The red Nexus 5, Satya Nadella, and the odd success of Flappy Bird

The Vergecast is a discussion of all things relevant and irreverent in the worlds of art, culture, science, and technology. On this week's episode, Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Ross Miller discussed the red Nexus 5, Microsoft's new CEO Satya Nadella, and the strange success of Flappy Bird. Audio: Download MP3 (35.4 MB) Subscribe to the podcast (iTunes audio) Subscribe to the podcast (iTunes video) Subscribe to the podcast (RSS) Subscribe to the podcast (Video RSS) Video: Also available on YouTube. 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.

• 0:22Nilay Patel?

  Beef That Sweat: The Sam Sheffer Story, today on The Vergecast. Hello and welcome to The Vergecast, where we'll be talking about beef in your sweat, with Sam Sheffer, the Sam Sheffer Story. Hi, everybody, it's The Vergecast. Josh is not here today. He's, he's, it's, you know.

• 0:39David Pierce?

  Josh is an enigma.

• 0:40Nilay Patel?

  Look, what's he gonna do?

• 0:42David Pierce?

  Sometimes he's here, sometimes he's not here.

• 0:44Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, I'm Neelai Patel.

• 0:46David Pierce?

  Roll it in a pizza. I'm David Pierce.

• 0:47Speaker 02

  I'm Ross Miller.

• 0:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, and this is The Vergecast, where we talk about, pretty much talk about where Josh is, what he could be doing, whether he's thinking about me, and whether he asked about me yesterday.

• 0:56David Pierce?

  I mean, Valentine's Day is coming up, so I assume he's out planning your special day.

• 1:00Nilay Patel?

  Right. I hope so.

• 1:01David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  He's gonna take me to the park.

• 1:02Speaker 02

  Yep, there's a park.

• 1:04Nilay Patel?

  No, Josh, he's doing Hollywood Tapalsky's out, you know?

• 1:07David Pierce?

  Hollywood Tapalsky.

• 1:08Nilay Patel?

  He's doing, he's making deals. Anyway, this is The Vergecast, where we talk about the week in technology news, culture news, news, news of the weird, news of the world.

• 1:17David Pierce?

  I'm on a BuzzFeed post.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Whether Ross is thinking about me right now.

• 1:20David Pierce?

  But it's called "How to Sear the Perfect Steak for Your Valentine's." We can talk about that if we want to.

• 1:24Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:24David Pierce?

  Turns out I have a lot of information on the subject.

• 1:26Nilay Patel?

  Really? That seems really easy.

• 1:27David Pierce?

  Step one is, choose your cut.

• 1:29Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So I've been in a hanger steak. We had a hanger steak the other day.

• 1:33David Pierce?

  We did.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it was good. That's what I've been.

• 1:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:36David Pierce?

  That's a steak.

• 1:37Nilay Patel?

  You know, I've been sous vide-ing things in a crock pot.

• 1:39Speaker 02

  Dude, the crock pot's the most amazing thing ever.

• 1:40Nilay Patel?

  I bought a thing called the Geek Food, like, DSV. I'm not even kidding, it has an amazing name. It's basically the world's most complicated on and off switch. So it's a power, it's-

• 1:51David Pierce?

  That sounds perfect.

• 1:52Nilay Patel?

  It's really nothing more than a power strip with a thermometer. And you plug the crock pot into it, and it measures the temperature of the water in the crock pot, and then it turns it off when it gets to that temperature, and then turns it back on again when it falls below it.

• 2:01David Pierce?

  That's amazing.

• 2:02Nilay Patel?

  So it holds it at a temperature.

• 2:03Speaker 02

  The crock pot itself doesn't do this? You have to buy a separate device?

• 2:05Nilay Patel?

  Crock pots are not complicated devices.

• 2:07David Pierce?

  No.

• 2:08Nilay Patel?

  They literally, it's funny, because when you- When you do recipes.

• 2:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you know, it's like run your crock pot at high for five hours and like that means nothing.

• 2:15David Pierce?

  It's like a crock pot is just like a lid.

• 2:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a lid and it's like, like literally, it's like, should that get hotter or colder? It's, there's no temperature setting. Anyway, but so I bought this thing, so I sous vide the steaks in it, which is amazing. And you, everybody should get one, because that's the best way to make steak.

• 2:27David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 2:28Nilay Patel?

  Look at this, look at this piece.

• 2:29David Pierce?

  Yeah. Beef sweat, thank you, man.

• 2:30Nilay Patel?

  Beef, beefy sweat. See you later. Swaggy chefs.

• 2:34David Pierce?

  So this, so you love this thing?

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Uh, this is a red nexus five, that's what.

• 2:37David Pierce?

  This is the red nexus.

• 2:38Nilay Patel?

  That's what David Pierce is holding right now.

• 2:39David Pierce?

  Uh, this just showed up yesterday.

• 2:40Nilay Patel?

  I would say that this is some of the biggest news this week, but that really is an insult to the rest of the news.

• 2:46David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, that says a lot less about this and more about the kind of week.

• 2:49Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so I will say this, I am on record, over and over and over again, saying that the white nexus five is a piece of junk. Uh, which I will maintain.

• 2:56David Pierce?

  And it's because it's the sides.

• 2:58Nilay Patel?

  It's the sides.

• 2:59David Pierce?

  It's like these gross glossy edges that just don't look good.

• 3:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think the black nexus five is fine, it's a soft touch.

• 3:05David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  Whatever, it's kind of generic. That one, which they are calling red.

• 3:09David Pierce?

  It's not red.

• 3:10Nilay Patel?

  You know, Josh and I have an endless argument over what is red and what is orange, and we actually, we.

• 3:16David Pierce?

  Is one of you colorblind? It's like a fairly cut and dry.

• 3:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, no, there's, because there's all kinds of orange stuff in our office, right? I'm like, that's red, he's like, it's orange, and like, we just do this.

• 3:22David Pierce?

  What, you mean like the couches upstairs? Those are definitely orange.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  No, the couches are orange, but the, the weird desk, that CB2 desk that we roll around, the TV sitting on right now.

• 3:29David Pierce?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 3:30Nilay Patel?

  Josh will swear up and down that that's red.

• 3:31David Pierce?

  Josh is wrong.

• 3:32Nilay Patel?

  Right, but so we, but like, after, it's, it's funny that over the course of the past few years, he, for a while, thought that he was colorblind. But now he's doing a pretty good job convincing me that I am colorblind.

• 3:43David Pierce?

  You and the rest of the world. So wait, what color is this?

• 3:45Nilay Patel?

  Orange, 100% that's orange. But Josh, I'm telling you, Josh will tell you that's red. And Google, for whatever insane reason, thinks this is red.

• 3:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 3:52Nilay Patel?

  That's because Google's not paying attention, they're like, they like moved on.

• 3:54David Pierce?

  That's fair.

• 3:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, whatever, we sold Motorola, we're never making phones again, that's red.

• 3:57David Pierce?

  I'm way back and forth on this thing.

• 3:58Nilay Patel?

  I want it, give it to me.

• 3:59David Pierce?

  You know, it's kind of red.

• 4:00Nilay Patel?

  This is, I like, I'm buying this phone, this is my next, right here. Like, I'm not even kidding, like, it's awesome.

• 4:05David Pierce?

  You just, the thing I like about it is you, like, you can't look directly at it for too long, it's like too bright.

• 4:09Nilay Patel?

  It's the best.

• 4:09David Pierce?

  It throws me off.

• 4:10Nilay Patel?

  No, it's cool, it's like who, you know, Nokia tried to do it, but they never went all the way like this?

• 4:15David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 4:15Nilay Patel?

  With like searing orange. Uh, you know, HTC tried to do it for a minute, uh, and then their HTC. Have you, you've played with this, right? I mean, it's, it's just a Nexus 5.

• 4:24David Pierce?

  I like the black buttons, too.

• 4:26Nilay Patel?

  Like, the black buttons, the little thing, I mean, it's Nexus, it still has a screen that like, I think looks kinda washed out.

• 4:31Speaker 02

  What about the camera? Like, is it got better?

• 4:32Nilay Patel?

  It has a Nexus 5 camera. You know what you can't ever take a picture of this with? A Nexus 5. Like, you try to take a picture of this with another Nexus 5 and the camera explodes. Ah, too many colors, too vibrant, too much details.

• 4:43David Pierce?

  I will say, just looking at it, like, on camera right now, it looks really good.

• 4:46Nilay Patel?

  It looks awesome. This is the best. Look, here's my iPhone, right? This is whatever. It's boring, it's functional, has a bunch of apps, a nice camera, whatever. This is red.

• 4:55David Pierce?

  And victory.

• 4:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, right? I mean, it's, this is the best. I want this. The screen, I will say, maybe it's because it's red, the screen looks better on this one. Maybe they're getting better.

• 5:04David Pierce?

  Yeah. It's crazy to me that it took, like, A, that it took Google this long to have colors, because Google is like, the company of colors.

• 5:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 5:10David Pierce?

  That's what their tagline is, actually.

• 5:11Nilay Patel?

  The company of colors.

• 5:13David Pierce?

  And number two, that they picked this one. Like, if, I kinda love them for it, because they're like, we're gonna make colors, we're just going all the way for it.

• 5:19Speaker 02

  But it's just, it's just reddish-orange.

• 5:20David Pierce?

  379? Massive color. I think it's 349.

• 5:23Nilay Patel?

  349. Yeah. I'm buying one of these immediately.

• 5:25David Pierce?

  There you go.

• 5:25Speaker 02

  Wow, alright.

• 5:26David Pierce?

  You wanna buy you one right now? We can do this live.

• 5:28Nilay Patel?

  Let's buy, it's, do we, nothing happens.

• 5:30Speaker 02

  Wait, you're buying?

• 5:32David Pierce?

  No. This is the, okay, I wanna talk about Flappy Bird. We were talking about Flappy Bird.

• 5:36Speaker 02

  Alright, well, that means I get to take it out and play Flappy Bird.

• 5:38David Pierce?

  And the thing is, I, I have played-

• 5:40Nilay Patel?

  349! Look at that!

• 5:42David Pierce?

  There you go. Wait, so is Flappy Bird new this week, or was the news that we found out that the developer is making all of the money that has ever existed in the world?

• 5:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think he's been around for a month. It's now like the top of the charts. More than a month, maybe.

• 5:53David Pierce?

  Oh, okay, so it's been out a while.

• 5:54Nilay Patel?

  It's been out a while. I have too many Google ads.

• 5:55Speaker 02

  Him and like, two, like, two other of his apps is all, are also like in the top App Store sales.

• 5:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, whoever this, this guy is, like, he's good at this game.

• 6:02Speaker 02

  How do you make money? It's a free game, right? It's a, it's a free game.

• 6:05David Pierce?

  All I wanna say is that I hate Flappy Bird.

• 6:07Speaker 02

  Wait, wait, wait. One?

• 6:07David Pierce?

  It's just-

• 6:08Speaker 02

  Two. Guys, this is my high score. Three? Four? Holy fuck, I got this.

• 6:12David Pierce?

  Ah.

• 6:13Nilay Patel?

  Yo, I just bought a phone.

• 6:14Speaker 02

  I just doubled my high score.

• 6:14Nilay Patel?

  By the way, Google, I wanna tell you this. Because of your terrible account management, I almost bought a phone, uh, with a totally wild, old Google account.

• 6:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, sure.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  I just, like, why don't you know?

• 6:24David Pierce?

  They'll ship it to, like, some other state that you used to live in.

• 6:26Speaker 02

  Do you remember the days when the Verge app was all one cohesive conversation?

• 6:29Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 6:29David Pierce?

  No. That, literally, that never happened.

• 6:31Nilay Patel?

  But I definitely just bought a red Nexus 5, because it's the best. And I'm never gonna, I mean, I guess I'll move my SIM card from my one into this.

• 6:38David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 6:39David Pierce?

  You have a T-Mobile SIM card, right?

• 6:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's the best. It totally works. The service is amazing.

• 6:45David Pierce?

  I have absolutely no, I need like that can't tell if serious gif right now.

• 6:50Nilay Patel?

  There are moments in New York City when having T-Mobile, well, so everything about buying T-Mobile services best, right? So I pay, I bought it at Walmart. I bought like the card. It's like a secret plan that you can buy at Walmart, or you can find if you like skirt around the website online. Where I pay 30 bucks a month for unlimited data and like 100 minutes of voice.

• 7:06Speaker 02

  Can you, can you tether?

• 7:07Nilay Patel?

  That's the whole plan.

• 7:08Speaker 02

  Wait, that's all? Can you tether?

• 7:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, you can do whatever you want.

• 7:12Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 7:13David Pierce?

  That's, that's amazing. That's like the plan they have for like the iPad and stuff, right? But except no voice.

• 7:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's 100 minutes of voice. So you can definitely buy this one at Walmart in a package and it says Walmart exclusive. And I said it, like went to Walmart to buy this thing. And then everyone tweeted me that you can like find it somewhere online.

• 7:27David Pierce?

  You just have to like wink at the right guy in the T-Mobile store and then everything's fine.

• 7:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you have to open.

• 7:32Speaker 02

  You get a lot of things.

• 7:33Nilay Patel?

  You have to Snapchat the right T-Mobile person.

• 7:35Speaker 02

  I'm looking for the right Walmart special.

• 7:36David Pierce?

  The answer is just John.

• 7:37Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so I bought it. I like, I love the idea that I have this card and I can like put it on all the phones and all, whatever. It's great. Uh, and then the service in New York City is like totally hit and miss.

• 7:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, really?

• 7:46Nilay Patel?

  It's like on one minute, I'm getting like 40 down and then like I take two steps to the left and my phone lights on fire and explodes.

• 7:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it is occasionally like outrageously fast. Like it's faster than my home internet sometimes. And then every once in a while, and then it's the same thing. I like walk into my bathroom and it's like no service ever again.

• 7:59Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Paul Miller, you totally, when he, when he first got back on the internet, Paul was like, uh, I had T, I just have T-Mobile. I've just been watching Netflix on my phone over and over again, connected to a projector. And he's like, there's no data caps. Like he's like, I'm like, what have you been up to, buddy? He's like, oh, you know, watching Netflix on my phone, connected to a projector. I was like, well.

• 8:17David Pierce?

  It's a pretty good move.

• 8:18Nilay Patel?

  You came all the way back to the internet. Like you live, that's like two years ahead of time on the internet.

• 8:22David Pierce?

  T-Mobile needs to buy like a little Pico projector company and start making those and just sell them.

• 8:27Speaker 02

  Well, I mean, Samsung did that. Wait, wait. Samsung did that phone though. They did the projector phone.

• 8:31David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. That was at the Beam, the Galaxy Beam. That phone was ridiculous.

• 8:34Nilay Patel?

  That was bad. Yeah.

• 8:35David Pierce?

