HBO vs. Max and Twitter vs. Substack

28:39Yes. Especially given how spotty and crappy a lot of the 4K content, especially on these services, has been in the past. Anything other than unlimited downloads is outrageous. Yes. A hundred is a lot. Whatever. I can get used to a hundred. You're probably not going to put more than a hundred things on your stuff anyway. But just the idea at all of it being limited and not being able to download anything on the ad light plan is is lunacy i like this is all so incredibly user hostile to me it just makes me angry well it's already like that so before you couldn't do downloads if you were on the cheapest version and i think netflix and a couple of others gatekeep downloads offline downloads yeah for higher prices so this is just all in i honestly i think they could have even not mentioned how many downloads and gotten away with it the combination of things here i'm with david yeah It's super hostile.

29:30We're inventing things to put boundaries on so we can upsell you. Yes. And the audacity of HBO Max, who didn't even launch with 4K in 2019, no 4K, only got around to doing Game of Thrones and 4K last year to be like, now we're going to charge you for 4K. And I was like, you couldn't even deliver 4K? You got to make some guarantees while it's coming. What am I seeing in 4K? But just the combo platter. These companies are so big. They all have marketing teams. they invent personas. This is like the phrase they use. They're like, let's invent a person and see what they would buy. And they all do this exercise.

30:05And I'm sure we have marketing people who listen to the show who are like freaking out. I see you. I'm in your brain. I've been to your meetings. And they're like, it's Sally. Sally's 35 years old. She doesn't travel a lot. She doesn't really know about 4K. She doesn't mind ads. She's got household income of 50K. 999 is perfect for And they invented a person who demands both 4K and 100 offline downloads. And they could not find a person who just wants 4K for slightly more money. Right? Because that's – I can think of a lot of people who are like, I do not need to download any content at all. 0 % need to do that.

30:46But when I watch the movies, I want them to be in 4K HDR. This is – I mean – How do you miss that person in this sequence of pricing? It's kind of similar to Netflix, though, right? Netflix does a similar pricing scheme where there's like a$15 version that gives you downloads and everything. But then if you want 4K and more concurrent streams, you have to go up to the$20 version. I guess the difference is Netflix has added those tiers over time. Yeah, it didn't feel quite as dickish. Right. Like this feels like you're just sacking. You're going backwards a little bit. Yeah. Because you're making it way more expensive in the middle tier.

31:18It seems like the worst deal in history. Yeah. I don't know, man. That said, there are going to add a bunch of Discovery's catalog to this thing, and all that's in HD anyway. And if you're just watching those shows, it doesn't matter. Yeah. David, you watch these shows. Are you like Discovery? I can't quite see the Wayne Scott. So this is why I'm with you, Nili, because I think, to me, the$15.99 a month middle plan is both the best and worst deal here. Because on the one hand, you get essentially nothing for it, especially if you're not the kind of person who wants to download. Like, the difference is fewer ads and downloads.

31:56And as a person who generally pays for no ads, fine. But that's$6 a month to just turn off ads. Do with that what you will. You don't get$4K. So then the flip side of that means you're paying another$4 a month for like the occasional movie to be in 4K. Because a huge amount of that library is just not available in 4K. Like I was just saying, it's gotten better over time. But it's still not great. I'm curious about that because a lot of this stuff is available in 4K, especially that older catalog. Well, in theory, a lot of it exists in 4K. Right. In theory, there was all the DC Universe stuff that was all shot in 4K, on 4K in DC Universe.

32:31And then when it all got moved over and they killed that app. Right. They were like, we're only doing it in 1080. Sorry. And I think it was honestly probably like a bandwidth issue. I've always wanted to track this down. And if you know, email me. But I think there was likely some sort of bandwidth issues. They were like, well, we can't handle 4K streams all the time. So let's keep those. Let's limit it. But nobody's confirmed that. That's just my 10 cap theory. I don't know. We'll see how it goes. I think they're going to be fine because they just Disney-fied everything. This was just watching like Disney being born in a single investor meeting.

33:10Like we're going to go after the kids. We're going to go after middle America. Look, that is the single best outcome that Zasov could have hoped for is one person saying this was like watching Disney being born. Seriously. Like that's what they're after. But like the bad kind of Disney, right? Yeah. The one that ruthlessly stole my daughter's name. Yes. Yeah. Like this is not the good, exciting Disney. can we we have not lingered on this at all this is actually i think it's a great name for a child horrible name for a streaming service awful especially because the history of max is cinemax or skinemax as i used to know it and it's like you picked the weakest brand in your portfolio the one that is most associated with a late night soft core pornography yeah you picked your porn name for the kids service yeah i mean a lot of kids would be like oh staying up late mom's not here cinemax is cinemax in this app yeah well cinemax is gone but yeah it's it's in the app like it's already the tabs are hbo food travel kids porn taxi cab confessions what we think of as cinemax is not not like it's it's all their newer stuff so um warrior uh banshee that kind of stuff their their original content but i'm so impressed that You can keep track of what medium grade shows are and what medium grade networks.

34:36Look, I love medium grade shows. That's like that's my bread and butter. It's like, you know, where all the sports are. I'm like, I know where Warrior Season 3 is.

34:48There's a show. It's called Samurai. It's on A &F. And I'm like, yeah, that sounds right. I love Samurai. It's so good. Oh, my God. The season finale. Incredible. Go watch it. we gotta take a break wait before we do can we just talk about the name for one more second yeah because it makes me angry and the what they should have called it i think is hbo and we can litigate that if you want to but what i did was there there's this very good wikipedia page of uh all of the warner brothers discovery properties that they have divested over time yeah either that don't exist anymore or that they've sold and i went through the list of all the ones that no longer exist to see if there were any better names that presumably they already own the trademark to and that they should have named their service instead of max would you like to hear a few of them yes i would absolutely yes uh do you remember beam casey neistat's app b-e-m-e that would have been a better name than max uh cnn airport which is a thing would have been a better name than max uh there's one called d play that's probably not a good idea uh i don't recommend d play that's right there with cinematics they had one called festival which i actually quite like all right uh there was full screen full screen i actually think is pretty good full screen is good the more i think about festival the more it lands in the d plays that's fair hannah barbara home video was a company that existed for the kids that's really good there's there's one called okay but it's spelled oh h exclamation point k that was pretty good that's drugs that's a channel of drugs uh warner brothers owned a minority stake in quibby can i interest you in bringing quibby back yes always there was one called warner max just wait can we just hit just the problem of race on the quibby it's like every time we talk about hbmx I want to go through the AT &T.

36:47Just to remind, this happened. AT &T got sued by the Trump Department of Justice because it wanted Warner Brothers so badly. And its whole pitch was, we're going to put bite-sized episodes of Game of Thrones preloaded on Android phones. We had to sit here, and I had to not be as outraged as I was. like i did the veneer of journalistic integrity was so thin and then like now there's max and i just want to remind everybody that quibi super happened it was a real thing for a month not even a month for like a week like we went to a ces presentation oh yeah they were like our innovation is that you will turn your phone and we've named it turnstile oh yeah remember and you had to talk Talk to people about like, and I really thought that like once I held it in my hand and I flipped it, I was understanding like a change in cinema.

