Have you followed the nugget account yet? Nugget. It's going to follow you. That's my impression of Instagram. That's a whole leafy. Hi, my friend, Neil. I Alex Kranz is here. I haven't used the feed despite being on threads daily. David Pierce is here alone in the studio. It's weird. This is a real inversion. If you're watching us on video, David's in New York and we're both at home. That's not how this usually goes. No, I came to the office today and you said no. It's just you and the nugget account in the office. You don't get to know where the people you like. Just random notes. Killing it.
And then our friend Taylor Werns has a deep intuitive understanding of social platforms work. And she's like a new social platform is defined by volume and she's going ham. God bless her. It's like some people know and I can't do it. Like the nugget account, pop crave and Taylor, they're like, we're going to dominate threads.
Yeah, for me, it's memes are. Oh, memes are. I don't know where memes are came from, but like every other post is memes are. And it is true. It's a, it's a algorithmic land grab. They're like, Oh, you don't know who to follow? Here's some posts. Yeah, just fire shit into the algorithm and maybe it will reward you. Adam and Sarah will be like, turn up the knob on that person, pop crave. For a while there, I was getting Bible verses. I think Casey was getting Bible verses too. And I was like, this algorithm, it's not very good. This no, thank you. It's just the Wendy's account for me on Sunday. That's only Wendy's.
All right, we should start with red. So there's a bunch of stuff. Talk about Microsoft FTC resolved. FTC lost Microsoft, maybe able to buy Activision. That's a big deal, big, big deal. We should talk about that. There's new App Beta talk about that. There's a Senate hearing right now about open AI and its data practices. The nothing fun to can. There's like a lot Bob Iger just like randomly said he was going to sell ESPN. He's all kinds of stuff going on. But let's start with threads. Just like a quick vibe check on threads.
How are you feeling? I'm torn. So I feel like we've been through this thing. What? It threads is now eight days old as we're recording this has over 100 million users. The growth is insane. Seems to be going very well. Everyone at meta is very excited and keeps talking about how this has exceeded their wildest imaginations. But I also feel like the like it's not even a backlash. It's like a pre backlash. Everyone is talking about how mad they're about to be at threads for all the things that it isn't and all the features it doesn't have. The fact that your whole feed is just the nugget account.
There was definitely it had that energy for like four days of just like pure summer camp joy. It was just like a bunch of posters found each other again. It was very exciting. And it feels like that is already kind of starting to turn off. At least my feed has gotten very like engagement porn constantly. It's just like interact with this. Look at this meme. Do you like this meme? Here's the Spiderman meme. Remember you found the Spiderman meme funny? Here's some more Spiderman memes. And I still think it's more fun than Twitter. But it is definitely like it's settling into I think a slightly less enthusiastic phase. At least as my read so far.
Yeah. And then there's a combo platter of jaded tech journalists being like all the problems are coming. And then the nugget account and then Shakira being like what's your favorite color? And it's like blue? Is it, will you talk to me Shakira? I hear your single like you know it's like what are we supposed to do with this? And I think that's kind of exactly what they want.
Yeah. Interesting right now blue skies in the middle of some sort of content moderation scan. They always will be. They don't have any. That's the issue. Yeah. They don't have any trust and safety like that's exactly right. So they they're just always going to have scandals like they didn't have any filter. So people put the N word in their usernames like that's just baby stuff right like baby problems for babies Instagram has it all. So I've seen all these people talk about like why are the vibes nice and like they've said only answer is like because we're behaving ourselves and the answer is like no.
The answer is a gigantic meta data center is keeping you away from it. And it works and it's good and the product is content moderation. And so you see stuff that's good and you don't see stuff that's bad and then occasionally the nugget account is like remember the eighties and she's like yes. And like people it's crazy. But like they're good at it. They're good at that thing in that way.
And that's my vibe check on it right now is like people are sort of they're pretty mad because they think the problems will happen again in exactly the same way that they've always been happening. But meta has like lived through most of those problems. Right. So they're going to have new problems. Don't get me. They're still meta and we should talk about that a little bit. But it just seems like that first wave of disillusionment of new social platforms is definitely not going to happen to the right.
Yeah. I have found myself in the unusual position this week of spending a lot of time running around reminding people that actually meta is better at running social networks than any other company on the planet. Which is like a deranged thing to have to say and feels not true. But it is true. Like meta is better at this than everybody else. It's so much bigger at it that it gets to deal with all the problems that no one else has. They're better to an extent. Right.
I think the truth is it's impossible to be good at it. Yeah. Right. But no one else is doing this better at any kind of scale than meta. Yeah. That's right. It's a deeply sad state of affairs. But seems true. And so it's weird to be that guy I'm defending meta's content moderation abilities. But I think you're right, Nei.
I found myself defending meta a lot this weekend. I didn't realize that so many people I followed were very like, we hate Facebook. So we just hate being here at all. And it's like, well, you don't have to be here. You can go somewhere else. No, but I want to be here. Because I need to be here. Please follow me. So I'm going to be just very angry here. And I'm like, that's just like a. And so it's like, I'm having to be like, you don't have to be here. You can just turn this off. I don't like you're just railing at the injustice of meta existing. And that's a weird space. But the interactions I'm having there are good. I've just realized like, oh, if someone's being dumb, I don't have to interact with them. And I can like mute them or block them. Yeah.
I think that's the other thing. Like you're a pro. You're like a social media pro. Yeah, we're a pro now. No one has to convince you to use the block button button. You're just doing it. You just not do that. And I can go and like interact with people who just want to talk about cool stuff. And like, that's really, really nice. I'm not having to worry about getting pulled into culture wars.
At one point, some guy was like, oh, you're saying this, but you're trash or whatever random troll thing it was. And I was just like, mute. Yeah. Done. In scene. And my life went on. And I didn't get really upset for an hour. Like I have to call somebody be like, do you believe what this guy said on threads? Which was far too common occurrence on Twitter. Yeah.
I just think in general, people are overestimating how much the vibe is good because people are generally cool and underestimating how much it is that meta is good at content moderation. And to your point, they're not perfect at it. And there's there's still Facebook, right? Like they're still biased towards and Shakira asking you what your favorite color is like that. It's just they want engagement and they're good at getting it. And sometimes that means just the weirdest stuff is happening on this platform and like drivel like basically.
Do you know the fourth most popular Facebook page last week was like a picture of a potato. I would like and subscribe. It was in garbage day by Ryan Broadock, who's great. We'll link it.
But it's like it's he just had a great piece about how like the just the cultural impact of Facebook itself is almost nil because being so weighted towards engagement means that you have to acknowledge that the fourth most popular page is a picture of a potato. Right.
Yeah. And like that's that's not that they're it's up against Barbieheimer, you know, like it's like which movie are you going to see first Barbie up inheimer or look at a picture of a potato like they're not on the same cultural scale. And so Facebook has tons of engagement and but it just doesn't have the impact threads as an opportunity for impact. I think they're taking that seriously.
The last two things will say about this. One a lot of people have asked me in particular if I believe them about activity pub because I have said very loudly the only reason I feel comfortable using this platform is Federation and decentralization. The evidence that they are serious about it continues to grow.
Yeah. Right. I've been sent screenshots of meta employees very sincerely engaging in like mailing list discussions about the standard. I've seen meta employees on threads itself like soliciting feedback for how activity pub should work like being involved in the technical side of it. I think they have to do it to launch in Europe. I actually don't think they have a choice for any number of like regulatory reasons. Now it's like a get out of jail free card. I don't know why they wouldn't do it. Yeah.
Like it just in so many regulatory discussions, he brings up a whole bunch of new ones, but it ends so many of the big ones. It's like a very contradictory regulatory position that they're entering. Which is you have to be interoperable so you can get past the competition concerns, but then you've created a bunch of illegal privacy practices because you're interoperable. And that's like, I don't know the answer. But if anyone can figure out it's meta and I think also on top of all of that, they want to. I think they just want to. I think they think it's a neat technical challenge that their company is able to solve. But technical, legal, like all that machinery, this is the hardest problem for that machinery to solve. So I think they want to. I think they might have to, but I think they're excited about applying themselves to that problem. I think the Instagram team is excited about it. Like Adam Messarri just cannot stop talking about activity. Like I believe him when he says how excited he is about integrating.
