Twitter blue check chaos and CarPlay squabbles

The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, and Alex Cranz discuss the end of Twitter and the future of infotainment. Links: The color quiz Twitter tried to hide who pays for their checkmark, but life finds a way. https://twitter.com/AlexBlechman/status/1641905502043926530 Substack is getting a Twitter-like ‘Notes’ feed Elon Musk’s obsession with blue checks is a verified problem Twitter yanks the New York Times’ checkmark in verification overhaul Today in Twitter: where are the retweet labels, and why did Doge replace the bird? Spotify shuts down its Clubhouse competitor Spotify shows how the live audio boom has gone bust Everybody hates GM’s decision to kill Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for its EVs The rest of the auto industry still loves CarPlay and Android Auto GM is cutting off access to Apple CarPlay and Android Auto for its future EVs Could a new PlayStation handheld be built for Remote Play? I like the idea Asus ROG Ally handheld gaming PC is no April Fools’ joke Walmart’s redesigned website looks better than Amazon Donald Trump was arrested, please like and subscribe The Home Assistant SkyConnect is a combination Zigbee and Thread dongle for better smart home control Vote for us in the People’s Voice Webby Awards for Best Technology Podcast! Email us at [email protected] or call us at 866-VERGE11, we love hearing from you. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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

• 0:00Speaker 00

  Company spend can be complicated. Managing it shouldn't be. AMEX Corporate connects cards, expenses, and payments all in one place. That's less time managing work and more time doing work that matters. Built to simplify, designed to scale. This is AMEX Corporate. Get started at go.amex/ammexcorporate. Terms apply.

• 0:28Speaker 01

  When it comes to AI, there is what we could do and what we should do. What will we decide? I'm Kimberly Nebula, host of the Pondering AI Podcast from SAS. Every episode, I sit down with innovators, researchers, and technologists to consider the questions that come after the AI breakthroughs. Questions that don't have easy answers, but need to be asked. If you're curious or concerned about AI, join me as we challenge assumptions and ponder the issues together. Find Pondering AI wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:09Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to our chat, the flagship podcast of not knowing what color Spotify's logo is. I'm your friend, Neelai. It's so hard.

• 1:17Alex Cranz?

  So hard.

• 1:18Nilay Patel?

  Alex Franz is here.

• 1:19Alex Cranz?

  I'm not colorblind, but I think I might be.

• 1:22Nilay Patel?

  After the color quiz.

• 1:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:23Nilay Patel?

  David Pierce is here.

• 1:24David Pierce?

  Hi, I got the first four right on our color quiz and was so like absolutely outrageously proud of myself. And then I think got the next three wrong and have not forgiven myself for it.

• 1:35Nilay Patel?

  It's not great. So it's design week here at The Verge. You've got a great package. It's super fun. We've got pieces on UI. We've got pieces on like how the logout button on website works, or more importantly, doesn't work. We've got pieces on accessibility and design that are coming. That's very exciting. But the highlight of the whole week was our color quiz, which is designed by our Associate Creative Director, Chris Ratsky, who's a genius, our engineer, Graham, who is an evil mastermind. And it's just made to torture us. And all you're supposed to do is you open it, you see five shades of blue and you gotta pick the one that's the Facebook logo. And the, the, the thing that makes it evil is that as you roll over each of the shades of

• 2:19Nilay Patel?

  blue, there's an actual Facebook logo that changes. So then you just sit there arguing with yourself because every one of them looks correct.

• 2:27Alex Cranz?

  Well, the Facebook one's also like a cheat because there's like an old Facebook color on there. So you're like, that's the one because I haven't checked Facebook in 10 years.

• 2:34Nilay Patel?

  I've been taking this quiz over and over again all week. I've, I can't get better at it. The only one that I get consistently is Snapchat. I'm very good at yellow.

• 2:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, just, just yellow.

• 2:43Nilay Patel?

  Well, so, uh, the only app on my phone that Max wants to use is Snapchat, but she can't, she can't read. It's, and it's because she's four.

• 2:53David Pierce?

  That's an important detail.

• 2:55Alex Cranz?

  She's four. Don't worry guys.

• 2:57Nilay Patel?

  So she just calls it the ghost button?

• 2:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:00Nilay Patel?

  It's perfect sense.

• 3:01David Pierce?

  First of all, unbelievable product idea for Snapchat. To sell something called a ghost button. I don't know what it does.

• 3:06Nilay Patel?

  She'll just pick up my phone and be like, ghost button. And it's like, and then we just do the filters. So I know what that one looks like.

• 3:11Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  Yelp?

• 3:13Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 3:13Nilay Patel?

  No, no idea what color red Yelp is. And there's actually, there's science in the quiz. If you haven't taken it, go on the site, do the color quiz. It will drive you bananas. And then with a sense of smugness and superiority, go make other people take it.

• 3:27Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 3:28Nilay Patel?

  There are people on our staff who've gotten them all right. We, over 20,000 people have taken this quiz so far.

• 3:33Alex Cranz?

  I think it's up to 50,000.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  It's up to 50,000?

• 3:35Alex Cranz?

  A lot of people have taken this quiz.

• 3:37Nilay Patel?

  And like, you can see the scores, they normalize it like around 4.5.

• 3:41Alex Cranz?

  I got six the second, the first time I did it, I got four. The second time I got six and the two I got wrong, I was like, that can't be the color. I'm going to pick this other one. And it was the color. So I feel like I could do eight if I just practiced.

• 3:54Nilay Patel?

  See, see.

• 3:56Alex Cranz?

  Just keep doing it.

• 3:57Nilay Patel?

  David, how'd you do?

• 3:58David Pierce?

  I ended up with six out of eight. Yelp was the one that I got to and was just instantly like, I'm not going to know this one. This isn't going to happen. So I just basically like closed my eyes and hammered a shade of red and that was that.

• 4:11David Pierce?

  The one I got wrong that I'm furious, like I can still, you know, picture the moment when I got it wrong was Spotify. And I was down to two shades of green and my, my rubric was basically like, pick the second best looking one. If I don't know which one it is, because usually there's one that's like simple and clean and chill and like no tech company is ever going to choose that one. So you pick the, the second chillist one and that's usually the one. And it served me really well, except in Spotify's case where they just went like full bonkers neon. And it just is supposed to hurt your brain.

• 4:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 4:44David Pierce?

  Spotify.

• 4:44Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Spot and lift. Go take it. Go look at all of Design Week. It's super fun.

• 4:50David Pierce?

  It's great.

• 4:50Nilay Patel?

  Sarah Zhang has a piece about the poop emoji in legal filings. And how it's breaking database systems across our country's court system. Very good. Like cackling when I was reading it. Uh, we've got one about shuffle button. And then we, we were doing this big partnership with the computer history museum about the history of the Lisa. Apple Lisa, the precursor to Macintosh. It's super cool. Go watch that video, go read that piece. All great. Design Week happening. Go look at it. Take the color quiz.

• 5:17Alex Cranz?

  Fail at the color quiz.

• 5:18David Pierce?

  Tell us what you got. Tell, we want to know.

• 5:20Nilay Patel?

  Well, the reason I want more people to take it is right now, the audience average score is higher than the Verge team's score. And I feel like if we can just get more people to take it. The staff can outdo the world.

• 5:31Alex Cranz?

  I, I think everybody's cheating. I think everybody's like going and like they've got it on their phone. They're holding their phone up next to it, whereas we didn't, we took it the real way.

• 5:38Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, we all had to take it on camera in a conference room so that we could make like marketing videos for it. It's

• 5:44David Pierce?

  My favorite was someone on our team who I won't name said in Slack, cause we were all talking about it like, oh, I didn't do very well. But then when I got to be on a monitor with a better color gamut, I got, I did better. And it was like, oh, okay. I'm sure you did.

• 5:58Nilay Patel?

  My controller's broken.

• 5:59David Pierce?

  Yeah, exactly. Must've been the lag. I don't know. Yeah.

• 6:04Nilay Patel?

  All right. Go take the caller quiz. Look at Design Week. A very cool situation on theverge.com this week. Speaking of theverge.com, a story that we've uncovered. This is the worst segue.

• 6:14Alex Cranz?

  Where's this going?

• 6:15Nilay Patel?

  Speaking of websites that start with the letter T, Twitter is kind of a disaster this week.

• 6:21Alex Cranz?

  Much better, much better segue.

• 6:23Nilay Patel?

  It's not great. It's what we're doing. Twitter had a very hard weekend, I would say. In the context of Twitter's other weekends, actually not that hard, but equally bad.

• 6:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 6:36Nilay Patel?

  Uh, but this is the weekend they that they started turning off verification.

• 6:40Alex Cranz?

  Have you have you been de-verified?

• 6:42Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 6:42Alex Cranz?

  Same.

• 6:43Nilay Patel?

  Uh, there was a rumor going around that if you blocked the verified account on Twitter, they could not de-verify you.

• 6:50Alex Cranz?

  I I did it just to see if that'll happen.

• 6:52Nilay Patel?

  I was like, I got nothing to lose. But like, David, the the actual mechanics of unverifying and then what they actually did, none of it seems to make any sense.

• 7:03David Pierce?

  No. So what turns out to be the case, there was some really good Washington Post reporting on this a few days ago, is that essentially there's just like a database of all the verified people on Twitter. You would think this is like a thing that lives inside of the app that is somehow sort of controllable and understandable. It's really not. It's like somebody just went and like pasted a picture onto your profile and then like wrote down in a line of a spreadsheet, I pasted the picture onto their profile.

• 7:30Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 7:30David Pierce?

  It's slightly more technical than that, but not much more technical than that. And so what that means is what seems to be happening is there is no way to sort of systematically find out and remove verification. So simultaneously, what has been going on is that the whole idea of paying $8 a month for Twitter Blue has become deeply embarrassing, which is what we've talked about on this show. And so

• 7:53Alex Cranz?

  I called it. Victory lap for me.

• 7:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, you did. Like, you you continue to have been right about that. So

• 7:57Nilay Patel?

  I'm so worried you're gonna be right about the other thing.

• 8:01Alex Cranz?

  I am. I'm gonna win that bet. Monica, Liz, get ready.

• 8:04David Pierce?

  We're not talking about this now. This is, listen, we, this, a lot of things happened while I was on leaf, but I'm back now and we can't do this anymore, Alex.

• 8:12Alex Cranz?

  It's coming.

• 8:13Nilay Patel?

  Alex thinks Elon's gonna tweet a dong. I just, let's be clear. That's what she thinks is gonna happen.

• 8:17Alex Cranz?

  It's, it's, every day we get a little closer.

• 8:19Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, Alex, victory lap one, blue check, mark of shame. Go ahead. Continue, David.

• 8:25David Pierce?

  Yeah, so it, I, being verified is now bad if you paid for Twitter Blue. And also, they can't un-verify people. So it's become this messy thing where they've actually changed the message on verification to, they either paid for Twitter Blue or are a legacy verified account. And there's no real indication if that's sort of the end state, or if it's gonna change. People have come up with Chrome extensions that will show you which is which. Like, there's one script that replaces the verified icon with the nerd emoji if you paid for Twitter Blue, which is just wonderful. And so it's gotten to this point now where this, there's, it's just a disaster, right? Like, the upside of paying for Twitter Blue

• 9:06David Pierce?

  is that you get more play. You get shown in the For You page, you get supposedly upranked in replies and things like that. So it's literally just a mark of thirstiness. And so there's no reason anybody would pay for it. And so you've had people like LeBron James say, of course, I'm not gonna pay for Twitter Blue, which is a terrible look for Elon Musk and Twitter. You have folks like the New York Times who have said, there was a big round of media organizations talking about whether or not they're gonna pay for Twitter Blue. And then Elon Musk vindictively was like, well, then we're gonna take that away from them. So he took off the blue check for the New York Times, but not a bunch of the other New York Times accounts. So it's just...

• 9:41Nilay Patel?

  Some of which, by the way, some of which have gold checks.

• 9:44David Pierce?

  Whatever that is.

• 9:46Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, so the, is my, here's my understanding in this...

• 9:51Nilay Patel?

  Disclosure alert, we run Twitter accounts.

• 9:54David Pierce?

  I, yeah, sure.

• 9:55Nilay Patel?

  I know what to tell you.

• 9:56David Pierce?

  We're all verified on Twitter.

• 9:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, disclosure, I, I have a phone. It contains all the apps. I use them all. We have accounts.

• 10:05David Pierce?