37:46Yeah. Yeah. They were into it. They got Steven Spielberg to say that his innovation was a show that came out only at night. He's like, I've always wanted to do this. I'm just saying every now and again, it's important to just take one step back and be like, this happened to us a lot. And no one believed us. But now we have Max. Now we have Max. Okay. More names, please. the only last one I had for you was Warner Max which was a short lived production company inside of the max if you experienced Warner Max please let me know I really think between CNN airport and Hanna-Barbera home video I can't believe they got rid of CNN airport it's so good easy win it's fine whatever alright we gotta take a break let's see if If you know how we can get our hands on CNN Airport, send me an email.

38:41Verge Airport. We're expanding. We'll take a break. We'll be right back.

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40:47All right, we're back. Let's talk about another kind of streaming. The sports? No, video games. Oh, yeah. It's a real thing. Last week, we talked about this rumor that Sony was developing a PlayStation handheld called the Q-Lite. The worst name. And you very confidently said it's not for game streaming. Sony has farmed out all of its game streaming to Microsoft, which in the moment I thought to myself, what? It was true. It was true. But things have changed. Many things have changed. But even in that moment when you said that last week, I was like, that doesn't. Well, it was really goofy because the reporting around the handheld was saying it is only going to be for streaming from your PS5.

41:26Yes. To the handheld, which is goofy. Which is goofy. And it is true that Sony had made some deal to use Microsoft's cloud technology. Right. The gaming team didn't actually find out about it until like afterwards. So for the longest time, Sony was farming out a lot of their gaming stuff and everything, even though they'd purchased this really great cloud gaming company in like the mid 2000s. Gaikai. Yeah. And they had all this technology and then they just didn't do anything with it. And then they're like, whatever, ignore it. And now apparently they're starting to pay attention to cloud gaming after Stadia died and everybody forgot Amazon exists and Microsoft is just cruising along.

42:07And the only game in town. So the reason that I, that when you said it last week, I was like, but they hate each other. Yeah. Right. And like the idea that Sony is big enough that one division of Sony made a deal to use Azure, the game division. Like, fine. I buy it. These are all huge companies. But Sony and Microsoft are basically at odds over the Activision deal. They are in legal conflict in countries around the world. And the idea that cloud streaming is the future of mainstream gameplay, I think, is just sort of accepted wisdom. It's not true, but everyone thinks it will be true soon. I mean, that's mainly because Microsoft has been saying that for the last few years.

42:46And everybody else has kind of ignored them, including Nintendo and Sony. They were both like, eh, the infrastructure's not there. We don't want to do it. Nintendo famously doesn't really invest in this stuff. Took forever even to get cloud saves off the ground. So this was like, everybody kind of ignored it. So I think it's a surprise, but a welcome one that Sony is now on board. Okay, so Sean Hollister has been digging through Sony's job listings. I mean, he's in it. Yeah. This is like, he's a detective. Sean might accidentally work for Sony. We can't prove it. He is a recruiter at Sony. If you get a call from him, he's got a job offer.

43:22Take it. But yeah, he has uncovered a lot of roles that are being hired all around cloud gaming tech. It seems like some of those roles got listed and then he wrote about them and then they disappeared. Oh, surprise. Ooh, surprising. And it suggests that they really are planning a strategy around cloud gaming. They're finally figuring it out. They're super late to the party, though. And that, I think, is going to be a challenge, both because the infrastructure, like Microsoft is really good at it because it has Azure. you're going to have to go and get that from Google or Oracle or somebody else, right?

43:55That's going to be a challenge. And then also they're just, Google did it and failed in like a heartbeat. And now they're coming in like they're the Kool-Aid man just coming in late. Yeah. So I kind of see that slightly differently. I would say where we are is we are rapidly on the road to all of that tech becoming pretty easy, actually. that because Azure exists and because Amazon is working on Luna stuff and that's all just going to get baked into AWS because Google did all this stuff with Stadia that is now getting rolled into Google Cloud, like the roll your own cloud gaming thing is actually going to get really easy, really fast, I think.

44:33And so if I'm Sony, what I'm thinking is, okay, I historically have better games than everybody else. And so I can come in and in a place where I no longer have to be a leader in technology, I can just show up, attach myself to this technology that already exists, put my better games into it and win. I actually don't know that I feel like Sony is super late to this game. They're late to the game if you want to be a cloud provider, but Sony clearly doesn't want to be a cloud provider. I mean, I think they're still going to have problems there because they still have to get the developers on board, right?

45:09That was a whole challenge on all of these. The reasons the Azure one works is because they said, no, you don't have to do anything that's very true but both stadia and and luna you have to go and like redo the games to work on the portfolio and in some cases build them like from scratch like they're yeah cloud games are different and and that's that that's unless you have assassin's creed which apparently can run anywhere for any reason it's actually running on my watch right now yeah so they're gonna have to like figure that out and i think that's where they're kind of late to the party is that a lot of that work they're either gonna have to redo it by choosing google or choosing Amazon and then saying, okay, now we got to go do all of our games.

45:47Because what they're known for is their exclusives, right? It's the Naughty Dog stuff and things like that. And now they're going to have to go and get those done. And those games also, when they do port them elsewhere, struggle. Like both the big one right now is The Last of Us on PC looking like absolute garbage. Yeah. And now you want to also go and adapt for the cloud. That's where their big challenge is, I think. Like it's less about going and finding the provider and making a deal with them. It's getting all of this stuff developed and working well enough. And then also the whole huge infrastructure problem that no one solved because PG is not on the SEC.

46:27Yeah. So we still have garbage. Yeah. But we are seeing this wave, right? There's the Logitech cloud gaming thing. There's a few of them now. Right. I would. The Steam Deck. The Steam Deck. Yeah. The little handhelds. And they're great. And I think that's what they're chasing after because they realized, oh, people, this is a new product category, which I was begging for. And I'm so happy it's happening. This is a thing. We can go into this space and make games and push them in this way. Microsoft was right. That was Microsoft's whole calculus is we can do you can go and you can buy it and you can have the console and it will play perfectly.

47:03But some people can't afford the console. Some people can't afford like it's their parents TV and their parents are never going to let them use the TV to play it. So they need something more portable. Now we can do a portable offering without making the Vita. Yeah. So Sony was thinking about this. They walked away from it. They walked away from game streaming. They signed this deal with Microsoft, which. They always had it. Like game streaming has always been there. It's just been not great. And everybody always would forget about it. And part of that was like, it's not very fast. It's not newer games.

47:36The big thing with Microsoft, what changed with Microsoft is Microsoft said, oh, we're going to do like day and day release. and that's huge that that suddenly makes us viable rather than like effectively like for the longest time cloud gaming was kind of mac gaming like technically you can do it wow but are you gonna have you're gonna play assassin's creed and that's about it yeah so what have we learned from these listings what because it looks like sony's gonna rebuild an entire infrastructure this handheld that will compete with the logitech and other stuff but have sony's library of games and Sony's graphical fidelity and Sony's service.

48:08What do we think this service looks like based on what Sean has uncovered? I mean, it sounds like they're going with a lot of people from Gaikai, I believe is how you say it. So I think we're going to see that again. I think this is, we're just going to be getting their new release. And there's some stuff we don't know, right? Specifically the developer stuff and how those developers are going to work. That's, I think, the big kind of up in the air from what I'm reading. Please correct me if I'm wrong. But we'll see. I think you have to nail that part before you can really get it off the ground.

