The Vergecast - Spotify's redesign, streaming boxes suck, and Gigi Sohn withdraws from FCC nomination

Episode Date: March 10, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler discuss Spotify's changes within its app, what happening this week at Twitter, Gigi Sohn withdrawing her nomination for FCC commissioner, and a whole lot more. Further reading: The Cybertruck wiper does not appear to extend Spotify’s new design is part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube  Spotify is going big on video podcasts After layoffs, SiriusXM looks to star-studded podcasts  Apple will launch its standalone classical music app on March 28th  All the streaming boxes suck now How a single engineer brought down Twitter Twitter just let its privacy- and security-protecting Tor service expire The FTC’s Twitter privacy investigations have ramped up since Elon Musk’s takeover Hey, where’s the Twitter Blue revenue sharing Elon Musk promised a month ago? Tesla under investigation after Model Y steering wheels fall off Congress rolls out new bill allowing nationwide TikTok ban Gigi Sohn withdraws her nomination for President Joe Biden’s FCC Now the Florida GOP wants political bloggers to register with the government Dish CEO says data was stolen in cyberattack that’s kept systems down for days Dish Network’s internal systems are so broken some employees haven’t worked in over a day  Microsoft Bing hits 100 million active users in bid to grab share from Googlet Is buzzy startup Humane’s big idea a wearable camera? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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Build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data, in your cloud with enterprise security built in. Go to retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. What's up, y'all. I'm Skylar Diggins, seven-time WMBA All-Star, Olympic gold medalist, and mom. And I'm Cassidy Hubbard, host and reporter for nearly 20 years,

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome the Rochcast. The flagship podcast of Wiper Innovation, where all your Wiper Innovation needs.

The code is Virchcast. Do you think that there's a podcast for the Wiper Industry? I was just wondering, what's the competition there, do you think? Is it heated? It exists. I mean, I love nothing more than a good trade publication. Like, I will just sit around reading Tire Business Weekly, a magazine for people who run tire stores.

It's very good. What if there's been monopolization in the windshield white industry? It's like glasses where like one company actually makes all the brands. But even that company has like probably a newsletter, like Luxottica weekly. And like every page is like, we bought another sunglasses company competition. Luxottica has always been at war with East Asia. Hi, I'm Neela. I'm your friend.

Alex Crenzino Cranz is here. I'm not at war with Asia. Uh, could that's a big announcement for the show today. I think we should start every episode by stipulating that Alex is not at war with Asia. The whole continent. The whole thing. You just, one of these days, though. If we do it enough, eventually we have to pay it off.

It's like Chekhov's gun. Yeah. Like eventually we're like, it's Alex's last episode. She's declared war on Asia. Richard Lawler is here. Hey, Richard. I have not committed securities fraud today. Hey.

Yes. that's a win. I mean, honestly, in the context of a tech show, not committing securities fraud in 2023 is a win. I'll take it. It is. That's good. Have you collapsed a bank today? Because it's the second of two has collapsed. I didn't say that I haven't. And then as you may have heard ominously in the background, David Pierce has returned. Hello, I'm back. I cannot honestly say I have not committed securities fraud today. It's like it's a bold thing to just confidently say, right? Like, I don't know what's happening to me today. What do I know about? securities fraud.

You sound like every crypto executive in America. What is a security and what is fraud? And can you really add them together? Is that a sentence? What is a sentence? I live in the Bahamas. I can do nothing wrong. Like, there are no rules here.

Buy a Bitcoin. Please God buy a Bitcoin. Someone. What's what we're referencing, by the way, is it over the weekend, Richard Silvergate, which is a financial institution that was backing a lot of crypto, teetered its way towards a collapse. And then actually today, this bank is not collapsed. Silicon Valley Bank, which is a sort of legendary Silicon Valley financial institution, one of the top 15 largest banks in the country, I think.

Its stock is collapsing because it has been exposed to crypto as well. Yeah, the financial contagion continues. It's not good. And as Liz Lapato wrote about the Silvergate collapse, one of the major impacts is that it's going to be a lot harder to kind of get your cash out of crypto. So if you were planning on doing that, you might want to figure out something. That won't accelerate the cycle at all. No, no, never does. It's not a bad time. Richard's like, here's what you should do. Run on the bank.

I didn't say you shouldn't. It's like, it's wild how quickly the run on the bank has turned into like the run on crypto has turned into like the run on the financial system. Yeah. It's just every day like the concentric circles just get a little bit wider. It's really wild. Well, that's what happens when a pyramid collapses. No, that's a triangle. David was talking about circles.

Pyramid circle. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I did okay in geometry. That might be the worst joke I've ever told in the show. Look, at the end of it, it collapses enough in Cranes, It clears war on the continent of Asia. So stay tuned for that.

It's coming. I don't want to talk about crypto, though. Although I will say, after two and a half years of pandemic, being able to use words like contagion in a different way, frankly, refreshing. Just putting that out there. Okay. Let's talk about the cyber truck wiper, the only story in technology.

That's a bold claim. There's only one story and it's a windshield wiper. So here's some inside baseball and how journalism is made. We're doing the thing that we do. We know, we're open out, we wake up. We open our laptops like, what's going on in the world? We see a bunch of pictures of like Tesla fans at the Tesla headquarters in California. Because, you know, Tesla has two headquarters now.

I moved the company officially to Texas with the engineering headquarters in California. Elon was just in California. Governor Newsom, they announced this whole expansion, whatever. So they have this event, investors, the whole thing, they park a bunch of Tesla vehicles outside of a building, including a cyber truck. Like any good editor-in-chief, I basically screamed, get-me photos of Spider-Man.

There's two things you want to do as an editor-in-chief. You want to circle print layouts, hung on the glass walls of a conference room, and say, fix this up before you go to print. I've never been able to do that. Maybe one day I will. Although we did just win the Asme Award for Best Print Design, which was deeply funny.

However, that's one. And then two, you want to scream, get me photos of Spider-Man. So we see the cyber truck. We see the wiper. I scream, get me photos of Spider-Man. I literally said this in Slack. Viren goes out with a long lens, try to get splash shots of the cyber truck, to the place where the cyber truck was by the time he arrives.

By the way, and he, like, recruits his Uber driver into, like, a scheme to sneak ever closer to the cyber truck. Like, the Uber driver is going to pose as a fan of Tesla. It was great. We were, like, very excited. And they get there, and the cyber truck is gone. However, then Tesla has its Investor Day, which is mostly a dud. And after that, Tesla had a design, Franz von Holhausen tweets a picture in front of the

cyber truck being like, I just took the beta out for a drive. And in the picture, the truck has clearly been out in the rain. And you can see the sweep of the gigantic wiper. This is the, like, I froze in my tracks when I saw this tweet. I can literally just imagine you, like, at home, just screaming, enhance at your computer, just like furiously making the browser bigger trying to get the picture. Yeah, I mean, I was like, it's there. I was like, God damn it, Tim, make this a touch screen.

So you can see it. You can see how the wiper's going to work. If you're following along on the show, you know that the Cybertrucks Wiper has been a point of major contention. Because they announced this thing by throwing rocks through the windows. but it didn't have a windshield wiper. So they got all distracted by the not bulletproof bulletproof glass and forgot the windshield wiper. Then Elon's tweeting, I am deeply concerned about the wiper, which is an amazing thing for an automotive CEO to tweet. Like, period.

Just in, I've interviewed a lot of auto CEOs. None of them are ever like, what keeps me up at night is windshield wipers. God knows they care about them. They just keep that under wraps. Like, what's top 10 anxieties of the CEO, Volvo? It's like, he's like, windshield wipers. Well, they actually, they talk about it in the publication. Yeah.

Like their industry pub. In the wiper pub. Yeah. Anyway, Eon's tweeting about it. He's like, the best thing would be for it to extend, but that's complicated. So everyone starts to think that the Cybertruck wiper is going to extend. The people, Tesla fans are leaping out of bushes to tell you about the Mercedes mono wiper concept from like the 19802C class. It's fully ridiculous.

There's a YouTube video showing how the Mercedes mono wiper worked that I swear. Where to God has a million views and it's just hopeful cybertruck fans. Aw. Because the concept. All 12 of them watching it several thousand times a piece. And like it's very cool and like it was actually it was mounted in the middle of the windshield. And it makes like a bow tie shape and there's like a gear. There's a gear set in the wiper.

The point of this is that Mercedes did not make this anymore. They were like, this was a bad idea. And they went back to two wipers. Cybertruck wiper does not extend. It just leaves a whole chunk of the windshield dirty. It's amazing that after all of this time, they're like, I don't know. Does the passenger need to see out the windshield? No.

They don't. I love it. I can't get enough of this thing. How much water do you think it sloths off? Like, does it just soak the people in the other cars? Just, ah, every time, like, it has to. Yeah, if it's, like, raining really hard and you're moving, like, a four-foot wiper, just By the way, four foot wiper is, as far as I can tell, not an exaggeration.

Like, I'm just, I'm just doing math here because I'm now at 500% Zoom on this photo. This is, this is where I am. It's very good to be back in the Vergecast. It's like, you assume, you know, Franz is a normal height dude. This thing is at least 75% as tall as he is. So this is a human-sized windshield wiper. I'm going to need, like, the Reddit people to. to do the thing where they like de-warp the photo?

Because there's a perspective trick that's happening there. Sure, but he's also standing right in front of it. It's not like, it's not like the distance between the two things, unless the cyber truck is sneakily, you know, 17 feet wide, which would not totally shock me. It's like the first two lane wide vehicle ever. Like, I don't know. But yeah, it just, it covers, it gets the whole driver's side,

super clean on the driver's side. It seems except for about a little stripe on top. And that's fine, that's fine. It's normal. But then you come around and as you get, get all the way to the other side. It's about the top right, I don't know, sixth. It just ignores entirely.

It's like, ah, there's no one here. You're not going to need to see out of this. It's fine. Yeah. You'll definitely never turn your head to the right while driving a cyber truck. No. Yeah, if ever a drone is flying up kind of just above you into the right, you'll never notice.

Your test. It's all, all of it's very funny. I still think they should go three wipers in a circle, which I promise you can be done. You get the two at the bottom, going like this and the one of the top going like that. I was imagining like a spinning Roomba on your windshield. I mean, at this point

nobody looks at in the middle. I don't know when the cyber truck is going to ship. I swear to you, the wiper on the cyber truck is a monumental piece of tech history. Because if the cyber truck is not a success, or if they

can't solve the wiper and ship the cyber truck, Tesla's in trouble. There's facts, right? Like, they've collected millions of $100 reservations for this thing. I'm looking at it now. And you know what? I'm going to go the other way.

