The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss AI tools announced at this weeks Pixel 9 event, Nilay's TV competition, tech regulatory news, and more.
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00:00:00Hello and welcome to our chest, the flagship podcast of our fancy new studio.
00:00:07Look at this, guys.
00:00:09It's sick.
00:00:10It's so fancy.
00:00:11I wish I was there to see it in person.
00:00:13Does it smell nice?
00:00:14You know, many times the studio smells like weed when I walk into it.
00:00:18When Alex and I have sat down to record this, the show, many times you've commented that
00:00:21it smells like weed in here.
00:00:23We don't know if that's from our colleagues at Vox.com.
00:00:27We don't know if that is from Liam.
00:00:29We don't know if that is from the other people who are podcasting here, but today it does
00:00:32not smell like weed.
00:00:33It smells fresh and new.
00:00:35It's good.
00:00:36If you're listening to the show, it's going to be the same show.
00:00:39The space that we recorded has been dramatically upgraded.
00:00:43David was gone for two weeks and our amazing studio team took the time to rebuild the thing
00:00:48while we were kind of out and about and traveling and recording remotely.
00:00:51It's just real fancy in here.
00:00:53It does look awesome.
00:00:54And truly, even if you're just listening, you won't see it, but the vibes will be better.
00:00:58It's very moody.
00:00:59Neely is a happier, more optimistic person now that we're in the studio.
00:01:05I got a giant TV behind me.
00:01:07That's the largest frame TV they make, ladies and gentlemen.
00:01:11And there's a hangout zone where sidekicks on podcasts go.
00:01:16The retired NFL player who just only says two things in every episode.
00:01:20I love that.
00:01:21That's the job I want.
00:01:23The A.J.
00:01:24Hawk corner is right over there if you're a Pat Maxey fan.
00:01:30I'm going to do every segment of today's show from a different spot in this room.
00:01:33But it is beautiful.
00:01:34It's very nice.
00:01:35It's funny.
00:01:36We share the studio with other Vox Media Podcast Network shows.
00:01:39So Andre Iguodala and Evan Turner record in here.
00:01:42And then we have a new show with Megan Rapinoe and Sue Bird that also records in here.
00:01:47And the first time I saw pictures of it, it was all set up for them.
00:01:49And I was like, where's our GameCube?
00:01:51Don't worry.
00:01:52Turns out they just changed the studio around for every show.
00:01:57I do think, though, we should find a way to anchor our Webby to the shelves so that no
00:02:01one can get rid of our Webby.
00:02:03Anytime you do a podcast, you will see the Vergecast's Webby.
00:02:06Those are the rules.
00:02:07I think our YouTube play button is permanently mounted all over there.
00:02:11So if you are an ex-NFL player sidekick, you know we have a million subscribers.
00:02:15You know it in your heart.
00:02:17You got to sit under that.
00:02:19That's the mark, everybody.
00:02:20Forever.
00:02:22Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli.
00:02:23Welcome.
00:02:24David Pierce is back from vacation.
00:02:25Welcome, David.
00:02:26Hi.
00:02:27I picked the worst two weeks of all time to be gone.
00:02:28But I'm very happy to be back.
00:02:30Nothing happened while you were on vacation.
00:02:31No, including not the culmination of a trial that I covered for months and cared deeply
00:02:36about and seems very important to the end of the Internet.
00:02:39Super chill.
00:02:40Hey, does anybody know anything about the search engine Neva?
00:02:42Oh, I guess the guy who wrote the profile of it isn't here at all.
00:02:45Yeah.
00:02:46Real bummer.
00:02:47I only reported on them for like a year and a half and didn't get to talk about that at
00:02:51the end.
00:02:52But the good news is that case is going to go on for six to seven more decades, so we'll
00:02:55have more chances.
00:02:56It'll be all right.
00:02:57Yeah.
00:02:58There's a long period.
00:02:59And then Alex, you were on last week.
00:03:00You've been on vacation.
00:03:01And then you immediately went away to cover the Pixel event in San Francisco.
00:03:05Yeah.
00:03:06I'm currently on the West Coast and not in the room with you.
00:03:09Otherwise, so we're going to use a Pixel to just do the add me feature and put me in there
00:03:13with you.
00:03:14But otherwise, it's a good time out here.
00:03:16It's very nice temperature wise.
00:03:18Yeah.
00:03:19So the question for this episode is, can you believe you're lying eyes?
00:03:21And the answer is fully, fully, fully no.
00:03:23So let's start with the Pixel.
00:03:25There's a lot to talk about.
00:03:26There was the Pixel event, which you guys, David, I think you covered a little bit on
00:03:29the Tuesday show.
00:03:30Yep.
00:03:31I want to talk about TVs.
00:03:32I love talking about TVs.
00:03:33So a lot of gadgets to open the show.
00:03:34Then we got a bunch of just stuff in the app store and the EU happening.
00:03:40And of course, we have a lightning round, the deeply controversial lightning round.
00:03:46I can't believe I left and you still didn't get the lightning round sponsored.
00:03:49Like that's, I wanted to come back from vacation and you were like, congratulations, David,
00:03:53here is the lightning round yacht that we all bought.
00:03:55We did it.
00:03:56We spent the money actually on the set.
00:03:58I've gotten all the way to in my head, leaving the various Vox Media corporate meetings that
00:04:03I have to go to with like, what if I ended every meeting with, don't talk to me until
00:04:08the lightning round is sponsored.
00:04:11I'm not sure this would go well.
00:04:13I'm not sure that it would achieve any goals really, or even my continued employment, but
00:04:19rest assured, I've thought about it.
00:04:23You feel really cool.
00:04:24Yeah.
00:04:25Like, why are you talking to me with an unsponsored lightning round?
00:04:29Sashay out, little scarf.
00:04:32Yeah.
00:04:34This is what I think about in my spare time is how to get myself fired.
00:04:37Okay.
00:04:38Let's talk about the Pixel.
00:04:39The Pixel itself, David, you talked about on the Tuesday show with everybody.
00:04:43There's like two parts of the Pixel event though, that I think are kind of important.
00:04:47One was the phone.
00:04:48And then the second is that the phone wasn't introduced until like 20 minutes into the
00:04:54event because what it really was, was Rick Osterloh, who now runs Android and Pixel talking
00:05:02about Android becoming the platform for Google's AI ambitions and even showing a bunch of AI
00:05:09features on Samsung phones.
00:05:10And there's something there that feels very worth talking about to me.
00:05:14What?
00:05:15You mean the fact that we saw a Samsung phone and a Motorola phone before we saw a Pixel
00:05:19phone?
00:05:20Yeah, that's the simpler way of putting it, I think.
00:05:24It's weird, right?
00:05:25There's something to that, that I think is really interesting.
00:05:29It's weird and it isn't.
00:05:32It's weird that it's not weird is actually where I'm at with this because there are three
00:05:37things going on here, right?
00:05:40One is that Rick Osterloh oversees Android and Pixel.
00:05:43And that is a very hard job.
00:05:45We've talked about this, that for years, Google was like, we have a very hard firewall between
00:05:50our own hardware efforts and our partner ecosystem with Android.
00:05:55Now it's just literally the same dude in charge of it.
00:05:58And that's a complicated thing to do, especially because for Google, the vast majority of everything
00:06:03that matters about Android does not happen on Pixel phones, right?
00:06:07So for Google to come out and say, look, a Samsung phone that does all this stuff is
00:06:11purely just a recognition of what actually matters to Google, which is the Android business,
00:06:15not the Pixel business.
00:06:16That is just the fact of the matter.
00:06:18The other thing is, I think Google thinks AI as a thing and Gemini as a thing is more
00:06:25important than all of that, right?
00:06:27That is the big bet.
00:06:28So you have to lead with Gemini and you have to lead with Android.
00:06:30And then a while later, you show everybody the phone that you made.
00:06:35And then if you also believe, as I do, and I think as Google does, that the hardware
00:06:40just exists in service of the software, which exists in service of the AI, it all ladders
00:06:46up.
00:06:47So it's weird that Google ostensibly launched a bunch of gadgets in what was not at all
00:06:52a gadget launch, but increasingly, this was now two days ago as we're recording this,
00:06:57it wasn't really a gadget launch.
00:06:59They launched some gadgets, but the main, most important thing they talked about was
00:07:04not the gadgets, which is very strange.
00:07:06Yeah, it felt more like an I-O.
00:07:08I mean, not in the room, it felt like a Pixel event in the room, but the content felt like
00:07:13an I-O keynote more than a Pixel event.
00:07:16Because it was just, yeah, we're going to talk about all these really great features
00:07:20that you can now use AI to generate adorable animals and Kiki Palmers here.
00:07:25Yeah, the Kiki Palmer thing, I'm still, I got nothing on-
00:07:28She's there.
00:07:30Between the Kiki Palmer thing here and the Sidney Sweeney thing at the facility, can
00:07:34we just stop with the really awkward celebrity cameos?
00:07:37Nobody has fun.
00:07:38It's good for them.
00:07:39They get paid.
00:07:40That's great.
00:07:41I say triple down.
00:07:42More celebrity cameos.
00:07:43Just more random Neil Patrick Harris at an Apple event, just get out there.
00:07:49Just whoever it is.
00:07:50It's going to be Chris Evans at the Apple event, or Scar Jo.
00:07:55But no, Sidney Sweeney looked like a hostage.
00:07:57Kiki Palmer, she got to move around.
00:08:00Hey, set the celebrities free.
00:08:02Yeah.
00:08:03Don't just make them sit in a chair in an awkwardly way.
00:08:05She was there at the very end, right?
00:08:07She was just there to be like, AI is great.
00:08:09And they're-
00:08:10She's like Kool-Aid manned in.
00:08:11Basically, yeah.
00:08:13But the thing you're discussing more broadly, which is Google believes it has a huge distribution
00:08:20advantage for Gemini.
00:08:23That distribution advantage is Android, and they're going to put it everywhere and embed
00:08:28it into all of their platforms and services.
00:08:30Alex, you're right.
00:08:31We did see that coming at IO.
00:08:32That's basically what they said.
00:08:34And Rick's message was, now the stuff is here.
00:08:37It's shipping.
00:08:38You can get it.
00:08:39And then they showed it on a bunch of Samsung Motorola phones.
00:08:43And then they're like, and here's the Pixel, and then here's a tiny bit of stuff the Pixel
00:08:47can do that the others can't do, which is the add me feature in the photos and all that.
00:08:52But there's a sense that Google knows it is better at distributing AI than any of its
00:08:58competitors.
00:08:59It took a lot of digs at Apple, for example, just secret, not even secret, just quiet side
00:09:06swipes at Apple throughout this whole event.
00:09:09We're available in all the languages.
00:09:11Apple's intelligence isn't.
00:09:12We don't have to send your data to a third party.
00:09:15Apple's going to send some of your stuff to open AI.
00:09:19But down the line, it was Google was just reinforcing that it is building the AI.
00:09:25It has it.
00:09:26It controls it.
00:09:27It runs in the cloud.
00:09:28And the best way to get it is through Android.
00:09:31I just don't know if that's going to get anybody to switch from an iPhone.
00:09:34That's actually the thing that I think is the most interesting here.
00:09:37That they're like, Android is the place where you get your AI.
00:09:40And everyone's kind of like, okay.
00:09:43Now what?
00:09:44I think Gemini Live is probably a good example of that, because that's coming to iOS later
00:09:48this year.
00:09:49And they spent a lot of time on Gemini Live, it felt like.
00:09:53That's their answer to chat GPT's voice assistant.
00:09:57And yeah, it really just felt like this moment of, okay, no, you don't actually just need
00:10:01to be on an Android device.
00:10:04And personally, I just kept thinking of the fact that just last week they found out that
00:10:08something's going to happen with Google.
00:10:10And one of their biggest revenue drivers is their relationship with the iPhone.
00:10:13And so now it feels like their phone ecosystem is more important than ever.
00:10:18And we just didn't hear a single thing about it besides AI.
00:10:22So yeah, it is a little weird that everything hinges on this AI now.
00:10:26So what all the big AI companies have been saying is that they think AI is a platform
00:10:30shift.
00:10:32You can interpret that a lot of ways.
00:10:34Like I tried to get Sundar Pichai to explain what that means to me.
00:10:38Sundar Pichai said it's as big as fire.
00:10:40I don't know that there's that many ways to interpret that.
00:10:42It's just the one, really.
00:10:44Yeah.
00:10:45I mean, it's true.
00:10:46But the way I have interpreted platform shift is people are going to use computers in a
00:10:52different way.
00:10:53And that will create many more opportunities to build products and services.
00:10:56And if you look back at the history of platform shifts, you go from, I don't know, DOS and
00:11:02text-based computing to mice and keyboards.
00:11:07And then you go from local applications to the web.
00:11:10And then you go to touchscreens on phones.
00:11:13Right?
00:11:14Yeah.
00:11:15Those are the platforms.
00:11:16Yeah.
00:11:17If you can think of another way to think about the word platform shift, please let me know
00:11:20because I'm sort of dying to figure out how to understand the words platform shift as
00:11:25it relates to AI.
00:11:26And all I've come up with in that framework is, oh, you're going to talk to the computer
00:11:31instead of typing.
00:11:32Which isn't a, that's a platform shift we already had.
00:11:36Except now we can do it.
00:11:37Except now Gemini Live can just like listen to you and maybe take actions on your behalf.
00:11:42And maybe you're going to type to it.
