Welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of catastrophic system failures. A sentence that is going to pay off several times, both literally and figuratively, throughout the course of this episode. I'm your friend David Pierce. Nilay is here.
Hey buddy, how's it going?
How are you? You know, we were just talking before we started recording about your podcast studio dreams. Would you like to very briefly tell the people of your podcast video dreams?
Okay, so here's what I got. So I record in the attic of my house. I'm in right now. The thing you're looking at is the attic of our house. And that's fine, except that I have two small children who are noisy and do not care that I record a podcast in the attic of this house.
And so my dream, I have two dreams. One is that we'll build a podcast studio above the garage, which is just a thing I say all the time. I have no idea if we'll ever actually accomplish this, and like whether I can get through like the small village politics of zoning variances I need to do that. The other idea I have, which is very important, and I just want to throw this out there. Behind my house, there's our backyard, there's a fence, and then there's a thing behind the house. Behind the house is a broken down parking lot that is owned by the Catholic Church. And my dream is to buy that parking lot and then build like a podcast village back there. I have no idea how to do any of that.
Like, I don't, you cannot just call the Catholic Church, from what I gather. And the fact that the pope is from Chicago and my family is in Chicago has gotten me approximately zero progress. Not done. So if you know how to get a hold of the person at the Catholic Church who can sell me a parking lot, give me a call or, I mean, you know, email me. That'd be better. I'm just curious because I don't, I mean, I look at it every day. I like saying I'm a reasonably effective person. I just don't know how to get stuff from the church.
Do you? I just asked Gemini. Um, and I will tell you several things. One, there is a phone number for the Vatican Central Telephone Exchange, which I'm happy to give you. Um, number two, Gemini's answer refers to Pope Francis a couple of times, which is, you know, not exactly what we're going for. Um, and it actually suggests sending snail mail to the Pope. If you want to reach the Pope, send the man a letter.
Well, hey, that's an improvement from indulgences, which is what I was assuming would happen here. Um, also from what I understand at the Catholic Church in New York State where I live, uh, that is just a, that's just like machine politics at the next level. Anyway, if you know anybody who can sell me a parking lot at the Catholic Church, give me a call.
Pope Leo, if you're listening, and I know that you are, get at us.
Hey, the Chicago Pope loves AI. He's talked about it a lot. So, yeah, there you go.
We could get down.
All right. So, right at the top here, I think we should talk about what's going on in Minneapolis and particularly the way that we've been covering it and talking about it. We talked about it a bit on Tuesday's show. It's been all over the site this week. We've done a lot of different coverage of what's going on on the ground and the politics and the policy of it. But a question that you and I, I know, have gotten a bunch, I've gotten it a bunch, and I suspect you've gotten it a lot more is why and how are we covering this? This is a question The Verge gets every time some sort of large non-phone related cultural event happens. Um, but I know this is a thing. We talk a lot about this in the newsroom and I know you think about it a lot. So, let me just put to you the question that everybody has been putting to us. Why is this a Verge story in the way that it has been so much this week?
Yeah, I think there's two ways to answer this. The first way is the way I think we usually answer it, which is to identify all of the tech angles in the story and say these are our stories. And there are a lot of tech angles in the story and I think we're going to talk about some of them here on this show today. But I actually want to just zoom out and not do that approach. I get a lot of emails and comments and posts from people who are sort of apologetic about it. They say they just want to read us for an escape from the news and to talk about tech. And like I said, they're kind of apologetic about it. And I get it. Like I definitely need a break from all of this. But I think it's more important for me to say that The Verge is going to keep covering ICE and the Trump administration and politics generally because we have spent 15 years building this platform into a little institution that creators refer to us as the mainstream media, which is very funny, but it's a little institution. And if we don't use it right now to say it's bad that masked government agents are kidnapping people off the street and shooting people in the back as they try and document it, then we will have done all the work for nothing. And I feel very strongly about that. I go on and on about the idea that what we sell here is our ethics policy. And I feel, and our newsroom feels just as strongly, that what we stand for, what The Verge stands for, are some pretty universal values around freedom and decency and kindness and respect. And I am dead certain that that demands that we speak out as clearly as possible and that our headlines are as blunt and direct as possible. And I get an equal amount of feedback from our audience and our subscribers that say, 'Yeah, keep doing it.' You can see it. You can see it in the comments. I get emails that say, 'Thank you for being so blunt.' And then equally important to me, and maybe this is only important to me, I also get the feedback from all of the people that have worked here over the past 15 years. And I care about those people a lot. We call them expats because you can check out, but you can never leave. They built the place. I know that they helped me build the place. They're not shy about telling me when we get it wrong. They're not shy about anything. And I get a lot of notes from that set of people that say keep going, keep doing it. This is what we helped build the place