Threads' big moment, and Sony's big controller

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Richard Lawler discuss Threads' new web app, Sony's Playstation handheld, NFL 4K streaming, AI music copyright, and a whole lot more. Further reading: Elon Musk says (yet again) that X will stop letting you block users X glitch wipes out most pictures and links tweeted before December 2014 X fixed the ‘bug’ that broke images attached to tweets from before 2014 X tests removing headlines from links to news articles Elon Musk says news organizations can get a share of X’s advertising revenue, too. Threads on the web is here NFL Sunday Ticket has arrived on the Google TV homescreen Amazon is bringing a whole lot of AI to Thursday Night Football this season Sony’s portable PlayStation Portal launches later this year for $199.99 Sony’s PlayStation wireless earbuds will cost a whopping $199.99 Sony’s PlayStation division is acquiring headphone maker Audeze This batarang houses Qualcomm’s next big bet on gaming Somebody already unboxed the Quest 3 Microsoft kills Kinect again Corsair’s first standing desk is designed for gaming, streaming, and more Google and YouTube are trying to have it both ways with AI and copyright Microsoft is bringing Python to Excel Netflix is going to let DVD subscribers keep unreturned discs for free White Noise Podcasters Are Costing Spotify $38 Million a Year - Bloomberg Sonic Spectrum: a journey into noise white, pink, red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple & violet Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 1:11Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of sub 10 micron build tolerances. If you can't outdo a Coke can, get out of this company. I'll explain what that means in a little bit. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. David Pierce is here.

• 1:24David Pierce?

  Hi. Do you ever wonder what your own build tolerances are? This is like, like you could go down that rabbit hole and it could cause you a lot of existential dread if you let it.

• 1:32Nilay Patel?

  Human beings notoriously have absolute shit build tolerances. We are poorly designed and horribly built. And honestly, we could do a whole hour on the evidence that we are alone in this world. Just based on how our knees work. You know, it's like, fine. But on the flip side, we're very good at making things with very tight build tolerances. Or are we? Richard Lawler is here to answer that question. Hey, Richard, how are you?

• 1:56Speaker 04

  Hey, the only thing I want to talk about is how the human ACL disproves any theory of intelligent design.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  See, this is where I was not going and Richard just, he'd gotten in that Cybertruck and he drove right off that cliff, just pedal to the metal, four wheels, spinning, EV drive, triangle in the night. Yes, no, I also believe that's true.

• 2:14David Pierce?

  I mean, it's fantasy football season, which means for the next three weeks, everyone is a doctor and an injury expert.

• 2:20Nilay Patel?

  It's coming.

• 2:21David Pierce?

  Uh, it's gonna be really great.

• 2:22Nilay Patel?

  It's coming. Alex Krantz on vacation, wish her well, but we got Richard, which is amazing. People love Richard. So let's start. It's one of those summer weeks. Like, I keep threatening the Verge team with the concept of September. Like, we have meetings and I'm like, September is coming. Cause if you just look, once September begins, it is stacked. There's, we assume there will be an Apple event, there's a Microsoft event, there's an Amazon event, there's, uh, Google is going to court about bundling on search, the code conference is at the end of September. It is just relentless, the second September begins. But here in late August, there's just the looming threat of September and then kind of just a grab bag of news, right?

• 3:06David Pierce?

  Well, that's the thing. This is, this is like the biggest change I have noticed over the years I've been covering this is like, this time of year used to be dead. Like dead, dead, dead. Nothing happened. And we would sit around and be like, have you heard of gadgets from the 90s? Let's make a podcast about that. And now it's like, what has happened is that every company knows that basically as soon as we get past Labor Day, the news is just like destroyed by the gadget onslaught of the next three months. And so if you have like relatively small news that you like still want to get out in the world and tell people about, it turns out like mid to late August is when to do it. So there's been like a flood of news. It's just that none of it is above like a six out of 10. Like the fact that like Python is coming to Excel,

• 3:50David Pierce?

  which is like a big deal for some people, not nearly a big enough deal to have been as popular on theverge.com as it has been this week.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  Wait, no, I disagree with you.

• 3:58Speaker 04

  Yeah, you're alone on that take.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  You're the one who's, who's all in on Excel world championships. You had Python to that mix. These people have like bionic capabilities now.

• 4:09David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. No, it's the, you're going to be able to build a Cybertruck in Excel pretty soon. That's just where we're headed.

• 4:14Speaker 04

  On the calendar, it says, this is a LG Briefcase TV.

• 4:18Nilay Patel?

  Kind of weak.

• 4:18David Pierce?

  That's exactly right.

• 4:19Nilay Patel?

  There is some news. Sony announced the PlayStation Portal. We'll talk about that. Microsoft killed the Kinect again, which is pretty good. Their first spawn con of the LG Suitcase TV has arrived. It's delightful. There's a whole bunch of, I wrote about Google and copyright law because quite honestly, I'm an addict. And that's, that's how I get my fix. So we have a lot of stuff to talk about, but I actually want to start with some reader feedback. So we have asked people to send us pictures of their childhood computer rooms. And boy, have you delivered. Like,

• 4:49David Pierce?

  They're so good.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  These are the best emails we have ever received in the history of the Verchast. It has been 10 years and I have never seen the volume or quality of emails like this. Keep sending them to us. We're going to blow them out. We've been posting some of them on social media and on the site and quick posts and stuff like that. But I want to do a big blowout feature and just talk about computer rooms. Because it turns out a lot of people have very fond memories of these rooms and these setups. And the photos are just incredible. The one thing I'll say. I would like to see some more diversity in the photo submissions. So if you're thinking about it, just do it. Cause I want to show an array of people and how they came up with computers. And right now, probably not surprising, it looks like one class of people.

• 5:30David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 5:30Nilay Patel?

  So if you're listening to this and you even half thought about send us in, because I want to show that like this was a, this was a time. This was a moment. Like, we all experienced the same kind of place, which I think is an important thing to point out. And they're also, also the photos are just incredible. I mean, like, it's just, it's photos of a bunch of cute kids. And then adults talking about what it was like to be a kid with a computer. Like, it's incredible.

• 5:52David Pierce?

  Well, it's super funny to me because like the, there's a generation that talks about like gathering around the radio on a Friday night to like, listen to the, you know, War of the Worlds or whatever. And then the next generation like gathered around the TV when the TV was a piece of furniture. And they were like, what the hell do you mean? You would like lie on the floor and listen to the radio. That's ridiculous. And then there was a generation of people who like had TV, or who had computers in their living room for whom that was like a destination and a place. And now the idea of like having to go to a computer is absurd. And it's just, it just like makes me think like, I keep looking around at all of the other gadgets in my house. And being like, what of these is like another generation from now gonna think is totally insane?

• 6:34David Pierce?

  That this is how it works. Like the idea that you couldn't like fold up your television and put it in your pocket? Like, is that gonna seem crazy in 20 years? I don't know, but it's like, these rooms all have the same vibe. Have you guys noticed this? It's like insane.

• 6:46Speaker 04

  The thing that I noticed was, uh, what's something that Dan Seifert actually pointed out? That Neelai asked for pictures of computer rooms? What he actually asked for was pictures of binders. Binders full of paper. They are near everyone's computer. We all had them and now they're just gone. You just don't do that anymore.

• 7:03Nilay Patel?

  My niece and nephew are headed off to college and they went to buy school supplies, which is hilarious thing. Like, you know, they did the Target run for your freshman dorm room. And I was like, oh, did you buy me the five star notebooks? And they were like, what are those? And I instantly turned into like stone. I was like, no, these are the only notebooks. And I mailed them to them and they're like, thanks, grandpa. Like, whatever. But it is true. Uh, a lot of these photos feature an enormous amount of paper. Anyway, please send us more. We want to blow them out. Just send them in. These are, again, the greatest emails we've ever received. And I don't know why people keep calling them the childhood battle stations. This is a theme. This is like emergent behavior inside the email, which is incredible, but it's great. We love it.

• 7:45Nilay Patel?

  Please keep sending us photos of your childhood computer rooms with that weird Office Max wood. And it's just, there's just something great about these photos. Okay, second update. I also asked for people to send me examples of real world 5G experiences. And the one I gave was that if you look at the Taylor Swift Eras Tour, the network capacity in NFL stadiums is incredible. Like, everyone is in the state, 100,000 people in some of these stadiums streaming video from the Eras Tour. That's a meaningful 5G. Now, is that a consistently reliable 5G? Like, does this happen to people every day?

• 8:25Nilay Patel?

  No, but it is kind of, that's it. That was the promise. It was delivered on. That's the only one I can think of.

• 8:31David Pierce?

  It's also like really good wifi. I would just, I would just say, it's like, even that might be giving 5G too much credit.

• 8:37Nilay Patel?

  If they had just done really good wifi, maybe they would have gotten there. But it, but it is true that most of these stadiums, massive investments in, in 5G from the various partners in the NFL, mostly Verizon. And it's working. That's great. Like, we, fine. I asked for other ones. We got some that were like, my, I have a Pixel on LTE and my friend has a Pixel that has 5G and where I live, he has better service than I do all the time and the LTE network is congested. So I'm going to get a 5G phone. And we've gotten a bunch of those. I would just say that that is not a 5G experience. That's just your carrier choking you out of your network. So you have to upgrade to a more expensive plan. So that doesn't count. In my opinion, that doesn't count. That's just someone came to your house and clipped the ignition

• 9:19Nilay Patel?

  wires to your car and said, ooh, I think you need a better car. Like, send me more of those. I'm looking for meaningful 5G experiences, not just download speeds, but stuff like Eras Tour that could not happen on LTE in the best case scenario. The one thing more people have sent me than anything else is a video of a banana getting stitches, like a robot surgery. Like, it's a Da Vinci robot.

• 9:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, to be clear, that was a perfect description. Anyone who is like, oh, what is he taught? Like, no, it's just, it's that. Like, the thing you're picturing at banana getting stitches.

• 9:53Nilay Patel?

