Streaming goes up, Zoom comes down

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

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

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of integrating apps into 5G, a plan that totally worked. And now we live in a utopia of robot surgery and video conferencing. David, what's utopia like? We're the flagship podcast of all of that.

• 1:28Nilay Patel?

  It's a lot to be the flagship podcast of. It's a big concept. There's not a lot of competition in the space and that's, that's business, baby. You gotta find, you gotta find your niche. I'm your friend Eli. David Pierce is here. Hi, I too am integrated into 5G. Alex Cranz is here. Alex is in San Francisco.

• 1:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I'm in San Francisco wondering like, who isn't integrated into 5G at this point? Come on, guys, get it together.

• 1:55Nilay Patel?

  I saw in one of the trade publications, I saw a headline that was like, the hottest thing in 5G isn't public 5G networks. And then

• 2:03Alex Cranz?

  What is it?

• 2:04Nilay Patel?

  It's private 5G. Like, obviously, the other thing. Sure, yeah. So they've, they've given up on us, the lowly public. And your private 5G network for warehouse operations is where the money is. And I just want to go back in time and like, show people that headline in meetings.

• 2:23Nilay Patel?

  You're lying.

• 2:25David Pierce?

  The hottest thing in public 5G is still slightly faster Netflix downloads in the airport before you get on the plane.

• 2:33Nilay Patel?

  Which isn't bad. It's like, I don't hate it.

• 2:35David Pierce?

  It's something.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  We could have just, we could have just fixed the wifi networks in the airport. I think we would have gotten there. Anyway, this is not the flagship podcast of any of that, although I promise you there will be a slight amount of telecom 5G dunking in this episode of the Vergecast. That's what we do.

• 2:50David Pierce?

  Every episode. Yeah, as is our right.

• 2:53Nilay Patel?

  A lot of time this week, a bunch of streaming news this week. Slack had a redesign. We have some reader emails, which are always fun. There's some Carplane news to get into. Got a Mr. Beast update. There's just like a lot going on, like a, like a summer grab bag. But like we did last week, we want to begin by just getting the Elon news out of the way. We, we know you like it, even though you, you tell us you don't like it. I don't know how to describe this exact phenomenon. You tell us loudly you hate it in the comments of the post that you have clicked on, read to the bottom, and then left comments on. It is, it is a weird dynamic, but we know, you know you want it. So David, can you just give us quickly all of the Elon news this

• 3:38Nilay Patel?

  week that's worth talking about?

• 3:40David Pierce?

  Sure. Okay. Here, here is everything I've compiled that has happened this week that matters.

• 3:53David Pierce?

  All right, that's it.

• 3:58David Pierce?

  That helped everybody so bad?

• 3:59Nilay Patel?

  That's all that means in the world of Elon that is actually worth noting this week. Just a dull roar of noise. And that's where we are this week with Elon. So that's good.

• 4:09David Pierce?

  The only actual Elon thing I will say is that Casey Newton wrote a very good issue of Platformer that we also ran on The Verge about how we talk about Elon that I thought was very good and very instructive, and people should go read that.

• 4:20Nilay Patel?

  Yep. It's on the site. It's on Platformer. Go read it. Case is great. Okay. Let's talk about some actual news. We've been sort of talking about this moment in streaming, the two strikes that are going on, the interlocking strikes between the writers and the actors. Bob Iger had gave an interview to CNBC a while ago that set everything astray. Then there was some news that said the writers are coming back to the table at the studios. Disney had earnings, which are really revealing. Alex, what is going on in the world of streaming?

• 4:47Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think the big thing is Disney's hiking the price of Hulu and Disney Plus, but only the ad-free version. So if you're already paying $7.99 a month for the ads, you're fine. Keep enjoying all of those beautiful ads. If you were like me, trying to avoid the ads, the prices have gone up. Disney Plus is now going to cost $13.99, and then Hulu, no ads, is going to cost $17.99. But if you want to keep both, you can just pay $19.99.

• 5:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, boy.

• 5:22Alex Cranz?

  And I think the streamers were looking out in the world, and they were thinking, "Okay, how can we make this pricing scheme make sense?" And they just looked to like, cellphone providers? Like, that's my best guess? Because it's just like caught confusing garbage.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  Can I just say, there's a table in the story we wrote about the price hike that lays out the different prices that you can pay for Disney's various streaming services. And it is like deranged how complicated this is. If you want Disney Plus, there's two options. If you want Hulu, there's four options, including one that is an ESPN Plus with Hulu add-on, which I guess is also Hulu. If you want ESPN Plus, there's three other ones. If you want bundle offerings, there's three other ones. And if you just want Hulu with Plus Live TV, there's two other ones. So basically, you have like 400,000 different ways to get all of Disney's content. But it's abundantly clear, Alex, correct me if I'm wrong, that the thing Disney would really like you to do is pay $7.99 and watch ads.

• 6:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because why have a streaming service when you can just have a couple of cable channels where you don't have to deal with cable carriers? Like, if I'm, if I'm a business person, that makes a lot of sense to me. If I'm a person who wants anything to be nice and effortless and work smoothly, it makes no sense. But, but like the business case makes a lot of sense and I hate it because it makes so much sense. But yeah, we're just kind of like back to cable again.

• 6:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 6:51Alex Cranz?

  But we have to do it all ourselves, which is, I mean, that was the point, right? Like, that was, that was, that was the initial promise of this all, right? Like, we were gonna cut our cables and then we were gonna be really happy. Um, because we could just choose and I would never have to pay for ESPN again.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  What I'm learning now in my old age is that by making everyone pay for everything, we subsidized a lot of the niche stuff.

• 7:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  So everyone that was forced to pay for ESPN, that made them a lot of money, just a lot of money that they could then subsidize a lot of stuff with.

• 7:20David Pierce?

  Like the Disney Channel.

• 7:21Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then when you break it all up and you say, everyone pay for exactly what you want, it turns out like-

• 7:27Alex Cranz?

  That's expensive.

• 7:28Nilay Patel?

  Everyone will pay for exactly what they want and everything will make smaller, like the pie will stay the same size, but it'll have more slices and that's not great. And so it's very clear, they're trying to get back to, okay, you pay for access to this, the advertisers will come in because the advertisers will spend a lot of money and that'll give us the margin to go subsidize all the other stuff. It's not clear if that's gonna work either, but that's just very much where they would like to go back to.

• 7:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, it is deeply hilarious to me how quickly we're going back to, it should just be like cable, but better. And it's like, if, if you could just go back 20 years and be any of these big cable providers, and if they were just like, what if we just let people pick the shows they wanted to watch and changed nothing else? They would have just dominated the universe for forever because it turns out that's all people actually wanted. Like, I just wanna choose what show is on, turned out to be the only behavior anybody actually wanted to change. Everything else was like, pretty all right in most cases.

• 8:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, there was, there was a sports agnostic folks, like, who didn't wanna have to pay for ESPN. And now I don't have to.

• 8:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, but all the people who watched ESPN were paying for the Disney Channel and Nickelodeon and all of the other stuff on your TV that got funded by the fact that ESPN made so much money.

• 8:44Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 8:45David Pierce?

  Like ESPN was such a cash cow for Disney that it funded all this other stuff. And so it's just like- In a way, this system like didn't make any sense, but actually seems like it kind of worked, except that cable was bad and expensive.

• 8:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm saying, look, every like 15 years or so, there's like a lawsuit from someone who's like, my taxes go to the military and I don't want my taxes to go to the military. And then they lose.

• 9:06Alex Cranz?

  That was us.

• 9:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, yeah. Right, it's like, and then, then, then, then, like, the lawsuit goes and the court's like, no, that's not how taxes work.

• 9:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:13Nilay Patel?

  You pay your taxes, the government gets a side of it. That's ESPN. ESPN is the military industrial complex.

• 9:18Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  And we, the American consumers, should be forced to pay our taxes because that subsidizes, like, the 35th show on the Disney Channel.

• 9:26David Pierce?

  Right.

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  And that's how that's gonna work.

• 9:28David Pierce?

  Well, and it's like, do you know how that, like, your Google Maps knows where you are? Like, thank the military for GPS being a thing, right? It's like, it turns out, like, all this stuff is connected a little more than you think.

• 9:39Nilay Patel?

  So, but this is like, Disney had earnings, right? And their earnings are mixed bag. It's, earnings are never that interesting to talk about, but they lost a bunch of subscribers in India because they lost the rights to Cricket. So Disney Plus is coming back down to earth, but the parks are doing well. And it's just unclear what new content they will have because of the strikes. Iger notably was like, I hope we can figure this out this time. Whereas a few months ago, he was like, I'm very disturbed by these sick bastards. You know, like, the tone has shifted a little bit. And it just seems clear, like, Disney, they've got a, they've got to power through this moment and actually have stuff worth buying and watching.

• 10:22Nilay Patel?

  And it's sort of unclear what that stuff is gonna be.

• 10:25Alex Cranz?

  Well, and that's, that's part of this, too, is like, you think, okay, they, they did Disney Plus and Marvel was supposed to be a big subscriber. Like, the main reason people subscribe to Disney Plus is because they have children. But everybody who doesn't have children, myself included, we want to, like, why would we want to go subscribe? And the idea was, okay, well, you're gonna subscribe for Star Wars, you're gonna subscribe for Marvel. And then all those shows are kind of garbage.

• 10:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, it sounded like a pretty compelling argument. And even at the beginning, it was pretty good. Like, WandaVision was great.

• 10:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:55David Pierce?

  The Mandalorian was great. It was like, it started well, and then just over the course of the next few years, they just systematically got worse, right as all the other factors got harder for Disney. And so it's just like, this perfect storm of like, what is the pitch here? And it seems to get harder and harder all the time.

• 11:10Alex Cranz?

  Like, you could not get pay people to care about Secret Invasion, which was the, the latest Marvel show. I, I watched all of it.

• 11:20Alex Cranz?

  I know what happened? Do I ever want to talk with anyone else about it?

• 11:25Nilay Patel?

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

• 11:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I mean, kind of like, that's a big part of it. And it's

• 11:43Nilay Patel?

  But my sense of it is the reveal in every episode is this beloved character has always been an alien.