for. And it helps them push in all the places they are. So I think that's just a role we play. If we get it wrong, you know, we'll hear about it. And if we die because we are clear about our values, like I think we will accept that. But we're going to stay on it. We're going to be sharp and clear. And if you need to go use our homepage and push all the follow buttons and make a feed of just like Windows news, like we, the tools exist and you can do that and I'm happy for you to do that. And I promise, the way I promised in Trump one, that like when it's all over we will do another one-hour show on HDMI. I promise you. Although it does turn out that HDMI is actually the most political thing we have ever covered on The Vergecast. So I just want to be clear. We're going to keep going. I think it's incredibly important for us to keep going. The thing that actually gets me about this moment is I'm watching all these creators in all of these different areas say the same thing just across the board, beauty creators, tech creators, you name it, car creators, just across the board. And I think that speaks to the moment we're in. And I do think there are lots of Verge stories here, right? There are lots of stories about surveillance and the big companies and their cos. We're going to talk about all that, but just the core of it is if you have built the platform, if you have spent all of this time making the thing that people depend on, now is the time to use it. And I can't be clearer about that. And if some of you just don't want to listen to us or you want to filter out the stuff you don't want from our homepage, that's fine. But I do think that's our responsibility.
I agree. And I think it's been really interesting to see how many, like you said, other creators and other places that are in many cases deliberately non-political come to that same conclusion that I would say, and I'm curious if you feel this way. I'm not normally a like silence complicity person. I don't, I actually think it's sort of ridiculous that we demand that every celebrity and every person with an audience have some strong opinion about everything that happens in the world. I actually think the world would be better if most people shut up about most things. Um, but this week has felt different in a really good way. And it does seem like a lot of people have come to that same realization that okay, there are some things, particularly this thing that I have seen with my own eyes this week in these videos that have been passed around that have been everywhere that I feel obligated to say something. And that has been such a sort of universal response on the internet over the last five days in such an interesting way.
Yeah. There's just a core, you could call it a libertarian streak in America. Whatever it is, the no, the government can't do that. Whatever that is, it cuts across the board and the government can't do that. And you know, I spend a lot of time having good faith, angry, whatever conversations about technical government policy on Decoder, whatever, but there are some lines and there are some things that I think we are still generally the same for everybody and this feels like one of them. I would say that I'm very concerned and we're going to talk about it in a second here that we all saw it and we all agree on what we saw is under attack by AI and the platforms and a lot of bad faith actors, but in this moment we all saw it. And you know, I hope everybody read the piece that our creative director Kristen Radke wrote. She grew up with Alex Prey. I just straight up cried when I read it. Like these are real people facing real consequences for exercising the rights that our constitution says that everybody has and that all of that is a mess. And I agree with you. This is one of those moments when everyone's saying the same thing and you can see that the Trump administration is responding to it. There's lots of stuff where not everybody's going to say the same thing and we're going to disagree about it. But this is one of those and I think it's very important for us to keep covering it because it might feel like Trump sent Tom Homan to Minnesota and some policy is going to shift and it's going to be over, but it absolutely is not going to be over. And our job as a newsroom is to just keep covering the story.
Yeah. Um, to your point, Kristen's piece is fabulous and it was like I mostly know the things that are about to happen in our newsroom. That's just one that like appeared on the site and I missed it entirely and that was, boy, was that a thing to read first thing in the morning. That's a terrific piece. Kristen is great. Um, there's a lot of good stuff on the site about this and I do feel like it's been a very Verge way of covering this stuff in a way that I have really enjoyed. Uh, there's been, you know, Sarah Jeong writing about policies and stuff. We've had a lot of really great like on the ground coverage, a lot of discussion about how the information is moving. Uh, we wrote a whole thing about the massive dick subreddit. Uh, Mia Sato did a great job on that. Like this is, I think this is not just a story you have to sort of look at and be like what is the tech angle here. Um, and a thing I don't know if we've ever talked about this on the show, but a thing that I've always liked about you. Uh, I hate most things about you, but a thing I've always liked about you is you were the easiest person to talk into a tech angle in history. Uh, that like there was a story, I forget which story it was years ago, but you were like there's a phone in it. It's fine. It's a tech story and I think that is like a, the world we live in is mediated by those things in ways that I think we grapple with this all the time, right? Like if every single thing happens on the internet, does that mean that every single thing is a Verge story? And the answer is no. But also some things rise to the level that we don't have to do that debate anymore. But also the lines of that are like what we explore all the time, right? Like to what extent is the internet making these things happen and changing them and changing the way that we understand them is like that's the story of everything.
