What is a monetization structure?

This week on Vergecast, Senior Editor Chris Plante comes to town to join Paul, Nilay, and video director Miriam Nielsen to discuss the overwhelming response to topics reported on our site; Pokémon GO and Nintendo's new NES. They also go deeper into augmented reality and how Nintendo is dealing with their properties. Paul once again brings us his weekly segment "Pokémon GO Tips and Tricks Review: Gadgets" 03:38 - Pokémon GO 16:59 - AR 33:40 - Nintendo 47:58- Paul's "Pokémon GO Tips and Tricks Review: Gadgets" 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.

• 0:02Nilay Patel?

  Philip Glass. I think I got it.

• 0:13Nilay Patel?

  Hello and welcome to The Vergecast. I'm Edoa Patel. I'm joined here by a cast of luminaries. Paul Miller is here.

• 0:22Speaker 01

  Hey.

• 0:23Nilay Patel?

  Chris Plant is here.

• 0:24Speaker 02

  Hello.

• 0:25Nilay Patel?

  Miriam Nielsen is here.

• 0:26Speaker 03

  Hi.

• 0:26Nilay Patel?

  Make the noise.

• 0:30Nilay Patel?

  Nobody knows how Miriam is making that noise.

• 0:33Speaker 02

  What they can't see is her entire realm of instruments.

• 0:36Speaker 03

  I just have a lot of kazoos.

• 0:38Nilay Patel?

  Miriam is here only to make sound effects today. Hello, welcome to The Vergecast, the flagship podcast of theverge.com. We only have four, so it's not a full armada, but we're working on it every day. This show sponsored by fake vodka that was actually sponsored last week. Which is amazing.

• 0:57Speaker 02

  Yeah?

• 0:57Nilay Patel?

  Scissor.

• 0:58Speaker 02

  No.

• 0:59Speaker 03

  Was there real vodka?

• 1:01Nilay Patel?

  No. It's like I don't want to give it to them for free, but if this company wants to come back and do it again.

• 1:06Speaker 01

  But just say there was some can't miss advertising last week.

• 1:10Nilay Patel?

  Last week I think was the best advertising on the show.

• 1:12Speaker 02

  That's where we want to start every episode, discussing last week's ads. Oh, boy.

• 1:17Nilay Patel?

  It was the best thing to happen on the show, I think, in a long time. But anyway, Scissor Vodka, Cut Through the Night.

• 1:23Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. The Novos, like, you know, they just got some great shirts, you know? We're just throwing money around.

• 1:30Nilay Patel?

  Who advertised on What's Tech this week?

• 1:32Speaker 02

  I think Citibank.

• 1:33Nilay Patel?

  Oh, we got some city ads coming up on this show. Welcome to The Vergecast, where we discuss podcast advertising on all of our other shows.

• 1:41Nilay Patel?

  Citibank also on Control Alt Delete this week, so they're all over the place.

• 1:43Speaker 02

  Oh, great.

• 1:45Speaker 01

  How's your monetization?

• 1:47Speaker 02

  Look, here's what's happening right now. Our structure is choice.

• 1:51Speaker 02

  You'll enjoy it on this week's episode of What's Tech. What's your monetization structure?

• 1:56Nilay Patel?

  What is a monetization structure?

• 1:58Speaker 02

  Oh, thank you, thank you.

• 1:59Nilay Patel?

  All of this conversation, of course, just delay tactics before the tidal wave of Pokémon Go washes over this show. Crushing everything in its wake like it has crushed the internet.

• 2:10Speaker 01

  What's your favorite Pokémon?

• 2:11Nilay Patel?

  I don't know, the yellow one.

• 2:15Nilay Patel?

  There's a reason I brought all three of you on this show today. Okay, let's just start at the start. There was a bunch of stuff that happened this week. I got a whole list of news. But our site, the industry, the world, has been dominated by this Pocket Genesis that was already available on amazon.com. That's not true. No.

• 2:34Speaker 01

  No.

• 2:35Nilay Patel?

  Pocket Ness.

• 2:36Speaker 01

  Yes. Not even Pocket Ness. It's like a classic.

• 2:39Nilay Patel?

  So zero.

• 2:40Speaker 02

  What are you talking about?

• 2:41Speaker 01

  He's talking about this new Nintendo, the NES.

• 2:44Nilay Patel?

  Here are the two big stories of the week. Here are the two massive stories of the week, for real. Pokémon Go.

• 2:51Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:51Nilay Patel?

  Dominated our entire site forever.

• 2:53Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 2:54Nilay Patel?

  I don't think that Pokémon Go explainer is gonna leave our most popular stories forever. It's just gonna stay there for the rest of time.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's still trending.

• 3:01Nilay Patel?

  Uh, it's just gonna stay there forever. Then today, huge kaboom story. Nintendo released a tiny little Nintendo Entertainment System.

• 3:09Speaker 01

  It's called the NES Classic Edition.

• 3:12Nilay Patel?

  With an HDMI output and two controller ports that are in the same place as the existing controller ports were, or the previous ones were, but look way uglier because they're a different kind of port.

• 3:23Speaker 01

  It's the Wii plug.

• 3:24Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 3:24Speaker 01

  The plug that's at the bottom of a Wii remote. Which is like what you would plug like a classic controller.

• 3:30Speaker 02

  Your hand motions right now are actually killing me.

• 3:34Nilay Patel?

  Anyway, so Nintendo dominated the week, right? I mean, these are, there's a lot to unpack here, but we gotta start with Pokémon.

• 3:43Speaker 02

  Sure.

• 3:44Nilay Patel?

  I'll just offer my one tiny Pokémon story. And then you guys are gonna actually tell me what it is. What the hell's happening? Tell me if the world is doomed. My parents called me yesterday. Out of the blue. Hey, how's it going? How are things? Are there various things in your life that, you know, we generally want to talk to you about? Great, great. Hey, what's Pokemon Go? They literally faked a call. Mm-hmm. They faked a check-in call because they were out with some friends in Racine, Wisconsin. They were by the lake and they saw hundreds of nerds waving phones at the lake. Hmm. Asked one of the nerds, "What are you doing?" And then rushed home to call me.

• 4:23Speaker 02

  And he said, "Star me!" And they were like, "Oh, no."

• 4:27Nilay Patel?

  They're like, "Have drugs infected our city? Are we safe?" So it's everywhere. It is a absolute phenomenon. What the hell's going on, Chris?

• 4:35Speaker 02

  Um, so, to get ahead of ourselves, there is a new episode of What's Tech, a fantastic podcast by theverge.com hosted by-

• 4:43Nilay Patel?

  Not as well monetized, I have to say.

• 4:45Speaker 02

  No, beautifully monetized. I will- I- I know, I care. You have too many things to worry about in your day. Uh, no, no. But there's an episode coming up on Tuesday that is What is Pokemon Go? And that, everyone got that call this week. Like, I truly believe everyone got that call. And this entire podcast is what you hand to your parents when you get those calls. So like, don't hand them this episode. We've already lost it with the advertising talk. Hand them that. But for anyone who's listening and is like somewhere in between-

• 5:15Nilay Patel?

  Don't listen to this garbage advertising podcast.

• 5:18Speaker 02

  It's very helpful. But the long and short of it is Pokemon, 20-year-old role-playing game series. You go around a fictional world collecting pocket monsters. There's now like 700 of them, collect them, fight them, yada, yada, yada. There've been like plenty of spinoffs, TV shows, but this is the first one that achieves like the clear fantasy of that video game, right? Which is like, "I don't want to walk around a fantasy world collecting fantasy animals. I want to walk around the real world taking people's dogs when they're cute, right?" But you can't do that, so they made an augmented reality game and they're like, "Oh..."

• 5:52Nilay Patel?

  Let me just confirm or deny that your fantasy is to take cute dogs from people?

• 5:57Speaker 03

  Definitely. I want all the dogs.

• 5:59Speaker 02

  Yeah, that is like-

• 6:00Speaker 01

  Don't you have that like one girlfriend who's like always talking about stealing babies?

• 6:03Nilay Patel?

  I have that one wife.

• 6:05Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 6:05Nilay Patel?

  Not babies, dogs.

• 6:07Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 6:07Nilay Patel?

  Definitely dogs. Every time we see a dog, she's like, "I could have that dog." I'm like, "You're a lawyer. You can't, you should, you know the rules."

• 6:13Speaker 01

  So Pokeballs steal animals?

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's, that's the idea, is that you can walk around the world and when you see cute things, you're like, "Mine." And then it's just yours. Which is like, I, I don't know if there are many more appealing fantasies than like instant animal husbandry. You know? That's the right word.

• 6:35Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I know it's the right word, but doesn't husband, well, it's not.

• 6:38Speaker 02

  No.

• 6:38Nilay Patel?

  Doesn't husband, it implies that you will then care for-

• 6:41Speaker 02

  Exactly, which you do in the Pokemons.

• 6:44Nilay Patel?

  I thought Pokemon Go was less, more about collecting, less about leveling.

• 6:47Speaker 02

  So, no, there, there is-

• 6:49Speaker 03

  You got to love it.

• 6:50Speaker 02

  When you get into the really cruddy meta-game that is like at the end of the game, yeah, there's a lot of leveling.

• 6:55Speaker 01

  I think, I think this is the right debate to have on the podcast because I feel like this is the question. Pokemon Go, clearly, everybody's playing it, everybody in the world all the time. And everybody's getting a bunch of Pokemon, the app is terrible, crashes all the time, it's frustrating, but people play it anyways.

