Disney’s big bets on sports, streaming, and Fortnite

26:17No, but it was like that was the most Disney of Disney games, right? Like that was like anytime I think of a video game of Disney, I go back to him being like, yeah, you're going to paint your way like into the future with like Mickey Mouse. It was also just symbolic of that period, though. That was like the height of prestige AAA single player games. Yeah. I just Googled best Disney video games ever just to make sure there wasn't like an obvious one I was missing. And we're looking at things like Castle of Illusion starring Mickey Mouse from 1990 and Quackshot from 1991. Like the track record's not amazing.

26:51Yeah. Yeah. And so they've got all these terrific IP that they've been very good at selling out to other companies. And now doing this with Epic in what seems like it's going to be a much tighter relationship. I'll be really curious to see what happens there. And also, if it explodes, it's going to be, like, really interesting to watch. It's also very fun that this is one of Apple's best friends partnering with one of Apple's mortal enemies. Yeah. Which I just enjoy very much. Like, Bob Iger and Tim Cook are going to have a lot of very polite, very testy phone calls over the next couple of years.

27:27And I'm very excited about it. It's going to be great times. I mean, Disney was a big launch partner. It was supposed to be for the Vision Pro. Yeah. Yeah, you can go hang out. You can watch a movie like I think in Darth Vader's palace or something. I don't remember if it is that exactly, but yes, it was Disney, definitely Star Wars themed. Yeah, I think there's one that's like on the volcano planet where he lived for a while. I know far too much about Star Wars apparently, judging by both of your faces. Oh, no, I remember all those things. I'm trying to remember because I went into the theater and I do not remember where it was.

28:01I wanted to say Tatooine. There was a Tatooine. That I know. I don't know if there were others, but there was definitely a Tatooine. Maybe I just made up Darth Vader. I want to watch a movie on Darth Vader's throne. It's a good idea. Listen, I know for sure Bob Iger is listening to this podcast. So, Bob, get it done. Make it happen. Come on. All right. One more thing before we switch gears and take a break here. I don't know if you guys saw it, but the feistiest argument of the week on threads, It's everyone's favorite feisty social media platform was about Apple TV Plus and HBO. Yeah. I just want to feel everybody out on how we feel about this.

28:35So Wired wrote a story basically positing that Apple TV is the new HBO and that it is where you go to get basically nothing but very good things. They don't do that much, but the things that they do are very good. And then Lucas Shaw, who's a reporter at Bloomberg and very good and knows this stuff better than most, quote tweeted somebody saying something to the effect of anyone writing something like this should be required to say that nobody watches Apple TV+. And the feelings that that brought out in people on the internet, people blogged about it, people posted about it, people got very angry at Lucas.

29:09Somebody called him a funny name that he then quote tweeted and it just became this whole thing. But I think the question underneath it is like, is Apple TV the one now? Like, is it the best one? Is it interesting? I mean, here's a question. Do you like science fiction? Sometimes. Okay. Do you like weird modernist takes on historical women's stories? Yes. universally. And do you like Ted Lasso? This is scarily accurate. If you like those three things, then like Apple TV is great. I think Apple TV Plus is very much like HBO in that it has really high standards. It maintains those really high standards.

29:59And like HBO, for a very long time, nobody watched it. Everybody's just like, we love to be like, oh yeah, HBO, Game of Thrones. Game of Thrones is huge. It's massive. And a ton of people watched Game of Thrones. That was not normal for HBO. That was a surprise and a shock and a delight for HBO. And also, I'm pretty sure that, like, the Game of Thrones ratings would have been, like, a pretty bad episode of the Big Bang Theory. No, no. I just don't say a conflict between the two things you just mentioned. Yeah. That's totally fair. Yeah. I think they were doing, like, 10, 11 million average viewers, which was massive for HBO.

30:35Yeah. And at the time, for broadcast TV, it was, like, pretty okay. But, you know, you think about the MASH finale or was Grey's my big one is Grey's Anatomy season two was over 20 million people watching it. So you're like. No. Yeah. 20 million people did not watch the latest season of For All Mankind. They should have. I guess the thing that interests me about this comparison is that a lot of the way that I experienced early like prestige TV and HBO shows was through a critics ecosystem that doesn't exist anymore. that a lot of the, I think you've written about this, that there was the idea that nobody's, like not that many people are watching this show, but every critic you know is watching this show.

31:15Everything on the internet is writing about it. There are these whole little ecosystems. I'm really curious what that looks like for Apple. Yeah, and I think Apple's been doing kind of okay with it. That's one of the reasons it's gone so far into science fiction is because like you have Monarch, which is a big show that's based in the Godzilla world. And it does ask you to care about the Godzilla movies. You shouldn't. But it wants you to so bad. It wants you to. And the show is legitimately good. I think it's got a great, like, time ahead of it. And same with For All Mankind. But it doesn't really, like, they're not really hitting at the same kind of, like, pace that traditionally those critically acclaimed, like, shows.

31:52Like, we don't have a television without pity anymore. AV Club is very, very different than it was 10, 15 years ago. Five years ago. And so you don't have those, like, conversations happening. Instead, you have people on TikTok going through and judging Emma Stone's favorite movies and saying why they suck, which is not particularly useful criticism. Or you have threads and people making fun of Lucas for something he was right about. Nobody watches Apple TV except for Bea and David, I think. Yeah. Well, there were a lot of people who responded being like, well, Apple TV Plus has 25 million subscribers.

