Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of snow days. I'm your friend David Pierce, and it is in fact a snow day here at my house in Virginia. We got like, I don't know, 10 inches of snow, maybe over the last 24 hours, which means I have spent a lot of time outside shoveling, only to discover that my back and my legs are just pathetically weak. It also means I've been indoors with my two small children for just an unbelievably long time.
We're all getting through it. It's going to be okay. To everyone who was in the path of the storm over the last few days, I hope everyone's doing okay. I hope everyone's doing okay for a lot of reasons. A lot going on right now. Hope everybody's staying safe and doing as well as you can.
Anyway, today on the show, we're going to talk about a lot of stuff. It's a weird episode of the Vergecast. Just is what it's going to be. First, Addy Robertson is going to come on and we're going to talk a little bit about what happened in Minneapolis with Alex Prey this weekend. An awful story about a man who was killed by ICE agents. The story is horrific and sad. We've been covering it. Everybody has been covering it. I hope you're paying attention to it. And Addy and I are going to try to talk a little bit about how we experience things like this online and what we're supposed to do about it.
We're also going to talk about the new TikTok, which both is part of that story and is just changing a lot on its own. The TikTok deal is done. We're going to talk about what happens next. After that, we're going to do just a full 90-degree context switch and we're going to talk about podcasts. So, Netflix has started doing podcasts. It signed these big deals with these big podcasts. And all of a sudden, I open up the Netflix app and there's podcasts. And if that's not a PhD thesis in what is a podcast, I don't know what is. So, Nick Quah, who writes for New York Magazine and is one of my favorite people to talk to about podcasts, is going to come on the show and help me make sense of all of it. We also have a really fun question about phone calls on the broadcast hotline. Lots to get to. It's going to be great. But first, my kids are upstairs and I have to go tell them to stop talking. That's literally what it is. Sometimes people are like, "David, do you make up things that you do?" But no, you can probably hear my kids banging around upstairs. One of them needs a nap. One of them needs lunch. We got a lot going on. I'm going to go deal with it and then we're going to do this. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back.
All right, we're back. Addy Robertson's here. Hi, Addy.
How you doing? It's been a few days for all of us.
Yeah, it's been a few days. No signs of letting up. Yeah. So, I think I want to not spend a ton of time on sort of the facts of what happened in Minnesota because we've covered them a lot. The facts are straightforward and horrific, and what is happening with ICE in Minneapolis. It's awful across the board. For our purposes here, I want to talk a lot about the way that information moves on the internet because there's a version of this story that we cover over and over and over when something like this happens. And I think we've seen this evolve and we've seen this change and we've seen the way that things get recorded and discussed and documented and talked about. And this feels different to me in a way that I have struggled to put my finger on. And I'm curious if you've been watching this as closely as anybody. Does it feel like something different has happened here over the last few days with the Alex Prey story than has happened before?
I feel like in some ways it's an evolution of what's been happening in Minneapolis over the last several weeks. I think you have just this weird, first of all, kind of right-wing creator economy that's merged with the government. And so right from the start you have like the ICE agent in Renee Good's killing allegedly holding a cell phone, but then you also have just this huge number of observers. Like I think that obviously documenting law enforcement killings is absolutely nothing new. But I think that at this point now it's something happens, a video goes up, and then you wait for the second and third and fourth angle. And I think that's kind of just this absolute omnipresence that feels, I think, new to this and for the last few weeks.
Yeah, I do think I was trying to think about that even how it has changed since Renee Good was killed and it does feel like one big difference with this one was that it was so much more kind of closely documented, right? Like the Renee Good thing. We spent endless hours litigating like the way the wheels of the car were turning and the way that this was just a video of a bunch of people on the street. And I think over and over over the course of even like the first couple of hours after this happened, it felt like we got sort of clearer and clearer video and better and better angles of the video. And it was just this thing became well and authoritatively documented faster than anything like this I can imagine. I mean, in a lot of ways it was, yeah, it was I mean, a really graphic incident, among other things. But I also think there's it's not just the actual video evidence. I think that to some extent, people have kind of learned that the debate in Renee Good's killing was really overwhelmingly bad faith.
