Microsoft Build 2020, Elon Musk's factory play, and Joe Rogan moves to Spotify

It’s Friday, which means there’s a new episode of The Vergecast to fill you in on all of the news from this week. Join Nilay, Dieter, and a rotation of other editors for everything that you need to know. The three topics covered this week are: Microsoft’s Build developer conference Elon Musk’s... active month Spotify getting exclusive streaming rights to The Joe Rogan Experience podcast During the first part of the show, Verge senior editor Tom Warren joins Nilay Patel and Dieter Bohn to discuss what was announced at Microsoft Build 2020 and what’s next for Windows software. Microsoft Lists is a new app designed for Teams, SharePoint, and Outlook Microsoft’s new Fluid Office document is Google Docs on steroids Microsoft to unify Windows desktop and UWP apps with new Project Reunion Microsoft’s new PowerToys Run launcher for Windows 10 is now available to download Microsoft Edge is getting a new sidebar search feature and Pinterest integration Microsoft is bringing Linux GUI apps to Windows 10 Microsoft’s new Windows Package Manager is already better than the Windows Store Microsoft Surface Earbuds review: comfort at a cost Microsoft Surface Go 2 review: don’t push it First look: Microsoft’s 13.5-inch Surface Book 3 A little over 35 minutes into the show, Verge deputy editor Elizabeth Lopatto updates us on Elon Musk’s latest endeavors, including his battle with Alameda County over opening his factory, his protests against lockdown orders, and SpaceX’s upcoming Crew Dragon spacecraft launch. Elon Musk’s battle to reopen Tesla’s Fremont plant may shape his legacy Tesla drops its lawsuit against Alameda County over lockdown order Elon Musk is playing Twitter footsie with the fringe right Here’s why Elon Musk keeps raising the price of Tesla’s ‘Full Self-Driving’ option Elon Musk’s Boring Company finishes digging Las Vegas tunnels Meet the first NASA astronauts SpaceX will launch into orbit Last but not least, senior reporter Ashley Carman stops by to explain the importance of Spotify landing The Joe Rogan Experience podcast as an exclusive. Joe Rogan’s podcast is becoming a Spotify exclusive It just took $700 million or so to put Spotify on top of the podcasting world Google suspended a popular Android podcast app because it catalogs COVID-19 content There’s a whole lot more discussed in this episode, so listen here or in your preferred podcast player to hear it all. Other stories discussed in this episode: Mark Zuckerberg on taking his massive workforce remote Students are failing AP tests because the College Board can’t handle iPhone photos Amazon reportedly delays Prime Day until September as it works to restore normal shipping Here’s how NYC is using powerful UV light to kill the coronavirus on subways and buses The FCC has received hundreds of complaints about carriers’ coronavirus pledge 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.

• 0:00Nilay Patel?

  This week on the Vergecast, Tom Warren joins us to talk about all the news from Microsoft Build. Liz Lopato joins us to talk about this week in Elon. It was a week in Elon. And Ashley Carmen joins us to talk about Spotify's big investment in the podcast wars. That's coming up on the Vergecast.

• 0:15Speaker 01

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• 0:44Speaker 02

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• 1:09Speaker 02

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• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the pandemic. That sounds more like a horror movie than I want, so pretend I said something better. Hi, I'm Neil. I'm your friend. Dieter Bohn is here.

• 1:30Speaker 05

  Howdy, howdy. I'm in my living room instead of in a closet today. I'm very excited.

• 1:34Nilay Patel?

  It's good. You sound roomier. We all need to get out.

• 1:38Speaker 05

  We're gonna, we're gonna see if we can take some of the reverb off and post, so stay tuned for that. I'm gonna sound like a robot by the end of it. I'm really excited.

• 1:44Nilay Patel?

  Here's what we'll do. We'll have Andrew do that first part without any processing.

• 1:48Speaker 05

  Uh huh.

• 1:49Nilay Patel?

  Andrew then process it from now.

• 1:51Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 1:51Nilay Patel?

  Right. And then we'll see, poor Andrew. A live test of Andrew's.

• 1:56Speaker 06

  You sound like Daft Punk.

• 1:57Nilay Patel?

  Tom Warren is here. Hello, Tom.

• 1:58Speaker 06

  Hello there.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  Tom's here to talk about Build. Which happened this week, my shop build, lots of news from that. We're gonna have Liz Lopato on to do this week in Elon. Just a lot of Elon happening this May. And then Ashley Carmen is going to join us at the end to talk about the enormous Spotify podcasting moves that are happening. So packed show. As always, I just want to start with some quick updates on the pandemic and the coronavirus. There's a lot going on. We interviewed Sundar Pichai this week. It's in the feed. We published it on Tuesday. We obviously asked Sundar about the website and the flow chart. He gave a very diplomatic answer, I will say, a very, very diplomatic answer. But that said, it is week 10. It is 10 weeks since Trump and

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  his team held up the flow chart and promised a website where maybe we could test it. I'm just gonna keep counting. I'm gonna be counting forever. We're gonna be listening to the show five years from now. It's all gonna be over. I'm gonna say it's week 4,000 and there's still no flow chart website. That said, it is week 10. We're keeping track. Sundar did tell us that Verily is in 13 sites, say 86 sites. It's not enough, but they're working on it. He said it has gone slower than they anticipated, which is interesting. Big week for interviews on The Verge. Obviously, Dieter and I interviewed Sundar Pichai. Casey Newton interviewed Mark Zuckerberg. Facebook is taking tens of thousands of employees and moving to remote first work. They can all work from home. So interview about how he's

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  gonna manage that. One thing both Sundar and Zuckerberg said to us, which is interesting, everyone should think about it, that when you first go and you end up working from home, in this moment, everyone kind of knew what to do. They were just finishing their projects. The big question is, when you have to do new stuff? So Casey talked to Zuck about that. We talked to Sundar about that. Go check out that interview. It's super interesting. Just some other stuff. Like I said, it's second order virus stories now. Monica Chin wrote a great story. A bunch of high school students took their AP exams remotely to, you know, they handwrote their answers on the AP tests. Then they took pictures of their answers and tried to submit them to the server. The server didn't tell them anything was going wrong and crashed out. And they ran out of time in the window to submit the

• 4:08Nilay Patel?

  answers. It's because the college board that administers the AP test. Didn't support HEIC photos, which is the default on the iPhone. So all these students have to retake their tests in three weeks, which is just horrible. The company's statement on this is, quote, "We share the deep disappointment of students who are unable to submit responses." It's like, it's like if somebody punches you in the face, they're like, "I share the deep disappointment that you feel right now about the bruise underneath your eye." It is very bad. We actually have a follow-up in HEIC coming because it's just sort of like, I never think about it. I do not think about the fact that my phone takes HEIC photos, except when we are reviewing another phone and we do phone, like photo comparisons.

• 4:53Nilay Patel?

  And I've got like one set of photos for an iPhone that is in some wacky format I can't share. And I'm always like, "That's an edge case. No one else, I guess not." So it turns out many people have a lot of feelings about HEIC and the patents underneath it. We're gonna follow up straight on that. It's not really, we went from like a virus story to straight up a Verge story, but what else were you here for? Amazon is delaying Prime Day until September as it works on restoring normal shipping speeds. Another second order pandemic story. We followed up, Annie Hawkins followed up on how New York City is going to use powerful UV lights on the subways and buses to kill the virus as a cleaning strategy. I think that is a very interesting use of technology. And lastly, we always pay attention to the FCC. You might recall that at the sort of

• 5:36Nilay Patel?

  beginning of all this, FCC Chairman Ajit Pai did something called the Keep America Connected Pledge, where he just sort of asked ISPs to promise that they would have lower prices for disadvantaged people, that they wouldn't cancel service if you don't pay your bill, a bunch of stuff, all voluntary. Everybody signed up for it. The FCC has received hundreds of complaints about this pledge not being met from carriers around the country. That is an ongoing story.

• 6:04Nilay Patel?

  As the pandemic progresses and more and more people unemployed, having connectivity, I think, as we all know, more important than ever. How is the FCC going to respond to pressure now from Congress to actually turn this from a voluntary thing to something with teeth? Ongoing story, we're tracking it.

• 6:19Speaker 05

  Well, so, I mean, doesn't the FCC want to give all power to do that to the FTC?

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  It's really, it's really unclear if the FCC thinks anyone should have this power.

• 6:28Speaker 05

  I think, I think the answer is they screwed up by asking this to be voluntary. They should have bound all of these carriers by the force of pinky swear and then everything would be fine.

• 6:39Nilay Patel?

  It would have had more weight than the webpage that they did put up. We'll see. Pi wants to be seen as a guy who does stuff, but he also wants to be a guy who totally devolves all power from the government. Those are incompatible ideas. I don't know if he's figured it out yet. You can't be the hero and also do nothing. We'll see. We'll just see what happens there. Anyway, that's the list of our stories. There's a lot going this week. There's way more coverage, including all of Verge Science's great coverage on the site. There are actually way more stories about the second order effects on the site. But a lot going on this week, so I just wanted to focus on that list. All right, Tom.

• 7:14Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 7:14Nilay Patel?

  Microsoft Build happened this week. It was a virtual event. They actually split up sort of the product announcements. We covered all the service stuff last week. This was sort of the developer event. Tell us about it.

• 7:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, so obviously they couldn't hold it in Seattle this year, so they did something kind of new. It was kind of like, I know, it's kind of like a TV show. That's kind of how they modeled it on. So think of like that Modern Family episode where it was all shot on smartphones and all that sort of stuff. That's what they modeled exactly on. So it's kind of like this intimate, I'm in your ear, you know, I'm a developer, you're a developer, we're all developers sort of thing. That was their big thing. Like, let's just focus on developers again.

• 7:56Speaker 05

  What did you think of it? I thought the presentation was genius. It like, it felt like that TV show Modern Family episode, but it also sort of felt like, sort of like a little bit of like, sometimes you were just like in a teleconference, you were just having a meeting.

