The government's plan to break up Google

The Verge's Lauren Feiner joins Nilay and David to talk about the US government's proposal in its search antitrust case against Google. They discuss the future of Chrome, what a white-label search engine might look like, and how a Trump administration might change the course of this case altogether. Then Nilay and David talk about the week in AI and gadget news, from the latest on Amazon's new Alexa to Google bailing on tablets all over again. Finally, in the lightning round, they discuss Comcast spinning off its cable channels and the latest in the Threads / Bluesky competition. Further reading: DOJ says Google must sell Chrome to crack open its search monopoly Google responds to DOJ’s ‘extreme proposal.’ Google workers to DOJ: we need protections to make your breakup effective Apple fights to keep DOJ antitrust suit from reaching trial Amazon announces new Echo Show 21 and Echo Show 15 smart displays Google may be about to reboot its laptop and tablet hardware again Google reportedly cancels Pixel Tablet 2 and might quit the category — again Sonos’ smart TV plans might have found an OS Windows 365 Link is a $349 mini PC that streams Windows from the cloud Comcast is spinning off its cable TV business Trump names Brendan Carr as his FCC leader Strava closes the gates to sharing fitness data with other apps Inside Elon Musk’s messy breakup with OpenAI Threads’ custom feeds are already rolling out Threads’ algorithm will focus more on the people you follow Bose acquires premium audio brand McIntosh Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Grist Cast, the flagship podcast of web browsers. And who owns them? And where they go? And what happens if no one owns any of them? It seems like a likely outcome here. I'm your friend Neil, David Pierce is here. The browser wars are just the end of web browsers. I love this. This is great. What have we done? Yeah. Lauren Feiner is here. Hey, Lauren. Hey. There is a lot of news, a lot of what I would call Lauren Feiner news this week. Unfortunately for Lauren Feiner, every week is that. Especially lately. The DOJ has put forth its proposal for what to do about Google antitrust in search, which involves potentially selling Chrome. Google's reacted to this. There are more antitrust lawsuits.

• 2:18Nilay Patel?

  Apple is trying to get out of its antitrust lawsuit. There's a bunch of AI chaos, or some gadgets. We got a lightning round.

• 2:27Nilay Patel?

  I want you to hear the excitement in my voice about the lightning round. You know it's coming. It's, it's gonna be good.

• 2:32David Pierce?

  I also have some personal news. Can I tell you my personal news?

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  What's that?

• 2:35David Pierce?

  I bought an M4 Mac Mini and it is glorious. Liam, our producer, can attest to the number of times I have slacked him over the last two weeks, being like, Liam, I'm gonna do it. Talk me out of it. And he keeps not talking me out of it. And so this morning, I opened up so many browser windows by accident that I got very frustrated with my computer. And so I went to the Apple Store.

• 2:56Nilay Patel?

  All right, let me just pull apart a few themes, a few core Vergecast themes here. David, who had an M1 Mac Mini on which he mostly does this, which was fine. It was fine, right? It was like not-

• 3:08David Pierce?

  Terrific computer.

• 3:09Nilay Patel?

  Right. And you bought a new computer that is vastly faster than what you need. Because after years of insisting eight gigs of RAM was enough, you ran out of memory and your computer slowed down. So you went and bought an entirely new computer to get eight gigs more RAM.

• 3:27David Pierce?

  Okay, I have several responses. Thank you for bringing this to my attention. Eight gigs of memory is fine if you are a regular person.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  You just bought a new computer. In no- Your M1 Mac Mini was not slow for this purpose.

• 3:40David Pierce?

  In no way, shape, or form should other people make computer purchasing decisions based on how I use browser tabs. Like, no one. The only person in my life I've met who is worse about browser tabs than I am is Addie Robertson.

• 3:53Nilay Patel?

  But you are the person-

• 3:54David Pierce?

  Who sat down next to me last week and I went, oh my God, that's so many tabs.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Right. And Addie is smart and good at buying computers and probably bought a computer with 16 gigs of RAM. Whereas you were like, most normals need eight gigs of RAM. I, David Pierce, tab assassin, are gonna buy a computer with eight gigs of RAM and then unnecessarily buy new.

• 4:12David Pierce?

  I had to choose between being good at life and having a powerful computer and I picked powerful computer. Like, it just, this is-

• 4:17Nilay Patel?

  And I will also point out that you refuse to buy a good TV.

• 4:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that I still feel good about.

• 4:23Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 4:23David Pierce?

  Still feel solid.

• 4:24Nilay Patel?

  It's a mess.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm proud of you. When's it coming? Thank you.

• 4:28David Pierce?

  It's here. I'm on it right now.

• 4:29Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you look great.

• 4:30David Pierce?

  If you're like, gosh, David is so much smarter and more attractive than he usually is on the Vergecast. This is it. We did it.

• 4:37Nilay Patel?

  That's all. I mean, I've spent a lot of time thinking about buying an M4 Mac Mini, but to do that, I have to convert one of my old iMacs into a monitor, which more and more people, I will say, out there are talking about.

• 4:49David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  I wouldn't say doing.

• 4:52Nilay Patel?

  Right? But now that I've opened the door to, hey, what if we all broke our iMacs trying to turn them into monitors? More and more people are like, will you do it first so that I can see if it works?

• 5:03David Pierce?

  We've definitely successfully made the business case for our roving RV in which we will do this process for you. It's ready.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  I will drive to your house in a van and break your old computer. That is the only promise I will make the listeners of the Vergecast. Some of you will come out of it with a monitor. Most of you will not.

• 5:21David Pierce?

  It's about the friends we've made along the way.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  Will we spend time together in a van?

• 5:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 5:25Nilay Patel?

  That is a guarantee.

• 5:29Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying.

• 5:31Nilay Patel?

  When I was a child, my father owned not one, but two different conversion vans. They were great, and I think they should come back as a market. And the specific market I'm proposing is the back of the van is where we hang out and play video games, and the front of the van is where I break your old iMac.

• 5:46David Pierce?

  I like that.

• 5:47Nilay Patel?

  Do you see what I'm saying? It's like, inside of captain's chairs, there's like a little lab situation. And the back is like couches. A good TV, David. Some game consoles.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  I'm not sure this is gonna work, and mostly it'll probably just get me arrested, because I'll be driving around being like, I'd like to break your computer and play video games with you in my van.

• 6:05David Pierce?

  So it's transparency. It gets you everywhere. And we'll make content about it and be huge on TikTok, and it'll be fine.

• 6:11Nilay Patel?

  That's finally, finally a business model in media that makes sense. All right, we should get into the news. There's a lot to talk about. Lauren, let's start with the DOJ and Google, just to lay some foundation for folks. I want to talk about the proposal this week. There are multiple antitrust lawsuits against Google. And it's, actually, I find it quite difficult to keep them all apart, because it's not clear how all of the things that happen will ultimately play out and make a new Google. And then on top of it, there's a new president and a new administration and a new attorney general, although Matt Gaetz dropped out like minutes before we started recording. So I don't even know who the attorney general's gonna be.

• 6:54Nilay Patel?

  But there's the one we're talking about today, which was the Google pays Apple money for search defaults in Safari. Google was found guilty of having a monopoly in search and the remedies are at this. There's another case, which is what advertising, right, Lauren?

• 7:10Speaker 06

  Yeah, the ad tech industry. And that one is going to closing arguments on Monday back in Alexandria, Virginia. And that's all about Google, how Google connects publishers and advertisers through its tech.

• 7:23David Pierce?

  That one's the much wonkier one.

• 7:25Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 7:25David Pierce?

  But also maybe the more important one.

• 7:27Nilay Patel?

  Because it's the money.

• 7:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 7:28Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 7:29Nilay Patel?

  So I just want to like, start there. There's a lot of activity around Google's business and how it all works together. And the reason I want to start there is all of that flows through Chrome. Right? At the end of the day, Google's ad tech is worthless unless there are web browsers that show you ads and Google has the biggest one. And at the end of the day, the reason it's paying for a default placement in other browsers is because it can't run Chrome on the iPhone. So it just pays Apple to do what it does on the desktop in Chrome. So that I just want to lay all that out. Like, there's a lot of swirling activity around Google and we're facing down this proposal inside of one case, but I'm not sure how it will affect the other case. And we won't know because it's just at closing arguments. Oh, and then this, by the way, this trial, there's

• 8:14Nilay Patel?

  so much, it's so confusing. This trial is not even over. This is just a proposal and then there's going to be another trial to debate this proposal.

• 8:24Speaker 06

  Right, right. So I mean, just to give you a sense of kind of the timeline of both of these cases here, like the ad tech case is going to closing arguments on Monday. And then we go, then we might get a decision in that case by like, the end of the year. And then that goes to the remedies phase if the judge says that Google is a monopolist in that case. And then they'll have to schedule that. And then in April, we have the remedies trial in the search case in DC. So, and then after all of that, you know, we, we know Google wants to appeal the search case. And I'd imagine whoever loses in the ad tech case is going to want to appeal there. So this is not happening very soon.

• 9:08Nilay Patel?

  But so it's just a mess because I've seen people react to the news today about Chrome is Google's going to have to sell Chrome and that's just not where we are. It's this government is currently composed in the Biden administration has put forward this proposal. Many things will happen, including the inauguration of Donald Trump and whoever his attorney general is being confirmed and all. And then further trials in April. So just that's the foundation. So we're going to talk about this because the ideas are really interesting, but I just want people to know like nothing is happening. Like we're a long way from from here to there. So talk about this proposal. So the Justice Department put out this proposal. What's in it?

• 9:47Speaker 06

  Yeah. So the proposal that the DOJ put out is their kind of initial proposed final judgment. So this is, you know, them saying to the judge, this is what we want you to do. This is what we want you to tell Google that they have to do in order to restore competition to the online search market. And so basically, you know, they had filed a kind of high level version of this not that long ago. And it was sort of like, here's what we're kind of thinking about. And, you know, we're looking at Chrome, we're looking at Android, we're looking at all these other things. This is like the more concrete version of that where they're saying, you know, this is what we intend to ask for in this trial. And, you know, they're going to get to go through a whole discovery process around this too.

• 10:30Speaker 06

  So now we can see that they are saying that they feel strongly that Google must divest Chrome. It's not just an option that's on the table. They think that this is a critical access point for Google search that needs to be separated from the company. And then on top of that, you know, they also considered divesting, having Google divest Android, but they're kind of, I guess, holding their fire on that for now, but they're leaving it on the table. So it's kind of an incentive for Google to comply with the rest of the remedies that they're proposing. And it's also, you know, something that they can turn to if they say, you know what? These other remedies aren't actually working to restore competition in the market.

• 11:11Nilay Patel?

  They're pretty deliberately hanging that over Google's head, right? They're like, you can do all of these other. Hugely consequential things that you've only begun to list, which is insane.

• 11:24Nilay Patel?

  But if you don't do them, like the, the big gun is we will take Android away from you. That was the, that's the, it's just like this looming threat throughout this entire filing.

• 11:33Speaker 06

  Yeah. And I think what really comes through in this filing is that, you know, the DOJ really wants to have, you know, as many options that it can have available to, to them on the table. You know, they don't want to end up in a situation where, you know, some of the remedies they propose don't work. Or, you know, the landscape changed such that none of these things really matter anymore because we know this is going to take years. And we know that AI is going to become a very important part of search. So they are clearly trying to be very deliberate in making sure that anything they ask the judge to impose isn't something that's going to be obsolete tomorrow.

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  So Chrome is, I think, the highlight by far. It's the easiest one that for people to understand. The looming threat of we will take Android away from you, I think, also pretty easy to understand. Then there's a bunch of other stuff in here.

• 12:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 12:24Nilay Patel?

  Which also seems tremendously impactful, but maybe a little bit more opaque. Can you go through those, Lauren?

• 12:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, sure. So I guess just some of the most important ones that come to mind. You know, going back to how this case began, it's really about contracts when you boil it down to it. And these contracts are contracts that Google has with phone makers and browser makers to be the default search engine on those platforms. And the DOJ basically wants to say, all right, Google can't enter into certain exclusionary agreements with those kinds of companies. They can't exchange something of value for like preferred placement or for boxing out rivals from those, those.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  Kind of platforms. And so, you know, that's kind of like the most straightforward thing that they're asking for.

• 13:17David Pierce?

  And that's kind of what we thought this would boil down to, right? Like, I feel like we've been saying for months that the easiest answer to where would this go is just the government is going to say, you're not allowed to make these deals anymore. Period. The end. Goodbye. And it seems like everyone is prepared for that to be an outcome here.

• 13:33Speaker 06

  Totally. I mean, that seems pretty baseline. It's pretty much like exactly what was in the complaint and exactly what the judge ruled was some of their anti-competitive behavior. So that seems pretty cut and dry. But at the same time, you know, okay, sure, like, Google could stop doing these agreements and then they could figure out another way to be the default or to, you know, just maintain their dominance in this area. So I think DOJ clearly thinks like, that's not enough. That just kind of like stops the bleeding.