And I think that the odds of getting caught in a discourse trap where you just endlessly litigate, well, did he have a gun? Did he have a gun? Did he pull it? Did he threaten with the gun? Did someone feel threatened by the gun? I think that people, at least some people, were maybe a little bit primed to just realize that's a trap.
Yeah. And I mean it is a trap. And I think I do think everybody fell into that trap again, but there has been this turn very quickly where a lot of people are like, and Sarah Jeong wrote a very good piece for us about this that is basically like it actually doesn't matter. All this stuff you're saying is not a relevant part of the debate that we're having. But the flip side of this video thing that I was so struck by is we've reached this place where all of this stuff is being increasingly well documented, right? And I think that the folks in Minneapolis have clearly made an effort to document these things like that this is being done on purpose. And I think that's really good. And yet at the same time the engine to either discredit what is being documented or ignore it entirely or modify it with AI is also spinning up like at equally record speed. Charlie Warzel, who you and I both like, wrote a very good piece for The Atlantic. And I think his headline was "Believe Your Eyes." And I came out of that piece being like, "Yes, that's true. Except you can't believe your eyes." Because we've hit this thing where the minute something is documented, that same minute it can be changed in any number of infinite ways. And it feels like the systems by which that is happening are getting sophisticated at unbelievable speeds. And I just I don't know how to reckon with that anymore. It's really hard for me to tell because on one hand, yeah, there are just all of these cases in which AI has made reporters' lives harder. I think the incident with the Instacart driver, like the guy who worked for the food delivery service that made up this entire AI-generated document that Casey Newton posted about, like I think those things are definitely examples of just how this can be really troublesome. But on the other hand, like as a bunch of us were watching this pretty much as it unfolded, it's actually in a lot of cases not that hard if you are used to paying attention to the provenance of images and to documenting like how things spread through systems and to kind of recognizing where is a credible source and where isn't. I think in a lot of cases it's not actually that hard to tell what's real. And it's also been a little bit striking to me that the rebuttals that the administration has tried to offer in both Renee Good's and this latest killing have been really, at least at first, not AI-manipulated things. The initial response from the White House with Renee Good was just this one selective angle that they had found that they hung all of their hopes on. And then the first response here was the picture of the gun that they had been claiming they confiscated. And so then while all of this stuff does kind of just really spiral out and I think become a huge problem, I think it does so in kind of weird ways and also in ways that haven't compromised the fundamental ability to at least kind of establish that something is happening. It's funny that a lot of the examples we've seen of AI-generated misinformation have been sort of well-meaning, for lack of a better word, examples. Like the idea is that you're attempting to enhance these things, that you're attempting to like uncover stuff. You're not actually trying to change the story. You are at least purporting to be trying to help. And this also happened with Charlie Kirk's alleged killer. So, it's interesting that I think the AI saga has not quite played out the way that the most obvious versions of it could.
