The Vergecast - If Netflix can't make live work, can anyone?

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Richard Lawler joins the show to chat about the Tyson / Paul fight, and more importantly the fact that Netflix didn't seem to be able to keep up. As live sports — and TV in general — move toward streaming, are even the biggest names in tech ready for what's coming? After that, Roland Allen, the author of The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, tells us about the history of the notebook, and why we've been writing things down about our lives for centuries. Even in a digital world, Allen argues, you just can't beat the notebook. Finally, a question from the Vergecast Hotline sends producer Will Poor down a TikTok Shop rabbit hole. Further reading: Netflix served the Tyson vs. Paul fight to 60 million households NFL fans worry Netflix’s bad Tyson vs. Paul stream means it can’t handle football Netflix adds Beyoncé to live entertainment juggernaut Netflix snagged global streaming rights for NFL Christmas Day games Roland Allen’s website The Notebook: a History of Thinking on Paper 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

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Bullet Journal method. I'm your friend David Pierce, and I am sitting here on a weekday buying candy on TikTok. Like, I don't know how this happened, but suddenly my algorithm is just absolutely overrun by freeze-dried skittles, which are a thing you can buy. And there's like a sour-coated gushers thing that everybody's really excited about. But the biggest thing that's happening all over TikTok is Swedish candy. There are these things called bubs. They're little like skulls that are massively popular. People are so excited about them.

They sell out like crazy. There's this company called Bon Bon that has absolutely blown up on TikTok. There's something happening inside of Candy Talk. And I can't figure out what it is. I can't figure out how it works where all these companies and people are getting this candy from and repackaging it and selling it to people. But I'm now deep down this rabbit hole. I bought candy on a TikTok live stream.

last night while I was walking my dog. It's a real thing that happened. And I bought it on the stream. And the guy was like, oh, David, thanks for your order. I'm going to give you extra sour powder because you ordered on the live stream. And I was like really excited for a long time that this was a thing that had happened to me. It's coming in two to four days, apparently. Is it anything? Is it food? Did I order it from an actual company? I literally have no idea. That's the TikTok shop. But it's possible there is going to be an alarming amount of candy. coming to my house very soon. And frankly, that's great news. Anyway, we are not here to talk about candy. I have a feeling I will be talking more about candy over time, but not today. Today we're

going to do two things. First, we're going to talk about the Jake Paul Mike Tyson fight on Netflix. I don't really care about the fight, but I care a lot about what it means that Netflix had this massively popular event, and it didn't go great. And Netflix has some more massively popular events about to happen. And we're also just at a really interesting moment in the sports streaming world, where if Netflix can't do it, can anyone? We're going to talk about it. Also, I'm going to talk to Roland Allen, who wrote a book about the history of notebooks. And actually, what he wrote is a history of civilization told through the notebook. He makes a really fun case for why pen and paper has been so important in history, why it's so important now, and why even in an increasingly digital world

writing things down in a notebook is not going away. Super fun. We also have a hotline question that we're going to get into that sent our producer Will Pour down kind of a wild rabbit hole of, again, the TikTok shop. It's a weird world out there. All that is coming up in just a second. But first, I've now been staring at these freeze-dried skittles

for too long, and I'm going to buy them. Wish me luck. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. 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. Prompt 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. Welcome back. All right. So Friday night, Jake Paul, Mike Tyson, it both was and was not the fight of the year. I don't know anything or particularly care about boxing, if I'm completely honest with you.

But the thing I heard from everybody is that actually the undercard, all the fights that were before the main fight, was great. Lots of good fights. But then Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson, eh. I mean, it was like a good. YouTuber versus a man of his late 50s. I don't really know what anybody expected, but that is the fight that we got. Anyway, I think the more interesting story here has less to do with that fight itself and more to do with how things went on Netflix and what it says about what Netflix is ready for as it tries to take over live TV and what the whole streaming industry is ready for. Lots to talk about there's lots of this stuff left to come. The tests keep coming for these companies. So figured it was a good time to check in and nobody better to do it with than Richard

Loller. Richard, hello. Hey. I just saw you the other day. This was very exciting. We were in person and you understood that I exist outside this room. I did. It's useful to be reminded of that every once in a while, but not like for two. I think we got about the right amount of time near each other. This, this is good. Yep. All right. So first question, did you watch the fight on Friday? I did not watch the fight because doing anything else was a better choice. Yeah, I mean, I would say as it turns out, that is largely correct. It is a real bummer that this whole thing was not about a sport I enjoy more than boxing between YouTubers and old men, but alas, here we are.

As I said on social media, if I wanted to see a YouTuber fight an old man, I would just go punch a YouTuber. I can put that fight on myself right now. It's a beautiful thing. If you walk outside, I'm sure someone is filming a time. TikTok and you can just punch them in the face and here we are. And apparently 60 million people will watch it if you do. But I think the reason I wanted to talk to you about this is we've talked a lot over the last couple of years about basically the question is streaming ready for sports. And it's been it's been coming. It's been happening. Amazon is kind of making it work with football.

But like the NFL is the thing. Right. And every streaming platform wants the NFL. A bunch of them have gotten it. Netflix is going to have it on Christmas Day. And I think to me, the single most surprising thing that happened this weekend was that Netflix was not ready for this fight. You'd think they would have been. Right. They have the data. They know how many customers they had. They know how many people were interested in this fight. They know how heavily they promoted it. They know that there wasn't really anything else to do on Friday night, it felt like. And still, they were surprised somehow. They just weren't ready for the moment. Yeah. And am I crazy for thinking that if anyone should be able to do this,

just from a pure technical, deliver the bits in high quality to people perspective, it ought to be Netflix. You'd think so, but delivering things live is very different. And I think that's what we found basically every time there's a massive event. And every time we've had these Super Bowl streaming

now for years, they've been available on the internet. Each and every time, it's just a little bit glitchier than you'd expect, even though they know how many people are going to tune in. Because it's hard. Because delivering these things with

milliseconds and just fractions of a second of delay is difficult. Like you can cache streams and videos. And if you have a new series, you can put your little devices in every everyone's nearby ISP and you could put it very close to them and have it preloaded. You can't do that with a lot. It just doesn't work. Yeah.

And it's starting to make me wonder if it is technically speaking right now just an unsolvable problem. Because like you said, I think if you go rewind a ways like Game of Thrones had, streaming issues. And there were a bunch of ways that these companies could and did solve them, right? And like, you don't hear that anymore from these sort of big event HBO style shows anymore. Like the, everybody logged on to HBO at nine o'clock on a Sunday night and couldn't watch their show. I have not heard that in years. We just fixed that. But there is something about trying to

do this live and just literally like the physical infrastructure of making all of that happen that we're very good at with linear television and they've been doing it for decades and they have trucks and it's a whole thing. And I'm starting to wonder if we just haven't developed the over-the-in-the-in-net pieces of this in such a way that it's going to work. I think the main issue is just that the internet

wasn't made to work like that. And we're kind of tacking things on and we're creating these solutions to work around a problem that the internet was never designed to solve. Something we talked about last year but that still hasn't really arisen is L4S, which was supposed to help the latency issue

so that when you send a packet, and it really needs to get to someone on time that it's the first one to get there. And there are so many other strategies that I think these companies have done to try and make sure that when people are streaming, it's not getting bogged down. It's not getting clogged at the various choke points.

