The Vergecast - HBO's no good very bad rebrand

Episode Date: May 16, 2025

Names are hard — but they don't have to be this hard. Nilay, David, and The Verge's Jake Kastrenakes start the show with some personal news, before digging into the monumentally silly thinking behind Warner Bros. Discovery re-re-naming its streaming service HBO Max. After that, and some more streaming news, we turn our attention to the gadget news of the week, including the long-awaited release of CarPlay Ultra and the latest announcements from the Android team at Google. Finally, in the lightning round, it's time for Brendan Carr is a Dummy, some debate on the future of Airbnb, and a brief party speaker update. Because the mystery continues. Further reading: It’s not Max, it’s HBO Max  Max was an all-time bad rebrand How HBO’s creatives survived corporate chaos ESPN’s standalone streaming app launches this fall for $30 a month  Fox One streaming service will arrive just in time for football season  Netflix’s ad tier is growing really fast — and that means more ads Netflix is bringing back Star Search as a live show YouTube will stream an opening week NFL game for free  Peacock’s NBA coverage will add an overlay with live shot stats  Apple’s CarPlay Ultra is finally here, if you have a new Aston Martin Apple’s fancy new CarPlay will only work wirelessly Android 16 Material Three Expressive UI coming in beta this month  Google’s splashy new Android UI is coming in beta this month.  It’s Dieter! Warner Bros. is launching a cinematic universe for brands Here's How NBCU Is Integrating Brand Sponsors for SNL50 FCC threatens EchoStar licenses for spectrum that SpaceX wants to use Airbnb’s new app has all of your vacation extras in one place 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 Skyler 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. Do you ever wonder what's in your lotion? If you look at the back of the bottle, it could contain more than a dozen ingredients. And they may not all be regulated. The threshold is so high that only 11 cosmetic ingredients have been restricted by the FDA since 1938.

This week on Explain It to Me, the chemicals lurking in your cosmetics. New episodes, Sundays, wherever you get your podcasts. Hello and welcome to GERNCAST, The Flagship Podcast, but pretending that everyone has Aston Martins. You know, just all everybody. Who does it? One of the great flexes of all time is being able to say,

our product has begun rolling out in one car no one will ever buy. Well, no, it's all new. We're Aston Martins, David. Yeah, one car, no one will ever buy. Sorry, I have to buy a new Aston Martin for this. I can't get this on my existing. We're going to get to it. But yes, it is new Aston Martins as of today.

and then if you have a newer Aston Martin that has the next generation Aston Martin infatainment system, you can go to your dealer and get a software update because God knows Aston Martin owners cannot insert a USB drive into their own car. Okay, I have a question. There is one Aston Martin in my neighborhood. Is it journalistically problematic if next time I see them, I track them to their house and ask them questions in their room? driveway about their Aston Martin. There's only one. Like I know I could recite the license plate, but I will not.

But it's like it's an Aston Martin. Like I see it a lot. And it's like, oh, that's the Aston Martin. And I have always wondered where they live. Do I now have a good journalistic reason to find out? Go slow. Start with cookies. You know.

Okay. Just like ask about the neighborhood. And then a couple weeks later, be like, I need to go for a drive. I like this. As a car person, this breaks in two. Two ways. One, this guy has been dreaming of the day someone shows up and is like, I see you have an Aston Martin. Yeah, there's no reason to buy one otherwise, right? Yeah. Like, I drive the Mustang around and like the high school kids are like, we have the engine.

I'm like, well, this is why I bought this far. Like, it's great. That's exactly what you want. And then there's the car people who are like, I'm not here. I was in Florida a couple years ago, right when the lucid air came out. And this is like, we're on vacation. like my friend's Ritzie part of Florida. And I saw his neighbor had a lucid air. And so we were walking up. And I deployed Max, who was, you know, at the time, a toddler's, like, extra cute. And I, like, I toddled her over to the lucid air. And I was like, my kid likes your car.

What is it? And he's like, I don't know what you're talking about. And you just walk away. You just, you don't want to, right? That's a person with security. He did not. I was like, not a lot of people have these. How did you get it?

He's like, I don't know. What are you talking about? I don't have the car. What's a car? Who are you? Now it's like Lucid would like ever want to talk about the Lucid era a little bit more than they have been. But that was in that there's only two ways this goes. Right.

Either. I mean, it's an Aston. I think I know which ways. Like no one's secretive about their Aston. No. If you're secretive about an Aston, you don't, you have too much money. I don't, I don't like it. But there's not like like, yeah, it's not like a hard.

You don't have to get like an allocation to get any of Aston Martin. True. Like, there's like Ferraris that you can only buy if you've bought enough previous Ferraris. This is why all the crypto bros have Lambos, by the way. This is a real thing. Lambo's, like, new money is associated with Lamborghini because Lamborghini will just sell you a car. You're like, oh, my God, I did it. Meme coin.

What do I do? Buy it Lambo. And the reason is because you just show up at the Lamborghini and they will just be like, yeah, you give us money and here is this car. You show up at the Ferrari dealership and like, have you bought our shit Ferraris for the past 10 years and kept them and not recently? Now you may have our best Ferrari. And those guys do not talk about where they're They're also often You know, the rulers of Middle Eastern nations

So they often don't talk about it Anyhow, we're going to talk about next generation I don't know how we got here. We're going to talk about next generation carplay. David is going to get arrested, stalking his neighbor in Washington, D.C. That's going to make for amazing podcasts later in this episode. We have to start, though, with news about ourselves.

This is a real thing. We're going to start with news about ourselves. It's how we think. David, would you like to tell the class what's going on in your life? I am having a baby in soon. To be clear, you are not. I am not personally having a baby.

My wife is having a baby and I will be there at the time. Where she's due July 6th. So sometime between mid-June and mid-July, I am just going to disappear into the ether for a couple of months. And, Eli, you also have news. my news is congratulations David uh-huh thank you it's great and now to add some complexity to this mix

my wife is also having a baby one week after David and his wife so already days July 14th children will arrive and then we will disappear we're gonna we're gonna go away

we're gonna try to take leave box media is actually really really great parental leave I didn't it didn't when I had my first baby. And I only took, like, eight weeks. And now we have, like, really great, like, industry leading leave. We're going to try to take it and, like, model it for our team, like, the whole thing that we do.

I suspect I will fail in some ways to take the whole thing, just given the nature of the job. But I'm going to try. I'm going to try. And in the meantime, on this show, Jake is going to take over hosting. It's going to be fun. Yeah. First off, congratulations to both of you. It was very exciting.

They said this off camera, but they're both going to do live stream gender reveal parties. I think it's probably going to be on Twitch. Stay tuned. That's fun. I like that idea. Yeah. It's definitely, definitely what we want to do. I'm going to do mine in the woods and we're going to fire a cannon of some kind.

Do you think that's a bad idea? Our doctor in their office in the waiting room, there's a sign. You know when there's a sign, you know this has been a problem, like in a corporate environment. The sign says, we will not tell anyone the gender of your baby. And it says, like, literally down the line. Oh, my God. It's like, we will not call the bakery. We will not call your grandparents.

And it's like a long list. And it's like every one of those is something that has happened. And we will not call the bakery is the first one. There have been like siblings and cousins who are calling being like, tell me so I can go do the gender reveal party. We were just like, tell us. We want to know. But what appears to be happening is people go in for whatever one reveals the sex of the baby. And then they don't want to know.

And they ask the doctor, will you call our bakery? So we can get the cake. that reveals the gender. And they're like, we are not part of this. If you would like a cake to be involved in this situation, that Baker can come with you. See,

I thought there was a HIPAA carveout for bakers. It's very good. But like every one of those on the sign, it's like, oh, this has happened. Like down to like, firework story. And it's like we're just like not doing that.

You realize you just described like an Uber Eats feature waiting to happen. Right? Like, it's someone will come with you, find out the sex of your baby, and then go acquire all the necessary. things for your gender reveal party. It's very good. It's sitting there.

It is truly good. But yeah, we're going in July. We're just going to dip. Yeah. And you'll ever be fun. Yeah, it's going to be a, like, delightfully chaotic Vergecast summer. Jake is going to take over the Friday shows. We have some really fun plans for the Tuesday shows. You're going to hear a bunch of different voices from the verge people. And the instruction that Milan and I have been giving to everybody is just get real weird with it. So we take no responsibility for what happens over the summer, but also I think it's going to be very fun.

And I'm excited to actually get to, like, listen to the show and not hear my own stupid voice. Yeah, it's going to be a good time. I'll still be here. We're going to bring people in from all across the verge. So lots of faces that you already know and are familiar with. Hopefully we'll get some more time for folks who get on here a little less often. We're going to have a good time.

Yeah. And then on Decoder, what we're going to do is Alex Heath is going to host the Thursday episode. So it'll explain our episodes. Here's what's going on. And on Monday, the CEO interviews, we are much of a really cool guest hosts. I'm very excited to announce some of these names as they come up. That's going to be really fun. I've told those folks don't try to make Decoder interviews.

Just go talk to people you think are really interesting and, like, have a good time. And I think once you hear who the guests hosts are, you will be equally excited about the idea of those people just, like, playing in the sandbox. So that's the plan. It's just going to be a mess. Yeah. I think everyone will be happy that I'm not around. Just be perfectly honest. Everyone will finally breathe.

The tech industry will take a break. Brendan Carr is honestly, I'm just going to call in once a week and rail up Brendan. If you thought that you would get one ounce of relief. I don't know how I turned an announcement into us having babies and the threat about running car, but I did it. Brendan Carr as a dummy has always been just for an Eli. So it stands the reason that you will keep making it even when. I'm going to hold my new child to the light like Simba and be like, your job is to torment this man. It's going to be great.

I'm really excited about it. But we have done a basically bad job of keeping the secret for months. So I'm glad we can finally tell all of you, but it's happening. We're weeks away. And then Dave and I have to figure out how to be parents of infants again, which will be a delight. Yeah. I will say baby monitor technology has progressed exactly zero in the past seven years. Quick question.

Who is reviewing the snoo? It's going to be. So I threatened to review the snoo when Max was born. and Dr. Harvey Karp, the inventor of the snoo, and I had many, many, many conversations. There's a lot going on with that product. He is very charming. I think Kristen Radke, our creative director,

has written about the snoo in the meantime, right? We've had a lot of babies on the VERS team recently, and there's a lot of snoo opinions. Sure. Max hated the snoo. Hated it. I was going to review it, and we stuck her in it. There's a hilarious picture of my Instagram.

where she's just in it. She's a little baby and she's all swaddled up because you put him in a straight jacket to put them in the snow. And she's just like, what the fuck is this? Like, it's just like every exposed part of her body is communicating that message from her eyes down. So we never used it.

She was just like, I hate you. I'm very upset with you. I don't, David, were you a snoo person? No, we, I spent an alarming amount of money on things a baby might sleep in that ours decided not to sleep in, but we never got all the way to the snoo. In part because right before I left on leave,

you and I were in a car in San Francisco going somewhere, and you spent like an hour in traffic railing against the snoo. And I was just like, well, I guess I won't get the snoo. So the snoo is just not allowed after that. Look, we have some parents, Jay Peters on our team, like, loves the snoo. Like, I think they, his view of it is like they wouldn't have gotten it through it without the snoo. Great. Like, whatever.

