Pod Insights The Vergecast Spotify's redesign, streaming boxes suck, and Gigi Sohn withdraws from FCC nomination About this episode The Verge's Nilay Patel, David Pierce, Alex Cranz, and Richard Lawler discuss Spotify's changes within its app, what happening this week at Twitter, Gigi Sohn withdrawing her nomination for FCC commissioner, and a whole lot more.
Further reading:
The Cybertruck wiper does not appear to extend
Spotify’s new design is part TikTok, part Instagram, and part YouTube
Spotify is going big on video podcasts
After layoffs, SiriusXM looks to star-studded podcasts
Apple will launch its standalone classical music app on March 28th
All the streaming boxes suck now
How a single engineer brought down Twitter
Twitter just let its privacy- and security-protecting Tor service expire
The FTC’s Twitter privacy investigations have ramped up since Elon Musk’s takeover
Hey, where’s the Twitter Blue revenue sharing Elon Musk promised a month ago?
Tesla under investigation after Model Y steering wheels fall off
Congress rolls out new bill allowing nationwide TikTok ban
Gigi Sohn withdraws her nomination for President Joe Biden’s FCC
Now the Florida GOP wants political bloggers to register with the government
Dish CEO says data was stolen in cyberattack that’s kept systems down for days
Dish Network’s internal systems are so broken some employees haven’t worked in over a day
Microsoft Bing hits 100 million active users in bid to grab share from Googlet
Is buzzy startup Humane’s big idea a wearable camera?
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Transcript 20,280 words · 10 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
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1:04 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to Rich Cast, the flagship podcast of wiper innovation, where all your wiper innovation needs. The code is RichCast. Do you think that there's a podcast for the wiper industry? I was just wondering, what's the competition there? Do you think, is it heated? It exists. Well, I mean, I love nothing more than a good trade publication. Like, I will just sit around reading Tire Business Weekly, a magazine for people who run tire stores. It's very good.
1:32 Speaker 03 What if there's been monopolization in the windshield wiper industry? It's like glasses where like one company actually makes all the brands.
1:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah, but even that company has like probably a newsletter, like Luxottica Weekly.
1:45 Nilay Patel? And like every page is like, we bought another sunglasses company. Competition, we have Luxottica has always been at war with East Asia.
1:55 Nilay Patel? Hi, I'm Neela. I'm your friend. Alex Cranzino Cranz is here.
1:59 Alex Cranz? I'm not at war with Asia.
2:01 Nilay Patel? Uh, good.
2:02 Alex Cranz? Big announcement for the show today.
2:04 Nilay Patel? I think we should start every episode by stipulating that Alex is not at war with Asia.
2:10 Alex Cranz? The whole continent, the whole thing.
2:13 Nilay Patel? You just, one of these days, though, if we do it enough, eventually we have to pay it off. It's like Chekhov's gun.
2:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
2:21 Nilay Patel? Like eventually we're like, it's Alex's last episode. She's declared war on Asia. Richard Lawler is here. Hey, Richard.
2:27 Speaker 03 I have not committed securities fraud today.
2:30 Nilay Patel? Hey, that's a win. I mean, honestly, in the context of a tech show, not committing securities fraud in 2023 is a win.
2:38 Speaker 03 I'll take it.
2:39 Alex Cranz? It is.
2:40 Nilay Patel? That's good. Has your, have you collapsed a bank today? Cause it's, the second of two has collapsed.
2:44 Speaker 03 I, I didn't say that I haven't.
2:46 Nilay Patel? And then, as you may have heard ominously in the background, David Pierce has returned.
2:50 David Pierce? Hello, I'm back. I cannot honestly say I have not committed securities fraud today. It's like, it's a bold thing to just confidently say, right? Like, I don't know what's happening to me today. What do I know about securities fraud?
3:01 Nilay Patel? You sound like every crypto executive in America. Like, what is a security and what is fraud? And can you really add them together? Is that a sentence? What is a sentence?
3:08 David Pierce? I live in the Bahamas. I can, I can do nothing wrong. We're like, there are no rules here.
3:13 Nilay Patel? Buy a Bitcoin. Please God, buy a Bitcoin. Someone, what's, what we're referencing, by the way, is that over the weekend, Richard Silvergate, which is a financial institution that was backing a lot of crypto, teetered its way towards a collapse. And then actually today, this bank has not collapsed. It's Silicon Valley Bank, which is a sort of legendary Silicon Valley financial institution. One of the top 15 largest banks in the country, I think. Uh, its stock is collapsing because it has been exposed to crypto as well.
3:42 Speaker 03 Yeah, the financial contagion continues. It's, uh, not good. And as Liz Lopato wrote about the Silvergate collapse, one of the major impacts is that it's going to be a lot harder to kind of get your cash out of crypto. So, uh, if you were planning on doing that, you might want to figure out something.
3:58 Nilay Patel? That won't accelerate the cycle at all.
4:00 Speaker 03 No, no, never does. It's not a bad sign.
4:02 Nilay Patel? Richard's like, here's what you should do. Run on the bank.
4:06 Speaker 03 I, I didn't say you shouldn't.
4:09 David Pierce? It's like, it's wild how quickly the run on the bank has turned into like the run on crypto has turned into like the run on the financial system.
4:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
4:17 David Pierce? It's just every day, like the concentric circles just get a little bit wider. It's really wild.
4:22 Alex Cranz? Well, that's what happens when a pyramid collapses.
4:25 Nilay Patel? No, that's a triangle. David was talking about circles.
4:27 Alex Cranz? Pyramid circle. It's fine. Don't worry about it. I did OK in geometry.
4:31 Nilay Patel? That might be the worst joke I've ever told on the show. Look, at the end of it, it collapses enough in crayons to clear Sora on the continent of Asia. So stay tuned for that. It's coming. I don't want to talk about crypto, though. Although I will say, after two and a half years of pandemic, being able to use words like contagion in a different way, frankly, refreshing. Just putting that out there. OK, let's talk about the Cybertruck wiper, the only story in technology.
4:57 Alex Cranz? That's a bold claim.
4:59 Nilay Patel? There's only one story, and it's a windshield wiper. So here's some inside baseball and how journalism is made. We're doing the thing that we do. We know we're open up, we wake up, we open our laptops, like, what's going on in the world? We see a bunch of pictures of like Tesla fans at the Tesla headquarters in California. Because, you know, Tesla has two headquarters now. They moved the company officially to Texas with the engineering headquarters in California. Elon was just in California. Governor Newsom, they announced this whole expansion, whatever. So they have this event, investors, the whole thing. They park a bunch of Tesla vehicles outside of a building, including a Cybertruck. Like any good editor in chief, I basically screamed, get me photos of Spider-Man. There's two things you want to do as an editor in chief.
5:44 Nilay Patel? You want to circle print layouts hung on the glass walls of a conference room and say, fix this up before you go to print. I've never been able to do that. Maybe one day I will. Although we did just win the ASME award for best print design, which is deeply funny. However, that's one. And then, two, you want to scream, get me photos of Spider-Man. So we see the Cybertruck, we see the wiper, I scream, get me photos of Spider-Man. I literally said this in Slack. Veeran goes out with a long lens, trying to get splash shots of the Cybertruck to the place where the Cybertruck was by the time he arrives. By the way, and he like recruits his Uber driver into a scheme to sneak ever closer to the Cybertruck, like the Uber driver is going to pose as a fan of Tesla.
6:24 Nilay Patel? It was great. We were like very excited and they get there and the Cybertruck is gone. However, then Tesla has its Investor Day, which is mostly done. And after that Tesla head of design Franz von Holhausen tweets a picture in front of the Cybertruck being like, I just took the beta out for a drive. And in the picture, the truck has clearly been out in the rain and you can see the sweep of the gigantic wiper. This is like, I froze in my tracks when I saw this tweet. I can literally just imagine you like at home just screaming enhance at your computer, just like furiously making the browser bigger, trying to get the picture. Yeah, I mean, I was like, it's there. I was like, God damn it, Tim, bake this a touchscreen.
7:10 Nilay Patel? So you can see it. You can see how the wiper is going to work. If you've been following along on the show, you know that the Cybertruck's wiper has been a point of major contention because they announced this thing by throwing rocks through the windows, but it didn't have a windshield wiper. So they, they got all distracted by the not bulletproof, bulletproof glass and forgot the windshield wiper. Then Elon's tweeting, I am deeply concerned about the wiper, which is an amazing thing for an automotive CEO to tweet, like period. Just in, I've interviewed a lot of auto CEOs. None of them are ever like, what keeps me up at night is windshield wipers. God knows they care about them. They just keep that under wraps. Like what's top 10 anxieties of the CEO Volvo? It's like, he's like windshield.
7:54 Alex Cranz? Well, they actually, they talk about it in the publication. Yeah. Like their industry pub.
7:58 Nilay Patel? The wiper pub.
7:59 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
8:00 Nilay Patel? Anyway, Elon's tweeting about it. He's like, the best thing would be for it to extend. That's complicated. So everyone starts to think that the Cybertruck wiper is going to extend. The people, Tesla fans are leaping out of bushes to tell you about the Mercedes mono wiper concept from like the 1982 C-Class. It's fully ridiculous. There's, there's a YouTube video showing how the Mercedes mono wiper worked that I swear to God has a million views and it's just hopeful Cybertruck fans. Oh. Because the concept. All 12 of them watching it several thousand times. And like, it's very cool. And like, it was actually, it was mounted in the, the middle of the windshield and it's, it makes like a bow tie shape and there's like a gearing,
8:43 Nilay Patel? there's a gear set in the wiper. The point of this is that Mercedes did not make this anymore. They were like, this was a bad idea and they went back to, to, Cybertruck wiper does not extend. There, it just leaves a whole chunk of the windshield dirty. It's amazing that after all of this time, they're like, I don't know, does the passenger need to see out the windshield? They don't. I love it. I can't get enough of this thing.
9:07 Alex Cranz? How much water do you think it sloughs off? Like, does it soak the people in the other cars? Just, ah, every time? Like, it has to.
9:16 Nilay Patel? Yeah, if it's like raining really hard and you, and you're moving like a four foot wiper, just.
9:23 David Pierce? By the way, four foot wiper is, as far as I can tell, not an exaggeration. Like, I'm just, I'm just doing math here, cause for, I'm, I'm now at 500% zoom on this photo.
9:34 David Pierce? This is, this is where I am. It's very good to be back on the Vergecast. It's like, you assume, you know, Franz is a normal height dude. This thing is at least 75% as tall as he is. Uh, so this is, this is a human sized windshield wiper.
9:49 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna need like the Reddit people to do the thing where they like, de-warp the photo. Cause it, there's a perspective trick that's happening there.
9:57 David Pierce? Sure, but he's also standing right in front of it. It's not like, it's not like the distance between the two things, unless the Cybertruck is sneakily, you know, 17 feet wide, which would not totally shock me. It's like the first two lane wide vehicle ever. Like, I don't know. But yeah, it just, it covers, it gets the whole driver's side. Super clean on the driver's side. It's, except for about a, a little stripe on top.
10:17 Nilay Patel? And that's, that's fine. That's normal.
10:18 David Pierce? But then you come around and as you get all the way to the other side, it, it's about the top right, I don't know, sixth. It just ignores entirely. It's like, ah, there's no one here. You're not gonna need to see out of this. It's fine.
10:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah. You'll definitely never turn your head to the right while driving a Cybertruck.
10:36 David Pierce? No. Yeah, if ever a drone is flying up kind of just above you and to the right, you'll never notice. You're toast.
10:44 Nilay Patel? It's all, all of it's very funny. I still think they should go three wipers in a circle, which I promise you can be done. You get the two at the bottom like this and one at the top going like that.
10:53 David Pierce? I was imagining like a spinning Roomba on your windshield.
10:56 Nilay Patel? I mean, at this point.
10:58 Alex Cranz? Nobody looks at it on the middle.
10:59 Nilay Patel? I don't know when the Cybertruck is gonna ship. I swear to you, the wiper on the Cybertruck is a monumental piece of tech history. Because if the Cybertruck is not a success, or if they can't solve the wiper and ship the Cybertruck, Tesla's in trouble. Those are facts, right? Like, they've collected millions of hundred-dollar reservations for this thing.
11:22 Speaker 03 I'm looking at it now, and you know what? I'm gonna go the other way. I think the wiper works.
11:25 Nilay Patel? Oh?
