Media companies versus AI crawlers

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What it's doing, what it's done and what it's about to do so you stay in control. To put AI to work for people, visit serviceNow. com We've all been there. You pop into the shop for five minutes and all of a sudden you've forgotten where you parked Car Four Unfortunately, that lost feeling is what it's like trying to manage your policy with other insurers Here C, come out, come out wherever you are. Please. With Gaio, you can use the app to easily manage all your policies in one place. Did this parking lot have a waterfall? I think you've wandered too far, mate? It feels good to find what you're looking for. It feels good to Gaico I did everything I could to not go to Montfred and Sons and I ended up at fucking Montfred and Sons Oh boy, I hate doing cold opens for podcasts, but can we please just do that Hello and welcome to Verird Ccast. 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. N tell. 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 Carlton Hotel. It is very lovely here U 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 likeike years and years and years. it' 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 to talk 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 crank to the max. It's wild. For everyone listening to this and not watching, I want you to imagine Nili in linen pants Oversized sunglasses. That's put a shirt st. It is unbuttonsed just like one button further than you would think Nili would have a shirt un button. Oh, I went too, buddy. Don't worry. I went too 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 All the tech companies are here throwing just the most elaborate parties. So the first night, Tuesday night Y choice was, did you want to see Ray Artist Ray or did you want to see ludicrous And then there was like I saw Janell Met gave a concert at a mansion for one hundred people Like it's just like, all this is crazy. Wa 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 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 and saw Ray and then last night it was Tiesto U. And uh, Mfred and sons. And I stood in line for Testo and it was really long. I was even in like the good line, the priority line that everyone wanted go to Testo. and I went to sa I saw DJ D Nice at the TikTok party. Aaz shhout 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, where' at Montford inststances? And I was like, And I went I went to over forance Im proud of you It really, 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 going to be twenty three again. Like the weird thing is like the amount of money in Ce. L this is an advertising festival. Theoretically, it is an advertising awwards festival where they award the most creative advertising made around the world all year. That is gone. there's I didn't see one piece of creative this whole week. E. 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 for two doinging? 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 ust like companies you've never heard of talking about their ability to target you the consumer and meta and TikTok and openenAI all talking about how they will know so much about you that they will generate custom ads for you individually And then somewhere next that is creators are great. And it's like, oh you you just need these people. Like you just need some hot people that distract you from the thing you're actually getting. Like dystopia but do it on the beach is basically the vibe. But with hot people, but with 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 canan, although 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 Blley, who works at Puck and has a great podcast called The Town that I really L like. He's been on the show from of the bodcast wrote a thing in his What I'm hearing newsletter just ruthlessly making fun of Can. 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 Cn this year. CAann is the festival to Can, a prestigious global film event where talented creative people display and sell their work, and look glamorous doing so. Cann Lions is not. It's a tacky business conference for selling advertising and announingrand partnerships populated mostly by pachy 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 It's basically saying, at look at us, the paunchy middle managers U, But I wondered like are people at canan feeling sad about which can 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 speed 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 Deter Bone, who would not wear shorts at Cann He would die first. And there's just so much money here This amount of money cannot be selfware. You you know what I mean? Like you can put enough GPUs in a data center and be like, I think that might be alive, right? Like it will 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 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 a press release is a shared understanding of how Gen Z approaches identity and self expression And then like that was a pan That was like that was like a full room of people believing this 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 communityities a part of, is part of the same personal story. And that's why the partnership between Spotify and Coach feels so natural, David I'm just say M Melany can say what 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 That is nothing. Someday I aspire to be the kind of person who just goes around to conferences being like, peopleople just want to be together. And every be like, Yeah'. 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 Landsy,'s CEO Digitos. I think she's actually one of the smartest advertising executes in the game. She's not confused. She's a tech executive. She traffs 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 Alie Beermman and Reainna Pachansky who are fancy agents for creators like Alex Earl and Jake Shane And you know, they're like, we're here to make money. L 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 it's they have some feeling about the film industry. They're like, whatever, man, everyveryone's watching Instagram. We're gonna move product. 