The Verge's Nilay Patel, Alex Cranz, and David Pierce discuss third-party iPhone app stores, game emulators, Google Android and hardware team restructuring, the latest TikTok news, and more.
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00:00:00 (dramatic music)
00:00:02 - Hello and welcome to the Rich Hast,
00:00:04 flagship podcast, mini LED technology.
00:00:07 - Yeah.
00:00:08 - If there's one thing this show is actually about.
00:00:11 - It's displays.
00:00:12 - It's displays.
00:00:12 - Yeah.
00:00:13 - Classic audio subject.
00:00:16 - It's David's favorite subject.
00:00:18 - If you're gonna talk displays,
00:00:22 you wanna do it in a radio show.
00:00:25 - That sounds right, yeah.
00:00:26 - I'm gonna make a TV show that's just sound next.
00:00:30 It's gonna be sick.
00:00:31 - Yeah.
00:00:32 - I feel like that's been done quite a lot.
00:00:35 - I also feel like Netflix just greenlit that for me,
00:00:37 just now.
00:00:38 - Congratulations to me.
00:00:39 - Just sound with David Pierce.
00:00:40 - Just sound with David.
00:00:41 (laughing)
00:00:42 It's pretty good.
00:00:43 - It's just you listing sounds you like.
00:00:45 - I was seeing him like in a little robe,
00:00:47 sitting at like a fireplace behind him,
00:00:49 and be like, and now here's another sound.
00:00:51 - Yeah, exactly, yeah, right.
00:00:52 He's like flipping pages.
00:00:53 - With like the NPR voice, yeah.
00:00:53 - He's like, baby's laughing.
00:00:55 (laughing)
00:00:56 - I feel like I have to disclose it
00:00:57 on the EP of a Netflix show.
00:00:59 (laughing)
00:00:59 - Oh yeah, we got to this right away.
00:01:01 You didn't even say your name
00:01:02 and you've already disclosed.
00:01:03 This is great.
00:01:04 - That was Neely.
00:01:05 (laughing)
00:01:06 - Neely.
00:01:07 The Netflix show is called The Future of,
00:01:08 it's great, you should go watch it.
00:01:10 This is Alex Kranz.
00:01:11 - Hey, what's up?
00:01:12 That's all I got.
00:01:13 - David Pierce, host of Just Sounds with David Pierce.
00:01:17 - It's an honor to be here.
00:01:18 - Oh my God, I love your work.
00:01:20 - It's good.
00:01:21 - Yeah.
00:01:22 - You know that, when you plug a USB device in
00:01:24 to Windows and it's like, do do do.
00:01:26 It's a good one.
00:01:28 That's episode three.
00:01:30 - Yeah.
00:01:30 (laughing)
00:01:33 - I'm just offering my, you know,
00:01:36 you got to brainstorm.
00:01:37 - It's a spin off for the Verge cast.
00:01:38 - All right, there's actually quite a lot of news this week.
00:01:40 - Yeah.
00:01:41 - We've got to talk about what's happening
00:01:42 with the iPhone, emulators have hit various app stores
00:01:45 around the world, which is actually really interesting.
00:01:47 Google has reshuffled its Android team,
00:01:49 which we should talk about.
00:01:50 Meta launched its big AI push to compete with ChatGBT.
00:01:54 It is true that Sony announced the next generation
00:01:56 of its mini LED TVs.
00:01:57 That will be a full hour in the middle of the show today.
00:02:00 Then we got a couple of letting rounds
00:02:02 and David's gonna do something he calls
00:02:03 headline blitz with David Pierce.
00:02:05 (laughing)
00:02:07 - Speed run.
00:02:08 - I'm gonna, it's the Just Sounds,
00:02:10 but it's me screaming headlines at you about TikTok.
00:02:13 It's gonna be incredible.
00:02:15 - I also, I just wanna, I'm gonna try to summon
00:02:19 some energy in the world.
00:02:20 It appears, not today, but there might be
00:02:24 a lightning round sponsor in the future.
00:02:26 So if you could, everyone listening could just--
00:02:29 - Send us the good vibes.
00:02:31 - We're gonna make it happen.
00:02:31 - Yeah.
00:02:32 - It's a guy named Steve.
00:02:34 He gave me 20 bucks.
00:02:36 - I love Steve, thanks for the 20.
00:02:38 - It's not Steve.
00:02:39 Sorry Steve.
00:02:40 Okay, let's talk about emulators on the app store.
00:02:42 This is a big deal.
00:02:43 So if you've been listening to Varchesk, you know,
00:02:47 the Europeans did some regulating, as they want to do.
00:02:50 They basically said you have to allow other app stores
00:02:54 in Europe on iOS devices.
00:02:56 Those other app stores started appearing.
00:02:57 One launched this week, Alt Store Pal.
00:03:00 What's the first thing these alternative app stores
00:03:04 want to allow?
00:03:05 Game emulators.
00:03:05 It's the thing people want.
00:03:07 There's been a little bit of back and forth
00:03:08 about which emulators are going up first,
00:03:11 which ones aren't.
00:03:12 Apple responds to this by saying, you know what?
00:03:15 We are going to allow emulators in our app store now
00:03:18 because we don't want people installing
00:03:20 these other app stores.
00:03:21 That means emulators have come to the Apple run
00:03:24 iOS app store.
00:03:25 The first good one called Delta is out.
00:03:28 It's been 10 years in the making, basically.
00:03:29 Riley test out the developers and cranking away on it
00:03:31 in various ways, gray area ways for 10 years.
00:03:36 It's here, people are playing it and they're loving it.
00:03:38 - It's good.
00:03:39 - David, you've been tracking this all very closely.
00:03:40 What's the vibe?
00:03:41 - Yeah, I'm just looking to see if this app
00:03:43 is still the number one app in the app store.
00:03:45 It is, in fact, still the number one app in the app store.
00:03:48 So, it was like two weeks ago, as you're hearing this
00:03:51 on Friday, I think two weeks to the day
00:03:53 since Apple did what it likes to do in these cases,
00:03:56 which is just sort of update a support page
00:03:58 without really telling anybody.
00:03:59 But there are people watching these things.
00:04:01 And basically, over the last five days, really,
00:04:05 we got the first Apple emulator, which showed up
00:04:10 in the app store and then fairly quickly
00:04:12 was revealed to be a clone of the old version of Delta,
00:04:17 which was an app called GBA4iOS,
00:04:21 spelled just like it sounds, really pulls off the tongue.
00:04:24 And it quickly got pulled from the app store.
00:04:27 And then another one came out, I think it was called Bimi.
00:04:30 It was out for a minute and then the developer pulled it
00:04:33 out of what the developer said was fear,
00:04:36 which we should come back to, which I think is fascinating.
00:04:38 And then, like you said, Delta came out.
00:04:41 We've talked to Riley on this show before.
00:04:42 He was on the show last fall talking about emulators.
00:04:44 He's been working on this forever.
00:04:46 And at one point a few years ago,
00:04:48 thought he was gonna be in the app store,
00:04:50 and then that got ripped away and has come up with,
00:04:52 I would say, increasingly creative ways,
00:04:55 if you wanna do some work, to get this thing out.
00:04:57 As soon as the announcement came out
00:04:59 that third-party app stores were gonna be allowed,
00:05:01 he announced he's been working on one.
00:05:03 Like, this was always the plan.
00:05:04 And then I think, it seems like basically
00:05:06 just out of nowhere, Apple was like,
00:05:09 "Yeah, you're cool, you can do this."
00:05:10 And he was like, "Sick, I've been building this
00:05:12 "for 10 years, here it is."
00:05:14 And it is like, I mean, it is a remarkably good app.
00:05:18 For what it does, we can talk about the legality
00:05:21 of ROMs and emulation, we should talk about all of that.
00:05:24 I did a Decoder episode with Sean Hollister
00:05:26 on all of this, like two weeks ago, it was very good.
00:05:28 But it's just so funny.
00:05:31 This is like a version 10 app that just showed up
00:05:34 on the app store all at once.
00:05:36 Like, I think I can say this without getting me
00:05:38 or Riley in trouble.
00:05:39 This thing has been in test flight for a very long time
00:05:41 because there's a lot less review on test flight.
00:05:45 You can just test apps in beta, some people can have them.
00:05:48 I have had it, it's like, it's out there.
00:05:50 And now all of a sudden he was able to just flip the switch
00:05:52 and it is the number one app in the app store.
00:05:54 So much pent up demand for something like this.
00:05:57 It's fascinating.
00:05:59 - So, we should talk about the legality of it, Alex.
00:06:01 I know you've been tracking a lot of that stuff over time.
00:06:05 There's a war on emulators generally occurring.
00:06:08 - Yeah, yeah, Nintendo for the longest time was like,
00:06:12 you know what, you do you.
00:06:13 Because the emulator audience I think was fairly small.
00:06:16 And I think they have been kind of probably dreading
00:06:19 and looking at this moment and knowing it was gonna happen
00:06:21 at some point.
00:06:22 'Cause you can get them on Android and go to town.
00:06:26 But iOS--
00:06:27 - But it takes some work.
00:06:28 - Yeah, it takes some work.
00:06:28 And iOS is like, there's some impact there.
00:06:31 And if you can just automatically download this
00:06:33 and then get your ROMs, that means you're not gonna pay
00:06:36 Nintendo for a similar version of it on your Switch, right?
00:06:41 Why would you do that when you can just have it
00:06:44 on your iPhone?
00:06:44 - I mean, so the answer for the longest time has been,
00:06:47 why doesn't Nintendo make a Game Boy Advance emulator
00:06:50 and sell ROMs?
00:06:52 And the answer to that has been,
00:06:55 they don't wanna pay 30% to Apple in fees?
00:06:57 - Yeah, it's kind of like, I think the more accurate,
00:07:01 like emotionally, their response is,
00:07:04 you know that meme of your beloved?
00:07:09 - The meme of my beloved.
00:07:11 - Singer.
00:07:12 - This singer.
00:07:13 - Mariah Carey.
00:07:14 - Mariah Carey.
00:07:15 You know that one of Mariah Carey?
00:07:17 That's what I think of.
00:07:18 - The meme of my beloved sounds like a very,
00:07:20 very inexpensive Netflix show.
00:07:22 (laughing)
00:07:25 That's just a couple guys and an iPhone and one--
00:07:27 - That's like a freebie show, yeah, right?
00:07:29 That's on freebie.
00:07:30 - I'm just, all right.
00:07:32 - But you know that Mariah Carey meme
00:07:34 where she's like, I don't know her,
00:07:35 and puts the glasses down?
00:07:37 That's kind of been Nintendo looking at the iPhone
00:07:39 for the last 15 years.
00:07:42 - Fair enough.
00:07:43 - Yeah, I don't know her, go away.
00:07:45 - But if you put Nintendo games on the iPhone,
00:07:46 you just reduce the value of Nintendo's hardware.
00:07:49 - Right, right.
00:07:50 - That's the thing that has been the problem.
00:07:52 - That is the thing.
00:07:53 That's what Nintendo is most focused on,
00:07:55 is they've got a really good business
00:07:57 of focusing on the hardware.
00:07:58 And they've opened up, right?
00:08:00 They've done some more development.
00:08:02 Super Mario, is it Super Mario Run?
00:08:04 I believe.
00:08:05 They've got some good games on there.
00:08:07 And they've even recently, I believe late last year,
00:08:10 were kind of like, yeah, we're gonna start
00:08:12 exploring more stuff on iOS.
00:08:17 But for the longest time, they've not been a fan of it.
00:08:19 And they've recently started going
00:08:20 after these companies again.
00:08:22 - Companies in little groups.
00:08:25 - Yeah.
00:08:25 - So Jason Citron, the CEO of Discord,
00:08:27 is on Decoder next week, look out for that.
00:08:30 Discord just got what amounts to a cease and desist,
00:08:33 like legal orders saying delete these channels,
00:08:37 these servers that are hosting emulator groups.
00:08:39 And they just wiped them out.
00:08:41 - Yep.
00:08:41 - And it's actually, when we talked about it,
00:08:43 he's like, the lawyers won't let me say.
00:08:45 But basically he's like, we don't have a choice.
00:08:48 And no one really knows how they ended up not a choice.
00:08:51 So you're just in this weird moment
00:08:53 where this stuff has been tolerated
00:08:55 because the distribution is zero,
00:08:57 or a handful of people in test flight who know Riley.
00:09:01 - Yeah.
00:09:02 - Or illegal in a way that's like fine.
00:09:05 There's a lot of arguments that it should be legal,
00:09:07 but it's been tolerated.
00:09:09 - Yeah.
00:09:10 - Now it's in the store.
00:09:11 Like Apple's like, screw it.
00:09:13 The last thing we can allow is the rise
00:09:16 of successful alternative app stores
00:09:18 because there's demand for these emulators.
00:09:20 We have to allow it in our store to keep people away
00:09:22 from the alternative app stores.
00:09:24 And it feels like this whole conversation
00:09:26 is gonna come to some kind of head.
00:09:27 - I totally agree.
00:09:28 And I think this is sort of a truism
00:09:31 of gaming in general that has held true over time,
00:09:34 that people who wanna play games
00:09:36 will jump through a surprising number of hoops
00:09:38 in order to play games, right?
00:09:40 It's why all of the cutting edge PC hardware
00:09:42 is given to gamers first,
00:09:44 because they're the ones who will pay for it
00:09:45 and do the work to adopt it.
00:09:46 It's why Apple allowed game streaming.
00:09:48 For the same reason, people will go out of their way
00:09:51 to do whatever they have to do in order to play games.
00:09:53 And so Apple has started to pull this stuff back.
00:09:56 But I just keep thinking about when we did an episode
00:09:58 on emulators on this show last year,
00:10:00 Chris Plant, the editor-in-chief of Polygon,
00:10:02 basically said when I asked,
00:10:04 "When are we just gonna get Spotify for old video games?
00:10:06 "Why can't I pay 20 bucks a month
00:10:08 "to play all of these ROMs perfectly legally?"
00:10:10 And he just looks me dead in the face and goes,
00:10:11 "No one actually wants that."
00:10:14 And his point was just that this group of people
00:10:16 is so small and so irrelevant
00:10:19 to the rest of the gaming industry
00:10:21 that it's actually not worth the effort to care about them.
00:10:24 For Nintendo, for anybody else,
00:10:26 that it's like you leave them alone
00:10:28 because odds are they're also buying your new games
00:10:30 and so that's great.
00:10:31 You don't wanna piss them off.
00:10:33 But it's just kind of a live and let live thing
00:10:35 because it doesn't mean anything to anybody else.
00:10:37 I think the fact that Delta is so successful
00:10:40 and the fact that this has become such a big thing
00:10:42 is going to be a really interesting moment in that story.
00:10:46 Because this is the first time ever
00:10:48 it looks like there is actual, honest to God,
00:10:49 mainstream demand for something like this.
00:10:52 Because if you just download Delta, there's nothing there.
00:10:54 It's just an app with nothing to do.
00:10:56 You have to fill it with stuff.