Yes. I mean, and I think this is one of the reasons I'm so caught up in trying to figure out how to feel about this. It's like the I sent you this one image that has been all over my timeline for the last couple of days and it's a photo of three agents next to Alex Prey who is he's kind of in the middle of falling down and the three agents are one is kneeling and the other two are standing over him. And I have seen this particular image a everywhere and b used to make a variety of different arguments on either side of the case about what actually happened and who's at fault and the problems here. Except the problem is this image that is being shared everywhere is essentially like you said an AI-enhanced still from a video that doesn't show what the video seems to be showing. So, and there are a bunch of like fascinating AI angles in this. You look at this image and actually one of the agents' heads has been replaced by a hand because it looks like the agent standing is sort of reaching his arm down and it looks like he just squashed the other agent's head down into his jacket. Alex Prey, if you look at this image, appears to be holding a gun. He's not. He wasn't. We know these things. The video shows that he was disarmed before he was pushed down on the ground, before he was shot, but it looks like he's holding a gun. And you can see why Gemini in looking at this image would take a blurry object in his hand and turn it into a gun, right? And this is just such a bizarre piece of this to me because again, I think you're right. You could go into this process with only the best intentions to say, I want to make this image better because I want to understand what's in it. And give it to a tool that you don't fully understand because hardly anybody fully understands what's happening here. And then this comes out and actually all of your sort of reasonable good faith incentives would be to believe what this image is even though absolutely everything about it is wrong. And I think like you say it's easy to establish provenance and stuff like that, but I just think most people's experience is to sort of drop into a story like this somewhere in the middle and then winding your way all the way back to the beginning when it was obvious what was what just feels harder than ever.
Yeah, I think that's right. I think it's also really frustrating that nobody has really established a social way to deal with AI as a stereotype machine and what it does is give you the most plausible narrative outcome which is a stereotype because this has been going on for ages that people have been enhancing images in ways that distorted them using more primitive AI tools using non-commercial AI tools just for years and years now. We've had years of knowing this happened and really nobody who is in a state to do anything about it I think has actually taken this seriously enough.
Yeah. What do you make of kind of the more universal outcry against this? We've been tracking this a lot and I think a lot of creators we have not seen talk about this kind of thing directly have been talking about this directly. There was like every subreddit on Reddit this became a huge thing. It just feels again to go back to the like information moving differently question. I don't know if there's a dam that broke here or if this was finally the straw that broke the camel's back, so to speak, or if there's something about the particulars of this case that just made it feel different to anyone paying attention to it. But I don't know. Does that feel different to you that this has reached a different sort of scale of conversation in places you would not necessarily expect?
Honestly, I think that Renee Good's killing to some extent kind of had already done part of this, but it's possible it's the dam breaking. It's also, look, it's they shot a man execution style in the middle of the street.
That's just a really striking image.
And we watched it again. I really do think going back and watching the Renee Good videos, it is so much less visible what's happening right there. It's just so much you understand what's happening. But this was visceral in a way that I had not experienced with most of these other things like it and it really we still as a society I think have not reckoned with the fact that these videos just appear. You just open an app and they're just there. Like a lot of us just watched someone get murdered by accident this weekend. What a bizarre experience that I don't know how to sort through that at all.
Yeah. I mean this is just this is something I've been doing for a really long time and I do think that it's probably not good for other people to do.
I don't think it's good for anybody to do, including you, but I'm glad you're here to do it for us. Okay, so I think this is a thing we should talk a lot more about, but I actually want to like wait a minute because there's a lot happening and we will come back to this.
I think it is unfortunately pretty implicated in the story that we are about to talk about.
Yes. And this is why I want to transition to this. I should say all of our thoughts are with everybody in Minneapolis. This is it's awful out there for a lot of people right now. We should talk about the new TikTok because I think this is a part of this story and there are real parallels or intersections of this that I think are really interesting. So the news of last week was that the long-awaited, long-complicated TikTok deal is finally done. TikTok US has new ownership and new investors and a whole new plan. What do you make of where this landed? Is this roughly the TikTok US we've been expecting all this time?
I think we don't know yet. The primary reason being that the entire thing this supposedly hinges on is data collection and the algorithm. And data collection. No one I think has established a really amazing way to say more than trust me at this point yet. And the algorithm has not even been deployed yet.
Right. So the changing that is supposed to happen here as I understand it, right, is there's new leadership. Adam Presser is now the CEO of TikTok US. There are a bunch of new board members. There's still some connection to TikTok global. Shou Zi Chew, the CEO is still I think he's on the board of directors, right?