But it still does. You've got how many different devices? You've got how many different bit rates? You've got how many different encodings and DRM protection and all of these other things that you're putting on top of this that make it that much harder to stream a live event. And it's just not a problem that we solved yet.

And I guess on Christmas Day, we're going to get another opportunity to see how close Netflix is. Yeah. Well, I think I've been making fun of Netflix for like 48 hours now because they put out that statement on Saturday that was basically like, we think we did a great job. After a whole evening and day of people online being like, this looks awful, I can't see anything. This is just like a 1980s pixelated monstrosity of a picture. And then Netflix is like, you know what? We did it. And I've kind of come around for all the reasons that you're saying, I'm like, honestly,

maybe this is literally the best Netflix could have done. And to some extent, that might be more alarming as we think about where we're going. But maybe Netflix is not out of its mind to think it actually did this about as well as it could have. I can definitely see why they would have that perspective. What's interesting is, like, I'm hearing from people, oh, you know, I was watching a stream of someone pointing their phone at the table. TV on TikTok and live streaming it because the Netflix stream was 45 minutes behind. And so it's like it can be done. You can get live video that people actually watch as long as

60 million people aren't tuning into this particular stream at the moment. Yeah, there is a magic number at which it all kind of falls apart. And I'm very curious. This is part of the reason I'm interested in these Christmas football games because Netflix has these two games on Christmas for the first time. They're both actually going to be really good games as it turns out. they're like some of the best teams in the NFL. It's going to be very exciting. It's Christmas Day. Lots of people are going to watch.

It seems unlikely that it's going to be 60 million people on either game. But like, let's say it's, let's say it's 30. We're going to get such an interesting test case of at what point have we just hit the capacity of all of this infrastructure. And there's also just not that much time. Like Netflix can't fix the internet between now and Christmas Day. So to some extent, I assume there will be lots of things that can. learn, but it's not like it can rebuild its whole data delivery system between now and Christmas in order to get these football games right. So I feel like we're going to get a totally different

but very similar test. And I think that's a big part of it. It's just that you aren't dealing with just one problem or just one problem in just one place. You have many people in many different places. You have different issues. You have, oh, the network's bad here or we don't have the back end node connecting close enough to this many people who are all trying to stream it. You have different kinds of demand in different places. What if it's good in most places, but it's not good in Baltimore? Like Baltimore is playing away at this Texans game. And if it's just bad in one city, that is millions of people who are going to be very upset with Netflix. Beyonce fans, not always if you are going to cause problems for them to watch, their favorite. Could be an

issue. We're going to find out what happens. Yeah. So speaking of Beyonce, let's talk about this, because the news on Monday was that Beyonce is going to be doing the halftime show at one of these games. Yes, at the second game between the Ravens and the Texas. Because it's in Houston. She's from Houston. Natural Senator. That makes sense. But like it's Beyonce, right?

Like I would say in terms of like who you could announce as your halftime performer, that's about as big as it gets. Right. Like that's, it's Beyonce. And so to me, it's like if you've ever wondered how serious Netflix is about doing this, Beyonce is the answer. Right. Like this, this company is not kidding. And I think Jake Paul and Mike Tyson, you can be like, oh, this is like slightly interesting, but also like slightly silliness. Two football games is like cool, but whatever.

But like it's, it's Beyonce, Richard. They got Beyonce. There are millions of people who will not miss that. This is going to be probably their first time to be able to see the songs off of her new album. It just, there are a lot of things that are lining up. They are going to be ready. They're going to be prepared for this. And Netflix has to deliver.

What do you make of this from Netflix? Netflix is clearly like all in now on sports. After you and I have spent years on this show talking about how Netflix was very happy to not be in live sports. They did the drive to survive thing. They were like, we're going to make the sort of ancillary content around games. We don't need to compete in this. Netflix has been saying this. It feels like this company has on a total 180 and is now like we have to figure out how to do live.

And that means sports. Does this make sense to you? The thing I'm not sure about is how far they'll go into live. Because I think that at least in one way it kind of serves. them. How do we keep people from not canceling Netflix? And one of the answers is we have a huge event every few months so that every time you start thinking, man, you know what? I haven't watching Netflix in a while. Do I still need the subscription? Then Beyonce's on there and you're like, yeah, can't cancel yet. Fair. That gives me, yeah, that's true. You need to basically have one of those

at least announced every month so that I'm like, okay, well, I'll keep it until then. And then, like, the day after Christmas, they're going to announce the next thing for February or whatever. And then that'll be that. We grew up with HBO and Showtime playing this game with boxing, with music, with all of these things, our entire lives growing up in the 90s. It's the same playbook.

You know what you just made me realize is they're definitely going to announce the Stranger Things debut of some kind the day after Christmas. And that's how we get there. For sure. Yeah. It just rolls in it on itself.

Yeah, exactly. Do you think Netflix has moves in sports here? Like, is this, are you at all as a sports fan interested in what's coming here? Not really. I just, I wonder what they can do, but they have enough money that it kind of doesn't matter because they can get enough events. If they can sign up, say, the NBA Cup or whoever, if they have enough money, people will create events for them to host.

Jake Paul versus Mike Tyson. They said, how can we get Generation Z, Generation X, and Millennials all to watch the same thing at the same time? Got it. And they'll just find something else. They will create something. They tried the hot dog competition. I don't think that really attracted all that much attention that seemed to go off pretty well without glitches.

Their reality show was the first one that had huge problems. And I think they did the comedy thing that didn't work all that well. But, you know, it's been kind of up and down. So it's hard to have these hits, but they're just going to keep looking. They're going to keep digging. They've got the checkbook ready to spend. Clearly. And I think the thing I've been trying to figure out is whether I want one of these streaming services

to really try and reinvent the wheel. Because I think, like, you look at, at Amazon, which has been doing Thursday Night Football for a couple of years now, it just is football. Amazon has like a couple of interesting stats ideas, but they're even like doing that in a sponsored way on other networks. Like that's just a whole separate thing. But it's like it's, it's Al Michaels. It is like the most straightforward down the middle old school kind of football game. And we haven't seen a Netflix football game, but I would assume it's going to be very much the same thing. Peacock is now streaming Sunday night football, but it's just taking a TV

streaming and turning it into streaming. So part of me is like, somebody needs to take this and like blow up the whole concept of what it might be and give us new ways of looking at stuff and change the cameras and make it more interactive and whatever else. YouTube with Sunday ticket, another example. Like YouTube Sunday ticket is just Sunday ticket. It's just Sunday ticket. And that's fine. But it's part of me is like, what's the next thing? And then the other part of me is like, well, maybe let's spend our time making sure the thing works and then give it a few years and we'll worry about actually putting this out there. I think that is the big question here because what I think what people want is not personalization.

It is the same thing but better because that's one thing that has been pushed out there. Oh, you'll be able to get your personalized stream. You'll be able to get exactly what you want. Maybe you'll be able to tune into whatever camera you want. But what works better is when we're all watching the same thing at the same time like Paul versus Tyson, which creates a spectacle, which creates a, I can't miss it. this and it's not personal, it's together and that is better. And you don't need like a fake auditorium of people. You just need an event that people want to watch. You don't need avatars.

