The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss President Biden signing the TikTok ban bill, Apple's May 7th iPad event, Tesla's flop era, and more.
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00:00:00Hello and welcome to The Verge Cast, the flagship podcast of saying, we're going to burn your
00:00:05house down unless you sell it.
00:00:08That's the metaphor everyone's using on TikTok.
00:00:12If you don't listen to The Verge Cast, we will burn your house down.
00:00:14Yeah, those are your choices.
00:00:16You can sell your house or Kranz will come to it and torch it.
00:00:19Yeah, I've got a lighter and everything.
00:00:21Hi, I'm your friend, Eli.
00:00:23I'm good.
00:00:24Kranz is here.
00:00:25Alex Kranz is here.
00:00:26Yeah, I'm here to hear all the scorching takes.
00:00:28Yeah, she's got a lighter and she's not afraid to use it.
00:00:31David Pierce is here.
00:00:32Hello.
00:00:33We were all so close to being in the same city for like 10 minutes yesterday and we
00:00:38managed to not record a Verge Cast and it was very upsetting.
00:00:40Yeah, it's funny that we've gone 180.
00:00:42Usually at least two of us are together.
00:00:44We were all very close to all three of us being together and now we're all three of
00:00:47us remote, but it's for good reason.
00:00:51David has the Rabbit R1 in hand.
00:00:53I can't tell you how much I want to talk about the Rabbit R1 and all the things it can or
00:00:57mostly cannot do.
00:00:58So that's very exciting.
00:00:59We're going to talk about that.
00:01:00We got to talk about the electric G-Wagon.
00:01:01That's another hour of the Verge Cast.
00:01:03Apple announced new iPads.
00:01:05Tesla had earnings.
00:01:06Elon threatened once again to turn every Tesla on the road into some sort of distributed
00:01:09AWS situation.
00:01:10Very weird.
00:01:11We got a lightning round at the end, but we have to start.
00:01:14We have to start with breaking news.
00:01:17Joe Biden, just before we began recording today on Wednesday, signed the bill that would force
00:01:23TikTok to either divest itself, to sell itself to some other company in the United States
00:01:28or shut down.
00:01:29Those are the two choices.
00:01:31It passed as part of an aid package to Ukraine, Israel.
00:01:35There's some humanitarian aid for Gaza in that package.
00:01:38The House passed it as part of that aid bill.
00:01:40They extended the timeline and the divestiture, which was the big holdup in the Senate before.
00:01:44So now TikTok has nine months to figure out a sale process.
00:01:49And if they're making progress, whoever is the president can add three months per the
00:01:54president's discretion, bringing the total to a year.
00:01:56So ByteDance basically has a year to figure this out.
00:01:59The clock is now ticking.
00:02:00The bill is signed.
00:02:01It's the law.
00:02:02No one knows what's going to happen next.
00:02:07There's so many strange unknowns about this.
00:02:10Things like who is going to be president when we hit the nine-month gap.
00:02:14It's so obvious to me that a big part of the sticking point was to move this past the election.
00:02:19That whatever is going to happen should have to happen after Election Day.
00:02:23And it'll either be our problem after we've been re-elected, if you're the Democrats,
00:02:27or it'll be their problem if you're the Republicans.
00:02:31That was in Lauren's reporting, too, is that a lot of these senators signed on to approve
00:02:36this bill because it pushed it past the deadline, because it gave them a little bit more space
00:02:41to do it.
00:02:42Yeah.
00:02:43No, I think it's such an easy maneuver at such an odd moment.
00:02:47We've talked so much about the politics of this, especially among young people in the
00:02:52United States, and all the weird ways that's going to go.
00:02:55All of the stuff I've been reading recently has been very strange, that intellectually,
00:02:59overwhelmingly, it seems like if you ask people, is TikTok bad in whatever mysterious way you
00:03:05want to define bad, people say yes.
00:03:07All of the polls are basically like, yes, most people believe TikTok is a net bad.
00:03:12But then, I think the reality of waking up and TikTok suddenly being gone is a thing
00:03:19in an election season that nobody actually wants to deal with.
00:03:23It's very strange.
00:03:24I also don't think that part is ever actually going to happen, but we can talk about that.
00:03:28Look, I love eating handfuls of M&Ms at midnight, which is a thing I love.
00:03:32I know it's bad.
00:03:33I know I shouldn't do that.
00:03:37Super do it all the time.
00:03:39That feels like our relationship to social media is a country right now.
00:03:43Maybe TikTok in particular.
00:03:44But in general, our relationship to social media is like, eh, this is making us feel
00:03:48bad, and maybe it's measurable, or maybe it's not, or maybe this guy is just a grifter trying
00:03:51to sell a book.
00:03:52Whatever it is, some ambient sense of, eh, I shouldn't eat M&Ms at midnight is there,
00:03:57and then everyone's just like, give them to me.
00:04:01Let me have them.
00:04:02The thing that's really interesting, it just got signed today.
00:04:05It felt inevitable all week that this would get signed.
00:04:08The momentum was there.
00:04:10Lauren Feiner, her reporting suggested the deadlines were coming ever faster, usually
00:04:15with bills.
00:04:16There's delays and lots of management, and this was just happening, and it actually happened
00:04:18I think a little faster than we anticipated it would happen, like a day faster.
00:04:22Now it's done.
00:04:23There's no more argument whether you should ban TikTok.
00:04:26They did it.
00:04:27They passed the bill.
00:04:28Joe Biden signed it.
00:04:29It's the law.
00:04:30I do think you could ask the question of, is what Joe Biden signed intended to be a
00:04:38ban of TikTok?
00:04:39It's not nothing to me that in his statement about signing the bill and his excitement
00:04:44and enthusiasm for the fact that this got done after all this time, didn't mention TikTok
00:04:48once or any of this stuff once.
00:04:51It's buried halfway down this long bill after, I forget the exact heading of the thing, but
00:04:58it's like miscellaneous and then TikTok.
00:05:02This is not the point of the bill, which I think is a strange thing that is going to
00:05:06play out potentially in some interesting ways as we go through the inevitable chaos
00:05:10of the next nine months.
00:05:11This got passed in service of passing something else, and I think what everybody decided along
00:05:17this process is passing this other thing is so important that, sure, we'll ban TikTok.
00:05:23I don't know if that changes anything about the way this actually plays out.
00:05:26I think the bill is still law.
00:05:28It did happen, but it's a strange way that we got here that makes me wonder, does Joe
00:05:35Biden actually want to ban TikTok, or is that just a price everyone is willing to pay in
00:05:40order to get this important aid bill?
00:05:43Oh, it was 100% a price everybody was willing to pay, right?
00:05:47This was a really—the whole bill was a hard-fought battle for everybody involved, and this was
00:05:53just like, you know what?
00:05:54We just need to get this bill out the door.
00:05:56If somebody wants to put this in, this is so at the back of most of our list, it's fine,
00:06:02which I thought was really, really interesting to go from TikTok being this huge center of
00:06:07discussion for everybody to being essentially a footnote in a much larger bill.
00:06:11Yeah.
00:06:12I mean, the House did have the up-down vote on the standalone TikTok bill, which had a
00:06:16much shorter timeline, and I think a lot of people had problems with that shorter timeline,
00:06:19and that just sort of arrived in the Senate with nothing, so at least one part of our
00:06:23government had the straight up-down vote.
00:06:25That's true.
00:06:26Right?
00:06:27And after the House voted to pass that version of the bill, Biden said, I'm going to sign
00:06:29it.
00:06:30I'm going to sign it.
00:06:31You get it to me, and I'll sign it, whether or not they skirted it through the Senate
00:06:35by attaching it to a bill that everyone wanted to get done.
00:06:39Yeah.
00:06:40I mean, like on the margins, but that's like how so many things get done.
00:06:43Totally.
00:06:44But I think you have—you had the House, just the straight up-down vote, and you had
00:06:47Biden saying, I'm going to sign it.
00:06:48So the motivations, I think, are clear.
00:06:52Whether or not Biden wants to run around crowing that he banned TikTok I think is very different,
00:06:56like politically very different.
00:06:57The White House, for example, announced today that it's going to keep campaigning on TikTok.
00:07:03They're just going to be like, I don't know if anyone's ready for that ratio.
00:07:07That is going to—in the history of ratios on the internet, every post the White House
00:07:11now makes, every post Joe Biden now makes on TikTok is going to get ratioed to hell
00:07:16and back, and it's going to be delightful.
00:07:18And that's fine.
00:07:19I was actually thinking about that as sort of—it's like a perfect microcosm of this
00:07:23whole thing.
00:07:24And I think the thing that I have come around to is, in the months that we've been talking
00:07:30about this, I think at the beginning of all these conversations, I underrated how important
00:07:35TikTok is as an information source, particularly to young people.
00:07:38But now you see the stats that are like, it is a growing search engine.
00:07:42It's a huge source of news, particularly for like Gen Z and younger.
00:07:47It matters a lot.
00:07:48And so for the White House to A, want to ban TikTok, but also understand that if we want
00:07:53to reach people, this is the literal only way, is actually like a perfect summation
00:07:58of the TikTok problem.
00:08:00TikTok is so important that you can ban it, and yet you have to use it.
00:08:04It's so strange.
00:08:05But that is like, that is where we are with what TikTok means to people right now.
00:08:10Somewhere in the TikTok office, there's the knob that just throttles you, and like shows
00:08:13each of you, the CEO of TikTok is just like, Biden Harris HQ.
00:08:16Goodbye.
00:08:17Yeah, their engagement is going to go way down.
00:08:19I'm nuked from orbit.
00:08:20Good night, everybody.
00:08:21So it's done, right?
00:08:23The point I'm trying to make is it's done.
00:08:24There are only three options now.
00:08:25TikTok has said it's going to sue, it's going to file some sort of legal complaint to say
00:08:30this is not allowed.
00:08:33We don't know what that looks like.
00:08:34They showed G2 actually put up a TikTok himself saying, make no mistake, this is a ban, which
00:08:40is interesting.
00:08:41We'll come back to that.
00:08:42And then we're going to go to court and we're going to fight for your rights as Americans
00:08:44under the constitution because you can't be silenced.
00:08:47Also a very interesting thing to say.
00:08:50And then he said, don't worry, TikTok will continue as before.
00:08:53Like we'll keep running TikTok, we're going to keep investing in TikTok.
00:08:55You just hold tight.
00:08:56I'm going to go defend the constitution against the United States government.
00:09:00Yeah.
00:09:01It's super funny to see the guy who made like unalive a word because you're not allowed
00:09:07to say dead on TikTok, the bastion of free speech, like that's a really weird stance
00:09:12for him to take because it's not.
00:09:14It's PG rated social media, right?
00:09:18It's social media for kids, which is why the kids use it and why part of the reason
00:09:23people don't want the kids using it.
00:09:25Like, come on.
00:09:26I'm never going to look at a corn emoji the same way, right, after being on TikTok.
00:09:30You went from very, very innocent to very weird, very quickly.
00:09:33So there's that element.
00:09:34There's also the fact that it's not the user speech that is being regulated here, right?
00:09:37It's TikTok, the company that distributes the speech of users and the notion that it's
00:09:43control of the algorithm presents some sort of national security risk, that there is some
00:09:47longstanding issue with having foreign powers control a significant part of our media.
00:09:52That's a very old policy issue.
00:09:53There's some issue with concentration of media ownership.
00:09:56So you just look at option one, we're going to file a lawsuit, we're going to win pure
00:10:00coin flip.
00:10:02We just don't know how that's going to go.
00:10:03We don't know what TikTok's lawsuit is going to be.
00:10:06It could hinge all on free speech or it could just hinge on like a technical drafting error
00:10:11where the government did not point to the correct statutory authority from 1805 to enact.
00:10:18We don't know.
00:10:19We have to see it.
00:10:20So that's option one.
00:10:21We're going to fight a lawsuit and win.
00:10:23Option two is they shut down and leave.
00:10:24They could do that.
00:10:26That's the ban, right?
00:10:28We've exhausted our other options and we're out of here.
00:10:30Goodbye, you ban TikTok.
00:10:32Weird.
00:10:33I think that is a choice that ByteDance has to make under duress, right?
00:10:39It's the, we're going to burn your house down unless you sell it.
00:10:41And they could be like, yeah, we lit the match.
00:10:43Like, see you later.
00:10:44We shut it down.
00:10:45Option two.
00:10:46Option three is that they sell it.
00:10:47You know, they got a year to figure it out.
00:10:49And option three has a bunch of weirdness in it because most of the companies that would
00:10:52want to buy TikTok, it feels like our own DOJ would prevent them from doing it for antitrust
00:10:57reasons.
00:10:58So that's option three.
00:11:00So it's not an easy road from here at all.
00:11:03I don't know what the creators are going to do.
00:11:05The creators have a year to figure out how much they want to trust TikTok while TikTok
00:11:10is trying to turn itself into their home shopping network anyway.
00:11:13And like, it's not, you know, universal music isn't on there anymore.
00:11:16Like there's a whole bunch of stuff over there that creators are going to have to react to.
00:11:19I think we're in for just a whole bucket of changes.
00:11:22Much in the same way that when, you know, Elon bought Twitter and started making changes
00:11:25over there, the social media landscape just started refracting around it.
00:11:28Like things started changing all around that energy.
00:11:32I think we're going to see the same thing with TikTok.
00:11:35There's only three options.
00:11:36They fight and win a lawsuit, which we haven't seen.
00:11:38We don't know what that lawsuit will be based on.
00:11:39So we don't know.
00:11:41They leave or they sell it.
00:11:43That's it.
00:11:44Okay.
00:11:45I just want to float a fourth option, which is they stay and the app stores pay a fine,
00:11:50which in case you're wondering, I calculated it would be $850 billion.
00:11:55So that's an option.
00:11:56Just throwing it out there.
00:11:57Apple can do that.
00:11:58That's just an option.
00:11:59That's 8.5 car projects for Apple.
00:12:00Yeah.
00:12:01It's like not even a big deal.
00:12:02It's fine.
00:12:03It's fine.
00:12:05To me, the strange thing that's going to happen in the middle of all of that is just uncertainty,
00:12:09right?
00:12:10And I've been reading and talking to folks about this just in the last few hours.
