Gemini is taking over Google

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss AI tools announced at this weeks Pixel 9 event, Nilay's TV competition, tech regulatory news, and more. Further reading: AI overshadowed Pixel at the Pixel event All the AI features coming to Google's Pixel 9 series Google debuts Pixel Studio AI image-making app Google makes your Pixel screenshots searchable with Recall-like AI feature Every time Google dinged Apple during its Pixel 9 launch event Google Gemini’s voice chat mode is here Using Gemini Live was faster than Google, but also more awkward Google Pixel 9 launch event: all the announcements and products Google's Pixel 9 lineup is a Pro show The Pixel 9 Pro XL showed me the future of AI photography Google’s Zoom Enhance camera trick is finally available Inside the competition that named the Sony A95L the best TV of 2024 Patreon adds Apple tax to avoid getting kicked out of the App Store Apple is finally going to open up iPhone tap-to-pay Apple relents and approves Spotify app with EU pricing AltStore PAL drops its annual subscription thanks to a grant from Epic Epic judge says he’ll ‘tear the barriers down’ on Google’s app store monopoly The FTC’s fake review crackdown begins this fall Ex-Google CEO: AI startups can steal IP, hire lawyers to “clean up the mess” Flipboard is going to let you follow fediverse accounts right inside the app Halide’s Process Zero feature captures photos with no AI processing Realme’s 320W fast charging can fully charge a smartphone in four and a half minutes Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:28Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends, like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra. Because it's not just a superior light beer, it's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com slash superior access to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser-Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 0:59Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to our chest, the flagship podcast of our fancy new studio. Look at this, guys.

• 1:05Alex Cranz?

  It's sick.

• 1:06David Pierce?

  It's so fancy.

• 1:07Alex Cranz?

  I wish I was there to see it in person. Does it smell nice?

• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  You know, many times this studio smells like weed when I walk into it. When Alex and I have sat down to record this, the show, many times you've commented that it smells like weed in here.

• 1:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20Nilay Patel?

  We don't know if that's from our colleagues at vox.com. We don't know if that is from Liam. We don't know if that is from the other people who podcast in here. But today it does not smell like weed. It smells fresh and new. It's good. If you're listening to the show, it's going to be the same show. It's just our, the space that we recorded has been dramatically upgraded. David was gone for two weeks and they, our amazing studio team took the time to rebuild the thing while we were kind of out and about and traveling and recording remotely. It's just real fancy in here.

• 1:49David Pierce?

  It does look awesome. And truly, even if you're just listening, like, you won't see it, but like, the vibes will be better.

• 1:54Nilay Patel?

  It's very moody.

• 1:55David Pierce?

  You know what I mean? It's like the, Neelai is like a happier, more optimistic person now that we're in this studio.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I got a giant TV behind me. That's the largest frame TV they make, ladies and gentlemen. And there's like a hangout zone, like where sidekicks on podcasts go.

• 2:13David Pierce?

  Oh, the like retired NFL player who just like only says two things in every episode. I love that. That's the job I want.

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  Like the AJ Hawk corner is right over there. If you're a Pat McAfee fan.

• 2:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to do every segment of today's show from a different spot in this room, but it is beautiful. It's very nice. It's funny. Um, you know, we share the studio with other Vox Media Podcast Network shows. So Andre Iguodala and Evan Turner record in here and then we have a new show with Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird that also records in here. And the first time I saw pictures of it was all set up for them. And I was like, where's our GameCube? Uh, don't worry. It turns out they just changed the studio around for every show.

• 2:54David Pierce?

  I do think though, we should find a way to anchor our webby to the shelves so that no one can get rid of our webby. Anytime you do a podcast, you will see the Vergecast's webby. That's, those are the rules.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  I think, I think our YouTube play button is permanently mounted all over there. So if you are an ex NFL player's sidekick, you know, we have a million subscribers. You know it in your heart. You gotta sit under that. That's the mark, everybody.

• 3:17Alex Cranz?

  Forever.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  Uh, anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. Welcome. David Pierce is back from vacation. Welcome, David.

• 3:22David Pierce?

  Hi, I picked the worst two weeks of all time to be gone, uh, but I'm very happy to be back.

• 3:26Nilay Patel?

  Nothing happened while you were on vacation.

• 3:28David Pierce?

  No, including not the like culmination of a trial that I covered for months and care deeply about and seems very important to the end of the internet. Like, yeah, super chill.

• 3:36Nilay Patel?

  Hey, does anybody know anything about the search engine, Nilay? Oh, I guess the guy who wrote the profile of it isn't here at all.

• 3:43David Pierce?

  Real bummer. I only reported on them for like a year and a half and didn't get to talk about that at the end. But the good news is that case is going to go on for six to seven more decades. So we'll have more chances. It'll be all right.

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a long period. And then Alex, you were on last week. You've been on vacation and then you immediately went away to cover the Pixel event in San Francisco.

• 4:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm currently on, on the West Coast and not in a room with you otherwise. So we're going to use a pixel to just do the admin feature and put me in there with you. But, but otherwise it's, it's a good time out here. It's very nice, temperature wise.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The theme of this episode is can you believe your lying eyes? And the answer is fully, fully no. So let's start with the Pixel. There's a lot to talk about. There was the Pixel event, which you guys, David, I think you covered a little bit on the Tuesday show.

• 4:26David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  I want to talk about TVs. I love talking about TVs. So a lot of gadgets to open the show. Then we got a bunch of just stuff in the App Store and the EU happening. And then of course, we have a lightning round. The deeply controversial lightning round.

• 4:43David Pierce?

  I can't believe I left and you still didn't get the lightning round sponsored. Like that's, I wanted to come back from vacation and you were like, congratulations, David. Here is the lightning round yacht that we all bought. We did it.

• 4:53Alex Cranz?

  We spent the money actually on the set.

• 4:54Nilay Patel?

  I've gone all the way to, in my head, leaving the various Vox Media corporate meetings that I have to go to. With like, what if I ended every meeting with, don't talk to me until the lightning round is sponsored?

• 5:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm not sure this would go well. I'm not sure that it would achieve any goals really, or even my continued employment. But rest assured, I've thought about it.

• 5:19Alex Cranz?

  You feel really cool.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Like, why are you talking to me with an unsponsored?

• 5:26Alex Cranz?

  Sashay out. A little scarf.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This is what I think about in my spare time is how to get myself fired. Okay. Let's talk about the Pixel. The Pixel itself, David, you talked about on the Tuesday show with everybody. There's like two parts of the Pixel event, though, that I think are kind of important. One was the phone. And then the second is that the phone wasn't introduced until like 20 minutes into the event. Because what it really was, was Rick Osterloh, who now runs Android and Pixel, talking about Android becoming the platform for Google's AI ambitions. And even showing a bunch of AI features on Samsung phones. And there's something there that feels very worth talking about to me.

• 6:11Alex Cranz?

  What? You mean the fact that we saw a Samsung phone and a Motorola phone before we saw a Pixel phone?

• 6:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's the simpler way of putting it, I think.

• 6:21Nilay Patel?

  It's weird, right? There's something to that that I think is really interesting.

• 6:25David Pierce?

  It's weird and it isn't. Like, it's weird that it's not weird is actually where I'm at with this because like there are three things going on here, right? One is that Rick Ostrello oversees Android and Pixel. And that is a very hard job. We've talked about this, that for years, Google was like, we have a very hard firewall between our own hardware efforts and our partner ecosystem with Android. Now it's just literally the same dude in charge of it. And that is, it's a complicated thing to do, especially because for Google, the vast majority of everything that matters about Android does not happen on Pixel phones. Right? So for Google to come out and say, look, a Samsung phone that does all this stuff is

• 7:07David Pierce?

  purely just a recognition of what actually matters to Google, which is the Android business, not the Pixel business. Like, that is just the fact of the matter. The other thing is, I think Google thinks AI as a thing and Gemini as a thing is more important than all of that. Right? Like, that is the big bet. So you have to lead with Gemini and you have to lead with Android and then like, a while later, show everybody the phone that you made. And then, if you, if you also believe, as I, as I do, and I think as Google does, that the hardware just exists in service of the software which exists in service of the AI, like, it, it all ladders up. So it's weird that Google ostensibly launched a bunch of gadgets in what was not at all

• 7:49David Pierce?

  a gadget launch, but like, increasingly, this was now two days ago as we're recording this, like, it wasn't really a gadget launch. Like, they launched some gadgets, but the main, most important thing they talked about was not the gadgets, which is very strange.

• 8:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it felt more like an I/O. I mean, not, not in the room, it felt like a Pixel event in the room, but the content felt like an I/O keynote more than a Pixel event. Because it was just, again, we're going to talk about all these really great features that you can now use AI to generate adorable animals and Kiki Palmer's here.

• 8:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, the Kiki Palmer thing, I'm still, I got nothing on, on.

• 8:25Alex Cranz?

  She's there.

• 8:26David Pierce?

  Like, between the Kiki Palmer thing here and the Sydney Sweeney thing at the, so like, can we just stop with the really awkward celebrity cameos? Nobody has fun. It's good for them, they get paid, that's great.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  I say triple down. More celebrity. More random Neil Patrick Harris at an Apple event. Just get out there. Just whoever it is.

• 8:47Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be Chris Evans at the Apple event. Let's be there or Scar Joe, but no, like Sydney Sweeney looked like a hostage. Kiki Palmer, like she got to move around.

• 8:56Nilay Patel?

  Hey, set the celebrities free.

• 8:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, don't, don't just make him sit in a chair and awkwardly wave.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  She was there sort of at the very end, right? Like she was just there to be like, AI is great. And.

• 9:06Alex Cranz?

  She like Kool-Aid manned in.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  Basically. But the, but the thing you're discussing more broadly, which is Google believes it has a huge distribution advantage for its, for Gemini. That distribution advantage is Android and they're gonna put it everywhere and embed it into all of their platforms and services. We, Alex, right, we did see that coming at I O. That's basically what they said. And Rick's message was now the stuff is here, it's shipping. Like you can get it. And then, you know, they showed it on a bunch of Samsung Motorola phones. And then they're like, and here's the pixel. And then here's a tiny bit of stuff the pixel can do that the others can't do, which is the add me feature in the photos and all that.

• 9:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:49Nilay Patel?

  But there's a sense that Google knows it is better at distributing AI than any of its competitors. It took a lot of digs at Apple, for example, just secret, not even secret. Just like quiet side swipes at Apple throughout this whole event. We're available in all the languages. Apple's intelligence isn't. We don't have to send your data to a third party. Apple's gonna send some of your stuff to open AI. Like down the line, it was, Google was just reinforcing that it is building the AI. Like it has it, it controls it, it runs in the cloud and the best way to get it is through Android. I just don't know if that's gonna get anybody to switch from an iPhone. Like that's actually the thing that I think is the most interesting here.

• 10:34Nilay Patel?

  That they're like, Android is the place where you get your AI and everyone's kind of like, okay.

• 10:39Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think Gemini Live is probably a good example of that because that's coming to iOS later this year. And that they spent a lot of time on Gemini Live, it felt like that's their like answer to ChatGPT's voice assistant. And yeah, it really just felt like this moment of, okay, no, you don't actually just need to be on on an Android device. And I personally, I just kept thinking of the fact that just last week, they found out that they something's going to happen with Google. And one of their biggest revenue drivers is their relationship with the iPhone. And so now it feels like their their phone ecosystem is more important than ever. And we just didn't hear a single thing about it besides AI. So, yeah, it is a little weird that everything hinges on this AI now.

• 11:22Nilay Patel?

  So what all the big AI companies have been saying is that they think AI is a platform shift. You can interpret that a lot of ways, like I've tried to get Sundar Pichai to explain what that means to me. Sundar Pichai said it's as big as fire. I don't know that there's that many ways to interpret that. It's just the one, really. Yeah, he's, yeah, I mean, it's true, but I, what the way I have interpreted platform shift is people are going to use computers in a different way. And that will create many more opportunities to build products and services, right? And if you look back at the history of platform shifts, you go from, I don't know, DOS and text-based computing to mice and keyboards.

