Of course Meta thinks gambling is the future

Summary

The Vergecast – “Of course Meta thinks gambling is the future”

Date: June 26, 2026
Hosts: Nilay Patel (in Cannes, France) and David Pierce

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the state of Big Tech – especially Meta – at the Cannes Lions advertising festival, offering a blend of on-the-ground insights and broader analysis about the platforms dominating the creator and advertising economy. Nilay and David also unpack their own company’s corporate restructuring, discuss the ramifications of the “RAMageddon” chip shortage on gadgets, evaluate trends in the automotive and gadget industries, and, as always, indulge in political tech intrigue with the “Brendan Carr is a dummy” lightning segment.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

1. Cannes Lions Ad Festival: Tech, Creators & Surveillance

[02:16–10:33]

• Vibe Update from Cannes:
  Nilay describes a Cannes taken over by American tech and advertising execs seeking out “hot people” (creators) while quietly discussing ever-more-sophisticated surveillance for advertising. The creative side of the festival feels increasingly absent, replaced by panels about platforms, data, and targeting.

  “The undercurrent of all this is just like, companies you’ve never heard of talking about their ability to target you, the consumer, and Meta and TikTok and OpenAI, all talking about how they will know so much about you that they will generate custom ads for you individually.” – Nilay [05:21]

• Culture & Wealth:
  The festival’s vibe is summarized as “dystopia, but do it on the beach” ([06:07]), with money and self-importance drowning any self-awareness.

  “This amount of money cannot be self-aware, do you know what I mean?... You put this much money on the beach and it loses intelligence as fast as it can.” – Nilay [07:58]

• Reality Check:
  Creators and their agents at Cannes are frank: everyone is here to “move product.” Authenticity is not the point; getting creators to channel brand messaging is.

2. Corporate Restructuring: Vox, PMX, and Day-to-Day Impact

[10:33–15:12]

• The News:
  The Verge is part of a holding company shakeup: Vox and Penske Media’s publishing assets (which include Billboard, Variety, The Hollywood Reporter, etc.) join forces as “PMX.”

• Key Takeaways:

  • For the newsroom, everyday life remains unchanged (same bosses, same mission).
  • There’s optimism for investment and smaller, focused teams.
  • Editorial independence is expected to be preserved.

  “Just give me the money and leave us alone. That’s been a good pitch for 15 years.” – Nilay [14:49]

3. Meta’s Double Life: Chaos at Home, Confidence at Cannes

[15:12–23:43]

• Stateside vs. Festival Reality:

  • US Perspective: News of executive churn at Meta (WhatsApp CEO exit), surveillance scandals (keystroke tracking for AI training), morale issues, and a public sense of flailing, especially after AI reorganization woes.
  • Cannes Perspective: Meta is the unbeatable advertising and creator platform—“the load bearing pillar of the Internet economy” ([18:52]), with unrivaled tools for creators and marketers.

  “Instagram and Meta are the load bearing pillars of the Internet economy... everyone depends on it and needs it.” – Nilay [18:52]

• Meta’s Money Machine:
  Even as creators must hustle for deals (Meta pays little), the platform’s scale ensures continuous revenue, regardless of drama.

• Zuckerberg’s Discontent:
  Despite Meta’s dominance, Zuck is “not cool” and craves platform control—envying Google’s ownership of Android and the web.

  “That man wants a platform of his own... and he is content tearing his company to shreds in like, ferocious ambition to get to a platform of his own. But…the fact that he’s not cool and no one trusts him is always going to stand in his way.” – Nilay [22:15]

4. Meta & Gambling: Is Betting the Next Engagement Mechanic?

[27:02–30:37]

• Polymarket Clone:
  Meta is trialing an in-house betting/prediction market (“polymarket clone” under codename Arena). The vision: transition from credits to real money for engagement.

  “Meta doesn’t have ideas. Famously, Evan Spiegel is the head of product at Meta…he’s very good at launching fast follows. He’s very bad at launching new ideas…” – Nilay [27:09]

• Why Gambling?
  Zuck senses that social engagement mechanics constantly evolve—and betting dovetails naturally into existing platform habits (think sports, group chats, etc.)

  “Do I love that everything is becoming gambling? I think that’s pretty bad.” – Nilay [29:30]

5. Gadget & Chip Industry: Ramageddon & Product Pricing

[32:05–41:49]

• The “Ramageddon” Shortage:

  • Microsoft, Apple, Valve/Steam: All raising prices or cutting RAM as chip shortages drive costs way up.
  • Examples: Apple hiked prices on nearly every product (Mac Studio with M3 Ultra up $1,300! [34:51]), Microsoft launches Surface devices with lower baseline RAM, the Steam Machine is much pricier than originally planned due to memory costs ([34:19])

  “If you need a gadget, buy it now. It’s only going to get worse. And here we go.” – David [35:05]

• Shifts in Consumer Tech:

  • Fewer cheap gadgets and phones—manufacturers simply can’t make money at the low end.

  • This may ironically lengthen the lifespan of devices, as consumers demand more repairability/durability at higher prices.

    “People are just going to hold on to things longer and they’re going to demand that they last a lot longer as they get more expensive.” – Nilay [38:34]

6. Automotive Tech: Slate Truck & Dumb vs. Smart Cars

[44:24–51:55]

• Slate Truck:

  • New $24,950 electric truck is “the first affordable product in a while.”

  • Customization is its selling point, but will buyers still want that given supply chain uncertainties?

  • Nilay is optimistic about consumer desire for a simpler, modular vehicle, especially compared to tech-bloated luxury cars.

    “Would the market prefer a cheaper, more planar car for a reasonable amount of money that you can just tweak at will, without running into some DRM Mercedes MBUX nonsense?” – Nilay [49:43]

• CarTech Creep:

  • Rant on overcomplicated interiors in new EVs (e.g., “the interior is basically a Korean nightclub” for Mercedes’ new electric C Class [48:30])

  • Hope is for a return to “dumber,” less intrusive “smart TVs” and gadgets, but skepticism abounds:

    “It will always be more lucrative to track you until you die.” – Nilay [51:55]

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• On Corporate Absurdity:

  “Spotify announced a partnership with Coach, the handbag company. And the heart of the partnership…is a shared understanding of how Gen Z approaches identity and self expression. And then like that was a panel that was like a full room of people believing this.” – Nilay [07:58]

• On Meta’s Power & AI:

  “To come to an advertising festival and look at an ocean of executives… and say, we’re going to put most of you out of a job is wild. And everyone’s like, amazing, weird.” – Nilay [21:36]

• On Tech Coolness:

  “Google also prints money…and Google’s like, it’s so nerdy. We love ourselves. And, like, they just don’t care.” – Nilay [22:15]

• On the Gadget Market:

  “This thing is both fairly priced and way too expensive. And it’s like, buddies, welcome to the future of gadgets.” – David [38:27]

• On Gambling Creep:

  “Do I love that everything is becoming gambling? I think that’s pretty bad.” – Nilay [29:30]

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• [02:16] Nilay’s Cannes report: The real festival vibe, creator economy, and ad execs
• [10:33] The Vox/Penske merger and what it means for The Verge
• [15:12] Meta’s world: news, morale problems, and platform dominance
• [27:02] Meta’s polymarket clone: why betting is coming to your platform
• [32:05] Gadget talk: Ramageddon, Apple’s price hikes, and industry trends
• [44:24] The $25k Slate Truck: Customization, features, and “feature bloat” in cars
• [54:05] “Brendan Carr is a Dummy” segment: political tech intrigue & FCC moves
• [62:24] Lightning Round: AI movies, media/antitrust fights, and more
• [66:48] Review: Kaleidoscape Strato E streaming server vs. Blu-rays
• [71:19] Bob Iger’s “exit interview” – Disney, Apple, and big media inside baseball
• [75:41] Media industry v. Google AI: People Inc. blocks crawlers, antitrust fights loom

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Episode Tone & Language

The hosts are candid, irreverent but thoughtful, often inserting in-jokes about the industry’s quirks (“dystopia, but do it on the beach”), and are never afraid to pull back the curtain on both their own industry and the technology giants they cover. This episode brims with skepticism about “creator economy” platitudes and deep unease at the direction of Big Tech—even as the hosts clearly enjoy the spectacle (and, at times, the parties).

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For More

• Nilay’s Decoder Interview next week: 4th of July “Grill Episode” with the CEO of Blackstone (now owner of Weber)
• Subscribe to The Verge: Full ad-free podcast access, exclusive newsletters, and more

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Missed Cannes? Don’t worry – after this episode, you’ll feel like you were on the sand, phone in hand, swiping through sponsored posts and betting on the next engagement mechanic. Just watch out for the hot people and the AI bots lurking in the waves.

Transcript

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[Nilai Patel]

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[David Pierce]

minutes and all of a sudden you've

[Nilai Patel]

forgotten where you parked. Car. Car. Unfortunately, that lost feeling is what it's like trying to manage your policy with other insurers here.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[Nilai Patel]

Come out, come out, wherever you are, please. With Geico, you can use the app

[David Pierce]

to easily manage all your policies in one place.

[Nilai Patel]

Did this parking lot have a waterfall? I think you've wandered too far, mate. It feels good to find what you're looking for. It feels good to Geico. I did everything I could to not go to Mumford and Sons and I ended up at fucking Mumford and Sons.

[David Pierce]

Oh, boy. I hate doing cold opens for podcasts, but can we please just do that? Hello and welcome to the vergecast, the flagship podcast of pmx, a thing I suppose we have to talk about today. I'm your friend, David Pearce, joining me from an increasingly fancy place. Neelai Patel.

[Nilai Patel]

Hey, buddy, what's up? How's it going?

[David Pierce]

Every time I see you, you seem to have moved up like one tax bracket in terms of where you're staying in the world. Where are you right now? What's going on?

[Nilai Patel]

I'm in Cannes, in the south of France.

[David Pierce]

Oh, you've moved up several tax brackets.

[Nilai Patel]

I'm in what can only be described as an apartment at the Carlton Hotel. It is very lovely here. It is very hot. There's a heat wave all throughout Europe and all throughout France. And I didn't know this, but apparently there's been a culture war in France over air conditioning for, like, years and years and years. Like, it is like a left, right, partisan issue.

[David Pierce]

Oh, wow.

[Nilai Patel]

And that has just come to an end with this heat wave, as far as I can tell, because everyone from New York is at Cannes to talk about advertising, and all the big tech platforms are here. It's basically America. I'm. I'm just in America. But everyone's drinking smaller, more potent cups of coffee. And then the air conditioning everywhere is just cranked to the max.

