The Vergecast - HBO vs. Max and Twitter vs. Substack

Episode Date: April 14, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Warner Bros. Discovery's new streaming service, Sony's mobile gaming move, and Twitter's feud with Substack. Further reading: HBO and Discovery’s ‘Max’ streaming service is here Max is charging more money for 4K, and that means it can't suck this time  What we’ve learned about Sony PlayStation’s new smartphone games team Sony is gearing up for a new cloud gaming push amid rumors of a PlayStation handheld NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube starts at $249 for the 2023 season Google TV’s live guide is getting crammed full of over 800 free channels Microsoft is experimenting with a Windows gaming handheld mode for Steam Deck-like devices  NPR becomes first major news organization to leave Twitter  PBS also stops tweeting after being hit with ‘government-funded media’ label Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best Mini’s cars are getting an ‘intelligent personal assistant’ named Spike You can now talk to Microsoft’s Bing chatbot from your keyboard in iOS with SwiftKey Nvidia RTX 4070 review: a $599 RTX 3080 — kind of  Vote for us in the People’s Voice Webby Awards for Best Technology Podcast 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

Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets, Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompts something like,

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. Hello and welcome to Verdechast, the flagship podcast of being super right about carplay and how useful it is. That's what we're doing. It's a full hour of me speaking my truth. I will say we've talked about a lot of things in the show over the past decade that we've been doing it. Decade Plus, if you can't the Engadjadj podcast. Never, never have I received the quality of comments that I received when I said CarPlay was not as good.

is sticking your phone running maps to your dashboard. Like, the YouTube commenters are like, I've been listening to this idiot for a decade. This is the worst thing he's ever said. I got emails. I'm pretty sure I tanked our Apple podcast review. I'm right. No.

And I want you to know that my conviction in this opinion is 100%. I just spent two hours in the car on my way here. And I got to say, being able to use two apps at once continues to be better than not being able to use two apps at once. How many accidents did you get in on your way? to the office. What is multitasking on the highway?

You got maps and the radio. I don't understand. I can do both of those things with car play. Do you want two screens or one screen? I don't get it. It's so confusing. Your old car. I think it's all your old car.

Today, I was in the new Android powered car. Forked Android, I might remind you. And it was still better to have the radio up. And then your little tiny dinky map. It's a huge phone. Was it? All right. I'm going to throw another one into the mix.

Okay. If you live in a place where Apple Maps is good, Apple Maps is better than Google Maps when you're driving. Oh, yeah, 100%. That's absolutely true. Yeah. I feel like this has been suppressed. By Big Google. By Big Google.

You can't tweet about it. If you type Apple Maps into Twitter, Elon personally comes to your house and removes the keys from your keyboard and makes you type Google maps. Just switches all the letters around. No, no, no. You meant Google. This is dangerous information on the podcast today. Yeah, we're just speaking truth. Fauci doesn't want you to know that Apple Maps is good now.

I'm sorry. Anyway. Okay. Look, while we're doing this, no, you're not. You just aren't is the thing. Because this thing you keep saying where what if I had my phone and also the radio is like, what if I use my phone for navigation and then listen to like Z-100 the whole way into the office?

No, no, it's what if the map is? open and to switch songs. So even skip tracks or switch between serious channels or a real thing that Becky does all the time. Oh, right. So you're on serious. We talked about this in the draft. So you've immediately ruled yourself out as like a person who exists in normal society. Yeah.

So that doesn't make any sense. Even if you just want to use Spotify and you just want to beep ahead tracks, it's better and easier. You don't have like a little button. I have a little button on my car and I go, boop. And it skips tracks. Yeah, it's on the steering wheel. Problem solved. Yeah.

And then I have, and then I go, Hey, Siri, hopefully that didn't activate anything, just looking around me and the maps change sometimes. I don't really do the maps one as much because I get confused driving. Again, I'm going to go back to, I've got a few things that I believe. One is a wired connections are better than wireless ones. Okay, that's true. That's one of my hottest opinions on the show. That's accurate.

Yeah, that's just real. One time some guy made an entire YouTube video about how Comcast owned me because I suggested that wired internet was superior to wireless internet. It's like a whole YouTube video. about exposing us. The thing that we disclose most often. So I will say, just to pause on that. That's one. That is your only correct opinion about carplay. Every other thing about car play you are dead wrong about.

But the thing where wireless carplay is kind of trash is precisely correct. Because wireless carplay exists on this like just long enough delay that you press the button. And right at that moment you go, oh, I don't think I press the button and press the button again because it's a stupid-ass capacity button. So instead of changing tracks once, it changes tracks twice because you didn't know if you press the button or not. That sucks. The answer is just plug it in and everything is magically terrific. I literally, I bought a new car and was not allowed to have wired car play. And it's the only thing I don't like about my new car.

That's your only car. You have USB ports? It does. You can plug it in and you can charge, but it is not allowed to do car play. See, Fauci doesn't want you have car play. Fauci. So it's wired. internet connections are better than wireless ones.

That's correct. Copyright law is the only meaningful speech regulation on the internet. Whatever. We don't have to go to that whole. I'm just telling you. It's classic car play take. And then three, two apps are better than one app.

More screens are better than one screen. Very simple. I feel like we all agree on this, except when it comes to should we use car. Digital maximalism. Yes, that's our, yes. That's why we founded the website.

I think you're right on everything but CarPlay. All right. But I also have the maps and the music on my car play. I'm just saying, can some people who agree with me that CarPlay is bad? And there are some of them. All two of you. Can we be a little louder? Can we start some bot accounts?

Whatever we got to stay. We're just going to bully you off any platform you're on. Don't, don't risk it. Yeah. The other part of this is at some point, Milai, you have to remember that you have to use something. And what you're describing is a delightful spot. experience where I have a giant screen where nothing works. And CarPlay, at least, is a screen where things work.

I'm just saying it's better to have the map on one screen and the music on the other screen. No, it's not. The most important person in my life. Why are you looking at the music? Agreeze with me about this. I asked Becky, hey, have you tried CarPlay again? And she looked at me and she said, why? And that was all I needed to know.

Be honest, the most important person in your life is Howard Stern on Sirius XM, which you listen to every single day. That's all I care about. All right. This is nothing to do with what we can talk about today. Quite a lot happened this week. HBO Max announced that it would just be called Max. Yeah.

They announced a bunch of shows and pricing tears. They did. They did not acknowledge that they had ruthlessly stolen my daughter's name. They did not. Which is just a real. How are you doing? It's a real problem. How's that going, by the way?

I haven't sat her down yet. And I'm like, here's what happened. AT&T Bond Warner Brothers. And now everything is going to be super confusing for you. But do you think is this like, do you remember when the Amazon Echoes first came out and there were all these stories like interviewing people named Alexa about what their life was going to be like now that the Amazon Echo exists? Do you think this is going to be like that? Like there's going to be a big like Washington Post feature about like people named Max being upset at the future of streaming services. They should interview Matt.

It's her birthday. And I think a great birthday present from the Washington Post to my daughter would be interviewing her about HBO Max. Yeah. She's five. Strong opinions. Well, Max has catered to her. Like, that was a big part of what they talked about in their big announcement. It was like, we want kids and kids won't watch HBO, but they'll watch Max.

All right. We'll come back to this. This is the first thing we're going to talk about. Sean Halster uncovered a bunch of information about PlayStation Cloud streaming that connects with its handheld that we've heard about. There's some other streaming news. We got pricing for Sunday ticket. Then there's just a bunch of Twitter stuff.

And there's Twitter v-substack, which came to the most. ridiculous of conclusions. Cominating an episode of Decoder, which honestly I'm just going to emotionally process in the third activist show. We're just going to do that together. Let's start with Max, though. Yeah, she's five.

She's five. Congratulations. She's great. Yeah, we made it. She has a thing in her room called a Yodo player. Oh, yeah? That's the one Neil Young made, right? No.

She has a Pono player. Max only listens to high bit rate losses. No, a Yoto player. Every parent knows what this is, but you, it's a streaming music. box, but it doesn't have an interface. It has cards. Okay.

So you stick a card in it, and it goes and collects a file with the internet and reads you a story. Do you want that in your car? I mean, at this point, the other player could definitely be in our car. We think about it a lot in our family, but she got new cards for her birthday, and one was kids bopping last night. We were just like, is she listening to Ariana Grande at 11 p.m.? And Drew is just up in the door, and she was just like, had stuck her kids bop. Just bopping.

This is the future of streaming media. Amazing. Physical cards. Bring back cartridges. Absolutely. Anyhow, Max, the actual streaming service. Alex, what on earth is going on here? Well, they felt that HBO was too elitist a brand, like HBO Max, was too elitist.

They didn't like it. People weren't using it where they were using Discovery and they were staying on Discovery and they were being retained by Discovery. So they said the best thing to do is kind of dumb it all down and just call it Max. Wait, this was their argument is that people weren't watching enough HBO Max they needed to rebrand it. Yes. They're like, Discovery does all of this stuff great. HBO Max doesn't it kind of sucks.

And a big part of this was about kids. They were like, we have all of this great content for kids and nobody's watching it. It's not like hitting with that audience. And we think that's because it's called HBO Max and that runs off all the children. Is that accurate? No. The full nonsense argument. I mean, so the one number I just want to point out is that they did say during the presentation, I think that it was 75% of HBO Max's viewership came from the home screen.

So like people loading the app pick something that they see, whereas people on Discovery Plus are actually like looking around and finding stuff and going to the different tabs that say like home and food and travel and whatever. Right. And what they took that to mean was not, oh cool, we built a service so full of good stuff that people are finding things that they like immediately. but let's build one that makes everybody work much harder to find anything they want to watch because we're just going to shove everything together. And they've been talking about doing this since the beginning, right? Like since Warner Brothers Discovery became a thing when those two companies came together, they've been talking about the possibility of having sort of one big behemoth streaming service

to cover everything. And I'm not like morally opposed to the idea. I just think they made every logistical decision dead wrong in the process of doing. doing this. I thought it was interesting. We didn't actually see the UI. We didn't see what this app is going to look like because it's not going to be based on the HBO Max app. They were pretty open about like it's garbage, which we all know it's garbage. And instead they're going to use like the discovery kind of stuff with some other things and make Voltron and this new Macs app will be amazing and always and it'll be a max. Can I just do some quick history here? Yeah. Go for it. Just to refresh my brain.