Like, the lesson you learn when you have the first baby is no one knows anything at all. Correct. The babies are very resilient and they will be fine and you just have to get through it. And so like, whatever works, man, like, I've no judgment. But Max just hated this thing. And there's one piece of information from my many conversations with Dr. Carp that just, it just undid it for me. So the snoo, you know, like rocks the baby. It, like, it detects when the baby wakes up and it starts rocking.

and then he, you know, there's this, it makes noise. It makes like white noise. And he, in his books, if you read Happiest Baby, which is his book or whatever, he's like, we tried to make the sounds of, like, mothers around the world. They all instinctively make this sound. And in the book, and even when you talk to him, he always comes back to, like, the sound Indian mothers make, which is, and he's like, and they go, chup, chup. And he's like, and he's got this idea that all these cultures make this sound. So what you got to do is like, pet the baby really hard. and go shh.

And I'm like, dude, if you go up to it, like my mom and you're like, did you ever just say chup to me really loud? She'd be like, no, because that means shut up. Like, that's what my mom would say when she was angry at me later in life to shut up. I was like, this is just a weird. There's a gap here. I don't understand. And then later I was actually talking to him. And I was like, where these sounds?

Like you have this big idea about these sounds and this like cultural connection to the sound. Like, how did you make the sound that the steamy makes? And I would just never forget it. He was like, oh, yeah, my nephew and I sat around, like, my name garage band. Yeah. And I was like, all right, dude. It always comes back to garage band.

I think, all right, man. So I will say Dr. Carp is lovely. I believe he's very sincere. He has all these ideas on what this new is and what it should be and different ways for it to go to different people. They got in trouble recently for pricing. I think Jay actually wrote that story for us. Many, many parents love this product. It was just, I, my daughter and I were both like, I don't know, man.

Anyway, we're going to have more. babies, what will further snoo coverage is coming. That's it. Everybody, that's a first cast. There's some destabilizing news. Yeah. To be clear, we're not going anywhere for a while here. So we got time. We have many things left

to talk about before we do. Lots of developer conferences coming out. There's lots of news. And then we're going to take a break for the summer. Yeah. Come back. All right, let's talk about speaking of things named Max. Eli, this should be the

greatest day in recent history in your household. The long national nightmare of Max's streaming services is finally over. They didn't get rid of the word, Max. That's fair. But now it's a qualifier. That's true. It's an adjective now and not the noun. So the news is that Warner Brothers Discovery had its upfronts this week.

All the streamers had their up fronts. That's where they present to advertisers, all the new, kinds of things they can buy, the new content that will be out on the services. And as part of the WBD upfronts, they announced that the streaming service, Max, would now be called HBO Max, which is what it was called to begin with. And they changed it 50 times along the way, landing on Max, big campaign. They shoved it full of weird discovery reality shows. We can talk about all that history. And then they realized that no one cared about that.

What they wanted was HBO shows. So they're taking the weird discovery reality. show is out and renaming the whole thing, HBO Max, which again is what it was called. And what everybody continued to call it? Like, they just could not break that. It's funny how much the AT&T Time Warner deal is going to come up in this episode.

It's going to come up a lot. AT&T bought Time Warner. The only thing that that resulted in was the Grayscale 4-3 Snyder cut. That's what happened. They bought AT&T, bought Time Warner, and then Zach Snyder was, like these dorks have money and berated them with an online harassment campaign into completing the Snyder cut, the pinnacle of which was a gray scale 4-3 Snyder cut, which you can go watch right now. It's called Justice is gray. It continues to exist on the service now. But that in terms of concrete results of AT&T buying time Warner, that is it as near as I can tell. Oh, many, thousands of jobs were lost. Just a little side note. Minor detail.

Yeah. Many, many, many, many thousands of layoffs. But you got a. 4-3 gray scale Snyder cut. It's in 4-3 because he wanted it to be an IMAX, but no one has an I-Mex screen

in their house. So he was like, tall, so we're going to go with 4-3. That literally his explanation provides in 4-3. Whatever.

That's the only result of AT&T buying Tem Warner that you can still see to the stay or that resulted really in anything at all.

This turned out to be a bad idea because it turns out you can't build your entire business on one movie. It's really the only thing that happened. So they, AT&T sells Time Warner to Warner Brothers Discovery to Discovery,

David Zazlov. He's like, well, you got this asset called HBO Max. That's the thing. That's the streaming service that's already out. I'm going to turn it into a competitor, Netflix, by dumping all my stuff on it. And then he reigns it Max. Yeah, he's pushed Discovery Plus and HBO Max together and called it Max, essentially. And also on this, literally the same day, he killed the CNN Plus streaming service that AT&T Time Warner had launched just before selling their entire company to Discovery. As of today, both of those big decisions

have been completely rolled back. Yep. CNN Plus coming back. Yeah, CNN Plus has come back as a standalone streaming service. HBO Max is now HBO Max again, and the Discovery content has been put a lot of it. Literally, oh, by the way, thousands of people have been laid off along the way.

Yep. Like, none of this has worked and mostly people have lost their jobs. And now they're, you know, they're doing this acute marketing campaign. We know, we, we screwed. It's like, no, you really screwed up. This is such an unbelievable disaster that I like, you cannot put too fine a point on how stupid this company has been throughout every single bit of this process. And they are. They're trying to play it off like a joke.

They did in the press release announcing this. They included the Ross and Rachel, we were on a break thing. which like, a, cool, timely cultural reference, guys. Everybody knows what Friends is now. And then they did a thing where there was like the white smoke coming out and they were like, we've picked a new brand. And it's like, no, no, no. What happened is your idiots.

And you were over and over. And the very, very thing that everybody said, the first day you announced this, which is that this is monumentally stupid because you are taking the best brand in entertainment and just deleting it from existence in the name of, every nonsensical thing that you want to put on this platform. They're just unwinding it completely. And then now, again, there are lots of rumors and some really good reporting out there that suggests that this company is about to split up again.

Like, truly, we are just going to have accomplished nothing except burning a ton of money and losing many, many jobs. That thing. Over and over and over again. They're really good at that thing. They're really good at that thing. They're really good at cost cutting. We rail against mergers on the show constantly.

The thing with mergers in particular, mergers with Time Warner is that all they do is delete jobs and make everyone look stupid. Yeah. Like, if you're out there being like, I could do a better job with this, I should buy Time Warner, I urge you to walk into the ocean and never look back because that will be a more successful outcome for you than buying Time Warner. It is the kiss of death. AOL, Time Warner was a company.

I used to work at it. And Gadda was part of AOL Time Warner. And it destroyed that company. It broke it and half. Keroswisher wrote two books about it. One of them has the greatest title of any business book ever. there must be a pony in here somewhere. It's a quote from, I believe, a Time Warner exec who said, this is a giant pile of shit in our entire thesis is there has to be a pony in here somewhere.

God. That's amazing. Incredible. That is a really good line. That's really good. Incredible. You just go read it. It's just a bunch of egos who think they can just like manufacture a thing out of nothing.

And that has been the story of Time Warner this whole time. I guess this time it's just Warner. Time Inc. The other part of Time Warner was sold to Mark Benny. CEO of Salesforce, who immediately invested in Humane and then had Time magazine name the Humane Pen one of the best inventions of the year. So that's going great over there. But you just see that the problem is you keep buying the media asset and then treating it like a commodity and thinking that's going to work. And thinking in particular that you can make something that isn't fancy, fancy just because you have the Warner Brothers Library.

And so, you know, with AOL, it was we're going to make AOL fancy by having this big media company and people will buy AOL because of it. Essentially the same thesis for AT&T. 18th thesis was we will preload, like, bite-sized versions of Game of Thrones on mid-range Android phones. And that's why people will choose us instead of Verizon. I don't have to say anything else about that. And then Discovery's thesis was David Zazov is a mid-market reality schloxter. and he's going to become a titan of Hollywood by having Warner Brothers

and doing all this stuff. And he immediately was like, what if, instead of carrying about the new fancy thing I bought, I loaded it up with my mid-market schluck. And you remember that slide from the beginning where they were like, here's the stuff we make for women

and here's the stuff for men. And we're like, bring these icons together. And it was just such an obtuse way of thinking about anything. Like content, people, humanity. like, this is an NBA fever dream that will result in nothing but way off. And here we are.

Well, even in the most generous reading of what happened, that came true and Netflix just absolutely kicked its ass at it up and down. Like, even if you want to say there is room for one sort of all encompassing general purpose, all things to all people, every level of content streamer, that's Netflix. It was obvious then that it was going to be Netflix and it has become even more entrenched as Netflix since then. Like, the idea was truly to come out and out Netflix, Netflix, and boy, have a lot of companies died attempting to out Netflix, Netflix. Which is fascinating because Netflix still has not figured out the, like, good movie part of making

movies. And Warner Brothers, like, as much as that's not going particularly well, they at least still make movies people want to watch. And Netflix has really figured out how to do the, like, mid-tier. totally average reality show that they can just fill the library with. Well, right. Ironically, Netflix's whole thing, like, do you remember years ago we were talking about, like, can Netflix become HBO before HBO becomes Netflix?

And the answer was like, actually neither one happened. But Netflix didn't need to become HBO. Yeah. What it realized is that we're just going to release so many mediocre Chris Hemsworth movies that we're going to make up for it in volume. And we're going to have a lot of C-minus action movies and just in, infinity reality shows. And that solves most of our problem.

And that actually making good movies is really hard, but making a lot of like, eh, movies is pretty easy and all it costs is money. And so, like Netflix has just decimated the competition in that particular game. And so now,

reading through all the stuff that David Zazov in particular is saying, it is the most, like, disingenuous way of being like, I was wrong and we got our ass kicked. And so we're going to go back to our old strategy, which is,

what if we just made good things? And if the good job is just to make good things, you know, it's the best brand ever for making good things, HBO. Like, this is what everybody said when they did it first. Like, why would you light on fire the thing that most signifies quality entertainment? And now they're like, what if we did quality entertainment? I can't think of a single rebrand that's really like gone over well. So there's always there's always the knee jerk reaction. But they're truly, I cannot think of another rebrand where for like from the moment it happened for years afterward, like up through a,

you know, leaders in the industry saying it was a bad idea forever. And that is what has happened with the Max rebrand. Right. Like we get to Ted Sarandos like a month ago being like, what were they thinking? Which like at that point, it's like, I don't know, do you stick with it out of pure shame or do you just take the hint from the guy who's really successful? Well, there's, David, you made the point many times that Netflix knows it's only real competition is YouTube. And once you have that realization that you're competing for minutes in the day and the only real competition for those minutes are video games in YouTube. You do two things. One, you start making video games, which Netflix has started to do. And two, you realize, oh, we're not here for fancy. Right. The

minutes in the day are being consumed by us on YouTube. Right. Like, we're, we, there's no CGI here, ladies and gentlemen. There should be, because I think I should be deaged, but we'll get to me. But like, you know, YouTube content is fundamentally cheap. it's vastly cheaper than the stuff that HBO makes. And so Netflix has just realized they can occupy a place on the middle of that cost curve and have a huge amount of volume that's slightly better than YouTube. And that's going to be great. And I think what Zazlov wanted to do was play that exact same game

with stuff that doesn't feel like YouTube at all that feels like weird cable reality programming that is like just kind of fine. Like it's not even a thing. It's not even a thing that YouTube offers. you, which is at least it's mostly real people talking to you. Right. Right. It's like this other thing that still has these weird high production costs.