  So there is a very famous robotic surgery device called the Da Vinci robot. If you are someone who's been paying attention to this stuff for a long time, Da Vinci videos are very familiar, but they all kind of look the same. And it's been around for a long, long time. And so they're famously, there was a meme of one of these robots doing surgery on a grape. And people said they did surgery on a grape. I don't know if you recall this. This was like, this was a real meme that occurred on the internet. So everyone is sending me a video. It's the same video, same, it's the same exact kind of video, but it's a banana. And there's a caption on it that says, "A surgeon in London did surgery on this banana located in California over 5G." And I have received 50 versions of this video in this caption. I'm

• 10:38Nilay Patel?

  not, I'm deep into reporting the story. I will tell you that that is not true. I will break this story wide open. This is the most investigative reporting I've ever done in my life, but I know this story is not true. I'm almost there. But that's not it. It's that did not happen over 5G. I promise you.

• 10:54David Pierce?

  So this is just not a 5G experience?

• 10:56Nilay Patel?

  This is somebody bootlegged a video, added a caption, and got views on Elon Musk's Twitter. And then it went viral like over and over again in that horrible cycle where people just started writing about a viral thing without ever checking to see if it was true. And now everyone believes that in the 5G robot surgery banana. And I'm just here to tell you that shit's not true. And I'm going to win my first Pulitzer Prize, breaking this story wide open. You can't stop me.

• 11:22David Pierce?

  So we had a meeting earlier today and Neelai came on, was like a couple of minutes late, as Neelai is to all of our meetings, and was like, sorry, guys, I've been really busy. There's a lot going on. And what he apparently meant was banana surgeries. We all thought you meant like, you know, the code conference is coming and there's a lot of work to do in Summers. And no, you just meant bananas.

• 11:42Nilay Patel?

  I will say that I, um, I checked one of my inboxes today. So I got a notification. It was in the middle of another meeting and I, my immediate thought was, I bet this is the banana surgeon. It was not, but that's where my, at least half of my brain is on banana surgery right now. But I'm telling you, that's not it. There has been a surgery done over 5G in China. That has happened. But if you're sending me this banana, I just want you to, the hammer's coming. And by this time next week, I will, I will have broken this story wide open. You won't, you can't stop me. This is, this is what we're here for. All right. Speaking of Elon, I, I don't know why this is true. You all tell us you don't want the Elon news and we look at our own statistics and boy do ya. So we're gonna do an Elon lightning round. Richard's gonna take it this week.

• 12:27Nilay Patel?

  Richard, give us this week in Elon in 90 seconds.

• 12:31Speaker 04

  Because Elon Musk can't chill. He has been up to things. Let's see, what has he done? He said that, uh, Twitter or X or whatever you want to call it, might not let you block people anymore. What does that mean? Only Elon really knows. And Lyndon Yaccarino, apparently the CEO of Twitter, in case you forgot that he's not the CEO of Twitter anymore. They said that something better than blocking is coming. It sounds like an enhanced mute. Now, can they pull blocking? A lot of people have pointed to the App Store policies from Apple and Google that say that you probably can't. Elon doesn't care. We'll see how that works out. Other things that happened, they wiped out all the pictures and links that people tweeted before December 2014. Just randomly, a thing that included the tweet that was the most retweeted tweet ever, the selfie from Ellen at the 2014 Oscars.

• 13:13Speaker 04

  It's now back. Some of those old images are back, some of them are not. They said they fixed it and that it'll fix itself over the next couple of days. Other things that have happened, they've said they're gonna remove headlines from news articles. The DOJ is suing SpaceX for saying that they won't hire people without green cards and not replying to the DOJ when the DOJ asked them to not do that and Elon continuing to tweet that they are doing it even though they are not supposed to be doing to have that policy. Pretty hard to deny it at that point. We've got more pictures of the Cybertruck showing the inside of it. Elon also emailed all the staff at Tesla and said that parts for the Cybertruck need to be designed and built to sub 10 micron accuracy. Sounds difficult, but they're gonna need to do it because if they get it wrong at all, those metal panels will look terrible. And there

• 13:57Speaker 04

  was a thread about, you know, people seeing a carrier loaded full of Cybertruck going down the road that looked really bad and that might be all of them soon. Also, Elon said that news organizations can get a share of those advertising revenue splits. So, you know, we could get those Elon bucks whenever they show up. Has he done anything else in the next, in the last five minutes that I missed?

• 14:15Nilay Patel?

  No, that's it.

• 14:16David Pierce?

  Mercifully, no. What's great about that is that was both a lot of things and genuinely actually nothing.

• 14:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. At least two of those things happened and then unhappened.

• 14:28David Pierce?

  And then unhappened.

• 14:30Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's just the Elon news cycle. And I promise you, we have a conversation. It's like, are we gonna, should we just wait for this to unhappen? And then we get incoming. It's like, are you gonna talk about the thing that happened? Revealed preferences. This is the secret to all economist's brains, is they say the market will act rationally and they know that when they actually measure, people's revealed preferences are ridiculous. That's Elon traffic.

• 14:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and Elon knows that fact better than anybody, right? Like, it is, we, we are as guilty of this as anybody. We continue to sit around and be like, Elon says a lot of nonsense. Most of it is nothing. We shouldn't take it that seriously. And then every time he says anything, it's like, oh, crap. It's Elon Musk. We should probably do something about this.

• 15:12Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm saying we're in the customer service business here. When, when we start getting the incoming, it's like, oh, fine. What we need is another button on a mouse. It's literally labeled hate click. So I can just measure that intent specifically. Maybe we should start adding two links to every story on the front page. One is just like regular click and the other one is god damn it. And like, so you can finally measure what, what's what? That's the cycle we're in with Elon. I know in my heart that most of those clicks are god damn it clicks.

• 15:43David Pierce?

  We just need our website to be able to turn on people's microphones. So that when you click, we can hear you go, ah. And that we register as a hate click every time.

• 15:52Nilay Patel?

  All right, well, this is my favorite feature of iOS 17 is the always on tap monitoring and the microphone that measures how much you're sighing and despair.

• 16:00David Pierce?

  But only for the verge.

• 16:01Nilay Patel?

  But only for.

• 16:01David Pierce?

  And we, we promise to only use your data for good.

• 16:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we're, it's, it's all happening locally on device. We're just, we're just measuring grunts per click. Uh, and then that gets hashed into differential privacy and sent to us. So we can figure out how to cover Elon Musk. All right, that's enough Elon. There's other news in a world of social media that I think is important to talk about. It's hard, it's also hard to calibrate it, right? And we, we're, we're getting similar feedback here. And this, this is threads, Instagram threads. We're obviously covering threads a lot. It's fun to cover the launch and birth and development of a new social platform, especially one done by Meta, which hasn't done a new one in quite a long time. They're being really transparent about it, which makes it fun to cover. It also seems like they've adopted the very clever strategy

• 16:46Nilay Patel?

  of not shipping obvious features, letting people beg for them and then delivering them like it was their idea. Like it, it's like if you ran a McDonald's and you're like, we don't have french fries. And then like six months later, you're like, based on overwhelming customer demand, we've launched french fries.

• 17:01David Pierce?

  No, it would be like if, if every time you asked for french fries, the cashier went, oh, what a good idea. We should have french fries. And then six months later, they launched french fries. That's what.

• 17:12Nilay Patel?

  Or like french fries are very complicated. We haven't, we have a number of thoughts about french fries.

• 17:16David Pierce?

  We're testing french fries internally.

• 17:18Nilay Patel?

  Exactly. But it's smart because everyone is happy all the time because they're getting exactly what they want, which is clever. So this week, slowly rolling out, I think by the time you listen to this, roll that to everyone, uh, web threads is here and it's pretty bare bones, but it works.

• 17:32David Pierce?

  It's a timeline. You can post. It seems fine.

• 17:36Speaker 04

  You can post, but you can't quote post. If you try to do it, you'll get a little, uh, coming soon message.

• 17:42Nilay Patel?

  Dunks coming soon. The feature that destroyed Twitter coming soon.

• 17:47David Pierce?

  But I don't know if you guys want to do this, but I had to change, like it wouldn't let me in with my Instagram password because the way I log into Instagram is by logging in through Facebook and the way I log into Facebook is with like a meta account. So I wound up having to change every single one of those passwords all the way up the stack just to be able to log into threads on the web. It was, it was a scene. Uh, and now I don't know what my Facebook password is and I can't reset it because it goes to my Instagram password, which would log me out of all my accounts. It's, it's bad times. I'm officially done with Facebook, I think forever and ever. Uh, but I'm into, I'm into threads on the web. But I feel like we're still in this position of like existential debate about whether threads is working. And we went through this weird thing where threads got, you

• 18:28David Pierce?

  know, this, this record-setting number of users grew really fast and then went back down really fast because everybody joined it, found out it was, you know, it, I don't know, it hadn't like solved world hunger all at once and then left because that's what people do when they join these new things. And then the narrative of threads is like a cool vibrant place changed really fast. And there was that data that said the installs had gone down and the daily active users had gone down. And there are a lot of reasons not to necessarily trust that data exactly. But it, it does feel like the hype cycle of threads happened in like record time. And I'm very curious how you guys think about it right now. Like is threads working generally?

• 19:09Speaker 04

  I think the answer is no, for the most part. It does not work. It doesn't do a lot of things. Um, and I think a lot of the discussion about threads when, especially when it launched right after. You had people seeing all these influencer accounts, all these brand posts. And I think there was a lot of discussion and handbringing about what does this mean? What is Meta trying to do to the social experience? Because they want to only show us influencers. And I think the truth was threads really didn't work. It just couldn't show you the post that you wanted to see because it could not work. It couldn't show you the post of people you follow. It couldn't do anything. And they're very slowly, you know, kind of, as Neil said, beat by beat, adding small things that will actually make it work. But the people who registered accounts, they're not opening the app because when you open the app, you can't see anything half the time. Half the time, the feed is blank.

• 19:53Speaker 04

  It doesn't have people you follow. It doesn't have the topics that you're actually interested in. So they actually do need to get some content that's going to get people coming back there. But I think that people should measure their impact and interest in threads with the knowledge that it basically doesn't work. It's barely held together. The app is semi-functional and we're starting there. We're starting at the bottom.

• 20:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think a good example was last night during the Republican primary debate, which was a shit show, just like flatly was a shit show. I mean that if you were a conservative or a liberal and you watched that and you came away with any, any takeaway other than, wow, that was a shit show. Like, I don't know what you're doing. Because there's basically just a bunch of people yelling insults at each other, which is prime Twitter material.

• 20:38Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 20:39Nilay Patel?

