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Hello and welcome to the Vertcast, the flagship podcast winning the Webby Awards. David, tell them what we've won. We are the flagship podcast of the Webby Awards. I think that's what they told us. Yeah. Thank you to everybody who voted. We won two Webby Awards, which are the same award but different awards for Best Technology Podcast. Basically, there's like the Judges Award and there's the People's Choice Award. We care a lot more about the People's Choice Award, but it's like, you know what, if there's an award, you might as well win it. You know what I mean? And we did. We won them both.

It was very exciting. We're going to get another one of those cool springy statues. I'm very excited about that. Thank you to everybody who voted. I know everybody tolerated us begging for votes for several weeks. So I appreciate everybody who voted. And we're very excited that we won. And shouts to everyone else in the category. We appreciate our fellow nominees. We defeated you.

I will say there are some like sincerely very good podcasts in that group. The EFF has had a podcast that was, I think came in second to us. It's very good. But was resoundingly defeated by the Verge cast as were all of our. We're trying so hard to be gracious winners and we're not.

And I will say the number one piece of feedback that we got was that the Webby's needs a new award for best podcast within a podcast. And we are going to win it next year. But we'll get to that later. That's how, you know, we had the president of the Grammys on Decoder, like just before Grammy nominees were announced. And I was like, do you just keep inventing categories so Beyonce can win them? And he was like, no.

Yes. I'm open to it. I'm just putting you got to put the energy in the world to collect it in return. You know what I'm saying? Anyway, I'm your friend, Eli. That's David Pierce. Jay Castanerakis is here. Hey, good to be here. A lot going on this week. We should try to unpack what happened with Nintendo Switch 2 pre-orders. Gadgets are appearing and disappearing and prices are vanishing or not being announced because of tariffs. We have to make a list of who might be able to buy Chrome because Google is on trial. So is Meta.

Just a lot going on in our nation's courthouse. Literally the same courthouse. Both trials in the same courthouse. Yeah, like down the hall from each other, essentially. Yeah, it's very funny. Our boy Brendan continues to speak or not speak. That's coming up. And then there's a film made of wood. That's true. Just a lot. Just a lot in this episode of Verge House. But I want to start with listener feedback. And what I would consider an investigation. Like a crowdsourced listener investigation.

So there's evidence, as you all know, that the party speaker market is hot. And the only evidence that we have of this is that these companies keep making them. Like we're five generations into party speakers. They keep getting bigger. People add more lights to them. More models are put out. Buttons to make them make more and less bass are added and removed at random times. There's something happening here to justify all this investment. And we are the locus of

of, I think the single most important body of analytics information about the part party speaker market in the tech industry today, because everyone keeps sending us pictures of parties. This investigation is going to win us the next Webby. A hundred percent. It is remarkable that no one has one, but everyone sees them everywhere and then sends us photos of them. So we've got two this week. One, we are going to ask for more information about if you know about this.

I think this is directly related to our nation's warfighting capability. But Sam emails to say, I know a huge target for the party speaker market. It is the U.S. military. And the U.S. military is in all capital letters. I'm in the Navy and the ship has at least a dozen party speakers that they loan out on deployments and such.

One dozen speakers per ship. This is perfect. You have a bunch of strapping gentlemen who can carry enormous speakers. So that helps. And, you know. There's not like SEAL Team 6 for this party speaker.

There's just one person in every platoon who just carries the party speaker. Yeah. And they're out in the world. They're doing stuff. They're busy. They can't be tied down. America's greatest export is our culture and our nation's military is just playing bangers on beaches around the world. If you're in the military, Sam, tell us more. Sam offered to tell us more. So I'm asking, tell us more. Are there fights? Is there a line to get the one dozen speakers? Are there one dozen speakers per boat?

Are there more on aircraft carriers, fewer on, I don't know, other kinds of boats? This suggests that somewhere in the Pentagon, there is a budget line for party speakers. And it hasn't been cut by Doge. Right. See what I'm saying? Like, Elon looked at it and was like, up, number go up. That sounds right, yeah. Two dozen per boat. Okay, so that's one. You're dying to know more. If you can send me a picture of a party speaker on an aircraft carrier with a jet going off in the background, I think we might be done here.

That might be the end of our goals. That's victory. Okay. So that's one. Second, Matthew sent a photo of a giant Sony party speaker in the wild, in the rain at a soccer clinic. And he says, I've included my five-year-old daughter for size comparison. He grants his permission around the photo. We're going to put smiley face over the face. He goes on to say, this thing sounded like shit, intermittent Bluetooth connection maybe, but I enjoyed its very existence.

It's fabulous. It is true that the speaker is almost as big as the five-year-old.

Five-year-olds are cute as well, by the way. And to my previous point, it looks Photoshopped. Like, we'll show this on YouTube if you're watching this. But I still have not seen a picture in which the party speaker does not look like it was Photoshopped in after the fact. And it is like a preposterously large alien from outer space that has just been inserted into this photo. Send me photos. Send me photos of frat house basements, of car dealerships, soccer tournaments. Again, aircraft carriers, extremely welcome.

We're just going to keep talking about this. The mainstream media won't talk about this. They're all about AI. But I'm saying look at the amount of investment and effort that has gone into giant party speakers over the past five years. And this isn't VC funding. This is just pure capitalism. Yeah. This is like the Sony party speaker is at the end of the hype cycle, which means it is only sustainable based on pure, unadulterated success.

Yeah, the robots aren't trying to bang Kevin Roos on the front page of the New York Times. This is us saying on the ground, the real people are demanding speakers the size of their children and the market is providing it to them. Look at it. Don't look away. All right. Seriously, if you see one set, it's delightful every time. It is. It's very good. Some of you send photos of things that are not party speakers. They're just speakers, which I also appreciate that people see speakers in the world and they think of me.

I love you. Thank you. But you know, you know, we want exercise in judgment. All right. Let's talk about switch to it. David, you were saying just before we started recording, everyone knew this would happen and it happened.

but it also felt like chaos. Yeah, this feels like it's sort of inevitable, right? I think it's been clear for a long time that the Switch 2 is a giant hit that a lot of people are going to want very badly, right? And then they were supposed to go on pre-order two weeks ago, and then that got delayed for a bunch of tariffy reasons. But they finally went on sale or on pre-order, what, Wednesday night into Thursday. And it was midnight East Coast time,

Like an alarming amount of our staff is just useless today because they were up late last night trying to order a Switch 2. And it was on sale at a bunch of places. We had folks checking at Target. We had folks checking at Best Buy, at Walmart. It was GameStop, I think, like did it, but was coming later. And it was...

at first just a huge gigantic mess right there were like there were we had people on our team who were like in a line to get in the line you know the thing they do with like concert tickets now where they're like here's the here's the queue before we put you in the queue to buy tickets and they did that but then they it would just punt you back to the beginning of the line when you got to the end of it's like total mess but then

It seemed like somewhere between like 45 and 60 minutes in. So like right around 1 a.m. Eastern, all the systems just sort of turned on. And at least on our team, I think everybody who wanted one got one. And so it just it was a mess. And then it worked. Sure. I mean, that's that's better than what usually happens, which is it's a mess. And then a spate of apologies are issued and then no one gets one. Yes.

Yeah. Jake, did you try? You didn't try to get one, did you? I did. And I think I am the only person in the United States who had a good experience. Really? I normally go to bed like around midnight. So I'm like, yeah, whatever. We'll see what happens. So midnight rolls around. I open up Target, hit the button.

All good. I signed the next morning and everything's on fire and everybody's just like, like it took it out of my cart. They canceled my order later. Uh, yeah, it was, it seems like it was a disaster for everybody except for me. And so I'm so sorry. I don't even want to play Mario cart. Uh, I, I feel like I don't deserve to have had that experience. Um, but, uh,

Yeah, it seems to me that there is just like maybe fundamentally no way to open a web page and have like 10 million people hit it at once and just like execute it well. It's like this every single time this happens and it never goes well. And I don't know that there's a solution for it.

There is some really complicated infrastructural thing going on that I would love to know the answer to. Because one of the things that a bunch of folks on our team found was, I believe it was Antonio DiBenedetto. His wife just opened up the Target app and bought one. Just like nothing. Totally fine. Everybody else is like melting servers across America. And she just sort of like haphazardly wandered her way into a Switch 2. Do you think it's if you look like a bot, the bot honeypots trap you? And so like Jake doesn't look like a bot because...

He wasn't like, he didn't have like eight web pages open already. And Antonio's wife didn't look like a bot. She was like open target and was there. And he was like, oh, you're not a bot. Like, come on in. Meanwhile, Sean Hollister shared a screenshot of him with like every store on the internet open at the same time. Do you see what I'm saying? It's like, uh, you look more like a bot than not. Like, let's see how committed you are.

Because that's the real root of all the problem. Right. Is they all want to stop bot farms and scalpers. And it sounds like, Jake, you're going to become a flipper now. Oh, yeah. How dare you? I could take it or leave it. But even in ticketing, this is the problem. Yeah. You want to stop all these bad actors from automating their way into buying all the inventory and reselling it. And so it feels like that was happening with the Switch 2. Yeah.

But it also feels like now the people are starting to look like bots and getting sent into like bot hell. I mean, people are acting like bots, right? Because everybody knows that they're up against the bots. And so like everybody has a hundred tabs open and there's just like,

What is the solution to that? The solution to that is like, I mean, you build competent ticketing, like line waiting infrastructure. You have like a, I don't know, a randomized lottery system ahead of time, which didn't work. Nintendo was like, we'll issue invites. And then right before pre-order start, Nintendo was like, oh, just kidding. We might invite you like a long time from now. Well, did you see the numbers in Japan? It is incredible. So I think this is from Dom's article, uh,

I believe that in what was it, eight years ago when the original switch came out, it was something like they sold 360,000 switch units in Japan within the first month. And so, you know, who knows how they estimated how many they would need in Japan this time around. But they put out this press release saying.

Hey, we might not have enough for the lottery that we announced because 2.2 million people have applied, which I will say is a lot more switches than last time. So, yeah, I like no wonder they're having a hard time. There's also just the additional pent up demand of people.

I better lock in this price now before tariffs arrive. Oh, big time. Yeah. Yeah. Because like, I believe Nintendo, like a week ago or something like that, when they finally said, hey, we're going to start up pre-orders again. They have like a line in their press release where they're just like, this is the price for now. Yeah.