48:39But right now it's like, okay, we're exploring the space. We're building in the space. We're going to get more engineers on board and more people that know that tech. Yeah. And that's really, really crucial. And then they're going to have to go and teach all of the developers, specifically Naughty Dog, how to design a game for something besides the PlayStation because Naughty Dog sucks at it. Can I tell a completely unrelated story? Yes. It's totally unrelated. But this is what I worry about when Sean writes about game streaming services. like pangs of anxiety rocket through my body when sean writes about game streaming services we were in a lawsuit for six years because sean called a game streaming service defunct this is a true story and the the guy who ran it claimed that we had defamed him for calling his dead game streaming service defunct and he went and sued us and he the statute of limitations had expired.

49:31But in Delaware, where he sued us, the state courts had not yet set the precedent that linking to an article did not constitute republishing it. So that was his argument to get out of the statute of limitations that we had recently linked to this article where we had called the dead gaming streaming service defunct. Yeah. So it's like you republished it. And our outside lawyers were like, yeah, The Delaware judge just wants this precedent. Six years of litigation. We won. We won going away. And the judge was like, yeah, it was defunct. But it was like, what are we doing? Every time. Well, I don't think he called anything defunct this time.

50:13We're keeping an eye on Sean. Yeah. We think we got all this right. It sounds very, very right. It sounds like they are interested in cloud gaming and their current service is not defunct. to be clear sony does currently have cloud gaming it's not good which i'm allowed to say because that's my opinion but they do have it is not defunct this is the thing that i thought was so interesting about sean's piece is and he points this out in his story is that from the job listings themselves it sounds very much like sony is starting this process from the beginning and it's it's saying yes that one of the jobs is like come help us dream up a vision for our cloud gaming and it's like my dudes it's 2023 like you don't have a vision for cloud gaming uh but then on the other hand like to your point alex this exists like they what they should be doing is taking this kind of crappy thing that they built in playstation now and make it better and instead what it sounds like is they're building a whole new thing from the ground up and which of those two things turns out to be true or if there's some combination of them is confusing and fascinating to me.

51:20Or this is just like a honey pot to keep engineers away from Microsoft. I love that plan. They just sit over there in the corner and never release it. I mean, this is in the season of tech layoffs, right? There's like the endless articles now. They're like the ultimate business insider bait. I made $250 ,000 at Google and I got paid to drink lattes all day. And the thesis is they were all just hiring to keep talent away from each other. I don't think that that is the position any of these companies are in anymore. I wouldn't expect Sony particularly to be a company that does that. That's not really Sony's MO.

51:53So I think they are trying to think of this from scratch. And the from scratch kind of makes sense when you think about the architecture element of this. Like, if they're thinking, okay, PlayStation 6, whenever that comes out, we want that to work with our new cloud gaming service, so everything works, which is what Microsoft did. That makes sense. That's the thing they can be doing. And I would get why they would want to start from scratch in that case. Because otherwise, bolting everything on and then trying to teach Naughty Dog again how to adapt that is going to be a lot of heartache every time i downloaded a game to my playstation i have the digital one yeah i'm like this is weird it's like weird that it's a it's like all the bits are on the on the drive before everything come down isn't the future much more hybridized right it's like weird that the games update to me i downloaded an update to fortnight the other day and it was 43.2 gigabytes or something i was like what am i downloading it takes eight minutes to connect every time i every time i turn on this damn game like what is the point of this if i'm just downloading it.

52:50You have to have the local assets because it moves so quickly that if you're having if they're having to download all of the assets to you and like load all of that in real time and do the rest all in real time, that's really, really complex and that creates a lot of lag. It seems like the two choices right now are pretty far apart. There's all of the game is rendered on the server and you're just streaming video and sending back control inputs and we've managed to crunch the latency so this works. right even when you're handheld yep and this is the only pitch for 5g that has ever made any sense to me and it's still but right but that's the idea right you're all the gpus are in the cloud and we're sending you a video stream and there's low enough latency that your control inputs can affect that video stream right get it and all the way on the other side is you've got the entire 43 gigabytes of fortnite and a powerful gpu in your house and the whole thing's running locally Yes.

53:44It just, I don't know enough. I'm just curious. Is there no middle ground where the PlayStation 6 is like hybridized, where some of it's running up there and some of it's running down here and there's a reason to have a GPU, but it's enhanced by the cloud service? I think theoretically that can happen, but you've got two issues there. One is that people really like to be able to play offline. They hate it when they have to like be connected all the time. That's like a huge issue. Anytime somebody downloads an Ubisoft game, they're like, oh my God, because Ubisoft has DRM that requires you to attach to the internet.

54:13Grand Tourism 7, the only game that exists. It's very limited when it's not going to be. Right. And so there's like the audience hates that. But then it is also just really complex because if you're having to like, what are you playing on? What are the assets that need to be on your computer? Theoretically, it's like your big 4K assets for like textures and stuff, right? Sure. And then what needs to be in the cloud? Like figuring that out, I think would be really, really complex and making it so that it handles it while also not losing lag would be really difficult i think we might see that and like adventure games probably stuff that's not super timing intensive lends itself more to that gran turismo probably not all your fighting games your first person shooters definitely not but like games where you're just dicking around and like climbing stuff yeah yeah it's just okay if it's got a little lag again i think i don't know enough about the the technical aspects of that and what you're describing sounds right it's just if you if sony announced the playstation 6 figure that out We'll have the first hybrid GPU setup and the streaming service is inherently built into it and it'll run great on your phone and this little handheld we're selling you.

55:17And then when you dock it to a GPU that's running your house, it gets even better. Yeah. Like if they can do that and be like, like the big catch there is you don't have to download 200 gigabytes just to play the new AAA game. That's huge. That would be a really big thing. And that's what everybody's working towards. But I think they've all ended on just do the video directly to you because that's just so easy. Well, yeah, and I guess in your middle ground, Neelai, what are you actually accomplishing? Because it kind of seems to me like the worst of both worlds because you can't play the game offline, which like Alex is saying is what you accomplish by downloading the 200 gigabytes.

55:50Maybe you shorten the download time. And as somebody who frequently has like 30 minutes to play video games and spends that whole 30 minutes downloading an update to a game, I feel that. But it feels like every good thing you're describing is actually maybe better served by working on the lag problem with input. Yeah, probably. Just the history of the tech industry is why not a weird compromise middle ground? That is fair. Is often the thing that happens. And it feels like Sony, if anybody's going to do that, well, maybe Nintendo. Nintendo, actually, I'd be more likely. Just put it on an SD card.