  But I, they, if I would, that's a really good idea. Maybe I should just do that.

• 8:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 8:39David Pierce?

  I literally don't see a single downside to this idea.

• 8:42Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 8:42David Pierce?

  Having a projector, just sticking your phone in and playing.

• 8:44Nilay Patel?

  Going for it.

• 8:45David Pierce?

  Yeah, playing movies.

• 8:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, the downside is that you have to purchase a projector. Would you like to shop for a projector now?

• 8:50David Pierce?

  No.

• 8:50Speaker 02

  Oh, God.

• 8:51Nilay Patel?

  So, everybody tweeted David what projector he should buy.

• 8:53David Pierce?

  No.

• 8:53Nilay Patel?

  We're just gonna crowdsource this.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  And what audio system? Soundbar? Full 5.1?

• 8:57David Pierce?

  That's true.

• 8:58Nilay Patel?

  No, you don't wanna, that's like, that's just rolling down.

• 9:00Speaker 02

  Look, this rabbit is going far down anyway.

• 9:02Nilay Patel?

  Like, what soundbar should I buy is all over. Okay, let's talk about what actually happened this week.

• 9:05Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:06Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I think there's actually, there are two pieces of, I think, huge news that are both connected.

• 9:11David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 9:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 9:12Nilay Patel?

  So, one, and we, and we talked about this on The Verge Live a little bit earlier this week, Mike Schott appointed Satya Nadella as CEO.

• 9:17David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 9:18Nilay Patel?

  Replacing Ballmer. We ran a touching tribute.

• 9:21Speaker 02

  Say his name again?

• 9:22Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, I've been saying it different every time.

• 9:23Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 9:23David Pierce?

  So, the way I've heard them, the way I've heard them say it is like Satya.

• 9:26Speaker 02

  Satya?

• 9:27Nilay Patel?

  It's Satya Nadella.

• 9:27David Pierce?

  It's Satya Nadella.

• 9:28Nilay Patel?

  Satya.

• 9:29David Pierce?

  No, it's not that.

• 9:30Nilay Patel?

  That's how my mother would pronounce it. Because, you know, like, I have a thing, like, my name, my parents pronounce my name far differently than everybody else.

• 9:34David Pierce?

  Really? How do your parents pronounce your name?

• 9:35Nilay Patel?

  Nele.

• 9:36David Pierce?

  Really?

• 9:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's my name.

• 9:38Speaker 02

  Wait, Nele?

• 9:38Nilay Patel?

  Nele, you can't do it. I'm sorry. This is like a, there's a cultural barrier that prevents you from ever pronouncing my name.

• 9:44Speaker 02

  I can just study this shit for years.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  And that is how Indian people pronounce Slattery.

• 9:48David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 9:48Nilay Patel?

  That's it. As far as I can tell. So, my name is Nele, and it's hard to say.

• 9:52David Pierce?

  I didn't even hear you just now.

• 9:54Nilay Patel?

  So, I grew up in Wisconsin, and it just turned into Nele.

• 9:57David Pierce?

  Okay. And then you just went for it?

• 9:59Nilay Patel?

  Just went for it.

• 9:59David Pierce?

  Like, hi, Nele.

• 10:00Nilay Patel?

  My sister made a, um, uh, she made a conscious decision when she went to college to undo Wisconsin pronunciation of her name.

• 10:07David Pierce?

  Really?

• 10:08Nilay Patel?

  So, she grew up in Wisconsin, everyone called her Terrell, like, Terrell Owens, which is hilarious.

• 10:11David Pierce?

  That's amazing.

• 10:11Nilay Patel?

  It's not, not real, not a, also not a man's name, or not a lady's name. And she went to college, she's like, my name is Thorol, that's her name. And, uh, right. And she, like, trained, like, Illinois to, like, pronounce her name correctly. And then she comes back to Wisconsin, and I was like, hi, Terrell, and she's like, who?

• 10:24David Pierce?

  She's like, what?

• 10:25Nilay Patel?

  And, uh, so, yeah, so, you know, I didn't, I didn't.

• 10:27David Pierce?

  Does she hang out with Terrell Owens a lot?

• 10:29Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 10:29David Pierce?

  They should be friends.

• 10:30Nilay Patel?

  You know, I think one time she met Jamie Foxx.

• 10:34Speaker 02

  Sure, that's nice, yeah.

• 10:36David Pierce?

  He probably knows Terrell.

• 10:39Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so Satya, I think is right. I think like-

• 10:42David Pierce?

  I'll buy it.

• 10:43Nilay Patel?

  OG, that's the pronunciation, but they've been saying Satya.

• 10:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 10:46Nilay Patel?

  They've been, they're all over the place a little bit.

• 10:47David Pierce?

  They are all over the place.

• 10:48Nilay Patel?

  I think they're gonna, but Satya Nadella is the CEO of Microsoft. He is, I will say this, I've gotten a lot of tweets from very excited people in India and my parents are very pleased.

• 10:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 10:58Nilay Patel?

  Like, nationalistically, like, people are very excited about this.

• 11:00David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 11:00Nilay Patel?

  But I think that's-

• 11:01David Pierce?

  You've seen a lot of that.

• 11:01Nilay Patel?

  I think that's like a weird thing, uh, cause his number one qualification is not that he's from India. It's that he's been at Microsoft for 22 years and has done like an excellent job running various parts of their business.

• 11:10David Pierce?

  Have you heard his name before?

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  Okay, I hadn't, I was sort of surprised by that.

• 11:14Nilay Patel?

  So here's what I think is really interesting.

• 11:16Speaker 02

  Tom did a small piece like saying like he might possibly like a low on the list.

• 11:20Nilay Patel?

  No, so that, here's why I think that's interesting. So, right when they said Bombers leaving, we did a story and we did some reporting, we talked to a bunch of people and his name came up a lot.

• 11:30David Pierce?

  Really?

• 11:30Nilay Patel?

  A lot, a lot. It was like Tony Bates, Alan Mulally, Stevie Neill, and you remember this, this, I, Satya Nadella? And it just kept on coming out, like, who? Right? Like, he's been there, he's been running, uh, big enterprise divisions, he ran Bing, like, not necessarily a natural choice.

• 11:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 11:46Nilay Patel?

  But he was in that conversation at a high level from the get-go.

• 11:49David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 11:50Nilay Patel?

  And I wanna say that, you know, there were other big candidates involved, but because he was in that conversation at a high level from the get-go, I'd- The rumor is that Bill Gates, he was Bill Gates candidate.

• 12:00David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting. Well, cause Gates is now coming back to like oversee this, to oversee this personally in a lot of ways.

• 12:05Nilay Patel?

  Well-

• 12:05David Pierce?

  He's like, he's an advisor.

• 12:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, so Gates, Bill Gates is stepping down as chairman of the board of Microsoft and then taking a bigger role on products as a technical advisor. And so that's like, there's a lot to unpack there with what's going on with Microsoft. And one of the things that we had always heard about with the, you know, the flashy external candidates, um, is that they didn't wanna be under Gates and Bombers on the board. And Gates is the chairman, effectively-

• 12:29David Pierce?

  Right.

• 12:29Nilay Patel?

  Running the show, but big, big strategic decisions was a problem for these external candidates. Alan Mulally, chief among them, right?

• 12:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, if I'm Alan Mulally, I'm like, screw you, I ran Ford, shut up.

• 12:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. But, you know, you know, the thing about Mulally is he said from the beginning, you know, I'm very happy at Ford.

• 12:44David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 12:44Nilay Patel?

  And he for me.

• 12:45David Pierce?

  He probably is very happy. I feel like he has a lot of reasons to be very happy.

• 12:49Speaker 02

  Like I'm happy at Ford and a re-up for a year and everyone's like, so what are you doing after that year? You're leaving, right? Like he's definitely leaving the year. No.

• 12:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, yeah, he's leaving. You're out of there. Uh, so yeah, you know, I think that there, there is an aspect to this where this was always kind of Gates's candidate. Um, and Gates got out of the way because he got, he, he got his guy.

• 13:07David Pierce?

  And like, if you're Bill Gates candidate at Microsoft, you don't, I feel like, how could you lose?

• 13:12Nilay Patel?

  I think there's a lot of this.

• 13:12David Pierce?

  Who's gonna be like, hey, Bill Gates, you're dumb.

• 13:15Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:15David Pierce?

  Remember how you're Bill Gates? I disagree with your decisions though. Like, no, that doesn't work for people.

• 13:20Speaker 02

  They are also like, oh, we're shedding the image of old Microsoft. We need to figure out what to do in the future.

• 13:24David Pierce?

  Yeah, but Bill Gates then just like smothers you with his money and you're dead and he wins.

• 13:27Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 13:28David Pierce?

  Right. I feel like that's how this goes.

• 13:29Speaker 02

  Just the stockpile malaria that he keeps.

• 13:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 13:32Nilay Patel?

  Stockpile of malaria.

• 13:34Speaker 02

  Isn't cocker, he just captures it.

• 13:35Nilay Patel?

  These are the ones the lasers didn't kill. Like releases mosquitoes. Yeah. Hands you a laser pointer.

• 13:41David Pierce?

  Didn't he do that at like a TED talk? He like released mosquitoes into the?

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 13:44David Pierce?

  He just does that at board meetings and he's like, I don't know, maybe you'll die, maybe you won't. I have this thing right here.

• 13:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, he hands you a laser pointer.

• 13:49David Pierce?

  So Satya Nadella, right? And then they're like, yes. And then he gives everybody the antidote and everything's fine.

• 13:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 13:53Speaker 02

  What's scary is how I can totally see that.

• 13:56David Pierce?

  I'm just assuming that that's correct.

• 13:58Nilay Patel?

  Look, he's, he's a, he is a evil genius. Uh, no, look, so there's that. There's that whole story. It's a huge story, right?

• 14:04Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:05Nilay Patel?

  There's, there's a big shift in their language from we're devices and services to we're cloud and mobile, which sounds like nonsense, but it was repeated, repeatedly said out loud and, you know, sort of out in the world as we did more reporting on it. It was repeatedly said that this marks an actual change.

• 14:22Speaker 02

  Right.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  That they're gonna go, the devices and services was Ballmer's line and cloud and mobile is Nadella's line and those are different in some way.

• 14:30David Pierce?

  But aren't those like, I mean, those are pretty easy synonyms for each other. It's like devices and mobile are like kind of becoming the same thing.

• 14:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I asked a, you know, the, when I was talking to the person I was talking to, I said, is that? Like a conflict difference? Or is that just shades of gray? And I was told, you should really read into what you want.

• 14:49David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 14:50Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's really meaningful.

• 14:51David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 14:52Nilay Patel?

  I, I think that it is a difference. I think that, um, devices and services means we're gonna make devices and put our services on them. And that was a strategy, right? I think that's why Office isn't on the iPad. I think cloud and mobile, cloud first, mobile first, that's Nadella's line, means we're gonna make, we're gonna literally move Microsoft software into the cloud.

• 15:11David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 15:11Nilay Patel?

  And then put it down onto mobile devices.

• 15:13David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:14Nilay Patel?

  And I think that opens them up to the iPad. I think that opens them up to Android. I think that opens them up to an entire suite of other devices and platforms that they have been trying to leverage into getting people onto Windows.

• 15:25David Pierce?

  Right.

• 15:25Speaker 02

  Well, here's the thing that's interesting though about that timing then, which is they just bought a hardware company.

• 15:30Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 15:30Speaker 02

  Bought a consumer devices company.

• 15:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  And, well, they haven't yet. This, this happened right before the Nokia purchase like finished.

• 15:36Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 15:37Speaker 02

  So what does that mean then?

• 15:39David Pierce?

  Well, that's mobile, right? Like, I don't, I think they're, I, I can't imagine they're gonna get rid of Windows Phone or try and get rid of it. Uh, but like, I think the, the smart thing, like the, this was, John Gruber wrote a great piece about this this week. Uh, and I thought the thing that was most interesting that he said was he, he quoted the numbers where it was like, the, the raw number of devices that run Windows products is still enormously high.

• 16:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 16:05David Pierce?

  Right? But the, the number, it used to be, like, I can just find the number here, but it, it used to be like, you know, there were 90 million devices and Windows ran on 95% of them. And it used, and now it's like 240 million devices and Microsoft, or in Windows stuff runs on 30% of them. And like, we're all numbers that are the same. And they're big ass numbers, but like, there's this huge world that they're not touching now. And this is like, and, and the, the place he landed in this piece, which I thought was really smart, is instead of saying, you know, we wanna be, he just wrote, uh, Satya Nadella needs to find Microsoft's new, a computer on every desk and in every home, running Microsoft software. Here's my stat, at Microsoft Services, sending data to and from every network device in the world. The next ubiquity isn't running on every device, it's talking to every device.

• 16:46Nilay Patel?

  And I think that's exactly right. And that's what Google has accomplished, right?

• 16:48David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 16:49Nilay Patel?

  And I think Microsoft, there's- There's been a lot of conversation about how companies are trying to do the Apple model.

• 16:56David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 16:56Nilay Patel?

  Where they sell you a device, they sell you the software, they sell you a suite of services that run on that.

• 16:59David Pierce?

  Right, right.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft, or Apple has 70% margins or whatever.

• 17:03David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:03Nilay Patel?

  40% margins. I don't, that's not Google's model, right? Google's model is they make a bunch of software. And they have, I think, very aggressively used those services in their software to push Windows into third place in terms of market share and services.

• 17:19David Pierce?

  Right.

• 17:20Nilay Patel?

  And I think that has been worked out really well for Google. I think Microsoft needs to come back and say, you know what? Google Docs isn't as good a cloud service as Office.

• 17:29David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 17:29Nilay Patel?

  Whatever, it just isn't, right? And if you want to run a real business, you need Excel. And we're going to put Excel in the cloud, for real.

• 17:35David Pierce?

  And we're going to put it everywhere.

• 17:36Nilay Patel?

  And we're going to put it everywhere.

• 17:37David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:37Nilay Patel?

  And that will, and that will enable them to start, to start a conversation with a class of customers that they have traditionally always had, but have started poking around because they have iPads now.

• 17:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 17:47Nilay Patel?

  And that's like a big deal. And I think saying you have to make the investment all the way to buy a Surface to get Excel is a huge ask now in this, this market.

• 17:56David Pierce?

  Well, yeah, I mean, I think the, what, what this is sort of an admission of to some extent is like doing what Apple has done is impossible because Apple already did it.

• 18:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 18:04David Pierce?

  Right, like the, they've built this locked in thing and their market share is big enough, especially in particular places like phones and tablets, where nobody else is going to get enough market share to like pull it off. And Apple's fine with not being 90% market share.

• 18:17Nilay Patel?

  And the one vendor who has done it in terms of hardware has, Samsung, has no software chops.

• 18:21David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:22Nilay Patel?

