Netflix is turning into YouTube

Netflix makes shows. And movies. And podcasts. And games. And… YouTube videos, apparently. So what even is Netflix anymore? Nilay and David have ideas. After that, they talk about Meta’s ongoing smart glasses mess, and whether Meta or anyone can make these devices work. Finally, it's time for Brendan Carr, RAMageddon, the state of X, and a dumb TV mystery. Further reading: Bloomberg: ⁠Netflix Viewers Are Abandoning Shows After One Season⁠ ⁠Of course viewers are giving up on Netflix shows ⁠ ⁠Netflix is about to host videos from BuzzFeed, Condé Nast, and other publishers⁠ ⁠Netflix Bets on Short Videos to Compete With YouTube - Business Insider⁠ ⁠Netflix's video podcast engagement numbers 'are low,' per insider⁠ ⁠Emmy Nominations List 2026: BEEF, The Diplomat, The Beast in Me, Black Rabbit, and More - Netflix Tudum⁠ ⁠If Microsoft sold off Xbox, who would even buy it?⁠ ⁠Meta is reportedly working on smart glasses that would be recording all the time ⁠ ⁠Meta’s glasses will turn off the camera if you tamper with the privacy light ⁠ ⁠Solos debuts an even lighter version of its camera-less smart glasses ⁠ ⁠Boz describes how Meta’s smart glasses facial recognition feature would work. ⁠ ⁠Another verdict on camera glasses in court: nope! ⁠ ⁠ABC tells the government to get out of its newsrooms⁠ ⁠Meta’s new Muse Image model can pull other Instagram users into AI photos ⁠ ⁠You can (and should) opt out of letting people use your Instagram posts with Meta’s AI.⁠ ⁠Are you ready for what it takes to stop ghost guns?⁠ ⁠Vizio accidentally made the best dumb TV on the market⁠ ⁠PC shipments fell for the first time in over two years thanks to RAMageddon. ⁠ ⁠A tough chart about the RAM crisis. ⁠ ⁠Subscribe to The Verge⁠ for unlimited access to ⁠theverge.com⁠, subscriber-exclusive newsletters, and our ⁠ad-free podcast feed⁠. We love hearing from you! Email your questions and thoughts to ⁠[email protected]⁠ or call us at 866-VERGE11. (Timestamps are approximate.) 00:01:00 Intro 00:04:00 Netflix Identity Crisis 00:08:00 Creators Versus Netflix 00:15:00 Netflix Buys YouTube Videos 00:18:00 Go90 Scale Check In 00:19:00 Netflix Should Buy Xbox 00:28:00 Smart Glasses Panopticon 00:46:00 Backlash And Offline Tech 00:49:00 Smart Glasses Without Cameras 00:55:00 FCC Chilling Effect 01:03:00 Ramageddon Price Shock 01:07:00 Regulating Ghost Guns 01:14:00 X Product Reality Check 01:20:00 Vizio Dumb TV Mystery 01:25:00 Wrap Up And Plugs Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

• 0:01Speaker 00

  Company spending is complex. Managing it should be simple. This is AMEX Corporate, a single platform connecting cards, expenses, and payments to streamline the way you work. Flexible controls for when priorities shift, support around the clock, all backed by American Express, so you can stay focused on what matters most. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash AMEX corporate. Terms apply.

• 0:35Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes. Earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/vox.

• 1:20Speaker 02

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app now with heart rate variability can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:51Speaker 03

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast Network. If you just ignore all the other corporate shenanigans, that remains true.

• 2:00Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 2:00Speaker 03

  And here we are. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil Appel's here. Hey, buddy.

• 2:04Speaker 04

  What's up?

• 2:05Speaker 03

  You're home for once. After a month of extremely fancy hotel rooms, you're back in, you know, your lowly old house.

• 2:12Speaker 04

  Yeah, back in my attic next to my daughter's room. At any moment, you can hear her singing Taylor Swift. It's gonna, that's what our summer has been.

• 2:19Speaker 03

  What does she think about the MSG wedding?

• 2:22Speaker 04

  She, she's more excited about her iPod. So I showed her pictures of the wedding and she's like, great. Good for Taylor. But she, you know, she's going to camp like it your olds do in the summer. And she wanted to listen to music on the bus on the way to camp. And some of her friends on the bus have like little Android music players. There's like kid music players. Some people have phones without SIM cards in them. It's that time in the parenting journey for me. It will come for you, David.

• 2:47Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 2:47Speaker 04

  And I was like, I'm not doing any of this. We are, we are delaying phone and phone like objects as long as we can. And so I dug out one of my old iPods that we actually retrofitted for a YouTube video ages ago with an SSD and a new battery.

• 3:04Speaker 03

  Oh, I've been debating doing this for my own purposes.

• 3:08Speaker 04

  Yeah. So I mean, we had it because we just like did this for a video ages ago. And I had to remember how to download MP3s. I'm not going to say how or why I did that.

• 3:17Speaker 03

  But it was completely legal. That's all you need to know.

• 3:20Speaker 04

  I was like, I pay for every streaming service. I, you know?

• 3:24Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 3:25Speaker 04

  I pay for every streaming service. I would like, I would like it on the record, your honor. I pay for every streaming service. I have done my economic duty to the artists of America, and I do it every month at high rates, ever increasing rates. Anyhow, so we gave her an iPod and we put a bunch of music on it. It is the worst selection outside of Taylor Swift, who I will concede is America's finest living songwriter. Shout out Walt Mossberg, who believes this in his, with every fiber of his being.

• 3:54Speaker 03

  One of Walt's better takes.

• 3:55Speaker 04

  It is. I agree. I think she's, she's right up there. It's a bunch of Disney's direct to streaming musical soundtracks. And I could not be unhappier about this. And so we plugged in the headphones and now it's over there. But you might hear it coming through the wall at any moment. This is very different from being in the south of France.

• 4:12Speaker 03

  Is she old enough to have a conversation with me about which of the high school musicals is the best?

• 4:16Speaker 04

  Oh, we haven't gotten there yet. We are at Zombies and Descendants and, oh, my friend, the ill-fated crossover musical experience.

• 4:26Speaker 03

  Okay, this, this is, this is big yikes. This is, I'm in the sweet spot of we are at Spidey and His Amazing Friends, and we are, we are appearing to be stuck there for some time. And this is terrific news in my household. I have no, we are not pushing past this until, until we're ready for like, you know, The Exorcist. We're just gonna stick with Spidey until then. It's gonna be amazing.

• 4:48Speaker 04

  Good luck, because once, once it comes for you, it's, it's all over. And you're like, can we just listen to Taylor Swift again? That's, that's actually a thing I say all the time.

• 4:57Speaker 03

  It's, I mean, you and, you and everybody else, it turns out. If you've thought about the wedding, by the way, I want to hear them. I'm very conflicted about it. I need to hear everybody's thoughts. Vergecast at theverge.com. Tell us how you feel. I'm dead serious about this. We have a bunch of stuff we should talk about today. There's a lot of Netflix stuff going on. There's a lot of Meta smart glasses stuff going on. Brendan remains, Brendan is going on at all times. Some deeply silly Instagram AI shenanigans that we should get into. But let's start with Netflix. I think we've spent a lot of time talking about streaming services on this show. And we, we have this thing called the Go 90 scale of streaming services. Right? And it is essentially.

• 5:36Speaker 04

  Doomed streaming services.

• 5:37Speaker 03

  Right, sorry. The Go 90 scale of doomed streaming services. And the idea is if you are a 90, like the Verizon streaming service Go 90, you are dead. If you are a zero, that's the, that's the best, most vibrant, most alive you can possibly be. And we've had Netflix at a zero for a very long time.

• 5:54Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 5:56Speaker 03

  I, I think there is an argument to be made at this particular moment in time that we need to tick it up on the scale a little bit.

• 6:01Speaker 04

  Oh, my.

• 6:02Speaker 03

  In part because there's just been a bunch of news this week that suggests that Netflix is slowly losing its mind and is starting to flail uncontrollably in a lot of directions. And that is what happens right before things start to get really ugly. Let me just throw a couple at you. So the biggest story of the week in, in sort of media tech circles was this Bloomberg report about how Netflix has this huge problem where it will have a hit first season of a show and then lose a vast quantity of the audience on the second season. And there are a bunch of examples of this. I think Beef was the one with the strongest drop off. Hugely successful first season, big zeitgeist show, won a lot of awards. The second season, by all accounts, very good. I didn't watch it and neither did anybody else. And, but this is, this is a recurring theme at Netflix, apparently. And, and they're struggling to figure out what to do about it

• 6:47Speaker 03

  and how to solve this problem. Everybody has theories about this. People are talking about this all week. Then next to that, there's news that Netflix is A, expanding its podcast operations, including deals with folks at the Vox Media Podcast Network. Shout out to Charlie Harding, friend of The Vergecast, who's Switched on Pop is going to be on Netflix going.

• 7:04Speaker 04

  Amazing.

• 7:04Speaker 03

  Sometime soon. Yeah. Big win for Charlie. We love Charlie. Go, go listen to and watch Switched on Pop. But they're also doing just straight up what I would call YouTube videos. They made a deal with a bunch of publishers, including our potential soon to be parent company. It's all very confusing. I don't understand any of it. You can do the disclosure if you'd like to.

• 7:22Speaker 04

  I'm gonna try. Go ahead.

• 7:24Speaker 03

  To basically take, in, in many cases, existing videos that were made for other social platforms and just put them on Netflix. And the Emmy nominations were this week. There, there's been a bunch of new information coming in earnings and such that suggests that even as Netflix continues to grow, people are spending less time on Netflix. There's just, the, the thing I wrote at the top of this Google doc is what is Netflix anymore? And I feel like if I am asking this question, maybe we're not at a zero on the Go 90 scale of doomed streaming services anymore.

• 7:55Speaker 04

  Yeah, I think that's right. Netflix is a subscription that you definitely had is no longer a given.

• 8:02Speaker 03

  I think that's right.

• 8:03Speaker 04

  Right? That's what kept it at zero on the doom scale for so long was if you were gonna have one subscription, it was almost certainly Netflix. I think what you are describing is not what is Netflix anymore. It's, boy, how fast is Netflix gonna turn into YouTube?

• 8:22Speaker 03

  Right. And is that, is that maybe the goal? Like, it, it sure looks like that is not just a thing that's accidentally happening, but that might be affirmatively the plan. And, and there are a lot of reasons that's really hard to do.

• 8:35Speaker 04

  It's really, no one has succeeded in doing that. To be clear, no one has ever succeeded in doing that. You know, I did just come back from Cannes. I listened to so many creators at that event talk about advertising and talk about reaching audiences. They all make long YouTube videos and they've integrated the advertising into the videos very directly. They market products. This is, this is the thing. And the two pieces of the creator economy that are booming are Instagram and YouTube. Like, those are the things. Those are the formats that people operate in. And TikTok is actually pretty secondary, like in really interesting ways.

