Media Confrontation with AI Crawlers

I did everything I could to not go to Monfred and Suns and I ended up at fucking Monford and Suns hine . Oh boy, I hate doing cold opens for podcasts, but can we please just do that? Hello and welcome to the Berg Cast, the flagship podcast of PMX , a thing I suppose we have to talk about today. I'm your friend David Pierce, joining me from an increasingly fancy place. Neil I Patel. Hey buddy. What's up? How's it going? Every time I see you you, seem to have moved up like one tax bracket in terms of where you're staying in the world. Where are you right now? What's going on? I'm in Cannes in the south of France. Oh, you've moved up several tax brackets. I'm in what can only be described as an apartment at the Carleton Hotel. It is very lovely here . It is very hot. There's a heat wave all throughout Europe and all throughout France. And I didn't know this, but apparently there's been a culture war in France over air conditioning for like years and years and years. Like it is like a left right partisan issue. Oh wow. And that has just come to an end with this heat wave . As far as I can tell, because everyone from New York is it can talk to about advertising. And all the big tech platforms are here. It's basically America. I'm just in America, but everyone's drinking smaller, more potent cups of coffee . And then the air conditioning everywhere is just cranked to the max. It's wild. For everyone listening to this and not watching, I want you to imagine Neili in linen pants , oversized sunglasses. That's a shirt . It is unbuttoned just like one button further than you would think Neili would have a shirt on button. Oh, I went to buddy. Don't worry. We're letting it fly. Just one button at the bottom hanging on for dear life. That's all we got here. The other thing to know is that we're on wildly different clocks. So David sounds tired because I believe it's eight thirty in the morning for you. It is in fact eight thirty in the morning. I sound tired because I was out until two in the morning. Just all the tech companies are here throwing just the most elaborate parties . So the first night, Tuesday night , your choice was, did you want to see Ray , the artist Rey, or did you want to see Ludacris? And then there was like, I saw Janelle Monet gave a concert at a mansion for one hundred people. Like it's just like, all this is crazy. Wait, Ray versus Ludacris is like the most perfect generational split of who would go to which party. I went to Ray. Oh , I saw Ludacris do his corporate gig for AWS at CW at CS and I was like, I've had this experience. Like I have seen a bunch of excited Polo shirts . You know, I don't need to do it. So I went saw Ray . And then last night it was Tiesto and Montford and Son's and I stood in line for Testo and I was really long. It was even in like the good line, the priority line that everyone could go to Testo and I went to and I saw I saw DJ D Nice at the TikTok party. Shout out to Patreon and my friends at Patreon for getting me into that one . And then I left and I got a text and it was like, We're at Montford and Sons and I was like, oh crap. And I went I went to Montford and Sons. I'm proud of you. It really happened. All this is happening within like feet of each other. This is like this reminds me of the experience of like when you're you're too old to do any of this stuff, but you like go to a bachelor party and so you're like, all right for forty eight hours I'm gonna be twenty three again. Like the weird thing is like the amount of money in can . Like this is an advertising festival. Theoretically, it is an advertising awards festival where they award the most creative advertising made around the world all year. That is gone. I didn't see one piece of creative this whole week. Everything. I saw tech companies talking about platforms and data and scale and targeting. I saw everyone is just like, how do we hide the amount of surveillance we're doing? Creators. And so then there's like a group of hot people at every party who are the creators . And we all have to talk about the creator economy like it's not built on massive surveillance apparatus . But like the undercurrent of all this is just like companies you've never heard of talking about their ability to target you the consumer. And Meta and TikTok and OpenAI all talking about how they will know so much about you that they will generate custom ads for you individually. And then somewhere next to that is creators are great. And it's like, oh , you just need these people. Like you just need some hot people to distract you from the thing you're actually doing. Like dystopia, but do it on the beach is basically the vibe. Both hot people, both hot people. You can get away with a lot if you put hot people on a beach. That is, I mean, history has proven that over and over for centuries. Wait, before we shouldn't spend too much time on, although Ken I do think it's going to make your week is going to make a bunch of the other stuff we have to talk about here very interesting . But I do really want to know so Matt Bellany who works at Puck and has a great podcast called Town I really like's been. He on the show for the broad cast wrote a thing in his What I'm Hearing Newsletter just ruthlessly making fun of Cannon and this like kind of traveled all over the place. I'll just read you a snippet of it. He says, I shouldn't have to say this, but to everyone asking if I'll be at Cannes this year. Cannes is the festival to Cannes, a prestigious global film event where talented creative people display and sell their work and look glamorous doing so. Can Lions is not. It's a tacky business conference for selling advertising and announcing brand partnerships populated mostly by paunchy middle managers and YouTubers. The only response to this that I saw was Rich Greenfield, the analyst standing with Evan Spiegel, the CEO of SNAP basically saying, look at it, look at us, the pawnchy middle managers . But I wondered, like , are people at Cannes feeling sad about which Cannes that they are? Has this caused a cultural war? There is no self awareness here. What are you talking about? Everyone is sweating their faces off . The amount of just like, what's be nude because it's so hot is like off the charts. I've had so many conversations about what is appropriate for people to wear men and women . Like you can make friends with anyone here by being like, Is it appropriate for men to wear shorts to a business meeting? Because the answer in this environment, this moment in time has to be yes, and no one wants to admit it. Shout out to Teter Bone, who would not wear shorts at Can he would die first . And there's just so much money here. This amount of money cannot be self aware . Do you know what I mean? Like you can, put enough GPU s in a data center and be like, I think that might be alive, right? Like it will gain consciousness, maybe. You put this much money on the beach and it loses intelligence, like as fast as it can . Let me just give you one example of the kind of news that's being made here. Okay. Spotify , you know, Spotify. They announced a partnership with Coach, the handbag company and the heart of the partnership, according to the press release is a shared understanding of how Gen Z approaches identity and self expression . And then that was a panel. It was like a full room of people believing this through hand Through handbags and spotify . Through Spotify handbags? One of the things we learned about Gen Z consumers is they don't think about identity in terms of categories. So what they wear, what they listen to the communities are part of is part of the same personal story. And that's why the partnership between Spotify and Coach feels so natural, David. What? I'm just saying Melanie can say he wants. You can't fight that. You can't you can't body up against that and be like, Are you? Do you feel bad? Because that is nothing . Some day I aspire to be the kind of person who just goes around to conferences being like, people just want to be together. And everybody that's great . Oh no, if you roll up to this conference with a British accent and you're like, advertising is broken. Like you will be the keynote speaker. Like it's fine. But I'm just telling you that the thing about where I'm at right now I had a bunch of great conversations. I did a decoder interview with Amy Lindsey is a CEO Digitos. I think she's one of the smartest advertising executives in the game. She's not confused. She's a tech executive. She traffics in data and analytics and she tries to get the right product on the right shelf at Walmart at the right time. And the creative is somewhere downstream of that, but she knows what her business is. I also interviewed Allie Behrmann and Rayna Potanski who are like fancy agents for creators like Alex Earl and Jake Shane. And they're like, We're here to make money. Like we build businesses for these creators. We find people have audiences and we build them businesses . And they talked about money with me the whole time. So there's no confusion here about what everyone's trying to do. Right. This is about the creators who are on panels here call themselves marketers . They know what they're doing. They're here to move product. So the idea that like it's that they have some feeling about the film industry. They're like, Whatever, man, everyone's watching Instagram. We're gonna move product. Yeah, yeah, that's fair. Actually, this is a useful pivot into some of the news that we should talk about. But first, we've been getting a lot of questions about some corporate verge news . Do you just want to talk this out for a minute? Oh sure. This is the second turn in the Vox media , corporate changes . Do you want to just talk through what's happening here? Yes, our company is killing itself . And then one part of the company is being reborn as Roxany two point zero and James Mardoch will own that company like the Phoenix from the Ashes. The other part of the company, the part of the company that we're in with Eater , that is being rolled up into a holding company called PMX, which is Pensky Media plus Fox . That's the name of the company. It does sound like BMX and PM notion here that everyone keeps saying to me is that no one should ever think about that brand. It is a holding company . Pensky Media owns Variety, Billboard , the Hollywood Reporter, on and on and on . They own the Golden Globes . They own south by southwest. It's just a big media holding company. All of those things operate as little independent companies that they really do . And so Pensky, media , all their publishing stuff, not like the Golden Globes, but like the magazines, and all the Vox stuff is coming together in one holding company. It's a joint venture between the stuff at Vox Media and the Pencie publishing stuff. And it's going to be run by the president of Vox Media, Ryan Pauli. So there was a lot of coverage of this, and I think the funniest part of it is Penceke's own trades covered it. And they did not know that they are the ones getting a new boss, which is very funny. Like we woke up and it's like the same guy that we've been reporting to for years . Who we both started this company with as babies fifteen years ago. Little children to Ryan at the Mumford and Sons Concert last night and we're both like, how did we end up here ? So there's a lot of shared history there. I'm reasonably excited about this. There's a lot of work to do. The deal is closedn.' Yout've got figureta out some structures, but Pensky media company has a lot of resources. Those are big fancy magazines that do great journalism. They fight off the lawsuits, which is a thing that I promise you, I have to think about all the time that never comes to the surface. But it's a capability that we need and that I depend on in my job as veteran in chief . And then the opportunity to invest more heavily in the verge is like right there in front of us. And the conversations we're ha ving now are about how to make the Verge feel even smaller, how to be our own little company, with our own little product team . You know, Jay has been on our board for a long time. He's the largest shareholder in Vox Media or what was Blox Media? I go to our board meetings and I like say wild things about Federation. That's like my role with this company. And he like listens intently and is curious about them. So that's a relationship. We're the same age, which is really weird. So that feels like a pure relationship in another weird way. So I'm hopeful there's more to come on this, but today we woke up and we had the same boss we had yesterday and everyone should just take a breath. I think it's going to be fine. Yeah, I think I think that's right. There was we got a bunch of as with the last one, a bunch of very well meaning people worried that this meant bad things. An important thing to say when I say we're the same age. J Pensky has come up reading the Verge . Like he is a reader of our website. He's a fan of tech. Like he pays a lot of attention to us. Again, he was the largest shareholder of the company. So if he mad at our coverage I would know, and that's just not the case. If you wanted to kill us, he could have done it right now. It could have been happening a long time ago, but that's just not that's just not how it goes. So yeah, I think he's intent on making sure he doesn't ruin it and in fact making it better. That is the conversation we have had. There's yet more to come. Like this deal has to close. A new holding company called PMX has to come into existence. It has to operate. Luckily the person in charge of that is the guy that we have known for years and years and years . I think it'll be fun. Yeah. And I think a thing you and I talk about and we've been talking about with our team a lot is that in the best case scenario, hardly anybody ever thinks about the corporate structure that enables our newsroom, we just get to go do the work and that remains the goal. I will say the same thing to the audience that I say to our team and to our corporate overlords, just give me the money and leave us alone That's my pitch. It's been a good pitch for fifteen years. So we're also I'm sure a really good pitch at Camline . No, the money here has a lot of ideas. If you're not, if you're not moving coach handbags, it doesn't want anything to do with you. That's a fair point. So actually let's wanted to talk about gadgets first, but you've now made me want to talk about Meta because while you've been at Can Lions , a place I'm confident there are a lot of Meta people running around telling you about all of these things you're talking about, the creator future of everything, the advertising future of everything, the AI future of everything . Meta sort of publicly appears to be a company that is in like complete turmoil and is desperately flailing to figure out what's going on . Can I just run you through a bunch of things that have happened this week while you've been gone? Yeah, this is very funny because that is not how it feels here but, dying to know. Yeah. This is what I want to talk about, because I think this disconnect we're about to get into has been true of meta for a very long time. And I think at this moment might be truer than it has ever been in complicated ways. But so here are just a bunch of news bits from Meta this week . One , Meta announced that the Instagram TV app is getting a big overhaul. It's coming to new platforms, but also they're starting to experiment with a lot of the stuff that has worked for YouTube on televisions, like the episodic series, things that feel more like shows, they're doing horizontal video. Like they are making the same push into the living room that YouTube has very successfully made over the last several years. That's one thing . Will Cathart, the head of WhatsApp, is leaving and he's being replaced by somebody who built a FinTech company that's very successful in India that Meta invested a huge amount of money in and is making this guy the global CEO of WhatsApp weird and fascin ating. Sure. Meta revived the Facebook Creator Studio app as an AI companion app for creators that will basically , I believe the phrase was tell you exactly how to grow on Facebook with AI. Like we'll draft comments for you again. This is all the stuff that YouTube and others have been doing for a while, but the idea is like how to grow your audience on Facebook in the most ruthless AI optimized way. Mark Zuckerberg has apparently tasked team with creating a polymarket clone The idea is apparently not to do it with real money at first. This product is at least codenamed Arena , which is a very funny name for Mark Zuckerberg, the Brazilian jujitsu fighter in a bunch of funny ways . But there 's this big idea about eventually letting people play with money after letting people play with credits. At first , this is like a company doing everybody else's ideas about how to make money, right? You look at all of these things in every one of these is what is a new way we can make money that somebody else is already making a tremendous amount of money . Next to this , there is an incredible amount of reporting being done, particularly by our friends at Wired and Summit Business Insider on this disastrous morale problem at Meta . They had this thing on Monday, I think, where they had to roll back the tool they had installed on everybody's computers that tracked all of their keystrokes and all of their mouse movements in order to train AI because a lot of the data that it was collecting was accessible to people across the company , which bad. Yeah. Andrew Bosworth, the CTO of Meta, had to basically put out a memo acknowledging that the AI reorg at the company has been I belie,ve the word was atrocious and that they 've created a huge morale problem. They think they're going to fix it with a snack budget. Like sure . This company just appears to be a mess and twisting in all directions, having no idea what's going on . And then, like you're saying they just have all the money in the universe. Like I cannot, Meta is the company I understand the least because it just continues to seem like it's winning and also to have absolutely no idea what it's doing. Yeah , if you're here, it is obvious that Instagram and Meta are the load bearing pillars of the internet economy. You want to talk about creators, there is not really a creator economy without Instagram and YouTube . Like TikTok is here and certainly they're, you know, big lucrative TikTokers, but they all have to pivot to other platforms . That's just a thing TikTokers have to do because TikTok doesn't really have a followed graph and all the other platforms do. And so like you just see like, okay, where are the two load bearing pillars of the creator economy as it's being expressed here at Can and it is absolutely Instagram and it's absolutely YouTube. They know it. They're acting like it. And then Meta's advertising tools are so lucrative and so powerful that they are here surrounded by advertising executives basically saying out loud, we're gonna kill you just directly saying it. Like their big announcements here are all about finding new audiences , generating custom content for those audiences, guardrails around the AI tools to make sure the AI generated creative is brand safe, new tools for targeting where you can put more money into the meta ad manager to find new audience but only up to a certain budget and then curve it back to make sure you still find qualified audiences that want to buy your like really boring ad tech stuff that is printing money for them . And you look at all that and how much energy that is being directed at that and how wildly successful it is. Everyone depends on it and needs it. And you look at the creator economy, which I said this a million times on the show, but Instagram does not pay creators anything . They are just a distribution platform for creators and they monetize it doesn't matter what happens on Instagram because Meta's making money regardless . The creators have to go hustle out their own brand deals. That's why they've all become ad agencies . So meta is winning both ways, right? It doesn't really matter what the creator economy does because Meta makes money every time you open Instagram. And if you want to participate in sort of the larger internet economy, Meta is getting to the point and Zuckerberg has said this out loud , they're getting to the point where they just want your money and the business results you desire and everything in the middle will be automated by Meta AI . And that looks like it might work. Like I have no idea if it will actually work. Right. But they're so confident here in it to come to an advertising festival and look at an ocean of executives from companies and say, We're going to put most of you out of a job is wild. And everyone's like, amazing. Yeah, weird. And I can only look at the rest of what's going on at Meta and say, Oh, Mark Zuckerberg hates the business he's in. It's not fancy. It's not important. It's not cutting edge. That man sells ads. Yeah. It's also like wildly uncool This is the part of like Can Lion is not the cool one . He sitting in San Francisco knows how not cool he is and how hard he's trying to be cool. Kylie Jenner is launching glasses with Mark Zuckerberg, right? We're just trying to yank some cool back to this company. Meanwhile, the money printer is just here and can just whirring away and he hates it. I think he hates it's just not the thing that makes him cool. Whereas, I think Google has no problem not being cool. Like Google also prints money and they're like, here's like the robot's gonna buy you the shoes and they're like everyone's like amazing and Google's like it's so nerdy, we love ourselves and like they just don't care. Google learned from the Google plus thing that being culturally relevant is not all it's cracked up to be. Thank you . I just want to clear that I have YouTube. But if you listen to Neil Mohan, his whole approach to YouTube now is we have learned not to be prescriptive about the creator economy. Like when ASMR videos came out , everyone was like, What is this garbage? And now they're a whole cultural category. This is a real quote from Neil this week. They know that they're pipes that Google wants to be pipes. Also, I think importantly, Google owns two major platforms. They own an Android. That is their platform. They control their destiny in that platform. And they own the web. Some huge extent they own the web. They have Chrome on desktop, they have massive market share, and Google will contest this, and they'll say the web is vibrant. And that is mostly true because mobile safari exists and Apple has very strong opinions about what web browsers can do on your phone. Yeah . But like Google has two platforms where it controls its destiny, and Meta has none. And they've known this forever, and I think this drives Mark Zuckerberger crazy. And if he was the sort of person who would just be happy selling ads and having Ludicrus come to his parties, I think he would be the happiest person alive because he's just he's just the winner of this moment. But that man wants a platform of his own. I think he sees AI as one opportunity to do that. I think he sees his glasses as another opportunity to do that. And he is content tearing his company to shreds in like ferocious ambition to get to a platform of his own. But I think the fact that he's not cool and no one trusts him is always going to stand in his way. Oh, I totally think that's right. I also think if you're Mark Zuckerberg, even in a more sort of calculating headspace , you look at these things and you realize that okay, we have built what amounts to a perfect business model on top of gigantic set of attention that we are able to deliver, right? That because so many people are on Instagram and because so many people are on Facebook, because these are so central to people's online lives, we make infinite money. That is just true. It's also, I think, fragile and it feels more fragile all the time, that the idea that actually maybe lots of people will pick up and leave your platform , I think is A real and B increasingly in evidence, right? Like Facebook's users are going down for the first time. They would argue with you about that. There's like regulatory battles, there's a war going on. Like sure . They have reasons for those numbers wavering this time around. I'm sure that they do. But if those people go, it doesn't matter. The reason, if those people go away, the business goes away. The business relies on I open Instagram forty times a day, whether it makes me happy or not. That's it. Yeah. It has to be that entrenched behavior or else this beautiful business model you've built on top of it collapses. It has nothing to do. And so what I wonder is like all that stuff that you're saying about like being cool and being culturally relevant, that's also sort of centrally tied up in this company's business in a way that if I'm Mark Zuckerberg causes me to lose a lot of sleep because like the minute Instagram stops being cool and I think Instagram is still cool. It's not what it once was, but it is it's a load bearing pillar of the creator economy conversation here. And it is, it is like glitzy and flash y in a way that like even TikTok isn't. Instagram is like, I would say ever since Oracle bought TikTok, something has changed. You can just feel it. That company has lost its aggression in a lot of ways, and it has become more of an infernalom driving you to the TikTok shop. Yep, they had the smallest party here. That's why I'll tell you . Interesting. Before we leave the Facebook , did any flavor of flavor at the TikTok party? I will say that was very cool. Did he have a big clock on? He was wearing a chain. I don't know if it was a big clock. It wasn't like the clock, you know what I mean? It wasn't okay. I just feel like if I saw Flava Flav and he wasn't wearing the clock, I'm not one hundred percent sure I would know it was Flava Flavor. Do you know? He was wearing the glasses. It was very obvious. All right, okay, cool. Let's tell you one more story about this. Try to get selfie, flavor with flavor with the answer like hi, whatever, try to get selfie. And he's like, I got to get out of here. Like he was trying, he was just trying to get through a hallway at the end of the party. And the person I was with, I won't say their name, but it was just the funniest moment was like, Flav . And he turned around and he saw that it was still us. He was like, I'm good. You guys, it's like, I'm not here. So that implies that Flav is Flava Flav's first name, which is a thing I've never done desperate call to Flavor. And he'd obviously reacted to it. He's like, Someone needs me. And then he was like, You don't. This isn't important at all. That's really good. I'm going to start yelling flavor at people as they walk away from me for not. I really like that. I do want to know what you think about this idea of Facebook doing a sort of fake and then maybe real polymarket clone . I mean, Facebook doesn't have ideas. Meta doesn't have ideas. Famously Evan Spiegel is the head of product at Meta. Right. He talked about Middle Managers And so the idea that there's something there's some attention mechanic that will keep you engaged, that's suck . Yeah, famously when he was buying Instagram, you know, we have emails from all these antitrust cases where his point of view was every generation there's another engagement mechanic that emerges and it disrupts the old one. And so photo sharing was that mechanic for Facebook. So he needed to buy Instagram. I think they wisely understood that buying TikTok was out of the cards in the middle all that NHS ligation and whatever. And they just brought TikTok to Instagram in the form of reels. But they understand, I think Zuck particularly understands that these new engagement mechanics do come and take time away from his apps . And so he's very good at like launching fast follows. He's very bad at launching new ideas, which is where I think the AI glasses and the interaction paradigms , the hiring of Allen Dye to build a new interaction UI for the metaglasses. There's something about that that requires a ton of invention, like user experience invention that meta historically has shown no competence in. I just want to say the implication in what you just said is that the next big time spent mechanic is gambling. Like straightforwardly, the implication in this decision is it's gambling. But I think he probably sees it. He probably has enough data to see like people move from their DM's on Instagram during a game to a gambling mechanic. Sure, yeah. They go to school. That's a thing that happens. That's a real thing. Yeah. We have a CEO of Yahoo on Dakota while back. Jim Lenson, who you know, he's a really smart guy. And I was like , Yahoo has private equity ownership. It's like Apollo. Caesar's palace. I was like, this is coming to Yahoo sports, right? You're going to do gambling in sports and finance. And he like's, No, but we know that once you're done in Yahoo finance, you go to your stocks app . Once you're done in Yahoo sports, you go to you go to one of the prediction markets. Like we see the mechanic. It is the most natural evolution the data would suggest. They haven't done it yet. I'm not sure if they're going to do it, but I think Zuck sees that too , right? It's the night before the Super Bowl and everyone on Instagram and WhatsApp is talking about the odds like you can just slide it in there. You can shove it in the big blue app like everything else. So I understand why he would do it. Do I love that everything is becoming gambling? I think that's pretty bad. Yeah . Yeah. No, it's it is it is as ruthlessly correct a decision, I think, as you could make, but boy does it feel bad. For threads, like threads has an oddly , I wouldn't say odd. Threads has how to describe threads ? In its diffuse way , in its sort of hazy way, threads is like, we should do sports , right? They have like a partnership with the NBA, they're growing in communities or how were they defined communities? Very natural if you think real time Twitter like post app is good for sports, which I tend to think it is, that you would add the gambling mechanic to that . Sure , very natural , deeply terrifying. By the way, I think gambling is bad. And I think it's really legal. And my personal view is that when you go to Las Vegas, you should find out how much all your friends are going to spend on gambling and spend that amount of money on limousines because that's the only place in the world where you can just demand a limousine arrive and one shows up. I'm in the south of France. I go outside and I'm like, Bring me a limo and they're like, it's not gonna happen for me, but you can do that in Vegas. That's my hot take on gambling. By limousines instead. I have been in your presence for this enough to know that you always end up being the one who has the best time too. Because I'm the one take a slip now . It's Denili Patelway. Everyone remembers me, no one remembers how much your dumbass lost a blackjack. Exactly right. All right, we should take a quick break and then I do want to talk gadgets because there's an interesting thing happening in gadgets right now and I want to talk about it, but let's take a break All right, we're back. There's a bunch of gadget news this week, and my theory of the case is that we are seeing the effects of Ramageddon on the products that we buy and use in the most clean way as possible now . Just to give you a preview , Microsoft put out new surfaces with less memory. You can now buy an eight gigabyte of RAM Microsoft Surface . It's to make it affordable, right? Like it is