00:10:58 And that stuff has to come from somewhere
00:11:00 and that stuff mostly comes from places
00:11:02 that are not you dumping ROMs that are yours
00:11:06 from your Game Boy cartridges,
00:11:08 which no one knows how to do
00:11:09 and no one is going to know how to do.
00:11:10 And you can just go on Google and search for ROMs
00:11:12 and they're all right there.
00:11:13 So this stuff is just out of the shadows in a way
00:11:16 it never has been before.
00:11:17 - I feel like notable Plex owner, Alex Kranz,
00:11:19 has a response for you, David.
00:11:21 - It is a lot easier if you wanna back up your carts now
00:11:24 versus 20 years ago.
00:11:26 - That's true.
00:11:27 - There's a lot of different ways to do it.
00:11:28 I think you can technically do it
00:11:29 with some of the analog consoles
00:11:32 and there's a whole bunch of little tools and stuff.
00:11:34 And to be clear, Nintendo doesn't care as much
00:11:37 about the NES games and the Super Nintendo games.
00:11:39 When they went after Yuzu,
00:11:40 that was because Yuzu was doing much more,
00:11:42 like it was doing the Switch.
00:11:43 The thing actually out right now that you can buy.
00:11:45 - Including Tears of the Kingdom.
00:11:46 Like before other people were playing Tears of the Kingdom,
00:11:49 people on Yuzu were able to play Tears of the Kingdom.
00:11:51 - And this next part I say,
00:11:53 as someone who owns the Super Nintendo version
00:11:56 of the analog, loves a retro game,
00:11:59 have you played a retro game lately?
00:12:01 - So I'm watching Fallout
00:12:02 and I was like, I should play Fallout 1.
00:12:04 And then I looked at it and I was like,
00:12:05 I'm not gonna play Fallout 1.
00:12:07 - Yeah, it's like watching old movies.
00:12:09 It takes a very particular kind of person to be like, yes.
00:12:12 - You know where they really work though, is on the iPhone.
00:12:16 - Yes.
00:12:17 - All the games that look like crap on your 60 inch 4K TV
00:12:21 look great in a little square on your iPhone.
00:12:24 It is the perfect place for this kind of thing.
00:12:26 - But it's, in some ways, right?
00:12:29 - I don't know this, I just know this hypothetically
00:12:31 based on the internet and all of the carts
00:12:34 that I have legally downloaded.
00:12:36 - This is great.
00:12:37 I feel like the fact that I'm, one, in charge
00:12:41 of this operation, two, a fucking copyright lawyer,
00:12:45 and three, deeply aware of the situation is all that,
00:12:48 like I'm going to jail when I leave here.
00:12:50 - Yeah, they're actually sitting out there.
00:12:52 But just for Neela, David and I get off.
00:12:54 - The Nintendo police are here.
00:12:55 They're like, Nintendo.
00:12:57 (Neela laughs)
00:12:59 - I'm sorry.
00:13:00 I couldn't apologize more deeply if I wanted to.
00:13:04 - Here's the finger work.
00:13:06 - So let's set aside the legality, right?
00:13:10 'Cause it is actually a weird gray area.
00:13:12 There's a lot of parallels to Napster and ripping MP3s
00:13:16 and it's a lot.
00:13:17 The law has changed.
00:13:19 Maybe we'll come back and do a whole thing
00:13:21 on the legality of that.
00:13:23 Let's set that aside.
00:13:25 One huge problem Apple has here is it traditionally
00:13:27 has not allowed emulation of any kind.
00:13:29 And now it is allowing it, which means an entire library
00:13:34 of software that people like better than Apple software
00:13:38 is available and proving a very important point.
00:13:40 Right, like Nintendo games are better than the games
00:13:45 that Apple has half-heartedly supported for 10 years.
00:13:49 And they are running in emulation.
00:13:51 They're not coded in Swift.
00:13:54 The controls are better.
00:13:56 They're more portable.
00:13:57 It's better.
00:13:58 Like the whole thing is showing a vision
00:14:02 of what the iPhone could have been the whole time
00:14:05 if Apple would just let go.
00:14:07 - Yep.
00:14:08 - And I feel like that's actually the bigger problem
00:14:10 for Apple in all of this.
00:14:11 Like the next emulator that comes out
00:14:14 is gonna just be Windows 95, right?
00:14:17 - But it can't.
00:14:18 That breaks the rules.
00:14:19 This is like, the parsing Apple's review guidelines
00:14:23 is so funny here because you can just tell
00:14:25 the number of meetings they had
00:14:27 to make sure what you just said is impossible.
00:14:29 Let me just read you two sentences.
00:14:31 It says, "Additionally, retro game console emulator apps
00:14:34 "can offer to download games."
00:14:36 So much going on in that sentence.
00:14:40 The following sentence, "You are responsible
00:14:42 "for all such software offered in your app,
00:14:43 "including ensuring that such software complies
00:14:45 "with these guidelines and all applicable laws."
00:14:48 Which applicable laws?
00:14:50 Who's to say?
00:14:51 But the phrase retro game console emulator apps
00:14:55 is so specific and so lawyered to absolute death.
00:15:01 What counts as retro?
00:15:04 Who's to say?
00:15:05 Apple can do whatever it wants.
00:15:06 What counts as a console?
00:15:07 A PC probably doesn't.
00:15:09 Like it is so narrowly tailored to just let Apple
00:15:12 do whatever it wants and nothing else in the funniest way.
00:15:16 - I just think this is gonna somehow end up
00:15:19 with all the Nintendo emulators getting kicked off
00:15:22 because Nintendo raises a stink
00:15:24 and we're just left with like Atari Lynx.
00:15:26 - But there can't be a universe,
00:15:28 by the way, Atari Lynx emulators rule.
00:15:31 I had California games on my Atari Lynx.
00:15:32 That shit was awesome.
00:15:33 - You had an Atari Lynx?
00:15:34 - Oh yeah, I did not notably have a Game Gear.
00:15:37 - No.
00:15:38 - I had the other thing, that's a bummer.
00:15:39 - I'm so sorry.
00:15:40 - I had the ostracized Atari Lynx.
00:15:43 - You had the one that I could only find
00:15:44 at like the off-brand toy store.
00:15:46 - It wasn't great.
00:15:47 I really wanted the TV tuner attachment.
00:15:48 - We're gonna come to TV tuners later in the show.
00:15:50 We'll come back.
00:15:51 It's all thematically linked.
00:15:53 Just thinking about my Atari Lynx.
00:15:57 It had the little cartridges that were like very thin.
00:15:59 - That was so cute.
00:16:00 - The Xbox 360 is a retro game console
00:16:02 at this point in time.
00:16:03 - Is it?
00:16:04 - Yes, of course it is.
00:16:05 - Maybe.
00:16:06 - It's two generations ago.
00:16:07 It's 20 years old.
00:16:09 - I think part of this is gonna be these companies
00:16:11 who are actively selling it, right?
00:16:12 Like Microsoft is pretty active
00:16:14 in supporting old games, right?
00:16:16 They're very backwards compatible.
00:16:17 Nintendo's actually pretty backwards compatible.
00:16:20 Sony, way less so.
00:16:21 So I think there's a real potential
00:16:23 of seeing like a PS1 game.
00:16:24 - If you are Microsoft,
00:16:26 you have a 20 year old console,
00:16:29 why aren't you putting that emulator on the store tomorrow
00:16:32 with the ability to download games for three bucks
00:16:34 and you're giving a buck to Apple?
00:16:36 Who cares?
00:16:37 That is free money.
00:16:39 - Some consoles are harder to emulate than others, right?
00:16:42 Like the Nintendo consoles, most of them are really easy.
00:16:45 N64, super hard.
00:16:47 Even on an iPhone today,
00:16:48 it is really hard to get N64 games playing properly.
00:16:52 And I think Xbox might be the same.
00:16:54 I need to double check this.
00:16:55 But I'm pretty sure that the Xbox 360,
00:16:57 you don't see as big a robust emulator community around it
00:17:01 as you do like Sony games.
00:17:02 And part of that is, again,
00:17:04 you can just go buy those games.
00:17:05 Like if you have an Xbox, any kind of Xbox,
00:17:08 you can just go and play Saints Row 2 or whatever.
00:17:11 - Yes, Sony is an interesting example
00:17:12 because Sony has done a really good job over the years
00:17:15 of making its current consoles.
00:17:18 And I confess, I don't have a PS5,
00:17:19 so I don't know how true this still is now.
00:17:21 But for a long time,
00:17:23 there were a lot of PS1 and PS2 games
00:17:25 that you could play on a PS3 and a PS4.
00:17:27 Like they've done a good job of keeping that stuff available
00:17:31 and making it part of its cloud services and all this stuff.
00:17:34 So I think if I'm Sony,
00:17:36 I can sort of see it in both directions.
00:17:38 Where one, it's like, okay,
00:17:38 this is helping me sell PlayStation.
00:17:41 So I want to do that.
00:17:42 But on the other hand,
00:17:42 I kind of agree that if Sony was just like,
00:17:44 hey, for whatever, 10 bucks a month,
00:17:48 you can play every PS1 game on your iPhone,
00:17:50 like I'd sign up for that in a heartbeat.
00:17:53 And it's just sitting there for them.
00:17:54 - It is true that some of this stuff is hard,
00:17:56 but have you heard of the staggering power
00:17:57 of the A-series chip?
00:17:58 - So as you guys were talking, I was looking this up,
00:18:01 and apparently there's only really like one emulator
00:18:04 for right now for Xbox 360.
00:18:05 It's only for PC.
00:18:06 It's called Xenia, which love the name.
00:18:09 And on Reddit, there is discussions.
00:18:12 People are really weird about it.
00:18:13 They're like, yeah, it sucks, or it's fine.
00:18:16 But it's apparently like one of the only ones.
00:18:19 - No, there's one called Xemu.
00:18:21 - Oh, there's also Xemu?
00:18:22 - Xemu is for the Mac.
00:18:24 - How could you forget about Xemu?
00:18:24 - I'm so sorry.
00:18:25 - We're all just Googling.
00:18:26 - We're just Googling this furiously right now.
00:18:28 - The point is Microsoft is very capable
00:18:30 of making the product.
00:18:31 Sony is very capable of making the product.
00:18:33 It is free to them 'cause they already own the library.
00:18:37 The demand is obvious,
00:18:39 and the thing it's just gonna prove out
00:18:42 is Apple's way of doing things
00:18:44 has unnecessarily restricted user experiences
00:18:47 on the iPhone. - That's a good point, yeah.
00:18:49 - That is the danger, because once that falls away,
00:18:53 and people are like, wait, this is better
00:18:54 than when Apple was in tight control of this ecosystem,
00:18:58 which is what we hear, by the way.
00:18:59 When we talk about antitrust and control,
00:19:02 we get an awful lot of notes from people
00:19:04 who are like, this is what I'm paying for.
00:19:06 It's for Tim Cook to push all the buttons
00:19:08 on my phone for me.
00:19:10 - Well, and I would point out
00:19:11 that one of the really hard things
00:19:12 about regulating that is proving the other way,
00:19:16 because a big part of what the DOJ in this case is saying
00:19:19 is that it would be better if it wasn't like this,
00:19:21 and that's so, so, so hard to prove,
00:19:24 and this, to your point, is going to be a very real way
00:19:28 in which it is going to get a lot better very quickly
00:19:31 because it changed.
00:19:32 - And I believe, I don't know,
00:19:34 but I believe that's why the emulator rule is global,
00:19:37 and not just in Europe, where Apple is required,
00:19:40 like legally required to allow other app stores,
00:19:43 which would just go ahead and do this.
00:19:45 They know, they can see the outsized demand for emulators.
00:19:49 If you allow other app stores with more permissive rules,
00:19:52 people will flock to those app stores,
00:19:54 they'll get the demand, they'll be like,
00:19:55 in Europe, we get game emulators.
00:19:57 Why don't we get them here?
00:19:58 Well, I guess we need rules to allow other app stores
00:20:01 in the United States, and they're not.
00:20:02 I think they'd rather be in a lawsuit with Nintendo
00:20:05 than have any political capital
00:20:08 to open up the app model in the United States.
00:20:09 - And that'd be a wild lawsuit, right?
00:20:11 'Cause a lot of these games were made,
00:20:14 and copyright was super weird in the '80s
00:20:17 around video games, if I remember correctly.
00:20:19 - It remains super weird, I would say it's not.
00:20:20 - Yeah, it's not easily sorted,
00:20:22 so this would be a fight for Nintendo regardless.
00:20:25 - It depends on who you're suing,
00:20:28 what you're suing them for.
00:20:30 Again, the things that you would map it to
00:20:34 are still Napster and Grokster,
00:20:37 and the Supreme Court and the appeals courts
00:20:39 in those cases invented theories of liability.
00:20:43 Like, with Grokster, it was like,
00:20:45 you are enabling copyright infringement,
00:20:47 you know it's happening,
00:20:48 you're marketing the thing for copyright infringement.
00:20:49 Now you are liable for copyright infringement,
00:20:51 even though you've done none yourself.
00:20:54 That's a bunch of steps down there,
00:20:56 you gotta get all the way there.
00:20:57 I'm not sure that you're gonna do that
00:21:00 against a single developer,
00:21:00 I'm not sure you can prove that case against Apple.
00:21:02 By allowing these emulators on your store,
00:21:05 you know you're marketing the iPhone
00:21:07 to do this copyright infringement,
00:21:09 there's a lot of road, it's a lot of steps.
00:21:11 - Yeah, it's also, Apple is,
00:21:13 like the second sentence of that thing
00:21:15 in the guidelines that I read is Apple
00:21:17 pretty clearly foisting that responsibility
00:21:19 on whoever is shipping the emulator.
00:21:21 They're like, oh, if people use software in here
00:21:23 that isn't yours to own, that's your problem.
00:21:25 We told you not to, you've broken our terms of service.
00:21:28 - Well that's why they pulled the one app too, right?
00:21:30 Like the GBA for iOS.
00:21:33 - No, that is very confusing.
00:21:35 - Yeah, I agree.
00:21:36 - So iGBA comes out,
00:21:38 that's the first emulator hit any of these stores.
00:21:40 - Okay, so not GBA for iOS.
00:21:42 - Right, but then Riley tweets,
00:21:43 hey, this is a fork of GBA for iOS,
00:21:45 the thing that I made long ago.
00:21:48 - That I definitely never had on my phone.
00:21:50 - And his point was Apple makes all this noise
00:21:53 about how the app store is controlled and safe,
00:21:55 and here's just a bootleg of my decade old project
00:21:58 that they let slide through while my real project
00:22:01 is sitting in review.
00:22:03 So he's like very irritated about this.
00:22:06 Apple pulls the app, and then in a classic sort of Apple way
00:22:10 there's no public explanation given of what they're doing,
00:22:12 there's nothing we can link to,
00:22:13 there's Mac rumors saying Apple has told us on background
00:22:16 that they've pulled it for these two reasons,
00:22:19 one of which is copyright.
