The Vergecast - Streaming goes up, Zoom comes down

Episode Date: August 11, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz break down the chaotic and increasingly more expensive state of streaming video. Are we just recreating cable TV? And afterwards, the crew explores the wild world enterprise software. Further reading: Disney Plus and Hulu are about to get even more expensive The Emmy Awards are officially delayed because of the writers and actors strikes Disney is ‘actively exploring’ ways to crack down on password sharing What does Bob Iger think about selling Disney to Apple? Paramount says it has a plan to weather the Hollywood strikes. Barbie earns $1 billion at the box office worldwide Verizon will soon raise prices on certain unlimited plans — yes, again Slack’s redesign: new DM and Activity sections and more features in the messaging app  Verizon is shutting down BlueJeans, which it bought for $400 million Zoom says its new AI tools aren’t stealing ownership of your content The LK-99 ‘superconductor’ went viral — here’s what the experts think Cadillac’s Escalade IQ is the next GM vehicle to lack Apple CarPlay MrBeast’s burger company is suing him for $100 million You can now verify your Threads profile on Mastodon Sign up for Installer, our weekly guide to all the best and Verge-iest stuff on the internet Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

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

covering the biggest names and stories in sports and mom. And this is Am Mom, a community for athletes, game changers, and moms of all kinds. dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of integrating apps into 5G, a plan that totally worked.

And now we live in a utopia of robot surgery and video conferencing. David, what's utopia like? We're the flagship podcast of all of that. Yeah, the whole thing. It's a lot to be the flagship podcast. It's a big concept. There's not a lot of competition in the space, and that's business, baby.

You got to find your niche. I'm your friend, Eli, David Pierce, is here. Hi, I, too, am integrated into 5G. Alex Kranz is here. Alex is in San Francisco. Yeah, I'm in San Francisco wondering, like, who isn't integrated into 5G at this point. Come on, guys, get it together. I saw, in one of the trade publications, I saw a headline that was like, the hottest thing in 5G isn't public 5G networks.

And then, what is it? It's private 5G. Like, obviously the other things. Sure. Yeah. So they've given up on us, the lowly public, and your private 5G network for warehouse operations is where the money is. And I just want to go back in time and show people that headline in meetings. You're lying.

The hottest thing in public 5G is still slightly faster Netflix downloads in the airport before you get on the plane. Which isn't bad. It's like, I don't hate it. It's something. We could have just fixed the Wi-Fi network. works in the airport. I think we would have gotten there's that. Anyway, this is not the flagship podcast of any of that, although I promise you there will be a slight amount of telecom 5G dunking in this episode of the Vergecast. That's what we do.

Every episode. Yeah, as is our right. A lot of talking about this week. A bunch of streaming news this week. Slack had a redesign. We have some reader emails, which are always fun. There's some carplane news to get into. Got a Mr. Beast update. There's just like a lot going on. Like a summer grab bag. But like we did last week, we want to begin by just getting the Elon news out of the way. We know you like it. Even though you tell us you don't like it. I don't know how to describe this exact phenomenon.

You tell us loudly you hate it in the comments of the post that you have clicked on, read to the bottom and then left comments on. It is a weird dynamic. But we know you know you want it. So, David, can you just give us quickly all of the Elon news? this week that's worth talking about. Sure. Okay. Here is everything I've compiled

that has happened this week that matters. All right, that's it. That helped? It's beautiful. That's all the news in the world of Elon that is actually worth noting this week. Just a dull roar of noise. And that's where we are this week with Elon.

So that's good. The only actual Elon thing I will say is that Casey Newton wrote a very good issue of platformer that we also ran on the verge about how we talk about Elon that I thought was very good and very instructive and people should go read that. Yep, it's on the site. It's on platformer. Go read it. Case is great. Okay. Let's talk about some actual news. We've been sort of talking about this moment in streaming the two strikes that are going on, the interlocking strikes between the writers and the actors.

Bob Eiger gave an interview to CNBC a while ago that set everything astray. Then there were some news that said the writers are coming back to the table at the studios. Disney had earnings, which are really revealing. Alex, what is going on in the world of streaming? Well, I think the big thing is Disney's hiking the price of Hulu and Disney Plus, but only the ad-free version. So if you're already paying $7.99 a month for the ads, you're fine. Keep enjoying all of those beautiful ads.

If you were like me trying to avoid the ads, that prices have gone up. Disney Plus is now going to cost $13.99, and then Hulu no ads is going to cost $1799. But if you want to keep both, you can just pay $1999. Oh, boy. And I think the streamers were looking out in the world, and they were thinking, okay, how can we make this pricing scheme make sense?

And they just look to like cell phone providers? Like, that's my best guess? Because it's just like caught confusing garbage. Can I just say there's a table in the story we wrote about the pricing? hike that lays out the different prices that you can pay for Disney's various streaming services. And it is, like, deranged how complicated this is. If you want Disney Plus, there's two options. If you want Hulu, there's four options, including one that is an ESPN Plus with Hulu add-on, which I guess is also Hulu. If you want ESPN Plus, there's three other ones. If you want

bundle offerings, there's three other ones. And if you just want Hulu with Plus Live TV, there's two other ones. So basically, you have like 400,000 different ways. is to get all of Disney's content. But it's abundantly clear, Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, that the thing Disney would really like you to do is pay $7.99 and watch ads. Yeah, because why have a streaming service when you can just have a couple of cable channels where you don't have to deal with cable carriers? Like, if I'm a business person, that makes a lot of sense to be.

If I'm a person who wants anything to be nice and effortless and work smoothly, it makes no sense. but like the business case makes a lot of sense, and I hate it because it makes so much sense. But yeah, we're just kind of like back to cable again. Yeah. But we have to do it all ourselves. Which is, I mean, that was the point, right? Like that was the initial promise of this all, right? Like, we were going to cut our cables and then we were going to be really happy because we could just choose.

And I would never have to pay for ESPN again. What I'm learning now in my old age is that by making everyone pay for everything, we subsidized a lot of the niche stuff. Yeah. So everyone that was forced to pay for ESPN that made them a lot of money, just a lot of money that they could then subsidize a lot of stuff with. Like the Disney Channel. Right. And then when you break it all up and you say, everyone pay for exactly what you want, it turns out like... That's expensive.

Everyone will pay for exactly what they want and everything will make smaller. Like the pie will stay the same size, but it will have more slices and that's not great. And so it's very clear. They're trying to get back to, okay, you pay for access to this. the advertisers will come in because the advertisers will spend a lot of money, and that'll give us the margin to go subsidize all the other stuff. It's not clear if that's going to work either, but that's just very much where they would like to go back to. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is deeply hilarious to me how quickly we're going back to it should just be like cable, but better.

And it's like if you could just go back 20 years and be any of these big cable providers, and if they were just like, what if we just let people pick the shows they wanted to watch and changed nothing else, they would have just dominated the universe for forever. Because it turns out that's all people actually wanted. Like, I just want to choose what show is on. Turned out to be the only behavior anybody actually wanted to change. Everything else was, like, pretty all right in most cases.

Well, there was a sports agnostic folks, like, who didn't want to have to pay for ESPN. And now I don't have to. Yeah, but all the people who watched ESPN were paying for the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and all of the other stuff. on your TV that got funded by the fact that ESPN made so much money. Right. Like, ESPN was such a cash cow for Disney that it funded all this other stuff. And so it's just like, in a way, this system, like, didn't make any sense, but actually

seems like it kind of worked, except that cable was bad and expensive. Yeah. Oh, I'm saying, look, every, like, 15 years or so, there's, like, a lawsuit from someone who's like, my taxes go to the military, and I don't want my taxes to go to the military. And then they lose. That was us. That was us. Yeah.

Right. Right. It's like, and then, like, the lawsuit goes. and the court's like, no, that's not how taxes work. You pay your taxes, you got to bring it to the side. That's ESPN. ESPN is the military industrial complex. And we, the American consumers, should be forced to pay our taxes

because that subsidizes like the 35th show on the Disney Channel. And that's how that's going to work. Well, and it's like, do you know how your Google Maps knows where you are? Like, thank the military for GPS being a thing, right? It's like, it turns out, like, all this stuff is connected a little more than you think. So, but this is like, Disney had earnings, right? And their earnings are mixed bag. It's earnings are never that interesting talking about, but they lost a bunch of subscribers

in India because they lost the rights to cricket. So Disney Plus is coming back down to Earth, but the parks are doing well. And it's just unclear what new content they will have because of the strikes. Iger notably was like, I hope we can figure this out this time. Whereas a few months ago, he was like, I'm very disturbed by these sick bastards. You know, like, the tone has shifted a little bit. And it just seems clear. Like Disney, they've got a power through this moment and actually have stuff worth buying and watching.

And it's sort of unclear what that stuff is going to be. Well, and that's part of this, too, is like, you think, okay, they did to Disney Plus and Marvel was supposed to be a big subscriber. Like, the main reason people have subscribed to Disney Plus is because they have children. But everybody who doesn't have children, myself included, we want to, like, why would we want to go subscribe? And the idea was, okay, well, you're going to subscribe for Star Wars. You're going to subscribe for Marvel.