  That I've ever seen.

• 18:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 18:23Nilay Patel?

  Especially not in the kinds of software that Microsoft's.

• 18:25David Pierce?

  Well, and they're not even really trying. Like, they're not trying to lock you in, in the same way that Apple is. Like, Apple straight up doesn't work if you don't use its products. Like, it's.

• 18:33Nilay Patel?

  That's true. I just plugged this phone into this computer. Like, this is a new computer and I never plug a phone into a computer anymore.

• 18:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 18:40Nilay Patel?

  I literally plugged it in and charged it and like all kinds of Apple stuff started up.

• 18:43David Pierce?

  Oh, God, yeah.

• 18:43Nilay Patel?

  It's like, would you like to use iPhoto? It's like, no. Like, literally the first time I've ever opened iPhoto on this particular machine is when I plugged it in.

• 18:50David Pierce?

  But then it's like, try to put a Word document onto your iPhone and it, everything just catches on fire. Like, it just won't, it just won't work. But then, but so that, by basically saying like, we're not going to try and do that anymore and we're going to go back to this model of. And it's way more true to like what Microsoft actually is to say, we just wanna be on every device. Like, we want all of the things that people use to be running our software is what Microsoft originally did. And they just happened to, like, Microsoft originally said a new, like, it was a computer on every desk and every home.

• 19:18Nilay Patel?

  That's why they have a Mac.

• 19:19David Pierce?

  We already did that. Now it's about getting Microsoft software onto it. And like, they got away from that. And the way back into that is to do cloud stuff and, and to open it back up to a lot of people.

• 19:28Nilay Patel?

  I think, and then, but that's short term. I think the other piece is like, you know, the real answer is computers everywhere. Right? Because everything is computer.

• 19:34David Pierce?

  Well, the computers are everywhere. Like, we're, that's, we're there.

• 19:37Nilay Patel?

  Right, but software like is running, like, putting a computer everywhere doesn't mean anything unless you have awesome software behind it, right?

• 19:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 19:43Nilay Patel?

  Um, like, I have that, there's, in my office upstairs, I have a really crappy camera that runs Skype.

• 19:48David Pierce?

  Like, like, really crappy. It's impossible to overestimate how crappy the camera is.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  But it does, but its functionality trumps how crappy it is, right? It literally is a camera, a webcam with a Tegra two processor, running Android, and running an insanely bad custom Skype UI on it.

• 20:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:05Nilay Patel?

  Right? And it just makes Skype calls.

• 20:06David Pierce?

  It's like somebody took WebOS cards and was like, how can I make this in four minutes? And then just shipped it.

• 20:12Speaker 02

  And look, and like.

• 20:13Nilay Patel?

  But so, but it does its job, which is I don't want a computer next to it. I don't need all the complexity of a computer. I literally just need a thing on top of my TV that can make Skype calls. And I have it, right?

• 20:22Speaker 02

  But in most, most people have it as an Xbox.

• 20:25Nilay Patel?

  Huh?

• 20:25Speaker 02

  When most people have it, it's an Xbox.

• 20:26Nilay Patel?

  But an Xbox costs $400. This thing costs $120.

• 20:30David Pierce?

  You've paid $120 for that thing?

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  It's $120.

• 20:33David Pierce?

  Seriously? That seems really expensive to me.

• 20:35Nilay Patel?

  But it's.

• 20:36David Pierce?

  Don't you have that TV at home that just has the, the webcam that pops up? You just gotta get another one of those.

• 20:40Nilay Patel?

  But that's, so that's another great example, though. So I have a Panasonic plasma television. It's brand new. It's one of the, the best pictures you can buy.

• 20:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 20:47Nilay Patel?

  And the software that runs on it is fucking miserable. Just awful. Just the worst. Like, if you work at Panasonic right now and you're a software engineer, you should quit, because you're bad at your job. You should go get a different kind of job. You should go be a carpenter.

• 20:58David Pierce?

  They won't get employed anywhere else. They should keep their job.

• 21:01Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying, have some dignity. Like, are you the guy who designed the, the, the make a video call UI on the Panasonic VT? What do I have? VT 90? VT 80?

• 21:11David Pierce?

  All I remember is you bought it and you Instagrammed it and you said, "America," because you bought it on Cyber Monday and were very proud of yourself.

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. If you designed that UI and that TV, you should never do any more software design in your life. You should feel ashamed. I'm sorry, that's just the way it is. But that's the opportunity for a company like Microsoft is to start making the software for that. I mean, and they tried to do it before, but it's to start saying like, there are all these other places for us to go. There are all these other kinds of devices that are going to talk to the internet and we can be the company that brings it all together.

• 21:40David Pierce?

  Yeah, well, and I hope that what they realize and what Satya Nadella does is say the answer to that is not always Windows. Right, like by making, they have to make Microsoft bigger than Windows because it's not going to work everywhere.

• 21:52Nilay Patel?

  So this is the second piece of news. So, you know, we don't know, there's a lot to unpack with Nadella. There's a lot to unpack about why Microsoft decided to introduce him by launching a webpage with a series of fake interviews.

• 22:04David Pierce?

  How long do you think it takes?

• 22:05Speaker 02

  It gives him before we get to like actually start evaluating what he's doing. What does it take, like a year?

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  Ninety days.

• 22:10Speaker 02

  Ninety, really?

• 22:11Nilay Patel?

  Hundred days. You evaluate the president for a hundred days.

• 22:13Speaker 02

  All right, I'm into that.

• 22:14Nilay Patel?

  So whatever, three and a half months.

• 22:16Speaker 02

  That's a good, that's a cool business.

• 22:17David Pierce?

  And he doesn't even have any wars to fight.

• 22:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 22:18David Pierce?

  He's gonna be fine.

• 22:19Nilay Patel?

  But he's got two major wars to fight. He's probably also right now just sitting there playing Flappy Bird.

• 22:26David Pierce?

  Is it on Windows Phone?

• 22:27Nilay Patel?

  First in the office, like he sits down at like Ballmer's old desk. It's like totally clean and bare and he's like, what do I do now? And like slowly pulls an iPad out of his pocket and starts playing Flappy Bird. He's on secret.

• 22:39David Pierce?

  I bet he's as bad at it as I am.

• 22:41Nilay Patel?

  It's right, we never would say about it.

• 22:44David Pierce?

  I'm not good at Flappy Bird.

• 22:45Nilay Patel?

  So here's the second piece, sort of the flip side of this news, which is Sony today decided they're not going to make Viop PCs anymore. They sold off the Viop business, which is incredible.

• 22:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 22:57Nilay Patel?

  It's an, that's an incredible admission of this isn't a viable business for Sony anymore. And Sony has all kinds of...

• 23:04David Pierce?

  Damn it, John.

• 23:06Speaker 02

  For those at home, playing at home, our director just gave us the worst pun, not to be repeated.

• 23:12Nilay Patel?

  Viable?

• 23:13David Pierce?

  I feel bad now.

• 23:14Nilay Patel?

  John, please leave.

• 23:16David Pierce?

  Please talk frankly.

• 23:17Nilay Patel?

  If you're John Lago Marcinho and you're responsible for the viable joke, I think you should leave right.

• 23:21David Pierce?

  Have some dignity.

• 23:22Nilay Patel?

  Have some dignity.

• 23:25Nilay Patel?

  By the way, iTunes Match has been running on this computer non-stop since the day I bought it. What are you doing?

• 23:29David Pierce?

  That's a normal thing.

• 23:29Nilay Patel?

  Why'd you just launch it off to tell me it's still running?

• 23:31David Pierce?

  I hate iTunes. But that's, we don't even need to go there. But so, so wait, so, so, wait, so...

• 23:36Speaker 02

  Was Sony making money?

• 23:37Nilay Patel?

  All kidding aside, I hate you iTunes.

• 23:40David Pierce?

  It's an ugly road for me to go down.

• 23:41Speaker 02

  So David, I had a question I asked you earlier, I don't know if you know this still, but does Sony make money on iTunes at all?

• 23:46David Pierce?

  So I did some research when you asked me that.

• 23:47Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:48David Pierce?

  And the answer is no.

• 23:50Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 23:51David Pierce?

  Like, they still sell a lot of them.

• 23:52Speaker 02

  Right.

• 23:53David Pierce?

  Which is something. But they, it's, it's not, it's not a money-making business for Sony.

• 23:58Nilay Patel?

  Right. Just like TVs.

• 24:00David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:00Nilay Patel?

  Sony's been in, in two businesses for a long time that should be their biggest growth businesses, but have been anchors on their company for a while.

• 24:07David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:08Nilay Patel?

  And it's computers and it's TVs. And it's funny because the reason they got in computers because they, in, you know, the late 90s, everyone was like, convergence! TVs and PCs will be the same thing.

• 24:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  And Sony's just been chasing after that and not getting there for 20 years. That, that's the whole story here.

• 24:23David Pierce?

  Yeah. Well, but it's, it's really interesting to me, like Sony's been talking about this, this one Sony thing for, forever, right? And, and I guess their, their plan was to make all different products with all the stuff they're really good at making.

• 24:34Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 24:35David Pierce?

  And they're just kind of bailing at all the things that they, they aren't doing.

• 24:39Speaker 02

  I mean, and the things too.

• 24:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:41Nilay Patel?

  No, but it's a platform decision. Well, they've only, which other ones have they ditched?

• 24:46David Pierce?

  eBooks today.

• 24:47Nilay Patel?

  They ditched eBooks today?

• 24:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 24:49Speaker 02

  Was that just today? That was just today, yeah.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  That's weird, because they have a, they had a, well, I guess, so they had a lead in Europe, right? They never cracked the American market, but Kindle isn't in Europe or across the world.

• 24:58David Pierce?

  Yeah, Sony did really well in Europe. And they, like, every time I've met with them, they're, they go, you know, to great lengths to remind me that it's super successful everywhere but the US.

• 25:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 25:06David Pierce?

  And I just, I don't know, I guess I get it from...

• 25:09Speaker 02

  It's just US and Canada.

• 25:10Nilay Patel?

  Right, where they're not, where they're losing here.

• 25:12David Pierce?

  Right.

• 25:12Nilay Patel?

  Like, why would you keep throwing money into, like, the, the void of Amazon?

• 25:16David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 25:17Nilay Patel?

  You can't beat them in the US. I think they're, but I think Sony killing the PC business to me is not an admission of we can't win in this business. I think it's an admission of, as a platform, Windows isn't important to the future of Sony. And that, to me, is, that is the killer. That is...

• 25:33David Pierce?

  That should be really... Scary for Microsoft.

• 25:35Nilay Patel?

  That's super scary for Microsoft. Cause they're one Sony and you, basically what you make is, now what you make is computers of different shapes and sizes.

• 25:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 25:42Nilay Patel?

  Whether it's like their weird, bad smartwatch, or whether it's a TV, or whether it's a PS4. They're all computers.

• 25:48David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 25:48Nilay Patel?

  And they're saying.

• 25:49David Pierce?

  It's like that and Justin Bieber albums are like the two things that Sony does.

• 25:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, that's true. And he's a computer.

• 25:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 25:54Nilay Patel?

  He does it on Windows, apparently. But what they're saying is they don't need the expertise of how to bring up the Windows platform.

• 25:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 26:00Nilay Patel?

  And ship PCs because they're gonna use other kinds of platforms everywhere. And the big bet that they made, and I actually always ask them this, because they've made a big bet on Sony mobile. Their phones are good.

• 26:09David Pierce?

  Mobile and cameras are the two things that they like.

• 26:11Nilay Patel?

  And they're great at it.

• 26:12David Pierce?

  They're swinging.

• 26:13Nilay Patel?

  And it's like they make tablets, you know, they make Sony Android tablets. They make that weird fablet.

• 26:17David Pierce?

  The Experia, well, there's the, there's the, what is it, the?

• 26:21Nilay Patel?

  There's a one that they're always dropping, they're pouring water on.

• 26:23David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Nilay Patel?

  And it's like its main thing that they can do with it.

• 26:26David Pierce?

  Dear lord, why can I remember?

• 26:27Speaker 02

  Wait, the phone? Z1?

• 26:28David Pierce?

  It's like the Z1 mega or something.

• 26:29Nilay Patel?

  But then there's the tablet.

• 26:30Speaker 02

  Oh, right.

• 26:31Nilay Patel?

  It's the Experia tablet. I think that's what it's called. And every time I see it, they've just got like a fountain, like, just hosing down the screen. I'm like, cool?

• 26:39Speaker 02

  That's the best part of every Sony show now is like, we have devices, we're just gonna put underwater. You just walk right by.

• 26:43David Pierce?

  I mean, I liked it because I got to lead a review with a story about my showering habits. So that was good.

• 26:48Nilay Patel?

  I mean.

• 26:48David Pierce?

  Thank you, thank you for that.

• 26:49Nilay Patel?

  What you don't know about David is that he will take any opportunity to discuss himself in the shower.

• 26:54David Pierce?

  That's true. I think actually people know that about me now. People have probably figured that out about me now.

• 26:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Top shelf got real weird at the end. I'm so sorry, John.

• 27:01Speaker 02

  The lost episodes.

• 27:02David Pierce?

  I'm so sorry.

• 27:03Speaker 02

  That will never be released.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  Stuff in the shower. That's actually.

• 27:08David Pierce?

  Stuff in the shower.

• 27:09Nilay Patel?

  It's not a bad.

• 27:09Speaker 02

  Top shelf shower stuff.

• 27:10Nilay Patel?

  You listen to like a Bluetooth speaker while you're playing a tablet?

• 27:12David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 27:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, actually, the only problem is that you'd have to be in a shower the whole time.

• 27:15David Pierce?

  I don't see why that's a problem. That's a great.

• 27:16Speaker 02

  This is a really bad modern Seinfeld.

• 27:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Uh, but no, sorry. But this is happening to the PC. I mean, Dell had to take itself private because it's consumer businesses and PCs just like weren't working out. Um, but what's the other one? IBM left years ago.

• 27:30Speaker 02

  HP.

• 27:31Nilay Patel?

  HP is doing whatever it's doing.

• 27:32Speaker 02

  Yeah. Lenovo's still big.

• 27:34David Pierce?

  Yeah, Lenovo's growing. Like, I mean, what it sounds like is happening to me, and, and the thing, the, the big analyst discussion around all this stuff is that Sony. It's not that the PC market isn't big and that there's not opportunity there, but what it's becoming again is like price commoditized. Right. And these Chinese companies like Lenovo are able to make these make and sell at such huge scale and so cheap that nobody else can compete. And it's like the real money in laptops is in like $350 laptops. Right. And that's like if you can make those with any kind of margins, you can make money. And if you can't, you can't make money in laptops. It's like that seems to be the prevailing wisdom here. And Sony, they're this-

• 28:12Nilay Patel?

