The Mystery of Dumb TVs

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Now I can instantly spend it whether I'm checking you out online with VMo or using a VenMoe debit card. Say more more exactly, because the more you do with themmo, the more you get s like earning up to five percent cash backack with VenMo Stash on a bundle of brands. So, order more pizza? The math demands it. Get the Venmo deebit card. VenMo Stash bundle terms and exclusions apply. See terms of Venmo. me slash stash terms. Venmo check out notot available with all merchants. VenMo Master card issued by the Bangcor Bank NA. Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media podcast network. if you Just ignore all the other corporate shenanigans. that remains true hereere we are. I'm your friend, David Pierce. Meiliplls here, Hey budy. What's up you're home For once. After a month of extremely fancy hotel rooms, you're back in, you know, your lowly old house. Yeah, back in my attic next to my daughter's room. At any moment, you can hear singing Taylor Swift It's going to that's what our summer has been. What does she think about the MSG wedding U she she's more excited about her iPod. So I showed her pictures of the wedding and she's like, great, good for Taylor. But you know, she's going to camp, like eight year olds do in the summer. And she wanted to listen to music on the bus in the way to camp. And some of her friends on the bus have like little Android music players. there's like kid music players Some people have phones without SIM cards in them It's that time in the parenting journey for me. It will come for you, David. And I was like, I'm not doing any of this We are We are delaying phone and foam like objects as long as we can U And so I dug out one of my old iPods We actually retrofitted for a YouTube video ages ago with an SSD And a new battery? I've been debating doing this for my own purposes Yeah, so I mean we had it because we just like did this for a video ages ago And I had to remember how to download MP threes. I'm not going to say how or why that was completely legal. That's all you need to know It's like I pay for every streaming service. I You know? Yeah. I pay for every streaming service. like I would like it on the record, Your Honor. I pay for every streaming service I have done my economic duty to the artists of America and I do it every month at high rates, ever increasing rates. And, so we gave her an iPod And we put a bunch of music on it. It is the worst selection outside of Taylor Swift who I will concede is America's finest living songwriter. shhout out Walt Mosserg, who believes this in whate every fiber of is being. One of Alalt's better takes. It is I agree. I think she's right up there It's a bunch of Disney's direct to streaming musical soundtracks. And I could not be unhapper about this. And so we plugged in the headphones and now it's over there, but you might hear it. coming through the wall at any moment. This is very different from being in the South of France. Is she old enough to have a conversation with me about which of the high school musicals is the best high school We haven't got there yet. We are at Zombies and desescendants in my friend, the ill fated crossover musical experperience. Okay, this this is this is big yikes. This is I'm in the sw spot of We are at Spidey and his amazing friends, and we are we are appearing to be stuck there for some time. And this is terrific news in my household I have no, we are not pushing past this until until we're ready for like You know the exorcist. We're just gonna to stick with spite until then. It's gonna be amazing. Good luck ' once it comes for you, it's all over, and you're like, can we just listen to Taylor Swift again That's actually the thing I say all the time It's I mean you and everybody else, it turns out. If you've thought about the wedding, by the way, I want to hear them. I'm very conflicted about. I need to hear everybody's thoughts. forcast the Birg dot com tell uss how you feel. I'm dead serious about this. We have a bunch of stuff we should talk about today. There's a lot of Netflix stuff going on. There's a lot of meta smart glasses stuff going on Brendon rememains Brendon is going on at all times. some deeply silly Instagram AI shenanigans that we should get into on But let's start with Netflix. I think We've spent a lot of time talking about streaming services on this show and we have this thing called the Go ninety scale of streaming serervices, right? And it is essentially doom streaming services. Right. sor right. the go ninety scale of doom streaming services. And the idea is if you are a ninety The Verizon streaming Service code ninety, you are dead. h If you are a zero, that's the best, most vibrant, most alive you can possibly be. And we have had Netflix at a zero for a very long time. I think there is an argument to be made at this particular moment in time that we need to tick it up on the scale a little bit. Oh my. in part because there's just been a bunch of news this week. that suggests that Netflix is slowly losing its mind and' starting to flail uncontrollably in a lot of directions. And that is what happens right before things start to get really ugly. Let me just throw couple at you So The biggest story of the week in sort of media tech circles was this Bloomberg report about how Netflix has this huge problem. where it will have a hit first season of a show and then lose a vast quantity of the audience on the second season. And there are a bunch of examples of this. I think beef was the one with the strongest drop offff hugely successful first season big Zeitgeeisty show, won a lot of awards The second season, Bi all accounts very good. I didn't watch it. And neither did anybody else. And but this is this is a recurring theme at Netflix, apparently and they're struggling to figure out what to do about it and how to solve this problem Everybody has theories about this, people are talking about this all week Then next to that, there's news that Netflix is A expanding its podcast operations, including deals with folks at the Vox Media podcast network. shout out to Charie Harding, friend of the Virchcast who's swch on pop is going to be on Netfix, going amazing sometime soon. Big win for Charlie. We love Charlie. G go listen to and watch switch on pot I also doing just straight up what I would call YouTube videos. They made a deal with a bunch of publishers, including our potential soon to be parent company. It's all very confusing. I don't understand any of it. You can do the disclosure if you'd like to. I'm gonna try to basically take in many cases, existing videos that were made for other social platforms and just put them on Netflix. and The Ey nominations were this week. There's been a bunch of new information coming in earnings and such that suggests that Even as Netflix continues to grow, people are spending less time on Netflix. There's just The thing I wrote at the top of this Google Dc is, what is Netflix anymore And I feel like if I am asking this question Maybe we're not at a zero on the G ninety scale of Doom streaming services Yeah. I think that's right. Netflix is a subscription that you definitely had is no longer a given I think that's right Right, That's what kept it at zero on the doom scale for so long was if you were gonna have one subscription, it was almost certainly Netflix I think what you are describing is not What is Netflix anymore? It's Boy, how fast is Netflix going to turn into YouTube? And is that is that maybe the goal? Like it sure looks like that is not just a thing that's accidentally happening, but that might be affirmatively the plan There are a lot of reasons that's really hard to do It's really no one has succeeded in doing that. To be clear, no one has ever succeeded in doing that You know, I did just come back from Can. I listened to so many creators Event talk about advertising and talk about reaching audiences. They all make long YouTube videos And they've integrated the advertising into the videos very directly. They market products. this is This is the thing. and the two pieces of the crreator economy that are booming are Instagram and YouTube Like thoseose are the things. Those are the formats that people operate in. And TikTok is actually pretty secondary, in really interesting ways. Is that just because there's no money in it? Like Still to this day, no one has figured out how to make money on TikTok? It's a discovery mechanism for other platforms I mean that's one argument. I think I mean they are Tkokers m make a lot money. but Charlie D Milio exists right sure There are TikTkers who do brand deals on that platform in big ways. but the idea that the audiences are growing or that you can reach new audences or you can experiment in new forats or you can like write it and you't TikTok is so interest graph driven really does not have any foog graph that the creators sort of flock back to YouTube in real ways. And that means thingsings like backrooms happen as YouTube phenomenons. and then Netflix gets to participate in that later at more expensive economics. Whereas YouTube gets to grow the talent that then becomes the Hollywood talent And I think if you're Netflix, you're kind of looking at this. you're like, Okay, the future of this industry is a bunch of creators who control all of the attention and all the cultural capital today They're nowhere near our platform. And the only time We will get a hold of them. is later when they have cache and the influence and the money to make Bigger budget things And then we have to pay really high rates to get those bigger budget things And then we're going to charge people for that and And we'll just be late becausecause those creators are also available for free on Instagram, and YouTube, and TikTok And we had better go get a piece of that early. And I think all of this flailing is a response to that. Netflix does not have anything close to what you would call a creator strategy No right, That's just not the thing that they do And if you think that's where the action is, if you think creators are where the future of the cultural industries are You had better do something And you might as well just fire a bunch of stuff at the wall, including paying for YouTube videos Why not The question is whether that's worth the ever increasing amount of money that Netflix charges customers to be on its platform at all compared to YouTube which