Reddit vs. Reddit: the latest on the fight for the platform

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Try Odoo for free at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com. Support for the show comes from Odoo. Running a business is hard enough, so why make it harder with a dozen different apps that don't talk to each other?

Introducing Odoo, it's the only business software you'll ever need. It's an all-in-one, fully integrated platform that makes your work easier. CRM, accounting, inventory, e-commerce, and more. And the best part, Odoo replaces multiple expensive platforms for a fraction of the cost.

That's why over thousands of businesses have made the switch. So why not you? Try Odoo for free at Odoo.com. That's O-D-O-O.com.

Hello and welcome to VerChast, the flagship podcast of open API access for third-party apps. On this episode of the show, we go deep into React. That would be incredible if we just do a whole show on React. We should do a whole show on React.

Anyway, I'm your friend Eli, David Pierce, here. Yeah, a thing that is true is that there is a whole series pitch that includes an episode on React, so don't shoot great. It's fine. Very good.

Alex Gaines is here. I can say I don't want to be on that episode. Yeah, Alex is like, rust for life. I don't know what these words mean, and I hope people get very mad at me.

I've learned that's the secret to online engagement. Can we make bumper stickers that say rust for life? I feel like you tell a lot of those. I want to be clear.

I don't know what these words mean. Jay Peters is here. Hey, I also cannot tell you what rust is. I buy the sticker, though.

We can Google it. The problem is that we Google it and get a result from a Reddit forum that is down. And that's really the show today. So we have a lot to talk about.

We have a talk about Vision Pro. We have a lightning round coming up. But the story of the week, which Jay in particular has owned top to bottom, is what is going on at Reddit. I will tell you, the listener now, Jay, five minutes ago, was on the phone with Reddit CEO Steve Huffman in what I think we can only describe as a somewhat contentious interview.

Steve Huffman does not want third-party apps. He does not care for them, it appears. No, it shouldn't be a surprise if he followed his AMA last week, where he also said that he wants apps to pay for these or go away. But in my interview with him, he kept that same line and believes very strongly that third-party apps should pay up or go away.

So there's a lot going on with the story. On Wednesday, we had Christian Seeley, the developer of Apollo, a third-party app. We should have got the developer and user side of what's happening with Reddit. It's important to talk about the Reddit side of what's going on with Reddit.

Jay, walk us through what's been happening. So at the highest level, this all comes down to API changes that were announced in April, which the company at the time positioned as a way to monetize their data that have been used to train AI and large language learning models. CEO Steve Huffman gave a big interview to New York Times to this effect. At the time, though, we didn't know how this might affect third-party developers.

And at the end of May, third-party developers learned how it would affect them. And it turns out the cost would be, for the vast majority of them, very, very, very high, to the point where now we know that some of the biggest apps are going to have to shut down and users are really unhappy about that. And the company's perspective on this is kind of muddled, right? What started out is we're mad at ChatGPT and Google for scraping Reddit for all these years and using the trained large language models.

And it's ended with, and we hate this third-party app that's developed by one guy in Canada. Well, so actually, I think it might be useful to back up even one tick further than that. Because I think the thing that has been true about Reddit for a long time is it is the best source of information on the internet, right? It's sort of a truism of people who love the internet, that if you want useful information about a product, you append Reddit to your Google search.

Because that's where all the good product information is. It's where all the good conversation is happening. It's where all of the good stuff is, right? Like Google's a mess.

We've been writing a lot about the disaster that is SEO. Reddit is wonderful, right? And the thing is, Reddit has never for one second figured out how to build a business out of this. So it has just floated along as this lovely internet place that has an alien as a logo.

And then recently has decided, okay, we want to be a public company. We want to be an ongoing business concern that makes money. And so they have spent the last couple of years really trying to find ways to be a successful business that could be a public business. And that really turned again when ChatGPT became huge.

And it was like, okay, it's very clear that Reddit's data is valuable not just to people on the internet, but to all of these companies who are building these AI models. And I feel like it started right at that moment to like, okay, our data is literally valuable in a monetary way. And we have to figure out how to squeeze more money out of it than we ever have before. And that's like, it's 15 years of work that they didn't do.

There's all kind of coming back right now. So I think that's right, right? They need to make money. They want to go public.

They've been talking about it. This idea that other big companies are going to scrape their site and use that to generate outsize AI profits has got to be annoying them. They're just screwing up how they are talking about this more than anything. Steve Huffman in particular seems determined to just tell the users of Reddit what's going to happen.

And I'm just reading the transcript of your energy. It comes through in text. What was it like in person? It was contentious is what you said is the best way to put it.

I wondered after seeing the AMA and seeing the company's response to this. I wondered if it was coming from the top. Like I couldn't think of why else Reddit, which has previously been, I feel like very responsive to its community, willing to listen, make adjustments as needed. That's not the case here.

Steve Huffman believes very much in this business decision to charge more for its API. And he is going to go through with it, hell or high water, because I'm not 100% sure at the end of the day why he wants to do that. But I think it's the combination of making money from these AI companies and to run out these third-party apps that he believes have built businesses that are in competition with Reddit itself. So this is like a decoder trope is that two things that look the same on the internet, often one of them is much more valuable than the other, right?

So accessing Reddit through Reddit makes much more money for Reddit than accessing Reddit through Apollo. And so if you're just looking at Reddit, and he says this in your interview, if you type Reddit into the app store and Apollo comes up and you pick Apollo over the Reddit app, you are making less money for Reddit. So I understand that, right, that framing, that these things are in competition. These experiences are in competition, and one of them generates more revenue for Reddit than the other.

I don't know, and I'm wondering if you got the sense when you're talking to him, if the API pricing actually equalizes that or it just gets rid of the competition. My sense is gets rid of this. Unfortunately, that's what I think it is. The pricing seems so high for the developers who make these really beloved apps, and Reddit has just shown they're not going to give an inch on any sort of negotiation or giving them more time to follow the policies or even like a lower price that I really think Reddit wants to get rid of these competing apps so that users have to go onto the website or the official Reddit app, and Reddit can hopefully find ways to better monetize those users from there.

So I'm going to read the audience's quote from Steve Hoffman to Jay real quick, because I think it really puts a lot into perspective. The vast majority of uses of the API, not third-party apps, the other 98% of them make tools, bots, and enhancements for Reddit. That's what the API is for. It was never designed to support third-party apps.

And Hoffman goes on to say he let it exist, and that he should take the blame for those apps existing, because, quote, I was the guy arguing for that for a long time. There's an inherent tension in those statements, right? I was the guy arguing for third-party apps to exist. Also, the API was never designed to allow these apps to exist.

Did he explain that tension at all to you? I mean, I'm still coming off the eye of it all, but... We really didn't realize Jay picked up the phone and tells us exactly what happened. Yeah.

I mean, I don't remember him speaking to that, which tells me this change was pretty sudden. And especially when we hear folks like the Apollo for Reddit developer, Christian Selig, when he had heard in January that the API was not going to change. I believe his quote from Reddit was, it won't change for years. And then all of a sudden, it's going through this monumental shift, says that something over the past six months changed within Reddit, even though this is something that Steve told me that they've been talking about doing something like this for a very, very long time.

They actually had made a choice about it, and they gave everybody a month and a half to figure it out, or two and a half months. But ultimately, they didn't even get that long, because I think, and you point this out in a lot of the coverage you've been doing, is that they made this announcement in April without saying prices. And what we've heard from a bunch of developers overwhelmingly is like, yeah, that sort of makes sense, right? Like, you've been giving us free data for a very long time.

