They went ahead and gave this thing a fan, which strikes me as maybe a good idea, but not a great sign of confidence in the whole Qualcomm situation at the moment.

• 1:16:44Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:16:45Nilay Patel?

  I, you know, the goal for these devices is to set the tone for the Windows ecosystem. I think they do that job just fine.

• 1:16:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're great looking.

• 1:16:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they look good. Those videos are on YouTube. Go watch them. They're great. Let us know what you think.

• 1:16:58Speaker 06

  Also, the testing with the smoke blowing around inside of the Surface Laptop to show how the air flows. That's really cool. You can see that on the social media and in the article.

• 1:17:07David Pierce?

  Dude, every time I watch one of these like stress testing gadgets videos, I'm always like, yeah, I've seen like a hundred of these before. And then 11 minutes later, I'm like riveted just watching a thing press the button over and over and over again. I will watch an infinite number of something beating up a gadget video, it turns out.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  Like four, five years into the verge, I actually made a rule that we were never going to look at phone prototypes again. Like this is like fundamentally stopped. We were like, I was like, great. Like, once again, you've brought me to the quietest room in Northern California to look at your headphones. Like, we're just not doing this anymore. And then it's like, kinda, can I go to the quiet room again?

• 1:17:42David Pierce?

  You just have to acknowledge it for what it is. Like, this is, I'm here once again.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  In the quietest room in California.

• 1:17:48David Pierce?

  To watch you punch a gadget in the face over and over again. I'm like, I'm ready for it.

• 1:17:52Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Watch the video. It's great. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll be right back with Lightning.

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• 1:19:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, back. The lightning round. Unsponsored for extra flavor. See, the reason I keep saying that. A joke, which is, I agree with many of our audience, is getting less funny over time. Although people do want the shirts. It's so every time you hear someone say who their sponsor is, you realize they have less flavor. Because we don't take the money. You can't pay us to say anything. You can show up. Suitcase is full of money. They have. Ford Fiesta is full of money. It's not a lot of money.

• 1:19:46David Pierce?

  Well, that was good because if there's one thing that resuscitates a joke, it's explaining it in great detail to the audience.

• 1:19:51Nilay Patel?

  It's a small, it's a small car.

• 1:19:55Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's the joke.

• 1:19:58Nilay Patel?

  Frunk's full of money. We won't take it. Everyone else takes money. If you want to support us, you can subscribe on the verge of calm. You can pay us money, but then you still can't tell us what to do. It's a great deal.

• 1:20:10David Pierce?

  But you get, you get a badge next to it when you yell at us about it.

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  That's true.

• 1:20:14David Pierce?

  And that's good.

• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. All right, David, it's time.

• 1:20:18David Pierce?

  Oh, we're so back. Last week, it was quiet. Too quiet. And so this week, according to the notes that I'm seeing, we are so, so, so very back on America's favorite podcast within a podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy. Neil, what do we have?

• 1:20:32Nilay Patel?

  Brendan Carr was a real dummy this week, like a shotgun blast of Brendan Carr this week. He was all over the place. He was at a Milken conference, Alex Heath is actually at this conference, but at this conference, he gave a bunch of interviews, a bunch of media outlets, not us, Brendan.

• 1:20:49David Pierce?

  Rude.

• 1:20:50Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, if you had real stones, you'd show up on our show. But he gave a bunch of, you know, interviews to your cable news outlets. And boy, did he say a lot of things. So I want to start with some classic Brendan, like classic Republican FCC chairman stuff. Because, you know, for all of his many, many faults, he is still a deregulatory telecom friendly FCC chairman. And so he just says the things now that you would expect people to say, but after all this time, you just know that they're industry plants and they're dumb. So Brendan said, during the Biden administration, the United States fell behind on opening the airwaves up to private sector and China now has an edge. If you recall.

• 1:21:34David Pierce?

  In American airwaves?

• 1:21:36Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 1:21:37David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:21:38Nilay Patel?

  But we, we might be losing the race to 5G again, you guys.

• 1:21:42David Pierce?

  Oh, no.