One of the advantages I think we have as The Verge and with our audience specifically is that we don't have to explain everything from like the ground up.
Right. Our audience, our listeners here, technically adept, can see how reality is shaped by what happens on the screens and I think importantly can see when particularly this administration trying to tweet things into reality runs into actual reality and the breakdown that occurs there. So yeah, there's a lot of angles here like through and through. This is a story that was basically meme'd into existence and then there was a ton of video and you have the governor of Minnesota asking everybody to document everything. You have major newsrooms doing second by second, frame by frame alignments of multiple angles of video. You just see like oh we put cameras on the phones and now like politics is different. So I think there's a lot of stories there, but I also think our advantage is we don't have to explain why things are tech stories that the understanding of the tech is actually what drives the culture and we can just talk about that.
Yeah. Um, so yeah, I think like you said this is, this story continues to change. We're going to cover it a lot. Um, we are
[email protected]. You're
[email protected]. I'm
[email protected]. We're not hard to reach if you have thoughts. Uh, many of you know this already and we read all shared those thoughts. Uh, we read all the emails. Please keep telling us what you want to do, what you want to hear more of, how we can make the following buttons more prominent so that you can tune it out if you want to. Um, for our purposes here, there is one specific thing I really want to talk about about this. Um, and a thing that I particularly want you to just help me think through, which is, uh, while all of this is going on in Minneapolis, across the country here in DC, in my backyard, uh, there was a screening of the Melania documentary called imaginatively Melania at the White House and, uh, Tim Cook, Andy Jassy, Lisa Su, the AMD CEO, and a bunch of other, you know, big name people went to this event. Um, there are a lot of circumstances around this documentary that are also ridiculous. Amazon paid $40 million for the documentary, which is like orders of magnitude.
28 million of which went directly to Melania,
right? And I think which was $26 million more than anybody bid. So if you win a bid by double, you're bad at negotiating. Just
Or great at corruption. Uh, and then they've spent $35 million marketing it. So, they're putting an enormous amount of money into a movie that no one is ever going to watch is going to be bad. Melania is a producer. There's just zero chance this movie is any good.
The movie, can I say one thing about the $35 million? If you buy the movie corruptly from the corrupt people, you say to the corrupt people, you're going to spend $35 million marketing the movie, and then you actually spend the $35 million, not only are you great at corruption, you are horrible at lying. Because the thing you can do is just say that you're going to spend the $35 million and you don't have to. Just like for example, Donald Trump Jr. can announce a cell phone and not ship the cell. Like take the lesson. You can just say stuff as David is constantly reminding us. The fact that they actually spent the 35 million is what I think the funniest part of this whole.
What they really should have done is buy like $100 worth of Facebook ads and just target them to that one block of Pennsylvania.
And all the ads should be like we spent $35 million. Like it doesn't matter.
Yeah, this ad cost $35 million is just all that should say. So again, this movie, which they bought for $40 million and spent another $35 million to market, like you said, just nakedly a bribe to the Trump family. Add in the fact that Tim Cook, and I want to talk about Tim Cook in particular. He's not the only person implicated in this, but I think he is the person we are talking about the most as a result. Uh, goes, takes a picture with Brett Ratner, the director of this documentary, and becomes kind of a flash point in this whole conversation of what is Tim Cook supposed to be doing in this instance, right? Like what do we expect of our CEOs?
What are any of these CEOs supposed to be doing, right? And honestly, this is the question that I have. So, people have spent all week basically being like, Apple is bad. Apple is burning many decades of good reputation that it has. Tim Cook is it, you know, Steve Jobs would be rolling over in his grave. Tim Cook is the wrong leader. Tim Cook has a responsibility to do more on and on. There has been a huge backlash to Tim Cook actively participating in this thing at the White House and also sort of the long history. I mean, the man gave a like gold plaque to Trump. He has been party to this administration in several ways. Um, but then also saying, why isn't Tim Cook saying anything? Why aren't they taking some stand or using their platform to say something about what's going on in Minneapolis? And Tim Cook eventually wrote a memo calling saying he had a good conversation with Trump about de-escalation, which is the most like nothing burger of a thing you could possibly imagine.
