The Vergecast - Microsoft Build 2020, Elon Musk's factory play, and Joe Rogan moves to Spotify

Episode Date: May 22, 2020

It’s Friday, which means there’s a new episode of The Vergecast to fill you in on all of the news from this week. Join Nilay, Dieter, and a rotation of other editors for everything that you need to know. The three topics covered this week are: Microsoft’s Build developer conference Elon Musk’s... active month Spotify getting exclusive streaming rights to The Joe Rogan Experience podcast During the first part of the show, Verge senior editor Tom Warren joins Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn to discuss what was announced at Microsoft Build 2020 and what’s next for Windows software. Microsoft Lists is a new app designed for Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document is Google Docs on steroids Microsoft to unify Windows desktop and UWP apps with new Project Reunion Microsoft’s new PowerToys Run launcher for Windows 10 is now available to download Microsoft Edge is getting a new sidebar search feature and Pinterest integration Microsoft is bringing Linux GUI apps to Windows 10 Microsoft’s new Windows Package Manager is already better than the Windows Store Microsoft Surface Earbuds review: comfort at a cost Microsoft Surface Go 2 review: don’t push it First look: Microsoft’s 13.5-inch Surface Book 3 A little over 35 minutes into the show, Verge deputy editor Elizabeth Lopatto updates us on Elon Musk’s latest endeavors, including his battle with Alameda County over opening his factory, his protests against lockdown orders, and SpaceX’s upcoming Crew Dragon spacecraft launch. Elon Musk’s battle to reopen Tesla’s Fremont plant may shape his legacy Tesla drops its lawsuit against Alameda County over lockdown order Elon Musk is playing Twitter footsie with the fringe right Here’s why Elon Musk keeps raising the price of Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ option Elon Musk’s Boring Company finishes digging Las Vegas tunnels Meet the first NASA astronauts SpaceX will launch into orbit Last but not least, senior reporter Ashley Carman stops by to explain the importance of Spotify landing The Joe Rogan Experience podcast as an exclusive. Joe Rogan’s podcast is becoming a Spotify exclusive It just took $700 million or so to put Spotify on top of the podcasting world Google suspended a popular Android podcast app because it catalogs COVID-19 content There’s a whole lot more discussed in this episode, so listen here or in your preferred podcast player to hear it all. Other stories discussed in this episode: Mark Zuckerberg on taking his massive workforce remote Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle iPhone photos Amazon reportedly delays Prime Day until September as it works to restore normal shipping Here’s how NYC is using powerful UV light to kill the coronavirus on subways and buses The FCC has received hundreds of complaints about carriers’ coronavirus pledge Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This week on the Vergecast, Tom Warren joins us to talk about all the news from Microsoft Build. Liz Lapado joins us to talk about this week in Elon. It was a week in Elon. And Ashley Carmen joins us to talk about Spotify's big investment in the podcast wars. That's coming up on the Vergecast. 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 and your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Vergecast. 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. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast. That sounds more like a horror movie than I want, so pretend I said something better. Hi, I'm Neal. I'm your friend. Deeter Bone is here.

Howdy, howdy. I'm in my living room instead of in a closet today. I'm very excited. It's good. You sound roomier. We all need to get out. We're going to see if we can take some of the reverb off and post. So stay tuned for that.

I'm going to sound like a robot by the end of it. I'm really excited. Here's what we'll do. We'll have Andrew do that first part without any processing. Uh-huh. Andrew then process it from now. Yeah. Right?

And then we'll see poor Andrew. A live test of Andrews. Just sound like Darth Punk. Tom Warren is here. Hello, Tom. Hello there. Tom's here to talk about build, which happened this week. My stuff build.

Lots of news from that. We're going to have Liz Lapado on to do this week in Elon. Just a lot of Elon happening this May. And then Ashley Carmen is going to join us at the end to talk about the enormous Spotify podcasting moves that are happening. So, a pack show. As always, I just want to start with some quick updates on the pandemic and the coronavirus. There's a lot going on.

We interviewed Sundar Patry this week. It's in the feed. We published out on Tuesday. We obviously asked Sundar about the web. website and the flow chart. He gave a very diplomatic answer, I will say. Very, very diplomatic answer. But that said, it is week 10. It is 10 weeks since Trump and his team held up the flow chart and promised a website where I knew we get tested. I'm just going to keep counting. I'm going to be counting forever. We're going to be listening to show five years from now. It's all over.

I'm going to say it's week 4,000. There's still no flow chart website. That said, it is week 10. We're keeping track. Sooner did tell us that Verily is in 13 states. They have 86 sites. it's not enough. But they're working on it. He said it has gone slower than they anticipated, which is interesting. Big week for interviews on the verge. Obviously, Deeter and I interviewed Sundar Pichai. Casey Newton interviewed Mark Zuckerberg.

Facebook is taking tens of thousands of employees and moving to remote first work. They can all work from home. So interview about how he's going to manage that. One thing both Sundar and Zuckerberg said to us, which is interesting, and everyone should think about it, when you first go and you end up working from home, in this moment, everyone kind of knew what to do. They were just finishing their projects. The big question is when you have to do new stuff.

So Casey talked to Zuck about that. We talked to Sundar about that. Go check out that interview. It's super interesting. Just some other stuff. Like I said, it's second order of virus stories now. Monica Chin wrote a great story. A bunch of high school students took their AP exams remotely to, you know,

the hand wrote their answers on the AP tests. Then they took pictures of their answers and tried to submit them to the server. the server didn't tell them anything that was going to wrong and crashed out. And they ran out of time in the window to submit the answers. It's because the college ward that administers the AP test didn't support HGIC photos, which is the default on the iPhone. So all these students have to retake their tests in three weeks, which is just horrible. The company's statement on this is, quote, we share the deep disappointment of students who are unable to submit responses. It's like, yeah, it's like if somebody punches you in the face, they're like, I should.

share the deep disappointment that you feel right now about the bruise underneath your eye. Like, what? It is very bad. We actually have a follow-up in H-E-E-S-C coming because it's just sort of like, I never think about it. I do not think about the fact that my phone takes H-EIC photos except when we are reviewing another phone and we do phone, like, photo comparisons, and I've got like one set of photos for an iPhone that is in some wacky format I can't share.

And I'm always like, that's an edge case. No one else. I guess not. So it turns out many people have a lot of feelings about HAC and the patents underneath it. We're going to follow up a story on that. It's not really, we went from like a virus story to straight up a verge story. But what else we're here for? Amazon is delaying Prime Day until September as it works on restoring normal shipping speeds.

Another second order pandemic story. We followed up, Annie Hawkins followed up on how New York City is going to use powerful UV lights on the subways and buses to kill the virus as a cleaning strategy. I think that is a very interesting use of technology. And lastly, we always pay attention to the FCC. You might recall that at the sort of beginning of all this FCC chairman of Jeep Pi did something called the Keep America Connected Pledge, where he just sort of asked ISPs to promise that they would have lower prices for a disadvantage people, that they wouldn't cancel service if you don't pay a bunch of stuff. All voluntary. Everybody signed up for it. The FCC has received hundreds of complaints about this pledge not being met from carriers around the country.

That is an ongoing story. As the pandemic progresses and more and more people unemployed, having connectivity, I think, as we all know, more important than ever, how is the FCC going to respond to pressure now from Congress to actually turn this from a voluntary thing to something with teeth? Ongoing story, we're tracking it. Well, so, I mean, doesn't the FCC want to give all power to do that to the FTC? It's really unclear if the FCC thinks anyone should have this power. I think the answer is they screwed up by asking this to be voluntary. They should have bound all of these carriers by the force of pinky swear, and then everything would be fine.

It would have had more weight than the web page that they did put up. We'll see. Pye wants to be seen as a guy who does stuff, but he also wants to be a guy who totally devolves all power from the government. Those are incompatible ideas. I don't know if he's figured it out yet. You can't be the hero and also do nothing. We'll see.

Well, we'll just see what happens there. Anyway, that's the list of virus stories. There's a lot going this week. There's way more coverage, including all of Verge Sciences, great coverage on the site. There are actually way more stories about these second order effects on the site. But a lot going on this week, so I just wanted to focus on that list. All right, Tom. Yes.

Microsoft Build happened this week. It was a virtual event. They actually split up sort of the product announcements. We covered all the surface stuff last week. This was sort of the developer event. Tell us about it. Yeah. So obviously they couldn't hold it in Seattle this year.

So they did something kind of new. And it was kind of like, I know, it's kind of like a TV show. That's kind of how they modeled it on. So think of like that modern family episode where it was all shot on smartphones and all that sort of stuff. That's what they modeled exactly on. So it's kind of like this intimate, I'm in your ear, you know, I'm a developer, you're a developer. We're all developers sort of thing. That was their big thing.