00:12:14And there is this overwhelming sense from a lot of people that TikTok is sort of screwed
00:12:20no matter what happens, because this is like, it just got completely thrown up in the air.
00:12:26Everything about TikTok.
00:12:27And there is no indication it's going to settle down quickly, right?
00:12:32And like, even if it gets a new owner, there will be lots of changes.
00:12:35If it disappears, obviously it'll be gone.
00:12:39And if it fights a lawsuit, that's going to take a long time.
00:12:41And so if you're a creator, if you're an advertiser, if you're anyone who has any kind of investment
00:12:46in this platform, the simplest thing to do is going to be immediately start investing
00:12:51your time and energy and money somewhere else.
00:12:53And that is just going to bleed TikTok so fast.
00:12:57And to the point where even if a year from now TikTok sells to Oracle, are we sure TikTok
00:13:05is going to still be TikTok in a year?
00:13:07Because this stuff moves fast.
00:13:09Right.
00:13:10And then the actual mechanism of sale is confusing because it appears ByteDance would not sell
00:13:16the algorithm that underlies TikTok, right?
00:13:18Right.
00:13:19Well, ByteDance has been pretty clear this whole time that it has no interest in selling.
00:13:24If you believe ByteDance, divesting is not an option.
00:13:27Well, yeah, because then we have to see if TikTok actually makes money.
00:13:30Right.
00:13:31I mean, like, yeah.
00:13:32Do they want a bunch of American tech companies poking around the books of TikTok?
00:13:34Like, they certainly do not.
00:13:36Do they have to say just as a negotiating tactic, we will never sell in order to ward
00:13:41off a ban?
00:13:42They sure do.
00:13:43But if you're just a responsible executive and now you're here and you have the three
00:13:46choices or choice four, to be fair to David, which is ask Apple to pay $850 billion a year
00:13:52in fines for having TikTok remain in the app store.
00:13:55Yeah.
00:13:56Like, it feels like you got to run down two of them.
00:13:59Right.
00:14:00Yeah.
00:14:01I mean, at some point your option is either zero dollars or a hundred billion dollars.
00:14:04And you just you sort of have no choice but to take that.
00:14:07But if that is the game that you're playing, you have to play that basically until the
00:14:12very last minute.
00:14:13Look, the millionaire Chinese teens buying G wagons all over Los Angeles.
00:14:18It's got to come from somewhere, you know, like the children of the CCP.
00:14:23They need their G wagons.
00:14:24That's all I'm saying.
00:14:25I'm just putting that out there somewhere.
00:14:26And like money talks.
00:14:27I'm like, that's real.
00:14:28And I think having some dollars is better than no dollars.
00:14:32Whether or not it's fair that the price is depressed because the thing has to be sold.
00:14:37Good question.
00:14:39There's just not a world in which the evaluation doesn't come down to, are we going to be successful
00:14:44in court?
00:14:45What number can we get?
00:14:46Because that middle road of we pulled out of the United States market and now we have
00:14:51nothing to show for all of our investment in building the TikTok user base.
00:14:55It just seems it's something that's a lawsuit, too.
00:14:57It's also just straight up bad business like that is just straightforwardly like a stupid
00:15:01capitalism decision at some point, notably the Chinese government, not so capitalist.
00:15:07Putting that out there.
00:15:08Well, and again, like there are the question of who ultimately makes this decision on that
00:15:13side.
00:15:15Very hard to know, would tell you a lot about how this will turn out, right?
00:15:19Like if if Xu Chu, the CEO of TikTok is the person who ultimately makes the decision,
00:15:24that will be very different than if TikTok is connected to ByteDance is connected to
00:15:28the Chinese Communist Party, which ultimately means the Chinese Communist Party makes that
00:15:31decision.
00:15:32That would go very differently.
00:15:33Like, there's so many things we don't know still.
00:15:36It's an exciting time, honestly, like I love when a social media platform changes hands
00:15:41or has this big moment because then you see see things like Adam Asari today.
00:15:45Was it on Instagram?
00:15:46I think you clocked the video of him just explaining to creators how to get engagement
00:15:52on the platform.
00:15:53And it's like that probably wouldn't have happened if there wasn't a TikTok.
00:15:57Adam Asari being like, so, OK, you're at work.
00:15:59I'm going to set some goals for you.
00:16:00We're going to check in six months to see how they're going and see how it's going.
00:16:04And it's like, dude, why does this all feel like work?
00:16:06Like, I actually think that's like the bigger story here is like this feels like a work
00:16:09for an awful lot of people across all of these platforms.
00:16:14And like maybe some people are going to be like, I don't want to work for TikTok anymore
00:16:17because it came to nothing.
00:16:18And that will just create energy somewhere else.
00:16:20We'll see.
00:16:21One of the funniest memes to me on Instagram is all the people who are like, oh, I had
00:16:25a call with Metta and we talked about, you know, strategies for how to succeed.
00:16:28And it like it has become a meme of people making jokes about it.
00:16:32But it started as a real thing.
00:16:33And it's like it's a big win to have a business call with Metta executives about your Instagram
00:16:37presence.
00:16:38Wait, did social media become the new Mary Kay?
00:16:42Yeah, it's been there for a long time.
00:16:44I don't think the people selling the hydro water bottles, yes, the bottles just have
00:16:49a blue LED in the bottom and they're like, this adds hydrogen to your water.
00:16:52That's a lie.
00:16:53It's very bad.
00:16:54And if you don't understand why it's bad, I'm just telling you that water is made of
00:16:59hydrogen.
00:17:00Yeah, it's already in there.
00:17:01It's H2.
00:17:02There's two of them for every oxygen.
00:17:03Famously, you get to get to double your hydrogens and it's like, what are you doing?
00:17:12I'm like, how is this happening on this platform?
00:17:13And they're all selling them in TikTok shop.
00:17:14And I just think that platform, the revenue pressure on all the social platforms is so
00:17:18high.
00:17:19But all these companies need to make money and show profitability, they're doing layoffs
00:17:22and they're just turning the screws.
00:17:23I'm like, can we, how do we make money?
00:17:26And they just landed on the home shopping network.
00:17:28I think it was headed towards a cliff anyway.
00:17:30Like there was a bubble in video creator economy, Taylor Lawrence has actually talked about it.
00:17:37And you can just see like, to me, the hydro water bottle is like, oh, that bubble is getting
00:17:41pretty big.
00:17:42Yeah.
00:17:43Like it's not good.
00:17:44All right.
00:17:45So here's the exercise I want to do.
00:17:47Three options, right?
00:17:48Lawsuit succeeds, ByteDance burns it down or they get sold.
00:17:53TikTok is a prize, right?
00:17:55It is the thing that no one can get.
00:17:57It is a scaled social network with an active user base of young people.
00:18:00That's what everybody wants.
00:18:01It's really hard to get the way that TikTok got it, right?
00:18:04They acquired Musically and then ByteDance started spending billions upon billions of
00:18:08dollars on Facebook and Instagram ads to convert people into downloading the app.
00:18:13You can't really do that.
00:18:14You can't even run that playbook anymore because of Apple's app tracking transparency.
00:18:17Like they made the ad changes.
00:18:19And so the market for app install ads is basically gone.
00:18:22You have to pay Apple for them and the App Store app, a different conversation.
00:18:25But the point is you can't just run the playbook, ByteDance did.
00:18:28And they ran that playbook to the tune of billions upon billions of dollars, right?
00:18:32So here's this thing that was really hard to do, that the conditions under which ByteDance
00:18:37did it have dramatically changed and it was very expensive even when they could do it.
00:18:41It's what everybody wants.
00:18:43It will be expensive, right?
00:18:45This isn't like Twitter fire sale.
00:18:48And even that was expensive as we've all discovered, like that was overpriced.
00:18:51This is the thing, like it is a scaled video advertising platform with a bunch of young
00:18:55people on it that love it, that defines the culture all the time.
00:18:59So who can afford it?
00:19:00I just looked up the list of the largest American companies by market cap.
00:19:04All of the ones that are measured in trillions are tech companies.
00:19:08So I figured we could just go down that list and then we can go to the companies that are
00:19:10measured in billions, which are much more amusing to think about as owners of ByteDance.
00:19:15But I think we should, we should start with the tech companies because they seem like
00:19:18the most likely group to at least have some interest.
00:19:22Clarifying question.
00:19:23How much should we think TikTok is worth?
00:19:27I have an idea in mind, but I'm curious if there is a like assumed number that I have
00:19:32not heard for what TikTok is valued at.
00:19:34Do we know?
00:19:35So the number that I have just picked out of the blue is $100 billion because that is
00:19:40more than double what Twitter was worth.
00:19:42It's a huge number.
00:19:44Most companies can't just do that, right?
00:19:46I would have actually gone a little higher.
00:19:47There was the estimate recently that YouTube is worth $400 billion on its own.
00:19:52So I was going to say like $200 billion, let's go half of YouTube.
00:19:54Once you're up here, it's just like whatever number you want.
00:19:56Another $100 billion?
00:19:57I'm good with $100 billion.
00:19:58I'm good.
00:19:59TikTok doesn't have like the numbers of YouTube though, right?
00:20:02Or the money.
00:20:03Yeah.
00:20:04Yeah.
00:20:05No, you're right.
00:20:06I'm good with $100 billion.
00:20:07This works.
00:20:08By the way, I'm picking that number just because it is this, it's a small, hard number.
00:20:11Yeah.
00:20:12Right?
00:20:13$44 billion for Twitter was like overpriced, but even then a lot of companies can just
00:20:17like do it.
00:20:18I don't think there's any world in which TikTok is in a regular, pure market sense worth less
00:20:25than $100 billion.
00:20:26So I feel pretty good about this.
00:20:27And I'll just, for some comparison, as of December 2023, Apple had $73 billion in cash
00:20:33on hand, which is an insane amount of cash.
00:20:36Like Apple is one of those cash rich companies out there.
00:20:39And that's how much, so I picked a hundred because it's, it will be hard even for an
00:20:41Apple to pull.
00:20:42Yeah.
00:20:43Yeah.
00:20:44Anyway, here's the list.
00:20:45The Apple and Microsoft jockeying back and forth for biggest market cap.
00:20:50So we'll start with Microsoft today, Microsoft actually feels like Microsoft should be in
00:20:56the running for TikTok.
00:20:57They had been in the running before when Trump tried to ban TikTok, Satya Nadella got pulled
00:21:02into those conversations.
00:21:03He has repeatedly described it as some of the weirdest business dealings he's ever been
00:21:07a part of.
00:21:08Then it just went away.
00:21:10And we got project Texas where Oracle took over the data, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah,
00:21:14which came to nothing, appears to have been mostly a front.
00:21:18Convinced no one of anything.
00:21:20No one cares about project Texas.
00:21:22And Microsoft has been desperate for like a true consumer play for a long time.
00:21:27I mean, it, it wasn't at Microsoft that sniffed around discord in a pretty big way.
00:21:32Like it wants something like this very badly.
00:21:34I disagree.
00:21:35This is, this is like a big old hot potato.
00:21:38Microsoft wants no part of like the big power of Microsoft nowadays is that we don't talk
00:21:43about Microsoft that often and, and that would change immediately with TikTok.
00:21:48A good question for all of us is, does your CEO want to get hauled in front of Congress
00:21:52to talk about content moderation, right?
00:21:54And Microsoft, no, the answer appears to be no.
00:21:57That said, there is a lot of scrutiny around Microsoft's deal with open AI, like a lot
00:22:03of antitrust scrutiny.
00:22:04And this is going to come up.
00:22:05The idea of antitrust scrutiny is going to come up as we go through this list.
00:22:07And there's, I think Microsoft could run a play where they say, look, here's what we're
00:22:11going to do.
00:22:12We're going to do a partnership with like Snap, which can deflute.
00:22:15Snap is not on the list of biggest American companies by any, by any means, like not even
00:22:20in top 100.
00:22:21Like, no, it's not even sniffing this.
00:22:23But you can say Microsoft, but you can see Microsoft say, okay, we're gonna do this weird
00:22:27kind of partnership with Snap, where they will fund them buying TikTok, will like be
00:22:31their backend provider, will run AI and Azure for recommendations, and it'll be the same
00:22:35kind of structure as open AI.
00:22:37And if that's fine over here, because it solves your big problem, I bet it's fine over here
00:22:40with open AI.
00:22:41Lina Khan will drop kick that deal right out the door.
00:22:46I mean, but this is the, this is the game, right?
00:22:48All these companies are, it's an, this is a problem that needs to get solved.
00:22:52Someone has to buy this thing.
00:22:54And if Lina Khan is like, I'm not going to let anyone buy it, then it is a ban.
00:22:58And so you have to at least run the process and you have to create some leverage somewhere.
00:23:01I think Microsoft has like three meetings, but ultimately walks away.
00:23:05Again, they came close before.
00:23:07Also Microsoft doesn't have a dead on anti-trust problem because it doesn't run any social
00:23:10networks from Xbox Live.
00:23:13And so it, you know, they could just buy it.
00:23:15I don't know if they'd want to, but I think using this leverage to turn down the heat
00:23:20on open AI might be interesting.
00:23:23Apple, one or two of the biggest companies in the world, Microsoft, Apple, always going
00:23:27back and forth.
00:23:28Apple.
00:23:29No way is my answer to this question.
00:23:300% than Tim Cook wants to sit in front of Congress and talk about content moderation
00:23:33ever.
00:23:34The funniest possible outcome of this whole thing is that Apple buys TikTok and makes
00:23:39it a feature of Apple TV plus.
00:23:41That is the, that is the single best thing that could possibly happen.
00:23:45That this is, this is their content play for Apple TV plus.
00:23:48Oh, it would be, it would be Apple music.
00:23:50Yeah.
00:23:52Apple music, right?
00:23:53Apple runs a music service.
00:23:54TikTok is huge in music.
00:23:55They have great relationships with all the labels because they're the big hedge against
00:23:58Spotify.
00:23:59Apple importantly has an incredible relationship with the Chinese government that is extremely
00:24:04well managed by Tim Cook.
00:24:05So they're, they're a known partner that would find a way to blah, blah, blah, interoperate,
00:24:11you know, with ByteDance globally.
00:24:14You could see the arguments.
00:24:15I'm just saying, I don't think Tim Cook wants to sit in front of Congress and talk about
00:24:17content moderation.