somewhat famously is free Although YouTube premium, I would say, even as it goes through its own unbelievably large series of price increases, remains the best deal in streaming and it's not particularly close. Oh yes only that's the true zero now I think I honestly think that's right And so this is this is the thing, right? I think you know, you can put a lot of pieces together and figure out how Netflix got here, right? Like you go way back to the idea that Netflix's main competitor was sleep This company has been obsessed with time spent in the service for a really long time. and To some extent, I get that. And then they've also made a bunch of other moves that suggest that that is the thing that they're after. They said they weren't into sports and then they got into sports. They said they weren't doing gaming and then they got into gaming and they're increasingly into gaming. This service is just a place to go to. do entertainment whichich is fine and good But like you said, that puts them in a very different competitive space with a bunch of gigantic platforms with impossible resources that are well established in this space that you just can't compete with. Like the billions of dollars that have been spent over the years trying to take down YouTube even in some small way, have all been wasted. It just hasn't worked and So for Netflix to say We want to be The shiny entertainment thing made sense to me, right? That it was like the race was, how do we become HBO before HBOes becomes Netflix? And it actually made sense a while back the thing to aspire to was to be HBO and that if you could be HBO and become the factory of Dit shows, all the rest of your problems solve themselves. So to me, it's like, I look at this and either if you're Netflix, you don't think you can win that game anymore by making the most best shows. I think in a lot ways is demonstrably true at this point. The best shows are not on Netflix.. And also look at it and say, okay, We need to continue to be the biggest thing in the world to support our unbelievable investment in everything We just have to go eat up minutes in people's day, whatever that looks like. And that just runs you directly into YouTube and TikTok And I think that is a losing game for Netflix in a big, big way I mean, again, the problem for every media business. of every kind, not not news websites or whatever. like every literal media business, the thing that makes content. That's your business You are up against an army of teenagers who will work for free It is the problem. You just have to stare at it and say most people on their phones, on their home screens have Instagram and YouTube and the economics of Instagram and YouTube er army of teenagers who will work for free And there they make infinity content Okay, like what are you going to do about something it has to be something The two things Netflix has always said about itself that you've described One, our only competition is sleep and we have toome HBO before HBO comes up always been in absolute opposition to each other Interesting Our only competition is sleep means they have to just have stuff a huge array of stuff that commands your attention and keeps you from playing video games and keeps you from opening TikTok. And that means eventually they're going to make video games, which they did and eventually they're going to have YouTube videos and podcasts, which they do And they've picked that one They did not pick, we will have the best quality content They just didn't. And Netflix has gotten really numeric about it. The New York Times did a profile of Dan Lyn, who runs the studio now Here's the quote, mrter Lyn is a reversion to the norm. He knows what works on the service and how much each movie should cost, and there's little he's willing to budge on, no matter how big a star is I mean, the whole profile is like he's like, I say no I say no, and I'm like, this is how much you can get. and you're going to hold to this budget and like He reorganized how their studio works and it is It's like quant stuff. you know what I mean? Like it is financial engineering to make the content. And people like working with him because he's honest. which is a rarity in Hollywood the only part of the profile we'll link it, you can read it. It's really good But I think that's very different than we charge you a lot of money. to show you the best stuff And it's a fundamentally different creative proposition too, right? it is like ruthless execution on a series of numbers as opposed to actual creative execution. I mean, Ryan Brodrick, our friend over at Garbage Day, wrote wrote a good thing about this that is like Netflix because of that exact approach that you're describing has become sort of a trailing indicator of what's cool and interesting and not leading any of it, right? Like you can look at something on Netflix and see what was trending eighteen months ago when they started production on it.. And that everything is sort of a copy of a copy of a copy of something that worked on Netflix. And Netflix's movies, frankly, have been like that for some time.'s why between the Rock Johnson just does that movie over and over and over again on Netflix It shows at least for a long time didn't feel like that and they're not all like that. There's still some good stuff on Netflix, but it does If you are going to run your business that way, you are going to run a very particular kind of business that is not the like big swing creative thing that Netflix seemed to want to be for a really long time There's just some part of this where the You know, there's a big dropoff between season one and season two of an Netflix show that runs right into Netflix is best when it's buying the content from networks that are good at this. It's not like there's bunch of Hollwood talent that's all locked up at great jobs right now. and is totally against the idea of making more episodes of television Like it feels like you could like, all right, we're going to set up a studio to do it like NBC did in the nineties, mayaybe at lower rates. R We're not going to pay every single cast member of friendriends a million dollars per episode. but like we're going to make twenty two minute long sitcoms and make sixty episodes of that in a season and do it again the next year and just market that thing so that you have to watch Netflix It seems like they have decided the economics of that don't work and the economics of buying YouTube videos That seems upside down to me for some reason. Well, the argument for Netflix in this case would be that it is such a good distributor, right? I've done a lot of reporting on recommendation algorithms over the years. and one of the things that is sort of seemingly true about Netflix is that it has Bet job than just about anybody else of putting content into a recommendation machine to put the right thing in front of you at the right time. It is very good at that What it has not had is the raw volume of content to do that with something like YouTube has. And so maybe For Netflix, what they're saying is like, we know what you want to watch, we just don't have it on the service. Let's go get it all on the service. and then we can put it in front of you. And I think like I can see the spirit of that theory. I just feel like it doesn't hold up the minute you tell me that I came here to watch you know, beef whichich I didn't. And instead you're going to show me a bunch of like old buuzzfed YouTube videos because structurally to you, that's the same thing. Like I just don't, I don't think that's. That's a company that believes what they do is distribute content notot forll sell you TV movies. Yeah. And that is a mistake Okay, let me put two ideas next to here. Okay O YouTube is going to end up incentivizing its creators to make things that look like TV faster than Netflix will get to having enough stuff that looks like YouTube I think that's right. I mean, that's YouTube is already well down that road. It's making those kinds of shows. rebuilt the TV app to look like television confidently tell you that it's grow faster on TV than any other platform This is the new race, right right? Like before it was we had to become HBO, before they become us, then it was our only competition to sleep And now And you and I are saying It very much feels like Netflix is that we have to overtake YouTube before YouTube overtakes us. Yeah, I think you're absolutely right. if you were to handicap that race, YouTube is well ahead So where would you put Netflix on a go ninety scale of Doom streaming services? I mean, it's like it's in the low single digits, right? It' it's like a two or a three Um But I think it is it is Meingful to me doesn't I don't know what Netflix is anymore. Like I don't know what the value prop of Netflix is in my life anymore You look at all those shows and some of them are good and I've seen a bunch of them. None of those are like the shows of the year, right? Even looking at the Emmies, it's like Purbus was a show a lot of people talked about. Widows Bay was a huge hit that a lot of people talked about. The pit is probably the show of the year for the second year running, which is pretty impressive It just Netflix is not. a thing you sort of have to go to. It's a thing you just sort of have in the background. And boy is that just already YouTube here's my here's my second one. Yeah, hit me Here's my hottest take Okay. Netflix should buy Xbox Wow is that not where I thought that was going? Okay, how to make the c Flix should buy box? Hit me with it Well, we'll start from the Xbox side of the house Xbox is a disaster and I know this because the people running Xbox keep issuing memos. sayaying it's a disaster. Yes Right Aha Sharma just put out the big memo being like, I got to reset this whole thing. We don't make enough money. I think she said something like for every dollar we put in Xbox, we lose sixty eight cents It seems bad That is one of the worst businesses I've heard of at massive scale in this industry. wait, it was sixty four, that's shit. sixty four, I'm sorry I'm sorry. that extra four cents is changes Really And the calculus of Microsoft is really gonna you can buy three more GPU's over the course of one year time That's a bad business and she is stripping it way down. Yeah. that you can see as she' spinning off the big studios she's firing people at all the other studios that she's keeping and she's focusing her energy on