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 Verge newews. M you just want to talk this out for a minute. the Oh sure. This is the second turn in the Vox media corporate Changes U, 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 Voxonia two point zero and James Mardoch will own that company like the Phoenix from the Ashes The other part of the company, part of company we're in with Eater that is being rolled up into a holding company called PMX which is Pensky Media plus Fox name of a company and does sound like BMX and DMX notion here that everyone keeps saying to me is that no one should ever think about that brand. It is a holding company Penski Media owns variety Billboard, the Hollywood Reporter on and on and on on. They own the Golden Globes I'm D south by southwest. It's just a big media holding company. All of those things operate as little independent companies like they really do Uh And so Penski media All their publishing stuff, not like the Golden Globes, but like the magazines and all the Vox stuff is coming together and one holding company. It's a joint venture between the stuff at VoxMedia and the Pensky publishing stuff. And it's going to be run by the president of VoxMedia, Ryan Pauly. So there's a lot of coverage of this, and I think the funniest part of it is Hence's own trades covered it And they did not know that they are the ones getting a new boss was 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.. I stood next to Ryan at the Mumford and Son'ons concert last night and we're both like, how did we end up here? So there there's a lot of shared history there. You know, reasonably excited about this. There's a lot of work to done. the deal isn' closed. You got to figure out some structures, but Pensky media compompany 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 like we need and that I depend on in my job as veter in chief. I'm And then, you know, the opportunity to invest more heavily in the Verge is like right there in front of us. And the conversations we're having now are about how to make the Verge feel even smaller. How to be our own little company, with our own little product team. Jay has been on our board for a long time. He's the largest shareholder in Vox media. What was Vox media I go to our board meetings and I 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 There's more to come on this, but today its 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. I think that's 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. Jay Pensky has come up reading the Vverge. Like he is a reader of our website. He's a fan of tech. like he he pays a lot of attention to us Again, he was the largest shareholder of the company. So If he was mad at our coverage. I would know. and that's just not the case. Yeah If you wanted to kill us, he could have done it right now. could have been happen 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. you have to 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 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 remains the goal I will say the same thing to the audience that I say to our team and to our corporate overlords Give me the money and leave us a letter That's my pitch. It's been a good pitch for fifteen years. So're also I'm sure a really good pitch at Canline 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 So actually let's I wanted to talk about gadgets first, but you've now made me want to talk about meta becausecause while you've been at Cann 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 U 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 Im 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 It is not how it feels here. but ye 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 just a bunch of news bits from Meta this week O 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 Kathcart, the head of WhatsApp, is leaving and they're being he's being replaced by somebody who built a Fint teech 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 fascinating. 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 like 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 Uh Mark Zuckerberg has is apparently tasked his team with creating a polymarket clone.. like the idea is apparently not to do it with real money at first. This product is at least codenamed Ana Um, which is a very funny name for Mark Zuckerberg, the like Brailian j Jitsu fighter in a bunch of funny fun There's this big idea about eventually letting people play with money after letting people play with credits at first This is like company doing everybody else's ideas about how to make money, right? Like Yeah You look at all of these things and every one of these is what is a new way we can make money that somebody else is already making? A tremendous amount of m Next to this. There is an incredible amount of reporting being done, particularly by our friends at Wired and someit Business Insider on this like disastrous morale problem that u U 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 Andrew Bazworth, the CTO of Meta, had to basically put out a memo acknowledging that the AI reorg at the company has been, I believe 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. L sure This company it 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 If you're here, it is obvious that Instagram and Ma are the load bearing pillars of the internet economy You want to talk about creaters There is not really a creator economy without Instagram and YouTube Like TikTok is here And certainly they're 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 follow graph 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. And 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 to kill you just directly Sing it Like their big announcements here are all about findinding 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 know, 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 of that and how much energy that is being directed at that Wildly successful it is. Everyone depends on it and needs it And you look at the creator economy, which Ive 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 Be Med is 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 R? It doesn't really matter what the creator economy does, because Ma makes money every time you open Instagram. And if you want to participate in sort of a 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 MetaI. And that looks like it Like I have no idea if it will actually work. R They' 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 Yes 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 in Can just whirring away and he hates it I think he hate 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, You're silling the robot's going to buy you the shoes. and they're like everyveryone'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. I YouTube, I just want to clear, I have YouTube. if you listen to Neil Mohan, his whole approach to YouTube now is we have learned not to be prescriptive about the creator our economy when ASMR videos came out Everyone was like, what is this garbage? And now there arere a whole cultural category. This is a real qu ill this week. they know they're pipes that Google wants to be pipes Also, I think, importantly, Google owns two major platforms Android, That is their platform. They control their destiny on that