56:25No problem. Nintendo never met at cutting edge graphic technology. Could not walk away from it. Yeah, it's like, oh, this is too nice. I don't know what you're talking about. Like, next year, the Switch will have Wi-Fi. That's what we're working on. so like i could see them being like you know what this is kind of garbage in a lot of ways but it's cool yeah so we're gonna do it because we're a nintendo sony sony would be like yeah i'm just curious it's i as we think about game stream again and the idea that things will default there because as david is pointing out being able to white label that stuff and just roll your own feels like at least it'll be technically easy if not business model easy or game library development easy but technically easy it's like at some point sony's got to make an argument for putting a gpu in your house yep yeah and that so does microsoft so does everybody else the argument right now is the internet sucks yeah and that's yeah it's the best argument it really is uh all right let's wrap up this section there's actually a bunch of additional streaming headlines david you want to go through them sure so well the one other thing we should talk about with sony real fast is the other thing sean did was uncover a bunch of new plans for sony's smartphone games which is the other future of gaming that sony has sort of systematically done a bad job at over the years it's a very good story it's very interesting it's actually a very similar story like sony has hired a bunch of good people made big promises about mobile games and not succeeded with any of them and appears to be sort of rebooting and trying again i'm excited about that we got a bunch of nfl sunday ticket news we talked a little bit about this on wednesday's show but all the information is finally out everybody in our comments is very upset that it's going to cost anywhere from 250 to like$400 for the season.

58:04Do you get blackouts? Are there blackouts? No. So that's the whole beauty of YouTube. And the reason they'll tell you that YouTube TV is so terrific is that you get the local games on YouTube TV. You get the out of market games on Sunday ticket. And for an extra$40 a season, you can also get red zone. So it's expensive and it's a mess, but at least it's all like in one app. I'm so happy for the both of you. If you're waiting for youtube to solve this problem sucks for you i also neil i i i did a packer's burn at the end of my youtube story you didn't even notice and i'm really sad about it well you already told me the pricing so uh yeah i definitely read that story and i thought i'll just let this go yeah that's probably what happened uh google tv alex this seems like something that would excite you um google tv got a big guide to 800 different free channels um i already have all of them because i I have channels.

58:53That's true. So the thing. And M3U. The thing that you were describing basically, which is like take all these free channels and like collate them into one app that you can actually search across is what Google is now trying to do, which is the single smartest thing Google has ever done in streaming. So congratulations to Google. It's the most Google-y thing they could have done. It's the best thing Google has ever done in streaming. I'm sure it'll be a piece of shit because it's Google TV and like every other streaming box, Google TV is trash. But hey, it's a good idea anyway. I got to say that this, by the way, this is David's hottest take.

59:22This is your CarPlay tape. When he wrote that headline, the number of people were like, I don't know, Apple is fine. It's like, yeah, but it's like not very good. Yeah. Everyone has Stockholm syndrome with Apple. This is the thing. CarPlay, not very good, just better than the other garbage. Yeah. No, that's that's basic. I mean, that's literally like Apple's entire business model. We're not garbage. Steve Jobs put up a bunch of phones and then was like, we made a slightly better phone. Do you want it? Have you been reading the Steve Jobs book that they put out? The Steve Jobs archive put out the e-book, and it's just lots of interviews and direct quotations.

59:57Does it make something wonderful? I think that's what it's called. It makes something wonderful. I'm a total sucker for it. It's just a complete sucker for it. You can read it on the web, and it has this great web presentation. You can download it to Apple Books, and then it does not mention Kindle. It's like, or you can have a PDF for your other garbage reader. It's very funny. But I highly recommend reading it because if you're listening to this, you're almost certainly a sucker for Steve Jobs saying things like the only good products that have ever existed are the original telephone and the trim line telephone and every other telephone is garbage.

1:00:26Incredible. And he's just saying this in like 1978, like straight out randomly to an interview where he's like 24 years old and he's like, there's only ever been two good telephones. And like, I'm a complete sucker for this. And you just read it. And then you like, look at the business model infected Apple ecosystem of today where everything is designed to get you to buy something else. And you're like, oh, I wonder if he would have loved this or hated it. And the Apple TV to me is like the number one example for this, where it's both designed to make you watch Apple TV Plus at every turn. And then they can't get the business deals to complete the interface to make it good.

1:01:00So it's just stuck in the middle of whatever it is. And because it's stuck in the middle, it's the best option because everyone else is like, screw it, we're just going all the way towards converting you to our services. And Apple at least has the restraint to not do it all the way. they don't have the catalog i was gonna say restraints for it um uh anyway so that's same with carb i'm just telling you everyone should read this book yeah because it's great and if you're a virtuos listener you're gonna be a sucker for it is there an audiobook version no it's just it's like collected writings okay who would they would they have to get like an ai the trim line was a great phone uh it's just very good anyhow i'll listen do you say there was one more uh well no just the one other thing we should mention which goes back to the gaming handheld stuff is a bunch of people got very excited on the internet because a video from a Microsoft hackathon, I think last September, just came out showing somebody had, you know, cobbled together, they called it like Windows handheld mode.

1:01:55And it was basically like, what if you could run Windows in a gaming specific mode on a Steam Deck like piece of hardware? And everybody got very excited about it. I took umbrage with this because it feels like nobody's used the Microsoft Cloud gaming platform on a Steam Deck. I spent an entire afternoon having to program it and get it all set up on my Steam Deck, and it looks almost identical to that, and it works great. And I was like, okay, I already did this. Yeah, but what if you didn't have to spend a whole afternoon getting it set up? That does seem very compelling. You have to download little pictures so that it will load properly in the Steam UI.

1:02:30It's a whole... It's a lot. I do love that we've come all the way back around to what if we had small computers that just ran all of Windows like straight up had a taskbar tiny computers like that was the 90s if the netbooks had just had little joysticks what if we called them pocket pcs well just think about it y 'all what if comeback was out here selling pocket pcs i'm gonna do some excel spreadsheets on my steam deck it's just like everything comes back around it's the one thing that's my fourth fourth thing yeah it's a wired connection something about carplay whatever other bullshit I made up and pendulums swing back around.

1:03:07Most of which are accurate except for the car play. Whatever other bullshit I made up with, I agree. Pocket PCs are coming back. I believe this in my heart. Alright, we gotta take a break. I can't believe we still have to talk about Twitter. We're gonna take a break and come back. We'll be right back.

1:03:56Support for this show comes from Figma. or app that anyone can explore, iterate on, and share. And it's all connected to Figma. So you can start from scratch or from your design file. Figma Make is made for designers, product managers, and builders who want to move fast and explore more ideas. Try it now and see how quickly you can make your ideas real with Figma Make. Just go to figma.com slash vergecast. That's F-I-G-M-A dot com slash vergecast. Support for the show comes from Crucible Moments, a podcast from Sequoia Capital. We've all had pivotal decision points in our lives that, whether we know it or not at the time, changed everything.

1:04:39This is especially true in business. Like, did you know that autonomous drone delivery company, Zipline, originally produced a robotic toy? Or that Bolt went from an Estonian transportation company to one of the largest rideshare and food delivery platforms in the world? That's what Crucible Moments is all about. Deep diving into make-or-break moments that set the course for some of the most important tech companies of our time. With interviews from some of the key players that made these companies a success. Hosted by Sequoia Capital's managing partner, Rule Off Botha, Crucible Moments is back for a new season with stories of companies as they navigated the most consequential crossroads in their journeys.

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1:05:44All right, we're back. I forgot to announce like the news, our news at the top of the show, which is that I am now the project manager for CarPlay. It's going to suck. It's going to run two apps at once, you guys. It does. No, it doesn't. Yeah, it does. I'm going to send you a picture of mine when I get home. I know the stupid boxes are not apps. I'm just going to be spamming screenshots. And then like widgets. Yeah. I'm not looking for widgets, man. I really want to ask you what you think the difference between a widget and an app is. I want 900 full-fledged windows open. Full tiles. Let's go.