Oh, this is one of the worst memos in Tim Cook's entire tenure.
It is a lot of words to say nothing.
Yeah. I actually just want to read it to you and I want to put it in context to be clear. The federal government executed a man in Minnesota and that night Tim Cook went to a party at the White House for the screening of a documentary about Melania Trump that is the product of naked corruption and then posed for a selfie with a director who has been accused multiple times of being a sex pest. This is pretty tone-deaf across the board.
Yes. So then there's this outcry as David's saying and he writes this memo and I think he wrote the memo because Apple employees are starting to say what is going on here like our company has values like of all of the companies in tech Apple is the one that like stands on its values right we're for artists and we have these values and we care about equality and all of the things that Apple cares about or says they care about anyway. So then Tim I think is pushed into writing a memo to Apple employees which leaked to Mark Gurman at Bloomberg. Here's the memo and I'm just gonna intersperse my commentary as I read this. Team, I am heartbroken by the events in Minneapolis. What are the events, Tim? Which ones? There's quite a few actually. Uh, two of which are particularly horrible. Is it those?
He's a big Timberwolves fan.
Or is there a bake sale that went awry? Like what are you talking about?
My prayers and deepest sympathies are with the families, the communities, and everyone that's been affected. Who has been affected? Is it the two dead people because they seem like the most important people or is it Donald Trump? He was affected as well. His poll numbers went down. And then the next line, this is a time for de-escalation. Who should de-escalate? Is it the militarized immigration police that are wearing M? Like this is nothing. This is nothing. And it goes to I had a good conversation with the president this week where I shared my views and I appreciate his openness to engaging on issues that matter to us all. What are the issues? What was he open to? Because after that nothing happened. So I just, what I see is a Tim Cook who is captured by a variety of political problems, tariffs, his biggest market is in China outside United States. Like American manufacturing, the fact that Apple runs the app store and Elon Musk hates the app store. Like he's a political creature now. That is the reality for Tim Cook and he has to manage this president and he's given into it. And I think in doing that he is trashing whatever legacy he thought he was going to have. It's going to be this and not Tim Cook built Apple into a company multiple times bigger than Steve Jobs could ever dream of. And I think that's a shame. I think there's a lot to say about the Tim Cook era at Apple. I think there's a lot to say about Tim Cook for a long time very clearly communicating Apple's values more than any thoughts he ever had about any of the products. And now it's Tim Cook wasn't a product guy and Tim Cook cashed in his legacy and his values to Trump at a moment when it was very clear to hardware store owners in Minnesota what their values should be and what they had at stake and they should put gas masks in the front of the store, right? And like that's a tragedy. And I think your question is like what should all the CEOs do? They've all picked the same way.
Yeah. But again, I mean I think intellectually and emotionally I feel all of what you're just saying. But then there is a certain part of me that's like what else is Tim Cook supposed to do?
He's just supposed to not go to the party. Like going to the party is a choice. Going to the documentary is a choice. Sure, he could. You could just not go that day. You could just not take the selfie, right? You can disengage from Mar-a-Lago, right? You can disengage from the social circuit and stay engaged on the politics. And I think a lot of people would understand, all right, Tim Cook, do you remember the first Trump administration, they opened a fake factory in Texas?
Like the factory already existed. Apple didn't even own the factory. It was Flex and it was to manufacture the Mac Pro and it was already happening. And they just sort of reopened a manufacturing facility and Trump got to
For the photo op. And Trump got to do it and we all just had to sit there and we're like, this is a sort of nonsense theater Tim Cook is going to do.
I think a lot of people would be like all right like we're going to do some nonsense theater to get away from tariffs going to the party when you own a rival movie studio to Amazon. That's a choice. And I think now we're in the place where maybe the politics are so corrupt that you have to go to the parties, too. I think that's the answer.
But I don't think, I think that's the line. I think you can actually get away with it.
Maybe that is the nonsense theater. Like maybe the nonsense theater is you have to show up, right? Like we have a president who is like leaving events to go stare out at the ballroom he's building. Like we're not doing politics the way we normally do.