• 1:21:43Nilay Patel?

  And then, to put a gloss on it, a 2025 gloss, he said, AI is going to be the use case that will drive some of these telecom networks. That's why we have to get more spectrum out there. We have to make it easier to invest in these high speed networks. And it's like, bro, they're chatbots.

• 1:22:01David Pierce?

  Also, that, that quote is going to stick in my head for a long time as the moment AI officially lost all meaning as a thing that anyone agrees on.

• 1:22:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:11David Pierce?

  Like, what, what does that even mean? It's AI is going to drive some of these telecom? Does he just mean it uses bandwidth?

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  But again, they, it is currently expressed as chatbots. Like, we're, we're pumping vast amounts of UTF text around the internet. Like, what are you talking about? He's a dummy. But he wants to have more spectrum auctions and sell more spectrum to the big companies and provide more government subsidies to the biggest telecom companies in the country. Because we have to win a fake race.

• 1:22:46Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. If you, Brendan, if you can explain yourself, you can show up, but you tell like the race to 6G is coming. Where you sit today, think, just be ready. Take a beat, take a moment, pull your car over and get ready to shout down the people who say there is a race to 6G because of AI. Steal yourself for this battle because it's coming and it won't be robot surgery on a grape, which never happened. It's gonna be AI. If we don't beat AI, China will win the race to 6G.

• 1:23:18David Pierce?

  8K 6G AI is a thing you're gonna start to hear.

• 1:23:21Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be nuts. So that's just like, that's like your little amuse bouche of Brendan being a dummy, right? Just saying the same dumb things that FCC chairman who want to give more spectrum and handouts to telecom companies always say. Dumb, not illegally dumb, right? Not you're a traitor to America dumb.

• 1:23:39David Pierce?

  Which for Brendan is, you know, great job. Good job, Brendan.

• 1:23:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he made it, he made it, he whatever, you know? He, yeah. He stayed in his lane.

• 1:23:46David Pierce?

  Regular dumb.

• 1:23:47Nilay Patel?

  Then he started to get, well, I think traitorously dumb. He talked about the FCC's investigation into Disney's DEI practices. And he said, "The preliminary data from our investigation indicates they're doing intentional discrimination, potentially among race and gender. That's a really big deal. It's a good thing," because, you know, Disney is slightly caved here. They've gotten rid of some of their rules. You know, they're, they're trying to appease the Trump administration. He said, "It's a good thing they're heading in the right direction, but we want to make sure that it's in substance and not in name only. We have to like, take a look at the conduct that took place in the past. That is a potential problem under the FCC's own equal opportunity employment rules." Which, by the way, they got rid of. Brendan, he got rid of all the DEI rules.

• 1:24:31Nilay Patel?

  So he's basically saying, "I'm, I'm gonna continue to try to punish Disney for nothing." Right? Like. They Ariel was black one time and now Bob Iger has to go to jail and Brendan Carr is gonna be the one to do it.

• 1:24:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're doing intentional discrimination, potentially among race and gender is the whole problem that existed forever that we tried to solve with D E I like that was the problem.

• 1:24:56Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. So he's still right, he's still trying to punish companies for their speech and how they run their companies. He is very interested in punishing companies for their speech. This is the thing he cares about the most. And so pushed on this, he tried to claim, and this is the one that just really, really got me. He tried to claim that the FCC's investigation into CBS and the Kamala Harris interview on 60 Minutes and the Paramount merger with Skydance, Paramount owned CBS, was totally unrelated to Donald Trump's own $10 billion lawsuit against CBS for the Kamala Harris interview.

• 1:25:39Nilay Patel?