  Neela, did you pay for Twitter Blue? Be honest.

• 10:07Nilay Patel?

  I did.

• 10:07David Pierce?

  This is a safe space.

• 10:08Nilay Patel?

  No, so I paid for old Twitter Blue.

• 10:10Alex Cranz?

  He paid for it.

• 10:11Nilay Patel?

  I paid for.

• 10:12Alex Cranz?

  Reckless Patel paid for it.

• 10:13Nilay Patel?

  Reckless Patel, and then got banned. My, my doppelganger got banned for impersonating me, even though that person was Alex, who's sitting right here. What, it's gone now.

• 10:23Alex Cranz?

  It's gone. It's all gone.

• 10:24Nilay Patel?

  All right, truly, truly wonderful. So we run Verge accounts.

• 10:28Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 10:28Nilay Patel?

  The Verge has an account. We Verge reviews, Verge science. We got a bunch of accounts. What we were told, and I think has become publicly disclosed by Twitter, is that if you were one of the top 10,000 followed accounts on Twitter, you got Twitter Blue, you got a checkmark for free. And you have to like use the API tools and then you could like have five affiliated accounts. But then if you weren't one of those and you paid for it, the affiliated accounts got like gold checkmarks and then like icons next to them.

• 10:59Alex Cranz?

  Too much.

• 10:59Nilay Patel?

  Very unclear like how it actually works. So the time, some of their accounts have gold checkmarks, which means they're affiliated with the New York Times. But the New York Times does not have a checkmark because Elon's mad at them.

• 11:12David Pierce?

  Perfect.

• 11:12Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, man. Like, all that's crazy. So we, the Verge accounts are affiliated. They're in it something, something, something. API usage rules, something. Who knows? It will change tomorrow. Our poor, like, audience director, Ruben, is just like beside himself every day.

• 11:28Alex Cranz?

  Softly weeping.

• 11:29Nilay Patel?

  What's going on? And then the other piece of the puzzle, as far as I understand it, is like, he's just adding labels to things like NPR saying, you're state affiliated media.

• 11:40David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 11:41Nilay Patel?

  And you just get, there's just a, there's a conference room at Twitter headquarters. It's been stripped of furniture because he sold it all on eBay. And he's just sitting on the floor like adding and removing labels from people's Twitter's account.

• 11:52Alex Cranz?

  There's an air mattress in the corner for some.

• 11:54Nilay Patel?

  He has added beds.

• 11:55Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, there's beds. It's like, people are living there.

• 11:58Nilay Patel?

  And he's like, he's like, I don't know, make it the Doge icon. It's actually good. Like, there's a part of it that I love.

• 12:04Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 12:04Nilay Patel?

  Which is what if you were allowed to screw with a major social network? It's like, yeah, I would just do whatever. And he did.

• 12:15David Pierce?

  I mean, it is sort of fun to imagine like what he would do differently if he were trying to kill it as fast as possible. Like, would any of his moves change? This all seems so destructive. And the thing is, like, the Twitter Blue stuff is silly and funny and whatever. And like, the changing the Twitter icon to the Doge icon is like, whatever. Ultimately, I have no feelings about that. It's sort of hilarious and doesn't really matter at all. But like, Twitter Blue is the overwhelming favorite to be the future of Twitter, if Twitter has a future. Like, its ad business has tanked, its usership is going down. Like Elon Musk has said over and over, he has like, big weird banking ideas that he won't let go of. But like, fundamentally, the way Twitter is going to survive, if it's going to survive, is to get

• 12:55David Pierce?

  a lot of people to pay for Twitter Blue. And basically, all that has happened so far is paying for Twitter Blue has gotten deeply embarrassing. And no one who has any actual like, reputation to protect will do it. Like, there was somebody who was tweeting the other day, like, imagine if you had a platform. Imagine what it would cost to get LeBron James to provide content for you. And imagine if by some crazy miracle, you had done that for free. Imagine then, what would happen if you just systematically drove him away?

• 13:25Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, for $96 a year. It was a very good tweet. I don't remember who it was. It was very good.

• 13:29David Pierce?

  It's a good tweet. We'll find it and put it in the show notes, because it's a good tweet.

• 13:33Nilay Patel?

  That is the part to me. And there are arguments that I've seen from people I respect for paying. Where if you run a small publication, and you are paying, and you get boosted and for you.

• 13:45David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 13:45Nilay Patel?

  That might work for you. I've seen arguments from advertisers right now, of small companies, where like, this is the most efficient advertising we can buy, because no one else is here.

• 13:55David Pierce?

  Yeah, for $8 a month, it's worth a shot.

• 13:56Nilay Patel?

  And then MyPillow guy.

• 13:57David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 13:57Nilay Patel?

  No, not even like, not just Twitter Blue, like, actually buying Twitter ads right now.

• 14:01David Pierce?

  Oh, interesting.

• 14:02Nilay Patel?

  Because they're so cheap. Because there's no, it's you and the MyPillow guy. Like, that's what you're doing. And so you can just buy a reach on Twitter, as long as it exists. So there, there's a dynamic there that's happening. But the more important thing that's happening, and we don't have to like, talk about Mastodon. Because who knows, but the more important thing that's happening is anecdotally, a lot of people I know are like, my engagement on Twitter has plummeted. The audiences aren't real. It's all just a bunch of people yelling about Elon all the time. Even there was the, you know, the Trump indictment this week. But like,

• 14:38Alex Cranz?

  It's quiet.

• 14:38Nilay Patel?

  There was a time when not being on Twitter during that day would have felt like a huge miss. Like all the actions unfolding on Twitter. And I was like, I just opened cable news. Like I, I'm, ooh, this is weird. What a weird reaction to this day is like, I'm gonna watch cable news? Because Twitter isn't any good.

• 15:00Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, it was not, it's not worth it anymore. It's like just kind of weirdos being angry about, I say that as somebody who's still on Twitter.

• 15:08Nilay Patel?

  I'm one of those weirdos.

• 15:08Alex Cranz?

  I count myself as one of those weirdos. But yeah, it's just people being vaguely angry about whatever's happening that day. And it like boils, Twitter's boiled down to like the most obnoxious elements of Twitter previously.

• 15:21Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 15:21Alex Cranz?

  With no real value added.

• 15:23David Pierce?

  And then an Elon Musk tweet in every other slot on your timeline because he demands it.

• 15:28Alex Cranz?

  I actually don't ever see him on, on mine. I don't know why. How is that possible? Maybe he blocked me, maybe I blocked him. I don't know.

• 15:35Nilay Patel?

  A very funny thing that happened this week is that Elon is using the for you tab as well.

• 15:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:39Nilay Patel?

  So he's just replying to ancient tweets. So he just replied to an ancient tweet from our own James Vincent about Bard and Bing citing each other.

• 15:48Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 15:49Nilay Patel?

  And he just hit it with a lull. So like James woke up to an army of bots.

• 15:53Alex Cranz?

  LOL.

• 15:54Nilay Patel?

  That follow Elon around the internet, repeating whatever he said, replying to a tweet from two weeks ago. Like a perfect encapsulation of the Twitter moment.

• 16:02Alex Cranz?

  Do you think Elon's ever gonna realize that so many of his followers that he thinks love him and adore him are bots? Like, we knew he, he's always had an issue with bots, but do you think he realizes that like what he bought was a giant bot network?

• 16:14Nilay Patel?

  Oh, he definitely knows that he bought, he tried to not buy it because of the bot networks, if you will recall.

• 16:19Alex Cranz?

  That's true.

• 16:20Nilay Patel?

  And now he's like, wait, they're the only, they're what I got. I don't wanna, a, a big theme of the podcast today for the audience is the hosts assigning themselves stories that we've talked about and not yet published. So David, I don't want to get too much into what comes next in Mastodon, but you and I have talked a lot about Activity Pub.

• 16:38David Pierce?

  We have.

• 16:39Nilay Patel?

  And you have promised me a story next week on this, so we can follow this up. But there's no big competitor in Twitter yet, right? Like every other social network is like, ah, what if we were TikTok instead?

• 16:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, that is kind of happening. And I think it it looks increasingly unlikely that Mastodon is going to be that thing. Like Mastodon is growing really fast. It's doing really well. I think anyone paying attention would say that Mastodon is a success. Sorry, right? But it is like several orders of magnitude smaller than Twitter. And it's even having its own funny issues now because Mastodon set itself up as such an aggressive counter to Twitter that now, like, if you're on Mastodon, you're obligated to call Twitter the bird site. You can't even say Twitter. You just say the bird site. And if you if you acknowledge being on Mastodon and on Twitter, it's like you violated the spirit of Mastodon and thus everyone will yell at you. Like, it's it's really become a thing that if you are a person who uses Mastodon and

• 17:34David Pierce?

  Twitter, you are like unwelcome on Mastodon. And in a really funny way, that is a huge problem for Mastodon because it is supposed to be the place that is like better than Twitter. And instead, it's just people yelling about Twitter, which is also what Twitter is. Like, we've accomplished nothing here. And so I think we're in a place now where I keep talking to people who are really excited about like the next phase of things, right? And I think Activity Pub and this whole idea of a decentralized internet and social ecosystem that doesn't rely on one platform and one person, because we've seen what happens now, right? Like, we we all used to talk about, you know, what would happen if Mark Zuckerberg stopped being the CEO of Facebook and someone with less good intentions came in? That all seems like hilariously naive now in retrospect.

• 18:18David Pierce?

  But like, we used to have those conversations. And then it was like, what if a maniac buys Twitter and does insane stuff with it every single day? Like, we know now, right? And so there's this big push towards an internet and a social world that is immune to those things. But I think there was a brief moment where it was like, maybe Mastodon is ready to take all of this stuff in. And for a big variety of reasons, including like discovery and identity and its own like toxicity, it's just not there. But I keep talking to people who are absolutely not put off and are like, Fast forward 12 months from now and we're going to have really exciting answers to these questions.

• 18:53Nilay Patel?

  Sure. So there's a difference there between Mastodon and we just had Yuzen Rajko, the CEO of Mastodon, the protocol on Decoder. So Mastodon, there's Mastodon the company. Yeah. There's Mastodon, the protocol. Okay. There's Mastodon, that social, the website. Hmm. These are all different things. It's like Apple TV. Yeah. There's Mastodon Plus. Yeah.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  Max. They're all different things. Yeah. David, when you say like, you can't talk about Twitter on Mastodon, do you mean on mastodon.social? Cause there's like 9,000 different servers.

• 19:31David Pierce?

  Yes. Well, and like, welcome to the problem, right? It's like, on Mastodon, where do you go? Do you go to a server that is just like run by a dude with a server in his house? Like a lot of people do. Do you go to mastodon.social, which is the one that is officially run by Mastodon, the company, but is so overloaded with people that it crashes all the time and they actually don't allow signups often? Do you just pick one and then move later? Like, we, these are questions you don't have to answer when it's go to Twitter and pick a username. And the, the like workflow for like, I, I want to go to this new internet. Where do I go? Uh, and, and like Casey Newton keeps making this point, which is like, people don't want to administer their own servers.

• 20:13David Pierce?

  And we're, we're kind of in a phase where doing this is not, you don't have to administer your own server, but you have to like, know what it means to administer a server in order to use Mastodon. And that's too much work. And so we're, we're in this interim phase where like Activity Pub is a, is a protocol by which a lot of different tools can come up that you will use the same follower graph, the same content and build lots of different experiences, right? It was like, what if you could use your Twitter account to post Instagram photos? Like, that's the future. That's where we're headed. That's what everybody believes in. None of that is built yet. And the problem with Mastodon is that it just requires two steps, too much work. And so the people who are mad enough at Twitter to leave are already there. And they're mad at the people who aren't mad enough at Twitter to leave.

• 20:59David Pierce?

  And so, uh, it just becomes this sort of self-perpetuating thing that like, until it gets easier, people are just going to stay where it's easy. And overwhelmingly, that's still Twitter. Like, it's hard to leave a thing even when it sucks.

• 21:11Alex Cranz?

  But it's probably like Mastodon is not going to be the thing, right?

• 21:14Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 21:15Alex Cranz?

  What comes next?

• 21:16Nilay Patel?

  So there's, there's a universe of competitors.

• 21:18Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 21:19Nilay Patel?

  So Mastodon is the decentralized one. It is built on this protocol called Activity Pub.

• 21:25Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 21:25Nilay Patel?

  That I will not shut up about.

• 21:27Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 21:27Nilay Patel?

