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- [00:01]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Support for today's show comes from Attio, the AI CRM for modern teams. Some companies pick a CRM because they have to. Others pick one because it helps them win. That's Atio. Every signal, from emails and meetings to product usage sinks into a live picture of every account. From day one, Attio's revenue agents instantly prospect and route leads and draft outreach and follow ups in your voice. Others call it an unfair advantage. You just call it, call it your next move. You can go to atio.com vergecast and you'll get 15% off your first year. That's a T T I O.com vergecast
- [00:46]
Guest or Interviewee
Are you thinking about divorce? Or maybe you're already in the thick of it and have no idea where to start. This week on Net Worth and Chill, I'm sitting down with Michelle Smith, one of the nation's most sought after divorce financial specialists who helps high net worth women navigate the emotional and financial realities of small splitting up. Michelle breaks down everything you need to know. What assets are on the table, what mistakes to avoid, and what you should be doing right now to come out on top. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on YouTube.com YourRichBFF
- [01:19]
Nilay Patel
hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Podcast network. If you just ignore all the other corporate shenanigans, that remains true.
- [01:28]
David Pierce
Yep.
- [01:28]
Nilay Patel
And here we are. I'm your friend, David Pearce. Neil Epcell is here. Hey, buddy, what's up? You're home for once. After a month of extremely fancy hotel rooms, you're back in, you know, your lowly old house.
- [01:39]
David Pierce
Yeah, I'm back in my attic next to my daughter's room. At any moment you can hear her singing Taylor Swift. It's gonna. That's what our summer has been.
- [01:47]
Nilay Patel
What does she think about the MSG wedding?
- [01:49]
David Pierce
She, she's more excited about her ipod. So I showed her pictures of the wedding and she's like, great, Good for Taylor. But she, you know, she's going to camp like 8 year olds do in the summer and she wanted to list music on the bus on the way to camp. And some of her friends on the bus have like little Android music players. There's like kid music players. Some people have phones without SIM cards in them. It's that time in the parenting journey for me. It will come for you, David.
- [02:14]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yeah.
- [02:15]
David Pierce
And I was like, I'm not doing any of this. We are delaying phone and phone like objects as long as we can. And so I dug out one of my Old ipods that we actually retrofitted for a YouTube video ages ago with an SSD and a new battery.
- [02:32]
Nilay Patel
Oh, I've been debating doing this for my own purposes.
- [02:35]
David Pierce
Yeah. So, I mean, we had it because we just did this for a video ages ago and I had to remember how to download mp3s. I'm not going to say how or why I did that.
- [02:45]
Nilay Patel
It was completely legal. That's all you need to know.
- [02:48]
David Pierce
I was like, I pay for every streaming service. I, you know. Yeah, I pay for every streaming service. I would like. I would like it on the record, your honor. I pay for every streaming service. I have done my economic duty to the artists of America. And I do it every month at high rates, ever increasing rates. Anyhow, so we gave her an ipod and we put a bunch of music on it. It is the worst selection outside of Taylor Swift, who I will concede as America's finest living songwriter. Shout out Walt Mossberg, who believes this with every fiber of his being.
- [03:21]
Nilay Patel
One of Walt's better takes.
- [03:23]
David Pierce
It is. I agree. I think she's right up there. It's a bunch of Disney direct to streaming musical soundtracks. And I could not be unhappier about this. And so we plugged in the headphones and now it's over there. But you might hear it coming through the wall at any moment. This is very different from being in the south of France.
- [03:39]
Nilay Patel
Is she old enough to have a conversation with me about which of the high school musicals is the best High school musical?
- [03:44]
David Pierce
Oh, we haven't gotten there yet. We are at Zombies and Descendants and oh, my friend, the ill fated crossover musical experience.
- [03:53]
Nilay Patel
Okay, this, this is, this is a big Yikes. This is. I'm in the sweet spot of. We are at Spidey and his amazing friends and we are, we are appearing to be stuck there for some time and this is terrific news in my household. I have no. We are not pushing past this until, until we're ready for like, you know, the Exorcist. We're just gonna stick with Spidey until then. It's gonna be amazing.
- [04:15]
David Pierce
Good luck. Cause once, once it comes for you, it's. It's all over. And you're like, can we just listen to Taylor Swift again? That's, that's actually a thing I say.
- [04:24]
Nilay Patel
It's, I mean, you and you and everybody else, it turns out. If you have thoughts about the wedding, by the way, I want to hear them. I'm very conflicted on. I need to hear Everybody's thoughts. Verscastheburge.com Tell us how you feel. I'm dead serious about this. We have a bunch of stuff we should talk about today. There's a lot of Netflix stuff going on. There's a lot of meta Smart Glasses stuff going on. Brendan remains. Brendan is going on at all times. Some deeply silly Instagram AI shenanigans that we should get into. But let's start with Netflix. I think we've spent a lot of time talking about streaming services on this show and we, we have this thing called the Go90 scale of streaming services. Right. And it is essentially doom streaming services. Right, sorry, the go90 scale of doom streaming services. And the idea is if you are a 90, like the Verizon streaming service go 90, you are dead. If you are a zero, that's the, that's the best, most vibrant, most alive you can possibly be. And we have had Netflix at a zero for a very long time.
- [05:22]
David Pierce
Yeah.
- [05:23]
Nilay Patel
I think there is an argument to be made at this particular moment in time that we need to tick it up on the scale a little bit.
- [05:29]
David Pierce
Oh my.
- [05:29]
Nilay Patel
In part because there's just been a bunch of news this week that suggests that Netflix is slowly losing its mind and starting to flail uncontrollably in a lot of directions. And that is what happens right before things start to get really ugly. Let me just throw a couple at you. So the biggest story of the week in sort of media tech circles was this Bloomberg report about how Netflix has this huge problem where it will have a hit first season of a show and then lose a vast quantity of the audience on the second season. And there are a bunch of examples of this. I think Beef was the one with the strongest drop off. Hugely successful first season, big zeitgeist show, won a lot of awards. The second season, by all accounts, very good. I didn't watch it and neither did anybody else. And. But this is, this is a recurring theme at Netflix, apparently. And they're struggling to figure out what to do about it and how to solve this problem. Everybody has theories about this. People are talking about this all week. Then next to that, there's news that Netflix is a expanding its podcast operations, including deals with folks at the Vox Media podcast network. Shout out to Charlie Harding, friend of the Vergecast, who's Switched On Pop is going to be on Netflix going sometime soon. Yeah, big win for Charlie. We love Charlie. Go. Go listen to and watch Switched On Pop. But they're also doing just straight up what I would call YouTube videos. They made a deal with a bunch of publishers, including our potential soon to be parent company. It's all very confusing. I don't understand any of it. You can do the disclosure if you'd like to.
- [06:49]
David Pierce
I'm going to try. Go ahead.
- [06:52]
Nilay Patel
To basically take in many cases existing videos that were made for other social platforms and just put them on Netflix. And the Emmy nominations were this week. There's been a bunch of new information coming in, earnings and such that suggest that even as Netflix continues to grow, people are spending less time on Netflix. There's just the thing I wrote at the top of this Google Doc is what is Netflix anymore? And I feel like if I am asking this question, maybe we're not at a zero on the go 90 scale of doom streaming services anymore.
- [07:23]
David Pierce
Yeah, I think that's right. Netflix is. The subscription that you definitely had is no longer a given.
- [07:30]
Nilay Patel
I think that's right.
- [07:31]
David Pierce
Right. That's what kept it at zero on the doom scale for so long was if you were going to have one subscription, it was almost certainly Netflix. I think what you are describing is not what is Netflix anymore? It's boy, how fast is Netflix going to turn into YouTube, right?
- [07:50]
Nilay Patel
And is that, is that maybe the goal? Like it, it. It sure looks like that is not just a thing that's accidentally happening, but that might be affirmatively the plan. And, and there are a lot of reasons that's really hard to do.
- [08:02]
David Pierce
It's really. No one has succeeded in doing that. To be clear, no one has ever succeeded in doing that. You know, I did just come back from Cannes. I listened to so many creators at that event talk about advertising and talk about reaching audiences. They all make long YouTube videos and they've integrated the advertising into the videos very directly. They market products. This is, this is the thing. And the two pieces of the creator economy that are booming are Instagram and YouTube. Like, those are the things. Those are the formats that people operate in. And TikTok is actually pretty secondary, like in really interesting ways.
- [08:41]
Nilay Patel
Is that just because there's no money in it? Like, still to this day, no one has figured out how to make any money on TikTok. It's a discovery mechanism for other platforms.
- [08:47]
David Pierce
I mean, that, that's one argument, I think. I mean, there are TikTokers who make
- [08:50]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
a lot of money.
- [08:50]
David Pierce
Like Charlie D' Amelio exists, right? Sure, there are. There are TikTokers who do brand deals on that platform in big ways. But the idea that the audiences are growing or that you can reach new audiences or you can experiment in new formats or you can like light up new channel like TikTok is so interest graph driven and it really does not have any follow graph that the creators sort of flock back to YouTube in real ways. And that means things like backrooms happen as YouTube phenomenons, and then Netflix gets to participate in that later at more expensive economics, whereas YouTube gets to grow the talent that then becomes the Hollywood talent. And I think if you're Netflix, you're kind of looking at this and you're like, okay, the future of this industry is a bunch of creators who control all of the attention and all the cultural capital today. They're nowhere near our platform and the only time we will get a hold of them is later when they have the cachet and the influence and the money to make bigger budget things. And then we have to pay really high rates to get those bigger budget things and then we're going to charge people for that and we'll just be late because those creators are also available for free on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok, and we had better go get a piece of that early. And I think all of this flailing is a response to that. Netflix does not have anything close to what you would call a creator strategy. That's just not the thing that they do. And if you think that's where the action is, if you think creators are where the future of the cultural industries are, you had better do something and you might as well just fire a bunch of stuff at the wall, including paying for YouTube videos. Why not? The question is whether that's worth the ever increasing amount of money that Netflix charges customers to be on its platform at all compared to YouTube, which somewhat famously is free.