11:26 Speaker 03 You think the wiper works? The wiper works. If you take a look at the top of it.
11:28 David Pierce? Richard, it objectively doesn't. It just doesn't. It does not wipe the windshield.
11:34 Speaker 03 The roof of the car comes in under the glass. Like, you can't see through most of that anywhere, where the, where the wiper isn't wiping. It just has such a monumentally stupid design that it looks like it's not clearing the visible area. But you can't even see out of that spot anywhere. I, I don't know. Is that like a pocket up there?
11:51 Nilay Patel? No, that's not right. I, I see what you're saying, but there's like a, I don't know. We, again, we gotta see. This is, it's, get me photos of Spider-Man. If you're out in the world, and you see a Cybertruck, just as much as you can, get photos of this wiper. It's the only story in technology that matters. I promise you. It's all I want, it's all I want to talk about. The best part of this story is I put that up on our new site with our new tool as a quick post, because, yes, it was worth 20 minutes of Verchass time.
12:21 Nilay Patel? But I was like, I can't be overriding this. And another publication wrote an entire story.
12:26 David Pierce? Listen, Wiper Weekly needs something to put on the cover, Eli. Don't shame Wiper Weekly.
12:32 Nilay Patel? God, if there's a trade publication for wiper engineers, can you please reach out to us? I would love to interview. As, if you're a reader, or if you're a writer, or an editor, it doesn't matter. If you're just aware of the wiper industry trade publication, reach out. I just want to know what you're like. All right. That's enough on windshield wipers. Let's talk about the other biggest design story in technology, which is Spotify and the general Tik Tok-ification of everything. David, you wrote up the design. There was an event this week. Alex Heath was there. We're gonna have some more coverage. We got an interview with their head of design and decoder coming out next week. But tell us what's going on at Spotify.
13:07 David Pierce? Yeah, so this was Spotify's Stream On event, which it does occasionally. The last one, I think, was two years ago. It's their big kind of State of the Union, here's what's going on at Spotify thing. And mostly they talk to creators. It was like 90 minutes of them being like, are you a creator? We love you. All creators, we love you. We are Spotify. Come to Spotify. We love you, creators. Hello. They brought up the Jonas Brothers just to introduce a video, which was the coolest flex I've ever seen in my entire life. They just came out and they were like, look, Jennifer Lopez also likes Spotify. And then they left. It was amazing. But anyway, the big announcement was that they're redesigning the Spotify homepage. And anyone who has used Spotify knows that basically Spotify is just like a lot of album covers. That's the only sort of design in there.
13:52 David Pierce? It's just rows and rows of tiles of album covers. And now it looks a lot more like some mix of like Instagram stories and Tik Tok and like a little bit of YouTube. But the idea is basically if you go to like the podcast thing, instead of getting a bunch of album covers of podcasts, you're gonna get actual like feeds of auto-playing podcasts. They're big into video as a thing. They're big into big imagery now. The idea is to be much more sort of immersive and also like discoverable. Instead of just fighting to have better album covers, it's gonna actually start to try to play you the most interesting bit of a podcast or a song or an audiobook and actually connect to you that way. So that's the sort of Tik Tok-ification of it all.
14:36 David Pierce? Everything is much more fullscreen. It's auto-playing. It's much louder. It's much more visual. And as far as I can tell, Spotify users hate this in the same way that they've hated every other non-music listening thing that Spotify has done, which is now the impossible track that Spotify is on. Where Spotify is like, okay, as we've talked about many times in the show, it turns out being a streaming music company. Company is an awful, awful, awful, awful business.
15:00 Nilay Patel? It's not great.
15:00 David Pierce? Don't do it if you ever want to make any money. So Spotify is now this big company that like can't stop losing money on music and is trying desperately to find other ways to make money. They've, they've made this big bet on podcasts. They bought an audio book company. They're trying to make live audio happen. And then you have Spotify users who just keep raising their hand, being like, I, I just would like to listen to my music. Please can you leave me alone? And this is Spotify trying to sort of satisfy everybody. And at least based on the reaction to what we've seen, the app is not out yet for most people, but people do not like the idea of what Spotify is going for here as far as I can tell.
15:33 Nilay Patel? I'm very sympathetic to the notion that people hate redesigns. I've, I've lived through it myself.
15:37 David Pierce? Yes, absolutely.
15:38 Nilay Patel? That's fine, but I will say that we Reddit did a mild redesign this week too. We had the chief product person from Reddit on Decoder. They're splitting that into a text feed and a video feed. And all the feedback is get this video feed out of my face.
15:52 David Pierce? Yep.
15:53 Nilay Patel? Like, we don't want it, even though all of the numbers inside of Reddit are, oh, boy, people are spending a lot of time on video. People hate the video player. If we're going to do video, we should, we should just put it over there and make a video feed and a text feed. And even then people are like, get this video out of my face. So I think there's like a revealed preference that's when you're alone, in your private time, you're watching the videos. And when someone asks you about it, you're like, I never watch videos. I only read novels.
16:18 David Pierce? Yes.
16:19 Nilay Patel? And I think every one of these companies is like dealing with that.
16:21 David Pierce? But the challenge there is the metrics don't track reality, right? Cause it's like, if I'm, on Spotify is a perfectly good example, right? If I open up Spotify, press play on a playlist, turn my phone off, put it in my pocket and never touch it again. In a certain sense, that's a huge victory, right? Like that is the intended use of Spotify. I can listen to music all day without needing to interact with the app. Like from user experience, that's a gigantic win. For Spotify trying to like make money and sell lots of really great, powerful visual ads, that's a disaster. And so what this is now is Spotify saying, and they even said this during the stream on event. They're like, we're not worried about engagement metrics. We're not here to just try to keep you inside of our app as much as you can, while very clearly building things that autoplay, that autoplay with sound,
17:03 David Pierce? and that are designed to be endlessly scrolling so that you look at them for much longer. It's like, at some point you can't have it both ways. And they're going to be like, oh, well, engagement went way up. And it's like, well, of course it did, but that's, are we sure that's good? Like, is that what we want out of Spotify?
17:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So one thing, the, the, the music industry in particular is fighting against straight up is TikTok. TikTok is where every song breaks. It's where, I don't know, like Fleetwood Mac rises like a zombie to continue haunting me for the rest of my days. Just shut up. It's so tiresome. Sorry. I under- the music is beautifully made and I understand they were all dating each other. And it is on a technical level, some of the finest music ever made. It is so boring. I'm sorry.
17:51 Alex Cranz? Neelai reviews rumors.
17:53 Nilay Patel? I've been ranting about Fleetwood Mac since I was 16 years old. This is like the sanded off edges of me talking about Fleetwood Mac. But like, that's a thing that happened, right? The guy riding the longboard in California, getting the free cranberries for life or whatever, is entirely a TikTok phenomenon. I realize that if you don't know what I'm talking about, that sounded completely bonkers. But if you just put those words into Google, you will, you will understand. It's a whole thing that happened.
18:20 Alex Cranz? Yep.
18:21 Nilay Patel? That's TikTok. Like TikTok just like made that song relevant again and made Fleetwood Mac relevant again. It's doing it over and over and over again. It's where new artists break. It's changing the complexion of the music industry. It's making songs shorter, which is very funny. It's like sampling, like everything is in the music industry is happening on TikTok. And then underneath it all, TikTok is not a music service, really. And so they're kind of like, yeah, music industry, you want to break a song? Just pay us a bunch of money and we'll make sure those tracks get promoted in a way that if Spotify does it and people claim Spotify does it. But if they actually do that, everyone will get really mad at Spotify.
19:00 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
19:01 Nilay Patel? So like Spotify has just got like a major problem on its hands that all discovery happens on TikTok. And then people go to Spotify to listen to the song. But they're spending all of their time in a platform that has video advertising built into it, which is much more lucrative than Spotify free.
19:16 David Pierce? Right. But the, the important second piece of that, though, is like, it's not audio-led discovery, right? Like, people are watching videos through which they discover audio. And that's, like, Spotify has, everybody, lots of different publications, or not publications, lots of different companies have tried to figure out how to do audio-first discovery. And it turns out it's essentially impossible, because the idea of like, I'm gonna sit here and just listen to something I've never heard of for a while is super boring and people get tired of it. And that's why everybody puts the hook to their song at the beginning of the song now. And so, but what you have with video is, it's, it's just more interesting. It's just gonna hold your attention a little longer, which gives the song a chance to catch you a little longer. And then you can sort of trip through TikTok that way. And so Spotify
19:59 David Pierce? has been trying to play this, like, how do we do more visual things game forever to keep you looking at the app and has just never solved it anything like the way TikTok has solved it.
20:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And now they just made TikTok again. And I, I think that the big question is whether people are going to open Spotify first to be like, I wanna find some new things. This is Spotify's claim, right? That the business they're in is actually discovery and not playback. And if you, you listen to the interview with Gustav that Alex is gonna do on Decoder next week, or if you listen to their event, they're very clear that the, the whole thing they're doing is trying to get people to try new things.
20:39 David Pierce? Yeah.
20:39 Nilay Patel? And that is fundamentally Spotify's value to the world, is discovery across all this. I'll just read this quote, not to give away the whole interview, but he says, in regards to cover art, he said to Alex, you have to click through one of the titles and you have to wait for one and a half, on minutes, on average, to get to the hook. That can't be the best way to discover music. The best way to discover audio must be through audio, which makes intuitive sense. But I know that when people open Spotify and it just starts blasting them with hooks, they're gonna lose their minds.
21:07 David Pierce? Yeah, I think that's right. And I think, by the way, the, the discovery thing is something you'll hear from every single music platform. They all think that the main thing that they can do for the music industry and for listeners is expose you to new stuff, right? Because it's like, if I wanna listen to Rumors by Fleetwood Mac, I have infinity options, many of them free, one of them typed into YouTube.
21:27 Nilay Patel? And the last one being, don't.
21:30 Alex Cranz? Rude. Rumors is wonderful, a perfect album.
21:35 Nilay Patel? Look, I'm not even disputing that argument. I know that many people feel this way.
21:41 Alex Cranz? Neela hates Fleetwood Mac.
21:42 David Pierce? When I spent a bunch of time with Lior Cohen, who runs YouTube Music a while back, and he said very much the same things. And like, Apple will say the same thing. That's why they gave Zayn Lowe all that money, right? It's like, discovery is the thing. They want to help break artists so they can be friends with the music industry. They want to help break artists so that listeners will keep coming back to discover new things. Like, that is the product in a really real way. It's just that TikTok showed up and is so much better at it than anybody else.
22:06 Alex Cranz? Is it also because, like, the playlists suck? Because for a long time, they kind of tried to replicate the DJ by doing all day playlists, right? And are people just not listening to those playlists and finding new musicians that way?
22:18 Nilay Patel? Well, Spotify rolled out the AI playlists.
22:20 Alex Cranz? Yeah, but those suck.
22:21 Nilay Patel? So they're doing much, much more of this stuff.
22:23 Speaker 03 It sounds like the problem for TikTok, the problem for Spotify, the problem for YouTube Music, is that I am not 16 always. And I'm not always hearing the best music I will ever hear, ever, at that point in my life.
22:37 Speaker 03 And if I were, maybe I would want to listen to these playlists and listen to a bunch of new songs, because I'd be young and I would be experiencing new things. I would say, yes, I'm making this music my entire personality now, as I did then. But it's now X number of years later, that music is still my personality. I want to hear the music that I listened to a decade plus ago. That is the only thing that I want. I do not want a playlist. I do not want suggestions. I want to hear the same songs that I've already heard. Possibly you could remix them and blend them together? That's cool. No new music. But I guess that's a problem for Spotify, that I don't want to listen to the new things.
23:11 Nilay Patel? Well, so underneath that is the real problem for Spotify, is that you listening to hits from the 90s over and over again does not actually make those artists any money. And maybe it shouldn't, right? Like, in the CD era, you would buy that CD, you would listen to it for the rest of your life. That artist would not get money every time you listen to a CD, but they got a lot of money upfront for the CD, right? And that usually sustained most artists. Now it's like the game that they're all playing is like pennies forever. Right? So Spotify has a lot of incentive to make their catalog artists, or like the catalog artists from major labels happy, because no one is getting the big dollars upfront. They're all just getting pennies over time. But they stop to break new artists.
