Netflix is turning into YouTube

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Yep. And here we are. I'm your friend David Pierce. Neil Episales here. Hey, buddy. What's up? You're home for once. after a month of extremely fancy hotel rooms you're back in you know your lowly old house yeah i'm back in my attic next to my daughter's room at any moment you can hear her singing taylor swift it's gonna that's what our summer has been what does she think about the msg wedding uh she she's more excited about her ipod so i showed her pictures of the wedding and she's like great good for taylor um but she you know she's going to camp like eight-year-olds do in the summer and she wanted to listen to music on the bus and way to camp and some of her uh friends on the bus have like little android music players there's like kid music players some people have phones without sim cards in them it's that time in the parenting journey for me it will come for you david yeah and i was like i'm not doing any of this we are we are delaying phone and phone like objects as long as we can uh and so i dug out one of my old ipods that we actually retrofitted for a YouTube video ages ago with an SSD and a new battery. I've been debating doing this for my own purposes. Yeah, so I mean, we had it because we just did this for a video ages ago. And I had to remember how to download MP3s. I'm not going to say how or why. But it was completely legal. That's all you need to know. I was like, I pay for every streaming service. You know? Yeah. I pay for every streaming service. I would like it on the record, Your Honor. I pay for every streaming service. I have done my economic duty to the artists of America, and I do it every month at high rates, ever-increasing rates. Anyhow, so we gave her an iPod, and we put a bunch of music on it. It is the worst selection outside of Taylor Swift, who I will concede is America's finest living songwriter. Shout out Walt Mossberg, who believes this in whatever fiber of his being. One of Walt's better takes. It is. I agree. I think she's right up there. uh it's a bunch of disney's direct to streaming musical soundtracks and i could not be unhappier about this and so we plugged in the headphones and now it's over there but you might hear it coming through the wall at any moment this is very different from being in the south of france is she old enough to have a conversation with me about which of the high school musicals is the best oh we haven't gotten there yet we are at zombies and descendants and my friend the ill-fated crossover musical experience okay this this is this is big yikes this is i'm in the sweet spot of we are at spidey and his amazing friends and we are we are appearing to be stuck there for some time and this is terrific news in my household i have no we are not pushing past this until until we're ready for like you know the exorcist we're just gonna stick with spidey until then It's going to be amazing. Good luck, because once it comes for you, it's all over. And you're like, can we just listen to Taylor Swift again? That's actually a thing I say all the time. I mean, you and everybody else, it turns out. If you have thoughts about the wedding, by the way, I want to hear them. I'm very conflicted about it. I need to hear everybody's thoughts. Vergecastattheverge.com. Tell us how you feel. I'm dead serious about that. We have a bunch of stuff we should talk about today. There's a lot of Netflix stuff going on. There's a lot of meta smart glasses stuff going on. brendan remains brendan is going on at all times um some deeply silly instagram ai shenanigans that we should get into um but let's start with netflix i think we've spent a lot of time talking about streaming services on this show and we we have this thing called the go 90 scale of streaming services right and it is essentially doomed streaming services right sorry the go 90 scale of doom streaming services and the idea is if you are a 90 like the verizon streaming service go 90 you are dead uh if you are a zero that's the that's the best most vibrant most alive you can possibly be and we have had netflix at a zero for a very long time yeah i i think there is an argument to be made at this particular moment in time that we need to tick it up on the scale a little bit oh my in part because there's just been a bunch of news this week that suggests that netflix is slowly losing its mind and starting to flail uncontrollably in a lot of direction And that is what happens right before things start to get really ugly. Let me just throw a couple at you. So the biggest story of the week in sort of media tech circles was this Bloomberg report about how Netflix has this huge problem where it will have a hit first season of a show and then lose a vast quantity of the audience on the second season. And there are a bunch of examples of this. I think Beef was the one with the strongest drop off. Hugely successful first season, big zeitgeisty show, won a lot of awards. The second season, by all accounts, very good. I didn't watch it and neither did anybody else. and but this is this is a recurring theme at netflix apparently and and they're struggling to figure out what to do about it and how to solve this problem everybody has theories about this people are talking about this all week um then next to that there's news that netflix is a expanding its podcast operations including deals with folks at the vox media podcast network shout out to charlie harding friend of the verge cast who's switched on pop is going to be on netflix going amazing sometime soon yeah big win for charlie we love charlie go go listen to and watch switched on pod um but they're also doing just straight up what i would call youtube videos they made a deal with a bunch of publishers including our potential soon-to-be parent company it's all very confusing i don't understand any of it you can do the disclosure if you'd like to i'm gonna try go ahead to basically take in in many cases existing videos that were made for other social platforms and just put them on netflix and they're the emmy nominations were this week there there's been a bunch of new information coming in earnings and such that suggests that even as Netflix continues to grow, people are spending less time on Netflix. There's just the thing I wrote at the top of this Google Doc is what is Netflix anymore? And I feel like if I am asking this question, maybe we're not at a zero on the go 90 scale of doom streaming services anymore. Yeah, I think that's right. Netflix is the subscription that you definitely had is no longer a given. I think that's right. Right. That's what kept it at zero on the doom scale for so long was if you were going to have one subscription, it was almost certainly Netflix. I think what you are describing is not what is Netflix anymore. It's. Boy, how fast is Netflix going to turn into YouTube? right and is that is that maybe the goal like it it sure looks like that is not just a thing that's accidentally happening but that might be affirmatively the plan and and there are a lot of reasons that's really hard to do it's really no one has succeeded in doing that to be clear no one has ever succeeded in doing that you know i did just come back from can i listened to so many creators at that event talk about advertising and talk about reaching audiences. They all make long YouTube videos and they've integrated the advertising into the videos very directly. They market products. This is the thing. And the two pieces of the creator economy that are booming are Instagram and YouTube. Those are the things. Those are the formats that people operate in. And TikTok is actually pretty secondary in really interesting ways. Is that just because there's no money in it? Like still to this day, no one has figured out how to make any money on TikTok. It's a discovery mechanism for other platforms. I mean, that's one argument. I think, I mean, there are TikTokers who make a lot of money. Like Charlie D'Amelio exists, right? Sure. There are TikTokers who do brand deals on that platform in big ways. But the idea that the audiences are growing or that you can reach new audiences or you can experiment in new formats or you can like light up new channels. Like TikTok is so interest graph driven and it really does not have any follow graph that the creators sort of flock back to YouTube in real ways. And that means things like backrooms happen as YouTube phenomenons. And then Netflix gets to participate in that later at more expensive economics, whereas YouTube gets to grow the talent that then becomes the Hollywood talent. And I think if you're Netflix, you're kind of looking at this, you know, like, OK, the future of this industry is a bunch of creators who control all of the attention and all the cultural capital today. They're nowhere near our platform. And the only time we will get a hold of them is later when they have the cachet and the influence and the money to make bigger budget things. And then we have to pay really high rates to get those bigger budget things. And then we're going to charge people for that. And we'll just be late because those creators are also available for free on Instagram and YouTube and TikTok. And we had better go get a piece of that early. And I think all of this flailing is a response to that. So Netflix does not have anything close to what you would call a creator strategy. No, right. That's just not the thing that they do. And if you think that's where the action is, if you think creators are where the future of the cultural industries are, you had better do something and you might as well just fire a bunch of stuff at the wall, including paying for YouTube videos. Why not? The question is whether that's worth the ever increasing amount of money that Netflix charges customers to be on its platform at all compared to YouTube, which somewhat famously is free. Yeah. Although YouTube Premium, I would say, even as it goes through its own unbelievably large series of price increases, remains the best deal in streaming. And it's not particularly close. Oh, yeah. That's the only one. That's the true zero now. Yeah. I think I honestly think that's right. And so this is this is the thing, right? I think, you know you you can put a lot of pieces together and figure out how netflix got here right like you go way back to the idea that netflix's main competitor was sleep this company has been obsessed with time spent in the service for a really long time and to some extent i get that and then they've also made a bunch of other moves that suggest that that is the thing that they're after they they said they weren't into sports and then they got into sports they said they they they weren't doing gaming