• 12:03Nilay Patel?

  And then you go from local applications to the web and then you go to touchscreens on phones, right?

• 12:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:10Nilay Patel?

  Those are the platforms. Yeah. If you can think of another way to think about the word platform shift, please let me know because I'm sort of dying to figure out how to understand the words platform shift as it relates to AI. And all I've come up with in that framework is, oh, you're going to talk to the computer instead of typing.

• 12:29Alex Cranz?

  Which isn't a, like, that's a platform shift we already had.

• 12:32Nilay Patel?

  Except now can do it, except except now Gemini Live can just like listen to you and maybe take actions on your behalf. And maybe you're going to type to it, maybe you're just going to say, I don't know, like, go make me an app that can do X and Gemini Live will spit it out and I'll be fine.

• 12:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:46Nilay Patel?

  Or Siri on with Apple Intelligence will go use the apps for you, which is something that Apple has, you know, it's not going to ship, but it's it's what they previewed at W W C. That's the platform shift.

• 12:57David Pierce?

  That's the platform shift. That last piece is the real platform shift. And this is what I've been hearing from people forever. I think it was Paul Ford recently wrote a really good thing about this, where he said, right now, we're in the like, command line era of AI, which is like, the tech is kind of under there, but nobody has figured out how to use it yet. And the idea that you're going to essentially use a command line to interact with it, which is essentially what writing an AI prompt is, is fine as far as it goes, but that's not the mainstream answer. And then actually, what needs to happen is everybody needs to invent the interface on top of that that makes it interesting. And that we have not seen. But I think the thing that I hear from everybody is like,

• 13:37David Pierce?

  this starts to get really interesting when we get to the, it can use your apps for you phase of all of this, because that's where you actually do use your computer differently. Because right now, it's like, you can look up information by talking instead of by typing. And Alex, to your point, A, that exists. B, it's not better. Like, it's not better. It's different. It's a little faster, but it's not better. And Alex, you've used Gemini Live a little, so I'm curious to hear what you think. But like, we're still at this point where it is, it is sort of a technology in search of a user interface.

• 14:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 14:14David Pierce?

  And I think, I didn't, like, you see a lot of Google poking at that. I think the pixel screenshots thing, which we should talk about, and which I am on record of being fascinated by, is an interesting version of that. But like, how you actually push and pull with this thing is such an unanswered question in so, so many ways.

• 14:31Alex Cranz?

  I feel like they definitely haven't figured it out. Like, I only spent a little time with Gemini Live. It was me and Sean Hollister and Allison Johnson, all in our little room, trying to talk to this thing, and...

• 14:43David Pierce?

  Was it the same? I'm picturing a demo like the ChatGPT one, where it's like, phone on a table, listening to you.

• 14:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like, you have to hold the phone. Like, I couldn't stand far away from the phone. You have to hold the phone really close to yourself, because otherwise it'll be like, no, I'm not listening to you. But I really struggled with it, because I try to be very polite in conversations, and like, oh, if you're talking, I'm gonna usually let you finish. Not always, as Virgcast listeners can attest, but I'm usually gonna let you finish. And this one, you're like, encouraged to interrupt it. And you're encouraged to interact with it in a way that would be like, really rude if you were interacting with a person. And so, it's at one point, wants you to feel like it's more human and more realistic. And at the other point... It's doing that. And then like, I got in a fight with it because it wouldn't shut up.

• 15:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 15:26Alex Cranz?

  So I told it was mansplaining me. And it was like, oh, I'm sorry. Do you want me to change my tone of my voice? And I was like, and it was a little sassy when it said it. I was just like, did I just get like, talk, clap back to that by AI?

• 15:38Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 15:39Alex Cranz?

  And then, yeah, and then Sean was like, I got this. And Sean just went in and was like, no, shut up. I have a question. And just immediately was just, no, no, shush. Me now. And, and like, he was basically a dick to it. And it worked perfectly. And I'm like, okay.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  Was he like, who knows more about the Steam Deck, you or me?

• 15:55Alex Cranz?

  He might have asked that. But we, he mainly asked it for stock tips. And then it was like, I wouldn't personally invest in Bitcoin. But you can do that if you want. It's just very high risk.

• 16:06Nilay Patel?

  Our very first Gemini scandal. Uh, no, that's not scandal. That's just good advice. Yeah. Here's my question. So you use it, you talk to it, it has some personality. This is, this is the thing, like, this is how Google is talking about beating OpenAI, right?

• 16:21Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 16:22Nilay Patel?

  OpenAI is going to put out its voice version. It's going to sound like Scarlett Johansson or not. It's going to have personality. It, it takes a breath in the middle of counting numbers as fast as it can. We've all seen that video. It's like they're competing on personality, not content?

• 16:37Alex Cranz?

  Right. They're, yeah, because some stuff it did really, really well for me. Like, I asked it to fix something. It took me a while to fix on my car. And it did it in 30 seconds. It was just great. And another stuff it really struggled with. And it struggled to understand the questions. And if, like, somebody compared it to being a kind of a friend. And I wouldn't have friends like this thing. Because it, it just talks. It doesn't listen to you. It doesn't respond to you in, in the way that a friend might. And it's, but it's at the same time, it's a computer. So you're just in this weird space where you're like, am I having to be nice to my computer?

• 17:18Alex Cranz?

  And I don't necessarily want that. I want it to just be my computer.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  What you want, I think that the thesis of The Verge as a whole, as a publication, is, do I have to be nice to my computer?

• 17:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, no.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  And we've been struggling to figure out that answer for quite some time.

• 17:32David Pierce?

  But I do think in a way, those companies pushing that stuff are kind of telling on themselves about the actual state of the technology, right? Because what has been true for 60 years is that if you give a computer any kind of personality, people will fall in love with it and try to have sex with it and tell it their deepest, darkest secrets. Like, it's just true. Like, we did a video about this a while ago that was very fun, and it's like in the 70s, this guy made a thing that basically all it did was say your commands back to you as a question. And so you'd be like, you know, my father was mean to me. And it would be like, your father was mean to you. And people were like, oh, my God, it understands.

• 18:07Nilay Patel?

  This is Eliza, right?

• 18:08David Pierce?

  Yes, that was Eliza. Yeah. And that's, that's actually a really powerful thing. And I think one other thing I missed while I was on vacation was all the friend drama. I wrote this story about this guy who launched an AI friend, and it, everybody went nuts on the internet because there was drama about who owned it. It was a whole thing. I'm very happy I missed all of that drama. But one of the things that Avi, the CEO, said to me was, he was like, the reason I'm doing this is because it's the only thing AI is any good at right now. And I think that's right, that there is, there is vast gaps between where we are right now with this technology and like, true utility in people's lives. But it's pretty easy to make one of these like, fun as hell to talk to, because

• 18:51David Pierce?

  it's not that hard to make them fun as hell to talk to. So what they're able to compete on right now is making them fun as hell to talk to, because that will make people use them more, even if they can't do very much, and the things that they do, they don't do very well. And so if you're just using this as like a rote, straightforward robotic task machine, you're going to notice it's bad and you're going to hate it.

• 19:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:11David Pierce?

  But if you make it fun and cool and friendly and exciting, it doesn't have to do that much, right? And I think that's a fine road to go down, but it is so not the same thing as like, making it more useful to people.

• 19:23Nilay Patel?

  So let me put that into the framework of the question I was asking. Alex, when you were using Gemini Live, did any of it feel like the platform shift?

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  Because that is the big question, right? If you're Microsoft and you're pouring billions of dollars into this because you missed mobile,

• 19:41Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 19:41Nilay Patel?

  then this is your chance to reclaim the primary user interface of computers. If you're Google and you're basically communicating that you're going to bet the company on this, is there evidence that that is real? Because I don't, I don't know. I honestly don't know.

• 19:57Alex Cranz?

  I, it's no. I think right now, yeah, I think, I think right now the answer is no for me. I think it is a valuable tool. I was talking with people afterwards who don't even work at Google, work at other companies about these kinds of things. And they were like, oh yeah, I really like it because it's a good brainstorming tool. It's a good way for me to like, just figure some stuff out. And I'm not going to brainstorm that way personally.

• 20:19Nilay Patel?

  That's it's fun to talk to. Like that's the whole thing.

• 20:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's fun to talk to, but, but like, I didn't feel this urge to just, oh, I want this in my, I did actually want it in my car immediately. So never mind, I did feel that urge.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Platform shift.

• 20:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 20:32Nilay Patel?

  And I was like, I want to be like. Slightly mansplaining to her. You're like, this is the future of computing.

• 20:36Alex Cranz?

  It was like so mansplaining. It was very upsetting. But like as a, as a voice, as, as if you think of it as part of the, the evolution of the voice assistant, the digital voice assistant, it's a lot better. It is a huge improvement over assistant. It's a huge improvement over Siri and Alexa. But is it a replacement for computing, like general computing? No, absolutely not. It's not a platform shift for my phone. It's a platform shift for my Alexa.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:04David Pierce?

  Well, I think even the question of is it better than Google Assistant or Siri or Alexa is a really interesting one because one of the things that's happening is Gemini is replacing Google Assistant kind of all over Android, which is a big deal. Like it wasn't that long ago that Google was out there being like, Google Assistant is the future of everything. And now it's very clearly Gemini. And there have been a bunch of people out there testing early versions of this thing. Obviously they're early, we'll see. And it just can't do some of the very, very basic things you would expect. That's right. And so it's like, okay, you have this thing that is more fun to talk to. Understands you better, does the sort of basic interface tasks way better, like orders of magnitude better than the stuff that we had before. But it can't do the things.

• 21:47David Pierce?

  Uh, I think it was Jared Newman at Fast Company wrote a thing where he was like, it can't tell me what the weather is. It can't play the podcasts that I have played because it doesn't have access to my apps. It doesn't do turn by turn directions very well. Just all these basic things. It's like, okay, what Google Assistant had is, is access to the systems that you actually want on your phone, right? Like it was able to use your apps for you and Gemma and I can't use your apps for you, but we're replacing the one with the other before it can do both things. Which to me is just, it's like, it's so clear that that is what Google thinks is more important.

• 22:19Alex Cranz?

  It feels like a big rush, but I'm also, I feel not concerned about it. I feel like that's the kind of thing that they can do a software update and be like, yeah, now it can do timers. Now it can tell you the weather, like those should be relatively easy things to just pipe in. And I think they just haven't because they've been moving that quickly to churn this out and, and compete with Apple, like to the point of they, this whole event happened a month before what we assume is going to be the Apple, the iPhone launch. And traditionally it's held in October and that was very, I think everybody at the industry was just like, oh, that's just to get ahead of Apple intelligence. And so it definitely feels like they're, they're, they're rushing it, but at the same time, there's a level of polish there, but it's not perfect, right?

• 23:01Alex Cranz?

  Like, like there's with, with Siri and Assistant and stuff like that, you ask it a question and it'll pop up something contextually on the screen for you. So you can see it, there's, there's a visual component and there's zero visual component here. And I think that if anything was the most annoying element of it. Cause you ask it for questions, you just expect to see some sort of result in front of you. And instead you just see this little glowy screen and it's like, okay, cool. Like that'd be, that'd be cool in my meta glasses. That's just not cool on my phone. It's a waste of my phone.

• 23:30David Pierce?

  Even when I use the chat GPT voice mode, which I think I've said a several times, I have mapped the action button on my iPhone. Uh, halfway through it talking, I'm like, I just need to read this.

• 23:41Alex Cranz?

  Like, yeah.