And so Netflix is starting to get into it. They're going to relaunch Star Search, right? They've got John Mullaney doing a live talk show. But that stuff feels different. It like, it qualitatively feels different than old school cable reality programming. It qualitatively feels different than YouTube. It occupies a different space. And they're winning on the time.

And then you're like, sure. here's whatever garbage Netflix movie in a month, it's just like the next thing you can watch. I think HBO's game is like white lotus, right? Like appointment, prestige programming that costs a bunch of money. Yeah. I don't know if that will be successful.

I don't know if he's trying to sell it again. It does feel like he's trying to sell it again. But man, like to just have missed it strategically so hard. Because you could have built that stuff with HBO. Right. And now they're saying this is. is the strategy, right? Like, they're just coming out and being like,

oh, what we understand now is that customers don't want just more stuff to watch. They want the high quality stuff. And it's like, yeah, that's the HBO pitch. That's how HBO became this like titanically successful thing on cable. Like, it worked. If you just have an ongoing run of the busiest show on television, which I think HBO has done more successfully probably than every other network combined over the last several decades.

You can win and it works. It's hard. It's very hard and you cannot manufacture it out of nothing. But the fact that HBO has like built the culture that keeps this stuff coming is very impressive. And so to look at that and be like, oh, we're just going to sort of cast that off to the side, then to only several years later turn around and realize,

oh, people like good shows? is just so backwards and insane to me. Like to just completely ignore every actual asset you have and then turn around to be like, oh, we had these assets. Those are cool. It's like, what are you doing? It just drives me insane.

The story of HBO is super fascinating and where it came from and this challenge of constantly trying to re-up the creative because the show's end. Right? It's just like, it's over now. Like, the White Lotus has to exist because the previous HBO, because succession is over.

Right. Right. Like that has really always been the engine of HBO. We did a Decoder episode with Felix Gillette and John Coblin who wrote a book called It's Not TV, The Spectacular Rise Revolution of Future of HBO. It's a great book. We'll link that episode. You should go read that book.

But they've got to get back to that. Right. It's not clear what engine makes the next White Lotus at HBO anymore. That's the problem. And if they are trying to sell it, it's also not clear who would buy it. because that's just an expensive, risky proposition compared to, here's a bunch of cheap stuff. We hope you watch it.

Which is kind of what they're all doing right now. I think Netflix should buy it and just rebrand as HBO just as for one day as a bit, just to really knife David Zazlov again. Zazov should be fired. I'm just going to say it. This has been such a disaster. Yes. That whatever board,

and I realize he's the way bought it and his company and his deal. And if you read the TikToks, the deal back when he bought Warner Brothers, he was the savior, right? He, like, pitched AT&T on this deal. They, AT&T needed it out because they were, they woke up one day and realized they were AT&T. And this was, this had been a huge boondoggle. And he, like, rescued it by engineering this deal. And all, you know, he's obviously the source in all these stories. Like, all these stories, like, described the ballrooms and restaurants and that they made the deal in. And it's like, dude, you sucked so bad. Like, everyone saw it coming. You pissed off everyone by canceling.

shows right away, like taking tax breaks on things that were already done, whether or not they were good. Just a mess. A creative financial mess from the start because this man does not know what he's doing. And if there's a board of directors there, you know, in the same way that like maybe Tesla's board of directors should take a hard look at how the company is going and they won't. It feels like the Warner Brothers Discovery Board should take a hard look at what has happened to that company under this management and be like, Maybe somebody else should do this. Maybe when we saw Warner Brothers, we ought to rethink this whole situation. Because this style of management is effectively the only product they have consistently shipped is layoffs.

And Jake, to your point, it's not like this is a thing that is only obvious in retrospect. Everyone who was paying attention has been saying this the whole time, including their competitors who don't normally say things out loud about them. Yes. But who were happy to be like, boy, it seems weird that if, If you have HBO, you'd just stop calling it HBO. I really can't think of any other company that has had such a, like, obstinate position, right? Like, Nil, to what you're saying, they've just been fighting with everybody, right? Everybody's telling them this name change is bad.

Everybody's telling them, hey, maybe you should release that movie everybody wants to watch. And they're just like, no, we're just going to like pocket it, right? We didn't, well, we're going to save a little bit of cash by not finishing it. Dude, they lost Christopher Nolan. Right, right. Like that is, heads would be spinning at, like, any other functional studio. Like, people would be, would have lost their job over that, right? People put so much work into curating a roster of directors that they can rely on

and getting the best, you know, movies and shows and, you know, creators to their studio. Those things take ages to build, and they just lost it in, I mean, weeks, right? Like, he just right out the door. And it's just been a few years of that. And it is puzzling what the strategy is supposed to be there. Yeah, the fact that I had to watch Oppenheimer on Peacock is maybe the worst thing that David Taz left in. Okay, now you've mentioned Peacocks. I need to disclose.

All right. Roundabout way, their usual block of entertainment disclosures. NBC Universal, whose parent is Comcast. is a minority investor in box media. They hate us. The comic cast us. And we'll get to why shortly. Because we cover them as an ISP, like the thing that we do.

I executive produced a Netflix show, which you can watch called The Future of. It pays us no money when you watch it. So fine. That deal is long since over. And in general, we subscribe to all these streaming services. There used to be more. And we have a TikTok account. It's at Dakota pod.

It's like, whatever you want. We're all talking. up and all these things. But, you know, it's not like these companies have any love loss for our coverage. The Nolan thing is, like, particularly interesting, right? Like, you have a director whose name alone allows you, like, we're going to spend $400 trillion on a series of movies that are a deep introspection on the nature of love and memory. And then they will all be hits.

Cool. It's like, you don't lose that guy. No one will understand any of them. what? And usually, we're just going to let that guy walk. And it's because they insisted on releasing day and date with the streaming service

because they thought the streaming service was the point. And if you are Warner Brothers, the point is making the movies. If you're HBO, the point is making the great shows, not the streaming service. Yes, you need to have the business

to support that effort. But the thing that's valuable is the work. You know, we talk about Netflix. They're quickly coming a place where the thing it's valuable as the service. And the work is just sort of fine and it's medium.

And it propels it along. And everyone is jealous of that. But you can't get there unless you have their scale and you never will. Even Netflix is is starting to run into troubles with that, right? Like there was all this reporting a while ago about the, after the huge Barbie hit, Greta Gerwig is doing Chronicles of Narnia movies. And they had this big fight over Greta Gerwig wanted it to be in theaters because people who make films want them to be in theaters.

Netflix was like, no, we don't do theaters. And so they had this big fight. and eventually credit card a week won, and it's going to get a theatrical run. So, like, Netflix is desperately trying to get away from the work mattering in a lot of ways, but I think it's still able to play that game the right way. And all David Zeslov seems to be able to do

is just swing from zero to 100. Those are only two moves. I don't really know what's in Netflix's interest at this point to not allow those theatrical runs, right? Especially if you're going to make movies that are allegedly supposed to be, you know, big budget hits. That's how you build buzz.

People like seeing things in theaters. Don't even wrong. It's great. Like, during the pandemic, when I could just be like, boom, Zoom, like, boop and watch Dune on like the first, it's great, love it. But if you're going to, you know, upset an entire community of people who you need to rely on to make the stuff that makes your business, maybe you should just do that, right? especially if it's going to make you a lot more money.

There's just a vanishing number of people with the leverage to do that. Yeah. And I think it's in Netflix's interest to make sure there's never another Christopher Nolan. I mean, the F1 movie this summer is going to be a really interesting test case here. Because it is such a big swing, it's a big movie, it's going to be in theaters, it's Brad Pitt. A lot of people are paying attention that it's going to be super ugly for Apple if this doesn't work. And I've heard a bunch of people who are really concerned that it is not going to work. And unless this thing is a big giant hit, it's going to, I suspect to make every streamer look even more sideways at the idea of like really giving these things a public run.

Like they don't share numbers for a reason. And you have to when it goes to theaters. Yeah. I have a lot of feelings with that F1 movie. I suspect it will not be a hit. Just having watched the trailers, I think they're trying to days of thunder F1. You know what I mean? Yeah.

And like, Days of Thunder only worked because it was, it was top gun again. Like, literally it was just, they were like, well,

that was a great movie. We haven't invented sequels yet. It's the 80s. We're going to do Top Gun, but on the ground. Yeah. And it was like way more expensive and way worse and like lots of ways.

And whatever. But like, like structurally, that movie worked because you're like, what Tom Cruise is going to do is drive faster than everyone else at the end of this movie. Yep.

And like F1 fans know that that is not a thing an F1 car can just do. Do you know what I? Yeah, they're all pretty much going as fast as they can all the time. Right. And the cars are different in a way that NASCAR cars are. Like there's like a literally like a plot point in in Days of Thunder where they're like, you have to learn how to drive the car. And he's like, sure.

And like you can't do that in the F1. Like this movie is going to make no sense because they're going to try to Days of Thunder F1. And then every F1 fan is going to be mad. Yes. We'll just see how it goes. It's going to go great. What could possibly go right? Also, the last Brad Pitt movie, the George Clinton, Wolfs on Apple TV, like, didn't.

It was fine. It was extremely fine. It was extremely, it was the most plain movie I've watched in a long time. Yeah. I mean, it was like so deeply fine in a way that like you get the sense they were trying to make Mr. and Mrs. Smith again, but like George Clooney was Angelina and Jolie. And you're like, well, there's still there's still an odd amount of sexual attention here.

Like, oh, yeah. Much more than I expected. Oh, yeah. But not. I ship the two of them for sure. Yeah. Anyhow, we'll see how that goes. There's more streaming news in this zone

because none of these people can stop asking you for money. Speaking of plans that have gone away and come back and once again, Risen, ESPN is launching its own app for $30 a month because I think they've realized the cable bundle can't save Disney. It's over. Fox is going to launch its sports app. It's called Fox One. It's going to launch for the NFL season.

That's when you would do it. It's not technically just sports. It's also for, you know, right-wing propaganda and various other things. But it's mostly for sports. All of these are mostly for sports. Yeah, because that's what they have the rights to. Right. And they've all spent billions of dollars buying these rights.

Yeah. And, like, there's just moves that are, YouTube has a Sunday ticket. They're going to stream an NFL game for free when the season. kicks off. There is just a thing here where, like, live sports is the last thing that can bring everyone together. Like, it's not even award shows anymore because I haven't seen any of movies. Yeah. Like, there's just a thing here that's, like, really happening. And it's, at the end of this, you're kind of like, man, that we're going to be paying substantially more than cable one those ever were. Oh, yeah. And there was a, there was a great thing going around the other day

after all this got announced, because to your point, that's, you just named three new places to watch football. this coming season. And now it's like, you're up to legitimately like 10 streaming services you're going to need if you want to watch all the games next year of the NFL season. Because like Netflix has Christmas games again. They're spread across all the different services again.

Like, it's awful. And it's only going to keep getting worse because that, to your point, is the only thing that these companies have found that lots and lots of people will reliably go to on purpose and jump through whatever hoops they have to. Like, I will do whatever is required to watch football is only true about football and basically nothing else. There's also something interesting there in that I can't think of anything else where like the rights are so spread out like that, right?

Like, it's not like YouTube can get one Spider-Man movie. Like, that's just not a thing, right, with IP. But the licensing deals for all the different networks are so spread out and split up that you have the situation where I have no idea. why YouTube was only able to acquire one NFL game. But people are going to go find it there because they like football. They like the NFL. They're going to watch it. And you just can't do that with anything else.