You don't need 3D. You don't need any of those things. You don't even need a good fight. What you're saying is if you had picked the other camera, you wouldn't have seen Mike Tyson's bare ass. And that would have been a problem for you. We could have all avoided that. It just would have been a choice if we had all been able to avoid that. But apparently that wasn't what the people voted for. 60 million people went the other way. So listen, We are wrong. Netflix knows what people want, Richard. Like, let's be honest with each other.

That was not... They have the analytics. My conspiracy theory says that was completely deliberate. And it is just to juice views. You got to get them how you can. This is the world we live in, Richard. It's fine. Next version of guys is going to be very interesting.

Listen, it's Q4. I'll do what I got to do. So how are you feeling as a streaming sports fan right now? This is like, this is a fun time to do this because we're in the middle of the NBA season. We're in the middle of the NFL season. The NHL has started college basketball is going. College football is peaking. It's like, this is the best part of the year if all you want to watch is sports. And yet I feel like my sports watching life is more chaotic and more expensive than ever. I tried to watch the Bill's Chiefs game on Sunday night and literally couldn't. I went through 10 services and I was like,

oh, I just don't have this game somehow. And I feel like you feel my pain on this as somebody who also likes to watch esoteric sports that you're not allowed to watch. That is the greatest thing. Like, oh, your team is playing. You pay for maybe three packages already to watch this particular sport. And you find out, wait, I don't have the one that has this game. Still, somehow. I'm maybe better than last year because the local monopoly that controls Pistons streaming, they're still bad.

They're still a monopoly. They're named after a different gambling company now. But at least it works. So when I give them my money to watch the Pistons, I can actually watch the game sometimes. And then I'm paying for League Pass and I'm paying for my local team subscription. But then if the game is on national TV on ESPN, if I'm not paying for, you know, a cable package, can't get it or I can't get the good T&T stream. I can get the League Pass T&T stream, which, you know, with no announcers and whatnot. And it's just like, wait, how is this better than cable?

Because I used to just have cable and it was like, okay, so I pay this much and I know that I will be able to see the game. Maybe it'll be on a different channel or whatever, but I will be able to turn on my TV and the game will come in. don't have to log in and log out and have glitches and have the same ad three times a row. Yeah, I remember years ago having sort of the mental rubric of like, okay, if it's a good game, it's going to be on this channel. If it's a, yeah, game, it's going to be on this channel. And if literally no one cares because both teams are trash, they'll just put it over here. And I knew the number of all of those channels.

And so I could find the game in 30 seconds no matter what. And now it's literally like I went on, I was on Sling watching Red Zone because Sling still has red zone for reasons I don't completely understand. I, Sling doesn't have CBS. So when Red Zone only got down to one game, I didn't have it there anymore. I went to, I went to YouTube TV, which had it, but my access had turned off because I forgot to pay it. That one's probably on me. But then I went over to every streaming service I could think of being like, which one has CBS?

And by the time I realized it was Paramount Plus, which, sure, that's the one with CBS, it was over. and I had to go in and find my Paramount Plus password because who uses Paramount Plus. And it was just a whole. And I was like, I will pay you just to watch the last five minutes of this game. I couldn't do it. Wouldn't let me. Devastating. And as I said, back in the day, I just knew three channel numbers.

That was all I needed to know. I didn't have to figure a whole bunch of things out. Yeah. Do you have any sense of whether this is getting get better? You and I haven't talked about venue sports in a while, this supposed like smushing together of all these different companies rights. Well, that depends on what happens in the courts. they ever actually get to launch or whatever they do or if it would be any good if it actually did exist, which will we ever find out if we do not know. Also, I think there's some interesting

things going on because Amazon, for example, like with the NBA, I think in 2025 could be very interesting because Amazon is going to have a lot of NBA games directly. They also own a share of the whatever it's called now, fan dual sports networks that have some of these local broadcast rights. And in my area has the local broadcast rights. so maybe they can package it together so I can just use one app to watch most of the games. Unfortunately, the Pistons might be good

and then they'll be on national TV and I'll have to pay even more to watch more games. So just problems on top of problems. Well, at that point, then you have to pay for ESPN's multitude of streaming services. It's part of venue. It has ESPN Plus. It's the what's called flagship, right?

That's the thing that's supposed to just be ESPN on the internet. That's supposedly launching next year. Like, in a funny way, we were having conversations a few years ago about how a bunch of really old rights deals were slowing everything down, right? Because they had all been signed a decade ago. They were really focused on broadcast TV in particular. And so the idea that this stuff could be streamed and available widely didn't really exist. Now it feels like basically all of those deals have turned over. I think the NBA is probably the last one to turn over.

And that starts next year. big streaming shift. Like you said, Amazon's a big player now. A lot of stuff is moving to ESPN, which is doing a lot of streaming stuff. And now it feels like the holdup is the platforms, which can't figure out how to launch. They can't figure out what they're supposed to charge.

They can't figure out how to serve this stuff to this many people. Like, we should be in a moment where some streamer is like, we are going to exclusively stream the Super Bowl and it's going to be fine. Netflix should be able to do that. There are more people in America who have Netflix than anything else. like this should be possible and yet it isn't and everyone knows it's not possible. So we're in a weird moment now where the problem we used to have is no longer the problem and it's making very obvious this new problem that we have, which is that none of the platforms

are ready for this. It turns out that the problem is money and certain companies have lots of it and they're willing to spend it so the leagues are going to chase it and however they can. And what the leagues have found is that playing the networks off of each other or now the platforms off of each other and the networks and the various, interminglings of those is the way to get the highest bids to make the most money. And so now we're in for another 10 years or so of switching and swapping between apps. I really hate how aggressively I'm starting to root for Amazon because I think you're right that Amazon has this big idea of being like the one that puts it all together.

And I think in theory ESPN wants to be that and is doing some interesting stuff along those lines. but Disney just doesn't have the money to do that. But basically, like, the companies that could just buy all the sports rates, it's just kind of Amazon and Apple. And Apple, I don't think, is interested in playing that particular sports game. But Amazon, like, it could get as much as it wants, right? Like, it can afford all of it. And so...

They have the scale. They also have the scale to deliver it as bad as their apps tend to be. They can actually deliver a live stream. AWS does exist. Yeah, Thursday Night Football. all works. It's not as big as these, like, I would be interested to see 60 million people try to watch Prime Video, right? Like, again, it's, there is a, there is a matter of scale that we just haven't seen on streaming work anywhere yet. But, but yeah, I feel like if someone were going to

give us the dream back, it's probably going to be Amazon, which I make, I hate saying that out loud, even just that, that felt bad, that I'm like, gosh, I hope Amazon wins TV because that would be terrific. But it kind of feels like it. That's how dark the future has gotten. We're looking at Amazon and San Sabaas. Yeah, Andy Jassy. It's all up to you. Oh, brother. So what have you seen this year that gives you hope? Let's end on a high note here. I want to just say, we haven't talked about this on the show in a long time. I thought Peacock crushed the Olympics. When it comes to sports streaming, the thing that I was like, okay, internet sports TV is going to be cool was Peacock in the Olympics. All the sports, all the different ways to navigate. They had the gold zone thing.

