Elon Musk's first week at Twitter / Matter's newest smart home devices

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Alex Heath discuss what has happened with Twitter since Elon Musk has taken over the company. Then, Nilay, David and Alex discuss the first Matter-compatible devices since the launch of the smart home standard. Further reading: Elon Musk wastes no time changing Twitter Why Elon Musk is so desperate for Twitter to make money Elon Musk could enable Twitter's edit button for everyone Elon Musk could cut half of Twitter’s workforce Over 190 smart home devices are now Matter certified and here’s what’s coming next We’re getting our first look at Matter devices today, and here’s what’s coming next Level locks had a secret Thread radio this whole time Amazon announces a phased rollout of Matter to its Alexa smart home platform Eve’s sensors and smart plugs will be among the first Matter-compatible devices Nanoleaf announces the first Matter-over-Thread light bulbs Philips Hue Bridge is getting updated to Matter early next year Aqara’s Matter transition begins in December with free hub update Amazon Music’s library of songs and podcasts is now free for Prime subscribers Apple TV 4K (2022) review: unmatched power, unrealized potential Netflix’s new cheaper plan with ads doesn’t work on Apple TV at launch Netflix’s $6.99 per month ad tier is now live PlayStation VR2 launches on February 22nd for $549.99 Comcast’s big rival to Roku and the smart TV is called… Xumo Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we'd love to hear from you. We are conducting a short audience survey to help plan for our future and hear from you. To participate, head to vox.com/podsurvey, and thank you! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Today on The Vergecast, Alex Heath joins us to break down all the drama going on at Twitter this week. Amazon Prime Music releases a new plan that surprises but mostly annoys existing users. And of course, we'll get into all the gadget news from this week. That's coming up right after this.

• 0:16Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:01Speaker 01

  This episode is brought to you by On Investing, an original podcast from Charles Schwab. Each week, hosts Lizanne Saunders, Schwab's chief investment strategist, and Colin Martin, head of fixed income research and strategy for the Schwab Center for Financial Research, bring you fresh insights on what's happening in the markets and why, and what the implications might be for your portfolio. Join Colin and Lizanne as they explore questions like, how do you evaluate corporate bonds that look interesting? And what sectors are on the move right now? Download the latest episode and subscribe at schwab.com/oninvesting, or wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:58Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of free speech.

• 2:02Alex Cranz?

  And weed.

• 2:03Nilay Patel?

  With exceptions. Both things. All right, so we have a weed update, a studio weed update. Alex and I are in the studio today. I'm your friend Eli. Alex Kranz is here.

• 2:12Alex Cranz?

  Hello.

• 2:13Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce is here.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  Hi.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  Alex Heath is joining us for the first segment to talk about, obviously, Elon Musk. Hi, Alex. Hi. All right, before we, but we have a weed, a studio weed update.

• 2:22Alex Cranz?

  Much more important update than Elon.

• 2:24Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we have, I don't know that we've ruled out Kara Swisher as the weed in the studio culprit.

• 2:28David Pierce?

  Have we ruled out that Elon Musk is the weed in the studio?

• 2:31Nilay Patel?

  Like, is that?

• 2:31Alex Cranz?

  He could be.

• 2:32David Pierce?

  It seems possible.

• 2:33Alex Cranz?

  It's very possible.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  We're in his head. I'll tell you that much.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  We, so I'm not saying it's conclusively not Kara, but I will say that we walked in today, Kara has not been in the studio. I didn't even know Kara was in the studio last time, but I know she, I've been in the office all day. I've not seen her.

• 2:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:47Nilay Patel?

  I think she lives in DC, so she's not here.

• 2:50Alex Cranz?

  Not here often.

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  Case still open.

• 2:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 2:52Nilay Patel?

  Still a suspect of interest.

• 2:53Alex Cranz?

  Right. We haven't ruled her out.

• 2:55Nilay Patel?

  But it smells like weed again.

• 2:56Alex Cranz?

  It does. Smells a lot like weed. Having a great time.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  And today we were informed that we share an air duct with another team at the company. I will not say who the team is. I think the listener should try to guess.

• 3:07Alex Cranz?

  Please send us.

• 3:08Nilay Patel?

  Once you guess.

• 3:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  It is very obvious. It will land. It will click. Which group? And not even accusing them. We don't know for sure.

• 3:17Alex Cranz?

  We don't know. It could be Recode.

• 3:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just think about it. What, what?

• 3:23David Pierce?

  It's, it's the Packers blog. They're dealing with a lot right now.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  That's just more of a booze situation. That's a brown liquor problem. That's not a weed problem. All right, there's a lot going on in the world, Elon. It's his first week at Twitter. It has been absolutely chaotic. On the other happier side of tech news, it's Matter's launch day. Speaking of weed, Matter, the smart home standard, is launching currently in Amsterdam. Our own time, they are just turning lights on and off. Just stoned out of their mind. I would agree. From all corners of the earth. Jen Tooe and Thomas Ricker are actually, Thomas lives in Amsterdam, Jen flew over there. Lots of news, the matter of it, we should talk about, it's pretty exciting. We got a bunch of gadgets to talk about. Let's start though with Elon. Speaking of brown liquor, let's start with Elon. Take a shot. Alex, it's been his first week. It's been chaotic.

• 4:12Nilay Patel?

  You kind of blew up the world over the weekend by reporting that Twitter Blue would cost $20. Our friend Casey Newton had reported it would cost four and then it landed at eight. It sounds like layoffs are happening maybe as soon as tomorrow for half the workforce. What's the latest?

• 4:27Speaker 05

  Yeah, so layoffs will most likely have started by the time this podcast drops. If not, I would expect soon after. Yeah, it's been, to sum it up, you know, just chaotic inside Twitter. I would say the current vibe is perfectly encapsulated by the fact that Elon Musk has almost 90 direct reports inside Twitter's internal directory.

• 4:49Speaker 05

  Which, you know, I think speaks to just the fact that he's fired everyone that would be below him had he kept them. Yeah, you know, it started with me having to Google Ligma on Friday, which was very unfortunate. Don't recommend that. And then throughout the weekend, it became apparent that Musk's first big project was going to be rehauling verification on Twitter. And I'd heard that he was making people stay in the office over the weekend to get a demo together to show him of this new idea. And I really do think that the price, the team building the feature, found out that the final price was going to be $8 by him tweeting it.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  To Stephen King.

• 5:31Speaker 05

  I don't like, that's, well, so, yes, I think Stephen King, props to Mike Isaac for pointing this out, who also testified in the big, was it the Simon and Schuster merger trial?

• 5:43Nilay Patel?

  Penguin Random House.

• 5:44Speaker 05

  Yeah, Penguin Random House. You know, Stephen King said, you know, basically, fuck this, like, I'm not going to pay $20 after we reported that Twitter was planning on making it $20. And then Elon responded and was like, how about eight? And then the next day said eight. So Stephen King had a product at Twitter, congrats.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  Wonderful move.

• 6:03Speaker 05

  It's actually, it's just remarkable, like, people, employees are literally just looking to Musk's Twitter account to see what their next directive is going to be and how their product is actually going to work, which is, it's just an amazing time we live in. Meanwhile, they're all sprinting to get this new Twitter Blue subscription product out the door by this coming Monday. November 7th, or else they're all going to be fired. And they all may be fired, or half them fired anyway, by Saturday or Friday when this comes out, since he's about to cut estimated around half of the company, almost 4,000 people, on Friday. So yeah, that's the lay of the land.

• 6:36Alex Cranz?

  Is this push to get all like Twitter Blue completely redone by the 7th? Is this like, is the intent to make people so miserable, they quit so he doesn't have to lay them off? Is the intent to make them fail so that he can be like, that's why you're fired? Like, is that kind of the calculus there before the layoffs?

• 6:56Speaker 05

  You know, Alex, only Elon can see into the mind of Elon.

• 7:01Alex Cranz?

  Has he tweeted anything on this?

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  If you're just like a Twitter engineer, you got like an engineering brain.

• 7:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:06Nilay Patel?

  Just a little game theory.

• 7:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:08Nilay Patel?

  There's, you cannot be miserable enough to quit at this moment in time. There's no amount of misery that would make you walk away from a severance that's coming if you get fired.

• 7:15Speaker 05

  Yeah, I mean, this is already, this is already super sadistic, this whole process. I think it's more to send a message, right? Like, I reported that literally the first day he took over, he was like, "redirect logged out homepage to Explore," and had that pushed through the code freeze. It's just kind of like a, "I'm here, and we're gonna start changing things that we thought we would never change," right? That was a hugely political thing before. Talked about it in the story of the weekend, anyway. And I think the same thing with Blue. It's more to just show, A, we can do stuff fast if we're forced to, at gunpoint. And B, I'm showing you where my priorities lie. So this is the big project that everyone's working on. The lead PM of this literally tweeted that she was sleeping on the floor in the conference

• 7:58Speaker 05

  room the other day, hashtag "sleep where you work." And so I think it's just to say, this is a new company. I mean, Twitter is a company that has had a monthly day of rest for the last two years, which Musk also got rid of.

• 8:12Alex Cranz?

  Aww.

• 8:13Speaker 05

  And is just like the opposite of a Musk company. Like, this is the most dramatic cultural reset of a company that I've ever witnessed. And it's happening in real time, in less than a week. And that's probably also why he fired the entire executive team, is he's just saying like, "We're not, we're changing..." Yeah.

• 8:31David Pierce?

  That to me is really one of the more sort of instructive parts of all of this is this is all so in keeping with how Elon Musk does business like any of the people who have come over to Twitter from Tesla. I guarantee you this is not phasing them. This is just how it works. He says insane things that are probably impossible, pushes everybody like crazy to make it work. And if it doesn't, there's hell to pay and or he just tweets a new crazy thing and then everybody chases that. This is just like this is the price of doing business with Elon Musk and it's in a strange way like part of it is it's incredible how quickly he has pulled this off like the sheer force of personality to just roll into the building and be like, what's up? Everything is different. Ready, go is like

• 9:12Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 9:12David Pierce?

  deeply messed up, but also in a certain way, like kind of impressive.

• 9:15Speaker 05

  I will say that I've had several Twitter employees compare this to like the Trump White House and the transition team there. And I think that's a very apt analogy. I mean, the guy that Musk is leaning on to help him come up with the layoff plan. His last name is Sax. I mean, you couldn't write this as a Hollywood script any better. And to what David was saying before, there are dozens of people from Tesla, the boring company Neuralink, including Musk's own cousin, other aides, other advisors, VCs in the building that, you know, are helping Musk do all this. And that's been very jarring for Twitter employees too, is to be like, wait, my fate is going to be dictated by the all in podcast.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So there's two things there. One, just to David's point, how many times we've seen a company get a new CEO? How many times we talked to new leadership at companies? Even when we have done new things, like what's the first thing that happens? Like the leader is like, I need to listen to everybody. Everyone needs to feel heard. I just need to go make everyone comfortable and then we'll start doing changes like. And then we will destroy you. I swear to God, there's a new CEO playbook. That's like the first, here's your first month. You just tell everyone you're listening, even if you're not. Yeah. You just say loudly, like, first, I need to listen to everyone. Yeah.

• 10:33David Pierce?

  It's literally called the Listening Tour. You do the Listening Tour.

• 10:35Nilay Patel?

  It's what you do. You just like walk around. You're like, I'm listening to you. And in the back of every CEO's head, it's like, to see if I'll fire you. But you do it. There's no listening to Elon, right? Like, he's been paying attention. He's addicted to Twitter. The thing I keep saying is like, it's like someone addicted to cigarettes was given a cigarette factory. And they don't realize that no one else is addicted to cigarettes the way that they are addicted to cigarettes. And they're like, I have been having thoughts about cigarettes for a long time, and we're gonna do them all. All of them, this week. It's just something that's hilarious. And then the second part of that is this, like, kitchen cabinet of his, which is mostly comprised of investors, not people who do things.

• 11:19Nilay Patel?