• 8:06Speaker 06

  They felt like you jumped on like the Microsoft Teams meeting and you were like chatting to them, but you weren't, you weren't chatting to them, but they were like talking to you, you know, like.

• 8:14Speaker 05

  Yeah, like it was so much better than I think OnePlus tried to do a full on keynote on like a black void stage and it just was super awkward. So I don't know. I don't know if Apple and Google, well, Google's just doing like some kind of Android presentation. We saw that teaser with George Takei, but I don't know if Apple is going to have the, I don't know if they're going to want to think as creatively as Microsoft did. I thought it was incredible how quickly they came up with a brand new format that totally worked.

• 8:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, I get the feeling they just let Scott Hansman, the guy who's who's kind of like leading up, I think they just let him do it. Like I don't feel like there was any like, you know, executives knocking on his door for five seconds saying, don't do that, don't do this. It was just like, you know, we need to be like a little bit human here and not like, you know, not a sales pitch and all that sort of stuff. And I think it worked. It was, you know, it was entertaining. It was super nerdy. There was nerdy stuff hidden throughout the keynote and stuff. It's just fun. They hit the right note. I think with the export stuff that they'd done the other week, they kind of tried to do an E3, you know, like smoke mirrors at stage and all that sort of stuff. And it just, yeah, didn't really work out. So whereas this was a bit more, you know, human. So.

• 9:21Speaker 05

  So let's start with kind of the headline news. You had a big story about the fluid office document. There's a lot of history here. Just try to explain what this is. And I kind of want to peel apart that history a little bit.

• 9:33Speaker 06

  It's so hard to explain without seeing it like so. So if you think of like Google Docs and the way that you collaboratively collaboratively work on that with other people, think of like a table or like a chart and figure that individually as like a module, like that you might paste into another app. Imagine those two were like combined with Google Docs and that's kind of what this is. So like you create a table in, I don't know, Outlook or let's say Slack, you create a table in Slack, you do some edits to it, you paste in an email, someone else who receives that email will be editing in real time from their email whilst you're looking at it in Slack and seeing it change there. So it's kind of like Google Docs, but trying to be everywhere and like modularized.

• 10:16Speaker 05

  Modularized. That's the word I would think of is.

• 10:19Nilay Patel?

  It's a way for different elements of different documents to sort of get remixed into different forms all over the place.

• 10:27Speaker 06

  Yeah, but basically, and then there's a separate part, which is like what they call a fluid workspace, which is essentially just a fluid document where you have all of these modular components in one. So that's kind of like your Google Doc that you'd have normally. You can pull those modular components out and paste them elsewhere. So I think when you see it and you see people using it in real time, it kind of makes sense. But like the challenge that they're going to have with all of this is getting developers again to like adopt it, get it to be like a standardized format. To do that, they're open sourcing it. So that's, that's like a good sign that they, you know, they're not just going to shove this in office and like hope everyone adopts it. They're going to like try and actually listen to the community and try and make it a thing.

• 11:09Nilay Patel?

  What developers do they, do they need? Like the examples you've just given, I'm working in a Word document and I want to pull in a table from Excel or a chart from Excel and have that data be living. So if somebody edits the Excel document, the table updates. Well, all that's happening in office anyway. What do they, what do they need developers to support?

• 11:29Speaker 06

  Well, so like when you copy a component, you're basically copying a URL to a document. It's still a document, like all the individual components are still documents like that. That structure isn't going away because you just, you can't do that on the web, you know, it doesn't just magically appear. So when you paste that URL in a client that doesn't support the fluid component, then it just, it's just an ugly URL, right? You know? So they need developers to render that content within their apps in the same way for a start. And then the other thing they want to do is to like enable developers to have, so say you've got like an ancient, I don't know, database or something, and you want a particular string in that to be dynamic and update freely, but you don't want to rewrite your whole app to be collaborative and, or you've created an app and, you know,

• 12:13Speaker 06

  the manager's like, yeah, but how do we use this together? You can, their idea is that you'll be able to get developers to then change and switch out strings so that they're fluid. So that's kind of interesting as well. Like, I don't know exactly how they're going to do that. They didn't really show that yet. They're still sort of, you know, working these ideas through. But like, the thinking behind that is kind of interesting because that does, you know, it goes way beyond what we're doing right now. So.

• 12:39Speaker 05

  So they need developers on both sides to adopt this thing for it to really take off. You need everybody to be able to render your little fluid Office module thing inside the app. So like, if you don't use Outlook, but instead you use, you know, Apple Mail or whatever, when you get a, one of these fluid docs, it'll actually work inside that or inside Slack or Discord or whatever. So they need that. They just need everyone to like, I don't know, adopt whatever their version of iFrame.

• 13:03Nilay Patel?

  I deeply love the idea of Discord users like live editing Excel instead of Discord.

• 13:09Speaker 05

  Yeah, for sure.

• 13:10Speaker 06

  Like Twitch streams of like Excel content, games being played in Excel.

• 13:16Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if this is true. I hope it's true. If you, if you're out there and you're listening to this, if you know of like Twitch streamers who are, it's like hardcore Excel users, just send, I would love to watch that. If there's like a hardcore Excel Twitch person, that it's the internet, it's got to exist.

• 13:32Speaker 06

  There'll be somebody.

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  Of course. We're going to profile the hardcore Excel Twitch streamer.

• 13:36Speaker 05

  But then on the other side, are they, they like, we've, we've all like, all these types of documents are basically like little iterations of like Office Docs or PowerPoint or whatever. Are they hoping and is there going to be like a, like just an interoperable framework of like little baby apps that you can embed anywhere, little baby like utilities? And that's what they're open sourcing? Or is this really about getting other apps to show Microsoft stocks?

• 13:57Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think it's, it's more about the entire framework. So it's not just about, you know, showing their document. It's, it's literally about getting the whole entire framework so that you can use it in, in any app. And it doesn't have to be their modules in your app. Like it's, it's literally the underlying technology as well. So they're open sourcing the whole lot. So, which should be in the next few weeks. So we'll probably know a little bit more about their, their thinking and what people, how people can actually contribute to it. And what sort of things they will do in the next few months to enable all this. But like they, when they showed it last year, it was, the focus was more like it looked like a Google Docs competitor. You know, they've had similar stuff on office.com for a while.

• 14:41Speaker 06

  Where you can collaboratively work together and it was super, but it was super fast and that sort of stuff. But this year is like, their thinking has obviously gone way beyond that, that initial like prototype that they showed. So it'd be interesting to see where it goes.

• 14:51Nilay Patel?

  I don't want to overdo it. There's a real chance we're going to talk about this for an hour if we overdo it, because you could. But there's like a lot of history behind this conceptual idea, right? Microsoft itself had a product called OLE, Object Linking and Embedding, which you could pronounce Olay. Just saying it's a choice you could make. Apple famously had a version of this in the nineties called OpenDoc that Steve Jobs somewhat more famously killed. He actually used the phrase bullet in the head to refer to his killing of OpenDoc.

• 15:21Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 15:22Nilay Patel?

  This is a dream, right? That you're going to have one document with live data from multiple other documents that can be edited in multiple places at once. The dream has not panned out historically. Why do you, why does, why do you think it might pan out this time? What does Microsoft think it might pan out this time?

• 15:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, I mean, I think Microsoft, in the way that they're approaching it and the way that they're like integrating into the, into office and stuff, makes it possible to work out. It depends, I think it really depends on the implementation there and how they then bring it across, you know, to Windows and to all their other apps that are like widely used. Cause they, they can kind of force adoption in a way. They've, then they're, they're really leveraging Teams as like the hub for it, which is a word that they use for every time they talk about Teams. It's like, it's our hub for everything. And so I think a lot of the work you'll see going into Teams and anything like that will be related to Fluid. I think it's the idea of getting people to stay within that app. And that's a big thing to keep people in Teams.

• 16:21Nilay Patel?

  Right, so you're, you're at work, you've opened Microsoft Teams, someone shares a Word doc with you. You actually never go to open Word, you just edit it inside of Teams because it's a Fluid doc and that change carries over everywhere else.

• 16:34Speaker 06

  Yeah, and in the times that we're in right now, like imagine then having half your team to the left of that Word document talking, collaboratively talking and chatting just as you would in an office, I was typing away like it kind of, it kind of makes sense around that sort of thinking in the way that. Things are potentially going in the world. But yeah, I think that their core idea is is to meet people where they're doing work. And I think they're shifting their thinking around jumping in and out of apps. They're seeing there's a lot of collaborative web startups doing some really innovative stuff that ultimately friends office, right? And that's their that's the one thing that no one's really been able to shake off is the office addiction. Excel, there's there's nothing really that that comes close to that sort of stuff. So and

• 17:17Speaker 06

  to that to the to the the hold they have on that market. So so I think it's it's definitely inspired by that protecting office. But

• 17:25Speaker 05

  I gotta say, at some point, they're basically just inventing an operating system inside a chat client. Like, I feel like it's like, that's the direction. Like, they're gonna need windowing, you know, you're gonna be able to manage like file types or like fluid types, you're gonna need to be able to like, where does your chat window go? What does this thing do? What does that thing do? It all these people, like, it's all collaborative. So it's like a different frameworks. But fundamentally, I feel like we're just we're just doing the same thing again, but inside a chat app instead of on a on a desktop.

• 17:51Nilay Patel?

  It's like how all software eventually becomes Excel. Now it's Excel is eventually going to have an operating system.

• 17:58Speaker 06

  It's gonna take over the world.

• 17:59Nilay Patel?

  It's like pretty good.

• 18:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Okay, so that's fluid. The open dock stuff to me, like, the connection to that big 90s dream is there. And I just want to point it out to people. Again, I don't want to overdo it because that stuff all just like died in the vine. But this is a long dream. Like, people have had this idea of live multimodal documents for a long time. It is remarkable that Microsoft not only is bringing it back, because I mean, they tried it like twice or three times, but they're bringing it back with a different name. They're not like mentioning the other way. And what is particularly remarkable is like, they might pull it off this time, right?