00:22:21 - Yeah, it's so important in this context
00:22:24 to remember that Apple's review process is insane.
00:22:27 Like in all seriousness, anyone who claims
00:22:31 that Apple's app review process is consistent
00:22:34 and has rules and makes sense is just out of their mind.
00:22:38 And we see this all the time,
00:22:40 it's so easy for bad apps to get through
00:22:43 while people get their apps hung up
00:22:46 on absolute tiny technicalities
00:22:48 that don't actually have anything to do with anything,
00:22:50 it's lunacy.
00:22:52 And so I think what happened in this case
00:22:53 is once it became obvious that this app
00:22:56 was just a rip of Riley's app, it's very popular,
00:23:00 this is a new thing, it makes sense from Apple's perspective
00:23:03 to say you've violated the rules
00:23:06 by borrowing someone else's app.
00:23:08 I think even the rule is borrowed in scare quotes
00:23:11 in Apple's guidelines, that they can't borrow your work,
00:23:15 which is a very funny way to say.
00:23:16 And so I think in this case it's pretty easy
00:23:19 and protected for Apple to say
00:23:20 you just boosted somebody else's app,
00:23:22 you can't have this.
00:23:23 - Well yeah, and it basically had wiped some of the licenses
00:23:27 that the original was developed with.
00:23:29 - Classic.
00:23:30 - Off of it.
00:23:31 - Classic back faith move.
00:23:33 - And filled it with ads, right?
00:23:34 - Yeah, so it was just all around like,
00:23:36 no, this is garbage.
00:23:38 And the guy apologized.
00:23:38 - And this is the thing we see in the app store
00:23:39 all the time, do you remember when Flappy Bird came out
00:23:42 and all of a sudden there were 40,000 Flappy Birds
00:23:44 that all had a million ads?
00:23:45 Or ChatGPT when it came out and was first really popular,
00:23:48 you could search for ChatGPT
00:23:50 and there were a billion things
00:23:51 that kinda looked like ChatGPT and were called ChatGPT
00:23:54 but just had ads and would steal your family from you.
00:23:57 Like, Apple is bad at this.
00:24:00 And just continues to pretend that it is like
00:24:04 in a firm hold of everything that happens in the app store
00:24:06 and it just is not.
00:24:08 - Nope.
00:24:09 - So that's emulators here in the United States
00:24:12 around the world because Apple knows
00:24:14 if it allows emulators in alternative app stores in Europe,
00:24:17 people will want them here, it's bad.
00:24:19 So it's allowed them here.
00:24:20 Wait, can I ask a legal question though?
00:24:22 This is the thing I've been wondering
00:24:23 about the last couple of days
00:24:24 since this has been going on.
00:24:26 This idea that we now see what better looks like
00:24:30 and that could be bad for Apple.
00:24:31 I've been trying to figure out in my head,
00:24:32 if I'm Apple, am I more worried about,
00:24:36 okay, this sort of proved the point
00:24:37 that the iPhone gets better if we allow this one thing,
00:24:40 now it becomes more legally dicey,
00:24:41 they're gonna say, well now we have to allow
00:24:43 all these other things because we've proven the point
00:24:44 that it gets better when we do.
00:24:46 Or does Apple say, we've thrown you a bone or two,
00:24:51 let's all shake hands and move on?
00:24:53 Does that make sense?
00:24:54 I'm trying to figure out which is the winning strategy there.
00:24:56 - I'm gonna ask some AI generation program
00:24:59 to generate Tim Cook and Jonathan Cantor
00:25:01 and Tim Cook saying, we've thrown you a bone or two,
00:25:04 now let's shake hands.
00:25:06 It'll blow up, we're gonna blow up a data center
00:25:07 with that prompt, it's an unimaginable situation.
00:25:10 I think the danger for Apple is they will get forced
00:25:15 into allowing more and more things.
00:25:18 This has long been the danger,
00:25:19 this is why they fought it for so long.
00:25:21 We don't know what kinds of things will happen
00:25:24 in the European market because other kinds of app stores
00:25:27 are gonna let other kinds of things happen.
00:25:29 So there's only one app store in Europe right now,
00:25:31 it's by Riley Testout, it is called AltStorePal,
00:25:35 it's gonna launch with Delta, obviously,
00:25:38 and this Clipboard Manager app, Clip,
00:25:40 which is a type of app that is forbidden by Apple
00:25:43 in the regular app store because the Clipboard Manager
00:25:45 can see all the things that you're copying and pasting.
00:25:48 Totally normal to have Clipboard Managers
00:25:51 on desktop computers, Apple is not allowed on the phone.
00:25:53 So here we go, here's this one other kind of thing
00:25:55 you can do in the iPhone that you couldn't do before.
00:25:56 Is that gonna be enough to turn the tide
00:26:00 of regulation around, I don't know.
00:26:02 Emulators obviously were, right?
00:26:04 So there's only one store right now.
00:26:06 - Yeah, there's only one store
00:26:08 and there's no porn or gambling
00:26:11 and I feel like we made a bet.
00:26:13 I think I may have lost a bet somewhere.
00:26:14 - How quickly porn, well I think Riley's been working
00:26:16 on this store for a long time.
00:26:18 - Yeah, and he didn't wanna put porn on it.
00:26:19 - Give it a minute, Kranz, I absolutely do not believe
00:26:22 you have lost this bet yet.
00:26:24 - It's coming.
00:26:25 - The second the Vision OS app store opens,
00:26:28 the floodgates, wrong phrase.
00:26:32 (laughing)
00:26:34 I'm sorry, boy.
00:26:38 - Don't cut any of that.
00:26:38 - But there's only one, the point is there's only one store,
00:26:40 we don't know, but the second there's another
00:26:43 compelling thing that you can accomplish
00:26:46 with an app from another store that is compelling enough
00:26:49 for anyone, any significant set of people
00:26:51 to go download that store and get that app,
00:26:53 Apple will allow that thing.
00:26:55 It seems inevitable that that is just how the flow
00:27:00 of innovation is gonna go now.
00:27:02 We always joke that just the hint of competition
00:27:06 makes these companies behave,
00:27:07 just like a whisper of competition.
00:27:09 Here you have both mandated competition
00:27:13 because of the regulators, there's now other app stores,
00:27:15 and there's gonna be way more than a whisper of competition.
00:27:18 There's gonna be just people trying stuff
00:27:20 'cause it's a land grab in Europe for iPhone customers again,
00:27:25 which is cool.
00:27:26 - Yeah, and that pipeline of cool apps come out
00:27:30 that Apple doesn't allow to, Apple allows it
00:27:33 so that people don't go through the hoops
00:27:35 of downloading an app.
00:27:37 What it seems is now obvious,
00:27:39 and I'm so curious how far this will go,
00:27:41 is that it is more important to Apple
00:27:43 to keep you in the app store
00:27:45 than to keep its rules about the app store.
00:27:48 - Oh yeah.
00:27:49 - Apple will bend massively as long as you stay
00:27:52 in the app store, and it's gonna be so interesting
00:27:55 to see how far that extends.
00:27:58 I am on record with the Apple Sports stuff
00:28:01 to say that betting and gambling is coming
00:28:04 to Apple platforms in a way that people do not yet see.
00:28:08 And I think this, porn I think is probably
00:28:10 a pretty bright line for Apple
00:28:12 that it won't cross for a variety of reasons,
00:28:14 but there will be popular betting apps
00:28:18 that do things that Apple's apps won't let you do,
00:28:21 and how far will it go to keep as much in the app store
00:28:25 as it possibly can is going to be a big question
00:28:27 over the next year or so.
00:28:28 - Oh see, I think the port is gonna happen as well.
00:28:31 I think they're gonna do-- - In the app store.
00:28:32 - Yeah, I think they're gonna be like,
00:28:34 oh you can age-gate it and then use Face ID
00:28:37 to access your Pornhub account.
00:28:39 - And they'll tell a security story about it.
00:28:41 - Yeah, yeah, they're gonna do
00:28:42 a whole security story about it.
00:28:44 - This is, no, I disagree.
00:28:45 - Okay, 'cause you'll just see too much porn on the subway?
00:28:49 - No. (laughs)
00:28:50 Although, here are two things.
00:28:51 One, as I was riding the subway into work this morning,
00:28:54 a woman was watching a horror movie
00:28:56 with full speakers, no headphones.
00:28:58 - Oh cool.
00:28:59 - And there was just a lot of deep breathing
00:29:00 and screaming, just horror movie.
00:29:03 And for a while, it was just deep breathing,
00:29:05 so everyone was looking around the subway car.
00:29:07 Incredible breach of subway etiquette all the way around.
00:29:10 And I was like, should I just give her my AirPods?
00:29:13 Like this might be worth the 200 bucks right now.
00:29:15 - I honestly believe that if you are listening
00:29:18 to something on full speaker,
00:29:20 everyone else within earshot is now firmly
00:29:24 within their right to come over
00:29:25 and press pause or rewind.
00:29:27 We're all watching this together now.
00:29:29 Like you just sit down next to the person.
00:29:31 - Yeah, we're all watching this together.
00:29:32 And I can be like, "Oh, can we just go back 10 minutes?
00:29:34 "I missed the part that was happening."
00:29:36 You should be able to sit down next to them
00:29:37 and be like, "We're watching this together."
00:29:38 - Just do the double tap to go back 10 seconds.
00:29:40 - Yeah, exactly. (laughs)
00:29:43 - Don't do that, but if you do, let us know how it goes.
00:29:45 - Probably not well.
00:29:46 - I'm guessing not well.
00:29:48 Okay, that was a side note.
00:29:49 Here is why I think Apple won't just let porn happen.
00:29:52 - Okay.
00:29:53 - There was nothing to watch the other night,
00:29:57 and I did it.
00:29:58 I watched Argyle.
00:29:59 - Uh-huh.
00:30:00 - Welcome.
00:30:01 - Which is bad, which is bad.
00:30:02 It's real bad.
00:30:03 - Did his hair ever move?
00:30:04 Did he ever fix his hair?
00:30:06 - It's not, I don't wanna say anything about this movie.
00:30:08 What I wanna say is throughout the entire period
00:30:11 that I was watching Argyle,
00:30:13 I was trying to imagine Tim Cook watching Argyle.
00:30:15 (laughing)
00:30:18 - Is that just like, if Tim Cook wouldn't do this,
00:30:21 it won't appear on the App Store?
00:30:23 - I think that is as good of a content understanding
00:30:26 for Apple as anything.
00:30:27 - And you're like, this is about as far as he's gonna go.
00:30:31 - Yeah.
00:30:31 - Like, he had to sit there,
00:30:33 and then he had to tell Matthew Vaughn
00:30:36 that that was a good movie.
00:30:38 Right?
00:30:39 Like, there was obviously a screening.
00:30:40 This is a big Apple movie from the twisted mind
00:30:43 of Matthew Vaughn.
00:30:43 - Yeah.
00:30:44 - Dua Lipa's in the thing.
00:30:46 And then they all got up, and the lights came on
00:30:48 in, you know, Apple Park, and Tim was like.
00:30:51 (laughing)
00:30:53 Right?
00:30:56 - Yeah.
00:30:57 - There's like a part of me that says like,
00:30:59 that there's a boundary on Apple's behavior.
00:31:02 And I don't know exactly what it is about the image
00:31:05 of Tim Cook watching Argyle that makes me confident
00:31:07 the boundary will never get to porn.
00:31:10 - Yeah.
00:31:10 - But if you just sit there, I don't watch Argyle,
00:31:13 I can't stress this enough,
00:31:14 this is not a good use of your time.
00:31:17 - It's awful.
00:31:18 - It is just not a good use of your time.
00:31:20 But if you watch it, and you imagine Tim Cook watching it,
00:31:24 and be like, this is what I paid for.
00:31:26 - Yeah.
00:31:27 - Then there's a part of your brain that's like,
00:31:28 when the whatever Apple product marketing manager
00:31:32 comes to him and says, all right,
00:31:33 here's how we're gonna solve for the porn revenue.
00:31:35 - Yeah.
00:31:36 - Like that person will just like get yeeted on site.
00:31:38 (laughing)
00:31:40 Like he's like, my brain can't process this.
00:31:42 - He's just got a little spring in his office.
00:31:44 (laughing)
00:31:47 - It's a beautiful Johnny Ive liquid metal.
00:31:50 - It's gorgeous, it looks kind of like the Webby Award.
00:31:52 - The design is obvious, and it's minimalism.
00:31:55 But it's just a box on a spring, it's like.
00:31:58 (imitating spring)
00:31:59 All right, that's enough talk about Tim Cook
00:32:01 and pornography in the same sort of mental space.
00:32:03 - We're sorry.
00:32:04 - We're not.
00:32:06 - David, I know you're covering it.
00:32:07 Are there more app stores in the mix here?
00:32:10 - I think so.
00:32:11 So the first phase of this,
00:32:14 there's been a handful of folks saying it's coming, right?
00:32:17 And a lot of it is gaming.
00:32:18 Epic has been loudly talking about doing this.
00:32:21 The folks behind the Set app thing,
00:32:23 which is like a subscription to a bunch of Mac apps,
00:32:26 they've said they're working on some stuff.
00:32:28 So I think we're gonna get more of these,
00:32:29 and there's gonna be a set of them
00:32:30 that are very professional and very legit
00:32:34 and are sort of big businesses unto themselves.
00:32:37 And then there's just gonna be this
00:32:39 crazy minefield of new ideas.
00:32:43 And I think those are gonna take a while,
00:32:45 from what I can tell.
00:32:46 It's hard work to build one of these things.
00:32:48 And I think in Riley's case,
00:32:50 he's been running AltStore for a while.
00:32:53 And so there was a bunch of paperwork
00:32:55 and stuff to do to get this working.
00:32:56 There was the,
00:32:57 you have to get like a million dollar line of credit
00:32:59 or something to open one of these app stores.
00:33:01 But he was able to, from what I understand,
00:33:04 jump through these hoops relatively quickly.
00:33:06 If this is just a--
00:33:07 - Yeah, because Tim Sweeney was like,
00:33:08 "Here's a million dollar line of credit.
00:33:10 "I need this to start happening."
00:33:11 - Basically, right.
00:33:12 And then if you're the MacPaw folks
00:33:15 who have been running Set app for a while,
00:33:17 or you're Epic, you have the resources to do this.
00:33:21 But if you wanna just spin up an app store from nothing,
00:33:23 it's actually pretty hard work.
00:33:24 And so I think that, my guess is like this fall,
00:33:28 and maybe even into next year,
00:33:30 is when the truly weird stuff is gonna start to happen.
00:33:33 But it is going to happen.
00:33:35 - My question is, what is the next set of emulators?
00:33:37 Like just to stay focused on emulators,
00:33:38 maybe Apple's not gonna allow Windows 95.
00:33:40 - It's Atari Lynx.
00:33:41 - It's definitely Atari Lynx.
00:33:42 But like maybe Apple isn't gonna allow Windows emulation
00:33:45 in this app store at the gate.
00:33:46 But you can see,
00:33:48 maybe AltStore is gonna allow Windows 95 emulation.