• 9:13Speaker 03

  Is that just because there's no money in it? Like, still to this day, no one has figured out how to make any money on TikTok. It's a discovery mechanism for other platforms.

• 9:20Speaker 04

  I mean, that, that's one argument. I think, I mean, there are TikTokers who make a lot of money. Like Charlie D'Amelio exists, right?

• 9:24Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 9:25Speaker 04

  There, there are TikTokers who do brand deals on that platform in big ways. But the idea that the audiences are growing or that you can reach new audiences, or you can experiment in new formats, or you can like light a new channel, like TikTok is so interest graph driven, and it really does not have any follow graph, that the creators sort of flock back to YouTube in real ways. And that means things like Backrooms happen as YouTube phenomenons. And then Netflix gets to participate in that later at more expensive economics. Whereas YouTube gets to grow the talent that then becomes the Hollywood talent. And I think if you're Netflix, you're kind of looking at this. You're like, okay, the future of this industry is a bunch of creators who control all of the attention and all the cultural capital today. They're nowhere near our platform.

• 10:08Speaker 04

  And the only time we will get a hold of them is later when they have the cachet and the influence and the money to make bigger budget things. And then we have to pay really high rates to get those bigger budget things. And then we're gonna charge people for that. And we'll just be late because those creators are also available for free on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. And we had better go get a piece of that early. And I think all of this flailing is a response to that. Netflix does not have anything close to what you would call a creator strategy.

• 10:38Speaker 03

  No.

• 10:39Speaker 04

  Right? That's just not the thing that they do. And if you think that's where the action is, if you think creators are where the future of the cultural industries are, you had better do something. And you might as well just fire a bunch of stuff at the wall, including paying for YouTube videos. Why not? The question is whether that's worth the ever increasing amount of money that Netflix charges customers to be on its platform at all compared to YouTube, which somewhat famously is free.

• 11:05Speaker 03

  Yeah. Although YouTube Premium, I would say, even as it goes through its own unbelievably large series of price increases, remains the best deal in streaming, and it's not particularly close.

• 11:18Speaker 04

  Oh, yeah, that's the true zero now.

• 11:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think, I honestly think that's right. And so this is, this is the thing, right? I think, you know, you can put a lot of pieces together and figure out how Netflix got here, right? Like, you go way back to the idea that Netflix's main competitor was sleep. This company has been obsessed with time spent in the service for a really long time. And to some extent, I get that. And then they've also made a bunch of other moves that suggest that that is the thing that they're after. They said they weren't into sports, and then they got into sports. They said they weren't doing gaming, and then they got into gaming, and they're increasingly into gaming. And this service is just a place to go to do entertainment, which is fine and good. But like you said, that puts them in a very different competitive space with a bunch

• 12:02Speaker 03

  of gigantic platforms with impossible resources that are well established in this space that you just can't compete with. Like, the billions of dollars that have been spent over the years trying to take down YouTube, even in some small way, have all been wasted. It just hasn't worked. And so for Netflix to say, "We want to be the shiny entertainment thing," made sense to me, right? That it was like, the race was, how do we become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? And it actually made sense a while back that the thing to aspire to was to be HBO, and that if you could be HBO and become the factory of great shows, all the rest of your problems solved themselves. So to me, it's like, I look at this, and either if you're Netflix, you don't think

• 12:44Speaker 03

  you can win that game anymore by making the most best shows, which I think in a lot of ways is demonstrably true at this point. The best shows are not on Netflix.

• 12:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 12:53Speaker 03

  And also, look at it and say, "Okay, we need to continue to be the biggest thing in the world to support our unbelievable investment in everything. We just have to go eat up minutes in people's day," whatever that looks like. And that just runs you directly into YouTube and TikTok. And I think that is a losing game for Netflix in a big, big way.

• 13:14Speaker 04

  Yeah. I mean, again, the problem for every media business of every kind, not news websites or whatever, like, every literal media business, the thing that makes content, that's your business. You're up against an army of teenagers who will work for free. It is the problem. You just have to stare at it and say, "Most people on their phones, on their home screens, have Instagram and YouTube. And the economics of Instagram and YouTube are an army of teenagers who will work for free. And they make infinity content."

• 13:47Speaker 04

  Okay, like, what are you gonna do about that? Something, it has to be something.

• 13:51Speaker 03

  Right.

• 13:52Speaker 04

  The two things Netflix has always said about itself that you've described, one, our only competition is sleep, and we have to become HBO before HBO comes up, have always been in absolute opposition to each other.

• 14:03Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 14:04Speaker 04

  Our only competition is sleep means they have to just have stuff.

• 14:07Speaker 03

  Right.

• 14:07Speaker 04

  A huge array of stuff that commands your attention and keeps you from playing video games and keeps you from opening TikTok. And that means eventually, they're gonna make video games, which they did, and eventually, they're gonna have YouTube videos and podcasts, which they do. And they've picked that one. They did not pick, "We will have the best quality content." They just didn't. And Netflix has gotten really numeric about it. The New York Times did a profile of Dan Lin, who runs the studio now. Here's the quote, "Mr. Lin is a reversion to the norm. He knows what works on the service and how much each movie should cost, and there's little he's willing to budge on, no matter how big a star is."

• 14:42Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 14:43Speaker 04

  I mean, the whole profile is like, he's like, "I say no."

• 14:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 14:46Speaker 04

  "I say no," and I'm like, "This is how much you can get, and you're gonna hold to this budget." And like, he reorganized how their studio works, and it is, it's like quant stuff, you know what I mean? Like, it is financial engineering to make the content. And people like working with him because he's honest, which is a rarity in Hollywood.

• 15:03Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 15:04Speaker 04

  It's the other part of the profile. We'll link it, you can read it, it's really good.

• 15:08Speaker 04

  But I think that's very different than, "We charge you a lot of money to show you the best stuff."

• 15:12Speaker 03

  Right. And it's a fundamentally different creative proposition, too, right? It is, it is like ruthless execution on a series of numbers as opposed to actual creative execution. I mean, Ryan Broderick, our friend over at Garbage Day, wrote a good thing about this, that is like, Netflix, because of that exact approach that you're describing, has become sort of a trailing indicator of what's cool and interesting and not leading any of it, right? Like, you can look at something on Netflix and see what was trending 18 months ago when they started production on it.

• 15:44Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 15:44Speaker 03

  And that everything is sort of a copy of a copy of a copy of something that worked on Netflix. And Netflix's movies, frankly, have been like that for some time. It's why, like, Dwayne The Rock Johnson just does that movie over and over and over again on Netflix. But its shows, at least for a long time, didn't feel like that. And they're not all like that. There's still some good stuff on Netflix, but it does, like, if you are going to run your business that way, you are going to run a very particular kind of business that is not the, like, big swing creative thing that Netflix seemed to want to be for a really long time.

• 16:19Speaker 04

  There's just some part of this where the, you know, there's a big drop off between season one and season two of a Netflix show that runs right into Netflix's best when it's buying the content from networks that are good at this.

• 16:32Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 16:33Speaker 04

  It's not like there's a bunch of Hollywood talent that's all locked up at great jobs right now.

• 16:39Speaker 03

  And is totally against the idea of making more episodes of television.

• 16:43Speaker 04

  Yeah, like, it feels like you could be like, "All right, we're gonna set up a studio to do it like NBC did in the 90s, maybe at lower rates, right? We're not gonna pay every single cast member of Friends a million dollars per episode, but like, we're gonna make 22-minute-long sitcoms and make 60 episodes of that in a season and do it again the next year."

• 17:00Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 17:01Speaker 04

  And just market that thing so that you have to watch Netflix. But it seems like they have decided the economics of that don't work, and the economics of buying YouTube videos do. And that seems upside down to me for some reason.

• 17:14Speaker 03

  Well, the argument for Netflix in this case would be that it is such a good distributor, right? Like, the, we've, I've done a lot of reporting on recommendation algorithms over the years, and one of the things that is sort of seemingly true about Netflix is that it has done a better job than just about anybody else of putting content into a recommendation machine to put the right thing in front of you at the right time. It is very good at that. What it has not had is the raw volume of content to do that with that something like YouTube has. And so maybe for Netflix, what they're saying is like, "Well, we know what you want to watch, we just don't have it on the service. Let's go get it all on the service, and then we can put it in front of you." And I think, like, I can see the spirit of that theory.

• 17:55Speaker 03

  I just feel like it doesn't hold up the minute you tell me that I came here to watch, you know, beef, which I didn't, and instead, you're gonna show me a bunch of, like, old BuzzFeed YouTube videos because structurally to you, that's the same thing. Like, I just don't, I don't think that's-

• 18:12Speaker 04

  Right, that's a company that believes what they do is distribute content, not sell you TV movies.

• 18:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:17Speaker 04

  And that is a mistake. Okay, let me put two ideas next to you.

• 18:20Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 18:22Speaker 04

  One, YouTube is gonna end up incentivizing its creators to make things that look like TV faster than Netflix will get to having enough stuff that looks like YouTube.

• 18:35Speaker 03

  I think that's right. I mean, that's, YouTube is already well down that road. It's making those kinds of shows. It's, it rebuilt the TV app to look like a television streaming service.

• 18:45Speaker 04

  Confidently tell you that it's growing faster on TV than any other platform.

• 18:48Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:49Speaker 04

  This is the new race, right? Like, before it was, "We have to become HBO before they become us," then it was, "Our only competition is sleep." And now, and you and I are saying, it very much feels like Netflix is that we have to overtake YouTube before YouTube overtakes us.

• 19:04Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. If you were, if you were to handicap that race, YouTube is well ahead.

• 19:09Speaker 04

  So where would you put Netflix on the Go90 scale of doing streaming services?

• 19:13Speaker 03

  I mean, it's like, it's in the low single digits, right? It's like a, it's like a two or a three. But I think it is, it is just meaningful to me that it doesn't, I don't know what Netflix is anymore. Like, I don't know what the value prop of Netflix is in my life anymore. But you, you look at all those shows, and some of them are good, and I've seen a bunch of them, none of those are like, the shows of the year, right? Like, even looking at the Emmys, it's like, Pluribus was a show a lot of people talked about. Widows Bay was a huge hit that a lot of people talked about. The Pit is probably the show of the year for the second year running, which is pretty impressive. It just, Netflix is not a thing you sort of have to go to, it's a thing you just sort of have in the background. And boy, is that just already YouTube.

• 19:58Speaker 04

  Yeah. Here's my, here's my second one.

• 20:00Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah, hit me.

• 20:00Speaker 04

  Here's my hottest take.

• 20:02Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 20:04Speaker 04

  Netflix should buy Xbox.

• 20:07Speaker 03

  Wow, is that not where I thought that was going? Okay.

• 20:09Speaker 04

  Hotest take, Netflix should buy Xbox.

