The Vergecast - The history of Roku and the fight over CarPlay

Episode Date: July 30, 2024

Today on the flagship podcast of dedicated streaming hardware:  We try out a couple of show formats we’ve been planning for a while.  In Version History, we tell the story of the Roku Netflix Player, debate its legacy, and try to decide whether this thing belongs in the Version History Hall of Fame.  From Fast Company: Inside Netflix’s Project Griffin: The Forgotten History Of Roku Under Reed Hastings From CNBC: How Roku used the Netflix playbook to rule streaming video From CNN: Netflix Player offers PC-free movie watching From Wired: Review: Roku Netflix Set Top Box Is Just Shy of Totally Amazing From The New York Times: Why the Roku Netflix Player Is the First Shot of the Revolution After that, it’s time for debates. Nilay Patel and David Pierce yell at each other about who should own the screens in your car. Are CarPlay and Android Auto the answer, the solution to universally crappy automaker software? Car companies haven’t figured out if they’ll let Apple CarPlay take over all the screens The rest of the auto industry still loves CarPlay and Android Auto Everybody hates GM’s decision to kill Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for its EVs Rivian CEO says CarPlay isn’t going to happen Apple’s fancy new CarPlay will only work wirelessly Later, David answers a question from The Vergecast Hotline about political spam texts. From The Washington Post: How to stop receiving spam texts From PCMag: Stop Robotexts: How to Block Smishing and Spam Text Messages Email us at [e-mail] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of dedicated streaming hardware. I'm your friend David Pierce, and if you're seeing this, I'm already dead. I'm just kidding. I'm on vacation. Right now, as you're listening to this or seeing it on YouTube, I am probably in the woods of Vermont, I don't know, running up and down a mountain or whatever you do when you're in the woods. The point was just to like get away, find somewhere with fewer screens and more trees and just spend two weeks detoxing. Detoxing sounds like more aggressive than I actually mean it. I kind of like life with screens.

It's all, I think, mostly fine. But it's nice to have a break every once in a while. And I will say when I go even like a day or two sort of deliberately turning all of that off, it is really rejuvenating in a way that just totally resetting usually is. Anyway, while I'm gone, we've prepared some really fun stuff for you over the next two Tuesdays. So we're forever experimenting with new ideas and new formats and even new shows we might want to launch at The Verge. And mostly they just live like in meetings and Google Docs and their ideas and things we want to do. But we figured while I'm gone, let's try some stuff out.

So what you're going to hear from us over the next two weeks is two versions of two different ideas we've had. One is kind of a rewatch show and one is kind of a debate show. Just new ways to talk about tech. It should still feel like the Vergecast. It's going to be people you recognize. But we want to just try some new ways of talking about this stuff that we don't do on this show typically. Maybe there'll be segments. maybe there'll be new shows.

Maybe you'll hate them and we'll never do them again. Who knows? But we're going to try some stuff. So the reason I tell you all this is because I genuinely want to know what you think of all of this. As you listen or as you watch, tell us what you think. Do you like these formats? Do you wish we asked different questions?

Do you wish we structured them slightly differently? Do you have other show ideas or format ideas you think that we should do inside of the Vergecast? I want to hear everything. We want all of your feedback all the time, but especially on this. This is deliberately us just being like, these are things we've been talking about for somewhere between months and years, we want to know what you think. So anyway, all of that is to say, should be fun.

We're trying new things. I'm nervous about this episode in a way that I think is very fun. So I'm going to go back to vacation. I hope you enjoy. This is the Vergecast. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Retool. Too many companies run critical operations on duct taped spreadsheets,

Slack workflows, and whatever else they could cobble together. Not because they want to, but because building internal tools means weeks of waiting on someone else's backlog. That's where Retool comes in. Build custom internal tools just by describing what you need. Prompt something like, build me a revenue dashboard on our Salesforce data. And Retool actually builds it on your company's data,

in your cloud, with enterprise security built in. Go to Retool.com slash Verchcast. We all need to retool how we build software. Welcome back. So for our first pilot, We're exploring an idea we've been talking about internally for, I think, more than a year at this point. And it came from the fact that a lot of us really like rewatch podcasts, the ones where usually it's people who are on a show, go through the show episode by episode, and they talk about what they remember from making that episode, some fun behind the scene stories. They talk to guest stars, just a kind of memory lane walk in which you both get to like relive something you really liked, but also learn new things about it.

One of the ones I really like is the Always Sunny podcast about the show. It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia. They stopped doing that show and I'm very sad about it, but that's a great one. Office ladies, but the Office is really popular. West Wing Weekly was a big one. There's the rewatchables on the ringer that's pretty popular. There are a million of these and I really enjoy them. It seems like every star at some point during the pandemic was like, I'll do a rewatch podcast and I will happily listen to all of them. So our idea was how do we do this for tech, right? There are all these stories out there of individual gadgets or apps or kind of these contained stories that we felt like we could go through and talk about in similar ways. A lot of them, we at the verge lived through.

We used them. We wrote about them. We covered them. And there are lots of stories that we have from those days that are just fun to talk about again. Plus, it's a good way to kind of go back in history and talk about how we got here. Right. There's a lot of good ways to talk about the history of the tech industry, but doing it kind of one gadget and device and app at a time felt like a really fun way to do it. So we've been kicking around this format for a long time. I've been kind of borrowing and stealing things from other rewatch podcasts that I really like. And we've put together something, we're calling it version history. I don't know if that's actually the name. I don't know if this is a good idea at all. But we've recorded a couple of them now and it's been really fun. So I hope you

enjoy them as much as we did. The first one is about the very, very, very first Roku. Here goes. All right, Alex Krantz. Hello. Hey, what's up? Neil I Patel, welcome. You're dead to me. This is how we like to start. This is great.

We're starting a thing. I'm on vacation. It's the whole thing. So the thing we're going to talk about in this first segment is the original Roku. It's called the Roku Netflix player. And here's how we're going to do this. We're going to basically, there are three pieces of this show that we're going to try to do here. And I think if we end up doing these longer episodes,

episodes, there will be more. But what we're going to do is I've broken it down to three pieces. We have like a brief history lesson. I have a whole bunch of notes. So I'm going to like tell you the brief story of this thing. You all should chime in and have feelings and thoughts. We're going to talk about how people felt about it. I've looked up a bunch of reviews. I have a lot of like funny stuff I want to show you. And then we have some questions that we're going to see if we can figure out this thing's legacy and whether it matters. And then we are starting a thing called the version history Hall of Fame. That's all I've decided about it so far. But then at the end, we're going to decide whether this thing belongs in the Hall of Fame. So the Roku Netflix player. So this goes

all the way back to like 2002. This guy, Anthony Wood, starts a company called Roku, originally to build music products. They built a couple of things that you've never heard of that don't really matter. But also at the same time, Netflix, this company that ship DVDs to people, decided that they wanted to build hardware. They wanted to like have a box for this new instant watch thing that they had on Netflix where you could watch TV shows on the internet, which was quite a thing. Was it because they knew that Silverlight sucks? So, no. Oh.