They had the primetime thing. That was great. And I don't know how replicable that is for other sports, but that to me was when it was like, okay, the streaming era of sports might be great. It was there. It worked. The streams were consistent. The quality was high. I didn't feel like I was way behind. I didn't have to feel like I didn't feel like I had to watch a bunch of things that I didn't want to. I got a lot that I wanted. There were some things that could have been better. I felt like you know, when you were navigating through, like, archived events, when you wanted to watch something that already aired, it was harder than it needed to be. But I felt like they also made some concessions, perhaps, to make the viewing experience a little bit better. Like, if you jumped out of something, you jump back in, okay, so the ad doesn't play just again, the way that we've seen in previous years on other platforms.

Yeah. And I think there's some push and pull because I understand, hey, this platform needs to make money from this event. Got it. but I just want to watch it. I paid for it. I would like to watch it. Give me that. And they kind of cross that bar.

And that's where everyone else should be aiming at the minimum. You're a simple man of simple needs, Richard. Just show me the thing that I have clicked on, please. Yes. Fair enough. All right. Richard, thank you as always. Thank you.

All right, we got to take a break, and then we're going to come back, and we're going to talk about notebooks. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade no-code website builder used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back. So a few weeks ago, I started reading this book called The Notebook, a history of thinking on paper. It's by a guy named Roland Allen, and it traces like a thousand years of history of how people write on paper.

He makes this big case that paper is this incredibly critical invention in the history of the world, and that actually without paper. without notebooks. We wouldn't have modern capitalism. We wouldn't know nearly as much about history as we do. That actually a lot of the world that we live in is defined by the way that people wrote stuff down and what they wrote stuff down on. He tells a whole history of notebooks all the way through the Renaissance and all the way up to now and even in the future. If you listen to the show, you know that I love note-taking apps. I love thinking about how people write stuff down. I think the systems for all this. are fascinating, and this book was like catnip for me. So I asked Roland to come on the show and talk through some of the big ideas in his book and also why notebooks continue to survive in this increasingly digital world. It's a super fun conversation. I really enjoyed talking to him, and yes, there is more 12th century history in this episode than most, but we're going to go with it. So to start with Roland, I asked him to quickly recap the case that he makes that

paper is a hugely important invention in the history of the world and that without paper we might not have any of this. Here's what he said to that. Yeah, permanence is really why. For thousands of years, we've had different ways of writing things down as human beings. So you go back to, you can carve on stone. You can make little dents in clay tablets, which you then fire and dry out, and they're permanent, but they are clay tablets. So they're not super portable or practical. or robust. Then you have papyrus, papyrus, the reed product, which grows in Egypt. And you can write on that, you can draw on that.

But papyrus, it turns out, unless it's actually in an Egyptian tomb, completely dry, with no movement and nothing to disturb it, it will just force massively fall apart. It can't cope with any kind of damp or it can't really cope with being handled. So papyrus is handy, but it's not permanent. And then you have wax tablets, and these are beautiful things. They're amazing. Completely died out in Europe. But for about 2,000 years, this is how Europeans retained information, took notes,

wrote poems, agreed contracts, bills of sale, whatever, with a layer of wax on wood, which you would then scrape into with a little stylus. Now, obviously, that's not permanent. So it's very useful for being a poet's notebook, for instance, because you can wipe it over at the end of the day when you finish writing your poem. But for a business record, it's no good at all because you know, you have to know what you agreed, what you contracted. Then you have parchment. And parchment comes along a little bit later during the period of the Roman Empire, probably. And that's a really good writing material. It's very tough. It's completely indestructible.

And you can write on it beautifully, and you can also paint on it, if you like. So the illuminated manuscripts which we see, the Book of Kells and so on, these are all on parchment, and they're very beautiful. But the problem is, when you write on parchment with a pen, the ink sits on the surface and dries, which means you can scrape it off, which means that, again, it's not permanent. You can change it, you can affect the record, so it's no good for business. Paper turns up in Europe around the year 1240, 1250, and very quickly, a few people realize it's a game changer because anything which is written on paper with ink stays there. So you can have a contract.

You can keep a business record. You can do anything legal. You can have a deed, for instance, and you don't have to worry about it being forged. Yeah? And that's important. So paper is really important because it's permanent, and that leads to its very, very rapid adoption

in the business community in particular. Was that where it started? I was trying to match some of the timelines And going back through, it seems like if I have the timeline correct, there were two threads. There was kind of the people who use it for business and people who use it for recording things in their own personal lives. But it does seem like business became a real use case for notebooks first. Yeah, absolutely. 100%. And the analogy which you can very easily draw is with the modern computer.

that comes from IBM and it's businesses and governments which have it to begin with for the first how long, 30 years, maybe, 40 years and then you get people using it creatively and then you get people like jobs thinking you can have some fun with this thing you can play games on it but you can also be seriously creative

so now you have Pixar for instance and I don't think anyone at IBM in the 1940s was thinking that Pixar was going to happen looking back it seems inevitable that people would do something like that. And it's exactly the same kind of relationship with notebooks. You have businesses come to rely on notebooks utterly. They use them for everything. And therefore, notebooks get into everyone's hands, particularly in a culture like Italy, which at the time, Italy's the richest part of Europe,

but it's also where they invent banking, where they invent companies, where they invent accountancy, double-entry bookkeeping, limited liability partnerships, futures markets, all of these things which we know and love. And a lot of that, you talk about happens not sort of, that doesn't happen and then they put it down in notebooks. Like the existence of those things and notebooks and this new writing permanent technology go hand in hand. Absolutely. You can't do one without the other. But then of course, so they have to have these notebooks. And once they have to have them in the evening, they take them home. And then they do the fun stuff with them. And that's entirely accidental, I think. But, you know, thank God from my point of view,

it's given us all of this interesting literature and art and poetry. Yeah. So I confess, I am particularly interested in the fun stuff. So let's start there. I think the first thing I had written down in my notes was like, let's go back to Florence. And there's a word that starts of the Z that I can't pronounce. And it was, it was, my gut tells me it's pronounced Zibaldoni, but I could be wrong. You're dead right. Yeah. Yes. I, I, You just have to imagine yourself ordering a Zibaldoni in an Italian restaurant and you'll be fine. A type of notebook and also a beautiful croissant-like thing that I will like very much. Tell me what those were.