23:54 Nilay Patel? And to break new artists, you gotta shove them in people's faces all the time. You gotta break new songs. And I think all of this stuff is in a real tension with the other piece of what they announced, which is an emphasis on video podcasts and showing you little clips of video podcasts in the feed as you scroll. Because that is just a jarring transition from like, here's the hook of a song, here's the hook of a song. Do you like this playlist? Go over here. Here's three people talking about whatever, which is admittedly what we do here.
24:24 David Pierce? Hi, guys.
24:25 Nilay Patel? And we'll probably figure out how to get involved in that on Spotify. But it's just, there's a lot of stuff. There's a lot of business models that are trying to cram into one experience.
24:35 David Pierce? But this is the magic of TikTok. Like that, that thing you just described is the thing that has made TikTok so powerful, which is that it can be wrong about what you're going to be interested in nine out of 10 times. And TikTok, that, that like endless vertical scrolling thing with video and sound is like immersive enough, even when you don't care about what it is, that it keeps you scrolling. And that's like, that's the magical thing that TikTok solved is most of the time you don't care about the thing that's being shown to you, but the price of TikTok being wrong is so low because the scrolling experience is so fun that you will just keep scrolling even when you don't care about the content. Like the activity is enough. And what that gave TikTok permission to do was just shove stuff you don't care about in your face all the time to see what hits.
25:18 David Pierce? And everyone is copying that for exactly that same reason, right? Like, that's what Facebook is trying to do. They're like, we, are you interested in this? And you say no. And they're like, what about this? And you say no. And they're like, what about this? And they'll just do that forever.
25:29 Nilay Patel? And if Facebook can't figure it out, it's like, is it girls? There's just like one bikini girl, no matter what, at all times. And I'm like, no, no, no, it's trucks jumping over stuff. I want to be very clear about this. I literally typed the words into the search box. And like every couple of weeks, I was like, I don't know, just one thing that'll make your wife mad.
25:49 David Pierce? Minus bloopers from the office. It's just like, when in doubt, TikTok, just show me bloopers from the office. And like, we're cool again. Everything's fine. But no, but that's the thing. And that's why you do that extra visual thing. Because it's just constant. There's just so much going on in a way that like, if you show me eight seconds of silence at the beginning of a song on a playlist, or like a slow building guitar, people are out. But if you just like, play loud noise over and over again as I scroll, like, that's gonna keep me engaged.
26:15 Alex Cranz? Okay, so the seventies, like, music in the seventies, that's when we started getting the long guitar solos and stuff. Before that, in the forties and fifties, Phil Spector, horrible man, dead now, but he made the wall of sound, right?
26:27 Nilay Patel? He got what was coming to him.
26:28 Alex Cranz? He got what was coming to him. I mean, he's saying like Russian roulette and the lady died. It was not great. But we wore a cape. Dude like wore a cape to record music. But in the fifties and sixties, wearing his little cape, he created like, a whole new way of listening to music, which was just blast it into your ears on every sing- like, he was like, I'm gonna make it really, really loud because everybody's just listening on radio. And so, the louder it is, the more they'll like, be likely to sit around and listen, which is why we have the Beach Boys, but also like, all of those great bops from the, the early sixties. So that's just kind of what they're doing again on TikTok?
27:08 Nilay Patel? Pretty much. The, the music distribution thing is like really interesting. So Phil Spector is like a, in the, like the forty-five era, right? He's like doing singles, he's distributing on radio. There's a really great Vox video about the dawn of the twelve inch single. And like, bands like New Order were like, Blue Monday will be forty-five minutes long, because we've, we can just have like oceans of vinyl to print on.
27:29 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
27:29 Nilay Patel? And then we colla- and then you kind of get into those seventies, eighties songs where it's like, what if we did synth pads? For like, a minute, before a single drum.
27:41 Nilay Patel? Right. And it's like these like huge builds and like Pink Floyd is just like, you know, just like swishing around your house, just haunting you. Um, that's great. Like that music is great. Could not work with any modern distribution.
27:53 David Pierce? No. Yeah.
27:54 Nilay Patel? Because you can't, you, there's, you just can't get to the hook right away. And all of that was when people bought vinyl records, they, they literally thought they wanted a lot of music for the money. Like the Clash is like San Denise is three, three 12 inches, six sides of vinyl. There are skits in here for some reason. We don't know why. And that's just value for dollar. And now everything is free. So it's like, just on to the next one. Fine. But the thing that's really interesting on Spotify, one, it's not a swipe, it's a scroll, which is the smallest distinction, but I think a weird one, right? They're trying to like cop this user interface behavior from TikTok, but they're making you like slowly scroll through this stuff. I think I would bet they switched to swipes pretty soon. And then two, what TikTok
28:39 Nilay Patel? has is a infinite universe of user generated content. So there, there is a lot of garbage, but then like things will hit that no one ever thought of.
28:48 David Pierce? Right.
28:48 Nilay Patel? And that's like the magic. Spotify is still pretty curated. Like what ends up in that feed is going to be pretty curated by the music industry, by the podcast industry. Spotify does have Anchor, they're like user generated podcast tool, but they've really diminished its stature. I think they've even renamed it.
29:06 David Pierce? Yeah, it's part of Spotify for podcasters now.
29:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So you've just got this feed. It's like, it acts a little differently. It is way more curated and professional. And usually those things together mean that they get stale fast as opposed to like the endless, like, what are the kids doing today of TikTok?
29:24 Speaker 03 The question for Spotify is that now that they've leaned into video, can they be on the go 90 scale?
29:31 Nilay Patel? Can I read you this quote that I've just been thinking about? So Spotify is really into video podcasts. Everyone's in the video podcasts. The reason is not complicated, right? It's that for the platforms, not for necessarily for the podcasters, but for the platforms, being able to insert video advertising is more lucrative than audio advertising.
29:50 Nilay Patel? We are, obviously this show is on YouTube now, like the details of our money are actually opaque to us. That's the whole point of the fact that we are journalism. There's a sales team. They do it all over there, but there's a real dynamic between the money you make in audio and the money making video and the dollars in there are generally higher. They're not higher on YouTube, which is weird, but YouTube is like the gold standard video platform. A lot of the platforms want to go capture those video dollars. So that's why Reddit does it. That's why Spotify is doing it. But here's this quote and it just, "Video podcasting is one of the fastest growing areas of podcasting and we expect that growth to continue." That's from Julie McNamara, head of global podcast studios at Spotify at this event. What's a video podcast? Is it just videos of
30:34 Nilay Patel? people talking? I mean, this is a video podcast, right? That's Yes. I think we get that. Is the view a video podcast? Yes. Okay.
30:45 Nilay Patel? Hundred percent. What is it a video podcast?
30:47 David Pierce? I actually, I think Alex is right. Like I think the, there was a great Twitter thread and I don't remember who it was, but I'm sorry, I'll see if I can find it and I'll tweet it back out. Actually, I won't. I don't use Twitter, but that's a whole other point that they were talking about Jason and Travis Kelsey, these football playing brothers who have had a super successful thing. And one of the points that this thread made was that they don't call it a podcast. Like it is distributed as a podcast on podcast platforms, but they just think of it as like a show. And I think that's right. Like what is, what is an interview show other than a video podcast, right? Like people talking to people on screen has been around forever. The only difference is like we show the microphones now. And so I think what's happened is this stuff has all just sort of collapsed where it's like, okay, people talking is interesting.
31:33 David Pierce? Watching people talk is interesting. These things don't all have to be different. We can just shove them together and just let them be shows. Like the word podcast is like a relic of iPods, right? Like it hasn't described what this industry is in a really long time.
31:48 Nilay Patel? No, I'm telling you, this is an exist, you were describing very confidently, an existential crisis for the podcast industry.
31:54 David Pierce? Oh, absolutely. It's happening. It's like
31:56 Nilay Patel? The idea that you make radio and you distribute it as MP3 files via RSS to an ecosystem of players that are all independent and can compete with it. That's like If you ask people, what is a podcast? They will start with RSS feeds.
32:13 David Pierce? Sure. And that broke the minute Spotify started spending money on podcasters. Right? Like, this is, this has been dying for a while. And I think what you're seeing now is everybody just acknowledging that, like, okay, this, this doesn't, this distinction doesn't exist anymore. And actually, what we're talking about is just a bunch of different kinds of distribution for the same kind of thing, which is people you talk, that you care about, doing stuff together, talking to each other. It's, right? Like, it's, I don't know. These things are not that far apart, I don't think.
32:38 Nilay Patel? Again, we obviously are participants in this.
32:40 David Pierce? I love video podcasts.
32:41 Nilay Patel? We make videos of this podcast and other podcasts. We put them on YouTube. We should figure out how to put them on Spotify. I don't even know that Apple Podcasts supports video. It does.
32:50 David Pierce? Does it?
32:51 Nilay Patel? I don't know anybody who watches video on Apple Podcasts, but it definitely supports video.
32:54 Alex Cranz? Only way I watch video. Just the only way. No other way to watch it.
33:00 Nilay Patel? I watch RSS fed video on Apple.
33:02 Speaker 03 But I catch myself on TikTok sometimes, watching video clips of podcasts that I've already listened to.
33:06 David Pierce? Absolutely.
33:07 Speaker 03 And I can't even really explain it.
33:09 Nilay Patel? By the way, go subscribe to youtube.com/vergecast. We'd really appreciate it. It's great.
33:15 David Pierce? Okay. But wait, wait, Neelai, let me, let me just expand this existential crisis slightly. So one of my favorite podcasts is the Always Sunny Podcast, uh, which is just the three creators and stars of the show, It's Always Sunny in Philadelphia, doing a podcast. The, the show is a podcast. It's also a video podcast on YouTube. Often on YouTube, during their podcast, they will play clips of their show and talk about the clips from their show or about the process of writing this show. So you could argue that their podcast has bled into a video podcast, which has bled into their television show. And I'm sure they're gonna do an episode where they make a podcast. They did do an episode where they make a podcast. It's like, what is, what is any of this anymore?
33:54 Alex Cranz? What is content?
33:55 David Pierce? I don't know.
33:56 Nilay Patel? I just, the idea that everything is a video podcast and soon Spotify will try to shove it into a feed that is almost TikTok, but not quite, that's where we're going.
34:05 David Pierce? Yes, absolutely, yes.
34:06 Nilay Patel? Right? One of my favorite examples of this is CNBC. All of their hours are published as audio podcasts in Apple Podcasts. You can go get Squawk on the Street as a podcast every day. And it's just CNBC anchors doing their show with no regard to the fact that it's a podcast. It play, it works perfectly fine.
34:24 David Pierce? Yeah, you just have to imagine there's a lower crawl saying, stocks down, everybody panics. And that's all.
34:29 Nilay Patel? Run on your bank. Get out there. Just run at your bank as fast as you can. I mean, I think they're usually when people think of podcasts, they they think of not a distribution, but like a form.
34:43 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
34:43 Nilay Patel? Right. This thing that we make is a podcast that despite all odds has been going on for over 10 years now. And it's just this, right? It's people talking to each other, maybe some format, maybe somewhere along the way, someone will commit a murder and we'll figure out who did it.
34:57 Alex Cranz? Richard.
34:57 Nilay Patel? That's on next season of the Vergecast.
34:59 Alex Cranz? Vergecast True Crime is an ideal waiting to happen.
35:01 Nilay Patel? Can we get, Liam, can you start playing like the Tinkly Serial piano here, please?
35:07 Nilay Patel? That would be amazing. Right. There's formats in podcasting, but you kind of understand what they are and people riff on them and they expand them. And you do not think of RSS based distribution. And I think once you open the door to it's a video too. I I've seen podcasts where everyone's wearing laugh mics and just sitting around on couches. And you're like, this is getting like, this is just a talk show now. This is late night television, but we're calling it a video podcast to get it into all this distribution. I don't know. Like there's Spotify is they're gonna end up competing more with YouTube than I think they understand because YouTube has all of that and it has YouTube videos and it has whatever else, right?
35:45 Alex Cranz? I like, I think, yeah, they'll kind they'll compete with YouTube and that the fact that YouTube is creating its own like podcasting setup and everything. But at the same time, I keep going back to this show, Critical Role, which I've only watched like half of an episode because they're four hours long and that's a terrible thing to do with your day. But it was a show that was four hours long and people were sitting there watching it and they kept begging for a podcast and they got a podcast. And some some listeners go and they listen to the podcast. Some people watch the show and the show's like still gotten like better. The production qualities have improved. It's all like they're investing further into that side of it. So it's like, I think those two audiences are just very different. And this is just a big mad grab to get as much audience as possible as quickly as possible. Right?
36:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah, that's what every platform is always doing. I just think Spotify in particular thinks it's competing with TikTok and it's
36:35 Alex Cranz? And it's competing with YouTube.
36:37 Nilay Patel? Competing with YouTube.
36:37 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
36:38 Nilay Patel? And YouTube is out there. Like YouTube was at Hot Pod Summit, our pop, our podcasting conference a couple of weeks ago. They announced YouTube podcast features. They announced video podcast features, background play, like YouTube knows, they they see it coming. They see that opportunity. But Spotify, I think, is they're headed in a different way. And somewhere lost in all of this is, boy, I'd like to just see a bunch of songs in my catalog and pick from them.
37:05 Alex Cranz? Right.
37:06 Nilay Patel? Which appears to be fully out of favor at this point.
37:08 Alex Cranz? It's done.
37:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah, no one will ever own any music ever again. All right, we gotta take a break. We'll come back. We gotta talk about David's anger at streaming boxes. This is just a real streaming media episode. And then, of course, there's a Twitter update, some policy updates. There's a lot going on. We'll be right back.
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38:52 Nilay Patel? Okay. All right, we're back. So David, you went on leave, child, cared for the child. And then you did the thing that everybody on leave does parental leave does is you held a baby who was sleeping. You couldn't move and you just thought deeply about technology and you concluded, I think rationally, what most people do, the state of television is a disaster and you should tell people about it. Tell us about it.
39:17 David Pierce? That's basically right. So what I promised I wouldn't do was I was not going to become a dad gadget guy. I was like, I will not come back from parental leave and be the guy who's like, have you heard of the Kikaroo? Like, I'm not, I will not be that guy.
39:32 Nilay Patel? The Kikaroo?
39:33 David Pierce? Yeah, well, I'm not doing it. You cannot bait me into this. I'm not doing it. What did happen was I spent a tremendous amount of time with a child sleeping on top of me watching television. And I watched television on my smart TV. I watched television on my Roku. I watched television on my Fire TV. I watched television on my Apple TV. I watched television on my, on my Nvidia Shield because I am a maniac who owns all these things. They're all bad. This is the thing that I have landed on is, uh, there was a time, not that many years ago, when the TV was going to be like the hub of technology, right? This was when the smart home was really starting to become a thing. This was when smartphone technology was starting to sort of percolate out and everything was getting new processing power
40:15 David Pierce? and much more sort of sensory awareness. This was the moment when like the game console was going to shrink all the way down and just become your set top box. Microsoft tried to do it with the Xbox. Everybody was like, the set top box is the future. And what turned out to happen is that set top boxes are bad and getting worse and becoming sort of increasingly commodified because for a bunch of reasons that have to do with how these companies make money, what the streaming services themselves want, and just the fact that this is the world we live in and smart TVs continue to get cheaper and cheaper. They suck and there's no way for them to get any better. There's no incentive or reason for anyone to try to build a good set top box anymore. And that just made me sad. And I got to the end of this post and I was like, I'm gonna, I'm gonna write an angry thing demanding everybody
41:00 David Pierce? do better. And I got to the end of it and was like, oh, no, it, it's just bad and it's never getting any better.
41:04 Nilay Patel? Yeah. So the ones that you really called out were, it's still very app based.
41:09 David Pierce? Yeah.
41:09 Nilay Patel? Which is what some of them want. I think Apple's still like, whatever it's app based, that's fine. But two, so it's app based instead of content based.
41:17 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, that's the the simplest thing your set-top box should do for you is take you to the things you want to watch. Like, that doesn't strike me as-
41:25 Alex Cranz? But it's never going to, because Netflix doesn't want to participate in any ecosystem that allows you to that allows you to find their content anywhere but the Netflix app.
41:35 David Pierce? Right. It's like if if if 30 years ago, you know, one of the cable companies had just been like, "No, we don't want to be in the guide. You have to use a different guide if you want to get to CNN." This is somehow the world we've ended up in.
41:46 Alex Cranz? Yes.
41:47 David Pierce? It's like, like, the the old spreadsheet TV guide was a much better interface than anything we have for finding stuff to watch now. And like, that is a deeply sad state of affairs.
41:56 Nilay Patel? So I love Verge readers, because a lot of them are like, "Whatever the Apple TV is fine", which I think is a reasonable, it's extremely fine.
42:05 David Pierce? It's fine. I say that in the piece. Like, it's it's probably the best one you can buy, because it's the only one that has an actually fast processor. And it's like, you know what? If the system is broken-
42:15 Nilay Patel? Oh, my God. Nvidia Shield people just lost their minds.
42:17 Alex Cranz? I was like, "Say that about the Shield."
42:20 David Pierce? The Shield is really fast and just utterly decimated by the fact that Android TV doesn't work very well. But there's a good processor in there. It just isn't very fast, and it's not Nvidia's fault. But the Apple TV is a perfectly fine thing, right? But like, there's so many simple ways it could be a lot better. One of them is just like if Siri weren't trash and Apple had ever made Siri good at anything ever for any reason, the Apple TV might be more useful. But it just, it's fine. And if you want fine, I can sell you fine for $15. Like, go buy a Roku stick that's inevitably on sale at Amazon, or buy a Fire TV that they will just give you for free if you look at them. And it's all just fine. Whatever.
43:04 Nilay Patel? I feel like fine was better a few years ago. Like, when when the Chromecast originally came out, it felt good to use. It was, it worked, it was cheap. And I think those are the the two, the two bars that it needed to cross. There are a lot of Chromecast fans in the comments of this piece, by the way. They were like, whatever. Oh, yeah.
43:21 Speaker 03 It's not, it's not nearly as cheap. It doesn't work nearly as well. Yeah, you know, like now you get HDR and 4K and all of these other things if you want them. But it's not as easy to use. I'm trying to watch an F1 clip, like casted to my TV. And suddenly the volume just starts going to maximum because my phone is at maximum. And, and what, why would anyone want this, this experience? This should not be like this. What, why, why am I having these problems?
43:46 Nilay Patel? You want to feel the, the beat of the engine thrumming through your body.
43:51 Speaker 03 Want to wake my wife up at 2:00 AM with the sounds of, of F1 engine.
43:55 Nilay Patel? But you're like, honey, listen to this engine.
43:57 Speaker 03 It will be the last time.
43:59 David Pierce? While I was sitting there complaining about set top boxes being bad. Anna, my wife, just kept saying, I don't care about any of the rest of it. Just why aren't all the apps the same volume? Like I turn on my smart TV and I have to put it, I put it to 25 for Netflix, 35 for Peacock, 45 for HBO. And then I go back to Netflix and it blows my ears out and wakes up my child. And it's like, this is the simplest thing that this hardware could do is just make everything the same volume. But it can't because it's not allowed to, because the streaming services won't allow the set top, the box makers to do anything.
44:31 Alex Cranz? Did you notice that Peacock also doesn't, hasn't fixed the, the difference between audio and commercials versus?
44:37 David Pierce? Oh, it's horrible.
44:38 Alex Cranz? Regular things like this is the number one thing people always hated. It was a great thing that soundbars tried to solve. And somehow the soundbar could not solve it on Peacock because Peacock's like, no, we want you to have this like, it's, and it's always like condom commercials is all I get on Peacock. And it's just like, and I'm like, well, this is.
44:56 Nilay Patel? The connected TV ecosystem has found you, Alex.
44:59 Alex Cranz? It has failed profoundly.
45:02 Nilay Patel? Mark Zuckerberg is listening to you, my friend.
45:05 Alex Cranz? I was just like, what is happening? Cause it's so loud and it's like, do you need condoms? I'm like, no, I, I'm good. Thanks.
45:15 Alex Cranz? Very, very loudly. And then back to Poker Face soft whisper.
45:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I like that it's a conversation you're having with your TV. You're like, no, thank you.
45:24 Alex Cranz? Cause I'm sitting in my house like, nope.
45:26 Nilay Patel? So what's fascinating about this is Apple in particular, everywhere else in its ecosystems has absolute control over its developers. Like the idea that iPhone apps would be this wildly inconsistent or not participate in universal search or whatever. Apple would write the rule. People would complain. The European bureaucrats would issue a directive. The whole, you, you, everyone knows the exact cycle I'm talking about. If you're a Verge has listener, right? We would do a whole episode about it. It would be a thing. On the TV side, Apple does not have the market share to exercise the control. And they have a lot of fans and people really like it, but apps launch, they launch without support for Apple's. They, sometimes they don't even launch on the Apple TV right away.
46:12 Nilay Patel? They launch without support for features. They launch the features late. I'm specifically thinking about YouTube TV launching 5.1 surround just way after it came to other platforms. And then the apps themselves are still kind of just like HTML5 wrappers. Because there's so many TV platforms that the streaming vendors have just been like, screw it. They're all web apps. Here's the web app package for Tizen. Here's the web app package for whatever LG is running WebOS on and on to go.
46:39 David Pierce? Not only are they doing that, it's, they're also on this incredible race to the technological bottom. Because now that there are all these incredibly cheap smart TVs, you have to build that app in such a way that not only does it work across all these platforms, it works on this unbelievably cheap, low end plat processor inside of like a shitty TCL TV. And so you're in this position where you, you are actually incentivized against building something that works because it would break most of the time. Like even if you built a really good app for the Apple TV, it would then not work most other places. So of course you're going to build the lowest common denominator, which is what everybody has started doing.
47:15 Nilay Patel? So one of the interesting responses I saw to your piece, David, were the people who said, this is why I've started buying channels inside of Apple TV and inside of YouTube TV and inside of Amazon. Yep. Right. They're like, I don't want to use a Showtime app. I just bought Showtime inside of YouTube TV or wherever, and that gets me closer to a single interface. We've seen a lot of these companies are starting to think about their products as bundles. Apple does it. Amazon does it. YouTube does it. HBO Max is going to turn into some, something. They're just going to call it Max and that's going to be a horrible day for me.
47:48 Speaker 03 ESPN has said that it's going to, or there's been a rumor that ESPN might allow other sports, sports channels to plug into it so that it could become a hub for your sports streaming.
47:57 Alex Cranz? That's Plex's big play, right? Now, every, every couple of years Plex does a new big play.
48:03 Nilay Patel? Is that Plex's big play?
48:04 Alex Cranz? No, that has become Plex's big play is they say, we want to be your central hub. So we've found these weird, horrible hacks that are not actually very user friendly to, to let all of the apps work inside our platform because we recognize that everything sucks. And like, Apple did that with the TV app, the terribly, terribly named TV app. They tried to do that, but again, everybody gets bodied because Netflix or some other big player doesn't want to listen to them and nobody has the market share to force.
48:34 Nilay Patel? Several years ago, the Verge's office was in Midtown, New York, and we want to go out after work or a drink or a snack. If you haven't been to Midtown, New York, it's kind of like a weird ghost town. But we used to walk into this restaurant. It was a couple of blocks away. It was really nice. It looked expensive. There was never anyone in there, ever. Zero people were ever in this restaurant and like 400 people worked there. The restaurant was a front for the mob. And in this metaphor, that restaurant is Plex.
49:08 David Pierce? Speak to that, Eli.
49:10 Nilay Patel? Just put that out there. That's fine, man. You can tell me you're doing all kinds of shit, but everybody knows what's happening in the back of that restaurant.
49:21 Alex Cranz? It's fast TV back there. That's what they got going on. It's free ad-supported TV.
49:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
49:28 Alex Cranz? The only way to watch.
49:29 Nilay Patel? 400 people work here, no customers.
49:34 Nilay Patel? Very odd, very odd situation. Actually, the TV app in Apple is like a perfect example of this, right? They wanted it. You can see what it would be if it worked, but no one will play ball, so it barely works and it's not the home screen of the product.
49:49 David Pierce? Yeah, it's, this is the thing is it's not, it's not like it's not obvious how to do this better, right? Like, there's a, there's a big, long vision of like, the TV as the center of your home in a lot of really interesting ways that are actually really complicated and multi-user technology is like a thing we actually really have not solved yet. So whatever, we can talk about that later. But the simple thing is like, just make it easier for me to watch things on my TV. And everybody knows how that would work. And there's been just enough players who have refused that it's been easier for everybody else to refuse, and it has just collapsed. Like, it's not unclear what Apple would like to do. It just can't do it.