• 20:11Speaker 03

  Hit me with it.

• 20:12Speaker 04

  Well, we'll start from the Xbox side of the house.

• 20:17Speaker 04

  Xbox is a disaster.

• 20:22Speaker 04

  And I know this because the people running Xbox keep issuing memos saying it's a disaster.

• 20:29Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 20:30Speaker 04

  Right? Asha Sharma just put out the big memo being like, "I gotta reset this whole thing, we don't make enough money." I think she said something like, "For every dollar we put into Xbox, we lose 68 cents."

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Seems bad.

• 20:41Speaker 04

  That is one of the worst businesses I've heard of at massive scale in this industry.

• 20:44Speaker 03

  Oh, wait, it was 64 cents, shit.

• 20:46Speaker 04

  64, I'm sorry. I'm sorry, that extra four cents is-

• 20:50Speaker 03

  Changes everything.

• 20:50Speaker 04

  Really, and the calculus of Microsoft is really gonna, you can buy three more GPUs over the course of one year. That's a bad business, and she is stripping it way down.

• 21:01Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 21:01Speaker 04

  Right? But you can see that she's spinning off the big studios, she's firing people at all the other studios that she's keeping, and she's focusing her energy on, like, Minecraft and, like, the big multi-service games that kind of print money. And she wants to be at a billion players a day, which is-

• 21:22Speaker 03

  Don't we all?

• 21:22Speaker 04

  Which is a huge number.

• 21:24Speaker 03

  I think the Vergecast should be one of the platforms that entertains billions of people a day.

• 21:28Speaker 04

  A billion players a day is my favorite Fatso song, actually.

• 21:35Speaker 04

  Sorry.

• 21:37Speaker 03

  That's a good joke.

• 21:39Speaker 04

  Uh, anyhow, and you could get there. Like, uh, I know there's like a lot, like Andrew Upster wrote for us a big piece being like that this number is big. And like, he's like, this whole plan doesn't make any sense. And basically the answer is this number is really big and you can't get there. Even if you count Candy Crush, right? And all the other sort of big casual games that they have, that's a huge goal that you have to get to. I think the reason that you would say that goal, which is, I think, impossible for Microsoft to reach with its current economics and commitment to AI over everything else, is that you have to pump a lot of money in the system and do a lot of marketing and you have to compete with sleep. You, you have to say, we're gonna win in all of these places over every other kind of entertainment.

• 22:19Speaker 03

  Right.

• 22:19Speaker 04

  Such that you're gonna play a game, probably on a phone. Netflix has been desperate to get itself on your phone.

• 22:25Speaker 03

  True. Yeah.

• 22:25Speaker 04

  They are desperate to get on your phone. They, that is why they've done games. It's why they've revamped their mobile app to be more Tik Tok-y. It's probably why they're doing podcasts and stuff now, right? This is inherently mobile content that people are watching on their phones. Well, why not just buy the gaming company and capture a bunch of that additional attention? You would have license then as, as Netflix to continue to sort of spin out of studios. But you are already really good at knowing what content to license and put in front of a bunch of people as a distributor and recommend the right stuff to the right people at the right time. And then you would body up against the phone platforms, which basically killed Microsoft's ambitions to do game streaming and

• 23:10Speaker 04

  find ways to turn your phone into an Xbox and say, look, you want Netflix here, you want Netflix and all your other platforms. We need to put games on, in the Netflix app in some way that is economically viable for us. And there's a lot of regulators around the world who are gonna look more kindly upon Netflix needing to do this than Microsoft.

• 23:26Speaker 03

  Yes, because it is Netflix's actual business.

• 23:29Speaker 04

  Because it's Netflix's actual business and they're, I think to Microsoft, they're like, yeah, file lawsuits, let's see what happens.

• 23:34Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 23:35Speaker 04

  Right. But I think Netflix has a much stronger case to say, look, we need to expand the range of entertainment options. And these platform policies are keeping us from doing it. And you would, you would just get, maybe not, maybe, maybe they don't care about the console hardware. You would get the ecosystem of creatives that make games to drive whatever IP that you need to drive in all the studios and all the things you need to. They are, they are probably the most logical home for Xbox. If you believe the future of entertainment has interactivity and gaming at the center.

• 24:08Speaker 03

  Which?

• 24:09Speaker 04

  I want to say I do not.

• 24:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:11Speaker 04

  But many, many, many people do.

• 24:13Speaker 03

  Correct. My favorite thing about this is everything you just said makes perfect sense. And I believe with absolute confidence that if that happens, it will go disastrously badly.

• 24:22Speaker 04

  Yes.

• 24:24Speaker 03

  Like, you just made such a compelling argument that I suspect is being made in the offices of Netflix at this moment. And probably frankly, at a bunch of other companies like this. Like, if you think David Ellison is not gonna try to roll up Xbox into Paramount, Warner, CNN, whatever it's gonna be.

• 24:40Speaker 04

  Oh, David Ellison talks a lot about gaming.

• 24:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 24:43Speaker 04

  Boy, does that guy love to talk about gaming.

• 24:45Speaker 03

  Yeah. Uh, for all the reasons you just described, and I think, uh, it would just, the, the cultures of those two things could not be further away from one another in a way that I think anyone who has tried to back their way into becoming a gaming company has found it very hard to do so.

• 25:02Speaker 04

  Oh, I think Sony managed to get enormous value from owning Sony Movie Studios and they put the Spider-Man font on the PS3.

• 25:13Speaker 03

  They did.

• 25:14Speaker 04

  That was great.

• 25:14Speaker 03

  They did. And Sony, a famously spectacular business that everyone should try and emulate right now. All right. We, we should switch gears. Um, if you have another idea for who should buy Xbox, I want to hear it because I think the, the idea that all of this is happening for Xbox to be sold to somebody. Neelai, A, I think you were kind of there first, but this is in the ether now. And I want to know who you think should buy Xbox. We should take a break and then we're gonna come back. And I have a bunch of mean things to say about smart glasses. We'll be right back.

• 25:48Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts, and no BS. More than 1,000 businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 26:32Speaker 05

  Ask yourself, what are your best people spending their time on right now? Expense reports, receipt chasing, month-end close that takes weeks. You become what you spend on, and that's not what you're building toward. Brex is the intelligent finance platform that eliminates that work before it starts. AI agents that handle the manual stuff automatically, so your team can spend their time on what actually compounds. It's time to get Brex AF. Learn more at brex.com/AF.

• 27:09Speaker 00

  What if managing company spend took less managing? Introducing Amex Corporate, one intelligent platform connecting cards, expenses, and payments so you can keep work moving. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is Amex Corporate. Get started at go.amex slash amexcorporate. Terms apply.

• 27:38Speaker 03

  All right, we're back. Neelai, big week for Neelai Patel's smart glasses Panopticon. This is, the, the facial recognition nightmare that is coming for us all, uh, continues to come for us all. This is really exciting for you.

• 27:54Speaker 04

  You know, I'm gonna, can I just say this from the beginning? I've been saying for years that the killer app for smart glasses is facial recognition and being able to do faces and names, like you're somewhere in the world, it tells you faces and names. And I personally, if I had the ability to remember people's names, I, I would be the president. I just know this in my heart.

• 28:14Speaker 03

  It's the only thing in the way.

• 28:15Speaker 04

  It, it just literally me, like every day, being awkward with someone that I've definitely met before and being like, yeah, let me introduce you to someone else real quick. Just to, you know, like, I think that has really thwarted my political ambitions.

• 28:28Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 28:28Speaker 04

  I say this because I've been saying it for years and it has been so removed from actual shipping reality for years, that it's been kind of a joke. And now it's not a joke. And every now and again, the clips go viral without the context of the fact that I've been saying it for years to illustrate how bad it would be. And I just want to say clearly, I think it would be bad.

• 28:48Speaker 04

  I think it would be bad to create a worldwide facial recognition Panopticon so that I can be the president. Am I going to refuse the opportunity to be the president when presented with such Panopticon? I think is a moral dilemma that each of us will have to choose in our own way. But I know it's bad. And I, I just wanna, I wanna say this is clear. I'm gonna have to say it every single time.

• 29:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 29:10Speaker 04

  Because it is the killer app. And I think there's a reason that we're inching our way towards Panopticon.

• 29:15Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 29:16Speaker 04

  But it's bad.

• 29:17Speaker 03

  So as a reminder, uh, this is either last week or the week before, we talked about the fact that Meta was building a facial recognition feature into its smart glasses. Uh, I think it was Wired that, that broke the news that this is a thing that they were building. They hadn't turned it on.

• 29:32Speaker 04

  Wired's news was the code was on the glasses.

• 29:34Speaker 03

  Right. The, the code was on the glasses. Meta's official response from Andy Stone, who likes to run around yelling at people on threads, was that this is disingenuous, we were never gonna turn it on, which is just a fully insane response to, you wrote the code and put it on the glasses. Like,

• 29:53Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 29:53Speaker 03

  That that's just a thing that happened. So anyway, um, next to that has been, uh, this running story, including some really great reporting by our friend Joanna Stern about this, like budding industry of people who will basically hack and break your Meta glasses so that the light doesn't turn on when you're recording. Meta issued a, an update this week to make it so that if you tamper with the light, it'll just disable the camera entirely. That's a very good thing. It's a mandatory update. Yay, Meta. Congratulations. And then immediately, immediately after this, news breaks that Meta is working on a new pair of smart glasses that is recording all the time.

• 30:31Speaker 03

  Uh, the idea is basically to capture snapshots every few seconds of, of audio and, and pictures. And to basically use all of the input in this. Um, their big idea, apparently, for privacy's sake, is to not send the data itself, but to send metadata, because in history, metadata has never been reverse engineered into data and has never been dangerous.

• 30:57Speaker 03

  So but like, there is just this thing happening where Meta is running around trying to explain and apologize for all of its disastrous security breaches. Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, did an interview with Nick Thompson at The Atlantic about a lot of this stuff. They had an interesting conversation in which Boz, I would say, very unsuccessfully tried to defend why a feature like this is worth doing. They both, like you, agreed, it would be awesome. I totally want this. And then Nick was like, but, but how do you, how do you reckon with all of the other stuff? And he used the examples of the, the blind community and veterans who need features like this. And that is both true and just an unbelievably disingenuous way to try and defend a feature like this.

• 31:41Speaker 03

  Like, if, if you are going to use accessibility as a reason to like ham fist a feature into a thing for billions of people, no. But anyway, even as they're running around doing this, they're also just pushing ahead as fast as they possibly can to make this thing more and more privacy damaging and problematic and run at all of the things that people already hate about where these glasses are going. And I sort of feel like, in the same way that, what, 13, 14 years ago now, the glass hole phenomenon ended smart glasses for a period of time. Like, I talked to people years after that, who were like, we had a project and we killed it after Google Glass, because we just couldn't. It was, Google ruined it for everybody. It set this industry way behind.