But I think one of the things that I have wondered a lot about is because it's gotten so big so quickly and because meta clearly now sees this as like a real player and a real revenue opportunity for the company, does this start to look less like a place we can experiment with what sort of might be the future and more like we have to make money to make the metaverse happen and it's suddenly going to look really profitable short term to keep the doors closed. So my, the part of me that is cynical about this happening says that actually the more successful it gets, the harder it will be both technically and like culturally within meta to do this. But I do think all the people who are actually building this thing seem to be genuinely serious about it. And I believe them at least at this point.
It's a pretty small team, right? I think that's what Alex Heath said last week on the show. Yeah, I think most areas said it's like a couple dozen people. Like it's not, it's not huge. Like this isn't been a big time sucker financial suck for the company and like the upside is just adorbus. So like to keep do it. And I think the money importantly is also not, they don't have to invent a business model. Yeah. They have to get some data and do some ad targeting and deliver some impressions that convert into e-commerce and they know how to do that very well. Meta's good at this. Like the Facebook ad units exist today. If all meta was saying was run these Facebook ad units and you can now target people on threads, they make the money. Will they convert? Like are they good? They don't have to like invent it from whole cloth and go out to the market and say like here's a new thing to buy. They're just like, can you extend the reach of our existing things that are. This thing is Facebook.
Yep. It is the Facebook news feed. It's kind of funny that we, you know, we're excited about the 2011 again. Okay, but here it is again. But key difference. I've not had to watch someone make a horrible, horrible dish in a video yet. Yeah. Like I haven't gotten that, that like tastes. It's a scam, but it's coming. By God, the celebrities are there to cook at you in any minute. It's coming.
I will say it is still meta. This story, you know, good vibes on meta, Zucksahiro, he's got a six pack, whatever. It's still meta. The flip side of meta is still meta, right? All the problems are still there with the other platforms. They do not have end to end encryption enabled in messenger by default. And so just this week, a woman pled guilty for exchanging messages with her daughter that enabled her to get abortion pills in a state in which abortion was legal. The cops are able to go get a warrant to search her text because meta has not enabled end to end encryption by default. They should do that. They should take the political hit and just do that. And they haven't done it. And this is people have been asking them to do for years. I would make the direct comparison to Apple, right? Which is insistent upon encryption. And yes, there are ways around it, especially if I cloud on all that stuff. But when there was a San Bernardino attack in the FBI, I said, unlock the phone. Apple said, we won't. We have these principles.
And so I just, it's great that Zuck is jacked and flexing on Elon. Like all great, right? Yeah. They still run some large platforms with some real problems. And that story about the woman going to jail, like, that is a horrible story. Yeah. Like I'm outraged by that story every time I think about it. I mean, there's a lot of those horrible stories. We're not going to get into them all today. But like, meta consistently has said profit over people and they're going to continue to do that. Just right now, it's really fun for the people. So yeah, yeah, take some of those good vibes. Make money off of me. I'm having a great time. Is it like an old political quote? Like when you have the chips, you got a cash. They don't hold. Yeah. So you got the political chips, cash on ended encryption. That's all I'm saying.
The other thing we should talk about real quick before we go into FTC. It's Apple Public Beta week. They just hit. We've got a bunch of coverage. Although Apple's like all the people have had them forever. Like people have been wearing the NDs and these forever. The official public betas are here. They're fun. They're like, it's a fun set update. Widget's man. It's just widgets. Yeah. Life is widgets now because it is 2011 again. David, you're very happy. I love widgets. I will die and my last breath will be to say smartphones should not just be things you use to open apps. Write that on my tombstone. And Monica wrote a really good thing about how the Mac is just turning into the iPhone. Which I think is exactly right. You can have desktop widgets on your Mac now. Standby is a thing. The smart display stuff is starting to become interesting. I think it's very cool.
I have also installed all of these betas and they have just absolutely decimated the battery life on every single one of my devices. My phone now runs really hot for about four hours every single day. It's really great. I really recommend the public betas. I talked a bunch about this with a bunch of our team on the Wednesday show. What are you guys psyched about? Have you tested anything? Is there anything you're seeing that you think is cool? I have been terrified to test it because I need my battery life. I already have bad battery life. I can't make it worse. So I put it off so far. But the standby mode, I just got one of the MagSafe chargers. But for my bedside table. I'm like, oh nice. Oh, I want this. I also got one for my car and you're a liar. Kneelai, they suck. Just throw it out there. Which ones you get? Someone hit me up on threads and said there's a new one. Okay. I got to find the brand. You should buy this one. It's the newest hottest one. I put it's like a belkin one and I stuck it in my vent and it immediately just tipped down. I'm sorry, it's drooping. It's all that's better than car play. So you know, whatever.
Nope. So I'm in every other year, macOS updater. So I just skipped Ventura. Like I just like missed me with it. Come at me the next year when you figured it out. So I'm just excited about like a fresh coat of paint on macOS. And then I missed out on all the Ventura features. So I'm excited about dumb stuff like continuity camera that I just had used for a year. It just seems like there's a layer of polish and that stuff stage manager on the iPad.
David, you wrote about it. It's not great, but it's not just. But it's not awful anymore. David's no longer like furious every time he mentions it. Like previously we would have heard a loud groan as soon as you said stage and we didn't get that. It's gotten to the point where like I no longer think you're a bad person if you use stage manager. Wow. For like a whole year. For like a whole year. Yeah. Like if you use stage manager, you and I are just not on the same page. But now it's like they're doing a thing. I don't think they've done it yet. There's a lot of work left to do. And I like I feel the same way about standby actually, which is that standby is like an amazing idea that basically has no idea the rest of the iPhone exists.
So like you put your phone up landscape and then you tap the thing to open the app and it just opens an app sideways. Yep. And it's like, well, that's not great. This is not how this is supposed to work. But you can see where it's going and stage manager. I think now you can see where it's going and that makes me very happy. Yeah. I wonder if I'm ever going to use standby mode. It's one of those things where I'm going to buy a dock and be excited about it and it will never happen. You're going to use it when you get in your car and car play comes on and you're like, Oh, actually, car play is good. And then your phone will just go into standby mode.
No, Neelite, you do want to know my theory that the thing of all of this that is going to be the best for you is the redesign on the watch where you just scroll the digital crown, the revolutionary input device on par with the mouse and multi touch. And it's just widgets. Yeah, just just a bunch of widgets. Neelite is going to be out here just wiggeting all day. I read these preview of watch. I was 10 or she was like, and now you use the digital crown more and I was like, Oh, we're going backwards. We just got Kevin Lynch got in that car and I was like, juke and put it in reverse and just like speed it off the backwards.
People, nobody understands the magic of it. He has to make you use it now. He's like, you will use it. Yeah. I'm using it. I don't want to prejudge. I get I understand why you would head that way, right? These like app clippy widget things where you get lots of slices of different apps on a screen that's getting ever larger. I get it all sort of emotionally, but I'm just kind of like, I don't know, man, I'm not, I'm not out here trying to like fiddle with the watch all day long, like, give me the modular face with as much text on it as I can get and I will be happy. But we'll see.
Just a little book on your phone on your watch. Yeah. So, let's figure out a go. If you're, you know, the sort of person who downloads beta is go hit him like use him and then send us a note. I'm very curious to see what you all think of them. I will say the one I would most years I would say at this point in time, everyone, almost everyone should feel comfortable downloading the public betas. This year, especially on iOS, I have had more weirdness than usual. There's this weird keyboard bug in a lot of apps that like it'll just sort of disappear the text box and so you'll be kind of typing into nothing. It's gone in some apps, but like it's still there for me in messages.
So it's still like if you are not a person who wants to spend your day like closing and reopening apps to make things work, I would probably wait one more rev on the public beta before you download it. Okay. Two things. I just saw two things. I have a much better answer to my favorite public beta moment. Okay. So we are like long past the point where Apple can even talk about all the features of iOS. Yeah. Like, do you remember when Apple was like, and now you can copy and paste and that took an hour to announce? Yeah. Right. And now it's just like there's too much. Long press was like an entire Apple event. Yeah.
They could not, they could not announce all this stuff this year. And one thing they didn't really announce or spend time on is this personal voice assistant thing and accessibility where you can train it on your voice and then it can speak for you. So 15 minutes of training and then overnight locally it processes an AI voice for you. Cool as hell. Straight up cool as hell. Have you done yours yet? No, I don't have the baby. I'm not brave enough. Oh, yeah. Look, this is a production environment, David. All right. We don't necessarily.
