The Vergecast - Disney’s big bets on sports, streaming, and Fortnite

Episode Date: February 9, 2024

The Verge's David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Adi Robertson discuss sports streaming, Apple Vision Pro updates, Bluesky removing its invite system, and more. Further reading: ESPN, Fox, and Warner Bros. are putting together a juggernaut sports streaming app Disney Plus will start its password-sharing crackdown this summer Disney invests $1.5 billion in Epic to create ‘persistent universe’ tied to Fortnite Apple TV+ Became HBO Before HBO Could Become Netflix @lucas_shaw • All these articles should be required to note that nobody watches Apple TV+. • Threads A new Vision Pro teardown shows Apple’s incredible pixel density Apple’s first Vision Pro beta lets you bring virtual items closer  Apple’s Vision Pro launch day photo drop captures eager customers. The Vision Pro’s killer app: Cybertruck clout-chasing accessory YouTube says a Vision Pro app is ‘on the roadmap’  Vision Pro’s Personas look a little crisper after latest beta update. It’s been 10 hours. Bluesky social network drops invite-only sign ups The fediverse, explained: Mastodon, Threads, and the open future of social networking X hits number one on the Apple App Store amid second celebrity image scandal The FCC bans robocalls with AI-generated voices Ford quietly created its own ‘skunkworks’ team to develop low-cost electric vehicles Apple is still working on foldable iPhones and iPads Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years, covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds.

dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of multi-stakeholder media companies. I'm your friend David Pierce. Niallipatel is not here. But we all are, which is very exciting. Alex Kranz is here.

Hi, Alex. Hey, I'm your friend who's ready to do a victory lap in a second. It's coming. Addie Robertson's here. Hi, Adi. We have a lot to talk about this week. There's a bunch of streaming news. Disney did just all the things.

We're going to talk about that. A bunch of Vision Pro stuff. This is like the first week that regular humans got vision pros, and it got real weird. So we're going to talk about that. Blue Sky stuff, a bunch of other stuff will do a big lightning round. But let's start with Disney. Right?

I feel like we have to start with Disney. I hate, hate, hate talking about earnings on the podcast. It is my least favorite thing. But every once in a while, Bob Iger shows up and it's like, what's up, losers? It's earnings time. Well, I think technically it's not just Disney, right? It's Disney and Warner Brothers Discovery. True.

Okay, you're right. So within the Disney story, there are like somewhere between two and three. three individual stories. Yes. We should probably start with the sports thing, right? That was kind of the big streaming wars news of the week. And Alex, this is where your victory lap begins. So tell us what's going on.

Yeah. So what's happening is ESPN and Fox, which are both currently owned by Disney, are teaming up with Warner Brothers, which is not owned by Disney currently. Give it time. Give it time. Are all coming together to make a giant streaming app, which is effectively what Hulu was back in 2009, which is when ABC and Fox and NBC all eventually came together to make Hulu and like fund Hulu and put all their content on it.

It didn't start that way, but that's where it went after like a year or two. And that's what's happening now. It's like Hulu for sports. And I said that right as the news broke. And then as more came out, it was like, yes, I'm right. It is Hulu for sports. Yeah, you were increasingly vindicated. Yeah.

So, okay, let me see if I understand this, because we've gotten sort of bits and pieces of information about what this thing is. But it's a streaming service that is launching later this year sometime. It will have a name. Yep. We don't know what the name is. Warner Brothers is involved, so it will probably be stupid. But it will have a name.

It's going to be a mix of all of the linear networks owned by those companies. Right? So like all the ESPNs, all the Fox Sportses, ABC, all the TNTs of the world. TDS. And just like those full. channels. Yes. It's just like it is it is live television of those channels sports or not sports, right?

Right. Okay. Because that was one of the big questions is like is this just sports? Is this not? It's just channels. Yeah, it's just channels, but it basically is sports. Okay. Right.

And so it's going to be like it's going to be all of these different sports things. And then Disney is still saying they're going to do something with ESPN as its own standalone, which has me wondering what the hell is going on with the ESPN plus, which I think you are one of the few people I've ever met that was. like, yes, this is a rad service. No, this is good. Okay, you're explaining that this makes no sense. Yeah.

Which is the thing that I have been trying to figure out is, does this actually make any sense? Because all of that is there, right? And then there's going to be what I think amounts to, like, individual sports, right? So the stuff on ESPN Plus, the stuff that Warner Brothers gets through the Bleacher Report, the stuff that Fox has streaming, like all that will also exist inside of this Hulu for sports. theoretically, yeah. Thing. And that's it, right?

It will have its own price. You can pay for it. But also if you want to watch all of that stuff on the other services that are also part of this, you can. And a lot of that stuff will also be on cable because it's just the cable channels that you're getting in the streaming bundle. So what is this thing? I think it's like a question. A thing I hear a lot from my brother and sometimes from you and Eli, but you guys are much more technically savvy, is streaming is really hard if you want to watch sports. Like, my brother is constantly complaining because he thinks, okay, I have this sports service.

That means I can watch the Cowboys anytime I want. Well, the Mavericks now. Now I can watch the Mavericks anytime I want. And then he'll be like, no, it's a blackout. And it's really annoying. And he has to then go buy another streaming service or he has to find someone who can, like, can, like, stream just that one channel to him. And it's all stupid and confusing. And this, I think, is going to potentially reduce that confusion.

but not a lot because sports streaming is still a huge mess because every single sports like owner like NFL and everybody is selling their rights all over the place in all these different ways and like trying to put all of their eggs in every single basket. And it feels like this is kind of solving for that, but kind of not. Yeah, it feels like, I don't know, Addy, does any of this make any sense to you? Can you explain this to us? Sports. As the resident sports lover.

Yes. The person who clearly knows anything about sports. I mean, this seems mostly it, that is absolutely the impression I get, is that sports is the great thing that streaming hasn't managed to do anything with yet. Yes. Which also, I think, means that there's more of a piracy ecosystem around it in a lot of ways. And I do wonder what impact that's going to have on this at a time when my sense is piracy

and all the other areas that streaming once decimated has grown a lot. Yes. That's interesting. Yeah. I don't really pirate anything except off of Alex's Plex server. Totally legal. But I have watched more sports than I'm proud of on like a TikTok live stream because I literally couldn't find anywhere else to watch it. I generally feel like if I try my hardest to find a legal way to watch something and there isn't one, it's no longer my fault.

Which is not a good legal argument, but it's how I feel about streaming. And often with sports, I'm like, okay, I pay for every single streaming service I can find that will show me sports. still there's like a one in three chance. I just can't watch whatever is on. You pay for live TV too, right? Not anymore. So I got rid of cable. But this is part of the whole thing is like the only reason now to have cable is if you

like sports because it is the one place that generally has all the sports. Unless you want like if you're big into like college volleyball, you're on ESPN Plus, right? But for the most part, live TV is like the last bastion of it's just where all the things are. Which is very funny because now that's the biggest problem in streaming is there is no place where all the things are. So we all just want cable again. Well, and there are also these smaller services that do live streaming that sports is kind of what they do. Like, I think Fubo is one and Sling TV is another one where like they still have all of these channels. And so they've been making $40, $50 a month on people for just this.

And they're about to get bodied. Do you think so? Like, is this the end of online live TV? No, I don't think it's the end of online, live online TV. I think it's probably going to be devastating for a few specific companies, like Sling and Fubo. Yeah. Right. I pay for Sling exclusively to watch sports.

Yeah. And I will stop now. Hulu's going to be fine, right? Who else does live streaming at this point? YouTube TV is the big one now. And YouTube TV has even made a big deal out of sports as the reason to have YouTube TV. Like they got the NFL Sunday ticket deal. paid a whole bunch of money for. It's the core thing that YouTube TV is is a sports package.

And increasingly, if this thing works and there are a million reasons to think it might not, like, did you guys see the news today that the leagues were blindsided by this and had no idea this was coming, which is bananas. I feel like the FTC is going to be very busy with this soon. I'm actually curious why this hasn't happened earlier. With everybody bundling together? The sports, like someone making a really big play for live, a large live sports. It's because partially the leagues. The leagues don't, like the leagues want to control their rights.

Their rights are super, super lucrative, which is why Google spent a ton of money to get YouTube TV and the NFL sports. Sunday ticket. Sunday ticket? Sunday ticket. There we go. Sports ticket. Sports ticket. It's the same thing. It's, no, it's, I think it honestly begins and ends there.