00:11:43Maybe you're just going to say, I don't know, like, go make me an app that can do X and
00:11:46Gemini Live will spit it out and I'll be fine.
00:11:49Or Siri with Apple Intelligence will go use the apps for you, which is something that
00:11:54Apple has, you know, it's not going to ship, but it's what they previewed at WWDC.
00:12:00That's the platform shift.
00:12:01That's the platform shift.
00:12:02That last piece is the real platform shift.
00:12:04And this is what I've been hearing from people forever.
00:12:07I think it was Paul Ford recently wrote a really good thing about this, where he's,
00:12:10he said right now we're in the, the like command line era of AI, which is like the tech is
00:12:16kind of under there, but nobody has figured out how to use it yet.
00:12:20And the idea that you're going to basically essentially use a command line to interact
00:12:24with it, which is essentially what writing an AI prompt is, is fine as far as it goes,
00:12:29but that's not the mainstream answer.
00:12:30And that actually what needs to happen is everybody needs to invent the interface on
00:12:33top of that, that makes it interesting.
00:12:36That we have not seen, but I think the thing that I hear from everybody is like, this starts
00:12:41to get really interesting when we get to the, it can use your apps for you phase of all
00:12:46of this, because that's where you actually do use your computer differently because right
00:12:51now it's like, you can look up information by talking instead of by typing.
00:12:57And Alex, to your point, A, that exists.
00:12:59B, it's not better.
00:13:01Like it's not better.
00:13:02It's different.
00:13:03It's a little faster, but it's not better.
00:13:05And Alex, you've, you've used Gemini live a little, so I'm curious to hear what you
00:13:08think, but like, we're still at this point where it is, it is sort of a technology in
00:13:14search of a user interface.
00:13:17And I think I didn't like, you see a lot of Google, like poking at that.
00:13:21I think the pixel screenshots thing, which we should talk about in which I am on record
00:13:24of being fascinated by is an interesting version of that, but like how you actually push and
00:13:29pull with this thing is such an unanswered question in so, so many ways.
00:13:34I feel like they, they definitely haven't figured it out.
00:13:37Like, like I only spent a little time with Gemini live.
00:13:39It was me and Sean Hollister and Allison, all Johnson, all in our little room trying
00:13:44to talk to this thing and was it the same?
00:13:47I'm picturing a demo, like the chat GPT one where it's like thrown on a table, listening
00:13:50to you and you just chat.
00:13:51You have to hold the phone.
00:13:52Like, like I couldn't stand far away from the phone.
00:13:54You have to hold the phone really close to yourself because otherwise it'll be like,
00:13:56no, I'm not listening to you.
00:13:58But I really struggled with it because I try to be very polite in conversations and like,
00:14:03oh, if you're talking, I'm going to usually let you finish.
00:14:06Not always as VirgCast listeners can attest, but I'm usually going to let you finish and,
00:14:10and this one, you're like encouraged to interrupt it and, and you're encouraged to interact
00:14:14with it in a way that would be like really rude if you were interacting with a person.
00:14:19And so, it's at one point wants you to feel like it's more human and more realistic.
00:14:24And at the other point it's doing that.
00:14:27And then like I got in a fight with it because it wouldn't shut up.
00:14:29Yes.
00:14:30So, I told it was mansplaining me and it was like, oh, I'm sorry.
00:14:33Do you want me to change my tone of my voice?
00:14:34And I was like, and it was a little sassy when it said it, I was just like, did I just
00:14:38get like, talk, clap back to it by AI?
00:14:42Yes.
00:14:43And then, yeah.
00:14:44And then Sean was like, I got this.
00:14:45And Sean just went in and was like, no, shut up.
00:14:46I have a question.
00:14:47And just immediately it was just, no, no, shush me now.
00:14:51And it's like, he was basically a dick to it and it worked perfectly.
00:14:54And I'm like, okay.
00:14:55Was he like, who knows more about the Steam Deck, you or me?
00:14:59He might've asked that, but he mainly asked it for stock tips and that it was like, I
00:15:04wouldn't personally invest in Bitcoin, but you can do that if you want.
00:15:08It's just very high risk.
00:15:09Incredible.
00:15:10Our very first Gemini scandal.
00:15:11No, that's not a scandal, that's just good advice.
00:15:16Here's my question.
00:15:17So, you use it, you talk to it, it has some personality.
00:15:21This is the thing.
00:15:22Like this is how Google is talking about beating open AI, right?
00:15:25Open AI is going to put out its voice version, it's going to sound like Scarlett Johansson
00:15:30or not.
00:15:31It's going to have personality.
00:15:32It takes a breath in the middle of counting numbers as fast as it can.
00:15:35We've all seen that video.
00:15:36It's like they're competing on personality, not content.
00:15:40Right.
00:15:41Yeah.
00:15:42Because some stuff it did really, really well for me.
00:15:45Like I asked it to fix something, it took me a while to fix on my car and it did it
00:15:49in 30 seconds.
00:15:50It was just great.
00:15:51And another stuff it really struggled with and it struggled to understand the questions.
00:15:56Like somebody compared it to being a kind of a friend and I wouldn't have friends like
00:16:03this thing.
00:16:04Because it just talks, it doesn't listen to you, it doesn't respond to you in the way
00:16:10that a friend might, but it's at the same time it's a computer.
00:16:15So you're just in this weird space where you're like, am I having to be nice to my computer?
00:16:21And I don't necessarily want that.
00:16:24I want it to just be my computer.
00:16:25What you want.
00:16:26I think that the thesis of The Verge as a whole, as a publication is, do I have to be
00:16:30nice to my computer?
00:16:31Yeah.
00:16:32No.
00:16:33And we've been struggling to figure out that answer for quite some time.
00:16:35But I do think in a way those companies pushing that stuff are kind of telling on themselves
00:16:41about the actual state of the technology, right?
00:16:43Because what has been true for 60 years is that if you give a computer any kind of personality,
00:16:50people will fall in love with it and try to have sex with it and tell it their deepest
00:16:54darkest secrets.
00:16:55It's just true.
00:16:56We did a video about this a while ago that was very fun.
00:16:58And it's in the 70s.
00:17:00This guy made a thing that basically all it did was say your commands back to you as a
00:17:04question.
00:17:05And so you'd be like, my father was mean to me, and it would be like, your father was
00:17:08mean to you.
00:17:09And people were like, oh my God, it understands me.
00:17:10This is Eliza, right?
00:17:11Yes, that was Eliza.
00:17:12Yeah.
00:17:13And that's actually a really powerful thing.
00:17:16And I think one other thing I missed while I was on vacation was all the friend drama.
00:17:19I wrote the story about this guy who launched an AI friend and it everybody went nuts on
00:17:25the internet because there was drama about who owned it as a whole thing.
00:17:29I'm very happy.
00:17:30I missed all of that drama.
00:17:31But one of the things that Avi, the CEO said to me was he was like, the reason I'm doing
00:17:36this is because it's the only thing AI is any good at right now.
00:17:39And I think that's right, that there is there is vast gaps between where we are right now
00:17:45with this technology and like true utility in people's lives.
00:17:50But it's pretty easy to make one of these like fun as hell to talk to, because it's
00:17:55not that hard to make them fun as hell to talk to.
00:17:57So what they're able to compete on right now is making them fun as hell to talk to, because
00:18:01that will make people use them more, even if they can't do very much.
00:18:04And the things that they do, they don't do very well.
00:18:06And so if you're just using this as like a wrote straightforward robotic task machine,
00:18:12you're going to notice it's bad and you're going to hate it.
00:18:14Yeah.
00:18:15But if you're trying to make it fun and cool and friendly and exciting, it doesn't have
00:18:18to do that much.
00:18:19Right.
00:18:20And I think that's a fine road to go down, but it is so not the same thing as like making
00:18:25it more useful to people.
00:18:26So let me put that into the framework of the question I was asking, Alex, when you were
00:18:31using Gemini Live, did any of it feel like the platform shift?
00:18:37Because that is the big question, right?
00:18:39If you're, if you're Microsoft and you're pouring billions of dollars into this because
00:18:42you missed mobile, then this is your chance to reclaim the primary user interface of
00:18:48computers.
00:18:49If you're Google and you're basically communicating that you're going to bet the company on this,
00:18:54is it, is there evidence that that is real?
00:18:57Because I don't, I don't know.
00:18:58I honestly don't know.
00:19:00I, it's no, I think right now, yeah, I think, I think right now the answer is no for me.
00:19:07I think it is a valuable tool.
00:19:08I was talking with people afterwards who don't even work at Google, work at other companies
00:19:13about these kinds of things.
00:19:14And they were like, oh yeah, I really like it because it's a good brainstorming tool.
00:19:18It's a good way for me to like just figure some stuff out.
00:19:21And I'm not going to brainstorm that way personally.
00:19:23It's fun to talk to.
00:19:24Like that's the whole thing.
00:19:25It's fun to talk to, but, but like, I didn't feel this urge to just, oh, I want this in
00:19:29my car.
00:19:30I did actually want it in my car immediately.
00:19:32So nevermind.
00:19:33I did feel that urge.
00:19:34So that's the platform shift.
00:19:35Yeah.
00:19:36I was like, I want to be like.
00:19:37It's lightly mansplaining to her.
00:19:38You're like, this is the future of computing.
00:19:39I just want to, oh my God.
00:19:40It was like so mansplaining.
00:19:41It was very upsetting.
00:19:43But as a, as a voice, as, as if you think of it as part of the, the evolution of the
00:19:47voice assistant, as the digital voice assistant, it's a lot better, it is a huge improvement
00:19:53of our assistant.
00:19:54It's a huge improvement over Siri and Alexa.
00:19:57But is it a replacement for computing, like general computing?
00:20:02No, absolutely not.
00:20:04It's not a platform shift for my phone.
00:20:06It's a platform shift for my Alexa.
00:20:07Yeah.
00:20:08I think even the question of, is it better than Google assistant or Siri or Alexa is
00:20:13a really interesting one, because one of the things that's happening is Gemini is replacing
00:20:17Google assistant kind of all over Android, which is a big deal.
00:20:20Like it wasn't that long ago that Google was out there being like, Google assistant is
00:20:23the future of everything.
00:20:25And now it's very clearly Gemini.
00:20:27And there have been a bunch of people out there testing early versions of this thing.
00:20:31Obviously they're early.
00:20:32We'll see.
00:20:33And it just can't do some of the very, very basic things you would expect.
00:20:37That's right.
00:20:38It's like, okay, you have this thing that is more fun to talk to, understands you better,
00:20:42does the sort of basic interface tasks way better, like orders of magnitude better than
00:20:47the stuff that we had before, but it can't do the things.
00:20:50I think it was Jared Newman at Fast Company wrote a thing where he was like, it can't
00:20:53tell me what the weather is.
00:20:55It can't play the podcasts that I have played because it doesn't have access to my apps.
00:21:00It doesn't do turn by turn directions very well.
00:21:02Just all these basic things.
00:21:03It's like, okay, what Google assistant had is, is access to the systems that you actually
00:21:08want on your phone, right?
00:21:09Like it was able to use your apps for you and Gemini can't use your apps for you, but
00:21:13we're replacing the one with the other before it can do both things, which to me is just,
00:21:18it's like, it's so clear that that is what Google thinks is more important.
00:21:23It feels like a big rush, but I'm also, I feel not concerned about it.
00:21:27I feel like that's the kind of thing that they can do a software update and be like,
00:21:30yeah, now it can do timers.
00:21:31Now I can tell you the weather.
00:21:33Those should be relatively easy things to just pipe in and I think they just haven't
00:21:38because they've been moving that quickly to churn this out and compete with Apple.
00:21:43To the point of this whole event happened a month before what we assume is going to
00:21:48be the iPhone launch and traditionally it's held in October and that was very, I think
00:21:53everybody in the industry was just like, oh, that's just to get ahead of Apple intelligence.
00:21:57It definitely feels like they're rushing it, but at the same time, there's a level of
00:22:02polish there, but it's not perfect, right?
00:22:06With Siri and Assistant and stuff like that, you ask it a question and it'll pop up something
00:22:09contextually on the screen for you so you can see it.
00:22:13There's a visual component and there's zero visual component here and I think that, if
00:22:17anything, was the most annoying element of it because you ask it for questions, you just
00:22:22expect to see some sort of result in front of you and instead you just see this little
00:22:25glowy screen and it's like, okay, cool, that'd be cool in my meta glasses.
00:22:31It's just not cool on my phone.
00:22:33It's a waste of my phone.
00:22:34Yeah.
00:22:35Even when I use the chat GBT voice mode, which I think I've said this several times, I have
00:22:39mapped the action button on my iPhone.
00:22:42Halfway through it talking, I'm like, I just need to read this.
00:22:45Yeah.
00:22:46Yeah.
00:22:47I'm tired of this.
00:22:48I can just read much faster than you can machine talk to me, robot.
00:22:53We're going to get another run at this when the phones come out.
00:22:55We're obviously going to get a chance to use it more.
00:22:57I want to talk for one second to wrap up the Android pixel AI conversation and just
00:23:04talk about the photo stuff for half a second.
00:23:06I feel like I could spend five hours talking about what is a photo right now.
00:23:11I would say historically speaking that we've proven that several times.
00:23:14So, you know, the pixel lines coming out, Becca's gotten a chance to use the add me
00:23:18feature and some of the other photo stuff.
00:23:19You can go watch that video, but we're just in a really weird spot where it seems like
00:23:26the phone makers in particular have utterly given up on the idea that the pictures they
00:23:32take should represent reality.