00:24:19Neil, I, they're going to use that exact quote you just said when they pull Tim Cook in front
00:24:24of Congress for buying TikTok.
00:24:27You have a good relationship with the Chinese government is precisely the reason not to
00:24:31buy TikTok if you're Tim Cook.
00:24:33All right, moving on.
00:24:34I think we can all, it would be the shock of all shocks if Apple buys TikTok.
00:24:39Nvidia, third biggest market cap in the country right now.
00:24:43It feels a bit afield.
00:24:45No.
00:24:46No.
00:24:47I mean, it's like, he's a smart dude, right?
00:24:49Like he started that company from the ground up.
00:24:52He's still running it now.
00:24:53He made his big bet on AI, like, they think very measured over there.
00:24:59Like everything they do has a purpose and a point, even when it's a screw up.
00:25:03So I'd be like, very surprised.
00:25:05Okay, allow me to make the counter case.
00:25:07I love it.
00:25:08I'm Jensen Wang.
00:25:09I have somewhat intentionally, somewhat accidentally stumbled into just an unbelievable gold mine
00:25:17that is the AI revolution.
00:25:19This will not last forever.
00:25:21Other people are going to figure out how to make GPUs as good as mine, and I'm not going
00:25:25to be able to sell H100s for however much money I want to whoever I want forever.
00:25:30I need another move.
00:25:32That other move is TikTok.
00:25:37Someone is writing that memo to NVIDIA right now, and then at the end of it, it's like,
00:25:41question mark, question mark, question mark, profit, you know?
00:25:45This is the move that's as big as H100s, like, I don't know about that.
00:25:51The other reason is there is a real version of this that is TikTok as training data, which
00:25:58I think is not worth $100 billion, but it's also not worth nothing.
00:26:02And I think one reason a lot of these companies will take a good hard look at TikTok is not
00:26:06because they want to operate a social network forever, but because operating a social network
00:26:11gets them basically an infinite supply of good training data for AI systems.
00:26:16For now, right?
00:26:18That's just what it is.
00:26:19I mean, this is what Mark Zuckerberg has been talking about with Facebook.
00:26:22They're touting the fact that they have this vast supply of stuff that people are making.
00:26:26All right, so Jensen swoops in, and he's like, look, I'm already in the middle of geopolitical
00:26:31hot zones because I'm building ships with TSMC in Taiwan, and the whole universe is
00:26:36organized around H100 production in Taiwan.
00:26:39What if I add a little TikTok to the mix?
00:26:41I could do it.
00:26:42All right.
00:26:43That's Nvidia.
00:26:44I'm putting that sub-50%.
00:26:45Way sub-50.
00:26:46But I'm into it.
00:26:47Sub-10.
00:26:48Do it, Jensen.
00:26:49But we made the argument.
00:26:50Alphabet, or as the people know it, Google.
00:26:55I mean, I think that no one wants them to buy it.
00:26:58If you want to ban TikTok, you let Google buy it and just slowly kill it until they
00:27:04shut it down.
00:27:05That's what will happen.
00:27:06That is effectively a ban.
00:27:08So, no?
00:27:09Do you think they're having that conversation?
00:27:11I think Google's totally having that conversation, though.
00:27:14They love a social media platform that they kill a few years later.
00:27:18This is just like, yeah.
00:27:19So to David's point, this is a rich source of training data for Google.
00:27:22Yeah, I think that's why they're actually talking about it.
00:27:24It is.
00:27:25A long time ago, when I asked Sundar about the web and what SEO has done to the web and
00:27:29where you would start a new thing if you were a new creator, he said, well, we have YouTube.
00:27:32So they know that all the organic content that is made by human beings is happening
00:27:38on video platforms.
00:27:39This is a rich source of that.
00:27:40They're already searching TikTok.
00:27:41You can search for TikToks on Google Search.
00:27:43Don't forget, Google has been saying loudly for two years now that one of the biggest
00:27:46threats to Google Search is TikTok.
00:27:48Yep.
00:27:49Which is, again, why they're not going to buy it.
00:27:52This is the real Lena Kahn hands on hips one.
00:27:54Yeah.
00:27:55Absolutely.
00:27:56Alphabet would do this.
00:27:57I believe absolutely, yes, Alphabet would do this.
00:28:01It would be sued to death once Lena Khan is already standing outside of the Googleplex
00:28:08in Mountain View with a lawsuit and just ready to huck it into Sundar Pichai's office the
00:28:14minute this happens.
00:28:15If I'm Sundar Pichai, I would do this in one second.
00:28:20But there's absolutely no chance that they will.
00:28:22All right.
00:28:23So that's Google.
00:28:24And the next one is really interesting.
00:28:26Amazon.
00:28:27I think Amazon looks at TikTok slowly turning into the home shopping network and moving
00:28:33an awful lot of records.
00:28:35And it's like this.
00:28:36This is what we want.
00:28:37This is the future of shopping.
00:28:38Yeah.
00:28:39Yep.
00:28:40Amazon has been gently trying to do this on Amazon properties for a while.
00:28:44They've had creator brand things that they've done.
00:28:48They've brought people in.
00:28:49They've done video stuff.
00:28:50None of it has really worked.
00:28:51But yeah, I think Amazon of these is the one that makes the most sense and also probably
00:28:57the one that is most likely to be plausible.
00:29:00Yeah.
00:29:01I don't think they don't run a social platform now in any way, shape or form.
00:29:04So the antitrust issues don't seem so bad.
00:29:07That said, you know, the Europeans just blocked Amazon from buying iRobot because they were
00:29:11worried about concentration in the robotic vacuum market.
00:29:13And Andy Jassy looked furious when he was talking about that on CNBC.
00:29:17Just so mad.
00:29:19Yeah.
00:29:20He's like, we're well beyond the law now.
00:29:21Like, are we?
00:29:22It sounds like you're right by the law.
00:29:25But they don't have a social platform.
00:29:27And TikTok really is a big advertising play.
00:29:30And Amazon is actually one of the biggest advertisers out there.
00:29:32I can see it.
00:29:33I think this would probably turn TikTok into something worse.
00:29:36Oh, yeah.
00:29:37Yeah.
00:29:38This is like Google where you don't – if you're a TikTok hugester, you don't want
00:29:41this purchase.
00:29:42Yeah.
00:29:43Like where – can you imagine if you just combine Amazon alphabet soup brands with TikTok
00:29:48shops, just general aesthetic.
00:29:49Oh, my god.
00:29:50Amazon Basics, just nonstop in your feed.
00:29:53I would 100% calling – start calling that group of TikTok creators Amazon Basics.
00:29:58You know who I'm talking about.
00:30:01Oh, yeah.
00:30:02Like the Amazon Basics, it would be bad for America.
00:30:05They're there.
00:30:06OK.
00:30:07So that's Amazon.
00:30:08That feels very likely.
00:30:09Of this list so far, Microsoft and Amazon feel like the most likely to at least try.
00:30:14Then there's Meta, which feels like an immediate hard no.
00:30:18Yeah.
00:30:19Yeah.
00:30:20I think the TikTok user base would revolt and leave if they tried.
00:30:22Meta would do it.
00:30:23It wouldn't be allowed to do it.
00:30:25Oh, sure they would.
00:30:26Microsoft is a killer.
00:30:27Yeah.
00:30:28He'd be like, $100 million?
00:30:29How many people do I have to kill?
00:30:31It's done.
00:30:32It's been done.
00:30:33Then at that point, I think Meta would own the five most popular apps in existence.
00:30:37Also, the regulators have a really good argument for Meta right now, which is, hey, you just
00:30:40made threads from scratch and it's doing great by some fake accounting.
00:30:45It's bigger than Twitter.
00:30:47I only say fake because Twitter's numbers are fake and then it's like sensor tower numbers
00:30:50which are weird.
00:30:51No one's numbers are real.
00:30:52Yeah.
00:30:53You just mash together a bunch of very truthy feeling numbers.
00:30:55Threads is bigger than Twitter.
00:30:56Fine.
00:30:57But the argument would be, well, you can do it on your own.
00:30:59You don't need this.
00:31:00So we'll see.
00:31:01So that's – OK.
00:31:02That's all the companies with valuations in the Ts.
00:31:05Notably, they are all tech companies.
00:31:07Then you slide down one notch.
00:31:09You go from six to seven.
00:31:11The valuations are now in the Bs, in the billions.
00:31:13I would just say these are much funnier companies to consider.
00:31:17Brookshire Hathaway.
00:31:18Yeah.
00:31:19Yes.
00:31:20That's the most likely, honestly.
00:31:21Warren Buffett.
00:31:22Warren Buffett's like social media.
00:31:23Let's go.
00:31:24Warren Buffett buying TikTok so that he could become like the ultimate TikToker in the way
00:31:30that Elon Musk bought Twitter so he could just be the tweeter, like perfect.
00:31:34When I think of Warren Buffett, I think of the phrase, burn out, not fade away, and buying
00:31:38TikTok.
00:31:39Really, just light a fire, baby.
00:31:42Warren just driving in his old car to McDonald's every morning, just vlogging on TikTok.
00:31:47Are you kidding me?
00:31:48Come on.
00:31:49It would be great.
00:31:50I could see it.
00:31:51I don't know how it fits in the portfolio.
00:31:53It would be good.
00:31:55Eli Lilly.
00:31:56It feels like a – no.
00:31:59Visa.
00:32:00Yeah.
00:32:01JP Morgan Chase.
00:32:03Why not have a bank own TikTok?
00:32:05What if TikTok was just payments processing?
00:32:08At the end of the day.
00:32:11Tesla is here, number 12 on the market cap list, although that valuation fluctuating
00:32:15wildly with every breath Elon takes.
00:32:18That feels like an obvious no, although the man does love a social network.
00:32:22I mean, yeah.
00:32:24Is Elon Musk himself a totally bonkers possibility here?
00:32:28I will say Elon, he's doing whatever he's doing on Twitter, and he's got Linda out
00:32:31there being like, Twitter's a video-first platform, and then Elon is the most text-forward
00:32:35person in the entire world.
00:32:37That's it.
00:32:38I don't think so.
00:32:39Yeah, he's not doing TikTok.
00:32:41I'm guessing Walmart, which actually tried to enter the TikTok sweepstakes long ago on
00:32:47the list, a huge American company, would be fascinated.
00:32:50I think for the same reasons as Amazon.
00:32:52Can we build a new kind of shopping distribution?
00:32:56I don't know.
00:32:57It does not seem likely.
00:32:58It does not seem like that's what America wants.
00:33:00They have so many ambitions and a lot of money.
00:33:03But like Amazon, I don't want it.
00:33:05All right.
00:33:06I'm just going to read the next five as an exercise for the reader.
00:33:09Just silently consider them and send us an email over which ones you think should buy
00:33:14TikTok of this list.
00:33:16ExxonMobil, Mastercard, Procter & Gamble, Home Depot, Costco, Bank of America.
00:33:25Okay, Costco is something.
00:33:27Costco, there we go.
00:33:28I just want to pause on Costco for one second.
00:33:30You know what is a brand that everybody loves?
00:33:33Costco.
00:33:34People love Costco.
00:33:35But if they have to start paying influencers a living wage like they do with their regular
00:33:41staff, no.
00:33:42That's too much money.
00:33:44Yeah, Costco is a well-run company in that way.
00:33:47Then there's the two tech companies I skipped over here, Oracle, which is already in the
00:33:51mix.
00:33:52You can see it.
00:33:53They're already in the mix for a reason.
00:33:55And then Salesforce, which I think we should end with Salesforce because that is the darkest
00:34:00outcome for TikTok.
00:34:03So Salesforce buys TikTok and tries to turn it into what LinkedIn became for Microsoft
00:34:09basically.
00:34:10Yeah.
00:34:11Salesforce just goes all in on business TikTok.
00:34:14Why not?
00:34:15This is the future of American small business is happening on TikTok.
00:34:19Small business TikTok is still my favorite thing.
00:34:21There are pressure washer guys out there today being like, it's spring, baby.
00:34:24Light it up.
00:34:25And then they're immediately making TikTok shop content where they're trying to convince
00:34:28extremely, obviously cheap surface cleaner where they plug it in and you see the whole
00:34:34thing dent in as they plug in the water.
00:34:36I'm like, what are we doing here?
00:34:38Anyway, sorry.
00:34:39I have a lot of feelings about TikTok right now.
00:34:42You might watch too many ads on TikTok.
00:34:44The whole thing is ads.
00:34:45You can just scroll past them.
00:34:46You know that, right?
00:34:47You just scroll past them.
00:34:48I just scroll until I get bloopers from the office.
00:34:50So I don't even know what you're talking about.
00:34:52Have you started seeing they're doing the shimmer effect across it to prevent the content
00:34:58It's very good.
00:34:59TikTok, honestly, Disney should buy TikTok because TikTok is the most impressive laboratory
00:35:05of copyright infringement that exists in the world today and maybe in world history.
00:35:09So I was actually going to bring up Disney as a wild card here.
00:35:12I don't think Disney can afford to do this, but I think like Disney kicked the tires on
00:35:16Twitter a bunch of years ago.
00:35:17Disney is interested in a new media startup in a really big way.
00:35:24I think TikTok is probably too big to be that thing for Disney.
00:35:27But if I'm Bob Iger, I bet there is a memo in that boardroom.
00:35:32Is Disney still interested?
00:35:34Because I think when they kicked the tires on Twitter, that was also around the same
00:35:38time they launched Fusion, which was like their digital media play.
00:35:42Yeah, that was the wasting money in Disney era.
00:35:45Yeah, I think they're beyond this point now.
00:35:48I don't think so.
00:35:49I think Disney is in the business of getting young people to watch its stuff.
00:35:54And the answer to that is TikTok.
00:35:56I want everyone to pull over in a car and just imagine what a TikTok themed part of
00:36:01Walt Disney World would look like.
00:36:03Close that loop.
00:36:04Every ride is 60 seconds long.
00:36:07And you just leap from one to the next.
00:36:09It's somewhat unsatisfying unless you do it a hundred times in a row.
00:36:12I don't think Bob Iger wants to talk about content moderation in front of Congress.
00:36:16I think that destroys Disney's brand, right?