I mean, debatable. Okay. The only place, this is a good point, the only place at this moment that you could watch Netflix shows on the internet was on a Windows computer through Internet Explorer because of Silverlight. There was a lot of enthusiasm about Silverlight coming to other platforms, which is a very funny thing to read about all these years later. I think we need to stop.

remind our audience that Silverlight was Microsoft's competitor to Adobe Flash. And that Adobe Flash was Adobe's ill-fated media platform for the web where you had plugins in your browser and you could run entire games and applications, but inside like Adobe's weird framework. I'm only saying this because we have an audience that is young. And this was a thing that happened to all, like, it was just made to happen to us. Yeah. We had no choice in the matter. And there was a time that Flash was considered like very good. Yeah. And Silverlight was kind of a would-be competitor to Flash.

Would-be is very accurate. Yeah. It was a pretender to the throne of a Toby Flash. When the first iPhone came out, it was a major controversy that it didn't run Flash or Silverlight or any of his crack and aggressor. That's where we are. We're many, many, many years away from this. I'm just pointing out that at the time, Netflix was like, we're betting on not Flash,

which was in itself bananas. But like the whole web was built on these like weird plugins. Yes. No, that's right. So that is, that is good context. So at some point in this process, Anthony Wood meets Reed Hastings, the CEO of Netflix, uh, at a conference. And this is where there is some disagreement on the history, but I believe the actual correct answer is that Anthony Wood convinces Reed Hastings to partner with his company, Roku, to build a player for Netflix. Anthony Wood was not a Netflix employee. He was kind of a Netflix employee, but he was like a contractor who was hired to work there. Roku was always a

separate company. This is the thing a lot of people get wrong in retrospect. Roku did not spin out of Netflix. Roku was its own thing that worked with Netflix. But anyway, they go through, they start building this thing called Project Griffin, that is basically going to be a box through which you can play Netflix on your television. And a team about 20 people work on it for a while. They get it ready. They get it done. It's going to be a box. It's going to be a streaming box. Everybody's very excited. And then right before the thing ships, Reed Hastings gets cold feet and says, basically, I am afraid that we are going to alienate all of our partners by making hardware. And that if they make a Netflix box, they are going to lose all of these other companies that they want to

work with to put Netflix on all the screens everywhere. They had made other partnerships. They were talking to Apple and lots of others about putting Netflix on other devices and thought if they made their own, they would piss people off. So instead, they basically, give this project back to Roku. And they gave them some people, some patents, all the work they had done so far. And in return got, I think it was 15% of Roku, which, spoiler alert, they sold and should have held onto for a very long time. Netflix does not have diamond hands. No, not in that case, certainly. So then in March of 2008, the Roku internet player gets launched. And again, just to give you a sense of timing there, at that time, Netflix had just reported

that it had 8 million subscribers. Most people were on DVDs. Again, the only way you could stream Netflix at the time was on a Windows PC through Internet Explorer. Nothing did unlimited streaming like this. It like wasn't a thing that you could do. The whole watch instantly thing on Netflix, brand new, very exciting. Nila, you'll appreciate this particularly. I wrote down the list of ports that the Roku Netflix player had. It had an HTML port. It had component ports. It had composite ports.

It had an Ethernet Jack. It had S-video and it had optical ports. Yeah. Everything. I love that. Yeah, that's the full port. S-video is a lot is, you're like, I'm not interested in quality, but I want to pretend that I am.

Yeah. So it costs $99. Do either of you have memories of the first ever Netflix box? I do. As big streaming nerds, Neil, yeah, you were at Angerner. Gadget, like, chronicling this stuff. There was a lot of Engadget stuff back then. Yeah. AOL has since deleted those posts from the internet. I went looking for them. They're gone. But we wrote a lot about this device because it was, like you said, the first

mainstream streaming device, Netflix's catalog is really small. So there's a lot of jokes about what you could not watch on it. But it was like obvious that gadget nerds would love this thing. And then the fury about it was that it was only 480I, which really explains that S-video port. Yes. Right. Like this thing could stream in interlaced SD. So they were trying very hard to conserve bandwidth. In an early preview of don't ever bet on someone to issue a software update, they kept telling us that it also supported 1080I. And they alluded to maybe doing more than just stereo sound too. There were lots of big ideas about like, oh, this box is very powerful. It'll do lots of other stuff. Yeah. And then those software updates never came. And I became the jaded monster that I am now.

But the idea was so sound. And then the question was, do you want a single appliance for a single app, right, that only has Netflix's catalog? Can Netflix make its catalog big enough? And you kind of just immediately got into all of the streaming questions from this one little box that had a tiny catalog that streamed in 40i. And it was a little glitchy. You know, like none of this technology worked yet. There was at that time, there were still, it's hard to believe. Major questions about whether the Internet was architected to stream video in this way.

like infrastructure, like physically, if it could do it. Yeah, whether like a packet switch network like the internet could do. And it's like, now you're like, what are you talking about? I can do this on my phone, whatever I want. Like at the time, there was, there were like architecture questions. And Comcast and other big ISPs, if you were remember, around the same time, we're like, if you plug your Xbox into a Comcast connection, we will give it a dedicated lane of broadband so we can serve it video. disclosure of Comcast is an investor in box,

me, you know all this. That idea did not work and actually they got a lot of trouble over it because that was the beginning of like a net neutrality fight, but like in its like primitive state. But it came out of something very sincere, which is like, can the internet do video? In the Netflix box was the first thing

that was like, we will just stream video to you. We will figure this out. Kranz, do you have one of these? Do you remember this thing coming out? No, I didn't have one because it didn't run Plex. I really wanted to be super into Netflix streaming at the time, but I only had Macs and the Windows Silverlight thing. So I was like, F this noise. I'm going full Plex. And it couldn't run Plex. So I was like, I don't, why do I need that?

