Streaming goes up, Zoom comes down

25:14But I do think it is possible that we will get to a point where both companies want it to happen, but ultimately decide they can't. Yeah. For a variety of reasons. We were hearing those rumors a couple of weeks ago that they might get rid of ESPN. They might sell Elf ESPN or something like that. That I could maybe see happening. But even then, it's back to, like, does Apple want to get into gambling? and also doing sports deals. Yeah. Probably not. It's a mess. I think they want to do sports deals, not gambling. Go ahead. I was just going to say, can we get a real quick strike update before we throw the break and move on from this stuff?

25:48Because I feel like a bunch of this stuff came up in these earnings calls, and people are back at the table but not back at the table. So it's all negotiations, which means everybody's going to have their own opinion on who's the one stepping back. Right now the Writers Guild is saying, well, it's the producers. They're not coming to the table. They refuse to come to the table. And the producers are like, uh-uh, we're here. And so it's not clear. There's still definitely a lot of discourse there and people upset with each other. But the Emmys have been delayed because of the strikes. Because you can't have a bunch of – what good are the Emmys if you don't have a bunch of actors up on stage being like, yeah, I want an Emmy?

26:28It's just the technical Emmys. And those are really good, but they haven't televised those for years. So I don't think they're going to start now. And so you've got that. Paramount just came out and was like, well, we are totally set. We are fine. We can continue to weather this. And this is where I'm super suspicious of other companies who are like, yeah, I just don't know if we're going to have all the content we need. Because they all knew these strikes were coming. They all knew this was going to be happening. They've all been banking shows for a while now to get through this. So any of them who say, well, I didn't know and everything, be super suspicious there.

27:05Take a moment, look around and be like, is that true? Because it's certainly interesting. And everybody's going to keep doing this. This is going to be like, there's always, you're going to have both sides expressing their truth, which is certainly the truth, but it's also specifically their versions of it. So, you know, maybe Disney doesn't have enough content to get them through. They could bring Willow back instead of yanking it off of Disney Plus after a few months. I'm fine. I'm not bitter. It's okay. Oh, this is how we get Batgirl back on Max. I see it. Yeah. This is how we get it back. They're like, oh my God, this actually will make us more money than the tax break saved us.

27:44It's interesting. I'll just note, and then we should take a break. The last time there was a writer's strike, that's when reality TV happened. Well, it was happening right before it. Right, and the studios started investing in it massively because it was cheaper. And then it became this, like, dominant form of media. That's what a lot of them are planning on doing. Like, a lot of them are going to carry through with that. But at the end of the day, especially because the actors are on strike, like, you still want – people like to see famous people. That's just the way it is. They want to see the famous people.

28:15And the famous people are all out picketing or staying in their houses going, yeah, you go, picketers. And, like, Venmo-ing the strike fund occasionally. Yeah. Will Smith is like, get my weird AI double from that bad movie that we shot in 120. Get him on the line. I can barely remember that movie. It's called The Gemini Man. Get The Gemini Man out there right now. Gemini Man 2, 3, and 4 are all coming next year. Yeah. If we don't solve this, AI Will Smith is coming to your house. That's the real threat. Well, no. It was last time it was reality. This time it's going to be, oh, what if we show you even more South Korean game shows?

28:51And that's going to be a weird. It's going to be a weird thing to look at a few years. I don't know if this doesn't get resolved soon is all I'm saying. Netflix is going to have a great time because they have a huge international library. So they're like set, Paramount set. Disney's the one I'm kind of surprised that they weren't set because you would think Hulu's definitely set. But we'll see. I don't know. After Only Murders in the Building Season 3, what is there on Hulu for anyone? The Little Fires show with Reese Witherspoon that I never watched but I know exists. Love that. The Little Fires one.

29:22on everybody's favorite show for your consideration for the Emmys. All right, that's enough. We will note here just to the end, Barbie is over a billion at the box office. Hell yes. Without any Ryan Gosling, Margot Robbie promotion because they're on strike two, which is also fascinating and probably everyone's going to learn the wrong lesson from that. Okay, that's it. We have to take a break. We'll be right back.

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32:12We're back in a hard transition from the state of streaming. We're now going to talk about enterprise software. Yes. The two most important things.

32:23David, you wrote about Slack's redesign this week. A lot going on with Slack. It's turning into Teams in a lot of ways. Yeah, basically. It's a sort of delightful story because Teams spent several years during the pandemic just ruthlessly copying everything it could about Slack and then just sort of decimating it because you get Teams for free by subscribing to Microsoft's many other products. Slack is a separate thing you have to pay for. So Teams sort of resoundingly won by just copying Slack and now Slack, which got bought by Salesforce as a half success story, half sort of retrenchment after being destroyed by Teams is now just completely copying Teams.

33:03So they've added a new sidebar where there's like the home feed where that kind of looks like Slack. But then there's also a DMs thing where you can see all your messages from all across Slack. There's an activity thing that'll show you every time you've been mentioned or the reaction emojis, all that stuff. It's basically like they're trying to sort of filter your messages a little better so you can make more sense of the chaos of Slack and also make it easier for you to find things like huddles and Canvas and some of these other features that they have. In general, the idea makes total sense to me.

33:35I think a lot of people are going to freak out because it does look pretty different. And it's a really different way of thinking about Slack. Like Slack, I don't know how you guys feel about it. It's pure chaos, but it is like an understandable kind of chaos. And I think shifting that is tough, especially for something like this. It's like people use this stuff for work all day, every day. And the idea of just like we've put in a new icon always freaks people out. Yeah. It's understandable because most things in Slack are the same kind of thing. Yeah. It's messaging. It's just a bunch of messages in a row.

34:06Right. Here's a line of text that, you know, it's like sent to someone or some room and at worst, maybe you'll like send someone a line of text in the wrong context and that's bad. Great. But like, it's all the same thing. And what's happening now with this redesign is like many more kinds of things are going to come to the front, like huddles and the canvas thing, which is like a Google doc for a room. And that's the turn that I think they've wanted to make for a long time. Like this is where we work and work involves lots of different kinds of communication and context versus this is where you send lines of text to other people.

34:43And we'll see. Whereas teams, we had a long conversation on teams and like the verge team Slack room because teams is much bigger, like an order of magnitude more users than Slack. Yeah. And it is mostly in big companies used as a video conferencing application, not any of the other stuff. Yeah, a lot of them still use Slack for like DMs and stuff. And then they use Teams for their video conferencing. Which is bizarre. Which is insane for like a bunch of reasons. Yeah. The IT guy's just like, I got money to spend, man. I'm having a great time. Like blowing that whole budget. Enjoy yourself, IT guy.