00:23:34What was the line that you pulled out, Neal?
00:23:35I were like, Google was like, we're not even, they don't, they don't do photos anymore.
00:23:39Yeah.
00:23:40So Julian at Wired did the piece on the pixel camera this year, sat down with a bunch of
00:23:44Google folks, talked about the camera and the new features and why it's better.
00:23:47And basically his thesis in this piece is Google is chasing memories, not photos.
00:23:51And so he talked to a Google PM named Isaac Reynolds, who says, quote, it's about what
00:23:55you're remembering.
00:23:56When you define a memory that has a fallibility to it, you can have a true and perfect representation
00:24:01of a moment that felt completely fake and wrong.
00:24:04What some of these edits do is help you create a moment that is the way you remember it,
00:24:09that is authentic to your memory and the greater context, but maybe isn't authentic to a particular
00:24:15millisecond.
00:24:16Wow.
00:24:17There's a, that's a PhD thesis.
00:24:20Seriously.
00:24:21It's beautiful.
00:24:22It's a PhD thesis in philosophy right there.
00:24:25Like what is real?
00:24:26Is it what you remember or what actually happened?
00:24:31I don't, a PhD thesis.
00:24:33I'm just telling you, you can spend the rest of your life chasing down that question.
00:24:38And Google has just made a decision that what they want to do is help people create the
00:24:43memories they felt they were experiencing as opposed to capturing what actually happened.
00:24:48And they're just headed down that road.
00:24:50They have been for some time.
00:24:52I think not just Google, that's everybody.
00:24:54Like that's a pretty good summation of the whole industry right now.
00:24:57Yeah.
00:24:58It's, it's bananas to me because we live in a time when like synthetic and fake media
00:25:05is everywhere and you can even see that having it exist at all allows bad actors to call
00:25:13into question the significance or reality of real media.
00:25:18Also Trump saying the Harris rally was quote AI'd, which can we just pause real fast?
00:25:24Like, can we not with the AI as a verb, like AI already means too many things.
00:25:28It's a, it's a huge catch all word that has become sort of meaningless.
00:25:32Can we not make it other parts of speech too?
00:25:35I agree that we should not use language the way Donald Trump uses language.
00:25:38But what I'm getting at is you only get to do that if people believe the technology can
00:25:44do it.
00:25:45And it is true that people have believed that technology can do this stuff.
00:25:47For years before Ken, but now they're going to hold in their hands the capability on a
00:25:53Samsung phone to circle an empty field and say, add a crowd, right?
00:25:57They can just do it.
00:25:58They are going to hold in their hands the ability to add people to photos who weren't
00:26:02there before with, add me on a Google pixel.
00:26:06And the companies are marketing this as this makes you more creative.
00:26:09It lets you take the photos you want.
00:26:10And now for Google all the way to, we want you to create the memories of the things you
00:26:15thought were happening rather than the things that were happening.
00:26:19I mean, haven't like Chinese phone makers been doing that with, we want to create what
00:26:24I think I look like versus what I actually look like with the face tuning.
00:26:28Like it's been happening a while.
00:26:31It's one of those things.
00:26:32I think what was shocking to me is the ease of access of the tool itself.
00:26:37But I'm not like shocked at putting these tools in the phone, but it's weird that they
00:26:41put it in the camera app.
00:26:43The add me feature is not like the most AI it's generating you, but it's doing a bunch
00:26:49of cool stuff.
00:26:50But on a technical level, it's, it's doing something cool, right?
00:26:53It's generating a depth map and then using the depth map to realign the multiple photos.
00:26:59That's all very cool.
00:27:00And I'm confident there's a bunch of AI in there that is helping to do that.
00:27:03But at the most fundamental level, what it's doing is compositing two photos together.
00:27:08Like you look at the photos that the Hollywood magazines put out with like 500 stars on
00:27:13the cover.
00:27:14Those are often composite photos.
00:27:15And we don't, those are add me photos.
00:27:17Like every single poster, movie poster you see is one of those add me photos.
00:27:22But like, right.
00:27:23But I'm never like, I wonder if this movie poster happened, right.
00:27:27But I will also say I got to try it out a little bit at the event and, and add me is
00:27:33certainly really cool.
00:27:35But also I would say it's like a, the Royal family level of Photoshopping abilities.
00:27:41Ooh.
00:27:42Deep cut, Alex.
00:27:43You see some, you see some like hands where hands should not be that sort of thing sometimes.
00:27:49So it's one of those things where it's like, yeah, it'll do it at a glance.
00:27:52It looks awesome.
00:27:53It looks really, really cool.
00:27:54You look closer and you see the edges on this stuff and I haven't gotten to try it as all
00:27:59of these tools, but like even the AI one where you circle things and add like that messed
00:28:05up at the event.
00:28:06They scrolled through it really, really fast when they were like, they're like, here's
00:28:08a hot air balloon.
00:28:09And then they like did another one.
00:28:10And the guy like just speed scrolled past this horrible amorphous blob.
00:28:14It was pretty great.
00:28:15All I'm getting at is those tools aren't great, but because they exist and they are broadly
00:28:19accessible, it's not just that there's a bunch of synthetic photos we can point at and say
00:28:24those are fake.
00:28:26Bad actors are able to point at real photos and say they are fake.
00:28:30And we are just barreling towards no one believes anything they see.
00:28:35I think we're already there.
00:28:36There's a strong argument.
00:28:37We're already there.
00:28:39Do you guys remember a bunch of years ago, Farhad Manjoo, when he was at the New York
00:28:43Times wrote this really great column about selfie culture and his big sort of thinky
00:28:51thought that I've been thinking about ever since was basically like, we've entered into
00:28:55a place where everything that there is to be photographed has been photographed.
00:28:59And so now what's different is that I'm there.
00:29:01And that's, it's like, it's a meaningful thing, right?
00:29:03It's like, I'm, this picture is different because it has me in it in the Grand Canyon.
00:29:07You've already seen pictures of the Grand Canyon.
00:29:09So people are putting themselves in it as like, this is a, this is a new way of seeing
00:29:13this because I'm here.
00:29:15Something like Admi just breaks that in the most interesting way.
00:29:18It's like we talk about sort of the cultural meaning of photos.
00:29:22And I was seeing a bunch of people during the Google event be like, how on earth can
00:29:25a photo first social network exist after this?
00:29:28Like if suddenly I can be anywhere at any time doing whatever I feel like just gets
00:29:35weird.
00:29:36And I get that Admi has some like limitations that make that challenging.
00:29:39I mean, arguably the photo for social media has been weird for a while, given that like
00:29:44influencers rent sets that look like planes to fake booking like they're sitting in a
00:29:49plane.
00:29:50But at least that like costs money and time and effort.
00:29:52Yeah.
00:29:53I agree.
00:29:54Like, like what pixel is that what Google has done is just remove a ton of barriers
00:30:00that were already existed, right?
00:30:02Like Photoshop already existed.
00:30:03People faking photos has been happening forever.
00:30:05But now it's just like to Nealey's point, really, really easy.
00:30:10Yeah.
00:30:11It's Samsung faking the moon, but it's you and it's everywhere.
00:30:13Like weird.
00:30:14Two things.
00:30:15One, we should have made this set look like a private jet.
00:30:18What were we thinking?
00:30:19Oh, my God.
00:30:20Fundamental error, Liam.
00:30:21This should look like a PJ lying down in the PJ.
00:30:25I'm so mad that this room doesn't look like the inside of a private jet.
00:30:30Second, what we're talking about, the cost element that you bring up, David, is the thing.
00:30:36Yeah.
00:30:37It's the thing.
00:30:38When ILM made fake dinosaurs in Jurassic Park, there was not a widespread outcry about people
00:30:45believing dinosaurs are real.
00:30:47A small outcry somewhere, I'm sure.
00:30:50Right.
00:30:51There's actually one line from that movie that should have gotten even more outcry,
00:30:54which is you were so busy wondering if you could.
00:30:56Right.
00:30:57I'm just pointing out.
00:31:00When you make it so that everyone's phone velociraptors in every photo and they look
00:31:05real and you brought the cost to nothing, some people are going to believe some dumb
00:31:10stuff.
00:31:12We're just there.
00:31:14I agree with you, Alex.
00:31:15We might be way past the point of no return where people are just not going to believe
00:31:19anything's true anymore.
00:31:21The needle might just be in the red.
00:31:22I'm just deeply cynical.
00:31:24I think we wrote with the Pixel 8 last year that we were at the what is a photo apocalypse.
00:31:29I'm just saying I'm looking at it now and there's no longer.
00:31:33When we wrote about the Pixel 8, there was some pushback.
00:31:36We're not doing this.
00:31:37We're being careful.
00:31:38You're overreacting.
00:31:39And then this year they're like, you can just put yourself in the photo.
00:31:40Right.
00:31:41And it's like, oh, we're over it.
00:31:44There's just a lot there to talk about.
00:31:45We're going to get the phones.
00:31:46I think we should see how well they work as always.
00:31:49But there's a piece of all of this, especially in election season, where I suspect we are
00:31:54going to be talking about whether or not people believe what they see for a long time
00:31:58now, because it's just it's fully off the rails.
00:32:02All right.
00:32:03We should take a break.
00:32:04We're going to come back and we're going to talk about televisions, I promise you it's
00:32:08going to happen.
00:32:09We'll be right back with more Broadcasting.
00:32:10All right, we're back.
00:32:16I'm in a different chair in the studio.
00:32:19I'm on this I'm on this side of the table.
00:32:21It's much more like regal.
00:32:23Like I want you to give me investment advice from this chair for some reason.
00:32:26Should we invest in Bitcoin?
00:32:27I can't do that.
00:32:28But I will tell you to smoke all the cigars you can smoke.
00:32:32That's what this feels like to me.
00:32:33Like, I should be giving bourbon and cigar advice.
00:32:36We should start that show.
00:32:38And my answer is to have as much as you want.
00:32:40That's it.
00:32:41It'll be fine.
00:32:42Just enjoy.
00:32:43Yeah.
00:32:44It's fun.
00:32:45It's two or three in.
00:32:46They're all the same, really.
00:32:47All right.
00:32:48That's enough.
00:32:49We've done enough philosophizing about A.I. and platform shifts and whether or not reality
00:32:54is real.
00:32:55Let's talk about the most important tech story of the week, which is that, as promised, I
00:33:00published twenty five hundred words about judging the twenty twenty four TV shootout.
00:33:07I've never been happier in my entire life.
00:33:10Doing the shootout, writing the words, avoiding the many other lawsuits that happened this
00:33:15week.
00:33:17Because if you remember last week, I was going to do it and then the Google decision came
00:33:20out and the whole week got thrown away and I couldn't talk about TVs.
00:33:23This week, I just ignored everything.
00:33:27Google also really ruining everybody's life is what I'm hearing.
00:33:29Yeah.
00:33:30It's been it's been a hard time on all of us.
00:33:32I think we and one assumes for Google, we should probably there's some regulatory stuff
00:33:38talking about Google.
00:33:39It's in a world of her right now.
00:33:40We'll come to that later.
00:33:42But we did it again.
00:33:43We're going to talk about TVs.
00:33:44We're going to talk about Google antitrust.
00:33:45Tell us about the TV.
00:33:46These concepts are so inextricably linked for some bizarre reason.
00:33:51Why?
00:33:52No, TVs.
00:33:53We're going to TVs.
00:33:56There's a really high end boutique home theater store in Scarsdale, New York, called Valley
00:34:01Electronics.
00:34:02They've been running the TV shootout for 20 years.
00:34:03This was the 20th one.
00:34:04You know, Google all the coverage from 20 years ago.
00:34:07Two thousand four.
00:34:08The plasmids are it.
00:34:09Amazing.
00:34:10The whole thing's amazing.
00:34:11I bought my Sony a ninety five L there because they have stock.
00:34:15It's actually pretty hard to get that TV, but they sell so many of them that Sony gives
00:34:18them special allocations.
00:34:20I went and bought one from them.
00:34:22I got to talk to the owner, Robert Zahn and his wife, Wendy.
00:34:26And they were like, do you want to judge the shootout this year?
00:34:29And I just imagine I was like, yes, like more than anything, I'm just going to my wife and
00:34:34daughter will be fine.
00:34:35I'll just wait here until the TV shootout because they called me in to judge it.
00:34:40It was an incredible panel.
00:34:43You can look at the story.
00:34:45The pictures are adorable.
00:34:46It was just a bunch of nerds in a room like they cleaned.
00:34:50They cleared out the store and they set up three TVs, three OLEDs and three mini LEDs
00:34:56from Samsung, Sony and LG.
00:34:59And they put forty thousand dollar Sony reference monitors like the ones they use for coloring
00:35:05in Hollywood in front of them.
00:35:06And then the first day was, quote, the objective day where the task was across a number of
00:35:15clips that they were playing to judge how similar the TVs were to the reference displays.
00:35:21And the TVs have been professionally calibrated by famous calibrators on the AVS forums.
00:35:27I was like in heaven.
00:35:29That's an amazing phrase you just said, by the way.
00:35:32Calibrated by famous calibrators?
00:35:34Like hell yeah.
00:35:35If you're an AVS forum nerd and you have ever just like gone and looked for the settings
00:35:38for a TV, it was probably Cecil Meade or Dwayne Davis.
00:35:42That's awesome.
00:35:43Who go by Classy Tech and D-Nice.
00:35:44I was in heaven, heaven, heaven.