• 23:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. I'm tired of this. Like, uh, I can just read much faster than you can, you can machine talk to me, robot. We're going to get another run at this when the phones come out. We're obviously going to get a chance to use it more. I want to talk for one second to wrap up the Android pixel AI conversation.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  And just talk about the photo stuff for half a second. I feel like I could spend five hours talking about what is a photo right now.

• 24:07David Pierce?

  I would say historically speaking, that we've proven that several times.

• 24:11Nilay Patel?

  So, you know, the Pixel 9 is coming out. Beck has gotten a chance to use the add me feature and some of the other photo stuff. You can go watch that video, but we're just in a really weird spot where it seems like the phone makers in particular have utterly given up on the idea that the pictures they take should represent reality.

• 24:31David Pierce?

  What was the line that you pulled out, Neelai, where like Google was like, we're not even, they don't do photos anymore?

• 24:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so Julian at Wired did the piece on the Pixel camera this year, sat down with a bunch of Google folks, talked about the camera and the new features and why it's better. And basically his thesis in this piece is Google is chasing memories, not photos. And so he talked to a Google PM named Isaac Reynolds, who says, quote, "It's about what you're remembering. When you define a memory that has a fallibility to it, you could have a true and perfect representation of a moment that felt completely fake and wrong. What some of these edits do is help you create a moment that is the way you remember it, that is authentic to your memory and the greater context, but maybe isn't authentic to a particular millisecond."

• 25:14David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 25:14Nilay Patel?

  There's a, that's a PhD thesis.

• 25:16David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  It's beautiful. That is a PhD thesis in philosophy right there. Like, what is real? Is it what you remember or what actually happened? I don't, a PhD thesis. I'm just telling you, you can spend the rest of your life chasing down that question. And Google has just made a decision that what they want to do is help people create the memories they felt they were experiencing as opposed to capturing what actually happened. And they're just headed down that road. They have been for some time.

• 25:49David Pierce?

  I think not just Google, that's everybody. Like, that's a pretty good summation of the whole industry right now.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's bananas to me.

• 25:57Nilay Patel?

  Because we live in a time when like synthetic and fake media is everywhere. And you can even see that having it exist at all allows bad actors to call into question the significance or reality of real media. So Trump saying the Harris rally was quote AI'd.

• 26:18David Pierce?

  Which can we not do that? Can we just pause real fast? Like, can we not with the AI as a verb? Like, AI already means too many things. It's a, it's a huge catch all word that has become sort of meaningless. Can we not make it other parts of speech too?

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  I agree that we should not use language like Donald Trump uses language. But what I'm getting at is you only get to do that if people believe the technology can do it. And it is true that people have believed the technology can do this stuff for years before it can. But now they're going to hold in their hands the capability on a Samsung phone to circle an empty field and say, add a crowd. Right? They can just do it. They are going to hold in their hands the ability to add people to photos who weren't there before with add me on a Google Pixel. And the companies are marketing this as this makes you more creative. It lets you take the photos you want. And now for Google, all the way to, we want you to create the memories of the things you thought were happening, rather than the things that were happening.

• 27:16Alex Cranz?

  I mean, haven't like Chinese phone makers been doing that with, we want to create what I think I look like versus what I actually look like with the face tuning? Like, it's been happening a while. It's one of those things, I think what was shocking to me is the ease of access of the tool itself, but I'm not like shocked at putting these tools on the phone. But it's weird that they put it in the camera app.

• 27:40Nilay Patel?

  The add me feature is not like the most AI. It's not generating you, but it's doing a bunch of cool stuff. But on a technical level, it's, it's doing something cool, right? It's generating a depth map and then using the depth map to realign the multiple photos. That's all very cool. And I'm confident there's a bunch of AI in there that is helping to do that. But at the most fundamental level, what it's doing is compositing two photos together. Like you look at the photos that the Hollywood magazines put out with like 500 stars on the cover, those are often composite photos.

• 28:12Alex Cranz?

  Those are add me photos. Like, like every single poster, movie poster you see is one of those add me photos. But like.

• 28:19Nilay Patel?

  Right, but I'm never like, I wonder if this movie poster happened.

• 28:23Alex Cranz?

  Right, but I will also say, I got to try it out a little bit at the event and AdMe is certainly really cool, but also I would say it's like the royal family level of photoshopping abilities.

• 28:37Nilay Patel?

  Ooh, deep cut, Alex.

• 28:39Alex Cranz?

  You see some, you see some like hands where hands should not be, that sort of thing sometimes. So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it'll do it at a glance. It looks awesome. It looks really, really cool. You look closer and you see the edges on this stuff. And I haven't gotten to try it as all of these tools, but like even the AI one where you circle things and add, like that messed up at the event. They scrolled through it really, really fast when they were like, they're like, here's a hot air balloon. And then they like did another one. It was like a blob and the guy like just speed scrolled past this horrible amorphous blob.

• 29:11David Pierce?

  It was pretty great.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  All I'm getting at is those tools aren't great, but because they exist and they are broadly accessible, it's not just that there's a bunch of synthetic photos we can point at and say those are fake. Bad actors are able to point at real photos and say they are fake. And we are just barreling towards no one believes anything they see.

• 29:31Alex Cranz?

  I think we're already there.

• 29:33Nilay Patel?

  There's a strong argument we're already there, but.

• 29:35David Pierce?

  Do you guys remember a bunch of years ago, Farhad Manjoo, when he was at the New York Times, wrote this really great column about selfie culture and his big sort of thinky thought that I've been thinking about ever since was basically like, we've, we've entered into a place where everything that there is to be photographed has been photographed. And so now what's different is that I'm there. And that's, it's like, it's a meaningful thing, right? It's like I'm, this picture is different because it has me in it in the Grand Canyon. You've already seen pictures of the Grand Canyon. So people are putting themselves in it as like, this is a, this is a new way of seeing this because I'm here. Something like AdMe just breaks that in the most interesting way. It's like, we talk about sort of the cultural

• 30:17David Pierce?

  meaning of photos and I was seeing a bunch of people during the Google event be like, how on earth can a photo first social network exist after this? Like if suddenly I can be anywhere at any time, doing whatever I feel like, just gets weird. And I get that AdMe has some like limitations that make that challenging.

• 30:36Alex Cranz?

  I mean, arguably the photo first social media has been weird for a while, given that like influencers rent. Sets that look like planes.

• 30:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:44Alex Cranz?

  To fake looking like they're sitting on a plane.

• 30:46David Pierce?

  But at least that like costs money and time and effort.

• 30:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 30:50David Pierce?

  It's about to get really easy.

• 30:51Alex Cranz?

  I agree. Like, like what Pixel is, what Google has done is just remove a ton of barriers that were already existed, right? Like Photoshop already existed. People faking photos has been happening forever. But now it's just like, to Nilay's point, really, really easy.

• 31:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's Samsung faking the moon, but it's you and it's everywhere. Like weird.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  Two things. One, we should have made this set look like a private jet. What were we thinking?

• 31:16Alex Cranz?

  Oh, my God.

• 31:17Nilay Patel?

  We failed. Fundamental error, Liam.

• 31:19David Pierce?

  Me, like just lying down in the PJ.

• 31:22Nilay Patel?

  I'm so mad that this room doesn't look like the inside of a private jet. Second, what we're talking about, the, the cost element that you bring up, David, is the thing.

• 31:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  It's the thing. When, when ILM made fake dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, there was not a widespread outcry about people believing dinosaurs are real.

• 31:44Alex Cranz?

  There's a small outcry somewhere, I'm sure.

• 31:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, right. There's actually one line from that movie that should have gotten even more outcry, which is you were so busy wondering if you could.

• 31:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:54Nilay Patel?

  Right? I'm just pointing out. But when you make it so that everyone's phone, velociraptors in every photo, and they look real, and you brought the cost to nothing, some people are going to believe some dumb stuff. And like, we're just there. And I, I agree with you, Alex. Like, we might be way past the point of no return, where people are just not going to believe anything's true anymore.

• 32:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, the needle might just be in the red.

• 32:19Alex Cranz?

  I'm just deeply cynical. I'm sorry.

• 32:21Nilay Patel?

  I think we wrote with the Pixel 8 last year, that we were at the what is a photo apocalypse?

• 32:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, I'm looking at it now, and there's no longer, when we wrote about the Pixel 8, there was some pushback. Like, we're not doing this, we're being careful, you're overreacting. And then this year, they're like, you can just put yourself in the, right? And it's like, oh, we're over it. Uh, there's just a lot there to talk about. We're gonna get the phones. I think we should see how well they work, as always.

• 32:45David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 32:45Nilay Patel?

  But there's a piece of all of this, especially in election season, where I suspect we are going to be talking about whether or not people believe what they see for a long time now. Because it's just, it's fully off the rails. All right, we should take a break. We're gonna come back, and we're gonna talk about televisions. I promise you, it's gonna happen. We'll be right back with more of our podcast.

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• 34:37Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I'm in a different chair in the studio. I'm on this, I'm on this side of the table.

• 34:43David Pierce?

  It's much more like regal. Like I want you to give me investment advice from this chair for some reason. Should we invest in Bitcoin?

• 34:50Nilay Patel?

  But I will tell you to smoke all the cigars you can smoke.

• 34:55Nilay Patel?

  That's what this feels like to me. Like I should be giving bourbon and cigar advice. We should start that show. And my answer is to have as much as you want. That's it'll be fine.

• 35:04David Pierce?

  Just enjoy.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Two or three in are all the same, really.

• 35:10Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's enough. We've done enough philosophizing about AI and platform shifts and whether or not reality is real. Let's talk about the most important tech story of the week, which is that, as promised, I published 2,500 words about judging the 2024 TV shootout. I've never been happier in my entire life. Doing the shootout, writing the words, avoiding the many other lawsuits that happened this week. Because if you remember, last week I was gonna do it, and then the Google decision came out, and the whole week got thrown away, and I couldn't talk about TVs. This week, I just ignored everything.

• 35:49David Pierce?

  Google also really ruining everybody's life, is what I'm hearing. It's been a hard time on all of us.

• 35:54Nilay Patel?

  A thing we, and one assumes for Google, we should probably, there's some regulatory stuff to talk about. Google's in a world of hurt right now. We'll come to that later. But we did it again. We were gonna talk about TVs, start talking about Google antitrust.

• 36:09Alex Cranz?

  Tell us about the TVs, Neil.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  These concepts are so inextricably linked for some bizarre reason. Why? No, TVs. We're into TVs. There's a really high-end boutique home theater store in Scarsdale, New York, called Valley Electronics. They've been running the TV shootout for 20 years. This was the 20th one. You can go Google all the coverage from 20 years ago. 2004, like, Plasmas are it. Amazing. The whole thing's amazing. I bought my Sony A95L there because they have stock. It's actually pretty hard to get that TV, but they sell so many of them that Sony gives them special allocations. I went and bought one from them. I got to talk to the owner, Robert Son, and his wife Wendy, and they were like, "Do you want to judge the shootout this year?" And I just imagine, I was like, "Yes. Like, more than

• 36:55Nilay Patel?

  anything, I'm just gonna, my wife and daughter will be fine. I'll just wait here until the TV shootout begins." They called me in to judge it. It was an incredible panel.

• 37:06Nilay Patel?

  You can look at the story. The pictures are adorable. It was just a bunch of nerds in a room. Like they cleaned, they cleared out the store and they set up three TVs, three OLEDs and three mini LEDs from Samsung, Sony and LG.

• 37:22Nilay Patel?

  And they put $40,000 Sony reference monitors, like the ones they use for coloring in Hollywood in front of them. And then the, the first day was, quote, "the objective day," where the, the task was across a number of clips that they were playing to judge how similar the TVs were to the reference displays. And the TVs had been professionally calibrated by like famous calibrators on the AVS forums. Can you, I was like in heaven.

• 37:52David Pierce?

  That's an amazing phrase you just said, by the way. Calibrated by famous calibrators? Like, hell yeah.

• 37:57Nilay Patel?