00:36:18Anywhere close to, there is evidence that teenage girls are feeling depressed because
00:36:22of our product.
00:36:23Not Disney's zone.
00:36:25But it's interesting to consider because it is where – like Disney missed out on
00:36:30Cocomelon, which was a YouTube phenomenon and is now a Netflix phenomenon.
00:36:34They don't have a pipeline for that stuff and TikTok might be that pipeline.
00:36:38I don't think they have the money and I don't think they have the mental stamina
00:36:43based on all the other things that are going on at Disney.
00:36:45All right, that's the list.
00:36:46There's other stuff.
00:36:47There's IMD and Pepsi and Netflix.
00:36:48But I feel like that's the list and you got to end with Salesforce because I just
00:36:52want everyone to consider the darkest timeline.
00:36:55We'll see what happens.
00:36:57A bunch of verge reporters are out in the world, pounding the pavement to see who
00:37:00wants to buy things.
00:37:01What Alexey told me yesterday when I was like, hey, let's go through the list.
00:37:04He's like, it's crickets because they're all afraid of Lena Kahn.
00:37:06And I think that is – that was how they were talking before Biden signed the bill
00:37:11and I think that will change in the weeks to come.
00:37:13But there's going to be a lawsuit.
00:37:15We'll see how it all goes.
00:37:17Kind of a wild time though.
00:37:19If you've been paying attention to the Verchest, you know that we generally
00:37:22think all of social media and the internet is being table-flipped upheaval and
00:37:27things are shaking out in different ways.
00:37:29This is one pretty big table flip.
00:37:31Yeah.
00:37:32I think it's going to be really interesting to see how this radiates outward too
00:37:37because there's been a lot of talk in the last couple of days about what this is
00:37:40going to mean for Instagram and for YouTube Shorts and for Snap and there's
00:37:45this sense of a handful of companies in the U.S. that really stand to benefit
00:37:48from the downfall of TikTok.
00:37:50And I think where people go, if they go, and how those platforms start to change
00:37:56is going to yet again upend the rest of everything.
00:37:59Like if TikTok suddenly floods into YouTube, it will change YouTube completely.
00:38:05Oh, there's going to be a land grab.
00:38:07100%.
00:38:08Yeah.
00:38:09Between like the QVC nature of TikTok and this, all those like edge case people,
00:38:14people who aren't really, really into it are going to be like,
00:38:16yeah, I'll just go somewhere else because at least I'm not getting sold to.
00:38:19Yeah.
00:38:20And this is, you recall what happened with Vine, right?
00:38:22The exodus of Vine to YouTube really changed the nature of YouTube.
00:38:25So you can just feel it coming.
00:38:26By the way, I forgot.
00:38:27I was just scrolling.
00:38:28I forgot the darkest timeline option, which I'm just going to say
00:38:31and then we're going to cut to a break.
00:38:33Verizon buys TikTok.
00:38:36That's it.
00:38:37We'll be right back.
00:38:38We're going to talk about the Rabbit R1.
00:38:39We're back.
00:38:40I just want to say if AT&T bought TikTok.
00:38:43Imagine what Zack Snyder would get up to.
00:38:45Well, it would immediately be spun off into some other.
00:38:48David Zaslav would own it six months later.
00:38:50So it would be fine.
00:38:52Four, three grayscale TikToks for everyone.
00:38:54Extremely dark.
00:38:55We've been talking a lot about terrible movies on this podcast recently.
00:38:58Should we talk about Rebel Moon?
00:39:00I refuse.
00:39:01That one's like very bad.
00:39:03Like it's so obviously bad.
00:39:04Yeah.
00:39:05It's so bad.
00:39:06Yeah.
00:39:07I haven't even looked at it.
00:39:08I saw it.
00:39:09I don't think this is a spoiler.
00:39:10I saw a screenshot of one of the final scenes where the ship is revealed
00:39:13to be a woman who is hogtied.
00:39:14Oh, good stuff.
00:39:16Doesn't seem like my bag.
00:39:17Also, that's almost certainly a spoiler and I just don't care.
00:39:20So I'm sorry to everyone.
00:39:21No, I mean, it does make me kind of want to watch it.
00:39:23But just so I can be mad while watching it.
00:39:25That's how I felt.
00:39:26To be clear.
00:39:29Just rage watch.
00:39:30All right.
00:39:31Enough.
00:39:32Enough of this.
00:39:34Zack Snyder talk.
00:39:35Yeah.
00:39:36Look, the man took his bag from AT&T and he made a square movie in
00:39:39greyscale where Superman is super weird.
00:39:42And you bring it up like three out of every four podcasts.
00:39:45You know, the policy thing that we're not about, we don't have time
00:39:48to talk about is soon net neutrality will become the law of the land
00:39:51again and everyone's going to talk about net neutrality and media
00:39:54and blah, blah, blah.
00:39:55And I'm just going to be like Justice League happened to you because
00:39:58you repealed net neutrality.
00:39:59That was a real outcome of repealing net neutrality.
00:40:02You don't believe me, but it's 100% true.
00:40:04All right.
00:40:05I want to talk about the thing that I've been most excited to talk
00:40:08about all week.
00:40:09David, you went to a party at the TWA Hotel at JFK in New York,
00:40:13which is a wild place to have a gadget launch.
00:40:16You saw Rabbit happen.
00:40:19There was a demo on stage, which we should talk about because I have
00:40:22a lot of feelings about that demo.
00:40:24And now you are holding a Rabbit R1.
00:40:26You have it.
00:40:27I have it right here.
00:40:28It's just so orange.
00:40:29It's mine.
00:40:30I bought this with my own money.
00:40:32Yeah.
00:40:33Oh, it's yours.
00:40:34It's not.
00:40:35They didn't do review units.
00:40:36This was so what I went to was the the pickup party for the first.
00:40:42I think it was 300 R1s that came out.
00:40:45So they they invited a bunch of media, but we had to buy our own in
00:40:49order to get into the event, which is fine.
00:40:51Very good.
00:40:52I should say to people don't know how this process normally works.
00:40:55Often for reviews.
00:40:56People will ship us something and we'll test it and review it.
00:40:58And then we ship it back.
00:40:59That's usually how it works, because if I had to buy every single
00:41:02thing that I wrote about, I would be homeless.
00:41:05So that's usually how it works.
00:41:06But in this case, we had to buy the thing.
00:41:08So now I own this thing.
00:41:09Luckily, it was only $200.
00:41:10But so we get to the TWA hotel, which is amazing.
00:41:14I had never been.
00:41:15It's like it's a very old terminal at JFK that has since been
00:41:19converted into this very swanky kind of old-fashioned hotel.
00:41:23It's awesome.
00:41:24Highly recommend.
00:41:25I had never been there before.
00:41:26I will probably never go again.
00:41:27But it was super cool.
00:41:28You should only go if you're having to fly in or out of JFK.
00:41:32Yeah.
00:41:33Oh God, it took me two trains in an Uber to get there.
00:41:35Like I don't recommend this plan otherwise.
00:41:38But yeah, so it was it was me and 300 or so other people along
00:41:43with a bunch of Rapid employees in this space.
00:41:45They had done lots of, you know, work to overhaul it.
00:41:48It had a big stage in the middle.
00:41:50They had a 360 photo booth and a speakeasy upstairs.
00:41:53There was a bar with signature drinks.
00:41:56They were doing all kinds of merchy stuff.
00:41:58It was very much like an old-school tech party.
00:42:01Like I haven't been to one of those since before the pandemic
00:42:04where it's just like a company with too much money.
00:42:06That's just like what if we just blew a bunch of it on this
00:42:10large event space and then Jesse Liu, the founder and CEO got up
00:42:15and spent like an hour basically just doing demos and he's been
00:42:19doing this for the last couple of months kind of with increasing
00:42:23frequency showing off how this thing works and what it can do
00:42:26and all this stuff and he just sort of stood on stage and did
00:42:29a bunch of demos that were ostensibly live and I have many
00:42:32questions about all of them and then gave them out to the that
00:42:38first group of you know, 300 people and so it was everybody
00:42:42there had like literally bought a thing to be there.
00:42:45So the room was very excited and there were a lot of people
00:42:47who had been in the discord for months sort of reading about
00:42:51the humane reviews and figuring out what was going on and trying
00:42:54to get details on what this thing would do and how it would work
00:42:56and lots of people.
00:42:57It was very funny like being in line for a bar while people are
00:43:00behind me debating how the large language model works and there
00:43:04was a guy who was like, yeah, every time you ask a question,
00:43:07you're eating into that $199 price and I was just like these
00:43:10are my people.
00:43:11It was great.
00:43:12I had I had a delightful time except that it was at 7 p.m.
00:43:16On a Tuesday night.
00:43:16I'm very old and I can't hang like that anymore.
00:43:18Yeah.
00:43:19Yeah, so you've got the thing now.
00:43:20I have the thing.
00:43:22It's right here.
00:43:22You've only had it for days.
00:43:23I don't think this is a review, but I was watching the demo
00:43:26that he done stage and two things struck me with that demo.
00:43:29One, there was a little disclaimer on the stream and he showed
00:43:33himself turning off the Wi-Fi.
00:43:35The entire demo was done over 4G LTE, not 5G.
00:43:38The one that is famously claimed to have very low latency.
00:43:41Good old 4G LTE, which is an interesting choice, but that's
00:43:45$199 and then he kept pointing out how fast everything was.
00:43:49At one point he took a picture and you know the thing did
00:43:52the thing where the AI told you it was in the picture and
00:43:55I was like, I don't.
00:43:57I don't think that uploaded over 4G LTE that like literally
00:43:59just the basics of it didn't seem like it was making sense.
00:44:03So two things on that one.
00:44:06None of it was fast like go back and watch it again.
00:44:10He did a very good job of sort of talking through his demos
00:44:14so that while it was waiting for stuff to happen it would
00:44:16work and there were there were a few times where he would
00:44:18do something and it would pretty instantly do it.
00:44:20But what it does very well is it signposts as it's doing
00:44:24stuff.
00:44:24So like you'll ask it a question and it'll respond and say let
00:44:26me go get that for you.
00:44:27And then it's like I'm going to get that for you and then
00:44:29it gets it for you.
00:44:29And what you've what it doesn't do is just sort of leave
00:44:32you hanging in awkward silence for several seconds, which
00:44:34feels like an eternity, but it does take a while to do a lot
00:44:38of things and with the photo having now tested this a bunch
00:44:43what it does when you like hold up the thing and say, you
00:44:46know, look at this and tell me what you see which is like
00:44:49the sort of computer vision thing that a lot of these gadgets
00:44:51do.
00:44:52It's not taking a good picture.
00:44:54It takes an awful picture and I can show you the awful pictures
00:44:58I've been taking but it literally it just uploads just
00:45:01the tiniest little bit of data in order to be able to answer
00:45:04the question.
00:45:06Is there a crowd full of people or like a begonia in front
00:45:10of you, right?
00:45:10Like that is the fidelity that it needs and that is all of
00:45:13the fidelity that it gets.
00:45:15So I actually think that particular one seems plausible to
00:45:18me.
00:45:18I guess I do need to watch it again because I was just struck
00:45:21by the speed at which things appeared to be happening.
00:45:25Over a 4G connection, not even a 5G connection over a 4G
00:45:28connection.
00:45:29Yeah, I'm not even putting this on rabbit.
00:45:31I'm just like I've used LTE connections before.
00:45:34They're not fast, especially now, right when I've all the
00:45:37bandwidth is being prioritized to the 5G connections.
00:45:39All the spectrum is being prioritized over there.
00:45:41That was one and then there's the other thing that struck me
00:45:44was how much stuff it can't do that.
00:45:46We were shown it doing at the first launch of that NCS where
00:45:50that stuff is just nowhere close like everything.
00:45:52It's weird.
00:45:53And even after being at that launch event where he got up on
00:45:56stage Jesse and said out loud.
00:45:59I am going to demo all of the things that it can do from day
00:46:01one and I have been testing those things and it can't do
00:46:05some of them.
00:46:06So the one of the big things that rabbit has been talking
00:46:10about is this thing called the large action model, right?
00:46:12And the idea is that it can actually like learn how to use
00:46:14apps on your behalf.
00:46:16That's like that's its whole pitch.
00:46:17No, it's not just like a thing for chat GPT.
00:46:19It's a thing where you can say go do Spotify for me, right?
00:46:23Or like go interact with Photoshop for me.
00:46:26That's literally one of the things I've talked about like it
00:46:28you can teach it how to use Photoshop for you that is not
00:46:31coming soon.
00:46:32It's not it's it's like a thing that somebody had the idea to
00:46:36do. It's like when we talk about car renders, right?
00:46:38It's like it's at the render stage as far as I can tell and
00:46:40then there's a bunch of stuff that seems very basic.
00:46:44Like I gave humane a lot of crap for not supporting things
00:46:49like alarms and reminders and these very basic things and you
00:46:52know what the rabbit are one doesn't support is alarms and
00:46:56reminders and I ironically like humane like the deja vu of all
00:47:01this is bananas for me like like humane Jesse stood on stage
00:47:05and put up a big slide with here's all the cool stuff for
00:47:07shipping in summer of 2024 and it's things like alarm calendar
00:47:12contacts GPS memory recall travel planning Yelp like basic
00:47:18things these are these are these are things that you should
00:47:21have from the beginning and there's just not really a good
00:47:25reason not to have it.
00:47:26So right now again, I've been testing this thing for a grand
00:47:30total of like 16 hours some of which I was asleep, right?
00:47:34Like none of this is final yet, but like a lot of things
00:47:37about this device do not work very well.
00:47:39Yeah, and it only has four apps, right?
00:47:42Yeah.
00:47:43Yeah.
00:47:44So I will say the the biggest most complicated question about
00:47:49the rabbit is how this large action model works and thus what
00:47:53you're giving it access to so when you log into the website,
00:47:56which is called rabbit hole, which I enjoy very much the branding
00:47:58on this thing is on point.
00:48:00They've done a very good job when you're playing music.
00:48:02There's a little rabbit guy with headphones on like it's great.
00:48:06Excellent branding exercise.