00:35:50Like just a bunch of nerds talking about TVs for two days straight.
00:35:53Where were you on the on the list of like panelists and experts from most to least qualified?
00:35:59Where would you say you were?
00:36:00Fully the least.
00:36:01Fully the least.
00:36:02Okay.
00:36:04All the other judges are basically like Hollywood types.
00:36:07So the director of encoding services at Warner Brothers Discovery, the senior director of
00:36:12technical operations at Paramount, a handful of professional cinematographers and directors,
00:36:18a handful of professional calibrators.
00:36:20So calibrators are, that's a real job in this industry.
00:36:24People set up their studios, they bring in the professional calibrators to make sure
00:36:27everything is displaying accurately at every point in the chain.
00:36:31So from your camera to your display to your mastering display, this is a real thing.
00:36:35And so those people have kind of the most knowledge of all of the quirks of all the
00:36:40various displays because they're constantly trying to get them to display accurately.
00:36:45And so what was particularly interesting is they know these TVs really well because these
00:36:53TVs are showing up increasingly in professional operations because fancy studio executives
00:36:59just like watching things on big TVs instead of little reference monitors.
00:37:04And they're like, yeah, these Sony A95Ls are showing up all over the place as reference
00:37:08displays for the executives.
00:37:10And so they just, and obviously they do fancy home theaters and other viewing rooms and
00:37:13all this stuff.
00:37:14So it's really interesting to talk to them because they're in the weeds of what these
00:37:17things can and can't do, sort of divorced from any marketing or whatever.
00:37:23Like they're just trying to make them look good professionally and they're completely
00:37:28aware of the limits of the TVs.
00:37:30So and then there's me and I'm like, yeah, I've just been looking at screens for 15 years.
00:37:33I have a lot of opinions.
00:37:34And I thought that was, it was kind of interesting to be that person because it like we weren't
00:37:42supposed to talk to each other so much, but in the conversations we had, it was kind of
00:37:45interesting how much my instincts were to compare things to like phones and tablets.
00:37:51And you can see how the TVs relate to what these companies do on their phones and tablets.
00:37:57So I was looking at the Samsung and I was like, oh, that looks like a Samsung.
00:38:00Like I have looked at a lot of Samsung screens over the years and boy, does Samsung like
00:38:05nuclear colors.
00:38:06Yeah.
00:38:07Yeah.
00:38:08Samsung has a move for sure.
00:38:09Yeah.
00:38:10And it's like, oh.
00:38:11And they were like, why do they do that?
00:38:12I'm like, I don't know.
00:38:13They just always do that.
00:38:14Like every Samsung display I've ever looked at has just been incredibly bright and colorful,
00:38:17even at the expense of accuracy.
00:38:19And that was, it was kind of interesting to just have that other perspective in the room.
00:38:22They obviously knew more on the technical elements of the displays.
00:38:27Like they were, they kept bringing up the reference curves on the reference display
00:38:31and being like, see this?
00:38:33And I'm like, it's a line.
00:38:36Make it brighter.
00:38:37And eventually, you know, you start to pick up on what they were showing you.
00:38:41But it was just like, it was interesting to have that other perspective.
00:38:44So the fascinating thing about all of this is this is the year that Sony made a big bet
00:38:51on mini LED TVs, as opposed to their OLEDs.
00:38:55So Sony's still selling a bunch of OLEDs.
00:38:56Their flagship TV is still an OLED.
00:38:58That's the A95L.
00:39:00That's a year old now.
00:39:01That came out last year, last September, basically.
00:39:05But you know, we're basically a year into it, and the A95L won again.
00:39:09It just won the shootout.
00:39:11Last year's TV.
00:39:12Last year's TV won the shootout.
00:39:14That's a quantum dot OLED.
00:39:15So there's a wider color gamut.
00:39:17We think it's a Samsung panel.
00:39:19It pretty much is a Samsung panel.
00:39:20And then this year's Samsung OLED, we think, is the next generation quantum dot OLED.
00:39:27But Samsung is Samsung, and they did some weird stuff with colors, and it lost by just
00:39:33like 0.1.
00:39:34Right?
00:39:35It was just a little bit behind in some things, because...
00:39:37And then the LG was at the back?
00:39:39And so this is a really weird thing, is the 65-inch LG G4 performed much worse than the
00:39:4883-inch LG G4.
00:39:51And the calibrators in the room who have been setting up these TVs for different people
00:39:55are like, this is the story with these TVs.
00:39:57The 55, and then the 77 and up, all great.
00:40:01The 65 seems to be worse.
00:40:03Oh no, I have to go get a new TV.
00:40:06Well, I mean, one takeaway I'll give everyone is the OLEDs were so close to each other that
00:40:11it was taking like three times the amount of time to score them as compared to the reference,
00:40:17because you had to see where the differences are.
00:40:20Whereas on the mini-LED side, you're like, okay, the LG's bad, no one knows what Samsung
00:40:25is doing.
00:40:26And then the Sony's pretty good, but I can see these big problems, right?
00:40:29And so the game on that first day was you had the reference display that was showing
00:40:34ideally what the studio or whoever wants you to see in the picture.
00:40:39That's the reference display.
00:40:40Wait, can I ask a really dumb question?
00:40:42Is a reference display the best one?
00:40:46Yes.
00:40:47Is that how we should think about reference display, is like, this is the perfect television?
00:40:51Yes.
00:40:52No.
00:40:53Yes.
00:40:54Yes and no.
00:40:55I'll agree with Alex partially, but no, it's the most accurate representation of the content.
00:41:01So it's the one that changes the least through the whole pipeline, I guess.
00:41:06Yeah, it's like you have a display and it is ideally the same display as the person
00:41:13who did the color on the movie.
00:41:15Got it.
00:41:16Okay.
00:41:17And I feel like sometimes that's the same.
00:41:18Or it's a display that performs identically to that display.
00:41:19But it's also like, it does stuff that an OLED just can't do, right?
00:41:24Like a reference display is going to do a much smoother gradient of color than an OLED's
00:41:29capable of.
00:41:30You're going to see those weird stepping, that stepping issue in an OLED.
00:41:33Right.
00:41:34So these Sony BVMs were a dual layer LCD, so they were able to do it.
00:41:38Right.
00:41:39They had some capabilities that OLEDs didn't.
00:41:40They're awesome.
00:41:41Sorry.
00:41:42They also have giant ass fans in them.
00:41:44So they could run really bright for a very long time.
00:41:47All the OLEDs were dimming.
00:41:49You could see it through all.
00:41:50And you said they're what?
00:41:51Like $40,000?
00:41:52$40,000.
00:41:53Yeah, cool.
00:41:54Okay.
00:41:55And they're also small.
00:41:56They're smaller.
00:41:57But interestingly, to your point, Alex, the QD OLEDs have the capability of displaying
00:42:01more colors than these reference displays.
00:42:03So there's places where they actually aren't as capable as the televisions.
00:42:09And so there were scenes, I forget which movie it specifically was, where we were, I think
00:42:13it was like the saber fight in Rogue One, or Darth Vader just like lighting people up.
00:42:18Spoiler.
00:42:19I mean, Rogue One is itself a spoiler.
00:42:21Ooh, that's actually a really good one for that.
00:42:23Yeah, it's great.
00:42:24Spoiler, Darth Vader kills people in a Star Wars movie.
00:42:28What?
00:42:29Oh no.
00:42:30So one of the questions there was like, is this accurate?
00:42:32Because the people who made the movie were just sort of mastering to whatever set of
00:42:38colors, but they couldn't see them.
00:42:40So then it's like, is it different?
00:42:41Is it bad?
00:42:42It was kind of, that was pretty interesting, right?
00:42:43Yeah.
00:42:44And so the reason that the first day was objective, but the goal was one out of five, how much
00:42:49is this the same as the reference display?
00:42:51Which is a really interesting way of thinking about it, a picture.
00:42:54Because sometimes you're like, this is better.
00:42:57I think this is better than the reference display, but it was different, so you knocked
00:43:01it down.
00:43:02And that took a while to get your head around, basically.
00:43:05This is where accuracy is king for me in TVs, because I've done the calibration.
00:43:10I went to ISF and did the week-long course with them and everything.
00:43:15So I love the accuracy.
00:43:17And so when I hear, oh, the Samsung is probably displaying more reds, well, those reds were
00:43:23never intended to be displayed according to the reference monitor.
00:43:27So is that actually better?
00:43:28No, because the director could never have decided that, so therefore it's not better.
00:43:34And we see that a lot with classic film, too.
00:43:37All the stuff they captured on Technicolor is so much more vibrant, and that was before
00:43:41we even had color spaces as a concept.
00:43:45And so it's just totally different, and it's weird.
00:43:49It's just weird.
00:43:50So you're a real, what did the founding fathers intend kind of person.
00:43:54Yeah, I'm a founder's intent.
00:43:57Me and Scalia are just over there.
00:43:59Yeah, you are truly the Anton and Scalia of TV calibrations.
00:44:02Whereas Nila is just like, what looks sick now?
00:44:05Like it's 2024, baby, give me them reds.
00:44:09I famously love a Samsung display.
00:44:12How many frame TVs do you own?
00:44:15Not even in the mix.
00:44:16I'm just putting it out there.
00:44:18I'm sitting next to like a hundred-inch frame TV, and it's like the TV quality of frame
00:44:23compared to all of these is like meh.
00:44:25That's why you're back to it.
00:44:27Can you describe a picture quality as present?
00:44:30Because that is a Samsung frame TV.
00:44:33That's what a Samsung frame TV looks like.
00:44:35Well, fascinating.
00:44:36To the OLEDs, they're all really close, Alex.
00:44:40Some color stuff aside, and the fact that the QD OLEDs have a wider color gamut is kind
00:44:45of interesting.
00:44:46But like outside of that context, it would be almost impossible to tell them apart.
00:44:51And honestly, it was like, the way you could tell was it was taking so long for people
00:44:55to score them.
00:44:57Because the difference between a four and a five, it was like, am I seeing any?
00:45:00It's like, what is it?
00:45:01It was only the LG that was like, it just was really muddy in dark scenes.
00:45:06It just like didn't have the detail in dark scenes that the other one said.
00:45:08Weird.
00:45:09On the mini-LED side, everyone was like, all right, that one's bad, this one's good.
00:45:12Except for the Sony, because Sony is putting so much emphasis on mini-LED this year.
00:45:17The Bravia 9, which apart from the A95 is like the flagship, it's the one they're pushing,
00:45:22all mini-LEDs, they get hella bright because they're just LCD TVs with an LED backlight.
00:45:29And you're like, oh, this tech has a long way to go and it could get there, but it's
00:45:32nowhere close.
00:45:33Like, they look kind of washed out.
00:45:34The colors are a little shifted.
00:45:36The detail isn't quite there.
00:45:38They're still a little blooming.
00:45:39So if you think about how a mini-LED backlight works, it's just another screen of pixels
00:45:46behind the screen that light up.
00:45:49Like, it's a lower-res screen behind the screen that lights up to produce light, and it has
00:45:53to match what's on the screen in real time so that you get true black.
00:45:57So they're off when there's something black, and they're lit when there's something on
00:46:00the screen.
00:46:01So if there's any latency, you see blooming, right?
00:46:04Or if the zone is too big, because it's not one-to-one, you see blooming.
00:46:08And so you can see in the algorithms are like trying to manage all of this as fast as they
00:46:13can with as little latency as possible.
00:46:15The Samsung is like all over the place.
00:46:18Sometimes this just looks like a regular local dimming TV.
00:46:21Sony was much better, but still had the problems.
00:46:23And then all of them, because they're LCDs, their viewing angles aren't as good as the
00:46:27OLEDs.
00:46:28And they're huge.
00:46:29Right?
00:46:30These 65-inch, 83-inch TVs we're looking at.
00:46:33So if you were too close to them, even just moving an inch or two to the left or right,
00:46:38shifted all the color and brightness.
00:46:39And you're like, oh, we're just not close.
00:46:42Sony is trying the hardest here, but we're not close.
00:46:46I don't understand why we would go backwards on viewing angle.
00:46:49Because they're cheaper.
00:46:50Because you get an 83-inch TV for much cheaper, and it's very bright, and it's very impressive.
00:46:53And outside of that room full of the most incredible display nerds I've ever met in
00:46:57my entire life, and I want all of them to come home with me tomorrow.
00:47:01Outside of that room, I think it would be very hard to tell these TVs apart.
00:47:05But it was like just that experience of paying such close attention to one quality of these
00:47:12products with other people who are doing that same task, it was very refreshing to
00:47:17me.
00:47:18We weren't judging whether or not Tizen is any good compared to WebOS.
00:47:21We weren't judging how many HDMI 2.1 ports the Sony TV has.
00:47:24Not enough.
00:47:25Right?
00:47:26None of that stuff.
00:47:27Game mode, all that.
00:47:28We were like, can this picture be calibrated to match a reference monitor, and which one
00:47:33comes closer?
00:47:34And there was just a part of that, having reviewed so many products over the years,
00:47:39and had to think about so many things.
00:47:41It's like, oh, this is actually a really interesting way of thinking about these products specifically.
00:47:46Was there consistent agreement among the, what was it, eight panelists?
00:47:50That's a lot of people to all point at this same, like, it's both objective and subjective
00:47:55in a certain way.
00:47:56Like, did everybody tend to agree on everything?
00:47:58We weren't, we were all so excited to be there that when we started judging, we were all
00:48:02chattering, and then we were like told to stop.