It makes sense that it's not going to have charges for us. But then what Reddit was telling them was, we're going to do this in the same way. It's going to make sense. And then Reddit comes out with this gigantic price at the end of May with a 30-day deadline, which is essentially nothing.

Like, there's really, there's not a lot of meaningful moves you can make in a 30-day window. And based on that, I don't know how you come out of this thinking anything other than they're just trying to kill the big third-party apps. Because they got, like, it's not hard to model that out and figure out that's what's going on here. And Steve went out of his way a bunch of times to say, we're working with us, do someone work with us, a lot of the stuff that's on the platform is still going to be on the platform.

And it's like, okay, but that's not the stuff you're describing as a competitor to Reddit. And what you're doing here is you are swiftly killing all of the things that you perceive to be a competitor to Reddit. I thought what was really interesting in your conversation there, Jay, was how actively hostile he was, not just to those developers, but to the users themselves. It really feels like a shift.

And maybe it's because they figured out large language models and they can go and they can monetize that. But it really feels like there's a shift at Reddit where they no longer view the users as customers, but as something in the way of what their actual profit is. Like, this whole conversation he had with you, he was just, he was talking about how the users are the ones that are shutting up other users. They're getting rid of dissent.

They're not letting the true people of Reddit speak out. And this is just a tiny minority. And that just seems, like, incredibly hostile and cruel to your user base, many of which are mods who are certainly the most dedicated members of the team, or of the community. What I feel like might be what the company is trying to stress test here is how much do people love Reddit, even if these third-party apps go away?

And I think for so many of us, Reddit has become a habit, becomes a cycle we check on a regular basis. And will the power users of the Reddit apps, which I have to suspect are ultimately a minority of users of the platform, do they move over? Or will they continue to be very vocal and want to be able to access Reddit in places that are not the official apps? That's what the protests this week have been about.

And we'll have to see if Reddit will respond to that or if they're going to continue to stick to the party line. And based on our conversation with Steve Huffin, I think it's going to be the latter. I think the confusion I continue to have with this, and maybe you can give some insight. He repeatedly says it's costing them $10 million a year in infrastructure and costs to support these apps, which makes them very little money to no money.

And he views that as almost they're stealing Reddit profit and stuff like that. So $10 million, which for a company like Reddit is a lot, but also should not be a whole lot for a company that large. And he's willing to go to war with his most vocal, most active users over $10 million. Steve Huffman last week, he said in the AMA that we are not profitable, is something that he said.

And I think based on my conversation with him, I think he's really trying to turn the business into a profitable business as soon as possible. And one very clear line item for that appears to be this $10 million infrastructure cost to maintain these apps that he is okay losing, perhaps at the expense of people being really, really, really mad at him, so that the company can find better business footing. You know, we'll see if that pans out. You know, it's funny, now I'm rooting for the Reddit app just so you can get public financial aid on the company.

Oh, I know. We just don't know the answer to that question. Alex, I think the one thing I would add to that is it's not just the $10 million, but it's the opportunity cost of all the people who use apps like Apollo, who are by definition going to be like power users of the platform, who are not using the Reddit app. So not only are you paying to keep Apollo alive, you're losing all of the money that you would get from all of the people who use Apollo.

But the thing that confuses me there is that's a mobile only app, which means it's affecting their mobile traffic. Reddit has its own app, which by all intents and purposes it sucks. Yeah, like I use Apollo because the Reddit app sucks. Yes, right.

The thing they should have done is spend $10 million to buy Apollo. Right. And that's the thing that I just keep getting confused on. I'm like, why are you like, we want to kill the good products and foist the shitty product on everybody and then be like confused when everybody's mad that we're foisting the shitty product on them.

Again, part of the interview and part of what prompted Reddit to speak today, they have not been speaking a lot, they put out a fact sheet. You know, their claim is like, this isn't such a big deal. Joe, you want to run us through some of the numbers there? So with this fact sheet, the main thing that they have on the fact sheet is that more than 80% of our top 5,000 communities by daily active users are now open.

And this is what is technically day four of the protests that started in earnest on Monday. And what Reddit is trying to say here is that Reddit wants to be open. It does not want to be protesting. The many quote unquote normal people want to be using Reddit, talking in their communities.

In this fact sheet, they had a few examples of like the Denver Nuggets subreddit is where people hung out when the Nuggets won the NBA championship because this is not what's included in fact sheet. NBA is closed because it's protesting these changes. And so I think Reddit is trying to counter the idea that the entire platform is in revolt, which is not necessarily a characterization I agree with when you go on to the are all subreddit, which I did during the interview with Steve Huffman. And at that time, four of the top five posts were images all about the blackout.

In support of the blackout. Yeah, in support of the blackout. I just want to say they call out the subreddits that are open here. That's Denver Nuggets, Dark Souls, Not the Onion.

And the last one, they're like, our Taylor Swift is open. It's like, you're playing with the hottest fire that burns on a planet. So why would you comment Taylor Swift? She just wrote Ticketmaster by herself.

Yeah. Well, what's missing from that statement is that this subreddit went dark on June 12th in protest of the changes. I believe it opened up on the 14th, which many subreddits did because that was the original intention of the protest was June 12th the 14th. But I just thought that was an interesting piece of missing context on that fact sheet.

What I can figure out is what point Reddit thinks they're making there. Because I do think it's true that there are a lot of people, even on the blackout subreddits, who would like them to be open, right? That it is, this was designed to be a problem for everybody. It's designed to prove a point.

And the only way you prove a point is by causing trouble, right? But what I don't get is, A, by saying a thousand of our top 5,000 subreddits are dark is actually a pretty large number, I would argue. Yeah, it's a thousand subreddits are dark. That's the math.

Of the top 5,000, right? That's a big number in one protest against an API change. Like, good God. But even beyond that, I think there's this thing that Reddit is trying to do that to some extent I'm sympathetic for.

Because I think if you're Steve Huffman, you know better than anybody that giving into Reddit is, like, the stupidest thing you can do. Because once they've defeated you, they will ruin your life forever. And I think that's probably true. But on the other hand, like, there's just no part of this in which he sounds sympathetic to the people on Reddit and what they actually want.

He just seems to be, like, holding his nose and saying, we have investors who appease, screw the rest of you. I don't know. Am I overstating that, Jay? Like, did you get any sense that the guy, like, wants Reddit to be successful and happy?

Clarify that question. There's Reddit the business successful and happy, and there's Reddit the community successful and happy. Fair. I guess I mean the community, yeah.

And I think what Reddit always talks about, and what Steve even said to you, was a reminder that Reddit is a platform run by the community. And then everything else he said seems very community hostile to me. I just think he's okay to take the key. Like, he has made this decision.

He is fine with the blowback, and he's just gonna stick to it. So let's come back around to large language models, because that's where we started, and David correctly pulled us out of that. But this is, like, what most people are putting together, what we have put together, is Reddit sees a bunch of big companies using Reddit's user data to train large language models, and they're gonna go and be even richer companies. And Reddit's, I think, somewhat rightfully annoyed by that, right?

And then somehow they're taking out these, like, independent app developers. Did you ask him, are you talking to Google and opening up? I feel like the Reddit-Google relationship is a very complex one. Google needs Reddit, and Reddit kind of doesn't need Google, but also needs Google.