Minecraft And like the big multiervice games that kind of print money. And she wants to be at a billion players a day which don't we all It was a huge number I think the Virgecast should be one of the platforms that entertains billions of people a day. A billion players a day is my favorite feto song actually. Itsous And yeah, and you can get there. L I know there's like a lot like Andrewster wrote for us a big piece being like that this number is big. And like he's like this whole plan doesn't make any sense. And basically the answer is this number is really big and you can't get Even if you count Candy Crush and all the other sort of big casual games that they have That's a huge goal that you have to get to I think the reason that you would say that goal, which is I think impossible for Microsoft to reach with its current economics and commitment to AI over everything else is that you have to pump a lot of money in the system and do a lot of marketing, and you have to compete with sleep You have to say, we're going to win in all of these places over every other kind of entertainment. R such that you're going to play a game, probably on a phone. Netflix has been desperate get itself on your phone. True. Yeah. They are desperate to get on your phone. That is why they've done games. It's why they've revamped their mobile app to be more TikToky.'s probablyrobably why they're doing podcasts and stuff now Right? This is inherently mobile content that people are watching under. Yes. Well, why not just buy the gaming company capture a bunch of that additional attention You would have license then is is Netflix continue the sort of spin out of studios But you are already really good at knowing what content to license and put in front of a bunch of people as a distributor and recommend the right stuff to the right people at the right time And then you would body up against the phone platforms basically killed Microsoft's ambitions to do game streaming and findind ways to turn your phone into an Xbox and say, lookook, you want Netflix here, you want Netflix and all your other platforms We need to put games in the Netflix app in some way that is economically viable for us. And there's a lot of regulators on the world. We're going to look more kindly upon Netflix needing to do this than Microsoft Yes because it maybe Netflix's actual business becausecause it's Netflix's actual business and they're, I think to Microsoft They're like, yeah, file lawsuits. It's what happens. Right But I think Netflix has a much stronger case to say, look, we need to expand the range of entertainment options. and these platform policies are keeping us from doing. And you would just get Maybe not maybe they don't care about the console hardware. You would get the ecosystem of creatives that make games to drive whatever IP that you need to drive. Studios and all things too They are they're probably the most Logical home for Xbox If you believe the future of entertainment has interactivity and gaming at the center whichich I want to say I do not Yeah, but many, many, many people do My favorite thing about this is everything you just said makes perfect sense and I believe with absolute confidence that if that happens, it will go disastrously badly Yes. like you just made such a compelling argument that I suspect is being made in the offices of Netflix at this moment and probably frankly at a bunch of other companies like this. Like if you think David Ellison is not going to try to roll up Xbox into paramount, Warner, CNN, whatever it's going to be. David Ellison talks a lot about gaming Thank it is I love to talk about gaming U for all the reasons you just described and I think it would just the cultures of those two things could not be further away from one another in a way that I I think anyone who has tried to back their way into becoming a gaming company has found it very hard to do so Oh, I think Sony managed to get enormous value from owning Sony Movie Studios and They put the Spider Man fon on the PS three That was great. They did. and Sony, a famously spectacular business that everyone should try and emuliate right now. All right, we should switch gears. If you have another idea for who should buy Xbox I want to hear it because I think The idea that all of this is happening for Xbox to be sold to somebody Neili A, I think you were kind of there first, but this is in the ether now U And I want to know who you think should buy Xbox We should take a break and then we're going to come back Um and I have a bunch of mean things to say about smart gllasses. We'll be right back. upp for the show comes from Framer If your team wants a website that looks and feels handcrafted, but is still fast to ship Framer is built for that. 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Instantly receive a workforce report highlighting your top employees with supporting data like recent performance reviews and engagement metrics But it doesn't stop there Rippling AI can turn these insights into a proposed retention strategy including a recommended ten percent spot bonus for top performers All you have to do is tap conffirm and a spot bonus is added to next month's pay run. So don't settle for AI. That's all talk. Head to rippling. Ai slash verge and get AI that turns insight into action That's R I PP L I N G AI slash Vverge Sign up for exclusive access today All right, we're back Neili big week for Neili Patel's Smart gllasses Pen Opticon U this is the facial recognition nightmare that is coming for us all continues to come for us all. This is really exciting for you opening You know, I'm going can I just say this from the beginning I've been saying for years that the killer app for smart gllasses Facial recognition and being able to do faces and names. like You're somewhere in the world that tells you faces names. and I personally, if I had the ability to remember people's names, I would be the president I just know this in my heart. It's the only thing in the way it just literally me like every day being awkward or someone that I've definitely met before and being like, yeah. Let me introduce you to someone else from just you know, like I think that has really thwarted my political ambitions. I say this because I've been saying it for years and it has been so removed from actual shipping reality for years that it's been kind of a joke And now it's not a joke. And every now and again the clips go viral without the context of the fact that I've been saying it for years to illustrate how bad it would be And I just want to say clearly, I think it would be bad I think it would be bad to create a worldwide facial recognition Penopticon so that I can be the president Am I going to refuse the opportunity to be the president when presented with such panomptica? I think is a moral dilemma that each of us will have to choose in their own way But I know it's bad And I just want to I want to say this is clear. I'm going to have to say it every single time. Yeah because it is the killer app. and I think there's a reason that Inching our way towards Pinopticon So it's fad So as a reminder, this is either last week or the week before we talked about the fact that meta was building a facial recognition feature into its smart glasses. I think it was wired that broke the news that this was a thing they were building. they hadn't turned. Lard's news was the code was on the glasses. Right. The code was on the glasses Meta's official response from Andy Stone, who likes to run around yelling at people on threads was that This is disingenuous, we were never going to turn it on, which is just a fully insane response to you wrote the code and put it on the glasses. like ye So that's just a thing that happened. So anyway Next to that has been this running story, including some really great reporting by our friend, Janna Stern about this like budding industry of people who will Basically hack and break your metaglasses so that the light doesn't turn on when you're recording U Meta issued an update this week to make it so that if you tamper with the light, it'll just disable the camera entirely That's a very good thing. It's mandatory update. Yay Meda, congratulations. And then immediately immmediately after this, News breaks that Meta is working on a new pair of smart glasses that is recording all the time. The idea is basically to capture snapshots every few seconds of audio and pictures and to basically use all of the input in this their big idea apparently For privacy's sake is to not send the data itself. but to send metadata because in history, metadata has never been reverse engineered into data and has never been dangerous. Uh. So but like there is just this thing happening where Meta is running around trying to explain and apologize for all of its disastrous security breaches. Andrew Bosworth, the CTO, did an interview with Nick Thompson at the Atlantic about a lot of this stuff. They had an interesting conversation in which B, I would say very unsuccessfully tried to defend why a future like this is worth doing. They both like you agreed. It would be awesome. I totally want this. and Uh then Nick was like, but but how do you how do you reckon with all of the other stuff? And he use the examples of the blind community and veterans who need features like this. And that is bothoth true and just an unbelievably disingenuous way to try and defend a future like this. If you are going to use accessibility as a reason to like ham fist a feature into a thing for billions of people But anyway Even as they're running around doing this, they are also just pushing ahead as fast as they possibly can to make this thing more and more privacy damaging and problematic and run at. all of the things that people already hate about where these glasses are going. sort of feel like in the same way that een, fourteen years ago now glasshole phenomenon ended smart glasses for a period of time. Like I talked to people years after that Who like we had a project and we killed it after Google Glass because we just couldn't. It was Google ruined it for everybody. It's set this industry way behind. I feel like Meta is in the middle of doing that right now. It is going to establish and ruin the idea of smart glasses before anybody else even gets to try. I saw a video, you know, Livy doing the influcer actually Yeah famous influencer We posted the video and we talked about it in our newsroom And she's like People