HBO vs. Max and Twitter vs. Substack

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss Warner Bros. Discovery's new streaming service, Sony's mobile gaming move, and Twitter's feud with Substack. Further reading: HBO and Discovery’s ‘Max’ streaming service is here Max is charging more money for 4K, and that means it can't suck this time What we’ve learned about Sony PlayStation’s new smartphone games team Sony is gearing up for a new cloud gaming push amid rumors of a PlayStation handheld NFL Sunday Ticket on YouTube starts at $249 for the 2023 season Google TV’s live guide is getting crammed full of over 800 free channels Microsoft is experimenting with a Windows gaming handheld mode for Steam Deck-like devices NPR becomes first major news organization to leave Twitter PBS also stops tweeting after being hit with ‘government-funded media’ label Is Substack Notes a ‘Twitter clone’? We asked CEO Chris Best Mini’s cars are getting an ‘intelligent personal assistant’ named Spike You can now talk to Microsoft’s Bing chatbot from your keyboard in iOS with SwiftKey Nvidia RTX 4070 review: a $599 RTX 3080 — kind of Vote for us in the People’s Voice Webby Awards for Best Technology Podcast Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from 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.

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• 1:25Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Verchast, the flagship podcast of being super right about CarPlay and how useful it is. That's what we're doing. It's a full hour of me speaking my truth. I will say I, we've talked about a lot of things on the show over the past decade that we've been doing it. A decade plus, if you count the Engage podcast. Never, never have I received the quality of comments that I received when I said CarPlay was not as good as sticking your phone, running apps to your dashboard. Like, the YouTube commenter is like, I've been listening to this idiot for a decade. This is the worst thing he's ever said. I got emails. I'm pretty sure I tanked our Apple Podcast review. I'm right.

• 2:05David Pierce?

  No.

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  And I want you to know that my conviction in this opinion is 100%. I just spent two hours in the car on my way here. And I gotta say, being able to use two apps at once continues to be better than not being able to use.

• 2:19David Pierce?

  How many accidents did you get in on your way to the office?

• 2:22Alex Cranz?

  What are you multitasking on the highway?

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  Maps and the radio. I don't understand.

• 2:26Alex Cranz?

  I can do both those things with CarPlay.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  Do you want two screens or one screen?

• 2:31Alex Cranz?

  I don't get it. I think it's just your old car. I think it's all your old car.

• 2:37Nilay Patel?

  Today I was in the new Android powered car. Forked Android, I might remind you. And it was still better to have the radio up.

• 2:46Alex Cranz?

  And then your little tiny dinky map?

• 2:48Nilay Patel?

  It's a huge phone.

• 2:50Alex Cranz?

  Was it?

• 2:50Nilay Patel?

  All right, can I throw, I'm gonna throw another one into the mix.

• 2:52Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  If you live in a place where Apple Maps is good, Apple Maps is better than Google Maps when you're driving.

• 2:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, oh yeah, 100%.

• 2:58David Pierce?

  That's absolutely true. Yeah.

• 2:59Nilay Patel?

  I feel like this has been suppressed. I, you know.

• 3:02Alex Cranz?

  By big Google?

• 3:02Nilay Patel?

  By big Google. You can't tweet about it. If you type Apple Maps into Twitter, Elon personally comes to your house and removes the keys from your keyboard and makes you type Google Maps.

• 3:14Alex Cranz?

  Just switches all the letters around?

• 3:16Nilay Patel?

  No, no, no, you meant Google. This is, this is dangerous information on the podcast today.

• 3:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we're just speaking truth.

• 3:22Nilay Patel?

  Fauci doesn't want you to know that Apple Maps is good.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  Anyway.

• 3:30David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 3:31Nilay Patel?

  Look.

• 3:32David Pierce?

  While we're doing this.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  I'm writing about CarPlay.

• 3:33David Pierce?

  No, you're not. You just aren't, is the thing.

• 3:37David Pierce?

  Because this thing you keep saying where what if I had my phone and also the radio is like, what if I use my phone for navigation and then listen to like Z100 the whole way into the office?

• 3:49Nilay Patel?

  No, no, it's what if the map is open?

• 3:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  And to switch songs, so even skip tracks or switch between Sirius channels are a real thing that Becky does all the time?

• 3:57David Pierce?

  Oh, right. So you, you're on Sirius. We talked about this in the draft. So you've immediately ruled yourself out as like a person who exists in normal society.

• 4:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:05David Pierce?

  So that doesn't make any sense.

• 4:06Nilay Patel?

  Even if you just wanna use Spotify and you just wanna beep ahead tracks. It's better and easier.

• 4:13Alex Cranz?

  You don't have like a little button? I have a little button on my car and I go boop and it skips tracks.

• 4:17David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's on the steering wheel. Problem solved.

• 4:19Alex Cranz?

  And then I go, hey Siri, hopefully that didn't activate anything, just looking around me. And then the maps change sometimes. I don't really do the maps one as much because I get confused driving.

• 4:30Nilay Patel?

  Again, I'm gonna go back to, I've got a few things that I believe. One is that wired connections are better than wireless ones.

• 4:37Alex Cranz?

  Okay, that's true.

• 4:38Nilay Patel?

  That's one of my hottest opinions on the show.

• 4:40Alex Cranz?

  That's accurate.

• 4:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's just real.

• 4:42Nilay Patel?

  One time some guy made an entire YouTube video about how Comcast owned me because I suggested that wired internet was superior to wireless internet. It's like a whole YouTube video about exposing us, the thing that we disclose most often.

• 4:55David Pierce?

  So I will say, just to pause on that, that is your only correct opinion about CarPlay. Every other thing about CarPlay you are dead wrong about, but the thing where wireless CarPlay is kind of trash is precisely correct. Because wireless CarPlay exists on this like just long enough delay that you press the button. And right at that moment, you go, oh, I don't think I pressed the button and press the button again because it's a stupid ass capacitive button. So instead of changing tracks once, it changes tracks twice because you didn't know if you pressed the button or not.

• 5:24Alex Cranz?

  Looks like it's Bluetooth, right?

• 5:26David Pierce?

  Is just plug it in and everything is magically terrific. I literally, I bought a new car and was not allowed to have wired CarPlay and it's the only thing I don't like about my new car. That's your only car.

• 5:37Nilay Patel?

  Do you have USB ports?

• 5:39David Pierce?

  It does. You can plug it in and you can charge, but it is not allowed to do CarPlay.

• 5:44Nilay Patel?

  See, Fauci doesn't want to have CarPlay.

• 5:47Alex Cranz?

  Fauci.

• 5:48Nilay Patel?

  So it's wired internet connections are better than wireless ones.

• 5:51Alex Cranz?

  That's correct.

• 5:52David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  Copyright law is the only meaningful speech regulation on the internet. We don't have to go to that.

• 5:57Alex Cranz?

  Interesting, interesting.

• 5:58David Pierce?

  Classic CarPlay take.

• 6:01Nilay Patel?

  Two apps are better than one app. More screens are better than one screen. Very simple. I feel like we all agree on this, except when it comes to should we use CarPlay?

• 6:12Alex Cranz?

  Digital maximalism.

• 6:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's our, yes, that's why we founded the website.

• 6:19Alex Cranz?

  I think you're right on everything but CarPlay.

• 6:22Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 6:23Alex Cranz?

  But I also have, I have the maps and the music on my CarPlay.

• 6:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, can some people who agree with me that CarPlay is bad, and there are some of them.

• 6:30Alex Cranz?

  All two of you.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  Can we be a little louder? Can we start some bot accounts? Whatever we gotta say.

• 6:35Alex Cranz?

  Stay quiet. We're just gonna bully you off any platform you're on. Don't, don't, don't risk it.

• 6:41David Pierce?

  Yeah, the other part of this is at some point, Neelai, you have to remember that you have to use something. And, and what you're describing is a delightful Spotify experience where I have a giant screen where nothing works. And CarPlay, at least, is a screen where things work.

• 6:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying that it's better to have the map on one screen and the music on the other screen.

• 7:01Alex Cranz?

  No, it's not.

• 7:02Nilay Patel?

  The most important person in my life.

• 7:04David Pierce?

  Why are you looking at the music?

• 7:05Nilay Patel?

  Agrees with me about this. I asked Becky, hey, have you tried CarPlay again? And she looked at me and she said, why? And that was all I needed to know.

• 7:13David Pierce?

  Be honest, the most important person in your life is Howard Stern on Sirius XM, which you listen to every single day.

• 7:20Nilay Patel?

  That's all, that's all I care about. All right. This has nothing to do with what we need to talk about today. Quite a lot happened this week. HBO Max announced that it would just be called Max.

• 7:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:30Nilay Patel?

  They announced a bunch of shows and pricing tiers.

• 7:34Alex Cranz?

  They did.

• 7:34Nilay Patel?

  They did not acknowledge that they had ruthlessly stolen my daughter's name.

• 7:38Alex Cranz?

  They did.

• 7:39Nilay Patel?

  Which is just a real.

• 7:41Alex Cranz?

  How you doing?

• 7:42Nilay Patel?

  It's a real problem.

• 7:42Alex Cranz?

  How's, how's that going, by the way?

• 7:44Nilay Patel?

  I haven't sat her down yet and I'm like, here's what happened. AT&T bought Warner Brothers and now everything's gonna be super confusing for you.

• 7:52David Pierce?

  But do you think, is this like, do you remember when the Amazon Echoes first came out? And there were all these stories, like interviewing people named Alexa about what their life was gonna be like now that, now that the Amazon Echo exists? Do you think this is gonna be like that? Like, there's gonna be a, a big, like, Washington Post feature about, like, people named Max being upset at the future of streaming services?

• 8:12Nilay Patel?

  They should interview Ma- it's her birthday and I think a great birthday present from the Washington Post to my daughter would be interviewing her about HBO Max. Yeah, she's five. Uh, strong opinions.

• 8:21Alex Cranz?

  Well, Max is catered to her. Like, that was a big part of, of what they talked about in their big announcement. It was like, we want kids and kids won't watch HBO, but they'll watch Max.

• 8:30Nilay Patel?

  All right, we'll come back to this. This is the first thing we're gonna talk about. Sean Holster uncovered a bunch of information about PlayStation Cloud streaming that connects with its handheld that we've heard about. There's some other streaming news. We got pricing for Sunday Ticket. Then there's just a bunch of Twitter stuff and there's Twitter v Substack, which came to the most ridiculous of conclusions. Culminating in an episode of Decoder, which honestly, I'm just going to emotionally process in the third act of the show. We're just, we're just gonna do that together. Let's start with Max, though.

• 8:58Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, she's five.

• 8:59Nilay Patel?

  She's five.

• 9:00Alex Cranz?

  Congratulations, Max.

• 9:01Nilay Patel?

  She's great. Yeah, we made it. She has a thing in her room called the Yodo Player.

• 9:05Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 9:06Nilay Patel?

  It's- That's the one Neil Young made, right? No, she's a porno player. Max only listens to high bitrate lossless. No, the Yodo Player, every parent knows what this is, but you, it's a streaming music box, but it doesn't have an interface. It has cards.

• 9:21Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  So you stick a card in it and it goes and collects a file with the internet and like reads you a story. Do you want that in your car? I mean, at this point, the Yodo Player could definitely be in our car. We, we, we think about it a lot in our family, but she got new cards for her birthday and one was Kids Bop. And last night, we were just like, is she, is she listening to Ariana Grande at 11:00 PM?

• 9:42Nilay Patel?

  And we stood in the door and she was just like, had stuck her Kids Bop.

• 9:46Alex Cranz?

  Just bopping along?

• 9:47Nilay Patel?

  This is the future of streaming media. It's amazing. Physical cards. Bring back cartridges. Absolutely. Anyhow, Max, the actual streaming service. Alex, what on earth is going on here?

• 9:57Alex Cranz?

  Well, they, they felt that HBO was too elitist a brand, like HBO Max was too elitist. They didn't like it. People weren't using it, where they were using Discovery and they were staying on Discovery and they were being retained by Discovery. So they said, the best thing to do is kind of dumb it all down and just call it Max.

• 10:17Nilay Patel?

  Wait, this was their argument is that people weren't watching enough HBO Max to rebrand it?

• 10:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes. They're like, Discovery does all of this stuff great. HBO Max doesn't. It kind of sucks. And, and a big part of this was about kids. They, they were like, we have all of this great content for kids and nobody's watching it. It's not like hitting with that audience and we think that's because it's called HBO Max and that runs off all the children. Is that accurate?

• 10:44Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  The full nonsense argument. I mean, so the one number I just want to point out is that they did say during the presentation, I think that it was 75% of HBO Max's viewership came from the home screen. So like people loading the app, pick something that they see. Whereas people on Discovery Plus are actually like looking around and finding stuff and going to the different tabs that say like home and food and travel and whatever.

• 11:06Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 11:07David Pierce?

  And what they took that to mean was not, oh, cool. We built a service so full of good stuff that people are finding things that they like immediately. But let's build one that makes everybody work much harder to find anything they want to watch because we're just going to shove everything together. And they've been talking about doing this since the beginning, right? Like since Warner Brothers Discovery became a thing, when those two companies came together, they've been talking about the possibility of having sort of one big behemoth streaming service to cover everything. And I'm not like morally opposed to the idea. I just think they made every logistical decision dead wrong in the process of doing this.

• 11:47Alex Cranz?