  Like I've been running around the halls of this company and being like Activity Pub.

• 21:30Alex Cranz?

  I love it. It's kick ass.

• 21:32Nilay Patel?

  Making David write a story about it. There's just something there, like if you, and you just look at the universe of people who are building on it. Meta is building some sort of Twitter competitor that is built on Activity Pub. Flipboard is all around.

• 21:44Alex Cranz?

  Tumblr.

• 21:45Nilay Patel?

  Activity Pub. Yep. We had Matt Mullenweg on Decoder. He said Tumblr and WordPress are going to support Activity Pub, which is kind of wild to think about Tumblr like being a decentralized social network that can interact with Mastodon. Like, that's weird, right?

• 21:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 21:57Nilay Patel?

  Mozilla is gonna do something with it. Like, you just see these companies, these like OG web companies, and people be like, alright, we can tear the wall of gardens down using this new protocol. And we'll talk about it more after David's story comes out next week, so I don't give the whole thing away. That's just cool.

• 22:13Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:13Nilay Patel?

  Then there's like post.news, which is a Twitter competitor that is totally closed and I didn't care if Swisher's on the board. They have a great proposition, which is that if you sign up for it, you use it, you see a New York Times article that you like, they've built microtransactions into the app to let you slide through their paywall.

• 22:31Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 22:32Nilay Patel?

  That's cool.

• 22:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's cool.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  Like, that's a thing Twitter should have built ages ago and never could get done.

• 22:36Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 22:36Nilay Patel?

  They're starting with that. Then there's a thing called Spoutable, which I haven't used.

• 22:40Alex Cranz?

  I don't know Spoutable.

• 22:42Nilay Patel?

  But people keep asking me about it. You know, in the way that like, it's, it's that moment, it's like a evolutionary explosion, like Cambrian explosion, where people will just send me emails. It's like, well, the verge engaged with Spoutable. And I'm like, I don't know what that is.

• 22:56Alex Cranz?

  Are you a cop?

• 22:59Nilay Patel?

  But like, a lot of sports people are on it. And, and you just see like, okay, there's a bunch of new networks starting. Are you looking at it?

• 23:05Alex Cranz?

  I'm trying to, but you have to create an account.

• 23:07Nilay Patel?

  See?

• 23:07Alex Cranz?

  Never mind.

• 23:08Nilay Patel?

  It bounced right out.

• 23:09Alex Cranz?

  I'm done.

• 23:11Nilay Patel?

  I just think it's really interesting to see this many new competitors because it's obvious that the thing is falling apart.

• 23:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that's the best part of this.

• 23:19David Pierce?

  And everybody overwhelmingly in the course of reporting this story, I have asked people, like, why do you think this is the moment? Because people have been working on this idea of like distributed open social for 25 years. Like, this is not a new idea. There have been a million attempts of it. Like, remember Jabber back in the day when you could put all of your IM clients into one app? Like, that's this. That's the same thing. You just talk to all your friends. It doesn't matter where they are. Like, that is functionally the exact same idea. And we ran away from that because Google Talk got really big and Google said, well, we don't need to deal with XMPP. And so they stopped supporting it and it all fell apart. And that is just what happens.

• 23:51Nilay Patel?

  Vergecast.

• 23:51David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's just what happens. And so I keep asking people, like, why do you think this is the moment? Why is there so much excitement? And almost every single person, I can't think of one person I've talked to for this story who hasn't said because of Elon. Because Elon Musk showed up and made abundantly clear to a lot of people how bad this can go and how fast and how ugly it is to have something that you've invested this much time and energy into fall apart like this. Like, there are so many people, and I'm one of them, who have stories about making friends on Twitter and like, we all, you know, the real Twitter is the friends we made along the way. Like, it's a really important place to a lot of people and it's just crumbling in a way that I think is really painful. And so the pitch is now, like, what if that can't happen anymore? And I

• 24:34David Pierce?

  think it's sinking in for people in a way it never has before. It's just that the right product for it doesn't really seem to have appeared yet.

• 24:42Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If you're listening to this podcast, you are almost certainly the sort of person that can deal with your own server. Just a guess I'm making.

• 24:49David Pierce?

  It's not that hard.

• 24:50Nilay Patel?

  You've probably got an NAS. You probably have a Plex server that, you know, want to tell the authorities about.

• 24:55Alex Cranz?

  It's okay. I support you.

• 24:58Nilay Patel?

  You're using it to distribute Linux.

• 25:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 25:01Nilay Patel?

  I know what you're doing.

• 25:03Alex Cranz?

  It's the best way to use it. Only Linux. It's all I share on my.

• 25:07Nilay Patel?

  Open source, open source textbooks in Linux on Alex's Plex server. Look, you're probably the sort of person who can figure this stuff out. You should start a Mastodon account.

• 25:19Nilay Patel?

  Just for the experience of doing it because it's difficult. And then you should start a Pixelfed account. Pixelfed is the Activity Pub Instagram.

• 25:26David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 25:26Nilay Patel?

  Same deal, you gotta find a server, all that blah, blah, blah. And then you should see posting from Twitter to Instagram is a thing you can do with those services.

• 25:33David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 25:33Nilay Patel?

  Right? From Mastodon to Pixelfed, from Pixelfed to Mastodon.

• 25:36David Pierce?

  You can make a Pixelfed post from your Mastodon account. Like that is, that's the magic, right?

• 25:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And there's just something that like, once you do it, you're like, oh, this makes a lot of sense. And I know, well, usually we spend this entire show talking about AI. And that's where all the hype is. But I think the thing that actually changes the nature of the social internet is somewhere in here. And then I promised we'll have a story about next week. We'll actually talk about the actual story with the actual reporting. But like, I just like watching this week in particular with Twitter, where like the legacy thing happened, the Trump stuff having no impact on Twitter. Like cable news for the last decade has been people with great haircuts reading tweets.

• 26:14David Pierce?

  And it was beautiful.

• 26:15Nilay Patel?

  Was it?

• 26:16David Pierce?

  I loved it.

• 26:16Nilay Patel?

  It might have destroyed democracy.

• 26:18David Pierce?

  Just a little, just a little.

• 26:20Nilay Patel?

  And to watch it this week and be like, oh, there's no, there's literally no loop here.

• 26:24David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 26:25Nilay Patel?

  Is like, oh, the thing is over, the vibrancy of the thing is over. I don't know when Aaron Rodgers is going to the Jets. I don't know if it's going to happen. But there's, there have been years of my life where I have one Twitter list that's just all the Packers beat reporters. And I used to check it a thousand times today and now I don't.

• 26:41David Pierce?

  Oh.

• 26:42Nilay Patel?

  That's crazy to me.

• 26:42David Pierce?

  That's actually a really good example of like, where are those people gonna go? Like, are we gonna lose that? Should we lose that? Are we, does everybody go to Mast? Like, I don't know, Casey on Platformer wrote a good thing about this, like why journalists can't quit Twitter. And like, as a journalist who quit Twitter, I'm here to tell you, like, it is possible. It's actually not nearly as hard as anyone thinks. But there is just something to, like, as long as anyone is there, people are gonna stay, right? And so I think it's gonna be really interesting to see what it takes. And I assume it's like some great product and some huge news event kind of in tandem that might be that pull. But I don't know, I like, my, my sense is Twitter can be broken for a long time and we're gonna keep having to talk about it because it's just really hard to leave.

• 27:26Nilay Patel?

  So Ben Smith, who is the editor in chief at BuzzFeed News and left to found, co-founded Semaphore, the new news site. He's got a book out called Traffic, which is not out yet, but it's going out in May. He's coming out of decoder. Traffic is about Gawker versus BuzzFeed. In like the early days of the internet and he's got, it's great. Highly recommended when it comes out, but he's got a theory in there that new news sites, new properties come into form, they're opportunities that come into form during election years.

• 27:53Alex Cranz?

  Oh, I like that.

• 27:55Nilay Patel?

  So he's like BuzzFeed News was like rushed out for an election. I actually remember when I was at Vox.com and we, we pushed it to hit the election. We like, that's the moment, like those cycles, there's lots of news, lots of whatever. This is like, and if you just kind of like, look at the history of the media, this is.

• 28:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, every four years for some reason, a new publication.

• 28:14Nilay Patel?

  Cause they line up with elections. Cause there's just like, there's two teams and they hate each other and you can't even talk shit about it. Like it's just very easy.

• 28:20Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, right.

• 28:20Nilay Patel?

  Um, and I just wonder if this upcoming election cycle is when you see a mass of like people moving to a new kind of media. So like, it's just on my mind that there's a thing happening. The one thing I want to point out before I move on and talk about Spotify, completely not knowing what it's doing, is Substack put out notes this week, which is basically they added a Twitter feed to Substack in the app. It looks exactly like our quick posts on our site. And like the reasoning is exactly the same, like sometimes you don't want to write a whole thing. And I'm like, yeah, yeah, we made that. But this is the next move, right? It's to, if you talk to any Substackers, their biggest audience funnel was on Twitter. Like they, they monetized their Twitter audience with Substack. And if that goes away, I'm not sure where the next generation of Substackers finds audience.

• 29:02Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because they can't build it from like TikTok or Instagram.

• 29:05Nilay Patel?

  The idea of making a TikTok video that's like, sign up for my newsletter is so bonkers. Can you imagine Casey just like dancing for dollars on TikTok?

• 29:16Alex Cranz?

  Just a little shuffle.

• 29:17Nilay Patel?

  So there's just a yawning need for a platform that's like Twitter, a text-based, real-time news platform. And someone's going to fill it. And I think that's actually really exciting, regardless, in the, the chaos of Twitter itself is like, regardless of the chaos of Twitter itself. But it's exciting to see this much activity in that space.

• 29:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 29:35Nilay Patel?

  Cause there just hasn't been for a long time.

• 29:38Alex Cranz?

  But it's not going to be mastered on. I'm just going to say it now. That's my, my third prognostication.

• 29:44Nilay Patel?

  So you got?

• 29:45Alex Cranz?

  I got, everybody's going to think the blue check mark's dumb. Elon's going to tweet his dong. And Mastodon is not going to be the true success.

• 29:53Nilay Patel?

  What if he tweets his dong on Mastodon?

• 29:56Alex Cranz?

  I'll pay you $20 because I'll just be like, oh, my God.

• 30:00Nilay Patel?

  I feel strongly that we should take a break. I quit the podcast. We're gonna be right back. We got to talk about Spotify. We got to talk about GM's doing CarPlay. We'll be right back.

• 30:12Speaker 01

  When it comes to AI, there is what we could do and what we should do. What will we decide? I'm Kimberly Nevela, host of the Pondering AI podcast from SAS. Every episode, I sit down with innovators, researchers, and technologists to consider the questions that come after the AI breakthroughs, questions that don't have easy answers but need to be asked. If you're curious or concerned about AI, join me as we challenge assumptions and ponder the issues together. Find Pondering AI wherever you get your podcasts.

• 30:43Speaker 05

  Your heart can tell you a lot about your health. Apple Watch Series 12 measures your heart rate every five seconds with the most accurate heart rate sensing in wearable. So your vitals app, now with heart rate variability, can tell you when something is off. And your readiness score can let you know when to rest and when to push. Hear the story in every heartbeat with Apple Watch Series 12. The features described are for wellness purposes only and not for medical use. iPhone 11 or later required. Based on Apple conducted study of heart rate accuracy, August 2026. Visit apple.com slash Apple Watch Series 12.

• 31:16Nilay Patel?

  Welcome back to the Vergecast, where we don't make bets about dongs.

• 31:22Alex Cranz?

  No more. It's done. Moratorium on that.

• 31:24Nilay Patel?

  It's good. It's a family show. Find your children. Don't explain what's going on. We got to talk about Spotify.

• 31:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 31:31Nilay Patel?

  So in the pandemic, Spotify decided that it was all in on podcasts and that it was all in on live audio.

• 31:38Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 31:39Nilay Patel?

  And then it is not.

• 31:42Alex Cranz?

  It's done. It's done with both of those.

• 31:45Nilay Patel?

  So Spotify bought this thing called, what was it, Green Room, David?

• 31:48David Pierce?

  It renamed it Green Room. The app before it was bought by Spotify was called Locker Room because it was specifically about like live talk about sports was like their main thing.

• 31:58Nilay Patel?

  And then they renamed it Green Room and they were going to compete with Clubhouse.

• 32:02David Pierce?