It is so expensive to have sports. And it is like the last thing that is that expensive. And I think it, but I think it spins both ways, right? I think for a while it was like, oh, okay, we can use sports to grow our own thing. And I think it was when Max launched that they made a big deal out of Bleacher Report being part of it. Right. They were like, we have HBO and we have Bleacher Report as if those things were like equals. And that didn't really work.

And now I think all these companies are a point where it's like, okay, if you're trying to buy sports rights, which again are the best way to win in TV. If you have the NFL, you're going to have a successful television business. It's just how it works. If you want to do that, you either have to have tech company money, because now Amazon and Apple and Google are all in this fight, and they just have infinity money to throw at this, or they have to band together and find a way to fight this.

Because what the leagues want is they want their stuff to be everywhere, which is why they're also on broadcast TV. Roger Goodell, the NFL commissioner, just gave a long speech basically about how they're not going to ditch broadcast TV because that's how most people experience the games. It's like, that's true, and it's going to be true for a while. So you either have to replace that unbelievable scale

with some other kind of unbelievable scale, which I think each of these companies wanted to do. I know for sure Disney has been trying to do this. They're like, oh, ESPN is going to be the thing. And they're like, well, it's going to cost you like $100 billion. And they're like, well, never mind. And so it does seem like kind of a sign of desperation out of these companies that they're like, our only chance is to all do this together or else we're housed. Well, we saw that last year because ESPN has been looking for a partner for a while now.

And apparently it had one over at Fox, which is part of Disney. They could have just like walked down the street and knocked on the door. And like, let's work together. Come on. And I guess they finally did. And then Warner Brothers, who has very, very vocally like David Zaisloff has been like, anybody. want to do business with me? I'm ready to do business. Yeah, he's like, I'll buy you, you buy me, I don't care. Whatever you want. Let's sign some chess.

And this, like, is a great deal for them because most of these, most of these big channels are owned by Disney. Only a few of these channels are owned by Warner Brothers. And now they've got, like, an actual leg into sports. No disrespect to Bleacher report. They've got an actual leg into, like, live broadcast sports. Yeah. And that's huge for them. And then these other two have some money bags over in the corner who are going to pay them more money. and hopefully fund whatever massive lawsuits, I guess they're going to deal with from the leagues and probably the FTC. It does absolutely feel like the kind of consolidation that the FTC right now is going to be like, yeah.

Do you think I've been going back and forth on this because on the one hand, it's just a thing they're all doing together, right? And I think the case that they seem to be making to each other and to the sports leagues and to the world is like this isn't a new product. we're just taking a bunch of existing things. Like one of the things I was reading made an interesting case that the fact that they are linear streaming channels and not some new way of disseminating the content is how they manage to do this without signing new deals with the league.

And I don't know if that's true or not, but I assume the case that they're going to make is this is okay because it's all, you know, stuff we were doing anyway, we're just packaging it differently. But I have a hard time imagining. That's how it reads to Lina Khan or anyone else. We've just spent a bunch of time talking about these small streaming players that are going to get bodied by this.

And that is just the biggest argument that people could make. Yeah. I think that's probably right. It's all down to Fubo. Fubo and Sling TV are about to change the history of sports broadcasting in America. But wait, let's talk about Hulu. Because you made the case when this is first coming out that this is Hulu for sports, which congratulations. You were precisely correct on that.

We should also probably do a disclosure here. Let's see, NELA's not here, so we'll do it. Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media through its subsidiary NBC Universal, which owns Peacock, notably, not a part of this, notably also owns lots of sports rights, as does CBS and Paramount Plus. So lots of sports still not in this. We made a Netflix show. It's good.

I had nothing to do with it. You all might have. It's a show. I did an interview. There you go. So Adi is wildly conflicted. Oh, my God. Addie, why are you doing?

I don't know. Other things. Alex has a plan. server of dubious legality. But we should just like, let's do a little bit of a retrospective on whether Hulu was a good idea. Because if you rewind it a million years ago, it was sort of a similar thing, right? They were like, okay, Netflix exists.

What we need is a way to take all the things that we like about broadcast TV on the internet. They weren't even fighting Netflix. At the time they were explicitly fighting pirates. Fair. Yeah. That's right. It was torrents.

They were fed up with torrents. I don't know who does those. And they were super upset with it. And so they said, so I think it was like NBC Universal was one of the first ones. It was like, hey, it got with some private equity companies and made this deal. And then ABC and Fox, who at that point, only one of them was owned by Disney, all said, oh, we want to be in on this too. We want like a nice control way to get our stuff out there without having to manage like ABC.gov.com. Remember that website?

Oh, yeah. And so they said, okay, let's all bundle together. Let's do it this way. And then CBS was like, F you guys, we're going to go do our own thing. And eventually that became Paramount Plus, which is weird. We choose not to reference CBS All Access. Yeah. It just went off and did its own thing.

But everybody else came together to fight piracy. And at the time, Hulu was huge. Like it was like the second most followed website after like YouTube or something at the time. Because people were really into it because they got all the stuff. And then everybody immediately started to like, bicker and fight because apparently when you have all of these huge egos and big companies in the room all trying to work together they don't so right well and i feel like that the other reason this is just hulu again is it's that dynamic exactly right it's i don't think pirates are so much

the fight here like i i really increasingly believe this is about like rights consolidation and making sure they can they can like continue to stay in the game together and build a sports thing, both because it's what people want and because it's the only way any of them can afford it. But this sense of like, okay, if we don't give people one place to come to do it, they will find other ways that are worse for us. Yeah. Which is what Hulu was.

And Hulu really worked because it was like, oh, I want to watch Parks and Rec, which was just on TV. I can either go torrent it tomorrow or I can just go to Hulu tomorrow. And everybody went to Hulu because it was easier. Yep. It was like it was Spotify and the music industry. Like, same thing. But then it turns out that having three large companies own a company together.

goes badly. Yeah. And like, you know who's been through this now is Disney. Disney knows this better than anybody and is now willingly signing up for this again. Disney just screwed itself into paying like $20 billion more dollars to acquire the rest of Hulu from Comcast after all of this. And now is just happily jumping back into bed in this exact same agreement again. It doesn't make any sense to me. I think it kind of makes sense.

I think Disney has been facing a lot of existential crises with its various business. Fair. Particularly broadcast TV, particularly ESPN. And this gives them, like, a lot of opportunity to make some money back and make those businesses viable again, provided they don't get fully bodied by the FTC, Fubo, everyone else involved. I'm honestly, let's just be clear that no matter what the FCC does, the FTC also tends to have to go through the courts. And the FTC has not a great track record with the courts right now. Yeah, no, they mostly lose. Yeah.

So that's fair. get like bodied on Twitter. Or excuse me, they'll get like bodied on threads, maybe X, possibly TikTok. I think Bob Iger will get over it. Yeah, I think he'll survive it. And speaking of Bob Iger, so let's switch to the other story here because I think the other thing happening at Disney right now is like Disney is both, I think, to your point, kind of in an existential crisis.

It's been a weird couple of years for Disney. It's not growing as fast as it wanted to. It's not making such money as it wanted to. ESPN is still. this giant fountain of cash that now seems threatened so they're trying to figure out all this other stuff. And yet,

our man Bob Eager shows up to the earnings this week and is really like kind of feeling himself rolls out these big giant initiatives and it's just like, what's up everybody? Like we're still the Walt Disney company. Yeah, it had like big Bob Chapic energy

particularly because it was so like tech focused a lot of the stuff he was saying because one of the things is that they're going to have their own like persistent universe tied to Fortnite which we don't entirely know what that means or what that's going to look like. We have a vague idea.

But it's got Fortnite, persistent universe, and Disney involved. So that sounds like money and cool. It feels like that's going to work. Yeah, it feels like that's like a Bob Chapic. Like that's the sort of thing he wanted to do, right? Like he wanted to turn this company into a tech company. And so this is like, okay, this is giving them some inroads

and taking their like terrific IP and putting it out there in the Fortnite space and making those deals. And then you also have like, okay, they're going to start cracking down on Disney plus password sharing, which is another like tech thing

where it's like, okay, no more free rides, get out of here, which Bob did when he was like, no more free rides at Disney World or whatever he did. And Bob Eiger was like,

how dare you do that? That's so hostile to our customers. We love everybody who comes to Disney World. How dare you raise prices? But he doesn't love people who share passwords. Don't do it.

