Pod Insights The Vergecast The Vergecast builds a tech company About this episode Today on the flagship podcast of corporate infighting:
The Verge's David Pierce, Nilay Patel, and Alex Cranz roleplay as CEOs of Vergecast Inc., tasked with creating a tech company by acquiring product lines from various industry giants. They select established products ranging from smartphones and PCs to messaging and audio solutions, sourced from companies such as Apple, Google, Amazon, Samsung, Meta, and others.
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Transcript 13,303 words · 9 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:02 David Pierce? Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of corporate infighting. I'm your friend David Pierce and I am sitting on my back patio getting the grill ready because it is July 4th weekend and that's just what you do. This is America, it's July 4th, it's also my birthday on July 4th and so we sit outside and we grill, even though it's very hot and there's mosquitoes everywhere. And would I rather be inside in the air conditioning looking at my television? Yes, but it's July 4th, so we're grilling stuff. Anyway, we have an awesome episode coming up for you today. We are going to basically start a tech company together. Neil Ipatel, Alex Cranz and I are going to, as a group of CEOs, which couldn't possibly go poorly, figure out how we would build a tech company out of the tech industry as it exists now.
0:47 David Pierce? It sounds a little complicated, but I'll explain the rules when we get into it. It'll all make sense. But basically, I wanted to see if you were to start from scratch and say, okay, what are the best products in tech? What can I take? What can I put together? What could we build that would be cool and different and that we could make awesome? How would we do that? We had a lot of fun putting this together and figured this would be a fun time to do it. It's July, the news is a little bit slow, we're about to get into crazy gadget season again, but it felt like a fun way to take a different kind of look at the tech industry. I should also say, some credit for this whole concept goes to a podcast I really like called The Big Picture, really good show about movies and they did one recently where the two of them started their own studios together and they kind of did a draft and picked actors and writers and it was a very fun episode.
1:33 David Pierce? And so I just kind of stole that concept and we're gonna take it and turn it and do something similar on the show today. So we're gonna start a tech company. I'm very curious what you think as you listen to it. If you think we made bad decisions, if you think we made good decisions, if you think we're monsters, I want to hear everything. Call the hotline 866-VERGE11, email us [email protected] . Tell us how you'd start a tech company and maybe between us, we're gonna take over the tech industry. It's gonna be awesome. Anyway, all of that is coming up in just a second, but first, I just noticed that I turned the grill on without actually turning the propane on. So, this is how good I am at grilling. I'm gonna go fix that problem. This is The Vergecast, we'll be right back.
2:13 Speaker 01 This episode is brought to you by Michelob Ultra. Good times mean competitions between you and your friends. Like seeing who can throw some pigskin the farthest or rush the field the fastest. Winner gets an ultra because it's not just a superior like beer. It's also giving fans superior access to their favorite sporting events. Superior is worth playing for. Visit michelobultra.com/superioraccess to enter. Enjoy responsibly. Copyright 2026 Anheuser Busch InBev Michelob Ultra Beer, St. Louis, Missouri.
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3:13 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Let's go. Neel Patel, hello.
3:17 Nilay Patel? Hello.
3:18 David Pierce? Alex Krantz, hello.
3:19 Alex Cranz? Hello, I'm excited to be a CEO today, right?
3:21 David Pierce? Thank you both for coming to maybe the most convoluted insane game I have yet devised. But I'm very excited about this. So the structure of this is basically as follows. We, the three hosts, are now co-CEOs of a tech company. Because I would say historically speaking, companies with three CEOs tend to be the most successful.
3:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's like BlackBerry, but a little bit more.
3:44 David Pierce? What if you added one more person who had some weird ideas and wanted to own a hockey team? It could be great. And we are going to build our own company out of parts of other companies. Is essentially how this is going to work. So I have, I think it's either 10 or 11 categories here that we as a tech company are going to enter by taking that product from another company. There are several rules. Again, this is very convoluted, but it's going to work. It's going to be fine once we get into it. Everything we take from a tech company, we get as it exists right now. Whatever it's selling, whoever it is that makes it, all the factory deals, all the marketing stuff, everything, we can, we can change it as we like, but We don't get the idea of it. We get the thing as it is right now. We only care about things up to 2030.
4:28 David Pierce? After that, who knows? We're all going to live on Mars. So we're playing like a six-year-long game here. And frankly, if we, as the triumvirate of CEOs, last until 2030, we will have been wildly successful.
4:38 Alex Cranz? I'm banking out really fast.
4:40 David Pierce? Yeah.
4:40 Alex Cranz? As soon as we IPO, I'm gone.
4:42 David Pierce? Alex is resting investing from like day one here. It's gonna be great. We can spend as much money as we want, but making money is not the point. We're actually not gonna talk about money at all on this show.
4:53 Alex Cranz? Okay.
4:54 David Pierce? We don't want to go out of business, but our main goal is just to build the greatest tech company in the history of the universe. Like, that is what we're after here. Because this is like, if we start talking about the money side of things, it just gets weird and complicated in ways that we don't have time for.
5:07 Nilay Patel? That's what we're gonna tell our investors. We're just gonna be like, look, guys, if we talk about money, this is gonna get weird and complicated. So you just relax.
5:15 Alex Cranz? We're just out to make an AGI. Don't worry about it.
5:17 David Pierce? Yeah, like for 20 years, Jeff Bezos was like, I can make money whenever I feel like it. For now, I'm just gonna like make cool stuff. Like, that's the vibe at our tech company. And I would say the two most important things as we pick here are, we can only take one product from each company. So, once we have used something from Apple, we cannot use anything else from Apple, or Samsung, or Google, or whoever else. One product per company, which I think is going to be very complicated. That product also cannot be the whole company. So if there is a company that makes a single product with its name, like I originally had Figma in one of our categories as like a thing we might want to take. But if you take Figma from Figma, there is no Figma anymore, so that doesn't count.
5:58 Nilay Patel? Well, what about FigJam?
6:01 David Pierce? Sure.
6:02 Nilay Patel? Moving right along.
6:04 David Pierce? Sure. That's actually, I'll give you that. Another one I had is like, oh, here's a good example. Like, we can't take Salesforce from Salesforce, but we could take Slack from Salesforce.
6:13 Nilay Patel? Oh, I see. So if Apple had a product called Apple, you would just be like, no.
6:17 David Pierce? That accounted for, you know, 98% of its revenue. Yeah. So sure, I guess under that rule, we can take FigJam. I'll let Fig Jam back to the list. And most importantly, this is not competitive. We are three CEOs. We are doing this together. And so we have to agree on everything that we're going to take, which I assume means this is going to take 12 hours.
6:36 Alex Cranz? Is there such thing as a hung jury in this situation?
6:39 David Pierce? No, because there are three of us. And if it comes to it, we will vote and two to one will win. This is why we have three CEOs. This is, it's a perfect, I can't believe no one has thought of this before.
6:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, why, why are people doing one and two?
6:50 David Pierce? Odd number CEOs solves all your problems. Yeah.
6:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
6:54 David Pierce? Okay, here are the categories. We're going to do smartphones, tablets and PCs. Then we're going to take a break. We're going to do wearables, headphones, app platforms, which is not specific apps, but think of like app businesses, like Microsoft Office is one of the options in that category. Uh, and then we're going to do what I have called boring B to B money faucets, which is the thing that makes you all the money that nobody ever wants to talk about. Then we're going to take another break. And then we're going to do messaging, streaming service, wildcard gadgets and wildcard, everything else. And then we're going to get out of here and we're going to go be filthy rich. Sound good?
7:25 Alex Cranz? I'm so excited to be rich.
7:26 David Pierce? All right. Category number one is smartphones. This to me is maybe the easiest, but also maybe the most difficult one to do first, which is why I wanted it to do it first.
7:35 Alex Cranz? See, I, I also agree with you because I think we're probably along the same lines for what the phone should be.
7:40 Nilay Patel? Well, the, the only thing that makes it different is David told us not to worry about money.
7:43 David Pierce? Oh, interesting.
7:44 Alex Cranz? We don't worry about money?
7:45 Nilay Patel? Well, if you give one wit about money, you take the iPhone.
7:48 David Pierce? Yes.
7:48 Nilay Patel? Right? Because then you, that now you funded whatever other boondoggles you want to get on. Like, yeah. Then we can pick the Kobo for tablets and it's fine.
7:55 Alex Cranz? That's what we should do. Exactly. You're, you're right on the same wavelength.
7:59 Nilay Patel? But if you don't care about money, then you might have a substantive discussion about what phone you want.
8:04 David Pierce? Well, so, okay, let me, let me frame this slightly differently. We don't care. We are not spending our time thinking about quarterly earnings and shareholder value, but we do want to win, right? In like big picture win.
8:14 Nilay Patel? Then we're taking the iPhone.
8:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:15 Nilay Patel? I've already, I've crushed you.
8:16 Alex Cranz? We're taking the iPhone, we win.
8:18 David Pierce? I think that's right. I think the only reason for me that the iPhone is challenging is that there are a lot of categories here in which Apple is also very good and some in which it has a lot less competition.
8:27 Nilay Patel? Oh, no, no, I can, every other category I can, I can defeat everyone else with the power of the iPhone's lock in.
8:33 David Pierce? Oh, interesting.
8:34 Nilay Patel? You trust me. You just wait. And I'm allowed to change stuff? Yeah, we're good. We nailed it. It's fine.
8:41 David Pierce? Oh my God. I just realized we're going to speed run building an app tax.