  Like, most of it, if you just take one step back, take the politics out of it, these people were trying to make tweets. That's what they were doing. Like, they were yelling insults at each other to get the social media clip that went viral that people would tweet about. Like, that is our politics for better or worse. And like, Threads was just not capable of generating that work. Like, it was not happening in real time. I found myself opening X to see what was going on there. And that was really weird because most of the journalists that I follow for that stuff have not paid for X premium or whatever. And so it was like a bunch of weird Bitcoin scams instead. Very confusing, top to bottom. I think Threads has that opportunity. They need to build out a bunch of stuff. So a really

• 21:20Nilay Patel?

  simple one is right now, when you actually make a thread on Threads, the replies are down ranked. So it doesn't work as well. And like

• 21:28David Pierce?

  Like your, your second thread in a line, if you reply to your own, it down ranks it.

• 21:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And this is something that, you know, if you're a long time Twitter user, this is, has become a very natural way of expressing yourself on Twitter, right? You write one tweet, then you reply to the tweet, and you're probably, and you get three tweets, and they're kind of all like, out in the world, doing their thing, getting boosted and promoted, and then people can see the whole thread. On Instagram, it's like the first one gets, and the rest are, or they might as well not exist. I know the Threads team knows this. They have posted about it. And they said that they want to fix it and make replies and threads first class citizens on the platform. That's the basics beyond even where the button to switch from the for you feed to the following feed is located. It's like, does this algorithm surface all the content or just some of it? And right now, it's like, just some of it. The moments

• 22:17Nilay Patel?

  that Threads are going to be good for, the moment that Twitter was good for, was live coverage of things. What is going on right now? Right? That Twitter was amazing at this. Event shows, sports, the NFL season is coming. If Threads doesn't have a bunch of features for this upcoming NFL season, if they're not ready for opening day, but that's a huge miss, right? So I think they got it. They got to rush through it. I think this is why the desktop version is here somewhat unfinished. Like, they know, a bunch of NFL beat writers are going to want a place to post at kickoff. They better have a version that works on laptops. Like, even if it's kind of broken, they, they need that thing for that kind of moment. But it's definitely, like, I think, it's just like, not there. Like, it's still kind of dead. I think a bunch of reporters and journalists and people who are sitting at

• 23:01Nilay Patel?

  work with their laptops, now that they can post on the web, they will start, and hopefully that fixes it in some way. But as of this moment, yeah, it's still just like waiting to be seen what happens here.

• 23:13David Pierce?

  Yeah, I think the thing that has changed for me is at the beginning of threads, I mean, really for the last like 12 months, it's kind of been like, okay, the debate is Twitter slash X losing its luster, right? And there were a lot of people who were like, yeah, it sucks now. I'm leaving. The platform's bad. It's been overrun by all of the people who say things that Elon likes to meme about. It's a disaster. And then there are other people who are like, no, it's still pretty much the way that it is. I think to me, the, you know, Twitter is still Twitter argument doesn't hold at all anymore. Like the thing, the Republican debate is a perfect example of that. Like that platform felt dead in a way that I don't remember the last time it felt dead. And part of it is I'm sure there was stuff happening.

• 23:56David Pierce?

  I literally can't see it. Like, I don't pay enough money to be able to see that stuff happening. And it's just, there are fewer people, they're posting less, the stuff is happening in weirder places. It's being surfaced in less effective ways. Like, that platform, I think, is pretty clearly dying. But I don't, it doesn't seem like it is sort of one to one and threads the other way, right? Like, you would sort of assume that as X drops, threads would go up. Because I think at this point, threads is like the leader in the clubhouse to be the next thing. If there's going to be a next thing.

• 24:30Nilay Patel?

  It's sure not Blue Sky.

• 24:31David Pierce?

  It's definitely not Blue Sky. Mastodon apparently had a good week. Like, I'm still very bullish on this space as a whole. Like, the open social web is going to be great. I wish it were more mature than it already is.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  By the way, we are trying to get Jay from Blue Sky and Eugen from Mastodon to come to the Code Conference. I'm just putting that vibe in the world. We've sent the emails. If you know him, you have a line to him. Tell him to come on stage. I want to talk about social media with him.

• 24:56David Pierce?

  Yeah, it'd be good. I'm into it.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  We will find a way to, Code is the same day as Meta Connect, also happening in September. We have some ideas. I'm bringing those those folks on tour stage. I won't spoil them at this time.

• 25:09Speaker 04

  What David said makes me think of two things. One thing is first, I like having like eight different social media apps to open and see different things. It's it's it's cool. When I'm sick of TikTok, I can go to Blue Sky. When I'm sick of Blue Sky, I can go to Mastodon. When I'm sick of Mastodon, I can go to Threads. Then I can go back to Twitter and see what's going on.

• 25:26David Pierce?

  Do you know what I love about this, Richard? I genuinely cannot tell if you're serious. Like, I sincerely don't know whether that was like full sarcasm or earnest honesty.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  What is happening right now is that David and I have children and Richard doesn't. And Richard's like, you know what is sick is bar hopping. And both of us are like, we're too tired. That is that is 100% the dynamic that just happened on this show. Richard's like, I like waking up on a Sunday and going to five different bars and just checking it. I'm like, I can't. I'm so sleepy.

• 25:56Speaker 04

  Like, who doesn't just have unlimited time to open every single app on their phone over and over and over again? Is that not is that not your experience?

• 26:03Nilay Patel?

  Look, I when I was in Chicago, I was an inveterate bar crawler. I understand, you know, you got drum and bass at one, you got house at the other, and you got to just feel the vibes through the night. Maybe you're gonna link, you know, anything could happen here on this internet. And then you get older and you're like, I can't be doing this anymore. And I think for a lot of people, that is a social media experience. So 2023 is like, well, I'm just like, just tell me which one's cool. Like, which one has onion rings? And my friends are gonna be there. Like, I'll be at that one.

• 26:33David Pierce?

  First of all, it's not onion rings. It's free pizza in the back. Like, that's that's the thing.

• 26:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 26:37David Pierce?

  Uh, but also, wait, Richard, that was thing one. What was thing two?

• 26:40Speaker 04

  Thing two is that, yes, it feels like Twitter's been hollowed out. I follow like 7,000 people, which is not the normal experience, and always use the chronological feed. So I kind of see a lot of different communities and how people are talking. And a lot of very important voices, like you said, either don't post at all, or just don't post on that platform anymore. But there's still people who do. So I think for a lot of people, the thing that they've experienced on Twitter, or X, or whatever you want to call it, is that it has always been so bad that if you use it, there's nothing that it could do that could make it so bad that you won't use it anymore. They've already run off everyone who isn't an addict.

• 27:15David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 27:16Speaker 04

  So there's just nothing they can do at that point.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  Right, but and those folks are the most addicted. So getting them to come to threads and post at the same rate requires that feedback loop and threads does not have enough people yet. And that's the chicken and egg problem. And again, I think the moments for threads are gonna look like NFL season when a lot of people start tweeting, the NBA finals, award season, like all the live events that Twitter used to capture, more presidential debates, election season. All of those moments are moments for this particular kind of social, like these are not TikTok moments. No one's watching the debate and like opening TikTok to get live reactions. Like you are a psychopath if you're doing that. I tried doing it last night. I was like, I feel like a psychopath. Like this is crazy.

• 28:03Nilay Patel?

  Because it's not there yet and like it's too fast. Like these are live logs, right? That's kind of what you want out of this. We make a lot of live logs. Like that's how I've always thought about this. And threads isn't quite ready for that yet, especially with its bizarre insistence on the algorithmic feed. And then Twitter isn't either.

• 28:20David Pierce?

  This is the moment threads kind of has to figure out what it wants to be, right? Because like Moserian, that whole team have been saying all along, they don't want to be a place for politics and a place for news. And it's like, do you know how you become Twitter is by being a place for politics and a place for news? Like you can't have it both ways. The only things that get people that excited are politics and news. And like I'm defining news broadly as just like things that are happening in real time, right?

• 28:45Nilay Patel?

  Like the weather is news.

• 28:47David Pierce?

  And that includes sports, like sports is news in a very real way, right? Like it's, it is a thing that is happening right now that we all are talking about. Like that's what it is. And for them to say, this is a place for text, but that isn't designed to be this kind of like real time, up to the moment thing. I'm just not sure I know what that is. And so it does feel like it's going to be interesting to see what it looks like on a football Sunday, because that's a relatively sort of low stakes and unproblematic version of this problem. But this question of like, how do you stay that fast? How do you surface stuff like this in real time? As somebody is tweeting 100 times during, or somebody is posting 100 times during a single game. What is the threads algorithm gonna make of that?

• 29:31David Pierce?

  And how is like the open question for me about what the next, you know, six months are gonna look like? And I just have no idea.

• 29:38Nilay Patel?

  I'll give you one very specific example. I have tweeted in my life during any number of Packers games, just the words, oh, no. Mostly in relation to Mike McCarthy, but just in general, oh, no. Right, like in Twitter was very good. It's somehow finding the people who understood what I was saying. That it was, there was a football game going on. I had been tweeting about it. Here's this like totally context free, oh, no, in the middle of a Sunday. And everyone kind of understood what was going on. That is kind of magic, right? That felt like a hive mind moment.

• 30:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:13Nilay Patel?

  Like you're in a community, you're all just sort of like chatting in this weird way. Instagram threads right now takes that, oh, no. And like seven hours later, delivers it next to like a John Cena tweet. Like it makes no sense what is going on there. And that is

• 30:27Speaker 04

  Classic Facebook.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And in that, yes. And they, they want to get away from context collapse. And it actually turns out that the chronological feed provides all the context. And so like, I think they have to make some big decisions, especially if they want, I get why they're saying they don't want politics and news. Like one, they all personally have bad experiences with that. Adam Mysteri ran the Facebook news feed. He has a bad experience with politics and news. I get it. Second, in Canada and Australia and all these other places, the governments are saying you might have to pay for links to news sites.

• 30:58Nilay Patel?

  They have solved that problem. They're not launched in the EU, which is going to have its own weird rules. So I get why they're like, you know what? This isn't, we're not headed straight forward. We're going to start with like fashion, Instagram stuff. But they're just going to quickly arrive at void when it's Biden and probably Trump in a debate. If you are competitive at all with Twitter, you need that experience to happen on your platform and not Twitter. Otherwise you're just not going to have the volume, not going to have the interest. And you're certainly not going to have the impact, which is what we have talked about the show several times now. Meta runs gigantic platforms that make more money than their rivals, but often have no cultural impact. And I think this platform lives and dies on its impact.