I honestly thought that was a bit. Plex has been around that long. Yeah, I've been on Plex since like 2008. That's nuts. It was originally, it's a spinoff of, um, Xbox Media Center, XBMC. Wow. So this is, this is how old all this stuff is. Like those are the days. Yeah. I appreciate that you skipped right past let's, find the, like, useful way and went straight to just pirated chaos. I love this for you. Look, the useful way came later than the pirated chaos. Useful way was, like, so far behind everybody else. Yeah, and I'm glad you were also early to the let me get a movie on Netflix, rip it to my computer, and then ship it back to Netflix, because that was, like, the single best

use of Netflix that existed. It ruled. So, Nilai, you mentioned some of these things, but I went back through a bunch of the reviews of this thing, which are very funny. I would say the thing people liked most was how easy it was to set up. You could just plug it in to whatever TV you had and log in to Netflix. It did the code thing where you would like log in on Netflix's website and enter a code and it would connect that way, which was way ahead of its time. People were very annoyed by typing in their Wi-Fi password on like five arrow cursor, which still annoying. So kudos everybody for figuring that out. I just want to point out it's been like 20 years and no one has better ideas.

That is still the best interface we have. It's ridiculous. But the two things that annoyed people were, one, as you said, Nilai, the selection. And this was at the time Netflix said it had about 100,000 things that you could get, which is much larger than the Netflix library today. Most of that stuff was on DVDs. And the streaming stuff was only about 10,000 titles. And that included, like, individual episodes of TV shows. I have a quote from CNET, which I very much enjoyed that said, March of the Penguins is the only movie in the top 100 that's available for streaming.

and it's also only one of four streamable documentaries. There was 30 Rock. There was the office, so like I would have been fine. But for the most part, people were unhappy about it. One thing I very much enjoyed, people were psyched that it only took about a minute to load a video. This was like a win. It was when you press play. It only took about a minute to start playing.

And this was back in the buffering days when you would just sit and like wait for Netflix to chug its way through. It is impossible for me to remember when that would have felt. fast to the point where now it's like that I would turn off my television and be like something is broken. I mean, think about back then, people having megabit internet connections was still like, it wasn't unusual, but it was rare enough, right, that you couldn't just count on it. Like, I graduated from law school in 2006 with a megabit internet connection and I was like, yeah. That was that moment. Like, bandwidth was not a thing. And Netflix was trying to, cram this device into an internet that was just not ready for it. Yeah, there were a bunch of people

talking about their internet speeds in their reviews. And a bunch of folks were like, oh yeah, I have a one megabit per second connection. And it does fine. And then somebody's like, I have a 2.2 megabits per second connection. And it's sick. It's like fast as hell, guys. You don't even know. Which I loved. Again, for a young audience, a megabit is a unit event with it is much smaller. Imagine if your current internet connection was 1,000th the speed that it currently is. That's what we're talking about. And also, the thing that Netflix did to make this thing work was it was just a player. You couldn't search at the beginning.

You couldn't find stuff. You couldn't browse. You would put things in your queue on Netflix.com and then you would go to the player and you could browse through your queue and pick stuff to watch. You had two different cues. This is a thing I had forgotten. You had a DVD queue and you had a streaming queue. And that was true for like years.

And I had completely forgotten that that was the case. And you had to like manage what you were getting when and you could stream some stuff and you could DVD some stuff. And it was insane chaos. And I don't miss that one tiny little bit. Well, you have to remember the entire Netflix paradigm was cues. Right. Right. So they had this like weird problem where stuff that is very familiar to us now like discovery and algorithmic recommendations and blah, blah, blah, like didn't exist because the entire.

higher Netflix model was, we're going to mail you some DVDs, you're going to mail them back, and we'll mail you the next ones. So even though they had recommendations, Netflix famously had a challenge to develop a better recommendation algorithm. The model that they were still using was you're going to put physical movies in a queue, like discs in a queue to be mailed to you. And I think they didn't want to break that right away. I thought it was a really good way of like, that was still at a time where we hadn't fully like comprehended how instantaneous media could arrive in our lives, right? Like even music at the time was like, wow, you can just download this off of iTunes? It was a big deal. And so them saying, hey,

you can get a whole movie. It felt like this big magical moment, but also getting drunk and then waking up the next morning and being like, what did I add to my cue? Best feeling in the world. incredible feeling when you're in college. Kranz, I really like imagining you, like, coming home from the bars at 2.30 in the morning and be like, let's Netflix queue, baby. It was the frat houses because we didn't have bars, but yes. That's good. All right. Well, we are time constrained here.

So let's just jump. These are some of the questions we're going to ask for every single one of these as we go. The first one is, what was the best thing in retrospect about this thing? To me, it's just that it was a box for streaming. Right? Like, I feel like that's just the whole, Mila really wants it to be the S-video port. I can, like, see it in the face. No, I'm going to give you like a really esoteric answer to this. Please. It made a Roku. Like, we've talked to Anthony Wood on this show many times over the years.

That company just has re-architected how TVs work. Like, fundamentally, the modern TV ecosystem, every version of it looks like Roku's plan. Yeah. And they started with this silly Netflix app, but they knew what they were making was the cable box of the future. They knew it from the beginning that this thing would be the cable box. They would give them away for as cheap as they could and they would charge fees like the App Store models to all the apps that were on the thing and they would just come to dominate. And I think that has like in some ways made the TV world a lot weirder. It's just it's weird out there. But it wouldn't have happened without this device. The way that Apple is. when Microsoft were going at the time was just really slow, right? Like the Apple TV existed. The Apple TV came out way before this. Remember it was a hobby? And it was basically a Mac Mini with a hard drive.

And you could buy movies and they would download overnight. Again, mega per second internet connections. They would download overnight to a hard drive. Microsoft was doing Windows Media Center. They've been doing it for almost a decade at this point. Every CES, Bill Gates would stand on stage and be like, I'm going to put a Windows PC in your living room. Like just threatening America in the world with this concept.

And they were just not getting it done because they were insistent that they needed to put computers, like big computers in your living room. And so Roku showed up with this little box, $99, didn't have much of an interface, but it did the one thing, which is stream movies over the internet. And that, I think, caused just a sea change in the industry. I agree with that. I think the extent to which Roku had had this plan fleshed all the way out from the very beginning, really surprised me in going back and researching this. Like they were saying from the jump, like, we want to have more apps on this.

We have plans for an app store. We like, they saw the whole thing and like pulled it off in a surprisingly coherent way over time. And just go back. I was just tell you out, just go back, look at the very first Apple TV, which was a Mac Mini.

It had an Intel processor and a hard drive. Yep. Yeah. Like, they were just way off in the weeds on that thing. One of the knocks on some of the reviews for this thing was that you couldn't rent or buy movies, which is a very funny knock in retrospect. Being mad at Netflix for not letting you rent movies is not a thing you hear so much anymore.