• 14:02David Pierce?

  Yeah. And it's the flip side of that that really gets me reading through this filing that, like, this whole thing is so much more punishing of Google than I expected it to be. And like, I'm not a lawyer and maybe I should have seen this coming. But there is a, there is a real thing they're doing in this filing where they're saying, okay, not only do we have to prevent Google from doing these monopolistic things, we have to take aggressive steps to unwind all of the things that Google has been doing and the lead it has built over the last 15 years. Like, a huge portion of this is just them saying, we need to break Google in half and give everybody else every advantage that Google has had in order for them to catch up. Right? Like, am I, am I overreading that part?

• 14:44Speaker 06

  No, I think that's fair. I mean, I think a lot of antitrust is kind of backward looking by nature. And I think, you know, often you hear companies say like, you know, we're not even doing this anymore. Like, this is all in the past. And like, that might be true, but it doesn't make, it doesn't mean that their conduct wasn't anti-competitive or that they can't still be held accountable for it. So, and I think, you know, the DOJ kind of often talked about in trial how there was this self-reinforcing cycle of Google is a good search engine. So then people come to it and they put in queries and then Google gets data and then it uses that data to make the search engine better and no one else has access to that whole cycle. And so I think they really feel like they need

• 15:26Speaker 06

  to break that cycle somehow for anyone else to even stand a chance.

• 15:31David Pierce?

  And the way the DOJ is doing that basically seems like it just wants to open source Google now. It's basically like all of your query data, your whole search index, your, the information people give you in YouTube searches, all the stuff across all of your surfaces, which is like the internet,

• 15:48David Pierce?

  should be made available, the, what's the phrase they keep using, at marginal cost? Just to everyone. Anyone, anyone who wants to run a thing that looks and works like Google should be allowed to, is essentially the, the vibe of what's coming here. And that to me is the part that surprised me the most. Like they're just like, everything that has made Google special and successful, you have to give it to everybody else for free now, just so they can catch up.

• 16:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 16:12David Pierce?

  Wild.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The thing that really strikes me about this is if you just take it at face value, I don't know how Google makes any money after this, right? And then there's the ad tech case like right next to it, which who knows how that will go, but it's all, that's also a case about contracts and pressure. And I just get the sense that it is more likely than not than Google will face some penalty in that case as well. So who knows? But this part where you're like, you have to stop preferencing Google search on YouTube? And let other people search YouTube the way that Google can search YouTube? YouTube is a closed platform.

• 16:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, I guess, I, I think that's, that's a completely fair point, but I also wouldn't cry too many tears for Google because I think, you know, they will be able to make money off of, you know, selling access to these APIs or, you know, to their index and to their search results and click and query data. And they'll also be able to, you know, they're still going to be this like amazing huge company full of great engineers and be able to create a product that's really attractive to people in search. So.

• 17:22Nilay Patel?

  Well, just hold on. They are currently an amazing company full of great engineers and they're ready to launch great products at scales, you know, there's a graveyard for a reason.

• 17:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:34Nilay Patel?

  They had a good run back in the day. Like, a lot of Google is, you can trace it back to the fact that they have a monopoly in search, it just throws off cache. And everything else is like, well, whatever, we tried messaging apps, you know, like, and this might make it better, it might make it worse. There's just a part of this where I, half of me says, this is a negotiation, so you just put forward the most intense first offer that you can make, which is, we're gonna break your business in half, and also, if you don't like it, we'll take Android too. And then we'll just see where we come back to from there. And then there's a part of me that says, we, you know, we saw, we, we just spent a few minutes talking about breaking up in Google Search, and the first part of this offer is, we're gonna take Chrome away from you. Right? And it's like, oh, this is a complete restructuring of Google.

• 18:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, at every level, what we're saying is, there should be a search engine that is almost like a utility for other people to build search products on top of. And other parts of Google, like YouTube, need to let other search products come into there. And we're basically gonna take a closed platform in YouTube and make it a more open one, which is really interesting. And then there's, we're gonna take this browser away, which is the window to almost your entire ecosystem, and someone else will have to buy it, which will accomplish what? Right? And there's just, those are two pretty different ideas, from what I can tell. Like, you're basically telling Google, you have to be a search engine company now, and we're gonna prescribe how that search engine company works.

• 19:01Nilay Patel?

  And then you're saying, we are gonna make a browser company that someone else will buy, and the number one way browser companies make money is by betting paid for default search, which we will no longer allow you to do. And at there, I'm, I'm just trying to puzzle all that through.

• 19:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, I mean, there's no doubt this is, you know, a huge swing by the DOJ, and, um, you know, they, they might not get everything they want. And like you said, this is a negotiation, this is their starting point, they're asking for a lot here, um, and it's gonna be up to the judge to figure out, you know, what is really necessary to restore competition here. And, you know, courts really don't like to be, um, you know, playing babysitter, or, you know, restructuring, like, playing the, um...

• 19:50Speaker 06

  Just really being the hand of God in the market. You know, they're not trying to dictate how the business goes. They're just trying to restore competition to this market generally. So I think the more that it gets into things that are about picking winners and losers, the more the judge is going to be skeptical and perhaps restrained on those things. So I think it really depends on how well the government makes the case in court for why these sorts of things are necessary.

• 20:22Nilay Patel?

  And when I've talked to Jonathan Kanter, who is the Assistant Attorney General for NTR, who's been leading this case, you can go listen to him on Decoder. His point is these consent decrees where we make companies promise to behave, and then we have to like watch them and go to court when they misbehave, don't work because everyone's smart and they can get around it. And what we want is big structural, like you break up the company that's clean. Like then it's over and we can see what happens next. And I think courts tend to agree with that because courts, the only humility that our judicial system shows is like, I shouldn't run your business. And I think I can't tell if that's humility or laziness or what it is, but that's usually how they respond to that idea of like ongoing compliance. Like the courts don't want to be in that business.

• 21:04Nilay Patel?

  I just think like at the, at the end of this, you look at the amount of change that would be imposed on Google. And it, sure, Google will have its opinions. Kent Walker, their chief legal officer, put out, you can tell like he's writing directly to Donald Trump. He's like, this is a radical interventionist agenda that will harm America.

• 21:23David Pierce?

  Like, it's pretty saucy.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Audience of one. Obviously, Google's going to push back against this. What happens in the trial, right? Because there's the remedies trial, and this is the proposal in the trial. Are they just gonna, I mean, I was just like, gonna sit down and be like, this is a bad idea? Do you have to like show proof? Like, how does this work?

• 21:40Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, my understanding is there's another discovery process. They get to call in witnesses. So it's going to be, you know, kind of like the first trial, but this time they kind of have to take as a given that the judge found that Google's, uh, Google had an illegal monopoly. And they're just talking about what is reasonable to impose on Google or not. So yeah, it's definitely, it's going to be a fight here.

• 22:06David Pierce?

  What's strange to me about this one is it feels like Either of the options that the DOJ is presenting here would make sense, right? I think force Google to spin off Android and Chrome into its own company. I think is, is, you can see a world in which that makes sense. Both of those are search businesses, I would point out, but like, there are people who have made a lot of money selling operating systems, right? So like, I can, you can see it, there's a, there's a thing there, somebody would spin up an app store, it'd be a whole thing. Sure, great, fine. Or force Google to essentially white label its search engine and make it available to everybody, right? So now, if I want to run a search engine, all I have to do is compete with Google on user experience, right?

• 22:50David Pierce?

  There, there is an assumption of like, common infrastructure, that whatever I search for, it's going to be as good, no matter where I search for it. Let people compete on top of that. I actually think that could be super interesting. And suddenly you have a bunch of people with a bunch of different ideas about how search could work. AI becomes really interesting on all of that. And then it's like, okay, the, the foundation of how we search is common, let's compete for real. I don't understand how you can do both of these things, because it, each one makes the other one worse, right? Like, Google's white label search engine will be better if Google controls Android and Chrome, because it will get that data that it is then forced to share with everybody else.

• 23:26Nilay Patel?

  Wait, I feel like I'm like, required, sigh, to point out that every time you make this claim, like some Google PR person leaps out of a bush and is like, we don't use Chrome click data to inform a search. And that is what they say every time.

• 23:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, and that continues to be provably not true.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  Just saying. Like I said, I feel required to say this, and I don't, I don't know if I believe it for one second.

• 23:45David Pierce?

  I trust things that come up in court and in discovery more than in the PR emails in my inbox.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, right now, outside of David's house, there's like a Google PR person peering through the bushes.

• 23:57David Pierce?

  But like, if the goal was to build the best search infrastructure for the whole internet, you'd do that, right? And like, that's how you get the user data, it's how you get the query data, like on and on and on. These things can actually reinforce each other in a way that would make the one product better if they were together. And then you're giving that product to everybody else. I can see a world in which that makes sense, but instead you're saying we're going to make Google's search engine worse and also take away its engine to make it better and then force Google to give its worst search engine to everybody. It's like, what are we, what are we actually, we're just making the whole search market worse.

• 24:28Nilay Patel?

  And I always thought that the whole point of this, at the end of the day, was who can build anything to compete with Google? And there's only one answer, which is Apple. And Google has been spending billions of dollars a year to make sure that doesn't happen. And really, the, the outcome you want is Apple builds a search engine because it has enough incoming click data and query data from Safari on the iPhone. It has the compute capability. It has the money, but like just a free, you know what they should have done instead of chasing a car is they should have built a search engine. And they didn't because Google just paid the money to waste on a car. Like, that's a weird economic outcome. But this doesn't seem like it creates that outcome at all, right? You're, you're going to prevent

• 25:12Nilay Patel?

  Google from paying Apple. And then you're going to spin off Chrome. Then you're going to say, everybody can just use the Google utility version of search, which Apple will just use at marginal cost. And it's like, well, we didn't, we didn't build the, we didn't make anybody build a new search engine. Maybe you're just betting on AI? Like, are you, is this all just, that's coming and it's going to change everything?

• 25:34Speaker 06

  I think the licensing actually does get you closer to that because, you know, if Apple and if, you know, really any other search engine that wants to is licensing the Google search results and click and query data, they really have a jumpstart on creating a very quality search engine. And, you know, if Apple combines that with its own data and own engineering of product, you know, I think they, then you're much closer to a very good product from Apple. And they're not, they're no longer constrained by, you know, if the judge decides to grant the, the contract remedies here, they're no longer constrained by their contract with Google.

• 26:15David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, if this goes a certain way, you basically get to the point where I, as a developer, all I have to do is write a pretty front end and do like three API calls and I have a Google level quality search engine. Like, that's pretty compelling. All of a sudden DuckDuckGo can reliably say, we're doing the privacy thing correctly. And also, our results are exactly as good, if not exactly the same, as what you get from Google. And other people can compete on the AI stuff. You can compete on interface.

• 26:44Speaker 06

  Right.

• 26:45David Pierce?

  The moves become really different because what you're saying is not, we can't compete with Google in order to have results quality. And because that is a flywheel that we have no access to. I mean, this is, I just keep coming back to Satya Nadella, the Microsoft CEO, sitting in the courtroom, basically explaining why Bing is worse than Google and why it's completely insurmountable. And everything in this filing makes me think that that is sitting in the heads of both Judge Meta and the DOJ in particular. And they're like, what we are going to do is just give that flywheel to anyone who wants it.

• 27:17Speaker 06

  Exactly.

• 27:18David Pierce?

  And like, and just there it'll be. And if that works, you'd get a million interesting search engines really fast, I think. It would decimate Google.

• 27:27Nilay Patel?

  The Google comms person outside your house today, right? And I can see them in the window back there. They're holding up a sign that said, or Microsoft could have made Windows good.

• 27:35David Pierce?

  There's also that. There is also that.

• 27:39Nilay Patel?

  These arguments are hard. Like, they are hard. And Microsoft has mostly failed at competing with Google on search. And even Microsoft's AI work has not really meaningfully moved the needle. So I do see the argument that you got to break this wide open. Otherwise, you're going to end up in the same kind of Apple-Google duopoly that kind of defined the last era of computing into whatever this next era is.

• 28:06David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:07Nilay Patel?

  The other argument is that AI comes to nothing and this is all garbage.

• 28:10David Pierce?

  And that Google is better at this because it's better at this, not because it's somehow structurally impossible to compete.

• 28:15Speaker 06

  Right. I think, I mean, two things. One is that I think it would result in a world where you're competing more on the product and the wrapping and the extra bells and whistles around search if everyone has access to the same kind of underlying data. And the second thing is that, you know, most of these remedies, the behavioral remedies, the things about licensing and that kind of thing. Would be enforced for 10 years. So it's not forever, but it's long enough that the DOJ feels that, you know, it would be able to create some sort of dynamic shift in the market.