so expensive to buy RAM that they're giving you less so that you can actually buy a product . The Steam Machine is out. I want to talk about the Steam Machine in a minute. We talked about it with Sean on the show earlier this week, but I'm curious what you think the vast majority of the story of this thing has been that it costs one thousand forty nine dollars, which is a lot more than I think anyone including Valve Hoped. And there's been this big kerfuffle about is it one Ramstick or two? Like this , this has been a news st ory . But the most immediate thing is that as promised, Apple just raised its prices . Tim Cook said this was coming, one of the previous for people, but Apple just took its store down, put it back up, and everything is more expensive. Apple store is down of all time truly . Like really. Truly, yes. Can I read you some of the prices? Sure. The HomePod mini is now thirty dollars more expensive The iPad Air is now one hundred and fifty dollars more expensive. The iPad Pro is up two hundred dollars. The MacBook Neo is up one hundred dollars. The MacBook Air is up two hundred dollars. The MacBook Pro is up three hundred dollars . The iM is upAC two hundred dollars . The Mac Studio M four Max is up five hundred dollars . The Mac Studio with the M three Ultra is up thirteen hundred dollars. No way. The Vision Pro is up two hundred dollars. Like meaningful across the board price increase for essentially every Apple product. I would just like to congratulate myself for buying a Mac Studio for no reason earlier this year . I really have been on this show all of twenty twenty six being like if, you need a gadget buy it now it's only going to get worse. Yeah. And here we go. I don't even think we're at the top of it. I really don't. Yeah, the MacBook Neo I bought for no reason also seems like a smart purchase now. Yeah, you 't have more than you bought it for. That's right working out . But do you agree with my overall thesis here that it feels like we are we are sort of at the product cycle into the Ramageddon experience where the world in which there is no RAM is starting to settle in to both what gadgets cost and even what they are. Yeah, wasn't there reports this week that like the new nothing phone just won't come out. Yep. Because the MF phone two pro successor, they just cancelled it because they're like, we can't make it what we want under the current circumstances. Yeah, I think we're just seeing like Apple's solution is we have price elasticity. People will pay the prices . But if you're going to buy Vision Pro, two hundred dollars is not going to deter you because you have conviction in your heart that wearing a headset is a good idea . If you need a Mac studio that's probably for work, you're going to absorb the cost, maybe you'll pass the cost up. Like you can see how they're playing the game, right? The smaller price increases are the consumer products and the bigger ones are the ones that tend to be used for work because you can absorb the cost ways . But I think a lot of other companies can't just play the game the way that Apple's playing it. Yeah, Apple has like famously huge margins in this industry in a way that I think that's why the hells do. I think they swallowed some of margins to see what would happen in this Tim Cook line that this isn't tenable was, in fact, a preview for prices being raised and a signal that their margins would go back up. And if Apple can't get pricing power in this market, like no one can, totally. So I mean, I think the steam machine is right a better example. What is this drama about one second ram versus two? So that's the most steam machine drama you can come up with. It's very good . As I understand it , Gabe Newell, the CEO of Valve, gave an interview in which he said there was going to be two eight gigabyte sticks of RAM in the steam machine . And in reality, what they're shipping is one sixteen gigabyte stick of RAM in the steam machine. And if you were to say David,, what's the difference? I genuinely could not sit here and tell you. I'm sure there is one. This is I am just out of my own technical depth in understanding why it matters, which one of these things you're getting The implication seems to be that it's going to ship with one stick of Ram and an empty slot. And that I think is sort of fascinating for a thing that is more peacey than not, sure yeah , but this has become a bit of a Kerfuffle. And again, like everything valve has said indicates that this device is probably three or four hundred dollars more expensive than they wanted it to be. And maybe even three or four hundred dollars more expensive than it was when they started making this product and that just over time this is just what the price has become. And at some point, they 've even spected out Emmer Roth and our team did a great job of basically going and building a gaming PC to rival this thing. And this is just what it cost s . Like it's rough out there. And I think Dom Preston wrote our daily newsletter pulled a comment that I really liked that was basically like, this thing is both fairly priced and way too expensive. And it's like, buddies, welcome to the future of gadgets fairly priced and way too expensive is just what we are in and headed towards. I'm feeling like the big repairability wave over the past two years is about to pay its dividends. Interesting. What do you mean? Bring people are just going to hold on to things longer and they're going to demand that they last a lot longer as they get more expensive . So it's interesting. It's these past few years repairability has been sure about durability, about fighting planned obsolescence. I think now it's going to we're going to add value for dollar to that mix . You buy something big and expensive , it cannot only last three years , right? It has to have a much longer shelf life. And this we ha inven' whatt you would call an error of disposable gadgets for quite a while. Yeah . And I just all that repairability work, like a lot of products are more repairable now than they were before . And I'm just hopeful like maybe all these market forces actually result in a good outcome , which is okay, it's going to be more expensive. That means it needs to last twice as long, right? Which means it's the battery. I hadn't really thought about it, but like basically for two decades since smartphones really became mainstream, we have just been on this relentless path of every single part becoming cheaper and more available all the time. To the point where like as we've talked about, everybody just put smartphone chips in anything they can find because smartphone phone chips are so readily available and so cheap that it's like, we'll figure out what to do with this later. We're just gonna put it in your dishwasher and see what happens it never really turned until now. It's just the RAM. I don't think it's the rest of the supply chain. none of it matters except the RAM the RAM drives the thing at this point, right? That you can't do any of it without memory. And if you can't get memory, you're nowhere. So but I think truly for the first time, it seems like the idea that you can count on this stuff being consistently cheaper and more readily available and higher quality as every generation turns over maybe that's going to change this industry even more than we've realized. Right. You can make the products cheaper if you account for the higher price of the random and use cheaper components elsewhere. Will people accept that? I don't know . But like you can play different games here. It just seems like the industry is still doing what you are describing, which is they're pushing every component to the edge all the time instead of being like, how do we actually make a holistic product based on the prices we have in front of us. And maybe this will be the thing that changes it. And that whole supply chain is like, oh, you can't make a cheap nothing phone anymore. Right. And what's the first thing to go is going to be the things that don't have that price elasticity, like cheap ph ones. If you take a phone that was two hundred dollars and you make it four hundred dollars, that phone ceases to have a reason to exist. And the people who could afford it can't anymore and you just shouldn't make it. And we're going to see a lot of things like that. And all of the fun little like gadgety knick knacks that have been coming out, I think are going to start to die because they just don't have that we can raise the price by two hundred dollars and get away with it because this is essential to your work life that a couple of companies and not many others do . Yeah . Like if I'm if I'm a like , you know, kickstarter sized startup right now , this has got to be terrifying. Oh, yeah. We should do, we did a bunch of t ariff coverage with these smaller companies. I feel like we should do some Ramading Ramadan. We should have been talking to Eric Mitchigovsky from Pebble about coming back on a show to talk about some of this stuff and we should do a couple of these. If you're a small hardware vendor, reach out. I would love to hear what's going on. Yeah, get at us for sure. Let me just read I want to read you just one thing from this is an interview that Valve did with Gamers Nexus about the Steam machine. Gamers Nexus asked them, were you able to lock in contracts for memory with the suppliers directly or did you have to jump through a bunch of poops? And this is Pierre , a software developer at Valve. He says, Look, there's no contracts. There's nothing. Those guys, they give us a price every month or something and they say you can buy that many and it's yes or no. And if we say no, then they never talk to us again . This is the state of things. Do you know what this made me think of is I bought a car in twenty twenty one like peak pandemic chaos year . Cars were the most expensive they've ever been. Used cars were going through the roof. We totaled our car and got more money for it than we paid for it, used seven years earlier, like insanity. And we wanted a hyundai Tucson. We wanted a hybrid, we wanted an SUV, we picked this car. And the people at the dealership put our name on a list of people. And when they got a car, they would start at the top of that list and they would call and say, I they have this this car in color at this price. Do you want it? And they would say, yes or no. And if they said no, they would go to the next person on the list and they would just call until somebody said yes. And the first time we got a call, they were like, it's this one, it's this color, it has all these