  Well, they were always targeting the super high end.

• 28:14David Pierce?

  Right, this is the thing.

• 28:15Nilay Patel?

  Do we have, do we have that photo essay we did of Sony machines? I mean, there are Sony-

• 28:19David Pierce?

  This made me so gorgeous.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Sony made some of the most beautiful PCs ever.

• 28:22David Pierce?

  Oh my god.

• 28:22Nilay Patel?

  It's funny that as, I've been seeing a lot of stuff about how Apple was willing to let Sony-

• 28:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:28Nilay Patel?

  -build macOS 10 machines, because Steve Jobs loves Sony.

• 28:31David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:32Nilay Patel?

  And it's true, Sony had some of the wildest hardware design of all time.

• 28:35David Pierce?

  Well, and they tried so many things like the Viop, which is such a ridiculous thing and didn't work.

• 28:41Speaker 02

  It's still my all time favorite.

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  What happened to the orange keyboard deck?

• 28:43David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 28:44Nilay Patel?

  The, or the second generation one did. The first one was real weird. I remember very distinctly, very distinctly, the first time I saw Viop, which was at CES. First time we ever got our hands on one.

• 28:54David Pierce?

  Right.

• 28:54Nilay Patel?

  And it came with a Vista. It had Vista on it. And we got, literally we got the bits to the Windows 7 Beta on a, we had it on SD card. We got it the same days of Viop and Paul was like, "I'm not running Vista." And like immediately put the Windows 7 Beta on, like off an SD card. He's like, "This is ridiculous, I'm not using this." But no, Sony made beautiful PCs.

• 29:14David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:15Nilay Patel?

  They sold them at a huge premium. They're always overpriced.

• 29:17David Pierce?

  Right.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  And they sold them at a massive premium. And that market is gone.

• 29:22David Pierce?

  Right.

• 29:23Nilay Patel?

  Right? Every PC, it's seriously like, Apple has 90% market share of PCs over $1,000.

• 29:27David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 29:28Nilay Patel?

  That's the number. Like straight, you can't win that game against Apple. And once you get under that, like you're totally in the commodity zone, which is what Google is targeting with Chromebooks, right? So there's like this weird dead middle of the PC market, where you've got Google on the bottom saying, "We're going to come at you with $279 Chromebooks, which are all you might need, and you have maybe a tablet or whatever, and a PC at work that runs Excel."

• 29:49David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:49Nilay Patel?

  And that's what you actually might need over there. And at the top, you have everybody buying MacBook.

• 29:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  And somewhere in the middle, there's a business for Lenovo. And maybe not Sony, and maybe not Dell, and maybe not HP.

• 30:01David Pierce?

  Like Lenovo sells a lot of $400 laptops. Like what, what nobody seems to be able to make or sell is like the $700 laptop. Or the $800 laptop, like there's just doesn't seem to be a market for that. And what's really interesting is like hearing, uh, like watching a lot of companies go into Chromebooks. Uh, the, the two reasons are really obvious, like Google, it sounds like from companies I've talked to, Google has gone to all of these companies and said, here's how much you're charging for this laptop. The end. And there's like, there's a ceiling and that's like, that comes from Google. Where they're saying, if you're going to make a Chromebook, you have to charge this much and like only Google is allowed to. That's what I've heard. I don't know this for sure, but more than one company has told me this.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 30:37David Pierce?

  Uh, that they're saying like, this is what your Chromebooks cost.

• 30:40Speaker 02

  With the exception of Google's own.

• 30:42David Pierce?

  The Chrome Pixel, where they're just like, YOLO, $2 million.

• 30:44Nilay Patel?

  There's a weird Google, the thing that they released today. The weird teleconferencing.

• 30:49David Pierce?

  Right. Well, that's, that's a totally separate.

• 30:50Speaker 02

  That's, that's enterprise.

• 30:51Nilay Patel?

  They're calling it a Chromebox.

• 30:52David Pierce?

  I know, but they're liars.

• 30:54Nilay Patel?

  It runs Chrome.

• 30:55David Pierce?

  It does, but it's not a.

• 30:56Nilay Patel?

  Designed to sit there and run hangouts, right?

• 30:58David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 30:58Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  And the whole package costs a thousand dollars.

• 31:01David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's, it's seems.

• 31:02Nilay Patel?

  It's a weird collection of other people's hardware.

• 31:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:04Nilay Patel?

  So it's like a, it's like a, what's it, an Asus or an Acer PC?

• 31:08David Pierce?

  I think it's Asus, but I can't remember. Let me look.

• 31:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, that one says HP on it.

• 31:13David Pierce?

  Oh, maybe it is.

• 31:14Nilay Patel?

  If you scroll down, there's definitely, there's an Asus logo I saw somewhere.

• 31:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, there is an Asus logo. Well, so Asus just released a $179 Chromebox.

• 31:22Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And it's the, yeah. Right. So there's these like commodity weird small form factor PCs that have like I7 chips in them.

• 31:28David Pierce?

  Mm hmm.

• 31:29Nilay Patel?

  Which is bonkers, uh, cause it's running hangouts.

• 31:32David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 31:33Nilay Patel?

  Google, if you need an I7 chip to run hangouts.

• 31:35David Pierce?

  You did it wrong.

• 31:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, screw it.

• 31:36David Pierce?

  Didn't do a good job.

• 31:37Nilay Patel?

  Uh, you should feel ashamed. You should go find the Panasonic guy and John and you guys should all go to an island and feel shame together.

• 31:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 31:43Nilay Patel?

  Uh, John, I'm sorry, but you have to go to an island now.

• 31:45Speaker 02

  But John, did I make one good observation here, which is the controller?

• 31:48Nilay Patel?

  No, no. So, and then, so that's what I'm saying. It's a weird, it's a weird combo this. So just to recap the news, Google today announced, they had an event and said, this is an interesting announcement for business. That's how they invited us. Sean Hollister went and it's a thousand dollar video. conferencing kit for businesses that basically is built on the back of hangouts. So it's this small form factor Chromebox. It is a remote. That remote is exactly the boxy box remote. Yes.

• 32:11David Pierce?

  I think it has a different number of buttons.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  It has one extra button in the front. Chris, Chris and I had a weird argument about this today. It's the same remote. They just like retooled it and added a button. It's, um, what is it? Parrot makes that speakerphone. It's a Bluetooth speakerphone and a Logitech camera.

• 32:25David Pierce?

  Oh, it's a Jabra speakerphone.

• 32:26Nilay Patel?

  A Jabra speakerphone.

• 32:27David Pierce?

  Yeah, and a Logitech.

• 32:28Nilay Patel?

  So it's just this weird collection of other people's hardware that like you, anybody can put together, but it all comes in one box. You plug it together and you like video conference over hangouts for $250 a year in support.

• 32:38David Pierce?

  And it's called Chromebook Chromebox for meetings, which is like my favorite wild draw on the nose name ever.

• 32:43Nilay Patel?

  I don't really, it's just.

• 32:44David Pierce?

  Like, what is that?

• 32:45Nilay Patel?

  It seems like Google is, it, here's, I think there's a class of startups and small businesses that are getting one step bigger.

• 32:52David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 32:53Nilay Patel?

  And they, our business is among them and they, they need a new breed of like conferencing applications that maybe 10 years ago, Microsoft just owned that entire market.

• 33:02David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:02Nilay Patel?

  And BlackBerry owned a huge chunk of that market and Google realized that it got a piece of it with hangouts. And they, they're like trying to like bet on it and edge their way back into Microsoft's territory.

• 33:11David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, I think there's a place for this. Like it's, it's really easy and companies that, you know, live on Gmail, which is more and more of these little startups that are growing. Like this just makes a ton of sense. It's really easy. Like there's the fastest way for us to do conference calls because we're all on Gmail all the time is just hangouts.

• 33:26Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 33:27David Pierce?

  But I don't know why I want.

• 33:28Nilay Patel?

  I have weird hangouts problems.

• 33:28David Pierce?

  I could just use my computer.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  I, it's like, hang, the hangouts UI, like I want there to be a control panel somewhere where it just tells me what the hell is going on with hangouts.

• 33:37David Pierce?

  And how to put pirate hats and mustaches on yourself.

• 33:39Nilay Patel?

  Well, that is always there. We use it. I use it all the time and, uh, there's just a weirdness to it.

• 33:46Nilay Patel?

  It's like hangouts is, uh, you push the button and then like a hangout happens and I'm never quite sure like who can see what or why.

• 33:52David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  Or what I'm sharing. It's like, it's happening in this browser, but there's no, there's no interface. There's no settings. I don't know.

• 33:59David Pierce?

  Right.

• 34:00Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's just weird to me. It's like now a hangout is happening. Also I have like 50, like I said, I have 50 Google accounts and managing that is impossible.

• 34:07David Pierce?

  Oh, it's a disaster.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:09David Pierce?

  It's a disaster.

• 34:09Nilay Patel?

  And so hangouts makes no sense to me.

• 34:11David Pierce?

  It could be worse. It could be 50 Hotmail accounts.

• 34:13Nilay Patel?

  All I really want is for Google to make a native Mac Hangouts app.

• 34:18David Pierce?

  Instead of the weird Chrome extension that takes over your whole screen for no reason?

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  Why is this happening?

• 34:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't know. We'll never understand that.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  Just do the right thing, Google.

• 34:25David Pierce?

  Yeah. Just stop blowing it.

• 34:27Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's like they have a Hangouts app on the phone. It's great.

• 34:30David Pierce?

  True. Wait, so hold on, let me finish this bio point.

• 34:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:33David Pierce?

  So, Google goes to these companies and says, "You can make a Chromebook or a Chromebook or a Chromebox, and it's gonna cost this much."

• 34:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  And then what they can also do is, they don't charge for the license.

• 34:41Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 34:42David Pierce?

  And it's like, you know how you spike your margins is don't pay for a Windows license?

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 34:47David Pierce?

  And it's like, that's done. And they can charge $250 for it, and people like it, and it has good battery life, and that's... That's gonna be a hard...

• 34:53Nilay Patel?

  I think the next generation of Chromebooks is the one that will be killer.

• 34:57David Pierce?

  I agree. I mean, I still...

• 34:58Nilay Patel?

  This generation is very enticing.

• 35:00David Pierce?

  Nobody's made a great one yet.

• 35:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 35:02David Pierce?

  And I've, like, I...

• 35:03Nilay Patel?

  I think HP edged close, but then they kept on lighting on fire.

• 35:06David Pierce?

  Yeah. This Toshiba one they announced at CES seems pretty nice.

• 35:09Nilay Patel?

  Isn't that one stout? Or Lenovo just came out with one. One of them just started shipping.

• 35:14David Pierce?

  They're all, yeah.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  Can it run YouTube?

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  We should, you know, reviews editor should do a review.

• 35:18David Pierce?

  Oh, who is that?

• 35:19Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 35:19David Pierce?

  I'll find that person.

• 35:20Nilay Patel?

  Who runs most reviews? Is it Ross?

• 35:23David Pierce?

  I think it's Ross.

• 35:23Speaker 02

  I do. Get on that.

• 35:24David Pierce?

  I dabble.

• 35:26Nilay Patel?

  Super annoying dude that everybody hates.

• 35:28Speaker 02

  He sounds like a real asshole. I never liked him.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so that's bio. I mean, look, it's sad. I think Sony needs to refocus. I think their TV business.

• 35:36Speaker 02

  You say refocus when it's TVs and tablets and smartphones and music and movies and Playstation, like...

• 35:42Nilay Patel?

  But those are all the same thing.

• 35:44David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 35:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? What Sony is ultimately is an entertainment company. That ad that they started running a couple of weeks ago when they ran at the Super Bowl, where like, "We just want you to experience feelings," which is basically every ad now.

• 35:55Speaker 02

  You should feel feelings.

• 35:56Nilay Patel?

  Every ad at the Super Bowl is like, "You feel feelings so deep. State Farm." And it's like, what the... What just happened?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  I got State Farm like 12 times.

• 36:05Nilay Patel?

  But Sony fundamentally is an entertainment company.

• 36:08David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 36:09Nilay Patel?

  And this whole diversion into PCs was always weird for them, because PCs are like commodity enterprise products.

• 36:15David Pierce?

  I don't know that I agree with that. I mean, the other side of Sony is, they're a huge manufacturer that has tons of partners all across the world, and like, it makes... Sense that they would take all this stuff that they make already and just stick it together, put a logo on it and ship it. Like they they make this stuff for other companies.

• 36:32Nilay Patel?

  But Sony doesn't make motherboards and Intel chips and graphics cards and.

• 36:35David Pierce?

  I mean, I guess it makes more sense for them to make things like cameras because that all that stuff they do make and and maybe that's what we're seeing here. But they're a like, I don't know that they're just an entertainment company.

• 36:44Nilay Patel?

  But but that's like, well, but think about when you say when you say cameras, right? Like they make the whole stack like they. Here's Justin Bieber dancing. Here's a Sony image sensor and a lens like looking at Justin Bieber dancing, right?

• 36:58David Pierce?

  I'm trying to figure out where Justin Bieber fit into that.

• 37:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like he's here, like Sony owns this, this this represents Bieber, this represents a camera, right? Like here's Sony broadcast technology doing stuff. Then here's like a PS4 receiving it plugged into a Sony TV that's showing it to you.

• 37:14David Pierce?

  So when you watch Taylor Swift.

• 37:15Nilay Patel?

  That's I think that's why they're not. Sitting on your couch, holding a Sony phone, like doing a second screen thing like that's the Sony story.

• 37:21David Pierce?

  That's why even though Sony isn't making money off TVs either, that's why I don't think Sony is ever going to get rid of TVs.

• 37:25Nilay Patel?

  They will never get rid of that.

• 37:26David Pierce?

  Because it's that same, they have that whole stack and PCs, I guess, were just sort of this thing over here that they also did that didn't have anything to do with the rest of this.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  I think it's why um why Vizio tried to make a PC. You know, they're still making, they're still making two of them.

• 37:38David Pierce?

  Right.

• 37:38Nilay Patel?

  Uh but they they wanted to play that game of everything's a screen that shows you entertainment.

• 37:43David Pierce?

  Right, right.

• 37:44Nilay Patel?

  Right? And here are all these screen sizes. We should make them all. And I think Sony made them all and they realized that it the PC business for them was a screen size and demanded the most investment, was the most competitive and cutthroat and had the lowest margins.

• 37:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 37:56Nilay Patel?

  And I don't think he, in that place, I don't think he want to compete against Samsung and Acer.

• 38:00David Pierce?

  Well, I think tablets are the other one that described that that describes and Sony is like not even trying that hard to compete in tablets either.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but that's the platform that, this is what I'm saying about Windows, right? Sony, they they used to, they made half a Windows convertible. I was gonna say half a tablet, but it's, you know, like.