platform. And they own the web. like 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 saafari exists and Apple has very strong opinions about what web browsers can do on M phone Yeah But like Google has two platforms where it controls its destiny. And Ma has not And they've known this forever, and I think this drives Mark Zaker crazy. And if he was the sort of person who would just be happy selling ads and having ludics 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 he that man wants a platform of his own. I think he sees AI is one opportunity to do that. I think he sees his classes as another opportunity to do that. and he is content tearing his company to shreds in like ferocious ambition 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 cculating headspace You look at these things and you realize that, okay, we have built what amounts to a perfect business model on top of this 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 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? Facebooks users are going down for the first time. They would argue with you about that. They would ye, 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 business relies on I open Instagram forty times a day, whether it makes me happy or not That That's it. Yeah. It is it is it has to be that entrenched behavior or else this beautiful business model you've built on top of it 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. 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 flashy 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 you can just feel it. That company has lost its aggression in a lot of ways, and it has become more of an infomercial driving you to the TikTok shop. They had the smallest party here. That's why I'll tell you Interesting . Before we leave the Facebook fllave of flave at the Ti Tk party I will say that was very cool Dy 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 I feel like if I saw Flav of Flave and he wasn't wearing the clock, I'm not a hundred percent sure I would know it was Flav of fllave was he wasaring glasses. It was very obvious. All right, okay, cool. Th I tell you one more story about this. try to get self you a flav flav with the answer like, Hi whatever try to get selfy. And he's like, I got to get out of here. Like he was just try 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 your name, but it was just the funniest moment was like, Slave turned around and he saw it was still us and he was like, I'm good, you guys like I' So that implies that flave is Flav of Flave's first name, which is a thing I've never. like desperate call to fl. And you'd obviously like reacted to it. And he's like, someomeone needs me. And then he wass like, you don't. This isn't important at all. That's really good. I'm gonna start yelling flave at people as they walk away from me ph not. I really like that. I do wan to know what you think about This idea of Facebook doing a sort of fake and then maybe real poly market clone I mean, Facebook doesn't have ideas. Meta doesn't have ideas. Famously Evan Spiegel is the head of product at Meta He keep talking about middle managers Um, And so the idea that there's something, there's some attention mechanic that will keep you engaged. That's suuck Now famously when he was buying Instagram You know, we have emails from all these antitrust cases whereere 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 the middle all that NHS ligation and whatever. and they just brought TikTok Instagram in the form of Reels, but they understand, I think Zach particularly understands theseese new engagement mechanics do come and take time away from his apps. And so he's very good at like launching fast followers He's very bad at launching new ideas, which is where I think the AI glasses and the interaction paradigms, the hiring of Allan Dye to build a new interaction UI for the metaglasses like 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 gambing. But I think he probably sees it. He probably has enough data to see like People move from their DMs on Instagram during a game to a gambling mechanic. Sure. yeah. They go to f school. That's thing that happens. That's a real thing. Yeah. We have a CEO of Yahoo on Dakoder a while back. Jim Lensson, who you know, he's a really smart guy And I was like Yahoo has private equity ownership. It's like Apollo, they own Caar'sal. It was like, this is coming to Yahoo S sports, right? You're you're going to do gambling in sports and finance. And he was like, no, but we know Once you're done in Yahoo fininance, you go to your stocks app Once you're done in Yahoo spports, 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 yet. I'm not sure if they're going to do it but I think Zuck sees that too It's the night before the Super Bowl and everyone on Instagram and WhatsApp is talking about the odds. You can just slide it in there. You can just 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 I think that's pretty bad No, is it is as ruthlessly correct a decision, I think as you could make, but boy does it feel bad? Forr threads. likeike 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 thrides is like we should do sports R? They have like a partnership with the NBA. They're growing in communities or how are they defin 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 Very natural It deeply terrifying.. I think gambling is bad, and I think it's tr 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 That's the only place in the world where you can just demand a limousine arrive and one shows up. I'm the south of Fr. I go outside and I'm like bring me a limo and they're like,, it's not going to happen for me. But you can do that in Vegas. That's my hot take on gambling buy l mousines 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 onegest liveough Nili Pellway. Everyone remembers me, no one remembers how much your dum ass lost to Plackjack Exactly right All right, we should take a quick break and then I do want to talk gadgets because there's a There's an interesting thing happening in gadgets right now and I want to talk about it. let's take a break Support for the show comes from Framer 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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L like a landscaper's first day trimming a hedge made I have definitely already been here Now is it left right or left mayaybe I'll cut a path out and find my way back later But it wasn't like that. I filed a claim in under two minutes on the GICo app and they handled it from there. It was taken care of almost as quickly as it helped. It feels good to get help, quick. It feels good to GICO. Support for the show comes from Vetch Pet insurance. Do you have a pet? Every six seconds, a pet owner in the US