Okay. So HBO existed. Yes. It was part of Time Warner. Yes. They made two apps. Yes. One called HBO Go and one called HBO Now. Yes. Then AT&T bought Time Warner for a lot of money.

And it was so much money. And the plan was to... Dot, dot, dot, dot. They were like, we did it. Something. Something. They were like, this is too many apps and we need a new one. So they built HBO Max.

At some point, I believe Vulture reported this. They rebooted the tech stack of the HBO Max app. That sounds right. This is like a thing that happened along the way. They were like, we got to make it better. We know it's bad. It crashes too much. And they redid it.

Then they spent a lot of money on Zach Snyder making a square version of Justice League. Black and white. So in black and white. That is seven hours long. Yes. This failed, I believe. to convert millions of people to HBO Max. Correct.

Okay. These are all things that happened. Yeah. Then AT&T was like, wait, why did we do this? And they sold Warner Brothers, Time Warner, to Discovery, which is like this app is garbage. The centerpiece of HBO's gigantic purchase was making this app. And they sold it to Discovery. And Discovery is like, this was stupid.

Yeah. Discovery was always like, this is stupid. You guys make a ton of stuff. And HBO Max is a garbage app and it's too focused. And you're ignoring all of this other content. What if this was more of a fire hose of garbage situation? Yeah, because that's what Discovery is very, very good at, right? Discovery is excellent at just fire hose of garbage.

And which is why we all watch HGTV and TLC and everything else. I assume judging from all of David's picks in the draft earlier this week. Hell yeah, dude. Nate and Jeremiah's home project, let's go. There's a new episode two night and I will watch it. This is just a canon of filler content is what I'm getting out of this. Which one important piece of this history here is that David Zazlov, the CEO of this combined company, has made abundantly clear over and over and over and over that that is the content he believes in. Especially for streaming.

Dude does not want or care about these incredibly expensive, you know, coastal elite premium stuff. Like what he wants is more money and more space to make Joe. with Chip and Joanna Gaines. Like, that's it. And he has been so clear about that. He has canceled expensive stuff. They killed Backgirl because they didn't think it was very good. Like, dude wants movies and theaters,

and he wants down-home TV shows on streaming services. And so to me, the long story of HBO ends with someone who absolutely does not give one single crap about HBO as a brand, as a store of content or as an ongoing concern, and has basically just tried to sort of systematically destroy it. He does, though. That part, I don't think is fair because he's still, they are acknowledging HBO. It sounds like it's going to be its own, like, carve out in the app. Like, it'll be a tab. Yeah. This is the tab. You go here for quality stuff. You watch A20. Good stuff. Yeah. This is the A24 tab. And then we're going to do everything else over here. And I kind of get that calculus. Like, he understands that TikTok and YouTube are his competitors because they're discovery's competitors, right? Then they're also everybody's competitors for attention. That's why you guys both check. chose them in the draft. Weren't you the one who told me that you were watching TikTok while watching a show? Yeah.

During the last week. Yeah. It was great. This is what I mean. Like, Discovery makes a lot of shows that you can definitely watch YouTube while watching. Yeah. Yeah. And I would actually say Netflix makes a lot of those shows, too.

Yes. Netflix makes a lot of shows that are, it's definitely fine if you miss the third episode because you were watching TikTok. Right. Netflix is where, like, I go and I'm like, I just need my pajamas on my brain. Netflix. HBO is like, I'm going to go get culture. We just have to do it all. Disclosure.

I'm the EP of a Netflix show. It's called The Future of It's a very good. Do not watch TikTok while watching the third episode. Just lock in. If you're one of my bot people, get some bots to watch it too. That would be great. It would just be making me happy. If suddenly our show hit the top of the Netflix charts for no reason,

I would receive nothing from it. But I think it would be funny. And I think we could share that moment together. That's my ass to you, the Vurchast audience. Our company, Vox Media, has a bunch of investors. NBC Universal is one of those investors. It's on my Comcast, which operates a peacock. I'm pretty sure Vox Media has made shows on HBO.

In fact, I know, I just can't remember what they're called. I'm sorry. This is a great disclosure. You can see how conflicted I am. Yeah. There it is. We have a TV division. They sell things to every TV network.

We're super conflicted, but we can still have opinions. I think at this point should be abundantly clear that we have opinions. We are not really constrained in what we see. But there it is. Those are disclosures. You had them now. Yeah. But back to what I was saying.

HBO is very much like not a pajama brain network. You do watch it so then you can go talk with your friends or whatever. Pajama brain. Yeah. You know, sometimes you're just like, I want pajamas for my brain. Oh, that's a thing. Is that a thing or is that a thing that you say? It's a thing my friend group says.

That's good. Yeah. That's good. Okay. Carry on. Carry on. Yeah. And so it's not a pajama brain network for the most part.

Netflix is, DiscoveryGo is, and he, I think, I guess, wants to do that with Max. but also then have this little tab that's HBO. Because they announce a bunch of shows that are very HBO shows that are not these big like pajama brain stuff. Sort of. They announced a bunch of really expensive shows based on somewhat impressive existing IP. It's the kind of thing you would want to do

if you didn't want to take any risks, but you wanted to make a bunch of money and seem prestigious is you would announce a 10 year long Harry Potter show, which is what they did, right? Like, if they had announced the eight new HBO originals that you've never heard of that are going to totally blow your mind to pieces, I'd be a lot more willing to believe that there's some real investment in like the thing that HBO has always done well. But to me, this is like the same thing AT&T used to say to HBO, which is basically like you need to make a lot more stuff and you need to make sure all of it is a hit and you have to prove it to us before you make it. And HBO is really bad at that.

You think about all their biggest hits, Succession, Game of Thrones. those weren't huge hits in the first episode. Those were slow burns. And it was only because they were given the opportunity to do that. And that's a big complaint about a lot of the other streamers, Netflix in particular, is everybody says, oh, they're not giving them enough time to make sure. So they haven't turned over the leadership at HBO.

It's still Casey Blois. Yeah. And he was very, he was like on stage, talking about it, really like doing his dance for the audience and saying, yeah, we're really excited because we've got Harry Potter. We've got a third Game of Thrones series. Well, so who was this event for? So I was watching this event like on and off throughout the day because it was fairly long.

It took forever. And I couldn't tell who it was meant for. It's not for audiences. It's not like it's for investors. It's for investors. Yeah, they're desperately trying to say the streaming market is crap right now. You, dear Wall Street, have bet that we are not going to pull this off. We're sitting on a mountain of debt, and we need you to think that we are about to be on fire in a good way.

And I'm just saying for that audience, what you want to show them is we've got one decade of Harry Potter in the bag. Sure. Yeah. These nerds are never going anywhere. They're paying us 1999 a month for 4K Harry Potter for 10 years. Can you do multiplication? That's the money. And they were dancing around the really big issue with Harry Potter.

Because Harry Potter is kind of like become a talk. property and everybody at Warner Brothers is refusing to acknowledge that because they're in so tight with J.K. Rowling, but she has become a very, very toxic personality. She had that big video game and people were furious about it and refusing to play it. That game was also a huge hit. It was a huge hit, but there's like definitely that toxicity. We also saw it with the Fantastic Beasts hiring of Johnny Depp. Like this continues to happen. And when they ask boys, what are you doing with her? Is she going to be involved in the show. She can be participating. Is she getting money for it? Obviously, yes. He just danced

around it. He's like, you know, she does her thing. We do ours. She says she's going to use all her money to destroy trans people. That's fine. We're going to keep over here. And I think at some point, they are going to have to deal with that, the same way Disney. Yeah, they've bought a decade-long headache. Right. But I'm just saying for this audience. And I agree. For this audience. And she's- This audience. This audience is seeing, okay, people will pay the monthly subscription to watch Harry Potter for a decade. You're doing True Detective season. for Jody Foster. That's a hit. Right. You've got to show them the franchise IP. I don't think that forecloses new stuff from HBO, especially because that leadership is still there. Yeah,

I think we're still going to see stuff from HBO. We're still going to see stuff from that kind of HBO Max team. They specifically called out the big successes there, which are hacks, the sex lies of college girls, which is really difficult to show to say you're watching any point in your life. And it's just, mm-mm. It's funny because you're the only person on. on the show that can say it and get away of it without. And even I was like, the other day, somebody was like, what are you watching? It was like the sex size of college girls. Ooh.

On HBO Max. It's a real show. So they were calling out like those big successes that were HBO Mac shows where people were concerned that they were going to just get rid of that programming team, get rid of that programming. They were also the other big thing that people were scared about was cartoons and losing cartoons, which is why they specifically called out a new Grimlins cartoon. Sure. And Rick and Morty, anime.

another property that has a big toxic cloud around it because... Justin Rorland. Yeah. Yeah. But yet again, another big established thing with a big fan base in a big catalog. I don't know. Just to me, like, play this out, right? So these things all get combined.

They start this app and they start to see how people use it. Right. And the reality of the world is that people spend more hours a day doing dishes while they watch HGTV than they do sitting in front of... Yeah, Succession once a week. And they're going to look at it and they're going to say this one episode of Succession cost more than three seasons of three HGTV shows. What in God's name are we doing?

And David Zazlov, as a person who has made very clear that he is not doing this for the prestige, he is doing this for the money. And frankly, the company needs to do things for the money. Like, how do you not eventually look at the balance and say, why are we spending all of this money to get these really great shows that people watch a little bit of into this tab when, in fact, actually, most of the people who come to our app are watching this other stuff that's much cheaper to produce and is an endlessly renewable resource. Like, I just, unless you are a person who cares, which is the thing that HBO has done over the

years is they've had people in charge who have said, we're going to take big risks because I'm in charge and I say so. That's, they just don't have that now. And the, and now they're bundled together with all this other stuff that is just going to decimate it in every metric, except for quality and cultural relevance. And those two things are really hard to put money against. So you're the two things. So you're correct that the company needs money. They're in a bunch of debt.

Like sold out. A lot of debt. Yeah. 18T still has a stake. They're in a bunch of debt. Everyone needs this thing to make money. Great. Zazov known for making money.

He's like good at it. He is good at it. But my theory as to why he'll keep HB around is that my theory for why he bought Warner Brothers in the first place, which is one, 18T is stupid and sold it to him for pennies in the dollar. And he could do it. But two, rich guys like fancy stuff.