Bob will hate you. Let's talk about this Fortnite thing because I think this was a surprise in a lot of ways. Disney said they're investing $1.5 billion, I think, in Epic to create a persistent universe, as you said, tied to Fortnite. Again, we have no details on this. But Disney and Epic have partnered a ton on stuff over the years.

There's been all kinds of Marvel stuff inside of Fortnite. And my sense is this stuff has done very well and feels like in a lot of ways kind of a natural place for Disney as a company to go, right? Yeah, the absolute first thing I thought is, oh, I kind of thought this had already somehow happens. Yeah. So, I mean, I think what we've seen from Fortnite over the last year, or from Epic, really, is this idea that they can take the thing that is Fortnite and the Unreal Engine underneath

it and build it out into more stuff, right? They did Lego Fortnite. They have the racing game that I can't remember the name of right now, but it's very fun and everybody should play. And there's just like there is a universe around. Fortnite now. Yeah. It seems very powerful.

Which also ties into it. It seems like what they kind of want to be is corporate Roblox. Yeah. Roblox is incredibly popular. Roblox is also just the jankiest thing in the world. You go to a website and click on a thing and you find like a prison simulator made by a 13-year-old. But my godson loves it. This is more, it is they want to be a game full of games.

And but it's these very well-recognized IPs. And it seems like if that's the goal, you literally could not imagine a better partner than Disney, right? Yeah. So is Roblox? Well, Lego was a pretty good partner. Lego, that's true. Yeah, because they did Lego first, right?

Yeah. And Lego Fortnite by all accounts is doing super well. And makes sense. It's like the thing I keep coming back to is like I'm very old. Yeah. And so I play Fortnite like it's like a game for shooting. Most people, especially younger than me, because again, I'm very old, Fortnite is just like a place to hang out.

It's just a place to like do fun stuff. Yeah. And there's like, there are purely creative worlds in Fortnite where you just go to build stuff. And it's the Roblox is kind of the same thing, right? Like the being there is the point. And like Disney World. It just is digital Disney world in so many ways. And I feel like Disney, I'm almost surprised Disney didn't try to do this itself.

But it seems like a big, big bet on who is going to win this race that it would pick Epic to go with. I also think the scaffolding of a game, even if you're mostly hanging out, is really, important just because we have seen at this point two or three decades of things like MMOs tend to be really successful even if people are using them to get married or hang out with friends whereas things like Horizon where the entire goal is why don't you do the things you do in real life but you can't actually get any of the sensory experience it seems like people just don't like obviously some people use them things like VR chat definitely have a base Yeah.

But I think it's a little less intuitive why you should get into them. I mean, my godson, I was back in Texas recently, and that night he's like, I'm going to play Roblox with my friends. And we were like, all right, cool. And we went off to the rodeo. We came back that night, and he was asleep. We get up the next morning. And he's like, my favorite game in the world is Lego Fortnite. The babysitter showed it to me, and now I'm obsessed.

And that's all he plays now. Like, it was just like an instant drug for him. And he was not a big Fortnite player. He was like Roblox fan. but that like it was just very clear it built that world and gave him that thing and then he could be like

there's my babysitter's house over there at Fortnite and I was like well that's a little creepy but also I love this for you and I love that she has the patience to play this with you because you're eight but it's like it's a very weird like it's not weird

but it's just kind of how quick it is for people to just jump into it and it feels like with Disney that's just going to be like huge yeah I mean yeah having the pull of characters you recognize and that storytelling that Disney is so good at goes a really long way. But it breaks my brain to think about all of this because on the one hand, I think the two things

that this says to me are epic is winning in some vague but real way. And also that we're all still betting on this idea of the metaverse being a thing. And I really thought we had just given up on that idea. Like I've made so much fun of the whole concept of the metaverse for the last two years. And now I'm sitting here being like, this is an unbelievably good idea. Of course Disney is. I feel vindicated because I feel like it was not me who wrote this, but several people just said, look, the metaverse is just video games. It's just that we went through a weird period where a bunch of men in suits decided that we, what if it was video games but minus the things that people actually like about video games. I feel like you used to make the point a lot that Roblox was the metaverse.

And like Roblox was one of the biggest metaverses, right? I think, and when Roblox itself decided, it wanted to make that point. Yeah, true. It ended up changing its name away from games, and that's also, I think, kind of silly because clearly people are doing games there, even if they're highly social. Right. But I just, I think we've gotten away from the idea that you're going to work in Fortnite, which is kind of what I associate the metaverse boom of the pandemic era with.

So there's no like B2B Fortnite software. It's just Roblox told all its employees to come into the office because you can't work in Roblox. What if we try to work in Lego Fortnite? I'm down. I would podcast in Lego Fortnite. Yeah. Let's do a whole show in Lego Fortnite. We can do it.

I'll wear my Rabin meta smart glasses. Same. And we'll hang out of Lego Fortnite. It'll be sick. So you're like this thing works for you. You're in on this concept? I mean, not me personally, but it makes sense to me. Okay.

Why not you personally? because I don't like being around other people virtually. That's honest. Okay. I respect that. Yeah, I think this part of Disney feels like in many ways the biggest bet where like it's, they're still very much calling Disney like the Disney plus company. Like that is the thing Disney needs to work. But Disney spent I think $2 billion to do a gambling thing that will work because it's sports gambling and it's

can't help but work. It's doing great, yeah. But this feels like in terms of sort of big swings with a lot of room for error and a lot of like monstrous room for success, the epic thing seems like it could be a big part of that. Yeah, because I feel like Disney when it comes to games has had like a very mixed run of things, right? Like they've had some good stuff. They've had some bad stuff. That's true.

Disney's not. I'm trying to think of the good games based on Disney IP. Right. Like they've licensed stuff so you have like Kingdom Hearts and many. Many Star Wars games. All of the Star Wars. They do exist. Right.

But then they... Are they good and fun and exciting and worth playing? Disney's also had like it's on internal studios and then it's like moved away from those internal studios. I think under Bob Chapic, it did a lot of like heavy reorg with the studios. And so this is like an interesting almost like return to form for Disney to be like, oh yeah. Games. Yeah. I mean, the thing I associate weirdly most with it is we're inspectors epic Mickey.

Yes, that's what I was thinking of too. An absolutely massive financial success. No, but it was like, that was the most Disney of Disney games, right? Like, that was, like, anytime I think of a video game of Disney, I go back to him being like, yeah, you're going to paint your way like into the future with like Mickey Mouse. It was also just symbolic of that period, though. That was like the height of prestige AAA single player games. Yeah. I just Googled best Disney video games ever just to make sure there wasn't like an obvious one I was missing.

And we're looking at things like Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse from 1990 and Quackshot from 1991. Like, the track record's not amazing. Yeah. Yeah. And so they've got all these terrific IP that they've been very good at selling out to other companies. And now doing this with Epic and what seems like it's going to be a much tighter relationship, I'll be really curious to see what happens there. And also, if it explodes, it's going to be like really interesting. to watch it. It's also very fun that this is

one of Apple's best friends partnering with one of Apple's mortal enemies. Yeah. Which I just enjoy very much. Like Bob Eiger and Tim Cook are going to have a lot of very polite, very testy phone calls over the next couple of years and I'm very excited about it. It's going to be great times. I mean, Disney was a big launch partner. It was supposed to be for the Vision

Pro. Yeah. Yeah, you can go hang out. You can watch a movie like I think in Darth Vader's Palace or something. It's, I don't remember if it is that exactly, but yes, it is Disney, definitely Star Wars themed. Yeah, yeah, I think there's one that's like on the volcano planet where he lived for a while. I know far too much about Star Wars, apparently, judging by both of your faces.

Oh, no, I remember all those things I'm trying to remember because I went into the theater and I do not remember where it was. I wanted to say Tatooine. Was there, oh. There was a Tatooine. That I know. I don't know if there were others, but there was definitely a tattooing. Maybe I just made up Darth Vader. I want to watch a movie on Darth Vader's, like, Throne.

It's a good idea. Listen, I know for sure Bob Iger is listening to this podcast. So Bob, get it done. Make it happen. Come on. All right. One more thing before we switch gears and take a break here. I don't know if you guys saw it, but the fisciest argument of the week on threads. Everyone's favorite feisty social media platform was about Apple TV Plus at HBO.