And it's like, yeah, like I don't blame them. I appreciate the like limited transparency there. Just they have no idea what's going to happen. Right. And I think it's there's a chance that not only is the price going to go up, but it might be much harder to get this thing at some point in the rest of the future. Like there is the sort of shock of the supply chain that is coming if and when all this tariff stuff becomes real.

rightly makes everybody nervous and we're already starting to see the fallout of some of that stuff it's interesting that the things that went up like major appliance purchases skyrocketed car purchases have skyrocketed we have a story about that and it and then there's like Nintendo switch to panic buying occurred like all all at the same time David appears you bought a Mac and for some reason I did

Uh, I, I went and, um, panic bot is a little strong, but like, it's a thing I was going to need to do in a year. And instead I just did it today. I bought a new MacBook air, um, that already, I have not even turned it on and has fingerprints all over it. Uh, so that's good stuff. But yeah, there is, there is a real, um, there is a real sort of lingering sense of like,

And many things have not changed yet, but the confusion just continues to get so much more confusing that like folks I talk to all the time are like, look, the only responsible thing we can tell you to do is if you want something, just go get it. Like it is, it might be fine. That's not advice I need to hear. No, but it like it, there is like a better than 50% chance that it will be fine. Yeah.

But it's not like a lot better than 50. Do you know what I mean? And so it's like, okay, if you're at a point where you need something, where it's sort of a coin flip of like, is it is it just going to be sitting on the shelf at this price for you in six months?

Yeah. I bought a Mac studio as I've been threatening to do for weeks on this show. Yeah. I bought a base model Mac studio and I upgraded the storage in it, which made it a custom order. And I watched that thing sit at the, at the dock in China going through customs, waiting to see. I watched the DHL shipping page. It's here. It's, it's, it's a delight. It's so much more computer than I need. Like,

Like every time I push it and the fan comes on, I'm like, I don't deserve this. How many local AI models are you running? Just all, it's just talking to me all day long. I'm actually, Nilay vibe coded me. I'm not here. Yeah. It's vastly more computer than me. And the old iMac is sitting here and I am going to, in fact, peel out the guts and try to make it a display. It's, I'm going to break it is what I'm going to do, but it's, it's, but I didn't need to buy it like you, David. I was like, at some point I'm going to do this. And then all this happened. And I don't know, I just,

I didn't need a lot of push. It sounds like you didn't need a lot of push. No, I needed exactly zero push. I needed a reason to be out of my house this morning is what I need. It worked out great. But it is a real thing. It's like I have a laptop that is kind of on its last legs and I'm

I would like to know that the laptop I need is the right thing. I mean, it's like I used to make fun of Walt Mossberg years ago because he bought, I think, like at least two, but maybe even several of the last MacBook Air before they put in the butterfly keyboard. And his excuse is always like, I might need another laptop and I don't want to have a crappy one. And I sort of feel that way now, too. Yeah.

I don't need this thing today, but I will need it eventually. And I would like it to be here. Well, the other thing is like, you know, the reason you wait is you think, okay, I'm going to like, the price is going to go down. And, and, and at the very least we know that is not going to happen. So if, if you're okay with suffering, whatever the standard price is, and you were just going to buy it like six months from now or a year from now, it's like, the gamble becomes a lot more appealing. Yeah. And we're, again, we're seeing this all over the place. And then we're also seeing, uh,

Just some companies opting out, right? Amber neck, which makes a bunch of game boy clones, which are questionably legal anyway. They're like, we can't do this anymore. Like they, they just halted all shipments. There's another one called Ayn, A-Y-N. They're pausing their shipments of basically game boy clones. Those companies were always under a threat. Like we, we've been talking and writing about those companies. Like they're in a very gray area legally where it feels like the addition of tariffs to their existing risk is

It's like, just makes that not a good business to be in. And so like, why wouldn't they just stop until they get some certainty? We have a big story about just general confusion in the auto industry about what parts of cars are going to get what tariffs from China. The Trump administration is pausing and unpausing tariffs. They've announced that they're in talks. And then the Chinese government said they're not in talks. You can watch the stock market just go up and down, just begging. Like literally the stock market is just begging for someone to tell them some, some good news.

i keep joking that all of cnbc right now is just a long podcast about a shitty chart and like i like it's great it's the most compelling television you can watch um because every day someone's like do you know what's going on this chart and ralph sarkin's like i don't know and like that's the whole that's eight hours of cnbc um elizabeth warren is basically asking apple if they finagled a tariff exception

Because that is corruption, like pretty straightforwardly. I would say we've have some reporting. It's not totally locked down that a lot of tech companies are asking for tariff exceptions. And this isn't just Tim Cook being special. We're trying to nail it down, but yeah,

That's just happening, right? Like different companies are getting different messages about what will get tariffed and what won't get tariffed. The major retailers like I think it's Walmart and Target and Best Buy all went to the White House and said our shelves will be empty and that the tariffs are pulled back. There's just a lot going on here that seems to indicate, like you're saying, David, that come a few months from now, there might not be stuff left.

Because no one is shipping things to the United States right now. Right. I think it was DHL, right, that just stopped taking deliveries to the U.S. over $800. Because, again, everybody is just at this point where it's like, we don't know what's happening. We don't know the rules. We don't know what it's going to be like tomorrow. And so the risk of literally putting something on a boat from China is too high because we don't know what the situation is going to be like when it gets there. Like, it's that high.

simple and crazy. And I will say it's worth pointing out over and over again that this is precisely the point, right? Like this is the thing that President Trump keeps saying is that this is all about leverage. He wants them to come to him and try to make a deal. The flying to Mar-a-Lago to beg him to make a tariff exemption so that he feels powerful and special. That's the whole point. And the confusion and the chaos is the thing that they are doing here on purpose.

But what we're seeing is it has just absolutely frozen everybody. Like I got a Bowers and Wilkins launched new headphones today. And I got an email from a comms person just like, you know, sending along the press release and a picture being like, hey, we launched a new thing. And it just says, due to the uncertainty of the tariff situation, pricing and availability are not available at this time. However, a notify me button will be placed on the Bowers and Wilkins website for customers who wish to purchase the product.

So literally the best you can do for a pair of headphones you want that a lot of people are gonna like and are gonna be very good is click a button that says, tell me when you know how much this thing is gonna cost. Like that's where we are. And we're starting to see that a lot of places that like over and over, we're just going to get things

that companies have made, but literally don't know if or how to sell them to you. Yeah. And that's wild. I think we're going to see a lot of companies waiting until the absolute last second to declare what their pricing is.

Because, again, like you don't even know if the day you announce your pricing, things are going to change. Right. That was the Nintendo thing, right? They launched it in, what, April? They launched it the day the tariffs were announced. Yeah. And for a product that's coming out in two months. And like I bet they regret that decision. Oh, yeah. Yeah. So Ryan Peterson is the CEO of Flexport, which is a?

Shipping software company. A lot of people use them to manage how things get across the world. He was just on Decoder. His Twitter feed is totally spicy. He's become everybody's like WTF tariffs guy. Because he's very spicy. He's very good. It's a fun episode. He's a fun listen. He is everywhere all the time now because he has all this data. So he tweeted yesterday in the three weeks since the tariff took effect.

Ocean container bookings from China and the United States are down over 60% industry-wide. And then just today he tweeted, the number of container ships sitting idle at the ports of Shanghai and Ningbo in China are double what they were a month ago. And then I think that is starting to spook people because there's reporting, and no one really knows, but Zeman Javers from CNBC is pretty reliable, says that

Treasury Secretary Scott Besson said the next step was China are no one thinks the current status quo is sustainable. One hundred forty five and one hundred twenty five percent. There will be a de-escalation and that should give you a sigh of relief. If you look at the number of container bookings between the United States and China, it's down 64 percent. The goal is not to decouple the United States from China. It's to de-escalate. So it's like, oh, they're just caving like nothing happened and they're just like walking it back.

But that means no one knows how much anything will cost. We're just seeing it across the whole industry. Products are being announced without pricing. People are rushing to buy things before tariffs hit. And all these companies are showing up at the White House basically asking for exemptions. And we don't know how those will be applied or not. It does seem like I should buy a car. Is that the next thing I should do? I do like reasons to buy.

I don't know what car we're going to buy. We're just at a point now where it's hard to know anything, right? And I think the funny thing about this Tim Cook news is that there is this overwhelming sense in the industry that Tim Cook is the only one. He's like the fixer who say what you want about Apple's creativity and its product development. Like my guy knows how to get things shipped.

Like that's, that's a thing Tim Cook is, is like historically great at. And, uh, it's just very funny that all of this stuff is happening and everybody's like, well, okay, there's a, there was an exemption for like chips and smartphones and computers. Like who makes all of those? And you can just sort of see like, there's, there's a real, like, you know, the silhouette of Tim Cook, like walking out of the West wing in a suit and he just like accomplished all of his goals. Uh,

I have no idea if Tim Cook did that. Yeah, no one knows. And there's a lot of confusion. In the first term, the way he accomplished that was by convincing Trump that if you put these tariffs on, somehow Samsung would beat Apple. And you can't have that. Right. Who knows what the mechanism there would have been. It was Bixby. It was Bixby.

It was Saturday Samsung. They're going to give you a free TV with every TV you buy, and somehow that will defeat Apple. But that was his argument. And Trump said it many times in his first term that I ease some of these tariffs back because they didn't want Apple to get defeated by Samsung. I'm not sure what anyone is saying now. The tariffs are across the board, like literally across the board to every country. And we don't know what's going to happen in these markets. So I think we're seeing a lot of...

A lot of rush to buy things. We've seen all those stories everywhere. And all that means is somewhere at the end of this, just like COVID, there'll be a giant fall. Yep. People will have the stuff. They will not need the stuff in the industry will not be evened out. Like there will not be even demand across the year or across years. It will be, oh, we bought everything in April of 2025. And so a year from now, no one will need anything.

And that is that's always rocky. It's so funny you mention that. I was thinking about this with Peloton just today. Like, Jake, to your point about the gigantic numbers in Japan, like if I'm Nintendo, do you look at this and say, OK, awesome, this is going to be a monstrous hit on proportions we had not even imagined. Let's go make a ton more of these things because because this is this is going to take over the world and we have won and we have to go chase that.

Or are we going to do the thing that Peloton did, which is look at a bunch of people who bought a thing all at once for mostly cultural reasons, as it turned out. This was like the beginning of the pandemic. And every person on Earth who had ever thought, maybe I should buy a Peloton, bought one all at the same time. They all did. And Peloton took that to mean, oh.

Sick. We are so much cooler than we thought we were. This growth will go on forever. And then what happens is you make a bunch of stuff. It's very expensive to store all that stuff. You don't sell it that very fast and it destroys your business. Like it's... Wait, wait. Peloton made an even bigger mistake. They bought Precore. They bought another company for its manufacturing capability. That's right. I forgot they did that. And then they were like, shit, we own Precore. Right. Yeah. Which...

