The Vergecast - Twitter blue check chaos and CarPlay squabbles

Episode Date: April 7, 2023

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the end of Twitter and the future of infotainment. Links: The color quiz Twitter tried to hide who pays for their checkmark, but life finds a way. https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1641905502043926530 Substack is getting a Twitter-like ‘Notes’ feed Elon Musk’s obsession with blue checks is a verified problem Twitter yanks the New York Times’ checkmark in verification overhaul Today in Twitter: where are the retweet labels, and why did Doge replace the bird? Spotify shuts down its Clubhouse competitor Spotify shows how the live audio boom has gone bust Everybody hates GM’s decision to kill Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for its EVs The rest of the auto industry still loves CarPlay and Android Auto GM is cutting off access to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for its future EVs Could a new PlayStation handheld be built for Remote Play? I like the idea Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming PC is no April Fools’ joke Walmart’s redesigned website looks better than Amazon Donald Trump was arrested, please like and subscribe The Home Assistant SkyConnect is a combination Zigbee and Thread dongle for better smart home control Vote for us in the People’s Voice Webby Awards for Best Technology Podcast! 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

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dropping May 14th. Tap in with us. Hello and welcome to our chest. The flagship podcast of not knowing what color Spotify's logo is. I'm your friend, Nilai. It's so hard. So hard. Alex Franz is here.

I'm not colorblind, but I think I might be. After the color quiz. Yeah. David Pierce is here. Hi. I got the first four right on our color quiz and was so like absolutely outrageously proud of myself. And then I think got the next three wrong and have not forgiven myself for it. It's not great.

So it's design week here at the verge. She's got a great package. It's super fun. We've got pieces on UI. We've got pieces on how the logout button on website works or, more importantly, doesn't work. We've got pieces on accessibility and design that are coming. That's very exciting.

But the highlight of the whole week was our color quiz, which is designed by our associate creative director, Chris Narakki, who's a genius, our engineer Graham, who is an evil mastermind. And it's just made to torture us. And all you're supposed to do is you open it, you see five shades of blue, and you got to pick the one that's the Facebook logo. And the thing that makes it evil is that as you roll over each of the shades of blue, there's an actual Facebook logo that changes. So then you just sit there arguing with yourself because every one of them looks correct. Well, the Facebook one's also like a cheat because there's like an old Facebook color on there.

So you're like, that's the one because I haven't checked Facebook in 10 years. I've been taking this quiz over and over again all week. I can't get better at it. The only one that I get consistently is Snapchat. I'm very good at Yellow. Yeah, just yellow. So the only app on my phone that Max wants to use is Snapchat, but she can't read. And it's because she's four.

That's an important detail. She's four. Don't worry, guys. So she just calls it the ghost button? Yeah. It's perfect sense. First of all, unbelievable product idea for Snapchat to sell something called a ghost. button. I don't know what it does. She'll just pick up my phone and be like, ghost button.

And it's like, and then we just do the filters. So I know what that one looks like. Yeah. Yelp? No. No. No idea what color red yelp is. And there's actually there's science in the quiz. If you haven't taken it, go on the site, do the color quiz. It will drive you bananas. And then with a sense of smugness and superiority, go make other people take it. Yes. There are people on our staff who've gotten them all right. Over 20,000 people have taken this quiz so far. I think it's up to 50,000. It's up to 50,000? A lot of people have taken this quiz. And like you can see the scores. They normalize it like around 4.5. I got six the second. The first time I did it, I got four. The second time I got six. And the two I got wrong, I was like, that can't be the color. I'm going to pick this other one. And it was the color.

So I feel like I could do eight if I just practice. C, C, C. Just keep doing it. David, how'd you do? I ended up with six out of eight. Yelp was the one that I got to and was just instantly like I'm not going to know this one. This isn't going to happen. So I just basically like closed my eyes and hammered a shade of red and that was that. The one I got wrong that I'm furious. Like I can still, you know, picture the moment when I got it wrong was Spotify. And I was down to two shades of green. And my rubric was basically like pick the second best looking one if I don't know which one it is because usually there's one that's like simple and clean and chill and like no tech company is ever going to choose that one. So you pick the, the, the,

The second chillest one, and that's usually the one. And it served me really well, except in Spotify's case where they just went like full bonkers neon. And it just is supposed to hurt your brain. Yeah. Spotify. Yeah. And lift. Go take it.

Go look at all of Design Week. It's super fun. It's great. Seri Zhang has a piece about the poop emoji in legal filings and how it's breaking database systems across our country's court system. Very good. Like, cackling when I was reading it. We've got one about shuffle.

button and then we were doing this big partnership with the computer history museum about the history of the Lisa Apple Lisa the precursor to Macintosh. It's super cool. Go watch that video to read that piece. All great. Design Week happening. Go look at it. Take the color quiz. Tell us what you got. We want to know. Well, the reason I want more people to take it is right now the audience average score is higher than the Verge team score. I feel like if we can just get more people to take it, the staff can outdo the world. I think everybody's cheating. I think everybody's like going and like they've got it on their phone. They're holding their phone up next to it. Whereas we didn't. We took it the real way. Yeah, we all had to take it on

camera in a conference room so that we could make like marketing videos for it. It's my favorite was someone on our team who I won't name said in Slack as we were all talking about it. Like, oh, I didn't do very well. But then when I got to be on a monitor with a better color gamut, I got I did better. And it was like, okay. I'm sure you did it. The controller's broke. Yeah, exactly. Must have been the lag. I don't know. All right. Go take the color quiz, look at Design Week. A very cool situation on Theverge.com this week.

Speaking of Theverge.com story that we've uncovered, this is the worst segue. This is the worst showing. Speaking of websites that start with the letter T, Twitter is kind of a disaster. Much better. Much better segue. It's not great. It's what we're doing. Twitter had a very hard weekend.

I would say in the context of Twitter. of Twitter's other weekends, actually not that hard, like equally bad. Yeah. But this is the weekend that they started turning off verification. Have you been de-verified? No. Same. There was a rumor going around that if you blocked the verified account on Twitter,

they could not de-verify you. I did it just to see if that'll happen. I was like, I got nothing to lose. But like, David, the actual mechanics of unverifying and then what they actually did, none of it seems to make any sense. No. So what turns out to be the case, there was some really good Washington Post reporting on this a few days ago, is that essentially there's just like a database of all the verified people on Twitter.

You would think this is like a thing that lives inside of the app that is somehow sort of controllable and understandable. It's really not. It's like somebody just went and like pasted a picture onto your profile and then like wrote down in a line of a spreadsheet. I pasted the picture onto their profile. Yes. It's slightly more technical than that, but not much more technical than that.

And so what that means is what seems to be happening is there is no way to sort of systematically find out and remove verification. So simultaneously, what has been going on is that the whole idea of paying $8 a month for Twitter Blue has become deeply embarrassing, which is what we've talked about on this show. And so I called it. Victory Lab for me. Yeah, you did. Like, you continue to have been right about that. So I'm so worried you're going to be right about the other thing. I am. I'm going to win that bet. Monica, Liz, get ready.

We're not talking about this now. Listen, a lot of things happened while I was on leave, but I'm back now and we can't do this anymore, Alex. It's coming. Alex thinks Elon's going to tweet a dong. Let's be clear. That's what she thinks is going to happen. It's every day we get a little closer. Anyway, Alex, victory lap one, blue check mark of shame. Go ahead. Continue, David.

Yeah. So being verified is now bad. if you've paid for Twitter Blue. And also they can't unverify people. So it's become this messy thing where they've actually changed the message on verification to they either paid for Twitter Blue or are a legacy verified account. And there's no real indication if that's sort of the end state

or if it's going to change. People have come up with Chrome extensions that will show you which is which. There's one script that replaces the verified icon with the nerd emoji if you paid for Twitter Blue. which is just wonderful. And so it's gotten to this point now where it's just a disaster, right?

Like the upside of paying for Twitter Blue is that you get more play. You get shown in the 4U page. You get supposedly upranked in replies and things like that. So it's literally just a mark of thirstiness. And so there's no reason anybody would pay for it. And so you've had people like LeBron James

say, of course I'm not going to pay for Twitter Blue, which is a terrible look for Elon Musk and Twitter. You have folks like the New York Times who have said there was a big round of media organizations talking about whether or not they're going to pay for Twitter Blue. And then Elon Musk vindictively was like, well, then we're going to take that away from them. So he took off the blue check for the New York Times, but not a bunch of the other New York Times accounts. So it's just some of which, by the way, some of which have gold checks, whatever that is.

Yeah. So here's my understanding in this disclosure alert. We run Twitter accounts. Yeah, sure. I don't know what to tell you. We're all verified on Twitter. Yeah. Disclosure, I have a phone.

It contains all the apps. I use them all. We have accounts. Mila, did you pay for Twitter Blue, be honest. This is a safe space. No, so I paid for old Twitter Blue. He paid for it. I paid for old.