What was the worst thing about this thing? Oh, I mean, it was a piece of junk. It wasn't very good. Yeah. Like, it only ran Netflix. So good, it existed. Bad everything else about it. Yeah.

You know, I said the thing about never, not believing in software updates coming or like not reviewing potential. This was like the, this is all of that is wrapped up in there. We'd never review a product based on its potential. This thing, like this device, you're like, oh man, the next one's going to be great. This one on the other hand, that's a real mess, right? But the next one was great. Like, the next Roku's were exceptional.

They got there. It took a long time for Roku to figure out. And even now the Roku product line is like, what are you doing? Series two, they said, yeah, you can do Plex. And that was, that was it. That was it. I was like Roku. is elite. Nothing else matters. Yeah, the pendulum of Roku was that it got way, way, way better,

and then it got way, way worse. And I don't think it's good now, but it was good for a long time. I feel like we've talked a lot about bandwidth on this episode. And it is really hard to remember a time when people's ideas were constrained by bandwidth. And so you could see, like, you're like, oh, this is how it should work. I should select a movie and it should start playing. And if you'll remember, the cable companies had those systems. They had video on demand systems. running on their weird proprietary cable networks with horrible interfaces and bad soft. Like, all of it was bad. But those networks were optimized to let you just do video on demand.

And no one thought the internet could do it. So this device could like let you do it. Now we live in a time when people are like 6G and everyone's like, what for? And like, we don't know. But like at that moment in time, the things people wanted to do were outracing the networks, which was what made it all so exciting. Because you could see the networks would catch up. All right, next question. If you could go back in time and make it before anybody else did. So in this case, you meet Reed Hastings at a conference before Anthony Wood does. What would you do differently?

I mean, I think we know Neely's answer and if I'll see as video ads. More ports. Man, it's like that first one was correct in its ambition. They got there. Should have had more apps on it. That's my answer too, actually. Go convince Hulu or somebody to like also do streaming. Plex, Hulu, and Boxy were all existing in 2008. At least two of those were brand new baby concepts, Boxy and Hulu. But like, they could have done it. They could have put some of that other stuff on there. And at the time, most people who were using streaming video and stuff, they were streaming it locally and they were using XBMC.

They were using Plex. That's how they were getting everything. And so the fact that Roku was late to like internal network video. was a bummer because it could have been really just hit the ground running. I just want to point out that Hulu launched in 2007 with only an announcement and no content. Yes, I love Hulu. So it would have been, it would have been, you could have gotten Hulu on there. That's what I'm saying.

Where is the ABC Go? It would have just been the logo. I want to look at just the logo and then I want the ABC Go app. ABC was still on go.com up until recently. It's wonderful. So was ESPN. I think the idea that it was an appliance actually, it well in its moment. Because remember, everyone else was trying to shove computers under your

TV and you were bringing in all of these computer metaphors. And this device was like, it's just your Netflix queue. It's just delivered here instead of in your mailbox. And it was, there was a simplicity to it that made people think about it differently. The thing I would have changed is I would have gotten Netflix to spend more money to put at least a couple hit movies on there. Because every review basically ended with there's nothing to watch. Like, this is the future. there's nothing to watch. And I think the big change would have been, hey, like, what's find the money to get one blockbuster movie on here so that people have something to watch and, like, they're excited about it.

Oh, the studios were terrified at that time, though. They would have said absolutely not. They didn't want any of their stuff streaming that way because they thought it was going to be like the end of how they make money. And it was, to be clear. They were correct. Yeah. But yeah, it's an interesting. Well, the next question is actually, is there an alternate time?

timeline in which this thing was even more successful, like what parallel universe makes the Netflix player an even bigger hit? And I think that's the one where Netflix starts spending on original content slightly quicker. Right. The thing that made Netflix streaming work was years later, right? This is like in my, I can't help but think about this timeline in terms of gadgets. 2008 was in gadget. Netflix launches house of cards. We were at the verge. Yeah. Right. And that's like years later. And that that was the turn. Like just fully the turn into, okay, now these devices have their own content. And Netflix knew it.

The movie studios did not want to give them the content. The TV studios did, which is how you end up with the office and suits and all this other stuff happening. But that was the thing they were missing. And eventually they just spent the money to figure it out by owning it directly. All right. A couple more questions. Then we'll get out of here.

Could you reboot this in 2024? I think the answer is no. I think like a Netflix specific thing has no place in 2024. What if it's like as an add-on for the Apple TV and all the other ones where Netflix refuses to have its continued watching in their apps. Oh, that's interesting. I mean, but like, is there something too? I want to turn on my TV and the very first thing that appears is just Netflix?

Like, skip the home screen, do I just give me Netflix? I kind of think no. No, yeah, I think we're past that point. That would have been great in 2020 or 2019, but 2024, nobody wants that. Yeah. That's kind of where I land, too. Nelai, what do you think? The constant ecosystem is just too fragmented.

That's what I think, too. Would this thing have been a bigger hit if? Apple had made it. Is the next question. No, because they did. And it wasn't a hit. No, but if Apple had made this thing, I don't mean Apple had made its own version. It had like marketed this thing.

Take the Roku player and put Apple's name in front of it. Would it have been a bigger hit? Yes. I think so too. This is 2008. Apple is coming off the iPhone. Things are starting to happen. I think this thing would have been bigger.

Wait, how do you like this specific device? No way. No? The Apple Netflix player would have been a hit. I absolutely think so. The Steve Jobs Apple does. not release this device. As evidenced by the fact that they did not. In this world that I'm creating, the Steve Jobs Apple releases this device. Walt has told the story many times on the show, Walt Mossberg,

where he was talking to Steve and Steve desperately wanted to build a proper cable box. And he went to the cable companies and said, I'm going to build an actual cable box that it runs our software. It looks great. The whole thing. And the cable company said, here's our garbage middleware software to authenticate to our cable networks. You have to put a cable car. in your box and Steve Jobs said no like absolutely not like I'm leaving this category behind and everyone will just hear my literal dying words

I finally cracked it, haunt them for a generation because TVs are garbage now and it was just because he didn't want to use, S video port man no way okay fair enough and to be clear they got all the way to the future TV is apps with the Apple TV

and they have since walked that back by launching Apple TV Plus and doing the exact thing Netflix had to do, which is making their own content to drive their own services. Yep, 100% agree. I also think it would have been a bigger hit if Apple made it. So I'm with Kranz. And last question, before we go, does the Roku Netflix player belong in the version History Hall of Fame?