- [10:33]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Although YouTube Premium, I would say, even as it goes through its own unbelievably large series of price increases, remains the best deal in streaming. And it's not particularly close.
- [10:45]
David Pierce
Oh yeah, it's the only. That's the true zero now.
- [10:48]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I think, I honestly think that's right. And, and so this is, this is the thing, right. I think, you know, you. You can put a lot of pieces together and figure out how Netflix got here. Right. Like, you go way back to the idea that Netflix's main competitor was sleep. This company has been obsessed with time spent in the service for a really long time, and to some extent I get that. And then they've also made a bunch of other moves that suggest that that is the thing that they're after. They. They said they weren't into sports, and then they got into sports. They said they, they. They weren't doing gaming, and then they got into gaming, and they're increasingly into gaming. And this service is. Is just a place to go to do entertainment, which is fine and good, but like you said, that that puts them in a very different competitive space with a bunch of gigantic platforms with impossible resources that are well established in this space that you just can't compete with. Like the. The billions of dollars that have been spent over the years trying to take down YouTube, even in some small way, have all been wasted. It just hasn't worked. And so for Netflix to say, well, we want to be the shiny entertainment thing made sense to me. Right? That it was like the race was, how do we become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix? And it actually made sense a while back that the thing to aspire to was to be hbo and that if you could be HBO and become the factory of great shows, all the rest of your problems solved themselves. So to me, it's like, I look at this and either if you're Netflix, you don't think you can win that game anymore by making the most best shows, which I think in a lot of ways is demonstrably true at this point. The best shows are not on Netflix.
- [12:20]
David Pierce
Yep.
- [12:21]
Nilay Patel
And also look at it and say, okay, we need to continue to be the biggest thing in the world to support our unbelievable investment in everything. We just have to go eat up minutes in people's day, whatever that looks like. And that just runs you directly into YouTube and TikTok. And I think that is a losing game for Netflix in a big, big way.
- [12:42]
David Pierce
Yeah. I mean, again, the problem for every media business of every kind, not. Not news websites or whatever, like every literal media business, that the thing that makes content, that's your business, you are up against an army of teenagers who will work for free. This, it is the problem. You just have to stare at it and say, most people on their phones, on their home screens have Instagram and YouTube. And the economics of Instagram and YouTube are an army of teenagers who will work for free, and they make infinity content. Okay, like, what are you going to do about that? Something. It has to be something. The two things Netflix has always said about itself that you've described. One, our only competition is sleep, and we have to become HBO before HBO comes up. Have always been in absolute opposition to each other.
- [13:31]
Nilay Patel
Interesting.
- [13:32]
David Pierce
Our only competition is sleep means they have to just have stuff, right? A huge array of stuff that commands your attention and keeps you from playing video games and keeps you from opening TikTok and that means eventually they're going to make video games, which they did. And eventually they're going to have YouTube videos and podcasts, which they do. And they've picked that one. They did not pick. We will have the best quality content.
- [13:53]
Nilay Patel
They just didn't.
- [13:54]
David Pierce
And Netflix has gotten really numeric about it. The New York Times did a profile of Dan Lin, who runs the studio now. Here's the quote. Mr. Lin is a reversion to the norm. He knows what works on the service and how much each movie should cost. And there's little he's willing to budge on, no matter how big a star is.
- [14:10]
Nilay Patel
Wow.
- [14:10]
David Pierce
I mean, the whole profile is like. He's like, I say no. I say no. And I'm like, this is how much you can get and you're going to hold to this budget. And like, he reorganized how their studio works. And it is. It's like quant stuff. You know what I mean? Like, it is financial engineering to make the content. And people like working with him. Cause he's honest, which is a rarity in Hollywood.
- [14:31]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [14:31]
David Pierce
It's the other part of the profile. We'll link it. You can read it. It's really good. But I think that's very different than we charge you a lot of money to show you the best stuff.
- [14:40]
Nilay Patel
Right. And it's a fundamentally different creative proposition too, right? It is. It is like ruthless execution on a series of numbers as opposed to actual creative execution. I mean, Ryan Broderick, our friend over at Garbage Day, wrote it, wrote a good thing about this that is like Netflix, because of that exact approach that you're describing, has become sort of a trailing indicator of what's cool and interesting and not leading any of it. Right. Like, you can look at something on Netflix and see what was trending 18 months ago when they started production on it. And that everything is sort of a copy of a copy of a copy of something that worked on Netflix. And Netflix's movies, frankly, have been like that for some time. It's why, like, Dwayne the Rock Johnson just does that movie over and over and over again on Netflix. But its shows, at least for a long time, didn't feel like that. And they're not all like that. There's still some good stuff on Netflix, but it does, like, if you are going to run your business that way, you are going to run a very particular kind of business. That is not the, like, big swing creative thing that Netflix seemed to want to be for a really long time.
- [15:46]
David Pierce
There's just some part of this where the, you know, there's a big drop off between season one and season two of a Netflix show that runs right into Netflix is best when it. It's buying the content from networks that are good at this.
- [15:59]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [16:00]
David Pierce
It's not like there's a bunch of Hollywood talent that's all locked up at great jobs right now and is totally
- [16:07]
Nilay Patel
against the idea of making more episodes of television.
- [16:10]
David Pierce
Yeah. Like, it, it feels like you could be like, all right, we're gonna set up a studio to do it like NBC did in the 90s, maybe at lower rates. Right. We're not gonna pay every single cast member of Friends a million dollars per episode, but, like, we're going to make 22 minute long sitcoms and make 60 episodes of that in a season and do it again the next year and just market that thing so that you have to watch Netflix. But it seems like they have decided the economics of that don't work and the economics of buying YouTube videos do. And that seems upside down to me for some reason.
- [16:41]
Nilay Patel
Well, the argument for Netflix in this case would be that it is such a good distributor. Right. Like the.
- [16:48]
David Pierce
We've.
- [16:48]
Nilay Patel
I've done a lot of reporting on recommendation algorithms over the years, and one of the things that is sort of seemingly true about Netflix is that it has done a better job than just about anybody else of putting content into a recommendation machine to put the right thing in front of you at the right time. It is very good at that. What it has not had is the raw volume of content to do that with that something like YouTube has. And so maybe for Netflix, what they're saying is like, well, we know what you want to watch. We just don't have it on the service. Let's go get it all on the service and then we can put it in front of you. And I think, like, I can see the spirit of that theory. I just feel like it doesn't hold up. The minute you tell me that I came here to watch, you know, Beef, which I didn't, and instead you're going to show me a bunch of, like, old BuzzFeed YouTube videos, because structurally, to you that's the same thing. Like, I just don't. I don't think that's right.
- [17:40]
David Pierce
That's a company that believes what they do is distribute content, not sell you TV movies.
- [17:45]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [17:45]
David Pierce
And that is a mistake. Okay, Let me put two ideas next to you.
- [17:48]
Nilay Patel
Okay?
- [17:49]
David Pierce
One, YouTube is going to end up incentivizing its creators to make things that look like TV faster than Netflix will Get to having enough stuff that looks like YouTube.
- [18:03]
Nilay Patel
I think that's right. I mean, that's. YouTube is already well down that road. It's. It's making those kinds of shows. It's. It rebuilt the TV app to look like a television streaming service will confidently
- [18:14]
David Pierce
tell you that it's growing faster on TV than any other platform.
- [18:16]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [18:17]
David Pierce
This is the new race. Like, right. Like, before it was, we had to become HBO before they become us. Then it was our only competition asleep. And now I think you and I are saying it very much feels like Netflix is that we have to overtake YouTube before YouTube overtakes us.
- [18:32]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. If you were. If you were to handicap that race, YouTube is well ahead.
- [18:37]
David Pierce
So where would you put Netflix on the go 90 scale of doom streaming services?
- [18:40]
Nilay Patel
I mean, it's. It's like it's in the low single digits. Right? It's like a. It's like a two or a three. Um, but I think it is. It is just meaningful to me that it doesn't. I don't know what Netflix is anymore. Like, I don't know what the value prop of Netflix is in my life anymore. But you. You. You look at all the shows, and some of them are good, and I've seen a bunch of them. None of those are, like, the shows of the year. Right. Like, even looking at the Emmys, it's like, Pluribus was a show a lot of people talked about. Widow's Bay was a huge hit that a lot of people talked about. The Pit is probably the show of the year for the second year running, which is pretty impressive. Uh, it. It just. Netflix is not a thing you sort of have to go to. It's a thing you just sort of have in the background. And, boy, is that just already YouTube.
- [19:25]
David Pierce
Yep. All right, here's my. Here's my second one.
- [19:27]
Nilay Patel
Oh, yeah, Hit me.
- [19:28]
David Pierce
Here's my hottest take.
- [19:29]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [19:31]
David Pierce
Netflix should buy Xbox.
- [19:35]
Nilay Patel
Wow. Is that not where I thought that was going? Okay, make the case.
- [19:37]
David Pierce
Netflix should buy Xbox.
- [19:38]
Nilay Patel
Hit me with it.
- [19:40]
David Pierce
Well, we'll start from the Xbox side of the house. Xbox is a disaster. And I know this because the people running Xbox keep issuing memos saying it's a disaster.
- [19:57]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [19:57]
David Pierce
Right. Asha Sharma just put out the big memo, being like, I got to reset this whole thing. We don't make enough money. I think she said something like, for every dollar we put in Xbox, we lose 68 cents.
- [20:07]
Nilay Patel
Seems bad.
- [20:08]
David Pierce
That is one of the worst businesses I've heard of at massive Scale in this industry.
- [20:12]
Nilay Patel
Oh wait, it was 64 cents. Shit, 64.
- [20:14]
David Pierce
I'm sorry, I'm sorry. That that extra four cents is changes really. And the calculus of Microsoft is really going to. You can buy three more GPUs over the course of one year. That's a bad business. And she is stripping it way down. Yeah, right. You can see that she's spinning off the big studios. She's firing people at all the other studios that she's keeping and she's focusing her energy on like Minecraft and like the big multi service games that kind of print money. And she wants to be at a billion players a day, which is.