• 11:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it's like, this person is secretly an alien.

• 11:52David Pierce?

  The show is just like, it's like an intermission between Marvel things. They're just like, here's, we're gonna reboot the show over seven

• 12:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 12:00David Pierce?

  different episodes. And then at the end of it, new Avengers.

• 12:04Alex Cranz?

  It was so bad.

• 12:06Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's cynical on its face, like, just even I know that much about it, which I don't even think that's spoilers. Like, the show's called Secret Invasion. I think

• 12:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  that's what it is on the tin. You know, like, I don't think I spoiled anything about the show for anyone, but it's like, oh, we need some new actors. So what if all the old actors are revealed to be aliens? And then they get in a spaceship and go back to their home planet? It's like, oh, this is, you guys are really out of ideas here. You're starting over.

• 12:35Alex Cranz?

  I think they

• 12:36Nilay Patel?

  Oh, they Now that's a spoiler, Alex. Now the people are gonna

• 12:39Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I'm sorry. I'm sorry. Never mind, guys.

• 12:41Nilay Patel?

  So, but the big picture here is just generally across the streaming market, Disney has these problems. They're gonna start doing some Netflix movies, right? They're gonna actively explore cracking down on password sharing, which seems to have worked really well for Netflix. They keep gesturing at the idea of selling themselves to Apple.

• 12:59Alex Cranz?

  This, okay, okay. I wanna like, this is, this is what I wanna call, I wanna use, I'm gonna drop a curse word here. This is utter bullshit. This happens like every time, Apple is one of those companies that has a ton of money and they always have a ton of cash around, right? And so everybody's like, oh, what should they do with it? And like, six, seven years ago, it's like, they should buy Netflix.

• 13:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:16Alex Cranz?

  And they were never gonna buy Netflix because that doesn't make sense.

• 13:19David Pierce?

  First of all, they absolutely should have bought Netflix.

• 13:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it would have been great then, but they were never going to because it didn't make sense. And the idea that they were gonna go and like Tim Cook, whose entire thing is like making money by being really smart about logistics, is gonna take on the cruise and the theme park industry? Tim Cook's about to retire. Like, he doesn't-

• 13:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's why you buy Disney at the end. And you're like, "Look, Bob Iger, you hate retiring." Have you thought of being CEO of that? Here you go. I bought Disney. You just, I'm gonna, I'm Tim Cook. Here's-

• 13:49Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, now you go and do all the keynotes.

• 13:51Nilay Patel?

  My swan song is "Headsets and Cruises," "Together at Last," and then he just rides off in the sunset.

• 13:57Alex Cranz?

  That's a very, like, retire-y swan song.

• 14:00Nilay Patel?

  And a horse made of money. This is the future of cruises. Is you get on and you put on your Apple Vision Pro on your Disney Cruise, and you sit on a recliner.

• 14:09David Pierce?

  But you're not actually on a boat at all. You're just at home.

• 14:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, you're, you're, you're in a soundstage that rocks.

• 14:14Alex Cranz?

  You have a little Mickey assistant.

• 14:16Nilay Patel?

  This is, by the way, the plot of Wally, so a little worried. But at least at the end, you know, they save Earth.

• 14:24David Pierce?

  I don't know. So the Disney-Apple thing has always seemed suspicious to me, like, to the point where it's, I, I have always agreed with you, Alex, that this is like, a thing people say because it sort of seems like it makes sense, but never was actually real. But the two things that happened this week that I thought were very interesting were, uh, Kim Masters of The Hollywood Reporter, who is very much like a person who knows everything about what's happening in Hollywood, wrote a, one of those stories that is like half-reported and half-speculative, but it's only speculative because you can't say out loud the things that other people have said to you that you know for sure, right? Like, reading between the lines, this thing is like, very accurate and very well-sourced. About, basically, hypothetically, if you were Disney, here is what you would do if you wanted to sell your company to Apple. You would divest, you would pull the different pieces apart,

• 15:09David Pierce?

  and you would essentially turn yourself into a company full of characters and IP without a lot of stuff attached to it. And then you would sell that to Apple. And then you look around and, oh, that's exactly what Bob Iger kinda sounds like he wants to do with Disney. And so that happened. The piece is very good. It's, we have it linked, uh, on The Verge. We should put it in the show notes, too. Like, Kim is, is a person who knows things. And I, I trust, I don't think Kim is like, making this up out of whole cloth. And then the other thing was, somebody on Disney's earnings call asked Bob Iger directly something to the effect of, "Are you selling to Apple?" And his answer was, he said, basically, I'm not going to say anything. It's not something that we obsess about.

• 15:51David Pierce?

  And then he said, obviously, anyone who wanted to speculate about these things would have to immediately consider the global regulatory environment. And then he said, I'll say no more than that. How do you not read that as, gosh, I'd really like to, but Lina Khan and the FTC, super, super, super would not allow it to happen? Like, I don't know how else to read that statement from Bob Iger.

• 16:10Alex Cranz?

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

• 16:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna, I'm gonna make the argument.

• 16:55David Pierce?

  Do it.

• 16:55Alex Cranz?

  Okay, be Bob.

• 16:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm coming back to Disney as CEO.

• 16:58Alex Cranz?

  Wow, congratulations.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  The first thing Bob Iger says in every room. Uh, look, I was leaving, but I'm coming back. Uh, no, here's the argument. I have two arguments to make. One is like a straightforward argument. We kind of went through this with Microsoft and Activision, and eventually the EU caved, and the FTC lost, and like, whatever, right? Like, it is the same shape of thing, right? The big distribution platform buys a bunch of content. We seem to not know how to stop it. It just happens. Fine, maybe it will just happen. I don't know if it will, but obviously Bob Iger is thinking about the global regulatory environment. Then there's, I think, what I would frame as the chaos argument, which is, let them dance. You know, like, this is how companies fall apart, is like, they get too big.

• 17:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:44Nilay Patel?

  And then this thing seems unmanageable, and like, Apple's corporate culture will crush Disney, and then maybe we'll be free. You know, it's like, that's like, it's the, it's the worst argument I can make. It is, I would say, the argument that, for example, has proven to be correct in the case of every AT&T acquisition in history. But go ahead, buy Time Warner. Try to, try to rule the world.

• 18:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, I was gonna say AOL Time Warner is exactly this kind of merger that you're describing also.

• 18:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and it's like, yeah, go ahead, try. See if that works out for you. See if, see if you are not destroyed by your own hubris. I'm not saying that's a great policy outcome. Many, many people lose their jobs along the way. And lots of art doesn't get made, although with Time Warner and AT&T, we did get the grayscale four by three Justice League. So that happened.

• 18:38Alex Cranz?

  We're gonna get like a Marvel movie just shot all vertically, so it fits perfectly on your iPhone and profile. That's what you're getting.

• 18:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, look, I, I'm not saying they should or shouldn't do it. I just think that like, if I'm Tim Cook, I'm looking at the history of these kinds of integrations. And I'm saying, oh, actually, in the end, this never works out. Like, it doesn't matter about the regulators. Like, if you are a smart business person, you look at integrations of this size. And you're like, oh, this is death. Like, this is what kills both companies in like, meaningful ways at the end of the road.

• 19:11Alex Cranz?

  He's told people no in the past, right? Like, wasn't there the one where Elon was like, please buy Tesla before Tesla was Tesla?

• 19:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:18Alex Cranz?

  And he was like, LOL, get out of my office. How did you get in here?

• 19:21Nilay Patel?

  Actually, speaking of things they should have bought, right? Like, the many, many, many attempts that Apple has made to make a car.

• 19:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  They should have just bought Tesla.

• 19:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 19:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 19:32Nilay Patel?

  They would have solved the panel gaps. I'll tell you that much.

• 19:36Nilay Patel?

  They wouldn't have cheaped out on the materials.

• 19:38David Pierce?

  There just would be no door handles at all.

• 19:40Alex Cranz?

  Your whole hand goes in those panel gaps.

• 19:43David Pierce?

  Yeah, but this is the thing that comes up every time the like, possibility of Apple acquiring some sexy company comes up. Like, do you remember a couple of years ago when Peloton was flagging and everybody was like, oh, Apple's gonna buy Peloton? And then there were a couple of people, I think, including our friend Steve Kovac at CNBC, who just basically raised their hand and were like, why on earth would Apple want Peloton? Like, why all these companies need Apple makes a lot of sense.

• 20:09Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:09David Pierce?

  Why Apple, the richest company on the planet that has done a very good job of developing the ability to do almost anything very well over time? Why on earth would it need like a warehouse full of treadmills and bikes that no one is buying?

• 20:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:24David Pierce?

  And in this case, like, what does Apple need with a theme park?

• 20:29Nilay Patel?

  I mean, they run a very nice theme park in Cupertino. It's a circle.

• 20:34Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's I guess like the basic business advice is like, don't buy problems, you know?

• 20:39David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:40Nilay Patel?

  This is a huge problem. Like, the future of streaming is a huge problem. Apple's involved in these strikes, right? They are part of the AMP TP. They're up against SAG, they're up against the Writers Guild Disclosure. Alex is part of the Writers Guild. Our newsroom is unionized with the Writers Guild. I'm a Netflix producer. Comcast owns a chunk of the company. You should watch our Netflix show. It's great. That was your best one yet. That was like all in one breath. That was really good. Someone wrote to us and said, your disclosures are starting to sound like flexes. So I'm trying to. But it is true that I'm a Netflix producer.

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  You should watch our Netflix show. It's great. It was nominated for an Emmy. Also, you've you've merged for your other podcast now? Do you want to disclose that? You can go to store dot the virtue dot com and buy buy literally my name on a hat. So that's a weird moment for me personally.

• 21:29Nilay Patel?

  That's all just really complicated for Apple. And this is like their first baby step in the water, right? They're not like a huge distributor of TV shows. Buying Disney is like now they're in it.

• 21:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 21:39Nilay Patel?