And now it's even weirder as Google trains data. I did ask what the AI company's response is. to this and he mostly just said that we're talking to them we're having conversations with them i tried asking one or two different ways and he didn't really get into specifics so i don't know what those conversations look like i don't know if open ai is like yeah we're gonna pay this i don't know google says yeah we're gonna pay this and we haven't heard anything from those big companies saying that they are gonna pay these fees either well how much of that is a red herring for the other big thing that's happening with reddit which is they want to do an ipo right like there's rumors of planned ipo they filed confidentially at the end or end of 2021 and you'll notice that's a year and a half since they filed confidentially it's been a long time it sounds like based on my interview that that's something reddit still wants to go through with but steve huffman didn't really give me any sort of timeline and so i don't know if it's like the goal is once this transition is done that they really start to move forward with that is it do they see if the ai companies spend a lot of money on them that gives them a really great revenue stream i'm not quite sure how that's all going to shake out because if you go like galaxy brain it's like okay the reason they're killing like i think he's pretty clear on the reason they're killing the api the reason they're killing third-party apps is because that's taking money away from them and they want that money and they probably really need that money for their ipo and to like make it successful they want to show that they've got users they want to show that they're driving ads and so this is a quick fast easy way for them to do that while also they're off negotiating their ll with the llms does that seem did i go to galaxy brain i mean i think i think it's hard to get a really clear picture of what reddit wants to do here besides shut down this api uh make sure that no third-party developers are making any money and potentially monetize their data for ai training models and i think save costs at the end of the day you know see if i've talked about that 10 million dollar infrastructure cost which they're not profitable and they're not profitable so they got to figure out if they want ipo and look good for investors i think they really have to try and put their business on as solid footing as they possibly can and i think what's interesting there is you say their business it's becoming increasingly clear their business is not the communities like and that's something that they said over and over again was you know our communities are like our business is our community we love our communities it's so important to us it's a driving force of reddit and it's like well no it's not if you're willing to piss off this much of the community right like ultimately that's not your business that's not your priority we were talking about this earlier today at a meeting that reddit has such good data on individual communities that like it should be able to build a strong business that's not that's also maybe not super hostile or like overly like annoying because there's lots of really focused communities who care about really specific stuff and it seems like really easy to target ads to in my opinion but clearly they want to make this broader statement about you need to be on our version of the app and not somebody else's yeah i'm just reading through this interview and at one point huffman says to you i did my ama i took my beating that's it wow i love you about that ama he answered 14 questions nobody said when he was done i had to ask reddit and they had to tell me that and i had to post it in the ama for people to find out that the ama was over so yes he took the beating but for a guy who probably knows how ama decorum is supposed to be i don't know if he did the best job there i'm just like reading this interview right now and what i'm getting from it over and over again is a sense that steve often thinks other people are getting more value out of reddit than reddit the business is getting out of reddit and i what i don't see here and what i haven't really heard from the company in this 18 month run-up to an ipo is how reddit's going to get more value out of reddit that is just weird to me right we see this value that apps like apollo are getting and he's got a line in the transcript it's like 95 percent of them like apollo uses our logo they take our data for free and resell it to users making 100 margin and they use that and that's competitive okay like sure i understand that you should charge a fee to apollo to regain your margin maybe i feel too high but that's just a business conversation right you show up to the third-party developers and say look this is we need to get some margin back from you using our data here's how much we think we need to get we realize that we've allowed you to do this for a long time let's walk down the road to the right answer you can come or go but like you'll feel like you're at the table there's we need to go yell at google and stability ai and open it at whoever else to make sure not scraping the site that's all just recovering the money i haven't heard an idea for like and we're going to make more money with x and that there's just a break there i think it's really important well what i think is interesting there is this pricing at least for like let's say reddit wanted to build a robust third-party app ecosystem it doesn't feel like this pricing is a way to do that yeah i mean again i think what we keep coming back to is that's not what they want they want people to use the API to build tools that enhance the core red experience which they will then monetize jay you've been on this like crazy i encourage everyone to go read all of jay's reporting this week read this interview it is important to hear what reddit and c huffman are saying in their own words so read that i think we're just reacting to the fact that jay just had this experience which is quite a lot but go read it i mean take in what they're saying jay what do you think happens next here i've been asked that a few times this week and i'm very sad to say that after the interview my opinion hasn't changed and i think i think the app shut down on june 30th and i think reddit keeps going and i think the users stay really mad but until reddit responds in some way to these protests which it really hasn't and the protests have lost a little bit of steam at least at this point we talk on thursday evening i don't know reddit's gonna budge and it makes me sad to say that it feels like reddit might quote-unquote win here but they're so strong in their conviction to get rid of these apps move forward the API changes and maybe monetize from the AI companies that i think they're just gonna go forward i wonder if i brought in the same meeting jay was talking about i brought the example of ebay which has weathered many many storms ebay uh just had some executives arrested for having a prominent critic of ebay stocked this is a real thing that's gone down the ebay world you just don't hear about it because ebay and they've just turned into a thing on the internet that happens they like mailed him a pig's head i think it was a pig mask it's a bloody pig mask sorry sorry but then it's just ebay it's like it's in the background of the internet it's not important we don't talk about it the way that we talk about facebook or google or whatever we used to we used to talk about yahoo that way well it continues to just putter along for some reason like is this the moment that reddit goes down that path instead of being on the path it was on it that's the open question to me right your users hate you so much but they don't have anywhere else to go are we sure that it's not already in that position no i think what we what the protests have made clear is that reddit is like the glue of the internet that when stuff is happening and it's not like twitter stuff politics stuff it's reddit that creates most of the content of vibrancy that's why people have the word reddit to search from a community perspective absolutely reddit is incredibly important and i think it's only become more so as people have run away from facebook and twitter like reddit has benefited from a lot of that but and reddit as a company has figured out how to make more money over the last couple years i just found an article i was looking for that basically reddit as of a year or so ago reddit and pinterest were about the same size and pinterest was making about three times as much money just to just put some of the numbers and pinterest is famously under monetized and not doing a great job you know they've offered us the ceo pinterest for code and i'm gonna be like what are you doing what happens there that's why it's you have a mall why is it not making more money and like pinterest is not doing a good job and it makes three times as much money as reddit but i think to me like the ebay thing is like ebay is still chugging along a lot of people buying stuff on ebay but ebay is not sort of vibrant in the same way which i guess is your point but to me it's like i'm reddit has always been kind of a third rate social media company and it seems it is though less and less likely all the time that it's gonna be more than a third rate social media company like reddit consolidated forums all the forums that existed in the world they still are out there but reddit became the new kind of hub of forums and easy place to search and i think because the majority of people don't actually use forums but it's been able to like skate by and be quiet and now they're having what's essentially it sounds like a labor protest in many regards and it certainly looks like one it looks like if you look at what's happening there and the messaging and the actions and compare that to what's happening with the strike in hollywood it's very similar and now they're just saying oh actually like the money matters you guys don't matter you're you're the forums like we keep you up for nice cities but like we gotta make money at the end of the day and we're gonna do that and if some of you leave that's fine i think it was very telling that he consistently was speaking up about how how all the people who are very vocal are keeping the majority of people quiet and not allowing them to speak up and not allowing them to have access to all their beloved reddits classic management tactics right like like that's just like okay yeah you're just trying to get everybody when you're the one who started it like you jacked up the api prices yeah i just the thing that strikes me about that is is the only capitalist it's fine jack up the prices that's a business negotiation great doing it with a hammer is like not great yeah i think that's what's confusing what's kind of baffled me here is like he's turned this into something that's very much mimics a labor protest when it never had to be something that mimics a labor protest right and i think that is like a third rail of reddit that's really where my ebay comparison came from right or etsy like there was a time when etsy sellers being mad at etsy had like cultural cachet like it would break we've covered moments like that and now it's just a marketplace it looks more like ebay than not right it lost its definition that's i think the danger for reddit is like these actions people need to care about you a lot to be this mad at you yeah once you break that then you might as well see anything else and i think the people on reddit for a long time felt like they were loved back by the company even when it was messy there's been many fights between the users and the mods and the admins but jay like steve's like an og redditor like he's the og writer that's what i'm saying like he should be one of the people who understands this community the best and i wonder if part of the reason this community feels so betrayed is because it's not like they hired some like you know corporate raider to come in and extract some money like they didn't make a private equity deal it's like it's the guy they believed in who built this thing that they trust who is now the one upending it on them and i wonder if that's part of the reason this feels bad people steve said something to me to start the interview before i ask any questions he talked about how my favorite analogy for reddit is that the city cities are physical things where they're really these living organisms created by their citizens and i think reddit is very much the same he said we're a platform and a tech company on one hand but on the other is a living organism this democratic living organism created by its users and i would agree with that sentiment like he clearly understands what the platform should be he just also doesn't really care for them right now well he doesn't care for a specific second and that's what the comparison there is mark zuckerberg right he's like i'm gonna do some stuff that everyone hates but get over it famously with newsfeed but he may come back to this facebook in particular has come back to that moment over and over and over again we rolled out newsfeed everyone was mad at us to members of congress like we rolled out newsfeed everyone was mad at us and they got over and realized they loved it anyway and like that's like part of the founding myth of facebook is that moment and i think steve huffman is the founder of reddit he understands his platform he understands his company and i think he's running a lot of that playbook or feeling a