  I thought it was interesting. We didn't actually see the UI. We didn't see what this app is going to look like because it's not going to be based on the HBO Max app. They were pretty open about like, it's garbage, which we all know it's garbage. And instead they're going to use like the Discovery kind of stuff with some other things and make Voltron and this new Max app will be amazing in all ways and it'll be Max.

• 12:09Nilay Patel?

  Can I just do some quick history here?

• 12:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, go for it.

• 12:11Nilay Patel?

  Just to refresh my brain.

• 12:13Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 12:13Nilay Patel?

  So HBO existed.

• 12:14Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 12:15Nilay Patel?

  It was part of Time Warner.

• 12:17Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 12:17Nilay Patel?

  They made two apps.

• 12:19Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 12:19Nilay Patel?

  One called HBO Go and one called HBO Now.

• 12:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 12:23Nilay Patel?

  Then AT&T bought Time Warner for a lot of money.

• 12:29Alex Cranz?

  It was a tragedy.

• 12:30Nilay Patel?

  So much money. And the plan was to...

• 12:35Alex Cranz?

  Dot, dot, dot. They're like, we did it.

• 12:38Nilay Patel?

  Something.

• 12:38Alex Cranz?

  Something.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  They were like, this is too many apps and we need a new one. So they built HBO Max. At some point, I believe Vulture reported this, they rebooted the tech stack of the HBO Max app.

• 12:54Alex Cranz?

  That sounds right.

• 12:54Nilay Patel?

  This is like a thing that happened along the way. They were like, we gotta make it better. We know it's bad. It's crashes too much. And they redid it. Then they spent a lot of money on Zack Snyder making a square version of Justice League.

• 13:08Alex Cranz?

  Black and white.

• 13:09Nilay Patel?

  Also in black and white. That is seven hours long.

• 13:13Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 13:13Nilay Patel?

  This failed, I believe, to convert millions of people to HBO Max. Okay, I'm just, these are all things that happened.

• 13:21Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 13:22Nilay Patel?

  Then AT&T was like, wait, why did we do this? And they sold Warner Brothers, Time Warner, to Discovery, which is like, this app is garbage. The centerpiece of HBO's gigantic purchase was making this app. And they sold it to Discovery and Discovery is like, this was stupid.

• 13:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Discovery was always like, this is stupid. We, you guys make a ton of stuff and HBO Max is a garbage app and it's too focused. And you're ignoring all of this other content.

• 13:54Nilay Patel?

  What if this was more of a fire hose of garbage situation?

• 13:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because that's what Discovery is very, very good at, right? Discovery is excellent at just fire hose of garbage and which is why we all watch HGTV and TLC and everything else. I assume judging from all of David's picks in the draft earlier this week.

• 14:11David Pierce?

  Hell yeah, dude. Nate and Jeremiah's home project. Let's go. There's new episode tonight and I will watch it.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  This is just a canon of filler content is what I'm getting out of this.

• 14:20David Pierce?

  Which we, one important piece of this history here is that David Zaslove, the CEO of this combined company, has made abundantly clear over and over and over and over that that is the content he believes in.

• 14:32Nilay Patel?

  Especially for streaming dude does not want or care about these incredibly expensive, you know, coastal elite premium stuff like what he wants is more money and more space to make shows with Chip and Joanna Gaines. Like that's it. And he has been so clear about that. He has canceled expensive stuff. They killed Batgirl because they didn't think it was very good. Like dude wants movies in theaters and he wants down home TV shows on streaming services. And so to me, the long story of HBO ends with someone who absolutely does not give one single crap about HBO as a brand, as a store of content, or as an ongoing concern, and has basically just tried to sort of systematically destroy it.

• 15:14Alex Cranz?

  He does though. I like that part. I don't think is fair because he's still, they are acknowledging HBO. It sounds like it's going to be its own like carve out in the app like.

• 15:24Nilay Patel?

  It'll be a tab.

• 15:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is the tab. You go here for quality stuff. You watch H20.

• 15:28Nilay Patel?

  Good stuff.

• 15:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is the H24 tab and then we're going to do everything else over here. And I kind of get that calculus. Like he understands that Tik Tok and YouTube are his competitors because they're Discovery's competitors, right? Then they're also everybody's competitors for attention. That's why you guys both chose them.

• 15:45Nilay Patel?

  Weren't you the one who told me that you were watching Tik Tok while watching the show?

• 15:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Nilay Patel?

  During the last week.

• 15:50Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was great.

• 15:51Nilay Patel?

  This is what I mean. Like Discovery makes a lot of shows that you can definitely watch YouTube while watching.

• 15:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And I would actually say Netflix makes a lot of those shows too.

• 16:00Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 16:00Nilay Patel?

  Netflix makes a lot of shows that are, it's definitely fine if you missed the third episode because you were watching Tik Tok.

• 16:05Alex Cranz?

  Right. Netflix is where like I go and I'm like, I just need my pajamas on my brain. Netflix HBO is like, I'm gonna go get culture.

• 16:11Nilay Patel?

  We just have to do it all. Disclosure. I am the EP of a Netflix show. It's called The Future of. It's a very good. Do not watch Tik Tok while watching the third episode. Just lock in. If you're one of my bot people, get some bots to watch it too. That would be great. I, it would just be make me happy. If suddenly our show hit the top of Netflix charts for no reason, I would receive nothing from it, but I think it would be funny and I think we could share that moment together. That's my ask to you, the rich ass audience. Our company Vox Media has a bunch of investors. NBC Universal is one of those investors that's on my Comcast, which operates Peacock. I'm pretty sure Vox Media has made shows and HBO. I know, I just can't remember what they're called. I'm sorry. This is a great disclosure. You can see how conflicted I am.

• 16:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there it is. Uh, we have a TV division. They sell things to every TV network.

• 16:58Alex Cranz?

  We're super conflicted, but we can still have opinions.

• 17:01Nilay Patel?

  I think at this point should be abundantly clear that we have opinions.

• 17:06Nilay Patel?

  We're not really constrained in what we see. But there it is. Those are disclosures. You had them now.

• 17:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And I like, but back to what I was saying, HBO is very much like not a pajama brain network. You do watch it so then you can go talk with your friends or whatever.

• 17:21Nilay Patel?

  Pajama brain.

• 17:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. You know, sometimes you're just like, I want pajamas for my brain.

• 17:26Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's a thing. Is that a thing or is that a thing that you say?

• 17:29Alex Cranz?

  It's a thing my friend group says.

• 17:30Nilay Patel?

  That's good. Yeah. Okay. Carry on.

• 17:32Alex Cranz?

  Carry on. Yeah. And, and so it's not a pajama brain network for the most part. Netflix is, Discovery Go is, and he, I think, I guess, wants to do that with Max. But also then have this little tab that's HBO, because they, they announced a bunch of shows that are very HBO shows that are not these big like pajama brain stuff.

• 17:51David Pierce?

  Sort of. They announced a bunch of really expensive shows based on somewhat impressive existing IP. It's the kind of thing you would want to do if you didn't want to take any risks, but you wanted to make a bunch of money and seem prestigious is you would announce a 10 year long Harry Potter show, which is what they did, right? Like i- if they had announced the eight new HBO originals that you've never heard of that are going to totally blow your mind to pieces, I'd be a lot more willing to believe that there's some real investment in like the thing that HBO has always done well. But to me, this is like the same thing AT&T used to say to HBO, which is basically like, you need to make a lot more stuff and you need to make sure all of it is a hit and you have to prove it to us before you make it. And.

• 18:33Alex Cranz?

  And HBO is really bad at that. You think about all their biggest hits, Succession, Game of Thrones. Those weren't huge hits in the first episode. Those took, those were slow burns.

• 18:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:43Alex Cranz?

  And it was only because they were given the opportunity to do that. And that's a big complaint about a lot of the other streamers, Netflix in particular, is everybody says, oh, they're not giving them enough time to make these shows.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  So they haven't changed, turned over the leadership at HBO. It's still Casey Boyz.

• 18:56Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And he was very, he was like onstage, talking about it, really like doing his, his, uh, dance for the audience and, and saying, yeah, we're really excited because we've got Harry Potter. We've got a third Game of Thrones series.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, so who was this event for? So I was watching this event like on and off throughout the day because it was fairly long.

• 19:18Alex Cranz?

  It took forever.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  Um, and I couldn't tell who it was meant for.

• 19:23Alex Cranz?

  I don't think they knew.

• 19:24Nilay Patel?

  Audiences. It's not like

• 19:25David Pierce?

  It's for investors.

• 19:27Nilay Patel?

  It's for investors, right?

• 19:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, they're desperately trying to say the streaming market is crap right now. You, dear Wall Street, have bet that we are not going to pull this off. We're sitting on a mountain of debt and we need you to think that we are about to be on fire in a good way. And

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Which is And I'm just saying for that audience, you like, what you want to show them is we've got one decade of Harry Potter in the back.

• 19:50David Pierce?

  Sure. Yeah.

• 19:51Nilay Patel?

  These nerds are never going anywhere. They're paying us 1999 a month for 4K Harry Potter for 10 years. Can you do multiplication? That's the money. Give us

• 20:00Alex Cranz?

  And they were dancing around the really big issue with Harry Potter. Because Harry Potter has kind of like become a toxic property and everybody's refused. Everybody at Warner Brothers is refusing to acknowledge that because they're in so tight with J K Rowling. But she has become a very, very toxic personality. She had that big video game and people were furious about it and refusing to play it.

• 20:20David Pierce?

  That game was also a huge hit.

• 20:21Alex Cranz?

  It was a huge hit, but, but there's like definitely that toxicity. We also saw it with, um, the Fantastic Beasts hiring Johnny Depp. Like this continues to happen. And when they asked, boys, what are you doing with her? Is she going to be involved in the show? She can be participating. Is she getting money for it? Obviously, yes. He just danced around it. He's like, you know, she does her thing. We do ours. She says she's going to use all her money to destroy trans people. That's fine. We're going to keep over here. And I think at some point they are going to have to deal with that. The same way Disney

• 20:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they've got a decade long headache.

• 20:55Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 20:55Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just saying for this audience, and I agree.

• 20:58Alex Cranz?

  For this audience, this audience doesn't give a shit.

• 21:00Nilay Patel?

  This audience is seeing, okay, people will pay the monthly subscription to watch Harry Potter for a decade. You're doing True Detective season four, Jodie Foster. That's a hit, right? You've got to show them the franchise IP. I don't think that forecloses. New stuff from HBO, especially because that leadership is still there.

• 21:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I think we're still gonna see stuff from HBO. We're still gonna see stuff from that kind of HBO Max team. They specifically called out the big successes there, which are Hacks, The Sex Lives of College Girls, which is a really difficult show to say you're watching at any point in your life.

• 21:35Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because you're the only person on the show that can say it and get away with it without.

• 21:39Alex Cranz?

  And even I was like, the other day, somebody's like, what are you watching? I was like, The Sex Lives of College Girls, ooh. On HBO Max, it's a real show. So they were calling out like those big successes that were HBO Max shows, where people were concerned that they were going to just get rid of that programming team, get rid of that programming. They were also, the other big thing that people were scared about was cartoons and losing cartoons, which is why they specifically called out a new Gremlins cartoon and Rick and Morty anime, another property that has a big toxic cloud around it because.

• 22:10Nilay Patel?

  Justin Orland.

• 22:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:12David Pierce?

  But yet again, another big established thing with a big fan base and a big catalog. I don't know, I just, to me, like, play this out, right? So these things all get combined. They start this app and they start to see how people use it, right? And, and the reality of the world is that I, people spend more hours a day doing dishes while they watch HGTV than they do sitting in front of Succession once a week. And they're gonna look at it and they're gonna say, this one episode of Succession cost more than three seasons of three HGTV shows. What in God's name are we doing? And David Zazlov, as a person who has made very clear that he is not doing this for the prestige, he is doing this for the money. And frankly, the company needs to do things for the money.

• 22:54David Pierce?

  Like, how do you not eventually look at the balance and say, why are we spending all of this money to get these really great shows that people watch a little bit of into this tab? When, in fact, actually, most of the people who come to our app are watching this other stuff that's much cheaper to produce and is an endlessly renewable resource. Like, I just, unless you are a person who cares, which is the thing that HBO has done over the years, is they've had people in charge who have said, we're going to take big risks because I'm in charge and I say so. That's, they just don't have that now. And the, and now they're bundled together with all this other stuff that is just going to decimate it in every metric except for. Quality and cultural relevance and those two things are really hard to put money against.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Here are the two things. So you're correct that the company needs money. They're in a bunch of debt.

• 23:40David Pierce?

  Like so badly.

• 23:40Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of debt.

• 23:41David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  AT&T still has a stake. They're in a bunch of debt. Everyone needs this thing to make money. Great. Zaslove, known for making money. He's, he's like, good at it.

• 23:49David Pierce?

  He is good at it.

• 23:50Nilay Patel?

  But my theory as to why he'll keep HBO around is that my theory for why he bought Warner Brothers in the first place, which is one, AT&T is stupid and sold it to him for pennies on the dollar. Uh, and he could do it. But two, rich guys like fancy stuff.

• 24:04David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  And I, at the end of the day, this is why the tech industry is just deeply attracted to Hollywood. Like they, they want, this is why Jeff Bezos is like, you know what? The expanse, 90 seasons. It's gonna get super boring at the end of it. Cause they, they wanna be in those rooms. This is why Adam Mosser is like, always at the Met Gala and that moment for Instagram was happening. The opportunity to show the cultural relevance is like irresistible.