  Like they're fully like, let's take an example. Jason Kilar took over for a Time Warner, right? He took over Warner Media and he was like, here's the thing we want to do. All the movies are going to go to streaming day and date. That is a thing that Apple would want to do to promote Apple TV plus on their devices. And that thing broke Warner Media, pushed Kilar out of the CEO role. And we ended it with Discovery Max plus whatever it's called. Those are culture decisions they have to make. They're not business decisions. And I think Apple likes being at a remove. The thing that I would offer, and we have an entire episode about sports and streaming coming next week. But Apple's really into sports. Yep. And I think they really want to do sports in the vision pro in like a serious way.

• 22:22Nilay Patel?

  ESPN over the past couple of months, and in particular last week, just sort of like casually rearranged the sports media market. Yeah. Right? They took Pat McAfee, who was kind of the one of the biggest indie sports podcasters, video people. He had a deal with FanDuel. Disney just took him away. I think he was unhappy with that FanDuel deal. He's now just part of the ESPN lineup, like big, huge, multi million dollar deal. And then this last week, Penn Gaming, which is another betting company, heavily invested in Barstool Sports. A lot of machinations there, but they basically just gave it back to Dave Portnoy, who is a controversial character in his own right. And so you can have Barstool, we're going with Disney, we're going with ESPN. And ESPN opened up to betting for

• 23:05Nilay Patel?

  the first time in partnership with Penn. So just in like the last few months, ESPN has just like repositioned some of the biggest indie names in sports media and entered betting. That's all just a lot, right? And that, those are power moves. Like, this is how ESPN wants it to be. This is how ESPN is going to get it. That puts ESPN in the driver's seat of kind of the next turn of things, maybe. But it's not clear that Apple wants to be in like the betting business at all, right?

• 23:35David Pierce?

  No, I would say it seems overwhelmingly likely that Apple doesn't want to be in that business. Like, to the extent that like betting apps are in the App Store seems to be only a headache for Apple. And I can't imagine them signing up for the regulatory complications that come with that anytime soon. And I think, like, to your, to your point about getting into this world fully, even with TV+, Apple has been sort of dragged kicking and screaming into the broader Hollywood landscape. Like, it, it had to commit to spending a bunch of money to put its movies in theaters. It's slowly becoming more of a part of Hollywood. But even still, like, Apple's whole thing is it likes things it can wrap its arms entirely around. And even if you own Disney, you just can't do

• 24:18David Pierce?

  that. So like, I can see what Disney would want from Apple, out of some, you know, partnership. What's the phrase everybody uses? Special relationship that, that they had with Jobs? Because Jobs owned Pixar. And there was some-

• 24:31Nilay Patel?

  He was the largest shareholder of Disney. It wasn't a special relationship. He was the largest individual shareholder of Disney. So he was like, I can call them. And they picked up the phone.

• 24:42David Pierce?

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

• 25:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:03David Pierce?

  For a variety of reasons.

• 25:05Alex Cranz?

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

• 25:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:20Alex Cranz?

  Probably not.

• 25:21David Pierce?

  It's, it's a mess.

• 25:22Nilay Patel?

  I think they want to do sports deals, not gambling. Go ahead.

• 25:24David Pierce?

  I was just gonna say, can we get a real quick strike update before we throw a break and move on from this stuff? Cause I feel like a bunch of this stuff came up in these earnings calls and people are back at the table, but not back at the table.

• 25:35Alex Cranz?

  So it's, it's all negotiations, which means everybody's going to have their own opinion on who's the one stepping back. Right now, the Writers Guild is saying, well, it's the producers. They're not coming to the table. They refuse to come to the table. And the producers are like, uh-uh, we're here. And so it's not clear. There's still definitely a lot of like discourse there and, and people upset with each other. But the, the Emmys have been delayed because of the strikes, because like you can't have a bunch like it. What good are the Emmys if you don't have a bunch of actors up on stage being like, yeah, I want an Emmy like it's, it's just the technical Emmys and those are really good, but they haven't televised those for years. So I don't think we're gonna start now.

• 26:17Alex Cranz?

  And so you've got that Paramount just, just came out and was like, well, we are totally set. We, we are, we are, we, we're fine. We can weather, continue to weather this. And this is where I'm super suspicious of other companies who are like, yeah, I just don't know if we're going to have all the content we need. Because they all knew this, these strikes were coming. They all knew this was going to be happening. They've all been banking shows for, for a while now to get through this. So any of them who say, well, I didn't know and everything, be super suspicious there. Like take a moment. Look around and be like, is that true? Because it's it's certainly interesting and everybody's gonna keep doing this. This is gonna be like, there's always, you're gonna have both sides expressing their truth,

• 26:59Alex Cranz?

  which is certainly the truth, but it's also specifically their versions of it. So, you know, maybe Disney doesn't have enough content to get them through. They could bring Willow back instead of yanking it off of Disney Plus after a few months. I'm fine. I'm not bitter. It's okay.

• 27:15Nilay Patel?

  Oh, this is how we get Back Girl back on on Max. I see it.

• 27:19Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, this is how we get it back. They're like, oh, my God, this actually will make us more money than the tax break saved us.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  It's interesting. I'll just know and then we then we should take a break. Uh, the last time there was a writer's strike, that's when reality TV happened.

• 27:33Alex Cranz?

  Hmm. Well, it's happening right before it.

• 27:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. And the studios started investing in it massively because it was cheaper. And then it became this like dominant form of media.

• 27:43Alex Cranz?

  That's what a lot of them are planning on doing. Like, a lot of them are gonna carry through with that. But at the end of the day, especially because the actors on strike, like you still want, people like to see famous people. That's just the way it is. They want to see the famous people and the famous people are all out picketing or staying in their houses going, yeah, you go picketers and like Vin Moeing the strike fund occasionally.

• 28:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Will Smith is like, get my weird AI double from that bad movie that we shot in 120. Get him on the on the line. I still, I can barely remember that movie. It's called The Gemini Man. Get the Gemini Man out there right now.

• 28:17David Pierce?

  Gemini Man two, three, and four are all coming next year.

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, if we don't solve this, AI Will Smith is coming to your house.

• 28:25Alex Cranz?

  That's the real threat.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's just like, it was last time it was reality. This time it's gonna be, oh, what if we show you even more South Korean game shows? And like, that's gonna be a weird, it's gonna be a weird thing to look at a few years. Shouldn't this doesn't get resolved soon is all I'm saying.

• 28:38Alex Cranz?

  Netflix is gonna have a great time because they have a huge international library. So they're they're like set Paramount set. Disney's the one I'm kind of surprised that they weren't set because you would think Hulu's definitely set. But yeah, we'll see.

• 28:51David Pierce?

  I don't know. After Only Murders in the Building, season three, like what is there on Hulu?

• 28:56Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 28:56David Pierce?

  For anyone.

• 28:57Alex Cranz?

  The Little Fires show with Reese Witherspoon that I never watched, but I know exists.

• 29:01David Pierce?

  Mm hmm. Love that. The Little Fires one. Everybody's favorite show for your consideration for the Emmys.

• 29:07Nilay Patel?

  All right, that's enough. We will note here, just at the end, Barbie is over a billion at the box office. Hell, yes. Without any Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie promotion, because they're on strike too, which is also fascinating, and probably everyone's going to learn their own lesson from that. Okay, that's it. We have to take a break. We'll be right back.

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• 30:32Nilay Patel?

  We're back. In a hard transition from the state of streaming, we're now going to talk about enterprise software.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 30:39Nilay Patel?

  The two most important things.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  David, you wrote about Slack's redesign this week. A lot going on at Slack. It's turning into Teams in a lot of ways.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, basically. It's a sort of delightful story because Teams spent several years during the pandemic just ruthlessly copying everything it could about Slack and then just sort of decimating it because you get Teams for free by subscribing to Microsoft's many other products. Slack is a separate thing you have to pay for. So Teams sort of resoundingly won by just copying Slack and now Slack, which got bought by Salesforce as a half-success story, half sort of retrenchment after being destroyed by Teams, is now just completely copying Teams. So they've added a new sidebar where there's like the home feed where that kind of looks like Slack, but then there's also a DMs thing where you can see all your messages from all

• 31:33David Pierce?

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

• 32:15David Pierce?

  day, and the idea of just like, we've put in a new icon, always freaks people out.

• 32:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's understandable chaos because most things in Slack are the same kind of thing.

• 32:23David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's messaging. It's just a bunch of messages in a row.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  Right. It's a, here's a line of text that, you know, it's like sent to someone or some room and at worst, maybe you'll like send someone a line of text in the wrong context and that's bad. Great. But like, it's all the same thing. And what's happening now with this redesign is like many more kinds of things are gonna come to the front, like huddles and the canvas thing, which is like a Google Doc for a room. And that's the turn that I, I think they've wanted to make for a long time. Like, this is where we work and work involves lots of different kinds of communication and contexts versus this is where you send lines of text to other people. And we'll see. Whereas Teams, we had a long conversation on Teams and like the Verge

• 33:09Nilay Patel?

  Team Slack room, because Teams is much bigger, like an order of magnitude more users than Slack.

• 33:16David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  And it is mostly in big companies used as a video conferencing application, not any of the other stuff.

• 33:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, a lot of them still use Slack for like DMs and stuff. And then they use Teams for their video conferencing.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  Which is bizarre.

• 33:31David Pierce?

  Which is insane for like a bunch of reasons. Yeah.

• 33:35Alex Cranz?

  The IT guys just like, I got money to spend, man. I'm having a great time, like blowing that whole bunch of it. Enjoy yourself, IT guy.

• 33:42Nilay Patel?

  If you're not watching the video, Alex just made the like, make it rain motion with her hands to describe an IT administrator buying Slack.

• 33:54Alex Cranz?

  You already got Teams out there and he's just throwing money around. She? They?

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  The thong songs playing. Alex is like buying enterprise software.

• 34:05Alex Cranz?

  That's how I, that's how like, as a lover of enterprise software, that's how I think about it.

• 34:10Nilay Patel?

  We'll see. I haven't gotten the new Slack update yet. David, are you using it?

• 34:14David Pierce?