lot of that vibe and i'm not sure it's the same moment or the same problem in or even the same political skills as mark zuckerberg i disagree i think he's running elon musk's playbook of like i'm coming in i'm gonna do what i'm gonna do i'm not sure that i see a lot of daylight between the elon musk twitter playbook and mark zuckerberg i'm the god king of facebook playbook and the steve huffman i'm the founder ceo of reddit playbook that's fair but one of them was like actively successful and happened almost 20 years ago and the other one happened last year and it's like in in flux and i think there's a direct line from from how he treated that community and was totally fine with people leaving and what's happening here where again we're seeing him be like yeah i don't care if you leave the people who are going to stay are going to stay because they love our community i guess what i'm saying is if you believe that reddit is a city the thing that you are is the mayor of that city right you're not the dictator of that city and that's the term where you are also a politician and where zuckerberg was actually good at historically his being a politician at the top of facebook love hated admired feared whatever he knows he has to play that role and he does to whatever amount of success you believe he does it he knows he has to do it and he does it and he has adam sary doing it for instagram right that's why instagram changes the button from green to blue adam's out making a video being like we made the button blue here's all the reasons we made the blue like and everyone else adam he's like if you don't like blue maybe next week we'll change it but probably not right like there's an amount of communication and presence for these leaders elon whatever you think of what's going on with elon you cannot deny his constant presence yeah he's out there shaking kissing every baby on the forehead no he's not kissing the baby he's stupid he's like why are you making me money baby make more money baby jay before you let you go can i ask you a better drama question i've been trying to figure out what is going on with all of these subreddits who are claiming that they're being forced open and mods are being removed and there's like there's like all this intra subreddit drama what is going on can you explain this to me this is my favorite sub drama and i can't figure out what's going on so maybe on tuesday earlier this week there were claims that uh subreddits that had were private in protest had been forcibly reopened by the reddit admins because reasons and uh the ones i'm aware of were claimed were advice animals and tumblr which my understanding is those are pretty big subreddits but it's been hard to track who says what about which person doing which thing and it has also been very confusing to me reddit to its credit said in the fact sheet today we are not shutting down discussions or unilaterally opening communities so reddit says they're not doing the thing that's on bread users because the conspiracy theories on both of those have been rampant people saying like steve is editing people's answers to his questions like it's been it's been out of control the last few days steve has edited in the past he's been busted doing that actually oh i think i would i would suspect he's not doing that in this case but he's also um people have not been very happy recently he's living his life to be fair if i had unilateral control of reddit i would probably do a lot of dumb things too i want you to know that i edit every comment on every single day there's a reason every comment ends with me like so it's not a little macro i've got going it's now we know yeah at the end of the day it's like it's my meditation we thought it was just a community yeah it turns out jay has been doing absolutely killer work on the story go read all this stuff read the stream i suspect it's going to keep going until june 30th so we've got much more done thanks jay we gotta take a break we'll be right back i'm maria sharapova and i'm hosting a new podcast called pretty tough every week i'm sitting down with trailblazing women at the top of their game to discuss ambition work ethic and the ups and downs that come on the path to achieving greatness we'll dive into their stories and get valuable insights from top executives actors entrepreneurs and other individuals who have inspired me so much in my own journey follow pretty tough wherever you get your podcasts so we are 250 years into this american experiment and i say it's going okay i give us like a c plus there is no perfect past but there is also no exclusively negative past because humans are going to human that's what we do i think the story of america is the struggle of people who have not been included in the promise of america to expand those principles to include more people what's going to determine the next 250 years of america how do we write a new social contract that can give us the democracy we deserve okay so i'm just gonna be a jerk here because i'm a historian so we have to have a prologue explaining you know we the people okay you guys just don't remember it from schoolhouse rock we the people are going to form a more perfect union and establish justice what is it ensure domestic tranquility so you're talking about a foundational document so i'm building a document that will protect american democracy that's this week on america actually all right back thank you to jay he has been killing it on the red report this week along with mia it's just been amazing to watch in many ways this is what the bird's made for along with the story that i'm gonna get into in the later end we hit our peak what do computers make us do is it the question the bird's here to answer weird reddit drama is one answer and then something something else but this segment is just titled crans has feelings i have a lot of feelings so you wrote two stories this week one of them actually connects to decoder this week it's about private equity another one is about the vision pro and tv actually crans both you and david had john gruber dunce this week which i think is a record that's exciting yeah so crans wrote the apple vision pro might be a tv but i won't play the tv and john is a friend so it's fine this is what vlogging is meant to be yeah and she was like the shoe the shoe might not be a shoe but he'll replace shoes it's like a great tweet from john uh and then david he wrote all phones should be flip phones and john wrote no i shouldn't effectively he's like what are you talking about so good this is what you want actually john i've been talking about this thing like he is vlogging a lot more lately uh-huh and we built our entire site to allow us to blog more and like the death of twitter and the end of the social web and all this reddit so it's all like mixing actually the same thing but it has resulted in us all writing up more and like having conversations across our sites you have more fights on their own websites yes that's great i love it it's more fun than twitter yes it's exactly what i want but that means friends you are now compelled to defend your apple vision pro take and then david i want you to defend your take okay we come back to that uh we'll start with the vision pro we continue to just consider what happened to us a couple weeks ago at wwc have you noticed by the way that there has been this run of people over the last couple days kind of re-evaluating it's like everybody does that like re-review six months later this is like eight days after i experienced the vision pro how do i feel and it's just a lot of people like processing emotions about gadgets which is very funny it's been a really interesting week of like re-coverage of that 30 minutes people spent wearing the vision pro i am this close to mandating that every story we write about the vision pro have a screenshot of apple's video just a frame grab of apple's video where the father is taking a photo of his kids playing and so they're playing and he's in accident in that setting and i'm just like we should put this in every story we write about this constantly remind people just bring people back to the essential nature of wearing this around other people which is kind of grand's point right which is right into it which is this is not really what tvs are for yeah yeah um so basically we had a big fight on in slack largely because guru had this great piece about how he was still thinking about this thing and how great it was as a tv and how they're gonna sell a lot of units because it is like a tv and i was like okay that's true i agree i agree with him it's like a tv i agree with david it's like a tv but it's not gonna actually replace the tv because tvs are communal by nature even though most of us probably don't watch tv with other people all the time they're still relatively communal things and this thing is very isolating and expensive and tvs are cheap and there's a lot of conversations about how oh this thing's gonna be really incredible because you're gonna be able to watch nba games from courtside and like we can't even get nba games in 4k we're gonna be getting 3d nba courtside like let's let's come on guys so we really was like thinking about how we've seen tv and stuff transform over the last couple years and how that media is slow to respond and the same thing's gonna happen with this product even though we do have this commitment for business and everything this feels a lot more like 3d tv than it does 4k tv and even 4k tv has been really struggled to adopt and get content out there yeah i've been thinking a lot about this piece alex since you and richard and like half our staff are fighting about this inside and the thing that i've come around to is i kind of think that this eyesight feature ends up being like culturally and technologically the single most important thing about the vision pro because like one of the things that happens at least in my life all the time is i sit on the couch and my wife sits next to me on the couch and we both look at our phones and we don't talk to each other we're both doing our own thing but we're in the same space and there's something to that and i think part of what feels so isolating to me about some of these headsets is like if i were to sit there and put on my quest 2 and start playing a game like i have a very real way gone somewhere else right in the sense that like i can hear her less i can't see her as well she can't see me as well she doesn't know what i'm doing it's just like the dynamic changes even if i'm sitting next to you with my headset on versus i'm sitting next to you looking at my phone and eyesight in particular this feature where you can see someone's eyes through the headset when they're doing something and we don't know exactly how this is gonna work with content can i watch a movie and have eyesight on i genuinely don't i don't know that we know the answer to that i think the answer is no i think eyesight only happens when you are talking to someone outside the headset but even that is messy right because one of the things we got in the demo is this idea that like i could be watching a movie and you start talking to me and you sort of fade in like my eyes fade in as that is happening yeah i think this is why we weren't demoed it i don't think they figured all those moments out yet that's fair because the basics of it are very simple you take a picture of your eyes and show them on a screen i don't think eyesight's gonna fix the fundamental isolation problem though because the fundamental isolation problem is you're sitting next to your wife you're both in this world you both have spent $3,500 minimum on these headsets you're both sitting on your couch next to each other wearing them you can look and you can talk to each other but you know if you're looking at something on your phone like this is stupid you can like show it you just look at it be like honey look how stupid this is and hold it up to her face and this you can't do that the classic phone interaction when i think about people who love each other it's like look how stupid this is but you can't really interact in that same way that you do when you're just sitting on the couch watching tv and on your phone or something and i think that the fact that you can't interact that way that isolation is gonna restrict use cases a little more well spin that out all the way to the ideal hardware right i keep coming back to the idea that the vision pro as it was announced is a simulator of what apple really wants which is ar glasses okay so now we're both wearing ar glasses there isn't a dumb battery pack in our pockets we've solved enormous technical challenges no virtual eyeballs on front of right we're both just wearing a pair of red bands and we're sitting next to each other and something dumb happens and i need to show it to you like there's still a problem there like the friction i agree with you it's like psychological emotional friction i mean practically i'm looking at a virtual object on my display and i want to show it to you on your display and i've got to get two different computers to agree on that right hey look at this it's no longer me holding you a pile of atoms it's no longer me showing you a pile of atoms it's me trying to send you a bunch of bits and that is just it's just harder like historically it's harder i don't know like are we going to get to a point where we've solved all of the technical problems to make ar glasses but like airdrop isn't good enough that i can just like nod my head towards you and you see the thing that i'm looking at