  He said, I haven't even read the president's complaint. We're just doing law enforcement. These aren't threats. That's just a penalty where I can take away their broadcast licenses, which by the way, no FCC has done for decades upon decades. And even the last time they did it required multiple, multiple court cases and they still didn't get to do it. He said, no, no, no, no, no. There are three separate things that are going on. President Trump has his lawsuit against CBS that's in state court. I haven't read that complaint. I don't know what all the complaints are. There's the transaction before us, Paramount and Skydance, and then there's a 60 Minutes complaint. Those last two have to do with the FCC. The first one doesn't. We're staying in our lane and we're just reviewing it. It's just the normal course of review where we take a normal interview with a politician

• 1:26:21Nilay Patel?

  during an election and we threaten to punish a company as hard as we can because they want to get a merger approved. And what we want from them is a settlement saying that they will not do quote unquote news distortion, which means they will tilt their coverage towards us. But that has nothing to do with Donald Trump, even though

• 1:26:38David Pierce?

  No, of course not.

• 1:26:39Nilay Patel?

  two weeks ago Brendan is proudly wearing the literal gold bust of Donald Trump's head as a pin on his chest. You have no credibility Brendan, like none at all, because you love to spat out on social media and be a MAGA warrior. And then when you're pressed on it, you pretend that you are a normal gray suit government bureaucrat, just doing the normal process of review and you can't have both. You can't, you can't be a totally corrupt, like. Censorious bureaucrat, and then on the other hand, be like, I'm just a lawyer doing my job. By the way, you know who agrees with me about this? It's not a bunch of weirdo progressive libs. It's the American Enterprise Institute, one of the most conservative think tanks in America.

• 1:27:21Nilay Patel?

  Published article this week called policing news policing DEI. The FCC's shifting priorities erode its credibility. It's an entire article about Brendan destroying the credibility of this agency by doing censorship. From a conservative think tank, here's just a quote. In short, the FCC's mission creep panders to the president eroding the commission's stability because it's hard to predict the regulatory direction which it will head next, other than a pro-Trump one. That's not me. It's not, you know, Uncle Woke over here.

• 1:27:55Nilay Patel?

  That's one of the most conservative think tanks in America agreeing with bipartisan groups of former FCC commissioners, agreeing with everybody who's ever looked at Stephen Levy wrote a piece in Wired about this a couple of weeks ago. Down the line, everyone looks at this and says, this man who is in charge of our nation's communications infrastructure, keeps issuing threats about content to broadcasters, to cable networks, to internet companies, has no power to regulate. And it's because he wants to censor speech. And these little claims, and he's just doing the normal review with a penalty that has essentially never been used in the course of a merger review to take away broadcast licenses for news distortion.

• 1:28:35Nilay Patel?

  You don't get to do that when you also wear the gold head of Donald Trump on your chest, where when you're also a MAGA warrior, when you're also on Twitter all day, every day, responding to reply guys saying you're going to punish companies for their speech. As always, Brendan, you're welcome to come on this show, which is much harder than the softball cable networks that you go on and try to answer some of these questions and see if you can respond with rigor and care to the accusations that your desire to censor speech rises to the level of not just First Amendment violation, but outright hostility or constitution. Anytime you want, this show, Decoder, you can just hang out with David in a coffee shop and I'll film it from around the corner with an iPhone.

• 1:29:13David Pierce?

  Sounds great.

• 1:29:14Nilay Patel?

  However, you want to do it. I don't think you can. I think you're a coward. That has been Brendan Carr's Dummy, America's favorite podcast.

• 1:29:21David Pierce?

  We're so back. Felt good. I didn't like taking a week. Last week, we were just like, yeah, Brendan, it's kind of still seems like he sucks.

• 1:29:29Nilay Patel?

  Don't worry, he'll talk again. He can't shut up. He keeps saying he's loving his job. So being America's chief censor. All right, we need a palate cleanser. David, what you got for me?

• 1:29:37David Pierce?

  Let's talk about Netflix just for a minute.

• 1:29:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:40David Pierce?