So I have recorded the requisite 150 sentences. My thing is still processing. It takes a long time to do it. It turns out data centers are faster at this than your phone. But I will come on the show next week and I will play for you some of what we have. And then we're working on some other fun stuff for later this month.
So here's my absolute favorite public video moment and shout to our friend, Mark Hasbronley because I understand exactly why this happened. He made it TikTok, definitely in this feature. And it was obviously in Drafts and TikTok has a bug where if the video is in Drafts and you publish it, it will just play whatever music you picked at full volume and not run your audio. And it was just the Paw Patrol theme song. And it was just the funniest thing I've ever seen. And I was like, I really hope they leave it up. And they took it down and they put it up. And it's the real video now. It's great. Mark has a great job. But there was just that brief, like 50 minutes where it was just, it was a regular Mark Has demo video like he's talking, but instead of any audio, it was just full volume Paw Patrol. Incredible. I was like, this is what this is what the Internet's for. We don't worry. We saved a clip. If you need it, you know, send us a Bitcoin. Okay, it's horrible for the environment. Okay. But if you're using it, virtual has to the virtual com. I'd love to hear it. I'm always curious.
Okay. We should talk about the big, big news of the week. There's just a lot of interpretation of this. A lot of ways you can think about it. But Tom, Addie, Andrew, we covered the hell out of the FTC versus Microsoft trial. Ups down, Swiss turns, decision came out. FTC lost. Like in pretty thorough fashion, I would say. Yeah. Yeah, it was this whole thing went very quickly because Microsoft had this July 18th deadline by which it had to acquire or it had to finalize the deal to acquire Activision Blizzard or not. So this all happened super fast. And the thing, the thing I really want to talk about and the thing I want you specifically to explain to me in the lab because you've been sort of talking about this obliquely all week and I want you to like put all your thoughts in one place for me is this entire thing turned out to be about Call of Duty. Yeah. Like in the judges ruling, like the second or third sentence was about Call of Duty. It says the gist of the FTC's complaint is Call of Duty is so popular and such an important supply for any video game platform that the combined firm is probably going to foreclose it from its rivals for its own economic benefit to customers detriment. Yeah. And then it goes on to basically say that's not the case and so they lose. How is that what this trial is about? Like if this became, can everyone have Call of Duty or not? And I don't feel like that was what the FTC actually meant to argue if it was going to try to win this case. What is happening here? Explain this to me.
I'm going to respond to this by offering a statement that I can not back up, but which I believe is true. Okay. Sony doesn't think cloud gaming will happen. Ooh. That's what I believe. Okay. I don't know if that's true. I don't know if inside of Sony there's some, you know, we've, we've reported on and Sean Hollister has reported on, uh, you know, the hires that Sony has listed to build a new cloud gaming service and they've had their fits and starts and whatever. They've got this weird handheld that only runs over Wi-Fi. It doesn't seem like they're working on it very hard, right? They bought guy-kai and killed it. Like, right. Sony, I think at a, at a base level is like the future of consoles is giant ass GPUs in your living room and will send code to you and you'll run them locally, right? Like I think that's Sony's bet. Yep. If you're Sony, that's a good bet. It has won you every generation of the console work. Okay. Fair enough. Yeah. Every time Microsoft is like, we have a new idea and Sony is like, we have more powerful games and Sony just keeps winning. Yeah. It's, it's fine. It's just the way it goes. I mean, is it winning? Yeah, it is winning this time. I forgot that's not the PS3. It is winning.
You know, Microsoft's point of view and I've had Phil Spencer on decoder and he has said this out loud. I think he said, I try. I was like, look, the console market is shrinking. We're losing to mobile. So winning this small, ever smaller slice of pie is not the point. And he has said to me and he said to the court, call of duty is not the point of this acquisition. The point of this acquisition in the present is like candy crush, the king, which activation also owns that makes a ton of money on mobile games. The point of this acquisition is building a library for our cloud gaming future, which hey, we own Azure. This is a great business for us to be in. We've got all these ideas about cloud gaming. One day we'll solve the Apple problem and ship a Xbox cloud gaming app on the phone. And so you're like, that's why they're doing it.
And so if you're the FTC, I think they kind of got baited by both Microsoft and Sony into endlessly talking about call of duty because what Sony wants is call of duty. So Sony's version of this is we don't care about any of the rest of this. We just want some kind of assurance that we're going to keep getting call of duty. But this is the only game that Activision makes that Sony gives a shit about. Apparently, they haven't talked about any others. They don't care about Diablo for. It's a show. They don't care about Starfield, like all the other stuff Microsoft makes. They don't they have a lot of exclusives. Right. And the numbers we've heard are insane and back that up, right? Like the numbers that came up about the huge percentage of people who game who only play call of duty and the billions of dollars in revenue that this means to Sony every single year. And I can't see why.
But but again, to your point, like this actually should not have been a lawsuit about call of duty because no one was actually in disagreement about call of duty. If you're saying we're worried about this and your opponent is like, here you go. Like over and over again. It's like, here you go. You want it on the switch? What's some no name, third rates, game streaming service, crackle, call of duty on crackle, anything you want, call of duty, wherever you want it, right? Microsoft has been saying this around the world and you know, the court and its opinion said this is one of the biggest deals in world that deserves scrutiny. It got a lot of scrutiny. This is fine. Guess what? All the scrutiny resulted in call of duty. Microsoft was showing up at the table with that deal for everyone. Yeah.
Can I just read you that chunk of the opinion? Because actually they get super interesting. Yeah. It says Microsoft's acquisition of Activision has been described as the largest in tech history. It deserves scrutiny. That scrutiny has paid off. Microsoft has committed in writing in public and in court to keep call of duty on PlayStation for 10 years on parody with Xbox. It made an agreement with Nintendo to bring call of duty to switch and it entered several agreements to for the first time bring Activision's content to several cloud gaming services.
And then it's basically the implication there is like, and we're done here. Yeah. And I think you're right. Like that's everyone at Microsoft was up there yelling that this was what they wanted to do through the entire process. Yeah. Here's the deal that we would like to give you in the courts. Like they're going to give you that deal. That's fine.
I just think that there's something in there that's like everyone wants to pile and actually see for losing this case. And you should. I think they got distracted into this call of duty side show, right? And it's because Sony wanted the steal. So like Sony is screaming, like give us call of duty and the FTC is like, all right, that's our way in. Like this other big company is mad about it and like, we'll find some anti-competitive stuff. And then you've got Sony's own executives and emails in evidence being like, I'm not so worried about this. Yeah, whatever.
But then you look around the world, right? It's still not done in the UK. And the UK is like focused on cloud gaming. You look at the EU, which focused on cloud gaming and call of duty and got call of duty and said, all right, we'll see if the Americans can do this. It's not that the FTC shouldn't have done this scrutiny. Every other big regulatory body apply the same level scrutiny and is getting various kinds of deals.
I think what people are looking at is the FTC lost this case in court and they've lost some other cases. And you're like, maybe this isn't maybe they're just always going to lose and they should never try. And I just that to me is the mistake and it's a mistake for two reasons. One, the court itself is saying, look at what the scrutiny got you. It got you call of duty. If Microsoft wasn't anticipating the scrutiny, they wouldn't have started with, we'll give you call of duty. They would have started with, we're going to make call of duty exclusive like they did with their other games. So weird, right? Like that's just a weird thing to be like, if you take away the threat, they'll still behave. I don't believe that.
Then there's the second thing, which like very, very, very wonky, but the Lina Khan project at the FTC and Lina Khan has been on this show before she was the chairperson at FTC. You can go listen to her. Her project is that the antitrust laws of this country are bad, right? They were reinterpreted in the 80s by Robert Bork and Ron Ray and all the stuff and that we got to a place where we no longer think about competition. We just measure prices and that has led to all kinds of bad effects.
And I think that is true. It's true for a variety of reasons. And her project is to go get the courts or Congress or someone to reset antitrust law. And there's two ways to do it. One, you create a lot of political capital. You make a lot of angry people so that Congress does something. So Amy Klobuchar and Elizabeth Warren and Ken Buck, who's Republican, who's on that committee, can pass the antitrust bill that they've had in their back pocket forever, right? Saying, look, this wasn't the right outcome under the existing law. There's a new law or you take it up to the appeals court and say the way we've been applying this law for ages is inappropriate because of these effects in this thing. We want you to read a new precedent and you take that to the Supreme Court, which I would just point out. This particular Supreme Court is like new precedent. Here you go. Like they're just into it.