Since they're able to get the property onto their platform and it just works, like beyond the fact that, yes, obviously sports is incredibly popular and people would watch it no matter what. Well, also, you know, the rights holders are differently situated. So if you are, like, it's funny because Disney owns everything now. But at the time, if you were Marvel, you could sell Spider-Man to Sony and X-Men to Fox and the rest of the characters you would like make your own weird movies on with John Favreau. And that turned out to be a really big deal. And they didn't know what would work and what wouldn't work, right? Sports leagues, every game is like, it has a value.

in a moment of time, and then that value goes to zero. And so they are very much incentivized to not sell like franchises or long-running things to let people go and try to get value out of overtime. They're very much incentivized to be like, all right, you can have Thursday and you can have Sunday and you can have, you know, the slated games during the week. Because after it's done, there's no residual value. Right. They have to make an event of it.

Every single... And that incentivizes them because when it's over, it's done. There's no catalog value. You can see they don't even really care about like old highlights. Right. They're just like whatever. You can have it because all that is just advertising for whatever is going to happen next. In a way that like, you know, Marvel gets tons of values from Avengers end game continuing to exist forever.

And it's like it's just a very different posture for the leagues. And they are, they have become incredibly good at milking it in a way that I would say has forced many people to consider sailing the stormy seas. And it's easier and easier all the time to do so. But no, I mean, and you look at it in. You can get a boat for nothing. And like the way that you get all of this stuff is like the NFL in particular has done a really good job of getting around its own contracts. Like they keep coming up with new days to have games. They keep calling the games new kinds of things.

They keep putting them in new places because they have these incredibly specific deals about where. things can be and when. And I mean, if you remember, it wasn't all that long ago that Verizon had NFL games specifically on mobile, but you could only watch them on your phone because that was the deal that Verizon had made on mobile. So if you wanted to watch NFL games on your phone, you had to have Verizon. But if you had Verizon, you couldn't watch NFL games on anything other than your phone. Like, the NFL is now worth so much money.

And it is the only thing that actually can claim to be an event that way. Like, you're seeing baseball deals go down. and other sports leagues are going down in their deals because no one is tuning in that way. And people will not jump through hoops to sign up for Amazon just to watch a Cincinnati Reds game anymore. But they will with football games. And so the price keeps going up and they keep finding new ways to slice and dice it. And it is truly, truly awful as a fan. But as a like Harvard Business School case study is like pretty spectacular.

It is very funny that even the NFL's like slicing and dicing of its schedule into different days. The days have gotten reputations. Like, you just know that you can drink your way through a Thursday and a football game. Yeah. Like the value of these different things have been, it's funny how they just like sort themselves out. All right. We got to, we want to end here on again, just remind everyone, the only thing David Zazlov has ever created his layoffs. Yep.

And Max was a disaster. And he stole my child's name, which I'm still pissed about. But now it's back. You're going to name your second child HBO, right? Just to really bring it full circle. Baby boy Peacock Patel is. Oh, I like that. Naming this kid's hard.

It's very challenging. I will accept your recommendations. Max actually has a very strong point of view. And she's going to win because we have nothing. We have nothing to stand up to her with right now. So let me know what you think. All right, we have to take a break. We're going to come back. There's lots more to talk about on this episode of VersaS. Support for this show comes from Shopify.

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rate to me. Yeah. Seems generous, but I'll take it. We're going to do it. Lots and lots of news this week. Lots of gadget news. Lots of tech news. We got to start with like a finally. I feel like a finally is worth it. Apple has announced that what it is now calling CarPlay Ultra is going to arrive.

It's shipping first on new Aston Martin cars. And then if you have a newer Aston Martin with the latest infatement system, you can go to your dealer and get a software update. And then you two will have CarPlay Ultra. Then they announced, it's coming to a bunch of other car companies. Porsche is supposed to do it. They announced that Hyundai, Kia, and Genesis would also get it, which are new partners.

No timelines in any of this stuff. Yeah. CarPlay Ultra is a concept. We've covered very closely. Like, so closely that when I was searching for our own coverage and I typed Nilai Patel CarPlay, Google generated a full AI summary

of my opinions about it. Like, there's a lot of us talking about CarPlay over the years. So several years ago, with 2023, I want to say, Apple announced Next Gen CarPlay, and it was just a picture of the, you know, an interior of a car with lots of screens, and it was all CarPlay. And we're doing it. And then they put up a slide, if you remember this, they put up a slide with like every

carmaker's logo. And what we learned is that many of those carmakers were surprised by their inclusion on this slide. Like, they're like, what are you talking about? Yeah. Because they all had regular carplay, which people like. and Apple was just like, of course they're going to do what we tell them to do. And they were not ready for this.

A year later, last year, Apple had announced no partners for Next Generation CarPlay. They had said to Portia and Asimson Martin would do it by the end of last year, and that didn't happen. And then like sneakily removed that mention from their website. Yeah, it was it got further and further away as time went on, it seemed. And then they announced a bunch of technical details about how this Next Generation Carplay would work. I wrote a lot about that. I took a lot of meetings. I've had a lot of car company CEOs on Decoder and asked them straight up, are you going to do this? And most of them have said no. famously Mercedes CEO Alia Clonius said no

Rivian CEO RJ Scringe said no we've had the heads of product from GM on he was not impressed by this like there's a lot of car companies that are like

we are not going to give up our interface to Apple like we have our own ideas about software and services you might think they're horrible ideas and in many cases they are but they are their own companies

and they would like to own their own relationships with customers and that's just hotcos so Apple had to re-architect all of this from we're going to take over

all your screens and CarPlay will be the future of the car, to this literally multi-layered approach to what the car companies control and what Apple controls are all these hybrid bits and bobs in the middle. It has taken them forever to get even one of these cars shipped with these deals in place. And the way I would characterize it is that it's a complete walkback. Like they're announcing CarPlay Ultra and yes, there's all this stuff you can do in the car with your phone now. But if you just take a minute to like look at what. it is, you're like, oh, they, it's kind of nothing. Like, I don't want to be like too rude.

It's something. It was, obviously, it's a long time and they had to do it. But the actual practical effect of it is so small. I'm genuinely confused what they have put in all of this work for. CarPlay makes a ton of sense, right? It is fantastic. You can use your phone to control things in your car. It gets rid of a bunch of the worst parts of car controls. CarPlay Ultra, like, do I need an iOS themed speedometer? Like, that seems, like,

what else does it do? What does it do for me that meaningfully improves the car experience? What does it do for Apple? So I know exactly what it does for Apple, which is as you're using your apps in the car, and you're pushing the buttons in the apps,

those apps are actually running on your phone, and Apple is collecting it's 30% cut. That's what it's for Apple, right? It puts their operating system and their business model, front and center as you're operating your car. That's a big deal. that's their business. And it keeps the automakers from putting their business models front and set in the car, which is the entire tension.

GM's entire conception of itself right now is like, we're a software vendor. And it's like, are you? And that's real or not. But like that's what they want to do. They want to have services in the car. Tesla's conception of itself is very much as a software maker. So is Rivians. They believe that they should own a customer relationship of people doing stuff in the car, particularly as a carster driving themselves.

So for Apple, CarPlay Ultra is, if you're going to buy stuff in your car, we want 30%. Apple. What else is their business model? I see. So there's a long play, right? Like, I'm not playing Angry Birds in the car right now. But like eventually, you know, it's, and it'll theme itself based on how fast my car is automatically driving.

Right. The idea is that there shouldn't be another software ecosystem that you participate in your car. Right. And you can not address straight line. Like people like car play, like we should do more with car play. And then there's this real tension in the industry over, well, eventually the cars will drive themselves. And we're going to turn all these screens into shopping malls and who gets the money and who gets credit cards. And that's just going to play itself out.

What the automakers have like really been wondering about is like, hey, we don't want all the cars to look the same. Right? You get into an Asin Martin, it should look different than a Porsche. It should look different than a Hyundai. So we need all this design control, which Apple did not want to give up initially. And so they ended in this place where I suspect CarPlay Ultra will just stop being relevant very fast. Because what they've done is they've broken the car's UI into layers. And so there's one layer that runs locally in the car that has nothing to with your phone that has been themed by Apple and the carmaker together.

That's like your speedometer, your turn signals. the odometer, which you can't screw with federally, right? Like, there's some stuff that you just can't connect to a phone. Like, it has to be there. So then the automaker gets that locally. Then there's the first time you plug your, you know, your CarPlay phone into your CarPlay Ultra Car, it like downloads a bunch of themes and graphics packages that Apple has designed in connection with a carmaker, right?

So I'm guessing what that means is Apple designed it for them. Like, knowing Apple, they did it. for the carmaker and that downloads to your car and then you get a bunch of themes through the spinometer and other stuff that are still local like the car is doing them but the the design comes over the air from Apple through your phone and then you can like click through it and then you get stuff like maps in the cluster and all the stuff and then the last piece which is I think super interesting because it's the thing that Apple I think had to give up is called punch through UI where the car maker has a bunch of stuff that it wants to do.

The rear view camera. The controls for a fancy audio system. The massaging seat controls. Like a lot of this stuff where it doesn't want to make it twice. Right. Here's whatever custom fancy feature we've built for this car. We don't want to redesign it with Apple. That just comes through carplay.

It punches through the carplay. face. And so you push a button and you just see the carmaker's UI. So now you have this like mishmash of stuff, which is exactly ends the promise of Apple will take over all the screens in your car. Because now it's gone from, at least it's bad, but consider now it's, because now it's gone from it's bad carmaker UI, but at least it's consistent to it's mostly Apple design stuff. And if you hit the wrong button, the carmaker's bad UI shows up and you've got to use that screen. And I don't, I just like don't know how that's going to play out. Do you remember back in the day with like smart TVs, everybody would do their really

like overwrought skin on top of Android, but then you'd open up settings and it would just be like the basic honeycomb Android thing. Like that's what this is. And it's not good UI. But I also feel like there's been this macro shift since Apple launched this the first time

three years ago. People want buttons. I just went back and looked at, there's a picture in Apple's press release, happily announcing that it has launched CarPlay Ultra, which, sure, compared to the picture that they showed off when it was called Next Generation CarPlay at WWDC. Back in 2022, it was even earlier than I remember. And the thing from 2022 is just screens everywhere, right? So the way it imagines this is sort of one

wide horizontal screen all the way across the front of the car. And then big huge infatement thing in the middle that looks sort of like standard carplay only more so. That was the idea, and that was how everybody was showing off concept cars back in the day. The Aston Martin one is a pretty small screen in the center of a console with a bunch of buttons. Like, it just looks like a car screen. And so it's actually like a pretty small car play display.

And then, Jake, to your point, the only new thing here is a speedometer that Apple designed that you can put Apple Maps, in the center of the instrument cluster so that you can see it. You get a little tiny heads-up display. And there's a couple different color themes. Yeah, like the ambition of this thing, at least has been rolled out now.