1:06:22Windows car coming soon. Widgets. All right. This is as good of a lead up to I am the new host of the Code Conference as I can possibly come up with. So as you know, we have a lot of lineage to Walt Mossberg and Kara Swisher. Walt was our executive editor for years. Walt and Kara started the D Conference that turned into the Code Conference, which Fox Media owns. Walt retired several years ago. He still texts me to remind me that we make journalism here, which is great. I love the fact that I can text Walt Mossberg. It's like one of those things. How did this happen? It's very cool. Kara was her last year of hosting code last year.

1:06:58She went out with a bang, did the best version of that thing that anyone can ever do. And so now Casey and I have to come up with a different version, which we've talked about for a long time, but this is the 20th year of code. We're moving locations again. Casey Newton, who is a virtual contributing editor, runs Platformer. You all know Casey. Myself and Julia Borson from CNBC are the new hosts of the code conference, which is in September. And if you know what we should do, you should let me know. No, we have a lot of ideas and just how to reset it a little bit. And so, you know, we're the new hosts.

1:07:28We're very excited about it. Obviously, we all interview people all the time. Kara is a very distinctive type of interviewer. I've ripped a lot of some Kara, just like straight up. There's a lot of Kara's moves in my game, but we want to push it a little farther. We want to have some different kinds of guests. I really want to get more creators on that stage and talk about their businesses and all the creator stuff. That's the news. We're very excited about it. It was just announced. And like I said, if you have ideas and what you want to see happen in the code conference, this is the moment because we are starting to put together what we're going to do.

1:07:57I'm going to DM you all mine. A lot of the ideas are like, can you yell at them even more? And it's like, most people can't yell at them at all. Like, Carrie yells at them a lot. But can you yell at them more? Yeah. Well, yes, we want to make great journalism and do tough interviews. And I think that's why some people show up. If you're a CEO, you're usually pretty type A. You want someone to challenge you. This is a real thing. This is why they come on Decoder 2. So, yeah, go to conference. It's a thing. I forgot to say it at the top. I was supposed to. I was instructed to, like, announce it, make a deal, and I forgot.

1:08:26I think this is a good place to mention it because we're going to talk about some people you should totally have. Yes. This is a good section. Just talk about Twitter. Dear, sweet Twitter. We should talk about Twitter in a second. But there's some other stuff that happened this week first that we should just note. Elon went nuts doing labels. Like, I think he discovered that there's a field in Twitter accounts called labels, and he started typing stuff into it to see what would happen. So he got into a fight with NPR. At first he labeled it state-sponsored media, which is just very funny because that's a real thing that happens in China, Korea, and other places.

1:09:00NPR is not that thing. It gets 1 % of its funding from the government. And the United States does have state-sponsored media, has Voice of America, which we use to broadcast. Yes, state-sponsored media and publicly funded media are not even a little tiny bit the same thing. Right. Very different. Bobby Allen from NPR is a great tech reporter there. He emailed Elon, said, what are you doing? Elon said, I'll change it. So he changed the publicly funded media. NPR said, this is stupid and you're being weird. And we're just not going to publish on Twitter anymore, which is a big decision. PBS also pulled publishing from Twitter after the same sort of label brouhaha.

1:09:33He did it to the BBC. He applied the same label to the BBC. And then he sat for, I will just be candid. I just talked about interviewing people. That interview sucked. The BBC interview of Elon Musk sucked. And I've figured out why. I've watched a lot of interviews with Elon. and he always seems to snow everyone everyone prepares for elon like he's going to be prepared oh yeah no no one's ready for him to be obviously winging it he's never prepared for any well no particularly i think he's sometimes prepared for like tesla and spacex sometimes yeah where his expertise lies but his interviews he just comes in and is like yeah i'm here to interview let's go yeah uh and so the bbc interview was bad like you i think of decoder often is like nilai versus media training like it's a game that i'm playing it is uh and you can't if you're playing a game with someone and they're they're not playing it you're often not doing well um and i would just say a bbc interview you just watch there are two people having radically different experiences like one person's like i'm gonna ask you questions and you're gonna answer the questions and elon's like here's what i'm gonna do i'm gonna just like throw water all over the walls and start honking like a goose and it's like what is happening in this interview like it doesn't make any sense but in that in that interview elon did say buying twitter is really painful he doesn't have a stone cold heart he says he got forced into buying it which is an incredible way to say i signed a contract to buy a company for 44 billion dollars and then was sued to enforce the contract and i thought i was gonna lose the lawsuit he was forced yeah yeah really no yeah just a very odd week for twitter and then he announced who knows if this will actually happen but all the blue checks will go away on of course 420 nice sorry thank you i appreciate you alex and then now i'm i think people are starting to get ads i've gotten ads they're like your blue checks are going away don't you want to subscribe and that again i think we have a lot of like advertising listeners this ad contains no explanation of what the benefits of paying might be not even a tout it's just a threat it's like it's just extortion your blue check is going away subscribe it's like no absolutely not like say one good thing that will happen he's gotta know you know generally when you do this you like you smash some stuff you like break things and you're like do it or else and instead it's just like, do it.

1:11:53I believe in my bones that he thinks that people think having a blue check is like a cool signifier of status, which A, it was never intended to be. The idea that like the blue checks were a thing was always ridiculous. And B, he has systematically made it stupid to have a blue check to the point, as I have said, as we have talked about before on this show, that you can have a blue check and hide it. because it's so embarrassing to have a blue check on your profile now because of what that communicates so to come out and say don't lose your blue check there were a bunch of people i saw the other day who were tweeting that actually what you should do is change your display name because it will automatically remove your blue check as a as a hack like i don't want to have a blue check anymore how can i get rid of it more quickly is a much more prominent question at this moment than how do I keep my blue check?

1:12:49This is what we've come to. I'm just really curious how he's going to do it. Because right now they're having to like go down the list and, and, and do it that way. Like manually, they hadn't figured out a way to, to do that. Not me. they've obviously figured it out because they found me. Did they find you? They saw I blocked the verified. There's a rumor. This is like, I mean, she doesn't want you to know like level of rumor, right? If you blocked the verified account that they wouldn't be able to find you because that was the only true list they had i still got my my check yeah no but you had to block at verified i did i think i just don't tweet a lot and also i have like four followers so they're like she can wait wait do i still have i still want it's not going to wait until fortran anyhow none of this matters uh because no just quit as david is pointing out none of this actually matters listen to me everyone let me let me just yeah look i read the first draft of David's activity pub story.

1:13:44Sit with me for a moment. It's very good. That's where the heat is. Just quit Twitter. Twitter is a place that has systematically proven to have bad product. It will not keep your personal stuff safe. It won't keep your private things private. It won't show you the things you want it to show you. It will show you exclusively things that you don't want to see. It breaks all the time. There is literally nothing left for you on Twitter. I don't know where to go. Come hang out on theverge.com. Go somewhere else. Go to Instagram. It's better on Instagram. Leave Twitter. Twitter is done. Let's just, however you feel about Elon Musk, however you feel about politics, Twitter is a bad platform and you should quit.