35:21If you're not watching the video, Alex just made the, like, make it rain motion with her hands to describe an IT administrator buying Slack.

35:33He already got teams out there, and he's just throwing money around. She? They? The thong songs playing. Alex is, like, buying enterprise software. That's how I, like, as a lover of enterprise software, that's how I think about it. We'll see. I haven't gotten the new Slack update yet. David, are you using it? I haven't gotten it yet either. It's going to roll out slowly. Slack always does this really slowly. They're like desperately afraid of making people nervous about changes. So you can like opt in to being fast or medium or slow in how you get updates. I think it's coming to free users first because like Slack doesn't care about you if you don't give them money.

36:12So just deal with the new thing and then sort of slowly to everybody else. I'm very curious about it. But the reason I added it to the rundown and we don't have to spend too long on this, but I think it's really interesting. We had this debate, ironically, in Slack after this story went up about why people care about Slack so much. Like, just to let people into how the verge works. I've written about Slack a lot over the years. And every time, a ton of people read it in a way that if I write about like a new feature in Google Docs, or Excel, or these other like, in many cases, much more popular features, like sometimes they're like big new things.

36:48But in every case, like a teeny tiny iterative update to Slack, people care about a lot. And I have been trying to figure out why this is for a long time. Like, what is it about Slack that means this much to people in a way that like your average app you use at work doesn't really matter? I think it's because people use Slack for their friends. And most enterprise software is just like not used that way. Like, that's just my thing. is like you live in Slack for like a lot of things you do with other people. If you have a D &D group, there's a chance you have a Slack. Maybe you have a Discord. We have a signal thank you.

37:29Right. Like, but so many people just have Slacks for things outside of work. Yeah. And I think that that means like everyone's just kind of interested. Like here's this interface I have for communities on the internet that is changing. Or, you know, Slack just captured so much of the imagination to begin with. that everyone remains interested in it. But Zoom isn't that thing. No one reads about when we do Zoom updates. Unless they're stealing all your data. With one recent exception, which we'll come back to. But I am curious how this, because I think you're right, Neela, where it is people use this outside of this.

38:06How is that going to affect adoption when they change it? Because right now if you go and you look at Discord and Slack, there's definitely some differences, but they fundamentally look a lot alike. and now it's not going to look like that way. One's going to be very, for like business, and the other is going to be where your gamer friends say mew mew. And like, which is the one, I don't have gamer friends that say that, just to be clear. You're the gamer friend who says that. I have the gamer friend. Which is going to be the one, like, are people going to still use it, or are they going to look at it and be like, old people use that and click out of it?

38:38So I have this like theory of competition in software, and I think it's best expressed with iOS to Android, they diverge in the way the interfaces look and then they converge again, like all the time. And you can drive yourself crazy and certainly gain a lot of hate replies on Twitter if you say iOS copied Android or Android copied iOS. That's the cycle they're in. But the reason they do that is very obvious is that if you want people to switch between platforms, you have to lower the cognitive burden of switching. Yep. If you are Google and you want people to switch from iOS to Android, you cannot have a radically different interface.

39:17Right. Yeah. You need to welcome them in and say most of the things are in most of the same places, and the things that are different are substantially better for X, Y, or Z reason. And you can 100 % argue over whether that is successful in the case of Android. But that's basically the thinking, right? It's like you've got to make it easy to switch. If you are Slack and Microsoft Teams is way bigger than you, it makes all the sense in the world that you're going to make Slack look slightly more like Microsoft Teams to try to peel that market share back. What's interesting, to your point, Alex, is they're not looking more like Discord.

39:51Yeah. Because that's the other competitor. It's just no one wants to admit that Discord is a competitor. Like, I had former Slack CEO Stuart Butterfield on Decoder ages ago. I might have even been the versus. I haven't even been pre-Decoder. The last time I talked to him about this specific thing, he was like, yeah, I don't think Discord's a competitor. But it obviously is. It's just in this moment, where's the money? The money is paid users of Microsoft Teams, not a bunch of randos in a crypto Discord. We're having a great time. Time of their life over there, yeah. Slack and Discord have been refusing to run at each other for years.

40:27like I remember asking the discord folks I don't know four years ago now when are you doing discord for teams and they were like we don't we don't want to mess with that it involves a bunch of like compliance and administrative work we don't want to do if you want to use it for work great but that's not officially what it's for and slack says literally the exact same thing in reverse they're like if you want to use it for personal stuff that's awesome knock yourself out that's not what it's for. And it's like these two companies just keep staring at each other, like refusing to acknowledge that they're actually doing the same thing.

41:00Yeah. Well, I think that's why Slack was so popular versus all of those competitors, right? Like, remember HipChat? We were at HipChat's shop for a minute. Oh, yeah. Yeah. HipChat, was it Campfire? Yep. And then, like, Teams. Teams was relatively new, and it was able to get an enormous market share because it's Microsoft, and it already was in all of those spaces. And it was just like, hey, now we give you this free, cancel your Slack subscription. And so for the longest time, it was popular partially because it was such a social app in a way that Teams really isn't. And so it's like, okay, well, if you go that way, aren't you ruining why most people adopted it to begin with?

41:38And I haven't used it. I don't know if it allows me to not accidentally broadcast things that I thought were DMs. Great. The Alex Kranz experience. But I look forward to it. But I am curious if that's going to happen. And actually, ironically, Microsoft is the company that is trying to do both. Like it made all this noise a couple of years ago about teams for families, which to me is just like outrageous. It's just a threat. That's like Excel for preschoolers. Like we're coming for you. Yeah. Like Microsoft cannot let go of this idea that you should use its tools for your regular life. And to me, it's like if they had called it Microsoft chat, it might have had a chance to be something.

42:24But if, like, can you imagine hanging up this call and going upstairs to Becky and being like, hey, let's plan in teams. No. Again, my goal in life is to not use software. It's just a stated goal. I think I've said this in the show. My ambition in, like, my career is not to accumulate more titles or power. it is to use as little enterprise software as possible. Like, I just want to get to the place where people walk into my office. I don't have an office. So like, I've got ages to go. People like show me printouts of emails and I like sign them with the Sharpie. I want this for you. It's like, all I want is to not use enterprise software at work.

43:09You have an attaché who carries your phone for you. Yeah. And you know, like, you know, the masters of the universe, they're not. You think Tim Cook looks at an email He's got an iPad, for God's sake. Yeah. Does Tim Cook use an iPhone? That's actually a good question. I've never actually seen him use a phone. I've seen him use an iPad. Wait, Neal, do you have a family coordination software that you use? No, we both work at home. You need to do that stuff when you're asynchronous, but we see each other all day long. You just yell at her. Yeah. We are communicating. I think now Max is going to start in kindergarten, It's like there's another force in the world that has to schedule us.