  I haven't gotten it yet either. It's gonna roll out slowly. Slack always does this really slowly. They're like desperately afraid of making people nervous about changes. So you can like opt in to being fast or medium or slow and how you get updates. I think it's coming to free users first, because like Slack doesn't care about you if you don't give them money. So just deal with the new thing. And then sort of slowly to everybody else. I'm very curious about it. But the reason I added it to the rundown, and we don't have to spend too long on this, but I think it's really interesting. We had this debate ironically in Slack after this story went up about why people care about Slack so much. Like just to let people into how the Verge works. I've written about Slack a lot over the years and every time, a ton of people read it.

• 34:57David Pierce?

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

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  I think it's because people use Slack for their friends. And most enterprise software is just like, not used that way. Like, that's, that's just my thing. It's like, you live in Slack for like, a lot of things you do with other people. If you have a D and D group, there's a chance you have a Slack. Maybe you have a Discord.

• 35:48Alex Cranz?

  We have a Signal, thank you.

• 35:50Nilay Patel?

  Like, but so many people just have Slacks for things outside of work.

• 35:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  And I think that that means like, everyone's just kind of interested. Like, here's this interface I have for communities on the internet that is changing. Or, you know, Slack just captured so much of the imagination to begin with, that everyone is interested, like, remains interested in it. But like Zoom isn't that thing. No one reads about when we do Zoom updates. Unless they're stealing all your data.

• 36:16David Pierce?

  With one recent exception, which we'll come back to.

• 36:20Alex Cranz?

  But I am curious how this like, because I think you're right, Neela, where it is, it is people use this outside of this. How is that going to affect adoption when they change it? Because right now, if you go and you look at Discord and Slack, there's definitely some differences, but they fundamentally look a lot alike. And now it's not going to look like that way. One's going to be very, for like, business, and the other is going to be where your gamer friends say mu mu. And like, which is the one? I don't have gamer friends that say that, just to be clear.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  You're the gamer friend who says that.

• 36:53Alex Cranz?

  Which is going to be the one, like, like, are people going to still use it? Are they going to look at it and be like, mm, old people use that and click out of it?

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  So I have this like, theory of competition in software. And it, I think it's best expressed with iOS Android. They diverge in the way the interfaces look and then they converge again, like all the time. And you can drive yourself crazy and certainly gain a lot of like hate replies on Twitter if you say iOS copied Android or Android copied iOS, right? Like, that's the cycle they're in. But the reason they do that is very obvious, is that if you want people to switch between platforms, you have to lower the cognitive burden of switching.

• 37:31Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 37:31Nilay Patel?

  If you are Google and you want people to switch from iOS to Android, you cannot have a radically different interface.

• 37:38Alex Cranz?

  Right. Yeah.

• 37:39Nilay Patel?

  You, you need to welcome them in and say, most of the things are in most of the same places. And the things that are different are substantially better for X, Y, or Z reason. And you can 100% argue over whether that is successful in the case of Android. But that's basically the thinking, right? It's like, you got to make it easy to switch. If you are Slack and Microsoft Teams is way bigger than you, it makes all the sense in the world that you're going to make Slack look slightly more like Microsoft Teams to try to peel that market share back. What's interesting, to your point, Alex, is they're not looking more like Discord.

• 38:12Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  Because that's the other competitor. It's just no one wants to admit that Discord is a competitor. Like, I had former Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield on Decoder ages ago. I don't even mean the Verge. I don't even mean pre-Decoder. The last time I talked to him about this specific thing, he was like, yeah, I don't think Discord's a competitor. But it obviously is. It's just in this moment, where, where's the money? The money is paid users of Microsoft Teams, not a bunch of randos in a crypto Discord. And like-

• 38:41Alex Cranz?

  We're having a great time.

• 38:42Nilay Patel?

  Time of their life over there. Yeah.

• 38:43David Pierce?

  Slack and Discord have been refusing to run at each other for years. Like, I remember asking the Discord folks, I don't know, four years ago now, when are you doing Discord for Teams? And they were like, we don't, we don't want to mess with that. It involves a bunch of like, compliance and administrative work we don't want to do. If you want to use it for work, great, but that's not officially what it's for. And Slack says literally the exact same thing in reverse. They're like, if you want to use it for personal stuff, that's awesome. Knock yourself out. That's not what it's for. And it's like, these two companies- Just keep staring at each other like refusing to acknowledge that they're actually doing the same thing.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 39:21Alex Cranz?

  Well, I think that's why Slack was so popular versus all of those competitors, right? Like, remember HipChat?

• 39:28Nilay Patel?

  We were a HipChat's shop for a minute.

• 39:30David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 39:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, HipChat was at Campfire.

• 39:33David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 39:34Alex Cranz?

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

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  The Alex Cranz experience.

• 40:09Alex Cranz?

  But I look forward to it, but I am like curious if that's gonna happen.

• 40:14David Pierce?

  And actually ironically, Microsoft is the company that is trying to do both. Like, it made all this noise a couple of years ago about Teams for families, which to me is just like outrageous.

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  It's just a threat. That's like Excel for preschoolers, like, we're coming for you.

• 40:32David Pierce?

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

• 40:56Nilay Patel?

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

• 41:24Alex Cranz?

  I want this for you.

• 41:27Nilay Patel?

  All I want is to not use enterprise software at work.

• 41:29David Pierce?

  You have an attache who carries your phone for you.

• 41:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and you know, like, you know, the, the masters of the universe, they're not, you think Tim Cook looks at an email? He's got an iPad for God's sake.

• 41:42David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:44Alex Cranz?

  Does Tim Cook use an iPhone?

• 41:46Nilay Patel?

  That's actually a good question. I've never actually seen him use a phone. I've seen him use an iPad.

• 41:49David Pierce?

  Wait, Neelai, do you, do you have a like family coordination software that you use?

• 41:54Nilay Patel?

  No, we both work at home. Like, we don't, you need to do that stuff when you're like asynchronous. But like, we see each other all day.

• 42:02Alex Cranz?

  You just yell at her.

• 42:03David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  Like, we are, we are communicating. I think now Max is going to start in kindergarten. So like, there's a, there's another force in the world that has to schedule us. And I think maybe now we will need to share a calendar, but. Uh, three people who spend all day together, you should not need software to manage that relationship. Really, I really cannot emphasize that enough. If you spend all day with two other people, you should not be like, I'd like to introduce some software into this world.

• 42:32David Pierce?

  There was a minute where I tried to get my wife on, on Trello for life planning purposes. And the, she was into it, but then we couldn't agree on how to format the Trello cards. So it all fell apart.

• 42:46David Pierce?

  She, I was just like, no, you have to use these things as checklists on the Trello cards. And she was just like, whatever, I'm going to write it all in the description. And like three days later, it just all fell apart. And now we just have like a series of context free links sent in our text message chain. And that's, that's our, that's how we talk to each other.

• 43:01Nilay Patel?

  That's not good. Are you, um, have you, have I converted you to Apple Watch walkie talkie people yet? That's the, the thing I'm going to miss the most when we like go back to offices and lives and whatever.

• 43:11David Pierce?

  No, she's a green bubble. Uh, Anna, Anna's a Pixel owner and a very happy one who will never switch. So when I'm like using or testing an Android phone, we can just like duo our faces off and it's great. But sadly, sadly, there will be no walkie talkies.

• 43:26Alex Cranz?

  Walkie talkie is dangerous. No one in my family understands how to use it. So I had to turn it off because I'd be like just hearing the whistling from my wrist, whatever I was doing that day. And I was like, nope, we're not doing this anymore. Revoked.

• 43:39Nilay Patel?

  We are so deep in them. I mean, this is enterprise. This is, when you say have you integrated Microsoft Teams into your life? It's like, no. But have you been in the grocery store talking to your wrist about which bread to purchase? Yes. Effectively on speakerphone to like.

• 43:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 43:56Nilay Patel?

  It's, the Apple Watch is, is loud now. And I'm just like, boop.

• 44:05Nilay Patel?

  Like I said, my entire life is just headed toward power moves of this kind. That's all I want.

• 44:10David Pierce?

  Love it.

• 44:11Nilay Patel?

  We actually, we were kind of on the subject of like, a bunch of behaviors changed in the pandemic work from home moment, and now everyone's sort of headed back to offices in various ways. One very funny example, that Zoom called everyone back to office this week, which is choice.

• 44:26David Pierce?

  Zoom?

• 44:27Nilay Patel?

  Just perfectly choice.

• 44:28David Pierce?

  Do you think Zoom knew, like when they're sitting there being like, we're about to send this, like, all staff email telling everybody to come back to the office, like, do you think they knew that they were like, well, we're about to play ourselves so hard as soon as this email goes out?

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  If I'm Zoom, I'm doing this just to generate some headlines about Zoom, because like, no one's been talking about Zoom for weeks, you know, and it's like, you know what we should do is call everyone back to the office, like, everyone will be like, remember Zoom? Zoom was great. It was better than the Teams we're forced to use now work. Where's that IT guy spending the money in the strip club?

• 45:01Alex Cranz?

  He's out there. He's like, oh, you want Zoom? I got you.

• 45:06Alex Cranz?

  He just, he's free with the budget.

• 45:09Nilay Patel?

  And then Zoom also got itself in trouble this week, as you alluded to earlier, David.

• 45:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:13Nilay Patel?

  They changed their terms of service, and I understand why they changed their terms of service. They just did it in the most ham-fisted, stupid way possible. So they basically changed their terms of service to say, all the data that you're putting through Zoom, Zoom has a license to. And they need that. If you run a service on the internet, you, you need a license to all the data that users put into your service for any infinite number of copyright reasons. Like, you run servers, you're going to copy data from one server to another, you're going to introduce new features that might remix the user data, all this stuff. So you just need this, like, big, broad license. And then-

• 45:48David Pierce?

  The example you always use when we talk about the stuff that I really like is thumbnails.

• 45:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 45:52David Pierce?

  If they don't have the rights to use and change and copy your stuff, they can't make the little versions of the image that you click on to get the big version of the image. Like, it's that simple in many-

• 46:02Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. They can't overlay text on those images, because that's a derivative. You just write yourself the biggest, broadest license you can. And they added these lines that are like, for artificial intelligence and training models. And it's like, everyone lost their mind.

• 46:16Alex Cranz?

  So fast.

• 46:17Nilay Patel?