[David Pierce]

It's wild for everyone listening to this and not watching. I want you to imagine Nilai in linen pants, oversized sunglasses, and a shirt that is unbuttoned just like, one button further than you would think Nilai would have a shirt on button.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh, I went too, buddy. Don't worry.

[David Pierce]

It's okay.

[Nilai Patel]

We're letting it fly.

[David Pierce]

Just one button at the bottom, hanging on for dear life. That's all we got here.

[Nilai Patel]

The other thing to know is that we're on wildly different clocks. So David sounds tired because I believe it's 8:30 in the morning for you.

[David Pierce]

It is in fact, 8:30 in the morning.

[Nilai Patel]

I sound tired because I was out until 2 in the morning. Just all the tech companies are here throwing just the most elaborate parties. So the first night, Tuesday night, your choice was, did he want to see Ray the artist Ray, or did he want to see Ludacris? And then there was like, I saw Janelle Monae give a concert at a mansion for 100 people. Like, it's just like, all this is crazy.

[David Pierce]

Wait, Ray versus Ludacris is like the most perfect generational split of who would go to which party.

[Nilai Patel]

I went to Ray. Oh, I saw Ludacris do his corporate gig for AWS at CW at ces, and I was like, I've had this experience. Like, I have seen a bunch of excited polo shirts. You know, I don't need to do it. So I went and saw Ray, and then last night, it was Tiesto and Montfort and Sons, and I stood in line for Tiesto, and it was really long. I was even in, like, the good line, the priority line that everyone. I could go to Tiesto and I went to. I saw DJ D. Nice at the TikTok party. Amazing. Shout out to Patreon, my friends at Patreon, for getting me into that one. And then I left and I got a text and it was like, we're at Mumford. And Sons. And I was like, oh, crap. And I went to Mumford and Sons.

[David Pierce]

I'm proud of you.

[Nilai Patel]

It really happened. All this is happening within, like, feet of each other.

[David Pierce]

This is, like. This reminds me of the experience of, like, when you're. You're. You're too old to do any of this stuff, but you, like, go to a bachelor party, and so you're like, all right, for 48 hours, I'm gonna be 23 again.

[Nilai Patel]

Like, the weird thing is, like, the amount of money in Cannes, like, this is an advertising festival, Theoretically, it is an advertising awards festival where. Where they award the most creative advertising made around the world. All year, that is gone. I didn't see one piece of creative this whole week.

[David Pierce]

Interesting.

[Nilai Patel]

I saw tech companies talking about platforms and data and scale and targeting. I saw. Everyone is just like, how do we hide the amount of surveillance we're doing? Creators. And so then there's just, like, a group of hot people at every party who are the creators. And we all have to talk about the creator economy. Like, it's not built on massive surveillance apparatus, but, like, the undercurrent of all this is just like, companies you've never heard of talking about their ability to target you, the consumer, and Meta and TikTok and OpenAI, all talking about how they will know so much about you that they will generate custom ads for you individually. And then somewhere next to that is, creators are great. And it's like, oh, you just. You just need these people. Like, you just need some hot people to distract you from the thing you're actually doing.

[David Pierce]

Like, dystopia. But do it on the beach is basically the vibe. But with hot people, you can get

[Nilai Patel]

away with a lot. If you put hot people on a beach, that's.

[David Pierce]

That is. I mean, history has proven that over and over for centuries. Wait, before we. We shouldn't spend too much time on Ken. Although I do think it's going to make your week, is going to make a bunch of the other stuff we have to talk about here. Very interesting, but I do really want to know. So Matt Bellany, who works at Puck and has a great podcast called the Town that I really like, he's been on the show, front of the broadcast, wrote a thing in his what I'm Hearing newsletter, just ruthlessly making fun of Cannes. And this, like, kind of traveled all over the place. I'll just read you a snippet of it. He says, I shouldn't have to say this, but to everyone asking if I'll be at Cannes this year, Cannes is the festival to Cannes, a prestigious global film event where talented creative people display and sell their work and look glamorous doing so. Cannes Lions is not. It's a tacky business conference for selling, advertising and announcing brand partnerships populated mostly by paunchy middle managers and YouTubers. The the only response to this that I saw was Rich Greenfield, the analyst, standing with Evan Spiegel, the CEO of Snap, basically saying, look at, look at us, the, the paunchy middle managers. But I wondered like, are, are people at can feeling sad about which can that they are? Has this caused a culture war?

[Nilai Patel]

There is no self awareness here. What are you talking about? Everyone is sweating their faces off. The amount of just like what's be nude because it's so hot is like off the charts. I've had so many conversations about what is appropriate for people to wear. Men and women. Like you can make friends with anyone here by being like, is it appropriate for men to wear shorts to a business meeting. Because the answer in this environment, this moment in time, has to be yes and no one wants to admit it.

[David Pierce]

Shout out to Dieter Bone, who would not wear shorts at Cannes. He would die first.

[Nilai Patel]

And there's just so much money here. This amount of money cannot be self aware, do you know what I mean? You can put enough GPUs in a data center and be like, I think that might be alive, right? It will gain consciousness. Maybe. You put this much money on the beach and it loses intelligence as fast as it can. Let me just give you one example of the kind of news that's being made here, okay? Spotify, you know, Spotify, they announced a partnership with Coach, the handbag company. And the heart of the partnership, according to the press release, is a shared understanding of how Gen Z approaches identity and self expression. And then like that was a panel that was like a full room of people believing this.

[David Pierce]

Through handbags and Spotify. Through Spotify Handbags, one of the things

[Nilai Patel]

we learned about Gen Z consumers is they don't think about identity in terms of categories. So what they wear, what they listen to, the community is a part of is. Is part of the same personal story. And that's why the partnership between Spotify and Coach feels so natural.

[David Pierce]

David. What?

[Nilai Patel]

I'm just saying, Matt Valentin can say whatever he wants. You can't fight that. You can't body up against that and be like, are you, do you feel bad? Because that is nothing.

[David Pierce]

Someday I aspire to be the kind of person who just goes around to conferences being like people just want to be together. And everybody's like, yeah.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh, no. If you roll up to this conference with a British accent and you're like, advertising is broke. Will be the keynote speaker. Like, it's fine. But I'm just telling you that the thing about where I'm at right now, I had a bunch of great conversations. I did a decoder interview with Amy Lanzi, who's the CEO of Digitas. I think she's actually one of the smartest advertising executives in the game. She's not confused. She's a tech executive. She traffics and data and analytics, and she tries to get the right product on the right shelf at Walmart at the right time. And the creative is somewhere downstream of that, but she knows what her business is. I also interviewed Ali Bearman and Raina Panchansky, who are like, fancy agents for creators like Alex Earl and Jake Shane. And, you know, they're like, we're here to make money. Like, we build businesses for these creators. We find people who have audiences, and we build them businesses. And they talked about money with me the whole time. So there's no confusion here about what everyone's trying to do, right? This is about the creators who are on panels here, call themselves marketers. They know what they're doing. They're here to move product. So the idea that, like, it's. It's that they have some feeling about the film industry. They're like, whatever, man. Everyone's watching Instagram. We're gonna move product.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Actually, this is a useful pivot into some of the news that we should talk about. But. But first, we've been getting a lot of questions about some corporate Verge news. Do you just want to talk this out for a minute? The. The. The. The.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh, sure.

[David Pierce]

This is the second turn in the Vox Media corporate changes. Do you want to just talk through what's happening here?

[Nilai Patel]

Yes. Our company is killing itself. And then one part of the company is being reborn as Vox Media 2.0, and James Murdoch will own that company like the phoenix from the ashes. The other part of the company, part of the company we're in with Iter, that is being rolled up into a holding company called pmx, which is Penske Media plus Fox. That's the name of the company, and it is.

[David Pierce]

It does sound like BMX and dmx.

[Nilai Patel]

The notion here that everyone keeps saying to me is that no one should ever think about that brand. It is a holding company. Penske Media owns Variety, Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter, on and on and on. They own the Golden Globes. They own south by Southwest. It's just a big media holding company. All of those things operate as little independent companies, like they really do. And so Penske Media, all their publishing stuff, not like the Golden Globes, but like the magazines and all the Vox stuff, is coming together in one holding company. It's a joint venture between the stuff at Vox Media and the Penske publishing stuff. And it's going to be run by the president of Vox Media, Ryan Pauly. So there was a lot of coverage of this, and I think the funniest part of it is Penske's own trades covered it. And they did not note that they are the ones getting a new boss, which I think is very funny. Like, we woke up, and it's like the same guy that we've been reporting

[David Pierce]

to for years, who we both started this company with as babies 15 years ago, little children.

[Nilai Patel]

And I stood next to Ryan at the Mumford and Sons concert last night, and we're both like, how did we end up here? So there's a lot of shared history there. I'm, you know, reasonably excited about this. There's a lot of work to be done. The deal isn't closed. We got to figure out some structures. But Penske Media Company has a lot of resources. Those are big, fancy magazines that do great journalism. They. They fight off the lawsuits, which is a thing that I promise you, I have to think about all the time. That never comes to the surface, but it's a capability that we need and that I depend on in my job as editor in chief. And then the opportunity to invest more heavily in the Verge is right there in front of us. And the conversations we're having now are about how to make the Verge feel even smaller, how to be our own little company with our own little product team. Jay has been on our board for a long time. He's the largest shareholder in Vox Media, or what was Vox Media. I go to our board meetings and I say wild things about Federation. That's my role at this company. And he listens intently and is curious about them. So that's a relationship. We're the same age, which is really weird. So that feels like a peer relationship in another weird way. So I'm hopeful there's more to come on this. But today we woke up and we had the same boss we had yesterday, and everyone should just take a breath. I think it's going to be fine.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I think that's right. We got a bunch of as with the last one A bunch of very well meaning people worried that this meant bad things.

[Nilai Patel]

An important thing to say when I say we're the same age. Jay Penske has come up reading the Verge like, he is a reader of our website. He's a fan of tech. Like, he. He pays a lot of attention to us. Again, he was the largest shareholder of the company, so if he was mad at our coverage, I would know, and that's just not the case.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, if he wanted to kill us, he could have done it by now. It's the.

[Nilai Patel]

Could have been happening a long time ago, but that's just not. That's just not how it goes. So I think he's intent on making. He doesn't ruin it and in fact, making it better. That is the conversation we have had. There's yet more to come. Like, this deal has to close. A new holding company called PMX has to come into existence. It has to operate. Luckily, the person in charge of that is the guy that we have known for years and years and years. I think it'll be fun.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. And I think a thing you and I talk about, and we've been talking about with our team a lot, is that in the best case scenario, hardly anybody ever thinks about the corporate structure that enables our newsroom. We just get to go do the work, and that remains the goal.