• 18:33Speaker 05

  Well, the it's this time before it was always like, it was like Google Wave, like

• 18:38Nilay Patel?

  that was another cut at it.

• 18:39Speaker 05

  Yeah, but you would imagine like a sci fi alternate future where you're like, oh, it'd be so great if everybody used this. And like, it was so alternate and sci fi that like, it never got there. But in theory, the stuff that Microsoft is doing at this thing, like, we've all developed to the point where like, this actually solves actual problems in the real world now, not wouldn't it be cool to solve problems, you know, in five years when we're all living in the future?

• 19:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think the biggest difference this time is like when Apple tried it in the 90s, that they were struggling. Company wise anyway, so they didn't really have the backing to really pull that off and de-influence. And the biggest, I think the biggest thing that's different from that era now is that Microsoft's doing it in open source, which is kind of like, I know we just go, oh, it's open source, but it's like, that's still kind of crazy. Cause like the Microsoft, even five years ago, 10 years ago, they wouldn't have done it in this way. I don't think like the, the, the, the changes that I've seen that they're doing at the company being so much more open, even with Windows, knowing that come on like 10, 20 years, people are not going to be reliant on Windows anymore. They know that. So like they, they're bracing for that and they know that they need

• 19:44Speaker 06

  to be elsewhere. They, they need to be open and they even admitted this week, you know, we were wrong on open source. It's just that, I think it's that thinking, the shift that's, that's different this time. And they have, they have the, the user base to leverage as well, which is quite a powerful thing.

• 20:00Nilay Patel?

  I, I would say also that, again, I told you we could overdo it if we do it, but like, and then Apple's shipping computers like four megabytes of RAM and they built a browser that you could embed in every other application. Like we complain about Electron apps eating our computers with like eight gigs of RAM and Apple's like, what if you could embed a browser in every app on four megabytes of RAM? It was not going to succeed.

• 20:22Speaker 06

  Well, like even, even right now, we're talking in a web browser or video chain. This would have been unthinkable, like, you know, 10 years ago in like the, the way that we're doing it right now. So.

• 20:31Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So you brought up, uh, Windows opening up. That's another huge part of what happened at Build. Linux GUI apps can now run on Windows. They are getting closer and closer to Linux over time. Explain what's going on there.

• 20:43Speaker 06

  Yeah. So they have, they've had a project called Windows Subsystem for Linux, um, which essentially brings, I mean, it didn't before, but this, this year in an update that's coming in a couple of weeks, you get a full Linux kernel inside Windows, which is also kind of insane. Microsoft bringing Linux to Windows, which is, you know, like, okay. You would never imagine that in your wildest dreams. So that's that part of it. Now that enables a lot of dev work, a load of stuff that, you know, doesn't really, you and I wouldn't use. But what this GUI part of it does is you can basically get a Linux app, like, you know, you want to run a Firefox version of Linux, a Linux Firefox version, side by side with a Windows version, you can.

• 21:28Speaker 06

  So those basic Linux apps, and there might be not be a ton of them, but the most important part of it all is that it's all powered with hardware acceleration, GPU hardware acceleration, which is something that was missing and which is a lot of developers doing like AI and machine learning work have really like been clamoring for. And the most crazy part of it all is they're actually building a direct text driver and a system for Linux. So it's not going to be native to Linux, it's going to be specifically for the Windows subsystem for Linux. So specifically on Windows, so, but it's kind of crazy that they're building direct hits for Linux essentially. There's a lot of stuff going on, it's to unpack it was, yeah.

• 22:09Nilay Patel?

  This, yeah, this is just like a lot of things even five years ago, you would say that will never happen. And again, this is, you brought this up earlier. This seems related to, there's a future for Windows and I understand what it is, but it is not the future where it's the center of the universe. And so they're just broadening it out.

• 22:28Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think the main reason they're doing this is not necessarily the fear that other, you know, people are going to stop using Windows. I think it's the fear of, or the realization that developers just don't care so much about using Windows. They're using Linux or they're using Mac to develop apps and web apps. And those, and those dev environments are just better and, you know, macOS is based on Unix. So you've got a lot of that stuff just baked in, whereas on Windows, it's always just been ignored. And, you know, Linux has ruled the server world. So I think it's more getting, getting them back to having a good dev box to offer developers. And then they can bring them in and like, once you've got people running Windows,

• 23:09Speaker 06

  then they suddenly want to build apps for Windows because it's the client that they're using, you know? They're like, oh, why don't I build like a nice app, which is kind of, you know, in the Mac world, you have beautiful, beautifully designed apps that are very functional.

• 23:23Nilay Patel?

  Well, we, we, we used to. Now we have a lot of apps. This brings me to the last thing, which once I understand, the same time I don't understand it. And then a third way, I think it is just like a deeply funny farce, which is that universal Windows apps and regular Windows apps and when it's called Project Reunion, please, what the hell is going on with this? Because it, it seems like the 45th attempt to do something with Windows apps in a store.

• 23:53Speaker 06

  So I think this is something that's been kind of going on behind the scenes for like the last couple of years. We know that universal web, universal Windows apps just haven't really, you know, the original vision of them running across your phone, your Xbox, your HoloLens, your Windows, like that just, yeah, it hasn't worked out. So devs have just wanted to update their own Win 32 apps and make them look pretty and make them a little bit more modern, but not lose all that code.

• 24:17Nilay Patel?

  We can't call them modern because that was the name of Windows apps.

• 24:22Nilay Patel?

  This is like crazy.

• 24:23Speaker 06

  They've wanted to take those apps and not fundamentally reshape them into, you know, touch-based ones and whatever. So that work has been going on for a couple of years. So now it's got an official name, which is Project Reunion. But it's essentially unifying the Win 32 desktop apps and the UWP apps and the APIs that are shared between those. And what it basically means is say, like, there is one version of Windows 10, we think, right? But there's not, it's all split into like two updates a year. So there's all separate versions and they all have different API versions. So if Microsoft goes, oh, we're shipping this great new API, you can do all this crazy stuff with your app. That's great if you're on the latest version of Windows, which is like, you know, if you're on the latest version of iOS 14, or something like that. And then the old developers don't go

• 25:08Speaker 06

  for those APIs because they're just not like, not everyone's got that version of Windows yet. So now they're going to like polyfill the APIs down to these older versions of Windows. So devs don't have to worry about it. It just automatically translates the APIs essentially. So they can adopt these new features quicker and not have to worry about supporting the people who are, you know, enterprises don't typically take the latest update, for example.

• 25:32Speaker 05

  The comparison I would make here is Google Play Services.

• 25:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 25:35Speaker 05

  Right. What you just described is how Google manages Android versions, which is they know that Samsung isn't going to update a phone that's three years old, but Google has Play Services and they can just make sure the latest apps work on old operating systems because there's a Play Services API that they they control. Is that, is it the same idea?

• 25:54Speaker 06

  Kind of similar. It's a similar sort of like, sort of way of doing things. But it's basically they're aiming to get people. I think they've realized that people aren't going to build these new touch-based apps. So let's get them like, make it easier for them to like, adopt the most modern Windows features. And so they don't have to worry about the the older versions of Windows. So they can just, you know, update their app, make it a little bit more modern, you know, nice title bar and just some touch features and all that sort of stuff without having to worry about the older versions.

• 26:28Speaker 05

  Does this mean that we're gonna like, actually see, I don't know, more apps in the Windows Store that feel like they belong, like that take advantage of Windows, like newer Windows features? Or does this just mean that everybody that's making the the same old mouse-driven apps will now finally like, just make them look a little bit nicer? You know, like?

• 26:44Speaker 06

  I think it could, it could mean a little bit of both, but like the Windows Store. So like, you can update and, and, you know, make your app a little bit more modern without having to make it into a store app. Like, what the store gives you is like a sandboxing sort of experience. And not every developer is interested in that. And, you know, we've seen it. There's, there's not a bunch of them in there, not the apps that we use every day. And so I think we'll see, you know, I think people, like, basically a big part of this is when UI free, which is one of the big parts of Project Reunion. And that's about allowing these older Win 32 apps to get the sort of modern UI that you kind of get in these, I don't know what to call it, UWP apps essentially, but like the touch-based apps that you, that you get from the store.

• 27:28Speaker 05

  What are we gonna call these apps?

• 27:30Speaker 06

  Windows apps.

• 27:31Speaker 05

  I mean, that's what Microsoft just wants us to call it Windows apps, but like, we have, we've had many different ways to refer to like their latest, this is how you should make apps now. They're basically promising to abstract all that away. So no one has to worry about it anymore. They're just Windows apps. But yeah, I don't believe them. And we're gonna need a word.

• 27:48Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I will say, the great, the greatest mistake Microsoft has ever made.

• 27:52Speaker 05

  Yeah, dropping Metro.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  It's so not the greatest mistake Microsoft has ever made. But yes, they called them Metro Apps and then the German grocery stores sued them for trademark infringement and they didn't pay the grocery store. And they should have just paid the grocery store and now no one knows what their apps are called. And I contend for the sake of this podcast, that that is the greatest mistake that Microsoft has ever made. They should have paid the grocery store.

• 28:18Speaker 06

  But I think, I think them saying, yeah, they're just Windows apps is definitely a step down from the UWP stuff. But I think it's just a realization, right? Like this hasn't worked out.

• 28:27Nilay Patel?

  So that is a pretty huge walk back though, like outside of the jokes about Metro. There was a time when Microsoft was saying, this is the future of the Windows platform. Touch first. This led to the first Surface hardware, right? I mean, this was an entire massive corporate strategy for them. And now it seems like it is fully walked back.

• 28:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, I think like, and they even did it. I mean, when I, when I spoke to Joe Bell Fury last year for the Edge piece, like he, he even kind of admitted in that piece that like there was, you know, constraints that they were working around to have their browser based on UWP, just for the sake of it. Office obviously haven't really gone there. And it was all these like problems that they even had from their own teams not wanting to adopt it. And when, once you get that, if you, if you haven't bought your API, like Windows desktop apps have been around for like, you know, 20, 30 years. You don't just suddenly overnight sandbox them, secure them and completely change the whole interface of apps. That takes some, some time. They should have done what they're doing now back then. Like just gradually get people to update and modernize.