43:52And I think maybe now we will need to share a calendar. But three people who spend all day together, you should not need software to manage that relationship. I really cannot emphasize that enough. If you spend all day with two other people, you should not be like, I'd like to introduce some software into this relationship. There was a minute where I tried to get my wife on Trello for life planning purposes. And she was into it, but then we couldn't agree on how to format the Trello cards. So it all fell apart. I was just like, no, you have to use these things as checklists on the Trello cards.

44:29And she was just like, whatever, I'm going to write it all in the description. And like three days later, it just all fell apart. And now we just have like a series of context-free links sent in our text message chain. And that's how we talk to each other. That's so good. Have I converted you to Apple Watch walkie-talkie people yet? that's the thing I'm going to miss the most when we go back to offices and lives and whatever. No, she's a green bubble. Anna is a Pixel owner and a very happy one who will never switch. So when I'm using or testing an Android phone, we can just duo our faces off and it's great.

45:03But sadly, sadly, there will be no walkie-talkies. Walkie-talkie is dangerous. No one in my family understands how to use it. So I had to turn it off because I'd be like just hearing the whistling from my wrist. whatever I was doing that day. And I was like, nope, we're not doing this anymore. Revoked. We are so deep in the, I mean, this is enterprise. This is, when you say, have you integrated Microsoft Teams into your life? It's like, no. But have you been in the grocery store talking to your wrist about which bread to purchase? Yes. Effectively on speakerphone too. Yeah. The Apple Watch is loud now.

45:38And I'm just like, boop, boop.

45:44Like I said, my entire life is just headed toward power moves of this kind. That's all I want. Love it. We should actually, we're kind of on the subject of like a bunch of behaviors changed and the pandemic work from home moment and now everyone's sort of headed back to offices in various ways. One very funny example of that, Zoom called everyone back to office this week, which is choice. Zoom. Like just perfectly choice. Do you think Zoom knew, like when they're sitting there being like, we're about to send this like all staff email telling everybody to come back to the office. Do you think they knew that they were like, well, we're about to play ourselves so hard as soon as this email goes out?

46:20If I'm Zoom, I'm doing this just to generate some headlines about Zoom. Because like no one's been talking about Zoom for weeks, you know? And it's like, you know what we should do is call everyone back to the office. Like everyone will be like, remember Zoom? Zoom was great. It was better than the teams were forced to use network. Where's that IT guy spending the money in the strip club?

46:40he's out there he's like oh you want zoom i got you he just he's free with the budget and then zoom also got itself in trouble this week as you alluded to earlier david yeah um they changed their terms of service and i understand why they changed their terms of service they just did it in the most ham-fisted stupid way possible so they basically changed their terms of service to say all the data that you're putting through zoom zoom has a license too. And they need that. If you run a service on the internet, you need a license to all the data that users put into your service for any infinite number of copyright reasons.

47:17Like, you run servers, you're going to copy data from one server to another, you're going to introduce new features that might remix the user data, all this stuff. So you just need this big, broad license. The example you always use when we talk about this stuff that I really like is thumbnails. If they don't have the rights to use and change and copy your stuff, they can't make the little versions of the image that you click on to get the big version of the image. Like, it's that simple in many cases. Oh, yeah, they can't overlay text on those images because that's a derivative. You just write yourself the biggest, broadest license you can.

47:48And they added these lines that are like, for artificial intelligence and training models. And it's like, everyone lost their mind. So fast. By the raw language of it, that means everything you say into Zoom can be used to train artificial intelligence. Right. It's like, oh, we're selling your data to OpenAI to put into GPT-4, and we're allowed to now, is the implication of that. Speaking of the strike, I saw a bunch of people in Hollywood tweeting like, oh, we can't use Zoom when we're creating stuff anymore. It's like people are so primed to see this stuff being taken from them and see this all being used against them in a lot of ways that Zoom did this the wrong way at exactly the wrong time.

48:30Yeah. If they'd done this like three months ago, nobody would have batted it, and I. until somebody like did a TikTok right now being like, did you know three months ago Zoom decided to steal all your data and give it to ChatGPT? And now you own nothing, including your face. Zoom does. Right. So this specific block of text is in like almost every terms of service. And it's just like what you need to run a service, right? You need to take a perpetual, worldwide, non-exclusive, royalty-free, sub-licensed, a little transferable license to do stuff. Access, use, store, transmit, review, disclose, preserve, extract.

49:06It's just a list of verbs. We are giving ourselves the broadest license to do verbs to your data. Because if you run a service, you want to do stuff. You're going to do verbs. Verbs is what we're here for. It's not nouns. If you're living a nouns life, you know? So they added this language about artificial intelligence. You just kind of combine the usual panic. every couple years, some teenager discovers the Instagram terms of service and people freak out and everyone posts that copy. It's like, I do not give Instagram the permission to do shit. Then I have to write a blog post that's an autocomplete of a blog post for years to go.

49:43This is literally the case, by the way. Jay Peters wrote our story about this Zoom AI thing and has backlinks to one about Instagram from 2012 and one about Dropbox and Google Drive, also from 2012. And they are, I mean, like almost exactly the same post, both written by Neelai, both being like, guys, this is just the words you need to have things on servers. Everything's probably fine. But so what's interesting about this is there's the general AI panic that is happening. It's like David was saying, even the writer's strike has big elements of this. And then there's the actual problem, which is, yeah, if you just read the language, it sure sounds like it.

50:23So Zoom had to clarify that customer data is customer data. which is if you are an enterprise software company, the worst thing to have to clarify. Yeah. Like that's the whole point of the enterprise software company. That's fundamentally why Slack and Discord are not the same, right? Like Slack makes these big promises to big businesses about its relationship to them. And Discord is like, yeah, it's for gamers. We're going to mine all your data. Like it's just like a very different approach. And I think Zoom stepped in it and we're going to see hundreds of other companies step in it. Because at the end of the day, Zoom probably wants to use AI to do things like better beauty filters that people ask for in Zoom calls, to do things like automated transcripts that are better than the already AI-powered automated transcripts are doing.

51:14What you want is to write yourself a broad license so you can innovate freely. And the reality is you're going to have to start asking permission step by step for all that stuff because this panic is coming over and over again. part of me is like okay zoom did this exactly wrong right like the they added a statement after all of this kerfuffle that said notwithstanding the above which is a deeply hilarious way to say well we wrote that badly so here's some new words uh zoom will not use audio video or chat customer content to train our artificial intelligence models without your consent like a like you're saying eli wild that that was not in there the first time but b I kind of don't know other than that one bit of, I think, clarification that some lawyer at Zoom didn't think they needed to do because it was inherently obvious, but it's not obvious to people who like to track changes on terms of service.