Yeah. Yeah, but the thing is supposed to be split off in a couple of meaningful ways. Like you said, the algorithm is supposed to be trained on and using and only concerned with US user data and then the data privacy of it all is supposed to be changed in some meaningful important way. And like you said, this has been a black box for forever, right? Like TikTok has been making grand promises about transparency and data privacy and stuff for years now. Project Texas was supposed to be this thing,
right? This Oracle deal is since 2020.
And so do you think we're at least on a path to knowing more? Like what would it take to have some real certainty here is a question I increasingly find myself asking.
I think in a lot of ways that depends on what we find out about the good faith of the people who own it. Now I really think that there's been a lot of parsing of say the terms and conditions which now allow for some more precise data collection and some other things. And I think people are reasonable to be worried about the things that we're being told and to be parsing these things closely, but I think a lot of the problem is like just look at the X roadmap. Like I think X is sort of the worst case scenario for what we see with TikTok now. And it was not a case where they made all of these like changes that you could document in public. It was just a case where they slowly started doing things behind the scenes and because Musk can't stop talking about them, a lot of them came out. But I think that I think it's just become way more of a black box because now there is virtually no accountability for it.
Yeah. What do you make of this terms of service thing? I think one of the most predictable things that happens whenever a deal like this goes through is the everybody reads the terms of service of the app for the first time and is incredibly alarmed by all of the things in it. This happens on Instagram all the time. Every once in a while somebody posts the terms of service and it's like, "Oh my god, can you believe they take all this information from me?" And in this case on TikTok, it was the phrase let's see, it said that it was going to collect information about quote your racial or ethnic origin, national origin, religious beliefs, mental or physical health diagnosis, sexual life or sexual orientation, status as transgender or non-binary, citizenship or immigration status, or financial information. I would say a it's important to note that this was already present in the terms of service. This does not appear to be a new thing under this group. There are a couple of new things. TikTok now seems to have access to more precise location and also having some more information about your AI interactions. But that sentence right that information is both again already in the terms of service but also in this new context of TikTok's new owners who are Oracle and Larry Ellison who is a very close friend of President Trump and you know these other investors and the people on the board they take on I think reasonably if not accurately new meaning for people. Do you make anything out of people being worried by this? Are they right to be worried by this?
I think people are again not so much the language which I think is like I fully support people looking at it and trying to change it. But I think people are right to be worried about the ownership. People are right to be worried about the fact that if TikTok does something to abuse people's trust, there's going to be no regulation or meaningful consequences for it. I think that people are right to be worried about the fact that now also the sort of circles that Larry Ellison is in are extremely gung-ho about censorship in the actual government censorship sense of taking down things that are critical of I mean Charlie Kirk and are critical of DHS and ICE. I think that we should just recognize that the intent of the people who own TikTok and the intent of the people that they are working with has become somewhat dramatically different.
Yes. And I think this is a really interesting one in the case of who the old owners were versus who the new owners are, right? The old owners, everybody was afraid of China. That was China is sort of the big bad in this story, right? And there was this intelligence briefing a long time ago where a bunch of senators came out and voted 50 to zero to ban TikTok. So, it's like, okay, well, clearly they must have seen something. We were never told what it was. There's some inclination that it has to do with what's happening in Gaza that there's just a lot of stuff that we don't know. But there has been this running undercurrent of what if China is changing what we see on TikTok to its own ends. That was always very abstract and whether it was real or not, we genuinely don't know. There are people who probably do, but we don't. This feels again in keeping with all of the other stuff that we've seen and what's happened to Twitter and X. And you can see what that turn would look like in this case, right? With these new owners, with their proximity to the Trump administration, with the way that information has moved on the internet the last few days with Alex Prey's story, you can see where this might go. And I think to me the biggest question is the best case scenario here is TikTok remains TikTok, right? Like it is roughly still the experience that people have liked it to be for a very long time just with the data centers are now in California instead of in China. Sure.