• 29:34Nilay Patel?

  At a very high level, what I feel like happened here is they looked at iPhone and especially the iPad and they're like, oh shit. I think it's great battery life and those apps are, it feels super fast because they're extremely limited in what they can do. And there is a massive developer ecosystem of making stuff and it's creating virtual cycle. We want that. So let's do that, but for Windows. And we're going to somehow transition everybody over to that new thing. And everyone was like, or I could just not be stuck in a tiny little sandbox and I could keep making the app do what I want it to do. And then they just like, they were just stuck in that for like almost a decade, like just forever.

• 30:11Speaker 06

  It was, it was definitely the iPad fear. I can imagine they saw the iPad and they're like, oh, this is the next iPhone. I think we all did think, you know, iPad would get to the sort of laptop killing phase, but it.

• 30:23Nilay Patel?

  That's another 45 minutes.

• 30:25Speaker 06

  Yeah. Stain for the can of worms, then.

• 30:29Nilay Patel?

  Well, I mean, it's true, right? I mean, the iPad, the limited feature set of iOS did not allow iPad apps to develop, may or may not be changing another can of worms. That, I think, brings me to actually the next set of stuff that happened with Microsoft. Dieter, the Surface Go 2 review is out. There is 13.5 inch Surface Book 3. Talk me through that stuff.

• 30:50Speaker 05

  Tom's also got the 15 inch Surface Book 3, I think, in his, in his hands right now. Yeah. Are you using it even as we speak?

• 30:56Speaker 06

  Not right now, but I have it next door.

• 31:00Speaker 05

  They're both, they're both like spec bumps, right? I, of course, love the Surface Go 2. They, they gave you an option for a better processor and that the screen is bigger. But fundamentally, to me, the Surface Book 2 is by the time you spec it up to what you need to have it be like a real computer that isn't just like a thing you give your kid to do their homework, you might as well buy a refurbished Surface Pro 6 or 7 and you'll get a bigger screen, a faster processor and a better experience. But if you really, really must have a tiny computer and that tiny computer must run Windows, then there's, there's, there's nothing else that you can buy. You have to buy the Surface Go 2.

• 31:36Nilay Patel?

  Who wakes up and is like, I must have a tiny Windows computer. Dieter, it's you.

• 31:40Speaker 05

  Me, I do.

• 31:43Speaker 06

  I think a lot of people see that $399 price, like the sticker price, right? Like.

• 31:47Speaker 05

  Well, I feel super conflicted about that price because, you know, it's, it's actually $499 because you gotta buy a keyboard. But then like, does that super base model with its slow storage and not enough RAM and a slow processor, like who is that for? Who gets to use that? And that's why I said like, give it to your kid to do their homework. Like, there is a place for computers like that, you know, just like there is a place for netbooks. I just don't think that that place should cost 500 bucks.

• 32:13Nilay Patel?

  Which was historically the target netbook price, right?

• 32:16Speaker 06

  They, they still don't have a Chromebook. That's, that's their problem. They don't have an operating system that's like.

• 32:21Speaker 05

  They got S mode, Tom. Come on.

• 32:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 32:23Nilay Patel?

  Dieter, didn't you tell me that you took the Go 2 out of S mode in like 30 minutes or something?

• 32:28Speaker 05

  Yeah, it took, it took about 30 minutes. I forget what it was Zoom, I think, that maybe gave me to it.

• 32:33Nilay Patel?

  It's brutal.

• 32:34Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:35Nilay Patel?

  Tom, tell us what the Book 3.

• 32:36Speaker 05

  Yeah.

• 32:37Speaker 06

  Yeah, the Book 3 is kind of like the Book 2.

• 32:42Speaker 06

  Yeah, like my thoughts on using it the last couple of days is it feels like the book two. It looks like the book two. There's not a lot of difference. I think I'm going to be struggle to find what's different, really. Like the difference is they've got a speedier SSD, although the model that I'm reviewing doesn't have that. And then the detach thing on the hinge is faster.

• 33:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I forgot to note that at my hands on. Yeah.

• 33:07Speaker 06

  It's minimal, though. Like, you still press it and you have to wait. So, but yeah, the holder is the same. It's just a spec bump, really.

• 33:17Nilay Patel?

  Did we ever figure out if the book architect who tweeted us is real or not?

• 33:21Speaker 06

  No.

• 33:22Nilay Patel?

  If you're listening to it, so three weeks ago, two weeks ago, I said, I don't believe anybody who uses a Surface Book ever pulls the display off the

• 33:30Speaker 06

  Ever since.

• 33:30Nilay Patel?

  I maintain.

• 33:31Speaker 06

  I have been getting emails.

• 33:33Nilay Patel?

  Don't do this. I'm doing it again. Well, I have a newsletter that goes people's inboxes and they reply. So I believe, I still believe this. One person tweeted at us and said, I'm an architect. I'm the, I'm the person from the ad who's always pulling the screen off and like handing it to clients. And I was like, oh, my God.

• 33:54Speaker 06

  While I am in my fancy Seattle loft, making Chemex coffee on the side while they're

• 33:59Nilay Patel?

  It's always perfectly lit here for some reason. And then people started tweeting at this person that they think he's fake, that he's a plant. Because he doesn't like, he's like a, doesn't have any followers. He like, doesn't tweet a lot. So it's a mystery whether we got astroturfed by like, Ben has been, it's like burner account.

• 34:22Nilay Patel?

  So if you're that person and you can provide proof, we're still interested. And Dieter is obviously in the market for emails from people who pull their two and ones apart.

• 34:30Speaker 06

  I'm definitely super interested in people who pull that apart because I never do it. And it's also super awkward because it's like, it's a giant, like the 15 inch version, it's a giant tablet. And you don't have the kickstand or anything to like, it's just like, it's super light, but it's just a bit.

• 34:46Nilay Patel?

  Tom, the architects of America have all settled on this.

• 34:51Speaker 05

  Do you think they're going to stick with this form factor with a snake hinge and the liquid metal, whatever it's called, that like locks it down and like the whole, the whole thing with the gap, like they're on their third iteration, they haven't changed since the last iteration. I feel like if they believe that you should have a separable tablet from like a base that's got lots of horsepower in it, like this, this can't be, this can't be what they actually want to make like forever.

• 35:15Speaker 06

  I feel like they're, they are held back by Intel. And I think, I think some of their plans.

• 35:20Speaker 05

  Aren't we all?

• 35:20Speaker 06

  Yeah. I think some of their plans they had for the Surface line, especially for the Pro were, you know, slightly derailed by, by Intel's stuff. And that's the biggest thing about the Pro, that the Book 3 like separates it from something that's the same sort of form factor and price is that it comes with 15 watt CPU, not 45 watt CPU. And that's, that's holding it back as well. Like it's their idea is developers and performance, but that is like a big, a big drop off there. So, because the performance is not nowhere near like what you get on a MacBook, for example.

• 35:53Speaker 05

  They should just put a 45 watt CPU in the base and then the tablet is just like, An ARM CPU. Yeah. All right.

• 36:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 36:00Speaker 05

  Well, there's my idea for you, Microsoft. We are way over, but Tom, thank you so much for covering Bill. You did a great job this week. A little inside baseball, like Tom doesn't sleep. I think he's a robot and that's the secret of the virg.

• 36:12Speaker 06

  This is, this is Tom 2.0.

• 36:15Speaker 05

  But no, Tom basically single-handedly covered Bill and it was incredible. So there's a lot of other stuff on the site, obviously, but if you're interested in what Microsoft is up to, you're interested in the future of Windows and Office and these documents, go check out Tom's coverage because it was great. Thanks for being here, man.

• 36:30Speaker 06

  Cool.

• 36:30Speaker 05

  Awesome. All right, we're gonna take a break. We're coming back. Liz Zapata is going to walk us through this week in Elon.

• 36:40Speaker 01

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• 37:40Nilay Patel?

  Liz Lopato, welcome back.

• 37:43Speaker 08

  Hey, long time no see.

• 37:44Nilay Patel?

  Liz, I don't know if we've said this to listeners before, but Liz is always... Every now and again, I get a Slack from Liz that's like, Elon is Elon-ing again. And then I know, I know, I know how her time will be spent. So it is May, meltdown May, as Liz has phrased it. There is, I would say, an enormous amount of Elon activity in this world.

• 38:03Speaker 08

  Yeah, we're going through a highly active Elon period, I would say. I find them difficult to predict, but once we're in one of the cycles, they do tend to extend for a while.

• 38:12Nilay Patel?

  So Liz oversees our science desk, our transportation desk, and our creators desk. So that's SpaceX, that is Tesla, and that is memes on the internet. And the intersection of those things is Elon Musk. So Liz, explain to us what happened this week in Elon.

• 38:28Speaker 08

  I'm gonna do my best. So you may remember that Elon Musk was like tweeting some stuff about the coronavirus, how he didn't think it was that serious. He thought the panic was worse than, you know, than the virus itself. And then he decided to open his Fremont factory that makes basically all of his cars in the US in violation of a county health order and sued the county in order to open early. And this week, he has dropped the lawsuit. We're looking at other sites for factories, specifically for the Cybertruck upcoming production. And we are also getting ready for a SpaceX launch next week that is going to be the first time

• 39:12Speaker 08

  that US astronauts have launched from US soil in almost 10 years. So I think that's most of what's going on with Elon. I'm probably forgetting some things because there's usually a lot of stuff going on with Elon, but I think...

• 39:26Nilay Patel?

  Well, one thing we haven't discussed on the Vergecast is I recently had a child with an amazing name.

• 39:30Speaker 08

  Oh, yeah, John.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  A E S

• 39:37Speaker 08

  Ash.

• 39:38Nilay Patel?

  Seventy one. Ash. Okay. That's fine.

• 39:40Speaker 08

  Yeah. A E is that that sort of symbol where you see the two of them fused together is, I think, pronounced Ash.