• 7:11Nilay Patel?

  The first thing you ever said to me was, "Oh, they built it in Unity."

• 7:13Speaker 01

  Yep.

• 7:13Nilay Patel?

  Paul was real mad about that.

• 7:14Speaker 01

  It's still tragic, and I think it's getting, got even worse after this update. But, people are all playing this. But, after you collect a bunch of Pokemon, which is just an undeniably joyful experience-

• 7:26Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 7:26Speaker 01

  What do you do? And so does this app or game or whatever it is have any staying power?

• 7:31Speaker 02

  And, and the wild thing is, that they, they, they made a game that was for everybody, right? Well, they made two games, and the first one is a game for everybody, where the way you collect these, it looks exactly like taking a photo in, with your phone. So it's instantly familiar, and instead of like the, the little button that you hit to take a photo, that's where the Pokeball is, and you swipe it and you catch a Pokemon.

• 7:51Nilay Patel?

  Oh, so we gotta, wait, wait, before you go on, we haven't said the most important thing, is this is the first massive augmented reality experience that has ever hit. So what, when Chris is saying, "Take a photo," that the interface, the default interface is you look around the world with your-

• 8:05Speaker 01

  Through your camera.

• 8:06Speaker 02

  And you see a little Pokemon in it.

• 8:08Nilay Patel?

  And you see Pokemon in it, that's why you're in the room.

• 8:09Speaker 03

  Annoyingly not to scale of the actual size of Pokemon. Because Pokemon, for the most case, are not tiny adorable animals, they're giant adorable animals.

• 8:16Speaker 02

  Starlight's huge.

• 8:17Speaker 03

  They're massive. They're like scary big.

• 8:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 8:20Speaker 03

  Except for like pigeons, which are pidgey sized.

• 8:22Speaker 02

  Want to be clear, we're talking about cartoon animals.

• 8:24Speaker 01

  So are you getting that from the TV series?

• 8:28Speaker 03

  No, from the stats in the game and from the stats that have been published since like the very first book of my game.

• 8:32Speaker 01

  The experience with you played on like the Game Boy, right? You they're all kind of that same size because they're portraits. Um, you don't even really even hardly see them in the actual world that you walk around in. But then, yeah, how you capture them is an RPG. You like knock down their health to their like weak and then you pick the correct item in the video game. It is a lot more complicated. It would have been less successful, maybe.

• 8:54Speaker 02

  So they made a game that is like, I mean, they stripped a game of like a very proven formula and made it as simple as possible, which is like, fine. That's how you get people in. But then after that, the logic would be like, okay, well then like, kind of like nudge them into something like about as complicated as the Game Boy game. And instead they're like, so before this, we made the most complicated, nonsensical territory, like simulation war game, where people had to go onto websites and like mine data and collaborate through forums to figure out even what any of it meant. And and they're like, you know what? Let's do that. But like, but it only had two teams. Let's have three. Let's make it even more complicated.

• 9:32Speaker 02

  And then let's like tie it to a battle system that is the worst mini game that we could possibly design, that has no real logic or skill to it. Oh, and it's connected to servers working regularly. So even though it's like a rhythm based fighting game, you have to have like a good connection to a server, which is a thing that they just clearly they're not going to have. So like the the top level game, you go from like as like a game nerd, somebody who can like, you know, figure these things out relatively quickly from playing too many games of my life. The first one is like a zero out of 10 in terms of like skill. And then you like skip to like a 12. It's just like, oh, cool. I hope you like reading forums because that's the only way you're gonna figure this out.

• 10:16Nilay Patel?

  The game you're referencing is Ingress. So 90sec Labs, they made Ingress at Google, which is only an Android, but still massively popular. Ingress had a big crowdsourcing element, right? So that's where the sort of the map of locations for Pokemon Go came from.

• 10:31Speaker 02

  Kind of.

• 10:32Nilay Patel?

  And then they spun out of Google and then they licensed the Pokemon IP from Nintendo. There's a clear relationship between the Ingris map and the Pokemon map.

• 10:41Speaker 02

  Yes.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Right?

• 10:42Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 10:42Nilay Patel?

  Which has led to a bunch of weird things happening, like Pokemon at the Holocaust Museum.

• 10:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. I mean, basically, yes. Which they actually, I believe Ingris got in hot water for that exact problem. Like, I think these are like things that that game already kind of went through, and then they just weren't taken care of for Pokemon. Okay, so I have, I have like very, not mixed is not the right word, but kind of confused feelings about this weirdness of like, so the game has these things called Pokéstops, and if you go to them, you can get like free items, right? So you're motivated to go out to these places. And also, they can be like places where you can catch more Pokemon. So there's some in places that are tasteless, like the Holocaust Museum in DC. The actual, I think like there actually is a Pokéstop at Auschwitz.

• 11:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 11:32Speaker 02

  I think there's one at the 9/11 Memorial. People are like, "Oh, these things shouldn't be here. This is horrid." And I agree on the obvious level of like, by virtue of being there, it's attracting players to like pull out their phone and play a video game in these places where maybe that's not right.

• 11:52Nilay Patel?

  Well, this game in particular, it's attracting players who have no interest in the thing.

• 11:55Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah. But, well, I think tourist destinations already kind of do that. Like, I have pretty mixed feelings on some of these places anyway, where you go there and it's like, clearly, these people are not here to like learn. They're here to take a selfie here and show that they were there. But that's a whole, that's a whole different debate.

• 12:12Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a different show.

• 12:13Speaker 02

  But the-

• 12:14Nilay Patel?

  That's What's Tech with Chris Plant.

• 12:15Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 12:16Nilay Patel?

  The commercialization of horrible history.

• 12:18Speaker 02

  Of horror tragedy. No, but I, at the same time, like, I do think the entire purpose of a game like this and augmented reality games is to paste a very like, simple veneer over reality, which is like hard. Like, life is hard and complicated, and we walk around the world and there's like, there are a million complicated things around us. And you pull up Pokemon Go, and what's saying is like, "That's a background to catching people." Pikachu. Like, we're making your world magical and happy because that suddenly loses focus and what comes into focus is like this thing.

• 12:57Nilay Patel?

  It's structure and rules.

• 12:58Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, and we're simplifying the world. So it's like entire purpose is to make the ugliness or difficulty of real life somehow feel magical. And I, like, again, I don't think that means it should be in these places, but I think like part of the intent of the game is to wash away.

• 13:18Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 13:19Speaker 02

  That the world is actually a very complex place and to put the like, yeah, structure, color, magic of video games into it.

• 13:28Nilay Patel?

  So the thing that struck me and like the reason that everyone is covering it in a variety of ways is not only like people are drawn to it, they're addicted to it, they're walking around, right? There's like all this, there's at least four or five stories that I've seen across the internet that are like Pokemon Go is great for exercise because it's making people walk again.

• 13:46Speaker 01

  So there's that mom who wrote about her autistic son.

• 13:49Nilay Patel?

  Make America walk again.

• 13:51Speaker 01

  There's that mom who wrote about her autistic son who doesn't like to like break routine, doesn't like to make eye contact or socialize with people and just Pokemon Go just totally like broke all his sort of rules for himself and was just a pretty much a normal kid.

• 14:06Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 14:06Speaker 01

  Catching Pokemon, which is awesome story.

• 14:09Nilay Patel?

  That's great.

• 14:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's like, yeah, people I like bump into in my neighborhood now to talk to about Pokemon, you know? I went to, I walked from like Washington Square Park up to Union Square. So Washington Square Park has a gym, Union Square doesn't.

• 14:23Nilay Patel?

  A Pokemon gym? Not like a Bally's.

• 14:26Speaker 01

  Correct.

• 14:26Nilay Patel?

  Okay.

• 14:28Speaker 01

  Union Square doesn't have a gym, but Washington Square was in just like an intense battle. So this thing, I know these battles are kind of inaccessible and not very fun, but there's a lot of people, there's a gym at my subway stop in Bushwick where there's like maybe 30 kids there most evenings fighting, like split into the three teams, yelling insults at each other, fighting over control of this gym.

• 14:53Speaker 02

  Yeah, and we had this, I mean, when we were kids, did you have, uh, what is it, like Digimon things? There was one before Digimon. It was right after Tamagotchi, there was like another Tamagotchi that you clipped into each other and they would fight.

• 15:07Nilay Patel?

  Oh, I think that was Digimon.

• 15:08Speaker 02

  Maybe that was, but it was horrible. But like, it was like huge when I was a kid because it didn't matter if it was good.

• 15:15Nilay Patel?

  Wait, did all three of you play Pokemon?

• 15:17Speaker 01

  I played some of the card game.

• 15:19Speaker 02

  Everything.

• 15:19Speaker 03

  All of it.

• 15:20Nilay Patel?

  Someone sent me a tweet yesterday, I wish I had it so I could at them, but they're like, I'm in that weird zone in between Gen X and Millennials. And they're like, the way you know which side you identify with is Pokemon.

• 15:32Speaker 02

  Wait, was that Chris Solentrop?

• 15:33Nilay Patel?

  I don't know.

• 15:34Speaker 02

  Chris Solentrop, who is, still does some of the reviews at the New York Times, pointed that out. He was like, Pokemon is, is the line between Gen X and Millennial. And like, where you follow that.

• 15:46Nilay Patel?