• 31:36David Pierce?

  And we really like, so let's say Threads launched at the beginning of July, right? And we really haven't had a sort of everybody on the internet moment since then, right? Like, there just hasn't been a thing that all of a sudden, out of nowhere, everyone was talking about. Has there been one? I can't, like, I can't think of...

• 31:57Speaker 04

  There was a viral NFT post that went around, and that was the most.

• 32:00Nilay Patel?

  Now we're taking a break. Richard's talking about viral NFT posts. I'm shutting this down.

• 32:05Speaker 04

  Oh, come on.

• 32:06Nilay Patel?

  I...

• 32:07Speaker 04

  You need to buy Bored Ape Club. I'll stop.

• 32:11David Pierce?

  This is not investment advice. The first cast is not investment advice.

• 32:14Nilay Patel?

  It is, because right now, you're buying low. There's nowhere else to go. All right, there hasn't been one. I'm saying last night, the debate should have been one, and it wasn't one.

• 32:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, but we're about to get 18 months of moments where people, people care about, are going to have to choose which platform they spend their day hammering away on. And like, the fight is coming in a really real way. And I wonder if Threads, like, even infrastructurally, is ready for it. I think the web thing is a big deal, but there's still, like you guys have been saying, a lot of work left to do.

• 32:47Nilay Patel?

  All right. Everyone, we're gonna take a break. Everyone, check on your NFT wallets. See if Richard has stolen from you.

• 32:54David Pierce?

  Richard will buy your Bored Apes. He told me that right before we started recording.

• 32:58Speaker 04

  Click any link I send you, it's fine.

• 33:00Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  Please don't click links from Richard. We'll be right back.

• 33:40Speaker 01

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• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Like I said, a lot of little news this week. Do you want to start with the PlayStation Portal? Or you want to start with all the streaming stuff?

• 34:21David Pierce?

  Let's do the Portal. This is the thing I am most flummoxed by. And Richard, as the gamer of the three of us, I would say, I'm curious to know, A, you should probably explain what this thing is because I think it's actually harder to explain than it seems like it should be. But then I want you to convince me that this is actually a thing that needs to exist in the world because I'm not sure.

• 34:42Speaker 04

  I will do that, but I'll start by apologizing because it's basically my fault that everything Sony announced this week exists. And I'll explain. I'm sorry I did this to the world. I will have to repay them somehow, perhaps in tokens that you could invest in on my blockchain, but.

• 34:58David Pierce?

  Click every link Richard sends you.

• 35:00Speaker 04

  So they have introduced the PlayStation Portal. This is something, you know, they kind of hinted at it. They said that it was coming earlier this year. It is a screen in the middle of a DualSense controller. That's it. It plays PS5 games over Wi-Fi from your PS5. You can't really do anything else. It's $200. You cannot connect Bluetooth headphones to it. If you want to use, if you want to use some wireless headphones with it, you need to buy some of their new audio gear. They have $200 wireless earbuds.

• 35:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh wait, I just want to underline that means they cost as much as the PlayStation Portal.

• 35:33David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 35:33Nilay Patel?

  Like your full kitted out price. For a portal in headphones is $400 because it doesn't have Bluetooth.

• 35:43David Pierce?

  At least, you know, 350 if you want the the the cheaper, crappier headphones. But it's it's I want to come back to PlayStation Link because I think it is preposterous.

• 35:54Nilay Patel?

  I just wanted to underline that price.

• 35:56Speaker 04

  Yes, the reason why you can't just use your regular headphones or perhaps Sony's other headphones that they introduced, they just released the new XM5 earbuds not that long ago. They don't have the PlayStation Link audio technology that lets you get lossless audio and low latency audio, which of course is important for gaming, but I think people use Bluetooth headphones with their Steam Decks and whatnot.

• 36:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you compare Bluetooth headphones to a Switch. It's fine.

• 36:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 36:20Speaker 04

  But yeah, Sony has said, no, you will use our headphones, the specific PlayStation headphones, or you won't use anything at all, I guess. But the reason why this is my fault is I take a look at my desk, at the table that I have sitting next to my couch in my living room, and there's a lot of gamer headsets on there that cost way too much money and I've just bought too many of them.

• 36:42David Pierce?

  How how many does one person need?

• 36:45Speaker 04

  More.

• 36:49Nilay Patel?

  Welcome to the Vergecast, everybody.

• 36:51Speaker 04

  Like, there's there's always another one. There's always a new feature. There's always there's always something else. You know, there's always, you know what? I think the reason why I lost that match is because my headset wasn't good enough.

• 36:59Nilay Patel?

  Ah, yeah.

• 37:00Speaker 04

  Which it just it's it's logical. It makes sense.

• 37:03David Pierce?

  If you'd been able to hear them sneaking up on you in spatial audio, you would have you would have gotten. I got you. I understand.

• 37:08Nilay Patel?

  Can I say the most old man thing about gamer headsets?

• 37:11Speaker 04

  Yeah.

• 37:12Nilay Patel?

  So I mostly only play online games with my Nashville friends and we have all discovered that it's easier to make speakerphone calls on our phones than to fuck with headsets. So I just have my phone with FaceTime Audio on a conference call, just like on my on the coffee table. It works so much better than gamer headsets.

• 37:31Speaker 04

  But that's only because you guys can't figure out Discord.

• 37:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's true. I was just gonna say, you just described the whole origin story of Discord. I'm just saying. Which is a bunch of nerds on Teamspeak and conference calls trying to make this stuff work.

• 37:42Nilay Patel?

  Like I'm saying, if I can avoid software in my life, I do it. And that that's my solve. Anyway, continue, Richard, with your headphone purchasing odyssey.

• 37:50Speaker 04

  Yes, I convinced Sony that this was a good idea because they saw how many headsets I bought and they said, we can sell headsets to idiots all day. This is just money that we're missing. We need to have more audio gear for gamers. The other part is they introduced this handheld. Why is this my fault? Do you know how many switches I've purchased? A lot of them. An almost untold number. I do not play the Nintendo Switch.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  Why do you?

• 38:12Speaker 04

  Have one. I bought them for other people. My wife has two.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 38:16Speaker 04

  I bought her one, then I bought a Switch OLED. And I thought that I would get one of them, but it turns out that she has two Nintendo Switches now.

• 38:22Nilay Patel?

  That's cool.

• 38:23Speaker 04

  And I think there are a lot of people like that where like they have multiple ones. They have one for this room. They have one for that room. They have one to take on the go. And that's what Sony is chasing with this device, I think, is that you've got a PlayStation and you want to play it in another room and you don't have a briefcase TV because you didn't buy the $2,000 briefcase TV.

• 38:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 38:39Speaker 04

  So what are you gonna do? Are you just gonna play games on your iPad like a normal?

• 38:43Nilay Patel?

  It makes sense for lots of like families, right? You got a PS5 downstairs and I have it connected to the big TV, speakers, whatever. That is like, you don't want another PS5 and TV rig upstairs. Moving the games back and forth sucks. Like here's this thing, you just like go play it in your bedroom. You just like give one to your teenager and play in the bedroom. That seems to make a lot of sense. Does it allow you to simultaneously play on the PS5 and remotely?

• 39:09Speaker 04

  I don't think so. I don't, I don't think it works like that.

• 39:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that seems, I mean, that's the miss.

• 39:14David Pierce?

  Yeah, so this is my thing with this device is like, with the one use case, I, I agree, makes sense, right? Like there are times I want to play games, sitting in bed or on the couch. Like my PlayStation is hooked up to the same monitor that I'm on right now on my computer. And there are other times I want to play games elsewhere. Moving my PlayStation is annoying. Completely get that. There are so many other things this thing could have done. Sony has game streaming that it could have done on the portal. Sony has some really cool old systems through which you can emulate old PlayStation games that it could have done on the portal. Sony could have done so many things that would have made this device cooler and better. It could have had streaming apps so you can watch movies and things when someone else is on your PlayStation.

• 39:58David Pierce?

  There's just a million ways it could have gone and it picked none of them, except like the minimum viable least thing this device could possibly be. And that just kind of drives me nuts.

• 40:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they picked the things that didn't require a processor. Right? I mean, that's like, kind of what it feels like. They made it as cheap as possible, but limiting the amount of local processing that is happening here and saying, all of that's going to happen on your PS5.

• 40:21David Pierce?

  I will say, the, the only case in which that argument holds is if the battery life is as good as supposedly it might be. And I think Sony said to CNET, I think that the plan is to have the battery last as long as the DualSense controller, which is like eight or nine hours. That's pretty good. If I can sit there and play games on it for eight hours on a charge, like, that's legit. It's still not enough. I still, I would trade two hours of that battery life for more things to do, but it's something.

• 40:50Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I would also point out, right, in one of the use cases here, what are you doing? You're on a trip, you're in a hotel room, you want to play your PS5 at home, your hotel has reasonably good wifi, you need, what, 15 megabits? That's the, that's sort of the recommended speed. You can get that in a lot of hotels nowadays. Great, you're playing. You know what you can also do is just bring a DualSense controller along and open the app on your iPad.

• 41:14David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 41:15Nilay Patel?

  And it's maybe not as seamless, but it also just, like, I have friends who just, like, do this all the time.

• 41:20David Pierce?

  Yeah, it works. Like, it really, it's a, it's a totally valid gaming system. Like, that's what I do right now in my house. And I have always thought that, like, some, when, like, when they first announced this as the Project Q, I was like, okay, add a, add a switchy thing to my PlayStation rig and I'm golden. This solves all my problems. This now just is like a slightly less wonky version of the system I already have.

• 41:43Nilay Patel?

  No, they, they didn't build a Switch. They built the Wii U, which,

• 41:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 41:47Nilay Patel?

  was not popular. So that's not a great sign. But I think the thing that's, happens from Sony's perspective is that, yeah, sure, you could just hook up your DualSense to an iPad and play that way, but then you wouldn't pay Sony $200.

• 42:03Speaker 04

  Which makes it less good for them and they don't want to do more cloud streaming or anything because that would encourage you to buy fewer PS5s and they don't want to do that either.

• 42:12Nilay Patel?