• 39:47Nilay Patel?

  Great. Okay. The baby's name is Ash. So he had a baby with Grimes. The lawsuit thing where he's threatened to sue the county and then he dropped it. What he, you know, it seemed like Alameda County was already saying they were working with Tesla. Did he just force their hand? What, what, is there a strategy there that we understand?

• 40:03Speaker 08

  Uh, not that I personally understand, although that doesn't mean that there is one. It just means that isn't one. It just means I don't understand it if there is. Um, but it seems like he really wanted to open early. And to keep this in context, you have to remember that all of the other car makers are pulling out all the stops in order to sell their cars right now. So you're getting like stuff like zero percent interest loans for seven years on one's cars, this kind of thing. And while, um, car sales have dropped, uh, starting in March, it's also the case that that has been uneven, depending on location. Um, and that certain things like SUVs have been less affected than other things, like

• 40:46Speaker 08

  for instance, sedans. So you can certainly see this as something where like you have this, uh, Model Y, which was recently introduced, this is its first year, and it is in fact a small SUV. And so it's in one of the areas where there hasn't been as much market falloff. And all of the other car makers are making very, very sweet deals. And if there aren't Model Ys around for people to buy, they may very well buy something else with one of those sweet deals. So there's like a sort of like kind of logic behind it, but I'm not sure that two weeks makes that much of a difference.

• 41:21Nilay Patel?

  And then we're seeing other car makers open and sort of like immediately close because of virus issues, right?

• 41:27Speaker 08

  Uh, sometimes it's the virus issues. Sometimes it's supplier issues. Sometimes it's both. Or I think we're going to be seeing a sort of a lot of hiccups around manufacturing, either because of supply chain stuff or because of virus stuff for most of this year. Like if, for instance, uh, most famously in the meatpacking plants, you'll notice that people are getting pretty sick because they're in close proximity. And it's it's spreading rapidly through that plant. And any manufacturing facility where people are in close proximity just normally is sort of hard to rejigger on the fly so that everybody's six feet apart. Like, just figuring out how to manufacture stuff in a safe way is probably going to take a while.

• 42:04Nilay Patel?

  So that's the push to reopen. We think that we understand some of the underlying logic there. It's a little shaky, especially the two-week time period. But other carmakers are blowing out sales to sell their crossover SUVs. Tesla has a new crossover SUV. They need to make it to sell it to compete. Okay, kind of buy it. Why the sort of bombastic attitude about it being a hoax, that it being overblown? Is there, is that just an act? I mean, I just, I kind of, at one point, Silicon Valley was the most responsive to, hey, there's this virus, right? It was the most, like, there was an article in Vox that, like, VC firms were the first

• 42:46Nilay Patel?

  to be in handshakes in America because they saw it, because they had connections in China because they're, you know, they just sort of saw it first. And it seems as soon as Elon kind of started saying, I don't buy it, I want to reopen, this is all overdone, a huge attitude has shifted. And, you know, he's an influential guy. Is there an underlying reason for that, do you think? Or do you think that he sincerely thinks it's overplayed?

• 43:09Speaker 08

  I don't know. I mean, I can't rule out that he sincerely thinks it's overplayed. Let's just be honest, biology has never been his strong suit. Like, when it comes to his Mars plans, he's like, you know, here's what the rocket looks like, and there's nothing about the life support systems. So I don't, I don't know. He may very well think it's overplayed. I do know that there are a couple of possible explanations for why he might be playing into this sort of political moment and this kind of political pushback. And the first is, obviously, that as long as Fremont Fremont is closed, he can't make cars in the US, period. There, and like, he can't sell anything, period. And he has, you know, so he has, he has a business to think about. So there's that. There's also, you know, the basic fact that his other company, SpaceX, its main client

• 43:54Speaker 08

  is the federal government. And the federal government is currently run by Republicans who also desperately want to reopen the country. So, you know, maybe he's playing ball because he's hoping that that will make President Trump happy and that might result in something good for SpaceX. I don't know. It is possible also that his search for another factory is playing in somehow. So the two places where that are essentially the finalists for the factory are Tulsa, Oklahoma, and Austin, Texas, both of which are states with Republican governors and Republican legislative bodies. So there are any of a number of things that could be happening, including just, you

• 44:38Speaker 08

  know, straight up sincere, "I just think this is bullshit and we should reopen," but it may be a political move.

• 44:44Speaker 05

  I mean, this is like the core of like, anytime Elon doth Elon, is he playing 4D chess or is he just popping off and is a little bit off the rails and eventually he'll come back? And it always seems like it's a distinction without a difference to me. I mean, I'm thinking specifically of his tweet about, you know, taking Tesla private. Like, there was some something behind it, but he was also just off the rails there. And I sort of feel like with this, it's the same sort of thing where it almost doesn't matter whether or not he's being sincere because the effects are pretty bad. And it matters way more now, or doesn't matter as much now what his like actual motivations are because the effects are like directly going to affect, you know, people living or dying.

• 45:28Speaker 08

  Yeah, I mean, look, a long-running theme of this week in Elon is that I don't really feel comfortable speculating about his motives a lot of the time because in many respects, they simply don't matter. Right? Like, I've seen, I've seen a lot of speculation about what's going on here. I think the New York Times published like four pieces, all of them op-eds about this. So there was like one that was like Kara Swisher, like, "He's doing it on purpose and there is a reason behind it." And another one was Greg Benson that was like, "Oh, he's doing this to get customers for his Cybertruck because the only people who drive trucks are Republicans, I guess."

• 46:03Speaker 05

  That is amazing.

• 46:05Speaker 08

  And then there was like another one that was like in the week in review section that was like, well, you know, he's always been bombastic and iconoclastic. And so this is just some classic Elon behavior. And like the, it doesn't matter. Like in some sense, it really truly does not matter. Um, what the motivation behind it is. So I, I personally have just been treating it as a black box. But you know, if people love to speculate, I certainly won't stop you.

• 46:29Nilay Patel?

  So the, this all plays into this tweet over the weekend. It's like just such a classic Elon moment for us to be talking about because it is so stupid. And yet it might portend so much. So Elon tweets, take the red pill with a picture of a red rose. Take the red pill is very much an alt right trope, right? It, it just, it is connected to the fringe right in a very direct way. And then the red rose is like the symbol of the democratic socialist of America. So it's very clearly a troll, but it led to Ivanka Trump retweeting him and saying taken. And then Lily Wachowski, who directed the

• 47:10Nilay Patel?

  matrix, saying fuck both of you. Just like, there's the whole culture just smashed together. But Liz, in the newsletter that's coming out, I've got the draft of it here. It's obviously after when you make the point that the, actually the factory competition, it does benefit Elon to play into sort of the conservative politics, the culture war of the moment.

• 47:31Speaker 08

  Yeah, I think so. Definitely. On two, in two ways, actually. There, there's the way in which directly shows up in the newsletter, which is, you know, conservatives are in charge of the places where he wants to put his factory. So playing nice with them is probably a good idea if he wants some like cool government subsidies. But also like, if you think about it, very famously, Tesla does not have an advertising budget, but advertising is not the only way that one accomplishes marketing. The other way to do it is through earned media. And so one of the ways that Elon has made sure that Tesla stays in the news is by acting out and in such ways that people will write about it. Um, and, and by giving him, you know, giving people essentially these moments of

• 48:12Speaker 08

  like big cultural whatever to react to, to keep him in the news. And I really genuinely think that for him, like, there's no such thing as bad press. It's all good press for him as much as he might like to complain about it because the plain fact of the matter is as long as he and Tesla are in the news. He doesn't have to advertise.

• 48:30Nilay Patel?

  So that is, you know, the last, the reason we brought this week in Elon was more tweets, more investor consternation. One of the arguments is if you're buying Tesla stock, you know, you're buying this CEO, you know, you're buying this character. Does there been any activity on that side of things? Because we were sort of expecting it to play out.

• 48:49Speaker 08

  I haven't seen a lot. I've seen some consternation among Tesla owners. Last week, I spoke to an epidemiologist who was really pissed about the way that Musk had chosen to violate the Alameda shelter in place order. And he was like, I own a Tesla.

• 49:07Speaker 08

  I can't believe this. So I, you know, I think that they're like, The Atlantic reported on some, some Tesla owners who feel betrayed by this. But I don't know that I've seen the same kind of consternation on the investor side. And I think that part of that is that the investors generally know what they're getting into, right? Like, it's not like it's a secret. Like, after 2018, like, there is a certain amount of instability that one does expect with Elon Musk as your CEO.

• 49:32Nilay Patel?

  Even if he's tweeting, the stock price is too high.

• 49:34Speaker 08

  I mean.

• 49:37Nilay Patel?

  To be fair, that's what he did.

• 49:39Speaker 08

  Yeah, that was, that was, I believe, the beginning of meltdown May, which has gone on for a year now. Yeah. So, you know, I, it doesn't, I don't imagine that you can be an investor in Tesla at this point and be surprised by this. You know what I mean? Like, there's been a fair amount of this kind of nonsense going on for a pretty long time. And like, if you are willing to invest in Elon Musk, and he is arguably, for a lot of investors, really the draw, then you know that you are, you are in for this, right? And like, I think from that perspective, it's kind of like, ah, well, you know, he's a mad genius. And so we have to let him be as eccentric as he likes in order to develop the very cool cars that we love.

• 50:18Nilay Patel?

  All right. So let's set aside Tesla for now. I'm sure we'll have you back in a week or two, just based on how things are going. Next week, and we'll have Lauren on next week after the launch. But just preview the SpaceX launch next week a little bit, because that is obviously Elon's other big company. And it is, I think, just an enormous moment for American Spacelight again. So Crew Dragon is launching. Just walk us through it real quick.