gets hit with a vet bill of over a thousand dollars And it's almost always an unwelcome surprise That's where Fetch pet insurance comes in. Fetch is the most complete pet insurance. Get paid back up to ninety percent of vet bills. You can use any vet in the US and Canada. All vets are in network. Go to fetchpet dot com slash save right now for your free quote. That's fetchpet dot com slash save 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 u just to give you a preview U 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. Uh The steam machine is out. I want to talk about the steam machine in a minute. We talked about it with Seaan 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 curfuffle about is it one ram stick or two? Like this is this has been a news story Bum The most immediate thing is that as promised Apple just raised its prices. Tim Cook said this was coming, one of the previate for people, but Apple just took it, stored down, put it back up and everything is more expensive re Apple store is down of all time. Truly. Like Really truly, yes. Can I read you some of the prizes? Sure The Homepod minini 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 a hundred dollars. The MacBook Air is up two hundred dollars. The MacBook Pro is up three hundred dollars The iMac is up two hundred dollars. The Max stududio M four Max is up five hundred dollars The Mac stududio with the M three Ultra is up one thousand three 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 we 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 have more than you bought it for. That's working out Um 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 both what gadgets cost and even what they are Yeah, wasasn't there reports this week that like the new nothing phone just won't come out Yep was the MF phone two pro successor. they just canceled it because they're like we can't we can't make it we want under the current circumstances. Yeah, I think we're just seeing like Apples solution is we have price elasticity. peoplee will pay the prices But if you run by a Vision Pro the 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. mayaybe you'll pass the cost up. Like you can see how they're playing the game 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 all kinds ways I'm 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 hell do. think I think they swallowed some our margins to see what would happen in this Tim Cook line that this isn't tenable. It 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 The Steam machine is probably a better example. What is this drama about One S Ram versus you? 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 gigabytes 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 A DV impmlication 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 ascinating For a thing that is more pCy than not, sure Yeah. but this this has become a bit of a Kfuffle. 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 and at some point, they like we've even inspected it out. And Roth and our team did a great job of basasically going and building a gaming PC to rival this thing, and this is just what it costs Like it's rough out there. And I think Dom Pressedon Rice our Daily Newsleter 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 for the past two years is about to pay its dividends Interesting. what do mean But people are just gonna to hold onto 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 reparability has been sure about durability, about, fighting plant 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 cannot only last three years Right? It has to have a much longer shelf life And this we haven't in what you would call an era of disposable gadgets for quite a while. I just all that repair ability work, likeike a lot of products are more repairable now than they were before. 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 which means it's replace the battery I hadn't really thought about it, but it 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. So the point where like as we've talked about, everybody just puts smartphone chips in anything they can find because smartphone chips are so readily available and so cheap that it's like, we'll figure out what to with this later. We're just going to put it in your dishwasher and see what happens H. never really Ced until now. And it's just the RAM. I don't think it's the rest of the supply chain. But but none none of it matters except right 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 U Maybe that's going to change this industry even more than we've realized that like right You can make the products cheaper if you account for the higher price of the RAM and use cheaper components elsewhere Will people accept that? I don't know. 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, o, you can't make a cheap nothing phone anymore. And what's the first thing to go is going to be the things that don't have that price elasticity, like cheap phones. that 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 full of companies and not many others do 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 I mean we did a bunch of tariff coverage with these smaller companies I feel like we should do someamamag We should I've been talking to Eric Mitchagowski from Pebble about coming back on the 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 wouldd 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, wereere 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 Uh Valves He says lookook, 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 manyoney 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 this made me think of is I bought a car in twenty twenty one Um, like peak pandemic chaos year. cars were the most expensive they've ever been U 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 ayundi Tucson. We wanted a hybrid, we wanted an SUV, we picked this car and peopleeople 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 they say I have this car in this 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 it's this one, it's this color. It has all the 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 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. It's like it's insane. That's. This is like, 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 dataenter. L it will come to some sort of conclusion Yes, I 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, and I think it's going to get way messier before 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 center prices and more expensive iPhones I mean, that's that's coming in September, man. Like can you imagine what this next run of iPhones, potentially including a foldable iPhone is going to cost in this world. Yeah. hoof