• 24:30David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  To be the big patron of the arts. And that's the thing he bought. He bought Warner Brothers. So I, I, I agree. That tension is there, especially for HBO, but I think he, he likes the big movies. He wants to put the big movies in theaters again, and they will have a home on his app. And I think his ultimate goal is to replace cable, just cable bundle writ large. You don't need anything. You just need this one app, costs 20 bucks a month. You're watching HGTV all day while you're just running around and then at night you're like, I wanna watch a blockbuster movie. And it's there for you made.

• 25:07David Pierce?

  You know, like people say.

• 25:10Alex Cranz?

  I, I think that's right.

• 25:11Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. You don't walk around your house talking like a 1940s bitch.

• 25:15David Pierce?

  No, I agree.

• 25:16Nilay Patel?

  The newest blockbuster from Warner Brothers is here.

• 25:20David Pierce?

  I do think that's right though. And I think they talked about making big investments in sports and Warner Brothers also has, I think TNT and Bleacher Report and stuff like that. So like, there's some sports in the empire already and they've talked about news and like, so it's all there.

• 25:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, TNT is basketball. It's not some sport. I mean, that's like.

• 25:37David Pierce?

  Yeah. Oh no, it's the hoops. They, they have real moves. Like if they wanna put some stuff into there, they have real splashy stuff they can do. I totally agree. I think that's gonna take a while because sports rights are really expensive and really love cable subscribers. But I do think like that, that road makes a lot of sense to me. I totally agree with that.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  And they have CNN, which is oddly not part of this.

• 25:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Because Zaslove hates CNN.

• 26:01Alex Cranz?

  He like went over there and was like, I hate you guys. I don't like this place.

• 26:05Nilay Patel?

  And shut it down.

• 26:06Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna do a whole other thing now. You're gonna be, you're gonna, you're gonna appeal to everyone instead of just the liberal elites. Uh, and, and that's really what he's coming at, right? Like this whole thing was him being like, I'm done with the liberal elites. This is gonna be a streaming service for the regular guy. Do you drink beer and drive a truck and like, wear a lot of plaid? This is for you.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  How do you, how do you say that and also green light the next succession? You just can't like.

• 26:33Nilay Patel?

  No, that's, I, no, I think you do. That's the bundle. This is the whole game. I mean, like in the magazine days, the front of book is like what sold the magazine and the fancy features were there to win awards and push the ad prices higher. This in many ways how we sell our property, right? Like you have the cheap stuff that gets people there. And then you have the prestige stuff that like makes you fancier and pushes your rates up and like at some point, they're gonna do an ad supported version here, right?

• 26:59Alex Cranz?

  Right. They're doing, they're doing three versions. Notably, Discovery Go is not going away. They're keeping Discovery Go.

• 27:04David Pierce?

  It's called Discovery Plus, by the way.

• 27:05Alex Cranz?

  Sorry. Whatever. They're keeping Discovery. Discovery is sticking around and they're doing these three new bundles. One is ad supported. I believe it's $9.99 and it's just ad supported. You watch it in HD. That's it. Then there's a $15.99 one, which is what the current non ad supported one is cost. No ads, HD only.

• 27:29Nilay Patel?

  Why?

• 27:30Alex Cranz?

  And you get 30 downloads, concurrent downloads, I guess.

• 27:34Nilay Patel?

  Wait, concurrent, concurrent streams or?

• 27:37David Pierce?

  No, like you can have things downloaded offline 30 of them at a time.

• 27:41Alex Cranz?

  So you can download and that was unclear. It seems like they haven't limited to this in the past, but now they are. And then there's now a $19.99 version, which gives you four concurrent streams, 4K UHD HDR with Dolby Atmos and 100 downloads.

• 27:59David Pierce?

  Okay. I just want to say every single thing about these pricing plans sucks. Every single thing.

• 28:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:05David Pierce?

  Starting with, my absolute favorite thing about this is the 9.99 month plan is the ad light plan, which implies the existence of an ad heavy plan.

• 28:16David Pierce?

  Which does not exist. There you start at ad light. I just, I don't know what that's supposed to mean.

• 28:20Alex Cranz?

  Sure.

• 28:21David Pierce?

  Two streams is not enough. I think four should be like the bare minimum for any streaming service that costs money. HD quality, like 4K being a thing you have to pay 10 extra dollars a month for is outrageous.

• 28:33Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 28:33David Pierce?

  Especially given how spotty and crappy a lot of the 4K content, especially on these services, has been in the past. Anything other than unlimited downloads is outrageous.

• 28:43Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 28:43David Pierce?

  A hundred is a lot. Whatever. I can get used to a hundred. You're probably not going to put more than a hundred things on your stuff anyway. But just the, the idea at all of it being limited and not being able to download anything on the ad light plan is, is lunacy. I like, this is all so incredibly user hostile to me. It just makes me angry.

• 29:03Alex Cranz?

  Well, it's already like that. So before you couldn't do downloads if you were on the cheapest version. And I think Netflix and a couple of others, gatekeep downloads, offline downloads.

• 29:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:11Alex Cranz?

  For higher prices. So this is just all in. I honestly, I think they could have even not mentioned how many downloads and gotten away with it.

• 29:20Nilay Patel?

  The combination of things here. I'm with David.

• 29:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's super hostile.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  We're inventing things to put boundaries on so we can upsell you.

• 29:28David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 29:28Alex Cranz?

  And the, the audacity of HBO Max, who didn't even launch with 4K in 2019, no 4K, only got around to doing like Game of Thrones in 4K last year. To be like, now we're going to charge you for 4K. And I was like, you couldn't even deliver 4K.

• 29:43Nilay Patel?

  Make some guarantees while it's coming.

• 29:44Alex Cranz?

  What am I seeing in 4K?

• 29:46Nilay Patel?

  But like, just the combo platter, like these companies are so big. They, they all have like marketing teams. They invent personas. This is like the phrase they use.

• 29:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:55Nilay Patel?

  They're like, let's invent a person and see what they would buy. And they all do this exercise. And I'm sure we have marketing people who listen to the show who are like freaking out. I see you. I'm in your brain. I've been to your meetings. And they're like, it's Sally. Sally's 35 years old. She doesn't travel a lot. She doesn't really know about 4K. She doesn't mind ads. She's got household income of 50K. 999 is perfect for her. And they invented a person who demands both 4K and 100 offline downloads.

• 30:25Alex Cranz?

  It's B.

• 30:25Nilay Patel?

  And they could not find a person who just wants 4K for slightly more money. Right? Cause that's, I can think of a lot of people who are like, I do not need to download any content. At all. 0% need to do that. But when I watch the movies, I want them to be in 4K HDR.

• 30:43Alex Cranz?

  This is, I mean-

• 30:43Nilay Patel?

  How do you miss that person in the sequence of pricing?

• 30:46Alex Cranz?

  It's kind of similar to Netflix, though, right? Netflix does this similar pricing scheme where there's like a $15 version that gives you downloads and everything. But then if you want 4K, you still have, and more concurrent streams, you have to go up to the $20 version.

• 31:01Nilay Patel?

  I guess the difference is Netflix has added those tiers over time.

• 31:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it didn't feel quite as dickish.

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 31:06Alex Cranz?

  Like, this feels like you're just-

• 31:07Nilay Patel?

  You're going backwards a little bit?

• 31:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:09Nilay Patel?

  Because you're making it way more expensive in the middle tier. It seems like the worst deal in history.

• 31:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. That said, they are going to add a bunch of discoveries catalog to this thing, and all that's in HD anyway. And if you're just watching those shows, it doesn't matter?

• 31:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:25Nilay Patel?

  David, you watch these shows. Are you like-

• 31:27David Pierce?

  No.

• 31:28Alex Cranz?

  You like Discovery?

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  I can't quite see the Wayne Scott.

• 31:31David Pierce?

  Well, so this is why I'm with you, Neil, because I think, to me, the $15.99 a month middle plan is both the best and worst deal here. Because on the one hand, you get essentially nothing for it, especially if you're not the kind of person who wants to download. Like, the difference is fewer ads and downloads. And as a person who generally pays for no ads, fine, but that's $6 a month to just turn off ads. Do with that what you will. You don't get 4K, so then the flip side of that means you're paying another $4 a month for like the occasional movie to be in 4K. Because a huge amount of that library is just not available in 4K. Like I was just saying, it's gotten better over time.

• 32:11Alex Cranz?

  Well-

• 32:11David Pierce?

  But it's still not great.

• 32:12Alex Cranz?

  I'm curious about that because a lot of this stuff is available in 4K, especially that older catalog they've done.

• 32:18David Pierce?

  A lot of it exists in 4K.

• 32:19Alex Cranz?

  Right, in theory, there was all the DC Universe stuff that was all shot in 4K, on 4K in DC Universe. And then when it all got moved over and they killed that app-

• 32:27David Pierce?

  Right.

• 32:28Alex Cranz?

  They were like, "We're only doing it in 1080, sorry." And I think it was honestly probably like a bandwidth issue. I've always wanted to track this down, and if you know, email me. But I think there was likely some sort of bandwidth issues. They were like, "Well, we can't handle 4K streams all the time, so let's gatekeep those. Let's limit it." But it's, nobody's confirmed that. That's just my, like, tin cap.

• 32:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 32:50Alex Cranz?

  Theory.

• 32:51Nilay Patel?

  I know. We'll see how it goes. They need.

• 32:53Alex Cranz?

  I think they're gonna be fine, cuz this is just, they just Disneyfied everything. This was just watching like Disney being born in a, in a single investor meeting. Like, we're gonna go after the kids, we're gonna go after middle America.

• 33:08Nilay Patel?

  That is the single best outcome that Zaza could have hoped for, is one person saying this was like watching Disney being born.

• 33:13David Pierce?

  Seriously.

• 33:14Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's what they're after.

• 33:16Alex Cranz?

  The bad kind of Disney, right?

• 33:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the one, the one that ruthlessly, ruthlessly, the one that ruthlessly stole my daughter's name.

• 33:22Alex Cranz?

  Yes, yeah. Like, this is not the good, exciting Disney.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  Can we, we have not lingered on this at all. This is actually, I think it's a great name for a child. Horrible name for a streaming service.

• 33:32David Pierce?

  Awful.

• 33:32Nilay Patel?

  Especially because the history of Max is Cinemax or Skinemax. That's how I used to know it. And it's like, you picked the weakest brand in your portfolio, the one that is most associated with a late night softcore pornography.

• 33:48David Pierce?

  Yeah, for the kids.

• 33:49Nilay Patel?

  You picked your porn name for the kid's service, yeah.

• 33:51Alex Cranz?

  I mean, a lot of kids would be like, ooh, staying up late, mom's not here, Cinemax.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  Is Cinemax in this app?

• 33:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, well, Cinemax is gone, but yeah, it's, it's in the app. Like, it's already.

• 34:05David Pierce?

  The tabs are HBO, food, travel, kids, porn.

• 34:11Nilay Patel?

  Taxi cab confessions.

• 34:14Alex Cranz?

  What we think of as Cinemax is not, not, like, it's, it's all their newer stuff. So, um, Warrior, uh, Banshee, that kind of stuff, their, their original content.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  But I'm so impressed that you can keep track of what medium-grade shows are and what medium-grade networks.

• 34:30Alex Cranz?

  Look, I love medium-grade shows. That's like, that's my bread and butter. It's like, you, you know where all the sports are? I'm like, I know where Warrior season three is.

• 34:42Nilay Patel?

  You're like, there's a show, it's called Samurai, it's on A and F, and I'm like, yeah, that sounds right.

• 34:46Alex Cranz?

  I love Samurai. It's so good. Oh, my God, the season finale. Incredible, go watch it.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, we gotta take a break.

• 34:57David Pierce?

  Wait, before we do, can we just talk about the name for one more second?

• 34:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:00David Pierce?

  Because it makes me angry. And the, what they should have called it, I think is HBO, and we can litigate that if you want to. But what I did was there, there's this very good Wikipedia page of, uh, all of the Warner Brothers Discovery properties that they have divested over time.

• 35:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:19David Pierce?

  Either that don't exist anymore or that they've sold. And I went through the list of all the ones that no longer exist to see if there were any better names that presumably they already own the trademark to and that they should have named their service instead of Max. Would you like to hear a few of them?

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I would absolutely. Yes.

• 35:35David Pierce?

  Do you remember Beam, Casey Neistat's app? B E M E.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, okay.

• 35:38David Pierce?

  That would have been a better name than Max. Uh, CNN Airport, which is a thing. Would have been a better name than Max. Uh, there's one called D-Play. That's probably not a good idea. Uh, I don't recommend D-Play.

• 35:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's right. They were cinema acts.

• 35:52David Pierce?

  Uh, they had one called Festival, which I actually quite like.

• 35:55Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 35:57David Pierce?

  Uh, there was Full Screen. Full Screen, I actually think is pretty good.

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  Full Screen is good. The more I think about Festival, the more it lands and the D-plays.

• 36:05David Pierce?

  That's fair. Hanna-Barbera Home Video was a company that existed.

• 36:10Nilay Patel?

  For the kids! That's really good.

• 36:12David Pierce?

  There's, there's one called OK, but it's spelled O-H exclamation point K. That was pretty good.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  That's drugs. That's a general of drugs.

• 36:24David Pierce?

  Uh, Warner Brothers owned a minorities taken Quibi. Can I interest you in bringing Quibi back?

• 36:28Nilay Patel?

  Yes, always.

• 36:30David Pierce?