Like, let's just focus on developers again. What did you think of it? I thought the presentation was genius. It felt like that TV show, Modern Family episode, but it also sort of felt like sort of like a little bit of like sometimes you were just like in a teleconference. You were just having a meeting. They felt like you jumped on like the Microsoft Teams meeting

and you were like chatting to them. But you weren't you weren't chatting to them, but they were like talking to you. You know, like. Yeah, like it was so much better than I think One Plus tried to do a full on keynote on like a black void stage and it just was super awkward. So I don't know.

I don't know if Apple and Google, well, Google's just doing like, some kind of Android presentation. We saw that teaser with George Taked. But I don't know if Apple is going to have the, I don't know, if they're going to want to think as creative as Microsoft did. I thought it was incredible how quickly they came up

with a brand new format that totally worked. Yeah, I get the feeling they just let Scott Hansman, the guy who's kind of like leading out, but I think they just let him do it. I don't feel like there was any like, you know, executives knocking on his door every five seconds saying, no, don't do that, don't do this. It was just like, you know, we need to be like a little bit human here

and not like, you know, not a sales pitch and all that sort of stuff. And I think it worked. It was entertaining. It was super nerdy. Those of nerdy stuff hidden throughout the keynote and stuff. It's just fun, I don't know. They hit the right note.

I think with the export stuff that they've done the other week, they kind of tried to do an E-free, you know, like smoke mirrors, stage and all that sort of stuff. And it just didn't really work out. Whereas this was a bit more, you know, human. So let's start with kind of the headline news. You had a big story about the fluid office. office document. There's a lot of history here. Just try to explain what this is. And I kind of want to

peel apart that history a little bit. It's so hard to explain without seeing it. Like so, so if you think of like Google Docs and the way that you collaboratively, collaboratively work on that with other people, think of like a table or like a chart and figure that individually as like a module, like that you might paste into another app. Imagine those two were like combined with Google Docs. And that's kind of what this is. So like, You create a table in, I don't know, Outlook or, let's say Slack. You create a table in Slack. You do some edits to it.

You paste it in an email. Someone else who receives that email will be editing it in real time from their email whilst you're looking at it in Slack and seeing it change there. So it's kind of like Google Docs, but trying to be everywhere and like modulized. Modularized. That's the word I would think of is it's a way for different elements of different documents to sort of get remixed into different forms all over the place. Yeah, but basically.

And then there's a separate part which is like what they call a fluid workspace, which is essentially just a fluid document where you have all of these modular components in one. So that's kind of like your Google Doc that you'd have normally. And you can pull all those modular components out and paste them elsewhere. So I think when you see it and you see people using it in real time, it kind of makes sense. But like the challenge that they're going to have with all of this is getting developers again to like adopt it, get it to be like a standardized format. to do that they're open sourcing it so that's that's like a good sign that they you know

they're not just going to shove this in office and like hope everyone adopts it they're going to like try and actually listen to the community and try and make it a thing what developers do they do they need like the examples you've just given i'm working in a word document and i want to pull in a table from excel or a chart from excel and have that data be living so that if somebody edits the excel document the table updates well, all that's happening in office anyway. What do they need developers to support? Well, so like when you copy a component,

you're basically copying a URL to a document. It's still a document. Like all the individual components are still documents like that. That structure isn't going away because you just, you can't do that on the web, you know, it doesn't just magically appear. So when you paste that URL in a client that doesn't support the fluid component, then it's just an ugly URL, right?

You know, so they need developers to render that content within their apps in the same way for a start. And then the other thing they want to do is to like enable developers to have, so say you've got like an ancient, I don't know, database or something, and you want a particular string in that to be dynamic and update freely, but you don't want to rewrite your whole app to be collaborative. Or you create an app and, you know, the managers are like, yeah, but how do we use this together?

You can, their idea is that you'll be able to get developers to then change and switch out strings so that they're fluid. So that's kind of interesting as well. I don't know exactly how they're going to do that. They didn't really show that yet. They're still sort of working these ideas through. But the thinking behind that is kind of interesting because that goes way beyond what we're doing right now.

So they need developers on both sides to adopt this thing for it to really take off. You need everybody to be able to render your little fluid office module thing inside the app. So if you don't use Outlook, but instead you use Apple Mail or whatever, when you get one of these fluid docs, it'll actually work inside. that or inside Slack or Discord or whatever. So they need that. They just need everyone to like, I don't know, adopt whatever their version of eye frame is. I deeply love the idea of Discord users like live editing Excel instead of Discord.

Yeah. For sure. Yeah. Like Twitch streams of like Excel content. Games being played in Excel. I don't know if this is true. I hope it's true. If you're out there and you're listening to this, if you know of like Twitch streamers who are,

it's like hardcore Excel users. Just send, I would love to watch that. If there's like a hardcore Excel Twitch person, that it's the internet. It's got to exist. There'll be somebody. Of course. We're going to profile the hardcore Excel Twitch streamer. But then on the other side, are they, like, we've all, like, all these types of documents

are basically like little iterations of like office docs or PowerPoint or whatever. Are they hoping? And is there going to be like a, like, just an interoperable framework of like little baby apps that you can embed anywhere, little baby like utilities and that's what they're open sourcing, or is this really about getting other apps to show Microsoft stocks? Yeah, I think it's more about the entire framework. So it's not just about showing their document. It's literally about getting the whole entire framework so that you can use it in any app. And it doesn't have to be their modules in your app. It's literally the underlying technology as well.

So they're open sourcing the whole lot, which should be in the next few weeks. So we'll probably know a little bit more about their thinking and how people can actually contribute to it and what sort of things they will do in the next few months to enable all this. But when they showed it last year, it was, the focus was more like, it looked like a Google Doc competitor. You know, they've had similar stuff on Office.com for a while where you can collaboratively work together and it was super, but it was super fast and that sort of stuff. But this year, it's like their thinking has obviously gone way beyond that, that initial

like prototype that they showed. So it'd be interesting, see where it goes. I don't want to overdo it. There's a real chance we're going to talk about this for an hour if we overdo it because you could. But there's like a lot of history behind this conceptual idea, right? Microsoft itself had a product called OLE, object linking and embedding, which you could pronounce OLA, just saying it's a choice you could make. Apple famously had a version of this in the 90s called OpenDoc that Steve Jobs somewhat more famously killed. He actually used the phrase bullet in the head to refer to his killing of OpenDoc.

Yeah. This is a dream, right, that you're going to have one document with live data for multiple other documents that can be edited in multiple places at once. The dream has not panned out historically. Why do you think it might pan out this time? What does Microsoft think it might pan out this time? Yeah, I mean, I think Microsoft in the way that they're approaching it and the way that they're integrating into office and stuff, makes it possible to work out.

It depends. I think it really depends on the implementation there and how they then bring it across, you know, to Windows and to all their other apps that are, like, widely used. Because they, they can kind of force adoption in a way. They've, then they're really leveraging teams as, like, the hub for it, which is a word that they use for every time they talk about teams. It's like, it's our hub for everything. So I think a lot of the work you'll see going into teams and anything like that

will be related to fluid. I think it's the idea of getting people to stay within that app. And that's a big thing to keep people in teams. Right. So you're at work. You've opened Microsoft Teams. Someone shares a Word doc with you. You actually never go to Open Word. You just edit it inside of Teams because it's a fluid doc. And that change carries over everywhere else. Yeah. And in the times that we're in right now, like imagine then having half your team

to the left of that word document talking collaboratively talking and chaying just as you were in an office. I watch you type in a way. Like it kind of makes sense around that sort of thinking in the way that things are potentially going in the world. But yeah, I think their core idea is to meet people where they're doing work. And I think they're shifting their thinking around jumping in and out of apps. They're seeing there's a lot of collaborative web startups doing some really innovative stuff that ultimately Friends Office, right? And that's the one thing that no one's really been able to shake off is the office addiction.

Excel. There's nothing really that comes close to that sort of stuff. and to that, to the hold they have on that market. So I think it's definitely inspired by that protecting office. I got to say, at some point, they're basically just inventing an operating system inside a chat client. Like, I feel like that's the direction. Like, they're going to need windowing, you know. You're going to be able to manage, like, file types or, like, fluid types.

You're going to need to be able to, like, where does your chat window go? What does this thing do? What does that thing do? All these clients, all collaborative. So it's like different frameworks. But fundamentally, I feel like we're just doing the same thing again, but inside a chat app instead of on a desktop. It's like how all software eventually becomes Excel. Now it's Excel is eventually going to become an operating system.