sell my travel itineraries. L there's a black market for where she's going on planes And then she's accosted when she lands in the airport. And she specifically was like, this is really weird and dangerous for me that I get off the plane and a bunch of weirdos are there like take my picture. And then she specifically was like, and they're all wearing metaglasses. Oh w And it's it's becoming that thing. Right? Like that's the association people are making with it. Like this is a thing for a particular class of weirdos. Yeah I have friends who are like world travelers and they're always like doing action sports and You know, their Instagram feeds are all on their metaglasses as they're like surfing and going down like there's some set of uses that are good and benign. Sure. Wearing wearing a GoPro on your head while you surf, not a problem. Wearing a GoPro on your head while you like walk through cost and stock influencers is basically. probably Uh like there's just something about that where I was like, this is a very famous influencer She literally is influential And she's like, I feel at danger. And then the product she called out was metgaglasses And there's something there that I've just been stuck on. likeike what is that a signal of? I haven't quite figured it out. I can't quite articulate it. but the product is starting to stand. in is like a symbol of how we treat each other Yes, you know what I mean? Like it means disrespect in some way. This is an enormous problem for Ma. whose entire brand is We don't respect You Right? Like this is This is the problem. likeike they made the product that most communicates their values which is that belongs to us We're going to listen to you Right ye Yeah And for all of the Instagram is listening to explanations about how they're actually, you know, like you're on the same Wiifi network as you're friend in the same place. So like they search for travel. like you can do it. You can back into the programmatic ad tech explanation for why Instagram is listening to you. And then the glasses are going to watch you all And now you're done and everyone you know and everyone you know. And you know, Bos's explanation of how the faces and names, feature work. It's called name tag. He's like, it would just be people that have actually introduced themselves to you, that have opted in and it's hashes and it's all stored locally, and you would say remember that person. And you're like, this all sounds fine except that person doesn't consent to be remembered in this way Right? The person on the other side of the glasses does not consent to me storing a hash of their face. and then recalling it later. Like, maybe Maybe they would like it if I did that with my dumb meat sack of a brain They would probably have a lot of feelings about my computer dude. Yes, right. And God are there going to be ways to break that system? Even in the perfect version of that system Can I like go stand up close to my TV and solve that problem with a video on my television It's unclear, right? We have not used the thing, but this is their defense of it. It's like We limit it to like a local system. And then he talked about the various laws in various states that are like make it hard to ship. He's like in Illinois, got this dumb law and And it's like, no, the people in Illinois passed a law saying biometric face recognition is illegal.. And I think they're pretty happy about that wealth Right? Like I think on balance, there's going to be more of those because people don't want this to happen. They perceive the glasses as an invasion and Meta's whole brand is invasion of privacy, likeike whether or not they want it to be. That is what people associate with them Yeah. All of this, I think, is next to the big dream of Everybody wants the AR glasses R? Everyone is trying to build their way to AR glasses in some way. And if you're going to have AR glasses, you need a camera that is always on, looking at the world next to you, sending that visual information to something to some computer somewhere processing it and then putting data over some something, whether it's real light in the lenses in front of you in clear lenses or whether it's a Vision Pro headset and it screens and you're passing through, whatever it is, you need to process the visual information from the world around you. Yeah. And there are lots of benign uses for this. I'm in an art museum. I just want to know more about the painting I'm looking at. There are absolutely not benign uses for this But no one has contended with the fact that at the end of it You have to record everything all the time. because the technology to do that at scale simply has not existed. And I think this meta attempt to take snapshots and do metadata is is the first baby step s we're going to record everything all the time so we can layer AR information over the world. Yeah, ironically, one of the most compelling explanations for Instagram is not recording you using the microphone on your phone has been that it's actually just impractical to do that. L to light up the microphone for a billion Instagram users and then store all of that audio in the cloud and process it is so prohibitively expensive They actually just couldn't do it even if they wanted to is a very One of the many compelling reasons that Instagram isn't doing that Uh There's a bunch of evidence that says that's no longer true that actually everyone is desperately trying to get all of your data Meta itself rolled out this program to its employees saying we're going to track all your keystrs, We're going to track how you use your computer so that we can teach our AI models how to use computers. like Everyone in the AI space will tell you All they want is more data all the time they will they will take all of it they can get no matter how Like wacky or weird it is, let the compute do the work. and So suddenly this goes from being prohibitively difficult from a technology perspective to being kindind of a huge upside. and you're going to have to rely on the company that is going to do this to treat that data well which is just a big, huge giant leap. I mean, do you remember Microsoft recall from whatever that was a couple of years ago now? The first run of that was Microsoft saying, it's locally stored, it's encrypted, it's completely private to your device. We understand the privacy risks here. This is meant just for you And then it turned out they were just storing a huge amount of the data in plainteext databases in your computer. So that like if I leave my computer at a coffee shop, you can just look at everything I've ever done on my computer. There are so many attack surfaces here There is just no shot of getting this right at any point in the near or immediate future and I cannot believe that Ma in particular continues to try to push at this. And this this is like thing I keep trying to sort through in my head is Do we have a fundamental smart glasses problem? which is just that we're going to keep running into this same thing over and over again that you can't do smart glasses without the invasive stuff It's it's literally, it's a fure not a bug and This is just a problem that is going to follow it forever. Or is it just that Ma is the absolute worst possible advocate for this technology at this time And if some other company, like if Apple were leading this race instead of Neta Would we feel differently about it becausecause by and large, people trust Apple in a way that they don't trust meta can't I can't peel those two things apart in my head It's definitely both. Meta's brand when it comes to privacy is garbage And I think M's brand in general is garbage it's not meteta is not a beloved company Straightforwardly. And even the way Mark Zuckerberg rolled out the we'd tracking all of our employees to train AI was so fundamentally dehumanizing He said something like, we could go collect this data from all the people in the world, but we think we've hired all the smartest people MetS. We're going to collect the data from you because the way you use computers is smart than everyone else. And it's like Ye We put the good brains in thatats. You know what I mean? Like Yeah, it's like we're we're doing this like this like di eugenics Like it was like it's just a weird way of talking about the people that you employ, right Like I have to S surveil you because you're smart It's weird. There's there's some disconnect from humanity at the center of that company that I cannot stop thinking about because they are desperate to own a platform. They are desperate to break away from their dependence on iOS and Android and the app store economics and Apple being able to turn off tracking and all the stuff that Apple and Meta have thought about for years then you're like Well, people trust Apple Do you know what people think is listening to them to do the ads? They're iPhones. You can trust Apple all you want. be like, Apple's the privacy company. and then ninety percent of people are like, my phone's listening to me sure. Instagram is listening to me all the time and' like, the apppple stop it? And like I dont.'sisting me all the And it kind of just doesn't matter Like I think tech companies as a whole do not have some great reputation for actually protecting people from the experiences that they' obviously having. I think that's right. Does every single person believe that Apple slows down their iPhone after two years so they have to buy new one? Like can you trade on that trust in other ways Maybe The reality is to make augmented reality glasses You need to put a camera next to your eyes that is continuously recording everything you see and processing that information over it There's not another way around it and there's certainly not a chip that can fit in the stem of the glasses that is both powerful enough And how are miserly enough? to do that in real time You have to sendit da to a cloud You gott to do it There isn't another choice Or you can build some something of the sizees of a Vision Pro with a battery pack that lives somewhere else, like. Those are the current choices in those worlds. And it just means like if you want to build the product that everyone thinks is the next thing You are going to have to invade people's privacy And maybe you shouldn't There's an incredible argument for, nope, you shouldn't do that The trade offffs required to make this product are so high at a societal level that we should stop it I don't