32:27That's different than how many viewers. Yeah. Yeah. They all watch Ted Lasso. I'll give you that. They did all watch Ted Lasso. And then they maybe watched, did they watch Foundation? Probably not. Severance. They all said they watched Foundation. Yeah. They watched like an episode and a half and they're like, yeah, totally. The only person in the world who watched all of Foundation is Dan Sievert. And then he had to leave The Verge because of him. Yeah, that's why he's not at The Verge anymore. It's because we found out he watched all of Foundation and we were like, wow. No, but Adi, I think the point you're making about critics made me think of something, which is that even still, I think about a website like The Ringer, which is a lot of really good pop culture coverage, they sort of instinctively cover every new like 9 p.m.

33:09on Sunday HBO show because there's just an assumption that this show sort of matters, right? Whether it's The White Lotus or Succession or any of those kind of handful of times a year shows that HBO puts out. Yeah, I'm getting that with True Detective right now. Yeah, totally. And there's just a cultural assumption that this show is relevant because it is like the Sunday night show on HBO. Apple TV definitely doesn't have that. No. Like I could not tell you what day any Apple TV show comes out, which I think is like a meaningful thing. Was Ted Lasso Tuesdays? I honestly couldn't tell you. Like the only streaming one in general I remember was the first season of The Mandalorian on Disney Plus came out Friday mornings.

33:50And I had friends who would literally like wake up early in the morning on Friday morning to watch the show in order to like be able to talk about it at work. And so like that's the level that you get to. And I think HBO just sort of has granted that level of of cultural relevance, even if it's not real. Like we were just looking this up before we started and four million people watched the series finale of Succession, like one of the great TV shows that every critic on the Internet was writing about, which is like half the number of people who watch an episode of Chicago Fire, like everybody's 95th favorite TV show.

34:24but nothing has hit that sort of cultural relevance that HBO just gets to have because it's an HBO and even though Apple TV has a lot of good shows I actually think like if you just took 50 random shows from any streaming service I would bet that Apple TVs are better than any random 50 on any other streaming service and that's what they were I mean that was like kind of the core argument I think of that HBO piece the Apple TV Plus piece was that, hey, like pound for pound, it's hitting above its weight. Like it's doing really well. Yeah, I think that's probably right. But it's also, it's not doing true detective numbers.

35:02It's not doing Chicago Fire numbers. And historically, Prestige TV doesn't do Chicago Fire numbers. That's why part of why it's Prestige TV is because a lot of people say, I don't want to watch that. It's too smart. It's too prestigious. It's too prestigious. I will say, though, and we need to take a break, but Criminal Record on Apple TV Plus kicks ass. I'm pretty sure it's not going to land the plane and it's not going to make any sense at the end, but it's like five episodes in and they've all been great. So I love this. Highly recommend. But I might take that back. Anyway, we need to take a break.

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39:27All right, we're back. Let's talk Vision Pro. So as you're listening to this on Friday, it's now been a week since the Vision Pro came out into the world. We've got a bunch of news, but Adi, I just want you to describe the vibes of what you've seen from a week of Vision Pro being in the world. It feels like I've seen sort of three things. One is everyone noticing all of the little annoying things about the Vision Pro that Neelai and the rest of us noticed. Two is people going, oh, wow, I'm like a developer or I'm a person who is interested in technology and this thing is a technologically interesting system.

40:04Both of which were I feel like kind of prefigured by our review. Yes. The third is this thing is really expensive. This is a cloud symbol. Agreed. And that is the one I should have seen coming more than I did. I think I sort of took it as this thing is really expensive. maybe it'll be kind of ridiculous and gauche to wear outside. Holy God, was I wrong. No. Oh, man, was I right. You're right. You're still right. Don't don't. It's still gauche. I'm right in the abstract. I'm wrong in actual reality. Don't give these people power. I mean, what was it? I think Jake posted something on the site. The headline of the quick post he did was just, it's been 10 hours.

40:45And this is a video of a man in his car driving while wearing a Vision Pro, which like we knew was going to happen and we got a bunch of impressed posts from people saying boy you guys called this and I kept being like this was not a tough call guys like this was what it was going to be but now we've seen we've seen people walking around the mall you see people on the subway like you're totally right that being the person with this out in the world makes you interesting and I don't think that'll last but it's very much where we are right now. Yeah I feel like there are two ways this could go one is the iPhone which having an iPhone in the early days Like if somebody else had one, you were like, oh, my God, iPhone.

41:22The other way is I remember Google Glass. I remember the period, like the week or two where Google Glass, it was like, oh, this is so exotic. All these models wear it. It's like this incredibly exciting sci-fi thing. And it looked a lot cooler than the Vision Pro, frankly. And then within a month or two, you were getting banned from bars. Yeah. No, 100 % it's going to be that side. Because right now, all the people doing it aren't using the Vision Pro correctly, which was pointed out to me by someone in our office who has a Vision Pro. If you're walking down the street with a Vision Pro on, just like pinch-pinching the air, you're not doing anything.

41:56Yeah, apparently you can only have one window open, and you have to hold it like this all the time. So theoretically, the only way to actually make it like— You're just carrying your window down the street. Walking around like that. And I'm like, yeah, you got—he got so bad. That's awesome. He was like, they're not doing it right. You can only have one window at a time. And he was like walking through the office showing us how it works. I was kind of hoping it would be like you wake up in the morning and you like walk to the subway just sort of leaving browser tabs behind you. Yeah. And then you just pick them all up on the way home.