  There was one called Warner Max.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  Can we just, wait, can we just hit, just the, um, Quibi? It's like every time we talk about HBO Max, I wanna go through the AT&T. Just to remind, this happened. Yeah. AT&T got sued by the Trump Department of Justice because it wanted Warner Brothers so badly. And its whole pitch was, we're gonna put, like, bite-sized episodes of Game of Thrones preloaded on Android phones.

• 36:58Nilay Patel?

  This we, we had to sit here and I had to not be as outraged as I was like I did. The veneer of journalistic integrity was so thin. And then like now there's Max and I just want to remind everybody that Quibi super happened. It was a real thing.

• 37:18Alex Cranz?

  For a month, not even a month, for like a week.

• 37:21Nilay Patel?

  Like we went to a CES presentation.

• 37:24Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:24Nilay Patel?

  They were like, our innovation is that you will turn your phone and we've named it Turnstile.

• 37:31Alex Cranz?

  Remember, and you had to like, you had to talk to people about like, and I really thought that like, once I held it in my hand and I flipped it, I was understanding like a change in cinema.

• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 37:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, they were, they were into it.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  They got Steven Spielberg to say that his innovation was a show that came out only at night.

• 37:47Alex Cranz?

  He's like, I've always wanted to do this.

• 37:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, every now and again, it's important to just take one step back and like, this happened to us a lot. And no one believed us.

• 37:57Alex Cranz?

  But now we have Max.

• 37:58Nilay Patel?

  Now we have Max. Oh, can more names, please?

• 38:00David Pierce?

  Uh, the, the only last one I had for you was Warner Max, which was a short-lived production company inside of.

• 38:08Nilay Patel?

  I don't believe that that happened. If you experienced Warner Max, please let me know.

• 38:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, I really think between CNN Airport and Hannah Barbera Home Video, we're really on to something.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  I can't believe they got rid of CNN Airport.

• 38:18David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:19Nilay Patel?

  It feels like a, it's a. What do you watch in airports now?

• 38:21David Pierce?

  Easy win. I know.

• 38:21Alex Cranz?

  Fox.

• 38:23Nilay Patel?

  It's fine.

• 38:24Alex Cranz?

  Yes, whatever.

• 38:26Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. I mean, let's find out, let's see if you know how we can get our hands on CNN Airport.

• 38:34Nilay Patel?

  Send me an email, you know?

• 38:35Alex Cranz?

  Virgin Airport.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  We're, we're expanding. We're taking a break. We'll be right back.

• 38:44Speaker 01

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• 40:01Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Let's talk about another kind of streaming.

• 40:05Alex Cranz?

  The sports?

• 40:06Nilay Patel?

  No, video games.

• 40:07Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  It's a real thing. Last week, we talked about this rumor that Sony was developing a PlayStation handheld called the Q Lite.

• 40:14Alex Cranz?

  The worst name.

• 40:15Nilay Patel?

  And you very confidently said, it's not for game streaming. Sony has farmed out all of its game streaming to Microsoft, which in the moment, I thought to myself, what?

• 40:25Alex Cranz?

  It was true.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  It was true.

• 40:27Alex Cranz?

  But things have changed.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  But many things have changed. But even in that moment when you said that last week, I was like, that doesn't.

• 40:32Alex Cranz?

  Well, it was really goofy because the reporting around the handheld was saying it is only going to be for streaming from your PS5.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 40:40Alex Cranz?

  To the handheld, which is goofy.

• 40:42Nilay Patel?

  Which is goofy. And it is true that Sony had made some deal to use Microsoft's cloud technology.

• 40:48Alex Cranz?

  Right. The gaming team didn't actually find out about it.

• 40:51Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 40:52Alex Cranz?

  Until like afterwards. So for the longest time, Sony was farming out a lot of their gaming stuff and everything, even though they'd purchased, they purchased this really great cloud gaming company in like the mid 2000s.

• 41:04Nilay Patel?

  Guy, guy.

• 41:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And they had all this technology and then they just didn't do anything with it. And then they were like, whatever, ignore it. And now apparently they're starting to pay attention to cloud gaming after Stadia died and everybody forgot Amazon exists and Microsoft is just cruising along.

• 41:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 41:21Alex Cranz?

  The only game in town.

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  So the reason that I, that when you said it last week, I was like, but they hate each other right now. Right? And like the idea that Sony is big enough that one division of Sony made a deal to use Azure, the game division, like, fine, I buy it. These are all huge companies. But Sony and Microsoft are basically at odds over the Activision deal. They are in legal conflict in countries around the world. And the idea that cloud streaming is the future of mainstream gameplay. I think is just sort of accepted wisdom. It's not true, but everyone thinks it will be true soon.

• 41:54Alex Cranz?

  I mean, that's mainly because Microsoft has been saying that for the last few years. And everybody else was kind of ignored them, including Nintendo and Sony. They were both like, eh, the infrastructure is not there. We don't want to do it. Nintendo famously doesn't really invest in this stuff. Took forever even to get cloud saves.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:12Alex Cranz?

  Off the ground. So, so this was like, everybody kind of ignored it. So I think it's a surprise, but a welcome one that Sony is now on board.

• 42:19Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so Sean Hollister has been digging through Sony's job listings. I mean, he's in it.

• 42:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  This is like, he's a detective.

• 42:29David Pierce?

  Sean might accidentally work for Sony. We can't, we can't prove it.

• 42:32Alex Cranz?

  He is recruiter at Sony. If you get a call from him, he's got a job offer. Take it. Uh, yeah, he, he has uncovered a lot of roles that are being hired all around cloud gaming tech. It seems like some of those roles got listed and then he wrote about them and then they disappeared.

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  Wow, surprise.

• 42:47Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, surprising. Uh, which, and it suggests that they really are planning a strategy around cloud gaming. They're finally figuring it out. They're super late to the party though. And, and that I think is going to be a challenge, both because the infrastructure, like Microsoft is really good at it because it has Azure. You're going to have to go and get that from Google or Oracle or somebody else, right? That's going to be a challenge. And then also they're just, Google did it and failed in like a heartbeat. And now they're coming in, like they're the Kool-Aid man, just coming in late.

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:19David Pierce?

  So I, I kind of see that slightly differently. I would say where we are is we are rapidly on the road to all of that tech. Becoming pretty easy, actually, that because Azure exists and because

• 43:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 43:33David Pierce?

  Amazon is working on Luna stuff and that's all just going to get baked into AWS. Because Google did all this stuff with Stadia that is now getting rolled into Google Cloud, like The roll your own cloud gaming thing is actually going to get really easy, really fast, I think. And so if I'm Sony, what I'm thinking is, okay, I historically have better games than everybody else. And, uh, and so I can come in and in a place where I no longer have to be a leader in technology. I can just show up, attach myself to this technology that already exists, put my better games into it and win. I like, I actually don't know that I feel like Sony is super late to this game. They're late to the game if you want to be a cloud provider. But Sony clearly doesn't want to be a cloud provider.

• 44:17Alex Cranz?

  I mean, I think they're still gonna have problems there because they still have to get the developers on board, right? That was a whole challenge on all of these. The reasons the Azure one works is because they said, no, you don't have to do anything.

• 44:29David Pierce?

  That's very true.

• 44:29Alex Cranz?

  But both Stadia and and Luna, you have to go and like redo the games to work on the port.

• 44:35David Pierce?

  And in some cases, build them like from scratch, like their, yeah, cloud games are different.

• 44:39Alex Cranz?

  And and that's that that's like.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  Unless you have Assassin's Creed, which apparently can run anywhere for any reason.

• 44:44Alex Cranz?

  It's actually running on my watch right now. Yeah. So they're gonna have to like, figure that out. And I think that's where they're kind of late to the party is that a lot of that work, they're either gonna have to redo it by choosing Google or choosing Amazon and then saying, okay, now we gotta go do all of our games. Because what they're known for is they're exclusives, right? It's the Naughty Dog stuff and and things like that. And now they're gonna have to go and get those done. And those games also, when they do port them elsewhere, struggle, like both the um, the big one right now is The Last of Us on PC. Looking like absolute garbage. Yeah. And now you want to also go and adapt for the cloud?

• 45:25Alex Cranz?

  That's where their big challenge is, I think. Like, it's less about going and finding the the provider and and making a deal with them. It's getting all of this stuff developed and working well enough. And then also the whole huge infrastructure problem that no one solved because PG's not on the SEC.

• 45:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:41Alex Cranz?

  So we're still have garbage.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But we are seeing this wave, right? There's the Logitech cloud gaming thing. We've, there's a few of them now, right? I would, the Steam Deck.

• 45:52Alex Cranz?

  The Steam Deck, yeah, the little handhelds. And they're great. And I think that's what like, they're chasing after. Because they realized, oh, people, this is a new product category, which I was begging for, and I'm so happy it's happening. Like, this is a thing. We can go into this space and make games and and push them in this way. Microsoft was right. Like, that was Microsoft's whole calculus is, we can do, you can go and you can buy it and you can have the console and it will play perfectly. But some people can't afford the console. Some people can't afford, like, it's their parents' TV and their parents are never gonna let them use the TV to play it. So they need something more portable. Now we can do a portable offering without making the Vita.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So Sony was thinking about this. They walked away from it. They walked away from game streaming.

• 46:36Alex Cranz?

  Pretty.

• 46:36Nilay Patel?

  Signed this deal with Microsoft, which.

• 46:38Alex Cranz?

  They always had it. Like game streaming has always been there. It's just been not great. And everybody always would forget about it. And part of that was like, it's not very fast. It's not newer games. The big thing with Microsoft, what changed with Microsoft is Microsoft said, oh, we're going to do like day and date release.

• 46:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:54Alex Cranz?

  That's huge. That that suddenly makes this viable rather than like effectively like for the longest time, cloud gaming was kind of Mac gaming. Like technically you can do it.

• 47:03Nilay Patel?

  Wow.

• 47:04Alex Cranz?

  But are you gonna have, you're gonna play Assassin's Creed and that's about it.

• 47:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So what have we learned from these listings? What do, because it looks like Sony is going to rebuild an entire infrastructure. This handheld that will compete with the Logitech and other stuff, but have Sony's library of games and Sony's graphical fidelity and Sony's service. What do we think this service looks like based on what Sean has uncovered?

• 47:25Alex Cranz?

  I mean, it sounds like they're they're going with a lot of people from Gaikai, I believe is how you say it. So I think we're gonna see that again. I think I think this is, we're just gonna be getting like their new release. And there's some stuff we don't know, right? Specifically, the developer stuff and how those developers are gonna work. That's, I think, the big kind of up in the air from what I'm reading.

• 47:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 47:46Alex Cranz?

  Please correct me if I'm wrong, but we'll see. I, I think if you have to nail that part before you can really get it off the ground. But right now, it's like, okay, we're exploring the space. We're building in the space. We're gonna get more engineers on board and more like people that know like that tech.

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:00Alex Cranz?

  And that's really, really crucial. And then they're gonna have to go and teach all of the developers, specifically Naughty Dog, how to design a game for something besides the PlayStation, because Naughty Dog sucks at it.

• 48:10Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell a completely unrelated story?

• 48:12Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  It's totally unrelated, but this is what I worry about when Sean writes about game streaming services. Like pangs of anxiety rocket through my body when Sean writes about game streaming services. We were in a lawsuit for six years.

• 48:26Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 48:27Nilay Patel?

  Because Sean called a game streaming service defunct. This is a true story. And the, the guy who ran it claimed that we had defamed him for calling his dead game streaming service defunct. And he went and sued us and he, the statute of limitations had expired. But in Delaware, where he sued us, the state courts had not yet set the precedent that linking to an article did not constitute republishing it.

• 48:56Nilay Patel?

  So that was his argument to get out of the statute of limitations that we had recently linked to this article where we had called the dead gaming streaming service defunct.

• 49:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:05Nilay Patel?

  So he republished it and the art outside lawyers were like, yeah, the Delaware judge just wants this precedent.

• 49:11Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 49:12Nilay Patel?

  Six years of litigation.

• 49:14Alex Cranz?

  Whoa.

• 49:15Nilay Patel?

  We won. We won going away and the judge was like, yeah, it was defunct. But it was like, what are we doing?

• 49:23Alex Cranz?

  Every time. Well, I don't think he called anything defunct this time.

• 49:27Nilay Patel?

  We're keeping an eye on Sean.

• 49:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  We think we got all this right.

• 49:30Alex Cranz?

  It sounds very, very right. It sounds like they are interested in cloud gaming and their current service is not defunct. To be clear, Sony does currently have cloud gaming. It's not good, which I'm allowed to say because that's my opinion, but they do have it is not defunct.

• 49:49David Pierce?

  This is the thing that I thought was so interesting about Sean's piece is, and he points this out in his story, is that from the job listings themselves, it sounds very much like Sony is starting this process from the beginning. And it's, it's saying

• 50:02Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 50:02David Pierce?

  That one of the jobs is like, come help us dream up a vision for our cloud gaming. And it's like, my dudes, it's 2023. Like you don't have a vision for cloud gaming. But then on the other hand, like to your point, Alex, this exists, like they, what they should be doing is taking this kind of crappy thing that they built in PlayStation now and make it better. And instead, what it sounds like is they're building a whole new thing from the ground up. And which of those two things turns out to be true, or if there's some combination of them is confusing and fascinating to me.

• 50:34Nilay Patel?

  Or this is just like a honey pot to keep engineers away from Microsoft, right?

• 50:38Alex Cranz?