  And yes, we know there's a bunch of engineers and people from his other companies, but the public face of the decisions is a bunch of finance people. Yeah. And it's just very, it's like, someone finally allowed them to play with the Legos, and they're like, alright, here's what you do. You make a huge tower with a skinny base. I've been thinking about these Legos for a long time. And they have no idea what they're doing, because they're just the money.

• 11:45Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  And that, to me, is like, the funniest part of this whole thing, is all these VCs are like, we need a team, we need a product, we need founders, we need people who know the product, and they themselves are not taking their own cliche advice.

• 11:59Speaker 05

  Money is important because Musk has a, I think he's on the hook for about a billion a year in interest payments alone on this Twitter deal. And interestingly, the rumor I keep hearing is that internally, there's a push to cost save about a billion a year in OpEx between all the cuts that are about to come, and they're scrutinizing every vendor contract, their cloud spend, everything to cut costs. So yeah, it is like, it is a thing of financial engineering. That is the Twitter problem on day one. And then the product stuff will happen. And he wants to obviously move quickly on the product stuff, but he's got to first make it work financially.

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  So $8 a month, there's currently, there's what, 400,000 verified users that we can tell. And that number comes from the number of people that the at verified account follows on Twitter.

• 12:49Speaker 05

  Which is automatic and is everyone who's verified. I've confirmed that. I think, I have it, so I'm really, I want to know what you guys think about this verification thing, and if everyone's gonna pay. I mean, of course we are, but like...

• 12:59Nilay Patel?

  I won't. No, no, that's the cigarette factory talk. You don't have to smoke cigarettes, Alex. You don't have to do it. You can quit. Get a pass.

• 13:09Speaker 05

  I get all of the blowback to this. And, you know, when I published the first, you know, that they were contemplating 20, it just was like people freaked out. Uh, blue check Twitter went on red mode. I think people are underestimating the incentives to, to buy into this because it's not just that you have a checkmark. Well, the way that Twitter verification has worked, and I don't think people get this, is that if you're verified, you're actually, it's, it's a quality signal in Twitter's algorithms. So you're boosted more in the timeline, you're boosted in replies. There's that verified filter that we have for checkmark where we can see verified responses. In the next update, that verified tab is going to become the first tab in the notifications tray. So basically, he's going to just bifurcate the audience.

• 13:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:51Speaker 05

  And I think people are going to be so pressured to pay for this because they're going to realize that, oh, I am in the cheap seats all of a sudden, not just in terms of like what I'm paying, but in terms of my reach and in terms of like my, my quality of like what I can see. And so I think that's why a lot of people, because it's also a network effect thing, will buy into this. And I actually, I actually think this will be like something that millions of people do.

• 14:12Alex Cranz?

  I think it's the exact opposite. I think the blue checkmark is about to be the mark that you're a weirdo who uses Twitter so much, you're willing to pay $8 a month for it. And I think it's going to be a point like where people say, oh, you have a blue check? Ew, you really pay for this? And maybe that, that won't happen, but I genuinely think that this is going to be like a big moment for this company and for social media in all, right? Like social media, generally the thing is, we are going to mine the crap out of your data and in return, you get all of this free access to communicate with other people. And now he's saying, we are going to mine the crap out of your data. And if you want a better experience, you have to pay $8 a month. And if you don't want like that, you can use the shitty version or you can walk.

• 14:57Alex Cranz?

  And I'm like, are people really going to pay that $8? Many, for people who already say they hate the site and they use it anyway, are those people really going to be like, yeah, buy this pack of cigarettes? Or are they going to be like, actually?

• 15:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm very happy that I'm making this.

• 15:10Alex Cranz?

  I can go get the filterless Enroll 'em myself.

• 15:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 15:14Alex Cranz?

  That's Mastodon, I assume.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  That's Texas coming.

• 15:16Alex Cranz?

  That's Mastodon. I saw someone this week who was like, yeah, I roll my own cigarettes. And I'm like, in 2022?

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Did you meet someone else who smoked cloves? Let's get into it.

• 15:27Alex Cranz?

  Tumblr is cloves in this situation, by the way.

• 15:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so I, my prediction is that the reality of this is going to be far more boring. And it's going to mean nothing.

• 15:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  The best comp is TSA PreCheck, which is neither a status symbol nor a thing that people love. It's just what you do if you just want to be degraded slightly more by the government of the United States. Right? Like, you can have a better experience if you pay for it this much.

• 15:51Alex Cranz?

  I keep my shoes on.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  It's not clear. You don't, the seat doesn't lay back all the way. You just get to keep your shoes on. And that, that, like, I already pay for Twitter. I'm already paying for it. It's $4 a month. They're doubling the price to add a checkmark and take away the ad-free experience on some publisher websites.

• 16:09David Pierce?

  No, but, but the thing is, nobody who follows you on Twitter knows that you pay for Twitter.

• 16:13Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 16:14David Pierce?

  Which I think is, is really important, right? Where like, think about all the people you see in your timeline.

• 16:18Nilay Patel?

  And when you're in the PreCheck line, everyone knows that you pay for PreCheck. It doesn't mean anyone thinks you're cool. They're just like, wow, you pay for PreCheck.

• 16:24David Pierce?

  You're not thirsting for retweets in the PreCheck line. Like, I don't think that analogy works at all, if I'm being honest.

• 16:31David Pierce?

  There, if you're like, if there's like a thirst trap camera when you get in the TSA PreCheck line, like, then I'd be into it.

• 16:36Nilay Patel?

  Absolutely gonna start doing thirst traps in the PreCheck line.

• 16:40Alex Cranz?

  I think it's more like, when you play a video game and, and you get like a cool little, like World of Warcraft, you get a cool little pet. Right? And if you go and you do all these really cool events, you get a cool pet. And so people will be like, this is my pet. And that was like the blue checkmark. And then other people will be like, I spent $5 at Subway and I also have a cool pet. And you'd see those pets and you'd be like, well, you're lame because you spent $5 at Subway for that pet.

• 17:04Nilay Patel?

  If Elon was gonna be wild, he would introduce tiered pricing.

• 17:07Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 17:07Nilay Patel?

  There'd be gold checkmarks.

• 17:08Alex Cranz?

  Oh my God, that's what I want. Like, just go all the way.

• 17:11Nilay Patel?

  That could happen. That could happen. I mean, I think we're undervaluing the algorithmic boosting aspect of this. And we're also undervaluing a unique aspect of Twitter as a social network, which is that a very, very small percent of the user base produces the vast majority of the content. And if you fall into that bucket, which is all of us, everyone in media, celebrities, the Scott Galloways of the world, et cetera, you are absolutely going to pay for this because otherwise your reach is going to be on day one reduced. So it's not even that you're in a separate line. It's that you're in another line where you keep getting pushed to the back of the line. The regular line. Two steps forward.

• 17:46Speaker 05

  I don't know if you've ever been to the airport. Well, at least you moved forward in that line. I have pre-check. I see. I have pre-check and I see your analogy, but it's almost like if you're in the other line, you just keep getting pushed back. It's not even that you're in another line. So I do think the people who produce the most content on Twitter will pay for this.

• 18:04David Pierce?

  But the part of this that makes me agree with Krantz is I would be more inclined to pay if it were divorced from the blue check.

• 18:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 18:12David Pierce?

  Because now what the blue check becomes, there's a certain world in which the blue check becomes like a symbol of your thirstiness that says, not only do I care about Twitter, I care so much about you reading my sick ass tweets that I'm gonna pay money to get in front of you.

• 18:25Alex Cranz?

  That's exactly what it becomes.

• 18:27David Pierce?

  All the people who made fun of Ben Smith for his like ridiculous promoted tweets promoting Semaphore, like this is now that at scale. It's you promoting your own tweets and that's what it's gonna look like.

• 18:38Speaker 05

  Yeah, sure, but like this is what verification at Twitter was originally designed to be. Like what Musk is doing is actually how Twitter has always wanted verification to work, which is that it's actually just to say you are who you say you are. And now it's linked to a credit card. So obviously people can fake that and that will happen.

• 18:56Alex Cranz?

  It's not.

• 18:56Speaker 05

  But I'm just saying like, this is what, that, I mean, yes, that is what it is. It's like we have an identity layer.

• 19:02Alex Cranz?

  Because it is now requiring, like I know I saw one guy who's like a journalist in Africa and he was saying, I need this because I am regularly arrested for my tweets. I'm regularly like stalked for this stuff. I can't afford the $8 a month or whatever it's gonna be in my country. So now I'm screwed. And like those people are still going to be affected by this.

• 19:24Speaker 05

  Oh, yeah.

• 19:24Alex Cranz?

  Are they gonna stay? I don't think they're going to. But I think like, I think like, this is not just pay to be verified. This is pay to be verified, get all of this stuff and pay for everybody in the world to know that you pay for this. And I think that's really silly. Like, I want that check to go away as soon as possible. I don't want a single person to think that I pay for twitter.com.

• 19:46Speaker 05

  No one has invented a way to actually identify users on social media at scale in a way that works yet. And I think credit card linking to accounts is the best thing that we, that anyone could do in the given, like, right now. I'm sure something will be invented that's better than that. And I hear you on the paid thing. I've heard that Blue is so rushed that it's only going to be in English and only in like a few markets when it comes out, which is a huge fail, right? That's a huge fail for the kind of people that you just talked about. And hopefully over time, must let journalists and people who work at nonprofits and activists be able to have it for free. I think that would be a good thing. I'm sure they're considering it. I'm just saying as an identity layer, that is actually what verification was supposed to be. Twitter has just been so inept at actually enforcing this over the last decade,

• 20:31Speaker 05

  that it's become this like elite class, like you have to have a social media manager contact at Twitter to be able to get it thing. That was never what it was intended to be. So it's actually returning verification to what it originally was supposed to be, which is just, I am who I say I am.

• 20:46Alex Cranz?

  But like in the worst way possible, inexpensive way possible. Yeah, like it's a terrible way to do it.

• 20:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, so I just want to be very clear about one thing. Criticism of the Musk administration of Twitter is in no way the same as praise for any other previous management of Twitter.

• 21:03Speaker 05

  Yeah, I'm so glad you said that.

• 21:06Nilay Patel?

  Deeply mismanaged company for a decade or more.

• 21:09Alex Cranz?

  Right, terribly managed.

• 21:10Speaker 05

  You can hold two things as truth. You cannot like the way Musk is doing things and you can also acknowledge that Twitter has been a spectacularly mismanaged company. And everyone at the company will privately acknowledge that.

• 21:21Alex Cranz?

  Like, it's wild that it's taken this long to figure out the verification thing. For years, everybody's like, how do we do it? And it's like,

• 21:28Speaker 05

  I mean, they put the program on pause for years where they were just like, screw it. We're not going to verify anyone else because this is such a mess and we don't even know how to like implement this at scale. And then they would still sneak people in, like if a Twitter employee had a contact and everyone would get mad. I mean, it's a disaster.

• 21:42Nilay Patel?

  So here's a question. I don't pay enough attention, but I think I know the answer. No one's mad at the blue checks on Instagram, right?

• 21:49Speaker 05

  Right.

• 21:49Nilay Patel?

  No one's mad at the, they're at Twitter, like YouTube has effectively blue checks. No one's mad at them.

• 21:54Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  No one's mad at the blue checks on TikTok.

• 21:57Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 21:58Nilay Patel?

  It's just Twitter.

• 21:59Speaker 05

  Because we're all deeply insecure cynics on Twitter.

• 22:02Alex Cranz?

  I think it's more because Twitter had like, I think, we want to be cautious and remember that a lot of this blue checks, like anger, came from right wing people who were upset that Trump was being deplatformed and felt that he was, he and other right wing commentators were being deplatformed at the, like, just prop up the blue checks and that these other people should be up there. But the reason they were deplatformed was because they were sharing misinformation and saying like, AIDS gives you COVID. Yeah. Like, that's the big, like, that's a big part of this that's like an undercurrent of this entire thing that I think a lot of people are really mindful of. And they, they know that, like, the blue check discourse always came from this really disgusting place.

• 22:46Speaker 05

  For the mainstream media.

• 22:47Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:48Speaker 05

  In a way, because that's what it literally has been. So if you actually think-

• 22:51Nilay Patel?