8:45 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it's going to go so fast. You think I don't care about money, David? Forty-five percent. Let's go.
8:53 David Pierce? Yeah, somewhere Lena Khan just started listening to this and she's like, this is.
8:56 Nilay Patel? She's like, this isn't the tech company I would have built.
8:58 Alex Cranz? We're not even gonna be allowed to make a company. Lena Khan's like, nope, nope.
9:01 Nilay Patel? Your fake company is illegal, sir.
9:04 David Pierce? Uh, okay, but just for this, for the sake of argument, the other nominees that I had here were Samsung, which I think is probably the only other reasonable competitor here, the Google Pixel, if you're, you know, feeling good about yourself, the Nothing Phone, which is a fun, like, dark horse. If you wanna like bet on doing something weird and cool in the next six years until 2030. Interesting bet. Huawei, OnePlus, Asus, Motorola, like, it gets bleak pretty fast.
9:28 Alex Cranz? Real fast.
9:28 Nilay Patel? Were you hoping that one of us would be like Motorola?
9:31 David Pierce? I was hoping one of you would fight for Samsung, to be honest, just because I think it's possible to maybe wanna pick an Apple product in another one, because we've now ruled out every other Apple product.
9:41 Alex Cranz? No, because I'm looking at through the rest and I'm like, I'm like, there's other really good competitors in these other places, but like, the iPhone, if you're, if, if the phone is like the engine of the business, which it feels like probably is true, then we want the iPhone.
9:56 Nilay Patel? I mean, alternatively, the, the one that I would have argued for would have been the Pixel, because then the one thing you would change about it would be caring, and then, and then it would be good.
10:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but with the iPhone, we've got like the people who are making the good processors on the iPhone, whereas the Pixel, we've got not that.
10:12 Nilay Patel? Sure, but yeah, a little, a little caring goes a long way.
10:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that's true.
10:16 Nilay Patel? Like, also trying to market the phone would be, uh, useful.
10:19 David Pierce? I mean, yeah, like, in terms of raw upside, the ROI, I think, for the Pixel would be huge, whereas the iPhone, I have a hard time imagining making the iPhone more successful, but it's also very successful. I think the answer is just the iPhone. I don't know that we need to talk about this much longer.
10:33 Nilay Patel? It's gonna solve every other problem on this list.
10:35 David Pierce? So, again, I would, I would remind you that one of the things we are not trying to do here is build a services business or a monopoly.
10:42 Nilay Patel? Wait, we're not trying to build a monopoly?
10:45 David Pierce? We want to win.
10:46 Nilay Patel? So you're saying this collection of three CEOs has to have some values?
10:50 David Pierce? Yeah, we want to like be cool. Our main value is like be cool.
10:54 Alex Cranz? Okay.
10:54 Nilay Patel? I want to have a monopoly in a cool way.
10:56 David Pierce? Yeah.
10:56 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
10:57 Nilay Patel? All right, fair. Okay, we can move on.
10:59 David Pierce? All right, so the iPhone, next up, tablets, which is ironically a very similar set of companies. But I would say that we can't pick the iPad, so the iPad is out, which leaves us with the four nominees I picked so far were the Samsung Galaxy Tabs, the Google Pixel tablet, such as it is, Amazon's whole Kindle lineup, which I think counts as a tablet, Kobo, you could do OnePlus, there's a lot of tablets out there. We could argue about the Microsoft Surface as a tablet line, but I think I won't count that. We'll get to that in a minute. What do you guys think? Who's favorite here?
11:30 Alex Cranz? I think we go with the books and then we have the Apple, the iPhone team make the operating system good.
11:37 Nilay Patel? Wait, is that, can you, can you make that choice? Can I pick the Galaxy, but it runs iPadOS?
11:41 David Pierce? No, but it, but if we don't take the iPad, we don't get iPadOS.
11:44 Alex Cranz? We're going to use iOS to put, put that on the books.
11:47 Nilay Patel? Oh, and then I didn't, we didn't take macOS, which would have been the real move. We can't, huh?
11:52 David Pierce? Yeah, see?
11:53 Nilay Patel? So, wait, it was a wait, hold on, to wind this week-
11:56 David Pierce? You put a retcon all of this to get an iPad running macOS?
11:59 Nilay Patel? I have to like take the Pixel, so I can take the MacBook, so I can take the Samsung Galaxy and make it run macOS? To get to a Galaxy Pad running macOS, I have to take the Pixel and then a MacBook?
12:12 David Pierce? That would be the way. I'm gonna be honest, I don't hate that strategy.
12:15 Nilay Patel? I feel like this board of directors meeting will be very confusing. No, I'm with, I'm with Krantz. I think you take the Kindle lineup, you jazz up the software a little bit, people are happy.
12:26 Alex Cranz? I wanted to go books to get, escape the lock-in, because I feel like we save some money with that acquisition.
12:32 David Pierce? But we can solve the lock-in. Remember, Android is open source, so Android is fair game, no matter what we do. We can just have Android.
12:37 Nilay Patel? We can undRMR the books, is what you're saying.
12:39 David Pierce? Yeah, and I think so then the real question is like, who, who is better at making the hardware that we can take and have a pretty solid lead on? And I feel like, I feel like it's Amazon. Like, Books does cool stuff, but I feel like if we, we just steal the Amazon team and we're like, what if we did a good job again?
12:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah, because we get, we get Panos.
12:56 David Pierce? Oh yeah, we get Panos.
12:58 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we're doing the Kindle, that's right.
12:59 David Pierce? I feel good about that.
13:00 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
13:00 Alex Cranz? We're doing the Kindle. We're gonna make it good now.
13:02 Nilay Patel? It's a real culture hire right there.
13:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:04 David Pierce? Do we immediately kill the whole Kindle Fire line? And we just focus on e-ink?
13:08 Nilay Patel? No, no, no. That's good for kids.
13:10 David Pierce? Okay.
13:10 Nilay Patel? So actually, I would say we take the tablet thing we're taking is like the extended Kindle.
13:15 David Pierce? The Kindle Universe we get.
13:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:17 Nilay Patel? All this class of tablets is accomplishing for anyone is playing Disney Plus for your children. So we're just like the Kindle Fire kids is the centerpiece of our tablet strategy.
13:29 Alex Cranz? And then we also just make a nice e-reader on the side that runs iOS.
13:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And then I can go to various state capitals and be like, you want, you want to make laws protecting kids? Make a law saying you have to buy a Kindle Fire for kids?
13:39 Alex Cranz? Yeah, there we go. I mean, I love how we're like making a really good culturally important company that also doesn't break laws.
13:47 Nilay Patel? I'm not trying to break the laws. I'm trying to make the laws.
13:49 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
13:49 David Pierce? I'm trying to be the laws.
13:51 Nilay Patel? You understand? If you don't buy a Kindle Fire, you will be arrested.
13:55 David Pierce? Here is my question is do we reboot the Fire Phone with our iPhone team?
14:02 Nilay Patel? Well, which part are we like?
14:03 Alex Cranz? The 3D display.
14:04 Nilay Patel? We've already added 50 cameras to the phone. What if we add four more to make it 3D?
14:09 David Pierce? Yeah, and it's one of them is just for barcodes.
14:11 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
14:12 David Pierce? Amazon Kindle, easy choice. Next up is PCs. And I think the list of folks is fairly familiar here. Alex, what do you got?
14:19 Alex Cranz? Okay, so the list is, it's, we can't do Apple. We've got Microsoft, Lenovo, Asus, Acer, HP, Razer, Dell. I think we should go Lenovo because if you get rid of all of the spamware that they like automatically install, you have some really nice laptops.
14:35 Nilay Patel? You've got really nice hardware.
14:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah, you got really nice hardware. And then we make the iOS team, they're gonna be working nights. But they're gonna have to basically like reinvent macOS. Like they can figure it out.
14:48 Nilay Patel? You're back into it. You start, iOS started with macOS. You know, like go the other way.
14:52 Alex Cranz? Go the other way. I fully believe in them. If we can make PC clones, we can do this too.
14:57 Nilay Patel? But we don't have the chips. I guess we do because we have the iPhone. So now we're just, now we just put a hinge and a lid on an iPhone. Like that's a laptop.
15:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:05 Nilay Patel? Which is more or less the iPad. I just want to be very clear about what we're discussing. We're like, we make iPads now.
15:11 Alex Cranz? But it's also got the little, it's got the little, the dot.
15:13 Nilay Patel? Oh yeah, the little, the trackpad guy?
15:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
15:15 Nilay Patel? I see. I was gonna say Microsoft because you, I want control of the operating system.
15:19 David Pierce? That's where I go to.
15:21 Nilay Patel? Right. And I want the Surface line.
15:23 Alex Cranz? I don't.
15:23 Nilay Patel? Now I've pulled the tablet ecosystem bigger, right? I've got my Kindles and my Kindle Fires and I've got the Surface Pro and I've got a whole range of products.
15:32 Alex Cranz? Tell us about all of the really good laptops and all in ones that, that we're gonna get with our Microsoft acquisition.
15:38 Nilay Patel? So here, again, a lot of my strategy is just try hard.
15:42 Alex Cranz? Okay.
15:42 Nilay Patel? Right? Just to be clear. So they had the Surface Studio, but like, what if you put a real chip in it?
15:47 Alex Cranz? Hmm.
15:49 Nilay Patel? And that's just me in meetings. Like, what if circle this on the whiteboard and then write try hard? And then like three exclamation points and that's my whole Surface strategy.
15:58 Alex Cranz? We can make it all run Risk V.