1:14:22Thank you for coming to my TED Talk. Yeah. I think I pretty much kind of quit this week with the NPR stuff. I was like, everything else he's done, whatever. For some reason, this was my line. This was your line. Yeah. I was like, you're just like being a dick to spread misinformation now. Yeah. So I, yeah. Yeah. He's done it before, but for some reason, this one. This is the one. Yeah. Again, watching that interview, I go back to my thesis, which is if you were addicted to nicotine and you bought a cigarette factory, you would think every idea you had ruled. Right? Yeah. Because you're like, everyone else feels the way I do.

1:14:58And everyone else would be like, you run a cigarette factory and I don't smoke. And why do you keep insisting that I buy cigarettes from you? Cigarettes with like 30 times more nicotine? just gums bleed as soon as you look at it he's addicted to twitter he thinks it's monopoly and i will point this out his other two companies are more or less monopolies yeah like tesla has had infinite demand for electric cars they can't meet the demand for electric cars and so he's run a business where every car he makes he sells and it doesn't matter if the cars have two inch panel gaps or they drive themselves into brick walls or like whatever people on electric cars and he's a supplier of them and maybe that will change his competition or maybe not the only other electric car you can buy in the market today is the chevy bolt yeah he's gonna be fine for a while uh right but like we'll see what happens when the kia ev9 hits or like all these other cool ones hit spacex is kind of a monopoly the government was like what if we didn't do nasa and nasa became like a buyer of rockets from the private sector except for the one big rocket and to his credit i will give him all the credit in the world for this he was like yes i will make rockets and launch them in space and land them again and the united launch alliance is like i mean you've done nothing i i would be willing to wager that elon musk is not in the top 50 people most responsible for the launching and landing of rockets but but yes agreed but i'm just saying his other two companies are kind of monopolies right they're in markets that that should be competitive and are not yet and the only yet is because i think cars are going to get competitive for him but it's still like car play is still like a conversation we're having like there's a lot of stuff teslas can do that the automakers are still sorting out but they're they might only now be competitive so i think he's just got monopoly brain yeah where he's like i've run twitter twitter is also monopoly i'm addicted to it what about you cigarettes and it's like oh dude you can just leave like i can just open the tiktok app on my phone instead of this garbage does he I know Instagram exists.

1:16:59Right. There's like all these other platforms to take your time. What is not true is that for years, the default answer for everything in media and politics has been Twitter. You're a candidate. Something weird happened on a campaign stop. You need to issue an apology. Like Twitter it is. Like it'll mainline into the press. Our site goes down and we're like, we need to tell our audience. We tell the people who follow us on Twitter, which is not the whole audience. Like by a huge margin is not the whole audience, but it feels like we're doing it. Yeah. Whatever. it's like always the answer twitter is like always the answer and now it's not and i think that is opening up a lot of opportunity for other companies it's opening up a lot of change hopefully and how we think about using the internet which would be good and it is driving elon musk bonkers yeah which is right because it he's not the answer he's not the monopoly provider of this thing and so all i think all the stuff he's doing is like we should talk about subsec now because this is like to me the most interesting thing where the monopoly did something aggressive against competition and it i think spectacularly backfired in a way that we're really upset right with the substack thing i don't usually i don't subscribe to a lot of substacks i'm sorry just the one it's platformer yeah i have platformer that's it and so i didn't really care as much but it seems like a lot of people care like substack one of its main traffic drivers is twitter and then he went and he started like dicking around with the links yeah so this happened last week on the show right we were like in the middle of it so substack launched substack notes which is it looks like a twitter competitor is not really twitter whatever it looks like it looks enough like twitter yeah to have scared elon musk there's some tiresome personalities involved in the back and forth whatever that's about right um that's just as much as i'm going to talk about that he He starts making it so that if a tweet has a Substack link in it, you cannot even like that tweet or retweet it.

1:18:51It was hilariously petty. He puts up a warning screen. So if you click a Substack link on Twitter, it says this site is unsafe. And he's basically like, do you remember the whole insane thing with the Hunter Biden laptop story? This is like, yeah, but like more aggressive. He used all of those tools that he was criticizing. And then the best one, which I don't think is a tool that has existed before, is that if you searched for the word Substack, even in the most brute force way. If you, we wrote stories and if you would search our hyperlinks, our URLs, and they had Substack and Slug, it would redirect that word to the word newsletter.

1:19:23Yes. Which is beautifully petty. Like, you are no longer allowed to search URLs on this platform that contain the word Substack. Like, that is the most king dictator anti-free speech thing I can think of. So Substack freaks out. Elon tweets and reply. Like, no public explanation of this is forthcoming. Elon tweets in a reply. Substack was trying to download a massive portion of the Twitter database to bootstrap their Twitter clone, which makes no sense. Like, it just doesn't make any sense. You don't want to download a massive pile of garbage? Even if you just think about what that means or how that would work or how you would do it or what you would use it for or what it would bootstrap.

1:20:03Right. Like, none of it. There's a great hacker news thread. It's like just on its face. This is a nonsensical thing to say. It wouldn't even accomplish anything. It's not like they're going to upload it and like backfill Substack notes with Twitter content. It's just like not a thing that's going to happen. Right. It just doesn't make any sense. So anyway, Chris Best, the CEO of Substack, was on Decoder this week. There's a lot to talk about in this conversation. Honestly, still processing. But I asked him, were you downloading Twitter? And he was like, no. And I was like, do you talk to Elon?

1:20:33He was like, no. I said, Andreessen Horowitz is an investor in both companies. They're in the syndicate that Elon bought Twitter with. and he's like did they help and he's like everyone no um and it sounds like he just did it he never gave them any warning and he never like told them what was wrong i mean like obviously you know everyone could be lying you just take whoever at their word but they say they weren't downloading a massive portion of the twitter database which no one can figure out why you would even want to do that was were they maybe like accessing that github that has a bunch of twitter code on it And he like found out and was like, but that's a code.

1:21:10That's not the database. I think we've established that while Elon likes to say he's close to the metal people who are, don't say that. Yeah. Who knows? So Chris told me all about sub stack notes and what it's for a big thing. That's part of this puzzle is for the average sub stack writer. The place where they get most of their subscribers is historically Twitter. like that has been the best sort of marketing for a sub stack writer what sub stack is doing now is they're pulling people into their app and making the app more of a consumer platform and sort of like redirecting you to other sub stacks and other and like recommending things and so the app is becoming a significant source of subscribers for sub stackers as well not too which is really interesting because that's a very closed kind of social network i will just say here that chris and i got into a fairly intense conversation about content moderation i'm shocked it didn't it was an episode of decoder um i don't want to like overdo it on this show you just go listen to that show what i'll say here is i really believe that if you are infrastructure you should not moderate hardly at all so if you're pipes if you're at &t or comcast or whatever like people know my feelings in that neutrality.

1:22:22Leave it alone. Like, just be the pipes. And the more you become a consumer service that people can switch away from, the more you have to, like, do it and, like, be a product. And, like, the product that social platforms make is moderation at the end of the day. And Chris does not agree with me. There's a turn in that that a lot of people miss, which is that we take the term moderation in a lot of cases to mean one very specific thing, right? Like, the idea of content moderation has come to be associated with a lot of specific versions of content moderation and specific kinds of policies. What's actually true is you just have to decide.