Um Real quick, one thing we should talk about. I w to know your thoughts on the slate truck. spepeaking of things with prices that are important, they announced the slate truck. twenty four thousand nine hundred and fifty dollars. Ronnie Mollla vers contributor when 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 I mean, when was the last time you saw an affordable product L right. And I love the fact that they, you know, if you're a car person, you know, people are just wrapping in cars left and right. likeike like fine. we're not going to paint it. You can wrap it howateeverver you want. I love the modularity. I love the fact you can turn in an SV and the airbags have little s like they littleittle connectors so the car knows when you've put the SUV roof on it and engages the airbags and the pillars. Like I think that's all so neat That's a lot of engineering Like I think all that is great. I think the range is troublesome to people. I think Americans just want to see three hundred nextext to a range estimate. That's fair. But that's maybe not what this truck is for. 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 I think that's the one Qion market happen, I'm dying to try one out. I think they're just so neat So I wonder about you specifically because you are like I would say you're sort of lightly a truck guy, is that makeakes sense? I want like aspire to be a truck guy. Exactly. had's great. I just think about it every day. Yeah. Does this satisfy the truck guy in you? becausecauseuse 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 like, you know, Ford F one fifty truck guys are going to want herear. 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, if you want to get into a long discussion of body and frame construction principles and why the Ford Rapor in particular sells so well because of its suspension that makes it drive like an SUV? The truck market is vast. It's complicated. I don't think the people buying this one are going to give one ounce of thought to ride quality in that way. If it's more forgiving than I think they will But us drive like a regular pickup truck that doesn't have like an indpeent rear suspion, it bounces over a bump like That's weird. That's a weird feeling sureir. So I suspect This thing is going to appeal to a lot of people that like the Ford Maverick appeals to 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 You they literally base model is called a 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 put your phone in the dash like all of you are doing anyway And I think that's just incredibly smart 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 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 you're going to find pretty much anywhere. Then We're in a Ramageddon world where now I have to go source a bunch of other parts might be more expensive for a bunch of supply chain and like war in the Middle East reasons Am I potentially signing myself up for 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 I, that's the fips side of what I'm saying right? It's going be It's make or break depending on how much people want to customize their truck And maybe they want it less than they did. Right. Like don I really don't think we know I do think people stare at new cars, which are getting increasingly more expensive. we're closing in the mediian price being like forty or fifty thousand dollars for a new cars 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 Ca class, like the interior is basically a Korean nightclub. L there's no other way to describe what is happening in that car what do you want me to do a little this l? 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 car maker can can just settle on using a circle for a steering wheel anymore. Like newew cars are getting increasingly weird to justify all of that cost and They're, you know, carmakers like, well, what will justify the money sccreens 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. Does't wouldould the market prefer a cheaper planar car for a reasonable lotount of money that you can just tweak it will without running into some DRM Mercedes MBUX nonsense Did you see the car? It looks crazy in there. It does. It's it's it's all so blue And there are so many, yet again, so many screens showing walls or screing over and over again. The C class is not a big car. like no 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 And there's a there's a moon roof that's doing stuff. I got to st look at this car.'s a lot of there's a of like that's obviously lxury, but like it's trrickling down to every But I was in an Uber here in France. and it was a BYD seal, which is basically a Tesla mododel three EY competitor. And I asked the guy, the lber driver, like, do you like this? better than Tesla. and he was like So much better than Tesla. likeike he blows Tesla out of the water. Wow. And I was like, what do you like about it? He's like the fit and finish is better, the range is better. And they pointed at the screen he goes, and it has carfay 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. I was like, whatever. was we were talking tragics. I spent a lot of time talking about this car with him. And I was like,, they're just like basically illegal in the United States And mean he's like in France, they have to protect Situen in Pijot and Renault, and he made like the French spitting noise to indicate his disgust with the French domestic car manufacturer. He was like, Pijot It was amazing 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. where all this stuff is going on. but There's just something to be said for people want a quality product at a good price The sl much remains to be seen with the slight truck up against the feature creep and the tech bloat in all the other new cars. We'll see like I'm happy it exists I have wondered If that is maybe one silver lining of what's about to happen,'s like Is there about to be a Big new push in much dumber gadgets that like, is this how we get dumb TVs back because it literally becomes too expensive to make smart TV's 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've to charge me more for it, that's someomewhere in this hotel is the Foxet Can data activation Well on the surveillance economy, no, this is a good this is a good segue to the beginning of the lighting round. So let's take a break, then we're going to come back. We'll do a lighting round Avatar Fire and Ash is now streaming on Disney Plus. It's the film critics are calling the best Avatar yet A true epic and completely jaw dropping. This is the only pure thing in this world. Return to Pandora on Disney pllus. It will be an adventure for the whole family and watch the Oscar winning phenomenon at home. This is sick Our Fire and Ash, now stream on Disney pllus, Rady P thirteen. Thinking about refreshing the carpet in your home, now's the time to do it. 