Reckless Fetel paid for it. Reckless Fetle paid for it and then got banned. My doppelganger got banned for impersonating me, even though that person was Alex who's sitting right here. It's gone. It's gone. It's all gone. All right.

Truly, truly wonderful. So we run Verge accounts. Yeah. The verge has an account. We verge reviews, Verge science. We got a bunch of accounts. What we were told, and I think has become publicly disclosed by Twitter, is that if you were one of the top 10,000 followed accounts on Twitter,

you got Twitter blue. You got a checkmark for free. And you have to, like, use the API tools. And then you could, like, have five affiliated accounts. But then if you weren't one of those and he paid for it, the affiliated accounts got, like, gold check marks. And then, like, icons. next to them.

Too much. Very unclear, like, how it actually works. So the Times, some of their accounts have gold checkmarks, which means they're affiliated with the New York Times. But the New York Times does not have a checkmark because Elon's mad at it then. I don't know, man. Like, all that's crazy. So we, the verge accounts are affiliated.

They're in it something, something, something. API usage rules, something. Who knows? It will change tomorrow. Our poor, like, audience director, Rubin is just like beside him. all every day. Softly weeping. What's going on?

And then the other piece of the puzzle, as far as I understand it, is like he's just adding labels to things like NPR saying, your state affiliated media. Yeah. And you just get, there's just a, there's a conference room at Twitter headquarters that's been stripped of furniture because he sold it all on eBay. And he's just sitting on the floor, like adding and removing labels from people's Twitter's account. There's an air mattress in the corner.

He has added beds. Yeah, there's beds. Like, people are living there. And he's like, I don't know, make it the Doge icon. It's actually good. Like, there's a part of it that I love. Yeah. Which is what if you were allowed to screw the major social network?

It's like, yeah, I would just do whatever I want it. And he did. I mean, it is sort of fun to imagine, like, what he would do differently if he were trying to kill it as fast as possible. Like, would any of his moves change? This all seems so destructive. The thing is, like, the Twitter blue stuff is, is silly and funny and whatever. And, like, the changing the Twitter icon to the Doge icon is like, whatever. Ultimately, I have no feelings about that.

It's, it's sort of hilarious and doesn't really matter at all. But, like, Twitter blue is the overwhelming favorite to be the future of Twitter if Twitter has a future. Like, its ad business has tanked. Its usership is going down. Like Elon Musk has said over and over, he has, like, big weird banking ideas that he won't let go of. But, like, fundamentally, the way Twitter is going to survive, if it's going to survive, is to get a lot of people to pay for Twitter Blue. And basically all that has happened so far is paying for Twitter Blue has gotten

deeply embarrassing and no one who has any actual, like, reputation to protect will do it. Like there was somebody who was tweeting the other day. Like, imagine if you had a platform. Imagine what it would cost to get LeBron James to provide content for you. And imagine if by some crazy miracle you had done that for free. Imagine then what would happen if you just systematically drove him away. Yeah, for $96 a year. It was a very good tweet.

I don't remember who it was. It was very good tweet. We'll find it and put it in the show notes because it's a good tweet. That is the part to me. And there are arguments that I've seen from people I respect for paying, right? If you run a small publication and you are paying and you get boosted in for you, that might work for you. I've seen arguments from advertisers right now of small companies where like, this is the most efficient advertising we can buy because no one else is.

here. Yeah, for eight bucks a month. It's worth a show. And the MyPillow guy. Yeah. No, not even like, not just Twitter blue, like actually buying Twitter ads right now. Oh, interesting. Because they're so cheap. Because there's no, it's, it's a you and the My Pillow guy. Like, it's what you're doing. And so you can just buy a reach on Twitter as long as it exists. So there, there's a dynamic there that's happening. But the more important thing that's happening, and we don't have to like talk about Mastodon because, who knows, but the more important thing that's happening is anecdotally, a lot of people I know are like, my engagement on Twitter has plummeted.

Yep. The audiences aren't real. It's all just a bunch of people yelling about Elon all the time. Even there was the, you know, the Trump indictment this week. Yeah. Like, there was a time when not being on Twitter during that day would have felt like a huge miss. Like all the actions unfolding on Twitter.

And I was like, I just opened cable news. Like I, I'm, ooh. This is weird. Yeah. What a weird reaction to this day is like, I'm going to watch cable news because Twitter isn't any good. Yeah. It was not, it's not worth it anymore. It's like just kind of weirdos being angry about, I say that as somebody who's still on Twitter.

I'm one of those weirdos. I count myself as one of those weirdos. But yeah, it's just people being vaguely angry about whatever's happening that day. And it like boils, Twitter's boiled down to like the most obnoxious elements of Twitter previously. Yeah. with no real value added. And then an Elon Musk tweet in every other slot on your timeline because he demanded it. I actually don't ever see him on mine.

I don't know why. How is that possible? Maybe he blocked me. Maybe I blocked him. I don't know. A very funny thing that happened this week is that Elon is using the 4U tab as well. Yeah. So he's just replying to ancient tweets.

So he just replied to an ancient tweet from our own James Vincent about Bard and Bing siding each other. Yeah. And he just hit it with a lull. So like James woke up to an army of bots that follow Elon around the internet repeating whatever he said replying to a tweet from two weeks ago.

Like a perfect encapsulation of the Twitter moment. Do you think Elon's ever going to realize that so many of his followers that he thinks love him and adore him are bots? Like we knew he's always had an issue with bots, but do you think he realizes that like what he bought was a giant bot network? Oh, he definitely knows that he bought.

He tried to not buy it because of the bot networks, if you will recall. That's true. And now he's like, wait, they're the only, they're what I got. I don't want to, a big theme of the podcast today for the audience is the host assigning themselves stories that we've talked about and not yet published. So David, I don't want to get too much into what comes next in Massadon, but you and I have talked a lot about activity pub. We have. And you have promised me a story next week on this so we can follow this up.

But there's no big competitor in Twitter yet. Right. Like every other social network is like, what if we were TikTok instead? Yeah, that is kind of happening. And I think it looks increasingly unlikely that Mastodon is going to be that thing. Like Mastodon's growing really fast. It's doing really well. I think anyone paying attention would say that Mastodon is a success story, right?

But it is like several orders of magnitude smaller than Twitter. And it's even having its own funny issues now because Mastodon set itself up as such an aggressive counter to Twitter that now, like, if you're on Mastodon, you're obligated to call Twitter the bird site. You can't even say Twitter. You just say the bird site. And if you, if you acknowledge being on Macedon and on Twitter, it's like you've violated the spirit of Macedon and thus everyone will yell at you. Like it's really become a thing that if you are a person who uses Macedon and Twitter, you are like unwelcome on Macedon. And in a really funny way, that is a huge problem for Macedon because it is supposed to be the place that is like better than

Twitter. And instead it's just people yelling about Twitter, which is also what Twitter is. Like, we've accomplished nothing here. And so I think we're in a place now where I keep talking to people who are really excited about like the next phase of things, right? And I think activity pub in this whole idea of a decentralized internet and social ecosystem that doesn't rely on one platform and one person because we've seen what happens now, right? Like we all used to talk about, you know, what would happen if Mark Zuckerberg stopped being the CEO of Facebook and someone with less good intentions came in?

That all seems like hilariously naive. now in retrospect. But like, we used to have those conversations. And then it was like, what if a maniac buys Twitter and does insane stuff with it every single day? Like, we know now, right? And so there's this big push towards an internet and a social world that is immune to those things. But I think there was a brief moment where it was like maybe Mastodon is ready to take all of this stuff in. And for a big variety of reasons, including like discovery and identity and its own like toxicity, it's just not there. But I keep talking to people who are absolutely. not put off and are like fast forward 12 months from now and we're going to have really exciting answers to these questions.

Sure. So there's a difference there between Mastodon. And we just had Eugent Roshko, the CEO of Mastodon, the protocol on Decoder. So Mastodon, there's Mastodon the company. Yeah. There's Mastodon the protocol. Okay. There's Mastodon that social website.

These are all different things. It's like Apple TV. Yeah. There's Mastodon plots. Max. They're all different things. Yeah. David,

when you say like you can't talk about Twitter or Massadon, do you mean on mastodon dot social? Because there's like 9,000 different servers. Yes. Well, and like welcome to the problem, right? It's like on Mastodon, where do you go? Do you go to a server that is just like run by a dude with a server in his house? Like a lot of people do.

Do you go to Mastodon.com social, which is the one that is officially. run by Massadon the company, but is so overloaded with people that it crashes all the time and they actually don't allow signups often. Do you just pick one and then move later? Like, these are questions you don't have to answer when it's go to Twitter and pick a username. And the like workflow for like, I want to go to this new internet. Where do I go? And like Casey Newton keeps making this point, which is like people don't want to administer their own servers. And we're kind of in a phase where doing this is not, you don't have to administer your own server, but you have to like know what it means to administer a server in order to use Massadon.