  Excuse me, we are the renegade media, sir.

• 22:53Speaker 05

  Oh, we're-

• 22:54Nilay Patel?

  This podcast exists on the friend, the fringes of American democracy.

• 22:58Speaker 05

  That's right.

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  You can't silence us. And if you try, we'll come for you somehow with weed.

• 23:06Alex Cranz?

  Laser bong.

• 23:06Speaker 05

  I'm just saying, like, Alex, if you, I, I agree with you that that's how, obviously how checkmarks have been viewed. If, if it becomes something that isn't regulated to a certain class by proxy of who you know, but something literally anyone can just pay for, is that not actually a good thing for what the checkmark represents long term?

• 23:22Alex Cranz?

  I think that's good. I think, like, making it accessible and more understandable and comprehensible is great. I think tying that to money is dumb. I think you can have Twitter blue, great service. You want to pay for that? Great. Verification should be independent of that because verification should never be about whether or not you're paying for the service.

• 23:44Nilay Patel?

  So what you're, I think there's a little bit of a heated, a heated agreement going on.

• 23:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 23:48Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 23:48Alex Cranz?

  We're furiously agreeing with each other.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  About, but about like two different things. Alex, there's two Alexes.

• 23:56Nilay Patel?

  You gotta go Cranz and Heath. God damn it. Okay. Heath said verification is a quality signal for Twitter. Yeah. That's the important part. I think this is the thing that maybe Elon and David Sacks and David, Jason Calacanis, all these people are working on, like, forget they're lost in the poison of the blue check mind. Yeah. Which is, it's good for the Twitter community to know that LeBron James is LeBron James on Twitter. Right. Like, that's his account. It's really him. They've done something to verify that it's him. And that blue check means it's him and not a fraud. Right. And across the Twitter ecosystem, that is good. Yes. You know that the president's the president. You know the White House is the White House. You know that Chuck Todd is Chuck Todd. I was just on Chuck Todd podcast, so that's, he's on my mind.

• 24:37Nilay Patel?

  Hey Chuck. That, you shouldn't charge the people for that. That's a value you're providing to the end user of Twitter. Right. To say, these people are who they say they are. You can trust this information. Yes. Adding capitalism to that does not necessarily accomplish that goal in the way that you need that goal to be accomplished. And he's already said, we're gonna start giving politicians and other, quote, "public figures," an additional label that they already have to serve that purpose. A blue check. Maybe it'll be pink. It's a blue check plus. Yeah. Right? And I think they just like hate. That's the gold check. They just like hate the media and they're like, the media should pay us. The flip side of that is, as Heath pointed out, we make all the content on Twitter. Like, the people, not we, the media,

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  like, the people, the users of Twitter make all this stuff. And I cannot think of another social platform that charges its users to have good experiences in that way. Like, YouTube is not out there being like, hey, Marquez Brownlee, would you like to pay us a little bit more money to have a not garbage experience on YouTube? They're much more like, hey, we found additional ways for you to make money. Take, like, YouTube Shorts now has an ad split that is more lucrative for you than TikTok, because we need to keep you here and not have you go to TikTok, which only has a creator fund. Right. And TikTok immediately responded to that by saying, we're gonna roll out better monetization than this creator fund, because that is the competition that you need for users. You need to pay them more money. Yeah.

• 26:04Nilay Patel?

  You need to pay your creators more money. Elon has said that this $8 a month fee will somehow create a fund to pay creators. The math on it is... Bad? It's horrible. At $8 a month, you get all 400,000 people, which you won't get. But assuming you get all 400,000 people, it's like, what, $35, $32 million a year? It's nothing.

• 26:24Speaker 05

  I think it's going to be dramatically more than the current 400,000 that opt into this because of the network effects of people realizing that they're getting gated in the algorithm because of it. And because of like, a simple thing like default tab placement matters a lot in these experiences. And the verified notifications experience is literally going to be first when you open notifications on Twitter.

• 26:46Alex Cranz?

  Why do you think they're gonna do that and not just leave the platform for one that doesn't charge them $8?

• 26:51Speaker 05

  Where are they gonna go? I mean, I've always like, I mean, everyone's always writing and saying like, when a platform goes through a moment like this, oh, people are gonna go. And right now, it's Mastodon, whatever. These network effects are really hard to rebuild. Twitter's had over a decade of this. And I just don't see the current creator class of Twitter, which is that, you know.

• 27:10Alex Cranz?

  I mean, we saw it with Tumblr. Like Tumblr, I think, is our best example. I know I bring it up a lot, but it is our best example here. They said, we're gonna get rid of boobies. I mean, they really said, we're gonna get rid of nudity. We don't want any nudity on the website. And that included-

• 27:24Speaker 05

  Verizon says no boobs.

• 27:25Alex Cranz?

  And that included no female presenting nipples. That was a really big one. That was in like, their announcement on it. And they lost over a third of their people. Like, like, over a third of their audience just said, okay, I'm out. And some of them went to Twitter, and some of them went to TikTok, and a lot of them went to Discord, and some of them went to Pillow Fort. But they did say, I don't want to be a part of this. And I think we're gonna see that on Twitter, too. And maybe those people will go to Mastodon. Hysterical. Maybe they'll go to Tumblr. Not likely. But I think they are gonna go and look at other avenues. Because it's like, well, why should I stay here and be charged for this experience that oftentimes I hate, when I can go to TikTok for free? When I

• 28:08Alex Cranz?

  can go to Mastodon and have 12 people talk to me-

• 28:11Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 28:11Alex Cranz?

  But for free?

• 28:12Speaker 05

  And then TikTok will happily serve me good tweets of people just on a green screen in front of a good tweet.

• 28:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, saying, look, this is good.

• 28:21Speaker 05

  I hear you, Cranz. I don't think there's anything that replaces Twitter for the people who are addicted to it. There's nothing that has the same network effects, the same potential reach that you can have a tweet that can get 15 million impressions in three days or 2 million because, you know, like, you just, you can't get that. TikTok, yeah, if you like videos, if you can, if you make videos. But for text and for news, there's nothing that can replace Twitter that currently exists.

• 28:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, I'm, I'm with Heath here. And I think the, the reality of Twitter is that Twitter costing $8 will not be in like the 10 worst things about Twitter. And like, yeah, and we're all still here, right? Like, it's, it's, there was a minute where it was like, you're going to be able to pay to make it better. And now it's, you're going to be able to pay to not make it worse. And I think that is a really odd way of thinking about the platform. But like, I do think it's gonna work.

• 29:13Speaker 05

  The pre-check line. Look, let's say they 10x.

• 29:15Alex Cranz?

  I love to keep my shoes on.

• 29:15Speaker 05

  Again, just the math here. So the math is so revealing. Let's say they get 10x the users they have for the current verified products. So 400,000, it's 4 million people decide to pay $8 a month for Twitter. They will make $384 million a year. Twitter makes a billion dollars a quarter. Like.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  Neel, he doesn't care about the economics.

• 29:38Alex Cranz?

  No, but he, he has to, right? Like, he has to pay down a billion dollars a year.

• 29:43Speaker 05

  Yeah, but I don't think Blue is about making money. I think it's the identity problem. It's how do we somehow verify the identity of people? And the only way, again, I come back to that people have decided is to do a credit card. And I think there's a plenty of like, fair criticism of what happens to people who are trying to anonymously speak out, get information out. A lot of the ways that Twitter really took off, say in the Arab Spring, how does that happen in an environment like this where you need to have

• 30:10Alex Cranz?

  It doesn't.

• 30:11Speaker 05

  a proven real identity tied to a credit card? It doesn't, or it's regulated to that bottom half of the service, right? That's not getting the same level of reach. And it's up to the checkmarks to go down, find it, bring it up into the checkmarked environment, which is just like feudalist and horrible. But I, I think, I do think there's going to be, you know, at least that identity layer. That is not about making money, but it's just about making Twitter a place where you know who you're seeing.

• 30:36Alex Cranz?

  If you pay for it.

• 30:38Speaker 05

  And I don't think he really cares about it being, if you pay for it. And I don't think he cares about it being, I think he thinks advertising is going to remain the biggest part of the company's revenue, even though advertisers certainly.

• 30:48Alex Cranz?

  Well, let's, let's talk about that advertise.

• 30:50Nilay Patel?

  Oh my God, are we ready for this? Let's talk about the thesis of welcome to hell Elon.

• 30:56Alex Cranz?

  How's that going for him?

• 30:57Nilay Patel?

  So there's a good piece in Rolling Stone that went up just before we started taping. Like the right wingers are already starting to turn on Elon because he had a meeting with CMOs. He like had an open letter to advertisers, said it's not going to become a hellscape. He had a meeting with a bunch of civil society groups, promised them that he wouldn't change the rules before the midterms. A little listening tour. And, you know, the, his new right wing fans who are quote unquote, you know, for free speech people, which is really just like, the N word club is here, you know, like they're pissed at him already, you know? And, and there's just a variety of figures who are saying, we were promised free speech and now you're talking to, you know, the anti defamation league and why would you do that?

• 31:38Nilay Patel?

  That has nothing to do with free speech. And I think he's caught in this place where Alex, I think you've talked to some advertisers. I have talked to some advertising folks. There's just a lot of skepticism that this will remain a good platform for advertising. And what I mean by that specifically is they don't want to be near bad content. They never have. They care a lot about quote unquote brand safety. This is why YouTube has adpocalypse's over the years.

• 32:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  Right? YouTube gets a little out of control. The moderation gets a little haywire. The community goes a little haywire and the advertisers all walk away. And this is a cycle that plays out on YouTube kind of over and over again. This is a cycle that's playing out on Twitter, kind of for the first time in this way, where the advertisers say, like the IPG, which is one of the biggest holding companies of ad agencies is saying, we recommend that you pause. GM has paused its spend. I think partially to tweak Tesla, like maybe more than partially.

• 32:32Alex Cranz?

  All those car companies.

• 32:33Speaker 05

  There's a legitimate concern that he literally has dozens of Tesla employees inside Twitter right now. And why would you, why would I put my brand campaigns and my spending and all that stuff on a platform that you have access to? And you run Tesla? I don't think there's going to be any auto dealers on Twitter for a while.

• 32:49Nilay Patel?

  That part's really funny. Tesla has historically never done any marketing. He has no idea how advertising works. Yeah. Twitter. Twitter is Tesla's marketing. Like, you like, that's the thing, like, he bought his marketing org. Right. It's just funny. Like, that's what it is. He now has a customer. Like, the marketers are Twitter's customers. That's where your billion dollars a quarter comes from. Yeah. Is ad agencies and CMOs. And he is, I think, enlisted Jason Calacanis, who started Weblogs Inc. and Gadget. Like, love Jason, very sincere guy. But he's the face of the advertising organization now for these marketers. That's a lot. Like, he's a new person. They don't trust him and they don't. Doesn't have a title. I don't know if you've seen the text to Elon. They think that he's gonna do what Elon tells him to do.

• 33:35Nilay Patel?

  Maybe there's evidence for that, and maybe there's not. Fall on a grind, eh? Jason's the one who sent the "get your blades out, boys" text to Elon. Sharpen. Sharpen your blades. Yeah. That's the, that, it's just this cast of characters. And if you think that marketing is stupid and Tesla doesn't need to do it, and you go to the CMO of a GM or the CMO of a Ford, and you're like, "Give me some money so you can compete on my platform against my own tweets." They're like, "Yeah, we don't trust you." And if you go to Procter & Gamble, and they want to sell Tide, or whatever that you want to sell, and you're like, "And also, we've decided to let 10% more racism back on the platform." They're just like, "No." Right.

• 34:17Nilay Patel?

  And so he's got this poll out that's like, "Should advertisers support free speech or political correctness?" And it's like, dude, it's their money. They can pay for whatever they want. That's the free speech.

• 34:31Nilay Patel?

  It's just utter, like, that piece of it, it's like such a blind spot for him, that he's got customers now.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  And unlike Twitter's users, those customers have a million places to go. Like, if you want to advertise on social platforms, your options are limitless. And there are a bunch of companies out there who will very happily take the money that you're taking away from Twitter right now. So I think, like, all the network.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  Facebook would love some incremental ad dollars. They would be very happy to make a little bit more money than they've been making.