- [20:49]
Nilay Patel
Don't we all?
- [20:50]
David Pierce
Which is a huge number.
- [20:51]
Nilay Patel
I think the Vergecast should be one of the platforms that entertains billions of people a day.
- [20:56]
David Pierce
A billion players a day is my favorite Fat Joe song actually. Sorry, that's a good joke anyhow. And you could get there. I know there's a lot. Andrew Robster wrote for us a big piece being like that this number is big. And he's like this whole plan doesn't make any sense. And basically the answer is this number is really big and you can't get there even if you count Candy Crush and all the other sort of big casual games that they have. That's a huge goal that you have to get to. I think the reason that you would say that goal, which is I think impossible for Microsoft to reach with its current economics and commitment to AI over everything else, is that you have to pump a lot of money in the system and do a lot of marketing and you have to compete with sleep. You have to say we're going to win in all of these places over every other kind of entertainment.
- [21:46]
Guest or Interviewee
Right.
- [21:47]
David Pierce
Such that you're going to play a game probably on a phone. Netflix has been desperate to get itself on your phone.
- [21:52]
Nilay Patel
True. Yeah.
- [21:53]
David Pierce
They are desperate to get on your phone. That this is why they've done games. It's why they've revamped their mobile app to be more tiktoky. It's probably why they're doing podcasts and stuff now. Right? This is inherently mobile content than people are watching on their phones. Well why not just by the gaming company and capture a bunch of that additional attention. You would have license then as Netflix to continue the sort of spin out of studios. But you are already really good at knowing what content to license and put in front of a bunch of people as a distributor and recommend the right stuff to the right people at the right time. And then you would body up against the phone platforms, which basically killed Microsoft's ambitions to do game streaming and find ways to turn your phone into an Xbox and say, look, you want Netflix here, You want Netflix and all your other platforms. We need to put games on in the Netflix app in some way that is economically viable for us. And there's a lot of regulators around the world who are going to look more kindly upon Netflix needing to do this than Microsoft.
- [22:53]
Nilay Patel
Yes. Because it is Netflix's actual business.
- [22:56]
David Pierce
Because it's Netflix's actual business. And they're, I think to Microsoft, they're like, yeah, file lawsuits and see what happens. Yeah, Right. But I think Netflix has a much stronger case to say, look, we need to expand the range of entertainment options and these platform policies are keeping us from doing it. And you would. You would just get. Maybe not that. Maybe. Maybe they don't care about the console hardware. You would get the ecosystem of creatives that make games to drive whatever IP that you need to drive, and all the studios and all the things you need to. They are. They're probably the most logical home for Xbox. If you believe the future of entertainment has interactivity and gaming at the center, which I want to say I do not, but many, many, many people do.
- [23:41]
Nilay Patel
Correct. My favorite thing about this is everything you just said makes perfect sense. And I believe with absolute confidence that if that happens, it will go disastrously badly.
- [23:50]
David Pierce
Yes.
- [23:52]
Nilay Patel
Like, you just made such a compelling argument that I suspect is being made in the offices of Netflix at this moment and probably, frankly, at a bunch of other companies like this. Like, if you think David Ellison is not going to try to roll up Xbox into Paramount, Warner, cnn, whatever it's going to be.
- [24:07]
David Pierce
Oh, David Ellison talks a lot about gaming.
- [24:10]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [24:11]
David Pierce
Wait, does that guy love to talk about gaming?
- [24:13]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. For all the reasons you just described. And I think it would just the cultures of those two things could not be further away from one another in a way that I think anyone who has tried to back their way into becoming a gaming company has found it very hard to do so.
- [24:30]
David Pierce
Oh, I think Sony managed to get enormous value from owning Sony Movie Studios. And they put the spider man font on the PS3.
- [24:40]
Nilay Patel
They did.
- [24:41]
David Pierce
That was great.
- [24:42]
Nilay Patel
They did. And Sony, a famously spectacular business that everyone should try and emulate right now. All right, we should switch gears. If you have another idea for who should buy Xbox, I want to hear it, because I think the idea that all of this is happening for Xbox to be sold to somebody. Neil A. I think you were kind of there first, but this is in the ether now and I want to know who you think should buy Xbox. We should take a break and then we're going to come back and I have a bunch of mean things to say about smart glasses. We'll be right back.
- [25:15]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [26:19]
Guest or Interviewee
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- [27:38]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [28:52]
Nilay Patel
All right, we're back, Neelie. Big week for Neelai Patel's Smart Glasses Panopticon. This is the facial recognition nightmare that is coming for us all, continues to come for us all. This is really exciting for you.
- [29:08]
David Pierce
You know, I'm going to. Can I just say this from the beginning? I have been saying for years that the killer app for smart glasses is facial recognition and being able to do faces and names like you're somewhere in the world. It tells you faces, names. And I personally, if I had the ability to remember people's names, I would be the president. I just know this in my heart.
- [29:28]
Nilay Patel
It's the only thing in the way.
- [29:30]
David Pierce
It's just literally me, like, every day being awkward with someone that I've definitely met before and being like, yeah, let me introduce you to someone else real quick. You know, like, I think that has really thwarted my political ambitions.
- [29:42]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [29:42]
David Pierce
I say this because I've been saying it for years, and it has been so removed from actual shipping reality for years that it's been kind of a joke, and now it's not a joke. And every now and again, the clips go viral without the context of the fact that I've been saying it for years to illustrate how bad it would be. And I just want to say, clearly, I think it would be bad. I think it would be bad to create a worldwide facial recognition Panopticon so that I can be the president. Am I going to refuse the opportunity to be the president when presented with such Panopticon? I think is a moral dilemma that each of us will have to choose in our own way. But I know it's bad. And I just want to. I want to say this as clear. I'm going to have to say it every single time.
- [30:24]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [30:24]
David Pierce
Because it is the killer app. And I think there's a reason that we're inching our way towards Panopticon.
- [30:29]
Nilay Patel
Yep. But it's bad. So, as a reminder, this is either last week or the week before, we talked about the fact that Meta was building a facial recognition feature into its smart glasses. Uh, I think it was Wired that. That broke the news that this was a thing that they were building. They hadn't turned. No, no.
- [30:46]
David Pierce
Wired's news was the code was on the glasses.
- [30:49]
Nilay Patel
Right. That the code was on the glasses. Uh, Meta's official response from Andy Stone, who likes to run around yelling at people on threads, was that this is disingenuous.
- [30:59]
David Pierce
We're.
- [31:00]
Nilay Patel
We were never going to turn it on. Which is just a fully insane response to, you wrote the code and put it on the glasses. Like, Yep, that's just a thing that happened. So, anyway, next to that has been this running story, including some really great reporting by our friend Joanna Stern about this, like, budding industry of people who will basically hack and break your Meta glasses so that the light doesn't turn on when you're recording. Meta issued an update this week to make it so that if you tamper with the light, it'll just disable the camera entirely. That's a very good thing. It's a mandatory update. Yay, Meta. Congratulations. And then immediately, immediately after this news breaks, that Meta is working on a new pair of smart glasses that is recording all the time. The idea is basically to capture snapshots every few seconds of audio and pictures and to basically use all of the input in this. Their big idea, apparently, for privacy's sake, is to not send the data itself, but to send metadata, because in history, metadata has never been reverse engineered into data and has never been dangerous. So, but, like, there is just this thing happening where Meta is running around trying to explain and apologize for all of its disastrous security breaches. Andrew Bosworth, the cto, did an interview with Nick Thompson at the Atlantic about a lot of this stuff. They had an interesting conversation in which Boz, I would say, very unsuccessfully, tried to defend why a feature like this is worth doing. They both, like, you agreed it would be awesome. I totally want this. And then Nick was like, but, but how do you. How do you reckon with all of the other stuff? And he used the examples of the. The blind community and veterans who need features like this. And that is both true and just an unbelievably disingenuous way to try and defend A feature like this, like, I. If. If you are going to use accessibility as a reason to like, ham fist a feature into a thing for billions of people. No, but anyway, even as they're running around doing this, they are also just pushing ahead as fast as they possibly can to make this thing more and more privacy damaging and problematic and run at all of the things that people already hate about where these glasses are going. And I sort of feel like in the same way that, what, 13, 14 years ago now, the glass hole phenomenon ended smart glasses for a period of time. Like, I talked to people years after that who were like, we had a project and we killed it after Google Glass because we just couldn't. It was. Google ruined it for everybody. It set this industry way behind. I feel like meta is in the middle of doing that right now. It is. It is going to establish and ruin the idea of smart glasses before anybody else even gets to try.
- [33:47]
David Pierce
I saw a video, you know, Livy Dune, the influencer? She's like a famous influencer. She posted a video and we talked about it in our newsroom. And she's like, people sell my travel itineraries. Like, they. There's a black market for where she's going on planes and then she's accosted when she lands in the airport. And she specifically was like, this is really weird and dangerous for me that I get off the plane and a bunch of weirdos are there to take my picture. And then she specifically was like, and they're all wearing meta glasses.
- [34:17]
Nilay Patel
Oh, wow.
- [34:18]
David Pierce
And it's become. It's becoming that thing. Right? Like, that's the association people are making with it. Like, this is a thing for a particular class of weirdos.
- [34:26]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yeah.
- [34:26]
David Pierce
I have. I have friends who are like world travelers, and they're always like, doing action sports. And, you know, their Instagram feeds are all on their meta glasses as they're like, surfing and going downhill. Like, there's some set of uses that are good and benign.
- [34:39]
Nilay Patel
Sure. Wearing. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you surface. Not a problem. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you, like, walk through cost in stock.
- [34:47]
David Pierce
Influencers is bad.
- [34:48]
Nilay Patel
Probably bad.