00:33:52 And we're all gonna be playing Leisure Suit Larry
00:33:54 on our iPads, right?
00:33:55 Like you can see Commodore 64,
00:33:59 is the Commodore 64 a retro game console?
00:34:01 I don't know.
00:34:02 - Yes.
00:34:03 - But I guess.
00:34:04 - Yeah, I believe there was one briefly on the store.
00:34:06 - There you go.
00:34:07 I mean, what is the definition of a retro game console?
00:34:10 - Right.
00:34:11 - We could do another half hour on the Birchest,
00:34:12 I'm confident.
00:34:13 But as that starts to open
00:34:15 and the library of acceptable software starts to expand,
00:34:19 which Apple has never allowed.
00:34:21 They've wanted everyone to stay inside of their user interface
00:34:24 and for good reason.
00:34:24 I don't think these are bad things that Apple wanted.
00:34:27 Right, they didn't want a bunch of weird flash ports
00:34:29 in the iPhone in the beginning.
00:34:31 They made very serious rules
00:34:32 about how apps should look and feel
00:34:34 so that the user experience would be great.
00:34:37 I think that the time limit on needing to do that
00:34:40 has long since expired.
00:34:42 So now it's like, what else is gonna be allowed here?
00:34:45 And you can see the emulation
00:34:46 of various kinds of other computers
00:34:49 are gonna very quickly open the door
00:34:51 to floods of other cool software.
00:34:53 Which, most of which by the way,
00:34:54 won't be monetized by weird micro payments and ads.
00:34:57 - Yeah.
00:34:58 - 'Cause it's just old software.
00:34:59 - I'm curious, one that I think will be kind of interesting
00:35:02 is ScumVM.
00:35:03 So ScumVM is a lot of--
00:35:06 - Oh, what was that game?
00:35:07 Monkey Island.
00:35:08 - Yeah, Monkey Island point and click games,
00:35:09 all made by LucasArts.
00:35:11 - Yeah.
00:35:12 - Which is now owned by Disney.
00:35:14 And ScumVM is kind of like independently maintained
00:35:16 by other people.
00:35:17 And I'm like, oh, that's a really,
00:35:19 that's one you always see any time a system
00:35:21 starts allowing emulators, the PSP, the Vita,
00:35:24 like even the Steam Deck.
00:35:27 That's one of the first ones you see.
00:35:29 And it's like, is it gonna pop up soon?
00:35:31 Are we gonna get ScumVM?
00:35:33 Are we gonna be able to play the Dig in Monkey Island
00:35:35 on this thing?
00:35:36 Or is Disney gonna come around and say, hey.
00:35:38 - Yeah, we'll see.
00:35:39 Look, there's a part of me that
00:35:42 the thing I'm looking forward to most
00:35:43 is some sort of retro Windows or Mac emulator
00:35:48 that just lets me run a non-creative cloud version
00:35:51 of Photoshop on an iPad.
00:35:52 (laughing)
00:35:54 - So close.
00:35:54 - That's coming, right?
00:35:55 It's coming.
00:35:56 Wes Davis, our weekend editor,
00:35:58 posted on threads a video of him playing.
00:36:00 - It was the Kirby, the Canvas Kirby game.
00:36:03 - Yeah, on an iPad.
00:36:04 - Yeah.
00:36:05 - For the Nintendo DS,
00:36:06 but he was playing it with a stylus and iPad.
00:36:07 And it's like, that's better than any idea
00:36:09 Apple's had for an iPad game.
00:36:10 - Yeah, I was like, that's cool as hell.
00:36:12 I love that.
00:36:13 - That's not great.
00:36:14 I'm excited for it all.
00:36:16 A little chaos is good for this market.
00:36:18 - Yeah.
00:36:19 - All right, I want you all to go.
00:36:20 We're gonna take a break.
00:36:21 You all go just watch the Argyle trailer.
00:36:24 - Don't do that.
00:36:27 Why would you tell people to do that?
00:36:28 Go do anything with your life
00:36:30 other than watch the Argyle trailer.
00:36:32 - I've never watched a movie where I've openly wished
00:36:35 the Apple TV had a 2X button.
00:36:37 (laughing)
00:36:38 'Cause I can't stop in the middle.
00:36:40 - Yeah.
00:36:41 Don't just walk out of the room.
00:36:43 Like, I'm just gonna go do laundry.
00:36:44 - I gotta know what happens.
00:36:45 It's just like a curse.
00:36:46 - This is why I watch so little stuff.
00:36:48 - Yeah.
00:36:49 - 'Cause I gotta know.
00:36:50 And then I'm like committed,
00:36:51 and now this is my personality now.
00:36:53 Like I'm a different--
00:36:54 - Now I really, David, I think we need to just find
00:36:55 the worst content possible and be like,
00:36:57 Eli, you're in it now.
00:36:59 You gotta keep going.
00:37:00 - Eli, I'm in your suits.
00:37:01 (laughing)
00:37:04 - All right, we're gonna take a break.
00:37:05 I'm gonna yell at David a little bit.
00:37:07 We'll be right back.
00:37:08 (upbeat music)
00:37:11 All right, we're back.
00:37:13 For me, it was the scene where she started ice skating.
00:37:15 (laughing)
00:37:16 - Wait, who?
00:37:17 I haven't seen it yet.
00:37:18 - No, no.
00:37:19 - This is spoilers.
00:37:20 - We cannot do this.
00:37:21 Listen, sometimes I would say the Verge cast
00:37:25 is known for long diversions down strange rabbit holes.
00:37:28 This is just like objective cruelty to our audience.
00:37:31 (laughing)
00:37:32 - I'm just saying, you know that famous story
00:37:33 where Tim Cook looks at his lieutenant,
00:37:35 and he's like, why are you still here?
00:37:36 - Yeah.
00:37:37 - I literally imagined him standing up
00:37:38 in the Steve Jobs theater when that happened
00:37:41 in the movie, and being like, why are you all still here?
00:37:43 - Matthew Ravon just crying.
00:37:45 (laughing)
00:37:46 Running, weeping from the room.
00:37:48 - It's not good.
00:37:49 I have so much to say about how bad this movie is.
00:37:53 I can't.
00:37:53 - All right.
00:37:54 - That's a Tuesday episode.
00:37:56 - No, do that on Decoder.
00:37:57 Get that out of here.
00:37:58 - It's a full, we're gonna get Matthew Vaughn on Decoder.
00:38:00 And be like, all right.
00:38:00 So the big reveal of this movie.
00:38:01 - How do you make decisions?
00:38:02 And let's change that.
00:38:04 (laughing)
00:38:06 - Whew, all right.
00:38:08 All right, speaking of Decoder.
00:38:12 - Oh.
00:38:12 - There's an org chart change at Google.
00:38:14 - Okay, that was a good segue.
00:38:16 I love that.
00:38:17 - I pulled that one off.
00:38:18 I was rehearsing that one.
00:38:19 - Yeah, I love that.
00:38:20 - And I looked in the mirror this morning.
00:38:21 I'm like, we're gonna get this right today.
00:38:22 - Just nail it.
00:38:23 - Yeah.
00:38:26 - So Google's getting a whole reorg.
00:38:30 Or it's not just Google, it's Android, right?
00:38:32 'Cause David, you actually spoke with Rick.
00:38:35 You got the whole thing.
00:38:37 - Yeah, so the place to start is that Google
00:38:39 is a famously well-run company with an org structure
00:38:44 that makes sense to everyone and is structured
00:38:49 in order to make everyone produce good work.
00:38:51 We all agree on that as sort of the premise of all of this.
00:38:55 No, Google is just abject chaos all the time.
00:38:57 And this is in large part deliberate.
00:39:01 From the beginning, Google's whole thing
00:39:03 has been hire really good people
00:39:04 and just sort of turn them loose.
00:39:06 And it's just a loose construction
00:39:08 of smart people who make things.
00:39:10 And that's fine as far as it goes.
00:39:12 That's how you get Gmail,
00:39:13 which was somebody's 20% project 20 plus years ago now.
00:39:17 It's also how you get 400,000 messaging apps
00:39:19 and all of the weird things that Google has built
00:39:22 and killed over the years.
00:39:23 But basically, the thing that I have come to understand
00:39:27 over the last couple of days of talking to people,
00:39:29 including this new team at Google,
00:39:31 which is basically a combination of Google's hardware team,
00:39:35 which was run by Rick Osterloh,
00:39:37 and its Android team, which was run by Hiroshi Lockheimer.
00:39:41 Hiroshi also ran Chrome, Chrome OS, Google Photos,
00:39:45 Google One, and a smattering of other stuff.
00:39:49 But it basically oversaw a lot of the most popular platforms
00:39:53 where people actually interact with Google stuff.
00:39:55 All of that is now being smushed into one team
00:39:58 under Rick Osterloh.
00:39:59 It's called the Platforms and Devices team.
00:40:02 And the idea very much is to make all of that
00:40:06 into one team so that they can run faster with AI.
00:40:09 Like, the whole story over and over is just AI.
00:40:13 We have to do things faster,
00:40:14 we have to make our moves more quickly,
00:40:17 we have to be able to pivot faster,
00:40:18 we have to be able to build new stuff faster,
00:40:20 we need to have hardware, software, and AI all together,
00:40:22 we need to have full stack everything.
00:40:24 Like, Google, I think as we've seen
00:40:27 over the last, what, 18 months now,
00:40:30 got caught sort of off guard by the speed
00:40:34 with which AI took over the world.
00:40:35 Like, Google built so much of this foundational technology
00:40:39 and yet didn't beat ChatGPT to market.
00:40:42 Like, that is a failing of that company.
00:40:44 And they are now racing to keep up.
00:40:47 And I think sort of smushing the hardware
00:40:49 and software together, particularly on phones,
00:40:52 is a pretty huge shift in trying to make that go faster.
00:40:57 - So I have a number of questions here.
00:40:59 One, I think Google was initially, Alex is just laughing.
00:41:04 - I'm just laughing.
00:41:05 I was like, the speed with your, I've got some questions.
00:41:08 - I'm reading this, I mean, it's an org chart.
00:41:11 I have a number of ideas about this org chart change.
00:41:14 But the core one is what you just said,
00:41:16 which is Google was caught off guard by ChatGPT,
00:41:18 it's a failing of the company.
00:41:20 It's been a year now.
00:41:22 LLMs are not as good as people said they were gonna be.
00:41:25 The Humane, like, even if you imagine a version
00:41:29 of the Humane pin where the hardware was perfect
00:41:31 and it was fast, it's still like, that's the wrong bridge.
00:41:37 There's no way for them to fix that problem.
00:41:40 And we have not seen any meaningful improvements
00:41:43 on hallucination for any of these models, really.
00:41:47 So you're like, yeah, they were caught off guard,
00:41:48 and then they were really worried
00:41:49 that Google search would go away.
00:41:51 Satya Nadella's out there being like, I'm gonna make 'em dance.
00:41:54 It is true that Google started dancing.
00:41:58 - They did a little tippy-tap dance.
00:42:00 - But Satya Nadella didn't do it.
00:42:01 (laughing)
00:42:03 - Right, it's like, but that wasn't,
00:42:04 Bing has not been the beneficiary of said dancing
00:42:08 in any way, shape, or form.
00:42:09 Google, I would say, dancing without rhyme or reason.
00:42:13 Not a lot of rhythm in the dancing
00:42:16 happening in Mountain View.
00:42:17 - Agreed.
00:42:18 - And so it's like, if you believe that that is a thing
00:42:20 that set them into action,
00:42:21 that's the thing you're talking about.
00:42:21 Like, to what end?
00:42:23 - I don't know, if I'm being completely honest.
00:42:27 And I feel like this is the strange moment
00:42:28 we've come to in AI.
00:42:30 Like, you had Drew Houston on Decoder this week, I think,
00:42:33 and he repeated the line that Sundar Pichai
00:42:36 and others have said, that AI is as important as fire.
00:42:39 Like, people just say that unironically,
00:42:41 that this is the most important thing
00:42:44 that has ever happened to society.
00:42:45 Like, literally, that's a thing people say out loud.
00:42:47 And, uh, is it?
00:42:52 Like, is there any actual evidence of that so far?
00:42:55 - I mean, I would say, yeah, Liz and I--
00:43:00 - Fire, Alex, fire.
00:43:02 - Also electricity.
00:43:03 - I would say there's ample evidence it's not crypto.
00:43:05 Like, I think we're there.
00:43:06 - Yeah, I think Liz and I have talked about this a lot.
00:43:09 She gets, like, weird 2 a.m. texts from me,
00:43:11 just being like, do you think that, like,
00:43:13 AI is the biggest thing since the internet?
00:43:17 - If Liz is not responding to these texts
00:43:19 with AI-generated responses,
00:43:21 I don't know what we're doing here.
00:43:21 - No, she's always fully in the conversation with me.
00:43:25 It's really nice that she returns my calls.
00:43:28 Thank you, Liz.
00:43:29 But I do think that, like, AI is,
00:43:32 artificial intelligence as a whole,
00:43:33 not necessarily just generative AI,
00:43:36 is a pretty big moment, right?
00:43:37 Like, it is a form of automation that is enormous,
00:43:41 and it covers a whole lot of different industries.
00:43:44 And that kind of big sea change is very rare,
00:43:47 and it is as big as the internet.
00:43:48 It is as big as when we started automating,
00:43:52 you know, machinery and stuff like that.
00:43:54 Like, it's a big moment,
00:43:55 but it happens in fits and spurts and stuff.
00:43:58 And right now we're kind of in a,
00:44:00 (grunts)
00:44:01 moment.
00:44:01 It's a technical term.
00:44:03 - Right, it's only obvious which things
00:44:05 qualify in retrospect, right?
00:44:07 Like, if you're running one of these companies,
00:44:10 you look at what the internet did 25 years ago,
00:44:13 and you look at what mobile did 15 years ago,
00:44:17 and you say, okay, a whole generation of companies
00:44:19 died at the hands of these changes,
00:44:21 and the world changed because of these changes.
00:44:24 Like, if you believe that AI is the next one,
00:44:26 you kind of have to bet everything right now,
00:44:29 even before it's ready.
00:44:31 Because if you don't,
00:44:33 you'll get left behind by the companies that do.
00:44:37 That's one side of the bet.
00:44:38 The other side of the bet is that at this moment,
00:44:41 there is nothing about AI and chatbots and this thing
00:44:46 that is that important yet.
00:44:49 And so we're in this place where it's still,
00:44:52 I think, the, like, we got that incredible pop of,
00:44:55 like, oh my God, I cannot believe this thing
00:44:56 is as good as it is, when ChatGPT launched.
00:44:59 And there has not been a moment
00:45:02 that has surpassed that since then.
00:45:05 Maybe I'm wrong.
00:45:06 I would be curious to know if there are folks
00:45:08 who feel like we've hit higher highs than that
00:45:10 in terms of, like, remarkable achievements in AI.
00:45:14 But to me, it feels like we're still riding
00:45:16 that one single high.