The good case scenario is capitalism works. That capitalism works the way that people talk about capitalism being supposed to work, which is you want to make money, you want to run a good service, you want to run a service that appeals to everyone. And that's great, but you again like look at X. X does not make a ton of sense from a standard free market capitalist perspective,
but it solves a different problem for a very rich person, right? And that's exactly where I was going is I think as you look at the capitalism works version of the outcome here versus the this is a means to a different kind of end. Maybe it's the cynic in me at this point in the technological history that we're covering, but it feels like if I had to bet on an outcome, I'm betting on it turning into X much more than it turning into the beautiful capitalistic utopia we hope it might be.
Yeah. Do you think a lot of it I think that that's I mean at this point probably what I would peg as the most likely outcome. I think the other outcome is that a lot of people are very responsive to vibes. And I think that even people who are not who are like very willing to throw conventional capitalism out the window are like, well, will people not like me? Will this go against like culture? Will this put me on sort of the wrong side of the winning angle in politics? And I think that is probably the thing that could stop someone at this point. Like I don't know Mark Zuckerberg is maybe the other example of like Mark Zuckerberg is someone I don't really know what his actual political convictions are but he very definitely has occupied different roles and very dramatically different styles of operating his company depending on which way the winds are blowing.
Yeah, in a strange way being a moving target like that is kind of useful in the long run for somebody like Mark Zuckerberg. But one thing I wonder in this case is how will people know whether it's changing? I think you know there was this weird change that happened this weekend after the change went through where as far as we can tell and according to TikTok's own explanations there has been some big power outage which screwed up the algorithm in some way and everybody's TikTok experience was just broken and there was a sense of like okay this is different and bad but if we take TikTok at its word and it was just because a thing got turned off that needed to be turned back on again. Do you have a sense of how we will know what is and isn't changing? Cuz I think again, you look at X and it was very obvious what was happening because like you said, Elon Musk just kept saying it out loud, right? Like you spend four minutes on X and it is blindingly obvious what that place is. Is TikTok likely to go the same way if it goes the same way.
I don't know about the early transition period because the other early transition period at X was just they like fired everyone and started randomly unplugging servers. And I don't know if there's that level of enthusiasm for just weird Doge-style chaos among like Silver Lake and Oracle. But in the longer term, TikTok has always I think been one of the most frustrating black boxes in terms of social media platforms and social media platforms in general. It's been a really huge issue that they've very quickly like just gradually retired all of the tools like that allow you to actually see into them and that this is a thing that academics have been asking about for a long time and it's again we failed to fix something and now it's blowing up in our faces in the worst possible way. But I do think that the academics that have not been fired as part of the Trump administration purge are probably going to do a good job in some ways of testing how things work out. I think those are probably the people we want to look for. I think that while again I find it eminently believable they will change things. People have pointed out there is a huge incentive as a creator to claim that you are being censored and to interpret things in the most dramatic way possible. So I think that we're also just going to see a lot of noise in the signal.
Yeah. Do you think politically this saga is over? Does this satisfy the many back and forths of what the ban is and is not that we've had over six years now?
In terms of the letter of the law, while they haven't got a new algorithm yet, which was the whole point of this thing, and I think there are other, Lauren has a good piece about just lawmaker responses. They are not terribly happy about this in terms of there being the political will to actually make a big deal out of it. We've had a year or more and it hasn't happened. So I'm not sure that now that the deal is closed and it would be even harder to do something that people are going to suddenly wake up. So I don't know. I think the saga probably isn't politically over in that there's still a lot to do and that managing a very large social media platform that is working with another large social media platform that is the same thing but run by different people is difficult. And that if they start politically messing with it, that's going to be a whole other story. I think we've just opened like a whole other can of worms. We've just finished this one part of the saga and now there are many directions it could go.