and then they got into gaming and they're increasingly into gaming and this service is just a place to go to do entertainment, which is fine and good. But like you said, that puts them in a very different competitive space with a bunch of gigantic platforms with impossible resources that are well established in this space that you just can't compete with. Like the billions of dollars that have been spent over the years trying to take down YouTube, even in some small way, have all been wasted. It just hasn't worked. And so for Netflix to say we want to be the shiny entertainment thing made sense to me right that it was like the race was how do we become HBO before HBO comes that becomes Netflix and it actually made sense a while back that the thing to aspire to was to be HBO and that if you could be HBO and become the factory of great shows all the rest of your problems solve themselves so to me it's like I look at this and either if you're Netflix you don't think you can win that game anymore by making the most best shows, which I think in a lot of ways is demonstrably true at this point. The best shows are not on Netflix. And also look at it and say, okay, we need to continue to be the biggest thing in the world to support our unbelievable investment in everything. We just have to go eat up minutes in people's day, whatever that looks like. And that just runs you directly into YouTube and TikTok. And I think that is a losing game for Netflix in a big, big way. Yeah. I mean, again, the problem for every media business of every kind, not news websites or whatever, like every literal media business, the thing that makes content, that's your business. You're up against an army of teenagers who will work for free. It is the problem. You just have to stare at it and say most people on their phones, on their home screens have Instagram and YouTube. And the economics of Instagram and YouTube are an army of teenagers who will work for free. and they make infinity content. Okay. Like, what are you going to do about that? Something. It has to be something. Right. The two things Netflix has always said about itself that you've described, one, our only competition is sleep and we have to become HBO before HBO comes up, have always been in absolute opposition to each other. Our only competition is sleep means they have to just have stuff. Right. A huge array of stuff that commands your attention and keeps you from playing video games and keeps you from opening TikTok. And that means eventually they're going to make video games, which they did. And eventually they're going to have YouTube videos and podcasts, which they do. And they've picked that one. They did not pick, we will have the best quality content. They just didn't. And Netflix has gotten really numeric about it. The New York Times did a profile of Dan Lin, who runs the studio now. Here's the quote. Mr. Lin is a reversion to the norm. He knows what works on the service and how much each movie should cost. and there's little he's willing to budge on no matter how big a star is wow i mean the whole profile is like he's like i say no yeah i say no and i'm like this is how much you can get and you're going to hold to this budget and like he reorganized how their studio works and it is it's like quant stuff you know what i mean like it is financial engineering to make the content and people like working with him because he's honest which is a rarity in hollywood sure it's the other part of the profile we'll link it you can read it it's really good um but i think that's very different than we charge you a lot of money to show you the best stuff right and it's a fundamentally different creative proposition too right it is it is like ruthless execution on a series of numbers as opposed to uh actual creative execution i mean ryan broderick our friend over at garbage day wrote it wrote a good thing about this that is like netflix because of that exact approach that you're describing has become sort of a trailing indicator of what's cool and interesting and not leading any of it right like you can look at something on netflix and see what was trending 18 months ago when they started production on it yeah and that everything is sort of a copy of a copy of a copy of something that worked on netflix and netflix's movies frankly have been like that for some time uh it's why like dwayne the rock johnson just does that movie over and over and over again on netflix um but its shows at least for a long time didn't feel like that and they're not all like that there's still some good stuff on netflix but it does like if you are going to run your business that way you are going to run a very particular kind of business that is not the like big swing creative thing that netflix seemed to want to be for a really long time there's just some part of this where the you know there's a big drop-off between season one and season two of a Netflix show that runs right into Netflix's best when it's buying the content from networks that are good at this. Yes. It's not like there's a bunch of Hollywood talent that's all locked up at great jobs right now. And it's totally against the idea of making more episodes of television. Yeah, like it feels like you could be like, all right, we're going to set up a studio to do it like NBC did in the 90s, maybe at lower rates, right? We're not going to pay every single cast member of friends a million dollars per episode like we're gonna make 22 minute long sitcoms and make 60 episodes of that in a season and do it again the next year yeah and just market that thing so that you have to watch netflix but it seems like they have decided the economics of that don't work and the economics of buying youtube videos do and that seems upside down to me for some reason well the argument for netflix in this case would be that it is such a good distributor right like the we've i've done a lot of reporting on recommendation algorithms over the years and one of the things that is sort of seemingly true about netflix is that it has done a better job than just about anybody else of putting content into a recommendation machine to put the right thing in front of you at the right time it is very good at that um what it has not had is the raw volume of content to do that with that something like youtube has and so maybe for netflix what they're saying is like well we know what you want to watch we just don't have it on the service let's go get it all on the service and then we can put it in front of you and i think like i can see the spirit of that theory i just feel like it doesn't hold up the minute you tell me that i i came here to watch you know beef which i didn't and instead you're going to show me a bunch of like old buzzfeed youtube videos because it's structurally to you that's the same thing like i just don't i don't think that's right that's the company that believes what they do is distribute content not sell you sell you tv and movies yeah and that is a mistake okay let me put two ideas next to you okay one youtube is going to end up incentivizing its creators to make things that look like tv faster than netflix will get to having enough stuff that looks like youtube i think that's right i mean that's youtube is already well down that road it's it's making those kinds of shows it's it rebuilt the tv app to look like a television streaming service confidently tell you that it's growing faster on tv than any other platform yeah this is the new race like right like before it was we had to become hbo before they become us then it was our only competition to sleep and now and you and i are saying it very much feels like netflix is that we have to overtake youtube before youtube overtakes us yeah i think you're absolutely right if you were if you were to handicap that race youtube is well ahead so where would you put netflix on the go 90 scale of doom streaming services i mean it's it's like it's in the low single digits right it's like a it's like a two or a three um but i think it is it is just meaningful to me that it doesn't i don't know what netflix is anymore like i don't know what the value prop of netflix is in my life anymore but you you you look at all those shows and some of them are good and i've seen a bunch of them uh none of those are like the shows of the year right like even looking at the Emmys it's like Pluribus was a show a lot of people talked about Widow's Bay was a huge hit that a lot of people talked about The Pit is probably the show of the year for the second year running which is pretty impressive uh it just Netflix is not a thing you sort of have to go to it's a thing you just sort of have in the background and boy is that just already YouTube yeah here's my here's my second one oh yeah hit me here's my hottest take okay netflix should buy xbox wow is that not where i thought that was going okay hotest take netflix should buy xbox hit me with it uh well we'll start from the xbox side of the house xbox is a disaster and i know this because the people running xbox keep issuing memos saying it's a disaster. Yes. Right? Asha Sharma just put out the big memo being like, I got to reset this whole thing. We don't make enough money. I think she said something like, for every dollar we put into Xbox, we lose 68 cents. Seems bad. That is one of the worst businesses I've heard of at massive scale in this industry. Oh, wait, it was 64 cents. Shit. 64. I'm sorry. I'm sorry. That extra four cents is really, and the calculus of Microsoft is really going to, you can buy three more GPUs over the course of one year. um that's a bad business and she is stripping it way down yeah right like you can see that she's spinning off the big studios uh she's firing people at all the other studios that she's keeping and she's focusing her energy on like minecraft and like the big multi-service games that kind of print money and she wants to be at a billion players a day which don't we all which is a huge number i think the verge cast should be one of the platforms that entertains billions of people a day a billion players a day is uh is my favorite fat show song actually um sorry uh yeah and you could get there like i know there's like a lot like uh andrew upster wrote for us a big piece being like that this number is big and like he's like this whole plan doesn't make any sense and basically the answer is this number is really big and you can't get there even if you count Candy Crush, right, and all the other sort of big casual games that they have, that's a huge goal that you have to get to. I think the reason that you would say that goal, which is I think impossible for Microsoft to reach with its current economics and commitment to AI over everything else is that you have to