• 28:49David Pierce?

  Yeah. See, I look at 10 years and I'm like, 10 years is an eternity.

• 28:52Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 28:53David Pierce?

  Like 10 years is, is, and what was it after five years? If Google's market share was less than 50% of search, they could petition to have this stuff called, like that, that's what we're asking for here, right? Like Google, which has been somewhere between like 85 and 95% of search for forever. They're like, no, no, no, we would like you to be less than 50 and we will consider this to be a competitive market again.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  So I want to talk about the politics of that timeline specifically, but first I just want to play a quick game. It's called, who can buy Chrome?

• 29:24Nilay Patel?

  Does anyone?

• 29:25David Pierce?

  Apple.

• 29:26Nilay Patel?

  Would anyone like to buzz in?

• 29:27Speaker 06

  Amazon.

• 29:27David Pierce?

  Amazon.

• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  And that's, but wouldn't the DOJ not like it if Amazon or Meta or Microsoft or Apple bought Chrome? Like, didn't we just recreate the problem?

• 29:38Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, I think it's possible that they say, you know what, these are, you know, different business lines and it's not, and it.

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  Well, you don't think Amazon's silk browser is a competitor?

• 29:50Speaker 06

  Yeah. I mean, that's the problem they're going to run into here. And I think that, that, that is an issue for that remedy. And I think on top of that, it's like, okay, well, what if this other theoretical big tech company that buys Chrome then decides that they want to make a search engine? And then are we back in the same place, just like under a different company name?

• 30:08David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, the number being thrown around is what? $20 billion? The number of companies that could spend that on a web browser with, like you said earlier, Neelai, no inherent business model. Like it's, it's so important to, to underline the fact that a web browser on its own is not a business. There is just no evidence that you can build a web browser that will be a business at any scale.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  We had Josh from, from Arc and the browser company on Decoder and they just pivoted away from making a web browser. It's very obvious.

• 30:36David Pierce?

  You just can't do it. You certainly can't do it to make a $20 billion acquisition make any sense.

• 30:41Nilay Patel?

  By the way, $20 billion is low. That's the number that Google is paying Apple just to be the default in search. That's the yearly number.

• 30:47David Pierce?

  Yeah. I saw somebody say, just take over Chrome, get the same deals because you'll be allowed to. And it's the greatest private equity arbitrage opportunity in history.

• 30:56Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah. This is, you should buy Chick-fil-A and open it on Sundays. Like you don't have to do anything.

• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  It's very easy.

• 31:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Nilay Patel?

  But I but Google won't be allowed to make those deals. So you're already you're just like operating very much behind.

• 31:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  I I think Chrome, the more we talk about it, just even in the past half an hour here, it feels like Chrome is a sideshow. We're going to train all of our attention, argue about whether whether or not you can you should sell Chrome or who you can sell it to. And the DOJ will take will give it up. So that Google can't make these deals. And that Google has to be this like weird kind of utility anybody can do it like that feels like part of the negotiation here. Maybe I'm wrong. I have I have no insight. It's just as we talk about it, it just seems so. It it feels like it accomplishes so little in the end versus actually opening up the search engine.

• 31:45Speaker 06

  I think this is a weird case where, you know, generally structural remedies or breakups are thought to be like cleaner and easier. And, you know, the court can just say, all right, let's like sever this and then we're done. We can wipe our hands of it. But it's complicated in this case because who's going to buy Chrome? And, you know, how does that look? You know, there's a lot of questions there. Whereas the behavioral remedies are often thought of as all right, this requires more oversight by the court. This is like a little bit harder to execute. But in this case, it does seem to get at the heart of what the DOJ had argued in the case was the problem and was the reason that other search engines couldn't catch up.

• 32:27Speaker 06

  And so I think we might, I could see the logic of, you know, why they might tend toward a more behavioral remedy here.

• 32:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it it's like negotiation 101, right? To go in with something like this that you're you know, you're willing to give up.

• 32:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, soon after shot, you will be the CEO of just Google Duo.

• 32:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You gotta have, what do you want to give me in return?

• 32:50David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, you gotta have the one thing that you're willing to part with, just in the name of seeming like you're arguing.

• 32:55Nilay Patel?

  I will be the CEO of Google Docs. Just sell, give me Google. I have a number of ideas already from the jump.

• 33:01David Pierce?

  They already did taps. Google Docs is perfect. Don't touch Google Docs.

• 33:04Speaker 06

  I wonder if they would make it so that they do something similar like they're proposing with Android where it's like, all right, fine. We don't have to spin out Chrome, but, you know, we'll hang it over your head in case you don't comply with everything else.

• 33:16Nilay Patel?

  That's what I feel like you have to sell Chrome as such a big shiny distraction from all of this other stuff. Right? The marginal cost of access to the Google search index is also a dagger to that company's business.

• 33:28David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, those are the things like, like you're saying, Lauren, that actually get to the trial that we had last year, right?

• 33:36Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 33:36David Pierce?

  The Chrome thing, I think, came out of left field for a lot of people because it, it just doesn't address the stuff that they spent months in court arguing about. It is, you can sort of get there from Chrome, but all of these arguments were about like the, the structural system that makes the underlying infrastructure of Google search unstoppable. And, and all, all the rest of the stuff in the filing is like poking at how to peel that apart. And then there's Chrome.

• 34:05Speaker 06

  Yeah, I, I think, I mean, another aspect of the trial was like, where are you able to access search? And Chrome and web browsers generally are one of the big access points. You either access search through your browser or your phone, basically. So, um, I, I think the thing with Chrome is that it's the one, like entity and Android, they're the one entity that Google actually owns. Like, the court can't impose a remedy on another company. It can't impose a remedy on Apple or Samsung.

• 34:36David Pierce?

  But I can. That's not true. Don't tell.

• 34:42Speaker 06

  But it can impose a remedy on Google to say, all right, at least for this one browser that you own, you can't use it in a self-preferencing way.

• 34:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I do want to talk about the, the politics of this. I think it's a good segue. So we've been comparing this case and the Apple case to the Microsoft case in the 90s for some time, since they started, basically. And it strikes me, even the timeline here and the politics of the timeline are the same. So Microsoft case in the 90s started in 1998 under Bill Clinton. The DOJ won, they pursued a breakup. George Bush gets elected and the DOJ says, ah, nevermind, we're going to settle the case. And there's some like winding back and forth in there. But there was a moment when Microsoft was going to get broken up. And then there was a moment when the DOJ said, nah. We're done with that. We're going to do these big consent decrees and you're fine. And all that was chaos, right? And the executives at Microsoft who were there at that time will tell you it was

• 35:36Nilay Patel?

  super distracting. And, you know, Bill Gates is like, this is why I didn't invent the cellphone, which is, you just tell yourself that, Bill. Right? Like you did the Zune. Sorry. But that is, that distraction from the giant created the opportunity for Google to exist. In many ways, it created the opportunity for Apple to make its big comeback because it's not like macOS nine software was selling the iMac. Web browsers were selling the iMac. So all of this distraction about Microsoft and bundling in our explorer, all this stuff in the 90s. Whether it came to anything, it just created the opportunity for other players to enter because Microsoft was constrained by whatever. Here we have a very similar situation. This case actually started in the Trump administration.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  It got won in the Biden administration under this DOJ. Now we're going to head into a remedies phase with a new president, a much more transactional president who will pay direct attention to the CEO of this company, who has already said he's talking to CEO of this company with Elon Musk on the call that was reported this week. And who knows who the Attorney General will be? Let's just start with the basics. Is, is Jonathan Cantor still going to be the Assistant Attorney General of Antitrust when this case goes to the remedies phase?

• 36:48Speaker 06

  That would seem highly unlikely. You know, even when I think administrations are aligned on certain policies, you know, they often just want to bring in their own people. So I think, you know, we're likely to see a different antitrust chief at the DOJ under Trump. But I think it is a big open question of what way that person will lean. Are they going to be a more populist neo Brandeisian antitrust person who actually does want to pursue really strong remedies against Google? Or are they going to be more of the, you know, establishment conservative type that wants to

• 37:28Speaker 06

  kind of do as light a touch a thing as they can. So I think we still don't really know what that's going to be. I mean, we don't even know who the AG nominee is going to be after Matt Gaetz dropped out. So I think there are a lot of big questions about that. But I do think it's important that it was brought under the first Trump administration. So I don't think we're going to see it completely wither away. But I could see for sure that maybe the next DOJ doesn't want to go as far as this DOJ has put out there.

• 38:00Nilay Patel?

  Do you think there's any age membership here, which is actually what we should sell Google into as many component parts as we think that's our proposal. So that the next DOJ shows up and even the walk or like pre negotiating against the next administration.

• 38:13Speaker 06

  Perhaps, I mean, I think any, any administration that walks back some of these, they're going to have to deal with what that looks like to the public. You know, I'm sure they would say that's not really a factor for them, but I think for any, anyone who works in politics, it is to an extent. They're going to have to say, all right, well, we did pull our punches here and explain that. So I think it, you know, it's harder to take something away than to add something back in. And, you know, I could see that potentially being a consideration here.

• 38:46Nilay Patel?

  The other piece, and I'm just curious to read on this, we obviously don't know who the attorney general will be. And Matt Gaetz had so many problems that he just withdrew, like he literally went to Capitol Hill for 20 minutes. He met with senators and was like, I'm out, you guys.

• 39:01Nilay Patel?

  And so that, that is whatever it is. And that's not the kind of politics we ever really talk on the show, but he was kind of an antitrust guy, like he was into it. Maybe in a bad faith way, like I just want to punish big companies, which is seems to animate a lot of Trumpist antitrust. But he was still like, that's pretty cool. JD Vance, we've watched video of him saying Google is a problem and Lena Kahn is doing a good job. We, Josh Hawley, right? Like there, there is a strain of antitrust thinking in the modern Republican Party. This is, we probably should break up Google. Elon Musk, I mean, he says everything.

• 39:41Nilay Patel?

  You can find a tweet of anything at this point, but he has said Google is a problem. Marc Andreessen and Ben Horowitz, benefactors of the Trump campaign and now benefactors of the administration, they think Google is a problem, like openly, they've openly said it. What, how does that tie up with actually want the government out of messing with big American companies? Because it, there's, there's an ideological inconsistency there. I have no idea how that resolves.

• 40:06Speaker 06

  Well, I think the staying out of American companies comes more from the establishment arm of the Republican Party. And I think Trump, you know, I think he can kind of talk that part of it when it is beneficial to him or, you know, in areas that make sense for him. But I think, you know, when it comes to big tech, he has often wanted to speak out on them and, you know, has an elevated antitrust enforcers in his previous administration who did go after both Google and Meta. So I think there's always been that strain within Trump and, you know, Trump's previous administration. So I think, you know, it is definitely notable

• 40:47Speaker 06

  that he continues to surround himself with people who do believe in this kind of more progressive view of antitrust. But at the same time, I would caveat that like with Trump, we never really know, you know, what's going to happen. You know, is he going to change his mind the next day and who's really got his ear? So I think it's hard to pull any policy from any one of those people. But I think that just seeing that there are so many of them that he's surrounding himself by and, you know, the animosity that he has had towards certain tech companies and tech executives, I think it's not hard to imagine that there would be some incentive to continue these fights against the tech companies.

• 41:31David Pierce?

  I would also just point out that the unifying theme of a lot of these antitrust fights is against companies that have, they have decided have wronged them in some way on the internet. Like, I think it's less about like a broad moral belief about antitrust and more about big companies that say bad things about me in search results.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's no, I want to be very clear. There's no rationalizing these decisions. I'm just pointing out, it's a bunch of people who are mad and they act in ways that accomplish retribution and. Trump in particular has said, they gotta treat me better or I will break them up.

• 42:05David Pierce?

  Right, and right or wrong, like however you want to feel about it, they have been mad at Google in particular, long enough that I think it stands to reason that they are going to continue to be mad at Google.

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  Right, and Anderson Horowitz can probably find a way to buy Chrome.

• 42:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, or fund a bunch of competitors that are gonna have a really easy time building ad-funded search engines now, right? Like, that suddenly, suddenly you take the best market in the history of the internet, and you break it into a thousand pieces and make it available for anyone to come into, like that you've just made every VC's year, right? Like, we've heard this for years, it came up at the trial, that VCs won't fund search companies, because it is, it's a, it's a dead area, it's not even worth trying to compete with Google. And instead, what you're doing is you're saying, here's a hundred billion dollar a year industry, that is suddenly completely up for grabs, and you don't even have to try that hard to be competitive, like, yeah, I'd be into that if I were a VC.

• 42:57Nilay Patel?