Like we own these factories to make treadmills that no one wants. They have since recovered. They're like two CEOs since then. Yeah. Peloton's doing fine. But I do think, and it is, I actually...

feel for companies in a moment like this because it is so hard to know and you have to make so many of these decisions with such long lead times and things are changing so quickly that like god help anyone who has to make like you know multi-million dollar inventory decisions about 2027 right now which like people have to do that's a thing that's happening and it is it just all seems impossible

Also for the Switch, I think it's like maybe a little bit different just because of the timeline of that product. Right. Nintendo is selling effectively the exact same product they made eight years ago for the exact same price. They like change the chip once, but it's fundamentally the same thing. And it's doing fine still for them. Like, I don't know, like it's going to be a little bumpy, but like they'll be whatever they can just put out some more Switch one games like.

That's where all the money is for them. Yeah. No, I think you're probably right. Nintendo is probably as immune to this as just about anybody. But I do think in general, like this idea of like, oh man, all these companies have no idea how to plan for the future. Oh yeah, it's going to be really tricky. I have no idea what it's going to look like a year from now when people are, you know, have already bought everything or we just don't have any products. Yeah. Do you know what the all time number one, we thought the pandemic would be forever is?

mistake was. Ooh. I, I'm, can I, I'm guessing, I'm going to guess you're going with Verizon blue jeans. That's a good one. Uh, the CEO of Verizon wireless was on. He's like, yeah, that was a rounding error. So no, but the good one. Okay. Is it fancy webcams? Nope. Damn. What is it? No, it's so bad. It's so bad. It's so big. It's, it's so big. You can't see it.

Facebook renamed itself Meta. They're like, we're going to live. We're going to do cartoons. No legs. No one will ever go outside again. You know what, though? I think that's worked out for them. Everyone has forgotten that they're furious with Facebook. They've forgotten why it was renamed Meta because no one ever used Meta Horizon. Nobody's like, man, that thing. We sure stopped using that. Zoom, everybody's like,

Boy, that really like went in the bucket afterwards. Horizon, Horizon Worlds, whatever, is doing just as well as it ever was. That's certainly true. What was the one concert in Fortnite that just confused everyone? Do you know what I'm talking about? It was Travis Scott. It was Travis Scott. That's what it was. Yeah, they did Astro World in Fortnite. Yep. And I mean, just that day, like Mark Zuckerberg was like, everyone's going to be at home in headsets forever. Yeah.

And it's like, no, the kids really want to go outside. Like they want, they want to look at a Travis Scott concert at the concert. So just to give people some, some inside baseball here, when you're a reporter, one of the things that happens is anytime there is like a big, like,

moment of some sort, product launch, sort of cultural event, whatever. One of the things that happens to every reporter is a million people flood into their inbox offering some kind of quote about that thing. Like my CEO would love to talk about how this affects B2B ad sales or like whatever. That was one of those days that I distinctly remember being

The Travis Scott concert in Fortnite happens and I had a hundred emails the next day from people who were like, let me tell you why this just changed everything about how society is going to work. Yeah. And it was like, you're totally right. It was like, this is a moment and the world will never be the same afterwards. And it was. It went right back. That's this. What's staggering about all that is COVID was an external crisis. Yeah.

Like it happened and everyone reacted to it. And then however you experience COVID, like a number of behaviors changed. A really interesting one, for example, is we started Decoder before COVID and no one wanted to be on video. And now everyone's assumption is that they will be on Google Meet calls. Weird. That's just a totally a pandemic change that happened. Tariffs are a totally self-created mess. Like they woke up one day, they asked ChatGPT how to ruin the world economy. And like, here we are.

But the same kind of like ripple effects are happening. You can just see it. And, but no one, there's no behavior change around it. It's like on balance. It's, it's a little bit easier to convince David to buy a MacBook air that that's where we are right now. And that is, but that's not a permanent change. It's not like a, everyone got used to video conferencing over these two years, but you can see the companies are having to deal with it. And in kind of the same ways, I don't know, like there's just something that's,

I wish if I could go back before COVID and predict what would have happened, you maybe would have predicted everyone gets more comfortable with video calls and working from home. But there's this one, I'm just not sure what the change is other than everyone's kind of mad that they can't get a switch to. Right. Yeah. I mean, there's going to be like a long, long road of here's what happens when everything gets more expensive and harder to find. But in terms of this sort of, you know, one day to the next culture change, like,

Here's hoping we never go through that again. That was such a specific thing, but it does feel like in the sort of how do you plan for the next two years thing, we're in a surprisingly similar place. I mean, they really renamed the company Meta. Yeah.

They did it so much. We broke that news. That was us, right? Remember we broke Alex Heath broke that Facebook doesn't rename itself. There was a string of like local radio stations holding contests about what they should be in the company. And they're like meta for the metaverse. And here we are. It's a 25. I haven't put on a quest headset in a long time. It's all the same. Let us know if you are in a quest headset, looking at a party speaker right now, email us. You can for sure be on the first cast. Yes. Who are you?

All right, we should take a break. We got to come back. We got to talk about Meta, which is in court right now, potentially going to get broken up. Google is in court. Lots to talk about there. We're going to take a quick break. We'll come back, get into all of it.

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All right, we're back.

Which trial should we start with? Should we start with Google? Should we start with Meta? They're both so good. Let's do Google first, just because I'm like, I need to warm up to how much fun I found Kevin Systrom at the Meta trial. So let's do Google first. Yeah, Google's a little simpler. There's a game to be played here. Right now, Google is in the remedies phase on the search trial. It has lost the ad tech trial. If you want nitty gritty on what those trials were, what those cases were,

how they were constructed. Jonathan Cantor, who led the DOJ's antitrust division, was just done to Coder. We went through them in detail. So we'll hold off on the detail, but the remedies phase of the search trial, Google was found to have an illegal monopoly in search, partially because they pay a bunch of money to Apple and other companies for defaults in Safari and other places.

Now we're onto, what are we going to do about it? The government says, and David, you were there for this part of the trial. So I want to hear what this was like in person. The government says you got to sell Chrome and you got to make search interoperable. And this is happening literally in the same courthouse at which Meta is on trial to have to sell Instagram and WhatsApp. And Lauren Finer is like running between the courtrooms, which is hilarious to me. Yeah.

Let's talk about the Google piece. You were in the courtroom when the government sort of like made this big claim. What are the vibes? So I was there for opening arguments on Monday. And one of the funniest parts about it to me was how much of opening arguments were just the lawyers reminding the judge of what laws are. It's like, it's because there's a real sense of like, it becomes, I discovered this in the, in the course of like talking to people about this and being there that like reminding the

everyone at the beginning of a remedies phase that Google is a monopolist and it lost and it has been convicted and that that is no longer the question. That is the starting point was so important for the government, right? Because they're setting up this thing where it's not

a question of whether Google did the wrong thing. Google is going to appeal that and we will be litigating that for forever. But for the purposes of right now, Google is a convicted monopolist. That is, that is no longer in question. Uh, and so David Dahlquist, who did the opening arguments for, uh, the DOJ said that like over and over and over again, like every, every two sentences, he was like, well, because Google is a monopolist, uh, but he,

it was really interesting. And I think these two sides have had a long time to talk to each other and do discovery and figure things out and try to like understand what they want. And if anything, it feels like they're getting further apart from each other. Well, you're about as far as you can get right now. I mean, yes, but the, the DOJ's argument, I would, I would actually put it into three buckets. One is you have to sell Chrome. Um,

Uh, one is no more distribution deals of any kind. You, you cannot, you cannot give Apple $20 billion to make you the default search engine and Safari. Uh, they would just like to get rid of those deals entirely. Uh, and then number three is, is what you said about interoperable. They want Google to essentially white label Google search for anyone who wants it. Uh,

Google doesn't like any of those. Surprise. What Google wants essentially is to stop making exclusive deals. It would essentially like to take the word exclusive out of all of its contracts. And so the idea is, well, now anyone can play the games that we're playing. If you want to give Apple $20 billion, you're welcome to.

I would argue that is preposterous. That is also what the government argues. But the thing that I found most interesting is that it seems very clear to me that one of those three things that Google is most nervous about is the white labeling of Google. I think the Chrome thing is really interesting, and I want to talk about who might buy Chrome. But essentially, what is being asked of Google if the DOJ gets its way is to take

All of its data. So it's, it's search index, it's query data, which is like what people are actually sending. Um, even it's like ranking algorithms and systems and just package that up and give to any other search engine that wants it for, I believe the phrase is a marginal cost. Uh, what is that cost? Uh,

No one knows. It's up to some committee that will get appointed and Google would like a lot more clarification about that. But Google's argument is essentially we have spent 25 years building this and now you just want us to hand it to anybody with $10 and a designer and they can just have Google. And the DOJ is like, yes, that is exactly precisely.

what we were trying to do. David, do you think that... Is that the, like, we're going to ask for too much and then get a step back? Or do you think they, like, legitimately are like, no, this is the thing we want and this is the thing we should have happen? So I think... I still think Chrome is the ask for too much move. Oh, interesting. I think Chrome is more...

Like the DOJ, I think, is more serious about selling Chrome than I expected. But I think if the DOJ was going to give one of these up, it would be that one. But I think the argument that the government makes is essentially that if you just level the playing field starting now and you say, OK, everyone starting today has to play by the same rules. Google is so far ahead that it doesn't matter. Right. Like you're starting a marathon and you're saying you're both running a marathon, but Google gets to start 25 and a half miles ahead. Right.

But you can both run as fast as you want now. It's like that's not a fair race. And so what Google is saying is, well, OK, you're actually you're giving all of our competitors a giant leg up just because we're a monopoly. And the DOJ is saying, yes, that is the only way to rectify this thing that we're doing. So I I wondered if it was one of the things that the DOJ would be willing to get rid of. But listening to them talk about it, they're like, no, this is not just about stopping the monopoly. It's about rectifying the monopoly.

Like we have to they kept using the phrase antitrust antifreeze, which I hate. And it's a bad metaphor. And like they should stop. They were like, they like printed on T-shirts. It is. It's awful. They're like, what does that mean? So the idea is Google's conduct froze all of its competitors and basically like put a freeze on the search engine market. And they were like, I think it was David Dahlquist who was like, we want to we don't want to just, you know.

put the block of ice out to thaw. We want to light a fire under it. And then somebody else came up and he was like, antitrust, antifreeze. And I was like, guys, this isn't it. Like, this isn't doing what you think it is. I don't want to, I mean, I am this person and this is our audience and I'm just going to go for it. That's not how melting and freezing things work. Like, you don't pour antifreeze on ice to make it not melt.