So you she's just playing a long game. I think she's played the early innings of that long game. Kind of stupidly like candidly. I think she has done a bad job with these things. She certainly has not explained that she is playing a long game. Right. And you would think it would help to have some kind of like small wins along the way to prove that like we are stepping in the right direction and then said it's just like I'm going to lose aggressively and then I'm going to win and that gets harder I think.
Could she have ever won this case? Because like even the deal for the Sony deal, that's only 10 years. College duty's been around for more than 20. It's been a huge, huge thing for more than 20 years. So nothing's to stop Microsoft 10 years from now from just saying, okay, that's it. Exclusive.
Yeah, but we'll all be dead then. There'll be like a new generation of dancing teens on a different platform. Like whatever. Even that felt kind of anti competitive to me and the court saying, no, this is fine. Like was there any hope of winning this case? If she'd gone after the other stuff, she hadn't gone after college duty. I don't know. I think we just won't know.
I think the the call of duty stuff was just such a distraction and somehow we ended just talking about it and I just will point you to Phil Spencer on decoders like this deal is not about call of duty. Who wants it? Do you want to? Well, we're going to run call of duty in the high frame on the verge.com like 10 years. So he'll write that deal with us tomorrow. He fine. As long as you're paying 70 bucks a pop for college, it's a great business. They're not going to change it. This thing is about, okay, how do we create a new paradigm for games that ends the console era and creates new market share? And that's how we end up talking about like the switch on all this other stuff, right?
我觉得Call of Duty的事情只是一个干扰,但我们最终还是在谈论它。我会给你参考Phil Spencer在像这样的商业模式上的观点,这不是关于Call of Duty的。谁想要它呢?你想要吗?我们将在verge.com上运行高帧率的Call of Duty大约10年。所以他明天会和我们谈这个交易。他没问题。只要你每个大学付70美元的费用,这是个好生意。他们不会改变它。这件事是关于,好吧,我们如何创造一个结束游戏机时代并开创新的市场份额的新范式?这就是我们最终会谈论像Switch和其他东西的原因,对吧?
Like, okay, and maybe they should have a big library of exclusives to do it. But you just see how with every other kind of streaming media that cycle is bad for consumers, it leads to less choices, it leads to less content and it leads to higher prices. Like just look at the streaming television industry. Not everything is on every service. All the prices are completely insane and the apps are not good. And you're like, do we have, is that how you want this to go? Like, shouldn't we make sure there's like a lot of competition here or a lot of like developers across these services so they have to compete for our dollars or quality as opposed to competing for dollars with content that comes and goes? That's the thing I'm worried about.
My question is why didn't the judge see that? Because they made that case. Like during the thing, they maybe didn't hammer on it the same as call of duty. Yeah, like that's my thing is like, how could she have one if the judge doesn't even like understand club gaming, right? Like if the judge is kind of being a dumbass. Well, Alex, wait, I'm realized I've been very strident, but I think we get to a place where like, how can the American legal system not understand club gaming? We might have already lost.
Right. That's true. But that's if that's if her strategy is to overturn antitrust law at a higher court, they still have to, they're going to have to understand club gaming, right? Like they're going to have to understand this stuff. And if we can't get this judge to understand it, how are we going to get the next judge to understand it? But this is where we come back to. I feel like so many of these fights and trials end up coming down to market size definitions.
And this was the case again, right? They had this giant fight over is Nintendo, a genuine competitor to Sony and Microsoft and is the cloud an actual threat to the console world. And I think in that case, if Sony is in the ear of the FTC being the one sort of explaining the other side of this fight and Sony is out here saying, yeah, we're not that worried about cloud gaming. It's fine. Then I can see how you would sort of write it off as like a lark that Microsoft is on and Microsoft has been on many larks that have not worked out.
And so I think Microsoft is also sitting there saying cloud gaming is like cool and fine, but we don't really care about it. Like they spent so much time. They tell investors it's the future. They tell the world. It's the future. They talk a ton about it. And then they sit on the stand and say, oh, we've pretty much paused all of our cloud gaming stuff. We don't care about it all that much. Is that like where the screw up happened for Colin? Like is that where she or her team screwed up as they didn't try to explain the actual technology stuff in a way that the judge could grasp?
No, I think the screw up happened that Sony basically was like, we're the competitor and we will be harmed in the judge will understand us. Sony saying this is anti competitive and then they fell down the rabbit hole of calls. Okay.
Yeah, I think that's right. But the one I'll compare to and this is really interesting and I trust is broken. So right. This is so long. Just go with me on this. This is what's a vertical merger, right? Where you buy the next company up and down the stack from you.
So Microsoft needs games by games. They're not direct competitor. It's a vertical merger. Microsoft bought Sony. That'd be horizontal merger right through direct competitors. Vertical mergers like never get challenged. There hasn't been one in like 40 years. The last one that challenged was 18 T time Warner by the Trump administration. The answer to every antitrust trivia question in like the best way. It's like very good. It's a very good. So this opinion like has to cite the most recent precedent.
It just has to continuously cite 18 T and time Warner as good precedent for allowing vertical mergers. And it's just like my dude. Did that work? Was that a good idea? Is anyone happy about that? Except for David Zazloff, Zack Snyder. Like Zack Snyder got to put out like a weird gray square version of the eight people who watch that are probably happy. I watched all three hours. I thought about watching it the other day and I sat down and I was like, I can't do this. Like I can't be watching a square movie right now.
It's like if there's you know those AI things where it's like we made the thing wide. It's like just do that for for just to say just please. Just expand the frame. Please let me use my whole TV. That's it. It's like super didn't work. It was a disaster idea that caused thousands of people to lose their jobs because the theory of the merger was bad. And yeah, you could say maybe the market will start out our time.
But like the government could have stopped it by saying this will reduce competition, which it definitely did. We definitely ended up with more consolidation on the other end of that in streaming. And we ended up with a less competitive wireless marketplace over time. Like it just all that happened. Like AT&T did not spend money on its network because they were busy spending money on fucking gray Justice League.
Why? But that's the only other vertical merger case that we have. And in that case, the court in the 18th and 10th morning is constantly talking about how there's no precedent. Like this is the first one in 40 years. That's weird. So I would just take a beat like this is a big project to reset how we think about competition in this country.
It will the beginning of it will be more losing than winning. It's just inevitable. And maybe we need a new law, but like you get to the new law by a bunch of senators and congresspeople saying, well, the FTC does not have the tools it needs to create competition. We have to give them so many tools.
My concern is we did have some protections for vertical integration. There was like the Paramount consent decree, which was from the 30s, which told like film studios that they couldn't own the theaters. And now they own the theaters again, they're just streaming. And that also in the Trump era got overturned because they were like, no, we don't need this anymore.
So it's like the court seemed to be like, yeah, vertical integration, coolest thing in the world. So how do they go through the courts to stop something like Microsoft acquiring Activision or AT&T acquiring Warner Brothers? I just want to be clear.
At this point, a workable antitrust law in this country would just be to make it illegal for AT&T to buy anything or for anyone to buy time Warner. Like you if that was just the rule, it might be fine. Like more people would keep their jobs. Yeah, that's like, and that's a way to measure like what's a good policy is like when you have mergers, people get laid off.
It ruins lives. Maybe some shareholders will make more money, but along the way, a bunch of like secretaries, like that redundant function, like your back offices merge and you like lay off your accounting department, right? Those are destructive actions for like thousands of people. If you just banned AT&T from buying stuff like more people would have kept their jobs like straight, like that's just a way to measure it.
If you could ban anyone from buying time Warner, like AOL might still exist. Like I just wanted those things. Do you buy the logic that the FTC and even the judge in this case have said, which is basically just that the existence of cases like this and the fact that there is someone paying attention and willing to pick this fight is going to do a lot of the work all by itself?
Yeah. Because before, I think we spent a generation with companies just being like, no, what everyone at the FTC is asleep at the wheel. This is a non issue. We'll get anything through. We want to. And now the case for Alina Khan would be at least someone is willing to pick the fight and that's going to make fewer people want to be on the other side of it.
I have two questions for you. Name one other commissioner of the FTC. No. I know the mall. I don't want to. I don't want to pick favorites. Name the previous chair of the FTC. Right? It's tough. Ronald Reagan. Her bird pooper. I don't know. It doesn't like she has a reputation and her reputation is that she thinks big mergers in consolidation are bad.