[Nilai Patel]

I will say the same thing to the audience that I say to our team and to our corporate overlords. Just give me the money and leave us alone. That's my pitch. It's been a good pitch for 15 years.

[David Pierce]

So we're also, I'm sure, a really good pitch at Cannes Lion.

[Nilai Patel]

No, the money here has a lot of ideas. If you're not moving coach handbags, it doesn't want anything to do with you.

[David Pierce]

That's a fair point. So actually, let's. I was, I wanted to talk about gadgets first, but you've. You've now made me want to talk about Meta, because while you've been at Cannes Lions, a place I'm confident, there are a lot of Meta people running around telling you about all of these things. You're talking about the creator future of everything, the advertising future of everything, the AI future of everything. Meta sort of publicly appears to be a company that is in, like, complete turmoil and is desperately flailing to figure out what's going on. Can I just run you through a bunch of things that have happened this week while you've been gone?

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah, this is very funny because that, that is not how it feels here. But Dying to know.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, this is what I want to talk about, because I think this disconnect we're about to get into has been true of Meta for a very long time. And I think at this moment might be truer than it has ever been in complicated ways. But. So here. Here are just a bunch of news bits from meta. This week. 1 meta announced that the Instagram TV app is getting a big overhaul. It's coming to new platforms, but also they're starting to experiment with a lot of the stuff that has worked for YouTube on televisions, like the episodic series, things that feel more like shows. They're doing horizontal video. Like, they are making the same push into the living room that YouTube has very successfully made over the last several years. That's one thing. Um, Will Cathcart, the head of WhatsApp, is leaving, and they're being. He's being replaced by somebody who built a fintech company that's very successful in India and that Meta invested a huge amount of money in and is making this guy the global CEO of WhatsApp. Weird and fascinating.

[Nilai Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

Meta revived the Facebook Creator Studio app as an AI companion app for creators that will basically, I believe the phrase was, tell you exactly how to grow on Facebook with AI. Like, we'll draft comments for you again. This is all the stuff that, like, YouTube and others have been doing for a while. But the idea is like, how to grow your audience on Facebook in the most ruthless, AI optimized way. Uh, Mark Zuckerberg has apparently tasked his team with creating a polymarket clone.

[Nilai Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

Uh, like, the idea is apparently not to do it with real money at first. This product is at least code named arena, um, which is a very funny name for Mark Zuckerberg, the, like, Brazilian Jiu jitsu fighter in a bunch of funny ways. Um, but there, there's this big idea about let eventually letting people play with money after letting people play with credits at first. This is like a company doing everybody else's ideas about how to make money. Right. Like, you look at all of these things and every one of these is what is a new way we can make money that somebody else is already making a tremendous amount of money next to this. There is an incredible amount of reporting being done, particularly by our friends at Wired and Summit. Business Insider, on this, like, disastrous morale problem at Meta. They had this thing on Monday, I think, where they had to roll back the tool they had installed on everybody's computers that tracked all of their keystrokes and all of their mouse movements in order to train AI because a lot of the data that it was collecting was accessible to people across the company. Which. Bad.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta, had to basically put out a memo acknowledging that the AI reorg at the company has been, I believe the word was atrocious. And, and that they've, they've created a huge morale problem. They think they're going to fix it with a snack budget. Like this company, it just appears to be a mess and twisting in all directions, having no idea what's going on. And then like you're saying they just have all the money in the universe. Like I cannot. Meta is the company I understand the least because it just continues to seem like it's winning and also to have absolutely no idea what it's doing.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah. If you're here, it is obvious that Instagram and Meta are the load bearing pillars of the Internet economy. You want to talk about creators? There is not really a creator economy without Instagram and YouTube. Like TikTok is here and certainly they're, you know, big lucrative tiktokers but they all have to pivot to other platforms. That's just a thing TikTokers have to do because TikTok doesn't really have a follow graph and all the other platforms do. And so like you just see like, okay, where are the two load bearing pillars of the creator economy as it's being expressed here at Cannes? And it is absolutely Instagram and it's absolutely YouTube and they know it, they're acting like it. And then Meta's advertising tools are so lucrative and so powerful that they are here surrounded by advertising executives basically saying out loud, we're going to kill you. Just directly saying it. Like their big announcements here are all about finding new audiences, generating custom content for those audiences, guardrails around the AI tools to make sure the AI generated creative is brand safe. New tools for targeting where you know, you can put more money into the Meta ad manager to find new audience, but only up to a certain budget and then curve it back to make sure you still find qualified audiences that want to buy your product. Like really boring ad tech stuff that is printing money for them. And you look at all that and how much energy that is being directed at that and how wildly successful it is. Everyone depends on it and needs it. And you look at the creator economy, which I said this a million times on the show, but Instagram does not pay creators anything. They are just a distribution platform for creators and they monetize. It doesn't matter what happens on Instagram because Meta is making money regardless, the creators have to go hustle out their own brand deals. That's why they've all become ad agencies. So Meta is winning both ways. Right. It doesn't really matter what the creator economy does because Meta makes money every time you open Instagram. And if you want to participate in sort of the larger Internet economy, Meta is getting to the point, and Zuckerberg has said this out loud, they're getting to the point where they just want your money and the business results you desire. And everything in the middle will be automated by Meta AI. And that looks like it might work. I have no idea if it will actually work, but they're so confident here in it. To come to an advertising festival and look at an ocean of executives from companies and say, we're going to put most of you out of a job is wild. And everyone's like, amazing, weird. And I can only look at the rest of what's going on at Meta and say, oh, Mark Zuckerberg hates the business he's in. It's not fancy, it's not important. It's not cutting edge. That man sells ads.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. It's also, like, wildly uncool.

[Nilai Patel]

This is the part of, like, Cannes. Lyon is not the cool one. He, sitting in San Francisco, knows how not cool he is.

[David Pierce]

Yep.

[Nilai Patel]

And how hard he's trying to be cool. Kylie Jenner is launching Glasses with Mark Zuckerberg, right. Where we're just trying to yank some cool back to this company. Meanwhile, the money printer is just here in Cannes just whirring away. And he hates it. I think he hates it. It's just not the thing that makes him cool. Whereas I think Google has no problem not being cool. Like, Google also prints money and they're like, here's like, the robot's gonna buy you the shoes. And they're like, everyone's like, amazing. And Google's like, it's so nerdy. We love ourselves. And, like, they just don't care.

[David Pierce]

Google learned from the Google thing that being culturally relevant is not all it's cracked up to be.

[Nilai Patel]

I mean, they have YouTube. I just wanna be clear. They have YouTube. If you listen to Neil Mohan, his whole approach to YouTube now is we have learned not to be prescriptive about the creator economy. Like, when ASMR videos came out, everyone was like, what is this garbage? And now they're a whole cultural category. This is a real quote from Neil this week. So they know, but they're pipes that Google wants to be pipes Also, I think importantly, Google owns two major platforms. They own Android. That is their platform. They control their destiny on that platform. And they own the web to some huge extent. They own the web. They have Chrome on desktop. They have massive market share. And Google will contest this. They'll say the web is vibrant. And that is mostly true because mobile Safari exists. And Apple has very strong opinions about what web browsers can do on the web, iPhone. But like, Google has two platforms where it controls its destiny and Meta has none. And they have known this forever. And I think this drives Mark Zuckerberg crazy. And if he was the sort of person who would just be happy selling ads and having ludicrous come to his parties, I think he would be the happiest person alive because he's just the winner of this moment. But that man wants a platform of his own. I think he sees AI as one opportunity to do that. I think he sees his glasses as another opportunity that. And he is content tearing his company to shreds in like, ferocious ambition to get to a platform of his own. But I think the fact that he's not cool and no one trusts him is always going to stand in his way.

[David Pierce]

Oh, I totally think that's right. I also think if you're Mark Zuckerberg, even in a more sort of calculating headspace, you look at these things and you realize that, okay, we have built what amounts to a perfect business model on top of this gigantic set of attention that we are able to deliver.

[Nilai Patel]

Right?

[David Pierce]

That because so many people are on Instagram and because so many people are on Facebook, because these are so central to people's online lives, we make infinite money. That is just true. It's also, I think, fragile, and it feels more fragile all the time that the idea that actually maybe lots of people will pick up and leave your platform, I think is a real and b, increasingly in evidence. Right? Like Facebook's users are going down for the first time.

[Nilai Patel]

They would argue with you about that. They would. You know, that's just like regulatory battles. There's a war going on. Like, sure, they have reasons for those numbers wavering this time around.

[David Pierce]

I'm sure that they do. But if those people go. It doesn't matter the reason. If those people go away, the business goes away. The business relies on. I open Instagram 40 times a day. Whether it makes me happy or not. It just that that's it. Yeah, it is. It is. It has to be that entrenched behavior or else this beautiful business model you've built on top of it collapses. It has nothing to do. And so what I wonder is, like, all that stuff that you're saying about, like, being cool and being culturally relevant, that's also sort of centrally tied up in this company's business in a way that if I'm Mark Zuckerberg, causes me to lose a lot of sleep because, like, the minute Instagram stops being cool. And I think Instagram is still cool. It's not what it once was, but it is.

[Nilai Patel]

It's a load bearing pillar of the creator economy conversation here.

[David Pierce]

And it is. It is, like, glitzy and flashy in a way that, like, even TikTok isn't. Instagram is like, I would say ever

[Nilai Patel]

since Oracle bought TikTok, something has changed. You can just. It's. You can just feel it. That company has lost its aggression in a lot of ways, and it has become more of an infomercial driving you to the TikTok shop.

[David Pierce]

Yep.

[Nilai Patel]

They had the smallest party here. That's what I'll tell you.

[David Pierce]

Interesting. I'm. Before we leave the Facebook, I did

[Nilai Patel]

meet Flavor flav at the TikTok party. I will say that was very cool.

[David Pierce]

Did he have a big clock on?

[Nilai Patel]

He was wearing a chain. I don't know if it was a big clock. It wasn't like the clock. You know what I mean?

[David Pierce]

It wasn't. Okay. I just. I feel like if I saw Flava Flav and he wasn't wearing the clock, I'm not 100% sure I would know it was Flavor Flav. Do you know?

[Nilai Patel]

It was. He was wearing the glasses. It was very obvious.

[David Pierce]

Oh, all right. Okay, cool.

[Nilai Patel]

Can I tell you one more story about this? Try to get a selfie of Flavor Flav at the end. So, like, hi, Whatever. Try to get a selfie. And he's like, I got to get out of here. He was just trying to get through a hallway at the end of the party. And the person I was with, I won't say their name, but it was just a funniest moment, was like, Flav. And he turned around and he saw that it was still us. He was like, I'm good, you guys.