It's going to take over the world. It's like pretty good. Yeah. Okay, so that's fluid. The open docks off to me, like the connection to that big 90s dream is there. And I just want to point it out to people, again, I don't want to overdo it because that stuff all just like died in the vine. but this is a long dream like people have had this idea

of live multimodal documents for a long time it is remarkable that Microsoft not only is bringing it back because I mean they tried it like twice or three times but they're bringing it back with a different name they're not like mentioning the other way and what is particular remarkable is like

they might pull it off this time right well this time before it was always like it was like Google Wave like that was another cut at it yeah but you would imagine like a sci-fi alternate fugitive where you're like, oh, it'd be so great if everybody used this. And like, it was so alternate and sci-fi that, like, it never got there. But in theory, the stuff that Microsoft is doing at this thing, like, we've all developed

to the point where, like, this actually solves actual problems in the real world now, not wouldn't it be cool if this solve problems, you know, in five years when we're all living in the future. Yeah, I think the biggest difference this time is like when Apple tried it in the 90s, they were struggling company-wise anyway, so they didn't really have the back-in to really pull that off and the influence. And I think the biggest thing that's different from that era and now is that Microsoft's doing open source, which is kind of like, I know we just go, oh, yeah, it's

open source, but it's like, that's still kind of crazy because like the Microsoft, even five years ago, 10 years ago, they wouldn't have done it in this way. I don't think. Like the changes that I've seen that they're doing at the company being so much more open even with Windows, knowing that come on like 10, 20 years, people are not going to be reliant on Windows anymore. they know that. So like they're bracing for that and they know that they need to be elsewhere. They need to be open. And they even admit this week, you know, we were wrong on open source.

It's just that, I think it's that thinking, the shift that's different this time. And they have, they have the user base to leverage as well, which is quite a powerful thing. I would say also then, again, I told you we can overdo it if we do it. But like in then Apple's shipping computers like four megabytes of RAM. And they built a browser that you could embed in every other application. Like, we complain about electron apps eating our computers with, like, eight gigs of RAM. And Apple is like, what if you could embed a browser in every app on four megabytes of RAM? It was not going to succeed.

Well, like, even right now, we're talking in a web browser or video chain. This would have been unthinkable, like, you know, 10 years ago in like the way that we're doing it right now. So, yeah. So you brought up Windows opening up. That's another huge part of what happened to build. Linux, GUI apps can now run on Windows. they are getting closer and closer to Linux over time.

Explain what's going on there. Yeah, so they've had a project called Windows subsystem for Linux, which essentially brings, I mean, it didn't before, but this year in an update that's coming in a couple of weeks, you get a full Linux kernel inside Windows, which is also kind of insane. Microsoft bringing Linux to Windows, which is, you know, like, okay. You never imagine that in your wildest dreams.

So that's that part of it. Now that enables a load of dev, work, a load of stuff that, you know, doesn't really, you and I wouldn't use. But what this gooey part of it does is you can basically get a Linux app like, you know, you want to run a Firefox version of Linux, that's a Linux Firefox version, side by side of the Windows version, you can. So those basic Linux apps, and there might not be a ton of them, but the most important part of it all is that it's all powered with hardware acceleration, GPU hardware acceleration, which is something that was missing, which is a lot of developers doing like AI and machine learning work

have really, like, been clamoring for. And the most crazy part of it all is they're actually building a direct text driver and a system for Linux. So it's not going to be native to Linux. It's going to be specifically for the Windows subsystem for Linux. So specifically on Windows. But it's kind of crazy that they're building direct text for Linux essentially. There's a lot of stuff going on. to unpack it was, yeah.

This is just like a lot of things even five years ago, you would say that will never happen. And again, this is, you brought this up earlier, this seems related to, there's a future for Windows and I understand what it is, but it is not the future where it's the center of the universe. And so they're just broadening it out.

Yeah, I think the main reason they're doing this is not necessarily the fear that other people are going to stop using Windows. I think it's the fear of, or the realization that developers just don't care so much about using Windows, they're using Linux or they're using Mac to develop apps and web apps. And those dev environments are just better on, you know, Mac OS is based on Unix.

So you've got a lot of that stuff just baked in, whereas on Windows, it's always just been ignored. And, you know, Linux has ruled the server world. So I think it's more getting them back to having a good dev box to offer developers. and then they can bring them in. And like once you've got people running Windows, then they suddenly want to build apps for Windows because it's the client that they're using, you know?

They're like, oh, why don't I build like a nice app, which is kind of, you know, in the Mac quad, you have beautifully designed apps that are very functional because... Well, we used to. Now we have a lot of apps. This brings me to the last thing, which once I understand the same time I don't understand it, and then the third way, I think it is just like,

a deeply funny farce, which is that universal Windows apps and regular Windows apps and it's called Project Reunion, please what the hell is going on with this? Because it, it seems like the 45th attempt to do something with Windows apps in a store. So I think this is something that's been kind of going on behind the scenes for like the last couple of years. We know that Universal Windows apps just haven't really, you know, the original vision of them running across your phone, your Xbox, your HoloLens, your Windows, like that just, yeah, it hasn't worked out. So devs have just wanted to update their own Win32 apps and make them look pretty and make them a little bit more modern but not lose all that code.

We can't call them modern because that was the name of Windows apps. Yeah. They've wanted to take those apps and not fundamentally reshape them into, you know, touch-based ones and whatever. So that work has been going on for a couple of years. So now it's got an official name, which is Project Reunion. But it's essentially unifying the Win 32 desktop apps and the UWP apps and the APIs that are shared between those. And what it basically means is say there is one version of Windows 10, we think, right?

But there's not, it's all split into like two updates a year. So there's all separate versions and they all have different API versions. So if Microsoft goes, oh, we're shipping this great new API, you can do all these crazy stuff with your app. That's great if you're on the latest version of Windows, which is like, you know, if you're on the latest version of iOS 14 or something like that. And then the old developers don't go for those APIs because they're just not, like, not everyone's got that version of Windows yet.

So now they're going to like polyfill the APIs down to these older versions of Windows. So devs don't have to worry about it. It just automatically translates the APIs essentially. So they can adopt these new features quicker and not have to worry about supporting the people who are, you know, enterprises don't typically take the latest update, for example. The comparison I would make.

here is Google Play Services. Yeah. What you just described is how Google manages Android versions, which is they know that Samsung isn't going to update a phone that's three years old, but Google has Play Services and they can just make sure the latest apps work on old operating systems because there's a Play Services API that they control. Is that, is it the same idea? Kind of similar.

It's a similar sort of like sort of way of doing things. But it's basically they're aiming to get people. I think they've realized that people aren't going to build these new touch-paced apps. So let's get them, like, make it easier for them to, like, adopt the most modern Windows features. And so they don't have to worry about the older versions of Windows. So they can just, you know, update their app, make it a little bit more modern, you know, nice tile bar and just some touch features and all that sort of stuff, without having to worry about the older versions. Does this mean that we're going to, like, actually see, I don't know, more apps than the Windows? store that feel like they belong, like, that take advantage of Windows, like, do our Windows features?

Or does this just mean that everybody that's making the same old mouse-driven apps will now finally, like, just make them look a little bit nicer, you know? I think it could, it could mean a little bit of both, but like the Windows store, so, like, you can update and, and, yeah, make your app a little bit more modern without having to make it into a store app. Like, what the store gives you is, like, a sandboxing sort of experience. And not every developer's interested in that. and we've seen it.

There's not a bunch of them in there, not the apps that we use every day. And so I think we'll see, you know, I think people are like, it's basically a big part of this is WinUI-Free, which is one of the big parts of Project Reunion. And that's about allowing these older Winfurti2 apps

to get the sort of modern UI that you kind of get in these, I don't know what to call UWP apps essentially, but like the touch-based apps that you get from the store. What are we going to call these apps? Windows apps. I mean, that's what Microsoft just wants us to call it Windows apps, but like, we've had many different ways to refer to like their latest.

This is how you should make apps now. They're basically promising to abstract all that away. So no one has to worry about it anymore. They're just Windows apps. But I don't believe them. And we're going to need a word. Here's what I will say. The greatest mistake Microsoft has ever made.

Yeah. Dropping Metro. It's so not the greatest mistake Microsoft has ever made. But yes, they called the Metro apps. and then the German grocery store sued them for trademark infringement, and they didn't pay the grocery store. And they should have just paid the grocery store. And now no one knows what their apps are called.