Yeah. Maybe she'll win. Maybe she'll lose. But that is like a drastic change. Right. And I do want to be clear. Two things. One, I think she did a bad job arguing this case. I think the call of duty head fake. She just got lost in it. Two. I don't. The more I think about it, it's more like I don't care if Microsoft owns Activision. Oh, I do. Why? Because vertical as we saw with streaming vertical integration is bad. But like the actual bad outcome of that when Sony is dominant and Apple is not going to let anyone do cloud gaming anyways like because Sony is dominant today and they have call a duty today.
Is there anything in that decision to stop Microsoft from saying, okay, Diablo four no longer works on PS five, which is the primary platform for it. Well, so now there's there's a lot of Phil Spencer running around saying that would be bad. There's all of this. And then on top of it, Microsoft is in third place. So like if the market's more competitive, is that bad? I mean, theoretically, that's it. If at any point, like this is all dependent on Microsoft being like, yeah, we're just good guys. We're fine with third place because we're keeping an open like we're altruism.
No, I don't think they're fine with third place. They're not if they flip out and then a call of duty exclusive after 10 years and then sales between the Xbox and PS five even out and the market is more competitive. Is that a bad? I don't know the answer to that question. Is the market more competitive if one of the largest gaming console makers in the world owns the majority of the studios because Activision Blizzard is just one of many studios they've acquired. They've been on a buying spree. They own most of the big studios like with the exception of things like EA, they own just about everything but after they acquire Activision Blizzard.
But even in that case, Sony's still winning for now, but like, okay, so let's say even is out and Microsoft goes from third to first. That means the market's more competitive. And then they go from third to first and then they say, okay, it's been 10 years. All of duty is now exclusive Diablo five or six or whatever is now exclusive. If you want to play any of these games, you have to play them on an Xbox. And so now Sony has nothing, no leg to stand on because it's been 10 years. They bided their time and they're having a great time.
Like we saw this happen over and over with streaming streaming was like, yeah, we're going to acquire this stuff. We're going to do this vertical integration and then we're going to pull the rug out from under people and because it's financially expedient for us. And I'm just like, I don't trust companies to do what's best for the people. They do what's best for their bottom line and their bottom line does not always mean what's best for people, right? Right now it's working for Microsoft. Yeah, I don't think I don't think we're agreeing. I'm just saying that instinct to do its best for your bottom line is usually tempered by competition in the market.
You only have few choices like either I can set prices for every product in America, vote Patel, I'll be a great and benevolent king or you can have like actual market competition that people can vote with their dollars. And right now you kind of don't. Right. And I think that's the thing that I'm getting at is Microsoft is so far behind that if you want a new console, you kind of end up buying a PS5. Because they have exclusives. Sure. But if Microsoft flips it, that's why it's doing better is because it's got all the it's got Naughty Dog. And now Microsoft owns everybody that's not Naughty Dog.
But that's market competition. Like if Sony waits, sits on its ass for 10 years. Yeah. And then Call of Duty goes away and they're like whoops Microsoft like that is their fault. Like it's Sony is also a multi-billion dollar self-interest company. And that's all I'm getting at is like the harms here are hard to see and they're definitely more pronounced in cloud gaming and the FTC kind of blew it. But the bigger projects the FTC is to say like any antitrust enforcement is good and the laws should change.
And I think everyone is kind of missing that second turn that they were always walking into a loss because the law does not support their Lina cons theories for how this should work. And again, you can go listen to her on this show before she worked at the FTC talking about her theories. And it's basically like this kind of consolidation creates a ton of bad outcomes for consumers that aren't just measured in raw prices. Right.
So in that case, it sounds like what you're saying is it's not so much the loss that that's the problem. It's the fact that the FTC allowed itself to fall down this distraction of call of duty being the problem that is actually the thing that's going to pull it away from getting to where it was trying to go. Yeah, I think that's right. Okay. But at least we get call of duty call of duty on the switch. Yeah, it's great animated. It's like call of duty, but you're Yoshi. I think a real problem for me is that I do not play call of duty. So it's like whatever you can have it. Phil, if you're listening, I want to run it on the homepage. Okay. We'll sign the deal. There's a call of duty at the verge.com. Love it. All right. We should take a break. We'll be right back.
Okay, we're back. David is just waving his computer around in the studio. What is happening? So a thing that happened about 20 minutes ago in this podcast is I spilled one whole pomple and was the cray just all over the computer. This is why we're not in the office. Turn it upside down. I did for a while. It was the key is to just make a tent and put it on the floor. And that makes everything better. It luckily Liam, our producer brought me what I would say is several rolls of paper towels that I have now used. Put it in some rice. Liam, get a bag of rice. Really big bag of rice. The most astounding part is it seems fine. I think the software updated it. But now I'm just on back. It fits suddenly like lights on fire while we're sitting here.
That's why and I will probably have to leave briefly, but I'm so now it's going to make for great TV. Listen, did I almost burn down the building when I tried to poke a battery for a video at the Wall Street Journal? Yes, I did. And this can be this can be found to make a GIF of it.
All right. Friends, I have a stat for you. Okay. Hit me with it. The average blockbuster store had between eight and 10,000 videos in it. And then we had 7,000 videos, Netflix, 3,600 movies. In moving to the streaming area, the amount of choice on the platforms is dwindling. Shrink. Yep. Which is the opposite of what people think. I bet if you gave those two numbers to a person and was like, which is which, I bet almost everyone would say Netflix is the bigger number. Yep. But then you asked them to go find a movie they remember from their childhood on Netflix and be like, oh, this is garbage. Yeah. I'm just saying, pump up the volume. Not available on any streaming service. Make it happen. It was definitely a block. You had that ready to you did not just look that up. I want everyone to know. Niela, I did not just Google to confirm that. That is a fact he knew before this podcast began. I think he just knows that at all times, like if it does appear. Every morning, he like, it's an email. His pump up the volume stream. I think it just comes to him in the night. Like he wakes up and he's like, oh, it's on Disney Plus now. Let's go. No way they would ever put pump up the volume and D plus. That's not even a chance. Maybe if they can solve the music licensing issues. The D plus having a movie where A, there's boobs and B, Christian Slater is like fighting the FCC by saying swear words. Just like right next to Moana. That's just not happening. All right. That's my stat for you. But to Alex's point, like you move to the streaming world and your choice gets less and like, that's a real stat about blockbuster, which I think is fascinating.
All right. Let's talk about a gadget. There's a bunch of a gadget talk about. There's a new foldable from honor. There's some iMac rumors. I think we should start with a nothing phone two. Is it in parentheses? In my head, it's in parentheses because whenever I get a new iPhone, it's always like iPhone four. And that's how it shows up on all the Bluetooth. And this is the nothing phone two. It is in parentheses. Our style guide says that it is not in parentheses and I love our style guide for that. But if you ask nothing, it is in parentheses.
This thing is like a vibes phone. It's like the first true vibes phone. Yeah. I think that's exactly right. It's like, I don't know, the nothing phone one was like cool because it was new, right? And I like, I root for every company that wants to make phones because we need more good phones in the world that are not made by Apple or Samsung. And like we've been talking about competition is a good thing. And if someone could figure out how to sell phones that isn't Samsung or Apple, that would be terrific. But it was like it was a new phone, right? Like it had some weird performance stuff. The camera wasn't amazing. The battery life was kind of, yeah, like it felt like a first phone. And this one, Alice and Johnson reviewed it for us and basically came out of it saying, like, look, it's a very good phone. It has a bunch of big ideas that either work for your brain or they don't. It's big on like, we want to give you tools to help you use your phone a little bit less. And one of those tools is making all the icons look the same, which is weird. It's like, what if it was harder to find the Instagram app? Like I'm not. That's a good thing.