100%. No. Kranz, I want to hear you first. Why? Because I think what we've said here, this was where the streaming box came from, right? This is where streaming kind of like started to take off. this was that first big moment. I would argue that the next Roku was the actual moment.

See, that's the one I'd put in the Hall of Fame. That's the one you'd put in the Hall of Fame? I just think this one is so important because we wouldn't have that next Roku without it. It's tricky. Eli, is your argument? It's not this one. It's the next one. Yeah, it's the first one that people started buying, right?

I mean, that's real. This one was not a huge hit. It was like the opposite. It was like a, I don't know, it was like a sketch. It was like they sold a prototype and they realized they had a good idea. and then they finished the idea. And that's the one that, like, actually changed the industry because it moved the way consumer demand was going. Okay.

All right. Well, we will rehab this debate when we do that one because that will be a fun episode, too. But for now, I think it stays out of the Hall of Fame. Okay. Also, because this is the first time we've ever done it. If we put the first thing in the Hall of Fame, it just feels like we're on a bad path. Yeah. Yeah.

Everything's entering the Hall of Fame. Yeah. It's no. No. Probably not. No. But Microsoft Silverlight, yes. By the way, Microsoft took the deal from the cable companies and shipped Windows PCs with cable card slots in them.

Yep. Nightmare. And actually, I think the headline in a gadget was nightmare. Feels right. All right. Thank you both for going on this journey with me. We got to take a break. And then we will come back.

And we have more pilots for you. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website building. used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO, not to mention advanced analytics that include integrated AB testing, your designers and marketers are empowered to build and maximize your dot com from day one.

So whether you want to launch a new site, test a few landing pages, or migrate your full.com, Framer has programs for startups, scaleups, and large enterprises to make going from idea to live site as easy and fast as possible. Learn how you can get more out of your dot com from a Framer specialist or get started building for free today at Framer.com slash verge for 30% off for 30% off. Framer.com slash verge. Rules and restrictions may apply. Welcome back. So for our next pilot, we're going to do a debate show. Liam James, our producer, has been wanting to do this for as long as I've been back at the verge.

He just has this idea of like, okay, what if we basically structure a way for everybody to yell at each other? And this is the kind of thing that we've discovered comes up on the show actually all the time. There are tons of things in tech with one side and then the other. We've had, you know, PlayStation versus Xbox and we've had Android versus iOS. and we've had debates as weird as like which brand of windshield wiper fluid is the best. The point is, it's just fun to pit things against each other and yell at each other about them. And that's kind of what we do all day at the verge anyway. So Liam put together a whole structure, a whole thing, and basically set up a very formal, litigious universe in which we can settle once and for all, which is better.

For the first one, we picked, I would say one of the things we feel more aggressively contested about right now, which is the software in your car. This is the is CarPlay the future or is it a nightmare debate? Here we go. Good day. I'm Liam James, moderator for today's debate. And my job is to facilitate a debate between today's hosts on the topic of automotive infotainment systems like CarPlay and Android Auto. Today we have editor-in-chief, Nilai Patel. Welcome, Neelai. Hello.

And editor at large, David Pierce. David, welcome to the debate. Thank you. All right. Before we get started, I'd like to share the rules with our audience. So each person will make their case for the Vergecast audience. A virtual coin toss will determine... My opponent is a communist.

A virtual coin toss will determine who goes first. We'll have opening statements and following that. Each host will be given two minutes to answer my questions with up to an optional one-minute rebuttal from the opposing host. The questions were not shared in advance with either person. Our hosts may use the internet to confirm factual details, but they use their limited time while doing so. Okay, and with that, let's get to our topic for today all the way back in June 2013. If you can remember that far back, Apple introduced CarPlay.

Actually, they called it iOS in the car, if I remember correctly, originally. It was a standard that enabled in dash head units in cars to display and control a more modern smartphone-like interface. Not long after, Android introduced their own standard with similar capabilities, but a lot of has changed since then. In mid-20204, we asked the question, what is better for consumers? Is it CarPlay, Android Auto, and similar systems, or should the automakers take back control and do this all themselves? All right, we are going to start off by doing a quick virtual coin toss. Technically, you're the visiting team, Eli. So you get to pick heads or tails. Tails never fails. All right. And it is tails. So, Nilai, would you like to go first?

or would you like to go last with your closing statements? I'd like to go last. You'd like to go last. It's a real defer to the second half move. It's good. It's the right call. It's the right call. Defense wins championships, David.

Okay, great. It will be no surprise to our audience that Nelai will be arguing today for the carmakers, and David will be arguing for car play and Android Auto. All right, let's get started with opening statements. David, you're up first. you have up to two minutes. My argument is very simple, which is that it's not that you couldn't have very good software built by carmakers. It's that you won't. It's that it doesn't exist. It has never existed and it will never exist. By bringing your phone into the car, what you get

is an interface you understand, you get the apps you already have, you get the data that already exists on your device. You don't have to rely on a bunch of car companies who have made decades worth of awful software and now are trying to charge you more subscriptions. They're trying to sell your data. They're trying to own more of the experience largely based on software stacks that some company, including those car companies, is not going to keep caring about. I am in control when I use car play. I get to plug the thing in or pair it over Bluetooth. It just works. It is my music app. It's my podcast app. I can use whatever I want for navigation, not whether somebody signed a deal with ways or here or whoever. It's my phone.

And the car should do car things. The car should keep me alive and get me where I'm going. And everything else should be somebody else's problem. And there is precisely zero evidence to show that car makers can build good software, including the car makers everybody says build good software. Do not build good software software. So my thing is let's let software companies be software companies and let car companies be car companies. And everybody can win.

And it's just that simple. And Neilie Patel, your opening statement. My fellow Americans, I come before you with two artists. Well, three. First, David is a communist. That's important. And we should not agree to his radical communist agenda. Second, no matter what, as long as I've made that point clear, I think that's important.

Two, I'm not arguing that carmakers are good. I'm arguing that car play in particular is bad. Carplay has not meaningfully changed in a decade. You can't do something as simple as look at a list of songs while looking at the map in CarPlay. just can't do it. The idea that Apple will somehow get good at showing you two applications at once on an iOS device is a pipe dream that we've seen fail over and over again with the iPad for a decade now. They're just not going to do it. Your opportunity for car play is limited. And that's fine if, like, communist David here, you think the state should limit you to one application at a time

in your car. My second point is that cars are getting ever more complicated. And the idea is that Cars are not a software experience. It's silly. I'm not saying they're good at the software now. Even your Teslas, your Rivians, I've been test driving, Rivian for three days now. It's not great. I'm not pretending it's great. But things like charging your EV, managing your range, knowing where all the nearby

chargers are, combined with autonomous driving, setting a destination on the map and letting the car help you get there, all stuff the car is going to do more and more of. And if you're an Apple fan, you know that integrated solutions are better than the weird Bluetooth fragmentation that David and his commie brethren would foist upon you. Be a true American. Let GM put Android in your car. Vote but tell. That was fantastic. Okay.