00:48:07Well done, but you log into rabbit hole and you go to there's
00:48:11a tab called connections and it like lists all the apps you can
00:48:14connect to and right now it's it's for like you said, it's
00:48:16Spotify doordash uber and mid journey, which is a strange
00:48:21four, but whatever and then so you you click on the connect
00:48:26button and what it does is open up a virtual machine on rabbit
00:48:32servers through which you just log into the Spotify web interface
00:48:36or the doordash web interface.
00:48:37So like I click on the doordash button and literally it opens
00:48:41the doordash website just the homepage of doordash.com on the
00:48:46thing and then I had to go click sign in I had to enter in my
00:48:48credentials and then I clicked continue like I'm signing into
00:48:51doordash normally and then it closes that window because now
00:48:54it is stored my credentials and what rabbit says is it doesn't
00:48:58store your credentials.
00:48:58It just stores like an authentication token so that you stay
00:49:01logged in and to that I say like have you ever tried to stay
00:49:05logged into a service on the internet?
00:49:06Like it's not possible.
00:49:07You can't the keep me logged in button doesn't work.
00:49:10So there is something else going on here.
00:49:13And there are a lot of people who are like, oh what you're
00:49:14doing is you're just exposing all of your login credentials
00:49:17to a virtual machine.
00:49:18That's just sitting on rabbits computer.
00:49:19Like you're just uploading your life to rabbit servers.
00:49:22That's stupid.
00:49:23Well, there's also one step beyond that which is you have now
00:49:26logged into doordash on rabbit servers and it's logged in.
00:49:30It doesn't matter if you have a credential.
00:49:32Well, right there.
00:49:33Perfect logged in access to doordash.
00:49:36Yes, and I think for me I like I'm logging into all of these
00:49:41things because I have to test this thing but like even logging
00:49:44into Spotify felt strange like this is like this is actually
00:49:47kind of a lot of access to information about me that you just
00:49:52have now and that's odd.
00:49:55But anyway, the interface for that sucks.
00:49:57The system isn't very good.
00:49:58I have not yet successfully used doordash every single time.
00:50:01I try to do it.
00:50:02I like I you know, you press the button on the side and you
00:50:04say order me some food and every single time it says doordash
00:50:07may take a while to load on rabbit OS, which is very funny and
00:50:10then it just immediately fails every single time.
00:50:12So what's happening in the background there from what I gather
00:50:16what the heart of the large action model is it's going to click
00:50:20around on the doordash website for you.
00:50:24I believe that's correct.
00:50:25Yeah, I think the the long-term plan here is to have more let's
00:50:30say robust integrations that they can actually like there's
00:50:33way to you do that with like structured data that you can get
00:50:36to some of that stuff.
00:50:37But but that's the old way right?
00:50:38Like doordash has an API and we've built a weird interface
00:50:41for doordash and our little orange square.
00:50:43You could you don't need a bunch of AI for that.
00:50:45No, you don't but it works and right.
00:50:49So this is like you're logged into doordash and we're going
00:50:52to show you pictures of the we're going to understand the
00:50:54doordash interface for you.
00:50:56And then we're going to let you're going to say buy me this
00:50:59food and we're just going to use the doordash website on your
00:51:02behalf.
00:51:02Like that's the that that is my understanding of what the large
00:51:05action model should do.
00:51:06Yeah.
00:51:06No, that's that's exactly right.
00:51:08And part of the process that they make that they're in theory
00:51:11one day someday when this launches going to make you go through
00:51:14is training the apps that you use like this is where you click
00:51:18to do X and this is where you click to do Y and you scroll down
00:51:21to get to the other thing.
00:51:22And that is that is how you teach these models how to do this
00:51:26stuff.
00:51:26And the reason they've worked with these four apps now is
00:51:28because their people have done that training with these four
00:51:32apps.
00:51:32So like literally deals with the four apps the deals with
00:51:34Spotify and uber and doordash, you know uber and doordash are
00:51:37competitors like uber eats exists.
00:51:39Yeah, I don't I don't know but I sure doubt it.
00:51:43I have a more basic question.
00:51:45Okay.
00:51:46I know you've only spent what 16 hours with it, but in that
00:51:49time, have you had an experience with it where you're like,
00:51:53oh, wow, I would willingly train this model when I get more
00:51:58access to it to have these kind of experience with another
00:52:01app.
00:52:03The Spotify integration is the one to me that I'm like, this
00:52:05is the thing.
00:52:06I really want to work.
00:52:08Does it be?
00:52:09No, it's all it is.
00:52:11So so bad you guys I can't I can't even tell you how bad it
00:52:14is.
00:52:14Like let me just give you a bunch of examples.
00:52:17I say to the thing play my discover weekly playlist and it
00:52:20plays every single time a song called.
00:52:22Can you discover by a band discovery?
00:52:26I say play Beyonce's new album and it played like a lullaby
00:52:31version of crazy and love and it's weird because it's not even
00:52:35like it's just searching and playing the first result because
00:52:37if you go to Spotify and search discover weekly, it shows you
00:52:41your discovery weekly playlist.
00:52:42So in theory that shouldn't be that hard a problem.
00:52:45It's doing some weird thing that I can't figure out yet and
00:52:49almost always does it wrong.
00:52:50So if I ask like a very basic question like play Justin
00:52:56Timberlake that works.
00:52:57It'll play a Justin Timberlake song and I have done that many
00:53:00many times but anything more complicated at least so far.
00:53:05It has fallen apart on me every single say this is what I don't
00:53:07understand about how it's working.
00:53:10If you're saying you can go to Spotify's website and type in
00:53:13crazy in love and it shows you the first result is correct.
00:53:17Theoretically.
00:53:18That is all the large action model is doing on the back end,
00:53:21right?
00:53:21It's looking at the web interface.
00:53:22It's identifying the search box.
00:53:23It's entering the string.
00:53:25It's saying here's the first result and it's double clicking
00:53:27on it.
00:53:28By the way.
00:53:28This is not some radically new idea, right?
00:53:31Like big businesses deploy robotic process automation to run
00:53:35their billing systems on Windows 98 billion dollar companies
00:53:38exist to deploy this at the end.
00:53:40Rabbit has more or less acknowledged that that is what it's
00:53:42doing.
00:53:42By the way, there was this weird thing.
00:53:43I don't know if you saw that there's somebody it was called
00:53:47like rabbit scam on GitHub GitHub sort of said they had found a
00:53:51bunch of code showing that all rabbit was doing was just lifting.
00:53:56Yeah stuff off of web pages and running the same systems that
00:53:59everybody else runs in order to like understand what's going on
00:54:02on a website and they were like this isn't as scary as you think
00:54:07it is.
00:54:07Like yeah, that's that's what we do.
00:54:08That's our public code.
00:54:09So like they're acknowledging that this is what is going on
00:54:12and I think it's not working like yeah, if you were again, if
00:54:15you're like some mid-size hospital system and you hire UiPath
00:54:19to show up and do RPA and it's like we're doing the lullaby
00:54:22versions.
00:54:23You're like fire them.
00:54:24It's like get rid of them, right?
00:54:25UiPath is a billion dollar company because it can do robotic
00:54:29process automation reliably at scale.
00:54:31Like why?
00:54:31Rabbit costs $200.
00:54:33What cost $200 but even the thing like the basic thing we entered
00:54:36a string of text into a search box and we played the first
00:54:39result like the industry or the robotic process automation industry
00:54:44knows how to do that.
00:54:46So why can't it do that?
00:54:47Like it feels like it's doing something else.
00:54:48Is it like inserting a little clippy in there?
00:54:52Is it trying to like be smart for you?
00:54:55It might be.
00:54:55It's also possible that it's doing something different with
00:54:58Spotify because Spotify, yeah, like has an actual sort of corpus
00:55:02of data that it lets other systems access.
00:55:05So I can't speak to Spotify in particular, but at least from the
00:55:08demos that I've seen again, I haven't been able to get DoorDash
00:55:10to work once but from Jesse's demo of DoorDash that seemed very
00:55:15clearly to be the thing using the website because the way that he
00:55:18showed what was working was he kept refreshing DoorDash.com on
00:55:22his laptop and it would show that something had been added to the
00:55:25cart on the website.
00:55:27That's not like a thing that happens if you use like a third-party
00:55:31API to do all of this stuff.
00:55:32That is just a thing using the web app for you.
00:55:35So this is the part that I'm just like most interested in because
00:55:38DoorDash is the slowest one and they said it's the slowest one and
00:55:40there comes a point at which all this like just horsepower through
00:55:44the interface with computer vision.
00:55:47It just hits the wall of like what if you just had an API, right?
00:55:51What if you could just instead of trying to have a robot figure out
00:55:55what's happening on an interface made for humans?
00:55:58What if you just let the robot talk to the application directly
00:56:00using actual API commands?
00:56:02The example that I'll give people, one of my favorite companies
00:56:05that I wished had succeeded was Kavo, the universal remote company
00:56:09that I hyped up on the show over and over again.
00:56:11They were doing exactly this to build a universal remote.
00:56:13You plug all of your devices into the Kavo and the Kavo is doing
00:56:16computer vision to watch your Apple TV interface or whatever and
00:56:19click around on your behalf.
00:56:20So you can just say the name of a show and the name of a service
00:56:23and it would just like bang around your TV and use it for you.
00:56:26And this shit was awesome when it worked.
00:56:28It was very slow and it was extraordinarily brittle when it broke.
00:56:33Yeah, it never worked.
00:56:34Like the win is very generous.
00:56:37Yeah, sometimes it worked, you know?
00:56:40And it was cool.
00:56:40It was very cool in those moments it worked, but most of the time
00:56:43it didn't.
00:56:44Right, and then the thing that like really got you was it wouldn't
00:56:46even show you the clicking around, like it would put up the Kavo
00:56:49screen and you would hear it like booping in the background.
00:56:51You'd be like, can I just see if you're getting this right?
00:56:53I would love to check your work.
00:56:54And then you'd be like, that is not what I wanted to happen at all
00:56:56or it would just error out.
00:56:58But the idea that like you've got a bunch of devices plugged into
00:57:00a central HDMI switcher and you're like, watch the show and it
00:57:04knows that's the Apple TV and you're like, I want to play PlayStation
00:57:07and it switches the input and bangs around your plate.
00:57:08Like all that was awesome.
00:57:11But it failed because fundamentally the approach is brittle.
00:57:15Right?
00:57:15It's just, there are known ways for it to break when the computer
00:57:19cannot understand what it's seeing.
00:57:21It's $199.
00:57:22Like, yeah, can they overcome this problem or do they actually just
00:57:25need to build a bunch of APIs?
00:57:26And then you've got something that looks like a, I think you have
00:57:28in your piece.
00:57:29That's just a mid-range Android smartphone with weird apps.
00:57:32Yeah, the answer is ultimately both.
00:57:34Right?
00:57:35And I think, I think Humane has said this about what it's working
00:57:39on.
00:57:39Rabbit has alluded to this too.
00:57:40Like they eventually want to build big enough systems that others
00:57:45will actually integrate with because the reason to not rely on
00:57:48APIs is that you're a tiny startup and nobody cares about you and
00:57:51nobody will make the deals with you.
00:57:52So you do hacky computer vision stuff so that you don't have to
00:57:56get the deals because by and large, they can't really stop you from
00:58:00doing that.
00:58:01They can, they can get mad and they have some ways, but like that's
00:58:03it's a more winnable game in that particular respect.
00:58:06But the way for them to do this, they all acknowledge is to eventually
00:58:11have those more official partnerships that just give them access to
00:58:14the DoorDash API.
00:58:15And then like this doesn't all have to be AI, right?
00:58:19Like I actually think we like run into a trap when we assume that
00:58:22the only way to do AI things is for all of it to be AI.
00:58:25Like some of it shouldn't be.
00:58:26We've solved a lot of problems.
00:58:28Actually, like we're pretty good at a lot of things that don't require
00:58:32pinging a large language model to order McDonald's.
00:58:34Like that's like ordering McDonald's on the internet is like a solved
00:58:37problem.
00:58:37We're very good at it now.
00:58:39And so I think we'll land there with a lot of stuff.
00:58:41But one nice thing you can do with these models is you can hack together
00:58:46a kind of solution to a lot of those business deals without needing
00:58:51those business deals.
00:58:52And I think that's what all of these companies are doing at first.
00:58:54The question is what a DoorDash is going to say.
00:58:56This is a legal scraping of our website.
00:58:57Like there's another whole set of problems that you kind of walk into
00:59:00immediately.
00:59:00I mean, the good news for DoorDash is DoorDash just wants you to order
00:59:03McDonald's, right?
00:59:03Like I said, and I think that's the assumption that they're making, right?
00:59:07Like Uber wants me in an Uber and is very happy.
00:59:10Anything that happens that gets me in an Uber.
00:59:12Same with DoorDash and me ordering McDonald's.
00:59:13Does Spotify want to stream copyrighted music to an orange rectangle?
00:59:18Yeah.
00:59:19Yeah.
00:59:20I don't know.
00:59:21They did it on their list of things that are coming.
00:59:23It's Apple music and it's like, is it?
00:59:26Is that one coming?
00:59:28Have you met them?
00:59:29Like they don't like competitors.
00:59:31They're not, you know, even Apple music, which is theoretically the, you
00:59:34know, horizontal play across like, have you tried Apple music on Android?
00:59:39You think your weird little robot is going to be allowed to use Apple music
00:59:43on the web that way?
00:59:44I don't know.
00:59:44We'll see.
00:59:45I'm very excited for you to review this thing.
00:59:46I think that that central question of like at $199 with no recurring fee,
00:59:52can you make this a business that needs to improve on some of the core AI
00:59:57features it is reliant on?
00:59:59Look at it this way.
01:00:00The thing you're saying, a bunch of these are solve problems, right?
01:00:04Okay.
01:00:04That's great.
01:00:05The things that are sort of easiest to do are solve problems.
01:00:07Order some food, call a ride, play songs, all API stuff.
01:00:12That means you're relying on the AI to solve all of the edge cases.
01:00:17Go to Photoshop and draw a cropping square around a thing.
01:00:21Like that is not a solved problem.
01:00:24You cannot API your way into doing that in Photoshop in the general case.
01:00:27You can do it maybe in some specialized ways.
01:00:30Okay, you're now, it's $199 with no recurring revenue.
01:00:34Can you make an AI that can solve for the general case of using a computer
01:00:38is the question that this thing is asking and I just like don't know the
01:00:40answer.