Talk a little bit about kind of how that spread. Okay, back to the restaurant. Zibaldoni seems to have been a word for salad, and that's exactly what it is. So it's a collection of lots of different things jumbled together. Now, this is a time before print. We're talking about 1,300, and it's Florence. And it's a time before print. So if you wanted to have any book or literature or poetry in your house,

you had to basically write it down yourself. Yeah? And therefore, Florence is a very business-like community. They're very entrepreneurial. Everyone's got their own little business. Therefore, everyone's got their business notebooks. They take them home in the evening. And if they hear a poem which they like,

or if they hear one of ESOP's fables is very popular, or a bit of Ovid, or a prayer, which is a poem. particularly resonant to them or a recipe. Very often they're writing down medicinal cures. Anything you want to keep written down in your house, you just write it down in your Zibaldoni. And it's a very personal notebook, but it's completely unsorted. So it's like a salad in this jumbled-up way. And they're brilliant because they're these windows into what Florentine people loved. So we know the poetry they like to read. We know the prayers that they wanted to remember. We know the stories that they like to tell. And we know what.

what they liked to eat when they had a headache, you know, all of this kind of information, because everyone in Florence at this time, who could read or write, which was most of them, unusually, they kept a Zibaldoni. And it was a really strange local thing, but it was so fun. I also get the sense that folks back then were reckoning with the same thing people reckon with now, which is like, what do I do with any of this? And this is sort of the eternal question of notebooks, right, is you write a bunch of stuff down, you collect all this stuff, and as a historical artifact, especially in aggregate, it's very cool, right? You get a sense of what people were doing in a community. But if I'm a person in Florence in the 1300s keeping one of these,

what am I doing with it day to day? What's going to happen to these notebooks? Are they thinking about like the grand sweep of history and their responsibility to write this stuff down? Like, what was the point of these notebooks? So the Zeweld only, the only point was fun. They weren't thinking about the grand sweep of history, but they knew that they were a bit precious because they would leave them in their wills. So this is one of the ways we know how many people had them, because the wills often survive.

And also you see these little dedications and then someone will start their Zibaldoni, then they'll leave it to their son. And then the son will have an argument on the pages of the Zibaldoni with his brother saying, oh, no, Dad left it to me, actually. So you have these little bickering. And you can see that sometimes they pass down three generations

and that people maintain them because the handwriting changes. So that's one thing. So Zibaldonia, they're always for fun, but people definitely know that they have a value. The other thing that they also start doing is viewing their family as a kind of business and then keeping what they would call a Libre de Familia, a recordanza, is the other word for it, where they keep a family record, which is essentially birth, death, marriages, investments. You know, we bought this house.

I invested in this company. My daughter got married. my son died, my grandson was born, he was baptized, etc. And they're very business-like. You wouldn't call them diaries because there's no emotion in there. There's no happiness or sadness. But they just record the central most important events of a family's life. And then that would get passed down through the generations as well.

But that's more viewing your family in a kind of quite serious business-like way. If you were at a grammar school in the, say, 1,500, 1600s in Europe, you were expected to keep a commonplace book in a very rigorous way, and that was a very formal kind of thing. But that was educational. No one ever really did that for fun, because it's such hard work. It's a real effort and it's study. But I think that outside of school, you have people like Leonardo who would just draw all over the place.

You have people who doodle, you have people who write very intimate personal diaries, people who write very formal ones, people who write about their relationship with God. God, you know, there's no hard and fast rules. Okay. And that feels like the thing that lingers most over time is that everybody is perpetually finding new ways to fill up a notebook. Yeah. Kind of more chaotic over time, too.

Everybody gets weirder and weirder about notebooks. Da Vinci is an interesting one. You mentioned him, and obviously, I would say you've obviously done more research on this than I have, but I would say Leonardo da Vinci's notebooks. probably history's most famous notebooks, fair to say? Yeah, I would say so. Okay. Those ones, when I was telling people that I was writing history of notebook and they were looking baffled, I would go, you know, Leonardo.

You're right. Well, one thing I thought was really interesting in your telling of his story was that he did not seem to imagine that his notebooks would eventually become wildly famous. And the idea that these were for public consumption was kind of a thing that happened much later. The notebooks were very personal and very individual. How did that change come about? At what point did people start writing notebooks, even in some of the styles that you're talking about, thinking about other people?

Very, very late in the day, I would say. I think what's interesting, Leonardo's notebooks are fascinating for two reasons, I think, very far apart in time. Firstly, because they're an amazing record of his thoughts, his researchers, his explorations, and his personality up to a point. So that period around the year 1500, wow, you know, there was something really incredible going on there. And then basically, they just vanish into aristocrats libraries, you know, and no one reads them. No one, they probably pull them off the shelf and just look at them as a curiosity.

No one studies them at all until the 1890s, when a German guy called Richter goes around Europe, he looks at them all, he transcribes them, he researches, he writes about them, and then for the first time, 400 years nearly after Leonardo dies, people actually realize, oh, he wasn't just a good painter. He was also all of these other kinds of genius as well, because he was just known as a painter up to that point. And then, and I think it is a direct result of the publication of Leonardo's notebooks and people understanding that there's this process behind his genius. Then everyone else starts taking their notebooks much more seriously. So Picasso, for instance, he starts painting in the 1890s at exactly the same time or learns how to paint. He's a boy. And he, for instance, took his sketchbooks incredibly seriously. He never gave them away. He never lost them. He kept them filed away in boxes in his house in the south of France.

And they were numbered, cataloged, ordered. He knew that his sketchbooks were really important. Whereas painters 100 years before him seems to have been a very casual relationship. or rather they themselves used their notebooks, but they had no sense that anyone else would ever find them interesting. So, yeah, I think there's definitely a change, and I think that Leonardo sort of accidentally, 400 years after his death, prompts it, yeah.

And to the extent, you know, if any kind of well-known writer now will sell their papers to the University of Austin, for instance, you know, collects writer's notebooks, and it will pay good money for them. 150 years ago, you know, universities were not doing that. They wouldn't have seen the value. Do you think that changes the way we look at those notebooks now? I mean, I think about even go back to Florence. Like, you think about those as an important record of real life in a way that as soon as people become self-conscious that someone else might see their notebooks, it sort of ceases to be a record of real life. It becomes an Instagram version of real life where everything is, maybe subtly, self-consciously changed to be for public consumption in a way that, I don't know, like we think about notebooks as these intensely private things, but as soon as you understand that

someone else might see it, I wonder if it changes what that thing is. Oh, when it comes to diary writing in particular, so any number of published diaries, you can tell were written with publication in mind. I write a diary every day, and I don't expect that anyone else will ever read it. And it's certainly never going to be published. And it's, I think you're right, it's more intimate and it's, you know, it's pretty uncensored, unfiltered. But then you have the Tony Blair's of this world whose diaries have published, I think. Sure.

And that's a completely different cattle of fish. Yeah. And I guess that's okay. Both of those things can exist, but they are very different things. Yeah. Yeah, very definitely, yeah. Okay. I am really curious about how you as a person in a digital world came to think about notebooks.

Because again, there is such a, there's so much about that history that A, feels very modern. Like we're talking about the same kinds of things now. And like you said, using computers for the same kinds of things that people were using notebooks for 800 years ago. But I wonder if you're going through and you have to spend time thinking about the thing itself. and like you said, paper is this crucially important invention. And if we had invented computers in 1,200 instead of inventing paper, would it have gone roughly the same way? Or is there something about that thing and that time and that invention

that made it different from even everything that came after? I think up to a point the invention makes the time, you know. You said to me very confidently that we live in a digital world, you know and and of course you are right yeah we do definitely live in the digital world we're speaking to each other you know via a digital link up and surrounded by amazing technology I would also if I was being contrarian say to you you're living in a notebook world because capitalism which gives us all of what we see around us that for 600 years was entirely based in notebooks we would call them ledgers or account books

but it was an entirely notebook-based system until the first IBM machines. And that was invented at the same time as, or roughly speaking, the same time as the notebook arrives in Europe, in that place, in Italy, around the year 1300. They invent all of the mechanisms of capitalism. So really, we are in that world as much as we're in the digital world. But yeah, and there is definitely a sense of you have an invention, and then it shapes the world that you live in, but in unexpected, surprising, fun, hopefully, ways.