And that's too much work. And so we're we're in this interim phase where like activity pub is a is a protocol by which a lot of different tools can come up that you will use the same follower graph, the same content and build lots of different experiences. Right. It was like, what if you could use your Twitter account to post Instagram photos? It's like, that's the future. That's where we're headed. That's what everybody believes in. None of that is built yet.

And the problem with Mastodon is that it just requires two steps too much work. And so the people who are mad enough at Twitter to leave are already there. And they're mad at the people who aren't mad enough at Twitter to leave. And so it just becomes this sort of self-perpetuating thing that like until it gets easier, people are just going to stay where it's easy. And overwhelmingly, that's still Twitter. Like, it's hard to leave a thing even when it sucks. But it's probably,

Like, Mastodon is not going to be the thing, right? I don't know. What comes next? So there's a universe of competitors. Right. So Mastodon is the decentralized one. It is built on this protocol called activity pub. Right.

That I will not shut up about. Yes. Like, I've been running around the halls of this company, I mean like, Activity Pub. I love it. It's kick ass. Making David write a story about it. There's just something there.

Like, if you, and you just look at the universe of people who are building on it, meta is building some sort of Twitter competitor that is built on activity pub. Flipboard is all right. Tumblr. Tiber. Yep. We had Matt Mullenweg on decoder. He said Tumblr and WordPress are going to support activity pub, which is kind of wild to think about Tumblr, like

being a decentralized social network that can interact with Mass. That's weird, right? Mozilla is going to do something with it. Like, you just see these companies, these like OG web companies and people be like, all right, we can tear the wall of gardens down using this new protocol. And we'll talk about it

more after David's story comes out next week. So I don't get the whole thing away. That's just cool. Then there's like post.com news, which is a Twitter competitor that is totally closed and getting Kare Swisher's on the board. They have a great proposition, which is that if you sign up for it, you use it, you see a New York Times article that you like. They've built microtransactions into the app to let you slide through their paywall.

Okay. That's cool. Yeah, that's cool. Like that's a thing Twitter should have built ages ago and never could get done. They're starting with that. Then there's a thing called spoutable, which I haven't used. I don't know spoutable. seem, but people keep asking me about it. You know, in the way that,

like, it's that moment. It's like, a evolutionary explosion, like Cambrian explosion, where people will just send me emails. It's like, well,

the Virgin Gage is spoutable. And I'm like, I don't know what that is. Are you a cop? But like a lot of sports people are on it. And you just see like, okay, there's a bunch of new networks starting.

Are you looking at it? I'm trying to, but you have to create an account. See? Never mind. It bounced right out. I'm done. I just,

I just think it's really interesting to see this many new competitors because it's obvious that the thing is falling apart. Yeah. Yes. That's the best part of this. And they, and the doge. Everybody, like, overwhelmingly in the course of reporting this story, I have asked people, like, why do you think this is the moment?

Because people have been working on this idea of, like, distributed open social for 25 years. Like, this is not a new idea. There are then a million attempts of it. Like, remember Jabber back in the day when you could put all of your IM clients into one app? Like, that's this. That's the same thing. You just talk to all your friends. It doesn't matter where they all.

are. Like, that is functionally the exact same idea. And we ran away from that because Google talk got really big and Google said, well, we don't need to deal with XMPP. And so they stopped supporting it and it all fell apart. And that is just what happens. Burge cast. Yeah. That's just what happens. And so I keep asking people like, why do you think this is the moment? Why is there so much excitement? And almost every single person, I can't think of one person I've talked to for the story who hasn't said because of Elon. Because Elon Musk showed up and made abundantly clear to a lot of people how bad this can go and how fast and how ugly it is to have something that you've invested this much time and energy into fall apart like this. There are so many people and I'm one of them who have

stories about making friends on Twitter and like we all, you know, the real Twitter is the friends we made along the way. It's a really important place to a lot of people and it's just crumbling in a way that I think is really painful. And so the pitch is now like what if that can't happen anymore? And I think it's it's sinking in for people in a way it never has before. It's just that the right product for it doesn't really seem to have appeared yet. Yeah. If you're listening to this podcast, you are almost certainly the sort of person that can deal with your own server. Just to guess I'm making.

It's not that hard. You've probably got an ass. You probably have a Plex server that you don't want to tell the authorities about. It's okay. I support you. You're using it to distribute Linux. Yeah. I know what you're doing.

It's the best way to use it. Only Linux. It's all I share on my own. open source, open source textbooks and Linux on Alex's flex server. Look, you're probably the sort of person

can figure this stuff out. You should start a Mastod account just for the experience of doing it because it's difficult. And then you should start a PixelFed account. PixelFed is the activity pub Instagram. Same deal, you got to find a server all that,

blah, blah, and then you should see posting from Twitter to Instagram is a thing you can do with those services, right? From Mastodon to Pixel Fed, from Pixel Fed to Massad. You can make a pixel Fed post. from your Mastodon account. Like that is,

that's the magic, right? Yeah. And there's just something that, like, once you do it, you're like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. And I know, like, usually we spend this entire show talking about AI, and that's where all the hype is. But I think the thing that actually changes the nature of the social internet is somewhere

in here. And then I promise we'll have a story about next week. I'll actually talk with the actual story with the actual reporting. But like, I just like watching this week in particular with Twitter, where like the legacy thing happened, the Trump stuff having no impact. on Twitter, like, cable news for the last decade has been people with great haircuts reading

tweets. And it was beautiful. Was it? I loved it. It might have destroyed democracy. Just a little. Just a little. And to watch it this week and be like, oh, there's no, there's literally no loop here.

Yeah. It's like, oh, the thing is over. The vibrancy of the thing is over. I don't know when Aaron Rogers is going to the jets. I don't know if it's going to happen. But there is, there have been years of my life where I have one Twitter list that's just all the Packers beat. reporters and I used to check it a thousand times today. And now I don't. That's crazy to me.

That's actually a really good example of like, where are those people going to go? Like, are we going to lose that? Should we lose that? Are we, does everybody go to mass? Like, I don't know. Casey on platformer wrote a good thing about this like why journalists can't quit Twitter. And like, as a journalist who quit Twitter, I'm here to tell you like it is possible. It's actually not nearly as hard as anyone thinks. But there is just something to like as long as anyone is there, people are going to stay. Right. And so I think. it's going to be really interesting to see what it takes. And I assume it's like some great product and some huge news event, kind of in tandem that might be that poll.

But I don't know. My sense is Twitter can be broken for a long time and we're going to keep having to talk about it because it's just really hard to leave. So Ben Smith, who is the editor-in-chief at BuzzFeed News and left to found, co-found semifor, the new news site. He's got a book out called Traffic, which is not out yet, but it's going on May. he's coming on the decoder. Traffic is about Gawker versus BuzzFeed in like the early days of the internet. And he's got, it's great,

highly recommended when it comes out. But he's got a theory in there that new, new sites, new properties come into form, their opportunities that come into form during election years. Ooh, I like that. So he's like, BuzzFeed News was like rushed out

for an election. I actually remember when I was at Vox.com we pushed it to hit the election. Like, that's the moment. Like those cycles, there's lots of news, Lots of whatever. This is like, and if you just kind of look at the history of the media, this is.

Yeah. Every four years for some reason, a new publication is. Because they line up with elections. Because there's just like, there's two teams and they hate each other. And you get them to talk shit about it. It's just very easy. Yeah. Right.

And I just wonder if this upcoming election cycle is when you see a mass of like people moving to new kind of media. So like it's just on my mind that there's a thing happening. The one thing I want to point out before I move on and talk about Spotify, completely not knowing what it's doing is substack put out notes this week, which is basically they added a Twitter feed to Substack in the app. It looks exactly like our quick posts on our site. And like the reasoning is exactly the same.

Like sometimes you don't want to write a whole thing. And I'm like, yeah. Yeah. Yeah, we made that. But this is the next move, right? It's to if you talk to any substackers, their biggest audience funnel was on Twitter. Like they monetize their Twitter audience with Substack. And if that goes away, I'm not sure where the next generation of substackers finds audience.

Yeah, because they can't build it from like TikTok or Instagram. The idea of making a TikTok video that's like sign up for my newsletter is so bonkers. Can you imagine Casey just like dancing for dollars on TikTok? Just a little shuffle. So there's just a yawning need for a platform that's like Twitter, a text-based real-time news platform. And someone's going to fill it. And I think that's actually really exciting. In the chaos of Twitter itself is like regardless of the chaos of Twitter itself.

But it's exciting to see this much activity in that space. Yeah. Because there just hasn't been for a long time. But it's not going to be Mastodon. I'm just going to say it now. That's my third prognostication. So you got... I got everybody's going to think the blue check marks dumb.

Elon's going to tweet his dong. And Mastodon is not going to be the true success. What if he tweets his dong on Mastodon? I'll pay you $20 because I'll just be like, oh, my God. I feel strongly that we should take a break. I quit the podcast. Goodbye. We're going to be right back.