  I will point out, that the first Trump administrations antitrust efforts ended with one, T-Mobile, like Sprint, in a negotiated deal that created Project China 5C, America's fourth wireless carrier, which, to this day, I think strikes terror into the heart of everyday Americans. I don't, who the fuck knows what's going on over there? That's one. And then the other one, they fought against AT&T buying Time Warner, because Trump hated CNN so much. That's it, that was the entire intellectual justification for opposing that merger, they lost, which is fine, and that resulted in a 4-3 grayscale Justice League directed by Zack Snyder. Those are the two outcomes of the previous Trump administrations'

• 43:42Nilay Patel?

  antitrust efforts.

• 43:43David Pierce?

  That's good, we've now hit the bingo card for the first Cash Talks about antitrust, so.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm just pointing out, you're like, how will Trump deal with Chrome? And you're like, well, the evidence suggests they will force them to hire Zack Snyder, to make grayscale square YouTube videos, and start Boost Mobile. Like, I don't know what to make of all that. But you could actually, out of the pieces of Google, you could probably do that. Google Fi is now Boost Mobile. Yeah, I was gonna say. That's my, that's my prediction. The last thing I want to ask you about, Lauren, real quickly. This case, the Google case, is done, right? They were found guilty of having an monopoly. And now we're in the remedies phase. The other case, it's wrapping up, right? It's going to come to a conclusion. The judge is going to decide. The judge, not a political actor in the way that some other folks are political actors, or at least not supposed to be, that will come to a conclusion. Apple's case is still pending.

• 44:32Speaker 06

  Right.

• 44:32Nilay Patel?

  It hasn't gone to trial. No one's been ruled anything. We're, Apple asked for a dismissal today. They said, make this go away. Apple has a lot to want from an incoming Trump administration. Just straightforwardly, Apple makes a lot of stuff in China, and Trump wants to impose tariffs on goods made in China. So you can see Tim Cook has to horse trade his way out of that. He did an excellent job of that last time. But maybe Tim Cook's singular achievement as CEO is navigating Donald Trump to excuse Apple products from tariffs. You can make the argument, I'm not saying it's good or bad, I'm not, not, outside of the morality of it, he did a good job of it. He, he excused Apple from a lot of noise by managing one man very directly. Do you think that he's going to be able to manage his way out of this antitrust lawsuit?

• 45:18Nilay Patel?

  Because the incoming Attorney General could just drop it.

• 45:21Speaker 06

  That's true. Yeah, I, I think, you know, when it's something like the, when it's coming from the DOJ, it really is up to the DOJ where they, if they want to continue the case and what direction they want it to go. You know, they certainly could withdraw it, but I think that's hard. It's already, you know, in this kind of pre-trial phase, they were just arguing a motion to dismiss. And, you know, now that's going to be up to the judge to decide whether any part of the case can move forward. And I guess it's theoretically possible that the judge dismisses the case. I think often in these really big cases, we might see them narrowed, but not fully dismissed.

• 46:03Speaker 06

  So yeah, then it's on the DOJ to decide what they do. And I think.

• 46:10Speaker 06

  Apple is in much more of a friendly position with Trump in a sense, just based on the past administration, when Tim Cook managed to really kind of walk this really precarious line in, you know, just being on Trump's good side. So I think if any company could do it, perhaps it's Apple. But, you know, that would obviously be a big deal if DOJ just dropped the case entirely. I think that would be somewhat unusual.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  And the DOJ is supposed to be independent of the presidency, and I don't think Donald Trump wants a DOJ that's independent of his presidency, right? Like, I don't want to be, this, what we're talking about is corruption, like, sort of straightforwardly corruption. Can Tim Cook call Donald Trump and say, "Drop my antitrust case"? Like, in a normal administration, that would end there. Like, lawyers would come screaming into the White House, they would burst into the Oval Office and be, "Mr. President, you can't do that." And that is not going to happen this time. Like, very clearly, he does not want that to happen. He does not want that constraint on his behavior. The question is, what happens next, right? And honestly, what's a Tim Cook tradeaway? Like, do you care more about tariffs? Or do you care more about your antitrust lawsuit?

• 47:23David Pierce?

  There's still a North Carolina factory that either does or doesn't exist, and either will or won't exist, that Tim can always throw into this.

• 47:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, last time he held a fake factory opening in Texas, which was very good. Look at this Mac Pro we've been making this whole time. It's a lot. That one, I think, is just up for grabs in a way that the Google ones are, they're up for grabs in a different way. Like I said, the Microsoft case is sort of illustrative here, right? Like, there was a change in administrations, and then the posture of the government changed, and we ended up with consent decrees instead of breakups. Who knows what's going to happen? But it does seem like Tim Cook, at the very least, cannot retire in the next four years.

• 48:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think Apple shareholders will definitely want him to hang on there.

• 48:06Nilay Patel?

  We're going to open so many fake factories. I'll take your, by the way, if you want to send me an email and tell me what the next Foxconn is going to be, I'm curious. We have to, we're going to end up with one. It's definitely going to happen. All right, we got to take a break. We, we, we're already over. We, it's segment one, we're already over. Lauren, thank you so much.

• 48:24Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me.

• 48:25Nilay Patel?

  We'll be right back.

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• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Get ready for another 45 minutes of talking about the Trump administration. I honestly just want to see if in our stats, we can see people stop listening to podcasts whenever I say his name.

• 50:41David Pierce?

  We sure can in our emails. I'll tell you that.

• 50:44Nilay Patel?

  No, we're gonna do gadgets. We it's all the politics are out of our system. We're gonna do gadgets. Well, there's gonna be a little politics later, but for now, we're gonna do gadgets.

• 50:52David Pierce?

  Everything is politics, Eli.

• 50:54Nilay Patel?

  Just like Alexa calling an Uber. Only the Uber has a giant American flag mounted at the back of it now by law.

• 51:02Nilay Patel?

  So there's like a bunch of.

• 51:06Nilay Patel?

  Great. You know, I came home from JFK yesterday and Uber has a bunch of choices at the airport. Like, do you want Uber Comfort? Do you want Business Comfort? Do you want Uber Electric or whatever? If I could pick giant American flag truck.

• 51:17David Pierce?

  Uber Patriot.

• 51:21Nilay Patel?

  Uber Raptor. I would take it. I'm just saying, you know me, I would take it. All right. Lots of AI stuff, lots of gadget stuff. Just a big mix of companies trying to figure out what on earth is going on, I would say.

• 51:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, what do we do now is like a real question facing the tech industry at this moment.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  So let's start with Amazon and just bundle these up. So there's a lot of rumors about what's gonna happen with the next version of Alexa. There was some reporting earlier this week that Amazon really wants to roll it out, but it's still too slow.

• 51:55David Pierce?

  Yep. It's tough. The vibes coming out of Amazon about what Alexa is and might be when it comes out next just keep getting worse. And it was supposed to launch in October. It's now the end of November. And I would say there is no sign of it yet. And it's it's one of those things like you kind of get to the point where once these things have been leaked in the way that they have several different times in several different ways, it starts to become clear. This is like, this is people who think this is a problem and want to talk about it, right? It's like, it was like, it's it. There is so much smoke now that it's like this. There's something really problematic happening here.

• 52:38Nilay Patel?

  But and then there's smoke on the other side, which is they've all been leaked in the other way. And like big hypey ways to like juice stock prices and make everyone think that. You know, they're not going to get lapped by OpenAI. Like, Jesus will, digital Jesus will turn on your lights soon, we promise.

• 52:54David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:55Nilay Patel?

  Is like a pro, is, is like a thing that all these companies are saying. And then the reality of building those products is still very challenging. So here you have Amazon, which I think suffered the most from the first wave of like chatbots. Like, why wasn't Alexa doing this already?

• 53:11David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 53:12Nilay Patel?

  Right? You, you didn't even have an iPhone services business to distract you the way that Apple got distracted from Siri. Like, you didn't have some cash cow. You just had a like, this was your bet. You wanted Alexa to be Windows. The interface is voice. This is the platform shift is we can talk to computers, they can talk to us. Like, what are you doing? And the answer is, don't worry, we got it. And it seems like, yep, they, they wanted to do agenty stuff. They wanted to call an Uber for you. They wanted to go buy concert tickets. Probably in the same way that everybody's talking about, right? Which is like, click around on some websites on the backend and AWS. But it's still too slow.

• 53:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's been really interesting to me thinking about the difference between the way that Google reacted to ChatGPT and the way that Amazon reacted to ChatGPT. Because what Google started saying almost immediately was, basically, we built all this technology. Like, these things you think you did, we invented. And we've been doing it for a long time. And what Google had was a lot of very good technology that it hadn't built into anything. And so Google all of a sudden raced to basically productize this stuff it had been working on internally for a very long time. And I think the speed with which Gemini has become like ubiquitous inside of Google and also pretty good suggests that most of what Google was saying was true, right? Like, it had the tech and it changed the company a lot to productize it, but like, it had it.

• 54:33David Pierce?

  Amazon was the opposite, right? Like, Amazon had the thing you would think would be the product, right? Like, ChatGPT is coming out being like, we've made voice mode. And it's like, Alexa is just voice mode and we've had it for 10 years. And What Amazon had to do was basically say, no, no, no, we can build these underlying capabilities to the point where it it soft launched this thing over a year ago in the middle of a bunch of like weird personnel changes where Dave Limp was leaving to go run Blue Origin, Panos Panay was leaving Microsoft to come in and run all this stuff. But like, they launched this thing already a year ago. They told us what it was going to be and made these grand promises about how it was coming soon. And it is, it has become abundantly clear over that last 12 months

• 55:15David Pierce?

  that building the technology is the hard part. And and Amazon just doesn't seem to be able to do it.

• 55:23Nilay Patel?

  But do you think it's the technology or do you think it's the product? Like, Amazon, you could cheat, right? You could just go pay OpenAI to use whatever and you still have to turn on the lights.

• 55:33David Pierce?

  And there's some, there's some reporting and evidence that that is a thing Amazon is either doing or has pretty aggressively considered doing is just paying for that. And you're right that then attaching all that stuff to the things that Alexa can already do is a challenge, right? Like, no matter what, you can't just like write a check to OpenAI and suddenly Alexa is way better. It's a lot of work.

• 55:53Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think Sam Altman really wants everyone to believe that you can just write a check to.

• 55:57David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think I think Sam Altman would love for you to believe that. And Dario at Anthropic is like, no, we'll do it for a smaller check. But like, you can't do that. But it is also, if you want to be Amazon and you want to do this at the scale that they're going to, you at some point have to build it yourself. And there are a lot of little tentacles to doing that well. But the first thing is just like, what if Alexa was just a little better? Like, you don't, you don't have to fix it all at once. Just, just do the thing that like Apple has been doing with Siri for forever, where it just like quietly gets a tiny bit better all the time.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  No, I reject this comparison. What are you talking about? That is not true at all.

• 56:35David Pierce?

  That's a bad comparison.

• 56:35Nilay Patel?

  Yesterday, I asked Siri to call my wife and it was like, no. Like, it did the new animation and everything, you know, like the glow, the screen glow. It's like beautiful. And I was like, call Becky. And it was just like, I don't, I'm, you know, I'm off the clock, man. Like. Like it's not better.

• 56:52David Pierce?

  I tried to set a reminder this morning. I put my coffee mug on the roof of my car and then forgot it. So it fell off and exploded. And so I I'm driving and I go on CarPlay and I'm like, hey, remind me in an hour to buy a new Yeti. That was what I said, because it's a Yeti mug. I love the thing. It's great. What it said was, in an hour, buy any popular was the name of the reminder. So you're right. I take back the Siri comparison. But at any rate, if Amazon wants to do this, it has some of the hardest things already out there, right? It has hundreds of millions of devices that support this thing. It has a big ecosystem of devices that work on its devices. Like, you just have to build the underlying part.

• 57:34David Pierce?

  And that is an easy thing to think is the easy part, and it is very clearly not the easy part.

• 57:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I I think with Apple, you can see it's also not the easy part.

• 57:44David Pierce?

  Totally. And Apple just decided to punt it to ChatGPT in a very real way.

• 57:48Nilay Patel?

  And even that is not it. Like, the part where you talk to the phone and it goes and does stuff for you, that's not ChatGPT.

• 57:55David Pierce?

  No.

• 57:55Nilay Patel?

  I actually think that can you make the existing voice assistant incrementally better with AI? Is not possible. Like, I think the way that Alexa and Siri and Google Assistant are currently architected is they're dead ends. Like, it feels very clear that these are dead ends and that everyone is struggling to rebuild the general purpose LLM into a thing that can do the same stuff that Siri can do and then make it more capable. And you're they're just stuck. Like, I don't I don't think you can be like, it's Alexa, the same Alexa you know and love. But sometimes it's a thousand times smarter. Like, I don't I don't think that that is like working.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  And so, yeah, we'll see. I mean, I, you know, my sense is that they brought in Panos to make this go because they needed strong leadership to make calls.