16:01 Nilay Patel? The power of one Raspberry Pi 4. Yeah, my vote, we, David, you're the tiebreaker here. It's between Microsoft and Lenovo. I agree. Lenovo makes some of the, the better hardware here.
16:11 Alex Cranz? You make a compelling point about being able to have Windows and make it good.
16:16 David Pierce? The one wrench I would like to throw in is that if we get Dell, we just instantly have the best lineup of Windows PCs that exists.
16:23 Nilay Patel? But we don't have Windows.
16:25 David Pierce? We don't have Windows. Do we want Windows?
16:27 Nilay Patel? You know, like, for example, like, I would like to walk up to the box that says, like, security and write try hard.
16:33 David Pierce? I will say though, under the rules of this game though, I don't, we, I think what we're getting is like a perpetual license to Windows. I don't think we're getting.
16:39 Nilay Patel? Even inside Mike, that's probably how the Surface.
16:41 David Pierce? Yeah, I don't think we get to run Windows.
16:43 Nilay Patel? But so when we took the iPhone, we don't get to run iOS?
16:45 Alex Cranz? No, we do. That one counts.
16:47 David Pierce? It does. It feels different. I can't describe to you why. No, it's because it's, it's one device to one operating system. This is not one device to one operating system. We are a partner to the operating system, not the only venue for the operating system.
16:59 Nilay Patel? Even if we're Microsoft?
17:00 David Pierce? We're not, but we're the Surface team. We aren't Microsoft. We're Vergecast Incorporated. We're not taking Windows from Microsoft. I still think it's Microsoft, just because I think we're, we're clearly building a luxury thing here. And I think getting there with Lenovo is gonna be challenging. Like, I don't, I don't know how we're gonna convince everybody that Lenovo is like kick ass cool again. I think we can get there with Surface.
17:23 Nilay Patel? We're not, we're not Lenovo. We're just, we're just taking the product. We're doing a little rebrand.
17:27 Alex Cranz? We got the ThinkPad.
17:28 David Pierce? Yeah, you're right.
17:29 Nilay Patel? A little coat of paint on there.
17:30 David Pierce? Get the yogas. You guys want some yogas?
17:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
17:33 David Pierce? They do the flippy things.
17:34 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna make tent mode happen for America.
17:36 David Pierce? Okay, I'm, I'm going Lenovo because I think we're gonna want Microsoft later. I think there are other things in this list that are going to be more useful to have for Microsoft. So I think we should pick Lenovo.
17:46 Alex Cranz? You're right. That's true.
17:48 Nilay Patel? I'm dying to know what you think those things are, but we'll come back to it.
17:51 David Pierce? Think of all the boring things that make you the most valuable company on planet Earth. And that's, that's what Microsoft does so well.
17:59 Alex Cranz? It's not the surface team.
18:00 David Pierce? Yeah, I think, all right, so we're, we're picking, we're picking Lenovo. Welcome to the team, the little nub. It's very exciting. What's that thing called? The track point? Is that what that's called?
18:09 Alex Cranz? Track point, track point.
18:10 David Pierce? Love that.
18:10 Alex Cranz? We just call it a nub. That's, we're rebranding it immediately. Just immediately. That's the first thing we do. Day one.
18:17 David Pierce? Yeah, I love this. All right. So just to recap so far, we're gonna take a quick break. We have, as Vergecast Incorporated, we now make the Apple iPhone, the Amazon Kindle, and Lenovo's set of PCs. I feel like we're doing very well so far. I'm excited about this. We're doing well. All right. We're gonna take a really quick break. We're gonna come back, do some more stuff.
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20:12 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Vergecast Incorporated. We haven't talked about our pay structure, by the way, as co-CEOs, but we'll come back to that. It's going to be very lucrative for us. Because again, we're only going to be in this job for six years. So we gotta, we gotta do it and get out.
20:26 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:27 David Pierce? Next category. I think this might be the richest and sort of most evenly competitive category of all the ones we're about to do, is wearables. And I'm defining wearables deliberately broadly. Anything that you wear on your body counts. We can't do things like the Apple Watch or the Vision Pro. We can't do all of Amazon's weird Alexa wearable stuff. But I would say mostly, we're still pretty wide open.
20:50 Alex Cranz? You have X-Real on here.
20:52 David Pierce? Yeah, I do have X-Real on here. I'm not saying we should pick it. I'm just saying it's a company I thought of when I said wearable out loud to myself. What do you guys think? Any, any jump out to you that we should definitely get into? I have a clear favorite here.
21:05 Nilay Patel? Out the gate, I'm going bold and taking Meta for the Ray-Bans.
21:08 Alex Cranz? Oh, okay. Oh, that's a good play. I wasn't even, I was thinking of the headset. I forgot about the glasses.
21:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
21:14 David Pierce? Okay, on that front, do we get one or the other, or do we get both? Like if we, if we say Quest, we get all the quests in one product. But I feel like the smart glasses are a different thing.
21:24 Nilay Patel? Get your face computers away from me. You know what I mean? Just adding, no, no, no. Other, what are three bands?
21:30 David Pierce? You just want the smart glasses.
21:31 Nilay Patel? I just want the glasses.
21:32 David Pierce? Even if we get the whole team, we're immediately killing the Quest line and we're just going smart glasses.
21:36 Nilay Patel? That's what they just did. I just want to, that's what Meta just did.
21:39 David Pierce? Yeah.
21:39 Nilay Patel? Just reorganize that team. So I'm saying the glasses are the future. And we're putting, we're putting our excess iPhone profits into the glasses.
21:48 Alex Cranz? Oh, I mean, if the glasses, like... Ran a really good AI. Well, no, we don't have one of those. We have Siri.
21:55 Nilay Patel? Although on a six-year time horizon, it's like, hmm, maybe I just want to take Samsung's watches and do lock-in.
22:02 David Pierce? I mean, that is, that is actually an interesting question, right? Like, are we betting that smart glasses are going to be sufficiently huge by 2030 that this is like worth it for us? Or are we just taking like a nerd gadget for the next six years?
22:16 Alex Cranz? No, this makes sense for us because we're like, we're, we're cool. We're luxury. What's this luxury? Like a pair of Ray-Bans.
22:22 David Pierce? Fair. Okay. I have two others I'd like to throw at you.
22:24 Alex Cranz? An Aura ring.
22:25 David Pierce? That is one of the things I was going to throw at you. I think Aura is like a sneakily fascinating company and they're way ahead in smart rings. Smart rings are, a lot of people think, including our own V-Song, about to be a real thing. I think especially if you're betting that this like health and fitness thing is going to keep growing really fast, that's a place to go. I also think Garmin for kind of the same reasons. Like, what if we can redesign Garmin's watches so that they don't look dumb? But they have all the cool stuff that Garmin already has that people really like. I feel like you could make something out of Garmin. I also, my immediate reaction when we did this was snap because I want the spectacles line. But I think we go, we go Ray-Ban meta smart glasses and that gets us everywhere we're going probably significantly faster.
23:06 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's basically, do we want to go watch, ring or glasses?
23:10 David Pierce? Totally.
23:11 Alex Cranz? But if we go Samsung, we do watch and ring, right?
23:13 Nilay Patel? Well, so the, the thing that this I think makes very clear is you can take any of the watches and you can do iPhone lock-in. And now you have a realistic competitor to the Apple Watch, right? Like,
23:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
23:25 Nilay Patel? That's the thing that actually holds a bunch of these companies back is they cannot communicate with the iPhone.
23:31 Alex Cranz? Right.
23:31 David Pierce? Yeah, but that be cool, Neelai. It's written, it's written at the top of the building of our headquarters. It just says be cool.
23:39 Alex Cranz? What's cooler than lock-in?
23:40 David Pierce? What's cooler than lock-in?
23:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah, the change I'm making is being like, all right, whoop, you're in. Like, let's go, you know?
23:45 David Pierce? Yeah.
23:46 Nilay Patel? Like you can, you can now more directly figure out Apple integrations.
23:50 David Pierce? Buy a ThinkPad, get a whoop, let's go.
23:53 Nilay Patel? But I'm saying that on a six-year time horizon, maybe that is a better move than take the Meta Ray-Bans and figure out how glasses work, which by the way, glasses also held back because they cannot properly integrate with your phone.
24:07 David Pierce? Yeah.
24:08 Nilay Patel? This is like a real problem for all these products.
24:11 Alex Cranz? But yeah, that's why like the glasses, we get them properly integrating with the phone, then we also have like an additional audio solution.
24:20 Nilay Patel? When you say an additional audio solution, that means some headphones.
24:23 Alex Cranz? Well, you know, headphones is headphones coming up next, so.
24:26 Nilay Patel? You've been a CEO for 20 minutes. You are already super corporate.
24:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we need, we need more than one audio solution for our company, guys.
24:34 David Pierce? I've prepared a deck to talk about this.
24:35 Alex Cranz? We would, we need to be diversified in our audio.
24:38 Nilay Patel? It's good. It happens to everybody.
24:40 Alex Cranz? It happens immediately. Yeah. But the Garmin, like the Garmin has so much cool stuff in it. They just look so ugly. And we've got the Apple team now, right? They can like make it look good. We're that team, that poor team in Panos Panay just chained to their desk.
24:55 David Pierce? We need that team to keep making iPhones, though. I don't know.
24:58 Nilay Patel? It's not like they're doing a lot. They're like, take the buttons off it.
25:00 David Pierce? That's true. It's thinner next time. We did it.