I think the wiper works. Oh, you think the wiper works? The wiper works. If you take a look at the top of it. Richard, it objectively doesn't. It just doesn't. It does not wipe the windshield. The roof of the car comes in under the glass.

Like, you can't see through most of that anyway where the, where the wiper isn't wiping. It just has such a monumentally stupid design that it looks like it's not clearing the visible area. But you can't even see out of that spot anyway. I don't know. Is that like a pocket? No, that's not right. I see what you're saying, but there's like a, I don't know. Again, we got to see.

This is, it's get me photos of Spider-Man. If you're out in the world and you see a cyber truck just as much as you can get photos of this wiper, it's the only story in technology that matters. I promise you. It's all I want to talk about. The best part of this story is I put that up on our new site with our new tool as a quick post because, yes, it was worth 20 minutes of our chest time. but I was like

I can't be overriding this and another publication wrote an entire story listen it's very good Wiper Weekly needs something to put on the cover you like

yeah don't shame we're weekly uh god if there's a trade publication for Wiper engineers can you please reach out to us

I would love to interview uh if you're a reader or if you're a writer or an editor it doesn't matter if you're just aware of the

Wiper industry trade publication reach out I just want to know what you're like all right that's enough windshield wipers. Let's talk about the other biggest design story in technology, which is Spotify and the

general TikTokification of everything. David, you wrote up the design. There was an event this week. Alex Heath was there. We're going to have some more coverage. We've got an interview with her head of design and decoder coming out next week. But tell us what's going on on on Spotify. Yeah, so this was Spotify's stream on event, which it does occasionally. The last one, I think, was two years ago. It's their big kind of state of the union. Here's what's going on at Spotify thing. And mostly they talk. to creators. It was like 90 minutes of them being like, are you a creator? We love you. All creators. We love you. We are Spotify. Come to Spotify. We love you. Creators. Hello. They brought up the Jonas Brothers just to introduce a video, which was the coolest flex I've ever seen in my entire life. They just came out and they were like, look, Jennifer Lopez also like Spotify. And then they left. It was amazing. But anyway, the big announcement was that they're redesigning the Spotify homepage. And anyone who has used Spotify knows that basically Spotify is just like a lot of album covers. That's the only sort of design in there.

It's just rows and rows of tiles of album covers. And now it looks a lot more like some mix of like Instagram stories and TikTok and like a little bit of YouTube. But the idea is basically if you go to like the podcast thing, instead of getting a bunch of album covers of podcasts, you're going to get actual like feeds of auto playing podcasts. They're big into video for as a thing. They're big into big. big imagery now, the idea is to be much more sort of immersive and also like discoverable.

Instead of just fighting to have better album covers, it's going to actually start to try to play you the most interesting bit of a podcast or a song or an audiobook and actually connect to you that way. So that's the sort of TikTokification of it all. Everything is much more full screen. It's auto playing. It's much louder. It's much more visual. And as far as I can tell, Spotify users hate this in the same way that they've hated every other

non-music listening thing that Spotify has done, which is now the impossible track that Spotify is on. Where Spotify is like, okay, as we've talked about many times in the show, it turns out being a streaming music company is an awful, awful, awful, awful business. Don't do it if you ever want to make any money. So Spotify is now this big company that can't stop losing money on music and is trying desperately to find other ways to make money. They've made this big bet on podcast.

They bought an audio book company. They're trying to make live audio happen. And then you have Spotify users who just keep raising in their hand being like, I just would like to listen to my music, please. Can you leave me alone? And this is Spotify trying to sort of satisfy everybody. And at least based on the reaction to what we've seen, the app is not out yet for most people, but people do not like the idea of what Spotify is going for here, as far as I can tell.

I'm very sympathetic to the notion that people hate redesigns. I've lived to it myself. Absolutely. That's fine. But I will say that we Reddit did a mild redesign this week, too. We had the chief product person from Reddit on Decoder. they're splitting that into a text feed and a video feed. And all the feedback is get this video feed out of my face.

Yep. Like we don't want it. Even though all of the numbers inside of Reddit are, oh boy, people are spending a lot of time on video. People hate the video player. If we're going to do video, we should we should just put it over there and make a video feed and a text feed. And even then people are like, get this video out of my face. So I think there's like a revealed preference that's when you're alone, in your private time, you're watching the videos. And when someone asks you about it, you're like,

never watch videos. I only read novels. Yes. And I think every one of these companies is like dealing with that. But the challenge there is the metrics don't track reality, right? Because it's like, if I'm on Spotify is a perfectly good example, right? If I open up Spotify, press play on a playlist, turn my phone off, put it in my pocket and never touch it again. In a certain sense, that's a huge victory, right? Like that is the intended use of Spotify. I can listen to music all day without needing to interact with the app. Like from user experience, that's a gigantic win. For Spotify trying to like make money and sell lots of really great powerful visual ads, that's a disaster. And so what this is now is Spotify saying, and they even said this during the stream on event, they're like,

we're not worried about engagement metrics. We're not here to just try to keep you inside of our app as much as you can while very clearly building things that auto play, that auto play with sound, and that are designed to be endlessly scrolling so that you look at them for much longer. It's like at some point you can't have it both ways. And they're going to be like, oh, well, engagement went way up. And it's like, well, of course it did. But that's, are we sure that's good? Is that what we want out of Spotify? Yeah. So one thing that the music industry in particular is fighting against,

straight up is TikTok. TikTok is where every song breaks. It's where, I don't know, like Fleetwood Mac rises like a zombie to continue haunting me for the rest of my days. Just shut up. It's so tiresome. Really. Sorry.

I understand the music is beautifully made, and I understand they were all dating each other. And it is on a technical level. some of the finest music ever made. It is so boring. I'm sorry. Nilai reviews rumors. I've been ranting about Fleetwood Mac since I was 16 years old.

This is like the sanded off edges of me talking about Lee Woodman. But like that's a thing that happened, right? The guy riding the longboard in California, getting the free cranberries for life or whatever, is an entirely a TikTok phenomenon. I realize that if you don't know what I'm talking about, that sounded completely bonkers. But if you just put those words into Google, you will understand.

It's a whole thing that happened. Yep. That's TikTok. Like, TikTok just, like, made that song relevant again. It made it really relevant again. It's doing it over and over and over again. It's where new artists break. It's changing the complexion of the music industry.

It's making songs shorter, which is very funny. It's, like, sampling it. Like, everything is in the music industry is happening on TikTok. And then underneath it all, TikTok is not a music service, really. And so they're kind of like, yeah, music industry, you want to break a song? Just pay us a bunch of money. And we'll make sure those tracks get promoted in a way that if Spotify does it and people claim Spotify does it.

But if they actually do that, everyone will get really mad at Spotify. Yeah. So like Spotify's just got like a major problem on its hands that all discovery happens on TikTok. And then people go to Spotify to listen to the song. But they're spending all over time in a platform that has video advertising built into it. which is much more lucrative than Spotify free. Right.

But the important second piece of that, though, is like it's not audio-led discovery, right? Like, people are watching videos through which they discover audio. And that's, like, Spotify has everybody, lots of different publications, or not publications, lots of different companies have tried to figure out how to do audio first discovery. And it turns out it's essentially impossible because the idea of like, I'm going to sit here and just listen to something I've never heard of for a while is super boring. and people get tired of it. And that's why everybody puts the hook to their song at the beginning of the song now.

And so, but what you have with video is, it's just more interesting. It's just going to hold your attention a little longer, which gives the song a chance to catch you a little longer, and then you can sort of trip through TikTok that way. And so Spotify has been trying to play this, like, how do we do more visual things game forever to keep you looking at the app

and has just never solved it anything like the way TikTok has solved it. Yeah. And now they've just made TikTok again. And I think that the big, question is whether people are going to open Spotify first to be like, I want to find some new things. This is Spotify's claim, right, that the business they're in is actually discovery and not playback. And if you listen to the interview with Gustav that Alex is going to do on Decoder next week, or if you listen to their event, they're very clear that the whole thing they're doing

is trying to get people to try new things. Yeah. And that is fundamentally Spotify's value to the world is discovery across all this. I'll just read this quote not to give away the whole interview, but he says, in regards to cover art, he said to Alex, you have to click through one of the titles and you have to wait for one and a half on minutes on average to get to the hook. That can't be the best way to discover music. The best way to discover audio must be through audio, which makes intuitive sense, but I know that when people open Spotify and it just starts blasting them with hooks, they're going to lose their minds. Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, by the way, the discovery thing is something you'll hear from every.

single music platform. They all think that the main thing that they can do for the music industry and for listeners is expose you to new stuff, right? Because it's like if I want to listen to Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, I have infinity options, many of them free, one of them type it into YouTube. And the last one being don't. Rude. Rumors is wonderful, a perfect album. Look, I'm not even disputing that argument. I know that many people feel this way. Nila Hayes Flewood back. When I spent a bunch of time with Lear Cohen who runs YouTube music a while back, and he said very much the same things.

And Apple will say the same thing. That's why they gave Zane Lowe all that money, right? It's like, discovery is the thing. They want to help break artists so they can be friends with the music industry. They want to help break artists so that listeners will keep coming back to discover new things. Like, that is the product in a really real way. It's just that TikTok showed up and is so much better at it than anybody else. Is it also because like the playlist suck?

Because for a long time, they kind of tried to replicate the DJ by doing all the playlist, right? And are people just not listening to those playlists and finding new musicians that way? Well, Spotify rolled out the AI playlist. Yeah, but those suck. So they're doing much, much more of this stuff. It sounds like the problem for TikTok, the problem for Spotify, the problem for YouTube music, is that I am not 16 always. And I'm not always hearing the best music I will ever hear, ever at that point in my life. And if I were, maybe I would want to listen to these playlists and listen to a bunch of new songs because I'd be young and I would be experiencing new things.

