The future of EV charging and Hollywood on strike

25:50So Tesla, in a moment of change, I would just say, right? Lower prices, higher revenue, lower margins. Interesting place for Tesla to be. Opening up the software stack, fascinating. They said they're doing release candidates of the Cybertruck from their factory. You see them rolling around Texas. It's very funny. But I just, you guys, we'll put it in the show notes. Go look on our site. There's a picture of the Cybertruck off-roading, covered in mud, with its big silly wiper trying to wipe the mud off the windshield. And the wiper sucks. This is an official Tesla press photo. This isn't me concocting some sort of fake biased mud trial because I hate Elon Musk.

26:36I'm looking at the photo the company sent us of its wiper supposedly wiping and it fucking sucks. I mean, honestly, A, it doesn't wipe completely. And B, it only even attempts to wipe like 60 % of the engine. If you are on the passenger side of this truck, you're not seeing anything. Have you ever done the thing when it's cold and you have snow on your windshield, so you pull your sleeve over your hand and you do this sort of one big wipe just to get some of the snow off? Do you know what I'm talking about? Yes. That's what this windshield wiper does. It's just your jacketed arm just going. That's your windshield wiper.

27:22I can't believe they released this. At least Photoshop it. ask mid journey to be like insert clean windshield whatever you need to do but this photo is it's just objectively hilarious how bad the wiper is in tesla's own photo i cannot believe we all just let it slide this we're recording a day after this photo came out and i i'm just i'm flabbergasted that we as a society this is why elon bought twitter so we couldn't all just clown on this photo. Like, look, just look at it. I beg you. Look at this photo. This is our country's finest engineering minds. And they're like, I don't know, this wiper's fine.

28:01It's nuts. Everything else about the Cybertruck, kind of interesting, right? They made it, it's much smaller. The packaging is much smaller. So it has a six and a half foot bed in a sub 19 foot frame, a regular pickup. My pickup truck is longer than 19 feet. It has a five foot five. This one is because it can park in normal garages. So I can fit in a normal garage. Do you have a special garage? No. To get the Raptor in my garage, you get two inches on a side. It is terrifying. But I'm really good at it now. And now I think I can drive that car anywhere. And I should not. That's not accurate. But trucks are getting much longer.

28:38So this one has a longer bed and a shorter package. Super interesting. Packaging innovation from Tesla. They're getting better at manufacturing it, which is a very complicated thing to manufacture. sure they i'm just saying they have not in any way figured out how to wipe the windshield i just not they haven't solved it why is it hard to do wipe the windshield i i my car does it quite easily yeah we've solved this problem we have such good windshield wiper technology now that tesla is choosing not to use what what is the rationale there besides like we don't want Windshield is at such an extreme angle and it's so large.

29:14Okay. Because big wiper. Why have good wiper when you can have big wiper? It's true. So, again, we've covered this extensively. Elon has said the wiper gives him the most anxiety about the Cybertruck. Because I think mounting standard wipers on that angle for that size, I think it would be less effective than the one big wiper. How likely is this thing, as soon as you get it on the road, behind a gravel truck to just be the most useless windshield? Based on the evidence I have from the companies on marketing materials. Just wrecked. Just look at the picture. It's incredible. I'm curious about this car.

29:49I like trucks. I think it would be fun to go really fast in a triangle. I want to see this on a ranch. I want to see this driving through like dealing with cattle, feeding the cattle. Big shiny metal thing that will burn at the touch. Just like. Yeah. How's it going to stay called? Who knows? More questions and answers. They're starting grass fires with the reflection. So it's not supposed to ship until late next year, really. But they have started production. So that's like the big news. And then the other news that I think is just surrounding Tesla that's worth talking about is the flood of companies that are adopting the NACS charging standard, which is the Tesla plug, abandoning CCS, which is the other garbage plug, quite frankly.

30:30It's an unusual case of the right standard winning and turning into a standard versus whatever – like the proprietary thing is going to become the standard. Good on Tesla for making that happen. The mechanics of it I think are still really unclear. Like these companies are signing deals to use this connector. It's not just a standard yet. Unclear how that will work. The Society of Automotive Engineers, they say they're going to make it a standard. You can see how Tesla is sort of being incentivized by government subsidies to enable people to use it in order to get tax rebates on charging network and other things.

31:04Tesla hit a point where they say they start charging astronomical fees for you to use this charging standard and companies are forced to pay those fees. Otherwise, they can't have their cars charged. Can Elon do a rug pull on ECS? I don't think so. I'm reasonably certain that he can't fool every major car manufacturer. Maybe if Nissan was like, we did it. We'd be like, you picked your demo the last time. I don't know. You're bad at this. But he's got Ford, GM, Volvo, VW. Just down the line, he's got them all and more signing every day. So you get the feeling, at least in the United States, they're going to end up here and the thing will actually become a standard.

31:48Electrify America is going to use it. And what we're just ending up with right now is like this weird interstitial period where it's dongle town for cars, which is not great. Driving the dongle town. Andy Hawkins wrote a story about this and had a quote from somebody who said, I feel like I'm driving a Betamax, which is just a really delightful. Because you are. Neil, I correct me if I'm understanding this wrong, but this seems like the kind of thing where the best case scenario, everybody wins, which is that basically, we get a charging network that everybody needs, including Tesla, that Tesla doesn't have to build for itself, that works for everybody, thus makes people worry less about range anxiety, thus makes more people buy EVs, thus is good for the government and Tesla and all these other companies.

32:34Like, who loses in this? It seems like the part that's sketchy is that a company invented the thing that is becoming the standard and that that company is Tesla, which is sort of run by a man who is not famously predictable. But like everything else about this seems like it's heading in a good direction. Right. Am I missing something? I think that's right. I think maybe the people who are the most upset are Tesla shareholders who think that Tesla should be a monopoly. Sure. Right. But even Elon Musk doesn't apparently think Tesla should be a monopoly. But for a minute, if you want an electric car, the only viable choice was a Tesla.

33:09Even today, and there are really good EVs out there right now. Even today, if you want to travel a lot in your EV, you need to buy a Tesla because they have the infrastructure to support that kind of EV travel. Now you don't, right? Because they're just going to open up the charging network and their big moat that made their car the best car is gone or loosening. You can still argue that they have the best software experience and the best full-cell driving, but that's just car stuff now. Before it was like you buy this car and there are not enough gas stations for you. And that's gone, right, with these deals.