know who is positioned to make that argument today does not appear to be in our nation's capability to have a fulsome argument about the risks and rewards of technology. and then Stell to I want to stop It might be in the market Right? Like these glasses might get pulled off people's faces and smashed I think we can see the opposition to data centers happening local governments around the country. L something else will happen the thing people want AR glasses, augmented reality glasses where you stare at a painting and it tells you who painted that painting and what it was are at a party and you just know that person's name I'm telling you I be the president if I had this kase would I'm already so charming. I'm just like this one failing, you know? who knows U the social cost to that is too high And I think we're seeing it now the cost of AI is too high versus the reward and there's a big backlash And I think meteta has no ability to make the case The reward is worth the social cost of interacting with better in this way. They do not have an ounce of credibility to say they're going to prot you And they have now two decades of evidence to suggest that They'll win in the end that actually all you need to do is wait. and people will come around And I think I have believed that for a long time, right? And it is the thing that makes me the most nihilistic about tech is this idea that Everyone is going to stand in the way and say, I don't want this. It's going to be bad. and then It'll they'll have a Black Friday sale and everybody gets on board and Everybody it is very hard to leave Google in such a way that you can feel however you want about Google and then you end up using Google products and you become sort of stockholm syndrom into Google. And I think a lot of these companies are set up on the belief that they will win in the end because people will always trade those things and those feelings for other features and convenience and think again, for a very for most of my career, I also believed that that was true and it sort of filled me with sadness when I really sat and thought about it. Mm. I don't know that's true anymore. It feels like something has changed in a way that I'm still struggling to put my finger on, but like This data center stuff is such a good example of there has been realal like boots on the ground, societal backlash to technology At a scale I don't think we've ever seen And it feels like it is only growing and not receding. And I think it's why I'm so obsessed with the Sart glasses question because I think this is going to be the first Big new technology in a very long time that a vast number of people are going to look at and just say no to Like we all eventually got smartphones. We just did. feeleel however you want about that about what smartphones did to the world, Everybody has a smartphone now. It just it happened think we're going there with smart glasses. And I I think it's going to be really different I still don't know how it's going to play out, but it feels like It is headed down a different path I'll just bring it back to you know, daughter's silly iPod That thing was on a shelf. I pulled it off the shelf I plugged into my computer and I Put some MP threes on it I will not say where the MP threees came from, but I put some MP threees on it. and then it worked. and it worked exactly the same way Today as it did ten years ago when I first bought this iPod And the exper and she's delighted Right? And I own the files. Let's just say I own the files. I own the files And I own the hardware and it didn't require some like DRM handshake with some cloud service And I didn't worry that social media was on this thing or that onene of the reasons I didn't want to buy her like an old iPod touch was like, I don't I'd actually don't want a bunch of g year oldls turning onto the camera right now. I just don't No, thank you. That's just a parenting decision. Other people might feel differently I see that just like burbling with some of my peers, you know, as we all raise our kids together. I see it with like a lot of younger people They don't they're just like looking at it and they're saying no, likeike I just want to be offline in this way And I think the promise of the next interface paradigm The next way of using technology has always been This will be superior to the phone So we got to get there first This is Mark xact worer in the metaverse You're gonna live your life in this helmet because it's more fun than your phone. retty much just rejected. Like straightforwardly. I think the reaction to AI being everywhere and not being very good in most consumer use cases People are rejecting it politically now. They're like, don't need need to build this infrastructure. I hate this actually Chat bot on my card dealerers's website is not providing me with anything Turn it off put all this tokens somewhere else. And I do wonder if the smart glasses You know, my thesis about the Medag glasses has always been people like them because they're a camer on their face and that's use And then you're like, now a lot of people have cameras in their face. Now a lot of people are recording with about your conscent. And like you can stop that pretty fast It's it's but that is that is the feature, not the bug, right? Like you can't, you can't have it both ways. You can't have a camera on your face without having a camera on your f It feels like a Zen cone, but sure. also I just want to say, I own the files is a t shirt we're gonna make.'s exited about that. I own the files. I mean, in the sense that I have the files Listen, let's not delve into copyright law here. I do have one more question on this. So there was there was a bit of gadget news in addition to all of the like big tech companies trying to make smart glasses, there's just a million startups out there trying to make smart glasses happen. Xreal is probably the best known one, but there's a lot of them out there. And there's this company Solos that announced a new version of smart glasses called the Airgo A six. Oh boy, sure. But one of its like key features is that it doesn't have a camer It has AI stuff, it has prescription support, It does a bunch of the other things that you would expect headphone style things. it doesn't have a camera And part of me wonders like, is this the next thing that's going to happen Is we're going to see if we can do smart gllasses minus a camera? This just is like I don't know how to say this. Bone conduction headphones are a really cool technology, they will never be cool You you know what I mean? I mean, sure But when my bone conduction headphones look like a pair of Rayban Wayfarers, they don't ensure these are bone conduction. The point I'm making is like Everyone's just trying to shove the assistant into a form factor. Yes. You know what I mean? Like what if I could get a microphone and speakers onto your face Sure, it looks like glasses. Yeah. I'm just there was a time when there was a bone conduction like headband. We covered a lot of these in a gadget, like the two thousands. They had a real moment They had a real moment and it's like Yeah, you're just they're just airpods. Like you just made airPods that look like glasses utility of the assistance is not high enough yet support any of this I'm sorry for people who work at solos. I did a good job Their glasses are very light, which I think is very important. So kudos to them for that. All right, we take one more break and then it's time for some lightning around stuff ll back right back upport for the show comes from Dekagon If you've looked into using AI to help with customer support You probably noticed most existing solutions don't quite fit your company's needs and take forever to launch Thankfully, there's Decagon. Deagon helps companies create personalized concierge style customer experiences with AI agents across chat, email, voice, and SMS They're available twenty four seven, feel natural to talk to, and can resolve customer requests on their own So businesses can keep up with requests without losing their personal touch Dechagon plugs directly into your existing systems, so agents can go live quickly And because workflows can be updated using natural language, teams can make changes themselves without long engineering cycles. That means less time spending managing workflows, more time focused on customers, and ROI in weeks Ready to transform your customer support Go to Deagon. Ai slash verge to get a personalized demo and see what Decagon can do for your team Decagon out Decagon. Ai slash erge That's Decagon dot Ai slash Virge Support for the show comes from Anthropic Important questions don't usually have simple answers, and they usually come with a mix of uncertainty, excitement, and reflection before a big breakthrough. So when you're working through something important, it helps to have a sounding board to explore ideas and uncover what's really underneath them. That's where Claud comes in Cloud is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you. Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move, Claud extends your thinking to tackle the problems that matter Plus Claud's research capabilities go deeper than basic web search. It can have comprehensive, reliable analysis with proper citations, turning hours of research into minutes Problems worth solving, Get started with Claud todayoday A claud d. Ai slash erge. That's cllaud d. A slash erge. And check out Clad Pro, which includes access to all of the features mentioned in today's episode. Claud. Ai slash erge One. I'm standup comedian John Marco Sereisei, and I'm actor penis model Russell Daniels. The downside is our podcast where we bring on guests to talk about how miserable their lives are. becausecause let's face it, things are not getting better. Every episode we talk about what's wrong with our lives, our guests lives, the world But in a fun way. Bottom line is you're gonna walk away feeling better about your life We've had so many cool guests, Caleb here on Busy Phillips, Stavros Halkias. Laverne Cox. Hassan Piker. Alana Glazer. I promise you're gonna have a good time. Now on the Vox Media podcast Network. This is the downside All right, we're back. No hype desk this week. So we are straight into America's favorite podcasts with our podcasts. I think my brother, my brother and me standans are still in my email about which is the best one, but I'm claiming victory because you can just say things. It's twenty twenty six. F friendnd a car is a dumm It's time. All right, a little bit of a seizure at the end there I thought there was going to be a drop. I want to be honest, I thought I thought that was building to a drop. It was really good. I appreciate it. This is good. We're doing a collaborative enterprise here We're sampling and we're building here. That was by Ryan Muellar. thank you, Ryan I love the dance remix. Somebody else take it and make the drop ' comingim. that was a great build. Yeah. I think we were all anticipating a pretty intense drop And then I think Ryan fell down on the sampler Listen, we only have so much time in the day. including Frsick is like last shot of the night.' like, I'm out. I've done it Thank you, Ryan. I appreciate you There we go. What did Brendon do this week? We have evidence this week that Brendan's various traitorous machinations against the First Amendment are starting to bear their poisonous fruit, David That's loud for. Okay Starting to for the starting for the first time U Yeah, in like real ways. So as you know, Brendan has been fulminating against our nation's broadcasters about the way in which they use our spectrum which is nonsense because people are not watching broadcast television, they're watching. as we' have discussed at Linkcoln already in this episode Brendon has power over broadcast spectrum, so he is issued content regulations against broadcasters like ABC and CBS and Fox and local radio stations. And if you recall from previous episodes, in a big one that he has been focused on is what's called the equal time rule, whereere if you have a candidate for a public office on the public airwaves, you are supposed to have the opposing candidate and offer them equal time unless you are a bona fide news program In which case do you have new dr news drugsent? you can be off So the only program that has ever really had to deal with this is Saturday Night Live, which has no argument that it is a news program. Rank, we all agree on this. and Saturday Night Live would have Kamala Harrison, and then NBC would give time to Donald Trump, which is a real thing that happened in the last election cycle. Yeah they had Trump at like a NACA race or something the next day. They gave him ad space at a NASCAR race. Yeah. The flash pointoint of this has been ABCs the view which is long operated under a bonafide news exception is actually started by Barbara Walters, who is a news anchor. And they wanted to have some candidates on. The SCC and cararR culminated against them. We all got in some trouble. There's now a review of whether or not the view is a bonaide news program. Youll recall, I think last week or a week before, ABC iss running ads to have people file comments for the OCC. to be like, don't screw through you Okay, that's all happening and ABC actually filed its response this week, which we'll get into In the meantime Brendon has had the effect he wanted. Senaphore did an analysis The view has not had any candidates for any competitive races on the air since all this happened He the speech of a news program which is precisely the goal was the goal. So here's a quote from Senaphore.Cran and Brennon Car annced in Febrary agency was investigating whether or not the view violated equal time rule. Since then, the ABC talk show hasn't featured a single political candidate running a competitive midterm race, according to Senaphore analysis. Earlier this year, a representative for New York Mayorson Mandani pitched the view on hosting the mayayor and Democratic Socialist candidateatesy supportor for Congress according to a person filming with the conversations, the view said it was interested in having the mayor on, but couldn't accommodate the candidates Be the staff was proceeding cautiously with political candidate bookings, while the FCC equal time inquiry was progressing The investigation itself has chilled the speech of the program, Bad and they will not have candidates for office on the air Even if those candidates are interesting, even if people like to see them, because they don't know if they will be punished for their political speech. Even though that speech is for years now been considered to be news programming right? But this is this is job done by Brenndon Carr. This is This is his move. He's not going to win this fight, but he can win this fight without actually having the fight And this is the specific phrase in First Aendment laaw is the chilling effect. Yeah actually made the rule that's leegal. You haven't actually violated the First Amendment. You haven't said I will put you in jail if you say these things You have just made the people stop doing it because they're afraid of a consequence that may or not be real And that means they have preemptively stopped saying the things they would have otherwise said. and all over First Amendment law. of the chilling effect is raised. You can't do this because you will have the chilling effect. and that is as bad as actually banning the speech itself Court after court, administration after administration, Republican, conservative, progressive, liberal, you name it The chilling effect is the problem And so Brendon has accomplished ice cold chilling effect at least on the view if not the rest of the media ecosystem that operates the broadcaster wways. So we'll see what happens. ABC did file its response to this inquiry this week. I can just quote you from it. It's pretty fiery for Disney, which had previously been pretty bendy when it comes to Trump administration. Yeah. But ABC says the First Amendment does not permit the government to sit in an editor's chair. yet that is the seat the commission now proposes to take deciding which broadcast programs qualify as legitate news and for those it finds wanting, compelling them to surrender their airtime to guests they never chose to feature They go on to say, An exemption that protects editorial independence only when the speaker's politics please those in power protects nothing at all. The shelter it gives one program today, it will deny another tomorrow when the gavel changes hands as it inevitably will ABC Disney that is pretty fiery stuff. Yeah. I'm glad they've found some spine here to fight back. I think they realize the public is on their side. And I will just remind everybody listening to this Brendon is not chasing broadcast regulation because he really believes in broadcast regulation. All of this is a trial balloon to find ways to censor and control speech on internet platforms, which everyone in the world is aware actually what people consume Even the view, people mostly watch the view on YouTube. I was just going to say one way to accomplish that goal is by silencing the view, right? Like that's there are a lot of people who watch Jimmy Kimmel and who watched the view and who watched Stephen Colbert on these other platforms and if you can just them down one at a time you can get a long way to accomplishing your goal without ever actually having to get out of your skis on it And eventually he will go to Google and he will go to TikTok and he will go to meta and say, hey All those defense contracts you want, all those big rich government contracts you want Actually, we think that you are using the public interternet or the public airwaves, or your services run on mobile broadb end, which run on the public airwaves And we don't think they're in the public interest You'd better change your algorithms I'm telling you, I keep saying it every week you can see the chilling effect in action right now in real time on ABC.. And you can see that that will just empower Brendon and arrest the administration to go after interternet platforms using whatever laws and powers they can magic up out of fairy dust and bad interpretations of existing statutes. If not pass an executive order claiming the authority, which the Trump administration loves to do. and in fact, which is in Project twenty twenty five the. about teelecom and speech regulation written by Brendan He's not a smart man. We know what he's doing. none of this is subtle He is a dumb rock of a man who is doing all the things he said he would do in absolutely hand fisted ways that make it easy for a company like ABC to write fiery responses to because there's only but one right answer. In any case, Brendon, if you want to come on the show and try to justify any of these actions, or talk about the nature of the chilling effect when the FCC chair is punishing broadcasters for their speech, I would welcome that conversation the show on Decoder Mono Emono, live streamed on kick, we can do it You say, you tell me the time in place It'll happen 's been Bren Crsummy America's for pcast the pc Pants and bos and pants and boots andants boots and ps and boots I really like the idea that we are going to build like an epic trance remix one track at a time here. I'm very excited about this. It's very good. All right, I have a Ramageddon update for you U I don't know if you're aware of this. E is more expensive now And it just keeps getting worse And I feel I feel ridiculous like continuing to be annoyed by this, but I'm continuing to be annoyed by this. But in particular, there were two bits of really interesting data this week that are directly ramaged and related that I just I just want to you about. So the first is IDC, a big research firm that does a lot of like analysis of market shares and stuff like that U putut out a chart this week that said that after nine straight quarters of growth, worldwide PC shipments dropped by four point nine percent year over year two uninterrupted years of growth. and I will say the growth actually kicks back to like kind of right after COVID. L there was this minute at the beginning of the pandemic where everybody bought a computer. Everybody everyone bought a new computer And then it dropped a little because everybody had a new computer. And then it has been it has been rising pretty steadily Sveral years now since then. and it is now dropping like a stone. because computers are too expensive and people can't buy them. They are harder to find than ever. Everybody's raising prices. Apple just raised prices. It's ugly out there. and there's an increasing sense that it's going to keep getting worse O one that I want to talk to you about is there's this church. from this company Omdia, which I know nothing about But it's fine. It put out a chart showing the share of the total bill of