00:48:05Okay.
00:48:06So our score, I don't know what everybody else scored.
00:48:08A worry for me as the consumer reviewer in the group was that I had no idea what I was
00:48:13talking about.
00:48:14I was like, man, I hope my scores are close.
00:48:15And they were.
00:48:17In the end, the averages that were released and the rankings that were released were exactly
00:48:23as I had thought them.
00:48:25Okay.
00:48:26You didn't see somebody flip a table?
00:48:27I feel like I was in the mainstream.
00:48:28You're just the one LG stan in the room who's like, I love Blooming.
00:48:34That LG Mini LED is not good.
00:48:36It's like a half-hearted.
00:48:38And to be fair, it was the cheapest TV on display, like thousands of dollars.
00:48:42So they put all their efforts into OLEDs anyway.
00:48:45Like they just farted that out.
00:48:47Yeah.
00:48:48It's like, let's hedge our bet a little bit.
00:48:49Like maybe this is the thing, but yeah, they have the micro lens array, which increases
00:48:54the brightness on their OLEDs.
00:48:55Like I said, the three OLEDs were so close to each other.
00:48:59You can tell that it's a mature technology, right?
00:49:03It just hit a point of refinement where you have to care a lot about extremely like arcane
00:49:09picture details.
00:49:10And Alex, I think you and I vibe on this.
00:49:14I care a lot about arcane picture details.
00:49:16The Mini LEDs is like all over.
00:49:18My notes on the color for the Sony Bravia 9 was just the single sentence, colors all
00:49:24over the map, just all over the place.
00:49:28Who knows what's going on here?
00:49:29So that was like the first day.
00:49:30The second day was much more subjective.
00:49:33They took down the 65s.
00:49:35They put up the biggest available sizes for all the TVs.
00:49:38So that was 77 for the Sony 83 for the LG 85 for the Mini LEDs.
00:49:44And the Roberts on the owner was like, I've never had more people ask for a head to head
00:49:49comparison of two TVs than people ask for the LG G4 83 versus the Sony Mini LED 85.
00:49:55Because they're very price competitive and one is obviously bigger, right?
00:49:59TVs, people have big, cheap screens.
00:50:02She's like, this is what everyone wants to see.
00:50:03So those two are right next to each other.
00:50:04And the LG just wiped the floor.
00:50:06Wow.
00:50:07So much better.
00:50:08Just incredibly better.
00:50:09And the fact that the LG 83 was so much better than 65, that's what everyone talked about.
00:50:13But we weren't doing the intense reference comparison that day.
00:50:17They took them, they set them up out of the box.
00:50:19They turned on filmmaker mode to turn off all the bullshit.
00:50:23And they turned off energy saver because energy saver brings the brightness down.
00:50:28Yeah.
00:50:28Energy saver is the number one thing you should turn off on your display.
00:50:31I mean, destroy it, destroy the environment, but just go turn.
00:50:36If you have it on right now, go turn it off.
00:50:38Right.
00:50:38It just significantly reduces the brightness of your panel.
00:50:40So they turn off energy saver and they put them in filmmaker mode, or I think Sony calls
00:50:43it professional mode, just turns off all the stuff and they let them run out of the box.
00:50:47And that's where like Samsung was the most Samsung like colors.
00:50:50Do you like them?
00:50:51And I, you know, the LG, the 83 inch LG, just, it was just a great picture, right?
00:50:57Like it was right behind the Sony in that evaluation, but we weren't doing numbers.
00:51:01We were just sort of ranking one, two, three for all the clips that we saw.
00:51:04And I, at the end, and we can just wrap it up here at the end, I was basically put the
00:51:09Samsung QD OLED, the S95D and the Sony LED were in a tie for me.
00:51:17It was hard.
00:51:17It was hard for me to decide because the Samsung QD OLED was a tie for me.
00:51:20Because the Samsung colors were so all over the place.
00:51:23And the Sony's backlight was so all over the place.
00:51:24And the viewing angles were weird and I couldn't decide.
00:51:26And in the end, I was like, it's an OLED because I know the Samsung can be calibrated
00:51:30and I know the Sony can't.
00:51:32So that's how I picked.
00:51:33Again, like my takeaway from this was one, I should spend more time in rooms with huge
00:51:38nerds.
00:51:38Yes.
00:51:39Because those are my people.
00:51:41And I would say what, like a hundred thousand dollars worth of TVs on a wallet for more
00:51:45than that.
00:51:45I mean, like this store is out of control.
00:51:48Like that's just the TVs.
00:51:49We didn't even talk about the audio side of the store.
00:51:53Scarsdale is a wealthy town.
00:51:56We're moving product.
00:51:58It was great.
00:51:58And he sells, you know, all the country.
00:51:59And they've been doing it for a long time.
00:52:01The room was full of Sony's actual product people, not just marketing people.
00:52:05So this like matters.
00:52:06This is not just like a small town bunch of nerds.
00:52:08This is like a thing people care about.
00:52:09TV shootout is a thing.
00:52:10There's a press release and like a whole thing.
00:52:12Like there are YouTubers there making YouTube videos.
00:52:14There are YouTubers live streaming with the calibrators, just talking TVs.
00:52:20Uh, yeah, I already assigned 10,000 words on the calibrators.
00:52:24So that's coming.
00:52:25That's actually a great name for a show.
00:52:27The calibrators.
00:52:28It is pretty good.
00:52:29I would, I would watch the picture over the course of every episode.
00:52:33The picture just gets slightly better.
00:52:37Uh, anyway, that's my TV story.
00:52:38I finally got to talk about it's on the site.
00:52:40Now you should go read it.
00:52:41I'm sorry if you have an LG for.
00:52:44And you, you, it's a great TV.
00:52:45You're fine.
00:52:46Don't listen to me.
00:52:47Just give it a 10.
00:52:49Alex is so disappointed.
00:52:51I'm okay.
00:52:52I'm working through it.
00:52:53I'll be fine.
00:52:54Alex, if you want, I'll take your crappy TV.
00:52:57Anyone who would like to give me their very good TVs.
00:52:59I will happily take them with no complaints whatsoever.
00:53:02Oh, it's so crappy.
00:53:03Oh, it's terrible.
00:53:05Can I say one more thing?
00:53:06At the opening of this whole event, um, they're talking about the TVs and like what they are
00:53:11and all this stuff.
00:53:11Uh, and they said two things.
00:53:13One, uh, they're like TCL and Hisense aren't here.
00:53:17They asked not to be included in a competition because they were going to lose.
00:53:22You can just, you can just read into that.
00:53:23And then later Robert was like one year Vizio was here and it was embarrassing.
00:53:27Oh boy.
00:53:28So that's whatever you want.
00:53:31It's a real, like, I will not be running for president in 2024.
00:53:35Yeah.
00:53:38Okay.
00:53:38That was it.
00:53:39That was my TV adventure.
00:53:40Thank you for joining me on this journey.
00:53:42This is why I started the verge so I could sit in a room full of TVs.
00:53:45Do you think they'll invite you back next year?
00:53:46Did you do a good enough job?
00:53:48I hope so.
00:53:49I hope.
00:53:50Can, can, can we come with you?
00:53:51Just, we'll, we'll be quiet.
00:53:52We'll just stand there.
00:53:53Alex and I will live stream it next year.
00:53:55I asked Chris Welch if he wanted to come with me next year and he goes,
00:53:58I don't want to get into that level of smoke.
00:54:02I respect that.
00:54:03Yeah, it was great.
00:54:04All right.
00:54:05We should talk about just a handful of, I don't know, regulatory things.
00:54:10What do you want to call them?
00:54:11But the main one that I really want to spend just a minute on, uh, is Apple.
00:54:16And it, it just can't give itself a break when it comes to the app store and fees.
00:54:23All over the world, right?
00:54:25It has an antitrust lawsuit in this country, in the EU, various charming European bureaucrats
00:54:31wake up every morning thinking about ways to troll, troll Tim Cook on Twitter.
00:54:35Like this company is under a lot of pressure and then it won't just do things that make
00:54:40its life easier.
00:54:41I don't know how to describe this, but this, I'm just, I'm going to tell you this story
00:54:45and you, you, if people out there can figure out why Apple did this, let us know.
00:54:52So Patreon exists, right?
00:54:55You can be a fan of someone.
00:54:56You can pay them some money to do whatever people on Patreon do knit clothes, make video
00:55:01games, whatever it is, Patreon.
00:55:04They've been in a gray zone with the app store for years.
00:55:09Because you can pay people money in Patreon and they haven't been charging the fee, right?
00:55:14They haven't been giving Apple the 30%.
00:55:16And I actually had Patreon CEO, Jack Conte on Decoder a while ago.
00:55:20And I said, have you ever talked to Apple about this?
00:55:23Like, are you an exception?
00:55:24And he was like, no, please stop talking about it, right?
00:55:27Like they know they're in this gray area.
00:55:31Okay.
00:55:31And there, there've been other companies that want to do Patreon like things like this little
00:55:35company fan house, right?
00:55:36And they did a whole pressure campaign to say, why are you charging our creators 30%?
00:55:41Like this is unfair.
00:55:42You're providing no value to them.
00:55:44Right.
00:55:44And the, cause the idea is if you sign up for a creator subscription inside of the app,
00:55:49Apple will treat that as an in-app purchase and take it 30%, right?
00:55:54Yeah.
00:55:54Okay.
00:55:55So they, they see signing up for whatever my favorite podcast on Patreon,
00:55:59add the same as signing up for Spotify through the app.
00:56:04Sure.
00:56:04And if you want to be very pedantic, that is probably the correct interpretation.
00:56:09Except that for years, it wasn't like, that feels important to keep saying.
00:56:14Particularly for Patreon.
00:56:16They have been in this gray area for years.
00:56:18You are a Patreon creator.
00:56:21You sign up for Patreon.
00:56:22You agree.
00:56:23Your Patreon is going to take 8% and you're going to take the rest of the money.
00:56:27That's it's fine.
00:56:28That's a fine deal.
00:56:29Uh, Apple's like, well, we want 30% before Patreon takes 8%.
00:56:34So now someone did the math.
00:56:36Instead of needing a thousand true fans, which is the number everybody always says,
00:56:40you need 1,554 fans to make the same money that you were doing before.
00:56:46That's weird.
00:56:47And it is weird because Apple doesn't need this fight right now.
00:56:52Because it's under all of this pressure for whether or not these fees are fair,
00:56:54whether the app store is fair, whether Apple has too much power in the market overall.
00:56:58Antitrust lawsuit in this country.
00:57:01I figured out why they did it.
00:57:02Yeah.
00:57:03So whoever sent the email and was like, okay, we're going to, we're going to increase,
00:57:06we're going to start charging the 30% of Patreon is actually like,
00:57:10was placed there by someone else to just make Apple give up.
00:57:15It's like a United States Department of Justice sleep.
00:57:18Yeah. Yeah.
00:57:18Somebody like, like, like they're, they're just a spy or something.
00:57:21And they were sitting because it just, it doesn't, why would you do that?
00:57:24Why would you just.
00:57:25On the calibrators?
00:57:27Yeah. The calibrators went in.
00:57:30They like, they like, they, they parachuted in and they were like, okay, we're going to do this
00:57:34so that we give even more ammunition for when we go after Apple
00:57:38for all the things we're going after Apple for around the 30%.
00:57:41Yeah, maybe it just seems like there are ways to make your life easier.
00:57:46And there are ways to make your life harder.
00:57:47Pissing off a bunch of independent creators to whom you are providing no value, right?
00:57:54You can make the argument that Apple provides a lot of value to its developers, right?
00:57:59They make the APIs, they ship the platform, they run some of the services, they make Xcode.
00:58:05Sure.
00:58:05That's very debatable.
00:58:06Like truly debatable.
00:58:08Yeah.
00:58:09But you can make the argument.
00:58:10And a lot of people have, if you were our Patreon creator,
00:58:15no value is coming your way from Apple.
00:58:17He probably actually comes from Patreon and you're already paying them money.
00:58:20Right.
00:58:21So Apple's showing up and be like, we want 30%.
00:58:24It's just like too much.
00:58:26And I suspect a lot of these Patreon creators are going to tell their audiences about it.
00:58:30And now Apple is right in a fight with creatives that they sort of keep walking into.
00:58:36Like their crush ad that they had to apologize for.
00:58:38Yep.
00:58:39Like why?
00:58:40They just keep making their life harder with these creatives.
00:58:43And I just don't know for what money.
00:58:46If you took 30% of all of Patreon's revenue and you gave it to Tim Cook,
00:58:50he'd be like, get out of my face.
00:58:52Yeah.
00:58:52This is nothing.
00:58:53Yeah.
00:58:54Like this isn't even gas for the jet.
00:58:57It probably isn't.
00:58:58The only thing I can think is that Apple is desperately trying to get to a place
00:59:06where it can say with a straight face that it enforces all of its rules equally.
00:59:10Because one of the things that has happened to Apple over and over is that it keeps saying,
00:59:16these are the rules and we're very clear about them and we apply them to everybody.
00:59:20Every 15 minutes we hear about a sweetheart deal that somebody has from Apple, right?
00:59:26And the rules exist except for all of the exceptions to the rules.
00:59:30And I think if you're Apple, one thing to do would be to say, okay,
00:59:35we're going to need to be able to stand up to regulators and say, look, these are the rules.
00:59:38They exist for everybody.
00:59:39Everybody follows them equally.