  It had nothing to do with my life until Pokemon Go happened. It just wasn't around my cohort.

• 15:52Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 15:53Nilay Patel?

  Of course, I also lived in Wisconsin, so we were...

• 15:55Speaker 02

  Then they didn't allow Pokemon there.

• 15:57Nilay Patel?

  No dancing and no pocket monsters was a weird rule that the minister in my town imposed. But we brought the dancing back. Kevin Bacon came through. Pokemon Kevin Bacon never came by, but dancing Kevin Bacon.

• 16:09Speaker 01

  One of my first pieces of what you would maybe call tech journalism. I had my own like website when I was like 13 or... No, maybe it was a little older, maybe like 15 or something like that. Really can't remember. But my friends were super into the Pokemon card game. I was just a little bit into it. I just had a starter set out of Squirtle base deck. And I chose Squirtle again for Pokemon Go, but...

• 16:32Nilay Patel?

  This podcast is getting real deep.

• 16:33Speaker 01

  Because that is my tie to it. But my friends were gonna do like competitive Pokemon card playing at Toys R Us. And I went there and like, like I was like, I'm the cool guy who's fly on the wall, talking to the nerds and like getting into like, what are nerds into? And what's it like to... And I wrote up this piece, probably like a thousand words. Of like how I was cool, but Pokemon's cool too.

• 16:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's not so bad.

• 17:00Nilay Patel?

  So we gotta talk about the thing with Pokemon Go that particularly relates to us. And I think the reason it's so popular, which is the AR aspect, right? I mean, that is, there's so many arguments to be made about whether it's AR that's drawing people in and making it crazy. This is to your point, Chris, like everything you're saying about making the real world seem manageable. There is the fact that it kills your batteries, so people are just turning it off, which is interesting. There's the fact that it might just be Pokemon's really popular and this is a new Pokemon game. Tell me about the AR aspect. Does that like, does that grab you? Is that a thing that you care about?

• 17:32Speaker 01

  I turn off AR.

• 17:33Nilay Patel?

  But you're still wandering.

• 17:35Speaker 01

  Pokemon.

• 17:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, I haven't played with AR at all.

• 17:38Speaker 02

  It's easier to catch.

• 17:39Speaker 03

  I did it once when I had to take pictures with Amelia today.

• 17:40Speaker 01

  What do you think the primary draw of this game is?

• 17:43Speaker 03

  The Pokemon characters.

• 17:45Speaker 01

  Like, what if they just came out with a Pokemon, like Nintendo's like, hey, we got a Pokemon game for iPhone? That had none of this geolocation, anything?

• 17:53Speaker 03

  Totally.

• 17:53Speaker 01

  That would still be huge, right?

• 17:54Speaker 03

  Yeah, although I do think that I like consuming the content of other people using the AR to do, like tell creative storytelling, like the memes online. I think that is part of why it became so popular. It like, all the people who loved Pokemon were gonna play it anyway, but then that brought it to a level where it reached so many more people than would have gone.

• 18:09Nilay Patel?

  Is the AR good? I'm looking to you as our like resident VR nerd.

• 18:12Speaker 03

  Is the AR good?

• 18:13Nilay Patel?

  Like, does it, it doesn't know depth, right? Like, it's pretty much just layering cartoons on things, right?

• 18:18Speaker 03

  It like, I think it has some ability to guess, kind of, it can sort of see where surfaces are, but it doesn't feel like they're actually in the world.

• 18:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, it's like, it misses more than it hits.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 18:29Nilay Patel?

  But it doesn't seem to matter.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  No.

• 18:30Nilay Patel?

  Like, I think we are probably the first people to seriously complain about the AR in Pokemon Go.

• 18:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, I'd agree. I, to answer, I think, like, you said, like, would the game be popular if it were, if it were just a normal Pokemon game? I don't think it would. I think, it wouldn't be this popular. And the reason is like, you have to know how to play a video game. Like, to play Pokemon, you have to know that, like, literally press start to get into the menu and create a save and read menus and navigate menus. And this is just like, there it is, a Pokemon! Hit, throw the ball.

• 19:03Nilay Patel?

  No, there's that whole beginning with what, Professor Marshmallow, what's his name?

• 19:07Speaker 03

  Willow.

• 19:09Speaker 03

  Those are super similar words.

• 19:11Nilay Patel?

  They have W's.

• 19:12Speaker 01

  You gotta check yourself.

• 19:13Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 19:14Nilay Patel?

  No, I'm, I am doing the act. I might know this stuff for real.

• 19:18Speaker 01

  Ask him, ask him.

• 19:19Nilay Patel?

  I'm doing the cranky old man act.

• 19:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 19:21Speaker 03

  You even downloaded it?

• 19:22Nilay Patel?

  I have it.

• 19:23Speaker 03

  Okay.

• 19:25Nilay Patel?

  Well, here's what happened.

• 19:25Speaker 03

  Started?

• 19:26Nilay Patel?

  We gotta talk about it. Yeah, I caught a Pokemon.

• 19:28Speaker 03

  Which Pokemon?

• 19:29Nilay Patel?

  The Chantrex? No, that's a stop smoking drug.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  A what?

• 19:34Nilay Patel?

  A Charback's? What the? No, that's a guy I know.

• 19:38Speaker 01

  Charmander?

• 19:39Nilay Patel?

  Charmander! That's the one.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  Alright, well, at least you picked the right ones.

• 19:43Speaker 01

  Just to rewind a second, though, for your point.

• 19:46Speaker 02

  I'm really sad that you said the name, because I think he had at least another five minutes.

• 19:49Speaker 01

  I'm sorry, I'm sorry.

• 19:49Speaker 02

  It's like, chuh.

• 19:50Speaker 01

  I'm really sorry.

• 19:50Speaker 02

  Chex?

• 19:51Speaker 01

  Okay.

• 19:52Nilay Patel?

  Chad, Chex. I caught some honey nut chex.

• 19:53Speaker 02

  Chad?

• 19:54Speaker 01

  Multiple levels of augmented reality here. There's augmented reality, like, the surface level that you think of as, like, taking video from reality and overlaying, like, 3D graphics on it. But there's also augmented reality in the sense that, like, if you walk past somebody in the street, and you and your buddy have a phone, and you're clearly playing Pokemon Go, and they're clearly playing Pokemon Go, they'll be like, "Oh, there's a Charmander around the corner." And then I'd be really excited, because Charmander, even though it's one of the starter Pokemon, if you don't get it right at the start, it's actually pretty rare. So I would definitely go around the corner, in the sense that there's a digital entity pinned to a geolocation, but I have to physically travel to collect.

• 20:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 20:38Speaker 01

  That's augmented reality as well.

• 20:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, I think it would be almost as popular if you got rid of the camera part of it.

• 20:44Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 20:45Speaker 03

  Because I think so many people play it without a camera, anyway. But the having to, like, I can't play it in my apartment like any other game. I have to leave to play, which I think is, you see everyone out playing it, and that there's some kind of weird, like, group mentality happening.

• 20:57Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's, but it's what Paul's talking about. There's, like, this layering over the digital world. So the reason I want to ask about AR, because there is, in our industry at this moment, like, the great AR/VR debate, the hottest and worst take. Our friend Farhad Manjoo, and I definitely tweeted right back at him. He was like, "If only Google Glass had had Pokemon Go." And I just, that seems really wrong to me. Not only because Google Glass doesn't actually support the true AR where it layers over reality, it's just like an HUD screen.

• 21:24Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 21:24Nilay Patel?

  But I think that you would not have bought glass to play Pokemon.

• 21:29Speaker 02

  Yeah, I agree. I, I mean, so I have, I don't know if I've talked to you about this, my like AR/VR cellphone versus home theater thing?

• 21:37Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 21:38Speaker 02

  So I, I have this theory about like, if I were, if I had money, this like, this crazy idea, but if I had like lots of money and I could invest in things, I would only invest in AR. I think VR is great, but I think like, if you were told like, hey, you can invest in smartphones or home theater systems.

• 21:55Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 21:55Speaker 02

  You would choose smartphones. And VR is, VR is a home theater. Like, you have to have a specific room for it, you have to like, when you are going to use it, you make time to use it. It is a luxury that most people don't have, and when you do have it, like, you have to have a special content for it, you have to stay up to date, like if you want good movies, you're buying Blu-rays, you're constantly putting money into it, and there's like kind of diminishing returns in quality, and it does a very specific thing. But AR is, to me, just a smartphone, right? The, the ultimate goal of AR is to like, make your life easier, and in theory, you can have less and less friction.

• 22:34Nilay Patel?

  It's to enhance reality.

• 22:35Speaker 02

  Yeah, to enhance reality, and, and to enhance your life, and it could, in theory, go anywhere. So, a lot of people had this idea that meant like, oh, well, whoo, friction, playing on your iPhone is so hard, you'll just wait on your face. And, no, that like, that misunderstands it, because that adds another thing that you have to buy, and it's closer to VR, it's, it's adding, and it's going to create like this kind of weird have and have nots. But like, the phone to me is such a brilliant form of AR, and it's why I'm so excited about Pokemon going, what comes from here, right? Because we already live with our phone in our hands, like, the idea of using the phone as the magnifying, magnifying glass to the world, is just like, our natural state almost.