  I love that plan. They just sit over there in the corner and never release it.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is in the season of tech layoffs, right? There's like the endless articles now that are like the ultimate business insider bait. I made $250,000 at Google and I got paid to drink lattes all day. Like in the thesis is they were all just hiring to keep talent away from each other.

• 50:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that that is the position any of these companies are anymore, but.

• 51:01Alex Cranz?

  I wouldn't expect Sony particularly to be a company that does that. That's not really Sony's MO. So I think they are trying to think of this from scratch and the from scratch kind of makes sense when you think about the architecture element of this. Like if they're thinking, okay, PlayStation six. Whenever that comes out, we want that to work with our new cloud gaming service. So everything works, which is what Microsoft did. That makes sense. That's the thing they can be doing. And I would get why they would want to start from scratch in that case. Because otherwise, bolting everything on and then trying to teach Naughty Dog again, how to adapt that is gonna be a lot of heartache.

• 51:35Nilay Patel?

  Every time I download a game to my PlayStation, I have the digital one.

• 51:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  I'm like, this is weird. It's like weird that it's a, it's like all the bits are on the, on the drive.

• 51:43Alex Cranz?

  Everything come down.

• 51:45Nilay Patel?

  Isn't the future much more hybridized? Right? It's like weird that the games update to me.

• 51:50David Pierce?

  I downloaded an update to Fortnite the other day and it was forty three point two gigabytes or something. I was like, what am I downloading? It takes eight minutes to connect every time I, every time I turn on this damn game. Like, what is the point of this if I'm just downloading it?

• 52:03Alex Cranz?

  You have to have the local assets because, because it moves so quickly that if you're having, if they're having to download all of the assets to you.

• 52:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:12Alex Cranz?

  And like load all of that in real time and do the rest all in real time. That's really, really complex and that creates a lot of lag.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  But I'm just saying, so it seems like the two choices right now are pretty far apart.

• 52:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:22Nilay Patel?

  There's all of the game is rendered on the server and you're just streaming video and sending back control inputs. And we've managed to crunch the latency so this works.

• 52:32Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 52:33Nilay Patel?

  Even when you're handheld.

• 52:34Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 52:34Nilay Patel?

  And this is the only pitch for 5G that has ever made any sense to me. And it's still, but, but, but that's the idea.

• 52:41Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 52:41Nilay Patel?

  You're, all the GPUs are in the cloud and we're sending you a video stream and there's low enough latency that your control inputs can affect that video stream.

• 52:49Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 52:49Nilay Patel?

  Get it? And all the way on the other side is you've got the entire forty three gigabytes of Fortnite and a powerful GPU in your house and the whole thing's running locally.

• 52:57Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 52:57Nilay Patel?

  It just, I, I don't know enough. I'm just, is there no middle ground?

• 53:02Alex Cranz?

  I think.

• 53:02Nilay Patel?

  Where the PlayStation six is like hybridized, where some of it's running up there and some of it's running down here and there's a reason I have GPU, but it's enhanced by the cloud service.

• 53:10Alex Cranz?

  I think theoretically that can happen, but you've got two, two issues there. One is that people really like to be able to play offline. They hate it when they have to like be connected all the time. That's like a huge issue. Anytime somebody downloads an Ubisoft game, they're like, oh my God. Cause Ubisoft has um DRM that requires you to attach to the internet.

• 53:27Nilay Patel?

  Grandpa's reason why it's seven, the only game that exists. Uh, yeah. It's very limited where it's not connected to the internet.

• 53:32Alex Cranz?

  Right. And, and so there's that, there's like, the audience hates that. But then it is also just really complex because if you're having to like. What are you, what are you playing on? What's, what's, what are the assets that need to be on your computer? Theoretically, it's like your big 4K assets for like textures and stuff, right? And then what needs to be in the cloud? Like figuring that out, I think would be really, really complex and making it so that it handles it while also not losing lag.

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Sure.

• 53:55Alex Cranz?

  Would be really difficult. I think we might see that and like adventure games, probably stuff that's not super timing intensive lends itself more to that. Gran Turismo, probably not. All your fighting games, your first person shooters, definitely not. But like games where you're just digging around and like climbing stuff.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 54:11Nilay Patel?

  It's just.

• 54:12Alex Cranz?

  It's okay if it's got a little lag.

• 54:13Nilay Patel?

  Again, I think, I don't know enough about the, the technical aspects of, of that and what you're describing, Sins, right? It's just, if you, if Sony announced the PlayStation six.

• 54:21Alex Cranz?

  They figure that out.

• 54:22Nilay Patel?

  Will have the first hybrid GPU setup. And the, the streaming service is inherently built into it and it'll run great on your phone and this little handheld we're selling you. And then when you dock it to a GPU that's running in your house, it gets even better.

• 54:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like if they can do that and be like, like the big catch there is you don't have to download 200 gigabytes just to play.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 54:42Alex Cranz?

  The new AAA game. That's huge. That would be a really big thing and that's what everybody's working towards. But I think they've all ended on just do the video directly to you because that's just so easy.

• 54:52David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, and I guess the, in your middle ground, Neelai, what are you actually accomplishing? Because it, it kind of seems to me like the worst of both worlds because you can't play the game offline. Which like Alex is saying is what you accomplish by downloading the 200 gigabytes. Maybe you shortened the download time and as somebody who frequently has like 30 minutes to play video games and spends that whole 30 minutes downloading an update to a game. I feel that, but it feels like every good thing you're describing is actually maybe better served by working on the lag problem with input.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, probably. It just, the history of the tech industry is why not a weird compromised middle ground?

• 55:29David Pierce?

  That is.

• 55:29Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  Is often the thing that happens.

• 55:31Alex Cranz?

  And it feels like Sony, if anybody's gonna do that, well, maybe Nintendo. Nintendo, actually, I'd be more likely.

• 55:37David Pierce?

  Like just put it on an SD card. No problem.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  Nintendo never met a cutting edge graphic technology could not walk away.

• 55:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, oh, this is too nice.

• 55:46Nilay Patel?

  Like next year, the Switch will have Wi-Fi.

• 55:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  That's what we're working on.

• 55:51Alex Cranz?

  So like I could see them being like, you know what? This is kind of garbage in a lot of ways, but it's cool.

• 55:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 55:57Alex Cranz?

  So we're gonna do it because we're Nintendo. Sony, Sony would be like.

• 56:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm just curious. It's I, as we think about game streaming again, and the idea that things will default there. Because as David is pointing out, being able to white label that stuff and just roll your own fields. Like at least it'll be technically easy, if not business model easy or game library development easy. But technically easy. It's like, at some point, Sony's got to make an argument for putting a GPU in your house.

• 56:24David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 56:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 56:24Nilay Patel?

  And that, so does Microsoft, so does everybody else.

• 56:27Alex Cranz?

  The argument right now is the internet sucks.

• 56:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:29Alex Cranz?

  And it's, yeah, it's the best argument.

• 56:31David Pierce?

  It really is.

• 56:31Nilay Patel?

  So, all right, let's wrap up this section. There's actually a bunch of additional streaming headlines. David, do you want to go through them?

• 56:37David Pierce?

  Sure. So well, the one other thing we should talk about with Sony real fast is the other thing Sean did was uncover a bunch of new plans for Sony's smartphone games, which is the other future of gaming that Sony has sort of systematically done a bad job at over the years. It's a very good story. It's very interesting. It's actually a very similar story. Like Sony has hired a bunch of good people, made big promises about mobile games and not succeeded with any of them. And appears to be sort of rebooting and trying again. I'm excited about that. We got a bunch of NFL Sunday Ticket news. We talked a little bit about this on Wednesday's show, but all the information is finally out. Everybody in our comments is very upset that it's going to cost anywhere from 250 to like $400 for the season.

• 57:18Alex Cranz?

  Do you get blackouts? Are there, are there blackout?

• 57:21David Pierce?

  No, so that's the whole beauty of YouTube. And the reason they'll tell you that YouTube TV is so terrific is that you get the local games on YouTube TV. You get the out of market games on Sunday Ticket. And for an extra $40 a season, you can also get Red Zone. So it's expensive and it's a mess, but at least it's all like in one app.

• 57:39Alex Cranz?

  I'm so happy for the both of you.

• 57:41David Pierce?

  If you were waiting for YouTube to solve this problem, sucks for you. I also, Neelai, I did a Packers burn at the end of my YouTube story. You didn't even notice and I'm really sad about it.

• 57:49Nilay Patel?

  Well, you'd already told me the pricing, so.

• 57:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  I definitely read that story and I thought I'll just let this go.

• 57:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's probably what happened. Uh, Google TV, Alex, this seems like something that would excite you. Uh, Google TV got a big guide to 800 different free channels. Um.

• 58:04Alex Cranz?

  I already have all of them because I have channels.

• 58:07David Pierce?

  That's true. So the thing.

• 58:08Alex Cranz?

  An M3U.

• 58:09David Pierce?

  The thing that you were describing, basically, which is like, take all these free channels and like, collate them into one app that you can actually search across is what Google is now trying to do, which is the single smartest thing Google has ever done in streaming. So congratulations to Google. It's the most Googly thing they could have done. It's the best thing Google has ever done in streaming. I'm sure it'll be a piece of shit because it's Google TV. And like every other streaming box, Google TV is trash. But hey, it's a good idea. Anyway.

• 58:33Nilay Patel?

  I gotta say that this, by the way, this is David's hottest take.

• 58:36Alex Cranz?

  This is your CarPlay take.

• 58:37Nilay Patel?

  When he wrote that headline, the number of people were like, ah, he's fine.

• 58:42Nilay Patel?

  It's like, yeah, but it's like, not very good.

• 58:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 58:46Nilay Patel?

  Everyone has Stockholm syndrome with Apple. This is the thing. CarPlay, not very good, just better than the other garbage.

• 58:52David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, that's, that's basic. I mean, that's literally like Apple's entire business model.

• 58:58Alex Cranz?

  We're not garbage.

• 58:58David Pierce?

  Steve Jobs put up a bunch of phones and then was like, we made a slightly better phone. Do you want it? And it.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  Have you been reading the Steve Jobs book that they put out? The Steve Jobs archive put out the ebook and it's just lots of interviews and direct quotation.

• 59:10David Pierce?

  Make Something Wonderful, I think that's what it's called.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  It's Make Something Wonderful. I'm a total sucker for it. It, it's just a complete sucker for it. You can read it on the web and it has this like great web presentation. Bring it like, download it to Apple Books and then it does not mention Kindle. It's like, or you can have a PDF for your other garbage reader. It's like very funny.

• 59:29Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but I highly recommend reading it because if you're listening to this, you're almost certainly a sucker for Steve Jobs saying things like, the only good products that have ever existed are the original telephone and the trimline telephone and every other telephone is garbage.

• 59:39David Pierce?

  Incredible.

• 59:40Nilay Patel?

  And he's just saying this in like 1978, like straight out randomly do an interview where he's like 24 years old. And he's like, there's only ever been two good telephones. And like, I'm a complete sucker for this. And you just read it and then you like, look. At the business model infected Apple ecosystem of today, where everything is designed to get you to buy something else. And you're like, oh, I wonder if he would have loved this or hated it. And the Apple TV to me is like the number one example for this, where it's both designed to make you watch Apple TV plus at every turn. And then they can't get the business deals to complete the interface to make it good. So it's just stuck in the middle of whatever it is. And because it's stuck in the middle, it's the best option because everyone else is like, screw it. We're just going all the way towards converting you to our services.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  And Apple at least has the restraint to not do it all the way. They don't have the catalog.

• 1:00:28David Pierce?

  I was gonna say restraint's one more for it.

• 1:00:31Nilay Patel?

  Uh, anyway, that's same with Carb. I'm just telling you, everyone should read this book. Cause it's great. And if you're a Virchass listener, you're gonna be a sucker for it.

• 1:00:38Alex Cranz?

  Is there an audiobook version?

• 1:00:40Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just, it says I collected writings. Who would they, would they have to get like an AI?

• 1:00:45Alex Cranz?

  Like a Steve Jobs.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  The Trimline was a great phone.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's just very good.

• 1:00:50Alex Cranz?

  I'll listen.

• 1:00:51Nilay Patel?

  Did you say there was one word?

• 1:00:52David Pierce?

  Uh, well, no, just the one other thing we should mention, which goes back to the gaming handheld stuff is a bunch of people got very excited on the internet because a video from a Microsoft Hackathon, I think last September, just came out showing somebody had, you know, cobbled together. They called it like Windows handheld mode. And it was basically like, what if you could run Windows in a gaming specific mode on a, on a Steam Deck like piece of hardware? And everybody got very excited about it.

• 1:01:18Alex Cranz?

  I took umbrage with this because it feels like nobody's used the Microsoft Cloud Gaming platform on a Steam Deck. I spent an entire afternoon having to like program it and get it all set up on my Steam Deck. And it looks almost identical to that and it works great. And I was like, okay, I already did this.

• 1:01:35David Pierce?

  Yeah, but what if you didn't have to spend a whole afternoon getting it set up?

• 1:01:37Alex Cranz?

  That, that does seem very compelling. Like you have to like download little pictures so that it will load properly in the Steam UI. It's a whole, it's a lot.

• 1:01:46Nilay Patel?

  I do love that we've come all the way back around to what if we had small computers that just ran all of Windows? Like straight up had a taskbar, tiny computers, like that was the nineties.

• 1:01:57Alex Cranz?

  If the netbooks had just had little joysticks.

• 1:02:00Nilay Patel?