pump a lot of money in the system and do a lot of marketing and you have to compete with sleep. You have to say, we're going to win in all of these places over every other kind of entertainment, such that you're going to play a game probably on a phone. Netflix has been desperate to get itself on your phone. True. Yeah. They are desperate to get on your phone. That is why they've done games. It's why they've revamped their mobile app to be more TikTok-y. It's probably why they're doing podcasts and stuff now, right? This is inherently mobile content that people are watching on their phones. Well, why not just buy the gaming company and capture a bunch of that additional attention? You would have licensed then as Netflix to continue the sort of spin out of studios, but you are already really good at knowing what content to license and put in front of a bunch of people as a distributor and recommend the right stuff to the right people at the right time. And then you would body up against the phone platforms, which basically killed Microsoft's ambitions to do game streaming and find ways to turn your phone into an Xbox and say, look, you want Netflix here, you want Netflix and all your other platforms. We need to put games in the Netflix app in some way that is economically viable for us. And there's a lot of regulators around the world who are going to look more kindly upon Netflix needing to do this than Microsoft. Yes, because it is Netflix's actual business. Because it's Netflix's actual business. And I think to Microsoft, they're like, yeah, file lawsuits. Let's see what happens. Yeah. Right. But I think Netflix has a much stronger case to say, look, we need to expand the range of entertainment options. And these platform policies are keeping us from doing it. And you would just get, maybe they don't care about the console hardware. You would get the ecosystem of creatives that make games to drive whatever IP that you need to drive in all the studios. They are probably the most logical home for Xbox, if you believe the future of entertainment has interactivity and gaming at the center. Which I want to say I do not, but many, many, many people do. Correct. My favorite thing about this is everything you just said makes perfect sense, and I believe with absolute confidence that if that happens, it will go disastrously badly. yes like you just made such a compelling argument that i suspect is being made in the offices of netflix at this moment and probably frankly at a bunch of other companies like this uh like if you think david ellison is not going to try to roll up xbox into paramount warner cnn whatever it's going to be uh david ellison talks a lot about gaming yeah boy does that guy love to talk about gaming yeah uh for all the reasons you just described and i think uh it would just the the Cultures of those two things could not be further away from one another in a way that I think anyone who has tried to back their way into becoming a gaming company has found it very hard to do so. Oh, I think Sony managed to get enormous value from owning Sony movie studios. And they put the Spider-Man font on the PS3. They did. That was great. They did. And Sony, a famously spectacular business that everyone should try and emulate right now. All right. We should switch gears. If you have another idea for who should buy Xbox, I want to hear it. Because I think the idea that all of this is happening for Xbox to be sold to somebody. Neal, A, I think you were kind of there first, but this is in the ether now. And I want to know who you think should buy Xbox. We should take a break, and then we're going to come back. And I have a bunch of mean things to say about smart glasses. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted, but is still fast to ship, Framer is built for that. You design on a visual canvas with responsive layouts, posting, and a CMS built in, so the work is production ready from day one. Agents work alongside you to draft pages and polish sections, then you review and publish what goes live. 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Stavros Halkius. Laverne Cox. Hassan Piker. Alana Glazer. I promise you're going to have a good time. Now on the Vox Media Podcast Network, this is The Downside. Support for the show comes from Rippling. Retaining your best employees should always be top of mind, especially if they are in high demand. And while it's impossible to predict the future, Rippling AI can help you identify who might be a flight risk. That's because Rippling AI is built on your live global workforce data, giving you full visibility into your business and the ability to stay ahead of the curve. Say you want to retain top talent, just ask Rippling AI, who are my top performers this year? And instantly receive a workforce report highlighting your top employees with supporting data like recent performance reviews and engagement metrics. But it doesn't stop there. Rippling AI can turn these insights into a proposed retention strategy, including a recommended 10% spot bonus for top performers. 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It's the only thing in the way. it's just literally me like every day being awkward or someone that I've definitely met before and being like, yeah, let me introduce you to someone else real quick. You know, like I think that is really thwarted my political ambitions. I say this because I've been saying it for years and it has been so removed from actual shipping reality for years that it's been kind of a joke. And now it's not a joke. And every now and again, the clips go viral without the context of the fact that I've been saying it for years to illustrate how bad it would be. And I just want to say clearly, I think it would be bad. I think it would be bad to create a worldwide facial recognition panopticon so that I can be the president. Am I going to refuse the opportunity to be the president when presented with such panopticon? I think it's a moral dilemma that each of us will have to choose. But I know it's bad. And I just want to I want to say this is clear. I'm going to have to say it every single time. Yeah, because it is the killer app. And I think there's a reason that we're inching our way towards Panopticon. Yep. So it's bad. So as a reminder, this is either last week or the week before we talked about the fact that Meta was building a facial recognition feature into its smart glasses. I think it was Wired that broke the news that this was a thing that they were building. They hadn't turned it on. Wired's news was the code was on the glasses. Right. The code was on the glasses. is uh meta's official response from andy stone who likes to run around yelling at people on threads was that this is disingenuous we were never going to turn it on which is just a fully insane response to you wrote the code and put it on the glasses like yep that's just a thing that happened so anyway um next to that has been uh this running story uh including some really great reporting by our friend joanna stern about this like budding industry of people who will basically hack and break your meta glasses so that the light doesn't turn on when you're recording uh meta issued a an update this week to make it so that if you tamper with the light it'll just disable the camera entirely that's a very good thing it's a mandatory update yay meta congratulations and then immediately immediately after this news breaks that meta is working on a new pair of smart glasses that is recording all the time. The idea is basically to capture snapshots every few seconds of audio and pictures and to basically use all of the input in this. Their big idea, apparently, for privacy's sake, is to not send the data itself, but to send metadata. Because in history, metadata has never been reverse engineered into data and has never been dangerous. uh so but like there is just this thing happening where meta is running around trying to explain and apologize for all of its disastrous security breaches uh andrew bosworth the the cto did an interview with nick thompson at the atlantic about a lot of this stuff they had an interesting conversation in which bos i would say very unsuccessfully tried to defend why a feature like this is worth doing uh they both like you agreed it would be awesome i totally want this and uh then nick was like but but how do you how do you reckon with all of the other stuff and he used the examples of the the blind community and veterans who need features like this and that is both true and just an unbelievably disingenuous way to try and defend a feature like this like i if you are going to use accessibility as a reason to like ham fist a feature into a thing for billions of people no but anyway even as they're running around doing this they are also just pushing ahead as fast as they possibly can to make this thing more and more privacy damaging and problematic and run at all of the things that people already hate about where these glasses are going and i sort of feel like in the same way that what 13 14 years ago now the glass hole phenomenon ended smart glasses for a period of time like i talked to people years after that who were like we had a project and we killed it after google glass because we just couldn't it was google ruined it for everybody it set this industry way behind i feel like meta is in the middle of doing that right now it is it is going to establish and ruin the idea of smart glasses before anybody else even gets to try i saw a video you know livy doing the influencer so yeah famous influencer um she posted a video and we talked about it in our newsroom and she's like people sell my travel itineraries Like they, there's a black market for where she's going on planes. And then she's accosted when she lands in the airport. And she specifically was like, this is really weird and dangerous for me that I get off the plane and a bunch of weirdos are there to like take my picture. And then she specifically was like, and they're all wearing meta glasses. Oh, wow. And it's because it's becoming that thing, right? Like that's the association people are making with it. Like this is a thing for a particular class of weirdos. Yeah. I have friends who are like world travelers and they're always like doing action sports and, you know, their Instagram feeds are all on their meta glasses as they're like surfing and going down. Like there's some set of uses that are good and benign. Sure. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you surf, not a problem. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you like walk through. A cost and stock influencers is bad. Probably bad. Like there's just something about that where I was like, this is a very famous influencer. She had like she literally is influential. and she's like i feel at danger and then the product she called out was meta glasses and i there's something there that i've just been stuck on like what is that a signal of i haven't quite figured it out i can't quite articulate it but the the product is starting to stand in as a like a symbol of how we treat each other yes you know what i mean like it means disrespect in some way this is an enormous problem for meta whose entire brand is we don't respect you right like this is this is the problem like they made the product that most communicates their values which is it belongs to us sorry we're gonna listen to you right yeah and for all of the instagram is listening to you explanations about how they're actually you know like you're on the same wi-fi network as your friend in the same place so like they search for travel like you can do it you can back into the programmatic ad tech explanation for why instagram is listening to you and then the glasses are gonna watch you all the time and now you're done and everyone you know And everyone, you know, and, you know, Boz's explanation of how the faces and names feature work, it's called name tag. He's like, it would just be people that have actually introduced themselves to you that have opted in and it's hashes and it's all stored locally. And you would say, remember that person. And you're like, this all sounds fine, except that person doesn't consent to be remembered in this way. Right. Right. The person on the other side of the glasses does not consent to me storing a hash of their face and then recalling it later like maybe maybe they would like it if i did that with my dumb meat sack of a brain but they would probably have a lot of feelings about my computer doing that yes yes right and like and god are there going to be ways to break that system even in the perfect version of that system can i like go stand up close to my tv and solve that problem with a video on my television it's unclear right we have not used the thing but this is their defense of it is like we limit it to like a local system and then he talked about the various laws in various states that like make it hard to ship he's like in illinois you got this dumb law and it's like no the people in illinois passed a law saying biometric face recognition is illegal yep and i think they're pretty happy about that law yeah right like i i think on balance there's going to be more of those because people don't want this to happen they perceive the glasses as an invasion and Meta's whole brand is invasion of privacy. Like whether or not they want it to be, that is what people associate with them. All of this, I think, is next to the big dream of everybody wants the AR glasses, right? Everyone is trying to build their way to AR glasses in some way. And if you're going to have AR glasses, you need a camera that is always on, looking at the world next to you, sending that visual information to something, to some computer somewhere, processing it, and then putting data over something, whether it's real light in the lenses in front of you and clear lenses, or whether it's a Vision Pro headset and it's screens and you're passing through, whatever it is, you need to process the visual information from the world around you. And there are lots of benign uses for this. I'm in an art museum. I just want to know more about the painting I'm looking at. There are absolutely not benign uses for this. But no one has contended with the fact that at the end of it, you have to record everything all the time. because the technology to do that at scale simply has not existed. And I think this meta attempt to take snapshots and do metadata is the first baby step towards we're going to record everything all the time so we can layer AR information over the world around you. Yeah, ironically, one of the most compelling explanations for Instagram is not recording you using the microphone on your phone has been that it's actually just impractical to do that, To light up the microphone for a billion Instagram users and then store all of that audio in the cloud and process it is so prohibitively expensive that they actually just couldn't do it even if they wanted to is one of the many compelling reasons that Instagram isn't doing that. There's a bunch of evidence that says that's no longer true, that actually everyone is desperately trying to get all of your data. meta itself rolled out this program to its employees saying we're going to track all your keystrokes we're going to track how you use your computer so that we can teach our ai models how to use computers like everyone in the ai space will tell you that all they want is more data all the time they will they will take all of it they can get no matter how like wacky or weird it is let the compute do the work and so suddenly this goes from being kind of prohibitively difficult from a technology perspective to being kind of a huge upside. And you're going to have to rely on the company that is going to do this to treat that data well, which is just a big, huge, giant leap. I mean, do you remember Microsoft Recall from whatever that was a couple of years ago now, that the first run of that was Microsoft saying it's locally stored, it's encrypted, it's completely private to your device. We understand the privacy risks here. This is meant just for you. And then it turned out they were just storing a huge amount of the data in plain text databases on your computer so that like if i if i leave my computer to coffee shop you can just look at everything i've ever done on my computer like this there are so many attack surfaces here that if there is just no shot of getting this right at any point in the near or immediate future and i cannot believe that meta in particular continues to try to push at this and this this is like the thing i keep trying to sort through in my head is do we have a fundamental smart glasses problem, which is just that we're going to keep running into this same thing over and over again, that you can't do smart glasses without the invasive stuff. It's literally, it's a feature, not a bug. And this is just a problem that is going to follow it forever. Or is it just that Meta is the absolute worst possible advocate for this technology at this time? And if some other company, like if Apple were leading this race instead of Meta, would we feel differently about it? Because by and large, people trust Apple in a way that they don't trust Meta. I can't peel those two things apart in my head. It's definitely both. Sure. Meta's brand when it comes to privacy is garbage. And I think Meta's brand in general is garbage. Yes. Meta is not a beloved company. They're just straightforwardly. And even the way Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the we're tracking all of our employees to train AI was so fundamentally dehumanizing. He said something like, we could go collect this data from all the people in the world, but we think we've hired all the smartest people that met us. We're going to collect the data from you because the way you use computers is smarter than everyone else. And it's like, eesh. We put the good brains in vats. You know what I mean? Yeah. It's like we're doing this diet eugenics. It was just a weird way of talking about the people that you employ, right? Like I have to surveil you because you're smart. It's weird. Or there's just like there's some disconnect from humanity at the center of that company that I cannot stop thinking about because they are desperate to own a platform. They are desperate to break away from their dependence on iOS and Android and the app store economics and Apple being able to turn off tracking and all the stuff that Apple and Meta have fought about for years. OK, then you're like, well, people trust Apple. Do you know what people think is listening to them to do the ads? Their iPhones. true yeah you can trust apple all you want like apple's the privacy company and then 90 of people are like my phone's listening to me yeah very true instagram is listening to me all the time and it's like well did apple stop it like i don't know it's listening to me all the time and it kind of just doesn't matter like i think tech companies as a whole do not have some great reputation for actually protecting people from the experiences they're obviously having yeah i think that's right does every single person believe that apple slows down their iPhone after two years. So they have to buy a new one. Like, sure. Like, can you trade on that trust in other ways? Maybe. But the reality is to make augmented reality glasses, you need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that to put information over it. There is not another way around it. And there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of the glasses that is both powerful enough and power miserly enough to do that in real time. You have to send that data to a cloud. You got to do it. There just isn't another choice. Or you can build something the size of the Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else. Like those are the current choices in this world. And it just means like if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing, you are going to have to invade people's privacy and maybe you shouldn't there's a incredible argument for nope you shouldn't do that nope the trade-offs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it i don't know who is positioned to make that argument today it does not appear to be in our nation's capability to have a fulsome argument about the risks and rewards of technology and then telling it tell anyone to stop it might be in the market right like these glasses might get pulled off people's faces and smashed i think we can see the opposition of data centers happening in like local governments or the country like something else will happen but the the thing people want ar glasses augmented reality glasses where you stare at a painting and it tells you what that who painted that painting and what it was you are at a party and you just know that person's name i'm telling you i'd be president if i had this case i would i'm already so charming i'm just like this one failing you know uh that's who knows um uh the social cost of that is too high yes and i think we're seeing it now the cost of ai is too high versus the reward and there's big backlash and i think meta has no ability to make the case that the reward is worth the social cost of interacting with meta in this way they do not have an ounce of credibility to say they're going to protect you well and they have now two decades of evidence to suggest that they'll win in the end, that actually all you need to do is