• 35:02David Pierce?

  Snapchat's still a thing. They, they have ads.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  Definitely what I've heard is that people, you know, the advertiser class thinks Twitter is... Fun. It's like, it's like the most live environment. So if you do the thing, you make the launch, it's where everyone goes to see if any, they got any traction. But they're like, we don't need it.

• 35:20Alex Cranz?

  It's like the smallest part of a lot of these big agencies spend.

• 35:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:23Alex Cranz?

  When it comes to social media. This is like at the very bottom of their thing. And they're like, oh yeah, okay, we'll throw a hundred K to a quick campaign, do some promoted tweets. So I'm really, really curious to see how much this like, I'm going to be focused on, on blue and solving this identity problem is going to, at the cost of like, I'm going to make all of these advertisers feel comfortable so I can get their billions of dollars, so I can make my billion dollar.

• 35:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:48Alex Cranz?

  Market.

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  I just think the idea that Elon has already pissed off some of his most vocal, hard right, ultra conservative influencer supporters because he has to promise the advertisers and like civil groups.

• 36:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:02Nilay Patel?

  That he can't change the rules too much is fast. Like, he's got to pull that Band-Aid right after the midterms and be like, here are the new rules.

• 36:09Alex Cranz?

  And I'm really curious also how much, how much of Twitter's ad money was coming from car companies? Because like, car companies are a big advertising market, right? Like, they spend a lot of money.

• 36:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. My understanding is the, the top spenders are the streamers, or the HBOs, the Disneys, the companies that are doing big brand campaigns around stuff like that.

• 36:30Alex Cranz?

  And we saw this week that they're also thinking, like, they're very conscious of, like, not Iger, Bob Chapek, the new CEO of Disney, has been making rounds with all of the, the conservative, like, senators and congressmen, assuming that the midterms is going to go their way so that he doesn't get hurt in whatever comes next, so that Disney doesn't, once again, become at the focal point of like, what's happening in the world? You guys suck. So it's going to be really, really interesting to see what happens with that. Plus with Twitter, like, this, the whole brand safety thing, is you're now having two very different concepts of what brand safety is.

• 37:04Nilay Patel?

  I do look forward to a conception of freedom of speech in America where the government forces Disney to buy ads on Twitter next to racist content.

• 37:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:11Nilay Patel?

  Like, you can just, there is a bill coming. Like Ted Cruz is like, I gotta work this out. Like, I'm going in the lab.

• 37:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:17Nilay Patel?

  Here's my new freedom of speech bill. Disney is required to buy ads on Twitter.

• 37:20Alex Cranz?

  And it's gonna be like, what? Supreme Court's gonna do it and then we're gonna just have the same conversation in four years.

• 37:27Nilay Patel?

  By the way, everyone should read Addy's piece about free speech in 230. That's our like big midterm story.

• 37:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's great.

• 37:33Speaker 05

  I would be curious to hear you guys react to this. So something Elon talked about internally on his first week at Twitter is Starlink and the potential of using Starlink to deliver Twitter to countries where I believe the readout of the meeting was something like they discussed how they would literally need to shoot down satellites and that's the only way that.

• 37:51Alex Cranz?

  Did he not talk to Zuck, who had this exact same plan like six years ago?

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  No, Zuck had a plane, Google had balloons.

• 37:58Speaker 05

  Yeah, and I just, I'm curious about that and what you guys think about that because obviously Musk is heavily compromised in China. You know, Twitter employees are already wondering is he gonna build a localized Chinese Twitter that has, you know, he says he's gonna have free speech but also abide by local laws. What does that look like in a place like China? It looks like Doian, the sister app to TikTok. It looks very different. But also like Starlink, what if he just like starts trying to like beam Twitter to countries that do not have anything near the US Constitution via Starlink?

• 38:32Nilay Patel?

  I mean, he can and he can't, right? I mean, right now, he won't let Starlink do that. Like when you install a Starlink receiver in a country that's unsupported, it just GPS is out. Like, and that's why they had to enable it in Ukraine and all these other places. So he's gotta change that decision. I think that decision is hard to change because he needs like SpaceX to be able to be somewhat neutral because it flies over every country. And then he's gotta ship Teslas everywhere. You're right that he's compromised in China. What he's compromised in China by is that he needs to sell a lot of Teslas there and he makes Teslas there. So if he's beaming Twitter to Chinese consumers using Starlink, they're just gonna shut down his Tesla factory.

• 39:13Speaker 05

  The way they

• 39:14Alex Cranz?

  They're just gonna take those Teslas and now there'll be a lot of cool cop cars in China with the Tesla logo.

• 39:21Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 39:22David Pierce?

  But at the same time, I absolutely believe he will try this, like with, with 100% certainty, this will be a thing that happens. Because, because what we've been watching since this started in April is Elon Musk like speedrunning the history of social media. And, and one of the steps along the way is trying to bring your app to other people who can't otherwise get it through weird means of the internet. Like, it's just a thing you're required to do. Google tried it, Facebook tried it, didn't work, but it's, it's like, it's one of the steps you have to fail on before you get to like building a payments network. And he'll eventually land on like vertical video and turning Twitter into a music app like everybody else does. But like, this is the path.

• 40:01Speaker 05

  It's gonna be delivering groceries.

• 40:03David Pierce?

  That's exactly right, yeah.

• 40:05Speaker 05

  Yeah, I, I mean, it's amazing because like Mark Zuckerberg, it took him almost three years to meet with like the ADL and like all of these like activist groups and human rights groups and like Musk did it like two days ago, right? He's like a week into the company and he's already like doing the Zuck like, I'm gonna clean this up tour. Zuck, by the way, I wish he would have actually answered my question when I asked him for advice for Musk, um, because he would have probably said like, don't do this. Trust me, uh, welcome to hell, right? But yeah, I, I, I think the next shoe to drop is who he actually installs permanently in some of these key roles. Because all these people we've been talking about, David Sacks, Jason Calacanis, they're, they're temporary. They're not gonna be working there full time.

• 40:50Speaker 05

  So who are the people that he either elevates internally, brings in from other companies, et cetera? I think that's the next.

• 40:56David Pierce?

  Is there any sense of who the like leading candidate for that would be so far? Like who's the, who's the betting favorite?

• 41:02Speaker 05

  Well, um, Kayvon, the former head of product who Parag fired in May, um, has been in the building, um, for the last week. So there's rumors he may come back. The optics are really, he tweeted that he's not actively involved. He replied to someone and said, but who knows? Well, the optics are rough because if you used to work at Twitter under the former regime and you come in now as Elon has kind of brutally fired the current regime. How does that work with people who have, feel certain ways about that, right? Like it's just, it's a tough thing to be like a former person and come in. That said, there are like 16 former heads of product at Twitter. I'm sure one of them is up for the job. The problem is, is you've got to find someone who like, A, wants to work at a private company

• 41:45Speaker 05

  that's like Musk's fourth company, doesn't want to work in big tech, or wants to leave, and also wants to deal with cleaning up and fixing Twitter. It's just, and working for Musk, like, there's, that's a short list, I think, right now.

• 41:57Alex Cranz?

  I can't imagine he pays, like, really well for this role either. I feel like he's the kind of guy who's like, you know what, you're working for Musk.

• 42:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, so at Tesla, he pays really well, because he pays in Tesla stock. And he doesn't have that anymore.

• 42:09Alex Cranz?

  I don't want that Twitter stock.

• 42:11Speaker 05

  They actually switched to cash grants recently, too, for a lot of people. Because of the economy, they started paying out cash awards, cashed out. So, I do think, like, hey, if he's like, hey, I mean, he's told investors, I know this, that he wants to take Twitter public again in like, three to five years. So, if that's the pitch, come in, fix this, take it back out with me, you'll have, whatever, half a percent of the company when it goes out, we're gonna make it a hundred billion dollar company, I'm Elon Musk, let's go. There may be some people who would bide at that. I think he has a lot of supporters, obviously. So, I just, I'm not sure who it's gonna be right now. Like I said, he has almost ninety direct reports right now.

• 42:47Nilay Patel?

  That's amazing. I mean, honestly, there's parts of this, like, where you just have to, you just have to give it to him.

• 42:51Alex Cranz?

  Doesn't he have twenty direct reports at Tesla?

• 42:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, something like that.

• 42:56Alex Cranz?

  What does his phone look like right now?

• 42:58Speaker 05

  I can't imagine.

• 42:58Alex Cranz?

  Does he just set on fire? Like, does he keep it, like, in ice at all times, so he can use it? Like...

• 43:04Speaker 05

  It's just the Twitter icon, just on the home screen.

• 43:07Nilay Patel?

  I've talked to a lot of CEOs, and like, what's your structure? What's your strategy? I definitely know a CEO is like, how does he get it all done?

• 43:17Speaker 05

  I think he literally just, like, barely sleeps. I think he sleeps like, three to four hours a night. Like, he was tweeting at like, 5:00 AM the other day, and like, like, how bananas this all is, is like, Twitter employees are glued to like, the Elon Jet Twitter account, to like, that tracks where his jet takes off and lands, to like, see, is he coming to the, our office next? Like, it's just, it's just insane. I mean, who knows, like, Raw Ligma may come in and be running.

• 43:40Nilay Patel?

  Wow, that's enough.

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  See ya. It was good to see you, Alex.

• 43:47Speaker 05

  Sorry, guys, I gotta go, I gotta go check in with my husband and wife. See you, guys.

• 43:50Nilay Patel?

  See you, brother. All right, that's, that's how you know it's over. Take a break. We'll be right back to talk about the smart home. We're right back.

• 44:05Speaker 06

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• 44:39Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Neelai Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week is part of our special series on the future of business. I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web, and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 45:00Speaker 07

  We polled all of that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, you won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online. And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 45:25Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back.

• 45:45Alex Cranz?

  We're back.

• 45:46Nilay Patel?

  That's enough. We're just gonna put that aside.

• 45:48Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna talk about what really matters.

• 45:50Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 45:51Alex Cranz?

  I'm tired.

• 45:52Nilay Patel?

  There you go. We're gonna talk about gadgets and standards and parties in Amsterdam where just doors are locking and unlocking left and right. It's Matter Lunch Day. This is a big deal.

• 46:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 46:04David Pierce?

  Wait, I'm sorry. Can I just pause real fast? Alex, I just want to acknowledge the Matter pun that you just made that I think Neil I completely missed.

• 46:11Nilay Patel?

  No, I didn't miss it.

• 46:11David Pierce?

  I just want you to know it was very good.

• 46:13Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 46:14David Pierce?

  It was very good. I liked it very much. And I just want you to know that I see you.

• 46:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I feel like I need to have a limit on how many times I can do that pun in this in this next 45 minutes.

• 46:24David Pierce?

  It's one and you did it and congratulations.

• 46:27Alex Cranz?

  You used it successfully. If I do it again, I'm going to try really, really hard not to.

• 46:30Nilay Patel?

  My strategy with puns is you just ignore the bullies that go away. And puns are verbal bullies.

• 46:38Nilay Patel?

  That's what I got for you. No, Matter Watch Day.

• 46:40Alex Cranz?

  It did.

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  What's going on?

• 46:41Alex Cranz?

  Okay, so Matter launched, over 190 smart home devices are now certified by Matter. But I think the big thing was that we also heard a lot about what's coming next for Matter. And we're starting to see a lot of these other products say, hey, yeah, now we're going to be on Matter. NanoLeaf was one of the big ones that just announced that they're going to finally put out a bunch of Matter products. They'd not done it before this. They'd had some Thread Light bulbs. I have one. It's lovely, but it doesn't have Matter. And so now it's going to have, if you go and buy the new ones, they will have Thread and Matter in them. Another one was Eve's. Eve is like a big company, really works closely with Apple HomeKit, and it's finally getting Matter.

• 47:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:22Alex Cranz?

  That's really exciting. I was noticing a lot of these products were ones that were like kind of exclusively HomeKit before this.

• 47:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:28Alex Cranz?