  Now, if you're an AVS forum nerd and you have ever just like gone and looked for the settings for a TV, it was probably Cecil Mead or Dwayne Davis.

• 38:05David Pierce?

  That's awesome.

• 38:06Nilay Patel?

  Who go by Classy Tech and D Nice. I was in heaven, heaven, heaven. Like just a bunch of nerds talking about TVs.

• 38:15David Pierce?

  So where, where were you on the, on the list of like panelists and experts? From most to least qualified, where would you say you were?

• 38:25Nilay Patel?

  Fully the least. All the other judges are basically like Hollywood types. So the Director of Encoding Services at Warner Brothers Discovery, the Senior Director of Technical Operations at Paramount, a handful of professional cinematographers and directors, a handful of professional calibrators. So calibrators are, that's a real job in this industry. People set up their studios, they bring in the professional calibrators to make sure everything is displaying accurately at every point in the chain. So from your camera to your display, to your mastering display, this is a real thing. And so those people have kind of the most knowledge of all of the quirks of all the various displays. Because they're constantly trying to get them to display accurately.

• 39:08Nilay Patel?

  And so what was particularly interesting is they know these TVs really well because these TVs are showing up increasingly in professional operations because fancy studio executives like watching things on big TVs instead of little reference monitors. And they're like, yeah, these Sony A95Ls are showing up all over the place as reference displays for the executives. And so they just, and obviously they do fancy computer theaters and other viewing rooms and all this stuff. So it was really interesting to talk to them because they're in the weeds of what these things can and can't do. Yes. Sort of divorced from any marketing or whatever. Like they're just trying to make them look good professionally and they're, they're completely aware of the limits of the TVs.

• 39:53Nilay Patel?

  So, and then there's me and I'm like, I've just been looking at screens for 15 years. I have a lot of opinions. And I thought that was, it was kind of interesting to be that person because it, like, we weren't supposed to talk to each other so much, but in, in the conversations we had, it was kind of interesting how much my instincts were to compare things to like phones and tablets. And you can see how the TVs relate to what these companies do on their phones and tablets. So I was looking at the Samsung and I was like, oh, that looks like a Samsung. Like I have looked at a lot of Samsung screens over the years and boy, does Samsung like nuclear colors. Yeah. Samsung has a move for sure. Yeah. It's like, oh, and they're, and they were like, why do they do that? I'm like, I don't know, they just always do that.

• 40:35Nilay Patel?

  Like every Samsung split ever looked at has just been incredibly bright and colorful, even at the expense of accuracy. And that was, it was kind of interesting to just have that other perspective in the room. They obviously knew more on the technical elements of the displays, like they were, they kept bringing up the reference curves on the reference display. Oh, wow. And being like, see this? And I'd be like, it's a line.

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  Make it brighter. And eventually, you know, you start to pick up on what they were showing you. But it was just like, it was interesting to have that other perspective. So the fascinating thing about all of this is this is the year that Sony made a big bet on mini LED TVs as opposed to OLEDs. So Sony's still selling a bunch of OLEDs. Their flagship TV is still on OLED. That's the A95L. That's a year old now. That came out last year, last September, basically. But, you know, we're basically a year into it and the A95L won again. Well, you just won the shootout.

• 41:33Alex Cranz?

  Last year's TV.

• 41:34Nilay Patel?

  Last year's TV won the shootout. That's a quantum OLED. So there's a wider color gamut. We think it's a Samsung panel. It pretty much is Samsung panel. And then this year's Samsung OLED, we think is the, like, the next generation quantum OLED. But Samsung is Samsung and they did some weird stuff with colors. And like, it lost by just like point one.

• 41:57Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 41:57Nilay Patel?

  Right? It was just a little bit behind in some things because...

• 42:00Alex Cranz?

  And then LG was at the back?

• 42:02Nilay Patel?

  And so this is a really weird thing is the 65-inch LG G4 performed much worse than the 83-inch LG G4. And the calibrators in the room who have been like setting up these TVs for different people are like, this is the story with these TVs. The 55 and then the 77 and up, all great. The 65 seems to be worse.

• 42:26Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no, I have to go get a new TV.

• 42:28Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, like, one takeaway I'll give everyone is like the OLEDs were so close to each other that it was taking like three times the amount of time to score them as compared to the reference because you had to see where the differences are. Whereas on the mini LED side, you're like, okay, the LG is bad. No one knows what Samsung is doing. And then the Sony's pretty good, but I can see these big problems, right?

• 42:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:51Nilay Patel?

  And so the game on that first day was you had the reference display. That was showing ideally what, you know, the studio or whoever wants you to see in the picture. That's the reference display.

• 43:03David Pierce?

  Wait, can I ask a really dumb question?

• 43:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:05David Pierce?

  Is a reference display like the best one? Like, is that?

• 43:09Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 43:10David Pierce?

  Should, is that how we should think about reference display is like, this is the perfect television?

• 43:14Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 43:14Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 43:15Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Yes and no. I'll agree with Alex partially, but no, it's the most accurate representation of like the content.

• 43:23David Pierce?

  So it's the one that like changes the least through the whole pipeline?

• 43:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like you have a display and it is ideally the same display as the person who did the color on the movie.

• 43:38David Pierce?

  Got it. Okay.

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  Or it's a display that performs identically to that display.

• 43:42Alex Cranz?

  But it's also like, it does stuff that an OLED just can't do, right? Like, like a reference display is gonna do a much smoother gradient of color than, than an OLED's capable of. You're gonna see those weird stepping, that stepping issue in an OLED.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  Right, so these, these Sony BBMs were a dual-layer LCD, so they, they were able to do it. Right, they had some capabilities, OLEDs didn't.

• 44:04Alex Cranz?

  Sorry.

• 44:04Nilay Patel?

  They also have giant ass fans in them, so they could run really bright for a very long time. All the OLEDs were dimming. You could see it.

• 44:12David Pierce?

  And you said they're what, like $40,000?

• 44:14Nilay Patel?

  $40,000.

• 44:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, cool, okay.

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  Interestingly, though.

• 44:16Alex Cranz?

  And they're also small.

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  And they're, they're smaller. But interestingly, to your point, Alex, the QD OLEDs have the capability of displaying more colors than these reference displays. So there's places where they actually aren't as capable as the televisions.

• 44:31Alex Cranz?

  Right, cuz.

• 44:31Nilay Patel?

  And so there were, there were scenes, I forget which movie it specifically was, where we were, it was, I think it was like the, the Saber fight in Rogue One, or Darth Vader's like lighting people up. And spoiler, I mean Rogue One is itself a spoiler.

• 44:45Alex Cranz?

  Really good one for that.

• 44:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's great. Um, spoiler Darth Vader kills people in a Star Wars movie.

• 44:50David Pierce?

  What?

• 44:51Alex Cranz?

  Oh no.

• 44:52Nilay Patel?

  But one of the questions there was like, is this accurate? Because the people who made the movie were just sort of mastering to whatever set of colors, but they couldn't see them. So then it's like, is it different? Is it bad? It was kind of, that was pretty interesting, right?

• 45:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 45:07Nilay Patel?

  And so the, the reason that the first day was objective, but the goal was one out of five, how much is this the same as the reference display? Which is a really interesting way of thinking about it, a picture. Cause sometimes you're like, this is better. I think this is better than the reference display, but it was different. So you knocked it down. And that took a while to get your head around, basically.

• 45:27Alex Cranz?

  This is where like I just accuracy is king for me in TVs. Cause I've done the calibration, like I went to to ISF and did like the week long course with them and everything. So I love the accuracy. And so when I hear like, oh, the Samsung is probably doing more, displaying more reds. Well, those reds were never intended to be displayed according to the reference monitor. So is that actually better? No, because that's

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 45:53Alex Cranz?

  They like the director could never have decided that. So therefore it's not better. And we see that a lot with like classic film too, like all of the, all the stuff they captured on Technicolor is so much more vibrant. And that was before we even had color spaces as like a concept. And, uh, and so it's just totally different and it's weird. It's just weird.

• 46:13David Pierce?

  So you're a real like, what did the, what did the founding fathers intend?

• 46:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, I'm a founder's intent. I'm, uh, me and Scalia are just over there.

• 46:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you are truly the Anton and Scalia of TV calibrations.

• 46:25David Pierce?

  Whereas Neela is just like, what looks sick now? Like it's 2024, baby, giving them reds.

• 46:31Nilay Patel?

  I famously love a Samsung display.

• 46:35David Pierce?

  How many frame TVs do you own?

• 46:37Nilay Patel?

  Not even in the mix. I'm just, I was just putting it out there. I'm sitting next to like a hundred inch frame TV and it's like the TV quality of frame compared to all of these is like meh.

• 46:48Alex Cranz?

  That's why you're back to it.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  Can you describe a picture quality as present? Because that is Samsung appears. That's what a Samsung frame TV looks like. Well, fascinating on the mini OLEDs. Oh, it's all really close. Alex, like, um, some color stuff aside in this, like, you know, the fact that the cutie OLEDs have a wider color gamut is like kind of interesting. But like outside of that context, it would be almost impossible to tell them apart.

• 47:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:13Nilay Patel?

  And that, and honestly, it was like, the way you could tell was it was taking so long for people to score them. Because the difference between a four and a five is like, am I seeing any? It's like, what is it? It was only the LG that was like. It just was really muddy and dark scenes. It just like, didn't have the detail and dark scenes that the other ones did. Weird. On the mini LED side, everyone was like, alright, that one's bad. This one's good. Except for the Sony, because Sony is putting so much emphasis on mini LED this year. Like they're the Bravia 9, which apart from the A95 is like the flagship. It's the one they're pushing. All mini LEDs, they get hella bright because they're just LCD TVs with an LED backlight. And you're like, oh, this tech has a long way to go and it could get there, but it's nowhere close. Like they look kind of washed out.

• 47:57Nilay Patel?

  The colors are a little shifted. The detail isn't quite there. They're still a little blooming. So if you think about how a mini LED backlight works, it's just another screen of pixels behind the screen that light up. Like it's a lower res screen behind the screen that lights up to produce light. And it has to match what's on the screen in real time. So you get true, so they're off when there's something black and they're lit when there's something on the screen. So if there's any latency, you see blooming, right? Or if the zone is too big, because it's not one to one, you see blooming. And so you can see in the algorithms are like trying to manage all of this as fast as they can with as little latency as possible. The Samsung was like all over the place.

• 48:40Nilay Patel?

  Like sometimes like this just looks like a regular, like local dimming TV. Sony was much better, but still had the problems. And then all of them, because they're LCDs, their viewing angles aren't as good as the OLEDs and they're huge, right? These 65 inch, 83 inch TVs we're looking at. So if you were too close to them, even just moving an inch or two to the left or right, shifted all the color and brightness. And you're like, oh, we're just not close. Like Sony is trying the hardest here, but we're not close.

• 49:08Alex Cranz?

  I, I just, I don't understand why we would go backwards on viewing angle.

• 49:12Nilay Patel?

  Cause they're cheaper, because you can get 83 inch TV for much cheaper and it's very bright and it's very impressive. And outside of that room full of the most incredible display nerds I've ever met in my entire life, and I want all of them to come home with me tomorrow. Outside of that room, I think it would be very hard to tell these TVs apart. But it was like, just that experience of paying such close attention to one quality of these products with other people who are doing that same task. It was like very refreshing to me. We weren't judging whether or not Tizen is any good compared to WebOS. We weren't judging how many HDMI 2.1 ports the Sony TV has. Not enough. Right? Like, none of that stuff, game mode, all that. We were like, can this picture be calibrated to match a reference monitor and which one comes closer?

• 49:57Nilay Patel?

  And that, I, I, there's just a part of that, having reviewed so many products over the years, and had to think about so many things. It's like, oh, this is actually a really interesting way of thinking about these products specifically.

• 50:09David Pierce?