01:00:41I feel the answer is probably no, but David, I just need you to do one thing
01:00:44for me.
01:00:45Can you hold it up to the mic and like click one of the buttons?
01:00:49I just need to know how clicky they are.
01:00:50Kranz is like do some ASMR shit.
01:00:52It's pretty quiet.
01:00:53Yeah.
01:00:53Oh, it's so quiet.
01:00:54That's nothing.
01:00:55Yeah, that's nothing right now.
01:00:56Pull over in your car.
01:00:57Turn off the engine.
01:00:59Roll up the windows.
01:01:00Click, click, click.
01:01:01That's what it sounds like.
01:01:02Don't do it without the clicks.
01:01:03They're pulled over now.
01:01:04Oh, yeah.
01:01:07That's not so bad.
01:01:09The people in the electric cars like what engine?
01:01:13No, but to me the thing is like the big open question for me with both the
01:01:16humane pin and this was like,
01:01:19what is like the one thing that this is actually for and I keep hoping it's
01:01:22going to be music and humane almost got there except for all the ways.
01:01:26It was awful and this like I was excited because it's Spotify and
01:01:30Spotify is what I and hundreds of millions of other people use to listen
01:01:33to music.
01:01:35Just not there, but so far it's a pretty good like question and answer
01:01:39machine, which I'm happy about rabbit has a big integration with perplexity
01:01:43the AI search engine.
01:01:45So for like relatively real-time questions like the NFL draft is
01:01:50tomorrow as we're recording this and I was asking a bunch of questions
01:01:53about like who is likely to go where in the NFL draft and it had good
01:01:57up-to-date information about the NFL draft.
01:01:59Like that's cool.
01:02:01Cue all the people saying why can't I just do it on my smartphone like
01:02:04you super duper can but what's weird to me about this so far and again,
01:02:08I have a lot of testing and stuff left to do is like this little thing
01:02:11the gadget itself feels right for this moment in AI like it's pretty
01:02:16cheap.
01:02:16It's not that ambitious.
01:02:17It's sort of silly and fun.
01:02:19It's like worst-case scenario.
01:02:21It's just like will look cool on my desk.
01:02:24Yeah, people pay a lot more for cool things on their desk, right?
01:02:28But they're also at the same time talking about this massive world
01:02:34changing vision for where it will all go and Jesse to his credit is
01:02:39constantly sort of tamping that down saying we're just at the very
01:02:42beginning.
01:02:42We haven't solved most of these problems.
01:02:44He said something at the beginning of his speech last night.
01:02:47That was like, I'm going to try all these demos and if they don't work,
01:02:52I'll try them again.
01:02:52And if they still don't work, we'll fix it and I was like, what a
01:02:56perfect summation of like the time.
01:02:58We're in for a high and so I think all of that is right and I appreciate
01:03:02kind of the like realism of what rabbit is doing as opposed to like
01:03:06humane, which is like, you know, sort of brought from the earth fully
01:03:10formed.
01:03:10We have solved this but then they're still like wildly overstating what
01:03:16this thing can actually do in a way that I find very frustrating.
01:03:18There's a bunch of comments on your hands-on post like why are you being
01:03:21nice to this in humane?
01:03:21It's like well one.
01:03:22It's not actually review yet.
01:03:24Important note like we're just holding the thing and two.
01:03:27It's like it's $200.
01:03:28Yeah.
01:03:29Yeah, and that's just different but I I am very curious to see as you go
01:03:33through this review process how much it needs to lean on the computer
01:03:38revision piece because the more it has to do that, which is the AI of it
01:03:43all the worse.
01:03:44It's going to be.
01:03:45Yes.
01:03:46I feel that very keenly.
01:03:47All right, some more things we should talk about in this section.
01:03:50Apple announced a May 7th event for new iPads two things about this one.
01:03:54It's just an infomercial just like tune in to watch our stream.
01:03:57No one's going anywhere.
01:03:58Yeah, and then they they're calling it let it loose and our friend Joanna
01:04:02Stern pointed this out the S and loose looks like a G.
01:04:04So it's let it loose which is if you want to think about what that means in
01:04:09the context of new iPads.
01:04:10I welcome you.
01:04:11I personally believe Apple is announcing Luge.
01:04:18It's very weak tonight.
01:04:19It's a huge like boogie board size cursive capital S.
01:04:23So it's like weird and so in context, it looks like a lowercase G very good.
01:04:28It's pretty it feels like we're going to get an OLED iPad, right?
01:04:32That's the rumor.
01:04:33It feels like they'll just chip bump everything else.
01:04:36I'm trying very hard not to buy an OLED iPad, but you're gonna why like I
01:04:42don't use the one so that I'm not the only one like I need I need other
01:04:45people making bad.
01:04:46We're going to do a group.
01:04:47We're going to call Tim Cook and we're like you get a group rate on ill
01:04:51conceived iPads.
01:04:54It just feels like this what they actually need to do is announce new
01:04:57software for the iPad not new hardware.
01:04:59There were a bunch of people talking about this that I really enjoyed that
01:05:01was like after this came out.
01:05:02Everybody was like relax.
01:05:04The real iPad event is WWDC in June like this.
01:05:07This doesn't matter and I think that's probably true.
01:05:09Like the strangest thing about the iPad is the hardware has been really
01:05:13good for a really long time.
01:05:16I would say other than please move the camera from the bad spot to the
01:05:20good spot.
01:05:21I have very few issues with the iPads hardware and have not had issues
01:05:25for a long time.
01:05:26I have a million issues with what it's like to actually use the damn thing.
01:05:30That's why I'm kind of curious about one of the big rumors is that they're
01:05:33going to do a new magic keyboard.
01:05:35That's like aluminum or something.
01:05:38It's more like a just a laptop case.
01:05:41Yeah with a bigger trackpad like that would be cool.
01:05:43David.
01:05:43I'm pointing out the 10th Gen iPad move.
01:05:45They move the camera.
01:05:46I know but they haven't they haven't on the other ones move it on all the
01:05:49other places.
01:05:49They're going to probably do it on the pro in the air this time around at
01:05:53some point.
01:05:53They're going to have to admit that the pro is just a weird laptop.
01:05:56Yeah, maybe this is the time like I've been I've been using my ancient now
01:06:0011 inch iPad Pro is like a tablet like this is dumb like it's just laptop
01:06:04all the time.
01:06:05I want to use it as tablet boy.
01:06:07Do I want to read stereo for you in PDF form on my iPad is God intended
01:06:14but it's just like the thing it's like yearns to be in its it's like
01:06:18you're also you I've noticed you started sending a lot of Apple News
01:06:22Plus links around which makes me think you you are becoming more of an
01:06:25iPad user.
01:06:27I'm just a rumor now.
01:06:28I'm a dad.
01:06:28I live in the suburbs sold my truck.
01:06:32I haven't sold the truck yet.
01:06:33It's heartbreaking.
01:06:34My stupid truck.
01:06:35It's this isn't just me trying to not use Twitter and Wall Street Journal
01:06:40and Condé Nast publications or Apple News Plus.
01:06:42I got suckered in the deal great fine, right?
01:06:46But do I love it?
01:06:48Do I think Apple News?
01:06:49I just I'm not going to pass any judgments Apple News Plus.
01:06:51I'm just gonna ask anybody who has the product go and look at the list of
01:06:55trending stories and be like, who do we think this audience is?
01:07:02You just make that distinction all in your I don't I'm not going to pass
01:07:04any judgment, but I'm like that they're not getting younger.
01:07:08Is it what I would say?
01:07:10It doesn't appear that they're getting younger with time.
01:07:14But anyway, yeah, I'm trying to use the iPad as a consumption device
01:07:16and the iPad Pro in particular.
01:07:19It kind of yearns to be a keyboard case and I hope they just go for it.
01:07:22Like we have a weird mini laptop.
01:07:25It's fine, you know, but they the software has to change.
01:07:27So that's it.
01:07:28That's coming very soon.
01:07:29May 7th a couple weeks from now.
01:07:31The Ray-Ban Meta smart glasses got a big update.
01:07:33They have multimodal AI.
01:07:34Now they announced some new colors and it's in various three designs that
01:07:38they have.
01:07:38I feel like I'm like about to buy one of these should I met also announced
01:07:43that it's making headsets with other people and attempt to make sort of
01:07:46Quest OS the open VR headset, which is Zuckerberg has talked about a lot.
01:07:51They're going to make an Xbox VR headset.
01:07:53It's a limited edition Meta Quest so you can see Zuckerberg is like we're
01:07:57going to be the Android of you are will get Apple's doing whatever it's
01:07:59doing over here.
01:08:01Can we call out the fact that it is so funny to watch Microsoft go from
01:08:04being like we're going to create the VR head like the VR space.
01:08:10We're going to do it all mixed reality.
01:08:12We're going to own this place to we're going to do a rebranded Meta Quest
01:08:16three.
01:08:18I mean if you're Microsoft and you're out there been like the future is
01:08:21Xbox game streaming.
01:08:23You might as well let them have it and run like a question basically like
01:08:26an Android phone right on your face.
01:08:28Yeah, take the free ads.
01:08:30I mean and the way they described it was so funny.
01:08:32It's like it's a it's a Quest 3 inspired by Xbox or something which
01:08:37just makes me think like somebody at Microsoft like sent over the hex codes
01:08:41for the Xbox green and we're like do whatever you want.
01:08:44Leave us alone.
01:08:45I hope it is like just huge.
01:08:48I hope it is so chunky like the original X.
01:08:50It's just a full-on like Master Chief Xbox controller.
01:08:53That'd be so yeah, just over the top.
01:08:56So the OS the quest OS is being rebranded I guess to Meta Horizon OS
01:09:01which is just a lot of words.
01:09:04Yeah, it's weird.
01:09:04There was like Horizon Worlds and then there was Horizon work rooms.
01:09:08So that was kind of always going to be their thing.
01:09:11But now they're trying to make it even bigger.
01:09:12I will say Horizon great name.
01:09:15For an operating system.
01:09:16Yeah, great job.
01:09:18The names are insane.
01:09:19It's just a lot of words.
01:09:19So Horizon OS runs on the quest hardware and Xbox is making it Xbox
01:09:24inspired a lot.
01:09:27Good news though more companies that are known for their good names
01:09:31will be participating in this ecosystem including Asus's Republic of
01:09:34Gamers.
01:09:35Very excited for the names to come from them.
01:09:37Lenovo will make something that will be it'll have Legion in it
01:09:43somewhere awards salad.
01:09:45Yep, Lenovo Legion quest flip 13.
01:09:48Yep.
01:09:48And and then all of these are going to run on Qualcomm chips Qualcomm
01:09:52also well known for stretching the boundaries.
01:09:58So that's interesting.
01:09:59We'll see how that goes right there.
01:10:00The players they have the momentum the quest.
01:10:03It's quest 3 itself got an update where the pass-through videos of
01:10:07higher quality and looks better when you look at phones.
01:10:09There's momentum over there.
01:10:11I want to come back to actually the Ray-Ban glasses which are a hit
01:10:16like they feel like a quiet hit.
01:10:17I know a lot of people who have them our friend Joanna Stern says she
01:10:20doesn't travel or go on field video shoots without them anymore.
01:10:23Wow.
01:10:24They're really good.
01:10:26I've got a pair.
01:10:26I I should wear mine more.
01:10:28I'm legit thinking about going and getting prescription lenses put in
01:10:31it because I always have to put my contacts in and it's like that
01:10:34frictions too much.
01:10:35But every time I wear on like why don't I wear my contacts more often
01:10:38these like are awesome.
01:10:40They're cheap.
01:10:40They're 300 bucks.
01:10:41I've got a friend who in the pandemic.
01:10:43She just became one of those people who doesn't live anywhere.
01:10:45She's just like literally last week.
01:10:47She's like I'm working from about and I was like, I hate you.
01:10:50You seem great.
01:10:51All of our photos are from that of course.
01:10:52Yeah, well and the thing meta got really right was it it went the
01:10:57correct direction in terms of saying like we're going to pick a very
01:11:01small number of things for this device to do and it's going to do them
01:11:04pretty well and then we're going to slowly add things that it can do
01:11:08like it when it started it was like, okay, it's a pretty good speaker
01:11:13system.
01:11:14If you like want to listen to music or podcasts or whatever, that's
01:11:16mostly what I use it for.
01:11:17It's become like when I'm out on a walk or whatever.
01:11:19I wear it and say I wear the glasses instead of headphones now, which
01:11:22is awesome.
01:11:24Pretty good camera people really like taking photos and videos that
01:11:27way and now they're adding on they're like, okay now we can do they
01:11:31had the you could like ask meta AI questions, but now they're adding
01:11:34the multimodal stuff.
01:11:35And so they're like they're sequencing this stuff really smartly
01:11:38instead of like promising the world from the very beginning and then
01:11:42not meeting people's expectations, which I think is really the key.
01:11:45These are better than people expected them to be which is so so so rare
01:11:50in this moment with hardware.
01:11:51Yeah.
01:11:52And again, the first thing they just had to be with some nice looking
01:11:54Ray Bans.
01:11:55Yeah, it's like, all right, get a pair of wayfarers.
01:11:57You have these other two designs like people just like those designs
01:11:59whether or not the battery last the camera works is like, oh, there's
01:12:01spare wayfarers.
01:12:02Like maybe it'll be cool.
01:12:03And now they're setting all this cool stuff was like that old Mitch
01:12:05Hedberg joke, right that like when an escalator an escalator doesn't
01:12:07break it just becomes stairs.
01:12:09Like that's that's these glasses, right?
01:12:11Like the worst case scenario is you just have a nice pair of sunglasses.
01:12:14Yeah, and honestly 300 bucks for a pay pair of ribbons is like a little
01:12:18bit of a premium and it's not crazy.
01:12:19No, and now the multimodal AI you can do the thing.
01:12:21What am I looking at?
01:12:22It tells you right?
01:12:23That's the big trick.
01:12:24That's the it's emerging is the party trick of these AI devices and it's
01:12:28as messy as anything else like V song did a bunch of testing with it and
01:12:31it was like hilariously wrong about cars and all this stuff and it's
01:12:35always like all these systems.
01:12:36It's very confident and just lies to your face.