50:25 Alex Cranz? You know what's gonna fix this. You know what's gonna fix-
50:28 David Pierce? If you say Plex, I'm gonna, I'm gonna leave. I'm going back on parental leave if you say Plex.
50:32 Alex Cranz? ATSC 3.0.
50:34 David Pierce? Oh, God.
50:34 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
50:37 David Pierce? That's even worse.
50:38 Nilay Patel? Nothing like 600 ultra-compressed channels of infomercials beamed directly to you from your local CBS affiliate.
50:45 Alex Cranz? In 4K.
50:47 David Pierce? We're like one scissor vodka joke away from me filling my Vergecast bingo card on my first day back. This is very exciting.
50:53 Nilay Patel? It's gonna be great. All right, that's streaming, streaming music, streaming TV, the business models, the money is preventing good user experiences, I think is what we're, what we're getting at here. This brings me to Twitter, where the money is preventing a good user experience in a different way, in that all of the people have been fired, and so the site keeps crashing. I don't know if there's much more to say, but there's just a lot going on with Twitter, but it's all kind of the same story, which is Elon fired everybody, and now all the people who know what they're doing are gone. And so Zoe and Casey at Australian Platformer- It's on the site. Basically, they tried to make an API change, brought down the whole site for several hours.
51:33 Alex Cranz? Because there was just one guy or one person. There was just one engineer on the project. They broke it and we're like, whoop.
51:41 Nilay Patel? And Elon did some tweets about how everything is brittle. That results in a lot of software people being like, the reality of all software is that it's brittle and that the solution to that is knowing, people knowing what they're doing.
51:51 David Pierce? I was interviewing somebody a couple of years ago for a totally unrelated story and they like paused me at the end of our interview. I did the like, is there anything I should have asked you? Like, what else are you thinking about question? Which is a good one for reporters to do. And he like, looks at me dead in the face and he goes, you need to report on tech debt more because tech debt is the underlying most important story of why everything is broken all the time. And like, my response was, I'm sure you're right. That is a just staggeringly boring story, but this is that, right? Like, it's, it's just, this, this service has been around for almost 20 years. There is tech debt everywhere and that just is what it is. You can't rewrite the thing from scratch, which is now what Elon is promising to do, which I find deeply hilarious.
52:32 Nilay Patel? He also promised to open source the algorithm. He also promised.
52:36 David Pierce? I said, promising. This is my point. Like, this, that's just as likely as rewriting the Twitter code from scratch, right? Like, you just, you can't do it. And this is why at some point you have to employ people who know what they're doing in order to keep making the service that you make work.
52:50 Speaker 03 That's one approach, but Netflix got a lot of mileage a few years ago because they had this technology they called Chaos Monkey, where it would test the resilience of their platform because it would go around and like shut stuff, shut stuff off at random and see if it still worked. And that was supposedly how Netflix would keep working mostly everywhere all the time. And now Twitter has a Chaos Monkey.
53:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
53:09 Speaker 03 Named Elon Musk. And he is stress testing the app. And when we get through this, it'll be fine eventually. They'll find every single hole. It's just going to take probably the rest of our lives.
53:22 Alex Cranz? If all the people he fired don't sue it into oblivion.
53:25 David Pierce? Richard, you've changed since I left.
53:26 Speaker 03 Big crypto, big Elon guy.
53:29 Nilay Patel? So there's one piece of the Twitter story we should talk about on the show. We did not write about it on the site because the story is so weird and so many of the details are actually quite hard to confirm and have not been confirmed. So I say what the story is first and then just talk about why we didn't do, because it's just weird. So there's a Twitter designer named Harold Dural Thorleifson, he goes by Holly on Twitter. Holly tweets Elon, hey, my laptop got shut off several days ago. I don't know if I'm fired. Am I fired? No one will respond to me maybe if you tweet Elon enough. Elon is just incredibly rude. Yeah, there's no other way to put it. He's just rude. He's like, what do you do here?
54:07 Alex Cranz? He responds with like, what do you do here? Just tell me right away, like without any, any kind of politeness, any let's take this to DMs. Let's, let's email this out. He's just like, what do you do here? And then the guy is like, well, I can't tell you because that'll break my confidentiality agreement. And
54:22 Nilay Patel? Which by the way, watching this is a distance. You're like, oh, that's a trap.
54:27 Alex Cranz? And Elon is like, fine, break it. Tell me everything. And so the guy tells him some stuff. Elon laughs at him because he's like, I worked on like a Figma project.
54:37 Nilay Patel? Right. He's, he's like, one of the things he did was he negotiated the price of a software as a service product down by 500K. And he was like, which thing? And he's like, Figma. And I don't think Elon knew what Figma was.
54:46 Alex Cranz? Elon just laughed because presumably he didn't know what it was and didn't realize that it's like hugely important for software designers to figure out what this software is going to actually look like. So he just kind of roasts the guy and then he continues the roast the guy the next day to other people who are like, Elon, you're being kind of a dick. And Elon's like, yeah, but the guy didn't even do anything here. He said he had some sort of like issues. So he couldn't even type. So what's even the point of this guy? And it's like, well, uh oh, because Hallie was, is actually like a pretty noted disability activist in Iceland, who's building a bunch of wheelchair ramps and had also like then explained in a Twitter thread how he had muscular dystrophy, how he had a wife and he slept in a big bed with, with his wife, unlike Elon,
55:31 Alex Cranz? how he saw his children every day, unlike Elon. And just like, just brutally goes after Elon while explaining like how every single way that Elon is wrong. And then Elon apparently realized that he had fired someone for disability reasons and then tweeted that he had fired someone for disabilities. And that's a good way to lose your company or at least a lot of money. And then said, okay, we're going to work it all out on the back end. And then there was also this whole thing where a lot of people were saying, well, Hallie was actually be owed a hundred million dollars if he was fired. But that's really difficult to confirm. So there's just a lot like, it was just a messy, messy HR dispute happening in real time
56:15 Alex Cranz? on Twitter and we all had to watch it. And that was just kind of gross.
56:19 Nilay Patel? Yeah, it was gross. So Elon tweets, he did no actual work. He claimed as an excuse, he had a disability that prevented him from typing. There's a response where he's like, oh, muscular dystrophy. I will say that the sort of like Elon take ecosystem went bananas around all of this. And the world of people who are like, he got him, he set a trap. Now he owes him the money. He got fired. First of all, the guy's in Iceland. We don't know what law his contract is under. We just don't know how he's employed. So we didn't even know what law controls here. Two, there is this thing with a hundred million dollars. Throw this in as a founder. There's a lot of reporting that we have, that Alex Heath has, that Casey and Zoe have at Platformer, that when Twitter acquired founders, their shares vested faster. They were owed more money.
57:04 Nilay Patel? So they had had founders on do not fire lists because it would cost them so much money to fight, to fire them on these accelerated vesting schedules. But we don't know how that applies to this guy. Then this guy's also Iceland's man of the year. It's a real thing because of his work as a disability activist, building the ramps. But most importantly, he did not sell his company for stock. He very famously sold it for cash. So he would pay more taxes because he credits Iceland's social services for allowing him to live, work and thrive with his disability. That's like the wrong person to fight.
57:39 Alex Cranz? And to fight publicly on Twitter.
57:41 Nilay Patel? What I'm just getting at is the, the story, right? That he got baited, Elon would owe him a hundred million dollars. We actually can't confirm like 50 of the dots in between. Boy, that was a real jerk interaction. And Elon publicly apologized and said he'd FaceTime the guy or they had a video call. And everything is just all the guy's considering saying.
58:05 Alex Cranz? Right.
58:05 Nilay Patel? And no one's talking. So I just like, I just want to say, this is like, kind of why we, A, it was gross. It seemed petty and gross and small and sort of, it's just more of the same, right? It's just like Elon's playing the hits, like doing his business like a jerk on Twitter. And then B, in the middle is just like. What feels like an unconfirmed, unconfirmable story that to do it responsibly after a port out. And I think that's just really telling like, I think the Twitter story is still really important. I think what happens to the social network that is the architecture of lots of things like this whole podcast. Who are Aaron Rodgers and the New York Jets right now? I'm just telling you like, it's on the back of my mind every second of every day. And it's all just playing out on Twitter, right? It's just like the architecture of sports media is still on Twitter. The architecture of politics is still on Twitter.
58:50 Nilay Patel? So what happens to Twitter is important. It just right now, every day is like these little explosions of chaos that kind of don't mean as much as they should mean, or don't mean as much as people want them to mean.
59:02 David Pierce? Yeah. My relationship with Twitter has changed so much the last few months. Like I just bailed on Twitter and I have to say, I have been shocked by how little I have missed. Like the, the thing that felt truest to me of everything that happened the last few months was that thing where Elon forced the engineers to juice his own metrics. Because it just everywhere, every time I would open it up, my mentions were filled with people tagging me in crypto scams. And my timeline was just Elon replying to people. It's just like, what is this place now? And I think there's a great piece on our site this week called how a social network falls apart. That really rang true to me that way. I was just like, the place just feels worse now. Like, forget the fact that it keeps collapsing because nobody works there anymore.
59:43 David Pierce? And like, it is just not being run in a competent way, as far as anybody can tell. It just, it just feels bad to me, but there is still that thing where I think people don't know where else to go. And it's like Mastodon is not that thing, at least not yet. And there's nowhere else. So it's like, if you, if you are one of those people who wants to know what's going on with Aaron Rodgers and the Jets, a person of which I am not one, but if you are one of those people, there's, there's just still nowhere else to go. And that's one of the things that is the most surprising to me is that, that people feel stuck, I think, in a realer way every single day.
1:00:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But it's also like, no, there's a guy who followed the Jets plane to California. And then like went to the airport and like watched the Twitter stuff. You know what I'm talking about? It's like someone found the plane, they went and saw the plane, they saw Aaron Rodgers walking the plane.
1:00:33 David Pierce? Yep.
1:00:33 Nilay Patel? The only place that happens is Twitter. Like, there's no replacement for that specific thing. Maybe it'll happen a little bit on Reddit.
1:00:39 David Pierce? For can.
1:00:42 Nilay Patel? 4chan. If sports media moves to 4chan, that will be wild. Get ready. But I just think like the stuff in the background of Twitter is like, the experiment is how much can you break it? How much can you make people feel bad and they still have to use it? And that's always what Twitter, what Elon, that's always what Elon has a banking on, right? Is people are addicted to Twitter and he can do anything because the guy who's the most addicted to cigarettes bought the cigarette factory and we're just gonna see how it goes.
1:01:08 Speaker 03 Well, something that I've noticed is that people complain about Twitter. We talk about Elon and his strategies and how he's working, but he has been effective in one kind of particular way that I've noticed. They defaulted everyone to the for you page to the algorithmic timeline. They have both timelines. People use the algorithmic timeline a lot and that is part of the reason why so many people saw, for example, this story playing out because if you are on that one and you follow anyone involved or anyone who is talking about it, it's going to be at the top of your feed. And at least so far, that bet has not been an incorrect one for Elon and for Twitter to put to kind of algorithmically juice discontent and unhappiness. Whatever that does for people, I don't know, but it has kept their attention.
1:01:50 Speaker 03 And something that, you know, if you're gonna remain on Twitter, I just, I beg people, please, don't use the algorithmic timeline. Turn off replies from people who don't follow you. You don't need to see what they say and turn off notifications for likes. You don't need to know whether or not people agree with you.
1:02:05 Nilay Patel? That's true. Turn off most of the features of Twitter is good advice from Richard. Also, if you see a bank, run at it as fast as you can.
1:02:12 Speaker 03 What could go wrong?
1:02:13 Nilay Patel? Just dead sprint. Do you know how 17 I drove a Mustang into a bank? That's a real story. We're gonna take a break. We'll be right back.
1:02:18 Speaker 03 Was it during a podcast?
1:02:20 Nilay Patel? We'll be right back. We got some policy stuff to talk about. It was not during, that was technically, if you drive a Mustang into a bank in the 90s, that's a video podcast. We'll be right back.
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1:03:45 Nilay Patel? All right, we're back. A little bit of policy news, then we got to talk about this Dish story, which is criminally undercovered, and we got some gadgets to close this out. And weird. Weird. It's weird. It's real weird. Policy news. Congress rolled out a bill that would allow the White House to ban TikTok across the nation. Got to say, it feels like the TikTok ban is coming, right? Like, everybody on both sides is like, what if we get rid of TikTok? And states across the country have banned it for their government devices. The federal government has banned it for government devices. It's getting weird out there. And TikTok has done approximately nothing to solve this problem, from what I can tell.