00:45:18 But if you believe that it is going to be as big
00:45:21 and fast and powerful as so many of these people do,
00:45:24 you don't have a choice but to bet everything on it
00:45:26 because otherwise you're just dooming yourself
00:45:28 and your company and your employees to death.
00:45:31 - Yeah.
00:45:32 - Yeah, and fine.
00:45:34 I think all of the big high point moments in AI since then,
00:45:39 or at least the ones that have, like, made the news broadly,
00:45:42 like, broken into mainstream news, not just this show,
00:45:45 have been bad.
00:45:46 - Yeah, they've been failures.
00:45:48 - Yeah, they've been failures.
00:45:48 - They've been swaggy popes.
00:45:50 - Yeah, like, you know, weird, woke mind virus controversies,
00:45:55 like fake ones, like, just, like, all over the place.
00:45:58 Like, Bard just getting dates wrong all over the place.
00:46:02 The thing that is notable at these systems right now
00:46:04 is that they don't know anything.
00:46:06 - You're right.
00:46:07 - We're gonna talk about Meta's AI launch this week.
00:46:09 It generated a bunch of images of stuff
00:46:12 and it just, like, doesn't know how clothes move.
00:46:15 - Yeah.
00:46:15 - Yeah, and it's like, oh, this isn't that useful.
00:46:19 And that's, so I just wanna stay there for one second.
00:46:22 Like, you're making this bet because you're like,
00:46:24 we have to accelerate our AI moment.
00:46:27 It's still unclear, like, what that moment looks like
00:46:31 in the end, and maybe the whole point is, like,
00:46:33 move faster, figure out what's right and what's wrong.
00:46:36 Ostrillo gave you the example of the pixel camera.
00:46:39 Okay, I get it.
00:46:42 - But they've been doing AI stuff with the pixel camera.
00:46:44 - But this is his example.
00:46:45 - Yeah.
00:46:46 - And he's like, we're gonna do that, but faster.
00:46:47 - It felt a little to me, and David,
00:46:50 maybe correct me if I'm wrong,
00:46:51 it felt a little like Silicon Valley, in particular,
00:46:54 is very hyped on AI, right?
00:46:55 Like, there, the conversation is,
00:46:57 what are you doing with AI?
00:46:58 If you're not doing something, you're stupid.
00:47:00 And a lot of this felt like almost a response
00:47:03 to those people being like, yes, we also care about AI.
00:47:06 We're big.
00:47:07 This is our performative moment to tell you
00:47:09 that we genuinely believe in this.
00:47:13 But it was really for that audience,
00:47:14 not necessarily for the rest.
00:47:17 - I think that's half right.
00:47:18 Like, I think that's exactly right.
00:47:19 I think the other audience is investors, right?
00:47:21 To, right now, if you want to continue
00:47:24 to run the company that you run,
00:47:26 you have to tell an AI story.
00:47:28 You just do.
00:47:29 Like, that is where we are.
00:47:31 It's what everybody was doing with mobile 10 years ago.
00:47:35 It was like, if you didn't have a mobile strategy,
00:47:37 what are you doing?
00:47:38 Now, that thing is AI, right?
00:47:41 Like, Mark Zuckerberg is the perfect example of this.
00:47:43 Like, Mark doesn't talk about the metaverse anymore,
00:47:45 because nobody wants to hear about the metaverse,
00:47:47 and they sell shares in meta when they do.
00:47:50 And so now they're telling an AI story.
00:47:51 And in a lot of ways, the AI story
00:47:53 and the metaverse story actually run together,
00:47:55 but they talk about it differently,
00:47:56 because that is how you win, and you get people excited,
00:47:59 and you convince them
00:48:00 that you are marching towards something huge.
00:48:02 So I think you're right.
00:48:03 They're telling that sort of same story to two audiences,
00:48:07 because without them, they don't have the runway
00:48:09 and talent they need to get there at all.
00:48:11 - Okay, so this was but the first question.
00:48:13 - Okay, sorry.
00:48:14 - Is this the right goal, right?
00:48:16 That's just the first one.
00:48:17 And I think the answer is probably yes.
00:48:18 Like, it has to be the right answer.
00:48:21 We have to show movement towards this goal.
00:48:23 We have to unify Google's famously messy teams,
00:48:26 blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
00:48:27 Google now has Google DeepMind,
00:48:29 which itself is a merger of Google Brain and DeepMind.
00:48:33 The CEO of that, Demis Hassabis, who's been on Decoder,
00:48:37 and I asked him, "How will this merger work?"
00:48:38 And he was like, "It'll be fine."
00:48:39 Recently, suddenly comments suggesting
00:48:42 he's not so happy with it.
00:48:44 So, right, so now you've got Google Research and DeepMind.
00:48:49 We'll see how that's going.
00:48:50 And then you've got this new group,
00:48:53 which, you know, from 1,000 yards,
00:48:56 if you squint and you're hammered,
00:48:57 it's like, oh, they're doing an Apple.
00:48:59 They're doing hardware and software
00:49:02 and services all under one roof
00:49:04 to make better, complete products.
00:49:06 - They're gonna vertically integrate everything
00:49:07 right when the FTC is like, "Hey, stop that."
00:49:10 - Yeah, it's perfect technique.
00:49:10 I mean, you do have to be hammered to make that claim.
00:49:13 Like, I don't, but you see it, right?
00:49:15 It's like, you squint, and you're like,
00:49:17 "Oh, hey, then they'll do all the products over here."
00:49:20 They still have a Samsung to deal with.
00:49:23 Like, if Google's like, "Now the Pixel rules,
00:49:25 "'cause we made the software custom for the Pixel.
00:49:27 "Do you want some of this Samsung?
00:49:28 "Also, you just announced a bunch of our AI stuff
00:49:31 "in your phones."
00:49:33 How are they gonna manage that?
00:49:35 - Google is very sensitive to this question.
00:49:38 I raised this question to Rick and Hiroshi,
00:49:41 and their response was essentially,
00:49:43 "No, you're wrong, everything is fine.
00:49:45 "The partners love us, don't even worry about it."
00:49:48 I'm paraphrasing, but only just.
00:49:50 (laughing)
00:49:51 But I think--
00:49:52 - I mean, they gave you a quote from the CEO of Qualcomm
00:49:54 for this story, just to be like, "See?"
00:49:56 And it's like, dude, he sells chips to every,
00:49:57 he doesn't care. - That's right.
00:49:59 That's right.
00:50:00 - Christian Amon does not care if Google and Samsung
00:50:02 are beefing as long as everyone's on phones.
00:50:04 - Yeah, he's good. - It's all about
00:50:04 the power of Snapdragon.
00:50:06 - I think there are two things going on here.
00:50:08 One, I think there's an interesting thing here
00:50:13 to compare what Google is doing
00:50:15 to actually what Panos Panay did at Microsoft,
00:50:18 which is he was running Surface,
00:50:20 and then he was running Surface and Windows,
00:50:22 and the way that they came to see it was actually
00:50:25 what we need to do is we need to make the best Windows PCs
00:50:29 and then give what we make back to the ecosystem.
00:50:32 So the Surface team actually pioneered a lot of things
00:50:35 that really worked well on Windows.
00:50:37 They did a lot of work on the handwriting stuff.
00:50:39 They did a lot of work on detachables,
00:50:40 and then essentially gave that back to partners
00:50:43 who were then able to make better Windows PCs as a result.
00:50:45 - Can I tell you a story about that?
00:50:46 - Sure.
00:50:47 - I feel like I can tell the story
00:50:48 'cause it doesn't work there anymore.
00:50:49 - Okay.
00:50:50 - So one of my favorite CS moments,
00:50:51 I'm walking around a Microsoft booth with Panos,
00:50:54 and we're talking about that exact concept.
00:50:57 Why do you make these things?
00:50:58 'Cause the Surface machines were there
00:50:59 and the partner machines were there,
00:51:01 and I'm like, "This has gotta be weird for you."
00:51:02 And he was like, "No, no, no, let me show you something."
00:51:04 Panos, like, "No, no, no, let me show you something."
00:51:05 - Yeah.
00:51:06 - And he's like, "That's my hinge."
00:51:08 And he was pointing at one of the partner machines.
00:51:10 He's like, "That's our hinge,
00:51:13 "and that's my display, blah, blah, blah."
00:51:15 He was like, "This is all our stuff."
00:51:17 And like, "We're just spending the money to innovate
00:51:20 "because none of these OEMs can outspend Apple,
00:51:24 "so this is worth it to us."
00:51:26 And I asked him for years to give me that story
00:51:29 in a printable way, but obviously none of the partners
00:51:32 are gonna be like, "That's Panos's hinge."
00:51:33 - Right. - Right.
00:51:34 - But I think there's something to that, right?
00:51:36 And if you are the company with the resources
00:51:38 to feed the ecosystem, you can kind of rising tide,
00:51:41 lift all boats, that situation.
00:51:43 And if you're Google, and what you need is for AI
00:51:46 to win broadly, and for Gemini to win specifically,
00:51:50 doing that work on the Pixel and then giving it to Samsung
00:51:55 theoretically works for everybody.
00:51:58 I say theoretically because I think Samsung
00:52:00 has a long history of not being psyched
00:52:02 about Google's situation internally anyway.
00:52:06 Tizen, I guess, still exists.
00:52:09 I would not bet Samsung is thrilled
00:52:11 with this change at Google.
00:52:12 But I do buy the theory that if Google
00:52:15 manages this correctly, it could pull Android AI
00:52:20 as a whole along with it.
00:52:22 - Well, and you're talking about phones.
00:52:24 We've been talking about phones mainly,
00:52:25 but it's not just gonna be the phones, right?
00:52:27 Like, it's gonna be in the TVs and the watches
00:52:29 and all the other places too,
00:52:31 where Samsung doesn't have as big a sharehold, right?
00:52:36 Like, Samsung TVs, they sell a lot of TVs,
00:52:38 mainly to Nele.
00:52:40 But--
00:52:40 - No.
00:52:41 - Tizen, maybe.
00:52:42 (laughing)
00:52:43 - I love it.
00:52:44 Oh, that's a good sound.
00:52:45 Actually, the Tizen startup sound on the TV.
00:52:47 Do, do, do.
00:52:48 It's like, pfft.
00:52:49 - Ooh.
00:52:50 - Just sounds.
00:52:51 - Episode four.
00:52:51 (laughing)
00:52:54 - But there is all this other stuff.
00:52:56 And in those cases, like, yes,
00:52:58 this makes a lot of sense, right?
00:53:00 Like, Android TV.
00:53:01 - Okay, let me give you the counter example.
00:53:03 - Okay.
00:53:04 - Just before you go off into Android TV,
00:53:06 'cause there's nothing I wanna talk about more
00:53:07 about the raging success of Android TV.
00:53:10 - It's all you think about, I know.
00:53:11 - Google bought Motorola, famously.
00:53:15 - Yeah.
00:53:16 - And Andy Rubin, the founder of Android,
00:53:19 who worked at Google at that time,
00:53:21 was, again, it was another CS story.
00:53:22 He was walking around CS,
00:53:23 and he saw how hard Samsung was skinning Android,
00:53:27 got furious, locked into a battle with Samsung
00:53:31 to bring them back into the fold and ruin Android less.
00:53:34 - Yeah.
00:53:35 Touch wiz.
00:53:36 - And the deal was, Google had to sell Motorola to Lenovo.
00:53:41 That was the concession that Samsung extracted to stop it.
00:53:46 Like, it wasn't because I yelled at them
00:53:49 about making bloop bloop sounds
00:53:51 and making everyone go to the bathroom because of touch wiz.
00:53:55 It was because Andy Rubin was like, "What are you doing?
00:53:58 "I will sell Motorola and stop competing with you directly
00:54:01 "if you real touch wiz back in."
00:54:03 That's a lot, right?
00:54:04 And many things have happened since then.
00:54:07 Now it's called One UI.
00:54:08 It's all different now.
00:54:09 Google, since then, bought the failing HTC,
00:54:12 turned that into whatever pixels we have now.
00:54:14 The relationships are different.
00:54:16 It seems like the tensions are different.
00:54:19 But there is actually history of Samsung being so irritated
00:54:24 that Google would compete with it head up
00:54:26 by buying Motorola that it started peeling people off
00:54:29 and Google had to make the big concession.
00:54:31 - Yeah.
00:54:32 - Yeah.
00:54:33 - But at the same time, touch wiz sucked.
00:54:37 Like, it was hurting Samsung, wasn't it?
00:54:39 - You know, many people--
00:54:43 - It was hurting me to look at it, so I just assumed.
00:54:46 - Famously, someone has called this show
00:54:48 and insisted that ladies love the wiz.
00:54:50 This is a real thing that has happened on the show.
00:54:53 - I forgot about that.
00:54:54 - Big Papa Joe, baby.
00:54:55 We'll run the clip.
00:54:56 We'll put the clip in the show notes.
00:54:57 That's a real thing that has happened.
00:54:59 We've been doing this show for a very long time.
00:55:01 - Yes.
00:55:03 - I don't know if people like touch wiz or not.
00:55:05 I don't know if that was a good idea.
00:55:06 I'm just saying that tension was there.
00:55:08 And part of the reason Tizen exists
00:55:10 is because Samsung wanted its own operating system.
00:55:14 It does not want to,
00:55:16 it wants to be in control of its future.
00:55:18 - Right.
00:55:19 - And it has this massive dependency on Google and phones.
00:55:22 And it did not want that in TVs,
00:55:23 anywhere else it doesn't want these dependencies.
00:55:26 I'm just saying, you look at this and you're like,
00:55:28 oh, you do your drunk thousand yard squint
00:55:32 at this org chart change.
00:55:33 Like, oh, they're walking right back into it.
00:55:36 - I call that the 2 a.m. Liz text squint.
00:55:39 (laughing)
00:55:40 - Yeah, I think that's right.
00:55:41 I guess, I think the thing that is different
00:55:44 from 10 years ago is like, where are you gonna go?
00:55:47 Like, Samsung knows Tizen is not a move at this point.
00:55:52 There's just no, there's no option outside of Android
00:55:56 if you are a smartphone manufacturer.
00:55:58 Samsung, if it made Android worse
00:56:01 or tried to go the AOSP route and build their own apps,
00:56:04 like, it didn't work last time
00:56:06 and it super wouldn't work this time.
00:56:08 - Yeah.
00:56:09 - And the other side is, if you believe that AI is the thing,
00:56:13 you need Google more than ever.
00:56:15 Because, like, Samsung has been way out in front
00:56:18 of promoting Gemini.
00:56:19 It's getting a lot of these Gemini features
00:56:21 ahead of Pixels in some cases.
00:56:23 Like, I think if you believe in the AI revolution,
00:56:27 Samsung is actually sort of forced
00:56:29 to increase its dependency on Google,
00:56:31 not try to get away from it.
00:56:33 - I mean, what if they end up going with, like,
00:56:35 Harmony OS or whatever Huawei's operating system is on?
00:56:40 Right?
00:56:41 - How's that going for them in the U.S.?