- [34:50]
David Pierce
Like, there's just something about that where I was like, this is a very famous influencer. She literally is influential. And she's like, I feel at danger. And then the product she called out was meta glasses. And there's something there that I've just been stuck on. Like, what is that a signal of? I haven't quite figured it out. I can't quite Articulate it. But the, the product is starting to stand in as a, like a symbol of how we treat each other.
- [35:16]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [35:16]
David Pierce
You know what I mean? Like, it means disrespect in some way. This is an enormous problem for Meta, whose entire brand is. We don't respect you. Right. Like, this is, this is the problem. Like, they made the product that most communicates their values, which is, it belongs to us. Sorry, we're going to listen to you. Right?
- [35:38]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [35:38]
David Pierce
And for all of the Instagram is listening to you explanations about how they're actually, you know, like, you're on the same WI FI network as your friend in the same place. So like, they search for travel. Like, you can do it. You can back into the programmatic ad tech explanation for why Instagram is listening to you. And then the glasses are going to watch you all the time. And now you're done.
- [35:54]
Nilay Patel
And everyone you know, and everyone you
- [35:55]
David Pierce
know and you know Baz's explanation of how the faces and names feature would work. It's called name tag. He's like, it would just be people that have actually introduced themselves to you that have opted in and it's hashes and it's all stored locally. And you would say, remember that person? And you're like, this all sounds fine, except that person doesn't consent to be remembered in this way. Right, Right. The person on the other side of the glasses does not consent to me storing a hash of their face and then recalling it later. Like, maybe, maybe they would like it if I did that with my dumb meat sack of a brain, but they would probably have a lot of feelings about my computer doing that.
- [36:37]
Nilay Patel
Yes. Yes.
- [36:38]
David Pierce
Right.
- [36:38]
Nilay Patel
And like, and God, are there going to be ways to break that system? Even in the perfect version of that system? Can I, like, go stand up close to my TV and solve that problem with a video on my television?
- [36:50]
David Pierce
It's unclear. Right. We have not used the thing, but this is their defense of it. It's like, we limit it to, like, a local system. And then he talked about the various laws in various states that are like, make it hard to ship. He's like, illinois, you got this dumb law. And it's like, no, the people in Illinois passed a law saying biometric face recognition is illegal.
- [37:07]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [37:07]
David Pierce
And I think they're pretty happy about that law. Right. Like, I, I, I think on balance there's going to be more of those because people don't want this to happen. They perceive the glasses as an invasion. And Meta's whole brand is invasion of privacy. Like Whether or not they want it to be, that is what the people associate with them.
- [37:25]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [37:26]
David Pierce
All of this, I think, is next to the big dream of everybody wants the AR glasses. Right. Everyone is trying to build their way to AR glasses in some way. And if you're going to have AR glasses, you need a camera that is always on, looking at the world next to you, sending that visual information to something, to some computer somewhere, processing it, and then putting data over something, whether it's real light and the lenses in front of you in clear lenses, or whether it's a Vision Pro headset and it's screens and you're passing through whatever it is you need to process the visual information from the world around you.
- [38:00]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [38:01]
David Pierce
And there are lots of benign uses for this. I'm in an art museum. I just want to know more about the painting I'm looking at. There are absolutely not benign uses for this, but no one has contended with the fact that at the end of it, you have to record everything all the time, because the technology to do that at scale simply has not existed. And I think this meta attempt to take snapshots and do metadata is. Is the first baby step towards we're going to record everything all the time so we can layer AR information over the world around you.
- [38:30]
Nilay Patel
Yeah. Ironically, one of the most compelling explanations for Instagram is not recording you using the microphone on your phone has been that it's actually just impractical to do that. Like to. To light up the microphone for a billion Instagram users and then store all of that audio in the cloud and process it is so prohibitively expensive that they actually just couldn't do it even if they wanted to, is a very. One of the many compelling reasons that Instagram isn't doing that. There's a bunch of evidence that says that's no longer true. That actually everyone is desperately trying to get all of your data. Meta itself rolled out, this program to its employees saying, we're going to track all your keystrokes, we're going to track how you use your computer so that we can teach our AI models how to use computers. Like, everyone in the AI space will tell you that all they want is more data all the time. They will. They will take all of it they can get, no matter how, like, wacky or weird it is. Let the compute do the work. And so suddenly this goes from being kind of prohibitively difficult from a technology perspective to being kind of a huge upside, and you're going to have to rely on the company that is going to do this, to treat that data well, which is just a big, huge, giant leap. I mean, do you remember Microsoft recall from whatever that was a couple of years ago now that the first run of that was Microsoft saying it's locally stored, it's encrypted, it's completely private to your device. We understand the privacy risks here. This is, this is meant just for you. And then it turned out they were just storing a huge amount of the data in plaintext databases on your computer. So that like, if I, if I leave my computer at a coffee shop, you can just look at everything I've ever done on my computer like this. There are so many attack surfaces here that it, there is just no shot of getting this right at any point in the near or immediate future. And I cannot believe that Meta in particular continues to try to push at this. And this is like the thing I keep trying to sort through in my head is, do we have a fundamental smart glasses problem? Which is just that we're going to keep running into this same thing over and over again. That you can't do smart glasses without the invasive stuff. It's, it's literally, it's a feature, not a bug. And this is just a problem that is going to fall it forever. Or is it just that Meta is the absolute worst possible advocate for this technology at this time and if some other company, like if, if Apple were leading this race instead of Meta, would we feel differently about it? Because by and large, people trust Apple in a way that they don't trust Meta. I can't, I can't peel those two things apart in my head.
- [41:06]
David Pierce
It's definitely both. Meta's brand when it comes to privacy is garbage. And I think Meta's brand in general is garbage. Yes, it's not. Meta is not a beloved company. They're just straightforwardly. And even the way Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the we're tracking all of our employees to train AI was so fundamentally dehumanizing. He said something like, we could go collect this data from all the people in the world, but we think we've hired all the smartest people at Meta. So we're going to collect the data from you because the way you use computers is smarter than everyone else. And it's like
- [41:39]
Nilay Patel
we put the good brains in vats, you know what I mean?
- [41:41]
David Pierce
Like, yeah, it's like we're, we're doing this, like this like diet eugenics. Like it was like just a weird way of talking about the people that you employ. Right. Like, I Have to surveil you because you're smart. It's weird. Yes. There's just like there's some disconnect from humanity at the center of that company that I cannot stop thinking about because they are desperate to own a platform. They are desperate to break away from their dependence on iOS and Android and the App Store. Economic. And Apple being able to turn off tracking and all this stuff that Apple and Meta have fought about for years. Okay, then you're like, well, people trust Apple. Do you know what people think is listening to them to do the ads? Their iPhones.
- [42:23]
Nilay Patel
True. Yeah.
- [42:25]
David Pierce
You can trust Apple all you want and be like, Apple's the privacy company. And then 90% of people are like, my phone's listening to me.
- [42:31]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, very true.
- [42:31]
David Pierce
Instagram is listening to me all the time. And it's like, well, did Apple stop it? They're like, I don't know, it's listening to me all the time. And it kind of just doesn't matter. Like, I think tech companies as a whole do not have some great reputation for actually protecting people from the experiences they're obviously having.
- [42:47]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I think that's right.
- [42:48]
David Pierce
Does every single person believe that Apple slows down their iPhone after two years? Do they have to buy a new one? Like, sure. Like can you trade on that trust in other ways? Maybe. But the reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of a glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You gotta do it. There just isn't another choice. Or you can build something the size of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Like those are, those are the current choices in this world. And it just means like if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy. And maybe you shouldn't. There's an incredible argument for nope, you shouldn't do that. Nope. The trade offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it. I don't know who is positioned to make that argument today. It does not appear to be in our nation's capability to have a fulsome argument about the risks and rewards of technology and then tell anyone to stop it might be in the market. Right. Like these glasses might get pulled off people's faces and smashed. I think we can see the opposition at data centers happening in like local governments around the country. Like something else will happen. But the, the thing people want, AR glasses, augmented reality glasses, where you stare at a painting and it tells you what that. Who painted that painting and what it was. You are at a party and you just know that person's name. I'm telling you, I'd be the president if I had this kitchen. I'm already so charming. I'm just like this one failing. You know, who knows? The social cost of that is too high.
- [44:59]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [45:00]
David Pierce
And I think we're seeing it now. The cost of AI is too high versus the reward and there's big backlash. And I think Meta has no ability to make the case that the reward is worth the social cost of interacting with Meta in this way. They, they do not have an ounce of credibility to say they're going to protect you.
- [45:18]
Nilay Patel
Well, and they have now two decades of evidence to suggest that they'll win in the end, that, that actually all you need to do is wait and people will come around. And I think I have believed that for a long time. Right. And it is the thing that makes me the most nihilistic about tech is this idea that everyone is going to stand in the way and say, I don't want this, it's going to be bad. And then it'll. They'll have a Black Friday sale and everybody gets on board. And like everybody, it is very hard to leave Google in such a way that you can feel however you want about Google and then you end up using Google products and you become sort of Stockholm syndromed into Google. And I think a lot of these companies are set up on the belief that they will win in the end because people will always trade those things and those feelings for other features and convenience. And I think again, for a very, for most of my career, I also believed that that was true. And it, it sort of filled me with sadness when I really sat and thought about it. I don't know that that's true anymore. It feels like something has changed in, in a way that I am still struggling to put my finger on. But like, this data center stuff is such a good example of there has been real, like, boots on the ground societal backlash to technology at a scale I don't think we've ever seen. And, and it feels like it is only growing and not receding. And I think it's, it's why I'm so obsessed with the smart glasses question because I think this is going to be the first big new technology in a very long time that a vast number of people are going to look at and just say no to. Like, we all eventually got smartphones. We just did. We. You feel however you want about that, about what smartphones did to the world. Everybody has a smartphone now. It just, it happened. I don't think we're going there with smart glasses. And I think it. I think it's going to be really different. And I still don't know how it's going to play out, but it feels like it is headed down a different path.