  Was there consistent agreement among the, what was it, eight panelists? That's a lot of people to all point at this same, like, it's both objective and subjective in a certain way. Like, did everybody tend to agree on everything?

• 50:20Nilay Patel?

  Um, we weren't, we were all so excited to be there that when we started judging, we were all chattering, and then we were like, told to stop.

• 50:28David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so our score, I don't know what everybody else scored. You know, like, a worry for me is, like, the consumer reviewer in the group, uh, was that I had no idea what I was talking about. I was like, man, I hope my scores are close. Um, and they were. In the end, you know, the, the average, the averages that were released and the rankings that were released were exactly as I had thought them.

• 50:48David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 50:48Nilay Patel?

  So I feel like I was in the mainstream, you know?

• 50:51David Pierce?

  I think the one LG stand in the room who's like, I love blooming.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  That LG Mini LED is not good. Like, it's like a half-hearted, and to be fair, it was the cheapest TV on display.

• 51:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 51:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, by thousands of dollars, so.

• 51:06Alex Cranz?

  They put all their efforts into OLEDs anyway. Like, they just farted that out.

• 51:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, let's hedge our bet a little bit. Like, maybe this is the thing. Um, but yeah, they have the micro lens array, which increases the brightness on their OLEDs. Like I said, the, the three OLEDs were so close to each other, you can tell that it's a mature technology. Right? It's, it's just hit a point of refinement where you have to care a lot about extremely, like, arcane picture details. And Alex, I think you and, you and I vibe on this. Like,

• 51:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  I care a lot about arcane picture details. The Mini LED is, is like, all over it. My, my notes on the color for the Sony Bravia 9 were, was just the single sentence, colors all over the map. Like, just all over the place. Like, who knows what's going on here? So that was like, the first day. The second day was much more subjective. They took down the 65s, they put up the biggest available sizes for all the TVs. So that was 77 for the Sony, 83 for the LG, 85 for the Mini LEDs. And the Roberts on the owner was like, I've never had more people ask for a head to head comparison of two TVs than people ask for the LG G4 83 versus the Sony Mini LED 85. Cause they're very, they're very price competitive and one is obviously bigger, right?

• 52:21Nilay Patel?

  TVs, people love big cheap screens. So he's like, this is what everyone wants to see. So those two are right next to each other and the LG just wiped the floor.

• 52:29Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 52:30Nilay Patel?

  So much better, just incredibly better. And the fact that the LG 83 was so much better than 65, that's what everyone talked about. But we weren't doing the intense reference comparison on today. They took them, they, they set them up out of the box. They turned on filmmaker mode to turn off all the bullshit. And they turned off energy saver because energy saver brings the brightness down.

• 52:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Energy saver is the number one thing you should turn off on your display. I mean, destroy, destroy the environment, but just go turn, if you have it on right now, go turn it off.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  Right. It just significantly reduces the brightness of your panel. So they turn off energy saver and they put them in filmmaker mode, or I think Sony calls it professional mode, just turns off all the stuff. And they let them run out of the box. And that's where like Samsung was the most Samsung, like here, colors, do you like them?

• 53:16Nilay Patel?

  And I, you know, the, the LG, the 83 inch LG just, it was just a great picture, right? Like it, it was right behind the Sony in that evaluation, but we weren't doing numbers. We were just sort of ranking one, two, three for all the clips that we saw. And I, at the end, and we can just wrap it up here, at the end, I was basically put the Samsung QD OLED, the S95D and the Sony LED were in a tie for me. It was hard, it was hard for me to decide because the Samsung colors were so all over the place. And the Sony's backlight was so all over the place and the viewing angles were weird. And I couldn't decide. And in the end I was like, it's an OLED because I know the Samsung can be calibrated. And I know the Sony can't. So that's how I picked. Again, like my takeaway from this was one, I should spend more time in rooms with huge nerds.

• 54:01Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  Cause those are my people.

• 54:04Alex Cranz?

  And I would say what, like a hundred thousand dollars worth of TVs on a wall in front of you?

• 54:08Nilay Patel?

  I mean, like this store is out of control. Like that's just the TVs. We didn't even talk about the audio side of the store.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Scarsdale is a wealthy town. This may like, we're moving product. It was great. And he sells, you know, all over the country and they've been doing it for a long time. The room was full of Sony's actual mark, like product people, not just.

• 54:28David Pierce?

  So this like matters. This is not just like a small town bunch of nerds. This is like.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. No, TV shootout is a thing. There's a press release and like a whole thing. Like there are YouTubers there making YouTube videos. There are YouTubers live streaming with the calibrators, just talking TVs in the back room.

• 54:44David Pierce?

  I already assigned you like 10,000 words on the calibrators. So that's coming.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  That's actually a great name for a show, The Calibrators.

• 54:51David Pierce?

  It is pretty good.

• 54:52Alex Cranz?

  I would, I would watch.

• 54:54David Pierce?

  And the picture, over the course of every episode, the picture just gets slightly better.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, that's my TV story. I finally got to talk about it. It's on the site now. You should go read it. I'm sorry if you have an LGG4 and you, it's a great TV. You're fine. Don't listen to me. Just give it a 10. Just say.

• 55:11David Pierce?

  Alex is so disappointed.

• 55:13Alex Cranz?

  I'm, I'm okay. I'm okay. I'm working through it. I'll be fine.

• 55:17David Pierce?

  Alex, if you want, I'll take your crappy TV. Anyone who would like to give me their very good TVs, I will happily take them with no complaints whatsoever.

• 55:25Alex Cranz?

  You just be like, oh, it's so crappy. Oh, it's terrible.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  Can I say one more thing? At the, at the opening of this whole event, they're talking about the TVs and like what they are and all this stuff. And they said two things. One, they're like TCL and Hi-Sense aren't here. They asked not to be included in a competition.

• 55:44David Pierce?

  Cause they were gonna lose.

• 55:45Nilay Patel?

  You can just, you can just read into that. And then later, Robert was like, one year Vizio was here and it was embarrassing for them.

• 55:50David Pierce?

  Oh boy.

• 55:51Nilay Patel?

  So that's, you can read into that whatever you want.

• 55:53Alex Cranz?

  Vizio rough.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  It's a real like, I will not be running for president in 2024 kinds of vibes. Yeah.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Okay. That was it. That was my TV adventure. Thank you for joining me on this journey. This is why I started The Verge, so I could sit in a room full of TVs.

• 56:08David Pierce?

  Do you think they'll invite you back next year? Did you do a good enough job?

• 56:11Nilay Patel?

  I hope so.

• 56:12Alex Cranz?

  I hope. Can, can, can we come with you? Just, we'll, we'll be quiet. We'll just stand there.

• 56:16David Pierce?

  Alex and I will livestream it next year.

• 56:18Nilay Patel?

  I asked Chris Welch if he wanted to come with you next year and he goes, I don't want to get into that level of smoke.

• 56:25David Pierce?

  I respect that. Yeah.

• 56:27Nilay Patel?

  It was great. All right. We should talk about just a handful of regulatory things. What do you want to call them? But the main one that I really want to spend just a minute on

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  is Apple and it it just can't give itself a break when it comes to the App Store and fees. Like it's in trouble all over the world, right? It has an antitrust lawsuit in this country, in the EU. Various charming European bureaucrats wake up every morning thinking about ways to troll Tim Cook on Twitter. Like this company is under a lot of pressure and then it won't just do things that make its life easier. I don't know how to describe this, but this I'm just, I'm going to tell you this story and you, you, if people out there can figure out why Apple did this, let us know. So Patreon exists, right? You can be a fan of someone, you can

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  pay them some money to do whatever people on Patreon do, knit clothes, make video games, whatever it is, Patreon.

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  They've been in a gray zone with the App Store for years because you can pay people money in Patreon and they haven't been charging the fee, but they haven't been giving Apple the 30%. And I actually had Patreon CEO Jack Conte on Decoder a while ago and I said, have you ever talked to Apple about this? Like, are you an exception? And he was like, no, please stop talking about it. Right? Like, they know they're in this gray area.

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  Okay. And there, there have been other companies that want to do Patreon like things, like this little company FanHouse, right? And they did a whole pressure campaign to say, why are you charging our creators 30%? Like, this is unfair. You're providing no value to them.

• 58:06David Pierce?

  Right. And the, because the idea is if you sign up for a creator subscription inside of the app, Apple will treat that as an in-app purchase and take its 30%, right?

• 58:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:17David Pierce?

  Okay. So they, they see signing up for whatever my favorite podcast on Patreon the same as signing up for Spotify through the app.

• 58:26Nilay Patel?

  Sure. And if you want to be very pedantic, that is probably the correct interpretation.

• 58:32David Pierce?

  Except that for years it wasn't. Like, that feels important to keep saying.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  Particularly for Patreon, they have been in this gray area for years. You, you are a Patreon creator, you sign up for Patreon, you agree, your Patreon is going to take 8% and you're going to take the rest of the money. That's it's fine. That's a fine deal. Apple's like, well, we are 30% before Patreon takes 8%. So now it someone did the math, instead of needing 1,000 true fans, which is the number everybody always says, you need 1,554 fans, like, to make the same money that you were doing before. That's weird. And it is weird because Apple doesn't need this fight right now. Because it's under all of this pressure for whether or not these fees are fair, whether the App Store is fair, whether Apple has too much power in the market overall, antitrust lawsuit in this country.

• 59:24Alex Cranz?

  I figured out why they did it.

• 59:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 59:26Alex Cranz?

  So whoever sent the email and was like, okay, we're gonna, we're gonna, we're gonna start charging the 30% of Patreon is actually like, was placed there by someone else to just make Apple give up.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  This is like the United States Department of Justice sleeper agent.

• 59:41Alex Cranz?

  Somebody like, like, like, they're, they're just a spy or something and they were sitting, because it just, it doesn't, but why would you do that?

• 59:47Nilay Patel?

  Tonight on the calibrators.

• 59:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the calibrators went in. They like, they like, they parachuted in. And they were like, okay, we're gonna do this so that we give even more ammunition for when we go after Apple, for all the things we're going after Apple for, around the 30%.

• 1:00:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, maybe. It just seems like there are ways to make your life easier and there are ways to make your life harder. Pissing off a bunch of independent creators to whom you are providing no value. Right? You can make the argument that Apple provides a lot of value to its developers. Right? They make the APIs, they ship the platform, they run some of the services, they make X code. Sure, that's very debatable, like, truly debatable.

• 1:00:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:32Nilay Patel?

  But you can make the argument, and a lot of people have, if you are a Patreon creator, no value is coming your way from Apple. Here, it actually comes from Patreon and you're already paying them money.

• 1:00:43Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  So like, why, Apple showing up and be like, we want 30%, that, it's just like, too much. And I suspect a lot of these Patreon creators are going to tell their audiences about it. And now Apple is right in a fight with creatives that they sort of keep walking into. Like their crush ad that they had to apologize for.

• 1:01:01Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, why? They just keep making their life harder with these creatives. And I just don't know for what money, like, how, like, if you took 30% of all of Patreon's revenue and you gave it to Tim Cook, he'd be like, get out of my face.

• 1:01:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:15Nilay Patel?

  Like, this is nothing.

• 1:01:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Nilay Patel?

  Like, this isn't even gas for the jet.

• 1:01:20David Pierce?

  It probably isn't. The only thing I can think is that Apple is desperately trying to get to a place where it can say with a straight face that it enforces all of its rules equally. Because one of the things that has happened to Apple over and over is that it keeps saying, "These are the rules and we were very clear about them and we apply them to everybody." And then every 15 minutes, we hear about a sweetheart deal that somebody has from Apple. Right? And there are, the rules exist, except for all of the exceptions to the rules. And I think if you're Apple, one thing to do would be to say, "Okay, we're gonna need to be able to stand up to regulators and say, 'Look, these are the rules. They exist for everybody.