1:04:24 Alex Cranz? Because they know they have teens. They know they have like an army of teens for when this ban goes down, that they can just point at the problem.
1:04:33 David Pierce? I mean, Neelai, can I interest you in Project Texas? Which I think, if I understand correctly, is a room where a person says TikTok is great. Trust us.
1:04:42 Nilay Patel? So they do have that. Project Texas, which the CEO of TikTok has talked about, which TikTok has talked about. They have transparency centers. Alex Heath went to one. The transparency centers are like giant touchscreens where you can pretend to be a TikTok moderator. It's very much like a children's museum for content moderation. I don't know how else to describe it.
1:05:00 David Pierce? That's all I can think of. Anytime I hear somebody talk about, it's like going to the museum and you touch it. And it's like, that's what gravity is. This time it's content moderation.
1:05:10 Nilay Patel? Like, there's a part of me, it's like, that's good. Like, more people should understand, like, how this works and how hard it is. On the other hand, you're like, this is your answer to the government being like,
1:05:19 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:05:19 Nilay Patel? China is a threat? Is this a science museum for content moderation? However, in that, in the transparency centers, there is a room full of servers that Alex and Casey and Taylor Lorenz and everybody else who went to Twitter, these things were not allowed to go in. Were Oracle employees, you remember Oracle is tied up in this in some Byzantine way, are allowed to review TikTok's code, see all the data they're, they're using because they are in control of it. And then this is the one that I thought was the funniest piece of this all. Oracle will submit the app to Apple in the App Store, which will solve all the problems.
1:05:53 Alex Cranz? Yeah. You just need some American capitalists inserted into things and it's fine.
1:05:59 Nilay Patel? Well, it's like, you guys, you know, the app on the phone like sends the data to China.
1:06:04 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:06:04 Nilay Patel? I mean, it doesn't, it doesn't matter who delivers the floppy to, to the spaceship.
1:06:11 Nilay Patel? It's the, the network, you know, the internet. It, it's a network that is interconnected. It's just like a very funny piece of that whole puzzle. It's like, what if Oracle was in charge of this app? It's like, yeah, what if the app was totally disconnected from the Chinese government? And huh, that's challenging. So that's all happening and like TikTok is making a big show of it. We're covering it, obviously. But this act, there is a strict act, bipartisan, and it would allow the Secretary of Commerce to ban foreign technologies and companies from operating in the US. They present a threat to national security. So this whole thing, all these companies reacting to TikTok, there might just be like a hole at the center of their strategy. Like you wake up and you're like, what do we do now?
1:06:53 David Pierce? I mean, I do wonder if part of the bet from a lot of these companies is that eventually TikTok is going to either be, you know, hamstrung and sold or outright banned. And all of a sudden, there's going to be this massive gold rush of trying to be the next Tik Tokiest thing for users in the United States. And they're all just sitting there waiting for this moment to happen. Which I, the part of this that's so strange to me is that every individual move against this seems not like specious, but it's also sort of theoretical, right? It's like, it's very hard to prove that TikTok is being nefarious in some way. You can talk about what
1:07:34 David Pierce? the Chinese government has access to. You can talk about the way the algorithms are being tuned. There are all these things that sort of seem sketchy, but have proven very hard to prove. And then so you get all these bills that say things like, we can do it if we want to, if we're able to, but only if it's allowed. And they're like, wait, what? It just, we seem to just be sort of like circling this over and over. But it does seem like we've gotten to a point where there's enough smoke on this that it feels like there's going to be fire.
1:08:03 Nilay Patel? Yeah, or at least the attempt, right? Because they got to prove that it's a threat to national security and TikTok has done all this Project Texas stuff. But it's out there. It's in the background in a very serious way that governments around the country are, you get to posture against China for free. And you get to say that you're doing it for the kids. So everyone's very worried about the teens at all times.
1:08:23 Alex Cranz? Think of the children.
1:08:24 Nilay Patel? So that's one. Two.
1:08:26 David Pierce? Wait, wait, before we move on, can I just, can I just say one thing? Like, I just want to give Congress a lot of credit for the, the, the backronyms in these names where like, clearly somebody's like, we want to call this the Restrict Act, but it has to stand for something. So the Restrict Act stands for the Restricting the Emergence of Security Threats That Risk Information and Communications Technology Act, or the Restrict Act. And I just think that's wonderful. Congratulations to Mark Warner and the rest.
1:08:52 Nilay Patel? That's a C, that's a B plus. Starting the Restrict Act with the word restrict, completely ridiculous. Like, you just immediately lose points.
1:09:01 David Pierce? That's fair. That's fair. Can I interest you in the Data Act? The Determining America's Technological Adversaries Act?
1:09:11 Nilay Patel? All right. Speaking of Congress, we'll have more on this very soon. But obviously we pay a lot of attention to the FCC here because theoretically the FCC regulates the nation's telecom providers. No one's doing a good job, particularly the Biden FCC has been deadlocked at 2-2 for a long time. Two Republicans, two Democrats, they've accomplished nothing, just flat out nothing. The Trump FCC accomplished a lot. Most of it was destructive, but they accomplished a lot. They're like, let's get rid of Netanyahu. What if the government was run by Verizon? Like, did it? Fine. Biden FCC, Biden campaigns and all this stuff, they've accomplished nothing
1:09:51 Nilay Patel? because they've been deadlocked at 2-2. For 16 months, the Fifth Commissioner has been waiting around. It was Gigi Sohn. Gigi has been on The Verge. She's a character on The Verge. She's like this ferocious consumer advocate. She was on the Board of Public Knowledge, the First Amendment Organization. She's been sitting there for 16 months. She's been nominated twice over. It expired both times. She's gone to committee twice. There have been hearings. We did an entire Decoder episode about this bizarre mystery where they cannot get her confirmation over the finish line. And the answer is Comcast, AT&T, Verizon, furiously spending money to keep the Biden FCC deadlocked, and in particular, from keeping a true consumer advocate on there. This is the
1:10:34 Nilay Patel? point of the show where we missed, actually, disclosures earlier. I should note Comcast is a minority investor in Vox Media, our parent company. You might tell from the tone of my voice. That's cool.
1:10:45 Alex Cranz? How do you feel about that?
1:10:47 Nilay Patel? That's fine. There's no love lost there. They're fine. They're all very cool.
1:10:51 David Pierce? We also made a Netflix show.
1:10:52 Nilay Patel? We made a Netflix show. It's called The Future Of. That's great. You should go watch it on your Comcast internet connection, your overpriced Comcast internet connection.
1:11:02 Nilay Patel? Disclosures, we have some. Gigi quit this week. She withdrew. She's like, couldn't take it, couldn't take the attacks. McKenna Kelly is reporting on all this. We'll have a lot more on it, but I just want to point out, this is like a policy disaster.
1:11:17 David Pierce? Yeah.
1:11:17 Nilay Patel? That is squarely Biden's fault. Like, he did not push to have a functional telecom regulator in this country. Is he, I mean, this is just me doing greatest hits now. Americans pay the highest prices for the slowest speeds in the entire world. If you go to Europe, you can get unlimited data SIM card that works anywhere in Europe for like, I don't know, nothing, $2. Here, it's massive amounts of money and getting more expensive. We're going to come to Dish Network. Our government approved the merger of T-Mobile and Sprint, reducing the amount of competitors in the market and said Dish, they would stand up Dish Network as a fourth competitor. Dish Network has been down for two weeks. Like, the whole fucking company had a cyber
1:12:01 Nilay Patel? attack. People couldn't pay their bills. Customer service agents couldn't even respond to people. Installers weren't getting scheduled. Zero coverage, except for us. Like, just crazy. Like, the amount of competition we've reduced and the amount that we've allowed prices to rise because we do not have a functional telecom regulator in this country. And this, this failure to nominate Gigi is like, just a stark reminder that actually, like, we talk a lot about tech company corruption and like, big tech. It's the telecoms. Like, they still own massive chunks of political power and they wield it with absolute, like, nightmare-like efficiency to make sure they get what they want and keep the monopolies in place. It's, I'm furious about it, as you can probably tell.
1:12:43 David Pierce? And Gigi Sohn really, really, really did not mince words to that effect. Like, I just keep reading this quote that she said over and over, which is in our story. She says, "It is a sad day for our country and our democracy when dominant industries with assistance from unlimited dark money get to choose their regulators. And with the help of friends in the Senate, the powerful cable and media companies have done just that." It's like, yeah, there it is, folks. Like, it's, it's pretty much that simple.
1:13:06 Alex Cranz? The most open and shut should have been approved immediately. And instead, there was a lot of conversation about how she hated Republicans and that she was gonna take Newsmax and, what was it, One America off the air, even though she wouldn't have had that power. There was a lot of just huge misinformation about her. Ted Cruz popping champagne. At at her loss, even though all of his constituents are absolutely destroyed by the terrible broadband in this country and all they want is better broadband. And he's like, yeah, fuck your broadband. Enjoy.
1:13:39 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And he and his claim is like, he's like, because she has like previously criticized Fox News.
1:13:45 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:13:46 Nilay Patel? That she would like do something to free speech. Meanwhile.
1:13:49 Alex Cranz? When she had zero control.
1:13:50 Nilay Patel? When and also like, I didn't pay attention to Fox News news lately.
1:13:55 Alex Cranz? Yeah. Good entertainment channel.
1:13:57 Nilay Patel? But meanwhile, right, there's no net neutrality in this country. And so things are starting to happen that are really weird, like state centers in Texas proposing bills to force ISPs to block websites with abortion information on them.
1:14:12 Alex Cranz? Yep.
1:14:12 Nilay Patel? And to make it so that hosting providers in Texas cannot host any website that has abortion information on it. Like I, that's straight up like fully in the realm of our telecom policy is now allowing infringements on free speech. Like the basics of net neutrality, even if you go to the big, even if you go to Comcast, I've talked to Comcast about this, right? They're like, yeah, we think no blocking, no locking. That's what they always call it, right? No blocking of websites, no locking of devices from the network. Everyone agrees on this. If you write a net neutrality bill and you're like, all right, we're going to start with no blocking and no locking. No one comes, jumps out and says, do this. Like,
1:14:54 Nilay Patel? maybe the exceptions are we'll block devices that are malicious. And everyone's like, yeah, sure, that makes sense. But the basics are like, don't, you can't block websites. You can't block content and you can't lock devices. And they, they've been saying this for over a decade that we've been covering this. And you get rid of it. And just a few years after you get rid of it, you have state centers in Texas saying, actually, we got rid of Dobbs too. Now you should block websites with abortion information. But if you're a Verge has listener, I don't care where you are on the full spectrum, that is just straight up an attack on the first amendment and an attack on how we think the internet should work. But maybe you think people shouldn't get abortions. The idea that you can block the information or block hosting providers from even having the websites, like fully out of bounds. And that's what you get without like functional telecom policy. Anyway, it's
1:15:35 Nilay Patel? outrageous. McKenna is going to have more on it. There's a lot to this story. It's a, it's a long weaving tale, like as David said, of dark money and corruption. Go listen to the Decoder episode about it. One thing I'll note, so a little competition. The star of that Decoder episode was the CEO of Newsmax, which is Chris Roddy is not a liberal by anyone's conception. And he was like, I want Gigi Sun on the FCC because she is a fighter for competition and what I need to do is compete. That's a big deal. So go listen to that episode of Decoder and the next week we'll have more from McKenna.
1:16:08 David Pierce? We can ask a really dumb question before we move on from this subject. What happens now? Like, does the Biden administration have to nominate somebody else?
1:16:14 Alex Cranz? They nominate.
1:16:15 David Pierce? Two, two forever? Like, what happens now?
1:16:17 Alex Cranz? They'll, they'll nominate somebody else and they probably will not be as like, as good an advocate for consumers. It'll probably be someone much more palatable to the telecoms because that's the only way they're gonna pass through.
1:16:31 Nilay Patel? Lawyer from Verizon.
1:16:32 David Pierce? Is a G-Pie coming back? Be honest.
1:16:34 Nilay Patel? So that's gonna happen. It'll be someone like that. It'll be someone who's a little more liberal, but it's like a Democrat who works for AT&T. Like, the former general counsel of Charter Communicate, like, that's what we've had for years. And that's what we're gonna get again. And so I would just not, like, when, um.