  Because Netflix had a kind of a sneakily interesting week product wise. First, big new update for the TV app for Netflix, which I find my like hobby horse of reporting is about streaming recommendations, like how to tell you what you want to watch. I think it's just the most fascinating thing in the world. And what Netflix did in part was that banner at the top of the Netflix app, it's now much bigger. And the one thing that that communicates is that Netflix believes more strongly than ever that it can just put something in front of you and you will probably click play. And so I think that's fascinating. This is much less like a discovery thing that we're moving rapidly away from the like infinite, you know,

• 1:30:23David Pierce?

  side scrolling tiles to just like a big ass thing that's like, watch this, you clown. And Netflix is betting that that's going to work. And I find that really fascinating. But thing number two, and Neel, I believe you are going to maybe rightfully, maybe wrongfully, take a victory lap on this one. Netflix is just doing TikTok now. Like, imagine Netflix did TikTok. That's what it's doing.

• 1:30:48Nilay Patel?

  So it's interesting because it's not TikTok. It's in the mobile app. They're going to do a vertical swipey feed of stuff you might want to watch. We haven't seen it, right? There's this quote from Eunice Kim, the chief product officer at Netflix. We know swiping through a vertical feed on social media apps is an easy way to browse video content. We know our members love to browse our clips and trailers to find the next obsession. Sort of. What people love to do is watch pirated clips of movies from the middle on TikTok. And so that's the experience you have to recreate, not you're going to swipe and then watch a trailer from the beginning.

• 1:31:24David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:31:25Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, that's not it. Like, what it is, and I'll just keep using A Few Good Men because it's very funny and TikTok just insists that I keep watching this movie. Maybe because I watch every clip to the end. And it's like, do you want more of this? And it's like, I do.

• 1:31:38Nilay Patel?

  It's we're gonna drop you in the middle of some of the most impactful scenes from the movie, ice cold, and there's comments next to it, most of which are what movie is this? And then people lying, which is very entertaining. It's that.

• 1:31:50David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:50Nilay Patel?

  So I'm curious how they actually execute this idea. I it I've asked everybody. I've asked the CEO of Tubi. I've asked Netflix itself, their executives have been on the show, I've asked them.

• 1:32:00Nilay Patel?

  And they're all like, yeah, it's hard because we don't have the rights to all this content. Right. And, you know, TikTok, there's people are stealing it. So of course you just put the best part. But like this studio is gonna say Netflix owns a bunch of its content, so it could do it right. We'll see. But I think in many ways, this is the new discovery method. And, you know, and David is just like the laziest TV watcher in the world. He's like, just play me whatever. Like, this is, this is the modern, just, I want to start watching something, so I'm just gonna flick channels. It's that mechanism, but for like the social media, social video age.

• 1:32:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, but it's funny you mentioned the the trailers thing because that that's been the thing I've been thinking about too. Like Spotify has been desperately trying to do this with music and podcasts too. And like you go to the podcasts page on Spotify and it just like starts playing a podcast right there in line. And it starts at the beginning, which is a huge mistake. And and like you're saying, when you're in this browse thing, showing me the beginning of the movie is the wrong thing to do. Showing me like the the thing that is happening that is gonna catch my eye is the thing to do. And we're already seeing this in trailers now, like that there's now the trailer before the trailer, where they they show like eight seconds and then it's like the trailer for Thunderbolts begins now.

• 1:33:15David Pierce?

  And it's like, I thought it began when I clicked play on this YouTube video 19 seconds ago. So already that has shifted to like grab you faster. And I think either a bunch of content makers are gonna start to have to like be smarter about how they make these trailers for these people. Or Netflix is gonna have to get really smart about saying, okay, this is the grabbiest 30 seconds of this show, which is a thing Netflix knows. Like it sees how people interact with this stuff.

• 1:33:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's really interesting. I hadn't thought about that.

• 1:33:43David Pierce?

  Netflix can theoretically figure out, and it could just, it could play me the thing that is likely to work for me in my own feed.

• 1:33:51Nilay Patel?

  Does Netflix know that? Netflix watch data is like mostly linear, right? What they know is when people stop watching. They don't know when most people begin watching. Because for Netflix, everybody begins at the beginning.

• 1:34:02David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:34:03Speaker 06

  Well, then they know which ones you come back to.

• 1:34:06Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:34:06Speaker 06

  And obviously, maybe they maybe their their producer here is actually the people on TikTok who posted clips and they just go back and take those clips.