42:27You come back out. You put it on. And it's like, oh, cool. There's all the stuff I had to do today. Like that sounds awesome. That is super not how it works. No. I would just like to note also this is a thing that I have had many people mention about pass-through is I am waiting. someday this thing is going to crash while you are wearing it, it is going to be incredibly annoying to suddenly be blind while you are driving. Don't drive with it. Don't be dumb. Yeah, that's a good, just quick PSA. Don't do that. Just don't do that. Well, I think like when the Wall Street Journal did theirs, when Joanna did her review and she did like a ski slope thing, they just shut down the ski slope because they're like, oh, we can't have other people like on this slope with her.

43:10And what if she goes blind right into somebody? Can't have that happen. So it's like, don't drive with it. I like that Joanna shows up and she's like, guys, I have an NDA. I have to do this separately. And they're like, don't worry. We don't want anyone around you anyway. You're cool. But it does seem like the people have landed on the thing that we've all been talking about for the better part of a year now, which is like this thing is a television. That seems to be overwhelmingly the takeaway. way is like, like you're saying, there's some cool technological stuff going on here in certain like engineering ways.

43:43This thing is masterful and amazing, kind of useless for a lot of things. But holy crap, is it a great TV watching experience? That's like the thing I've seen overwhelmingly seems to be that. Which is driving me insane because it is a TV that I cannot use in the way that I would use a TV because it is single user. The single userness of this thing has been driving me just up a wall for a week. Yeah. Oh, no, I completely agree. And I'm getting mad like watching you. I'm angry. Like I'm genuinely angry because I have so many electronics and I look, I share them with a person. Yeah. And the point is we are both able to use this thing.

44:22And I can't. It's not just like, oh, it's fitted for your face or whatever. It's you literally can't use the interface. Right. It won't recognize your eyes. Yeah, we haven't all been using Neelai's review unit because we can't. Right. I mean, you can start a guest – like, to be clear, the thing that happens is there's one person who can own this thing. It recognizes them. You can start a guest session by pressing the button, and then you have to do this, like, minute-long calibration process of picking colored dots out. Yeah. And then it can recognize you, and it can recognize you basically until it swaps back, and then you have to start a new guest session.

44:55So there gets to be one designated TV user in the house. That's it. No one else watches TV in the house. Everyone else has to spend a minute getting their TV ready. And I do think I was less worried about this before it launched than I have become now. I'm with you. I think it's actually the single biggest thing missing from the Vision Pro right now is decent multi-user support. Because if it is a television and or a game console, it's going to be a thing you pick up, put on, use for a bit, and then put down. It is very much an episodic device, like all headsets are right now. Chris Grant made this point on this show a while ago, and I haven't stopped thinking about it ever since.

45:33I was like, oh, why aren't there VR games that are fun to play for eight hours? And he was like, who the hell wants to play a VR game for eight hours? I think that's right. And so the idea that I take off my headset and put it down on my couch and the headset is the television and my wife can't then put it on is stupid. Like there are people who are saying, you know, it's lonely and you can't watch TV alone or you have to watch TV alone in it. And I both think that's true and also kind of overstated. Like a lot of people spend a lot of time watching TV alone. I think that's basically OK. Somewhere Richard Lawler is listening to this feeling very vindicated.

46:08But this idea that it would be like no one else in my house is allowed to watch my TV ever. It's just bad. It'd be in the 50s. Well, or like no one's allowed to use my PlayStation. Right. Yeah, exactly. So like rich, multi-kid families. Do you ever have friends like that when you were a kid? And they'd be like, oh, this is my PlayStation. My brother has his own PlayStation. What? No. They'd be like, I did not have this now. Why do I have that? Why don't I have my own PlayStation? And your parents would be like, because they cost money. Get out. Go mow the yard. Yeah, they'd be like, go outside.

46:45That's your PlayStation. And because it's extremely easy to switch. Because every other entertainment-focused computing device on the market, except maybe the iPad, recognizes you're supposed to have multiple profiles. I just like watching Addy get so mad about multiple profiles. I was talking to Jake on our team earlier. The fun of being in the office is I get to just randomly get in arguments with people. And he got very heated and was saying that we should start giving every iPad a zero out of ten until they give proper multi-user support. And I'm just like, hell yeah, dude. It's a stance. Let's go for it.

47:13No more 7s. Only 0s. Yeah, I support this. I'm into this. Any other Vision Pro stuff we should talk about? I don't want to linger on this. We've talked a lot about Vision Pro on the show. I Fix It did a big breakdown. Oh, yeah, that's right. And boy, howdy, is the pixels per inch awesome. Is it nuts? Yeah. Run us through the numbers. 3 ,386 pixels per inch. That seems high. Yeah. It's only a few pixels less than what you would expect for what 4K requires, which is why it's not technically a 4K display. But it's this big. The fact that it's an inch and it has that many pixels on it is kind of insane.

47:54Do you want to give the Quest 3 and the other numbers that were in our post? Yeah, yeah, yeah. A useful comparison? Yeah, and by comparison, the MetaQuest 3 has 1 ,218 PPI, and then the HTC Vive Pro has 950. And if you want something that you actually look at more than like once a day, the iPhone 15 Pro Max has 460 PPI. So this thing is – And they point out that pixels per degree is a lot of – in some ways more accurate. that's like the degree of field of view that pixels because a headset is like this thing where it just blows up a gigantic, a small screen to a gigantic field. But even those numbers are also pretty good.