bells and whistles you don't want . Do you want the car? And Anna, my wife, who was on the phone with them, was like, Well, we don't really want all these other things. And I guess I was like, I'm gonna be real with you. If you don't say yes to this, I'm almost certainly never gonna call you again. And so we bought the damn car . And it's like insane. That's right. This is the world that we live in with computer memory now. That it's like, it is run by this set of companies that have essentially all the power and leverage you could possibly imagine . All that power and leverage comes from having a handful of data center and chip vendor clients building data centers. Like it will come to some sort of conclus ion . Yes, I am increasingly pessimistic about how long that's going to take. Oh yeah, with that. But it will, it will end. I just don't think it's going to end as soon as we would like . I And think it's going to get way messier before it ends. Here's what I want you to imagine before we move on. At some point, like regular non tech media is going to notice Ramageddon, just imagine how those headlines are going to go when people are protesting data cent er prices and more expensive iPhones. Yep, I mean that's coming in September, man. Like can you imagine what this next run of iPhones potentially including a foldable iPhone is gonna cost in this world? Yeah, whoof . Real quick. One of the things we should talk about. I want to know your thoughts on the slate truck. Speaking of things with prices that are important, they announced the slate truck twenty four thousand nine hundred fifty dollars. Ronnie Mullah Virtge contributor when it took it for a ride seems to like it. Where do you stand on the slate truck at this moment in time? I love it. I think it I mean when was the last time you saw an affordable product ? Like and I love the fact that they, you know, if you're a car person, you know, people are just wrapping in a car's left and right, like , fine. We're not going to paint it. You can wrap it however you want. I love the modularity. I love the fact you can turn in an SUV and the airbags have little like they're little connectors so the car knows when you put've the SUV roof on it and engages the airbags and the pillars. Like I think that's all so neat . Like that's a lot of engineering . Yeah . Cool. Like I think all of that is great. I think the range is troublesome to people. I think Americans just want to see three hundred next to a range estimate. But that's maybe not what this truck is for . Like most of the people who are going to buy this kind of truck to do this kind of like have a toy or use it for work, they're not traveling hundreds of miles in a go. So I think that's the one question mark I have on. I'm dying to try one out. I think they're just so neat . So what I wonder about you specifically because you are like, I would say you're sort of lightly a truck guy if that makes sense. I wanted aspire to be a truck guy. Exactly. It was great. I just think about it every day. Yeah, does this satisfy the truck guy in you? Because like the line in Ronnie's story that keeps sticking out to me is that it drives more like a crossover SUV than a pickup , which I think is intended as a compliment , but is not what a lot of Ford F one fifty truck guys are going to want here , but maybe this isn't for them anyway. So for you as like a light truck guy , how does this thing strike you? I mean, do you want to get into a long discussion of body and frame construction principles and why the Ford Raptor in particular sells so well because of its suspension that makes it drive like an SUV? Like the truck market is vast, it's complicated. I don't think the people buying this one are going to one ounce of thought to ride quality in that way If it's more forgiving than I think they will. But usually like a regular pickup truck that doesn't have an independent rear suspension, it bounces over a bump. Like that's weird, that's a weird feeling. Sure . So I suspect this thing is going to appeal to a lot of people that like the Ford Maverick appeals to. Like there's a there is a market for smaller pickup trucks. The thing that's going to make or break the slate truck is how much people actually take to customizing it. This entire thing is a bet on literally the base model is called the blank slate. The whole thing is a bet on actually you want to customize this truck. We are going to limit the options we put in front of you. All the way down to there's no infotainment, just put your phone in the dash like all of you are doing anyway . And I think that's just incredibly smart. The part about that I don't like is it makes the very cheap price seem sort of fake, right? In the sense that like, yes, twenty four nine fifty is slightly more, I think, than slate wanted this thing to be in part because the giant tax break that you get for buying a car like this has gone away, but still it is , I think by a wide margin , the cheapest electric car and the cheapest pickup you're going to find pretty much anywhere . But then we're in a Ramageddon world where now I have to go source a bunch of other parts that might be more expensive for a bunch of supply chain and war in the Middle East reasons . Am I potentially signing myself up for a headache that I didn't even know I was getting into , that like the sort of DIY car economy feels a lot scarier right now than it did a couple of years ago. Yeah, I mean, that's the flipside of what I'm saying, right? It's gonna be it's make or break depending on how much people want to customize their truck. True. And maybe they want it less than they did. Right. Like I really don't think we know. I do think people stare at new cars which are getting increasingly more expensive. Like we're closing at the median price being like forty or fifty thousand dollars for new car. Yeah. That's crazy. It's insane. And then you look at those cars and they are just shock full of tech. Like the new Mercedes electric sea class, like the interior is basically a Korean nightclub. Like there's no other way to describe what is happening in that car what do you want me to this way ? It's just like what is going on in this car ? Right? Like the new electric BMWs are like the interiors are bananas and there's a weird trapezoid infotainment screen . No carmaker can just settle on using a circle for a steering wheel anymore. Like new cars are getting increasingly weird to justify all of that cost . Yeah . And there, you know, carmakers like , well, what will justify the money? Screens . And I don't think that's actually working . Do you know what I mean? Like I think there's this is this will be a test of the market. Doesn't would the market prefer a cheaper planar car for a reasonable amount of money that you can just tweak at will without running into some DRM Mercedes MBUX nonsense ? Did you see the car? It looks crazy in there. It does. It's all so blue and there are so many, yet again, so many screens showing walls screening over and over again. The Class is not a big car you're like if I put my baby in that car, it's like there will be a one to one baby to screen volume ratio . Yeah, and there's a there's a moon roof that's doing stuff. I gotta stop looking at this car. So there's a lot of there's a lot of like that's obviously a luxury car but it's just trickling down to everything. But I was in an Uber here in France . And it was a BYD SEL, which is basically a Tesla Model three EY competitor. And I asked the guy, the labor driver,, like like do you this? It's better than Tesla. And he was like, so much better than Tesla. Like he blows Tesla out of the water. Wow. And I was like, What do you like about it? He's like, The fitt and finish is better, the range is better. And then he pointed at the screen and goes, and it has carplay. And that was like the last it was like, check . And he was like and then you said, I'll get out here, thank you It was like, whatever. We were stuck in traffic. So I spent a lot of time talking about this car thing. And I was like,, they yeah just're like basically illegal in the United States . And he's like, in France, they have to protect Cituen and Pujot and Renault. And he made like the French spitting noise to indicate his disgust with the French domestic car manufacturer. He's like, Puj it was amazing . I love that. And he was like, The French government just taxes these cars. If I went to China, I could buy two for the price that I bought one here in France, but everyone is still buying them here because they're better cars . And like there's just something to be obviously the Chinese government is subsidizing them. They're part of a huge trade. Well, all the stuff is going on. But there's just something to be said for people want a quality product at a good price . The slight much remains to be seen with the slight truck, but up against the feature creep and the tech bloat in all the other new cars , we'll see like I'm happy it exists. Yeah. I have wondered that is maybe one silver lining of what's about to happen is like is there about to be a big new push in much dumber gadgets that like is this how we get dumb TV's back because it literally becomes too expensive to make smart TVs and rather than ship all that crap in your television? That's the most optimistic thing you've ever said. No. This is what I'm saying. It will always be more lucrative to track you until you die .. Yeah, that's true Even if they have to charge me more for it, that's look at it. Somewhere in this hotel is the Fox that can data activation . Well, on the surveillance economy, this is, a this good is a good segue to the beginning of the lightning round. So let's take a break, then we're going to come back. We'll do the lightning round. Barry back. All right, we're back. It's time now for the lightning round , beginning with America's favorite podcast within her podcast. I don't even have to ask. I just I give up at this point. I'm not he just does it every week. We're still here. Brendon Carr is a dummy. Brendan Carr is a dummy Belia is a dummy Brandon Car is a dummy Brendan Car is a dummy Brendan car is a dummy dummy dum it's merch done. It's still going merge . That rolled. Oh man, that was good. That ruled, play that at your can party, me . So that's like, that's the real theme song for America two hundred and fifty right there. Thank you to Dave Girtner who sent that to us. The revolutionary spirit in that was it's real . That was awesome. Now with Mercher. That was very good. All right, Neilah, what do you do this week? What did he do this