Yeah. I just want to feel everybody out on how we feel about this. So Wired wrote a story basically positing that Apple TV is the new. HBO and that it's, it is where you go to get basically nothing but very good things. They don't do that much, but the things that they do are very good. And then Lucas Shaw, who's a reporter at Bloomberg and very good and knows this stuff better the most, quote tweeted somebody saying something to the effect of anyone writing something like this should be required to say that nobody watches Apple TV Plus.

And the feelings that that brought out in people on the internet, people blogged about it, people posted about it, people got very angry at Lucas, somebody called him a funny name, name that he then quote tweeted and it just became this whole thing. But I think the question underneath it is like, is Apple TV the one now? Like is it is it is it the best one? Is it interesting? I mean, here's a question. Do you like science fiction?

Sometimes. Okay. Do you like weird modernist takes on historical women's stories? Yes. Unversally. And do you like Ted Lassow? This is scarily accurate. If you like those three things, then like Apple TV is great.

I think Apple TV Plus is very much like HBO and that it has really high standards. It maintains those really high standards. And like HBO for a very long time, nobody watched it. Everybody's just like, like we love to be like, oh yeah, HBO, Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is huge. It's massive. And a ton of people watched Game of Thrones. That was not normal for HBO.

That was a surprise and a shock and a delight for HBO. And also, I'm pretty sure that, like, the Game of Thrones ratings would have been, like, a pretty bad episode of the Big Bang Theory. I just don't say a conflict between the two things you just mentioned. That's totally fair. Yeah, I think they were doing, like, 10, 11 million average viewers for, which was massive for HBO. And at the time for broadcast TV, it was, like, pretty okay. But, you know, you think about the mash finale or was Gray's. My big one is Grey's Anatomy Season 2 was over 20 million people watching it.

So you're like, no. Yeah. 20 million people did not watch the latest season of For All Mankind. They should have. I guess the thing that interests me about this comparison is that a lot of the way that I experienced early, like, prestige TV and HBO shows was through a critics ecosystem that doesn't exist anymore. that a lot of the, I think you've written about this, that there was the idea that nobody's, like not that many people are watching this show,

but every critic you know is watching this show. Everything on the internet is writing about it. There are these whole little ecosystems. I'm really curious what that looks like for Apple. Yeah. And I think Apple's been doing kind of okay with it. That's one of the reasons it's gone so far into science fiction is because, like, you have Monarch,

which is a big show that's based in the Godzilla world. And it does ask you to care about the Godzilla movies. You shouldn't. But it wants you to so bad. It wants you to. And the show is legitimately good. I think it's got a great, like, time ahead of it. And same with for all mankind.

But it doesn't really, like, they're not really hitting at the same kind of, like, pace that traditionally those critically acclaimed, like, shows. Like, we don't have a television without pity anymore. AV club is very, very different than it was 10, 15 years ago, five years ago. And so you don't have those, like, conversations happening. And said you have, like, people on TikTok. going through and judging Emma Stone's favorite movies and saying why they suck,

which is like not particularly useful criticism. Or you have, what is it, you have threads and people making fun of Lucas for something he was right about. Like nobody watches Apple TV

except for B& David, I think. Yeah, well, there were a lot of people who responded being like, well, Apple TV Plus has 25 million subscribers. That's different than how many people.

viewers. Yeah. Yeah, they all watch Ted Lasso. I'll give you that. They did all watch Ted Lasso. And then they maybe watched Did they watch Foundation? Probably not.

They all said they watched Foundation. Yeah. They watched like an episode and a half. And they're like, yeah, totally. The only person in the world who watched all of Foundation is Dan Sefert. And he's – And then he had to leave the verge because of him. Yeah, that's why he's not at the verge anymore.

It's because we found out he watched All of Foundation. And we were like, wow. No, but, Adi, I think you're – the point you're making about critics made me think of something, which is that, like, even still – like I think about a website like The Ringer, which is a lot of really good pop culture coverage. they sort of instinctively cover every new like 9 p.m. on Sunday HBO show. Right. Because there's just an assumption that this show sort of matters, right?

Whether it's the White Lotus or Succession or any of those kind of handful of times a year shows that... Yeah, I'm getting that true detective right now. Yeah, totally. And there's just a cultural assumption that this show is relevant because it is like the Sunday night show on HBO. Apple TV definitely doesn't have that. No. Like, I could not tell you what day any Apple TV show comes out, which I think is like a meaningful thing. Was Ted Lasso Tuesdays?

I honestly couldn't tell you. Like, the only streaming one in general, I remember, was the first season of the Mandalorian on Disney Plus came out Friday mornings. And I had friends who would literally wake up early in the morning on Friday morning to watch the show in order to, like, be able to talk about it at work. And so, like, that's the level that you get to. And I think HBO just sort of has granted that level of cultural relevance, even if it's not real. Like, we were just looking this up before we started, and four million people watched the series finale of Succession, like one of the great TV shows that every critic on the Internet was writing about, which is like half the number of people who watch an episode of Chicago Fire. Like everybody's 95th favorite TV show. But nothing has hit that sort of cultural relevance that HBO just gets to.

have because it's at HBO. Yeah. And even though Apple TV has a lot of good shows, I actually think, like, if you just took 50 random shows from any streaming service, I would bet that Apple TVs are better than any random 50 on any other streamer. And that's what they were, I mean, that was like the kind of the core argument, I think, of that HBO piece, the Apple TV Plus piece, was that, hey, like, pound for pound, it's, it's hitting above its weight.

Like, it's doing really well. Yeah, I think that's probably right. But it's also, it's not doing true detective numbers. It's not doing Chicago fire numbers. And historically, Prestige TV doesn't do Chicago Fire numbers. That's why part of why it's Prestige TV is because a lot of people say, I don't want to watch that. It's too smart. It's too prestigious.

It's too prestigious. I will say, though, and we need to take a break. But Criminal Record on Apple TV Plus kicks ass. I'm pretty sure it's not going to land the plane and it's not going to make any sense at the end. But it's like five episodes in and there have all been great. So I love this one. Highly recommend, but I might take that back. Anyway, we need to take a break.

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So as you're listening to this on Friday, it's now been a week since the Vision Pro Pro came out into the world. We've got a bunch of news, but Adi, I just want you to describe the vibes of what you've seen from a week of Vision Pro being in the world. It feels like I've seen sort of three things. One is everyone noticing all of the little annoying things about the Vision Pro that Neely and the rest of us noticed. Two is people going, oh, wow, I'm like a developer or I'm a person who is interested in technology and this thing is a technologically interesting system. Both of which were, I feel like kind of prefigured by our review.

Yes. The third is this thing's really expensive. This is a cloud symbol. Agreed. And that is the one I should have seen coming more than I did, I think. I sort of took it as this thing is really expensive. Maybe it'll be kind of ridiculous in gauche to wear outtide. Holy God, was I wrong?

No. Oh, man, was that right? You're still right. Don't, don't. It's still gauche. I'm right in the abstract. I'm wrong in actual reality. Don't give these people power.

I mean, what was it? I think Jake posted something on the site. The headline of the quick post he did was just, it's been 10 hours. And this is a video of a man in his car driving while wearing a Vision Pro, which like we knew was going to happen. And we got a bunch of impressed posts from people saying, boy, you guys called this. And I kept being like, this was not a tough call, guys. Like this was what it was going to be.

But now we've seen people walking around the mall. You see people on the subway. Like, you're totally right that being the person with this out in the world makes you interesting. And I don't think that'll last, but it's very much where we are right now. Yeah, I feel like there are two ways this could go. One is the iPhone, which having an iPhone in the early days, like if somebody else had one, you were like, oh, my God, iPhone. The other way is, I remember Google Glass. I remember the period, like the week or two where Google Glass, it was like, oh, this is so exotic, all of these models where it's like this incredibly exciting sci-fi thing.

and it looked a lot cooler than the Vision Pro, frankly. And then within a month or two, you were getting banned from bars. Yeah. No, 100% it's going to be that side. Because right now, all the people doing it aren't using the Vision Pro correctly, which was pointed out to me by someone in our office who has a Vision Pro. If you're walking down the street with a Vision Pro on, just like pinch, pinching the air, you're not doing anything.