• 32:25Speaker 03

  I feel like Meta is in the middle of doing that right now. It is, it is going to establish and ruin the idea of smart glasses before anybody else even gets to try.

• 32:33Speaker 04

  I saw a video, you know, Livy Dune, the influencer, she's like a famous influencer. She posted a video, and we talked about it in our newsroom, and she's like, people sell my travel itineraries? Like, they, there's a black market for where she's going on planes. And then she's accosted when she lands in the airport. And she specifically was like, this is really weird and dangerous for me, that I get off the plane, and a bunch of weirdos are there, like, take my picture. And then she specifically was like, and they're all wearing Meta glasses.

• 33:02Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 33:03Speaker 04

  And it's because, it's becoming that thing. Right? Like, that's the association people are making with it. Like, this is a thing for a particular class of weirdos.

• 33:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 33:13Speaker 04

  I have, I have friends who are like world travelers, and they're always like doing action sports, and, you know, their Instagram feeds are all on their Meta glasses, as they're like surfing and going in. Like, there's some set of uses that are good and benign.

• 33:24Speaker 03

  Sure. Wearing, wearing a GoPro on your head while you surf, not a problem. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you, like, walk through-

• 33:32Speaker 04

  A cost and stock influencers is bad.

• 33:34Speaker 03

  Probably bad.

• 33:35Speaker 04

  Like, there's just something about that, where I was like, this is a very famous influencer. She had, like, she literally is influential. And she's like, I feel at danger. And then the product she called out was Meta glasses. And I, there's something there that I've just been stuck on. Like, what is that a signal of? I haven't quite figured it out. I can't quite articulate it. But the, the product is starting to stand in as a, like, a symbol of how we treat each other.

• 34:02Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 34:03Speaker 04

  Do you know what I mean? Like, it, it means disrespect in some way. This is an enormous problem for Meta, whose entire brand is, we don't respect you. Right? Like, this is, this is the problem. Like, they made the product that most communicates their values, which is, eh, it belongs to us. Sorry. We're, we're gonna listen to you. Right? And for all of the Instagram is listening to you explanations about how they're actually, you know, like, you're on the same Wi-Fi network as your friend in the same place, so like, they search for travel. Like, you can do it. You can back into the programmatic ad tech explanation for why Instagram is listening to you, and then the glasses are gonna watch you all the time. And now you're done.

• 34:39Speaker 03

  And everyone you know.

• 34:40Speaker 04

  And everyone you know. And, you know, Boz's explanation of how the, the faces and names feature would work, it's called name tag. He's like, it would just be people that have actually introduced themselves to you, that have opted in, and it's hashes, and it's all stored locally, and you would say, remember that person. And you're like, this all sounds fine, except that person doesn't consent to be remembered in this way.

• 35:04Speaker 03

  Right.

• 35:05Speaker 04

  Right? The, the person on the other side of the glasses does not consent to me storing a hash of their face and then recalling it later. Like, maybe, maybe they would like it if I did that with my dumb meat sack of a brain, but they would probably have a lot of feelings about my computer doing that.

• 35:22Speaker 03

  Yes. Yes. And like, and god, are there going to be ways to break that system? Even in the perfect version of that system, can I, like, go stand up close to my TV and solve that problem with a video on my television?

• 35:35Speaker 04

  It's unclear, right? We have not used the thing, but this is their defense of it. It's like, we limit it to like a local system. And then he talked about the various laws in various states that are like, make it hard to ship. He's like, in Illinois, you got this dumb law. And it's like, no, the people in Illinois passed a law saying biometric face recognition is illegal.

• 35:53Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 35:54Speaker 04

  And I think they're pretty happy about that law.

• 35:55Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Right? Like, I, I think on balance, there's gonna be more of those, because people don't want this to happen. They perceive the glasses as an invasion, and Meta's whole brand is invasion of privacy. Like, whether or not they want it to be, that is what the people associate with them.

• 36:11Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:12Speaker 04

  All of this, I think, is next to the big dream of, everybody wants the AR glasses. Right? Everyone is trying to build their way to AR glasses in some way. And if you're gonna have AR glasses, you need a camera that is always on, looking at the world next to you, sending that visual information to something, to some computer somewhere, processing it, and then putting data over some, something. Whether it's real light in the lenses in front of you, and clear lenses, or whether it's a Vision Pro headset, and it's screens, and you're passing through, whatever it is, you need to process the visual information from the world around you.

• 36:46Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 36:47Speaker 04

  And there are lots of benign uses for this. I'm in an art museum. I just want to know more about the painting I'm looking at. There are absolutely not benign uses for this. But no one has contended with the fact that at the end of it, you have to record everything all the time. Because the technology to do that at scale simply has not existed. And I think this Meta attempt to take snapshots and do metadata is, is the first baby step towards, we're gonna record everything all the time, so we can layer AR information over the world around you.

• 37:16Speaker 03

  Yeah. Ironically, one of the most compelling explanations for Instagram is not recording you using the microphone on your phone, has been that it's actually just impractical to do that.

• 37:27Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 37:28Speaker 03

  To, to light up the microphone for a billion Instagram users, and then store all of that audio in the cloud and process it, is so prohibitively expensive that they actually just couldn't do it, even if they wanted to, is a very, one of the many compelling reasons that Instagram isn't doing that. There's a bunch of evidence that says that's no longer true, that actually everyone is desperately trying to get all of your data. Meta itself rolled out this program to its employees, saying, we're gonna track all your keystrokes, we're gonna track how you use your computer, so that we can teach our AI models how to use computers. Like, everyone in the AI space will tell you that all they want is more data, all, all the time. They will, they will take all of it they can get, no matter how, like, wacky or weird

• 38:13Speaker 03

  it is, let the compute do the work. And so suddenly, this goes from being kind of prohibitively difficult from a technology perspective, to being kind of a huge upside. And you're gonna have to rely on the company that is going to do this to treat that data well, which is just a big, huge, giant leap. I mean, do you remember Microsoft Recall from, whatever that was, a couple of years ago now? That the first run of that was Microsoft saying, it's locally stored, it's encrypted, it's completely private to your device, we understand the privacy risks here, this is, this is meant just for you. And then it turned out they were just storing a huge amount of the data in plane text databases on your computer. So that, like, if I, if I leave my computer to a coffee shop, you can just look at everything I've ever done on my computer.

• 38:54Speaker 03

  Like, this, there are so many attack surfaces here, that it, there is just no shot of getting this right at any point in the near or immediate future. And I cannot believe that Meta in particular continues to try to push at this. And this, this is like, the thing I keep trying to sort through in my head, is, do we have a fundamental smart glasses problem? Which is just that we're gonna keep running into this same thing over and over again, that you can't do smart glasses without the invasive stuff. It's, it's literally, it's a feature, not a bug. And this is just a problem that is going to follow it forever. Or is it just that Meta is the absolute worst possible advocate for this technology at this time?

• 39:38Speaker 03

  And if some other company, like, if, if Apple were leading this race instead of Meta, would we feel differently about it? Because by and large, people trust Apple in a way that they don't trust Meta. I can't, I can't peel those two things apart in my head.

• 39:51Speaker 04

  It's definitely both.

• 39:52Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 39:53Speaker 04

  Meta's brand, when it comes to privacy, is garbage. And I think Meta's brand in general is garbage.

• 39:59Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:00Speaker 04

  And it's not, Meta is not a beloved company. They're just straightforwardly. And even the way Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the, we're tracking all of our employees to train AI, was so fundamentally dehumanizing. He said something like, we could go collect this data from all the people in the world, but we think we've hired all the smartest people at Meta, so we're gonna collect the data from you, because the way you use computers is smarter than everyone else. And it's like, eesh.

• 40:24Speaker 03

  We put the good brains in vats.

• 40:26Speaker 04

  You know what I mean? Like, yeah, it's like, we're, we're doing this, like, this, like, diet eugenics. Like, it was like, it's just a weird way of talking about the people that you employ, right? Like, I have to surveil you, because you're smart.

• 40:39Speaker 04

  It's weird.

• 40:39Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:40Speaker 04

  There's just like, there's some disconnect from humanity at the center of that company that I, I cannot stop thinking about because they are desperate to own a platform. They are desperate to break away from their dependence on iOS and Android and the App Store economics and Apple being able to turn off tracking and all this stuff that Apple and Meta have fought about for years. Okay. Then you're like, well, people trust Apple. Do you know what people think is listening to them to do the ads? Their iPhones.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  True. Yeah.

• 41:11Speaker 04

  You can trust Apple all you want and be like, Apple's the privacy company. And then 90% of people are like, my phone's listening to me.

• 41:16Speaker 03

  Yeah, very true.

• 41:17Speaker 04

  Instagram is listening to me all the time. And it's like, well, did Apple stop it? Like, I don't know. It's listening to me all the time. And it kind of just doesn't matter. Like, I think tech companies as a whole do not have some great reputation for actually protecting people from the experiences that they're obviously having.

• 41:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think that's right.

• 41:34Speaker 04

  Does every single person believe that Apple slows down their iPhone after two years so they have to buy anyone? Like, sure, like, can you trade on that trust in other ways? Maybe, but the reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of a glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You gotta do it. There, there just isn't another choice. Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else.

• 42:18Speaker 04

  Like, those are, those are the current choices in this world. And it just means like, if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy. And maybe you shouldn't. Like, there's an incredible argument for, nope, you shouldn't do that. Nope, the trade offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it.

• 42:47Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 42:48Speaker 04

  I don't know who is positioned to make that argument today. It does not appear to be in our nation's capability to have a fulsome argument about the risks and rewards of technology and then tell anyone to stop. It might be in the market, right? Like, these glasses might get pulled off people's faces and smashed. I think we can see the opposition at data centers happening in like, local governments around the country. Like, something else will happen, but the, the thing people want, AR glasses, augmented reality glasses, where you stare at a painting and it tells you what that, who painted that painting and what it was. You are at a party and you just know that person's name.

• 43:32Speaker 04

  I'm telling you, I'd be the president if I had this case. It would, and I'm already so charming, I'm just like this one failing, you know? Uh, who knows? The social cost of that is too high.

• 43:45Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 43:45Speaker 04

  And I think we're seeing it now, the cost of AI is too high versus the reward and there's big backlash. And I think Meta has no ability to make the case that the reward is worth the social cost of interacting with Meta in this way. They, they do not have an ounce of credibility to say they're going to protect you.