33:43So I think Tesla is just in a more competitive environment. It would be like Apple supporting RCS. It's like literally giving up one of your biggest pieces of lock-in willingly. Right. And I really do think that Tesla had to do it because of various basically Biden administration policies that made them do it to get the tax credits in various ways. I think they had to do it because if they didn't, then Ford and GM and whoever else would actually invest in Electrify America, would actually make that network possible because they need it to compete. And I think Ford, Jim Farley has been on Decoder and said, we know the charging experience sucks.

34:17They have this massive investment in Mustang Mach-Es and F-150 Lightnings and all these other EVs that aren't moving the way they were moving last year with all the tax credits, partially because of the charging network problems. So you just see like, OK, do I want to face off against all the world's biggest automakers who will band together and pick the bad standard? Or do I want to try to make some money off the supercharging network that I've spent tons and tons of money building? And maybe I'll charge higher rates to a Ford customer. Like they can play these games. The problem is going to be, and this is really in Andy's piece, the software that makes all this work seamlessly for people is going to be nuts.

34:54Right? Like if you roll up to a supercharger, which doesn't have a screen, and you want to pay for it, and you need one app, a Tesla app to pay for it, and you roll up to Electrify America or ChargeNet or whatever, and you need another app and all those different billing systems and your car is sort of incompatible with everything. Ugh. So I think there's a layer of software compatibility that needs to happen here. I don't know. It does feel like I have a Jeep with an old, now the old connector, the CCS connector. I'm like, crap. I bought the wrong charging station for my garage. I got this dumb Betamax car.

35:22This feels like a bad time to buy an EV in a way that is the opposite of the intended result, right? Like you buy a new Kia and you're like, welcome to Dongletown. Like that sucks. This is like that. Do you remember when everybody was buying combo VCR DVD players? Yeah. This is like, this is that moment. And then eventually we'll get to something. We had a good comment on Andy's piece, actually. I can't remember who it was, but somebody was complaining about dongles, and the response, what I thought was really smart, was, this isn't like a phone. Cars are really big. You can put the adapters almost anywhere.

35:53That's fair. They're like, we have trunks and front trunks and glove boxes. Like, you'll be fine. And that's probably correct. That is very true. All right, we've got to take a break. Man, we've been out. Gadgets. We've got to take a break. We'll come back. We'll do maybe a little more gadgets, and we'll talk about how I will. We'll be right back.

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37:25Support for this show comes from MongoDB. Innovation is the key to success, but innovation also comes with its own set of challenges. And if you're a developer who wants to find a new way in and think outside of the box and think beyond legacy code, it's time to check out MongoDB. MongoDB is a flexible, unified platform that's built for developers by developers. MongoDB is ACID compliant, enterprise ready, with the capabilities you need to ship AI apps fast. That's why so many of the Fortune 500 trust MongoDB with their most critical workloads. Ready to think outside rows and columns? start building at mongodb.com slash built all right we're back welcome back to wiper talk do you have a favorite brand of wipers i'm again i think those detailers will will have one by the way car detail tiktok one of my favorite tiktoks oh yeah could watch it all day long the people who just like take the little brush to paint the stripe and just do it freehand all the way down I'm like, ugh.

38:31Ugh. It's beautiful. And then you're like, don't do that to the car. Why do you have this skill? Yeah, there's that. Why did the market create the need for this product? A little loopy. All right. Let's talk about Hollywood. But I think the way to talk about Hollywood is to start by talking about AI. Oh, yeah. That works. There's some AI news. I think that will lead us into the interlocking strikes that have brought Hollywood to its knees, which are in their core about AI. But there's a bunch of actual AI news this week. so first Gurman reported at Bloomberg that Apple has an AI chatbot they haven't quite figured out what to do with it which is funny all on its own I love why they made it though they made it because they didn't want their employees using like BART or chat GPT for security reasons and so they're like okay we'll just make our own now we did it what do we do with it and here's the fascinating part they're running it on Google Cloud yes which is just wild it makes sense like Apple has a bunch of products that could use an LLM the new keyboard in iOS 17 where it has a language model sort of built into it for better autocorrect.

39:35By the way, have you seen this conspiracy theory? I don't know what you want to call it. This claim that the autocorrect in the current iOS keyboard is very bad. And getting worse. And getting worse. Taylor Lorenz made a Instagram video and it like tagged me and it was like, figure this out. And I was like, it seems fine for me. I don't know how to. It's just a vibe. It is. I can't tell you how many times somebody says, I'm sorry, what did you say? and then I have to go look back and be like, that's not what I typed. You think it's getting worse? It feels like it's getting worse. Maybe my fingers are dumber.

40:06Send us an email, leave us a comment if you think it's getting worse. This is a very difficult thing to measure. Yeah. I have not noticed it, but it seems like Alex has. David, what about you? I definitely have not noticed it getting worse. It seems fine to me. Here's my theory. It's the summer and everyone's drinking. I was about to say, this happened to me on the path train today where I was so - Where everyone's hammered. There were some hammered people, but I was sober and it still did it. But it does also happen, seems to happen more when you're having a good time. I'm just saying, like you soak that iPhone in rosé, keyboard doesn't work so well.

40:43It's just, ooh, conspiracy. But I'm dying to know if people have seen it because I've seen this around. Like I said, Taylor tagged me in a video she made. I've seen other videos about it. But it's like impossible to measure. So we just need a lot of like anecdata. My running hypothesis is that this is kind of along the lines of the my phone is listening to me conspiracy theory in that, like, you see 700 ,000 ads a day. And the one that happens to have been perfectly targeted is the only one you pay attention to, which ironically is a statement about how good targeted ads actually are, but is also the thing that makes people think they're listening.

41:21It's like, no, it's just it's it's a one in 700 ,000 chance. And you just only notice the one that got it right. This strikes me as sort of the same thing where like people type a lot into their phones and these things make mistakes and some of them are weird. The ones that always get me are the people who type a word and it pops up the little autocorrect bubble trying to autocorrect it to something insane. Yeah, I have not noticed that again on my phone, but there are lots of people who say that it has. It changed. What are you doing to water doing? I'm like, that's just, no one talks like that, Apple.

41:54People from Pennsylvania. I've taught from there. What are they doing? Just assumed. All right. We started by talking about AI, and we ended up with this keyboard thing. Let me know. Let us know. We're dying to know. Yes. I'd love to run this story to ground, and the only way we can do it is responses. So Apple's building this thing called Ajax. They're running it in Google Cloud. They are doing LMs on the keyboard. You can see how they would want to plug this thing into Siri. It is wild to me that Amazon hasn't plugged an LLM into Alexa and Google hasn't plugged one into Assistant. Siri, no one's going to be like, oh, no, you changed Siri.