And I contend for the sake of this podcast that that is the greatest mistake that Microsoft has ever made. They should have paid the grocery store. But I think them saying, yeah, they're just Windows apps is definitely a step down from the UWP stuff. But I think it's just a realization, right? This hasn't worked out. So that is a pretty huge walkback, though, like outside of the jokes about Metro. there was a time when Microsoft was saying, this is the future of the Windows platform,

touch first. This led to the first surface hardware, right? I mean, this was an entire massive corporate strategy for them. And now it seems like it is fully walked back. Yeah, I think, like, and they even did it. I mean, when I, when I spoke to Joe Belfuri last year for the edge piece, like, he even kind of admitted in that piece that, like, there was, you know, constraints that they were working around to have their browsers.

are based on UWP, just for the sake of it. Office obviously haven't really gone there. And it's all these like problems that they even had from their own teams, not wanting to adopt it. And once you get that, if you haven't brought your AP, like Windows desktop apps have been around for like, you know, 20, 30 years. So you don't just suddenly overnight sandbox them, secure them and completely change the whole interface of apps. That takes some time.

They should have done what they're doing now back then. like just gradually get people to update and modernize. At a very high level, what I feel like happened here is they looked at iPhone and especially the iPad and they're like, oh shit, I think it's great battery life and those apps are feel super fast because they're extremely limited in what they can do. And there is a mass developer ecosystem of making stuff and it's creating virtual recycle. We want that. So let's do that, but for Windows and we're going to somehow transition everybody over to

that new thing. And everyone was like, or I could just. not be stuck in a tiny little sandbox and I could keep making the app do what I want it to do. And then they just like, they were just stuck in that for like almost a decade, like just forever. It was definitely the iPad fear. I can imagine they saw the iPad and were like, oh, this is the next iPhone. I think we all did think, you know, iPad would get to the sort of laptop killing phase. But it, that's another 45 minutes. Yeah.

Just open a can. Well, I mean, it's true. I mean, the iPad, the limited feature set of iOS did not allow iPad apps to develop, may or may not be changing another can of worms. That, I think, brings me to actually the next set of stuff that happened in Microsoft. Deeter, the Surface GoTo review is out. There is 13.5 inch Surface Book 3 talking through that stuff. Tom's also got the 15-inch Surface Book 3, I think, in his hands right now. Are you using it even as we speak?

Not right now, but I have it next door. they're both they're both like spec bumps right i of course love the service code too they they gave you an option for a better processor and that the screen is bigger but fundamentally to me the source of service book two is by the time you spec it up to what you need to have it be like a real computer that isn't just like a thing you give your kid to do their homework you might as well buy a refurb surface pro six or seven and you'll get a bigger screen a faster processor and a better experience but if you really really must have a tiny computer and that tiny computer must run windows then there's there's there's nothing else that you can buy you have to buy the surface go too

who who wakes up as like i must have a tiny windows computer deeter it's you me i do i think a lot of people see that three nine nine price though the sticker price right well i feel super conflicted about that price because you know it's it's actually four ninety nine because you got to buy a keyboard but then like does that super base model with its slow storage and not enough RAM and a slow processor. Like, who is that for? Who gets to use that? And that's why I said, like, give it to your kid to do their homework.

Like, there is a place for computers like that, you know, just like there was a place for netbooks. I just don't think that that place should cost $500. Which was historically the target netbook price, right? They still don't have a Chromebook. That's their problem. They don't have an operating system that's like a Chrome. They got S mode, Tom.

Come on. Yeah. Did you tell me that you took the go-to out of S-mod in, like, 30 minutes or something? Yeah, it took, it took about 30 minutes. I forget what it was Zoom, I think, that maybe did it. It's brutal. Yeah. Tom, tell us with the book three.

Yeah, the book three is kind of like the book two. Yeah. Like, my thoughts on using the last couple of days is it feels like the book two. It looks like the book two. There's not a lot of difference. I think I'm going to be struggled to find what's different, really. Like the differences, they've got a story. speedier SSD, although the model that I'm reviewing doesn't have that.

And the detach thing on the hinge is faster. Yeah, I forgot to note that at my hands on. It's minimal, though. Like, you still press it and you have to wait. But yeah, the hardware's the same. It's just a spec bump, really. Did we ever figure out if the book architect who tweeted us is real or not? No, if you're listening to it.

So, what, three weeks ago, two weeks ago, I said, I don't believe anybody who uses a service book ever pulls the display off the basis. I maintain. I have been getting emails. No, no, don't do this. I'm doing it again. Well, I have a newsletter that goes to people's inboxes and they'll reply. So I believe, I still believe this. One person tweeted at us and said, I'm an architect. I'm the, I'm the person from the ad who's always pulling the screen off and like handing it

to clients. And I was like, oh my God. I am in my fancy Seattle loft making ChemX coffee. on the side. Yeah, it's always perfectly lit here for some reason. And then people started tweeting at this person that they think he's fake, that he's a plan because he doesn't like, he's like a doesn't have any followers. He like doesn't tweet a lot. So it's a mystery whether we got astroturfed by like Panos Panhe's like burner account. So if you're that person and you can provide proof where we're still interested and

a dealer is obviously in the market for emails from people. who pull their two and ones apart. I'm definitely super interested in people who pull that apart because I never do it. And it's also super awkward because it's like it's a giant, like the 15 inch version, it's a giant tablet. And you don't have the kickstand or anything to like, it's just a, like it's super light, but it's just a bit. Tom, the architects of America have all settled on this.

Do you think they're going to stick with this form factor with the snake hinge and the liquid metal, whatever it's called that like locks it down? And like the whole thing with the gap, like they're on their third iteration. They haven't changed since the last iteration. I feel like if they believe that you should have a separable tablet from like a base that's got lots of horsepower in it, like this can't be this can't be what they actually want to make like forever. I feel like they're held back by Intel. And I think I think some of their plans. Aren't we all?

I think some of their plans they had for the surface line, especially for the pro, you know, slightly derailed. by Intel's stuff. And that's the biggest thing about the book three, like separates it from something that's the same sort of form factor and price is that it comes with a 15 watt CPU, not 45-watt CPU, and that's holding it back as well. Like, their idea is developers and performance, but that is like a big drop off there.

Because the performance is not nowhere near, like, what you get on a MacBook, for example. They should just put a 45-watt CPU in the base, and then the tablet is just like... An arm CP. Yeah. All right. Well, there's my idea for you, Microsoft.

We are way over, but Tom, thank you so much for covering build. You did a great job this week. A little inside baseball. Like, Tom doesn't sleep. I think he's a robot. And that's the secret of the version. This is Tom 2.0. This is very.

But no, Tom basically single-handedly covered build, and it was incredible. So there's a lot of other stuff on the site, obviously. But if you're interested in what Microsoft is up to, you're interested in the future of Windows and office in these documents. go check out Tom's coverage because it was great. Thanks for being here, man. Cool. Nice.

All right, we're going to take a break. We're going to come back. Lizapado is going to walk us through this week in Elon. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Every thriving, successful business has to start somewhere. A good place to start is a relatively simple question. What if, given the right tools, I've really put my all into this. One tool that can help grow your sprouting business to new heights is Shopify.

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And then I know, I know how her time will be spent. So it is May. Meltdown May, as Liz has phrased it. There is, I would say, an enormous amount of Elon activity in this world. Yeah, we're going through a highly active Elon period, I would say. I find them difficult to predict, but once we're in one of the cycles, they do tend to extend for a while. So Liz oversees our science desk, our transportation desk, and our creator's desk. So that's SpaceX. That is Tesla. And that is memes on the internet. And the intersection of those things is Elon Musk. So Liz, explain to us what happened this week in Elon. I'm going to do my best. So you may remember that Elon Musk was like tweeting some stuff about the coronavirus, how he didn't think it was that serious. He thought the panic was worse than, you know, than the virus itself. And then he decided to. open his Fremont factory that makes basically all of his cars in the U.S. in violation of a county health order and sued the county in order to open early. And this week he has dropped the lawsuit.

We're looking at other sites for factories, specifically for the cyber truck upcoming production. And we are also getting ready for a SpaceX launch next week that is going to be the first time that U.S. astronauts have launched from U.S. soil in almost 10 years. So I think that's most of what's going on with Elon. I'm probably forgetting some things because there's usually a lot of stuff going on with Elon, but I think... Well, one thing we haven't discussed on the Vergecast is recently had a child with an amazing name. Oh, yeah. John.