• 58:47David Pierce?

  And yep.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  He's as strong of a product leader as you can get. So we'll see how it goes. But the basic problem of, on the one hand, you have Sam Altman and Dario out there being like, we can build AGI on current hardware, which is a real thing these people have said. And then, on the other hand, you've got Amazon being like, well, it's it's turning it's turning out to be very difficult to to switch on a light switch with these tools. It's like, we're just like all over the place.

• 59:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, this is why there was the the one bit of Amazon news that I thought was super interesting this week was, I believe it was Business Insider that had a story that Amazon is, instead of trying to do all of this stuff itself and do the like agentic AI that can go use websites on your behalf, it's just making deals with partners to do this stuff, which is like a thing you and I have been talking about for forever, right? Like APIs over AIs is like a thing I keep saying to people that like, why can't you just make the Uber app do it for you because you don't have to go fake the Uber app, just just let Uber do it. And that appears to be the way that Amazon is going, which I think A, you can read as a total referendum on how good Amazon's own AI stuff is, but also

• 59:58David Pierce?

  like, they're making deals with Uber so that when you say get me a ride, it'll just call you an Uber, and DoorDash for food deliveries, and Ticketmaster for buying tickets to things. And these are ideas that raise other complicated questions, like, should it tell me that it's DoorDash doing it so that I understand the like transparency of this process and the fees and who all this stuff's going to and who has my information? All that stuff is really complicated UI, but like, DoorDash is gonna do it better than Amazon hacking DoorDash, you know what I mean? So like, I think that is actually a good sign to me that there is a version of Alexa that is going to be better at this stuff in a more integrated way, that Amazon has stopped saying, we're going to solve all of this

• 1:00:40David Pierce?

  problem with fake Rabbit-style AI where we're just gonna go use websites for you, we're just going to be partners with the people who know how to do this. And I think that is going to be the right approach for a pretty long time.

• 1:00:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, Amazon has the money to do it. I mean, you know, Jesse from Rabbit is like, I don't have the money to do it, so I've got to do some clicking around. We'll see, I just, again, we can achieve AGI in current hardware, but Apple and Amazon can't quite deploy this stuff at scale in a way that makes sense and doesn't break light switches.

• 1:01:13Nilay Patel?

  Just something to consider. Speaking of lights, which is there one other bit of Amazon news, which is fascinating. They announced new Echo shows this week. Chen has the write up Echo show 15 and 21, which is basically just a TV. Like it's a 21 inch Echo show in your kitchen. They show it in their own press photos, running the Fire TV interface. Like it's a TV with-

• 1:01:35David Pierce?

  On a stand with a remote. Like it's just a television.

• 1:01:38Nilay Patel?

  It's just a TV. Pretty good. People like having TVs in their kitchens in particular. Great. They're doing some adaptive light stuff. I don't think Amazon's photo stuff is very good, but they're obviously making a run at put photos in here and make them look good.

• 1:01:52David Pierce?

  Do you have a kitchen TV? Like, do you have a, do you have a dedicated screen for watching stuff in the kitchen?

• 1:01:56Nilay Patel?

  No, we, we have a Nest Hub that shows photos that often just misresponds to Google queries. We use it for setting timers. And because it is a Google device, you can run YouTube TV on it. Right. But it's, it's small. And then our, you know, it's like our house, the first one of our houses gigantic. So you can just see the big TV in the kitchen. You usually look across the house to that TV. And to whatever extent we are watching TV, that is the solution. But I, we're just not like TV people in that way.

• 1:02:26David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 1:02:28Nilay Patel?

  And also Becky's just constantly listening to podcasts on her phone, built in speakers on her phone. Like, that's the real TV in our house.

• 1:02:35David Pierce?

  Understood.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  What's fascinating about these two Echo shows, aside from the fact that they're enormous and cheap, although a 21 inch screen with 1080p resolution for $2.99. That's like some David Pierce stats right there.

• 1:02:47David Pierce?

  Literally, that is more expensive than my 4K TCL P series that is 50 inches right behind me.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, that thing looks great. I'm sure. No banding in the colors. It's great. $2.99 for the 15. All that's, all that aside, the screens aside, they've got built in cameras for video calling. They're proud of the cameras. And then they have built in Wi-Fi thread and Zigbee radios for smart home stuff. And so you just see, okay, the idea is we're going to put a little computer in your house, a little server. It's going to connect everything for you. You're not going to have a bunch of little hubs, like your Hue hub or your smart things hub or whatever. It's all going to be built into this device. And then you'll have this device. And this will be the locus of smart home control. Also the thing you talk to and also your TV. Pretty interesting. Whether any of that actually works or whether Matter plays out the way it's supposed to play out, so you can buy a bunch of stuff and still

• 1:03:37Nilay Patel?

  control it from your iPhone and also have this Home Hub, who knows? But at least we're making like confident steps towards you just by this thing. Everything connects to this thing and then it is expressed out to your phones and your voice assistants or whatever. Mess, it's still messy, but you can see the idea.

• 1:03:56David Pierce?

  I do think it's the right infrastructure. I mean, you pit this against what we've heard about Apple's stuff, which is very much like buy a little controller for every room kind of thing. And I think, I think you're right that having sort of the one big screen you can yell at from almost anywhere and then your phone is actually a much closer answer to the right one. And I also think like Jen talks about this all the time, having a screen with big ass buttons on it goes a really long way towards making your smart house usable by actual humans.

• 1:04:26Nilay Patel?

  It sort of does. I just want to, I will offer, I will offer this one piece of evidence, which is both a huge victory and a gigantic failure. There are so many ways to turn lights on and off in this house. Infinite ways. You can, you can just speak to the heavens and lights will turn on. You can just, you can just wish for lights to turn on.

• 1:04:44David Pierce?

  Just yell darkness and things happen.

• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  And so in our kitchen, which is pretty dark, I have Hue lights in adaptive mode. So they just turn on in the morning and they're in daylight. And then as the day goes on, they get warmer and warmer and warmer. And at the end of the day, they're warm. And yesterday they were out of sync and I was in California. So I get a text from Becky, which is a huge victory. A huge victory. She said, I hate you. The lights are the wrong color. Because when I put them in, she's like, who gives a shit about this?

• 1:05:14David Pierce?

  Right. Right. Now she knows.

• 1:05:16Nilay Patel?

  This is of a, of a piece with, I hate you. I can see the motion smoothing on my parents TV. I hate you. The lights are on color.

• 1:05:23David Pierce?

  Yep. You did it.

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  Huge victory. I was like, I'm done.

• 1:05:26David Pierce?

  Welcome to my particular circle of hell.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  Marriage over. Mission accomplished.

• 1:05:32David Pierce?

  I got another one.

• 1:05:34Nilay Patel?

  On to the next. And then she was like, how do I fix it? And I was like, just, there's like 50 different ways to fix this problem. So you can open your phone, there's scenes and home on your phone. But it occurred to me that one, there's a button on one of our Lutron light switches. You can just push to fix it. And she didn't, she was like, I don't care about that. Like, I don't want to do that. I don't want to figure out what that is. Cause it's like, it's just an unlabeled little round button. And she didn't, she was like, I don't care. And then I was like, well, you can go to the Nest Hub. And you can, you can just like yell at it. She's like, I, she literally said, voice commands are so inefficient. And I said, one day, sometime in the next 50 years that we are married and live in this house together. I wouldn't, you were going to say movie time out loud just once.

• 1:06:19Nilay Patel?

  That's it going anywhere. And it got all the way to, there is an old iPhone mounted on one of those new standby mode stands. That just shows the buttons. It is next to the home, the Nest Hub. They're physically next to each other. But because the Nest Hub doesn't see the HomeKit scenes, I needed an old iPhone on a stand. And it says kitchen daytime lighting. And she went and pushed that button. And I was like, this is just a gigantic failure. There are so many ways to accomplish this and she just didn't do it.

• 1:06:50David Pierce?

  Yeah, A, Matter will fix it.

• 1:06:52Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 1:06:54David Pierce?

  Sure. But B, you just described the exact problem with everyone's smart home, which is that what you end up doing is you're like, oh, I've built a million ways to do everything. It's totally redundant. It totally works. And it's like, no, no, no. The actual thing she wanted from you is tell me to walk up to the big screen, slide the thingy that's the colors and I'm done. That's a better answer.

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  Which is more or less effectively what happened, right? She walked up to the phone on the stand. It said kitchen daytime and she just pushed it.

• 1:07:22David Pierce?

  Fine.

• 1:07:22Nilay Patel?

  But it's a next, it was next to the Nest Hub, which cannot do that because it doesn't support the HomeKit scenes.

• 1:07:28David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:07:29Nilay Patel?

  Which is not good.

• 1:07:30David Pierce?

  Therein lies the, the actual.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  But she could also, she should have just said movie time to her phone. Not movies time, she could have said kitchen. She will, she will never say movie time. We sit down and watch a movie. I'm like, are you going to say it? She's like, I'm never saying this.

• 1:07:43David Pierce?

  And you, I'm just imagining you doing it like hammer time. Just like, stop. Movie time.

• 1:07:49Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't even do much.

• 1:07:51David Pierce?

  Everybody else leaves if you watch a movie alone.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Lights in one room, but it's such a funny thing to say. Like other people have it where like the shades come down, the projector turns on.

• 1:08:00David Pierce?

  The popcorn starts, yeah.

• 1:08:01Nilay Patel?

  Like all this stuff happens. Mine is just like lights off in one room, but it's still the funniest thing you can say.

• 1:08:06David Pierce?

  It's pretty good. It's pretty good.

• 1:08:08Nilay Patel?

  All right. We'll see. We'll see if Matter can fix it. I think is the end of that. That.

• 1:08:13David Pierce?

  Matter 1.5. I hear that's the one.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, AI, it's funny how AI and Matter and Bluetooth are all the same, on the same cadence. Like, we're gonna get there. We're gonna build Digital God and it's gonna turn off the lights, you guys.

• 1:08:25David Pierce?

  I take it honestly. If that's the one thing Digital God can do, I'm, I'm ready for it.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  Let's move on to Sonos because it's of a piece with all this. So there have been rumors that Sonos is gonna make like a TV streamer for a long time. This is the next logical thing for them to make. A huge part of their business is, uh, soundbars and home theater systems. And lately improving their app, set that aside. Um, so it's been very logical they're gonna do this. The many, many questions about how Sonos could build a TV streamer. Like, you need an operating system, you need app support, you know, all that stuff. So Bloomberg reported a price. It'll hit somewhere between 150 and $200. And then Chris Welch put together some evidence based on some previous reporting by Yanko Rutgers, who's an excellent reporter.

• 1:09:11Nilay Patel?

  Um, that this operating system will be called Ventura and be made by a company called The Trade Desk.

• 1:09:20Nilay Patel?

  This is very confusing. Do you know what's going on here?

• 1:09:22David Pierce?

  It is bonkers. So, okay, so The Trade Desk is an advertising company. Like, it's more complicated than that, but it's also not more complicated than that. Like, they are an advertising company and they just launched this thing. Uh, the thing that Yanko reported a while ago was that The Trade Desk was building a smart TV operating system. Uh, and he got a bunch of pushback, including from people who just straightforwardly like, no, we're not. Uh, yes, they were. And they launched it officially and it's called Ventura. Uh, The Trade Desk wouldn't tell us anything about it. They wouldn't share images. They wouldn't share videos. But it is apparently a thing and it is so abundantly clear that what they are doing. Is offering a place on which you can show ads and run Netflix. That seems to be the whole vibe of the thing.

• 1:10:05David Pierce?

  And they had a bunch of information, you know, from, from partners and it was like the heads of advertising at various streaming services being like, sick ads, we love ads, ads are great. And then Sonos being like, we are excited to be part of this. And, and like you said, Chris Welch has been reporting on this for forever. And he, he put two and two together and is basically like, this is pretty clearly what Sonos is doing.

• 1:10:33David Pierce?

  Which is weird, but also pretty sensible if, if you're Sonos and you're like, oh, we desperately need not only for people to buy this thing, but for this to be a real source of revenue for us outside of hardware, which Sonos has been desperately trying to figure out how to do for a long time. And so throwing in with a thing that is fundamentally about building an advertising business seems like a bummer of a user experience, but probably a good business for Sonos.

• 1:10:59Nilay Patel?

  So I'm just gonna read you this paragraph from Trade Desk about Ventura. Ventura represents a major advance in streaming TV operating systems as it solves key issues with prevailing market systems today, including frustrating user experiences, inefficient advertising supply chains and content conflicts of interest.

• 1:11:17David Pierce?

  I mean, those are my three biggest issues, I'd say. When I think about what I hate about watching TV, inefficient advertising supply chains is number two on the list for sure.