We've got to talk about Spotify. We've got to talk about what GM's doing in car play. We'll be right back. Support for the show comes from Framer. Framer is an enterprise-grade, no-code website builder, used by teams at companies like Perplexity and Muro to move faster. With real-time collaboration and a robust CMS, with everything you need for great SEO,

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Welcome back to the Vergecast, where we don't make bets about dogs. No more. It's done moratorium on that. It's good. It's a family show. Find your children. Don't explain what's going on. We got to talk about Spotify.

Yeah. So in the pandemic, Spotify decided that it was all in on podcast. And then it was all in on live audio. Right. And then it is not. It's done. It's done with both of those. So Spotify bought this thing called, what was it, Green Room, David?

It renamed it Green Room. The app before it was bought by Spotify, it was called Locker Room, because it was specifically about, like, live talk about sports. It was like their main thing. And then they renamed a Green Room, and they were going to compete with Clubhouse. Which is itself, by the way, just a hilarious statement. They were going to compete with Clubhouse. is now with hindsight a very funny thing to say.

It turns out you could compete with Clubhouse. And the thing that competed with a clubhouse was leaving your house. It was outdoors. Like any other room with people in it competed with Clubhouse. Touch grass. Look, in the depths of the pandemic, I swear to God, the tech industry was like, all right, we've got them. Brains and vats. They're never leaving the house again.

Software will eat not only the world, but the human population. And like, I get it. We had a million version in this conversation, like what trends are here to stay and what trends are going to go back? And most everybody bet wrong. And now all these companies are having layoffs. But the reason I want to talk about Spotify in particular is their big bet on podcasts is shaky. Yeah. And then this big bet on live audio where you would just like open Spotify at the end of night and talk.

Dudes would be talking. What is next for this company? Have they heard of music? Have they heard of like, I think everybody just needs to go look at Apple Music Classical and do that. Like if Spotify did that and gave you more access to metadata and let you search and browse that way, that would be better than to spend all the money on locker room and rename it Green Room, which I presume is just Broadway show tunes. So I was reading the comments of your Apple Music classical piece, which was great. I went to read it. And a lot of people in the comments are like, this is Roon.

Oh, really? And so if you don't know Roon is, Roon is like a wild idea. It is a subscription-based music player that has not music in it. So you got to plug it into a title account or a lot of people use this thing called Quobas. Is this the one that like you use for your smart home? Yeah, like people integrate with smart homes, but it's a music player. Right. So you like plug it in a title or if you have a big local library on your Linux distribution

plus server, it'll like read it all. It'll figure out all the metadata. It'll show you, like, lots of links. It'll reorganize the metadata. So you're like, okay, this guitar player in this song played on this song. Yeah. And like, the thing people say is like, this is just a discovery interface. Like, I'm just like falling down the rabbit hole of music in a way that like.

But you don't have Kazah to like back up the falling down. Right. You got to pay for, you got to pay. You got to source your music somewhere. Yeah. Yeah. You know, I spent like a significant part of my legal career defending kids who used Kazan.

Thank you. They all lost. Oh, no. Just like, you know, these are not winnable cases. Yeah. And that's why Kazai is a hundred billion dollar company. They did it everybody. No, but the thing about that is I, what I was going to say is what Spotify needs to do is stop thinking about itself as the audio company.

Like that's what they've been saying over and over, right? They're not a music thing. They're about audio. And what it actually seems like needs to happen and where there is much more room for doing interesting stuff is to go all in on music. Like Spotify should take the fact. that every musician has a link tree in their social bios as like a direct threat to Spotify. And like if you want to buy merch, that should be Spotify. If you want to buy concert tickets, that should be Spotify.

Like there is no money to be made in licensing music to stream on a platform. There's a hell of a lot of money to be made in all of the other ways that artists make money. And that all sucks now. Like everybody's mad at Ticketmaster thanks to Taylor Swift. Buying stuff on the internet is a disaster. Everybody's merch stores are ridiculous. Like if I'm Spotify, I'm chasing the entire music industry much more than I'm chasing the audio industry at this point. Yeah.

But what Spotify wants you to do is pay them $15 or $20 a month and then keep all the money. And the thing you're describing is like, what if other people made money? Right. Like when you listen to music on Spotify, some complicated set of algorithms assigns four cents to every artist that you listen to per street. whatever, and they've got to give a huge chunk of your subscription dollar away when you listen to podcasts, that is not true. Yeah. Because they've already bought and ingested them.

Well, they have like a weird relationship with the music industry, right? Because of the fact that, you know, they only get four cents for every song. But the music industry also owns a huge chunk of Spotify. Yeah. So they, so theoretically, they could just go in and be like, okay, you're the new ticket master. Let's go. Yeah, I mean, maybe. Ticketmaster also owns all the venues.

This is a very complicated thing to unwind. I'm just saying if you look at Spotify's arc, right, right? They desperately tried to keep more of your dollars by pointing you at audio that they already owned they owned outright so they didn't have to pay further royalties on or that other users are making for free and things like what at Spotify Clubhouse Jr. or whatever it was called green room. Green room. Spotify Clubhouse Junior is really different. We don't talk about that here. I'm just saying like I think Spotify is not in just in a shakier zone.

Yeah. been any of the other big tech companies. Like we talk about the other streamer. Like we'll end up talking about Disney and it's like war with the state of Florida. And it's reorg and Netflix and all this other stuff. And they've all had cuts and they've like stopped spending money. Spotify is a streaming service. Its competitors are Apple and Amazon, which heavily subsidized their services.

And then they're a title. We forget about title. Deer Sweet title, which is part of Block, which has like a research report. It's like Block is built on fraud. Very good. Not great. So yeah, it's just a weird, a weird moment for that company in particular. Yeah.

And it, the same ways with Twitter, right? It's the foundation of like an entire ecosystem. And it's like, what if that one? What if this domino falls? Yeah. I mean, the thing for Spotify, though, is I think because the music industry is so invested in it, it, they just, they can't let it fall, right? Like you let it fall and it's just Apple, Amazon, and YouTube own the music business.

And that for the music business is like an abject disaster. So I would, I, I have high, or like, Dizer. Like, what if Dizer just wins? Go get it, Dizer. Like, I'm in on that plan. Fall Rune. We should talk. So this brings me to CarPlay.

Oh, yeah. Okay. Everybody's favorite Dezer consumption location. Only way I listen to Zezer. Well, it's interesting. Like, so GM had an announcement this week. Very odd announcement. They released a fact sheet.

And then I think only Reuters, like, Reddit. You know, and like, Reuters had that. It's like GM walks away from Carplay. And we saw that headline and we were, no, that's dumb. And then we acquired the fact sheet, which we published so people could actually see this was sourced. Because it is such a bonkers thing to say that we didn't think people would believe our headline. So we like put the PDF in the story. They're walking away from carplane Android Auto in just the EVs.

And their reasoning is that the cars are computers now and that they want to do things like, have you used the built-in nav so that when you're on your way to a charging station, the battery's pre-conditioned so you can charge faster. Yeah, that sounds great. I wish they thought of that 20 years ago. Like, welcome to the party, GM. I think this is the beginning. I think every automaker is going to start to do things like this in five years.

That's the public reasoning, right? And it's like that reading the story, it was like, that's the one thing they could think to say that sounded like a feature. And then everything else is just, we don't make any money from carplay. And we think there's a lot of money to be made in not carplay, right? Like, is there any other way to read this than that? Yeah, Patrick George did a great piece for the site that was just that. He went and spoke to a lot of people and they're like, oh, yeah, they just want to make money.

And so they're going to kill it so that they can like. Yeah, the future of cars is no steering wheels and you're shopping all day in the car. Yeah. Or looking at ads while you like stream movies or whatever. Just like minority report. I have been to enough CES future of car panels where they're like soon. We will reclaim the time you spend commuting. And it's like, oh, awesome.

For what? For literature? For art? And like for advertising. an e-conference. It's like, oh, that's not what I thought. We get 30%. To improve the human condition, and it's like, no, no, no, no, shopping.

Candy crush. Candy crush. So, yes, I think that's what GM wants to do. I do think there's some valid stuff in there, right? If you make a self-driving car and you don't control the navigation system, you almost certainly have a problem. Are you saying this because you hate car play and you want to support big? Big car.

Yes, I love big car. Big car. Big car is my favorite. You know, big car. Who doesn't love a big car? Yeah. My parents, by the way, refer to our cars as small, medium and big. That's my mom's like, can we borrow your medium car?

It's a real thing that happens. I love that so much. It's very good. No, I think car play is bad. Like, just to be clear, this is my opinion. Carplay is bad. It is superior to have the radio on the bad infotainment screen. and then mount your phone using a magsafe charger.

We'll put an affiliate link in the show notes. This is my white whale. It's the world's best magsafe charger. If you make a new one that's about like 5% better than what, I will buy it in a heartbeat. I will spend $70 to $7.00 new magsafe charger. I'm imagining like, you know, the people have like McDonald's boxes all over their cars. That's just you with magsafe chargers.