No one saw that Twitter was coming 10 years before Twitter arrived. And then suddenly it's everywhere, and then suddenly it's nowhere again, you know. So, who knows. So, okay, let's fast forward a bunch in history to not now, but close to now. And I want to talk about the bullet journal. And the reason I wanted to start with Zibaldoni is that I feel like you can draw a straight line from that thing in Florence 800 years ago to the bullet journal phenomenon of today. Like a dead straight line through almost a millennium of time.

How is that possible? Like, why do you think this thing, this idea of how we want to record our lives in a physical notebook, has been so insistently persistent over so many things? centuries. It's a really great simple, minimal tool, I think. With any kind of technology, there's a, or any kind of invention, there's a real virtue to simplicity, you know. So your knife and fork or your chopsticks, chopsticks are great because they're minimal. You can't, once you've pictured them, you've invented them once, you cannot improve on them. And a notebook, I think, is a lot like that. It came to a kind of, very quickly, it became kind of perfect in terms

if it's how practical it was, how cheap it was, how available it was to everyone. And you can't really improve on that as a bit of technology, you know, because, and then people will use it in different ways over history. And bullet journals are, I think, a really good example of how you can take this really simple thing and just use it in a slightly new way, and suddenly it opens possibilities for people which they never appreciated before. Like, there are a lot of people who's genuinely, there are a surprising number of people whose lives have really been improved by doing bullet points to organize their life, and it kind of helps them to rationalize things and make proper decisions and act more intentionally

and thereby live happier lives. I think I find it constantly incredible how this really simple thing can be reinvented so regularly. But you're right, there is a continuous line all the way through. I think it's just because it's incredibly simple, and it doesn't require batteries, it doesn't require system updates. If you drop it, it doesn't break. What was it that was interesting to you about the bullet journal and its history? Why did that jump out to you as a thing worth adding to this history? It was important to me because, firstly, because it was a real thing.

It was a real trend, you know, when I was starting to think about the book. And it gave me sort of confidence that there was going to be an appetite of people who were interested in this stuff, which is really key in terms of building my confidence. And then what was interesting was I've never bullet journaled myself. I've never done the Rider Carol method. But I got his book and then I spoke to him, interviewed him, and he's really thought about it quite deeply. And he's thought about the implications of writing stuff down

and of organizing your thoughts on the page and having this notebook which you carry everywhere and which you write everything down on. And that kind of encouraged me to think deep. about it too. You know, he's taken it very seriously for a long time. And he's thought about it in a particular way, and I've got a more historical angle, and I think about it in different ways, but they're completely compatible. But just the fact that he had taken it seriously, I found really interesting. And hence giving him a chapter, I think, was, you know, kind of fair, because he was

really about the only person who had written a book about notebooking, you know, before I did. So, and he also had some really interesting things to say about notebooks which aren't bullet journals. He was really inspired, for instance, by kind of artist's scrapbooks and sort of collages and sketchbooks, which were sort of more than sketchbooks, which had elements of diary in them. So not pure bullet journal stuff, but stuff which is a really interesting expression of your experience. And Ryder definitely put me onto those things. Why do you think that way of thinking about notebooking and journaling and keeping track of your life lagged so much the business side of things, which as you chart in the book got really systematized and really specific. And like we built capitalism on top of these things, right?

Like double entry accounting became a worldwide phenomenon and people understood how to do it. And there were kind of accepted rules on how to keep these kinds of notebooks. but in people doing it in their own lives, like you said, there have been bits and pieces of this over time, but somebody like writer Carroll comes along hundreds of years later and really thinks, like, okay, how can I break this thing down into sort of understandable, repeatable pieces? That just happened much later.

Why do you think that is? Honestly, I have no idea. There are questions you can't answer. I mean, another big question, which I just have no idea, is why did people start writing? diaries? Or rather, why did they start writing diaries in England in around the year 1570, when they'd never done them anywhere else in the world before? I've looked really hard trying to find out what was so special about England at that time, which made people start to keep a diary, like you would, an emotional diary of how they felt about the day's events. Sorry, not very good

podcast material. I'm making a baffled expression. Listen to the picture of that. I'm I have no idea. And I think my answer to your question is, it's a good question. I have no idea. Yeah. It's, I have a theory. And it's based on nothing, but it's a theory. And I'm going to give you my theory as a way of asking you another question, which I also have about this. I'm here for it. I think as especially as we became more enmeshed with digital tools, life took on like a new level of informational chaos. There is just more stuff. coming at us now than there ever has been. And that's true in our professional lives, but it's also true in our personal lives, I think, in a new way in the last, I don't know, several decades, that there's just more happening around you and to you all the time. And we're still reckoning with that as people, right? This question of like, we understand what is

going on in the world in a way that we are like evolutionarily not equipped to do. And what do we do with that? All these really interesting questions, but I think one thing that I see all the time is people crave systems. There is this idea that if I can just find a way to make this make sense, everything will be better, right? And I think, and you mentioned the getting things done method in the book also. And I think that speaks to the same thing where it's like, there is this swirling mass of stuff in my life. And if you can just tell me where to put it and how, my brain will get quieter. And I think that's meaningful to people. And again, there is a definite sort of we are people of our time and technology thing that is all kind of swirling together there. But I feel like when I

see people who like really love bullet journal, what it says is like the world is insane and messy, but I have made this thing that is like my world and it is beautiful and looks like me. And it just feels good. And it's why like people get mad at all the bullet journalers who are like spending all of their time organizing their pages and not time getting stuff done. And it's like, no, the organizing the pages is actually the point of the thing. As much as anything else. It's taking control. Right. Like making the notebook is the point. And I feel like that was one of the things that just keeps coming up throughout history in your book is like the act of making the thing is as much the point as anything else. Going back and reviewing it is fine, doing stuff with what you put in, it is fine. But the act of making the notebook

in the first place is maybe the most important part of the whole process. And I feel like there's so much of that happening right now that we need structure around that more than ever. That's just a theory. That's it. And my answer to that is yes. That's the short answer. Slightly more involved example to sort of back up what you said. So I have a day job and I do this.

I write books and talk to people about it. And so the level of inputs into my life in terms of communication and things flying. at me from different directions. I've got two email addresses. I've got the Instagram. I've got the Twitter, which I'm switching off shortly, but I've got the Facebook. I've got WhatsApp on the phone, et cetera, et cetera. It just goes on. And that's before I'm in a room with anyone actually talking to them face to face. And my way of dealing with this is to write a diary, yeah? So at the end of the day, I will put it all down in here and it's under control, as you say. And I'm I've turned this ephemeral, non-stop flow of craziness, most of which is completely trivial,

but has to be managed somehow. And I've just turned it into a calm thing on the page. Yeah, I completely agree. And as to how that makes me feel, the analogy I use is it's like having a shower. Yeah? Shows are lovely. Just great. I like to have a shower every day.

but if I can't, if I have to go a day without, that's fine. No one really minds. Two days without, it's, you know, mentally I start to smell. And that's what I'm like with the diary. That's really good. I can miss a day. I can't miss two days. I start to smell mentally.