48:41Yeah, it's like the numbers here are just outrageously high. And you're like, okay, so this thing is like damn good. Yeah, because the pixels per degree, the Vision Pro is at 34 PPD, which is lower than the 94 and the 95 ratings for the iPhone 15 from 15 feet away, or no, the iPhone 15 from a foot away, or the standard 65-inch 4K TV from 6.5 feet away. So I guess is lower number better here for the PPD? For the pixels per degree? Higher number is typically better. I think that the point is that it is still not going to get you the kind of clarity that you get from looking at a very small field of view for a small screen.

49:26but it is still, I don't know that I have the numbers here, but it is still pretty good for comparing it against other headsets. Yeah. But it also makes pretty clear how hard a technical problem this is because, I mean, Neil, I was talking about this when we talked about his review. It's like the comparison to like blood cells, which means nothing, but it is technologically insane that Apple got this many pixels onto a screen this small and it's still not enough to do the thing that we need to do in order for the stuff to be really realistic. That is the scale of this problem, is you can have that many pixels on that small space, but because it's so close to your eyes and because it is literally trying to simulate reality, the bar is just so, so, so high that even though Apple has done an order of magnitude more than anyone else has been able to do, we're still not there.

50:16The road for really making this stuff amazing is so long. It's crazy. It's also a reason why pixels are just not the be-all and end-all of headsets. Totally. Like things like field of view turn out to be a really big deal with the Vision Pro. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's been really interesting watching everybody go through, I would say, the kind of normal honeymoon phase of a Vision Pro where you get it on, you do the first couple of things, you get the setup, you learn how to do the pinch, the eye tracking, and it's like, oh my God, it works. And it feels amazing. And then very slowly you start to notice like, oh, I can see the edges of my vision here as I'm going.

50:51And then, oh, oh, the pinching doesn't really work. And you just like slowly but surely, the things that don't quite work start to creep in. But everybody seems to have that very first 20 minutes in the headset where it's like, oh my God, I'm never taking this off. This is the greatest thing that's ever happened. That is also the impression that I feel like everyone who put on a VR headset in 2013 got. Yeah. That's probably true. No, that's true. I was talking to a friend who he did, when I worked with him, we worked on the original Oculus Quest review. Was it the Oculus Quest? The Rift. The Rift was the first.

51:22The original Rift, yeah. Yeah. And we worked on the original Rift review, and he's like, wow, I kind of called it. Like, then. I said, basically, my review is a lot like all of the Vision Pro reviews right now. And it's like, look back. Yeah, no, he's right. Like, when you finally try really cool VR, you're like, oh, wow, this is awesome. And then it kind of goes away, which is why nobody talks about VR cardboard anymore. Because that was really cool when you first put on, like, the cardboard. And then five minutes later, you're like, okay, what do I do now? Yeah, I think a lot of this stuff is just a question of how long it takes to reveal its problems to you.

51:54Yes. And the Vision Pro, to its credit, seems to take a pretty long time to reveal its problems to you. But right about the time it starts getting heavy and the battery starts dying and the gestures don't work quite so well. And you remember you spent$3 ,500 on it. Every once in a while, somebody has just been posting in all caps$3 ,500. And I feel like this is now my legacy on the Vergecast. I'm very happy about it. I do feel bad. You mentioned Google Cardboard. I feel really bad for all of the people who spent a bunch of time making 180 and 360 degree videos, I guess, including us many years ago.

52:29And Apple is just like, no, they're not good enough. You're not looking at them. Yeah, which is they look like potatoes, which is wild because it's not like Apple is going way out of its way to ensure every experience you have in the Vision Pro is like perfect and sane. And a lot of people are having issues with motion sickness and some of the problems with the ways that apps work. And there are not that many guardrails except on videos that Apple doesn't think look good enough. And I think that's kind of a silly set of guardrails. Yeah, it's frustrating, especially that it's even just on the web.

53:03Like the web is the place I think of as you should be able to just go and experience a thing even if the quality is not great. Yeah, if I'm willing to go onto that stupid keyboard and type www.youtube.com slash 360 videos that are going to make me throw up, that is my right. This is the internet. I should be allowed to toot that. All right, anyway, we should move on. Before we get to laying the ground, one and a half more things I want to talk about. I'm only giving Alex a half, and we'll get to that in a second. Blue Sky opened up this week, which I think is interesting. This is the new Twitter-y social network that all the shit posters went to and have been kind of hanging out in secret for the last year.

53:43And now Blue Sky is open to everybody. Jay, their CEO, did an interview with Alex Heath talking about how they plan to make money. And what do you guys make of this? Is Blue Sky coming? Do you know how I fully understood? I hadn't looked at the website yet. I was scrolling through threads and I saw a bunch of posts saying, I'm on Blue Sky, but I'll still be posting here on threads. And that's how I knew that Blue Sky had opened. And I was like, is it good if that's how I find out is just a bunch of people on threads saying, I'll still be here. I'll still be on both, posting on both. Yeah, it's interesting.