Yes. And I, at the end of the day, this is why the tech industry is just a deeply attracted to Hollywood. Like they want, this is why Jeff Bezos is like, you know what? The expanse, 90 seasons. It's super boring at the end of it. Because they, they want to be in those rooms. This is why Adam Asaerra is like, always at the Met Gallo in that moment for Instagram was happening. The opportunity to show the cultural relevance is like irresistible.

Yeah. To be the big patron of the. arts. And that's the thing he bought. He bought Warner Brothers. So I, I agree. That tension is there, especially for HBO, but I think he, he likes the big movies. He wants to put the big movies in theaters again. And they will have a home on his app. And I think his ultimate goal is to replace cable, just cable bundle writ large. You don't need anything. You just need this one app. Cost 20 bucks a month. You're watching HGTV all day while you're running around and then at night you're like I want to watch a blockbuster movie and it's

there for you maybe you know like people say I think that's right sorry you don't walk around your house talking like a 1940s bitch no I agree I do actually after I do think that's right though and I think they talked about making big investments in sports and Warner Brothers also has I think TNT and Bleacher report and stuff like that so like there's some sports in the empire already and they've talked about news and like, so it's all there. Well, TNT is basketball. It's not some sports. I mean, that's like.

Yeah, oh, no. It's the hoops. They have real moves. Like, if they want to put some stuff into there, they have real splashy stuff they can do. I totally agree. I think that's going to take a while because sports rights are really expensive and really love cable subscribers. But I do think like that that road makes a lot of sense to me. I totally agree with that.

Oh, and they have CNN, which is oddly not part of this. Because Zazlov hates CNN. He like, went over there. It was like, I hate you guys. I don't like this place. You're going to do a whole other thing now. You're going to be, you're going to, you're going to appeal to everyone instead of just still liberal elites. And that's really what he's coming at, right? Like this whole thing was him being like, I'm done with the liberal elites. This is going to be streaming service for the regular guy. Do you drink beer and drive a truck and like wear a lot of plaid? This is for you. How do you say that and also green light the next succession? You just can't. No, that's, I think you do. That's the bundle.

This is the whole game. I mean, like, in a magazine days, the front of book is like what sold the magazine and the fancy features were there to win awards and push the ad prices higher. In many ways, how we sell our property, right? Like, you have the cheap stuff that gets people there. And then you have the prestige stuff that, like, makes you fancier and pushes your rates up. And like, at some point, they're going to do an ad-supported version here, right? Right.

They're doing three versions. notably Discovery Go is not going away. They're keeping Discovery Go. It's called Discovery Plus, by the way. Sorry. Whatever. They're keeping Discovery. Discovery is sticking around.

And they're doing these three new bundles. One is ads supported. I believe it's $9.99. And it's just ad supported. You watch it in HD. That's it. Then there's a $15.99 one, which is what the current non-ad-supported one is costs. No ads.

HD only. Why? And you get 30 downloads, concurrent downloads, I guess. Wait, concurrent streams. No, like you can have things downloaded offline, 30 of them at a time. Yeah, so you can download. And that was unclear. It seems like they haven't limited to this in the past, but now they are.

And then there's now a $1999 version, which gives you four concurrent streams, 4K, UHD, HDR with Dolby Atmos, and 100 downloads. Okay, I just want to say every single thing about these pricing plans sucks. Every single thing. Yeah. Starting with, my absolute favorite thing about this is the $9.99 month plan is the AdLight plan, which implies the existence of an ad heavy plan, which just not exists. You start at AdLight. I just, I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

Sure. Two streams is not enough. I think four should be like the bare minimum for any streaming service that costs money. HD quality, like, 4K being a thing you have to pay 10 extra dollars a month for is outrageous. Yes. Especially given how spotty and crappy a lot of the 4K content, especially on these services, has been in the past. Anything other than unlimited downloads is outrageous.

Yes. A hundred is a lot. Whatever. I can get used to 100. You're probably not going to put more than 100 things on your stuff anyway. But just the idea at all of it being limited and not being able to download anything on the ad light plan is, is lunacy. Like, this is all so incredibly user hostile to me.

It just makes me angry. Well, it's already like that. So before you couldn't do downloads, if you were on the cheapest version. And I think Netflix said a couple of others, gatekeep downloads, offline downloads, for higher prices. So this is just all in.

Honestly, I think they could have even not mentioned how many downloads and gotten away with it until one of us goes. The combination of things here, I'm with David. Yeah, it's super hostile. We're inventing things to put boundaries on. so we can upsell you. Yes.

And the audacity of HBO Max, who didn't even launch with 4K in 2019, no 4K, only got around to doing, like, Game of Thrones in 4K last year to be like, now we're going to charge you for 4K.

And I was like, you couldn't even deliver 4K. Yeah, you got to make some guarantees while what's coming. What am I seeing in 4K? But like, just the combo platter, like,

these companies are so big. They all have like marketing teams. They invent personas. This is like the phrase they use. Yeah. They're like, let's invent a person and see what they, would buy. And they all do this exercise. And I'm sure we have marketing people who listen to

show who are like freaking out. I see you. I'm in your brain. I've been to your meetings. And they're like, it's Sally. Sally's 35 years old. She doesn't travel a lot. She doesn't really know about 4K. She doesn't mind ads. She's got a household income of 50k. 9.99 is perfect for her. And they invented a person who demands both 4K and 100 offline downloads. And they could not, find a person who just wants 4K for slightly more money. Right? Because that's, I can think of a lot of people who are like,

I do not need to download any content at all. Zero percent need to do that. But when I watch the movies, I want them to mean, 4K HDR. This is, I mean, how do you miss that person in the sequence of pricing?

It's kind of similar to Netflix, though, right? Netflix does this similar pricing scheme where there's like a $15 version that gives you downloads and everything. But then if you want 4K, you still have, and more concurrent streams, you have to go up to the $20 version.

I guess the difference is Netflix has added those tiers over time. Yeah, it didn't feel quite as dickish. Right. Like, this feels like you're going backwards a little bit. Yeah. Because you're making it way more expensive in the middle tier. It seems like the worst deal in history. Yeah.

I don't know, man. That said, there are going to add a bunch of discoveries cataloged to this thing, and all that's in HD anyway. And if you're just watching those shows, it doesn't matter. Yeah. I. David, you're, you watch these shows. Are you like,

No. You like discovery? I can't quite see the Wayne Scott. Well, so this is why I'm with you, Neely, because I think to me, the $1599 a month middle plan

is both the best and worst deal here. Because on the one hand, you get essentially nothing for it, especially if you're not the kind of person who wants to download. Like, the difference is fewer ads and downloads. And as a person who generally pays for no ads,

fine. But that's six bucks a month to just turn off ads. Do it that what you will. you don't get 4K. So then the flip side of that means you're paying another $4 a month for like the occasional movie to be in 4K. Because a huge amount of that library is just not available in 4K. Like I was just saying, it's gotten better over time.

But it's still not great. I'm curious about that because a lot of this stuff is available in 4K, especially that older catalog. Well, in theory, a lot of it exists in 4K. In theory, there was all the DC universe stuff that was all shot in 4K on 4K and DC universe. And then when it all got moved over and they killed that app, they were like, we're only doing it in a 1080. Sorry. And I think it was honestly probably like a bandwidth issue.

I've always wanted to track this down. And if you know, email me. But I think it was likely some sort of bandwidth issues. They were like, well, we can't handle 4K streams all the time. So let's gatekeep those. Let's limit it. But nobody's confirmed that. That's just my like 10-Kap theory.

I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I think they're going to be fine. because this is just, they just Disney-fied everything. This was just watching like Disney being born in a single investor meeting. Like, we're going to go after the kids. We're going to go after Middle America. Look, that is the single best outcome that Zazov could have hoped for is one person saying this was like watching Disney being born.

Seriously. Like that's what they're after. But like the bad kind of Disney, right? Yeah, the one that ruthlessly, the one that ruthlessly stole my daughter's name. Yes. Yeah. Like, this is not the good exciting Disney. Can we have not lingered on this and all.

This is actually, I think it's a great name for a child. Horrible name for a streaming service. Awful. Especially because the history of Max is Cinemax or Skinimax. I used to know it. And it's like you picked the weakest brand in your portfolio, the one that is most associated with a late night softcore pornography. Yeah.

You picked your porn name for the kids service. Yeah. I mean, a lot of kids. would be like, ooh, staying up late, mom's not here, Cinemax. Is Cinemax in this app? Yeah, well, Cinemax is gone, but yeah, it's in the app. Like, it's already... The tabs are HBO, food, travel, kids, porn.

Like, that's just... Taxi cab confessions. What we think of as Cinemax is not, not. Like, it's all their newer stuff. So, Warrior, uh, Banshee, that kind of stuff. their original content. I'm so impressed that you can keep track of what medium-grade shows are and what medium-grade networks.

Look, I love medium-grade shows. That's like, that's my bread and butter. It's like, you know where all the sports are. I'm like, I know where Warrior Season 3 is. You can just be making this up. You're like, there's a show. It's called Samurai. It's on A&F.

And I'm like, yeah, that sounds right. I love Samurai. It's so good. Oh, my God. The season finale. Incredible, go watch it. We got to take a break. Wait, before we do, can we just talk about the name for one more second?

Yes. Because it makes me angry. And what they should have called it, I think, is HBO. And we can litigate that if you want to. But what I did was there's this very good Wikipedia page of all of the Warner Brothers Discovery properties that they have divested over time. Yeah. Either that don't exist anymore or that they don't exist anymore or that they. they've sold. And I went through the list of all the ones that no longer exist to see if there

were any better names that presumably they already own the trademark to and that they should have named their service instead of Max. Would you like to hear a few of them? Yes, I would absolutely do you remember Beam Casey Nystats app, B-E-M-E? That would have been a better name than Max. CNN Airport, which is a thing. Would have been a better name than Max. There's one called D-Play. That's probably not a good idea. I don't recommend D-Play. That's right there with Cinemax. They had one called Festival, which I actually quite like. All right.

There was full screen. Full screen, I actually think, is pretty good. Full screen is good. The more I think about Festival, the more it lands and the D plays. That's fair. Hannah Barbera Home Video was a company that existed. For the kids. That's really good.

There's one called O-K, but it's spelled O-H-exclamation point K. That was pretty good. That's drugs. That's a general. drugs. Warner Brothers owned a minority's taken Quibi. Can I interest you in bringing Quibi back? Yes, always.