  Called them pocket PCs. Well, just think about it, y'all. What if Combat was out here selling pocket PCs?

• 1:02:07Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna do some Excel spreadsheets on my Steam Deck.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  It's just like, everything comes back around. It's the one thing, it's my fourth. Poor thing.

• 1:02:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:15Nilay Patel?

  It's a wired connection, something about CarPlay, whatever other bullshit I made up, and pendulums swing back around.

• 1:02:21Alex Cranz?

  Most of which are accurate, except for the CarPlay.

• 1:02:25David Pierce?

  Whatever other bullshit I made up with.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  Copyright law. Pocket PCs are coming back. I believe this in my heart.

• 1:02:32Nilay Patel?

  All right, we gotta take a break. I can't believe we still have to talk about Twitter. We're gonna take a break and come back. We'll be right back.

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• 1:04:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. I forgot to announce like the news.

• 1:04:10Alex Cranz?

  CarPlay.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  Our news at the top of the show. Which is that I

• 1:04:16Nilay Patel?

  I am now the project manager for CarPlay.

• 1:04:19Alex Cranz?

  It's gonna suck.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna run two apps at once, you guys.

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  It does.

• 1:04:23Nilay Patel?

  No, it doesn't.

• 1:04:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it does. I'm gonna send you a picture of mine.

• 1:04:27Nilay Patel?

  I know, I know. The stupid boxes are not apps.

• 1:04:30Alex Cranz?

  I'm just gonna be spamming screenshots.

• 1:04:33Nilay Patel?

  And then like widgets.

• 1:04:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:35Nilay Patel?

  I'm not looking for widgets, man.

• 1:04:37Alex Cranz?

  I really wanna ask you what you think the difference between a widget and an app is.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  I want 900 full-fledged Windows open, full tiles. Let's go.

• 1:04:45David Pierce?

  Windows car coming soon.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  Widgets. All right, this is as good of a lead up to I am the new host of the Code Conference as I can possibly come up with. So as you know, we have a lot of lineage to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher, who was our executive editor for years. Walt and Kara started the D Conference that turned into the Code Conference, which Fox Media owns. Walt retired several years ago. He still texts me to remind me that we make journalism here, which is great. And I love the fact that I can text Walt Mossberg. It's like one of those things. Like, how did this happen? It's very cool. Kara was her last year of hosting Code last year. She went out with a bang, did the best version of that thing that anyone can ever do. And so now Casey and I have to come up with a different version, which we've talked about for a long time.

• 1:05:31Nilay Patel?

  But this is the 20th year of Code. We're moving locations again. Casey Newton, who is a Verge contributing editor, runs Platformer. You all know Casey. Myself and Julia Boorstein from CNBC are the new hosts of the Code Conference, which is in September. And if you know what we should do, you should let me know. No, we have a lot of ideas and just how to reset it a little bit. And so, you know, we're the new hosts. We're very excited about it. Obviously, we all interview people all the time. Kara is a very distinctive type of interviewer. I've ripped a lot of hers from Kara, just like straight up. There's a lot of Kara's moves in my game, but we wanna push it a little farther. We wanna have some different kinds of guests. I really wanna get more creators on that stage and talk about their businesses and all the creator stuff. That's the news. We're very excited about it. It was just announced.

• 1:06:13Nilay Patel?

  And like I said, if you have ideas and what you wanna see happen in the Code Conference, this is the moment. Cause we are starting to put together what we're gonna do.

• 1:06:19Alex Cranz?

  I'm gonna DM you all my.

• 1:06:22Nilay Patel?

  A lot of the ideas are like, can you yell at them even more?

• 1:06:24Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Most people can't yell at them at all. Like Kara yells at them a lot.

• 1:06:29Nilay Patel?

  But can you yell them more? Yeah, well, yes, we want to make great journalism and do tough interviews. And I think that's why some people show up. If you're a CEO, you're usually pretty type A. You want someone to challenge you. This is a real thing. This is why they come on Decoder 2. So, yeah, go conference. It's a thing. I forgot to say it at the top. I was supposed to. I was instructed to like announce it and I forgot.

• 1:06:49Alex Cranz?

  I think this is a good place to mention it because we're gonna, we're gonna talk about some people you should totally have.

• 1:06:53Nilay Patel?

  Yes, this is a good session. Just talking about Twitter, dear sweet Twitter. We should talk about Twitter and Substack at length, but there's some other stuff that happened this week first we should just note. Elon went nuts doing labels. Like, I think he discovered that there's a field in Twitter accounts called labels, and he started typing stuff into it to see what would happen. So he got into a fight with NPR. At first he labeled it like state-sponsored media.

• 1:07:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Nilay Patel?

  Which is just like very funny because that's, that's like a real thing that happens in China, Korea and other places. NPR is not that thing. It gets like 1% of its funding from the government. And the United States does have state-sponsored media, has Voice of America.

• 1:07:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:30Nilay Patel?

  Which we use to broadcast.

• 1:07:30David Pierce?

  Yeah, state-sponsored media and publicly funded media are not even a little tiny bit the same thing.

• 1:07:36Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:07:37Alex Cranz?

  Very different.

• 1:07:38Nilay Patel?

  Bobby Allen from NPR is a great tech reporter there, emailed Elon, said, what are you doing? Elon said, I'll change it. So he changed to publicly funded media. NPR said, this is stupid and you're being weird and we're just not going to publish on Twitter anymore, which is a big decision. PBS also pulled publishing from Twitter after the same sort of label, brouhaha. He did it to the BBC. He had applied the same label to the BBC. And then he sat for, I will just be candid, I just talked about interviewing people. That interview sucked. BBC interview of Elon Musk sucked. And I've figured out why. I've watched a lot of interviews with Elon and he always seems to snow everyone. Everyone prepares for Elon, like he's going to be prepared.

• 1:08:15Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:08:16Nilay Patel?

  And no one's ready for him to be obviously winging it.

• 1:08:19Alex Cranz?

  He's never prepared for any?

• 1:08:21Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, particularly, I think he's sometimes prepared for like Tesla and SpaceX.

• 1:08:25Alex Cranz?

  Sometimes, yeah.

• 1:08:25Nilay Patel?

  Where his expertise lies.

• 1:08:27Alex Cranz?

  But his interviews, he just comes in and is like, yeah, I'm here to interview. Let's go.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And so the BBC interview was bad. Like you, I think of Decoder often is like Neil I versus media training. Like it's a game that I'm playing.

• 1:08:39Alex Cranz?

  It is.

• 1:08:40Nilay Patel?

  And you can't, if you're playing a game with someone and they're, they're not playing it, you're often not doing well. And I would just say a BBC interview, you just watch, there are two people having radically different experiences. Like one person's like, I'm going to ask you questions and you're going to answer the questions. And Elon's like, here's what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna just like throw water all over the walls and start honking like a goose. And it's like, what is happening in this interview?

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't make any sense. But in that, in that interview, Elon did say buying Twitter is really painful. He doesn't have a stone cold heart. He says he got forced into buying it, which is an incredible way to say, I signed a contract to buy a company for $44 billion and then was sued to enforce the contract. And I thought I was gonna lose the lawsuit. He was forced.

• 1:09:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah, really. No.

• 1:09:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, just a very odd week for Twitter. And then he announced, who knows if this will actually happen, that all the blue checks will go away on, of course, 4/20.

• 1:09:37Alex Cranz?

  Nice, sorry.

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  Thank you. I appreciate you, Alex. And then now I'm, I think people are starting to get ads. I've gotten ads. They're like, your blue checks are going away. Don't you want to subscribe? And it, again, I think we have a lot of like advertising listeners. This ad contains no explanation of what the benefits of paying might be. Not even a tout. It's just a threat. It's like

• 1:09:57Alex Cranz?

  It's just extortion.

• 1:09:58Nilay Patel?

  Your blue check is going away. Subscribe. It's like, no. Absolutely not. Like, say one good thing that will happen.

• 1:10:07Alex Cranz?

  He's gotta know, you know, generally when you do this, you like, you smash some stuff, you like break things and you're like, do it or else. And instead it's just like, but like, do it.

• 1:10:16David Pierce?

  I, I believe in my bones that he thinks that people think having a blue check is like a cool signifier of status. Which A, it was never intended to be. The idea that like, the blue checks were a thing was always ridiculous. And B, he has systematically made it stupid to have a blue check. To the point, as I have said, as we have talked about before on this show, that you can have a blue check and hide it. Because it's so embarrassing to have a blue check on your profile now because of what that communicates. So to come out and say, don't lose your blue check. There were a bunch of people I saw the other day who were tweeting that actually what you should do is change your display name

• 1:10:58David Pierce?

  because it will automatically remove your blue check as a, as a hack. Like, I don't want to have a blue check anymore. How can I get rid of it more quickly? Is a much more prominent question at this moment than how do I keep my blue check? This is what we've come to.

• 1:11:14Alex Cranz?

  I'm Just really curious how he's gonna do it? Because right now they're having to like go down the list and, and, and do it that way? Like manually, they hadn't figured out a way to, to do that not manually.

• 1:11:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, they've obviously figured it out because they found me.

• 1:11:28Alex Cranz?

  Did they find you?

• 1:11:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I blocked the verified, there's a rumor.

• 1:11:31Alex Cranz?

  I did too.

• 1:11:31Nilay Patel?

  This is like, I mean, Fauci doesn't want you to know like level of rumor, right? That if you blocked the verified account, that they wouldn't be able to find you because that was the only true list they had.

• 1:11:41Alex Cranz?

  I still got my, my check.

• 1:11:43Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, but you had to block at verified.

• 1:11:45Alex Cranz?

  I did. I think I just don't tweet a lot and also I have like four followers. So they're like, mm, she can wait.

• 1:11:52Nilay Patel?

  Wait, do I still have, I still have one? It's, it's not going to wait until four, anyhow, none of this matters, uh, because.

• 1:11:58David Pierce?

  No, just quit Twitter.

• 1:11:59Nilay Patel?

  As David is pointing out, none of this actually matters.

• 1:12:01David Pierce?

  Listen to me, everyone. Let me, let me just.

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Look, I read the first draft of David's activity pub story.

• 1:12:06David Pierce?

  Sit with me for a moment.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  It's very good.

• 1:12:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:08Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's where the heat is.

• 1:12:10David Pierce?

  Just quit Twitter. Twitter is a place that has systematically proven to have bad product. It will not keep your personal stuff safe. It won't keep your private things private. It won't show you the things you want it to show you. It will show you exclusively things that you don't want to see. It breaks all the time. There is literally nothing left for you on Twitter. I don't know where to go. Come hang out on the verge.com, go somewhere else, go to Instagram. It's better on Instagram. Leave Twitter. Twitter is done. Let's just, however you feel about Elon Musk, however you feel about politics, Twitter is a bad platform and you should quit. Thank you for coming to my TED Talk.

• 1:12:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:48Alex Cranz?

  I, I think I pretty much kind of quit this week with the NPR stuff. I was like, everything else he's done, whatever. For some reason, this was my, my line.

• 1:12:56Nilay Patel?

  This was your line?

• 1:12:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, huh, you're just like being addicted to spreading misinformation now.

• 1:13:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I, yeah.

• 1:13:02Alex Cranz?

  That was, that was, he's done it before, but for some reason this one I was like, yeah.

• 1:13:07Nilay Patel?

  Again, watching that interview, I go back to my thesis, which is if you were addicted to nicotine. And you bought a cigarette factory, you would think every idea you had ruled, right? Yeah. Because you're like, everyone else feels the way I do. And everyone else would be like, you run a cigarette factory and I don't smoke. And why do you keep insisting that I buy cigarettes from you? Cigarettes with like 30 times more nicotine. You just gums bleed as soon as you look at it. He's addicted to Twitter. He thinks it's monopoly. And I will point this out, his other two companies are more or less monopolies. Yeah. Like Tesla has had infinite demand for electric cars. They can't meet the demand for electric cars. And so he's run a business where every car he makes, he sells.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  And it doesn't matter if the cars have two inch panel gaps or they drive themselves into brick walls. Or like whatever, people want electric cars and he's a supplier of them. And maybe that will change his competition or maybe not. The only other electric car you can buy in the market today is a Chevy Bolt. He's gonna be fine for a while. Right, but like, we'll see what happens when a Kia EV9 hits or like all these other cool ones hit. SpaceX is kind of a monopoly. The government was like, what if we didn't do NASA? And NASA became like a buyer of rockets from the private sector. Except for the one big rocket. And to his credit, I will give him all the credit in the world for this. He was like, yes, I will make rockets and launch them in space and land them again. And the United Launch Alliance is like, you've done nothing.

• 1:14:33David Pierce?

  I would be willing to wager that Elon Musk is not in the top 50 people most responsible for the launching and landing of rockets. But, but yes.

• 1:14:41Nilay Patel?

  Agreed. But I'm just saying, his other two companies are kind of monopolies, right? They're in markets that should be competitive and are not yet. And the only, yeah, is because I think cars are going to get competitive for him. But it's still, like, CarPlay is still like a conversation we're having. Like, there's a lot of stuff Tesla's can do that the automakers are still sorting out. But they're, they might only now be competitive. So I think he's just got monopoly brain. Yeah. Where he's like, I've run Twitter. Twitter is also monopoly. I'm addicted to it. What about you? I'm just cigarettes. And it's like, oh, do you can just leave? Like I can just open the TikTok app on my phone instead of this garbage.

• 1:15:20Alex Cranz?

  Does he know Instagram exists?