With those opening statements, we will move on to our first question, which is going to be for David Pierce. Hello. David. Driving can be considered one of the more dangerous activities we complete in our daily lives. Many people consider the carplay and Android auto interfaces to be less tactile. And more specifically, the removal of buttons inside of modern cars has caused a lot of consternation on the side of older drivers. What do you say to the people that want all the important safety interfaces, things like windshield wipers, climate control for fogged up windows, things that you need to be able to quickly turn on and off in the car being relegated to touchscreen interfaces.

I have two points to make, and Liam, thank you for asking that. Very good question. Point number one, this is a bad trend. You always know the person's not sure what they're going to say yet when they compliment the moderator's question. I'm sorry, I'm reclaiming my time from the moderator. This trend is wrong. I am pro buttons. We are pro buttons. here on the Vergecast, buttons are good. We should have more dedicated controls for doing things. That is not the trend that we are on, and neither Apple nor Google caused that trend.

This trend towards touch interfaces for everything in cars is, I believe, a bad idea, but it is the one that we are on. And so what I'm arguing is that rather than present you with a giant set of brand new controls every time you get into a vehicle or onto a scooter or anything, that you should have a system that you understand and that I am now bringing this thing with me instead of basically just being tossed into the deep end of somebody's bad software design every single time I sit down in front of the steering wheel. Would I like to completely change the car industry such that none of this was important

and that there was a button that I could just roll the windows down with and I didn't have to guess how to open the handles to get in the freaking car? Yes, of course. But that is not where we are. And so what matters more than ever actually is consistent. and having some cross-car understanding of where things are and how they work. And there is no better system for that than CarPlay and Android Auto. Wow, that was exactly two minutes.

Delide, would you like to rebut that? Spoken like a true communist. Is there a penalty for ad hominem attacks on this? David would have you turn away from the freedom and innovation and liberty of the market to put insane door handles on vehicles and instead have Tim Cook impose a draconian system of weird sliders and that gray scale that they do that doesn't look good even on an OLED display. You know what I'm talking about?

It's just not good. It just doesn't look good. As Americans, we should have the freedom to have cars that look cool and operate the windshield wipers in ever more esoteric ways. Automatic, you say, nay, I will push whatever button I choose to push. Am I a car socialist? I think I may be a car socialist. I never thought about this.

David hates liberty. He wants everyone to drive one of those weird. Russian cars with the bubble windshields. And all the controls are exactly the same. And you know how to use them because you've been given a car by dictator Pierce over here. Gentlemen, what's more American? Let's keep the redneck. The open road with a variety of buttons and knobs.

Let's keep the rhetoric down, gentlemen. Moving on to our next question. Yeah, let's just move the gas pedal. Who even cares? Do whatever you want. It doesn't even matter. Cars are fine. What's the worst thing could happen?

That's a free market, baby. Next question is for you, Neelai. Eli, you mentioned in your opening statement the problem of having many more capabilities in cars and the inability to show those in ways that allows for multitasking or multi-window interfaces to make this both easier and safer to use. What makes you think automakers are the right people to fix that problem? Again, let me be clear. I'm arguing mostly that car play is bad. I don't think that carmakers are the best people to solve these problem. In fact, I think they might be some of the worst, but no one will try to solve the problem if we just give everything to one company, if we just hand over our interfaces to one company

with no incentive to do anything other than to get you to buy another iPhone or to sign up for one of their various services. You want to buy a new car that comes with three months free Apple TV Plus? Be my guest. Let it ride. I'm just saying you will never get new ideas in this market if you give up. And David would have us give up to live in his top-down government controlled. Emphasis on live, as in remain alive.

I'm just saying we're going to be in it. We're headed towards a future where I believe people would like to both look at the map and pick the next song without having to literally switch apps because the car will be doing more of the work itself. I don't see a pathway from the car play we have today to that future, and I see no indication that Apple's interested in that. I also see a future in which there are more screens in the cars, there are more screens in the car, where passengers are doing more things on the screens in the car, and having that all tied to one phone seems a little bonkers. I think you want your car to be as integrated and as functional as your smartphone, and I think it's on carmakers to get there. And I'm saying I'm going to get there now, but I'm saying,

I don't want to live in David's weird dystopian nightmare future. The weird dystopian nightmare future you're describing is one in which you know how to use your car. Is that what we're talking about? I am pro competition. I believe in the idea that we can have lots of different options here. I don't think a world in which car play is the only interface that exists is the ideal outcome. I'm just saying it's better than a world in which I am getting into a car. and just banking on GM to have finally, for the first time in its history, built good software.

I would point you to GM, a company that very famously broke up with Android Auto and CarPlay, has had disastrous consequences, had to stop selling the first car on which it made its own software because its software was so bad. This is what we're up against. I'm not arguing CarPlay is the solution to all of our problems. I'm just arguing it's better than that. Real-time fact check, sir. Eli, it is not your turn.

Real-time fact-check. chance to respond with your next question. Yeah, listen, Neely, the move is just talk over the moderator. We've been through this before. Come on. I feel like all of us have learned some very bad lessons along the way here. Please, I welcome your real-time fact checks, sir. All right. Again, no one's saying that GM is good at software.

It wasn't the move away from Android Auto that caused the blazer to get recalled and have the stop. So that was their bad battery software. It's GM's general software ineptitude. It's different software. The escalades are moving. People are buying escalades. People are buying the cars that don't have the stuff.

But what they are enjoying about it is they get in the car and it already has a Spotify app and it already has Google Maps, which are the only things people want. And are completely duplicative of the apps that they already have on their phone. Gentlemen, we need to move on. The next question is for you, David Pierce. Long before options like CarPlay and Android Auto came out, we had problems with cell phones in cars. Text messaging, distracting people, people talking on the phone. Lots of things went in place to try to regulate that, hands-free options and stuff like this. Are you really saying that people should have apps in their cars?

Should they be playing with Spotify and Apple Music and all of these interfaces when they're driving a car? I would encourage you to spend one minute watching people drive their cars. Everyone is looking at their phone all of the time. And again, would it be great if some of the systems that these companies have tried to implement had worked, if the things like the driving modes and the auto text response that says driving, call you back later. Have you ever gotten one of those texts? No one's ever gotten one of those texts. Those aren't a thing. The good news is, because as my ridiculous opponent said, in the first correct thing he's said this entire time, people do just want a couple of apps. Maybe it's Google Maps and Spotify.