And then all those shows are kind of garbage. Yeah, it sounded like a pretty compelling argument. And even at the beginning, it was pretty good. Like, Wanda Vision was great. Yeah. The Mandalorian was great. It was like, it started well. And then just over the course of the next few years, they just systematically got worse,

right as all the other factors got harder for Disney. And so it's just like this perfect storm of, like, what is the pitch here? and it seems to get harder and harder all the time. Like, you could not get, pay people to care about secret invasion, which was the latest Marvel show. I watched all of it. I know what happened? Do I ever want to talk with anyone else about it?

You're like, barely want to admit that you watch the show. Here's my understanding of secret invasion, just to be clear. I have not watched it. I've barely paid attention to it. It's the show where everyone is revealed to be an alien so that they can recast new actors in those roles. the next movies? Yeah, I mean, kind of.

Like, that's a big part of it. And it's... But my sense of it is the reveal in every episode is this beloved character has always been an alien. Yeah, it's like, this person is secretly an alien.

The show is just like, it's like an intermission between Marvel things. They're just like, here's... We're gonna reboot the show over seven different episodes. And then, at the end of it, New Avengers.

We did it. It was so bad. Like, it's cynical on its face. Like just even I know that much about it, which I don't even think that's spoilers. Like the show is called Secret Invasion. I think that's what it is on the tin. You know, like, I don't think I spoiled anything about this show for anyone. But it's like, oh, we need some new actors.

So what if all the old actors are revealed to be aliens? And then they get in a spaceship and go back to their home planet. That's like, oh, this is, you guys are really out of ideas here. Like you're starting over. I think they. Oh, they s' it. Now that's a spoiler, Alex. now that people are going to eat.

Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Never mind, guys. But the big picture here is just generally across the streaming market. Disney has these problems. They're going to start doing some Netflix news, right? They're going to actively explore cracking down and password sharing, which seems to have worked really well for Netflix.

They keep gesturing at the idea of selling themselves to Apple. This, okay, okay. I want to, like, this is what I want to call. I want to use, I'm going to drop a curse word here. This is utter bullshit. This happens like every time. Apple is one of those companies. that has a ton of money, and they always have a ton of cash around, right?

And so everybody's like, oh, what should they do with it? And, like, six, seven years ago is like, they should buy Netflix. Yeah. And they were never going to buy Netflix because that doesn't make sense. First of all, they absolutely should have bought Netflix. Yeah, it would have been great then. But they were never going to because it didn't make sense. And the idea that they were going to go, and, like, Tim Cook, whose entire thing is, like, making money by being really smart about logistics is going to take on the cruise and the theme park industry,

Tim Cook's about to retire. Like, he doesn't. Yeah. That's why you buy Disney at the end. And you're like, look, Bob Eiger, you hate retiring. Have you thought of me to see you about it? Here you go. I bought Disney.

You just, I'm gonna, I'm Tim Cook. Here's. Yeah, now you go and do all the keynotes. My swan song is headsets and cruises together at last. And then he just rides off in the sunset. That's a very like retiree swan song. And a horse made of money. This is the future of cruises.

Is you get on and you put on your Applevision pro on your Disney cruise and you sit in a recliner. But you're not actually on a boat at all. You're just at home. Well, you're in a sound stage that rocks. You have a little Mickey assistant. This is, by the way, the plot of Wally, so a little worried. But at least at the end, you know, they save Earth. I don't know. So the Disney Apple thing has always seemed suspicious to me, like to the point where it's, I have always agreed with you, Alex, that this is like a thing people say because it sort of seems like it makes sense, but never was actually real. But the two things that happened this week that I thought were very interesting, were Kim Masters at the Hollywood

Reporter, who is very much like a person who knows everything about what's happening in Hollywood, wrote a one of those stories that is like half reported and half speculative, but it's only speculative because you can't say out loud the things that other people have said to you that you know for sure, right? Like reading between the lines, this thing is like very accurate and very well sourced about basically, hypothetically, if you were Disney, here is what you would do if you wanted to sell your company to Apple. You would divest. You would pull. You would pull. the different pieces apart, and you would essentially turn yourself into a company full of characters and IP without a lot of stuff attached to it, and then you would sell that to Apple.

And then you look around and, oh, that's exactly what Bob Eager kind of sounds like he wants to do with Disney. And so that happened. The piece is very good. It's, we have it linked on The Verge. We should put it in the show notes, too. Like, Kim is a person who knows things. And I trust, I don't think Kim is, like, making this up out of whole cloth.

And then the other thing was somebody on Disney's earnings call asked Bob Eager directly something to the effect of are you selling to Apple. And his answer was he said basically, I'm not going to say anything. It's not something that we have assessed about. And then he said, obviously, anyone who wanted to speculate about these things would have to immediately consider the global regulatory environment. And then he said, I'll say no more than that. How do you not read that as, gosh, I'd really like to, but Lena Khan and the FTC super, super, super, super, would not allow it to happen. Like, I don't know how else to read that statement from Bob Liger.

Yeah, and I think that goes back to the fact that this isn't going to happen. I mean, theoretically, it could, right? Like, I don't want to say it's never going to happen, but it's very unlikely to because the EU would come down on that new combined company and just destroy it. Like, they would never allow it to happen. And it would be just borderline unconscionable for the FTC to let two. of the biggest companies, the company that has like a practical monopoly in the theater space, practical monopoly and all these other spaces, and the company that has the app store monopoly

combine into one mega company? Like, that's bad business unless you're Bob Iger. All right. I'm going to, I'm going to make the argument. Do it. Okay. Be Bob. I'm coming back to Disney's CEO. Wow. Congratulations. The first thing Bob Iger says in every room. Look, I was leaving, but I've come back. Now, here's the argument. I have two arguments. make. One is like a straightforward argument. We kind of went through this with Microsoft Activision and eventually the EU caved and the FCC lost and like whatever, right? Like, it is the same shape of thing, right? The big distribution platform buys a bunch of content. We seem to not know how to stop it. It just happens. Fine. Maybe it will just happen. I don't know

if it will. But obviously, Bob Iger is thinking about the global regulatory environment. Then there's, I think, what I would frame is the chaos argument. Which is let them dance. You know, like, this is how companies fall apart. It's like they get too big. Yeah. And then this thing seems unmanageable. And like Apple's corporate culture will crush Disney.

And then maybe we'll be free. You know, it's like, it's the worst argument I can make. It is, I would say, the argument that, for example, has proven to be correct in the case of every AT&T acquisition in history. But go ahead, buy Time Warner. Try to rule the world. Yeah, I was going to say, AOL, Time Warner is exactly this kind of merger that you're describing also. Yeah, and it's like, yeah, go ahead, try. See if that works out for you.

See if you are not destroyed by your own hubris. I'm not saying that's a great policy outcome. Many, many people lose their jobs along the way. And lots of art doesn't get made. Although with Time Warner and AT&T, we did get the gray scale four by three Justice League. so that happened. We're going to get like a Marvel movie just shot all vertically so it fits perfectly on your iPhone and profile. That's what you're getting.

Yeah, I mean, look, I'm not saying they should or shouldn't do it. I just think that like if I'm Tim Cook, I'm looking at the history of these kinds of integrations. And I'm saying, oh, actually in the end, this never works out. Like, it doesn't matter about the regulators. Like if you are a smart business person, you look at integrations of this size and you're like, oh, this is death. Like this is what kills both companies in like meaningful ways at the end of the road. He's told people no in the past, right?

Like wasn't there the one where Elon was like, please buy Tesla before Tesla was Tesla? Yeah. And he was like, LOL, get out of my office. How did you get in here? Actually, speaking of things they should have bought. Right? Like the many, many, many attempts that Apple has made to make a car. Yeah.

It should have just bought Tesla. Yeah. Yeah. They would have solved the panel gaps. I'll tell you that much. They wouldn't have cheaped out of the materials. There just would be no door handles at all. Your whole hand goes in those panel gaps.

Yeah, but this is the thing that comes up every time the possibility of Apple acquiring some sexy company comes up. Like, do you remember a couple of years ago when Peloton was flagging and everybody was like, oh, Apple's going to buy Peloton? And then there were a couple of people, I think, including our friend Steve Kovach at CNBC, who just basically raised their hand and were like, why on Earth would Apple? Apple want Peloton. Like, why all these companies need Apple makes a lot of sense. Yeah. Why Apple need the richest company on the planet that has done a very good job of developing the ability to do almost anything very well over time.

Why on Earth would it need like a warehouse full of treadmills and bikes that no one is buying? Yeah. And in this case, like, what does Apple need with a theme park? I mean, they run a very nice theme park in Cupertino. It's a circle. You can go to it. Yeah, I guess like the basic business advice is like don't buy problems. Yeah.

This is a huge problem. Like the future of streaming is a huge problem. Apple is involved in these strikes, right? They are part of the AMPTP. Yeah. They're up against SAG. They're up against the Writers Guild. Disclosure, Alex is part of the Writers Guild.

Our newsroom is unionized with the Writers Guild. I'm a Netflix producer. Comcast owns a chunk of the company. You should watch our Netflix show. It's great. That was your best one yet. That was like all in one breath. That was really good.

Someone wrote to us and said, your disclosures are starting to sound like flexes. So I'm trying to... But it is true that I'm a Netflix producer. You should watch her Netflix show. It's great. It's nominated for an Emmy. Also, you have merch for your other podcasts now?

Do you want to disclose that? Oh, yeah. You can go to store. Dotterverge.com and buy literally my name on a hat. So that's a weird moment for me. Personally, that's all just really complicated for Apple. And this is like their first baby step in the water, right? they're not like a huge distributor of TV shows.