I would say, yes, I'm making this music my entire personality now, as I did then. But it's now X number of years later that music is still my personality. I want to hear the music that I listened to a decade plus ago. That is the only thing that I want. I do not want a playlist. I do not want suggestions. I want to hear the same songs that I've already heard. Possibly you could remix them and blend them together.

that's cool. No new music. But I guess that's a problem for Spotify that I don't want to listen to the new things. Well, so underneath that is the real problem for Spotify, is that you listening to hits from the 90s over and over again does not actually make those artists any money. And maybe it shouldn't, right? Like in the CD era, you would buy that CD, you would listen to it for the rest of your life. That artist would not get money every time you listen to a CD. But they got a lot of money up front for the CD.

right and that usually sustained most artists now it's like the game that they're all playing is like pennies forever right so Spotify has a lot of incentive to make their catalog artists or like the catalog artists from major labels happy because no one is getting the big dollars up front they're all just getting pennies over time but they stuff to break new artists and to break new artists you got to shove them in people's faces all the time you got to break new songs and i think all of this stuff is in a real tension with the other piece of what they announced which is an emphasis on video podcasts and showing you little clips of video podcasts in the feed as you scroll. Because that is just a jarring transition from like, here's the hook of a song. Here's the hook of a song. Do you like this playlist? Go over here. Here's three people talking about whatever, which is admittedly what we do here.

Hi, guys. And we'll probably figure out how to get involved in that on Spotify. But it's just there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of business models. They're trying to cram into one experience. experience. But this is the magic of TikTok. Like that, that thing you just described is the thing that has made TikTok so powerful, which is that it can be wrong about what you're going to be interested in, nine out of ten times. And TikTok, that, that like endless vertical scrolling thing with video and

sound is like immersive enough even when you don't care about what it is that it keeps you scrolling. And that's like, that's the magical thing that TikTok solved is most of the time you don't care about the thing that's being shown to you, but the price of TikTok being wrong is so low because the scrolling experience is so fun that you will just keep scrolling even when you don't care about the content. Like the activity is enough. And what that gave TikTok permission to do was just shove stuff you don't care about in your face all the time to see what hits. And everyone is copying that for exactly that same reason, right? Like that's what Facebook is trying to do? They're like, are you interested in this? And you say no. And they're like, what about this? And they're like, what about this? And they're like, what about

this? And they'll just do that forever. And if Facebook can't figure it out, it's like, is it girls? And they will there's just like one bikini girl no matter what at all times. And I'm like, no, no, no, it's trucks jumping over stuff. I want to be very clear about this. I literally typed the words into the search box. And like every couple weeks, I was like, I don't know, just one thing that'll make your wife mad. Mine is bloopers from the office. It's just like when in doubt, TikTok, just show me bloopers from the office.

And like, we're cool again. Everything's fine. But no, but that's the thing. And that's why you do that extra visual thing because it's just constant. There's just so much going on. in a way that like if you show me eight seconds of silence at the beginning of a song on a playlist or like a slow building guitar, people are out. But if you just like play loud noise over and over again as I scroll, like that's going to keep me engaged. Okay. So the 70s, like music in the 70s, that's when we started getting the long guitar solos and stuff.

Before that in the 40s and 50s, Phil Specter, horrible man dead now. But he made the wall of sound, right? He got what was coming to him. He got what was coming to him. I mean, he played like Russian roulette and the lady died. It was not great. But he wore a cape. Dude, like, wore a cape to record music.

But in the 50s and 60s, wearing his little cape, he created, like, a whole new way of listening to music, which was just blast it into your ears on every single. Like, he was like, I'm going to make it really, really loud because everybody's just listening on radio. And so the louder it is, the more they'll, like, be likely to sit around and listen, which is why we have the Beach Boys, but also, like, all of those. great bops from the early 60s. So that's just kind of what they're doing again on TikTok. Pretty much. The music distribution thing is like really interesting. So Phil Spector is like in like the like the 45 era, right?

He's like doing singles. He's distributing on radio. There's a really great Vox video about the dawn of the 12 inch single and like bands like New Order were like Blue Monday will be 45 minutes long because we've got we can just have like oceans of vinyl to print on. Yeah. And then we collat. And then you kind of get into those.

70s 80 songs where it's like, what if we did synth pads for like a minute before a single drum right? And it's like these like huge builds and like Pink Floyd is just like you know, just like swishing around your house just haunting you.

That's great. Like that music is great. Could not work with any modern distribution. No. Yeah. Because you can't there's, you just can't get to the hook right away. And all of that was when people bought vinyl records, they literally literally thought they wanted a lot of music for the money.

Like the clash is like San Dinaista is three, three 12 inches, like six sides of vinyl. There are skits in here for some reason. We don't know why. And that's just value for dollar. And now everything is free. So it's like just on to the next one.

Fine. But the thing that's really interesting at Spotify, one, it's not a swipe. It's a scroll, which is the smallest distinction. But I think a weird one, right?

They're trying to like cop this user interface. behavior from TikTok, but they're making you, like, slowly scroll through this stuff. I think I would bet they switch to swipes pretty soon. And then two, what TikTok has is a infinite universe of user-generated content. So there is a lot of garbage, but then, like, things will hit that no one ever thought of. Right. And that's, like, the magic. Spotify is still pretty curated. Like, what ends up in that feed is going to be pretty curated by the music industry, by the podcast industry. Spotify does have anchor. They're like user generated podcast tool, but they've really diminished its stature. I think they've even renamed it. Yeah, it's part of Spotify for podcasters now.

Yeah. So you've just got this feed. It's like it acts a little differently. It is way more curated and professional. And usually those things together mean that they get stale fast as opposed to like the endless like what are the kids doing today of TikTok? The question for Spotify is that now that they've leading into video, can they be on the go? 90 scale. Can I read you this quote that I've just been thinking about? So Spotify is really in the video podcasts. Everyone's in the video podcasts.

The reason is not complicated, right? It's that for the platforms, not for necessarily for the podcasters, but for the platforms, being able to insert video advertising is more lucrative than audio advertising. We are, obviously this show is on YouTube now. Like the details of our money are actually opaque to us. That's the whole point of the fact that we are journalism. there's a sales team. They do it all over there. But there's a real dynamic between the money you make in audio and the money making video and the dollars in video are generally higher.

They're not higher on YouTube, which is weird, but YouTube is like the gold standard video platform. A lot of the platforms want to go capture those video dollars. So that's why Reddit does it. That's why Spotify's doing it. But here's this quote. And it just, video podcasting is one of the fastest growing areas of podcasting. And we expect that growth to continue. That's from Julie McNamara, head of global podcast studios at Spotify at this event. What's a video podcast? Is it just videos of people talking? I mean, this is a video podcast, right? Yes. I think we get that. Is the view a video podcast? Yes. Okay. What is it a video podcast? I actually, I think Alex is right. Like, I think there was a great Twitter thread, and I don't remember

who it was, but I'm sorry. I'll see if I can find it and I'll tweet it back out. Actually, I don't use Twitter, but that's a whole other point. They were talking about Jason and Travis Kelsey, these football playing brothers who have had a super successful thing. And one of the points that the thread made was that they don't call it a podcast. Like, it is distributed as a podcast on podcast platforms, but they just think of it as like a show. And I think that's right. Like what is an interview show other than a video podcast, right?

Like people talking to people on screen has been around forever. The only difference is like we show the microphones now. And so I think what's happened is this stuff has all just sort of collapsed where it's like, okay, people talking is interesting. Watching people talk is interesting. These things don't all have to be different. We can just shove them together and just let them be shows. Like the word podcast is like a relic of iPods, right? Like it hasn't described what this industry is in a really long time. No, I'm telling you, this is an exist. You were describing very confidently an existential crisis for the podcast industry. Oh, absolutely. It's happening. It's happening. It's like, the idea that you make radio and you distribute is MP3 files via RSS to an ecosystem of players are all independent and can compete with you. That's like, if you ask people what is a podcast, they will start with RSS feeds.

Sure. And that broke the minute Spotify started spending money on podcasters, right? Like this is, this has been dying for a while. And I think what you're seeing now is everybody just acknowledging that like, okay, this doesn't, this distinction doesn't exist. anymore. And actually what we're talking about is just a bunch of different kinds of distribution for the same kind of thing, which is people that you care about doing stuff together, talking to each other. It's, right? Like, it's, I don't know, these things are not that far apart, I don't think. Again, we obviously are participants in this. I love video podcasts.

We make videos of this podcast, another podcast. We put them on YouTube. We should figure out how to put them on Spotify. I don't even know that Apple podcast supports video. It does. Does it? I don't know anybody who watches video on Apple Podcasts, but it definitely supports video. Only way I watch video. just the only way no other way to watch that who needs it I watch RSS fed video and Apple

but I catch myself on TikTok sometimes watching video clips of podcasts that I've already listened to absolutely and I can't even really explain it by the way go subscribe to

YouTube.com slash Vergecast we'd really appreciate it that's great okay but wait wait Nila let me just expand this existential crisis

slightly so one of my favorite podcasts is the always sunny podcast which is just the three creators and stars of the show, it's always Sunday in Philadelphia,

doing a podcast. The show is a podcast. It's also a video podcast on YouTube. Often on YouTube during their podcast, they will play clips of their show and talk about the clips from their show or about the process of writing this show. So you could argue that their podcast

has bled into a video podcast, which has bled into their television show. And I'm sure we're going to do an episode where they make a podcast. They did do an episode where they make a podcast. It's like, what is it? What is any of this anymore? What is content?

I don't know. I just, the idea that everything is a video podcast and soon Spotify will try to shove it into a feed that is almost TikTok, but not quite. That's where we're going. Yes. Absolutely. Yes. Right. One of my favorite examples of this is CNBC.

All of their hours are published as audio podcasts in Apple Podcast. You can go get squawk on the street as a podcast every day. And it's just CNBC anchors doing their show with no regard to the fact that it's a podcast. It plays, it works perfectly fine. Yeah, you just have to imagine there's a little. lower crawl saying, stocks down, everybody panics. And that's all. Run on your bank.

Get out there. Just run at your bank as fast as you can. I mean, I think they're usually when people think of podcasts, they think of not a distribution, but like a form. Yes. Right? This thing that we make is a podcast that despite all odds has been going on for over 10 years now.

And it's just this, right? It's people talking to each other, maybe some format, maybe somewhere along the way someone will commit a murder and we'll figure out who did it. That's on next season of the Vergecast. Vergecast True Crime is an idea waiting to happen. Can we get, Liam, can you start playing like the Tinkly serial piano here, please? That would be amazing. Right, there's formats in podcasting, but you kind of understand what they are and people riff

on them and they expand them. You do not think of RSS-based distribution. And I think once you open the door to, it's a video too, I've seen podcasts where everyone's wearing laugh mics and just sitting around on couches. And you're like, this is getting, like, this is just a talk show now. This is late night television, but we're calling it a video podcast to get it into all this distribution. I don't know. Like there's Spotify is they're going to end up competing more with YouTube than I think they understand because YouTube has all of that and it has YouTube videos.