You actually just whatever. OK, good job, government. You're doing great. But anyway, so all of this is to say, I think that that piece of it and what I left the courthouse wondering, and I'm curious what you all think of this, is if there is a middle ground in that one, if there is a way to, like, give some of its competitors a leg up so that they can compete without just making Google hand over the

25 years of trade secrets in order to prop up anyone who wants to build a search engine. Because like literally the way the DOJ is framing this is that like the three of us could design a front end with a search box and then just like pipe in a Google API and we would have Google. Like that, it's not all the way that, but it is pretty damn close to that. Well, their idea is that we would pay Google some fee. Yeah.

Right. For that service. And then we would have to then figure out a business model that made us paying that fee to Google worth it. Right. Like what they want is competition on that layer. Like there should be competition in search engines and there can't be right now because no one has the click stream from Google. No one has the raw volume of search data. So you got to get that somehow. Google can give it to you and then you can have like, then KG can be better or whatever. Right. That feels hard.

For a variety of reasons, because no one knows what the other business model is. The thing that gets me is, and you hear this now from a lot of antitrust people on both sides of the aisle, and it's fascinating that this is the Trump DOJ basically saying the same things Jonathan Cantor was saying.

We can't just fix the problem now. We have to change it so it doesn't happen again. We have to go back in time and unwind some of this. I think they call it a flywheel, right? You have Chrome. You collect all the click data from Chrome. That feeds into search. You get better search. You get all the click data from search. You direct traffic to websites. That's the problem. It's very hard for any external company to just replace one part of that. So you've got to break the whole thing up. But the real issue, and you just hear this a lot, is...

The complicated, you have to behave this way and we're going to watch you to make sure you act better is really hard, especially for the government because presidents come and go. People come and go. Like it's the private companies, especially huge private companies are very clever and motivated and finding ways out of the compliance rules that they were put in front of. And so breaking up the company, the quote structural remedy is just simpler. Yeah.

And now the argument that I've heard, like FTC commissioners who are coming on a decoder next week, the argument they're making is it's actually more democratic.

It takes the government out of your business. We just send Chrome off into the woods or you'd sell Instagram. And then that's a different company and we're done. Like the government's out of your hair as opposed to, we're going to watch your every move, which you kind of like the Trump administration is like, what if we watched your every move? Right. Like they have an, they have an inclination to be like up in your business. And so there's a little bit of a flip there, but.

I don't know if make the API interoperable, make search interoperable will play because Google will just preference itself again. They will find a way to do it. They will come to some settlement agreement and say, okay, our Google search experience is still slightly better than the one we sell to Microsoft. Yeah. Which I think one of the other things that DOJ really wants is that the sort of

cloud they get to put over google's head if they don't comply with all of these things and all and like live under the remedies correctly is to have to sell android uh like that's that's the that's the thing for non-compliance that's like in case of emergency yeah and and so i came to realize over the course of this that like they picked the biggest possible hammer that they could in order to say okay if if we don't think and again it's all very nebulous it's like if a

If just a bunch of people who have not yet been named decide that you're not doing a good enough job. And Google is like, we have questions about all of that. But they're like their compliance rule is Android. And that is the that is the real huge hammer hanging over Google if it goes through. My hottest take here is that in 36 months, Google, as we know, it does not exist. It sure seems like it. Like whether it's the government that does it, whether Google reconfigures itself somehow. Yeah.

Whether the thing that sort of happened to Microsoft in the 90s happens, like Microsoft had all these cases and all these, but Microsoft ended with a big consent decree. They were going to break up Microsoft into, I think they called it Apps Co and OS Co, which is horrible names. Apps Co is the one that was like on the cover of Time. Like what's Apps Co? It's like very silly. And then the, you know, George Bush got elected and,

The Clinton DOJ went away and they settled the case with this big consent decree that said Microsoft had to not preference its own apps and stuff on Windows. And that just led to like years of headaches that allowed like Google to exist and Apple to make this like roaring comeback on the strength of the open web, which is the only reason the iMac is any good. Like Apple came back because the web browser supplanted Windows as an app platform.

now we have Apple. But if that hadn't happened, why would you buy an iMac? Right? So all of that happened because Microsoft was kind of distracted and then Bill Gates will tell you that's why they missed mobile. Although I don't think that's the case at all. I saw their mobile phones, you know, um,

I'm just wondering like 36 months from now, three years from now, what will have Google been distracted by? Google is not like a monster of execution right now. Yeah. So the government breaks it up. Google breaks itself up. Larry page shows back up and is like, I don't know, spin off YouTube. Like something is happening that changes this company as we know it in the next three years. Yeah. I think it's, it's possible that the

the big tech companies now just have like a different level of resources than any of those companies did back then, that they're so entrenched and so much bigger and have so much more money that they can walk and chew gum at the same time in that respect. But I mean, to your point, we're seeing it now, right? Like Google is already not operating at full capacity because it has been

has been fighting these fights. And you see leadership is changing and moving around, and this company is relentlessly trying to figure out what kind of company it's supposed to be, which is a lot as all of this is happening. And of course, Google's argument is that AI is that thing, right? Like what the web and what mobile were to Microsoft then was

AI is now. And they're running the same playbook. Yeah. It says in a trial it was revealed that Google is paying Samsung, quote, an enormous sum to pre-install Gemini. Yep. Like they're just doing what they do. Yeah. And so the DOJ is like, no, we have to stop Google from doing this so that it doesn't do it again. And Google is like, well, ChatGPT is doing just fine. And so that isn't a real problem. Like this is the fastest growing consumer technology in history. And

Google is not getting in its way. So I think where that shakes out in this trial is going to be really fascinating. But there's been a lot more AI already in court than we expected. Like the very first witness after opening arguments was an AI expert who literally just spent like an hour and a half explaining terms about AI to the court.

which I thought was so interesting. I might be jumping ahead a little bit here, but the AI thing is really fascinating when it comes to Chrome because the big companies to be like, "Oh, I buy Chrome." They're AI companies. They're all looking for a gateway in, and those gateways are Google products, right? It is Chrome. It is Google's search index.

They would leap at this opportunity because Google is still the gatekeeper. They are still the biggest surface. They're winning because they keep putting their own stuff on that surface. And I think these AI companies know no matter how good their product is, you just cannot replace that.

Well, you said the big AI companies. I just want to peel that apart a little bit. OpenAI said they would buy Chrome. They said that in court, right, David? Or they filed a document saying they would do it. And then Perplexity...

which is just a very different scale than OpenAI, was like, yeah, we'll do it too. But Perplexity is also like, we'll buy TikTok. Perplexity is a SPAC with an AI arm attached to it. Like, they will buy Peloton if it comes up for sale. So, look, I don't know if Perplexity can afford it. I don't know if Perplexity can afford TikTok. They do have some revenue. I tweeted that I don't have any revenue. It was a joke. They do have some revenue that's growing. But OpenAI is the big dog. Yeah. Right? Sam Altman's like, what if I had a trillion dollars? And a lot of people are like, what if you did?

What they would get is distribution, which is the thing they all need. Right. If you're up against Apple on the iPhone and Apple can just be like, you're going to use Siri until we make it good. You're kind of stuck. Right. But if you're in Chrome, literally looking at all of the web pages that people are using and all of the things they are typing into all of the text boxes across the internet, well, you have a lot of power.

Right. That's huge. And then you can put the AI system or the chatbot right in front of all the users all the time, which is stuff other browser makers are trying to do. That's basically what the Arc browser is going to become, right? Yeah. Who else could buy Chrome? Well, it was really interesting listening to the lawyers in opening arguments try and make the case that

Chrome is a really good business because the thing Google says, and the thing I've heard a bunch is, uh, the browser business as a standalone business actually really sucks. Uh, that a browser has lots of value and is hugely useful. And the, like you said, the distribution is ridiculous. Uh, the, the DOJ's estimation was that Chrome has four and a half billion users, which is, would make it the biggest platform on the internet by like a pretty wide margin. Um,

But people don't pay for browsers. They put up a thing where they're like, here's how you monetize. And the first thing they came up with was ads, like the Mozilla Firefox ads that you see. And I'm just sitting there in listening to this being like, yeah, and how's that going for Mozilla, which gets all of its money from a Google default search deal. Like, it's just that is very hard to pull off. And then they came around to, well,

what if an AI company just took out the Google search box and put in their chatbot? And that is the answer. It's the only way, right? It becomes the thing that I use to interact with chat GPT that I spend $20 for, right? It's different than it is for Google because there's nowhere that you pay money. Google's flywheel just exists sort of next to Chrome and you access it

by constantly typing searches into the Chrome bar, which is why it's a perfect and unbeatable business. But that is the whole pitch, as far as I can tell, is it gives you massive distribution. It puts you in front of

most of the population of the earth already, even if it doesn't grow, it's like, it is an unparalleled thing to just be able to put your stuff in front of. It does, it gets you browsing data, it gets you all kinds of stuff, but it will have to be in service of something else. And even the DOJ is like, this is not going to be a business by itself. You're not just going to be able to start charging $10 a month for Chrome and that's going to work. Like they understand everything

That it has to be in service of another thing in order to work. And I found that really fascinating. It's funny. You can do the TikTok exercise. You can come up with this list of potential acquirers for TikTok. But it's pretty vast, right? I keep putting Walmart on that list. Walmart should buy TikTok and then the TikTok shop won't.

Feel quite like being mugged in the way that it does today. Like, have you heard of Vivo or you will now? Like there's something happening there. This is just dark. Yeah. And maybe Walmart can just like take it and run it and have a young audience and compete with Amazon. Like you can build a pretty wide aperture for TikTok. I don't, who buys Chrome? Is this just open AI and perplexity? Like why would Apple buy Chrome?

I think Apple should buy Chrome. Hear me out. Really? Okay. Yeah. Safari is a garbage browser. Chrome is probably the most used software on Macs and is the worst running piece of software on Macs. They fixed that. They've just doubled the battery life on MacBooks. And who needs a Surface for when they eventually have a good AI application? Apple. Wait, they have the biggest Surface in history. They have the iPhone. Yeah, but you put it on Chrome too. Now it's everywhere. You know what more people use than use iPhones, Nealey? Is it Chrome? Chrome.

Right. But Apple doesn't care. Can you imagine whoever is Craig Federighi being like, we got to work on Windows Chrome, you guys. Like, that's your job. The very funniest outcome here would be that Apple buys Chrome just to shut it down. And they claim it's in the interest of the user experience on the Mac. They're like, we don't want people using bad browsers on Apple devices. So we're just going to kill Chrome. Yeah. Apple does not want the web to be a great application platform because they want iOS to be their application platform. Yeah.