Give him the iPad. Like the one use of AR that I can think of that would be useful for Tim Cook right now is building a model of the ballroom and letting Trump wave the iPad around.
Like just walk around outside the building.
I've seen that demo so many times. Like let like get like make an even bigger iPad. Be like, 'Look, dude. We made you a special 17-inch iPad. You have to grip it like this and you can look at an AR model of the ballroom from every angle. And by the way, if you click this button, it gets even bigger.'
Do you see what I'm saying? Like, everyone would be happy with that. That's fine. And do that photo op all day. I don't think you have to do this. And I think when you send statements to your upset company about it, I think you can actually be clear about what you mean. And I don't think that will piss anyone off.
I just think we're at the place now. There was, I saw one of like Slack responses from Apple employees to this note that was like, 'Well, at least we didn't hear about this in a push notification from the wallet app.' Like this is a company that feels like it's straying from its values in a way that its own employees are noticing. And I think that's, I feel like Andy Jassy doesn't get this because no one thinks of Amazon as anything but just like a ruthlessly like efficient corruption machine.
Yeah. Yeah, I don't think anyone would be surprised that Amazon is doing this, right? Like that's it, that is and that's the thing is I kind of come back to trying to figure out every time whether ultimately you boil all these things down and you're just mad at capitalism and it's like, well, okay, let's solve for shareholder capitalism and then we can have the rest of these conversations about values. But I do agree with you that there is a line there somewhere where it's like you can be a responsible leader of a business and not like a horribly tone-deaf person who doesn't represent all the people who work for you and what actually matters and what you say your values are. I just think that that line has been made very hard to find by this administration on purpose.
On purpose. And the administration is more than willing to use state power to punish you. There's a reason we do a Brendan Carr segment every week. That man is willing to use the power of the government to punish speech. I think that problem gets worse if you're really big.
Yeah. Like we have railed against the monopoly scale of these companies on the show for years. And like that's your problem. Like one version of this problem is you as a customer feel trapped, right? You're mad at Tim Cook. You're mad at Apple. You're mad at Amazon. You're mad at whoever. There's nowhere for you to go. You're stuck. That's weird. Okay. You're these companies and you're so big that when the government comes to put pressure on you, it kind of feels justified. Like what else can stop you? Like these companies are all as big as other countries like Apple and Meta and Google and Microsoft.
They are as big, their income, their revenue is as big as the GDP of some other countries. So like of course the only power that can check them is the government. So they're stuck. And that's like what I mean that like coffee shop owners and bakeries and hardware stores and midsize printing firms in Minnesota are like leading with their values because they're fine. And in many cases they're gaining customers and the customers they're losing are the ones they don't want because they're not out of people in the world because they are total monopolies. And like I think like we talk about that all the time, but the scale of these companies is so out of control that they've become like value-free zones. There's nothing they can do because they have to be. There's no growth in values at some point.
Yeah. They're just out. And I don't know. I think that's bad. I generally think the scale of these companies is bad. It's generally for what I think are purely capitalistic reasons. Like you can vote with your vote and you can vote with your dollars and if you can't vote with your dollars you're kind of stuck waiting for the government to do stuff and that feels bad like I don't know if you've noticed the government's pretty bad at doing stuff.
Right. So I would prefer to say like this sucks and switching and that is just not possible at the scale of these companies and then you get to they're so big that they have to treat our government corruptly and I think that's even worse. Anyway, I think Tim has other choices here. I think he'd rebuild his image. But if what he does is he protects Apple from Trump for three years and then rides off into the sunset and retires to become the executive chairman of the board for the next CEO, I actually don't think he's going to be remembered well. I think he's going to be remembered as a guy who capitulated.
I think you're right. I went back and was reading, Tim Cook wrote and posted publicly a thing after George Floyd was killed in 2020. Um, and let me just read you the beginning just I just want the tone shift of this is just insane. And then we can move on. Uh, but here's how it starts. It says right now there is a pain deeply etched in the soul of our nation and in the hearts of millions. To stand together we must stand up for one another and recognize the fear, hurt, and outrage rightly provoked by the senseless killing of George Floyd and a much longer history of racism. Like the word and feeling and tone of that could not be more different.
And I remind you that happened in the first Trump administration.
The external conditions were nominally the same.
It's just hard to read both of those and have any feeling that Tim Cook meant either one of them. You know what I mean?
Yeah. I think it's easier to blame the nebulous idea of racism, which is what that is.