So that's the thing, right? Like how you. It's good. It's aesthetically pleasing. Oh, it's beautiful. The home screen of the nothing phone is one of the best looking home screens I've ever seen. It's gorgeous. It has the, the glyph thing on the back. So if you put it down on the table face down, it has these lights that show up that will do some new stuff. It has the little charging indicator. So like the light at the bottom will fill up as it charges. It has a new countdown thing that if you have a timer on, it'll actually sort of decrease the light as the timer counts down. There are these nifty things like do any of these add up to like a transformational idea about smartphones? Like no, but there's some cool ideas here. And I think that's what you mean by calling this a vibes phone, right? Like it's. If the things about it make you feel something, awesome. You're going to love this phone and be super happy because it does all the phone things pretty well, unlike the phone one. But it's still like, is this the future of smartphones? Like there's really nothing here that screams. Yes. You know what? Every time we've just come to a place with smartphones where that question is kind of like saying like, is this the future of shoes? It's like, it's just like doesn't. What are you talking about? like, because of the platform split, you're kind of always like, will the nothing phone to capture share from the iPhone? And it's like, that doesn't matter.
Like if you're the Android ecosystem, you now get to pick from like a bunch of different vibes, right? You can pick a Galaxy Fold and like run subway servers next to TikTok, next to Discord and like just fully live in that zone, which is crazy, or you can like get this phone, which is like very chill and has lights on the back. And I think it's just like a neat place for phones to be in, at least on the Android side of the equation, where you can almost buy a mood or buy a style. And yeah, it's only because this one has a reasonably good camera and like it does phone things well. Whereas I think on the iPhone side of the house, it's kind of like, boy, that camera bump got even bigger. And it's like, that's fine. And that's fine. But it's just at least on the Android side of the equation, you can now kind of pick a style, which is interesting. And it hasn't always been the case.
Yeah, so I just like a few hours ago sat in this studio wearing this shirt and talk to Carl Pei, the CEO of Nothing. That's going to be our next Wednesday show. But one of the things he kept saying that I thought was really interesting is kind of to your point, Eli, that like, we're sort of at a point now where like, if you just want a phone, this is especially true in the US, if you want a phone and you have no follow up questions, the answer is an iPhone, right? It's like it is sort of it is the phonest of phones at this point. And Samsung is like kind of there on the Android side, but it has some weird bad ideas and some wacky ideas and some good ideas. But Android is the place where there should be lots of different ideas about what a smartphone can like be and do and how it can work and where finally it seems like sort of turning into that era. And you mentioned like the honor phone that the foldable thing is starting to happen and the tech is getting better really fast. The flip phones are starting to be competitive. It's like there are finally a bunch of different kinds of phones you can buy in the Android ecosystem.
My issue with the Nothing Phone 2 is it doesn't push on any of those ideas far enough to really feel big. Yeah. Can anyone push on those ideas? Like one of the reasons Samsung and Apple have become so big is because they were the ones that had the resource to do things like make the camera not garbage. Right. And everybody, nobody else had the like you need a lot of really good engineers to do that and nobody else could afford that. So like it seems like most of the big kind of ways to make the phones interesting are expensive and nothing is like, okay, well we're just going to go for the interesting cosmetic stuff because that's a ring light on the back of your phone to probably cost them five bucks to stick it in there. Right. It's like a thing they can do. Yeah. Instead of pouring $10 billion into camera R&D. Yeah. Right. But like all things, even camera R&D got commoditized. Right. You can write like this phone I think is an example of it per Alice in three like it's fine. Yeah. In a way that I think when we were sort of in a cusp of computational photography, like you needed the money and now you're like, or I can just buy it off the shelf because it's a commodity. Yeah. I mean, yeah. And that's even true. Like the nothing fun has the Snapdragon eight plus gen one, which is technically a last year chip, but it's a very good chip. It does all the things you would need a smartphone chip to do. It's pretty efficient. It's pretty fast. Like that stuff just is widely available now to your point, which is, which is really cool. But the weird central tension of all of that is that all this stuff is so commoditized. But there are so many people in the market that it can still be hard to get in because even though everyone is out here building better cameras than ever that you can buy, there's so much more competition to buy those cameras that small companies have a hard time getting to these new supposedly commoditized things because like Foxconn is just tapped making all the phones for all the other companies making phones. And so it's just, it's a weird thing where it's like the stuff is all there. It's more accessible to more people than ever. And yet it's still kind of on the other side of the wall unless you're a really big company.
Yeah. Was just, I think how you end up with we're still, we're still here talking about Apple, Samsung and nothing. Yeah. You know what I mean? And like nothing is connected to much like they have the ability to capture some of the resources in a big company just cause the way because Carl pay basically. Yeah. Yeah. It's so cool. I mean, like it has LED lights in the back. I want it. The home screen is so, so, so good looking. They're doing this monochrome thing with the like old timey pixelated text. It just, it just looks so good and it makes me so happy. And it's like the first Android phone where they're like, what if we actually gave like one whole shit about what it looked like when you turned it on? And I don't feel like there's any other Android manufacturer out there doing that. And it makes me happy that nothing is doing that. Yeah.
You know what it kind of looks like? It kind of looks like the books, Paul, that was also announced this week, the six inch Android phone. I knew it was coming. It's $250. And I knew it was coming. Yeah. I was sneaking it in. I was, I was waiting for the right moment and, and the nothing phone gave it to me.
But yeah, this thing is, I think this thing is gorgeous for the same reason that I want the other one is like, I something about that just monochrome sleek design. I'm like, yeah, all right. I don't need colors. I got a TV for colors. It's a, it's a stance I would really like you to keep on this show for a very long time. And you could just, all the colors I need in life are satisfied by my television is, is a, is an Alex crayons belief that I feel like you should carry on for a long time.
It's true. It's true. My gadget that I was inevitably going to sneak in this conversation is that Telly has started shipping the free TV. Yes. Yeah. It's real. Did you guys think it was real? I knew it was like, I mean, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, it's like, I knew it's like not a hard product to ship. It's, it's a television. It's a TV and they ship it to you for free. They didn't have to turn on stripe. They were just like, here you go.
How much are they spending on the TVs? Like, or on the shipping of the TVs? Because anytime I had to review a TV, that was always enough fair. Oh, yeah. Expensive one for whatever the company shipping it to be was. They had to capitulate. Did you read this? They had to capitulate because it, you know, it doesn't have any streaming. Software built into it, which is just intrusive advertising software. So they were just like, screw it. Here's a Google TV dongle. Yes. Like in the box. I mean, everything about this is great. I cannot wait for people to get it. I hope it's just rattling around in there. Like it's not even its own package. It's like taped on the side.
It's sad to me that the internet's like tearing itself apart right now. Like, I'm very happy about it for some reasons. But like, that Reddit is in turmoil and like, no, and Twitter threads, like, there's a version of the internet where immediately disassembling this thing and figuring out how it worked would have been all we all did together for a minute. You know, and like, I just can't wait for people to get this thing. If you get one, please email us. We want to know everything. Oh, yeah. Yeah. If you have a telly, I am not allowing one in my home.
But if you get one, you know, let me know. Let me know on the side. I'm not going to be able to get one in my home. Yeah. Call the hotline and tell us about your telly and we can change your voice and play it on the podcast if that's what you want. I am desperate to know more about this thing. I think I continue to think it's actually an extremely good idea. I think it's going to work. I think it's going to be very successful. I also think it is hilarious nonsense in the best possible way.
Do we know what panels they're using? Like where they're sourced. Who cares? It's a free television, Alex. It has all the colors I need. What are you talking about? I need to know if there's a Halloween. Yeah. I mean, the whole thing is very, very good.
Other gadgets, there's a rumor that Apple is going to do a 32 inch iMac. Yes. I'll buy this thing in a heartbeat. I am so close to always buying a Mac mini. Every time there's one on sale and there's one on sale lately all the time, especially the M1, which is all that I need because all I would run one app to podcast, I have one and it's wonderful. I'm always so close to buying one. I'm like, can I get a buy display? And then you end up in that display thing where I buy cheap one, but then I'm me and I can't buy a cheap one. I'm like crap, I'm not going to buy a studio. It's like 32. Just give it to me. You spend so much money. It's great.
Yeah. Monitor. That's the other place I get my color. You're like, I vary. You should start like a wellness trend. Yeah. You just have color on your TVs and your anything bigger than 27 inches, you can have color on it. Anything smaller? No, black and white iPad, like a chroma diet. That's like the TikTok crema fest. Gwyneth Paltrow just trademarked that while you were talking. No, goop. Don't steal our idea. Gwyneth. Don't steal. I'm watching you Gwyneth.
The 32 inch iMac I think is super exciting. If we get a 32 inch iMac before we get a 27 inch iMac, I'm going to be furious because the 27 inch iMac is a perfect product and the fact that it doesn't exist is so stupid and bad. And a 24 inch iMac is a dumb idea, but a 27 inch iMac is an amazing idea. But I also think there is this rumor.