And it really cleans me out. Sort of that process of just dumping it on the page really, really is refreshing and cleansing in that sense. Yeah, I like that a lot. Why do you think we haven't found a way to do that digital, in the way that is satisfying and valuable in the same way that we have in notebooks. Because like, we pretty much do business on computers now. There's not a lot of paper notebooks out there responsible for how capitalism runs anymore.

But I think I am someone who has tried every note-taking app on planet Earth. I obsessively use them. I build these systems. And overwhelmingly the ones that feel the best. And as I talk to people, the answer is you try them all and you eventually just get a nice notebook and a pen and you start filling it. And there is something about that that we have not replaced. And I'm curious if you have thoughts on why it has been so hard to replace. I have lots of thoughts.

I'm going to give you the deepest one because I think this is, I think your listener can cope with a sort of high level bit of neurobiology. So when you write on a notebook page, and they've done this with MRI scans and the very clever. a way of using multiple menorice scans called voxel-based morphometry when you can look at multiple brains at once. When you write in a notebook, you use different parts of the brain to when you type or when you write something on your phone or your tablet. And one of the different parts you use is the hippocampus. Now this is right in the bottom of the brain and it's your mental map. So when you drive to your place of work, you're using your hippocampus. When you know, where the coffee cups are in your kitchen, you're using the hippocampus.

Taxi drivers, cab drivers, have amazingly well-developed hippocampi. It was an early case study in brain plasticity, actually. Right. So this is very interesting. Why do you engage your hippocampus when you're writing in a notebook? And it's because your notebook is a place, right? And it has its own geography. So when you write things on the pages of a notebook, you remember, or I certainly tend to

remember, oh, that was on the left-hand side at the top. Oh, that was, I wrote that in blue. somewhere. Now that was at the back of the notebook, that was at the front. And I'm thinking about the notebook in quite a different way to how I think about a digital note. And what they think, the people who research this, is that when you scroll or you carry on writing and what you've written on a screen just scrolls up, up, up, up, top of the page and vanishes off the top of your screen, it just vanishes. It has no place in the geography of your lived experience, unlike stuff which you write down in a notebook page. So I've got my yellow notebook, and I know that if I

open it halfway through, roughly speaking, I'm going to find what happened in July. And I can't do that with notes I've made on an iPad, just because my brain hasn't thought about them in that geographic way. So that's one reason why. You feel more comfortable, and you navigate those notes more happily than you do when they're digital. Other reasons are to do with, I think, the sort of the sensory experience of writing, fingers on the page. the pen in your hand, being a slightly richer experience. It's more difficult as well. It's very easy to type. You can type, you could, roughly speaking, type everything I said to you right now. You'd get it all pretty much down. You can't do that with a pen and ink. You have to filter,

you have to parse the ideas, you have to process them and paraphrase, and that gives you a much richer, deeper understanding of what you are actually listening to. You can type whatever I say, without actually listening to what I'm saying at all, but to write it down, you have to paraphrase it and therefore you have to actually interact with the ideas. So this is why teachers and academics much prefer their students to write notes rather than to type them.

So those are a couple of answers. Do you think there's a marriage there that we can make work? I mean, I keep thinking about you, you start the book with Moleskin, which is probably the first notebook most people think of when they think of notebooks. And Moleskin for years has been building digital tools.

And they have a really beautiful calendar app. They have a really interesting journaling system. It's all very good. Nobody cares about it the way that they care about physical moleskin notebooks. And, you know, there's this phase for a long time of like maybe we're

going to do smart pens where I'll write in a notebook, but it will transcribe it digitally. And now there are things that are like, okay, you can write with a pen, but it's on your iPad, and it will recognize the text and make something out of it. And It feels like we're poking at this thing where the act that you're describing, I think, is absolutely the best one. But having a notebook that is a bunch of words on a page that sits on my bookshelf waiting for me to do something with it,

feels like it's missing something. Like there is a best of both worlds here that I think I desperately want to exist. And I don't know, maybe it just doesn't and can't and won't. But I am curious, like, do you think we can marry those two things? I'm not going to say never. I've not seen it done yet in a way which I think some people, that sort of the moleskin magic paper, the dotted paper, whatever, they make it work for them and good luck. And that's great. And some people also manage to make those kind of posh tablets, the remarkable tablets work in a similar way.

And again, go you. Personally, I haven't ever managed to. Okay, last thing. and then I will truly let you go. Tell me just briefly about Moleskin and why you start the book with Moleskin, I want to end our podcast with Moleskin. Why is Moleskin so ascendant?

What is it about this company and this thing that has made Moleskin, the brand, the notebook, the thing in our sort of modern world? It's the complete refinement. She took, and I say she, Maria Segre Bondi, who was the woman who,

conceived the Moleskin notebook who took the very simple basic notebook that we knew, she added to it, she added this little elastic strap, the pocket in the back, the little page at the front saying, if you find this notebook, please return it to. She added all of these things to a very minimal product, and she somehow made it seem even more minimal, right? So, and the analogy I make, she made it minimal and she made it black, and that was the most Italian thing you could do. It's like pearsall sunglasses, Prada little black dress, espresso.

You know, that's what they do. They make it minimal and black. And she did that. And somehow, she just, she tricked us, if you like.

She fooled us. And thank God that she did. I wouldn't have written this book if it wasn't for Moleskins, I think, because she made us look again at this simple notebook and think of it as something

which had some material value that had some material beauty and could be there for inspiring in a way that your school exercise book couldn't be. So she's, from that point of view, she's my heroine creatively. She's also, for me, a figure of awe because if you look at Moleskins numbers, the company's numbers through history, that company's profit margin is ridiculous.

It's like 43% profit every year, gross profit, and it's a manufacturing company. No company does that. You know, how did they do it? So I take my hat off to her, and I can forget quite easily about all of the ridiculous collaborations with Evernote and Adobe and things like that. Yeah, listen, you've got to do some weird stuff. Because the key product is amazing. Yeah.

Well, and to that point, actually, one of the things you say kind of as an aside in the book is that there are a million other notebooks that are like, they give you ideas and prompts and they put stuff inside and they're like, this one's for your recipes. This one is for your travels. And what actually turns out to be the case is nobody wants that. They want the blank one. And I think that is like as a perfect metaphor for. all of this, that just carries with me through the whole thing. You can make it, whatever you want, you can guss it up, and people will want the blank one because then they can do what they want with it. And there's something very powerful in that. Yeah. Freedom. Yeah. I mean, that's the story of

the notebook, right? It is permanence and it's freedom in very real ways. Lovely. Yes. I'll take that. Can I can I have that? Yeah, I'll take that. All right. We've got to take one more break, and then we're going to come back and take a question from the Vergecast hotline. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Grammarly. You don't need reminding that the world moves fast. But work today requires clear communication, and when every message counts, sounding rushed or generic can be getting lost in the shuffle.