A.E.S. 71. Ash. Okay. That's fine. Yeah, AE is that sort of symbol where you see the two of them fused together is, I think, pronounced ash. Great. Okay. The baby's name is Ash. So he had a baby with crimes. The lawsuit thing where he's threatened to sue the county and then he dropped it. It seemed like Alameda County was already saying they were working with Tesla. Did he just forced their hand? Is there a strategy there that we understand? Not that I personally understand, although that doesn't mean that there is one. It just means that isn't one. It just means I don't want to. understand it if there is. But it seems like he really wanted to open early. And to keep this in context, you have to remember that all of the other car makers are pulling out all the stops in order to sell their cars right now. So you're getting like stuff like zero percent interest loans for seven years on one's cars, this kind of thing. And while car sales have dropped starting in

March. It's also the case that that has been uneven depending on location and that certain things like SUVs have been less affected than other things like, for instance, sedans. So you can certainly see this as something where like you have this model Y, which was recently introduced, this is first year. And it is, in fact, a small SUV. And so it's in one of the areas where there hasn't been as much market fall off. And all of the other car makers are making very, very sweet deals. And if there aren't model-wise around for people to buy, they may very well buy something else with one of those sweet deals. So there's like a sort of like kind of logic behind it. But I'm not sure that two weeks makes that much of a difference. And then we're seeing other carmakers open and sort of like

immediately close because of virus issues, right? Sometimes it's the virus issue. Sometimes it's supplier issues. Sometimes it's both. Or I think we're going to be seeing sort of a lot of hiccups around manufacturing, either because of supply chain stuff or because of virus stuff for most of this year. Like if, for instance, most famously in the meat packing plants, you'll notice that people are getting pretty sick because they're in close proximity. And it's spreading rapidly through that plant. And any manufacturing facility where people are in close proximity just normally is sort of hard to rejigger on the fly so that everybody's six feet apart. Like, just figuring out how to manufacture stuff in a safe way is probably going to take a while. So that's the push to reopen.

We think that we understand some of the underlying logic there. It's a little shaky, especially the two-week time period. But other carmakers are blowing out sales to sell their crossover SUVs. Tesla has a new crosser or SUV. They need to make it to sell it to compete. Okay, kind of buy it. why the sort of bombastic attitude about it being a hoax, the, it being overblown? Is there, is that just an act?

I mean, I just, I kind of, at one point, Silicon Valley was the most responsive to, hey, there's this virus, right?

It was the most, like, there was an article in Vox that like, VC firms were the first to ban handshakes like in America. Because I saw it, because they had connections in China because they're, you know, they just sort of saw it first.

And it seems as soon as Elon kind of started saying, I don't buy it, I want to reopen, this is all overdone, a huge attitude has shifted. And he's an influential guy. Is there an underlying reason for that, do you think? Or do you think that he sincerely thinks it's overplayed? I don't know. I mean, I can't rule out that he sincerely thinks it's overplayed. Let's just be honest, biology has never been his strong suit.

Like when it comes to his Mars plans, he's like, you know, here's what the rocket looks like. And there's nothing about the life support systems. So I don't, I don't know. He may very well think it's ever played. I do know that there are a couple of possible explanations for why he might be playing into this sort of political moment and this kind of political pushback. And the first is obviously that as long as Fremont is closed, he can't make cars in the U.S., period. And like he can't sell anything, period. And he has, you know, so he has a business to think about.

So there's that. There's also, you know, the basic fact that his other companies, space. SpaceX, its main client is the federal government. And the federal government is currently run by Republicans who also desperately want to reopen the country. So, you know, maybe he's playing ball because he's hoping that that will make President Trump happy and that might result in something good for SpaceX. I don't know. It is possible also that his search for another factory is playing in somehow. So the two places that are essentially the finalists for the factory are Tulsa, Oklahoma and Austin, Texas, both of which are states with Republican governors and Republican legislative bodies.

So there are any of a number of things that could be happening, including just, you know, straight up sincere. I just think this is bullshit and we should reopen. But it may be a political move. I mean, this is like the core of like anytime Elon Doth Elon is, is he playing 40 chess or is he just popping off and is a little bit off the rails and eventually he'll come back. And it always seems like it's a distinction without a difference to me. I mean, I'm thinking specifically of his tweet about, you know, taking Tesla private. Like there was some something behind it, but he was also just off the rails there. And I sort of feel like with this, it's the same sort of thing where it almost doesn't match.

matter whether or not he's being sincere because the effects are pretty bad. And it matters way more now or doesn't matter as much now what his actual motivations are because the effects are like directly going to affect, you know, people living or dying. Yeah. I mean, look, a long running theme of this week in Elon is that I don't really feel comfortable speculating about his motives a lot of the time because in many respects, they simply don't matter. Right. Like I've seen, I've seen a lot of speculation about what's going on here. I think the New York Times published like four pieces, all of them op-eds about this. So there was like one that was like, Kara Squisher, like, he's doing it on purpose and there is a reason behind it. And another one was Greg Bensinger that was like,

oh, he's doing this to get customers for his cyber truck because the only people who drive trucks are Republicans, I guess. That is amazing. And then there was like another one that was like in the week in review section that was like, well, you know, he's always been bombastic and iconic lastic, and so this is just some classic Elon behavior. And like, it doesn't matter. Like, in some sense, it really truly does not matter what the motivation behind it is. So I personally have just been treating it as a black box. But, you know, people love to speculate. I certainly won't stop you. So this all plays into this tweet over the weekend. It's like just such a classic Elon moment for us to be talking about because it is so stupid. And yet it might portend so

much. So Elon tweets, take the red pill with a picture of a red rose. Take the red pill is very much an alt-right trope, right? It just, it is connected to the fringe right in a very direct way. And then the red rose is like the symbol of the Democratic Socialist of America. So it's very clearly a troll, but it led to Ivanka Trump retweeting him and saying, taken, and then Lily Wikoski, who directed The Matrix, saying, fuck both of you. just like there's the whole culture just smashed together. But Liz, in the newsletter that's coming out, I've got the draft of it here, it's obviously going to have to run, you make the point that actually the factory competition,

it does benefit Elon to play into sort of the conservative politics, the culture war of the moment. Yeah, I think so, definitely. In two ways, actually. There's the way in which directly shows up in the newsletter, which is, you know, conservatives are in charge of the places where he wants to put his factory. So playing nice with them is probably a good idea if you want some cool government subsidies. But also, like, if you think about it, very famously, Tesla does not have an advertising budget. But advertising is not the only way that one accomplishes marketing.

The other way to do it is through earned media. And so one of the ways that Elon has made sure that Tesla stays in the news is by acting out and in such ways that people will write about it. And by giving him, you know, giving people essentially these moments of like big cultural whatever to react to to keep him in the news. And I really genuinely think that for him, like, there's no such thing as bad press. It's all good press for him as much as he might like to complain about it because the plain fact of the matter is as long as he and Tesla are in the news, he doesn't have to advertise. So that is, you know, the last, the reason we brought this week in Elon was more tweets, more investor consternation. And one of the arguments is if you're buying Tesla stock, you know you're buying this CEO, you know you're buying this character.

Does there have any activity on that side of things? Because we're sort of expecting it to play out. I haven't seen a lot. I've seen some consternation among Tesla owners. Last week I spoke to an epidemiologist who was really pissed about the way that Musk had chosen to violate the Alameda Shelter in Place order. And he was like, I own a Tesla. I can't believe this.

So, you know, I think that they're like, the Atlantic reported on some, some Tesla owners who feel betrayed by this. But I don't know that I've seen the same kind of consternation on the investor side. And I think that part of that is that the investors generally know what they're getting into, right? Like, it's not like it's a secret. Like, after 2018, like, there is a certain amount of instability that one does expect with Elon Musk as your CEO. Even if he's tweeting the stock price is too high. I mean, to be fair, that's what he did. Yeah, that was, I believe, the beginning of Meltdown May, which is going on for a year now.

Yeah. So, you know, it doesn't, I don't imagine that you can be an investor in Tesla at this point and be surprised by this. You know what I mean? Like, there's been a fair amount of this kind of nonsense going on for a pretty long time. And, like, if you are willing to invest in Elon Musk, and he is arguably for a lot of investors, really the draw, then you know that you are, you are in for this, right? And like, I think from that perspective, it's kind of like, ah, well, you know, he's a mad genius. And so we have to let him be as eccentric as he likes in order to develop the very cool cars that we love. All right. So let's set

aside Tesla for now. I'm sure we'll have you back in a week or two, just based on how things are going. Next week, and we'll have Lauren on next week after the launch, but just preview the SpaceX launch next week a little bit because that is obviously Elon's other big company. And it is, I think, just an enormous moment for American spaceflight again. So, Crew Dragon is launching. Just walk to see that real quick. Yeah. So one thing to keep in mind is that we haven't launched American astronauts from American soil since, I think, 2011.