  By the raw language of it, that means everything you say into Zoom can be used to train artificial intelligence.

• 46:23David Pierce?

  Right. It's like, oh, we're selling your data to OpenAI to put into GPT-4, and we're allowed to now, is like- The the implication of that. Speaking of the strike, I saw a bunch of people in Hollywood tweeting like, oh, we can't use Zoom when we're creating stuff anymore. It's like, people are so primed to see this stuff being taken from them and see this all being used against them in a lot of ways. That Zoom did this the wrong way at exactly the wrong time.

• 46:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:51Alex Cranz?

  If they'd done this like three months ago, nobody would have batted an eye. Until somebody like did a TikTok right now being like, did you know three months ago? Zoom decided to steal all your data and give it to ChatGPT. And now you own nothing, including your face. Zoom does.

• 47:08Nilay Patel?

  Right. So this specific block of text is in like almost every Terms of Service. And it's it's just like what you need to run a service, right? You need to take a perpetual worldwide, non-associative royalty-free, sub-licensed, or transferable license to do stuff. Access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract. Like, it's just a list of verbs. We are giving ourselves the broadest license to do verbs to your data. Because if you run a service, there's you want to do stuff.

• 47:37Alex Cranz?

  You're gonna do verbs.

• 47:38Nilay Patel?

  Verbs is what we're here for. It's not nouns.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  If you're living a nouns life, you know, so they added this language about artificial intelligence. So you just kind of combine the like usual panic. Like every couple of years, like some teenager discovers the Instagram Terms of Service and people freak out. And everyone posts that copy and it's like, I do not give Instagram the permission to do shit. And then I have to like write a blog post that's an autocomplete of a blog post from four years ago.

• 48:03David Pierce?

  This is literally the case, by the way. J. Peters wrote our our story about this Zoom AI thing and has backlinks to one about Instagram from 2012 and one about Dropbox and Google Drive also from 2012. And they are, I mean, like, almost exactly the same post, both written by Eli, both being like, guys, this is just, this is just the words you need to have things on servers. Everything's probably fine.

• 48:30Nilay Patel?

  But so what's interesting about this is there's the general AI panic that is happening. It's like David was saying, even the writer's strike is has big elements of this. And then there's the actual problem, which is, yeah, if you just read the language, it sure sounds like it. So Zoom had to clarify that customer data is customer data, which is if you are an enterprise software company, the worst thing to have to clarify.

• 48:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 48:54Nilay Patel?

  That's the whole point of the enterprise software company. That's fundamentally why Slack and Discord are not the same. Right? Like Slack makes these big promises to big businesses about its relationship to them. And Discord is like, yeah, it's for gamers. We're gonna mine all of your data. Like, it's, you know, it's just a very different approach. And I think Zoom stepped in it and we're gonna see hundreds of other companies step in it. Because at the end of the day, Zoom probably wants to use AI to do things like better beauty filters that people ask for in Zoom calls, to do things like automated transcripts that are better than the already AI-powered automated transcripts are doing. What you want is to write yourself a broad license so you can innovate freely.

• 49:39Nilay Patel?

  And the reality is you're gonna have to start asking permission step by step for all that stuff, because this panic is coming over and over again.

• 49:45David Pierce?

  Part of me is like, okay, Zoom did this exactly wrong. Right? Like, they added a statement after all of this kerfuffle that said, notwithstanding the above, which is a deeply hilarious way to say, well, we wrote that badly, so here's some new words. Zoom will not use audio, video, or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent. Like, A, like you're saying, Eli, wild that that was not in there the first time. But B, I kind of don't know, other than that one bit of, I think, clarification that some lawyer at Zoom didn't think they needed to do because it was inherently obvious, but is not obvious to people who like to track changes on terms of service. It's, this is just a hard thing to do.

• 50:30David Pierce?

  And I think one of the things we've discovered with a lot of these tools is like, the thing that happens when somebody starts recording a Zoom call and there's that very loud thing that goes like, this meeting is now being recorded.

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:41David Pierce?

  And they have this new thing with the AI meeting summaries, where it like, goes way out of its way to let you know that it's doing AI meeting summaries and you have to like, click a thing to make the giant window full of text go away. We're just setting ourselves up for this like, heinous user experience because these companies are afraid of our reaction to what they're doing in order to run their service. And there, it feels like there has to be a middle ground in there somewhere, but I don't know what it is and it feels like it's gonna be a while before we find it.

• 51:11Alex Cranz?

  I think it's like, one, they have to repeatedly prove that they're not gonna do nefarious things with your data. And that's pretty hard for them to currently do because... Everything we cover at theverge.com, there's so many examples of it, right? And so like, they've, they've kind of set themselves up to fail in that respect because they have misused data over and over and over and over again. And so to be like, no, no, but this time is different. Like, nobody's gonna believe that. You've got, you've got a really sad, you've got, people are way more savvy about this stuff than they were 10, 15 years ago. And so you, you've got to fix that. And I think until they can kind of earn that trust back, they're gonna be in this place. And then the other side of it is like, people, please, like, go read anything ChatGPT wrote

• 51:56Alex Cranz?

  that is longer than like 100 words, and then come back to me and say that it's gonna steal my job. Like, right, you know, the stuff is not, we, we are very excited about it. And everybody's like, oh, it's gotten so big. But at the same time, it is still very early days. ChatGPT and these other generative AI systems aren't gonna be writing really good books. They'll write books, but they're not gonna be readable fun books most of the time.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:24David Pierce?

  I do wonder, though, if, to your point, Neelai, about companies running into this, if what they're gonna learn from this is just barrel your way through it.

• 52:35Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that's all.

• 52:35David Pierce?

  Don't ask permission. Don't be nice. Just do what Google did and say, yeah, we take your shit from the internet. What are you gonna do about it?

• 52:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the problem is Zoom exists in a world where Microsoft Teams exists.

• 52:46Alex Cranz?

  And Slack.

• 52:47David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 52:47Nilay Patel?

  And Slack, right? Like, Google, Google's approach to data on the internet right now, explicitly now in some of their terms, is if the crawler can see it, we can train AI with it.

• 52:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:59Nilay Patel?

  And that's a nightmare choice, right? You have to say, don't index my website in Google search. Uh, okay, like, maybe. Like, I'm gonna shut my business down rather than like, Google train its models on my data. Like, you have to be Google to put yourself in that position. With Zoom, it's like, well, I'm just not gonna use Zoom. It's like, the market works. The real answer, I think, is Unfeasible in America, but you need some sort of privacy law so that if they do overstep, there's a consequence and that keeps them in line. I don't know if we're gonna get that anytime soon. I just want you to try to, I keep using this example. You have to go into Chuck Schumer's office and be like, alright, there's a spectrum of

• 53:43Nilay Patel?

  AI things here from beauty filters and Zoom to the people on Reddit who faked Glorbo to make, write about Glorbo in World of Warcraft. Write a law, Chuck.

• 53:54David Pierce?

  Well, if that's the spectrum, the law is just, all these things are very good. No problems.

• 54:04Alex Cranz?

  Only good things, there are only upsides.

• 54:06Nilay Patel?

  Alright, let's end on my favorite story of the week. Same enterprise software, real middle section on enterprise software here. Speaking of work from home, the Zoom explosion, all this stuff, in the height of the pandemic, when everyone thought, no one was ever gonna go work in an office again, where it's all video conferencing forever. Verizon bought a company called BlueJeans for $400 million. They, this was a big deal. Like, the CEO of Verizon went on CNBC to announce it. They were talking about how they're gonna roll it into 5G. Verizon, you know, a big IT supplier, they're like, our distribution network, this is the future of business. BlueJeans powered by Verizon, give all your employees Verizon 5G phones, a low latency BlueJeans experience will blow. Anyway, they shut it down this week.

• 54:53Alex Cranz?

  It's because, have you ever used BlueJeans?

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, no, no. I'm a, I'm a regular human.

• 54:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I had to, so that's what the Writers Guild of America used as its software. And so when I was a union steward, you'd have 200 people on a call in blue jeans and no one knew how it worked.

• 55:12David Pierce?

  Should've gone on strike about that.

• 55:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm sorry.

• 55:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, really? It was brutal. It was just the worst app on the planet. And I remember when Verizon bought it, I was like, either they'll make it good or they didn't understand that they bought garbage. And it sounds like it was the latter.

• 55:30Nilay Patel?

  Let me just put that headline right next to something else. Verizon will soon raise prices on unlimited plans again.

• 55:37David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 55:37Nilay Patel?

  Maybe if you hadn't lit $400 million on fire, buying a third-rate video conferencing app to make your 5G network better, you could have just kept the prices lower. Just garbage software.

• 55:52David Pierce?

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

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  They had a bunch of marketing that was like, "Nothing fits like Blue Jeans." Like, that's what they were doing.

• 56:17David Pierce?

  That's true, and has nothing to do with video conferencing.

• 56:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna read you this sentence. "We have made the difficult decision to sunset our suite of Blue Jeans products." There is more than one product?

• 56:28David Pierce?

  We are taking off our blue jeans.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  That's bad. So if you're on a Verizon Go Unlimited, Beyond Unlimited, or Above Unlimited, sure.

• 56:39David Pierce?

  This is some real Disney streaming shit here. I don't like this.

• 56:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. You will be paying $3 more per month. They do this like clockwork every year, because the new iPhones are coming out, and they don't want you on the legacy plans when you get a new iPhone. They want you to put you on the new, more expensive plans to get the new phone. And so every year, they come out with new plans, new blah blah blah, the new subsidies for the iPhones, and they make the old plans more expensive. Every year, like clockwork. And it's, I'm just gonna point out that if they had not lit $400 million on fire on a product called Blue Jeans, maybe their investors would be happier with them. And maybe, maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't have to raise prices so much. Also, maybe if we hadn't let T-Mobile buy Sprint,

• 57:27Nilay Patel?

  and there are actually four wireless carriers in this country, it would be actual competition on the market. That's just me. We don't have a Dish Network. Gen 5 SIS update for you today, because they've done fuck all.

• 57:41David Pierce?

  That sounds right.

• 57:42Alex Cranz?