And it has whatever else, right? I think, yeah, they'll compete with YouTube and that the fact that YouTube is creating its own like podcasting set up and everything. But at the same time, I keep going back to this show Critical Role, which I've only watched like half of an episode because they're four hours long and that's a terrible thing to do with your day. But it was a show that was four hours long and people were sitting there watching it and they kept begging for a podcast and they got a podcast. And some listeners go and they listen to the podcast. Some people watch the show and the show's like still gotten like better. The production qualities have improved. It's all like they're investing further into that side of it. So it's like I think those two audiences are just very different. And this is just a big mad grab to get as much audience as possible, as quickly as possible, right? Yeah. That's what every platform is always doing. I just think Spotify in particular

thinks it's competing with TikTok. And it's being with YouTube. Yeah. And YouTube is out there. Like YouTube was at Hot Pod Summit, our podcasting conference a couple weeks ago. They announced YouTube podcast features. They announced video podcast

features, background play. Like, YouTube knows. They, they see it coming. They see that opportunity. But Spotify, I think, is, they're headed in a different way. And somewhere lost in all of this is, boy, I'd like to just see a bunch of songs in my catalog and pick from them. Right. Which appears to be fully out of favor at this point. It's done. Yeah. No one will ever own any music ever again. All right, we got to take a break. We'll come back. We've got to talk about David's anger at streaming boxes. This is just a real streaming media episode. And then, of course, there's a Twitter update. We've got some policy updates.

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That's upw-w-r-k.com. Upwork.com. All right, we're back. So, David, you went on leave, child, cared for the child. And then you did the thing that everybody on leave does, parental leave does, is you held a baby who was sleeping. You couldn't move and you just thought deeply about technology. And you concluded, I think rationally, what most people do, the state of television is a disaster and you should tell people about it.

Tell us about it. That's basically right. So what I promised I wouldn't do was I was not going to become a dad gadget guy. I was like, I will not come back from parental leave and be the guy who's like, have you heard of the kikaru? Like I'm not, I will not be that guy. The kikaru? Yeah, well, I'm not doing it.

You cannot. Beat me into this. I'm not doing it. What did happen was I spent a tremendous amount of time with a child sleeping on top of me watching television. And I watched television on my smart TV. I watch television on my Roku. I watched television on my fire TV. I watched television on my Apple TV.

I watched television on my on my Invidia Shield because I am a maniac who owns all these things. They're all bad. This is the thing that I have landed on is there was a time not that many years ago when the TV was going be the hub of technology, right? This was when the smart home was really starting to become a thing. This was when smartphone technology was starting to sort of percolate out and everything was getting new processing power and much more sort of sensory awareness. This was the moment when like the game console was going to shrink all the way down and just become your set top box. Microsoft tried to do it with the Xbox. Everybody was like, the set top box is the future. And what turned out to happen

is that set top boxes are bad and getting worse and becoming sort of increasingly commodified. because for a bunch of reasons that have to do with how these companies make money, what the streaming services themselves want, and just the fact that this is the world we live in, and smart TVs continue to get cheaper and cheaper. They suck, and there's no way for them to get any better. There's no incentive or reason for anyone to try to build a good set-top box anymore, and that just made me sad.

And I got to the end of this post, and I was like, I'm going to write an angry thing demanding everybody do better. And I got to the end of it and was like, oh, no, it's just bad. and it's never getting any better. Yeah. So the ones that you really called out were it's still very app-based. Yeah. Which is what some of them want.

I think Apple's still like whatever, it's app-based. That's fine. But two, so it's app-based instead of content-based. Yeah. I mean, that's the simplest thing your set-top box should do for you is take you to the things you want to watch. Like, that doesn't strike me as. But it's never going to because Netflix doesn't want to participate in any ecosystem that allows you to find their content anywhere but the Netflix app.

Right. It's like if, if 30 years ago, you know, one of the cable companies had just been like, no, we don't want to be in the guide. You have to use a different guide if you want to get to CNN. This is somehow the world we've ended up in. Yes. It's like like the old spreadsheet TV guide was a much better interface than anything we have for finding stuff to watch now. And like, that is a deeply sad state of affairs. So I love verge readers because a lot of them are like, whatever the Apple TV is fine, which I think is a reasonable it's extremely fine. It's fine.

I say that in the piece. It's probably the best one you can buy because it's the only one that has an actually fast processor. And it's like, you know what? If the system is broken at least... The Uvidia Shield people just lost their minds. I was like, whatever. You say that about the Shield.

The Shield is really fast and just utterly decimated by the fact that Android TV doesn't work very well. But there's a good processor in there. It just isn't very fast and it's not Envidius's fault. But the Apple TV is a perfectly fine thing, right? But like there's so many simple ways it could be a lot better. One of them is just like if Siri weren't trash and Apple had ever made Siri good at anything ever for any reason, the Apple TV might be more useful. But it just, it's fine.

And if you want fine, I can sell you fine for $15. Like go buy a Roku stick that's inevitably on sale at Amazon or buy a fire TV that they will just give you for free if you love. look at them and it's all just fine. Whatever. I feel like fine. It was better a few years ago. Like when the Chromecast originally came out, it felt good to use. It was, it worked.

It was cheap. And I think those are the two bars that it needs to cross. There are a lot of Chromecast fans in the comments of this piece, by the way. They were like, whatever. Oh, yeah. It's not nearly as cheap. It doesn't work nearly as well. Yeah, you know, like now you get HDR and 4K and all these other things if you want them.

but it's not as easy to use. I'm trying to watch an F1 clip like casted to my TV and suddenly the volume just starts going to maximum because my phone is at maximum. And why would anyone want this, this experience?

This should not be like this. Why am I having these problems? You want to feel the beat of the engine thrumming through your body. I would not want to wake my wife up at 2 a.m. with the sounds of F1 engine. But you're like, honey, listen to this engine. It will be the last time.

While I was sitting there complaining about set-top boxes being bad, Anna, my wife just kept saying, I don't care about any of the rest of it. Just why aren't all the apps the same volume? Like, I turn on my smart TV and I have to put it, I put it to 25 for Netflix, 35 for Peacock, 45 for HBO. And then I go back to Netflix and it blows my ears out and wakes up my child. And it's like, this is the simplest thing that this hardware could do is just make everything the same volume. But it can't because it's not allowed to because the streaming services won't allow this. the boxmakers to do anything.

Did you notice that Peacock also doesn't, hasn't fixed the difference between audio and commercials versus. Oh, it's horrible. Regular things. Like, this is the number one thing people always hated. It was a great thing that sound bars tried to solve. And somehow the sound bar cannot solve it on Peacock because Peacock's like, no. We want you to have this like, it's, and it's always like, condom commercials is all I get on

peacock. And it's just like, and I'm like, well, this is. The connected TV ecosystem has found you out. It has failed. Profound work. Mark Zuckerberg's listening to you, my friend. And I was just like, what is happening? Because it's so loud.

And it's like, do you need condoms? No, I'm good. Thanks. Very, very loudly. And then back to poker face, soft whisper. Yeah. I like you think that it's a conversation you're having with your TV. You're like, no, thank you.

Because I'm sitting in my house. Like, nope. Mm-mm. So what's fascinating about this is, Apple in particular, everywhere else in its ecosystems has absolute control over its developers.

Like, the idea that iPhone apps would be this wildly inconsistent or not participate in universal search or whatever, Apple would write the rule, people would complain, European bureaucrats would issue a directive. Everyone knows the exact cycle I'm talking about if you're a virtual

listener, right? Yeah. We would do a whole episode about it. It would be a thing. On the TV side, Apple does not have the market share to exercise the control. And they have a lot of fans and people really like it. But apps launch. They launch without support for Apple. Sometimes they don't even launch on the Apple TV right away.

They launch without support for features. They launch the features late. I'm specifically thinking about YouTube TV launching 5.1 surround just way after it came to other platforms. And then the apps themselves are still kind of just like HTML5 wrappers because there's so many TV platforms that the streaming vendors have just been like, screw it, they're all web apps. Here's the web app package for Tysin. Here's the web app package for whatever LG is running WebOS on and on to go. Not only are they doing that. They're also on this incredible race to the technological

bottom because now that there are all these incredibly cheap smart TVs, you have to build that app in such a way that not only does it work across all these platforms, it works on this unbelievably cheap, low-end processor inside of like a shitty TCL TV. And so you're in this position where you are actually incentivized against building something that works

because it would break most of the time. Like even if you built a really good app for the Apple TV, it would then not work most other places. So of course you're going to build the lowest common denominator, which is what everybody has started doing. So one of the interesting responses I saw to your piece, David, were the people who said,

this is why I've started buying channels inside of Apple TV and inside of YouTube TV and inside of Amazon. Yep. Right. They're like, I don't want to use a Showtime app. I just bought Showtime inside of YouTube TV or wherever. And that gets me closer to a single interface. We've seen a lot of these companies are starting to think about their products as bundles.

Apple does it, Amazon does it. YouTube does it. HBO Max is going to turn into something. They're just going to call it Max and that's going to be a horrible day for me. ESPN has said that it's going to perhaps, or there's been a rumor that ESPN might allow, other sports channels to plug into it so that it could become a hub

for your sports streaming. That's Plex's Big Play, right? Now, every couple of years, Plex does a new big play. No, that has become Plex's big play. As they say, we want to be your central hub. So we've found these weird,

horrible hacks that are not actually very easily to let all of the apps work inside our platform because we recognize that everything sucks. And like Apple did that with the TV app the terribly, terribly named TV app. They tried to do that. But again, everybody gets bodied because Netflix or some other big player

doesn't want to listen to him, and nobody has the market share to force. Several years ago, the Verger's office was in Midtown, New York, and we wanted to go out after work for a drink or a snack. You haven't been to Midtown, New York. It's kind of like a weird ghost town. We used to walk into this restaurant. It was a couple blocks away. It was really nice.