wait and people will come around. And I think I have believed that for a long time, right? And it is the thing that makes me the most nihilistic about tech is this idea that everyone is going to stand in the way and say, I don't want this. It's going to be bad. And then they'll have a Black Friday sale and everybody gets on board. And it is very hard to leave Google in such a way that you can feel however you want about Google, and then you end up using Google products, and you become sort of Stockholm syndrome into Google. And I think a lot of these companies are set up on the belief that they will win in the end, because people will always trade those things and those feelings for other features and convenience. And I think, again, for most of my career, I also believed that that was true. And it sort of filled me with sadness when I really sat and thought about it. I don't know that that's true anymore. It feels like something has changed in a way that i'm still struggling to put my finger on but like this data center stuff is such a good example of there has been real like boots on the ground societal backlash to technology at a scale i don't think we've ever seen and and it feels like it is only growing and not receding and i think it's it's why i'm so obsessed with the smart glasses question because i think this is going to be the first big new technology in a very long time that a vast number of people are going to look at and just say no to. Like we all eventually got smartphones. We just did. We feel however you want about that, about what smartphones did to the world. Everybody has a smartphone now. It just, it happened. I don't think we're going there with smart glasses. And I think it's going to be really different. And I still don't know how it's going to play out, but it feels like it is headed down a different path. Yeah. I'll just bring it back to, you know, my daughter's silly iPod. That thing was on a shelf. I pulled it off the shelf. I plugged it into my computer and I put some MP3s on it. I will not say where the MP3s came from, but I put some MP3s on it and then it worked. And it worked exactly the same way today as it did 10 years ago when I first bought this iPod. And she's delighted. And I own the files. Let's just say I own the files. I own the files. And I own the hardware and it didn't require some DRM handshake with some cloud service. and I didn't worry that social media was on this thing or that the one of the reasons I didn't want to buy her like an old iPod touch was like I don't I'd actually don't want a bunch of eight-year-olds running around with a camera right now I just don't no thank you um that's just a parenting decision other people might feel differently um and I see that just like burbling with some of my peers you know as we all raise our kids together I see it with like a lot of younger people like they just don't they're just like looking at it and they're saying no like i just want to be offline in this way and i think the promise of the next interface paradigm the next wave using technology has always been this will be superior to the phone so we got to get there first this is mark's not working in the metaverse you're gonna live your life in this helmet because it's more fun than your phone and like pretty much just rejected uh-huh like straightforwardly i think the reaction to AI being everywhere and not being very good in most consumer use cases, people are rejecting it politically now. They're like, we don't, we don't, you don't need to build this infrastructure. I hate this actually. This chat bot on my car dealer's website is not providing me with anything. Turn it off. Like put all those tokens somewhere else. Um, and I, I do wonder if the smart glasses, you know, my thesis about the meta glasses has always been people like them because there are a camera on their face and that's useful. Sure. And then you're like, now a lot of people have cameras in their face now a lot of people are recording you without your consent like you can stop that pretty fast yeah it's it's that but that is that is the feature not the bug right like yeah you can't you can't have it both ways you can't have a camera on your face without having a camera on your face it feels like a zen cone but sure i'm also i just want to say i own the files is a is a t-shirt we're gonna make uh sure i'm excited about that I have the files. I mean, in the sense that I have the files. Listen, let's not delve into copyright law here. I do have one more question on this. So there was a bit of gadget news. In addition to all of the big tech companies trying to make smart glasses, there's just a million startups out there trying to make smart glasses happen. Xreal is probably the best known one, but there's a lot of them out there. And there's this company, Solos, that announced a new version of smart glasses called the air go a6 oh boy sure but one of its like key features is that it doesn't have a camera it has ai stuff it has uh prescription support it does a bunch of the other things that you would expect like headphone style things it doesn't have a camera and and part of me wonders like is this the next thing that's going to happen is we're going to see if we can do smart glasses minus a camera. This just is like, I don't know how to say this. Bone conduction headphones are a really cool technology. They will never be cool. Do you know what I mean? I mean, sure. But when my bone conduction headphones look like a pair of Ray-Ban Wayfarers, they are cool. I'm not even sure these are bone conduction. The point I'm making is like, everyone's just trying to shove the assistant into a form factor. Yes. Do you know what I mean? Like, what if I could get a microphone and speakers onto your face? sure it looks like glasses yeah i'm just there was a time when that was a bone conduction like headband we covered a lot of these in a gadget in like the 20 the 2000s they had a real moment they had a real moment and it's like yeah you're just they're just airpods like you just made airpods that look like glasses but the utility of the assistance is not high enough yet to support any of this yeah i agree with that yeah i think i'm sorry for people who work at solos. You did a good job. Their glasses are very light, which I think is very important. So kudos to them for that. All right, we should take one more break. 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From the Vox Media Podcast Network and the Wisdomist Company. new episodes drop weekly on youtube and your favorite podcast app all right we're back no hype test this week so we are straight into america's favorite podcast within podcasts uh i think the the the my brother my brother and me stands are still in my email about which is the best one um but i'm i'm claiming victory because you can just say thanks it's 2026 now brendan carr is a dummy it's time all right a little bit of a seizure at the end there i thought there was gonna be a drop i want to be honest i thought that i thought that was building to a drop it was really good i appreciate it this is good we're doing a collaborative enterprise here we're sampling and we're building here that was by ryan moeller thank you ryan i love the dance remix uh somebody else take it and make the drop that's what's coming next that was a great build yeah i think we were all anticipating a pretty intense drop and then i think ryan fell down on the sampler listen we all only have so much time in the day including brendan it's like last shot of the night it's like i'm out i've done it thank you ryan i appreciate you there we go what did brendan do this week we have evidence this week that brendan's various traitorous machinations against the first amendment are starting to bear their poisonous fruit david that's wow for you okay starting to for the start for the first time uh yeah in like real ways so as you know brendan has been fulminating against our nation's broadcasters about the way in which they use their spectrum, which is nonsense because people are not watching broadcast television. They're watching the apps on their phone, as we have discussed at length already in this episode. But Brendan has power over broadcast spectrum, so he has issued content regulations against broadcasters like ABC and CBS and Fox and local radio stations. And if you recall from previous episodes, in a big one that he has been focused on is what's called the equal time rule where if you have a candidate for a public office on the public airwaves you are supposed to have the opposing candidate and offer them equal time unless you are a bona fide news program in which case you have new news judgment you can be off so the only program that has ever really had to deal with this is saturday night live which has no argument that it is a news program and we all agree on this and saturday night live would have kamala harris on and then nbc would give time to donald trump which is a real thing that happened in the last election cycle Yeah, they had Trump at like a NASCAR race or something the next day. They gave him ad space at NASCAR race. Yeah. The flashpoint of this has been ABC's The View, which has long operated under a bona fide news exception. It was actually started by Barbara Walters, who is a news anchor. Right. And they want to have some candidates on. The FCC and Carr fulminated against them. We all got in some trouble. There's now a review of whether or not The View is a bona fide news program. You'll recall, I think last week or the week before, ABC's running ads to have people file comments with the SEC to be like, don't screw with the view. Okay, that's all happening. And ABC actually filed its response this week, which we will get into. In the meantime, Brendan has had the effect he wanted. Simon Ford did an analysis, and The View has not had any candidates for any competitive races on the air since all this happened. He has chilled the speech of a news program. Which is precisely the goal. That was the goal. So here's a quote from Semaphore. FCC chairman Brian Carr announced in February the agency was investigating whether or not the view violated the equal time rule. Since then, the ABC talk show hasn't featured a single political candidate running a competitive midterm race, according to the Semaphore analysis. Earlier this year, a representative for New York mayor, Zaron Mandani, pitched the view on hosting the mayor and Democratic Socialist candidates. He's supportive of Congress, according to a person familiar with the conversations. The view said it was interested in having the mayor on but couldn't accommodate the candidates because the staff was proceeding cautiously with political candidate bookings while the FCC