  And now they're going to be everywhere. And that's exciting because HomeKit smart gadgets, I feel, are better.

• 47:34Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I agree. So I mean, the interesting underlying piece of Matter is that it is basically HomeKit.

• 47:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:39Nilay Patel?

  So Apple, you know, there's a real experience with all this where you just, it's like you just wish everyone would cut to the end.

• 47:46Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:47Nilay Patel?

  Like two years before the end. And so, you know, Amazon had its own ecosystem and Google had its own ecosystem and Apple had its own ecosystem. And you're like, why don't you all just make a thing that works together? And they're like, no, because we would like to fully dominate your life in every way possible.

• 48:02Alex Cranz?

  We want to destroy your credit card.

• 48:04Nilay Patel?

  And then like five years later, here they are. They're very proud of their new standard that they all made together because they realized this was stupid.

• 48:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  So I don't want to take them very happy. They did it. Matter's great.

• 48:14Alex Cranz?

  It took, yeah.

• 48:14Nilay Patel?

  It took a long time.

• 48:15Alex Cranz?

  It took a long time. It shouldn't have taken this long. It kept getting delayed. It's supposed to come out, what, in like 2021, I think?

• 48:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:21Alex Cranz?

  Like it kept getting delayed and it was kind of obnoxious that it took this long, especially because a lot of this stuff could already work together. You could go and get HomeBridge. You could go and get these other software products and just make this shit work. All together and be friends. And the companies were like, no, no, no, no, no, wait, wait, we're gonna get thread and then we're gonna have our new standard.

• 48:41Nilay Patel?

  It took a long time. But the reason it's HomeKit devices first is because it's Apple's credit, a lot of what Matter is, is HomeKit.

• 48:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:49Nilay Patel?

  Like, Apple basically gave away the store on the HomeKit standard and said, here, you use, everyone use HomeKit. It's secure. It's good. It's what we will approve. Apple, to make a smart home device, you want to be on the iPhone. You want to be in the control panel on the iPhone. So everyone, Apple saying, we're gonna let it be HomeKit because that's what we will approve. Big step for Apple.

• 49:10Alex Cranz?

  Huge step for Apple.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  Imagine they like.

• 49:12Alex Cranz?

  They don't play nice.

• 49:13Nilay Patel?

  You know, like whoever at Apple got back to their house, they closed their, like, I hope I did the right thing. You know, like that. Is that kind of move for them? So you're, Eve is like a big HomeKit company and people really like their stuff. Nanoleaf.

• 49:25Alex Cranz?

  Nanoleaf.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  They were.

• 49:27Alex Cranz?

  They do the cool, like, light panels that you always see in every single Battle Station photo on Reddit.

• 49:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Alex Cranz?

  Every guy's like, yeah, I got my new, my new computer setup.

• 49:36Nilay Patel?

  All the streamers have Nanoleaf. That's great. But like Nanoleaf flights are great because they're, they, they have been on thread for a while. So if you had like a HomePod Mini and a Nanoleaf flight.

• 49:45Alex Cranz?

  Just works.

• 49:46Nilay Patel?

  It just works and it's like instantaneous in a way that the best Wi-Fi.

• 49:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Setups are not instantaneous.

• 49:51Alex Cranz?

  I think one of the big ones here for me was Philips Hue Bridge is going to have a software update to support Matter. That's really, really nice because Philips Hue Bridge, I think, is probably one of the ones that the majority of people, if you do, do smart home, you dip your toe in, that's like one of the first things you do. You go and you buy the cool lights. You spend $40 per light bulb and you feel really proud about it until somebody asks you how much you spent for a light bulb and you do the math in your head.

• 50:16David Pierce?

  That one is kind of funny to me because like, in theory, what Matter does is obviate the need for things like the Hue Bridge.

• 50:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:24David Pierce?

  Like, the whole reason for Matter is so that we don't have to plug in a million Hue Bridges to our homes. And to me, that's like a perfect example, right? Like, in, in the best possible world, Philips have come out and say, all of our lights now support Matter. Control them however you want. Happy days are here again. But instead, this is like, this is the launch of Matter, but it's actually like one step in the right direction instead of like a solved problem.

• 50:45Alex Cranz?

  Right. Well, because they don't have, a lot of those, those light bulbs, they don't have the, like, they don't have the hardware in them to support this. They, they have to go through it.

• 50:55David Pierce?

  Which is because the bridge is, the bridge does all of the actual work.

• 50:58Alex Cranz?

  Does all the work. So I'm really excited to never use the Philips Hue. Light app ever again, just a terrifically terrible app.

• 51:06David Pierce?

  That app is trash.

• 51:07Alex Cranz?

  And I'm really excited. And every couple of years, they're like, we redid it. And it's the same, but a slightly different.

• 51:12Nilay Patel?

  This is why I end up, this is why I have a Raspberry Pi.

• 51:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Homebridge makes everything better.

• 51:19Nilay Patel?

  It's so, this, this, I'm excited for Matter just to get, I mean, I love this, it's like a Tamagotchi that runs my thermostat.

• 51:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, I have to feed and care for it. And I'm like, if I don't like, check it every day, it'll die.

• 51:33Nilay Patel?

  It's my little Linux pet.

• 51:34Alex Cranz?

  Give it a little pet.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  And I know if it's working or not, because we can, we can set the thermostat on our phones without using the Nest app. It's the whole game.

• 51:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  I'm excited to, I mean, I'm like, I'm sad, I think bittersweet, like, I might send it off to college.

• 51:49Alex Cranz?

  Aww.

• 51:50Nilay Patel?

  And now we're gonna have Matter instead, but it's, it's that thing where because I have a Nest thermostat, I need to have middleware in my house. Extremely brittle, self-installed middleware in my house to just make it convenient. And that's what the Hue lights have been for so long.

• 52:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:06Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, there's like more bits and bobs here that need to come out. Like, I'm just hesitant to say on this podcast of all podcasts, the words thread border router. And this is like, this is where it belongs. That's where that vocabulary belongs.

• 52:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:23David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 52:24Nilay Patel?

  And like, what needs to happen is every router, every wifi router needs to have a Thread radio in it. So that they're all Thread border routers.

• 52:32David Pierce?

  Is this when we should litigate the difference between Matter over wifi and Matter over Thread? And how they're actually different things and Matter is actually an umbrella term that describes several different things?

• 52:40Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I think this is, I said I was hesitant and it's like, ah.

• 52:44David Pierce?

  I don't want to.

• 52:45Nilay Patel?

  David just Kool-Aid manned into the room. Be like, Matter is an umbrella term.

• 52:50Alex Cranz?

  You did it.

• 52:50David Pierce?

  I would like to leave. I hate this. I'm sorry.

• 52:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Matter is the control standard. It's the how everything talks to each other standard.

• 52:58Alex Cranz?

  But it uses a bunch of different technologies.

• 53:01Nilay Patel?

  They can operate, and the big move is that it uses IP instead of some other, I mean, this stuff is so wonky, they've been talking about it for years.

• 53:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  And it's like, so you guys, after five years of argument, you decided to use IP packets? Instead of some other weirdo riff? And they're like, yes.

• 53:20Alex Cranz?

  It was just shocking. Just shocking. We are gonna see some other new technology coming to matter. They're gonna start supporting garage door controllers, which could be fun. Electronic gates.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  That's all just doors.

• 53:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 53:33Nilay Patel?

  You're just trying two different kinds of doors.

• 53:34Alex Cranz?

  They're just doing doors.

• 53:35Nilay Patel?

  Big doors. Big doors that open.

• 53:37Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna do doors. You're gonna soon be able to open and close your door without having to have Homebridge installed, which is really exciting.

• 53:44Nilay Patel?

  My garage repairman is HomeKit already.

• 53:46Alex Cranz?

  But I think the one that's kind of like interesting is the ambient

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  Small doors.

• 53:51Alex Cranz?

  The tiniest doors.

• 53:53David Pierce?

  Looking around now and I'm like, what if I just never had to open a door again? What if all my doors were just magically open when I needed them?

• 53:58Alex Cranz?

  They open. It's great.

• 54:00David Pierce?

  I could carry two beverages at the same time.

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  The Matter Door Committee is like, alright, next we're doing big doors. And after that, I don't wanna hear it, Tom. We're not doing medium doors. We're going straight to small doors.

• 54:10Alex Cranz?

  The tiny, like the little fairy doors.

• 54:12David Pierce?

  Medium doors suck it.

• 54:17Nilay Patel?

  Ambience.

• 54:18Alex Cranz?

  But I think the big one is gonna be the ambient motion and presence sensing. Because that's a weird technology that, like Matter itself, is a whole bunch of different standards spread all around, right? Like Linksys has, we're gonna bounce the wifi off of you to know exactly where you are in your house at all times, which is both awesome and terrifying. And then you also have like the weird ultrasound sensing and the motion detecting in cameras and stuff. So all of that is gonna soon come into Matter. Soon. I say soon. It is still Matter. It still could be like four years from now when we finally get this. But.

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  The dream here is that you can buy all these different kinds of devices.

• 54:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:58Nilay Patel?

  And it doesn't matter if you're a Google Home person or a HomeKit person.

• 55:01Alex Cranz?

  Doesn't matter at all.

• 55:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh my god, Alex. I'm trying so hard here.

• 55:05David Pierce?

  I gave you one, Alex. I said one.

• 55:07Nilay Patel?

  This is why it was delayed. Like, they just kept getting sidetracked by their own wordplay.

• 55:12Alex Cranz?

  They're like, these puns are so good.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  We gotta get back to work. Someone in the background was like, none of this matters!

• 55:19Alex Cranz?

  Do you think they have like a big sign that's like, absolutely no puns beyond this point? Just no. Like, instant termination.

• 55:25Nilay Patel?

  It's work time.

• 55:28Nilay Patel?

  Start writing that spec. The problem with that is all the like, you can make it taken by motion sensors from any company and door locks from any company and like cobble together your own security system. But what people want to buy is like complete integrated products. It's like, is Ring going to fully participate? Or are they going to hold back some features for their proprietary riff? Right? Like.

• 55:53Alex Cranz?

  I mean, probably, yeah.

• 55:54David Pierce?

  But isn't the goal of Matter to make that a false dichotomy? That like, what we have now is an integrated ecosystem, no matter what you buy? That like, in theory, what should happen now is I can control, I have all of my controllers work, and all I have to do is attach something to my network once, and it talks to all of my devices through all of my devices. And that's so like, the thing Ring has done, which is like build itself a beautiful little walled garden, in theory, eventually becomes like redundant and unnecessary. And to me, what's super exciting about that is you get to a future where the bar for building this stuff is super, super, super low. Because right now, if you want to build like an actually competitive smart home thing, even if it's just like a dumb little like water sensor.

• 56:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:37David Pierce?

  It's so much work, and you have to build so much new software every single time. And a lot of them choose Alexa because Alexa has made that development easier than most. But then you only get once through the market, and then if you want to do HomeKit, that's a whole separate thing. So a lot of companies are just giving up because like, it's not worth, it's not worth the development work to get into this ecosystem. But if you can say like, build it once and it will work for everywhere, it's like, it's like building a web app, and if you can just like, people can have it. That becomes kind of amazing. And I don't know, like Matter is not going to be there in the first iteration, but like, that's got to be where this is headed, and it's supposed to be where this is headed.

• 57:10Alex Cranz?

  I think Neil, I was saying that like, like a web app, what if the web app gives you way different features than the app that you install on your phone?

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like Ring wants you to open their app so they can sell you more Ring cameras. Like, I have Ring, it says like, you have an order, you open it, and then you like, go to the home screen, and it's like, have you thought about buying more cameras? Right? Like, they want, they do want you in their apps in some way.

• 57:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, but now I don't have to open Ring's app. This is the beauty of Matter. The beauty of Matter is I don't ever have to use the Philips app or the Ring app ever again, as long as I can.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  But that desire is not going to go away. Right? Like, the business model for these companies cannot be, you sell a water sensor once and you walk away.

• 57:45Alex Cranz?