• 23:17Speaker 02

  I mean, think about how crazy this is, that nobody's been like, killed by a car playing this game. What that tells us is, people are so trained to walk around looking at their phones, that like, nobody got seriously hurt. That's, that's, that's actually a crazy thing, when you think, think about how many people are playing this game.

• 23:36Nilay Patel?

  Head down.

• 23:37Speaker 02

  Head down, looking at a phone, and like, and it was just instinctual.

• 23:41Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 23:42Speaker 01

  It's true. It's like walking through like Washington Square Park and Union Square. I'd say maybe just a slightly higher percentage of people are on their phones. It's just that when you creep on them and look over their shoulder, they're not like on Facebook or Snapchat or reading Wikipedia. They're playing Pokemon.

• 23:59Nilay Patel?

  Right. And they're clustering. They're clustering in weird ways.

• 24:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, they stop like in the middle.

• 24:03Speaker 01

  Yeah, there's erratic motions.

• 24:05Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, you're like, ah, this group of people is clustering in a Twitter way. These people, these idiots are playing Pokemon. Go. Well, so that, I mean, the AR VR question to me is, it's the one.

• 24:16Speaker 01

  I really liked Chris's thing, by the way.

• 24:18Nilay Patel?

  Well, there's a whole, we've already talked on this show and on the site a thousand times. Chris, you did fine. You're fine.

• 24:26Speaker 03

  Gold star.

• 24:27Nilay Patel?

  No, we talked on this show a billion times about how VR could drive a phone upgrade cycle, right? You get higher resolution screens, you're getting better networks, fast processor, blah, blah, blah. But there's a whole camera cycle that you could drive with AR, right? I mean, if you are better able to read the scene and calculate depth and do all this other stuff, you can radically improve. I'm bringing this up as a bridge to, hey, maybe the next iPhone might have two cameras. Or there's finally a reason for these phones.

• 24:52Speaker 01

  I thought they abandoned that. Yeah, a second camera could definitely make it a lot easier to do depth detection, although because each phone will probably end up needing like tweaked algorithm to like really make good use of it.

• 25:05Nilay Patel?

  Well, it's a model of phone.

• 25:06Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, that could help.

• 25:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. I'm just like, what are, it's just, you watch the cycle, like what, if people want to use their phones this way, like how will the phone change?

• 25:15Speaker 02

  I think the big thing that we're going to see happen with AR is, I think, I think we have to get away from this dumb voice bullshit. Like, there is a language that we have with technology since the dawn of man, and it is with our fingers. Like, that is how we engage with technology. And suddenly it's like, we're gonna just talk to robots because we talk to people and we're totally okay with that. But the way I can see AR being advantageous is if I'm already used to holding my phone up right in front of my face, right? And again, using it to look around the world. If I can hold up my phone and look at anything in my house through it and touch it, like look at my Amazon Echo. And touch it. And then like alongside it in this AR thing is the sound or the list of all the musics or recent things I played.

• 25:58Speaker 02

  And I can tap that and it takes two seconds of pulling out my phone. That is a thousand times easier to me than like, okay, for every single thing I own, I need to remember 140 commands about how I talk to this thing and what it can do. I, I, I, I'm probably wrong. I'm sure voice will be forced into the world by the powers that be. But AR feels like such a natural solution because everybody knows that language, right? Like, everybody knows how to communicate with touch. Everybody knows how to like read a basic menu.

• 26:27Nilay Patel?

  I feel like Miriam wants to.

• 26:28Speaker 03

  I don't know. I like,

• 26:29Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Basically bought an Echo purely so I could yell at it to turn off my lights. Cause getting, getting into the app and like turn, doing all the slider things, it's so much easier to tell it what to do. Maybe not so much in the outside world because I don't really like talking. But in my own home, like I lose my phone all the time now because I don't need it for anything when I'm home. Cause I can just text from my laptop if I would open stuff like that.

• 26:52Speaker 02

  Interesting. I do all my light commands with my phone. This is, this is the divide.

• 26:56Nilay Patel?

  What do you, you have an Xperia? What are you using to text from your laptop?

• 26:59Speaker 03

  I use a bunch of weird like encrypted apps that Ariel maybe started using to text her.

• 27:07Nilay Patel?

  So Ariel's like, Ariel wants some ice and now she's on the dark net? Like that's what I'm hearing.

• 27:12Speaker 03

  Basically. And like hangouts, all my family has Android, so it's helpful.

• 27:16Nilay Patel?

  Well, I want to ask you, the last time Miriam was on the show, we mostly argued about the word spherical video for an hour.

• 27:22Speaker 03

  That's true.

• 27:22Nilay Patel?

  But there's, for a minute, it seemed like VR was really ascendant, right? The, the two big headsets came out. We made a bunch of stuff, thus cementing the place of VR in society and culture.

• 27:31Speaker 02

  Congratulations.

• 27:32Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, I thought we did great. But it seems to have dropped off a little bit. Just sort of, I, I just watched, I, I just monitor Addie Robertson's mood. She covers the VR industry like thoroughly. And then this moment, at least all the hot takes about Pokemon that I've read have something, they're like, this is AR's transformational moment. Do you buy that or no?

• 27:53Speaker 03

  I mean, I don't know that another game is going to have this kind of spread. Cause I feel like the fact that it got all of these Pokemon, huge Pokemon fans to start playing. And then everyone else was like, oh, this is really fun and normals, quote unquote, can play it too. I don't know that I would want to play a game like this where you like, hold your phone up and look at the world and do things through it again.

• 28:13Nilay Patel?

  I would, so I would play a game. I think the, the, the like, you have to leave your house to play a game. You need something like Pokemon to like, draw you along.

• 28:20Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 28:21Nilay Patel?

  I could imagine. You're gonna wave your phone around and see crazy shit in the world around you.

• 28:24Speaker 03

  Yeah, maybe. I mean, I think it could be done. I think it just, I don't think any phones are there right now and it's gonna be a while. Like the same, I think that's the same reason the head, the headsets in VR kind of failed is cause like the tech.

• 28:34Nilay Patel?

  Well, I haven't failed.

• 28:35Speaker 03

  Not failed, like, well, most people don't have them.

• 28:39Nilay Patel?

  But in, in this moment of VR, that's not failure, right?

• 28:42Speaker 03

  True.

• 28:42Nilay Patel?

  They've succeeded about as much as they, they were able to succeed.

• 28:46Speaker 03

  I don't know. I feel like they're not super happy where they're at.

• 28:48Speaker 02

  I can't imagine, from what I've heard about Oculus's software sales numbers, that they're thrilled.

• 28:53Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 28:54Speaker 02

  That would be, I don't know.

• 28:57Nilay Patel?

  What, you gotta scoop over that playoff?

• 28:58Speaker 02

  I've just, I've, I've heard.

• 28:59Nilay Patel?

  I gave you a gold star. I can give you another one.

• 29:01Speaker 02

  I, I, I do love stars. No, I, I, I have just heard that sales numbers for certain big Oculus games were not especially thrilling.

• 29:12Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 29:12Speaker 01

  So developers are gonna be discouraged, which is, was always Oculus's.

• 29:16Nilay Patel?

  Cause they're not a controller.

• 29:17Speaker 01

  Oculus this whole time was like, we have to have the perfect launch. Can't do anything wrong with the launch because we only get this one chance where people are gonna be gun shy. And then we'll have to wait a long time again for VR to be ascending again. And then Oculus totally misses out the launch.

• 29:33Speaker 02

  But I think they even maybe knew that because I, I don't, I don't know all the details about how these developers got their stuff worked out. But from what I understand, Oculus paid them quite a bit to like, kind of be like, it doesn't matter what you make on this platform. The point is like, to prove it and then you'll get paid, which is like, not shocking. I, I think the issue with like Oculus and all this stuff is they're just charging insane amount. Like, if you want to talk about why it didn't click, it's like, you're essentially making iPhone level games and then charging traditional game prices on it.

• 30:05Speaker 01

  Yeah. Yeah, especially because what you want with Oculus Vive right now is, is experiments.

• 30:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, and people just playing as many things as they.

• 30:13Speaker 01

  I want to try all the different ones and find out what kind of thing I like and then I'll know. Yeah.

• 30:18Nilay Patel?

  But isn't that a better argument for something like Gear VR where it's like, just put this in your phone.

• 30:22Speaker 01

  Well, just Gear VR doesn't have good. The power. Interaction.

• 30:26Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 30:27Speaker 01

  So I think, I think.

• 30:28Nilay Patel?

  Oh, you pair it. I mean, I'm saying like, if they put out the touch controller and pair it to the controller, like you could do, and get a lot farther.

• 30:34Speaker 01

  I think the Sony.

• 30:36Nilay Patel?

  That was such a big sigh when I said touch controller.

• 30:38Speaker 01

  Sony release is the last big try. If the Sony VR, PlayStation VR doesn't do well.

• 30:46Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying the hell out of PSVR.

• 30:48Speaker 01

  I feel like a lot of people will, but if that doesn't do well, then. Yeah.

• 30:52Speaker 03

  I mean, it's a lot easier sell, like especially when everyone's switching to smaller computers and tablets and whatnot, getting a headset like an Oculus or.

• 30:59Nilay Patel?

  Oh, it's actually a weird, well, switching to smaller computers maybe, but PC sales are up. It's a weird little data point in this world.

• 31:06Speaker 03

  Is it because of?

• 31:06Nilay Patel?

  For the first time in years.

• 31:08Speaker 01

  But it's like Chromebooks. It's not, it's not a $1,200 PC that you need to run.