• 38:16David Pierce?

  Sure, right.

• 38:16Nilay Patel?

  They made Windows tablets and that hasn't worked. Nobody's, that platform does not taken off on tablets. Like there's a few very happy, like corporate executives who have Surface Pros.

• 38:28Nilay Patel?

  That's it. And then there's everybody else.

• 38:30David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:30Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and I think Android tablets, they, they're the ones that still have the chance.

• 38:34David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Nilay Patel?

  And so I think Sony has to stay right there. If you're gonna make Android phones, you might as well make Android tablets. And their phones are good, and people like them, and in Europe in particular, they're selling well.

• 38:43David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:44Nilay Patel?

  So I think Sony, like, this is like the Sony story is, when I say refocus, it's decide what platforms as computers are important to you.

• 38:51David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:51Nilay Patel?

  And what your story is of like, how you get, how you get this guy.

• 38:55Speaker 02

  Justin Bieber.

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  How you get the beaves to people.

• 38:57David Pierce?

  Right.

• 38:58Nilay Patel?

  Is effectively.

• 38:58David Pierce?

  You taught him how to dance, didn't you?

• 38:59Nilay Patel?

  I did. Hey, do a thing with Rihanna, it'll be cool. What? It's, it's the Justin Bieber story.

• 39:08David Pierce?

  Wait, so what happens to Vio now?

• 39:10Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they're selling it to some Japanese company.

• 39:12David Pierce?

  Are they gonna, like, are there gonna be?

• 39:15Speaker 02

  They're gonna make them for Japan, I think.

• 39:17David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 39:17Speaker 02

  Is the thing.

• 39:18Nilay Patel?

  I, that just seems weird.

• 39:20David Pierce?

  Like, the, this business is, they're clearly getting rid of it.

• 39:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but if you're not Sony, if you're running Vio as its own business.

• 39:27David Pierce?

  True.

• 39:27Speaker 02

  I guess you can.

• 39:28Nilay Patel?

  You can do all kinds of stuff too.

• 39:29David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:30Nilay Patel?

  You can make decisions that Sony would never make.

• 39:32David Pierce?

  Right.

• 39:32Nilay Patel?

  And you can make, you can make the business smaller, you can stop selling it around the world, you can, I don't know, you can do stuff.

• 39:38David Pierce?

  Yeah, you can probably make money, but that's kinda sad. Like, Sony made good computers.

• 39:41Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:42David Pierce?

  For a long time.

• 39:43Speaker 02

  I mean, they can still make good hardware, it's just.

• 39:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 39:45Speaker 02

  Guys have a keyboard and a hinge.

• 39:46Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of secrets happening to me right now.

• 39:48David Pierce?

  Lot of secrets.

• 39:48Nilay Patel?

  You wanna talk about secrets?

• 39:49David Pierce?

  Let's talk about secrets.

• 39:50Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I will say that I just, this is one of the worst.

• 39:53Speaker 02

  Oh, god, friend number thirty-five joined, I wonder who it is.

• 39:55Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so here's this app secret, do you guys know about this? We're not gonna write about it yet, cause I don't know what the story is, unless you're a gigantic tech insider nerd. Uh, there's an app called Secret.

• 40:04Speaker 02

  You suck at Flappy Bird and everybody knows it, and they're talking about it right now.

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna talk about Flappy Bird in a second.

• 40:09Speaker 02

  That was you, wasn't it?

• 40:09Nilay Patel?

  It was, not me.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 40:11Nilay Patel?

  My secrets are awful because I have no secrets. My, like, literally this app and like, two cups of bourbon are gonna be a disaster for me, cause everyone will know who I am. I'm an open book.

• 40:23David Pierce?

  The only two, so I haven't used secrets, but there are two about me and they're both just you taking pictures of me and then saying weird things like, I don't think you're doing this right.

• 40:33Nilay Patel?

  So there's an app called Secret. You download it. It does some weird sketchy privacy stuff where it takes your entire contact list, all the email addresses, all the phone numbers you have, creates a network that you cannot access.

• 40:44David Pierce?

  Can I just say, by the way, how are we okay with that?

• 40:46Nilay Patel?

  We're not.

• 40:46David Pierce?

  Like, we yell at every company that does it and then we're like, oh, you want to use it for secrets? Okay, that's totally fine. Have all my information.

• 40:53Speaker 02

  I did it, though.

• 40:54David Pierce?

  I know. Everybody's doing it. The thing that seems to be is like, the whole tech industry is using Secret.

• 41:00Nilay Patel?

  So we're, here's what we have on Secret right now. We have their nice little video about-

• 41:05David Pierce?

  Share a thought.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  Share a thought is there. And, you know, it's like, sometimes I'm sad, or like, today I'm happy, or like, I kissed my mother and it was the best feeling that I've ever had. Like, not like that, you sick bastard.

• 41:15Speaker 02

  I'm about to tell jokes on this internet.

• 41:17David Pierce?

  A super weird-

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  That's not super weird. Like, I hugged my mom and it felt cool. Like, that's great, you know?

• 41:22David Pierce?

  Nope. Still not getting better. This is no. I mean, I guess, like, put that in a secret and nobody knows it's you and you'll be fine.

• 41:33David Pierce?

  I hugged my mother and it felt cool.

• 41:36Speaker 02

  I cannot wait to like this so privately.

• 41:39David Pierce?

  That's just no. I mean, I guess it's worse when you put it in a secret because now it sounds like a secret.

• 41:43Nilay Patel?

  There. Done. I'm posting the secret.

• 41:45Speaker 02

  Wait, wait. Refresh.

• 41:48Nilay Patel?

  All right, so it's an app and you type in thoughts, you do this stuff. And all that's happening right now is that the first wave of adopters are in this app. So it's all people in the valley and tech journalists. And it is the cattiest place on earth. And it's super entertaining right now. I will say this app has sort of a terrible UI. It's not wonderful. And it is so annoying with push notifications. I just got one now. It told me my 40th friend had signed up. Thank you. That's not a fact I need to know. Certainly not a fact that should interrupt- I don't care if I know that information.

• 42:22David Pierce?

  Yeah, no, it's not useful.

• 42:23Nilay Patel?

  Like, there's no reason I need to know. Like, it doesn't matter.

• 42:26David Pierce?

  Also, the thing is, I-

• 42:27Nilay Patel?

  Just shut up.

• 42:29David Pierce?

  It's actually way better if I don't know that only forty of my friends are on it, because I could like, guess which forty, and then narrow it way down to who's saying these terrible things about how they hugged their mother, and it felt really cool.

• 42:39Nilay Patel?

  Look, here's, I hugged my mom and it felt cool, that's a secret. Secret is teaching me that everyone else hates the same people and things as me.

• 42:46David Pierce?

  Yes, which seems to be like Sam Biddle. That's like, that's how I know who uses this, is everybody either loves or hates Sam Biddle, and that's basically what secret is about.

• 42:53Nilay Patel?

  Maybe you should check your privilege instead of an app. So, look, this is a thing that's gonna, I hate dudes who never do their legs chicken legs.

• 42:58David Pierce?

  Oh, I just got that.

• 43:00Nilay Patel?

  Clearly we have the same friends.

• 43:01David Pierce?

  Sometimes, late at night- I'm just assuming that was directed at Neil. I get an inexplicable craving for CES pizza.

• 43:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 43:07David Pierce?

  Ugh. I hate that person.

• 43:08Nilay Patel?

  So, this is a wave. There's gonna be like weird, bad mainstream, like CNN, like, the app all of Silicon Valley is secreting about.

• 43:15David Pierce?

  Right.

• 43:16Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's like gonna be a headline.

• 43:18David Pierce?

  Whisper's is gonna be the big thing.

• 43:19Nilay Patel?

  So, but there's secret and there's whisper, and so the interesting-

• 43:21David Pierce?

  Aren't they the same thing, essentially?

• 43:23Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, I don't know.

• 43:23David Pierce?

  Oh, wait, I thought it was the same thing.

• 43:25Nilay Patel?

  I don't, look, I don't have any secrets. If I did know, I wouldn't tell you.

• 43:29David Pierce?

  As best I can tell, well, so I guess whisper is like-

• 43:32Nilay Patel?

  By the way, telling people you're posting a secret, I think is probably not the, uh, probably not the smartest move.

• 43:37David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's fair. So, I think whisper, Whisper's thing is it's, it's public, but it's anonymous. Whisper is like post-secret. You remember post-secret?

• 43:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, yeah.

• 43:45David Pierce?

  Where it was like, you would send in this postcard, and nobody knew who it was from, but it was like, everybody could see it. And Whisper's kind of the same way, whereas I guess secret is more like designed to be around your friends, which is something. But like, man, these whispers are super weird.

• 44:01Nilay Patel?

  This caller's called Cash, I'm using it.

• 44:04David Pierce?

  No, but this is- Grandma gave me Taco Bell hot sauce with my fish sticks. I was like WTF until I tried it. Incredible. Bitch knows her shit. Whisper.com.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  Okay, so, but here's the thing, like, people are starting to post like weird rumors on secret, and like, the Wall Street Journal covered one today.

• 44:18David Pierce?

  Did it really?

• 44:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was about the Evernote one.

• 44:20Nilay Patel?

  They debunked that one.

• 44:22Speaker 02

  Oh, okay.

• 44:22Nilay Patel?

  And which is the saddest moment-

• 44:24David Pierce?

  The saddest moment ever.

• 44:25Speaker 02

  Let's, let's back up. So, there was a secret, secret that came out, that was like, Evernote is about to get acquired. And enough people thought it was real, that the Wall Street Journal had to acknowledge this secret was now-

• 44:36David Pierce?

  Well, like I said, he was like, "I work at Evernote and we're about to be acquired," was like the, the text of the thing. And yeah, and everybody like, and I guess enough people freaked out.

• 44:43Speaker 02

  Not only the people who believe it, yeah, yeah.

• 44:45David Pierce?

  Secret freaked out. But while he has like 40 friends all freaked out and that was it.

• 44:49Nilay Patel?

  I, it's just, there's, Val, I read a story about it today. It's like, there's this return of, you know, the internet is the wild west.

• 44:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 44:57Nilay Patel?

  With like Snapchat and secret and whisper and all these apps that make you anonymous and untraceable. Although I did just give my entire contact list to these people. And we have been complaining about the NSA and metadata and how you can like definitely figure out who's who very fast.

• 45:10Nilay Patel?

  I mean, secret knows who I am.

• 45:11David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 45:12Nilay Patel?

  Someone's gonna break, someone's going to hack secret.

• 45:14Speaker 02

  It also, it keeps track of which ones you posted, what comments you did. Like, it's gonna dox everybody at some point.

• 45:19David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, and like, it's, it's just, it's out there. And this is like, probably way easier to pin to you than something like Snapchat. Because Snapchat at least theoretically disappears, so you have to like dig harder to find the data. Secret is all out there. It's just a matter of like, here's this and here's this and like, let's shove them together and then that's.

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Thank god no one posted anything of value on this thing.

• 45:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I think it's interesting. I think that this like rush to go play with an app called secret is fun. But I was, more conceptually, the value of secrets is eventually telling them to someone and like, the danger of maybe somebody finding out, and this has none of that.

• 45:54David Pierce?

  Right. I mean, but I think there's, there's certainly something to the idea of like, but there's something to the idea of like having to get something off your chest, but not having to, not telling anybody who's dangerous.

• 46:05Nilay Patel?

  So you're gonna tell your friends list an app called secret?

• 46:07David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's perfect.

• 46:08Speaker 02

  So you have, you have passive aggressive issues with your friends, so you're gonna post it anonymously on secret, hoping that they may or may not see it? And, okay.

• 46:16David Pierce?

  Sounds great. That's a good promise.

• 46:18Speaker 02

  Profitable.

• 46:19David Pierce?

  Also, like, if you spent enough time.

• 46:21Nilay Patel?

  The control room hates the Verge cast that just went up on secret.

• 46:24David Pierce?

  You could definitely figure out, like, three quarters of these, yeah.

• 46:29Speaker 02

  I think we just got doxed.

• 46:30David Pierce?

  It was Billy Disney, everybody.

• 46:31Nilay Patel?

  I wonder who that was?

• 46:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, you see, you don't know. It's anonymous.

• 46:35Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I have a number of ideas.

• 46:37David Pierce?

  A number of ideas?

• 46:38Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's, it's a small.

• 46:39David Pierce?

  They had taken a picture of themselves.

• 46:41Nilay Patel?

  There's so many, so many people back there. Oh, this could be a reader just trolling us.

• 46:46Nilay Patel?

  Alright, now I'm playing Flappy Bird.

• 46:47Speaker 02

  God.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  Just moving on to other apps that I'm now obsessed with.

• 46:51David Pierce?

  Which is, no, you know what I'm obsessed with is threes. Have you played this game?

• 46:53Nilay Patel?

  I have not played this game.

• 46:54David Pierce?

  It's crazy. It's like...

• 46:56Speaker 02

  I tried looking for it in the App Store.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  There's a lot of... I will say our commenters were very confused about why we covered threes.

• 47:02David Pierce?

  Really?

• 47:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they're like, "Why, why is this on here? You must be getting, this must be an ad."

• 47:06David Pierce?

  Well, anytime we like anything, it's an ad.

• 47:08Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:09David Pierce?

  That's just true. Everybody should know.

• 47:10Speaker 02

  And when we hate it, we're fanboys for the other thing.

• 47:11David Pierce?

  Right. When we hate it, it's an ad for somebody else, whether we say it or not.

• 47:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, when I hate things, I do my best work.

• 47:18David Pierce?

  That's true, actually. That's a fact.

• 47:19Nilay Patel?

  Ah, god, this game sucks.

• 47:21Speaker 02

  Alright, I'm buying this.

• 47:22David Pierce?

  This is...

• 47:22Speaker 02

  I'm buying threes.

• 47:23David Pierce?

  I've played like four rounds of Flappy Bird. I got zero, zero, zero, and one, and then felt so good about getting one that I quit, and I have no desire to ever play again.

• 47:31Speaker 02

  I just got my high score during the show. Four.

• 47:34David Pierce?

  Nice.

• 47:34Speaker 02

  Got a four.

• 47:35David Pierce?

  Well done.

• 47:35Speaker 02

  I know.

• 47:36David Pierce?

  I'm very proud of it.

• 47:36Speaker 02

  I can't do it again.

• 47:37David Pierce?

  It's very exciting. No, this, I genuinely don't understand why a game like this is so popular.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  Flappy Bird or threes?

• 47:43David Pierce?

  Flappy Bird. Threes is like, I think threes is popular for the same reason that like Letterpress is popular. There are people who like these sort of slightly intelligent requiring games.

• 47:54Speaker 02

  Right.

• 47:54David Pierce?

  But like, this is basically just a worse, annoyingly difficult version of Jetpack Joyride.