54:18You're on Blue Sky, right? I'm on Blue Sky. I went to Mastodon first. I still use Mastodon. I have slipped to Blue Sky just because Blue Sky felt much more low stakes. Interesting. Part of it was that it was private, that it was just much smaller. But it does feel like where a bunch of A, Twitter people that I liked went, and B, it feels like I don't have to be contributing to a greater social good, which was the feeling I ended up getting from Mastodon. Yes. Mastodon is very much like an NGO designed to make the world a better place through lots of developmental documentation. Which I'm sure is not true for absolutely every instance.

54:57It's like all of the usual caveats. I just got the sense. I was like, is this really a good enough, constructive enough thing? There were just so many people talking about you just you shouldn't be you shouldn't be cluttering up our timelines with all of this frivolous stuff. Yeah. And then I went to Blue Sky and Drill was there. It's just all frivolous. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I'm also a decent amount of law Twitter ended up there. Yeah. Fair. Yeah. Part of me thinks it's a success story if they all end up being their own things and different. And I think the weirdest part is going to be the people who kind of commit to posting everywhere and try to be the same thing everywhere.

55:34I just don't think it's going to work. And I think these things have all developed such different norms that like the vibe on Blue Sky is unrecognizable to the vibe on Threads or on Mastodon. Largely in good ways, but mostly in just extremely chaotic ways. There's just a lot of people making inside jokes that you don't understand if you've been off of Blue Sky for more than 10 minutes. But that's a good thing, right? And I think that part of the big bet that the social web is making right now is that there can be lots of winners and lots of things to come out. But in some ways, I think Blue Sky taking this long to open up was both the best and worst thing that happened to Blue Sky.

56:11Like Blue Sky has this very like mature vibe now, right? Like Blue Sky knows what it is. But the downside of that is it knows what it is for this small group of people who have been there together alone, like on a desert island for a year. While Threads became sort of the clear mainstream choice, Mastodon continues to be Mastodon. Threads and Mastodon are eventually going to be integrated. And so it just kind of feels like Blue Sky is just relegated to forever being an also-ran. Yes. I mean, that's why I didn't – I have an account, but I don't really participate in Blue Sky as much because my brain can only handle so much social media.

56:51And so I don't want to like – I'm not going to be one of those people on a bunch of different platforms and always talking. And that one I was like, I just feel like this one is not going to be the big one. I think a lot of really cool people are there. But a lot of the really cool people there, I'll just text and talk to them because they're my friends. On the other hand, I kind of – well, A, I do wish that it were much easier to have a single interface where I could at least check all these things. Yes. At the same time, that's very annoying to me. But I'm also – I don't know. I hope we get more sites that are small and niche and that I can just go to for a small subset of things.

57:26Blue Sky in some ways reminds me of Tumblr in its post-hegemonic era. Yeah, in its current era where it's just like a couple of folks you know and they're being really weird and that's great. Yeah. Tumblr's in the phase where every time somebody mentions Tumblr, you go, oh, Tumblr. Yeah. And that is kind of what Blue Sky feels like already. Except that I guess one of them allows porn. Well, you know. Tumblr. I'm really curious how long that's going to last because I am just – Apple and Google exerted so much pressure a few years ago in getting not safe for work stuff, either paywalled or – not paywalled, but like either walled away or taken down.

58:01Yeah. The Blue Sky getting on it feels odd. Yeah, I mean, to some extent, I think you could make a pretty good argument that Blue Sky never should have opened up. That sort of managing and slowing down that growth was a good thing for Blue Sky. Like, it grew too fast in the beginning. Like, remember when people were hacking the invite codes and a ton of people came on all at once? It became a mess. Like, the norms changed. People started doing weird stuff. The platforms started breaking in weird ways. The health thread ruined everyone's life. And there was, I think, a moment where they said, okay, we're going to slow this down on purpose.

58:37And I think that was the right thing to do then. And I think you could make the case it's the right thing to do now. The problem is that runs against all of Blue Sky's stated goals, right? Which are to build a social protocol for the web that is bigger than Blue Sky and to kind of reinvent the way that we do everything. Which I think at this point, it lost, right? Like we're in a VHS Betamax war with AT protocol, which runs Blue Sky, and ActivityPub, which is underneath Mastodon, and which Threads is going to adopt. And it almost doesn't matter anymore, I don't think, which one is better. ActivityPub is going to win.

59:10It's just going to win. And I think if I'm Blue Sky, you either have to look at it and say, okay, do we want to keep fighting this fight that we are now so far behind, or do we go, like you're talking about, and try to be something different and not try to build the next great social media company, but lean into this thing that we already are, which I think could be very cool. but doesn't at some point they have to make money yeah presumably and i think that's going to be a real challenge if they don't grow and i and i totally agree with you i think massazon runs on like a patreon yeah you can get you can get by for a pretty long time that's true that's true projects yeah used to be taken for granted as just things that could exist yeah and there's a way to run this stuff as like an okay business that doesn't involve like if blue sky wants to be a trillion dollar company, there are certain things you have to do in pursuit of that, right?

1:00:03But I think my hope is for the next phase of the social web that not everybody tries to be a trillion dollar company, that there are going to be lots and lots of much smaller ways to do this stuff. Fingers crossed. And I think Blue Sky, I could be totally wrong because there are a lot of things Blue Sky does really well and it's a nice looking app. Everybody on there, it's where Drill is. It's like it is the most fun social platform on the internet. Like I really believe that. but it is such an unusual place now that I feel like if I had never been there before it would show up and it would it would feel very strange it also feels like a place that you kind of can only really grasp if you were on twitter yes but like but like on twitter like capital o on twitter and and god help you if you were one of those people it really is it's full of like decade old twitter jokes that if you don't get you you sort of need a glossary to help you understand what the hell is going on in Blue Sky.