You like can't get in the passenger seat because there's 200 magsafe chargers. It's a perfect impulse by gadget. I swear to God. Because you can always make it 5%. better. The magnets click a little harder. The charging's a little faster. The mounts a little smarter. And you put them out. My phone is almost as big as the infotainment screen in my car. What year is your car? The Raptors of 2020. Okay. And that's a tiny little screen. That's before the new big screen. Okay. So that one is like, whatever. Yeah. That's sync three.

I've sworn on blood oath that I will not buy another Ford until they go to the Android-based system. I'm like, I can't have more sync in my life. It's real bad. It's not allowed. This is the point, right? Like car play is bad, except that it's so much better than everything that anyone else. It's not better. It is way better. So I've got a Mazda CX5, and I know every single time I forget to plug my phone in because they'll be like, I'm just going to call someone. And this robot voice is like, who do you want to call? I'm like, what the hell are you?

Yeah, I don't know what you're doing there. You can make it. I'm just saying, so they're all small screens, except for our new Jeep, which is an Android computer and is basically like a Tomogachi. I have to go into the garage every night and be like, are you okay? Petting the car. And we like this better than car play. Just to be clear, this is an improvement on just plugging your phone in and everything works fine. Consumer satisfaction with car infotainment systems has been going steadily down since wireless carplay was introduced because it's so unreliable. That's what Monica was talking about this when we were having a huge argument and I was telling

you you were both wrong for hating car play because she had it wireless and it kept like disconnecting and she'd be like driving and it'd be like, where are we going? And she'd be be like, where? You should know. Right. And so integrated is better than weird fragmented. I'm just telling you it is superior to mount your phone in the car using a, I should just make a wireless magsafe charger at this point. It's superior to mount your phone, put the map on there and then do your audio because you can deal with it. You can get through it. We just need a little slot and you just pop your phone in. Yeah. And it just. Projections. Yeah. And just done. Anyhow, the reason I'm zooming at, car play is horrible and I'm correct. And I don't know. No. No. Wrong. It's not good. The only thing you want to do with it is.

Show your maps. Are you so excited about having the one app for music that exists? Like, they're literally what the end of this is. No, because I'm going to stick my phone on the dash, and it's going to start charging through the power of magnetism. It's going to be awesome every time. You can't stop me. You're arguing for more dongles.

Steve Chevy, what are you going to do my house? Arrest me? He's getting in his little car. He's getting in his small car. Because I use the blinding power of magnets to overcome your stupid infotainment. No. Do whatever I want. You can't see.

Let me just make sure I understand. So what you're arguing is I would like to get in my car. I would like to attach my phone to an incredibly powerful magnet. And then I would like to plug my phone in to some thing. No. It's just the magnet is there. Are you listening to music out of the speakers of your phone? No, with Bluetooth's into the car.

James is going to still let you Bluetooth into the car. Okay. So you're playing your music over Bluetooth. Your steering wheel control. to control the music player and you got a map on the phone and you're not stuck in some weird projection system

and you've got two screens. What Vergecast listener does not want two screens going instead of one? What if I had one small good screen and one big bad screen? Like what a cool future that is? The Mercedes experience.

I don't know, man. I'm just saying car play's not great and Apple's dream that it would colonize all of the screens in your car is hitting reality. Remember last year at WWC where they're like, here's the future of CarPlay.

Yes. And they showed all the logos and all the car companies like, uh. They were like, n'uh. What are you doing? It's about to be a year later. No carmakers have announced any plans to support that version of CarPlay. True. And GM's like, actually, we're not going to support CarPlay at all.

Because we need to take the screen back because this is where people will shop in the future. By giving it to Google. Yeah. Like, they're just going to make something crappy. Like all of the other systems, you're still using your phone when you use your very powerful magnet, because the system behind your phone is garbage. They're all garbage. And CarPlay's just a little better. And I really... That's not. But the GM's not going to do better. They did Q. Like, your car infotainment in the best case scenario now is like a four-year-old Android

tablet. Like, congratulations on your four-year-old Android tablet. So the argument that I'll give, I don't own a Tesla, but every Tesla owner has already experienced his life, right? Where like, There's no carplay integration. They've asked for it. But Tesla's like, this is the future. We want to control your experience in the car. We're going to put games on here. We're going to do over-the-year updates every day.

Every automaker thinks that's their future, too. Whether or not they can execute at the level the Tesla is executed remains to be seen. Yeah. I think it makes sense. They all want to do this. They're doing the exact same thing TV makers did where they're all like, we're going to own the home and we're going to put their smart TV in. And most of them have been like, this kind of sucks. Yeah.

Go buy it. I'm just saying the outrage about GM walking me from CarPlay. If you just look at CarPlay itself, it's kind of bad. I love it. But that's the thing. Like the fact that CarPlay, and there have been all these stats that say like 80% of people won't buy a car without CarPlay. It's not because CarPlay is magical software. It's because everything else is shit.

Like the thing about Tesla is like Tesla has people who make good software and has a decent reputation for making good software. And a lot of Tesla people still want CarPlay. but at least this stuff broadly works, right? Like, it's pretty good software. There is nothing in the history of the auto industry to suggest that they know how to make good software. They didn't know how to make good simple software. Like, when all the software had to do was change the radio station, it was horrible. And now I'm supposed to assume that these companies are just going to turn around and figure out how to make it.

Like, car play and Android Auto worked because they were so bad at making software in cars. So they just came and said, well, we're just going to show up and go over the top. And, like, what how, is there any evidence that that has changed? Isn't what, one of the carmakers is doing like a skeuomorphic one, right? Didn't they all invest in like epic? No, yeah, no, they all run Unreal Engine. So the new, the new Mustang, which is still sync. Why?

Yeah. But like all the graphics in it are Unreal Engine. There's like, Rivians or Unreal Engine? It's such high res sync. Yeah. It's so high res. I mean, it looks beautiful. And you're like, is this the new Android system that you announced like over 18?

And they're like, no, it's not, sir. It's garbage. What it is. Hot, hot garbage. Look, Q&X will never go away. It's going to be in Ford's forever. They did announce an Android-based system. It's supposed to come out.

No one knows when it's coming out. But it runs Unreal Engine, and that's all the graphics. Rivians run Unreal Engine. There's tons of that going on in the auto space because they know that when they move to EV drive trains, the actual difference in driving a car will be nil. Like, they cannot make it very, all the cars are going to kind of be the same.

Yeah. Is that why they're all? making such futuristic looking designs to like because they have to loudly exclaim this is a new kind of car or else no one will notice yeah and put the little hymmy speaker in so it sounds like a himmy yeah that's my hymny impression uh that's not that's the wrong sound that's a Honda impression uh you should the frat zonic speaker and the new uh charger the evy charger or whatever is no evy challenger yeah uh it it's like rumbles yeah it's like rumbles yeah it's like a I can't get that low.

Like my voice doesn't go that low. Anyhow, they're doing it because this is their opportunity to break from history. And they know they're like the EV buyer wants to feel special. Evis are more expensive and they have to be more expensive because the margins are lower on these cars because they're invented. They're full of new

technology that hasn't proven out. And then they all think we're all going to not drive and shop in the car. Like, I promise you every auto CEO is like, I can't wait for people to start shopping in their cars. On our screens where we take 30 percent. And like the CEO of BMW is like, and soon you'll subscribe to your heated seats. And they're. And people hate all of that. Yeah. No one likes it. Like Apple has the benefit of being first

movers and the I'm going to bake a big technological walled garden. And all the car companies are now like 30 years later saying we're going to do it too. And everybody's like, no, that sucks. Yeah. Yeah. We're just heading back to the early days of cell phones where everybody had their own operating system with their own app store, with their own brand new ideas about how to do absolutely everything. The weird thing that's different here is they're all picking Android. Because it's easy to build on. Well, but it's weird.

So like the GM system is Google built in. So it's not 100% clear if the thing is Android. Yeah. Like the operating system is Android. But the navigation is Google Maps. Is it going to have like Play Store in it? Ooh. Yeah.

Like is it Android like Huawei is Android or is it Android like? So my Jeep is Android is Android. Android, like Huawei is Android. Yeah. And boy, does it show. Boy, is that obvious. And that's bad. That's like not a place to go.

Like, they're very proud of it. Getting three guys who just graduated from college to build your entire car infotainment system seems like a bad idea. And that's kind of the sense of what I get from all of these attempts. Right. They've all forked Android in some way. Or they're using Q&X and Google is there to be their mapping provider. Yeah. Or there's Android automotive.

which is Google is a whole OS of your car, which is like what Polestar uses. But just in response to David, they're all picking Google services. So Google is colonizing more of the auto industry, whereas Apple is like, what if we do all the screens for you? Same with TVs.

They did the same thing, right? None of the TV makers wanted to, they all wanted to build their own TV stuff. And then one day they said, oh, Android does it good enough. And then we can still slap all our logos on everything and pop it out. Yeah.