  Which is itself, by the way, just a hilarious statement. They were going to compete with Clubhouse is now with hindsight, a very funny thing to say.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  It turns out you could compete with Clubhouse and the thing that competed with the Clubhouse was leaving your house.

• 32:15David Pierce?

  It was outdoors.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  Like any other room with people in it competed with Clubhouse.

• 32:20Alex Cranz?

  Touch grass.

• 32:22Nilay Patel?

  Look, in the depths of the pandemic, I swear to God, the tech industry was like, all right, we've got them. Brains in vats, they're never leaving the house again. Software will eat not only the world, but the human population. And like, I get it. We had a million versions of this conversation, like what trends are here to stay and what trends are gonna go back. And most everybody bet wrong. And now all these companies are having layoffs. But the reason I want to talk about Spotify in particular is their big bet on podcasts is shaky.

• 32:51Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 32:52Nilay Patel?

  And then this big bet on live audio where you would just like open Spotify at the end of the night and.

• 32:57Alex Cranz?

  Talk?

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  Dudes would be talking. Does, what is next for this company?

• 33:04Alex Cranz?

  Have they heard of music? Have they heard of like, like, I think everybody just needs to go look at Apple Music Classical and do that. Like if Spotify did that and gave you more access to metadata and let you search and browse that way, that would be better than to spend all the money on Locker Room and rename it Green Room, which I presume is just Broadway show tunes.

• 33:25Nilay Patel?

  So I was reading the comments of your Apple Music Classical piece, which was great. Everyone should read it. And a lot of people in the comments were like, this is Rune.

• 33:33Alex Cranz?

  Oh, really?

• 33:34Nilay Patel?

  And so if you don't know what Rune is, Rune is like a wild idea. It is a subscription based music player that has no music in it. So you gotta plug it into a title account or a lot of people use this thing called QuoBuz.

• 33:44Alex Cranz?

  Is this the one that like you use for your smart home?

• 33:48Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, like people integrate with smart homes, but it's it's a music player.

• 33:51Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 33:52Nilay Patel?

  So you like plug it in a title, or if you have a big local library on your Linux distribution.

• 33:57Alex Cranz?

  Whatever.

• 33:58Nilay Patel?

  Server, uh, it'll like read it all. It'll figure out all the metadata. It'll show you like lots of links. It'll reorganize the metadata. So like, okay, this guitar player in this song played on this song.

• 34:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:08Nilay Patel?

  And like the the thing people say is like, this is just a discovery interface. Like, I'm just like falling down the rabbit hole of music in a way that like.

• 34:15Alex Cranz?

  But you don't have Kazaa to like back up the falling.

• 34:18Nilay Patel?

  Right. You gotta pay for, you gotta pay.

• 34:20Alex Cranz?

  You gotta, you gotta source your music somewhere.

• 34:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 34:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 34:24Nilay Patel?

  You know, I spent like a significant part of my legal career defending kids who use Kazaa.

• 34:28Alex Cranz?

  Thank you.

• 34:28Nilay Patel?

  They all lost.

• 34:29Alex Cranz?

  Oh, no.

• 34:30Nilay Patel?

  Just like, you know, these are not winnable cases.

• 34:32David Pierce?

  Yeah, and that's like Kazaa is a hundred billion dollar company.

• 34:36Nilay Patel?

  They did it, everybody.

• 34:38David Pierce?

  No, but the the thing about that is I I what I was gonna say is what Spotify needs to do is stop thinking about itself as the audio company. Like, that's what they've been saying over and over, right? They're not a music thing. They're about audio. And what it actually seems like needs to happen, and where there is much more room for doing interesting stuff, is to go all in on music. Like Spotify should take the fact that every musician has a link tree in their social bios as like a direct threat to Spotify. And like, if you wanna buy merch, that should be Spotify. If you wanna buy concert tickets, that should be Spotify. Like, there is no money to be made in licensing music to stream on a platform. There's a hell of a lot of money to be made in all of the other ways that artists make money.

• 35:20David Pierce?

  And that all sucks now. Like, everybody's mad at Ticketmaster, thanks to Taylor Swift. Buying stuff on the internet is a disaster. Everybody's merch stores are ridiculous. Like, if I'm Spotify, I'm chasing the entire music industry much more than I'm chasing the audio industry at this point.

• 35:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, but I what what Spotify wants you to do is pay them fifteen or twenty dollars a month and then keep all the money.

• 35:46Nilay Patel?

  And the thing you're describing is like, what if other people made money? Right? Like when you listen to music on Spotify, some complicated set of algorithms assigns four cents to every artist that you listen to per stream, whatever. And they've got to give a huge chunk of your subscription dollar away. When you listen to podcasts, that is not true. Yeah. Cause they've already bought and ingested them.

• 36:07Alex Cranz?

  Well, they have like a weird relationship with the music industry, right? Because of the fact that, you know, they only get four cents for every song.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  But the music industry also owns a huge chunk of Spotify.

• 36:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. So they, so theoretically they could just go in and be like, okay, you're the new Ticketmaster. Let's go.

• 36:23Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I mean, maybe Ticketmaster also owns all the venues. Uh, this is a very complicated thing to unwind. I'm just saying, if you look at Spotify's arc.

• 36:31Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 36:31Nilay Patel?

  Right. They desperately tried to keep more of your dollars by pointing you at audio that they already, they owned outright. So they didn't have to pay for their royalties on, or that other, that users are making for free and things like what Spotify Clubhouse Jr. Or whatever it was called.

• 36:45Alex Cranz?

  Green Room.

• 36:45Nilay Patel?

  Green Room.

• 36:48David Pierce?

  Clubhouse Jr. Is really different. We don't, we don't talk about that here.

• 36:53Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying like, I think Spotify is in just in a shakier zone.

• 36:57Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 36:57Nilay Patel?

  Than any of the other big tech companies. Like we, we talk about the other streamer, like we will end up talking about Disney and it's like war with the state of Florida and it's reorg and Netflix and all this other stuff. And they've all had cuts and they've like stopped spending money. Spotify is a streaming service. Its competitors are Apple and Amazon, which heavily subsidize their services. And then their.

• 37:18Alex Cranz?

  Title.

• 37:18Nilay Patel?

  And Title.

• 37:19Alex Cranz?

  Don't forget about Title.

• 37:20Nilay Patel?

  Dear Sweet Title, which is part of Block, which has like a research report. It's like Block is built on fraud. Very good.

• 37:27Alex Cranz?

  Not great.

• 37:28Nilay Patel?

  So yeah, it's just a weird, a weird moment for that company in particular.

• 37:32Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 37:33Nilay Patel?

  And it, the, the same was with Twitter, right? It's the foundation of like an entire ecosystem. And it's like, what if that one, what if this domino falls?

• 37:42David Pierce?

  Yeah. I mean, the, the thing for Spotify though is I think because the music industry is so invested in it, it, they just there, they can't let it fall, right? Like you let it fall and it's just Apple, Amazon and YouTube own the music business. And that for the music business is like an abject disaster. So I would, I, I have high, or like Deezer, like what if Deezer just wins? Go get it Deezer. Like I'm in on that plan.

• 38:04Alex Cranz?

  Fall rune.

• 38:05Nilay Patel?

  We should talk, so this brings me to CarPlay.

• 38:07David Pierce?

  Oh yeah. Okay. Everybody's favorite Deezer consumption location.

• 38:12Alex Cranz?

  Only way I listen to Zizer.

• 38:13Nilay Patel?

  Uh, well, it's interesting. Like so GM had an announcement this week, a very odd announcement. They released a fact sheet and then I think only Reuters like read it. Yeah. And like Reuters had headlines like GM walks away from CarPlay and we saw that headline and we were running, no, that's dumb. And then we acquired the fact sheet, which we published. So people could actually see this was sourced. Cause it is such a bonkers thing to say that we didn't think people would believe our headline. So we like put the PDF in the story. Um, they're walking away from CarPlay Android Auto and just the EVs. And their reasoning is that the cars are computers now. And that they want to do things like have you use the built in nav so that when you're on your way to a charging station,

• 38:56Nilay Patel?

  the battery is preconditioned so you can charge faster.

• 38:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, that sounds great. I wish they'd thought of that 20 years ago. Like, welcome to the party, GM.

• 39:06Nilay Patel?

  I think this is the beginning. I think every automaker is going to start to do things like this in five years.

• 39:09David Pierce?

  That's the public reasoning, right? And it's like that, that, reading the story, it was like, that's the one thing they could think to say that sounded like a feature. And then everything else is just, we don't make any money from CarPlay and we think there's a lot of money to be made in not CarPlay. Right? Like, is there any other way to read this than that?

• 39:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, Patrick George did a great piece for the site that was just that. He went and spoke to a lot of people and they're like, oh yeah, they just want to make money. And so they're going to, they're going to kill it so that they can like.

• 39:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. The future of cars is no steering wheels and you're shopping all day in the car. Or looking at ads while you like stream movies or whatever.

• 39:41Alex Cranz?

  Just like Minority Report.

• 39:43Nilay Patel?

  I have been to enough CES future of car panels where they're like, soon we will reclaim the time you spend commuting. And it's like, oh, awesome. For what? For literature? For art? And like for advertising? And e-commerce. It's like, oh, that's not what I thought.

• 39:58Alex Cranz?

  We get 30%.

• 40:02Nilay Patel?

  To improve the human condition? And it's like, no, no, no, shopping.

• 40:05David Pierce?

  Candy Crush.

• 40:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Candy Crush. So yes, I think that's what GM wants to do. I do think there's some valid stuff in there, right? If you make a self-driving car and you don't control the navigation system, you almost certainly have a problem.

• 40:21Alex Cranz?

  Are you saying this because you hate CarPlay and you want to support big, big car?

• 40:26Nilay Patel?

  Yes, I love big car.

• 40:27Alex Cranz?

  Big car.

• 40:28Nilay Patel?

  Big car is my favorite.

• 40:31Alex Cranz?

  You know, big car.

• 40:32Nilay Patel?

  Who doesn't love a big car?

• 40:33Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 40:34Nilay Patel?

  My parents, by the way, refer to our cars as small, medium and big.

• 40:39Nilay Patel?

  That's my mom was like, can we borrow your medium car? It's a real thing that happens.

• 40:42Alex Cranz?

  I love it so much.

• 40:43Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. No, I, I think CarPlay is bad. Like, just to be clear, I, this is my opinion. CarPlay is bad. It is superior to have the radio on the bad infotainment screen. And then mount your phone using a MagSafe charger. We'll put an affiliate link in the show notes. This is my white whale. It's like the world's best MagSafe charger. If you make a new one, that's about like 5% better than one, I will buy it in a heartbeat. I will spend $70 on a new MagSafe charger.

• 41:09David Pierce?

  I'm imagining like, you know, the people who have like McDonald's boxes all over their cars. That's just you with MagSafe chargers. You like can't get in the passenger seat because there's 200 MagSafe chargers.

• 41:19Nilay Patel?

  It's a perfect impulse buy gadget. I swear to God. Because you can always make it 5% better. The magnets click a little harder, the charging's a little faster, the mounts a little smarter. And you put them out. My phone is almost as big as the infotainment screen in my car.

• 41:33Alex Cranz?

  What, what year is your car?

• 41:36Nilay Patel?

  The Raptors of 2020.

• 41:38Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 41:38Nilay Patel?

  And that's a tiny little screen. That's before the new big screen.

• 41:41Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 41:41Nilay Patel?

  So that one is like, whatever.

• 41:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 41:43Nilay Patel?

  That's sync three. I've sworn on blood oath that I will not buy another Ford until they go to the Android based system. I'm like, I can't have more sync in my life.

• 41:50Alex Cranz?

  It's real bad.

• 41:51Nilay Patel?

  It's not allowed.

• 41:52David Pierce?

  This is the point, right? Like CarPlay is bad, except that it's so much better than everything that.

• 41:59Nilay Patel?

  It is not better.

• 42:00Alex Cranz?

  It is way better. So I've got, I've got a Mazda CX5. And I know every single time I forget to plug my phone in. Cause I'll be like, I'm just gonna call someone and this robot voice is like, who do you want to call? I'm like, who the hell are you?

• 42:14Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know what you're doing there. You can make it. I'm just saying. So they're all small screens, except for our new Jeep, which is an Android computer. And is basically like a Tamagotchi. Like I have to go into the garage every night and be like, are you okay?

• 42:28Alex Cranz?

  Petting.

• 42:29David Pierce?

  And we like this better than CarPlay. Just to be clear, this is an improvement on just plugging your phone in and everything works fine.