25:06 Nilay Patel? I think you're the tiebreaker. I think it's between Garmin and Meta. Once again, David, you have to, you have to pull apart this corporate battle.
25:13 David Pierce? I think we should pick Meta.
25:14 Nilay Patel? Ooh.
25:15 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
25:15 David Pierce? Because I think, I think the Ray-Ban Meta partnership is cool. I think the glasses are awesome and people really like them. And I think our ability to like integrate them a little and make them way better for people, instant victory. Like, I think with the other picks that we have here, we have a chance to like immediately make these things much cooler in a way that I feel like we're gonna have to basically like tear down the Garmin hardware team and build it back up. And I feel like that's gonna take us a while.
25:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah, it's gonna be more than six years.
25:46 David Pierce? Garmin, please know that I love you and you make cool things, just like make them cooler.
25:51 Nilay Patel? Garmin, if you'd like to integrate with Veritas Incorporated's iPhone, you can pass 55%.
25:56 David Pierce? Yeah, we'd love to have you.
25:57 Alex Cranz? We've got some really good audio solutions for you.
25:59 Nilay Patel? The developer program is open and it will only be slightly more than half of your revenue.
26:05 David Pierce? Yeah. Also, the smart glasses are just like cool and I love using them and I want to have them. So we're going with that. I feel good about it. I don't love that we just hired a hardware team out of Meta, which makes me feel a lot of feelings in general, but it's okay. We're doing it.
26:20 Nilay Patel? We now know everything about you.
26:24 David Pierce? Our privacy policy, by the way, is dope. Like, let's just take that for granted. In case you're wondering about our privacy policy, it is sick.
26:31 Alex Cranz? The EU never gets mad at us.
26:33 David Pierce? No, it's like not a problem at all. I should have said at the beginning, by the way, by picking the iPhone, we did just bring ourselves a delightful antitrust case that I'm not super psyched about. But I feel like it's, it's one of those that's coming anyway, right?
26:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah, Lena, call us.
26:47 David Pierce? Neelai has been begging to fight an antitrust case, so like it's time.
26:50 Nilay Patel? From this side. That's really what I've been after this whole time is let me be the monopolist.
26:55 David Pierce? It's perfect.
26:56 Nilay Patel? I'm just saying, we're raising rents. If we're going down, we're going down rich.
27:00 David Pierce? Yeah. And by the time any of this comes out, it'll be past 2030. We'll be out anyway. It's fine. I'm not worried about it. All right. Next category is headphones. And here again, we're pretty wide open. Apple is off the board, but I'm going to allow Beats to stay on the board because it is different enough that I think we'll allow it.
27:16 Nilay Patel? Because they don't care about it.
27:18 David Pierce? Yeah, pretty much. Like, I don't know if Apple knows that it owns Beats, so we're just going to let it ride. But there's also obvious players here, Bose and Sony and Sonos is a new one.
27:26 Alex Cranz? Just headphones, though.
27:27 David Pierce? Well, no, we'll make this headphones slash speakers. We'll go audio solutions.
27:31 Nilay Patel? Oh, my God.
27:31 David Pierce? In Alex Cranz's.
27:32 Alex Cranz? I think you know exactly where we're going with this.
27:35 David Pierce? Neelai is going to advocate for the party speaker.
27:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I'm taking Sony. Now that it's audio solutions.
27:42 Alex Cranz? We got a lot, a wider range.
27:44 Nilay Patel? It's the ULT era. I mean, you want luxury. What screams luxury more than the words "mega bass"?
27:50 David Pierce? A seven foot tall speaker.
27:52 Nilay Patel? By the way, shout out to the Vergecast listeners who just send me pictures of it in the wild.
27:56 David Pierce? Amazing.
27:56 Nilay Patel? It's like they're birding, you know, but like only one person cares about birds and it's me.
28:02 David Pierce? How does it feel to be known for the Cybertruck wiper and Sony party speakers? Like, is this a good legacy that you're happy about?
28:08 Nilay Patel? Is that on the list? Cybertruck wiper? On the wildcard gadgets? Cybertruck wiper?
28:13 David Pierce? We have two wildcard options, so don't worry. For me, it's Sonos on this one.
28:18 Nilay Patel? Interesting.
28:18 David Pierce? I want Sonos real bad, because again, we're in this like, we want to build cool stuff that's integrated. Sonos makes good products, they know how to make good audio products. I feel like we could take Sonos and be like, just learn how to make software, everything's gonna be fine.
28:31 Nilay Patel? Just learn the easy part.
28:32 David Pierce? Yeah, like, have you heard of apps? What if we did that? This could be fun.
28:36 Nilay Patel? So again, I would actually take Sony here. Not just because of the party speaker situation. I think their headphones are really good.
28:42 David Pierce? They are.
28:43 Nilay Patel? Sony noise cancelers are really good. I think they compete with Bose to be the top of the market. Then they've got an actual audio solutions catalog, like, an actual array of speakers. Like, what is one product I want desperately from Sonos that they won't sell? Is like, a receiver, right?
28:57 David Pierce? Fair.
28:58 Nilay Patel? There's a huge array of those audio products that you can ruthlessly integrate with a phone, in a way that even Sonos can't right now. That's why they have the software problems. Like, their app platform has to support a bunch of stuff, because it can't just put it on your phone directly. And also, Megabase, I would just get it.
29:13 David Pierce? Okay.
29:14 Nilay Patel? I would have it.
29:15 David Pierce? Alex, what do you think?
29:16 Alex Cranz? I just really like the Sony headphones.
29:18 David Pierce? Okay.
29:19 Alex Cranz? They just have such a nice wider range. Like, Sonos just got into headphones, they don't have any in-ear monitors, they don't have any buds.
29:26 David Pierce? Also, tough time to be taking over Sonos. Like, real, real kind of reputation hit.
29:30 Nilay Patel? Oh, you know what you don't have on here?
29:32 David Pierce? What's that?
29:33 Nilay Patel? Again, I'm just gonna point this out for everyone. I think the age of televisions is coming to an end, because David made a list of gadgets and didn't put TVs on them.
29:41 David Pierce? Yeah, I don't care. No part of me wants to build televisions.
29:44 Nilay Patel? Well, I'll just remind everyone that I asked the CEO of Netflix about the Samsung Frame TV, and he was like, "What? Stop talking to me." I was like, "Do you think this is a harbinger of doom?" And he was like, "I don't know what you're saying. I own one." But I'm just saying, you made an entire list of gadgets and you didn't put TVs on here. It's a prophecy.
30:02 Alex Cranz? Cause he knew you were gonna say the Samsung, we're gonna acquire the Samsung Frame and fix it.
30:05 David Pierce? To be clear, not an oversight. We are not getting in the television business. What if we made no money and everything was impossible and we had to spy on our users?
30:13 Nilay Patel? All I'm saying is, if TVs were on here anywhere, then I would change my headphones pack. If you're giving me audio solutions but not TVs, then it's Sony. If TVs are back on the list, then I have to, I'm required by like blood and heritage to take Sony televisions.
30:30 David Pierce? Okay.
30:31 Nilay Patel? And then I would change my headphones back.
30:32 David Pierce? So we do have a wild card round coming later. And if you, if you think you can win the fight for us to get Sony TVs, you can, you can hold your fire for them.
30:40 Alex Cranz? I'm gonna fight for TCL so hard.
30:42 David Pierce? Yeah, I don't think you're gonna win the Sony TVs, but I just don't think we wanna be in the TV business.
30:47 Nilay Patel? Well, if I take him off the board here, it's a big, it's a big decision. How do I get Mac OS in the tablet?
30:53 Nilay Patel? You know, I gotta play three moves ahead.
30:54 David Pierce? I will be down with Sony here. By the way, tough beat for Bose that none of us are even attempting to take Bose.
31:00 Alex Cranz? They're fine.
31:00 Nilay Patel? Well, you made it audio solutions.
31:02 David Pierce? Right.
31:03 Nilay Patel? If it was just headphones, I would immediately go Bose so I could win the Sony fight later.
31:08 David Pierce? Interesting. Okay. Yeah, and I don't, it's just like a bunch of weird scientists in Massachusetts. It's like, we don't, we don't need that. I'll go Sony under one stipulation, which is that we immediately rename every single product they make to something not stupid.
31:21 Nilay Patel? No, with more letters. Twice as many letters.
31:24 David Pierce? And another dash in the middle for no reason.
31:29 Nilay Patel? Just get in there.
31:30 David Pierce? Okay. I think it's Sony.
31:32 Nilay Patel? Okay.
31:33 David Pierce? I feel good about this. I think we're, I think we're aligned.
31:35 Nilay Patel? I can figure something out for TVs.
31:36 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
31:37 David Pierce? I feel now obligated to take something from Samsung just so that you can't argue for the Frame TV, because I don't need this in my life.
31:43 Nilay Patel? That's not what I was gonna take. Again, I believe it's a harbinger of doom.
31:48 David Pierce? Okay, so the next two things on here are, I would say, the sneaky places we're gonna make a lot of money. This is what pays for everything else that the shareholders are gonna love, and we're probably never gonna talk about again. The first one is app platforms, which I suppose could be a single app, if we wanted a single app, but I'm thinking more along the lines of like, big groups of things. So like, I had Adobe Creative Cloud as an option here, and Microsoft Office, and Google Workspace. This is like, probably B2B software that is going to make us just a tremendous amount of money. What do we think?
32:19 Nilay Patel? So I have to go with Office.
32:21 David Pierce? Okay.