It looked expensive. There was never anyone in there. ever. Zero people were ever in this restaurant. And like 400 people worked there. That restaurant was a front for the mob. And in this metaphor, that restaurant is Plex. Speak to that, me like. Just put that out there. That's fine, man. You can tell me you're doing all kinds of shit. But everybody knows what's happening in the back of that restaurant. It's fast TV back there. That's what they got going on. It's free ad supported TV. Yeah. The only way to watch.

400 people work here. No customers. Very odd. Very odd situation. Actually, the TV app in Apple is like a perfect example of this, right? They wanted it. You can see what it would be if it worked, but no one will play ball. So it barely works and it's not the home screen of the product.

Yeah, it's, this is the thing is it's not, it's not like it's not obvious how to do this better. Right? there's a big long vision of like the TV as the center of your home in a lot of really interesting ways that are actually really complicated and multi-user technology is like a thing we actually really have not solved yet. So whatever, we can talk about that later. But the simple thing is like, just make it easier for me to watch things on my TV. And everybody knows how that would work. And there's been just enough players who have refused that it's been easier for everybody else to refuse and it has just collapsed. Like it's not unclear what Apple

would like to do. It just can't do it. you know what's going to fix this. If you say Plex, I'm going to, I'm going to leave. I'm going back on parental leave. If you say Plex. ATSC 3.0. Oh, God. Yeah.

That's even worse. Nothing like 600 ultra-compressed channels of infomercials beam directly to you from your local CBS affiliate. In 4K. We're like one scissor vodka joke away from me filling my Vergecast bingo card on my first day back. This is very exciting. It's going to be great. All right.

That's streaming, streaming music, streaming TV, the business models, the money is preventing good user experiences. I think is what we're, yep,

what we're getting at here. This brings me to Twitter, where the money is preventing a good user experience in a different way, in that all of the people have been fired, and so the site keeps crashing.

I don't know if there's much more to say, but there's just a lot going on with Twitter, but it's all kind of the same story, which is Elon fired everybody, and now all the people who know what they're doing are gone. And so Zoe and Casey had a straightened platformer.

It's on the site. Basically, they tried to make an API change. Brought on the whole site for several hours. Because it was just one guy or one person. There was just one engineer on the project. And they broke it and were like, well. And then Elon did some tweets about how everything is brittle. That resulted in a lot of software people being like the reality of all software is that it's brittle.

And the solution to that is knowing people knowing what they're doing. I was interviewing somebody a couple of years ago for a totally unrelated story and they like paused me at the end of our interview. I did the like, is there anything I should have asked you like what else are you thinking about question, which is a good one for reporters to do. And he like looks at me dead in the face and he goes, you need to report on tech debt more because tech debt is the underlying most important story of why everything is broken all the time. And like my response was I'm sure you're right. That is a just staggeringly boring story. But this is that, right? Like it's, it's just, this service has been around for almost 20 years.

There is tech debt everywhere. And that just is what it is. You can't rewrite the thing from scratch, which is now what Elon is promising to do, which I find deeply hilarious. He also promised to open source the algorithm. He also promised creator sharing. I said promising. This is my point.

That's just as likely as rewriting the Twitter code from scratch, right? Like, you just, you can't do it. And this is why at some point you have to employ people who know what they're doing in order to keep making the service. that you make work. That's one approach, but Netflix got a lot of mileage a few years ago because they had this technology they called Chaos Monkey, where it would test the resilience of their platform because it would go around and like shut stuff off at random and see if it still worked.

And that was supposedly how Netflix would keep working mostly everywhere all the time. And now Twitter has a Chaos Monkey named Elon Musk. And he is stress testing the app. And when we get through this, it'll be fine eventually. they'll find every single hole. It's just going to take probably the rest of our lives. If all the people he fired don't sue it into oblivion. Richard, you've changed since I left.

Big crypto, big Elon guy. So there's one piece of Twitter story we should talk about it on the show. We did not write about it on a site because the story is so weird. And so many of the details are actually quite hard to confirm and have not been confirmed. So I say what the story is first. And then just talk about why we didn't do it. It's unpleasant too. So there's a Twitter designer named Harold Dural Thorleafson.

He goes by Holly on Twitter. Holly tweets Elon, hey, my laptop got shut off several days ago. I don't know if I'm fired. Am I fired? No one will respond to me. Maybe if we tweeted Elon enough. Elon is just incredibly rude. Yeah.

There's no way to put it. He's just rude. He's like, what do you do here? Just tell me right away. Like without any kind of politeness, any let's take this to DMs, let's, let's email this out. He's just like, what do you do here? And then the guy is like, well, I can't tell you because that'll break my confidentiality agreement.

Which, by the way, watching this is a distance. You're like, oh, that's a trap. And Elon is like, fine, break it. Tell me everything. And so the guy tells him some stuff. Elon laughs at him because he's like, I worked on like a Figma project. Right. He's like, one of the things he did was he negotiated a price of a software and service product down by 500K.

And he's like, which thing? he's like Figma, and I don't think Elon knew what Figma was. Elon just laughed because presumably he didn't know what it was and didn't realize that it's hugely important for software designers to figure out what the software is going to actually look like. So he just kind of roast the guy. And then he continues the roast the guy the next day to other people who are like, Elon, you're being kind of a dick.

And Elon's like, yeah, but the guy didn't even do anything here. He said he had some sort of like issues so he couldn't even type. So what's even the point of this guy? And it's like, well, uh-oh. because Hallie is actually like a pretty noted disability activist in Iceland who's building a bunch of wheelchair ramps and had also like then explained in a Twitter thread how he had muscular dystrophy, how he had a wife and he slept in a big bed with his wife unlike Elon, how he saw his children every day unlike Elon. And just like just brutally goes after Elon while explaining like how every single way that Elon is wrong. And then Elon apparently realized that he had fired someone for disability reasons and then tweeted that he had fired someone for disabilities. And that's a good way to lose your company or at least a lot of money and then said, okay, we're going to work it all out on the back end.

And then there was also this whole thing where a lot of people were saying, well, Hallie was actually owed a hundred million dollars if he was fired. But that's really difficult to confirm. So there's just a lot, like it was just a messy, messy. HR dispute happening in real time on Twitter and we all had to watch it. And that was just kind of gross. Yeah, it was gross. So Elon tweets, he did no actual work.

He claimed his excuse to he had a disability that prevented him from typing. There's a response where he's like on muscular dystrophy. I will say that the sort of like Elon take ecosystem went bananas around all of this. And the world of people who were like, he got him, he set a trap. Now he owes him the money.

He got fired. First of all, the guys in Iceland, we don't know what law his contract is under. We just don't know how he's employed. So we don't even know law controls here. Two, there is this thing with $100 million. Thorloy as a founder. There's a lot of reporting that we have, that Alex Heath has, that Casey and Zoe have a platformer, that when Twitter acquired founders, their shares vested faster.

They were owed more money. So they had had founders on do not fire lists because it would cost them so much money to to fire them on these accelerated investing schedules. But we don't know how that applies to this guy. Then this guy is also Iceland's man of the year. It's a real thing because of his work as a disability activist, building the ramps. But most importantly, he did not sell his company for stock. He very famously sold it for cash.

So he would pay more taxes because he credits Iceland's social services for allowing him to live, work, and thrive with his disability. That's like the wrong person to fight. And to fight publicly on Twitter. What I'm just getting at is the story, right, that he got baited. Elon would owe him $100 million. We actually can't confirm like 50 of the dots in between. Boy, that was a real jerk interaction.

And Elon publicly apologized and said he'd FaceTime the guy or they had a video call. And everything is just all the guy is considering saying. Right. And no one's talking. So I just like I just want to say this is like kind of why we. A, it was gross. It seemed petty and gross and small and sort of, it's just more of the same, right?

It's just like, Elon's playing the hits with, like, doing his business like a jerk on Twitter. And then B, in the middle is just like, what feels like an unconfirmed, unconfirmable story that,

to do it responsibly after a report out. And I think that's just really telling, like, I think the Twitter story is still really important. I think what happens to the social network that is the architecture of lots of things. Like, this whole podcast,

who about Aaron Rodgers in the New York Jets right now. I'm just telling you. Like it's on the back of my mind every second of every day. And it's all just playing out on Twitter, right? It's just like the architecture of sports media is still on Twitter. The architecture of politics is still on Twitter. So what happens to Twitter is important. It's just right now every day is like these little explosions of chaos that kind of don't mean as much as they should mean or don't mean as much as people want them to mean.

Yeah. My relationship with Twitter has changed so much the last few months. Like I just bailed on Twitter and I have to say I have been. shocked by how little I have missed. Like the thing that felt truest to me of everything that happened the last few months was that thing where Elon forced the engineers to juice his own metrics because it just everywhere, every time I would open it up, my mentions were filled with people tagging me in crypto scams and my timeline was just Elon replying to people.

It's just like, what is this place now? And I think there's a great piece on our site this week called How a Social Network falls apart that really rang true to me that way. It was just like the place just feels worse now. Like, forget the fact that it keeps collapsing because nobody works there anymore. And like it is just not being run in a competent way as far as anybody can tell. It just, it just feels bad to me. But there is still that thing where I think people don't know where else to go.

And it's like, Mastodon is not that thing, at least not yet. And there's nowhere else. So it's like if you are one of those people who wants to know what's going on with Aaron Rogers and the Jets, a person of which I am not one. But if you are one of those people, there's just still nowhere else to go. And that's one of the things that is the most surprising to me is that people feel stuck,

I think, in a realer way every single day. Yeah. But it's also like, no, there's a guy who followed the Jets plane to California and went to the airport and, like, watched the Twitter stuff. You know what I'm talking about. It's like someone found the plane. They went and saw the plane. They saw Aaron Rogers walking the plane. Yep.

The only place that happens is Twitter. Like, there's no replacement for that specific thing. Maybe it'll happen a little bit on Reddit. 4chan. 4chan. If sports media moves to 4chan, that will be wild. Get ready. But I just think, like, the stuff in the background of Twitter is, like, the experiment is how much can you break it?

How much can you make people feel bad? And they still have to use it. And that's always what Elon, that's always what Elon has a banking on, right? People are addicted to Twitter and he can do anything because the guy who's the most, Most addicted to cigarettes, bought the cigarette factory, and we're just going to see how it goes. Well, something that I've noticed is that people complain about Twitter and we talk about Elon and his strategies and how he's working, but he has been effective in one kind of particular way that I've noticed.