  It's true. You can also just do what I do, which is I bought a second power cable and a second HDMI cord. And I set them up in the sunroom where there's a projector and I just move my PS5 around. And literally the only inconvenience of that is I have to remember to turn it off all the way.

• 42:29Speaker 04

  It will scream at you if you do not do that.

• 42:31David Pierce?

  Oh, it does that awful thing. It doesn't like it. No.

• 42:35Nilay Patel?

  But yeah, but I move my PS5 from the basement to the outside to play Madden on the projector all the time. It's fine.

• 42:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's smart.

• 42:43Speaker 04

  That's what my series has this for. It's when I want to play Xbox somewhere else. I got it.

• 42:48Nilay Patel?

  I love how Richard has just multiples of every console. There's an Excel spreadsheet in both Microsoft and Sony. It's just labeled like lawler margins.

• 42:57Speaker 04

  No, you can pretty much predict what products people are going to come out by what I have six of.

• 43:03Speaker 04

  Because they're going to release more of those very soon. I think the other thing is that this signals that there's going to be another PS5. Uh, pretty soon. We saw that shell leak of the slim thick, whatever it is.

• 43:13Nilay Patel?

  The slim thick.

• 43:15Speaker 04

  If you look at it, you can see that they've released these audio gear that doesn't work with the PS5 without a USB dongle, which um, you know, we love the dongles. They don't. They're going to need to release a system with that. They're going to do something. So we'll maybe have more clarity early next year, mid next year, when we get another PS5 and see how it all works together.

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this means we now have to talk about PlayStation Link. This is ridiculous that it doesn't have Bluetooth. It's ridiculous that these headphones are so expensive, don't work with the existing PS5. And Sony's claim is what? Just lower latency?

• 43:46Speaker 04

  Yeah, that's about it.

• 43:47David Pierce?

  Something, something higher audio quality too. And they claim it's easier to switch between devices, which is funny because one of the things that Sony's headphones are notoriously not great at is switching between devices. Uh, so I don't know that I have a ton of faith in that, which is a thing you can do over Bluetooth and Sony does poorly. But yeah, in theory, there are like, they have a list of reasons and I don't find a single one of them. compelling and I I think PlayStation like as a thing is just like totally outrageous.

• 44:16Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this is the sort of thing and Mark has finally made a video about this. This is the sort of thing that if Apple did it with the iPhone, like I would lose my mind like. I accused Apple of wanting to do this when they released the AirPods and they took the headphone jack off the iPhone, right? Like, we're gonna get everyone used to wireless audio. Then we're gonna build a proprietary wireless audio protocol and you can only use our headphones. And this is true in phones like all over the place.

• 44:40David Pierce?

  And it will say a not small portion of that Apple has done.

• 44:44Nilay Patel?

  Right. And so is Google and so is Samsung.

• 44:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  Everyone's phones now, they've all taken the headphone jacks away and they have Bluetooth and they have Bluetooth. Plus proprietary extensions that only their headphones can use. So the AirPods, obviously. Bunch of features only AirPods can access on an iPhone. If you have a Samsung phone, there's a bunch of features that Samsung buds can do. If you have a Pixel, the Pixel buds have custom extensions. That's all shitty over there. But the reality is like, unless this features aren't very good. Like, oh no, spatial audio, like whatever.

• 45:17David Pierce?

  Also, I don't, I don't necessarily hate that as a thing, like to to say. We support the standards, right? Like it's what Apple does with iMessage too. They're like, if you want to send SMSs. That's fine, we'll support it, it works. But if you want to exist in our system. Everything is better and like, do I wish the world was not that way? Yes, but like, that's how it is and that's roughly fine as long as you're. In a position where you can still fail sort of gracefully. This is like if Apple had just said, no more SMSs ever.

• 45:44Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the PlayStation Portal does have a 3.5 millimeter headphone track. Which presumably has low latency. It's, it's just, it's weird. It doesn't have the middle thing.

• 45:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't have Bluetooth. So if you wanted to. You could get one of those like AirPods Bluetooth dongles. That you use on an airplane seat back and plug that into your PlayStation Portal and then pair your phones to that. I, you know, we're gonna make Sean Hollister make that video one day. I can see it coming like a train in the night. But it is like, it's weird that you would build wireless radios that support your proprietary thing. You would have a headphone jack and then not the most common thing.

• 46:25Speaker 04

  But it isn't weird. It's the most classic Sony thing ever, making a weird proprietary thing that doesn't work with any of one else's stuff. The problem that you point out is that it doesn't work with their own headphones. Like, I have a bunch of XM headphones here and none of them have it. Why is that?

• 46:40Nilay Patel?

  Like, you get the feeling, you know, I love talking about an org chart. You get the feeling that when like, people walk into the Sony office, it's a little bit like Memento. Like, they're just constantly introducing themselves to each other, like, oh, you work on headphones? I don't know, we did headphones here.

• 46:54Speaker 04

  We did headphones? It's like, no one knows who the boom speaker guy is.

• 46:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, oh, we do, we do PlayStations? We should maybe-

• 47:02David Pierce?

  The one-party speaker guy is just in the back, just jamming the whole time.

• 47:05Nilay Patel?

  He's just like livid. He's like, super bass, you know, and like the mega bass team is like, what the fuck? You know? Like, that's just Sony all the time.

• 47:15David Pierce?

  True. Well, and the PlayStation team seems to be especially that way. Like, the PlayStation team seems to not have to play by any of the other Sony rules and just kind of does whatever it wants at all times.

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The Memento comparison, I think, is a little dark. It's more like Dory in Finding Nemo.

• 47:33David Pierce?

  Every time it turns around, it's like, who are you?

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't think everyone at Sony is heavily tattooed and trying to solve a murder. That would at least, I think, give them a little more purpose. This is much more like, hello? Who are you?

• 47:45David Pierce?

  You seem nice. Yeah.

• 47:46Speaker 04

  That was the Phil Harrison Sony. That was a few generations ago.

• 47:49Nilay Patel?

  There's actually a lot of other gaming stuff going on. Qualcomm has sort of a portable device. We've described it as a battering. The Quest 3, which we're expecting to see at Meta Connect, is leaked out. People are unboxing it. There's a new Atari 2600, which is very good. Samsung TVs are getting cloud gaming. There's just kind of a lot going on.

• 48:08David Pierce?

  I think the Qualcomm thing, to me, is the most exciting, which is basically like Qualcomm is making a big bet on handheld gaming as a thing. And this is kind of what Qualcomm does, right? They sort of look around and they say, okay, we really only know how to make one thing. What other industry can we make it for? And they've like, they've done this with cars. They got really into wearables. They got super into headphones for a while. And now the thing that they're trying to figure out is how to do like custom chips for gaming handhelds. And so they came out with- Three different like tiers of chips. There's the G1, the G2, and the G3X Gen 2, which basically ladder all the way up from like, as far as I can tell, basically like a phone level thing to like a Steam Deck level thing. And I just think that's awesome.

• 48:51David Pierce?

  Like, there are lots of problems with this, starting with the fact that they run Android, and there aren't that many good games for Android. The gaming ecosystem is not that great. But game streaming is going to help solve some of that problem. And so like, the idea that we might be about to get a run of different versions of these devices, because they're going to get easier and cheaper to make and source parts for, I think is super exciting. I don't know that I love the idea that they should all look like a screen in the middle with two halves of a controller on either side. But that seems to be where we're aligning as a world on what these things are supposed to look like. But, I don't know, Richard, are you gonna end up buying 15 different versions of handheld gaming consoles? Like, I'm excited about this thing. I'm not 100% sure why all the time, but I am excited about it.

• 49:32Speaker 04

  No. They predict that you'll go outside, that you'll use them places, and I don't touch grass. So, no, not gonna do it.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  Listen, if you use all your Nintendo Switches indoors, you can use these indoors also.

• 49:43Speaker 04

  But I don't play the Nintendo Switch.

• 49:45David Pierce?

  Oh yeah, alright, fair enough. Let's get your wife on here, what does she think?

• 49:48Speaker 04

  Okay, she might have a few.

• 49:50Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so we have long asked for emails from people who buy Android phones to play games, pro gaming phones. The potential customers of the Razer Edge or this Qualcomm thing. I'm just looking, I just searched the Rich Hessen box for Android gaming. This one is spam. This leaves us with six emails, one of which is not about gaming at all. But I'll just read some. This one starts out with, "I do not own an Android gaming phone." So, you can see what this call for reader feedback is like. "But they own an Android gaming handheld called the PyMax Portal. I bought it specifically for one game, Junction Impact, so I could play it on the go.

• 50:31Nilay Patel?

  I want to be able to play with a controller, which is not supported on Android but does on iOS. It works okay, but you can get controllers to press the virtual buttons." So that's, this is like, this is why people buy Android gaming devices. Like, I want to play one game that supports controllers on one platform and not another, and this thing let me do it. This person actually bought a Razer Edge, this is a quote. "There are a few games optimized for controllers on Android, and most are pretty good. I use the Edge to emulate games I definitely own in other forms, definitely emulators up to PS2, 3DS, and Switch." And then this is a very important line. I'm one of the people who have more fun getting something to work than actually having the thing, which is after my own heart. I am absolutely that person.

• 51:11David Pierce?

  These are our people.

• 51:12Nilay Patel?

  And then he finishes with, this explains why the next thing I bought was an ROG Ally.

• 51:19David Pierce?

  Fair. Emulators are not a small piece of this, though. I think like the deeper I get into this world, the more I realize there is like a vast ecosystem of weird ways to play games that are at least 20 years old, all over Android especially. And I think that's very cool.

• 51:38Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 51:39David Pierce?

  But yeah, I mean, we're due for like what happened with Android tablets, right? Like, everybody's gonna beg Google to care about this and push things along and make them try new things. And then Google will be like, we think Android gaming is the future. And then eight years from now, we'll be somewhere.

• 51:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. We got one last one. This person likes to play free to play games on their phone. He says, I've had legitimately rewarding gaming experiences on mobile, especially puzzle games like Fair Little Nightmares, where shadows somewhere in Monument Valley. And then they finish by saying, I live in Minnesota and anyone who says water is a good windshield fluid is a monster, which is an important callback to our other reader feedback. But I just want to point this out, like, we have been asking on this show, if you are a hardcore Android gamer, let us know. And this is a pretty good gestalt of what the responses have been like. I'm a big nerd and I like to tinker, which, again, you were listening to the right podcast. We love you here. I want to play one game and solve one problem and Android helps me solve that problem very directly. That is just straight Android stuff.