32:22 Nilay Patel? Only for one small reason, and I can't believe you didn't think of it first, David. We cannot run this company without Microsoft Excel.
32:27 David Pierce? Oh, that's interesting.
32:28 Nilay Patel? No company can be run without Microsoft Excel. Like, just for our own survival.
32:33 Alex Cranz? You know, you can just like, pay for a license. We'll have so much money. We can just pay for a license for Excel.
32:39 David Pierce? But what if other people paid us for licenses?
32:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I'm just saying, you want a, you want a dog food, you know, you're, you're in work.
32:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but we can have Adobe Creative Cloud and just have a stranglehold on the entire industry.
32:51 Nilay Patel? You want people to hate us?
32:54 Alex Cranz? We could just, like, I love a monopoly. I'm, I'm on this side of things now.
32:58 David Pierce? Another antitrust fight that I'm really excited about, yeah.
33:01 Alex Cranz? We're only gonna be there six years. By the time that stuff all hits, we'll be long gone.
33:05 David Pierce? So I think the upside of Creative Cloud is, we take Creative Cloud, we make the pricing better, and we're legends. Right? Like, instantly, best possible PR win is we just like, give away Premiere. We're just like, here, you can have it.
33:19 Alex Cranz? No, we, we sell like, rather than the cloud license, we're like, okay, you can just buy Premiere, but it'll cost a thousand dollars.
33:26 David Pierce? Yeah.
33:27 Alex Cranz? Then we make a lot of money, and people are happy because they can just own it.
33:30 David Pierce? For six years.
33:30 Alex Cranz? Yeah, for six years. And then it's gone. And then, and then, you know, whoever follows us, Panos, I'm sorry, you're taking over the company from us. Good luck.
33:39 Nilay Patel? A lot of our ideas are like, what if we made slightly less money?
33:42 David Pierce? But that's fine.
33:42 Nilay Patel? Whereas my ideas are, what if we made a lot more money?
33:46 David Pierce? Yeah, this, this says a lot about the, the distinct vibes of the Vergecast Incorporated team, I would say. It's either Office or it's Creative Cloud, right? I feel like there's nothing else. You like, we could go try to get like Oracle's weird business or like IBM's consulting arm or whatever, but we haven't picked a Google thing. Do we not want Google Workspace? Do we just take Google Workspace and go kill Office?
34:07 Nilay Patel? So my, my idea here, again, you know, the, our, our company's mission is try hard.
34:12 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:12 Nilay Patel? And Workspace is a ripe target for trying hard.
34:15 David Pierce? Yeah.
34:15 Nilay Patel? This is also where you could do messaging. You could, you know, you could walk in the room and be like, make a list of all the messaging products and then walk out and six months later, come back in and look at the list and like circle one, like this one, we're just doing this one.
34:27 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:28 Nilay Patel? And we're going to name it G Chat. That's a real, that's a thing you could do here.
34:31 David Pierce? It is, it is. Messaging, I would point out, is a separate category. So we're, we're going to get to messaging. But if we, whatever company we pick here, we can't pick there.
34:37 Nilay Patel? Okay.
34:38 David Pierce? Which is a case for and against some folks here.
34:41 Alex Cranz? And if we pick Microsoft Office, we can't pick Azure. If we pick Google Workspace, we can't pick Google Cloud.
34:48 David Pierce? That's right.
34:48 Nilay Patel? No one was picking Google Cloud.
34:51 Nilay Patel? All right, okay, I'll, I'll, I will concede and say we should pick Creative Cloud and our mission here is to make people not, not hate us.
34:57 David Pierce? Yeah, I think, I think this is where we win over all the people to use our hardware because they're going to love, this is how we sell Lenovo ThinkPads.
35:04 Nilay Patel? Because of 55% lock-in. You can run Creative Cloud on someone else's laptop. It'll just cost four times as much money. I, I don't make the rules.
35:14 David Pierce? Yeah.
35:15 Nilay Patel? Except for that one.
35:16 Alex Cranz? Well, you just say the more your company makes, we charge you more. Like it's just a scale, a sliding scale.
35:21 David Pierce? Oh, I like that. You pay per YouTube subscriber instead of per.
35:25 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:27 Alex Cranz? Exactly. Oh, you're just getting out in this industry. You basically get it for free.
35:31 David Pierce? Right.
35:31 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
35:32 David Pierce? I love this.
35:32 Alex Cranz? The minute you start making success, that we, we come for our, our cut.
35:36 Nilay Patel? And if you're wearing our wearable, we can track your general burnout level as a creator and we start bringing the price back down.
35:42 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
35:42 David Pierce? I love that.
35:43 Alex Cranz? See? Oh my God. Synergy.
35:45 David Pierce? We actually turn the app off when you need a rest day. And then, and then we'll get it back.
35:49 Nilay Patel? Calm down, Jimmy.
35:53 David Pierce? All right, so we're good on Creative Cloud?
35:55 Alex Cranz? All right.
35:56 Nilay Patel? I mean, sure.
35:57 David Pierce? I think it's the right answer.
35:58 Nilay Patel? That's okay. I know I'm the one who has to deal with like whatever terms of service conflagration. It's like, I'm fine. I'll do it.
36:04 David Pierce? Yeah.
36:05 Alex Cranz? David and I work four days a year.
36:07 David Pierce? Oh, yeah. Cranz and I are the ones who like go to canned lions and like meet with advertisers. You have to actually like do the things.
36:14 Nilay Patel? I have to write the blog post. It's like, all right, we changed our terms of service. It's true that we're gonna take your firstborn child. We're doing this for the good of all humanity.
36:24 David Pierce? This is beautiful. I love this for you. All right. Next category is the boring B2B money faucets. This is where we get to, we get to pick our cloud provider. We can make B2B chips that we sell. I was gonna put ARM in here, but we can't have ARM because ARM's only thing is ARM, so that doesn't really work. We can, this is, this is where we make all of our money, but we try to never talk about in public because no one cares.
36:47 Nilay Patel? Can we take TSMC?
36:48 David Pierce? What would you want to take from TSMC?
36:50 Nilay Patel? Making the chips for everybody?
36:52 David Pierce? No, that's their whole thing.
36:54 Nilay Patel? But they don't make a product called TSMC.
36:56 David Pierce? No.
36:57 Nilay Patel? They don't ship TSMCs around the world.
36:59 David Pierce? That would be then just buying the company, which is not what we're doing. We're taking products.
37:02 Alex Cranz? You get like one TSMC factory.
37:04 David Pierce? This is like an expansion draft in sports, right? We get to like pick from your roster, but we can't have your team.
37:09 Nilay Patel? What about that one company in Europe that actually makes the lithography machine?
37:13 David Pierce? Ooh.
37:13 Nilay Patel? The TSMC relies on?
37:15 David Pierce? That like $23 million machine?
37:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah. There's only, what's the name of that company? ASML. I think we should take ASML. I think we should take the machine that makes the fabs.
37:23 David Pierce? The machine that makes the fabs. Okay.
37:25 Alex Cranz? Not like Azure?
37:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but like, you know, I'm already defending Creative Cloud. Like, I'm not trying to be out of here.
37:32 Alex Cranz? I just want to print all the money. Like, this is, this is, this is our money printer. Who gets mad at Azure lately?
37:39 Nilay Patel? No one, but it's also in second place, right? You have to, you have to go make the AI case. You gotta do the AI CRM thing to make, to grow Azure. I guess we're just milking it for profits and walking away, right?
37:50 Alex Cranz? Right. Yeah, we're only here for six years.
37:52 Nilay Patel? And we can't take AWS because we took the Kindle.
37:54 David Pierce? Right.
37:54 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
37:54 David Pierce? Which is a very funny trade to have made.
37:58 Nilay Patel? You're trying to build a business.
37:59 Alex Cranz? I mean, oh, we could take Whisper from OpenAI.
38:03 David Pierce? Whisper's open source. We're good there.
38:05 Alex Cranz? Oh, yeah.
38:06 Nilay Patel? Also, OpenAI, it's on this list as a money faucet, but it is not. It's like a reverse. It's a drain.
38:12 David Pierce? Oh, true. I meant to write this as basically like, if we want, we can take like GPT-4O from OpenAI.
38:19 Nilay Patel? Which, which still, which they are now in a stunning business judo move are giving away for free to Apple.
38:26 David Pierce? Yeah, no, I'm not. I don't think that's the winner, but I just, I wanted to have an AI option here.
38:31 Alex Cranz? Let's take Nvidia GeForce now.
38:34 David Pierce? Yeah. So this is the thing. How do we get something from Nvidia? This is, this is my question. What do we take from Nvidia? Is it just the H100 business? Do we just, we just take Nvidia's whole AI chip situation?
38:46 Nilay Patel? I'm telling you, do you, do you buy ASML? And then you're like, if you use these machines to make H100s, 55%.
38:57 Alex Cranz? That is a pretty good funny faucet. I feel like we will be ripe for disruption there.
39:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I think taking the Nvidia AI chip business is like a strong move because now you're selling to Google Cloud and Azure. And on a six-year horizon, they all want to disrupt you, but they won't be able to.
39:14 David Pierce? So I was about to say, do we worry that every other chip maker on earth is going to start making these? And this becomes a bad bet pretty soon.
39:21 Alex Cranz? That's Panos's problem in six years.
39:23 Nilay Patel? Yeah, not in six years, baby.
39:25 David Pierce? Okay.
39:25 Nilay Patel? In six years, I'm on a boat.