They defaulted everyone to the 4U page to the algorithmic timeline. They have both timelines. People use the algorithmic timeline a lot, and that is part of the reason why so many people saw, for example, this story playing out. Because if you are on that one and you follow anyone involved or anyone who is talking about it, it's going to be at the top of your feed. And at least so far, that bet has not been an incorrect one for Elon and for Twitter to put to kind of algorithmically juice discontent and unhappiness. Whatever that does for people, I don't know, but it has kept

their attention. And something that, you know, if you're going to remain on Twitter, I just, I beg people, please, don't use the algorithmic timeline. Turn off replies from people who don't follow you. You don't need to see what they say. And turn off notifications for likes. You don't need to know whether or not people agree with you. That's true. Turn off most of the features of Twitter is good advice from Richard. Also, if you see a bank, run at it as fast as you can. What could go wrong?

Just dead sprint. Do you know how 17 I drove a Mustang? That's a real story. We're going to take a break. We'll be right back. Was it during a podcast? We'll be right back. We got some policy stuff to talk about.

It was not during it. Technically, if you drive a Mustang into a bank in the 90s, that's a video podcast. We'll be right back. 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. That's where LinkedIn Hiring Pro comes in. It's built to be your hiring partner, helping you find the right candidates faster.

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from MongoDB. If you're tired of database limitations and architectures that break when you scale, it's time to think outside of rows and columns. Because let's be honest, you didn't get into tech to babysit a broken database. You got into it to actually build something. MongoDB lets you do that. It's flexible, developer first, asset compliant, enterprise ready, and built for the AI era. Say goodbye to bottlenecks and legacy code. Start innovating with MongoDB.

There's a reason it's trusted by so many of the Fortune 500. And that's because it's a platform built by developers for developers. MongoDB. It's a great freaking database. Start building at MongoDB.com slash build. All right, we're back. A little bit of policy news. Then we've got to talk about this dish story,

which is criminally undercover. And we got some gadgets to close us out. And weird. Weird. It's weird. It's real weird. Policy news. Congress rolled out a bill

that would allow the White House to ban TikTok across the nation. Gotta say it feels like the TikTok ban is coming, right? Like everybody on both sides is like, what if we get rid of TikTok? And states across the country have banned it for their government devices. The federal government has banned it for government devices. It's getting weird out there. And TikTok has done approximately nothing to solve this problem from what I can tell.

Because they know they have teens. They know they have like an army of teens for when this ban goes down that they can just point at the problem. I mean, Nilai, can I interest you in Project Texas, which I think if I understand, correctly is a room where a person says TikTok is great. Trust us. So they do have that. Project Texas, which the CEO of TikTok has talked about, which TikTok has talked about. They have transparency centers. Alex Heath went to one. The transparency centers are like giant touch screens where you can pretend to be a TikTok moderator. It's very much like a children's museum for content moderation. I don't know how I'll describe it. That's all I can think of anytime I hear somebody talk about.

It's like going to the museum and you touch it and it's like that's what gravity is. And this time it's content moderation. Like there's a part of me. It's like, that's good. Like more people should understand like how this works and how art it is. On the other hand, you're like, this is your answer to the government being like, China is a threat is a science museum for content moderation? However, in that, in the transparency centers, there is a room full of servers that Alex and Casey and Taylor Lawrence and everybody else who went to tour of these things were not allowed to go in.

We're Oracle employees. You remember Oracle is tied up in this in some Byzantine way. are allowed to review TikTok's code, see all the data they're using because they're in control of it. And then this is the one that I thought was the funniest piece of this all. Oracle will submit the app to Apple

in the app store, which will solve all the problems. Yeah. You just need some American capitalists inserted into things, and it's fine. Well, it's like, you guys, you know,

the app on the phone, like sends the data to China. Yeah. It doesn't matter who delivers the floppy to the spaceship. The problem is the network, you know, the internet. It's a network that is interconnected. It's just like a very funny piece of that whole puzzle.

It's like, what if Oracle was in charge of this app? It's like, yeah. What if the app was totally disconnected from the Chinese government? Like, huh, that's challenging. So that's all happening. And like, TikTok is making a big show of it. We're covering it, obviously. But this act, the restrict act is a bipartisan.

And it would allow the secretary. of commerce to ban foreign technologies and companies from operating the U.S. They present a threat to national security. So this whole thing, all these companies reacting to TikTok, there might just be like a hole at the center of their strategy. Like you wake up and you're like, what do we do now? I mean, I do wonder if part of the bet from a lot of these companies is that eventually TikTok is going to either be, you know, hamstrung and sold or outright banned.

And all of a sudden there's going to be this massive goal. rush of trying to be the next TikTok-iest thing for users in the United States. And they're all just sitting there waiting for this moment to happen. The part of this that's so strange to me is that every individual move against this seems not like specious, but it's also sort of theoretical. Right. It's like it's very hard to prove that TikTok is being nefarious in some way. You can talk about what the Chinese government has access to. You can talk about the way the algorithms are being tuned. There are all these things that sort of seem sketchy,

but have proven very hard to prove. And then so you get all these bills that say things like, we can do it if we want to, if we're able to, but only if it's allowed. And they're like, wait, what? It just, we seem to just be sort of like circling this over and over, but it does seem like we've gotten to a point where there's enough smoke on this

that it feels like there's going to be fire. Yeah, or at least the attempt, right? Because they got to prove that it's a threat to national security and TikTok has done all this project, Texas stuff. But it's out there. It's in the background in a very serious way that governments around the country are you get to posture against China for free. And you get to say that you're doing it for the kids. So everyone's very worried about the teens at all times. Think of the children.

So that's one. Two, wait, wait, before we move on, can I just, can I just say one thing? Like, I just want to give Congress a lot of credit for the, the, the, the, the backronyms in these names where like, clearly somebody's like, we want to call this the Restrict Act, but it has to stand for something. So the Restrict Act stands for the restricting the emergence of security threats that risk information and communications technology act or the Restrict Act. And I just think that's wonderful. Congratulations to Mark Werner and the rest. That's a C, that's a B plus. Starting the Restrict Act with the word restrict,

completely ridiculous. Like, you just immediately lose points. That's fair. That's fair. Can I interest you in the Data Act, the deterring America's technological adversaries act? All right. Speaking of Congress, we'll have more on this very soon. But obviously, we pay a lot of attention to the FCC here because theoretically, the FCC regulates the nation's telecom providers. No one's doing a good job. Particularly the Biden FCC has been deadlocked at 2-2 for a long time to Republicans, two Democrats. they've accomplished nothing, just flat out nothing.

The Trump FCC accomplished a lot. Most of it was destructive, but they accomplished a lot. They're like, let's get rid of that new trial. They did it. What if the government was run by Verizon? Like, did it. Fine. Biden FCC, Biden campaigns and all this stuff,

they've accomplished nothing because they've been deadlocked at two, two. For 16 months, the fifth commissioner has been waiting around. It was Gigi soon. Gigi has been on the verge cast. He's a character on the verge. She's like this ferocious consumer advocate. She was on the board of public knowledge, the First Amendment organization.

She's been sitting there for 16 months. She's been nominated twice over. It expired both times. She's gone to committee twice. There's been hearings. We did an entire Decoder episode about this bizarre mystery where they cannot get her confirmation over the finish line. And the answer is Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, furiously spending money to keep the Biden FCC deadlocked. and in particular from keeping a true consumer advocate on there.

This is the point of the show where we missed actually disclosures earlier. I should note, Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media, our parent company. You might tell from the tone of my voice. That's cool. How do you feel about that? That's fine. There's no love loss there. They're fine.

We also made a Netflix show. We made a Netflix show. It's called The Future of. That's great. You should go watch it on your Comcast internet connection. you're overpriced Comcast internet connection Disclosures We have some

Gigi quit this week She withdrew She's like couldn't take it Couldn't take the attacks McKenna Kelly is reporting And all this will have a lot more on it But I just want to point out This is like a policy disaster

Yeah That is squarely Biden's fault Like he did not push To have a functional telecom regulator In this country Is he I mean this is just me doing Greatest hits now Americans pay the highest prices

for the slowest speeds in the entire world. If you go to Europe, you can get unlimited data SIM card that works anywhere in Europe for like, I don't know, nothing, $2. Here, it's massive amounts of money and getting more expensive. We're going to come to DISH Network.

Our government approved the merger of T-Mobile in Sprint, reducing the amount of competitors in the market and said DISH, they would stand up DISH network as a fourth competitor. Dish Network has been down for two, weeks. Like the whole fucking company had a cyber attack. People couldn't pay their bills. Customer service agents couldn't even respond to people. Installers weren't getting scheduled. Zero coverage except for us. Like just crazy. Like the amount of competition we've reduced and the amount that we've

allowed prices to rise because we do not have a functional telecom regulator in this country. And this, this failure to nominate Gigi is like just a stark reminder that actually like we talk a lot about tech company corruption and like big tech, it's the telecoms. Like they still own massive chunks of political power and they wield it with absolute like nightmare like efficiency to make sure they get what they want and keep the monopolies in place. It's, I'm furious about it as you can probably talk. And Gigi's own really, really, really did not mince words to that effect. Like I just keep reading this quote that she said over and over, which is in our story.

She says, it is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries with assistance from unlimited dark money get to choose their regulators. And with the help of friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that. It's like, there it is, folks. It's pretty much that simple. The most open and shut should have been approved immediately. And instead, there was a lot of conversation about how she hated Republicans and that she was going to take newsmax and what was it, one America off the air, even though she wouldn't have had that power. There was a lot of just huge misinformation about her. Ted Cruz, popping champagne at her loss, even though all of his constituents are absolutely destroyed by the terrible broadband in this country.

And all they want is better broadband. And he's like, yeah, I fucked your broadband and joy. Yeah. And his claim is like he's like, because she has like previously criticized Fox News. Yeah. That she would like do something to free speech. Meanwhile. When she had zero control.

And also, like, I can pay attention to Fox News News lately. Yeah. Good entertainment channel. But meanwhile, right, there's no net neutrality in this country. And so things are starting to happen that are really weird, like state senators in Texas proposing bills to force ISPs to block websites with abortion information on them. Yep. And to make it so that hosting providers in Texas cannot host any website that has abortion information on it. like I that's straight up like fully in the realm of our telecom policy is now allowing

infringements on free speech like the basics of net neutrality even if you go to the big even you go to Comcast I've talked to Comcast about this right they're like yeah we think no blocking no locking no locking that's what I always call it right no blocking of websites no locking of devices from the network everyone agrees on this if you write a net neutrality bill and you're like all right we're going to start with no blocking and no locking. No one jumps out and says, do this. Like maybe the exceptions are we'll block devices that are malicious. And everyone's like, yeah, sure, that makes sense.