1:23:02Our content moderation policy is that everything legal is allowed on our platform, no matter what, is content moderation. I don't happen to agree with that policy, but that is a policy. That counts as content moderation. What you can't do is nothing. And what you can't do is say, we don't have opinions on that because at some point you just literally have to and if you want to leave those things there and deal with whatever consequences there are fine if you want to remove those things and deal with whatever consequences that there are fine but you have to do something and there's so much in this space right now where people are just like what if we just did nothing yeah and pretended that was fine it's like that's not actually how it works the thing that always gets me is more speech is legal in the country than people expect yeah yes right and you and you can just see this play out on social platforms a lot of time.

1:23:51People think hate speech is illegal or people think lying is illegal. Yelling fire in a movie theater. People really think if people think yelling fire in a movie theater is illegal, it's just like a long list of people's expectations of what is allowed versus what is actually allowed. And I think that's fine, right? It's better for the norms of speech to be kind of malleable and fuzzy and change with people over time than it is for the government to impose those. A hundred percent. This is like the most first cast of all time. We started with like car play stocks and we're just like government imposed norms.

1:24:20But where I think Substack is confused and actually in a weird interplay with Elon's confusion around free speech is that you can't run a company with the most permissive set of norms. You just can't do it. Yeah. Because that means your values, that means your company doesn't have any values. It doesn't stand for anything. It doesn't mean anything. And over time, that's all you sell. All a company sells are its values. And I just think, I think they've gotten burned. This is like director's commentary. you should go listen to Kodurin like you will understand this director's commentary like after that conversation I was like I know you didn't want to answer that question you probably like fall down the slippery slope of this question a lot right like I ask you one hypothetical and then like another harder one and then another harder one and like I I know that's shitty that's a bad thing to do and I agree with him like that's not a useful way to talk about it and he was like yeah that happens to me a lot so I get why he doesn't want to do it but if you can't say I I disagree with that statement, but my terms of service allow it.

1:25:18Right. And that's a decision that I've made because of X, Y, and Z. Then you're, you're lost. Right. And I, I think that's the turn that we're missing from all of these social company CEOs right now is to be able to state their own values and have that value include. Lots of people are going to say shitty thing with my software. Yeah. And I don't, I don't know. Vote Patel. I'll figure it out. No, I think that's right. And I think it's definitely true that way too much of our conversation around this is about litigating specific bad content. Like even you go to congressional hearings and people are like holding up tweets on poster board being like, this was under, I mean, this happened at TikTok, right?

1:25:54They were like, I watched this one video one time and it was bad. And how could you allow that on the platform? And it's like, what are you supposed to do with that? Like, that's not actually a useful way to have this conversation. But to your point, the only way to ever have that conversation is to start from somewhere. And I think what everybody has decided is that if I don't tell you what I think, I don't have to answer for any of it. And it's actually the opposite. Like, if you just tell us what you think, we can move on with our lives, right? Like, otherwise, you are going to be held. Yeah, I can decide whether I'm going to do business with you or not.

1:26:27Otherwise, you're going to be held accountable for every imaginable version of your value system. Yeah. And you're screwed. And I think, to just bring this back around to Elon, this same confusion is the heart of Elon's Twitter administration. he doesn't know that he has to make these decisions well he's like it's free speech we're going to allow most things and then and then he globally blocks tweets because the indian government asked him to right and it's like whoa that's super bad like whoa like you had an entire team an entire product infrastructure since 2014 that allows you to moderate content on a per country basis and provide transparency around governments are asking you and you don't know it exists because you fired everybody and now uh someone in texas can't see a tweet because the Indian government said no.

1:27:13That's bad. Right? And it's like, that's the level of complication here where you can't just say it's free speech. Yeah. And I just think that we're at a moment now with these social platforms where maybe the problem has just gotten too hard at scale. And the thing to actually do is decentralize the platforms. Yep. You should read David's activity piece next. I'm really excited to read it one day. I'm super hot on this protocol. That's the real end of the Vergecast. The answer is a weird open source protocol that's been around since 2011 that is finally getting some action. This is new VergeCast bingo.

1:27:45Huh? This is the new VergeCast bingo. The new VergeCast bingo? Yeah. There is VergeCast bingo. CarPlay is the free space in the middle. Yeah. It's my last trip. And ActivityPub just down there, down there at the bottom, right corner. If ActivityPub makes it onto the bingo sheet, something good's happening. Oh, we've all made it. Yeah. That's great. Like it's because it's not been on the bingo card for a long time. Just like the last two episodes. Just the last two. But you can see we should do like verge cast heat checks like the ringer pods do. Where but instead of like actors, it's activity.

1:28:19I use track like we started mentioning it more and more. Slowly. It's pretty good. All right. I'm down. I'm just putting out there. All right. We got we got it. I'll get a pick one for the lightning round to wrap us up. David. I'll go first. So mine is there was news today, Thursday, as we're recording this. That you can now talk to the Bing chatbot through your keyboard if you use the SwiftKey keyboard. This is interesting. On its face, not terribly exciting news. I think SwiftKey is interesting. I've always thought that phone keyboards are sort of an unused, fascinating space. There's actually a lot of cool stuff you can do with just a keyboard app that people don't realize.

1:28:53It's very hard to make them good, but they're very interesting. But the broader point that I think is really interesting here is one of the most fascinating debates to me right now is between people who see things like chat GPT and Bing and GPT-4 and say, give that to me everywhere. Integrate that into all the apps I use. I want it. This is the future. Put it everywhere. And the people on the other side who are like, get this away from me. Leave me alone. Stop doing this. Like I'm in a bunch of discords and slacks and stuff for various apps that I use, including one for Notion. And there is this ongoing like holy war between people who are like, I am emailing the help desk at Notion every 15 minutes to turn off Notion AI on my account because every time I hit slash, it says, do you want me to help you write a blog post?

1:29:38And then there are other people who are like, AI is the future. Get rid of everything. Just make Notion a chatbot. How much money can I possibly give you? And I think Microsoft in particular is just deep down this road of we're going to shove AI into every nook and cranny of every app that we make. And you're going to love it. I mean, there are people at Microsoft in every meeting who are opening the door and sticking their head and be like, dudes, Clippy is real. Shoving them and running down the hallway. They're just like Bing campus ambassadors just firing t-shirt cannons with Bing. Clippy's alive!

1:30:14this is a 30-year dream and now they have it yeah there's some bing product manager who like gets a bonus every time bing shows up in a new thing and that person is a billionaire now congratulations to them but yeah that that fight i think is going to be really interesting the swift key thing i actually think is sort of smart like it'll it'll actually let you back into doing it inside of a lot of other apps so i think in that way it's very clever but ai is going to be in wait how long until Oh, Apple blocks that. It's been pretty permissive with stuff so far. Federico Vittigi over at MacStories built an unbelievably cool chat GPT thing just using shortcuts.

1:30:49It's called SGPT, I think. It is extremely cool and very powerful and bakes a lot of that stuff into other apps that you're using. Interesting. So I think people are finding ways into this, and Apple so far has just kind of let it happen. It honestly surprises me a little how permissive it has been so far. You've just destroyed it. It's very possible. It is over. Someone just realized it. Yeah. Zach, don't tell anyone. Don't mind that. Just let that slide. You didn't hear it. I know. It's been a decade. I know who listens to this. Mine. This is so good. Yeah. I was so excited about this. Mini, the car company, make the Cooper.