Lauren would know that for sure, but I'm pretty sure it's 2011. And so basically on May 27th, two NASA astronauts are going to put themselves in the newly developed spacecraft in Florida and head to the ISS. on the crew dragon, which is the very first private spacecraft to ever take astronauts from the US to the space station. And it's been like, I don't know, 10 years in the making, I think. If it's successful, it'll be the very, very first time that we've managed to have a commercial flight to the ISS with astronauts on it,

rather than a flight that was developed by NASA. So, you know, there are a couple of things that make this pretty significant, right? Like first of all, the return of human space flight to the U.S., but second, the commercial crew program. And this has been something that NASA has been working on for quite some time with a bunch of goals. And the biggest is that private companies create the next generation of spacecraft instead of NASA

in the hopes that that might be cheaper. And so, you know, once those things are complete, then their companies can potentially turn a profit by selling seats on those spacecraft to, for instance, space tourists. So is this the first step towards space tourism or is this just one step in a long road in commercial spaceflight for NASA? Well, Lauren will have a more informed opinion than me, but I think it's the first step towards a long road of commercial development. I don't think that this is a first step necessarily towards space tourism because there are so many question marks around that still. I think that that actually is going to take longer to develop than most people realize. But I do think that it is pretty interesting in terms of the commercial crew development.

and the possibility of, you know, having rockets be made by somebody other than the U.S. government and commissioned by people other than the U.S. government. Like, that is a thing that is now possible. So just to bring this back to Elon and then we'll let you go, SpaceX is about to have a huge moment. Next week, the 27th, everyone should watch that launch. We're going to cover the hell out of it. It is just a gigantic moment. SpaceX seems insulated from this crazy this time.

Why is that? Well, I mean, there is like this sort of physical distance, right? Like SpaceX is in L.A. And Tesla is in Northern California. You know, the sort of office headquarters are in Silicon Valley and the factory is in Fremont. So like there is like that physical distance between them, even though the two do in some ways overlap. But I also think it's the case that they are just doing very different things. Like they're both transportation, obviously. But they're different kinds of transportation for different clients. So you don't really have to advertise for SpaceX. You don't have to do marketing for SpaceX. You don't have to be on Twitter, like, getting people interested in SpaceX because the only people you have to get

interested are the government people who will sign the check for you. So, like, figuring that stuff out is different. And I think that's a big part of, like, why SpaceX has been sort of insulated, because, like, these kinds of antics, like, they don't really matter in the same way to SpaceX's customers, and SpaceX, unlike Tesla, is a private company. So if the investors are pissed, I'm not necessarily going to see that in public because they can just call Elon. You know what I was going to say is SpaceX also has an incredible, somewhat under-recognized number two who seems to be actually running the company. Oh, Shotwell. Yeah. She's phenomenal. To my mind, like part of what is maybe an undersung virtue of Elon's is correctly delegating to

Gwen Shotwell, who has done a really, really wonderful job with SpaceX over the years. I think that he does not have that person with Tesla. And sometimes I think it shows in some ways. And sometimes I think he likes Tesla being the chaos monster that it is. All right. Liz, thank you so much. This week in Elon, you can subscribe to it. I'm going to make Liz write it every week until the Eloning is complete.

I don't have a time frame for that. But the Eloning is happening again. So subscribe. And we'll have Lauren on next week to talk about this flight. If you're listening to this, Marky calendar right now, May 27th. It's a moment. If you're a verge person, you're listening to this, we should all basically watch it together. So check that out.

We have tons of coverage of that. Thanks again, Liz. Yep. Support for the show comes from LinkedIn. If you're a small business owner, you know that every hire counts. But time and resources are limited. Finding, connecting with, and screening the right candidates takes up valuable time you could be giving to your customers.

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at cloud.a.ai slash vergecast. That's clod. a.ai slash vergecast. And check out Claude Pro, which includes access to all the features mentioned in today's episode. clod.a.ai slash vergecast. Ashley Carmen.

Hello. Hello. I'm good. You know, in my closet podcasting. Literally. Yeah, it's the story podcast. Andrew, I'm going to blow up your spot. I'm very excited for a story that Andrew is working on,

which is the blue Yeti is the mic of the pandemic. because every time I talk to anybody or at them on the show, they all believe it. So good. So everyone's in a closet with a blue eddy. It's great. Except for us. We're very fancy.

Well, we're podcasting about podcast now, Ash. Yeah. Met up. Massive shakeup in the podcast world this week. Joe Rogan going to Spotify. But then you wrote a bigger piece about Spotify's grand ambitions. Walk us through what is going on here. So this week it came out that Joe Rogan, host of the Joe Rogan experience, a controversial but

massively popular show. Rogan says he claims he gets 190 million downloads a month, has never been on Spotify before, famous holdout. And Spotify announced this week that now Joe Rogan is going to become a Spotify exclusive show, meaning that his YouTube video podcast will be taken down and will not exist. That's a huge deal. Because Joe Rogan is synonymous with YouTube podcasting. So he's no longer going to have that on YouTube. And also the audio will only live on Spotify as well. And Spotify just recently started testing, obviously it's going to be a full launch video podcasts in app last week with other popular

YouTube podcasters. So clearly, this is all part of a grander scheme to potentially bring more YouTube podcasters over to its platform. Can you briefly sort of talk about the idea of YouTube podcasting? Because I think that people are, you know, or listen to the Vergecast, people are familiar with podcasting as like a concept because it's been around for 20 years. But like the specific kind of podcasting that happens on YouTube is very different, right? Yeah, so a lot of times what will happen is people record, you know, Vergecast used to be a video podcast. Oh, my. We're going to get so many emails right now.

Sorry. Had to. But the idea is that, you know, you would be doing the show regularly and a lot of podcasters just do it regularly. But the difference is they can cut their show up into video clips and benefit from Google search algorithm. So, you know, interviewing Sundar, you can cut that up into a clip and say, interview with Google CEO.

And when people search for that, you might be the first podcast that comes up. So Rogan, he's like played this to perfection, right? Because he has big guests. He cuts those interviews up into 10,000 clips. He's all over YouTube. I actually, I've only experienced the Joe Rogan experience as YouTube clips. So it goes, all of that is going away. And then his massive podcast, which is usually, I think most people will probably listen to it in Apple podcasts, because that is where all the action is.

All of that is maybe to Spotify. What is the price tag for that deal? Reportedly, it could be anywhere from tens of millions to over 100 million, depending on performance on the platform. So up to 100 million for just one show, Joe Rogan. He's not working for Spotify. He said it was a licensing deal. He has creative control. A big move for Spotify because, as you said, the show is controversial for a variety of reasons we don't need to go to.

But it is controversial. But he retains creative control. They also just bought Gimlet, which is a huge deal. They make reply all. And they bought The Ringer, which is Bill Simmons. Bill Simmons also has a massively successful podcast. That's a lot of things to buy. I think you added up, you said the total price, I guess, 700 million for this.

They also acquired Parcast, which does true crime and whore. So basically they've lacked, Joe Rogan, you know, is his own big star thing. But as far as the other intellectual property they own, they have special. Sports covered now. True crime and whore. Prestige reply all gimlet shows, which turn into often, they have turned into TV shows. So prestige narrative. And then they have anchor, which they acquired as well, which is a creative tool that gets beginner podcasters on their platform using their tools in their space. So that's the, I mean, that's the whole soup to nuts. That's like all the big categories, big personality, and then some creative tools. And then

there's an ad element to this too, right? Right. So the difference between Spotify and what we would normally think of as a podcast is podcasts, RSS. I just know Deter's going to. I'm just standing by. There's a whole open web arguments we had, but keep going. So typically, podcasts are distributed through RSS feeds. It's a very open ecosystem. You can have an RSS feed to distribute it across platforms.

Spotify does not use RSS feeds. You have to give it permission to access. You have to basically upload your show. And so also the difference is that typically with podcasts, you would download the show. and then listen to it. Spotify is completely, mostly streaming. So they invented this thing called streaming ad insertion, and that's really different from how ads are distributed now in podcasts. Podcasts are just starting to get into something called dynamic advertising, which allows the ads to be switched out depending on the week or day and the ad deal that's happening at that time.