Buying Disney is like now they're in it. Yeah. Like they're fully in like, let's a good example. Jason Kalar took over for at Time Warner, right? He took over Warner Media and he was like, here's the thing we want to do.

All the movies are going to go to streaming day and date. That is a thing that Apple would want to do to promote Apple TV Plus on their devices. And that thing broke Warner Media, pushed Kilar out of the CEO role. And we ended with Discovery Max Plus, whatever. it's called. Those are culture decisions you have to make. They're not business decisions.

And I think Apple likes being at a remove. The thing that I would offer, and we have an entire episode about sports and streaming coming next week, but Apple's really into sports. Yep. And I think they really want to do sports in the Vision Pro in a serious way. ESPN over the past couple months, and in particular, last week, just sort of like casually rearranged the sports media market. Yeah. Right. They took Pat McAfee, who was kind of one of the biggest indie sports podcasters, video people. He had a deal with Fandual. Disney just took him away.

I think he was unhappy with that Fandual deal. He's now just part of the ESPN lineup. Like big, huge multi-million dollar deal. And then this last week, Penn Gaming, which was another betting company, heavily invested in Barsstool Sports. A lot of machinations there, but they basically just gave it back to Dave Portnoy,

who is a controversial character in his own right, and said you can have Barstool. We're going with Disney. We're going with ESPN, and ESPN opened up to betting for the first time in partnership with Penn. So just in the last few months, ESPN has just like repositioned some of the biggest indie names in sports media and entered betting. That's all just a lot, right? And those are power moves. Like, yeah.

This is how ESPN wants it to be. This is how ESPN is going to get it. That puts ESPN in the driver's seat of kind of the next turn of things, maybe. But it's not clear that Apple wants to be in like, the betting business at all, right? No, I would say it seems overwhelmingly likely that Apple doesn't want to be in that business. Like, to the extent that, like, betting apps are in the app store seems to be only headache for Apple, and I can't imagine them signing up for the regulatory complications that come

with that anytime soon. And I think, like, to your point about getting into this world fully, even with TV Plus, Apple has been sort of dragged kicking and screaming into the broader Hollywood landscape. like it had to commit to spending a bunch of money to put its movies in theaters. It's slowly becoming more of a part of Hollywood. But even still, like Apple's whole thing is it likes things it can wrap its arms entirely around. And even if you own Disney, you just can't do that. So like I can see what Disney would want from Apple out of some, you know, its partnership.

What's the phrase everybody uses special relationship that they had with jobs because jobs owned Pixar? Yeah. There was some. He was the largest shareholder of Disney. It wasn't a special relationship. He was the largest individual shareholder of Disney. So he was like, I can call them. And they picked up the phone.

Yeah, he and Bob had like a special handshake that they did. Yeah. And they would like do butterfly kisses when they saw each other. And that was the Disney Apple relationship. But yeah, I tend to be with you, Kranz, that this won't happen. But I do think it is possible that we will get to a point where both companies want it to happen. but ultimately decide they can't. Yeah.

For a variety of reasons. We were hearing those rumors a couple of weeks ago that they might get rid of ESPN. They might sell ELF ESPN or something like that. That I could maybe see happening. But even then it's back to like, does Apple want to get into gambling and also doing sports deals?

Yeah. Probably not. It's a mess. I think they want to be sports deals not gambling. I was just going to say, can we get a real quick strike update before we throw a break and move on from this stuff? because I feel like a bunch of this stuff came up in these earnings calls,

and people are back at the table but not back at the table. So it's all negotiations, which means everybody's going to have their own opinion on who's the one stepping back. Right now, the Writers Guild is saying, well, it's the producers. They're not coming to the table. They refuse to come to the table. And the producers are like, uh-uh, we're here. And so it's not clear.

There's still definitely a lot of discourse there and people upset with each other. but the emmys have been delayed because of the strikes because like you can't have a bunch like it what good are the emys if you don't have a bunch of actors up on stage being like yeah I want an Emmy like it's it's just the technical Emmys and those are really good but they haven't televised those for years so I don't think you're going to start now and so you've got that Paramount just just came out and was like well we are totally set

we are we are fine we can weather continue to weather this And this is where I'm super suspicious of other companies who are like, yeah, I just don't know if we're going to have all the content we need because they all knew these strikes were coming. They all knew this was going to be happening. They've all been banking shows for a while now to get through this. So any of them who say, well, I didn't know and everything, be super suspicious there. Like take a moment, look around and be like, is that true? Because it's certainly interesting. And everybody's going to keep doing this. This is going to be like there's always, you're going to have both. sides expressing their truth, which is certainly the truth, but it's also specifically their versions of it. So, you know, maybe Disney doesn't have enough content to get them through. They could bring Willow back instead of yanking it off of Disney Plus after a few months. I'm fine. I'm not bitter.

It's okay. Oh, this is how we get back girl back on Max. I see it. Yeah. This is how we get it back. They're like, oh, my God, this actually will make us more money than the tax break saved us. It's interesting. I'll just know, and then we should take a break. The last time there was a writer's strike, that's when reality TV happened.

Well, it was happening right before it. Right, and the studios started investing in it massively because it was cheaper, and then it became this, like, dominant form of media. That's what a lot of them are planning on doing. Like, a lot of them are going to carry through with that. But at the end of the day, especially because the actors are on strike, like, you still want people like to see famous people. That's just the way it is.

They want to see the famous people, and the famous people are all out picketing or staying in their houses going, yeah, you go picketers. And like, VINMowing the Strike Fund occasionally. Yeah, Will Smith is like, get my weird AI double from that bad movie that we shot in 120. Get him on the line. I still, I can barely remember that movie. He's called the Gemini Man. Get the Gemini Man out there right now. Gemini Man, two, three, and four are all coming next year.

Yeah, if we don't solve this, AI Will Smith is coming to your house. That's the real threat. Well, no, it's just like, it was last time it was reality. This time it's going to be, oh, what if we show you even more South Korean game shows? And like, that's going to be a weird, it's a weird thing to look at a few years. Shinar if this doesn't get resolved soon is all I'm saying. Netflix is going to have a great time because they have a huge international library. So they're like set, Paramount set.

Disney's the one I'm kind of surprised that they weren't set because you would think Hulu's definitely set. But we'll see. I don't know. After only murders in the building season three, like what? is there on Hulu. Yeah. For anyone. The Little Fire show

with Reese Witherspin that I never watched, but I know exists. Love that. The Little Fires one. Everybody's favorite show for your consideration for the Emmys.

All right. That's enough. We will note here just to the end, Barbie is over a billion at the box office. Hell yes. Without any Ryan Gosling,

Margot Robbie, promotion, because they're on Strike 2, which is also fascinating and probably everyone's going to learn the wrong lesson from that. Okay, that's it. We have to take a break.

Thank you. Support for this show comes from Shopify. Starting something new isn't just hard. It can be really scary, too. So much work goes into this thing that you're not entirely sure will even work. But here's a better thought. What if it did all work? What if your instincts were actually right all along?

Shopify wants to help you get there. They're the commerce platform behind millions of businesses worldwide and nearly 10% of all e-commerce in the U.S. from established brands like Allbirds and Hines to companies just getting started. Their design tools make it simple to create the exact online presence you're envisioning with hundreds of ready-to-use templates available. And with built-in marketing tools,

you can launch full email and social campaigns in just a few clicks. So you can connect with customers wherever they are. It's time to turn those what-ifs into with Shopify today. You can sign up for your $1 per month trial today at Shopify.com slash vergecast. You can go to Shopify.com slash vergecast.

That's Shopify.com slash vergecast. 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. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job. Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week.

With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. We're back in a hard transition from the state of streaming. We're now going to talk about enterprise software. Yes.

The two most important things. David, you wrote about Slack's redesign this week. A lot going on with Slack. It's turning into Teams in a lot of ways. Yeah, basically. It's a sort of delightful story because teams spent several years during the pandemic, just ruthlessly copying everything it could about Slack, and then just sort of decimating it because you get Teams for free

by subscribing to Microsoft's many other products. Slack is a separate thing you have done. to pay for. So teams sort of resoundingly won by just copying Slack and now Slack, which got bought by Salesforce, as a half success story, half sort of retrenchment after being destroyed by teams, is now just completely copying teams. So they've added a new sidebar where there's like the home feed where that kind of looks like Slack, but then there's also a DMs thing where you can see all your messages from all across Slack. There's an activity thing that'll show you every time you've been mentioned or the reaction emojis, all that stuff. It's basically like they're trying

to sort of filter your messages a little better so you can make more sense of the chaos of Slack and also make it easier for you to find things like huddles and canvas and some of these other features that they have. In general, the idea makes total sense to me. I think a lot of people are going to freak out because it does look pretty different and it's a really different way of thinking about Slack. Like Slack? I don't know how you guys feel about it. It's pure chaos, but it is like an understandable kind of chaos. And I think shifting that is tough, especially for something like this, it's like people use this stuff for work all day, every day.