Like there's a, there's something happening with Safari that is often overlooked, but it's like Safari is,

just has a wall of capabilities that prevents web apps from competing with iOS apps. So again, I hear you. I bought a Mac studio just to run Chrome. 10 years from now, it'll still be running Chrome, but not well. Yep. And listen, they're going to need to build a search engine once those search deal exclusivities, that exclusivity cache stops coming through Chrome. So, but that's it. That's the argument to license

Google, if you're Apple, you can quickly, and all this goes through, you can quickly build a better, more interesting search product into Spotlight or Siri or whatever because you have the back end of Google to support it in a way that has to be inoperable. It doesn't mean you have to buy Chrome. I'm not saying this is a wise decision. Okay, but that's the argument. Jake, you valiantly made the argument, which was increase the better left on MacBooks. Microsoft. Wouldn't work.

I mean, they even said in court, Microsoft, Meta, Amazon, basically out for antitrust reasons. Who can buy? What is, I don't understand this. It literally, the longer I think about this, the more it might literally just be open AI.

There's a really interesting case to be made. I'm just naming big companies. Exxon. What? It becomes the Rivian exclusive browser. No, I think there's an interesting case to be made that if all of this goes against Google, the single company that stands to benefit the most is OpenAI. And it's...

It has the cash to do it. It doesn't have the antitrust worries to do it. It can raise money infinitely, clearly. It would hugely benefit from access to Google's search data. One of the things that an OpenAI person said in deposition was basically you can get to 80% of Google's search quality pretty easily, and the last 20% is useless.

virtually impossible and just absolutely impossibly expensive. And this is the thing I've heard from anyone who wants to build search. You can build a pretty good search engine by yourself. But the difference between a pretty good and a Google level search engine is many years and hundreds of billions of dollars or Google is forced to give it to you, right? And so OpenAI immediately starts to solve that quality gap, maybe gets a browser out of it and suddenly goes from having

not distribution problems, but like it has to win its distribution to suddenly just having it. And like it, it would be in a very funny way, raising one competitor in particular out of all of this, like up to Google's level. It's just funny that like literally a TikTok, I can make an argument for almost any company to buy TikToks. Yeah. Sunkist should buy TikTok. Like, fine, give me enough time. I'll get there. And the orange company should buy TikTok. Yeah.

It's hard to make an argument for any company to buy Chrome because the business model doesn't make a lot of sense. You can sort of make a like browsing data argument that is interesting, but not at the price it would cost to get it right. Like having access to everyone's browsing data is,

Is very valuable and would be to lots of people. But I think buying and running Chrome is probably not the most efficient way to get there. Or at least the way that Google runs Chrome, which to its credit is in a like reasonably open way. Mm hmm.

Like, I think people think of web browsers like document viewers, but they're actually application platforms. They're little operating systems now, right? They have different memory between tabs. Your apps are literally running them and obviously in the cloud as well. Like that's where apps run on desktop computers for most people. And Google has to manage that. They have a commitment to the web being open, which is good. If you buy Chrome, you don't have to do any of that. You can just say your app will run even better in Chrome if you pay us some money.

And like, there's all these other things you could do to make that money, which seemed bad. And in addition to offloading Chrome, the government wants Google to offload the Chromium project, which is it's it's like ostensibly but not really open source browser project that it oversees and funds and also powers every other browser that you probably use at this point. Like,

Edge is Chromium. Arc is Chromium. Brave is... Everything on the web at this point, except for Safari and kind of Firefox, is Chromium. And so you end up at this point where we would be changing the way that the underlying infrastructure of how people use the internet belongs to somebody else. And maybe there's a devil-you-know, devil-you-don't thing going on here, but for all of its flaws, Google has been a pretty good steward of...

browsers over the years. Yeah. We give Chrome a lot of crap, but like the reason web chat is very good and video looks really great in your browser is in large part thanks to work that Google did and then gave to the ecosystem. Like that stuff is that stuff matters. It's funny because the reason they did that was to ensure Google search could see everyone's data. Well, sure. Like this idea. I mean, like they're they were always aligned.

Yeah. The alignment was good for the most part. Like let's build open web platforms for everything and make sure everything is standards compliant. Also that will ensure that our systems can crawl everything and see everything. Right. Great. And now we're just like, if you break that apart, maybe, maybe there's not so much incentive for things to be open. I have no idea what's going to happen here. I just think it's fascinating that, I mean, I don't know what's going to happen with TikTok either. It's just really interesting that,

That you should buy and run TikTok seems like a simpler problem than you should run Chrome, which does not have like content moderation issues or like the Chinese government hating Donald Trump issue. Like, but it's like, oh, that's way harder. Like we should buy TikTok. Is this because like TikTok, there's like a clear business model. Chrome, the business has to be something else, right? Yeah.

Unless you're just going to have a bunch of pop-ups on every single new tab screen, you fundamentally need to have another business that you are boosting with Chrome, which means you just need to have a pretty good business already that could use that distribution. And you have to have a bunch of extra cash. And that's just a really weird situation to be in. Maybe it's Walmart. Every new tab screen is just a bunch of recommended products to buy. At the end, Walmart buys everything. Wait, wait, wait. Hear me out. Taboola.

Oh, God. Oh, well, that's the end of the internet, everybody. Okay, so that's one trial. We don't know what's going to happen. That's ongoing. We're going to keep covering that one really deeply. Simultaneously, in the same building, Meta's on trial. And that might result in the breakup of Instagram and WhatsApp. I would say that one started out sleepy. I got a note today from an executive in the industry who says we complain too much about market definitions with Alex Heath last week.

uh, it doesn't matter as much. The judge is going to decide whatever. And that it's the emails and Kevin Systrom on stage saying meta tried to choke Instagram after it acquired it, that will win the day. I have done a one 80 on this trial in the span of seven days. Okay. Tell me why. I,

left last week basically being like, the government doesn't know how to categorize meta and it's going to tank its case, right? Like meta is very deliberately all things to all people. And that is a very hard thing to put a market definition on. And if you can't have a good market definition, you can't call it a monopoly. And meta is not a monopoly on the internet. And so it's like that there was just that fundamental disconnect that it was like, maybe

Maybe the case against Meta is going to hinge on wrapping its arms around Meta, and that's going to be very hard to do. But then Kevin Systrom gets on the stand and just spends a day just throwing darts at every other executive at Meta, Mark Zuckerberg in particular. Kevin Systrom, famously the founder of Instagram, one of the co-founders of Instagram. Yeah, sold Instagram to Facebook, then called Facebook, for a billion dollars. Obviously, Instagram is Instagram. And

Mark Zuckerberg's argument before Kevin Cichrom took the stand is essentially that Instagram is only Instagram because of this company, that we have the resources, we poured fuel on the fire, it grew because of us, like on and on and on. And we talked last week about it's actually hard to prove otherwise. And then Kevin Cichrom came and

sat on the stand and said otherwise over and over and over again, that actually what happened was Instagram came aboard and was starved for resources that Mark Zuckerberg saw Instagram as a threat. And so took stuff away from it in order to prevent it from growing and killing Facebook. And this is a thing we've heard kind of intermittently over the years is that like Mark Zuckerberg runs a big company, but like Facebook is his special baby and anything that threatens the Facebook platform cannot be allowed to do that. Like,

Like that tracks with what we know of his personality and history, that Facebook, the thing, is more important to him than anything else in his empire. And so Systrom just gets up there and basically for like a whole day was just like Instagram was killing it. And then we continued to kill it more or less in spite of the company that acquired us, which, by the way, got an unbelievably great deal in doing so.

Do you think Mark Zuckerberg uses Facebook? No. I mean, he posts on Facebook. What is there for him to use? Like, is he looking at all the AI generated memes? I've heard this thing that he loves Facebook and I'm sure he loves the charts and graphs that say he's rich. You know, like Facebook makes so much money that when they think they're going to have a bad quarter, like PMs can just like turn knobs to make the revenue targets. Like it's nuts. The scale and the power of Facebook. Right.

But if you say to someone, I heard someone say this today on the train, he sounds like he reads a lot of Facebook. He sounds like he spends a lot of time on Facebook. And I was like, I know exactly what that means. And it's bad. Yeah. It's not right. It's not good.

And it's like, do you think Mark Zuckerberg is just like Facebook brained? Like that would be horrible. And that it's whatever Instagram is, whatever it's becoming now full of AI slop for a minute. It was cool. Right. It's still, it still has a place in the culture. That's very important. Yeah. In a way that Facebook, the only reason I use it is because like the parents group at the school is on Facebook.

Okay, but if I'm going to psychoanalyze Mark Zuckerberg here for a moment... Also, sometimes I type Mustang in a marketplace and I just think about the lives I could lead. That's it. I've been shopping for patio furniture on Marketplace and it is not a great time. I'm just saying, if you want to buy a mid-2000s Terminator Cobra, you can find one on Facebook Marketplace. Continue. Okay, so if I'm going to psychoanalyze Mark Zuckerberg for a second, which feels dangerous, I think...

What is true of Facebook and Meta at large is that the wrap on the company is that all Meta has ever done is copy, that it is a very successful and ruthless fast follower, right? That

what it is in many ways is a collection of other people's good ideas executed on at larger scale, except Facebook. Mark Zuckerberg did Facebook, right? Like that is, that is a real thing that he holds onto. And I think if you're Mark Zuckerberg and you are this like business tycoon who is sort of known for being a monster as much as you are like a great coder, uh,

Facebook is the thing that you did. And I think that is forever really meaningful to someone like he doesn't. Sure. He doesn't get credit for Instagram the same way. He doesn't deserve credit for Instagram the same way. Same with WhatsApp. Like those are part of his business empire, but they're not like things that he did. And I think the world sees it that way. And I would I would bet that he sees it that way, too. But like in the context of this, they also launched threads. Right. And threads is was a copy of Twitter. It now is a weird parallel ecosystem thing.

It's still creators doing prompts all day long. Yeah. But the prompts are getting darker and weirder. Like, tell me five people you hate. Something like, what is happening on threads? And they, Atomisery just launched their CapCut clone edits. Instagram is getting ready for TikTok to go away. Yes. And they're doing it by cloning all the rest of TikTok's features. They're doing it by turning threads into more of a posting platform. They're building a creator marketing platform

platform that still has nothing to do with Facebook as far as I can tell. Like all of the interesting things that are happening at Meta are happening in the threads Instagram zone, but nothing is happening. It's like if you care about it the most, like why don't you have any ideas for it? Well, there's that. I mean, I think to some extent that's

a view that is easy to hold for people of a certain age in the United States, right? Which are like Facebook's least engaged demographic right now. But it is true that you go lots of other places around the world and Facebook is much more like central to culture and it's very important. But also...