• 42:35Nilay Patel?

  Consumer satisfaction with car infotainment systems has been going steadily down since wireless CarPlay was introduced because it's so unreliable.

• 42:43Alex Cranz?

  That's what Monica was talking about this when we were having a huge argument and I was telling you, you were both wrong for hating CarPlay. Because she had it wireless and it kept like disconnecting and she'd be like driving and it'd be like, where are we going? And she'd be like, where? You should know.

• 42:55Nilay Patel?

  Right. And so integrated is better than weird fragmented. I'm just telling you, it is superior to mount your phone in the car using a, I should just make a wireless MagSafe charger at this point. It's superior to mount your phone, put the map on there and then do your audio. Cause you can deal with it. You can get through it.

• 43:11Alex Cranz?

  We just need a little slot and you just pop your phone in and, and it just, it's your phone. Yeah. And just done.

• 43:17Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, the reason I'm zooming out, CarPlay is horrible and I'm correct and I don't know.

• 43:21David Pierce?

  No, wrong.

• 43:22Nilay Patel?

  It's not good. The only thing you want to do with it is show your maps.

• 43:24David Pierce?

  Are you so excited about having the one app for music that exists? Like they're literally what the end of this is.

• 43:30Nilay Patel?

  I'm gonna stick my phone on the dash and it's gonna start charging through the power of magnetism. It's gonna be awesome. Every time. You can't stop me.

• 43:38David Pierce?

  You're arguing for more dongles.

• 43:41Nilay Patel?

  Steve Chevy, what are you gonna do to my house? Arrest me?

• 43:44Alex Cranz?

  He's getting in his little car. He's getting in his small car.

• 43:47Nilay Patel?

  Cause I use the blinding power of magnets to overcome your stupid infotainment. No, I'm gonna do whatever I want. You can't see.

• 43:57David Pierce?

  Let me just make sure I understand. So what you're arguing is I would like to get in my car. I would like to attach my phone to an incredibly powerful magnet. And then I would like to plug my phone in to some thing.

• 44:10Nilay Patel?

  No, it's just the magnet is there. It's charging.

• 44:13David Pierce?

  Music out of the speakers of your phone?

• 44:15Nilay Patel?

  No, with Bluetooths into the car. GM's gonna still let you Bluetooth into the car.

• 44:19David Pierce?

  Okay.

• 44:19Nilay Patel?

  So you're playing your music over Bluetooth, your steering wheel controls to control the music player and you got a map on the phone. And you're not stuck in some weird projection system. And you've got two screens. What Vergecast listener does not want two screens going instead of one?

• 44:34David Pierce?

  What if I had one small, good screen and one big, bad screen? Like what a, what a cool future that is.

• 44:41Nilay Patel?

  The Mercedes experience. I don't know, man. I'm just saying CarPlay is not great and Apple's dream that it would colonize all of the screens in your car is hitting reality. Remember last year at WWDC where they're like, here's the future of CarPlay?

• 44:53Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 44:54Nilay Patel?

  And they showed all the logos and all the car companies like, uh.

• 44:57Alex Cranz?

  They were like, nah.

• 44:58Nilay Patel?

  What are you doing? It's about to be a year later. No carmakers have announced any plans to support that version of CarPlay.

• 45:06David Pierce?

  True.

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  And GM's like, actually, we're not going to support CarPlay at all because we need to take the screen back because this is where people will shop in the future.

• 45:13David Pierce?

  By giving it to Google.

• 45:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, like they're just gonna make something crappy. Like all of the other systems, you're still using your phone when you use your very powerful magnet because the system behind your phone is garbage. They're all garbage and CarPlay is just a little better. And I really.

• 45:30Nilay Patel?

  That's not.

• 45:31David Pierce?

  I mean, you're.

• 45:32Alex Cranz?

  But like GM's not gonna do better. They did Q.

• 45:35David Pierce?

  Like your car infotainment in the best case scenario now is like a four-year-old Android tablet. Like congratulations on your four-year-old Android tablet.

• 45:43Nilay Patel?

  So the argument that I'll give, I don't own a Tesla, but every Tesla owner has already experienced this life, right? Where like there's no CarPlay integration. They've asked for it, but Tesla's like, this is the future. We want to control your experience in the car. We're gonna put games on here. We're gonna do over-the-year updates every day. Every automaker thinks that's their future too. Whether or not they can execute at the level that Tesla's executed remains to be seen.

• 46:06Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like I think it makes sense. They all want to do this. They're doing the exact same thing TV makers did where they're all like, we're gonna own the home and we're gonna put a smart TV in. And most of them have been like, this kinda sucks.

• 46:19Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 46:19Alex Cranz?

  Go buy a.

• 46:20Nilay Patel?

  I'm just saying the outrage about GM walking away from CarPlay. If you just look at CarPlay itself, it's kinda bad.

• 46:27Alex Cranz?

  I love it.

• 46:28David Pierce?

  But that's, that's the thing. Like the fact that CarPlay and, and there have been all these stats that say like 80% of people won't buy a car without CarPlay. It's not because CarPlay is magical software. It's because everything else is shit. Like the, the, the thing about Tesla is like Tesla has people who make good software and has a decent reputation for making good software. And a lot of Tesla people still want CarPlay, but at least this stuff broadly works, right? Like it's pretty good software. There is nothing in the history of the auto industry to suggest that they know how to make good software. They didn't know how to make good, simple software. Like when all the software had to do was change the radio station, it was horrible. And now I'm, I'm supposed to assume that these companies are just going to turn around and figure out how to make it.

• 47:10David Pierce?

  Like CarPlay and Android Auto worked because they were so bad at making software in cars. So they just came and said, well, we're just going to show up and go over the top. And like what, how, is there any evidence that has changed?

• 47:20Alex Cranz?

  Isn't one, one of the car makers is doing like a skeumorphic one, right? Didn't, didn't they all invest in like Epic?

• 47:27Nilay Patel?

  Oh yeah, no, they all run Unreal Engine. So the new, uh, the new Mustang, uh huh, which is still sync. Why?

• 47:35Nilay Patel?

  But like the, all the graphics in it are Unreal Engine. There's like, uh, Rivian's are Unreal.

• 47:39David Pierce?

  Such high-res sync.

• 47:40Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 47:40David Pierce?

  It's so high-res.

• 47:41Nilay Patel?

  I mean, it looks beautiful and you're like, is this the new Android system that you announced like over 18? And they're like, no, it's not, sir.

• 47:47Alex Cranz?

  It's garbage, what it is.

• 47:48Nilay Patel?

  It's like.

• 47:48Alex Cranz?

  Hot, hot garbage.

• 47:50Nilay Patel?

  It's, it's, look, Q and X will never go away. It's going to be in Ford's forever. And they did announce an Android-based system. They're supposed, it's supposed to come out. No one knows when it's going out, but it runs Unreal Engine and that's all the graphics. Rivian's run Unreal Engine. There's tons of that going on in the auto space because they know that when they move to EV drivetrains, the actual difference in driving a car will be nil. Like they, they, they cannot make it very, they, all the cars are going to kind of be the same.

• 48:16Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:17David Pierce?

  Is that why they're all making such futuristic looking designs to like, because they have to loudly exclaim, this is a new kind of car or else no one will notice?

• 48:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. And put the little Hemi speaker in so it sounds like a Hemi.

• 48:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 48:31Alex Cranz?

  That's my Hemi impression.

• 48:32Nilay Patel?

  Uh, that's not, that's the wrong sound. That's a Honda impression.

• 48:38Nilay Patel?

  You should the Frat Xonic speaker and the new charger, the EV charger, whatever is no EV challenger.

• 48:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 48:45Nilay Patel?

  It it's like.

• 48:46Alex Cranz?

  Rumbles.

• 48:47Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like a dinosaur.

• 48:48Alex Cranz?

  I can't get that low, like my voice doesn't go that low.

• 48:51Nilay Patel?

  Anyhow, they're doing it because this is their opportunity to break from history. And they know they're like, the EV buyer wants to feel special. EVs are more expensive. And they have to be more expensive because the margins are lower on these cars. Because they're invented, they're full of new technology that hasn't been proven out. And then they all think we're all going to not drive and shop in the car like. I promise you every auto CEO is like, I can't wait for people to start shopping in their cars. On our screens where we take 30%. And like the CEO of BMW is like, and soon you'll subscribe to your heated seats. And they're.

• 49:23Alex Cranz?

  And people hate all of that.

• 49:26Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, no one likes.

• 49:27Alex Cranz?

  Like, like, Apple, Apple has the benefit of being first movers in the, I'm gonna bake a big technological walled garden. And all the car companies are now like 30 years later saying, we're gonna do it too. And everybody's like, no, that sucks.

• 49:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 49:42David Pierce?

  Yeah, we're just heading back to the early days of cell phones where. Everybody had their own operating system with their own app store with their own. Brand new ideas about how to do absolutely everything.

• 49:51Nilay Patel?

  The weird thing that's different here is they're all picking Android.

• 49:53Alex Cranz?

  Because it's easy to build on.

• 49:55Nilay Patel?

  Well, but it's like weird. So like the GM system is Google built in. So it's not 100% clear if the thing is Android.

• 50:03Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  Like the operating system is Android, but the navigation is Google Maps.

• 50:07Alex Cranz?

  Is it gonna have like Play Store in it?

• 50:09Nilay Patel?

  Ooh.

• 50:10Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Like, is it, is it Android like Huawei is Android or is it Android like?

• 50:15Nilay Patel?

  So my Jeep is Android like Huawei is Android.

• 50:17Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:17Nilay Patel?

  And boy, does it show.

• 50:21Nilay Patel?

  Boy, is that obvious.

• 50:22Alex Cranz?

  And that's bad. That's like not a place to go like.

• 50:26Nilay Patel?

  They're very proud of it.

• 50:26Alex Cranz?

  Getting three guys who just graduated from college to build your entire car infotainment system seems like a bad idea. And that's kind of the sense of what I get from all of these, these attempts.

• 50:38Nilay Patel?

  Right. They've all forked Android in some way, or they're using QNX and Google is there to be their mapping provider.

• 50:42Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 50:43Nilay Patel?

  Or there's Android Automotive, which is Google's whole OS of your car, which is like what Polestar uses. But just in response to David, they're all picking Google services. So Google is colonizing more of the auto industry. Whereas Apple is like, what if we do all the screens for you?

• 51:00Alex Cranz?

  Same with TVs. They did the same thing, right? None of the TV makers wanted to, they all wanted to build their own TV stuff. And then one day they said, oh, Android does it good enough. And then we can still slap all our logos on everything and pop it out.

• 51:13Nilay Patel?

  And yeah.

• 51:14Alex Cranz?

  That's what they've done. So Android is just doing that again for a new market.

• 51:18Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's like, it's hard to see, consumers don't change their cars enough.

• 51:22Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 51:23Nilay Patel?

  So it's like, that market is just moving way, way, way, way slower.

• 51:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, because like every, what, 10 years? I don't know.

• 51:28Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 51:28Alex Cranz?

  I just got this car.

• 51:30Nilay Patel?

  And you're gonna have it forever.

• 51:31Alex Cranz?

  Forever.

• 51:31Nilay Patel?

  Have you gotten a MagSafe mat for you?

• 51:33Alex Cranz?

  No, because I plug in with the Lightning and then I throw it in my.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  I'm just gonna get, I've got like a drawer full.

• 51:39Alex Cranz?

  Just bring me one. Bring me your second best one. You can keep your best one, but bring me like a second.

• 51:45Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I'm giving you my best one. It's completely off the table.

• 51:48Alex Cranz?

  Absolutely not.

• 51:49Nilay Patel?

  You opened that door just to suggest that I gave you the best one?

• 51:51Alex Cranz?

  I just like, how are you going to convince me otherwise? I really need to feel that snap.

• 51:56Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Oh, my God, a good, a good MagSafe click. It's very good. Anyhow.

• 52:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 52:01Nilay Patel?

  This is, I'm telling you by the, at WWDC this year, Apple will say nothing about CarPlay. This is my prediction.

• 52:07Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 52:08Nilay Patel?

  Because it has gone nowhere. It's all, it's all gonna be headset talk anyway. And then this time next year, two more automakers will have dropped phone projection.

• 52:15Alex Cranz?

  Hmm.

• 52:16Nilay Patel?

  That's my other prediction.

• 52:17Alex Cranz?

  I can see it. No dogs inside.

• 52:19David Pierce?