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you don't have to sound like everyone else. With Gramerly, you never will. Download Grammarly for free atgrammerly.com. That's Grammarly.com. All right, we're back. Let's get to the hotline. As always, the number is 866-Vorge11. The email is Vergecast at theverge.com.

Please send us all of your questions. We have a couple of specific hotline-y things we're going to do in the next couple of months before the end of the year. So keep an eye on our socials. We'll mention it on this show. But all of your questions, send them to the hotline. We love it.

This week, like I mentioned, we have something slightly different. We got a question that sent our producer will pour down a pretty wild rabbit hole inside the TikTok shop. So here, let me just play you the question, and then Will's going to take it away. Here we go. Everyone, this is Sean from Ohio. I know that Nilai specifically hates carplay, but one thing I've been saying pop up on TikTok a bunch lately is these carplay adaptable screens that they plug into your car somehow. And it's kind of like a retrofit for old vehicles

to use CarPlay or Android Auto. I've been seeing them all over TikTok lately. I don't know if this is apronware, if this is real, until the other day I saw one out in the wild in a car next to me, and I wanted to wave them down and ask them if it's good or not. So wondering if you guys think they're good, is this just crazy T-Mood technology or whatever? Anyways, love to hear your opinion.

Thanks. Bye. So I am the proud owner of a 2006 Toyota Prius, and I would love to have CarPlay. So as soon as I heard this hotline question, I went on TikTok and I just searched for CarPlay screen. And I found exactly what our listener, Sean, was looking at. If you're like me and you have a much older car that you want to feel more expensive, you need this portable Apple CarPlay.

Once you connect it to the CarPlay, it has your phone, your messages, all your different apps on there as well. And it's a great price. Don't sleep on this. Shop at the link below. you could save yourself hundreds of dollars. There are at least a couple of different models for sale on the shop. The one I saw the most was made by Hi-H-I-E-H-A.

It's a seven-inch color touchscreen. It comes with a couple of different mounting options for your car, and they throw in a backup camera. And all of that is $37, allegedly marked down from 120, which is a very suspicious markdown. I also found a lot of really similar listings for similar products, similar prices, similar markdowns. I've never bought anything on TikTok.

It was all really overwhelming and all a little bit sketchy feeling. So, Sean, I completely understand your feeling of, is this real? Is this not real? You know, it all kind of reminded me of the, you know, page seven of an Amazon search result page for a gadget. But it's $37. That is an amount of money that the verge can put on the line on your behalf. So I ordered it.

Okay. I got my CarPlay screen in the mail. The brand on the box is Uni-O-Ni, but it says from TikTok Incorporated. It came very quickly. Let's open it up. My first impressions of it, 7 inches is actually a pretty big screen. It kind of has an iPad mini vibe to it. It seems solid enough.

It comes with a power cable that goes out to a cigarette lighter, or it's a USBC, if you happen to have that. There's an ox cable that it comes with. It's got the backup camera and the wiring, and two different suction or adhesive mounting options for your dashboard. The screen itself is kind of heavy, and the mounts are pretty cheap plastic, so I was a little bit worried about how well it was going to,

mount stably to the dashboard, but I gave it a shot. Let's figure out where to put this thing. One tricky thing for me was just figuring out where to put it. Like, my Prius has a screen, and I need that for the existing backup camera and for AC and for other stuff that I don't have physical buttons for. So it needs to be a second screen that I put on the dash somewhere that is not going to block my view of the road. or my view of the speedometer, et cetera, et cetera.

Mounting itself turned out to be fine. The suction and the adhesive worked out well. And once I turned the car on, the screen worked fine. Okay, it's turning on. I've got options for CarPlay, Android Auto, phone link, and audio output. Setup was really easy. It was reasonably bright and responsive. I don't know.

It was a little laggy, a little bit washing. out, but again, $37. And for what it's worth, it is a ton better than my existing Prius screen. Head south on 30th Avenue Southwest, towards Southwest Cambridge Street. I drove around with it for a while, and I don't know, it did all the carplay things. Google Maps is amazing on a much larger screen if you're used to a phone that's in a holster on your dashboard. It was easy to see texts when I was parked.

There's a lot of little perks to it. audio was a little bit more complicated. It comes with a bunch of options to send audio. One, there's a standard ox jack, which for me means a long, awkward, sneaking cable to the port in my car. You can use Bluetooth, which is just horrible on my Prius, so that's a no. You can send audio to FM radio, which I kind of love and is an amazing throwback. Or it does have an internal speaker, which is crappy, but it's actually fine. for directions, if that's the only thing you need the audio for.

And the light, turn right onto 26th Avenue Southwest. And by the way, if you ever wanted to know what the Vergecast would sound like on FM radio, here you go. Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcasts of quantified REM cycles. So like I said, I drove around for an afternoon with it. And there were things I struggled with, but they don't actually have much to do with the device itself. The screen is cheap, but it's functional. But a couple things stood out. The first thing is, to get the most out of it, I would need to

install it on my dashboard, and then I'd need to snake the power to the cigarette lighter in one part of the car, and then snake the audio cable to the ox port in another part of the car. And if I wanted the backup camera, I'd have to wire that to the brake light and to the screen. It's all just a lot of cable management. Like, you're putting a screen in the car where there wasn't one, or in my case, finding a place for a second screen, which is all doable, but it's not something that TikToks show you, because, you know, they're all trying to sell you this thing. Like, if I did a TikTok review, 100% of it would just be really awkward cable management. And then the other thing that I realized all at once as I was driving down the street is that, oh, wait, I live in a

neighborhood where car break-ins happen kind of a lot. And I now have what, looks like an iPad mini just sitting on my dashboard at all times. Like, this thing 100% is going to get stolen at some point, which, again, is not a knock on the screen itself, and it might not be a concern for you where you live. But it's kind of a deal breaker for me, because there's no way this thing is worth a broken window. So, Sean, what are we to make of this thing? Well, at a really basic level, it does what it claims to do.

I don't know how long it will last. It's certainly really cheap. But it all works. It gives you car play in your car if you didn't have it before. And the rest of it is just up to you to make work with your car. For me, I've always been jealous of people with car play, but now I'm faced with this question, is this actually better than just putting my phone in a holster on the dashboard? And I think my answer is no, honestly, but your answer might be different. All right, that is it for The Vergecast today. Thank you to everyone who was on the show, and thank you, as always, for listening. There's lots more on everything we talked about from all the Jake Paul, Mike Tyson, Netflix stuff, to Roland Allen's book, to all the stuff about the TikTok shop on Theverge.com.

I'll put a lot of links in the show notes. There are a lot of links this week. But as always, read theverge.com. It's good website. And if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other good ideas of notebooks that I should buy, you can always email us at vergecast at the birch.com or call the hotline 866 Verge 1-1. Again, we have some fun stuff coming for the hotline in the next few weeks, so keep an eye on our socials. Keep it locked here.

We'll keep you posted. This show is produced by Liam James, Willpore, and Eric Gomez. The Vergecast is a Verge production and part of the Vox Media Podcast Network. Neelai and I will be back on Friday to talk about all the news happening this week, all the new gadgets, all the wild, stuff with the FCC, and maybe we will have named show and tell by then, but frankly, I wouldn't bet on it. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.