42:31Like, fine. Like, let Siri try to come on to you a little bit. One person is. I don't know who you are, but you're out there and you're going to be really upset. I'm so sorry. It's amazing to me that at this moment in time, Microsoft has hornier products than Apple. No, that doesn't shock me at all. Microsoft always much more low-key horny than Apple since the beginning no now we gotta no I disagree I don't know I don't know how to further this conversation this is our inaugural debate I don't for a future podcast I've never wanted to not have a conversation but also viscerally disagree with you as much as I do right I win he can't argue I win I don't I don't know how to say that's just wrong please don't debate me in the Vergecast emails with this one either folks i don't i don't need it that's fine all i'm saying is it's weird that bing is like let's do it i agree with that the thing that's not weird you said it's weird that these things haven't been integrated into like alexa and assistant and siri yet they're bad like it's really important to remember that like chat gpt is bad it's like it's fascinating and it's interesting and there's so many things you can do with it that are very cool it's wrong a lot And I think Siri sucks, but is not prone to lying to you.

43:46And I think all this stuff that we're reckoning with, with what does it mean that chat GPT exists? What if I asked Siri to turn off Bluetooth and the large language model told me Bluetooth doesn't exist and invented a conspiracy theory about Bluetooth and how Bluetooth is what my phone is using to listen to me? Wait, I just want to point out that might be a better situation than whatever happens with Siri now. when it says here's some web results for bluetooth yeah exactly that's not apple like fine spin me a yard about the pirate named bluetooth like i don't at least it's interesting yeah but i think this is my this is why i like this apple story because like if you follow the timeline here this is what apple does right they let everybody make the products and then apple comes in and says we're the ones who made this good i think what is very clearly true is that you cannot yet solve all of the problems of these large language models.

44:39We just haven't figured out how to do it. And there's no indication really ever that Apple has some like generations ahead AI thing going on. If anything, Apple has been behind on this stuff for a decade. And so I think Apple is probably in here being like, we can build a better chat GPT. And then they've just built a chat GPT and they're like, well, shit now, what do we do with this? And there, if, if they can figure out how to make that a product, people actually want to use that lives up to Apple standards and that they can tell a privacy story about. That'll be cool and exciting. I don't see that happening anytime soon.

45:12I mean, honestly, at this point with Siri, Siri's response to every query was, let me spin you a yarn about the pirate creature. It's just like a hilarious lie. Yeah, I'd like way better. Maybe that's fine. Do it. You know, the Amazon side of it, the Google side of it, that makes sense to me why they haven't integrated it, right? That's boring business stuff. Like Alexa is not a business. They haven't figured out how to make it a business. It's been years. They cut some of the Alexa team earlier this year because there's no path to some huge profitable business. All these queries cost money. So you're like, we're going to make it more expensive to run Alexa against no business is not a good decision.

45:50Right. So where you see Amazon investing is like, how do we use LLMs on Amazon.com, right? Which is, that's the business that actually will make Amazon money in the long run. Right. Can we make the descriptions of items on Amazon better and richer and more fun to read, that will sell more things. Google has the same problem, right? The Google Assistant, for all of it's crowing about how it's the future over the past years. Like Google Assistant is not a business. It's useful. Like I am the only person that likes Google Home and it's because the displays have the cool photo feature where they are reflective.

46:22That's it. That's why we are a Google family. So nothing to do with the Google Assistant? No, very little to do with I think the hardware is superior hardware to the Amazon hardware because of the photo reflectivity feature. And I think Google Photos is superior back end for photos in the Amazon thing. And fine. And Google Assistant exists. You may set timers for me, Google. Given you've passed the first two doors. Would it be cool if Google Assistant was more conversational and more useful? Sure. But then they have to run an LLM query, which costs infinitely more money than whatever Steam engine Google Assistant is running on now.

47:01And is slower and more error prone and harder to guess what it's going to do and harder to sort of manually program. Like these things are bigger and weirder and wackier. And I think that's going to make them be much slower for a lot of this stuff. Yeah. Yeah, and I think especially now as people are getting more used to what LMs can do and can't do, you're just seeing like, oh, these things are like – as you said, David, they're mostly a C+. Yeah. In some cases, they're getting dumber. Yeah. What is that study this week that chat to you is getting dumber at math, right? Yeah, it's getting worse at math.

47:35That's amazing. That's great because we're all bad at math. And it's learning from us. Stupid computer. That'll learn you. Like why were we ever scared? We're the source material. Of course it's going to be fine. Yeah, and there's the idea of model collapse. Did you see this week Wix announced – Wix is a website host. They announced you could create an entire website and deploy it with just a couple of chatbot prompts. But they were also very clear like don't just use the copy rewrite. It's written by like ChatGPT I think. Oh, I've got bad news for Wix. People are just going to use the copy. Oh, yes.

48:13Yes. And then there's a turn in there that is really fascinating to me. So their demo, the Wix demo, was for like an online fitness company or something, some like training company, like something with classes. Yeah. So they – like I have a company that does trainings, make me a website. And then it's like – it showed picture of like instructors. And it was like pick an instructor that matches your vibe. And they obviously picked like the coolest one. And then it made a whole website. And then the next turn was we are also managing the scheduling of your classes. We see you have some open slots.

48:47Do you want us to make a social media marketing campaign to get customers for you? And you're like, yes. And it just fired off some Instagram assets or whatever and it published them and said it's done using the existing. And it's like at some point you're not even running the business. Yeah. And then I saw someone else tweeted at me just pointing out a startup guy who's like, I just published 250 ,000 words of content to like 45 niche interest websites that I started. They're all just SEO honeypots and I'm making money. And it's like, oh, the canon of C plus content is here. Yeah. Yeah. At scale, like massive scale.

49:25And that's, you know, you know how I feel about the web. Come with me to my private web of people. The robot web continues to grow. So this is actually the next piece of AI news. Meta is giving away its AI stack. It's called Llama. Now it's called Llama 2. They're running it on Azure. It's a Microsoft service. So Microsoft's kind of the overall winner, right? Big investment in OpenAI. OpenAI is using Azure. Now this partnership with Meta. Microsoft is a big investor in Meta from way back. Now, Meta's stack is going to run on Azure. So Microsoft is just like, just run it here. Just optimize for our chips and our services and our data centers, and we're the winner.

50:05Everyone's just going to pay us the fees. The fascinating thing about Meta's announcement is they keep claiming that they've open-sourced their model, which is fascinating because it already leaked, if you will recall. So Meta's LLM leaked. People were using it. They're running on laptops. So it's not a great outcome for a variety of reasons, mostly about safety. But that led to a memo inside of Google that said, we have no moat. These open source models will kill us. Big controversy there. So now Meta's saying, OK, fine. We're just going to open source the whole thing. But then they didn't actually open source it.