1:00:58Yeah. But we'll see. I support all of this. I hope Blue Sky works. I just don't think it's going to. All right, Alex. I'm so afraid to do this right now. I have a piece of news here. I'm so nervous about what's going to happen. Before we take a break, we have one more story we should talk about for such a short amount of time. Shortest amount of time. And in fact, it says, Alex, be careful in all caps. As some of you know, I did make a bet with some people that at some point we would probably see a picture of Elon Musk in little Elon. I don't want to say any other way. I already hate this. Yeah, and we're one step closer because they are currently dealing with a problem on the platform, on X, the platform, where there is a non-consensual photo of a celebrity in the nude.

1:01:54I mean, it's Drake's nudes. We can just say this. It's Drake's nudes. Everyone on the internet knows this. This is why this became a story. It led to X being the number one app on the Apple App Store. I want to just be very clear. Non-consensual nudes are not okay. don't do that but also I hate how close we are getting to the big nude where I win a bet I don't want to win this bet it's a terrible bet everyone loses that bet everyone loses when I win this bet clean up your act X like stop letting non consensual stuff just be all over your platform that's not cool yeah well and that and then all this stuff we were kind of bookended with stories about the Taylor Swift deepfakes being all over X first.

1:02:39There were problematic, non-consensual deepfakes. And now there's a deepfake of Taylor Swift endorsing Donald Trump that's all over the platform. X is just an odd, odd place. Yeah, it's an old kind of internet, but not in a good way, particularly if you have any vested interest in X and don't want to be sued. I was saying it reminds me of Reddit back in the mid-teens during the period where they were extremely lauza-fair. Yeah. But at least Reddit would say out loud that they didn't want these things. They wouldn't do anything about it for a long time, but at least they would say, we don't want this awful stuff to be all over our platform.

1:03:20Yeah. You do not get that sense from the leadership at X right now. Yeah. Well, I think that Elon is definitely operating in a landscape that comes after Reddit's cleanup in which you can't even just say, I don't endorse this, but it's here. You have to have full-throated endorsement of, yes, the Nazis. Even though, look, yes, he has condemned the Nazis. He also just talks to a bunch of far-right people and spreads his own conspiracy theories. And there's just a bunch of stuff that even though Reddit people hung out with and invited the guy from Creepshots into their events, they didn't end up doing that.

1:03:58Right. Yeah. No, I think that's right. And it's just bad times all around. Yeah, just bet times. I don't want to win this bet. Don't. Please. I went from kind of wanting to win the bet because I like to be smug and win things to like, I don't actually want to win this bet with Liz. Don't. It's a terrible bet. And also, to everyone who is asking for trending topics to be on threads, you don't want that. Don't click on trending topics because something bad will probably happen when you do it. All right. We need to take a break. Then we're getting back to a landing round. Support for this show comes from 1Password.

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1:07:39All right, we're back. Let's not talk about Drake's nudes anymore. Let's do a laying around. Addy, you go first. What do you have? So the FCC has a law against robocalls, and this is said you cannot have artificial voices. Do artificial voices include AI voices? Artificials in the world? My instinct says yes. And they agreed. Good. Good for them. Nice. They declared today that the that AI generated voice clones in robocalls definitely do violate the Telephone Consumer Protection Act. That means they can crack down on them. This is partly relevant because the election season is heating up and New Hampshire has just released the results of an investigation about who was making phone calls pretending to be Joe Biden.

1:08:25It's companies in Texas. Yeah, it was companies in my hometown. OK, you need to be less excited about this. I mean, look, anytime I see my hometown. It's not a cool, like, ah, those are my people moment. If you're not from, like, New York or, like, a big town and you see, like, I'm from Fort Worth. I see Fort Worth in a name. I'm like, oh, cool. And then I look a little closer. You just described Fort Worth, Texas like it's, like, a tiny town in Iowa. I mean. It's, like, a large city right next to Dallas. This is so flattering. Thank you. Yeah, I think of it as being a pretty big place. When you're next to Dallas, like, they're always over there talking about how cool they are and how you suck.

1:08:59I see. We have some inferiority complexes over in Fort Worth. And apparently we also have spammers calling, pretending to be Joe Biden. And they were saying, like, don't vote, right? Yeah, you've got to save your vote. Yes, save your vote. A thing that doesn't make any sense. Oh, wow. Thanks, Texas. Wasn't that a whole story in the last election cycle, that there was a guy who was convicted for posting on Twitter about, like, telling people not to vote, making fake ads, saying you can vote by text message. and telling people not to vote? I think you were thinking of Jacob Wohl, the troll who, yes, was doing robocalls.

1:09:37And robocalls were, yeah, they were an issue in the last election. They're obviously also just an issue as part of the overwhelming spam that means I don't answer my phone anymore. Yep, same. I told somebody in an email the other day, oh, give me a call when you get a sec, and they called me four minutes later and I didn't answer. I was like, I don't know this number, I'm not answering the phone. Anyway, so now AI has, like it has a lot of things, supercharged this. It's starting to become an issue and the FCC is at the very least recognizing it's an issue and we probably will end up seeing more about this.