Yeah, apparently you can only have one window open and you have to hold it like this all the time. So theoretically, the only way to actually make it like, just like walking around like that. And I'm like, yeah, you got, and he got so bad. He was like, they're not doing it right. You can only have one window at a time. And he was like walking through the office, showing us how to it works. I was kind of hoping it would be like you wake up in the morning and you like walk to the subway just sort of leaving browser tabs behind you. And then you just pick them all up on the way home.

You come back out, you put it on and it's like, oh, cool, there's all the stuff I had to do today. Like, that sounds awesome. That is super not how it works. No. I would just like to note also, this is a thing that I've had many people mention about pass-through is I am waiting. Someday this thing is going to crash while you were wearing it. It is going to be incredibly annoying to suddenly be blind while you are driving. Don't drive with it.

Don't be dumb. Yeah, that's a good. Just quick PSA. Don't do that. Just don't do that. Well, I think, like, when the Wall Street Journal did. theirs, when Joanna did her review and she did like a ski slope thing, they just shut down the ski slope because they're like, oh, we can't have other people like on this slope with her. And what if she goes blind?

Right into somebody. You can't have that happen. So it's like, don't drive with it. I like that Joanna shows up and she's like, guys, I have an NDA. I have to do this separately. And they're like, don't worry. We won't anyone around you anyway. You're cool.

But it does seem like the people have landed on the thing that we've all been talking about. for the better part of a year now, which is like, this thing is a television. That seems to be overwhelmingly the takeaway. It's like, like you're saying, there's some cool technological stuff going on here. In certain, like, engineering ways, this thing is masterful and amazing. Kind of useless for a lot of things. But holy crap, is it a great TV watching experience? That's like the thing I've seen overwhelmingly seems to be that.

Which is driving me insane because it is a TV that I cannot use in the way that I've would use a TV because it is single user. The single-usiness of this thing has been driving me just up a wall for a week. Yeah. Oh, no, I completely agree. And I'm getting mad, like, watching you sitting here. I'm angry. Like, I'm genuinely angry because I have so many electronics and I, look, I share them with

a person. Yeah. And the point is, we are both able to use this thing. And I can't, it's not just like, oh, it's fitted for your face or whatever. It's, you literally can't use the interface. Right. It won't recognize your eyes. Yeah, we haven't all been using Nelai's review unit because we can't.

Right. I mean, you can start a guest set. Like, to be clear, the thing that happens is there's one person who can own this thing. It recognizes them. You can start a guest session by pressing the button, and then you have to do this, like, minute-long calibration process of picking colored dots out. Yeah. And then it can recognize you, and it can recognize you basically until it swaps back. And then you have to start a new guest session.

So there gets to be one designated TV user in the house. That's it. No one else watches TV at this house. Everyone else has to spend a minute getting their TV ready. And I do think I was less worried about this before it launched than I have become now. I'm with you. I think it's actually the single biggest thing missing from the Vision Pro right now is decent multi-user support. Because if it is a television and or a game console, it's going to be a thing you pick up, put on, use for a bit, and then put down.

Right? It is like very much an episodic device. Like all headsets are right now. Like Chris Great made this point on this show a while ago, and I haven't stopped thinking about it ever since. I was like, oh, why aren't there VR games that are fun to play for eight hours? And he was because, like, who the hell wants to play a VR game for eight hours? Like, I think that's right. And so the idea that I take off my headset and put it down on my couch and the headset is the television.

And my wife can't then put it on is stupid. Like, there are people who are saying, you know, it's lonely and you can't watch TV alone or you have to watch TV alone in it. And I both think that's true and also kind of overstated. Like a lot of people spend a lot of time watching TV alone. I think that's basically okay. Somewhere Richard Lawler is listening to this feeling very vindicated. But this idea that it would be like no one else in my house is allowed to watch my TV ever. It begins a 50s.

Or like no one's allowed to use my PlayStation. Right. Yeah, exactly. So like rich multi-kid families. you remember did you ever have friends like that when you were a kid and they'd be like oh this is my PlayStation my brother has his own PlayStation what no you'd be like I did not have this now why don't I have that why don't I have my own PlayStation then your parents would be like because they cost money get out yeah go go mow the yard yeah they'd be like go outside that's your playstation

it's extremely easy to switch because every other entertainment focused computing device on the market except maybe the iPad recognizes you're supposed to have multiple profiles I just like watching adding it so mad about I was talking to Jake on our team him earlier. The fun of being in the office is I get to just randomly get in arguments with people. And he got very heated and was saying that we should start giving every iPad a zero out of 10 until they give proper multi-user support. And I'm just like, hell yeah, dude. It's a stance. Let's go for it. Multi-users are nothing. Yeah, I support this. I'm into this. Any other Vision Pro stuff we should talk about? I don't

want to linger on this. We've talked a lot of Vision Pro on the show. I fixed it did a big breakdown. Oh, yeah. That's right. And boy, howdy. is the pixels per inch, awesome. Is it nuts? Run us through the numbers. 3,386 pixels per inch. That seems high. Yeah.

It's only a few pixels less than what you would expect for like what 4K requires, which is why it's not technically a 4K display. But it's this big. Yeah. In fact that it's an inch and it has that many pixels on it is kind of insane. Do you want to give the Quest 3 and the other numbers? that were in our post? Yeah, yeah, yeah, I guess.

A useful comparison? Yeah, and by comparison, the MetaQuest 3 has 1,218 pPI, and then the HTVive Pro has 950. And if you want something that you actually look at more than like once a day, the iPhone 15 Pro Max has 460 pPI. So this thing is... And they point out that pixels per degree is a lot of... in some ways more accurate.

That's like the degree of field of view that pixels, because a headset is like this thing where it just blows up a gigantic small screen to a gigantic field. But even those numbers are also pretty good. Yeah. It's like the numbers here are just outrageously high. And you're like, okay, so this thing is like damn good.

Yeah, because the pixels per degree, the Vision Pro is at 34 PPD, which is lower than the 94 and the 95 ratings for the iPhone 15 from 15 feet away or no, the iPhone 15 from a foot away or the standard 65 inch 4K

TV from 6.5 feet away. So is lower number better here for the PPD? No, higher number is typically better. I think that the point is that it is still not going to get you the kind of clarity that you get from like looking at a very

small field of view for a small screen. But it is still, I don't know that I have the numbers here, but it is still pretty good for comparing it against other headsets. Yeah. But it also makes pretty clear how hard a technical problem this is, because, I mean, Neil, I was talking about this when we talked about his review. It's like the comparison to like blood cells, which means nothing. But it is, it is technologically insane that Apple got this many pixels onto a screen this small, and it's still not enough to do the thing that we need to do in order for the stuff to be really realistic. Right. Like,

That is the scale of this problem is you can have that many pixels on that small space, but because it's so close to your eyes and because it is literally trying to simulate reality, the bar is just so, so, so high that even though Apple has done like an order of magnitude more than anyone else has been able to do, we're still not there. The road for really making this stuff amazing is so long. It's also, yeah, a reason why pixels are just not the be-all and end-all of headsets. Totally. Like things like field of view turn out to be a really big deal with the vision pro?

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's been really interesting watching everybody go through, I would say, the kind of normal honeymoon phase of a vision pro where you get it on. You do the first couple of things. You get the setup. You learn how to do the pinch, the eye tracking. And it's like, oh, my God, it works.

And it feels amazing. And then very slowly you start to notice, like, oh, I can see the edges of my vision here as I'm going. And then, oh, the pinching doesn't really work. And you just like slowly but surely the things that don't quite work start to creep in. But everybody seems to have that very first 20 minutes in the headset where it's like, oh my God, I'm never taking this off. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened. That is also the impression that I feel like everyone who put on a VR headset in 2013 got.

Yeah. That's probably true. No, that's true. Yeah. I was talking to a friend who he did when I worked with him, we worked on the original Oculus Quest review. Was it the Oculus Quest? The Rift. The Rift. The Rift was the first.

The original Rift, yeah. Yeah. And we worked on the original Rift review, and he's like, wow, I kind of called it. Like, then I said, basically my review is a lot like all of the Vision Pro reviews right now. And it's like, look back. Yeah, no, he's right. Like, when you finally try really cool VR, you're like, oh, wow, this is awesome. And then it kind of goes away, which is why nobody talks about VR cardboard anymore.

Because that was really cool when you first put on, like, the cardboard. And then five minutes later, you're like, okay, what do I do now? Yeah, I think a lot of this stuff is just a question of how long it takes to reveal. its problems to you. Yes. And the Vision Pro, to its credit, seems to take a pretty long time to reveal its problems to you. But right about the time it starts getting heavy and the battery starts dying and the gestures don't work quite so well.