And the idea of just like, we've put in a new icon always freaks people out. It's understandable chaos because most things in Slack are the same kind of thing. Yeah, it's messaging. It's just a bunch of messages in a row. Right. Here's a line of text that, you know, it's like sent to someone or some room. And at worst, maybe you'll like send someone a line of text in the wrong context and that's bad. Great. But like, it's all the same thing. And what's happening now with this redesign is like

many more kinds of things are going to come to the front, like huddles and the canvas thing, which is like a Google Doc for a room. And that's the turn that I think they've wanted to make for a long time. Like, this is where we work. And work involves lots of different kinds of communication and contexts versus this is where you send lines of text to other people. And we'll see. Whereas teams, we had a long conversation on teams in like the Verge team Slack room because Teams is much bigger, like an order of magnitude more users than Slack. Yeah. And it is mostly in big companies used as a video conferencing application, not any of the other stuff.

Yeah, a lot of them still use Slack for like DMs and stuff. And then they use teams for their video conferences. Which is bizarre. Which is insane for like a bunch of reasons. Yeah. The IT guy's just like, I got money to spend, man. I'm having a great time. Like, blowing that whole budget.

Enjoy yourself, IT guy. If you're not watching the video, Alex just made the like make it rain motion with her hands to describe an IT administrator buying slack. He already got teams out there. And he's just throwing money around. She? They? The thong songs playing. Alex is like buying enterprise software.

Woo. That's how I, like, as a lover of enterprise software, that's how I think about it. We'll see. I haven't gotten the new Slack update yet. David, are you using it? I haven't gotten it yet either. It's going to roll out slowly. Slack always says this really slowly.

They're, like, desperately afraid of making people nervous about changes. So you can, like, opt in to being fast or medium or slow in how you get updates. I think it's coming to free users first because Slack doesn't care about you if you don't give them money. So just deal with the new things. and then sort of slowly to everybody else. I'm very curious about it. But the reason I added it to the rundown, and we don't have to spend too long in this,

but I think it's really interesting. We had this debate, ironically, in Slack after this story went up about why people care about Slack so much. Just to let people into how The Verge works, I've written about Slack a lot over the years, and every time a ton of people read it, in a way that if I write about a new feature in Google Docs or Excel or these other, like,

in many cases, much more popular features. Like, sometimes they're, like, big new things. But in every case, like, a teeny, tiny iterative update to Slack, people care about a lot. And I have been trying to figure out why this is for a long time. Like, what is it about Slack that means this much to people in a way that, like, your average app you use at work doesn't really matter? I think it's because people use Slack for their friends.

And most enterprise software is just, like, like not use that way. Like that's, that's just my thing is like, you live in Slack for like a lot of things you do with other people. If you have a D&D group, there's a chance you have a Slack. Maybe you have a Discord. We have a signal. Thank you. Right. Like, but so many people just have slacks for things outside of work. Yeah. And I think that that means like everyone's just kind of interested. Like here's this interface I have for communities on the internet that is changing. Or, you you know, Slack just captured so much of the imagination to begin with that everyone is, like remains interested in it. But like Zoom isn't that thing. No one reads about when we do

Zoom updates, unless they're stealing all your data. With one recent exception, which we'll come back to. But I am curious how this like, because I think you're right, Neely, where it is, these people use this outside of this. How is that going to affect adoption when they change it? Because right now, if you go and you look at Discord and Slack, there's definitely some differences, but they fundamentally look a lot alike. And now it's not going to look like that way. One's going to be very, for like business and the other is going to be where your gamer friends say mu mu, and like, which is the one, I don't have game of friends that say that,

just to be clear. You're the gamer friend who says that. Which is going to be the one. Like, are people going to still use it? Are they going to look at it and be like, old people use that and click out of it? So I have this theory of competition and software. And I think it's best expressed with iOS to Android. They diverge in the way the interfaces look,

and then they converge again, like, all the time. And you can drive yourself crazy and certainly gain a lot of hate replies on Twitter if you say iOS copied Android or Android copied iOS, right? Like, that's the cycle they're in. But the reason they do that is very obvious is that if you want people to switch between platforms, you have to lower the cognitive burden of switching.

Yep. If you are Google and you want people to switch from iOS to Android, you cannot have a radically different interface. Right. Yeah. You need to welcome them in and say most of the things are in most of the same places. And the things that are different are substantially better for X, Y, or Z reason. And you can 100% argue over whether that is successful in the case of Android. But that's basically the thinking, right?

It's like you got to make it easy to switch. If you are Slack and Microsoft Teams is way bigger than you, it makes all the sense in the world. that you're going to make Slack look slightly more like Microsoft Teams to try to peel that market share back. What's interesting, to your point, Alex, is they're not looking more like Discord. Yeah. Because that's the other competitor.

It's just no one wants to admit that Discord is a competitor. Like I had former Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield on Decoder ages ago. I don't even been the Versches. Might even even been pre-decoder. The last time I talked to him about this specific thing, he was like, yeah, I don't think Discord's a competitor. But it obviously is. It's just in this moment, where's the money?

The money is paid users of Microsoft Teams, not a bunch of randos in a crypto Discord. We're having a great time. Time of their life over there, yeah. Slack and Discord have been refusing to run at each other for years. Like, I remember asking the Discord folks, I don't know, four years ago now, when are you doing Discord for teams? And they were like, we don't want to mess with that. It involves a bunch of like compliance and administrative work. we don't want to do.

If you want to use it for work, great, but that's not officially what it's for. And Slack says literally the exact same thing in reverse. They're like, if you want to use it for personal stuff, that's awesome. Knock yourself out. That's not what it's for. And it's like these two companies just keep staring at each other, like refusing to acknowledge that they're actually doing the same thing. Yeah.

Well, I think that's why Slack was so popular versus all of those competitors, right? Like, remember HipChat? We were a Hipchats shop for a minute. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Hip Tech, was it campfire? Yep. And then, like, Teams.

Teams was relatively new, and it was able to get an enormous market share because it's Microsoft and it already was in all of those spaces. And it was just like, hey, now we give you this free. Cancel your Slack subscription. And so for the longest time, it was popular partially because it was such a social app in a way that Teams really isn't. And so it's like, okay, well, if you go that way, aren't you ruining why most people adopted it to begin with? And I haven't used it.

I don't know. Like, if it allows me to not accidentally broadcast things that I thought were DMs, great. The Alex Cranes experience. But I look forward to it. But I am, like, curious if that's going to happen. And actually, ironically, Microsoft is the company that is trying to do both. Like, it made all this noise a couple of years ago about teams for families, which to me is just, like, outrageous. That's just a threat.

That's like Excel for preschoolers. like, we're coming for you. Yeah, like Microsoft cannot let go of this idea that you should use its tools for your regular life. And to me, it's like, if they had called it Microsoft chat, it might have had a chance to be something. But if, like, Eli, can you imagine hanging up this call and going upstairs to Becky and being like, hey, let's plan in teams?

No. Again, my goal in life is to not use something. software. It's just a stated goal. I think I've said this in the show. My ambition in like my career is not to accumulate more titles or power. It is to use as little enterprise software as possible. Like I just want to get to the place where people walk into my office. I don't have an office. So like I've got ages to go. People like show me printouts of emails and I like sign them with the Sharpie. I want this for you. All I want is to not use enterprise software. You have an attache who carries your phone for you.

Yeah. And you know, like, you know the masters of the universe, they're not. You think Tim Cook looks at an email? He's got an iPad for God's sake. Yeah. Does Tim Cook use an iPhone? That's actually a good question. I've never actually seen him use a phone.

I've seen him use an iPad. Wait, Neil, do you have a, like, family coordination software that you use? No, we both work at home. Like, we don't, you need to do that stuff when you're, like, asynchronous. but like we see each other all the whole. You just yell at her. Yeah. Like we are communicating.

I think now Max is going to start in kindergarten. So like there's another force in the world that has to schedule us. And I think maybe now we will need to share a calendar. But three people who spend all day together, you should not need software to manage that relationship. I really cannot emphasize that enough. If you spend all day with two other people, you should not be like, I'd like to introduce some software into this role. There was a minute where I tried to get my wife on Trello for life planning purposes.

And she was into it, but then we couldn't agree on how to format the Trello cards. So it all fell apart. I was just like, no, you have to use these things as checklists on the Trello cards. She was just like whatever, I'm going to write it all in the description. And like three days later, it just all fell apart. And now we just have like a series of context-free links sent in our text message change. and that's our, that's how we talk to each other. That's not good.

Are you, have I converted you to Apple Watch Wachie Talkie people yet? That's the thing I'm going to miss the most when we go back to offices and lives and whatever. No, she's a green bubble. Anna, Anna is a pixel owner and a very happy one who will never switch. So when I'm like using or testing an Android phone, we can just like duo our faces off and it's great. But sadly, sadly there will be no walkie-talkies. Wokie-tokies dangerous. No one in my family understands.

understands how to use it. So I had to turn it off because I'd be like just hearing the whistling from my wrist, whatever I was doing that day. And I was like, nope, we're not doing this anymore. Revoked. We are so deep in them. I mean, this is enterprise. This is, when you say, have you integrated Microsoft teams into your life? It's like, no. But have you been in the grocery store talking to your wrist about which bread to purchase? Yes. Effectively on speakerphone. Like, it's the Apple Watch is loud now. And I'm, I'm just like, boop. Like I said, my entire life is just headed toward power moves of this kind. That's all I want. Love it. We're kind of on the subject of like a bunch of behaviors changed and the pandemic work from home moment and everyone sort of headed back to offices in various ways. One very funny example of that, Zoom called everyone back to office this week, which is choice.