• 1:02:02David Pierce?

  Everybody follows them equally.'" I don't think that's a good strategy. I don't think it's gonna work. But I think if you're Apple, it is at least one way to be able to say with a straight face, "Look, these are the rules. We're clear about them. You don't have to play by them anymore because you can go to Alt Store or whatever, but these are the rules." I think doing this this way, and particularly in these very like haphazard ways that Apple seems to be doing this, is deeply bizarre. But I think if you're Apple, I cannot think of another reason to pick this particular fight with Patreon right now, other than that.

• 1:02:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, so just to be clear on some of the timing, they told Patreon this was gonna happen a while ago, and now it's just happening. But there's no reason that it should be happening. So that's like, it's not that they woke up yesterday and were like, "Patreon's gonna pass." They said, "Here's a big notice period and now it's happening and now Patreon is communicating about it." So a more delayed timeline. But still, even if you want to make the argument, we have perfect enforcement of these rules. There are no exceptions. You're still walking into, and we've pissed everyone off along the way. I'll give you another example. Apple is going to allow Spotify to show pricing in its app in the EU.

• 1:03:13Nilay Patel?

  Just the, the thing that is happening is that Spotify is going to put numbers in its app. You still can't buy Spotify in the app.

• 1:03:22David Pierce?

  There, there's a, there's, I really encourage everyone, if you're not driving to, we'll put this link in the show notes, but open it up and look at the side by side screenshots, because it is this like big dramatic regulatory moment in this long-term fight between Apple and Spotify. It's a big deal. And then you look at the side by side screenshots and they are identical, except that one of them says 1799 per month, 1499 per month, and the other doesn't. That's it.

• 1:03:49Nilay Patel?

  And this took like, you know, one of the more powerful government entities in world history to like force the one of the richest companies in world history to let another company show numbers. And you're like, what is the point of this fight? Who gives one solitary shit? It's like, you can't possibly care. This cannot matter to your bottom line so much. Or, and it can't be such a good argument that your rules are so evenly enforced that you're willing to die on this hill over displaying literally 1799 in the Spotify app.

• 1:04:20David Pierce?

  But they

• 1:04:21Nilay Patel?

  Not even letting people buy stuff. Just showing the price that you can get on the web versus in the app.

• 1:04:26David Pierce?

  The only part of that I would take issue with is the, it can't possibly matter so much to your bottom line. I mean, like, Apple just reported earnings. It's super, super does matter to Apple's bottom line. And especially if you're Apple, looking at a world in which Google is no longer legally allowed to give you $20 billion every year. Like, this stuff matters an awful lot to Apple. And, and suddenly the, the, the rent that you get to extract from everyone in the App Store goes from a like, small but meaningful part of your business to like a giant and meaningful part of your business.

• 1:04:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:58Alex Cranz?

  Do you think that's part of it too? Is just they, their, their services, because they've been bundling that 20 billion into the services reporting, right?

• 1:05:06David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's the lion's share of both the services revenue and Apple's profits.

• 1:05:10Alex Cranz?

  And, and they've been really big on, yeah, this is, this is, our services is doing great. And now it's going to be like, no, and actually it doesn't.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, the Google remedy is years away.

• 1:05:19Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:05:20Nilay Patel?

  So reacting to the Google case, like clamping down on Patreon.

• 1:05:24Alex Cranz?

  That would be hysterical.

• 1:05:25Nilay Patel?

  A little short sighted. Again, I, I think, I don't think it's gas for the jet. Like, it is not a huge amount of money. But I think their general attitude towards all of these regulators and all these courts saying, yep, these platforms need to open up, has basically been to put a middle finger in the air instead of figuring out how to innovate.

• 1:05:45Alex Cranz?

  Mm hmm.

• 1:05:46Nilay Patel?

  Right? And like, icky. I like, I just, I'm just saying, they could make their lives easier, not harder, and they are consistently choosing harder.

• 1:05:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  It is bizarre to me. There's a little more regulatory stuff to talk about because this comes right next to the judge in the epic Google antitrust case, saying he will tear the barriers down on the Play Store. Because he ruled that the Play Store was a monopoly. And he's like, we're opening up the Play Store in the United States. The, obviously, the court in the Google search case, found that there was a monopoly. And then Google's ad tech case kicks off in early September. And that probably is not going to go port. Like, of all of the cases where we're going to see a bunch of emails of Google executives saying shady things about money, the ad tech case is the one.

• 1:06:35Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:06:36Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:06:36Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna be great.

• 1:06:37Nilay Patel?

  That's the one.

• 1:06:37Alex Cranz?

  It's so boring and so consequential.

• 1:06:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. So you just see like, Google is under all of this pressure and the, the judges in these cases and the regulators in the EU are like, we're gonna tear this company apart. And Apple's sitting there with the big open antitrust case to come.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  And obviously, empowered Justice Department, because they just won the big Google trial and they got the next one coming. And then a bunch of EU regulators who are doing, and it's like, why are you signaling to all of these people that your response to this, putting your finger in the air? Like, it's not gonna work. Because they're winning right now against Google in a real way. And maybe Google is more cuddly than Apple, maybe people like Apple better than Google. However those optics feel, they're on the hunt and they're winning. And so like, if you, I don't know, there's just something weird about this.

• 1:07:24Alex Cranz?

  I was like, it's bad optics to go take a cut of 30% from a whole bunch of creators who don't make a lot of, most of them aren't making a ton of money, right? Like, that's bad optics. It's just such an unforced error. It feels like them just stepping in rakes constantly. They're just sideshow Bob.

• 1:07:41Nilay Patel?

  If you know what the strategy here is, please let us know because I'm dying to know. If you even want to concoct a strategy, we are not being successful at it. But there's a thing happening like broadly in the world of tech right now where the regulators are winning. And the platforms are being pried open and distribution is getting a little crazier. And it's like, kind of interesting for us, right? Like, it means more interesting things are happening. Like, Alt Store is just a thing that's happening in EU. Emulators are happening all over the iPhone right now because of EU regulation. The emulators are cool, like they're downstream of some boring lawyer stuff. But now you can run DOS on your iPhone.

• 1:08:19David Pierce?

  Right. Well, and it's worth pointing out how big a shift all of that is from even, let's say, 12 months ago. Like, I, I think the, the bet this time last year would not have been on huge wins for the US government in particular. Right? It was, it was perceived that the EU had wildly overstepped its bounds and that that was all going to get very weird. But like, LinaCon was having a really bad time picking fights with tech companies and it wasn't going well and it didn't go well. And over and over, this sense was like, what, what is happening here? The tech companies are going to keep winning. Apple was kind of winning against Epic. Google lost, but in kind of a like, not necessarily quite as terrifying way.

• 1:09:01David Pierce?

  It just, it, the momentum felt very different not that long ago. And I think it has maybe not caught up to everybody how quickly and aggressively it seems like the wins on all of that stuff have changed.

• 1:09:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:14David Pierce?

  And in part because of what you're saying, the things like the emulators, right? Like with every little crack, like product changes are happening. And there was the, the one just this week with Apple opening up Tap to Pay stuff. Like, that's been in the antitrust trials. That is one of the things that Apple has kept really aggressive control over. Like, we talked a lot about digital wallets on the show when this came out because like, and that's the kind of stuff that is making big changes just because of the threat of regulatory action, right? Like, all this stuff is going to take a decade to play out, but it doesn't matter because as soon as it starts playing out. It all changes.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I, I just think we're on the cusp of, and we've talked about this a million times on the show. It just feels like everything is about to change, like the internet's about to change, our social networks are about to change, search is about to change. And then this stuff is going to break these companies open. I am hopeful we see a round of interesting, new, innovative companies and products and ideas. I'm also a little worried that like mostly we're going to get lawsuits and I'm going to try to talk about mini LED TVs every week and instead have to read PDFs. Even on this own show, we have now sandwiched the television discussion inside of antitrust conversations. I don't know why this keeps happening to me, but my solemn promise to all of you is that anytime we talk about antitrust, I will bring up all my televisions.

• 1:10:28David Pierce?

  I actually believe that. Yeah.

• 1:10:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. We're gonna come back with the lightning round and I'll be in a third chair.

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• 1:12:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I'm in what I think of as the homeboy chairs.

• 1:12:10Alex Cranz?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, when you got the NBA players in here during the podcast, this is where the homeboys sit.

• 1:12:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:17David Pierce?

  You look like you should be like, you look like a professor during the pandemic who like went a little hard on redecorating the home office.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  That's right. That's also this look, you know, sidekick, homeboys, professor with an axe to grind.

• 1:12:35Alex Cranz?

  The slats are like, it's very trippy. It's a good, it's a good look.

• 1:12:40Nilay Patel?

  We bought very similar slats for the studio at my house and, you know, I don't know whose fault this is or if this is racist, but we forgot to consider that they're the same color as me.

• 1:12:52Nilay Patel?

  So we had to stain the slats.

• 1:12:54Alex Cranz?

  Just turn to the side, you'll disappear in the frame.

• 1:12:58Nilay Patel?

  So again, anyway, this is, I'm in the loose hangout. You might call this the hype desk.

• 1:13:03David Pierce?

  It's a Vergecast throwback.

• 1:13:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:05David Pierce?

  One could call it that.

• 1:13:06Nilay Patel?

  One could say we are now in the market for someone to sit in the hype desk in a Vergecast once again, because we have a hype zone over here in the studio.

• 1:13:15David Pierce?

  The as-yet-un-sponsored, un-launched hype desk.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  Look, once we get this lightning round sponsored, we're moving on.

• 1:13:24Nilay Patel?

  But now that I'm in the hype desk, I think, David, that makes, you gotta run the lightning round. And I'm just gonna say whether or not things are hype.

• 1:13:30David Pierce?

  Okay, good. Well, now that, now that I'm in charge, I've picked six things for the lightning round.

• 1:13:36Nilay Patel?

  Classic, classic lightning round.

• 1:13:38David Pierce?

  No, at Krantz, let's, let's, let's start with you. You have a fun gadgety one, so you go first.

• 1:13:42Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah, I got a fun gadgety one. So, so RealMe is a Chinese phone maker and they make phones. I don't wanna, I don't wanna make a big assessment on the quality of those phones.

• 1:13:52David Pierce?

  They are phones. We can say that with confidence.

• 1:13:55Alex Cranz?

  And they are really into like making the charging better and faster. And they introduced 320 watt fast charging.

• 1:14:04Alex Cranz?

  Just.

• 1:14:05Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 1:14:06Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's, they're doing, they said they could do a battery in four minutes and 30 seconds, like a Pixel 9 battery.

• 1:14:12David Pierce?

  Wait, isn't the plug I have in the wall like seven and a half watts? And I'm pretty sure, like 30 is like very fast.

• 1:14:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so this is, this is insane. Unclear if it will burst into flames as soon as you plug it in. Unclear if it'll set your phone on fire.

• 1:14:27Nilay Patel?

  Do you need like a, like a Thunderbolt 4 style cable, like a big, thick braided?

• 1:14:32Alex Cranz?

  I wouldn't feel comfortable using.

• 1:14:34Nilay Patel?

  You're not sending this through like a, like a flimsy, like lightning cable, right?

• 1:14:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is not what you want to use, like that random cable you found at the bottom of your desk. Don't, don't use that for this.

• 1:14:43Nilay Patel?

  You're plugging like a CCS charger into your phone.

• 1:14:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. So it's USB C right now.

• 1:14:50Nilay Patel?

  What can't USB C do except tell you what it's doing?

• 1:14:53Alex Cranz?

  But they haven't really like, there's no phones that's really fully supported out in the wild. It's just technology. They just said, we did it. This was kind of their, they were doing their roadshow and showing off their, their new technology. And it was like, yeah, we're going to do this soon. So at some point, we're going to have phones charging in four minutes and that'll rule unless they catch on fire.

• 1:15:15Nilay Patel?