There was one called Warner Max. Wait, can we just hit just the problem of race on Quibi? It's like every time we talk about HBO Max, I want to go through the AT&T. Just to remind, this happened. Yeah. AT&T got sued by the Trump

Department of Justice because it wanted Warner Brothers so badly. And its whole pitch was we're going to put, like, bite-sized episodes of Game of Thrones preloaded on Android phones. This, we, we had to sit here. And I had to not be as outraged as I was. Like, the veneer of journalistic integrity was so thin. And then, like, now there's Max. And I just want to remind everybody that Quibi super happened.

It was a real thing. For a month. Not even a month for like a week. Like we went to a CES presentation. Oh, yeah. They were like our innovations that you will turn your phone and we've named it turnstile. Oh, yeah. Remember, and you had to talk to people about like, and I really thought that like once I held it on my hand and I flipped it, I was understanding like a change in cinema.

Yeah. Yeah, they were into it. They got Steven Spielberg to say that his innovation was a show that came out only at night. He's like, I've always wanted to do this. I'm just saying every now and again, it's important to just take one step back. I'm like, this happened to us a lot. And no one believed us. But now we have Max.

Now we have Max. All right. More names, please. The only last one I had for you was Warner Max, which was a short-lived production company inside of that happened. If you experienced Warner Max, please let me know. Yeah, I really think between CNN Airport and Hannah-Barbera home video, we're really on to something. I can't believe they got rid of CNN Airport. Yeah.

It feels like a... What are you watching an airport? Easy win. I know. Fox. It's fine. It's whatever. All right.

We got to take a break. Let's find out. Let's see if you know how we can get our hands on CNN Airport. Send me an email. Virgin Airport. We're expanding. We're taking a break. We'll be right back.

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That's Upwork.com to connect with top talent ready to help your business scratch. That's UPWRK.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. Let's talk about another kind of stream. The sports? No. Video games.

Oh, yeah. It's a real thing. Last week we talked about this rumor that Sony was developing a PlayStation handheld called the Q-Lite. The worst name. And you very confidently said it's not for game streaming. Sony has farmed out all of its game streaming to Microsoft, which in the moment, I thought to myself, what?

It was true. It was true. But things have changed. But many things have changed. But even in that moment when you said that last week, I was like, that doesn't. Well, it was really goofy because the reporting around the handheld was saying it is only going to be for streaming from your PS5. Yes. To the handheld, which is goofy.

Which is goofy. And it is true that Sony had made some deal to use Microsoft's cloud technology. Right. The gaming team didn't actually find out about it until like afterwards. So for the longest time, Sony was farming out a lot of their gaming stuff and everything, even though they'd purchased this really great cloud gaming company in like the mid-2000s. Guy-Chi. Yeah. And they had all this technology and then they just didn't do anything with it.

And then they're like, whatever, ignore it. And now apparently they're starting to pay attention to cloud gaming after Stadia died. And everybody forgot Amazon exists and Microsoft is just cruising along in the only game in town. So the reason that I, that when you said it last, I was like, but they hate each other right now. Right? And like the idea that Sony is big enough that one division of Sony made a deal to use Azure the game division, like, fine, I buy it.

These are all huge companies. But Sony and Microsoft are basically at odds over the Activision deal. They're in legal conflict in countries around the world. And the idea that cloud streaming is the future of mainstream gameplay, I think is just sort of accepted wisdom. Like it's not true, but everyone thinks it will be true soon. I mean, that's mainly because Microsoft has been saying that for the last few years. And everybody else was kind of ignored them, including Nintendo and Sony.

They were both like, eh, the infrastructure's not there. We don't want to do it. Nintendo famously doesn't really invest in this stuff. It took forever even to get cloud saves off the ground. So this was like everybody kind of ignored it. So I think it's a surprise, but a welcome one that Sony is now on board. Okay. So Sean Hollister has been digging through Sony's job.

job listings. I mean, he's in it. Yeah. This is like he's a detective. Sean might accidentally work for Sony. We can't. We can't prove it. He is a recruiter at Sony. If you get a call from him, he's got a job offer.

Take it. Yeah, he has uncovered a lot of roles that are being hired all around cloud gaming tech. It seems like some of those roles got listed and then he wrote about them and then they disappeared. Oh, surprise. Oh, surprising. Which, and it suggests that they really are planning a strategy around cloud gaming. they're finally figuring it out. They're super late to the party, though. And that, I think, is going to be a challenge, both because the infrastructure, like, Microsoft is really good at it

because it has Azure. You're going to have to go and get that from Google or Oracle or somebody else, right? That's going to be a challenge. And then also they're just, Google did it and failed in like a heartbeat. And now they're coming in. Like, they're the Kool-Aid man, just coming in late. Yeah. So I kind of see that slightly differently. I would say where we are, is we are rapidly on the road to all of that tech becoming pretty easy, actually. That because Azure exists and because Amazon is working on Luna stuff, and that's all just going to get baked into AWS, because Google did all this stuff with Stadia that is now getting enrolled in Google Cloud,

like the roll your own cloud gaming thing is actually going to get really easy, really fast, I think. And so if I'm Sony, what I'm thinking is, okay, I historically have better games than everybody else. And so I can come in and in a place where I no longer have to be a leader in technology, I can just show up, attach myself to this technology that already exists, put my better games into it, and win. I actually don't know that I feel like Sony is super late to this game. They're late to the game if you want to be a cloud provider. But Sony clearly doesn't want to be a cloud provider.

I mean, I think they're still going to have problems there because they still have to get the developers on board, right? that was a whole challenge on all of these. The reasons the Azure one works is because they said, no, you don't have to do anything. That's very true. But both Stadia and Luna, you have to go and redo the games to work on the porphyryphra.

And in some cases, build them from scratch. Like their cloud games are different. And that's like... Unless you have Assassin's Creek, which apparently can run anywhere for any reason. It's actually running on my watch right now. Yeah, so they're going to have to like figure that out. And I think that's where they're kind of late to the part.

is that a lot of that work, they're either going to have to redo it by choosing Google or choosing Amazon and then saying, okay, now we've got to go do all of our games. Because what they're known for is they're exclusives, right? It's the Noddy Dog stuff and things like that. And now they're going to have to go and get those done. And those games also, when they do port them elsewhere,

struggle. Like, both the big one right now is the Last of Us on PC, looking like absolute garbage. Yeah. And now you want to also go and adapt for the cloud. That's where their big challenge is, I think. Like, it's less about going and finding the provider and making a deal with them. It's getting all of this stuff developed and working well enough.

And then also the whole huge infrastructure problem that no one's solved because PG's not on the SEC. Yeah. So we're still having this wave. Right. There's the Logitech cloud gaming thing. There's a few of them now. Right. I would, the Steam deck category.

Yeah, the little handhelds. And they're great. And I think that's what like they're chasing after because they realized, oh, people, this is a new product category, which I was begging for. And I'm so happy it's happening. Like this is a thing. We can go into this space and make games and push them in this way. Microsoft was right. Like that was Microsoft's whole calculus is we can do, you can go and you can buy it and you can have the console and it will play perfectly.

But some people can't afford the console. Some people can't afford, like, it's their parents' TV, and their parents are never going to let them use the TV to play it, so they need something more portable. Now we can do a portable offering without making the Vita. Yeah. So Sony was thinking about this. They walked away from it.

They walked away from game streaming. They signed this deal with Microsoft, which... They always had it. Like, game streaming has always been there. It's just been not great, and everybody always would forget about it. And part of that was, like, it's not very fast. It's not newer. games. The big thing with Microsoft, what changed with Microsoft was Microsoft said, oh, we're

going to do like day and day release. And that's huge. That, that suddenly makes this viable rather than like effectively, like for the longest time cloud gaming was kind of Mac gaming. Like, technically you can do it. Wow. But are you going to have, you're going to play Assassin's Creed and that's about it. Yeah. So what have we learned from these listings? Because it looks like Sony's going to rebuild an entire infrastructure, this handheld that will compete with the Logitech and other stuff but have Sony's library of games and Sony's graphical fidelity and Sony's service. What do we think this service looks like based on what Sean is uncovered? I mean, it sounds like they're going with a lot of people from Guy Kai, I believe is how you say it.

So I think we're going to see that again. I think this is, we're just going to be getting like their new release. And there's some stuff we don't know, right? Specifically the developer stuff and how those developers are going to work. That's, I think, the big kind of up in the air from what I'm reading. Yeah. please correct me if I'm wrong. But we'll see.

I think if you have to nail that part before you can really get it off the ground. But right now it's like, okay, we're exploring the space, we're building in the space. We're going to get more engineers on board and more like people that know like that tech. Yeah. And that's really, really crucial. And then they're going to have to go and teach all of the developers, specifically Nottie Dog, how to design a game for something besides the PlayStation because Noddy Dog sucks at it. Can I tell a completely unrelated story?

Yes. It's totally unrelated. But this is what I worry about. when Sean writes about game streaming services. Like pangs of anxiety rocket through my body when Sean writes about game streaming services. We were in a lawsuit for six years

because Sean called a game streaming service defunct. This is a true story. And the guy who ran it claimed that we had defamed him for calling his dead game streaming service defunct. And he went and sued us. And the statute of limitations had expired. But in Delaware where he sued us, the state courts had not yet set the precedent that linking to an article did not constitute republishing it.

So that was his argument to get out of the statute of limitations that we had recently linked to this article where we had called the dead gaming streaming service defunct. Yeah. So he's like, you republished it. And our outside lawyers are like, yeah, the Delaware judge just wants this precedent. Wow. Six years of litigation. We won. We won going away, and the judge was like, yeah, it was defunct. But it was like, what are we doing? Every time. Well, I don't think he called anything defunct this time.

Yeah, we're keeping an eye on Sean. We think we got all this right. It sounds very, very right. It sounds like they are interested in cloud gaming and their current service is not defunct. To be clear, Sony does currently have cloud gaming. It's not good, which I'm going. allowed to say because that's my opinion, but they do have it. It is not defunct. This is the thing that I thought was so interesting about Sean's piece is, and he points this out in his story, is that from the job listings themselves, it sounds very much like Sony is starting this process from the beginning. And it's, it's saying, yes, that one of the jobs is like, come help us dream up a vision for our cloud gaming. And it's like, my dudes, it's 2023.