that doesn't sound like the hardest problem of all of these to solve here's what i'm going to guarantee without a doubt that the nod your head to airdrop a thing 95 successful how long did it take bump exactly one decade before you could wave your phones at each other and even like fine i'm not saying it won't work i won't mostly work i'm saying that the problem of there's something on my screen that i want to put on your screen has bedeviled computers since the history of computers and like mostly it works fine but it's never the same as we're both just looking at a screen together and it's even harder when you're trying to sync audio and video across those screens at extremely high bit rates in 3d with surround sound like what like isn't it just easier to use our eyes and ears the way that we have them you know this makes me think of when i believe it was when our netflix show was coming out you know disclosure the version of netflix we all got on like netflix's sharing platform to watch something together do you guys remember this and as it turned out anyone who joined this thing could control it so every single person that joins just instinctively pressed play to make it play but actually what they did was pause it so we got like 100 people playing and pausing this thing and so maybe you're right maybe we're never gonna be good at this look and apple has to share play like they have begun to build the infrastructure they need to solve these problems i'm not saying they're not working on it i'm not saying they won't be 95 successful i'm just saying even if you spin it out to it's just a pair of wireframe steve jobs classes you will solve some of the most challenging physics and engineering problems in the history of computing it's still like all right i gotta i gotta bluetooth some shit to you like there's just something there that okay we've put up an expensive screen in a room and we're gonna perceive it together so it will just forever be superior yeah a tv is always going to be superior for that reason right like you're always just gonna be able to turn on a tv it's a solved technology it's way way way way way way cheaper and i think that's really crucial when we talk about this we talk about like because essentially i'm the ideal user for the vision pro right i live alone i love tv i love content consumption yeah having 105 inch 4k beautiful display in my home at all times always in front of my eyeballs sounds like the best thing in the world but it also sounds like the worst thing in the world it sounds just deeply unappealing it's like it's expensive and it is that isolation factor is there and for me personally i can't i wouldn't be able to get over the fact that like i'm just sitting in my house in a huge like not huge sitting in a fairly large apartment by myself completely isolated this is the steve jobs dream a huge house devoid of furniture and somehow there's just macintoshes everywhere just everywhere but you see that there's a photo sean lennon john lennon's kid got a mac in the 80s for his ninth birthday and there's a photo of steve jobs on the ground with andy warhol and he's like showing him how to use this nine-year-old's mac this is like what everybody wants right yeah now just imagine that steve jobs and andy warhol were wearing headsets at a nine-year-old's birthday party and he was like look at my headset yeah it's it's dumb i think it's kind of stupid and somebody somebody after i wrote that piece immediately hit me up and was like thank you i don't think this is gonna replace it because every time i use my husband's headset i have to then wipe off like my face that's on the headset and there's always like that intimate kind of grossness that headsets demand oh dude i use somebody else's laptop and i'm like get this garbage away from me most people have natural throwing turned on and now you're gonna put it on your face yeah which is much more sensitive by the way people have asked us this as far as i can tell there's no profiles on the vision pro so it's just one person it's one person and there were hints that there would be a guest mode but there would be no like user accounts which it seems like an enormous miss for the first version of this product really i think it's the opposite like this is like a win for people who want a reason to not give this to their children like this is a i think this is a really good thing for apple to launch on like the third version of this i'm not at all surprised this doesn't have family sharing stuff on yet i mean if they want everybody to have a headset because everybody's going to be living in this ar future where you're wearing face computers all the time then yeah you don't necessarily want profiles because face computers are just harder to share with other people naturally so it's like no we discourage you everyone goes to spend $3,500 get your entire family out yeah tell your mom to buy an iphone right like that's the tim cook line but you know there's been this sort of long philosophical debate in tech about like is the future that you sort of have the one screen that rules them all right whether it's like your iphone that the world revolves around or in this case a headset that the world revolves around or is the future that like everything around you is connected and has a display and it's and what you have is like a wearable or whatever that sort of imbues that with your preferences and information and so like i can walk up to any screen on earth and just like tap it with my thumb and it will know that it's me and become my computer until i walk away like that's one vision of the future the vision pro is the exact opposite of that vision right where now the thing i have on my face controls literally the world around me which i find fascinating and apple has always kind of been on the side of like your device rules the world as opposed to like every device can be your device like the chrome os vision is the every device can be your device right you just log in with your username and password to google and boom you have a chromebook any chromebook to your chromebook and it's really interesting to see the vision pro be like the very end of that right where it's like you don't have a tv that you have information on the information that's here there's nothing else in the world that you need i don't think there's an answer for that i think that's going to be the persistent problem because the two things are so fundamentally at odds and privacy is sitting right there in the right like your security and privacy are right there and i think that's always going to be up to an individual and how much of that they want to give away some people are going to be like yeah i'm happy to live in this world i don't want anyone to ever know what i'm watching this sounds great and a lot of people like myself are going to be like no i want i want some privacy and then there are other people who are going to be like yeah i like leave every window open lights blazing look in my house kind of deal and those people are making millions of subscription fees i love them wait so just like the core of that the problems are still the same it's really interesting if you drill into it right you you're in your living room you still need to put sensors and everything you still need to put networking chips and everything you still need to put control logic and everything it's just kind of like where does the interface live so i look at my thermostat and the thermostat could just be a computer with a display and an interface and a whole bunch of stuff i gotta learn or the vision pro could say you're looking at a place where a thermostat should be we'll put up some thermostat controls but there still needs to be a bunch of stuff on the other end of that experience that controls the furnace and knows how hot it is in the house you look at an area where a tv should be you still have to like have streaming services i think you run into the other situation and this is coming again from someone who lives by themselves has a whole home get it out as a smart home people still come over to my house they like i still have people that's your first mistake yeah like beyond the walls of the z wave alliance you shall people visit and then if they want to do things like like one of my friends i didn't know this i forgot and i set it up so anytime i took the dog for a walk after every dark it would turn all the lights off to save electricity i forgot that and she's like okay i'll stay in your house watching tv while you go walk your dog and then like a minute later she's just like texting me being like i'm in complete darkness and everything's off what do i do and i think the vision pro is like exacerbates that problem right so he comes over to your house and they're like can we watch tv no but they have their own vision pro theoretically they have their own vision pro but realistically no like that level of adoption is so far down the line it took us how many decades to like adopt fully adopt tv right and then the privacy problems are even worse right so again even if you solve it it's just a pair of glasses everybody's got their glasses on and you gotta calm your house and connect your network and get control of your devices and blah blah blah and it's like oh it's actually a little bit better for the computers to be like physically air-gapped a little bit yeah that's not the right word but you know what i mean for it's like you can't control this unless you're touching it is a meaningful layer of security yeah yeah you don't want the guy who's coming over to install your fridge to be like oh yeah i'm just gonna go adjust the thermostat like you watch him do that in real life you'd be like dude what are you doing but the vision pro you'd just be like like reaching out or maybe or we live in like a horrible world of like sharing passwords for augmented reality devices it's coming it's coming they're gonna have to solve the bump problem right they're gonna have to figure out how they airdrop it if you're the sort of analyst out there who writes apple fanfic there are some of them you're what you're doing is you're saying okay apple's the beginnings of all of these technology solutions are getting made right so that the contact sharing with bump share play this that all these little branded apple features will coalesce into an amazing ar experience yeah maybe but right right now that is fanfiction and that's fine like fanfiction has led to a number of things in society 50 shades of gray it started off as fanfiction maybe one day your apple fanfiction will turn into reality i can't i can't predict the future but i know that it's not now and i know those problems are real here's like here's the thing i really want to get into and i don't know the answer to this i'm noodling on it i'm just gonna put out a call for submissions okay i keep talking about this formula for things that you wear where it's like the amount of time it's on your body versus the amount of time you fill with it has to be lower than the amount of value it gives you and i think the vision pro is going to make it clear that it has to be like the most utility ever yeah right like a watch a pair of glasses on your face is extremely useful right like if i didn't wear my glasses i couldn't see so i want them on my face all the time and i will deal with cleaning them and generally being worried about the zombie apocalypse like if there's a zombie apocalypse like i'm done we're owned these glasses are the most important things in the world i will hold both of your hands and lead you to safety don't worry it'll be fine find the 2020s and we're gonna build our spider around but like they're really useful so you deal with the amount of care you have to put into them my smartwatch apple has generally increased the amount of utility and i deal with charging it every night the vision pro is like it lasts for two hours of battery you have to wear it on your face all the time to get any value out of it at all and it delivers something and i just feel like we should write out that equation i've done it in all kinds of different ways i'm open to submissions like let us know write to us and let us know what you think that equation is because i think as we come closer to like reviewing the vision pro and the next quest and all this stuff it will truly help us like figure out if these things are going to be the future or if they're just like a weird side quest yeah i think a first cast the first.com send us an email send us a formula we will find the best ones and we will give you credit for it it's something like time on body times fiddliness equals value you have to add the dilby factor in there too it's like times how stupid do you look in this yeah but i think this goes back to me for like the more i think about it the more apple's like fundamental whiff on the vision pro was how was the storytelling and it's it's the guy at the birthday party it's the woman doing laundry it's uh like mark zuckerberg had that good zinger where he's like all the pictures of this are someone sitting alone on their couch i think that's true and i think what's going to be true about the vision pro is that it's going to be very very cool for very specific episodic things right like, Chris Grant said this on the broadcast a while ago, like, VR is great for things you do for a short period of time, and then you take the headset off. And I think if Apple had said that, or, like, shown us versions of that, where, like, here are things you can do in this that are cool, this is not a lifestyle product yet.