• 1:11:28Nilay Patel?

  That's very good. It's very good in that, um, like, young people are just watching YouTube. It doesn't even matter, like.

• 1:11:36David Pierce?

  That's a pretty efficient advertising supply chain.

• 1:11:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's pretty good. It's like, I watched the NFL on YouTube. And then the Jake Paul fight on Netflix.

• 1:11:46Nilay Patel?

  I, I know what they mean by inefficient advertising supply chain. It's my curse to know what that means.

• 1:11:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  I, I don't even want to tell you because it's so stupid. All they mean is that when you open a TV box, you have multiple apps on the TV box. And those apps don't know what ads you have seen. And so different ad providers are selling the same ad to like Hulu and Netflix and whoever else YouTube TV. And the supply chain is inefficient because it can't just target you, the user. It's targeting apps, which then have user like, this is all a mess. And Roku's entire business model is you can't even put that stuff on a Roku unless you give Roku a cut, just like the app store. And that means Roku makes money, but all these other companies are like, why are we all paying this fees to run the same ads and the same box, the same person? And Roku's like, I don't know, I'm rich.

• 1:12:33David Pierce?

  Give me $5.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  Is this a thing you can sell to a consumer? We've solved the problem of you might see the same ad a bunch of times and are like, I don't know.

• 1:12:40David Pierce?

  To be fair, yes. Like honestly, if I could just stop getting the one ad that I get 100,000 times a day for a stupid HVAC cleaning company, like I would, I would pay more money for that. I would.

• 1:12:55Nilay Patel?

  You would pay more money for an efficient advertising.

• 1:12:57David Pierce?

  Yeah. So it was like, if, if Peacock was like $5.99 a month.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  They are like that.

• 1:13:01David Pierce?

  $6.99 a month will only show you the same ad once. I would pay the.

• 1:13:05Nilay Patel?

  But they do say that they pay more money and we won't show you any ads or real.

• 1:13:08David Pierce?

  No, no, that's all I'm saying. I'm fine with that.

• 1:13:10Nilay Patel?

  I thought you want a middle tier.

• 1:13:11David Pierce?

  I have to look at my phone sometimes, right? Like, I'm good with ads. I just want, I want, I want more ads. I want ad variety.

• 1:13:19Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I just think like it's, it's great to chase a TV box. It's, it's very hard and nothing about this makes me confident that they will solve the core problems, which is like, where do I find the thing I want to watch? And sometimes it's on Netflix and Netflix has no incentive to play. Like, that's just real. And like, and then you got to integrate it. You gotta be able to say movie time and have the curtains come down. I gotta get some curtains in my house.

• 1:13:45David Pierce?

  There's also the question of like, why would you buy this from Sonos ever? Like what, what TV streaming box could Sonos possibly offer you that would be super compelling?

• 1:13:53Nilay Patel?

  A soundbar.

• 1:13:55Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that they will ever do an actual box. I think they will do a soundbar with a bunch of HDMI inputs and say, just buy this thing. It'll sound amazing. And also it's got the streaming stuff built into it. But the reality is more and more people are not buying boxes at all. They're just buying the TVs and using the built in garbage TV software. And like, is Sonos going to make a TV? Who knows? Speaking of who knows what anyone is doing in hardware. That's my segue. Google is purportedly canceling the Pixel Tablet 2, might leave tablets entirely. But then also might be about to reboot all of laptops and tablets. And then also there's a rumor that they're going to shut down Chrome OS and rebuild it on Android.

• 1:14:33David Pierce?

  Kudos, by the way. You just explained a thing that doesn't make any sense in about the most sensible possible way.

• 1:14:38Nilay Patel?

  Who knows what's going on?

• 1:14:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:40Nilay Patel?

  Also, the government forcing this so.

• 1:14:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, right. Yeah, I mean, there is an interesting thing here that is a line between those two things. Like, do you remember the thing that Meta did where they were like, oh, you're gonna, you're gonna make us break up our messaging apps, so we're gonna stitch them all together in such a way that that's impossible? Like, is that what's happening here as Google says we shouldn't do these things?

• 1:15:02Nilay Patel?

  That Meta's thing was ice cold, was calculated. They saw it coming, they made a move. They still, they haven't actually actually to move. Like, they're sort of interoperable.

• 1:15:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:12Nilay Patel?

  But this is not that.

• 1:15:14David Pierce?

  There's nothing ice cold or calculated about Google's hardware strategy.

• 1:15:19Nilay Patel?

  We made another run at tablets and nothing has happened. We might cancel this whole deal. Also, maybe Chromebook should run Android, they said, for the 50th time in the past five years.

• 1:15:29David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I, the thing I think is interesting about this is, uh, the, the Pixel Tablet thing is weird. There's been some conflicting reporting on a bunch of, uh, a bunch of sites that primarily report on Google and Android about, uh, what was coming for the Pixel Tablet 3. And then there was a report on Android headlines that the Pixel Tablet 3 was canceled. And then there was another report that actually the thing that was canceled was not the Pixel Tablet 3, it was the Pixel Tablet 2, which would imply that there are no more Pixel Tablets coming. Uh, I would say what seems to be clear is that Google is getting out of the tablet business in some fairly short order, which like, I don't see a lot of Pixel Tablets in the world. I'm not super shocked by this, but also, boy, was it not a long time ago that Rick

• 1:16:14David Pierce?

  Ostrow and the whole Google crew were like, no, we're serious about this. We're doing this for real. We're in it to win it. All we can do is keep making stuff that people like and we're in it for the long haul. And like, whoops. I think the, I think the Chromebook, Chrome OS, Android thing is probably more interesting because the thing that happened not that long ago is that Android and hardware all became Rick Ostrow's problem. And, and what you need in order to do this thing that Google has tried and failed failed to do a thousand times, which is combined Chrome OS and Android, is you need somebody to just make that call who can direct every single person involved what to do. And now that person is Rick Osterloh. And we reported a while ago that Google was canceling the next Pixelbook.

• 1:16:58David Pierce?

  And that that was just not going to be a thing. And what seems to be the case now, if Google is going to get back into the laptop business, it's going to be something like the Pixel laptop and it's going to run Android. And basically Android plus desktop class Chrome browser

• 1:17:16David Pierce?

  could work like it's just, it's just sitting there, right? But it requires a big leap from Google to say, we're out of the Chromebook business. Or to at least just say, we're doing this other thing instead. Chromebooks are going to be low end education things and we're, we're going to do Android for the high end. Boy, is that probably not going to work, but it's like, it's a thing you can organizationally do inside of Google now. I think kind of for the first time ever.

• 1:17:43Nilay Patel?

  Sure. I just think the, the promise of the Chromebook is that it is simple. And being like, now it's Android really gets you away from that promise, right? Cause you, and by simple, what I mean is there's only one, I mean, you can run Android apps in a Chromebook now. And it's, they've gotten vastly more complicated over the past few years. But what I mean is generally the application model on a Chromebook is Chrome.

• 1:18:09David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's browser.

• 1:18:10Nilay Patel?

  You're going to run a bunch of browser tabs and you, you can run most applications and browsers. And that is a powerful application environment and it's taken over most things. When most desktop apps are really just web apps and various wrappers like, that's a big idea and they have just abandoned it kind of, which is weird. And now they must sell Chrome. So who knows? That's a joke, but to say, actually, we should run this on our other operating system with a vastly different application model. We're just, we're just like right back in the mess. Now it's just a laptop.

• 1:18:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:40Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's, it's just a Windows laptop or a Mac because you've got the native application model and then you've got what everybody is actually doing on their laptops, which is running web apps.

• 1:18:48David Pierce?

  Right. And you end up in a weird iPad-y zone where like, we're starting to see bits and pieces of this with Android as it gets into foldables. Right. Where they're, they're testing the, the free form desktop windowing, which makes no sense on some Android devices. Slight sense on some Android devices and like.

• 1:19:05Nilay Patel?

  Maybe that's why they're getting out of tablets because they're just like foldables are it. And we're just going to put all of our effort into that.

• 1:19:10David Pierce?

  Foldables and laptops? Like, I think it's a, it's a not crazy thesis.

• 1:19:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I was, I was out with somebody who had a Pixel Fold the other day. It wasn't Liam who bought one and returned one. I will call out our producer. Um, but I was out with somebody who had one and, uh, loved it. Just grinning from ear to ear every time he unfolded it.

• 1:19:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's a good phone. That's like, I, yeah, I think that would not be an insane stance for Google to take. If and only if you can then make the desktop thing actually work. And like we've been saying, Google has promised to figure out how to marry Chrome and Android for a very long time. And it has never, ever once come even close to being remotely good.

• 1:19:49Nilay Patel?

  And now they might have to be forcibly divorced by the United States government. All right. Let's end here, which is, this is like the funniest place to end after that conversation. It was Microsoft Ignite this week. Sachin Dala got on stage, talked a lot about scaling laws and AI and all this stuff. And then he was like, also here's a $349 PC that streams Windows, which is basically a Chrome box for Windows.

• 1:20:09David Pierce?

  Yes. Like it is precisely exactly that.

• 1:20:13Nilay Patel?

  It's a cute little guy.

• 1:20:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:15Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's a square, but yeah, it's like a little, it's a little guy and it just, it's a Chrome box for Windows.

• 1:20:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. You, you stream Windows on it. I think this is going to be very successful. Like maybe not this one, but this idea of basically like, here's just a super essentially like thin client that you plug into a screen and run Windows on in a, in an internet-y kind of way. Gangbusters. I'm all for it. This thing is, it's like, I want to buy one of these just to like have around. I think the idea that people are going to completely stream their computer is still a long way away. But this is like a, you know, I need it for a developer environment at work or we're, we're running our dentist office on streaming Windows. Like, sure, I'm into it.

• 1:20:59Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this thing just looks like a, it's a, this, when you get your first job and you sit down at your first computer and your first cubicle, and this thing is looking at you, it's like, oh, this sucks.

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's my reaction to this. David's like, I want to stream Windows at my house.

• 1:21:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, but the beauty of it is unlike the crappy desktop computer that you get your first day at work at the, at the, you know, accounting firm, this one just runs the internet and the internet is fast now. So that's good. You don't have to do much on this thing. It just has to run the internet.

• 1:21:31Nilay Patel?

  You just have to be surveilled by your boss. This thing has a built-in mouse jiggler detector.

• 1:21:38Nilay Patel?

  The cops come if it detects you're fake working.

• 1:21:41David Pierce?

  It's perfect. No, it is very funny. Google is like desperately trying to get a, become more like Windows and Microsoft is like, never mind, we're done being Windows. Let's just do the internet.

• 1:21:50Nilay Patel?

  If you remember, the first iPad was explicitly positioned by Steve Jobs as not a netbook.

• 1:21:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:57Nilay Patel?

  Right. This idea that you would have a thin client PC that like, maybe not stream the entire operating system, but just ran web apps. I mean, that was the EPC. I cut my, I cut my teeth writing about EPCs. Joanna Stern, she became a name in the gadget world by getting netbook scoops.

• 1:22:18David Pierce?

  That's very good. Were netboxes a thing? Can we, can we make netboxes a thing?

• 1:22:22Nilay Patel?

  Okay. Yeah, they're, they're a little, whatever. The idea was you're going to buy this cheap Linux computer that's going to run web apps. And that's going to cost $500. And then Steve Jobs was like, here's an iPad. Would you like a good computer? They went away.

• 1:22:36Nilay Patel?

  That was it. All right, we gotta take a break. One day, we're gonna have Joanna back and I'm gonna, I'm gonna make her tell the story about when she came to me totally stressed out. She's like, I can't just get EPC scoops on demand.

• 1:22:51Nilay Patel?

  That was amazing. I was like, you're good, don't worry about it. All right, we gotta take a break, we'll be right back. What's a lightning ad? It's coming, get ready, everybody.

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• 1:26:06Nilay Patel?

  We're back. My friends, I've asked for sound effects for this, for Fanfare.

• 1:26:14Nilay Patel?

  It happened. The lightning round is sponsored. And not in a small way.

• 1:26:22Nilay Patel?

  Drumroll, please. Liam, please announce our first ever Vergecast lightning round sponsorship.

• 1:26:28David Pierce?

  Okay, let me turn on my ad voice. This week's lightning round is presented by AWS.

• 1:26:35Nilay Patel?

  We did it. We did it. If you hadn't heard of AWS before.

• 1:26:42David Pierce?

  We all get new Frame TVs now, because it's sponsored.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  Let's do it one more time. Play the music one more time. One more time.

• 1:26:51David Pierce?

  We did promise we would, this would be the greatest ad buy in the history of the Vergecast.

• 1:26:56Nilay Patel?