Zoom. Like, just perfectly choice. Do you think Zoom knew? Like when they're sitting there being like, we're about to send this like all staff email telling everybody to come back to the office, do you think they knew that they were like, well, we're about to play ourselves so hard as soon as this email goes out? If I'm Zoom, I'm doing this just to generate some headlines about Zoom. Because like no one's been talking about Zoom for weeks, you know?

And it's like, you know what we should do is call it back to the office? Everyone will be like, remember Zoom? Zoom was great. It was better than the teams were forced to use network. Where's that IT guy spending the money in the strip club? He's out there. He's like, oh, you want Zoom? I got you.

He just, he's free with the budget. And then Zoom also got itself in trouble this week, as you alluded to earlier, David. They changed their terms of service. And I understand why they changed their terms of service. They just did it in the most ham-fisted, stupid way possible. So they basically changed their terms of service to say, all the data that you're putting through Zoom, Zoom has a license to. And they need that. If you run a service on the internet, you need a license to all the data that users put into your service for any infinite number of copyright reasons.

Like you run servers, you're going to copy data from one server to another. You're going to introduce these features that might remix the user data, all this stuff. So you just need this like big, broad license. The example you always use when we talk about the stuff that I really like is thumbnails. Yeah. If they don't have the rights to use and change and copy your stuff, they can't make the little. versions of the image that you click on to get the big version of the image. Like, it's that simple in many of these cases. Oh, yeah. They can't overlay text on those images because that's a

derivative. You just write yourself the biggest, broadest license you can. And they added these lines that are like, for artificial intelligence and training models. And it's like everyone lost their mind. So fast. By the raw language of it, that means everything you say into Zoom can be used to train artificial intelligence. Right. It's like, oh, we're selling your data to open AI to put into GPD4 and we're allowed to now is like the implication of that. Speaking of the strike, I saw a bunch of people in Hollywood tweeting like, oh, we can't use Zoom when we're creating stuff anymore. It's like people are so primed to see this stuff being taken from them and see this all

being used against them in a lot of ways that Zoom did this the wrong way at exactly the wrong time. Yeah. If they'd done this like three months ago, nobody would have bad at it and I until somebody like did a TikTok right now being like, did you know three months ago? Zoom decided to steal all your data and give it to chat GPT. And now you own nothing, including your face. Zoom does.

Right. So this specific block of text is in like almost every terms of service. And it's just like what you need to run a service, right? You need to take a perpetual worldwide, non-asslusive royalty-free, sub-license, a little transferable license to do stuff, access, use, store, transmit, disclose, preserve, extract, like, it's just a list of verbs. We are giving ourselves the broadest license

to do verbs to your data. Because if you run a service, there's, you want to do stuff. You're going to do verbs. Verbs is what we're here for. It's not nouns. If you're living in a noun's life, you know, so they added this language

about artificial intelligence. You just kind of combine the like usual panic. Like every couple of years, like some teenager discovers the Instagram terms of service and people freak out. And everyone posts that copy that's like, I do not give Instagram the permission to do shit. And then I have to like write a blog post that's an auto-complete of a blog post for years ago. This is literally the case, by the way.

Jay Peters wrote our story about this Zoom AI thing and has backlinks to one about Instagram from 2012 and one about Dropbox and Google Drive also from 2012. And they are, I mean like almost exactly the same post, both written by Neelai, both being like, guys, this is just the words you need to have things on servers. Everything's probably fine. So what's interesting about this is there's the general AI panic that is happening. It's like David was saying, even the writer's strike has big elements of this. And then there's the actual problem, which is, yeah, if you just read the language, it sure sounds like that.

So Zoom had to clarify that customer data is customer data, which is if you are an enterprise software company, the worst thing to have to clarify. Yeah. Like, that's the whole point of the enterprise software company. That's fundamentally why Slack and Discord are not the same, right? Like Slack makes these big promises to big businesses about its relationship to them. And Discord is like, yeah, it's for gamers. We're going to mine all your data. Like, it's just like a very different approach.

And I think Zoom stepped in it and we're going to see hundreds of other companies step in it. Because at the end of the day, Zoom probably wants to use AI. to do things like better beauty filters that people ask for in Zoom calls, to do things like automated transcripts that are better than the already AI-powered automated transcripts are doing. What you want is to write yourself a broad license

so you can innovate freely. And the reality is you're going to have to start asking permission step by step for all that stuff because this panic is coming over and over again. Part of me is like, okay, Zoom did this exactly wrong, right? Like they added a statement after all of this kerfuffle that said, notwithstanding the above, which is a deeply hilarious way to say,

well, we wrote that badly, so here's some new words. Zoom will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. Like, A, like you're saying, Eli, wild that that was not in there the first time.

But B, I kind of don't know other than that one bit of, I think, clarification that some lawyer at Zoom didn't think they needed to do because it was inherently. obvious but is not obvious to people who like to track changes on terms of service. This is just a hard thing to do. And I think one of the things we've discovered with a lot of these tools is like the thing

that happens when somebody starts recording a Zoom call and there's that very loud thing that goes like, this meeting is now being recorded. Yeah. And they have this new thing with the AI meeting summaries where it like goes way out of its way to let you know that it's doing AI meeting summaries and you have to like click a thing to make the giant window full of text go away. We're just setting ourselves up for this, like, heinous user experience because these companies are afraid of our reaction

to what they're doing in order to run their service. And it feels like there has to be a middle ground in there somewhere, but I don't know what it is, and it feels like it's going to be a while before we find it. I think it's like, one, they have to repeatedly prove that they're not going to do nefarious things with your data. And that's pretty hard for them to currently do because everything we cover at the verge.com,

there's so many examples of it, right? And so, like, they've kind of set themselves up to fail in that respect because they have misused data over and over and over and over again. And so to be like, no, no, but this time is different. Like, nobody's going to believe that. You've got a really sad, you've got people are way more savvy about this stuff than they were 10, 15 years ago. And so you've got to fix that.

And I think until they can kind of earn that trust back, they're going to be in this place. And then the other side of it is like, people please, like, go read anything chat GPT wrote. That is longer than like 100 words and then come back to me

and say that it's going to steal my job. Like, right? You know, the stuff is not, we are very excited about it. And everybody's like, oh, it's gotten so big. But at the same time, it is still very early days.

Chat GPT and these other generative AI systems aren't going to be writing really good books. They'll write books, but they're not going to be readable fun books most of the time. Yeah. I do wonder, though, if to your point, Nelai, about companies running into this, if what they're going to learn from this is just barrel your way through it. Oh, that's all.

Don't ask permission. Don't be nice. Just do what Google did and say, yeah, we take your shit from the internet. What are you going to do about it? Yeah, the problem is Zoom exists in a world where Microsoft Teams exists. And Slack. Fair. And Slack, right?

Like Google's approach to data on the internet right now, explicitly now in some of their terms, is if the crawler can see it, we can train AI with it. Yeah. And that's a nightmare choice, right? You have to say, don't index my website in Google search. Okay, like, maybe. I'm going to shut my business down rather than, like,

Google train its models on my date. Like, you have to be Google to put yourself in that position. With Zoom, it's like, I'm just not going to use Zoom. It's like the market works. The real answer, I think, is unfeasible in America. But you need some sort of privacy law so that if they

do overstep, there's a consequence and that keeps them in line. I don't know if we're going to get that anytime soon. I just want you to try to, I keep using this example. You have to go into Chuck Schumer's office and be like, all right, there's a spectrum of AI things here

from beauty filters and Zoom to the people on Reddit who faked Glorbo to make the idea write about Glorbo and World of Warcraft. Write a law, Chuck. Well, if that's the spectrum, the law is just all these things are very good. No problems.

Only good things, they're only upsides. All right, let's end on my favorite story of the week. Same enterprise software, real middle section on enterprise software here. Speaking of work from home, the Zoom explosion, all this stuff, in the height of the pandemic, when everyone thought no one was ever going to go work in our office again, where it was all video conferencing forever, Verizon bought a company called Blue Jeans for $400 million.

This was a big deal. The CEO Verizon went on CNBC to announce it. They were talking about how they're going to roll it into 5G. Verizon, you know, a big IT supplier. They're like, our distribution network, this is the future of business. Blue Jeans, powered by Verizon. give all your employees, Verizon 5G phones, a low latency, Blue Jeans experience will blow.

Anyway, they shut it down this week. It's because have you ever used blue jeans? No, no, no, no. I'm a regular human. Yeah, I had to, so that's what the Writers Guild of America used as its software. And so when I was a union steward, you'd have 200 people on a call in Blue Jeans, and no one knew how it worked.

Should have gone on strike about that. Yeah. I'm sorry. Yeah. Really? It was brutal. It was just the worst app on the planet. And I remember when Verizon bought it, I was like, either they'll make it good or they

didn't understand that they bought garbage. And it sounds like it was the latter. Let me just put that headline right next to something else. Verizon will soon raise prices on unlimited plans again. Yep. Maybe if he hadn't lit $400 million on fire buying a third rate video. conferencing app to make your 5G network better, you could have just kept the prices lower. Just garbage software.

Yeah, I just feel it's called Blue Jeans. Like, this is why, have I told you about the career I'm going to have when I leave the verge where I just walk into rooms and say, that name is stupid? And then somebody writes me a check for $50,000 and I leave. What a stupid name. Oh, Blue Jeans me. Like, are you serious? That company never had a chance for one second.