00:56:43 - Yeah, not great, but, like, I don't know.
00:56:45 I think, I don't wanna just immediately say
00:56:48 they're totally locked into Android,
00:56:50 although they very much are.
00:56:52 I think there is, like, options available to them,
00:56:55 especially as we have this.
00:56:56 - I say this in all sincerity,
00:56:57 make me a list of those options.
00:56:59 - Yeah, it's Harmony OS.
00:57:01 They're just gonna go all in on the Chinese market.
00:57:03 - This is why you need middleware and super apps.
00:57:05 (laughing)
00:57:08 - You got us there.
00:57:09 - Yeah, it was coming, inevitably.
00:57:11 - Yeah.
00:57:12 - All right, I'm hopeful for a more focused, faster Google.
00:57:16 That's what Rick is saying he wants to do.
00:57:17 He wants to move everything faster.
00:57:19 He wants to ship more things.
00:57:20 I think the best thing Google could do
00:57:22 to kill even more products, actually, right now,
00:57:25 just reduce the number of Google products by half,
00:57:28 and then loudly announce that it will just keep
00:57:30 iterating those products for five years.
00:57:32 - That'd be cool.
00:57:33 - That would be a huge change.
00:57:35 - Do you remember in, like, 2011
00:57:37 when Larry Page came back as CEO and he did,
00:57:39 I think it was on an investor call,
00:57:41 said the, he gave the whole, like,
00:57:44 more wood behind fewer arrows speech,
00:57:46 and then Google promptly killed a whole bunch of stuff
00:57:48 that it had been working on?
00:57:49 Like, this is just the Google cycle, right?
00:57:52 They're like, they realize, oh,
00:57:55 we're not making enough money,
00:57:56 and/or the world is changing.
00:57:58 The first time it was about Google+ was like,
00:58:00 we're gonna reorient everything around social,
00:58:01 which went super great,
00:58:03 and that's why we all use Google+ now.
00:58:05 It's just the same thing again, right?
00:58:07 Like, Google sort of lets its company sprawl,
00:58:09 lets everything get weird,
00:58:11 hires lots of people, builds a million messaging apps,
00:58:13 and then at some point you go,
00:58:14 oh, this is actually making us interesting,
00:58:17 but it's making us slow,
00:58:18 and we have to all point in one direction now,
00:58:21 and that's what you do
00:58:22 when you have to point in one direction,
00:58:24 and for Google, that one direction is very much AI.
00:58:26 Like, they made a couple of other little org changes today
00:58:29 as part of this announcement
00:58:31 at DeepMind and Google Research and elsewhere,
00:58:33 and like, Sundar Pichai in particular
00:58:35 is very clear that the message is like,
00:58:36 move faster and move towards AI.
00:58:38 Like, that is Google's job for the foreseeable future.
00:58:41 Will it work?
00:58:43 Yes, because Google is a famously well-run company
00:58:46 with a culture and structure that makes total sense.
00:58:48 - All right, well, Google I/O is coming up next month.
00:58:50 - Yeah, that's right.
00:58:51 - And I anticipate we will,
00:58:53 we end up talking to all of these folks at I/O every year,
00:58:55 so we'll just see how it's going.
00:58:58 We're like, one month in, did it work?
00:58:59 (laughing)
00:59:00 - Just stare really hard.
00:59:02 - And then AI Sundar Pichai will say, yes, it did,
00:59:04 and then that'll be it.
00:59:05 - All right, you know, we have Meta is competing
00:59:08 with ChatGPT on our list here.
00:59:09 They are, they announced AI products, they're everywhere.
00:59:13 You can chat with a meta AI
00:59:14 on literally any meta surface you can think of.
00:59:17 Instagram, WhatsApp, for some reason.
00:59:19 - Have you done that?
00:59:21 - No, I have gone directly to meta.ai
00:59:24 and only asked to produce images of Jesus made of spaghetti.
00:59:27 (laughing)
00:59:30 - The true correct use.
00:59:33 - Which it won't do.
00:59:34 It will not produce any religious iconography.
00:59:38 If you ask it to produce images of a Middle Eastern man
00:59:40 from ancient times made of spaghetti,
00:59:42 it will happily do that.
00:59:44 - But it's not Jesus per se.
00:59:46 - I, you know, you can--
00:59:48 - It's open to interpretation.
00:59:49 - You can get to a state.
00:59:53 You can prompt engineer your way into something that
00:59:56 I believe--
00:59:57 - Make it look more Jesus-y.
00:59:58 (laughing)
01:00:01 - So the reason I mention this, just to point out,
01:00:04 this has been going on for months now.
01:00:06 Crazy AI generated images are constantly
01:00:09 going viral on Facebook.
01:00:11 The last one, I think our friends at Hard Fork covered it.
01:00:14 Jesus as a crab.
01:00:17 Just like hundreds of thousands of likes.
01:00:18 - Was there a shrimp?
01:00:20 - There's crab and shrimp.
01:00:22 - Oh, there's crab and shrimp.
01:00:23 Oh, I got deep into shrimp Jesus.
01:00:25 I totally missed shrimp.
01:00:25 - Yeah, I think Hard Fork was shrimp Jesus.
01:00:27 There's also, you know, carcinization is like
01:00:29 a real phenomenon in evolution where everything
01:00:31 turns into a crab and it has been true of
01:00:34 AI generated Jesus as well on these platforms.
01:00:37 And then the one that just killed me,
01:00:41 it's a quick post on this, I wrote it,
01:00:42 you can go into it.
01:00:44 The images of Jesus made of spaghetti on a Lambo
01:00:47 also made of spaghetti.
01:00:47 - Oh my God, it was so good.
01:00:49 - The last one I saw had 36,000 likes.
01:00:52 - Oh my God.
01:00:53 - It's very good.
01:00:54 And I, you know, if Meta's gonna release AI tools,
01:00:56 we gotta see if we can just close the loop.
01:00:58 - Yeah.
01:00:59 - And the answer is no, actually.
01:01:02 The spaghetti Jesus on a Lambo is not nearly as good
01:01:05 as the ones that are currently on Meta's other platforms.
01:01:09 So whatever tool the spammers are using,
01:01:11 a little bit ahead of Meta's tools currently.
01:01:14 - I like that.
01:01:15 - That's good for them.
01:01:16 - Meta's got some work to do.
01:01:17 - Meta should always be a little bit behind
01:01:17 its own users, that feels right.
01:01:19 I do think it's interesting though that part of this
01:01:21 also Meta released Lama 3, which is the new version
01:01:24 of its own LLM.
01:01:26 And it seems in a very real way like we have
01:01:29 a pretty strong sort of four party race right now
01:01:33 between Claude from Anthropic, GPT whatever,
01:01:37 Gemini and now Lama to be like the model.
01:01:42 We're in this space where it's like,
01:01:44 it feels like computer chips from a million years ago
01:01:46 when like every subsequent one that comes out
01:01:48 every two weeks is like a little bit faster.
01:01:50 And just the sort of speed and success
01:01:54 is going up really fast.
01:01:54 But these four companies are all like deep in it.
01:01:57 They have a ton of money.
01:01:59 They're very invested and it is,
01:02:00 it is kind of happening really fast.
01:02:03 - Yeah, although I don't know that it's quite
01:02:05 like computer chips and that they are all bad
01:02:10 in different ways.
01:02:11 - Fair.
01:02:12 - Right, like as chatbots, Molly White who writes Web 3
01:02:16 is going to scrape, she just had a newsletter
01:02:18 that she's like, I'm kind of interested in this.
01:02:19 Like I'm more positive on it than people think
01:02:21 given how she feels about crypto.
01:02:23 We'll link to the newsletter as well.
01:02:24 But she's like, I asked it to write this newsletter
01:02:26 and she has all the results of all the four.
01:02:28 And she's like, the thing about them is I told it
01:02:31 to write like me and it just is scolding you.
01:02:33 Like they write like angry school teachers.
01:02:35 Like that's her phrase.
01:02:36 And it's like, that's the thing.
01:02:38 Like they can generate copy.
01:02:41 Is there a reliable way for anyone to say
01:02:46 whether the copy is generated is getting better
01:02:48 or worse even within a single model or between them?
01:02:53 - As a critic and an editor, yes.
01:02:56 But I don't want to read it all.
01:02:57 - But you look at like four columns of like middling work
01:03:00 and you're like, I'm not gonna rank these.
01:03:03 - They're all garbage.
01:03:04 - All of you get D minuses.
01:03:05 Like get out of here.
01:03:06 - Well in that way, it's actually kind of an interesting
01:03:08 parallel to the computer chips thing.
01:03:09 Because we're in the phase where they're all passing
01:03:13 benchmark tests with increasingly impressive scores
01:03:15 that don't mean much to real people yet.
01:03:18 And the question is like, is anyone actually going
01:03:20 to make real use of the sort of raw capability
01:03:23 of this stuff that means anything to anybody?
01:03:26 And so far, the answer is largely not really.
01:03:30 - Yeah, but I do think one interesting piece
01:03:33 of the meta puzzle at least is it has massive distribution
01:03:37 and is 0% afraid of using it.
01:03:39 Like if you use a meta product,
01:03:41 boy is there AI next to you now.
01:03:43 It's just happening.
01:03:44 Here it is, just talking to you.
01:03:46 A meta's AI showed up in a Facebook group for people
01:03:49 with gifted and disabled children,
01:03:51 made up a child it had and said it was very happy
01:03:53 in the New York City public schools.
01:03:54 - Oh no.
01:03:56 - Yeah, that's just a thing.
01:03:57 And someone said, is this Black Mirror?
01:03:59 And the AI responded, no it's not.
01:04:01 It's just me, meta AI.
01:04:04 - It was like a story in 404,
01:04:05 which we also link many links, links to everyone.
01:04:07 I'm just saying the most notable stuff about this era
01:04:09 and I was like, when it's going a little sideways.
01:04:12 - Yeah, I mean they've gotten really, really good
01:04:15 at making machines that are impressive
01:04:17 at confidently lying.
01:04:19 - Yeah.
01:04:20 - And that's--
01:04:20 - The goal, I mean, it's always been the goal.
01:04:22 - Yeah, like just go put a little suit on it
01:04:24 and have it run for office.
01:04:25 Like it's got it down.
01:04:26 - Finally, finally a president I can get behind.
01:04:28 - Yeah, Llama 3.
01:04:30 It's like, I'm shrimp Jesus.
01:04:32 (laughing)
01:04:34 I'm proud to be American.
01:04:35 That's enough AI talk, let's talk about the real thing.
01:04:39 Mini LED televisions.
01:04:42 (laughing)
01:04:43 - Yeah, we got the TVs.
01:04:44 - It's been heavy, man.
01:04:46 - Sorry David.
01:04:47 - Policy updates, there's been Europeans.
01:04:48 - AI stands for awesome interpolation.
01:04:51 (laughing)
01:04:52 - All right, so Sony.
01:04:54 This is the most important story of the year.
01:04:57 - I'm with you, for now.
01:04:59 Until next week.
01:05:00 (laughing)
01:05:01 - I'm telling you, there's a revolution in TVs happening.
01:05:04 Just lock in.
01:05:07 - All the TV makers are like, "Neil, I can't sit."
01:05:11 - Yeah, 'cause I do.
01:05:13 So at CES's last year,
01:05:16 we saw a bunch of mini LED televisions.
01:05:17 I confidently predicted that mini LEDs
01:05:20 would bring prices down
01:05:21 and people would start buying bigger TVs.
01:05:23 There's a little bit of data,
01:05:24 that's where there's a little bit of data
01:05:25 about some other thing that I'll talk about in a second.
01:05:28 Sony has started skipping CES, they've done it for years.
01:05:30 They announced their TVs this year.
01:05:32 Sony, slowly pulling back from OLEDs.
01:05:36 Which is really interesting.
01:05:39 So the OLED I have, the A95L, QD OLED,
01:05:43 quantum dot OLED, very bright, very colorful.
01:05:46 They're just sticking around.
01:05:48 No updates to the flagship OLED in the second one.
01:05:50 - Wow.
01:05:51 - All of the flagship TVs are mini LED TVs.
01:05:55 They're the Bravia nines.
01:05:56 Sony won't tell you how many backlight zones they have,
01:06:00 they will just tell you increasing percentages.
01:06:02 Incredible chart.
01:06:04 They're just like 325% more dimming zones.
01:06:08 - Just more.
01:06:09 - Just more.
01:06:11 - Don't worry about it, it's just a lot.
01:06:13 - And that's 325% more than last year's X95L,
01:06:18 which I've seen, which is a beautiful TV
01:06:20 that only if you're paying attention to,
01:06:22 do you see any blooming.
01:06:24 Now it's brighter, there's 325% more zones.
01:06:27 I'm anticipating that there will be no blooming,
01:06:30 or it'll be even harder to see.
01:06:32 Which means you can now get gigantic,
01:06:35 super bright, LED bright TV with the black levels of OLED,
01:06:40 without the burn-in problems.
01:06:42 - How much does that cost?
01:06:44 - And it's better for gaming,
01:06:46 'cause it's faster refresh of LEDs.
01:06:48 - Yeah, no I totally am all for that.
01:06:50 And with someone with a 2017 OLED,
01:06:53 really, you cannot understand how much I'm all for that.
01:06:56 - It's also 50% brighter than the X95.
01:06:58 I'm just telling you--
01:06:59 - But how much is it?
01:07:00 - They're not like a number that's good.
01:07:03 (laughing)
01:07:05 - Nealey, tell the people, tell the people,
01:07:07 what is the cheapest one of these costs?
01:07:09 - The 65 inch is 3299, which is not out of whack
01:07:14 with top end OLEDs.
01:07:16 - Top end.
01:07:16 - Let's just, can I just say that price number
01:07:18 slightly differently?
01:07:19 - Yeah.
01:07:20 - It costs $3299.99.
01:07:23 - If you're like sitting there--
01:07:24 - 3299 is like, oh, 32 bucks.
01:07:27 That's what a normal TV costs now.
01:07:29 No, no.
01:07:29 - You're gonna have this thing on the wall for 10 years.
01:07:31 If you're out there cross shopping an LG G3,
01:07:33 you're like, oh, that's interesting.
01:07:36 That's all I'm saying.
01:07:37 - Yeah.
01:07:37 - You're gonna have it on your wall for two years,
01:07:39 and then Nilay Patel is gonna come on the Verge cast
01:07:41 in 2025 and say, listen everybody,
01:07:44 there's another 325% increase.
01:07:46 - Well, so here's the problem.
01:07:47 So the A95 only goes up to 77 inches,
01:07:50 and the top end Bravia 9s are 85 inches.
01:07:54 - That's so much TV.
01:07:55 - Which is $5,499.
01:07:57 I just bought this TV last September.
01:07:59 Like, what am I doing?
01:08:01 It's a, this is bad.
01:08:02 Like, I have to send her to college, right?
01:08:04 You know, like, that's gonna be a couple days of college
01:08:07 by the time she's ready to go to college.
01:08:10 - That's like some textbooks.