Again, there might be more cars. There might be other stuff going on. But at least this first instantiation of it is so much smaller than what Apple was pitching at the beginning. That it's kind of, if it had just described this, we would have been like, oh, sure, that kind of makes sense. That's cool. It's like an extension of the look of carplay

onto the other screen that you look at. in your car. But again, functionally, it is not, right? The thing you're going to get from,

we skinned the cluster is between the speedometer and the tachometer is a middle display that can show another view of carplay apps. Yeah. Which lots of cars already

have now. Right. So like, functionally, yep, the Apple designed the speedometer and the new estimate is like,

oh, that's nothing. Right. Right. Right. And then it's, the center carplay experience is still the same

as it was. If you look at the picture, it's still just a grid of icons. It's not meaningfully new in that way, except some more controls have been integrated into carplay. And because of punch through UI, you can push a button and, like, adjust the fancy speaker system using the native interface of the carmaker. But that was a click away before. Right. It wasn't that. It was just like functionally, it's not that much more different at all.

If Abel had announced that in 2022, it probably would have shipped in 2022. You know what I mean? Like, if it had just explained it that way, the way that you just explained it, all the automakers on that slide would have been like, yeah, sure, fine, whatever. You want to let it show Apple maps between the speedometer and the Tacometer while you're driving? Sure, great, fine. And they did because the original carplay, which by the way, will continue. Yeah.

They're just going to keep making regular carplay. This is CarPlay Ultra. That is going to continue where you still get mirroring of maps onto the center cluster. And lots of cars have that. And in fact, every time another car is launched with it, that people have been confused because they assume that that is next generation car play. And we have run story after story being like, no, that's just regular car play. Next gen car play is when your phone begins to operate more, like the interface of the car

directly, like all of the screens directly in this weird hybrid fashion are operated by with Apple design products that come from your phone. Right. The idea was that you should be able to control the temperature of the cabin through carplay. Right. And so that, so that's one that's. really interesting, right? If you look at Apple's own designs of what an H-FAC screen should look like, it's not some beautiful Johnny Ive reinvention of an H-Fax screen. It's not Steve Jobs

showing all the old smartphones and being like, here's why they suck. Like, here's the new idea. It's just an H-Fax screen. Yeah. Like, down to like the weird sliders and the sync button for the multiple zones that like every car maker has. Like they didn't actually do it right. It is just Apple design riff on a very standard H-FAC screen. So if you're a car, car maker. When, as these cars come out, I would say the HVAC screen is the thing to look at to see how important this is. Because if the carmakers give that to Apple, then they think there's some value there.

If they do the punch through UI where they just show their own HVAC screen, you will know they do not give a shit. Yeah. That this is just another feature on the spec sheet. Every car YouTube review that I've ever watched that literally, whoever, it doesn't matter who it is, Doug Demiro, Forrest, Marquez on the auto focus channel. They wave at the center screen and it has carplay and Android Adam. And they just move on because they don't care.

Yep. Right? And like, that's how you will know that this thing matters or doesn't matter if everyone just punches through their own HVAC controls. But the other thing that has happened is we've gone back to buttons. Like again, you rewind three years ago and there was this idea that actually what we want is a car cabin full of screens. And overwhelmingly customers told car companies, no, you know what I want is buttons. I want to be able to feel the temperature control so that I don't have to look for it while I'm driving down the highway. And like company after company has gone back to saying, okay, we're going to actually have physical controls in the car.

I think there's one other thing driving. I agree. Buttons are great. Buy a car with buttons. Send a signal on the market that be the hero American needs. But also a bunch of these carmakers put in all these screens and they realized they had no idea what to do with them. Right. Like, sir, at all.

even that car play that first carplay mentioned from 2022 it has like five calendars on it because they just didn't know what to fill the pixels with right they're like another clock widget that'll do it and you know the thinking is like some applications will be developed to fill these screens and there's nothing you're so right it has a it has a it has a music widget that is just like the progress bar of the song that is it's got to be three feet wide yeah it's incredible um you know we have a passenger screen in our grand cherokee we have a passenger screen in our grand cherokee we I've never turned it on. I had all these dreams that Becky would, like, drive me around. I watch, like, watch football on the passenger screen. And it's like five HDMI dongles later. I'm like, nope, I'm just going to watch it on my phone, which is almost as big as the screen. I test drive a Cadillac Vistic for a weekend.

It's great. So they're new three-row electric EV. I'm going to write about it. It's a great car. It has huge screen at it. Like one of those big curvy Cadillac OLEDs. And I was just like, what is all this? What do you?

I have three maps open right now. I have a three-foot podcast time-elapse slider. Like, what is this for? The new Escalate IQ, which is even bigger and has even more screens, you're like, oh, this is, it's 10, it's 10 maps. Like, maybe like three different map applications. Like, why not? Let's have a good time.

And I think they realized the utility of these screens was dropping. Like, there was nothing to use them for, really. People weren't using apps and shopping on them. And then the customers are like, we hate touching these screens. And yeah, I think Apple got caught into that larger trend, but I also think they just oversold what they were trying to do. And all the carmakers, like, why would we give you our customers this way? And all the customers were like, I don't care about any of this. And we still get a lot of notes whenever we cover carplay.

I'm not a carplay fan. We use it in our older cars. I bought a box. I have this like 2016 Mercedes. DC-43. It does not have any, like, it's the worst screen in the world. And I bought a box. I literally unplug the radio, and I bought a box that sits. You plug the radio into the box and the box into the screen, and it hijacks the screen to put carplay on it. That's great. That's, like, I upgraded, it's a total hack. And that's, like, fine, right? Sure. But we don't use it in our cars that

are good. Like, my not garbage cars, we don't use this thing. And there's a lot of reasons for that. And kind of the number one is carplay is a single application interface. You can get widgets, right? So you can have a music player and the map open at the same time. But they're both widgets. They're not actually the apps.

Right. And what we want is the map open and the music player open so you can like, screw with it. So we just mount a film. Like everyone does. And this doesn't solve that core problem. Hold on. Hold on. Statistically, everyone uses CarPlay.

This is not true. It's not true. Lots and lots of people. Now I'm just going to issue bug requests to Apple. What is the show for? So if you look right now on like various support forums, they just changed CarPlay so that no matter what you're doing on your phone, it happens in CarPlay. And the thing that a lot of people had figured out was you could take Google Maps out of CarPlay. You can open a CarPlay preferences on your phone and you can take Google Maps out. Oh, sure. You just hit the minus button.

So then you have Google Maps open on your phone and your music or podcast or whatever running on CarPlay, which was the number one use of CarPlay. When we hear from listeners or readers, but why they like CarPlay, it's I have 45 audio apps. Yep. Right. I have whatever ebook reader I'm doing,

of not my podcast apps. They're all perfect. I don't want to mess with them. I don't want to log in a GM's weird Android instance. Like, I just want to use my apps. They've curated my phone. They all have CarPlay. They go on that screen.

That's fine. And then a lot of people were taking Google Maps out so they could basically have two monitors. Yeah. And they would mount the phone with Google Maps and they would have the music in CarPlay. And Apple broke it. So you can take Google Maps out. And then the phone is still like, no, we're sending this to CarPlay. And there's like furious forum posts about it.

because that's a lot of people were still using that to have two different screens at once. Sure. Including me and I'm very annoyed about this. I'm just complaining about my almost 10-year-old car that gets me nowhere with anyone. But like there's something there that's really powerful that Next Generation CarPlay doesn't solve.

But that even like GM's like crazy like giant curved screen kind of solves because you can put Google Maps in the cluster and it's just Google Maps. And then you can have the music player and it's really big. And it's like, oh, with all the screen, you should just let me run two apps at once. And they haven't quite gotten there. Maybe they will want to. I mean, this is from the company that makes the iPad.

Are you, are you shocked by this fact? Again, it's like, your point about buttons is there. But it's like, oh, man, they put in all these screens in the car and they forgot to build any apps for them. And they forgot the number one, like, why do people have three monitors? It's not to run one big app. Like, you want to run. That's why you want lots of windows. Like, we'll say.

I want three linear. feet of one app in my car. I just want to call one thing out. Apple gave one publication early hands-on with CarPlay. I believe it's Top Gear. We embedded their video. Top Gear's, you can watch it. It's great.

Almost everything is our reporting. Like down to like Mercedes CEO, La Colania said he wouldn't use. That's us. That's Dakota. And then the explanation in that video of like how it works. That's us. We wrote that story. Again, when you just ask Google about CarPlay, it's like,

Nilai hates it. It's like very fun. So we're going to get our own hands on soon. I'm excited to play with it. WDWC is coming up around the corner. Very interestingly announced this weeks before WWC. In another world, this is a highlight announcement, right? And there's Aston Martin sitting there

and everyone does hands-on to the Aston Martin. But they announced it early. You wonder if they're going to have more WDC or if this was a distraction from that. All right. I can continue complaining about CarPlay. Let's not. Are you sure?

I got another 20 minutes. That's what Decoder is for. That's true. Go watch literally no shade of Top Gear people. It was just very funny. It's a good video. Watching this video, I was like, oh, that's just, that's not.

That's source testing it. There was one thing in that video that I really appreciated, which is that he too is confused about when it's wired carplay and when it's wireless car play because he plugged it into his car and it launched the thing that said set up wireless car play. And it's like, which one did I do here? Which is a feeling that I have constantly all the time. Next, carplay ultra is only.

wireless. That plugin is just the initial download of assets. So you plug in your phone. I see. The phone is like, I've got a library of assets for carmakers that Apple is designed with everybody. We're going to go update the database of assets and then download the right ones to your car. I so fundamentally do not believe in the idea that I should have to have an iPhone in order for my car to work properly. Like you're just, that's, this is, this is the problem with CarPlay Ultra that I have always had is that does not make sense to me. The fact that my

car is somehow not feature complete unless I own an iPhone is just backwards. This is the other thing that lies Apple with us. They could just throw in an iPhone for the cost of an Aston Martin. That's not a huge. Anyone who buys an Aston Martin can afford

several iPhones. It's a principal thing for me. Like my phone and my car should not require each other to have a complete experience. I'm fine if one wants to add to the other. Like, sure. And Cardplay and Android Auto are like interesting competitive experiences or whatever.

But if my car is not feature complete without my phone, we have done something wrong as a society. Fundamentally, I agree with you and you are correct. As somebody who primarily experiences cars via rentals, it drives me crazy when it has a baked in thing. I just, right, my phone has everything on it. It's fully up to date. It has all my preferences. Boom, plug it in,

easy done. And, like, I find that to be just delightful. Sure. You are correct that a car should function. David, I can get you in a 2008 D. DB 9 for 17.5 tonight.

And then I can buy the carplay screen on TikTok, and we're good to go. That's the way it goes. Yeah. All right. Just in honor of the fact that it's aversch has, I'm going to quickly shop for Cadillac escalades, while David,

moves on to whatever's next. We should talk about the Android announcements just for a couple of minutes here. So Google I.O. is next week. And I think Google just has a lot of other AI stuff to talk about. So they just did all the Android stuff early. They announced a bunch of new stuff for Android 16,

including a whole new design language that they call Material 3 Expressive, which is a stupid name for what I think is actually like a very cool looking thing. Like, it's just really funny that looking at phones have gotten, they've gotten so much more like sterile and straightforward over time. And Google is like, what if it feels like playful and colorful and everything was purple? And it's very Gen Z and I'm like very cool and young, so it worked for me too.