week ? But the one that we should pay attention to is this was the week that the public comment period on whether or not the view on ABC is a bona fide news program opened and the license renewal for the various ABC stations owned by Disney that he pulled the licenses early up for renewal to punish Disney for being too woke or whatever whatever word salad exists in Brendan's corrupt little mind . So this is that week . So ABC stations are running ads encouraging their viewers to leave comments at the SEC's website saying that the view is a bona fide news program. It's kind of wild. We have it. Do you want to run it? Yeah, let's just watch this. I haven't actually seen this . I had this idea for a show different women, different points of view . You has welcomed your favorite guests and covered the issues you care about for nearly thirty years . Now the FCC wants to control who is allowed to appear on the show . Viewers , use your voice, scan this QR code you have until July sixth . So a lot of ideas packed in there. It's kind of giving like pharmaceutical ad. It is . Opening up Barbara Walters is a choice and ending with we believe, the viewers of the view will scan this QR code and put it on the SEC. Like just a lot of ideas in there who knows or if it will work . Brendan will tell you that none of this is true, right? This is just a good faith re examination of whether the view is a bona fide news program and needs to abide by the equal time rule. All this is to punish Disney. So you recall this kicked off in Ernest FRO as a James Tolerico appeared on the view. He's obviously a congressional candidate in Texas and news programs do not have to give equal time, entertainment programs to it because that's like free advertising. So historically, the only program that has ever had to think about the equal time rule is Saturday Night Live because you cannot make the case that that is a new show . And they're very good at it . And you know, when Kamala Harris appeared on Saturday Night Live, they gave President Trump airtime at an NSCAR race like the next weekend or something . But the view s it's right on the line and it has operated under a bona fide news exemption for years and years and years. Like they've gotten it and Carr, because he's a dummy and he wants to control speech in America, has said, well, what if I pull it? What if I reexamine this? And what if I chill your speech for not allowing you to have candidates on a news program or limit your speech overall ? And so it's up for a review. He pulled the licenses of the ABC stations early for renewal, which is totally unprecedented. And so now ABC is mounting this campaign in return to get its viewers to say, No, this is the news , right? You do need to say, protect this program because we, the consumers of the view, want it to stay the way it is, which is fundamentally crazy for any media property in America to have to do in response to pressure from the government. And I'm just going to keep saying this over and over again. I say it almost every time we do this segment now. Brennan is going after broadcast because that is the power he has . Right, right? So ABC has antennas in cities and it broadcasts over the radio waves, and the federal government has a lot to say over radio waves because radio waves are a scarce public resource, and we do need to allocate them well , right? You don't want the TV broadcast interfering with the cell broadcast interfering with what first responder radio transmissions. So that's why we have spectrum policy and that's the SEC's job. And for whatever reason, we have said, okay, the broadcasters have to use their spectrum in the public interest. And there's a lot of reasons for that when they were the only game in town, there were a lot of good reasons for that. All of that is nonsense now. Most people experience the view on YouTube and is Instagram clips . The government having any instinct about what to do with the view or what candidates can appear on there is nonsensical when its primary distribution is internet distribution that the car has no control over . And all of this is just a test balloon for can I control Instagram? Can I regulate speech on the internet? And he will find a way to do it if you start falling down the slippery slope because the public interest standard of spectrum use for broadcast television is as far removed from the experience of everyday Americans as like the telegraph. Like it just doesn't make any sense. Part of the idea in theory there is like if he can scare the view out of existence, he solves his Instagram problem without needing to regulate Instagram, right? Yeah, sure. I mean, I think Don Lehman will just go to YouTu be. You know, like that's the thing that is happening, right? But I mean, like, they got Colbert fired in a very like straightforward. Like there's some evidence that this playbook works. They did, but Colbert, you don't think Colbert is going to have a more lucrative second act on one of these platforms. Oh, I think there's he's gonna he's gonna be here at Cannes chilling creator supplements like everybody else and like maybe that will break his heart, but the money will be there for him . This is what I mean. Like that ecosystem is richer, it is populated by right wing voices. No one bodies up to Facebook and is like, You're not equally balanced. It's like, No actually this is pretty balanced to one side . The crazy uncles of your town make themselves known on Facebook every single day . So I think it's less about I need to solve the supply of the view on Instagram and more if I can get control over broadcast, if I can overcome the First Amendment using these high and mighty rules about equal time and fairness , I can bring that to the internet. And there's lots of ways you could bring that to the Internet. Mobile Internet, for example, runs on public radio spectrum. Sure. What are you going to do with that?? Right Like it's just right there for Brendan if that he wins these battles here. You know he will turn his attention to the broader internet. And I just remind everybody, YouTube is owned by a defense contractor. Like there's a lot of ways for a unified Trump administration to make life hard for a lot of these companies. Yeah. YouTube is owned by a defense contractor is a very funny way to think about a lot of things. Twitch is owned by a defense contractor. Yeah . Like these there's a lot of ways for thing, Xbox is owned by a defense contractor. There's again, I'm just pointing this out over and over again. Like if the Trump administration thesis of this is one government that we control tip to tail holds . Yeah, getting the view kicked off the air or punishing them or yanking their bona fide news exception on broadcasts. It's broadcast spectrum policy. There's a reason we historically have not talked about in this show , but all this is a trial balloon for what can we do? How can we punish the other companies that control the media that actually matters? Anyway, that's Brendan . I'm in France, man , it' Is can't believe I had to think about running car in France. Here are the land of the free. Libertate, fraternity, egalita, Brendan. If you want to come on the show and defend your actions, you corrupt tyrant of a man , I welcome you. We can do it in France. That's been Brendan Carr is a dummy, America's favorite podcast in the podcast. Brendan Car is a dummy . It's beautiful. We're also going to do an AI version of you wrapping the whole guns and ships Hamilton song about Brendan Carr. Oh god. And that's going to go. That's what the Ak is for. We're going to Kevin O'Leary, we're at big data center, finally, a reason that people can get behind Love it. I have a lightning round item that dovetails actually sort of perfectly with everything you just talked about , which is this movie artificial. Do you know about this movie? I don't. So it's imagine the social network, but it's about Sam Altman and Open AI is essentially, I think, was like part of the pitch and kind of the vibe. The movie's called Artificial. It stars Andrew Garfield as Sam Altman. It's directed by Luca Guadanino, who's a very good director . This movie has been in the works, I think for about a year . It's very near production being finished . Amazon had was going to run the movie and had said that it was going to put it in theaters to basically give it an Oscar qualifying theatrical run. Like this movie is supposed to be a big deal. Andrew Garthfield is a very good actor. The cast is really impressive, all this stuff, and then just sort of out of nowhere, Amazon dropped the movie this week of course. Yeah. Again, this is like it is owned by a defense contractor, right? And I think the story seems to be essentially that this This script was originally like a mix of kind of brutal but also like funny satire. It's written by Simon Rich, who wrote for SNL for a very long time, a very funny person, and it would have been sort of needley in a way, I think, would be my guess about the first reader of this script . But it definitely did not paint Sam Altman as a good person and open AI as a good company wanting to make the world a better place. It's like very much the sort of duplicitous schemer Sam Altman that a lot of people have come to know recently. Then apparently what happened is Luca Guardini knew, the director made the movie darker and darker and sort of more anti AI as time went on , finished the movie, screened it for Mike Hopkins who runs the studio at Amazon who immediately pulled the plug. Wow . And Amazon has not as far as I can tell p,ublicly given a reason for this, except to say basically we don't think we're the right distributor for this, we want somebody else to have it . But I think you can draw the lines pretty easily, right? Like Amazon has lots of deals with OpenAI and other AI companies , all of these companies are tied up together . Open AI has been making these like weird circular deals with everybody for a very long time. And you can see why if you want to A impress the Trump administration , which looks favorably generally on people like Sam Altman and on people like Elon Musk and others who are apparently not depicted super well in this movie . And you want to keep your very lucrative AI deals going, you would dump this movie. So they dump this movie and then apparently start shopping around and one by one it appears other studios are starting to pass. Wow as well . Netflix has apparently passed. A twenty four has passed . Warner Brothers, one of its, I think, substudios has passed. There are other distributors who are looking