1:16:53 David Pierce? What's John Ledger doing these days? He could do it.
1:16:55 Nilay Patel? To give him an example of the Biden administration's confidence in this FCC, right? They, they did all that rural broadband stuff and they did not do it through the FCC. They did it through other agencies because they just don't trust the FCC to be effective. It's, maybe, maybe you should shut it down. Like, maybe you wanna go full libertarian and be like, my three-part plan for America is like to shut this down because it's a disaster. But, fine, I'm not gonna disagree with you at this moment in time. You gotta replace it with something, right? Like, some effective oversight of the telecoms, not of the content, right? I don't think that we should have government speech regulations. I think everybody knows that. I'm saying literally AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Comcast, all of them are little monopolies.
1:17:37 Nilay Patel? Their markets are not competitive and they do weird shit and raise prices all the time. And that's like, you can't even argue with that. Do we think that ISPs in this country are like great and that people love them? No, no one does. 0% of the people believe that. Long pause.
1:17:54 Alex Cranz? Two members of the FCC do.
1:17:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:17:56 Alex Cranz? They think it's going great.
1:17:58 Nilay Patel? It's going great. Uh, the one ISP people love is Starlink. Although in the Starlink credit yesterday, I saw someone who said, hey, I was at the mall the other day and T-Mobile home internet is available in my area and I switched to 5G home internet over Starlink. Wow. And ever in the, I read the thread, people are like, I do it too. Ooh. Big win for 5G. It's the only, the only win for 5G. Okay. Speaking of 5G, I mentioned the same addition network. This is super weird. It's super weird. So Dish is a big company, right? They run Dish, they run the satellite television service. They run Boost Mobile that they picked up. They run Project 105, sis.
1:18:39 Nilay Patel? Their ultra competitive 5G network is just striking fears in the heart. Hans Vestberg, CEO of Verizon, wakes up with cold sweat in the middle of the night. He's like, Project 105, sis, where are we on this? Do they still have just the one phone? I know I was out for a while. Is it still just the one phone? There have been no updates. Okay, cool. They've got the one phone, they got the one tower in Portland, they're doing great.
1:18:59 Alex Cranz? Mitchell is the only subscriber.
1:19:02 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Uh, this is the day of their earnings call. This happened several weeks ago and we covered it. Uh, we got a tip from an installer just to our general tips line. Hey, like our systems have been down for hours and we think it's a cyber attack. That same day, they had an earnings call where they said, this is not a cyber attack. We'll, we'll have it back up shortly. Like days went by, Richard, I think it was like two full days before any other updates. People couldn't log in and pay their bills on the Boost Mobile website. The dishnetwork.com website was just a, we're sorry message. That was it. Just like a box that said, we're sorry, we're down. Like you couldn't pay your Boost Mobile bill, you couldn't sign up, people's deliveries or service appointments were canceled.
1:19:45 Nilay Patel? There was no coverage of this, except for us, basically, and a handful of trade publications.
1:19:49 Speaker 03 And they finally put out a statement eventually saying that there was a cybersecurity incident. Uh, they, they still haven't really said what, what is going on. I think the last time this was updated was on March 7th. Where, where are they now? What have they fixed? What is resolved? This is, this is just kind of nowhere.
1:20:05 Nilay Patel? Yeah. On the 3rd, they said they're making progress. First of all, this is a mystery. We should get to the bottom of it. Second of all, it's wild that this is happening to a major telecom company is going through this. There's almost no coverage of it anywhere. And then three, this is the company that's supposed to provide competition in the broadband market.
1:20:28 Nilay Patel? These are hopes and dreams, Ajit Pai. Like, you're like, there will be four competitors. Dish Network is gonna do it. They can't even reboot the PC.
1:20:38 David Pierce? There is something deeply hilarious to me about the Dish website right now. Like dish.com, which at least in my experience so far, doesn't always load, but does sometimes load. There are three buckets that you can see at the top, three parts of the website. The first one says, thank you for your patience. It says, you know, we're experiencing a system issue. That's been there for, what, two weeks now? The second one is customer support. That's good. And the third one is a big banner that says, get inflation-free TV with Dish. The same price every month for three years. And I just, it's like, it's a super bold move to be like, come pay us for TV. You can't have, but we will not raise the price on the TV that you're not allowed to have, and we will never install for you. And we will charge you immediately.
1:21:23 David Pierce? It's gonna be, it's only $80 a month for TV that we will never install at your house because of a cybersecurity incident. Welcome to Dish.
1:21:32 Nilay Patel? I will say Dish is not paying a very big Figma bill, looking at this website.
1:21:38 Nilay Patel? That's not a cost that they're carrying. No one needs to reduce that bill because that bill is currently $0, everybody. This is a Squarespace template. It's weird. We'll see if it comes back up. But it's just, I want to call it because it's so weird that no one's talking about it. All right, let's close with a lightning round. I think this is very funny. I think the Bing number is very funny. David, you want to talk about the Bing number?
1:22:00 David Pierce? Sure. So Bing, which is now probably more in the news over the last two months than ever accumulated in the history of Bing. Would you say that's fair to say?
1:22:09 Nilay Patel? Yeah, this is the most Bing that has ever been bonged.
1:22:11 David Pierce? Yeah. We have binged and bonged so hard.
1:22:18 David Pierce? For weeks and Microsoft very proudly announced that it now has 100 million active daily users, which on the one hand, to Microsoft's credit, is not a small number, like 100 billion people using your search engine every day, big number, very exciting. I think Google is is substantially over 10 times that size. And and again, let's not forget, this is not like the number of people who are going to use this forever. This is like being at its absolute buzziest in the history of the product is somewhere in the range of one tenth the size of Google, which again, it's a big market. As Sachin Adela said to you, Neil, I like, they don't have to beat Google to make an awful lot of money from a search engine. But
1:23:02 David Pierce? it's just like this was a stark reminder of just exactly how big Google still is in this space.
1:23:09 Nilay Patel? So their math at the event was for every 1% of market share, they saw $2 billion of revenue. So they've ticked up to something. Now, I think that math was based on people using Bing like a search engine and not like
1:23:27 David Pierce? Trying to get it to fall in love with them.
1:23:31 Nilay Patel? Right. Not asking it if it needs condoms, if you get what I'm saying.
1:23:36 Nilay Patel? And like, I don't know if that has played out. Like, they had to restrict, right, the number of queries. They're now back up to 10 queries. I think they thought most users should shut me like, how many two by fours fit into a Kia, which is like their big example. And instead, it's like, people are like, do you love me?
1:23:52 David Pierce? What does your butt look like, thing?
1:23:57 Nilay Patel? Are you afraid of death? And it's like, I don't think that you can monetize that.
1:24:01 David Pierce? CPMs are real.
1:24:02 Nilay Patel? So I'm wondering if there's like, actually a cost curve here where the advertising is being delivered at the rate. That Microsoft assumed it would be delivered at, but it is, you're right. Like you only get an edge dev, you gotta sign up, there's a waitlist. But this is the most Bing that is like, our friend John Gruber has a headline on Daring Fireball. It says, Microsoft Bing is the most exciting product in tech. And it's definitely because people are trying to make out with their laptops.
1:24:27 David Pierce? Yes.
1:24:28 Nilay Patel? Not because it's a better search experience.
1:24:29 David Pierce? But that, that's worth your, whatever $10 billion investment in OpenAI right there. Like we Bing has gotten more press and juice than ever before. And like you, it's, it's, I suspect they will happily take that investment over and over and over again. Even if they can never figure out how to make this anything more than a novelty, which it very much still is.
1:24:49 Nilay Patel? It's, it's a fun novelty.
1:24:51 David Pierce? Oh, it's delightful. It's so fun. Is it?
1:24:53 Nilay Patel? But it, man.
1:24:54 David Pierce? But it's kind of nothing.
1:24:56 Nilay Patel? I was using one called Character AI. Again, talking about this is always talking about like someone's dream, but the short version of the story is someone showed me Character AI. So I click on it, character.ai, it's like you chat with like famous characters. And I was like, I'm gonna talk to Mario from Mario 64. Within two moves, I got Mario from Mario 64 to ask me if I felt lucky punk.
1:25:22 Nilay Patel? This is spectacular.
1:25:26 Nilay Patel? What's going on? This is as much fun as you can have with a computer.
1:25:31 David Pierce? I love it.
1:25:34 Nilay Patel? None of this makes any sense. None of this is good. This isn't like a quality, I guess I'm talking about it now, but like it's not useful. It's not even like that entertaining because it's just like, it breaks the same way every time. But I'm sure Sasha somewhere is like, just keep that number going up.
1:25:50 David Pierce? Yeah. All this stuff is really terrific, really expensive marketing and no one quite knows for what yet.
1:25:59 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Speaking of Google and search, Google's like freaking out. It's like very obvious. They declared a code red. They're like rolling it out. They had the sort of disastrous Bard launch.
1:26:10 David Pierce? Who?
1:26:10 Nilay Patel? Bard got something wrong, which we now all realize is basically the, the main thing that these generative AI systems do is they confidently lie to you.
1:26:17 David Pierce? Yeah. The thing it got wrong was like very low stakes.
1:26:20 Nilay Patel? Compared to what it is. Yeah, like, yeah, but report from Bloomberg. Google wants to put AI in all of its products as soon as possible within months.
1:26:30 Alex Cranz? Wasn't, forgive me, wasn't AI already in all of Google's products? Isn't that what every Google I O is about? Is how AI is in all of their stuff and it's doing everything and AI will save the day.
1:26:42 Nilay Patel? And so it can erase stuff in the background of your photos, but it's not telling you that it loves you. So it has to get that. No, they demoed that. I think Google's mistake. Again, they invented the technology like we, if you are listening to this in your car right now and you slow down just a little bit. A Google PR person will come running out on the highway to tell you that the T in chat GPT was invented by Google and stands for transformer. Like just pump the brakes a little bit, just feather them a little bit. And like, someone is going to leap out of a bush to be like, the T in chat GPT was invented by Google. Like it's their technology. They, they should be saying it a lot. Yeah. But it's like, yeah, you didn't realize the value of this technology was the robot sounding nuts.
1:27:28 Alex Cranz? If only they'd realized.
1:27:31 Nilay Patel? Like, like the value of this technology is like 1,000 Tik Tok hustle culture bros being like, here's how to make money with chat GPT. And they were like, here's what's going to happen. Soon, there's going to demo having a conversation with a Venus flytrap. And you're like, what are you talking about?
1:27:49 Alex Cranz? Should have been Mario.
1:27:50 Nilay Patel? Should have been Mario, just openly threatening me, which is all anybody wants. I kept typing and it asked me to sign up and I told James Vincent, like, I want to sign up just so I'd see if I can get Mario to explicitly call me a coward. Yeah, like, that's how they get you, like 1299 and Mario's be like, you're a coward. Uh, I didn't sign up. So you like being nagged by the AI. This is what we're learning a lot about each other. Thanks to chat, chat. Mario was like, jump through this painting and come on an adventure with me. And I was like, I don't want to jump through the painting, right? Cause like saying no to the AI always makes them very mad. And he's like, come on, it'll be fun. I was like, what's behind the painting? And he's like, evil. This is so dumb. Every time I'm talking about this, you just, you sound like you're talking about a dream. This is like Addy's point.
1:28:33 Nilay Patel? And like, you had this like emotional experience with no stakes that no one cares about. AI, everybody, that's the big. So Mario was there.
1:28:43 Nilay Patel? Can you explain this humane thing to me? It sounds very bad.
1:28:48 Alex Cranz? It sounds like Google Clips.
1:28:49 Nilay Patel? Speaking of AI technologies.
1:28:52 Alex Cranz? Speaking of AI technology.
1:28:54 Nilay Patel? Did you know the T in ChatGPT was?
1:28:56 Alex Cranz? Was it? I had no idea. Now I'm about to get a bunch of emails.
1:29:00 Nilay Patel? A little bit. If you're on cruise control right now, just, you know, push, you know, you can push the button in the wheel. Take it down from 62 to 59. Google employee comes.
1:29:08 Alex Cranz? Just running right next to the car as fast as they can.
1:29:15 Nilay Patel? There's like Google shuttle buses will pull up, like hold up paper in the windows. We're the T. We're the T.