  Glad I bought a car already.

• 52:20Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, my bets are better than your bets. All right, we gotta take a break and we got a little bit of a lightning round. There's a lot going on in this lightning round. We'll be right back.

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• 53:59David Pierce?

  All right, we're back.

• 54:00Nilay Patel?

  What?

• 54:01David Pierce?

  I'm super right. I just realized at some point on the Vergecast, we're going to do an entire segment about Neelai's favorite MagSafe chargers. And I could not be more excited about it.

• 54:10Nilay Patel?

  Right now, I'm on Belkin. I've got a Mophie one in the, in the truck.

• 54:15Alex Cranz?

  Uh huh.

• 54:15Nilay Patel?

  No, I don't. Don't. I have a Moment one in the truck.

• 54:19Alex Cranz?

  I want to just hear the click. I want you to do a whole segment where you just click them all against the microphone. So we can really hear it for you.

• 54:25David Pierce?

  Andrew, our producer, just instantly greenlit that segment. Absolutely guaranteed. Done.

• 54:29Nilay Patel?

  So the, the truck is weird because there's not a cigarette port, a power port, close enough to it. It's just a weird situation. So I can use the Moment ones, which aren't actually chargers. And Moment uses stronger magnets.

• 54:40Alex Cranz?

  Ooh.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  And they're very proud of their stronger magnets, which are not MagSafe approved.

• 54:45Alex Cranz?

  So if you get in a car accident, your phone probably isn't twirling around.

• 54:49David Pierce?

  All the metal in your car is just going to attach to the

• 54:53Nilay Patel?

  Very good. Welcome to the third segment of the Vergecast where we just continue the previous segment about how cool magnets are. MagSafe is legitimately my favorite feature on the phone.

• 55:03Alex Cranz?

  Is that your lightning?

• 55:04Nilay Patel?

  Have you done the thing where you hang the puck in your bathroom yet, next to your mirror?

• 55:08Alex Cranz?

  No.

• 55:09Nilay Patel?

  You gotta get a MagSafe. They're like five bucks on Amazon.

• 55:11Alex Cranz?

  Like, I live in a small apartment in New York City.

• 55:14Nilay Patel?

  Whatever. Just hang the puck on the mirror. And then when you're like brushing your teeth, you can like have YouTube TV open. It's great.

• 55:20Alex Cranz?

  I'm all right.

• 55:21Nilay Patel?

  All right. I'm tired. It's like, it's the best thing you can do.

• 55:24Alex Cranz?

  I'll believe you. I believe you in my heart. I'm never gonna do it.

• 55:27Nilay Patel?

  Again, there's a person who has a five-year-old in their house, like, this is my me time, baby. Just like rocking and rolling, watching TV in the bathroom.

• 55:36Nilay Patel?

  All right, lightning round. David, you start.

• 55:39David Pierce?

  Sure. So I had two. We'll do, they're both fairly quick. The first one is that Walmart rolled out a big redesign of its website because Walmart, which I have been proclaiming is a secret, like sneaky tech giant, and nobody realizes it, is now a drastically better-looking website than amazon.com, which, a very funny thing that happened this week was when this news came out, everybody sort of all at once had this moment on our staff of being like, wait, Amazon is ugly. Like, what a bad website amazon.com is. And we've all just been sort of slowly like frog boiling in water to amazon.com, and we just didn't realize it's a hideous website. And then Walmart, which used to be a like roughly equivalently hideous website, came out and said like, oh, we care about curation and we're gonna make things look

• 56:23David Pierce?

  a little nicer and we're gonna use like colors and the names of things aren't gonna be 65 words long. And we're gonna have like a thing that actually makes sense for shopping. And everybody's just like, oh, Amazon sucks. And that was my favorite part of this whole thing. It was like Walmart did a redesign and everybody was like, you know what's bad? It's amazon.com.

• 56:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It does look very pretty.

• 56:41David Pierce?

  It's nice.

• 56:42Alex Cranz?

  Looks nice. I'm still not gonna shop there, but like, I appreciate that Walmart was like, we're getting our asses kicked and we're actually gonna come back and go after a big tech company, even though we're just the guys to like destroy small towns with our giant, very convenient and lovely shopping centers.

• 56:59Nilay Patel?

  We had the CEO of Barnes & Noble on Decoder. And I was like, this is quite a turnaround for you. You remember, he used to like destroy small town bookstores. And he's like, you know, Amazon exists now.

• 57:10Nilay Patel?

  He's like, don't worry about it.

• 57:11Alex Cranz?

  We're the little guys.

• 57:12Nilay Patel?

  We're what you need. Like, he's like, small bookstores can't exist without Barnes and Noble because they are the distributor of the small bookstores now.

• 57:18Alex Cranz?

  Wow.

• 57:19Nilay Patel?

  So like your local independent bookseller is like, it needs a Barnes and Noble to exist. Otherwise, Amazon will crush it.

• 57:26Alex Cranz?

  That's incredible. I love that.

• 57:28Nilay Patel?

  I don't know if Walmart is that thing for people, but.

• 57:30Alex Cranz?

  Not yet. Not yet.

• 57:31David Pierce?

  Quite a take, though. But yeah, Walmart has been on this like relentless quest to just solve logistics in a way I think is super funny and interesting that during the pandemic, they they started talking a lot about, we're going to turn our stores into essentially like, super optimized warehouses for Instacart shoppers to come pick stuff up. And they were really big on curbside pickup. And they've just, they have this like, omni-channel, buy everything any way you want, and it all magically appears at your house, vision in their head. And I don't know if it's what anyone actually wants out of their life, but it is the vision that like, that that Walmart has. And I find it sort of fascinating watching them go after it.

• 58:09Alex Cranz?

  They're like, they saw Amazon doing what they do best, and doing it a little better. And they went, oh, wait, no, we're the biggest guy in the room. We're not just going to give that up. And as a me, have a me, because they were, for the longest time, they were like, the largest employer in the United States, and Amazon took that over. And so Walmart's like, no, no, no, we can employ the most people. No, we actually already have all these warehouses built out. We don't have to go do it. We just call them stores, super centers. And in fact, we can just fill that with crap and get it to you faster. So like, that part of it, I think, is really, really interesting. They just said, nah, we're really good at doing this. F you.

• 58:45Nilay Patel?

  There's a weird set of rumors that Walmart will be the one to buy TikTok, which I think is just like, perfect.

• 58:50David Pierce?

  What?

• 58:51Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's very good. I don't have any, it's true. I've just.

• 58:53Alex Cranz?

  Love this for the Waltons.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  Heard the rumors. Okay, here's my pick. Speaking of Amazon.

• 58:57Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 58:57Nilay Patel?

  And things Amazon does. Pretty devastating report in The Hollywood Reporter this week about Amazon Prime Studios.

• 59:04David Pierce?

  Yeah.

• 59:05Nilay Patel?

  How badly it's going over there. Uh, I'm just gonna do the disclosure now. I'm gonna talk on streaming. Get ready. Buckle up. Comcast, NBC Universal Division, is an investor in Vox Media. They own Peacock. They, Comcast did not love me, but they own Peacock. That's a competitor. Uh, we made a Netflix show. I'm the EP of a Netflix show. Um, I've used Hulu.

• 59:26Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 59:28Nilay Patel?

  Everyone in this room has opinions about the Lord of the Rings.

• 59:30David Pierce?

  I like Succession, it's on HBO.

• 59:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Yeah, disclosures. Amazon Prime Video, they invested a ton of money in the Lord of the Rings series.

• 59:38Alex Cranz?

  Yep.

• 59:38Nilay Patel?

  Thirty-seven percent completion rate. It's brutal. No one talks about it.

• 59:42Alex Cranz?

  Did you watch it?

• 59:43Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 59:43Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. I watched all of it.

• 59:45Nilay Patel?

  It's for nerds.

• 59:46Alex Cranz?

  It was real bad. I got like, I fell asleep. I didn't like laundry during it. It was one of those shows.

• 59:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Well, I was told it was slow. Their quote in the piece was like, we're definitely doing a second season. This was all world building. Which is bad.

• 1:00:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:01David Pierce?

  Season one was just set up for season two.

• 1:00:03Nilay Patel?

  A hundred million dollars of world building, whatever.

• 1:00:06Alex Cranz?

  Nerds.

• 1:00:07Nilay Patel?

  Uh, yeah, nerd stuff.

• 1:00:08Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:09Nilay Patel?

  Look at these wizards, huh? Elves? Here are some elves.

• 1:00:13Alex Cranz?

  That's what it was though. You're right. That's what it was. That was the show.

• 1:00:18Nilay Patel?

  Have you read Hobbits? You love those, right? Here's some, soon they'll all collide.

• 1:00:24Nilay Patel?

  It was, it's just a very slow show. Uh, but the bigger point is, Amazon's entire idea about this thing is you will subscribe to Prime, then you'll get great shows, and that'll make you stay subscribed to Prime, so you keep shopping on Prime.

• 1:00:39Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:00:39Nilay Patel?

  And the thing itself does not need an identity, it just has to be good enough that you're happy about it and stay subscribed to Prime. What is fascinating to me, and Alex, I really want your view of this, is the normals that I know are all Fire TV people.

• 1:00:53Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:54Nilay Patel?

  Like, everyone. All of Becky's aunts are like Fire TV people.

• 1:00:57Alex Cranz?

  Not Roku?

• 1:00:58Nilay Patel?

  Not Roku. It's all Fire TV. It's bonkers to me.

• 1:01:01Alex Cranz?

  That's wild.

• 1:01:02Nilay Patel?

  And I'm like, are they happy with Prime? Are they watching The Lord of the Rings?

• 1:01:07Alex Cranz?

  I think-

• 1:01:07David Pierce?

  Clearly not.

• 1:01:08Alex Cranz?

  Prime is stealthy. Like, it does, technically it has like the largest number of subscribers, or the second largest, over 200 million subscribers. But they're also, that's because they're also just regular Prime shipping subscribers. And so most people, I don't think, really think about it that often, except for then when they want to watch a movie and it happens to have it, or they, they heard like, a leave of their own, and then they watched it and went, this is gay. Because it's very gay. It's great, watch it. But a lot of people then were like, no, I didn't want that, and click out. Um, so I don't think as many people are engaging with it. And we're, there, that was a big part of that piece too, was about how it hasn't had a big hit. The closest it's had is a couple of like bro shows like The Boys and

• 1:01:47Nilay Patel?

  The Boys is great.

• 1:01:48Alex Cranz?

  Jack Reacher. Do you like Jack Reacher?

• 1:01:50Nilay Patel?

  I didn't watch that.

• 1:01:51Alex Cranz?

  It's a real bro. Like, it's like bro spy show.

• 1:01:53Nilay Patel?

  The Voice is particularly weird because I think people are taking the wrong message from The Boys.

• 1:01:57Alex Cranz?

  Yes.

• 1:01:58Nilay Patel?

  Which is that Homelander is cool and it's like, hmm, that's not it.

• 1:02:01Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:02Nilay Patel?

  That's not what that show's about.

• 1:02:05Alex Cranz?

  They're like, what if white supremacy was awesome? No, no, wrong, wrong.

• 1:02:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:08Alex Cranz?

  Kill it.

• 1:02:09Nilay Patel?

  What if we lasered everyone's heads if they pissed us off? That would rule The Boy. It's like, no, that's not.

• 1:02:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:14Nilay Patel?

  That's not it, everyone.

• 1:02:16Alex Cranz?

  But most people, it doesn't have these big moments. Like, it got Fleabag, but Fleabag wasn't even an Amazon show. They picked it up. They acquired it from, I think, the BBC or something. And

• 1:02:26Nilay Patel?

  That's fine.

• 1:02:27David Pierce?

  Yeah. And then, and this was a detail that was in the story. Amazon then gave Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who created Fleabag, a truckload of money to make more stuff. And then she didn't make anything for them.

• 1:02:37Alex Cranz?

  So she was supposed to make, the part of the issue here is that their, their idea is, okay, we need to get people on board. So we're gonna throw money at creators, which reasonably good, especially nowadays where everybody's throwing money around.

• 1:02:49David Pierce?

  Yeah, that's what everybody

• 1:02:50Alex Cranz?

  But then they're not following through. And so like Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Donald Glover were supposed to make a Mr. And Mrs. Smith show. There was, things did not go well there. There were some personality clashes and stuff. So they parted ways and she's still now doing a Tomb Raider show. But she has a tendency to go and come up with the idea for a show and then walk away.