[David Pierce]

So that implies that Flav is Flava Flav's first name, which is a thing I've never considered.

[Nilai Patel]

This desperate call to Flav, and he'd obviously reacted to it. He's like, someone needs me. And then he was like, you don't. It's like, this isn't important at all.

[David Pierce]

It's really good. I'm gonna start yelling Flav at people as they walk away from me for not. I really like that. I do wanna know what you think about this idea of Facebook doing a sort of fake and then maybe real polymarket clone.

[Nilai Patel]

I mean, Facebook doesn't have ideas. Meta doesn't have ideas. Famously, Evan Spiegel is the head of product at Meta.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilai Patel]

Talk about middle managers. And so the idea that there's something, there's some attention mechanic that will keep you engaged, that's Zuck famously. When he was buying Instagram, we have emails from all these antitrust cases where his point of view was every generation there's another engagement mechanic that emerges and it disrupts the old one. And so photo sharing was that mechanic for Facebook. So he needed to buy Instagram. I think they wisely understood that buying TikTok was out of the cards in the middle of all that antitrust litigation and whatever, and they just brought TikTok to Instagram in the form of reels. But they understand, I think Zuck particularly understands that these new engagement mechanics do come and take time away from his apps. And so he's very good at launching fast follows. He's very bad at launching new ideas, which is where I think the AI glasses and the interaction paradigms, the hiring of Alan Dye to build a new interaction UI for the Meta glasses, there's something about that that requires a ton of invention, like user experience, invention that Meta historically has shown no competence in.

[David Pierce]

I just want to say the implication in what you just said is that the next big time spent mechanic is gambling. Straightforwardly, the implication in this decision is it's gambling.

[Nilai Patel]

But I think he probably sees it. He probably has enough data to see people move from their DMs on Instagram during a game to a gambling mechanic.

[David Pierce]

Sure. Yeah. They go to fanduel.

[Nilai Patel]

That's a thing that happens.

[David Pierce]

That's a real thing. Yeah.

[Nilai Patel]

We had a CEO of Yahoo on decoder a while back, Jim Lenzon, who, you know, he's a really smart guy. And I was like, Yahoo has private equity ownership. It's like Apollo. They own Caesar's Palace. I was like, this is coming to Yahoo Sports, right? You're going to do gambling and sports and finance. And he was like, no, but we know that once you're done in Yahoo Finance, you go to your stocks app. Once you're done in Yahoo Sports, you go to one of the prediction markets. We see the mechanic. It is the most natural evolution. The data would suggest they haven't done it yet. I'm not sure if they're going to do it. But I think Zuck sees that, too. It's the night before the super bowl and everyone on Instagram and WhatsApp is talking about the odds. You can just slide it in there. You can just shove it in the big blue app like everything else. So I understand why he would do it. Do I love that everything is becoming gambling?

[David Pierce]

I think.

[Nilai Patel]

I think that's pretty bad.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Yeah. No, it's. It is. It is as ruthlessly correct a decision, I think as you could make. But, boy, does it feel bad for Threads.

[Nilai Patel]

Like Threads has an oddly. I wouldn't say odd. Threads has. How to describe Threads in its diffuse way, in its sort of hazy way, Threads is like, we should do sports. Right? They have, like a partnership with the NBA. They're growing in communities or however they define communities. Very natural. If you think real time Twitter, like post app is good for sports, which I tend to think it is, that you would add the gambling mechanic to that.

[David Pierce]

Sure. Very natural. Deeply terrifying.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh, yeah. By the way, just to be clear, I think gambling is bad and I think it's really legal. And my personal view is that when you go to Las Vegas, you should find out how much all of your friends are going to spend on gambling and spend that amount of money on limousine, because that's the only place in the world where you can just demand a limousine arrive and one shows up. I'm in the south of France. I go outside, I'm like, bring me a limo. And they're like, huh? And it's not going to happen for me. But you can do that in Vegas. That's my hot take on gambling. Buy limousines instead.

[David Pierce]

I have been in your presence for this enough to know that you always end up being the one who has the best time, too.

[Nilai Patel]

Because I'm the one with the biggest lips.

[David Pierce]

It's the Nilai Patel way.

[Nilai Patel]

Everyone remembers me. No one remembers how much your dumbass lost to blackjack.

[David Pierce]

Exactly right. All right, we should take a quick break and then I do want to talk gadgets, because there's an interesting thing happening in gadgets right now, and I want to talk about it, but let's take a break.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

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[David Pierce]

When I scraped my car in that parking garage, I was worried that it could be a long process to take care of it. Like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedge maze.

[Nilai Patel]

I have definitely already been here. Now was it left right or right left? Well, maybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later.

[David Pierce]

But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the Geico app and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it happened.

[Nilai Patel]

It feels good to get help quick. It feels good to Geico.

[David Pierce]

Support for this show comes from Fetch Pet Insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill of over $1,000 and it's almost always an unwelcome surprise. That's where Fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance get paid back up to 90% of vet bills. You can use any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet.comsave right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet.comsave. All right, we're back. There's a bunch of gadget news this week and my my theory of the case is that we are seeing the effects of Ramageddon on the products that we buy and use in the most clean way as possible. Now, just to give you a preview, Microsoft put out new surfaces with less memory. You can now buy an 8 gigabyte of RAM. Microsoft Surf. It's to make it affordable, right? Like it is so expensive to buy RAM that they're giving you less so that you can actually buy a product. The Steam machine is out. I want to talk about the Steam machine in a minute. We talked about it with Sean on on the show earlier this week. But I'm curious what you think. The vast majority of the story of this thing has been that it costs $1,049, which is a lot more than I think anyone, including Valve hoped. And there's Been this big kerfuffle about. Is it one RAM stick or two like this is? But this has been a news story. Um, but the most immediate thing is that as promised, Apple just raised its prices. Uh, Tim Cook said this was coming, wanted to preview it for people, but Apple just took its store down, put it back up, and everything is more expensive. Can I read you some of the

[Nilai Patel]

worst Apple Store is down of all time?

[David Pierce]

Truly? Like, really truly? Yes. Can I read you some of the prices? Sure. Uh, the HomePod mini is now $30 more expensive. The iPad Air is now $150 more expensive. The iPad Pro is up $200. The MacBook Neo is up $100. The MacBook Air is up $200. The MacBook Pro is up $300. The iMac is up $200. The Mac Studio M4 Max is up $500. The Mac Studio with the M3 Ultra is up $1,300.

[Nilai Patel]

No way.

[David Pierce]

The Vision Pro is up $200. Like, meaningful across the board price increase for essentially every Apple product.

[Nilai Patel]

I would just like to congratulate myself for buying a Mac Studio for no reason earlier this year.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

I really.

[David Pierce]

We have been on this show all of 2026 being like, if you need a gadget, buy it now. It's only going to get worse. And here we go. I don't even think we're at the top of it. I really don't.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Yeah.

[Nilai Patel]

The MacBook Neo I bought for no reason also seems like a smart purchase now.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, you can sell it for more than you bought it for.

[Nilai Patel]

That's rough.

[David Pierce]

It's working out. But do you. Do you agree with my overall thesis here that it feels like we are sort of at the product cycle into the Ramageddon experience, where the world in which there is no RAM is starting to settle in to both what gadgets cost and even what they are?

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah. Wasn't there reports this week that, like, the new nothing phone just won't come out?

[David Pierce]

Yep, because the CMF Phone 2 Pro successor, they just canceled it because they're like, we can't. We can't make it what we want under the current circumstances.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah, I think we're just seeing like, Apple's solution is we have price elasticity. People will pay the prices.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilai Patel]

Like, if you're going to buy a Vision Pro, the 200 is not going to deter you because you have conviction in your heart that wearing a headset is a good idea. If you need a Mac Studio, that's probably for work. You're Going to absorb the cost. Maybe you'll pass the cost off. Like, you can see how they're playing the game. Right. The smaller price increases are the consumer products and the bigger ones are the ones that tend to be used for work because you can absorb the cost all kinds of ways. But I think a lot of other companies can't just play the game the way that Apple's playing it.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, Apple has like famously huge margins in this industry, in a way, and

[Nilai Patel]

I think that's why they help. I think, I think they swallowed some of their margins to see what would happen in this Tim Cook line. That this isn't tenable was in fact a preview for prices being raised and a signal that their margins would go back up. And if Apple can't get pricing power in this market, like no one can totally. So, yeah, I mean, I think the, the Steam Machine is probably a better example. What is this drama about one stick around versus two? So that's the most Steam Machine drama you can come up with?

[David Pierce]

It's very good. As I understand it, Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve, gave an interview in which he said there was going to be two eight gigabyte sticks of RAM in the Steam Machine. And in reality, what they're shipping is one 16 gigabyte stick of RAM in the Steam Machine. And if you were to say, David, what's the difference? I genuinely could not sit here and tell you. I'm sure there is one. This is, I am just out of my own technical depth in understanding why it matters which one of these things you're getting. The implication seems to be that it's going to ship with one stick of RAM and an empty slot. And that I think is sort of

[Nilai Patel]

fascinating for a thing that is more PC than not sure.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, but this, this has become a bit of a kerfuffle. And again, like everything Valve has said indicates that this device is probably 3 or $400 more expensive than they wanted it to be and maybe even three or four hundred dollars more expensive than it was when they started making this product. And that just over time, this is just what the price has become. And, and at some point they like, we've even specced it out. Emma Roth on our team did a great job of basically going and building a gaming PC to rival this thing. And this is just what it costs. Like it's, it's, it's rough out there. And I think Dom Preston, who writes our daily newsletter, pulled a comment that I really liked that was basically like, this thing is both fairly Priced and way too expensive. And it's like, buddies, welcome to the future of gadgets. Fairly priced and way too expensive is just what we are in and headed towards.

[Nilai Patel]

I'm feeling like the big repairability wave for the past two years is about to pay its dividends.

[David Pierce]

Interesting. What do you mean?

[Nilai Patel]

I mean, people are just going to hold on to things longer and they're going to demand that they last a lot longer as they get more expensive. So it's interesting. It's these past few years, repairability has been sure about durability, about, you know, fighting planned obsolescence. I think now we're going to add value for dollar to that mix. You buy something big and expensive, it cannot only last three years. It has to have a much longer shelf life. We have been in what you would call an era of disposable gadgets for quite a while. And all that repairability work. A lot of products are more repairable now than they were before. I'm just hopeful. Maybe all these market forces actually result in a good outcome, which is, okay, it's gonna be more expensive. That means it needs to last twice as long.

[David Pierce]

Right.