• 48:00Nilay Patel?

  You think so?

• 48:00David Pierce?

  Like, what if Jetpack Joyride were way...

• 48:02Nilay Patel?

  It's funny because we did a story on this, and he's making fifty thousand dollars a day on this game.

• 48:06David Pierce?

  I know, he's making crazy amounts of money.

• 48:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I got two. Oh, shit. Aw, man. Excuse me.

• 48:11Speaker 02

  Alright, I'm doing this. I'm doing this.

• 48:13Nilay Patel?

  It's very exciting.

• 48:14Speaker 02

  I'm gonna play threes, but now I gotta play flappy.

• 48:15Nilay Patel?

  Here's why this game is popular. Because most people go through the day and they accomplish nothing. They wake up and they, they, they don't do anything hard. At least I don't.

• 48:23David Pierce?

  Right.

• 48:23Nilay Patel?

  Uh, they, they, there's no challenge in their lives, just float through life.

• 48:26David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 48:26Nilay Patel?

  Hoping, hoping to feel the thrill of victory.

• 48:29David Pierce?

  Four.

• 48:29Nilay Patel?

  And this...

• 48:30David Pierce?

  And then they don't, ever again.

• 48:31Nilay Patel?

  And this game makes you work for it for two seconds, and then you feel it, and you're like, "I got one."

• 48:36David Pierce?

  It's just unfair. You're like, "I got one, everybody, I'm out of here."

• 48:40Nilay Patel?

  "I'm leaving this dead-end job."

• 48:42Speaker 02

  "I got one."

• 48:43Nilay Patel?

  Like, spike the phone. Screw this.

• 48:45David Pierce?

  Sure. I buy it.

• 48:46Nilay Patel?

  "I'm done using Excel today."

• 48:48Speaker 02

  I'm gonna break my phone playing this game.

• 48:50Nilay Patel?

  What else?

• 48:51David Pierce?

  No, I think my theory, so this is like, uh, my, my roommate played, uh, was, was unemployed for a while and played Dark Souls for like 300 hours.

• 49:01Speaker 02

  That is the hardest game.

• 49:02David Pierce?

  See, this is the thing. I think this is a thing with people. He, I asked him why he liked this game and he was like, "I have no idea how to play it. It's so hard. All I do is die."

• 49:09Speaker 02

  And I was like, "That? You didn't answer my question yet."

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  Well, this is DayZ, right?

• 49:12David Pierce?

  Yeah, so I was just gonna say, it's the same kinda thing where like, I think there's this weird, we all have this weird like masochistic streak where we like to die 10,000 times and then the one time we don't die, even when we're not successful, like it's not a victory, it's like a, it's a don't die. We feel sorry about ourselves.

• 49:29Nilay Patel?

  I achieve victory over death every single day of my life. I don't know what you're talking about.

• 49:34Speaker 02

  This is great.

• 49:35David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:35Speaker 02

  This is interesting game for her. Like, Super Meat Boy was another one, like you die 3,000 times each level.

• 49:39David Pierce?

  I did play that game a lot.

• 49:40Speaker 02

  And they show you every death, the replay, once you accomplish it. Golden Goblins back in the day, like, people just loved super hard games.

• 49:47David Pierce?

  I just, I will never understand that.

• 49:50David Pierce?

  I just don't get it.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  What games do you play?

• 49:51David Pierce?

  I play mostly...

• 49:52Nilay Patel?

  You play games where you win right away?

• 49:53David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 49:53Nilay Patel?

  You play draw...

• 49:54David Pierce?

  It takes more than five minutes to win.

• 49:56Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 49:56David Pierce?

  But you, you cut the rope. All day. Just all day.

• 49:59Nilay Patel?

  It's the opposite of draw.

• 50:02Speaker 02

  Alright, no, but like, so, but DayZ, anyone else actually played this game?

• 50:05Nilay Patel?

  No, I watched, I watched the livestream yesterday.

• 50:07Speaker 02

  That was remarkable.

• 50:08Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, I will say that I'm, I, I have a theory.

• 50:12Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  The theory is that there are two people inside of TC Sonic.

• 50:16Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  One of them runs our news day to day. That's cool.

• 50:21Speaker 02

  Alright.

• 50:22Nilay Patel?

  The other one of them is a murderer who uses Twitter.

• 50:25Speaker 02

  Question, why are these different?

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  I just, I'm just confident

• 50:28Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 50:28Nilay Patel?

  That they're different.

• 50:29Speaker 02

  I don't think they are. I really think that's the same, the same aggressive murderer's drive to hit news.

• 50:35Nilay Patel?

  That's true. Uh, but I, I watched the stream. I mean, they, they, what, they found Sean. Sean was being attacked.

• 50:40Speaker 02

  Did you catch the last 15 minutes?

• 50:41Nilay Patel?

  I did not catch the last 15 minutes.

• 50:41Speaker 02

  See, here's what happened.

• 50:42Nilay Patel?

  I was, it was described to me.

• 50:43Speaker 02

  This is everything you can do in the game and I'm sorry, this is real. So, they spent an hour and 15 minutes looking for Sean Hollister.

• 50:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:50Speaker 02

  Addy and TC. They found him. They had a friend who was a plant. He was supposed to kill Sean at first sight, but that didn't work out because they lost him. But they found him. They had Sean go on a roof and said they were... People coming, please be careful and keep a lookout. TC gets behind Sean, handcuffs him, force feeds him poison, puts a burlap sack over his head. At which point Sean falls off a ledge.

• 51:12David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 51:13Speaker 02

  But somehow.

• 51:14David Pierce?

  Survives.

• 51:14Speaker 02

  No, he survives and it gets worse. He survives, handcuffs come off. So TC, Addie are running down because they can't just jump off with him. And then.

• 51:22David Pierce?

  This is like the next Mission Impossible movie that you're describing.

• 51:25Speaker 02

  And all of a sudden, someone starts shooting at them, but missed. So TC got behind him and hacked him up with an axe. At which point Addie goes, well, we're almost done anyway, and shoots TC with a shotgun. TC's fairly alive, shoots Addie in the head and they both bleed to death. This is the end of our stream yesterday.

• 51:42David Pierce?

  God, that's dark.

• 51:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, at least it ended well.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  It's dark.

• 51:44Nilay Patel?

  I mean, I always knew there was something between those two.

• 51:46David Pierce?

  That doesn't.

• 51:47Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 51:48David Pierce?

  That real vicious co-murder.

• 51:51Nilay Patel?

  That's how every great love story ends. I don't know. That was my wedding vows. One day we'll both shoot each other.

• 51:56Speaker 02

  It's like a Romeo Juliet. Daisy is the most sadistic game though.

• 51:59Nilay Patel?

  One day we'll both hunt down Sean Hollister and then shoot each other.

• 52:02Speaker 02

  Aww.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  I love you, buddy. You're the best.

• 52:04David Pierce?

  Flocking in a field as they say this to each other.

• 52:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, TC's kind of scary.

• 52:09Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 52:10Speaker 02

  Yes. So, but, okay, we did explain Daisy, but essentially it's a $4 game that is broken, that is not finished. You pay to just suffer through this game. Where you wake up with no food, you're hungry, you have no items, you have no clothes and you somehow have to survive. If you die, you lose everything and you just do it again. There is no point. This is the most sadistic or masochistic game you can imagine.

• 52:31Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it seems really, but the thing is, it's also a really bad game, right?

• 52:35Speaker 02

  Well, yeah, it's, it's alpha. It's not even finished. It's half an idea and people are paying $3 just to be part of this broken idea as they build it in real time.

• 52:44Speaker 02

  And it's made a lot of money doing it.

• 52:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:46David Pierce?

  It's kind of a great idea.

• 52:48Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 52:48Nilay Patel?

  Is it just because you can do anything?

• 52:50Speaker 02

  Kind of?

• 52:51Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's like-

• 52:51Speaker 02

  It's the, it was the promise that you can do anything as soon as they finish building it.

• 52:55David Pierce?

  In a weird way, is the appeal the same as like Minecraft? Where it's like, the game doesn't exist yet, and you just sort of make it as you go and figure it out.

• 53:02Speaker 02

  Minecraft was a more complete idea, and like, the part of Minecraft where it was broken, and this broken, like, was free. And then, once it got to a certain level, like, okay, now it's beta or whatever, well, you can pay.

• 53:09David Pierce?

  Fair.

• 53:10Speaker 02

  This was like, we have an idea, we're kinda building it, this is real-time Kickstarter.

• 53:14David Pierce?

  They're like, give us all your money.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 53:15David Pierce?

  And this game's gonna be awful, but maybe it'll be good, and you'll love it even while it's awful.

• 53:19Speaker 02

  And everyone loves the faults, and like, it gets fixed every now and then, kinda does it, things break more. Still, it's a success. No game like this has existed. They do now.

• 53:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 53:29Speaker 02

  Minecraft Rust is kinda like between Daisy and Minecraft.

• 53:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 53:32Speaker 02

  Um-

• 53:33David Pierce?

  Fair enough.

• 53:33Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  They both have zombies. They both, you both die. There's zombie hordes in both, yes.

• 53:38Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:39Nilay Patel?

  I mean, that's what makes the game successful. Uh, real open world.

• 53:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 53:42Nilay Patel?

  The sense of adventure and freedom, and also murderers.

• 53:45David Pierce?

  I will say, I've played Dead Rising a lot for exactly those reasons.

• 53:49Nilay Patel?

  I'm really bad at video, I maybe should play video games this weekend. I'm really bad at playing video games. I buy them all.

• 53:55Speaker 02

  Really?

• 53:55Nilay Patel?

  Just non-stop buy them all, and then I, they sit, they're just stacked up on a shelf. Most of them still in plastic.

• 54:01David Pierce?

  I have a lot of games, and I find myself just playing a mix of FIFA and Grand Theft Auto.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  Or-

• 54:07David Pierce?

  I'm replaying Grand Theft Auto for like, the forty-seventh time right now.

• 54:10Speaker 02

  Wait, which one?

• 54:10David Pierce?

  Out of Control 5, yeah. I can't stop playing that game. Wow. It's outrageous.

• 54:14Nilay Patel?

  Sit in my house, I own the, yeah.

• 54:15David Pierce?

  It's great.

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Own a lot of stuff.

• 54:16David Pierce?

  If you, like, my, my move, I beat it enough times now that like, the actual game isn't that fun, so I just go, and I try to get five stars, and then kill as many cops as possible until I die.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Which is the whole point of Grand Theft Auto.

• 54:28David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 54:28Nilay Patel?

  There needs to be a mode in Grand Theft Auto where like, you're playing it, but while you're playing it, you're doing things that like-

• 54:34Speaker 02

  Are productive.

• 54:34David Pierce?

  You're like mining bitcoins.

• 54:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no, but like, things that like, married people have to do. Cause that's like, it's like, man, if I was playing Grand Theft Auto, but also like, shopping in the room and board catalog, that would really solve a lot of problems for me.

• 54:45Speaker 02

  So like, you take a rock, I want that.

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  That's like-

• 54:47Speaker 02

  And then it just ships.

• 54:48Nilay Patel?

  That's what marriage is.

• 54:49Speaker 02

  It just adds it to your Overstock.com account when you do, yeah.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  It's like, man, we really need new chairs for our dining table. Let me go into Grand Theft Auto.

• 54:57Nilay Patel?

  That would be the best.

• 54:58David Pierce?

  You can like, rob a crate and barrel, and they're like, oh, you must want all this.

• 55:00Nilay Patel?

  Straight up, like, you know, they're at A, it's like, making like, storage units for our closet, like, doing like, you know, husbandry stuff.

• 55:05David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 55:05Nilay Patel?

  It'd be great if I was doing that in Grand Theft Auto.

• 55:07David Pierce?

  And they just like, automatically make you a Pinterest board of all the things that you decide you want.

• 55:11Nilay Patel?

  Here's my thought, let me just put it out there. Grand Theft Auto Container Store.

• 55:15David Pierce?

  I would play that game.

• 55:16Nilay Patel?

  Just make it happen, right? You just go and you're like wandering around, you're like, "Man, these shells look really great." And then like a hooker shows up and you kill her.

• 55:25Nilay Patel?

  Let's add a little interest to it.

• 55:27Speaker 02

  Clearly you like killing hookers. Do you want to play Day Z as well?

• 55:31Nilay Patel?

  I'm sorry. I'm sorry, everyone, most especially my wife and the creators of Grand Theft Auto. Who I hope never ever get in the room.

• 55:37David Pierce?

  I was gonna say, they should be. They'd be friends.

• 55:39Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that'd be cool. Uh, is there anything, what else?

• 55:41David Pierce?

  Can we talk about Facebook Paper?

• 55:42Nilay Patel?

  Kinda.

• 55:43David Pierce?

  I guess.

• 55:43Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 55:44Nilay Patel?

  We should talk about Paper. We should talk about Sochi, because whatever's happening in Sochi is crazy. But let's talk about Paper.

• 55:49David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 55:50Nilay Patel?

  Go ahead. You go.

• 55:50David Pierce?

  I...

• 55:51Nilay Patel?

  You talk about it. I'm just gonna sit here.

• 55:53David Pierce?

  I mean, I'm curious what you guys think. I've been using it a lot. Right? So I like...

• 55:58Nilay Patel?

  I download it.

• 55:58David Pierce?

  I use...

• 55:59Nilay Patel?

  Tell the people what it is.

• 56:00David Pierce?

  So Facebook Paper is a new app, just came out this week, and it's ostensibly a news reading app. Uh, so it's like really beautiful. It's the best design I've ever seen from Facebook. Uh, and it's about, it's all for news. So the first stream you have is your Facebook feed. And then you can pick like headlines, and they have a bunch of goofy names for like all the different sections. But you basically like build your own little newspaper. And they have a bunch of cool animations and a bunch of different ways of thinking about like how you move in and out of an app that I really like.

• 56:31David Pierce?

  But it's, it's just, it's a news app. Like fundamentally, it's a news reading app. And one of the things that you can read is your Facebook.

• 56:37Speaker 02

  Not entirely real time either. Like, it's like, it doesn't have the breaking news. It's like, "Oh, well, I don't know a lot about like Home and Garden, but I can read this."

• 56:43David Pierce?

  Well, it's grabbing from Facebook feeds. So it's like, it's relying on, it picked, I think they picked 40 publishers. Is that right? I forget. But they have 40 publishers and they're like, "Here are their Facebook feeds, essentially." And like, that's slow by nature, A.

• 56:59Speaker 02

  It's getting, I guess.

• 57:00David Pierce?

  It's incomplete, uh, but it's also, like, I guess their idea is that like they want people to break news on Facebook, I guess. But that doesn't happen.

• 57:07Speaker 02

  I feel like they want to have like some Facebook app.

• 57:10David Pierce?

  Right, right.

• 57:11Nilay Patel?