• 52:39Nilay Patel?

  Like iOS is not like, we want to help you solve a problem that you've made up. iOS is like, welcome to our world, right? We've issued you a blazer. Android's like, whatever you want. And so like, that makes sense. And then the third one is like, I'm able to do things over here with emulators. I wasn't able to do some of us. That all makes sense.

• 52:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 52:56Nilay Patel?

  But there's not the, I don't think there's a culture of, like with gaming PCs, right? There's a gaming PC culture. The razor edge does not have that kind of culture around it. I think the Steam Deck is getting there, but that feels like a whole different kind of thing.

• 53:10Speaker 04

  Well, there has to be two sides to it because you have to have the culture and you also have to have the working business model. And the problem for Android gaming is that you don't really have a business model that makes someone make a great game for Android. So the best game that you can play on your Android gaming device is a 15 year old PlayStation game.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:26Speaker 04

  Which is fun, great for you if you have one, it's just not like there's no business in that.

• 53:31Nilay Patel?

  Well, they're about to release all the remasters, the Metal Gear games, and boy, are they gonna get that money from me again.

• 53:38Nilay Patel?

  They're super gonna get that money from me again. Let's end by switching gears a little bit. We've talked about football season a bunch already in the show. It's coming, so it's just a couple of weeks away here, and the tech platforms that are invested in football are starting to do stuff. So NFL Sunday Ticket, obviously, is a big YouTube deal. They're doing pricing promotions for college students, which is a Sunday Ticket mainstay. Lying to the NFL about where you live to get cheaper Sunday Ticket, I think a cultural phenomenon, underreported. But you can do it, and it's getting more integrated into the Google TV home screen. And then Amazon is like, you know, we had the CEO of AWS on Decoder a couple of weeks ago. And he was like, we advertise in the NFL because it shows off the capabilities.

• 54:21Nilay Patel?

  And the decision makers of big companies like know who we are, which is, I always wondered, like, if you're in the market for AWS, why do you need to know about it? How do you not know about it?

• 54:32Speaker 04

  The IBM Super Bowl ad.

• 54:33Nilay Patel?

  And it turns out like a lot of people don't know about it. And like next gen stats powered by AWS makes it easier for people to go to their boss and say, we would like to work with AWS. Incredible. Incredible that that is still the case in 2023. But they are rolling out an awful lot of additional next gen stats on Thursday Night Football.

• 54:53David Pierce?

  Yeah, I spent some time earlier this week with some of the folks working on this stuff. And it's super interesting to hear them talk about it because like, we're all football fans. And the thing that we know as football fans is that if you in any way mess with football, people freak out.

• 55:12Nilay Patel?

  Yep.

• 55:12David Pierce?

  Like, anything where like, if you, if you move the camera angle that it's at when they snap the ball, people freak out.

• 55:19Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah, the scoreboard.

• 55:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. Like if it was, if it's up here versus down at the bottom of the screen, people have really strong opinions. Like it's, it's, that stuff matters to people. And if there is one media property on the planet that you don't mess with in general, for lots of reasons right now, it's the NFL. But now Amazon, like they did Thursday Night Football last year, it went pretty well. They didn't have any like huge disastrous errors. Ryan Fitzpatrick wore like a lot of weird shirts during the halftime shows, but like it was fine. And so this year, Amazon is like, okay, we have some confidence and we know we can do this. The numbers were pretty big last year. They weren't as big as linear TV numbers have typically been for Thursday Night Football, but they were bigger than everybody expected for streaming.

• 56:02David Pierce?

  And so they're like, okay, what wild new stuff can we do? And they've invented some genuinely cool stuff. We'll see if it works in actual, you know, live games. But in the stuff they've been testing, like they have a thing, they call it defensive alerts, where it'll actually on screen in real time, flag players that things are likely to blitz. And the idea is it essentially teaches the viewer how to read the field like a quarterback does. So you see a player's body language, or how they move before the snap, or what they're saying to each other. And it'll actually register, like this player is likely to blitz, keep an eye on them. So it's like, it's a cool way to watch, but also invites you like into the strategy of the game. And again, I suspect

• 56:44David Pierce?

  we're going to see this go really haywire a lot of ways in the way that all of these large language model systems go haywire, which is going to be deeply hilarious. But it's a cool idea. And as like a kind of stat nerd on top of just liking, watching football, it's going to be super fun. I'm kind of into it.

• 57:02Speaker 04

  But the danger is that you build Fox tracks, which we all, which we remember for the wrong reasons, which is how much people hated it. First of all, they were right. The puck is hard to see on TV, or at least it was back before high definition.

• 57:12David Pierce?

  No, it was the right thing. They should, yeah. Fox should have stuck that out.

• 57:15Speaker 04

  Maybe not the right application, but they were correct. They identified the problem and they dealt with it. Helping you follow the puck around during NHL games. But as you said, messing with football, people have been watching football their whole life. They know how to watch football. They decided how they want to watch football. Again, I do not watch the Lions anymore because I like to have happy Sundays filled with joy and mirth. But if I did watch the Lions.

• 57:37Nilay Patel?

  Wandering the streets, going to bar after bar.

• 57:39Speaker 04

  And my TV told me which blitzer the Lions quarterback is not seeing coming because of course he isn't because he plays for the Lions. So he sucks. He's not going to remake the correct read. Every single time I would, I would stop watching Lions games again. So I don't know. This might not work.

• 57:58David Pierce?

  So what you're saying is knowledge is, knowledge is rage in this, in this case.

• 58:02Nilay Patel?

  But here's what I'll say. Amazon historically, last season with Thursday Night Football, Amazon had the worst games in NFL history. Like, yeah, some of the worst games I have ever seen. And like, maybe that's luck and maybe that's scheduling. Who knows? They were all like uniform, like the broadcasters were like, what are we doing? Like Al Michaels is like, I'm like, you know, audibly opening his flask, just trying to get through it. You can hear them like swiping on FanDuel themselves, like looking for prop bets to talk about. Like, and so like, maybe all this stuff just makes that stuff slightly more interesting to watch. If you're not betting on the outcome of the game, which is currently why people watch NFL games to the end.

• 58:45David Pierce?

  Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the thing that was not in Amazon's plans that I expected were fantasy or gambling. Cause the, I mean, that's the two places everybody is going, right? Like you watch football either because you have a fantasy team or you have bets on it. And like ESPN is now into betting, which we've talked about, like that is where all of this is headed and it's where all the money is. And Amazon, it's a long deal. It has like 10 more years of Thursday night football to do. I suspect we'll get there, but none of that yet.

• 59:12Nilay Patel?

  10 more years of bottom of the barrel teams, kind of not scoring any points.

• 59:16David Pierce?

  Oh, and wait, before, before we go, we should take a break and stop talking about football. But the, it's not in 4K. And I, I mentioned twice in the story that I wrote about it, that it's not in 4K, which was just little tiny nods to Eli Patel each time.

• 59:30Nilay Patel?

  They failed.

• 59:31David Pierce?

  How, how angry are you that it's not in 4K?

• 59:33Nilay Patel?

  So they are all doing this thing where they'll promise that they have invested in 4K delivery. So like the cameras are 4K now. Cameras are actually high resolution because they like being able to punch in. And they're like HDR.

• 59:45David Pierce?

  Which is why they like the twice a game, they show that thing where you get like the tons of Boko on the shot. And everybody's like, this is amazing. It's like, yeah, they could do that the whole camp.

• 59:54Nilay Patel?

  No, so those ones, that's actually, that's something different. That that shot, they've started using basically prosumer level DSLRs. And this was like a whole invention, like, oh my God, like NFL broadcast teams are using Sony A7R2. It's like, great. And and people got lost their minds and thought it was AK. And we all had to be like, no, those are Sony A7s. Like that's every YouTuber has this camera.

• 1:00:14David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 1:00:15Nilay Patel?

  But they're already shooting at higher resolution because they like to be able to zoom.

• 1:00:18David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:00:19Nilay Patel?

  And they shoot those pretty crisply. So they've built these like 4K HDR workflows. And then to go out to all of their additional partners who are not 4K enabled, they bring it down to 1080p. And then, you know, if you're Fox, you then re upscale it to 4K at the delivered, which is insanity. Right? It's like, it's so frustrating. And they have all landed on this line that says, we're going to do HDR. Because people, that's what people can see. And I'm like, you are nuts. Like, what people can see is more detail. If you're like, look at how much brighter it is, I I believe you, right? People are, every year Marquez does the photo comparison bracket.

• 1:01:04Nilay Patel?

  And every year, the brightest photos win regardless of quality. Like, I believe you that people can see brighter stuff. But in the context of an NFL football game, there is actually so little dynamic variation. Because the whole field is awash in lights. There are no dark parts of an NFL football game.

• 1:01:22David Pierce?

  They do that on purpose.

• 1:01:24Nilay Patel?

  It's like, yeah, they're they're trying very hard to make everything bright regardless.

• 1:01:29David Pierce?

  Even in the the like promo material that Amazon has for this, the thing that is the most different between SDR and HDR is the sky.

• 1:01:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:39David Pierce?

  And it's like, fine, like how many, for the four establishing shots that they do every game of like the city that they're in, it'll look great. But I don't know what this gets me for football.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's just, it's it's bananas to me, especially because Amazon owns it end to end, right? It's their broadcast, their distribution, their app, they should be, they should at least be able to do it. And they they still haven't. Fox still hasn't done it. It's been years now since we've been dunking on Fox for not doing it. CBS, God bless them. They were at least they're at 1080p, whereas Fox is at 720 and ESPN is at 720. Like, that's horrible, but they've all adopted this middle ground of HD HDR instead of QHD HDR, which is crazy. It's like horrible. Like, just stop it. It's like, it's especially galling because everywhere else in the world, like, the Premier League is in just full, like, you can just get it in true 4K across England.

• 1:02:34David Pierce?

  You know who has the Premier League in England?

• 1:02:35Nilay Patel?

  Is it NBC?

• 1:02:36David Pierce?

  Amazon Prime Video.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  Is it Amazon Prime Video?

• 1:02:38David Pierce?

  It is Amazon Prime.

• 1:02:39Nilay Patel?

  I thought NBC had it.

• 1:02:41David Pierce?

  It's a, it's a mix, but Amazon streams it.