• 1:34:14Nilay Patel?

  That would be amazing if Netflix was scraping TikTok to see which Netflix shows got the most reactions as pirated TikTok videos. There's something here that's really powerful.

• 1:34:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:23Nilay Patel?

  It just it all comes down to the execution and the thing that they're competing against is infinity people trying infinity variations on infinity free content that they're not paying for. Which is like always the problem, but to me, this is it's so but the future of discovery. I'm kind of excited to try that.

• 1:34:39David Pierce?

  It's gonna be fascinating. And to Richard's point, there there is this source of tons of good data on what people actually care about. It just it's just all illegal and doesn't belong to Netflix.

• 1:34:51Speaker 06

  I I wonder if what if the the use of it isn't even as much. Okay, so you watch this and then you watch the video, but just it means that you're using the Netflix app more and that you're less willing to let your Netflix subscription die. Whether or not you watch the show, anything, but it's just something you can use to eat time, which is what a lot of these apps really are. You don't know what to watch, but you just don't want to scroll past some men talking on a podcast.

• 1:35:16Nilay Patel?

  Or babies.

• 1:35:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, like what if step two of this thing is it just becomes another set of things to watch on Netflix? That they're just like, oh, you're you're watching. Instead of watching Netflix shows, you're watching things 18 seconds at a time.

• 1:35:31Nilay Patel?

  That's fine. Netflix is definitely right. We compete with death or whatever.

• 1:35:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:35Nilay Patel?

  Sleep, not death. Netflix is like Ted Sarandos is like, I will defeat death.

• 1:35:43Nilay Patel?

  Where they're like, we compete with like, they're fully in the attention economy. They've known it for a long time. Their competitor is YouTube and video games. And so if you're in the Netflix app, watching short clips of Bridgerton, all that, I don't think they care. Because they already own the content. That's the thing that makes this harder for every other service. Right? Like, even Apple TV can't do it. You you think Apple's paying for all that stuff, but like many other big production companies and studios actually make the majority of their content still. So these are all licensing deals and they don't have all these moves. Netflix just outright owns a bunch of its stuff.

• 1:36:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so we'll see. I'm excited for this one. It, there's something here that I think is very powerful.

• 1:36:21Speaker 06

  The TV UI is weird because it's like three different versions of interfaces they already did. But I don't know. Back to the future, I guess.

• 1:36:28David Pierce?

  I mean, this is like the Netflix story in a nutshell. They're like, what if we just, what if we just stretched some boxes and condensed some boxes? Does that help?

• 1:36:39Nilay Patel?

  What if we made the thumbnails bigger and the text smaller?

• 1:36:42Speaker 06

  I just want them to never show me a summary that is like a clip of a review of the show that doesn't tell me anything about what it is in the show. I don't, I don't care if XYZ website said it was cool.

• 1:36:51David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 1:36:53Speaker 06

  What is it about?

• 1:36:54David Pierce?

  Fascinating deadline. And you're like, cool. Thanks, Netflix. This is great. That's exactly what I needed to know.

• 1:36:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you know, Apple doesn't show you the Rotten Tomato scores of its own shows. If you're like, look, and you know, the Apple TV interface usually has a little bit of metadata, but for Apple stuff, it's looked up there. It's very good. Uh, all right. I want to end on two more gadgets. Well, one more gadget, really. Uh, I just want to call out the fact that Jen Tuohy reviewed four robot lawnmowers. And maybe the most Jen Tuohy moment that can exist. Uh, you, you have to read it. It's very good. It includes the line, they don't cut your lawn, they shave it. Perfect. Per- perfect.

• 1:37:32David Pierce?

  Jen went through a lot to get that story done and it's very good. So everyone should go read it and buy a lawnmower just to support Jen. Because this is like a year of work to try and get these things to shave her lawn.

• 1:37:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't know. You should buy the lawnmower. I think you should read the story and subscribe to The Verge. You can wait, wait a couple of years in the lawnmower.

• 1:37:48David Pierce?

  That's fair. Read the story and subscribe to The Verge and then maybe don't buy a lawnmower.