• 44:04Speaker 03

  Well, and they have now two decades of evidence to suggest that they'll win in the end, that, that actually all you need to do is wait and people will come around. And I think, I have believed that for a long time, right? And it is the thing that makes me the most nihilistic about tech is this idea that everyone is going to stand in the way and say, I don't want this, it's going to be bad. And then it'll, they'll have a Black Friday sale and everybody gets on board. And like, everybody, it is very hard to leave Google in such a way that you can feel however you want about Google and then you end up using Google products and you become sort of Stockholm syndromes into Google. And I think a lot of these companies are set up on the belief that they will win in

• 44:44Speaker 03

  the end because people will always trade those things and those feelings for other features and convenience. And I think, again, for a very, for most of my career, I also believed that that was true and it, it sort of filled me with sadness when I really sat and thought about it. Uh, I don't know that that's true anymore. It feels like something has changed in, in a way that I'm still struggling to put my finger on, but like, this data center stuff is such a good example of there has been real, like, boots on the ground societal backlash to technology at a scale I don't think we've ever seen. And, and it feels like it is only growing and not receding. And I think it's, it's why I'm so obsessed with the smart glasses question because I

• 45:25Speaker 03

  think this is going to be the first big new technology in a very long time that a vast number of people are going to look at and just say no to. Like, we all eventually got smartphones. We just did. We, you feel however you want about that, about what smartphones did to the world. Everybody has a smartphone now. It just, it happened. I don't think we're going there with smart glasses and I think, I think it's going to be really different. And I, I still don't know how it's going to play out, but it feels like it is headed down a different path.

• 45:53Speaker 04

  Yeah. I'll just bring it back to, you know, my daughter's silly iPod. That thing was on a shelf. I pulled it off the shelf. I plugged it into my computer and I put some MP3s on it. I will not say where the MP3s came from, but I put some MP3s on it. And then it worked and it worked exactly the same way today as it did 10 years ago when I first bought this iPod. And the experience, and she's delighted, right? And I, I own the files. Let's just say I own the files. I own the files. And I own the hardware and it didn't require some like DRM handshake with some cloud service. And I didn't worry that social media was on this thing or that, the, one of the reasons

• 46:34Speaker 04

  I didn't want to buy her like an old iPod Touch was like, I don't, I actually don't want a bunch of eight year olds running around with a camera right now.

• 46:41Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 46:41Speaker 04

  I, I just don't. No, thank you. Um, that's just a parenting decision. Other people might feel differently. Um, and I see that just like burbling with some of my peers, you know, as we all raise our kids together. I see it with like, a lot of younger people, like, they just don't, they're just like looking at it and they're saying, no, like, I just want to be offline in this way. And I think the promise of the next interface paradigm, the next wave of using technology has always been, this will be superior to the phone. So we got to get there first. This is Mark Zuckerberg in the metaverse. You're going to live your life in this helmet because it's more fun than your phone. And like, pretty much just reject it.

• 47:19Speaker 03

  Uh huh.

• 47:20Speaker 04

  Like straightforwardly, I think the reaction to AI being everywhere and not being very good in most consumer use cases, people are rejecting it politically now. They're like, we don't, we don't, you don't need to build this infrastructure. I hate this actually. This chatbot on my car dealer's website is not providing me with anything. Turn it off. Like, put all those tokens somewhere else. And I, I do wonder if the smart glasses, you know, my thesis about the meta glasses has always been people like them because there are a camera on their face and that's useful.

• 47:48Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 47:49Speaker 04

  And then you're like, now a lot of people have cameras on their face. Now a lot of people are recording you without your consent. And like, you can stop that pretty fast.

• 47:55Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, it's that, but that is, that is the feature, not the bug, right? Like, you can't, you can't have it both ways. You can't have a camera on your face without having a camera on your face.

• 48:05Speaker 04

  It feels like a, like a Zen cone, but sure.

• 48:08Speaker 03

  Also, I just want to say, I own the files is a, is a T-shirt we're going to make. Uh, that's going to be great. I'm excited about that. I own the files.

• 48:14Speaker 04

  I mean, in the sense that I have the files.

• 48:18Speaker 03

  Yeah. Listen, let's not delve into copyright law here. Um, I do have one more question on this. So there was, there was a bit of gadget news. In addition to all of the like, big tech companies trying to make smart glasses, there's just a million startups out there trying to make smart glasses happen. Xreal is probably the best known one, but there's a lot of them out there. And there's this company, uh, Solos, that announced a new version of smart glasses called the Ergo A6.

• 48:44Speaker 04

  Oh, boy.

• 48:44Speaker 03

  Sure. But one of its like, key features is that it doesn't have a camera. It has AI stuff. It has, uh, prescription support. It does a bunch of the other things that you would expect, like headphone style things. It doesn't have a camera. And, and part of me wonders like, is this the next thing that's going to happen? Is we're going to see if we can do smart glasses minus a camera?

• 49:05Speaker 04

  This just is like, I don't know how to say this. Bone conduction headphones are a really cool technology. They will never be cool. Do you know what I mean?

• 49:16Speaker 03

  I mean, sure. But when my bone conduction headphones look like a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, they, they are cool.

• 49:20Speaker 04

  I'm sure these are bone conduction. I, the point I'm making is like, everyone's just trying to shove the assistant into a form factor.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 49:29Speaker 04

  Do you know what I mean? Like, what if I could get a microphone and speakers onto your face? Sure, it looks like glasses.

• 49:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:36Speaker 04

  I'm just, there was a time when that was a bone conduction, like, headband. We covered a lot of these in a gadget in like, the 20, the 2000s.

• 49:42Speaker 03

  They had a real moment.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  They had a real moment. And it's like, yeah, you're just, they're just AirPods. Like, you just made AirPods that look like glasses. But the utility of the assistance is not high enough yet to support any of this.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah.

• 49:58Speaker 04

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry for the people who work at Solos. You did a good job.

• 50:02Speaker 03

  Their glasses are very light, which I think is very important. So kudos to them for that. Um, all right, we should take one more break and then it's, it's time for some lightning round stuff. We'll be right back.

• 50:14Speaker 06

  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/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.

• 50:44Speaker 07

  Instagram teen accounts come with automatic protections that limit who can contact teens, the content they can see, and the time they spend on the app. Learn more about teen accounts and Instagram's ongoing work to protect teens online at instagram.com/teenaccounts.

• 51:03Speaker 08

  You've been searching for the right foundation since forever. But now finally, you can find your match with Sephora. With so many options from the best brands, you can pick the shade, coverage, and finish that's just right for you. And don't worry, it's easy to find your match with help from our expert beauty advisors and shade matching tools, plus free samples to take home and try. Visit Sephora in store and online to find your match.

• 51:35Speaker 03

  All right, we're back. No hype test this week, so we are straight into America's favorite podcast within podcasts. Uh, I think the, the, my brother, my brother and me stands are still in my email about which is the best one. Um, but I'm, I'm claiming victory because you can just say thanks, it's 2026.

• 51:50Speaker 04

  Now it's March.

• 51:52Speaker 03

  Brendan Carr is a dummy. It's time.

• 52:14Speaker 04

  All right, a little bit of a seizure at the end there. I thought there was gonna be a drop. I want to be honest. I thought that I was building to a drop. It was really good. I appreciate it.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  This is good. We're doing a collaborative enterprise here. We're sampling and we're building here. That was by Ryan Mueller. Thank you, Ryan. I love the dance remix. Somebody else take it and make the drop.

• 52:35Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's what I mean. That was a great build. I think we were all anticipating a pretty intense drop. And then I think Ryan fell down on the sampler.

• 52:44Speaker 03

  Listen, we all only have so much time in the day, including Brendan.

• 52:47Speaker 04

  It's like last shot of the night. It's like, I'm out.

• 52:50Speaker 03

  I've done it.

• 52:52Speaker 04

  Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate you.

• 52:54Speaker 03

  There we go. What did Brendan do this week?

• 52:55Speaker 04

  We have evidence this week that Brendan's various traitorous machinations against the First Amendment are starting to bear their poisonous fruit, David. That's what I have for you.

• 53:05Speaker 03

  Okay, starting to for the first time.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Yeah, in like real ways. So as you know, Brendan has been fulminating against our nation's broadcasters about the way in which they use our spectrum, which is nonsense because people are not watching broadcast television. They're watching the apps on their phone, as we have discussed at length already in this episode. But Brendan has power over broadcast spectrum. So he has issued content regulations against broadcasters like ABC and CBS and Fox and local radio stations. And if you recall from previous episodes, in a big one that he has been focused on is what's called the equal time rule, where if you have a candidate for a public office on the public airwaves, you are supposed to have the opposing candidate and offer them equal time unless you are a bona fide news program.

• 53:53Speaker 04

  In which case you have new news judgment, you can be off. So the only program that has ever really had to deal with this is Saturday Night Live, which has no argument that it is a news program. And I think we all agree on this. And Saturday Night Live would have Kamala Harris on and then NBC would give time to Donald Trump, which is a real thing that happened in the last election cycle.

• 54:09Speaker 03

  Yeah, they had Trump at like a NASCAR race or something the next day.

• 54:11Speaker 04

  They gave him ad space at NASCAR race.

• 54:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 54:13Speaker 04

  The flashpoint of this has been ABC's The View, which has long operated under a bona fide news exception. It was actually started by Barbara Walters, who was a news anchor. And they wanted to have some candidates on. The FCC and Carr fulminated against them. We all got in some trouble. There's now a review of whether or not The View is a bona fide news program. You'll recall, I think last week or the week before, we, ABC's running ads to have people file comments with the FCC to be like, don't screw with The View. Okay, that's all happening. And ABC actually filed its response this week, which we will get into. In the meantime, Brendan has had the effect he wanted. Semaphore did an analysis and The View has not had any candidates for any competitive races on the air since all this happened.

• 54:58Speaker 04

  He has chilled the speech of a news program.

• 55:00Speaker 03

  Which is precisely the goal.

• 55:02Speaker 04

  That was the goal. So here's a quote from Semaphore. FCC Chairman Brendan Carr asked in February, the agency was investigating whether or not The View violated the equal time rule. Since then, the ABC talk show hasn't featured a single political candidate running a competitive midterm race, according to the Semaphore analysis. Earlier this year, a representative for New York Mayor Zaron Mendani pitched The View on hosting the mayor and Democratic Socialist candidates he's supportive of Congress, according to a person familiar with the conversations. The View said it was interested in having the mayor on, but couldn't accommodate the candidates because the staff was proceeding cautiously with political candidate bookings while the FCC equal time inquiry was progressing.

• 55:38Speaker 04

  So the investigation itself has chilled the speech of the program. And they will not have candidates for office on the air, even if those candidates are interesting, even if people would like to see them, because they don't know if they will be punished for their political speech. Even though that speech is, for years now, been considered to be news programming.

• 55:56Speaker 03

  Right. But this is, this is job done by Brendan Carr. This is his move. He's not gonna win this fight, but he can win this fight without actually having the fight.

• 56:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. And this is the, the specific phrase in First Amendment law is the chilling effect.