1:29:23 Alex Cranz? Humane is the company. It was started by some former Apple people. There was a lot of hype around it. It's gotten a lot of investment, including Sam Altman from OpenAI has invested a lot of money in it. They've even talked about their IPO, not actually talked about what they make at Humane, which is kind of a problem if you're going to do things like an IPO. And a leak of a, from 2021's pitch deck suggests that it's some sort of wearable camera.
1:29:53 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:29:54 Alex Cranz? Which I think we've all kind of moved past as a thing that anybody really wants.
1:30:00 Nilay Patel? So the leak is a very blurry slide deck that was obviously made for investors. Again, John Gruber had it posted on a website. So this is what we're working off of. There's a bunch of patents floating around in the world like, let's saw it up. There's an awful lot of hype with this company.
1:30:16 Alex Cranz? Yes.
1:30:17 Nilay Patel? And so some of the patents are like, it'll project a virtual keyboard on any surface. You can like type with your hands, but a lot of them are about, okay, it's going to record everything and like, show you stuff. But like, it's basically the core of it from what we can tell from this stack is a camera that you wear all the time. That is constantly recording everything, sending it to a cloud, categorizing it with, of course, AI. What else? 10,000 monkeys typing furiously. And then you can say things like, show me my daughter's home run from earlier today. And it will deliver you that video.
1:30:46 David Pierce? Yeah, I mean, this is, this is Google Clips. It's Snap Spectacles. It's Facebook's smart glasses thing like this. This is a, a, a rich area that no one has cracked in any kind of way that anyone actually cares about.
1:31:00 Alex Cranz? Here, here's my question. So they, they talk a lot about AI in this. It's a bunch of former Apple people. How much of this is a play to get acquired by Apple? For for AR stuff, VR stuff in the future. Because if you're ingesting all of that data, if this thing goes out and exists and suddenly and people decide to wear a camera all the time that ingests all of this data. Now you're getting a lot of data that can be really, really useful if you want to train your facial recognition and all your other fancy like AI components for your smart glasses.
1:31:35 Nilay Patel? So Gruber had a note about this in the blog post where he leaked the deck. And there, yeah, this is like the interpersonal workings of Humane, the people who left to start it. Apparently not beloved at Apple. People thought they took too much credit for stuff that teams built.
1:31:48 Alex Cranz? Oh, so maybe.
1:31:49 Nilay Patel? That's like Gruber sourcing, who knows?
1:31:51 Alex Cranz? Maybe not.
1:31:52 Nilay Patel? That is the vibe that he reported when he leaked this deck.
1:31:55 Alex Cranz? Okay.
1:31:55 Nilay Patel? Now, that doesn't mean they won't get sold to Google or Microsoft. Like somewhere the Google Clips product manager is like, what if we just like bought my idea? I guess did it good. Who knows? But they have raised an awful lot of money and the man, the hype here has been like just off the charts. Like this is a company that makes videos about like the feelings they hope you have about their products.
1:32:16 Speaker 03 Would you say the hype is taking a sort of a magical leap? Is that?
1:32:21 David Pierce? Yes, dude, that's what I keep thinking of too. But at least magically made a thing that is like hopelessly impractical and the field of view is only this big, but like what it is is actually very cool. Yeah, this to me is like, I'm not sure they're doing anything.
1:32:35 Nilay Patel? I'm sorry, can we just back up on that?
1:32:37 Alex Cranz? No, the technology was cool. I'll defend that, like beating it directly into your eyeball.
1:32:43 Nilay Patel? They promised that they were going to hack the GPU of your brain. Those were the words they used.
1:32:48 David Pierce? Hell, yeah.
1:32:49 Nilay Patel? And then they remember they have that crazy wired story with like the, I mean, now I think they just hung up a bunch of like LED robots. Like glued them to someone's.
1:32:58 Speaker 03 They had wet them, making demos.
1:32:59 Alex Cranz? All the commercials were the whale.
1:33:01 Nilay Patel? And the whale, and they had the video that no one could tell if it was real because it was like, it was like they generated it and handed it out. And then in the end, they'd use the same sort of LCD wave guide stuff.
1:33:11 Alex Cranz? Like when Beyonce saw it and then decided to invest, Beyonce went, neat.
1:33:15 Nilay Patel? Yeah, no, the number of celebrities who went to Florida to invest in magically because the GPUs of their brains have been hacked is off the charts. I'm just saying this, that feels like this thing, right? Like it's a.
1:33:26 Alex Cranz? But with AI.
1:33:27 Nilay Patel? The first step is what's there isn't there another, there's like another app and their, their pitch is we'll record everything you do on your computer so you can find it again.
1:33:36 Alex Cranz? Why would you?
1:33:37 David Pierce? It's called Rewind.
1:33:38 Alex Cranz? Why would you do that?
1:33:39 David Pierce? It's like Rewind AI.
1:33:40 Nilay Patel? I'm 1,000% too much Gen X to be like, yeah, that's a good idea. Like, I saw that Will Smith movie with Gene Hackman. I, no. Hmm.
1:33:49 David Pierce? Yeah. No, the, the thing the humane story really reminds me of is, uh, when Carl Pei left OnePlus and started nothing and spent months and months talking about how we need a hardware revolution and everything needs to be different and then just launched headphones.
1:34:04 Alex Cranz? And a phone with LEDs.
1:34:06 David Pierce? Sure.
1:34:07 Alex Cranz? On the back.
1:34:07 David Pierce? Uh, yeah, congratulations. That's innovation. Yeah.
1:34:10 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:34:11 David Pierce? Great. Headphones, but you can see the headphones. It's like, fine. But, uh, this feels like it, it just, the fact that no one has learned that hype eventually comes around and crushes you underneath it is mind blowing to me. And humane just keeps doing this to itself. Uh, like all these companies keep doing it to themselves. Magic Leap was like, we've hacked the GPU of your brain, but if they had just said like, we built this kind of neat thing that you probably can't buy for a long time. Like it might be in much better shape now.
1:34:41 Alex Cranz? It's because they don't have, they don't have editors. This is, this is like, like if those, if the marketing people who wrote all of this stuff had an editor to be like, does it really hack the GPU of your brain? They go, oh.
1:34:53 David Pierce? No, they don't need an editor. I've always said that when I get out of journalism, my next career is going to be to be the consultant that you pay a lot of money to sit in the room and tell you all your ideas are bad. Like if you need somebody to tell your boss that this is actually not as cool as they think it is, I will do that for the low, low price of $25,000.
1:35:11 David Pierce? Like I will sit there, I'll tell you, your names are stupid and that this thing isn't as cool as you think it is, and you should probably cool it for a minute. And I'm going to make a fortune. It's going to be great.
1:35:20 Alex Cranz? I'm so happy for you.
1:35:21 David Pierce? I'm just looking through these humane slides and it's deeply hilarious. The, the first slide says, what is it? And then it says, cloud connected site enabled AI platform with server side app ecosystem. And then three slides later, you realize it's a camera.
1:35:37 Alex Cranz? It's just so blurry, too. That's like.
1:35:41 David Pierce? Yeah, that's the thing. It's like, dear leakers, if you're gonna take pictures of things, just press the focus on your, on your camera. It's so easy. Smartphone cameras are so good.
1:35:49 Alex Cranz? Any leak I get, super blurry, usually in black and white, usually like 320 by 200 pixels. You need a microscope.
1:36:00 Nilay Patel? Okay, so Imran Choudhary, who is the CEO of Humane, he's one of the founders, he just keeps saying things like, this will be the best human experience ever. Humane is the next shift between humans and computing, the best human experience ever. It's technology that improves the human experience is born from good intention. Products that put us back in touch with ourselves, each other and the world around us, and experiences that are built on trust with interactions that feel magical and bring joy. That's a lot, right? Like, just like at the end of the day, that's a lot, you know? And it's like, phones are pretty good. So like, the, the, just the hype here of like, what are you gonna deliver? And then the list of partners is crazy. Like, they're partnered with LG and Volvo Cars. And it's like, to do what?
1:36:42 Nilay Patel? And I, I just think there's no way you can build up a company like this and not have whatever first version of a first product be a letdown.
1:36:50 Alex Cranz? A hundred percent.
1:36:51 Nilay Patel? Because the first version of any first product is defined by the compromises you made to ship it out the door.
1:36:57 David Pierce? Yep.
1:36:58 Nilay Patel? All right, last little lightning round piece. David, you were really into Alison's Vivo X90 Pro versus Samsung S23 Ultra camera comparison.
1:37:05 David Pierce? Yeah, it's just very good, and everyone should read it. She basically went to try to figure out, in the world of smartphone cameras, is it better to have a lot of pixels or a big sensor, essentially? Which is the sort of eternal camera war. And she landed in this very funny sort of existential place that I don't want to totally spoil, but it's basically like, everything is actually 100 times more complicated than you think. And it does, without quite saying it, boil all the way down to like, what's a photograph?
1:37:32 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
1:37:33 David Pierce? But it's, it's really good. And she ends up sort of meditating on like, what makes these things work and why this stuff is hard? And sort of how the whole imaging pipeline has changed as this tech has changed? Again, I don't want to spoil it, but it's, it's, it's really good. And was one of the sort of vergiest things I'd read in a while. Because you could, she started with one question and ended in like, a total explosion of gadgets and technology. And it's, it's a really fun read. And spoiler alert, the Samsung camera ends up being substantially better. But it's a good read. Everyone should go read it.
1:38:04 Nilay Patel? All right, we have gone so far over. If you're listening to this in your car, just know that the humane section went on for like 25 more minutes. And we honestly, we just had to cut it because we just kept on looking at their marketing materials and being like, what is this? So if you need to experience the part that was cut, just hit pause, just, I don't know, look at a flower. Like, what is this? That's what we did while he gazed at humane.
1:38:30 Nilay Patel? We are going to be at South by Southwest on Sunday. If you are in Texas at the show, we're doing a live Vergecast, March 12th, 2:30 PM. It's free and open to the public. It's in, I believe it's in Slack's space. That's gonna be fun. So come see us at South by Southwest. You can call the Vergecast hotline, 866 VERGE11. David, you're back. You're gonna be with us at South by Southwest.
1:38:51 David Pierce? I'm back. I'm gonna be there. Richard, I'm very sorry to be coming back and to be doing a terrible Richard impression for a long time on the podcast. But for everyone who is very sad that Richard is gonna be on the show a little less, don't worry, Richard, you're gonna be here a lot still. I like you better than Nilay or Alex.
1:39:09 Nilay Patel? Richard, I've decided that you should take over the Vergecast TikTok account, which doesn't exist. But if it did, it would just be Richard. You down?
1:39:16 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:39:16 Alex Cranz? Do it.
1:39:17 Speaker 03 Yes.
1:39:18 Alex Cranz? Yeah.
1:39:18 Speaker 03 That is, that's all I'm doing now, as long as I can do it from this room.
1:39:21 Nilay Patel? All right, that's fine. You gotta do the dancing dogs thing.
1:39:25 Nilay Patel? All right, we gotta end this before I have more ideas. Solax this week. Alex, what's going on with that?
1:39:29 Alex Cranz? So this week, it's gonna be, well, this coming week, it's gonna be Tiny Makes Things, who is a keycap designer for mechanical keyboards. It's a very fun discussion. Ashley Skada has a wonderful time with it.
1:39:43 Nilay Patel? Very cool. All right, that's it. We've gone so far over. That's Vergecast.
1:39:50 Speaker 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 Marino. 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.
1:40:25 Speaker 08 Support for this show comes from CoreWeave. Everywhere you look, AI is expanding what we thought was possible. And at the center of it all is CoreWeave. Medical research and diagnosis, education, complex visual effects for movies, science and technology breakthroughs. CoreWeave powers AI pioneers around the world with purpose-built tech, building what's never been built before. CoreWeave is the essential cloud for AI. Ready for anything, ready for AI. To learn more about how CoreWeave powers the world's best AI, go to CoreWeave.com/ReadyForAnything.
1:41:05 Speaker 09 Running a business shouldn't feel like surviving a software group project. One app for accounting, another for inventory, another for sales, and somehow, none of them talk to each other. That's where Odoo comes in. An all-in-one business management software that brings every part of your business together. From sales and accounting to inventory and marketing, all in one powerful platform. No messy integrations, no bouncing between tabs, and best of all, no spreadsheets. Stop managing software and start managing your business with one unified system. Try for free today at Odoo.com/vox. That's O-D-O-O dot com slash vox.
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