equal time inquiry was progressing. So the investigation itself has chilled the speech of the program. Right. And they will not have candidates for office on the air, even if those candidates are interesting, even if people like to see them, because they don't know if they will be punished for their political speech. even though that speech is for years now been considered to be news programming right but this is this is job done by brennan carr this is this is his move he's not going to win this fight but he can win this fight without actually having the fight yeah and this is the the specific phrase in first amendment law is the chilling effect yeah you haven't actually made the rule that's illegal you haven't actually violated the first amendment you haven't said i will put you in jail if you say these things you have just made the people stop doing it because they're afraid of a consequence that may or may not be real. And that means they have preemptively stopped saying the things they would have otherwise said. And all over First Amendment law, the specter of the chilling effect is raised. You can't do this because you will have the chilling effect. And that is as bad as actually banning the speech itself. Court after court, administration after administration, Republican, conservative, progressive, liberal, you name it, the chilling effect is the problem. And so Brendan has accomplished an ice-cold chilling effect, at least on The View, if not the rest of the media ecosystem that operates on the broadcast airwaves. So we'll see what happens. ABC did file its response to this inquiry this week. I can just quote you from it. It's pretty fiery for Disney, which had previously been pretty bendy when it comes to the Trump administration. But ABC says, the First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in an editor's chair. Yet that is the seat the commission now proposes to take, deciding which broadcast programs qualify as legitimate news. And for those it finds wanting, compelling them to surrender their airtime to guests they never chose to feature. They go on to say an exemption that protects editorial independence only when the speaker's politics please those in power protects nothing at all. The shelter it gives one program today, it will deny another tomorrow when the gavel changes hands as it inevitably will. For ABC Disney, that is pretty fiery stuff. I'm glad they've found some spine here to fight back. I think they realize the public is on their side. And I will just remind everybody listening to this, Brendan is not chasing broadcast regulation because he really believes in broadcast regulation. all of this is a trial balloon to find ways to censor and control speech on internet platforms which everyone in the world is aware is actually what people consume even the view people mostly watch the view on youtube i was just going to say one way to accomplish that goal is by silencing the view right like that's there are a lot of people who watch jimmy kimmel and who watch the view and who watch stephen colbert on these other platforms and if you can just chop them down one at a time, you can get a long way to accomplishing your goal without ever actually having to get out over your skis on it. Yeah. And eventually he will go to Google and he will go to TikTok and he will go to Meta and say, hey, all those defense contracts you want, all those big rich government contracts you want. Well, actually, we think that you are using the public internet or the public airwaves or your services run on mobile broadband, which run on the public airwaves. And we don't think they're in the public interest you had better change your algorithms i'm telling you i keep saying it every week you can see the chilling effect in action right now in real time on abc yep and you can see that that will just empower brendan and the rest of the administration to go after internet platforms using whatever laws and powers they can magic up out of fairy dust and bad interpretations of existing statutes if not pass an executive order just claiming the authority which the trump administration loves to do and in fact which is in project 2025 the chapter about telecom and speech regulation was written by brendan carr he's not a smart man we we know what he's doing this is none of this is subtle yeah it's he's a he's a dumb rock of a man who is doing all the things he said he would do in absolutely hand-fisted ways that make it easy for a company ABC to write fiery responses to because there's only but one right answer. In any case, Brendan, if you want to come on the show and try to justify any of these actions, we're talking about the nature of the chilling effect. When the FCC chair is punishing broadcasters for their speech, I would welcome that conversation on the show on decoder, mono, E mono live streamed on kick. We can do it. You say, you tell me the time and place it'll happen. Yeah. Anyhow, that's been Brendan Carr's dummy. America's favorite podcast. in the podcast i really like the idea that we are going to build a like an epic trance remix one track at a time here i'm very excited about this it's very good um all right i have a ramageddon update for you um i don't know if you're aware of this everything is more expensive now and it just keeps getting worse. And I feel ridiculous, like, continuing to be annoyed by this, but I'm continuing to be annoyed by this. But in particular, there were two bits of really interesting data this week that are directly Ram again related that I just want to talk to you about. So the first is IDC, a big research firm that does a lot of, like, analysis of market shares and stuff like that, put out a chart this week that said that after nine straight quarters of growth, worldwide pc shipments dropped by 4.9 year over year two uninterrupted years of growth and i will say the growth actually sort of kicks back to like kind of right after covid like there was this minute at the beginning of the pandemic where everybody bought a computer everybody everyone bought a new computer and then it dropped a little because everybody had a new computer and then it has been it has been rising pretty steadily for several years now since then uh and it is now dropping like a stone because computers are too expensive and people can't buy them. They are they are harder to find than ever. Everybody's raising prices. Apple just raised prices like it's it's ugly out there. And there's an increasing sense that it's going to keep getting worse. But the other one that I want to talk to you about is there's this chart from this company Omdia, which I know nothing about, but it's fine. It put out a chart showing the share of the total bill of materials for products that is taken up by memory right so and this is like how much of the total cost of building a gadget comes from buying the memory and basically that number has at least doubled in the last couple of years uh that before if you were buying a premium device above 800 in this case the memory accounted for 11 of the cost of that device so you're buying a thousand dollar device it's a it's a hundred dollars worth memory um that is now 26 of the of the price that is what the memory costs um it's even worse in lower end phones uh we've talked about on the show that like the real danger immediately for a lot of these ramageddon things is that cheap devices just go away they maybe it becomes completely untenable to sell somebody a $200 phone in a world where the memory in that phone costs, in this case, it would be $120. The number is for the mid-low range, $200 to $400, the memory alone makes up 59% of the cost of the bill of materials, up from 32%. That's crazy. The numbers are just insane. And everywhere you look, it's like the costs just are what they are, and either you can stomach it or you can't nobody nobody has deals nobody has access to anything there's just a bunch of ships out there and it is like full anarchy to get there first and everybody who can pay for it is paying outrageous quantities of money for it and everybody else just gets screwed and like the the increasing sense that i get from people is like this is going to get worse and it's going to last a while and it is just it's scary times out there man and now there's this big run on like you're starting to see youtubers make content about how to buy used gadgets yep i don know if you noticed this but this is like how to make your stuff last longer and how to buy used stuff and find the best refurbished open box deals is like a real rising type of content for exactly this reason Everybody's just priced out of everything now. And so it's like, well, OK, maybe I'll go buy a three year old MacBook because it's literally the only thing I can afford. How do I go get it? Again, my prediction is the repairability push of the past several years is going to bear real fruit now. Yeah, I absolutely think you're right. We're almost a little bit lucky that there was that push. Yeah. There was actually like the FCC, the Trump FTC won a right to repair victory over John Deere this week. Like, I think consumers understand that being able to fix things is important to them, especially as costs go up and things last less long. So we'll see. Like I'm hopeful that there's one outcome here. It's that a generation or two becomes fixated on the notion that you should be able to fix things and make them last a long time because they were so expensive to begin with. Yeah. We should get like one of the refurb companies, like the back markets of the world. We should talk to them. Like I'm very curious that their business is booming the way that you would think it would be booming. Yeah. It's a good question. We should. We'll reach out to them. We'll get them on the show. Back market. And if you're listening, and I know that you are, get at us. Trust me. They're already, the email's already been sent. Yeah, indeed. All right, what's your next laying around item? Okay, I'm going to do one heavy one, and then I'm going to end on a fun one. Okay. It's heavy in the sense that the subject is heavy, but I think it is one of the greatest sort of verge stories, like verge-iest verge stories we've done in a while, and it's about the push to regulate ghost guns. So there is a law in New York. There's an upcoming one in California. There's a bunch of other laws around the country that would make it harder to print gun parts on your 3D printer, which sounds great. And actually a flashpoint for all this regulation is Luigi Mangione, who printed some of the parts of the guns he used to allegedly murder the CEO of UnitedHealthcare. He's in trial, so it's allegedly – I understand people have a lot of feelings whenever we say this. We do not