materials for products that is taken up by memory Right? So and this is like How much of the total cost of building a gadget comes from buying the memory and Basically, that number has at least doubled in the last couple of years. that before, if you were buying a premium device above eight hundred dollars in this case, the memory accounted for eleven percent of the cost of that device. So you're buying a thousand dollars device It's a hundred dollars worth memory. That is now twenty six percent of the price. That is what the memory costs. It's even worse in lower end phones. We've talked about on the show that like the real danger immediately for a lot of these Ramageddon things is that cheap devices just go away. it becomes completely untenable to sell somebody a two hundred dollarars phone in a world where The memory in that phone costs in this case, it would be one hundred and twenty dollars It's the number is for the mid low range, two hundred to four hundred dollars, the memory alone makes up fifty nine percent of the cost of the bill of materials up from thirty two percent. That's crazy. Like the numbers are just insane And everywhere you look, it's like The costs just are what they are and either you can stomach it or you can't obobbody has deals, nobody has access to anything. There's just a bunch of chips out there and it is like full anarchy to get there first and everybody who can pay for it is paying outrageous quantities of money for it and everybody else just gets screwed and inccreasing sense that I get from people is like, this is going to get worse and it's going to last a while and It is just, it's scary times out there, man. And now there's this big run on like you're starting to see YouTubers make content about How do I use gadgets I don't know if you've noticed this but this is like how to make your stuff last longer and how to buy used stuff and find the best refurbished open box deals is like a real rising type of content for exactly this reason. Everybody's just priced out of everything now And so it's like, well Okay, mayaybe I'll go buy a three year old knackbook because it's literally the only thing I can afford. How do I go get it Again, you know, my prediction is the repairability push of the past several years is going to bear real fruit now I absolutely think you're right. We're almost a little bit lucky that there was that push There was actually like the FTC, the Trump FTC wantoned right to repair victory over John Deere this week I think consumers understand that being able to fix things is important to them, especially as costs go up and things last less long. So we'll see. I'm hopeful that there's one outcome here. It's that a generation or two becomes fixated on the notion that you should be able to fix things and make them last a long time because they were so expensive to begin with You should get like one of the reirm Japanese like the back markets of the world We should talk to them. Like I'm very curious to their businesses booming the way that You would think it would be booming. Yeah Its a good question. We should we'll reach out him we'll get on the show. Back market. if you're listening and I know that you are Get at us rust me. They're already the email's already been sent.. Indeed. All right, what's your next lighting round item? Okay, I'm going to do one heavy one, and then I'm gonna to end on another fun one U it's heavy in a sense that the subject is heavy, but I think it is one of the greatest sort of verge stories, like irgiest verge stories we've done in a while. and it's about the push to regulate ghost guns. So there is a law in New York, there's an upcoming law in California,'s a bunch of other laws around the country that would make it harder to print on your three D printer. which sounds great And actually a flashpoint for all this regulation is Luig Gi Mangioni, who printed some of the parts of the guns he used to allegedly murder the CO of United Health Care. He's in trial. so it's allegly I understand people have a lot of feelings whenever we say this. support murder on the show. Another thing I feel like I have to say all the time. But this is a flashpoint in this regulatory conversation. And in particular in New York, where I live, Governor Kathy Oakle is all about regulating ghost guns because I think it feels like a thing politicians can do. Right If you want to run into the Second Amendment with regular guns, you're going you're going to hit a wall The kids shouldn't be able to print guns at home Yeah. that feels like a winner. You know It's like an awkward pro take to have, do you know what I mean? Like to be too be the one who's like pyched about ghost guns is just kind of a weird hill to die. Yeah. It just feels like this thing, like your kids shouldn't be able to come home from school and print a gun. I passed a law stopping it. who can who dares argue with me? Not the gun manufacturers because they'd like to sell you the guns they made in their factories. Like There's some weird political calculus here where this is an acceptable thing to say in the ws of Past Okay, here's the problem if you want to stop someone from printing a gun part You have to identify the fact that they are trying to print a gun part. Which means we have to know what they are printing. Where are you going to do that? At what point in the, Download a file or draw a picture on your computer, send it over USB to a three D printer, have the printer run around and do it Where, where in that chain Do you insert the regulatory mechanism that the law demands No one knows the answer to this question. The laws do not say where Right? They just have a mandate for blocking technology. like don't do that Don't do it. makeake it. you printer manufacturers, you make it so you can't print guns And the model is that printer manufacturers have made it say you can't print money Right If you try to scan a dollar bill into Photoshop and then print the dollar bill, like a bunch of things will stop you that The difference is that dollar bills are known And like the societal cost of fake money is like Right? Like everyone's like, okay, we get it. Like you can I you can flatly identify currency, it looks one way And we all understand why Adobe Photoshop should not be able to Ecept scanans of currency and printed. Be that will ruin everything for everyone. Yeah If you would like to destabilize the United States economic regime, we would prefer you do it with Bitcoin, not fake dollars.? L That's kind of where we've landed as a society Okay, well, there's not just one gun So you can't just identify one gun the way you can identify one dollar U Our ability to destabilize society with guns has already happened at scale That ship is sa And It's the parts. it's not the finished product So if you want to print a something that looks like a pistol handle Well, now you got to block all the things that might look like a pistol handle, regardless of what it might be used for in the future So this story is just excellently written about how hard it is how the open source three D printing community is railing against it, even if the people themselves support gun regulation. because they understand like this is a type of surveillance. that can lead to all kinds of other outcomes and block all kinds of other legal things that you might want to print, or In the worst case, allow the government to ban even more things because they will have built a system to identify what it is you're printing and then tell the manufactrs to stop it. It's making me think about how like, Acuweather has successfully lobbied so that No one the government is not allowed to do weather forecasts and turboax makes it really hard for you to file your taxes without using turboax. that like, You'd have an awful lot of company is trying to make it very hard for people to three D print one thing or another And like this this slope gets really slippery. from ghost guns, which I think are like you said, a pretty universal We all basically agree Dict Ghost guns are b Boy does the same principle run into things people do not agree on in the same way very quickly? Right. Do you want car makers to be able to say you can't three D parent replacement parts for your car? Yeah. And they will they concoct nonsense safety reasons for those things hundred percent. I'm So anyway, this story is you can go read the comments, by the way, someome people do not agree with you about US guns in any way shape or form, David. They're in the comments of our story. But just I vir to go read story It is one of theirgiest v stories such a long time because it is It's one of those stories about politicians, and I think a lot of regular people seeing a problem. The kids can print guns And then assuming that there's a technological solution that does not carry trade offffs and the community is way ahead of everyone on what those trade offffs are and what could be and why they're unacceptable At the same time, it's like, you probably shouldn't be able to print a guy home. D, you read it, you tell you tell us Yeah. it's it's this is what I mean. It's It's a story that just going to make you uncomfortable, regardless of where you ultimately land on the issue The best Verge stories make you slightly uncomfortable. Do have a three D printer I do not. I feel like I should get one now. I feel the exact same way. I like I don't I don't know what I would use one for But then I see everybody Like there is no genre of vertical video that I enjoy more. than people solving T teeny tiny low stakes problems with three D printers. Yeah.gh. It's everybody who's just like, I didn't have a stand for this thing so I printed one. I'm always like, hell, yeah Yeah let's go. You did this And then Gilkin is going to lobby those things out of existence. This is the future Rreditory. Theyirre gone. We you know, we're home in the farm. I did the episodes from my wife's farm and her dad not only just has a huge shop where he repairs the tractor on the farm But then there's what can only be described as a crafting shed with one of those gigantic tables in the middle to just do projects on. And I walked in there and I was like, I'm going to get one of these tables. I'm gonna buy a three D printer. And then I had no further thoughts Like what will I do with a giant craft table in the three D printer? Like I was just like a goal I have in my life is to have a crafting shed with a huge table and a three D printer