Right. He's not blaming the cops in that statement. And here there's only one thing to blame, right? An out of control secret police. And he just can't say it.
I don't know, man. Don't go to the parties. That's my advice.
I think just of a piece with all of this stuff, there was a bunch of news this week about the changes with TikTok. Uh, basically the deal went through last week. TikTok USA got off to, I would say, just a horrifically bad start. Um, they couldn't keep the thing online enough to show you videos, which is a bit of a problem if you're TikTok. Um, there was also a bunch of Meta news. Mark Zuckerberg said on an earnings call that AI is the future of social media and a bunch of people just like made fart noises into their computers as a response. But it seems to me that there is a thing that's happening here where the sort of public at large and I hate to generalize everybody, but it kind of feels like any benefit of the doubt, any belief in the general desire to do the right thing and do a good job with these platforms in particular is just gone.
Gone. First, the TikTok thing is very funny because I think that there's going to be some sort of weird new ownership censorship scandal coming, right? The Ellison family, Oracle, bought TikTok. A group of investors include Andreessen Horowitz are part of the consortium that bought TikTok. Like, a bunch of people who have expressed beliefs about content moderation just bought an important platform and I suspect they're going to do something with it. Maybe I'm wrong, maybe they're not going to, but I think they will. I don't think that's anything to do with what happened this last week. I think that what happened this last week is Oracle has to run something now and then it broke.
And like a very funny part of this is TikTok kept putting out statements being like, 'Our data center partner had an outage.' And it's like, 'You mean Oracle, the company that bought you? You just can't say it.'
This is the catastrophic system failure I was referring to at the beginning. That's, they called it a catastrophic system failure.
And it's like, you mean fantastic?
You mean Larry? You mean dad broke it?
Cuz that's your data center partner, the company that bought you because the government made it happen. Like, why can't you just say it?
I think I would be back in on TikTok if they were just like, you know, Larry did it again, guys.
Yeah, Dad broke it. Like, he was screwing around in the garage and he unplugged the server. Like, which is basically the Oracle experience from what I'm told. So there's that which is very funny. Then there's some reporting from I think Bobby Allen at NPR that because they separated the infrastructure from ByteDance at large, there really was a data center problem with Oracle US and it was supposed to fail over to the ByteDance data center in Singapore and that link was broken and then there was a catastrophic failure. This is also very funny because I would remind you TikTok was banned 100 years ago.
Yeah. Like they have been prepared for this outcome for a long time.
and to only now realize that the failover link was reliant on the illegal data center is just the funniest outcome.
Yeah.
But I do think it suggests that no one trusts them. No one trusts content moderation. No one trusts what they see in their feeds. Um, Instagram had this weird bug where stories were not getting any views and so everyone leapt immediately to anything I post about ICE isn't getting any views. TikTok had the weird bug in DMs where it appeared the word Epstein was getting blocked in DMs. But only if you sent it as a single word, which is not how anyone talks in DMs, but everyone up to TikTok is banning the word Epstein because of ICE, which is a conspiracy theory that if you just sort of examine it makes no sense. And you're like, 'Oh, no one trusts these people. They're all too big. All of their content moderation has gone away. They've thrown it all out the window for community notes or not even community notes in the case of Meta. They say it's happening, but it's not actually happening. And now the Trump family and its aura of corruption has like personally touched all these platforms. Mark Zuckerberg will do anything he can to get in Trump's good graces. He's
Still not in Trump's good graces because he's still Mark Zuckerberg. Like, what are you going to do with that? And I, you can see there's other platforms that are growing because people are totally fed up.
Yeah. And I don't think I can see how they can recover the trust because I can't. No. And in part because it is so hard to see, right? That like something as flagrant as they took it over and immediately banned the word Epstein from TikTok is just not how it works. That's like, that's not what these companies do typically unless, you know, like, could that happen eventually? Sure.
I mean, it is what happened with Elon, right? He took it over and immediately changed how that moderation worked.
He did. That is very true. And I think we're going to see that in this case, right? Like someone was asking me the other day, is there a world in which at the end of this TikTok remains TikTok and it sort of feels the same and this transition is normal? And my answer was no. Like even absent all of the politics, just the fact of who these people are and the way that they're retraining the algorithm and the way that they're rethinking the way that people's data is stored and the way that they're going to redo content moderation, it's going to be different. And it's very hard to imagine it's not going to be worse. And the hole that they're in now suggests that they would have to do a bunch of very loud, proactive, successful things to make this work. And again, I would remind you TikTok has been trying to do this for years. Project Texas was like as loud and nakedly transparent as I think it is possible to be in this space and it didn't do anything for anybody. And I think once you've burned your reputation to this extent, I think it's very hard to get back. And it's the same for Tim Cook. Like, are we one cool iPhone feature away from everybody being like, Tim's genius? Like, no, I just don't see it. I don't know how you get this back.