  I think like, the example is, so the Philips Hue app, terrible garbage, hate it, the worst thing in the world. But what it does really cool, that I can't do on the Apple Home app, is make all my lights mimic. Candlelight.

• 57:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:58Alex Cranz?

  Like, I want to sit down and read a book and pretend like I have a roaring fire in my home.

• 58:03David Pierce?

  I love when all my lights flicker all the time.

• 58:05Alex Cranz?

  It's great. It's, I play a little jazz, have a little cocktail. It's really, it's a nice moment.

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  Alice is hammered, be like, I can flicker.

• 58:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Flicker faster. It's great.

• 58:19Alex Cranz?

  But you can't do that with the Home App, like, and, and I don't see them changing that anytime soon. And so if I want to do that, I have to go and go there and get through all those ads for other Hue lights that I don't need.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think that this is what, watching this play out is going to be, what features do these companies hold back for their weirdo riffs?

• 58:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:39Nilay Patel?

  And what features are the commodity features? And I, we have no idea, but you can see it play out across every other standard. Like, AirPods are technically Bluetooth.

• 58:50Alex Cranz?

  Technically.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  But, yeah. But Apple is special Bluetooth. It's better than the Bluetooth everybody else gets. So not to be too negative, it's rare that we see a new standard launch.

• 59:00Alex Cranz?

  Well, I was gonna go, there's an, there's an optimistic side to this. And I think David was touching on that earlier, in that you're still, if you just want to go and buy a cheap sensor and plug it into your house and you don't need fancy features, now you can just go do that. You want to go buy a cheap light and you don't care if it does candlelight, great, you can just go do that. So those, those premium ones are still going to be there to say, hey, give me extra money and use my annoying app and you get cooler new features. But for the vast majority of people, they can just opt out of that and just be like, I just want lights that turn on when I get home.

• 59:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm, I-

• 59:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't want to think of my house as an ecosystem of hardware and software. My house is just my house. Like, when I need a light, I would like to buy a light. Like, and, and we've ended up in this place where it's like every time, like, the, the- I always joke with my wife that like anytime she changes anything, it inevitably spirals into changing everything. Right. It's like, we get a new rug and then it's like, oh, well, now the bedspread doesn't work. And then we paint the walls and now I'm tearing down the bathroom and it's all because we got a new fucking rug. And that's what the smart home is like now. It's like, you find one thing that is cool and you suddenly have to rip every wire out of your walls and replace it just so it all works with your old stuff. And Matter, in theory, obviates that for regular people like me, who do not want to deal with it.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  So I've been thinking about this a lot in the context of maybe we'll move. Like, maybe we're gonna have a different house. I'm like, the only way to ethically sell my home is to just run away. To not even tell people that there is a smart home stuff in it. Cause if you start, you have to be like, all right, here's the first thing you need to do. There's 500 things in this house that think the wifi is named whatever the wifi is named. So you've gotta just, you're gonna need a 40 foot ladder and there's a floodlight on the roof. And you've gotta go press a tiny button on the side of it while holding your phone. It's like, no, actually what I should do is just bail.

• 1:00:59Nilay Patel?

  Like, if you're interested in that floodlight, just like every other home in America, you're gonna discover what happened to the floodlight on your own.

• 1:01:05Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna have a fun adventure.

• 1:01:06Nilay Patel?

  I can't be putting on this, like, you can't put this amount of responsibility on someone else. There's a tiny Tamagotchi in the utility room that makes the thermostat work.

• 1:01:16David Pierce?

  If you don't feed it, the house will burn down.

• 1:01:19Nilay Patel?

  You can't give this responsibility to someone. All you can do is like pack your bags and just walk off into the night and be like.

• 1:01:27Alex Cranz?

  Lose my number.

• 1:01:30Alex Cranz?

  Realtor calls, just hang up.

• 1:01:32Nilay Patel?

  So maybe Matter makes this better because all the stuff will just like still work together.

• 1:01:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:36Nilay Patel?

  And it won't be like, here's a collection of apps that runs the garage door. I hope you're okay with this.

• 1:01:44Alex Cranz?

  Well, you're gonna have to wait because that's not coming yet. It won't be supported by Matter.

• 1:01:48Nilay Patel?

  Until Matter supports garage doors.

• 1:01:51Alex Cranz?

  Ethically.

• 1:01:52Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. We're gonna have to keep living in the woods. Last one, just on Matter, which is really cool. Level locks are really cool, the company Level. They've had a secret thread radio in them.

• 1:02:01Alex Cranz?

  That's the coolest thing in the world.

• 1:02:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:04Alex Cranz?

  I love when somebody's like, secretly, we've been planning for this all along. Surprise! And you're just like, oh!

• 1:02:10Nilay Patel?

  What was the one Google smart home thing where secretly it had a microphone all the time? And that was the wrong thing to do? Do you remember this? It was like, one of the Google security system things. And they were like, it's had a microphone the whole time. And everyone was like, no, that's the wrong choice for you to make.

• 1:02:24Alex Cranz?

  Nest Home Security.

• 1:02:25Nilay Patel?

  Yes, the Nest Home Security Hub had a microphone in it. And Google was like, surprise! And everyone was like, bad surprise!

• 1:02:30Alex Cranz?

  Poor surprise. Take it out. Nobody wants that.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  But we have a secret thread radio that makes our locks more compatible with more things? Great.

• 1:02:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And Level, actually, those locks look like real locks.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:42Alex Cranz?

  Which would probably be nice, because part of the problem with most smart locks is super hackable, actually. You have a cool little hacking tool, you can just like, say hello, I'm in your house now. So, it's really nice.

• 1:02:55Nilay Patel?

  I know, go to my house. I'll see you guys later, do the, have fun with the third segment. All right, we'll have-

• 1:03:04David Pierce?

  To race Alex.

• 1:03:05Alex Cranz?

  I know, I'm gonna be like, surprise, Eli.

• 1:03:08Nilay Patel?

  Hello?

• 1:03:09Alex Cranz?

  I found the Tamagotchi. Taking it out of the wall. Enjoy your thermostat.

• 1:03:14Nilay Patel?

  Can you go push that button on the roof that changes the Wi-Fi network for the floodlight? We'll have much more Matter news. By the way, if I could be anywhere, it would be in Amsterdam with Jen and Thomas while they play with smart home gadgets.

• 1:03:26Alex Cranz?

  It just sounds like a-

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Dream situation.

• 1:03:29Alex Cranz?

  Wonderful time.

• 1:03:30Nilay Patel?

  Two of the coolest people on our team.

• 1:03:31Alex Cranz?

  Super jealous.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  And they are just turning lights on and off in Amsterdam. Like, at the fastest rate possible.

• 1:03:38Alex Cranz?

  They're living the life we all want to live.

• 1:03:39Nilay Patel?

  And they're both just the biggest smart home friends. We'll have lots from them on the site. Check it out. Okay, we'll take a break. Quick tour through some gadgets. And I'll do a show. We'll be right back.

• 1:03:53Speaker 06

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• 1:04:37Speaker 08

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 1:05:10Nilay Patel?

  Okay, we're back. Should we talk about the Apple TV and what's going on with that? Or should we start talking about Amazon Music?

• 1:05:17David Pierce?

  Let's do Amazon first because this was, this was like the sneaky big story of the week to me and I'm still surprised at what a thing it turned out to be.

• 1:05:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:26Alex Cranz?

  People really like to read about Amazon Music.

• 1:05:29David Pierce?

  And really hate the new Amazon Music.

• 1:05:31Alex Cranz?

  Really, really hate it.

• 1:05:32David Pierce?

  Not all of them, but some of them.

• 1:05:34Alex Cranz?

  I mean, they basically turned Amazon Music into Pandora.

• 1:05:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, like a combo of Pandora and Spotify's free tier, like much more Spotify's free tier than Pandora. So we had Steve Boom, who's the VP of Amazon Music on Decoder. They had a big announcement. Amazon, the bundle of Amazon Music that came free with Prime, which is not free at all. It's just a, it's just a language we have all chosen to use together. Yes, this expensive thing came with a thing that is not free, but it came with the thing.

• 1:06:02Alex Cranz?

  You pay for this already.

• 1:06:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's funny how they're like, this comes free with Prime and it's like, it's nothing about this is free. To Amazon Music, the music service that is included in your Amazon Prime subscription, used to have only 2 million tracks.

• 1:06:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  But it basically worked like any other premium music service. Like you could pick songs, you could make a playlist, you could, whatever. It was just the way that you thought Apple Music or Spotify Premium worked. They have now changed it so that it has 100 million tracks, which is effectively the major label catalogs, like all of the popular music in America.

• 1:06:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:39Nilay Patel?

  And you can pick, you can ask for one song at a time. You can like, be like, play this one Taylor Swift song to Alexa, it'll play that song.

• 1:06:47David Pierce?

  No, not even. So this is where it kind of falls apart. So the way it works basically is you're just in shuffle mode all the time.

• 1:06:54Alex Cranz?

  Like Pandora.

• 1:06:54David Pierce?

  If you go to Midnight's by Taylor Swift and you hit play, whatever song you click on, it will just shuffle songs from that album. It won't start with the one that you picked. Maybe it will by accident, but it won't. It'll just shuffle through the album. If you pick an artist, it'll shuffle through the artist. If you pick a playlist, it'll shuffle through the playlist. My favorite thing that has happened so far is like, people release singles and they, they look on these services like albums with one song.

• 1:07:17Alex Cranz?

  Mm-hmm.

• 1:07:18David Pierce?

  You go to that album, I thought this was going to be like a loophole. I was like, oh, it'll shuffle the album, but there's only one song, so I win. Uh, you click on it and it just plays a completely different song. It's super jarring. And, and this is the thing is like, it does functionally work like Pandora or in a lot of ways like Spotify is free here. You get a limited number of skips. You're mostly designed to be using it as sort of background music. It's very much like a, put it on at the beginning of the party and don't touch it for six hours kind of music experience.

• 1:07:48Alex Cranz?

  Can you blacklist songs? Like if I want to listen to cats and be like, I don't want to hear Mr. Mestopheles. I just, I want everything else from cats.

• 1:07:58David Pierce?

  First of all, Skimble Shanks to Rarely Cat is the only good song from cats. But we don't need to talk about that.

• 1:08:03Alex Cranz?

  Not memories?

• 1:08:04Nilay Patel?

  I need this to stop. All right, we did puns. We've made weed jokes. Alex said Ligma twice.

• 1:08:11Alex Cranz?

  Other Alex.

• 1:08:12Nilay Patel?

  This is over.

• 1:08:14David Pierce?

  Okay, fair enough.

• 1:08:15Nilay Patel?

  Putting my foot down.

• 1:08:16David Pierce?

  And, and the funny thing about this is this, like, as a music streaming strategy, perfectly valid, right? This is like a thing a lot of folks do. It's, I, it is just how some systems work. I think as far as I can understand, it is, it is basically cheaper to run a service like this where you can't play the song you choose, you just sort of get music as opposed to giving people like true on-demand, click the song and play the song music. Makes perfect sense. The problem is it's a total 180 in how it works from what Amazon Music used to be, which like Neil I said, is smaller library, but basically total access. Uh, and I should say the new Amazon Music has a set of playlists that it calls all-access playlists and those you can interact with however you want.

• 1:08:59David Pierce?

  And those are like, you know, big hits and some stuff like that. So it's, it's both confusing and a total change from what people who are using this are used to. So my, my guess would be if you've never used Apple Music before and you open it up and you're like, oh, tight, all the music is here. I'm going to like throw on a drive playlist while, while I'm on my commute this morning. Like, that's a great experience. But for people who have like curated their own playlists in Apple Music that now don't work the way they expected, or can't go listen to the music they had found there, or what some people are saying, they've bought music that Amazon has now put behind the paywall and won't give them that kind of on-demand access to. Like, I can see why you'd be pissed. They basically just like upended the whole experience for you for something that I think a lot of people weren't really asking for.

• 1:09:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, two things. One, you said Apple Music there twice when you meant Amazon Music, but I think the listeners will forgive us.

• 1:09:48David Pierce?

  Did me an Amazon Music. I'm sorry.