01:08:11 - Yeah, a single textbook.
01:08:13 - Yeah, you get 24 hours in the store, kid.
01:08:15 I bought a new TV.
01:08:16 (laughing)
01:08:19 I'm just saying, these TVs represent a huge shift
01:08:24 from OLED in this market.
01:08:26 This is when it's starting to happen,
01:08:28 and I think that means the rest of the TVs
01:08:30 are gonna get cheaper.
01:08:31 Like, these are the crazy top ends
01:08:33 that are supposed to compete with the high-end OLEDs.
01:08:35 They have insane features.
01:08:36 We're so far from the motion smoothing debate generally.
01:08:42 Like, regular, you know, regular people,
01:08:44 TVs just have to turn off motion smoothing.
01:08:46 At the high end of the market now,
01:08:48 the TVs have built-in calibrated modes for the services,
01:08:52 where the services can calibrate your TV
01:08:54 for whatever they're streaming.
01:08:56 So, Prime Video calibrated on the new Sony Bravia 9s
01:09:01 will know if you're watching a movie
01:09:02 or you're watching Monday Night Football
01:09:04 and recalibrate the TV for you automatically.
01:09:05 - But that'll only work if you use
01:09:08 the smart TV function they have.
01:09:10 - Oh, I'm gonna not talk about the details.
01:09:13 (laughing)
01:09:14 If you wanna run BraviaCore
01:09:16 and stream at 80 megabits per second, you gotta--
01:09:18 - It's gonna look so tight.
01:09:20 - You gotta make some sacrifices.
01:09:22 - By the way, there's some debate in the comments
01:09:24 of Chris Welch's story about this,
01:09:26 about whether it's called BraviaCore or Sony PicturesCore.
01:09:30 I'll just clear it up.
01:09:31 It's only BraviaCore on Bravia TVs,
01:09:34 which are the only place the platform supports
01:09:36 80 megabits per second pure stream.
01:09:39 Everywhere else, it's Sony PicturesCore,
01:09:40 and it doesn't have the one feature that's good.
01:09:42 - So, Sony PicturesCore is the bad one.
01:09:45 Sony PicturesCore is like,
01:09:46 what if we made a not good streaming service
01:09:49 with a small cat?
01:09:50 What if we made a streaming service where you open it,
01:09:52 and it was like, Madam Web is the thing we got this for?
01:09:55 (laughing)
01:09:57 - You turn it off.
01:09:59 - Yeah, I just didn't redeem my credits for Madam Web.
01:10:03 - No, I will say, Sony does a thing that I appreciate,
01:10:06 which is they make the TV that is just the dope TV.
01:10:11 And they're like, whatever it costs, no problem.
01:10:14 But this $5,500 one is enormous.
01:10:17 It has, what was it called, like X-wide angle
01:10:19 for the viewing angle stuff.
01:10:21 It has amazing speakers.
01:10:22 It's like, I just, Sony does the thing that I like,
01:10:25 where they're like, here is the luxury version,
01:10:27 and we are just going to slowly make that one
01:10:29 cheaper over time.
01:10:31 And someday in 2061, I will own this exact TV in my house.
01:10:36 And I can't look, I can't.
01:10:38 - It's gonna take a long time.
01:10:39 So, that's the Bravia9, the top end.
01:10:42 So, the flagship Sony TVs this year are Mini LEDs,
01:10:45 and my A95, which we'll just soldier on.
01:10:48 - Yeah, well, I mean, that's good though,
01:10:50 because you don't have, do you have regret buying it?
01:10:52 Do you have the FOMO?
01:10:54 - I don't want to say it this time.
01:10:55 (laughing)
01:10:56 Then, the one step down, the Bravia8s, are regular OLEDs,
01:11:00 not the QD OLEDs that I have in the A95.
01:11:03 They've got all the same stuff,
01:11:05 but you can just see Sony is, like,
01:11:07 their biggest, best, their push is Mini LEDs.
01:11:10 I think the rest of the industry will follow them.
01:11:12 Then, there's actually cheaper Mini LED TVs
01:11:14 that don't have all of this stuff.
01:11:17 - I think you used cheaper generously here.
01:11:19 - It's a very relative term.
01:11:22 - $2,300 for a 65 inch Mini LED set is like,
01:11:26 that is as good as the X95,
01:11:27 is dead on competitive with an OLED,
01:11:30 with a high end OLED.
01:11:31 - I think I need to just, one in my house,
01:11:32 next to my 2017 OLED to see which is better.
01:11:36 I gotta, like, get 'em next to each other,
01:11:38 and see if it's truly better.
01:11:40 - All right, so I will end my gushing over Sony's
01:11:42 solid business, which I haven't seen.
01:11:44 I don't know if these are as good as I want them to be.
01:11:46 I don't know what 325% more dimming zones mean.
01:11:49 I don't know if these auto-calibrated modes
01:11:51 that require to use their weird software
01:11:53 that basically tries to, like, ransom you
01:11:56 into enabling Samba Interactive TV,
01:11:58 which watches your every move like a hawk
01:12:01 to sell it to some snarling data broker.
01:12:04 I don't know.
01:12:05 All right, that's all just there.
01:12:05 I'm just saying, picture quality-wise,
01:12:07 you can see what's happening in this market.
01:12:08 - Yeah.
01:12:09 - Next to that is the fucking Frame TV,
01:12:12 which is, like, dominating the charts,
01:12:14 and I just wanna tell this story
01:12:16 about the rudest text you can send me,
01:12:18 the rudest text I've ever received,
01:12:20 and I feel comfortable saying this
01:12:21 because I posted about it and Casey revealed himself.
01:12:24 - Yeah.
01:12:26 - So, you know, Casey and I are friends,
01:12:28 as you can tell by the tone of my voice,
01:12:30 and so, you know, he just got a new house.
01:12:33 He's like, "Everyone's excited.
01:12:34 "Everyone's buying stuff.
01:12:35 "I just got a new house," and he's like,
01:12:37 "Should I buy a Frame TV?"
01:12:38 And he sent me this text at 12.30 in the morning,
01:12:40 and he's on the West Coast, I'm on the East Coast,
01:12:43 and I believe this conversation took another full hour.
01:12:45 Like, I was like, "I can't let this go.
01:12:46 "Something's wrong in the internet."
01:12:47 - Yeah, yeah, you're like,
01:12:49 you couldn't sleep that night until you get that done.
01:12:50 - I tried so hard to make this man buy an LG.
01:12:53 I was like, "You play video games?
01:12:55 "Do you like quality?"
01:12:59 - Why did he want the Frame?
01:13:01 - Because in the end, it was revealed
01:13:05 that all of the people he was asking owned Frame TVs,
01:13:08 including me.
01:13:09 I own two.
01:13:11 One's just in the studio, in the podcast studio in my house.
01:13:15 It just shows the Decoder logo.
01:13:16 That's all it does.
01:13:17 - Yeah, and it does have a beautiful bezel.
01:13:19 - Yeah, sure.
01:13:22 - Sure, I'm trying to help you here, Neela.
01:13:24 I'm trying, I'm trying.
01:13:25 - I'm saying the Frame TV is like a 10-year-old LCD panel
01:13:28 with a single backlight, no dimming zones.
01:13:31 It's just a bad TV.
01:13:32 - Yeah.
01:13:33 - But people like it because the display is matte,
01:13:36 and most people don't actually watch their TVs anymore.
01:13:41 They watch TikTok.
01:13:42 - Neela, can I float a theory at you?
01:13:44 That maybe people don't care
01:13:47 about 325% more dimming zones anymore.
01:13:51 Is it possible?
01:13:52 - They don't care about TVs anymore.
01:13:53 I think the Frame TV is the harbinger of doom.
01:13:56 What's the problem?
01:13:57 What is the thing all streaming services are facing?
01:14:00 People are saying, "Okay, there's gonna be
01:14:02 "a big black rectangle in my house.
01:14:03 "I want it to look best when it's off
01:14:05 "'cause it's mostly off."
01:14:07 - Wait, I just realized the Sony TV is basically
01:14:10 like a cool gaming PC to the Frame's iMac.
01:14:15 - I've never, I don't think I've ever wanted to melt
01:14:19 as much as I currently wish to melt.
01:14:21 - You have so many iMacs in your house, Neela.
01:14:24 - Neela, this is why it just sounds
01:14:25 is gonna be a huge hit on Netflix
01:14:27 because nobody watches their TV anyway.
01:14:28 It's just sound while you look at TikTok.
01:14:31 It's gonna be incredible.
01:14:32 - But I'm saying, I keep making this joke
01:14:35 that I could write 10,000 words about the Frame TV.
01:14:38 I definitely could.
01:14:39 Maybe I just need to rant into a camera for an hour.
01:14:42 We can edit it together.
01:14:44 But all I'm saying is you look at the market.
01:14:46 You look at the quality of TVs that are coming.
01:14:49 There's a technology shift in the TV industry
01:14:51 underway right now with these mini LEDs.
01:14:54 I think they're gonna be really cool.
01:14:55 And then you look at what people are spending the money on,
01:14:58 like what people think the best TV on the market is.
01:15:00 What's still priced.
01:15:02 You are worried about these prices.
01:15:03 Go look at the Frame when it's not on sale.
01:15:05 - Yeah. - It's insane.
01:15:06 - You're buying a 2016, 2017 vintage,
01:15:09 you know, edge lit LCD panel.
01:15:12 Like it's bad.
01:15:13 And they're charging the prices of an OLED
01:15:15 because the display is matte
01:15:16 and you can pay 50 bucks for the art store.
01:15:19 And people are like, that's the best TV you can buy.
01:15:22 - That's why Samsung will stick with Android.
01:15:26 - Tyson. - On the phone.
01:15:27 - Oh. (laughs)
01:15:28 - On the phone.
01:15:29 It all comes back to the phone and Android.
01:15:31 Why is that?
01:15:32 - I just forgot.
01:15:33 - Because the Tyson app store is killing it on the Frame.
01:15:36 - That was a bad joke, keep going.
01:15:37 - Okay, we'll just cut that part.
01:15:38 Anyway, I was saying,
01:15:39 it's like, just keep ranting about this forever.
01:15:42 Forever and ever and ever.
01:15:44 - I like it though.
01:15:45 - I'm telling you the Frame TV is the harbinger of doom
01:15:48 for the streaming services.
01:15:50 'Cause people are like, oh, we don't watch this thing.
01:15:55 We're gonna pay a premium.
01:15:57 - Oh, you're saying because the TV is so crappy
01:16:00 that when they do watch it, they'll be like,
01:16:01 what's the point?
01:16:02 - People are buying a TV intentionally to not watch it,
01:16:05 is what I'm saying.
01:16:06 The point of a TV is no longer to be watched.
01:16:09 - Right, it's to just be there.
01:16:10 It's like a binky.
01:16:11 - Yeah.
01:16:12 - Like, if I need a TV, I'll turn on this thing
01:16:14 and I don't really care what it looks like.
01:16:16 The rest of the time, it's gonna show me a picture.
01:16:18 - Is it that many people though?
01:16:19 - It is, I would argue,
01:16:21 the Frame TV is Samsung's most important product.
01:16:23 It is a product that has the most impact
01:16:25 on the culture today.
01:16:28 A thousand words, 10,000 words.
01:16:30 - I was like, I wanna read all of these words.
01:16:33 - When am I gonna, I host two podcasts a week.
01:16:35 I can't even justify to this group of people
01:16:39 that we should talk about the Frame TV that much.
01:16:42 Everyone, I need to take a week off.
01:16:44 - I got a lot of emails asking for your 10,000 words
01:16:47 on the Frame TV, so I think we're gonna have
01:16:49 to just do this at some point.
01:16:51 - Yeah, we'll carve the time out.
01:16:52 We'll carve the time out.
01:16:53 - All right, let's do one more TV related.
01:16:56 Just to end this segment in a place of hope and optimism.
01:17:00 - Oh no, are we about to go from Neelye's crazy
01:17:02 to Kranz's crazy?
01:17:03 - Yes. - Oh no.
01:17:04 - Well, 'cause one of the things I noticed
01:17:06 in the Sony story was that these TVs all have
01:17:09 ATSC 2.0 tuners in them.
01:17:11 Yeah, and this week was the big broadcasting conference
01:17:16 in Las Vegas, NAB, and everybody was making
01:17:20 lots of announcements, and the big announcement,
01:17:22 some of the big announcements I was excited about
01:17:24 was from Roxy, who we covered back at CES,
01:17:27 and NBC Universal, Peacock, some sort of distantly
01:17:32 related cousin of ours.
01:17:34 (laughing)
01:17:35 Is that-- - There's no way.
01:17:37 I'm sorry, there's no way Peacock is a distant--
01:17:40 - Comcast?
01:17:41 - Yes.
01:17:44 - Is a part investor in us.
01:17:45 - Okay.
01:17:46 - And Peacock.
01:17:48 We're distant cousins. - Sure, sure.
01:17:51 I don't, we don't know each other.
01:17:53 - That means I'm basically friends with Zooey Deschanel,
01:17:55 so I'm good with that.
01:17:56 - Basically, yeah, yeah, yeah. - That's just fine.
01:17:57 - It's fine. - That's the worst disclosure
01:17:59 we've ever had. (laughing)
01:18:01 - I'm basically friends with Zooey Deschanel.
01:18:03 - That's the new disclosure.
01:18:04 (laughing)
01:18:07 But they both announced that they were bringing
01:18:10 new technology to ATSC 3.0.
01:18:12 Right now there's a couple of channels in the country
01:18:15 that broadcast on this spectrum that use ATSC 3.0,
01:18:19 not a lot, and right now if you go and you watch shows
01:18:21 on those channels, it's just normal TV.
01:18:25 There's no reason to be excited.
01:18:27 But coming soon, because of Roxy,
01:18:30 you're gonna be able to pause and skip in your local news.
01:18:35 And then on the Today Show, which I know everyone listening
01:18:39 is a huge fan of, you'll be able to do the same
01:18:43 through the NBC Universal stuff.
01:18:45 And so it's like, it's a little bit, little, little,
01:18:48 - Yeah. - Little bit,
01:18:49 little something happening there.
01:18:51 And eventually it could be something really cool.
01:18:53 I still keep being like, one of these days Peacock
01:18:55 is just gonna be on NBC, and that'll just be the new NBC.
01:18:59 - Oh, and it'll distribute over there.
01:19:01 I got you. - Yeah, one day.
01:19:02 - The thing I wanna reveal about the story
01:19:04 is that when Alex was writing it,
01:19:06 she realized that her TV does not have ATSC 3.0.
01:19:09 - Oh no, it does now.
01:19:11 (laughing)
01:19:12 - Get out there, many LEDs for everyone.
01:19:13 - I bought that tuner immediately.
01:19:15 - You bought a tuner.
01:19:17 Bravia nines.
01:19:18 All right, we gotta take a break.
01:19:19 I'm telling, I've worn David down.
01:19:22 This is what you get.
01:19:23 This is your fault.
01:19:24 - My TCL Roku TV is quaking over here.