  That's accurate.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  Just saying Dish Network was supposed to, in a long, confusing deal brokered by the Trump administration, stand up a fourth 5G network using a technology called ORAN that would compete with the Giants. You can, you look around.

• 58:01David Pierce?

  Well, but now Dish Network is merging with EchoStar, so that's...

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  Which is the same company. I just want to point out, if you are an old billionaire and you have two companies and you're like, I don't know, merge them up together, you have accomplished nothing. This is like when people made me, tried to make me care about Paramount and Viacom and CBS all merging, and the only good thing about it was that like, the parent company was called National Amusements, which is like deeply funny. And it's like, but it's all just the same, like, one old guy owned all the companies, right? And you're like, yeah, and they're like, oh, man, this is the greatest succession drama. It's like, no, it's all just the same company. None of this matters. That's Dish and EchoStar merging, which we wrote about this week, which is fine. I'm just pointing out, we were supposed to have four wireless carriers in America.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  We let T-Mobile buy Sprint, which was a mess. And then we brokered, instead of anything real, a fake idea about Dish Network making a fourth network, which, look around, doesn't exist.

• 59:01David Pierce?

  It's going really great. I would just say Dish and EchoStar could combine, rename their network to Blue Jeans, and be heroes. It's just right there.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  Look, we like asking for your emails. We're going to take a break, we'll come back, we'll read some emails. If you are a person, beyond just my phone is faster, or I've downloaded more pirated Netflix videos than ever in an airport, if you're someone who's actually like, experienced the benefits of 5G, I want to hear from you. It cannot be that your bandwidth is just faster. I'm talking you did a robot surgery. Like one of these things they told us would happen with 5G. I have one example for everyone. I'll put it out there right now. Last night, I watched Taylor Swift announce 1989 Taylor's version from SoFi Stadium on like

• 59:59Nilay Patel?

  45 different like crystal clear live streams on TikTok. That is because NFL stadiums have millimeter wave 5G in them. That's why. That's it.

• 1:00:09David Pierce?

  That's the future.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  Okay, I'll give you that one. I've taken that one off the table. They put so much bandwidth in NFL stadiums that I watched effectively pirate live streams of a Taylor Swift concert. Okay, that one's off the table. Give me something else. Email us, [email protected]. I'm dying to know if anyone has done like a robot 5G surgery, if they've deployed a low latency application to a telecom company's edge data center. You let me know, because I haven't seen one other than these phones are slightly faster.

• 1:00:41Alex Cranz?

  Does updating your laptop at a hotel count?

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  No, that's just more bandwidth.

• 1:00:45Alex Cranz?

  But it was really nice bandwidth.

• 1:00:48Nilay Patel?

  You cannot give me, you cannot give me, I can pull down one gig speeds, blah, blah, blah. You have to give me something on the order of tens of thousands of people in an NFL stadium livestreamed crystal clear video to the internet all at once. Right? Not just you alone stood on a street corner with with high bandwidth. Tens of thousands of people used the internet once to because of the Taylor Swift. Like that is, and I give you that, that is a meaningful 5G thing that you could not do with an LTE network. But give me like one more. Wait, we did not do all of this for the era's tour. At least I don't think we did. [email protected], email us. We'll be right back.

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• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. We have a little bit of lightning round. There's some good stuff in the lightning round this week, I gotta say. But before I get to that, last week, we asked about fart apps in the Vision Pro. I will say, one person completely misinterpreted that conversation and got very mad at me on Twitter. What we were saying is, when you have a new platform like the Vision Pro, the first wave of apps is like toys. It's like silly stuff, which was the first wave of apps on the iPhone. And then everyone like figured out what they could do because they'd made so many stupid silly apps. And then you get the wave of mobile apps that has like revolutionized the culture. There's someone on Twitter who's like super mad at me that I'm not aware of the apparently successful enterprise VR apps that exist today. And it's true, I'm not.

• 1:03:23David Pierce?

  Blue Jeans VR coming to...

• 1:03:27Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. But this was a prompt. Like, what's the first wave of silly apps for the Vision Pro gonna be? We got some good answers.

• 1:03:33David Pierce?

  We did. I have also come up with one that I think is correct, and I'm gonna quit my job and make it, and I'm gonna make a fortune in the first year. But we should go through the ones that we got because they're all generally very good.

• 1:03:46Alex Cranz?

  What is?

• 1:03:46David Pierce?

  We'll come back.

• 1:03:47Alex Cranz?

  That was a tease, David. That was a tease.

• 1:03:49David Pierce?

  I have to read through and see all of these to decide if I'm gonna share my idea.

• 1:03:54Nilay Patel?

  All right. So the first one, Josh W., his idea for a Vision Pro fart app, Drunk Vision, which makes a lot of sense, although you will puke right away.

• 1:04:04David Pierce?

  Just throw up in your head.

• 1:04:05Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  And then that leads right into his second idea, which is Shroom Vision. I buy it, right? What if you could feel like, like Aaron Rodgers mode for your Vision Pro is like, it's also called Vision Pro. Very good. Justin G. wrote, try on clothes app. It's Snapchat filters for your whole body and all you have to do is look at someone else. Dangerous idea.

• 1:04:28David Pierce?

  My immediate reaction to this was, oh, that seems really smart. And then one second later I went, oh, no.

• 1:04:36David Pierce?

  But I will say the thing, like, everyone at Snapchat keeps telling me that the AR try on thing is real and people like it and use it. And if you could like, put on your Vision Pro and stand in front of the mirror and like, see how you would look and stuff like, there will be something like that and I bet it'll work. I don't know about the all you have to do is look at someone else thing.

• 1:04:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, there's some real consent issues there.

• 1:05:00Alex Cranz?

  I don't want to be able to change other people's clothes. That seems like a no go.

• 1:05:04Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm thinking. Real time revenge porn.

• 1:05:09Nilay Patel?

  There's like App Store review problems in there. We'll see. But I get it. People like that idea. Michael G. says, the obvious answer is fart clouds floating around the user with spatial audio fart sounds.

• 1:05:21David Pierce?

  This literally is the answer. Spatial audio fart sounds is a thing that will happen. Like, Michael has spoken that into existence and this will happen now.

• 1:05:28Nilay Patel?

  People took the fart app prompt a little too literally because Zach wrote transparency mode and you not only hear a fart, but you see a plume of purple and green come out of butts. That's right up there with Snapchat filters.

• 1:05:45Nilay Patel?

  Well, can you imagine? You're going to be wearing a $3,500 headset. You're walking around the city and you're just like, waiting for farts. So you can see the like sparkle farts.

• 1:05:57David Pierce?

  So you're imagining this not as a way to like, make it look as if someone is farting. You're imagining like a fart recognition system.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's transparency mode for farts.

• 1:06:07Alex Cranz?

  Fart detector.

• 1:06:08David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. So somebody farts and it's just, it's like the, the thing in the pool that turns your pee purple. It's just like, AR fart.

• 1:06:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's that. And every time it happens, you hear an Apple executive say something like, with the power of the M2 chip.

• 1:06:25Nilay Patel?

  Christopher C. writes, "Slow mo running from Baywatch in whatever space you are in," which I actually don't understand.

• 1:06:32Alex Cranz?

  It's like you're putting it on and you're walking down the street. And in addition to all the other people, it's this person's slow motion running towards you.

• 1:06:39David Pierce?

  It's just Pamela Anderson slowly running.

• 1:06:41Nilay Patel?

  It's just Hasselhoff. It's good that you went to Pamela Anderson and I went to Hasselhoff. That says it all, really. All right. And then my last one, this is my favorite one because it includes the phrase benefit hypothesis.

• 1:06:53David Pierce?

  Hell, yeah.

• 1:06:54Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. So Ruben wrote, "App description: When the USA men's soccer team wins the World Cup, then your Apple Vision Pro will livestream a video of former President Donald Trump in prison."

• 1:07:08David Pierce?

  Wow, that turned hard in the middle there.

• 1:07:11Nilay Patel?

  It did. Benefit hypothesis: Both political parties will wonder how a former US president spends his time in prison. Two, the curiosity will cause a positive effect on USA's overall soccer performance over time.

• 1:07:25David Pierce?

  So they're gonna want to win so bad so that we can see that. Oh, interesting.

• 1:07:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so that we can all see it.

• 1:07:31David Pierce?

  I don't know what this has to do with the Vision Pro, but it's an interesting incentive strategy.

• 1:07:34Nilay Patel?

  And then he has some potential names here. Victory Watch Ex-President Edition, The Champions Presidential Stream, Goal to Watch POTUS in Prison.

• 1:07:43David Pierce?

  These all sound like golf tournaments.

• 1:07:45Nilay Patel?

  And then number 10 here at the end, Soccer Glory Presidential Story. I don't know, man. I like getting emails.

• 1:07:55Alex Cranz?

  Wow. That's so good.

• 1:07:58Nilay Patel?

  Very good. If you have ideas, we already had the prompt. If you have had a meaningful 5G experience, you email me and I'm taking the errors to off the table. So that's it.

• 1:08:08David Pierce?

  We're gonna get zero emails about that. So what's your better idea?

• 1:08:11Nilay Patel?

  We did get some emails from some Android gamers. We'll collate those and talk about those.

• 1:08:17David Pierce?

  Once there's more than one.

• 1:08:22Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to dox the one person who emailed me.

• 1:08:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  So we've got, send some more of those. But if you've got ideas on like what the first wave of Vision Pro, I'm very curious.

• 1:08:33David Pierce?

  Can, wait, can I tell you what my idea is? I've actually, I have been thinking a lot about this and I actually think I'm right. I think there's going to be this like gigantic genre of what amounts to like fidget spinner apps in the Vision Pro. Neil, you and I have both gotten this demo and just the thing where you can sit there and just like touch your fingers together to do stuff is delightful. And I think about like the, do you guys remember that app when the iPhone first came out? That was just a beer on the screen and you could like slosh it back and forth?

• 1:09:03Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:09:04David Pierce?

  That thing was like, oh, look at the accelerometer. This is cool. It does stuff when I move it. The equivalent of that on the Vision Pro is going to be like, I put my fingers together and something happens. So it's going to be like, there's going to be a bubble wrap app that makes a billion dollars. There's going to be one of the little like popper fidget things that's going to make a ton like spin something around with your finger. Like it's going to be huge.