[Nilai Patel]

Which means it's really just a battery.

[David Pierce]

I didn't really thought about it, but like, basically for two decades since smartphones really became mainstream, we have just been on this relentless path of every single part becoming cheaper and more available all the time. To the point where, like, as we've talked about, everybody just puts smartphone chips in anything they can find because smartphone chips are so readily available and so cheap that it's like, we'll figure out what to do with this later. We're just going to put it in your dishwasher and see what happens. It never really turned until now.

[Nilai Patel]

It's just the ram. I don't think it's the rest of the supply chain.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, but none of it matters except the right, the RAM drives the thing at this point, right. That you can't do any of it without memory. And if you can't get memory, you're nowhere. So. But I think truly for the first time, it seems like the idea that you can count on this stuff being consistently cheaper and more readily available and higher quality as every generation turns over, maybe that's going to change this industry even more than we've realized that like,

[Nilai Patel]

right, you could, you can make the products cheaper if you account for the higher price of the RAM and use cheaper components elsewhere. Will people accept that? I don't know. But like, you can play different games here. It just seems like the industry is still doing what you are describing, which is they're pushing every component to the edge all the time. Instead of being like, how do we actually make a holistic product based on the prices we have in front of us? And maybe this will be the thing that changes it. And that whole supply chain is like, oh, you can't make a cheap nothing phone anymore.

[David Pierce]

Right. And what's the first thing to go is going to be the things that don't have that price elasticity, like cheap phones that if you, if you take a phone that was $200 and you make it $400, that phone ceases to have a reason to exist and the people who could afford it can't anymore and you just shouldn't make it. And we're going to see a lot of things like that. And all of the fun little like gadgety knickknacks that have been coming out I think are going to start to die because they just don't have that. We can raise the price by $200 and get away with it. Because this is essential to your work life that a couple of companies and not many others do. Yeah, like if I'm a, if I'm a like, you know, Kickstarter sized startup right now, this has got to be terrifying.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh yeah, we should do, I mean we did a bunch of tariff coverage with these smaller companies. I feel like we should do some Ramageddon.

[David Pierce]

We should. I've been talking to Eric Mitzigowski from Pebble about coming back on the show to talk about some of this stuff and we, we should do a couple of these.

[Nilai Patel]

If you're a small hardware vendor, reach out. I would love to hear what's going on.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, get at us for sure. Um, let me just read, I want to read you just one thing from this is an interview that Valve did with gamers Nexus about the Steam machine gamers. Nexus asked them, were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of hoops? And this is Pierre, a software developer at Valve. He says, look, there's no contracts, there's nothing. Those guys, they give us a price every month or something and they say you can buy that many and it's yes or no. And if we say no, then they never talk to us again. This is the state of things. Do you know what this made me think of is I bought a car in 2021, like peak pandemic chaos year. Cars were the most expensive they've ever Been used cars were going through the roof. We totaled our car and got more money for it than we paid for it. Used seven years earlier like insanity. And we wanted a Hyundai Tucson. We wanted a hybrid, we wanted an suv. We picked this car. And the people at the dealership put our name on a list of people. And when they got a car, they would start at the top of that list and they would call and they say, I have this car in this color at this price. Do you want it? And they would say yes or no. And if they said no, they would go to the next person on the list and they would just call until somebody said yes. And the first time we got a call, they were like, it's. It's this one, it's this color. It has all the, all these bells and whistles. You don't want. Do you want the car? And Anna, my wife, who was on the phone with them, was like, well, we don't really want all these other things. And the guy was like, I'm going to be real with you if you don't say yes to this, I'm almost certainly never going to call you again. And so we bought the damn car. And it's like, it was insane.

[Nilai Patel]

That's very great.

[David Pierce]

And this is like, this is the world that we live in with computer memory now that it's like, it is run by this set of companies that have essentially all the power and leverage you could possibly imagine. It's. It's wild.

[Nilai Patel]

All that power and leverage comes from having a handful of data center and chip vendor clients building data center. Like it will come to some sort of conclusion.

[David Pierce]

Yes, I, I am increasingly pessimistic about how long that's going to take.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh yeah, I agree with that.

[David Pierce]

But it will, it will end. I just don't think it's going to end as soon as we would like. And I think it's going to get way messier before it ends.

[Nilai Patel]

Here's what I want you to imagine before we move on. At some point, like regular non tech media is going to notice Ramageddon. Just imagine how those headlines are going to go when people are protesting data center prices and more expensive iPhones.

[David Pierce]

Yep. I mean, that's coming in September, man. Like, can you imagine what this next run of iPhones, potentially including a foldable iPhone, is going to cost in this world.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Real quick, one other thing we should talk about. I want to know your thoughts on the Slate truck. Speaking of things with prices that are important, they announced the slate truck. $24,950. Ronnie Mola Verge contributor took it for a ride, seems to like it. Where do you stand on the slate truck at this moment in time?

[Nilai Patel]

I love it. I think it, I mean, when was the last time you saw an affordable product?

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Right?

[Nilai Patel]

And I love the fact that they, you know, if you're a car person, you know, people are just wrapping their cars left and right. Like, like, fine, we're not going to paint it. You can wrap it however you want. I love the modularity. I love the fact that you can turn it in an suv and the airbags have little, like, they have little connectors so the car knows when you've put the SUV roof on it and engages the airbags and the pillars. Like, I think that's all so neat. Like, that's a lot of engineering.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilai Patel]

Cool. Like, I think all that is great. I think the range is troublesome to people. I think Americans just want to see 300 next to a range estimate. But that's maybe not what this truck is for. Like, most of the people who are going to buy this kind of truck to do this kind of like, have a toy or use it for work, they're not traveling hundreds of miles in a go. So I think that's the one question mark I have, and I'm dying to try one out. I think they're just so neat.

[David Pierce]

So I wonder about you specifically, because you are, like, I would say you're sort of lightly a truck guy, if that makes sense.

[Nilai Patel]

I want aspire to be a truck guy.

[David Pierce]

Exactly. I had one.

[Nilai Patel]

It was great. I just think about it every day.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Does this satisfy the truck guy in you? Because, like, the line in Ronnie's story that keeps sticking out to me is that it drives more like a crossover SUV than a pickup, which I think is intended as a compliment, but is not what a lot of, like, you know, Ford F150 truck guys are going

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

to want to hear.

[David Pierce]

But maybe this isn't for them anyway. So for, for you, as like a light truck guy, how does this thing strike you?

[Nilai Patel]

I mean, do you want to get into a long discussion of body and frame construction principles and why the Ford Raptor in particular sells so well because of its suspension that makes it drive like an suv. Like, the truck market is vast. It's complicated. I don't think the people buying this one are going to give one ounce of thought to ride quality in that way. If it's more forgiving, then I think they will. But you drive a regular pickup truck that doesn't have an independent rear suspension. It bounces over a bump. That's a weird feeling. Sure. So I suspect this thing is going to appeal to a lot of people that, like the Ford Maverick appeals to. There is a market for smaller pickup trucks. The thing that's going to make or break the slate truck is how much people actually take to customizing it. This entire thing is a bet on, literally, the base model is called the blank slate. The whole thing is a bet on, actually, you want to customize this truck. We are going to limit the options we put in front of you all the way down to. There's no infotainment. Just put your phone in the dash like all of you are doing anyway. And I think that's just incredibly smart.

[David Pierce]

The part about that I don't like is it makes the very cheap price seem sort of fake. Right. In the sense that, like, yes, 24. 9:50 is slightly more, I think, than Slate wanted this thing to be. In part because the giant tax break that you get for buying a car like this has gone away. But still, it is, I think by a wide margin, the cheapest electric car and the cheapest pickup you're going to find pretty much anywhere. But then we're in a Ramageddon world where now I have to go source a bunch of other parts that might be more expensive for a bunch of supply chain and like war in the Middle east reasons. Am I potentially signing myself up for headache that I didn't even know I was getting into that. Like the. The sort of DIY car economy feels a lot scarier right now than it did a couple of years ago.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah. I mean, that's the flip side of what I'm saying. Right. It's gonna be. It's make or break depending on how much people want to customize their own truck.

[David Pierce]

True. And maybe they want it less than they did.

[Nilai Patel]

Right. Like, I don't. I. I really don't think we know. I. I do think people stare at new cars, which are getting increasingly more expensive. Like, we're closing at the median price being like 40 or $50,000 for a new car. That's crazy.

[David Pierce]

It's insane.

[Nilai Patel]

And then you look at those cars and they are just chock full of tech. Like the new Mercedes electric C Class. Like, the interior is basically a Korean nightclub. Like, there's no other way to describe what is happening in that car. Like, what. What do you want me to do?

[David Pierce]

Google this while you talk?

[Nilai Patel]

It's just like, what is going on in this car? Right. Like the new electric BMWs are like, the interiors are bananas. And there's a weird trapezoid infotainment screen. No car maker can just settle on using a circle for a steering wheel anymore. New cars are getting increasingly weird to justify all of that cost. And carmakers are like, well, what will justify the money screens? And I don't think that's actually working. Do you know what I mean? I think this will be a test of the market. Would the market prefer a cheaper planar car for a reasonable amount of money that you can just tweak at will without running into some DRM Mercedes MBUX nonsense? Did you see the car? It looks crazy in there.

[David Pierce]

It does. It's, it's, it's all so blue. And there are so many, yet again, so many screens showing wall to wall screens thing over and over again.

[Nilai Patel]

The C Class is not a big car. Like, no. You're like, if I put my baby in that car, it's like there will be a one to one baby to screen volume ratio.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, there's a moonroof that's doing stuff. I gotta stop looking at this car. It's a lot, there's a lot going on.

[Nilai Patel]

That's obviously a luxury car, but it's just trickling down to everything. By the way, I was in an Uber here in France and It was a BYD seal, which is basically the Tesla Model 3 EY competitor. And I asked the guy, the Uber driver, like, do you like this? It's better than Tesla. And he was like, so much better than Tesla. Like he blows Tesla out of the water. And I was like, what do you like about it? He's like, the fit and finish is better, the range is better. And then he pointed at the screen and he goes, and it has CarPlay. And that was like the last. It was like, check. And he was like.

[David Pierce]

And then you said, I'll get out here, thank you.

[Nilai Patel]

Whatever. We were stuck in traffic. So I spent a lot of time talking about this car with him. And I was like, yeah, they're just like basically illegal in the United States. And he's like, in France they have to protect Citroen and Peugeot and Renault. And he made like the French spitting noise to indicate his disgust with the French domestic car manufacturer. He's like, peugeot, it was amazing.

[David Pierce]

Love that.