52:07This is just a hard thing to do. And I think one of the things we've discovered with a lot of these tools is like the thing that happens when somebody starts recording a Zoom call and there's that very loud thing that goes like, this meeting is now being recorded. And they have this new thing with the AI meeting summaries where it goes way out of its way to let you know that it's doing AI meeting summaries and you have to click a thing to make the giant window full of text go away. We're just setting ourselves up for this heinous user experience because these companies are afraid of our reaction to what they're doing in order to run their service.

52:44And it feels like there has to be a middle ground in there somewhere, but I don't know what it is and it feels like it's going to be a while before we find it. I think it's like, one, they have to repeatedly prove that they're not going to do nefarious things with your data. And that's pretty hard for them to currently do because everything we cover at theverge.com, there's so many examples of it, right? And so they've kind of set themselves up to fail in that respect because they have misused data over and over and over and over again. And so to be like, no, no, but this time is different. Like, nobody's going to believe that.

53:17You've got a really – people are way more savvy about this stuff than they were 10, 15 years ago. And so you've got to fix that. And I think until they can kind of earn that trust back, they're going to be in this place. And then the other side of it is, like, people, please, like, go read anything ChatGPT wrote that is longer than, like, 100 words. And then come back to me and say that it's going to steal my job. Like, right? You know, this stuff is not, we are very excited about it and everybody's like, oh, it's gotten so big. But at the same time, it is still very early days. ChatGPT and these other generative AI systems aren't going to be writing really good books.

53:58They'll write books, but they're not going to be readable, fun books most of the time. Yeah. I do wonder, though, if, to your point, Neelai, about companies running into this, if what they're going to learn from this is just barrel your way through it. Oh, that's all. Don't ask permission. That's all we should have learned. Don't be nice. Just do what Google did and say, yeah, we take your shit from the internet. What are you going to do about it? Yeah, the problem is Zoom exists in a world where Microsoft Teams exists. And Slack. Fair. And Slack, right? Like Google, Google's approach to data on the internet right now, explicitly now in some of their terms is if the crawler can see it, we can train AI with it.

54:37Yeah. And that's a nightmare choice, right? You have to say, don't index my website in Google search. Okay. Like maybe like I'm going to shut my business down rather than like Google train its models on my data. Like you have to be Google to put yourself in that position. With Zoom, it's like, well, I'm just not going to use Zoom. The market works. The real answer, I think, is unfeasible in America. You need some sort of privacy law so that if they do overstep, there's a consequence and that keeps them in line. I don't know if we're going to get that anytime soon. I just want you to try to keep using this example.

55:16You have to go into Chuck Schumer's office and be like, all right, there's a spectrum of AI things here from beauty filters and Zoom. to the people on Reddit who faked Glorbo to make, yeah, I write about Glorbo in World of Warcraft. Write a law, Chuck. Well, if that's the spectrum, the law is just all these things are very good. No problems.

55:43Only good things there, only upsides. All right, let's end on my favorite story of the week. Same enterprise software, real middle section on enterprise software here. Speaking of work from home, the Zoom explosion, and all this stuff. In the height of the pandemic, when everyone thought no one was ever going to go work in an office again, where it was all video conferencing forever, Verizon bought a company called BlueJeans for$400 million. This was a big deal. The CEO of Verizon went on CNBC to announce it. They were talking about how they're going to roll it into 5G. Verizon, a big IT supplier, they're like, our distribution network, this is the future of business.

56:22BlueJeans powered by Verizon. give all your employees Verizon 5G phones a low latency BlueJeans experience. Anyway, they shut it down this week. Have you ever used BlueJeans? No, no, no. I'm a regular human. Yeah, I had to. So that's what the Writers Guild of America used as its software. And so when I was a union steward, you'd have 200 people on a call in BlueJeans and no one knew how it worked. Should have gone on strike about that. Yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, really? It was brutal. It was just the worst app on the planet. And I remember when Verizon bought it, I was like, either they'll make it good or they didn't understand that they bought garbage.

57:07And it sounds like it was the latter. Let me just put that headline right next to something else. Verizon will soon raise prices on unlimited plans again. Yep. Maybe if you hadn't lit$400 million on fire buying a third-rate video conferencing app to make your 5G network better, you could have just kept the prices lower. Just garbage software. Yeah, I just feel it's called BlueJeans. Like, this is why. Have I told you about the career I'm going to have when I leave The Verge where I just walk into rooms and say, that name is stupid, and then somebody writes me a check for$50 ,000 and I leave? What a stupid name.

57:47Oh, BlueJeans me. Like, are you serious? That company never had a chance for one second. They had a bunch of marketing that was like, nothing fits like BlueJeans. Like, that's what they were doing. That's true and has nothing to do with video conferencing. I'm just going to read you this sentence. We have made the difficult decision to sunset our suite of BlueJeans products. There is more than one product? We are taking off our BlueJeans. That's bad. So if you're on a Verizon Go Unlimited, Beyond Unlimited, or Above Unlimited, sure. This is some real Disney streaming shit here. I don't like this.

58:21Yeah. You will be paying$3 more per month. They do this like clockwork every year because the new iPhones are coming out, and they don't want you on the legacy plans when you get a new iPhone. They want you to put you on the new, more expensive plans when you get the new phone. And so every year, they come out with new plans, new blah, blah, blah, the new subsidies for the iPhones, and they make the old plans more expensive. Every year, like clockwork. I'm just going to point out that if they had not lit$400 million on fire on a product called BlueJeans, maybe their investors would be happier with them.

59:00And maybe, maybe, just maybe, they wouldn't have to raise prices so much. Also, maybe if we hadn't let T-Mobile buy Sprint and there are actually four wireless carriers in this country, It would be an actual competition market. That's just me. We don't have a Dish Network Gen5Sys update for you today because they've done fuck all. That sounds right. That's accurate. Just saying. Dish Network was supposed to, in a long, confusing deal brokered by the Trump administration, stand up a fourth 5G network using a technology called ORAN that would compete with the giants. you look around. Well, but now Dish Network is merging with EchoStar.

59:43So that's... Which is the same company. I just want to point out, if you are an old billionaire and you have two companies and you're like, I don't know, merge them up together, you have accomplished nothing. This is like when people tried to make me care about Paramount and Viacom and CBS all merging. And the only good thing about it was that the parent company was called National Amusements, which is deeply funny. And it's like, but it's all just to say like one old guy owned all the companies, right? And you're like, yeah. And they're like, oh man, this is the greatest succession drama. It's like, no, it's all just the same company.