00:59:41I don't think that's a good strategy.
00:59:43I don't think it's going to work.
00:59:45But I think if you're Apple, it is at least one way to be able to say with a straight face,
00:59:48look, these are the rules.
00:59:49We're clear about them.
00:59:50You don't have to play by them anymore because you can go to Alt Store or whatever.
00:59:54But these are the rules.
00:59:56I think doing this this way and particularly in these very like haphazard ways that Apple
01:00:03seems to be doing this is deeply bizarre.
01:00:06But I think if you're Apple, I cannot think of another reason to pick this particular fight
01:00:12with Patreon right now other than that.
01:00:15Well, so just to be clear on some of the timing, they told Patreon this is going to
01:00:18happen a while ago, and now it's just happening.
01:00:20But there's no reason that it should be happening.
01:00:22So that's like it's not that they woke up yesterday and were like, Patreon's going to
01:00:25pass.
01:00:26They said, here's a big notice period, and now it's happening.
01:00:28And now Patreon is communicating about it.
01:00:29Right.
01:00:30So a more delayed timeline.
01:00:32But still, even if you want to make the argument, we have perfect enforcement of these rules.
01:00:36And there are no exceptions.
01:00:38You're still walking into and we've pissed everyone off along the way.
01:00:42I'll give you another example.
01:00:44Apple is going to allow Spotify to show pricing in its app in the EU.
01:00:50Just the thing that is happening is that Spotify is going to put numbers in its app.
01:00:57You still can't buy Spotify in the app.
01:01:00I really encourage everyone, if you're not driving to we'll put this link in the show
01:01:05notes, but open it up and look at the side by side screenshots, because it is this like
01:01:09big, dramatic regulatory moment in this long-term fight between Apple and Spotify.
01:01:15It's a big deal.
01:01:16And then you look at the side by side screenshots, and they are identical, except that one of
01:01:20them says $17.99 per month, $14.99 per month, and the other doesn't.
01:01:24That's it.
01:01:26And this took like, you know, one of the more powerful government entities in world history
01:01:30to like force the one of the richest companies in world history to let another company show
01:01:35numbers.
01:01:36And you're like, what is the point of this fight?
01:01:39Who gives one solitary shit?
01:01:42It's like, you can't possibly care.
01:01:45This cannot matter to your bottom line so much, and it can't be such a good argument
01:01:50that your rules are so evenly enforced that you're willing to die in this hill over displaying
01:01:55literally $17.99 in the Spotify app.
01:01:58But not even letting people buy stuff, just showing the price that you can get on the
01:02:02web versus in the app.
01:02:03The only part of that I would take issue with is the, it can't possibly matter so much to
01:02:07your bottom line.
01:02:08I mean, like Apple just reported earnings.
01:02:09It's super, super does matter to Apple's bottom line.
01:02:12And especially if you're Apple, looking at a world in which Google is no longer legally
01:02:16allowed to give you $20 billion every year.
01:02:18Like, this stuff matters an awful lot to Apple.
01:02:21And suddenly the rent that you get to extract from everyone in the app store goes from a
01:02:29like, small but meaningful part of your business to like a giant and meaningful part of your
01:02:34business.
01:02:34Yeah.
01:02:35Do you think that's part of it too, is just their services, because they've been bundling
01:02:40that $20 billion into the services reporting, right?
01:02:43Yeah.
01:02:43It's the lion's share of both the services revenue and Apple's profits in a very real
01:02:48way.
01:02:48And they've been really big on, yeah, this is, our services is doing great.
01:02:51And now it's going to be like, no, it actually, it doesn't.
01:02:54Well, the Google remedy is years away.
01:02:56Okay.
01:02:57So reacting to the Google case, like clamping down on Patreon.
01:03:01That would be hysterical.
01:03:02A little short-sighted.
01:03:03Again, I think, I don't think it's gas for the jet.
01:03:07Like it is not a huge amount of money, but I think their general attitude towards all
01:03:12of these regulators and all these courts saying, yep, these platforms need to open up has basically
01:03:17been to put a middle finger in the air instead of figuring out how to innovate.
01:03:23Right.
01:03:23And like, icky.
01:03:24I like, I just, I'm just saying they could make their lives easier, not harder.
01:03:28And they are consistently choosing harder.
01:03:30Yes.
01:03:31And it is bizarre to me.
01:03:33There's a little more regulatory stuff to talk about because this comes right next to
01:03:36the judge in the epic Google antitrust case saying he will tear the barriers down on the
01:03:44Play Store because he ruled that the Play Store was a monopoly.
01:03:48And he's like, we're opening up the Play Store United States.
01:03:51The, obviously the court in the Google search case found that there was a monopoly.
01:03:56And then Google's ad tech case kicks off in early September.
01:04:01And that probably is not going to go poor.
01:04:03Like of all of the cases where we're going to see a bunch of emails of Google executives
01:04:08saying shady things about money, the ad tech case is the one.
01:04:12Oh yeah.
01:04:13Right.
01:04:13Like that's the one.
01:04:14It's so boring and so consequential.
01:04:17Right.
01:04:18So you just see like Google is under all of this pressure and the judges in these cases
01:04:22and the regulators in the year are like, we're going to tear this company apart.
01:04:25And Apple is sitting there with the big open antitrust case to come and obviously
01:04:32empowered justice department because they just won the big Google trial and they got
01:04:35the next one coming.
01:04:36And then a bunch of regulators are doing, and it's like, why are you signaling to all
01:04:41of these people that your response to this, putting your finger in the air?
01:04:44Like it's not going to work because they're winning right now against Google in a real
01:04:48way.
01:04:48And maybe Google is more cuddly than Apple.
01:04:50Maybe people like Apple better than Google.
01:04:52However, those optics feel they're on the hunt and they are winning.
01:04:58And so like if you, I don't know, there's just something weird about this.
01:05:01I was like, it's bad optics to go take a cut of 30% from a whole bunch of creators who
01:05:06don't make a lot of, most of them aren't making a ton of money, right?
01:05:10Like that's bad optics.
01:05:11It's just such an unforced error.
01:05:13It feels like them just stepping in rakes constantly.
01:05:17They're just sideshow Bob.
01:05:18If you know what the strategy here is, please let us know.
01:05:21Cause I'm dying to know, or if you even want to concoct a strategy, we're not being
01:05:24successful at it, but there's a thing happening like broadly in the world of tech right now
01:05:29where the regulators are winning and the platforms are being pried open and distribution is
01:05:36getting a little crazier.
01:05:37And it's like kind of interesting for us, right?
01:05:39Like it means more interesting things are happening.
01:05:42Like AltStore is just a thing that's happening.
01:05:46Emulators are happening all over the iPhone right now because of EU regulation.
01:05:50The emulators are cool.
01:05:51Like they're downstream of some boring lawyer stuff, but now you can run DOS on your iPhone.
01:05:56Right.
01:05:57Well, and it's worth pointing out how big a shift all of that is from even, let's say
01:06:0212 months ago.
01:06:03Like I think the bet this time last year would not have been on huge wins for the U S government
01:06:14in particular, right?
01:06:14It was, it was perceived that the EU had wildly overstepped its bounds and that that was all
01:06:18going to get very weird.
01:06:19But like Lena con was having a really bad time picking fights with tech companies and
01:06:23it wasn't going well and it didn't go well.
01:06:25And over and over this sense was like, uh, what, what is happening here?
01:06:29The tech companies are going to keep winning.
01:06:30Apple was kind of winning against Epic Google lost, but in kind of a, like not necessarily
01:06:37quite as terrifying way.
01:06:38It just, the momentum felt very different.
01:06:41Not that long ago.
01:06:42And I think it has maybe not caught up to everybody how quickly and aggressively it
01:06:47seems like the wins on all of that stuff have changed.
01:06:51Yeah.
01:06:51Yeah.
01:06:51And in part because of what you're saying, the things like the emulators, right?
01:06:54Like with every little crack, like product changes are happening.
01:06:57And there was the, the one just this week with Apple opening up tap to pay stuff.
01:07:01Like that's been in the antitrust trials.
01:07:04That is one of the things that Apple has kept really aggressive control over.
01:07:08Like we talked a lot about digital wallets on the show and this came out because like,
01:07:12and that's the kind of stuff that is making big changes just because of the threat of
01:07:16regulatory action, right?
01:07:17Like all this stuff is going to take a decade to play out, but it doesn't matter because
01:07:21as soon as it starts playing out, it all changes.
01:07:24Yeah.
01:07:25And I, I just think we're on the cusp of, and we've talked about this a million times
01:07:30on the show.
01:07:30It just feels like everything's about to change.
01:07:32Like the internet's about to change or social networks about to change search about change.
01:07:35And then this stuff is going to break these companies open.
01:07:38I am hopeful we see a round of interesting, new, innovative companies and products and
01:07:44ideas.
01:07:44I'm also a little worried that like mostly we're going to get lawsuits and I'm going
01:07:48to try to talk about many led TVs every week.
01:07:51And instead I have to read PDFs.
01:07:52Even on this own show, we have now sandwiched the television discussion inside of antitrust
01:07:57conversations.
01:07:57I don't know why this keeps happening to me, but my solemn promise to all of you is that
01:08:02anytime we talk about antitrust, I will bring up all that televisions.
01:08:05I actually believe that.
01:08:06Yeah.
01:08:08All right.
01:08:08We got to take a break.
01:08:08We're going to come back to the lightning round and I'll be in a third chair.
01:08:16All right, we're back.
01:08:18I'm in what I think of as the homeboy chairs.
01:08:21It's beautiful.
01:08:22Like when you got the NBA players in here during the podcast, this is where the homeboys
01:08:26sit.
01:08:26Yeah.
01:08:28You look like you should be like, you look like a professor during the pandemic who like
01:08:35went a little hard on redecorating the home office.
01:08:40That's right.
01:08:40That's also this look, you know, sidekick, homeboys, professor with an ax to grind.
01:08:47The slats are like, it's very trippy.
01:08:50It's a good look.
01:08:51We bought very similar slats for the studio at my house.
01:08:54And, you know, I don't know whose fault this is or if this is racist, but we forgot to
01:08:59consider that they're the same color as me.
01:09:02So we had to stay in the slots and just turn to the side, you'll disappear in the frame.
01:09:08So, again, anyway, this is where I'm in the loose hangout.
01:09:11You might call this the hype desk.
01:09:14It's a very fast one.
01:09:15Could one could one could one could say we are now in the market for someone to sit in
01:09:19the hype desk in the chest once again, because we have a hype zone over here in the studio,
01:09:25the as yet unsponsored, unlaunched hype desk.
01:09:28Once we get this lightning round sponsored, we're moving on.
01:09:33But now that I'm in the hype desk, I think, David, that makes you got to run the lightning
01:09:36round and I'm just going to say whether or not things are hype.
01:09:39OK, good.
01:09:39Well, now that now that I'm in charge, I've picked six things for the lightning round.
01:09:45Classic, classic lightning round.
01:09:47No, Kranz, let's let's let's start with you.
01:09:49You have a fun gadgety one.
01:09:50So you go for it.
01:09:51Yeah, I got a fun gadgety one.
01:09:53So so real me is a Chinese phone maker.
01:09:56And they make phones.
01:09:58I don't want to I don't want to make a big assessment on the quality of those phones.
01:10:02They make phones.
01:10:02We can say they are phones and they are really into like making the charging better and faster.
01:10:07And they introduced three hundred and twenty watt fast charging.
01:10:13Just that's great.
01:10:16It's it's they're doing they said they could do a battery in four minutes and 30 seconds,
01:10:20like a pixel nine battery.
01:10:22Wait, isn't the plug I have in the wall like seven and a half?
01:10:24And I'm pretty sure like 30 is like very fast.
01:10:28Yeah.
01:10:29So this is this is insane.
01:10:30Unclear if it will burst into flames as soon as you plug it in.
01:10:34Unclear if it'll set your phone on fire.
01:10:36Like a like a Thunderbolt four style cable, like a big, thick.
01:10:40I wouldn't feel comfortable.
01:10:42You're not sending this through like a like a flimsy like lightning.
01:10:46OK, yeah, yeah.
01:10:47This is not what you want to use, like that random cable you found at the bottom of your
01:10:51desk.
01:10:51Don't don't use that.
01:10:53Don't don't use that.
01:10:54Like you're playing like a CCS charger into your.
01:10:56Yeah, yeah.
01:10:58So it's USBC right now.
01:11:01What can USBC do except tell you what it's doing?
01:11:04But they haven't really like there's no phones that's really fully supported out in the wild.
01:11:11It's just technology.
01:11:12They just said we did it.
01:11:13This was kind of there.
01:11:14They were doing their roadshow and showing off their new technology.
01:11:17And it's like, yeah, we're going to do this soon.
01:11:19So at some point, we're going to have phones charging in four minutes, and that'll rule
01:11:25unless they catch on fire.
01:11:26Can I just say my favorite part of the story is I mean, the story is great.
01:11:30We should charge our phones faster.
01:11:31The press image they supplied is incredible.
01:11:34It's just like a happy guy standing in front of a screen that says 320 watts supersonic
01:11:39charge.
01:11:39And he just pleased this punch.
01:11:42What else do you need?
01:11:44That's all you need.
01:11:45Like, that's how I feel when I read 320 watts.
01:11:48I'm like, OK, yeah.
01:11:49Same feeling.
01:11:49Like, I wish I was giving this presentation right now.
01:11:52Like, I truly can we get the words 320 watt supersonic charge in this TV, please?