• 31:12Speaker 03

  People are switching to like smaller and lighter and tablets and you have to buy a whole nother thing for these headsets.

• 31:16Speaker 01

  One more thing on Pokemon Go, I do think there's one other property that could do this, be as successful. What is it?

• 31:27Speaker 01

  Be a World of Warcraft. Ooh. Interesting.

• 31:30Speaker 03

  Oh, that'd be really interesting.

• 31:31Speaker 01

  It would be all Blizzard, I think. I think it would have to be like, kind of like, uh, what is it? Maybe. What's their storm? Oh, Heroes of the Storm. Well, I don't know. See, I, I think that you could put something, something.

• 31:45Speaker 03

  They'd have to figure out the battle mechanic, but that would be a freaking fun game.

• 31:48Speaker 01

  You basically go point to point of interest.

• 31:51Nilay Patel?

  False, false train of.

• 31:52Speaker 01

  Like Harvest. I like this. Harvest, like whatever, like thing is there.

• 31:57Nilay Patel?

  Chromebooks.

• 31:58Speaker 01

  You get quests sometimes to like kill X number of. Things. Things, Pikachu's maybe.

• 32:04Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this, this just sounds like a.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  You could like mine ore in meetings.

• 32:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, you could mine ore in meetings.

• 32:09Nilay Patel?

  Oh, that was another Pokemon Go hot take.

• 32:11Speaker 01

  If all the office buildings were all the crafting professions.

• 32:14Speaker 03

  Oh, that'd be great.

• 32:16Nilay Patel?

  And then you actually start crashing.

• 32:17Speaker 01

  So at work, you're like skinning and.

• 32:20Speaker 03

  Oh, wow.

• 32:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, but then you go out and about and you kill some, I don't know, whatever. And then you level up and you gear up.

• 32:27Speaker 03

  I feel like the teams and the guilds would be so much more fun.

• 32:30Speaker 01

  Yeah, the guilds.

• 32:31Nilay Patel?

  Somewhere right now, some attorney from Blizzard is like freaking out.

• 32:35Speaker 01

  That launch trailer for Pokemon Go, the original trailer, shows everybody in Times Square battling, was it Mewtwo?

• 32:44Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:44Speaker 01

  And, and that's like a, that's like a raid boss in World of Warcraft. You have like 30, 40 people and you're all fighting the same thing at once. Like, can you imagine that sort of experience?

• 32:57Nilay Patel?

  I can.

• 32:57Speaker 03

  That'd be great.

• 32:58Nilay Patel?

  PC shipments are up, by the way. One, okay. Well, hold on, let's take a break for this advertising from Citi.

• 33:04Speaker 01

  Monetize us, Neelai.

• 33:08Nilay Patel?

  The Vergecast, as you know, is supported by Citi Cards with Android Pay. How cool is it that we live in a world where you can use the same device to listen to the Vergecast and buy your morning coffee, groceries, and more? Did I mention that it's a super fast way to pay? Just use your Citi card with Android Pay at the register. Get in, get it, and get going. Download the Android Pay app on Google Play or visit citi.com/androidpay to get started. Android Pay is available for eligible Citi Consumer Credit and Debit Cards. Okay, we're back. Here we are.

• 33:36Speaker 03

  Oh, that's great.

• 33:37Speaker 01

  Great monetization.

• 33:38Nilay Patel?

  I thought so.

• 33:39Speaker 01

  Love that ad. Yay.

• 33:40Nilay Patel?

  All right, I want to talk about Nintendo. I want to shift gears because the other big news was this NES Classic. And Paul's just shaking his head. Why are you shaking your head at the NES Classic?

• 33:48Speaker 01

  I'm just, I saw this and I was like, whatever.

• 33:51Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's kind of crappy, right? It feels pretty cheap.

• 33:53Speaker 01

  It looks cheap. It looks like, like, like a cheat, a keychain item.

• 33:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it looks like, it's like 40 bucks, right?

• 34:00Speaker 01

  But what I'm saying is that I'm bad at my job for not thinking that this was what everybody in the world wanted, apparently.

• 34:07Nilay Patel?

  I mean, this thing blew up in a way that few of our stories blow up. Like, you know, like, an Apple Day will come and like, everyone will read the new iPhone post. This one story was like, it had a trajectory like that. Like, everyone on Facebook was like, dude, I gotta buy this. And I kind of don't understand it.

• 34:24Speaker 02

  I mean, nostalgia.

• 34:26Nilay Patel?

  Is that it?

• 34:26Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, we did another post. Uh, Paul, did you read the Genesis one?

• 34:31Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah, I did.

• 34:32Speaker 02

  Yeah, so, th- there was this post that was like, hey, there's also a Sega Genesis version of this. It's already available. It's on Amazon, you can buy it right now for essentially the same price. It doesn't have HD in it, but like, whatever.

• 34:44Speaker 01

  It actually has a ton of technical problems with it.

• 34:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah.

• 34:48Nilay Patel?

  Really? What are the technical problems?

• 34:49Speaker 01

  The control, it has two wireless controllers, but they, uh, communicate over infrared.

• 34:54Nilay Patel?

  Oh, come on, I'm done, like, closing my laptop.

• 34:57Speaker 01

  I know, you'd love that. Um, it comes with like, 80 games, but like, about half of them are like, knockoff, like, clones.

• 35:05Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so this thing's a mess. That, that thing is like-

• 35:07Speaker 01

  It's made by this company called AtGames. It runs Sega Genesis cartridges, but not all of them.

• 35:12Nilay Patel?

  So the Nintendo one is like, official Nintendo product.

• 35:14Speaker 02

  It's official, yeah.

• 35:15Nilay Patel?

  30 games built in, some weird ones in there, but mostly good stuff. Like, Legends of Zelda 2, not a good game, just putting it out there.

• 35:22Speaker 02

  Debatable, anyway.

• 35:24Nilay Patel?

  Link to the Past?

• 35:25Speaker 02

  That's, now, now you're confused.

• 35:27Nilay Patel?

  Wait, what's the one, Legends of Zelda 2?

• 35:30Speaker 03

  It's the Adventure of Link.

• 35:31Nilay Patel?

  Adventure of Link, I am confused. That's the one where Link jumps a lot and you can't win?

• 35:34Speaker 02

  Ah!

• 35:35Nilay Patel?

  Right? Is that the one?

• 35:36Speaker 02

  Okay, so, so, the reason I think this one is-

• 35:40Nilay Patel?

  I'm right.

• 35:41Speaker 02

  Oh, boy.

• 35:41Nilay Patel?

  Right, it's like Link in a bog, and you're seamlessly jumping up and down.

• 35:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's it.

• 35:45Nilay Patel?

  Bad things happen to you.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  Did you say dad things happen to you?

• 35:48Nilay Patel?

  Bad things, dad things happen to you. Link starts grilling.

• 35:50Speaker 02

  Oh, no!

• 35:52Nilay Patel?

  Starts making fonds.

• 35:53Speaker 02

  What happened to the foundation? We don't have the money? We just painted the house!

• 35:59Nilay Patel?

  Bring that car home on time.

• 36:02Speaker 02

  Oh, Melinda's gonna be so mad.

• 36:04Nilay Patel?

  Melinda?

• 36:04Speaker 02

  That's his wife's name.

• 36:06Nilay Patel?

  Link's wife's name is Melinda.

• 36:07Speaker 02

  Mm-hmm.

• 36:07Nilay Patel?

  Alright.

• 36:08Speaker 02

  He never married Zelda.

• 36:09Speaker 03

  That just fell apart.

• 36:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, oh yeah, she was like, no, you don't need to be my hero, I can be my own woman.

• 36:14Nilay Patel?

  You don't know how to do the downward stab thing, because you can't get out of this bog.

• 36:17Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 36:18Nilay Patel?

  You're stuck with Melinda.

• 36:19Speaker 02

  Let's never say any of these words ever again.

• 36:22Nilay Patel?

  I hated that game, can I just put it out there?

• 36:24Speaker 02

  No, no.

• 36:25Nilay Patel?

  Zelda 2.

• 36:25Speaker 02

  Do you know what? You did put it out there.

• 36:27Nilay Patel?

  Terrible game.

• 36:28Speaker 02

  Um, no, here's the one-

• 36:30Nilay Patel?

  Really bad game.

• 36:30Speaker 02

  Oh my god.

• 36:31Speaker 01

  I feel like we've jumped from the millennial to the Gen X.

• 36:37Nilay Patel?

  Zelda, the original Zelda brought me, my sister and I together, we played it a lot. Zelda 2 came out, we put it in, my sister was like, "I hate this," and left, and I never saw her again.

• 36:45Speaker 01

  I mean, how many, how many young people could even name like more than five NES games? Do you think like a lot?

• 36:52Speaker 02

  I mean, how many people could name more than five Xbox games?

• 36:56Nilay Patel?

  Well, here, okay, hold on. Well, do you think one day they'll put out a tiny little Xbox?

• 37:00Speaker 02

  No, so here's why I think this is, this is why, this is so important. Right now, look at what Xbox is doing with Xbox One, right? Or even the previous one. They make like lots of versions of their hardware. And I don't think anybody really falls in love with hardware and video game consoles anymore. I think there's like, you like it, and it does its job. It doesn't look too much like a DVD player. But I think the reason the NES thing clicks even more than the Sega Genesis is the NES thing is so iconic in its design, and so unlike anything else, and so weird. Like putting it in and then lowering it, and there's like, there's almost this like little religion around using the NES.