• 50:41Speaker 08

  Yeah. So one thing to keep in mind is that we haven't launched. American astronauts from American soil since I think 2011. Uh, Lauren would know that for sure, but I'm pretty sure it's 2011. And so basically on May 27th, two NASA astronauts are going to put themselves in the newly developed spacecraft in Florida and head to the ISS on the Crew Dragon, which is the very first private spacecraft to ever take astronauts from the US to the space station. And it's been like, I don't know, 10 years in the making, I think. It's, it's, if it's successful, it'll be the very, very first time that we've managed to have a

• 51:21Speaker 08

  commercial, uh, flight to the ISS with astronauts on it rather than, um, a flight that was developed by NASA. So, you know, there are a couple of things that are, that make this pretty significant, right? Like first of all, the return of human flight, space flight to the US. But second, the commercial crew program. And, uh, this has been something that NASA has been working on for quite some time with a bunch of goals. Um, and the biggest is that private companies create the next generation of spacecraft, um, instead of NASA in the hopes that that might be cheaper. And so, you know, once those things are complete, then the companies can potentially turn a profit by, uh, selling seats on those spacecraft to, for instance, space tourists.

• 52:03Nilay Patel?

  So is this the first step towards space tourism? Or is this just one step in a long road in commercial space flight in, for NASA?

• 52:11Speaker 08

  Well, Lauren will have a more informed opinion than me, but I think it's the first step towards a long road of commercial development. I don't think that this is a first step necessarily towards space tourism because there are so many question marks around that still. I think that that actually is going to take longer to develop than most people realize. But I do think that it is pretty interesting in terms of the commercial crew development and the possibility of, you know, having, having rockets be made by somebody other than the US government and commissioned by people other than the US government. Like those, that, that is a thing that is now possible.

• 52:44Nilay Patel?

  So just to bring this back to Elon and then we'll let you go. SpaceX is about to have a huge moment, uh, next week, the 27th. Everyone should watch that launch. We're going to cover the hell out of it. It is just a gigantic moment. SpaceX seems insulated from this crazy this time. Why is that?

• 53:00Speaker 08

  Well, I mean, there is like the sort of physical distance, right? Like SpaceX is in LA and Tesla is in Northern California. You know, the, the sort of office headquarters are in Silicon Valley and the factory is in Fremont. So like, there is like that physical distance between them, even though the two do in some ways overlap. But I also think it's the case that they are just doing very different things. Like, they're both transportation, obviously, but they're different kinds of transportation for different clients. So you don't really have to advertise for SpaceX. You don't have to do marketing for SpaceX. You don't have to be on Twitter, like, getting people interested in SpaceX because the only people you have to get interested are the government people who will sign the check for you.

• 53:43Speaker 08

  Um, so like figuring that stuff out is different. Um, and I think that's a big part of like why SpaceX has been sort of insulated because like these kinds of antics, like, they don't really matter in the same way to SpaceX's customers. And SpaceX, unlike Tesla, is a private company. So if the investors are pissed, I'm not necessarily going to see that in public because they can just call Elon.

• 54:09Nilay Patel?

  You know what I was gonna say is SpaceX also has, uh, an incredible, somewhat under-recognized number two who seems to be actually running the company.

• 54:19Speaker 08

  Oh, Shotwell, yeah. She's phenomenal. To my mind, like, part of what is maybe an undersung virtue of Elon's is correctly delegating to Gwen Shotwell, who has done a really, really wonderful job with SpaceX over the years.

• 54:32Nilay Patel?

  I think that he does not have that person with Tesla, and sometimes I think it, it shows in some ways, and sometimes I think he likes Tesla being the chaos monster that it is. All right. Liz, thank you so much. This week in Elon, you can subscribe to it. I'm gonna make Liz write it every week until the Elon-ing is complete. I don't have a timeframe for that, but the Elon-ing is, is happening again, so subscribe. And, uh, we'll have Lauren on next week to talk about this flight, but if you're listening to this, mark your calendar right now, May 27th. Uh, it's, it's a moment. If you're a Verge person, you're listening to this, we should all basically watch it together, so check that out. We'll have tons of coverage of that. Thanks again, Liz.

• 55:07Speaker 08

  Yep.

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• 56:13Nilay Patel?

  Ashley Carman.

• 56:14Speaker 09

  Hello.

• 56:15Nilay Patel?

  How you doing?

• 56:16Speaker 09

  Hello, I'm good, you know, in my closet podcasting. Literally.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  That's, that's the story podcast. Andrew, I'm gonna blow up your spot. My, I'm very excited for a story that Andrew's working on, which is the Blue Yeti is the mick of the pandemic. Because every time I talk to anybody, they're on the show, they all...

• 56:31Speaker 09

  So good.

• 56:32Nilay Patel?

  So everyone's in a closet with a Blue Yeti. It's great. Except for us, we're very fancy. Well, we're podcasting about podcasts now, Ash.

• 56:37Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 56:38Nilay Patel?

  We're gonna do it. Massive shakeup in the podcast world this week. Joe Rogan going to Spotify. But then you wrote a bigger piece about Spotify's grand ambitions. Walk us through what is going on here.

• 56:49Speaker 09

  So this week, it came out that Joe Rogan, host of the Joe Rogan Experience, a controversial but massively popular show, Rogan says he gets, he claims he gets 190 million downloads a month, has never been on Spotify before, famous holdout, and Spotify announced this week that now... Joe Rogan is going to become a Spotify exclusive show, meaning that his YouTube video podcast will be taken down and will not exist.

• 57:15Nilay Patel?

  That's a huge deal.

• 57:16Speaker 09

  That's a hu- because Joe Rogan is synonymous with YouTube podcasting. So there, he's no longer going to have that on YouTube. And also, the audio will only live on Spotify as well. And Spotify just recently started testing, obviously, it's going to be a full launch, video podcasts in app last week with other popular YouTube podcasters. So clearly, this is all part of a grander scheme to potentially bring more YouTube podcasters over to its platform.

• 57:40Speaker 05

  Can you briefly sort of talk about the idea of YouTube podcasting? Because I think that people are, you know, are listening to the Vergecast. People are familiar with, with podcasting as like a concept because it's been around for 20 years, but like the specific kind of podcasting that happens on YouTube is very different, right?

• 57:55Speaker 09

  Yeah, so a lot of times what will happen is people record, you know, Vergecast used to be a video podcast.

• 58:00Speaker 05

  Oh my, we're gonna get so many emails right now.

• 58:04Speaker 09

  Sorry, had to. But the idea is that, you know, you would be doing the show regularly and a lot of podcasters just do it regularly. But the difference is they can cut their show up into video clips and benefit from Google's search algorithm. So, you know, interviewing Sundar, you can cut that up into a clip and say, interview with Google CEO. And when people search for that, you might be the first podcast that comes up.

• 58:28Nilay Patel?

  So Rogan, he's like played this to perfection, right? Because he has big guests, he cuts those interviews up into 10,000 clips, he's all over YouTube. I actually, I've only experienced the Joe Rogan experience as YouTube clips. So it goes, all of that is going away. And then his massive podcast, which is usually, I think most people probably listen to it in Apple Podcasts, because that is where all the action is. All of that is moving to Spotify. What is the price tag for that deal?

• 58:55Speaker 09

  Reportedly, it could be anywhere from tens of millions to over 100 million, depending on performance on the platform.

• 59:04Nilay Patel?

  So up to 100 million for just one show, Joe Rogan. He's not working for Spotify. He said it was a licensing deal. He has creative control. A big move for Spotify, because as you said, the show is controversial for a variety of reasons we don't need to go to, but it is controversial, but he retains creative control. They also just bought Gimlet. Which is a huge deal. They make Reply All and they bought The Ringer, which is Bill Simmons. Bill Simmons also has a massively successful podcast. That's a lot of things to buy. I think you added up, you said the total price tag is 700 million for this.

• 59:39Speaker 09

  They also acquired Parcast, which does true crime and horror. So basically, they've locked, Joe Rogan, you know, is his own big star thing. But as far as the other intellectual property they own, they have sports covered now, true crime and horror, prestige, Reply All, Gimlet shows, which turn into often, they have turned into TV shows, so prestige narrative. And then they have Anchor, which they acquired as well, which is a creative tool that gets beginner podcasters on their platform using their tools in their space.

• 1:00:08Nilay Patel?

  So that's, I mean, that's the whole soup to nuts. That's like all the big categories, big personality, and then some creative tools. And then there's an ad element to this too, right?

• 1:00:17Speaker 09

  Right. So the difference between Spotify and what we would normally think of as a podcast is podcasts, RSS. I just know Dieter's gonna.

• 1:00:26Nilay Patel?

  I'm just standing by. There's like, there's a whole open web argument to be had, but keep going.

• 1:00:32Speaker 09

  So typically podcasts are distributed through RSS feeds. It's a very open ecosystem. You can have an RSS feed to distribute it across platforms. Spotify does not use RSS feeds. You have to give it permission to access. You have to basically upload your show. And so also the difference is that typically with podcasts, you would download the show and then listen to it. Spotify is completely mostly streaming. So they invented this thing called streaming ad insertion, and that's really different from how ads are distributed now in podcasts. Podcasts are just starting to get into something called dynamic advertising, which allows the ads to be switched out depending on the week or day and the ad deal that's happening at that time. For example, if you're flowers.com, I hear this example all the time. If you're flowers.com, you don't want to run your ad in the middle of July, but you definitely want to run it during Mother's Day. So they

• 1:01:17Speaker 09

  can sub in this ad that'll appear in every Vergecast episode during Mother's Day. What Spotify is doing with streaming ad insertion is that as people are streaming live, it will insert ads that are specifically targeted to them. And because Spotify knows what you listen to, music wise, but also podcast wise, which is way more telling, knows where you live, it knows your gender, knows your age, I guess it knows your name. And who knows if they're buying any third-party data or anything like that, they can do a lot more targeting than you could with any other platform. So they really have control over the entire ecosystem and can put these ads in.

• 1:01:49Nilay Patel?