And Apple would never say that, but they could have told stories about it differently, because it's not a lifestyle product, and it's a really long way from being a lifestyle product. But the idea that I would put this on, do something in it for a couple of hours, and then take it off and go about being, like, a regular person in the real world again, I think is much more compelling than this idea of, like, you were going to wear this headset while you do laundry and go to birthday parties for the rest of your life. But this is what I mean about, it's a simulator. They showed us what they want it to be, and they built, like, a hardware simulator of what it can be.

Right, but they still told everybody that this is what it was. Like, I think the big problem with Apple and the messaging, and I think you're totally right, David, it is, they did bad storytelling here. The story was, we have a vision of the future, here's your first taste of it. And instead, they're like, here's the future, now you can have it.

And that's just wrong. We did it already. Yeah. No, you didn't.

To be fair, and I have criticized the Apple launch more than anyone, I think. I would point out that they announced the digital crown as an input device on par with multi-touch and the mouse and the click wheel. But what they didn't show you is, they didn't show you pictures of somebody sitting there at their kid's birthday party, like, using the phone as it watches the viewfinder. Right, but they showed us supermodels running through Africa with a first-generation Apple watch.

I run through Africa every day with my wife. They showed us that thing where people were sending heartbeats to each other, which, by the way, I accidentally did to Joanna Stone the other day, and she's like, what are you doing? She's like, are you sending me your heartbeat? Yeah, that's like, that's way too intimate.

That's like, I wouldn't do that to anybody. I didn't even know it was still there. I just put the wrong button in my message. Anyhow, the point I'm making is, even with the Apple watch, they did the thing that Apple is prone to doing right now, which is they sort of remix the greatest hits of their product launches.