• 37:42Speaker 01

  Like make a guitar out of a NES or something like that?

• 37:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 37:45Speaker 01

  But I just, I just always found it the ugliest box.

• 37:49Speaker 02

  Oh, no, it's, it's hideous in like a Ridley Scott designing Alien sort of way, right? Like it's this hideous but like hyper practical looking thing. Like it looks like it's built to last.

• 38:01Nilay Patel?

  I like, I like it too much. It's like I'm, I'm, I see what you're saying in a very objective level. And then I'm like thinking about it, I'm just getting the warm fuzzies.

• 38:08Speaker 01

  All I could think of is like exhaling as hard as possible into this thing to try to clean it.

• 38:13Speaker 02

  Please make Bo Jackson baseball work.

• 38:16Speaker 03

  That's like the worst thing you can do to it.

• 38:18Nilay Patel?

  Wasn't Bo Jackson base, what was the company that ripped off the cartridges? And they got sued and they put out the black cartridges?

• 38:23Speaker 02

  I don't know.

• 38:24Nilay Patel?

  Bo Jackson baseball is a licensed game. There was another company that like cracked the cartridge code and they put out black cartridges and Nintendo sued them.

• 38:32Speaker 02

  Oh, I don't know. That's, that, that goes into like the whole Nintendo seal of approval thing, which is a whole separate thing.

• 38:36Nilay Patel?

  These were not sealed. Well, they were sealed with disapproval.

• 38:39Speaker 02

  Yes. Ah, what, what a good Mad Magazine bit.

• 38:45Nilay Patel?

  Whatever, Melinda.

• 38:48Speaker 02

  Melinda.

• 38:49Nilay Patel?

  Alright, so wait, here's my question. Nintendo, for ages, everyone's like Nintendo, stop making consoles. You've lost the magic of your consoles. Just make mobile games. And there Nintendo has insisted that they not do that. They have said it over and over again, they're not gonna do it. No, they've, they've changed their mind on that. Right, but I'm saying they just changed their mind. Right. Like a year ago, they said, we're gonna enter these waters, basically. And then Pokemon is obviously a massive explosion. And then there's this nostalgia wave of everyone wants to buy a $50 tiny NES.

• 39:20Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 39:21Nilay Patel?

  Should Nintendo just like give up and just put Mario 1 on the iPhone for real?

• 39:26Speaker 02

  I mean, it's complicated. You, a few things. One, the Pokemon thing isn't just Nintendo. Like the Pokemon, Pokemon is owned by the Pokemon Company, which has a relationship with Nintendo. So it's not, it's not as clear cut as it might seem there. I do think Nintendo is unlike any other company in video games, because they actually made a profit off their hardware. Like they built hardware to make money, while Microsoft and other companies have often built hardware at a loss. It's kind of changed recently because of other issues. But there was for a long time, the idea of like, oh, you, you make hardware to like get the licensing fees. Well Nintendo has always been like, no, we, we basically make a toy thing and it makes us money.

• 40:10Speaker 02

  And then we sell additional toy things onto it. So I think they didn't want to lose that money because for them, that was, that was their business. That's like what made them rich. That the Game Boy will be the like perfect example of that, right? Like the reason the Game Boy like funded them and a lot of their handhelds have done so well for them is like, that is the hardware and by restricting the things to that, you can sell the Game Boy and make tons and tons and tons of dollars. And they always want to replicate the Game Boy. I mean, it was just such a huge success that, and there's nothing really like it that lasted that long. And was like that cheap of technology. I mean, when they sold it, it was wildly out of date the day it came out. And it made them a ton of money. So I get it, I'm like, like you don't want to give that up.

• 40:52Speaker 02

  And I think it is one of those things like, once you start to give that up, it's, it's kind of hard to like put the toothpaste back in the tube. That said-

• 40:59Nilay Patel?

  They have a new console, what's it, Neo?

• 41:02Speaker 02

  Nobody knows, people have ideas of what it is, but it's not announced yet.

• 41:06Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 41:06Speaker 02

  In theory, it's coming out this year, we'll see. But I do think, the comparison I was, I think I was talking to Dieter about this, but like, it kind of reminds me of Marvel, like, when they started really being serious about movies and like, making good games and things like that, where they had worried so much about the comic book base, business, and like, even though they were great at it, like, they were just, they were never going to like, bring back the comic book business. And I think that is the point that Nintendo's shareholders are at, where they're like, "I know, it was great, but it's not coming back." Like, that's just not how the world works anymore. You, you have to find a different method, and it seems like there is no method, until

• 41:51Speaker 02

  you realize like, "Oh, we have the greatest portfolio in the industry." And that's what happened with Marvel, it was like, "Oh, what are we doing? This is so stupid." "Our portfolio is so insane, and, like, everybody wants it, so we can only partner with the best people in the world."

• 42:08Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 42:08Speaker 02

  So, that, that's such a crazy opportunity, where you have this portfolio, and if I'm them, I'm saying, "Okay, we're gonna do these things, kind of like what they did with Pokemon Go, and say, 'We're just gonna work with the people who are the absolute best at this, who have the absolute, like, most power, who can guarantee us essentially success.'" And I, I think they'll follow that, that model, I'm hopeful they'll follow that model, and the results will be pretty staggering.

• 42:33Nilay Patel?

  If they said, if they walked up to Apple and said, "Look, we'll put Mario in the App Store, but you have to give it better placement, right? You, you have to, you have to promote this for us, and it'll be exclusive, like, Apple tomorrow."

• 42:45Speaker 02

  Exactly.

• 42:45Nilay Patel?

  If they went to Google and said, "All right, we'll do it on Android, but everything, every Android phone from now on, the Google logo will be placed with Mario's face." Google'd be like, "Yeah, that's probably fine."

• 42:56Speaker 01

  Well, and also on the developer end, I think you could definitely attract more talent to make something great, because those are just the things that people really love.

• 43:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, and I, I think what you'll see is, Pokemon's actually a really great example for this. People have always been, I mean, from the beginning have been like, "Why is Pokemon not on..." GameCube, or Wii, or Nintendo 64. Why is there not just like a Pokemon game?

• 43:20Speaker 01

  There was Pokemon Snap.

• 43:21Speaker 02

  I mean like, a Pokemon game where you like go and do Pokemon. And what they figured out was like, no, lock the, be like what we know the IP to be into the hardware that it's in, and then experiment off of that. So like, I don't think we'll see a Pokemon game on iOS. It'll just be more marketing that will like introduce it to more people, and then they will probably go and announce more hardware. It might actually like have success as in the hardware space, because we'll be like, oh man, I really like that thing, but I'm craving that classic Mario experience.

• 43:57Nilay Patel?

  So they're just gonna put out crappy retro?

• 43:59Speaker 02

  I don't think it'll be crappy. I think it'll just be like, it'll be designed for the hardware. They're, they're really smart in that way. Like, they do not get enough credit. A lot of people talk about how they're old fashioned and they have a lot of issues, especially with like how they use the internet. But I think more than-

• 44:13Nilay Patel?

  You mean by ignoring it?

• 44:14Speaker 02

  Well, well, yes, yes. But like-

• 44:17Nilay Patel?

  What? What is that?

• 44:18Speaker 02

  More, more than any other company, like, they know how to design to the hardware. When they put the Nintendo 64 out with that weird controller, they changed how people played shooters in games, even if it was like goofy in a lot of examples. It still is like revolutionary every time they put out new hardware.

• 44:36Nilay Patel?

  Do you think they can do that again?

• 44:38Speaker 02

  Wii U is like the one exception.

• 44:38Nilay Patel?

  I just don't think they can do that again.

• 44:40Speaker 02

  I mean, I think they just did it with Pokemon Go in that sense. Like, they knew to partner. You don't think so?

• 44:47Nilay Patel?

  No, cuz your whole riff at the beginning was they just stole a camera interface.

• 44:50Speaker 02

  They didn't steal it. No, that's just knowing how to use the platform.

• 44:54Nilay Patel?

  Sure, but what I'm saying is, I don't think they can, I don't think you can sell people another piece of mobile hardware that is worse than their phone. So you're just gonna end up making something that is either-

• 45:05Speaker 02

  I, I think you're thinking-

• 45:06Nilay Patel?

  An expensive or limited phone.

• 45:08Speaker 02

  You're thinking in sales of iPhones. Think about it in sales of like what the Nintendo 3DS sold, and if they can have the iPhone things, too, and then also have that business where they just like guaranteed millions and millions of hardware sales that you sell knowing that they don't have to be as good as the iPhone. That's a lot of money.

• 45:25Speaker 01

  I think just a straightforward 3DS successor could be great right now, and then the rumors make it sound like that will have some tie-in to the home console.

• 45:34Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 45:34Speaker 01

  Which Nintendo's done so very little. They pretended like they were gonna do that with the Game Boy Advance and the-

• 45:41Speaker 02

  And the Wii U, the Wii U looked like it was going to be like, here's a tablet that you carry around.

• 45:45Speaker 01

  Right.

• 45:46Speaker 02

  But then you found out that you actually did to keep it in your house. Still the craziest. And that was like the moment I was like, wow, this is pretty, oh, oh, no.