50:36They didn't? So the license is not actually an open source license. It's not an official open source license. It doesn't meet the definition. What is it? It has all these restrictions in it. And if you are a big company with over 700 million active users, you don't get to use it at all. So it's just like not open source. That's literally just Google and Apple. And Snap, I think, is the smallest of the companies that have hit the threshold. And I guess like Telegram now. Sure. Sorry, Telegram. And they're like, if our competitors wish to use it, they can make a deal with us. And it's like, guys, that's not open source.

51:07I love that. Open source, asterisk. I mean, they keep saying it's open source. It's like you read the license. It's like not an open source license. Well, it's just like when Elon Musk keeps saying he's going to open source the Twitter algorithm. And it's like posting some of the code is not the same as open sourcing. Yeah. It's like, you know who the most pedantic nerds of all are? Are open source nerds. Yeah. Like you say it's open source and you're like, here's our model. And it's like, what community do you think that you are interacting with right now? I would honestly rather have like an open source aficionado read a contract I needed to sign before a contract lawyer.

51:43Yeah. Like they will go through everything. They'll find everything. I don't have to worry about it. Like I'm renting this car. Is it open source? Anyway, we've asked Meta about it. I'm very curious what the reasoning here is like why they are using this term. It is going to land them in some amount of trouble with like the open source community. But they keep saying it. And I think the reason they're saying it is because they want to be perceived as a provider of models people have a dependency on. But if you're going to do – if you're going to open source, you have to actually do it. You have to actually give the source code to people and let them use it however they want basically.

52:15And that is like, here are a bunch of rules and restrictions. Like the words open source and acceptable use policy are not aligned. Like those are not concepts that plug into each other. This is much more along with like the creative commons where it was like the like on Flickr a million years ago, right? There would be the license that it was like, you can use this photo only for your personal use and you have to give credit to the original author. And that's kind of a foundational thing on the internet. That's not open source. Open source means you can have it and do what you want with it, generally speaking.

52:49Yeah, open source licenses are copyright licenses. They're like rooted in the fact that you own the copyright and you're like offering terms of a license. but they are very rarely like conditional in the way that this is conditional. And now we're 40 years into the open source experiment. There are governance bodies that are like, these are the licenses that count and these are the ones that don't. And Meta didn't pick one that does, you know? And like, is this the biggest deal in the world? It's not the biggest deal in the world. Can I tell the VertiCast audience about open source licenses? I can.

53:19And I think Meta should be like, we should stop using this word because it just doesn't mean the thing that it's supposed to mean. And that's like, to me, important. They're going to keep doing it until they get in trouble. Well, that's why the sheriff of open sources here. I don't know if you know, it's my fourth title here at Fox Media. Call me the sheriff. But I was saying that community, before we noticed it, the open source community said, what are you doing here? And I think it is important for how software is made that those words continue to mean the thing they're supposed to mean. All right.

53:51I promised we would segue from this AI conversation to the Hollywood AI conversation. Yeah. I'm going to figure out a way to segue it. Okay. I can segue this with a question. So I've found myself for whatever reason listening to a lot of podcasts about the strikes happening in Hollywood. And the reason I think we should talk about the strike right now is there's a lot of different things floating around, a lot of different arguments being had. There are two separate strikes happening that are kind of connected and kind of not and the biggest thing i cannot figure out and i want you to answer this for me kranz is okay how much is this actually about ai because what the writers have been saying is we don't want studios to be able to use chat gbt and other tools to generate scripts the actors were saying we don't want you to be able to use our likenesses and like make deep fakes of us to go into movies and then i listened to all these like big wigs in the entertainment business saying no that's all sort of a far off farce what they're actually arguing about is streaming residuals Which one is it?

54:46Yeah. Streaming residuals are like residuals is the core thing here because residuals is how the majority of both actors and writers get paid. OK. So let's come back to that. But tell me how much AI actually matters first. AI matters because in both cases they're worried about the potential future use, not the current use to some extent, to a large extent. And so they're worried about that potential future use and they want to make sure that the studios don't be assholes further down the line. So for the writers, they're specifically saying, we want certain protections. You can't give us – you can't have ChatGPT go come up with a script and then make us write it and then not pay us for coming up with the ideas for the script.

55:28Like we don't want to have to be using ChatGPT prompts to write. And so that's like the core thing there is they don't want – they want AI to be treated as a tool, not as like a creative force that can be copyrighted and everything like that. But no one is out here thinking that tomorrow chat GPT could write a great script that would turn into a blockbuster Marvel movie. Oh, some people are out there correct. The studios are totally – I mean they're definitely not correct. Yeah, the studios are very interested in AI and they would love to be able to cut the writers out entirely or just pay writers to edit whatever chat GPT wrote, which they would love to do that and they'd love to do that consistently.

56:09And the writers are like, you can't do that yet. You will probably be able to do that in a few years. And we want to go ahead and just nip that in the bud now. So that's what's happening with the writers. For the actors, it's specifically – right now if you're an actor, you just go get scanned. Like you signed a contract for a new show or something, a new movie. You go and they're going to like scan your face. They're going to scan your body. And then they just take that data and walk away with it. And right now it's not clear where they take that data. And if you know, hit me up because I'd love to know.

56:40But specifically background actors, they're saying, well, we would love to take a background actor's face and scan it and then pay them for that initial scan and never pay them again and use their face however we want forever in our films and TVs. And so background actors are like – that's how you get your card. That's how you kind of get into SAG. For some of them, it's not a livelihood, but it keeps the lights on, right? Like between that and their DoorDash side hustle or whatever. and so they obviously don't want to do that. So that's where they're concerned there because most of the big actors, like the Matt Damons, the Cillian Murphys, yes, I saw Oppenheimer.

57:17Yeah. You see it in 70mm? No. With the Palm Pilot? But I saw it with Christopher Nolan and so I think it's okay if we don't see it on IMAX. Flex. I think it's okay. Yeah, flex. So just to put a point on that, so I was thinking about this because have you guys seen the new Indiana Jones movie? Not yet. But the age stuff they do in that. Yeah, so for the first like 20 minutes of the movie, I guess this is a spoiler alert, but like whatever. It's Indiana Jones. He's de-aged, like digitally de-aged. And it is both the best. If you think that's a spoiler, don't email us. Go ahead. If you think it's a spoiler, you already have commented on TheVerge.com about it.