They say one more thing, they tell you about a new kind of let them down. In a way that the Apple watch followed the script, and, you know, computers had to get slightly better for the Apple watch to start working, right? Then they totally rebooted the interface, uh, Gen 3 or Gen 4, Series 3 or Series 4, and, you know, they figured out how to turn the screen on all the time. They got faster, and, like, they just caught up to where they were going always.

This is like, what are they gonna catch up to? Well, and also, the Apple watch was not as huge, like, revisionists might say it was successful. It was not hugely successful when it first started. There was a lot of criticism of it.

Like, that was that script creaking under the load and having to wait three, four years before the watch really worked. Like, my first watch I called my great regret. But what I'm saying is, like, the path from the beginning to the end of the fourth year. It was clear.

Right, even when they totally rebooted the interface, it was like, all right, we threw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, we threw out with sticks, we're gonna hide all this other stuff, right? We're gonna simplify this down. This is like, here's a bunch of spaghetti at the wall, no one can tell you. Like, it was fairly obvious, I think, with the watch, that notifications and health features were the things that were the most interesting.

It was never obvious that sending a heartbeat to people would be the thing that would sell Apple watches, but they needed to fill out the idea of the product. Well, just, like, your point with your piece, Alex, is what they have showed most compellingly, is it's a TV. Yeah, right. And all the other stuff is like, eh, you gotta have something in your face.

But ultimately, this is a very, very nice TV. Well, so if you do the math, their math on, this is a nice TV, it might be worth it, is not so off. A nice, a nice big OLED TV is gonna cost you more than $2,000. So, 65-inch.

But this is, like, much bigger than that, right? Yeah, yeah. So, a 75-inch, 85-inch OLED TV, depending on the sales and the time of the year, and whatever it's super cool, it's gonna cost you more than $2,000. Right.

A nice Atmos sound system to pair with it will probably cost you around $1,000. And that's a cheap one. That's, like, a refurbished one with a receiver and speaker wires. Right.

If you go, like, the Stonestrat, it's gonna cost you way more than $1,500. Just the ARC alone is $700. Okay, we got there. We got to the price of the Vision Pro.

But it's also, but then you have a Vision Pro. You don't have a TV and a nice sound system that you can plug your console into. Well, and I think that's a different person, necessarily. Because I think what this is for is for those people who don't want to have that one big home theater system, right?

Like, those people are gonna go do that all the time. Hey, guys, I love you. You're my people. You're wonderful.

I know they're here, and I want to acknowledge them. Yeah, you guys all, you two, you and them all read the same publications on your iPads together. But, like, that's one kind of person. I think this felt like it was more intended for everybody else.

And everybody else is gonna spend $600 on a TCL, maybe $100 on a Vizio soundbar after they keep saying it sucks, and they go to theverse.com and Google Best Soundbar, and they're like, oh, okay, I'll get a Vizio. And so they're gonna spend, like, a grant. How do you convince them to go spend $3,500? TV manufacturers have been struggling with this for a while now.

They all keep pushing the biggest, fanciest TVs, but the TVs that actually sell, that actually move, are the cheap TVs. I think that price gap is gonna be a problem for Apple. And they'll definitely come down in price, right? Like, this is $3,500, but there's gonna eventually be a vision next to pro, and it'll probably be, like, $1,500 or something.

And you're still gonna be struggling with that. Okay, I could spend this and have a really good set for me personally, or I could have something that, like, is much more flexible and can do a lot more. And I think that's where they're gonna struggle. But they don't have to, they're not trying to displace the TV market right now.

Right. But that's what they're gonna have to compete with, because that's what they've made. They've made, like, a competitor to the TV. Right.

I think we're both saying the same thing, which is, in the end, no one is gonna cross the shop this with TVs. Yeah. But in the end, the value proposition is, look at this TV. So that's a, there's a disconnect there that somehow, someway will get resolved.

And I think probably what results is time and determination from Apple to make this a product that works. Yeah, I think the stakes for it would be so much lower if it were $500, right? If this is, like, a thing you could buy that was sort of purely additive to your TV, and you watched it when it was just you, but when it wasn't just you, you put it down and you watch TV with whoever else is in the room. But at $3,500, the value proposition is just so different that, like, I think Apple is gonna lose that fight for a while here.

Yeah, a $500 one, every single college dorm would be filled with them. It would be the most popular thing. There's a long way to go between this product is $3,500 because it has to, yeah. All right, we should take a break.

Kranz, you also wrote about the Instant Pot and what happened to private equity. And I just want to point out, they got purchased by a big private equity firm that does private equity stuff. They're bankrupt. This was a pretty simple business.

They made Instant Pots, and then once a year, they sold Instant Pots, whatever. It wasn't a complicated business. The connection I want to make is Kranz wrote a piece about how the search for endless growth tanked this company, which happens over and over again. And then just by coincidence, this week's decoder is Brendan Ballew, who's a federal prosecutor, who wrote a book called Plunder about how private equity is destroying American markets, and you should just go listen to it and then consider the Instant Pot.

It's a very good episode. As everyone knows, I hate Decoder and refuse to listen to it, but it's a good episode of Decoder. We'll allow it. I have never been more surprised.

Like, sooner or later, I was like, good job. I'm like, here's a federal prosecutor who wrote a wonky book about antitrust and private equity, and I was like, this is the episode. Okay. I know we've talked to an audience of nerds, and even to me, sometimes it's surprising what people are doing about.

Wait, before we take a break, I just have one question, which is, Alex, were you as sad as you seemed writing this story about the Instant Pot? You seemed very sad about the Instant Pot. I'm just bummed. I'm always bummed when private equity, like, kills something that's cool.

Stop doing that private equity, but they won't because they love profit. I do love my Instant Pot. Well, the bank isn't taking it away. Kicking out our doors, claiming all our Instant Pots.

This is why you should buy things that don't rely on cloud services, because the bank can take that away. That's true. That's true. Always on my mind.

All right, we have a take a break. We'll come back. We have a little link around in the rest of the time. We'll be right back.

This week on Networked and Shell, I'm joined by Tank Sinatra, the mean king, with over 15 million followers across Tank's good news, influencers in the wild, and his personal account. Tank is breaking down what the meme economy really is, how much a single sponsor post pays, why major brands are throwing serious money at jokes, and how meme culture thinks preparation age, starter packs, and a perfectly timed screenshot is actually reshaping how we think about money and value. Get ready for a conversation that'll change the way you scroll, make you rethink what going viral is really worth, and prove that sometimes the most serious money moves are wrapped in the silliest of jokes. Listen wherever you get your podcasts or watch on youtube.com slash yourrichvff.

All right, we're back. It's lightning round time. David has picked one for me, and in retaliation, I picked two more for myself. David, why don't you begin?

Yeah, I really played myself on this one. The good news is mine's very quick, so we can leave two or three hours for here or several. Mine is that Instagram added a feature to its status update thing in the app that will now show what song you're listening to, and I just want to give real genuine kudos to the Instagram team and as a whole for doing its damnedest to bring back the away message. Yep, I have been saying the away message and status things need to come back for years.

I believe in it with my whole heart. I wish this were like an open standard that worked everywhere, and I could like change my Slack status, but also change my Instagram status, like that'd be rad. But this rules, this is aim away messages coming back via Instagram, and I just want to applaud Instagram. I think they do a lot of bonkers things, and it's mostly a bad app, but notes and the whole status feature is very good, so congratulations, Instagram.

Well, they're doing that, and they added broadcast it. Instagram is quickly turning into the everything app. Yes. Eat it, Twitter.