01:19:28 - Oh my God, no, that's just upsetting.
01:19:29 Don't say you have a TCL Roku on this podcast.
01:19:32 - Speaking of TVs that are ruthlessly mining your data.
01:19:34 - Yeah. - It's awful.
01:19:36 All right, we gotta take a break.
01:19:38 We'll be right back with David Pierce's
01:19:41 TikTok headline blitz.
01:19:42 Oh God.
01:19:43 All right, we're back.
01:19:48 I would say that it's when there's not quite enough news
01:19:51 is when our show goes the longest.
01:19:53 I don't know why that is,
01:19:55 but that has been true for 10 years.
01:19:56 - I think it's when I give you too much time
01:19:58 to mess with the rundown before we start.
01:20:00 I'm gonna start revealing the Verge cast to you
01:20:03 four minutes before we get recording.
01:20:04 - Just live reacts.
01:20:05 We could just do a box of me reacting to you
01:20:08 doing the Verge cast the whole time.
01:20:10 It's rare that we get a show that's so out of control
01:20:13 that we bring up Big Papa Joe.
01:20:14 - Here we are.
01:20:16 - That's a lot.
01:20:17 - We're here.
01:20:18 - We gotta wrap this thing up.
01:20:19 We're just way, way over the line.
01:20:22 I promised it and now it's here.
01:20:24 David Pierce's headline blitz.
01:20:26 David, take it away.
01:20:28 - I would like to just briefly catch you up
01:20:29 on all of the things that are happening with TikTok
01:20:32 because TikTok is not banned.
01:20:34 It is still here and it is wild,
01:20:37 is just how I would say it.
01:20:38 So here's what has gone on in TikTok land
01:20:40 just since the last time we did this show together
01:20:43 in the studio.
01:20:44 TikTok Notes is an app that is coming out.
01:20:46 It's only available in a couple of countries
01:20:48 but it's just straight up Instagram.
01:20:49 TikTok just did Instagram and they're like,
01:20:51 "Here, would you like Instagram?"
01:20:52 TikTok made it so that's a thing that exists.
01:20:55 There are also now ways to buy event tickets,
01:20:58 like concert tickets and stuff inside of TikTok
01:21:00 because TikTok hasn't found enough ways to sell you stuff.
01:21:02 They wanna sell you more stuff.
01:21:03 I think that is gonna work.
01:21:05 I think all of this concert stuff
01:21:08 is going to move inside of music apps
01:21:10 in really interesting ways
01:21:11 and I think TikTok is gonna do it first
01:21:12 and it's gonna be really fascinating.
01:21:14 There's been a bunch of non-news news
01:21:17 about the TikTok divestment stuff.
01:21:19 There's a new bill in the House
01:21:21 that is being attached to aid to foreign countries
01:21:25 that is partly now also a TikTok ban.
01:21:28 So it's possible that that is going to move to the Senate
01:21:30 much more quickly where they're gonna have to talk
01:21:32 about divestment and banning.
01:21:34 The president has said that he's gonna
01:21:36 potentially delay a ban another six months
01:21:38 to make this all happen again.
01:21:41 TikTok has said it's going to restrict people
01:21:44 who keep posting problematic stuff on the For You feed.
01:21:48 It also was reported this week
01:21:51 that all of this Project Texas stuff,
01:21:53 which I would say we have relentlessly made fun of
01:21:55 on this show for a long time,
01:21:57 is basically just a bunch of nonsense
01:21:59 and that ByteDance has access
01:22:01 to lots of US users' TikTok data.
01:22:03 Twitch and Spotify continue
01:22:06 to do their best TikTok impressions.
01:22:08 Spotify is rolling out a remix thing
01:22:10 so you can start to play with music
01:22:11 in the same way that you can play with sounds
01:22:13 and speed them up on TikTok.
01:22:15 Twitch is doing a For You feed, basically.
01:22:17 I don't know how to say it more than that.
01:22:18 They just did a For You feed for Twitch,
01:22:21 which I think is actually very smart.
01:22:22 The world is TikTok now.
01:22:24 Everybody is trying to become TikTok
01:22:26 and TikTok is trying to become everybody else
01:22:28 and maybe it'll be banned and maybe it won't.
01:22:30 And that's all I got.
01:22:31 - I will say that TikTok trying to sell stuff relentlessly
01:22:35 is just reaching new levels of weirdness for me personally.
01:22:38 - I found a solution.
01:22:39 - Okay.
01:22:40 - Okay, here's what you guys are gonna do.
01:22:42 You're gonna go on TikTok
01:22:43 and you're gonna search deep talk, one word, deep talk.
01:22:48 And then you're gonna watch a bunch of those videos.
01:22:50 They're gonna be really weird.
01:22:51 They're gonna be nonsensical.
01:22:52 You're gonna be really confused.
01:22:54 You're gonna be like,
01:22:54 this just looks like what Kranz's brain looks like
01:22:57 on the inside. - Yeah, yeah.
01:22:58 - And you like a few of those
01:23:00 and then you're on deep talk
01:23:01 and you're no longer on shop talk.
01:23:03 - Okay. - It's great.
01:23:04 - When I say all AI right now,
01:23:07 my experience with it is like weird and bad.
01:23:10 TikTok believes I want to coil things
01:23:13 that look like ropes so much.
01:23:16 It's like, you're gonna buy a garden hose reel.
01:23:18 You're gonna buy an extension cord reel.
01:23:20 You're gonna buy a USB cord reel,
01:23:22 which I don't think you should be doing at all.
01:23:24 It's just like, have you thought about reels?
01:23:26 Buy 'em.
01:23:27 Just buy 'em now.
01:23:29 And the pitches are increasingly abstract
01:23:33 and a little threatening.
01:23:35 Like, they're like, you will feel guilt
01:23:37 if you don't get in on this hose reel deal now.
01:23:40 - Mine is a puppet.
01:23:42 - It's already bad.
01:23:44 It's already bad, Alex.
01:23:45 - Skateboarding on a leaf over water.
01:23:49 That's all my TikTok is right now and it's great.
01:23:51 I'm like, I don't know what the hell's happening here.
01:23:52 - I'm just saying, there are people out there right now
01:23:54 who have bought upwards of a dozen hose reels
01:23:57 because this algorithm has just ruthlessly manipulated them.
01:24:01 - Yeah, I mean, I did buy something
01:24:03 not directly from TikTok, but they should be a strainer.
01:24:06 I went and got it on Amazon.
01:24:07 It's great.
01:24:08 - We'll see.
01:24:09 Do we have a sense of the Senate bill might be moving?
01:24:12 Do we have a sense of if it's gonna happen or not?
01:24:14 - At the moment, not exactly,
01:24:15 but Lauren Finer just wrote a really good story
01:24:18 that the general assumption is that
01:24:20 because it's tied to foreign aid,
01:24:22 the Senate is basically gonna have no choice
01:24:25 but to talk about it.
01:24:26 Like, where we landed with the last bill
01:24:27 is the Senate is just sort of studiously
01:24:29 pretending it doesn't exist.
01:24:32 That is going to be less possible now.
01:24:35 And it's, I think, it's gonna get raised one way or another.
01:24:38 Where it goes seems to be anyone's guess.
01:24:41 - All right, we have time for, I think, two more.
01:24:44 That was David's Headline Blitz, everyone.
01:24:46 Congratulate David.
01:24:46 Please send him a note if you'd like more Headline Blitz
01:24:49 in the future.
01:24:49 - You can sponsor the Headline Blitz
01:24:50 inside of the lightning round if you'd like to.
01:24:53 - It's available for sponsorships at this time.
01:24:55 We're still, we're very close.
01:24:57 Just everyone close your eyes and send good vibes
01:24:59 to our first lightning round sponsor,
01:25:01 and then we'll move on to the Headline Blitz.
01:25:02 All right, Alex, what you got?
01:25:03 - Yeah, so Boston Dynamics, they make the robots.
01:25:06 - That's a good one.
01:25:07 - Yeah, they make the robots.
01:25:08 Earlier this week, they said goodbye to Atlas.
01:25:11 And then the very next day, they said hello to new Atlas.
01:25:14 In the most terrifying video of all time.
01:25:17 Where like the legs did like some weird
01:25:20 360 degree hinge stuff.
01:25:23 The head looks like some sort of lamp.
01:25:25 It basically looks like a video game monster.
01:25:28 And then we wrote about how it needs to have hair.
01:25:31 - We did do that.
01:25:33 It was a good pitch from Alex.
01:25:34 And I said just make sure it's over reported.
01:25:36 And boy did Eve Peyser over report the story
01:25:38 of why robots need hair.
01:25:40 - Just asking directly some poor scientist,
01:25:43 do you think the robot would be less creepy with fur?
01:25:45 And the robot's like, no.
01:25:47 - The scientist was like, not the robot.
01:25:50 You don't ask the robot what would make it less creepy.
01:25:52 (laughing)
01:25:54 - Don't worry about it.
01:25:58 - Was this written by a robot?
01:26:01 Give the robot's hair written by a robot.
01:26:03 You should watch the video.
01:26:08 Our former Verge reporter, James Vincent,
01:26:10 I believe his post on the video was,
01:26:13 it's funny that Boston Dynamics
01:26:14 just leaned directly into terrifying.
01:26:17 - Yeah, just horrifying, horrifying.
01:26:19 - It's very good.
01:26:20 'Cause it looks like a person,
01:26:21 but it moves like a horror movie.
01:26:23 This is probably what the person on the train was watching.
01:26:24 All right, here's mine.
01:26:25 I just want to end with this.
01:26:26 Because, I'm just gonna say it.
01:26:30 So this, wait, so this is mine.
01:26:32 I just want to end with this.
01:26:34 I don't know why I think this is so funny.
01:26:36 Samsung is requiring its executives
01:26:39 to come to work for six days a week now
01:26:42 to quote, inject a sense of crisis.
01:26:45 - Yeah, they gotta get around that Google reorg.
01:26:48 - Wait, so Samsung is like,
01:26:50 we want to make this worse for everyone.
01:26:54 So, right, they've had disappointing financial results.
01:26:57 Sales are down.
01:26:58 They fell short of expectations in 2023.
01:27:02 It's a crisis, we need to make you feel the crisis.
01:27:04 The executives are now doing a six day work week
01:27:07 until something.
01:27:09 And I, you know, theoretically I'm an executive
01:27:15 at this organization.
01:27:16 I feel like if I was like,
01:27:17 I'm gonna come to work one extra day a week,
01:27:19 but it's just executives having ideas
01:27:22 about how to not come to work anymore.
01:27:24 I feel like our staff would be like,
01:27:26 you're gonna have the worst ideas in the world.
01:27:29 - Have fun by yourself.
01:27:31 - It's like, here's what we need.
01:27:32 Everyone have more meetings on Saturday
01:27:35 about how it's a crisis.
01:27:37 That will solve the crisis.
01:27:40 I cannot wait for the weird shit
01:27:43 Samsung is about to start doing.
01:27:45 Like just fully, they just did a buy one,
01:27:47 get one free TV deal.
01:27:49 That's a six day work week idea.
01:27:51 Like fully a six day work week idea.
01:27:53 They're gonna start giving away toasters
01:27:57 when you open a bank.
01:27:57 It's gonna be incredible.
01:27:59 They're gonna have the wobbly guy
01:28:01 in the lots outside the best spot.
01:28:02 - Is Bixby coming back?
01:28:04 - Bixby, full Bixby, but like goth Bixby.
01:28:07 Like get some attention.
01:28:08 I finally saw the video of What's Her Name.
01:28:11 - Just crawling out of the water.
01:28:14 Go, go JoJo Siwa Bixby.
01:28:14 - Bixby's doing a country album.
01:28:16 Let's see if that works.
01:28:17 Like, can you imagine what a bunch of executives
01:28:21 unconstrained by the reality of making or doing anything
01:28:26 trapped in the office together on Saturday
01:28:28 told it's a crisis and they can't go home on Saturdays
01:28:33 until the crisis, just imagine.
01:28:36 It's gonna be incredible.
01:28:37 I can't wait for what happens this year with Samsung.
01:28:40 - We're gonna get some cool stuff.
01:28:41 - Every TV's a 3D TV.
01:28:42 Like just anything.
01:28:44 - Curved and 3D.
01:28:46 With AI inside.
01:28:48 - It's good.
01:28:49 - Yeah.
01:28:50 - The whole rest of the world.
01:28:51 - Yeah, and then Undecoder is like,
01:28:51 we're going fully remote.
01:28:53 You don't push your employees.
01:28:54 You get better innovation.
01:28:55 Samsung's like, Saturdays.
01:28:57 - Yeah.
01:28:58 We're just gonna stand over you and breathe loudly.
01:29:01 - Someone there is currently pitching
01:29:04 bringing back the Galaxy Note,
01:29:06 but now it has two styluses,
01:29:07 and everybody is like freaking out about how exciting it is.
01:29:10 - And the lead times on new products are long.
01:29:15 - Yeah.
01:29:16 So like four years from now,
01:29:17 we're gonna be like, what on earth?
01:29:19 - Yeah, instead of a stylus, it's nunchucks.
01:29:21 And it's gonna be epic.
01:29:23 - We're gonna look back on today.
01:29:25 - Yeah.
01:29:25 - You can directly trace.
01:29:27 - Just boop all the way back to that.
01:29:30 It's gonna be a good time.
01:29:31 - What if it's a laptop, but it's 54 inches?
01:29:33 - All I'm saying is I'm gonna start calling
01:29:35 whatever happens next,
01:29:36 we just have to start calling it Saturday Samsung.
01:29:38 - Yeah.
01:29:39 - Just as a family, can we agree on that?
01:29:41 - Yes, totally.
01:29:42 - Okay, I'm hopeful, as a person
01:29:44 who is an aficionado of weird Sony,
01:29:47 I am very hopeful for the opportunity
01:29:49 Saturday Samsung might bring.
01:29:50 - Party speakers.
01:29:52 - Right, where are they?
01:29:53 - It's coming.
01:29:54 - Where's Samsung's answer to ULT Pro?
01:29:57 - Somewhere, it's coming.
01:30:00 - What was that little robot we saw that could, Bollie.
01:30:02 - I was just about to say,
01:30:03 Bollie is about to get a lot of shine
01:30:05 at Saturday Samsung.
01:30:06 Bollie is a main character.
01:30:09 - Let's go, Bollie, go.
01:30:11 - All right, that's it, we're way over time.
01:30:13 Just completely over.
01:30:15 I apologize, but I don't apologize
01:30:17 because the feedback we get is
01:30:18 you'd like this to be six hours long.
01:30:20 So we'll do that next week.
01:30:22 All right, that's it, that's The Vergecast.
01:30:24 (upbeat music)
01:30:27 - And that's it for The Vergecast this week.
01:30:30 Hey, we'd love to hear from you.
01:30:32 Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11.
01:30:34 The Vergecast is a production of
01:30:36 The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:30:38 Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.
01:30:41 That's it, we'll see you next week.
01:30:44 (upbeat music)
01:30:46 (upbeat music)