1:00:19None of this matters. That's Dish and Echo Star merging, which we wrote about this week, which is fine. I'm just pointing out we were supposed to have four wireless carriers in America. We let T-Mobile buy Sprint, which was a mess. And then we brokered, instead of anything real, a fake idea about Dish Network making a fourth network, which, look around, doesn't exist. It's going really great. I would just say Dish and EchoStar could combine, rename their network to BlueJeans, and be heroes. It's just right there.

1:00:56Look, we like asking for your emails. We're going to take a break. We'll come back. We'll read some emails. If you are a person beyond just my phone is faster or I've downloaded more pirated Netflix videos than ever in an airport. If you're someone who's actually like experienced the benefits of 5g, I want to hear from you. It cannot be that your bandwidth is just faster. I'm talking, you did a robot surgery. Like one of these things, that they told us would happen with 5G. I have one example for everyone. I'll put it out there right now. Last night, I watched Taylor Swift announce 1989 Taylor's version from SoFi Stadium on like 45 different crystal clear live streams on TikTok.

1:01:43That is because NFL stadiums have millimeter wave 5G in them. That's why. That's it. That's the future. Okay, I'll give you that one. I've taken that one off the table. They put so much bandwidth in NFL stadiums that I watched effectively pirate live streams of a Taylor Swift concert. Okay, that one's off the table. Give me something else. Email us, virgcastthevirg.com. I'm dying to know if anyone has done a robot 5G surgery, if they've deployed a low-latency application to a telecom company's edge data center. You let me know, because I haven't seen one other than these phones are slightly faster.

1:02:21Does updating your laptop at a hotel count? No, that's just more bandwidth. But it was really nice bandwidth. You cannot give me, you cannot give me, I can pull down one gig speeds, blah, blah, blah. You have to give me something on the order of tens of thousands of people in an NFL stadium, live streamed crystal clear video to the internet all at once. Right? Not just you alone stood on a street corner with high bandwidth. with tens of thousands of people use the internet once to, because of the Taylor Schultz. Like that is that, that, and I give you that, that is a meaningful 5g thing that you could not do with an LTE network, but give me like one more.

1:03:04Like we did not do all of this for the arrows tour. At least I don't think we did. Verge cast is Verge icon. Email us. We'll be right back.

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1:04:33We've all had pivotal decision points in our lives that, whether we know it or not at the time, changed everything. This 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.

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1:05:42All right, we're back. We have a little bit of lightning around. There's some good stuff in the lightning around this week, I gotta say. But before we get to that, last week we asked about fart apps in the Vision Pro. I will say one person completely misinterpreted that conversation. Got very mad at me on Twitter. What we were saying is when you have a new platform like the Vision Pro, the first wave of apps is like toys. It's like silly stuff, which was the first wave of apps on the iPhone. And then everyone like figured out what they could do because they'd made so many stupid, silly apps. And then you get the wave of mobile apps that is like revolutionized culture.

1:06:16There's someone on Twitter who's like super mad at me that I'm not aware of the apparently successful enterprise VR apps that exist today. And it's true, I'm not. Blue Jeans VR coming to us. Whatever. But this was a prompt. Like, what's the first wave of silly apps for the Vision Pro going to be? We got some good answers. We did. I have also come up with one that I think is correct, and I'm going to quit my job and make it, and I'm going to make a fortune in the first year. But we should go through the ones that we got because they're all generally very good. What is it? We'll come back. That was a tease, David.

1:06:51That was a tease. I have to read through and see all of these to decide if I'm going to share my idea. All right. So the first one, Josh W., his idea for a Vision Pro fart app, Drunk Vision, which makes a lot of sense, although you will puke right away. It's literally just throw up in your head. Yeah. And then that leads right into his second idea, which is Shroom Vision. I buy it, right? What if you could feel like Aaron Rodgers mode for your Vision Pro is like, it's also called Vision Pro. Very good. Justin G. wrote, Try on Clothes app. it's snapchat filters for your whole body and all you have to do is look at someone else dangerous my immediate reaction to this was oh that seems really smart and then one second later i went oh no yeah but i will say the thing like everyone at snapchat keeps telling me that the ar try-on thing is real and people like it and use it and if you could like put on your vision pro and stand in front of the mirror and like see how you would look and stuff like Like, there will be something like that, and I bet it'll work.

1:07:56I don't know about the all-you-have-to-do-is-look-at-someone-else thing. Yeah. There's some real consent issues there. I don't want to be able to change other people's clothes. That seems like a no-go. Here's what I'm thinking. Real-time revenge point.

1:08:11There's, like, App Store review problems in there. We'll see. But I get it. People like that idea. Michael G. says the obvious answer is fart clouds floating around the user with spatial audio fart sounds. This literally is the answer. Spatial audio fart sounds is a thing that will happen. Like Michael has spoken that into existence and this will happen now. People took the fart app prompt a little too literally because Zach wrote transparency mode and you not only hear a fart, but you see a plume of purple and green come out of butts. That's right up there with Snapchat filters for your whole body.

1:08:47can you imagine you're wearing a$3 ,500 headset you're walking around the city and you're just like waiting for farts so you can see the like oh so wait so you're imagining this not as a way to like make it look as if someone is for you're imagining like a fart recognition system yeah it's transparency mode for farts fart detector oh yeah so somebody farts and it's just it's like the the thing in the pool that turns your pee purple. It's just like AR. Yeah, it's that. And every time it happens, you hear an Apple executive say something like, with the power of the M2 chip.

1:09:28Christopher C. writes, slow-mo running from Baywatch in whatever space you are in, which I actually don't understand. It's like you're putting it on and you're walking down the street. And in addition to all the other people, it's this person's slow motion running towards you. It's just Pamela Anderson slowly running. Just Hasselhoff. It's good that you went to Pamela Anderson and I went to Hasselhoff. That says it all, really. All right, and then my last one, this is my favorite one because it includes the phrase benefit hypothesis. Hell yeah. It's very good. So Ruben wrote, app description colon, when the USA men's soccer team wins the World Cup, then your Apple Vision Pro will live stream a video of former President Donald Trump in prison.

1:10:10Wow, that turned hard in the middle there. It did. Benefit hypothesis. Both political parties will wonder how a former U.S. president spends his time in prison. Two, the curiosity will cause a positive effect on USA's overall soccer performance over time. So they're going to want to win so bad so that we can see that. Oh, interesting. Yeah, so that we can all see it. I don't know if this has to do with the Fission Pro, but it's an interesting incentive strategy. And then he has some potential names here. Victory Watch Ex-President Edition, The Champions Presidential Stream, Goal to watch POTUS in prison.