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Law Supplies last ends june thirtieth turns at aka dot mS slash college Pc All right, we're back. It's time now for the lightning round. beginning with America's favorite podcasts within a podcast. I don't even have to ask. I just just I give up at this point. I'm He just does it every week We're still here friend and car is a dummy Car is a dummy He yeah. There is a dummy A! Well Merch It's still going . That rolled. Oh man, that was good. That rolled. Play that at your can party, me. That's like that's the real theme song for America two hundred fifty right there Thank you to Dave Girner who sent that to us. The revolutionary spirit in that was it'ss it's real That is awesome Now with merch. That was very good. All right, Neili, what do you do this week I mean 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 bonafide newews program opened and the license renewal for the various ABC stations owned by Disney that pulled the licenses early up for renewal to punish Disney for being too woke or whatever Whatever word salad exists in Brendon's 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 bonaide news program Its kind of w that. we have. Do you want to run it? Yeah, let's just watch this. I haven't actually seen this What is you Pase welcome 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. sccan 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 Barbaran Walters is a choiceing We believe the viewers of the view will scan this QR code and at the SCC. like Just a lot of ideas in there Who knows if it will work. Brendan will tell you that none of this is true, right? This is just a good faith reexamination of whether the view is a bonaide news program and needs to abide by the equal time rule All this is to punish Disney. So you recall all this kicked off in Enest FO was it James Tel Rico appeared on the view. who's obviously a congressional candidate in Texas And news programs do not have to give equal time entertainment programs do because it's like free advertising. So historically, the only program that has ever had to think about the equal time rule is Saturdayight Live. becausecause 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 Saturdayight Live, they gave President Trump Airtime in NSCA race like the next weekend or something But if you it's right on the line. and it has operated under a bonafide 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, said, Well, what if I pull it? What if I ree examamine this? And what if I showill your speech for not allowing you to have candidates on your news program or limit your limit your speech overall And so it's up for a review. He pulled the licenses of 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 Just 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 a broadcast because that is the power he has. Right So ABC has antennanas 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 cw 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 are a lot of reasons for that All of that is nonsense now Most people experience the view on YouTube and as Instagram clips The government having any instinct about what to do with the view or what candidateates' can appear on there is nonsensical when its primary distribution is internet distribution that car has no control over. All of this is just a test balloon for C I control Instagram Can I regulate speech on the internet? And you will find a way to do it if you start fllowing down the slippery slope becausecause the public interest standard of Spectrum use for broadcast television is as far removed from the experience of everyday Americans as teelegraph 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 Lemmon will just go to YouTube. 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? I think Cber's's going to He's going gonna to be here at C showilling creator supplements like everybody else. and like maybe that will break his heart 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 I 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 you know, high and mighty rules at equal time in 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 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 internern. And I just remind everybody YouTube is owned by a defense contractor Like there's a lot of ways for a unified Trump administration make life hard for a lot of these companies. 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 there's a lot of ways for 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 to tail holds Getting the view ked off the air or punishing them or yanking their bonafide news exception on broadcasts like W's broadcast spectrum policy, there's a reason we historically have not talked about in a show 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 Brendon I'm in France, man. It's I can't believe I had to think about runntning car in France Here are the land of the free, liiberte, fraternity. e call ite, Brendon. 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 Thats been Bndon Carr' a dummy, America's favor pcast and in podcast and Beautif We're also gonna do an AI version of you wrapping the whole Guns and ships Hamilton song about Brendon Carr. Oh. And that's going to go That's what the for. We're Kevin O'Leary,re that big data center, Finally, a reason that people can get behind U I have a lightning aroundound 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 Uh so it's Imagine the social network But it's about Sam Altman and OpenAI fun is essentially, I think, was like part of the pitch and kind of the vibe. The movie is 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 is very near production being finished Amazon 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 Garfield 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 O of course. Yeah. againain, 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 like wrote for SNL for a very long time, is very funny person. and It would have been sort of needly in a way, I think would be my guess about the first read of the script. But it definitely did not paint Sam Altman as like a good person and open AI is like a good company wanting to make the world a better place. It's like very much the sort of duplicitous schemer Sam Altan that a lot of people have come to know recently thenen apparently what happened is Luca Guardinu, 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 publicly 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 openp AI and other AI companies. All of these companies are tied up together Oping Eye 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 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 Sting to seem like this movie might just kind of die the only like, 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 It's just you can just see it. 