To your previous point, Facebook is now so big that I think you can't mess with it. And like we've even seen in the trial last week, Zuckerberg used to have all these wild ideas. What if we reset everybody's friend count every year and made them rebuild it from scratch? Which the more I think about it is an idea that I love. And I think all of social media should maybe adopt this. Like on January 1st every year, you just start from a clean slate and have to do it again. Amazing. Should do that. But like,

Increasingly, it is like it's both sort of too big to fail and also too big to do anything with. So it's just kind of left over here by itself. Kevin's system showing up and saying, I could have done this. No problem. I think is, to your point, devastating to Meta in this case.

Because he's very confident that he could have succeeded here. But David, you were saying that like market definition is not going to be important. But it sounds like you're saying that actually what matters in the end is people just don't like Facebook, right?

Right. And like, is that enough to get a judge to agree that it is a monopoly? Like I still just fundamentally write Instagram could have been great on its own. Sure. Sure. That's fine. But that doesn't make meta a monopoly today, does it? But it's not today. It's not today. This is actually as I've done more reporting on this and talk to more people, the.

The thing that the government is trying to argue as clearly as it can is the bad thing that happened is Mark Zuckerberg saw upstart competitors and tried to kill them.

And here now are the founders of those competitors showing up and saying, we got bought, they paid the money, and this argument that they supercharged our growth is just fiction. Because actually what there was was jealousy and a reduction in resources. And we would have raised money or grown on our own or been more innovative. But instead I fought these political battles. Which is a tricky argument because like-

scoreboard, right? Like, look at Instagram. You can't argue that Instagram has not been a huge success. That's just, that doesn't work. But Systrom got up there and was basically like, we succeeded against the wishes of our acquirer, which I think to your point, Eli, is if that argument is successful, that's the argument that wins this case. Yeah. By the way, Meta, you know, Andy Stone from Meta is out there being like, look at all this nice stuff Kevin Systrom has said in the public in the past. And it's like, well, dude, he wasn't

on in court under oath, like totally free to say whatever he wants. Like he worked for you. Of course he said nice things. He's also got his fuck you money now in like a very real way. I mean, that's the dream, right? Is to sell the company for a billion dollars. And then like years later show up and be like, you were a dick. Yeah. That's again, that one's very clean. I can see it. I can see how Instagram survives as a business all on its own.

I can't quite see how WhatsApp survives as a business on its own. But the most interesting thing about that conversation is the founders of WhatsApp had no intention of being a big business. And Zuckerberg was like shocked by anything he said. They, they lacked ambition. Yeah. They just weren't happy doing their thing. And they had, they were like a small team that was massively successful. They probably would never have been a, whatever it was, $21 billion business that they ended up selling for. Um,

But yeah, they were fine with that. And in a really funny way, that gave them tons of leverage. It also turns out that this is the other thing that came up in court was that absolutely everyone wanted to buy WhatsApp. We kind of knew that at the time, but Google kicked the tires. I think Twitter at the time kicked the tires. It was very clear that this was going to be a thing. And it gave...

WhatsApp a lot of leverage and credibility, but it also put Meta in a position of being like, oh, this thing is a huge threat to us as being validated. We have to go get it right now. Wow. I don't know what's going to happen in this one. The twists and turns day by day in this trial, you know, there's a very old cliche in like lawyer world that if you don't have the law on your side, you argue the facts and you don't have the facts. You argue the law and if you don't have the facts, you pound the table. This is like a joke. And it feels like Meta doesn't have the facts.

So they're really focused on these very hyper-technical legal arguments. And then it's also just like the Trump FTC is in charge of this trial. And Mark Zuckerberg's in the Oval Office, like throwing money around, like no idea what's going to happen here. But it does seem like my prediction with Google is 36 months, totally different company. One way or another, 36 months from now, 36 months from now, what do you think meta looks like? Jake, what do you think? I think they're going to walk out of this. I think they're going to be fine.

It's a confusing technical trial. And I don't know how much the Trump White House is committed to this thing. Yeah. I keep saying it's the most legible one. It's very hard to explain Google ad tech to people. But it's so funny because I still feel like

This trial is, we don't like Meta. We don't like Mark Zuckerberg. That is valid. Very legible. That is very, very, very real. But I don't know. Is it against the law? You're so unlikable, it's illegal. That's tough. Right now in the American legal system, edging closer to being a viable position. We'll see. We'll see. David, what's your prediction? I...

I think what Meta should do and genuinely might is just spin off Instagram of its own volition. I think that solves this problem. You can't spin out WhatsApp in the same way. But I think it agrees to a settlement where it spins off Instagram and actually wins just as much because Instagram would be fabulously successful on its own. Do you think there's like a movement inside Meta that's like, let Miss Ferry cook?

Yeah. I kind of, I mean, most areas been cooking, right? Like it's, it's not nothing that he has been out in front of this company for a pretty long time now. He pioneered the chain. Yeah, exactly. So another thing that Mark fast followed, uh,

I mean, I've been saying this for months on the show that these companies should break themselves up before the government does it for them. And I could buy that. But they're too proud of a company to do that. Can I just say real quick, I just want to shout out two people before we get off this topic. One is Lauren Feiner, who has been in court. It's multiple courtrooms at a time all week and has been doing awesome work for us all over the website. The other person is Dirk Stoop.

who was a former product manager on the Facebook camera team, who was called up to testify in this trial and was basically asked a series of questions that amounted to why was Facebook camera so bad that they had to buy Instagram? And that's tough. And I just want to say to Dirk that you did your best, and I'm very sorry. Big shout out to Lauren, by the way. We would have had her on the show, but she's in court right now. Yeah.

Yeah, literally the next time Lauren comes out of the D.C. Circuit Courthouse, we will have her on the show. Yeah, but she's killing it. All right, we've got to take a break. I'm going to rest up for the lightning round. You let us know. You tell me what you think. Email us. 36 months from now, what do these companies look like? I'm dying to know. All right, we've got to take a break. We'll be right back. I think you're on mute. Workday starting to sound the same? I think you're on mute. Find something that sounds better for your career on LinkedIn.

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We're back. It's time for the lightning round. Unsponsored for Flavor. We've gotten some t-shirt designs. I'm pretty excited about them. Today, I had a meeting with a platform executive and he asked me some business questions. And I was like, I don't know. I talked to our publisher, Helen. She's very smart. And he was like, you don't get involved in your business? And I was like, no, what I sell is our ethics policy. He goes, oh, that's very royal. And it was a real interaction I had. And I was like, it is very royal. That's what we sell here.

Cause it, you know, it's like high and mighty. That's what he meant. Oh, not like of the Royals. I was like, I don't think so. He didn't mean that like me and Meghan Markle have anything in common. He meant that you sound like Thomas Turk. And I was like, I am in fact, very, very precious about the fact that you can't pay me to say anything.

Unless he's sponsoring the lightning round, in which case, let's talk. It's time for our new segment in the lightning round, Nilay versus Meghan Markle. Who wore it best? It's time to get some clicks on YouTube, my friends. Let's do it. We're going straight into celebrity coverage. All the latest in celebrity defamation. I don't know anything about that. She does have a podcast, I think. So technically she is our enemy now. So.

Did she win the Webby for best technology podcast? She did not, Duchess. Yeah. All right. Her USBC takes were just, they're out of left field, did not make any sense. I know. The people weren't buying it. But I think the audience knows, I think Suits is a horrible show. All right, we have to stop talking about Meghan Markle. Ooh. All right. David, is it time? It's time. It is time.

Once again, for the 2026 Webby winning podcast within a podcast, we're going to win so hard. We create a category just so we can win it. Brendan Carr is a dummy. Neil, what do you got? Brendan had a, he had a quiet week. He did. He had a quiet week. He went to a satellite company in Texas with Ted Cruz and said he was bringing American innovation back in a way that required him to say Ted Cruz is like cool and smart.

Again, I think Brendan's a dummy, so he got hoodwinked by Ted Cruz and having to say Ted Cruz is cool and smart. So that happened. The really interesting things that happened with Brendan this week amount to who he will talk to and who he will not talk to. Okay. The thesis of the Trump administration this time around is, what if corruption was cool? Right? You can see it all over the place. Yeah.

What if Mark Zuckerberg gives Trump a million dollars? Is that enough to settle a lawsuit? The answer is no. So we're going to find out if it's $2 million. There's just a lot of what if corruption was cool happening in this administration. So the first one is just so funny. Who is Brandon meeting with? Well, he's meeting with his old boss, Ajit Pai, who is in the White House and at the FCC this week. In his new role as president of the CTIA, which is the wireless industry's number one lobbying group.

And they're posting selfies together. So here's the FCC posting selfies with his old boss, who is now the top lobbyist for the wireless companies that Brendan regulates. Just openly corrupt. Like, it's just like hilariously corrupt, right? Like, these guys are supposed to be on opposite sides of the fence.

And there's always a weirdness, right, with the regulator and the companies that regulate. Because the regulator wants the companies to be successful. We all want the wireless companies to, like, have good networks and charge reasonable rates and all this stuff. And you're like, no, that's a GPI. Like, he's the one who was like, you know what we should do? We should create DISH network. Like, it doesn't make any sense at all. None of this makes any sense. Like, what if we went from having lots of competitors to three and then a fake network that ran something called OpenRAN that doesn't work?

Every day, the CEO of Verizon wakes up thinking about Dish Network. Like, it's just a fake. It's a totally fake situation. But he's in the office, Ajit Pai, taking selfies together. You know who he's not meeting with? David Ellison, who wants to buy Paramount and CBS. Reporting in Puck this week.

Brendan, who has threatened CBS, Trump has threatened CBS over 60 minutes, news distortion, all the censorship he wants to do saying, I want to have investigations into CBS and how it works. Well, the potential acquirer of Paramount and CBS, David Ellison, whose father is Larry Ellison, notable Trump donor can't get Brendan on the phone. Interesting. That's a weird one because, uh, I mean, the other news this week was, uh,

Bill Owens, the executive producer of 60 Minutes, quit basically because he was like, I have become a corporate problem. And

Because of all the like journalistic shenanigans of the parent company, he was like, I can't I can't be here anymore. And all of this is being done in this incredibly crappy, shady, anti-journalistic way so that Brendan Carr will take David Ellison's phone calls. That's the whole point of all of this is we are going to write giant settlement checks so that they let the deal go through. Yep.