• 1:09:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, this is what I'm saying. The person who's on my, I mean, like just missed the point. The point is when you have a bunch of new interface concepts, the first round of apps is just, can you trigger all the sensors and push all the buttons?

• 1:09:35David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:09:36Nilay Patel?

  And that trains everybody to get excited about what else they can build. In the way that the first round of iPhone apps was like, turn the phone sideways and it looks like you're pouring a beer. Like that didn't accomplish anything other than getting people used to motion controls on an iPhone.

• 1:09:51David Pierce?

  Totally.

• 1:09:52Nilay Patel?

  And like something like that will happen. The first, I guarantee you the first round of Vision Pro apps is going to be more stuff like that. I can't say it's going to be champion story, presidential glory.

• 1:10:04Nilay Patel?

  Just not a, not a clear business model path. But you can see how some of this stuff will happen. All right. Lightning round. Cranz, you've got LK99, which is the fakest story. This, can I say this? I will say the LK99 situation like exemplifies broken Twitter to the max.

• 1:10:24Alex Cranz?

  Yes. A hundred percent.

• 1:10:26Nilay Patel?

  Like it exists because Twitter decided it would exist. And like, no one could stop it. And then we all had to talk about it. And then, go ahead. You got it. It's you.

• 1:10:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, yeah. It felt very, um. If people understood how how science is normally reported and how major discoveries are normally reported, they would have been a little less hyped about this. Because generally speaking, when science has really cool, big discoveries, they like to be like, hey, look at these really cool, big discoveries we have. They don't like to leak to competing studies on the same product to a different forum and then have everybody argue over whether it's real or not and have very little proof. That's the opposite of science. Everybody who was like, it's all a conspiracy.

• 1:11:10Alex Cranz?

  No, they were incorrect. But LK99 was was is a substance. There were a number of developers who came out and they said, oh, this could be the next superconductor. And and the important thing about superconductors, they're really, really good at conducting electricity at room temperature, at normal pressure. Most superconductors cannot do that. We have superconductors today, but they usually have like thermal or pressure issues, which makes them really, really like great to use, but really, really expensive to use. So something that just works at normal time, like out of the box, is a huge, huge idea. And one of the things that like tells a superconductor from other things is the ability to levitate over magnets. But those aren't the only materials that levitate over magnets. So when everybody saw this partially,

• 1:11:55Alex Cranz?

  not even fully, partially levitating, they're like, oh, my God, it's a superconductor. And it turns out that, oh, my God, it's not. It's just one of those materials that levitates over magnets. And it sounds like there's definitely some cool use cases for it. It sounds like there's some interesting things here. But the researchers, some of the researchers already were trying to like, sell it. And so this was part of their marketing hype to like, sell it. And the other researchers were not. And the superconductor research space was already dealing with some drama, because some other people had previously claimed.

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  Wait, can you just say, can the superconductor research space was already dealing with some drama? Incredible.

• 1:12:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, yeah. There was already drama, because there was already another, like, study that was like, oh, yeah, we've got the new superconductor. And it turned out it was all fake and wrong and terrible. So like, people keep coming into this space because it's it's very, like, it's the potential for profit's huge here. So everybody wants to find that superconductor.

• 1:12:52Alex Cranz?

  Make lots of money.

• 1:12:53David Pierce?

  Wait, can I, can I ask a really dumb question? I, I confess I have like not really followed this story because the night I sat down and was like, I'm gonna read the hell out of LK99 was the same day. Everybody was like, never mind, this is nothing. So I basically have not followed this story at all.

• 1:13:08Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:13:08David Pierce?

  And this is where I ask a very dumb question about superconductors, which is like, let's say in theory, this had been the thing that some of these people thought it was. So what? Like, why did this become such a like? Real world excitement phenomenon so fast?

• 1:13:23Alex Cranz?

  I think the, the, the big thing for superconductors and where it would be really powerful is like, right now, superconductors are used in a lot of power plants and stuff like that. But if you can get a cheap, super reliable superconductor, which if this had been one, would have ticked to those boxes, right? It would have been cheap. It would have been easy to produce. If you can do that, then you can conceivably make like electric cars, anything that runs on power, just way more efficient because it's able to move that with and, and without like as much heat and stuff like that. It's super efficiently.

• 1:13:57David Pierce?

  So instead, in theory of doing what we do with silicon now, which is only a semiconductor, you could do it much better with a superconductor.

• 1:14:03Alex Cranz?

  Right, you could do it so, so much better. And, and so like, it would just make things way faster. It would make things way less power hungry. Like, it would be in a lot of ways, magic, but.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  I just want to give you this quote from our piece, which is, if you start with a rock, you end up with a rock.

• 1:14:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And this was the thing, what I didn't get about the Twitter side of this was how so many people were like, this is crazy. It's so cool. And then they'd go talk to researchers and researchers are like, we're skeptical. And they're like, you're in the pocket of somebody. You hate science. And it's like.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. This is what I mean about Twitter, like the broken, blue check version of Twitter that we have now, like, is made for hype cycles.

• 1:14:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Nilay Patel?

  And it, every kind of like crypto scammer, AI thread boy had a moment with LK99. And the media is so organized around having Twitter be its assignment editor, that this obviously fake thing.

• 1:15:04Nilay Patel?

  Like ended up everywhere. Like we wrote about it because there was so much interest in it.

• 1:15:08Alex Cranz?

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

• 1:15:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, I want to quote, "Michael Norman, distinguished fellow and former director of the material science division at the Oregon National Laboratory. When you start with a rock, chances are you will end up with a rock."

• 1:15:40Alex Cranz?

  That's awesome.

• 1:15:41Nilay Patel?

  It's a, it's a, it's a rock. But it's just like, to me, the thing was, and it's interesting. It captures the imagination. You love capturing it. It's like, every so often, I remember early in my Engadget tenure, tenure as like a baby blogger, someone had claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. And like,

• 1:15:59Nilay Patel?

  but like, you know, they were gonna like hold a video demonstration. They called in the thing and like, we were like, I was just like, guys, this is bullshit. Like, look at it. And there was this answer, which I still think about all the time, which is the audience is interested and it's a service to go and ask the questions and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, but we can just answer the questions now.

• 1:16:18Nilay Patel?

  Like, it's definitely not gonna work.

• 1:16:20Alex Cranz?

  You just say it's bullshit.

• 1:16:21Nilay Patel?

  It, it didn't work in the end. Uh, surprise. But it's just like this cycle. But because Twitter is in the middle of it, like the idea that something has gone viral on Twitter still carries meaning in the world, even though the, the, the meaning is sort of divorced from the mechanics of Twitter.

• 1:16:38Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:39Nilay Patel?

  And so it's like, oh yeah, like a bunch of like grifters started doing threads about what it means for there to be a room temperature superconductor. And without ever verifying that there was a room temperature superconductor. And then everybody wrote about it. So everyone was excited. Including our audience who basically asked us to write about it.

• 1:16:54Alex Cranz?

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

• 1:17:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's the, it's the, I call it the local news cycle. Once when I, as a child in Wisconsin, the local news once reported that kids were getting high by drinking too much water, which is a real thing that you can do. I have since learned. And my mom was like, how much water are you drinking? And I was like, not enough, bro. It's, I've been drinking a lot of Miller Lite.

• 1:17:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, she's not worried about that, though. The water's the problem.

• 1:17:37Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, I've got a quick update on the Mr. Beast situation. You recall last week, Mr. Beast sued the company that was doing his ghost kitchens for Mr. Beast Burgers, trying to get out of the contract because there was no quality control. Surprise. They have now sued him back for $100 million, saying that he's gotten more value out of them, and he's become more famous because of the burgers.

• 1:18:02Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. I just, that's your lightning round update. I think Mr. Beast versus the burger company is, it's like the pinnacle of influencer culture in a way. It is directly related to like the, there are a lot of thread boys threading on the tweets about how Mr. Beast Burger was like the future of dining.

• 1:18:20David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:18:21Nilay Patel?

  All of those people should be forced to apologize.

• 1:18:25Nilay Patel?

  Here's my theory. If you were a thread person on Twitter doing threads like that, and then you want to join Instagram threads, Instagram should enforce that you have to post 50 apologies first.

• 1:18:36David Pierce?

  And eat 50 Beast Burgers.

• 1:18:38Nilay Patel?

  Eat 50. You have to do a Beast Burger challenge.

• 1:18:43Nilay Patel?

  If you have ever written a one of 99 Twitter thread about how Mr. Beast Burger was the future of dining, I think, I think you should have your platform credentials revoked until you eat 50 Beast Burgers.

• 1:18:55David Pierce?

  I like it. I will say, listen, I'm not a lawyer, but the, the idea that Mr. Beast is only famous because of the burgers does not make a lot of sense to me.

• 1:19:03Nilay Patel?

  It does not fly. It's also, by the way, his actual work, it is clear he cares a lot about the quality of his actual work.

• 1:19:13David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:19:13Nilay Patel?

  Like a Mr. Beast video is like a rigorously edited jewel of a thing. And it's like, you can see why he's pissed the burgers are wrong. It's just like very obvious. Anyhow, all right, Dave, what's yours?

• 1:19:29David Pierce?

  Uh, mine is just a small threads update, uh, which is a very cool little thing that happened where you can now use your Mastodon profile and your threads profile essentially as verification systems. So you can, you can go to Mastodon and say, you know, my threads account is this and then actually use your threads account to verify that, which at a very small level is like, it doesn't matter. It's like a teeny, teeny feature, but it is, and Instagram people have been saying this is the first sort of meaningful step threads has made into like the activity pub decentralized social media world. And we've said a bunch of times, like, there are lots of reasons to believe threads will

• 1:20:11David Pierce?

  never decentralize in the way that it is promised, but the people who are building the thing continue to loudly say they are going to do it. And this was sort of the first like real world instantiation of that. And I think that's very exciting.

• 1:20:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's cool. I mean, it is like a very little thing, but it is true that threads engineers were posting like, "Hope you believe us, like, we're taking these baby steps."