Like, you can just see where it's going. It's kind of neat, but it's also, pull you up on Instagram, and a lot of things are happening. I think Instagram is really quickly heading down a path of being, like, the everything social app, because, like, Facebook is an entertainment platform slash dying. WhatsApp is only ever going to make money by helping you chat with businesses, so they're leaning really hard into, like, shopping.

They're doing some social stuff, but Instagram is, like, especially if their Twitter competitor threads sort of attaches Instagram in an interesting, useful way, like, this becomes the place you share stuff with your friends. That is what they are going for in a really big way, and I think it's going to be really interesting to watch. Yeah. All right, my first one is one David Stein, who's actually really cool.

Taylor Swift exists. Her fans exist. The ticketing catastrophe happened. That led to a series of hearings, Live Nation slash Ticketmaster, along with a bunch of other ticketing companies, and Airbnb.

So Live Nation, SeatGeek, Dice, and Airbnb. It's so funny to me that Airbnb is part of this. Well, you know why, but they have announced that they will no longer have hidden fees. They're going to disclose the total price while you're shopping, and this is, like, a classic, right, a threat of regulation.

Like, Taylor Swift fans were so upset that the government was, like, what if we regulate these companies, and they're, like, what if we just do what you want to regulate us, and Airbnb is the next because people are so pissed about cleaning fees. Yep. So Airbnb, like, also sees the writing on the wall, and so all these companies are going to be more transparent about the pricing, which is a wholly good thing. I think it might be better if there's more actual competition in space, but I will take whatever crumbs of transparent pricing we can get.

Yeah, they're going to take this to be a huge victory, but what this actually is, is just they know that they can charge whatever they want, so instead of hiding the fees, they're going to tell you about the fees, but if you want to go see Taylor Swift's Aerosaur, you are still going to pay the dumb, enormous, monopoly-riddled fees because you have to. So, like, we have not solved our problem, but we've solved this much of the problem. Let me read you. I mean, it's called the Breakup Ticketmaster Coalition.

I don't think this quote's going to be surprising. Here's what the Breakup Ticketmaster Coalition said about this announcement. Live Nation Ticketmaster's announcement today is a half-hearted attempt to ward off a looming DOJ investigation into addressing the real issue, its monopoly power over live events. Yeah, that's what the Breakup Ticketmaster Coalition would say.

Do you actually want the fees broken out? Like, every time the fees get broken out, I just get really annoyed about the fees, because I'm like, why am I paying all these fees? Yeah. I don't want to see, I want, like, I would rather not know it all and just be like, why is that?

But then you pay them. Yeah, I still have to pay it either way, but one way I can be like, you know what, maybe this fight really did cost $1,000, and I don't need to know about, like, the $100 gas tax fee that got passed on to me that Delta could have paid for themselves. They do that to make you mad at the government. Yeah, they're trying to be, mad, besides the price itself.

I have bad news for you about the current state of American markets. You're going to be mad. All right, guys, let's do what you want. Something I'm not mad about is Steam has, Steam looks nice.

Like, it's, like, pretty nice versions of it, but you know how sometimes you're using Steam and you go to a tab and you're like, oh my god, what's happened here? They started to, like, make it a little more cohesive. Everything's running together. There's a new Notes app, which is a lot of fun, and Sean Hollister, like, absolutely adores it, and I cannot wait to, like, start using it on my Steam deck.

It's just, like, it's a nice thing. Something I'm not mad at. There you go. Yeah, something I didn't want to rage at.

I want to do something positive. I regret to inform you there's a hundred dollar gas tax. Okay, I got two more, but they're really fast. One, Twitter, I got to work copy a lot, I'm going to work just somehow.

Twitter is being sued for $250 million by the Music Publishers of America because they just don't pay any licensing fees for music. Hilarious, hilarious problem for Twitter to be in. This is, like, the most solved problem for the major platforms. These are just deals they all can take because the companies know that music on these platforms is a lucrative marketing channel for them.

Whoops. Well, amps, my favorite part of this is the other things that Twitter decided not to pay for this week, which were, like, it's Google Cloud bill, apparently, and that's become a whole thing. They're getting evicted from an office in Colorado because they stopped paying rent. Like, Twitter's new biz dev strategy is just, like, don't pay any of our bills and see what happens, and it's a move.

It is a move. Yeah. It certainly works for some people. I would just say that the don't pay the music industry move is not one that traditionally works out well for anyone.

Fair. Including music industry. Metallicas. Yeah.

They come collect on you. They want their money and they're going to get it. Okay, here's my last one. I want to end on a high note.

This is the most important software update of all time. The Meter Smart Meat Thermometer has gotten a software update. M-E-A-T-E-R. That's very important.

It's very good. It's owned by Traeger. This was a big deal when they acquired it last year. It now supports the Dynamic Island in live activities on iOS.

What does it do? If you're smoking a brisket, you just glance at your phone, it'll tell you the internal and the ambient temperature, right? And maybe, I actually have very little success in this work. It'll calculate the time remaining.

Our computer's good at math. Who knows? You gotta wrap it in brown paper. It's all good.

Yeah. My favorite thing about this is, this is the stupidest thing I've ever heard, and also, for sure, the best use of the Dynamic Island that anyone has discovered since the Dynamic Island. I think about the amount of engineering that has had to occur for this to happen, right? The Meter people had to make a thermometer with a wireless chip in it that could survive the heat of a grill and work.

And that just has two different thermometers in it. That's just a feat of, like, miniaturization in packaging. All in and of itself. Apple had to make the iPhone.

Can you imagine if the meat guys had been working on the Vision Pro? Yeah. I imagine every day. Can you imagine you look at your grill and, like, it just shows you a bunch of grill information?

This is the future. This is why you want the glasses. The best you want, yeah. My wife says that whenever I'm operating a smoker, she's like, the only words you say to me are temperatures.

She's like, how are you? I'm like, 207. She's like, what are you talking? I don't care.

And then the other day, we had the wildfire smoke and we were running the air purifiers in the house. She's like, I finally understand, because I just want to tell you what number of the air purifiers are all day. And then she started calling them the smoke machines, which is a perfect name. Anyhow, those need to get updated for the dynamic island as well.

I just want to tell you, the meter smart thermometer has been updated to support the dynamic island on the iPhone is the sentence that The Verge was created to publish. A number of concepts in that sentence that normal people don't give a shit about is so high. But you, my people, you're here for me. Also, I want to thank Dave Lee for tipping me to that story, because that's why we have readers.

They know you. All right, that's it. Thanks to you, our nerds, for being with us. Once I want to call out, Mia wrote about Google, about the storefronts on Google and how they're, like, SEO disasters.

It's part of our ongoing coverage of, like, the world Google has made in this time of change. It seems like a good time to look at what we built before we tear all down, but it's something new. Go read that story. It's really good.

And we have lots more Google coverage to come. Okay, that's it. Dave, what's Wednesday's episode? Next Wednesday, we're going to talk to Jen Tui about a bunch of smart home stuff.

This week was smart home week on TheVerge.com. Like, a lot of really great stories. I learned a ton about all of people's weird, insane smart home setups, including URsGrants. But we talked to Jen about, basically, like, where to start and how smart phones should work, or smart homes should work, rather.

And then we're going to talk to Josh Jezza about a thing he's been working on for a long time that I can't tell you about yet, but he's really cool. And it's coming next week. Very exciting. All right, that's it.

That's VergeCast. Bye-bye. And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. We'd love to hear from you.

Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and the Box Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audience. That's it.

We'll see you next week.