But the basics are like, don't, you can't block websites. You can't block content and you can't lock devices. And they've been saying this for over a decade that we've been covering this. And you get rid of it in just a few years after you get rid of it, you have state centers in Texas saying, actually, we got rid of Dobbs too. Now you should block websites to the abortion information. If you're a virtualist listener, I don't care where you're on the political spectrum, that is just straight up an attack on the First Amendment and an attack on how we think the internet should work. Maybe you think people shouldn't get abortions. The idea that you can block the information or block hosting providers and even having the websites, like fully out of bounds.

And that's what you get with that, like functional telecom policy. Anyway, it's outrageous. McKenna is going to have more on it. There's a lot to this story. It's a long weaving tale, like as David said, of dark money and corruption. go listen to the Decoder episode about it. One thing I'll note, so a little competition. The star of that Decoder episode was the CEO of Newsmax,

which is Chris Roddy is not a liberal by anyone's conception. And he was like, I want Gigi sound on the FCC because she is a fighter for competition and what I need to do is compete. That's a big deal. So go listen to that episode Decoder and the next week we'll have more from McKenna. Can I ask a really dumb question before we move on from this subject?

What happens now? Like, does the Biden administration have to nominate somebody else? Is it just going to be two, two forever? Like, what happens now? They'll nominate somebody else, and they probably will not be as, like, as good an advocate for consumers. It'll probably be someone much more palatable to the telecoms because that's the only way they're going to pass through.

A lawyer from Verizon. Is a G-Pye coming back, be honest? I know, there'll be someone like that. It'll be someone who's a little more liberal, but it's like a Democrat who works for AT&T. like the former general counsel of charter communicate like that's what we've had for years and that's what we're going to get again and so it I would just not like when um what's john ledger doing these days he could do it to put him on the example of the Biden administration's confidence in this FCC right they they did all that rural broadband stuff and they did not do it through the FCC

they did it through other agencies because they just don't trust the FCC to be effective it's maybe maybe you should shut it down like maybe you want to go full liberty And like, my three-part plan for America is like to shut this down because it's a disaster. Fine. I'm not going to disagree with you at this moment in time. You got to replace it with something. Right. Like some effective oversight of the telecoms. Not of the content, right? I don't think that we should have government speech regulations. I think everybody knows that. I'm saying literally AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, all of them are little monopolies. Their markets are not competitive. and they do weird shit and raise prices all the time. And that's like, you can't even argue with that.

Do we think that ISPs in this country are like great and that people love them? No, no one does. Zero percent of the people believe that. Long pause. Two members of the SEC do. Yeah. They think it's going great. It's going great.

The one ISP people love is Starlink. Although in the Starlink credit yesterday, I saw someone who said, hey, I was at the mall the other day and T-Mobile Home Interim. internet is available in my area and I switched to 5G home internet overstarting. Wow. And ever in the, I go read the thread. People are like, I do it too. Who big win for 5G.

It's the only win for 5G. Okay, speaking of 5G, I mentioned this thing about DISH network. This is super weird. It's super weird. So DISH is a big company, right? They run DISH. They run the satellite television service. They run Boost Mobile that they picked up.

They run project channel. a five sis. Yes. Ultra competitive 5G network. Everybody's favorite. Just striking fears in the heart. Hans Vesberg, C.O. Verizon wakes up,

cold sweat in the middle night. He's like Project Gena 5 sis. Where are we on this? Do they still have just the one phone? I know I was out for a while. Is it still just the one phone? There's been no one. Okay, cool.

They've got the one phone. They got the one tower in Portland. They're doing great. Mitchell is the only subscriber. Yeah. This is the day of their earnings. This happened several weeks ago. And we covered it.

We got a tip. from an installer just to our general tips line. Hey, like, our systems have been down for hours. And we think it's a cyber attack. That same day, they had an earnings call where they said, this is not a cyber attack. We'll have it back up shortly. Like, days went by.

Richard, I think it was like two full days before any other updates. People couldn't log in and pay their bills on the boost mobile website. The dish network.com website was just a we're sorry message. That was it. Just like a box. said, we're sorry, we're down. Like, you couldn't pay your boost mobile bill. You couldn't sign up.

People's deliveries or service appointments are canceled. There was no coverage of this, except for us, basically, in a handful of trade publications. And they finally put out a statement eventually saying that there was a cybersecurity incident. They still haven't really said what is going on. I think the last time this was updated was on March 7th. Where are they now? What have they fixed?

What is resolved? This is just kind of nowhere. Yeah. On the third, they said they're making progress. progress. Oh. First of all, this is a mystery. We should get to the bottom of it.

Second of all, it's wild that this is happening to a major telecom company is going through this. There's almost no coverage of it anywhere. And then three, this is the company that's supposed to provide competition in the broadband market. These are hopes and dreams, Ajit Pi. Like, you're like, there will be four competitors. Dish Network is going to do it.

They can't, they can't even reboot the PC. there is something deeply hilarious to me about the DISH website right now. Like DISH.com, which at least in my experience so far, doesn't always load, but does sometimes load. There are three sort of buckets that you can see at the top, three parts of the website. The first one says, thank you for your patience. It says, you know, we're experiencing a system issue. That's been there for, what, two weeks now. The second one is customer support.

That's good. And the third one is a big banner that says get inflation-free TV with DISH. the same price every month for three years. And I just, it's like, it's a super bold move to be like, come pay us for TV you can't have, but we will not raise the price on the TV that you're not allowed to have, and we will never install for you. And we will charge you immediately.

It's going to be, it's only $80 a month for TV that we will never install at your house because of a cybersecurity incident. Welcome to DISH. I will say DISH is not paying a very big Figma bill, looking at this website. that's not a cost that they're carrying. No one needs to reduce that bill because that bill is currently $0, everybody.

This is a Squarespace template. It's weird. We'll see if it comes back up. But it's just, I want to call that because it's so weird that no one's talking about it. All right, let's close with a lightning round. I think this is very funny. I think the Bing number is very funny.

Do you want to talk about the big number? Sure. So Bing, which is now probably more in the news over the last two months than ever cumulative in the history of Bing. Would you say that's fair to say? Yeah. This is the most Bing that has ever been bunged. Yeah. We have Binged. We have Binged and Bonged so hard for weeks.

And Microsoft very proudly announced that it now has 100 million active daily users, which on the one hand, to Microsoft's credit, is not a small number. Like 100 billion people using your search engine every day. Big number, very exciting. I think Google is substantially over 10 times that size.

And again, let's not forget, this is not like the number of people who are going to use this forever. This is like being at its absolute buzziest in the history of the product is somewhere in the range of one-tenth the size of Google.

Which, again, it's a big market. As Sachin Adela said to you, Niela, like, they don't have to beat Google to make an awful lot of money from a search engine. But it's just like, this was a, stark reminder of just exactly how big Google still is in this space. So their math at the event was for every 1% of market share. They saw $2 billion of revenue.

So they've ticked up to something. Now, I think that math was based on people using being like a search engine and not like. Trying to get it to fall in love with them. Right. Not asking it if it needs condoms. if you get what I'm saying. And like, I don't know if that has played out. Like, they had to restrict, right, the number of queries.

They're now back up to 10 queries. I think they thought most users show up me, like, how many two by fours fit into a Kia? Which is like their big example. And instead, it's like, people are like, do you love me? What does your butt look like, thing? Exactly. Like, are you afraid of death?

And it's like, I don't think that you can monetize that. CPMs are real. So I'm wondering if there's like, actually a cost curve here where the advertising is being delivered at the rate that Microsoft assumed it would be delivered at. But it is, you're right. You can only get an edge to have. You got to sign up. There's a wait list. But this is the most Bing that is, like, our friend John Gruber has a headline on Daring Fireball. It says Microsoft Bing is the most exciting product in tech. And it's definitely because people are trying to make out with their laptops. Yes.

Not because it's a better search experience. But that's worth your whatever $10 billion investment in open AI right there. Like, Bing has gotten more press and juice than ever before. And like, it's, it's, I suspect they will happily take that investment over and over and over again, even if they can never figure out how to make this anything more than a novelty, which it very much still is. It's a fun novelty. Oh, it's delightful. It's so fun. Is it? But it, man. But it's kind of nothing. I was using one called character AI. Again, talking about this is always talking about click someone's dream. But the short version of story is someone's showing me character.

I say, click on it, character. I can go on it. It's like, you chat with like famous characters. And I was like, I'm going to talk to Mario for Mario 64. Within two moves, I got Mario for Mario 64 to ask me if I felt lucky punk. And I was like, this is spectacular. Perfect. Like, I don't know what's going on here.

This is as much fun as you can have with the computer. I love it. None of this makes any sense. None of this is good. This isn't like a quality. I guess I'm talking about it now. But like, it's not useful.

It's not even like that entertaining because it just like it breaks the same way every time. But I'm sure Sacha somewhere is like, just keep that number going up. Yeah. All this stuff is really terrific, really expensive marketing. And no one quite knows for what yet.

Yeah. Speaking of Google and search, Google's like freaking out. It's like very obvious. They declared a code red. They're like rolling it out. They had the sort of disastrous Bard launch. Who?

Bard got something wrong, which we now all realize is basically the main thing that these generative AI systems do is they confidently lie to you. Yeah, the thing it got wrong was like very low stakes in this kind of thing. It's compared to one of it is. Yeah. Like yeah. But report from Bloomberg, Google wants to put AI in all of its products as soon as possible within months. wasn't AI already in all of Google's products?

Isn't that what every Google I.O. is about is how AI is in all of their stuff and it's doing everything. And AI will save the day. So it can erase stuff in the background of your photos, but it's not telling you that it loves you. So it has to get that. No, they demo that. I think Google's mistake, again, they invented the technology. Like, if you are listening to this in your car right now and you slow down just a little bit, a Google PR person will come running out on the highway to tell you that the T and chat

GPT was invented by Google and Stanser Transformer. Like, just pump the brakes a little bit. Just feather him a little bit. And like someone is going to leap out of a bush to be like the T and GBT was invented by Google. Like it's their technology. They should be saying it a lot.