at picking it up, but it's starting to seem like this movie might just kind of die . And the only sure, maybe it's just a horrible movie that nobody wants. I don't think that's the most likely answer as to why nobody wants to distribute this movie. A twenty four just took a big Google investment. Exactly, to make AI movies, which a lot of people are real pissed about . Yeah . Like it's just you can just see it. It's a very naked way of looking at the fact that it kind of is in no one's business interest to say mean things about AI right now, which is funny because if you're reading the cultural room, this is the movie you should release. Yes. I don't understand that at all. Like there's a lot of money to be made in releasing the movie that says AI is bad. bad. And it sounds like there's been a shortage of them. Yeah, but is that more money than the money that you risk by pissing off the AI people? That's that 's the equation. There's got to be some indie studio or industry is going to pick this up. So apparently Neon and Mubi are apparently the frontrunners for it, which are like perfect. They are the ones who should release a movie like this. And I hope it hits big for them, and I hope everything goes great. But I think like this, all the things you're talking about about like these companies are run by defense contractors and the government and this other part of the economy and the business world has leverage over these things in ways that don't necessarily seem obvious but are still very real. This is like a perfect example of that to me. There should be more than five companies, VoPatel twenty eight This is my entire presidential platform. That's really good. Should be more than five companies . Yeah, it's good stuff. All right, what's your next lighting round item? I actually know what it is because I assigned this one to you , but do you want to talk about it? Yes, we finally published our review of the Kaleidoscape Strado E. John Higgins did it We have Klaidesreamersca,pe he st has got , I've got to setup. This is the ten thousand dollars movie streaming server player setup that we both have in our houses. John is actually a good TV reviewer. I just like cosplay as a TV reviewer. So he did the review. The fight here is against Blu ray. It is blue ray quality. They do do all of their own encoding . They take the master files from the studios and they make their own encodes, which so they can't exceed Blue Ray quality in some cases. Blue rays are dying, which is really sad. So this is the high quality movie playback system. Like there isn't another one except for Sony Rabbi Corps, which only exists on Sony televisions and can only play Sony movies. I love it, you know, that's an ecosystem that I really am fond of. It's vastly cheaper than the kaleidoscape because it just arrives on Sony televisions . But you need a big setup to see it. This is John's real point here. If have you an average TV and an average soundbar, none of this money is worth it. If you have a really nice TV and a really nice audio system, particularly if you have a nice audio system, you will get a lot out of this setup. And that was my main takeaway was that it's really hard to show people the visual fidelity increase . Like in Pacific Rim you can see it blocks less. The color red is really hard to compress and it does a better job at the color red across the board. These are very fine details. It is fast action scenes with a lot of moving elements. It does a way better job there. Everything else is like, oh, it's definitely crisper . I'm gonna leave now. Like that's how people react to it . On the audio side blows everything out of the water . Like if you have a good audio setup, it is uncompressed audio. It's louder, the dynamic range is way wider, so the quiet parts are quieter, and the loud parts are even louder. Everything is crisper. Like it just sounds better than the overly compressed streaming audio that we've been listening to for so long that it knocks people's socks off. So it's very expensive . You do not need to buy the full ten thousand dollars client server setup. You can get the Strato EPlayer alone, which I think is three grand. It's this is one of the things that's never supposed to be on sale, but you can find them on site like people sell them too for cheaper. You do end up having to buy or rent all the movies and shows. It's not as convenient as everything else. But for that set of movies that you want to have the full experience in , yeah, I think it's worth it, especially as Blue R kind of declines, which it's slowly been doing in meaningful ways year after year . A lot of people are going to tell me that we should just review a plex server next to this . We have plans. We have plans to cover the what I will call the community. Interesting. Blue ray, by the way, turned twenty this week. That's happy, happy twentieth anniversary of Blue Ray. That's such a weird phenomenon. Like, man, it makes me feel old. I remember being at the CES edit with the Angad team when there was a blue ray booth and an HDVD booth and it was going to be it was going to be the kickoff of the format war and the night before CES HDV failed. It collapsed and took they the booth down before CS opened. Whoa . Now I just feel like an old guy. I feel like that's a version of history episode waiting to happen. We're going to have to do that at some point. That's a good one. But yeah, literally the night before, it was like the breaking news was like Toshiba just caved. They were like, yeah, we're out. Whoa . That's kind of wild actually. That's pretty cool. I have been bluy shopping this week because of the anniversary, and then realized I literally don't own a blue ray . So now I'm also shopping for a blue ray player. It's been a fascinating week. Three thousand dollars strategy eBay. Although you have a garbage TV. Like very proud to have a garbage TV. Well, what I was gonna say is like I have been slowly starting the fight with my wife to put a sound bar in the living room. Like this is the person with whom I had to fight my way up to a fifty five inch television. Yeah Anna began our relationship with a twenty two inch computer monitor as her TV and I think would still be perfectly happy in that place. So I'm slowly fighting battles and I've decided soundbar is the next one. That's good. I'm really looking forward. The problem is to get the best out of the soundbar, you gotta stick a subway for someone in that room too, and that is the hardest fight of all. Yeah, that's true. 'Cause you can't really hide that either. I can't like stick that in a cabinet. That's just a big box. You gotta hold the kids painted or something like it's just you're doomed. Yeah, we're going to have to come back to that one. All right, I have one more lightning round item for you. Yeah , which is did you see this Bob Eiger sort of exit interview that he did with the Financial Times? Really interesting. I think Bob Egger is sort of a weird story. He was the CEO of Disney for a very long time , left once kind of did aggressive sabotage on the person that he picked to succeed him during the pandemic. Bob Chapeck came back as if he was like the white knight who like also killed his predecessor. I don't know. It's a very weird thing. Now his left for real. He says did a really interesting interview with the Financial Times only in the shuts. The piece about it and sort of the state of Disney is really interesting. But there are a couple of things that he mentions in it that I just found really interesting and pertinent to our purposes. One is the Twitter deal, which he confirmed, this was sort of known at the time that Disney was one of the assumed they won Twitter or Twitter and they thought Twitter was toxic . Yeah The phrase the phrase Eiger used was , quote, a horrible distraction, which I think was a super good call in retrospect . He also said they wanted to buy James Bond, which obviously didn't work out. That's now owned by Amazon . But the one I really want to talk about, and I think this is so funny is Bob Egger made it sound like there were there was work underway to have Disney merge with Apple. Sure But sort of , this is the thing that I really like. So Eiger describes the potential merger as truly transformational, right? This is like a thing people have talked about before that Apple should buy Disney. They have a lot of values that they talk about that are similar. You can see how it might work . But then Eiger also says in the end, the conversations quote never went anywhere and that quote, Apple didn't show that much interest . So I'm like, Pob did this almost ? Yeah, or did you just call you sent a series of emails? It's just the equivalent of Vauwager being like flav or . Yeah, that's exactly right. It just makes me laugh. So Egger ends up on the Apple board. They're like, these companies have been tied up together for a very long time. But I just really like the idea that we almost merged by which he means I asked if you wanted to buy me and you never responded to my email. There was that period sort of, I wouldn't say late jobs era because jobs had no interest in buying anything . But in the beginning of the Tim Cook era where I was like, they've got to spend money. Well, it was after the Beats thing too. There was this sense of like maybe Apple is on a real acquisition terror now and it's just going to go eat the industry alive because it has two hundred billion dollars in cash. They've got to buy something. Everyone wanted them to buy like hyundai. Like do you remember like every company got floated and in the end Netflix was going to be it for a minute? Yeah like it was there was a lot out there and I think in the end actually Apple got so burned by the Beats acquisition that they never wanted to do anything of that scale again . Like the beats acquisition shortcapped them Apple Music and all this stuff, but it also brought them Jimmy Ivy and Dr. Dre as Apple employees with no titles and like a massive culture clash that I think they're still they're still fighting through . Yeah, yeah. But anyway, I just thought that was interesting. And also I continue to think the Disney Apple combination is a strange and fascinating thing that clearly will never happen. Even I mean, Jobs is the largest Disney shareholder for a time. So you can sold Pixar or to Disneyland. You can float a bunch of stuff , but like, yeah, there's you had no shop . Yeah . I'll say it can. I was gossiping with a media person here and we were talking about Eiger. And they were like, every one of these big companies CEOs is now