57:52So I understand. But it's better than any version of that I've seen before. And it's also still pretty bad. And it also clearly still requires Harrison Ford. So that one was unique, though, because they used Lucasfilm had tons of footage of him. They had all these dailies from all the other projects, all the Star Wars and Indiana Jones they've used when he was that age. And so they actually used all of that footage to recreate his face. So that's actually maybe closer to the kind of thing you're talking about than most of what we've seen in the past. And that one was OK because like it was like the stuff they weren't using it in other things.

58:30And for someone of his level, like they're going to go and make a different deal. Like he's going to have like a SAG contract, but he's also going to have this other contract. And they'll make those agreements. This is to protect all those people who don't have these other separate contracts to make sure that they don't get screwed over. So that like your background actor, you hit it big and then suddenly you're just popping up all over the place because 20 years ago somebody got the rights to your face. That's what they're trying to avoid. So what's fascinating about that is the writers are sort of operating in the bounds of existing copyright law.

59:10Yes. Because they write things. Yeah. And you can make copies of it and the law understands all of that. And so the writers are like, we want to get paid these rates for these kinds of work. Your face is not a copy of anything. It's just your face. Or should not be. And the idea that you can scan it and that becomes a copy of your face and you've made a copy of your face doesn't exist anywhere. But it exists in some state level likeness law, right of publicity law. There's no copyright law for your face. This is just a new problem. And so it's I think Hollywood is going to have to invent a solution to this problem that is way ahead of the government of courts or whatever, because there's just no answer.

59:56You can't go and find the answer to this question inside the law. And I'm not saying the writers don't have complicated problems of their own, but they're at least inside of something that makes sense that there is a framework for talking about. I'll give you an example. Just this week, there was a court case where a bunch of photographers had sued first BuzzFeed and then Instagram because BuzzFeed had embedded Instagrams of their photos. So the photographers are taking some photos, posting them on Instagram. BuzzFeed embedded the Instagram posts onto BuzzFeed articles. And the photographer sued BuzzFeed and Instagram and said, this is copyright infringement.

1:00:32Haven't we had this debate before? I'm getting like real deja vu listening to you explain this. This happens all the time. And so the courts over the years, this is a true thing in our law. No one talks about it. If you look at people on the social networks, they're all like, LLMs are fair use. This is where we are in reality in 2023. The courts applied what is known as the server test. And they said no copy of this photo was ever made on BuzzFeed. The photo still existed on Instagram servers. And the user's web browser called Instagram servers. Thereby, the server test, which is now part of the United States copyright law, is there is no copyright infringement for the product first loose.

1:01:14But if BuzzFeed had screenshotted that Instagram and put it on its site, it might have been a different fight. That's why you don't screenshot. And to the user, there's no difference in those things. Right. Wild. And where is the copy? I'm going to end up saying this on the show a thousand times during this AI battle. Copyright law is about copies. The court in deciding whether embedding an Instagram post on a BuzzFeed article is copyright infringement goes and finds the copy of the photo. And it's on Instagram server because that's where the photographer themselves put it in accordance with Instagram's terms of service.

1:01:48And the court said, nope, BuzzFeed can use it for free because it's on Instagram server. And if they had screenshotted it, like David said, and put it on the thing, which is to you exactly the same experience. and in many cases good journalism practice, right? Because Instagram could take a photo down, who knows? Like then they might have lost because the copy of the photo would have been on BuzzFeed servers. And that is the game. Like where is the copy? And so the writers on their side, they have copies. They have hundreds of years of copyright law about writing things down and making copies of them and putting them here and who owns what's rights.

1:02:23And you get to faces and you're like, we just don't do this. There's a vacuum of this because you can't do it. There's just never been occasion to care about it before. You've made a copy of my face. Oh, that's a photo. Yeah. That's what that is. Right. Or you've made a movie. And like for me to be in your movie, there's some laws about like my life. There's cases about re-edits of movies that we've covered because they're complicated. But you've never had the, you took my whole face and now you can use my face as many times as you want. We have. We see this sometimes. In Hollywood, there is a little bit more law here.

1:02:58Yeah, California state law because of Hollywood exists. Because Sima Liu, the actor who was in Shang-Chi last year for Marvel, before he was a big famous actor, he went out and did a whole bunch of photos. for like yeah go use them in shutterstock or whatever and so then now you can go find those and be like put him put this big celebrity like royalty free yeah this royalty free big celebrity thing and and we've seen this happen a couple of times and then they'll usually be like you can do that you can't he can't yeah you take him down because they're royalty free stock photos of him right but like but even that is a photo that's not his face yeah you haven't made him do something he wasn't doing before because you have a digital model of his face.

1:03:41Yeah. And there's just no, as far as I know, there's not like a great framework for that. There's some ones that people have come up out of whole cloth, like that horrible Will Smith movie that they shot at 120 hertz. Do you know what I'm talking about? Gemini Man. If you watch it at the intended frame rate, it looks like a CGI demo reel. It doesn't even look like a real movie. Like, why'd you do this? It's like an Unreal Engine commercial. Yeah. For that movie, he signed a deal where I think he owns it. that model. He didn't want the studio to have it. But he's Will Smith. He has the leverage to do it.

1:04:11These background actors, their only way to get leverage is by going on strike. Yeah. And so that's what they're doing. They're all on strike and it's going to last a while. It seems like everybody's really entrenched in their positions. The producers don't want to give over more money. Ultimately, this all boils down to money, right? Streaming makes a lot of money. Streaming is... We like to talk about, oh, which streamer is going to be on the Go90 scale, but they all make money. They're all doing pretty okay. Some, Netflix way better than everybody else, right? They're doing great. Netflix, they rolled out the ad tier, subscriptions went up.

1:04:49Yeah, and Netflix also was one of the first to figure out how to I don't want to say manipulate, but aggressively use the current contracts to cut down on how much they pay people. And that's what they're trying to get rid of. That's what they're trying to fix. And naturally, Netflix doesn't want to help them on that because they want to keep all the money for themselves. So Netflix is really interesting. It's time for the disclosure block. We're way late on this. I apologize. We're minutes late to this series of escalating disclosures. One, we made a Netflix show. I'm the EP of that Netflix show.

1:05:22It's called The Future of You. You should go watch it. Two, our company makes all kinds of other Netflix shows with all the other streamers. That division of our company is called Box Media Studios. You should watch everything they make and then send us cash in an envelope. Our newsroom is unionized with the Writers Guild of America. I'm in the WGA. Here she is. It's true. She's on strike. I'm not on strike. She's not on strike. I'm not on a contract that is currently on strike. Alex will not be in the background of your movie. That too. Until future notice. And then NBC is one of these companies, Universal.