I don't know if we've heard about it since like January, but there was this rumor at the beginning of the year that Apple is starting to think about smart display stuff and like you look at like standby and the lock screen widgets and there's like this thing starting to happen where Apple is like what can your screens be when you're not using them. And I think the idea of like Apple basically doing that with my computer monitor is very exciting to me. Like make that the hub of all of my stuff because it's a big screen that just sits on my desk and I'm near it all the time. Like I love that.
I assume this thing will cost $67,000 and I will not buy it. What if it's the iMac Pro? Remember like if we just get that again, that's the 32 inch. You want a big screen? It's can't be cheap. That's very, see this is a problem. It's like I want to buy just an m1 Mac and like a beautiful display that's not expensive or isn't a panel from 1985 which is a current studio display. Can I interest you in the Spectre 4K monitor that I bought that just randomly turns off three times a day for no reason? I see I can't live that life man. I'm too old now. I refuse. I got gray hair in the beard. Only the finest of displays.
When I break my chroma fasted. I only chroma between noon and eight p.m. I do a 16-8 chroma fast. All right. All this color is exhausted me. I got to take a chroma fast. We're back. By the way, did you know when I was in high school I stage managed over 70 productions of Joseph and the amazing tech in college. We've got 100% true. We'll be right back everybody.
We're back. I have so many questions. We've got something to talk. No lightning round. I'm just going to talk about Joseph. All right. I'm just going to tell this one. There's so many stories embedded in this. So I was like a theater tech nerd kid. This should be very obvious. Super off-brand for Neil. And so it's like summer in Wisconsin in the 90s. My theater nerd friends and I'll just like descend on the Racine Theater Guild, which is mounting a production of Joseph and the amazing tech in college. This is true happening. I don't know how to describe all the things that happen there.
But rest assured there's a scene in this Andrew Luever musical where Joseph and his brothers have to destroy a goat. Are you aware of this? The whole thing that happens in the show. And they're seeing theater guilders theater in the round. So there's a VOMS on the side of the stage. So to get the goat off the stage, you couldn't build the normal things that you would build. So I took our remote controlled truck and disassembled it and built a goat on top of it. And we had a remote controlled goat that this is like one of my highlight of my youth. That's legitimately like peak knee-like. You drive in? Yeah, it would like speed up the side of the stage. And then they would like rip its legs off and like, you know, he would sing about how sad he was or whatever. And we'd drive the disembodied goat down. I think one time in the many of these many shows, because we're like teenagers, we were like, go out and party after every single one of these things. Of course. I forgot to plug the, you know, the old school RC battery back in its charger. So the fucking kid would come back down off the stage, which is like, oh. And yeah, that thing just got kicked. Straight up dance catch on stage. This really feels like the adult version of Neelite needs to disassemble his Ford Raptor and just turn it into a robot goat. That's your weekend plan. Little project.
I hadn't thought about that until I crawl my fast. I'm going to cry. All right. Be that goat. Honestly, punted little robot goat. Has there ever been a better mascot for the verge than a little robot? Go in an oddly Christian musical ring by Andrew. I don't know. Well, it's a good.
All right. It's a lightning. Yeah. Prands. You should start because as we've been talking, there has been massive. And you use the world of entertainment. Yes, as we were talking, SAG declared that starting Friday at midnight, they're on strike. So they are officially, if you're listening to this, SAG is on strike. They're picketing. This is the first time both SAG and the writer's skill, the WGA were both on strike since 1960. So it's been a while. Like WGA goes on strike at the drop of a hat, 11 for it. But SAG usually doesn't. We should know a series of escalating disclosures here.
I know. I wanted to see how far I could get before you interrupted with disclosures. Well, I think once you get to WGA strikes the drop of hat, I think we have to disclose our newsroom, wonderful people unionized with WGA. They're great. We love them. I'm a member. Yeah. Crands in it. Great. We're fine. But we should disclose that. We make television shows with Netflix and HBO. I'm the executive producer of the Netflix show and then Comcast with Trans NBC. The investor, the company, all of them are on the one side of the table or the other. And currently none of them are making anything as you're listening because all the actors and the writers are on strike.
Well, and this is also happening as there was this big deadline story in which a bunch of unnamed studio executives basically said, not even basically said in as many words, we are just going to wait out the writers until they lose their homes and then they're going to have to come back to the table and we're going to win. It's incredibly stupid. And there was apparently some back room.
This is not like a dumb thing. An executive set off the top of their head. There was some like back room strategizing among studio executives apparently who decided to say all this stuff to a reporter who was going to put it into a story as if it was like a negotiating move. And instead, I think it is to the extent that you can move things even more against a bunch of billionaires who are mad at writers for wanting to have homes. It has shifted it even further against the billionaires who don't want writers to have homes. It's really something.
Yeah, it backfired terrifically. There are rumors that there's like recording of the video call of all the producers arguing about the deadline story after it went up, which if you have that hit me up. I would love to see it. Kran's posted the phrase and I quote, this is my peepee tape. I must see it. It is. Go out to the very chest, everyone. I think that's the fastest segue from Andrew Lloyd Webber to peepee tape in media history. That's a piece of thesis for you. Breaking records here.
Call Dr. Guinness. I don't know if there's a Dr. Guinness. I don't know how you know what it's. But yeah, this thing is popping off and it didn't help that Bob Iger today said that the writers were hurting the industry. I think that probably only added fuel to the fire.
Fran Drescher spoke. She's the president of SAG, the nanny. Yeah. Yeah. That's her. She's the president of SAG. She had a very fiery speech saying that basically they're ruining lives. They're getting rid of residuals. That's the big thing here. The big fight with both the WGA and SAG is they want residuals. If they make product, they want to make money from that years down the line because that's how most of them support themselves, especially like people who maybe have big careers in their 30s and then nothing in their 40s because people start hiring them for a wide variety of reasons usually due to ageism. So they really want these residuals and the companies are like, well, no, because we're doing streaming now, we don't make enough money to pay you residuals, but I Bob Iger make $27 million a year and I think you guys need to get back to work. Just a terrifically tone deaf move on his part. That was a real bummer.
Fran Drescher发言了。她是SAG(演员工会)的总裁,就是那个保姆。是的,没错,就是她。她发表了一篇非常激烈的演讲,基本上是说他们正在毁掉人们的生活。他们要取消版权分红,这是一个大问题。编剧工会和演员工会都在为版权分红进行激烈的斗争。如果他们创造了作品,他们希望多年后能从中赚钱,因为这是他们中的大多数人维持生计的方式,特别是那些在三十多岁时有过辉煌事业但在四十多岁时却一无所获的人,主要是因为人们开始因为年龄歧视而不再雇佣他们。所以他们真的希望获得这些版权分红,而公司却说:“不行,因为我们现在正在进行流媒体,没有足够的钱来支付您的版权分红。”但是鲍勃·伊格尔却每年赚取2700万美元,而且我认为你们需要回去工作。这是他的一个非常不敏感的行为,真是让人沮丧。
So I encourage everyone to go watch this on. I goes on CNBC. It's the Sun Valley. It's an incredible setting to be like, this strike is disturbing and it should stop. He's at Sun Valley. Because this is where all the billionaires go to make mogul deals where they buy each other's companies. Right. Like the next turn he's going to be like, and we're consolidating all the studios even for like, who knows, right? But the occasion of it is that he just signed a new to your contract. Like he's never leaving Disney. No. Like the last thing that they're going to do with Bob Iger is instead of the animatronic Spiderman, they're just going to eat him into the sun. That exhibit. And that's how he's going to go out, right? It's he's just in the company.
And he said two things originally. One he said the strike is disturbing. Like the actors and the writers are not paying attention to the economic reality of this industry, which is fascinating. And you can feel any way you want about that. Like on some level, there isn't a grain of truth in there, which is these companies do not make as much money selling Seinfeld 60 billion times over and over again in different territories in the world. Which the economics of that are not happening. Should they still make it more equitable? They should. And like somewhere in there is Friday, I come, but nobody else would.
And then he said, Oh, I might sell ESPN and ABC. Like linear television is like on its way out for us. And we might have to do something else. And that is like, that's the end of Disney is we know it. ESPN funded everything. Like the cable fees for ESPN funded the acquisition of Marvel and Lucasfilm and all this stuff. And that engine is gone is basically what he's saying. And I think that is utterly fascinating.