• 1:20:31Alex Cranz?

  They were so proud about it. It just makes me happy that like, how excited people were for it. I'm not excited for it, but everybody was so just pumped. I don't care. But everybody else was so pumped.

• 1:20:41David Pierce?

  So I just want to say, by the way, that the, every time I write about this stuff or talk about it on a show like this, the overwhelming response is people don't care about decentralized platforms. That's not how you win user experience, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's a stupid argument. People didn't care about anything until they realized why it was cool and started using it. That's how things work. And in this case, like, I, I will continue to plead loudly that decentralized social media is a good idea and we should pursue it and you should care as a person because it will make better products and a better internet. And my number one goal in life is to convince random strangers that decentralized social media is a concept they should care about.

• 1:21:26David Pierce?

  So here I am.

• 1:21:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, it's, I'll give you the, I'll just flip that around. These clowns forced us to care about.

• 1:21:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? Like, they, the money that flowed into that ecosystem to try to force us to care about it. And we, the Verge and the Verge cast audience, by and large, was like, don't care about this. Like, fully rejected. But it's weird that because there's not that much money in the system, that people are like, no one will ever care about this. And like, I just, it's, the things are not user experiences. The things are the things that enable other people to make products and services that compete, which is the thing that we care about the most.

• 1:22:12David Pierce?

  It's like, it's like the moment that the open web started to beat AOL. There were probably owners, people who are like, who cares? Everybody's on AOL. And it's like, no, this other thing is better.

• 1:22:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:20David Pierce?

  And like, give me a minute and I'll prove it to you. And like, that's how I feel about the future of social stuff right now.

• 1:22:25Nilay Patel?

  At the end of the day, Twitter is going to buy Time Warner.

• 1:22:30Nilay Patel?

  That's the final form of Twitter is, they're also going to own Batman for some reason. All right, the last one, we got, you know, I had to end here.

• 1:22:39David Pierce?

  Yeah, it feels right.

• 1:22:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, unfortunately.

• 1:22:42Nilay Patel?

  There's a new EV Escalade. It's called the Escalade IQ. I love it. It is so expensive. It's $130,000. But it is hot. It's, and it's huge.

• 1:22:52David Pierce?

  It's the biggest car I've ever seen. It's ridiculous.

• 1:22:54Nilay Patel?

  It's so big. It's not as big as the Escalade ESV. It's not as big as the biggest Escalade, but it's still huge. It's bigger than a regular Escalade. Three rows, beautiful, 450 miles range, mostly because the battery is the size of a Sherman tank. It has a crab walk mode that the Hummer EV has. So it can like go sideways. The thing's cool. $130,000. I sent a photo of it to Becky with just the words, hear me out. And she wrote, that's hot.

• 1:23:19David Pierce?

  Oh, congratulations.

• 1:23:20Nilay Patel?

  Good, right? I was like, what if we sell everything and buy an EV Escalade? And she was like, I'll think about it. It's hot. Go look at pictures. GM, they've been saying this was gonna happen. No CarPlay. Huge screens on the inside. The inside of this car looks hot. It's like wall-to-wall screens.

• 1:23:37David Pierce?

  It's a 55-inch screen across.

• 1:23:40Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's an LED LCD that wraps around. The sort of climate cluster is another screen. In the back, there's a third screen. Screens for days. And they're saying no CarPlay or Android Auto. Again, they said this was gonna happen ages ago. No one believed them. Here's the new Escalade, and they've done it. Now, importantly, Google built-in, so you get Google Maps, you get Google, all the stuff that you might want off a phone, but no Android or CarPlay. I don't know if this is a good idea. I haven't used it, haven't seen the car many questions. But this is the moment when big carmakers say, when Cadillac says, you know what? You're gonna buy an Escalade with or without CarPlay. Also, probably you're in the backseat of this Escalade, so it doesn't matter.

• 1:24:22Nilay Patel?

  But like, they're betting people are gonna buy Escalades without CarPlay, because what they want is an Escalade.

• 1:24:29David Pierce?

  Okay, Neela, you are obligated by law to think this is a good idea, so congratulations. What I would just say is, I know I came back to the show and said that I agree that CarPlay is bad. But the thing is, I'm looking at the picture of this screen right now, and it essentially, if I can describe it, it basically, the photo I've seen here in our piece looks like sort of three distinct sides. One side shows like nav and car information. The middle is kind of classic infotainment. And on the right is, I don't know, like a 15-inch across screen that just has seven icons. Like, this is what we're doing with our screens? Like, here's seven icons. This is awful. This is the worst UI design I've ever seen in my life.

• 1:25:13Nilay Patel?

  Oh, no, you, no, no, no. So you're looking at that, that's like a menu screen. So I think, again, I have not seen this car. So the screen all the way on the right is in front of the passenger, and that is basically a TV.

• 1:25:26David Pierce?

  A really skinny candy bar television.

• 1:25:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so it's a really weird TV.

• 1:25:31Alex Cranz?

  With, it looks like it's got HDMI input.

• 1:25:34Nilay Patel?

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

• 1:25:59David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:00Nilay Patel?

  But that's what that thing over there in front of the passenger is, is this belief the car industry has that passengers want a dedicated screen that play, that is a TV.

• 1:26:07David Pierce?

  Well, it's a dedicated screen for them to put ads on. Which is all fine and good. I'm just saying the software design here is garbage.

• 1:26:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, the UI is ugly.

• 1:26:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, again, we have not seen the thing. So I don't know what mode that is in, but you're right. You've got a thing that is a cluster all the way on the left, like that's the instrument cluster. You've got your standard infotainment and then there's a set of new ideas on the right of the car. But honestly, no one in the car industry has figured out, but there should be a screen in front of the passenger that is a TV. You just watch, it's, it's coming to all the cars.

• 1:26:43David Pierce?

  And there's another screen right in front of the gear shifter. Like this is, this is just.

• 1:26:48Nilay Patel?

  That's the, that's the weird, crazy, that's the climate control and.

• 1:26:53David Pierce?

  Cause you don't have that in the other 55 inches.

• 1:26:55Alex Cranz?

  I just worry about these. Freezing.

• 1:26:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. So like, here's what we don't know. Is this fast? Is it responsive? Is the interface good? David thinks the interface is bad. What we, we have spent but a few minutes looking at this thing. My point is GM's position, and I guarantee you many, many more car makers position over time is going to be. We are not letting Apple take over the user experience of our vehicles. And we think in particular, I think GM thinks with the Escalade. The people will buy Escalades even without CarPlay Android Auto because it has Google Maps, which is the thing that people care about the most. And that's going to be that Rivian is already there. Tesla has been there forever. And I think they're, they're basically looking at what people are doing on these phone apps.

• 1:27:43Nilay Patel?

  On these phone projection systems and saying, you know what? By and large, they are running Google Maps. So if we just sign the deal with Google and run Google Maps on our thing, yep, we can run ads on the weird whoo whoo integration over on the right. Yes, we can like, you know, as EV charging networks, blah, blah, blah. We can like, monitor the cars better. We can do telemetry. You can sell your data, all that stuff that seems kind of gross. But fundamentally, they're saying, look, what you want out of this is Google Maps and we've signed the deal with Google to give you Google Maps and Google is waiting there with open arms.

• 1:28:12David Pierce?

  I don't think that theory is wrong. I just don't think there is any evidence in the history of cars that says car makers can make good software.

• 1:28:21Alex Cranz?

  Or the history of TVs. Like this is the exact same thing TVs have done. TVs have been doing this for ages. They're like, we're gonna do it. Samsung ties in and then you go buy an Apple TV and you plug it in and you go away. And you just can't do that with this because I guess you plug your it into the HDMI port?

• 1:28:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, you can just plug your phone into HDMI port and run off your phone. But only on that screen that the passenger gets. We'll see. It's $130,000 EV Escalade. Like, the risk profile for this car is very low. I think the people who are going to spend $130,000 on EV Escalade have people who use their phones for them.

• 1:28:58David Pierce?

  Fair. That's gonna be you someday, me like.

• 1:29:00Nilay Patel?

  And that's my dream.

• 1:29:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're gonna get the Becky review of this car someday.

• 1:29:04Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be great. All right. That's it. David, you have a new newsletter?

• 1:29:08David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah. If you're listening to this on Friday, you have one day to sign up. It's called Installer and the idea was basically to just take all of the cool stuff on the internet and put it all into one place. It's like, there's like new apps every week. There's new stuff to watch. There's new games to play. There's new like cool creators coming out all the time. And I spend a lot of time just like pouring this stuff into like random documents and never doing anything with them. And I was like, I am going to do better at finding new stuff. And I've been asking people to send stuff installer at the verge.com. Anytime you see anything cool anywhere on the internet, send it to me. I've already gotten a ton of really fun stuff. There's a lot of really fun stuff in the first issue.

• 1:29:49David Pierce?

  You can read it on the site every Sunday, but you can also subscribe and get it in your inbox every Saturday. And we're going to do lots of things like have beta invites and access to cool stuff and like giveaways and stuff. So it's a, it's a big advantage to be a day early. It's the verge.com slash installer. I think the first issue is really fun and I hope it will be forever.

• 1:30:11Speaker 05

  It's gonna be awesome.

• 1:30:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:30:12Speaker 05

  Neel is in the first issue. I made Neel send me his home screen and tell me about all the truly unhinged apps that he seems to use every day. So if you want to know what Neel's phone looks like, check it out.

• 1:30:24Nilay Patel?

  I do not know why Spotify's... Apple Music. I took that screenshot. I was like, why is this here? Uncurated to the extreme. All right. One more thing. We're doing cybersecurity questions on the Wednesday show, right, David? Give us a call. 866-VERGE11 with your cybersecurity questions. I'm having a lot of fun doing reader feedback this summer. One question I have for all of you, also let us know if you like it. If you like it when we're reading the emails and doing the voicemails, that would be really useful. We are having fun. I just want to make sure you think it's a good part of the show. Let us know. Also, if you've ever had a meaningful 5G experience, it's driving bonkers. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. Back on.

• 1:31:08Speaker 05

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at [email protected]. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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