then you will have it, you will say, I've done it and you will close the door and never go in that room again. Ambition over. But it was just one of those moments where I was like, oh, this is where I'm meant to accomplish this in some way And I think it's three D printing small parts to solve pet pece. I re off this for you. All right, I have Just a series of very funny hosts from Nikita Beer, who's the head of product at X. He's up here, by the way, fully going through Fully going through it and posting through it as the header product atX absolutely should But just is just over and over sort of saying the quiet part loud about how disastrous a platform X is. So the first one of these was a little while ago Evidently, X ran an experiment with three percent of users and discovered that removing the top thirty, I'm quoting directly, rememoving the top thirty highest paid revenue share accounts from the four you timeline increased both time spent and daily active users on X. So this is to say the people we pay to post on our platform, if we took them out Everyone likes our platform more Wild thing to admit out loud. but also incredibly obviously correct if you've ever spent any time on X in the last like three years. If you get rid of all the posts that I see, I will like X more. correct. Absolutely yes. Could not agree more. And then there was another one this week X is in its ambition to beat the everything app. appears to be pushing really hard on video right now that they they really want to be a vertical video platform in this for all the same reasons everybody wants to be a vertical video platform, right? justust wants to that thing. it's where the ads are, it's where the views are, whatever And He put out a post in response to a bunch of people saying, oh God, X is just turning into TikTok because everything is turning into TikTok And he goes, No, it's not and then basically goes on to say, yes, it precisely is. So he says he says post containing videos already make up close to half the impressions on X, which is A fascinating and B decision that they made, right? Like It's important remember incentivized a type of content and correct and also boosted it in the algorithm. L there's a reason you see Elon Musk every time you log into X and it's not because the algorithm thinks you'd like it. It's because X decided to do that to you It's very important that you remember this U but then This this is the one that's my favorite He says many videos from top accounts are simply stolen from other users, sometimes five years after they originally went viral The next bullet says our team believes this recycled content has a negative impact on the user experience and the business. You think all the people we pay to post on X are bad and everyone likes it when they're gone. All the videos are old and stolen Welcome to X. And he turns this into a pitch four we're shipping an editor and recorder into X so that you can make original content. And then he says at the end, if you're a creator that does not recycle other people's content, you have the biggest arbitrage opportunity of your career to build an audience here What an unbelievably optimistic end to saying all of the stuff on our platform is trash and it would be better if it was all gone.'s just There's no other takeaway from all this stuff that X is learning except we have to just get rid of everyone here and start over and then maybe it'll be great. The reason I say Njita beer is going through it He's the head of product at X, right? And he is just learning the lessons every other head of product at every other social network knew ten years ago Ten years ago, everyone knew Oh, people are going game our algorithm with garbage Oh, if you just let this run wild The people who gain the algorithm best will rise to the top and people will hate it and they'll leave It's a slot factory, no matter if you have AI or not Everyone knows it Everyone has always known it And Elon thought he was so much smarter than everyone else that he fired all the people who understood how to run the platform And then he was like, just make the algorithm Do whatever thing that I'm calling free speech today. and now here we are Yeah And all the people who are Sudx are just getting their brains cooked left and right And pornicquita beer is like Yeah, but our users are going away, our money is going away. I have to fix it. I'll juice video views for original content which is the last refuge of the scoundrel when it comes to social media, right? Like I will lie about your video views to get you to post here more. That is some twenty sixteen Facebook shit And it works super well for five minutes and then get you get some new thing you're interested in and it all falls apart Well because at the end of the day, the reason that you've gotten all the people post videos is so you can put pre roll ads around it. And people hate those And the advertisers don't want to be around it on X because of the thing that X is all the five year old stolen videos that you're posting. Yeah It's rough out there. It's rough. I feel I do feel sort of bad for him because He really It's just very obvious that he's going through it. Yes. But I also don't feel at all because it's very obvious Exactly what that dob is. Yep. And it was the minute he took it. He did post on june thirtieth todayoday marks one year at X. I'm proud to report three all time highs user engagement, my cortisol levels, my biological age. That's a good tweet. That's learn how to do a good tweet. That's a great tweet. Kudos to it N. That's very good. All right, you get one more. What's your last one? All right, it's like a happy one and a mystery. It's all wrapped up in one. Love it. We should more mysteries on the Birge cast. This is a good mystery. Okay But So every time we talk about smart TVs in the show, people like, I wish I could just buy a dumb TV And historically the answer is you can't because the reason TV's are so cheap is they are subsidized by all of the surveillance that is buil fr TVs. David continues to buy Roku TVs for some mysterious reason. and the reason they cost ten dollars is because Roku is tracking his every move and foisting advertising around TV on the other side of my computer right now is unplugged and I'm one hundred percent sure it's listening. Its watching what It' just playing ads. And the TV market has gotten all the way down to the end of that road such that you can literally get a free TV Pmanent advertising screen bolted at the bottom of it. It's a around aix minute and I don't know why So those are the economics of the T market. The reason they're cheap is they're counting the revenue from the adverising to subsid prices Essentially this is why you't buy D TV. if you want one, you end up buying like a five thousand dollars digital signage display, which are often the same panels, but then they don't look as good, whatever. Anyhow John Aaggins, our TV reviewer this week reviewed the new Vizio Mini LE quQantum which is a very cheap quantum. TV. He says it looks pretty good. And he discovered that as you set it up You can just turn it all off You can just make it a done te. So as you're going through the setup, You can just say, I don't want this to turn off You can disconnect the OS basically. You can add it, obviously an external streaming device, but the HDMI ports stay active and all of the smarts are literally disabled keep the OS from even being active at all You just nope your way through the whole setup process. You just nope your way through the whole setup process and the OS is not So it busyoz owned by Walmart, it asks you if you want to have a Walmart account and you just say no, and it warns you you will not be able to manage payments and subscriptions. It's like great. know. I don't care at all And then when you decline another warning, it literally pops up a box it says whoops Delining this step means missing out on all of your smart TV features and you just did okay. And that's it. Then the OS is disabled and you've got a dumb TV with enabled HDMI ports. and that's it And you can obviously keep it off of Wiifi, which a lot of people do anyway. and then you've got it. So here's the mystery Visio do this on purpose Theres There's some set of people that are like, V has gotten in trouble for tracking before. and they might have they might have done this on purpose So John is digging into the mystery of the four hundred dollars Vio done TV But right at this second You can go buy a four hundred dollars mini Visio mini ID quantum. Tv Have it be a totally dumb heill. So the like Occam's razor explanation here is just that No one in the development process to test the flow of what if I just say no to everything And so they accidentally shipped a thing you can just say no to everything you mean you can say note everything on most TVs Like when you start up my Sony A ninety five L, you can put it in like basic mode. Sure. But like Android is sold there, right It is O, like dumb panel with HMI inputs. Huh At least that that'ss that's what it looks like. So Did they do that on purpose? becausecause of its like legal issues? D they just forget wereere they so cheap that they're like, Yeahah, just don't try Yeah, they're like we're just happy you're Walmart. You know what I mean? he's dging into it.eresting. He's digg into it, but that's why it's like a great story because everyone wants a cheap dumb panel. and now you at least for the time being, You can go to Walmart, you can buy four hundred dollars MinelliQuantumount TV, which is like reasonably good deal It's not like an olded, but like it's pretty good And it'sum TV. it's the thing you want And it, you know, in an age where everything is getting more expensive kind of cheap And then we will solve the mystery of whether or not Vizio knows what they did I mean, they do now because the headlines on the site. So we'll see if we ruin it for a run. I mean, they even John even got a quote from a senior project manager Mike Wood at Vizio who said sessentially h He said, obviously, we believe there's a lot of benefits to using the Visio OS and our smart features, but the choice is up to the user Yeah, but it's like, did they say that? and then they realize that like out turn Right. And then and then they're going to issue a software update that turns off the last nope and then and then that's it Yeah Anyway, he's following up on it to see see what the case is, but today