1:10:45These all sound like golf tournaments. And then number 10 here at the end, soccer glory presidential story. I don't know, man. I like getting emails. Wow. It's so good. Very good. If you have ideas, we already had the prompt. If you have had a meaningful 5G experience, you email me. And I'm taking the errors to her off the table. So that's it. We're going to get zero emails about that. So what's your better idea? We did get some emails from some Android gamers. We'll collate those and talk about those. Once there's more than one of them. That's basically what I'm saying. I don't want to dox the one person who emailed me.

1:11:28Yeah. So we've got – send some more of those. But if you've got ideas on like what the first wave of Vision Pro – I'm very curious. Wait, can I tell you what my idea is? I've actually – I have been thinking a lot about this and I actually think I'm right. I think there's going to be this like gigantic genre of what amounts to like fidget spinner apps in the Vision Pro. Nelan, you and I have both gotten this demo. And just the thing where you can sit there and just like touch your fingers together to do stuff is delightful. And I think about like the – do you guys remember that app when the iPhone first came out that was just a beer on the screen and you could like slosh it back and forth?

1:12:05Oh, yeah. That thing was like, oh, look at the accelerometer. This is cool. It does stuff when I move it. The equivalent of that on the Vision Pro is going to be like, I put my fingers together and something happens. So it's going to be like, there's going to be a bubble wrap app that makes a billion dollars. There's going to be one of the little like popper fidget things that's going to make a ton, like spin something around with your finger. Like it's going to be huge. Yeah, this is what I'm saying. The person who's all mad at me, like she's going to miss the point. The point is when you have a bunch of new interface concepts, the first round of apps is just, can you trigger all the sensors and push all the buttons?

1:12:37Right. And that trains everybody to get excited about what else they can build in the way that the first round of iPhone apps was like, turn the phone sideways and it looks like you're pouring a beer. Like, that didn't accomplish anything other than getting people used to motion controls on an iPhone. And, like, something like that will happen. The first, I guarantee you, the first round of Vision Pro apps is going to be more stuff like that. I can't say it's going to be champion story, presidential glory. just not a not a clear business model path um but you can see how some of this stuff will happen all right lightning round kranz you've got lk99 which is the fakest story this i can i say this i will say the lk99 situation like exemplifies broken twitter to the max yes a hundred percent It exists because Twitter decided it would exist and no one could stop it and then we all had to talk about it.

1:13:35And then go ahead. You got it. It's you. Yeah, yeah. It felt very – if people understood how science is normally reported and how major discoveries are normally reported, they would have been a little less hyped about this. Because generally speaking, when science has really cool big discoveries, they like to be like, hey, look at these really cool big discoveries we have. They don't like to leak two competing studies on the same product to a different forum and then have everybody argue over whether it's real or not and have very little proof. That's the opposite of science. Everybody who was like, it's all a conspiracy.

1:14:12No, they were incorrect. But LK99 is a substance. There were a number of developers who came out and they said, oh, this could be the next superconductor. And the important thing about superconductors, they're really, really good at conducting electricity. at room temperature, at normal pressure. Most superconductors cannot do that. We have superconductors today, but they usually have like thermal or pressure issues, which makes them really, really great to use, but really, really expensive to use. So something that just works at normal, like out of the box is a huge, huge idea. And one of the things that like tells a superconductor from other things is the ability to levitate over magnets.

1:14:51but those aren't the only materials that levitate over magnets. So when everybody saw this partially, not even fully, partially levitating, they were like, oh my God, it's a superconductor. And it turns out that, oh my God, it's not. It's just one of those materials that levitates over magnets. And it sounds like there's definitely some cool use cases for it. It sounds like there's some interesting things here. But some of the researchers already were trying to sell it. And so this was part of their marketing hype to sell it. and the other researchers were not. And the superconductor research space was already dealing with some drama because some other people had previously claimed.

1:15:30Wait, can you just say, the superconductor research space was already dealing with some drama. Incredible. Oh yeah, there was already drama because there was already another study that was like, oh yeah, we've got the new superconductor. And it turned out it was all fake and wrong and terrible. So people keep coming into this space because the potential for profit's huge here. So everybody wants to find that superconductor and then make lots of money. Wait, can I ask a really dumb question? I confess I have, like, not really followed this story because the night I sat down and was like, I'm going to read the hell out of LK99 was the same day everybody was like, never mind, this is nothing.

1:16:08So I basically have not followed this story at all. Okay. And this is where I ask a very dumb question about superconductors, which is like, let's say in theory this had been the thing that some of these people thought it was. So what? Like, why did this become such a, like, real-world excitement phenomenon so fast? I think the big thing for superconductors and where it would be really powerful is, like, right now superconductors are used in a lot of power plants and stuff like that. But if you can get a cheap, super-reliable superconductor, which if this had been one, would have ticked those boxes, right?

1:16:43It would have been cheap. It would have been easy to produce. if you can do that, then you can conceivably make like electric cars, anything that runs on power, just way more efficient because it's able to move that with and without like as much heat and stuff like that. It's super efficiently. So instead in theory of doing what we do with silicon now, which is only a semiconductor, you could do it much better with a superconductor. Right. You could do it so, so much better. And, and so like it would just make things way faster. It would make things way less power hungry. Like it would be in a lot of ways magic.

1:17:16But I just want to give you this quote from our piece, which is if you start with a rock, you end up with a rock. Yeah. And this was the thing. What I didn't get about the Twitter side of this was how so many people were like, this is crazy. It's so cool. And then they'd go talk to researchers. The researchers are like, we're skeptical. And they're like, you're in the pocket of somebody. You hate science. And it's like. Yeah. This is what I mean about the broken blue check version of Twitter that we have now is made for hype cycles. Yeah. And every kind of crypto scammer AI thread boy had a moment with LK99.

1:17:58And the media is still organized around having Twitter be its assignment editor that this obviously fake thing ended up everywhere. like we wrote about it because there was so much interest in it. Yeah, we weren't going to write it. Like we talked about this when it first popped off and we were like, oh, we're not going to write about it because all of the reasons that I talked about, which didn't seem reliable and everything else. But then so many people were writing about it. We were like, okay, well, we have to like explain how this is all incorrect and they're wrong and that this isn't a big deal, which is a bummer of a story to write.