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 and things about AI wr Which is funny, because if you're reading the cultural Rom, this is the movie you should release. Yes. I don't understand that at all. There's a lot of money to be made in releasing the movie that says AI is bad. And it's 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 that's the equation. There's gott to be some indy studio or industrier is gonna to pick this. So apparently Neon and Mubby are apparently the front runners for it, which are like They are the ones who should release a movie like this. And I hope it hits big for them and I hope that everything goes great But I think like this All the things you're talking about about like these companies are owned 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, through Patel twenty eight That's. That's my entire presidential platform It's really There should be more than five companies good stuff. All right, what's your next ling 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 Klaidescapes Strado E. John Higgins did it. We have Klaidescape streamers. He has got a set upp. I've got a setup. This is the ten thousand dollars movie streaming server player setup that we both have at 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 is Blue ray quality. They do do all of their own encoding. they take the, you know, the master files from the studios and they make their own encodes, which so they can' exceed Blue ray quality in some cases U, Blue rays are dying, which is really sad So this is the high quality movie. playback system There isn't another one except for Sony Robia Core, 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 Kaidscape because it just arrives on Sony televisions. But you need a big setup to see it. This is John's real point here. You have 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 In Pacific Rim you can see it blocks less Color red is really hard to compress It does a better job at a color red across the board. These are very fine details. like it is fast action scenes with a lot of moving elements It does a way better job there. Every else's like, oh it's defitely crisper I'm going to leave now. L that's how people react to it. onn the audio side. blows everything out of the water Hm. 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 crispper. Like it just sounds better than the overly compressed streaming audio that we've been listening to for so long that it like knocks people's socks off. It's very expensive. You do not need to buy the full ten thousand dollars client server setup. You can get the Strato ePayer alone, which I think is three grand. It this is one of the things that's never suppos to be on sale, but you can find them on sle. like people sell them to 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 those set of movies that you want to have the full experience in Yeah, I think it's worth it, especially as Blue Ray 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 what I will call the community Interesting. Blue Ray, by the way, turned twenty this week happappy happay twentieth anniversary of Blueway. That's such a weird phenole. Like, man, that makes me feeld. I remember being at the same yes, edit with the and gadget team. U when there was a blue ray booth and an HDDBD booth And it was going to be it was going to be the kickoff of the format war And the night before CS HDV failed. It collapsed and they took the booth down before CS opened. Wha Now I now I just like an old guy I feel like that that's a version history episode waiting to happen. We're gonna have to do that at some point. That's a good one. Yeah, literally the night before, it was like the breaking news was like Toshiba just caved. They're like, yeah, we're out. That's kind of wild actually. That's pretty cool. I have been Blue ray shopping this week because of the anniversary and then realized I literally don't own a Blue ray play. So now I'm also shopping for a Blue Ray player. It' been It's been a fascating week Th thousand dollars strrado e baby. Although you have like a garbage TV. L very proudly have a garbage TV. Well, what I was gonna to say is like I have been Mh slowly starting the fight with my wife to put a soundbar 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 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 like I'm slowly fighting battles and I've decided soundbar is the next one That's good' I'm really looking forward The pre is to get the best out that s you gott to stick a subwo for somehere in that room too, and that is the hardest fight of all 'use you can't really hide that either. I can't like stick that in a cabinet. That's just a big box. You like You gotta hope the kids painted or something. Like it's just you're doomed Yeah, we're going 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 Egger sort of exit interview that he did with the Financial Times? U Really interesting. I think Bowwiger is It's sort of a weird story. He was the CEO of Disney for a very long time left once kind of 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 It wass a very weird thing. Now his left for real. He says did a really interesting interview with the financial Times in the show notes. 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 Uh, that I just found really interesting and pertinent to U. our purposes. One is the Twitter deal, which he confirmed, this was sort of known at the time that Disney was We all they wanted Twitter, Twitter and they thought Twitter was toxic the phrase the phrase Igger used was, quote, a horrible distraction, which I think was a super good call in retrospect P 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. And 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 that Apple should buy Disney. they have a lot of like 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? This is the equivalent of Volwager being like, Flave This is exactly right. It just makes me laugh. So Eiger 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 really. But in the beginning of the Tim Cook era where I was like, they've got to spend money Well was 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 gonna 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 remember like every company got floated? And in the end Netflix was going to be it for a minute. 