And it's just, it's just not happening. What if corruption worked, right? It's the answer is the check isn't big enough. The capitulation hasn't been big enough. There's a bill Owens, a 60 minutes producer. So I can't produce the show in an independent way anymore. I've got to go. The corporate pressure on the news division is too high and it's still not enough. And so the thesis is, and this is in the, in the puck article, we'll put it in the show notes, uh, is legally, this is all bad.

These are clear violations of the first amendment for the FCC to say, we'll launch an investigation in 60 minutes for Donald Trump to say last week, I think Brennan Carr should pull CBS's broadcast license because they didn't like the coverage. You take that to court, you're going to win.

Right. That that's just violations of the first amendment. Straightforwardly news distortion does not mean I don't like it. Like there's, there's a real standard there. There's a jurisprudence. These cases aren't brought very often because they're incredibly hard for the government to win for good reason. Right.

Because the First Amendment exists. But they have no intention of winning it. They have every intention of getting a check and an apology. What they want is power. So you don't take the call and you make the person do more and more stuff to bend to your will to get what you want. And this is the thesis now. He will meet with Ajit Pai in his office, take selfies together to give the wireless companies more spectrum because they spend a lot of money on lobbying.

But he won't meet with David Ellison, whose deal he's blocking on totally specious grounds so that CBS will put even more pressure on his news division. That is just censorship stuff. That is just Brendan trying to shift what is acceptable public debate in his role as a government regulator of speech.

As always, this is a disaster for the First Amendment, for American civil liberties. And you can see at some point the rich people who want to buy CBS, who own the networks, should start fighting back. Because when they are fighting back in other parts of the government, when Harvard fights back in the Trump administration, they start to cave. But no one's really pushed back on Brendan yet, at least from...

The industry. But the thing that's starting to happen that I think is fascinating is the other commissioners of the FCC, former commissioners of the FCC, are starting to push back very loudly. So Anna Gomez, who is a Democratic commissioner of the FCC, is going on tour. She's actually I think she's starting today as we record. She's going on tour to protect the First Amendment.

It's called the First Amendment Tour to Challenge. What a cool thing to say, by the way. I'm going on tour to protect the First Amendment. The tour is called the First Amendment Tour to Challenge Government Censorship and Control. So she announced it today. She's having events all over the country. She says the FCC is being weaponized under Brendan Carr to attack freedom of speech in the media and telecommunications sector instead of focusing on its core mission, connecting the public, protecting consumers, and supporting competition.

I feel like we can't say clearly enough that that is from another FCC commissioner. From another FCC commissioner. His colleague. Weird. They go to the same office.

They park their cars next to each other. And she's like, hey, you're a weird threat to America. I mean, they actively work together closely. It's unclear. Under normal circumstances. It's unclear. With the FCC, I've covered the FCC for a long time. Until Brendan got there, this was never a bunch of fire breathers. It's a bunch of gray suit government lawyers being like, we need to allocate the spectrum efficient. And now they're like a censorship machine. And you can see it took a while for

For everyone else to be like, oh, this is really bad. They had to shake off the character they were supposed to play and adopt these new characters. Anna Gomez silencing dissenting voices is not a show of strength. It's a sign of fear. We must continue to speak out against the growing campaign of censorship and control before this dangerous new normal becomes the status quo. That's her talking about nominally her boss. Yeah. Weird.

But this is like if you ever discover the podcast I have where I just say mean things about you the whole time like that, then I think you will see some signs of fear. Crazy, right? Like this is happening in the government right now. Sitting commissioners, the FCC, who might be illegally fired by Trump. He's already illegal fire, legally fired commissioners at the Federal Trade Commission. He's threatened to illegally fire Powell at the Fed.

She's speaking out. Good for her. She's welcome. If you want to on tour, you want to stop with us in the cutter. We'd love to have you commission. Former commissioner Tom Wheeler is out with peace and lawfare this week saying Brendan Carr is moving to break foundational principles of American government and democracy.

I've met Tom Wheeler. Tom Wheeler has been on Verge shows before. Go back and just look at a picture of Tom. Like, look at him. Watch his interactions with me as I push him on things. He is not a you're going to break foundational principles of American government and democracy editorial writer. He is not a bomb thrower. He is. He was a government regulator of spectrum. Famously, he came from the industry. People criticized Obama for revolving door hiring wheels.

And here he is saying Carr's actions mark an unprecedented expansion of government intrusion into free speech and a direct assault on those engaged in promoting equal opportunity. They undermine the constitutional balance of power by bypassing co-equal branches of government to enlarge presidential authority through self-serving presidential decree. For a high-level bureaucrat, that is like screaming swears as loudly as you possibly can. Again, I've known Wheeler for a long time. Just listen to him talk to me about anything in the past.

gaze upon him, perceive Tom Wheeler. And he's like, yeah, you're doing some dictator stuff, man. That's not normal. So there's some pushback against Carr this week. Again, he was in Texas having to pretend that Ted Cruz is hip and cool. But I'm happy to see Commissioner Gomez and now former Chairman Wheeler

Really push back very loudly and you can see it. It's, it's starting to percolate throughout the media ecosystem. Again, there's a big puck article. So yeah, the podcast within a podcast continues, but the battle is joined as always. Brendan, you're welcome to join us here on America's favorite podcast within a podcast. If you ha if you are as cool as you think you are, you will join a podcast called Brendan Carr's dummy, right? If you have it, you have the juice, you would be on the show.

You're also welcome on Decoder, during which I am much more polite. That seems less fun. I mean, look, dude, the CEO of Verizon Wireless was just on Decoder. He did not have to come on that show, but he's a fan. Had the best answer to the decision-making question I've ever heard.

One of the worst answers to why did you kill that neutrality I've ever heard, but that's life. So look, it's equal opportunity. It's a really great process for making really bad decisions. I love that. It was good. It's a good episode. I highly recommend it. We got into it. He's a listener. He's a verge nerd. It was cool to talk to him. We disagree about that. That's fine. Brendan, you're welcome. It will maybe be less cool. Oh, also, by the way, in that Puck article, Brendan's wife, Michaela, she is the top policy person at Palantir.

The MAGA universe, the MAGA extended universe continues to grow. There are only like four companies in this entire world, it turns out. All right, Brandon, you're welcome. Again, I think you're a coward, so you won't show up. And a dummy. And so if you do, I think you'll lose. But you should come on. It'll be fun. We'll have a good time. Bring Ted Cruz. We'll have a great time.

I've been dying to debate Ted Cruz. This is like one of those things like, what would you throw it all away for? And it's like yelling at Ted Cruz. All right, we need a palate cleanser, David. Can I interest you in a wood smartphone? Is that a good palate cleanser?

Jeep, I think, is bringing back the wood. Jeep's wood is back, man. This is... We're doing it here. Yeah, because we can't import anything else. Right. We're just going to cut down more trees. We have to cut down America's forests. So it's great. Motorola came out with some new phones. I am torn on these. So it's three different flip phones, like the thing Motorola has been doing with the Razr. But the most interesting one is the Razr Ultra, which...

I would say essentially makes the same set of changes that the other new razors do, which is like, you know, it's a little, a little faster. It has slightly better, um, like build quality, essentially. Like that's the thing Motorola sort of consistently is trying to get better at. It's just like how to make these things nice. But the ultra has a wood back, uh,

It's $1,300. It is preposterous, and I love it so much. There's a really fun thing to do whenever this comes up, which is look at our own links of our own coverage about Motorola making wooden phones.

And I'm just pointing out that in 2014, January 29th, 2014, David Pierce wrote a story about the Moto X called The New Retro, How Motorola Brought Wood Back, literally. And it's about the wooden back of the Moto X and the first line, the lead. The terrible. I don't know how you and I chose this because I remember editing this story. But the lead of this story, the first sentence, not so long ago, wood was everywhere in the world of consumer electronics. It was.

This is fact. And by not so long ago, I mean the mid-1970s. It's like, I look at our own website, it's like a time capsule into like, what were we thinking? Jake, what do you think about this phone? Be with me on this, Jake. Well, there's a...

Key feature that you failed to mention. By the way, the Motorola executive editor in 2014 was Rick Osterloh, who now runs Android Chrome. So I was right and so was he. Yeah. Key feature you forgot to mention. Exclusive to the Ultra. Big upgrade possibility here. AI button on the side. Oh, no.

So what kind of button are we talking about? I missed this. I need to look at pictures of this. It's like your standard flavor button. It opens up some AI menu where you can maybe there's been a lot of noise this week about how perplexity is going to come pre-installed on this thing. I think perplexity was probably hoping everyone would, you know.

I think this is a more serious integration. Our app is on the second screen. Open it up. You know, much potential there, I would say, in another world where Gemini didn't exist.

But listen, I'm all for it. I love it. They also have an Alcantara. I don't know if I'm saying that right, version. So really greatest hits. Surface line gave that up. You know, we're due for some fun phone textures. I feel like the Razer line in its way is sort of all about throwback stuff. This is fun. It's cool. I love it. It's unfortunate that it is exclusive to the Ultra version, which is the most expensive version. And I think you're stuck with, you know,

the plain old options on the like standard model that I think most people probably go for. But, but even the standard ones, I will say have, they're doing a fun sort of two tone color thing where the bottom half is one color and the top half is another color. It's just nice, right? Like we're in, we're in this moment where like the best you can hope for is like a gentle blue on your smartphone. I bought,

My phone just to get the blue. And that's, this is what excitement looks like in smartphones now. And, uh, like genuinely kudos to Motorola for a, a,

continuing to go with the only thing it ever did that anyone cares about, which is the Razr. Like, truly, I mean that sincerely. And also, apparently, wooden phones, which you cared about a lot in 2014. Listen. This story is very long. The Moto X was sick. There's two things, and this just combines them. Can I continue to read you quotes from Rick Ostrilow to David Pierce from the story from 2014? Yeah.

The X phone team started to show the wooden models to focus groups and the response was overwhelming. Quote, people were immediately like, whoa, that's different from anything I've seen before. People couldn't believe that it was actually real. That's a bad quote. That's my bad. I should have cut that one out. And then he goes on to say, there's no supply chain for wood, Osterloh says. There's your headline. Wood is typically used for furniture and stuff. It's a totally different group of people from the people we normally do business with.

Wood is typically used for furniture and stuff. That's the insight you come to the verge for. It was a long time ago. We didn't really know what we were doing yet. Rick rolled David Pierce in particular with, here's how hard it was to make a wooden phone. All I'm saying is 11 years later, we're back at it. So they must've been onto something. Finding wood that won't warp, splinter, or crack is hard.