• 56:08Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 04

  You haven't actually made the rule that's legal. You haven't actually violated the First Amendment. You haven't said, I will put you in jail if you say these things. You have just made the people stop doing it because they're afraid of a consequence that may or may not be real. And that means they have preemptively stopped saying the things they would have otherwise said. And all over First Amendment law, the specter of the chilling effect is raised. You can't do this because you will have the chilling effect. And that is as bad as actually banning the speech itself. Court after court, administration after administration, Republican, conservative, progressive, liberal, you name it. The chilling effect is the problem. And so Brendan has accomplished an ice cold chilling effect, at least on The View. If not the rest of the media ecosystem that operates on the broadcaster ways.

• 56:54Speaker 04

  So we'll see what happens. ABC did file its response to this inquiry this week. I can just quote you from it. It's pretty fiery for Disney, which had previously been pretty bendy when it comes to the Trump administration. But ABC says, "The First Amendment does not permit the governor to sit in editor's chair, yet that is the seat the commission now proposes to take, deciding which broadcast programs qualify as legitimate news, and for those it finds wanting, compelling them to surrender their airtime to guests they never chose to feature." They go on to say, "An exemption that protects editorial independence only when the speaker's politics please those in power protects nothing at all. The shelter it gives one program today, it will deny another tomorrow when the gavel changes hands as it inevitably will."

• 57:38Speaker 04

  For ABC Disney, that is pretty fiery stuff.

• 57:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:42Speaker 04

  I'm glad they've found some spine here to, to fight back. I think they realize the public is on their side. And I will just remind everybody listening to this, Brendan is not chasing broadcast regulation because he really believes in broadcast regulation. All of this is a trial balloon to find ways to censor and control speech on internet platforms, which everyone in the world is aware is actually what people consume. Even The View, people mostly watch The View on YouTube.

• 58:13Speaker 03

  I was just gonna say, one way to accomplish that goal is by silencing The View, right? Like that's, there are a lot of people who watch Jimmy Kimmel and who watch The View and who watch Stephen Colbert on these other platforms. And if you can just chop them down one at a time, you can get a long way to accomplishing your goal without ever actually having to get out of your skis on it.

• 58:32Speaker 04

  Yeah. And eventually he will go to Google and he will go to TikTok and he will go to Meta and say, hey, all those defense contracts you want, all those big, rich government contracts you want. Actually, we think that you are using the public internet or the public airwaves, or your services run on mobile broadband, which run on the public airwaves, and we don't think they're in the public interest. You had better change your algorithms. I'm, I'm telling you, I keep saying it every week. You can see the chilling effect in action right now in real time on ABC. And you can see that that will just empower Brendan and the rest of the administration to go after internet platforms using whatever laws and powers they can magic up out of fairy dust and bad interpretations of existing statutes.

• 59:16Speaker 04

  If not pass an executive order, just claiming the authority, which the Trump administration loves to do. And in fact, which is in Project 2025, the chapter about telecom and speech regulation was written by Brendan Carr.

• 59:33Speaker 04

  He's not a smart man. We, we know what he's doing. None of this is subtle.

• 59:37Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 59:37Speaker 04

  It's, he's a, he is a dumb rock of a man who is doing all the things he said he would do in absolutely ham-fisted ways that make it easy for a company like ABC to write fiery responses to, because there's only but one right answer. In any case, Brendan, if you want to come on the show and try to justify any of these actions or talk about the nature of the chilling effect when the FCC chair is punishing broadcasters for their speech, I would welcome that conversation. On the show, on Decoder, mono E mono, livestreamed on Kick. We can do it. You say, you tell me the time and place. It'll happen.

• 1:00:10Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:00:11Speaker 04

  Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast on the podcast.

• 1:00:22Speaker 03

  Boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants. I really like the idea that we are going to build like an epic trance remix, one track at a time here. I'm very excited about this.

• 1:00:32Speaker 04

  It's very good.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  All right. I have a Ramageddon update for you. I don't know if you're aware of this. Everything is more expensive now. And it just keeps getting worse. And I feel, I feel ridiculous, like continuing to be annoyed by this, but I'm continuing to be annoyed by this. But in particular, there were two bits of really interesting data this week that are directly Ramageddon related that I just, I just want to talk to you about. So the first is IDC, a big research firm that does a lot of like analysis of, of market shares and stuff like that, put out a chart this week that said that after nine straight quarters of growth, worldwide PC shipments dropped by 4.9% year over year, two uninterrupted years of growth.

• 1:01:13Speaker 03

  And I will say, the growth actually sort of kicks back to like, kind of right after COVID. Like there was this minute at the beginning of the pandemic where everybody bought a computer. Everybody, everyone bought a new computer. And then it dropped a little because everybody had a new computer. And then it has been, it has been rising pretty steadily for several years now, since then. And it is now dropping like a stone because computers are too expensive and people can't buy them. They are, they are harder to find than ever. Everybody's raising prices. Apple just raised prices. Like it's, it's ugly out there. And there's an increasing sense that it's going to keep getting worse. But the other one that I want to talk to you about is there's this chart from this company, Omdia, which I know nothing about.

• 1:01:54Speaker 03

  But it's fine. It put out a chart showing the share of the total bill of materials for products that is taken up by memory, right? So and this is like, how much of the total cost of building a gadget comes from buying the memory? And basically, that number has at least doubled in the last couple of years. That before, if you were buying a premium device above $800, in this case, the memory accounted for 11% of the cost of that device. So you're buying a $1,000 device, it's a it's $100 worth of memory. That is now 26% of the of the price. That is what the memory costs. It's even worse in lower end phones. We've talked about on

• 1:02:39Speaker 03

  the show that like, the real danger immediately for a lot of these Rama Gaddan things is that cheap devices just go away. They maybe it becomes completely untenable to sell somebody a $200 phone in a world where the memory in that phone costs, in this case, it would be $120. Like, it's the the number is for the mid-low range, $200 to $400, the memory alone makes up 59% of the cost of the bill of materials, up from 32%.

• 1:03:08Speaker 04

  That's crazy.

• 1:03:08Speaker 03

  Like, the numbers are just insane. And everywhere you look, it's like, the the costs just are what they are, and either you can stomach it, or you can't. Nobody, nobody has deals, nobody has access to anything. There's just a bunch of chips out there, and it is like, full anarchy to get there first. And everybody who can pay for it is paying outrageous quantities of money for it. And everybody else just gets screwed. And like, the the increasing sense that I get from people is like, this is going to get worse, and it's gonna last a while. And it is just, it's scary times out there, man. And now there's this big run on like, you're starting to see YouTubers make content about how to buy used gadgets.

• 1:03:45Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:03:46Speaker 03

  I don't know if you've noticed this, but this is like, how to make your stuff last longer, and how to buy used stuff, and and find the best refurbished open box deals is like, a real rising type of content for exactly this reason. Everybody's just priced out of everything now. And so it's like, well, okay, maybe I'll go buy a three year old MacBook, because it's literally the only thing I can afford. How do I go get it?

• 1:04:08Speaker 04

  Again, my, you know, my prediction is the repairability push of the past several years is going to bear real fruit now.

• 1:04:15Speaker 03

  Yeah, I absolutely think you're right.

• 1:04:17Speaker 04

  We're almost a little bit lucky that there was that push.

• 1:04:19Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:20Speaker 04

  There was actually, like, the FTC, the Trump FTC won a right to repair victory over John Deere this week. Like, I think consumers understand that being able to fix things is important to them, especially as costs go up and things last less long. So we'll see. Like, I'm hopeful there's one outcome here. It's that a generation or two becomes fixated on the notion that you should be able to fix things and make them last a long time. Because they were so expensive to begin with.

• 1:04:49Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:04:49Speaker 04

  We should get like, one of the refurb companies, like, the back markets of the world. We should, we should talk to them. Like, I'm very curious if their business is booming the way that you would think it would be booming.

• 1:05:02Speaker 03

  Yeah. It's a good question. We should, we'll, we'll reach out to them. We'll get them on the show. Back market, if you're listening, and I know that you are, get at us.

• 1:05:09Speaker 04

  Trust me. They're already, the emails already been sent.

• 1:05:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, indeed. All right. What's your next landing round item?

• 1:05:16Speaker 04

  Okay, I'm gonna, I'm gonna do one heavy one, and then I'm gonna end on a fun one.

• 1:05:19Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:05:20Speaker 04

  It's, it's heavy in the sense that the subject is heavy, but I think it is one of the greatest sort of verge stories, like, vergiest verge stories we've done in a while. And it's about the push to regulate ghost guns. So there is a law in New York, there's an upcoming law in California, there's a bunch of other laws around the country that would make it harder to print gun parts on your 3D printer, which sounds great. And actually, a flashpoint for all this regulation is Luigi Mangione, who printed some of the parts of the guns he used to allegedly murder the CEO of United Healthcare. He's in trial, so it's allegedly, I understand people have a lot of feelings whenever we say this. We do not support murder on this show. Another thing I feel like I have to say all the time.

• 1:06:04Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:06:04Speaker 04

  But this was a flashpoint in this regulatory conversation. And in particular, New York, where I live, Governor Kathy Hochul is all about regulating ghost guns, because I think it feels like a thing politicians can do.

• 1:06:15Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:06:15Speaker 04

  Right? If you want to run at the Second Amendment with regular guns, you're gonna, you're gonna hit a wall. But the kids shouldn't be able to print guns at home.

• 1:06:23Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:23Speaker 04

  That feels like a winner, you know?

• 1:06:25Speaker 03

  It's an awkward pro take to have. Do you know what I mean? Like, to be, to be the one who's like, really psyched about ghost guns, is just kind of a weird hill to die on.

• 1:06:31Speaker 04

  Yeah, it just feels like this thing, like, your kids shouldn't be able to come home from school and print a gun. I passed a law stopping it. Who can, who dares argue with me? Not the gun manufacturers, because they'd like to sell you the guns they made in their factories. Like, there's some weird political calculus here where this is an acceptable thing to say, and the laws have passed. Okay, here's the problem. If you want to stop someone from printing a gun part, you have to identify the fact that they are trying to print a gun part.

• 1:06:58Speaker 03

  Oh, which means you have to know what they are printing.

• 1:07:02Speaker 04

  Where are you going to do that? At what point in the

• 1:07:06Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 1:07:06Speaker 04

  Download a file or draw a picture on your computer, send it over USB to a 3D printer, have the printer run around and do it? Where? Where in that chain do you insert the regulatory mechanism that the law demands? No one knows the answer to this question. The laws do not say where, right? They just have a mandate for blocking technology.

• 1:07:28Speaker 03

  Just like, don't do that.

• 1:07:29Speaker 04

  Don't do it. Make it, you, you printer manufacturers, you make it so you can't print guns. And the model is that printer manufacturers have made it so you can't print money. Right? If you try to scan a dollar bill into Photoshop and then print the dollar bill, like, a bunch of things will stop you.

• 1:07:45Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:07:45Speaker 04

  But the difference is that dollar bills are known. Right? And like, the societal cost of fake money is like, right? Like, everyone's like, okay, we get it. Like, you can, you can flatly identify currency, it looks one way. And we all understand why Adobe Photoshop should not be able to accept scans of currency and print it.