And you remember you spent $300 or $3,500 on it. Every once in a while somebody has just been posting in all caps, $3,500. And I feel like this is now my legacy on the Vergecast. I'm very happy about it. I do feel bad. You mentioned Google Cardboard. I feel really bad for all of the people who spent a bunch of time making 180 and 360 degree videos, I guess, including us many years ago. And Apple is just like, no, they're not good enough.

You're not looking at them. They look at them. They look like potatoes. Which is wild because it's not like Apple is going way out of its way to ensure every experience you have in the Vision Pro is like perfect and sane. And a lot of people are having issues with, you know, motion sickness and some of the like problems with the ways that apps work. And there are not that many guardrails except on videos that Apple doesn't think look good enough. And I think that's kind of a silly set of guardrails. Yeah, it's frustrating.

Yeah. Especially that it's even just on the web. Like the web is the place I think of is you should be able to just go and experience a thing even if the quality is not great. Yeah. If I'm willing to go onto that stupid keyboard and type www.w. YouTube.com slash 360 videos that are going to make me throw up. Like, that is my right.

This is the Internet. I should be allowed to do that. All right. Anyway, we should move on. Before we get to the laying and ground, one more thing, one and a half more things I want to talk about. I'm only giving Alex a half, and we'll get to that in a second. Blue Sky opened up this week, which I think is interesting. This is the new Twittery social network that all the shit posters went to and have been kind of hanging out in secret for the last year. And now Blue Sky is open to everybody. Jay, their CEO, did an interview with Alex Heath talking about how they plan to make money.

And what do you guys make of this? Is like, is Blue Sky come in? How I fully understood. I hadn't looked at the website yet. I was scrolling through threads and I saw a bunch of posts saying, I'm on Blue Sky, but I'll still be posting here on threads. And that's how I knew that Blue Sky had opened. And I was like, is it good if that's how I find out is just a bunch of people on

threads saying I'll still be here. I'll still be on both, posting on both. Yeah, it's interesting. You're on Blue Sky, right? I'm on Blue Sky. I went to Mastodon first. I still use Mastodon. I've slipped to Blue Sky just because Blue Sky's felt much more low stakes.

Interesting. Part of it was that it was private, that it was just much smaller. But it does feel like where a bunch of, A, Twitter people that I liked went, and B, it feels like I don't have to be contributing to a greater social good, which was the feeling I ended up getting from Mastodon. Yes. Mastodon is very much like an NGO designed to make the world a better place through lots of developmental documentation. Which I'm sure is not true for absolutely every instance.

Like all of the usual caveats, I just got the sense. I was like, is this really a good enough, constructive enough thing? There were just so many people talking about you just, you shouldn't be, you shouldn't be cluttering up our timelines with all of this frivolous stuff. Yeah. And then I went to Blue Sky and Drill was there. It's just all frivolous stuff. Yeah. Yeah.

And also a decent amount of law Twitter ended up there. Yeah, fair. Yeah, part of me thinks it's a success story if they all end up being their own things and different. And I think the weirdest part is going to be the people who kind of commit to posting everywhere and try to be the same thing everywhere. I just don't think it's going to work. And I think these things have all developed such different norms that, like, the vibe on blue sky is unrecognizable to the vibe on. threads or on Mastodon. Largely in good ways, but

mostly in just extremely chaotic ways. There's just a lot of people making inside jokes that you don't understand if you've been off of Blue Sky for more than 10 minutes. But that's a good thing, right? And I think part of the big bet that the social web is making right now is that there can be lots of

winners and lots of things to come out. But in some ways, I think Blue Sky taking this long to open up was both the best and worst thing that happened to Blue Sky. Like, Blue Sky has this very like mature vibe now, right? Like, Blue Sky knows what it is. But the downside of that is it knows what it is for this small group of people who have been there together alone, like on a desert island for a year.

While Threads became sort of the clear mainstream choice, Mastodon continues to be Mastodon. Threads in Mastodon are eventually going to be integrated. And so it just kind of feels like Blue Sky is just relegated to forever being an also-ran. Yes. I mean, that's why I didn't, I have an account, but I don't really participate in blue sky as much as much. Because my brain can only handle so much social media. And so I don't want to like, I'm not going to be one of those people on a bunch of different platforms and always talking. And that one I was like, I just feel like this one is not going to be the big one.

I think a lot of really cool people are there. But a lot of the really cool people are there, I'll just text and talk to them because they're my friends. On the other hand, I kind of, well, A, I do wish that it were much easier to have a single interface where I could at least check. all these things. Yes. At the same time, that's very annoying to me. But I'm also, I don't know, I hope we get more sites that are small and niche and that I can just go to for a small subset of things.

Blue Sky in some ways reminds me of Tumblr in its post-hegemonic era. Yeah, in its current era where it's just like a couple of folks you know and they're being really weird and that's great. Yeah. Tumblr's in the phase where every time somebody mentions Tumblr, you go, oh, a Tumblr. Yeah. And that is kind of what Blue Sky feels like already. Except that I guess one of them allows porn.

Well, you know. I'm really curious how long that's going to last because I am just Apple and Google exerted so much pressure a few years ago in getting not safe for work stuff either paywalled or not paywalled but like either walled away or taken down. The blue sky getting on it feels odd. Yeah, I mean to some extent I think you could make a pretty good argument that blue sky never should have opened up that main that sort of. of managing and slowing down that growth was a good thing for Blue Sky. Like it grew too fast in the beginning. Like, remember people were hacking the invite codes and a ton of people came on all at once. It became a mess.

Like the norms changed. People started doing weird stuff. The platforms started breaking in weird ways. The hell thread ruined everyone's life. And there was, I think, a moment where they said, okay, we're going to slow this down on purpose. And I think that was the right thing to do then. And I think you could make the case it's the right thing to do now. The problem is that runs against all of Blue Sky's stated goals, right, which are to build a social protocol for the web that is bigger than Blue Sky and to kind of reinvent the way that we do everything, which I think at this point, it lost, right?

Like we're in a VHS Beta Max war with AT protocol, which runs Blue Sky and Activity Pub, which is underneath Mastodon and which threads is going to adopt. And it almost doesn't matter anymore. I don't think which one is better. Activity Pub is going to win. Yes. It's just going to win. And I think if I'm blue sky, you either have to look at it and say, okay, do we want to keep fighting this fight that we are now so far behind? Or do we go like you're talking about and try to be something different and not try to build the next great social media company but like lean into this thing that we already are?

Which I think could be very cool. But doesn't at some point they have to make money? Yeah, presumably. I think that's going to be a real challenge if they don't grow. And I totally agree with you. Massadon runs on like a Patreon. Yeah. You can get by for a pretty long time.

That's true. Open source projects used to be taken for granted as just things that could exist. Yeah. And there's a way to run this stuff as like an okay business that doesn't involve. Like if Blue Sky wants to be a trillion dollar company, there are certain things you have to do in pursuit of that. Right. But I think my hope is for the next phase of the social web that not everybody tries to be a trillion dollar company that there are going to be lots of. and lots of much smaller ways to do this stuff.

Fingers crossed. And I think Blue Sky, I could be totally wrong because there are a lot of things Blue Sky does really well and it's a nice looking app. Everybody on there's, that's where drill is. It is the most fun social platform on the internet. Like I really believe that. But it is such an unusual place now

that I feel like if I had never been there before, it would show up and it would feel very strange. It also feels like a place that you kind of can only really grasp if you were on Twitter? Yes. But like on Twitter. Like capital O on Twitter. And God help you if you were one of those people.

It really is. It's full of like decade old Twitter jokes that if you don't get you, you sort of need a glossary to help you understand what the hell is going on on Blue Sky. Yeah. But we'll see. I support all of this. I hope Blue Sky works. I just don't think it's going to.

All right, Alex. I'm so afraid to do this. right now. I have a piece of news here. Before we take a break, we have one more story we should talk about for such a short amount of time. Shortest amount of time. In fact, it says, Alex, be careful in all caps. As some of you know, I did make a bet with some people that at some point we would probably see a picture of Elon Musk in Little Elon. I don't want to say any other way. I already hate this. Yeah. And we're one step closer because they are currently dealing with a problem on the platform, on X, the platform, where there is a non-consensual photo of a celebrity in the

nude. I mean, it's Drake's Nudes. Like, we can just say this. It's Drinks Nudes. Everyone on the internet knows this. This is why this became a story. It led to X being the number one app on the Apple App Store. I want to just be very clear, non-consensual nudes are not okay. Don't do that, but also I hate how close we are getting to the big nude where I win a bet. I don't want to win this bet. It's a terrible bet. Everyone loses that bet. Everyone loses when I win this bet.