Like, you don't have a vision for cloud gaming? But then on the other hand, like, two, your point, Alex, this exists. What they should be doing is taking this kind of crappy thing that they built in PlayStation now and make it better. And instead, what it sounds like is they're building a whole new thing from the ground up. And which of those two things turns out to be true or if there's some combination of them is confusing and fascinating to me. Or this is just like a honey pot to keep engineers away from Microsoft. Right. I love that planet. They just sit over there in the corner and never release it. I mean, this is in the scene. In the sea, season of tech layoffs, right? There's like the endless articles now. They're like the ultimate business insider bait. I made $250,000 of Google and I got paid to drink lattes all day. Like in the thesis is they were all just hiring to keep talent away from each other. Yeah. I don't think that that is the position any of these companies are anymore, but. I wouldn't expect Sony particularly to be a company that does that. That's not really Sony's

MO. So I think they are trying to think of this from scratch. And the from scratch kind of makes sense when you think about the architecture element of this. Like if they're thinking, okay, PlayStation 6, whenever that comes out, we want that to work with our new cloud gaming service. So everything works, which is what Microsoft did. That makes sense. That's the thing they can be doing. And I would get why they would want to start from scratch in that case.

Because otherwise, bolting everything on and then trying to teach naughty dog again, how to adapt that is going to be a lot of heartache. Every time I downloaded a game to my PlayStation, I have the digital one. Yeah. I'm like, this is weird. It's like weird that it's a, it's like all the bits are on the drive before I play it. Everything come down. Isn't the future much more hybridized, right?

It's like weird that the games update to me. I downloaded an update to Fortnite the other day and it was 43.2 gigabytes or something. I was like, what are my downloading? It takes eight minutes to connect every time I, every time I turn on this damn game. Like, what is the point of this if I'm just downloading it? You have to have the local assets because it moves so quickly that if you're having, if they're having, if they're having, to download all of the assets to you and load all of that in real time

and do the rest all in real time. That's really, really complex and that creates a lot of lag. But I'm just saying, so it seems like the two choices right now are pretty far apart. There's all of the game is rendered on the server and you're just streaming video

and sending back control inputs and we've managed to crunch the latency so this works. Right. Even when you're handheld. Yep. And this is the only pitch for 5G that has ever made any sense to me.

And it's still, But that's the idea. Right. All the GPUs are in the cloud and we're sending you a video stream and there's low enough latency that your control inputs can affect that video stream. Right. Get it. And all the way on the other side is you've got the entire 43 gigabytes of Fortnite and a powerful GPU in your house and the whole thing's running locally. Yes.

It just, I don't know enough. I'm just curious. Is there no middle ground where the PlayStation 6 is like hybridized where some of it's running up there and some it's running down here and there's a reason of a GPU, but it's, enhanced by the cloud service. I think theoretically that can happen, but you've got two, two issues there. One is that people really like to be able to play offline. They hate it when they have to like be connected all the time. That's like a huge issue.

Anytime somebody downloads an Ubisoft game, they're like, oh my God, because Ubisoft has DRM that requires you to attach to the internet. Grand Theresa is 7, the only game that exists. Yeah. Very limited when it's not connected to the other. Right. And so there's like the audience hates that. But then it is also just really complex because if you're having to like,

what are you playing on? What's what are the assets that need to be on your computer? Theoretically, it's like your big 4K assets for like textures and stuff, right? And then what needs to be in the cloud? Like figuring that out, I think would be really, really complex and making it so that it handles it while also not losing lag. Sure. It would be really difficult. I think we might see that. And like adventure games probably stuff that's not super timing intensive lends itself more to that. Grand Turismo, probably not. All your fighting games, your first person shooters, definitely not. But like games where you're just dicking around and like climbing stuff. Yeah.

Yeah. It's just okay if it's got a little lack. Again, I think I don't know enough about the technical aspects of that and what you're describing sense. It's just if you, if Sony announced the PlayStation 6th. If they figure that out. We'll have the first hybrid GPU set up. And the, the streaming service is inherently built into it.

And it'll run great on your phone and this little handheld was selling you. And then when you dock it to a GPU that's running your house, it gets even better. Yeah. Like if they can do that. be like, like, the big catch there is you don't have to download 200 gigabytes just to play the new AAA game. That's huge. That would be a really big thing. And that's what everybody's working towards. But I think they've all ended on just do the video directly to you because that's just so easy. Well, yeah. And I guess the, in your middle ground, Nilai, what are you actually

accomplishing? Because it kind of seems to me like the worst of both worlds because you can't play the game offline, which like Alex is saying is what you accomplish by downloading the 200 gigabytes. Maybe you shorten the download time. And as somebody who frequently has like 30 minutes of video games and spends that whole 30 minutes downloading an update to a game, I feel that. But it feels like every good thing you're describing is actually maybe better served by working on the lag problem with input. Yeah, probably. Just the history of the tech industry is why not a weird compromise middle ground. That is yeah. Is often the thing that happens. And it feels like Sony, If anybody's going to do that, well, maybe Nintendo.

Nintendo actually, I'd be more likely. Like, just put it on an SD card. No problem. Nintendo never met at cutting-edge graphic technology. It could not walk away. Yeah, it's like, oh, this is too nice. Like, next year, the switch will have Wi-Fi. Yeah.

That's what we're working on. So, like, I can see them being like, you know what? This is kind of garbage in a lot of ways, but it's cool. Yeah. So we're going to do it because we're in Nintendo. Sony would be like. Yeah, I'm just curious. As we think about game stream again and the idea that things will default there because, as David is pointing out, being able to white label that stuff and just roll your own feels, like at least it will be technically easy, if not business model, easy or game library development easy, but technically easy.

It's like at some point, Sony's got to make an argument for putting a GPU in your house. Yep. And that, so does Microsoft. So does everybody else. The argument right now is the internet sucks. Yeah. And that's a good argument. Yeah, it's the best argument.

It really is. All right, let's wrap up this section. There's actually a bunch of additional streaming headlines. David, do you want to go through them? Sure. Well, the one other thing we should talk about with Sony real fast is the other thing Sean did was uncover a bunch of new plans for Sony's smartphone games, which is the other future of gaming that Sony has sort of systematically done a bad job at over the years.

It's a very good story. It's very interesting. It's actually a very similar story. Like, Sony has hired a bunch of good people, made big promises about mobile games and not succeeded. with any of them and appears to be sort of rebooting and trying again. I'm excited about that. We got a bunch of NFL Sunday ticket news.

We talked a little bit about this on Wednesday show, but all the information is finally out. Everybody in our comments is very upset that it's going to cost anywhere from $250 to like $400 for the season. Do you get blackouts? Are there blackouts? No. So that's the whole beauty of YouTube. And the reason they'll tell you that YouTube TV is so terrific is that you get the local games on YouTube TV,

you get the out-of-market games on Sunday ticket. And for an extra $40 a season, you can also get Red Zone. So it's expensive and it's a mess, but at least it's all like in one app. I'm so happy for the both of you. If you were waiting for YouTube to solve this problem, sucks for you. I also, Nilai, I did a Packers burn at the end of my YouTube story. You didn't even notice. And I'm really sad about it.

Well, you already told me the pricing. So, yeah. I definitely read that story. And I thought, I'll just let this go. Yeah, that's probably what happened. Google TV, Alex, this seems like something that would excite you. Google TV got a big guide to 8. 800 different free channels.

I already have all of them because I have channels. That's true. So the thing, an M3U. The thing that you were describing, basically, which is like take all these free channels and, like, collate them into one app

that you can actually search across is what Google is now trying to do, which is the single smartest thing Google has ever done in streaming. So congratulations to Google. It's the most Googly thing they could have done. It's the best thing Google has ever done in streaming. I'm sure it'll be a piece of shit

because it's Google TV and like every other streaming box, Google TV, trash. But hey, it's a good idea anyway. I got to say that this, by the way, this is David's hottest take. This is your car play. When he wrote that headline, the number of people are like, I don't know, he's fine.

It's like, yeah, but it's like not very good. Yeah. Everyone has Stockholm syndrome with Apple. This is the thing. Carplay, not very good. Just better than the other garbage. Yeah. No, that's, that's basic. I mean, that's literally like Apple's entire business model. We're not garbage.

Steve Jobs put up a bunch of phones and then it was like, We made a slightly better phone. Do you want it? Have you been reading the Steve Jobs book that they put out? The Steve Jobs Archive put out the ebook and it's just lots of interviews and direct coordination. Does it make something wonderful? I think that's what's called. It's make something wonderful.

I'm a total sucker for it. It's just a complete sucker for it. You can read it on the web and it has this great web presentation. You can download it to Apple Books. And then it does not mention Kendall's like, or you can have a PDF for your other garbage. It's very funny. But I highly recommend reading it because if you're listening to it, because if you're listening, of this, you're almost certainly a sucker for Steve Jobs saying things like the only good products

that have ever existed, are the original telephone and the trimline telephone and every other telephone is garbage. Incredible. And he's just saying this in like 1978, like straight out randomly doing an interview where he's like 24 years old and he's like, there's only ever been two good telephones. And like, I'm a complete sucker for this. And you just read it and then you like look at the business model infected Apple ecosystem of today where everything is designed to get you to buy something else.

And you're like, oh, I wonder if you would have loved this or hated it. And the Apple TV to me is like the number one example for this where it's both designed to make you watch Apple TV Plus at every turn. And then they can't get the business deals to complete the interface to make it good. So it just stuck in the middle of whatever it is. And because it's stuck in the middle, it's the best option because everyone else is like, screw it. We're just going all the way towards converting you to our services. And Apple at least has the restraint to not do it all the way. They don't have to catalog.

I was going to say restraints form for it. Anyway, that's same with carp. I'm just telling you, everyone should read this book because it's great. And if you're a virtualist listener, you're going to be a sucker for it. Is there an audiobook version? No, it's just, it says like collected writings. Okay. Who would they have to get like an AI?

Like Steve Jobs and person. The trim line was a great phone. It's just very good. Anyhow. I'll listen. Do you say there was one word? Well, no, just the one other thing we should mention, which goes back to the gaming handheld stuff is, a bunch of people got very excited on the internet because a video from a Microsoft hackathon,

I think last September, just came out showing somebody had cobbled together. They called it like Windows handheld mode. And it was basically like, what if you could run Windows in a gaming specific mode on a Steam Deck like piece of hardware? And everybody got very excited about it. I took umbrage with this because it feels like nobody's used the Microsoft Cloud Gaming platform on a Steam deck. I spent an entire afternoon having to like program it. and get it all set up on my Steam deck. And it looks almost identical to that and it works great.