39:27 David Pierce? I mean, the other, the other problem here is that if we, if we take that, the bubble bursts and we become the poster child of the AI bubble that just burst. And that's going to happen in less than six years.
39:38 Nilay Patel? That's true. This is why I'm saying we should take ASML, the chip company.
39:41 David Pierce? That is like the least sexy business you could possibly imagine in that. I doubt there's as much money in it because I don't think they can make all that many of those.
39:50 Alex Cranz? It's like Samsung and their battery business. Actually, maybe this is a good idea. Where Samsung just makes a bunch of random stuff that makes them a ton of money.
39:58 Nilay Patel? Oh yeah, we could take LG Display, right?
40:00 David Pierce? Oh, that's good.
40:01 Alex Cranz? Ooh.
40:02 Nilay Patel? Right? Like, you want, you want to put an OLED in your phone? Come talk to Lucky Gold Star, you know?
40:07 David Pierce? Wait, I like that a lot.
40:08 Alex Cranz? I was like, LG Display, that, that feels like it. The way we all were just like.
40:11 David Pierce? Yeah. And it, that feels, that feels sticky. They're gonna make screens for a long time. I feel like we're in, and that's like, that's easy. It runs itself. We're good. All right. I love this.
40:20 Nilay Patel? And, and we love talking about it.
40:22 David Pierce? We do.
40:22 Nilay Patel? You know?
40:22 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
40:23 Nilay Patel? You want to talk about dual-layer OLEDs? Let's go.
40:25 David Pierce? Do you feel like this gets you close enough to the TV business that you're happy now, Eli?
40:30 Alex Cranz? They make the panels that go in your Sony.
40:32 Nilay Patel? That's true. They do make the panels.
40:33 David Pierce? That's where like, we're.
40:34 Nilay Patel? Fine. I got my, I got myself a monitor and TV business.
40:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
40:37 Nilay Patel? We're gonna take LG Display and we're gonna, we're, we're gonna make TVs.
40:41 Alex Cranz? And then we're just gonna bolt two Sony Party speakers to it. Boom.
40:45 Nilay Patel? You think we want to sell these tomorrow? Come on.
40:48 Alex Cranz? Some little pulsing lights at the bottom.
40:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
40:51 David Pierce? Okay.
40:51 Nilay Patel? All right.
40:52 David Pierce? That's good. LG Display. This is great. I'm in. All right. We're gonna take one more break and then we're gonna go back. We got four more to do. We're gonna build Virg casting. We'll be right back.
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42:36 David Pierce? All right, we're back. Next up for the triumvirate at Vergecast Incorporated is messaging. We can, we can take, again, not a company, so we can't take Signal from Signal or Telegram from Telegram, but we can, we can take and reinvent any messaging app or platform or ecosystem that we want. We can't take from Meta, which I just realized because we took the Ray-Ban Smart Glasses, which I now slightly regret because I would like to have taken WhatsApp.
43:03 Alex Cranz? So we can take all of the different Google chats that have existed and finally make one?
43:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah, this is our opportunity.
43:09 David Pierce? Yeah, we can make Gchat.
43:11 Nilay Patel? Done. Done. I can solve, I can find, I can solve this.
43:17 David Pierce? I mean, again, on the list of like do it and be legends, finally making Gchat is, is way up there.
43:22 Nilay Patel? Just making Gchat and then I, you know, I got the phone. So your blue bubble problems are solved.
43:28 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Yeah, we don't have to worry about messaging.
43:30 David Pierce? We just put blue bubbles on the iPhone.
43:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah, super done. This isn't even, why are we even, Gchat, baby. I met my wife in there. That's a real story, by the way. That's not just a case in you.
43:39 David Pierce? That is a real thing.
43:40 Nilay Patel? Back then, I spent years of our, our early relationship in Gchat and nowhere else.
43:44 David Pierce? Do you ever randomly find like the transcripts of those chats when you're searching for something in your Gmail? This is a thing that happens to me occasionally. I'll search for like pizza in my Gmail and it'll be like, did you mean this conversation you had with your ex 11 years ago that we saved to Gmail?
44:00 Nilay Patel? Ooh, I haven't thought about that and now I'm worried about looking.
44:03 Alex Cranz? Don't look, don't look.
44:04 Nilay Patel? We're gonna set that aside.
44:06 Alex Cranz? Don't look.
44:06 David Pierce? It's probably for the best.
44:08 Nilay Patel? All of those G chat conversations were before we were dating. So they were just conversations about the things we had gotten up to at night, which is a lot of things.
44:17 David Pierce? I love it.
44:17 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
44:18 David Pierce? That's very good.
44:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
44:19 David Pierce? All right. The only other one I would throw in is Slack, which I think is like a forever unrealized potential that.
44:26 Alex Cranz? Or Discord.
44:26 David Pierce? So, but we can't take Discord because Discord is Discord, right? Like, that's, that's, it's off the.
44:31 Alex Cranz? I thought somebody else on Discord now.
44:33 David Pierce? No, they almost sold, but it's still just Discord. Microsoft was gonna, but then they were like, this seems like a disaster, which probably reasonable call.
44:41 Alex Cranz? G chat being good, like, we're gonna kind of win people over with, with Adobe. But eventually we will jack up the prices on them and having like, yeah, just having G chat there is like instant win.
44:55 David Pierce? Oh, yeah. All right. I feel good about this. It's G chat. And we're, we're agreed that we're scrapping all the other nonsense and we're calling it G chat, right?
45:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah, without.
45:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:03 Nilay Patel? Easily.
45:04 David Pierce? We are building the G chat that always should have existed. Next one is streaming service, uh, which is actually fun because again, we can't steal a company. So like Netflix is out.
45:12 Nilay Patel? Oh shit, we just traded G chat for YouTube.
45:17 David Pierce? Oh no.
45:18 Nilay Patel? No, no, can we go back?
45:19 Alex Cranz? No, we can take TikTok.
45:21 Nilay Patel? Oh, we can take TikTok.
45:22 David Pierce? Yeah, you're right. We can take TikTok.
45:23 Nilay Patel? For now, it's on.
45:25 David Pierce? So.
45:26 Nilay Patel? Oh, we can buy, we are it. We're gonna save America.
45:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we, we buy it. Yeah. There we, oh my God.
45:32 Nilay Patel? Well, dude, the wildcard round here is amazing. We're gonna, we're gonna be heroes with G chat and we're gonna save America's youth.
45:38 David Pierce? Oh, wow. We just did it. This is, this is, we're now the coolest company on earth. Okay.
45:44 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
45:45 David Pierce? And the good news is this one isn't even gonna be very expensive because they're desperately trying to get rid of it.
45:49 Alex Cranz? Yeah, eat your heart out, Oracle.
45:51 Nilay Patel? We do have to fight the Chinese government and Larry Ellison.
45:54 Alex Cranz? It'll be fine.
45:54 Nilay Patel? Do you think at the end to buy TikTok, you have to win a boat race against Larry Ellison? He's like, I'll do this if you can beat me in the Americas Cup.
46:02 David Pierce? Let's yacht about it.
46:03 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
46:05 David Pierce? Okay, so I will just say there's a bunch of Disney streaming services that are interesting. ESPN would make us an awful lot of money for a pretty long time. Hulu exists, Disney Plus exists, we could have Apple TV Plus and have all the good shows.
46:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but those are also dependent on external licenses that we might not acquire.
46:25 David Pierce? True.
46:26 Alex Cranz? With our streaming service acquisition, right? We're not getting the rights to Star Wars.
46:30 David Pierce? We get, we get all the existing contracts.
46:32 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
46:33 David Pierce? But I think you're right. If we get Disney Plus, we get, we don't get to own Star Wars. You're right.
46:37 Nilay Patel? The economics of streaming are very simple. There's a handful of companies who think the Samsung Frame TV will continue to exist. Their business model is they pay a lot of money for content and then try to pay, make people pay money for it. The other model is TikTok gets free content from America's teenagers and then sells ads against it. And, not for nothing, an infinite array of pirated movies from the idiots who are paying for content.
47:02 David Pierce? Yeah.
47:03 Nilay Patel? It's, it's gotta be TikTok. You're just sort of, the economics of the business, like, do you want to have costs or not costs?
47:08 David Pierce? But again, TikTok not famously making a ton of money right now.
47:11 Nilay Patel? Well, because they're, they're, you know, we're, we'll fix that. 55%.
47:14 Alex Cranz? No, no, it's, it's, we, we do something like deal with Adobe Creative Cloud where we somehow charge our own creators.
47:20 David Pierce? Well, we're gonna have to, because if we get TikTok, we don't get CapCut. So we're gonna have to immediately put the Creative Cloud team on building CapCut so that people lose.
47:28 Nilay Patel? But the TikTok video editor is CapCut, so we just spin it out.
47:31 David Pierce? It's good enough. Yeah, like, it'll work.
47:32 Nilay Patel? And we call it CutCap.
47:33 David Pierce? We can probably, CutCap. There we go. All right. TikTok and CutCap. We've done it. All right. I, I think that's right. I feel good about it. I like briefly wanted to fight for Prime Video just because it is like, it's another one that is like, try harder. Uh, oh no, we took Kindle. God.
47:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we took Kindle.
47:48 David Pierce? The amount of money that costs, that taking Kindle has cost us. Good lord.
47:52 Nilay Patel? I mean, it is very funny that we took Kindle and Google Chat.
47:57 Alex Cranz? That's what we took from those companies.
47:59 David Pierce? I will say, if we want to go back and take Slack and YouTube, we have a chance.
48:03 Alex Cranz? No, we're committed.