1:05:55Yeah, NBC Universal is currently, ooh. And they own a chunk of Vox Media. We all watch shows from time to time. There's all you're just going to do. We're actually at the heart of a lot of the strike stuff happening this week. NBCUniversal. Really? Do tell. Yeah. So we're getting to tree law now. Oh, here we go. Tree law. All caps, tree law. Just to be clear. This is not lowercase. This is all caps. NBCUniversal is one of the many studios that is currently, they're having strikes outside of them. And so picket lines go out there and they march. And it's a real honest to God picket line like you see from history.

1:06:29The signs are incredible, by the way. Just as a side note, like an incredible genre of the internet right now is writer and actor picket signs. They're just phenomenal. If you ever wanted to go meet an actor, they might be on a picket line right now and you can go meet them. But you should also be picketing and like give them water and stuff. So planned picket lines were to happen outside of NBCUniversal. They have a whole bunch of trees which provide lovely shade. Those trees are owned by Los Angeles because they're outside of the studio. Those trees were all mysteriously trimmed just before the picket line was supposed to happen.

1:07:04So there was no shade. And it's like 100 degrees in Hollywood right now. And so there was a lot. NBCUniversal said it's just standard. We always trim these trees down to the limbs. Yeah, this is totally normal. It's fine. It's not. L.A. is like investigating them because. Tree law. Tree law. That's not their trees to go trimming. And it's apparently really bad to trim those trees to that length in the summertime. That's just cartoon villainy. Seriously. Like I was going to say the thing about Netflix, which all the producers are doing cartoon villainy in some way. The true law thing is ridiculous.

1:07:42Netflix got a pass on this contractual obligation stuff, right? Because if you think back a year ago or two years ago, Netflix was just writing checks nobody could match. Oh, yeah. They're like Shonda Rhimes, here's a billion dollars. Make as many shows as you can, right? And what has turned is Netflix needed to be profitable. So it stopped writing those checks. It burned a lot of those creators by not renewing their shows. It burned a lot of the fandoms of those shows by not renewing the shows. It has all this content. No one's making any residuals. And then the most important thing is that all the other companies chased Netflix into that business model.

1:08:14So they all felt like they had to compete. They had to outspend Netflix. So for a minute, Netflix is the industry hero because they're writing big checks. And they have a business model that seems to work. And they – I mean it does because they're profitable. And then the other end of the rainbow is, oh, the whole industry adopted this business model. The financial structure of how we get paid is now gone because we were addicted to cable reruns and selling internationally into different markets. And now it's all just on HBO Max or Peacock or Netflix or whatever. Yeah, because these shows are like – if you look at the contract, these shows appear differently in the contract.

1:08:53They don't appear as linear TV. They don't appear as cable TV. And so in order to hit like that threshold to start paying higher residuals, they have to make more content. And it's usually like I think after the second season is when things start to go up, which is why you see so many Netflix shows canceled after the second season because then they don't have to pay increased residuals. But Kimiko Glenn was an actress on Orange is the New Black. She was a main character on that show. I think she started in like the second or third season is when she appeared on the show. In a ton of it, main character making maybe, if she's lucky, 50 cents per episode in residuals when like she's a star of the show.

1:09:36And that's most of that cast, which was all primarily people who weren't normally seen on TV. It was a big deal that they all got these roles and they were all having to work second jobs, third jobs to afford. And they still are like this did not open the world to them and make them all fabulously rich. Maybe other shows did if they went were lucky and got a network show. But if you're on a streaming show, you're not like you cannot support yourself. You have to have a second job, which means you will see an actor you love at Target and you should be really polite to them because they're probably working.

1:10:08Just be chill. Yeah, it's like Mandy Moore, who is like a huge star and was on This Is Us, which was a giant hit, was talking in an interview, I think this week about the residuals check that she's been getting from Hulu, which now has This Is Us. And she said there was one check that was one penny. There was one that was two cents. There was one that was 81 cents. It's like, this is not actual money that these folks are getting. But the thing that I struggle with is if you rewind five years, there were a lot of very smart people who were like waving their hands saying this is unsustainable. Netflix is spending money it doesn't have.

1:10:42It's in crazy debt. We're due for some consolidation. This is all getting out of control. And for years, everybody just like blissfully danced along. And a lot of people made a lot of money off of these streaming services. Like Shonda Rhimes made a ton of money and employed a lot of people. and so was were we just always due for this correction is this is just the pendulum swinging to the other side before we get to the middle this is totally because the wga strike back in 2007 was about residuals then too for streaming they saw this was like totally nascent at this point i think there were like maybe three web series uh disclosure i was actually writing for one of those at the time.

1:11:20It was Lifetime Movie Network. That's a flex disclosure. That's so much better than my Joseph and the Amazing Dreamcoat disclosure. I wrote one episode. What was it called? The show was called Inspector Mom. Oh my God. Starring Danica McKellar. Danica McKellar. Wow. Yeah. She's lovely. Wow. Yeah. It's fancy. But so back in 2007, it was like us and Battlestar Galactica. And I want you to be very clear. we were in no way in the same level as Battlestar Galactica. One of those was a hit. Yeah, one of those you know. The other one you just learned about. But there wasn't a lot, but everybody was super interested in it.

1:11:58And at the time, everybody was doing it as an ultra low budget. And when you're producing these things as ultra low budget, you don't have to pay as much. You can really dick people around and you can pay them a lot less. You can pay your writers less, you can pay your actors less and everything like that. And they're like, this is going to be a whole new thing. we clearly need to make sure our writers get paid. And so that's why they went on strike back in 2007 to make sure that they were going to get that money. And they were really not as aggressive as they should have been. There was a big argument within the WGA about it at the time.

1:12:30The people who were like, don't worry about it won. All the other people were like, what did we say for the last 15 years? And so now we're at this point, like they've been waiting for a very long time. This was always probably going to happen. And I think the biggest surprise is that the DGA, the Directors Guild, isn't a part of this. Because so many, I think the reason that didn't happen for them is so many of them are also producers. Much more of them, like standard, are producers as well. So they're like, this works for us. We're fine. We can make it work. But they're also, and directors in a very real way, you can't copy their work.

1:13:08Yeah. Like a lot of those big existential questions that are facing the writers and the actors, directors don't have to deal with and and these other ones are having to face that like writers having to face okay if the producer like goes and writes a prompt and sends me that prompt that like writes a prompt chat gpt spits something out he sends that to me who owns the and i write a whole script do i own the copyright to my script does chat gpt own the copyright to the script does the guy who like busted out a quick prompt on the copyright to my script and everything in it and all the intellectual material, like they gave me 150 words and I turned that into a two-hour movie.