Well, and not only that ESPN like was the shining star of the cable business for decades, like a big part of the reason that the cable business has started to go away comes back to what people say about ESPN, which is what I don't want to pay these massive carriage fees for sports because I don't watch sports. And my cable bill includes $7 a month for ESPN because ESPN has to pay billions of dollars to the NBA in order to get games. So they're charging the cable providers who are charging me and I don't watch sports. And so like that is the single cleanest example of why Unbundling is useful. And it has just it's destroying ESPN as it happens.
Like ESPN spent so much money because it could pass those fees on to so many people. And it is now I think very much an open question of like, is there does that business continue to exist if you have to just charge directly the people who watch the sports? Where are the sports? Like are they still on ESPN? Yeah, they're on Reddit. Like it's just it's so true for so many people that is so complicated to watch sports that pirating the streams are right. It is easier.
Oh, yeah. And sports is a disaster. And this will take a long time to play out because they sell these rights like a decade at a time. And so it's going to get real weird. But also the thing that happened is companies like Disney signed decade long deals thinking that cable was going to very slowly and carefully decline and streaming was going to grow and the money was going to offset and everybody was going to get rich. And now what it looks like is all the numbers are down big really fast. And so I go saying like we need a strategic partner for ESPN was so like Disney other than money, Disney doesn't need anything in terms of like how to do content. And so the fact that even Disney can't figure this out is fascinating.
You also just stole my lightning round thing, which is the ESPN thing. So that's fine. So I I'm I'm done. That's you. I've had another one. I got the Google thing and you for your lightning round. No, I don't even want to. I'm just mad about ESPN. Sorry. There's a big future of sports media piece to be written because it is just a total chaos zone right now. Yeah. Yeah. And even stuff like Twitter and Instagram threads like that's where the center of gravity and sports has been for a while. Right. It's like, I hear here's a story I want. I'm desperate for this.
Do you know when if you're a sports fan, you see this happen like every season, college football recruits go and they sign with a team. All the way around. If you're a sports fan, you see this like happen all the time, like high school students get recruited by a college and they say they're going to commit to some college, right? This like happens in every sport. And they all put up like Instagram templates where they've written a bunch of copy and they have a bunch of photos. I just want to know who designs the templates. Who's doing it? Who's open in Canva and listening to some 17 year old talk about how Jesus is in their heart and they were always meant to play for a like, who is it? Let me know. Like, I just want to talk to you. I have all the jerseys done.
Yeah. It's amazing. Right. That's a whole economy of creators and creatives and agencies and that exists because of Instagram, not because of ESPN. And so like you just see like even that part of it is shifting. I just think it's like there's a whole thing to be written about how all of it is shifting, but then the actual part of it where you like sit down and watch the games is so hard that it's easier to open Reddit and just find them. Yeah. And it's going to cascade through everything else because sports have been the richest thing in TV on all sides for a really long time. Yeah. Yeah.
What's your lightning round? Even you ever saw this coming my way. Sarah Silverman is suing OpenAI and meta. Oh, we are. I want to talk about legal things. What? I love it. How does this relate to Joseph and the Technicolor dreamcoat? Would you say? Well, so Sarah Silverman has a coat of many colors and those colors are a number of legal theories about you know, real problem being on threads like I'm tweeting all this. It's kind of people like, yeah, this is what we came here for. It's like, this is not the feedback loop America needs. More lawsuits. No, no, no, no, no. This is where I was trying to get away from. Easy dopamine hit by saying I hate this judge. Like, stop it bad, but I'll do it anyway because I'm addicted to it.
Anyway, Sarah Silverman, there's a law firm basically that is organizing itself around suing the AI companies. So they had a couple other offer. They had a couple other children's book authors and now they filed the second one, Sarah Silverman, some other authors. And they're basically saying, look, you can ask these tools to summarize these books and then they do it. At some point, that means you have made a copy of this book and that copy was unauthorized. And that's the whole argument. It's a pretty good argument. Like, as far as legal, it's not like out on a ledge, right? It's saying, hey, did you have permission to make this copy of this book? Because usually you don't.
Isn't that basically exactly what worked for the record companies against all the free pirating websites? We can worry about all the big picture stuff, but you're taking our thing and you're putting it over here and that's not allowed. No, it was a different, like Sarah, John, and I could probably do two hours of interest. They had to invent all these theories about how they were enabling users to do copy or infringement. Okay. Right. So Napster wasn't doing any infringement on its own. I was sending a file from my computer to your computer and that was unauthorized, but Napster created a business that let us do that and they knew that. And they just had to like invent a bunch of legal theories about contributory.
So this one's even more straightforward than this is just straight up, like, did you make a copy of this book? Did you have permission to make a copy of this book? If you did not have permission, is it fair use for you to have made a copy of this book ingested into your servers and then deliver what is obviously a derivative work of this book, which is summary of the book. Wouldn't that have ramifications for like everything computers do? Yes. Without question, like all computers do is make copies, right? Like the fundamentally, in copyright law is like very backwards in this way because it, I think I've said this many times the show. It's hard for people in the computer era to wrap their heads around the basic of copyright law, which is that it regulates the act of making copies. So if I make a copy of something that implicates copyright law, if you don't make a copy, then there's nothing, whatever. So like you reading the book, you have not made a copy of the book. You reading a book perfectly memorizing it and then writing it all down is an unauthorized copy of the book. When you do that, most people cannot do that. Computers can do that at rapid scale.
So like there's just a decade of law, like furious law, Google books, like go look at that case, like ferocious lawsuit about the existence of Google books. Amazon, remember they had a Kindle and the Kindle had text to speech built into it? Ferocious lawsuit from the author's guild about whether that was copyright infringement. That makes no sense to me. Like just like, right? Like it's text, it's on my computer. I can hit a button and it should read to me. So like no, that's a derivative work. We make a lot of money doing audio books. You can't have it. Like we're not letting you make that copy. And they won essentially. They got a set of items.
So like there's just this thing where it's like, it's the simplest thing and like the hardest thing in any conversation is to keep people focused on the simplest thing, which is did you make a copy of the book? Like everyone spins off into like the philosophy of it. It's like, no, did they make a copy of the book? They have permission to make that copy of the book. The answer is like, obviously no. And I think this is the these lawsuits are just going to escalate because copyright law is like not ready for this problem. That's exciting. Yeah, I'm thrilled. And then just to bring this all the way back around, the FTC is also now investigating open AI for the way that it has gotten some of that data to train its models.
And it just feels like like Sam Altman was out here a while ago being like, please regulate us. We love regulation. And like boy, is he about to get what he asked for? Yeah, but he's like, he's like, regulates some like mythical problem. He's like, make it illegal for the AI to launch nuclear weapons. Yeah. Fine. Good. The part where it's like the AI is hovered up all the data in the world without permission and hasn't returned any of that value to any of the people who made the starting works. That is a decade of litigation, like straight up a decade of lawsuits to come, which is great because we have a website and we like writing about lawsuits and the people on threads are like super into it when I tweet about the lawsuit.
So off we go. I think what we're going to do is we're going to we're going to have one version cast episode of year that's just 19 hours long and it's just all of Neelas thoughts about copyright law.
It's like a honeypot version cast episode. Right. And we've been published it. It's just it's just on the internet. It's going to be great. I think people that we've been threatening that one. I keep threatening an hour long about metadata on decoder. It's all it's all coming. That's what we're here for.
Absolutely. We're the people who did to do holiday spectaculars. Very few other publications that are scale or sustained success. People are like, why is the purchase a sustained success? I'm like hour long HTMI podcast. Yeah. Get into it.
We were asked the other day if that's the thing we intend to keep doing and we say, absolutely, you are damn right. That is a thing we intend to keep doing. I will die before I don't do a holiday. That's how much I love you.
All right. I was going to end on another Joseph and the amazing technical dream project, but I actually don't remember any other words. David, you're a musical theater nerd. I have never seen Joseph in the amazing technical dream code. I could sing you several songs from Jesus Christ Superstar, which feels like it's roughly the same thing. This is the most Android webber that has ever been on the show.
I think it's time to stop. It has been wonderful. I love you. The Verge cast audience. This is David said Carl Pay on the show next week, right? Yeah, we got some fun stuff coming up next week, but yeah, that's a good one. All right.