  So I mean, that's like the, that is Google's business model. That is Facebook's business model, right? That is the big ad targeting machine is coming for podcasts in a way that just hasn't. I'll, I'll give this example because it's very funny and also so I can apologize. If you listen to this sooner interview, we recorded a promo for other ads on the Box Media Network and they got accidentally inserted into our sooner episode for some people. So you're like halfway through this and our interview would stop and the ad would be me telling you to listen to sooner episode. That's like a good example of how clunky dynamic ad insertion is right now. So my apologies free to all those people. It's like five people. I hope you laughed. I laughed, but that happens at download, right? So if you download the show today, that flowers.com ad happens at download.

• 1:02:34Nilay Patel?

  But you're saying, and so the archive into the future, it loses its value. Spotify can do it in real time, no matter when you're listening, not just because they're streaming. So that creates like an enormous amount of value for them. And also it lets other kinds of advertisers participate, right? Like that's the idea is they're going to expand the market for podcasts.

• 1:02:52Speaker 09

  Right, right now it's just that I believe it's still in testing phases and limited partners, but you could easily see this being even good for local, like Facebook, local advertising. I know you live in Brooklyn. I'm a restaurant owner. Here's my ad for my restaurant on your pot, on this podcast.

• 1:03:07Nilay Patel?

  Right, and all, and all that restaurant owner has to do is download the Anchor app, which is an easy podcast creation app, right? Like this is always my theory was that they were making an easy tool for someone like that. And so then that could automatically inserted and targeted.

• 1:03:19Speaker 09

  Yeah, right now, again, limited, so they're not doing that yet. But of course you can see where this goes.

• 1:03:23Nilay Patel?

  You trill do with RSS, but I mean, I'll, I'll, I'll take the bait. The, the big change here is like when platforms get built, now they get built. It's like one big company that like owns the whole stack or tries to control as much of the stack as possible. So like you can imagine a podcasting future that looks much more like radio with like local stations and like, you know, local ad sellers at the local stations and some of them get bought up in clear channel. But like, there's a whole bunch of like individual entities doing stuff and that's sort of analogous to RSS.

• 1:03:49Speaker 05

  RSS. But now, and the way the internet seems to work these days, Google and Facebook get a whole bunch of ad money for like, stuff that you look at with your eyes. And Spotify is trying to do the same thing with stuff that you hear with your ears. That's how you hear things. Unless you've got like, a really cool like, synesthesia thing.

• 1:04:08Nilay Patel?

  I hear with my heart, Dieter.

• 1:04:10Speaker 05

  But it has made a bunch of people, and like, specifically like Marco Arment, who makes the Overcast Podcast app, very mad. And I am very sympathetic to being mad and being sad about the death of like, RSS and open standards, right? But like, you can make so much more money if you're able to do ad targeting. So there's that. And then the other thing that is sort of surreal and weird to me about this is, the company that like, makes the platform that enables you to listen, is also now making the shows. And so there's like, there's no separation between the platform that provides you with the content, and the platform that owns and makes the content. Because they can make a lot more money that way, too. It's always been that way in TV, but there's always been like, stuff around the edges. But it's increasingly weird

• 1:04:54Speaker 05

  to think about the internet working that way. You know, you don't think of, you used to not think of, anyway, like, Google, you just go to all Google stuff. You use Google as a portal to other stuff. Somebody else provided the content. And that's just not Spotify's game here at all. They own the content, they own the ads, they own the distribution. And that is a wild world.

• 1:05:12Speaker 09

  And they own the tools to create it.

• 1:05:14Speaker 05

  Of course.

• 1:05:15Nilay Patel?

  Well, so the other example there is, yeah, there's a Google example. There's obviously the Netflix example. Do you think Spotify is trying to be more like Netflix?

• 1:05:22Speaker 09

  So, initially, when this news happened, we were thinking, okay, you know, for a video that we did, which everyone should go watch on The Verge's YouTube channel, we were thinking, okay, could we make this comparison to Netflix? And, I don't know, I don't, because I really think ads are going to be a huge part of this. Because 99% of podcasts aren't Joe Rogan. They're not going to be exclusive for Spotify. They just aren't. So, they're going to be open on every platform. Why wouldn't you be? I think the ads, if they fully are like, you know what? Anyone can come to us and pay for us to do their ads for them. That's where I think they're really going to make the money versus Netflix, which is like, we want people to subscribe specifically for our content. Right now, you could be a free Spotify user and access Joe Rogan. You don't have to pay.

• 1:06:04Speaker 09

  And I honestly don't really see that changing because they make money off of you listening to the show, regardless of if you're free or not. And I also want to point out that if you are a Spotify premium user, you will still hear ads in Spotify podcasts.

• 1:06:17Nilay Patel?

  Really?

• 1:06:17Speaker 09

  Yeah. I couldn't believe it. I asked them about this at CES because that's when they announced the streaming ad insertion. And I spoke, I believe, to Dawn, but regardless. She was saying that that's the user behavior for podcasts is hearing ads. So they didn't feel they needed to change that. I almost am like, did I hallucinate this? Because that is a crazy justification. Like, I still am like-

• 1:06:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but they were probably coming off the huge Luminary controversy, where Luminary was like advertising their podcasts and needed ads, and they got like knocked down. I bet they were just like, we'll see if we can play it another way. I mean, they're gonna have a fast forward button, right? They're not gonna force you to listen to the ad.

• 1:06:51Speaker 09

  Right, yeah, I skip ads, so you could do that. But still, I think that's a pretty big deal. That, in theory, if they keep that, they're double dipping in revenue there. So you're subscribing and they're getting that ad money. Brilliant. And I do think I should just point out, sorry, I'm just basically telling you my video that I did. But I do, I do really want to point out for anyone who doesn't realize this, that the reason Spotify cares so much about podcasts is because with music streaming, which is what we typically think of when we think of Spotify, the company has to pay per listen. So every time you listen to Rihanna, they have to pay Rihanna's record label. With podcasts, it's making money on every listen, at least for its exclusive shows. And for the non-exclusive shows, it doesn't have to pay anything.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  What is the, so that we talked about this controversy that immediately ensued when Rogan went exclusive, and one assumes every new Ringer show will be exclusive. We assume new Gimlet shows will be exclusive. That has created, I think, a rift. There was already like this bubbling chaos in the podcast community, but now it's here, right? People are like, you shouldn't even call them podcasts, which is like just my favorite argument to have. But it's like boiled over. Tell me, what does that split look like? What are the sides of that fight?

• 1:08:02Speaker 09

  I mean, people in podcasting really see it as the last open frontier for the open web. And losing that is a very big deal to them because for them- That's the beauty of podcasting is anyone can get into it. Anyone can start an RSS feed. Anyone can have the same platform access as everybody else. And now we're starting to see a little bit of people being prioritized potentially. I mean, you have to keep in mind Spotify says they won't do this, but like you have to keep in mind Spotify is also trying to become a tastemaker and curate shows and playlists and use their algorithm to generate algorithm playlists. So you start and they have marketing money.

• 1:08:40Speaker 09

  The resources behind the shows that are Spotify exclusives is so, are so, is so much more vast than what most other shows have. And I think people are really starting to realize that and also mourn the loss of what they see as the last open web bits.

• 1:08:55Speaker 05

  The surreal part of this to me is the thing that enables the openness of the current podcast ecosystem based on RSS is Apple and iTunes.

• 1:09:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I mean, that's where I'm, that's where I'm going.

• 1:09:07Speaker 05

  How? It's so amazing. And so I, I, I actually don't love always looking at tech stories as like which corporate titan is going to win. And what does this mean for the other corporate titan's business? But Apple is not like, they want to get into this, right?

• 1:09:21Speaker 09

  Apple, Apple, I truly know nothing, but Apple really shocks me. It's shocking because they had such a lead, such a lead. And, you know, they could come back. They're the default podcast player on every iOS device. And theoretically, Google, which is great at advertising, is, has Google Podcasts now. They could theoretically even enter the race and you still have to third party download Spotify. So that gives them some of a leg up. But up and up until now, and even now, Apple seems to just be like, yeah, they haven't said anything. There's rumors they're going to start making their own shows, but those are rumors.

• 1:09:57Speaker 05

  Planet of the App should have been a podcast. That's the answer.

• 1:10:00Nilay Patel?

  So that's where I was going in a different way. So in a different and a better way.

• 1:10:07Speaker 05

  Wow.

• 1:10:08Nilay Patel?

  So Julia wrote this week, Julia Alexander wrote a piece about Apple TV plus just kind of like falling flat. Okay. And I think it is mostly fallen flat. Would it have been better if they had taken the entire budget for the morning show? And instead of paying Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and Steve Carell? If they had paid Joe Rogan to make him Apple exclusive, right? Would that have been a better bet for Apple in terms of owning a content ecosystem than trying to run up against Netflix and Disney Plus and Warner Media, right? Like, but they picked the biggest players to roll up against in TV, but they they could have just won in podcasting. But it doesn't seem like Apple wants to do ads.

• 1:10:47Speaker 09

  Well, so that's the whole thing. Apple doesn't charge anyone to use Apple Podcasts, so they don't have that system built yet. They also don't do ads. So Spotify, if you don't subscribe, they get the ad money. If you subscribe, they still get the ad money. They're making money any which way you cut it. But I think Spotify's strategy speaks to the idea that you notice. I can't think of a major, major show that Spotify has launched on its own without prior existing IP that has been a phenomenal, huge hit. So I think what Spotify's showing us is that you need these mega stars to come on your platform. And there's only so many of those in podcasting. Really, there's not many. And NPR is never going to do that. I mean, I would think the dailies and the New York Times. Joe Rogan is one of the few.

• 1:11:29Speaker 09

  And now Gimlet and Parcast, like, they've locked up some solid stuff. And I think that Apple would run into some of the same issues they did with Apple TV Plus, which is it is hard to launch new shows, both visually and audio shows.

• 1:11:44Nilay Patel?

  I also think what I don't want to overread it with the Joe Rogan like controversy stuff. But Apple is a corporation, the way it holds itself out, the way it behaves. Having like owning access to Joe Rogan and having any sort of direct financial relationship to that show and that cast of characters and that tone, I think is like, Apple can't do it. Right? And that was like the criticism of the TV stuff at the beginning, whether or not you believe it's true. Like that Tim Cook was like, all of our shows are too mean. Right? And like, yeah, the shows are whatever they are. Some of the morning shows are good, some of them are very bad. But like, podcasting is more direct. You make more of it, like literally right now, we're just talking, right? And like, there's just way more room to make controversial stuff without checks and balances.