Yeah. And I suspect you're right and I think it's going to be one of those things that is very obvious in retrospect how it turned out. You know what I mean? When we write the history books about all of it, we'll know. But I think I'm just fascinated by what the day-to-day experience of being on TikTok is going to be like because there's going to be a brief period where I think it's just objectively worse because it's going to if this new algorithm is going to exist, these things take time. It's going to be different. It's going to feel bad to people like the experience will just sort of meaningfully change in some way. Even if it's not better or worse, it just will be different. And then after that, all bets are off. I have no idea where it goes from here. But I think the idea of TikTok remaining TikTok just with better data privacy feels essentially impossible to me at this moment in time.
I think the other thing that's going to be interesting to watch is just how much pressure the administration puts on TikTok. Like we already again with Charlie Kirk and with earlier ICE DHS operations, we saw lawmakers, we saw the DOJ, we saw other officials trying to just get companies to take things down. We've seen this framing of any accountability for any individual officer being described as doxing. That's why we don't really know anything about the people who killed Alex Prey, right? I think that the odds that they're going to see this as a friendly platform and try to shut down the spread of things that they don't like on it feels just inevitable whether or not it actually happens.
Agreed. All right. Well, we will see. There's a lot left to come back to here unfortunately. But for now, thank you Addy. I appreciate you coming on.
We're going to take a break and then we're going to just aggressively context switch. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. A website should help your business grow, not slow it down. So, if updating your company's website feels like a chore, then it might be time to try Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Miro to move faster. With real-time collaboration, a robust CMS with everything you need for great SEO and advanced analytics that include integrated A/B testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your.com from day one. Changes to your Framer site go live to the web in seconds with one click without help from engineering. So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your.com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at framer.com/verge for 30% off a Framer Pro annual plan. That's framer.com/verge for 30% off. framer.com/verge. Rules and restrictions may apply.
All right, we're back. So, like I said, let's just do a full clean break here. There is no good way to segue from what we were talking about to what we're about to talk about, but we're just going to do two different things on this show. And we're going to have a lot more to say about what's going on in Minneapolis. Our team is doing really great coverage from on the ground and from afar. There's just a lot of good stuff out there. I will do my best here to link you to it and to bring people on who can talk about it, but keep your eyes on the site. The story is moving really fast. We will cover it as we can. This is what you subscribe to The Verge for, by the way. Like if you subscribe to The Verge, do it knowing that it lets us do this kind of coverage the way that we do it. And I'm really proud of our team. So, all that to say full on, let's go do something else now. So, I had this very strange experience a few weeks ago where I sat down to watch Netflix and all of a sudden I was confronted with a podcast I've been listening to for years. So, Bill Simmons is a sports podcaster and was a sports writer for a long time. Has a very famous sports podcast. He's a big deal. I've been listening to for many years and I had just a truly bizarre experience of being confronted by his face just like this on my screen as I sat down to watch television and I had this moment of being like is this the end of podcasts? And I don't mean that in a sort of bleak way. I just mean we've always had delineations of where things are and what they are and different formats and different kinds of things. And I think if you ask somebody what is a TV show and then you ask them what is a podcast? I think you would be able to intellectually understand the difference between those two things and now it feels to me like all of that stuff is crashing into each other on Netflix. Literally and figuratively crashing into each other on Netflix. So I called up Nick Quah who's one of my favorite people to talk about this with. He is a critic and staff writer. He writes for Vulture and New York Magazine, our sister publication here at Vox Media. He's also just been covering podcasts longer than just about anybody and knows this space super well. So whenever I have feelings about podcasts that I need to talk through, I like to do it with Nick. And that is exactly what we did here. Let's get into it.
Nick Quah, welcome back to the Vergecast.
Oh, my pleasure. It's an honor. One of the older podcasts in the world. I love it.
It does feel like every day that goes by that we continue to make new episodes, we become one of the oldest still running podcasts. I guess
you live a new day every day. You two are becoming older.