• 1:08:07Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:08:08Speaker 04

  Because that will ruin everything for everyone.

• 1:08:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:08:10Speaker 04

  Sure. If you would like to destabilize the United States economic regime, we prefer you do it with Bitcoin, not fake dollars. You know, like, that's kind of where we've landed as a society. Okay, well, there's not just one gun. So you can't just identify one gun, the way you can identify $1. Our ability to destabilize society with guns has already happened at scale. That, that, that ship has sailed. And it's the parts, it's not the finished product. So if you want to print a thing that looks like a pistol handle, well, now you got to block all the things that might look like a pistol handle, regardless of what it might be used for in the future. So this story is, is just excellently written about how hard it is, how the open source 3D printing community is railing against

• 1:08:54Speaker 04

  it, even if the people themselves support gun regulation. Because they understand, like, this is a type of surveillance that can lead to all kinds of other outcomes, and block all kinds of other legal things that you might want to print, or, in the worst case, allow the government to ban even more things. Because they will have built a system to identify what it is you're printing, and then tell the manufacturers to stop it.

• 1:09:16Speaker 03

  It's making me think about how, like, AccuWeather has successfully lobbied so that no one, the government is not allowed to do weather forecasts, and TurboTax makes it really hard for you to file your taxes without using TurboTax, that like, you'd have an awful lot of companies trying to make it very hard for people to 3D print one thing or another. And like, this, this slope gets really slippery from ghost guns, which I think are, like you said, a pretty universal, we all basically agree that ghost guns are bad. But boy, does the same principle run into things people do not agree on in the same way very quickly.

• 1:09:53Speaker 04

  Right. Do you want carmakers to be able to say you can't 3D print replacement parts for your car?

• 1:09:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:09:57Speaker 04

  And they can, will they concoct nonsense safety reasons for those things?

• 1:10:00Speaker 03

  100%.

• 1:10:01Speaker 04

  Yeah. So anyway, this story is, you can go read the comments, by the way, some people do not agree with you about ghost guns in any way, shape, or form. They're in the comments of our story. But I just, everyone should go read this story, it's one of the vergiest fridge stories in such a long time, because it is, it's one of those stories about politicians, and I think a lot of regular people, seeing a problem, the kids can print guns, and then assuming that there's a technological solution that does not carry trade offs, and the community is way ahead of everyone on what those trade offs are, and what they could be, and why they're unacceptable.

• 1:10:35Speaker 03

  Mm hmm.

• 1:10:35Speaker 04

  At the same time, it's like, you probably shouldn't be able to print a gun at home. Yeah, you read it, you tell, you tell us. It's, it's, this is what I mean. It's, it's a story that it, it's just going to make you uncomfortable, regardless of where you ultimately land on the issue.

• 1:10:51Speaker 03

  Yep. It's, it's

• 1:10:53Speaker 04

  The best verge stories make you slightly uncomfortable.

• 1:10:56Speaker 03

  Do you have a 3D printer?

• 1:10:57Speaker 04

  I do not. I feel like I should get one now.

• 1:10:59Speaker 03

  I feel the exact same way. Like, I don't, I don't know what I would use one for. But then I see everybody, like, there is no genre of vertical video that I enjoy more than people solving teeny tiny, low stakes problems with 3D printers.

• 1:11:14Speaker 04

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:14Speaker 03

  It's everybody who's just like, I didn't have a stand for this thing, so I printed one. I'm always like, hell, yeah. Let's go. You did this. And then Belkin is gonna lobby those things out of existence. This is the future of Reddit.

• 1:11:24Speaker 04

  Air gone. We're, you know, we're home on the farm. I did the episodes from, from my wife's farm. And her dad not only just has a huge shop where he repairs the tractor on the farm, but then there's a, what can only be described as a crafting shed with one of those gigantic tables in the middle to just do projects on. And I walked in there, and I was like, I'm gonna get one of these tables, and buy a 3D printer. And then I had no further thoughts. Like, what will I do with a giant craft table and a 3D printer? Like, I was just like, a goal I have in my life is to have a crafting shed with a huge table and a 3D printer.

• 1:11:56Speaker 03

  And then you will have it, you will say, I've done it, and you will close the door and never go in that room again.

• 1:12:01Speaker 04

  Ambition over. But it was just one of those moments where I was like, oh, this is where I'm meant to accomplish this in some way.

• 1:12:07Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Speaker 04

  And I think it's 3D printing small parts to solve pet peeves.

• 1:12:13Speaker 04

  All right.

• 1:12:13Speaker 03

  I love this for you. All right, I have just a series of very funny posts from Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X.

• 1:12:22Speaker 04

  Nikita Beer, by the way, fully going through it.

• 1:12:24Speaker 03

  Fully going through it and posting through it as the head of product that X absolutely should. But just is just over and over, sort of saying the quiet part loud about how disastrous a platform X is. So the first one of these was a little while ago. Evidently, X ran an experiment with 3% of users and discovered that removing the top 30, I'm quoting directly. Removing the top 30 highest paid revenue share accounts from the For You timeline increased both time spent and daily active users on X. So this is to say, the people we pay to post on our platform, if we took them out, everyone liked our platform more. Like, wild thing to admit out loud.

• 1:13:06Speaker 03

  Also incredibly obviously correct if you've ever spent any time on X in the last like three years. If you get rid of all the posts that I see, I will like X more. Correct? Absolutely, yes. Could not agree more. And then there was another one this week. X's in its ambition to be the everything app appears to be pushing really hard on video right now. That they really want to be a vertical video platform in this, for the, all the same reasons everybody wants to be a vertical video platform, right? Like, it just wants to be that thing. It's where the ads are, it's where the views are, whatever.

• 1:13:40Speaker 03

  He put out a post in response to a bunch of people saying, oh, God, X is just turning into TikTok because everything is turning into TikTok. And he goes, no, it's not. And then basically goes on to say, yes, it precisely is. So he says, he says, posts containing videos already make up close to half the impressions on X, which is A, fascinating, and B, a decision that they made, right? Like, it's important to remember.

• 1:14:03Speaker 04

  They incentivized the type of content.

• 1:14:05Speaker 03

  Correct. And also boosted it in the algorithm. Like, there's a reason you see Elon Musk every time you log into X, and it's not because the algorithm thinks you'd like it. It's because X decided to do that to you. It's very important that you remember this. But then, this is the one that's my favorite. He says, many videos from top accounts are simply stolen from other users, sometimes five years after they originally went viral. The next bullet says, our team believes this recycled content has a negative impact on the user experience and the business. You think?

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  All the, all the people we pay to post on X are bad, and everyone likes it when they're gone. All the videos are old and stolen. Welcome to X. And he turns this into a pitch for, we're shipping an editor and recorder into X so that you can make original content. And then he says at the end, if you're a creator that does not recycle other people's content, you have the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career to build an audience here. What an unbelievably optimistic end to saying, all of the stuff on our platform is trash, and it would be better if it was all gone. There's no other takeaway from all this stuff that X is learning, except we have to just get rid of everyone here and start over, and then maybe it'll be great.

• 1:15:14Speaker 04

  The reason I say Nikita Beer is going through it, he's the head of product at X, right? And he is just learning the lessons. Every other head of product at every other social network knew 10 years ago. 10 years ago, everyone knew, oh, people are going to game our algorithm with garbage. Oh, if you just let this run wild, the top, the people who game the algorithm best will rise to the top, and people will hate it, and they'll leave. It's a slop factory, no matter if you have AI or not. Everyone knows it. Everyone has always known it. And Elon thought he was so much smarter than everyone else that he fired all the people who understood how to run the platform.

• 1:15:56Speaker 04

  And then he was like, just make the algorithm, do whatever thing I'm calling free speech today. And now here we are. And all the people who are saw next are just getting their brains cooked left and right. And poor Nikita Beer is like, yeah, but our users are going away, our money is going away, I have to fix it. I'll juice video views for original content, which is the last refuge of the scoundrel when it comes to social media. Right? Like, I will lie about your video views to get you to post here more? That is some 2016 Facebook shit.

• 1:16:26Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it works super well for five minutes, and then you get, you get some new thing you're interested in, and it all falls apart.

• 1:16:33Speaker 04

  Well, because at the end of the day, the reason that you've gotten all the people to post videos is so you can put pre-roll ads around it. And people hate those. And the advertisers don't want to be around it on X because of the thing that X is.

• 1:16:47Speaker 03

  All the, all the five-year-old stolen videos that you're posting.

• 1:16:50Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:16:51Speaker 03

  It's rough out there.

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  It's rough. I feel, I do feel sort of bad for him because he really, it's just very obvious that he's gone through it.

• 1:17:00Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:17:00Speaker 04

  But I also don't feel bad at all because it's very obvious exactly what that job is.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  Yep. And it was the minute he took it. He did post on June 30th, today marks one year at X. I'm proud to report three all-time highs, user engagement, my cortisol levels, my biological age. That's a good tweet. This man learned how to do a good tweet.

• 1:17:17Speaker 04

  That's a great tweet.

• 1:17:18Speaker 03

  Kudos to Nikita.

• 1:17:20Speaker 04

  That's very good.

• 1:17:21Speaker 03

  All right, you get one more. What's your last one?

• 1:17:23Speaker 04

  All right, I've got like, it's like a happy one and a mystery.

• 1:17:26Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:17:27Speaker 04

  It's all wrapped up in one.

• 1:17:28Speaker 03

  Love it. We should have more mysteries on the Vergecast.

• 1:17:31Speaker 04

  This is a good mystery.

• 1:17:32Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 1:17:32Speaker 04

  Okay. So every time we talk about smart TVs on the show, people are like, I wish I could just buy a dumb TV. And historically, the answer is you can't because the reason TVs are so cheap is they are subsidized by all of the surveillance that is built on TVs. David continues to buy Roku TVs for some mysterious reason, and the reason they cost $10 is because Roku is tracking his every move and foisting advertising around him.

• 1:17:56Speaker 03

  The TV on the other side of my computer right now is unplugged, and I'm 100% sure it's listening. It's just what it is. It's just playing ads.

• 1:18:02Speaker 04

  And the TV market has gotten all the way down to the end of that road such that you can literally get a free TV with a permanent advertising screen bolted to the bottom of it.

• 1:18:12Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:18:12Speaker 04

  And a lot of people did it. And I don't know why. So that, those are the economics of the TV market. The reason they're cheap is because they're counting the revenue from the advertising to subsidize the price of the panel. Essentially, this is why you can't buy a dumb TV. And if you want one, you end up buying like a $5,000 digital signage display. Which are often the same panels, but then they don't look as good, whatever. Anyhow, John Higgins, our TV reviewer this week, reviewed the new Vizio Mini LED Quantum, which is a very cheap quantum.tv. He says it looks pretty good. And he discovered that as you set it up, you can just turn it all off.