Clean up your act. X, like, stop, stop letting non-consensual stuff just be all over your platform. That's not cool. Yeah. Well, and then all this stuff, we were kind of bookended with stories about the Taylor Swift deepfakes being all over. X first, there were non-consensual deepfakes. And now there's

a deep fake of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump that's all over the platform. X is just an odd, odd place. Yeah, it's an old kind of internet, but not in a good way, particularly if you have any vested interest in X and don't want to be sued. Yeah. I was saying it reminds me of Reddit back in the mid-teens

during the period where they were extremely lost I fair. Yeah. But at least Reddit would like say out loud that they didn't want these things. They wouldn't do anything about it for a long time. But at least they would say, we don't want this awful stuff to be all over our platform. Yeah. You do not get that sense from the leadership at X right now.

They are, yeah. Well, I think that Elon is definitely operating in a landscape that comes after Reddit's cleanup in which you're, yeah, you can't even just say, I don't endorse this, but it's here. It's like you have to have full-throated endorsement of yes, the Nazis. Even though like, look, yes, he has condemned the Nazis. He also just talks to a bunch of far-right people and spreads his own conspiracy theories. And there's a bunch of stuff that even though Reddit people like hung out with and invited the guy from creep shots into their events, like they didn't end up doing that. Right. Yeah.

No, I think that's right. And it's just bad times all around. Yeah, it's just bad times. I don't want to win this bet. Don't, please. I went from kind of wanting to win the bet because I like to be smug and win things to like, I don't actually want to win this bet with Liz. Don't.

It's a terrible bet. And also, to everyone who is asking for trending topics to be on threads, you don't want that. Don't click on trending topics because something bad will probably happen when you do it. All right, we need to take a break. Then we're going back to do a landing round. Support for the show comes from Anthropic. Not every question has an easy answer.

And the ones that are really worth asking usually come with a healthy mix of inspiration and backpedaling, aha moments, and quiet meditation. When you're working through one of those problems, you want a partner to bounce ideas off of and figure out where the deeper issue lies. That's where Claude can help. Claude is the AI for minds that don't stop at good enough. It's the collaborator that actually understands your entire workflow and thinks with you, Whether you're debugging code at midnight or strategizing your next business move,

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Passengers who'd been stuck aboard the Hanta or maybe Hanta virus-stricken Dutch cruise ship disembarked in the Canary Islands this weekend, prompting the highest stakes game of Where are they now since maybe COVID? Some of the evacuees, American and French, have since tested positive for the virus. And yet public health officials seem remarkably calm. We do have one individual who was taken to the biocontainment unit early, early this morning. And we assessed that individual. They are doing well. Possibly because this is not the one to freak out over.

Today, explain, drops every weekday afternoon. Buzzwords like progressive and affordability are thrown around all the time. in politics. But what do they actually mean? For me, being a progressive means at least two things. One, being willing to unite lots and lots of people, all of the folks that are getting screwed over against the powers that be that are making your life worse. And then second, being progressive is essentially a hopeful enterprise. That you think, I think, that the world can be much better, that we don't have to settle for crumbs or settle for the status quo.

And is there a difference between what it means to the elected officials and what it means to the people? So money is essentially the root of everything. I don't care if you're gay. I don't care if you have all that. That's like secondary. Third, like that doesn't, that's not a priority. That's this week on America Actually.

Let's begin. All right, we're back. Let's not talk about Drake's nudes anymore. Let's do a laying around. Addy, you go first. What do you have? So the FCC has a law. against Robocalls. And this has said, you cannot have artificial voices. Do artificial voices include

AI voices? Artificials in the work? My instinct says yes. And they agreed. Good. Good for them. Nice. They declared today that the, that AI generated voice clones in Robocalls definitely do violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. That means they can crack down on them. This is partly relevant because the election season is heating up. And New Hampshire has just released the results of an investigation about who was making phone calls pretending to be Joe Biden. It's companies in Texas. Yeah, it's companies in my hometown. Okay, you need to be less excited about this.

I mean, look, anytime I see my hometown's name. This is not a cool, like, oh, those are my people. If you're not from, like, New York or, like, a big town and you see, like, I'm from Fort Worth. I see Fort Worth. I see Fort Worth in a name. I'm like, oh, cool. And then I just described Fort Worth, Texas, like it's like a tiny town in Iowa. I mean. It's like a large city.

right next to Dallas. This is so flattering. Thank you. Yeah, I think of it as being a pretty big place. Look, when you're next to Dallas, like, they're always over there talking about how cool they are and how you suck. So we have some inferiority complexes over Fort Worth. And apparently we also have spammers calling, pretending to be Joe Biden.

And they were saying, like, don't vote, right? Yeah, you've got to save your vote. Yeah, save your vote. Yeah, save your vote. Thanks, Texas. Wasn't that a whole story in the last election cycle that there were? There was a guy who was convicted for posting on Twitter about telling people not to vote, making fake ads saying you can vote by text message and telling people not to vote. I think you were thinking of Jacob Wool, the troll who, yes, was doing robocalls.

And robocalls were, yeah, they were an issue in the last election. They're obviously also just an issue as part of the overwhelming span that means I don't answer my phone anymore. Yep, same. I told somebody in an email the other day, oh, give me a call when you get a sec, and they called me four minutes later and I didn't answer. I was like, I don't know this number. I'm not answering the phone. Anyway, so now AI has, like it has a lot of things, supercharged this. It's starting to become an issue.

And the FCC is at the very least recognizing it's an issue. And we probably will end up seeing more about this. This also seems like we're already kind of deep in the deep fake election in a very real way. I just, if you get a call and it's like, hello, this is probably. President Biden. Why would you ever believe that call? I'd be like, oh, Joe, what's up, dude? Like, that's just like whenever you get the emails and it is like, this is President

Biden, I need your help right now, Alex Kranz. But you would at least think that is a message he recorded, right? No. You wouldn't? When you see those move on emails, are you like, oh my God, Nancy Pelosi is actually emailing me, David Pierce? No, you're always like, this is stupid and not real. Okay, you want the weirdest version of this, though, is that Eric Adams,

who you will hear definitely in conjunction with the weirdest of anything. Yeah. He does his own deepfakes. Like he had a bunch of calls where he auto-translated his voice. Yes, I remember that. To make it sound like he spoke languages that he didn't. I'm curious how that stuff is going to end up being affected by this. I mean, hopefully, I would assume it would be the same way where they're like, no, that's not true.

I don't, oh, man, what a legal mess that's going to be. Can you deep fake yourself? I don't know. I feel like maybe just don't do that kind of call. Maybe it's so, it's so, like, dumb. Because it's just like Nancy Pelosi is not writing me this email. Joe Biden is not out here calling me, like at the phone banks calling me because do we do phone banks anymore? Is that really a thing anymore?

No. Maybe. Maybe in New Hampshire. But it's just dumb. I'm just like, who is answering these calls being like, oh, well, Joe told me not to vote. Well, better not vote. I mean, I mean, still send those people to jail. Don't do that.

Don't do that. Yeah, but I'm just like, what? This stuff is, this stuff is a mess. And yeah, we are only at the very beginning of what's to come. Alex, what you got? My thing is not about Joe Biden or my home state. Okay, well, that I don't care. Yeah, never mind.

It's all dumb. No, it is cool because Ford, Ford, hold on. I almost said Fort Worth again. Ford Worth. Ford. So Ford has been quietly creating a skunk works team for low-cost EVs. And that's exciting because cheaper EVs are good. More competitors with Tesla will be good.

Just competition in general. We love that. It is also, did you all watch that show? Like All-American, I think it was called, like the Auto Show. Oh, yeah. American Auto. American Auto. Yeah, yeah.

It just feels like it was out of a storyline from that. So, okay. Let me explain to you what I don't understand about this. Ford, notoriously a company that makes cars. Yeah. You don't need to make a car company inside of your car company to make cars. You can just make cars. Yeah.