• 45:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Touchscreen. Like, when you're like, they're really good at hardware. It's like, yeah, they made a tablet from nineteen ninety-five. Right? And they're like, this is the cutting edge of game. I just, the best hardware that you're gonna get is gonna be your phone.

• 46:10Speaker 02

  Yeah, but, but you, you have to like, not think about it like that. Like, the PlayStation Move is better hardware than the Wii mode, right? But like, PlayStation, who owns PlayStation Move? Like.

• 46:23Speaker 01

  I bought PlayStation.

• 46:25Nilay Patel?

  I remember that.

• 46:26Speaker 01

  The Wii and Wii U.

• 46:27Nilay Patel?

  Here's what I'm gonna say though. I'm gonna buy the hell out of a PSVR. I'm holding off on Madden this year. For the PSVR to come out, cause I, cause I don't wanna buy it for Xbox One, I wanna buy it for PS4.

• 46:37Speaker 01

  PlayStation VR is not gonna be the best hardware. It doesn't have all the specs.

• 46:41Speaker 02

  Yeah, where are my specs?

• 46:43Speaker 01

  Oculus and the Vive.

• 46:44Nilay Patel?

  I hear what you're saying.

• 46:45Speaker 02

  If you want the best specs, you will buy.

• 46:48Nilay Patel?

  I'm not saying it's specs, I'm saying like, it's a fucking resistive touchscreen.

• 46:52Speaker 02

  No, no, I agree, but it's also, the Wii U is without question, the big mistake.

• 46:57Nilay Patel?

  Right.

• 46:57Speaker 02

  And they have a history of not doing that. Like, I, I would, I would say, if there was one company that I would never count out, it is Nintendo, because it has this ability to be like, don't mind me, just step in my grave. Don't mind me, just putting the dirt in my mouth, gonna be dead now. And then like, rising from the dead and like, flying. I mean, like, gotcha. I'm the king again, baby.

• 47:21Nilay Patel?

  This vacuum cleaner is gonna suck up these ghosts.

• 47:26Nilay Patel?

  It's true. That was their great, look at this GameCube controller. The game is sucking up ghosts in a mansion.

• 47:32Speaker 02

  But that's, it's like, what is it, the Star Trek movies, where like, the odd ones or the good ones or something? We're, it's time for the odd one. We've been on an even cycle and.

• 47:42Nilay Patel?

  Let me introduce you to our sponsor, Centrify Corporation.

• 47:45Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 47:46Nilay Patel?

  The Centrify Identity Platform is a next generation identity management solution that protects organizations against cyber threats. Check out the white paper or sign up for a 330 day trial at centrify.com/identity. All right, we gotta talk about some other things.

• 47:59Speaker 01

  Well, we gotta do my weekly segment.

• 48:01Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, what's it called?

• 48:02Speaker 01

  It's called Pokemon Go Tips and Tricks Review.

• 48:08Nilay Patel?

  Which is SEO keywords.

• 48:12Speaker 02

  High fun success.

• 48:14Speaker 01

  This is a tough one for me, but I figured you would probably, you know, I think about your family sometimes.

• 48:19Nilay Patel?

  Thank you. Someone has to.

• 48:21Speaker 01

  Superbook.

• 48:22Nilay Patel?

  Oh, the Superbook.

• 48:23Speaker 01

  Superbook.

• 48:24Nilay Patel?

  Love this damn thing.

• 48:25Speaker 01

  $100 laptop with no computer inside it. You just plug your Android phone in and now the Android phone is magically a computer through this cheap laptop with the Andromium OS.

• 48:40Nilay Patel?

  Come on.

• 48:42Speaker 01

  Which, which I don't know why they didn't use, um.

• 48:44Nilay Patel?

  Chrome OS.

• 48:45Speaker 01

  No, what's, there's, there's another one that's really popular. Remix. Remix OS is super popular. I don't know why they didn't use that. Andromium.

• 48:53Speaker 02

  It's pronounceable. Wasn't this like already the Windows Mobile thing?

• 48:58Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, Windows Mobile 10, with Continuum does this.

• 49:00Speaker 01

  And then there was the Motorola Atrix along with, this has been tried a lot of times.

• 49:04Nilay Patel?

  A lot of people have tried this. This is the dream. Palm made the Folio. Can I tell you the story?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  They never shipped the Folio.

• 49:09Nilay Patel?

  Well, they made it.

• 49:10Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:11Nilay Patel?

  We did like a hands-on review. The Palm Folio, this is before smartphones were a thing, for real. The Palm Folio was a laptop that connected to your Palm Pilot, your Trio.

• 49:23Speaker 01

  So you could see your spreadsheets.

• 49:24Nilay Patel?

  So you could see spreadsheets and do work, but it like ran the same operating system and it was like $900. And it was such a stupid idea that NGadget killed it with a blog post. Peter Ohas and Ryan Block and Josh Shapolsky read a blog post being entitled Palm, It's Time For An Intervention. And one of the bullets was, the Folio is a stupid idea. And like a week later, Palm was like, we're killing the Folio.

• 49:48Speaker 02

  Wow.

• 49:49Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. It was that. Idea has been ice cold, then Palm, you know, did.

• 49:55Speaker 01

  But Palm cursed the category. It's like when Voldemort didn't get the job.

• 50:03Nilay Patel?

  A death axe.

• 50:04Speaker 01

  Of for being the defense.

• 50:07Nilay Patel?

  Against dark arts.

• 50:08Speaker 01

  Dark arts teacher, he cursed the position. And so everybody always leaves after a year. That's what happened.

• 50:13Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. And then the Atrix came, I think the Atrix was the next big one. There's Redfly, Dieter, I made a whole list. The idea that you have a phone and it like turns into a computer. Fucking dream. Yeah. Right. It's like, I got my phone. Now, these are some pretty boring dreams. It just is the dream. I don't know.

• 50:30Speaker 03

  Why do you want that?

• 50:31Speaker 01

  I remember thinking that when I saw the Atrix, it's like, that sounds awesome. But now that I think about it. So the thing about this shell, right?

• 50:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 50:37Speaker 01

  It is clearly larger or thicker than like the HP Spectre or a MacBook, right? It's going to be a lot slower than either of those things. Because it's a hundred dollars, you're not going to get a good screen or keyboard or trackpad.

• 50:53Nilay Patel?

  Paul's ruining my dreams. I'm making you play Zelda 2 when we go upstairs.

• 50:57Speaker 01

  I would much prefer to get like a, like a $300 Chromebook than something like this. And even more, I would prefer to be affluent and just have a MacBook. Or an HP Spectre.

• 51:09Nilay Patel?

  I'm buying this thing.

• 51:09Speaker 01

  All right.

• 51:10Nilay Patel?

  What are you gonna use it for? I don't know.

• 51:12Speaker 01

  You gonna plug it into your iPhone? You gonna plug it into your iPhone?

• 51:15Nilay Patel?

  No.

• 51:15Speaker 01

  Are you gonna plug it into?

• 51:17Nilay Patel?

  All right, let's talk about that. That's your gadget of the week is a superbook. That's a shout out to me. Yeah, that, look, I'm telling you the dream. The dream is you have one centralized processor in your life that connects to one cloud account. And it just powers screens of various sizes. That's the dream. So it's, you don't have to like switch things and sync things and worry about things. You're just like, you're living, you're just living your life.

• 51:36Speaker 03

  Sure. Never edit video again.

• 51:37Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. Miriam, I have something very sad to tell you.

• 51:40Speaker 01

  Never play World War.

• 51:42Nilay Patel?

  All right. Tell me about this dumb phone. Actually, I want you to hand it to Miriam. I want Miriam to tell me about this phone. Would you buy this phone? This is a Moto Z. Droid Force.

• 51:52Speaker 01

  Yeah, that's the Force.

• 51:53Nilay Patel?

  Yeah. What is it?

• 51:54Speaker 01

  Wait, Miriam, Miriam, hold it out like, like head height and then drop it on the ground.

• 52:01Speaker 03

  Am I allowed to do that?

• 52:02Speaker 01

  Yes. You can hold it higher than that.

• 52:04Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be fun. Yeah, we can't hurt a phone.

• 52:08Speaker 01

  I dropped it from like chest height on the concrete today.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Oh, can you really do that, though? That's great. I break all things.

• 52:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I know.

• 52:15Speaker 01

  I wasn't saying, yeah, I know you break everything. I say, I do that, too.

• 52:18Nilay Patel?

  We gotta, we gotta talk about this. So this phone, it's the new Droid, it's Moto Z.

• 52:22Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 52:23Nilay Patel?

  It's indestructible.

• 52:25Speaker 01

  Yeah. And, and what else?

• 52:27Nilay Patel?

  It doesn't have a headphone jack and the USB C headphone dongle is plugged into the bottom.

• 52:32Speaker 01

  Right now.

• 52:33Nilay Patel?

  So Miriam was like, I love this phone. I break everything. I'd get it. And then look at that. Look at that dongle.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  So the headphones that I currently use for my commute, they have two pieces anyway, because they're meant to, it's like a

• 52:44Nilay Patel?

  Pre-dongled your phone?

• 52:47Speaker 03

  No, it's like, it's like they're sport ones, so they're, they have a shorter version, so you could like have it on your sleeve if you want.

• 52:52Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 52:52Speaker 03

  So I don't know how that's this, that much different if this just like was always attached to your headphones.

• 52:57Speaker 01

  Yeah, remember the original Xbox had that breakaway cable?

• 53:00Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it sucks.