• 1:15:22Nilay Patel?

  Right. There's like all these other platforms to take your time. What is not true is that for years, the default answer for everything in media and politics has been Twitter. You're a candidate, something weird happened on a campaign stop, you need to issue apology, like Twitter it is, like it'll mainline into the press. Our site goes down and we're like, we need to tell our audience. We tell the people who follow us on Twitter, which is not the whole audience, like by a huge margin is not the whole audience, but it feels like we're doing it.

• 1:15:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:49Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. It's like always the answer. Twitter is like always the answer. And now it's not. And I think that is opening up a lot of opportunity for other companies. It's opening up a lot of change, hopefully, in how we think about using the internet, which would be good. And it is driving Elon Musk bonkers.

• 1:16:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:06Nilay Patel?

  Which is right, because he's not the answer. He's not the monopoly provider of this thing. And so all I think interesting, all the stuff he's doing is like, we should talk about Substack now, because this is like, to me, the most interesting thing where the monopoly did something aggressive against competition. And it, I think spectacularly backfired in a way that-

• 1:16:26Alex Cranz?

  Were really upset, right? With, with the Substack thing. I don't usually, I don't subscribe to a lot of Substacks. I'm sorry.

• 1:16:32Nilay Patel?

  Just the, the one. It's-

• 1:16:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I have Platformer. That's it. And so I didn't really care as much, but it seemed like a lot of people care, like Substack. One of its main traffic drivers is Twitter. And then he went and he started like digging around with the links.

• 1:16:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So this happened last week on the show, right? We were like in the middle of it. So Substack launched Substack Notes, which is, it looks like a Twitter competitor, it's not really Twitter, whatever. It looks like, it looks enough like Twitter.

• 1:17:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:17:00Nilay Patel?

  To have scared Elon Musk. There's some tiresome personalities involved in the back and forth.

• 1:17:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's about right.

• 1:17:05Nilay Patel?

  Um, that's just as much as I'm going to talk about that. He starts making it so that if a tweet has a Substack link in it, you cannot even like that tweet, let it like or retweet it. It was hilariously petty. He puts up a warning screen. So if you click a Substack link on Twitter, it says this site is unsafe.

• 1:17:19Alex Cranz?

  Basically like, do you remember the whole insane thing with the, the Hunter Biden laptop story? This is like, yeah, but like more-

• 1:17:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he used all of those tools that he was criticizing. And then the best one, which I don't think is a tool that has existed before, is that if you searched for the word Substack, even in the most brute force way, if you, we wrote stories and if you would search our hyperlinks, our URLs, and they had Substack in the slug, it would redirect that word to the word newsletter.

• 1:17:46Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:17:47Nilay Patel?

  Which is beautifully petty. Like, you are no longer allowed to search URLs in this platform that contain the word Substack. Like, that is the most king dictator anti-free speech thing I can think of. So Substack freaks out, Elon tweets in reply, like, no public explanation of this is forthcoming. Elon tweets in reply, Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap the Twitter clone, which makes no sense. Like, it just doesn't make any sense.

• 1:18:14Alex Cranz?

  You, you don't want to download a massive pile of garbage?

• 1:18:17Nilay Patel?

  If you like.

• 1:18:18Alex Cranz?

  To make news?

• 1:18:19Nilay Patel?

  Even if you just think about what that means, or how that would work, or how you would do it, or what you would use it for, or what it would bootstrap.

• 1:18:26Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:18:27Nilay Patel?

  Like, none of it. There's a great Hacker News thread, it's like, this, like, just on its face, this is a nonsensical thing to say.

• 1:18:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, it wouldn't even accomplish anything. It's not like they're gonna upload it and like backfill Substack notes with Twitter content. It's just like not a thing that's gonna happen.

• 1:18:41Nilay Patel?

  Right. It just doesn't make any sense. So anyway, Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, was on Decoder this week. There's a lot to talk about in this conversation. Honestly, still processing. But I asked him, were you downloading?

• 1:18:53Alex Cranz?

  Twitter?

• 1:18:54Nilay Patel?

  And he was like, no. And I was like, did you talk to Elon? He was like, no. I said Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in both companies. They're in the syndicate that Elon bought Twitter with. And he's like, did they help? And he's like, everyone, no.

• 1:19:07Nilay Patel?

  And it sounds like he just did it. They, he never gave them any warning. And he never, like, told them what was wrong. I mean, like, obviously, you know, everyone could be lying. You just take whoever at their word. But they say they weren't downloading a massive portion of the Twitter database, which no one can figure out why you would even want to do that.

• 1:19:24Alex Cranz?

  Was, were they maybe like accessing that GitHub that has a bunch of Twitter code on it? And he like found out and was like?

• 1:19:32Nilay Patel?

  But that's a code, that's not the database.

• 1:19:34Alex Cranz?

  I think we've established that while Elon likes to say he's close to the metal, people who are, don't say that.

• 1:19:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, who knows? So Chris told me all about Substack notes and what it's for. A big thing that's part of this puzzle is for the average Substack writer, the place where they get most of their subscribers is historically Twitter. Like, that has been the best sort of marketing for a Substack writer. What Substack is doing now is they're pulling people into their app and making the app more of a consumer platform and sort of like redirecting you to other Substacks and like recommending things. And so the app is becoming a significant source of subscribers for Substackers as well now too, which is really interesting because that's a very closed kind of social network. I will just say here that Chris and I got into a fairly intense conversation on content moderation.

• 1:20:24Alex Cranz?

  I'm shocked.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  It didn't, it was an episode of Decoder. I don't want to like overdo it on this show, you just go listen to that show. What I'll say here is I really believe that if you are infrastructure, you should not moderate hardly at all. So if you're Pipes, if you're AT&T or Comcast or whatever, like people know my feelings and that neutrality.

• 1:20:45Alex Cranz?

  Leave it alone.

• 1:20:45Nilay Patel?

  Leave it alone. Like, just be the Pipes. And the more you become a consumer service that people can switch away from, the more you have to like do it and like be a product. And like the product that social platforms make is moderation at the end of the day. And Chris does not agree with me.

• 1:21:02David Pierce?

  There's a turn in that that a lot of people misses, which is that we take the term moderation in a lot of cases to mean one very specific thing, right? Like, the idea of content moderation has come to be associated with a lot of specific versions of content moderation and specific kinds of policies. What's actually true is you just have to decide. Like, our content moderation policy is that everything legal is allowed on our platform, no matter what.

• 1:21:32David Pierce?

  Is content moderation. I don't happen to agree with that policy, but that is a policy. Like that counts as content moderation. What you can't do is nothing. And what you can't do is say, we don't have opinions on that because at some point you just literally have to. And if you want to leave those things there and deal with whatever consequences there are, fine. If you want to remove those things and deal with whatever consequences that there are, fine. But you have to do something. And there's so much in this space right now where people are just like, what if we just did nothing?

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:59David Pierce?

  And pretended that was fine. It's like, that's not actually how it works.

• 1:22:03Nilay Patel?

  The thing that always gets me is more speech is legal in the country than people expect.

• 1:22:10David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:10Nilay Patel?

  Yes. Right. And you, and you can just see this play out on social platforms a lot. People think hate speech is illegal or people think lying is illegal.

• 1:22:17David Pierce?

  Yelling fire in a movie theater.

• 1:22:18Nilay Patel?

  People really think, if people think yelling fire in a movie theater is illegal. It's just like a long list of people's expectations of what is allowed versus what is actually allowed. And I think that's fine, right? It's better for the norms of speech to be kind of malleable and fuzzy and change with people over time. Than it is for the government to impose those norms. A hundred percent. Uh, this is like the most first guest of all time. We started with like CarPlay sucks and running with like government imposed norms. But where I think Substack is confused and actually in a weird interplay with Elon's confusion around free speech. Is that you can't run a company with the most permissive set of norms. You just can't do it. Yeah. Because that means your values, that means your company doesn't have any values.

• 1:23:02Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't mean anything. And over time, that's all you sell. All a company sells are its values. And I, I just think, I think they've gotten burned. This is like director's commentary. You should go listen to it and like, you will understand this director's commentary. Like after that conversation, I was like, I know you didn't want to answer that question. You probably like fall down the slippery slope of this question a lot, right? Like I ask you one hypothetical and then like another harder one and then another harder one. And like, I, I know that's shitty. That's a bad thing to do. And I, I agree with him. Like that's not a useful way to talk about it. Uh, and he was like, yeah, that happens to me a lot. So I get why he doesn't want to do it. But if you can't say, I disagree with that statement, but my terms of service allow it. Right? And that's a decision that I've made because of X, Y, and Z. Then you're, you're lost, right?

• 1:23:46Nilay Patel?

  And I, I think that's the turn that we're missing from all of these social company CEOs right now. Is to be able to state their own values and have that value include lots of people are going to say shitty thing with my software.

• 1:23:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:58Nilay Patel?

  And I don't, I don't know. Vote Patel. I'll figure it.

• 1:24:02David Pierce?

  No, I think it's right. And I think it's definitely true that way too much of our conversation around this is about litigating specific bad content. Like even you go to congressional hearings and people are like holding up tweets on poster board being like, what this was on your, I mean, this happened at TikTok, right? They were like, I watched this one video one time and it was bad. And how could you allow that on the platform? And it's like, well, like, what are you supposed to do with that? Like, that's not actually a useful way to have this conversation. But to your point, the only way to ever have that conversation is to start from somewhere. And I think what everybody has decided is that if I don't tell you what I think, I don't have to answer for any of it. And it's actually the opposite. Like, if you just tell us what you think, we can move on with our lives, right? Like, otherwise, you are going to be held-

• 1:24:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I can decide whether I'm going to do business with you or not.

• 1:24:49David Pierce?

  Exactly. Otherwise, you're going to be held accountable for every imaginable version of your value system. And you're screwed.

• 1:24:55Nilay Patel?

  And I think, to just bring this back around to Elon, the same confusion is the heart of Elon's Twitter administration. He doesn't know that he has to make these decisions. Well- He's like, it's free speech. We're going to allow those things. And then-

• 1:25:10David Pierce?

  And then he globally blocks tweets because the Indian government asked him to.

• 1:25:13Nilay Patel?

  Right. And it's like, whoa, that's super bad. Whoa, like you had an entire team, an entire product infrastructure since 2014 that allows you to moderate content on a per-country basis and provide transparency on what governments are asking you. And you don't know it exists because you fired everybody. And now someone in Texas can't see a tweet because the Indian government said no. That's bad, right? And it's like, that's the level of complication here where you can't just say it's free speech.

• 1:25:41Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:41Nilay Patel?

  And I, I just think that we're at a moment now with the social platforms where maybe the problem has just gotten too hard at scale. And the thing to actually do is decentralize the platforms.

• 1:25:52Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 1:25:52Nilay Patel?

  You should read David's Activity Pub piece next.

• 1:25:54Alex Cranz?

  I'm really excited to read it one day.

• 1:25:56Nilay Patel?

  I'm super hot on this protocol. That's the real end of the Vergecast. The answer is a weird, open source protocol that's been around since 2011 that is finally getting some action.

• 1:26:06Alex Cranz?

  This is new Vergecast Bingo.

• 1:26:08Nilay Patel?

  Huh?

• 1:26:08Alex Cranz?

  This is the new Vergecast Bingo.

• 1:26:10Nilay Patel?

  The new Vergecast Bingo.

• 1:26:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, there's, there is Vergecast Bingo.

• 1:26:12David Pierce?

  CarPlay is the free space in the middle.

• 1:26:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:17Nilay Patel?

  It's my last trip.

• 1:26:18Alex Cranz?

  An activity pub just down there, down there at the bottom, right corner.

• 1:26:21Nilay Patel?

  If Activity Pub makes it onto the bingo sheet, something good.

• 1:26:25David Pierce?

  We've all made it. Yeah, that's great.

• 1:26:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's to, it's because it's not been on the bingo card for a long time.

• 1:26:30Alex Cranz?

  Just like the last two episodes.

• 1:26:32Nilay Patel?

  Just the last two, but you can see, we should do like Vergecast heat checks, like the Ringer pods do, where, but instead of like actors, it's Activity Pub. They use track, like, we started mentioning it more and more.

• 1:26:45Alex Cranz?

  Slowly increasing.

• 1:26:46David Pierce?

  It's pretty good. All right.

• 1:26:47Alex Cranz?

  I'm done.

• 1:26:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm just putting it out there. All right, we got, we got, I'll get to pick one for the lightning round to wrap this up. David?

• 1:26:51David Pierce?

  I'll go first. So mine is, there was news today, Thursday, as we're recording this, that you can now talk to the Bing chatbot through your keyboard if you use the SwiftKey keyboard. This is

• 1:27:03Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 1:27:04David Pierce?

  On its face, not terribly exciting news. I think SwiftKey is interesting. I've always thought that phone keyboards are sort of an unused fascinating space. There's actually a lot of cool stuff you can do with just a keyboard app that people don't realize. It's very hard to make them good, but they're very interesting. But the broader point that I think is really interesting here is, one of the most fascinating debates to me right now is between people who see things like ChatGPT and Bing and GPT-4, and say, give that to me everywhere, integrate that into all the apps I use. I want it. This is the future. Put it everywhere. And the people on the other side who are like, get this away from me, leave me alone, stop doing this. Like, I'm in a bunch of Discords and Slacks and stuff for various apps that I use, including one for Notion.

• 1:27:46David Pierce?