01:12:39I actually I'm starting to be of the mind that we need to push back
01:12:43strongly against calling any of this AI.
01:12:45We just need to call them what language models because they just make up
01:12:49words.
01:12:50There's no intelligence artificial or otherwise happening here.
01:12:54That's gonna be a hard fight.
01:12:55I don't think we're gonna I'm not gonna win that fight.
01:12:56There's a lot of fights.
01:12:57I've won.
01:12:57I'm not gonna win that fight for you, but the conflation of can you talk
01:13:00with are you smart is in a real weird moment on the internet right now
01:13:04turns out we talk maybe less money.
01:13:08I talk a lot does is I'm not trying to burn anybody but that's putting
01:13:11that out there fascinating to me though put the just add all this up
01:13:16right?
01:13:16You got meta doing this sort of open stuff with Lenovo and all these
01:13:19other companies.
01:13:21You've got the glasses which are sort of a sneaky hit that people like
01:13:25next to okay analyst reports a vision Pro demand is suffering right?
01:13:30And it's like did Apple just get outgunned by a pair of Ray Bans?
01:13:33Yes.
01:13:34Yes, that's crazy.
01:13:35It's nuts.
01:13:36It's not crazy though.
01:13:37It was a $3,500 bet against a $300 bet.
01:13:41I don't even think it's that I think Apple just miscalculated like I the
01:13:45longer I use these devices the more I can't believe Apple didn't make
01:13:49the smart glasses like if in the thing that Apple has traditionally done
01:13:55which is like build a thing and then build the more complicated thing
01:13:57and then build the more complicated like Apple is actually very good at
01:14:00laddering that stuff up over time and in this case just way overshot it
01:14:04was like it was like building for generations too soon and trying to
01:14:10convince people to buy it and what if they had just built like the iPod
01:14:13version of it, which is just like a nice thing for listening to music
01:14:17and talking to an assistant people would have gone nuts for it and it
01:14:20is like it continues to blow my mind that Apple just I think picked
01:14:25wrong.
01:14:25They could still do it.
01:14:26We could still get the Apple Vision Air.
01:14:29Oh, I'm sure we will.
01:14:29I'm sure that's where it's headed.
01:14:31But like I the what the humane folks told me is they were like, okay,
01:14:34well when we built this we decided to build the hardest thing first based
01:14:38on the idea that then it's much easier to sort of ratchet our ambition
01:14:41down and sell cheaper simpler versions of the thing but it turns out if
01:14:44you blow the expensive one, you don't get the chance to do the next
01:14:47things and I think Apple has kind of dug itself a hole here by so
01:14:51aggressively overshooting.
01:14:53I also like all these supply chain numbers should be taken with like a
01:14:56giant heap of salt all the time, but I will say anecdotally nobody
01:15:00talks about the Vision Pro anymore.
01:15:02Yeah, it is totally faded.
01:15:04I spent a lot of time looking in the subreddit and it is a lot of people
01:15:10like what are we using this thing for?
01:15:11Yeah, you know, then there's like one app comes out and it's a hit and
01:15:13people really like it but it's a little little dire in there.
01:15:17I'm just going to say I was right in there.
01:15:19It's putting out there.
01:15:20It took a lot of heat for that one.
01:15:21It's better out here.
01:15:22Yeah, it's better.
01:15:22Right.
01:15:22The question is like is it worth putting it on and there isn't
01:15:26anything that makes it worth putting on.
01:15:28There's a few things that sometimes but even Mark Gurman in his newsletter
01:15:32where he was talking about some of these roads.
01:15:33He's like I'm wearing this thing less and less like it's lonely like
01:15:36he's like I want to watch basketball alone.
01:15:39I think it's weird.
01:15:39It's just like a weird moment in hardware.
01:15:41Yeah, where the big expensive stuff didn't go and the sort of cheap stuff
01:15:45that's making small promises is gaining a new kind of momentum.
01:15:49I think I'm going to buy him.
01:15:50I don't know why I have too many glasses.
01:15:51I lose them.
01:15:52I have a rule to not buy glasses that are more than 50 bucks not buy sunglasses
01:15:55and wear 50 bucks because they're gone.
01:15:57That's good.
01:15:57I might as well just flush the $50 down the toilet.
01:15:59You know, I mean, but there's part of it's like what if the goodness
01:16:03is these these ones are very heavy so it will be hard to lose them.
01:16:08They did like and the charging case is really nice.
01:16:12So you're gonna be like, oh, I can't lose my charging case because
01:16:15it's so nice and then you'll never lose your glasses Alex.
01:16:18You've never under us.
01:16:19I'm just I'm filled with optimism today.
01:16:22Yeah, just all optimism.
01:16:24All right, we're gonna take a break.
01:16:24I'm gonna look on the meta website and see and see if I can convince
01:16:27myself.
01:16:27So it's $300.
01:16:28We're gonna come back.
01:16:28We got to talk about Tesla and we got a lightning round and we're
01:16:30gonna get out of here.
01:16:31We'll be right back.
01:16:36Okay, we're back.
01:16:37We have to talk about Tesla.
01:16:38Tesla to earnings Andy Hawkins headline for the preview of earnings
01:16:41was Tesla's in its flop era, which is a great headline just to recap
01:16:45Tesla has laid off more than 10% of its workforce like 14,000 people
01:16:49bunch of executives are leaving including the guy who was in charge
01:16:52of the powertrain and energy division and then the head of policy
01:16:56who's the guy who gets autonomy like approved also gone a lot going
01:17:02on with Tesla, right?
01:17:02There's a rumor that they're going to cancel the cheap EV and then
01:17:05they kind of said they weren't going to cancel it, but it also
01:17:08sounds like what they're really going to do is make the model wide
01:17:10cheaper.
01:17:11They've recalled all 3800 Cybertrucks 3878 Cybertrucks, but they
01:17:18talked Elon said Optimus would be a fully sentient robot that would
01:17:23quote expand the economy the world economy infinitely.
01:17:27Sick.
01:17:27They'll be selling that at the end of next year.
01:17:29Yeah, sure.
01:17:30So a classic Elon bump there.
01:17:32I think he even said in that announcement in that like in that
01:17:35sentence.
01:17:35I think he said but I'm just guessing it's like, yeah, great investor
01:17:40call.
01:17:41There's a new Model 3 performance great, but they don't have his new
01:17:45cars.
01:17:46There's not really a plan to have new cars.
01:17:48They're going to announce some robo-taxi plan on August 8th.
01:17:51And then there's this thing that they've been talking about which
01:17:53he brought up again on the earnings call today, which I just want
01:17:55to talk about for five seconds because it is bonkers to me.
01:17:58He was talking about how many H100s Tesla has.
01:18:00He went on this very funny aside about how he doesn't like calling
01:18:02them GPUs.
01:18:03They don't have any graphics, but whatever.
01:18:04It's what it was.
01:18:05You can hear the investors being like what and then he got to we
01:18:09have all these H100s and we are doing inference AI inference more
01:18:13efficiently because we had to learn how to do it in the car, which
01:18:16is constrained.
01:18:17Great.
01:18:17That makes sense.
01:18:17It's a good argument when I can measure it when it makes sense and
01:18:20then he's like we've got this like AWS play which they've hinted
01:18:23at before but he was like what we're going to do is run it on all
01:18:27the Tesla's that are just sitting around so quote if you can imagine
01:18:31in the future, perhaps there's a fleet of 100 million Tesla's and
01:18:34on average they've gotten like maybe a kilowatt of inference
01:18:37compute.
01:18:38That's a hundred gigawatts of inference compute distributed all
01:18:41around the world.
01:18:42It's pretty hard to put together a hundred gigawatts of AI compute.
01:18:44So in perhaps maybe instead of using the car 10 hours a week, we
01:18:48use it 50 hours a week while it's sitting there that leaves over
01:18:50100 hours a week with a car inference computer can be doing something
01:18:52else and it seems like it would be a waste to not use it.
01:18:55My man is describing steady at home for Tesla's.
01:18:58Yeah.
01:18:59What are those terms of service look like?
01:19:02It's just like you do you want to run compute models on your car
01:19:06while it's like sitting in the driveway your car which by the way
01:19:09famously runs on electricity.
01:19:10Uh-huh.
01:19:12Like where's that electricity?
01:19:13Where's that power bill coming from?
01:19:14Are you going to get it cheaper?
01:19:14So you buy a car and now Elon can use it to do whatever inference to
01:19:18run whatever Robotaxi fleet that he thinks he's going to need to run
01:19:21it.
01:19:21Also, I don't know if you know about AWS.
01:19:23They like knowing where the computers are and and typically those
01:19:27computers are not driving somewhere between 20 and 100 miles an hour
01:19:32while they're being used like, you know, I've interviewed the CEO
01:19:34of AWS.
01:19:34I would say a core assumption of that conversation was that he knew
01:19:38where the servers were and they were not ever at risk of crashing
01:19:42into other servers.
01:19:44This feels like such a classic Elon Musk thing because even as you
01:19:47are reading that it's like, okay, this sort of makes sense like big
01:19:52fleet lots of compute sitting around.
01:19:54What if we use the compute and then it's like you raise your hand and
01:19:56you go like how is any of that going to work and it's like, ah, don't
01:19:59worry about that.
01:20:02Doing it at the same time that like Chevy is getting a lot of flack
01:20:07because they've been using their computers to spy on people and report
01:20:10it to their insurance companies.
01:20:12Like maybe not the time to be like, yeah, you've got a computer in
01:20:14there and I want to use it.
01:20:17Yeah, it's like it's mine now.
01:20:18Yeah.
01:20:19I just think this is the one where it's like what you want is searching
01:20:22for is arguments that Tesla will have massive margins software company
01:20:26style margins instead of car company merchants and the thing that's
01:20:30hammering Tesla right now is they have absolutely car company margins
01:20:33again because they dropped the price so much and they don't have any
01:20:35new cars.
01:20:36So the competition is here and you can see the sales fell like 55% like
01:20:40they they're just not doing it anymore.
01:20:42And so he's concocting these arguments where sentient Optimus robot
01:20:46will expand the world economy by infinity.
01:20:50That's a pretty good margin.
01:20:51It's good.
01:20:52That's I mean if you know more power to you if you pull that off and
01:20:54then he's like and I'm going to build this like distributed data center.
01:20:58So I'm now I'm running AWS instead of having to build a data center in
01:21:01Texas or wherever you might need to build it and it's like this is the
01:21:05truth is outing here, right?
01:21:07Like it is very hard to get from here to I'm running a distributed AI
01:21:13supercomputer and every Tesla in the world.
01:21:16It's like it's this very hard.
01:21:18It kind of feels a little like a Peloton moment for him, you know,
01:21:23we're Peloton everybody and everybody got a Peloton because they wanted
01:21:26one and it feels like maybe everyone who wanted the Tesla got one.
01:21:29Well, let me just ask you this question about this distributed
01:21:31inference computer.
01:21:32What happens at rush hour?
01:21:34Yeah, right.
01:21:35The total capacity of the computer just like plummets like hour by hour
01:21:38like it's always five o'clock somewhere like every hour.
01:21:41There's just like huge dip in capacity like starts and it comes starts
01:21:45coming back online at 7 p.m.
01:21:46Like literally the Sun sets on Tesla's compute capacity across the
01:21:50United States every single day.
01:21:51Like it's very hard to pull this through.
01:21:55I think I think it Tesla's in a like fascinating moment.
01:21:59They I am not sure it five years from now.
01:22:01It looks anything like this company.
01:22:03No.
01:22:03Yeah, it seems hard to imagine.
01:22:05I mean, I think this company has already gone through so many weirder
01:22:10iterations than anybody would have expected and continues to sort of
01:22:14chug along like Tesla feels very much like a cockroach at this point
01:22:18that sort of nothing could happen to Tesla that would surprise me and
01:22:20also it will be the last company that exists on planet Earth.
01:22:24I disagree but I like it feels like it's going to crap.
01:22:30Yeah, even like a bunch of Tesla fans are like, I don't know about this
01:22:34anymore.
01:22:34Well, that's I mean that that's one of the big questions to me.
01:22:37I was talking about this with Andy Hawkins yesterday like this question
01:22:41of kind of the Elon Musk effect that the people who are predisposed to
01:22:48want Tesla's for a lot of the reasons that Tesla promotes them being good
01:22:52for the world and all that are also people who are likely to not be psyched
01:22:55about Elon Musk's shenanigans, particularly as he runs X and so
01:23:01trying to figure out how to quantify how much of this is about the
01:23:06challenges in the EV market how much this is about plug-in hybrids, which
01:23:09I thought was really interesting thing that must said during the earnings
01:23:12call.
01:23:12He blamed a lot of the struggle on the rise in plug-in hybrids and how
01:23:17much of this is just people voting with their dollars and voting against
01:23:21Elon Musk is really hard to know and I think it's going to be super obvious
01:23:24in retrospect, and I'm very curious how it's going to shake out.
01:23:27There's also the fact that if you're just going to buy a car and you're
01:23:32going out in the world and you're like, I'm going to buy a car and you
01:23:34don't buy a car based on id then you go and you look and you say, okay
01:23:38Tesla's have really bad reliability.
01:23:41They're really hard to repair.
01:23:43They're really hard to just get an appointment and oftentimes that
01:23:46appointments horrible.
01:23:47The build quality is crap to the point that like they keep having to do
01:23:51recalls on the Cybertruck like those are all just signs of a badly run
01:23:55company and I think I think this company had a lot of advantage because
01:23:59it was first mover and Elon Musk is an incredible salesman, but now like
01:24:03the bloom is off that rose Twitter X whatever you want to call it ripped
01:24:07that right off and now it's like, okay, we see that this guy is just a
01:24:10really good salesman and he pulls it all out of his butt and he is not
01:24:13some genius and actually he's not running a very good company because
01:24:17he's running 12 at once and no one can do that even Elon Musk.
01:24:21Alex is Alex Kranz the verge of the K.
01:24:23Yeah, just email that hit me up.
01:24:26I'm doing you a favor.
01:24:27I'm here to debate you debate Alex with a K, please.
01:24:31It's going to be great honeypotting Tesla trolls.
01:24:35I don't think you're wrong.
01:24:36I just think I think the fundamentals of the auto business.