1:10:07This also seems like we're already kind of deep in the deep fake election in a very real way. I just – if you get a call and it's like, hello, this is President Biden, why would you ever believe that call? I'd be like, oh, Joe, what's up, dude? That's just like whenever you get the emails and it's like, this is President Biden. I need your help right now, Alex Kranz. But you would at least think that is a message he recorded, right? No. You wouldn't? When you see those move-on emails, are you like, oh, my God, Nancy Pelosi is actually emailing me David Pierce? No, you're always like, this is stupid and not real.

1:10:43Okay, you want the weirdest version of this, though, is that Eric Adams, who you will hear definitely in conjunction with the weirdest of anything, he does his own deep fakes. Like, he had a bunch of calls where he auto-translated his voice. Yes, I remember that. To make it sound like he spoke languages that he didn't. I'm curious how that stuff is going to end up being affected by this. I mean, hopefully, I would assume it would be the same way where they're like, no, that's not true. Oh, man. What a legal mess that's going to be. Can you deepfake yourself?

1:11:17I don't know. I feel like maybe just don't do that kind of call. Maybe just don't. It's so dumb because it's just like Nancy Pelosi is not writing me this email. Joe Biden is not out here calling me, like at the phone banks, calling me because do we do phone banks anymore? Is that really a thing anymore? No. Maybe. Maybe in New Hampshire. But it's just dumb. I'm just like, who is answering these calls being like, oh, well, Joe told me not to vote. Well, better not vote. I mean, still send those people to jail. You're never more people than you think. Yeah, but I'm just like, what? This stuff is a mess.

1:11:56And yeah, we are only at the very beginning of what's to come. Alex, what do you got? My thing is not about Joe Biden or my home state. Okay, well, then I don't care. Yeah, never mind. It's all dumb. No, it is cool because Ford – Ford. Hold on. I almost said Fort Worth again. Ford Worth. Ford Worth. Okay, so Ford has been quietly creating a Skunk Works team for low-cost EVs. and that's exciting because cheaper EVs are good, more competitors with Tesla will be good, just competition in general, we love that. It is also, did you all watch that show, like All American, I think it was called, like the auto show?

1:12:34Oh yeah, American Auto. American Auto, yeah, yeah. It just feels like it was out of a storyline from that. So, okay, let me explain to you what I don't understand about this. Ford, notoriously a company that makes cars. Yeah. You don't need to make a car company inside of your car company to make cars. You can just make cars. Yeah. That's your thing. It's like Apple's like, well, we created a Skunk Works team inside of Apple to build smartphones. It's like, nope, you do that already. Just tell them to make a different one. Yeah. What is this? I think my understanding of it is. Ford is like it's illegal for Ford to make anything other than F-150s.

1:13:11So they have to create a whole new thing to make something else. I suspect it was probably because a lot of the people working on the Skunk Works project, the head of it is a guy who was at Tesla for years, Alan Clark. But a lot of people working on it are from this place called Automotive – auto space motive space power. I had to – A &P. Sure. Yeah. I had to spell it out. And they acquired this startup last year. And so I think it's probably just easier to fold them into a little company than a big company. But still, I agree with you. It's like you can just go tell your people to make cheap EVs.

1:13:48That just makes me think they call it a skunkworks because somebody at Ford thinks that makes them sound like a tech company. And what that actually is is just a team at your company. That's just some people who work for you. They're going to go make a really cool stealth bomber. Look, I think it's awesome. I am extremely in favor of Ford and everybody else trying to figure out how to make cheap EVs because that dream seems increasingly dead all over the place now. And like more power to anybody trying to pull this off. Yeah. It's funny. Like Farley, the CEO of Ford, had an earnings call after all of this came out.

1:14:23TechCrunch reported the story and said that Clark and the team at AMP slash Ford Skunk Works, cheap EVs.com, whatever you want to call the place, said this is a flexible platform that will not only deploy to several types of vehicles, but will be a large installed base for software and services that we're now seeing at Ford Pro. I don't know what any of that means. And I don't understand how this company is running. And does it know that it's a car company? Somebody went to ChatGPT and said, listen, dear ChatGPT, I run a car company. What would I say if I ran a tech company instead? And they wrote that press release.

1:15:03Yeah, Jim Farley, don't let ChatGPT write your press releases anymore. Just build cars, man. Just make cool cars. Just make cheaper cars. Yeah. Take the things that you make and make them cheaper. Maybe shorter. Right inside your company. Yeah. Maybe I don't need cameras to be able to see out of the front of my car. Listen, it's week and all dreams. It's the little things. I'm going to go last because we started on a Kranz victory lap and now we're going to take a David victory lap. What is it? So the information reported this week that Apple is developing, quote, at least two iPhone prototypes that are flip phones.

1:15:37In their Skunk Works project that's probably not actually owned by Apple. Correct, which is just they take all the people who work at Apple Park and they just tell them to make phones. And they say, you're a Skunk Works now. And somebody raises their hand and says, what does that mean? Does it change anything? And they say, shut up. We're a tech company. This is the future. Just go do it. But there have been rumors about this for a while that Apple was making these things. And also, a thing to know about a company like Apple is that they prototype everything. Like if you can imagine a phone of some shape or function or feature, I would bet you$10 there is one on a table somewhere in Apple Park.

1:16:21It's just how it works. It's just what you do if you are a company this big that makes this many products. But Apple, like me, thinks flip phones kick ass and is going to make some. And I think it's awesome. I love that. And apparently also Apple is working on a foldable iPad, which is the other dream. Yeah. Like what that's just like give me an iPad mini that folds up and I can put it in my pocket. Like, hell yeah. That is also apparently being worked on. This stuff is complicated. We've seen flip phones. They're hard and bad and have big creases and have their issues. I still firmly believe this is like the next thing.