[Nilai Patel]

And he was like, the French government just taxes these cars. If I went to China, I could buy two for the price that I bought one here in France. But everyone is still buying them here because they're better cars. And there's Just something to be and obviously the Chinese government is subsidizing them. They're part of a huge trade where all this stuff is going on. But there's just something to be said for people who want a quality product at a good price. Much remains to be seen with the slate truck. But up against the feature creep and the tech bloat in all the other new cars, we'll see. Like, I'm happy it exists.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, I have wondered if that is maybe one silver lining of what's about to happen is like is there about to be a big new push in much dumber gadgets that like is this how we get dumb TVs back? Because it literally becomes too expensive to make smart TVs and rather than ship all that crap to in your television.

[Nilai Patel]

That's the most optimistic thing you've ever said. No, this is what I'm saying. Like it will always be more lucrative to track you until you die.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that's true. Even if they have to charge me more for it.

[Nilai Patel]

That's look, somewhere in this hotel is the fox that can data activation.

[David Pierce]

Well on the surveillance economy though, this is a good. This is a good segue to the beginning of the lightning round. So let's take a break. Then we're going to come back, we'll do bit a little lightning round. Be right back. Study and play Come together on a Windows 11 PC. And for a limited time college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal Everything you need to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 Premium and a year of Xbox game Pass ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn [e-mail] studentoffer while supplies last ends June 30 [e-mail].

[Nilai Patel]

where is Daredevil? I'm right here. Don't miss the return of Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again.

[David Pierce]

So what's next? I feel liberated.

[Nilai Patel]

We're gonna take this city back over medicated in an all new season. Now streaming only on Disney plus.

[David Pierce]

They're on horror us. It's time we started hunting them.

[Nilai Patel]

I can work with them.

[David Pierce]

This should be tons of fun.

[Nilai Patel]

Marvel Television's Daredevil Born Again now streaming only on Disney plus When you need

[David Pierce]

to build up your team to handle the growing chaos at work use indeed sponsor jobs. It gives your job post the boost it needs to be seen and helps reach people with the right skills, certifications and more Spend less time searching and more more time Actually interviewing candidates who. Check all your boxes. Listeners of this show will get a $75 sponsored job credit@ Indeed.com podcast. That's Indeed.com podcast. Terms and conditions apply. Need a hiring hero. This is a job for indeed. Sponsored jobs. All right, we're back. It's time now for the lightning round, beginning with America's favorite podcast within a podcast. I don't even have to ask. I just. I just. I give up. At this point. I'm not. He just does it every week. We're still here. It's Brandon Carr is a dummy.

[Nilai Patel]

Hell yeah. Now it's merchant. It's still going. That rules.

[David Pierce]

Oh, man, that was good.

[Nilai Patel]

That ruled.

[David Pierce]

Play that at your can party Me.

[Nilai Patel]

That's like. That's the real theme song for America 250 right there.

[David Pierce]

Thank you to Dave Garner, who sent that to us.

[Nilai Patel]

The revolutionary spirit in that was. It's real. That was awesome. Now with merch.

[David Pierce]

That was very good. All right, Nilai, what do you do this week?

[Nilai Patel]

What didn't he do this week? But the one that we should pay attention to is this was the week that the public comment period on whether or not the View on ABC as a bonafide news program opened and the license renewal for the various ABC stations owned by Disney that he pulled the licenses early up for renewal to punish Disney for being too woke or whatever. Whatever word salad exists in Brendan's corrupt little mind. So this is that week. So ABC stations are running ads encouraging their viewers to leave comments at the SEC's website saying that the View is a bonafide news program. It's kind of wild that we have it. Do you want to run it?

[David Pierce]

Yeah, let's just watch this. I haven't actually seen this.

[Nilai Patel]

I had this idea for a show. Different women, different points of View.

[David Pierce]

The View has welcomed your favorite guests and covered the issues you care about for nearly 30 years. Now the FCC wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show. Viewers, use your voice. Scan this QR code. You have until July 6th.

[Nilai Patel]

So a lot of ideas packed in there.

[David Pierce]

It's kind of giving like pharmaceutical ad.

[Nilai Patel]

It is. Opening with Barbara Walters is a choice. And ending with we believe the viewers of the View will scan this QR code. And at the fcc, like, just a lot of ideas in there. Who knows if it will work. Brendan will tell you that none of this is true. Right. This is just a good faith reexamination of whether the View is a bonafide news program and needs to abide by the equal time Rule, all this is to punish Disney. So you recall all this kicked off in earnest after was it James Tallrico appeared on the View. He's obviously a congressional candidate in Texas. And news programs do not have to give equal time. Entertainment programs do because that's like free advertising. So historically, the only program that has ever had to think about the equal time rule is Saturday Night Live, because you cannot make the case that that is a new show and they're very good at it. And you know, when Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live, they gave President Trump airtime in a NASCAR race like the next weekend or something. But the View, it's right on the line and it has operated under a bona fide news exemption for years and years and years like they've gotten it. And Carr, because he's a dummy and he wants to control speech in America, has said, well, what if I pull it? What if I reexamine this and what if I chill your speech by not allowing you to have candidates on your news program or limit your speech overall? And so it's up for review. He pulled the licenses of the ABC stations early for renewal, which is totally unprecedented. And so now ABC is mounting this campaign in return to get its viewers to say, no, this is the news. Right. You do need to say protect this program because we, the consumers of the View, want it to stay the way it is, which is fundamentally crazy for any media property in America to have to do in response to pressure from the government. And I'm just going to keep saying this over and over again. I say it almost every time we do this segment. Now Brennan is going after broadcast because that is the power he has. Right. So ABC has antennas in cities and it broadcasts over the radio waves. And the federal government has a lot of say over radio waves because radio waves are a scarce public resource and we do need to allocate them well. Right. You don't want the TV broadcast interfering with the cell broadcast interfering with what? First responder radio transmissions. So that's why we have spectrum policy. And that's the FCC's job. And for whatever reason we have said, okay, the broadcasters have to use their spectrum in the public interest. And there's a lot of reasons for that. When they were the only game in town, there were a lot of good reasons for that. All of that is nonsense. Now, most people experience the view on YouTube and as Instagram clips. The government having any instinct about what to do with the View or what candidates can appear on there is nonsensical when Its primary distribution is Internet distribution that car has no control over. And all of this is just a test balloon for can I control Instagram, Can I regulate speech on the Internet? And he will find a way to do it if you start falling down the slippery slope. Because the public interest standard of spectrum use for broadcast television is as far removed from the experience of everyday Americans is like the telegraph. Like, it just doesn't make any sense.

[David Pierce]

Part of the idea, in theory there is like, if, if he can scare the view out of existence, he solves his Instagram problem without needing to regulate Instagram. Right?

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Don Lemon will just go to YouTube, you know, like that, that's the thing that is happening. Right.

[David Pierce]

But I mean, like, they got Colbert in a very, like, straightforward way. Like, there's some evidence that this playbook works.

[Nilai Patel]

They did. But Colbert, you don't think Colbert is going to have a more lucrative second act on one of these platforms? Oh, no, I think Colbert, he's going to have to. He's going to be here at Cannes showing creator supplements like everybody else. And like, maybe that will break his heart, but the money will be there for him. Sure. This is what I mean. Like, that ecosystem is richer. It is populated by right wing voices. No one bodies up to Facebook and is like, you're not equally balanced. It's like, no, actually this is pretty balanced to one side. The crazy uncles of your town make themselves known on Facebook every single day. So I think it's less about I need to solve the supply of the view on Instagram and more. If I can get control over broadcast, if I can overcome the First Amendment using these high and mighty rules about equal time and fairness, I can bring that to the Internet. And there's lots of ways you could bring that to the Internet. Mobile Internet, for example, runs on public radio spectrum.

[David Pierce]

Sure.

[Nilai Patel]

What are you going to do with that? Right. Like, it's just right there for Brendan, if he wins these battles here, you know, he will turn his attention to the broader Internet. And I just remind everybody, YouTube is owned by a defense contractor. Like, there's a lot of ways for a unified Trump administration to make life hard for a lot of these companies.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. YouTube is owned by a defense contractor. Is a very funny way to think about a lot of things.

[Nilai Patel]

Twitch is owned by a defense contractor.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, like these.

[Nilai Patel]

There's a lot of ways for things. Xbox is owned by a defense contractor. There's again, I'm just pointing this out over and over again. Like, if the Trump administration thesis of this is one government that we control. Tip to tail holds. Yeah. Getting the View kicked off the air or punishing them or yanking their bona fide news exception on broadcast like it's broadcast spectrum policy. There's a reason we historically have not talked about it in the show, but all this is a trial balloon for what can we do? How can we punish the other companies that control the media that actually matters Anyway, That's Brendan. I'm in France, man. I can't believe I had to think about Brendan Carr in France. Here, the land of the free, liberte fraternite, I call it. Brendan. If you want to come on the show and defend your actions, you corrupt tyrant of a man, I welcome you. We can do it in France. That's been Brendan Carr's a dummy. America's favorite podcast. In the podcast, Brendan Carr is a dummy.

[David Pierce]

It's beautiful. We're also going to do an AI version of you rapping the whole Guns and Ships Hamilton song about Brendan Carr.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh, God.

[David Pierce]

And that's going to go.

[Nilai Patel]

That's what they have for. We're going to Kevin o', Leary, that big data center. Finally, a reason that people can get behind.

[David Pierce]

I love it. I have a lightning round item that dovetails actually sort of perfectly with everything you just talked about, which is this movie Artificial? Do you know about this movie?

[Nilai Patel]

I don't.

[David Pierce]

So it's Imagine the Social Network, but it's about Sam Altman. And OpenAI is essentially, I think was like part of the pitch and kind of the vibe. The movie's called Artificial. It stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman. It's directed by Luca Guadagnino, who's a very good director. Um, this movie has been in the works, I think for about a year, is very near production being finished. Amazon had. Was. Was going to run the movie and had said that it was going to put it in theaters to basically give it an Oscar qualifying theatrical run. Like, this movie is supposed to be a big deal. Andrew Garfield is a very good actor. The cast is really impressive. All this stuff and then just sort of out of nowhere. Amazon dropped the movie this week, of course. Yeah. Again, this is like it owned by a defense contractor. Right. And I think the. The story seems to be ess that this. This script was originally like a mix of kind of brutal but also like funny satire. It's written by Simon Rich, who like wrote for SNL for a very long time, is a very funny person. And it would have been sort of needly in a way, I think, would Be my. My guess about the first read of this script, but it definitely did not paint Sam Altman as, like, a good person and OpenAI as, like, a good company wanting to make the world a better place. It's like, very much the sort of duplicitous schemer Sam Altman that a lot of people have come to know recently. Then apparently what happened is Luca Guadagnino, the director, made the movie darker and darker and sort of more anti AI as time went on, finished the movie, screened it for Mike Hopkins, who runs the studio at Amazon, who immediately pulled the plug on the whole thing. And Amazon has not, as far as I can tell, publicly given a reason for this, except to say, basically, we don't think we're the right distributor for this. We want somebody else to have it. But I think you can draw the lines pretty easily. Right. Like, Amazon has lots of deals with OpenAI and other AI companies. All of these companies are tied up together. OpenAI has been making these, like, weird, circular deals with everybody for a very long time. And you can see why, if you want to a impress the Trump administration, which looks favorably generally on people like Sam Altman and on people like Elon Musk and others who are apparently not depicted super well in this movie, and you want to keep your very lucrative AI deals going, you would dump this movie. So they. They dump this movie and then apparently start shopping it around. And one by one, it appears other studios are starting to pass.