  And there is this ongoing, like, holy war between people who are like, I am emailing the help desk at Notion every 15 minutes to turn off Notion AI on my account, because every time I hit slash, it says, do you want me to help you write a blog post? And then there are other people who are like, AI is the future. Get rid of everything. Just make Notion a chatbot. How much money can I possibly give you? And I think, like, Microsoft in particular is just deep down this road of like, we're going to shove AI into every nook and cranny of every app that we make, and you're gonna love it. And I think

• 1:28:20Nilay Patel?

  I mean, there are people at Microsoft in every meeting who are like, opening the door and sticking their head and be like, dude, Clippy is real.

• 1:28:28Nilay Patel?

  Running down the hallway to next door.

• 1:28:29David Pierce?

  They're just like Bing campus ambassadors, just like firing T-shirt cannons with Bing.

• 1:28:33Nilay Patel?

  Clippy's alive!

• 1:28:36Nilay Patel?

  This is a 30 year dream and now they have it.

• 1:28:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, there's some Bing product manager who like gets a bonus every time Bing shows up in a new thing and that person is billionaire now. Congratulations to them. But yeah, that that fight I think is going to be really interesting. The Swift key thing I actually think is sort of smart like it'll it'll actually let you back into doing it inside of a lot of other apps. So I think in that way it's very clever. But AI is going to be in.

• 1:28:59Nilay Patel?

  Wait, how long until Apple blocks that?

• 1:29:03David Pierce?

  It's been pretty permissive with stuff so far. Federico Vitig over at Mac Stories built an unbelievably cool chat GPT thing just using shortcuts. It's called SGPT, I think. It is extremely cool and very powerful and bakes a lot of that stuff into other apps that you're using.

• 1:29:20Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 1:29:20David Pierce?

  So I think like people are finding ways into this and Apple so far has just kind of let it happen. It honestly surprises me a little how permissive it has been so far.

• 1:29:28Alex Cranz?

  You've you've just destroyed it.

• 1:29:30David Pierce?

  It's very possible.

• 1:29:31Nilay Patel?

  Someone just realized it.

• 1:29:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Zach, don't tell anyone. Don't mind that. Just let that slide. You didn't hear it. I know. It's been a decade. I know who listens to the show.

• 1:29:43Nilay Patel?

  Uh, mine. This is so good.

• 1:29:45Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:29:46Nilay Patel?

  I was so excited about this. Mini, the car company.

• 1:29:49Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 1:29:50Nilay Patel?

  Make the Cooper. There's a new Mini Cooper. It looks tough, which is weird.

• 1:29:55Alex Cranz?

  Does it have CarPlay?

• 1:29:56Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, but I know what it does have. It has a new virtual assistant in it. It's a dog named Spike. No shoes.

• 1:30:05Alex Cranz?

  I love this so much.

• 1:30:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so if you buy, so but first of all, there's a theory that in bad economies, cars get more aggressive looking. And if you believe that, then we are about to have the worst recession in a hundred years. Cars are ridiculous looking. I we have one listener who sent me, apparently we've been running an ad for something called the Toyota Crown. And I was sent a video of what the Toyota Crown looks like. It's not great.

• 1:30:31Alex Cranz?

  I gotta look it up. Oh, that's a, that's a look.

• 1:30:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a look.

• 1:30:35Alex Cranz?

  Some Subaru WRX.

• 1:30:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:37Alex Cranz?

  By way of Camry.

• 1:30:40Nilay Patel?

  Every new BMW looks like it's so mad at you all the time.

• 1:30:44Alex Cranz?

  So angry.

• 1:30:45Nilay Patel?

  Very much. The newest one, I think the, the IX, no, it's the M50, whatever one they made.

• 1:30:52Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:52Nilay Patel?

  The newest.

• 1:30:53Alex Cranz?

  With the SUV?

• 1:30:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Someone said it looks like the pigs from Angry Birds. Can't not see that anymore. So the new Cooper is very aggressive, but voice assistant in it, they're all doing this thing. They want to get away from CarPlay. They want you to use their software mostly to shop. You gotta watch this video of Spike. It's a dog named Spike and you'd be like, hey, Spike. And your Mini Cooper would be like, woof, woof.

• 1:31:13Alex Cranz?

  Does it, does it talk or does it just bark?

• 1:31:15Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's a, it's a talking dog. Yes. It's Spike the English Bulldog. Uh, it will be in future Mini vehicles.

• 1:31:22Alex Cranz?

  Does it have like the dog voice, the rough?

• 1:31:24Nilay Patel?

  It will have various forms of support.

• 1:31:27David Pierce?

  We all agree this is fantastic, right? That this is like in, in the world in.

• 1:31:31Alex Cranz?

  Oh, it's adorable.

• 1:31:32David Pierce?

  There are assistants everywhere. This is the best possible outcome, that a little purple headed dog just like runs around changing gears for me. Like, that's all I've ever wanted.

• 1:31:41Nilay Patel?

  Oliver Heimer, Mini's head of design, says, quote, "We are taking Spike into the future as a digital character," which first of all implies that Spike was in the past as well. It's not.

• 1:31:52David Pierce?

  Spike has always been here. There's always been Spike.

• 1:31:56Nilay Patel?

  Spike has been uploaded to the matrix. He is not just a design experiment. He's becoming a characterful companion for the user experience. It's just really good. It just, the whole thing's really good. More cars should have talking dogs in them.

• 1:32:09David Pierce?

  Completely agree.

• 1:32:09Alex Cranz?

  It's just adorable.

• 1:32:11David Pierce?

  Spike will dance with a disco ball.

• 1:32:13Nilay Patel?

  He will?

• 1:32:13David Pierce?

  Spike gives you directions. Spike's, Spike is the best. I love Spike.

• 1:32:17Alex Cranz?

  Oh my God. I'm watching the video now and like the dancing, just the hopping up and down. This is so cute.

• 1:32:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:23David Pierce?

  This is terrific.

• 1:32:23Alex Cranz?

  Very distracting if you're driving.

• 1:32:26Nilay Patel?

  We're not driving. The car's driving itself and you're shopping with Spike. Welcome to the future of transportation.

• 1:32:30David Pierce?

  I'm very glad we're out of the phase of like personified humanoid robot assistants and into the like Pixar character dog era of assistance.

• 1:32:39Nilay Patel?

  Justice for Bixby.

• 1:32:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:32:42Nilay Patel?

  Although Bixby was not actually a dog, we just told everyone it was a dog.

• 1:32:45David Pierce?

  We manifested Bixby.

• 1:32:47Alex Cranz?

  Bixby had no.

• 1:32:49Nilay Patel?

  Bixby's a dog with shoes. That's what, that's what it is. It's in your phone. It's definitely wearing shoes and it's a dog.

• 1:32:56Alex Cranz?

  I don't like that.

• 1:32:59Alex Cranz?

  Not at all.

• 1:32:59Nilay Patel?

  But you never got to see it.

• 1:33:01Alex Cranz?

  I never got to see it. Poor Bixby.

• 1:33:03Nilay Patel?

  Uh, all right, Alex, what's yours?

• 1:33:05Alex Cranz?

  Tom Warren had a review of the Nvidia RTX 4070, which is a $600 card that is pretty much as powerful as like $700 card from last year, which was the 3080. And he really liked it, except for it doesn't do 4K. But if you want 4K, buy a PlayStation 5 or spend $1,000.

• 1:33:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:33:28Nilay Patel?

  I buy it.

• 1:33:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. It's cool. I'm like-

• 1:33:30Nilay Patel?

  Will be good for my full motion VR sim racing.

• 1:33:32Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:33:33Nilay Patel?

  It's awesome.

• 1:33:34David Pierce?

  I do appreciate that we're like finally getting back to good GPUs that regular humans can actually afford to buy.

• 1:33:42Alex Cranz?

  I'm, I'm excited. Like, I mean, it's still the same cost as a PS5.

• 1:33:46David Pierce?

  Sure. And it's still gigantic and weighs 600 pounds.

• 1:33:49Alex Cranz?

  And it's got like, kind of a weird, uh, the, the power port on it. I think he, he wasn't super crazy about, but it's like, eh. I'm, I'm excited. I, I, I love that we like, for a while there AMD and Nvidia were both like, yeah, we're gonna gouge you because like, there's a shortage. Every card's $1,000. And now they're like, it can be 600. And if they can just make like a really good 1440p like this, but for 300?

• 1:34:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:34:12Alex Cranz?

  That'd be sick.

• 1:34:14Nilay Patel?

  And then you, you buy a full motion. The money you save on that, you buy on the full motion VR sim racing.

• 1:34:19Alex Cranz?

  I would, I would do sim racing in, in my Brooklyn apartment.

• 1:34:24Alex Cranz?

  I would have no furniture, but it'd be really cool.

• 1:34:27Nilay Patel?

  Uh, the TikTok algorithm has discovered that I love videos of people sim racing in full motion setups. It is ridiculous. Have you ever, uh, watched a video of someone else effectively watching TV? Cause that's what I'm doing a lot.

• 1:34:40Alex Cranz?

  Do they like move when they drive?

• 1:34:42Nilay Patel?

  It's like, I'm gonna watch a lot of videos. A video, by the way, just given the, the physical setup that are obviously best in landscape, but I'm gonna watch videos that are shot in portrait of a man in a chair. The chair moves and he's watching a monitor.

• 1:34:58Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:34:59Nilay Patel?

  But I can't get enough. The algorithm's like, do you want more of this?

• 1:35:01Alex Cranz?

  That's just Star Trek.

• 1:35:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:35:03Alex Cranz?

  Like, it's fine.

• 1:35:04David Pierce?

  People not moving in chairs.

• 1:35:06Nilay Patel?

  It's the future. The chair is moving. They're, they're not moving relative to the chair, but the chair plus person are moving relative to the earth. And they're all moving at the speed of light.

• 1:35:17David Pierce?

  We've taken the like 4D rides at Disney World and put them in our houses. And this is the future.

• 1:35:23Alex Cranz?

  Perfect. I love it. Do Ratatouille.

• 1:35:26Nilay Patel?

  There are people who have attached fans to them and they call them wind simulators.

• 1:35:33Alex Cranz?

  Like is it a little fan? It's just like a...

• 1:35:37David Pierce?

  I mean, where's the lie? Be like, where's the lie?

• 1:35:41Nilay Patel?

  I love it. I'm gonna end up with one of these. If you're listening to this and you're like, this is said with the purest love. I love you for calling it a wind simulator and I am extraordinarily jealous that I do not have a wind simulator of my own.

• 1:35:55Alex Cranz?

  I think you can get one for like $15 at Walmart. Just clip it on.

• 1:35:58Nilay Patel?

  It's not a high fidelity simulation.

• 1:36:00David Pierce?

  We're gonna get to the code conference in November and everybody's gonna be like, where's Neily? And it's just gonna be like, we lost him. He's racing.

• 1:36:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh, don't. No, no, no. Now that I have access to like, oh, I can make people have real life experiences. We're putting the billionaires in sim racing rigs. Don't you worry about it. If you run a sim racing company and you wanna do a code experience, you know, there's someone to call.

• 1:36:21David Pierce?

  Neily, this is our hot ones. Instead of eating wings, interview people while VR racing in simulators.

• 1:36:29Alex Cranz?

  This is it. I would watch the hell out of that.

• 1:36:31Nilay Patel?

  All right, Jeff. And by which I mean Jeff Bezos. Let's ride. All right, we gotta, we gotta end this before, before CEO. Makes me not the host of the code conference anymore.

• 1:36:42Alex Cranz?

  Just kicking the door down. Hey, Jim.

• 1:36:45Nilay Patel?

  This is all over. That was it. That was the Vergecast. I wanna say, uh, you should vote for us in the Webby Awards. If you've enjoyed this experience, you should make people give us a trophy.

• 1:36:56Alex Cranz?

  It's springy.

• 1:36:57Nilay Patel?

  It's spring. It's beautiful. Uh, David really, David wants a bat.

• 1:37:00David Pierce?

  I don't have one. There's one in the office. I don't have one. I have a mantle with nothing on it. And I would like it to be a Webby.

• 1:37:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the David Alex Vergecast is not one of them.

• 1:37:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, we need one. Help us.

• 1:37:11Nilay Patel?

  Vote for these two. I'm old. I got springs for days.

• 1:37:15David Pierce?

  Look at me, I'm Neily.

• 1:37:17Nilay Patel?

  There's a link in the show notes. Please vote for us. We'd really appreciate it. We got to win. So vote. We would love it. Uh, the site is really good this week. There's lots of stuff. Go check it out. Um, and we've got a really cool new feature. We made our story streams. They're like alive now. So they update live. So we're going to be using those a lot. I just want to call this out because we are, we have been rapidly like working on the redesign stuff. And that's the thing that we spent all of our attention on. And now they're like done. They're very cool.

• 1:37:43Alex Cranz?

  Cool. We did it for, for the HBO Max.

• 1:37:46Nilay Patel?

  We did it for HBO Max event. We did it for April Fool's Day, just as an experiment. Uh, and it's event season coming up. So Google I O, Apple W W C, Microsoft Build, we're going to use them a lot for that. I just want to call it. People ask me, how's the redesign going? And it's like, oh, we shipped, the thing is here. We, we shipped it iteratively, like you do on the internet. And now the product is like complete. It's a complete thought. It's very cool. Check it out. Okay. That's it. That's for us.

• 1:38:12Speaker 07

  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 Moreno. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's 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.

• 1:38:46Speaker 01

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• 1:39:30Speaker 08

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