support murder on this show. Another thing I feel like I have to say all the time. But this was a flashpoint in this regulatory conversation. And in particular, New York, where I live, Governor Kathy Hochul is all about regulating ghost guns because I think it feels like a thing politicians can do. Right. If you want to run at the Second Amendment with regular guns, you're going to you're going to hit a wall. But the kids shouldn't be able to print guns at home. Yeah. That feels like a winner. You know, it's an awkward pro take to have. Do you know what I mean? Like to be to be the one who's like really psyched about ghost guns is just kind of a weird hill to die. Yeah, it just feels like this thing, like your kids shouldn't be able to come home from school and print a gun. I passed a law stopping it. Who can, who dares argue with me? Not the gun manufacturers, because they'd like to sell you the guns they made in their factories. Like, there's some weird political calculus here where this is an acceptable thing to say in the laws that passed. Okay, here's the problem. If you want to stop someone from printing a gun part, you have to identify the fact that they are trying to print a gun part. Oh. which means you have to know what they are printing where are you going to do that at what point in the download a file or draw a picture on your computer send it over usb to a 3d printer have the printer run around and do it where where in that chain do you insert the regulatory mechanism that the law demands no one knows the answer to this question the laws do not say where right they just have a mandate for blocking technology like don't do that Don't do it. Make it. You printer manufacturers, you make it so you can't print guns. And the model is that printer manufacturers have made it so you can't print money. Right? If you try to scan a dollar bill into Photoshop and then print the dollar bill, like a bunch of things will stop you. Right. But the difference is that dollar bills are known. Right? And like the societal cost of fake money is like, right? Like everyone's like, okay, we get it. Like you can you can flatly identify currency. It looks one way. And we all understand why Adobe Photoshop should not be able to accept scans of currency and print it. Sure. Because that will ruin everything for everyone. Yeah. Sure. If you would like to destabilize the United States economic regime, we prefer you do it with Bitcoin, not fake dollars. You know, like that's kind of where we've landed as a society. OK, well, there's not just one gun. So you can't just identify one gun the way you can identify one dollar. our ability to destabilize society with guns has already happened at scale that that that ship has sailed and it's the parts it's not the finished product so if you want to print a thing that looks like a pistol handle well now you got to block all the things that might look like a pistol handle regardless of what it might be used for in the future so this story is is just excellently written about how hard it is how the open source 3d printing community is railing against it even if the people themselves support gun regulation because they understand like this is a type of surveillance that can lead to all kinds of other outcomes and block all kinds of other legal things you might want to print or in the worst case allow the government to ban even more things because they will have built a system to identify what it is you're printing and then tell the manufacturers to stop it it's making me think about how like accuweather has successfully lobbied so that no the government is not allowed to do weather forecasts and turbo tax makes it really hard for you to file your taxes without using turbo tax that like you you'd have an awful lot of companies trying to make it very hard for people to 3d print one thing or another and like this this slope gets really slippery from ghost guns which i think are like you said a pretty universal we all basically agree that ghost guns are bad but boy does the same principle run into things people do not agree on in the same way very quickly right do you want car makers to be able to say you can't 3d print replacement parts of your car yeah and they can will they concoct nonsense safety reasons for those things 100 yeah um so anyway this story is you can go read the comments by the way some people do not agree with you about those guns in any way shape or form they're in the comments of our story um but i just want everyone to go read this story is one of the virgiest virge stories in such a long time because it is it's one of those stories about politicians and i think a lot of regular people seeing a problem the kids can print guns and then assuming that there's a technological solution that does not carry trade-offs and the community is way ahead of everyone on what those trade-offs are and what they could be and why they're unacceptable at the same time it's like you probably shouldn't be able to print a gun at home yeah you read it you tell you tell us yeah it's it's this is what i mean it's it's a story that it's just going to make you uncomfortable regardless of where you ultimately land on the issue yep it's it's the best verge stories make you slightly uncomfortable do you have a 3d printer i do not i feel like i should get one now i feel the exact same way i'm like i i don't i don't know what i would use one for but then i see everybody like there is no genre of vertical video that i enjoy more than people solving teeny tiny low stakes problems with 3d printers yeah it's everybody who's just like i didn't have a stand for this thing so i printed one i'm always like hell yeah let's go you did this and then belkin is going to lobby those things out of existence this is the future reddit they're gone um we're you know we're home in the farm i did the episodes from from my wife's farm and her dad not only just has a huge shop where he repairs the tractor on the farm but then there's a what can only be described as a crafting shed with one of those gigantic tables in the middle to just do projects on and i walked in there i was like i'm gonna get one of these tables and buy a 3d printer and then i had no further thoughts like what will i do with the giant craft table and the 3d printer like right i was just like a goal i have in my life is to have a crafting shed with a huge table and a 3d printer and then you will have it you will say i've done it and you will close the door and never go in that room again ambition over uh but it was just one of those moments where i was like oh this is where i'm meant to accomplish this in some way yeah and i think it's 3d printing small parts to solve pet peeves all right i love this for you all right i have um just a series of very funny posts from nikita beer who's the head of product at x who hit a beer by the way fully going through it fully going through it and posting through it as the head of product that x absolutely should but just is just over and over sort of saying the quiet part loud about how disastrous a platform x is so the the first one of these was a little while ago um evidently x ran an experiment with three percent of users and discovered that removing the top 30 i'm quoting directly removing the top 30 highest paid revenue share accounts from the for you timeline increased both time spent and daily active users on x so this is to say the people we pay to post on our platform if we took them out everyone liked our platform more like wild thing to admit out loud also incredibly obviously correct if you've ever spent any time on x in the last like three years if you get rid of all the posts that i see i will like x more correct absolutely yes could not agree more uh and then there's another one this week um x is in its ambition to be the everything app appears to be pushing really hard on video right now that they they really want to be a vertical video platform in this for the all the same reasons everybody wants to be a vertical video platform right like it it just wants to be that thing it's where the ads are it's where the views are whatever um he put out a post in response to a bunch of people saying oh god x is just turning into tiktok because everything is turning into tiktok and he goes no it's not uh and then basically goes on to say yes it precisely is so he says uh he says post containing videos already make up close to half the impressions on x which is a fascinating and b a a decision that they made right like it's important to remember incentivize the type of content and correct and also boosted it in the algorithm like there's a reason you see elon musk every time you log into x and it's not because the algorithm thinks you'd like it it's because x decided to do that to you it's very important that you remember this uh but then this this is the one that's my favorite he says many videos from top accounts are simply stolen from other users sometimes five years after they were originally went viral the next bullet says our team believes this recycled content has a negative impact on the user experience and the business you think all the all the people we pay to post on x are bad and everyone likes it when they're gone all the videos are old and stolen welcome to x and he turns this into a pitch for we're shipping an editor to and recorder into x so that you can make original content. And then he says at the end, if you're a creator that does not recycle other people's content, you have the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career to build an audience here. What an unbelievably optimistic end to saying all of the stuff on our platform is trash and it would be better if it was all gone. There's no other takeaway from all this stuff that X is learning, except we have to just get rid of everyone here and start over and then maybe it'll be great. The reason I say Nikita Beer is going through it. He's the head of product at X, right? And he is just learning the lessons. Every other head of product at every other social network knew 10 years ago. 10 years ago, everyone knew, oh, people are going to game our algorithm with garbage. Oh, if you just let this run wild, the top, the people who gain the algorithm best will rise to the top and people will hate it and they'll leave. It's a slot factory no matter if you have AI or not. Everyone knows it. Everyone has always known it. And Elon thought he was so much smarter than everyone else that he fired all the people who understood how to run the platform. And then he was like, just make the algorithm do whatever thing I'm calling free speech today. And now here we are. And all the people who are saw next are just getting their brains cooked left and right. And poor