  Right? And I still won't do it, just to be clear. I'm still a precious flower. But I'll run the music again. We'll just do it again. Liam, who sponsored lightning round?

• 1:27:08David Pierce?

  This week's lightning round is presented by AWS.

• 1:27:11Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's very good. We have grand plans for future lightning round sponsorships. It took a long time to pull it off. And then, and then, you know, our ad team, they just went for the biggest whale they could find. And again, you know, now you've heard of them. They were just a little, a little fly operation before. Now the real validation has finally come to AWS. Uh, this is great. We have grand plans for, uh, other companies. I don't know how that works at all. Some other people, Liam will announce your name at the drop of a hat, if you pay us money. Um, and then we have grand plans for how people can participate because we've gotten so many emails from listeners being like, I was sponsoring lightning round and we have some ideas. It's gonna be good.

• 1:27:53Nilay Patel?

  All right. So we're changing line around. We got some feedback last time on our new segment, show and tell, which is this is just the lightning round. Which is not, it's not wrong. It's not wrong. It's not right, but it's not wrong. Yeah, they're thematically similar. So here's the new idea. We'll, we'll still do show and tell. You show up, we talk about stories, we go through them. Lightning round, we just have the long list. We're just gonna go through them as fast as we can. Yep. Lightning speed. Yep. Sponsored by cloud computing. I will say historically speaking, for everyone who's listening to this, when we have tried this, it becomes the longest thing we do. Uh, and so, so our, our good friend, Neelai Patel, has committed to actually lightninging his way through the lightning. We have grand plans for this too. It's gonna be great.

• 1:28:38Nilay Patel?

  As soon as someone sponsors us for enough money for us to buy a clock,

• 1:28:44Nilay Patel?

  one clock. Yeah. The most expensive clock of all time. First we buy the yachts and then we buy the clocks. One stopwatch. And we're gonna go through this very fast. All right, let's start. Comcast is spinning off its cable TV business. This is actually huge news. So Comcast, as you know, NBC Universal is an investor in Vox Media. The big news here is that we're probably gonna have to change this disclosure. Oh yeah, that's true.

• 1:29:10Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how it's gonna happen. I have no insight into how that will change. You know what's gonna be amazing is pretty soon our disclosure is going to be SpinCo. Yeah. Is an investor. So Comcast signaled this in their last earnings report, we're gonna spin off some of our cable assets into quote, a well capitalized company, which means they're gonna give them a bunch of money, not load them up with debt, which is usually how that goes. And the new company right now, because it doesn't have a name, it's called SpinCo and it is MSNBC, CNBC, a bunch of cable networks. So Comcast wants to be out of the cable network business. That's not where the money is for them anymore. The money is in broadband. They're gonna hold on to NBC Universal and then hilariously, uh, Bravo, because Bravo makes money on Peacock. Is that true? Yep.

• 1:29:52David Pierce?

  Weird. There's I just assumed Brian Roberts, the CEO, just like really loved Below Deck or something. He's like, I can't get rid of Bravo.

• 1:29:59Nilay Patel?

  So this is what we have yet to see how this is going to go. Mark Lazarus is the CEO of Spinco. There's big questions about CNBC, MSNBC, because they're built on the infrastructure of NBC News.

• 1:30:10David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:30:10Nilay Patel?

  Which Comcast is going to keep. So like, how does that work? By the way, people know I've appeared on CNBC many times. There is your disclosure. I hope everyone there is doing great. But I think you can just point to this directly and say, oh, the era of cable television is over.

• 1:30:29David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:30:29Nilay Patel?

  It is just over. We're fully into streaming and maybe not even into streaming. We might just be into video platforms like YouTube and TikTok. And what you actually need to do is figure out how CNBC or MSNBC or any of these other networks that you're taking is a participant in those.

• 1:30:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's really interesting. You go back even a few years and the overwhelming theory was basically the the pay TV landscape is slowly declining, right? It's going to make us a lot of money, but it is going to very slowly winnow away. And what actually happened is it is it is just exploding into a thousand pieces all at once, right? Like it is it is collapsing more quickly and more aggressively than anyone expected. So what you're seeing now is all these companies scrambling to get out of that business as fast as they possibly can.

• 1:31:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:31:14David Pierce?

  And and we've gone from like, this is how do we manage the slow growth of streaming with the slow death of cable? And now it's how do we manage the slow growth of streaming with the extremely rapid death of cable? And it's it's putting a lot of people in weird positions.

• 1:31:31Nilay Patel?

  I think they're keeping NBC. I think Disclosure is still NBC.

• 1:31:34David Pierce?

  Nothing would make me happier than you having to say Spinco on every episode of Vergecast. So that is what I'm rooting for.

• 1:31:40Nilay Patel?

  It's going to be confusing. That's a big deal. We're going to see how it plays out.

• 1:31:45Nilay Patel?

  But the idea that you have this other company that has to find its own distribution. That is the problem solved. Every company is trying to solve this problem. Right next to that, Donald Trump has officially named Brendan Carr as his nominee for chairman of the FCC, which we predicted on the show the last three weeks in a row.

• 1:32:02David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:32:03Nilay Patel?

  I will actually lightning round this one.

• 1:32:06Nilay Patel?

  This is dumb and bad and Brendan has bad ideas. You can just go read his Project 2025 chapter. It is nonsensical. Like, he wants to seize power at the FCC and use it to control speech on platforms and do it using like threats of Section 230 reform. No, that's not gonna work. We're just gonna make fun of him for the next four years. That is a promise from me to you.

• 1:32:27David Pierce?

  Perfect. Done. Moving on.

• 1:32:29Nilay Patel?

  I don't quite get this one. Explain this one. Strava is closing its API, basically.

• 1:32:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, so Strava is one of those companies that is kind of like the data layer of a lot of other fitness apps. It's like what you use to track your runs and bike rides and all that other stuff. And kind of out of nowhere informed lots of developers that it's changing the way it polices its API. And ostensibly, it's about privacy and AI training and making sure that people's data is preserved in the way that Strava understands. And Strava has come out and said, "We think this is barely gonna touch anybody. It's not gonna be a problem." But a lot of users and app developers are saying, "Actually, things that we like, like these automatically generated leaderboards that let us compete with our friends inside of these apps,

• 1:33:15David Pierce?

  or like, you know, summaries and things over time that let you track information, like things you can do that Strava doesn't let you do, but you can do with Strava data, is all just gonna disappear." And I think it's happening really fast. Strava gave everybody like 30 days' notice that this was happening, which is really fast in any kind of like developer environment. And so people are just kind of freaking out. And I think what it will actually be remains to be seen. But it's, it's just one of those things that is like,

• 1:33:44David Pierce?

  one company is in the middle of a lot of this stuff and this data means a lot to people. And you can read it as Strava trying to be good to its people and you can read it as Strava trying to close the windows so that you have to use Strava more. And It'll, it remains to be seen which one it's actually going to be.

• 1:34:02Nilay Patel?

  So let me make the comparison to, of all things, Reddit.

• 1:34:05David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:34:06Nilay Patel?

  Reddit just had a good quarter. It's a public company, profitable for the first time ever. Crazy, like they've been around for a long time.

• 1:34:11David Pierce?

  20 years later, yeah.

• 1:34:13Nilay Patel?

  Reddit got there by going to war against its developers and its users and taking what had been a pretty open ecosystem and closing it down and saying, you're going to use our app. If you want to make another app, you were going to pay us so much money that it's not even remotely worth it. If you want to be a moderator of a subreddit, you're going to play by our rules or we're going to take it away from you. And this was generally bad, right? This is a large platform that pissed off its most important constituency. I think we've, we've, we've said it, like the power users of Reddit who moderate the subreddits, the app developers make the apps people like. They're basically like, get out, like we, our way of the highway.

• 1:34:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:48Nilay Patel?

  And it has had effectively no negative repercussion that we can see. Right? Reddit's still growing. It just made money. It signed a big deal with Google. People are still using Reddit. It's the only non-AI spam source of data for Google search. Like, there's a lot going on with Reddit that is positive, but they had to go through this wrenching change, which, you know, you can't make an apple without breaking some eggs. Some very important, very meaningful eggs.

• 1:35:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:12Nilay Patel?

  Still broken. Is that Strava, right? They're just closing it down, saying, screw this ecosystem. We're going to make money off of what we have here.

• 1:35:19David Pierce?

  That's certainly the cynical read. And one of the things that's happening is Strava is starting to build its own AI features. Like they have a, uh, V-Song, who's been covering all this for us, mentioned that, I think it's called Athlete Intelligence. Strava's thing, which is essentially like a summary of all of your training data that tells you how you're doing. That's the kind of thing that you've been able to use Strava data for in other apps. And now Strava is saying, no, you can't do that, but we're doing that. And that is precisely the thing that Reddit said to like third-party app developers, right? Like that's, that's the speech. The difference is, I think it's. I don't use Strava, so I could be wrong about this. And I would be curious to hear from people who have been using Strava for a really long time.

• 1:36:01David Pierce?

  But to me, the switching costs out of Reddit are much higher than they are out of Strava. Like, if you want something like Reddit but not Reddit, it doesn't exist. There's nowhere to go. You just, there are no other places. Strava has lots of competition. And you've seen this even in like the forums and on ironically, the subreddits where people are talking about this stuff. People are encouraging people to go like invest in the Garmin ecosystem more or like there are other ways to track this kind of stuff. I think for people who have been in this ecosystem a long time, getting out will be very hard. But it'll be interesting to see if Strava can actually pull this thing off because I just don't know that its walls are quite as like high and impenetrable as Reddit's were. And that was Reddit's bet all along, right?

• 1:36:45David Pierce?

  It was like, we can do this because fundamentally, most of you like it here. And also, where are you gonna go?

• 1:36:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we use Facebook groups.

• 1:36:51David Pierce?

  Right, exactly. I just, I don't know that Strava has quite that same tie to people. But again, I am not a Strava user. And if you are, I would, I would love to hear like what the perils of leaving Strava feel like.

• 1:37:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm very curious. I also choose not to track how much I run every day.

• 1:37:08David Pierce?

  I track it just by sitting at my desk.

• 1:37:12Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, is it zero? Was it zero again? All right, that's it. Ding ding ding, the clock went off. Imagine this, you can see the future of Lightning Round coming. Now that we're swimming in cash.

• 1:37:24David Pierce?

  Can we buy an Alarmo, the Nintendo's alarm clock? And have that be our little mascot of the Lightning Round?

• 1:37:30Nilay Patel?

  There were some documents filed by Elon Musk in his pending extremely shaky loss against OpenAI, but at least it's generating discovery. Emails between Elon, Sam Altman, between the other founders of OpenAI and Sam Altman. It's sort of document how this company went from a nonprofit to Sam Altman's house of profits.

• 1:37:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't know how else to describe it. Like, in the beginning, Elon's like, DeepMind to Google is gonna hire everybody. Here's some money, start a nonprofit, so we can make AI. And now we're at, we're gonna make this a for-profit company controlled only by Sam Altman. Lots in these emails. So Kylie wrote them up, but it really does seem like, I think that Elon gave a bunch of money to Sam Altman without a contract. Step one, from your friend who is not your lawyer, but is a lawyer, Neil Patel, have a contract?

• 1:38:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:38:23Nilay Patel?

  It's really hard to file a claim for breach of contract without a contract. It's basic stuff, guys. So they don't have a contract, so he's inventing all these other legal theories, which are all very tenuous.

• 1:38:33Nilay Patel?

  But the emails make it very clear that Sam Altman was like, here's a nonprofit, and then slowly made it a for-profit. And it now is about to actually flip the switch, make it a for-profit.

• 1:38:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, and also the ways in which Sam in particular has consolidated his power over time. And all of this happened almost to the day, a year after the insane events of last Thanksgiving, when Sam got briefly fired and then came back with more power and more autonomy and ability to do whatever he wants. My read of this whole lawsuit, and there's a, I'll link to the blog post, I'm sorry, I don't remember who wrote it, but somebody just put all the emails in a blog post in a row, and it is so funny to read, because you can tell Elon Musk's angle here is basically just to like Big Brother, Sam Altman, that he's like, listen, bucko, you couldn't have done this without me.

• 1:39:24David Pierce?

  I'm the reason OpenAI exists. I did it, but then all the bad stuff that's happened and the fact that it's not what we wanted is your fault. And it's very, it's very funny, because a lot of the emails are basically Sam going to Elon with every question, every problem, and Elon being like the grand fixer, who's like, mostly just says, throw money at the problem, it'll be fine.

• 1:39:47Nilay Patel?

  Elon stuff.

• 1:39:48David Pierce?

  Which is a theory, and it seems to be working in a lot of ways for him.

• 1:39:51Nilay Patel?

  And about half the time, he says, do you want to have one of my babies? Which is Elon's other move.

• 1:39:55David Pierce?