1:13:49Why should the studio get to own that? So again, there's just a long history of concepts that might help you answer that question. I don't know where they're going to land. What I know is the money that they're looking for, the challenge is that either it doesn't exist the way that it used to or it exists but it's flowing to the CEOs slash it's being used to fund vastly more projects than before. So Friends, I think Friends is like the example here. All the people who made Friends are rich and they're going to keep being rich and whatever. They're doing great. They're doing great. Seinfeld, another example.

1:14:28They made Friends. They put it on broadcast television. They sold a bunch of ads against that broadcast television. They paid all the actors a million dollars an episode for Friends because just that first cut was so valuable. with ads and broadcast television. Everybody watched it every Thursday. Then they sold it again to foreign countries and to syndication and to cable networks. Then they sold it a 15th time to Netflix. Then it came off of Netflix and they sold it a 16th time to, what is it, Hulu? Where is it now? Wherever it is now. I think it's on Peacock now. It's on Peacock. It's on Peacock, yeah.

1:14:59They sold it to themselves the last time. Well, and it was a big deal. Do you remember how big a deal that was? Actually, because they were leaving a ton of money on the table to bring it back to Peacock as a big bet on what Peacock was. It's like that thing held its value for so long. Right, because it's an asset. Like it's a very, I don't know, you make a widget and you can sell it however many times. The streaming model is you make a show and you sell it once. Yep. Probably to yourself. And then you hope it brings in subscribers. And you kind of end up in this horrible Spotify situation where you're like, okay, you pay me$9 a month.

1:15:32You play this much Taylor Swift. We're going to divide up the total number of streams. And Taylor Swift gets a penny, but she gets a billion streams. So it's a billion – and like the contract they're negotiating now has to contend with that math versus the we made you a show and you have sold it for dollars over and over and over again. Now it's we made you a show and you're going to sell it for pennies once. We're seeing a big change there. Like David Zeslov, love to rip on the guy. Cartoonish villain in many ways. But he is big on like a show doesn't work for us or whatever. We can go and sell it again.

1:16:04We saw that with Westworld. And I think we're going to see more of that, especially – some of it is we need to unload these assets that just aren't doing it for us. Maybe they'll do better on Peacock because nobody subscribes to Peacock except for me. Maybe they'll do better on Peacock. That's going to save the industry. That's a sign. That's a strike sign right there. But they are thinking about like – they're starting to think about how we need to sell these things and make more money off of it. the studios are thinking that, not just the writers and actors and producers and everybody who are making no money in perpetuity on these projects.

1:16:39So I think we are going to see some changes there. I think we're going to see kind of a return to some extent of that current, like that TV model from 10, 15 years ago. I don't think it's going to be as lucrative as it was then. It's going to be 2003 again. This is just what we're doing here. I think what we're really going to find out is how powerful the Netflix voting block in the Producers Guild is. That's the real thing because Netflix doesn't want to ever move to that model. They want to have everything owned by them and then never pay you residuals. A lot of these other studios have been doing this a lot longer and they're going to be more inclined to go in a different direction.

1:17:16So we're going to see. I'm really curious to see how this ends. I think it's going to be a long time. I think we're We're in for midi months. Into winter, basically. All right, we got to take a break. We come back. We're new lightning round. We're doing some more gadgets. Yeah. I talk some CMS. People have asked before. We'll be right back.

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1:19:58We're back. It's lightning round time. We went way over. We're already over. You get me talking about unions in Hollywood. That's you and copyright. And it's all at the same time. Oh my God. Poor David. Sorry. David's just been holding up a stopwatch in the background, like red cards. Stop. Stop, nerds. Please. Nerd car going off cliff. All right, lightning round. David, you want to start? Sure. So I have two. One is just that Andrew Marino and I figured out why there's a Palm Pilot in your favorite IMAX theater, and you should go read our story. Very good. The answer turns out to be very small and slightly boring, but also deeply hilarious, and it makes me very happy.

1:20:34Can I just say the sourcing of that story is incredible because you keep referring to a well-placed sword. it. And it's like, I'm not, I'm not going to reveal who it is. It just, it makes it sound like you're reporting on the CIA in the best possible way. I think the truth of the matter is, um, there aren't that many people who know, let's just say that, uh, it's my source is Christopher Nolan. Let's just, let's just do it now. No, I want to talk just very briefly about this new thing called the U S cyber trust mark, which is basically a label that is going to be affixed to products that are i don't know safe in a cyber security way and i both want to know what you guys think of the logo which i have deeply mixed feelings about to me it looks like a like second tier turkish soccer team crest uh that's the vibe i get here but it's like a shield with some dots and some lines too busy it's just not great and this is supposed to connote like this This is an official government approved.

1:21:33Yeah. Cyber secure thing. To me, this strikes me as a good idea in theory, right? Like having a thing that is like, this is a secure device that has passed some measure of testing and will not do sketchy things. Great idea. It's along the lines of the like, you know, privacy nutrition labels Apple does in the app store. Big fan. I don't see any world in which this is enforceable or holds up over time. threats change devices change standards change things go out of date there's always some new hack and the idea that uh one of the things they want to do is put a qr code on the box so you can scan the qr code to see if it's up to date and still safe so actually the badge doesn't mean anything you have to scan the qr code to see if the badge still applies i just think this is one of those like good ideas that nobody actually thought all the way through and if i was a horrible person i would go print out a bunch of these fake labels and put them on real products and like best spy and then and then have people yeah when then when people scan it oh my god just i don't have the technological know-how and i'm not that horrible yet so i won't do this but like it seems like a very easy way to cheat this system and screw over a lot of people also it's ugly yeah it's it's not beautiful yeah i'm really out like are they gonna make like a beautiful label that's like insecure wi-fi you know the ul label is gorgeous no one knows what that means yeah i I don't know what it means, but I know it's pretty.

1:22:56That's fair. But my thing with this is I think like the one of the comparisons that the FCC's Jeff Jess Rosenworcel made is to like the Energy Star logo, which is a useful thing. Right. And they're talking about this a lot with right to repair stuff, too, that you should have these quick visual signals that like this passes some kind of test that I approve of. Right. Like it is it is energy certified. That's good. The vibes are good. Right. And with right to repair, it's like that's good, too. And this one just seems way higher stakes because what you're asking me to do is make like a real problematic decision about this thing, whether it is safe or not for me to use based on this label.