1:16:56Yes. And I think it's clear to everyone, including Apple, that smartphones need a next thing or they're just going to be laptops. They're just going to be fine. You're going to have it. You're never going to think about it. You're going to upgrade it when it dies, and that's going to be it. And Apple has a lot of money riding on being able to get you to upgrade more quickly than that. And I think foldables are going to be that thing. I think the only part of this that surprises me is that we aren't closer to the Apple foldable given historically their timeline of kind of like following everybody else.

1:17:29They're usually only a couple of years. With the exception of the Vision Pro, they're usually only a couple of years behind everybody else. I have a theory about this. And this one will be like five or six years. Do you want to know my theory about this? What? They can't call it anything other than the iPhone. And you can't make an iPhone that is like a 1.0 anymore. Like they can't come out and be like, it's a new thing. It's called the iFlip. Everybody like, no, it's just a flip. It's an iPhone. Like what are we doing here? And so I think if I'm Apple, I feel like I have to make an iPhone that is like on par with all the iPhones we already sell, which is now a 17-year-old line of phones.

1:18:05And so I think catching up to that is really hard because the flip phones require new components. They require rethinking how batteries work. There's some new software stuff you're going to have to do. Like it's hard work to do this well. And I think in the way that Apple was clearly very comfortable releasing a Vision Pro that is not the thing they wanted it to be, I don't think you get away with that with an iPhone. I think you can maybe get away with that with an iPad. I think if they came out with a foldable iPad and were like, this is a whole new thing and people were like, it's not perfect, but oh my god, it folds.

1:18:35Isn't that cool? That I could see. But I think the iPhone is too big and too important to everything that Apple is doing for them to be like, here's a thing that's not quite finished. That's my theory. I guess I can see that. The iPhone is also just – your phone is a thing that you absolutely need to work in a way that you don't a bunch of other devices. Right. Yeah. Like if my iPad sucks, I just put it down. Yeah. No, you're exactly right. If I leave my phone at home, life has fallen apart. I had when I was in Vegas for CES, my phone just like broke one day. And it was the most stressful like six hours trying to get all of that to work again because I couldn't log in anything because I didn't have the two-factor working.

1:19:17I couldn't talk to my wife because we talk over SMS because she's on the Pixel and I'm on an iPhone. Like it was awful. And I had this moment of being like, oh, I'm way too reliant on my phone. But that's just life now. You're exactly right. You can actually feel your stress. Like I only sort of tangentially knew about what was happening with your phone, but I could still feel the stress through Vegas. Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I about burned our hotel down with my anxiety. Yeah, like the moment – you could also – at one point you're like, oh, I'm feeling pretty good. David must have gotten his phone fixed.

1:19:47OK. Yeah, I had this moment of like, OK, I have meetings to go to. I have things I'm supposed to do today. I'm not doing any of it because my phone doesn't work. It's like what is this world that I live in now? but that like I can't I cannot leave my hotel room until my phone works again yeah it's not good but but you're totally right like that that is that is where apple is and so if they're like here's the iphone flip it might break but give me the ipad give me the like that's what I got my little ipad mini I want to get rid of that thing I want I want it to fold I want to have it in my back pocket I'm ready I've been waiting so long to upgrade my ipad mini which still has touch id and is like busted and is now old enough that some of the apps won't update anymore.

1:20:26And I'm just holding out. I'm like, give me the thing, Apple. Give it to me. You're going to have to wait until it sounds like 2026 is the earliest people are theorizing this is going to come out, but we'll see. I can't wait that long. Yeah. I mean, we've got new iPads coming probably pretty soon. Tim Cook, I know you're listening. You're in a room with Bob Hiker right now listening to this podcast. Just ship me one. I won't even tell anybody. Just get me one. It'll be fine. Everything will be okay. All right. We got to get out of here. We've gone long, as always. Yep. In Neelai's honor. It sounds like Neelai's dead.

1:21:01Neelai's just gone for the day. He'll be back. Everybody always gets very worried about Neelai when he's not here. I promise everyone he's okay. He's just, I think, on a plane being too ashamed of himself to use his Vision Pro, which I plan to give him a lot of crap for next week. But we need to get out of here. But before we do, one quick thing. we the Vergecast are moving to the Verge's YouTube channel starting next week so starting with the show on Tuesday all of the Vergecast episodes are going to be on the Verge's YouTube channel not the Vergecast's YouTube channel we're still going to use Vergecast channel for clips and all kinds of other fun extra stuff we're going to do but if you want to find the full episodes go subscribe to the Verge channel if you're already subscribed hang out there I think you can subscribe to a playlist on YouTube which we'll have for the podcast you can do that too it's gonna be awesome uh so do that smash them buttons whatever youtubers say i don't know uh and until then go listen to decoder casey newton was on it for once it was a good decoder episode uh and decoder is all decoder is also now twice a week the verge cast is now on tuesdays and fridays instead of wednesdays and fridays there's a lot of change going on but it's the verge cast we'll see you next time rock and roll

1:22:11And that's it for The Vergecast this week. Hey, we'd love to hear from you. Give us a call at 866-VERGE-11. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. Our show is produced by Andrew Marino and Liam James. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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