1:31:28There's a new Mini Cooper. It looks tough, which is weird. Does it have CarPlay? I don't know. But I know what it does have. It has a new virtual assistant in it. It's a dog named Spike. No shoes. I love this so much. So if you buy. So first of all, there's a theory that in bad economies, cars get more aggressive looking. And if you believe that, then we are about to have the worst recession in 100 years. Cars are ridiculous looking. We have one listener who sent me. Apparently, we've been running an ad for something called the Toyota Crown. And I was sent a video of what the Toyota Crown looks like.

1:32:08i gotta look it up uh oh that's a that's a look yeah it's a look some subaru wrx yeah by way of camry it's a lot every new bmw looks like it's so mad at you all the time so angry very much uh the newest one i think that the ix no it's the m50 whatever one they made yeah the newest like the suv yeah uh someone said it looks like the pigs from angry birds you can't not see that anymore so the new cooper is very aggressive but voice assistant in it they're all doing this thing they want to get away from carplay they want you to use their software mostly to shop you got to watch this video of spike it's a dog named spike and you can be like hey spike and your mini cooper does it talk or does it just bark uh it's a it's a talking dog yes it's spike the english bulldog It will be in future mini vehicles.

1:32:59Does it have like the dog voice, the rough? It will have various forms of support. We all agree this is fantastic, right? That this is like in the world in which there are assistants everywhere. This is the best possible outcome that a little purple headed dog just like runs around changing gears for me. Like that's all I've ever wanted. Oliver Heilmer, mini's head of design, says, quote, We are taking Spike into the future as a digital character, which, first of all, implies that Spike was in the past as well. It's not a digital character. Spike has always been here. It's always been Spike. Spike has been uploaded to the Matrix.

1:33:35He is not just a design experiment. He's becoming a characterful companion for the user experience. It's just really good. The whole thing's really good. More cars should have talking dogs in them. It's just adorable. Spike will dance with a disco ball. He will. Spike gives you directions. Spike is the best. I love Spike. Oh, my God. I'm watching the video now and the dancing, just the hopping up and down. This is so cute. This is terrific. Just very distracting if you're driving. We're not driving. The car's driving itself and you're shopping with Spike. Welcome to the future of transportation.

1:34:07I'm very glad we're out of the phase of personified humanoid robot assistance and into the Pixar character dog era of assistance. Justice for Bixby. I'm into it, yeah. Although Bixby was not actually a dog. We just told everyone it was a dog. We manifested Bixby. Bixby had no... Bixby's a dog with shoes. That's what it is. It's in your phone. It's definitely wearing shoes. And it's a dog. I don't like that. I like that. Not at all. But you never got to see it. I never got to see it. Poor Bixby. All right, Alex, what's yours? Tom Warren had a review of the NVIDIA RTX 4070, which is a$600 card that is pretty much as powerful as like$700 card from last year, which was the 3080.

1:34:55And he really liked it, except for it doesn't do 4K. But if you want 4K, buy a PlayStation 5 or spend$1 ,000. Yeah. Yeah. I buy it. Yeah. It's cool. It'll be good for my full motion VR sim racing. Yes. Yes. I do appreciate that we're like finally getting back to good GPUs that regular humans can actually afford to buy. I'm excited. I mean, it's still the same cost as a PS5. Sure. And it's still gigantic and weighs 600 pounds. And it's got like kind of a weird, the power port on it. I think he wasn't super crazy about. But it's like, I'm excited. I love that we like for a while there AMD and NVIDIA were both like, yeah, we're going to gouge you because like there's a shortage.

1:35:40Yeah. Every car is$1 ,000. And now they're like, it can be$600. And if they can just make like a really good 1440p like this, but for$300? Yeah. That'd be sick. And then you buy full motion. The money you save on that, you buy on the full motion VR sim racing. I would do sim racing in my Brooklyn apartment. You can't rip all your furniture. I would have no furniture, but it'd be really cool. The TikTok algorithm has discovered that I love videos of people, sim racing and full motion setups. It is ridiculous. Have you ever watched a video of someone else effectively watching TV? Because that's what I'm doing a lot.

1:36:17Do they like move when they drive? It's like, I'm going to watch a lot of videos. A video, by the way, just given the physical setup that are obviously best in landscape. But I'm going to watch the videos that are shot in portrait of a man in a chair. The chair moves and he's watching a monitor. Yes. I can't get enough of the algorithms. Like, do you want more of this? That's just Star Trek. like it's fine people not moving in chairs it's the future the chair is moving they're they're not moving relative to the chair but the chair plus person are moving relative to the earth and they're all moving at the speed of light we've taken the like 4d rides at disney world and put them in our houses and this is the future perfect i love it there are people attached fans to them and they call them wind simulators like is it a little fan it's just like a i mean where's the lie be like yeah where's the lie i love it i'm gonna end up with one of these if you're listening to this and you're like you this is said with the purest love i love you for calling it a wind simulator and i am extraordinarily jealous that i do not have a wind simulator of my own i think you can get one for like 15 at walmart just clip it on it's not high fidelity simulation we're gonna get to the code conference in november and everybody's gonna be like where's neilai and it's just gonna be like we lost him he's right oh don't no no now that i have access to like oh i can make people have real life experiences we're putting the billionaires in sim racing don't you worry about it if you run a sim racing company and you want to do a code experience you know there's someone to call me like this is our hot ones instead of eating wings interview people while vr racing in simulators this is it i would watch the hell out of that all right jeff and by which i mean jeff business let's ride all right we gotta we gotta end this before before ceo makes me not the host of the code conference anymore kicking the door down Hey, Jim.

1:38:22This is all over. That was it. That was the Vergecast. I want to say you should vote for us in the Webby Awards. If you've enjoyed this experience, you should make people give us a trophy. It's springy. It's spring. It's beautiful. David really, David wants a bat. I don't have one. There's one in the office. I don't have one. I have a mantle with nothing on it, and I would like it to be a Webby. Yeah, the David Alex Vergecast is not one. Yeah, we need one. Vote for these two. I'm old, Al. I got springs for days. Look at me. I'm Neel. There's a link in the show notes. Please vote for us. We'd really appreciate it.

1:38:57We got to win. So vote. We'd love it. The site is really good this week. There's lots of stuff. Go check it out. And we've got a really cool new feature. We made our story streams. They're like live now. So they update live. So we're going to be using those a lot. I just want to call this out because we are, we have been rapidly like working on the redesign stuff. And that's the thing that we spent all of our attention on. And now they're like done. They're very cool. It's very exciting. We did it for the HBO Max. We did it for the HBO Max event. We did it for April Fool's Day just as an experiment.

1:39:27And it's event season coming up. So Google I.O., Apple WWDC, Microsoft Build. We're going to use them a lot for that. I just want to call out. People ask me, how's the redesign going? And it's like, oh, we shipped. The thing is here. We shipped it iteratively like you do on the internet. And now the product is like complete. It's a complete thought. It's very cool. Check it out. Okay, that's it. That's for Chess. Bye-bye.

1:39:49And 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 vergecastattheverge.com. 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 Minters, and our executive producer is Eleanor Donovan. The Vergecast is a production of The Verge and Vox Media Podcast Network. And that's it. We'll see you next week.

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