  Can I just say my, my favorite part of the story is, I mean, the story is great. We should try to run faster. The press image they supplied is incredible. It's just like a happy guy standing in front of a screen. It says 320 watt supersonic charge and he just pleased his punch.

• 1:15:31Alex Cranz?

  What, what else do you need? That's all you need. Like, that's how I feel when I read 320 watts. I'm like, okay, yeah, same feeling.

• 1:15:38Nilay Patel?

  Like, I wish I was giving this presentation right now. Like, I, I truly, can we get the words 320 watt supersonic charge in this TV, please?

• 1:15:46David Pierce?

  They also call, they call the charger the pocket cannon, which is unbelievable.

• 1:15:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just, that's great.

• 1:15:53Nilay Patel?

  Tremendous.

• 1:15:54Alex Cranz?

  Everything about it's wonderful and, but we'll have to see if it actually does it not just in a demo.

• 1:16:02David Pierce?

  I will say, I have for years thought that the thing that all these companies say that it's like, you know, the battery is trash, but it charges pretty fast. You can get from zero to 50% in 35 minutes. I've always kind of thought that was nothing. Like, who cares? But the idea of fully charging my phone in four and a half minutes, it's like, okay, I can plug in my phone. I can brush my teeth and my phone is going to be at like 70% is awesome.

• 1:16:27Nilay Patel?

  You can also heat a small village. You can fry one egg.

• 1:16:33Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. You can.

• 1:16:34David Pierce?

  I do like the idea of both turning my oven on and charging my phone at the same time.

• 1:16:39Alex Cranz?

  No, I think you'll blow a circuit breaker if you do that.

• 1:16:42David Pierce?

  No, it's like, it's like a hot plate and a phone charger all in one little gizmo on my table.

• 1:16:48Nilay Patel?

  This is great. The, the street, the streetlights for miles around dim when David plugs in his phone.

• 1:16:54Nilay Patel?

  I'm just looking at this photo, this guy smiling at the words 320 watt supersonic charge. And I think more of the tech industry should be like this.

• 1:17:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:02Nilay Patel?

  That's what I have for you.

• 1:17:03David Pierce?

  I will take a pocket cannon.

• 1:17:06David Pierce?

  Feel like I probably not allowed to say that on a podcast, but yeah, here we are. All right. I have two. The first one, I actually should have brought this up, up at the top where we were talking about all the AI image processing stuff. But Halide, a very good camera app for iPhones and iPads, launched a thing this week called Process Zero. That is basically just a setting inside of their app that instead of running every photo you take through either Apple's, I think they offer Apple's standard image processing, the ProRAW processing. And then a thing they call reduced, which is just kind of a light version of Apple's processing, runs it through no processing. So you get, you get what is supposed to be as close to like a film camera experience as possible. You just get the light it collects, the end.

• 1:17:50David Pierce?

  A, super cool feature. It got a lot of people very excited, this idea that like, we, we can actually choose to go another way. It's going to make some of your photos meaningfully worse. It's going to change them in certain ways, but I think that idea of like, not only do I get to pick like where I am in the photo, which is weird, but like I have actual real control over what is happening to my photo every time I capture it. Is very cool. Also, just the idea that a camera on your phone can have that kind of access is very cool and not a thing I really understood until I started writing about this thing that like it's again, it's just collecting sensor data. And if you give apps like how I'd access to that sensor data, there's all kinds of interesting stuff they're going to be able

• 1:18:33David Pierce?

  to do with it. And I just think that's very cool and a sort of rich vein that at least to my knowledge, nobody has really explored. And I think that's really cool.

• 1:18:42Alex Cranz?

  If you don't know a lot about photography, don't use that feature. All your photos are gonna look like trash.

• 1:18:47Nilay Patel?

  Disagree. This is how you learn a lot about photography.

• 1:18:51Alex Cranz?

  That's true. I'm assuming of like the 70 year old who listens to the Vergecast and is like, you know what? I want to, this sounds cool. I want to, I want to put this on my phone.

• 1:19:01Nilay Patel?

  No, that person, what are you doing with your time?

• 1:19:03Alex Cranz?

  It's my mom.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  Get out there. Oh, I see. Got it. Understood. So just Alex's mom.

• 1:19:11Alex Cranz?

  Don't do it. Everyone else.

• 1:19:12Nilay Patel?

  I've hung out with your mom before, Alex. I'll teach her about, about digital photography.

• 1:19:16Alex Cranz?

  You say that now. That'll be a great four hour Vergecast.

• 1:19:20Nilay Patel?

  I think people will listen to it. Talk about a Patreon. Just me and your mom.

• 1:19:26Nilay Patel?

  But what's really interesting here is Pocket Point and Shoot digital cameras are making a tiny blip of a comeback, particularly with younger folks, because they see how bad the processing on their phones has gotten, and they don't want to be always connected. Like, my nieces and nephews are all carrying around Powershot Elfs. And I'm like, I made a lot of mistakes with those cameras. Don't do what I did. But it's fascinating to see that little comeback. Is it meaningful? Is it the threat to smartphone? No, none of that. But it is a pushback on how processed the photos are getting. And I think, you know, an app putting some of those photos into the phone might push the default cameras back towards sanity. And I'm kind of hoping Apple takes the hint.

• 1:20:12David Pierce?

  Right. There's

• 1:20:14Nilay Patel?

  They've overdone it. Samsung has overdone it for years. Google has been inching towards overdoing it. I think it's Apple that has taken kind of the most aggressive step from the 12 or the 13 to now, where it's just like, oh, these photos just look bananas.

• 1:20:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, I like the photos less on my iPhone 15 than I have in a long time from the iPhone. Like, I think in a certain way, they are technically better photos. I like them less. Like, my photos don't look like I feel like they should anymore on most smartphones. But the iPhone, I think, held out a long time, but that has kind of gone away.

• 1:20:50Alex Cranz?

  What is it that, I guess, because I maybe don't see it as much. What is it that you guys are seeing when you do that? Is it like, is it the color? Is it the dynamic range? All of it?

• 1:21:00Nilay Patel?

  It's all of it. The things for me, and I'm curious, David, since you have the same opinion, if you're seeing something different. For me, it's the iPhone is now just completely allergic to shadows. Just takes them away. It loves the sky. Like, nothing loves the sky like the iPhone camera loves the sky. So just like more sky.

• 1:21:20David Pierce?

  But not the sky as it is. Like, what if the sky was the best it has ever been in history all the time? Every time you take a photo.

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God, sky. Oh, turn up that sky knob.

• 1:21:30David Pierce?

  Yeah. You're like, oh, no, it's gray out today. And the iPhone's like, the fuck it is. Let's go.

• 1:21:35Nilay Patel?

  And then those things combined, if you're outside in a bright scene, it can actually make your photos gray. Right? So I was thinking about dynamics, like, if you're a music person, you know, dynamics are quiet and loud. Like, there's dynamics in photographs, too. And so if everything is bright, the perceived brightness of the whole image drops. And so the iPhone, by getting rid of shadows and pumping up the sky and then over, like, bringing everything up, actually makes the photo look dim. And I've seen influencers, like, complain about their iPhone cameras. And they're like, why does this camera so gray? Like, I think Alex Earl has made a video about why her camera appears to be gray. Right? And like, that's bad. Like, you don't want to be there, right?

• 1:22:17Nilay Patel?

  When you are the hardware of the entire creator economy, having the creators being like, why is my phone gray? And it's not because they're less bright. It's because if you destroy all the shadows and you make everything bright. Actually, everything looks dim. And that's just kind of a weird spot Apple's gone into. I don't know, David, is that what you're seeing here or is it something else?

• 1:22:35David Pierce?

  No, that's, that's basically right. And the, the other thing I keep noticing, and in the, the highlight story I wrote, there's a really interesting comparison shot where what Apple does by getting rid of shadows wherever it can and hyping up the brightness everywhere you can, is it just, it just flattens it all too. So there's a, there's a version of the shot that is like, it's a, it's the front of a flower shop. Uh, and so you see all this sort of the flowers and the pots in the front. And the photo was like crisper and brighter than the one that you got with the process zero thing that Halide is doing. But it's also much less like dynamic, the photo itself. There's no, there's no sense of sort of ups and downs. You get the sense the whole curve is just like bright. And it makes the whole thing look really flat, kind of like you're talking about, Neil.

• 1:23:18David Pierce?

  And it just, it makes all the photos less interesting in a way, like they're brighter and cooler and less interesting to me in, in so many ways.

• 1:23:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And there's other stuff there's doing, there's like weird sharpening. When you get in the low light iPhones just start freaking out.

• 1:23:32David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:23:33Nilay Patel?

  And like, not in a bad way, they're not like making technically bad photos. I think that's what you're getting at, David. They're just trying so hard to make a great photo that you lose the character of it. And then there's tons and tons and tons in processing, like.

• 1:23:45David Pierce?

  Right. And I think what you're seeing a lot of coming back with the, the point and shoots and the process zero stuff like this whole idea is like, I, people should be allowed to take bad photos. You know what I mean? And it's like, there's something to, if I'm standing in a dark room and I take a picture, maybe it's actually okay that the picture is dark. Like maybe, maybe that's okay. And, and sometimes that's what I want. And increasingly with these devices, uh, you are not allowed to take a dark photo. And I think that's just weird.

• 1:24:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to say a sentence that a small number of people will understand the significance of. Charlie XCX invited the Cobra Snake to her birthday party.

• 1:24:23Nilay Patel?

  That's a real thing. And if you were in your twenties in the early 2000s, you're like, oh, it's back. It's just fully back.

• 1:24:31David Pierce?

  We're just doing it again.

• 1:24:32Nilay Patel?

  That whole aesthetic is back. And like, we're just gonna do flash photos of drunk people. And like, let's do it. The iPhone can't do that shit.

• 1:24:40Nilay Patel?

  No one wants that.

• 1:24:41David Pierce?

  No, a bunch of squinting people with a flash on. That's what we're looking for.

• 1:24:44Nilay Patel?

  Oh, they're not squinting. Those eyes are dilated, my friend.

• 1:24:48David Pierce?

  Fair enough. Two check. All right. My other one, and then, Neel, we should get to you, and then we should get out of here, is Flipboard, which is, we've been sort of chronicling Flipboard's relentless quest to figure out the Fediverse, which I continue to find very interesting, turned on a thing that I think is actually very instructive in understanding how all of this is supposed to work, which is just that now you can follow Fediverse accounts, so like, people from Mastodon, or Pixelfed, or even on Threads, from inside of Flipboard, right? And it's like, if you want to understand the way the Fediverse is supposed to work, it's that where you make posts and where you read posts can be different, and that anybody can decide how those posts are supposed to look, and how they're supposed to work, and in what order they show up. And so like,

• 1:25:28David Pierce?

  the idea that you can do Mastodon inside of Flipboard is both like, mind bending and exactly the point. And so if you've like, wanted to understand how the Fediverse works, go to Flipboard and like, mess around with a bunch of Mastodon stuff. They've put together some lists, I think, one that includes you and Eli, because you're just a tremendously huge deal in the Fediverse. But like, that, I think this is the closest thing I have seen to like, telling the whole story of like, here is, here is what you get when all you have is just this mass of content that you can either build something that adds to, or build something that reads from, however you want. So I think that was very cool.

• 1:26:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:03David Pierce?

  That's awesome.

• 1:26:04Nilay Patel?

  Flipboard is way ahead of this curve, right? They've like, re-architected their app, or the way they're thinking about their app, around Activity Pub and these open protocols. And you kind of have, it, you know, in the broadest sense, like, the future of a browser.

• 1:26:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:19Nilay Patel?

  But it's bidirectional. Like, you take content in, you get to read it, and you can like, reply to it, and it goes right back to the person who made it. And it's pretty powerful.

• 1:26:28Nilay Patel?