1:18:31Yeah, I'm going to quote, Michael Norman, distinguished fellow and former director of material science division at the Argonne National Laboratory. When you start with a rock, chances are you will end up with a rock. That's awesome. It's a rock. But it's just like, to me, the thing was, and it's interesting to capture the imagination. You love capturing. It's like every so often, I remember early in my Engadget tenure as like a baby blogger, someone had claimed to have invented a perpetual motion machine. And like, but like, you know, they were going to like hold a video demonstration and they called him the thing.

1:19:04And like, we were like, I was just like, guys, this is bullshit. Like, look at it. And there was this answer, which I still think about all the time, which is the audience is interested and it's a service to go and ask the questions and blah, blah, blah. And I was like, but we can just answer the questions now. Like, it's definitely not going to work. Just say it's bullshit. It didn't work in the end. Surprise. But it's just like this cycle. But because Twitter is in the middle of it, like the idea that something has gone viral on Twitter still carries meaning in the world, even though the meaning is sort of divorced from the mechanics of Twitter.

1:19:40Yeah. And so it's like, oh yeah, like a bunch of like grifters started doing threads about what it means for there to be a room temperature superconductor and without ever verifying that there was a room temperature superconductor. And then everybody wrote about it because everyone was excited. Including our audience, basically asked us to write. Yeah. It makes me think of all the TikTok trends that like parents and schools get terrified about that weren't actually trends, but it was just like one person made a video and then some person made a video warning you about the video and then everybody latched onto that.

1:20:08And it's like, this was never actually a thing that kids were doing, but now we're afraid of the thing that kids aren't doing. If you go to the original video. This cycle is bad news. Yeah. It's the, I call it the local news cycle. Once when I, as a child in Wisconsin, the local news once reported that kids were getting high by drinking too much water, which is a real thing that you can do. I have since learned. And my mom was like, how much water are you drinking? And I was like, not enough, bro. I've been drinking a lot of Miller Lite. She's not worried about that though. The water's the problem.

1:20:39Anyhow, I've got a quick update on the Mr. B situation. You'll recall last week, Mr. B sued the company that was doing his ghost kitchens for Mr. Beast burgers trying to get out of the contract because there was no quality control. surprise they have now sued him back for a hundred million dollars saying that he's gotten more value out of them and he's become more famous because of the burgers I don't know man just that's your lightning round update I think Mr. Beast versus the burger company is it's like the pinnacle of influencer culture in a way it is directly related to like the there are a lot of thread boys threading on the tweets about how Mr.

1:21:20Beast Burger was like the future of dining oh yeah All of those people should be forced to apologize. Here's my theory. If you were a thread person on Twitter doing threads like that, and then you want to join Instagram threads, Instagram should enforce that you have to post 50 apologies first. And eat 50 Beast Burgers. Eat 50 Beast. You have to do a Beast Burger challenge. If you have ever written a one of 99 Twitter thread about how Mr. Beast Burger was the future of dining. I think you should have your platform credentials revoked until you eat 50 Beast Burgers. I like it. I will say, listen, I'm not a lawyer, but the idea that Mr.

1:22:02Beast is only famous because of the burgers does not make a lot of sense to me. It does not fly. It's also, by the way, his actual work, it is clear he cares a lot about the quality of his actual work. Yep. Like a Mr. Beast video is like a rigorously edited, jewel of a thing yeah and it's like you can see why he's pissed the burgers are wrong it's just like very obvious and yeah all right david what's yours uh mine is just a small threads update uh which is a very cool little thing that happened where you can now use your mastodon profile and your threads profile essentially as verification systems so you can You can go to Mastodon and say, you know, my Threads account is this, and then actually use your Threads account to verify that, which at a very small level is like, it doesn't matter.

1:22:56It's like a teeny tiny feature, but it is an Instagram. People have been saying this is the first sort of meaningful step Threads has made into like the activity pub decentralized social media world. And we've said a bunch of times, like there are lots of reasons to believe Threads will never decentralize in the way that it has promised. but the people who are building the thing continue to loudly say they are going to do it and this was sort of the first like real world instantiation of that and I think that's very exciting. Yeah, it's cool. I mean, it is like a very little thing but it is true that Threads engineers were posting like, hope you believe us, like we're taking these baby steps.

1:23:34They were so proud about it. It just makes me happy that like, how excited people were for it. I'm not excited for it but everyone was so just pumped. I don't care. But everybody else was so pumped. So I just want to say, by the way, that every time I write about this stuff or talk about it on a show like this, the overwhelming response is people don't care about decentralized platforms. That's not how you win user experience, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And that's a stupid argument. People didn't care about anything until they realized why it was cool and started using it. That's how things work.

1:24:05Uh, and in this case, like I will continue to plead loudly that decentralized social media is a good idea and we should pursue it and you should care as a person because it will make better products and a better internet. Uh, and my number one goal in life is to convince random strangers that decentralized social media is a concept they should care about. So here I am. I'll give you the, I'll just flip that around. These clowns forced us to care about crypto. right? Like they, the money that flowed into that ecosystem to try to force us to care about it. And we, the verge and the verge cast audience by and large was like, don't care about this, like fully rejected.

1:24:54But it's weird that because there's not that much money in the system, that people are like, no one will ever care about this. And like, I just, it's the things are not user experience. experiences. The things are the things that enable other people to make products and services that compete, which is the thing that we care about the most. It's like the moment that the open web started to beat AOL. There were probably a lot of people who were like, who cares? Everybody's on AOL. And it's like, no, this other thing is better. And like, give me a minute and I'll prove it to you. And like, that's how I feel about the future of social stuff right now.

1:25:28And at the end of the day Twitter is going to buy a time Warner. That's the final form of Twitter is they're also going to own Batman for some reason. All right. The last one we got, you know, I had to end here. Yeah. It feels right. Yeah. Unfortunately, there is a new EV escalate. It's called the escalate IQ. I love it. It is so expensive. It's$130 ,000, but it is hot. It's, and it's huge. It's the biggest car. It's massive. It's ridiculous. It's so big. It's not as big as the Escalade ES-V. It's not as big as the biggest Escalade, but it's still huge. It's bigger than a regular Escalade. Three rows, beautiful, 450 miles of range, mostly because the battery is the size of a Sherman tank.

1:26:09It has a crab walk mode that the Hummer EV has, so it can go sideways. The thing's cool. $130 ,000. I sent a photo of it to Becky with just the words, hear me out, and she wrote, that's hot. Oh, congratulations. Good, right? I was like, what if we sell everything and buy an EV Escalade? And she's like, I'll think about it. It's hot. Go look at pictures. GM, they've been saying this was going to happen. No CarPlay. Huge screens on the inside. The inside of this car looks hot. It's like wall-to-wall screens. It's a 55-inch screen across. Yeah, it's an LED LCD that wraps around. The sort of climate cluster is another screen.