And I was like, okay, I already did this. Yeah, but what if you didn't have to spend a whole afternoon getting it set up? That does seem very compelling. Like, you have to like download little pictures so that it will load properly in the Steam UI. It's a whole, it's a lot. I do love that we've come all the way back around to what if we had small computers that just ran all of Windows. Like straight up had a task bar tiny computers. Like, that was the 90s.

Netbooks had just had little joysticks. What if we called them pocket PCs? Just think about it, y'all. What if Comback was out here selling pocket PCs? I'm going to do some Excel spreadsheets on my Steam deck. Just look, everything comes back around. It's the one thing. It's my fourth thing.

Yeah. It's like wired connections, something about car play, whatever other bullshit I made up, and pendulum swing back around. Most of which are accurate except for the car play. Whatever other bullshit I made up with, I agree. Pocket PCs are kind of. coming back. I believe this in my heart. All right, we got to take a break.

I can't believe we still have to talk about Twitter. We're going to take a break and come back. We'll be ready. Support for this show comes from Whatnot. Whether you're selling online or out of a storefront, you already know the challenge. You're simply hoping for people to find your listing or waiting for them to walk in.

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All right, we're back. I forgot to announce, like, the news, our news at the top of the show, which is that I, I am now the project manager for CarPlay. It's going to suck. It's going to run two apps at once, you guys. It does.

No, it does it. Yeah, it does. I'm going to send you a picture of mine. I know. I know. The stupid boxes are not. apps. They're like widgets.

You're on one app and then like widgets. Yeah. I'm not looking for widgets, man. I really want to ask you what you think the difference between a MacBook Pro. I want 900 full-fledged windows open. Full tiles. Let's go.

Windows car coming soon. Widgets. All right. This is as good of a lead up to I am the new host of the Code Conference as I can possibly come up with. So as you know, we have a lot of lineage to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Walt was our executive editor for years. Walt and Kara started the D conference

that turned into the Code conference, which Fox Media owns. Walt retired several years ago. He still texts me to remind me that we make journalism here, which is great. I love the fact that I can text Walt Mosberg. It's like one of those things. How did this happen?

It's very cool. Kara was her last year of hosting code last year. She went out with a bang, did the best version of that thing that anyone can ever do. And so now Casey and I have to come up with a different version. which we've talked about for a long time. But this is the 20th year of code. We're moving locations again.

Casey Newton, who is a virtual contributing editor, runs a platformer. You all know Casey. Myself and Julie Borson from CNBC are the new host of the Code Conference, which is in September. And if you know what we should do, you should let me know. No, we have a lot of ideas and just how to reset it a little bit. And so, you know, we're the new hosts. We're very excited about it.

Obviously, we all interview people all the time. Kara is a very distinctive type of interviewer. I've ripped a lot of, for some Kara, just like straight up. There's a lot of Kara's moves in my game. But we want to push it a little farther. We want to have some different kinds of guests. I really want to get more creators on that stage

and talk about their businesses and other of your creator stuff. That's the news. We're very excited about it. It was just announced. And like I said, if you have ideas and what you want to see happen in the code conference, this is the moment because we are starting to put together what we're going to do. I'm going to DM you all mine. A lot of the ideas are like, can you yell at them even more.

And it's like, most people can't yell at them at all. Like, Carrie yells at them a lot. But can you yell at them more? Yeah. Well, yes, we want to make great journalism and do tough interviews. And I think that's why some people show up. If you're a CEO, you're usually pretty type A. You want some of a challenge you?

This is a real thing. This is why they come on Decoder 2. So, yeah, code conference. It's a thing. I forgot to say it at the top. I was supposed to. I was instructed to announce it maybe. And I forgot.

I think this is a good place to mention it. Because we're going to talk about some people you should totally have. Yes. This is a good section. Just talking about Twitter. Dear Sweet. Twitter. We should talk Twitter and Substack at length,

but there's some other stuff that happened this week first. We should just note, Elon went nuts doing labels. Like, I think he discovered that there's a field in Twitter accounts called labels and he started typing stuff into it to see what would happen. So he got into a fight with NPR. At first he labeled it,

like, state-sponsored media. Yeah. Which is just like very funny because that's like a real thing that happens in China, Korea, and other places. NPR's not that thing. It gets like 1% of it's funny from the government. And the United States does have,

state-sponsored media has Voice of America, which we use to broadcast. State-sponsored media and publicly-funded media are not even a little tiny bit the same thing. Right. So Bobby Allen from NPR is a great tech reporter there. E-mailed Elon said, what are you doing? Elon said, I'll change it.

So you changed the publicly funded media. NPR said, this is stupid and you're being weird and we're just not going to publish on Twitter anymore, which is a big decision. PBS also pulled publishing from Twitter after the same sort of label, Brouhaha. He did it to the BBC. he applied the same label to the BBC

and then he sat for I will just be candid I just talked about interviewing people that interview sucked the BBC interview of Elon must suck and I've figured out why I've watched a lot of interviews with Elon and he always seems to snow everyone

everyone prepares for Elon like he's going to be prepared oh yeah no one's ready for him to be obviously winging it he's never prepared for any well no particularly I think he's sometimes prepared for like Tesla and SpaceX sometimes yeah where his expertise lies But his interviews, he just comes in and is like, yeah, I'm here to interview.

Let's go. Yeah. And so the BBC interview was bad. Like you, I think of Dakota often is like Neelai versus media training. Mm-hmm. Like, it's a game that I'm playing. It is. And you can't, if you're playing a game with someone and they're, they're not playing it.

You're often not doing well. And I would just say at a BBC interview, you just watched. There are two people having radically different experiences. Like, one person's like, I'm going to ask you questions and you're going to answer the questions. And Elon's like, here's what I'm going to ask you. I'm going to just like throw water all over the walls and start honking like a goose. And it's like, what's happening in this interview? It doesn't make any sense.

But in that interview, Elon did say buying Twitter is really painful. He doesn't have a stone cold heart. He says he got forced into buying it, which is an incredible way to say, I signed a contract to buy a company for $44 billion and then was sued to enforce the contract. And I thought I was going to lose the lawsuit. He was forced. Yeah, yeah, really, no. Yeah, just a very odd week for Twitter.

And then he announced, who knows if this will actually happen, but all the blue checks will go away on, of course, 420. Nice. Sorry. Thank you. I appreciate you, Alex. And then now I think people are starting to get ads. I've gotten ads. They're like, your blue checks are going away. Don't you want to subscribe?

And again, I think we have a lot of, like, advertising listeners. This ad contains no explanation of what the benefits of paying might be. Not even a tout. It's just a thrift. Right. It's like, it's just extortion. Your blue check is going away. Subscribe. It's like, no. Absolutely not.

Like, say one good thing that will happen. He's got to know. You know, generally when you do this, you like, you smash some stuff. You like break things and you're like, do it or else. And instead it's just like, do it. I believe in my bones that he thinks that people think having a blue check is like a cool signifier of status. which A, it was never intended to be. The idea that like the blue checks were a thing was always ridiculous.

And B, he has systematically made it stupid to have a blue check. To the point, as I have said, as we have talked about before on this show, that you can have a blue check and hide it. Because it's so embarrassing to have a blue check on your profile now because of what that communicates. So to come out and say, don't lose your blue check. There were a bunch of people I saw the other day who were tweeting that actually what should do is change your display name because it will automatically remove your blue check as a, as a hack. Like, I don't want to have a blue check anymore. How can I get rid of it more quickly?

Is a much more prominent question at this moment than how do I keep my blue check? This is what we've come to. I'm just really curious how he's going to do it because right now they're having to like go down the list and do it that way, like manually. They hadn't figured out a way to do that not made me well they've always figured it out because they found me did they find you they well i blocked the verified there's a rumor this is like i mean did she doesn't want you to know like level of rumor right but if you blocked the verified account that they wouldn't be able to find you because that was the only true list they had i still got my my check yeah no but you had to block at verified i did i think i just don't tweet a lot and also i have like four followers

so they're like she can wait wait do i still have i still on it's it's not going to until 4thron. Anyhow, none of this matters. No, just quit Twitter. As David is pointing out, none of this actually matters. Listen to me, everyone. Let me, let me just. Yeah. Look, I read the first draft of David's activity pub story. Sit with me for a moment. It's very good. My children. Yeah. That's where the heat is. Just quit Twitter.

Twitter is a place that has systematically proven to have bad product. It will not keep your personal stuff safe. It won't keep your private things private. It won't show you the things you want it to show you. It will show you exclusively things that you don't want to see. It breaks all the time. There is literally nothing left for you on Twitter. I don't know where to go. Come hang out on the verge.com. Go somewhere else. Go to Instagram. It's better on Instagram. Leave Twitter. Twitter is done. Let's just, however you feel about Elon Musk, however you feel about politics, Twitter is a bad platform and you should quit. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Yeah. I think I pretty much kind of quit this week with the NPR stuff. I was like,

everything else he's done whatever for some reason this was my my line this was your line yeah i was like you're just like being addicted to spread misinformation now yeah so i yeah that was that was he's done it before but for some reason this one i was the one yeah again watching that interview i go back to my thesis which is if you were addicted to nicotine and you bought a cigarette factory you would think every idea you had ruled right yeah because you're like everyone else feels the way i do And everyone else would be like, you run a cigarette factory and I don't smoke. And why do you keep insisting that I buy cigarettes from you? Cigarettes with like 30 times more nicotine?

You just gums bleed as soon as you look at it. He's addicted to Twitter. He thinks it's monopoly. And I will point this out. His other two companies are more or less monopolies. Yeah. Like Tesla has had infinite demand for electric cars. They can't meet the demand for electric cars.

And so he's run a business where every car he makes, he sells. And it doesn't matter if the cars have two-inch panel gaps or they drive themselves into brick walls or like whatever people on electric cars and he's a supplier of them. And maybe that will change his competition or maybe not. The only other electric car you can buy in market today is a Chevy Bolt. He's going to be fine for a while. Right. But like we'll see what happens when the Kia EV-9 hits or like all these other cool ones hit. SpaceX is kind of a monopoly.