And I just, I don't know, I like it. They're making the animations more playful. There's a lot more for developers to do in terms of like fonts and widgets and sizes and shapes of things. and users can customize it a lot. And I've given material you kind of a hard time over the years because it was just like, oh, your wallpaper has some brown in it. What if everything was brown? But there's something about this and the idea that actually,

yeah, I should be able to make everything look the way that I want instead of just Apple's weird idea about tinting that I've come to really like. And I think Google is like on to something here. Yeah, the new design is really fun. I am a little skeptical of the implementation. Material U, it is not a big jump from Material U, right? It is fundamentally the same thing, just made a little bit wackier. And if you use lots of different things on an Android phone, you know,

the implementation of Material U has not changed, I think, basically at all since it was announced like four years ago, right? It's the same five widgets, right? And you still see in the Material 3 expressive, whatever it is, you know, demo, slides that they're showing, it's this, it is the same weather widget and the same clock widget that we saw four years ago, right? Those are still on my home screen because those are the only widgets that theme themselves properly, right? Like, I really want a step counter widget, right? Google owns Fitbit. They have Google Health or whatever it's called. Neither of those have a material expressive whatever widget, right? A lot of apps now do support the icon theme, which is great,

but not all of them do. And there is something truly awful. by the way, about when your home screen has a bunch of apps that all fit the theme and then like two that haven't updated. And it just, there's nothing that kills a vibe quite like the one app that steadfastly refuses to play nice with the operating system. Yeah. And I think like unlike on, look, Apple has made some, I think some errors with the way they have done theming. But I do think that one thing Apple has to its advantage is when they do something, their developers listen. And so when Apple changes the theme of its operating system, which we may see next month, I suspect you'll see a lot of app developers, you know, moving forward to update and theme in that style to reflect what the operating system is supposed to feel like.

And I don't know using Android apps that most of them reflect the feeling of material you or material design or, you know, whatever is coming next. Android feels different and it's nice and I think it looks lovely. And there are places where, you know, those effects are able to be added into third-party apps, right? I see the little squiggly playback line on the Spotify widget in the notification shade. It's great. It's nice. I want to be clear, like, I think the design is really fun. And I think the Android has become sort of a much more, like, lively looking operating system in that way than iOS.

But I think, like, coming up with this big design refresh is step one. And step two is following through with it. It is having people make widgets. It is having people support theming. And Google did not do that with Material You. And it is not clear to me that they have a push behind Material 3 expressive either. So that is where my skepticism is. And I hope that they are able to get some people on board with it because it would be really fun and delightful to have all my icons be the same color and have all these fun widgets.

The bar is on the floor, Jake. Yeah, yeah. All my icons be the same color. Right. It's not happening. This to me is so indicative of how. weirdly Google has started to handle Android. Like for so long,

Android had versions that it launched that were a thing. Like Google would do a bunch of updates to Android at once and be like, look, a new version of Android. It had a dessert name. Like, it was a thing. And that has just stopped. Now, like, we don't even really pay attention to new versions of Android anymore, which is like maybe a failing of ours, but I think is mostly a failing of Google's.

No, no, no. I mean, this is the thing. A couple years back, we were like, hey, we, we really, out to Google, we're like, hey, did you guys say the word Android during this Google IOC keynote? And they're like, you know, and like, okay, we had missed. But they were specifically not mentioning Android version numbers because they want to blur it. They want it to just be like they're these iterative things. Well, and it's because it is such a disastrously fragmented.

Yes. Thing that if they don't tell you what version number it is, you can't put up the chart with how low the updates have been to that version number, right? And like, Apple made such a meal out of it every year showing all of the phones that have been updated to the new iOS versus all of the phones that had been updated to the new Android. And it was always ugly. And I think Google just rather than try to fight, just kind of gave up and decided to hide. And I think that is a bummer. There is a back and forth there, right? The cynical view, which is correct, but cynical, is that Google is largely a base operating system supplier to Samsung, at least expressed in this country.

Sure. Samsung is all the Android market share. And it doesn't matter what Material 3 expressive is because Samsung's going to put one UI on top of Android and that's what you get. Right. And all that really matters is does Google push security updates fast enough for the people of Samsung phones as the operating system vendor? And the capabilities of each successive operating system version are now very small. Even in iOS world, right? Yeah.

The real differences between iOS 13 and 14 are nothing. Right? It's nothing. Like there's some stuff. Your phone will insist on summarizing your text messages, even if you turn Apple intelligence off. That's a feature that exists on iOS now. But the sort of like incremental value to app developers to users

for successive operating system versions is just smaller and smaller every year. Yeah. Okay. So that's like the very cynical view. Like Google has blurred these version numbers because really it just has to provide base Android to Samsung, which will then do one UI stuff. And it doesn't matter because the whole point of Android is search volume. Sure.

And now maybe a Gemini queries, right? And there's a whole interest route about that. The less cynical version of this is that actually creates freedom for Google's design team to say, it all looks different now. Right? We're pushing the boundary of what Android can look like and feel like with things like Material 3 expressive because no one will be mad at us when we change it. because no one has it.

Right. A bunch of pixel owners will be excited because they signed up for this. This is why you buy a pixel at the end of the day is to get Google's vision of Android. So if we make it different,

they'll be excited because they got something no one else has and that will create whatever exclusively or pixel. I don't know if that actually works out, but that's the argument you would make.

It's like the less cynical argument of like the opportunity that's creative of the fact that Samsung is the volume player in Android and Google can be like the very tip of the spear. Has Google done a great job

being the tip of the sphere of the Android ecosystem, it has not. No. And I think that's the opportunity they're missing. Those can both be true at the same time, right? That is Google has lost control of its destiny in that way. But it has moves it can do even as kind of a bit player in its own universe. And that's so sad. I mean, that's what it is. But that's fine.

But I think Jake, to your point, like the challenge for Google has been, to, like, propagate its good ideas. And I think just pitting what Google launched this week next to all of the stuff we've seen about what's coming from iOS, which is this, like, Vision Pro-based, everything in sort of 3D space, even more like cold and sterile and space agey look. I'm vastly prefer Android. Like, the ideas about what your phone should look like, I resonate with what Google is up to so much more than what Apple is up to. but until and unless you get at least enough people to buy into this that it feels coherent and good, it's going to feel the way Android always has, which is like a mishmash of a decade's worth of ideas.

And that feels bad. And so it's like that Google has always struggled to get to that tipping point where it's like, okay, I actually understand what this thing is trying to do. And it feels consistent no matter where I am. And Android never feels consistent. They have guaranteed that the home screen on pixel phones is going to look really cool for the next three years. Yes. And I think it's very possibly going to end there.

And I hope it doesn't, but that is what it is. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And it's the thing Google is invested in, in like a real way, is making sure Gemini is everywhere. And Google is fine if you don't take its aesthetic ideas, but it is going to beat you up until you put Gemini everywhere. Or pay you lots of money, which is paying Samsung lots of money. Yeah, it's going to beat you up with. dollars.

Just throw money at you. Mr. Beast at the YouTube upfronts. Mia Sato was at the up fronts and she said, Mr. Beast got on stage and says, no one tells you how heavy money is, which is an all-time quote. Because he's the one of two cases full of money. In that school, they're like, Samsung, would you like to know how heavy this money? Do you think he understood the true, like, emotional depth of that sentence? No one understands how heavy money is.

He's like, wow. It's very good. we'll see I mean I'm excited for Io I think we're you know from everything we've heard there's going to be a push towards you know Google's next set of platform ideas around AI around mixed reality around all this stuff I think that's stuff would be exciting it's weird because material three expressive it's it there's an argument that like skeormorphism is coming back right these are very tactile very real feeling textures and I don't know how that plays with all of the other kinds of of experiences that all these companies want to build. You don't want a bunch of, like, weather and felt in your AR glasses. Like, that's really weird. That's just super goofy. And I think that's why Apple is headed towards this, like, sterile, like, literally,

it looks like aeroglass from Windows back in the day, right? Like, they're headed towards computer interfaces, because if you want the real world to come through your glasses, you want computers on top of it. And Google's in this other direction. And we'll just see, I'm sure they have some idea about outcomes together. That's kind of what I'm interested to see at I. Yeah, agreed. All right, we should move on.

Wait, hold on. Before we move on, we just need to just brief shout out to the public reemergence of our good friend and former colleague Dieter Bohn, who was on stage, virtual stage, stage, quote unquote, stage, doing stuff. And boy, were people excited to see Deeter. Yeah, basically just doing phone hands-ons. Yeah, he just did phone hands-ons. He just was, he remains Deeter. It was nice. And he was like the surprise treat at the end of the video. You should go watch it. It's great. Yeah. But he's like, look, this one opens, that one closes. It's very good. Dieter still loves phones, and I will forever love Deeter for loving phones. Yeah.

I'm excited for I.O. I assume I.O. this year, this is next week, is just going to be Gemini Talk, like, top to bottom. Like, here's everything we do better than chat, GPT. Yep. That is certainly the vibe that I'm getting from all the rumors and reporting so far. It's like Google is, I think, clear. than ever about what it's about as a company, and the thing that it is about is Gemini.

Feel about that however you want, but Google is going to, the pivot to Gemini is very, very real. There's, this got unearthed in the docks of one of the Google trials, internal notes from Google meetings that they are thinking of redoing the entire search stack with an LLM as the base.

Oh, wow. This is a big deal. That's where we're at with Google and Gemini. Yeah. So we're going to go there. I'll be there. Our team will be there. Lots of interviews, lots of hands-on, lots of probing questions about whither the web.

That's my job at Google A-O. I just walk around me like, what about the web? We'll see how it goes. Love this. It's going to be great. All right. All right, we got to take a break. We'll be back.

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Can I actually, can I, can we do a digression about sponsorship and flavor? Sure. I have a lot to say about what's going on in the world of advertising. I always say that we're unsonsored for flavor because I want people to think when they hear sponsor integrations, oh, there's less flavor here. You can't pay to tell us what to do. you know, we're a reader ethics policy. Our ethics policy is basically you can't tell me what to do, which if you can get into a line of work

where the thing you're selling is the inability of anyone to tell you what to do, like I highly recommend it. I'm not saying digital media is a great or stable career, but one thing it does offer is the ability to say, you cannot tell me what to do. It's good. That's what I like about it.

And that's what we sell here. Subscribe to the verge. That's what you're buying from us. Everything else is turning into the worst kind of marketing integrated sponsorship that I can possibly think of. And it's like everywhere now. So we were talking about Warner Brothers Discovery

up front and all these media companies are having them. Warner Brothers launched Storyverse this week where you can just buy their IP library and make ads out of it. I hate this so much. Like do you know they did Bateman versus Batman? That's part of Storyverse.

Where like State Farm showed up and they're like, we'd like to buy some Batman stuff And Warner Brothers is like, yeah, you can make ads out of this. That's what this is for. It's to turn it into advertising. And now they've done a couple of these pilots. And I'm not saying these ads were bad. But like their business model is now we make this IP and you can show up and turn whatever is in our catalog into advertising.

This is the thing that makes the most sense of all of the Zazlov actions, right? Like it all comes back to this, right? Like, oh, we have things that people like that we can ring more money out of. Yeah. Absolutely. And it's funny, they announced this name change and we were looking at all their press releases. And Emma who was covering this, I was like, the actual story here is this ad product where their catalog, the whole Warner Brothers catalog is now able, like it's for sale to be remixed into advertising. That's what it's for. We're so few steps away from. And we've uploaded a bunch of assets for you to use generative AI to just make ads against. Like put this right next to Mark Zuckerberg's thing that he was talking about where he's like, we're going to let you make AI ads. And it's like, we're going to let you make AI Batman ads is like it's just right there. And it's right there.