• 1:09:50Nilay Patel?

  That's fine. We'll get over it. Or will we?

• 1:09:52David Pierce?

  It's the one that doesn't have Zane Lowe. That's all I know.

• 1:09:55Nilay Patel?

  Too, in talking to Steve Boom, you know, the Amazon Music has been really targeted at the bottom 80% of music consumers.

• 1:10:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:03Nilay Patel?

  Which is fascinating, right? Like, they're like, this is the thing when you ask Alexa for a song, it just needs to play the song. And most people don't spend a lot of money on music, so we're gonna go here. We're gonna find the 80% of people who don't spend a lot of money on music and make the product for them. And it's gonna be bundled with Prime, so they just use it.

• 1:10:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, I thought it was really interesting that he said to you that there's like a giant subset of people who will never spend $10 a month on music. Cause my impression was always that like, all these companies assumed eventually everyone would do it. That it is like

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:30David Pierce?

  Such a demonstrably good deal for people who listen to music, that eventually it would get everybody. But he's like, no, there is clearly a maximum of people who will do that and we're after everybody else. I just thought that was really interesting.

• 1:10:39Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I'm one of those 80%. I have Apple Music and that's just because I get it through one of my, like, I think my phone plan. Otherwise, I'd be like, I'm not gonna pay for music. I'll just pirate it. I mean, I'll just listen on YouTube.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  Fire up the Plex server. Let's do this thing. Yeah, I mean, that, I think if you make that assumption, you're like, these people don't care very much.

• 1:10:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:00Nilay Patel?

  Right? And so we can just like, change the terms of the deal. And like, people, I think there's an assumption that people are just like wandering, I mean, like, play some music, Alexa. And Alexa's like, here's some stuff. And that's the end of it. And the reality is that some people were actually very particular about their use of this service inside of 2 million tracks. And now that has changed and they're mad.

• 1:11:21Alex Cranz?

  Do they get that back if they pay more? They do, right?

• 1:11:24Nilay Patel?

  Cause there's the premium service.

• 1:11:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and I think they're equally mad about being upsold.

• 1:11:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  So, we'll see.

• 1:11:29Alex Cranz?

  It's Twitter blue all over again.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  Everything is Twitter blue.

• 1:11:32Alex Cranz?

  It all goes back to Twitter.

• 1:11:33Nilay Patel?

  You get a blue checkmark if you pay for non-shuffle playing Amazon Music. Chris Walsh reviewed the Apple TV 4K. It's great. It's an Apple TV. They took out the fan, it's a little lighter, the chip is really fat. Unnecessarily fast. The expensive one has thread. I just am bringing it up because there's a new TV feature that is going to make me upgrade my TVs. Between Matter and QMSVRR on TVs, it's like, I gotta upgrade, I gotta get new locks, I gotta get new lights, I gotta...

• 1:12:00Alex Cranz?

  You gotta get the TV that supports VRR.

• 1:12:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's called, it's not out yet. So the new Apple TV supports something called QMSVRR. I don't know what the QMS stands for and I refuse to Google it. No, that's not true.

• 1:12:11Alex Cranz?

  I was like, I'm Googling it. Quick media switching.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  So there's the new Apple TV has something called QMS VRR, which is Quick Media Switching Variable Refresh Rate. So variable refresh rate, as you know, can just like promotion on your phone, the TVs can swing from 24 hertz to 120.

• 1:12:27Alex Cranz?

  It's always going to give you what looks nicest to your eye.

• 1:12:29Nilay Patel?

  Yep, it's going to match the content dynamically. It's not going to blink out to black. And then QMS is Quick Media Switching. So I think you just sent the, the thing you're playing can send a flag and it can switch the VRR really fast.

• 1:12:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:12:39Nilay Patel?

  So the Apple TV supports it. There are no TVs that support it yet, which is hilarious because there are tons of TVs that support VRR. This seems like it should be but a software update away, but the TV manufacturers continue to be TV manufacturers.

• 1:12:52Alex Cranz?

  Oh, they're gonna make you buy a new TV.

• 1:12:56David Pierce?

  I literally don't think you could have described a feature that sounds less interesting and worth upgrading my TV.

• 1:13:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm going to upgrade my TV to this so fast.

• 1:13:03David Pierce?

  Okay, so you know how when you're watching TV.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  I do not want the TV to blink out to black. I don't want it to happen.

• 1:13:09Alex Cranz?

  You could wait, you could also go and if your, if your TV already supports VRR, somebody will absolutely find a hack.

• 1:13:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:15Alex Cranz?

  And hack QMS on there.

• 1:13:17Nilay Patel?

  And I'm saying that the community of Twitter followers that I have built up is like, crap, I've got to upgrade my TV. So you're my people, but this is the reason I'm going to upgrade my Apple TV. It's the reason I'm finally going to buy a new TV. And then matters.

• 1:13:30David Pierce?

  How many times a day would you say the refresh rate changes on your television, Neelai? Let's talk this through.

• 1:13:34Nilay Patel?

  It's not the refresh rate, it's the, it's the matched content. So you can't run the interface in like Dolby Vision at 120 and then go watch Netflix 24 standard SDR. You can't run the interface at like Dolby Vision 120 and then open Netflix in SDR 24 hertz without like an HDMI refresh. And HDMI refresh with my.

• 1:13:55Speaker 00

  Hate to be the bearer of bad news.

• 1:13:56Nilay Patel?

  We gotta end the show?

• 1:13:58Speaker 00

  No, no. So I am one of your people, Neelai, and I was just telling David earlier, I want to change my TV. There's a limitation to QRR. It only works for changing refresh rates without a blank, the black screen. It does not work going from SDR to HDR or different versions of Dolby or HDR 10 plus.

• 1:14:24Nilay Patel?

  I can't, I can't abide.

• 1:14:25Speaker 00

  I know.

• 1:14:26Nilay Patel?

  Find me the QMS VRR office. We're going there right now.

• 1:14:30Speaker 00

  Very frustrating.

• 1:14:31Nilay Patel?

  Is the HDMI building in the shape of a giant H? Find it on Google Maps. Let's go there. Everyone look for the H on Google Maps. Uh, well, that sucks. Now I'm not buying any TV. You had your chance, LG.

• 1:14:44Alex Cranz?

  He's gonna be an LG.

• 1:14:45David Pierce?

  I feel vindicated somehow. I feel like I won this fight.

• 1:14:47Alex Cranz?

  I still want it. I'm still gonna.

• 1:14:50Nilay Patel?

  I just wanna buy a new TV.

• 1:14:51Alex Cranz?

  I know. Mine's five years old. I'm ready. It's time.

• 1:14:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, mine's six.

• 1:14:54David Pierce?

  I will say that reading.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  What is garbage TV?

• 1:14:56Alex Cranz?

  I gotta get a new TV.

• 1:14:57David Pierce?

  Reading Chris's review and he, he keeps talking about how much unnecessary power there is inside of this box. All I can think after spending months sitting here like begging my Roku TV to load the app that I'm trying to load is like, I will take unlimited power from my set top box. Like I would like six to seven times more power than I need from my set top box. Because it's just, it is the worst. Like if my worst problem was that the screen flickered every once in a while, that'd be great. Now it's like, I opened the HBO Max app and four out of six times, it's just like, ah, I'm gonna crash your television.

• 1:15:29Nilay Patel?

  I bought a smart projector last year and like over the course of this summer, it's like, what if I didn't run Android?

• 1:15:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:37Nilay Patel?

  Like, what if I just like coughed and sneezed? And it's like, here's, here's parts of this interface.

• 1:15:43Alex Cranz?

  The media tech processor.

• 1:15:44David Pierce?

  My TV is tired. My TV literally acts like it's tired. It's just like, all right, give me a minute. Like, yeah, I'll search for that for you, but like, hold on.

• 1:15:53Nilay Patel?

  Hey, Roku 4K sticks are 25 bucks for Black Friday.

• 1:15:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, but then I have to plug a Roku into my Roku TV. I can't like on principle, on principle, I cannot do that. But I will buy an Apple TV that is unnecessarily powerful and expensive and plug it into my Roku TV. Like, yeah, I will.

• 1:16:08Alex Cranz?

  Can you bypass that? Cause I know with Roku, it always like presents you the menu. Can you bypass that?

• 1:16:14David Pierce?

  I have to open my Roku. Yeah, the data I can do with like, I can do that with like great spite and anger. Like every time I open my Roku menu, I can say, no, no Roku to my Apple TV and then I'll feel like I've accomplished something.

• 1:16:25Nilay Patel?

  You know, there's a chart at Apple. There's like, we've got this many A15s out in the world on our TVs. We're about to become a gaming powerhouse. And then like Tim Cook is like, but I hate video games. And that's where that conversation, the conversation's gonna hit that brick wall every time. That's why the Apple TV is unnecessarily powerful. Cause they think it's a game console.

• 1:16:42David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:16:43Nilay Patel?

  And if they can just get enough A15s.

• 1:16:46Alex Cranz?

  Nobody tell them. Nobody tell them. I want my unnecessarily powerful set top box.

• 1:16:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:52Alex Cranz?

  I don't want Roku. Yeah, I don't want Roku. So like, just nobody tell Tim Cook about this. We're all buying it for the games, Tim. It's the only reason.

• 1:17:00Nilay Patel?

  It's all gonna happen. Speaking, last little bit of streaming news, Netflix ads plan came out today. It's $7 a month. You can sign up for it. Doesn't work on the Apple TV at launch.

• 1:17:10Alex Cranz?

  Doesn't work on the Apple TV at launch. A surprising number, a surprising amount of content doesn't work? And you get a big padlock sign? And then when you click, it's like, hey, we noticed you clicked on this movie you wanted to watch. Would you like to give us money? So that's why it doesn't work on Apple TV because.

• 1:17:29Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:17:30Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's why I assume.

• 1:17:31Nilay Patel?

  Netflix gave a statement to 95 Mac and they said it's coming.

• 1:17:35Alex Cranz?

  Okay, it's coming. Once they figure out how to get around the 30%.

• 1:17:38Nilay Patel?

  Well, or they're just gonna remove the the tout to actually pay you money.

• 1:17:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:42Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. But if it doesn't work at launch, I, you know, I'm assuming this.

• 1:17:45Alex Cranz?

  They're gonna email you. It'll be fine.

• 1:17:48Nilay Patel?

  They're gonna get a big fight. But it's out now. You can read Jay wrote about.

• 1:17:52Alex Cranz?

  Jay wrote about it. He tried it out for a few hours and it seems to be just digital advertising. It's like Hulu and stuff where there's no rhyme or reason to when the advertisements will pop up. So when there are those natural breaks, instead of it being there, it's gonna be like mid sentence. I love, would you like to buy some Tide Pods? It's gonna be great. So there's still a lot to figure out there. They should probably look to broadcast television because they figured out this whole advertising thing decades ago. But he seems to like it overall. He's like, yeah, if you if you don't want to be paying as much.

• 1:18:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so on the Netflix app on iOS devices, like phones, it just basically says you need an ad free plan. It doesn't let you buy it.

• 1:18:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, they'll do that on the TV. I'm sure they just have to like, get through some weird app. It doesn't work on older Chromecast either.

• 1:18:40Alex Cranz?

  Right. And it's not gonna work on probably a lot of your older Roku's too, David. I'm sorry. Does it work on yours? You have to test it out.

• 1:18:47David Pierce?

  Give me like 45 minutes for the Netflix app to load and I'll tell you.

• 1:18:51Nilay Patel?

  Also, the video quality is locked at 720p and there's no offline downloads. I don't know.

• 1:18:56David Pierce?

  I think, are you, this strikes me as a fairly clear way for Netflix to get people in and then try to get them to upgrade, which I guess I underestimated the extent to which it was gonna be that. Like, this is not like just as good but with ads. This is worse Netflix for less money.

• 1:19:13Alex Cranz?

  You can't even watch Arrested Development. None of Arrested Development.

• 1:19:16David Pierce?

  That's what I'm saying. Like, it's, it's, it's very clear that this Netflix is looking at this like a gateway drug to a fully paid Netflix plan and not like a real swing at advertising, right?