[Nilai Patel]

Wow.

[David Pierce]

Netflix has apparently passed. A24 has passed. Warner Brothers, one of its, I think sub studios, has passed. There are other distributors who are looking at picking it up, but it's starting to seem like this movie might just kind of die. And I the only, like, sure, maybe it's just a horrible movie that nobody wants. I don't think that's the most likely answer as to why nobody wants to distribute this movie.

[Nilai Patel]

A24 just took a big Google investment.

[David Pierce]

Exactly. To make AI movies, which a lot of people are real pissed about.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Like, it's just. You can just see it. It's a very naked way of looking at the fact that it kind of is in no one's business interest to say mean things about AI right now. Which is funny because if you're reading the Cultural Room, this is the movie you should release.

[Nilai Patel]

Yes. I don't understand that at all. Like, there's a lot of money to be made in releasing the movie that says AI is bad. And it's. It's not like there's been a shortage of Them.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, but is that more money than the money that you risk by pissing off the AI people? That's. That's the. That's the equation.

[Nilai Patel]

There's gotta be some indie studio or indie distributor that's gonna pick this up.

[David Pierce]

So apparently Neon and Mubi are apparently the. The front runners for it, which are like, perfect. They. They are the ones who should release a movie like this. And I hope it hits big for them and I hope that everything goes great. But I think, like, this, all the things you're talking about, about, like these companies are owned by defense contractors and. And the government and this other part of the economy and the business world has leverage over these things in ways that don't necessarily seem obvious, but are still very real. This is like a perfect example of that to me.

[Nilai Patel]

There should be more than five companies. Vaux Patel, 28. That's what I got. That's my entire presidential platform.

[David Pierce]

That's really good.

[Nilai Patel]

There should be more than five companies.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, it's good stuff. All right, what's your next lighting round item? I actually know what it is because I assigned this one to you. But do you want to talk about it?

[Nilai Patel]

Yes. We finally published our review of the Kaleidoscape Strato E. John Higgins did it. We have Kaleidoscape streamers. He has got a setup. I've got a setup. This is the $10,000 movie streaming server player setup that we both have at our houses. John is actually a good TV reviewer. I just like cosplay as a TV reviewer. So he did the review. The fight here is against Blu Ray. It is Blu Ray quality. They do do all of their own encoding. They take the master files from the studios and they make their own encodes so they can exceed Blu Ray quality. In some cases, Blu Rays are dying, which is really sad. So this is the high quality movie playback system. There isn't another one, except for Sony Braviacore, which only exists on Sony televisions and can only play Sony movies. I love it. That's an ecosystem that I really am fond of. It's vastly cheaper than the Kaleidoscape because it just arrives on Sony televisions. But you need a big setup to see it. This is John's real point here. You have an average TV and an average soundbar. None of this money is worth it. If you have a really nice TV and a really nice audio system, particularly if you have a nice audio system, you will get a lot out of this setup. And that was my main takeaway, was that it's really hard to show people the visual fidelity increase. Like in Pacific Rim, you can see it blocks less. The color red is really hard to compress, and it does a better job at the color red across the board. These are very fine details. Like, it is fast action scenes with a lot of moving elements. It does a way better job there. Everything else, it's like, oh, it's definitely crisper. I'm going to leave now. That's how people react to it. On the audio side. Blows everything out of the water. If you have a good audio setup, it is uncompressed audio. It's louder. The dynamic range is way wider, so the quiet parts are quieter and the loud parts are even louder. Everything is crisper. It just sounds better than the overly compressed streaming audio that we've been listening to for so long that it knocks people's socks off. So it's very expensive. You do not need to buy the full $10,000 client server setup. You can get the Strato E player alone, which I think is three grand. This is one of those things that's never supposed to be on sale, but you can find them on sale. People will sell them to you for cheaper. You do end up having to buy or rent all the movies and shows. It's not as convenient as everything else, but for those that set of movies that you want to have the full experience in, yeah, I think it's worth it. Especially as Blu Ray kind of declines, which it's slowly been doing in meaningful ways year after year. A lot of people are going to tell me that we should just review a Plex server next to this. We have plans. We have plans to cover what I will call the community.

[David Pierce]

Interesting. Blu Ray, by the way, turned 20 this week. Happy 20th anniversary to Blu Ray.

[Nilai Patel]

That's such a weird phenomena. Like, man, that makes me feel old. I remember being at the CES with the Engadget team when there was a Blu Ray booth and an HD DVD booth and it was going to be the kickoff of the format war. And the night before CES HDV failed, it collapsed and it took the booth down before CES opened.

[David Pierce]

Whoa.

[Nilai Patel]

Now I just feel like now I just feel like an old guy.

[David Pierce]

I feel like that's a version history episode waiting to happen. We're going to have to do that at some point.

[Nilai Patel]

That's a good one. But, yeah, literally the night before, it was like the breaking news was like, Toshiba just caved. They're like, yeah, we're out.

[David Pierce]

Whoa. That's kind of wild, actually. That's pretty cool. I have been Blu Ray shopping this week because of the anniversary and then realized I literally don't own a Blu Ray player. So now I'm also shopping for a Blu Ray player. It's been a. It's been a fascinating week.

[Nilai Patel]

$3,000 strato e, baby. Although you have like, garbage TV. Like, very proudly have a garbage TV.

[David Pierce]

Well, what I was going to say is, like, I have been slowly starting the fight with my wife to put a sound bar in the living room. Like, this is the person with whom I had to fight my way up to a 55 inch television.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Anna began our relationship with a 22 inch computer monitor as her TV and I think would still be perfectly happy in that place. So I'm like, I'm slowly fighting battles and I've decided soundbar is the next one.

[Nilai Patel]

That's a good one.

[David Pierce]

I'm really looking forward to.

[Nilai Patel]

The problem is to get the most out of that soundbar, you gotta stick a subwoofer somewhere in that room too. And that is the hardest fight of all. Yeah, that's true.

[David Pierce]

Because you can't really hide that either. I can't like stick that in a cabinet.

[Nilai Patel]

That's just a big box. You gotta let the kids paint it or something like, it's. You're doomed.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, we're gonna have to come back to that one. All right. I have one more lightning round item for you.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Which is. Did you see this Bob Iger sort of exit interview that he did with the Financial Times? Really interesting. I think Bob Iger is. Is sort of a weird story. He was the CEO of Disney for a very long time. Left once, kind of did aggressive sabotage on the person that he picked to succeed him during the pandemic. Bob Chapek came back as if he was like the white knight who, like, also killed his predecessor. I don't know. It was a very weird thing. Now has left for real, he says did a really interesting interview with the Financial Times. We'll link it in the show, Notes the piece about it and sort of the state of Disney is really interesting. But there are a couple of things that he mentions in it that I just found really interesting and pertinent to our purposes. One is the Twitter deal, which he confirmed. This was sort of known at the time that Disney was one of the first.

[Nilai Patel]

We've all known that they wanted Twitter and they thought Twitter was toxic.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, the phrase. The phrase Iger used was, quote, a horrible distraction, which I think was a super good call in retrospect he also said they, they wanted to buy James Bond, which obviously didn't work out. That's now owned by Amazon. But the one I really want to talk about, and I think this is so funny is, is Bob Iger made it sound like there were, there was work underway to have Disney merge with Apple.

[Nilai Patel]

Sure.

[David Pierce]

And sort of, this is the thing that I really like. So Iger describes the potential merger as truly transformational. Right. This is like a thing people have talked about before that, that Apple should buy Disney. They have a lot of, like, values that they talk about that are similar. You can see how it might work. Um, but then Iger also says in the end, the conversations, quote, never went anywhere. And that, quote, Apple didn't show that much interest. So I'm like, bob, did this almost.

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah.

[David Pierce]

Or did you just call?

[Nilai Patel]

Yeah. You sent a series of emails. This is the equivalent of Iger being like, Flav.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, that's exactly right. It just makes me laugh. So Iger ends up on the app on the Apple board. They're like, these companies have been tied up together for a very long time. But I just really like the idea that we almost merged, by which he means I asked if you wanted to buy me and you never responded to my email.

[Nilai Patel]

There was, there was that period, sort of, I would say, late Jobs era, because Jobs had no interest in buying anything really. But in the beginning of the Tim Cook era, where it was like, they've got to spend money.

[David Pierce]

Well, it was, it was after the Beats thing too, there was this sense of like, maybe Apple is on a real acquisition terror now and it's just going to go eat the industry alive because it has $200 billion in cash.

[Nilai Patel]

They've got to buy something everyone wanted them to buy, like Hyundai. Like, do you remember, like, every company got floated and in the end, when

[David Pierce]

Netflix was going to be it for a minute, there was a lot out there.

[Nilai Patel]

And I think in the end, actually, Apple got so burned by the Beats acquisition that they never wanted to do anything of that scale again. The Beats acquisition sure got them Apple music and all this stuff, but it also brought them Jimmy Iovine and Dr. Dre as Apple employees with no titles and a massive culture clash that I think they're still fighting through.

[David Pierce]

Yeah, yeah. But anyway, I just thought that was interesting. And also I continue to think the Disney Apple combination is a strange and fascinating thing that clearly will never happen.

[Nilai Patel]

I mean, Jobs was the largest Disney shareholder for a time, so you can't

[David Pierce]

sold Pixar to Disney.

[Nilai Patel]

You can Float a bunch of stuff that like. Yeah, you had no shop, Bob. Yeah, I'll say it can. I was gossiping with a media person here, and we were talking about Iger, and they're like, every one of these big company CEOs is now effectively an accountant. And the only difference with Bob Iger is he has any amount of emotional intelligence whatsoever. He can communicate like, I like Avengers movies in a way that doesn't make him sound like a robot programmed to try to make a human connection. And then he's like, we'll see if the new guy can do it because he might just be an accountant, too.