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 Beat acquisition sure cap the Apple Music and all this stuff, but it also brought them Jimmy Iv and Dr. Dreay as Apple employees with no titles and like a massive culture clash that I think they're still they're still fighting through But anyway I just thought that those 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 was the largest Disney shareholder for a time. Yeah I sold Pixar to Disney. You can float a bunch of stuff. But like, yeah, there's you had no shop on I'll say it can. I was gossiping with a media person here and we were talking about Eiger and they're like Every one of these big companany CEOs is now effectively an accountant And the only difference with Bob Eiger 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 program to try to make a human connection. And he's like, we'll see if the new guy can do it becausecause he might just be an accountant too Like did do you remember that trend? It was like a couple months ago where all the burger CEO's 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 the context in which this came up Was it really They are them all being accountants now is a perfect explanation.. That's really funny All right, what's your next lightning round? we got? where And Oh, speaking of Tan, I want to end here because I think this is a preview of some stuff that's coming the CEO of People Inc Neil Vogel has been doing the rounds here So People Lc owns obviously people. They used to be called dot dash Meredith and like about. com Like this is a big roll upp of digital media companies and they change them to People Lc to you know, just use the name of the famous magazines to not be called dot dash Marith Yeah you know you know good call. So he's on this terror and you can hear him on all the media podcasts and this stuff. And he's like in age of AI brand stand for something. and I like largely agree with him on a lot of these things. But he was on the Axiosi yacht Giving an interview to Axus because you do interviews and Yachtts here at Kan What a sentence, sure 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 s 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 becausecause Google uses the same crawler for search as it does for AI training called it an abusive market power. and he said, I wish we could work with them constructively, but we are probably headed for confrontation. means the antitrust litigation about Google using the search crawler to train AI is like We are on the precipice of that antrust ligigation Bea 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's That's the it's coming. 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 It seems like a pretty straightforward 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 antirust lawyer, but boy does that seem like a airly straight l H 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 D decoder To years ago was 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 Hm 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 O real time traffic analysis has recently shown a bunch of weird spikes that make it very awesy spikes in the world And like kind of out of nowhere, all of a sudden like our traffic just like multiplies. And it's very obvious that what this is is this is AI bots crawling our site. Like I just wonder know what else it could possibly be at this moment in time. and 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. Cloudflare has talked about that for the first time it's seeing more bought traffic than human traffic. thinging is is here now. And I think People Linkc is an interesting place to fight it. The thing that it's going to make everyone do is it won't force either week, everyone gets deals right from the AI companies, and it becomes very lucrative for us to you know, meaningful human journalism in a database for AI companies to reconstitute as AI summaries. L 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 That's what they're going do But I him saying it at canan 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'm I think In particular with Google, you, the deal has been obvious you allow the Google seearch crawler to hit your site at scale. And in return, it delivers you traffic. search traffic arrives and you can monetize however you want You'd like now we're also doing AI and Gemini is just telling you the answers to stuff. likeike you get literally nothing in return And I think any judge or jury. is going be, yeah, that's a new deal. No one signed up for this Google is going to have a lot of responses to that, I'm sure. But that's it does feel like fraid I don't change the deal further, you know, like that' that's the mode this industry is in Thats 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, I mean, that's's that's why it's the people lynx of the world who have to go fight this fight because they're in a Their business model is much more actively threatened by this at this moment in time. Oh with that question. 's That fight, I think is only just beginning. and boy are we going to cover it here on the show Weird. Sh 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 Dakota next week? What's coming out? It's our best episode of the year. It's the fourth of July It's our grill episode And I will say this, I shot the intro I never thought would have gone this long. It 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 CEOs should we have as a joke? You h to 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 grill company Blackstone, the Griddle compomany, 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 Dolly, the CEO of Waxstone, but he's now the CEO of Weber because he just bought it Wait I assume I heard Weber Blackstone and assumed Weber bought Blackstone. You're telling me Blackstone b Weber. They put the more famous name. Yeah, he just like, ye Yeahah. L I won and then I bought you And now he has like the conversation so weious because he's a really good dude. I really like him a lot. He's very humble, but he's like, yeah, I I had to fix this culture that had broken to the point where I showed up and just bought it Wait, you you've backed your way into like an accidentally perfect Dakoder episode. It is the funniest Dakoder 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 like I was like, so because I wanted him on the show last year when the deal went down, but he was an antitrust review. So I couldn't come on It's just like easily the funniest. We even talked about Ramageddon. I was like, is the I Gll platform affected by the RAM shortage? And he was like No, that's not really a problem It's like I got I got another fish to fr. yees, like a perfect Dakoder episode is a guy who literally is a startup founder came to like massive prominence of the pandemic because of TikTok the biggest name in the space. It's pretty good. I'm very excited for that Happy fourth of July, everyone. 's good stuff. Also, you're on version History this coming weekend. We're doing the Nest episode. Oh very good. whereere we get deep in our feelings about thermostats