Maybe it's Apple Maps and Apple Music. What I gain by bringing my own device is I get to use the apps that I want. I'm not forced into someone else's locked down system that will inevitably be an old version of Android running old apps and not running very many apps. I get to have the stuff that I want. So the best case that I have for safety is to push that stuff to the large display in front of me instead of requiring me to constantly look down at my phone. So actually, every single app that I'm adding to one of these two app stores through which I can actually get the things that I care about is an improvement.

It's not going to solve everything because everybody is still going to. to look at their phone, but it's better. My friend, how popular is car play? Extremely popular. Everyone has it, right? It's everywhere. Yeah. Do you know why people are still looking at their phones in their cars? Because CarPlay sucks.

That's why. Because they can't do the things that the people want to do. So they pick up their phones anyway, making driving, according to the latest statistics I've seen, 5,000% more dangerous. Based on the numbers. That's the America, David Pierce, wants you to live. Right? You can look at my website, Neuipatel.

for carplay president.com. And please donate. All I'm saying is, if carplay was good, you would not see people constantly using their phones in their cars. And if carmakers could make good software, people wouldn't be using carplay. No, because you're plugging in your phone or worse, you're on wireless carplay, which has brought down the rate of new car satisfaction because it's so flaky over the past three years.

You've taken the big real estate of the big screen and you've turned it into a single unitasking, limited application model, and then people use their phones anyway. Why not allow that screen to do multiple things at once? Nil, what makes you think carmakers can do this at all? Two things. One, they're trying, which is interesting. You don't see a lot of trying in technology these days. And second, there are some results that show that how we build and design cars is changing. So Tesla's way ahead here. They've reduced the number of computers in their cars over the years to almost nothing at this point. And that's Tesla. Great. They've also reduced the number of curved surfaces on their trucks to zero. And then you look at Rivian, which just updated the R1

platform to something you're calling the zonal architecture. They're combining the multiple sensor arrays and microprocessors and controllers and integrated systems on their cars into big computers in zones of the car that control various functions. That's a big deal. That's literally really rethink of how cars are designed, how they operate, all the functions of a car, all the bits and bobs are really that can be controlled, not only from the touchscreen, but remotely, requires the car to have a computing architecture that can do all the stuff. Then you can put an interface on top of that. Maybe that interface is CarPlay, but you need to do that work, the hardcore computer design

integration work across the car to even have the opportunity to do something like introduce cool new features with over-the-air updates. You just have to design the car differently. All the carmakers want to do this. So they have the desire. And then there's competition in the market that's pushing them to deliver. And if you just give up the screen to Apple and say, look, this car is here to get you from point A to point B. I believe the world will turn gray, much like the Soviet Union.

Have you ever seen the hunt for Red October? It's one of my favorite movies. If they had car playing submarines, it would have solved a lot of problems. I'm just saying. David, do you want to respond to that? I do want to respond. My response is that I agree that car companies. should be in charge of making their cars work. That's not what we're debating here. That's

not a complicated question. And to the extent that making a car work is increasingly a job of building and maintaining computers, sure, learn how to do that. But it is just simply true that these companies have no track record and very little ability to build good, usable software for humans. Most of the time, most of what's happening in a car is abstracted away from the person who is using it. And that's good. Most of it should not be your job to figure out all the time. If you had to pick which brake you applied every time you applied the brakes, bad things would happen. It's good that that's attracted away from you. The stuff that is not is the stuff that is in front of you. It's the navigation. It's the music. It's basic controls over the systems inside of your car.

That stuff should be separate. And you, the user, the driver, the passenger, whoever you are in the car, should be able to control what that is and you should be able to bring it with you in a way that is consistent and is personalized and is yours. Let the car companies be car companies. Okay, go into closing statements. David, you're first. Okay, let me describe to you some things that I don't want. I don't want a car that I get in and cannot make any sense of no matter what. I don't want a car that doesn't have my apps. I don't want a car that has my apps, but doesn't know anything about me like where I live or where my office is or any of the places that I like to go. I think of car companies and tech companies as like sports owners. Like,

they're very good at business. They make a lot of money and then they go buy a sports team and they think because they knew how to run like a mortgage company. They know how to run a sports team and they'll just do it the same way. Different things. Let different things be different things. And letting someone build good infotainment software that humans are supposed to use is so radically different from what it takes to make a car work very well. I don't think the Apple car was a good idea. I kind of think Waymo is weird and way out over at skis and doing some crazy stuff. Like, let the tech companies do the tech things. Let the car companies do the car things. I'm not interested in updating my car software every time a new Spotify feature appears. I am not

interested in having to upgrade my car just because Google forgets about its Android automotive nonsense in two years. I want to be able to bring my technology to my car and I want my car to keep life. Those are two different jobs, and I'm okay with them being different jobs. And Mr. Patel. My friend David Pierce makes an impassioned case, but my friends, he is wrong. Because if you listen to him, you would believe that CarPlay is any good at all. It's not. It just isn't. Just look at it. You don't have to believe me. You don't have to look at charts and graphs or go to my website and vote for Patelcarsoftware.com and leave

$20 donation. 95% of Americans have donated $20 or less. You don't have to do any of those things, but you should. Just look at it. Who are you going to believe? David Pierce, his slick tongue, his carpet bagging. It's not good. It hasn't substantively changed in a decade. It's just the same list of things. I, like many Americans, most Americans, all Americans, believe that the greatest joy in life is buying something expensive and then pushing all of the budget. In Pierce's communist America, there's no more, there's none of that. You just get in the car and it's the same old dumb car play that you've had for the past 10 years with nothing new on the menu.

I don't want to live in that America. I want to live in America where, God forbid, some software designer at Ford has decided to move all the climate controls around. And then you've got to figure it out, and then you've figured it out, and you've won one tiny shred of victory in your life. vote Patel I can see why you were a good lawyer you just said nothing and I'm like yeah 80% how you sound

20% what you say that's good I feel it you're dead wrong and car play is no one no one thinks car play is great it's just that it's better and I live in a world where better is enough

here here again I've spent several days with the Rivian the Rivian maps are better They're good. But the actual zooming when you drive around with the maps is so deeply confusing, because it zooms in on the map as you get closer to a turn, rendering your ability to know how, like when the turn is going to be, like to nothing.