1:26:47In the back, there's a third screen. Screens for days. And they're saying no CarPlay or Android Auto. Again, they said this was going to happen ages ago. No one believed them. here's the new escalade and they've done it now importantly google built in so you get google maps you get google all the stuff that you might want off a phone but no android or carplay i don't know if this is a good idea i haven't used it haven't seen the car many questions but this is the moment when big car makers say when cadillac says you know what you're gonna buy an escalade with or without carplay also probably you're in the back seat of this escalade so it doesn't matter But they're betting people are going to buy Escalades without CarPlay because what they want is an Escalade.

1:27:31Okay. Neela, you are obligated by law to think this is a good idea, so congratulations. What I would just say is I know I came back to the show and said that I agree that CarPlay is bad, but the thing is I'm looking at the picture of this screen right now, and it essentially, if I can describe it, it basically, the photo I've seen here in our piece looks like sort of three distinct sides. One side shows like nav and car information. The middle is kind of classic infotainment. And on the right is, I don't know, like a 15 inch across screen that just has seven icons. Like this, this is what we're doing with our screens.

1:28:09Like here's seven icons. This is awful. This is the worst UI design I've ever seen in my life. Oh, no, no, no. So you're looking at that. That's like a menu screen. So I think, again, I have not seen this car. So the screen all the way on the right is in front of the passenger, and that is basically a TV. A really skinny candy bar television. Yeah, so it's a really weird TV. It looks like it's got HDMI input. It does have – I have one of these in my car. So we have a Jeep with a passenger screen. It has a filter on the front of it, so you can't see it from the driver's seat. And it has HDMI in and some apps.

1:28:48Great. Like, I've used it once to stream a football game to that thing. And the entire time, I just told my wife that I was watching football. And she's like, I don't care. You often do that on your phone anyway. But I was like, no, it's in the car. But that's what that thing over there in front of the passenger is, is this belief the car industry has that passengers want a dedicated screen that is a TV. Well, it's a dedicated screen for them to put ads on, which is all fine and good. I'm just saying the software design here is garbage. Yeah, the UI is ugly. Yeah, I mean, again, we have not seen the thing.

1:29:22So I don't know what mode that is in, but you're right. You've got a thing that is a cluster all the way on the left. Like that's the instrument cluster. You've got your standard infotainment. And then there's a set of new ideas on the right of the car that honestly no one in the car industry has figured out, but there should be a screen in front of the passenger that is a TV. Just watch. It's coming to all the cars. and there's another screen right in front of the gear shifter. Like this is just - That's the weird, crazy, that's the climate control. Because you don't have that in the other 55 inches.

1:29:57I just worry about these freezing. Right, so like here's what we don't know. Is this fast? Is it responsive? Is the interface good? David thinks the interface is bad. We have spent but a few minutes looking at this thing. My point is GM's position, and I guarantee you, many, many more car makers position over time is going to be, we are not letting Apple take over the user experience of our vehicles. And we think in particular, I think GM thinks with the Escalade, the people will buy Escalades even without CarPlay and Android Auto, because it has Google Maps, which is the thing that people care about the most.

1:30:35And that's going to be that Rivian is already there. Tesla has been there forever. And I think they're basically looking at what people are doing on these phone apps, on these phone projection systems, and saying, you know what? By and large, they are running Google Maps. So if we just sign the deal with Google and run Google Maps on our thing, yep, we can run ads on the weird Hulu integration over on the right. Yes, we can, like, you know, as EV charging networks, blah, blah, blah, we can, like, monitor the cars better, we can do telemetry, you can sell your data, all that stuff that seems kind of gross.

1:31:06But fundamentally, they're saying, look, what you want out of this is Google Maps, and we've signed the deal with Google to give you Google Maps, and Google is waiting there with open arms. I don't think that theory is wrong. I just don't think there is any evidence in the history of cars that says car makers can make good software. Or the history of TVs. Like this is the exact same thing TVs have done. TVs have been doing this for ages. They're like, we're gonna do it. Samsung ties in. And then you go buy an Apple TV and you plug it in and you go away. And you just can't do that with this because I guess you plug it into the HDMI port.

1:31:40Yeah, yeah. You can just plug your phone into HDMI port and run off your phone. But only on that screen that the passenger gets. We'll see. It's$130 ,000 EV Escalade. The risk profile for this car is very low. I think the people who are going to spend$130 ,000 on EV Escalade have people who use their phones for them. That's going to be you someday, Eli. That's my dream. We're going to get the Becky review of this car someday. It's going to be great. All right. That's it. David, you have a new newsletter. Oh, yeah. If you're listening to this on Friday, you have one day to sign up. It's called Installer.

1:32:18And the idea was basically to just take all of the cool stuff on the internet and put it all into one place. It's like, there's like new apps every week, there's new stuff to watch, there's new games to play, there's new like cool creators coming out all the time. And I spend a lot of time just like pouring this stuff into like random documents and never doing anything with them. And I was like, I am going to do better at finding new stuff. And I've been asking people to send stuff in seller at the verge.com. Anytime you see anything cool anywhere on the internet, send it to me. I've already gotten a ton of really fun stuff.

1:32:49There's a lot of really fun stuff in the first issue. You can read it on the site every Sunday, but you can also subscribe and get it in your inbox every Saturday. And we're going to do lots of things like have beta invites and access to cool stuff and like giveaways and stuff. So it's a, it's a big advantage to be a day early. It's theverge.com slash installer. I think the first issue is really fun, and I hope it will be forever. It's going to be awesome. Nelai's in the first issue. I made Nelai send me his home screen and tell me about all the truly unhinged apps that he seems to use every day.

1:33:22So if you want to know what Nelai's phone looks like, check it out. I do not know why Spotify is. Apple Music. I took that screenshot. I was like, why is this here? Uncurated to the extreme. All right. One more thing. we're doing cybersecurity questions on the Wednesday show right David give us a call 866 Verge 11 with your cybersecurity questions I'm having a lot of fun doing reader feedback this summer one question I have for all of you also let us know if you like it if you like it when we're reading the emails and doing the voicemails that would be really useful we are having fun I just want to make sure you think it's a good part of the show let us know also if you've ever had a meaningful 5G experience it's driving bonkers alright that's it that's the Verge Cast back and roll

1:34:10And that's a wrap for VergeCast this week. We'd love to hear from you. Shoot us an email at vergecast at theverge.com. The VergeCast is a production of The Verge and the Vox Media Podcast Network. The show is produced by me, Liam James, and our Senior Audio Director, Andrew Marino. Our Editorial Director is Brooke Minters. That's it. We'll see you next week.

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