• 1:03:09Nilay Patel?

  Huh.

• 1:03:09Alex Cranz?

  Because that's what she'd like, Killing Eve, she did the first season and she's like, this is cool, bye. And the show got progressively worse as different showrunners came on.

• 1:03:16David Pierce?

  The first season's amazing, though.

• 1:03:18Alex Cranz?

  It's really good. The show still was great. I loved it. But, yeah, so they're doing that a bunch. They're just throwing money at people and then being like, hey, do you do anything with that 20 mil we gave you? No? Cool. Here's another 20.

• 1:03:28Nilay Patel?

  Why can't I get these deals?

• 1:03:29Alex Cranz?

  Right? Like, I gotta go do that. That sounds great.

• 1:03:32Nilay Patel?

  The thing that really strikes me with all of these is the harshest criticism, and I think the most devastating criticism in the story, is they don't know what they want.

• 1:03:39David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:03:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:40Nilay Patel?

  Right? And that is, to some extent, the criticism of Netflix, all the big sort of data-driven To some extent, the criticism of YouTube is like, this thing has no point of view. It's just a mishmash of stuff. It's all driven by data.

• 1:03:53Alex Cranz?

  Well, and they hired, so the person who's running Amazon Prime, she was hired to have vision. And she does have vision, like she was a big fan of Ali or Their Own. She's been pushing some other stuff and she's running into conflict with the people who are data driven. And then also the stuff that she puts all her effort into.

• 1:04:11Nilay Patel?

  It's not good, not working.

• 1:04:12Alex Cranz?

  Doesn't actually land.

• 1:04:13Nilay Patel?

  Lord of the Rings.

• 1:04:14Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, so it's, well, that wasn't her, her deal. Like she came in to do that. That was Jeff Bezos being like, I want to watch my nerd show.

• 1:04:20Nilay Patel?

  And the expanse.

• 1:04:22Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:22Nilay Patel?

  Which spun completely, like literally into orbit.

• 1:04:25Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:04:26Nilay Patel?

  The second they went through that gate, I was like, the show's done. Like, I'm over it.

• 1:04:29Alex Cranz?

  More seasons came.

• 1:04:30Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, they kept making it.

• 1:04:32Alex Cranz?

  So many seasons.

• 1:04:33Nilay Patel?

  Uh, I just want to compare that to HBO, which absolutely has a point of view and just like fires off hit after hit.

• 1:04:40Alex Cranz?

  Right.

• 1:04:40Nilay Patel?

  Even with all the corporate chaos of HBO and AT&T and all the rest. They're like, what we do is we make things we like. And then we show them to people. And that's how you get the White Lotus and Succession and all the rest of it. And it just doesn't seem like the tech companies that want to take over streaming have gotten it with the notable exception of Apple.

• 1:04:58Alex Cranz?

  Yep. Apple's the only one and they, they, and that was partly because they hired a bunch of HBO people.

• 1:05:03Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:03Alex Cranz?

  So part of this is, is Amazon doesn't want to listen to, to these people that they hire. They go and they hire them and they're like, let's do this. And Amazon's like, nah, let's do this other stuff. And, and so there's just this constant disconnect and Netflix is having the same issue. Netflix is totally driven by the algorithm to the point that it cancels shows that are really, really popular. And then gets people furious and lots of bad press and everybody yells at them. And Apple has figured this out because they just trusted that we don't know what we're doing here. We're going to pay people who do and let them work and like get out of the way. And also give them a ton of money to do it.

• 1:05:38David Pierce?

  Just a ton of. Well, and to be fair, Apple has had its share of stinkers. It's just also had some really massive successes in a way that Amazon hasn't. But the thing for me is it's always been like this at Amazon. Like, do you remember when Amazon would put out a bunch of pilots and let people vote on which ones they thought should go to series? Like, it turns out that if you do the whole Amazon thing, which is like, start with what the customer wants and, you know, go out to the end, which is how Amazon says it does everything, you're gonna get shitty stuff because people don't know what they want. And if you ask people what they want, they're gonna say Lord of the Rings. And then you have to make a good Lord of the Rings show. And that's much harder than just saying, do you like Lord of the Rings? But then on the flip side, Amazon, at least as far as I can tell, has never been at all

• 1:06:23David Pierce?

  clear about what its video stuff is for. And even in the course of this story, they talked a bunch about like, one of the compelling things about Lord of the Rings was all the like merchandising opportunities, right? And they, they've talked about this with football too, that if you get people to sign up, like, we're gonna be able to sell you football related things. Like, maybe you'll buy your Tostitos through Thursday Night Football and that that's actually as big a victory as getting you to watch Thursday Night Football through Prime Video. And so there's just been this weird thing where it's like, what, what are these shows and movies here to accomplish for Amazon? And I don't necessarily think Amazon has a clear answer to that. They at least have not communicated that to Hollywood. And until they do, it's gonna keep being the same thing where people just come in like, what, what do you want from us? Like, what does success look like here?

• 1:07:07Alex Cranz?

  And, and they had it, even people saying that. I think the guy that did A League With Your Own was like, what do you want from us? Like, greenlit our show.

• 1:07:15Nilay Patel?

  They wanna sell baseball bats.

• 1:07:16Alex Cranz?

  Apparently. Just the little girls.

• 1:07:19Nilay Patel?

  All right. This is the longest lightning round ever. You can tell, we have a lot of feelings about this story.

• 1:07:23Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:23Nilay Patel?

  But it is notable that the data-driven streamers are not producing hits at the rate of the people who are just like, have taste.

• 1:07:31Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:32Nilay Patel?

  There's a lesson.

• 1:07:33Alex Cranz?

  Shock.

• 1:07:33Nilay Patel?

  All right, what's your lightning round item?

• 1:07:34Alex Cranz?

  Ooh, so mine is kind of, I'm folding two in together because we had some handheld news this week. So first of all, Asus on April Fools' Day was like,

• 1:07:44Nilay Patel?

  This was not great.

• 1:07:44Alex Cranz?

  It was really bad. Asus was like, hey, we're gonna do a really cool handheld. April Fools, and everybody's like, well, that's stupid. Like, the Steam Deck exists. You could have done that. And then a few days later, they're like, oh, actually, we are doing it. And everybody's like, well, that was stupid. Why didn't, why did you message it with April Fools? And I think the idea there was supposed to be you'd get really excited and wish it existed, and then be really excited when it did exist.

• 1:08:06Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the classic April Fools' gambit.

• 1:08:09Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, and instead, they just pissed everybody off. And we don't really know a lot about the pricing or what's involved. There's a couple of YouTubers that have seen it so far. It seems potentially really cool. It runs Windows. Could be neat. Could be $600, and nobody would want to spend that on a handheld when a Steam Deck's $400.

• 1:08:27Nilay Patel?

  Why is it called the Rog Ally?

• 1:08:29Alex Cranz?

  Because it's your ally in gaming.

• 1:08:30Nilay Patel?

  Oh, my God.

• 1:08:31David Pierce?

  Also, have you ever seen Asus' product names? Rog Ally is like the best it's ever done.

• 1:08:35Alex Cranz?

  Rog is Republic of Gamer, which was a gaming

• 1:08:39Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:40Alex Cranz?

  thing that they acquired years ago. And so they just

• 1:08:43Nilay Patel?

  This is the ally.

• 1:08:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:08:44Nilay Patel?

  All right.

• 1:08:45Alex Cranz?

  It's your friend.

• 1:08:45Nilay Patel?

  I'll take it.

• 1:08:46Alex Cranz?

  And then the other part of this is Sony is considering also making a handheld super late to that party in some respects, even though they did the Vita and they did the PSP, and they're both were great. Overpriced, nobody bought them except for me and probably Sean.

• 1:09:00Nilay Patel?

  I had a PSP.

• 1:09:01Alex Cranz?

  Okay, you, me, and Sean.

• 1:09:02Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:03Alex Cranz?

  We were the three that owned the PSP. It was great. Mine was pink.

• 1:09:06Nilay Patel?

  Did I have a Vita too? There's a real chance I might have had a Vita a long time ago.

• 1:09:09Alex Cranz?

  The Vita was like, it had like 3G in it. You're like, it's like, it's practically a phone. I can justify this purchase.

• 1:09:14Nilay Patel?

  It's weird that a gadget made so little impression that I can't remember if I owned one, but it feels like the sort of thing that I bought.

• 1:09:20Alex Cranz?

  It was not great. The games were great for it. But so Sony is looking into this again, curiously, not for cloud gaming. That's probably because they have a really bad cloud gaming infrastructure. They farmed it all out to Microsoft. They don't, everybody's, no, somebody's gonna yell at me in the comments, and I'm sorry. I know you all love it, and it works, but it's garbage. So they're not making it for that. They're making it for remote play, so you can just play your PS5 far away from your house.

• 1:09:47Nilay Patel?

  That makes sense.

• 1:09:48Alex Cranz?

  But that might be the only thing you can do with it. And how much is it going to cost? Because everybody's struggling to get it under $400. And why would you spend $400 on something to just play your PS5 that's at home? When you could spend $400 on a Steam Deck that lets you do that and play other games?

• 1:10:05David Pierce?

  I would assume this has to be coming alongside some like huge expansion in Sony's cloud gaming stuff. Because if not, you're exactly right. This just becomes like history's most expensive, barely useful PlayStation peripheral. Just slightly edging the move sticks that existed. But uh.

• 1:10:26Alex Cranz?

  The reporting was like emphatically like it's not for cloud gaming. It's for remote play, which is why it's so weird. Also, the name is bad.

• 1:10:34Nilay Patel?

  What's the name?

• 1:10:35Alex Cranz?

  Q Lite.

• 1:10:37Nilay Patel?

  It's okay. It's worse than Rogue Ally.

• 1:10:39Alex Cranz?

  Yeah, I was like, we should do it Rogue Ally.

• 1:10:41Nilay Patel?

  Or QAnon.

• 1:10:42David Pierce?

  Let's hope that's a code name.

• 1:10:44Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:45Nilay Patel?

  Can I tell you? Whatever. They can do whatever they want.

• 1:10:48Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:10:48Nilay Patel?

  It's fine.

• 1:10:49Alex Cranz?

  You'll buy it.

• 1:10:50Nilay Patel?

  Sony needs to put PSVR2 Gran Turismo demo stations in every mall and store and 7-Eleven in America.

• 1:10:59Alex Cranz?

  How many times have you vomited playing it?

• 1:11:01Nilay Patel?

  No, so the first day was really bad.

• 1:11:02Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:11:03Nilay Patel?

  So I had Addie send me one of our PSVR2 review units. And then I bought a Logitech G923 wheel and pedals and a chair. It's, I was like, whatever, it's fully ridiculous. But I live in the woods. I'm in the basement. No one can see me, headset on. And the first day I was like, oh, this is a mistake. Super queasy. And then a couple of days later, it's fine.

• 1:11:26Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:11:26Nilay Patel?

  A couple of days of queasy. I'm obsessed. It is like being in the stupid cars.

• 1:11:31Alex Cranz?

  Love that. Do you like miss the brake? Do you have brake pushback and stuff? Like when a real car, you can feel it when you're braking?

• 1:11:39Nilay Patel?

  No, because it's just their plastic pedals.

• 1:11:42Alex Cranz?

  I don't know.

• 1:11:43David Pierce?

  You know, you can spend like 30 grand on this setup, Neelai. And I feel like we're headed down a dangerous road.

• 1:11:48Nilay Patel?

  I've spent a bunch of credit card points and this is fine. Like I haven't spent like, it was like a hundred dollars and a bunch of credit card points to accomplish this setup. It is legitimately the most compelling thing you can do in VR.

• 1:11:59Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:00Nilay Patel?

  Like it is so cool. It's so much fun. Uh, you convince yourself that you're moving, which is like absolutely bizarre to be sitting dead still.

• 1:12:11Nilay Patel?

  Holding a plastic wheel that you cannot see because you're wearing a VR headset and like leaning your body like it's crazy. I took out, my wife came down the stairs the other day and I took out the headset. I literally went, you gotta try this. And she was like, what is wrong with you?

• 1:12:26Alex Cranz?

  Just went right back up the stairs.

• 1:12:27Nilay Patel?

  I'm out of here. For all the, we talked so much about last week, talked about AR killer apps, all this stuff. It's incredibly complicated full setup.

• 1:12:35Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:36Nilay Patel?

  It's like $1,500 worth of stuff, right? You need a PS5, you need a headset, which is another $500, $600. You need to buy a wheel. It's all ridiculous.