effectively an accountant. And the only difference with Bob Egger is he has any amount of emotional intelligence whatsoever . Like he can communicate like I like Avengers movies in a way that doesn't make him sound like a robot programmed to try to make a human connection . And he's like, we'll see if the new guy can do it because he might just be an accountant too . Yeah. Like did you do you remember that trend? It was like a couple months ago where all the burger CEOs were eating their burgers and every single one of them was just like weird and bad and it was like, have you ever eaten a burger before? That was actually that cont ext in which this came up. Was it really ? They are them all being accountants now is a perfect explanation. Yeah, that's really funny. All right, what's your next lighting round? What we got? We've got one of the most. Oh, speaking of can, I want to end here because I think this is a preview of some stuff that's that's coming . The CEO of People Inc. Neil Vogel has been doing the rounds here. And so People Inc owns obviously people. They used to be called dot dash Meredith. They own like about com. Like this is a big roll up of digital media companies. And they change the name to People Inc. to take, you know, just use the name of the famous magazines. To not be called dot dash Meredith So he's on this terror and you can hear him on all the media podcasts and all this stuff and he's like an age of AI brands stand for something and I like largely agree with him on a lot of these things. But he was on the Axios yacht giving an interview to Axios because you do interviews and yachts here it can. What a sentence. And he said this line, which I think is really interesting. He's like, we partnered with Cloudflare and we blocked every single AI crawler and scraper. We just blocked them all. Like Cloudflare did us a solid. We just blocked them all. And all of them started calling us because they need our data because we make new information. And now we have deals. Like you have to turned off this spigot and we got all the deals. And he says, the one we could not turn off was Google because Google uses the same crawler for search as it does for AI training. He called it an abusive market power and he said, I wish we could work with them constructively, but we are probably headed for confrontation , which means the ant itrust litigation about Google using the search crawler to train AI is like we are on the precipice of that antitrust litigation because once the one media company CEO says it, all the rest of them get real brave and they start saying it too . And you can just see it that's the it's coming. It that's the tip of the iceberg, I think. That's interesting. And I think I mean, A, if you want to talk about sort of abusing monopoly power , that seems like a pretty straightforward like you can't leave our search engine . So we're going to force you to play nice with our AI is like if I am not an antitrust lawyer, but boy does that seem like a fairly straight line ? But also this is a thing that has been brewing, right? And we've been talking a lot about this. And these companies, like you had Nick Thompson, the CEO of the Atlantic on decoder like two years ago. A long time ago talking about kind of this same dynamic of like, well, we have to figure out how to set a market and protect ourselves while also we think participating in this business and technology that we think is interesting and important . And that has just come for everybody that now we are in this place where like he's right, people link is huge. They have a lot of brands. We've actually been seeing this. This is this is some like weird inside baseball stuff, but like our real time traffic analysis has recently shown up a bunch of weird spikes that make it very happy spikes in the world. Yeah. And like kind of out of nowhere, all of a sudden, like our traffic just like multiplies . it And's very obvious that what this is is this is AI bots crawling our site. Like I just don't know what else it could possibly be at this moment in time . And so like this thing is not going away anytime soon. And in fact, it's getting worse and it's changing the traffic mix of the internet for lots of people. Like Cloudflare has talked about that for the first time it's seeing more bot traffic than human traffic. Like this thing is here now and I think People Inc is an interesting place to fight it. The thing that's going to make everyone do is it will force either we everyone gets deals right from the AI companies and it becomes very lucrative for us to put meaningful human journalism in a database for AI companies to reconstitute as AI summaries. Like maybe that's the future of everything. The other thing that might happen is that everything gets paywalled even harder because it costs money to serve traffic at scale. And if you're serving a bunch of bot traffic and there's literally nothing on the other end of it for you, you're just going to turn it off , right? And I think you're going to see a bunch of smaller companies head that way. The people Inks of the world are going to body up and do antitrust litigation against like that's what they're going to do . But him saying it at can on a stage , you can see all the other media executives are like, huh, is it time that we say that too? We've been waiting. You know, like it's a herd mentality and this is I think in particular with Google, you know, the deal has been obvious. You allow the Google search crawler to hit your site at scale and in return it delivers you traffic . Like search traffic arrives and you can monetize however you want . You'd like now we're also doing AI and Gemini just telling you the answers to stuff. Like you get literally nothing in return . And I think any judge or jury is going to be like, yeah, that's that's a new deal. No one's signed up for this. Google is going to have a lot of responses to that, I'm sure , but it does feel like pray I don't change the deal further, you know? Like that's the mode this industry is in. Yeah. That said, it's the south of France. You would not just looking at the amount of money sloshing around here, you would not feel like any of these people are in any kind of distress whatsoever . Well, that I mean that's it's that's why it's the people links of the world who have to go fight this fight because their business model is much more actively threatened by this at this moment in time. Oh with that question. Yeah. That fight, I think, is only just beginning. And boy, are we going to cover it here on the show . We should get out of here. You've got fancy people things to do, I'm sure Mumford and all of his sons, I assume are just right outside of your door. Get out of here, Mumford. You do need to go, but before you go, what's on Decorn next week? What's coming out? It's our best episode of the year. It's the fourth of July . Oh yeah. It's our grill episode. And I will say this. I shot the intro duction that I never thought would have gone this long. It's five years Can I so this year it's the CEO of Weber Blackstone. So when we first made our list of like what grill CEO should we have as a joke, you obviously put Weber at the top right ? And at the time Weber was too fancy and they wouldn't do it. And they were like, What are you a tech website? No, go away . And so our first ever gridd company was Blackstone, the Griddle Company, which was like a TikTok sensation. Oh, sure . Not only are they a TikTok sensation, they were enough of a rocket ship that they acquired Weber . So it's the same guy. It's Roger Daly, the CEO of Blackstone, but he's now the CEO of Weber because he just bought it. Wait, I assume I heard Weber Blackstone and I assumed Weber bought Blackstone. You're telling me Blackstone Whatever they put the more famous names ever. Yeah, he was like, yeah, like I won and then I bought you . And now he has like the conversation's hilarious because he's a really good dude. I really like him a lot. He's very humble, but he's like, yeah, I had to fix this culture that had broken to the point where I showed up and just bought it . Wait, you've backed your way into like an accidentally perfect decoder episode. It is the funniest decoder episode of all time . Like we talk about grilling not at all . Like he had to put his merger through FTC antitrust review . Wow. So I was like, so 'cause I wanted him on a show last year when the deal went down, but he was an antitrust review . So he couldn't come on. That's awesome. It's just like the easily the funniest. We even talked about Ramageddon. I was like, is the IGRL platform affected by the RAM shortage? And he was like, No, that's not really a problem . It's like I got another fish to frank . But yes, like a perfect Dakota episode is a guy who literally is a startup founder came to like massive prominence in the pandemic because of TikTok bought the biggest name in the space. That's awesome. That's pretty good. I'm very excited for that. Happy Fourth of July everyone. That's good stuff. Also, you're on Version History this coming weekend. We're doing the Nest episode. Oh, very good. Where we get deep in our feelings about thermostats . That was really fun. Go subscribe to the Virgin History YouTube channel, the podcast feed, whatever. It's a really good episode. I think one of my favorites we've done in a while. I think you'll all enjoy it. For now, that's it for the Virgin Cast. Next week's a short week, but you and are going I to be back, I think next Thursday before we head out for a while. We got a lot of stuff coming up next week. It's gonna be a fun one. Until then, remember to subscribe to the Verge for all of our podcasts ad free, including this one. You get all of our exclusive newsletters . You get all of our coverage of grills and everything else. I don't know. Virgurs. com slash subscribe. That's where you go to subscribe. Also, send us email birdcast birds. com. Call the hotline eight six bird one. All of your questions, all of your thoughts and feelings about technology and the movie artificial and everything else. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of Vox Media Podcast Network. Today's show was produced by Josh Cajas, Eric Gomez, Brandon Keefer, Travis Larchuck, and Aron La Cassio. We will see you next week , Eline. Can we end on the song instead? Can we can we just play Brendan Carr is a dummy instead? Because that's the real rock and roll. Brendon Carr is a dummy Brandon car is a dummy. Brandon car is a dummy Brandon car is a dummy dummy dump dummy dummy no ise really good and done no Back in roll