• 1:37:52Nilay Patel?

  Okay. And then I want to end with just a tiny wee party speaker update. It's very hard to top party speaker in front of a fighter jet, which is what we had last week. Thank, thank you again for sending us that photo. Uh, we got some more photos. Many more photos of party speakers and boxes in stores. Again, I love you. I'm happy that when you see a party speaker, you think of us. It's very validating. I'm glad, well, I'm glad we're a community. That's not it. But it's in the wild. Right? Guys in Europe on a scooter using it as a chair. Uh, we did get one photo that I was really good. I don't want to run it because it was, it's an audible marketing campaign. You know?

• 1:38:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:33Nilay Patel?

  But Audible apparently puts people in marathons, wearing party speakers as backpacks, playing audiobooks.

• 1:38:41Nilay Patel?

  And so you can like run along.

• 1:38:43David Pierce?

  Good.

• 1:38:44Nilay Patel?

  And that's like multiple different books, like there's a rom com book, there's like another book and you can follow. Very good audible stunt.

• 1:38:53David Pierce?

  We got one like up on a shelf in a gym, a lot of people seeing party speakers at their gym. One at a, at a, I think it was a butcher shop in India. I think the, the thing that we've done that I'm very proud of is we have, we have taught people to see the party speakers in the wild. It turns out they're everywhere and we were all just trained to not notice them.

• 1:39:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:14David Pierce?

  It's like a real fish noticing the water situation that's happening right now. And we are discovering the extent to which the world has been infiltrated by party speakers. And so people who are like, I've been to this place every day for five years and I never noticed this giant fifth grader sized speaker blowing audio at me all day. Now we're seeing it. We've, we've changed the world.

• 1:39:35Nilay Patel?

  And then we received one person who was like, how do you not know about this phenomenon called sound clashes? It apparently takes place in Jamaica and India. Where they just build giant speaker systems and play them at each other. And I was like, first of all, that's I, how did I not know this?

• 1:39:51David Pierce?

  Like battle bots, but it's party speakers.

• 1:39:52Nilay Patel?

  But those aren't party speakers. Those are giant custom audio rigs. So honorable mention to sound clashes. I encourage you to go watch the videos on YouTube. They're wild. Different, different. Right? That's like the people who, um, if you get in the car audio of it, people are like, all I really care about SPL and what they're just talking about how loud their subwoofers are. I love you. You know, that's great.

• 1:40:13Speaker 06

  Forward facing or rear facing, Neil, are you stealing your trunk or are you not stealing your trunk? We gotta talk about it.

• 1:40:19Speaker 06

  This is, this is a big issue.

• 1:40:21Nilay Patel?

  You know what's up? Like, that's a different, we'll do a whole other series on that someday. And I appreciate that people were like, oh, you want to talk about party speakers? Like, I get it. I understand the connection that was made in your mind.

• 1:40:34Nilay Patel?

  Different. We're, we're still on party speakers.

• 1:40:37David Pierce?

  We'll get to that.

• 1:40:38Nilay Patel?

  All right. We're way over, just so over. We love you all. That's it. That's our first.

• 1:40:49Speaker 08

  And that's it for The Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poor, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:41:10Speaker 09

  New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.

• 1:41:40Speaker 10

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich is about taking care of what gives your life meaning. That's why your financial advisor personalizes your plan to help you preserve your progress and create something that lasts. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 1:41:55Speaker 11

  Mr. Monopoly here. Miss me? Monopoly is back at McDonald's with millions of prizes. A 2027 Jeep Cherokee, a Carnival Cruise Vacation, gift cards from DoorDash, and Best Buy. Feel the play in the McDonald's app. Get your bag.

• 1:42:13Nilay Patel?

  No purchase necessary. 50 U.S. and D.C. Age 18+. See play at MCD.com for rules and play at MCD.com/AMOE for info and playing without purchase by mail by November 2nd. Chance card game ends November 8th. Game ends November 22nd, 2026. See rules for prize details. Monopoly is a registered trademark of Hasbro.