That's your thing. It's like Apple's like, well, we created a skunk works team inside of Apple to build smartphones. It's like, nope, you do that already. Just tell them to make a different one. Yeah. What is this? I think my understanding of it is. Ford is like it's illegal for Ford to make anything other than.

F-150s, so they have to create a whole new thing to make something else. I suspect it was probably because a lot of the people working on the skunk work project. The head of it is a guy who was at Tesla for years, Alan Clark. But a lot of the people working on it are from this place called automotive. Auto space, motive, space power. I had to, AMP. Sure. Yeah, I had to spell it out.

And they acquired this startup last year. And so I think it's probably just easier to hold them into a little company than a big company. But still, I agree with you. It's like, you can just go tell your people to make cheap EVs. That just makes me think they call it a skunk works because somebody at Ford thinks that makes them sound like a tech company. And what that actually is is just a team at your company. That's just some people who work for you. They're going to go make a really cool stealth bomber.

Bliss, look, I think it's awesome. I am extremely in favor of Ford and everybody else trying to figure out how to make cheap EVs. because that dream seems increasingly dead all over the place now. And like more power to anybody trying to pull this off. Yeah. It's funny. Like Farley, the CEO of Ford had an earnings call after all of this came out. TechCrunch reported the story and said that Clark and the team at AMP slash Ford SkunkWorks,

cheap eVs.com, whatever you want to call the place, said this is a flexible platform that will not only deploy to several types of vehicles, but will be a large installed base for software and services that we're now seeing at Ford Pro. I don't know what any of that means. And I don't understand how this company is running and doesn't know that it's a car company? Somebody went to chat GPT and said, listen, dear ChatGPT,

I run a car company. Like Jim Farley. What would I say if I ran a tech company instead? And they wrote that press release. Yeah, Jim Farley, don't let ChatGPT. you write your press releases in anymore. Just build cars, man. Just make cool cars.

Just make cheaper cars. Yeah. Take the things that you make and make them cheaper. Maybe shorter. Right inside your company. Yeah. Maybe I don't need cameras to be able to see out of the front of my car. Listen, it's weak and all dream.

It's a little thing. I'm going to go last because we started on a Cran's victory lap and now we're going to take a dated victory lap. What is it? So the information reported this week that Apple is developing, quote, at least two iPhone prototypes that are flip phones. In their skunk works project that's probably not actually owned by Apple. Correct, which is just they take all the people who work at Apple Park and they just tell

them to make phones. And they say, you're a skunk works now. And somebody raises their hand and says, what does that mean? Does it change anything? And they say, shut up. We're a tech company. This is the future. Just go do it.

But there have been rumors about this for a while that Apple was making these things. And also, a thing to know about a company like Apple is that they prototype everything. Like, if you can imagine a phone of some shape or function or feature, I would bet you $10 there is one on a table somewhere in Apple Park. It's just how it works. It's just what you do if you are a company this big that makes this many products. But Apple, like me, thinks flip phones kick ass and is going to make some, and I think it's awesome. I love that. And apparently also Apple is working on a foldable iPad, which is the other dream.

Yeah. Like what a, that's just like give me an iPad mini that folds up and I can put it in my pocket. Like, hell yeah. That is also apparently being worked on. This stuff is complicated. We've seen flip phones. They're hard and bad and have big creases and have their issues. I still firmly believe this is like the next thing.

Yes. And I think it's clearer to everyone, including Apple, that smartphones need a next thing or they're just going to be laptop. They're just going to be fine. You're going to have it. You're never going to think about it. You're going to upgrade it when it dies, and that's going to be it. And Apple has a lot of money riding on being able to get you to upgrade more quickly than that. And I think foldables are going to be that thing.

I think the only part of this that surprises me is that we aren't closer to the Apple foldable, given historically their timeline of kind of like following everybody else. There usually only a couple of years. With the exception of the Vision Pro, they're usually only a couple of years. behind everybody else. And this one will be like five or six years. Do you want to know my theory about this? What?

They can't call it anything other than the iPhone. And you can't make an iPhone that is like a 1.0 anymore. Like they can't come out and be like, it's a new thing. It's called the I flip. Everybody like, no, it's just a flip. It's an iPhone. Like what are we doing here? And so I think if I'm Apple, I feel like I have to make an iPhone that is like on par with all the iPhones.

We already sell, which is now a 17. year old line of phones. Same. And so I think catching up to that is really hard because the flip phones require new components. They require rethinking how batteries work. There's some new software stuff you're going to have to do. Like, it's hard work to do this well. And I think in the way that Apple was clearly very comfortable releasing a Vision Pro

that is not the thing they wanted it to be, I don't think you get away with that. Okay. With an iPhone. I think you can maybe get away with that with an iPad. I think if they came out with a foldable iPad and we're like, this is a whole new thing. and people are like, it's not perfect, but oh my God, it folds. Isn't that cool? That I could see.

But I think the iPhone is too big and too important to everything that Apple is doing for them to be like, here's a thing that's not quite finished. Okay. That's my theory. I guess I can see that. Your phone is a thing that you absolutely need to work in a way that you don't, a bunch of other devices. Right. Yeah.

Like, if my iPad sucks, I just put it down. But like I, yeah, no, you're exactly right. If I leave my phone at home, life has fallen apart. I had, when I was in Vegas for CES, my phone just like broke one day. And it was the most stressful like six hours trying to get all of that to work again because I couldn't log in anything because I didn't have the two factor working. I couldn't talk to my wife because we talk over SMS because she's on the pixel and I'm on an iPhone. Like, it was awful.

And I had this moment of being like, oh, I'm way too reliant on my phone. But that's just life now. You're exactly right. You can actually feel your stress. Like, I only sort of tangentially knew about what was happening with your phone, but I could still feel the stress through Vegas. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I about burned our hotel down with my anxiety trying to do that.

And you could also, at one point, you're like, oh, I'm feeling pretty good. David must have gotten his phone fix. Okay. Yeah, I had this moment of like, okay, I have meetings to go to. I have things I'm supposed to do today. I'm not doing any of it because my phone doesn't work. Yeah. It's like, what is this world that I live in now?

But I cannot leave my hotel room until my phone works again. Yeah. It's not good. It's not good. But you're totally right. Like that is where Apple is. And so if they're like, here's the iPhone flip, it might break. But give me the iPad.

Give me the iPad. I got my little iPad mini. I want to get rid of that thing. I want to default. I want to have it in my back pocket. I'm ready. I've been waiting so long to upgrade my iPad mini, which still has touch ID and is busted and is now old enough that some of the apps won't update anymore.

and I'm just holding out. I'm like, give me, give me the thing, Apple. Give it to me. You're going to have to wait until it sounds like 2026 is the earliest people are theorizing this is going to come out, but we'll see. I can't wait that long. Yeah. I mean, we've got new iPads coming probably pretty soon.

Tim Cook, I know you're listening. You're in a room with Bob Hiker right now listening to this podcast. Just ship me one. I won't even tell anybody. Just get me one. It'll be fine. Everything will be okay. All right.

We've got to get out of here. We've gone long, as always. Yep. In Neli's honor, it sounds like Nelai's dead. Neely's just gone for the day. He'll be back. Everybody gets very worried about Neli when he's not here. I promise everyone, he's okay.

He's just, I think, on a plane being too ashamed of himself to use his Vision Pro, which I plan to give him a lot of crap for next week. But we need to get out of here. But before we do one quick thing, we, the Vurgcast, are moving to the Verveges YouTube channel starting next week. So starting with the show on Tuesday, all of the Vervechcast. Vergecast episodes are going to be on the Verge's YouTube channel, not the Vergecast's YouTube channel. We're still going to use Vergecast channel for clips and all kinds of other fun extra stuff

we're going to do. But if you want to find the full episodes, go subscribe to the Verge channel. If you're already subscribed, hang out there. I think you can subscribe to a playlist on YouTube, which we'll have for the podcast. You can do that too. It's going to be awesome. So do that. Smash them buttons, whatever YouTubers say.

I don't know. And until then, go listen to Decoder. Casey Newton was on it. For once, it was a good decoder episode. And Decoder is also now twice a week. The Vergecast is now on Tuesdays and Fridays. Instead of Wednesdays and Fridays, there's a lot of change going on. But it's the Vergecast.

We'll see you next time. Rock and roll. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866 Verge 1-1. The Verge cast is a production of the Verge and box media podcast network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it.

We'll see you next week.