They had a bunch of marketing that was like nothing. It's like blue jeans. Like, that's what they were doing. That's true and has nothing to do with video conferences. I'm just going to read you this sentence. We have made the difficult decision to sunset our suite of blue jeans products. There is more than one product. We are taking off our blue jeans.

That's bad. So if you're on a Verizon Go Unlimited, Beyond Unlimited, or Above Unlimited. Sure. This is some real Disney streaming shit here. I don't like this. Yeah. You will be playing $3 more per month. They do this like clockwork every year because the new iPhones are coming out and they don't want you on the legacy plans when you get a new iPhone.

They want you to put you on the new, more expensive plans to get the new phone. And so every year they come out with new plans and new blah, blah, blah, blah, the new subsidies for the iPhones and they make the old plans more expensive. Every year like clockwork. And it's, I'm just going to point out that if they had not lit $400 million on fire, on a product called blue jeans, maybe their investors would be happier with them. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't have to raise prices so much. Also, maybe if we hadn't let T-Mobile buy Sprint and there are actually four wireless carriers in this country, it would be actual competition in the market. That's just me.

We don't have a DISH network. Gena-5Sys update for you today because they've done fuck all. That sounds right. That's accurate. Just saying Dish Network was supposed to. a long, confusing deal brokered by the Trump administration, stand up a fourth

5G network using a technology called O-RAN that would compete with the giants. You look around. Well, but now DISH Network is merging with Echo Star, so that's... Which is the same company. I just want to point out, if you are an old billionaire

and you have two companies and you're like, I don't know, merge them up together, you have accomplished nothing. This is like when people tried to make me care about Paramount and Viacom and CBS all merging. And the only good thing about it was that like the parent company was called National Amusements, which is like deeply funny. And it's like, but it's all just to say like one old guy owned all the companies, right? And you're like, yeah. And they're like, oh man, this is the greatest succession drama.

It's like, no, it's all just the same company. Like none of this matters. That's DISH and ECHOSTAR merging, which we wrote about this week, which is fine. I'm just pointing out, we were supposed to have four wireless carriers in America. We let T-Mobile by Sprint, which was a mess. And then we brokered instead of anything real, a fake idea about DISH network, making a fourth network, which look around. Doesn't exist. It's going really great.

I would just say Dish and Echo Star could combine, rename their network to blue jeans and be heroes. It's just right there. Look, we like asking for your emails or take a break. We'll come back. We'll read some emails. If you are a person, beyond just my phone is faster or I've downloaded more pirated Netflix videos than ever in an airport, if you're someone who's actually like experienced the benefits of 5G, I want to hear from you. It cannot be that your bandwidth is just faster. I'm talking you did a robot surgery.

Like one of these things they told us what happened with 5G. I have one example for everyone. I'll put it out there right now. Last night, I watched Taylor Swift announced 1989 Taylor's version from SoFi Stadium on like 45 different, like, crystal clear live streams on TikTok. That is because NFL stadiums have millimeter wave 5G in them. That's why. That's it. That's the future.

Okay, I'll give you that one. I've taken that one off the table. They put so much bandwidth in NFL stadiums that I watched effectively pirate live streams of a Taylor Shoeff concert. Okay, that one's off the table. Give me something else. Email us, Virchast theverge.com.

I'm dying to know if anyone has done like a robot 5G surgery, if they've deployed a low latency application to a telecom company's edge data center. You let me know. Because I haven't seen one other than these phones are slightly faster. Does updating your laptop at a hotel count?

No, that's just more bandwidth. But it was really nice bandwidth. You cannot give me, you cannot give me, I can pull down one gig speeds, blah, blah, blah. You have to give me something on the order of tens of thousands of people in an NFL stadium, live streamed crystal clear video to the internet all at once. Right? Not just you alone stood on a street corner with high bandwidth. tens of thousands of people use the internet ones because of the Taylor Shlifel.

Like that is, and I give you that, that is a meaningful 5G thing that you could not do with an LT network. But give me like one more. Like, we did not do all of this for the Ares Tour. At least I don't think we did. Vergecast is Verge.com. email us. 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. That way you can hire with confidence without turning it into another full-time job.

Hiring Pro streamlines the entire process from drafting your job to shortlisting candidates and conducting AI-powered interviews for initial screenings. Its updated conversational interface lets you describe what you need in plain language. Nearly 60% of hirers find a candidate to interview within a week. With Hiring Pro, you spend less time searching and more time connecting with the right talent. And instead of getting buried in resumes, you get a focus shortlist that actually moves your hiring forward. Join the 2.7 million small businesses using LinkedIn.

to hire. Get started by posting your job for free at LinkedIn.com slash track. Terms and conditions apply. Support for the show comes 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, acid 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.

We have a little bit of the lightning around. There's some good stuff in the lightning around this week, I got to say. But before I get to that, last week we asked about fart apps in the Vision Pro. I will say one person completely misinterpreted that conversation. I got very mad at me on Twitter. What we were saying is when you have a new platform like the Vision Pro, the first wave of apps is like toys. It's like silly stuff, which was the first wave of apps on the iPhone. And then everyone like figured out what they could do because they'd made so many stupid silly apps.

And then you get the wave of apps. of mobile apps that is like revolutionized culture. There's someone on Twitter is like super mad at me that I'm not aware of the apparently successful enterprise VR apps that exist today. And it's true, I'm not. Blue jeans VR coming to a... Whatever. But this was a prompt.

Like, what's the first wave of silly apps for the Vision Pro going to be? We got some good answers. We did. I have also come up with one that I think is correct. And I'm going to quit my job and make it. And I'm going to make a fortune in the first year. But we should go through the ones that we got because they're all generally very good. What is?

We'll come back. That was a tease, David. That was a tease. I have to read through and see all of these to decide if I'm going to share my idea. All right. So the first one, Josh W., his idea for a Vision ProFart app, a drunk vision, which makes a lot of sense, although you will puke right away. It's literally just throw up in your head.

Yeah. And then that leads right into his second idea, which is Shroom Vision. I buy it, right? What if you could feel like, like Aaron Rogers mode for your Vision Pro is like, it's also called Vision Pro, very good. Justin G wrote Try on Clodes app. It's Snapchat filters for your whole body and all the way if you just look at someone else. Dangerous idea. My immediate reaction to this was, oh, that seems really smart.

And then one second later, I went, oh, no. Yeah. But I will say the thing, like everyone at Snapchat keeps telling me, that the AR try-on thing is real and people like it and use it. And if you could like put on your Vision Pro and stand in front of the mirror and like see how you would look and stuff, like there will be something like that and I bet it'll work. I don't know about the all you have to do is look at someone else thing. Yeah.

There's some real consent issues there. I don't want to be able to change other people's clothes. That seems like a no-go. Here's what I'm thinking. Real-time revenge point. There's like app store review problems in there. We'll see. But I get it. People like that idea. Michael G. says the obvious answer is fart clouds floating around the user with spatial audio fart sounds. This literally is the answer. Spatial audio fart sounds is a thing that will happen. Like Michael has spoken that into existence and this will happen now.

People took the fart app prompt a little too literally because Zach wrote transparency mode and you not only hear a fart, but you see a plume of purple and green come out of butts. That's right up there with Snapchat filters for your whole body. Can you imagine? You're going to wearing a $3,500 headset. You're walking around the city and you're just like waiting for farts so you can see the like sparkle farts. So you're imagining this not as a way to like make it look as if someone is fart. You're imagining like a fart recognition system. Yeah, it's transparency mode for farts.

Fart detector. Oh. Yeah. So somebody farts and it's just, it's like the thing in the pool that turns your pee purple. It's just like AR. Yeah, it's that. And every time it happens, you hear an Apple executive say something like, with the power of the M2 chip. Christopher C writes, slow mo running from Baywatch in whatever space you are in, which I actually don't understand.

It's like you're putting it on and you're walking down the street. And in addition to all the other people, it's this person. and slow motion running towards you. It's just Pamela Anderson slowly running. It's just Hasselhoff. It's good that you went to Pamela Anderson and I went to Hasselhoff. That says it all, really. All right.

And then my last one, this is my favorite one, because it includes the phrase benefit hypothesis. Hell yeah. It's very good. So Ruben wrote, app description, colon. When the USA men's soccer team wins the World Cup, then your Apple Vision Pro will live stream video of former president Donald Trump in prison. Wow, that turned hard in the middle there. It did. Benefit hypothesis,

both political parties will wonder how a former U.S. President spends his time in prison. Two, the curiosity will cause a positive effect on USA's overall soccer performance over time. So they're going to want to win so bad so that we can see that. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so that we can all see it. I don't know what this has to do with the Fission Pro, but it's an interesting incentive strategy. And then he has some potential names here, Victory Watch, ex-president edition, the Champions presidential stream, goal to watch Potison present.

These all sound like golf tournaments. And then number 10 here at the end. Soccer glory, presidential story. I don't know, man. I like getting emails. That's so good. Very good. If you have ideas, we already had the prompt. If you

have had a meaningful 5G experience, you email me. And I'm taking the errors to her off the table, so that's it. We're going to get zero emails about that. So what's your better idea? We did get some emails from some Android gamers. We'll collate those and talk about those. Once there's more than one.