48:05 David Pierce? Is there anything cooler than fixing Gchat? Like, that might be the single most important thing we do at this company. I feel really good about it.
48:12 Alex Cranz? I mean, the teens will prefer us for TikTok.
48:14 David Pierce? That's true. Okay, so we have, we have two more categories, one of which I just changed two minutes ago, and I'm very excited about it. So far, we have the iPhone business from Apple. We have the Kindle business from Amazon. The PC business from Lenovo. We're doing all of Meta's wearables. We haven't decided yet if we're killing the Quest, but we're probably killing the Quest. We're all in on the smart glasses. We're taking Sony's audio solutions. We're taking Adobe Creative Cloud. We're taking LG Display. And we're taking Gchat. Well, we're taking the mess of Google's messaging systems, which I think actually probably means we hire most of Google, because everybody's working on messaging and one another. And we're making Gchat. And then we are saving America and taking over TikTok. How do we feel so far? Feel good?
48:57 Nilay Patel? Just how many rules?
48:58 Alex Cranz? I'm feeling great.
48:58 David Pierce? I really feel like it does. Lenovo is still very much the, like, weird one out, but we're gonna make Lenovo cool again. It's gonna be great.
49:05 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we'll fix it.
49:06 David Pierce? Okay, so we have, we have two left, which one is wildcard gadgets, which is, I think the rules still apply, so we can't take from a company we've already taken from, but we can take from any category, including categories we have not talked about. So it's some other product that Vergecast Inc. is going to make that is not off limits, because we've already taken from another company. We can, we can do TVs. This is where we take the Cybertruck, if we want to take the Cybertruck. Anything you guys want? Any initial thoughts? Anything you're excited about?
49:34 Nilay Patel? Well, so this is where I was gonna back into taking LG's TVs.
49:37 David Pierce? Okay, too late.
49:38 Nilay Patel? But then we already have LG Display.
49:40 David Pierce? I think this is better. We have the part of the business that's like, good, and not the part of the business that is WebOS. I feel really good about LG Display and not LG TVs.
49:48 Alex Cranz? Have you guys heard of a company called Stores and Bickle?
49:51 David Pierce? Is this how we get into like bespoke whiskey?
49:53 Alex Cranz? No, this is how we get in. We just get the volcano. They make a whole bunch of different vapes. We just get the volcano business.
49:59 David Pierce? Okay.
49:59 Alex Cranz? And then we like, we make one that looks really, really cool. We put a big screen on it. We put some big speakers on the side, just a whole one stop party business.
50:09 David Pierce? Just for Alex Cranz.
50:11 Alex Cranz? It was just, you know, legalization is coming for this country. We gotta, we gotta be there at the start.
50:16 David Pierce? I'm not feeling that. I gotta tell you. I just feel like if we were in this till 2040.
50:21 Alex Cranz? Yeah, that makes sense.
50:22 David Pierce? I'd be down. 2030 feels iffy and that's just like a lot of legislation stuff.
50:27 Nilay Patel? All right, I'm just, I'm throwing this out there. The Nvidia Shield.
50:31 Alex Cranz? We, we, oh yeah, we didn't do Nvidia, did we?
50:33 Nilay Patel? We took LG Display over Nvidia's GPU business. We're doing really well.
50:38 Alex Cranz? This gets us the Tegra.
50:40 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:40 David Pierce? Why this?
50:41 Nilay Patel? Cause I, I think between Krantz and I, we can communicate with an audience of TV. We can, we can bring the Shield back to prominence.
50:48 David Pierce? This is a try harder move.
50:50 Nilay Patel? Look, if you look, if you look on the forums right now, people are like, the Shield isn't it anymore.
50:54 David Pierce? That's true. And it was for a long time.
50:56 Nilay Patel? There's a lot of people who are like, what you want to do is run Infuse on Apple TV. And I think that's, that's a shame.
51:01 David Pierce? Interesting.
51:01 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we're not getting Infuse.
51:03 David Pierce? Do we want to get into the car business is my big question here.
51:06 Nilay Patel? No, cause we, to be a successful carmaker, you gotta, you gotta make a shoe. You gotta make a midsize crossover and I, that's just not for us.
51:12 David Pierce? Okay. But again, we, we would take all the infrastructure required to do it. So we'd, we'd be up and running making Kia Fortes tomorrow.
51:19 Alex Cranz? We're not buying Kia.
51:20 David Pierce? We're not, we're, we're just taking the Forte.
51:24 Alex Cranz? I was like, I don't want any part of the Kia Hyundai business. They keep that.
51:28 David Pierce? Neel, you don't want the Mustang Mach-E? This is your moment. Take the Mach-E, man.
51:32 Nilay Patel? It's a shoe. I'm just telling you, I'm just not, I'm not making a midsize crossover.
51:35 David Pierce? All right.
51:36 Nilay Patel? No, thank you. Like if you're gonna let me be like crazy about it, you know, let's get nuts. But I don't, that business is too, too wackadoo. I, I talked to a lot of car CEOs. They're all insane. Like, that's what will tear us apart.
51:50 David Pierce? Okay.
51:51 Alex Cranz? Wait, I thought of it.
51:52 Nilay Patel? Okay.
51:53 Alex Cranz? Samsung's barely alive digital camera business.
51:57 David Pierce? Oh, I like getting into the camera business.
51:59 Nilay Patel? Oh, and then we can actually make them smartphones, right?
52:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:02 Nilay Patel? We actually take you do the thing where you make the smartphone mirrorless camera.
52:05 Alex Cranz? Exactly.
52:07 Nilay Patel? Interesting.
52:07 Alex Cranz? Does Samsung still make cameras?
52:08 David Pierce? Do we want Samsung's, though, or do we want, like Fuji's X100 business?
52:13 Nilay Patel? Yeah, and then the solution is you just make them.
52:16 David Pierce? Right, make more of them. Let people buy them who would like them.
52:19 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:20 Nilay Patel? I like that. I like taking a camera. That's actually a great idea.
52:23 Alex Cranz? Yeah, and then we fix the software so that it like doesn't take you 12 hours just to change a setting?
52:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Sony cameras, but with menus that humans beings can navigate.
52:34 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:34 Nilay Patel? But I do think Fuji is like a good, in terms of wildcard gadget for our brand especially.
52:39 Alex Cranz? And then we do like a limited release of the iPhone and the Fuji and they have like the same look to them. We'd sell a lot of money.
52:46 David Pierce? That's pretty good. All right, so we're taking Fuji's X100. All right.
52:50 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
52:51 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
52:51 David Pierce? I like it. And then last category, the one I just added a minute ago. I had another non gadget wildcard, but I think that's boring. So what we're gonna do instead is we're gonna buy a startup.
53:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I know my answer right away.
53:03 David Pierce? Really?
53:04 Alex Cranz? I really hope it's the same one.
53:06 Nilay Patel? It's Rivian.
53:06 David Pierce? Oh, so you want to get into the car business?
53:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was, uh, cuz they don't make a shoe.
53:14 David Pierce? They also famously lose all the money in the world.
53:17 Nilay Patel? Sure, but 55%. I can fix it.
53:19 David Pierce? If you want a Rivian, you have to buy an iPhone. Rivians are now in-app purchases on iPhones.
53:26 Nilay Patel? 55%.
53:28 Alex Cranz? What about like, we could get SSI. We could have like just the AI guy.
53:32 Nilay Patel? Just one guy.
53:33 Alex Cranz? We're all ready.
53:34 Nilay Patel? I mean, in that case, is OpenAI still a startup? Because that would be another.
53:38 David Pierce? I was just about to say, I think OpenAI counts.
53:40 Nilay Patel? But you want something, you want like a startup, you want like an earthy.
53:43 David Pierce? So my vote, if we're buying an AI company, I want to buy Anthropic.
53:47 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:47 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
53:48 David Pierce? Which is, I would say, less valued, but also way less problematic.
53:53 Alex Cranz? And they're actually making products, right?
53:55 David Pierce? Their product is moving along fast. They're like kind of right in the mix with Google and OpenAI. I don't know that I want to deal with the like Sam Altman of it all, if I'm being honest.
54:05 Nilay Patel? And a CEO is notoriously difficult here.
54:08 David Pierce? Exactly. So if we're going AI, and that was one of my instincts, my vote would be Anthropic. I also think like a company like Notion would be an interesting one for us to buy, potentially a lot of money there.
54:19 Nilay Patel? Is Notion a startup? They've been around for a long time. This gets us into like, what is a startup zone?
54:24 David Pierce? Yeah, like is Stripe still a startup? They're doing pretty well.
54:27 Alex Cranz? I like the idea of Anthropic, though. Like, that is firmly a startup.
54:31 David Pierce? Yeah, Anthropic counts, I think.
54:33 Alex Cranz? Like Rivian has factories. Is that a startup when it has factories?
54:37 Nilay Patel? Fair.
54:39 David Pierce? It is just a pretty much a car company.
54:41 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
54:42 David Pierce? But Neelai, the problem is if we buy Rivian, they're gonna, we have six years to convince you to make a shoe. We will convince you to make a shoe.
54:48 Nilay Patel? Look, the R3X is very close to a shoe, but it's a cool shoe. That's all I got for you.
54:55 David Pierce? So, okay, the other Anthropic question is, do we want to be in the AI game? Like, are we?
54:59 Nilay Patel? No.
54:59 David Pierce? We don't need a move.
55:01 Alex Cranz? Not really, because then we have to deal with copyright stuff. Neelai's got a lot of blogs he's gonna have to write already, like apology blogs. I don't, we don't need more.