I mean, Tim has spent years pretending to be surprised by his own products at product introductions. Like, I don't think he can announce the new feature and be like, I invented product innovation, right? Like, I've personally seen this man have Johnny Ive point at the back of a Mac Pro and he's like, wow, look at the fans. And it's like, you've seen it before, right? Like, I don't know what that is. Um, no one believes that he's a product innovator. Like, I think what I'm getting at is like, once you have the stain of corruption, it's yours forever.
You can't get away from it. And all of these companies right now feel corrupt because they are so close to the nakedly corrupt thing that I don't know if TikTok can ever get the trust back. I think it will just be conspiracy theories about content moderation from here on out. And I certainly don't think Meta is going to get any of it back given their history, given the fact that Instagram is just a platform for the weirdest slop. Man, I saw sexy Winnie the Pooh just doing the Dougie the other day and I was like, I don't, this is making me feel too many feelings.
I saw a sexy Winnie the Pooh doing a Dougie is not a sentence I'm going to forget you saying anytime soon.
A lot of people have seen it and a lot of the comments suggest that a lot of the people had the same emotional breakdown that I did at that time.
I am officially never a child again after seeing that video.
Damn Winnie. Anyhow, I just, these platforms have lost their trust.
Yeah. And I think that's one of the weirdest outcomes of all this because they're also how all of these videos are being distributed. And so there's something very important there about being able to trust what your eyes can see, being trust that it's not being manipulated by AI in real time, that it's not fully generated by AI, and that the people distributing the content to you are telling you the truth and are trustworthy and can reach you.
Every single one of those is a lever that now these people have, a new group of people has an opportunity to pull.
Yeah. And there's like, I think it's very hard to show how to do better when you've entered the, like, even again, if I'm going to approach this with the best faith possible and say Larry Ellison just wants TikTok to be awesome. He just wants to watch sick videos of trucks. Like, that's all Larry Ellison wants. If I believed that, he is still going to have an incredibly hard time convincing people that he is not who they think he is because of the unbelievably long list of evidence suggesting he is exactly who they think he is. And we've hit this point now where like all this stuff with the Instagram thing, there are perfectly reasonable technical explanations for why view counts wouldn't be going up the way that they're supposed to on Instagram. Everybody immediately leaps to conspiracy theory. This is malicious in some way. And it's like you said, I think once you've inspired that immediate connecting of dots in people's brains, you can't undo it.
Yeah. And especially once your platform has been so successful spreading every other conspiracy theory in the world. Yeah. Like you're stuck with, like, you live in a house that you built.
Well, and I think the bet for all, I mean, the bet for Twitter in a very real way and I think the bet for TikTok is going to basically be where are you going to go? What's your other move? Which is why it's been fascinating. Have you joined Upcrolled yet?
I have not joined UpScroll. There's another, um, UpScroll is the TikTok clone, right? It's like number one in the app store.
Not yet. There's another one, Skylight, which is the app protocol open social web TikTok clone that I'm interested in. I just haven't installed it on my phone yet.
Skylight is very cool. Um, I think Skylight is really neat that it exists more than it is like a particularly sophisticated product, if that makes sense. But it is built on all the stuff that makes Blue Sky special and interesting, but it's TikTok and I think that's very cool. Um, UpScroll is just lit. It's positioning itself as we are TikTok with better values. And boy, is it working for people. It's really fascinating. And I don't think that app has any sort of particularly terrific set of features going for it. It's run by people I think in a team in Australia, New Zealand. Uh, the app is fine. It's like, it just looks like an app that was getting a few hundred downloads a day, which is what it was getting, and now it's the number one app in the app store. Um, but it does suggest there is meaningful energy for something else.
It's like one of my predictions for this year was we're going to get a new social platform that matters. And whether, I wouldn't bet on it being UpScroll, but it sure looks like it's going to be something that there is real appetite for it in a meaningful way.
As always, my bet is on the open social web.
God, I hope something's happening there. Can we actually, can we end on one thing?