• 1:12:30Nilay Patel?

  Apple, like, that's too dangerous for Apple. And I think you just look at that and like, we can't, we can't do that.

• 1:12:35Speaker 09

  Being an editorial property comes with responsibility. Like, this is a media company we work at.

• 1:12:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:42Speaker 09

  If I go off and say something fricking crazy, you're gonna have to do something about it.

• 1:12:47Nilay Patel?

  It's a threat I live under every day of my life. What did Ashley do today? Well, not, but I think Spotify just has, and again, I don't want to like overplay, but Spotify publishes artists, they publish music, like they are used to the core service they provide being connected to controversial people like Spotify. Kanye West is on the Spotify platform. But, but like iTunes exists. The, the, Apple found a way. Apple found a way, but like there's, there's a remove in the way that Spotify markets its service. iTunes exists and Apple's big move is like, everyone gets a U2 album.

• 1:13:21Speaker 09

  I'm trying, I'm trying to remember because when the R. Kelly stuff happened, I remember, I'm pretty sure Spotify took off R. Kelly content.

• 1:13:29Nilay Patel?

  Yep. And then it was a massive backlash and then they undid it, right? And I think they decided it on that day, right? We are not gonna, we are not gonna exert editorial influence over the art, like what the art people want to consume on our platform.

• 1:13:41Speaker 09

  I can't remember where Apple was in that fight though.

• 1:13:44Nilay Patel?

  I think Apple is also equally hands off, but Apple doesn't, I think at that time they were not programming playlists and they certainly did not say it out loud in the same way. So I think Spotify is just more comfortable like with that approach with being the arbiter of culture in that way, where I think Apple thinks of itself as a service writer. Now, I'm sure that, like I said, I don't want to overplay it, but I think that's part of the reason Apple hasn't just like waded in fully. And I do think the other question is Google, because Google does have dynamic ad insertion tech that can certainly figure it out. They have a massive corpus of data about people and they have a default podcast player and they have the Google assistant and speakers in everybody's houses and they're nowhere as far as I can tell.

• 1:14:26Speaker 09

  Yes, they have a ways to go and they definitely are nowhere on exclusive shows, but the Google's scary. Google's a scary one because as you mentioned, the day, if you're worried about privacy, Spotify's spooky. But you know, you're like, okay, they can't read my emails.

• 1:14:42Nilay Patel?

  Spotify's like Scooby Doo scary and Google's like Saw scary.

• 1:14:47Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:14:49Speaker 09

  Google knows shit. So like, that is scary.

• 1:14:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but like, at the same time, like, Amazon is nowhere on podcasting and they have speakers in everybody's houses, right? Like, it's interesting that Spotify, everyone knew the opportunity was there. People have been waiting and talking about whether Apple's gonna do anything for years. You have been covering, like, what are you doing? Anybody, does anybody Apple want to talk about your podcast plans? And they're like, no, we're good. We've been waiting with Google. We've been waiting in some cases with Amazon and Alexa, like, are you gonna make this easier, you're gonna make it better? Spotify just spent the money. And I think part of the consternation out there is, they spent the money, it seems like they have a

• 1:15:34Nilay Patel?

  good plan, they're gonna execute it. And there's no one organized to compete with that spend. So if you just look at the things that we complain about in terms of monopolies, you were just saying we have a YouTube video. YouTube is a monopoly. There's no one organized to compete with YouTube to deliver a video. Facebook, Instagram is a monopoly, right? Like, there's no one organized to compete as a social network with that. This feels like it could be the same term for podcasts, but all these other big companies clearly saw the opportunity and decided to just blow it, which is mind boggling.

• 1:16:07Speaker 05

  But again, I'm just, I'm sorry, like, the solution to, we're afraid of a company getting too big, shouldn't be another big company will save us.

• 1:16:15Speaker 09

  I mean, and that's what's really sad about what could happen in the podcasting industry is that there are so many independent players here, like Overcast, you mentioned, Pocket Cast, Stitcher, the list goes on. There's Podcast Addict, which we can talk about if you guys want a little bit later. But, you know, there's a lot of independent podcast apps, and it really sucks to see that they might simply just be pushed out because they can't compete. Apple and Google could maybe get in the game. Like, Rogan's deal is a licensing deal. I don't know the terms, but eventually it will be up, and man, that dude is gonna cash out.

• 1:16:49Speaker 09

  But but other than that, like, they could potentially compete. Whereas these smaller players, I don't know what happens there.

• 1:16:58Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it just seems like the revenue piece is the one like Apple. If Apple wants the open ecosystem to prevail for its player to-

• 1:17:06Speaker 05

  It's such a weird thing to hear you say.

• 1:17:08Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. In 2020, if you were like, Neel, you're going to be begging for another internet giant to compete. I'd be like, yeah, yeah, that's what I'm doing now. It's May 2020.

• 1:17:16Speaker 05

  In 2020, you just said the sentence, "Apple wants the open ecosystem to win." I'm just pointing that out.

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  It's been a surprising time. We're all learning about ourselves, but I think they do. I think they would rather not have Spotify just suck up all of your podcasts listening and then suck up all of your music listening and then end up in another place where they're going to sell the HomePod. And instead of selling you the Apple Music service, what everybody wants is to use their Spotify subscription on it, which is where they're cruising to right now.

• 1:17:44Speaker 09

  Well, last year, Spotify did a test for something they called Car Thing. That was, I don't remember how many people they gave it out to. It was a small number, but it was a test for a kind of like smart speaker in your car that you could use to launch Spotify. And I'm pretty sure at the time, they trademarked Home Thing, too. So there is a world in which Spotify is like, screw it. We're making our own smart speaker. And since you all listen to your podcasts and music on Spotify, here we are. Here's your speaker. Boom. We'll give it to you for free.

• 1:18:14Speaker 05

  I want anybody who has access to the person in charge of Spotify's mergers and acquisitions division to grab that person's phone and delete Sonos' contact information from it.

• 1:18:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh, man. We're all doomed. Hey, we just had Patrick on. He didn't hint at anything like that. Anyway, he was like, "We need more companies." That's like Spence's whole deal. All right, Ashley, real quick, tell us the Podcast Addict story, then we gotta get out of here.

• 1:18:40Speaker 09

  So kind of like what you were mentioning with Apple having to sort of police if they start getting into editorial content. Something happened this week with Google where they have a popular podcast app in the Play Store. Supposedly, it was about to reach 10 million downloads before this happened. Google took this app, Podcast Addict, down from the Play Store over this past weekend because it implemented a new developer policy around COVID-19 content, saying that if you publish or display, I guess, COVID-19 content, it has to be approved by a health organization or, I think, a government body. And so this Podcast Addict app- Just catalogs RSS feeds. It's not, it doesn't make its own content. It doesn't publish

• 1:19:21Speaker 09

  anything. And Google mistakenly, according to Hiroshi, which, you know, at whatever, he came, he came in and said it was a mistake, but they took it down and they said that it was a mistake, but they took it down because he had, there were, well, there was COVID content. Like you guys talk about COVID content. You're not approved by the health organizations to talk about these things.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  Not even a little bit.

• 1:19:42Speaker 09

  So like in theory, Vergecast could have gotten him taken down. He has no idea what the, the owner has no idea what took his app down specifically, but this is kind of speaks to this idea that podcasts, there's so much content, there's so much voice content. It is hard to police unless you're going to kick creators off who are controversial.

• 1:19:59Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So like, you know, Apple had that, they might have backed down, but Apple and Google are in the unique position of running the app stores where competitive products, we talk this all the time, the competitors, their own apps are there and they can shut them down. And Spotify has been just making noise about that being unfair in Europe, here, just everywhere anyone will listen. And I think we're about to just see that boil over as they get really competitive in podcasts and start to threaten other pieces of the pie. Like, I would imagine this fight is going to get bigger, not smaller. That's just my guess.

• 1:20:33Speaker 09

  The listeners should know I'm rubbing my hands together. Very ominously.

• 1:20:38Nilay Patel?

  Ashley's got a great ear of reporting ahead of her. All right. So we're going to let you get back to that. We've, as always, we've gone over. It's just the way the Vergecast goes lately. Ashley, thank you so much. Your videos are already up on YouTube?

• 1:20:49Speaker 09

  Yeah.

• 1:20:50Nilay Patel?

  Go watch that, share with your friends, explain that podcasting will never be the same. That's how I want you to tweet it. I want you to tweet Ashley's video that says podcasting will never be the same and then tag Ashley. We're just going to blow you up.

• 1:21:00Speaker 09

  You'll scare people.

• 1:21:01Nilay Patel?

  All right. We had Sundar on the interview show this week. I'm, I was, it's already in the can, so I can promise it. Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack, interview show on Tuesday. Ashley and I interviewed the CEO of Tinder, Ellie Sidman, that's coming out. We, we've got just a murderer's row of interviews coming up. I'm really excited about it. So that's on Tuesday. Stuart Butterfield, CEO of Slack. We're just going to keep rolling that. We'll be back next Friday with the chat show. On and on we go. You can tweet at us. We had a lot of people on today. I'm at reckless, Deirdre's at backline, Ashley.

• 1:21:31Speaker 09

  Ashley R. Carmen.

• 1:21:32Nilay Patel?

  Tom is at Tom Warren and Liz is at MS Lapato, Ms. Lapato. That's all correct. I got them all. Very good. We love your feedback. Tweet at us. We'll be back soon. Rock and roll. Paul.

• 1:22:01Speaker 10

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• 1:22:31Speaker 11

  Everyone's got a hard question about AI. Your job, your kids, where it's going. Anthropic was built to surface those questions and share what it finds along the way, because there's hope in hard questions. Ask yours at claud.ai/spotify and keep thinking. That's claud.ai/spotify.