The government was like, what if we didn't do NASA? And NASA became like a buyer of rockets from the private sector. Except for the one big rocket. And to his credit, I will give him all the credit in the world for this. He was like, yes, I will make rockets and launch them in space and land them again. And the United Launch Alliance is like, you've done nothing. I would be willing to wager that Elon Musk is not in the top 50 people most responsible for the launching and landing of rockets. But yes, agreed.

But I'm just saying his other two companies are kind of monopolies. They're in markets that should be competitive and are not. Not yet. And the only yet is because I think cars are going to get competitive for him. But it's still, like, car play is still like a conversation we're having. Like, there's a lot of stuff Teslas can do that the automakers are still sorting out. But they might only now be competitive. So I think he's just got Monopoly brain.

Yeah. Where he's like, I've run Twitter. Twitter's awesome monopoly. I'm addicted to it. What about you? And it's like, oh, dude, you can just leave. Like, I can just open the TikTok app on my phone instead of this car. Does he know Instagram exists?

Right. There's like all these other platforms to take your time. What is not true is that for years, the default answer for everything in media and politics has been Twitter. You're a candidate, something weird happened on a campaign stop.

You need to issue an apology. Like Twitter it is. Like it'll mainline into the press. Our site goes down. And we're like, we need to tell our audience, we tell the people who follow us on Twitter,

which is not the whole audience. Like by a huge margin is not the whole audience, but it feels like we're doing it. Yeah. Whatever. it's like always the answer. Twitter is like always the answer.

And now it's not. And I think that is opening up a lot of opportunity for other companies. It's opening up a lot of change, hopefully, and how we think about you think the internet, which would be good. And it is driving Elon Musk bonkers. Yeah. Which is right, because he's not the answer. He's not the monopoly provider of this thing.

And so I think you're interesting all the stuff he's doing is like, we should talk about subsect now because this is like, to me, the most interesting thing where the monopoly did something aggressive against competition and it, I think, spectacularly backfired in a way that... People were really upset, right, with the substack thing. I don't usually, I don't subscribe to a lot of substacks. I'm sorry. Just the one. It's platform. Yeah, I have platformer. That's it. And so I didn't really care as much. But it seems like a lot of people care. Like, Substack, one of its main traffic drivers is Twitter. And then he went and he started like digging around with the links. Yeah. So this happened last week.

week on the show, right? We were like in the middle of it. So substack launch substack notes, which is, it looks like a Twitter competitor is not really Twitter, whatever. It looks like, it looks enough like Twitter. Yeah. To have scared Elon Musk. There's some tiresome personalities involved in the back and forth. Yeah, that's about right. Um, that's just as much as I'm going to talk about that. He starts making it so that if a tweet has a substack link in it, you cannot even like that tweet. Let's like, or retweet it. It's hilariously petty. He puts up a warning screen. So if you click a substack link on Twitter, it says this site. He's basically like, do you remember the whole insane thing with the, the Hunter Biden laptop story?

This is like, yeah, but like more. He used all of those tools that he was criticizing. And then the best one, which I don't think is a tool that has existed before, is that if you searched for the word substack, even in the most brute force way, if you, we wrote stories and if you would search our hyperlinks, our URLs and they had substack and the slug, it would redirect that word to the word newsletter. Yes. Oh, beautiful. Beautifully petty. Like, you are no longer allowed to search URLs in this platform that contain the word substack. Like, that is the most king dictator anti-free speech thing I can think of.

So substack freaks out. Elon tweets and reply. Like, no public explanation on this is forthcoming. Elon tweets in or apply. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, which makes no sense. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. You don't want to download a massive pile of garbage. It'd be like, even if you just think about what that means or how that would work or how you would do it or what you would use it for or what it would bootstrap.

Right. Like none of it. There's a great hacker news. It's like just on its face. This is a nonsensical thing to say. Yeah, it wouldn't even accomplish anything. It's not like they're going to upload it and like backfill substack notes with Twitter content. It's just like not a thing that's going to have.

Right. It just doesn't make any sense. So anyway, Chris Best, the CEO of Substack was on Decoder this week. there's a lot to talk about in this conversation. Honestly, still processing. But I asked him, were you downloading Twitter? And he was like, no. And I was like, do you talk to Elon?

He was like, no. I said, Andrewston Horowitz is an investor in both companies. They're in the syndicate that Elon bought Twitter with. And he's like, did they help? And he was like, everyone, no. And it sounds like he just did it. He never gave them any warning. And he never, like, told them what was wrong.

I mean, like, obviously, you know, everyone could be lying. you just take whoever at their word. But they say they weren't downloading a massive portion of the Twitter database, which no one can figure out why he would even want to do that. Was, were they maybe like accessing that GitHub that has a bunch of Twitter code on it? And he like found out and was like, but that's a code.

That's not the database. I think we've established that while Elon likes to say he's close to the metal, people who are don't say that. Yeah. Who knows? So Chris told me all about subsect notes. and what it's for. A big thing that's part of this puzzle is for the average substack writer, the place where they get most of their subscribers is historically Twitter.

Like that has been the best sort of marketing for substack writer. What substack is doing now is they're pulling people into their app and making the app more of a consumer platform and sort of like redirecting you to other substacks and other and like recommending things. And so the app is becoming a significant source of subscribers for substackers as well not too, which is really interesting because that's a very close. kind of social network. I will just say here that Chris and I got into a fairly intense conversation on content

moderation. I'm shocked. It didn't. It was an episode of Decoder. I don't want to like overdo it on this show. You just go listen to that show. What I'll say here is I really believe that if you are infrastructure, you should not moderate hardly at all.

So if you're pipes, if you're AT&T or Comcast or whatever, like people know my feeling is in that neutrality. Leave it alone. Leave it alone. Like, just be the pipes. And the more you become a consumer service that people can switch away from, the more you have to, like, do it and like, be a product. And like the product that social platforms make is moderation at the end of the day.

And Chris does not agree with me. There's a turn in that that a lot of people misses, which is that we take the term moderation in a lot of cases to mean one very specific thing, right? Like, the idea of content moderation has come to be associated. with a lot of specific versions of content moderation and specific kinds of policies. What's actually true is you just have to decide. Like, our content moderation policy is that everything legal is allowed on our platform, no matter what, is content moderation.

I don't happen to agree with that policy, but that is a policy. Like, that counts as content moderation. What you can't do is nothing. And what you can't do is say, we don't have opinions on that. Because at some point, you just literally have. to. And if you want to leave those things there and deal with whatever consequences there are, fine. If you want to remove those things and deal with whatever consequences that there are fine. But you have to do something. And there's so much in this space right now where people are just like, what if we just did nothing? Yeah. And pretended that was fine. It's like, that's not actually how it works. The thing that always gets me is more speech is legal in the country than people expect. Yeah. Yes. Right. And you can just see this play out on social platforms a lot. People think hate speech is illegal. Or people think lying is illegal. Yelling fire in a movie theater.

People think yelling fire in a movie theater is illegal. It's just like a long list of people's expectations of what is allowed versus what is actually allowed. And I think that's fine, right? It's better for the norms of speech to be kind of malleable and fuzzy and change with people over time than it is for the government to impose those norms. This is like the most first cast of all time. We started with like car play socks and running with like government imposed norms.

But where I think substack is confused. And actually in a weird interplay with Elon's confusion around free speech is that you can't run a company with the most permissive set of norms. You just can't do it. Yeah. Because that means your values, that means your company doesn't have any values. It doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't mean anything. And over time, that's all you sell.

All a company sells are its values. And I just think, I think they've gotten burned. This is like director's commentary. You should go listen to her in like, you will understand this director's commentary. like after that conversation, I was like, I know you didn't want to answer that question, you probably like fall down the slippery slope of this question a lot, right?

Like I ask you one hypothetical and then like another harder one. And then another harder one. And like, I, I know that's shitty. That's a bad thing to do. And I agree with him. Like, that's not a useful way to talk about it. And he was like, yeah, that happens to me a lot.

So I get why he doesn't want to do it. But if you can't say, I disagree with that statement, but my terms of service allow it. Right? And that's a decision that I've made because of X, Y, and Z. then you're lost, right?

And I think that's the turn that we're missing from all of these social company CEOs right now is to be able to state their own values and have that value include lots of people are going to say shitty thing with my software. Yeah.

And I don't, I don't know, vote Patel. I'll figure it. No, I think that's right. And I think it's definitely true that way too much of our conversation around this is about litigating specific bad content. Like even you go to congressional hearings and people are like holding up tweets

on poster boards. being like, what, this was on your, I mean, this happened at TikTok, right? They were like, I watched this one video one time and it was bad and how could you allow that on the platform? And it's like, well, like, what are you supposed to do with that? Like, that's not actually a useful way to have this conversation. But to your point, the only way to ever have that conversation is to start from somewhere. And I think what everybody has decided is that if I don't tell you what I think, I don't have to answer for any of it. And it's actually the opposite.

Like, if you just tell us what you think, we can. move on with our lives, right? Like, otherwise, you are going to be held. Yeah, I can decide whether I'm going to do business with you or not. Exactly. Otherwise, you're going to be held accountable for every imaginable version of your value system. Yeah. And I think to just bring this background to Elon, this same confusion is the heart of Elon's, like, Twitter administration.

He doesn't know that he has to make these decisions. Well, he's like, it's free speech. We're going to allow them those things. And then he globally blocks tweets because the Indian government asked him to. Right. And it's like, whoa, that's super bad. Whoa, like you had an entire team, an entire product infrastructure since 2014 that allows you to moderate content on a per country basis and provide transparency around what governments

are asking you. And you don't know it exists because you fired everybody. And now someone in Texas can't see a tweet because the Indian government said no. That's bad. Right. And it's like, that's the level of complication here where you can't just say it's free speech. Yeah. And I just think that we're at a moment now with the social platforms where maybe the problem has just gotten too hard at scale and the thing to actually use decentralized platforms.

Yep. You should read David's activity pub piece next. I'm really excited to read it one day. I'm super hot on this protocol. That's the real end of the verge cast. The answer is a weird open source protocol. It's been around since 2011 that is finally getting some action. This is new verge cast bingo.

Huh? This is the new verge cast bingo. Yeah. There's, there is Vergecast bingo. Car play is the free space in the middle. Yeah. That's my last trip.