The one piece that we put up about all this that made me laugh the hardest, although it is a pretty poignant feature about the nature of tear gas, is Sarah Jeong wrote Best Gas Masks and we had the comments that people like, stick to tech, and our commenters were like, this is tech, it's gear, it's a gadget. So I would like to put gas masks on the Nilay scale of wearable [__].
Because it's a gadget, we could do it. So if you remember, and we've rejiggered the scale a little bit. So if you remember the scale of wearable [__], the x-axis is fiddliness and the y is utility. And so if you have something that you put on your body, the utility has to far outweigh the fiddliness.
Nilay, I have great news for you.
Travis, our producer, has vibe coded something for you.
Would you like to see it?
You know, AI has really taken a turn when we're vibe coding every week now. I swear Travis keeps complaining that he has to do this and I think he loves it.
I think he loves it too. Oh, this is perfect. So, you see on the y-axis is very tall. Uh, right. You've got utility. So, like very useful and the x-axis is fiddliness and you can go to fiddliness and then oh, you put in the line that I asked for. I think that line is at 2x. So, anything above the line is good and anything below the line is useless.
So, do we have, can we put eyeglasses on here?
Sure. So, I have, well, okay. Okay, let me just tell you the ones we have here. Uh, I have the Vision Pro, I have the Meta Ray-Bans, and I have the Meta Ray-Ban displays. So, let's put those in first.
Okay, so the Vision Pro is very fiddly and not very useful.
See? Yeah, that's perfect.
Low utility, high fiddly, way below the line.
It's in the dead zone, right?
Yeah. This diagonal needs a name.
This is like the eyeglasses diagonal, right? That's great. Uh, what was the other band?
The Meta Ray-Bans, where would those go?
The Meta Ray-Bans are like kind of fiddly. They're like on the line.
Right. Kind of fiddly. Yeah.
Well, I would say further down. They're, yeah. Like there. Yeah.
Like lower medium utility, lower medium fiddly.
Yeah. They're glasses. You got to plug them in, but they're useful because you do. You see what I mean? Like regular glasses skyrocket high, like massive utility because they allow you to see. That overcomes any amount of fiddliness. They go up here in the high utility, not fiddly part of the range.
And then the displays I think are even more fiddly because you got to wear the bracelet.
So they're a little higher utility.
And lower, a little higher utility because they have a thing and...
They're like substantially more fiddly.
And so you can see how the eyeglass line really defines this here.
Okay. So then you get gas masks which are very fiddly, right? You got to tighten the straps. You got to make sure you got a seal. From our commenters, it turns out you got to pick the right cartridges to filter out the chemical irritants the government is using to oppress you. But if you need it, the utility is off the charts.
So these belong at the basically the top right corner of the...
Right above the line over there. But only if you need it. Oh, I forgot to mention, by the way, face is a huge fiddliness penalty.
Yes. So all these things, if you put them on your face, the fiddliness is off the charts.
Yeah. But as to your point, if we're talking does it do a job that is important, hard to beat gas mask.
If you need it, then it overcomes face.
Do you see what I mean? This is why it works on the chart. It's just another gadget that you can apply the rubric to.
It's very good. This is where we've come to in America.
We'll link to Sarah's piece on The Verge. But like you always like to say, you find something on the internet and you're like, this is a PhD thesis. Like Sarah's buying guide to the best gas masks is a PhD thesis on so many things but also is The Verge. Like if you're like, what is The Verge? Read Best Gas Masks and you will fully understand the whole thing.
I get notes from like our expats. A lot of people are like, yeah, this is the thing that we, this is what you should do.
It's sincerely absurd and also fantastic. All right, we love a weird graph. We love the open social web. This is what we do here. Uh, we should take a break and then we have the, let's get to gadgets. We're going to do some gadgets.
We're going to turn out of this and we're going to get back to some gadgets and some AI stuff because that's what else is there to talk about, right? We'll be right back.
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All right, we're back. Nilay, there's a new phone.
Have you heard about phones?
I love phones. What are we here for?
The Samsung Galaxy Z Trifold is on sale today, Friday, January 30th, if you're watching or listening to this now. And the big thing we've been waiting for on this, this is the three-pane folding phone, was the price. Um, the price is, I would say, worse than I expected. It is $2,899 for a 512 GB of storage smartphone. It seems high.
There's my take. How's that?
Here. Can I do some inside baseball?