That's what they've done. So Android's just doing that again. for a new market. Yeah, it's like, it's hard to see consumers don't change their cars enough. Right. So it's like that market is just moving way, way, way, way slower.

Yeah, because it's like every, what, 10 years? I don't know. Yeah. I just got this car. Who know? I have it forever. Have you gotten a MagSafe mat for you? No, because I plug in with the lightning

and then I throw it in my, my... I'm just going to get, I've got like a drawer full of them. I'm just like, just bring me one. Bring me your second best one. You can keep your best one, but bring me like your second. Yeah, that I'm giving you my... best one. It's completely off the table. Absolutely not. You open that door just to suggest that I give me the best one.

I just like, how are you going to convince me otherwise? I really need to feel that snap. It's very good. Oh my God. A good magsafe click. It's very good. Anyhow. Yeah. This is, I'm telling you by the, at WWDC this year, Apple will say nothing about CarPlay. This is my prediction. Okay. Because it has gone nowhere. It's all, it's all going to be headset talk anyway. And then this time next year, two more automakers will have dropped phone projection. That's my other prediction. I can see it. I'm glad I bought a car already.

My bets are better than you. All right, we got to take a break and we got a little bit of a lightning around. There's a lot going on in this lightning round. 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.

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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 Mongo 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. What? I'm super right.

I just realized at some point on the Virgcast, we're going to do an entire segment about Nelai's favorite MagSafe chargers. And I could not be more excited about it. Right now I'm on Belkin. I've got a Moffy one in the truck. No, I don't. Don't. I have a moment one in the truck.

I want to just hear the click. I want you to do a whole segment where you just click them all against the microphone. So we can really hear it for you. Andrew, a producer, just instantly greenlit that segment. Absolutely guaranteed. So the truck is weird because there's not a cigarette port or power port close enough to it. It's just a weird situation. So I can use the Moment ones, which aren't actually charters.

And Moment use a stronger. magnets. Ooh. And they're very proud of their stronger magnets, which are not MagSafe approved. So if you get in a car accident, your phone probably isn't twirling around. All the metal in your car is just going to attach to that. That's very good. Welcome to the third segment of the Virchcast, where we just continue the previous segment

about how cool magnets are. Magsave is legitimately my favorite feature on the phone. Is that your lightning? Have you done the thing where you hang the puck in your bathroom yet next to your mirror? No. You got to get a magsafel. They're like five bucks in Amazon. Like I live in a small apartment.

Whatever. Just hang the puck on the mirror. And then when you're like brushing your teeth, you can like have YouTube TV open. It's great. I'm all right. All right. It's like it's the best thing you can do. I'll believe you.

All right. I believe you in my heart. I'm never going to do it by the most person. There's a five year old in their house. Like this is my me time, baby. Like just like rocking and rolling. Close the door. Watching TV in the bathroom.

All right. Lightning round. David, you start. Sure. So I had two. We'll do, they're both fairly quick. The first one is that Walmart rolled out a big redesign of its website because Walmart, which I have been proclaiming as a secret like sneaky tech giant and nobody realizes it, is now a drastically better looking website than Amazon.com, which a very funny thing that happened this week was when this news came out. Everybody sort of all at once

had this moment on our staff of being like, wait, Amazon is ugly. Like what a bad website Amazon.com is and we've all just been sort of slowly like frog boiling in water to Amazon.com, and we just didn't realize it's a hideous website. And then Walmart, which used to be a like roughly equivalently hideous website, came out and said like, oh, we care about curation and we're going to make things look a little nicer and we're going to use like colors. And the names of things aren't going to be 65 words long. And we're going to have like a thing that actually makes sense for shopping.

And everybody is just like, oh, Amazon sucks. And that was my favorite part of this whole thing. It was like Walmart did a redesign. And it's like, you know what's bad. It's Amazon.com. Yeah. It does look very pretty. It's nice.

It looks nice. I'm still not going to shop there. But like, I appreciate that Walmart was like, we're getting our asses kicked and we're actually going to come back and go after a big tech company, even though we're just the guys that like destroy small towns with our giant, very convenient and lovely shopping centers. We had the CEO of Barnes & Noble on Decoder. And I was like, this is quite a turnaround for you. You remember you used to like destroy small town bookstores.

And he was like, you know, Amazon. exist now. He's like, don't worry about it. We're the little guys. Where are what you need? He's like small bookstores can't exist without Barnes & Noble because they are the distributor to the small bookstores now. Wow.

So like your local independent bookseller is like it needs a Barnes and Noble to exist. Otherwise Amazon will crush it. That's very good. I love that. I don't know if Walmart is that thing for people, but not yet. Not yet. Not yet. But Walmart has been on this like relentless quest to just solve logistics.

in a way, I think is super funny and interesting that during the pandemic, they, they started talking a lot about we're going to turn our stores into essentially like super optimized warehouses for Instacart shoppers to come pick stuff up. And they were really big on curbside pickup. And they've just, they have this like omni channel by everything any way you want. It all magically appears at your house vision in their head. And I don't know if it's what anyone actually wants out of their life, but it is the vision that, that Walmart has. And I find it sort of fast. watching them go after it. Well, they're like, they saw Amazon doing what they do best and doing it a little better.

And they went, oh, wait, no, we're the biggest guy in the room. We're not just going to give that up. And as a meet, have a meet. Because they were, for the longest time, they were like the largest employer in the United States. And Amazon took that over. And so Walmart's like, no, no, no, we can employ the most people. No, we actually already have all these warehouses built out. We don't have to go do it.

We just call them stores, super centers. And in fact, we can just fill that with. crap and get it to you faster. So, like, that part of it, I think, is really, really interesting. They just said, no-uh. We're really good at doing this. F-U. There's a weird set of rumors that Walmart will be the one to buy TikTok, which I think is just,

like, perfect. What? It's very good. I don't know, but that it's true. Love this for the Walters. I just heard the rumors. Okay. Here's my pick.

Speaking of Amazon. Okay. And things Amazon does. Pretty devastating report in the Hollywood Reporter this week about Amazon Prime Studios. Yeah. How badly it's going over there. I'm just going to do the disclosure now. I'm going to talk on streaming.

Gary Eddy. Buckle up. Comcast, NBC Universal Division is investor in box media. They own Peacock. Comcast does not love me, but they own Peacock. That's a competitor. We made a Netflix show. I'm the EP of a Netflix show.

I've used Hulu. Yeah. Everyone in this room has opinions about that. Like succession. It's on HBO. Yeah. Yeah. Disclosures. Amazon Prime Video. They invested a ton of money in the Lord of the Rings series.

Yeah. 37% completion rate. It's brutal. No one talks about it. Did you watch it? No. Yeah. I watched all of it.

It's from nerds. What do I love? It was real bad. I got like, I fell asleep. I did like laundry during it. It was one of those shows. Yeah. When I was told it was slow, their quote in the piece was like, we're definitely doing a

second season. This was all world building, which is bad. Season one was just set up for season two. A hundred million dollars of world building. whatever. Nerds. Yeah, nerd stuff. Yeah.

Look at these wizards, huh? Elves? Here are some elves. That's what it was, though. You're right. That's what it was. That was the show. Have you met hobbits?

You love those, right? Here's some of them. Soon they'll all collide. It was, it's a very slow show. But the bigger point is Amazon's entire idea about this thing is you will subscribe to Prime, and you'll get great shows. and then I'll make you stay subscribed to Prime, so you keep shopping on Prime.

Right. And the thing itself does not need an identity just has to be good enough that you're happy about it and stay subscribed to Prime. What is fascinating to me now, because I really want your view of this, is the normals that I know are all fire TV people. Yeah.

Like everyone, all of Becky's aunts are like fire TV people. Not Roku? Not Roku. It's all fire TV. It's bonkers to me. That's wild. And I'm like, are they happy with Prime? Are they watching the Lord of the Rings?

I think... Clearly not. Prime is stealthy. Like, it does... Technically, it has, like, the largest number of subscribers or the second largest. It's over 200 million subscribers. But they're also... That's because they're also just regular prime shipping subscribers.

And so most people, I don't think, really think about it that often, except for when they want to watch a movie and it happens to have it. Or they heard, like, a leave of their own. And then they watch it and went, this is gay. Because it's very gay. It's great. Watch it. But a lot of people then were like, no, I didn't want that and click out.

So I don't think as many people are engaging with it. And we're there, that was a big part of that piece too was about how it hasn't had a big hit. Yeah. The closest it's had is a couple like bro shows like the boys and the boys is great. Jack Reacher. Do you like Jack Reacher? I didn't watch back. It's a real bro.

Like it's like bro spy shows. The voice is particularly weird because I think people are taking the wrong message from the boys. Yes. Which is that homelander is cool. And it's like, that's not it. Yeah. That's not what that shows about. They're like, what if white supremacy was awesome?

No, no, wrong, wrong. Yeah. Kill it. What if we lasered everyone's heads if they pissed us off? That would rule the boy. It's like, no, that's not it, everyone. Most people, it doesn't have these big moments. Like, it got Fleabagg, but Fleabagg wasn't even an Amazon show.