1:23:36And with that just would need to come this really complicated enforcement mechanism that I'm not sure is even really possible to do well. I like that even the official mock-up of it from the FCC is hard to read. Like you have to do some really bad design to be like, yeah, it's also terrible to read. It's I'm just it's ugly. And I think you're right. Like, how are you supposed to? Nothing is secure. If it's connected to the Internet, it's in some way can be hacked. Someone will figure it out. Yes, I agree with you broadly on that front. That's how I live my life. She said with her laptop and phone and smartwatch.

1:24:21That's true. But like we've now covered enough fly by night products. Yeah. I'm thinking of wise. Right. Where they made claims are backed up by no one. They're unenforceable because they're backed up by no one. Like this is a very sort of like how does a market capitalist government fix problems like this is like we'll put a nutrition label on it. And like this is the answer to every question is like consumers will count calories. But for gadgets. But like at least if you put this label on and you lie, people can sue you. That's true. And that is as much of a corrective as anything. Yeah. I'll give you that.

1:24:56I almost feel like it should be more like the like Surgeon General's warning on a pack of cigarettes. That's just like this thing connects to the Internet. Be worried about that. That feels to me like it would be more immediately productive. But the difference between the American Surgeon General warning and like the British one is that we should do the British ones. Like in Europe, the cigarettes just say, this will kill you. Here it's like Surgeon General's warning, a bunch of stuff. And like over there, it's like death. Death lurks here. Delicious death. You'll never stop thinking about it for the rest of your life if you do this in your 20s.

1:25:34Nila's just quietly pulling the cigarette out as we speak. Oh my God, it's so good. The first one after a drink, but it'll kill you. All right, I'll stop now. I was like, I don't even smoke and I want a cigarette now. Have you ever had one of these after a big dinner? Woo! That'll kill you for sure. Steak dinner. Covered in butter. This is the worst lighting round. That's mine, Neal. What's yours? Wait, I'm sorry. You have four assigned to you here. This podcast has been very long. Pick one. I'm picking one. I'm going to pick the WordPress one. Okay. Yeah. So our company this week announced that we're switching CMSs.

1:26:11This is so nerdy, but people asked me to talk about it. So if you have been following us since 2011, you know that right now one of our CMSs that we use is a proprietary CMS called Chorus that we have made a lot of noise about over the decade of this company. Chorus is a lot of things. If you are a web nerd, you know that a CMS is – it's the database from which we serve the website. And CMSs can do an awful lot of things. At a basic level, the CMS is a text editor and a database of content. And sometimes it's also the front end of the website. So you can separate those things. With our redesign, we decoupled the front end of the website, the thing that you all look at at theverge.com, from the back end, which is what we all type in.

1:26:55So now through an API, you go to theverge.com. The API pulls out of the database, whatever, which means you can swap out the back end of the thing. We already use multiple CMSs to make The Verge all the time. One of our CMSs is Google Sheets. And I promise you every big publisher from the times on down has content that is served out of Google Sheets. I can confirm this. Yeah. It's just a useful, like, it's a really powerful spreadsheet that never goes down. Like, if you need to make that kind of thing, you can do it. When we do our live blogs, we use a CMS called NorCon Live Center, which hilariously is, I think most of our clients are, like, English Premier League blogs.

1:27:33So there's a bunch of features in Live Center that I always want to use that make no sense, like a running score tally. A button that just says goal. Yeah. It's, like, very funny. I'm dying to use those features. If you can figure them out, we'll do them in the next Apple event. But that's another CMS we use. I think all of you know I'm excited about ActivityPub. I think plugging a social network into our stack of things, you can see how a Threads post and a Quick post on our front page are closer in spirit than not. There's a lot you could do there if you think of that as a CMS. So we're swapping out Chorus, which is our main CMS that we write most things in for WordPress.

1:28:12but we're keeping the front end experience of the site because we've decoupled the two things. That's the answer. It's a big emotional decision at our company. A lot of us, most of my life's work has been produced in Chorus. There it is. I feel a way about it, but people ask me why it's happening because I saw the Axios article. And it's you want to spend your developer effort on building new kinds of products, not making a word processor in a database. That's life in software. I keep sending people the video of Steve Jobs doing a funeral for Mac OS 9. I don't think this is going over as well as I want it to, but I think it's very funny.

1:28:47That's what I copy. All right. What's your lightning round, Alex? Omar thought he ordered coffee this week. Okay. And he's like, wait a minute. I don't use the Starbucks app that often. And it was because there was a bug with the Starbucks app. So it told a whole bunch of users that they all ordered coffee this week. Amazing. Everybody was like, wait a minute. But I didn't. And I just think that's hysterical. Was it the intern? This is my favorite thing that happens. Like when that, what was it? The HBO sent that test email to like millions of people a while ago because somebody pressed the wrong thing.

1:29:16It's like when you hit the, when you mean to hit the test button and you accidentally hit the send this to everybody button, just know that it always makes me happy every single time. What they told Omar was earlier today, a push notification from the Starbucks app was sent as an error. So yes, it probably was an intern. Somebody clicked the wrong button. Boop. Yep. Everybody got coffee. Nobody is getting free coffee out of this. You still have to pay for coffee at Starbucks. I do. It's also like Starbucks should learn from this because this is an incredible marketing thing to do to just randomly ping someone's phone and say your order is ready.

1:29:51It's like the Pavlovian thing that would happen to me where I would just go to Starbucks if I got that notification. I don't remember ordering Starbucks, but there's like a 60 % chance I did. I'm going to go. It would work. I'm just saying Starbucks. I would definitely think that my identity had been stolen. I would have a vastly different response I'd be like I need to throw my phone in the ocean right away and call my mom I would just assume I blacked out And ordered a Starbucks Yeah fair enough I can't believe we just gave Starbucks this idea I'm so sorry Talk about engagement Delete the Starbucks app Did I ever tell you about the time I gave Amazon An idea for an ad that they used And didn't give me credit for and I'm furious about it You should go on strike Yeah go on strike Don't give them your ideas We are way over we will tell you that story next week Fair enough.

1:30:35On this, The Verge cast, some things I want you to read on our site. We have an excerpt of John Romero's autobiography, Doomguy, which is a story of id software. Go read that. It's a great story. Good yarn. And then McKenna Kelly wrote an incredible profile of Gigi Sohn and how her nomination to be an FCC commissioner was basically just overturned by weird, dark money and telecom lobbyists. It'll make you angry, but in a righteous way. It's good. That's a good feeling. You want to harness that feeling. And then on Decoder, I asked the CEO of Squarespace why anyone should make a website. And I'm pretty sure I sold them a pressure washer.

1:31:09That's a weird one. Those two ideas, I promise they connect. It was great. Okay, that's it. That's VergeCast. Bye-bye.

1:31:24And 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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