01:24:39He has to not be a car company and it the thing that is happening is it's
01:24:43getting sucked into being a car company because it is one and because it
01:24:46yeah, because it is make cars and the blaming the hybrid thing is super
01:24:49funny to me.
01:24:49Like yes, I own a hybrid but like you're basically telling your customers
01:24:52that wrong.
01:24:53Right and how do you get across?
01:24:56How do you get past the market making a decision and regulate the market
01:24:59Joe Biden?
01:25:00Will you make hybrids illegal?
01:25:01It's like kind of the only answer that or you can yell at everyone that
01:25:04they're wrong and like yelling at the market that it's wrong and like not
01:25:07that always famously works for everyone who does it.
01:25:11This is famously why a Betamax beat VHS.
01:25:14Everyone knows it.
01:25:15I don't think hybrid.
01:25:16I think hybrids everyone.
01:25:17I know as hybrid knows it's like some short-term solution to the
01:25:20infrastructure.
01:25:20Yeah, I think they're like everyone prefers to drive around in the battery.
01:25:24My dad just recently bought a Prius after spending months looking for an
01:25:29Evie because he just like they just couldn't find one that made sense and
01:25:32decided that in their lives at this point like the next car should be an
01:25:38electric car.
01:25:39The car right now should not be and I think a lot of people are making that
01:25:42decision.
01:25:43Yeah, what's the new Prius?
01:25:44It doesn't look like an angry robot anymore.
01:25:46No, it's kind of great.
01:25:48Yeah, we'll see.
01:25:50All right, lightning round.
01:25:52What you got David?
01:25:53So while we're talking about Apple TV Plus soon to be augmented by the
01:25:58purchase of tick-tock there was a there was a report this week that Apple has
01:26:04been negotiating with FIFA, which is the the governing body of soccer around
01:26:08the world to do a new global tournament exclusively on Apple TV Plus.
01:26:16I find this fascinating for a bunch of reasons.
01:26:18One Apple is like increasingly deep into the sports world.
01:26:22They have this thing with Major League Soccer that's going very well.
01:26:25It seems in part because you know, Lionel Messi decided to play for the
01:26:28MLS, but the numbers that have been thrown around are upwards of a billion
01:26:33dollars from Apple to be the one to stream this tournament, which is like
01:26:38we've spent a lot of time talking about Apple TV Plus is kind of a somewhere
01:26:43between sort of a lark and a side project that it was never going to be
01:26:47really material to Apple.
01:26:49It was just kind of a thing it did on the side in order to sell more
01:26:52subscriptions to iCloud, right?
01:26:53Like that was always the play this seems to me to be the sort of thing that
01:26:57you only do if you're actually serious about turning this into a real thing
01:27:01and Apple is just further and further and further into sports in a way that
01:27:06I continue to find surprising and sort of fascinating and they want to invent
01:27:11a completely new thing with some of the biggest soccer clubs in the world,
01:27:16which would be huge and is immediately the kind of thing that would draw
01:27:20potentially millions of new people to Apple TV Plus, but this is like there's
01:27:24no indication.
01:27:26I think it was a New York Times story that first reported this that this is
01:27:29like a done deal, but they want to do it next summer, which means like this
01:27:33is a big thing that could happen very quickly.
01:27:35And like, I don't know Apple TV Plus just continues to be a bigger thing
01:27:40than I think I've given it credit for.
01:27:42I think it kind of makes sense though right now for Apple to do it because
01:27:46Hollywood is in a state of flux, right?
01:27:49Like streaming is completely changing the game there.
01:27:52Everybody's trying to figure out where the revenue streams are and the tech
01:27:55companies are kind of leading the forefront.
01:27:58The tech companies are running Hollywood in a way they haven't previously
01:28:02and Apple is doing it really, really well.
01:28:05It's a smaller play than everybody else, but it's doing it intelligently
01:28:09and it's like, yeah, this makes sense for them to go in and just like take
01:28:13a couple of streaming services out.
01:28:15Yeah, just body a few with money and then snap up the dregs of that later,
01:28:22right? Like make a deal with Skydance or whatever.
01:28:24But if that's the play, Apple could just walk into the offices of any
01:28:28streaming service it wanted to and just write a check for its valuation and
01:28:32then sell.
01:28:32Yeah, but they don't want to do that.
01:28:33They want cheap licenses and stuff like that.
01:28:37That's what runs these services.
01:28:38But this is what I'm saying.
01:28:39A billion dollars to create a new soccer tournament is not that thing.
01:28:43Like the MLS thing.
01:28:44I understood.
01:28:44That's a relatively small relatively safe bet and they got to essentially
01:28:49take over that whole project.
01:28:51This is a mud.
01:28:52This is like negotiating for NFL rights, which Apple like famously has not won
01:28:57because it's one.
01:28:57They take it.
01:28:58Yeah, but it wanted what has been reported is that it wanted like complete
01:29:01control over this thing and you're not getting that from the NFL and you're
01:29:04not getting it from FIFA and they're still willing to throw billions of
01:29:06dollars at it.
01:29:07It's fascinating.
01:29:07But this would drive subscriptions.
01:29:09Yeah, shorts is sick.
01:29:10Like yeah, I think he's smart.
01:29:12He's also a huge sports.
01:29:13Yeah, he is and you know sports are the stickiest thing.
01:29:16We'll see.
01:29:18I think Apple has to get good at broadcasting sports.
01:29:21Yeah, they're not great at it right now.
01:29:23So the more they get into it the more they have to come does out like does
01:29:27Tim Cook want to sit in Congress and talk about contact moderation?
01:29:29I don't know.
01:29:30Does Tim Cook want to sit in front of a bunch of soccer fans and talk about
01:29:34penalties like I don't know about that either.
01:29:36But does Tim Cook want to go like sit in a box at the World Cup?
01:29:39Like yeah, absolutely.
01:29:41That's true.
01:29:41All right, what you got?
01:29:44Qualcomm.
01:29:45They're back baby.
01:29:46We'll see.
01:29:47We say that every once in a while.
01:29:50Just immediate.
01:29:51Yeah, so Qualcomm has announced they had previously announced some new
01:29:55processors and these are their kind of responses to the x86 processors from
01:30:01Intel and AMD this is meant to go in Windows machines meant to compete with
01:30:05Apple.
01:30:06They're saying they're as fast as the M3 and it's going to blow it out of
01:30:10the water.
01:30:11Joanna Nelius our new laptop reviewer went and checked some of them out in
01:30:16some very very very very controlled demos and she was like there could be
01:30:21something there.
01:30:22She was seeing it was slower than the M3 in some cases faster and others.
01:30:27I mean if it's even in the ballpark of the M3, that's a huge deal.
01:30:31Yeah, that's a huge deal.
01:30:32Right?
01:30:32And I think there's there's some really interesting stuff particularly
01:30:34around architecture.
01:30:35They're not doing the big little core deal that everybody else does where
01:30:38they're like these are performance cores and these are efficiency cores.
01:30:41They're like, yeah, these are all performance course because they're just
01:30:44that efficient.
01:30:46That was me doing a Qualcomm impression.
01:30:49Sorry.
01:30:50So it's the the Snapdragon X elite was the ones previously announced and now
01:30:55we have the Snapdragon X plus no good which is slower deal because it's not
01:31:01elite.
01:31:02They're going to throw a premium in there.
01:31:03No one's going to know what's going on.
01:31:05Yeah, nobody will know.
01:31:06I appreciate that when you when you try to match Apple's performance, you
01:31:09also try to match Apple's insane name scheme.
01:31:12This is good.
01:31:13And it's all bad.
01:31:14They're all the names are bad, but we don't know when these are probably
01:31:18going to come this year.
01:31:19We'll probably start seeing them in some Windows devices this year and I'm
01:31:22really really curious to see it because like if ARM and Windows can work for
01:31:27once that would be huge.
01:31:28Yeah, but they famously kind of like screwed it up the last time.
01:31:32And the time before that and the time before that and the time before that
01:31:35yeah, that's why I immediately undercut Qualcomm's like back at it again at
01:31:40the Krispy Kreme.
01:31:41The Microsoft event is May 20th or 21st or something and they're going to
01:31:44announce new surfaces that we think by all indications are going to run these
01:31:49things.
01:31:50So we're going to we're going to see this sooner rather than later.
01:31:52But Tom's been reporting about how excited Microsoft is Qualcomm seems very
01:31:56excited.
01:31:57This could be something when we've got Computex come in.
01:32:00That's May 31st.
01:32:01Oh, yeah, it's going to be like laptop explosion here.
01:32:05That's going to be yeah.
01:32:06So we're going to get a lot of laptops soon and I suspect a lot of them are
01:32:09going to have these these new processes in them.
01:32:12Will these processors be good?
01:32:13It's a big move away from Intel.
01:32:15There's a lot of laptops with these weird snapdragon chips in them.
01:32:17We'll see.
01:32:18Yeah.
01:32:18Well, we'll also have to see because historically the laptop makers don't
01:32:21like to ship the the stuff besides Intel be to reviewers to check out because
01:32:27they want you to check out the thing that people actually buy and that's
01:32:30usually the Intel products.
01:32:32So it's going to be a fun one.
01:32:34All right.
01:32:34Mine is very simple.
01:32:36So nice as a new app looks very good on mobile.
01:32:39They've sort of gotten rid of all the tabs and it's just all just widgets.
01:32:43It's cool.
01:32:44They said it's gonna be faster.
01:32:44It's come out May 7.
01:32:45We'll see if the mobile app is faster.
01:32:47This is not the thing I actually want to talk about.
01:32:48They are getting rid of their desktop apps, which they've had forever on Mac
01:32:52and Windows and they're going all to web apps and you can now because it's
01:32:56web app, you can control your service from anywhere, which is interesting.
01:32:58I'm just pointing out that the move to distribute applications on desktop
01:33:02computers to the web instead of in native binaries is like full speed ahead.
01:33:09Like it's over.
01:33:10Like, uh, you know, Dylan field, the CEO of Figma was like, why would you
01:33:13distribute an app on a desktop computer any other way except the web?
01:33:17And like, yep, there's electron and some other stuff where you package it
01:33:19up and it like looks native and da, da, da, da.
01:33:21But I saw this and I was like, oh, this is just hat.
01:33:23Like this is a huge shift in computers.
01:33:26That is like reaching a point where.
01:33:28It's it's like, no one even talks about it.
01:33:31Like it just assumed that if you're going to make a new app for desktop
01:33:34computers, what you are actually shipping as a web app.
01:33:36Yeah.
01:33:37And I, the thing I point to is the vision pro, the high end of computers,
01:33:41the cutting edge of what a computer can be mounted directly to your face.
01:33:45Uh, all of the most interesting apps and was on the vision pro, uh, the
01:33:48Netflix app, the YouTube app, whatever are just custom web browsers.
01:33:52Yeah.
01:33:52We really called that by the way.
01:33:54I feel like we, we deserve credit for saying over and over that the thing
01:33:57that the only thing that might save the vision pro is, is web apps.
01:34:01Yeah.
01:34:01Uh, that has been absolutely correct.
01:34:03Uh, anyway, I'm excited for the news on this thing.
01:34:04Cause the old app is indeed slow.
01:34:06Uh, wasn't the old app supposed to fix the fact that the app before that was
01:34:10slow and bad?
01:34:12No.
01:34:12So they, uh, this is like a long story.
01:34:13We had Patrick Spence on the show, I think, to explain himself to us when
01:34:16they did.
01:34:16I know.
01:34:17And they had the old platform, which they now call S one, right.
01:34:20Which was like ancient and they rearchitected everything for the future
01:34:23and to support Atmos and all this other stuff they wanted to do.
01:34:26Um, uh, and that's called S two.
01:34:29So that was just an architecture update.
01:34:31It was not a, we need to make a faster update.
01:34:33So they kept their slow app, but made it work on the new architecture.
01:34:37Yeah.
01:34:37There's a lot of arguments about like what the best way to run Sonos is now.
01:34:40Like, do you want to run Sonos net, which is like a custom 2.4 gigahertz
01:34:43network?
01:34:43You just want to run everything on wifi, which says you should do, um, good
01:34:47times in these, in these subreddits.
01:34:49I just use Spotify connect and it works fine.
01:34:52Yeah.
01:34:53That's fine.
01:34:54I wish I had a more complicated, interesting idea.
01:34:57I never ever touched the Sonos app and I'm very happy.
01:35:00I've used airplay for years now.
01:35:02It's great.
01:35:02It works just fine.
01:35:03And you can group things in airplay.
01:35:04You can group unlike speakers in airplay, which is a very interesting.
01:35:08Um, but I don't know.
01:35:09I still got a soft spot for it.
01:35:10All right.
01:35:11That's a weird way over.
01:35:12We've touched on everything from web apps to the future of free speech in
01:35:16America, busy week to, to whatever's going on with Tesla.
01:35:20It's a lot.
01:35:20It was a big, it was a busy week and we got more of them coming.
01:35:22Cause we're, we're head first into developer conference season now.
01:35:25Yep.
01:35:26All right.
01:35:27I'm going to start a go fund me for this old iPad.
01:35:28You can hit me up.
01:35:30That's not true.
01:35:32Uh, tell Alex all your favorite things about your Tesla.
01:35:35If you have, she'd love to hear him.
01:35:36Oh, we need to say this.
01:35:37We utterly forgot to say this because we were so bad at this.
01:35:40We won Webby awards.
01:35:42Thank you so much for all the people who voted for us and the people's
01:35:45cast.
01:35:45Thank you.
01:35:46The judges who gave the same award to the decoder podcast.
01:35:50We really do appreciate it.
01:35:51It's very cool that we have been doing the show for as long as we do it,
01:35:55doing it.
01:35:55And people still voting for us for these awards.
01:35:57I truly appreciate it.
01:35:59Sponsor the lightning round.
01:36:00You degenerates.
01:36:01All right, it's time.
01:36:05Uh, all right.
01:36:06That's it.
01:36:06That's for chest.
01:36:11And that's it for the verge cast this week.
01:36:13Hey, we'd love to hear from you.
01:36:14Give us a call at eight six six verge.
01:36:16One.
01:36:16One.
01:36:17The verge cast is a production of the verge and Vox Media Podcast Network.
01:36:21Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James.
01:36:24That's it.
01:36:24We'll see you next week.