  Like, nothing works with it yet. Right. Like, which is a problem, but you can just see, oh, there's like glimmers here of a new kind of web. I'm the one who keeps babbling on about how we're going to federate our site. You can see how our site would play with something like that. Right. Very quickly, but then you start to build it and we're trying to build it and it's like, oh, there's a million problems to solve. Yeah. Like, big hairy technical problems that no one has ever really tried to solve before. Which is why, you know, Threads is federating and they are doing it in like drip by drip, like they're solving one little problem at a time. They, they let you know that someone in the Fediverse had liked one of your posts.

• 1:27:09Nilay Patel?

  Sure, that was just a problem to solve. They, now they, now they, you see those posts, but you can't reply to them. Now they let you like those posts, but you can't reply to them. Obviously, replying to them is going next. And all of that is just like, where does the data go? If you want to delete something, how do you delete it across all of these servers that have now ingested it? Maybe you can't. Yeah. Weird, right? If someone replies to me on another server with another kind of moderation policy and puts something bad in my replies on my site or in mass, like, how do I moderate that? Big questions, like huge, earth-shattering questions, like, that obviously have made the process slow for everyone. But you're like, oh, these are new problems. Like, I'm in the market for new problems. Totally.

• 1:27:52Nilay Patel?

  Like, we've never thought about these problems before. Fun, like, this is great. So I'm very excited to just, like, see everyone making slow progress here.

• 1:28:00Alex Cranz?

  I just have a question. Which is the bigger platform shift, Jib and I Live or Flipboard?

• 1:28:05Nilay Patel?

  You know, you know, I believe it's the Fediverse. I, I really do too. In my heart of heart, I believe it's the Fediverse.

• 1:28:10Alex Cranz?

  I just really wanted to hear us all say Flipboard is the platform shift this week.

• 1:28:14Nilay Patel?

  Look, I like Flipboard. I think they do really interesting. I don't know, Flipboard is a platform shift. I think it is part of the platform shift about how information moves around the internet. That, you know, if you are going to break something like Google through regulatory action or just... Google killing stuff.

• 1:28:35Nilay Patel?

  Google end of life, Google search seems like a likely outcome. It's more likely than not, given Google's history. If all that stuff is breaking down and all, you know, the photo based networks are flooded with synthetic images no one can trust. You need to make something else.

• 1:28:50David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:28:50Nilay Patel?

  And it seems like everyone has bet on open interoperable networks this time. And I do think that is fundamentally a bigger shift that more people will feel than Gemini. Maybe on the long term, obviously, like AI will like do all the things and none of us will have to work and there are lots of springers pina coladas. But right now, I think it's the social web.

• 1:29:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree. All right. Neil, what's yours before we get out of here?

• 1:29:14Nilay Patel?

  What is mine? This is what happens when you're in a sidekick chair. You're not prepared.

• 1:29:19Alex Cranz?

  He's just here to hype.

• 1:29:20Nilay Patel?

  Yo. Good point.

• 1:29:25Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so mine is actually related to AI. So Eric Schmidt used to be the CEO of Google. He gave a talk recently. He got dinged for a lot of stuff he gave in this talk. And then he asked for the talk to be taken off of YouTube. Not a great cycle, right? You give a talk at Stanford, you're like, oh no, you're quoting my talk. Please remove it from YouTube.

• 1:29:46David Pierce?

  Wasn't there a moment in it where he he's like, this is off the record and the person he's talking to like points at the camera?

• 1:29:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What are you doing?

• 1:29:52David Pierce?

  It's a tough look.

• 1:29:53Nilay Patel?

  That's brutal. So the thing he got in trouble for, they asked for the talk to be taken down. Was he said Google was behind in AI because the workers prioritized working from home and snacks as opposed to being competitive.

• 1:30:06Nilay Patel?

  From the former CEO of Google, this did not go well. Like, just what are you talking about?

• 1:30:10David Pierce?

  It's also just a bad take.

• 1:30:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a million reasons and I don't think it's the people who work at Google who made the strategic errors, right?

• 1:30:20Nilay Patel?

  But whatever. And also, Google is, you know, this is coming on the heels of like the Pixel event where Google is like doing huge muscular AI stuff.

• 1:30:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:29Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. So he got in trouble for that. Alex Heath wrote a quick post about it. He was like, here's this thing that happened. The video got taken down. And then Alex got a transcript of the thing. And you actually watched part of the other video. And Schmidt said something else that I think is very fascinating, very telling, and I think very important to understanding, not just Silicon Valley, but Google and Google's place in the world. So he said to this room full of like Stanford students, a lot of you are going to be tech people. I hope a lot of you are tech startups. What I would do right now, if TikTok was banned, I propose each, quote, I propose each and every one of you, say to your LLM, the following, make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users, steal all the music, put my preferences in it, produce this program in the next 30 seconds,

• 1:31:11Nilay Patel?

  release it. And in one hour, if it hasn't gone viral, do something different along the same lines.

• 1:31:16Alex Cranz?

  What LM, LM?

• 1:31:18Nilay Patel?

  So first of all, yeah, I don't know what kind of magic LM. Like, at best, you're gonna be like, do you want to bang this iPad?

• 1:31:26Alex Cranz?

  He's using the rabbit we all expected to see.

• 1:31:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, seriously. So, but I, you understand what he's saying. He's like, if TikTok is banned, just clone it. Just take it. Take the music, take the users, take the content, just make a clone of TikTok and stand it up and people will start using it. If they don't, do it again. And his point was, the quote, "The example I gave of the TikTok competitor is that's what you do if you're a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, which hopefully all of you will be. If it took off, you would hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean up the mess. But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content." Wait, wait, what's, what's the next line? And do not quote me. Yeah. Whoopsies.

• 1:32:05Nilay Patel?

  So anyway, my, my point of this is Eric Schmidt ran Google in the early period, right? He was famously the adult they hired to run Google. Well, I don't know, Larry and Sergey were growing up or whatever they're doing, finding, learning whether or not toe shoes were for them. Eric is the adult in the room. This is what Google did. And not in a small way, in a big, open way. They just built a company on copyright infringement. They hired a bunch of lawyers and they cleaned up the mess. And they were a friendly company with two lovable goofballs as their founders. They were providing an enormously valuable service at the time. Google search was enormously valuable. Google Book search, copyright lawsuit, enormously valuable. YouTube,

• 1:32:48Nilay Patel?

  enormously valuable, built on copyright infringement, particularly against Viacom. So valuable that Viacom lost its copyright infringement case because Viacom's own people kept uploading the content to YouTube.

• 1:33:00Nilay Patel?

  Like ridiculous. But this, this is how Google worked in the beginning. That is the attitude. We're going to make the thing. It's going to be so useful. People are going to love it. And then when the copyright infringement cases or whatever other lawsuits come, we will have enough money to pay lawyers to make it go away. And Google did it. That actually worked. It was a successful strategy at the time. It was successful for other companies like Uber or whatever it is. Right? We are at a point now where the AI companies kind of want to run the same playbook. Google wants to run the same playbook with AI and training. And they're not lovable goofballs anymore. And so when Eric Schmidt is at Stanford complaining that, you know, the kids aren't working hard enough anymore. And then on top of it being like, just steal the stuff and figure it out later.

• 1:33:42Nilay Patel?

  The attitude that he said, that the, like the world's attitude in response to that is nowhere near as friendly as it was when they were building Google. And I, I think it's actually kind of fascinating to see that shift. Like, I don't know, like Alexis Ohanian, like wrote the book that was like, ask for permission, not forgiveness.

• 1:34:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:34:04Nilay Patel?

  And that was like the whole industry's attitude and that worked. Like, I think that's a great message for a lot of things still to this day. But you're in this place where if you want to build Google again, or something like Google, and you're like, I'm just going to tell a robot to copy TikTok and then I'll figure it out if it works. I don't think, I actually do not think that is going to succeed in the culture as it is today.

• 1:34:23David Pierce?

  No, and I think that is one of the most misplaced things in some corners of Silicon Valley now. And it's not true everywhere, but it is true a surprising number of places. This sense that the folks in the tech industry still are the like countercultural revolutionaries trying to build a better future. And it's just like, you know, a bunch of hippies in San Francisco who are just like trying to make cool stuff together. Like, that is not how those people are perceived. And enough of them see themselves that way, that that's why they're like, oh, we're, we're just the contrarians. And it's why you see this like crazy push away from wokeism and all this stuff. And like, I don't want to get into the political side of it, but it comes from the same impulse that it is like, we are the renegades. And it's like, no, you're not, dude.

• 1:35:07David Pierce?

  Like you are the most establishment of the establishment. And you, you don't get the leeway that you once got. And maybe you never should have.

• 1:35:17Alex Cranz?

  The thing is also, they were never the renegades. Like, like Silicon Valley was built on like military funds and stuff, right? Like, they were never that. It was a very conscious. PR move and they decided at some point, we are too big to need to do that PR move. But actually you can't keep running your playbook and do that because then you just look like a Hearst or something. You just look like all of the kind of like people who are always the villains in period films. That's not a great look.

• 1:35:46Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:35:46Alex Cranz?

  And we're seeing this Apple, like Apple doing the 30%. You're just seeing over and over again. It's like, no, you guys forgot, like you forgot the PR part of this. That actually is really important. You do have to market this. You market yourselves. And if you stop doing that, we are gonna all eventually be like, hey, you're being kind of assholes.

• 1:36:03Nilay Patel?

  You are. I can actually draw a straight line from what you're saying, Alex, to Rick Osterloh. In an interview with Ronna Stern this week at the Wall Street Journal, she said, hey, you had to pull this ad that you ran during Olympics of someone asking Gemini to write a letter to an athlete for his daughter. And it got pulled because everyone's like, why, just have your kid do it. Like, sit down with your kid and do this. Don't ask her out to it. And he was like, the market isn't ready for this. This is like when we went from handwriting to email. And it's like, no, it's not. It just isn't. And that little latitude, like, you're just not ready for the thing. It worked at a different time. It really did.

• 1:36:37Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:37Nilay Patel?

  It worked for the web. It worked for computer mice. It did not work, I would say, for the digital kind of the apologetic. But it worked for the iPod. All the stuff it worked for. This is the moment where we're just gonna take this stuff and you're gonna thank us later. A little, little warning sign, I would just say. That's my lightning round item.

• 1:36:56Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:36:56Nilay Patel?

  Watch, watch that one. Because it's the source of more conflict than you think.

• 1:36:59Alex Cranz?

  Agreed.

• 1:37:00Nilay Patel?

  Yep. All right. That's it. That's the show. We've gone way over. We've talked about antitrust too many times.

• 1:37:05Alex Cranz?

  Do you have any more chairs to sit in? How are the chairs?

• 1:37:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there is, there's several more chairs.

• 1:37:10Alex Cranz?

  Okay, good.

• 1:37:10Nilay Patel?

  We'll, we'll do more chairs next week. If you have ideas for sponsoring the hype zone, please let me know. My God, I'm gonna get this show sponsored. I think we actually have ads right now. I don't even know how it works.

• 1:37:26Nilay Patel?

  That's not my side of the house at all. All right, that's the show. Thank you for listening. We got like hydrogen car special episode on Tuesday, David?

• 1:37:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, so we have deeply fun stuff coming up the next few weeks of the Vergecast, but the short version of a long story that I'm very excited for everybody to hear is Will Poor took a ride in a hydrogen car that no one was sure was going to go anywhere or keep everyone alive during the whole process. And he learned a lot about kind of the history and future of cars and everything. And he's alive! It was an awesome story. And he made it out. So it's a happy ending.

• 1:38:05Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, that's coming up on Tuesday. Escape from hydrogen cars.

• 1:38:08David Pierce?

  Pretty much.

• 1:38:10Nilay Patel?

  Today on the Calibrators. That's it. That's the Vergecast. Rock and roll.

• 1:38:17David Pierce?

  And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:38:35Speaker 08

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