Nikita Beer is like, yeah, but our users are going away. Our money is going away. I have to fix it. I'll juice video views for original content, which is the last refuge of the scoundrel when it comes to social media, right? Like I will lie about your video views to get you to post here more. That is some 2016 Facebook shit. Yeah, and it works super well for five minutes and then you get some new thing you're interested in and it all falls apart. Well, because at the end of the day, the reason that you've gotten all the people to post videos is so you can put pre-roll ads around it and people hate those and the advertisers don't want to be around it on x uh because of the thing that x is all the all the five-year-old stolen videos that you're posting yeah it's rough out there it's rough i feel i do feel sort of bad for him because he really it's just very obvious he's going through it yes uh but i also don't feel bad at all because it's very obvious exactly what that job is yep and it was the the minute he took it he did post on june 30th uh today marks one year at x i'm proud to report three all-time highs user engagement my cortisol levels my biological age that's a good tweet that's a learn how to do a good tweet that's a great tweet kudos to nita that's very good all right you get one more what's your last one all right i've got like it's like a happy one and a mystery okay it's all wrapped up in one i love it we should have more mysteries on the verge this is a good mystery Okay. Okay. So every time we talk about smart TVs on the show, people are like, I wish I could just buy a dumb TV. And historically, the answer is you can't because the reason TVs are so cheap is they are subsidized by all of the surveillance that is built on TVs. David continues to buy Roku TVs for some mysterious reason. And the reason they cost $10 is because Roku is tracking his every move and foisting advertising around him. The TV on the other side of my computer right now is unplugged, and I'm 100% sure it's listening. It's still watching. It's just what it is. Yeah, it's just playing ads. And the TV market has gotten all the way down to the end of that road such that you can literally get a free TV with a permanent advertising screen bolted to the bottom of it. Yep. And a lot of people did it. And I don't know why. So those are the economics of the TV market. The reason they're cheap is because they're counting the revenue from the advertising to subsidize the price of the panel. Essentially, this is why you can't buy a dumb TV. And if you want one, you end up buying like a $5,000 digital signage display, which are often the same panels, but then they don't look as good, whatever. Anyhow, John Eggins, our TV reviewer this week, reviewed the new Vizio Mini LED Quantum, which is a very cheap quantum.tv. He says it looks pretty good. And he discovered that as you set it up, you can just turn it all off. Whoa. You can just make it a dumb TV. So as you're going through the setup, you can just say, I don't want this. So turn it off. You can disconnect the OS, basically. You can add it, obviously, an external streaming device. But the HDMI ports stay active, and all of the smarts are literally disabled. You can keep the OS from even being active at all. You just nope your way through the whole setup process. You just nope your way through the whole setup process, and the OS is not active. So it asks you to, you're busy, it was owned by Walmart. it asks you if you want to have a Walmart account and you just say no. And it warns you, you will not be able to manage payments and subscriptions. And it's like, great. Oh, no. I don't care at all. And then when you decline another warning, it literally pops up a box that says, whoops. Declining this step means missing out on all of your smart TV features. And you just hit OK. And that's it. Then the OS is disabled and you've got a dumb TV with enabled HDMI ports. And that's it. And you can obviously keep it off of Wi-Fi, which a lot of people do anyway. And then you've got it. So here's the mystery. Did Vizio do this on purpose? There's some set of people that are like, Vizio has gotten in trouble for tracking before. And they might have done this on purpose. So John is digging into the mystery of the $400 Vizio dumb TV. But right at this second, you can go buy a $400 Vizio mini-LAD quantum.TV and have it be a totally dumb panel. So the Occam's Razer explanation here is just that no one in the development process thought to test the flow of what if I just say no to everything. And so they accidentally shipped a thing you can just say no to everything. And you can say no to everything on most TVs. Like when you start up my Sony A95L, you can put it in like basic mode. Sure. But like Android is still there. Right. This is off. Like dumb panel with HDMI inputs. Huh. At least that's what it looks like. So did they do that on purpose because of legal issues? Did they just forget? Were they so cheap that they're like, yeah, just don't try to do that. Yeah, they're like, we're just happy you're in Walmart. You know what I mean? He's digging into it. Interesting. He's digging into it, but that's why it's a great story because everyone wants a cheap dumb panel. And now, at least for the time being, you can go to Walmart. You can buy a $400 mini LED Quantum.TV, which is a reasonably good deal. It's not like an OLED, but it's pretty good. And it's dumb TV. It's the thing you want. Wow. In an age where everything is getting more expensive, kind of cheap. And then we will solve the mystery of whether or not Vizio knows what they did. Huh. I mean, they do now because the headline's on the site. So we'll see if we ruined it for everyone. I mean, John even got a quote from a senior product manager, Mike Wood, at Vizio, who said, essentially, he said, obviously, we believe there's a lot of benefits using the Vizio OS and our smart features, but the choice is up to the user. yeah but it's like did they say that and then they realize that like we point out right and then and then they're gonna issue a software update that turns off the last nope and then and then that's it yeah that is anyway he's he's following up on it to see see what the case is but today four hundred dollar dumb panel imagine a world in which you had to actually make your product worth using in order for people to use it what a world that would be i think everyone is very addicted to how cheap advertising supported things are it's very true i think all the way back to the netflix conversation i think you can put that right underneath everything netflix and every other streaming service is doing right now you can do an awful lot of stuff you can just do ads yep you can make as many seasons of love island for peacock as you want thank goodness all right we should get out of here uh it's nice it's nice to see you it's nice to see you it's good to be home i'm never leaving again i really really really feel that uh who's on decoder next week uh decoder is really It's a Jinju Wu who runs automotive at NVIDIA. And we spent a lot of time just being like, what's up with cars? How do you make them drive themselves? I made him evaluate Tesla full self-driving and whether or not they need LiDAR. You'll not be surprised to hear that NVIDIA thinks AI is the solution. What's NVIDIA's take on CarPlay? I think this might be the only episode where we didn't talk about CarPlay. Neil, you've one job to tell. It just didn't come up. I mean, I know what he would have said. is like nvidia believes in open systems and consumers can do whatever they want as long as they're running our chips there that's the whole episode we did that for one hour that's pretty good no it's really good i'll give you a little preview they are literally running models in the car like reasoning models to drive the cars so the models are constantly talking to themselves whoa like the car is like there's a double parked car i should go left like it's happening like furiously like talking it out i think it's great we that's it's great wild and terrifying it's very equal measure i like that um also if you haven't yet the episode you did with peter kofka about comcast and mbcu and like the the whole state of media distribution also very interesting and kind of right next to all the stuff we were talking about about netflix that's good episode that one has the long disclosure about what's going on with parent companies go listen to that one it's like so long it'll get shorter uh in a few weeks i don't know exactly what it'll be but we'll figure it out yeah uh version history this weekend is philip's hue uh a late ad to this season of version history but one of the most interesting smart home products and actually like maybe the most successful smart home thing we have yet had uh hue lights super interesting fun story jen too is on it she actually interviewed the guy who invented the hue lights and comes with lots of fun stories it's a great episode it's good time uh and if you want to get all of those name hue no hugh hugh is hugh his name is phillips hugh that'd be amazing if that's your name get at us i have lots of questions or if your name is hugh phillips hugh phillips also acceptable we'd love to hear from you like i'm out on alexas i'm in on hugh phillips uh if you want to get all of our podcasts ad free including all of the ones that we've just mentioned the best thing you can always do is subscribe to the verge that's how you make neilai ungovernable that's how you make it so that he can afford to never leave his house ever again this is truly hate being told what to do how do we get more wood slats for neilai so that he doesn't have to leave anymore subscribe now i travel with wood slacks uh theverge.com subscribe you get all our newsletters you get all our podcasts ad free lots of other stuff uh and also we want to hear from you about everything taylor swift's msg wedding uh your favorite shows on netflix all of your the videos that you hate to see on x uh your feelings about the view all of it send it all to us vergecast at the verge.com is the email 866 verge 11 is the hotline send us everything i think somebody can someone text this number actually text whatever you want to 866 verge 11 and not whatever you want well don't text whatever you want instead of calling us with a hotline question text us with a hotline question there you go i think this works but i i need i need some more testing than just me to see if this works so text the hotline say what up i look forward to hearing from you the verge cast is a verge production and part of the vox media podcast network this show is produced by jox kahas eric gomez brandon keifer travis larchuk and aaron lacasio we will see you next week nila