- [47:07]
David Pierce
Yeah. I'll just bring it back to, you know, my daughter's silly ipod. That thing was on a shelf. I pulled it off the shelf, I plugged it into my computer and I put some MP3s on it. I will not say where the MP3s came from, but I put some MP3s on it and then it worked. And it worked exactly the same way today as it did 10 years ago when I first bought this ipod. And the experience. And she's delighted. Right. And I, I own the files. Let's just say I own the files. I own the files and I own the hardware. And it didn't require some like DRM handshake with some cloud service. And I didn't worry that social media was on this thing or that the. One of the reasons I didn't want to buy her like an old ipod touch was like, I don't. I actually don't want a bunch of 8 year olds running around with the camera right now.
- [47:55]
Nilay Patel
Mm.
- [47:56]
David Pierce
I, I just don't. No, thank you. Um, that's just a parenting decision. Other people might feel differently. Um, and I see that just like burbling with some of my peers. You know, as we all raise our kids together, I see it with like, a lot of younger people. Like, they just don't. They're just like looking at it and they're saying no. Like, I just want to be offline in this way. And I think the promise of the next interface paradigm, the next way of using technology has always been this will be superior to the phone. So we gotta get there first. This is Mark Zuckerberg in the Metaverse. You're going to live your life in this helmet because it's more fun than your phone. And like, pretty much just rejected, like straightforwardly. I think the reaction to AI being everywhere and not being very good in most consumer use cases, people are rejecting it politically now. They're like, we don't need any to build this infrastructure. I hate this. Actually, this chatbot on my car dealer's website is not providing me with anything. Turn it off. Like, put all those tokens somewhere else. And I do wonder if the smart glasses, you know, my thesis about the metaglasses has always been people like them because they're a camera on their face. And that's useful.
- [49:02]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [49:03]
David Pierce
And then you're like, now a lot of people have cameras in their face. Now a lot of people are recording you without your consent. And like, you can stop that pretty fast.
- [49:09]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it's, it's that. But that is, that is the feature, not the bug. Right. Like, you can't, you can't have it both ways. You can't have a camera on your face without having a camera on your face.
- [49:20]
David Pierce
It feels like, like a Zen cone. But sure.
- [49:23]
Nilay Patel
Also, I just want to say I own the files is a, is a T shirt. We're going to make sure. I'm excited about that. I own the files.
- [49:29]
David Pierce
I mean, in the sense that I have the files.
- [49:32]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, listen, let's not delve into copyright law here. I do have one more question on this. So there was, there was a bit of gadget news. In addition to all of the, like, big tech companies trying to make smart glasses. There's just a million startups out there trying to make smart glasses happen. Xreal is probably the best known one, but there's a lot of them out there. And there's this company, Solos, that announced a new version of smart glasses called the Ergo A six.
- [49:58]
David Pierce
Oh, boy.
- [49:59]
Nilay Patel
Sure. But one of its, like, key features is that it doesn't have a camera, it has AI stuff, it has prescription support. It does a bunch of the other things that you would expect, like headphone style things. It doesn't have a camera. And part of me wonders, like, is this the next thing that's going to happen is we're going to see if we can do smart glasses minus a camera?
- [50:19]
David Pierce
This just is like. I don't know how to say this. Bone conduction headphones are a really cool technology. They will never be cool. Do you know what I mean?
- [50:30]
Nilay Patel
I mean, sure, but when my bone conduction headphones look like a pair of Ray Ban Wayfarers, I don't even ensure
- [50:35]
David Pierce
these are bone conduction. The point I'm making is like, everyone's just trying to shove the assistant into a form factor.
- [50:42]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [50:43]
David Pierce
Do you know what I mean? Like, what if I could get a microphone and speakers onto your Face.
- [50:48]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Sure.
- [50:49]
David Pierce
It looks like glasses. Yeah, I'm just. There was a time when that was a bone conduction, like headband. We covered a lot of these in a gadget in like the 2000s.
- [50:56]
Nilay Patel
They had a real moment.
- [50:57]
David Pierce
They had a real moment and it's like, yeah, you're just. They're just AirPods. Like, you just made AirPods that look like glasses. But the utility of the assistance is not high enough yet to support any of this.
- [51:10]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I agree with that. Yeah, I think.
- [51:13]
David Pierce
I'm sorry. For the people who work at Solos, you did a good job.
- [51:16]
Nilay Patel
Their glasses are very light, which I think is very important. So kudos to them for that. All right, we should take one more break and then it's time for some lightning round stuff. We'll be right back.
- [51:27]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
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- [53:48]
Nilay Patel
1, 2, 3. I'm stand up comedian John Marco Cerese.
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Sponsor/Ad Reader
And I'm actor penis model Russell Daniels.
- [53:55]
Nilay Patel
The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are because, let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode, we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guests lives, the
- [54:08]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
world, but in a fun way.
- [54:10]
Nilay Patel
Bottom line is you're gonna walk away feeling better about your life. We've had so many cool guests. Caleb Huron.
- [54:16]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Busy Phillips.
- [54:17]
Nilay Patel
Stavros Halkias.
- [54:19]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Laverne Cox.
- [54:20]
Nilay Patel
Hassan Piker.
- [54:21]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Alana Glaser.
- [54:23]
Nilay Patel
I promise you're going to have a good time. Now on the Vox Media podcast network.
- [54:27]
David Pierce
This is the downside.
- [54:34]
Nilay Patel
All right, we're back. No hype desk this week, so we are straight into America's favorite podcast within podcasts. I think the. The. The My brother, My brother and me stands are still in my email about which is the best one. But I'm. I'm claiming victory because you can just say thanks. It's 2026. Brandon Carr is a dummy. It's time.
- [55:06]
Guest or Interviewee
How.
- [55:12]
David Pierce
All right. A little bit of a seizure at the end there. I thought there was going to be a drop. I want to be honest, I thought that was building to a drop. It was really good. I appreciate it.
- [55:22]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
This is good.
- [55:22]
Nilay Patel
We're doing a collaborative enterprise here. We're sampling and we're building here. That was by Ryan Muller. Thank you, Ryan. I love the dance remix. Somebody else take it and make the drop. That's what's coming next.
- [55:34]
David Pierce
That's what I mean. That was a great build. And I think we were all anticipating a pretty intense drop. And then I think Ryan fell down on the sampler.
- [55:42]
Nilay Patel
Listen, we all only have so much time in the day, including Brendan took
- [55:46]
David Pierce
his, like, last shot of the night, and I was like, I'm out.
- [55:48]
Nilay Patel
I've done it.
- [55:51]
David Pierce
Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate you.
- [55:52]
Nilay Patel
There we go. What did Brendan do this week?
- [55:54]
David Pierce
We have evidence this week that Brendan's various traitorous machinations against the First Amendment are starting to bear their poisonous fru. David, that's for you.
- [56:04]
Nilay Patel
Okay. Starting to for the first time.
- [56:09]
David Pierce
Yeah. In, like, real ways. So as you know, Brendan has been fulminating against our nation's broadcasters about the way in which they use our spectrum, which is nonsense because people are not watching broadcast television. They're watching the apps on their phone, as we have discussed at length already in this episode. But Brendan has power over broadcast spectrum, so he is issued content regulations against broadcasters like ABC and CBS and Fox and local radio stations. And if you recall from previous episodes, in a big one that he has been focused on is what's called the equal time rule, where if you have a candidate for a public office on the public airwaves, you are supposed to have the opposing candidate and offer them equal time. Unless you are a bonafide news program, in which case you have new judgment, you can be off. So the only program that has ever really had to deal with this is Saturday Night Live, which has no argument that it is a news program. We all agree on this. And Saturday Night Live would have Kamala Harris on and then NBC would give time to Donald Trump, which is a real thing that happened in the last election cycle.
- [57:07]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, they had Trump at like a NASCAR race or something.
- [57:09]
David Pierce
The next day they gave him ad space at a NASCAR race.
- [57:12]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [57:12]
David Pierce
The flashpoint of this has been ABC's the View, which has long operated under a bonafide news exception. It was actually started by Barbara Walters, who is a news anchor.
- [57:20]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [57:21]
David Pierce
And they wanted to have some candidates on the FCC and car fulminated against them. We all got in some trouble. There's now a review of whether or not the View is a bona fide news program. You recall, I think last week or the week before we. ABC is running ads to have people file comments with the FCC to be like, don't screw with the View. Okay, that's all happening. And ABC actually filed its response this week, which we will get into. In the meantime, Brendan has had the effect he wanted. Semaphore did an analysis and. And the View has not had any candidates for any competitive races on the air since all this happened. He has showed the speech of a
- [57:58]
Nilay Patel
news program, which is precisely the goal.
- [58:00]
David Pierce
That was the goal. So here's the quote from Semaphore. FCC Chairman Brian Carr announced in February the agency was investigating whether or not the View violated the equal time rule. Since then, the ABC talk show hasn't featured a single political candidate running a competitive midterm race. According to the Semaphore analysis earlier this year, a representative for New York mayors are on. Mandani pitched the View on hosting the mayor and Democratic socialist candidates he supported for Congress. According to a person familiar with the conversations, the View said it was interested in having the mayor on, but couldn't accommodate the candidates because the staff was proceeding cautiously with political candidate bookings while the FCC equal time inquiry was progressing. So the investigation itself has chilled the speech of the program.
- [58:40]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [58:41]
David Pierce
And they will not have candidates for office on the air, even if those candidates are interesting, even if people would like to see them, because they don't know if they will be punished for their political speech, even though that speech is for years now been considered to be news programming. Right.
- [58:55]
Nilay Patel
But this is. This is job done by Brendan Carr. This is job done. This is his move. He's not going to win this fight, but he can win this fight without actually having the fight.
- [59:02]
David Pierce
Yeah. And this is the specific phrase in First Amendment law is the chilling effect.
- [59:06]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yeah.