55:09 David Pierce? Yeah, Neelai is definitely the one testifying in Congress, right? We're all, we're all on the same page about that.
55:14 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
55:15 David Pierce? I have, I have several other options for you. Can I throw some options at you?
55:17 Alex Cranz? I love an option.
55:18 David Pierce? We could buy DJI, another company that might need some saving in America, that does some interesting stuff.
55:23 Nilay Patel? But not a startup. So you, this is not just companies we could buy.
55:27 David Pierce? Is it not a startup?
55:28 Nilay Patel? Super not a startup.
55:29 David Pierce? Yeah, you're probably right. Okay, fine. That doesn't count. There's the like canvases and figmas of the world that also are kind of iffy on whether they're startups, but like if we're in the creator world with Creative Cloud, we fold that in. The FTC won't allow it.
55:42 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
55:43 David Pierce? These aren't the rules.
55:44 Nilay Patel? Canva is 10 years old and has a $26 billion value. Like, it's just like not a startup.
55:50 Nilay Patel? Like, you want to go, you, you need some installer shit. Like, what's some like weird two-person app?
55:56 David Pierce? Oh, interesting.
55:56 Alex Cranz? Let's get Carrot.
55:57 David Pierce? Does Discord count?
55:59 Nilay Patel? No.
55:59 Alex Cranz? Yep.
55:59 Nilay Patel? Not a startup. Like, if Rivian isn't a startup, none of these other things are startups that you're mentioning.
56:04 David Pierce? Okay. Fair enough. I think Anthropic is the best idea I have.
56:08 Nilay Patel? Yeah, Anthropic is good.
56:09 David Pierce? I think I'm buying Anthropic.
56:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
56:10 David Pierce? It's like, we're gonna like run them off to the side, though. There, we're gonna sort of Instagram Anthropic, where it's like, you do your thing, and if you become really successful, we'll ruin it for you eventually.
56:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
56:20 David Pierce? But until then, like, you're kind of, this is like your, your problem. And like, if you get in trouble, that's your problem and not ours. We're gonna call them like the moonshot factory or whatever.
56:30 Alex Cranz? Well, I think just having them collab on making Siri not suck would be like huge.
56:35 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
56:35 David Pierce? Oh, yeah, because we do need Siri to not suck. That's pretty important.
56:38 Alex Cranz? Big, big change for us.
56:40 David Pierce? Okay, all right. Anthropic it is. Welcome to the team, Anthropic people.
56:45 Alex Cranz? How do you feel about party speakers, Anthropic? How can you make AI accelerated?
56:50 Nilay Patel? Make these LEDs blink smarter than ever.
56:53 David Pierce? We have a lot of audio solutions that are ready for you. Okay, I feel like we've done this. Can I, can I recap for you?
56:59 Alex Cranz? Yes.
57:00 David Pierce? At Vergecast Incorporated, here are the things that we make now. We have the iPhone business. We have the Kindle business and all that that entails. Lenovo PCs are now Vergecast PCs. Meta's whole wearables thing, the Quest and the Ray-Ban smart glasses, that's us now. Sony's audio solutions, headphones, party speakers, the whole jam, that's ours now.
57:22 Nilay Patel? Yes.
57:22 David Pierce? Adobe Creative Cloud is our big software app platform play. LG Display is now ours. We are, we are just fabbing it up for everybody. If you want a TV, hit up the Vergecast. I love this.
57:34 Alex Cranz? Yes.
57:35 David Pierce? Right. We are taking over all of Google's messaging shenanigans and turning them into Gchat, which might be the single hardest thing we signed ourselves up for.
57:42 Nilay Patel? This is what kills us. I want to be clear.
57:44 David Pierce? That's right.
57:44 Nilay Patel? It's like the guitarist and the singer start arguing a little bit and then Oasis breaks up. That's messaging.
57:53 David Pierce? Joe Biden just gave us TikTok. Congrats to us, big day. We now have Fujifilm's X100 business, and Anthropic is now part of Vergecast Incorporated. How do we feel?
58:03 Nilay Patel? This feels good. This feels great. This is the right combo of things. We're doing a little bit of good. We're doing a little bit more evil. We're making some money and then we're gonna fix messages.
58:14 David Pierce? We are incredibly deep into hardware. Like, my only worry is like, should we not have done LG Display and pick something that is more like cloud, software, AIE?
58:23 Alex Cranz? No, no, no. Because if we own the hardware, then they all have to do. We got AI. We got Anthropic.
58:28 David Pierce? Yeah.
58:28 Alex Cranz? We got Anthropic in the iPhone. We have all the power.
58:32 David Pierce? And Anthropic is like, their whole thing is they want to be like a B2B thing. So that's, that could eventually pay dividends for us.
58:39 Alex Cranz? And we have most of Google because we acquired all of Google messaging.
58:42 David Pierce? Yeah.
58:42 Nilay Patel? And we're, we're just printing money on increasing Creative Cloud fees.
58:46 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
58:46 Nilay Patel? Just to be clear.
58:48 Alex Cranz? Right. Microsoft is gonna be paying so much money for their Creative Cloud.
58:51 Nilay Patel? I think there's money to be had. Again, TikTok's business model is they pirate content.
58:57 David Pierce? What are we gonna do at the TikTok shop? What's our first move with the TikTok shop?
59:00 Nilay Patel? Oh, we are 55%.
59:02 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
59:03 Nilay Patel? Straight up. You wanna transact in the TikTok shop? We're taking the fees.
59:07 Alex Cranz? Yeah. We just charge outrageous fees there, except for our own products, in which case we give them, we don't charge a fee at all.
59:13 David Pierce? Oh, yeah. The self-preferencing is going to be out of control on all of these. Like, do you want good Photoshop? You have to use RX 100 camera. Otherwise, you get bad Photoshop. Really, sorry.
59:23 Nilay Patel? This is actually great. It's like, why do these companies act like this? And like, we're pretending we run the company. And we're like, we are gonna be so evil.
59:29 David Pierce? We started out trying to do a good job, and now we're doing this.
59:32 Alex Cranz? We're just the most evil. Lena Kahn just waiting behind us all right now.
59:37 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
59:38 David Pierce? All right. Well, I think we've solved it. I feel like there's, we're easily a trillion-dollar company right off the bat here.
59:42 Alex Cranz? Immediately.
59:43 David Pierce? Our website is gonna be sick, by the way.
59:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
59:45 David Pierce? That's very important to me. We're gonna give all our products cool names, and our website is gonna be so tight with like, a good, understandable URL scheme. These are the things I care about. I'm gonna run the naming of everything. You guys can run the company, but I'm in charge of names.
1:00:00 Alex Cranz? Yeah. The speakers will like, have real names.
1:00:02 David Pierce? Yeah. More letters.
1:00:05 Nilay Patel? Continue to say this. There's only one solution.
1:00:07 David Pierce? But it's, but it's, I think it's right. It's no more numbers. It's just all letters and you have to guess what the letters mean because they're in no order. It's just consonants and you have to guess. That's all of our products from now on. I love it.
1:00:18 Nilay Patel? I'm very excited. And I promise the people, MegaBase is coming back.
1:00:22 David Pierce? Oh, absolutely. MegaBase is coming to many new products. We have new places to put MegaBase.
1:00:26 Nilay Patel? The iPhone is going to have a hardware MegaBase button.
1:00:29 David Pierce? We're going to rattle your head off with the smart glasses with MegaBase. We will give you and solve your migraines all at once.
1:00:36 Nilay Patel? Gchat MegaBase.
1:00:39 Alex Cranz? Every time you type, just a.
1:00:41 David Pierce? All right. Well, it's been an honor. Thank you for joining this company with me.
1:00:45 Alex Cranz? This is wonderful.
1:00:46 Nilay Patel? This is going to be a wild six years.
1:00:48 Alex Cranz? Yeah, we're going to make so much money. Panos, have fun.
1:00:51 Nilay Patel? And then go to jail.
1:00:53 Alex Cranz? No, Panos goes to jail. We're out. We're out.
1:00:56 David Pierce? Lena Khan, you know how to reach us.
1:00:57 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:00:57 David Pierce? All right. Thank you, guys. We'll do this again soon.
1:01:00 Nilay Patel? Thank you.
1:01:02 David Pierce? All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to Eli and Alex for doing this weird thing with me. And thank you, as always, for listening. As you can tell, we have a lot of thoughts on all this, but I want to hear yours, too. We're going to put some links in the show notes to coverage we've done of these companies. But I really want to know what you think. What did we pick wrong? What did we pick right? What would you have picked differently? How would you build your tech company? You can always email us at [email protected] , call the hotline 866-VERGE11. Tell us all your thoughts on Vergecast, Inc. If you have thoughts on anything else, hit up the hotline, send us an email. We love hearing from you. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Eli, Alex, and I will be
1:01:43 David Pierce? back on Friday to talk about all of the upcoming news. There's a lot of gadgets about to come, plus some more weirdness in the AI world, and lots more. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.
1:02:05 Speaker 07 New and exclusive holiday decor just launched online at The Home Depot. Check out the viral Grand Duchess Collection with smart holiday lights you can control from your phone. Easily customize the twinkle across trees, wreaths, and garlands to match your holiday vibe. Create stunning light effects, then switch it up with the tap of your fingers. Even the man in red will be impressed. Shop the holiday decor you want, online only, at homedepot.com.
1:02:35 Speaker 08 Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing and wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash apple watch series 12.
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