I think that was a pull quote, actually. Is this one wood or is it bamboo as well? The Moto X was bamboo, I believe. Allison, who wrote about this and saw it, her piece calls it a wood grain back panel. Oh boy, it's like a sticker. Don't know what to make of it. Yeah, it's either like a sticker or it's like wood in the way that Ikea furniture is wood. It does make me slightly nervous. But all of this is like...

There's some interesting like, you know, material stuff going on, but it just looks great. And there's something to these things just being more than a giant slab of glass that I think should be explored a lot more than it has been recently. Yeah. And once we break up every single company, many more companies will be able to build a wood supply chain. Perfect. I want to end with a big thing. YouTube turned 20 this week.

We ran a piece about the first videos on YouTube famously. It was like My Day at the Zoo or whatever it's called. And David, you wrote about YouTube itself. And then YouTube TV is getting some changes. And it's all kind of the same story. Like, there's still just random clips of stuff. But it did eventually eat TV. It really did eat TV. So that was where I started with the story was essentially trying to figure out, like, what is YouTube now? Because the big change that happened at YouTube or really over the last...

two or three years is that it became mostly a TV platform. Like it is still viewed everywhere. It's still very popular, but it is like, it is both in terms of how people watch YouTube and how YouTube conceives of itself. It is mostly a TV platform. And I just think that's fascinating. So I talked to a bunch of people across the company about like YouTube's conception of itself and tried to understand just sort of like what makes this thing go and landed on essentially YouTube.

This is not a reference anyone is ever going to remember, but there's this very famous Matt Taibbi story in Rolling Stone about Goldman Sachs where he described Goldman Sachs as I'm paraphrasing, but a vampire squid that jumps on the face of anything that smells like money. And that's YouTube, but for content and in a much less like society destroying way. Yeah.

But this company is fascinating. Like I talked to the people there who do the TV stuff and the people who do the gaming stuff and the people who do the creator stuff. And overwhelmingly, like if you just think of YouTube as like an insatiable content machine that just it will take anything that is content, however broadly you want to define that. And it will put it into an algorithm that is very good at figuring out what somebody is going to want and then stick it in front of you. That is like.

Like you talk about Google flywheels. That is Google's best flywheel right now. It is unstoppable and it is working way beyond anything I realized.

I think it's so interesting to be talking about this right after we discussed the Meta trial because Facebook turned 20 last year. YouTube turns 20 this week. And if you just look at the cultural trajectory of those two platforms, they could not be more different. That's so true. YouTube, I don't know that you necessarily call YouTube a social platform exactly, but I think it is probably at a stronger place than it's ever been in many ways. And Facebook, you just could not say the same thing by any stretch.

And I couldn't tell you exactly why, but maybe this is because they have looked at it much more as a platform for other people's content and they've just embraced that rather than, I think, trying to do all those different social plays. I kind of disagree in like a very small way, not a big way, Jake. I think you've got the shape of it right. YouTube is a social platform in that you as a user are meant to be in the comment section. You are not meant to be in the video box.

There's a weird period where they thought you were, everyone is supposed to be uploading videos to YouTube, right? Like you can go search file names from a specific period of time and you get everybody's iPhone videos. Cause they thought it was just a general string platform. That's gone. They, they, they pivoted out of that really fast, right? They invented the YouTube creator. Uh, Taylor Lawrence has a great history of where that word came from. It came from the advertising industry actually. Um, and MCNs like multi-channel networks, um,

They invented the YouTube creator who is this like semi-professional and now very professional dominant culture maker. That's not regular people. Regular people are doing social stuff on YouTube, right? They're, they're hitting like, they're trying to get T series above a PewDiePie. Like that's all happening. Yeah.

Like it's very interactive and social, but it's, it's, it's not in the main box. The main box is like for pros now or people who want to be pros. Whereas Instagram is still just everything all at once. I think that's, that's the thing that keeps getting meta into trouble.

They have never built the thing that lets you like my daughter just like discovered that YouTuber is a job. And now I have to stop that from happening. I'm really sorry. Right. But like Instagram creator is like not really a job. TikTokers is a job. Like it's, it's just meta is in this weird space where it never delineated all of those things.

Well, yeah. And I think, I think I remember when threads was first launching Adam, this area was talking about, you know, there's something in the design of the app where like the, the reply and the original post look the same. And that's actually really important in an app like threads or Twitter. Um, and to your point, you know, YouTube never, ever, ever tried to do that. It always had such a clear hierarchy of who you are and where you are on the platform. And I think the, the thing that

has made TikTok interesting is that it has found the middle ground there that actually works for people, right? Like the duets and the stitches and they have really forced YouTube to be reactive to that. But like Jake, to your point, what most people want

the vast majority of people want is to mostly consume and like maybe very lightly participate. And YouTube hit that formula early on and then never ran away from it. And like, even at times when it looked like it maybe should have, when like Facebook was ascendant and all of a sudden it was like, oh, we need to make this more interactive and do different kinds of feeds and all this stuff. YouTube just like kept being YouTube and like history just proved it right over and over and over again. And it's funny because the content got to move up.

Right. The product didn't, the products always had that delineation and the stuff in the video box got more and more and more premium and now it's eating TV. Yeah. And I think it's just fascinating. It's also why I think Google should break itself up before the government shows up and distracts that whole company away from whatever YouTube is or is becoming because it's, I think YouTube looks more like Google's future than anything. I think Google kinds of kind of knows it too, but it's just tied to this mess.

Yeah, no, I would agree with that. I think there's a there's a strong case to be made. And people make this case. You see it from analysts and stuff every once in a while that YouTube is a substantially more valuable business alone than it is inside of Google. I wonder if one of the most fascinating things about Google and other people have made this point for years now is that no one pays attention to it as a platform.

Everyone is constantly paying attention to like TikTok's moderation rules. Everyone is constantly paying attention to threads or X or whatever's moderation rules. We all pay a lot of attention to Mark Zuckerberg and how he feels about racism today. Surprisingly more open to it than the day before because his company is on trial. And what if corruption was good? Who knows? No one talks about YouTube moderation. It just doesn't come up. We sometimes talk about YouTube radicalization with all this stuff, but the day-to-day YouTube stuff doesn't.

Even though creators are, you know, my joke is that a creator gets their wings when they make their first video about how they're mad at YouTube. No one talks about it. And I think that is part of the benefit of being part of Google. You just can't yell at YouTube. Like, that's Google. Yeah. I also think...

It is it's a big platform that feels big in a way that like TikTok is a really big platform that feels small. Right. And so I think it's very funny talking to people about their TikTok feeds because you slowly discover over the course of a conversation that, oh, my TikTok and your TikTok have nothing to do with each other.

But we both sort of open the app and use it in the same way. So I feel like I'm getting some kind of universal experience. YouTube is just it just feels giant in a way that I feel like no one thinks they understand YouTube, which really works to YouTube's benefit. I think people engage with YouTube very differently, too. Right. For Facebook, for Instagram, even for absolutely for TikTok, you go specifically to those apps.

YouTube comes to you. That's not true for everybody, right? You still open it up on your TV. You still open it up on the website and browse. But you're going to find videos embedded. You're going to be sent a link, right? When was the last time somebody sent you a link to a piece of content on Facebook?

Like that wasn't a spammer. I mean, I send people spaghetti Jesus all day long. Dude, it's so funny. I asked you, I asked a bunch of people at YouTube about that because I posed to one of their engineering people that like my theory of the case for YouTube is that it is a very good video player that is easily embedded across the internet. And for some reason, no one else has figured out how to do that. And the guy kind of hemmed and hawed and he gave me a good explanation for why.

why that's not the whole answer and a lot of his answer is actually in the piece but then I was like but explain to me why no one has done a good enough like why aren't embeds as good as YouTube's and he was kind of like I don't know it's weird

It's like you can't do it with music. Like there are no music embeds anywhere on the Internet that are as good as YouTube music videos, which is hugely powerful for YouTube. And you just poke at that across everything. And it's like the fact that none of these other platforms have invested in, like you said, Jake, that sort of experience I have somewhere else that I interact with this content is just weird to me. And YouTube is ubiquitous that way. Well, you know, it's still connected to all the Google stuff.

Because YouTube is part of Google, which wants the web to be good, which invests in big web containers that it's crawlers can see.

That are interoperable across different browsers, all the web stuff fed into YouTube. Whereas I think if they didn't have that pressure, they might be more close to like all the other embeds. Yeah. That's a fair, fair point. Yeah. Um, I will say, I think it was either Tik TOK or Instagram that after we launched our redesign, they made their embeds behave better. I was like, these embeds are too tall for our design. And they were like, I don't remember which one it was. They were like, I think it was Instagram. They're like, oh, that's bad, but no one uses these embeds. So we never got this feedback. Yeah.

Weird. All right. That's it. Tell me. I feel like I've asked for a lot of emails from people. Send us your party speakers. Tell me if you would buy Chrome and how much you would spend on it. And then tell me about YouTube. I'm just sort of dying to know. Like everyone has a different YouTube, right? We're 20 years in. I have friends who only watch YouTube. They don't have streaming services. They just watch YouTube. Okay. Real quick before we go, let's just do this. If you were to go to youtube.com right now,

What would it show you? Jake, you go first. Oh, it's all chess videos and Bon Appetit cooking content. Oh, okay. Like chess tutorials or like Magnus Carlsen like being cool? Oh, it's both. Both. Yeah. It's like play-by-plays. It's hugely embarrassing. I'm so sorry. I love this for you. Nilay, what's yours? Oh, I've turned off all the tracking. It doesn't show me anything. It just begs me to turn the tracking back on. You get just... It's like the one line of text. They've started...

I think they've realized that this was working too well. So they started flashing recommendations and they take them away and say, your tracking is off. And it's like, yeah, I know. It's like, I'd love to show you this video. But when I had the tracking, it was a lot of, it was in the COVID era before I turned the tracking off. It was a lot of, I don't remember the channel, a guy who restores things. But he would like take an old drill and like sandblast it and repaint it. And I found this very calming. I was like, I just, I need projects to come to a conclusion because nothing in COVID felt like a conclusion.

So I would just watch this guy. He's like, I fixed this hand mixer. I'm like, you did it. It's very good. That is really good. Uh, mine, I just went to youtube.com and mine is, um, I would say a mix of female singer songwriter music videos, uh, which there's a lot of right now, uh, soccer highlights and, uh, parks and rec. That's my, that's my YouTube right now. Yeah. Um, I watched an embarrassing videos on YouTube. I will say it's very, it's very fun.

All right. That's it. That's VergeCast. Send us notes. We want your feedback. If you see a party speaker, think to yourself, is this enough? And then email it to me. That's it. That's VergeCast. And that's it for the VergeCast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Will Poore, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer. And that's it. We'll see you next week. ♪