01:11:59They call the charger the pocket cannon, which is unbelievable.
01:12:02Yeah, just that's great.
01:12:04Tremendous.
01:12:05Everything about it's wonderful.
01:12:07And but we'll have to see if it actually does it.
01:12:10Not just in a demo.
01:12:12I will say I have for years thought that the thing that all these companies say that it's
01:12:18like, you know, the battery is trash, but it charges pretty fast.
01:12:22You can get from zero to 50 percent in 35 minutes.
01:12:25I've always kind of thought that was nothing like who cares?
01:12:28But the idea of fully charging my phone in four and a half minutes, it's like, OK, I
01:12:32can plug in my phone.
01:12:33I can brush my teeth and my phone is going to be at like 70 percent is awesome.
01:12:37You can also heat a small village.
01:12:39You can fry one egg.
01:12:42It's going to be great.
01:12:43You can I do like the idea of of both turning my oven on and charging my phone at the same
01:12:47time.
01:12:48No, I think you'll blow a circuit breaker if you do that.
01:12:51Yeah, it's like it's like a hot plate and a phone charger all in one little little gizmo
01:12:56on my table.
01:12:57This is great.
01:12:58The street, the streetlights for miles around dim when David plugs in his phone.
01:13:04I'm excited.
01:13:05I'm just looking at this photo.
01:13:06I'm just looking at this photo.
01:13:07This guy smiling at the words, 320 watt supersonic charge.
01:13:10And I think more of the tech industry should be like this.
01:13:13Yeah, yeah.
01:13:13That's what I have for you.
01:13:14I will take a pocket cannon.
01:13:17I feel like I live to say that on a podcast.
01:13:19But yeah, here we are.
01:13:20All right.
01:13:21I have to the first one.
01:13:23I actually should have brought this up at the top where we were talking about all the
01:13:26A.I.
01:13:26image processing stuff.
01:13:28But Halide, a very good camera app for iPhones and iPads, launched a thing this week called
01:13:34Process Zero that is basically just a setting inside of their app that instead of running
01:13:40every photo you take through either Apple's, I think they offer Apple's standard image
01:13:45processing, the pro raw processing, and then a thing they call reduced, which is just kind
01:13:49of a light version of Apple's processing, runs it through no processing.
01:13:53So you get you get what is supposed to be as close to like a film camera experience
01:13:57as possible.
01:13:57You just get the light.
01:13:59It collects the end.
01:14:01A super cool feature got a lot of people very excited.
01:14:04This idea that like we can actually choose to go another way.
01:14:07It's going to make some of your photos meaningfully worse.
01:14:11It's going to change them in certain ways.
01:14:12But I think that idea of like, not only do I get to pick like where I am in the photo,
01:14:16which is weird, but like I have actual real control over what is happening to my photo
01:14:21every time I capture it is very cool.
01:14:24Also, just the idea that a camera on your phone can have that kind of access is very
01:14:32cool and not a thing I really understood until I started writing about this thing that like
01:14:36it's again, it's just collecting sensor data.
01:14:39And if you give apps like how I'd access to that sensor data, there's all kinds of interesting
01:14:43stuff they're going to be able to do with it.
01:14:45And I just think that's very cool.
01:14:46And a sort of rich vein that, at least to my knowledge, nobody has really explored.
01:14:51And I think that's really cool.
01:14:53If you don't know a lot about photography, don't use that feature.
01:14:56All your photos are going to look like trash.
01:14:58Disagree.
01:15:00You learn a lot about photography.
01:15:02That's true.
01:15:04I'm assuming of like the 70 year old who listens to the Verge cast and it's like,
01:15:09you know what?
01:15:09I want to, this sounds cool.
01:15:11I want to, I want to put this on my phone.
01:15:12No, that person.
01:15:12What are you doing with your time?
01:15:14Get out there.
01:15:15Oh, I see.
01:15:16Got it.
01:15:18Understood.
01:15:20So just Alex's mom.
01:15:23I've hung out with your mom before, Alex.
01:15:25I'll teach her about digital photography.
01:15:27You say that now.
01:15:29That'll be a great four hour Verge cast.
01:15:31I think people will listen to it.
01:15:33Talk about a Patreon, just me and your mom.
01:15:37But what's really interesting here is pocket point and shoot digital cameras
01:15:42are making a tiny blip of a comeback, particularly with younger folks,
01:15:47because they see how bad the processing on their phones has gotten.
01:15:51And they don't want to be always connected.
01:15:52Like my nieces and nephews are all carrying power shot elves.
01:15:56And I'm like, I made a lot of mistakes with those cameras.
01:15:59Don't do what I did.
01:16:01But it's fascinating to see that little comeback.
01:16:03Is it meaningful?
01:16:04Is it the threat to smartphone?
01:16:06No, none of that.
01:16:07But it is a pushback on how processed the photos are getting.
01:16:11And I think, you know, an app putting some of those photos into the phone
01:16:16might push the default cameras back towards sanity.
01:16:20And I'm kind of hoping Apple takes the hit, right?
01:16:23There's they've overdone it.
01:16:26Samsung has overdone it for years.
01:16:28Google has been inching towards overdoing it.
01:16:30I think it's Apple has taken kind of the most aggressive step from,
01:16:34I don't know, the 12 or the 13 to now,
01:16:37where it's just like, oh, this, these photos are bananas.
01:16:40Yeah.
01:16:41I like the photos less on my iPhone 15 than I have in a long time from the iPhone.
01:16:46Like, I think in a certain way, they are like technically better photos.
01:16:50I like them less.
01:16:52Like my photos don't look like I feel like they should anymore on most smartphones.
01:16:57But the iPhone, I think, held out a long time, but that has kind of gone away.
01:17:01What is it that I guess, because I maybe don't see it as much.
01:17:04What is it that you guys are seeing when you do that?
01:17:07Is it like, is it the color?
01:17:08Is it the dynamic range?
01:17:11All of it?
01:17:11It's all of it.
01:17:12The things for me, I'm curious, David, since you have the same opinion,
01:17:15if you're seeing something different.
01:17:17For me, it's the iPhone is now just completely allergic to shadows.
01:17:22Just takes them away.
01:17:24It loves the sky.
01:17:26Like nothing loves the sky.
01:17:28Like the iPhone camera loves the sky.
01:17:30So just like more sky.
01:17:31But not the sky as it is.
01:17:32Like, what if the sky was the best it has ever been in history?
01:17:36All the time.
01:17:37Every time you take a photo.
01:17:38Oh my God.
01:17:39Sky.
01:17:39Oh, turn up that sky knob.
01:17:41Yeah.
01:17:41You're like, oh no, it's gray out today.
01:17:43And the iPhone's like, the fuck it is.
01:17:44Let's go.
01:17:46And then those things combined, if you're outside in a bright scene,
01:17:51it can actually make your photos gray.
01:17:53Yeah.
01:17:54So I was thinking about dynamics.
01:17:56Like if you're a music person, you know, dynamics, right?
01:17:59Quiet and loud.
01:17:59Like there's dynamics in photographs too.
01:18:01And so if everything is bright, the perceived brightness of the whole image drops.
01:18:06And so the iPhone, by getting rid of shadows and pumping up the sky and then over,
01:18:09like bringing everything up actually makes the photo look dim.
01:18:13And I've seen influencers like complain about their iPhone cameras.
01:18:18And they're like, why is this camera so gray?
01:18:20Like, I think Alex Earl has made a video about why her camera appears to be gray.
01:18:24Right.
01:18:24And like, that's bad.
01:18:26Like, you don't want to be there, right?
01:18:28When you are the hardware of the entire creator economy,
01:18:32having the creators being like, why is my phone gray?
01:18:34And it's not because they're less bright.
01:18:37It's because if you destroy all the shadows and you make everything bright,
01:18:41actually everything looks dim.
01:18:42And that's just kind of a weird spot Apple has gone into.
01:18:44I don't know, David, is that what you're seeing too or is it something else?
01:18:46No, that's basically right.
01:18:47And the other thing I keep noticing, and in the highlight story I wrote,
01:18:51there's a really interesting comparison shot where what Apple does by
01:18:58getting rid of shadows wherever it can and hyping up the brightness everywhere you can,
01:19:02is it just, it just flattens it all too.
01:19:04So there's a, there's a version of the shot that is like, it's a,
01:19:07it's the front of a flower shop.
01:19:09And so you see all this sort of the flowers and the pots in the front.
01:19:12And the photo was like crisper and brighter than the one that you got
01:19:15with the process zero thing that how that is doing.
01:19:17But it's also much less like dynamic, the photo itself.
01:19:21There's no, there's no sense of sort of ups and downs.
01:19:24You get the sense the whole curve is just like bright
01:19:27and it makes the whole thing look really flat,
01:19:28kind of like you're talking about and it just,
01:19:30it makes all the photos less interesting in a way,
01:19:32like they're brighter and cooler and less interesting to me in so many ways.
01:19:36Yeah.
01:19:37And there's other stuff there's in, there's like weird sharpening.
01:19:39When you get in a low light, iPhones just start freaking out.
01:19:43Oh yeah.
01:19:44And like, not in a bad way.
01:19:45They're not like making technically bad photos.
01:19:48I think that's what you're getting at David.
01:19:49They're just trying so hard to make a great photo that you lose the character of it.
01:19:54And then there's tons and tons and tons and processing, like.
01:19:56Right.
01:19:57And I think what you're seeing a lot of coming back with the,
01:19:59the point and shoots and the process zero stuff.
01:20:01Like this whole idea is like, I, people should be allowed to take bad photos.
01:20:06You know what I mean?
01:20:07And it's like, there's something to, if I'm standing in a dark room and I take a picture,
01:20:11maybe it's actually okay that the picture is dark.
01:20:13Like maybe, maybe that's okay.
01:20:14And sometimes that's what I want.
01:20:16And increasingly with these devices, you are not allowed to take a dark photo.
01:20:21And I think that's just weird.
01:20:22I'm going to say a sentence that a small number of people will understand the significance of.
01:20:29Charlie XCX invited the cobra snake to her birthday party.
01:20:35That's a real thing.
01:20:36And if you were in your twenties in the early two thousands, you're like, Oh, it's back.
01:20:40It's just fully back.
01:20:43That whole aesthetic is back.
01:20:44And like, we're, we're just going to do flash photos of drunk people and like,
01:20:48let's do it.
01:20:48The iPhone can't do that.
01:20:49Shit.
01:20:51No one who wants that.
01:20:52No, a bunch of squinting people with the flash on that's, that's what we're looking for.
01:20:55Oh, they're not squinting.
01:20:56Those eyes are dilated.
01:20:59Fair enough.
01:21:00Touche.
01:21:01All right.
01:21:01My other one.
01:21:01And then Nealey, we should get to you and then we should get out of here is a flipboard,
01:21:05which is we've been sort of chronicling flipboards, like relentless quest to figure
01:21:09out the Fediverse, which I continue to find very interesting, uh, turned on a thing that I think
01:21:14is actually very instructive in understanding how all of this is supposed to work, which is just
01:21:18that now you can follow Fediverse accounts.
01:21:20So like people from mastodon or pixel fed, or even on threads, uh, from inside of flipboard.
01:21:26Right.
01:21:27And it's like, if you, if you want to understand the way the Fediverse is supposed to work,
01:21:30it's that where you make posts and where you read posts can be different.
01:21:34And that anybody can decide how those posts are supposed to look and how they're supposed to work
01:21:37and in what order they show up.
01:21:38And so like the idea that you can do mastodon inside of flipboard is both like mind bending
01:21:44and exactly the point.
01:21:45And so if you've like, wanted to understand how the Fediverse works, go to flipboard and like
01:21:49mess around with a bunch of mastodon stuff.
01:21:51They've put together some lists.
01:21:52I think one that includes you and Eli, because you're just a tremendously huge deal in the Fediverse.
01:21:56Uh, but like that, I think this is the closest thing I've seen to like telling the whole story
01:22:03of like, here is, here is what you get when all you have is just this massive content
01:22:08that you can either build something that adds to or build something that reads from
01:22:12however you want.
01:22:13So I think that was very cool.
01:22:14Yeah.
01:22:14That's awesome.
01:22:15Flipboard is way ahead of this curve, right?
01:22:17They've like rearchitected their app or the way they're thinking about their app
01:22:21around activity pub and these open protocols.
01:22:24And you kind of have it, you know, in the broadest sense, like the future of a browser.
01:22:29Yeah.
01:22:30But it's bidirectional.
01:22:31Like you take content and you get to read it and you can like reply to it and it goes
01:22:34right back to the person who made it.
01:22:36And it's pretty powerful.
01:22:40Like nothing works with it yet.
01:22:42Right.
01:22:43Which is a problem.
01:22:44But you can just see, oh, there's like glimmers here of a new kind of web.
01:22:49I'm the one who keeps babbling on about how we're going to federate our site.
01:22:52You can see how our site would play with something like that very quickly.
01:22:57But then you start to build it and we're trying to build it and it's like,
01:23:00oh, there's a million problems to solve here.
01:23:02Yeah.
01:23:03Like big, hairy technical problems that no one has ever really tried to solve before.
01:23:08Which is why, you know, Threads is federating and they are doing it in like drip by drip.
01:23:12Like they're solving one little problem at a time.
01:23:16They let you know that someone in the Fediverse had liked one of your posts.
01:23:20Sure.
01:23:20That was just a problem to solve.
01:23:23Now they let you see those posts, but you can't reply to them.