  I mean, so I used, um, I mean, I will say some of these animations are great.

• 57:15David Pierce?

  Yeah, I mean, it's a gorgeous app.

• 57:17Nilay Patel?

  Like this thing, right? It does this thing, like, here's a Virg story, and where you can, like, flip it open, and it's like a brochure.

• 57:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, it's really nice.

• 57:23Nilay Patel?

  That's cool. Um, I will say, like, I used Cover Feed.

• 57:27David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  I used, so on my Android phones, I always have Facebook Home, which is insane. I think I'm the only person who really likes it. But I only have it, not for the launcher, but for the home screen. Cause I love just looking at my phone.

• 57:37David Pierce?

  It's a good-looking lock screen.

• 57:38Nilay Patel?

  Standing there and just blasting through photos.

• 57:40David Pierce?

  Did you unfriend, like, eighty people after installing it? Cause that was my first impulse.

• 57:43Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I said, I muted them from the.

• 57:46David Pierce?

  Hmm, smart.

• 57:47Nilay Patel?

  From the list. But, uh, so, yeah, it's just people.

• 57:49David Pierce?

  That way you don't have to deal with the confrontation of the unfriend.

• 57:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 57:52David Pierce?

  I understand.

• 57:52Nilay Patel?

  It's rough.

• 57:53David Pierce?

  They'll come after you.

• 57:54Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it's weird when you discover.

• 57:55David Pierce?

  Full high school girlfriends. Which I'm just assuming is all of your Facebook friends.

• 58:00Speaker 02

  Why would you, wait, why would you want to unfriend that? Don't you wanna know what they're up to?

• 58:04Nilay Patel?

  I know what they're up to. They're raising adorable children. That's cool.

• 58:08David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:08Nilay Patel?

  It's great.

• 58:08David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  It's great for your children. It, I mean, I'm happy that we spend our time together. It's, it's cool. I, please don't be on my lock screen anymore.

• 58:16Speaker 02

  This is the thing, I think Paper's a gorgeous app. I just can't use Facebook, cause like.

• 58:19David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 58:20Speaker 02

  I don't know what to do with it. I don't care about the feeds.

• 58:21David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't really use Facebook anymore. I use Facebook for planning events.

• 58:24Speaker 02

  Yes. Accepting event invites.

• 58:26David Pierce?

  That's it. Like, people who have birthday parties always seem to plan them on Facebook.

• 58:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 58:30David Pierce?

  And that's it.

• 58:31Nilay Patel?

  Cause that's where the people are.

• 58:31David Pierce?

  Right.

• 58:32Nilay Patel?

  That's where.

• 58:33David Pierce?

  And I use Facebook Messenger a lot.

• 58:34Nilay Patel?

  I think of a birthday party, every year, for me and my birthday party, is an opportunity to talk to my high school girlfriends.

• 58:38David Pierce?

  Hmm.

• 58:38Nilay Patel?

  And invite them to my birthday party. Bring your children, I say.

• 58:41David Pierce?

  So it's just you and a hundred ex-girlfriends in a room together. I like it.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, hey, how's it going?

• 58:47David Pierce?

  Speaking of reasons to apologize to your wife.

• 58:48Nilay Patel?

  Another year older.

• 58:48David Pierce?

  Yeah. Hey.

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  Didn't work out.

• 58:51David Pierce?

  Wanna see my secrets?

• 58:55Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna sit here and use this app, you guys can watch it. Uh, no, I think a lot of people use Facebook, and I think Paper. I think Facebook, the Facebook app on a phone is so, it's weird, cause this app is complicated in a wildly different way.

• 59:07David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:08Nilay Patel?

  It's complicated in like a UI way, but much more simplified in the sense that you're just like blasting through Facebook one screen at a time.

• 59:13David Pierce?

  Right.

• 59:14Nilay Patel?

  Um, and I think that's really cool. I think that's really interesting.

• 59:17David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:17Nilay Patel?

  I just, the regular Facebook app is so, it's simpler in. Like idea, you open it up and like Facebook is there, you scroll.

• 59:24David Pierce?

  Well, and it's so ingrained at this point, like people know how to use Facebook that way. People have been using Facebook that way for a long time now. And this is like a totally different way of thinking about Facebook. But the thing that I'm, the thing that I have to keep reminding myself of, and I keep asking people, uh, and people seem to really like this app, is that I think it like, for people like us, it makes no sense. Like, right, I spend all of my time reading the news and by the time I get to paper, it's like, oh, I've seen every story in here. But most people, it's like, it's just a, it's a great, like, there's no way, there's no better looking way I've ever seen to like, get a bunch of news in three minutes, like waiting in line somewhere.

• 59:58Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 59:58David Pierce?

  Uh, and that's what most people want, that's what Facebook mostly is for, I think, is, is these sort of just check-ins. And it used to be with people and now it's with news. And I think that's like, Facebook sees itself that way, I think. Where it's like, your friend group is now your access to all this other stuff.

• 1:00:12Nilay Patel?

  So I have this theory about Facebook.

• 1:00:13David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:00:14Nilay Patel?

  And maybe it's right and maybe it's wrong, but here's my theory about Facebook. When Fa- when Facebook started off as about people.

• 1:00:21David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:22Nilay Patel?

  When it was a bunch of like twenty something people partying all the time. And that was really exciting, right? And so Facebook could just be about people and that would power growth forever.

• 1:00:32David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:00:32Nilay Patel?

  Right? Cause it's a bunch of young people.

• 1:00:34David Pierce?

  I mean, it worked.

• 1:00:34Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 1:00:35David Pierce?

  They got a billion people that way.

• 1:00:36Nilay Patel?

  Right. Spring break on Facebook was a phenomenon that I experienced for like four years. It was the best.

• 1:00:42David Pierce?

  With your own high school girlfriend.

• 1:00:44Nilay Patel?

  With all of them, all hundred of them at once.

• 1:00:46David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:00:46Nilay Patel?

  It was really weird.

• 1:00:49Nilay Patel?

  We did a lot of keg stands, um, and then posted about them on Facebook. Now Facebook's audience is much, much older and the things they are doing are no longer as inherently exciting or naked. And that's real. And I think now Facebook has to find other things to show people. Because the story, like, old people complaining is not exciting. Like, Grand Theft Auto container store is like a real phenomenon in my life and I don't want to talk about it on Facebook.

• 1:01:12David Pierce?

  So you go from like naked keg stands to like, ow, my feet hurt and I'm at the container store. Like, that's not nearly as interesting.

• 1:01:17Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm friends with a bunch of like, people, like my parents' friends on Facebook. Like, they want to be friends with me and like, they're like, these kids today. I'm like, why am I looking at Facebook? And I think Facebook has to shift what it's showing people from just what was in here. Apparently exciting and like titillating to other stuff.

• 1:01:34David Pierce?

  Well, so is this, I mean, this is sort of the other side of that same problem that Facebook is. Everybody says about Facebook, which is that young people don't use Facebook anymore.

• 1:01:40Nilay Patel?

  They're gone. So that, that content, that constant flow of like wild, bad ideas, which is exciting and like keeps things exciting is gone.

• 1:01:47David Pierce?

  So you're saying instead of Facebook, like trying to get teens back, they're just owning that teens don't use Facebook anymore. I hate teens. I hate saying that for, not, not teens, teens, you're cool. I like you.

• 1:01:59Nilay Patel?

  Young rebels.

• 1:02:01David Pierce?

  But.

• 1:02:01Nilay Patel?

  I love teens.

• 1:02:04David Pierce?

  But the.

• 1:02:07Nilay Patel?

  I completely lost my train of thought.

• 1:02:08David Pierce?

  Yeah, alright, that's great, thank you. But what they're saying is like that they're just not.

• 1:02:14Nilay Patel?

  By the way, I'm inventing, I'm inventing secret doxes.

• 1:02:18David Pierce?

  Is that a thing?

• 1:02:18Nilay Patel?

  Like secret, secret R L R Ts.

• 1:02:20David Pierce?

  I think people might have already done that by now. This is cool. This is just, this is great.

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:26David Pierce?

  Teens.

• 1:02:27Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, how do you?

• 1:02:29David Pierce?

  No, I think if, if Facebook is, is smart, or this, I don't know if it's smart or not, but this seems like an admission to me from Facebook being like, hey, turns out.

• 1:02:37Nilay Patel?

  By the way, my friend just auto corrected teens to trends with a Z.

• 1:02:41David Pierce?

  That's perfect.

• 1:02:41Nilay Patel?

  So I'm doing something wrong.

• 1:02:43Speaker 02

  We have a, we have a coworker who somehow his girlfriend changed ha, ha, ha to auto correct to I like to poop. So every now and then I'll get a text and I go, I like to poop. It's like, that's, that's nice.

• 1:02:54Nilay Patel?

  This is the worst. We should probably end this podcast.

• 1:02:56David Pierce?

  Should we?

• 1:02:57Nilay Patel?

  I mean, look, I, I think paper is really interesting. I think Facebook trying to re-decide what it is, make new decisions about how it exists, become. And they're turning into the new AOL, right? They're, they're turning into the new, like default in destination for a million people on the internet. I've always said, I think Facebook for a lot of people is the internet.

• 1:03:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:03:17Nilay Patel?

  Like Facebook and Google, you can make a decision, like which one of these things is the internet to people? I think Google, the whole Google plus thing was the fear that Facebook would become the internet for people. Um, I think there's for, that's like where our parents are gonna live in the internet.

• 1:03:31David Pierce?

  Well, but isn't the like, I, I think the.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  I think for a whole new generation of people, it's, it is things like Snapchat and Whisperer and all these other social networks that come and go in a heartbeat. Because you don't want to. Preserve this stuff.

• 1:03:42David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:03:42Nilay Patel?

  Like, the lesson of Facebook has been learned.

• 1:03:44Speaker 02

  But also, like, is there, is there a desire for, like, that single unified, like, avatar? You control your identity.

• 1:03:50David Pierce?

  That's what I think Facebook did, that nobody gets that Facebook did, is I think what Facebook did is build this friend group. Like, Facebook's been around for ten years, they just celebrated their 10th anniversary with a bunch of weird stuff. But the thing they've done in those ten years, more than build Facebook.com, is they've, like, all of my friends are on Facebook. All of them, every single one, and except for Sam Thonis, who is not on Facebook because he's the worst.

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  A bunch of people here are on Facebook.

• 1:04:13David Pierce?

  I hate all of them. None of them are my friends. But no, but what they've done is now, Facebook now has this crazy leverage with that group to build that into anything. And if they're like, they, they did Messenger, and they were like, hey, we have, we built an IM app, and you know what it already includes is all of your friends. Like, that's a huge victory.

• 1:04:30Speaker 02

  And their real names and their pictures, so you don't.

• 1:04:32David Pierce?

  Right, and they can do that in, and I mean, I think that's a huge part of Instagram, is like, building that back into Facebook where it's, it's now, they're now connected that way, is huge.

• 1:04:40Speaker 02

  Right, because I don't, I don't use Facebook for login, but I will use it for authenticators, because like, great, fun, easier than putting a password.

• 1:04:45Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:04:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:04:46Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:04:47Speaker 02

  I don't want to connect to Google. Google, I have real shit on Google. Facebook, I have nothing.

• 1:04:51Nilay Patel?

  What's your real, what's your real, I mean, it's like, you're, they're not gonna get to my Gmail, right?

• 1:04:55Speaker 02

  But like, if I.

• 1:04:56Nilay Patel?

  The last thing I want any app to do is post for me on my behalf on Facebook, and they all want to do it.

• 1:05:01David Pierce?

  No, you, no, see, I don't, I think that's.

• 1:05:02Speaker 02

  Privacy to only you, and then they don't do it.

• 1:05:04David Pierce?

  Yeah, I don't think they, I've, I have yet to have an app do that in a long time. Everyone, actually, that's not true, I had one, I can't remember what it was, I had one do it, and I just instantly was like, this is a terrible app, and never use it again, so, good job, that app.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Interesting.

• 1:05:15David Pierce?

  But, I, I think, like, I, I agree, and like, I use, uh, what was it, Audio? And signing into Audio with Facebook, it like, instantly found all of my friends and was recommending them based on people who are on Facebook. And like, that's, nobody else has that and can compete with Facebook along that line. So, as long as Facebook has that and nobody else does, they have this huge ingrained advantage anywhere they want to go.

• 1:05:35Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:05:35David Pierce?

  And they can go a million different places, and they seem committed to doing that, and like, with design, like, what they had in paper, if they apply that to other things, I think it's super interesting.

• 1:05:42Nilay Patel?

  Here's the problem, paper's only on iOS, they left 50% of the market, it's not theirs.

• 1:05:47David Pierce?

  Right.

• 1:05:47Nilay Patel?

  And they have to figure that, I mean, like, you know, they'll get there, I'm sure.

• 1:05:50David Pierce?

  But at least they've proven, like, there's, the, the chops are there, and they're willing to think about it in different ways.

• 1:05:54Nilay Patel?

  People who built it are like, all ex-Apple employees, right?

• 1:05:56David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:57Nilay Patel?

  So, that's, I mean, bunch, so, a lot of interesting ideas, but I think Facebook has to prove to a next generation of people.

• 1:06:04David Pierce?

  Why they should use Facebook.

• 1:06:04Nilay Patel?

  Why they should use Facebook, and why having that network behind them is interesting and useful. And I think they're doing a fine job of it, but I think. That piece of Facebook where they were gonna become the default communication network for everybody is gone.

• 1:06:16David Pierce?

  Yeah, I agree.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  Uh, cuz I just don't use Facebook to communicate with people. And when people do wanna use Facebook with me, I'm like, you're gonna say something weird. That's like literally what I think. It's like, someone's gonna ask me for something or say something weird, or ask me for something weird.

• 1:06:30David Pierce?

  Fair enough. I use Facebook Messenger all the time. I love it.

• 1:06:33Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 1:06:33David Pierce?

  It's so good. The app on iOS is fantastic. It's everywhere. And it's like, Hangouts on iOS is just a disastrous piece of a disaster. It's awful. Right, but why is Messenger better? And Facebook Messenger is great.

• 1:06:46Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:06:46David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:47Nilay Patel?

  That's real weird.

• 1:06:47David Pierce?

  It's great. It's super fast. It has the stickers. Those are fun.

• 1:06:51Nilay Patel?

  No, no.

• 1:06:52David Pierce?

  No, stickers are awful. But it's basically, it's like a fun, easy app that all my friends already use. It's like, if all my friends used WhatsApp, I'd rather use that, but they don't. And they all use Facebook.

• 1:07:02Nilay Patel?

  So you're saying friends of the old's?

• 1:07:03David Pierce?

  Mm-hmm. Friends of the old's. It's all your ex-girlfriends and your parents' friends.

• 1:07:08Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's wild.