Yeah. But it's like, yeah, you didn't realize the value of this technology was the robot sounding nuts. Not anything useful. If only they'd realize. Like the value of this technology is like 1,000 TikTok hustle culture bros being like, here's how to make money with chat GPT.

And they were like, here's what's going to happen. Sundar is going to demo having a conversation with a Venus flytrap. And you're like, what are you talking about? Should have been Mario. Should have been Mario just openly threatening me, which is all anybody wants. I kept typing and it asked me to sign up. And I told James Vincent, like, I want to sign up just so I'd see if I can get Mario to explicitly call me a coward. You know, like, that's how they get you.

Like 1299 and Mario would be like, you're a coward. I didn't sign up. So you like being negged by the AI. This is what we're learning a lot about each other thanks to chat GPS. Mario was like, jump through this painting and come on an adventure with me. And I was like, I don't want to jump through the painting. Right. Because like saying no to the AI always makes them very mad.

And he's like, come on. It'll be fun. I was like, what's behind the painting? is like evil. This is so dumb. Every time talking about this, you sound like you're talking about a dream. This is like Addie's point.

And like you had this like emotional experience with no stakes that no one cares about. AI, everybody. That's the big. But Mario was there. Myr was there. Can you explain this humane thing to me? It sounds very bad. It sounds like Google clips.

Speaking of AI technology. Yes. Speaking of AI technology. Did you know the tea and chat? GBT was invented. Was it? I had no idea. Now I'm about to get a bunch of emails.

If you're on cruise control right now, just, you know, push, you know, you can push the button in the wheel. Take it down from 62 to 59. Google employee. Just running right next to the car as fast as they can. Booking it. There's like Google shuttle buses will pull up, like hold up paper in the windows. We're the T.

We're the T. Humane is the company. It was started by. some former Apple people. There was a lot of hype around it. It's gotten a lot of investment, including Sam Altman from OpenAI, has invested a lot of money in it.

They've even talked about their IPO, not actually talked about what they make at Humane, which is kind of a problem if you're going to do things like an IPO. And a leak of a, from 2021 pitch deck, suggests that it's some sort of wearable camera. Yeah. Which I think we've all kind of moved past as a thing that anybody really wants. So the league is a very blurry slide deck that was obviously made for investors.

Again, John Gruber had it, posted on a website. So this is what we're working off of. There's a bunch of patents floating around in the world. I'm like, let's sell it up. There's an awful lot of hype with this company. Yes. And so some of the patents are like, it'll project a virtual keyboard on any surface. You can like type with your hands.

But a lot of them are about, okay, it's going to record everything and, like, show you stuff. But like, it's basically the core of it from what we can tell them in the stack is a camera that you wear all the time. That is constantly recording everything, sending it to a cloud, categorizing it with, of course, AI. What else? 10,000 monkeys typing furiously. And then you can say things like, show me my daughter's home run from earlier today. And it will deliver you that video. Yeah, I mean, this is, this is Google Clips.

It's Snap Spectacles. it's Facebook's smart glasses thing like this this is a rich area that no one has cracked in any kind of way that anyone actually cares about here's my question so they talk a lot about AI in this it's a bunch of former Apple people how much of this is a play to get acquired by Apple for for AR stuff VR stuff in the future because if you're ingesting all of that data if this thing goes out and it exists and people decide to wear a camera all the time that ingests all of this data now you're getting a lot of data that can be really really useful if you want to train your facial recognition and all your other fancy like AI components

for your smart glasses uh so gruber had a note about this in the blog post where he leaked the deck and they're yeah this is like the interpersonal workings of humane the people who left to start it apparently not beloved at apple uh people thought they took too much credit for stuff that team's that's like gruber sourcing, who knows? Maybe not.

That is the vibe that he reported when he leaked this tech. Now, that doesn't mean they won't get sold to Google or Microsoft. Like somewhere

that Google Clips product manager is like, what if we just like bought my idea again? Did it good. Who knows? But they have raised an awful lot of money and

man, the hype here has been like just off the charts. Like this is a company that makes videos about like the feelings they hope you have about their products.

Would you say The hype is taking a sort of a magical leap. Is that? Yes. Dude, that's what I keep thinking of too. But at least magically made a thing that is like hopelessly impractical and the field of view is only this big.

But there was cool technology. It's actually very cool. Yeah. This to me is like, I'm not sure they're doing anything. I'm sorry. Can we just back up on that? No,

the technology was cool. I'll defend you that. Like, beating it directly into your eyeball. They promised that they were going to hack the GPU of your brain. Those were the words they used. Hell yeah. And then they remember they had that crazy wired story with like the, I mean, now I think

they just hung up a bunch of like LED roadlights. Like glued them to someone. They had wet up making demos. All the commercials were the whale. And the whale and they had the video that no one could tell if it was real because it was like it was like they generated it and handed it out. And then in the end, they'd use the same sort of LCD waveguide stuff. Like when Beyonce saw it and then decided to invest, Beyonce went neat.

Yeah. No, the number of celebrities who went to Florida to invest in magically because the GPUs of their brains have been hacked is off the charts. I'm just saying that feels like this thing, right? Like it's like... But with AI. The first step is, isn't there another, there's like another app in their pitches will record everything you do on your computer so you can find it again. It's called rewind. It's like rewind.

I'm 1,000% too much GenX to be like, yeah, that's a good idea. Like, I saw that Will Smith movie with Gene Hackman. I didn't know. Yeah. No, the thing the Humane story really reminds me of is when Carl Pay left One Plus and started nothing and spent months and months talking about how we need a hardware revolution and everything needs to be different and then just launched headphones. And a phone with LEDs.

Sure. On the back. Yeah. Congratulations. That's innovation. Yeah. Yeah. Great. Headphones, but you can see the headphones.

It's like, fine. But this feels like it just the fact that no one has learned that hype eventually comes around and crushes you underneath it is mind blowing to me. And Humane just keeps doing this to itself. Like all these companies keep doing it to themselves. Magically, it was like, we've hacked the GPU of your brain. But if they had just said, like, we built this kind of neat thing that you probably can't buy for a long time. Like it might be in much better shape now. They don't have, they don't have editors.

This is like, like if the marketing people who wrote all of this stuff had an editor to be like, does it really hack the GPU of your brain? They go, oh. No, they don't even editor. I've always said that when I get out of journalism, my next career is going to be to be the consultant that you pay a lot of money to sit in the room and tell you all your ideas are bad. Like if you need somebody to tell your boss that this is actually not as cool as they think it is, I will do that for the low, low price of $25,000. I will sit there. I'll tell you your names are stupid and that this thing isn't as cool as you think it is and you should probably cool it for a minute. And I'm going to make a fortune. It's going to be great. I'm so happy for you. I'm just looking through these humane slides and it's deeply hilarious. The first slide says, what is it? And then it says cloud connected, site enabled AI platform with server side app ecosystem. And then three slides later, you realize it's a camera. It's just so blurry, too.

That's like... Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, dear leakers, if you're going to take pictures of things, just press the focus on your, on your camera. It's so easy. Smartphone cameras are so good. Any leak I get, super blurry. Usually in black and white, usually like 320 by 200 pixels. You need a microscope.

Okay. So Amron Chowdry, who is the CEO of Humane. he's one of the founders. He just keeps saying things like, this will be the best human experience ever. Humane is the next shift between humans and computing, the best human experience ever. It's technology that improves the human experience

that's born from good intention, products that put us back in touch with ourselves, each other in the world around us, and experiences that are built on trust with interactions that feel magical and bring joy. That's a lot, right? Like, just like at the end of the day, that's a lot. You know, and it's like, phones are pretty good.

So just the hype here of like, what are you going to deliver? And then the list of partners is crazy. Like they're partnered with LG and Volvo cars. And it's like, to do what? And I just think there's no way you can build up a company like this and not have whatever first version of a first product be a letdown. 100%. Because the first version of any first product is defined by the compromises you made to ship it

at the door. Yep. All right. Last little lightning round piece. David, you were really into Allison's Vivo. 90 Pro versus Samsung S-23 Ultra Camera comparison. Yeah, it's just very good and everyone should read it. She basically

went to try to figure out in the world of smartphone cameras is it better to have a lot of pixels or a big sensor essentially, which is the sort of eternal camera war. And she landed in this very funny sort of existential place that I don't want to totally spoil,

but it's basically like everything is actually a hundred times more complicated than you think and it does without quite saying it boil all the way down to like what's a photograph. Yeah. But it's, it's really good. And she ends up sort of meditating on like what makes these things work and why this stuff is hard and sort of how the whole imaging pipeline has changed as this tech has changed. Again, I don't want to split it, but it's, it's really good. And was one of the sort of virgiest things I'd read in a while. Because she started with one question and ended in like a total explosion of gadgets and technology. And it's a really fun read. And spoiler alert, the Samsung camera ends up being substantially better. But it's a good read. Everyone should go read it. All right.

We have gone so far over. If you're listening to this in your car, just know that the Humane section went on for like 25 more minutes. And we honestly, we just had to cut it because we just kept on looking at their marketing materials and be like, what is this? So if you need to experience the part that was cut, just hit pause.

Just, I don't know, look at a flower. It's like, what is this? That's what we did. Well, he gazed at Humane for a while. We are going to be at South by Southwest. on Sunday, if you are in Texas at the show, we're doing a live Vergecast March 12th, 2.30 p.m. It's free and open to the public. It's in, I believe it's in Slack space.

Yeah. That's going to be fun. So come see us at South by Southwest. You can call the Vergecast hotline 866 Verge 1-1. David, you're back. You're going to be at with us at South by Southwest. I'm back. I'm going to be there.

Richard, I'm very sorry to be coming back and to be doing a terrible Richard impression for a long time on the podcast. But for everyone who is very sad that Richard is going to be on the show a little less, don't worry, Richard, you're going to be here a lot still. I like you better than Nilai or Alice. Richard, I've decided that you should take over the Vergecast TikTok account, which doesn't exist. But if it did, it would just be Richard. You down? Yes. Do it.

Yes. Yeah. That's all I'm doing now, as long as I can do it from this room. All right, that's fine. You got to do the dancing dogs thing. All right. We've got to end this before I have more ideas. So lax this week.

Alex, what's going with that? So this week it's going to be, well, this coming week, it's going to be Tiny Makes Things, who is a keycap designer for mechanical keyboards. It's a very fun discussion. Ashley Skeda has a wonderful time with it. Very cool. All right. That's it.

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

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