That's basically what I'm saying. I don't want to docks the one person who emailed me. So we've got, send some more of those. But if you got ideas on like what the first wave of Vision Pro, I'm very curious. Wait, can I tell you what my idea is? I've actually, I have been thinking a lot about this and I actually think I'm right. I think there's going to be this, like, gigantic genre of what amounts to, like, fidget spinner apps in the Vision Pro.

Neelana, you and I have both gotten this demo, and just the thing where you can sit there and just, like, touch your fingers together to do stuff is delightful? And I think about, like, the, do you guys remember that app when the iPhone first came out that was just a beer on the screen and you could, like, slosh it back and forth? Oh, yeah. That thing was like, oh, look at the accelerometer. This is cool. It does stuff when I move it.

The equivalent of that on the Vision Pro is going to be like, I put my fingers together and something happens. So it's going to be like there's going to be a bubble wrap app that makes a billion dollars. There's going to be one of the little like popper fidget things that's going to make a ton. Like, spin something around with your finger. Like it's going to be huge. Yeah, this is what I'm saying. The person who's not mad at me like just going to miss the point. The point is when you have a bunch of new interface concepts, the first round of apps is just can you trigger all the sensors and push all the buttons.

Right. And that trains everybody to get a. excited about what else they can build in the way that the first round of iPhone apps was like, turn the phone sideways and it looks like you're pouring a beer. Like that didn't accomplish anything other than getting people used to motion controls on an iPhone. Totally. And like something like that will happen. The first, I guarantee you, the first round of Vision Pro apps is going to be more stuff like that. I can't say it's going to be champion story, presidential glory. Just not a clear business model path.

But you can see how some of this stuff will happen. All right. Lightning Round. Kranz, you've got LK99, which is the fakes story. Can I say this? I will say the LK99 situation like exemplifies broken Twitter to the max. Yes. A hundred percent. Like it exists because Twitter decided it would exist and like no one could stop it.

And then we all have to talk about it. And then go ahead. You got it. It's you. Yeah, yeah. It felt very, um, if people, People understood how science is normally reported and how major discoveries are normally reported. They would have been a little less hyped about this.

Because generally speaking, when science has really cool big discoveries, they like to be like, hey, look at these really cool big discoveries we have. They don't like to leak two competing studies on the same product to a different forum and then have everybody argue over whether it's real or not and have very little proof. That's the opposite of science. So everybody who was like, it's all a conspiracy, no, they were incorrect. But LK99 was, is the substance, there were a number of developers who came out and they said, oh, this could be the next superconductor. And the important thing about superconductors, they're really, really good at conducting electricity. At room temperature, at normal pressure.

Most superconductors cannot do that. We have superconductors today, but they usually have like thermal or pressure issues, which makes them really, really, great to use, but really, really expensive. use. So something that just works at normal, like out of the box is a huge, huge idea. And one of the things that like tells a superconductor from other things is the ability to levitate over magnets. But those aren't the only materials that levitate over magnets. So when everybody saw this partially, not even fully, partially levitating, they were like, oh my God, it's a superconductor. And it turns out that, oh my God, it's not. It's just one of those materials that levitates over magnets. And it's

It sounds like there's definitely some cool use cases for it. It sounds like there's some interesting things here. But some of the researchers already were trying to sell it. And so this was part of their marketing hype to sell it. And the other researchers were not. And the superconductor research space was already dealing with some drama because some other people had previously claimed. Wait, can you just say the superconductor research space was already dealing with some drama? Incredible.

Oh, yeah. There was already drama because there was already another, like, study that was like, oh yeah, we've got the new superconductor. And it turned down it was all fake and wrong and terrible. So like people keep coming into this space because it's, it's a very profit, like it's potential for profits huge here. So everybody wants to find that superconductor and then make lots of money. Wait, can I, can I ask a really dumb question? I confess I have like not really followed this story because the night I sat down and was like, I'm going to read the hell out of LK99 was the same day everybody was like, never mind, this is nothing. So I

basically have not followed this story at all. Okay. And this is where I ask a very dumb question about superconductors, which is like, let's say in theory this had been the thing that some of these people thought it was, so what? Like, why did this become such a like real world excitement phenomenon so fast? I think the big thing for superconductors is where it would be really powerful is like, right now superconductors are used in a lot of power plants and stuff like that. But if you can get a cheap, super-reliable superconductor, which if this had been one, would have ticked those boxes, right?

It would have been cheap. It would have been easy to produce. If you can do that, then you can conceivably make, like, electric cars, anything that runs on power, just way more efficient. Because it's able to move that and without like as much heat and stuff like that. It's super efficiently. So instead, in theory of doing what we do with silicon now, which is only a semiconductor, you could do it much better. with a superconductor. Right. You could do it so, so much better.

And so, like, it would just make things way faster. It would make things way less power hungry. Like, it would be, in a lot of ways, magic. I just want to give you this quote from our piece, which is, if you start with a rock, you end up with a rock. Yeah. And this was the thing. What I didn't get about the Twitter side of this was how so many people were like,

this is crazy. It's so cool. And then they'd go talk to researchers. the researchers are like, we're skeptical. And they're like, you're in the pocket of somebody. You hate science. And it's like, yeah. This is what I mean about Twitter.

Like the broken blue check version of Twitter that we have now, like is made for hype cycles. Yeah. And it, every kind of like crypto scammer, AI thread boy had a moment with LK99. And the media is still organized around having Twitter be its assignment editor that this obviously fake thing like ended up everywhere. Like we wrote about it because there was so much interest in it. Yeah, we weren't going to write it.

Like we talked about this when it first popped off and we're like, oh, we're not going to write about it because all of the reasons that I talked about, which was, didn't seem reliable and everything else. But then so many people were writing about it, we're like, okay, well, we have to like explain how this is all incorrect and they're wrong and that this isn't a big deal, which is a bummer of a story to write. Yeah. I'm going to quote, Michael Norman,

distinguished fellow and former director of Material Science Vision at the Argonne National Laboratory. When you start with a rock, chances are you will end up with a rock. That's awesome. It's a rock. But it's just like, to me, the thing was, I mean, it's interesting to capture the imagination.

You love capturing. It's like every so often, I remember early in my Engadgette tenure as like a baby blogger, someone had claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. And like, But like, you know, they were going to like hold a video demonstration. They called them the thing. And like we were like, I was just like, guys, this is bullshit.

Like, look at it. And there was this answer, which I still think about all the time, which is the audience is interested and it's a service to go and ask the questions and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, but we can just answer the questions now. Like, it's definitely not going to work. You just say it's bullshit. It didn't work in the end. Surprise. But it's just like this cycle.

But because Twitter is in the middle of it. Like the idea that something has gone viral on Twitter still carries meaning in the world, even though the meaning is sort of divorced from the mechanics of Twitter. Yeah. And so it's like, oh, yeah, like a bunch of like grifters started doing threads about what it means for there to be a room temperature superconductor and without ever verifying that there was a room temperature superconductor. And then everybody wrote about it because everyone was excited. Including our audience basically asked us to write about.

Yeah. It makes me think of all the TikTok trends that like parents and, schools get terrified about that weren't actually trends. But it was just like one person made a video and then some person made a video warning you about the video. And then everybody latched onto that. And it's like this was never actually a thing that kids were doing. But now we're afraid of the thing that kids aren't doing.

If you go to the original video. This cycle is bad news. Yeah. It's the, it's the, I call it the local news cycle. Once when I, as a child in Wisconsin, the local news once reported that kids were getting high by drinking too much water, which is a real thing that you can do. I have since learned. And my mom was like, how much water you'd be drinking?

And I was like, not enough, bro. I've been drinking a lot of Miller light. She's not worried about that, though. The water's the problem. Anyhow, I've got a quick update on the Mr. B. Situation. You recall last week, Mr. B sued the company that was doing his ghost kitchens for Mr. Beast burgers trying to get out of the contract because there was no quality control.

Surprise. They have now sued him back for $100 million, saying that he's got more value out of them, and he's become more famous because of the burgers. I don't know, man. That's your lightning round update. I think Mr. Beas versus the burger company is, it's like the pinnacle of influencer culture in a way. It is directly related to, like, there are a lot of thread boys threading on the

tweets about how Mr. Beast Burger was like the future of dining. Oh, yeah. All of those people should be forced to apologize. Here's my theory. If you were a thread person on Twitter doing threads like that, and then you want to join Instagram threads, Instagram should enforce that you have to post 50 apologies first. And eat 50 Beast Burgers. Eat 50B.

You have to do a Beast Burger challenge. If you have ever written a one of 99 Twitter thread about how Mr. Beast Burger was the future of dying, I think you should have your platform credentials revoked until you eat 50 Beastburgers. I like it. I will say, listen, I'm not a lawyer, but the idea that Mr. Bees is only famous because of the burgers does not make a lot of sense to me. It does not fly. It's also, by the way, his actual work, it is clear he cares a lot about the quality of his actual work. Yep.