For example, if you're Flowers.com, I hear this example all the time. If you're Flowers.com, you don't want to run your ad in the middle of July, but you definitely want to run it during Mother's Day so they can sub in this ad that will appear in every Vergecast episode during Mother's Day. What Spotify is doing with streaming ad insert is that as people are streaming live, it will insert ads that are specifically targeted to them. And because Spotify knows what you listen to, music-wise, but also podcast-wise, which is way more telling, knows where you live, it knows your gender, knows your age, I guess it knows your name. And who knows if they're buying any third-party date or anything like that, they can do a lot more targeting than you could with any other platform. So they really

have control over the entire ecosystem and can put these ads in. So, I mean, that's like the, that is Google's business model. That is Facebook's business model, right? That is the big ad targeting machine is coming for podcasts in a way that just hasn't. I'll give this example because it's very funny. And also, so I can apologize. If you listen to this, Sundar interview, we recorded a promo for other ads on the Box Media Network and they got accidentally inserted into our Sooner episode for some people. So you, like, halfway through the Sooner interview would stop in the ad. would be me telling you to listen to this sooner an episode. That's like a good example of how clunky

dynamic ad insertion is right now. So my apologies, free to all those people is like five people. I hope you laughed. Um, I laughed. But that happens at download. Right. So if you download the show today that flowers.com ad happens at download. But you're saying, and so the archive into the future, it loses its value. Spotify can do it in real time no matter when you're listening, not just because they're streaming. So that creates like an enormous amount of value for them and also it lets other kinds of advertisers participate, right? Like, that's the idea. So they're going to expand the market for podcast ads. Right. Right now, it's just, I believe it's still in testing phases and limited partners, but you could easily see this being even good for local, like Facebook,

local advertising. I know you live in Brooklyn. I'm a restaurant owner. Here's my ad for my restaurant on this podcast. Right. And all that restaurant owner has to do is download the anchor app, which is an easy podcast creation app, right? Like, this is always my theory, was that they were making an easy tool for someone like that. And so then that could automatically insert it and target it. Yeah. Right now, again, limited. So they're not doing that yet. But of course, you can see where this goes. You trilled with RSS, but I mean, I'll take the bait. The big change here is like when platforms get built now, they get built. It's like one big company that like owns the whole stack or tries to control as much the stack as possible. So like you can imagine a podcasting future that

looks much more like radio with like local stations and like, you know, local ad sellers that the local stations and some of them get bought up in Clear Channel, but like there's a whole bunch of individual entities doing stuff, and that's sort of analogous to RSS. But now, the way the internet seems to work these days, Google and Facebook get a whole bunch of ad money for like stuff that you look at with your eyes. And Spotify is trying to do the same thing with stuff that you hear with your ears. That's how you hear things. Unless you've got like a really cool like synesthesia thing. I hear with my heart, Dieter. But it has made a bunch of people. and like specifically like Marco Arment, who makes the overcast podcast app, very mad.

And I am very sympathetic to being mad and being sad about the death of like RSS and open standards, right? But like, you can make so much more money if you're able to do ad targeting. So there's that. And then the other thing that is sort of surreal and weird to me about this is the company that like makes the platform that enables you to listen is also now making the shows. And so there's like there's no. separation between the platform that provides you with the content and the platform that owns and makes the content because they can make a lot more money that way too. It's always been that way in TV, but there's always been like stuff around the edges. But it's increasingly

weird to think about the internet working that way. You know, you don't think of, you used to not think of anyway, like Google, you just go to all Google stuff. You use Google as a portal to other stuff. Somebody else provided the content. And that's just not Spotify's game here at all. They own the content. They own the ads. They own the distribution. And that is a, a wild world. And they own the tools to create it. Of course. Well, so the other example there is, yeah, there's a Google example. There's obviously the Netflix example. Do you think Spotify is trying to be more like Netflix? So initially when this news happened, we were thinking, okay, you know, for a video that we did, which everyone should go watch on the Virgin's YouTube channel,

we were thinking, okay, could we make this comparison to Netflix? And I don't know. I don't, because I really think ads are going to be a huge part of this. Because 99% of podcasts aren't Joe Rogan. They're not going to be exclusive for Spotify. They just aren't. So they're going to be open on every platform. Why wouldn't you be? I think the ads, if they fully are like, you know what, anyone can come to us and pay for us to do their ads for them. That's where I think they're really going to make the money versus Netflix, which is like, we want people to subscribe specifically for our content. Right now, you could be a free Spotify user and access Joe Rogan. You don't have to pay. And I honestly don't really see that changing because they make money off of you listening.

to the show, regardless of if you're free or not. And I also want to point out that if you are a Spotify premium user, you will still hear ads in Spotify podcasts. Really? Yeah. I couldn't believe it. I asked them about this at CES because that's when they announced the streaming ad insertion. And I spoke, I believe, to Dawn.

But regardless, she was saying that that's the user behavior for podcasts, is hearing ads. So they didn't feel they needed to change that. I almost am like, did I hallucinate this? Because that is a crazy justification. Like, I still am like, yeah, but they were probably coming off. the huge Luminary controversy where Luminary was like advertising the podcast and needed ads and they got like knocked down. I bet they were just like, we'll see if we can play it another way. I mean, they're going to have a fast forward button, right? They're not going to force you

to listen to the ad. Right. Yeah, I skip ads. So you could do that. But still, I think that's a pretty big deal that that in theory, if they keep that, they're double dipping in revenue there. So you're subscribing and they're getting that ad money. It's brilliant. And I do think I should just point out, sorry, I'm just basically telling you my video that I did. But I do, but I do, I do really want to point out for anyone who doesn't realize this, that the reason Spotify cares so much about podcasts is because with music streaming, which is what we typically think of when we think of Spotify, the company has to pay per listen. So every time you listen to Rihanna, they have to pay Rihanna's record label.

With podcasts, it's making money on every listen, at least for its exclusive shows. And for the non-exclusive shows, it doesn't have to pay anything. So that we talked about this controversy that immediately ensued when Rogan won exclusive and one assumes every new ringer show will be exclusive. We assume new Gimlet shows will be exclusive. That has created, I think, a rift. There was already like this bubbling chaos in the podcast community, but now it's here, right? People are like, you shouldn't even call them podcasts, which is like just my favorite

argument to have, but it's like boiled over. Tell me, what does that split look like? What are the sides that fight? I mean, people are in podcasting, really see it as the last, the last, you know, the last, Open Frontier for the Open Web, and losing that is a very big deal to them. Because for them, that's the beauty of podcasting is anyone can get into it. Anyone can start an RSS feed. Anyone can have the same platform access as everybody else. And now we're starting to see a little bit of people being prioritized potentially. I mean, you have to keep in mind. Spotify says they won't

do this. But like, you have to keep in mind. Spotify's also trying to become a tastemaker and curate shows in playlists and use their algorithm to generate algorithm playlists. So you start, and they have marketing money. The resources behind the shows that are Spotify exclusives is so much more vast than what most other shows have. And I think people are really starting to realize that and also more in the loss of what they see as the last open web bits. The surreal part of this to me is the thing that enables the openness of the current podcast

ecosystem based on RSS is Apple and iTunes. Yeah. I mean, that's where I'm going to. Wow. It's so amazing. And so I actually don't love always looking at tech stories as like which corporate Titan is going to win and what does this mean for the other corporate Titans business? But Apple is not like they want to get into this, right? Apple, Apple, I truly know nothing, but Apple really shocks me. It's shocking because they had such a lead, such a lead. And, you know, they could come back. They're the default podcast player on every iOS device. And theoretically, Google, Google. Google, which is great at advertising, has Google Podcast Now, they could theoretically even enter the race. And you still have to third party download Spotify. So that gives them some of a leg up.

But up until now and even now, Apple seems to just be like, yeah, they haven't said anything. There's rumors they're going to start making their own shows. But those are rumors. Planet of the app should have been a podcast. That's the answer. So that's where I was going in a different way. So in a different and better way. So Julia wrote this week, Julia Alexander wrote a piece about Apple TV Plus, just kind of like falling flat.

Okay. And I think it is mostly falling flat. Would it have been better if they'd taken the entire budget for the morning show? And instead of paying Jennifer Anderson and Reese Witherspoon and Steve Grell, if they had paid Joe Rogan to make him Apple exclusive? Would that have been a better bet for Apple in terms of owning a content ecosystem than trying to run up against Netflix and Disney Plus? water media, right? Like, but they pick the biggest players to roll up against in TV, but they could have just won in podcasting, but it doesn't seem like Apple wants

to do ads. Well, so that's the whole thing. Apple doesn't charge anyone to use Apple podcasts, so they don't have that system built yet. They also don't do ads. So Spotify, if you don't subscribe, they get the ad money.

If you subscribe, they still get the ad money. They're making money any which way you cut it. But I think Spotify strategy speaks to the idea that you notice, I can't think of a major, major show that Spotify has launched on its own without prior existing IP that has been a phenomenal huge hit. So I think what Spotify is showing us is that you need these megastars to come on your platform. And there's only so many of those in podcasting. Really, there's not many. And NPR is never going to do that. I mean, I would think the dailies in the New York Times.