[David Pierce]

Yeah. Like, did you. Do you remember that trend? It was like a couple months ago where all the burger CEOs were eating their burgers and every single one of them was just like, weird and bad. And it was like, have you ever eaten a burger before?

[Nilai Patel]

That was actually the context in which this came up.

[David Pierce]

Was it really? Yeah. They are them all. Being accountants now is a perfect explanation. That's really funny. All right, what's your next lightning round?

[Nilai Patel]

What do I got? What do we got?

[David Pierce]

Hold on.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh, speaking of, can I want to end here? Because I. I think this is a preview of some stuff that's. That's coming. The CEO of People Inc. Neil Vogel, has been doing the rounds here. So People Inc. Owns, obviously People. They used to be called dot dash Meredith. They own, like, about dot com, like, this is a big roll up of digital media companies and they changed their name to People Inc. To take, you know, just use the name of the

[David Pierce]

famous magazines to not be called dot dash Meredith.

[Nilai Patel]

You know, good call. So he's on this terror, and you can hear him on all the media podcasts and all this stuff. And he's like, in the age of AI brands, stand for something. And I like, largely agree with him on a lot of these things, but he was on the Axios yacht giving an interview to Axios, because you do interviews in yachts here at Cannes.

[David Pierce]

What a sentence.

[Nilai Patel]

And he said this line, which I think is really interesting. He's like, we partnered with Cloudflare and we blocked every single AI crawler and scraper. We just blocked them all. Like, Cloudflare did us a solid. We just blocked them all. And all of them started calling us because they need our data, because we make new information. And now we have deals. Like, you turned off the spigot and we got all the deals. And he says the one we could not turn off was Google because Google uses the same crawler for search as it does for AI training. He called it an abusive market power. And he said, I wish we could work with them constructively, but we are probably headed for confrontation. Which means the antitrust litigation about Google using the search crawler to train AI is like, we are on the precipice of that antitrust litigation because once the one media company CEO says it, all the rest of them get real brave and they start saying it too. And you can just see it's coming. That's the tip of the iceberg.

[David Pierce]

I think that's interesting. And I think, I mean a. If you want to talk about sort of abusing monopoly power, that seems like a pretty straightforward, like you can't leave our search engine, so we're going to force you to play nice with our AI is like, if I am not an antitrust lawyer, but boy, does that seem like a fairly straight line. But also this, this is a thing that has been brewing, right? And we've been talking a lot about this. And these companies, like you had Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic on Decoder like two years ago, a long time ago, talking about kind of this same dynamic of like, well, we have to figure out how to set a market and protect ourselves while also we think participating in this business and technology that we think is interesting and important and that that has just come for everybody. That now we are in this place where like, he's right. People Inc. Is huge. They have a lot of brands. We've actually been seeing this, this is, this is some like weird inside baseball stuff. But like our real time traffic analysis has recently shown a bunch of weird spikes that make it very obvious spikes in the world. Yeah. And, and like kind of out of nowhere, all of a sudden, like our traffic just like multiplies. And it's very obvious that what this is, is this is AI bots crawling our site. Like, I, I just don't know what else it could possibly be at this moment in time. And so like this, this thing is not going away anytime soon. And in fact it's getting worse and it's changing the traffic mix of the Internet for lots of people. Like Cloudflare has talked about that for the first time. It's seeing more bot traffic than human traffic. Like this thing is, is here now. And I think People Inc. Is an interesting place to fight it.

[Nilai Patel]

The thing that it's going to make everyone do is it will force either everyone gets deals right from the AI companies and it becomes very lucrative for us to put, you know, meaningful human journalism in a database for AI companies to reconstitute as AI summaries. Like, maybe that's the future of everything. The other thing that might happen is that everything gets paywalled even harder because it costs money to serve traffic at scale. And if you're serving a bunch of bot traffic, but. And there's literally nothing on the other end of it for you, you're just going to turn it off. Right. And I think you're going to see a bunch of smaller companies head that way. The people inks of the world are going to body up and do antitrust litigation against. Like, that's what they're going to do. But him saying it at Cannes on a stage, you can see all the other media executives are like, huh, is it time that we say that too? We've been waiting, you know, like it's a herd mentality. And this is, I think, in particular with Google, you know, the deal has been obvious. You allow the Google search crawler to hit your site at scale and in return it delivers you traffic. Like search traffic arrives and you can monetize however you want. Now we're also doing AI and Gemini is just telling you the answers to stuff. You get literally nothing in return. And I think any judge or jury is going to be like, yeah, that's a new deal. No one signed up for this. Google is going to have a lot of responses to that, I'm sure. But it does feel like, pray I don't change the deal further, you know, like that's, that's the mode this industry is in.

[David Pierce]

Yeah.

[Nilai Patel]

That said, it's the south of France. You would not. Just looking at the amount of money sloshing around here, you would not feel like any of these people are in any kind of distress whatsoever.

[David Pierce]

Well, I mean, that's, it's, that's why it's the people links of the world who have to go fight this fight because they're in a. Their business model is much more actively threatened by this at this moment in time. Oh, with that question. Yeah, it's, it's that that fight, I think, is only just beginning. And boy, are we going to cover it here on the show. We should get out of here. You've got fancy people, things to do, I'm sure today Mumford and all of his sons, I assume, are just right outside of your door.

[Nilai Patel]

Get out of here, Mumford.

[David Pierce]

You do need to go. But before you go, what's on decoder next week? What's coming up?

[Nilai Patel]

It's our best episode of the year it's the fourth of July.

[David Pierce]

Oh, yeah.

[Nilai Patel]

It's our grill episode. And I will say this. I shot the intro at a grill

[David Pierce]

that I never thought would have gone this long.

[Nilai Patel]

It's five years. So this year, it's the CEO of Weber, Blackstone. So when we first made our list of, like, what grill CEO should we have? As a joke, you always put Weber at the top, right? And at the time, Weber was too fancy, and they wouldn't do it. And they were like, what are you, a tech website? No. Go away. And so our first ever grill company was Blackstone, the griddle company, which was like, a TikTok sensation.

[David Pierce]

Oh, sure.

[Nilai Patel]

Not only are they a TikTok sensation, they were enough of a rocket shop ship that they acquired Weber. So it's the same guy. It's Roger Dali, the CEO of Blackstone, but he's now the CEO of Weber because he just bought it.

[David Pierce]

Wait, I heard Weber, Blackstone, and I assumed Weber bought Blackstone. You're telling me Blackstone bought Weber?

[Nilai Patel]

They put the more famous name first. Yeah, he just like, yeah, I won, and then I bought you. And now he has, like, the conversation's hilarious. Because he's a really good dude. I really like him a lot. He's very humble. But he's like, yeah, I had to fix this culture that had broken to the point where I showed up and just bought it.

[David Pierce]

Wait, you've. You've backed your way into, like, an accidentally perfect decoder episode.

[Nilai Patel]

It is the funniest decoder episode of all time. Like, we talk about grilling. Not at all. Like, he had to put his merger through ftc. Antitrust review. Wow. So, like, I was like, so. Because I wanted him on the show last year when the deal went down, but he was an antitrust review, so he couldn't Come on.

[David Pierce]

That's awesome.

[Nilai Patel]

It's just easily the funniest. We even talked about Ramageddon. I was like, is the Igrill platform affected by the RAM shortage? And he was like, no, that's not really a problem.

[David Pierce]

I got other fish to fry here.

[Nilai Patel]

But yeah. So a perfect Dakota episode is a guy who, literally, as a startup founder, came to massive prominence in the pandemic because of TikTok. Bought the biggest name in the space.

[David Pierce]

That's awesome.

[Nilai Patel]

It's pretty good.

[David Pierce]

I'm very excited for that.

[Nilai Patel]

Happy fourth of July, everyone.

[David Pierce]

That's good stuff. Also, you're. You're on version history. This coming weekend, we're doing the Nest episode.

[Nilai Patel]

Oh, very good.

[David Pierce]

Where we get deep in our feelings about thermostats. That was really fun. Go subscribe to the Version History YouTube channel, the podcast feed, whatever. It's a really good episode. I think one one of my favorites we've done in a while. I think you'll all enjoy it for now. That's it for the Vergecast. Next week's a short week, but you and I are going to be back, I think next Thursday before we head out for a while. But we got a lot of stuff coming up next week. It's gonna be a fun one. Until then, remember, subscribe to the Verge for all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. You get all of our exclusive newsletters. You get all of our coverage of grills and everything else. I don't know the verge.com subscribe. That's where you go to subscribe. Also send us email vergecasthevirge.com call the hotline 866-verge11 all of your questions, all of your thoughts and feelings about technology and the movie article artificial and everything else. The Verge cast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show was produced by Josh Kahas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuk and Aaron Locasio. We will see you next week.

[Nilai Patel]

Eli can we end on the song instead? Can we. Can we just play Brendan Carr as a dummy instead? Because that's the real rock and roll. Yes,

[David Pierce]

Is a dummy. Brendan Car is a dummy.

[Nilai Patel]

Brandon Car is a dummy. That's really good.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

Roll.

[Nilai Patel]

When I got a new car, I

[David Pierce]

thought my insurance premium would increase and empty my bank account like if fatui won the lottery. I've invested most of my winnings in chicken tenders because they're bomb. But bro, I bought a house and it's sick, bro. I'm thinking the floor is going to be all trampoline, bro. With a helipad on the roof. The contractor said it's structurally unsound. They're just being babies.

[Nilai Patel]

But switching to Geico saved me hundreds.

[David Pierce]

So my bank account is safe.

[Nilai Patel]

It feels good to save some hard earned cash. It feels good to Geico. This episode is brought to you by Google Chrome.

[David Pierce]

You think you know a browser, but Gemini and Chrome, that's new. It can help you with practically anything

[Nilai Patel]

on the web, like restoring a vintage motorcycle from a 50 page restoration block.

[David Pierce]

Or finally break down that long article you've had open for weeks.

[Nilai Patel]

Gemini and Chrome is here for it,

[David Pierce]

ready to make anything online make sense. There's no place like Chrome.

[Nilai Patel]

Check responses setup required compatibility and availability varies.

[Sponsor/Ad Voice]

18.

[Nilai Patel]

You can't reason with the sun. Trust us, we've tried. This summer, it's time to put that angry ball of fire on mute. Columbia's Omnishade technology is engineered to protect you from the sun's harsh rays that can burn and damage your skin. The sun is relentless, but so is our gear. Level up your summer@columbus columbia.com to spend more time outside and less time slathering on aloe lotion. You're welcome, Columbia. Engineered for whatever.