• 1:02:42Nilay Patel?

  Of course, right? And it's in true 4K. In Japan, every year that the Olympics come out and NHK in Japan is like, we're doing a test, a first ever test. And last year it was like a first ever test of native over the air 8K broadcast, which just worked. And like next year, like 24K native over the air broadcast. And we're here with 1080p HDR. This is why David didn't bring it up and I'm going to stop now. What are they doing? These are the most lucrative sports rights in America. Just do it. Neil Mohan, if you're listening to me, man who runs YouTube, I've sent him this email. Why won't YouTube just pay to do this in 4K? I will pay them more money. And he was like, that's a, that's a good idea. That's as far as I've gotten. I'm doing the Lord's work.

• 1:03:25David Pierce?

  That's a good idea. We're the Detroit Lions of resolution. Richard, the Lions are good now. I'm totally over it. It's fine. They haven't hurt me. We'll talk about that while we're at break.

• 1:03:35Nilay Patel?

  Fly hard.

• 1:03:38Nilay Patel?

  We'll take a break. We'll be back.

• 1:03:44Speaker 00

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• 1:04:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, we're back. Is this a lightning round? Is that what this is gonna be? We're already over.

• 1:04:53David Pierce?

  Yeah. We're gonna do this one fast because, because you, you specifically, Neelai, look at me.

• 1:05:00David Pierce?

  The thing you picked for the lightning round.

• 1:05:02Nilay Patel?

  This was assigned to me.

• 1:05:03David Pierce?

  I, that's true. I picked it for you because you wrote about it for the website. I feel the urge to like, set a timer that like, lights your house on fire after several minutes.

• 1:05:12Nilay Patel?

  All right, I'll just do this.

• 1:05:14David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  So, so you might remember our friend AI Drake. Can we get a little laser bong?

• 1:05:24Nilay Patel?

  AI Drake is an existential threat to the music labels, to YouTube, to everyone, because you cannot copyright a voice. Can't do. That's, and if you want to do likenesses and publicity, that's state law, there's no federal law. So, Google this week announced a deal with Universal Music Group, which represents Drake and The Weeknd, saying, "We're gonna figure out some sort of something, something or the other. We're gonna have a, a working group called the YouTube AI Music Council, like Frank Sinatra's children will be in it, Ryan Tedder from OneRepublic, he can always be drafted into making consequential music. It's gonna be fine." So, they have a council, like, figure out some AI stuff that's good. And then, this line.

• 1:06:08Nilay Patel?

  "We will figure out how to expand content ID to cover generated music." YouTube content ID is not a perfect system. It is necessary for YouTube to exist. So YouTube in the early days, right, full of like South Park clips that were unlicensed. Viacom sues YouTube. This is existential. YouTube full of pirated music or music without licenses. Parents are uploading videos of their kids dancing to Prince. You can't sue YouTube. Section 230, so that label sue the parents for posting videos of their kids dancing to Prince. This is a real case. I went to the appellate courts in this country for that to be ruled fair use. Banana situation. So YouTube over many years has built the system called Content ID,

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  which I promise you, most kids in this country think is the law. This like automated content identification system that only operates on YouTube. Like whenever you see YouTubers thinking about copyright law, they are not actually thinking about copyright law. They're thinking about YouTube's system that it built to enable itself to exist in the face of existential copyright threats.

• 1:07:12David Pierce?

  Which is not a crazy assertion. I mean, for all intents and purposes, it is the law. Like.

• 1:07:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's the, it's the thing that it's the enforcement mechanism of the platform that pays a lot of people their money. Sure, it is close to law and it has a relationship to the law, which is really important, right? If you are ever in the middle of a content ID dispute, if you make a piece of film credit, we were talking about this last week, if you make a piece of film criticism and it gets flagged by Content ID and a studio gets a hold of it and they say, take this down, it's not fair use. YouTube doesn't step in to say, no, we think it is. YouTube says, well, you guys talk to each other. And then after a minute of that, it says, well, you should go to court. Like that's.

• 1:07:51David Pierce?

  And let us know how it goes.

• 1:07:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, basically like let us know how it goes, like whatever, because it has the whole legal system to fall back on. Because fair use for that kind of stuff is like well within the law. What they're gonna do with Universal Music, I promise you this will happen, is one, next year, Google I O will get a video of Ryan Tedder being like, make me some beats. And then like Google part making a beat and Ryan would be like, this is great for creativity. That video is coming. Hundred percent coming and then next to it, content ID will be expanded so that if you are using the AI-generated voice of Drake in a song, Universal Music Group can push a button and take that video down or monetize it for themselves. I guarantee you, this is where they're going.

• 1:08:33David Pierce?

  That second point, I think, is the one, right? Because what Universal is going to say is like, we don't want to pick this fight, we just want to make the money off of it, right? Like, if Universal and the other labels can play this correctly, it's all upside. Like, they've just infinitely scaled the amount of Drake music there can be in the world, and they'll get paid for all of it, right?

• 1:08:53Nilay Patel?

  Maybe. So we don't know what the rates are going to be. They've just said it enough to suggest this is what they're going to do. They haven't done it yet. We don't know the details. But, you know, they put out blog posts. One was Neil Mohan, and the other one was Lucy and Grange, the CEO of Universal, and they put out like paired blog posts on the YouTube blog. And they all sound very proud of themselves. You can just see that this is what they're after. Right? If you train a bunch of AIs on Drake and then it can rap like Drake, Universal's like, you should pay us. And I think a lot of people say, okay, common sense, that makes sense. The flip side of that is that is not anywhere in the law. So if you get that notice from YouTube that says, "Content ID has flagged fake Drake, we flagged a laser bong, take it down or blah blah blah," and you're like, "No, I disagree."

• 1:09:38Nilay Patel?

  And they're like, "Go to court." And you show up in a court, and the court's like, "What the hell are you talking about?" It's like, that out doesn't exist. So then YouTube has to make decisions, and it's going to be like, "You, Drake, Universal Music Group, and YouTube," and I just feel like I know who's definitely going to lose. I don't know who's going to win, but I know who loses in that situation. I also know that content ID notoriously overzealous, right? It's too protective of copyright material on YouTube. Youtubers know this. Our own audience, we got some emails last week after we talked about it, they know that the Youtubers are all trying to dance around it just to do film criticism. What happens when it's just a kid trying to rap like Drake? No AI, just an impersonator of Drake. Do they get taken that like? There's no law that distinguishes that.

• 1:10:22Nilay Patel?

  There's no AI system that can reliably at a hundred percent success rate distinguish between AI Drake and a kid who just is really good at sounding like Drake. Who's gonna lose that one? I don't know the answers to this, but I do know that in order to keep YouTube going and in particular competitive with Tik Tok, which has huge influence over the music industry, Google has to like invent some kind of additional licensing scheme for the labels. The labels are gonna get paid for this or they're gonna take their music away. And Google can't have that.

• 1:10:54David Pierce?

  Right, yeah, it's, I mean, I was trying to think about this after you wrote this story and the number of industries out there that have this kind of leverage over YouTube. I think it's just one, it's just music like if, if, if the movie industry decided it hated YouTube, that would be bad, but not like crush the creator economy bad. But if you suddenly lose access to music for creators to do stuff in shorts, like there goes shorts, it's done.

• 1:11:22Nilay Patel?

  No more dances on shorts, it's all done.

• 1:11:24David Pierce?

  YouTube music goes away. A huge percentage of YouTube's views are music videos. Like there's literally the Mr. Beast just set a record for the most views in 24 hours for a non-music video. Like that is a, that is, that is how big music videos are. And I think it's pretty clear that the music industry knows it is this powerful over YouTube.

• 1:11:47Nilay Patel?

  They definitely know. And so you can just see what YouTube is forced to do. Couple of blog posts saying, we're all friends. Here's the AI council, we're gonna build some tools together. Ryan Tedder, get in here. You know, just do some, you'll, you'll do anything for money.

• 1:12:02David Pierce?

  What do you, what do you think against Ryan Tedder? Are you just like mad that he's wrote so many good songs? Is that what it is?

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  Is it, is that, is that how you describe them? Someone today described that new Addison Raraka to me is like the return of the Kia commercial music. It's just like, that's where we are in music history.

• 1:12:18David Pierce?

  The hamsters?

• 1:12:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's, it's, it sounds like royalty free car commercial music. Like a lot of music sounds like royalty free car commercial music right now.

• 1:12:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, and it's all because Ryan Tedder invented it. So you're welcome.

• 1:12:31Nilay Patel?

  He's he's an innovator. He's right up there with Slash.

• 1:12:34David Pierce?

  Exactly.

• 1:12:34Nilay Patel?

  Eddie Van Halen slash Ryan Tedder. That's the pantheon of rock music. Anyhow, but you can see what they're doing with the music industry, right? They're making nice. They're gonna find ways to work together and they're gonna invent a revenue stream for them. The flip side of that with Google in particular is Google is looking at the whole web. No one has leverage over Google when it comes to the web and they're saying, oh, this is ours now. And so if you allow Google search crawlers to look at your website, you are training Bard. And there's, and you are training the search generative experience. And there's fundamentally zero difference between I'm gonna Hoover up all the songs in the world

• 1:13:14Nilay Patel?

  to make a Frank Sinatra AI and I'm gonna Hoover up all of the articles about bikes to make the search generative experience answer questions about bikes. That is, it's the same thing. And Google, on the one hand, is saying, okay, these, this partner is important. So we gotta build custom copyright private law on YouTube for them so they can get some money and be happy. And then to the entire rest of the internet, they're saying, if you want search traffic, we're taking your shit. And I, I like, you just, you're watching this play out in like absolutely bananas ways. And I think they're gonna come around to signing some deals. I think OpenAI is gonna come around to signing some deals. Google has some kind of deal with the New York Times. They won't talk about the terms.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  OpenAI has some kind of deal with the AP. They don't really talk about the terms. But you can just see like their choices are either a decade of fair use litigation. Some of these cases are already going from Sarah Silverman and others. Or we're gonna pay the biggest and richest players to participate in our experiences and like compete that way. And all of that just feels like, oh, we're just kind of like getting back to AOL. Right? Where like AOL had a bunch of media partners and you would like get AOL in there. And then there were like some forums that you could like also go to or like you could dump out to the internet, you know, through AOL. But like really like AOL's media partners were the thing. And it just seems like that's where everyone is going because to solve the AI training copyright problem, you're either betting on a decade of litigation with our current court system.