• 1:12:44Alex Cranz?

  Share.

• 1:12:45Nilay Patel?

  Uh, and you can, you can spend like $30,000 on like full motion iRacing PC based.

• 1:12:51David Pierce?

  Yep.

• 1:12:51Nilay Patel?

  Max Verstappen, the F1 racer, has a full rig in his trailer. So he leaves F1 races and then sim races against people using his real name, which is incredible.

• 1:13:02David Pierce?

  Badass.

• 1:13:03Alex Cranz?

  Devastating.

• 1:13:03David Pierce?

  Sim racing as yourself is the coolest imaginable thing.

• 1:13:07Nilay Patel?

  And all that's fine. And like, I have friends and I've tried those things on screens with the three screens around you. I'm telling you, you put on a VR headset, you're like, oh, this is the coolest thing you can do in VR.

• 1:13:15Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:16Nilay Patel?

  Sony needs to throw this cloud gaming, whatever. Get people the headsets with the racing games.

• 1:13:22Alex Cranz?

  That should, that's like their Tetris.

• 1:13:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's $1,500 of sim racing setup. Uh, also it judges you every time you put it on. It's like, are you sitting down again? And it's like, I'm definitely sitting down again. It's like, don't you want to play standing up, moving around? It's like, no, no, no. I'm in the chair, bro.

• 1:13:38David Pierce?

  Stationary mode. What's up?

• 1:13:41Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It's like, every time it's like, are you, uh, you're stationary again? It's like, sure, him. Let's just put the pedal to the metal, bro.

• 1:13:51Nilay Patel?

  It's very good. Okay. One more. Wait, how many pics are we at? That was like one each, basically?

• 1:13:56David Pierce?

  We did one each. You, you get one more and then I think we should probably go.

• 1:13:59Nilay Patel?

  All right. Let me wrap this up. Last lightning round item. This is me just assigning myself a story again. We'll have it on the website tomorrow.

• 1:14:05Alex Cranz?

  Okay.

• 1:14:06Nilay Patel?

  Something is happening in Wisconsin.

• 1:14:09Alex Cranz?

  Cheese?

• 1:14:10Nilay Patel?

  It's not.

• 1:14:11Alex Cranz?

  49ers.

• 1:14:12Nilay Patel?

  Uh, Aaron Rodgers is leaving.

• 1:14:16Nilay Patel?

  The only things anyone can think of. So as you know, I'm obsessed with the Foxconn plot, which is just minutes away from the trap, my childhood home in Wisconsin. Yeah. They're gonna do something on it. And it's not coffee robots or whatever nonsense they claimed they were doing. It's definitely not building TVs. AK AI.

• 1:14:33David Pierce?

  Yeah, wait, so the first thing, let's just, let's run through the history of this real fast. So it was.

• 1:14:37Nilay Patel?

  Real fast.

• 1:14:38David Pierce?

  It was gonna be, it was gonna be TVs, right?

• 1:14:41Nilay Patel?

  Yes. So in the Trump administration, Donald Trump, golden shovel, break ground with Terry Go, chairman of Foxconn, says, we're building a TV factory in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin. They ram it through, they bulldoze houses, the whole thing. AI AK plus 5G.

• 1:14:57David Pierce?

  Sure.

• 1:14:58Nilay Patel?

  The plus. They're gonna do 15,000 jobs, billions in tax subsidies. I don't need to tell you that this did not happen. It was never gonna happen and it definitely did not happen. At one point in the course of this story, when they broke ground on the factory, uh, display experts told us that foundation doesn't look correct for an LCD fab. And we asked them and they said, the special clay soil in Wisconsin does not, means that we do not need to build the foundation that you need in the rest of the world. And I went, I'm from there and no one ever told me that the dirt was special. So that was weird. So then they built this weird building, they call it the multipurpose building, it is all but empty, they use it for storage, edit, reason to storage, they're cleaning it, coffee

• 1:15:43Nilay Patel?

  robots, they think they're making server boards for Google there, but they won't claim, no reporters have ever been there, there's a tiny dome that they claim is a data center, but the actual data center is in shipping containers outside the dome. It's, it's all very good. Geodesic dome, right? Yeah, it's like a little, it's so, it's like by my parents' house, every time I go home, I look at it, I'm like, it's so small.

• 1:16:03David Pierce?

  It's just a little, little snow globe data center.

• 1:16:05Nilay Patel?

  And it's not, it's just like a conference center, you can rent it out for weddings. Anyhow.

• 1:16:10David Pierce?

  First of all, let's, let's do that.

• 1:16:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. If any of your listeners are getting married. Might I interest you in Mount Pleasant, Wisconsin?

• 1:16:18David Pierce?

  Neelai will officiate your wedding at the dome.

• 1:16:21Nilay Patel?

  Uh, every time, uh, when my sister got married, my parents renovated the house. When my, when I got married, they did the backyard, my parents, they're looking to do the bathroom and apparently it takes a wedding to kick them into gear. So if you're listening to this.

• 1:16:33David Pierce?

  Get at us.

• 1:16:34Nilay Patel?

  Let me know.

• 1:16:37Nilay Patel?

  So there's a news report, somebody tweeted this at me and just looking at Twitter in the background, I came upon it days late. Mount Pleasant, the board that approved the Foxconn deal, just like quietly announced that Microsoft would be building a data center there. They did this a week before the election. So they announced this thing, Microsoft is building a data center. They have not taken the votes to do it, but they announced it before the election, approved the Foxconn is a great idea. So I'm looking at the story and I'm like, I don't, I don't know about this. I will say Microsoft President Brad Smith is from Appleton, Wisconsin, loves Wisconsin. There's a big tech campus at Lambeau Field called Title Town Tech. Okay, man loves Wisconsin. He likes investing in Wisconsin. Love it. Love it for me, love it for him. I've not yet been invited to Lambeau Field. I'm just putting

• 1:17:21Nilay Patel?

  that out there. But I feel like it's two hometown boys we could really vibe. So I asked Microsoft, Microsoft sends me the following statement. This is all they say. Our data center campus investment plans with the village of Mount Pleasant in Racine County are part of Microsoft's long-term commitment for the local communities in Wisconsin. We look forward to our work there. Other than that, we don't have more to say, nor are we doing interviews. So that's nothing.

• 1:17:46Nilay Patel?

  Okay. All right. I was like, can I talk to anyone about how many jobs will this data center? It's a room full of servers. It's a one job. Yeah, Microsoft data centers, they're around the country. You can see, they don't make a lot of jobs and they know it. Kevin Scott, the CTO of Microsoft has a whole book about how data centers don't make a lot of jobs. It's a great book. He was on, again, on Dakota, we've talked about it. He's like, this is not the thing that is like an engine of job creation. But you need to have them and like, then you build infrastructure and you have power grids and this helps local communities. They're getting tax rebates and subsidies for it as always. And Mount Pleasant and Foxconn are like, this is what happens when you build the infrastructure, the clients will come. And it's like, no, you guys were, you tore down people's homes.

• 1:18:31Nilay Patel?

  To build a TV factory. Where's the TV factory?

• 1:18:34Alex Cranz?

  Where are the jobs? Where are the jobs?

• 1:18:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. So we're going to be tracking the Microsoft data center in Mount Pleasant. I'm sure they're actually going to build it, but I think-

• 1:18:42David Pierce?

  They literally, they Field of Dreams did. They just, if you build it, they will come. Just throw up a giant empty building and somebody will come put servers in it.

• 1:18:50Nilay Patel?

  And by "it," just to be specifically clear, is it is declaring the land on which people's homes sit as blighted, tearing them all down, trucking water from Lake Michigan over there and building a power substation for no one to lie fallow for three years. So that eventually Microsoft is like, "Yeah, sure, we'll put one there."

• 1:19:12David Pierce?

  Classic Field of Dreams.

• 1:19:14Nilay Patel?

  That's it. I mean, that's Field of Dreams, too.

• 1:19:17Alex Cranz?

  Just the movie.

• 1:19:19Nilay Patel?

  So again, we're tracking it. I don't know what to tell you.

• 1:19:24Nilay Patel?

  It is very silly. I think it is very odd that Microsoft isn't like pounding its chest. They're building a data center in South East Wisconsin. Like, they just, they just don't want to talk about it.

• 1:19:34Alex Cranz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:35David Pierce?

  Neil, when do you run for mayor of Resete, Wisconsin? This is the only outcome here.

• 1:19:40Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that I could get my dad to vote for me, so that's going to be tough.

• 1:19:46David Pierce?

  You did swear once on the Verge.com. He didn't like that.

• 1:19:49Nilay Patel?

  My parents were not. I think I could get my mom.

• 1:19:52David Pierce?

  Okay. It's a good start.

• 1:19:54Alex Cranz?

  Yeah. Just promise you'll never swear again. Would that help?

• 1:19:57Nilay Patel?

  I don't know that I'm prepared to make these commitments to the people of Wisconsin today.

• 1:20:03Nilay Patel?

  And I will consider my options at this time while you're hearing from my attorney.

• 1:20:08David Pierce?

  We're not doing interviews.

• 1:20:11Alex Cranz?

  No interviews. Sorry.

• 1:20:12Nilay Patel?

  No press. All right, that's it. That's the Vergecast. I promise that all the stories we talked about will be published. David will publish about Activity Pub.

• 1:20:20David Pierce?

  Yes.

• 1:20:21Nilay Patel?

  I will write about Wisconsin.

• 1:20:23Alex Cranz?

  I made no promises today.

• 1:20:25Nilay Patel?

  We did one last week, right? Yeah, I did one last week. I did. Album is a classical. Yeah, so I promised it and I delivered. I swear to God, this entire show is just for us to ideate stories, put on the website. But that's why you love it. That's the Vergecast. Stuff on the website you should look at. We do have a retrospective of the Lisa going on, the Apple Lisa, the precursor to Macintosh, the Computer History Museum. It's great. Go look at it. I really want people to read McKenna's story about the Donald Trump protests in front of Manhattan courthouse and how everyone there was a streamer. It is one of the vergiest Verge stories we've ever published. It's very good.

• 1:20:58David Pierce?

  It's really good.

• 1:20:58Nilay Patel?

  And we have the same with the Home Assistant Sky Connect, which is another extremely Verge story. It's so Verge. It's so nice. That's the range. And then take the caller quiz, whatever. David, you want to tell people to vote for the People's Choice Award?

• 1:21:11David Pierce?

  Yes, so the Vergecast is nominated for a Webby Award for Best Technology Podcast. We're currently losing to a TechCrunch podcast. I like TechCrunch fine. They're all lovely people. I would like to destroy them and bury them in the ground with our votes. Please go, we'll put the link in the show notes. Please go vote for the Verge so that we can gloat to everyone we ever met that we on the Webby and they didn't.

• 1:21:33Nilay Patel?

  It's like a spring. Yeah.

• 1:21:36David Pierce?

  Yeah, the award itself is rad looking and I want one, so let's get it.

• 1:21:41Nilay Patel?

  Very good. That's it. That's Vergecast. Back to you.

• 1:21:49Speaker 07

  And that's a wrap for Vergecast this week. Thanks for listening. If you enjoy the show, subscribe in the podcast app of your choice or tell a friend. You can send us feedback at [email protected]. This show is produced by me, Liam James, and our senior audio director, Andrew Moreno. This episode was edited and mixed by Amanda Rose Smith. Our editorial director is Brooke Minter's and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Box Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

• 1:22:22Speaker 01

  When it comes to AI, there is what we could do and what we should do. What will we decide? I'm Kimberly Nevela, host of the Pondering AI Podcast from SAS. Every episode, I sit down with innovators, researchers, and technologists to consider the questions that come after the AI breakthroughs. Questions that don't have easy answers but need to be asked. If you're curious or concerned about AI, join me as we challenge assumptions and ponder the issues together. Find Pondering AI wherever you get your podcasts.

• 1:22:53Speaker 08

  Support for this show comes from Harvey AI. The future of law is agentic, not just tools that assist, but AI agents that navigate complex matters. That's why Harvey created agents that can do the work from end to end. They build a plan, pull from secure data sources, run subagents in parallel, and draft the work product ready for your review. So you delegate the work and own the judgment. Trusted by more than 60% of the AM Law 100 and leading Fortune 500 legal teams, Harvey is the AI operating system designed specifically for legal work. Harvey, AI tailored for law. Learn more at harvey.ai.