Oh, perfect. It's good. But it's better, but it's better than CarPlay. That's all I'm saying. You can have the music player and the map on the big screen at the same time. I mean, that does sound nice. I'll give you that. No, there can be no agreeing.

No agreeing. We both hate each other. Okay, Vergecast listeners, what do you think? Did Nilai make the case better? Or did David? Let us know what you think by calling 866 Verge 1-1 or email us at Verge.com. And let us know what you think of this new format and what other topics you'd like us debate. There's a whole lot more to this conversation at theverge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, but also readtheverge.com. All right. We've got to take one more break and then we're going to get to the Vergecast hotline. 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.

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I have a problem. How do I stop all of these insane spam and political texts? In the last like two weeks, I've gotten over 60 spam texts or text begging me to donate to different political campaigns, candidates that I've never given my information to. I'm assuming they got my info because of some candidate I gave a donation to years ago. how do I get off these lists? Of course, there's just the regular spam stuff that I get, but it's completely taken over my messages app. I don't want to get a new phone number. I like my phone number. A lot of stuff's tied to it. Is there anything that I can do? I know getting on the do not call list doesn't help with political campaigns. Help me out here. Thanks. Love

the show. Okay, so at least for people in the United States, this is a huge and widespread problem. I don't know how big a deal it is in other countries. I've heard a lot about folks getting political spam on WhatsApp and other places. But I just want to talk about the U.S. for right now because this in a funny way is actually maybe more complicated in the United States than most places. And the unfortunate answer to the question is there really isn't anything you can do, at least not anything that is kind of guaranteed to work in a sweeping broad way. So there's one kind of text that is from a legitimate business about legitimate business purposes, right? Those are the ones sometimes that you'll sign up for when you get a receipt from square, right?

You'll have signed up to get text messages. And usually what those things will have is they'll say stop to unsubscribe. And typically you respond stop and it stops, right? Like that is actually a thing that these companies are legally required to do is stop when you say stop. And there are systems that some carriers have to block that stuff. Like that actually works as a system when it is legitimate. When it's not legitimate, the problem with replying stop to a mass text message is actually what you've done is you've confirmed to whatever spammer is sending that spam text that your number is real and that someone is paying attention to it. And what that essentially gives them is license to keep spamming you.

There's no technical reason that they have to stop if you say stop and they won't. So this is the risk that you're taking, right? If you get a political text, let's say, from an actual campaign run by an actual above board organization and you reply, stop, you'll stop getting it. All it does is stop that one thing. And frankly, the honest truth is your phone number and my phone number have probably been sold a million times to a million different organizations. So you're forever playing this game of whackamol. There's no just like turn off the political text button that you can press. But you can do it one by one.

And if you reply, stop over and over and over again, the numbers will go down. That's been my experience. Every time I get one that is obviously from a campaign, and usually you can Google the number, by the way, and it will tell you pretty reliably if it is a real number from a real campaign. If it is, and you reply to stop, it will go down. Again, whack a mole, but it'll work. If you get it wrong and you reply to something that looks like a political text but is actually a spammer or a scammer of some kind, which is a thing that they do, especially in moments like this,

you've just caused yourself extra problems. So really what you have to balance here is, okay, do I want to do the work of verifying every one of these numbers in order to go press the stop button, which just means texting stop, and make them go away? Or is it less work to just frankly ignore the text messages? There are also a couple of things you can do other than replying. One thing you can do is delete it and report it to your carrier, which in theory will tune their systems for detecting spam. So that might make it better for everybody, but it also is, you know, manual labor every time you get one of these from a new number. You swipe and you hit delete and report junk and it goes to Verizon and whoever your carrier is. And that slowly makes things better, but it will not immediately solve all their problems.

There's also things like Robo Killer and other apps that try to intercept some of that stuff. I found that they work-ish. Like there are a lot of things like that will make things slightly better. But there is no way to just go and say, do not send me political texts. Unfortunately, by the time you get one, that ship has probably sailed. Your number is in some database. Everybody has access to that database. Those databases get sold a million times over.

And you are forever resigned to getting a lot of politics texts. One thing I've heard from a bunch of people is that if you are getting a lot of these, using the filters, especially on iOS, that will actually filter out messages from unknown numbers, can be really handy. If you're getting like an overwhelming number of these, you can go into settings, you can filter unread messages and it'll just dump those into, it's kind of the equivalent of like the other inbox on Facebook or one of the other like LinkedIn kind of social apps that people you haven't necessarily put into your contacts or declared that you care about get foisted into that other one. I did that for a while and it turned out I missed a lot of text messages from people who

I actually cared about but didn't have their number. Your mileage may vary. So like I said, there are a lot of half measures here, but I think what I would recommend if you're trying to get this down is Google the phone numbers of ones you're getting a lot to make sure that they're legitimate, and then delete those text messages, reply, stop, and report whatever spam and junk you can to your carrier. That helps you and it helps everybody. But be careful because all it takes is a couple of incorrect responses and all of a sudden you've flagged to whoever sent that message and to whoever owns the database of those numbers and everything else that you are legit and you are paying attention. And when you do that to the wrong people, it can be a problem. The politics tax are only going to get worse. If you have a better idea about how to get rid of them, please let me know I'm all ears because I am getting just aggressively too many of them right now. And I'm deeply tired of it too.

So good luck to all of you out there with your text messages. I hope that helps a little. All right. That is it for the Vergecast today. Thanks to everybody who came on the show. Thank you for listening. Again, we want to hear everything you think about these pilots. We're trying new formats.

It's been fun to mess around and see, like, are these things we want to do on the Vergecast every once in a while? Are these entirely new shows we should launch? Let us know everything you're thinking. There's also lots more on all this stuff, our coverage of CarPlay and the automakers, our coverage of Roku and the Streaming Wars, all this stuff is all over the Verge.com. We'll put some links in the show notes, especially to the stuff that we referenced in a lot of these pilots. But just check out the website. It's a good website.

It's a shockingly newsy summer. Keep it locked on the verge.com. And as always, if you have thoughts, questions, feelings, or other streaming gadgets that you think we should make shows about, email us at Vergecast at the verge.com, or keep calling the hotline. 866, Verge 1-1. We love hearing from you. I'm on vacation. I'm going to be back in two weeks.

We're going to have lots more to do because, again, it's a real newsy summer. This show is produced by Andrew Marino, Liam James, and Will Poor. Vergecast is Verge production and part of the Vox Media podcast network. Neli and the gang will be back on Friday to talk about, I don't even know. I'm on vacation. whatever news there is, because there just keeps being news. We'll see you then. Rock and roll.