• 1:14:43Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna make a multi-billion dollar bet on how Clarence Thomas feels in five years. Woof. Or you can pay a bunch of money to the New York Times. And I'm just watching this play out and it's like, oh, this is all kind of icky. Like, it's important to take a step back and just be like, this is what's happening. The copyright law is so broken and weird that on the one hand, the estate of Frank Sinatra gets paid whenever there's a Frank Sinatra impersonator on YouTube. Weird. And on the other hand, most websites have to give all their shit to Google for free, or basically commit suicide by not getting any search traffic. Weird.

• 1:15:21David Pierce?

  And either way, anybody who doesn't have the sway to pick and win that fight gets hosed. Like, if you're, if you're an independent artist, Google's not signing that deal with you for YouTube and isn't signing that deal with you for SGE. And you just have to bank on the fact that, that what it supposedly delivers you is worth it. But anyway, Neela, you went about six times longer than you were supposed to on that one. So.

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  I can keep going.

• 1:15:44David Pierce?

  No, listen, if this were banana surgery, I would say you can have as long as you want.

• 1:15:47Nilay Patel?

  The whole hour next week is banana surgery.

• 1:15:50David Pierce?

  Uh, I'll go next. Mine's quick. And then Richard, you, you can go last. Mine is just mostly a shout out to my father-in-law, who I think was the last subscriber to DVD.com.

• 1:16:00Nilay Patel?

  Nice.

• 1:16:01David Pierce?

  Which is what Netflix's DVD system has been called for the last bunch of years. And obviously DVD.com is going out of business. And PSA to anyone who has DVD.com. Netflix is both sending out a bunch of random DVDs. It just seems to have like a warehouse full that it's just shipping to its subscribers. And anything you have, when the system goes away, you get to keep. So, uh, I told this to my father-in-law over the weekend and without one word, he ran into their computer room, which they have.

• 1:16:31Nilay Patel?

  Nice.

• 1:16:32David Pierce?

  Sat down and managed his queue to put all his favorite movies at the top. Because he's like, okay, now I'm gonna get a bunch and the system is gonna think, these are the movies I want to watch, so maybe they'll ship them to me at the end. So, if you have DVD.com, now is, now is your time. You're gonna get a bunch of free movies.

• 1:16:47Nilay Patel?

  Does DVD.com ship Blu-rays? I gotta, I gotta go.

• 1:16:52David Pierce?

  I'm just saying, this is the time. I'm here for you.

• 1:16:55Nilay Patel?

  And there's so mu- there's so much stuff that has never been released digitally that you can't get streaming video on demand anywhere and it's just on disc. And it's a pretty good chance to get it.

• 1:17:03David Pierce?

  Like, take your five favorite movies between now and September 29th that are probably never gonna come to streaming. Make it happen.

• 1:17:11Nilay Patel?

  Pump up the volume.

• 1:17:12David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:17:13Nilay Patel?

  It's never coming. The music rights are too hard.

• 1:17:16David Pierce?

  Yeah. All right. Well, now we've lost Neelai to his DVD queue. So, Richard, what do you have?

• 1:17:19Speaker 04

  The only thing that any of us should be talking about, Samsung released, or Samsung has announced the price and a release window for their 57-inch dual UHD gaming monitor.

• 1:17:29David Pierce?

  I'm assuming you have like four or five of these already.

• 1:17:31Speaker 04

  I am looking at an Odyssey G9 monitor right now, the 49-inch one, which I feel like many people think that is too much to have essentially like, you know, two 1440p displays.

• 1:17:43David Pierce?

  People are saying that, yeah. People say that.

• 1:17:45Speaker 04

  Giant curved display that takes up most of your room. I now feel like it's too little because they, you can get a 57-inch that is like two 4K displays in one giant curved screen. And in the US, it'll be available in October for about 2,500 bucks. Yeah, I need that.

• 1:18:02David Pierce?

  Steal at any price, man.

• 1:18:03Speaker 04

  Yeah. The bad news is, you know, having had the G9, it's not great for gaming. Like, you'd think that, like, you can play games, it's gonna wrap around you, and you'll feel very immersed. Basically, no games support 32 by 9 aspect ratio.

• 1:18:16David Pierce?

  Surprise!

• 1:18:18Speaker 04

  Which, you know, who would have guessed? They would spend a lot of time developing for this aspect ratio that no one uses. And the games either stretch in bad ways, or they just take up the middle of the screen and other stuff like that. So, it's not great for gaming, but like, if you, I don't know, maybe run news for a website and you have a billion tabs open, you can just, you can just, you can have all the tabs. You can have so many tabs on a 57-inch screen.

• 1:18:43David Pierce?

  So, I'm thinking game in the middle, Slack on the left, browser on the right, and you just...

• 1:18:49Speaker 04

  Yep.

• 1:18:50David Pierce?

  Just crush the internet.

• 1:18:51Speaker 04

  You described my day.

• 1:18:52David Pierce?

  And fools all day. I'd love this. $2,500 actually is less than I thought this was gonna cost, which is like an insane thing to say out loud, but I was pretty sure Samsung was gonna be like, "This thing is five grand. What are you gonna do about it?"

• 1:19:06Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I want you to do. If you watch the video where they introduce this thing, the monitor is Elysium, like, it's a spaceship flying over a city that's in a curved monitor. And I don't know that they watched Elysium, because that, that truly implies the monitor houses a deeply inequitable class system.

• 1:19:24Speaker 04

  It's not, it's not Elysium, it's Halo. And when you visit the, the Ring World in Halo, everything was fine, right? That's how that story went?

• 1:19:31Nilay Patel?

  I would just say, in general, Ring World's not great in fiction.

• 1:19:39Nilay Patel?

  I'm getting one of these. Look, I gotta kid out a new podcast suit. We're moving. So get a new hat. We gotta figure it out. So I'm fully in the market for like gamertiles, crazy displays. This is gonna be a good time.

• 1:19:50David Pierce?

  I think there, there's gonna have to be a Vergecast series of Nilay doing his new podcast room.

• 1:19:58Nilay Patel?

  Just installing gamertiles.

• 1:20:00David Pierce?

  If you're an interior designer or have ideas about what Nilay needs to put in his new studio, email them to us, [email protected].

• 1:20:07Nilay Patel?

  We didn't talk about the gamer standing desk.

• 1:20:09David Pierce?

  Oh, man.

• 1:20:10Nilay Patel?

  Of course, there. This thing looks ridiculous. I love it. I love it. The only thing that would be better if, if the top was a true patch bay with like, like quarter inch plugs.

• 1:20:19David Pierce?

  This to me is like, if you took the, the r slash battle stations subreddit and like fed it into mid journey and then just said, show me a desk. This is what it would spit out. It's like, it's got a bunch of monitor holders. It's got two different lights. There are speakers everywhere. It has a stream deck. It has a thousand different places to hang things. It loves a pegboard. It's got some controllers. It's like, it is just the perfect average of every insane gamer system you've ever seen. And I mean that as a compliment. I'm kind of in love with this thing.

• 1:20:53Nilay Patel?

  And that's great, but like they invented a workbench and a pegboard. Yeah, it's good. I mean, it's, we started the show with, show us your, your vintage computer rooms. And we're ending the show with like, there's a motorized standing desk with a pegboard.

• 1:21:06David Pierce?

  This is the new computer room. Like all the old Office Max hutches have been replaced by

• 1:21:11Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:11David Pierce?

  sit-stand desks and pegboards.

• 1:21:14Nilay Patel?

  I'm into it. Maybe I'll get, maybe this, I'm, I'm gonna build my new podcast studio around this thing.

• 1:21:18David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 1:21:19Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't know if I'm gonna do that. We'll see. I gotta look at this more carefully. All right. We gotta end the show. We're way over. This is for a show, a slow news week. I don't even know how we, how we pulled this off. And there's like stuff we didn't even get to. For example, a full hour on Python and Excel. Just didn't happen. One thing I want to call out, this is one of the funniest things that has happened to me today. Our friend Ashley Carmen, Verge expat, now Bloomberg, she's their podcast and music reporter at Bloomberg. She wrote a story about white noise podcasts on Spotify, in which there are many, and Spotify freaking out because their official, like, white noise licensed streams make more money than the podcasts. So they're like, we have a $38 million

• 1:21:59Nilay Patel?

  white noise podcast problem, which is just the most capitalism thing. To be like, this white noise, if we move it from this bucket to that bucket is $38 million, is ridiculous. So our friend Charlie Harding, who you might know, is the creator of Laserball, the show, and co-host of Switch on Pop. He made an entire series of white noise podcasts. We'll link them in the show notes.

• 1:22:22David Pierce?

  Now he's worth $700 million.

• 1:22:25Nilay Patel?

  My goal, and they all have, like, just truly ridiculous names. They're called Sonic Spectrum. They're all colors. He made ChatGPT write the descriptions of them. Venture into the vastness of white noise encompassing every frequency. Like, it's all great. My goal is that we make this a real thing. We get some wellness blogs to cover it in a serious way. And if we can just get to the point where Aaron Rodgers is listening to Sonic Spectrum pre-game, because he loves crystal healing, I'll be very happy. Make this happen for me.

• 1:22:57David Pierce?

  Neelai's end games always end with either Aaron Rodgers or Mariah Carey. Those are the two, the two long cons.

• 1:23:04Nilay Patel?

  The Mariah Carey long con's very different. I gotta upend my family for that one. This one is very direct. Just share Sonic Spectrum as much as you can and see if we can make it a thing. It's, I mean, it's, these descriptions are some of the funniest ChatGPT should have ever read. And then it's just white noise. It's very good. We'll have a link in the show notes. There's a quick post on the site. Go check it out. It's a very, very funny. Okay, that's it. David, what's in this taller this week? Anything good?

• 1:23:27David Pierce?

  A bunch of good stuff, actually. The PlayStation Portal will be in there, spoiler alert. But I found a new app for organizing all your crap online, which I am, of course, deeply obsessed with. And there's a bunch of new, like, creator stuff and YouTube stuff. And I found this was a surprisingly good week for, like, random things appearing on the internet. So it's gonna be a good one.

• 1:23:46Nilay Patel?

  I like it. Okay, that's it. That's Rich Cast. Back for all.

• 1:23:54Speaker 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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