Joe Rogan is one of the few. And now Gimlet and Parcast, like, they've locked up some solid stuff. And I think that Apple would run into some of the same issues they did with Apple TV Plus, which is it is hard to launch new shows, both visually and audio shows. I also think what I don't want to overread it with the Joe Rogan, like controversy stuff. But Apple is a corporation, the way it holds itself out, the way it behaves, having like owning access to Joe Rogan and having any sort of direct financial relationship to that show and that cast of characters and that tone, I think is like, Apple can't do it. Right. And that was like the criticism of the TV stuff at the beginning, whether or not you believe it's true.

Like that Tim Cook was like, all of our shows are too mean. Right. And like, yeah, the shows are whatever they are. Some of the morning shows are very good. Some of them are very bad. But like podcasting is more direct. You make more of it. Like literally right now we're just talking.

Right. And like there's just way more room to make controversial stuff without checks and balances. Apple, like that's too dangerous for Apple. And I think you just look at that and like we can't. We can't do that. Being an editorial property comes with responsibility. Like, this is a media company we work at. Yeah.

If I go off and say something freaking crazy, you're going to have to do something about it. It's a threat I live under every day of my life. What did Ashley do today? Well, but I think Spotify just has, and again, I don't want to like overplay, but Spotify publishes artists. They publish music. Like, they are used to the core service they provide being connected to

controversial people. Like, Spotify, Kanye West is on the Spotify platform. But, but like iTunes exists. Apple found a way. Apple found a way, but like there's a, there's a move in the way that Spotify markets its service. iTunes exists and Apple's big move is like everyone gets a U2 album. I'm trying to remember because when the R. Kelly stuff happened, I remember I'm pretty sure Spotify took off R. Kelly content. Yep. And there was a massive backlash and then they undid it, right? And I think they decided

on that day, right, we are not going to exert editorial influence over the art, like, what the art people want to consume on our platform. I can't remember where Apple was in that fight, though. I think Apple is also equally hands-off, but Apple doesn't, I think at that time they were not programming playlists, and they certainly did not say it out loud in the same way. So I think Spotify is just more comfortable, like, with that approach, with being the arbiter of culture in that way, where I think Apple thinks of itself as a service writer. Now, I'm sure that, like, like I said, I don't want to overplay it, but I think that's part of the reason Apple hasn't just, like, weighted in fully. And I do think the other question is Google, because Google does

have dynamic ad insertion tech. They can certainly figure it out. They have a massive corpus of data about people, and they have a default podcast player, and they have the Google assistant and speakers in everybody's houses, and they're nowhere, as far as I can tell. Yes, they have a ways to go, and they definitely are nowhere on exclusive shows. But Google's scary. Google's a scary one because as you mentioned the date if you're worried about privacy Spotify's spooky but you know you're like okay they can't read my email Spotify's like Scooby-Doo scary and Google's like saw scary yeah Google no shit so like that is scary yeah but like at the same time like Amazon is nowhere on podcasting and they have speakers everybody's houses right like it's interesting that Spotify everyone knew the opportunity

opportunity was there. People have been waiting and talking about whether Apple's going to do anything for years. You have been covering. Like, what are you doing? Anybody, does anybody Apple want to talk about your podcast plans? And I'm like, no, we're good. We've been waiting with Google. We've been waiting in some cases with Amazon and Alexa. Like, you're going to make this easier. You're going to make it better. Spotify just spent the money. And I think part of the consternation out there is they spent the money, it seems like they have a good plan, they're going to execute it. And there's no one organized to compete with that spent. So if you just look at the things that we complain about in terms of monopolies, you were just saying we have a YouTube video. YouTube is a monopoly. There's no one

organized to compete with YouTube to deliver video. Facebook, Instagram is a monopoly, right? Like, there's no one organized to compete as a social network with that. This feels like it could be the same term for podcasts. But all these other big companies clearly saw the opportunity. and decided to just blow it, which is mind-boggling. But again, I'm just, I'm sorry. Like, the solution to we're afraid of a company getting too big shouldn't be another big company will save us. I mean, and that's what's really sad about what could happen in the podcasting industry

is that there are so many independent players here, like Overcast, you mentioned, Pocketcast, Stitcher. The list goes on. There's podcast addicts, which we can talk about if you guys want a little bit later. But, you know, there's a lot of independent podcast. podcast apps, and it really sucks to see that they might simply just be pushed out because they can't compete. Apple and Google could maybe get in the game. Like, Rogan's deal is a licensing deal. I don't know the terms, but eventually it will be up and man, that dude is going to cash out. But other than that, like, they could potentially compete, whereas these smaller players,

I don't know what happens there. And it just seems like the revenue piece is the one, like Apple, If Apple wants the open ecosystem to prevail for its player to... It's such a weird thing to hear you say. I don't man. In 2020, if you were like, Nila, you're going to be begging for another internet giant to compete with. I'll be like, yeah, that's what I'm doing now. It's May 2020.

In 2020, you just said the sentence, Apple wants the open ecosystem to win. I'm just pointing that out. It's been a surprising time. We're all learning about ourselves. But I think they do. I think they would rather not have Spotify just suck up all of your podcast listening and then suck up all of your music listening and then end up in another place where

they're going to sell the home pod and instead of selling you the Apple Music Service, what everybody wants is to use their Spotify subscription on it, which is where they're cruising to right now. Well, last year, Spotify did a test for something they called Car Thing. That was, I don't remember how many people they gave it out to. It was a small number, but it was a test for a kind of like smart speaker in your car that you could use to launch Spotify. And I'm pretty sure at the time they trademarked Home Thing. too. So there is a world I wish Spotify is like, screw it. We're making our own smart

speaker. And since you all listen to your podcast and music on Spotify, here we are. Here's your speaker. Boom. We'll give it to you for free. I want anybody who has access to the person in charge of Spotify's mergers and acquisitions division to grab that person's phone and delete Sonos's contact information from it. Oh, man. We're all doomed. Hey, we just had Patrick on. He didn't hint on anything like that. Anyway, he was like, we need more companies. That's like Spence's whole deal. All right, Ashley, real quick, tell us the podcast addict story. Then we got to get out of here. So kind of like what you were mentioning with Apple having to sort of police if they start getting into editorial content, something happened this week with Google where they have a

popular podcast app in the Play Store. Supposedly, it was about to reach 10 million downloads before this happened. Google took this app podcast addict down from the Play Store over this past weekend because it implemented a new developer policy around COVID-19 content, saying that if you publish or display, I guess, COVID-19 content, it has to be approved by a health organization or I think a government body. And so this podcast addict app just catalogs RSS feeds. It's not, it doesn't make its own content, doesn't publish anything. And Google mistakenly, according to Hiroshi, which, you know, whatever, he came in and said there was a mistake. But they took it down and they said that it was a mistake, but they took it down because he had, there was, there was COVID content. Like you guys talk about COVID content. You're not approved by the health organizations to talk about these things. Not even a little bit. So like in theory, Vergecast could have gotten him taken down. He has no idea what, the owner has no idea what took his app down specifically. But this kind of speaks to this idea that podcasts, there's so much content, there's so much voice content. It is hard to police, unless you're going to kick creators off. who are controversial.

Yeah. So like, you know, Apple had that. They might have backed down. But Apple and Google are in the unique position of running the app stores where competitive products, we talk to this all the time. The competitors, their own apps are there. And they can shut them down. And Spotify has been just making noise about that being unfair.

In Europe, here, just everywhere anyone will listen. And I think we're about to just see that boil over as they get really competitive in podcasts and start to threaten other pieces of the pie. I would imagine that this fight is going to get bigger, not smaller. That's just my guess. The listener should know I'm rubbing my hands together. Very ominously. Ash's got a great year of reporting ahead of birth.

All right. So we're going to let you get back to that. As always, we've gone over. That's just the way the Vurchase goes lately. Ashley, thank you so much. Your videos are already up on YouTube. Yeah. Go watch that.

Share with your friends. Explain that podcasting will never be the same. That's how I want you to tweet it. I want you to tweet Ashley's video. It says podcast. you'll never be the same and then tag Ashley. We're just going to blow you up. You'll scare people.

All right. We had Sundar on the interview show this week. It's already in the can, so I can promise it. Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack interview show on Tuesday. Ashley and I interviewed the CEO of Tinder, Ellie Seidman. That's coming out. We've got just a murderer's row of interviews coming up. I'm really excited about it.

So that's on Tuesday, Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack. We're just going to keep rolling out. We'll be back next Friday with the chat show. On and on we go. You can tweet at us. we had a lot of people on take i'm at reckless deers at backline Ashley Ashley R Carmen Tom is at Tom Warren and Liz is at

MS Lepado Ms. Lepado That's all correct They got them all very good We love your feedback tweeted us We'll be back soon rock and roll Paul