• 53:01Speaker 01

  So when your siblings tripped on it?

• 53:02Speaker 03

  You're gonna like awkwardly, it'll pull apart and then you'll drop your phone, but your phone will be fine when you, when it pulls apart and you drop it.

• 53:09Nilay Patel?

  That's how you solve this problem. You make an indestructible phone.

• 53:12Speaker 01

  My biggest worry seeing something like this, like I would say that cable sticks out of that phone. We've also seen these like supposed like leaked.

• 53:20Nilay Patel?

  The renders of the new iPhone are super ugly.

• 53:22Speaker 01

  The, the new iPhone earbuds, but I don't, I don't believe those are the actual ones.

• 53:26Nilay Patel?

  I think the cases that we're seeing.

• 53:27Speaker 01

  But that, that, see that USB C cable sticks out almost, I would say, maybe three quarters of an inch, right?

• 53:34Nilay Patel?

  Oh, yeah. The USB C plug, you mean, not the cable.

• 53:36Speaker 01

  Sorry, yes, correct, correct. The cable, uh, let me paint a picture for you.

• 53:40Speaker 03

  It's stuck in really tight, though.

• 53:41Speaker 01

  There's, there's, there's one plug.

• 53:43Speaker 03

  No, well, yeah.

• 53:44Speaker 01

  There's one plug, it's USB C.

• 53:46Speaker 03

  Like this part.

• 53:46Speaker 01

  The dongle is about five inches long and it has the USB C plug, but the USB C plug has sort of audio components in it.

• 53:57Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, it's a new USB C.

• 53:58Speaker 01

  And it's, so it sticks out a little bit. And I feel like if that was in my pocket, it would

• 54:02Nilay Patel?

  When you sat down?

• 54:03Speaker 01

  Like when I sat down, it'd be kind of an angle and I'd feel like I'd bend that.

• 54:07Nilay Patel?

  Nothing about this is, makes me feel.

• 54:09Speaker 01

  So that plug needs to be shortened.

• 54:11Speaker 03

  How much longer is it than a normal three and a half millimeter thing that sticks out?

• 54:15Speaker 01

  Well, I, I have

• 54:16Nilay Patel?

  Normal three and a half ones are either angled or, and they spin.

• 54:19Speaker 01

  Yeah, they spin and they're angled.

• 54:23Nilay Patel?

  Screw you, no headphone jack.

• 54:26Speaker 02

  Man, that's the appeal.

• 54:28Speaker 03

  Alright, alright, alright.

• 54:29Speaker 01

  That's true, the dongle's nice for picking it up.

• 54:32Speaker 03

  There's gotta be some jokes there.

• 54:34Nilay Patel?

  Alright, well, I'm just saying, look, the no headphone phones are coming. Here's the first one. Marion, would you get this phone?

• 54:39Speaker 03

  No, but that's just because I don't buy things.

• 54:42Nilay Patel?

  Imagine that you were buying, yeah.

• 54:44Speaker 03

  Is it one of the ones that are free with my carrier?

• 54:47Nilay Patel?

  Perfect. Chris?

• 54:48Speaker 03

  Maybe, I mean, the, how, is it waterproof?

• 54:50Speaker 01

  I don't know.

• 54:51Speaker 03

  If it's waterproof, then yeah.

• 54:52Nilay Patel?

  Throw it in a bucket of water, throw it everywhere else. Find a bucket of water.

• 54:55Speaker 02

  This is your time.

• 54:56Speaker 03

  There's a lot of laptops.

• 54:57Speaker 02

  Now, the appeal of this is like you could play Johann Sebastian Joust with it. Did you play that game?

• 55:02Speaker 01

  It's water resistant.

• 55:03Speaker 02

  That would be like the, it's, you can't break it, so you could play, you could play jousting mobile games.

• 55:08Speaker 01

  It's water repellent, moderate exposure to water, such as accidental spills, splashes, or light rain. Not designed to be submerged in water, or exposed to pressurized water or other liquids.

• 55:22Nilay Patel?

  Don't power wash your phone.

• 55:24Speaker 01

  Waterproof.

• 55:25Nilay Patel?

  That's weird.

• 55:26Speaker 01

  It's got advanced nanocoding technology.

• 55:29Nilay Patel?

  Okay, so we gotta wrap up. It's the end of our show. It's time. We gotta go play Pokemon Go. This was a muted show, mostly because of my burning hatred for Pokemon Go.

• 55:39Speaker 02

  Okay, got it, got it.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  Hatred, wow.

• 55:41Nilay Patel?

  It's not hatred, it's more like a burning antithropy.

• 55:44Speaker 02

  And do you think it's maybe that you just don't feel relevant anymore?

• 55:47Nilay Patel?

  I'm old, I'm dying.

• 55:48Speaker 01

  Are you old sometimes?

• 55:49Nilay Patel?

  Here's what happens. Mortality finds you.

• 55:52Speaker 02

  It's a terrible feeling.

• 55:53Nilay Patel?

  In the form of cartoons that other people are chasing in a digital world all around you.

• 55:56Speaker 02

  At least you don't have to regularly talk to one of your coworkers about five seconds of summer.

• 56:02Speaker 02

  If you wanna feel old, I can make that happen.

• 56:05Nilay Patel?

  What's up, Caitlin? Shout out to you.

• 56:07Speaker 01

  No, that's it. How do you feel about the new sniper character for Overwatch, Anna?

• 56:12Nilay Patel?

  I like that she's a grandmother.

• 56:13Speaker 01

  Hmm.

• 56:14Nilay Patel?

  There's a whole thing. See, I know what's up.

• 56:15Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 56:16Nilay Patel?

  Yeah.

• 56:16Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 56:17Nilay Patel?

  Caught that one because I read an article somewhere else.

• 56:19Speaker 01

  Nice.

• 56:19Nilay Patel?

  Uh, oh, I have a thing to say. An important thing to say. There's a show, a television show called Mr. Robot. This show is about evil hackers doing wonderful things in a world full of evil psychopathic corporate people.

• 56:33Speaker 01

  Imagine if someone could get into your phone and steal your Pokemon. Just trying to make it relevant.

• 56:39Nilay Patel?

  That's pretty much what Mr. Robot's about.

• 56:40Speaker 03

  The app is too bad for that.

• 56:41Nilay Patel?

  It's about the world's most sophisticated Pokemon hackers. Anyhow, Mr. Robot's back. First episode was last night. It was great. I was on USA's after show, but every week for this season on Wednesdays, there's a big announcement I should have done at the top of the show. Every week, Wednesdays, Russell Brandem, Emily O'Shea, and I are hosting the official Mr. Robot after show, which will be on the verge and on USA Network dot com. So watch Mr. Robot and then basically if you loved the video Vergecast, this is going to be kind of a lot like that, only focused on Mr. Robot for some time. I won't tell you how long.

• 57:15Speaker 02

  I'll give it a shot.

• 57:16Nilay Patel?

  It's gonna be good. It's gonna be crazy. We've got a lot of plans, but Wednesdays.

• 57:20Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 57:21Nilay Patel?

  Wednesdays.

• 57:22Speaker 02

  Uh, that's not good for me, but can I watch it on demand?

• 57:25Nilay Patel?

  That's the show. Yes, of course you can watch it. It's the internet.

• 57:28Speaker 02

  Just wanted to make sure.

• 57:29Nilay Patel?

  We'll be torrenting that thing far and wide. We're gonna have an official IRC channel for like the lead hackers, it's gonna be a whole thing.

• 57:35Speaker 02

  But only for the lead hackers?

• 57:36Nilay Patel?

  Yeah, the regular plebes get to use Twitter.

• 57:38Speaker 02

  Okay, got it.

• 57:39Nilay Patel?

  You can use a hashtag on Twitter or you can figure out M I R C. Those are your choices to talk to me at the Mr. Robot after show. Uh, but it's been really fun. I want everybody to listen. There's also a bunch of other stuff to listen to. Chris, just wanna plug your show.

• 57:50Speaker 02

  Yeah, so there's a show called Wednesday hosted by me, and this week's episode is about Pokemon.

• 57:56Nilay Patel?

  Jesus Christ.

• 57:57Speaker 02

  I think you should listen to it.

• 57:59Speaker 01

  He had me on one time and I thought he was a great interviewer.

• 58:02Speaker 02

  Thank you.

• 58:03Nilay Patel?

  There you go.

• 58:04Speaker 02

  You were a great guest.

• 58:05Nilay Patel?

  Thank you.

• 58:06Speaker 02

  Gold stars all around.

• 58:07Nilay Patel?

  I thought Miriam did a good job today, guys.

• 58:08Speaker 02

  I think she really did.

• 58:09Nilay Patel?

  Stop complimenting each other.

• 58:10Speaker 02

  Did you see her throw that phone?

• 58:11Nilay Patel?

  I host a show called Control or Delete with Walt Mossberg.

• 58:14Speaker 02

  Okay.

• 58:15Nilay Patel?

  Lauren Good on the Recode side hosts Too Embarrassed to Ask, Emily and Liz do Verge ESP. Uh, Recode has other great shows, Recode Decode, Recode Media. Just listen to Vox Media stuff all day long in your headphones connected to your dumb dongle. All right, that's it. That's Vergecast. Thanks again to Centrify for all your cyber identity needs. Centrify, you've been thanked.

• 58:54Nilay Patel?

  Back in the room. Paul.