  And Sam, I don't think has said yes to that yet.

• 1:39:58Nilay Patel?

  But an OpenAI board member did, in fact, ultimately have three of you on its baby.

• 1:40:01David Pierce?

  Correct. Three of the 12 that we know about.

• 1:40:05David Pierce?

  But yeah, it's, it's just, there's a lot more to come. We've heard, we've seen reporting that there are a lot of messages from inside of OpenAI, including in like Signal and other messaging apps that we're going to see as part of this discovery. Like, we're going to learn a lot about how this company operates.

• 1:40:19Nilay Patel?

  Because of this one lawsuit that

• 1:40:20David Pierce?

  Because of this

• 1:40:21Nilay Patel?

  I, I promise you, he will lose this lawsuit.

• 1:40:24David Pierce?

  Well, that's what, that's, that's kind of what I mean. I think this is as much a push to make this stuff public as it is to win the lawsuit. Like this is Elon Musk trying to insert himself as the brains behind OpenAI as much as it is an attempt to actually win the lawsuit, which I just find totally fascinating.

• 1:40:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And we're going to cover every twist and turn. Read the emails, read Carly's piece. It's very good. Okay, we should end. Actually, can I insert one extra lightning round?

• 1:40:48David Pierce?

  Please.

• 1:40:49Nilay Patel?

  Bose acquired the company that makes Macintosh, the super high-end speakers. I don't know why. I just want to point out that there's incredible amount of consolidation in high-end audio, which is very funny. Because there's Bose, a shout out to Macintosh, which like makes like $10,000 amplifiers, and I've always wanted one. So, cool. But cool, like legitimately cool. I'm happy this company continues to, to succeed in whatever way it's going to succeed. So yeah, so there's Sound United, which is owned by Massimo. That's Bowers and Wilkins, Denon, Poke, Morantz, Definitive Technology, Boston, just like all of them over there. And then there's another company that owns like Pioneer and Onkyo.

• 1:41:32Nilay Patel?

  And they're all the same. Like, it's just bananas.

• 1:41:37Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's all consolidated over there. And now Bose owns Macintosh. And there's just this like wild consolidation in audio. And you're basically end up picking like the same products, but at different levels of expense.

• 1:41:49David Pierce?

  Because if I'm, if I'm like the kind of person who wants $10,000 speakers, which as you know, I obviously am, as you can tell by the incredibly powerful audio setup behind me in the room here. Is this good news or bad news? Like, I can't ima-, on the one hand, Bose is like going to allow this company to keep existing. But on the other hand, are these just going to be the like? Brand names they slap on their existing products so that they can charge five times as much money for?

• 1:42:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's a little bit of that. There's a little bit of like every car company needs a name. So you can like license the names to car companies. Like my Jeep has Macintosh, but does it really?

• 1:42:27David Pierce?

  Harman Kardon was everywhere in cars for a minute there.

• 1:42:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my Jeep is actually funny because it runs Android and there's a little Android app on the screen that puts up the blue Macintosh meters and it is all that's great. And I love it. Like I was like, yep, I'm buying that car. And then it's a slow Android app that is very slow. And it's like, the meters are like a full second behind me. I paid extra for this. This is who I am. But I'm just fascinated with this market in particular because it is consolidating at such a high rate because consumer audio is going away. Just like it just is, right? There's not a headphones market anymore. There's an AirPods market and then everything else.

• 1:43:05David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:43:05Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then, and those things are becoming wearables. Like they're putting a lot of compute into those. You can see that if you buy a Samsung phone, the best headphones to buy are Samsung's headphones. You buy a Pixel, the best headphones to buy are Pixelbuds. You buy an iPhone, best headphones to buy are AirPods because they're extensions of the phones now. Weird. That's a weird, bad outcome that I promise you happened because they took the headphone jack out of phones. And so all these other companies are racing to consolidate the very, very high end of the market where the money is.

• 1:43:31David Pierce?

  Interesting. I never thought about it like that, that headphones are now, they're a phone accessory, much more than they are their own gadget.

• 1:43:37Nilay Patel?

  They're like, that market just got wiped out.

• 1:43:39David Pierce?

  Which is why everybody is trying to do those like $350 noise cancelling headphones because that's like the only thing left.

• 1:43:45Nilay Patel?

  That's what's left. And even that, kind of shaky.

• 1:43:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:43:49Nilay Patel?

  Although I did, on my flight home from California yesterday, I saw so many knockoff AirPod Maxes.

• 1:43:55David Pierce?

  I believe that.

• 1:43:56Nilay Patel?

  They're everywhere. All right. Last one. This is a good one. You take this one.

• 1:44:00David Pierce?

  So we talked a lot about the, the state of social last week. Blue sky being ascendant, threads being. Threads, and the fascinating thing that has happened in the seven days since, I would say, is that Blue Sky has continued to grow. It's over 20 million people now, continues to grow at like somewhere on the pace of like a million people a day, which is huge. And Threads is terrified, I would say, is the simple way I would put it. Threads has already started copying some of the feeds. They're letting you do the custom feeds thing. Just today, you pointed this out just before we started recording, I had missed it, it had happened so recently. Adam Mosseri, who runs Threads and Instagram, said that they're

• 1:44:45David Pierce?

  tweaking the algorithm to focus more on people you follow, which people have been asking Threads for since the first damn day of Threads.

• 1:44:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:53David Pierce?

  And it is, it is just not a coincidence that they're doing this because of and after the crazy flight to Blue Sky. So Threads is like moving pretty fast to start to do some of the stuff that Blue Sky is doing really well. I made a joke the other day that Blue Sky's legacy is going to be unfortunately the same as Snapchat, which is that it's going to have all the good ideas that get eaten by Meta. And instead of Evan Spiegel being the de facto product chief of Facebook, it's going to be Jay Graber, and that is coming through much faster than I expected.

• 1:45:28Nilay Patel?

  I disagree. I disagree. Okay, a couple of reasons. One, you know, we should just have like a soundboard where I just, you can just play clips of me talking in the Fediverse. Like ultimately, these things should interoperate, right?

• 1:45:43David Pierce?

  Oh, sure.

• 1:45:44Nilay Patel?

  So Blue Sky gets some benefit if it's interoperable with Mastodon. And the protocols are different, but I think there's just a lot of bridges that are going to get built and like, that'll be fine.

• 1:45:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, they will cross-talk pretty quickly here, I think. That's coming.

• 1:45:54Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I mean, the protocols are very different.

• 1:45:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:57Nilay Patel?

  Very, very, very different and wildly different levels of maturity. And honestly, Threads isn't fully federated and neither is Blue Sky.

• 1:46:04David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:46:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, there isn't, I think now there are personal data servers that you can, you can just like, you can host, you can self-host Blue Sky, but there are no other apps. Like the actual app of Blue Sky, only Blue Sky makes.

• 1:46:14David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:46:15Nilay Patel?

  And there's pieces of it that are still kind of project, they're early.

• 1:46:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:19Nilay Patel?

  They just started.

• 1:46:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:20Nilay Patel?

  They promised to do it. They haven't done it all the way yet. Same with Threads. They promised to do it, they haven't done it all the way yet. But the network effect here will benefit both companies in a way that did not happen for Snapchat.

• 1:46:28David Pierce?

  That's true. I agree with that.

• 1:46:30Nilay Patel?

  That, that should be the promise. Second, Threads has not boosted the best idea, which is starter packs. So you can steal feeds, you can show people more people they follow, but starter packs on Blue Sky are the thing.

• 1:46:45David Pierce?

  They're such a great product.

• 1:46:48Nilay Patel?

  Right. I made a list of people you should follow. If you care about K-pop and you publish the list and you can just hit follow and you're done. Like that is driving so much growth over there.

• 1:46:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:46:57Nilay Patel?

  In addition to it being RevCrown by default, in addition to having multiple feeds and block lists and all that stuff. But they have made it really easy to just start.

• 1:47:06David Pierce?

  Yeah. Even in a way that like Twitter never figured out, like the, the, there were the Twitter suggested follows when you would start. And that was like really great for whoever made it on those lists, but it wasn't specific in a way. But now you're right. You can, you can go to Blue Sky, you can type in, I did this the other day. I was like, I like Arsenal, the soccer team. I just typed in Arsenal to the list of starter packs, clicked follow on one of them that was like all the Arsenal people. And all of a sudden my feed is full of Arsenal people. Like it's wild that no one invented this before and Blue Sky just nailed it. I think Threads is going to be somewhere between one day and several days from putting out something very much like that. But kudos to Blue Sky.

• 1:47:44Nilay Patel?

  I really think, and again, I'm very nervous about the first amendment in the Trump two administration, Brendan Carr.

• 1:47:54Nilay Patel?

  You're gonna, I'm so sorry. We're gonna find some way to algorithmically cut out the Brendan Carr segments of the Vergecast over the next four years. But then those of you who like it, we're gonna find a way to turn the volume up on those. We've got, we've got ideas for podcasts, everybody. I'm nervous about it and Federation is a thing, is the escape hatch for social media.

• 1:48:14David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:48:14Nilay Patel?

  Right. Where I think Jay Graber can say, look, we moderate Blue Sky this way, but if you don't like it, there are other servers or other apps. You can compose your own moderation and you can just have it that way. And that is the, no other company has built that yet. I think Threads wants that for various EU reasons, right? This isn't a closed network. We're building it any way you want, but if you want to follow our accounts on another network, you can. There's, these are big ideas.

• 1:48:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:48:39Nilay Patel?

  Again, they're not fully baked, but they're the thing that is going to escape a bunch of weird regulatory pressure on speech on the internet. I'm excited for them.

• 1:48:47David Pierce?

  Yeah, and we are still in kind of the rising tide lifts all boats moment, right? Where like what these things are trying to do fundamentally is less compete with each other and more lure people away from X. And the, the more, the more the balance shifts away from X and into all of these other things, they all stand to benefit as they interconnect. And I think they all have incentives, like you're saying, to interconnect. It's going to take a minute, but they'll do it. But I think whether you're Blue Sky or Threads, you can look at the success of the other one as a victory, as long as Threads keeps being the winner. If you're, if you're Adam Mosseri, right?

• 1:49:26David Pierce?

  Like you've, you've got to, there is still some victory in being the one that people are excited about, and I think Threads has lost that in a pretty big way. It had it for a while. People were psyched about Threads. People wanted Threads to win. And I think really quickly in the last three weeks, all of that, like good energy has shifted to Blue Sky. And I think if you're Adam Mosseri, that's the thing you worry about.

• 1:49:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. While still feeding just the weirdest engagement bait to your audience of 205 million people.

• 1:49:55David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:49:55Nilay Patel?

  Um, we'll see. I mean, they have different ideas and I, a little bit of competition goes a long way.

• 1:50:00David Pierce?

  Hundred percent.

• 1:50:01Nilay Patel?

  It's amazing how a little bit of competition here is made meta react more than governments around the world.

• 1:50:07David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:50:08Nilay Patel?

  Like it's just, oh, other people like this other product better, we better change. That's, that's a good, that's, that's the feedback loop everybody wants. But like I said, we're, it's early, very early. Maybe Lynda Yaccarino is going to stage like an enormous comeback here.

• 1:50:24David Pierce?

  Starter packs on X could change everything.

• 1:50:27Nilay Patel?

  My favorite Nazis. All right.

• 1:50:31Nilay Patel?

  Sorry. I mean it. Uh, that's it. We're way, we're at a hundred miles over. I can't, I shouldn't say Nazis. Whatever. I mean, I meant it. Leave it in there. All right, that's it. We're way over. Liam, just because it's the inaugural one, just say the name of the sponsor again.

• 1:50:48David Pierce?

  AWS.

• 1:50:49Nilay Patel?

  Ah, that feels so good.

• 1:50:50David Pierce?

  It's beautiful.

• 1:50:50Nilay Patel?

  It's good. Beautiful. Play the music again. It's, I don't even know.

• 1:50:54David Pierce?

  Mission accomplished.

• 1:50:55Nilay Patel?

  Mission accomplished. We did it, everybody. That's it. That's a rich ass. Thank you to Lauren Feiner for being on the show. That's it. That's rich ass.

• 1:51:05Speaker 10

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

• 1:51:25Speaker 11

  At Edward Jones, we believe rich means opening yourself to new possibilities. That's why your dedicated financial advisor meets you where you are, helping you move forward with confidence. Let's find your rich. Edward Jones. Member SIPC.

• 1:51:41Speaker 12

  I am a sample, long before I'm measured, long before I'm named. Each piece of me has a message, a nuanced role. When you look beyond the average, when you see where I belong, you see why I behave the way I do. When you start looking at my details, when you include my context, I start telling you the truth. I always had a story. You just needed a way to hear it.

• 1:52:06Speaker 07

  Every sample has a story. Learn more at 10xgenomics.com.