An activity pub just down there, down there at the bottom, right corner. If activity pub makes it onto the bingo sheet, something good time. We've all made it. Yeah. That's great.

Like it's to, because it's not been on the bingo card for a long time. Just like the last two episodes. Just the last two. But you can see. We should do like verge cast heat checks like the ringer pods do. Where like, but instead of like actors.

It's activity. These track, like we started mentioning it more and more. Slowly. It's pretty good. All right. I'm down. I'm just putting out there. All right.

We got, we got to, oh, I've got to pick one for the lightning round to wrap us up. David. I'll go first. So mine is, there was news today, Thursday, as we're recording this, that you can now talk to the Bing chat bot through your keyboard if you use the Swiftkey keyboard. This is interesting. On its face, not terribly exciting news. I think Swift key is interesting. I've always thought that phone keyboards are.

sort of an unused fascinating space. There's actually a lot of cool stuff you can do with just a keyboard app that people don't realize. It's very hard to make them good, but they're very interesting. But the broader point that I think is really interesting here is one of the most fascinating debates to me right now is between people who see things like chat GPT and Bing and GPT4 and say, give that to me everywhere, integrate that into all the apps I use. I want it.

This is the future. Put it everywhere. And the people on the other side who are like, get this away from me, leave me alone. stop doing this. Like I'm in a bunch of discords and slacks and stuff for various apps that I use, including one for Notion. And there is this ongoing like holy war between people who are like, I am emailing the help desk at Notion every 15 minutes to turn off Notion AI on my account

because every time I hit slash it says, do you want me to help you write a blog post? And then there are other people who are like, AI is the future. Get rid of everything. Just make Notion a chat bot. How much money can I possibly give you? And I think, like, Microsoft in particular is just deep down this road of like,

we're going to shove AI into every nook and cranny of every app that we make. And you're going to love it. And I think, I mean, there are people at Microsoft in every meeting who are opening the door and sticking ahead and be like, dudes, Clippy is real. Shubing them, like, running down the hole. They're just like Bing campus ambassadors. We did. We did.

We did. We did. Clippy's alive. This is been a 30. your dream and now they have it. Yeah. There's some Bing product manager who like gets a bonus every time Bing shows up in a new thing and that person is a billionaire now. Congratulations to them. But yeah, that that fight, I think is going to be really interesting. The SwiftKate thing I actually think is sort of smart.

Like it'll it'll actually let you back into doing it inside of a lot of other apps. So I think in that way it's very clever. But AI is going to be in. Wait, how long until Apple blocks that? It's been pretty permissive with stuff so far. Um, Federico Vitigi over at Mac Stories built an unbelievably cool chat GPT thing just using shortcuts. It's called SGPT, I think. It is extremely cool and very powerful and bakes a lot of that stuff into other apps that you're using. Interesting.

So I think people are finding ways into this. And Apple so far has just kind of let it happen. It honestly surprises me a little how permissive it has been so far. You've just destroyed it. It's very possible. Someone just realized it. Yeah. Zach, don't tell anyone.

Don't mind that. Just let that slide. You didn't hear it. It's been a decade. I know who listens to the show. Mine. So good. Yeah.

I was so excited about this. Mini, the car company, make the Cooper. There's a new mini Cooper right. It looks tough, which is weird. Does it have a car play? I don't know. But I know what it does have. It has a new virtual assistant in it.

It's a dog. Name Spike. No shoes. I love this so much. So if you buy, so first of all, there's a theory that in bad economies, cars get more aggressive looking. And if you believe that, then we are about to have the worst recession in 100 years. Cars are ridiculous looking. We have one listener who sent me, apparently we've been running an ad for something called the Toyota Crown.

And I was sent a video of what the Toyota Crown looks like. It's not great. I got to look at that. Oh, that's a look. Yeah, it's a look. some Subaru WRX Yeah By way of Camry

It's a lot Every new BMW Looks like it's so mad at you All the time They're so angry Very much The newest one I think that the IX

No it's the M50 Whatever one they made Yeah The newest sort of SUV Yeah Someone said it looks like the pigs From Angry Birds You can't not see that anymore

So the new Cooper is very aggressive But voice assistant In it They're all doing this thing They want to get away from carplay They want you to use their software, mostly to shop. You got to watch this video of Spike. It's a dog named Spike.

And you'd be like, hey, Spike, and your Mini Cooper be like, what for it? Does it talk or does it just bark? It's a talking dog. It's Spike the English Bulldog. It will be in future mini vehicles. Does it have like the dog voice, the rough? It will have various forms of support. We all agree this is fantastic, right?

That this is like in the world in which there are assistance everywhere. this is the best possible outcome that a little purple-headed dog just like runs around changing gears for me. Like that's all I've ever wanted. Oliver Heimer, Minnie's head of design, says, quote, we are taking Spike into the future as a digital character, which first of all implies that Spike was in the past as well. It's not a digital character. Spike has always been here. It's always been Spike.

Spike has been uploaded to the Matrix. He is not just a design experiment. He's becoming a characterful companion for the user experience. experience. It's just really good. It just, the whole thing's really good. More cars should have talking dogs in them. Completely agree. It's just adorable. Spike will dance with a disco ball. If you will. Spike gives you directions. Spike is the best. I love Spike. Oh my God. I'm watching the video now and like the dancing. Just the hopping up and down. This is so cute. Yeah. This is just very distracting with you're driving. We're not driving. The car is driving itself and you're

shopping with Spike. Welcome to the future of transportation. I'm very glad we're out of the phase of like personified. humanoid robot assistance and into the like Pixar character dog era of assistance. Justice for Bigspey. Yeah. Although Bigsby was not actually a dog, we just told everyone was a dog.

We manifested Bigsby. Bigsby had no. Bigsy's a dog with shoes. That's what it is. It's in your phone. It's definitely wearing shoes and it's a dog. I don't like that.

Not at all. But you never got to see it. I never got to see it. Poor Bixby. All right, Alex, what's yours? Tom Warren had a review of the Invideo RtX 4070, which is a $600 card that is pretty much as powerful as like $700 card from last year, which was the $3080. And he really liked it, except for it doesn't do 4K. But if you want 4K buy a PlayStation 5 or spend $1,000.

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's cool. We'll be good for my full motion VR sim racing. Yes. I do appreciate that we're like finally getting back to good GPUs that regular humans can actually afford to buy. I'm excited.

Like, I mean, it's still the same cost as a PS5. Sure. And it's still gigantic and weighs 600 pounds. And it's got like kind of a weird, the power port on it. I think he wasn't super crazy about. But it's like, I'm excited. I love that we like for a while there, AMD and Nvidia are both like, yeah, we're going to gouge you because like there's a shortage. Every card's $1,000.

And now they're like, it can be $600. And if they can just make like a really good 1440p like this, but for $300, that'd be sick. And then you buy a full motion. The money you save on that, you buy on the full motion VR sim racing. I would do sim racing in my Brooklyn apartment. You'd get rid of all your furniture. I would have no furniture, but it would be really cool. The TikTok algorithm has discovered that I love videos of people, sim racing and full motion setups.

It is ridiculous. Have you ever watched a video of someone else effectively watching TV? Yes. Because that's what I'm doing a lot. Do they like move when they drive? Yeah. It's like, I'm going to watch a lot of videos. A video, by the way, just given the physical setup that are obviously best in landscape,

but I'm going to watch videos that are shot in portrait of a man in a chair. The chair moves and he's watching a monitor. Yes. I can't get enough. The algorithm is like, do you want more of this? That's just Star Trek. Yeah. It's fine.

People not moving in chairs. It's the future. The chair is moving. They're not moving relative to the chair, but the chair plus person are moving relative to the earth. And they're all moving at the speed of life. We've taken the like 4D rides at Disney World and put them in our houses. And this is the future.

Perfect. I love it. Do ratatoo. There are people who have attached fans to them and they call them wind simulators. Like, is it a little fan? It's just like a... I mean, where's the lie, B.I? Yeah.

Where's the lie? I love it. I'm going to end up with one of these. If you're listening to this, you're like, this is said with the purest love. I love you for calling it a wind simulator, and I am extraordinarily jealous

that I do not have a wind simulator of my own. I think you can get one for like $15 at Walmart. Just clip it on. It's not high fidelity simulation now. We're going to get to the code. conference in November and everybody's going to be like, where's Nelai? And it's just going to be like, we lost him. He's racing. Oh, don't.

No, no, no. Now that I have access to like, oh, I can make people have real life experiences, we're putting the billionaires in sim racing race. Don't you worry about it. If you run a sim racing company and you want to do a code experience, you know, there's someone to call. Eli, this is our hot

ones. Instead of eating wings, interview people while VR racing in simulators. This is it. I would watch the hell out of that. All right, Jeff. And by which I mean, Jeff, business. Let's ride. All right. We got to end this before CEO makes me not the host of the Code Conference anymore. Just kicking the door down.

This is all over. That was it. That was a verge cast. I want to say you should vote for us in the Webby Awards. If you've enjoyed this experience, you should make people give us a trophy. It's springy. It's spring. It's beautiful. David really, David wants it bad. I don't have one. There's one in the office. I don't have one. I have a mantle with nothing on it. And I would like it to be a wedding. Yeah, the David Alex Vergecast is not one away. Yeah, we need one. Vote for these two. I'm old. Wow. Cool. I got springs for days. Look at me. I'm Neely. There's a link in the show notes. Please vote for

us. We'd really appreciate it. We got to win. So vote. We'd love it. Uh, the site is really good this week. There's lots of stuff. Go check it out. And we got a really cool new feature. We made our story streams. They're like alive now. so they update live. So we're going to be using those a lot. I just want to call this out because we have been rapidly like working on the redesign stuff and that's the thing that we spent all of our attention on.

And now they're like done. They're very cool. We did it for the HBO Max. We did it for the HBO Max event. We did it for April Fool's Day just as an experiment and it's event season coming up. So Google I.O, Apple WWACC, Microsoft, build. We're going to use them a lot for that.

I just want to call out. People ask me out, how's redesign going? And it's like, oh, we ship the thing is here. We shipped it iteratively like you do on the internet, and now the product is like complete. It's a complete thought. It's very cool. Check it. Okay.

That's it. That's our chest. Welcome. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend, you can send us feedback at Vergecast at theverge.com. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith.

Our editorial director is Brooke Minters and our executive. producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.