• 1:07:09David Pierce?

  Those are my Facebook friends. I just scraped your Facebook one day and friended all of them.

• 1:07:13Nilay Patel?

  You can have them. Just my ex-girlfriends.

• 1:07:17David Pierce?

  So should we talk about Sochi?

• 1:07:18Nilay Patel?

  We, I mean, there's some weird stuff. There's a media story here. That's really what this is for me right now. So, as far... So Winter Olympics are happening in Sochi, Russia.

• 1:07:27David Pierce?

  Starting like tomorrow or something. Isn't it soon?

• 1:07:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:31David Pierce?

  I think it's soon.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  And, you know, all the usual Olympic stories are there. NBC is gonna tape-delay it, which is like weird, but they're committed to doing it. But then there's this weird second class of like strange stories about Russia. So the first one, which I thought was interesting, is that Sochi is actually like a beach town.

• 1:07:47David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:48Nilay Patel?

  For most of the year. Um, somebody pointed out to me that it's the same distance from the equator as Toronto, but I don't think if Toronto is a beach town. Sochi is definitely a beach town.

• 1:07:55David Pierce?

  Was that supposed to prove that it's a beach town?

• 1:07:57Nilay Patel?

  I have no idea. No, they're like, but it's, see, Toronto's cold. And I was like, yeah, but it's like forty-five degrees.

• 1:08:01David Pierce?

  Toronto's not near an ocean, like...

• 1:08:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, whatever.

• 1:08:04David Pierce?

  Whatever.

• 1:08:05Nilay Patel?

  It's like a lake over there, something. Uh, Lake Canada, you know? It's good.

• 1:08:09David Pierce?

  Lake Canada?

• 1:08:10Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the Canadian lake system.

• 1:08:12David Pierce?

  I've been there. It's great. Yeah.

• 1:08:13Nilay Patel?

  It's nice. Uh, very clean. Um, I don't know. It's just super polite lakes, Canada.

• 1:08:19David Pierce?

  They're all starting a band together.

• 1:08:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, no, so anyway, so there are mountains about an hour away. That's where they're actually holding most of the Winter Olympics stuff.

• 1:08:28David Pierce?

  Yeah, right.

• 1:08:28Nilay Patel?

  But all sorts of other crazy stuff is happening. Like, somebody was saying, say, Shaun White pulled out of the slope-style, uh, uh, snowboard event because

• 1:08:36David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:08:36Nilay Patel?

  the, the snow isn't ready, the tracks aren't ready, and then journalists are getting the social media now.

• 1:08:40David Pierce?

  Well, he hurt himself practicing because the, like, they hadn't finished setting it up and it wasn't ready. So he

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:08:46David Pierce?

  like busted his, like, his knee or something.

• 1:08:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:48David Pierce?

  Getting ready.

• 1:08:48Nilay Patel?

  Uh, so there's that, and then there's, like, all these journalists are descending there and they're, uh, tweeting pictures of, like, disaster

• 1:08:55David Pierce?

  The double toilets, man.

• 1:08:57Nilay Patel?

  The double toilets.

• 1:08:58David Pierce?

  The double toilets is the greatest.

• 1:08:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there's, like, rubble in hotel lobbies.

• 1:09:00David Pierce?

  That is insane.

• 1:09:01Nilay Patel?

  Um, and so the interesting piece here is that NBC will presumably not report on this because their interest is in presenting the Olympics as, like, this happy

• 1:09:10David Pierce?

  Right, there's supposed to be a spectacle.

• 1:09:11Speaker 02

  But, wait, at the same time, though, NBC is the one that did this hacking story. We'll get to that in a second, but, like, I don't think they're, I don't think they're censoring themselves for, for that reason.

• 1:09:21Nilay Patel?

  All right, so we'll see, but it's, it just seems like every Olympics is, like, a nightmare of corruption and stuff.

• 1:09:29Speaker 02

  Oh, absolutely, yes.

• 1:09:30Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and then this one in part is, like, in particular, it's being exposed because of social media, right? That's what's happening.

• 1:09:36Speaker 02

  That, also, the exorbitant, like, exorbitance of this, like, $51 billion is the estimated quote for all this, and the fact it's not ready.

• 1:09:41David Pierce?

  Well, but it's also, like, the, the conditions seem uniquely awful for the wrong people. Like, right, there, there are, it's always, there's always corruption, there's always issues, but those are always sort of behind the scenes. But when you walk in and see a sign that says, "Don't drink the water," or "Don't put the water on your face, it'll kill you."

• 1:09:56Nilay Patel?

  Yes.

• 1:09:56David Pierce?

  It's like, that's, that's a lot more straight, like, in your face, literally, than it normally is. And so I think it's, like, what was it? Was South Africa the last one? Where's the last Olympics? I confuse the Olympics and the World Cup all the time.

• 1:10:09Speaker 02

  Wait, the last?

• 1:10:10David Pierce?

  Where's the last Summer Olympics?

• 1:10:12Speaker 02

  Everywhere.

• 1:10:14David Pierce?

  It was, it was two years ago, it was London.

• 1:10:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:16Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:10:17David Pierce?

  So there's like, I'm sure there was all kinds of stuff going on in London, but like ultimately you're in London, which is like a nice city with nice amenities and so nobody really notices unless they look for it.

• 1:10:24Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we covered the hell out of that one because we have all kinds of people in London.

• 1:10:27David Pierce?

  Right. And so I, I think, I just think in this case, like it's.

• 1:10:30Nilay Patel?

  I think Aaron was running some sort of Airbnb scam the whole time.

• 1:10:32David Pierce?

  It's entirely possible.

• 1:10:33Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. He, he's like, well, look, I can make like millions in this thing. So whatever.

• 1:10:36David Pierce?

  I mean, they, they keep, like, I, I remember seeing today that like links for everything from like South by Southwest in Austin to like Sochi. And it's like, if you live in a place where lots of people go occasionally.

• 1:10:49Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:10:49David Pierce?

  You just, oops, you're rich.

• 1:10:51Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:10:52David Pierce?

  Like, here's my house for fifty thousand dollars a night.

• 1:10:54Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:55David Pierce?

  Somebody's some like.

• 1:10:57Nilay Patel?

  And that's why I've been buying houses in weird places. Just hoping, waiting.

• 1:11:01Speaker 02

  Topeka, Kansas.

• 1:11:02David Pierce?

  And now you're like pitching the Olympic committee to try and.

• 1:11:04Nilay Patel?

  Please.

• 1:11:05David Pierce?

  You're like, do you want to come to Des Moines for the Olympics?

• 1:11:07Nilay Patel?

  Wisconsin. It's gonna be great, guys. My parents have a nice pad.

• 1:11:10David Pierce?

  That'll be great.

• 1:11:10Nilay Patel?

  Um, no, uh, so I think we're actually like, I think we're, we're gonna pay attention to the Olympics for any number of reasons. We always do. But, um, this story in particular, where there's the main narrative of the Olympics.

• 1:11:22David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:11:23Nilay Patel?

  And then there's a sub-narrative of people using back channels to tell you what's really happening. And then on top of it, there's like crazy Russian surveillance. So the director of the Sochi Olympics today straight up was like, the hotel rooms are fine. People are just trashing them. Our surveillance cameras have been watching the showers. And they're just pointing the shower heads at the wall. And the follow-up question was like, excuse me, the surveillance cameras in the bathrooms? And he was like, I'll get back to you on that.

• 1:11:50Nilay Patel?

  And now, now he's denying that such a thing was ever said to the Wall Street Journal.

• 1:11:54David Pierce?

  Wow.

• 1:11:55Speaker 02

  That'll go well.

• 1:11:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So there's just, there's just a, a deep level of weirdness there. And I think the danger is treating it like,

• 1:12:03Nilay Patel?

  like Russia's some weird, I mean, it's obviously a different country, but some weird other place.

• 1:12:07David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:12:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that's always the danger. But the reality is there is the official story and then there's like the real story.

• 1:12:13David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:14Nilay Patel?

  And I think this one in particular, we're gonna see a very different real story emerge from what the main narrative of the Olympics is.

• 1:12:20David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, I think that one of the stories that never really gets told, but is true. No matter where you have the Olympics, but especially when it's in a place like this that just doesn't seem to have been ready at all for a Winter Olympics.

• 1:12:28Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:12:29David Pierce?

  Is the, just the sheer level of like infrastructure and overhaul you have to do to make an Olympics happen. Uh, like the, the New York Times ran this piece the other day. I was showing you this where they were, they sort of superimposed some of the events on New York City.

• 1:12:42Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:12:43David Pierce?

  So it's like, what if the bobsled run were in Times Square and it was like forty blocks long?

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:12:48David Pierce?

  And the downhill ski slope was twice the size of Central Park. Like it's wild. Um, but I think what nobody really talks about is, what was the number you said? Like fifty one billion dollars?

• 1:12:57Nilay Patel?

  Fifty one billion dollars.

• 1:12:58David Pierce?

  Like to get the Olympics is an unbelievable undertaking and there, there are people are tweeting pictures of buildings that aren't finished.

• 1:13:04Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 1:13:04David Pierce?

  Like they kicked people out of their houses and then half finished a building that was supposed to be used for the Olympics.

• 1:13:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:08David Pierce?

  And I think it's, it's actually gonna be really important to tell that story. And I think you're right that it's, it's really easy to sort of treat it as like this other third world place, but I think it's, it's real and it, it's told in bits and pieces in every Olympics.

• 1:13:21Nilay Patel?

  That are crazy. You know, ESPNations have been collecting a lot of them. The pictures that are out are nuts.

• 1:13:26David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:26Nilay Patel?

  Like just nuts.

• 1:13:27David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:27Nilay Patel?

  And there is a story today that like, there's a wild dog problem. So the government's just killing dogs ahead of the Olympics.

• 1:13:34Speaker 02

  The, the dog murder squad. It's, it's third party. It's not government. They just hired a company that does this. Which also makes the question, why do you already exist?

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, if you live in a sound, yeah.

• 1:13:43Speaker 02

  Oh, you need a dog murder squad.

• 1:13:43Nilay Patel?

  Opportunity just waiting.

• 1:13:45David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:45Nilay Patel?

  Just, you're like, you know what?

• 1:13:46David Pierce?

  It's a small business.

• 1:13:47Nilay Patel?

  Let's, let's get those Olympics guys and then clean up and then rent out my house.

• 1:13:51David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:52Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and that was the rich cast.

• 1:13:55Nilay Patel?

  Like, I don't know what else to do.

• 1:13:56Speaker 02

  Come back to Flappy Bird. Screw this.

• 1:13:58Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I mean, I'm gonna go upstairs and play Flappy Bird. What are you gonna do? We missed, we didn't miss anything.

• 1:14:03Speaker 02

  I don't think so.

• 1:14:04Nilay Patel?

  Can we, here's what I end. It's true. And this is important. I think we should end on this.

• 1:14:08Speaker 02

  I thought you were about to butt in your jacket. I was like, it's about to get serious here.

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna leave here. Uh, I would like to end on iced tea.

• 1:14:14Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:14:15Nilay Patel?

  So I'm gonna, here's what I'm gonna say.

• 1:14:17David Pierce?

  You just set this up a little bit.

• 1:14:19Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 1:14:19David Pierce?

  No?

• 1:14:20Nilay Patel?

  I refuse.

• 1:14:21David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 1:14:21Nilay Patel?

  So that was the Vergecast for whatever week this was.

• 1:14:24David Pierce?

  It was the week of February. The week of February 3rd.

• 1:14:27Nilay Patel?

  February the 3rd, the Vergecast. It happened to you at this time, and you should tell a professional. That was our Vergecast. Thank you. Thank you for being with us. You can leave a comment on the post. You can yell at us on Twitter. I'm Reckless.

• 1:14:40David Pierce?

  I'm Pierce David.

• 1:14:41Speaker 02

  Oda Roscoe.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  Just a bad collection of Twitter handles right there.

• 1:14:44David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're so sorry.

• 1:14:45Nilay Patel?

  There's probably a phone number you can call. You can just talk to your parents, or your local counselor. Just whatever you want to do.

• 1:14:51David Pierce?

  Or you can rent Neil's house on Airbnb.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:53Speaker 02

  Fight him, Neil. In Wisconsin.

• 1:14:54David Pierce?

  In Wisconsin.

• 1:14:55Nilay Patel?

  Just please, you can hold the Olympics at my parents' house. They'll teach you how to pronounce my name and any other collection of any names that you want. And that was it. And now, Ice T, we'll talk about Dungeons and Dragons. I'm not, no.

• 1:15:09Speaker 03

  I read an audiobook.

• 1:15:11Nilay Patel?

  And that's why you're here.

• 1:15:12Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, on our sponsor.

• 1:15:13Speaker 04

  On Audible, yeah.

• 1:15:15Speaker 03

  Audible.com.

• 1:15:16Speaker 04

  That's hot.

• 1:15:16Speaker 03

  And I went to their offices and they said, Ice, we want you to read this book. Okay, they didn't tell me

• 1:15:23Speaker 03

  that this was a motherfucking Dungeons and Dragons book, okay? Dungeons and Dragons is some of the most crazy, deep, deep, deep nerd shit ever invented. So every word you're saying is pretty much made up. Motherf***s talk like Yoda. You know, outside I go into the sun thereof and out, what the f***? How do you read this shit, you know? To actually verbally say these words?

• 1:15:50Speaker 04

  It's weird.

• 1:15:51Speaker 03

  Son, it took me three and a half hours to read 25 pages. Three and a half hours. I have, I'm only reading a short story. It's like 45 pages. I have to do it in two days. I walked in here like, oh yeah, 40 pages, man, we got this, man. I got three hours.

• 1:16:09Speaker 03

  I needed breaks. I needed water. The guy was in the other room coaching me. Don't worry, Ice. You can make it. You're doing really good. You're doing really good. He was saying, yo, people have broken down, tried to read that stuff. When this thing comes out, I'll tell y'all. When it comes out, and it'll be a treat just to watch me with my South Central educated ass trying to read some Dungeons and Dragons shit.

• 1:16:35Speaker 04

  It's still gonna be good.

• 1:16:36Speaker 03

  Talking about, I mean, oh my god, talking about, what were we talking about? Pegasus and Pegasus and that's horses with wings, banking to the left. This motherfucker got a sword that talks to him and shit. It's a story based on the Dungeons and Dragons type thing.

• 1:16:52Speaker 04

  The series, yeah, the series.

• 1:16:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, motherfuckers live in places that don't exist and it comes with a map. My god, I told my manager, I said, "Don't ever have me trying to do..."

• 1:17:02Speaker 04

  Book you for no shit like that no more.

• 1:17:04Speaker 03

  This shit is crazy, you know, let me read some porno or something, a sex book.

• 1:17:07Speaker 04

  It's easier.

• 1:17:08Speaker 03

  I know about that.