They picked it up. They acquired it from, I think, the BBC or something. That's fine. Yeah. And then, and this was a detail that was in the story, Amazon then gave Phoebe Waller Bridge, who created Fleabag, a truck. of money to make more stuff, and then she didn't make anything for them. So she was supposed to make, part of the issue here is that their idea is, okay, we need to

get people on board. So we're going to throw money at creators, which reasonably good, especially nowadays, where everybody's throwing money around. Yeah, that's what everybody did. But then they're not following through. And so, like, Phoebe Waller Bridge and Donald Glover were supposed to make a Mr. and Mrs. Smith show. There was, things did not go well there. There was some personality classes and clashes and stuff. So they parted ways. And she's still now doing a Tomb Raider show, but she has a tendency to go and come up with the idea for a show and then walk away. Because that's what she's like, killing Eve, she did the first season. And she's like, this is cool, bye. And the show got progressively worse as different showrunners came on.

The first season's amazing. It's really good. The show still was great. I loved it. But yeah, so they're doing that a bunch. They're just throwing money at people and then being like, hey, do you do anything with that 20 mill we gave you? No. Cool. Here's another 20. Why can't I get these deals? Right? Like, I got to go do that. That sounds great. The thing that really strikes me with all of these is the harshest criticism, and I think the most devastating criticism in the story, is they don't know what they want. Yes. Yeah. Right. And that is, to some extent, the criticism of Netflix, all the big sort of data-driven, to some extent the criticism of YouTube is like,

this thing has no point of view. It's just a mishmash of stuff. It's all driven by data. Well, and they hired, so the person who's running Amazon Prime, she was hired to have vision. And she does have vision. Like she was a big fan of a league of their own. She's been pushing some other stuff. And she's running into conflict with the people who are data driven. And then also the stuff that she puts all her effort into. It's not good. It doesn't actually land.

Lord of the Rings. Yeah. So it's, well, that wasn't her deal. Like she came in to do that. That was Jeff Bezos being like, I want to watch my nerd show. And the expanse. Yeah. Which spun completely, like literally into orbit.

Yeah. The second they went through that gate, I was like, the show's done. Like, I'm over it. More seasons came. Yeah, they kept making it. So many seasons. I just want to compare that to HBO, which absolutely has a point of view and just like fires off hit after hit.

Right. Even with all the corporate chaos of HBO and AT&T and all the rest, they're like, what we do is we make things we like and then we show them to people. And that's how you get the White Lotus and succession and all the rest of it. And it just doesn't seem like the tech companies that want to take over streaming have gotten it with the notable exception of apps. Apple's the only one. And that was partly because they hired a bunch of HBO people. Yeah.

So part of this is Amazon doesn't want to listen to these people that they hire. They go and they hire them and they're like, let's do this. And Amazon's like, no, let's do this other stuff. And so there's just this constant disconnect. And Netflix is having the same issue. Netflix is totally driven by the algorithm to the point that it cancel shows that are really, really popular. And then gets people furious and lots of bad press and everybody yells at them. And Apple has figured this out because they just. trusted that we don't know what we're doing here. We're going to pay people who do and let them work and like get out of the way. And also give them a ton of money to do it. Just a ton of money. Well, and to be fair, Apple has had its share of stinkers. It's just also had some really massive successes in a way that Amazon hasn't. But the thing for me is it's always been like this at Amazon. Like, do you remember when Amazon would put out a bunch of pilots and let people vote on which ones they thought should go to series like it turns out that if you do the whole Amazon thing which is like start with what the customer wants and you know go out to the end which is how Amazon says it does everything you're

going to get shitty stuff because people don't know what they want and if you ask people what they want they're going to say Lord of the Rings and then you have to make a good Lord of the Rings show and that's much harder than just saying do you like Lord of the Rings but then on the flip side Amazon at least as far as I can tell has never been at all clear about what its video stuff is for and even in the course of this story They talked a bunch about, like, one of the compelling things about Lord of the Rings was all the, like, merchandising opportunities, right? And they, they've talked about this with football, too, that if you get people to sign up,

like, we're going to be able to sell you football related things. Like, maybe you'll buy your Tostitos through Thursday Night Football and that that's actually as big a victory as getting you to watch Thursday Night Football through Prime Video. And so there's just been this weird thing where it's like, what, what are these shows and movies here to accomplish for Amazon? And I don't necessarily think Amazon has a clear. answer to that. They at least have not communicated that to Hollywood. And until they do, it's going to keep being the same thing where people just come in. They're like, what do you want from us?

Like, what does success look like here? And they had even people saying that. I think the guy that did a league with their own was like, what do you want from us? Like, greenlit our show. They want to sell baseball pets. Apparently. Just the little girls. All right. This is the longest lightning round ever. You can tell. We have a lot of feelings about this story. Yeah. But it is notable that the data-driven streamers are not produced. producing hits at the rate of the people who are just like, have taste. Yeah. There's a lesson there.

Shock. All right. What's your lightning round item? Ooh, so mine is kind of, I'm folding two in together because we had some handheld news this week. Oh, boy. So first of all, Assuse on April Fool's Day was like. This was not great.

It was really bad. Assis was like, hey, we're going to do a really cool handheld. April Fool's. And everybody's like, well, that's stupid. Like the Steam Deck exists. You could have done that. And then a few days later, they're like, oh, actually, we are doing it. And everybody's like, well, that was stupid.

Why did you message it with April Fool's? And I think the idea there was supposed to be, you'd get really excited and wish it existed and then be really excited when it did exist. The classic April Fool's Gambit. Yeah. And instead they just pissed everybody off. And we don't really know a lot about the pricing or what's involved. There's a couple of YouTubers that have seen it so far. It seems potentially really cool.

It runs Windows. Could be neat. Could be $600. And nobody would want to spend that on a handheld when a Steam Deck's run. Why is it called the Rog ally? Because it's your ally in gaming. Oh, my God. Also, have you ever seen Asus's product names?

Rog ally is like the best it's ever. So, Rog is Republic of Gamer, which was a gaming thing that they acquired years ago. And so they just... This is the ally. Yeah. All right. This is your friend. I'll take it.

And then the other part of this is Sony is considering also making a handheld super late to that party in some respects, even though they did the Vita and they did the PSP and they both were great. overpriced, nobody bought them except for me and probably Sean? I had a PSP. Okay, you, me and Sean. Yeah. We were the three that owned the PSP. It was great. Mine was pink. Did I have a Vita too? There's a real chance I might have had a Vita along. The Vita was like, it had like 3G in it.

You were like, it's practically a phone. I can justify this purchase. It's weird that a gadget made so little impression that I can't remember if I owned one, but it feels like the sort of thing that I bought. It was not great. The games were great for it. But so Sony is looking into this again. curiously, not for cloud gaming.

That's probably because they have a really bad cloud gaming infrastructure. They farmed it all out to Microsoft. They don't. Everybody's, no, somebody's going to yell at me in the comments and I'm sorry. I know you all love it and it works, but it's garbage. So they're not making it for that. They're making it for remote play. So you can just play your PS5 far away from your house.

That makes sense. But that might be the only thing you can do with it. And how much is it going to cost? Because everybody's struggling to get it under $400. and why would you spend $400 on something to just play your PS5 that's at home when you could spend $400 on the Steam deck that lets you do that and play other games? I would assume this has to be coming alongside some like huge expansion in Sony's cloud gaming stuff. Because if not, you're exactly right. This just becomes like history's most expensive, barely useful PlayStation peripheral, just slightly edging the move sticks that existed.

But, uh, just barely edging. The reporting was, like, emphatically like it's not for cloud gaming. It's for remote play, which is why it's so weird. Also, the name is bad. What's the name? Q light. That's okay. It's worse than Rog Ally.

Yeah, it was like, we should do want Rog Ally. Or QAnon, the video name system. Let's hope that's a code name. Yeah. Can I tell you, whatever. They can do whatever they want. Okay. It's fine.

You'll buy it. Sony needs to put PSVR2, Grand Turismo, demo stations in every mall and store and 7-11 in America. How many times have you vomited playing it? No, so the first day was really bad. Okay. So I had Addie send me one of our PSVR2

review units and then I bought a Logitech G923 wheel and pedals and a chair. It's, I was like whatever is fully ridiculous, but I live in the woods, I'm in the basement, no one can see me, headset on, and the first day I was like, ooh, this is a mistake. Super queasy. And then

Just a couple days later, it's fine. Okay. So a couple days of queasy. I'm obsessed. It is like being in the stupid cars. Love that. Do you like miss the brake? Do you have brake pushback and stuff?

Like when a real car, you can feel it when you're braking? No, because it's just, they're plastic pedals. I don't know. You know you can spend like 30 grand on this setup, Mila, and I feel like we're headed down a dangerous road. I've spent a bunch of credit card points and it's fine. I haven't spent, like, it was like $100 and a bunch of money. card of guard points to accomplish this setup.