It's beautiful. So, I like to bring you here whenever weird stuff that I don't understand is happening in the podcast business and try to make you explain it to me. And right now the weird thing that is happening in the podcast business is Netflix just kind of writ large. And there are two different pieces of the puzzle that I want to talk to right now. There's Netflix paying a bunch of money to companies like Barstool and The Ringer and iHeart to bring video podcasts onto Netflix. And then there's Netflix starting to make its own original video podcast. And I think those are sort of overlapping but kind of different things. And I want to talk about them both. But my first question for you is, if I remember correctly, the last time I talked, you were kind of ambivalent about the idea of podcasts becoming a video-forward medium. Since the last time we talked, if anything, it has become an even more video-forward medium. How are you feeling about the world of video podcasts these days?
Oh, you know, I'm feeling, you know, inevitability, right? We live in a world of incentives, motivations, and metrics. And the incentives and metrics are such that everything in the media business and the internet digital media business is oriented around video being a really fast highway to growth or to getting more audiences between video's ability to travel on social media a little better, get in front of more people in theory, you know, trickle down the funnel. And it's and video's ability to make sense to more places in the entertainment ecosystem that makes a lot of money. So, you know, I feel what I'm feeling, how I'm feeling is irrelevant to the way the world works, but very much so. Right now, January 2026, I would say that the bulk of the energy around podcasting is around it sort of, you know, pivot towards video. It's not pivot, it's complete. But I would also say that there's now there should be a real conversation as to like whether we call these things podcasts, right? Whether podcasting has a technical definition or it's more of a conceptual brand definition because at the same time while we're talking about Pete Davidson's theoretical video podcast that doesn't really have a version that's going to be just audio that you can access it outside of Netflix, you know there is still kind of an ecosystem of audio-forward and centric podcasts many of which are independent of course that are still making quite a bit of money and have quite a bit of audience so there's a bit of a category collapse here.
Yeah, one of the trends I have started to find really interesting is I'm starting to see more and more podcasts where the audio episode is still the main thing, right? And often the only way to get the full episode is in audio, but they'll actually record on video just to run social clips. So you can't find the full episode on video anywhere, but you can find tons of social clips. And that to me is like the most perfect acknowledgement of what this is of anything I've ever seen that it is like, okay, we want to make an audio thing. And I actually really appreciate the idea that audio things are different. Like as this show has become more video-based, we do things differently and there are things we don't do now, right? And that sucks, right? Like I don't like that. And I think we're still trying to figure out a way to make that work. But you can make an audio product, but it is just factually true that if you want to find new audiences, the best and in many cases only way to do it is to make vertical video of your podcast and put it on TikTok. Like it's just that just is the way now. Like
but you know that is also just like practical right like if it turns out to be the case that video is the best marketing medium then yes engage in a marketing medium the sort of core product itself how you make money how you develop a relationship with an audience if that is primarily oriented around the sort of audio component of it makes sense there's I was talking to somebody who hosts a show for a very big media company I it's you know I don't think I have the liberty to sort of share the details on this but he was telling me about how he sort of it's kind of feels like there two timing two different audiences and within the real the span of their sort of like episodes that they do. There are some episodes depending on the subject and depending on the guest it just performs better as a video podcast on YouTube versus on as an audio only on the RSS feed and it ping pongs back and forth pretty regularly. And the question to me is like how do you sort of square the accounting of that? Like can you make revenue on both sides collectively to actually support your show? But there is this really strange sense where like a different like you are serving fundamentally different audiences using the same vessel and you got to do it again and again and again and again to somehow make the numbers work.
Yeah. I mean I remember you know years ago thinking it was so weird that you could get a 60 Minutes podcast that was literally just the audio feed of 60 Minutes. And like some of the CNBC shows have done that and there is it is that's sort of a different container for the same thing, but it is like a fundamentally worse product, right?
But that's also one of the earliest forms of podcasting was that people ripped straight from the broadcast of Fox News and throw it on Apple iTunes like that that was a very very legitimate way that people engage in podcasting in like the late 2000s for sure.