It's been there in the background of all these companies for a long time. So NBCU, Comcast, our favorites, their sponsors for SNL 50 this season were getting sketches on air. So like, Mabelene was a big sponsor and they did a bunch of stuff with the cast and VW was a big sponsor. And every episode of S&L had that sketched the Californians. Yep. But it was just a VWI. But that was Mark's advertising. You know that sketch, the Jennifer Coolidge, Ariana Grande, everyone's Jennifer

Coolidge sketch? Yep. I think Dana Carby was in it. Mabeline. Mabelin is a title sponsor of S&L 50, and they got a sketch on air. Oh, wow. They went viral because it was very funny. That's just integrated brand advertising.

And what is that sketch? It's just all of them saying, Mabelin 50 times. Like, what? And that's like, whatever. It's a comedy show. Fine, integrate the brands, product placement, all you want. Okay, here's the last one. This one, like, drove me over the edge this week.

There's a new documentary, F1 documentary, on Netflix, about Kimmy Antonelli, the new driver for Mercedes. It is literally a WhatsApp commercial. Like, when you open it on Netflix, the interface, you know, where it says, like, what the show is about, the first words are sponsored by WhatsApp. It doesn't even tell you what it is. Like, literally the first things you see are sponsored.

sponsored by WhatsApp. And then it's like the story of Kimi Antel. I take you over Louis Hamilton's seat in the Mercedes. And then you start the show. And, you know, it's just like a 40 minute documentary about like the 17 year old kid getting to drive a car. Like this is catnip for me. And like in the title sequence, it's like presented by WhatsApp. And then the, the, the doc is tons and tons of fake WhatsApp conversations and staged WhatsApp video calls. Oh, that's really weird. Right. So like, everything you said until that is like, I'm like fine, whatever. Like get your money to make your documentary however you want. Art and commerce, sure, knock yourself out. But then, ugh. Yeah, like Toto Wolf calls Kimmy Antenelli to tell him to take, you know, he's getting the job.

And the first words he said in that call are we've set up this WhatsApp call. Oh, my God. Brutal. Also, the video quality of that call, horrible. horrible advertising for what I'm like you know I like post some blue sky about this and people are like you know race cars are all about advertising and like um you know the team speak button on the steering wheel and Mercedes is a WhatsApp icon because they have a long fine whatever get your bag I don't care I'm just saying the actual content is advertising now yeah like these things have collapsed like we are just viewing advertising to a point where the first line of the description of the thing is this is a WhatsApp commercial and then you watch and he's like, oh, this is super a WhatsApp commercial. I have a friend who's been in like every kind of video production, like movies, TV shows, advertising.

And he's like, the end of this is someone is going to win the Academy Award for Best Picture. And the producer who accepts the award will be an advertiser. Right? The end of this collapse of everything turning into marketing. Everything is an ad for, everything on YouTube is an ad for AG1. Like that's all it is. Like everyone just trying to build these channels so that they can do branded content

integrated in the thing. And at the end of it, you're going to be like, best picture goes to Coca-Cola. This is his theory. And I have laughed at him for years and I watched this WhatsApp thing. That feels kind of right.

Anyway, unsponsored for flavor. Do you know what I mean? So, okay, here's a weird thing. WhatsApp can't tell me what to do. This whole conversation, we're going to run this episode as a WhatsApp video call. I have said WhatsApp enabling a lot.

So, you never know. Yeah, we don't even get paid for it. Maybe we're the idiots. I mean, in many ways, we are the idiots. Everyone else is like driving their ass and Martin's around. That's all I'm saying. I'm buying $200 boxes for Amazon to retrofit car play in my 10-year-old car. Like, it's a very different world we live in.

But I much prefer not being told what to do. And I assure you all the people who do these integrations, they get told what to do. The best career advice I ever got was from somebody who told me that every time you do well in your career, you're going to get to choose between power and autonomy, and you should always choose autonomy. That's pretty good. It's good advice. Anyway, if you'd like to continue to support us just yelling at companies and not being able to be told what to do, you can subscribe to the verse.

That's the engine that powers this whole little operation. That's how Eli gets his ass and Martin. Look, I'm telling you right now, I can get you into a 2007 escalade with a hundred, $159,000 miles on the clock for $89.95, David. I mean, I'm down. We go splitzies, the three of us. If you want to go up model, we want to spend a little bit more. I get you in 2014 platinum.

Platinum slayed now. 98K on the clock, 16.9. No. I think we go smaller because we're going to retrofit it as our mobile podcast studio. So you're going to rip out the inside? Yeah. We don't need the fancy stuff. Every time I despair about the car industry,

I remind myself that you can just buy a little. Escalade for no money, and that is a viable option. It's like the best thing you can do with your car budget is like, I'm buying an old escalade. I'm not saying because it's like a great or reliable car that the previous owners have treated them well. I'm saying that at any moment, if you're like, I'm a little in the dump, so I can just buy an escalade.

That does me. I feel better. Do you see what I'm saying? That's real. Like I can get one. 89. 95. All right.

David, it's time. Oh my God. Nealai, now we have a countdown of these. We only get to do so many of these until we have to stay. for a minute. Both of my children will be doing them in my sense. It's time for America's favorite podcast within a podcast. Brendan Carr is a dummy.

All right. This week on Brennan Carr is a dummy. We have what I can only describe is a moral dilemma. Unlike, I guess the other ones are not moral dilemmas. It's just moral outrage. It's moral outrage. Usually in Brennan Carr is a dummy, we present but one story, which is Brendan Carr, who is a traitorous moron, shows up and says, I would like to use the power of

government to chill your speech. And then we point out that the First Amendment exists and Brendan's ideas are bad and that he should feel bad about himself. And then we essentially threat, invite him to come on the show and defend himself. Yeah. That's the structure of the thing. It's, you know, you buy the box of cereal, you get the marshmallows. Everyone's happy.

We sell what we sell here. That's the structure of buying cards down. I'm aware, right? You got a hit product. You got to sing your hits, you know? Today, this week, we're changing it up. All right? We're going country.

Because it's it I can't identify who the villain of the story is except for everyone and then and then you have no idea what to do. So this week our boy Brendan threatened to investigate Dish Network for not using the spectrum it obtained after T-Mobile bought Sprint and it was given Boost Network to run as our nation's fourth wireless carrier. Oh, we have a real worst person you know makes a great point kind of situation. You see what I'm saying? Don't worry. There's a twist coming. Okay. But that's the heart of it, right? Is Brendan woke up and he realized for a reason that I will come to that it turns out DISH Network is not a viable fourth wireless carrier in the United States. That Project Gen.5Sys, their plan to somehow use AWS and a time.

technology called OpenRAND to build a very, to very quickly build a fourth national wireless carrier came to nothing. By the way, it's called Gen. Five, because they spelled Genesis with a five. This is a real thing. I'm not kidding. We've done a lot of coverage of Project Genesis over the years, Project Gen. Five, sis.

And it has effectively come to nothing. It launched in, like, two markets with one phone, like a Motorola edge. We sent Mitchell Clark to, like, use this phone back in the day. And he was like, this sucks. This is in 2022. Nothing has happened since. At one point, there was an entire crypto scam grafted onto the back of Project Genesis. Like everything except building a network.

And if you'll remember, this all came about because Brendan's predecessor at the FCC Ajit Pi under the first Trump administration rubber stamped T-Mobile buying sprint. And the solution they came up with to the reduction of competition in the United States was to say, okay, you can buy Sprint and you have to sell some spectrum and boost to DISH Network, which is going to wake up and realize that it's a viable national wireless carrier and preserve competition so that we will still have four national carriers in the country. This was their plan. They allowed this merger to happen, which resulted in thousands of layoffs and higher prices because we reduced competition.

And they said, Dish Network will fix it. DISH Network is going to stand up a new network using this new technology called OpenRAN, which is interesting. OpenRan is the idea that the hardware and software inside of a cell tower should be more interoperable so more companies can provide it. And this way you avoid big dependencies on company like Wallway, which is controlled by a train's government. This is a real problem. And the way we're going to do is by making things interoperable to promote competition. That has not played out. I would just point out just like none of this happened.

It was all a good idea is pine and the kind of stuff. Dish Network did not build the network. So Brandon has noticed this has happened. And he wrote a letter to ECHOSTAR, which owns this network. And he said, I've directed agency staff to begin a review of ECHOSTAR's compliance with its federal obligations to provide 5G service throughout the United States per the terms of its federal spectrum licenses. That you hold a number of FCC spectrum licenses that cover a significant amount of spectrum. You haven't used them. Obviously, ECHOSTAR says it warned its investors that we have made a wireless network.

No one can see it, but it's there. And then it, quote, cannot predict with any degree of certainty the outcome of the SEC proceedings. One, because I think it can predict the outcome. And two, because you can't predict Brendan. Right. Like, Brendan's going to be like, have you thought about being 25% more racist? You'll be fine. Like, that's like a normal outcome of a Brandon core investigation.

Okay. So here's the twist. First, Brendan is investigating a deal his own predecessor made. And no one can predict the outcome, at least of all the company. So that's one. That's weird, right? Why is Brendan doing this? come on you already know everybody knows why because SpaceX wants the spectrum and

Brendan wants to give it to his buddy Elon Musk this is getting so boring it's like at least at least like I was genuinely in this moment rooting for Brendan to have like made a good decision that it's like and in the name of journalistic credibility we're like we got to give Brendan one this week but no but I don't know it's true that I've railed against dish now sure stupid idea for years But where did this come from? What's the evidence that Brendan is tying this investigation to? SpaceX said one of its satellites measured the power spectral density levels in the bands that Dish Network has and found the dishes use of those bands as diminish the best.

So just SpaceX is like, look, hey, we took it upon ourselves. We pointed one of our satellites at the entire country measured on the spectrum usage. And trust us, bro. They're not using it. So can we have it? And Brendan immediately fired off a letter saying you're not using it. I have open an investigation. SpaceX says, SpaceX said the spectrum that Dish is using remains ripe for sharing among next generation satellite systems that seek to finally make productive use of the spectrum for consumers and first responders.

First of all, the spectrum was being used before they sold Sprint to T-Mobile and gave the spectrum to Dish Network. I'm not saying Sprint was a great company. They sucked in a variety of ways. But it was, in fact, using the spectrum. But it was using the spectrum. You could use Sprint. People did. And then finally make use of this spectrum for consumers and first responders.

It's like, yeah, all the other companies exist. Like, if you would like to get first responders better cell coverage using the spectrum, you would give it to one of the companies that actually operates a wireless network. Right. That would be the outcome. You wouldn't be like SpaceX. Can you horsepower up a new solution? The same way you ask DISH network to horsepower up a new network.

What are we doing here? So we'll see what happens. There's a bunch of reporting about this. We'll link to it. But this week in Branden Car is a dummy. He has done the right thing for the stupidest possible reason. And the funniest thing about this is it's his predecessor's deal. They promised us when they made this deal allowing T-Mobile to buy Sprint.

The DISH network would meet its commitments to stand up a fourth wireless network using this spectrum, using the boost assets. and everyone knew, just like we knew with Max, that this would never happen. Never in a million years would this happen. And every time we reported on it, and the reporting consisted of, we're going to go to Las Vegas and see if there's a wireless network there.