01:23:26Now they let you like those posts, but you can't reply to them.
01:23:28Obviously replying to them is going next.
01:23:29And all of that is just like, where does the data go?
01:23:32If you want to delete something,
01:23:35how do you delete it across all of these servers that have now ingested it?
01:23:39Maybe you can't.
01:23:41Weird, right?
01:23:41If someone replies to me on another server with another kind of moderation policy
01:23:46and put something bad in my replies on my site or in mass, like how do I moderate that?
01:23:52Big questions, like huge earth shattering questions,
01:23:56like that obviously have made the process slow for everyone.
01:24:00Oh, these are new problems.
01:24:01I'm in the market for new problems.
01:24:03We've never thought about these problems before.
01:24:06Fun.
01:24:06This is great.
01:24:07So I'm very excited to just see everyone making slow progress here.
01:24:11I just have a question.
01:24:12Which is the bigger platform shift?
01:24:14Jib and I Live or Flipboard?
01:24:17You know I believe it's the Fediverse.
01:24:19In my heart of heart, I believe it's the Fediverse.
01:24:21I just really wanted to hear us all say Flipboard is the platform shift this week.
01:24:25I like Flipboard.
01:24:26I think they're really interested.
01:24:28I don't know if Flipboard is a platform shift.
01:24:29I think it is part of the platform shift about how information moves around the internet.
01:24:38If you are going to break something like Google through regulatory action or just
01:24:42Google killing stuff, like Google end of life, Google search,
01:24:48seems like a likely outcome.
01:24:49It's more likely than not, given Google's history.
01:24:52If all that stuff is breaking down and all the photo-based networks are flooded with
01:24:58synthetic images no one can trust, you need to make something else.
01:25:01And it seems like everyone has bet on open, interoperable networks this time.
01:25:06And I do think that is fundamentally a bigger shift that more people will feel than Jib and I.
01:25:13Maybe in the long term, obviously AI will do all the things and none of us will have to work and
01:25:17the robots will just bring us pina coladas.
01:25:20But right now, I think it's the social web.
01:25:22Yeah, I agree.
01:25:23All right, Nealey, what's yours before we get out of here?
01:25:25What is mine?
01:25:26This is what happens when you're in a sidekick chair.
01:25:29You're not prepared.
01:25:30You're just here to hype.
01:25:31Yo, good point.
01:25:36Okay, so mine is actually related to AI.
01:25:39So Eric Schmidt used to be the CEO of Google.
01:25:42He gave a talk recently.
01:25:44He got dinged for a lot of stuff he gave in this talk.
01:25:47And then he asked for the talk to be taken off of YouTube.
01:25:50Not a great cycle, right?
01:25:53You give a talk at Stanford, you're like, oh, no, you're quoting my talk.
01:25:55Please remove it from YouTube.
01:25:57Yeah, wasn't there a moment in it where he's like, this is off the record?
01:26:00And the person he's talking to like points at the camera.
01:26:02Yeah, what are you doing?
01:26:03It's a tough look.
01:26:04It's brutal.
01:26:05So the thing he got in trouble for, he asked for the talk to be taken down,
01:26:09was he said Google was behind in AI because the workers prioritized working from home and snacks
01:26:14as opposed to being competitive.
01:26:17From the former CEO of Google, this did not go well.
01:26:20Just what are you talking about?
01:26:21It's also just a bad take.
01:26:22Yeah.
01:26:23Yeah.
01:26:23There's a million reasons.
01:26:24And I don't think it's the people who work at Google who made the strategic errors, right?
01:26:31But whatever.
01:26:32And also Google is, you know, this is coming on the heels of like
01:26:35the Pixel event where Google is like doing huge muscular AI stuff.
01:26:39Yeah.
01:26:40Whatever.
01:26:41So he got in trouble for that.
01:26:42Alex Heath wrote a quick post about it.
01:26:44He's like, here's this thing that happened.
01:26:44The video got taken down.
01:26:46And then Alex got a transcript of the thing.
01:26:48And you actually watched part of the video and Schmidt said something else that I think is
01:26:52very fascinating, very telling.
01:26:54And I think very important to understanding,
01:26:58not just Silicon Valley, but Google and Google's place in the world.
01:27:01So he said to this room full of like Stanford students,
01:27:06a lot of you are going to be tech people.
01:27:07I hope a lot of your tech startups.
01:27:08What I would do right now, if TikTok was banned, I propose each quote,
01:27:12I propose each and every one of you say to your LLM the following,
01:27:15make me a copy of TikTok, steal all the users,
01:27:18steal all the music, put my preferences in it,
01:27:21produce this program in the next 30 seconds, release it.
01:27:23And in one hour, if it hasn't gone viral, do something different along the same lines.
01:27:27What LLM is he using?
01:27:29So first of all, yeah, I don't know what kind of magic LLM,
01:27:32like at best you're going to be like, uh, do you want to bang this iPad?
01:27:36Like he's using the rabbit we all expected to see.
01:27:39Yeah, seriously.
01:27:41But you understand what he's saying.
01:27:43He's like, if TikTok is banned, just clone it.
01:27:45Just take it.
01:27:46Take the music, take the users, take the content,
01:27:48just make a clone of TikTok and stand it up and people will start using it.
01:27:51If they don't do it again.
01:27:53And his point was the quote, the example I gave of the TikTok competitor is,
01:27:59that's what you do if you were Silicon Valley entrepreneur,
01:28:01which hopefully all of you will be.
01:28:02If it took off, you would hire a whole bunch of lawyers to go clean up the mess.
01:28:06But if nobody uses your product, it doesn't matter that you stole all the content.
01:28:10Wait, wait, wait, what's, what's the next line?
01:28:11And do not quote me.
01:28:14Whoopsies.
01:28:16So anyway, my point of this is Eric Schmidt ran Google in the early period, right?
01:28:20He was famously the adult they hired to run Google.
01:28:24Well, I don't, Larry and Sergey were growing up or whatever they're doing,
01:28:28finding, learning whether or not toe shoes were for them.
01:28:31Eric is the adult in the room.
01:28:33This is what Google did.
01:28:35And not in a small way, in a big open way,
01:28:40they just built a company on copyright infringement.
01:28:42They hired a bunch of lawyers and they cleaned up the mess.
01:28:44And they were a friendly company with two lovable goofballs as their founders.
01:28:49They were providing an enormously valuable service at the time.
01:28:53Google search was enormously valuable.
01:28:54Google book search, copyright lawsuit, enormously valuable.
01:28:58YouTube, enormously valuable, built on copyright infringement,
01:29:01particularly against Viacom.
01:29:03So valuable that Viacom lost its copyright infringement case
01:29:06because Viacom's own people kept uploading the content to YouTube.
01:29:09Like ridiculous, but this is how Google worked in the beginning.
01:29:14That is the attitude.
01:29:15We're going to make the thing.
01:29:16It's going to be so useful.
01:29:18People are going to love it.
01:29:19And then when the copyright infringement cases
01:29:21or whatever other lawsuits come,
01:29:22we will have enough money to pay lawyers to make it go away.
01:29:25And Google did it.
01:29:26That actually worked.
01:29:28It was a successful strategy at the time.
01:29:30It was successful for other companies like Uber or whatever it is, right?
01:29:34We are at a point now where the AI companies kind of want to run the same playbook.
01:29:37Google wants to run the same playbook with AI and training,
01:29:41and they're not lovable goofballs anymore.
01:29:44And so when Eric Schmidt is at Stanford complaining that, you know,
01:29:47the kids aren't working hard enough anymore,
01:29:49and then on top of it being like,
01:29:50just steal the stuff and figure it out later.
01:29:52The attitude that he said that the world's attitude in response to that
01:29:57is nowhere near as friendly as it was when they were building Google.
01:30:01And I think it's actually kind of fascinating to see that shift.
01:30:05I don't know, like Alexis Ohanian wrote the book
01:30:08that was like, ask for permission, not forgiveness.
01:30:11And that was like the whole industry's attitude.
01:30:13And that worked.
01:30:15I think that's a great message for a lot of things still to this day.
01:30:19But you're in this place where if you want to build Google again
01:30:21or something like Google,
01:30:22and you're like, I'm just going to tell a robot to copy TikTok,
01:30:25and then I'll figure it out if it works.
01:30:27I don't think, I actually do not think that is going to succeed
01:30:29in the culture as it is today.
01:30:31No, and I think that is one of the most misplaced things
01:30:36in some corners of Silicon Valley now.
01:30:39And it's not true everywhere,
01:30:40but it is true a surprising number of places.
01:30:41This sense that the folks in the tech industry
01:30:44still are the like counterculture revolutionaries
01:30:47trying to build a better future.
01:30:49And it's just like a bunch of hippies in San Francisco
01:30:53who are just like trying to make cool stuff together.
01:30:55Like that is not how those people are perceived.
01:30:58That is not how those people are perceived.
01:31:01And enough of them see themselves that way,
01:31:03that that's why they're like,
01:31:05oh, we're just the contrarians.
01:31:07And it's why you see this like crazy push away
01:31:10from wokeism and all this stuff.
01:31:11And like, I don't want to get into the political side of it,
01:31:13but it comes from the same impulse
01:31:15that it is like, we are the renegades.
01:31:17And it's like, no, you're not dude.
01:31:18Like you are the most establishment of the establishment
01:31:22and you don't get the leeway that you once got.
01:31:26And maybe you never should have.
01:31:28The thing is also they were never the renegades.
01:31:31Like Silicon Valley was built on like military funds
01:31:34and stuff, right?
01:31:35Like they were never that.
01:31:37It was a very conscious PR move.
01:31:41And they decided at some point,
01:31:42we are too big to need to do that PR move.
01:31:45But actually you can't keep running your playbook
01:31:47and do that because then you just look like a hearst
01:31:49or something.
01:31:49You just look like all of the kind of like people
01:31:52who are always the villains in period films.
01:31:55That's not a great look.
01:31:57And we're seeing Apple doing the 30%.
01:32:00You're just seeing it over and over again.
01:32:02It's like, no, you guys forgot.
01:32:04You forgot the PR part of this.
01:32:05That actually is really important.
01:32:07You do have to market this.
01:32:08You market yourselves.
01:32:09And if you stop doing that,
01:32:11we are going to all eventually be like,
01:32:13hey, you're being kind of assholes.
01:32:15I can actually draw a straight line
01:32:16from what you're saying, Alex,
01:32:17to Rick Ostrillo in an interview
01:32:19with Joanna Stern this week at the Wall Street Journal.
01:32:22She said, hey, you had to pull this ad
01:32:24that you ran during Olympics
01:32:26of someone asking Gemini to write a letter
01:32:28to an athlete for his daughter.
01:32:30And it got pulled because everyone's like,
01:32:31why, just have your kid do it.
01:32:32Like sit down with your kid and do this.
01:32:34Don't ask the robot to do it.
01:32:35And he was like, the market isn't ready for this.
01:32:37This is like when we went from handwriting to email.
01:32:39It's like, no, it's not.
01:32:41It just isn't.
01:32:41And that little attitude,
01:32:43like you're just not ready for the thing.
01:32:46It worked at a different time.
01:32:47It really did.
01:32:48It worked for the web.
01:32:49It worked for computer mice.
01:32:52It did not work, I would say,
01:32:53for the digital crown and the Apple Watch.
01:32:54But it worked for the iPod.
01:32:56All this stuff it worked for.
01:32:58This is the moment where we're just gonna take this stuff
01:33:01and you're gonna thank us later.
01:33:03A little warning sign, I would just say.
01:33:06That's my lightning round item.
01:33:07Watch that one.
01:33:08Because it's the source of more conflict than you think.
01:33:10I agree.
01:33:12All right, that's it.
01:33:13That's the show.
01:33:14We've gone way over.
01:33:15We've talked about antitrust too many times.
01:33:16Do you have any more chairs to sit in?
01:33:18How are the chairs?
01:33:20There's several more chairs.
01:33:21Well, we'll do more chairs next week.
01:33:23If you had ideas for sponsoring the Hyphen Type Zone,
01:33:27please let me know.
01:33:29My God, I'm gonna get this show sponsored.
01:33:32I think we actually have ads right now.
01:33:33I don't even know how it works.
01:33:37That's not my side of the house at all.
01:33:39All right, that's the show.
01:33:40Thank you for listening.
01:33:42We got like hydrogen car special episode on Tuesday, David?
01:33:46Yeah, so we have deeply fun stuff
01:33:50coming up the next few weeks of the Verge cast.
01:33:52But the short version of a long story
01:33:54that I'm very excited for everybody to hear is
01:33:56Will Poore took a ride in a hydrogen car
01:34:00that no one was sure was going to go anywhere
01:34:02or keep everyone alive during the whole process.
01:34:05And he learned a lot about kind of the history
01:34:07and future of cars and everything.
01:34:09And it was an awesome.
01:34:10And he's alive.
01:34:10It was an awesome story.
01:34:11And he made it out.
01:34:12So it's a happy ending.
01:34:16All right, well, that's coming up on Tuesday.
01:34:18Escape from hydrogen cars.
01:34:19Pretty much today on the calibrators.
01:34:22That's it.
01:34:23That's the Verge cast.
01:34:24Rock and roll.
01:34:28And that's it for the Verge cast this week.
01:34:30Hey, we'd love to hear from you.
01:34:31Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11.
01:34:34The Verge cast is a production of the Verge
01:34:36and Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:34:38Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.
01:34:41That's it.
01:34:41We'll see you next week.