Like a Mr. Beast video is like a rigorously edited jewel of a thing. Yeah. And it's like, you can see why he's pissed at the burgers are wrong. It's just very obvious. Anyhow, all right, Dave, what's yours? Mine is just a small threads update, which is a very cool little thing that happened where you can now use your Mastodon profile

and your Threads profile essentially as verification systems. So you can go to Mastodon and say, you know, my threads account is this and then actually use your Threads account to verify that, which at a very small level, is like, it doesn't matter. It's like a teeny tiny feature. But it is, and Instagram people have been saying,

this is the first sort of meaningful step threads has made into like the activity pub decentralized social media world. And we've said a bunch of times, like there are lots of reasons to believe threads will never decentralize in the way that it has promised. But the people who are building the thing continues who loudly say they are going to do it. And this was sort of the first like real world instantiation of that.

And I think that's very. exciting. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, it is like a very little thing, but it is true that Threads, engineers were posting, like, hope you believe us. Like, we're taking these baby steps. They were so proud about it. It just makes me happy that, like, how excited people were for it. I'm not excited for it, but everyone was so just pumped. I don't care. But everybody else was so pumped. So I just want to say, by the way, that every time I write about this stuff or talk about it on a show like this, the overwhelming response is people don't care about decentralized platforms. that's not how you win user experience, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.

And that's a stupid argument. People didn't care about anything until they realized why it was cool and started using it. That's how things work. And in this case, like, I will continue to plead loudly that decentralized social media is a good idea and we should pursue it. And you should care as a person because it will make better products and a better internet. and my number one goal in life is to convince random strangers that decentralized social media is a concept they should care about. So here I can.

I'll give you the, I'll just flip that around. These clowns forced us to care about crypto. Right? Like they, the money that flowed into that ecosystem to try to force us to care about it. And we, the verge and the verge cast audience

by and large was like, don't care about this. Like, fully rejected. But it's weird that because there's not that much money in this system, that people are like, no one will ever care about this. And like, I just, it's, the things are not user experiences. The things are the things that enable other people to make products and services that compete, which is the thing that we care about the most. It's like, it's like the moment that the open web started to beat AOL, there were probably

We own people who cares, everybody's on AOL. And it's like, no, this other thing is better. Yeah. And like, give me a minute and I'll prove it to you. And, like, that's how I feel about the future of social stuff right now. And at the end of the day, Twitter is going to buy Time Warner. That's the final form of Twitter is they're also going to own Batman for some reason. All right.

All right. Yeah. It feels right. Yeah. Unfortunately. There's a new Evie Escalade. It's called the Escalade IQ. I love it.

It is so expensive. It is $130,000, but it is hot. It's, and it's huge. It's the biggest car. It's a massive car. It's ridiculous. It's so big. It's not as big as the escalate ESV.

It's not as big as the biggest escalate, but it's still huge. It's bigger than a regular escalate. Three rows, beautiful, 450 miles of range, mostly because the battery is the size of a Sherman tank. It has a crab walk mode, the Hummer EV has. So it can go sideways. The thing's cool. $130,000.

I sent a photo of it. to Becky with just the words, Hear Me Out, and she wrote, that's hot. Oh, congratulations. Good, right? I was like, what if we sell everything in buying EV Escalade? She was like, I'll think about it.

It's hot. Go look at pictures. GM, they've been saying this is going to happen. No car play. Huge screens in the inside. The inside of his car looks hot. It's like wall-to-wall screens. It's a 55-inch screen across.

Yeah, it's an LED LCD that wraps around. The sort of climate clusters another screen. In the back, there's a 30-1. screen screens for days. And they're saying no car player Android Auto. Again, they said this was going to happen ages ago. No one believed them. Here's the new escalade.

And they've done it. Now, importantly, Google built in. So you get Google Maps. You get Google all the stuff that you might want off a phone. But no Android or a car play. I don't know if this is a good idea. I haven't used it. Haven't seen the car.

Many questions. But this is the moment when big car makers say, when Cadillac says, you know what? you're going to buy an escalade with or without car play. Also, probably you're in the backseat of this escalate, so it doesn't matter. But, like, they're betting people are going to buy escalades without carplay because what they want is an escalate. Okay.

Nelai, you are obligated by law to think this is a good idea. So, congratulations. What I would just say is, I know I came back to the show and said that I agree that car play is bad. But the thing is, I'm looking at the picture of this screen right now. And it essentially, if I can describe it, basically, the, the, The photo I've seen here in our piece looks like sort of three distinct sides. One side shows like nav and car information.

The middle is kind of classic infotainment. And on the right is, I don't know, like a 15 inch across screen that just has seven icons. Like this is what we're doing with our screens. Like here's seven icons. This is awful. This is the worst UI design I've ever seen in my life. Oh, no, no, no, no. So you're looking at that, that's like a menu screen.

So I think, again, I have not seen this car. So the screen all the way in the right is in front of the passenger, and that is basically a TV. A really skinny candy bar television. Yeah, so it's a really weird TV. It looks like it's got HDMI input. It does have. I have one of these in my car. So we have a Jeep with a passenger screen.

It has a filter on the front of it, so you can't see it from the driver's seat. And it has HTML in and some apps. Great. Like, we've, I've used it once to stream a football game to that thing. And the entire time, I just told my wife that I was watching football. And she's like, I don't care. You often do that on your phone anyway. But I was like, now it's in the car.

Like, but that's what that thing over there in front of the passenger is, is this belief the car industry has that passengers want a dedicated screen that is a TV. Well, it's a dedicated screen for them to put ads on, which is all fine and good. I'm just saying the software design here is garbage. Yeah, the UIs ugly. Yeah, I mean, again, we have not seen the thing. So I don't know what mode that is in, but you're right. You've got a thing that is a cluster all the way in the left.

Like, that's the instrument cluster. You've got your standard infotainment. And then there's a set of new ideas on the right of the car that honestly no one in the car industry has figured out. But there should be a screen in front of the passenger that is a TV. Just watch. It's coming to all the cars. And there's another screen right in front of the gear shift. Like this is just...

That's the weird crazy info. That's the climate control. Because you don't have that in the other 55 inches. I just worry about these freezing. Right. So like here's what we don't know. Is this fast? Is it responsive?

Is the interface good? David thinks the interface is bad. We have spent but a few minutes looking at this thing. My point is GM's position, and I guarantee you many, many more carmaker's position over time is going to be, we are not letting Apple take over the user experience of our vehicles. And we think, in particular, I think GM thinks with the escalade, the people will buy escalades even without Carplan Android Auto, because it has Google Maps, which is the thing that people

care about the most. And that's going to be that Rivian is already there. Tesla has been there forever. And I think they're basically looking at what people are doing on these phone apps, are on these phone projection systems and saying, you know what, by and large, they are running Google Maps. So if we just sign the deal with Google and run Google Maps on our thing, yep, we can run ads on the weird Hulu integration over on the right. Yes, we can like, you know, as EV charging networks, blah, blah, blah, we can like monitor the cars better. We can do telemetry, can sell your date,

all that stuff that seems kind of gross. But fundamentally, they're saying, look, what you want out of this is Google Maps. And we've signed the deal with Google to give you Google Maps. And Google is waiting there with open arms. I don't think that theory is wrong. I just don't think there is any evidence in the history of cars that says car makers can make good software. Or the history of TVs. Like, this is the exact same thing TVs have done. TVs have been doing this for ages.

They're like, we're going to do it. Samsung Tysen. And then you go buy an Apple TV and you plug it in and you go away. And you just can't do that with this because I guess you plug it into the HTMLI port. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, you can just plug your phone into HMI port. and we're off your front.

But only on that screen that the passenger gets. We'll see. It's a $130,000 EV Escalade. Like, the risk profile for this car is very low. I think the people who are going to spend $130,000 on EV Escalade have people who use their phones for them. That's going to be you someday, Mil. And that's my dream.

We're going to get the Becky review of this car someday. It's going to be great. All right. That's it. David, you have a new news like. Oh, yeah. If you're listening to this. On Friday, you have one day to sign up.

It's called installer. And the idea was basically to just take all of the cool stuff on the internet and put it all into one place. It's like there's like new apps every week. There's new stuff to watch. There's new games to play. There's new like cool creators coming out all the time. And I spend a lot of time just like pouring this stuff into like random documents and

never doing anything with them. And I was like, I am going to do better at finding new stuff. and I've been asking people to send stuff installer at theverger.com anytime you see anything cool anywhere in the internet, send it to me. I've already gotten a ton of really fun stuff. There's a lot of really fun stuff in the first issue. You can read it on the site every Sunday, but you can also subscribe and get it in your inbox every Saturday. And we're going to do lots of things like have beta invites and access to cool stuff and like giveaways and stuff. So it's a big advantage to be a day early. It's theverge.com slash installer.

I think the first issue is really fun, and I hope it will be forever. It's going to be awesome. Neilie's in the first issue. I made Neilize send me his home screen and tell me about all the truly unhinged apps that he seems to use every day. So if you want to know what Neilie's phone looks like,

check it out. I do not know why Spotify is on Apple Music. I took that screen shot. I was like, why is this here? Uncurated to the extreme. All right. One more thing. We're doing cybersecurity questions on the Wednesday.

show, right, David? Give us a call. 866, Verge 1-1 with your cybersecurity questions. I'm having a lot of fun doing a reader feedback this summer. One question I have for all of you, also let us know if you like it. If you like it when we're reading the emails and doing the voicemails, that would be really useful. We are having fun. I just want to make sure you think it's a good part of the show. Let us know. Also, if you've ever had a meaningful 5G experience, it's driving bonkers. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. Back on wrong. And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear

from you, shoot us an email at Vergecast at theverge.com. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.