They would be like, you don't know what you're talking about. Ridiculous. Yeah. Don't let the mergers happen. This is just more merger chaos. Do you know what the best thing to happen to the American wireless industry is? The single best thing has happened

in the past 15 years to the American wireless industry. AT&T was blocked from buying T-Mobile. Yeah. That's by far the best thing that happened to the American Wireless News. And then they uncarriered. Yep. And they hired John Ledger.

And they, AT&T had to pay a bunch of money in a breakup feed at T-Mobile. So T-Mobile got recapitalized. Important, important piece of puzzle. But that only happened because they were blocked from buying it. And then John Lodger showed up and said, what is this industry? I have to be competitive now.

I'm going to do a bunch of stuff to make this industry more competitive. to win some customers and try to succeed instead of just cashing out and letting AT&T burn money, making 4-3 gray-skilled Batman movies. Compete. It makes everything better. As always, I would respond to the many critics who show up to say that I'm, you know, just some woke DEI hire by pointing out that the only consistent opinions that I expressed in the show regarding politics or that free markets are good, competition makes for better products, and you should be a little bit less racist than Brendan.

And that's all I'm really asking for. And if you think that's super liberal, that's fine. But I don't know about that. Anyhow, that's been Brennan cars, a dummy. Brennan, as always, if you have the wherewithal, the emotional fortitude,

or even the raw intelligence to show up and defend these back-asswards decisions, you're welcome on our shows. The fanciest CEOs in the industry show up under cover and defend themselves to me, and they're able to do it.

I don't think you can do it. I don't think you're going to show up. I think you're a dumb coward. But if you want to, the door's always open, my friend. Maybe he has Project Gena 5Sys and just like can't access this podcast. Yeah, he's out there collecting one quarter of an NFT at a time every time he sends a text message. That's boost mobile phone.

That's been Brennan Carr's a dummy, America's favorite podcast for the podcast. It was a great one. I treasure them all even more now, knowing we will have to take a break because God help Jake if he has to do this every week. I'm going to have Neelai just like do a little voice memo on his phone. I assume he'll have some crazed moment in the middle of the night when he needs to let out some steam. We'll just play that right into the mic. Can you imagine if you could send a letter to the FCC being like, I've graded my own homework and I should get the spectrum. I mean, we should have just been putting that at the end of all of our articles.

Like, hey, this dish thing isn't happening. Can you give it to us? Like, we'll use it. Yeah. It's just very funny that we pointed to satellite. Who knew that work? And just like measure this guy's user. It's like, you don't have to do that much work, man.

You just have to be like, does this exist? Yeah. You can go to the website, project genafivesysys.com. It's still there. It's called the genufivecysc 5G.com. And the last media and press update, like the newest one is from 2022. And the headline is DISH adopts Verica's chaos engineering platform to test and ensure reliability.

And it's like, oh, God. First of all, chaos engineering is the new name of our product design firm, and I'm very excited about it. It's like teenage engineering, but like much worse. It's chaos engineering, and that's us. I'm into it. I believe it's a riff. You know, Netflix used to have the Chaos Monkey.

Oh, yeah. Which was its reliability tester where it would just, it would simulate just like people pulling servers out of the racks. I think that's what this is, but it's just very funny that they put out a press release. I don't know, man. Anyhow, Brandon, if you're listening, I can get you into a 2015 Cadillac Escalade luxury for 18-7 out the door. All right? Let's talk.

Yeah. All right, we need a power cleanser here, David. Can we talk about Airbnb, which is like all, the only thing I can think about the last 48 hours? So Airbnb this week, basically like, it wants you to think it completely pivoted the company. And Brian Chesky is out here. Stephen Levy had a big piece in Wired. Amazing photos in that piece. Oh, they're very good.

And it says the headline is something like Airbnb is in midlife crisis mode, which I'm sure Airbnb is not wild about. But it's kind of true. And it describes this like fever dream that Brian Chesky had in which he decided to completely change what Airbnb is doing. Ironically, in the middle of all of the open AI chaos that we covered, he was like a central figure in sorting all this stuff out and was like somehow inspired. by this to go create similar chaos at his own company. So they go through this whole thing and Airbnb is now trying to pivot hard into being more

than just like places to stay, but they're doing like experiences, which they've kind of done in the past, but they're doing much more aggressively now. And then services, like local services where you are, I guess. I just find this all very weird. Like Airbnb seems to want to be fancy Yelp. But with transactions. And that's the difference. You never transacting Yelp, right?

Yelp is a search engine. And you're like, find me a hairdresser. And then it shows you a list and there's reviews and whatever. But you don't like do anything else. You just use it. And people have favorite for listings. This is very much more like, I need a haircut. I'm going to open Airbnb and some like vetted barbers and hairdressers will be available to me and they will come to my house and cut my hair.

While you're on vacation? While you're on vacation? Or if not. Which is like, yeah. I do think the single most interesting thing that, changed here is when you open the app, there's three tabs. It is like places to stay, experiences services. The default tab that it opens to is the experiences tab, which is just not what Airbnb is known for. So I think like you're right, Neelai, they are pushing this very

hard. And there's a world where you just open this and you order a private chef for the night to your house where you live, even when you're not staying somewhere on vacation. I think it's sort of a weird concept. But it makes a lot of sense, right? Like if you're only using Airbnb for one thing, then it's only one place that they can make money. But now if they can sell you experiences to do while you're in that place, if they can sell me experiences to do while I live here in New York City,

like that is a big new market for them. And that is actually, that is a market no one is doing a very good job of. Like, I don't know if you guys ever have this experience, but I have it all the time where it's like, oh, what's going on near me this weekend? and the answer is you check 58 websites and you end up on like an event bright listing for a thing you've never heard of and that's the best you can do. And at various times different companies have tried to tackle the like what's going on around me problem. Nobody's ever done a very good job of it. And I think you're right, Jake, that there is a big opportunity and a big business there in being the one that is like anywhere you are even if it's at home.

if you want to like explore and find stuff to do come here. Airbnb makes a certain kind of sense as that platform, except that it's been trying to do that and failing for a really long time. And so now to double down on that, but then also add like, I just don't know that I, I'm on vacation and I want to find a place to get a massage is like a unsolved problem. Right. And it's everything on there is like a little hokey right now.

And admittedly, it's towards. stuff like that's fine right but it's like do a pizza tour right get a photo in Times Square I mean you're in New York it's like that's what that's what you're here for it's fair like you may as well do it there but yeah I I'm not sure if that is what is going to solve it for people right like they they have offered these things already and maybe just feels more legitimate because it's now like front and center in the app it's certainly more convenient right you were probably going to go on that pizza tour I mean I'm thinking about it Brian Chesky is actually on Decoder tomorrow.

As we're speaking, I'm preparing to interview him tomorrow about all this stuff. This is, I think, his third time on the show. He's great on Decoder. He loves explaining how he thinks. So I'm very curious if he's doing the same thing that I've seen from other companies. Like Uber just had an event this week, Dara Coast for Shawy, the CEO of Uber also taped to Decoder this week. And, you know, their whole thing is like route sharing and scheduling your commute and Uber One subscriptions. And all of these companies that were kind of like push a button.

for a service one time or, you know, a few times a week or in Airbnb's case, like, maybe a couple times a year. They're like, we want you to use this every day. Like, that's how they're going to grow. They all think they're going to grow in this way. Like, you need a relationship with Uber. And you're going to schedule a commute in Uber that you do every single day and you're going to have this like ongoing relationship with Uber.

That's sort of a big part of their growth, right, for revenue anyway. It feels like the same move for Airbnb. Well, and in the same way that they're like, we have this core underlying technology that like, like Airbnb is fundamentally like a guest and host matching platform, right? And it's like if you just expand that out, you get to, well, people need to book things and people need to have things booked. So sure, we'll do that. But like, there's a lot of those out in the world.

I don't know. I just, I am, maybe you're right, Nelai that being the one that processes the payments and manages it all is, is meaningful. But I'm just not sure I'm not. like if I want to find a place to have dinner near my Airbnb, I have a hard time imagining that the first thing I'm going to do is open the Airbnb app. Well, I mean, that's their challenge. I got to teach people to do that.

I think that side of it is like different because, you know, there's 10 chefs available in my area. And it's like, yeah, I have no idea how to get a private chef, especially if I'm on vacation. And I think there's a lot of people that are like, okay, I've like, you know, my whole friend group is going to rent a house. And it would be sick to have a private chef. And like, now it's a button. And like, if you can just build that muscle, it's like, oh, I could do that at home.

There's something there. Again, I'm excited to talk to Brian tomorrow. I share a lot of these same doubts. Will you ask Brian if he has any friends who aren't billionaires? Because that, the thing you just described is a billionaire problem. I don't think it's a billionaire problem. I think the reason people get big Airbnb houses is because if you can split the cost with enough people, it starts to feel reasonable. right? And I've never actually booked a private chef. I don't know if the math works the same way for private chef. I'm still scrounging pennies to buy Cadillac Escaded for 89.95. But that's how that math works for a lot of people, right? We can all get our own hotel room or we can pool our money and get a sick house for a weekend. Like, I hear that all the time. If you can add on to that, I mean, this is my entire thesis about limos in Las Vegas, right? Like, it's no fun to be in a little bit by yourself.

Like, that's the saddest you can be is drunk in Vegas alone in a limo. Like, that is as Drake as I've ever felt in my time. But you put 10 people in a little bit. This is the best experience I've ever had. Right? And there's just something about that that you can see them trying to tap into here. I don't think it's, I need to find a restaurant near me. I think it's some other thing that's like, can we make this a little bit more special as a group?

That's fair. And I can see that working. I just don't think that road is very long. Like, there's just not the list of things that qualify under that rubric just isn't huge. I do want to make one addendum to my limo comment, which is one year at CES, I got a Cadillac escalade limo from the airport by myself and I took it to Shake Shack by myself. And that ruled. That, that, I mean, that. Las Vegas is the only city in America in the world.

I think, where you can just summon an escalade limousine. You just like walk outside of a building and be like, do you have a giant limo? And like 10 guys are like, oh, yeah, here I am. Can't have that experience anywhere else in the world. You got it. That's why it's, that's what it's for. I mean, I know other people think Vegas has other purposes, but in, you know, that's it's it.

That's it's the one. Yeah. That's what it's for. All right. All right. I'm going to ask Brian Juski how many people he's ever, if he's ever been drunk alone in a little tomorrow. That's good.

Let me know if you've got your shirts. By the way, party speaker update, speaking of that, many, many, many photos of party speakers this week on transportation. We got one on an airport shuttle, which seems deeply rude. Like, don't do that. Confine spaces are not where party speakers go. Lots of Nashville Bachelor Party bike buses with party speakers on them. That's a thing. And then here's the thing I want to know, just to wrap this up.

So many pictures of party speakers are made by a company called Ion, which I believe is a house. brand of one of the major retailers. I'm not sure. If you know what Ion is, if you know who run Ion, let me know. That's the next phase of our investigation. Because I think they'll talk. I've been trying to get onto the Sony party speaker team for years. Like, I've gone to the highest levels of the Sony Corporation and been like, I know people

in Japan. I will send them to the party speaker team. And they're like, not to do. That's some like Apple Design Lab shit. You know what I mean? Like the room where they put the cup holders in the party speaker. speakers. I think I have people.

All right. That's it. That's for Chasper. And that's it for the Vergecast this week. And hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-Vorge-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcasts Network. Our show is produced by Will Por, Eric Gomez, and Brandon Kiefer.

And that's it. We'll see you next week.