• 1:19:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  No, I, well, I don't know. I was gonna be really strident about that, but I've, I've, in five seconds, toned my opinion down. Well, so the comparison I was gonna make is if you're gonna do that, then you might as well do Spotify free and actually just make it free and let the ads pay for the free.

• 1:19:39David Pierce?

  Shuffle Netflix.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  Shuffle Netflix. Like, why not?

• 1:19:42Alex Cranz?

  What are you watching today? You'll find out.

• 1:19:45Nilay Patel?

  But Spotify free is really important to Spotify.

• 1:19:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:48Nilay Patel?

  It is the most important part of their product. It is the thing they give away and everybody has it and it is designed to make you start to pay for Spotify. And it's the top of the funnel. So they care a lot about Spotify free. It's the thing they make. Netflix got dragged kicking in streaming to Netflix with ads, right? Like, they kinda don't wanna make it. They've had to. They've reduced the price. It's still $7. So you still have to pay for it. And then you get these ads and the ads are where the money is supposed to come from, because Netflix has this theoretically huge audience. So they're, I think they're just kinda stuck in the middle. Like, they haven't built the, let's capture everyone and get them to pay us, because it's still not free. They still gotta get $7 a month out of people. And they haven't built the, this is worth $7 a month and you have to watch ads.

• 1:20:30Alex Cranz?

  They've got a lot of contracts they have to get through, too. So, so Jay's piece noted that some of the stuff that's not available now is gonna be available later. And that's just because, like, they have to go back to these people and be like, hey, we signed a deal with you that we would just stream this movie. Now we wanna put ads on it.

• 1:20:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:46Alex Cranz?

  Can we do that without giving you more money? And I don't think they can.

• 1:20:51Nilay Patel?

  I just think they should have done a free with ads tier in addition to this one.

• 1:20:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:55Nilay Patel?

  Like if you did free with ads and then you did $7 with like some ads and maybe 10 AP.

• 1:21:01Alex Cranz?

  Or like free with this, with this limited library.

• 1:21:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:05Alex Cranz?

  And then $7 with the whole library and ads. And maybe that's the plan. And so we're all going to be really delighted when that happens because it'll be an improvement from this. I wouldn't.

• 1:21:14David Pierce?

  I mean, we all, we all paid a crap ton of money for cable subscriptions that still had a lot of ads. So like, I don't know that money plus ads is all that shocking a behavior.

• 1:21:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:25David Pierce?

  That's true. It would be interesting to see Netflix be like, okay, you can get it for free, but every hour it's going to be 30 minutes of ads. Ready for this? Like, here we go.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  I feel compelled at this time to disclose, we made a Netflix show. It's very good. It's called The Future Of. I'm hopelessly biased in favor of it. I think you should watch it, no matter what your plan. Also, Comcast is an investor in the Fox Media, our parent company. You know, I don't care what Peacock does at this time, but they exist and they outrun a competitive streaming service.

• 1:21:54Alex Cranz?

  Should we? I feel like that's a good segue to talk about Comcast.

• 1:21:57Nilay Patel?

  Just in general?

• 1:21:58Alex Cranz?

  Just in general. No, they, they have their own rival to Roku, speaking of. And they said a while back, they announced that they and Charter were going to be partnering together and doing their own hardware ecosystem. And they finally have a name for it and it's called Xumo.

• 1:22:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:13Alex Cranz?

  And it's the exact same name that they already were using for a software suite. So that's kind of interesting. I don't know. I think it's interesting mainly because of Roku. And, and how this is really a play for that super cheap set top box. Because a lot of people have Roku TVs and these aging TVs and they are not going to go and pay a thousand dollars to have QMS VRR. And instead they're just going to be like, I want a cheap set top box to play me the things. And Charter and Comcast are like, we'll do it and it will be called Xumo. I'm just that name.

• 1:22:45David Pierce?

  When I moved into my current house, we signed up for Comcast and they literally sent me a set top box, which back then was called Flex. And I believe their Flex program is now what's turning into Xumo for free. And I literally was like, I don't want it. I have set top boxes. I'm good. And he was just like, ah, we'll send you one. Like, I think you're right that it's, they want to be in this platform game so badly. They've been trying this for years. Like, nobody has tried more times with less success than Comcast to build

• 1:23:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:17David Pierce?

  a real like set top box empire.

• 1:23:19Alex Cranz?

  It's really interesting because they do have this obsession with hardware and that that no other kind of companies do. They all, they always want to own all of that hardware in your house and make you pay a leasing fee for it.

• 1:23:31David Pierce?

  Yeah. Remember when the X1 was going to be like the supercomputer of set top boxes? And then everybody was like, the X1 costs like six times too much money, Comcast.

• 1:23:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:40David Pierce?

  Please leave me alone. I do not want your cable box.

• 1:23:42Alex Cranz?

  Like, I think they're addicted, if anything, to that leasing revenue stream and they're trying everything, they're trying their damnedest to keep a hold of it as they lose all these other elements of like cable is going away, cable is, you know, everybody says 10 years from now cable is going to be dead. And where is that going to leave them with internet? And then ideally these set top boxes that they will charge you an arm and a leg for each month.

• 1:24:05David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, and just like looking at the, the home screen on my Roku, right? Like I, I, I turn on my television and right next to all of my apps, there's just a big ass ad on the right side. And like, you know, who would like to be the one selling that ad is every media company on planet earth. So like, it makes a lot of sense to me that that's a really competitive space. And for Comcast, like as it gets harder and harder to sell people cable subscriptions, like owning the box where people look at their television is going to be a lucrative space, right? Like Roku has continued to prove that. And it's, it's going to keep working for any company that can actually figure out how to pull this off. What's crazy to me is how few have actually been able to like, it's been a long time since there was an interesting new player in this space. And like, I certainly don't think Xumo is going to change that.

• 1:24:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:24:49David Pierce?

  But like, I guess kudos to Comcast for

• 1:24:52Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think

• 1:24:52David Pierce?

  continuing to bang its head against this particular wall.

• 1:24:54Nilay Patel?

  I think you guys have done an excellent job laying out the strategic case for Comcast to make this product fun. They called it Xumo with their next.

• 1:25:05Nilay Patel?

  Like Z U M O.

• 1:25:06David Pierce?

  This is the important part.

• 1:25:08Alex Cranz?

  This is, yeah, that's the whole name.

• 1:25:10Nilay Patel?

  They, we live in a world where people do not really understand the difference between Roku and Hulu. Like, it's my favorite question that I've ever gotten from like the family. Like, what is the difference between Roku? And they're like, Xumo on our X-Class TVs running on Xfinity. And it's like, you guys.

• 1:25:27Alex Cranz?

  Playing the software, because it also has software and the software is called Xumo Play. So you've got to open the Xumo Play app on your Xumo.

• 1:25:35Nilay Patel?

  No, thank you.

• 1:25:37Nilay Patel?

  I just don't know.

• 1:25:38David Pierce?

  Okay, wait, Neelai, can I, can I propose something to you that I think is gonna slightly blow your mind?

• 1:25:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:43David Pierce?

  This name is a tremendous improvement over the streaming box that Comcast launched last year, which, which was spelled uppercase X, lowercase i, uppercase O, lowercase n, lowercase e.

• 1:25:57Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:25:58Alex Cranz?

  What?

• 1:25:59David Pierce?

  This is a real thing that happened.

• 1:26:00Alex Cranz?

  How do you say that?

• 1:26:01David Pierce?

  Is it, and, and all of the headlines you will find about this thing are about how I literally don't know how to pronounce the name. It's very good. This was Comcast last try, so Xumo is, we're moving in the right direction.

• 1:26:12Alex Cranz?

  So does Comcast just have a room and they've got an X and they've got a whole bunch of vowels? And they're just like, throw them at the wall. That's the name.

• 1:26:20David Pierce?

  It's just like, it's like the refrigerator magnets. They just like whip them at the refrigerator. Like, ah, there it is.

• 1:26:24Alex Cranz?

  The guy had the X in there.

• 1:26:25Nilay Patel?

  Is it the Z1? But then they saw there was an X. I don't know, man.

• 1:26:29David Pierce?

  Oh, Z1 could be good.

• 1:26:30Nilay Patel?

  At the end of the day, Comcast is sad that they used to have two businesses. They sold cable television and internet access.

• 1:26:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:36Nilay Patel?

  And one business is going away and it's not the internet access business. So they, they're like, what can we do to get back in the TV business?

• 1:26:43Alex Cranz?

  Give us some monies.

• 1:26:44Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, here's what we're gonna do. Army of consultants come up with a name. And Army of consultants was like, we drank a lot of tequila. We're going with Z1. Oh, Xumo. Let's go with Xumo.

• 1:26:56Nilay Patel?

  It's bad. All right. There's other stuff going on on the site. We're just like way over. It's like six hours of Vergecast at this point. I mean, we love you all.

• 1:27:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:27:05Nilay Patel?

  But honestly, I can't think about Elon Musk anymore. I just can't. I can't do it. Site is great. Lots of coverage on the site. We had like a really fun day on the site just today between Elon, the amount of short posts, Thomas and Janet, the matter thing. We had the big decoder investigation and what's going on in the FCC, which was real fun.

• 1:27:23David Pierce?

  Versus is back.

• 1:27:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, Versus is back. Yeah, V did her first Versus.

• 1:27:27Alex Cranz?

  Great.

• 1:27:27Nilay Patel?

  On smartwatches. It's great. Just kind of like an incredible week on the old verge.com. So go check it out. You know, tweet at us. I'm at reckless. I mean, while you can. We gotta add comments to quick posts. It's like as fast as we can. Tweet us while you can. I'm at reckless. Alex is Alex6trans. David is at Pierce on Twitter, the platform that we once loved. Well, actually, no, I never.

• 1:27:50David Pierce?

  Pay $8 a month and you can tweet mean things to certain Eli as much as you want. And he's obligated to read them.

• 1:27:55Nilay Patel?

  One last shout out to Addy's big piece on the First Amendment this week, which I think is really important. Maybe one of the most important things we've ever published. Please go read that. Back on Wednesday, McKenna and Addy are going to talk about that piece. It's gonna be a good one.

• 1:28:05David Pierce?

  Indeed.

• 1:28:06Nilay Patel?

  And then you can call us. 866-VERGE11. 866-837-4311. David will listen to everything that you say.

• 1:28:13David Pierce?

  For $8 a month.

• 1:28:15Nilay Patel?

  Eight.

• 1:28:16David Pierce?

  But I'll pay you $8 a month.

• 1:28:17Nilay Patel?

  I stole this from Elon. Anytime anyone criticizes me on Twitter now, I'm just like $8. It's great. I encourage you to try it with your friends and family.

• 1:28:24David Pierce?

  I have to give you $8 a month and then you get to yell at me on the Vergecast hotline. I think that's how that works.

• 1:28:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah. David will pay $8 if you call this number. Please call this number. 866-VERGE11. David will give you $8 if you call it. That's it. That's Vergecast track.

• 1:28:43Speaker 00

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. 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 Minterz 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.

• 1:29:20Nilay Patel?

  Hi, I'm Nilay Patel, editor in chief of The Verge, and Decoder is my show about big ideas and other problems. This week, as part of our special series on the future of business, I talked with Matthew Prince, co-founder and CEO of CloudFlare, about how AI bots and agents are remaking the business model of the web and how CloudFlare is trying to build a new economy around websites getting paid every time an AI crawler shows up.

• 1:29:42Speaker 07

  We polled all that data and looked at it and said that it would be the second half of 2027, automated traffic will become larger than human traffic. I was stunned when, just a few months later in May, a team came to me and said, "You won't believe it, but automated traffic is now past human traffic online." And that's just expanding like crazy. And if you extrapolate that out, five years from now, we think that automated traffic will be 1,000 times human traffic online.

• 1:30:06Nilay Patel?

  This was a fascinating conversation, not just about the future of the web, but also about how one of the world's most important software companies is deciding which of its employees it can replace with AI. Listen to Decoder wherever you get your podcasts. This series is presented by EY.

• 1:30:22Speaker 09

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