- [59:07]
David Pierce
You haven't actually made the rule that's legal. You haven't actually violated the First Amendment. You haven't said, I will put you in jail if you say these things. You have just made the people stop doing it because they're afraid of a consequence that may or may not be real. And that means they have preemptively stopped saying the things they would have otherwise said. And all over First Amendment law, the specter of the chilling effect is raised. You can't do this because you will have the chilling effect. And that is as bad as actually banning the speech itself. Court after court, administration after administration, Republican, conservative, progressive, liberal, you name it, the chilling effect is the problem. And so Brendan has accomplished an ice cold chilling effect, at least on the View, if not the rest of the media ecosystem that operates in the broadcast airways. So we'll see what happens. ABC did file its response to this inquiry this week. I can just quote you from it. It's pretty fiery for Disney, which had previously been pretty bendy when it comes to the Trump administration. But ABC says the First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in an editor's chair. Yet that is the seat the commission now proposes to deciding which broadcast programs qualify as legitimate news. And for those it finds wanting, compelling them to surrender their airtime to guests they never chose to feature, they go on to say an exemption that protects editorial independence only when the speaker's politics please those in power, protects nothing at all. The shelter it gives one program today, it will deny another tomorrow when the gavel changes hands, as it inevitably will for abc. Disney. That is pretty fiery stuff. Yeah, I'm glad they've found some spine here to fight back. I think they realize the public is on their side. And I will just remind everybody listening to this, Brendan is not chasing broadcast regulation because he really believes in broadcast regulation. All of this is a trial balloon to find ways to censor and control speech on Internet platforms, which everyone in the world is aware is actually what people consume. Even the View. People mostly watch the view on YouTube.
- [61:12]
Nilay Patel
I was just going to say one way to accomplish that goal is by silencing the View.
- [61:15]
David Pierce
Right.
- [61:15]
Nilay Patel
Like that's there. There are a lot of people who watch Jimmy Kimmel and who watch the View and who watch Stephen Colbert on these other platforms. And if you can just chop them down one at a time, you can get a long way to accomplishing your goal without ever actually having to get out over your skis on it.
- [61:31]
David Pierce
Yeah, and eventually he will go to Google and he will go to TikTok and he will go to Meta and say, hey, all those defense contracts you want, all those big rich government contracts you want. Well, actually, we think that you are using the public Internet or the public airwaves or your services run on mobile broadband, which run on the public airwaves and we don't think they're in the public interest. You had better change your algorithms. I'm telling you. I keep saying it every week. You can see the chilling effect in action right now in real time on abc. And you can see that that will just empower Brendan and the rest of the administration to go after Internet platforms using whatever laws and powers they can magic up out of fairy dust and bad interpretations of existing statutes, if not pass an executive order just claiming the authority which the Trump administration loves to do. And in fact, which is in Project 2025, the chapter about telecom and speech regulation was written by Brendan Carr. He's not a smart man. We, we know what he's doing. This is, none of this is subtle. Yeah, it's. He's a. He is a dumb rock of a man who is doing all the things he said he would do in absolutely ham fisted ways that make it easy for a company like ABC to write fiery responses to. Because there's only but one right answer. In any case, Brandon, if you want to come on the show and try to justify any of these actions or talk about the nature of the chilling effect when the FCC is punishing broadcasters for their speech, I would welcome that conversation. The show on Decoder Mano e mono live streamed on Kick, we can do it. You say, you tell me the time and place, it'll happen.
- [63:09]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [63:09]
David Pierce
Anyhow, that's been Brennan Carr's dummy, America's favorite podcast and podcast Brendan Car Is a dummy. Boots and pats and boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants and boots and pants.
- [63:24]
Nilay Patel
I really like the idea that we are going to build like an epic trance remix one track at a time here. I'm very excited about this.
- [63:30]
David Pierce
It's very good.
- [63:31]
Nilay Patel
All right, I have a Ramageddon update for you. I don't know if you're aware of this. Everything is more expensive now and it just keeps getting worse. And I feel ridiculous like continuing to be annoyed by this, but I'm continuing to be annoyed by this, but in particular, there were two bits of really interesting data this week that are directly Ramageddon related that I just, I just want to talk to you about. So the first is idc, a big research firm that does a lot of like analysis of, of market shares and stuff like that. Put out a chart this week that said that after nine straight quarters of growth, worldwide PC shipments dropped by 4.9% year over year, two uninterrupted years of growth. And I will say the growth actually sort of kicks back to like kind of right after Covid. Like there was this minute at the beginning of the pandemic where everybody bought a computer. Everybody, everyone bought a new computer. And then it dropped a little because everybody had a new computer. And then it has been, it has been rising pretty steadily for several years now since then. And it is now dropping like a stone because computers are too expensive and people can't buy them. They are, they are harder to find than ever. Everybody's raising prices. Apple just raised prices like it's, it's ugly out there and there's an increasing sense that it's going to keep getting worse. But the other one that I want to talk to you about is there's this chart from this company Omdia, which I know nothing about, but it's fine. It put out a chart showing the share of the total bill of materials for products that is taken up by memory. Right? So and this is like how much of the total cost of building a gadget comes from buying the memory. And basically that number has at least doubled in the last couple of years. That before if you were buying a premium device above $800, in this case the memory accounted for 11% of the cost of that device. So you're buying a thousand dollar device. It's a $100 worth of memory that is now 26% of the of the price. That is what the memory costs. It's even worse in lower end phones. We've talked about on the show that the real danger immediately for a lot of these Ramageddon things is that cheap devices just go away. It becomes completely untenable to sell somebody a $200 phone in a world where the memory in that phone costs. In this case it would be $120. Like it's. The number is for the mid low range, 200 to 400. The memory alone makes up 59% of the cost of the bill of materials, up from 32%.
- [66:06]
David Pierce
That's crazy.
- [66:07]
Nilay Patel
Like the numbers are just insane and everywhere you look it's like the costs just are what they are and either you can stomach it or you can't. Nobody, nobody has deals, nobody has access to anything. There's just a bunch of chips out there and it is like full anarchy to get there first. And everybody who can pay for it is paying outrageous quantities of money for it and, and everybody else just gets screwed. And like the, the increasing sense that I get from people is like this is going to get worse and it's going to last a while. And it is just, it's scary times out there, man. And now there's this big run on like you're Starting to see YouTubers make content about how to buy used gadgets.
- [66:44]
David Pierce
Yep.
- [66:45]
Nilay Patel
I don't know if you've noticed this, but this is like how to make your stuff last longer and how to buy used stuff and, and find the best refurbished open box deals is like a real rising type of content for exactly this reason. Everybody's just priced out of everything now. And so it's like, well, okay, maybe I'll go buy a three year old MacBook because it's literally the only thing I can afford. How do I go get it again?
- [67:08]
David Pierce
My prediction is the repairability push of the past several years is going to bear real fruit now.
- [67:14]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, I absolutely think you're right.
- [67:16]
David Pierce
We're almost a little bit lucky that there was that push. Yeah, there was actually like the ftc, the Trump FTC won a right to repair victory over John Deere this week. Like, I think consumers understand that being able to fix things is important to them, especially as costs go up and things last less long. So we'll see. Like, I, I'm hopeful there's one outcome here, it's that a generation or two becomes fixated on the notion that you should be able to fix things and make them last a long time because they were so expensive to begin with. Yeah, we should get like a, one of the refurb companies like the back markets of the world. We should talk to them. Like, I'm very curious if their business is booming the way that you would think it would be booming.
- [68:01]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, it's a good question. We should. We'll. We'll reach out to them. We'll get them on the show back. Market, if you're listening, and I know that you are, get at us.
- [68:08]
David Pierce
Trust me, they're already. The email's already been sent. That's how it goes.
- [68:12]
Nilay Patel
Indeed. All right, what's your next lighting round item?
- [68:15]
David Pierce
Okay, I'm gonna. I'm gonna do one heavy one, and then I'm ending on our fun one.
- [68:18]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [68:20]
David Pierce
It's heavy in the sense that the subject is heavy, but I think it is one of the greatest sort of Verge stories, like, vergiest Verge stories we've done in a while, and it's about the push to regulate ghost guns. So there is a law in New York. There's an upcoming law in California. There's a bunch of other laws around the country that would make it harder to print gun parts on your 3D printer, which sounds great. And actually, a flashpoint for all this regulation is Luigi Mangioni, who printed some of the parts of the guns he used to allegedly murder the CEO of United Healthcare. He's in trial, so it's allegedly. I understand people have a lot of feelings whenever we say this. We do not support murder on the show. Another thing I feel like I have to say all the time, but this was a flashpoint in this regulatory conversation, and in particular, in New York, where I live, Governor Kathy Hochul is all about regulating ghost guns, because I think it feels like a thing politicians can do.
- [69:14]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [69:14]
David Pierce
Right. If you want to run at the Second Amendment with regular guns, you're gonna. You're gonna hit a wall. But the kids shouldn't be able to print guns at home. Yeah, that feels like a winner.
- [69:23]
Nilay Patel
You know, it's an awkward pro take to have. Do you know what I mean? Like, to be. To be the one who's, like, really psyched about ghost guns is just kind of a weird hill to die.
- [69:30]
David Pierce
Yeah. It just feels like this thing. Like your kids shouldn't be able to come home from school and print a gun. I passed a law stopping it. Who can. Who dares argue with me? Not the gun manufacturers, because they'd like to sell you the guns they made in their factories. Like, there's some weird political calculus here where this is an acceptable thing to say in the laws of pass. Okay, here's the problem. If you want to stop someone from printing A gun part. You have to identify the fact that they are trying to print a gun part.
- [69:58]
Nilay Patel
Oh. Which means you have to know what they are printing.
- [70:01]
David Pierce
Where are you going to do that? At what point in the download a file or draw a picture on your computer, send it over USB to a 3D printer, have the printer run around and do where? Where in that chain do you insert the regulatory mechanism that the law demands? No one knows the answer to this question. The laws do not say where. Right. They just have a mandate for blocking technology.
- [70:26]
Nilay Patel
They're just like, don't do that.
- [70:27]
David Pierce
Don't do it.
- [70:28]
Nilay Patel
Make it.
- [70:29]
David Pierce
You printer manufacturers, you make it so you can't print guns. And the model is that printer manufacturers have made it so you can't print money.