It is legitimately the most compelling thing you can do in VR. Yeah. Like, it is so cool. It's so much fun. You convince yourself that you're moving, which is bizarre, like, absolutely bizarre to be sitting dead still, holding a plastic wheel that you cannot see because you're wearing a VR headset and like leaning your body. Like, it's crazy. I took up, my wife came down the stairs the other day, and I took up the headset. I literally went, you got to try this.

And she was like, what is wrong with you? I just went right back up the stairs. I'm out of here. For all of that, we talked so much about last week, talked about AR, killer apps, all this stuff. It's an incredibly complicated full setup. Yeah. It's like $1,500 with a stuff, right?

You need a PS5, you need a headset, which is another $5,600. You need to buy a wheel. It's all ridiculous. Share. And you can. You can spend like $30,000 on like full motion, eye racing, PC-based.

Max for Stapin, the F-1 racer. has a full rig in his trailer. So he leaves F1 races and then sim races against people using his real name, which is incredible. It's badass. Devastating. Sim racing as yourself is the coolest imaginable thing. And all that's fine.

And like I have friends and I've tried those things on screens with the three screens around you. I'm telling you put on a VR headset. You're like, oh, this is the coolest thing you can do in VR. Yeah. Sony needs to throw this cloud gaming, whatever. Get people to headsets with the racing games. That should that's like they're Tetris. Yeah.

It's $1,500 of sim racing setup. Also, it judges you every time you put it on. It's like, are you sitting down again? And it's like, I'm definitely sitting down again. It's like, don't you want to play standing up moving around? It's like, no, no, no. I'm in the chair, bro. Stationary mode.

What's up? Yeah. Let's go. Every time it's like, are you, uh, you're stationary again, huh? It's like, sure am. Let's just put the pedal to the metal, bro. It's very good. Okay. One more. Wait, how many picks are we at? That was like one each, basically. We did one each. You get one more and then I think we should probably go.

All right. Let me wrap this up. Last lightning around item. This is me just assigning myself a story again. We'll have it on a website tomorrow. Okay. Something is happening in Wisconsin. Cheese? 49ers. Aaron Rogers is leaving. It's the only things anyone can pick up. So as you know, I'm obsessed with the Foxxon plot, which is just a minute. away from my child at home in Wisconsin.

Yeah. They're going to do something on it. And it's not coffee robots or whatever nonsense they claim they were doing. It's definitely not building TVs. AKAI. Yeah, wait. So the first thing, let's just, let's run through the history of this real fast. So it was.

Real fast, do you think it was going to be TVs, right? Yes. So in the Trump administration, Donald Trump, Golden Shovel breaks ground with Terry Goad, chairman of Foxhahn, says we're building a TV factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. They ram it through. They bulldoze houses, the whole thing. AI 8K plus 5G.

Sure. The plus. They're going to do 15,000 jobs, billions in tax subsidies. I don't need to tell you that this did not happen. It was never going to happen, and it definitely did not happen. At one point in the course of this story, when they broke ground on the factory, display experts told us that foundation doesn't look correct for an LCD fab. And we asked them, and they said, the special clay soil in Wisconsin

does not mean that we do not need to build the foundation that you need in the rest of the world. And I went, I'm from there and no one ever told me that the dirt was special. So that was weird. So then they built this weird building.

They called it the multipurpose building. It is all but empty. They used it for storage. They had it reasoned to storage. They claim it coffee robots. They think they're making server boards for Google there, but they won't claim. No reporters have ever been there.

There's a tiny dome that they claim as a data center, but the actual data center is in shipping containers outside the dome. It's all very good. Geodesic dome, right? Yeah, it's like a little. It's like buying my parents' house. Every time I go home, I look at it.

I'm like, it's so small. It's just a little snow globe data center. And it's just like a conference center. You can rent it out for weddings. Anyhow. First of all, let's do that. Yeah. If any Vurchase listeners are getting married,

might I interest you in Mount Pleasant Wisconsin? Nilai will officiate your wedding at the That's true. Every time when my sister got married, my parents renovated the house. When I got married, they did the backyard. They're looking to do the bathroom. And apparently it takes a wedding to kick them into gear. So if you're listening to that, get at us.

Let me know. So there's a news report. Somebody tweeted this at me and just looking at Twitter in the background. I came upon it dazily. Mount Pleasant, the board that approved the Foxxend deal, just like quietly announced that Microsoft would be building a data center there. They did this a week before the election. So they announced this thing

Microsoft is building a data center. They have not taken the votes to do it, but they announced it before the election to prove the Foxhahn is a great idea. So I'm looking at this story and I'm like, I don't know about this. Yeah. I will say Microsoft President Brad Smith is from Appleton, Wisconsin. Loves Wisconsin. There's

a big tech campus at Lambeau Field called Title Time Tech. Okay. The man loves Wisconsin. He likes investing in Wisconsin. Love it. Love it for me. Love it for him. I've not yet been invited to Lambeau Field. I'm just putting that out there. But I feel like it's two hometown boys, we could really vibe. So I asked Microsoft.

Microsoft sends me the following statement. This is all they say. Our data center campus investment plans with the village of Mount Pleasant in Racine County are part of Microsoft's long-term commitment for the local communities in Wisconsin. We look forward to our work there. Other than that, we don't have more to say, nor are we doing interviews. So that's nothing. Okay. All right.

I was like, can I talk to anyone about how many jobs will this data center? It's a room full of servers. It's a one job. Microsoft data centers, they're around the country. You can see they don't make a lot of jobs. And they know it. Kevin Scott, the CEO of Microsoft has a whole book about how data centers don't make a lot of jobs. It's a great book.

He was on, again, on Dakota, we've talked about it. He's like, this is not the thing that is like an engine of job creation. Yeah. But you need to have them. And then you build infrastructure and you have power grids. And this helps local communities. They're getting tax rebates and subsidies for it, as always. And Mount Pleasant and Foxcon are like, this is what happens when you build the infrastructure.

The clients will come. And it's like, no, you guys were, you tore down people's homes to build a TV factory. Where's the TV factory? Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs? Yeah. So we're going to be tracking the Microsoft Data Center in Mount Pleasant. I'm sure they're actually going to build it.

They literally, they field of dreams did. They just, if you. build it, they will come. Just throw up a giant empty building and somebody will come put servers in it. And by it, just to be specifically clear, is it is declaring the land on which people's homes sit

as blighted, tearing them all down, trucking water from Lake Michigan over there, and building a power substation for no one to lie fallow for three years. So that eventually Microsoft is like, yeah, sure, we'll put one. Classic field of dreams.

That's it. I mean, that's field of dreams, too. Just the movie. So, again, we're tracking it. I don't know what to tell you. It is very silly. I think it is very odd that Microsoft isn't, like, pounding its chest. They're building a data center in South Asia and Wisconsin.

Like, they just don't want to talk about it. Yeah. Nil, when do you run for mayor of receipt Wisconsin? This is the only outcome here. I don't know that I could get my dad to vote for me, so that's going to be tough. You did swear once on Theverse.com. He didn't like that. It did.

My parents were not. I think I could get my mom. Okay. It's a good start. Just promise you'll never swear again. Would that help? I don't know that I'm prepared to make these commitments to the people of Wisconsin today. And I will consider my options at this time.

You're hearing from my attorney. We're not doing interviews. No interviews. No press. Sorry. No press. All right. That's it.

That's a Vergecast. I promise that all the stories we talked about will be published. David, we'll publish about Activity Pub. Yes. I will write about Wisconsin. I made no promises today. You did one last week, right?

I did one last week. I did. Apple Music, classical. Yeah. So I promised it and I delivered. I swear to God, this entire show is just for us to ideate stories put on the website. But that's why you love it. That's the Vergecast.

Stuff on the website you should look at. We do have a retrospective of the Lisa going on, the Apple Lisa, the Precurs of the Macintosh with the Computer History Museum. It's great. go look at it. I really want people to read McKenna's story about the Donald Trump protests in front of the Matt and courthouse and how they everyone there was a streamer. It is one of the virgiest verge stories we've ever published. It's very good. It's really good. And we have the same with the Home Assistant Sky Connect, which is another just extremely verge story. It's so verge. That's the range. That's the range. And then take the color quiz, whatever. David, do you want to tell people to

vote for the People's Choice Award? Yes. So the Vergecast is nominated for a Webby Award for Best Technology Podcast. We're currently losing to a TechCrunch podcast. I like TechCrunch fine. They're all lovely people. I would like to destroy them and bury them in the ground with our votes. Please go.

We'll put the link in the show notes. Please go vote for the Verge so that we can gloat to everyone we ever met that we on the Webby and they didn't. It's like a spring. Yeah. Yeah, the award itself is rad looking and I want one. So let's get it. Very good.

That's it. That's for trust. And that's a wrap for VIRGAST this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice, or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at vergecast at theverge.com.

This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Marino. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.