• 1:18:49Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  You can just make it a dumb TV. So as you're going through the setup, you can just say, I don't want this to turn off. You can disconnect the OS, basically. You can add it, obviously, an external streaming device, but the HDMI ports stay active, and all of the smarts are literally disabled. You can keep the OS from even being active at all.

• 1:19:11Speaker 03

  You just nope your way through the whole setup process.

• 1:19:13Speaker 04

  You just nope your way through the whole process, and the OS is not active. So it asks you to, new Vizio is owned by Walmart, it asks you if you want to have a Walmart account, and you just say no. And it warns you, you will not be able to manage payments and subscriptions. And it's like, great.

• 1:19:27Speaker 03

  Oh, no.

• 1:19:28Speaker 04

  I don't care at all.

• 1:19:31Speaker 04

  And then when you decline another warning, it literally pops up in the box that says, whoops. Declining this step means missing out on all of your smart TV features, and you just hit okay, and that's it. Then the OS is disabled, and you've got a dumb TV with enabled HDMI ports, and that's it. And you can obviously keep it off of Wi-Fi, which a lot of people do anyway, and then you've got it. So here's the mystery. Did Vizio do this on purpose? There's, there's some set of people that are like, Vizio has gotten in trouble for tracking before, and they might have, they might have done this on purpose. So John is digging into the mystery of the $400 Vizio dumb TV. But right at this second, you can go buy a $400 Mini Vizio Mini LED Quantum.tv and have it be a totally dumb panel.

• 1:20:16Speaker 03

  So the, like, Occam's razor explanation here is just that no one in the development process thought to test the flow of, what if I just say no to everything? And so they accidentally shipped a thing you can just say no to everything?

• 1:20:30Speaker 04

  And you can say no to everything on most TVs. Like, when you start up my Sony A95L, you can put it in like, basic mode.

• 1:20:37Speaker 03

  Sure.

• 1:20:38Speaker 04

  But like, Android is still there.

• 1:20:40Speaker 03

  Right.

• 1:20:40Speaker 04

  This is off, like dumb panel with HDMI inputs.

• 1:20:44Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 1:20:45Speaker 04

  At least that's, that's, that's what it looks like. So did they do that on purpose because of like legal issues? Did they just forget? Were they so cheap that they're like, yeah, just don't turn off the OS?

• 1:20:56Speaker 03

  Yeah, they're like, we're just happy you're in Walmart, you know what I mean?

• 1:20:58Speaker 04

  He's digging into it.

• 1:20:59Speaker 03

  Interesting.

• 1:21:00Speaker 04

  He's digging into it, but that, that's why it's like a great story because everyone wants a cheap dumb panel. And now you, at least for the time being, you can go to Walmart, you can buy a $400 Mini LED Quantum.tv, which is like reasonably good deal. It's not like an OLED, but like, it's pretty good.

• 1:21:15Speaker 04

  And it's dumb TV. It's the thing you want.

• 1:21:16Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 1:21:17Speaker 04

  That, and it, you know, in an age where everything is getting more expensive, kind of cheap.

• 1:21:23Speaker 04

  And then we will solve the mystery of whether or not Vizio knows what they did.

• 1:21:27Speaker 03

  Huh.

• 1:21:28Speaker 04

  I mean, they do now because the headline's on the site, so we'll see. We ruined it for everyone.

• 1:21:31Speaker 03

  I mean, they even, John even got a quote from, from a senior product manager, Mike Wood at Vizio, who said, essentially, he said, obviously, we believe there's a lot of benefits to using the Vizio OS and our smart features, but the choice is up to the user.

• 1:21:44Speaker 04

  Yeah, but it's like, did they say that, and then they realized that like, we point out that you can turn it off?

• 1:21:48Speaker 03

  Right. And then, and then they're going to issue a software update that just turns off the last nope, and then, and then that's it. That is fascinating.

• 1:21:54Speaker 04

  Anyway, he's, he's following up on it to see, see what the case is, but today, $400 dumb panel.

• 1:22:00Speaker 03

  Imagine a world in which you had to actually make your product worth using in order for people to use it. What a world that would be.

• 1:22:06Speaker 04

  I think everyone is very addicted to how cheap advertising-supported things are.

• 1:22:10Speaker 03

  It's very true. I think, all the way back to the Netflix conversation, I think you can put that right underneath everything Netflix and every other streaming service is doing right now. You can do an awful lot of stuff if you can just do ads.

• 1:22:21Speaker 04

  Yep. You can make as many seasons of Love Island for Peacock as you want to.

• 1:22:26Speaker 03

  Thank goodness. All right, we should get out of here. It's nice, it's nice to see you. It's nice to see you at home again.

• 1:22:31Speaker 04

  It's good to be home. I'm never leaving again.

• 1:22:33Speaker 03

  I really, really, really feel that. Who's on Decoder next week?

• 1:22:38Speaker 04

  Decoder next week is really good. It's Jinji Woo, who runs automotive at Nvidia, and we spent a lot of time just being like, what's up with cars? How do you make them drive themselves? I made him evaluate Tesla full self-driving and whether or not they need LiDAR. You'll not be surprised to hear that Nvidia thinks AI is the solution.

• 1:22:56Speaker 03

  What's Nvidia's take on CarPlay?

• 1:22:59Speaker 04

  I think this might be the only episode where we didn't talk about

• 1:23:02Speaker 03

  Neil, God. You've one job, Patel.

• 1:23:05Speaker 04

  Just didn't come up. I mean, I know what he would have said. He's like, Nvidia believes in open systems and consumers can do whatever they want as long as they're running our chips. There, that's the whole episode. We did that for one hour.

• 1:23:15Speaker 03

  That's pretty good.

• 1:23:16Speaker 04

  No, it's really good. I'll give you a little preview. They are literally running models in the car, like reasoning models to drive the cars. So the models are constantly talking to themselves.

• 1:23:25Speaker 03

  Whoa.

• 1:23:26Speaker 04

  Like the car is like, there's a double parked car. I should go left. Like it's happening like furiously, like talking it out. I think it's great. We, it's great.

• 1:23:35Speaker 03

  Wild and terrifying.

• 1:23:36Speaker 04

  It's very good.

• 1:23:36Speaker 03

  In equal measure. I like that. Um, also, if you haven't yet, the episode you did with Peter Kafka about Comcast and NBCU and like the, the whole state of media distribution, also very interesting and kind of right next to all the stuff we were talking about, about Netflix. That's a good episode.

• 1:23:53Speaker 04

  That one has the long disclosure about what's going on at other current companies. So go listen to that one.

• 1:23:57Speaker 03

  It's like, it's like three minutes long.

• 1:24:01Speaker 03

  It'll get shorter, uh, in a few weeks. I don't know exactly what it'll be, but we'll figure it out.

• 1:24:08Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 1:24:08Speaker 03

  Version history this weekend is Philips Hue, a late add to this season of Virgin History, but one of the most interesting smart home products and actually like maybe the most successful smart home thing we have yet had. Hue Lights, super interesting, fun story. Gen two is on it. She actually interviewed the guy who invented the Hue Lights and comes with lots of fun stories. It's a great episode. It's a good time. Uh, and if you want to get all of those.

• 1:24:32Speaker 04

  Is his name Hugh?

• 1:24:33Speaker 03

  No. Hugh Hugh is H U G H.

• 1:24:37Speaker 04

  His name is Philips Hue.

• 1:24:41Speaker 03

  That'd be amazing. If that's your name, get at us. I have lots of questions.

• 1:24:43Speaker 04

  Or if your name is Hugh Phillips.

• 1:24:45Speaker 03

  Hugh Phillips.

• 1:24:45Speaker 04

  Also sensible.

• 1:24:47Speaker 03

  We'd love to hear from you. Like, I'm out on Alexas. I'm in on Hugh Phillips. If you want to get all of our podcasts ad free, including all of the ones that we've just mentioned, the best thing you can always do is subscribe to The Verge. That's how you make Neelai ungovernable. That's how you make it so that he can afford to never leave his house ever again. This is the goal.

• 1:25:05Speaker 04

  I truly hate being told what to do.

• 1:25:06Speaker 03

  How do we get more wood slats for Neelai so that he doesn't have to leave anymore? Subscribe to The Verge.

• 1:25:11Speaker 04

  Now I travel with wood slats.

• 1:25:14Speaker 03

  Theverge.com/subscribe. You get all our newsletters. You get all our podcasts ad free, lots of other stuff. Uh, and also we want to hear from you about everything. Taylor Swift's MSG wedding, uh, your favorite shows on Netflix, all of your, the videos that you hate to see on X, uh, your feelings about the view, all of it. Send it all to us. [email protected] is the email. 866-VERGE11 is the hotline. Send us everything. I think somebody, can someone text this number, actually text whatever you want to 866-VERGE11 and tell me if it goes through.

• 1:25:43Speaker 04

  Not whatever you want.

• 1:25:44Speaker 03

  Well, don't text whatever you want. Instead of calling us with a hotline question, text us with a hotline question.

• 1:25:49Speaker 04

  There you go.

• 1:25:50Speaker 03

  I think this works, but I, I need, I need some more testing than just me to see if this works. So text the hotline, say what up. I look forward to hearing from you. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. This show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kiefer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron LaCassio. We will see you next week. Neelai.

• 1:26:09Speaker 04

  Back at you.

• 1:26:13Speaker 01

  Support for the show comes from Engine. Running a small business means every dollar has to work hard. But if your team is still booking travel the old way, it's costing you more than you think. Engine is the fastest growing travel and spend platform in the country, built specifically for businesses like yours. Book a trip in as little as two and a half minutes, earn up to 10% back on hotels. And in 2025, Engine customers save more than $300 million on travel with zero booking fees, no contracts and no BS. More than a thousand businesses join Engine every month. Join them and get $500 when your business signs up and starts traveling at engine.com/box.

• 1:26:59Speaker 09

  This week, it pays extra to be a My Lowe's Rewards member. Through October 14, members get $10 My Lowe's money when you spend $200 or more on an eligible purchase during My Lowe's Money Days. Also using your My Lowe's Rewards credit card, even better, that's an additional $20 My Lowe's money. Use it to save on your next Lowe's haul. Exclusions, restrictions and more terms apply. See Lowe's.com/MyLowe'sMoneyDays for details. My Lowe's money expires 30 days after issuance. Subject to change. Credit offer subject to credit approval.

• 1:27:27Speaker 10

  If you've got an insurance question, you could talk to the butcher at your local grocery store. He'd probably talk about trimming the fat, but it'd be about your brisket, not your insurance policies. Or you could talk to your local GEICO agent. They offer personalized assistance in finding the choicest cuts of coverage for all your insurance needs, which means more money for filet mignon, or if you're a vegetarian, tofu, le mignon. To find a GEICO agent near you, visit GEICO.com/local.