- [70:39]
Nilay Patel
Right.
- [70:39]
David Pierce
If you try to scan a dollar bill into Photoshop and then print the dollar bill, like a bunch of things will stop you. Right. But the difference is that dollar bills are known. Right. And like, the societal cost of fake money is like, right. Like everyone's like, okay, we get it. Like, you can I. You can flatly identify currency. It looks one way. And we all understand why Adobe Photoshop should not be able to accept scans of currency and print it.
- [71:06]
Nilay Patel
Sure.
- [71:07]
David Pierce
Because that will ruin everything for everyone. Yeah, sure. If you would like to destabilize the United States economic regime, we prefer you do it with Bitcoin, not fake dollars. You know, like, that's kind of where we've landed as a society. Okay, well, there's not just one gun, so you can't just identify one gun the way you can identify $1. Our ability to destabilize society with guns has already happened at scale. That ship has sailed. And it's the parts, it's not the finished product. So if you want to print a thing that looks like a pistol handle, well, now you got to block all the things that might look like a pistol handle, regardless of what it might be used for in the future. So this story is just excellently written about how hard it is how the open source 3D printing community is railing against it, even if the people themselves support gun regulation because they understand, like, this is a type of surveillance that can lead to all kinds of other outcomes and block all kinds of other legal things that you might want to print. Or in the worst case, allow the government to ban even more things because they will have built a system to identify what it is you're printing and then tell the manufacturers to stop it.
- [72:15]
Nilay Patel
It's making me think about how, like, AccuWeather has successfully lobbied so that no one, the government is not allowed to do weather forecasts. And TurboTax makes it really hard for you to file your taxes without using Turbo that like you, you'd have an awful lot of companies trying to make it very hard for people to 3D print one thing or another. And like this, this slope gets really slippery from ghost guns, which I think are, like you said, a pretty universal. We all basically agree that ghost guns are bad, but boy, does the same principle run into things people do not agree on in the same way. Very quickly.
- [72:52]
David Pierce
Right. Do you want car makers to be able to say you can't 3D print replacement parts for your car?
- [72:55]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
Yeah.
- [72:56]
David Pierce
And they can. Will they concoct nonsense safety reasons for those things?
- [72:59]
Nilay Patel
100%. Yeah.
- [73:01]
David Pierce
So anyway, this story is. You can go read the comments. By the way, some people do not agree with you about ghost guns in any way, shape or form. David. They're in the comments of our story. But I just. Everyone should go read the story. It is one of the vergiest Verge stories in such a long time because it's one of those stories about politicians and I think a lot of regular people seeing a problem. The kids can print guns and then assuming that there's a technological solution that does not carry trade offs and the community is way ahead of everyone on what those trade offs are and what they could be and why they're unacceptable. At the same time, it's like, you probably shouldn't be able to print a gun at home. I know. You read it, you tell, you tell us. It's, it's. This is what I mean. It's, it's a story that. It's just going to make you uncomfortable regardless of where you ultimately land on the issue.
- [73:49]
Nilay Patel
Yep.
- [73:51]
David Pierce
It's, it's the best Verge stories make you slightly uncomfortable.
- [73:54]
Nilay Patel
Do you have a 3D printer?
- [73:56]
David Pierce
I do not. I feel like I should get one now.
- [73:58]
Nilay Patel
I feel the exact same way. Like, I don't, I don't know what I would use one for. But then I see everybody, like, there is no genre of vertical video that I enjoy more than people solving teeny, tiny, low stakes problems with 3D printers. Yeah, it's everybody who's just like, I didn't have a stand for this thing, so I printed one. I'm always like, hell yeah, let's go. You did this. And then Belkin is going to lobby those things out of existence. This is the future.
- [74:22]
David Pierce
We're headed towards Ergon. We're, you know, we were home on the farm I did the episodes from my wife's farm. And her dad not only just has a huge shop where he repairs the tractor on the farm, but then there's a what can only be described as a crafting shed with one of those gigantic tables in the middle to just do projects on. And I walked in there and I was like, I'm going to get one of these tables. I'm going to buy a 3D printer. And then I had no further thoughts, like, what will I do with the giant craft table and the 3D printer? I was just like, a goal I have in my life is to have a crafting shed with a huge table and a 3D printer.
- [74:56]
Nilay Patel
And then you will have it. You will say, I've done it. And you will close the door and never go in that room again.
- [75:00]
David Pierce
Ambition over. But it was just one of those moments where I was like, oh, this is where I'm meant to accomplish this in some way.
- [75:06]
Nilay Patel
Yeah.
- [75:07]
David Pierce
And I think it's 3D printing small parts to solve pet peeves. All right, what do you got?
- [75:12]
Nilay Patel
I got this for you. All right. I have just a series of very funny posts from Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X.
- [75:20]
David Pierce
Who Nikita Beer, by the way, fully
- [75:22]
Nilay Patel
going through it, fully going through it and posting through it, as the head of product at X absolutely should, but just is just over and over, sort of saying the quiet part loud about how disastrous a platform X is. So the first one of these was a little while ago. Evidently X ran an experiment with 3% of users and discovered that removing the top 30, I'm quoting, directly removing the top 30 highest paid revenue share accounts from the for you timeline, increased both time spent and daily active users on X. So this is to say the people we pay to post on our platform, if we took them out, everyone liked our platform. More like wild thing to admit out loud, yet also incredibly obviously correct. If you've ever spent any time on X in the last like three, three years, if you get rid of all the posts that I see, I will like X more, Correct? Absolutely, yes. Could not agree more. And then there was another one this week. X is in its ambition to be the everything app appears to be pushing really hard on video right now that they, they really want to be a vertical video platform in this for the all the same reasons everybody wants to be a vertical video platform, right? Like it, it just wants to be that thing. It's where the ads are, it's where the views are. Whatever. He put out a post in response to a bunch of people saying, oh, God, X is just turning into TikTok because everything is turning into TikTok. And he goes, no, it's not. And then basically goes on to say, yes, it precisely is. So he says. He says posts containing videos already make up close to half the impressions on X, which is a, fascinating. And B, a a decision that they made. Right.
- [77:01]
David Pierce
Like, it's important to remember incentivized a type of content.
- [77:04]
Nilay Patel
Correct. And also boosted it in the algorithm. Like, there's a reason you see Elon Musk every time you log into X and it's not because the algorithm thinks you'd like it, it's because X decided to do that to you. It's very important that you remember this. But then this. This is the one that's my favorite. He says many videos from top accounts are simply stolen from other users, sometimes five years after they originally went viral. The next bullet says, our team believes this recycled content has a negative impact on the user experience and the business. You think all the. All the people we pay to post on on X are bad and everyone likes it when they're gone, all the videos are old and stolen. Welcome to X. And he turns this into a pitch for we're. We're shipping an editor to end recorder into X so that you can make original content. And then he says at the end, if you're a creator that does not recycle other people's content, you have the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career to build an audience here. What an unbelievably optimistic end to saying all of the stuff on our platform is trash and it would be better if it was all gone.
- [78:04]
David Pierce
That's just.
- [78:05]
Nilay Patel
There's no other takeaway from all this stuff that X is learning, except we have to just get rid of everyone here and start over and then maybe it'll be great.
- [78:13]
David Pierce
The reason I say Nikita Beer is going through it, he's the head of product at X, right? And he is just learning the lessons. Every other head of product at every other social network knew ten years ago. Ten years ago, everyone knew. Oh, people are going to game our algorithm with garbage. Oh, if you just let this run wild, the people who game the algorithm best will rise to the top and people will hate it and they'll leave. It's a slop factory. No matter if you have AI or not, everyone knows it. Everyone has always known it. And Elon thought he was so much smarter than everyone else that he fired all the people who understood how to run the platform. And then he was like, just make the algorithm do whatever thing I'm calling free speech today. And now here we are and all the people who are sell on X are just getting their brains cooked left and right. And Pornikita beer is like, yeah, but our users are going away. Our money is going away. I have to fix it. I'll juice video views for original content, which is the last refuge of the scoundrel when it comes to social media. Right. Like I will lie about your video views to get you to post here more. That is some 2016 Facebook shit.
- [79:24]
Guest or Interviewee
Yeah.
- [79:25]
Nilay Patel
And it works super well for five minutes and then you, you get, you get some new thing you're interested in and it all falls apart.
- [79:32]
David Pierce
Well, because at the end of the day, the reason that you've gotten all the people to post videos is so you can put pre roll ads around it and people hate those and the advertisers don't want to be around it on X because of the thing that
- [79:43]
Nilay Patel
X is all the, all the five year old stolen videos that you're posting. Yeah, it's rough out there.
- [79:51]
David Pierce
It's rough. I feel, I. I do feel sort of bad for him because he really. It's just very obvious that he's going through it.
- [79:58]
Nilay Patel
Yes.
- [79:59]
David Pierce
Uh, but I also don't feel bad at all. Cause it's very obvious exactly what that job is.
- [80:03]
Nilay Patel
Yep. And it was the, the minute he took it. He did post on June 30th. Today marks one year at X. I'm proud to report three all time highs. User engagement, my cortisol levels, my biological age. That's a good tweet.
- [80:14]
David Pierce
That's a good tweet.
- [80:15]
Nilay Patel
May learn how to do a good tweet.
- [80:16]
David Pierce
That's a great tweet.
- [80:17]
Nilay Patel
Kudos to Nikita.
- [80:19]
David Pierce
That's very good.
- [80:20]
Nilay Patel
All right, you get one more. What's your last one?
- [80:21]
David Pierce
All right. I've got like a. It's like a happy one and a mystery.
- [80:25]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [80:25]
David Pierce
It's all wrapped up in one.
- [80:27]
Nilay Patel
I love it. We should have more mysteries on the Vergecast.
- [80:29]
David Pierce
This is a good mystery.
- [80:30]
Nilay Patel
Okay.
- [80:31]
David Pierce
Okay. So every time we talk about smart TVs on the show, people are like, I wish I could just buy a dumb tv. And historically the answer is you can't. Because the reason TVs are so cheap is they are subsidized by all of the surveillance that is built on TVs. David continues to buy Roku TVs for some mysterious reason. And the reason they cost $10 is because Roku is Tracking his every move and foisting advertising around him.
- [80:54]
Nilay Patel
The TV on the other side of my computer right now is unplugged, and I'm 100% sure it's listening.
- [80:58]
David Pierce
It's still watching.
- [80:59]
Nilay Patel
It's just what it is. Yeah, it's just playing ads.
- [81:01]
David Pierce
And the TV market has gotten all the way down to the end of that road, such that you can literally get a free TV with a permanent advertising screen bolted to the bottom of it. Yep.
- [81:11]
Nilay Patel
And I don't know why.
- [81:12]
David Pierce
And I don't know why. So that those are the economics of the TV market. The reason they're cheap is because they're counting the revenue from the advertising to subside suppressing panel. Essentially, this is why you can't buy a dun tv. And if you want one, you end up buying like a $5,000 digital signage display, which are often the same panels, but then they don't look as good. Whatever. Anyhow, John Eggins, our TV reviewer, this week reviewed the new Vizio Mini LED Quantum, which is a very cheap quantum tv. He says it looks pretty good. And he discovered that as you set it up, you can just turn it all off.
- [81:47]
Nilay Patel
Whoa.
- [81:48]
David Pierce
You can just make it a dumb tv. So as you're going through the setup, you can just say, I don't want this to turn it off. You can disconnect the os, basically. You can add it, obviously an external streaming device, but the HDMI ports stay active, and all of the smarts are literally disabled. You can keep the OS from even being active at all.
- [82:09]
Nilay Patel
You just nope your way through the whole setup process.
- [82:11]
David Pierce
You just nope your way through the whole setup process. And the OS is not active. So it asks you to. Visio is owned by Walmart. It asks you if you want to have a Walmart account, and you just say no. And it warns you you will not be able to manage payments and subscriptions. It's like, great, oh, no, I don't care at all. And then when you decline another warning, it literally pops up a box that says, whoops. Declining this step means missing out on all of your smart TV features. And you just hit okay, and that's it. Then the OS is disabled, and you've got a dumb TV with enabled HDMI ports.
- [82:44]
Guest or Interviewee
And.
- [82:44]
David Pierce
And that's it. And you can obviously keep it off of WI fi, which a lot of people do anyway, and then you've got it. So here's the mystery. Did Vizio do this on purpose? There's. There's some set of people that are like, Vizio has gotten in trouble for tracking before. And they might have, they might have done this on purpose. So John is digging into the mystery of the, of the $400 Visio Dumb TV. But right at this second, you can go buy a $400 Visio mini LED Quantum TV and have it be a totally dumb panel.
- [83:15]
Nilay Patel
So the, like, Occam's razor explanation here is just that no one in the development process thought to test the flow of what if I just say no to everything? And so they accidentally shipped a thing. You can just say no to everything.
- [83:29]
David Pierce
And you can say no to everything on most TVs. Like, when you start up my Sony A95L, you can put it in like BASIC mode, sure. But like Android is still there, right? This is off like dumb panel with HDMI inputs.
- [83:42]
Nilay Patel
Huh?
- [83:43]
David Pierce
At least that's what it looks like. So did they do that on purpose because of legal issues? Did they just forget? Were they so cheap that they're like, yeah, just don't turn on the os?
- [83:55]
Nilay Patel
Yeah, they're like, we're just happy you're in Walmart. You know what I mean?
- [83:57]
David Pierce
He's digging into it.
- [83:58]
Nilay Patel
Interesting.
- [83:58]
David Pierce
He's digging into it. But that's why it's like a great story, because everyone wants a cheap dumb panel. And now you, at least for the time being, you can go to Walmart, you can buy a $400 mini LED Quantum TV, which is like reasonably good deal. It's not like an oled, but like, it's pretty good. And it's dumb tv. It's the thing you want.
- [84:15]
Nilay Patel
Wow.
- [84:16]
David Pierce
That and it, you know, in an age where everything is getting more expensive, kind of cheap. And then we will solve the mystery of whether or not Vizio knows what they did.
- [84:26]
Nilay Patel
Huh.
- [84:27]
David Pierce
I mean, they do now because the headlines on the site. So we'll see if we ruined it for everyone.
- [84:30]
Nilay Patel
I mean, they even John even got a quote from a senior product manager, Mike Wood at Vizio, who said, essentially he said, obviously we believe there's a lot of benefits to using the Vizio OS and our smart features, but the choice is up to the user.
- [84:42]
David Pierce
Yeah, but it's like, do they say that? And then they realize that, like, we pointed out that you could turn it off.
- [84:47]
Nilay Patel
Right? And then. And then they're going to issue a software update that just turns off the last. Nope. And then. And then that's it. That is fast.
- [84:53]
David Pierce
Anyway, he's following up on it to see. See what the case is. But today, 400 dumb panel, imagine a
- [84:59]
Nilay Patel
world in which you had to actually make your product worth using in order for people to use it.
- [85:03]
Guest or Interviewee
It.
- [85:04]
Nilay Patel
What a world that would be.
- [85:05]
David Pierce
I think everyone is very addicted to how cheap advertising supported things are.
- [85:08]
Nilay Patel
I know, it's very true. I think all the way back to the Netflix conversation. I think you can put that right underneath everything Netflix and every other streaming service is doing right now. You can do an awful lot of stuff if you can just do ads.
- [85:20]
David Pierce
Yep. You can make as many seasons of Love island for Peacock as you want.
- [85:23]
Nilay Patel
David. Thank goodness.
- [85:25]
David Pierce
All right.
- [85:26]
Nilay Patel
We should get out of here. It's nice to. It's nice to see you. It's nice to see you at home again.
- [85:30]
David Pierce
It's good to be home. I'm never leaving again.
- [85:32]
Nilay Patel
I really, really, really feel that. Who's on decoder next week?
- [85:36]
David Pierce
Decoder next week is really good. It's Jinju Wu who runs automotive at Nvidia. And we spent a lot of time just being like, what's up with cars? How do you make them drive themselves? I made him evaluate Tesla full self driving and whether or not they need LiDAR. You'll not be surprised to hear that Nvidia thinks AI is the solution to.
- [85:55]
Nilay Patel
What's Nvidia's take on CarPlay?
- [85:58]
David Pierce
I think this might be the only episode where we didn't talk about CarPlay.
- [86:01]
Nilay Patel
Neil, you've got.
- [86:04]
David Pierce
Just didn't. Come on. I mean, I know what he would have said. He's like, Nvidia believes in open systems and consumers can do whatever they want as long as they're running our chips.
- [86:12]
Sponsor/Ad Reader
There.
- [86:12]
David Pierce
That's the whole episode. We did that for one hour.
- [86:14]
Nilay Patel
That's pretty good.
- [86:15]
David Pierce
No, it's really good. I'll give you a little preview. They are literally running models in the car. Like reasoning models to drive the cars. So the models are constantly talking to themselves. Like, the car is like, there's a double parked car. I should go left. Like it's happening. Furiously talking it out. I think it's great. It's great.
- [86:34]
Nilay Patel
Wild and terrifying. It's very good measure. I like that. Also, if you haven't yet, the episode you did with Peter Kafka about Comcast and NBCU and like the. The whole state of media distribution. Also very interesting and kind of right next to all the stuff we were talking about about Netflix. That's a good episode.
- [86:51]
David Pierce
That one has the long disclosure about what's going on in their current company. So go listen to that one. It's like so long.
- [86:57]
Nilay Patel
Three minutes long. It'll get shorter in a few weeks. I don't know exactly what it'll be, but we'll figure it out. Version History this weekend is Philips Hue. A late ad to this season of Version History, but one of the most interesting smart home products and actually like maybe the most successful smart home thing we have yet had. Hue Lights. Super interesting. Fun story. Gen 2 is on it. She actually interviewed the guy who invented the Hue lights and comes with lots of fun stories. It's a great episode, it's a good time. And if you want to get all
- [87:30]
David Pierce
of those name Hugh.
- [87:32]
Nilay Patel
No, Hugh. Hugh is h u g h. His name is Phillips.
- [87:36]
David Pierce
Hugh.
- [87:39]
Nilay Patel
That'd be amazing. If that's your name, get at us. I have lots of questions.
- [87:42]
David Pierce
Or if your name is Hugh Phillips.
- [87:43]
Nilay Patel
Hugh Phillips also acceptable. We'd love to hear from you. Like I'm out on Alexas. I'm in on Hugh Phillips. If you want to get all of our podcasts ad free, including all of the ones that we've just mentioned, the best thing you can always do is subscribe to the Verge. That's how you make Nilay ungovernable. That's how you make it so that he can afford to never leave his house ever again. This is the goal.
- [88:04]
David Pierce
I truly hate being told what to do.
- [88:05]
Nilay Patel
How do we get more wood slats for Nili so that he doesn't have to leave anymore?
- [88:09]
David Pierce
Subscribe now. I travel with wood slats.
- [88:12]
Nilay Patel
The Verge.com subscribe you get all our newsletters, you get the all our podcast ad free. Lots of other stuff. And also we want to hear from you about everything. Taylor Swift's MSG wedding, your favorite shows on Netflix, all of your the videos that you hate to see on X, your feelings about the View, all of it. Send it all to us. Vergecastheburge.com is the email. 866-version-1 is the hotline. Send us everything. I think somebody can someone text this number. Actually text whatever you want to 866-verge-11
- [88:42]
David Pierce
and tell me whatever you want.
- [88:43]
Nilay Patel
Well, don't text whatever you want. Instead of calling us with a hotline question, text us with a hotline question.
- [88:48]
David Pierce
There you go.
- [88:48]
Nilay Patel
I think this works, but I need some more testing than just me to see if this works. So text the hotline. Say what up? I look forward to hearing from you. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast network. The show is produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Kieffer, Travis Tharchuk and Aaron Locasio. We will see you next week. Neali.